Among Americans, perceptions of widespread corruption in their government have been generally increasing over the past seven years.

Americans Less Satisfied With Freedom

Like topographic maps of mountain ranges, network maps can also illustrate the points on the landscape that have the highest elevation. Some people occupy locations in networks that are analogous to positions of strategic importance on the physical landscape. Network measures of “centrality” can identify key people in influential locations in the discussion network, highlighting the people leading the conversation. The content these people create is often the most popular and widely repeated in these networks, reflecting the significant role these people play in social media discussions.

Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

The Snowden revelations appear to have damaged one major element of America’s global image: its reputation for protecting individual liberties. In 22 of 36 countries surveyed in both 2013 and 2014, people are significantly less likely to believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its citizens. In six nations, the decline was 20 percentage points or more.

America’s ‘freedom’ reputation is on the decline a year after NSA revelations - The Washington Post

Taylor Swift:

I'd like to point out that people are still buying albums, but now they're buying just a few of them. They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart or have made them feel strong or allowed them to feel like they really aren't alone in feeling so alone.

The Taylor Swift essay spread through Facebook with the typical breathlessness of professionally promoted viral media - "Talor Swift wrote an Oped for the Wall Street Journal, and its AMAZING!" I did not bother to read it until you also referenced it here on MemeStreams, and I hate to detract from your point, but my reactions are on a completely different dimension.

While Taylor Switft speaks artfully to the emotional connection that artists seek to make with their fans, its hard not to see the specter of the Recording Industry Association of America haunting the shadows behind her. The purpose of the essay is to, once again, emphasize the recording industry's grievance that a change in information technology has changed their business model (which was, of course, a product of information technology in the first place.)

While Taylor Swift is certainly a more pleasant ambassador for their interests than the contemptible David Lowery, the bottom line here is still the same. The RIAA feels that society owes them their 15 billion and must make whatever accommodations they demand in order to ensure that they get it. It will be a long time before people forget the bitter fight over SOPA and total tone deafness that the industry has exhibited regarding the legitimate concerns that their proposals raise.

Having said that, the only criticism that the RIAA made of the effort to defeat SOPA that I think has some validity is the criticism that if not for the support of Google the effort would not have been nearly as successful. While it is hardly sympathetic for a party that seeks to enrich itself by lobbying for special policy accommodations to argue that some of their opponents are also financially motivated, the criticism is nonetheless important for civil liberties advocates to understand.

The fight over SOPA and PIPA involved far more public engagement than the fight over NSA surveillance of meta-data has motivated thus far. Are people genuinely more concerned about internet filtering technology than surveillance of telephony meta-data? As time progresses, these two concepts will converge. The monitoring of telephony meta-data will eventually entail the monitoring of Internet meta-data, and what you can monitor, you can sanction, which is just as good as preemptive blocking. They are basically the same discussion.

There might be an underlying distinction from a civil liberties perspective - telephony meta-data monitoring primarily implicates the freedom... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Taylor Swift, the RIAA, and the NSA

The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people's moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. This is just how a website works, everyone does this and everyone knows that everyone does this, I don't see why people are all up in arms over this thing all of a sudden.

10 ways Facebook is actually the devil

The recent agreement between Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) and Georgia State University (GSU) regarding radio station WRAS is bad public policy—fiscally, substantively, and procedurally.  This transaction should be revisited by the parties and it should be significantly modified or rescinded.

Open Letter Regarding WRAS | WABE 90.1 FM

The Court’s opinion offers a major endorsement of treating computer searches differently than physical searches. Although the opinion is phrased primarily about “cell phones,” Chief Justice Roberts makes clear that “cell phones” are really just “minicomputers.” And if you take the reasoning of Riley to apply to other minicomputers and to electronic storage devices generally — which I think is the fairest reading of the opinion — then it means that lots of other applications of the Fourth Amendment to computers are now in play. As readers of the blog know, the lower courts are struggling to apply old principles of the Fourth Amendment to the new facts of computers. I think Riley can be fairly read as saying that computers are a game-changer: We’re now in a “digital age,” and quantity of data and the “qualitatively different” nature of at least some digital records changes how the Fourth Amendment should apply.

This could have a significant impact on the question of suspicionless searches of electronics at border crossings.

The significance of Riley - The Washington Post

Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse. A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee’s pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but any extension of that reasoning to digital data has to rest on its own bottom.

Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee’s person. The term “cell phone” is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras,video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.

Supreme Court requires warrants for cell phone searches on arrest - The Washington Post

From Riley v. California:

Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation’s response to the reviled “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write that “[e]very man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.” According to Adams, Otis’s speech was “the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”

Party like it’s 1761 — in a good way - The Washington Post

At the time Erven’s team conducted their research, they didn’t know how many vulnerable medical devices were directly connected to the internet as opposed to simply being connected to internal networks accessible via the internet.

Erven and Merdinger set out to scan the internet to answer this question. They scanned for any systems using port 445—the port the SMB protocol uses to transmit data—and filtered for hospitals and other health care organizations while using keywords like “anesthesia” and “defibrillator.” Within half an hour, they discovered a health care organization that was leaking information on 68,000 systems. The organization, which Erven would not identify, has more than 12,000 employees, 3,000 physicians and large cardiovascular and neuroscience institutions associated with it.

Hospital Networks Are Leaking Data, Leaving Critical Devices Vulnerable | Threat Level | WIRED