August, 2009

Technology Policy / Writing — No Comments
29
Aug 09

CDT Blog Posts


As a continued act of record keeping, here are the blog posts I did for the Center for Democracy and Technology on their PolicyBeta blog during my internship.  I had a great time there and learned a lot about Internet/Security/Privacy policy and how government really works.  I worked on several projects at CDT, some of which resulted in blog posts.  One of my projects was writing the “CRS Report of the Week” posts.  CRS is the Congressional Research Service, the “Congressional Thinktank” that does policy reports for Congressmembers.  They produce CRS Reports, which explain current legislative issues.  CRS Reports aren’t directly available to the public, which is interesting since CRS is tax-payer funded to the tune of $100 million a year.  CDT runs a project called Open CRS which liberates CRS Reports found in the wild.  I wrote CRS Report of Week blog posts to illustrate how useful CRS Reports were.  They provide great introductions to topics and are often surprisingly timely.  Read one if you want to understand an issue.  I also worked on the Browser Privacy Report and PASS ID.

CRS Report of the Week Projects I Worked on

The photo is the Farragut West Metro Station, next to which CDT is located and where I got off every day.

Technology Policy / Writing — 1 Comment
29
Aug 09

WWS 586F Class Blog Posts


As a matter of record keeping and curiosity, here are the blog posts I wrote for the seminar on Information Technology and Public Policy that I took at the Woodrow Wilson School. Many of them, especially the ones on the Facebook Terms of Service and the Kindle 2, are now outdated due to events in the past months, but others are still relevant. 4 and 9 are topics that still stand today–4 is on how Computer Science education (especially at lower levels) could be improved and 9 discusses some of the tragedies that occur with what are normally positive traits of the Internet: the ability to disseminate information quickly, to keep sources anonymous, and to retain information for an indefinite amount of time.

  1. Facebook wants to own your life [February 22nd, 2009]
  2. The Kindle 2’s Correct Copyright Claims (and the Authors Guild’s Incorrect Ones) [February 28th, 2009]*
  3. Blurring Google Earth [March 7th, 2009]
  4. Computers in Our World [March 28th, 2009]
  5. TVGuardian Will Protect Us All [April 4th, 2009]
  6. The Kindle 2: A New Hope (for the disabled) [April 11th, 2009]
  7. eBooks and mp3s [April 18th, 2009]
  8. Protecting Children from the Indescribable Filth of YouTube [April 25th, 2009]
  9. Grief From Griefers [May 2nd, 2009]

*Tim Lee (the tech libertarian) was in my class! He approved of this post.

Talk — No Comments
28
Aug 09

Hi there!

Since WordPress’s default title for a new post is “Hello World!“–the title that I probably would have chosen–I felt the need to change it.  This is my obligatory explanatory post for why I’m adding my noise to the chaos of the Internet.  I figure, I like to write and sometimes spend time researching information that’s not organized that I think could be helpful to someone else.  Essentially, because I can.  This is a personal project and might even be a little fun and educational.

I have “blogged” twice before, once for class (WWS 586F: Information Technology and Public Policy instructed by the singularly awesome Ed Felten) and once for my internship at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).  Both experiences taught me two lessons:

  1. blogging is easy
  2. blogging is hard

Blogging is easy because it’s informal.  The audience isn’t going through my grammar participle by participle and there doesn’t need to be a formal structure.  It can be written in a conversational tone.

Blogging is hard because I’m putting myself out there.  My scariest classes at Princeton by far were my Creative Writing classes.  It was nerve-wracking for me to go to workshops and have ten other students and one (likely published and highly acclaimed) professor examine my writing paragraph by paragraph and critique it.  Computer Science is interesting because for the most part, people in the field are detached from their audience.  A programmer hardly sees their actual uses and computers talk, not people.  Writing is inherently intimate and revealing of the writer.  Not only is blogging as a form of writing revealing, it’s also putting that revealing information on the Internet for anyone to see and likely stored in some computer forever.

Both previous blogging adventures had clear goals in mind.  This one does not.  This is probably a mistake.  However, it’s my mistake, and my mistake it’ll be.  This will be interesting.