Category: Other Topics
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Unlocking Hidden Consensus in Legislatures
A legislature is a small group with a big impact. Even for people who will never be part of one, the mechanics of a legislature matter — when they work well, we all benefit, and when they work poorly, we all lose out. At the same time, with several hundred participants, legislatures are large enough…
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Supreme Court to Hear State Freedom of Information Act Case "McBurney v. Young"
On Friday, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to McBurney v. Young. This case formally concerns the “Privileges and Immunities Clause” of the Constitution. It raises questions about what access rights citizens have to government records and about who counts as a journalist. Oral argument will likely be scheduled for 2013. Mark McBurney is a citizen…
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Introducing Myself: Technology, Society, and Public Policy
I’m a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton this year. My first months here have already been amazing. I’m pleased to be joining this blog as well! My conceptual toolkit and my method comes mostly from sociology, but I’m also a former computer programmer. That means that I feel welcome in…
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Which States have the Highest Risk of an E-Voting Meltdown?
This post is joint work by Joshua Kroll, Ian Davey, Alex Halderman, and Ed Felten. Computer scientists, including us, have long been skeptical of electronic voting systems. E-voting systems are computers, with all of the attendant problems. If something goes wrong, can the problem be detected? Can it be fixed? Some e-voting systems are much…
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Is Spotify the Celestial Jukebox for Music?
In 1994, law professor Paul Goldstein popularized the term “celestial jukebox” to refer to his vision of a networked database of consumable on-demand media. In the face of copyright law that was ill-suited to the rapid rate of technological change, he described a system in which consumers would pay-per-play rather than purchasing and owning individual…
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Accountable Algorithms: An Example
I wrote yesterday about accountable algorithms. When I say that a public algorithm is “accountable” I mean that the output produced by a particular execution of the algorithm can be verified as correct after the fact by a skeptical member of the public. Today I want to work through an example.
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Accountable Algorithms
Ethan Zuckerman had an interesting reaction to his first experience with the TSA Pre-Check program, which lets frequent flyers go through a much shorter and less elaborate procedure at airport security checkpoints. Ethan’s concerns about unfairness are worth pondering, but I want to focus here on his call for more openness about the algorithm that…
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Opening Government: On the Limits of FOIA and the Metaphor of Transparency
At a recent symposium (“Piracy and the Politics of Policing: Legislating and Enforcing Copyright Law”) sponsored by the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, I was invited to respond to an excellent paper by David Levine on secrecy, national security, and the denial of public access to documents from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiation…
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Broken Ballots
A important new book has just been published on the technology and policy of elections. Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count by Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, covers voting systems from the 19th century to the present, with particular focus on the last two decades. The authors describe the strengths and weaknesses of the…
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Who won the Iowa primary – and does it matter from a technical perspective?
As Americans know, the 2012 presidential season began “officially” with the Iowa caucuses on January 3. I say “officially”, because caucuses are a strange beast that are a creation of political parties, and not government. Regardless, the Republican results were interesting – out of about 125,000 votes cast, Mitt Romney led by eight votes over…