In the video clip above, President Obama blames America’s current unemployment problem on… automation. ATMs and airport kiosks are singled out.

These words could only be uttered by someone who knows very little about economics or the history of human progress. In fact, they could only be uttered by someone who has never reflected on this question before in his  life. Because if you reflect for one moment, you come up with this glaringly obvious counterfactual: we use a lot more  labor-saving technology today than in previous generations, and yet we also employ far more people. Therefore, increased automation does not lead to decreased national employment.

If you do more than just think for a second — if you read an economic history book, for instance — you discover that increased automation doesn’t even necessarily lead to decreased employment in the industry being automated! The classic example is the 19th century British textile industry. The so-called “Luddites” smashed automated looms fearing that they would lead to rampant unemployment in their industry. But, as the new technology proliferated, textile industry employment rose. Among other reasons, increased efficiency drastically lowered the prices of textile goods, that shot demand through the roof, and to meet the new demand new workers were required to operate and maintain the new machinery.

There are other examples, of course, and the president will save the American people a great deal of hardship, and himself further embarrassment,  if he familiarizes himself with them. Here’s a good brief introduction from the British Secretary of State… under Margaret Thatcher.

Update:

For those having trouble viewing the video, here is a transcript of the relevant Q&A:

Q: Why, at a time of record profits, have you been unable to convince businesses to hire more people Mr. President?

A: [....] the other thing that happened, though, and this goes to the point you were just making: there are some structural issues with our economy, where a lot of businesses have learned to be a lot more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and there’s an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport, and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.

Barack Obama, Luddite? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Bloomberg is reporting more bad news for the nation’s air traffic control system, which is run by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA is $500 million overbudget and six years behind schedule on a $2.1 billion technology upgrade project.

The FAA has a long history of mismanaged technology projects, and so the latest screw-ups are nothing new. Yet the nation needs high-tech advances in air traffic control more than ever to ease our increasingly congested airspaces.

There is a better way to run air traffic control—a private sector way, as Canada has been demonstrating. In 1996, Canada converted its government air traffic control system to a private nonprofit corporation. Nav Canada has been a smashing success, providing an excellent model for possible U.S. reforms.

A December 24 story in the Financial Post describes how Nav Canada is a world leader in efficiency, safety, and technology under private management. “A once troubled government asset, the country’s civil air traffic controller was privatized 14 years ago and is now a shining example of how to create a global technology leader out of a hulking government bureaucracy.” It really is an impressive story of pro-market reform.  

Canada’s system recently won an award from the International Air Transport Association. The IATA said that “Nav Canada is a global leader in the efficient implementation and reliable delivery of air traffic control procedures and technologies.”

We should have that type of efficient air traffic control system in this country. Privatizing the FAA should be a high priority for the next Congress.

See here for a discussion on privatizing air traffic control.

Privatize the FAA is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

NOTE:  This is the first in a series of monthly posts in which Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

The Current Wisdom only comments on science appearing in the refereed, peer-reviewed literature, or that has been peer-screened prior to presentation at a scientific congress.

The Iceman Goeth:  Good News from Greenland and Antarctica

How many of us have heard that global sea level will be about a meter—more than three feet—higher in 2100 than it was in the year 2000?  There are even scarier stories, circulated by NASA’s James E. Hansen, that the rise may approach 6 meters, altering shorelines and inundating major cities and millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide.

Figure 1. Model from a travelling climate change exhibit (currently installed at the Field Museum of natural history in Chicago) of Lower Manhattan showing what 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise will look like.

Researchers and the media need to stop suggesting that Manhattan or even Miami will be lost to a rising sea. That’s not realistic; it promotes denial and panic, not a reasoned consideration of the future.

Titus was commenting upon his 2009 publication on sea-level rise in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The number one rule of grabbing attention for global warming is to never let the facts stand in the way of a good horror story, so advice like Titus’s is usually ignored.

The catastrophic sea level rise proposition is built upon the idea that large parts of the ice fields that lay atop Greenland and Antarctica will rapidly melt and slip into the sea as temperatures there rise.  Proponents of this idea claim that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its most recent (2007) Assessment Report,  was far too conservative in its projections of future sea level rise—the mean value of which is a rise by the year 2100 of about 15 inches.

In fact, contrary to virtually all news coverage, the IPCC actually anticipates that Antarctica will gain ice mass (and lower sea level) as the climate warms, since the temperature there is too low to produce much melting even if it warms up several degrees, while the warmer air holds more moisture and therefore precipitates more snow. The IPCC projects Greenland to contribute a couple of inches of sea level rise as ice melts around its periphery.

Alarmist critics claim that the IPCC’s projections are based only on direct melt estimates rather than “dynamic” responses of the glaciers and ice fields to rising temperatures.

These include Al Gore’s favorite explanation—that melt water from the surface percolates down to the bottom of the glacier and lubricates its base, increasing flow and ultimately ice discharge. Alarmists like Gore and Hansen claim that Greenland and Antarctica’s glaciers will then “surge” into the sea, dumping an ever-increasing volume of ice and raising water levels worldwide.

The IPCC did not include this mechanism because it is very hypothetical and not well understood.  Rather, new science argues that the IPCC’s minuscule projections of sea level rise from these two great ice masses are being confirmed.

About a year ago, several different research teams reported that while glaciers may surge from time to time and increase ice discharge rates, these surges are not long-lived and that basal lubrication is not a major factor in these surges. One research group, led by Faezeh Nick and colleagues reported that “our modeling does not support enhanced basal lubrication as the governing process for the observed changes.” Nick and colleagues go on to find that short-term rapid increases in discharge rates are not stable and that “extreme mass loss cannot be dynamically maintained in the long term” and ultimately concluding that “[o]ur results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.”

But this is actually old news. The new news is that the commonly-reported (and commonly hyped) satellite estimates of mass loss from both Greenland and Antarctica were a result of improper calibration, overestimating ice loss by  some 50%.

As with any new technology, it takes a while to get all the kinks worked out. In the case of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite-borne instrumentation, one of the major problems is interpreting just what exactly the satellites are measuring. When trying to ascertain mass changes (for instance, from ice loss) from changes in the earth’s gravity field, you first have to know how the actual land under the ice is vertically moving (in many places it is still slowly adjusting from the removal of the glacial ice load from the last ice age).

The latest research by a team led by Xiaoping Wu from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory concludes that the adjustment models that were being used by previous researchers working with the GRACE data didn’t do that great of a job. Wu and colleagues enhanced the existing models by incorporating land movements from a network of GPS sensors, and employing more sophisticated statistics. What they found has been turning heads.

Using the GRACE measurements and the improved model, the new estimates of the rates of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica  are only about half as much as the old ones.

Instead of Greenland losing ~230 gigatons of ice each year since 2002, the new estimate is 104 Gt/yr. And for Antarctica, the old estimate of ~150 Gt/yr has been modified to be about 87 Gt/yr.

 How does this translate into sea level rise?

 It takes about 37.4 gigatons of ice loss to raise the global sea level 0.1 millimeter—four hundredths of an inch. In other words, ice loss from Greenland is currently contributing just over one-fourth of a millimeter of sea level rise per year, or one one-hundreth of an inch.  Antarctica’s contribution is just under one-fourth of a millimeter per year.  So together, these two regions—which contain 99% of all the land ice on earth—are losing ice at a rate which leads to an annual sea level rise of one half of one millimeter per year. This is equivalent to a bit less than 2 hundredths of an inch per year.  If this continues for the next 90 years, the total sea level rise contributed by Greenland and Antarctica by the year 2100 will amount to less than 2 inches.

 Couple this with maybe 6-8 inches from the fact that the ocean rises with increasing temperature,  temperatures and 2-3 inches from melting of other land-based ice, and you get a sum total of about one foot of additional rise by century’s end.

 This is about 1/3^rd of the 1 meter estimates and 1/20^th of the 6 meter estimates.

Things had better get cooking in a hurry if the real world is going to approach these popular estimates. And there are no signs that such a move is underway.

So far, the 21^st century has been pretty much of a downer for global warming alarmists. Not only has the earth been warming at a rate considerably less than the average rate projected by climate models, but now the sea level rise is suffering a similar fate.

Little wonder that political schemes purporting to save us from these projected (non)calamities are also similarly failing to take hold.

References:

Nick, F. M., et al., 2009. Large-scale changes in Greenland outlet glacier dynamics triggered at the terminus. Nature Geoscience, DOI:10.1038, published on-line January 11, 2009.

Titus, J.G., et al., 2009. State and Local Governments Plan for Development of Most Land Vulnerable to Rising Sea Level along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Environmental Research Letters 4 044008. (doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044008).

Wu, X., et al., 2010. Simultaneous estimation of global present-day water treansport and glacial isostatic adjustment. Nature Geoscience, published on-line August 15, 2010, doi: 10.1038/NGE0938.

The Current Wisdom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“Techno-Panics” are public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies, particularly driven by the desire to protect children. As the moniker suggests, they’re not rational. Techno-panic is about imagined or trumped-up threats, often with a tenuous, coincidental, or potential relationship to the Internet. Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka of the Progress & Freedom Foundation have written extensively about techno-panics on the TechLiberationFront blog.

Talking about techno-panic does not deny the existence of serious problems. It merely identifies when policymakers and advocates lose their sense of proportion and react in ways that fail to address the genuine issues—such as censoring a web site because it reveals the fact that some few among a community of tens of millions of people will conspire to break the law.

You’d think that a congressional representative from the heart of Silicon Valley would not sow techno-panic, but here’s Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) on the Craigslist censorship issue:

“We can’t forget the victims, we can’t rest easy. Child-sex trafficking continues, and lawmakers need to fight future machinations of Internet-driven sites that peddle children.”

