Supreme Court Rules Sea...

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously decided today to uphold citizens’ Fourth Amendement rights in the GPS tracking case which would have allowed the U.S. government to track a suspects’ cars without a warrant. The court states that the Fourth Amendement’s protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” extends to vehicles. According to the ruling ( PDF version here ), a warrant is required “[w]here, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area,” including a car. The case stems from a case involving the nightclub owner Antoine Jones, who was sentenced to life in prison for drug dealing before the appeals court overturned the ruling. The government had installed a GPS device on the suspect’s Jeep, which led to his later arrest. The government tracked Jones over four weeks in order as a part of its case proving Jones was distributing cocaine and storing it and money in a suburban house outside Washington D.C. In today’s ruling, five Supreme Court justices, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed that attaching a GPS to a car would violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights. The other four justices, led by Samuel Alito, agreed in the Jones judgement itself, saying that the move to attach the GPS violated Jones’ “reasonable expectations of privacy.” All judges agreed that GPS tracking should require warrants, which upheld the appeals court decision. The ruling will have a serious impact on police investigations going forward, as GPS tracking has become a common means of obtaining information on a suspect’s movements. The case had Big Brother -esque implications, however, despite the Justice Department’s argument that the government was not after “24-hour surveillance of every citizen in the U.S.” The idea that the government walk up to your driveway and plant a GPS device (originally a military technology) on your car, had left many with a feeling of unease.

Box’s Next Frontier: Cl...

For Box, 2011 was a huge year in terms of customer acquisition. Box ended the year with 77% of the Fortune 500 using the company’s cloud storage offerings. Procter and Gamble marked one of Box’s largest deployments for the year. While Box is still continuing to focus on cloud solutions for the enterprise in 2012, the company has set its sights on a potentially huge fish for the year—the federal government. Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells me that there is a huge opportunity for Box in procuring cloud storage options for government agencies. “There’s going to be a big shift in public sector using cloud services this year,” Levie explains. “With so many agencies having to collaborate with public and other organizations, it’s more efficient to do this in the cloud.” One of the obstacles to offering cloud services to the government are the high security requirements. For example, we’ve seen some of the early security hurdles Google faced with expanding cloud-based Google Apps to government agencies. But Box has recently started ramping up security for cloud storage, making controls more granular and giving IT administrators more control over user functions. It is expected that Box will add even more security and control for compliance with government agencies’ data. Levie says that the company is potentially tapping into the $70 billion market for providing technology and software to the government. Clearly, that’s a huge revenue opportunity for the company. And government agencies seem interested in making a move to the cloud. In November, President Obama has ordered federal agencies to improve their records management, encouraging them to ditch paper-based storage to the cloud. Already, a number of enterprise cloud-services companies are clamoring to appeal to the government for services. Amazon recently launched the GovCloud to provide a secure cloud computing environment for government agencies. IBM, and HP recently won a $250 million private cloud contract. And Salesforce is also eying public sector initiatives to help governments adopt cloud computing. Box is currently serving a number of local and state governments with cloud storage services, says Levie. At the end of the day, he explains, the government is dealing with the exact same problems as the enterprise. And that is an opportunity Box is not going to pass up.

Codecademy and The Whit...

Today, Codecademy in conjunction with The White House announced a new program to educate the country’s youth: Code Summer Plus. The announcement was made at an event held by Twilio and hosted by United States CTO Aneesh Chopra. There, Codecademy’s founder Zach Sims explained that as part of Obama’s larger Summer Jobs Plus initiative, Code Summer Plus will offer a “condensed version of our curriculum and get [youth] on track to become engineers.” Additionally, partners including Foursquare, Twilio, and any other company can work with Codecademy to create lessons that will be distributed to the kids. Summer Jobs Plus is designed to help the government connect young people with jobs. There will also be a markup employers can add to their websites’ code to tag it to be crawled and included in the National Resource Directory . The Summer Jobs Plus program’s goal is to offer 250,000 employment opportunities by the beginning of the summer. Summer Jobs Plus and Code Summer Plus will link to lead youth to jobs. For example Chopra explained how a student who built an app prototype as part of Code Summer Plus could be connected to mentors or internships in technology. Codecademy’s Sims also officially announced that Codecademy now supports 1 million students.  Some speculated it had hit this milestone recently after signing up 300,000 would-be coders in one week through its Code Year program . Additionally, Mitch Kapor announced his commitment to start SMASH Academy – Summer Math and Science Honors Academy. It’s 3 year, 5 week summer residential program for high potential high school students of color in science, technology, engineering, and math. It will include media technology, coding, entrepreneurship, public speaking and other education that high schools aren’t providing. Run by the Level Playing Field Academy and hosted at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and USC, it will help 220 students. SMASH is backed primarily by Mitch Kapor as well as corporations and other sponsors.

