Lots to parse on this one, although it looks like a new chapter in the “Surveillance Wars” Edward Snowden started with his leaks.

Two choice quotes really stood out to me in this article, though, especially because they are in sequence:

Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of both NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency, said […] judges “are not really in a good position to judge the merits of intelligence collection programs.”

That’s funny, because the very next paragraph cites consistent judicial approval of the program as a defense to its continued use:

An Obama administration official said that on 35 occasions in the past, 15 separate judges assigned to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court had declared bulk communications of telephone metadata lawful.

Which one is it? Well, as usual with the law, it’s probably both. Judges are human too, despite what some litigators may say, and their job is to decide.

Whether that decision is sufficiently informed in every case is up for debate, but if the former head of the NSA and the CIA doesn’t think judges are well-equipped to render decisions on intelligence collection programs, it’s curious the Obama administration would rely on that judgment in defending the collection programs. 

Perhaps the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) should be amended to mandate an intelligence background for all judges appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance panel.

As it stands now, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can quite literally appoint whomever he wants to the FISA court, whether they have any experience in intelligence or not.

How intelligent is that?

A TechCrunch reporter had this to say about his employer’s sister product:

Put another way: The CrunchBase team ended up looking like it didn’t really understand how Creative Commons worked, or at least that’s what the vast majority of online commentary suggested.

Mutually agreeable settlement is always the best outcome. Although judging by the comment from CrunchBase President Matt Kaufman near the bottom of the TechCrunch post I linked to, Aol still doesn’t understand Creative Commons at all.

It’s a noble cause, but a flawed strategy. Victory is unlikely, but even if achieved it will be quickly squelched by legislation redefining personhood as belonging only to human beings.

That’s one of the problems universal marriage proponents have had: some courts have said gay couples have a right to marry, but many legislatures, including most notably the U.S. Congress via the Defense of Marriage Act, have simply legislated a definition of marriage that explicitly excludes those deemed unworthy of the right.

Luckily, DOMA was ruled unconstitutional this year (I’m ashamed to say I apparently failed to blog about the June 2013 decision…). But it was the culmination of a long battle for the plaintiff and an even longer one for opponents of the ludicrous insult to the constitution that was DOMA.

In short, it’ll be a long time before the law purports to give a damn about how depressed a chimp in a trailer park feels. And that’s a damn shame.

Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at The Washington Post:

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

Incidental indeed.

The quarter-billion-dollar news company Pierre Omidyar is founding will be fascinating: a digital-first journalism outfit with old media money behind it.

It’s an odd flip of the Jeff Bezos/Washington Post play, which involved a digital-first entrepreneur putting the same money as Omidyar, $250M, behind an old media organization.

If I had more free time, there would be a good article in there somewhere about what exactly it means to see that kind of money converging on the old/new media dichotomy from opposite directions.

But I don’t, so there won’t. For now, at least.

Stephen Wolfram, putting modesty aside as he often and justifiably does, to discuss his most ambitious project to date:

The level of automation is incredibly higher than people could ever have before – it’s incredibly powerful. Anything that WolframAlpha knows your app knows.

This can be the beginning of a vastly more accessible world of bespoke, personal programming, or it could be very, very bad.

No.

Very sad news. I’ve used Winamp for its entire life, all 15 years.

Everyone on the Internet should have to read these.

Great news for fair use doctrine, and a big win for word geeks.

Judge Denny Chin said much in his ruling granting Google’s motion for summary judgment, but this part stuck out to me:

Google Books permits humanities scholars to analyze massive amounts of data — the literary record created by a collection of tens of millions of books. Researchers can examine word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers to consider how literary style has changed over time.

The decision is up on Scribd. I shall geek out further about it after I have a chance to read it through.

The link is aimed at software developers but it’s applicable to anyone looking for a new job. I am at my current employer as much because it answered my questions satisfactorily as because I answered its questions satisfactorily.

This is essentially journalism à la carte: Peter Jukes offered to continue live-tweeting the News of the World phone-hacking trial if the crowd would fund it. Interest was strong enough to do just that, and his Indiegogo funders ordered up some trial coverage, funded through Christmas.

He’s probably not the first and certainly not the last, but I predict this is just the beginning of a trend and this sort of thing will be far more common in the years to come.

Correction: This blog correctly uses the same title I gave this post to describe this long-form article. So, it’s not so new, after all.

David Kravets writes at Wired about AOL’s demand that an app called People+ stop using a complete replica of AOL’s tech company database.

AOL’s CrunchBase is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution:

We provide CrunchBase’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution License [CC-BY].

