So before considering the new garbage coming from Эдвард Сноуден and his accomplices the Glenns Greenwald, let’s recap how far we’ve come with this pair.
The NSA has demonstrated that Snowden never did go through official channels with his alleged evidence of problems, and we certainly know he never did attempt to use legal means to alert the President or the Congress that there were issues at the NSA that needed investigation.
Instead, he ran to China, taking sensitive information with him and putting it at risk of being taken by America’s adversary, then he went to Russia and did the same thing. Then he conspired with serial sock puppeteer and extremist blowhard the Glenns Greenwald to dribble out information, most of it totally unrelated to any allegations of Constitutional or legal violations.
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A big bill is in the air. Politicians are starting to talk about passing a new Communications Act. Lobbyists are drooling at the prospect of a new Communications act. Small government activists want a new Communications act, and they give good reasons for it.
I don’t want a new Communications Act. Here’s why.
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Conservatives often talk about how government picks winners and losers, but sometimes it’s important to discuss just how that is done. It’s easy to see in cases like Solyndra where government picks winners, but sometimes it’s harder to see when government is making one industry win at the expense of another.
Laws related to technology are full of examples like that, and tonight I’m going to illustrate two important ways government makes broadcasters winners at the expense of cable companies and content producers.
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Email technology has changed over the years, and some people hope you don’t understand why, and how that matters for the issues of the day. So tonight I’m going to discuss how the technologies have changed, and why that influences the debates over both the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and the IRS missing emails scandal.
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Bitcoin is an electronic “currency” based on math similar to what it used by cryptography. It has little in the way of central authority, just some software developers who push through software changes on a whim, however this limited authority has no means of moving money around.
As a result, Bitcoin is dangerous, useful to criminals but lacking in the basic property rights that ordinary people need in order to operate in an economy.
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To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
That’s what the Constitution says on patents (and copyrights, but we’re not going there tonight). However today the situation involving patents is messy, and takes some effort to sort through. I’ll do my best here to give the rundown of the challenges we face today, and what we should do about them.
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I’ve been grinding out Tech at Night here at RedState for four years as of this week. But I think it may be time for a change of format. It’s always been a link-centered post, where I accumulate links to interesting news and commentary, and then try to string it together with a narrative. It turns out that’s a lot of work for the amount of traffic I get.
So we’re going to try a new format. Instead of covering all the links equally, I’m going to pick one topic to write about more in depth, just trying to cover what the issue is, why it matters, and what I think is the right position. Then I’ll just throw in a bunch of interesting links at the end with little to no commentary at all.
Please, submit in the comments ideas for future topics. Doesn’t even have to be tech policy, it can be electronics news, video games, whatever you want. Please, ask me about Zelda 2 speedrunning if you like.
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The Global Warming fraudsters have to cheat their data in order to ‘hide the decline’ of temperatures. Likewise, it’s turning out that the left is going to have to cheat in order to make it look like American Internet competition is terrible. they’re going to do this by cheating the definitions by changing them mid-stream, in order to create a decline. Liars all, the Net Neturality/Universal Broadband left.
Uf you want to see the truth though, it’s Net Neutrality that actually harms Internet access, as seen in Chile.
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I know, I’m late again. Turns out after being sick my body’s just been exhausted recovering. We’ll be better off next week.
Ajit Pai came to RedState on Friday to tell us about the Zapple Doctrine was being used by the FCC to stifle freedom of speech, specifically to try to hinder Scott Walker. The Zapple Doctrine is now dead, but we need to check the FCC to keep it from returning.
Broadcasters also want to check the FCC but they’re going to the courts, the same way ISPs had to over Net Neutrality.
And House Republicans are hard at work to shut Net Neutrality down again, after the courts already had to slap it down twice before.
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We missed Tech on Monday because of Memorial Day, but I was sick anyway so it wasn’t happening. Still getting over my cold though, so this tech is about 2 hours late.
Here’s your periodic reminder that kids and teenagers shouldn’t be online unsupervised. Adult sexual predators are actively hunting them to take advantage of them.
Keeping data Internet-accessible is inherently dangerous to your privacy. Internet security is spotty but still users don’t actually quit services that gather their data, as their outrage is always short lived. People want convenience and innovation so I reject calls for bigger government to try to use FTC to enforce a privacy few actually want.
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