Thomas Wells: There is an advantage to a government being so obnoxiously direct about its paternalism: one can politicize and challenge the government's limitation of our choices. This may not be possible if the state instead tries to change how we behave by exploiting our cognitive weaknesses about how we understand the choices we face.
Dan Geer: You have the biggest financial firms saying that their dependencies are no longer manageable, and that the State's monopoly on the use of force must be brought to bear.
Mikey Dickerson: These problems are fixable; these problems are important, but they require you to choose to work on them.
James Comey: It is time to have open and honest debates about liberty and security.
Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Steven Rich: Prince George's police spent $382,000 on license-plate readers ... and an undisclosed amount on a "cell site simulator" that can surreptitiously track cellphones. The Prince George's police spokeswoman said the cellphone-tracking system is only used under court order and that the department "follows best practice policies" when spending forfeiture funds.
Economist: Last year America's courts and law-enforcement agencies served 37,839 subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants for location data just to one phone company, AT&T. This year's figure had already climbed to 30,886 by the end of June, the company says.
Paraphrasing David Pritchard: ... every detail of students' interactions -- how long they spend watching lectures, how often they pause or repeat sections, how much of the textbook they read and when, and so on -- is recorded ...
Steve Lohr: Sociometric Solutions advises companies using sensor-rich ID badges worn by employees. These sociometric badges, equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an accelerometer, monitor the communications behavior of individuals -- tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.
Evgeny Morozov: We no longer need to visit the proverbial bazaar: the market will find us in the comfort of our homes, making us an offer we cannot refuse.
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