Browsing PBH By Articles

FBI: We Need Wiretapping And We Need It Now

Posted on May 19, 2012 in Articles

The Article: FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites – now by Declan McCullagh in CNET.

The Text: The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.

The FBI general counsel’s office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

“If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding,” an industry representative who has reviewed the FBI’s draft legislation told CNET. The requirements apply only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded, according to a second industry representative briefed on it.

The Entrance Of Hollande In The Euro Crisis

Posted on May 18, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Austerity and the euro crisis: Add Hollandaise sauce in the Economist.

The Text: TEN YEARS ago Romano Prodi, the-then president of the European Commission, created a stink when he declared that the euro zone’s budget rules were “stupid” because they were too rigid. But with the onset of the euro zone’s debt crisis in 2010 the response has been to try to make them even stiffer.

At Germany’s insistence, the euro zone first gave the commission more powers to monitor and enforce deficit limits, including the threat of “semi-automatic” sanctions for rule-breakers. And second, almost all members of the European Union were dragooned into signing up to the fiscal compact, a new treaty requiring then to adopt binding balanced-budget rules, preferably in their constitutions.

The election of a Socialist, François Hollande, as France’s new president, is causing a rethink in Brussels. There is certainly a change of rhetoric about a “growth compact”. But in substance, the change may be rather modest.

The Hidden Cost Of Higher Education

Posted on May 17, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Dismantling The Middle Class: The Hidden Cost Of Higher Education by Amanda Richards in The Speckled Axe.

The Text: For decades, education was viewed as the most important step on the path out of poverty and the golden ticket to class mobility in American society. While this may still ring true for those managing on a hand-to-mouth existence, the role of education in securing the continued upward economic trajectory of the middle class is much less certain. Indeed, with rising costs of tuition and cuts in student aid, the debt burden of a college education may be enough to break the middle class.

The American middle class, historically admired for its size and diversity, owes much of its existence to the public universities that made access to higher education available to everyone regardless of socio-economic background. According to Christopher Newfield in his book Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class: “There has never been a middle class in history that was not created by public infrastructure—by facilities offering rough equity regardless of personal means. As the middle class cuts public education, it cuts the conditions of its own existence.”

Since 1980, college tuition has more than doubled. Potential students often must seek outside funding in addition to scholarships, financial aid and parental support. Students used to put themselves through college on part-time jobs, but with tuition averaging roughly $21,000 a year and rising faster than inflation, the prospect of doing it alone is not an option for most – and the alternative has some pretty significant setbacks.

Moderation In Congress: (Surprisingly) Not Dead Yet

Posted on May 16, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Congressional Moderation: Dwindling, Not Dead by Adam Sorensen in Time.

The Text: Dick Lugar’s Tuesday primary loss in Indiana has inspired a predictably large amount of introspection about polarization in Congress. It marked a dark trend, but did it augur the death of all moderation? No. There are certain political realities that still exist for Republicans running in Blue states and Democrats in Red territory.

“Independent,” “beholden to no one” and “working together” are words that appear in this ad; “Republican” is a word that does not. It’s not just talk either. A Congressional Quarterly analysis found Brown voted with his party in opposition to Democrats just 54% of the time in 2011, the second-lowest score in Mitch McConnell’s caucus. If a Republican wants to win re-election in Massachusetts, that’s just the way it’s going to be.

That being said, things aren’t static and Brown doesn’t cancel out Lugar. Nate Silver runs down the full list of falling bodies, but it’s hard to paint a clearer picture than this graph of Howard Rosenthal and Keith Poole’s data on congressional polarization over time:

American Ghouls

Posted on May 15, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Metta World Peace, Ray Easterling, and our appetite for sanctioned violence by Charles P. Pierce in Grantland.

The Text: It is devoutly to be hoped that, when the artist formerly known as Artest comes back from his seven-game enforced vacation for going upside the noggin of James Harden, the return of Metta World Peace simply will be treated as that of a guy who did something stupid, got caught, and got punished. It is devoutly to be hoped that the whole episode will not be treated as A Teachable Moment for the rest of us, and won’t somebody please think of the children, please? It is devoutly to be hoped that there will be little of the prattle about What This Means To Us Going Forward. And I’ll pay anyone a shiny buffalo nickel if they don’t mention kids in the way they dress and their rap music.

This is not to say that I think that nothing in sports ever has anything to tell us about the greater world in which we all live, work, and try to keep the gang on Wall Street from stealing all of what’s left of our money. If you know where — and, more important, how — to look, then it was in the context of our games that you could get a clearer and more honest view of race, and class, and the effect of the rise of mass media, to name only a few of the important issues of the past 100 years. My problem is that I would almost guarantee you that the lessons we will be told we should draw from the MWP episode almost assuredly will be all the wrong ones. They will address the lessons society should draw from sports. The real lessons should be those that sports now have to learn from society.

The sports-entertainment complex now is coming dangerously close to demanding for itself the right to set itself up as a sanction-free zone for legitimized violence.