Today’s Links: December 3, 2012

OPINION

DAVID KRAVETS: “Internet Hangs in Balance as World Governments Meet in Secret”
“There’s a lot of sky-is-falling doomsday predictions about the World Conference on International Telecommunications, which opens Monday in Dubai with some 190-plus nations discussing the global internet’s future.”

KEN PAULSON: “Futile fight on student tweets”
“High school is all about preparing the next generation for citizenship. We teach them civics, history, a smattering of math and science and hand them a diploma. But we too often also try to control their every move. That’s literally the case with the news last week that a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio was expelled after refusing to carry an ID with a computer chip designed to track the movements of every student in the school. Students have constitutional rights long before someone hands them a high school diploma. While those rights grow with age, the free speech rights of high school students are not inconsequential.”

NICK GILLESPIE: “Please read this if you think deficits don’t matter and that spending doesn’t drive deficits.”
“At the same time that more people are out of work and receipts go down, demand for various welfare programs (unemployment, food stamps, etc) increases. What was different in many ways during the thick of the Bush years was that spending continued to increase during the good times, too. In 2001, Bush took the reins of a government that was spending 18.2 percent of the economy. By 2008, government spending equaled 20.8 percent of the economy. It then spiked to 25.2 percent of GDP in 2009 (a budget year for which some expenses were Obama’s but most were Bush’s). That sort of massive divergence is explainable in light of the fiscal crisis and the Bush and Obama administrations’ responses to it. In my my view, those responses were both hysterical, counterproductive, and at least in regard to the auto bailout, illegal.”

NEWS

CYBERSECURITY – ACLU Wants To Challenge Cyberbullying Law
“A raft of new laws addressing crime and punishment take effect on Saturday, including a move widening a three-year-old North Carolina statute criminalizing cyberbullying to protect school employees.”

MEDIA – News Corp. Announces Its Corporate Split, and the Closing of The Daily
“News Corporation announced additional details about its coming split on Monday, including a plan to cease publication of The Daily, its stand-alone tablet newspaper.”

INTELLIGENCE – US military plans to double spy network
“The Pentagon’s military intelligence unit plans to send hundreds more spies overseas, doubling the size of the U.S. military’s spy network, reported The Washington Post’s Greg Miller, who recently broke the story of the Obama administration expanding kill lists into a ‘disposition matrix.’”