Of all representatives in Congress, Speier should know that Craigslist has been making it easier for law enforcement to locate and enforce the law against any perpetrators of crimes against children. Pushing them to rogue sites does law enforcement no good. Censoring Craiglist only masks the problem, which may be in the interest of politicians, but definitely not children.

Speier (D-Silicon Valley) Sows Techno-panic is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Electronic Frontier Foundation trumpets a surprising privacy win last week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In U.S. v. Maynard (PDF), the court held that the use of a GPS tracking device to monitor the public movements of a vehicle—something the Supreme Court had held not to constitute a Fourth Amendment search in U.S. v Knotts—could nevertheless become a search when conducted over an extended period.  The Court in Knotts had considered only tracking that encompassed a single journey on a particular day, reasoning that the target of surveillance could have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the fact of a trip that any member of the public might easily observe. But the Knotts Court explicitly reserved judgment on potential uses of the technology with broader scope, recognizing that “dragnet” tracking that subjected large numbers of people to “continuous 24-hour surveillance.” Here, the DC court determined that continuous tracking for a period of over a month did violate a reasonable expectation of privacy—and therefore constituted a Fourth Amendment search requiring a judicial warrant—because such intensive secretive tracking by means of public observation is so costly and risky that no  reasonable person expects to be subject to such comprehensive surveillance.

Perhaps ironically, the court’s logic here rests on the so-called “mosaic theory” of privacy, which the government has relied on when resisting Freedom of Information Act requests.  The theory holds that pieces of information that are not in themselves sensitive or potentially injurious to national security can nevertheless be withheld, because in combination (with each other or with other public facts) permit the inference of facts that are sensitive or secret.  The “mosaic,” in other words, may be far more than the sum of the individual tiles that constitute it. Leaving aside for the moment the validity of the government’s invocation of this idea in FOIA cases, there’s an obvious intuitive appeal to the idea, and indeed, we see that it fits our real world expectations about privacy much better than the cruder theory that assumes the sum of “public” facts must always be itself a public fact.

Consider an illustrative hypothetical.  Alice and Bob are having a romantic affair that, for whatever reason, they prefer to keep secret. One evening before a planned date, Bob stops by the corner pharmacy and—in full view of a shop full of strangers—buys some condoms.  He then drives to a restaurant where, again in full view of the other patrons, they have dinner together.  They later drive in separate cars back to Alice’s house, where the neighbors (if they care to take note) can observe from the presence of the car in the driveway that Alice has an evening guest for several hours. It being a weeknight, Bob then returns home, again by public roads. Now, the point of this little story is not, of course, that a judicial warrant should be required before an investigator can physically trail Bob or Alice for an evening.  It’s simply that in ordinary life, we often reasonably suppose the privacy or secrecy of certain facts—that Bob and Alice are having an affair—that could in principle be inferred from the combination of other facts that are (severally) clearly public, because it would be highly unusual for all of them to be observed by the same public.   Even more so when, as in Maynard, we’re talking not about the “public” events of a single evening, but comprehensive observation over a period of weeks or months.  One must reasonably expect that “anyone” might witness any of such a series of events; it does not follow that one cannot reasonably expect that no particular person or group would be privy to all of them. Sometimes, of course, even our reasonable expectations are frustrated without anyone’s rights being violated: A neighbor of Alice’s might by chance have been at the pharmacy and then at the restaurant. But as the Supreme Court held in Kyllo v US, even when some information might in principle be possible to obtain public observation, the use of technological means not in general public use to learn the same facts may nevertheless qualify as a Fourth Amendment search, especially when the effect of technology is to render easy a degree of monitoring that would otherwise be so laborious and costly as to normally be infeasible.

Now, as Orin Kerr argues at the Volokh Conspiracy, significant as the particular result in this case might be, it’s the approach to Fourth Amendment privacy embedded here that’s the really big story. Orin, however, thinks it a hopelessly misguided one—and the objections he offers are all quite forceful.  Still, I think on net—especially as technology makes such aggregative monitoring more of a live concern—some kind of shift to a “mosaic” view of privacy is going to be necessary to preserve the practical guarantees of the Fourth Amendment, just as in the 20th century a shift from a wholly property-centric to a more expectations-based theory was needed to prevent remote sensing technologies from gutting its protections. But let’s look more closely at Orin’s objections.

First, there’s the question of novelty. Under the mosaic theory, he writes:

[W]hether government conduct is a search is measured not by whether a particular individual act is a search, but rather whether an entire course of conduct, viewed collectively, amounts to a search. That is, individual acts that on their own are not searches, when committed in some particular combinations, become searches. Thus in Maynard, the court does not look at individual recordings of data from the GPS device and ask whether they are searches. Instead, the court looks at the entirety of surveillance over a one-month period and views it as one single “thing.” Off the top of my head, I don’t think I have ever seen that approach adopted in any Fourth Amendment case.

I can’t think of one that explicitly adopts that argument.  But consider again the Kyllo case mentioned above.  Without a warrant, police used thermal imaging technology to detect the presence of marijuana-growing lamps within a private home from a vantage point on a public street. In a majority opinion penned by Justice Scalia, the court balked at this: The scan violated the sanctity and privacy of the home, though it involved no physical intrusion, by revealing the kind of information that might trigger Fourth Amendment scrutiny. But stop and think for a moment about how thermal imaging technology works, and try to pinpoint where exactly the Fourth Amendment “search” occurs.  The thermal radiation emanating from the home was, well… emanating from the home, and passing through or being absorbed by various nearby people and objects. It beggars belief to think that picking up the radiation could in itself be a search—you can’t help but do that!

When the radiation is actually measured, then? More promising, but then any use of an infrared thermometer within the vicinity of a home might seem to qualify, whether or not the purpose of the user was to gather information about the home, and indeed, whether or not the thermometer was precise enough to reveal any useful information about internal temperature variations within the home.  The real privacy violation here—the disclosure of private facts about the interior of the home—occurs only when a series of very many precise measurements of emitted radiation are processed into a thermographic image.  To be sure, it is counterintuitive to describe this as a “course of conduct” because the aggregation and analysis are done quite quickly within the processor of the thermal camera, which makes it natural to describe the search as a single act: Creating a thermal image.  But if we zoom in, we find that what the Court deemed an unconstitutional invasion of privacy was ultimately the upshot of a series of “public” facts about ambient radiation levels, combined and analyzed in a particular way.  The thermal image is, in a rather literal sense, a mosaic.

The same could be said about long-distance  spy microphones: Vibrating air is public; conversations are private. Or again, consider location tracking, which is unambiguously a “search” when it extends to private places: It might be that what is directly measured is only the “public” fact about the strength of a particular radio signal at a set of receiver sites; the “private” facts about location could be described as a mere inference, based on triangulation analysis (say), from the observable public facts.

There’s also a scope problem. When, precisely, do individual instances of permissible monitoring become a search requiring judicial approval? That’s certainly a thorny question, but it arises as urgently in the other type of hypothetical case alluded to in Knotts, involving “dragnet” surveillance of large numbers of individuals over time. Here, too, there’s an obvious component of duration: Nobody imagines that taking a single photograph revealing the public locations of perhaps hundreds of people at a given instant constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. And just as there’s no precise number of grains of sand that constitutes a “heap,” there’s no obvious way to say exactly what number of people, observed for how long, are required to distinguish individualized tracking from “dragnet” surveillance.  But if we anchor ourselves in the practical concerns motivating the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, it seems clear enough that an interpretation that detected no constitutional problem with continuous monitoring of every public movement of every citizen would mock its purpose. If we accept that much, a line has to be drawn somewhere. As I recall, come to think of it, Orin has himself proposed a procedural dichotomy between electronic searches that are “person-focused” and those that are “data-focused.”  This approach has much to recommend it, but is likely to present very similar boundary-drawing problems.

Orin also suggests that the court improperly relies upon a “probabilistic” model of the Fourth Amendment here (looking to what expectations about monitoring are empirically reasonable) whereas the Court has traditionally relied on a “private facts” model to deal with cases involving new technologies (looking to which types of information it is reasonable to consider private by their nature). Without recapitulating the very insightful paper linked above, the boundaries between models in Orin’s highly useful schema do not strike me as quite so bright. The ruling in Kyllo, after all, turned in part on the fact that infrared imaging devices are not in “general public use,” suggesting that the identification of “private facts” itself has an empirical and probabilistic component.  The analyses aren’t really separate. What’s crucial to bear in mind is that there are always multiple layers of facts involved with even a relatively simple search: Facts about the strength of a particular radio signal, facts about a location in a public or private place at a particular instant, facts about Alice and Bob’s affair. In cases involving new technologies, the problem—though seldom stated explicitly—is often precisely which domain of facts to treat as the “target” of the search. The point of the expectations analysis in Maynard is precisely to establish that there is a domain of facts about macro-level behavioral patterns distinct from the unambiguously public facts about specific public movements at particular times, and that we have different attitudes about these domains.

Sorting all this out going forward is likely to be every bit as big a headache as Orin suggests. But if the Fourth Amendment has a point—if it enjoins us to preserve a particular balance between state power and individual autonomy—then as technology changes, its rules of application may need to get more complicated to track that purpose, as they did when the Court ruled that an admirably simple property rule was no longer an adequate criterion for identifying a “search.”  Otherwise we make Fourth Amendment law into a cargo cult, a set of rituals whose elegance of form is cold consolation for their abandonment of function.

GPS Tracking and a ‘Mosaic Theory’ of Government Searches is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On TLF, Berin Szoka comes up just shy of ranting, but it’s a good rant against the myth that Web sites like Facebook sell or give your data to advertisers.

In targeted online advertising, the business model is generally to sell advertisers access to people based on their demographics. It is not to sell individuals’ personal and contact info. Doing the latter would undercut the advertising business model and the profitability of the web sites carrying the advertising.

