I have to admit that I’ve been a bit in shock over Congress’s decision to simply renew the Patriot Act, recently, without a single safeguard to protect against abuse. That’s because just before all this happened, we wrote about how a report from the government found (not for the first time) that the FBI regularly abused its authority to get phone records it had no right to. This went well beyond earlier reports of abusing National Security Letters. In this case, the FBI didn’t even bother with NSLs. Instead, sometimes it would just use a post-it note. On top of that, reports came out noting that just weeks before this report was released, the Obama administration issued a ruling with a blanket absolution for the FBI’s activities — basically saying that if the President said it was okay, it was fine.

This is not how our government is supposed to work.

Julian Sanchez has a fantastic article that should be a must read, detailing how Obama went from being a candidate who insisted there would be “no more National Security Letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime” because “that is not who we are, and it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists,” to one who appears to have no problem regularly spying on citizens and covering it up. President Bush was really bad with warrantless wiretapping and retroactive immunity for telcos — and most people figured Obama would at least be marginally better on that issue. But it’s really scary how the entirety of the federal government doesn’t seem to care much about these blatant privacy abuses — and the public and the press has shrugged them off as well.

Given all the reports of abuses, and Obama’s campaign statements, you would think that at least the government would put in place some kind of oversight and safeguards when the Patriot Act came up for renewal. No such luck. In fact, the administration appears to have worked with Republican Senators to make this possible. I don’t think this is what people meant when they expected to see more “reaching across the aisle” from the President:

Indeed, by the time the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of reauthorization in early November, legislators of both parties were venting their frustration about the scant guidance they’d gotten from the administration.

Behind closed doors, however, the administration was anything but silent. Instead of openly opposing civil-liberties reforms that had been under consideration in the Senate, The New York Times reported in October, the Obama administration opted for a kind of political ventriloquist’s routine. The Justice Department wrote a series of amendments diluting or stripping away the new protections, then laundered them through Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, who offered them up verbatim.



It’s worth taking a closer look at one such reform proposal — again, predating the latest and most damning OIG report — to get a sense of the disconnect between the administration’s public and private stances. Some legislators had wanted to require the FBI to develop “minimization procedures” for NSLs, as they do when full-blown wiretaps are employed, to ensure that information about innocents is not circulated indiscriminately and that irrelevant records are ultimately discarded. This would only bring NSLs in line with other Patriot provisions compelling production of business records, where minimization is already required, and in principle, the Justice Department is already on board with this plan: As Inspector General Glenn Fine noted in his testimony before the Senate in September, the department’s NSL working group was already laboring to develop such procedures in response to the abuses documented in previous OIG reports — but the working group had been dragging their heels for more than two years.

The task of blocking any legal requirement that the Justice Department pick up the pace fell to Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California. At a House markup session in November, Lungren offered up an amendment that would strip away the minimization mandate and even argued, bizarrely, that the very concept of “minimization” was inapplicable in the NSL context. He was visibly confused when Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, after making a point of praising Lungren’s “scrupulous study” of the issue, pointed out that the Justice Department itself had publicly accepted the need for such procedures.



“This is the first I had heard that the Justice Department was either considering it or had not raised any objections to this,” a visibly perplexed Lungren stammered, “because it was my understanding they felt this was an inappropriate transfer of a process that is used in the electronic surveillance arena.” The talking points with which Lundgren had been supplied, it seems, had not been checked against the official assurances the department had been providing.

Sanchez’s writeup goes into a lot more detail, but it’s a depressing look at today’s politics, media and the public as well. Politicians from both parties first belatedly tried to “legalize” blatantly illegal spying on Americans, and then, when they had an immediate opportunity to put in place the most basic safeguards because “that is not who we are,” instead conspired with each other to renew the law and completely ignore the vast and blatant abuses of it. When you wonder why so few people trust politicians, this is why.

Equally troubling is the fact that the story of the widespread spying basically disappeared after a week. Sure, lots of people are focused on the buzz du jour (healthcare, healthcare, healthcare), but how is it that everyone is just willing to forget that our own government has been spying on thousands of people in ways that flagrantly violate what the law clearly states?

