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.
Via Valleywag – and unbelievably I’m relying on Valleywag for hard news – former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio will get a new trial after the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that evidence was properly excluded from his trial. Nacchio claims that he expected income from government contracts but the contracts were canceled when his company declined to comply with government demands for customer information. The trial court didn’t allow this allegation into evidence.
As I speculated last October, the administration is probably working so assiduously on immunity for telecom firms because the telecoms have information about yet more administration surveillance activities than has been revealed to date. Nacchio’s new trial may bring some of this information to light.
Update: Sure enough, Valleywag is not reliable.
Chris Soghoian has an important post on the C|Net News blog examining a Google statement to him about whether it has facilitated or participated in government surveillance.
In response to Chris’ question, “Is Google sharing ‘huge volumes’ of search records with the government?”, a Google spokesperson said, “Google was not part of the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.”
That’s answer that should peg anyone’s non-denial denial detector. Google should be more direct and forthcoming.
H.R. 2341, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, would prohibit securities and commodities trading based on nonpublic information relating to Congress, and it would require additional reporting by Members and employees of Congress on their securities transaction.
The motivations behind it are utterly pure. It’s would be unfair for Members of Congress and staff to use inside knowledge of Congress for pecuniary gain.
But how a law like this would be effectively enforced is beyond me. A bar on congressional-insider trading would most likely cause one of the following results:
- It would be honored in the breach;
- It would lead to endless (perhaps politically motivated) investigations of our representatives and their staffs; or
- It would force many or most congressional employees to withdraw from investing as a prophylactic against 2.
None of these would be easy and fair, and compliance would deprive congressional staff of normal sources of income and of participation in investment that keeps their experience and thinking in line with other Americans. The law would not provide investors comfort.
The better solution is to lower the amount and value of congressional-insider information. How? Sunlight. Stuff like I do with WashingtonWatch.com, like Jerry does with OpenRegulations.org, and plenty of others do with similar projects.
Who says airport security checks have to be a bad time?
Google’s dominant status in search and online advertising is not long for this world. Depending on your definition of “long.”
A comment on Valleywag from a disgruntled ex-employee is probably typical of what happens when an organization gets big. Now, of course, Google isn’t all the way dysfunctional – far from it – but big organizations get slow, and this is some evidence that the process is underway.
For my own part, I’m a fan of Google and a user of AdSense on WashingtonWatch.com, but I haven’t run any AdWords ads in months. It’s too complicated for a person like me, who has a lot of competing demands on his time, to run a campaign that I’m confident can be cost-effective. There’s room for a fresh, clean alternative to AdWords, and it’ll be interesting to see who comes up with it.
For those transfixed by the Google juggernaut, remember: This too shall pass.
At his Iconoclast blog, Declan McCullagh has a very good write-up of the broad sweep of NSA surveillance and the resurrection of the Total Information Awareness program in new guise.
Don’t let the facetious headline fool you: I welcome news stories like this New York Times piece (via Ars), which reports on the amount of data major online firms collect.
It gives us tech sophisticates some more information, but, more importantly, it starts to educate the lay public that they are part of an information economy whether they like it or not. This will stimulate them on the margin to make choices about where they surf, whether they accept cookies, and so on. Putting this information in the hands of the public pits these online firms against one another to seek trust with the public, such as by controlling their data collection, ensuring the public that the data won’t be misused, and so on.
The marketplace continues to lag in its provision of privacy, in part because of the technical difficulty of determining how things work, what data goes where, etc. With the press overwhelmed by the problem of figuring this stuff out, it hasn’t been able to put the public in a position to act. In a small way, this article starts to clear that fog. A welcome development indeed.
The head of the California Assembly’s Transportation Committee has introduced a resolution rejecting REAL ID. Wired’s Threat Level blog reports:
Howard Posner, a policy consultant to the Transportation Committee, said that last year the committee contemplated moving legislation to accept Real ID, but reconsidered after “looking at the cost, and the incredible inconvenience for driver’s license holder and the privacy issues.”
“We heard the feds had enacted this without any kind of review process or holding hearings,” Posner said. “We thought someone ought to step back and see if this is the most cost effective way to secure driver’s licenses.”
Most of us think of watch-listing as a fool’s errand in the air travel context. Well, here’s a story of how it can wreak havoc (more accurately, deny free speech and due process) in the context of Web domains.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s OFAC list (for Office of Foreign Asset Control) is a list of people and entities that U.S. entities can’t do business with. Because doing business with them would be support for the terrorists.
Oh, and support for travel agents specializing in getting Europeans to Cuba.
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