'Consent' Asks: Who Owns The Internet?

While the Internet may aid the spread of democracy, democracy doesn't necessarily mean a free and open Internet. In her new book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, Rebecca MacKinnon, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices, a citizen media network, investigates the corrosion of civil liberties by the governments and corporations that control the digital world. "The critical question is: How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy?" MacKinnon tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne. Despite the recent uprisings in the Middle East, MacKinnon points out, those countries have a long way to go to achieve the openness required of a democratic society. For instance, although the Egyptian government stopped censoring the Internet after Mubarak stepped down, activists still assume all their electronic communications are being monitored. NPR Morning Edition

Snapshot: Progressive and Privacy

Dragon NewsBytes pointed this morning to a piece about security researcher Trevor Eckhart, who discovered that Sprint and Verizon phones are running CarrierIQ, a piece of software which has the potential to track minute details about callers’ lives. This reminds me of the conversation Dave and I were having recently about the large swathes of privacy people will surrender in exchange for the smallest remuneration. The poster child for this of course is the 2004 study on the streets of London in which researchers found that people would surrender their passwords, user names and personal details in exchange for a bar of chocolate. Informing Intelligence-Led Policing

Digitizing Health Records, Before It Was Cool

THE push to move the nation from paper to electronic health records is serious business. That’s why a first look at the campus of Epic Systems comes as something of a jolt. A treehouse for meetings? A two-story spiral slide just for fun? What’s that big statue of the Cat in the Hat doing here? Don’t let these elements of whimsy fool you. Operating on 800 acres of former farmland near Madison, Wis., Epic Systems supplies electronic records for large health care providers like the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, as well as health plans like Kaiser Permanente and medical groups like the Weill Cornell Physicians Organization in New York. In fact, Epic’s reputation as a fun-filled, creative place to work helps draw programmers who might otherwise take jobs at Google, Microsoft or Facebook. The New York Times

Code of conduct: The relentless march of the algorithm

Last October a tiny tech start-up from Australia called Kaggle raised $11m from a trio of venture capitalists. More interesting than the sum, modest by Silicon Valley standards, is who provided the funding: Index Ventures, a venture-capital firm co-founded by Neil Rimer in London but now one of the hottest in San Francisco; Khosla Ventures, founded by Vinod Khosla of Sun MicroSystems; and Max Levchin, one of PayPal's founders. Among Silicon Valley's many potential investors, they are aristocracy. Kaggle swiftly relocated from Melbourne to new offices in San Francisco. The Independent

Australian Privacy Foundation slams e-health system

THE $500 million personally controlled e-health record system is a document viewing service, not a patient care system, and it is unclear whether any benefits will be available following its July 1 launch, the peak privacy body says. "The Australian Privacy Foundation asks how the system, which cannot uniquely identify individuals and simply permits document transmission and viewing, will be used for patient care benefit at all," the APF says in its submission to the Senate inquiry into the PCEHR legislation and related matters. The Australian