Hat tip: Jason Schultz
Articles by Tim Lee 
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Julian is doing his best to put me and my FISA writing to shame by digging into National Security Investigations & Prosecutions, an in-depth treatment of surveillance law.
Ironically, despite writing about technology for a living, I have a bad track record when it comes to adopting new web tools. I only joined the Facebook and RSS bandwagons last year for example. At Jerry’s virtual urging, though, I’ve broken down and joined the Twitter revolution. Now you, too, can read all the interesting things I have to say in 140 characters or less.
One of the things that annoyed me about the sign-up process is that it asked me for my GMail/Yahoo!/whatever password in order to add all of the people in my address book to my Twitter watchlist. This is a Bad Idea, and especially now that sites are starting to offer dedicated APIs for this purpose, there’s no excuse for demanding peoples’ passwords.
I’ve got a Mac. Any recommendations for good Twitter-related software I should be checking out?
Over at Techdirt, I disagree with Jerry’s point (and Mike Linksvayer’s) about the concept of ad-supported Wikipedia. While the organization could certainly do some worthwhile things with the money, I think there’s a significant danger that fighting over the money could begin to overshadow the Wikimedia Foundation’s important mission of ensuring the integrity of the Wikipedia editing process itself.
Superficially, this might seem at odds with libertarians’ general inclination to view profit-making as a benign phenomenon. But I think the essential point here is actually one that libertarians make a lot: money generally matters less than institutions. Increased spending—on schools, narcotics control, wars, whatever—will only have beneficial effects if the underlying institutional framework is designed to use that money effectively. If your institutions aren’t designed to utilize resources effectively—if, say, you’ve got a bureaucratic monopoly school system or a hopelessly confused military strategy—then injecting additional resources into those institutions isn’t going to produce any positive results. Those additional resources will simply be dissipated into pointless rent-seeking.
There’s nothing dysfunctional about Wikipedia, viewed as an institution for editing an encyclopedia. But there’s no reason to think an institution built to edit an encyclopedia is going to have any special competence to oversee the spending of millions of dollars of free money. And given that arguments about money could easily distract and divide the already-fractious Wikipedia community, I think it’s probably smart to avoid that quagmire entirely.
Look at that. Another example of the “so-called ‘libertarians’ and their complete and total absence during our FISA fight.” Seriously, Julian’s got a great piece in the LA Times:
In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against “reverse targeting” Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they’d never do it.
But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau “in a most untenable and embarrassing position,” so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts.
Johnson famously heard recordings of King’s conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King’s strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him “hours each night” to read the reports.
Read the whole thing; Julian describes similar abuses in the Harding, Truman, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations. While I certainly hope that Presidents Obama, Clinton, or McCain wouldn’t do anything like this, it would be naive to enact legislation that requires us to simply trust them.
Regarding yesterday’s secret session of Congress:
Democrats said very little was discussed that could not have been revealed in open session. Pelosi didn’t show up, and Democrats, underwhelmed by the GOP’s evidence, used just 10 minutes of their allotted 30 minutes of secret time.
“We probably could have gone and eaten together at McDonald’s, and it would have had just as much effectiveness,” said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.), one of the conservative Democrats the GOP was targeting.
It’s incredibly refreshing to see the House take seriously its responsibility to resist White House efforts to undermine the rule of law. Six weeks ago, I thought it was only a matter of time before Congress capitulated and once again reduced judicial oversight over domestic surveillance activities. But now people are seriously talking about the stalemate lasting for the remainder of the Bush administration.
The White House has cried wolf so many times that the tactic is becoming less effective with every repetition. As the House continues to ignore the president’s scare tactics, those tactics are beginning to look faintly ridiculous. At this point, there is very little political reason for the House to capitulate, and good policy reasons for them not to.
I don’t think I’m currently in a position to apply for it, but this sounds really interesting:
Our platform team is responsible for the core software technologies that cut across all of our products and power the site. Internships are available for talented software engineers who are proficient in PHP, C++ or Java, and have experience and interest in working in LAMP environments.
What change or new feature that could be completed as a 3 month project with a small team of fellow interns would you undertake to improve NYTimes.com?
Please submit your resume and a brief response (200 words or less) to the question above to nytimes2008internship@gmail.com.
I’ve been known to beat up on “old media” outlets and their tendency to resist technological change, but I’ve actually been pretty impressed of late by the nimbleness of the largest newspapers. The Post has long been a leader in the use of the web, and lately the New York Times and (to a lesser extent) the Wall Street Journal have also shown increasing web savvy.
One example is Open, a blog that discusses the use of open source technologies at the Times. It’s a sporadically-updated blog that gives a glimpse at the technology underlying one of the world’s most prominent media platforms.
Mike makes the essential point about the H1-B visa fight: the job market isn’t a zero-sum game. Granting more visas doesn’t mean fewer jobs for Americans, except possibly in the very short run. More skilled workers make companies more successful, creating new jobs. Moreover, some immigrants go on to start companies of their own, which wind up employing more Americans.
But I think Mike was too kind to this article purporting to debunk the notion that there’s a shortage of skilled IT workers. On one level, it’s just a totally nonsensical issue. The demand for workers is a curve, not a point. At a salary of $80,000/year, some number of IT workers would be hired. You’d see significantly fewer hired if the average salary were $100,000, and significantly more at $60,000/year. So the question isn’t whether there is “a skill shortage.” The question is what effects restricting the supply of IT workers will have on wages and on the growth of the technology industry. Most likely the answers are that restricting immigration of IT workers means that native IT workers will enjoy modestly higher wages at the expense of a somewhat smaller and less productive technology industry. This is good for IT workers, of course, which is why there’s considerable sympathy for it among the Slashdot crowd. But it’s not good for much of anyone else, and like most forms of protectionism, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. IT workers are already among the best-compensated professions around, and I see no reason that truck drivers and school teachers should pay higher prices or enjoy fewer high-tech products in order to prop up the wages of workers who already get paid twice as much as them.
Ars has a good article reminding us of an important fact about peer-to-peer tools like BitTorrent: while they certainly can be used for illegal and unethical purposes, they’re ultimately just tools. They also have indisputably legal and legitimate uses—in this case, rapidly deploying software updates on a campus network. One of the reasons that stopping piracy is only going to get harder over time is that as peer-to-peer tools mature, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish “good” and “bad” peer-to-peer tools. The tools will be increasingly ubiquitous and powerful, and there won’t be any easy way for the authorities to restrict their use to legal purposes.
I think this is one reason that the Grokster decision (in which I reluctantly concluded that the plaintiffs had the better argument) is likely to be a pyrrhic victory for the copyright industry. The Supreme Court said that if there’s clear evidence that a company’s product is designed to facilitate file-sharing, then that company can be held liable for contributory infringement. But that test makes it pretty easy to avoid liability. BitTorrent appears to be navigating it successfully, and others will doubtless do the same.
Glen Whitman has a great post on the relationship between modularity and innovation. He’s exactly right that modularity (or what software types would call open standards) promotes progress by allowing people to build software from pre-existing components without worrying about exactly what’s inside any given component. One of the most important examples of modularity in the computer industry is the Internet’s end-to-end principle, which allows application developers to ignore the details of how to get packets from A to B, and instead focus on what to do with packets once they reach their destination.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.