Last week, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in United States v. Jones. The Court held unanimously that because D.C. police entered a suspect’s car without a valid warrant or reasonable suspicion, they violated the suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights. But in the course of the decision, the Court raised — and ultimately failed to answer — a pivotal question about the future of privacy in America: Does the Fourth Amendment provide protection against warrantless electronic data collection and surveillance?
A great deal rests on the answer to this question. In order to fully enjoy the conveniences of the modern world, people today have voluntarily opted into GPS tracking on their mobile devices and in their vehicles. They’ve opted for E-Z Pass electronic tolling; for debit cards instead of cash; and for cloud web services instead of local storage. Most of us leave digital footprints, and we accept that it’s possible for someone to learn a lot about us from our footprints. But we’re also loathe to think that this information could be accessed by the government without probable cause.
The Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Jones did not establish protections for electronically accessed information. The justices did, however, address today’s driving Fourth Amendment concerns, and they speculated on how recent jurisprudence will shape tomorrow’s digital age protections.
[click to continue…]
Have a listen here.
Wikipedia, Reddit, and other popular websites all went black today to protest SOPA and PIPA, two bills currently before Congress. Critics charge that the bills could potentially shut down the Internet as we know it. Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia explains how the bills would work, and how they would indeed stifle free speech.
By Berin Szoka, Geoffrey Manne, and Ryan Radia
As has become customary with just about every new product announcement by Google these days, the company’s introduction on Tuesday of its new “Search, plus Your World” (SPYW) program, which aims to incorporate a user’s Google+ content into her organic search results, has met with cries of antitrust foul play. All the usual blustering and speculation in the latest Google antitrust debate has obscured what should, however, be the two key prior questions: (1) Did Google violate the antitrust laws by not including data from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks in its new SPYW program alongside Google+ content; and (2) How might antitrust restrain Google in conditioning participation in this program in the future?
The answer to the first is a clear no. The second is more complicated—but also purely speculative at this point, especially because it’s not even clear Facebook and Twitter really want to be included or what their price and conditions for doing so would be. So in short, it’s hard to see what there is to argue about yet.
Let’s consider both questions in turn.
Should Google Have Included Other Services Prior to SPYW’s Launch?
Google says it’s happy to add non-Google content to SPYW but, as Google fellow Amit Singhal told Danny Sullivan, a leading search engine journalist:
Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,… Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.
[click to continue…]
I’m fond of saying that the two iron laws of modernity are 1) things are getting better, and 2) people think they’re getting worse.
One more piece of evidence that these laws hold: this article complaining about Siri. Siri is a voice-activated program that comes with new iPhones. Users can ask their phone where, say, the nearest Thai restaurant is. Just say it out loud. No typing. In seconds, Siri gives out a dozen options, with maps, directions, and even menus.
It’s an amazing piece of technology, and it will only improve in the coming years. And this guy grouses that Siri “won’t tell me how much battery life is left, or turn my Wi-Fi antenna on or off.” What an astonishing mindset. It is disheartening that when faced with such cool innovations, people invariably find ways to complain about them.
On the other hand, if consumers weren’t such harsh sovereigns, many of today’s innovations might never happen in the first place. Modernity’s second iron law — people think things are getting worse — is a double-edged sword.
In a recent Washington Times op-ed, Mark Hyman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group makes some compelling arguments calling for a spectrum inventory. His suggestion that the NTIA and FCC fulfill their mandate from President Bush in 2003 to increase spectrum efficiencies is on point and laudable. It’s certainly true that plenty of spectrum currently sitting in government hands could be put to better use, and thus a part of the problem is spectrum management. But that’s about all Hyman gets right.
His assertion that the “looming spectrum crisis” is a ruse manufactured by FCC Chairman Genachowski and parroted by major cell phone companies is completely erroneous. Hyman points to “the only independent study” on this subject to support this claim, one conducted by Citigroup. That report claimed that cellular companies were using just a fraction of the spectrum assigned to them. Critics have since eviscerated the Citigroup report, pointing to its use of outdated figures and misunderstandings of mobile technology as the cause of its flawed and ultimately inaccurate conclusions.
Hyman also alludes to public statements from Sprint and Verizon as proof that no spectrum crunch exists. Yet this September Verizon’s CEO declared that the AT&T / T-Mobile merger “was kind of like gravity” and had to happen in part because of the government’s inability to get sufficient amounts of spectrum to carriers. Such a statement bolsters claims that we do in fact face a spectrum crunch.
The FCC was actually aware of this problem at least as far back as 2002, when the Spectrum Policy Task Force issued its report. That report detailed how FCC’s allocations of spectrum in 1994 were based on predictions that there would be 54 million mobile users by the year 2000. In 2000 however the number of mobile users was more than double that base amount; the authors explained that the FCC and industry “have significantly and consistently underestimated the need for additional spectrum and the public’s utilization of new technologies and applications.”
[click to continue…]
Defenders of online gambling testified before the House today to beg for their right to gamble legally. Poker Players Alliance Chairman (and former U.S. Senator) Al D’Amato, who represents 1.2 million online poker players, detailed several problems in the current law he would like to see corrected. First, he noted that players currently cannot “play on a site that is located in the U.S.; that employs U.S. citizens; that pays U.S. taxes or is regulated by any level of government in the U.S.”
Second, he described how since Obama’s Justice Department cracked down on U.S.-based online poker sites last year, “many thousands of U.S. poker players have not been able to recover money that they deposited into Full Tilt Poker and Ultimate Bet/Absolute Poker accounts, or money they won playing on these sites.”