I did some myth-busting of my own last year when the Wall Street Journal published erroneous information about a health-interest site called RealAge.com, which does not give or sell visitors’ data to drug companies.

Understanding how technologies and business models work is job one for crafting good public policies, but as I noted yesterday…

Busting the Myth that Web Sites ‘Sell Your Data’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Politico has a pretty thorough article on D.C.’s thorough ignorance of things tech.

Take a 2008 hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee about privacy and online behavior-based advertising. The discussion seemed to fall apart when Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and others seemed not to understand the term “cookies.”

Cookies. That’s the (utterly rudimentary) technology that was an issue a decade ago. Washington, D.C. naturally overreacted, but luckily only harmed itself. The White House recently revamped the cookie policy for federal government web sites.

It’s worth noting Tech’s thorough misapprehension of Washington, D.C. as well. Judging by how they act, most tech executives have all the insight they could pick up from Schoolhouse Rock. It seems cool and helpful to come to Washington and give money, so they do, encouraging the bears to rip open their cars looking for peanut butter.

Nor Does Tech Get D.C. . . . is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Politics and extortion share a similar logic: Give to the one who can hurt you the most.

Joe Biden Is No Friend of Tech, So Tech Should Give to Joe Biden is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A passionate plea from Michael Arrington TechCrunch, the number three tech blog in the country and the number four blog overall, according to Technorati’s current rankings:

Silicon Valley has fueled much of the growth in our economy over the last few decades and has created amazing (and highly profitable) companies that are making the world a much better and more interesting place to live. All that happened while the government ignored us.

We don’t want handouts. We don’t want “public-private partnerships,” and we sure as hell don’t want legislation. Just let us do our thing and maybe say thanks to those companies that create jobs by the hundreds of thousands and send in those humongous corporate tax payments on profits. Because all you can do is screw up something beautiful. Really.

While maintaining his hugely popular site, Arrington has made himself something of a controversialist. His policy preferences aren’t strictly libertarian, but his instincts are that freedom produces innovation much better than any alternative public policies.

One From Silicon Valley: Leave Us Alone is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Jeff Stein notes over at the Washington Post, the declassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the Christmas underpants bomber ought to sound awfully familiar to anyone who thumbed through the 9/11 Commission’s massive analysis of intelligence failures. Of the 14 points of failure identified by the Senate, one pertains to a failure of surveillance acquisition: the understandably vague claim that NSA “did not pursue potential collection opportunities,” which it’s impossible to really evaluate without more information. (Marc Ambinder tries to fill in some of the gaps at The Atlantic.)  The other 13 echo that old refrain: Lots of data points, nobody managing to connect them. Problems included myopic analysis—folks looking at Yemen focused on regionally-directed threats—sluggish information dissemination, misconfigured computers, and simple failure to act on information already in hand.

Yet you’ll notice that in the wake of such failures, the political response tends to be heavily weighted toward finding ways to collect more dots.  We hear calls for more surveillance cameras in our cities, more wiretapping with fewer restrictions, fancier scanners in the airport, fewer due process protections for captured suspects. Sometimes you’ll also see efforts to address the actual causes of intelligence failure, but they certainly don’t get the bulk of the attention.  And little wonder! Structural problems internal to intelligence or law enforcement agencies, or failures of coordination between them, are a dry, wonky, and often secret business. The solutions are complicated, distinctly unsexy, and (crucially) don’t usually lend themselves to direct legislative amelioration—especially when Congress has already rolled out the big new coordinating entities that were supposed to solve these problems last time around.

But demands for more power and more collection and more visible gee-whiz technology?  Well, those are simple. Those are things you can trumpet in a 700-word op-ed and brag about in press releases to your constituents. Those are things pundits and anchors can debate in without intimate knowledge of Miroesque DOJ org charts.  In short, we end up talking about the things that are easy to talk about.  We should not be under any illusions that this makes them good solutions to intel’s real problems. Hard as it is for pundits to sit silent or legislators to seem idle, sometimes the most vital reforms just don’t make for snazzy headlines.

Collecting Dots and Connecting Dots is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tim Carney has a blog post at the Examiner that’s worth quoting in full:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued its 2009 congressional scorecard, and once again, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex. — certainly one of the two most free-market politicians in Washington — gets the lowest score of any Republican.

Paul was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers not to win the Chamber’s “Spirit of Enterprise Award.” He scored only a 67%, bucking the Chamber on five votes, including:

• Paul opposed the “Solar Technology Roadmap Act,” which boosted subsidies for unprofitable solar energy technology.
• Paul opposed the “Travel Promotion Act,” which subsidizes the tourism industry with a new fee on international visitors.
• Paul opposed the largest spending bill in history, Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill.

(Rep John Duncan, R-Tenn., tied Ron Paul with 67%. John McHugh, R-N.Y., scored a 40%, but he missed most of the year because he went off to the Obama administration.)

I wrote about this phenomenon last year, when the divergence was even greater between the Chamber’s agenda and the free-market agenda:

Similarly, Texas libertarian GOPer Rep. Ron Paul—the most steadfast congressional opponent of regulation, taxation, and any sort of government intervention in business—scored lower than 90% of Democrats last year on the Chamber’s scorecard.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., had the most conservative voting record in 2008 according to the American Conservative Union (ACU), and was a “taxpayer hero” according to the National Taxpayer’s Union (NTU), but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says his 2008 record was less pro-business than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.
This year’s picture was less glaring, but it’s still more evidence that “pro-business” is not the same as “pro-freedom.” The U.S. Chamber is the former. Ron Paul, and the libertarian position, is the latter.

I suspect that on issues such as free trade agreements and immigration reform, I might be closer to the Chamber’s position than to Ron Paul’s. But to suggest that Paul is wrong to vote against business subsidies — or that DeMint was wrong to vote against Bush’s 2008 stimulus package and the $700 billion TARP bailout – certainly does illustrate how much difference there can be between “pro-business” and “pro-market.” Instead of “Spirit of Enterprise,” the Chamber should call these the “Spirit of Subsidy Awards.”

Ron Paul, the Chamber of Commerce, and Economic Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

TechLawJournal has a thorough analysis of Justice John Paul Stevens’ opinions in technology-related areas. I reproduce it here with permission. (Tim Lee’s earlier about Justice Stevens’ legacy in tech is here.)

Justice John Paul Stevens, who has served on the Supreme Court since 1975, announced on April 9, 2010, that he will retire when the Court completes its current term this summer. This article reviews his contributions to technology related areas of law.

Outline of Article:
1. Summary.
2. Copyright Cases.
3. State Immunity in IPR Cases.
4. Patent Cases.
5. Communications Cases.
6. Internet Speech Cases.
7. Privacy Cases.
8. Other Cases.

1. Summary.

Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion in the 1984 landmark Sony Betamax case. It was a 5-4 opinion. He joined in the unanimous 2005 opinion in MGM v. Grokster, regarding vicarious copyright infringement by the distributors of peer to peer systems. He wrote a long and vigorous dissent in Eldred, the 7-2 case regarding the Copyright Term Extension Act.

Justice Stevens led the fight against extending sovereign immunity to states for violation of, among other things, intellectual property laws. He dissented from the outset, and never considered the Court to be constrained by the doctrine of stare decisis. However, his concern was with the conservatives’ interpretation of states rights, not incenting the creation of intellectual property.

Justice Stevens wrote for a unanimous Court in Illinois Tools Works v. Independent Ink. Otherwise, he has not been active in writing opinions in patent cases in recent years.

Justice Stevens has been an ardent advocate of freedom of speech on the internet. He wrote the majority opinion in Reno v. ACLU in 1997, overturning the censoring provisions of the Communications Decency Act. He dissented from the Court’s 2003 opinion in US v. American Library Association upholding the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which required filtering on certain government subsidized computers. He wrote a concurring opinion in 2004 in Ashcroft v. ACLU, holding unconstitutional the Child Online Protection Act (COPA).

Justice Stevens’ dedication to freedom of speech also led him to write the majority opinion in 2001 in Bartnicki v. Vopper, which limited electronic privacy and condoned violation of the Wiretap Act.

However, he reiterated his slight regard for privacy and Fourth Amendment rights by authoring the dissent in 2001 in Kyllo v. U.S, a case holding that the thermal imaging of a home to detect lamps used for growing marijuana constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

Justice Stevens has not been active in writing majority or dissenting opinions in communications law cases. However, last year in a dissent in FCC v. Fox, he wrote a significant explanation of the nature of the administrative process. He presented an explanation of the FCC as an agent of the Congress.

Finally, Justice Stevens should be remembered for authoring the Court’s 1984 opinion in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 467 U.S. 837. This is not a communications or technology case. However, this case regarding administrative procedure gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wide latitude to write regulations that give wild and implausible interpretations to federal statutes.

2. Copyright Cases.

Justice Stevens has not been a consistent supporter of the copyright based industries. He wrote the majority opinion in the Sony Betamax case, and wrote a vehement dissent in Eldred, the Copyright Term Extension Act case. On the other hand, he has been the Court’s most active critic of the line of cases granting states immunity in intellectual property cases.

Sony. Justice Stevens wrote for the majority in the Court’s 1984 5-4 opinion in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417.

He wrote that the “sale of video cassette recorders (“VCR´´s) did not subject Sony to contributory copyright liability, even though Sony knew as a general matter that the machines could be used, and were being used, to infringe the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. Because video tape recorders were capable of both infringing and “substantial noninfringing uses,´´ generic or “constructive´´ knowledge of infringing activity was insufficient to warrant liability based on the mere retail of Sony’s products.”

MGM v. Grokster. Justice Stevens joined in, but did not write, the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2005 opinion [55 pages in PDF] in MGM v. Grokster, 545 U.S. 913.

