If you’ve ever wondered how international law, laws of war and national security policy might be applied to a zombie apocalypse scenario, listen to episode 89 of The Lawfare Podcast.

The law and policy discussed are real and interesting but the tongue-in-cheek analysis is wonderfully entertaining.

Lawrence Lessig’s Mayday PAC is using the very system it decries to attempt to bring that system down. In other words, Lessig et al are hijacking the virus (the influence of big donors on American politics via election contributions) to deliver the vaccine (funding for politicians committed to proposals which would limit big political contributions).

If you support the cause, be heartened: Lessig likes to fight, and is good at it.

If you don’t support the cause, it’s probably time to start taking Mayday seriously. Your candidate’s job may depend on it.

If you use Facebook, this article is a must-read. It’s now common knowledge Facebook is always watching and analyzing how you use the service. But the breadth and depth of the company’s participation in the data brokering economy is staggering. The worst part? You literally signed up for it.

Facebook obviously doesn’t charge its users money, but the mere act of creating a profile affirmatively grants the company total access and usage rights over everything you do on the site. It even shares its data about you with data brokerage firms whose business model is monetizing you.

This is all stuff I have personally known and accepted for a long time, but as the ability to easily aggregate dossiers on anyone and everyone increases, it’s more important than ever to educate yourself and those you care about. Facebook is not free, and in fact it’s worth asking whether the price most people pay by clicking a harmless-looking “I agree” button is really worth it.

This piece by Claire Lew at Signal v. Noise doesn’t exactly fit into my general topics of law, technology and design, but it’s so important I that feel obligated to share it. I mention in my article about the role of metrics in editorial strategy that I’ve been present for some poor decisions and didn’t speak my mind.

Claire’s post explains exactly why I failed to speak up, and it’s an important read whether you’re a manager or not. Unlike more navel-gazing, hand-wavy articles in the management advice realm, she actually offers some practical advice.

Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani, reporting at the Washington Post:

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

R. Jai Krishna, reporting on the reaction of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the outcry over the company’s experiment on the emotions of nearly 700,000 unwitting users:

We take privacy and security at Facebook really seriously because that is something that allows people to share” opinions and emotions, Sandberg said.

The telling part about Sandberg’s reaction is that those who take privacy and security seriously don’t have to say it very often, if at all.

When it comes to my own website, editorial calendars always give way to real life. I’m back with the latest in a series that would be more accurately called the “Podcast of the Month.” I really need to step it up with these, as I still have about 70 of them to which I listen with some regularity.

I’m featuring This Week In Law, a podcast covering technology, privacy, intellectual property and other areas of the law relevant to the internet and its users, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the most recent episode (embedded below), entitled Monkeys, Ducks and Unicorns, discusses the Aereo case as well as a recent Fourth Amendment case about cell phones, both decided by the Supreme Court in June.

The second reason I’m featuring This Week in Law is because I have probably listened to more hours of this podcast than any other. It got me through law school by educating, entertaining and inspiring me, even while I was studying far less interesting areas of the law. The voices of Denise Howell and Evan Brown, in a way that only happens on the internet, more familiar to me than some of my longest friends’ voices.

Subscribe to This Week In Law in iTunes, Pocket Casts or RSS.

Parker Higgins of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lamenting the recent removal of a public domain NASA clip he posted on the audio sharing site SoundCloud:

The real goofy bit is that before I started at EFF, I worked at SoundCloud. I actually uploaded this Apollo 13 clip, along with sounds from Apollo 11 and others, as part of a project to attract more historic and archival audio and really celebrate the public domain as a rich source of sounds.

Copyright law has been trending in favor of rights holders for a long time. That’s precisely why unlawful claims of copyright over public domain works are so despicable.

Aviva Rutkin, reporting in New Scientist:

A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon [of contagious emotion] would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones.

Forget about the filter bubble, Facebook is (and has been since at least 2009) a Petri dish.

Click through to find out the results.

