The FBI has long been searching for a way to bypass the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which they have claimed makes their job difficult, increasingly so in the information age. Previously the FBI just broke the law and hoped it would not get caught, now the agency wants a patina of legality to [...]

One post-election question up for debate is where the Republican Party would go to try and capture the areas of the electorate they cannot penetrate – particularly minorities and the youth vote. The watered-down version of the DREAM Act suggested a policy path for reaching some segments of the minority electorate. And for about 24 [...]

President Obama took to Reddit today to participate in their popular “Ask Me Anything” feature. The question-and-answer session began at 4:30pm ET and quickly crashed the system, though it appears to be working now (at least for me). At last count there are over 4,300 comments on the thread. Some of the questions were extremely [...]

The Senate, unable to come up with a schedule for amendments, blocked the cybersecurity bill today in an outcome that, despite being a result of Republican obstruction, satisfied Internet activists who had been urging a no vote. You can see from the roll call that this was generally a partisan vote. The backstory is that [...]

The US Postal Service will default on a $5.5 billion prepaid retiree health benefit payment today, and this will surely lead to calls for privatization or mass jobs cuts. But the default concerns the unusual way in which the USPS, unlike virtually any other company in the world, pre-pays its health benefits many years out. [...]

The Senate easily advanced a motion to proceed on their version of a cybersecurity bill yesterday, by an 84-11 vote. Clearly this bill, a separate version of which has already passed the House, has a broad degree of support. As if on cue yesterday, the head of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander, warned about [...]

The Senate will vote on a cybersecurity bill that’s taken years to get to the floor. The House has already passed a bill known as CISPA, which raised the ire of privacy and technology activists. Even the White House threatened a veto. Now the Senate will get their turn, after a series of maneuvers designed [...]

We’ve been waiting for this to come to pass, and it looks like the days of tiered broadband pricing are finally upon us: Here in South Texas, Time Warner Cable customers have been given the online equivalent of a scale in the bathroom, a “usage tracker” that adds up all the household’s Facebooking and YouTubing. [...]

I mentioned earlier that the White House weighed in on CISPA, the cybersecurity bill working its way through Congress. Previously they had been generally supportive of it, at least from the words of counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. But now, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council has criticized the bill. CISPA would encourage companies to [...]

Over the past couple weeks, another grassroots protest has emerged against legislation that would affect the Internet. It’s at a lower level than the SOPA/PIPA protests so far, but the activism against CISPA, which is considered cybersecurity legislation, is following the same trajectory. Many experts have described the threats from CISPA, particularly to the privacy [...]

Here’s some potentially good news. I wrote back in January about an FCC proposed rule that would force local TV stations to put the results of the political ad spending on their airwaves online, rather than in an obscure filing room at the station that few people ever see. This would increase the transparency of [...]