In this case, the Court reversed the judgment of the U.S. Court of Appeals (9thCir) regarding vicarious copyright infringement by the distributors of peer to peer systems. The Supreme Court held that “one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.” See, story titled “Supreme Court Rules in MGM v. Grokster” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,163, June 28, 2005.

Copyright Term Extension Act. Justice Ginsburg wrote for the majority in the Court’s 2003 7-2 opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186. This opinion upheld the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which retroactively extended the maximum duration of copyrights. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Upholds CTEA in Eldred v. Ashcroft” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 584, January 16, 2003.

Both Breyer and Stevens dissented. Stevens wrote a long and emphatic criticism of the CTEA and the majority opinion. He stated that “By failing to protect the public interest in free access to the products of inventive and artistic genius — indeed, by virtually ignoring the central purpose of the Copyright/Patent Clause — the Court has quitclaimed to Congress its principal responsibility in this area of the law. Fairly read, the Court has stated that Congress’ actions under the Copyright/Patent Clause are, for all intents and purposes, judicially unreviewable. That result cannot be squared with the basic tenets of our constitutional structure. It is not hyperbole to recall the trenchant words of Chief Justice John Marshall: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.´´ Marbury v. Madison …”

Fair Use and Copying of Unpublished Works. Justice O’Connor wrote for the majority, which Justice Stevens joined, in the 1985 6-3 opinion in Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539. The Court held that the unpublished state of a work of authorship may defeat the affirmative defense of fair use.

Database Protection. Justice O’Connor wrote the 8-0-1 1991 opinion in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340. Justice Stevens joined in O’Connor’s opinion. Justice Blackmun concurred without writing an opinion. The Court held that collections of data, such as electronic databases, are generally not subject to copyright protection.

Fair Use and Parody. Justice Souter wrote the unanimous 1984 opinion in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1984). Justice Stevens joined in this opinion. This was the dispute involving the hideous and commercial parody of Roy Obison’s classic titled “Oh, Pretty Woman”. The Court reversed the Court of Appeals, which had held that the defense of fair use was barred by the song’s commercial character and excessive borrowing.

3. State Immunity in IPR Cases.

In the late 1990s the Supreme Court held in a series of 5-4 opinions that states have immunity from suits for money judgments in federal court for violation of intellectual property and other statutes. The Court’s reasoning was weak and tenuous at best. Several Justices, including Stevens, continuously dissented.

Stevens’ retirement from the Court removes one vote towards a five member majority for reversing or limiting this line of cases. There were once four consistent votes against state sovereign immunity in IP cases: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. Souter was replaced by Justice Sonia Sotomayor last year. Now Justice Stevens in leaving. There remain three consistent votes in favor of state sovereign immunity: Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy.

Obama, both as Senator and President, has not shown any particular affinity for the doctrine of states rights. Moreover, his judicial appointments to date, and especially Justice Sotomayor and his Second Circuit appointments, suggest that he will be sympathetic to the interests of the copyright industries.

Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion in the seminal case of Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996). This case involves the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and the Indian Commerce clause of the constitution. He wrote that the Congress lacks authority under Article I of the Constitution to abrogate the states’ 11th Amendment immunity from suit in federal courts. However, its holding regarding the abrogation of state sovereign immunity serves as the precedent for similar cases involving intellectual property. This was a 5-4 opinion.

Stevens wrote in his dissent that “This case is about power — the power of the Congress of the United States to create a private federal cause of action against a State, or its Governor, for the violation of a federal right.” He wrote that the majority opinion “prevents Congress from providing a federal forum for a broad range of actions against States, from those sounding in copyright and patent law, to those concerning bankruptcy, environmental law, and the regulation of our vast national economy.”

Stevens argued that “There may be room for debate over whether, in light of the Eleventh Amendment, Congress has the power to ensure that such a cause of action may be enforced in federal court by a citizen of another State or a foreign citizen. There can be no serious debate, however, over whether Congress has the power to ensure that such a cause of action may be brought by a citizen of the State being sued. Congress’ authority in that regard is clear.”

Next came Rehnquist’s opinion in Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank, 527 U.S. 627 (1999), invalidating the Patent and Plant Variety Protection Remedy Clarification Act. This too was a 5-4 opinion. Justice Stevens wrote the long and strenuous dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter.

At the same time, the Court issued its opinion in College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board, 527 U.S. 666 (1999), invalidating the Trademark Remedy Clarification Act. Scalia wrote this 5-4 opinion. Both Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer wrote dissenting opinions.

As a result of these cases, states can hold intellectual property, and enforce their intellectual property rights in federal court. At the same same, states are in effect free to steal the intellectual property of others, without fear of a money judgments against them. Some states infringe intellectual property rights, hide behind 11th Amendment immunity, and lobby their Senators to block legislation that would remedy this situation.

In 2006 the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Central Virginia Community College v. Katz, 546 U.S. 356. This is an 11th Amendment case involving the Bankruptcy Code’s treatment of preferential transfers by a debtor to state entities. The Supreme Court held, 5-4, that the Congress can abrogate state sovereign immunity in the Bankruptcy Code. However, its analysis is equally applicable to the Patent Act or Copyright Act.

Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion. He commanded a majority because Justice O’Connor switched sides. This opinion cannot be reconciled with the 1990s IP opinions.

See also, story titled “Supreme Court Rules in State Sovereign Immunity Case” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,295, January 24, 2006. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Grants Certiorari in State Sovereign Immunity Case” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,109, April 5, 2005.

Some members of Congress attempted to remedy this situation by legislation. However, they failed. See, stories titled “Legislators Introduce Bills to Address Infringement by States” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 302, November 6, 2001; “Sen. Leahy Reintroduces Bill to Close 11th Amendment Loophole to IPR” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 394, March 22, 2002; “Senate Judiciary Committee Considers Federalism and Intellectual Property” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 522, October 3, 2002; and “Legislators Re-Introduce Bills to Address State IPR Sovereign Immunity” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 680, June 13, 2003.

4. Patent Cases.

Justice Stevens wrote for a unanimous Court in Illinois Tools Works v. Independent Ink. Otherwise, he has not been active in writing opinions in patent cases in recent years.

Illinois Tools Works v. Independent Ink. Justice Stevens wrote the unanimous March 1, 2006, opinion [20 pages in PDF] of the Supreme Court in Illinois Tool Works v. Independent Ink, a patent tying antitrust case. See, story titled “Supreme Court Vacates in Patent Tying Antitrust Case” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,321, March 2, 2006.

The Supreme Court vacated the judgment of the U.S. Court of Appeals (FedCir) and remanded. The Court of Appeals held in January of 2005 that “a rebuttable presumption of market power arises from the possession of a patent over a tying product”.

The Supreme Court concluded that “Congress, the antitrust enforcement agencies, and most economists have all reached the conclusion that a patent does not necessarily confer market power upon the patentee. Today, we reach the same conclusion, and therefore hold that, in all cases involving a tying arrangement, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant has market power in the tying product.”

eBay v. MercExchange. Justice Thomas wrote the unanimous opinion in 2006 in eBay v. MercExchange, 547 U.S. 388. Justice Stevens joined in this opinion, and in a concurring opinion written by Kennedy. The Court held that the traditional four factor framework that guides a court’s decision whether to grant an injunction applies in patent cases. See, story titled “Supreme Court to Consider Availability of Injunctive Relief in Patent Cases” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,261, November 29, 2005, and story titled “Supreme Court Rules on Availability of Injunctive Relief in Patent Cases” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,371, May 16, 2006.

Patent Obviousness. Justice Kennedy wrote the unanimous 2007 opinion in KSR International v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398. Justice Stevens joined in this opinion. See, story titled “Supreme Court Rules on Patent Obviousness in KSR v. Teleflex” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,576, May 7, 2007.

MedImmune v. Genentech. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority in the Court’s 2007 8-1 opinion in MedImmune v. Genentech, 549 U.S. 118. Justice Stevens joined in Scalia’s opinion. Justice Thomas wrote a dissent. This is a case regarding when a patent can be challenged by a licensee in a declaratory judgment action. See, story titled “Supreme Court Rules on Case or Controversy Requirement in Patent Litigation” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,516, January 9, 2007.

Doctrine of Equivalents. Justice Kennedy wrote the unanimous 2002 opinion in Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., 535 U.S. 722. Justice Stevens joined in that opinion. The Court again affirmed the doctrine of equivalents, articulated its purpose, held that the narrowing of a patent claim may give rise to prosecution history estoppel (but that it does not absolutely bar application of the doctrine of equivalents), and listed circumstances under which it might or might not operate as a bar. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Reverses in Festo Case” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 439, May 29, 2002.

Carlsbad Technology v. HIF Bio. Justice Thomas wrote the unanimous 2009 opinion in Carlsbad Technology v. HIF Bio, 556 U.S. __. This is a case regarding federal appellate court jurisdiction. Stevens wrote one of three concurring opinion. See, story titled “Supreme Court Reverses in Carlsband Technology v. HIF Bio” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,934, May 5, 2009.

5. Communications Cases.

Justice Stevens has not been active in writing majority or dissenting opinions in communications cases.

However, in 2009 he wrote a dissent in a broadcast case in which he made a key observation about the nature of the administrative process. He also wrote that the FCC is essentially “an agent of Congress” to which the Congress delegates legislative authority to write rules that “reflect the views of the Congress”.

Section 251 Regulation. Justice Stevens joined in Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in 1999 in AT&T v. Iowa Utilities Board, 525 U.S. 366.

FCC Price Regulation. Justice Stevens joined with the majority in the Court’s 2002 5-3 opinion in Verizon v. FCC, 535 U.S. 467, upholding the FCC’s rules regarding how incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) charge interexchange carriers (IXCs) and competitors local exchange carriers (CLECs) for access to their facilities. See, story titled “Supreme Court Upholds FCC Pricing Rules” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 431, May 14, 2002.

