Here is NYT on a recent survey:

As arguments swirl over online privacy, a new survey indicates the issue is a dominant concern for Americans.

More than half of respondents said government should be “wholly” or “very” responsible for protecting an individual’s online privacy.

Here is TRUSTe's press release on the survey they conducted:

The TRUSTe survey found that consumers still hold themselves responsible when it comes to online protection: respondents indicated that “Individuals” and “Website owners” are most responsible for an individual’s online privacy, with four fifths of respondents indicating each was very or wholly responsible. A large percentage also reported that ISP’s and Browser manufacturers were very or wholly responsible – 70%, while government was seen as having the least responsibility with only 57% of respondents indicating the government was very or wholly responsible for protecting an individual’s online privacy through legislation or regulation.

From the recent archive, Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Spinning

Another front beckons.

Mexican drug traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.

The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government's 2-year-old war against drug organizations, which are evolving into a more militarized force prepared to take on Mexican army troops, deployed by the thousands, as well as to attack each other.

At least one grenade attack north of the border, at a Texas nightclub frequented by US police officers, has been tied to Mexican traffickers.

"At this stage, the drug cartels are using basic infantry weaponry to counter government forces," a US government official in Mexico said. "Encountering criminals with this kind of weaponry is a horse of a different color," the official said.

"It's not your typical patrol stop, where someone pulls a gun. This has all the makings of an infantry squad, or guerrilla fighting."

This Means War

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow:

No one denies that slums - also known as shantytowns, squatter cities, and informal settlements - have serious problems. They are as a rule overcrowded, unhealthy, and emblems of profound inequality. But among architects, planners, and other thinkers, there is a growing realization that they also possess unique strengths, and may even hold lessons in successful urban development.

Christopher Alexander:

A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

The suburbs affect humans as zoos affect animals.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals.

Coming to America:

First world shanty towns.

Learning from slums

From a new report by the Markle Foundation:

For all the nation has invested in national security in the last several years, we remain vulnerable to terrorist attack and emerging national security threats because we have not adequately improved our ability to know what we know about these threats. Today, we are still vulnerable to attack because we are still not able to connect the dots. At the same time, civil liberties are at risk because we don’t have the government-wide policies in place to protect them as intelligence collection has expanded.

Old habits die hard. The "need to know" principle and stovepiping of information within agencies persist. The adoption of the "need to share" principle and the responsibility to provide information, and actions to transform the culture through metrics and incentives, are necessary to the success of the information sharing framework. In addition, those who depend on information to make decisions and accomplish their mission must be empowered to drive information sharing, to ensure they get the best possible data.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Finally:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

Nation At Risk: Policy Makers Need Better Information to Protect the Country

On corporate life:

I think now, with what we’re seeing with mobility, we’re going to have a totally different concept of what it means to go to work.

On management:

You always have this problem of being surrounded by “yes men” and people who want to predigest everything for you. In the old organization, you had to have this whole army of people digesting information to be able to feed it to the decision maker at the top. But that’s not the way it works anymore.

On intellectual property:

It’s not so much the question of what’s owned or what’s not owned. It’s a question of how can you leverage the assets you have to realize the most value.

On scarcity:

We have to look at today’s economy and say, “What is it that’s really scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention.

Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers

Inspired by the vast potential of bioengineering, ordinary people are seeking their inner Frankenstein -- doctor, not monster. Two speakers who know their way around Petri dish and beaker discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of do-it-yourself biology with an MIT Museum crowd.

Showing ads from a 1980 Omni magazine, Natalie Kuldell reflects on the vast changes in computer engineering in the past few decades – from 20-lb PCs to laptops and handhelds. In contrast, she laments, genetic engineering today still resembles in large part its 1980 antecedents -- inserting bits of DNA into organisms like E. coli. She avers that computer engineering made such leaps because its technology was widely available to amateurs, who helped drive many advances. Biotech hasn’t moved as fast, and won’t, believes a nascent do-it-yourself (DIY) community, until basic components of biology become accessible to a larger population.

Freeman Dyson:

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever.

About Drew Endy:

As an engineer, he can recognize a kludge when he sees one. And in his opinion, life is a kludge.

Decius:

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

Bill Joy:

An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends.

Do-It-Yourself Biology

If you're in the habit of buying books two months in advance, Richard Posner's next book is now available for pre-order.

The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we’ve learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn’t it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well.

Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions.

Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist—that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation—and the Keynesian—that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920’s, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated.

From late 2007, Slavoj Žižek:

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’

The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression

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.

The End of Privacy

I wander toward the world‘s margins, the dark places, places of solitude, rural landscapes, wasteland. What this says about me is unimportant; what one encounters in such places is the heart of the matter. For it is there that life is unvarnished and vital, where the margins offer the occasional glimpse of a darkly-splendid world.

Christopher Alexander:

A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

Bruce Haley Pictures

Another front beckons.

Ruthless drug cartels in Mexico are battling against each other and against the government for control of the drug trade. 2008 was the most violent year in Mexico, with around 6,000 drug-related murders. 2009 looks like it could be even worse. And there are fears that Mexico's narco-violence could spread north of the border into the U.S. In this one-hour Vanguard report, Laura Ling travels to the border towns of Juarez and Tijuana, Mexico where drugs gangs are fighting for control of the drug routes into the United States. Ling also goes to the city of Culiacan in Sinaloa State, a region that's known as the birthplace of narco-trafficking in Mexico. Despite the 40,000 federal troops that are patrolling cities across Mexico, violence is increasing and the methods of killings are becoming even more brazen and grotesque. Ling speaks with gun dealers in El Paso, Texas and U.S. officials about the illegal smuggling of weapons into Mexico--90% of the weapons seized in Mexico have been traced back to the U.S. She examines the culture of corruption and lack of public trust in a police force that has become known for working with the cartels.

Recently:

"We're throwing everything into this. We are cleaning the house," said President Felipe Calderon in an interview on Mexican television.

From further back:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Narco War Next Door