Jed Rubenfeld, in the Stanford Law Review:

This Article is about the Fourth Amendment. It is an attempt to recover that amendment’s core meaning and core principles.

By revitalizing the right to be secure, Fourth Amendment law can vindicate its text, recapture its paradigm cases, and find the anchor it requires to stand firm against executive abuse.

Julian Sanchez, on Rubenfeld's essay:

Rubenfeld's essay is not another catalog of privacy threats, but rather a provocative reexamination of the meaning of the Fourth Amendment—one that manages to be simultaneously radical (in the sense of "going to the root"), novel, and plausible in a way I would not have thought possible so late in the game.

Rubenfeld's big apple-to-the-noggin idea is this: mainstream jurisprudence regards the Fourth Amendment as protecting an individual right to "privacy"—which in the late 20th century came to mean the individual's "reasonable expectation of privacy"—with courts tasked with "balancing" this against the competing value of security. This, the good professor argues, is basically backwards: the Fourth Amendment explicitly protects the "security" of our personal lives. Excavating a neglected 17th and 18th century conception of "security" leads to a new reading that both avoids well-known internal problems with the "reasonable expectation" view and helps us grapple with the thorny privacy challenges posed by new technologies.

This new conception of the 4th amendment is potentially very important - In my view the combined effect of the third-party doctrine, which states that what you tell Google you've told the government, and the notion that machines cannot violate your privacy, will enable the rise of a total surveillance society in which everyone is watched by law enforcement all the time. We are very close to the point where the 4th amendment will be an anachronism - a technicality that has very little impact on everyday life - and a radical reconsideration will be necessary in order to re-establish it.

The End of Privacy

We are building a hacker space in Atlanta.

Want to help? Got time, money, or both?

www.FreesideAtlanta.org

Christian conservatives claimed victory and predicted it would send a message to biotech companies thinking of doing business in Georgia.

The bill was originally intended to restrict multiple births through invitro fertilization — inspired by the California “octuplet” mom. However, religious conservatives underestimated the reaction of couples who have had to cope with infertility... Five other Republicans joined Weber and the Democrat caucus to table S.B. 169, which forced Republicans into a 90-minute recess to rewrite the bill.

“We’re doing in five minutes things that ought to take a year and a half..." warned state Sen. Steve Thompson (D-Powder Springs).

Becker of GRTL: "it makes a statement."

Message received - loud and clear. Do not do business in Georgia as inevitably the legislature will cough up some poorly considered bill in an attempt to serve the limitless desires of one of their power hungry interest groups and trample on you in the process. I've seen this happen numerous times before in multiple contexts.

After nearly backing away from the issue, the Georgia Senate passes a ban to limit embryonic stem cell research | Political Insider

There have been a number of articles lately about people cutting costs by cancelling/cutting cable TV service.

This is an interesting discussion.

Cancel Cable TV

The analogue of the 1929 Wall Street crash is not the 2007 credit crunch, but the bursting of the New Economy bubble in 2000. The follies of the 1990s resembled those of the 1920s...

In 1937-38, markets and business leaders came to doubt the durability of the business foundations on which partial recovery from the Great Depression had been built. In 2007-08, markets and business leaders came to doubt the durability of the financial foundations that had supported consumption and asset price growth after the New Economy fiasco.

Our capacity to learn from the Great Depression is limited because we do not know how economies would have evolved after 1938 if politics had not supervened.

FT.com / Columnists / John Kay - Lessons from a 1930s rebound that petered out

The elites who run the US banking industry have had a great run of economic good fortune. They used this wealth to further strengthen their political power, both through donations to politicians of almost all stripes and more broadly through taking positions of formal and informal influence throughout the executive and legislative branches.

More here.

Our taxpayer money is ensuring their bonuses. We're making sure that companies, that banks survive. And eventually, of course, the economy will turn around. Things will get better. The banks will be worth a lot of money. And they will cash out. And we will be paying higher taxes, we and our children, will be paying higher taxes so those people could have those bonuses. That's not fair. It's not acceptable.

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Geithner v. The American Oligarchs

If you really believe Citigroup (C) has suddenly started making money (excluding mark-to-market losses) you are quite possibly border line retarded. They've had the "best quarter since 2007"! Really? They did as well NOW as during the absolute apex of the greatest credit bubble ever? HOW? HOW is that even possible? WHERE could those profits possibly come from?

[ The Financial Ninja ]: You Don't Put in THE Bottom With a Spike in Libor

"Simply put, the intelligence community has always and will always prioritize its own collection efforts over the defensive and protection mission of our government's and nation's digital systems," he said.

I agree. This point is a lot more important than it sounds.

NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to 'Grave Peril', Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress | Threat Level from Wired.com

Sacramento's homeless rate is rising quickly as people lose their homes and their jobs.

The sea of tents along Sacramento's American River is growing by the day. But here, there are no rules and no regulations. Here, at Tent City, you are on your own.

First world shanty towns.

CBS13 Investigates: Sacramento 'Tent City' - cbs13.com

possibly noteworthy wrote:
In this decade alone, two of Atlanta's huge suburban counties, Clayton and DeKalb, have acquired substantial black majorities, and immigrants arriving from foreign countries are settling primarily there or in similar outlying areas, not within the city itself.

Reading back over this, one wonders to what degree its an oversimplification made by someone who doesn't actually understand how this city is laid out. I mean, generally speaking I think that there is some gentrification of downtown Atlanta that has been going on, but you can't rely on data about counties to understand the relationship between urban and suburban here because thats not how the counties are laid out. It seems like thats what they are doing - are they presuming that the demographic data for Fulton reflects "the city itself?" In fact, the "city," which I think of as the area inside the perimeter, is split 55 - 40 between Dekalb and Fulton with the other 5 percent going to Clayton. Fulton includes huge suburban areas southeast and north of the city, including well to do Sandy Springs where houses on quarter acre lots go for $500,000.*

DeKalb has lots of immigrants because there used to be (1970) a huge industrial area along Peachtree Industrial Blvd. with numerous factories. They have been shutting those factories down, which caused property values in the area to collapse, Detroit style. Except Atlanta is not Detriot, and a huge, diverse immigrant community swept in to take advantage of the cheap rents. Its like if you took all of the immigrant clusters in NYC, shook them up, and placed them in a single neighborhood. Referring to this place as an "outlying area" and an example of demographic inversion is simply misleading.

Today the area is starting to gentrify a bit. They renamed part of "Peachtree Industrial Blvd" to just plain "Peachtree Blvd." One of the last big factories, a GM plant, closed in September. Not a reaction to the crisis - this had been announced for years. There were plans on the table to level it and install a new urbanist shopping/living/working type setup. I suspect those plans are on hold given the economic crisis.

Same thing with developments downtown. Apparently 66 new condos were sold during the second half of 08 and they recently auctioned off a bunch of nice downtown condos at half their original asking prices. Whatever demographic inversion was going on has absolutely ground to a halt and in my view there is way too much high end housing coming on the market. There are numerous buildings in construction around the city that feature million dollar condos - a Ritz Carlton residence in Buckhead, a Trump Tower, and 1010 Midtown where most of the units are around $600,000. I honestly think this represents some sort of spreadsheet fantasy where the numbers look better if you assume all the customers are rich. The actual market is looking for something completely differ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Trading Places: The Demographic Inversion of the American City