You can tell I like my writing when I take a sentence from a post and make it the title.
Annnyway, my brief comment on the whistleblower who outed “Stellar Wind” is on the Cato@Liberty blog.
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.
Follow @Jim_Harper
The video of last week’s Cato policy forum can be viewed here. (Check out TLFer Jerry Brito’s fine presentation.)
If your preference is for a briefer taste of the transparency issues, a podcast with Ed Felten recorded that day is here:
The AeA and the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) are merging to become the Technology Association of America.
ITAA gobbled up – er, merged with – the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association and the Cyber Security Industry Alliance earlier in the year.
Now, as to the new name: Are they really going to cover all technology? Farm technology? Construction technology? Mining? Watercraft? Plastics? Dental surgery? They seem to have moved from a name (ITAA) too narrow to include the electronics work of AeA to a name that is too broad.
And here’s the important question: . . . What URL? The Texas Apartment Association has the obvious one.
Go, domain speculators! Go!
The memo from John Podesta articulating the transition’s “‘Seat at the Table’ Transparency Policy” is redacted. Redactions are kind of a red flag to transparency fiends, but they’re probably appropriate (a name, an email address).
The overall “Seat at the Table” program is a decent step forward. You can get a look at the documents submitted to the transition, search them (somewhat clumsily – and not more often than once every 15 seconds), and comment on them.
So carry on transparently, Change.gov!
(Before you finish reading this, if you’re in D.C., you’ll want to sign up for this policy forum.)
Ben Goddard’s most recent column in The Hill is called “Obama Marketing Lesson,” and he reviews how the Internet and savvy use of media energized President-Elect Obama’s campaign effort. “[S]ocial networks have returned as one of the most powerful forces in politics,” he says.
President-elect Obama has a database of some 10 million names and e-mail addresses, and those who built it have made clear they’ll activate that army to support the new president. MoveOn.org is already preparing its supporters to advocate for progressive policies. Groups like Divided We Fail, Healthcare for America Now! and the American Medical Association are already running television and online campaigns to advocate for healthcare reform.
(Goddard will be lending some of his insights about communications strategies to secure the country against fear and overreaction at our January conference on counterterrorism strategy, by the way.)
The substance of the campaigns he talks about might be far from encouraging for libertarians. None of these are limited government advocates. Politicized online social networks could be the agar in which a new mobocracy grows – something our republican form of government was designed to prevent.
Via Jeff Jonas, who oh-so-carefully assessed the treatment he received in Stephen Baker’s book The Numerati, I came across this NPR interview with Baker.
In the latter part of the interview, Baker discusses pretty accurately Jonas’ dissent from the passion for predictive data mining in the national security world. That dissent was given expression in the paper Jeff and I wrote, “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining.”
The data intelligentsia are an interesting subject for a book, of course – it looks The Numerati may have a lot of similarities to Robert O’Harrow’s No Place to Hide – and the NPR interview is interesting. But what makes it notable is Baker’s economic literacy. Or, more accurately, his lack of economic literacy.
Now, I’m not an economist either, so I’ll stand for correction in the comments (actual economists preferred, not just people with strong opinions, please).
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve done a fairly lengthy write-up of the Google Flu Trends privacy issue. It’s an important problem that I think deserves a little more than dismissal.
My conclusion: “The heart of the problem lies not with the current leader in search, or any other Internet innovator. The problem lies with our unconstrained government.”
If you’re inclined to dismiss this conclusion as libertarian boilerplate, please read the post.
I have previously extolled the virtues of soma fm.
I do so again by noting that they are encouraging a bit of soma fm t-shirt chic – or by the looks of things, perhaps t-shirt geek.
As Masnick has said more eloquently, you give away the stuff that people could take, and sell the stuff they could not.
The 111th Congress and the new Obama administration should scrap “E-Verify.” The federal government’s inchoate immigration background check system is the culmination of 20 years’ failure to create a tolerable “internal enforcement” program for U.S. immigration law. Rather than building on past failure, the new Congress and president should pull the plug on E-Verify and reform immigration law so that it aligns with the nation’s economic need for labor.
More here.
How about nothing.
My Cato colleague Gene Healy has a book out that is essential reading for people who think that all things turn on the presidency. The folks at the Family Online Safety Institute should read The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.
Because the subject line of the email they sent me promoting their “Safe at Any Speed” conference about online safety is: “What Will the Obama Administration Do . . . ?”
Please: Nothing, nothing, nothing. It is, and shall forever be, the responsibility of parents to raise their children, including by guiding kids’ access to and use of the online world. Adam pointed you last week to a report that appears to do a good job of keeping things in perspective.
It’s nice to see that FOSI is involving people like Adam and First Amendment lawyer nonpareil Bob Corn-Revere in their conference. The next thing they should do is move it out of Washington to where the parents are. And don’t ask what presidents will do about online safety.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.