The definition of terms essential to the application of a law is the most basic requirement for competent lawmaking.

Sometimes one or more terms are appropriately defined in an open way, to provide flexibility in the application of a law. This is not one of one laws. The shield law is meant to protect reporters, so defining what exactly a reporter is should be done wi surgical precision.

I am open to arguing how broad or narrow the definition of journalist should be in a shield law, but that conversation but result in a specific outcome that is codified in the new law.

It is impossible to have that discussion and achieve that specific codification when legislators shirk their fundamental responsibility.

As Morgan Weiland of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in the article linked above, Senators Feinstein and Durbin, and all the legislators who contributed to the poorly-drafted law, have failed in their duty to their constituents and the rest of our country. Hopefully a competent legislator will step in to correct their shortcomings as the law progresses.

This profile of Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley by Austin Carr at Fast Company does a great job of humanizing the app and its maker.

That’s probably because the man behind the location-sharing and, more recently, stuff-to-do discovery app, has put so much of himself into Foursquare. There are many profiles written about business and tech personalities, but few intrigued as much as this one does.

I think it’s because Carr really communicates how Crowley is finding himself at a cross-roads not only with Foursquare as a company, but with his life’s direction and essence.

John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, reporting for Reuters Washington bureau:

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.

This goes well beyond spying. This is, I would argue, exactly why people object to such domestic spying.

The logic is that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. However, the “Special Operations Division” probably isn’t infallible, since, well, no one is, and that means that you may have nothing to hide, and think you have nothing to fear, and be completely wrong.

Innocent people may have been convicted as a result of what appear on their face to be unconstitutional, extrajudicial practices.

Those arguing that the price for protection from terrorists and other would-be evil doers is letting the National Security Agency have a peak at our Gmail will have a much more difficult time making the same case for falsifying an evidence trail.

The defense was often held in the dark and, apparently, at least in some cases, investigators misled both the prosecution and judicial evidentiary discretion.

Oh, and as a cherry on top, here’s a gem from near the end of the Reuters story:

A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit’s annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.

The monitoring of internet communications for sensitive information, it would seem, goes both ways.

This is something everyone should read. Apple isn’t the only company benefiting from working conditions like this, and that makes it worse, not better.

The dominant press narrative is that Apple is profiting from the misery of toiling foreign workers.

The truth is that much of the electronics industry, not to mention the apparel and the toy industries, are also built on the underpaid and overworked backs of non-Americans all over the world.

Ben Popper, at The Verge¹:

Some Reader partisans may have given up on RSS after the shutdown, but the majority seem to have migrated to other platforms. In the weeks following the announcement, Feedly saw 3 million Google Reader refugees sign up and Newsblur says it now has 25 times the paid subscriptions it did in March.

Interesting. It looks like Google inadvertently revived the very market Reader killed when it debuted.

I’m still relying on Feedly right now, and they’re the paid option I’m most likely to go with whenever they begin offering a premium tier, but the options are admittedly plentiful.

And there’s no denying that the death of Reader, in retrospect, was probably the best thing to happen to RSS since, well, the birth of RSS.

Huge

I wrote recently about my disappointment with Twitter’s response to a woman deluged with rape threats. Today, David Edwards of t The Raw Story reports that a man has been arrested in England for threats made against Caroline Criado-Perez.

Twitter said in a statement to Sky News :

[the] ability to report individual tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.

Good idea, let’s make that a priority.

It’s been ten years since Lawrence v Texas saw anti-sodomy laws declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but I suppose stupidity is eternal. At least the District Attorney is ending the absurdity by refraining from prosecution. There may yet be hope for Baton Rouge.

This is a disturbing story, but more broadly it represents a big step backward for a company otherwise known for standing up for its users.

Jon Russell, writing at The Next Web:

Wang said, via Twitter, that the company was unable to discuss the specifics of the incident because “we don’t comment on individual accounts.” That position was echoed in a statement that Twitter provided to the BBC.

That’s unacceptable. It’s one thing to give the silent treatment to feature requests and “first world problem” complaints. But it’s another thing entirely when someone is being deluged with threats and then sees their own account suspended when they reach out about it.

Twitter is lucky it has built up so much goodwill among users and the press, because it burned much of it off with this serious misstep.

Sue Reisinger, writing at Corporate Counsel:

In a warning to employers, the National Labor Relations Board has “unliked” certain social media policies that restrict an employee’s right to speak critically of the employer online, unless the policies were set in collective bargaining.

It’s clear many companies didn’t consider the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) implications when they developed their social media policies. It’s often HR professionals that have to draft these policies, but the onus can’t be placed solely on them to catch how the new rules might implicate nuances of the NLRA. Any company who has implemented or plans to implement a social media policy is well-advised to have a labor and employment attorney review it first.

John Futty, reporting for The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio:

Judge Michael J. Holbrook placed Young on probation yesterday for five years and ordered that she spend a minimum of three days in jail each Christmas while on probation.

