Gene Healy for the Cato Institute: Our 44th president has never lacked chutzpah. In a speech to U.S. troops last month, he denounced the “false promise” that “we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs” and piously proclaimed that “democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war.”
An audacious statement, given that it is Obama himself who has made perpetual warfare the new normal and the president the ultimate “decider” in matters of war and peace. Where George W. Bush secured congressional authorization for the two major wars he fought, Obama started two undeclared wars (in Libya and against the Islamic State), ordered 10 times as many drone strikes as his predecessor, and this summer bombed six countries just over Labor Day weekend. And it is Obama who is largely responsible for warping the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to target al Qaeda and the Taliban, into an enabling act for endless war, anywhere in the world.
Through it all, Obama has maintained the pose of a “reluctant warrior,” repeatedly lecturing the country about the dangers of an imperial presidency while forging new frontiers in the expansion of executive power … Obama even had the gall to quote James Madison’s admonition that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Two weeks after Obama invoked Madison’s warning, the public received new evidence of its continued relevance. June 2013 brought the first of a series of revelations about secret dragnet data-collection programs that targeted Americans in the name of protecting them from terrorism. In the quest to “collect it all,” the National Security Agency had built what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden termed a “turnkey tyranny.” As former NSA counsel Susan Hennessy has observed: “No one should kid themselves about the idea that in the wrong hands, [the agency] couldn’t do quite a bit that’s very scary.”
Manuela Ekowo for New America: College instructors often lament that laptops and other devices distract students from engaging with them, course material or other students. There may be some truth to this. Research has shown students retain more information if they jot down notes rather than type them. Other research suggests that multitasking is a lot harder than it seems. Laptops may tempt students to multitask during class, breaking their concentration. Instructors have and can use studies like these to justify why laptops shouldn’t be in the classroom.
However, such arguments paint the classroom with too broad a stroke. A more accurate picture would be that laptops and other devices can be a distraction in lecture-based classrooms, not all classrooms. This is especially true for instructors who aren’t using technology to keep students engaged in the lecture.
Laptop bans underestimate the many ways instruction can be enhanced with laptops and other technologies. For example, tracking student engagement through analytics and adaptive technologies, restructuring a course by flipping it, incorporating active learning techniques, or ensuring students have access to materials with open educational resources. And some disciplines couldn’t be taught without a device. Imagine a computer science instructor who didn’t allow students to make use of computers.
Alongside research that suggests technology is not always the best substitute for pen and paper, colleges should consider the growing evidence suggesting technology-enhanced learning environments can be beneficial.
Adam Tanner for The Century Foundation: The world of information is rapidly changing, and in this environment, U.S. rules fall precariously short in protecting our medical data.
What many patients do not know is that much of their health information is routinely sold and traded, in anonymized form, to third parties in for-profit commerce unrelated to their specific treatment. After a person gets medical care, pharmacies, insurers, labs, electronic record systems and the middlemen connecting all these entities automatically transmit patient data directly to what is, in effect, a big health data bazaar. This trade, which has nothing to do with the individual’s treatment or insurance processing, is allowed by privacy rules if the patient’s name is removed. The result is a blizzard of transactions hidden to the public in which companies, called data miners, buy, sell and barter anonymized but intimate profiles of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Such secondary use of patient data can have good intentions. For example, massive anonymized patient databases can help pharmaceutical companies develop and market effective drugs and treatments. The profiles that data miners produce remove the easy identifiers about a patient, such as name, birthdate and so on, but they also leave certain information in the profiles, such as the doctor’s name, to allow drug companies to target sales to individual doctors based on their prescribing patterns.
While the anonymization of patient data may seem like a good firewall for protecting privacy, it increasingly is not. Because of the way big data can now be massaged and processed, companies can, for example, use the same information to identify patients who are likely to suffer from certain conditions and then market drugs to them. …
Beyond this well of anonymized data flowing from medical practices, there is also a flood of new information entering the data bazaar through nonmedical sources, none of which are protected by HIPAA. Social media, fitness devices and health apps give advertisers additional information that can be openly traded and sold, but without any obligation to remove patient names or details.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