Antitrust and Telecom: Trinko. Justice Scalia wrote the 2004 opinion in Verizon v. Trinko, 540 U.S. 398, holding that a claim alleging a breach of an ILEC’s duty under the 1996 Telecom Act to share its network with competitors does not state a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

Justice Stevens wrote a separate opinion “concurring in the judgment” of the Court. Justices Souter and Thomas joined. Stevens wrote that it was AT&T, and not Trinko, who was injured by Verizon’s conduct, and therefore, under the Sherman and Clayton Acts, only AT&T has standing to raise the antitrust claim. Stevens concluded “I would not decide the merits of the § 2 claim unless and until such a claim is advanced by either AT&T or a similarly situated competitive local exchange carrier.”

See also, story titled “Supreme Court Holds That There is No Sherman Act Claim in Verizon v. Trinko” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 815, January 14, 2004.

Antitrust and Telecom: Pacific Bell v. Linkline. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority in the 2009 5-4 opinion in Pacific Bell v. Linkline, 555 U.S. __. Justice Breyer wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg.

This issue was whether “a plaintiff states a claim under Section 2 of the Sherman Act by alleging that the defendant — a vertically integrated retail competitor with an alleged monopoly at the wholesale level but no antitrust duty to provide the wholesale input to competitors — engaged in a “price squeeze´´ by leaving insufficient margin between wholesale and retail prices to allow the plaintiff to compete.” The majority held not. The four concurring justices would have sent the case back to the District Court to consider a predatory pricing claim.

See, stories titled “Supreme Court Reverses in Pacific Bell v. Linkline”, “Supreme Court: There Is Robust Competition in the Broadband Market”, and “Commentary: Impact of Pacific Bell v. LinkLine” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,906, February 27, 2009.

State Statutes that Bar Local Governments from Providing Telecom Services. Justice Souter wrote the 2004 opinion in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, 541 U.S. 125. This is a case regarding 47 U.S.C. § 253(a) and state statutes that prohibit political subdivisions from offering telecommunications services. Missouri passed a state statute that bans local governments in Missouri from offering telecommunications services. The local governments, represented by the Missouri Municipal League, wanted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to preempt this statute, under Section 253, which provides that states cannot ban “any entity” from providing telecommunications services. It has always been clear that Section 253 means that states cannot bar any company from providing telecommunications services. The question was, does Section 253 also include local governments. The FCC said no. The 8th Circuit said yes. The Supreme Court said no. Of course, this does not mean that states must bar local governments from providing telecommunications services. This opinion only stands for the proposition that states may bar local governments from providing telecommunications services.

Justice Stevens wrote a solo dissent. He would have affirmed the judgment of the 8th Circuit. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Reverses in Nixon v. Missouri” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 864, March 26, 2004.

Cell Towers. Justice Scalia wrote the 2005 opinion in Rancho Palos Verdes v. Abrams, 544 U.S. 113, holding that an individual who brings an action to enforce the limitations on state and local authority to regulate the location, construction, and modification of wireless communications facilities under 47 U.S.C. § 332, cannot also recover damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.

Justice Stevens wrote a solo concurring opinion. He concurred with the Court’s conclusion as to Section 332. However, he wrote that the Court has not “properly acknowledged the strength of our normal presumption that Congress intended to preserve, rather than preclude, the availability of §1983 as a remedy for the enforcement of federal statutory rights.”

See also, story titled “Supreme Court Holds That Individuals Who Sue Under §332 Cannot Also Recover Damages Under §1983″ in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,101, March 23, 2005.

Broadband Internet Access Service. Justice Stevens joined with the majority in the Court’s 2005 opinion [59 pages in PDF] in NCTA v. Brand X, 545 U.S. 967. This opinion upheld the FCC’s determination that cable broadband internet access service is an information service. Justice Thomas wrote the opinion of the Court.

Justice Stevens wrote a two sentence solo concurring opinion in which he commented on Chevron deference. He wrote that Justice Thomas’s opinion “correctly explains why a court of appeals’ interpretation of an ambiguous provision in a regulatory statute does not foreclose a contrary reading by the agency. That explanation would not necessarily be applicable to a decision by this Court that would presumably remove any pre-existing ambiguity.”

See also, story titled “Supreme Court Rules in Brand X Case” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,163, June 28, 2005.

FCC Regulation of Broadcast Speech. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority in the 2009 5-4 opinion [PDF] in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, 556 U.S. __. In this case, the FCC issued an order that fined broadcasters for fleeting expletives. The Court of Appeals vacated and remanded, on the grounds that the FCC’s new fleeting expletives policy is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) for failing to articulate a reasoned basis for the change in policy. The Supreme Court reversed on the basis APA does not preclude unexplained shifts of long standing policy.

Justice Stevens joined in the dissent. See, story titled “Supreme Court Reverses in FCC v. Fox” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,932, April 28, 2009.

FCC Rulemaking Process. In FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Justice Stevens also wrote a solo opinion that delved into the nature of the administrative process.

“Apparently assuming that the Federal Communications Commission’s … rulemaking authority is a species of executive power, the Court espouses the novel proposition that the Commission need not explain its decision to discard a longstanding rule in favor of a dramatically different approach to regulation.” He continued that the Constitution disperses the federal power among the three branches –legislative, the executive, and judicial. Moreover, “Strict lines of authority are particularly elusive when Congress and the President both exert a measure of control over an agency.”

But, he wrote that “when Congress grants rulemaking and adjudicative authority to an expert agency composed of commissioners selected through a bipartisan procedure and appointed for fixed terms, it substantially insulates the agency from executive control.”

“Just as the FCC’s commissioners do not serve at the will of the President”, Stevens wrote, “its regulations are not subject to change at the President’s will. And when the Commission fashions rules that govern the airwaves, it exercises legislative power delegated to it by Congress.”

Justice Stevens, quoting from the Supreme Court’s 1935 opinion in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., 295 U.S. 602, stated that “the FCC “cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive´´ and is better viewed as an agent of Congress established “to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in the statute in accordance with the legislative standard therein prescribed, and to perform other specified duties as a legislative … aid.´´”

“There should be a strong presumption that the FCC’s initial views, reflecting the informed judgment of independent commissioners with expertise in the regulated area, also reflect the views of the Congress”, opined Stevens.

6. Internet Speech Cases.

Communications Decency Act. Justice Stevens wrote for the majority in the 1997 7-2 opinion in Reno v. ACLU, 521 US 845. This case held that the Communications Decency Act (CDA) is unconstitutional under the First Amendment. All of the Justices, except Rehnquist and O’Connor joined.

Internet Filtering. Justice Rehnquist wrote for the majority in the 2003 opinion in US v. American Library Association, 539 U.S. 194. This case upheld the constitutionality of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which provides that for libraries to receive federal subsidies or grants, they must use internet filtering technologies. Justice Stevens wrote a dissent.

The CIPA statute, which was enacted by the 106th Congress, requires schools and libraries receiving e-rate subsidies, pursuant to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program loosely based on 47 U.S.C. § 254(h)(1)(B), and libraries receiving grants under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) (20 U.S.C. § 9101 et seq.), as a condition for receiving subsidies or grants, to use filtering technologies on computers with internet access that are used by children, and to filter images that constitute obscenity or child pornography.

A three judge panel of the U.S. District Court (EDPa) held the statute unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment. It held that filtering software is a content based restriction on access to a public forum, and is therefore subject to the strict scrutiny test — that is, it must be necessary to achieve a compelling governmental interest, and be narrowly tailored to further that interest. The District Court held that the federal government has a compelling interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, or, in the case of minors, material harmful to minors. However, it found that mandating the use of filters is not narrowly tailored to further those interests.

The Supreme Court reversed. Justices wrote several opinions. No one opinion was joined by a majority of the Court. However, six Justices joined in opinions stating that the CIPA is constitutional. Rehnquist wrote an opinion that was joined by Justices O’Connor, Scalia and Thomas. In addition, Justice Kennedy wrote an opinion, that was joined by Justice Breyer, that concurred as to the judgment of constitutionality, but offered a different analysis.

Rehnquist first reviewed the nature of internet access and filtering software. He wrote “there is also an enormous amount of pornography on the Internet, much of which is easily obtained. … The accessibility of this material has created serious problems for libraries, which have found that patrons of all ages, including minors, regularly search for online pornography. … Some patrons also expose others to pornographic images by leaving them displayed on Internet terminals or printed at library printers. … Upon discovering these problems, Congress became concerned that the E-rate and LSTA programs were facilitating access to illegal and harmful pornography.”

Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent that “it is neither inappropriate nor unconstitutional for a local library to experiment with filtering software as a means of curtailing children’s access to Internet Web sites displaying sexually explicit images. … Whether it is constitutional for the Congress of the United States to impose that requirement … raises a vastly different question.”

He wrote that “Because the software relies on key words or phrases to block undesirable sites, it does not have the capacity to exclude a precisely defined category of images.” He stated that it both underblocks, by allowing undesirable sites through, and overblocks, by blocking non-objectionable web sites.

He wrote that “the software’s reliance on words to identify undesirable sites necessarily results in the blocking of thousands of pages that “contain content that is completely innocuous for both adults and minors, and that no rational person could conclude matches the filtering companies’ category definitions, such as `pornography´ or `sex.´ ´´ … In my judgment, a statutory blunderbuss that mandates this vast amount of “overblocking´´ abridges the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.”

See also, story titled “Supreme Court Upholds Children’s Internet Protection Act” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 686, June 24, 2003.

COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion of the Court, in which Justice Stevens joined, in the 2004 5-4 opinion in Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656. This was a a constitutional challenge to the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Stevens also wrote a concurring opinion.