This made me smile. Now, crime is bad, and Christmas in jail is bad. But what a creative way to punish a fraudster without wasting taxpayer money on a non-violent offender.

I’ll be the first to admit I took multivitamins on and off for years, always assuming vitamins could only be good for you. But the overwhelming majority of scientific studies on the subject not only debunks the myth that they help, but strongly suggests that they may be harming us.

The article I link to above is longer than most I share here, but it’s also more important that you read the whole thing. It could (and, to be honest, should) change your mind on including multivitamins as a part of your daily diet, at least without your doctor’s advice.

I wrote yesterday about Ms. Dalelv’s 16-month sentence for sex outside marriage, among other absurd charges to levy against a victim of rape, in the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. I’m happy to report that, according to Reuters, the 24-year-old has been “pardoned” and will be able to go back to Norway.

The fact that UAE called it a “pardon” is as unconscionable as the sentence itself, but freedom by any name is better than being jailed in the kind of nation that would punish a rape victim.

Update: she has been “pardoned.”

A Norwegian woman was raped, reported it to police, and was charged and convicted of extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and perjury. She was sentenced to 16 months in jail.

For being raped.

And that’s three months longer than her attacker.

This is a major problem of international law. What happens when the economic and business relationship between two states places citizens in the crosshairs of antiquated and ignorant laws? What is the remedy when the Western expectations of a visitor are shattered by foreign norms that, well, prompt Western folks to use words like “antiquated” and “ignorant.”

The Norwegian government has the woman safely housed in what sounds like a naval base, but there is a warrant out for her arrest.

We will find out. I’ll be keeping an eye on this story.

Kevin Poulsen, at Wired's Threat Level blog:

MIT argues that those people might face threats and harassment if their names become public. But it’s worth noting that names of third parties are already redacted from documents produced under FOIA.

MIT has screwed up repeatedly throughout this ordeal, and this is not a sign of improvement. If anything, their interference itself might prompt anonymous hackers to launch new salvos against their networks or dox their personnel.

Two years is a good run, and the site looks and reads far better than it did before his reign, but Tim Stevens’ exit from his role as editor-in-chief at Aol property Engadget is bad sign for the site and it’s owner.

It’s never a good sign, in business or blogging (and especially when your product is a hybrid), when a leadership role is vacated before a replacement is appointed.

With US authorities pushing for easier backdoors into electronic communications systems, a network of anti-graffiti drones looks like a good front for general state-wide surveillance. The German privacy ethic runs deep, but it may provide an interesting model for US authorities to consider in the long-term.

I can understand why programmers may want to consider using a decent font, but it’s worth noting that writers, particularly those who prefer plain text, should also pay attention to the fonts they’re using.

I like to write with a monospace font for two reasons. First, there’s nostalgia in using a monospace font that connects me to the days I spent in college writing on a typewriter. Second, I find them easier to look at for long periods of time than standard serif or sans serif fonts.

If you write often on a computer, you owe it to yourself to be a little picky about the fonts you use.

Evernote’s reminders are great news, and something I’ve been waiting for since at least February, but here’s all that matters to me:

We have big plans to expand the functionality, and to bring it to more platforms in the very (very) near future.

I can’t wait to get this on mobile. I’ve long hoped that some day Evernote would become the one-app-to-rule-them-all for me. I already use it as a data archive, storage for manuals, occasional journal, research tool, and songwriting management tool. True, cross-platform task management would supercharge the service for me, and may even end my Any.do versus Wunderlist problem.

In related news, Wunderlist has added hashtag support in its web incarnation, and so far I’m actually finding it’s very useful.

There is plenty of Google news today coming out of their annual I/O conference, but this looks far more important and big-picture, if it actually gets used.

Number twelve and counting; this looks to be a big year for marriage equality in the United States.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published data on what hospitals charge for the most common procedures. There is much to look at, and other have done good reporting on it, notably Sarah Kliff and Dan Keating at the Washington Post and Barry Meier, Jo Craven McGinty and Julie Creswell at the New York Times.

The bottom line is that hospital pricing practices appear from this data to be arbitrary. I wouldn’t be surprised if pricing flucutated from year to year based on what revenue each hospital brings in. That’s unconscionable, and a failure of the free market in arguably the most important industry. Hospitals and canadian pharmacies would do well to get together and establish transparent and ethical best practices for pricing, because the alternative is onerous regluation to ensure they are not gouging insurance companies, government agencies, and individual patients without regard to actual costs.

This article by Daniela Hernandez at Wired is well-done and fascinating. However, this bit most caught my eye:

Half of the $100 million in federal funding allotted to this program will come from Darpa — more than the amount coming from the National Institutes of Health — and the Defense Department’s research arm hopes the project will “inspire new information processing architectures or new computing approaches.”

Make no mistake: the US military wants intelligent killing machines.

And the steady march continues, as Delaware joins their ten predecessors in granting gay couples the basic American right to marry.