Getting “Internet Freed...

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Richard Fontaine , a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security and the co-author (with Will Rogers) of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age , from which this post is partly drawn. What is Internet freedom? The United States government has an “Internet freedom” agenda, complete with speeches by the Secretary of State and millions of dollars in program funding. A key United Nations official last year issued a major report emphasizing the right of all individuals freely to use the Internet. Taking a different tack, Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers and “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google, recently argued in the New York Times that Internet access is not a human right. And Devin Coldewey parsed the debate in TechCrunch , noting that the Internet is an enabler of rights, not a right unto itself. The answer matters. As an ever greater proportion of human activity is mediated through Internet-based technologies, the extent of our online rights — and what we really mean by “Internet freedom” — will take on greater importance in political and economic life. After a year in which new communications tools were used to dramatic effect throughout the Middle East, and at a time when autocratic governments are cracking down against online freedom, it is worth pausing to get straight the concept so many hold dear. We might start by distinguishing between two linked but distinct concepts: freedom of the Internet and freedom via the Internet. Freedom of the Internet refers to the ability to engage in unfettered expression in cyberspace. This vision of Internet freedom, as scholar Evgeny Morozov has pointed out , represents freedom from something: censorship, government surveillance, DDoS attacks, and so on. The principles undergirding freedom of the Internet are articulated in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which describes as inalienable the right to receive and impart information without interference, “throughout any media and regardless of frontiers.” In this sense, Internet freedom is little different from the notion of free expression, whose advocacy has been an element of U.S. foreign policy for decades. After all, American ambassadors have long pressed foreign governments to allow a free press, release jailed journalists and cease jamming unwanted broadcasts. Freedom via the Internet is at once both a more alluring and complicated idea. Its advocates suggest that more online freedom can lead to more offline freedom; that is, the free flow of ideas over the Internet promotes democratization. Anyone who witnessed the Arab Spring cannot fail to be moved by the use of new communications tools by protestors to foment political change – nor by the desperate attempts by Mubarak’s Egypt, Qaddafi’s Libya, and others to stop them from doing so. Then there is Internet access itself. While taking away the ability of individuals to engage in legitimate online expression seems clearly to represent a human rights violation, it is difficult to view governments that fail to provide broadband for their populations as human rights violators. It is important that those who care about Internet freedom achieve a measure of conceptual clarity, because those who would abridge it are using definitions for their own ends. At an April 2008 U.N. conference that sought to clarify what represents “aggression” online, for instance, a senior Russian official argued that “any time a government promotes ideas on the Internet with the goal of subverting another country’s government – even in the name of democratic reform – it should qualify as ‘aggression.’” Similarly, the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organisation – which includes Russia and China – in 2009 adopted an accord that reportedly defined “information war,” in part, as an effort by a state to undermine another’s “political, economic and social systems.” Government officials and their private sector counterparts have a key role to play in all of this. The United States should be in the lead in formulating acceptable international definitions of Internet freedom, aggression, and cyber security that respect widely-recognized human rights. It will also need to continually articulate the distinction between political speech permissible under such regimes as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and truly illicit online activity (like child pornography, cyber crime, and terrorism). None of this will be easy. Even some of America’s closest democratic friends have views of Internet freedom that are more restrictive than those widely held in the United States. Witness recent attempts by the government of India to have key Internet companies remove objectionable content or restrictions in Europe on online speech that insults population groups. But the effort begins with getting straight precisely what we mean by “Internet freedom.” The idea – and the reality – is too important to muddle. Excerpt Image from Feross.org

Is Google a Public Comp...