The COPA provided, in part, that “Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both.”

The COPA further provided that “It is an affirmative defense to prosecution under this section that the defendant, in good faith, has restricted access by minors to material that is harmful to minors … by requiring use of a credit card”.

The District Court issued a preliminary injunction of the COPA. The U.S. Court of Appeals (3rdCir) affirmed. The Supreme Court affirmed the issuance of the preliminary injunction, and remanded.

In addition, Justice Stevens wrote a concurring opinion in which Justice Ginsburg joined. He wrote that “I continue to believe that the Government may not penalize speakers for making available to the general World Wide Web audience that which the least tolerant communities in America deem unfit for their children’s consumption, … and consider that principle a sufficient basis for deciding this case.”

He added that “encouraging deployment of user-based controls, such as filtering software, would serve Congress’ interest in protecting minors from sexually explicit Internet materials as well or better than attempting to regulate the vast content of the World Wide Web at its source, and at a far less significant cost to First Amendment values.”

See also, story titled “Supreme Court Affirms Preliminary Injunction of COPA” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 928, June 29, 2004.

7. Privacy Cases.

Electronic Privacy. Justice Stevens wrote for the majority in the Supreme Court 2001 6-3 opinion in Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514. The Court held that a radio host cannot be sued under 18 U.S.C. § 2511 for playing an audio recording of a cellular telephone conversation, despite a federal statute that made illegal both the interception of the conversation, and its disclosure.

Justice Stevens reasoned that the case pitted statutes banning disclosure of illegally obtained electronic communications against the First Amendment freedom of speech claims of persons with illegally obtained recordings to disclose them if their content pertains to a public issue.

While Justice Stevens and the majority may have defended First Amendment rights, they did so at the expense of privacy rights. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Diminishes Electronic Privacy” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 192, May 22, 2001.

Thermal Imaging. Justice Scalia wrote for the majority in the Court’s 5-4 2001 opinion in Kyllo v. U.S., 533 U.S. 27. The majority held that the thermal imaging of a home to detect lamps used for growing marijuana constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The Court further held that such searches are unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment unless supported by probable cause and authorized by a warrant.

Justice Stevens wrote the dissenting opinion, which was joined by Rehnquist, O’Connor and Kennedy. He reasoned that the police did not enter the house search, so there was no search. Under this reasoning, police computer intrusions, or searches of files stored in the cloud, would not be protected by the 4th Amendment.

8. Other Cases.

Internet Wine Sales. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in the Court’s 2005 5-4 opinion in Granholm v. Heald, 544 U.S. 460. Justice Stevens wrote one of two dissents.

The Court held that Michigan’s and New York’s regulatory schemes that permit in-state wineries directly to ship alcohol to consumers, but restrict the ability of out-of-state wineries to do so, violate the dormant commerce clause. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Rules in Internet Wine Sales Case” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 1,137, May 17, 2005.

The commerce clause is one of the few legal defenses that internet retailers have against burdensome, protectionist, and technophobic state regulators.

While Stevens would have allowed the protectionist state statutes to stand, his argument was limited to wine sales, which is also affected by the 21st Amendment. He wrote that “The New York and Michigan laws challenged in these cases would be patently invalid under well settled dormant Commerce Clause principles if they regulated sales of an ordinary article of commerce rather than wine.”

Trademark: Reverse Passing Off. Justice Scalia wrote the 8-0 2003 opinion in Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox, 540 U.S. 806. Justice Stevens joined in this opinion. The defendant copied a work whose copyright had expired, and failed to attribute its origin. The plaintiff alleged that its work of authorship was copied (which can be actionable under the Copyright Act), but instead proceeded on the legal theory of violation of the Lanham Act’s false designation of origin provision. Passing off occurs when a producer misrepresents his own goods or services as someone else’s. Reverse passing off occurs when a producer misrepresents someone else’s goods or services as his own. Both can be actionable under the Lanham Act, which makes actionable not only the misleading use of marks, but also the false designation of origin of goods. The lower courts ruled for the producer. The Supreme Court reversed. It held that this is not the purpose of the Lanham Act. Moreover, allowing this sort of use of the Lanham Act would have the impermissible effect of creating perpetual quasi patents and copyrights. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Reverses in Dastar v. Fox” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 672, June 3, 2003.

Computer Generated Images. Justice Stevens joined with the majority in the Court’s 2002 opinion in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234, a case involving a constitutional challenge to part of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 (CPPA). The Court ruled that provisions of the statute banning computer generated images depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct is overbroad, and violates the First Amendment. See also, story titled “Supreme Court Upholds Speech Rights of Child Pornographers” in TLJ Daily E-Mail Alert No. 412, April 17, 2002. The Congress then rewrote the statute at issue.

TLJ on Justice Stevens’ Tech Influence is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A new BBC poll is garnering plenty of press attention for its striking finding that 78% of global respondents believe that Internet access “should be a fundamental right of all people.” Fascinating!  Except… what exactly does that mean?

The obvious problem here is that, at least as it’s worded in English, the question is ambiguous between two equally plausible readings.  Especially when juxtaposed with another question about whether the Internet should be regulated by government, it could be understood as asking whether there’s a fundamental negative right to be free to use the Internet — to read and communicate free of government censorship or other onerous barriers.  That’s probably how we’d interpret a parallel question about whether people had a “fundamental right” to “access” information via newspapers or books.

Many folks, though, seem to be reading it as a measure of support for a fundamental positive right to be provided with (broadband?) Internet access. And that just seems a bit silly, frankly. There’s a decent case to be made that it’s desirable for governments that can afford it to make some kind of public Internet access available to citizens who can’t.  You can even imagine that, a few years down the line, some states in the developed world might have moved so heavily toward interacting with the public online that it would become more or less necessary for full political equality.  But a basic human right? Something that governments are “violating fundamental rights” if they don’t do? It’s not just that I don’t believe this; I have trouble imagining that much of anyone literally thinks so.  A few of my friends at Free Press, maybe, but 4/5 of the world’s population?  Color me dubious.

I’ll confess being startled at the response to a much less ambiguous question: A global majority agreed that “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.” While I find this pattern of responses congenial enough, I can’t take it much more seriously.  After all, what falls under the category of “regulation of the Internet”?  Censorship, of course, which I expect is what most people immediately thought of.  But in reality, of course, there are a whole panoply of laws and rules that at least arguably “regulate” the Internet in some sense, some of which even I would approve of. I have many, many issues with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for instance, but there’s nothing wrong with the idea that there should be a basic protocol that provides both a safe harbor for service providers hosting user content and a mechanism for complaining about copyright-infringing or libelous or otherwise tortious material.  Probably there are other “regulations” I’d approve too, but I’d have to sit and think about it for an hour to even enumerate all the different kinds of rules that might be considered to “regulate the Internet” in one way or another.

Because it’s at least not susceptible to such dramatically divergent readings, this response might be more useful as a kind of big-picture attitude check. But the reality is that almost none of the respondents can really mean it because even someone steeped in tech policy would have to sit and think about the question for a half hour to really get a grip on what it entails. Or might entail. If the BBC were engaged in some kind of serious social science, they probably would have worked up better questions.  But of course, that’s not the business they’re in.  They’re in the business of asking the sort of question that will let them run exciting headlines that get re-tweeted and drive page views. And 100% of respondents in my poll of myself agree they’ve succeeded.

Annals of Unhelpful Polling: Internet Access Edition is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A good default proposition regarding the government’s role in the economy would state that the government should not loan money to an enterprise if the enterprise in question cannot find one single market actor anywhere in the universe to loan said enterprise a single red cent.  It might suggest – I don’t know – that the investment is rather … dubious.

Alas, like all good propositions regarding the government’s role in the economy, this one is being left by the roadside by the Obama administration.  Unfortunately, the only complaint being made by a not insubstantial segment of the political Right – frequently, the political crowd that is busy decrying “Bailout Nation” – is that the loan guarantees are not fat enough.

I write, of course, about the $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee announced by President Obama this week for Southern Company to build two new nuclear power plants.  The money will be used to guarantee the loans being made by the federal government (via the Federal Financing Bank) to partially cover the cost of Southern’s projected $14 billion nuclear construction project at their Vogtle plant near Waynesboro, Georgia.  The loan guarantees were authorized by Congress in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and, we are told, are the first installment on a total package of $54 billion that the President would like to hand out to facilitate the construction of 7-10 new nuclear power plants (Congress, however, has only authorized $18.5 billion to this point).

The claim being made by some – that the loan guarantees are necessary to jump-start investor interest in new nuclear power plant construction – is not quite correct.  Even these lavish loan guarantees aren’t enough to do that.  In a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy dated July 2, 2007, six of Wall Street’s s then-largest investment banks – Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley – informed the administration that, contrary to the government’s expectations, anything short of a 100 percent unconditional guarantee would be insufficient to induce private lending.

Why is it risky to build nuclear power plants?  Because new nuclear projects tie up more capital for longer periods of time than its main competitor, natural-gas fired generation.  Nuclear power makes economic sense only if natural gas prices are very high.  Then, over time, the high initial costs of nuclear power would be offset by nuclear power’s lower fuel costs.  Moreover, as noted by Moody’s in an analysis published in July of last year, there is uncertainty associated with construction costs, regulatory oversight, technological developments that might reduce the cost of rival facilities, and the ability of utilities to recover costs and make a profit over the lifetime of the plant – a risk tied up in the economic prospects of the region being served by the plant.  And those risks have been increasing, not decreasing, as time has gone on.

In short, even during the go-go days prior to the September 2008 crash – a time when Wall Street was allegedly throwing around money left and right to all sorts of dubious borrowers – the banks that stand accused of recklessly endangering their shareholders on other fronts were telling utility companies that they would not loan them anything for new nuclear power plant construction unless the feds unconditionally guaranteed every last penny of those loans.  That’s how risky market actors think it is to build nuclear power plants.

