Author Archive | Stewart Baker

Not long ago I criticized the SG’s submission to the Court on whether to grant cert in Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria. I thought it was a remarkably bad brief in a bad cause. But even a bad brief from the SG can be persuasive when it asserts a federal interest in preempting a state […]

This post excerpts my book’s discussion of the third failed privacy model. (If you just can’t wait to see all three, or my idea for a better solution, I’ve posted a free copy of the chapter here.) If requiring a predicate is the lawyer’s solution; the third failed approach is the bureaucrat’s solution. It is […]

Much of this post has already been published by Glenn Reynolds, who generously cast me as Marshall McLuhan in a debate between him and Andrew Sullivan about the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill. But Glenn doesn’t encourage comments, and experience suggests that there are several commenters who would burst a gasket if they couldn’t explain just how wrong Stewart Baker’s […]

Suddenly the Internet is full of chatter about Senator Lieberman (and Collins and Carper) proposing an “Internet kill switch.” It’s the one issue that Huffington Post and Drudge have agreed on in months: there’s a kill switch coming and they don’t like it. Personally, any time the left and the right get together to complain […]

Lots of readers have wondered why I unload so heavily on the privacy lobby in these posts and the book.  It’s simple.  I think they’re exploiting our natural, if Luddite, resistance to new technology, and they’re promoting solutions that are almost always bad ideas and in some cases are going to get a lot of people killed.  Of course […]

I just finished testifying on cybersecurity issues to the House Homeland Security committee.  The headline from that hearing is likely to be the bipartisan support that emerged for the broad thrust of the Lieberman-Collins-Carper bill that I blogged about earlier and that I supported at the hearing.  Ranking member Peter King (R-NY) announced that he would […]

A few people on the Volokh Conspiracy have complained that some of my posts seem to be deriding privacy advocates.  I think that’s close, but not quite right.  We all believe in privacy, certainly I do.  But as I see it, today’s privacy advocates, often in alliance with industry (what I called the “privacy-industrial complex”), […]

When Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Carper proposed legislation last week to deal with the risk of a large-scale attack on our computer infrastructure, the libertarian-privacy attack was not long in coming.  Declan McCullagh, a committed libertarian journalist for Cnet, posted a long story full of angst about the bill. It would, he said, “”grant the president far-reaching […]

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the Obama Administration was ready to engage in talks with Russia about on cyberspace disarmament. I finally had a chance to read the remarks, by the new head of Cyber Command, Gen. Keith Alexander, also the head of the National Security Agency. (In a revealing typo, the […]

My new book, Skating on Stilts, is mostly a meditation on how the technologies we love eventually find new ways to kill us, and how to stop them from doing that. I talk about three technologies — jet flight, computers, and biotech. Anticipating the release of the book next week, Huffington Post is hosting an excerpt from the […]

EJazzNews sends out an email with a free sampler of  jazz every week.  Full tracks, zip file of mp3s, no DRM.  Good stuff, too, by my unadventurous lights.  This week’s, EJN 13, featured several torchy female jazz singers and a scatting male singer that were talented and new to me.  Better than Pandora, which has […]

BP has had another agonizing failure as it tries to stop the massive oil deep under the Gulf of Mexico. The President, meanwhile, is taking heat for the disaster and his apparent paralysis in the face of crisis. The consequences of the spill are devastating, and compensation is well beyond the resources of BP, even […]