Politics

Great article (PDF) in the Washington Post about the increasing amount of secrecy in the government and the country - and why it is a disturbing trend. This democracy we live in was built on an open sharing of ideas - remember that the original settlers were escaping religious persecution - and too much secrecy in our government perverts its foundations. As the saying goes, the best disinfectant is sunlight. Hopefully our next administration will reverse the current trend.

But the notion that information is more credible because it's secret is increasingly unfounded. In fact, secret information is often more suspect because it hasn't been subjected to open debate. Those with their own agendas can game the system, over-classifying or stove-piping self-serving intelligence to shield it from scrutiny. Those who cherry-picked intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war could ignore anything that contradicted it. Even now, some members of Congress tell me that they avoid reading classified reports for fear that if they do, the edicts of secrecy will bar them from discussing vital public issues.

The Recording Industry has gone way overboard in somehow getting Florida and Utah (and possibly Rhode Island and Wisconsin) to pass a laws that say:

Richard Clarke puts is relatively simply and quite well in this op-ed - saying that "we are beating them over there to prevent them from coming over here" is nonsense.

The trials and tribulations of electronic voting are not just an American problem. The Dutch Government apparently had their main supplier of e-voting systems essentially threaten them with blackmail if they didn't purchase his company after an independent watchdog group (great: The "We don't trust voting computers foundation") leader was poised to be put on a commission to investigate the voting computers.

Sign The petition

To my Congressional representatives (and to Congress as a whole) --

As a fan of Internet radio, I was alarmed to learn that music royalty rates were recently determined by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) which, if enacted, would certainly silence most or all of my favorite online listening services. (For most webcasters, this new royalty rate represents more than 100% of their total revenues!)

Very interesting article in The New Yorker on the (finally) increasing influence of non-traditional military methods in the non-traditional non-battlefield of the "war on terror." Looking at the social networks of people in the countries and places where terrorists are coming from is important to figuring out how to function there - militarily or otherwise - since we are often now not fighting these countries themselves but people hiding within them, so we have to work with and use the people there to g

The Energy Information Administration released its far forward looking report on energy sources and consumption in the country. Alternative and biomass sources play a smaller part in our country's future then the current amount of news about them might lead one to believe, leaving our fossil fuel friend coal to do most of the heavy lifting. The report doesn't talk directly about any possible reduction in energy consumption, although I guess it might be implied in reduced rates of energy demand increase.

If this story about Ted Haggard having some non-coed fun is true, I have to say it is pretty funny.

Everyday conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it... Privacy was the default assumption. This has changed. We now type our casual conversations. We chat in e-mail, with instant messages on our computer and SMS messages on our cellphones, and in comments on social networking Web sites like Friendster, LiveJournal and... MySpace. These conversations...