Under the immigration reform bill, some employers would have an incentive of up to $3,000 per year to hire a newly legalized immigrant over a U.S. citizen.
In avoiding one controversy — the cost of providing millions of newly legalized immigrants with ObamaCare subsidies — the Senate “Gang of Eight” may have risked walking into another.
via Immigration Bill Gives New Legals $3,000 Hiring Edge
The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on final passage of H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 (CISPA).
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, strongly urges Members of the House of Representatives to vote “Nay” on passage of CISPA.
The following statement may be attributed to Ryan Radia, Associate Director of the Center for Technology & Innovation at CEI:
We support voluntary information sharing about cyber threats and applaud lawmakers for rethinking outdated federal laws that inhibit Web firms’ ability to defend their networks. Yet CISPA goes far beyond untangling this web of legal barriers – it voids private contracts and undermines the rule of law. Although a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Justin Amash, proposed an amendment to address these concerns, the House Rules Committee rejected this crucial amendment.
While CISPA’s sponsors emphasize “voluntary” information sharing, the bill actually cannibalizes private contracts between cloud computing providers and their customers, which include many individuals and small businesses. CISPA’s sweeping immunity provision in subsection (b)(4) permits a provider to break its privacy promises to users with impunity. Indeed, the bill gives firms blanket immunity for all acts involving cyber threat information sharing, so long as such acts are taken in “good faith” – even if companies have not taken any reasonable steps prior to sharing information to ensure that it pertains to an actual cyber threat.
CISPA also permits government agencies to recklessly mishandle private information, providing absolutely no recourse to businesses and individuals harmed by such wrongdoing unless the violation is “willful[] or intentional[].”
If information sharing is to be truly voluntarily – and if the cloud computing revolution is to realize its vast potential – Internet providers must be able to make enforceable promises about when they’ll share user information and with whom. CISPA violates this proviso and should be rejected by the House of Representatives.
Full article: http://cei.org/news- … -undermines-rule-law
More than 10 years ago, Robert Gold sought to do what many Americans have dreamed of their whole lives: patent an idea.
Gold developed a breakthrough in wireless communications that would help people speak to one another with less interference and greater security.
Then it disappeared like a dropped call.
The Department of Defense concluded that his invention could be a national security threat in the wrong hands and slapped Gold’s patent application with a so-called “secrecy order” in 2002, which prevented him from discussing the technology with anyone. Five years later, his attorney succeeded in lifting the order, but by then, it was too late.
“The window of opportunity, I believed, had really passed during those years,” Gold said. “So we have not been successful at commercializing the idea.”
Gold stresses today that he didn’t oppose the government’s position -– public knowledge about covert communications techniques could undermine the military. The federal government sponsored his research and retained the right to use the technology.
But it also promoted an incentive by granting Gold shared patent rights, meaning he could file an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and seek to commercialize the idea. Accomplishing that, however, required petitioning to have the secrecy order lifted as the years passed with his invention living in the shadows.
It’s a common refrain in the stump speeches of politicians that America is a nation of ideas, but Congress decided in 1951 that some of those ideas must nonetheless be kept hidden. Today, as Silicon Valley and other innovation centers churn out thousands of patents a year, some lawmakers wonder whether the government should have broader powers.
What is known about secrecy orders is largely the result of Freedom of Information Act requests filed by groups like the Federation of American Scientists, an independent, nonpartisan think tank. Those documents show that the overall number of secrecy orders has steadily increased in recent years, totaling more than 5,300 by 2012, with some of them in effect for decades.
Full article: http://www.wired.com … y-orders-on-patents/
