By Tyson E. Hubbard
How would you feel if your daily travels were tracked and stored in a large computer database? Presumably someone going over the raw data could figure out where you worked, where your kids went to school, where your family lived and at what stores you liked to shop. In the wrong hands, the potential abuses of that sort of information are very scary. What many people do not realize is that it is exactly this type of information that is being collected every day by police officers across the country. New technology which is being heavily marketed to police departments allows a camera mounted on top of a police cruiser to take a picture of your license plate and store that information, complete with time, date and exact latitude and longitude coordinates for your vehicle. This sort of information is gathered anytime your car happens to travel past a police car, or more accurately anytime a police car travels past your car. Think about how many times you pass a police car on the average day: maybe it is on the freeway, or you see a police officer doing speed checks, or you are even going the other direction on the freeway and there is an officer across the median. Maybe as you run your daily errands there is police car that has someone pulled over on the side of the road, or even a cruiser parked at the local donut shop. Then there are the times a police officer drives by your car and you are not even aware. You might be in the parking lot at work or home with the garage door open. Everytime a transaction like this occurs, when your car and a police car are in the same location and the officer’s camera is operational, the information is collected. With the vast amount of information being collected and stored on every driver, police departments across the country have essentially placed tracking devices onto everyone’s vehicles.
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By Laura Eleanor Gagnon
Thomas Jefferson wrote that “liberty . . . is the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free.” Generations of Americans pride themselves on being citizens of the country granting the most freedoms in the world. Liberty is a cornerstone of our distinguished nation. However, the federal government has gravely impaired that celebrated liberty in the area of scientific research. Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research was prohibited, thereby inhibiting the opportunity for scientific greatness that Jefferson so eloquently described.
Of course, scientific advancement generally does not come without a price tag, especially when the advancement is truly groundbreaking. Sometimes the cost involves endangering our wildlife; other times it involves destroying the environment. In the case of embryonic stem cell research, the price tag for innovation may mean the destruction of embryos. Many Americans struggle with this tradeoff: is it worth ending the potential lives of these embryos in order to conduct research that may treat and even cure diseases crippling over 128 million Americans?
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By David Ray
Try to imagine life without the Internet. Over the last half century, the dramatic growth of the Internet has fundamentally changed the way humans shop, communicate, and entertain themselves. The Internet’s one billion users make nearly six billion searches a year. The growth of the Internet has been dramatic, with usage increasing 200 percent since 2000. According to the Department of Commerce (DoC), e-commerce now accounts for over fifty-six billion dollars in retail sales annually in the United States (U.S.) alone.
After providing a brief history of the Internet and a review of how the DNS operates, this paper examines a number of criticisms that have forced ICANN to confront the challenge of an increasingly hostile international community. This paper identifies several international alternatives to ICANN and evaluates their effectiveness. Ultimately this paper concludes management of the DNS by an international organization is unrealistic, inadvisable, or both. This reality necessitates a restructuring of ICANN to adequately address the international concerns surrounding the current framework.
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By Lisa Wines
While the use of electronic payment methods in the United States steadily increases, we still depend on paper checks more than any other industrialized nation in the world. Reliance on paper checks carries with it logistical and security limitations, which create a degree of exposure to fraud for all parties involved. As this exposure has become more apparent in recent years, Congress recently passed The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act as a step toward a fully digital payment system. While the Uniform Commercial Code governs transactions involving paper checks, electronically converted checks and substitute checks are governed by the National Automated Check Clearinghouse Operating Rules and Regulation E. When State and Federal law conflict on a check-related issue, the Act preempts the inconsistent laws.
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By Steven C. Judge
The fast-emerging technology of Voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) has incited a debate over whether it should be regulated and who should be assigned the task. VoIP technology involves a blend of two industries: telephone, which has regularly been the subject of regulation, and the Internet, which has normally been left alone. The concern involved is that however the regulatory scheme is set up, it will have untold, and probably far reaching, impacts on the Internet.
Too much regulation could restrict the developing technology and adversely affect the impact on the Internet, but too little could have the same adverse effect on the telephone. It is important that when determining how to regulate VoIP, that the regulatory bodies, both state and federal, look to the past mistakes made in the regulatory schemes for the telephone.
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