Congress
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Technology Is At The Heart Of Obama’s Second-Term Management Agenda
President Obama on Monday highlighted the continuing role of technology in his second-term management reform agenda, using a televised speech to White House staff to also defend the federal workforce and nudge Congress to grant him long-sought authority to consolidate agencies to curb duplication. [...] Read More »
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The Culprit Behind High U.S. Health Care Prices
Elizabeth Rosenthal’s eye-opening article about health care costs in The New York Times on Sunday was a reminder of how much more Americans pay for given procedures than citizens in health systems abroad. What was probably more surprising to most readers was the huge price differentials for identical procedures... Read More »
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The Day We Fought Back
[...] The groups that organized this action have long been pushing hard for real surveillance reform. But we knew that the time was ripe—that the Snowden leaks, unrelenting media pressure, grassroots activism, and even pressure from within Congress—were creating a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give the public—worldwide—the chance to voice its opposition to mass spying. [...] Read More »
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The Google File System Makes NSA’s Hack Blatantly Illegal And They Know It
The latest Edward Snowden bombshell that the National Security Agency has been hacking foreign Google and Yahoo data centers is particularly disturbing. Plenty has been written about it so I normally wouldn’t comment except that the general press has, I think, too shallow an understanding of the technology involved. The hack is even more insidious than they know. Read More »
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The Internet Radio Fairness Act: What It Is, Why It’s Needed
The 2012 campaign is almost over, which means Congress may soon be able to get back to business. One of the things it should prioritize is fixing a longstanding tax on innovation that most folks don’t know about, but they should: the unfair legal treatment of Internet radio. Read More »
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The Internet's Anti-NSA Revolt Starts Tuesday
Thousands of civil-liberty and online-freedom groups and websites will take to the digital streets next week to wage a coordinated war against the National Security Agency's spying powers, a battle strike reminiscent of a virtual protest that two years ago killed an online piracy bill. Read More »
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The Law That Gave Us The Modern Internet—And The Campaign To Kill It
Ever heard of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? It gave birth to the social web. Here's why we need more laws just like it. Read More »
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The New Aaron Swartz Documentary At Sundance
“The Internet’s Own Boy,” a documentary about the life and death of Aaron Swartz, premièred on Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation. The life of Swartz as a coder and an Internet thinker is well known. [...] The documentary, shot in the course of that year, gives us relatively little new information about the legal controversy, but it is deeply revealing about who Swartz was. Read More »
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The NSA-Reform Paradox: Stop Domestic Spying, Get More Security
The nation can survive the occasional terrorist attack, but our freedoms can't survive an invulnerable leader like Keith Alexander operating within inadequate constraints. Read More »
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The Rich Get Richer Through The Recovery
The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. Read More »
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The Secret Sharer
On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state... Read More »
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The Software Patent Solution Has Been Right Here All Along
New paper from a legal researcher [presented at the 8th International Conference on Open Source Systems] suggests a fix for the software patent mess has been lurking in the statute all this time.
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The Threat From Antibiotic Use On The Farm
When I was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency’s national advisory committee recommended in 1977 that we eliminate an agricultural practice that threatened human health. Routinely feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy livestock, our scientific advisory committee warned, was breeding drug-resistant bacteria that could infect people. Read More »
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The Top Secret Rules That Allow NSA To Use US Data Without A Warrant
Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA's surveillance of Americans' communication Read More »
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The West Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion Was Not A Freak Event
Greenpeace has listed 483 chemical facilities in the U.S. where 100,000 or more would be at risk from explosions Read More »
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