Nothing like a clever turn of phrase to capture and popularize an idea. At TechCrunch, Duncan Riley has come up with “American Tracking & Takedown.”
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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Here’s a Cato TechKnowledge on how the Senate immigration bill attempts to revive the flagging REAL ID Act.
Here’s an exclusive for TechLiberationFront readers: We’ve revamped the RSS feeds on WashingtonWatch.com to make them much more useful.
Along with the feed for every dang bill that gets introduced in Congress, there are feeds for bills that have a cost/savings estimate, and for new laws, plus feeds for the comments and wiki edits on each bill. We’ll add bill-status feeds shortly.
There are also subject matter feeds, so if you want to see every bill dealing with intellectual property, or science policy, for example, you can.
I hadn’t. According to the Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday (via DCist), it was an instant landmark in American cinema when made by filmmaker Charles Burnett’s as his master’s thesis at UCLA in the 1970s. It was never released because the soundtrack had too many classic songs in it, making widespread screening too expensive.
Via Ars Technica, here’s a Quad-Cities Online report on the state of Illinois using $1 million in taxpayer dollars to fund litigation in support of an unconstitutional ban on video game violence. The money was taken from other budget areas, including public health, welfare, and economic development.
The ideal would be to give the money back to taxpayers. It rightly belongs to them. But given the choice between using the funds to erode free speech rights or using them to support the welfare state, I’ll take the welfare state.
Mine is a simple – dumb, even – adaptation of Metcalfe’s Law.
“The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data.” – first quoted in this eWeek article about the electronic employment verification system included in the current immigration bill.
I actually suspect that Briscoe’s et al’s refinement of Metcalfe’s law is more accurate, but that’s just so complicated.
Outside the tech policy area, but I just had to vent . . . .
In a blog post from Found|Read titled Dangers of a Threesome – (clever) – hapless Kevin Wolf writes of bringing two equal partners into a company formed around a business idea of his. He is distraught because the two partners recently fired him. His third conclusion from this episode – third! not first – is “If the idea for the business originated with you, consider keeping a controlling voting interest in the company.”
No shit. (‘Scuse my French.)
Found|Read is part of the impressive GigaOM network of online news sources and blogs, which produces a wide array of interesting information and thinking. But I wouldn’t listen very long to a running coach, sitting on the ground with skinned knees, who advised me that I should lace my shoes.
Ars Technica reports that an amendment to the FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act “upholds the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Backed (FISA) as the only means by which to do electronic surveillance—and . . . requires continuous judicial oversight of requests.”
Divided government is a real boon.
Here’s Google’s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer discussing in more detail Google’s recent laudable decision to anonymize its server logs after 18-24 months. The discussion helps illustrate the diverse interests that must be balanced in choosing how long to maintain information.
It’s often easy to disregard the value that deep wells of raw information have for information-based business. Fleischer explains some of how Google makes use of data to improve its services and protect users. These consumer-beneficial activities must be balanced against the background demand for privacy protection.
Of particular note, of course, is his discussion of the emerging government demands for data retention (some of which conflict with government demands for data destruction). Data retention mandates are outsourced government surveillance, neatly shifting the cost of surveillance to the private sector while avoiding limits on government action like the Fourth Amendment and Privacy Act (in the case of the U.S.). Too put a fine point on it, data retention is bad.
This explication of Google’s thinking is a welcome contribution to public understanding. I did get a little chirping on my B.S. detector where Fleischer says he had talked to privacy activists in developing their plans. I’d like to know which ones. It’s a small enough community that I figure I would have known about it (I say at the risk of sounding self-important).
I’ve been aware in the past of government agencies deluding themselves about taking privacy into consideration because they’ve heard from government contractors selling “privacy enhancing technologies” like immutable audit logs and such. As often as not, this stuff is lipstick on a pig – seeking to make bad surveillance programs acceptable by tacking on complex, fallible privacy protections.
I’m sure Google has done better than that in its consultations with privacy experts. At least, I hope I’m sure.
Update: Nate Anderson at Ars is not nearly so sanguine about Google’s data retention practices and its defense of them.
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