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Lanxon writes “It’s true: ‘Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,’ ‘Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,’ and ‘Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?’ are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired’s presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items which are in-stock at nearby stores. The image at right is from a search I just did for “HDTVs.”  The blue dots are subtle, but they certainly distinguish those results. Google has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm to show local inventory, and it is inviting other merchants to apply to participate as well. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra previewed the local product search last December, but it is now live.

Highlighting local inventory in product search results is exactly what Milo does, although it works on the Web as well as mobile. Milo will have to try to keep one step ahead of Google now that its business has been targeted as a feature of Google Product search.

The good news for Milo is that nobody really uses Google Product Search. It is not even highlighted as one of the products on the Google iPhone app, for instance. Maybe that will change, now that it has a geo-enabled set of results.

When you are looking for stuff to buy, it always helps to know where you can buy an item nearby. The vast majority of people who shop on the Web actually just use it for research, and then go local to buy.

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A judge has taken Pink Floyd’s side in a court battle between the band and its label, EMI, and digital downloads are at stake. The band says its 11-year-old contract only permits EMI to sell complete albums, not individual tracks, but the label has been offering downloads of individual songs through online services like iTunes.

The word “record” was used in the contract, which EMI believes implies physical media. Therefore, the label thinks that it can do whatever it wants as far as digital downloads go. The judge was quoted in Bloomberg saying, “There is nothing in the terms ‘album’ or ‘record’ to suggest they apply to the physical product only.” The court seems to support Pink Floyd’s goal to preserve the artistic integrity of its work.

This isn’t the first struggle EMI has had with artists over online content. Social media darlings OK Go recently ended their relationship with the label and announced that they’re forming their own label called Paracadute.

Fortunately for listeners who want individual tracks, this court development hasn’t prohibited EMI from making Pink Floyd songs available yet. That might happen later on, though.

Is the Album Dead?

Pink Floyd has always resisted singles, preferring to release complete albums intended for straight-through listening. And they’re not the only band that has complained about the shift in focus to singles that the online era has heralded. But even if you’re sympathetic to the artistic vision, it’s hard to see these sorts of restrictions as shrewd business moves.

Single tracks completely dominate digital downloads, and digital downloads make up the extreme majority of music sales now. It’s possible that the age of the album has all but ended. Do you still regularly buy complete albums online or do you stick with singles now? Discuss it in the comments and maybe we can figure out where the music industry is going.

Tags: EMI, itunes, music, pink floyd

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Last year, we wrote about how the University of Oregon cracked down on a great student video supporting the school’s football team, because the team’s mascot was in the video. Why should that matter? Well, it turns out that the team’s mascot looks quite a bit like Donald Duck, whose trademark is (of course) owned by Disney. It turns out that Disney and the University of Oregon had a long-term handshake agreement made with Walt Disney himself, that said the University could use the duck as its mascot, but had to get agreements from the company to use it in any setting outside of the agreement — hence the university freaking out about the student video. But, in some surprisingly good news, Maurice Troute alerts us to the news that Disney has now agreed that it has no trademark claim over the mascot. Apparently, printed logos and t-shirts and such still are covered by the Disney agreement — but the physical mascot has been set free:

In an agreement finalized this week, Disney acknowledges that the “current incarnation of a costumed character featured at the University of Oregon’s athletic and promotional events (the ‘Oregon Duck’) is not substantially similar” to Disney’s Donald Duck character.

Kudos to Disney for apparently being willing to not just respect a decades old handshake agreement on this, but to recognize when it should no longer try to stretch the trademark and let a clearly distinct usage go free. Given that Disney has a history of being really aggressive over such things, this is a nice surprise.

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abartels writes “It seems like there’s been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there’s good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn’t with Oracle but with the Rackspace Cloud.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Consumer Reports has a new report on which computer company has the best tech support. Apple wins! That’s what happens when the same company controls the hardware as well as the operating system (and several of the most prominent pieces of software). The highest ranking PC manufacturer is Dell for desktops and Lenovo for laptops.

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

One of the most powerful aspects of social media and the web is the fact that it isn’t specific to any location. So long as you have an Internet connection, you can be halfway across the world Skyping, tweeting, and communicating with your friends. It has broken down barriers, given people the ability to work remotely, and made it so that your location doesn’t have to determine your destiny.