And it’s not as if the federal government disagrees completely.  The Congressional Budget Office pegs the chance of default (program-wide) at 50 percent or better and the Government Accountability Office likewise thinks that default risks are quite high.  Energy Secretary Stephen Chu says that he thinks the chance of default is much lower.  We can only speculate about who’s right given that no one has tried to build a nuclear power plant in the United States for over 30 years.

Regardless of what the risk actually is, the loan guarantees do not reduce that risk.  They simply transfer the risk from the bank to taxpayer.  In this particular case, however, the loan guarantee transfers risk from one arm of the state to the other, so it doesn’t really count.  But if such loan guarantees  ever were to induce actual private lending for plant construction, that’s how it would work.

Plenty of arguments have been offered to justify these loan guarantees.  Most of them are flimsy on their face.

For instance, we’re often told that we “need” new power plants.  But with electricity demand declining over the past couple of years, it is unclear when that need might arise.

Regardless, when the market “needs” more electricity, that need will be manifested in price signals that will carry with them profit opportunities.  Profit-hungry investors will be willing and able to meet that need without the help of government.  Of course, if market conditions don’t radically change, those needs will be met with gas-fired power plants, but hey, if that bothers you, take it up with someone else.

Others argue that we need the jobs that will be produced by new nuclear power plants.  Well, building big new reactors will certainly employ a lot of (largely unionized) construction workers.  But that’s one reason why building a nuclear power plant is not very economic compared to building gas-fired generators.  If creating jobs is the idea whether the project makes any economic sense or not, then let’s just ban food imports and farm equipment and put everyone to work with hand plows and scythes.

Two somewhat more serious arguments have been offered to justify these loan guarantees.  Neither of them stands up to much scrutiny either.

The first argument – the argument most often heard from the nuclear power industry and some segments of the political Left – is that we need nuclear power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Of course, the best (that is, most efficient) way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to internalize the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the retail price of electricity and then allow market actors to adjust their production and consumption decisions accordingly.  That price internalization exercise, however (whether directly through a carbon tax or indirectly through a cap-and-trade program), does not appear to be in the cards in the foreseeable future.  Hence, the loan guarantees are advanced as a “second-best” solution, one that will get us the technology and economic efficiency that would be delivered by a properly crafted carbon tax or cap-and-trade program without the retail price increases associated with either.

One of several problems with this argument is that it would take one hell of a carbon tax – or one hell of an onerous cap-and-trade program – to get anyone interested in building nuclear power plants.  If natural gas prices remained roughly where they are at present (that is, if they were to remain at historical norms) then it would take a $90 per ton carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program that delivered carbon emission credits at $90 per ton on the open market to induce investment in nuclear power plants.  Few economists who study climate policy believe that a carbon tax of that size is defensible given what we know about climate change.

And that’s if construction costs are as low as advertised.  Were they to double (as they did from 2003 to 2009) – either because of endogenous increases in the cost of capital, labor, or construction-related resources or because of cost overruns – then it would take at least a $150 per ton carbon tax (or a cap-and-trade program that delivered $150 carbon credits to the market) to induce investment.

You might ask yourself what the historical relationship is between final (inflation-adjusted) nuclear power plant construction costs in the United States and construction costs as projected at the onset of the project.  Happily, the CBO has done your homework for you.  They found that final construction costs averaged 207 percent of projected costs.  Hence, a doubling of construction costs is probably more likely than not once a project is underway … if past is prologue.

The upshot is that there are many more efficient ways to respond to greenhouse gas emission constraints than to go on a nuclear power bender.  This observation is heresy on the Right, but almost every credible analysis of the matter backs up that observation.

The second argument one hears to justify federal loan guarantees is that they are necessary to counter-balance the excessive regulatory costs associated with new plant construction.  Now, put aside the fact that the Nuclear Energy Institute – the trade association of the nuclear power industry – has often expressed near-total satisfaction with the current federal regulatory regime.  If the regulatory regime is truly “bad” and, accordingly, is imposing steep and unnecessary costs on the industry, then the correct remedy is to improve said regulatory regime, not to subsidize the industry.

The counter-complaint that positive regulatory reforms are impossible is difficult to swallow.  After all, if there is sufficient political will to bestow tens of billions of dollars worth of tax money on this industry, then surely there is enough political will to reform the bad and unnecessarily costly regulations allegedly bedeviling the object of those very same legislative affections.

I will confess to being skeptical about the argument that high construction costs are largely the fault of regulators.  Building a light water breeder reactor is a technologically challenging and costly undertaking whether regulators are on the scene or not.  Moreover, it is not obvious to me that the regulations that are in place are a priori objectionable from a libertarian perspective.

One rarely, if ever, hears of particulars in this bill of complaint offered about nuclear regulation.  But if a persuasive bill of complaints is ever presented, then the appropriate response is regulatory reform and then to leave the decision to build or not to build to markets.

In the course of announcing these loan guarantees, President Obama said this week that “The fact is, changing the ways we produce and use energy requires us to think anew. It requires us to act anew.”  Well, there’s nothing new about throwing subsidies at nuclear power.  Economist Douglas Koplow calculates that federal nuclear subsidies have totaled $178 billion from 1947-1999.  The promise of a nuclear economy with rates too cheap to meter has been made for over half a century.  What would be new would be a policy of “just saying no” to industries with their hands out in Washington.

[Cross-posted at MasterResource]

Radioactive Corporate Welfare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today’s New York Times reports that President Obama has “ordered the rapid development of technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal,” as well as mandating the production of more corn-based ethanol and financing farmers to produce “cellulosic” ethanol from waste fiber.

You’ve got to like the president’s moxie.  Faced with his inability to pass health care reform and cap-and-trade, he now chooses to command the impossible and the inefficient.

Most power plants are simply not designed for carbon capture.  There isn’t any infrastructure to transport large amounts of carbon dioxide, and no one has agreed on where to put all of it.  Corn-based ethanol produces more carbon dioxide in its life cycle than it eliminates, and cellulosic ethanol has been “just around the corner” since I’ve been just around the corner.

However, doing what doesn’t make any economic sense makes a lot of political sense in Washington, because inefficient technologies require subsidies–in this case to farmers, ethanol processors, utilities, engineering and construction conglomerates, and a whole host of others.  Has the president forgotten that his unpopular predecessor started the ethanol boondogle (his response to global warming) and drove up the price of corn to the point of worldwide food riots? Hasn’t he read that cellulosic ethanol is outrageously expensive? Has he ever heard of the “not-in-my-backyard” phenomenon when it comes to storing something people don’t especially like?

Yeah, he probably has.  But the political gains certainly are worth the economic costs.  Think about it.  In the case of carbon capture, it’s so wildly inefficient that it can easily double the amount of fuel necessary to produce carbon-based energy.  What’s not to like if you’re a coal company, now required to load twice as many hopper cars?  What’s not to like if you’re a utility, guaranteed a profit and an incentive to build a snazzy, expensive new plant?  And what’s not to like if you’re a farmer, gaining yet another subsidy?

Obama Commands the Impossible is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I was dismayed today to listen to a recorded radio program in which James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation debated Michael German of the ACLU about the whole-body imaging systems being considered for airports after the Christmas attempt to light a bomb on a flight into Detroit.

Carafano, who I like personally, is a careless debater. He misstated the law, insulted a caller to the radio program, and misstated people’s names as he mischaracterized their views—in particular, my name and my views.

The segment was recorded, so we can capture exactly what Carafano said:

When the Transportation Security Administration rolled out this technology, they went through a very long and detailed consultation period with privacy and civil liberties groups including Jim Lindsey at Cato. I remember Jim Lindsey, when we had a session on privacy and civil liberties, stood up and complimented Secretary Chertoff, and said, “Look, this is something that you’ve actually done right. You’ve gone out to the stakeholder community, and you’ve gone over the procedures with us and we’ve come up with procedures that we’re very, very comfortable with.” So I think the privacy issue is really a non-issue.

At a Heritage event in June, 2008, I rose to rebut how Secretary Chertoff dismissed privacy advocates. He said privacy advocates prefer “no-security” airlines and that they want people to use fraudulent documents. As I gently chastised him for that, I did compliment the work of one TSA official to minimize privacy consequences of millimeter wave, which does provide a margin of security.

The event was recorded, so we can capture exactly what I said: “Frankly, I think millimeter wave is not a bad technology. Peter Pietra at TSA has done a good job, I think, of getting the agency to design the system well.”

That’s it. I made no reference to a ”long and detailed consultation period,” and I don’t know of any such thing happening. I didn’t compliment Secretary Chertoff, but a deputy who—despite Chertoff, most likely—managed to instill some privacy protections in TSA’s use of whole-body imaging systems. As to my comfort, I’ll take “less uncomfortable than I would have been” over “very, very comfortable,” which is inaccurate.

As I’ve written elsewhere, ”I think [TSA privacy officer Peter Pietra has] done a creditable job of trying to build privacy protections into this system. . . . But maybe it’s not enough. We’re talking about trying to maintain privacy with a technology that’s fundamentally intrusive.”

Perhaps I’ve taken too subtle a position on millimeter wave: It provides a small margin of security at a high cost to privacy. With that, I’ll let the country make its decision, while I seek to moot this as a public policy issue: Airline security should be provided by airlines and airports, not the government.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to speak of me—by any name—as an endorser of this technology or the process of its adoption. Thanks to sound and video recording technology, the record can be clear.