Third, he told Congressmen that “along with legislation to license Internet poker, Congress should finally clarify the laws governing Internet gambling and create effective enforcement against whatever is illegal…. Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 simply told banks to block payments for ‘unlawful Internet gambling’ without defining that term.”
Ernest Stevens of the National Indian Gaming Association also testified. He called Indian gaming “the Native American success story.” He noted that the Supreme Court has held since 1987 that the Indian gaming is “crucial for tribal self-determination and self-governance.” He argued that Congress must respect Indian tribes as “sovereign governments with a right to operate, regulate, tax, and license Internet gambling” and “must be available to customers in any locale where Internet gaming is not criminally prohibited.”
[click to continue…]
Over at Pajamas Media today, I have some interesting news on the Shuttlyndra situation, which would be a huge scandal if anyone cared about space, or the waste of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars — past, present and future.
On 26 September 2011, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) issued a press release regarding fuel depots. This included a letter to former Administrator Mike Griffin who had dismissed the notion of fuel depots and commercial launch vehicles as being a viable alternative to the Space Launch System(SLS) during Congressional testimony.
Rohrabacher noted “When NASA proposed on-orbit fuel depots in this Administration’s original plan for human space exploration, they said this game-changing technology could make the difference between exploring space and falling short. Then the depots dropped out of the conversation, and NASA has yet to provide any supporting documents explaining the change,” says Rohrabacher.”
Well, despite what NASA may or may not have been telling Rep. Rohrabacher about its internal evaluations regarding the merits of alternate architectures that did not use the SLS (and those that incorporated fuel depots), the agency had actually been rather busy studying those very topics.
And guess what: the conclusions that NASA arrived at during these studies are in direct contrast to what the agency had been telling Congress, the media, and anyone else who would listen.
[click to continue…]
Much of the cybersecurity focus this year has been on Congress’s efforts to mandate data breach notifications and security standards. Now the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is entering the fray. On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the agency issued a guidance document instructing publicly traded companies on the procedures they must follow relating to cybersecurity issues.
The SEC makes clear that these obligations are preexististing, and that the guidelines merely clarify the requirements as they pertain to cybersecurity. For example, regarding risk disclosure, the SEC states:
Consistent with the Regulation S-K Item 503(c) requirements for risk factor disclosures generally, cybersecurity risk disclosure provided must adequately describe the nature of the material risks and specify how each risk affects the registrant. Registrants should not present risks that could apply to any issuer or any offering and should avoid generic risk factor disclosure.5 Depending on the registrant’s particular facts and circumstances, and to the extent material, appropriate disclosures may include:
- Discussion of aspects of the registrant’s business or operations that give rise to material cybersecurity risks and the potential costs and consequences;
- To the extent the registrant outsources functions that have material cybersecurity risks, description of those functions and how the registrant addresses those risks;
- Description of cyber incidents experienced by the registrant that are individually, or in the aggregate, material, including a description of the costs and other consequences;
- Risks related to cyber incidents that may remain undetected for an extended period; and
- Description of relevant insurance coverage.
[click to continue…]
For thousands of years, no human traveled faster than a horse. Napoleon’s armies were no mobile than Caesar’s. That changed almost overnight with the automobile and then the airplane. Despite that rapid progress, flight times from New York to London have barely budged in 50 years.If anything, it’s slower now that the Concorde is out of service.
That could change in the next 15-20 years with the dawn of space tourism. A spacecraft has to travel about 17,000 miles per hour to stay in orbit. A partnership between KLM airlines and a wealthy Formula One mogul hopes to make first-generational suborbital crafts that can reach 2,200 miles per hour, with an eventual goal of hitting 13,750 miles per hour.
This is good for more than space tourism — a trip from London to Sydney would take an hour and 45 minutes. That’s about the same as a flight today from New York to Chicago.
Caesar and Napoleon would be astonished. Hopefully this venture doesn’t experience the crony capitalism problems that NASA has had with a similar project.
Rick Santorum has a Google problem, and everybody knows about it — mostly because Rick Santorum won’t stop talking about it. Last week, Politico reported that Santorum had contacted Google and asked them to do something about “spreadingsantorum.com,” the (hugely successful) revenge prank pulled by columnist Dan Savage after Santorum publicly compared homosexuality to bestiality.
After Google declined to manipulate their search results, Santorum said:
“If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country. [...] To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”
Santorum may regret giving Politico that quote, which reveals that the presidential hopeful is not entirely sure what Google is (a website? a system?) and how search engine algorithms work. As Noam Cohen at The New York Times says:
“The immediate reaction to Mr. Santorum’s statement has largely been, ‘How quaint. He thinks he can get Google to fix the Internet for him if he asks?’ Mr. Santorum could have hurt his cause more only if he had told the company’s officials to roll up their sleeves and put a plug in the tubes carrying the offensive material. “
Yet Cohen and many others — like Politico‘s Ben Smith — think that Santorum has a point. Cohen argues:
“Google’s defense — that the behavior of its ever-improving algorithm should be considered independent of the results it produces in a particular controversial case — has a particularly patronizing air, especially when it comes to hurting living, breathing people.”
The Santorum/Savage melee would be little more than a titillating sidebar to Santorum’s presidential campaign were it not for the fact that Google is now defending itself in Washington against government officials, politicians, and competitors who say the tech giant is unfairly manipulating its search results to promote its own products.
[click to continue…]
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
Twitter 
Facebook 
CEI.org 
WorkPlaceChoice.org 
GlobalWarming.org 
CEI On Demand Video 
Liberty Week Podcast 