Related: Even the Editor of Facebook’s Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy

Mark Headd, Philly’s first Chief Data Officer, who quit in spring of 2013, talking to Juliana Reyes of Technically Philly about why he resigned the post:

“A self-certifying website is a 20th century answer to the problem of tax deadbeats,” he wrote in an email. “An open data API is a 21st century answer to the problem. And that was my single biggest frustration during my time at the city — we were constantly using 20th century answers to problems that required a 21st century solution.”

I know from personal experience and talking with friends that this is a common complaint of tech-savvy government employees, especially leaders ostensibly authorized to do something about it but never truly empowered.

Budgets and egos slow technological (and many other forms of) progress to a glacial pace in many government settings.

I once spent valuable time collecting requirements for a piece of vital software, researching and recommending a reasonably priced and effective off-the-shelf solution.

Instead, someone decided to shoehorn the new use case into an aging enterprise software suite that had never seemed anything more than an ugly utilitarian GUI on top of a fancy backend of connected spreadsheets.

There was no line-item cost to the shoehorn solution, so it naturally looked like a winner when it came to budgeting. But the person-hours wasted reinventing the wheel easily outweighed the out-of-pocket cost of the solution I had proposed.

And aside from cost, persons in positions of power are often averse to being educated by twenty-somethings. That is especially true when it comes to technology, which most leaders know is important but few truly understand.

Budgets and egos.

Anyway, go read the rest of the article. It looks like Mr. Headd replies to comments, so it’s worth asking him any questions you might have.

Violet Blue, reporting at ZDNet:

Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks

Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize Facebook’s tracking ability across desktop and mobile browsers. Be sure to have a look if the recent changes freak you out.

From a May 2013 editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review:

Perhaps journalism can learn from the mistakes of the food industry, which bred a perfectly red, flawless-looking tomato, giving the edge to looks over taste, since that’s what consumers were buying.

Redesigns focusing on side door web traffic will all be for naught if the product in that shiny new package languishes under clickbait headlines and SEO-heavy ledes.

Nathan Mattise, reporting at Ars Technica:

The two companies will demonstrate “continued commitment for three years after closing to the FCC’s Open Internet protections established in 2010, irrespective of whether the FCC re-establishes such protections for other industry participants following the DC Circuit Court of Appeals vacating those rules.”

My first draft of this post was cynical and incredulous, as I am wont to be. But on second thought, it would behoove AT&T to stick to it’s “vow,” if for no other reason than to grease the skids for regulatory approval of the deal. Like I said about Moves and Facebook, it’s hard to blame a company for seeking growth.

While the FCC’s Open Internet rules have been struck down since they were first imposed in 2010, Comcast still abides by those rules pursuant to requirements imposed by the FCC on its purchase of NBCUniversal.

Now that those rules have been struck down, and we’re in limbo while a new rules proposal goes through its comment period, AT&T committing to the Comcast restrictions presumes the FCC will have similar concerns about their purchase of DirecTV. So the worst case scenario for AT&T is that the FCC achieves similar restrictions via the new rules, in which case AT&T is already prepared. And the best case scenario is that the new rules are more lenient than the 2010 rules, and AT&T is even happier.

In fact, the only losers here are consumers. While there is some question about whether this consolidation in the connectivity/content space will cause immediate market overlap and thus a significant reduction in local competition, it’s hard to see how things will get better for consumers as a result of this vertical integration over time.

I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it.

A great point. That young man is going places.

Gino Barrica, responding to yet another article¹ cautioning against the pursuit of a law degree:

See, I’m not a self-hating lawyer. I’m not one of those who hang my head in shame when people ask what I do and I’m not someone who tells people to run for the hills when they tell me they’re considering law school. Yes, I’m up to my ears in debt. But, I’m also full of pride.

Gino is a friend and classmate of mine from Temple Law and someone who, I happen to know, is more intelligent than most people. While I plan on eventually giving my own experience with the bar exam the long-form treatment it deserves, I would like to, as lawyers like to say, incorporate by reference all of Gino’s thoughts on the value of a law degree to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

Andrew O’Hagan reads his essay Ghosting, about the failed ghostwriting project during which he got to know WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange as few do. The full text is also available at the link.

