The Washington Post has an interesting article about the FBI’s surveillance of author Norman Mailer:
FBI Surveillance of Norman Mailer
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NSA Surveillance: Having a Laugh at the Expense of Your Privacy
ABC News reports about a new scandal arising out of the NSA Surveillance Program:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
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The Future of Academic Presses
Academic presses are facing a difficult future. Book publishing in general is an industry that is struggling, and academic presses have it especially hard since many titles they publish will not have mass popular appeal. Unfortunately, many academic presses are no longer subsidized by their universities, including very wealthy schools like Harvard and Yale, which are greedily hoarding the money in their big endowments. As a result, academic presses must find ways to be profitable, which can be difficult with books that aren’t written by Malcolm Gladwell or Stephen Colbert.
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Facebook, Myspace, and College Admissions
Last year, I noted that employers and others were increasingly looking at applicants’ social network website profile pages in their hiring decisions. Apparently, now college admissions officers are also using social network sites like Facebook and MySpace to make decisions on applicants. According to the Wall St. Journal:
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Politicians and Script Writers
Much has been made of the fact that large parts of Sarah Palin’s speech were already pre-written before she was even chosen as the VP candidate. According to the Washington Post:
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Politics in the Age of MySpace and Facebook
Recently, I was interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail about the young teenage father-to-be involved in the media circus surrounding vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter. I believe that the media should restrain itself from prying further into Palin’s daughter’s private life, as well as that of the father-to-be. He was referred to only as “Levi” by the media until recently, when a few media entities and bloggers started identifying him by his full name. I don’t believe he should be identified by his last name unless he consents to it. His identity is of little relevance to the issues in the campaign.
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Franz Kafka’s Last Wishes and the Kafka Myths
Professor Lior Strahilevitz (U. Chicago Law School) has an interesting post about Franz Kafka’s papers. The famous story about Kafka’s papers is that Kafka asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them after his death. Although Kafka had published a few works during his lifetime, a great many stories, parables, letters, and diary entries were unpublished, as were Kafka’s two great book masterpieces, The Trial and The Castle. Brod refused to burn them. Instead, he published them, and Kafka would go on to achieve enormous posthumous fame as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
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Fallacies About Privacy
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz has an op-ed arguing that we’ve gotten over privacy:
We seem to be following the advice of Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, who in 1999 said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” And the observation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: “The privacy you’re concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy.”
These comments could be dismissed as technology executives trying to minimize complaints about technology. But whatever we say about how much we value privacy, a close look at our actual behavior suggests we have gotten over it. A recent study by AOL of privacy in Britain found that 84% of people said they would not disclose details about their income online, but in fact 89% of them willingly did.
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The End of Privacy?
I’ve written an article for the September issue of Scientific American magazine called The End of Privacy? The article is available online here, with a slightly different title: Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?.
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Should People’s Political Donations Be Public?
Pursuant to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), people’s campaign contributions must be accessible to the public. I’ve long found this to be problematic when applied to the campaign contributions of individuals. Certainly, information must be reported to the government to ensure that campaign contribution limits aren’t exceeded. But I don’t know why it is the public’s business to know what candidates I’ve given money to and how much. Go to Moneyline CQ or Fundrace2008 or OpenSecrets.org and you can search for the campaign contributions of anyone. You can learn a person’s address, occupation, and the amounts he/she contributed and to whom.
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