Still, to discount location would be foolish. It’s where we socialize and, for the most part, where we work. We grow to love (or hate) the neighborhoods and cities in which we live. And with the rise of smartphones and GPS, location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Google Buzz have been growing like wildfire.

Thus, I’m not surprised that a new debate has been raging in entrepreneurship circles over whether it matters where your startup is based. For web entrepreneurs, the perceived epicenter has always been San Francisco and the Bay Area – often known as Silicon Valley. With a huge collection of technology companies, venture capitalists, and talented engineers, many advocate moving to the area if you’re serious about building a startup.

That mentality has been challenged recently by growing startup hubs around the globe. One of the ones making a lot of headlines is New York City’s tech scene, which has been growing rapidly in recent years and includes startups such as Foursquare and VC firms like Union Square Ventures. Boulder, Colorado is also gaining traction due to the presence of Techstars, an early-stage seed venture firm.

Why Location Still Matters

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While you have a lot of good choices for where to build your company, don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that location doesn’t matter; in fact, it does. Here’s why:

• Different locations have different entrepreneurial support communities.

These are vital, because entrepreneurship can quickly become lonely and nerve-wracking without mentorship and support.

• Talent pools around location. You will simply find more talented engineers in Silicon Valley, while you’ll find a larger pool of financial minds in NYC and media moguls in Los Angeles. You can find talent anywhere, but the pool matters.

• In-person meetings are just as important as they were five years ago. Being able to grab a coffee with a potential investor or partner is still going to be more powerful than Skyping or email.

With that said, it doesn’t mean that San Francisco or Silicon Valley is the best place to start a web company.

Yes, in a lot of cases it can be because of the influx of money and talent, but there are a lot of other things you should consider, including:

• Partnerships: Foursquare, an NYC-based company, has succeeded in striking a lot of great media partnerships, including ones with Bravo and The New York Times. Their location has surely helped: NYC simply has more advertising and media companies than other locations, and Foursquare has seized upon the opportunity it presents.

• Talent: While engineering talent is prevalent in Silicon Valley, you need to consider what your startup is about. For example, Boston has a strong startup community with great scientists and academics that come from MIT and Harvard.

• Happiness: If you live in a place that you simply hate, you are not going to be as productive. If your own needs aren’t fulfilled, how can you expect to fulfill the needs of a startup and its employees? If I have any piece of advice for where to create your startup, it’s this: make sure it’s a place that will make you happy first and foremost, and then go from there.

Location matters for your startup, but it doesn’t define success. Hard work, smart execution, and the right team are far more important. Don’t compromise those things in your quest to find your perfect startup city.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- 7 Essential Online HR Resources for Your Small Business
- Google Buzz: 5 Opportunities for Small Businesses
- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Matejay

Tags: business, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, List, Lists, small business, startup

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A bunch of news sites have been playing up a minor item in a Deutsche Bank note to clients about how Apple has a lot more patents than Google or HTC. I have to say, this is one of the most meaningless bits of data out there, and it’s getting way too much attention for its import. First of all, it looks like the report counted overall patents — not even patents just in the spaces where these companies overlap. Second, the number of patents one holds is absolutely meaningless when it comes to actually being able to enforce the patents.

More troubling is the report’s conclusion:

“While litigation appears to be an increasingly common cost of doing business,” he concludes, “we view Apple’s willingness to aggressively defend its patent portfolio favorably and welcome the defense of its IP.”

Historically, this is generally not a good sign. It’s usually a sign that a company has run into an innovation stumbling block, and doesn’t think it can really continue to innovate at the pace the market is expecting, so it seeks to hold back competitors and pump up revenue through litigation, rather than innovation. A smart research report would note that breaking out the offensive patent lawsuits is generally a warning sign. But, then again, this is a research report that thinks the overall number of patents a tech company has is a meaningful metric.

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Paul Taylor noted a story that I would have thought to be an april fools day joke a few weeks from now, which makes it only seem more tragic. A 3 year shot himself with a gun after mistaking it for a Wii controller.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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