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Jan 13, 2025 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
Under a standard of recency that allowed me to review a 40-year-old book in 2023, I want to celebrate the very recent publication, over a year ago, of two articles on the law of eavesdropping. Historically, there was fairly robust law on listening in. Given new technological forms of secret overhearing, that law may have applications in the present day. There is a reason we have student-run law reviews and writings. When students dive into a subject, they have to learn the whole thing.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
“Tech” could push our society in two different directions in the forthcoming Trump administration. They could both be called the Singaporean model. But one could be an embrace of Singapore’s authoritarianism, while the other is an embrace of Singapore’s openness to real technological change. You could guess which I prefer. The inspiration for the instant exposition is a recent Persuasion podcast on the “Singaporean model” of development.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
Can treating information as a form of property empower people to protect privacy using their property rights? Consider the following two quotes:Consumers and businesses—each in their way and for their purposes—withhold or hoard personal information, trade it, process it, profit from it, and enjoy other rights to personal information in the “bundle of sticks” that make up property rights. It is time to recognize that important development.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
aei.org | John Fortier |Jim Harper |Naomi Schaefer Riley |Sally Satel
Amid political polarization, are there practical steps to combat extremism that are acceptable across the political spectrum? In Electoral Reform in the United States: Proposals for Combating Polarization and Extremism, the Task Force on Institutional Reforms to Combat Political Extremism offers ideas for reforming key aspects of the US electoral process.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
The game of reading political outcomes is more art than science, especially at the national level. Election results turn on hundreds or thousands of policy and campaign margins. There is no one deciding issue. But some float to the top. My colleague Ruy Teixeira persuasively identifies four cultural and policy issues through which the progressive left handed a victory to Donald Trump, for example. Behind the billowy skirts of that caveat, I’ll float an electoral margin that I think might be salient.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
The Program on the Economics of Privacy at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School has been looking at empirical evidence around people’s privacy interests. Among their recent presentations was a paper in progress called “Demand for Privacy from Data Brokers” by Avinash Collis of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. It piqued my interest, so I went looking and didn’t find the paper online. So that will be it for this blog post.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
DNA service provider 23andMe is on the financial ropes, and that is cause for privacy concern. So argued Kristen V. Brown, a staff writer at The Atlantic in a piece last week. I wouldn’t argue against being concerned, but there may be more privacy protection in place than Brown believes. Certainly if my views about contract law and property pertain in these contexts. But let’s see. The problem is not new.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
For my next trick, I hereby predict the fall of the new May 7, 2027 REAL ID compliance deadline. If you’re not a regular reader of my REAL ID posts, here’s the joke: Every REAL ID compliance deadline goes by the wayside. You won’t ever have to get a REAL ID. And when I wrote here and in The Atlantic earlier this year about the impending collapse of the May 2025 deadline, it was as insightful as predicting sunshine in the Sahara. But the way REAL ID deadlines fall is always interesting.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Owen O’Brien-Powers
Tech policy analysts of a certain glamorous age may remember the “Gore Tax.” That’s the partisan moniker given to a program established by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and implemented during the Clinton administration. It required telecom firms to pay into a small suite of “universal service” funds aimed at ensuring the availability of affordable telecommunications to everyone, certainly to sympathetic groups like schools, libraries, rural residents, and the poor.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
aei.org | Jim Harper |Kate Beinkampen
Everything is right in my colleague Daniel Lyons’s recent post “Net Neutrality, and Other FCC Initiatives Jeopardized Post-Chevron,” covering practical upshots of the Chevron doctrine’s end at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A single turn of phrase he uses inspires me to wax theoretical about just how important the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision is.