I have been watching from the fringes as people squabble over the new offering from Google “Search Plus Your World”. All I can see that has been accomplished is that the Internet industry press is starting to look less like reporters and more like advocates for whatever constituency they are trying to impress. The worst offender is Apple’s mouthpiece, MG Siegler , who is fully convinced that Apple represents heaven and Google represents the powers of hell and he will tell everyone about it over and over and over. Ridiculous but it is how this has played out. What is really happening is that people are arguing whether Google and its search function should be allowed to operate in a free market sense or should it be “confiscated” by the government through regulation etc so that it can be fair. This is just ridiculous in a supposedly free market environment. For painfully obvious reasons (i.e his own income and influence), Siegler outlines how Apple avoids this mess without ever saying what is actually taking place. That is that, Apple produces a product that people can buy into of their own free will. There is a cost to get there and a barrier to entry. It is free market. Google on the other hand provides a critical service that would make life a bit more difficult (although not impossible since there are competitors like Bing etc which people also like to conveniently forget) that is FREE to the end user (if they have Internet access, of course). There seems to be some confusion around this whole free thing. It really forces common sense and reason to the back seat. You see, everyone seems to be pushing for the government to do everything for them. That’s fine if you want to go there. I am not here to make a political argument. But just because something is free it doesn’t mean that EVERYONE owns it! This is a company’s product / service just like Apple’s iPhone but it is offered to the masses for free. There is only one way to “own” it; buy some freakin’ Google stock! From a business perspective though, the government should not be involved in what Google has done here with Search Plus Your World. Not at all, but people like Siegler keep yelling into their megaphone that the government will be looking into the apparent injustice that Google is perpetrating on the unsuspecting world at large. His cries will get the attention of headline hungry politicians so it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice work, MG. He even veils it in a conspiracy theory that this is part of some master plan to drag Facebook before the government before their IPO but I’m not buying that. What is really happening is that the idea of the open Internet actually is impossible to achieve in a free market. Why? Because if it were truly open then the big players of Google, Twitter and Facebook would be openly sharing their data with each other because everyone benefits. Guess what? That idea is BS because the only reason that Facebook and Twitter are not being used as true social signals by Google (meaning all data is available to the likes of Google to give people social influenced search results) is money. The guess is, Twitter wanted more than Google would pay for the access to the Twitter firehose so that went away. This happens in the free market. Companies have a right to pay what they feel is the fair amount for something and Google plus Twitter have made their positions clear so they are not doing business. Free market. Facebook doesn’t share their info with Google but they do with Bing because of their choice to be in bed with Microsoft. Once again, free market. They made a choice in business relationships and as a result Google has limited access to Facebook information to formulate a social influence result set based on their data. Really this is all a big joke. Why can’t we just get off the bandwagon that Google owes the world something? It gives the world something, it does it well and it is rewarded handsomely for a good service that is needed. It is doing it in a completely unique environment that we have no precedent for as well. If you asked the average guy on the street as to whether or not he gives a rip that Google makes a lot of money providing its service and if they think they should be limited in what they provide as a result, most would look at you cross-eyed and say “I could care less. I just want to search the Internet”. Then ask that person about social signals and the vast majority of the world (which Silicon Valley doesn’t have a single clue about) would once again say they will take what they can get for free as long as it works well enough to help them do what they want to do. In other words, this whole argument is happening at a level that the public, the majority, isn’t even involved in. This is a real funny thing that is going on here because the 1% are turning on their own! The average person cares about being able to search the Internet and get good information for free. They could care less about how much a company makes doing it. The people that “care” about this the most are the ones that will profit from it like Silicon Valley, the Siegler’s of the world, politicians and the like. It’s that simple.In the end this has nothing to do with something that is for the better good. It’s for the good of the 1%. Pretty ironic considering the usually liberal angle of the Internet set! This argument gets very circular and tiresome very quickly so I will be quiet for now. I wish opportunists like Siegler would go on radio silence as well. Now that would be heaven. Guess what? Ain’t gonna happen.