The Associated Press reports:

The school’s board of governors had voted to pay $35,000 to the former secretary of state under President George W. Bush and national security adviser for her appearance at the May 18 ceremony.

Any question involving money, and therefore just about any question at all, boils down at some point to supply and demand. I understand schools want to attract high-profile commencement speakers. But the fact that Rutgers would offer, and Rice would accept, $35,000, to speak for less than an hour, is shameful.

Schools should not be willing to supply so much money, and speakers, often wealthy, should not demand it. For a more thorough treatment of this topic, read the excellent 2011 essay “Commencement Cash Cow” by Pablo Eisenberg at InsideHigherEd.

Janet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet:

The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, the barriers for exit are high. This leaves users and consumers with no real choice nor a voice to express our concerns.

It’s a fascinating article.

Public entities don’t often have the budget needed to attract top talent from the private sector. But exposing data to public manipulation and scrutiny, aside from fulfilling a duty of transparency too often ignored, allows anyone interested in displaying and improving their skills to bring their talents to bear on that data.

Joel Gascoigne is a co-founder and the CEO of Buffer, the most powerful tool for sharing and scheduling stuff across multiple social networks. It’s a great service and one I use almost daily. But more importantly, Joel’s thoughtful blog is a great way to read about how he and his co-founder, Leo Widrich, run a successful startup.

The recently deceased García Márquez, in an interview published in the winter 1981 issue of The Paris Review:

My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading.

I have never read his work (a sin of literary omission I will soon remedy), but in this story García Márquez perfectly described a sensation I have at least once a week. It’s why I started writing fiction again recently after a long drought.

Go read the rest of the interview, it’s great.

Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so.

I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if you have an auto-refresh (as many news sites do) and your average session duration is equal or nearly equal to that refresh interval.

Anyway, Mr. Malik always has safe advice for business owners and writers alike, so go read the rest of his article.

Gerard Magliocca, writing at Concurring Opinions:

If I cited [someone else’s] brief in an attempt to fairly attribute the source when I made the same point, then I’d look like an uncreative doofus. If I did not cite the brief, though, then that would (or could) be plagiarism.

It would be an interesting bit of research to determine how many sentences are copied without attribution from the briefs of other attorneys. I suspect it happens often.

I don’t think it’s uncreative to cite another lawyer’s brief. Legal writing is a game of cites. If anything, an uncited thought may raise questions rather than project creativity.

The real creativity in legal advocacy, as far as I have learned in law school, working as a litigation paralegal and reading far too much legal writing for “pleasure,” is in the optimal juxtaposition, creatively, of the cited facts and the thoughts of your forbears.

No one wants to see a newly minted physics professor work out the proof for E = MC2. The formula is there as a shortcut so others can build, creatively, upon the concepts for which it provides a shorthand.

After all, what judge prefers your lengthy version of an angle you could just as easily refer to with a short quote and a cite to a previous brief?

Whatever you think of this, a quick search turned up a bit of further reading on the issue and I’ve included a few links below. The question certainly isn’t settled, so I’m as interested as Mr. Magliocca in hearing other opinions.

Further Reading

• The Problems of Plagiarism as an Ethics Offense (PDF)
• Plagiarism: A Workshop for Law Students (PDF)
• Lindsay Lohan’s lawyer sanctioned for plagiarizing in briefs

Yoree Koh reporting at The Wall Street Journal:

Twitter said it has 241 million monthly active users the last three months of 2013. Twitter defines a monthly active user as an account that logs in at least once a month. By Twitter’s standards, a person does not have to tweet to be considered a monthly active user.

I would think active users tweet and passive users only read. If I was considered an active user of every platform I sign into in a month, I would be considered far more active than I really am.

Good thing a bipartisan bill aims to end that embarrassing situation.

The things the National Technology Information Service does which don’t involve charging hundreds of dollars for free stuff and bleeding money doing it will be absorbed by the Commerce Department under the proposed bill.

But why does Obama want to add $19M to the failed agency’s budget in 2015? I don’t mean to sound like a melodramatic RNC ad, but it seems like a bad idea.