Quoth the White House Office of the Press Secretary:However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with ( Read more... )

(The following, plus a few side anecdotes, was delivered at SIGINT 13, Cologne, Germany, July 5th, 2013. Here's the video.About a year and a half ago I was in Brussels for a workshop that Google and Privacy International hosted. The goal of this workshop was to develop policy language around privacy that Google could use in negotiating with ( Read more... )

Skip this post if you're sick of hearing about Donglegate.

We'll start with a little history. You might have noticed, in the KYM synopsis, a reference to the PyCon Code of Conduct, a document largely derived from boilerplate language originally advanced, systematically, by the Ada Initiative in August 2012. The PyCon code asserts that "all ( Read more... )

I feel like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek gets a bad rap from today's liberals and progressives, mainly because his support of free markets (particularly free global markets) made him the darling of Republicans from the beginning and especially the Reagan administration. I recently re-read his essay "Why I am Not A Conservative", which ( Read more... )

You might or might not be familiar with the blog Slacktivist, perhaps best known for its ongoing exegesis of the wretched theology and even worse writing in the Left Behind novels. The blog ran for years on typepad.com, and recently its author, Fred Clark, moved it to the Patheos portal in the interest of engaging with the broader ecumenical/ ( Read more... )

By now you've all probably heard about the court order that the U.S. Department of Justice served on Twitter last December, and which Twitter successfully fought to have unsealed so that it could notify the affected subscribers - among whom are Dutch entrepreneur and privacy activist Rop Gonggrijp, Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir, ( Read more... )

Apart from being one of our nation's founding documents and an eloquent call to resistance against tyranny, the Declaration of Independence happens to be a great template for how to structure a logical argument as a springboard for further action. Its form is that of a syllogism, one of the oldest methods of deductive reasoning. First it ( Read more... )

I'm editing an anthology of critical responses -- both written and artistic -- to the United States diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November and December of this year.

Details at the link above, and under the cut. Please feel free to spread this far and wide! I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.

( Call for Papers )

I don't know what the hell bizarro universe I woke up in today, but I kinda like it. Democrats proposing tax cuts? In my Congress? It's more likely than you think...

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Don't miss the money shot at 5:11 -- "particularly when we're using a Chinese credit card to pay for it all." Boo yah.

This should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway -- call ( Read more... )

I have a favour to ask of all of you. It will take about half an hour to an hour of your time in the next week, though first, for context, you should go read about what happened to Peter WattsTL,DR: Canadian science fiction author is accused by Michigan border guards, while he's on the way back to Canada, of having assaulted them. In court, it came ( Read more... )