Have you seen Red Road?

Internet Eyes is an online instant event notification system. Utilizing Open Circuit Television (OCTV) software, viewers are able to monitor live video feeds from our customers and notify them the instant an event is observed.

Typical event notifications include

* Shop lifting
* Anti-social behavior
* Burglary
* Vandalism

Would you like the opportunity to help detect these crimes?

How does a reward of £1000 a month sound?

Marshall McLuhan:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

Internet Eyes

Lawrence Lessig:

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement -- if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness -- will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

Aaron Swartz:

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

Freeman Dyson:

I beseech you, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, to think it possible you may be mistaken.

Colin Powell:

Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

Against Transparency

Richard B. Rafal:

Since we are moving toward socialism with ObamaCare, the time has come to do the same with other professions -- especially lawyers.

ABA Journal:

Of the 2,377 respondents who answered all or part of the survey, 84.2 percent indicated they would be willing to earn less money in exchange for lower billable-hour requirements.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

A Doctor's Plan for Legal Industry Reform

Paul Ohm:

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.

Lee Gomes:

This preoccupation with keeping data anonymous can lead to surreal outcomes.

Kip Hawley:

Our Behavior Detection teams routinely -- and quietly -- identify problem people just through observable behavior cues.

Decius:

No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Michael Froomkin:

Despite growing public concern about privacy issues, the United States federal government has developed a number of post 9/11 initiatives designed to limit the scope of anonymous behavior and communication. Even so, the background norm that the government should not be able to compel individuals to reveal their identity without real cause retains force. On the other hand, legislatures and regulators seem reluctant to intervene to protect privacy, much less anonymity, from what are seen as market forces. Although the law imposes few if any legal obstacles to the domestic use of privacy-enhancing technology such as encryption it also requires little more than truth in advertising for most privacy destroying technologies.

Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov:

We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary's background knowledge.

Flynn23:

Once someone cracks a really interesting problem that just requires sensitive data to be collected, shared, and analyzed, then all bets are off.

Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization

Gold Star

David Grann:

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

Justice Scalia:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Also worth a "look" -- The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, which has been misinterpreting bad punctuation since 2005.

Justice Stevens:

Imagine a petitioner in Davis's situation who possesses new evidence conclusively and definitively proving, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is an innocent man. The dissent's reasoning would allow such a petitioner to be put to death nonetheless. The Court correctly refuses to endorse such reasoning.

Decius:

Conor Clarke suggests that Scalia and Thomas are not crazy in holding the view that federal courts are powerless to help a convicted but demonstrably innocent death row inmate.

I think this is one of those moments when there is a clear division between right and wrong

Trial By Fire

Ashby Jones:

People who follow the world of law firms know, among so much else, two things: 1) that billing-by-the-hour has long been the way law firms get paid and 2) companies have over the years had only limited success in getting firms to agree to do it any other way.

That's changing. In a big way.

Decius, in 2007:

There is a substantive difference between a competitive threat and a blogger, and any lawyer worth his salt ought to be able to articulate that difference in a court room. But its in the interest of the firm to stoke that fear. That fear turns into billable hours. By telling corporate managers with a straight face they have to generate these C&Ds or toss their trademark away, the firm generates revenue.

Fear is the reason that a handful of lawschools have dominated the market.

Bob Skrivanek:

"You have this expectation that when you get out of law school, things will be better. Sometimes it's not true."

ABA Journal:

Of the 2,377 respondents who answered all or part of the survey, 84.2 percent indicated they would be willing to earn less money in exchange for lower billable-hour requirements.

Has the Clock Struck 12 on the Billable Hour?

FRONTLINE:

This is the story of the most important change in the relationship between government and private business in a generation.

In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk draws on a rare combination of high-profile interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky merger, and the government's new role in taking over -- some call it "nationalizing" -- the American banking system.

Breaking the Bank

Roger Ebert:

Bill O'Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.

He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels.

O'Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance.

People aren't in the habit of searching the dial.

P.J. O'Rourke:

I wonder, when was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

Have you read Infinite Jest?

The O'Reilly Procedure

Ed Felten et al:

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Aaron Swartz:

I've spent the past year and change working on a site that publishes government information online. In doing that, I've learned a lot. But I've also become increasingly skeptical of the transparency project in general.

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

Government Data and the Invisible Hand

Yaroslav Trofimov for WSJ:

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is on the defensive, its struggles reverberating throughout Islamist movements that the secretive organization has spawned world-wide.

The Brotherhood engaged in assassinations and bombings in the past, and one of its ideologues, Sayyid Qutb, developed a radical theology that still motivates jihadi groups such as al Qaeda. Since the 1970s, however, the Egyptian Brotherhood renounced violence and rejected Mr. Qutb's more fiery theories. It has focused instead on building an Islamic society from the bottom up, through proselytizing, social work and political activism.

In such an environment, the Brotherhood's strategy has long been to run heavily publicized parallel social services. But the Brotherhood's social-services pitch doesn't always match reality, in part because of the campaign against its financing. On a recent evening visit to the two Brotherhood clinics, no doctor or patients could be seen. The clinics themselves turned out to be tiny rooms tucked into corners of Brotherhood offices. Behind the flimsy curtains, they contained little more than a cupboard full of pills, rickety furniture and a blood-pressure gauge.

"In the beginning, the Brotherhood had a lot of popularity -- people thought they'd achieve something. But once they got into parliament, they've become just like everyone else."

Decius:

When you put God and the king in the same chair the result must be despotism.

Economist on Obama:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Muslim Brotherhood Falters as Egypt Outflanks Islamists