The bad part about lack of anonymity in our transactions is that Big Data actually gets us some reasonable legal use cases for privacy like why should my credit card company and everyone they share data with know what kind of porn I buy or what books I read or whether I go out to lunch often and who knows what kind of automated algorithms farther down the chain might do with that info like deny me employment surreptitiously.

I think unfortunately the cat is out of the bag in terms of protecting that kind of data from widespread sharing and mining. The only thing that we can really do now is legislate transparency in how its used (like credit reports) and prohibit discriminatory practices based on it.

Unfortunately financial privacy's primary use case is tax evasion, criminal purchases, and money laundering. I think it is better that we reform laws against consensual crimes like recreational drug use and respect freedom of speech/belief/press as a basic human right and not just count on bad laws being difficult to enforce.

I promise I'll give up my password when I get a warrant and verify it with my lawyer.

The only reasons for backdoors are to violate the 4th amendment with mass surveillance or for ephemeral keys that get destroyed like an encrypted chat or phone call but they should not have been recorded without a warrant in the first place.

The allegations about murder-for-hire were never proven in the court or even charged iirc. He was basically convicted for being in a criminal enterprise by running the marketplace. There are plenty of violent criminals who got far lighter sentences than Ulbricht for basically acting as an online middleman for illegal transactions.
IMHO, you could probably imprison the CEO of Ebay for being the biggest fence of stolen goods under the same theory.

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cox, TW, all sued into bankruptcy, then the government steps in and nationalizes the last mile infrastructure. FTW!

The other issue concerns employee use of employer owned systems. There have been cases where employees have been prosecuted for violating a purely civil agreement between them and their employer about the systems they have access to.

In general the law should not criminalize a civil contract violation or in the case of EULA's and Acceptable Use policies, it is questionable whether they are even valid contracts. This is especially true when the law in question is very one sided in favor of big companies using the threat of prosecution against researchers and employees and customers. I can't get the FBI to prosecute Comcast for turning on their public Wifi network on my router, even though it does potentially violate the CFAA.

If you make factual data public, you don't generally "own" it as in you don't have exclusive rights to it. You can't copyright a database of factual information. Basically the CFAA lets a firm make data public but then if someone uses a script to aggregate it, they can claim it was a felon. Just as an example, the CFAA could even apply to things like price comparison websites if a particular merchant doesn't want their public pricing information compared to their competitors.

As a BMW 3 series driver from Maryland, my sincere hope is that BMW makes their cars drive just like us :)

After reading TFA, it seems like the company runs like a cult of personality of Ms. Holmes. Their answer for every objection is to impugn the integrity or intelligence of the person who raised the issue. Their remembrance of the facts diverges wildly from the first hand accounts of their critics. Whenever they mention Ms Holmes odd behavior, they basically make the No True Scotsman defense, that Ms Holmes would never do that. That is classic cult-like behavior.

I can't get my head around how they raised so much money with nothing but the most basic outline of an idea and not even an original one. Score one for political connections.

I smell something funny, but I don't think they have a test for that at Theranos.

Well I suppose on a long enough timeline, it is a joke but its not very funny within our lifetime.

I think the basic outline of the CCP plan is just to convert their military/political power into such overwhelming economic power through crony capitalism that even free and open democracy won't make any difference in who is running things.

The Big Sky area of Montana is already full of vacation homes and ranches of wealthy VC types so its not a big stretch that they might choose to plop a Data Center there. Still I think it is far more likely that you will see more data centers copping up in SLC because of the NSA. All the big government contractors will be putting boots on the ground in SLC and they can't co-locate at the NSA facility.

SF, NYC, and DC are just so expensive.

It would seem like the victim can consent to the location tracking of her stolen cell phone. No warrant necessary or certainly an easily obtained one.

Now if they tracked the perpetrators cell phone, that would require a warrant under SCOTUS rulings I've seen.

I don't think a civil NDA between the state and a government contractor has any power over a criminal case and it certainly does not override the 4th amendment.

Congress never intended pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses to apply to consumer contracts under the FAA but business-friendly courts have interpreted the law that way. Congress just needs to amend the FAA so that pre-dispute binding arbitration is not binding in consumer contracts, as well as prohibiting the requirement that consumers waive their right to class-action and jury trial pre-dispute.

It would also help if Congress gave the CFPA or some other pro-consumer leaning agency oversight of private arbitration companies because right now they have a massive conflict of interest since their customers are the big businesses that count on them ruling in their favor more often than courts would in consumer cases.

I am inclined to agree with that. There are a lot of great universities out there. MIT and Harvard are among the ones with enormous endowments that still get hundreds of millions in donor cash that could probably be put to better use at schools with less name recognition.

Reminds me of the scene from Babylon 5 where Londo explains that an action figure of him is lacking the appropriate alien sex organs and that is why is should be banned.