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Lunchtime Listen: Checks and Balances
In his new book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Charlie Savage documents how the Bush administration has expanded presidential power and limited the checks and balances of Congress and the courts. In an interview with Terry Gross he outlines many of the key points of his book:
- Charlie Savage, In Pursuit of the Imperial President, Interview of Charlie Savage by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, (September 5, 2007)
A transcript is available on LexisNexis and Factiva and the audio is also available as a podcast.
Savage describes some of the expanded executive powers this way:
...the ability to unilaterally pull out of a treaty without consulting the Senate as Bush did in the anti-ballistic missile treaty in December of 2001, which means some future president who doesn't like NATO or the UN could just say, 'We're out,' and we would be out. The ability to impose martial law over the objections of a state governor. The ability to hold a US citizen without trial or without charges perpetually by naming them an enemy combatant. The ability to keep all matters of documents and government activity secret from lawsuits and from Congress in a much broader fortress of secrecy than previous presidents have enjoyed. A much more aggressive use of the ability to shut down lawsuits simply by uttering the magic words 'state secrets.'"
And he says that the implications reach far into the future:
...the Bush administration could leave office entirely tomorrow and the agenda will already have been completed.... The strategy was, 'We are going to permanently expand the power of the presidency as an institution for all future presidents to wield. We are going to throw off the restraints that were imposed in the '70s after Watergate and Vietnam. We are going to magnify the powers that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed "the imperial presidency," which had arisen just in the first couple of decades of the Cold War, peaked under Nixon and were sort of brought under control again after Watergate and Vietnam.'
Charlie Savage covers national legal affairs for "The Boston Globe" and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigation into President Bush's use of executive signing statements.
Continue readingLunchtime Listen: Greg Elin of the Sunlight Foundation
Here is a good lunchtime listen:
- Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators: Greg Elin, Chief Architect, Sunlight Foundation, ITConversations (2007-08-18)
If you want a preview, read Udell's blog post about the interview here:
- A conversation with Greg Elin about the Sunlight Foundation Jon Udell, August 20, 2007.
The Sunlight Foundation aims to make the operation of Congress and the U.S. government more transparent and accountable.Continue reading
Aaarrrr! Pirate talk now available
You may or may not remember that I posted a couple of weeks ago about Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate party giving a talk at Stanford. For those who missed the talk, the video is now available as well as several other talks that Rick did while traveling to the Open Source Convention and the Bay area.
Many thanks to Stanford Libraries and the Center for Internet and Society for co-sponsoring the talk and for Henrik Bennetsen and Galen Davis of the Stanford Humanities Lab for videotaping the well-attended and interesting event!
Leave us comments and let us know what you think about Rick's ideas for reforming international copyright.
Continue readingLunchtime listen: NPR on California Voting Machines
As you know, we've been tracking e-voting and the CA story for a while. Today's lunchtime listen is from NPR's Talk of the Nation, August 3, 2007. In this 17 minute segment, NPR interviews Matt Bishop, co-director, Computer Security Laboratory; professor, department of computer science at UC Davis, the leader of the hacking effort of e-voting machines certified for use in CA. His red team was able to compromise the security of all the systems tested! Particularly interesting was his description of "social engineering" which is sort of like phishing in which people are manipulated into performing actions or divulging confidential information. In other words, the *technology* can be easily hacked out of human or social weakness! Continue reading
More about Malamud Google Tech Talk
Here is a bit more information about All The Government's Information, Carl Malamud's "Google Tech Talk" (51 min video) May 24, 2006. (See also our post: Carl Malamud on "All The Government's Information").
I urge you to listen to this because there is so much that government information specialists will find interesting. The prepared part of the talk is only about 22 minutes. There is enough technology to make the talk interesting to technologists, but not so much as to make it uninteresting to the non-technologist. Most of the talk is about ideas and how to make them happen, not the technology.
Here are my notes about some interesting parts -- with (very approximate) references to the minute:second time within the video.
The heart of Carl's talk is his description of his new project, The Public Memory Trust (17:11), and its first project, "Washington Bridge" (14:43). The trust has a mission "of building public works projects on the internet." The Washington Bridge project is an attempt to get video from Congressional hearing rooms to the real world and to the internet in real time and to archive the video permanently. His goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality and utility of this kind of service so that it can be taken over and run by others. (This is the same thing he did with SEC data.) He sees training other to do the same thing at the state and local level and replicating the service (48:30). He says that if there is a public proceeding, the public needs to have access to it, now and forever and it needs to be archived.
I find it particularly interesting that Carl's vision is to provide "the data" (i.e., the raw video streams) not just to service providers (such as television networks and Google Video), but also to anyone who might want to "take this data and do something with it." He mentions technology companies that could use huge amounts of video as raw material for their experiments with creating digital signatures, creating metadata automatically, and doing speech to text conversion, but, presumably, "the data" would be available for anyone to use and reuse as they please. At question time someone asks about peer-to-peer and Carl says, "bittorrent service on the entire archive is a no-brainer" (40:25).
Carl says he spoke to Bruce James at GPO about the project and GPO is giving the project a "GPO fellow" position. (18:00 - 20:00) But a key part of Carl's goal is to create a "large public domain archive" -- something that GPO has never explicitly stated that it is willing to do in quite the same way. GPO's model is to hold onto and control access to government information; Carl's model is to distribute it and make it available to others. He notes that "in the long run, I would like to see every library in the country have a peta-byte of disk and a permanent archive of all congressional proceedings." (18:07)
Net-Neutrality comes up briefly (47:00 to 48:30)
Meta-data creation is discussed in several places (e.g. at 25 minutes and 35 minutes).
Carl's slide with links is at http://public.resource.org/google.techtalk.html.
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