However, the terms of service for the same product say, with my emphasis:

CrunchBase reserves the right in its sole discretion (for any reason or for no reason) and at anytime without notice to You to change, suspend or discontinue the CrunchBase API and/or suspend or terminate your rights under these General Terms of Service to access, use and/or display the CrunchBase API, Brand Features andany CrunchBase content.

Actually, as AOL attorneys should know (but apparently don’t), the company cannot reserve any such right at all, at least as to any data accessed, used or displayed while the Creative Commons license is still in effect, which it is as of November 6, 2013.

AOL can legally prohibit future access, use and display, but once content is under a Creative Commons attribution license one reserves no rights whatsoever, except the right to attribution.

It’s baffling that AOL lawyers would assert otherwise.

Bobby Ghoshal, co-founder of the now-defunct social news app Flud:

A year after pivoting to the enterprise we were out of business […] because we ran out of money and investors didn’t have enough data to make a decision to jump on board.

I buy this reasoning. I read a lot about venture capital investors and how they conduct their due diligence.

Investors want to (as they should) gorge themselves on data before even discussing the possibility of backing your startup.

But if the first iteration of your idea falters and you’re too late to accept it or notice it or implement a pivot, getting to the next phase of development won’t save you because, as Ghoshal notes, the data won’t be there to convince investors to sign on the line which is dotted.

Of course, passion and user engagement is important when you’re building an app with a backend service. But all passion and users usually get you is a meeting.

It’s data that closes deals.

The Steam gaming network is now the number 2 community for gamers in the world. Sony’s PlayStation Network is on top with 110 million users, followed by Steam with 65 million. Microsoft’s Xbox Live network takes the third spot with 48 million subscribers.

The Steam number is truly impressive because, unlike the other two on the list, Steam has no console on the market yet.

The PC-gaming market and multiplayer software maker expects to launch beta hardware soon, but to take the second position without anything in households yet is quite a feat.

Mystery one day, party barge the next.

It could be that I’m new to the journalism industry and only recently interested in its developments. But it seems to me as if journalism and law are converging like never before, and on an international stage.

While Al Jazeera America is unlikely to face direct legal action, the American arm of the Qatari news network only launched in August 2013. It’s new, and if its current sources face investigation and potential federal charges, prospective sources may decide not to become sources at all. 

Special interest groups oppose federal privacy reform to prevent onerous new regulations.

But this effort must, at some point, become counterproductive.

A multitude of state-specific privacy frameworks that, by (federal) law, can’t operate between states, must, at some point, become at least as onerous as new federal regulations. 

I thought this was interesting but not really worth mentioning here, until the Coast Guard visited, apparently, as USA Today reports, under a presumably Google-imposed gag order.

I’m an avid Google user, incredibly open on the internet, and something of an apologist for the utility of systems that know a ton about me. But I still think it’s rich that, as Michael Winters writes in the article, Google “is zealously guarding its privacy” around the barge.

So rich. 

UPDATE: It’s a party barge. No, seriously.

Jim Roberts on his new role at Mashable:

To some it might seem a bit of a departure. You might imagine a headline like: “Longtime New York Times and Reuters veteran forsakes legacy media for digital upstart.”

Interesting. Roberts is suddenly a living metaphor for the future.

Worth a read whether you’re a male or a female.

Hat-tip to Sheryl Axelrod, immediate past president of the Temple Law Alumni Association and a preeminent Philadelphia-area lawyer, for sharing this on LinkedIn.

(Yes, I visit LinkedIn, even when not looking for jobs.)

Some possibilities not contemplated in this brief Time piece:

• software developer for driving computer
• component designer/manufacturer of driving computer
• technician who performed final calibration of driving computer
• technician who installed driving computer
• creator of simulation software used by technician to test computer

In fact, car manufacturers and passengers are probably less likely to be at fault than any of the folks I list above.

After all, when a computer messes up in the present, it’s not really messing up: it’s telling you a human messed up in the past.

Linda Ellis, copyright troll:

If protecting my rights in your eyes makes me a “troll,” then I’ll wear the badge proudly and keep fulfilling my role.

Current law does allow hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for sharing drivel like the Ellis train wreck above. Real reform is needed, but it’s unlikely to get the requisite congressional attention any time soon.

Advocacy group Public Knowledge has a good start, called the Copyright Reform Act. It’s model legislation meant to provide a starting point for practical copyright reforms.

I haven’t read it all yet, but I’m confident it doesn’t allow hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for having your crappy poetry shared on the internet by strangers with bad taste in literature…

Absolutely necessary.

Just like cover letters, every resume you send should be tailored to the recipient, highlighting the experience you have that’s most relevant to that company and integrating some basic research on the employer.

If you’re sending the same resume with every job application you’re doing it wrong.