And this video – featuring a brief glimpse of yours truly – discusses some of the costs of administering our tax system. (SPOILER ALERT! They’re high.)
Articles by Jim Harper 
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
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This morning, Cato put out a TechKnowledge of mine called “The Promise that Keeps on Breaking.” It deals with the policy issues surrounding President Obama’s yet unfulfilled promise to post bills sent to him by Congress online for five days before he signs them.
A Cato@Liberty post last week went through the President’s progress so far on the five-day promise.
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the issuance of the first RFC, or “request for comments,” an important milestone in the development of the Internet. This piece by Stephen Crocker is an enjoyable look back.
The title of the piece is “How the Internet Got its Rules,” which strikes me as poorly chosen. (Titles are often chosen by the publisher, not the writer.) Given the open, collaborative process used then, and still today, to govern much of the Internet’s functioning, “rules” is an inapt substitute for the word “protocols.”
The Library of Congress now has a YouTube channel. Among the gems you can find there, the first moving image ever made. It’s a man named Fred Ott, sneezing:
On the problems with the newspaper industry, Michael Kinsley writes in the Washington Post:
You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee, as I do, but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy? Sorry, but people who have grown up around computers find reading the news on paper just as annoying as you find reading it on a screen. (All that ink on your hands and clothes.) If your concern is grander – that if we don’t save traditional newspapers we will lose information vital to democracy – you are saying that people should get this information whether or not they want it. That’s an unattractive argument: shoving information down people’s throats in the name of democracy.
I rarely say it, but the whole thing is worth reading.
The “Jefferson 1” – feted by TLF with a fundraiser some months ago – has sued the Park Police. She was arrested at the Jefferson Memorial in 2008 for dancing to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday.
TLF wishes well her effort to vindicate our First and Fourth Amendment rights.
Chris Soghoian has responded to my recent post lauding his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). We’re agreed in the main on user empowerment. The interesting stuff is on the margin: He disagrees with me that blocking third party cookies as I do (and he does too) is a satisfactory approach to suppressing tracking by advertisers.
There are a couple of points worth making about the discussion.
The first has to do with our slightly differing objectives. Chris is deeply focused on advertisers and his dislike of being tracked by advertisers. Though it is not absolute, I have a preference against tracking by anyone other than sites that I know, like, and trust. I’m no more worried about advertisers than any entity that would track my surfing – and there are many.
Again, TLF readers, I ask you to try setting your browser to query you before setting cookies. It’s a real insight into the dozens of entities getting a look at you as you surf, including a bunch of social networks and news sites.
If “advertisers” are what you seek to harness, that seems like a group that can be captured through some kind of centralized control mechanism. (I don’t think it actually is.) But if your goal is privacy as against all comers, you don’t attempt to centrally plan or decide who is good and who is bad. Responsibility rests with the end user.
Let the goal be “advertisers,” though. And I ask: Those social networks and news aggregators – are they “advertisers”? If you’re going to require a subset of Web communicators to obey opt-out cookies, you have to be able to define that subset – a problem Chris doesn’t seem to have thought about yet.
Lots of different publishers, sites, and networks have data that is entirely fungible with the tracking data advertisers collect. What do you get if you push down on the “officially advertisers” part of the balloon? Workarounds.
But I’ve backed into the second point – the means to these ends. Chris soft-pedals how he would get at tracking, but as far as I can tell it’s a law that says “advertisers” have to obey opt-out cookies. Continue reading →
What a victory for privacy and personal responsibility is Chris Soghoian’s Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). It signals to the 27 ad networks with well-configured opt-out cookies that you don’t want them to track you.
It’s a technical solution that empowers (and places responsibility with) the user to exercise dominion over his or her personal information. No need for law and regulation. No need to go pleading to politicians and bureaucrats for help.
It’s also a little more efficient than my method of controlling tracking, which is to take a glance at cookies as Web sites ask to set them on my computer.
(The answer is usually “no,” but it’s very interesting to see who all wants to get a glance at me when I visit any site. It’s a lot more than just ad networks, btw. I have no idea why people think ad-network tracking is bad and tracking by others is a matter of indifference.)
Now, Chris and I always find something to disagree about, so for good measure I’ll note that I disagree with his goal of switching targeted advertising from opt-out to opt-in. Continue reading →
One hopes not. But the White House’s 60-day review of cyber security, ongoing now, could set the stage for it.
In a TechKnowledge piece out today, I argue against federal responsibility for private cyber security. A common law liability regime is the best route to discovering and patching security flaws in all the implements of our information economy and society.
The smarties at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton recently sat down to discuss these issues too.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.