Society is approaching a turning point that could well determine the future of privacy. Policy-makers and business leaders soon will make decisions about technology practices that will either ensure that data is used for the benefit of individuals and society, or take us down a path where we are controlled by how others use our data.

Why do we say this?

A new tech savvy administration is entering office, with the likely entry of new appointees who are steeped in the privacy and tech policy debates. Joining them will be veterans of a campaign that broke new ground in maximizing online data use to connect to its audience. This intersection between privacy and a full appreciation of the value of data may provide an opportunity for policymaking that seeks to balance data use with user controls.

These factors all combine to bring us to a uniquely opportune moment. Individual companies have taken major steps forward. AT&T has committed to an affirmative consent model for behavioral targeting and other ISPs have joined in advocating that model. Yahoo! is collaborating with eBay and Wal-Mart to label ads and expand user choices. Microsoft is adding new privacy features to Internet Explorer, and AOL has launched an educational effort around behavioral targeting. However, there is clearly much more that can be done to create a movement to put trust at the center of decisions about data use.

From the archive:

Privacy is one of the most important concepts of our time, yet it is also one of the most elusive.

The Future of Privacy

Section 802 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 is a blatant attempt to prevent this Court--and every other court, federal or state--from deciding whether the carrier defendants conducted dragnet, warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans' communications and communications records in violation of the Constitution and numerous statutes.

The carriers and the government portray section 802 as merely a decision by Congress about plaintiffs' remedies; after all, they say, plaintiffs may instead sue the government. But statutes cannot override the constitutional protections all Americans enjoy from the government's agents any more than the government itself can. This attempt to destroy plaintiffs' constitutional claims alone dooms section 802. Moreover, the sham proceeding established by section 802 violates due process in myriad ways.

But section 802 is far, far more: it is an attempt to manipulate the judiciary and subvert the Constitution. Underlying the Constitution lies the bedrock, structural principle of the separation of powers, by which the Framers sought "to assure as nearly as possible, that each branch of government would confine itself to its assigned responsibility. The hydraulic pressure inherent within each of the separate Branches to exceed the outer limits of its power, even to accomplish desirable objectives, must be resisted."

Section 802 crosses those limits by explicitly giving the Attorney General the power to partially repeal previously enacted law, delegating standardless discretion to the Attorney General, and requiring courts to accept the Attorney General's factual findings without independent judicial review. It also violates the Constitution by giving the Attorney General the unilateral authority to gag the court and hide court processes from the plaintiffs and the public. Accordingly, this Court must find section 802 unconstitutional.

From the archive:

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.

EFF Files Brief in FISA Case

Mark Danner:

Can you not hear the wheels of scandal spinning? It is the music of our age.

From the archive:

Eliot Spitzer certainly had no choice but to resign if, as it seems, he broke the law. But that still leaves the bigger question of whether the law is an ass.

Frozen Scandal

This article investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. Pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.

An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization

Chris Hedges:

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us.

America the Illiterate

Naomi Klein:

On the same day that he allocated the first $125 billion to the banks, Secretary Paulson announced the largest federal budget deficit in U.S. history. Buried in his statement was a preview of the next phase of the financial disaster. The deficit numbers, he declared, reinforce the need to "pursue policies that promote economic growth and fiscal responsibility, and address entitlement reform." He was referring to Americans who feel entitled to receive Social Security in their old age and Medicaid when they are sick. Those programs, Paulson implied, might not be able to survive the budget crisis he is currently creating for the next administration.

From Tom Friedman, in 2005:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

From last month:

"We need this to be clean and quick," Paulson told ABC.

The New Trough

P.J. O'Rourke:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye.

None of this is the fault of the left. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement.

...

Meanwhile stoners continued their slow, shuffling march to social acceptance.

We Blew It

Andy Baio:

Like the rest of the world, I've been completely obsessed with the presidential election and nonstop news coverage. My drug of choice? Gabe Rivera's Memeorandum, the political sister site of Techmeme, which constantly surfaces the most controversial stories being discussed by political bloggers.

While most political blogs are extremely partisan, their biases aren't immediately obvious to outsiders like me. I wanted to see, at a glance, how conservative or liberal the blogs were without clicking through to every article.

With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases. Check out the screenshot below, and install the Greasemonkey script or standalone Firefox extension to try it yourself.

Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey

Valdis Krebs:

As both presidential campaigns sprint toward the finish line I took one more look at the political books being bought in October 2008 and the patterns they created.

The arrows in the network map above show which books were "also bought" together. A-->B shows that customers who bought A, also bought B. Click on the map above for a larger view.

A few surprising patterns...

Complete Polarization

George Orwell:

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.

Politics and the English Language