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NSA Reform: Call Your Representative Today

Sorry, no Tech Tuesday today – instead a brief post about need for more dramatic NSA reform than what has been proposed so far. It is already 4:30pm but I still suggest that you call your representative or senator in Washington, DC. Here are what I believe to be important demands. First, to put the NSA under civilian leadership subject to Senate confirmation (instead of military). Second, to break up the NSA into multiple agencies, one focused on actually protecting networks (one of the NSA’s...

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Software Patents Need To Go

My partner Brad put up a great post on the USV blog yesterday, arguing for an independent invention defense against software patents. A while back, I had proposed an alternative, a change in how litigation works. In that post, I wrote that:Some folks have suggested doing away with software patents altogether as a way of addressing this problem. That strikes me as too dramatic a solution as I don’t believe that all software patents are evil. For instance, if someone were to spend years and lot...

Will The Center Hold?

I still follow German politics a bit, if for no other reason than talking to my parents and friends who live there. But right now there are interesting things happening there that are relevant to US politics. Germany has federal elections coming up on September 27 and had state elections in three states last week. The state elections showed a fascinating split with two smaller parties, “The Left” (“Die Linke” and the “Free Democratic Party” (“FDP”), scoring major gains. The Left is a combinat...

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Reform - Continuations

Republic, Lost and United

Yesterday saw the beginning of a massive effort across a large number of Internet companies to help stop PIPA/SOPA legislation. While that is an important fight it is worth asking - can we afford to fight bad bills one at a time? Why do we even wind up with terrible bills like this in the first place? In his new book “Republic, Lost” Larry Lessig accumulates an impressive amount of evidence pointing to the corrupting influence of money on politics. Everyone who cares about the future – whethe...

Getting Money Out of Politics (Event at BuzzFeed)

I am co-hosting an event on May 14 at the BuzzFeed offices with folks from Represent.us / United Republic and others backing the American Anti-corruption Act. We will be discussing the rationale behind the Act and how the campaign plans to pass it via ballot initiative in cities, counties, states, and eventually federally. We are getting together from 6:30 to 8:30pm, and food and drink will be served. If you are interested please email me so that I can get your name added to the list (firstna...

Toward a Better Patent System

Another topic that I have written a lot about here on Continuations are patents and in particular software patents. While there is a lot of reform that I would love to see I have also come to appreciate that sometimes the only way to get there is in small steps. One relatively meaningful step was just introduced by Senator Schumer. The basic idea is to allow for a much fast tracked review of many of the suspect business process patents used by patent trolls to sue startups and larger tech com...