Technology Clarifies Debate About Whole-Body Imaging Technology is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

By now, you’ve probably heard the story—and seen the video.  During the weekend’s Snowpocalypse™ in DC, a gaggle of young urbanites, using Twitter and other social media, announced a big group snowball fight at the corner of 14th and U Streets.  For a while, it was all good fun, with the participants periodically stopping the skirmish to help dislodge a motorist for a snowdrift, amid collective cheers. But an off-duty plainclothes cop whose Hummer had been hit by a few snowballs lost his cool—and advanced on the crowd to berate them with his gun drawn. You’d think an angry, out-of-uniform guy brandishing a gun might set off a dangerous stampede in the snow, but true to form, the DC crowd responded with chanting: “You don’t bring a gun to a snowball fight!”

Initially, the Metropolitan Police Department “reviewed the evidence” and concluded that the officer had only been holding a cell phone after all—folks who’d said it was a gun must have just imagined it, what with all that snow. But it turns out there were a whole lot of video cameras and phonecams there, and still shots and recordings began to circulate on the Internet, making it impossible to deny what had happened.  By Monday, the chief of police had issued a statement calling the officer’s behavior “totally inappropriate” and announcing that he’d be relegated to desk duty pending further inquiry.

As anyone who follows the excellent work of my colleague Radley Balko will be well aware, things often play out quite differently—with departments circling the wagons, and no serious accountability for far more egregious abuses of authority. But video—increasingly ubiquitous and portable—can make a difference. And it strikes me that, in one sense, it helps remedy other kinds of social inequality.  Reviewing that video of the snowball scene, you might point out that the crowd is full of white 20-somethings, many of whom (given the city’s demographics) are almost certainly college-educated professionals, while police misconduct toward less privileged groups is far more likely to be ignored.

What is privilege, though? In cases like these, it consists largely in the ability to be seen and heard—to attract media attention, to articulate your story in a clear and compelling way, to be considered credible by press and the community. All of these, unfortunately, depend enormously on class, status, race, and education. Unless there’s video. And video is democratic these days. You’d have to poke around a bit to find even a bottom-of-the-line cheapo cell phone that didn’t come with at least a still camera, and likely video capture to boot. So while there’s been some attention paid to the potential of this kind of “Little Brother” surveillance to increase accountability—the to lessen disparity in power between citizen and cop—it’s also worth stressing the way it can lessen certain kinds of disparities between citizens.

That said, and just going by memory, it seems like most of the stories I encounter in this vein still involve white, middle-class, college-educated young people. One possibility is that this shows I’m wrong, and that other aspects of privilege still play into their videos circulating while others languish. Another, though, is just that they’re both accustomed to this kind of routine use of technology and sharing of data, and that they take their social power for granted. That is, it occurs more naturally to them that the right response to this kind of misbehavior is to record and circulate it. If it’s mostly the latter, we’re on an interesting precipice, where the main remaining precondition for the leveling effect to kick in is just awareness that the other preconditions are in place.  If that’s right, the next few years should be interesting.

Do Bring a Phonecam to a Snowball Fight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last night, thanks to Craigslist and a Web-enabled cell phone, I unloaded two extra tickets to tonight’s World Cup qualifying game between the U.S. and Costa Rica in under an hour. (8:00, ESPN2 “USA! USA! USA!”)

Wanting to avoid the hassle of selling the tickets at RFK, I placed an ad on Craigslist offering them at cost, figuring I might find a taker and arrange to hand them off downtown today or at the stadium tonight. Checking email as I walked to the gym, I found an inquiry about the tickets and phoned the guy, who happened to live 100 feet from where I was walking. A few minutes later, he had the tickets and I had the cash.

This quaint story is a single data point in a trend line—the high-tech version of It’s Getting Better All the Time. Everyone living a connected life enjoys hundreds, or even thousands, of conveniences every day because of information technology. Through billions of transactions across the society, technology improves our lives in ways unimaginable two decades ago.

Before 1995, nobody ever traded spare soccer tickets in under an hour, on a Tuesday night, without even changing his evening routine. If soccer tickets are too trivial (you must not understand the game), the same dynamics deliver incremental, but massive improvements in material wealth, awareness, education, and social and political empowerment to everyone—even those who don’t live “online.”

Sometimes debates about technology regulation are cast in doom and gloom terms like the Malthusian arguments about material wealth. But the benefits we already enjoy thanks to technology are not going away, and they will continue to accrue. We are arguing about the pace of progress, not its existence.

This is no reason to let up in our quest to give technologists and investors the freedom to produce more innovations that enhance everyone’s well-being even more. But it does counsel us to be optimistic and to teach this optimism to our ideological opponents, many of whom seem to look ahead and see only calamity.

Technology: Debating the Pace of Progress is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the high points of last week’s Gov 2.0 Summit was transparency champion Carl Malamud’s speech on the history of public access to government information — ending with a clarion call for  government documents, data, and deliberation to be made more freely available online. The argument is a clear slam-dunk on simple grounds of fairness and democratic accountability. If we’re going to be bound by the decisions made by regulatory agencies and courts, surely at a bare minimum we’re all entitled to know what those decisions are and how they were arrived at. But as many of the participants at the conference stressed, it’s not enough for the data to be available — it’s important that it be free, and in a machine readable form. Here’s one example of why, involving the PACER system for court records:

The fees for bulk legal data are a significant barrier to free enterprise, but an insurmountable barrier for the public interest. Scholars, nonprofit groups, journalists, students, and just plain citizens wishing to analyze the functioning of our courts are shut out. Organizations such as the ACLU and EFF and scholars at law schools have long complained that research across all court filings in the federal judiciary is impossible, because an eight cent per page charge applied to tens of millions of pages makes it prohibitive to identify systematic discrimination, privacy violations, or other structural deficiencies in our courts.

If you’re thinking in terms of individual cases — even those involving hundreds or thousands of pages of documents — eight cents per page might not sound like a very serious barrier. If you’re trying to do a meta-analysis that looks for patterns and trends across the body of cases as a whole, not only is the formal fee going to be prohibitive in the aggregate, but even free access won’t be much help unless the documents are in a format that can be easily read and processed by computers, given the much higher cost of human CPU cycles. That goes double if you want to be able to look for relationships across multiple different types of documents and data sets.

All familiar enough to transparency boosters. Is there a reason proponents of limited government ought to be especially concerned with this, beyond a general fondness for openness? Here’s one reason.  Public choice theorists often point to the problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits as a source of bad policy. In brief, a program that inefficiently transfers a million dollars from millions of taxpayers to a few beneficiaries will create a million dollar incentive for the beneficiaries to lobby on its behalf, while no individual taxpayer has much motivation to expend effort on recovering his tiny share of the benefit of axing the program. And political actors have similarly strong incentives to create identifiable constituencies who benefit from such programs and kick back those benefits in the form of either donations or public support. What Malamud and others point out is that one thing those concentrated beneficiaries end up doing is expending resources remaining fairly well informed about what government is doing — what regulations and expenditures are being contemplated — in order to be able to act for or against them in a timely fashion.

Now, as the costs of organizing dispersed people get lower thanks to new technologies, we’re seeing increasing opportunities to form ad hoc coalitions supporting and opposing policy changes with more dispersed costs and benefits — which is good, and works to erode the asymmetry that generates a lot of bad policy. But incumbent constituencies have the advantage of already being organized and able to invest resources in identifying policy changes that implicate their interests. If ten complex regulations are under consideration, and one creates a large benefit to an incumbent constituent while imposing smaller costs on a much larger group of people, it’s a great advantage if the incumbent is aware of the range of options in advance, and can push for their favored option, while the dispersed losers only become cognizant of it when the papers report on the passage of a specific rule and slowly begin teasing out its implications.

Put somewhat more briefly: Technology that lowers organizing costs can radically upset a truly pernicious public choice dynamic, but only if the information necessary to catalyze the formation of a blocking coalition is out there in a form that allows it to be sifted and analyzed by crowdsourced methods first. Transparency matters less when organizing costs are high, because the fight is ultimately going to be decided by a punch up between large, concentrated interest groups for whom the cost of hiring experts to learn about and analyze the implications of potential policy changes is relatively trivial. As transaction costs fall, and there’s potential for spontaneous, self-identifying coalitions to form, those information costs loom much larger. The timely availability — and aggregability — of information about the process of policy formation and its likely consequences then suddenly becomes a key determinant of the power of incumbent constituencies to control policy and extract rents.

Public Information and Public Choice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column today would be astonishing in its incoherence if only Friedman hadn’t long ago sapped us of our ability to be astonished by his incoherence. Like many capital-’d’ Democrats, Friedman has soured on democracy for failing to deliver on his policy wish list.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Why does Friedman say the United States has one-party democracy? Because the Republican Party is effectively opposing the Democratic Party’s agenda! Not even kidding. Get this:

The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

Only the Democrats are really playing! You might think that would mean they can do whatever they darn well please. But no! The Democrats can’t do anything! Because the other party‘s opposition is so effective! So it’s exactly as if there’s just one party: nothing gets done!

My hunch is that the Times’ editors see Friedman aiming the gun at his foot, but watching a man stupid enough to actually pull the trigger is so fun they hate to intervene. That or they’re trying to explode the myth of American meritocracy.

So where were we? Oh, yes: one-party democracy is aggravating because sometimes one party can’t do what it wants because the other party gets in the way. Sooo frustrating!!! Why have democracy at all when all you end up with is a single party stymied by the other one! And so it is that Friedman comes to wax romantic about communist central planning:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

Nikita Kruschev, the enlightened leader of a now-defunct one-party autocracy, was also committed to overtaking the United States in technology and so much more. “We will bury you” is how he put it. At the time, more than a few left-leaning American opinionmakers suspected he was right. After all, how can inefficiently squabbling democracies possibly keep pace with undivided regimes wholly devoted to scientifically centrally planning their way into the brighter, better future? And that, children, is why we speak Russian today.

Thomas Friedman’s New Math of Democracy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog