Monthly Archives: May 2007

Memorial Day (III)

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

I'm very happy to be in Italy today for this interesting conference, but I'm just a little bit sorry that as a result I can't join in with any of the activities designed to Support the troops. End the war.

If you're in the US today, you can.

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Memorial Day (II)

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Juan Cole has some thoughts about Memorial Day 2007.

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Memorial Day

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Daily Kos: Numbers

Q: “Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?”

MR. SNOW: “It's a number, and every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks people want something.” — White House Press Conference, 15 June 2006

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NJ Gov. Jon Corzine’s Poweful Seatbelt Commercial

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

YouTube – NJ Gov. Jon Corzine's Seatbelt PSA

[I'm in Italy until late Wednesday, so I queued up a few posts to cover while I'm away. This is one of them.]

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Off to Bologna

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

By the time you read this, if all goes according to plan I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic, off to Bologna for what promises to be an unusually interesting workshop organized by Ian Kerr and the the other wonderful people at “On the Identity Trail”.

A short description of the event is at On the Identity Trail in Bologna, Italy for International Workshop on Anonymity.

I've done something a bit scary for this conference: I've written a paper that showcases my ignorance about something that I care about in the hopes that the high-powered (and geographically diverse) participants will educate me.

The key question which motivates the paper is this: why are people in common law countries like the US and the UK so much more bothered about ID cards than the people in Western Europe? It's a puzzle — we fear them, they domesticated them. They had abuses (Nazi Germany and occupied Europe), we had far fewer. Why the difference? Attitudes to authority? Different conceptions of liberty, or citizenship? Counter-balancing aspects of the legal system? None of the above?

[Incidentally, one of the many flaws of the current draft paper is that it pretends Eastern Europe doesn't exist — mostly because I don't know enough about contemporary attitudes to ID cards in post-communist Europe.]

Posted in ID Cards and Identification, Talks & Conferences | 3 Comments

W. David Stephenson Is Back

Posted on May 25, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. is back after months of darkness. He's got a new feed address too.

Unfortunately, the very useful archives (lots of info on disaster preparedness and on the ways in which citizen-based preparedness might be better than current centralized top-heavy models) have yet to emerge from what sounds like a painful transition from Userland to WordPress.

Fear of transitioning from my very customized MT 2.x to WordPress has kept me from making the move, although WP would I think be easier to use (and would standardize me with most of the other blogs I run).

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