As I was gathering my notes to review New Money: How Payment Became Social Media in a Google Doc, I was distracted by a ping from my connected Gmail account. Apparently, my Chase Freedom Unlimited card had not yet been upgraded to contactless technology—just wave your card over the terminal, no need [...]
Governments often tell their subjects that they must submit to surveillance programs to stay safe. Whether the boogeyman is terrorism, hate, or even health, government snooping on private data often violates our rights to privacy. But surveillance programs are unsafe on their own. Securing major sets of sensitive personal data [...]
By: Andrea O'Sullivan December 8, 2020 Financial access can make or break anyone in America. Being cut off from our payment systems is a bit like being unpersoned: Large swathes of the economy are suddenly out of reach while financial futures darken. Controlling financial access is a great way to control [...]
By: Andrea O'Sullivan November 17, 2020 It is remarkable just how unremarkable America's massive financial surveillance system has become to most people. Americans were rightly outraged when Edward Snowden revealed the government's widespread spying campaigns on online communications. Yet every day, our financial transactions are subject to similar scrutiny. The programs aren't even secret: you [...]
By: Andrea O'Sullivan October 27, 2020 The Department of Justice has been busy thinking about how to deal with cryptographic technologies. This past month, DOJ has issued two major statements on privacy-preserving tech, one of them an international rallying cry to build government backdoors into secure communications and the other a "clarification" [...]
Last week, Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Antitrust released their much-ballyhooed report on competition in tech to great fanfare. It's a beast of a crie de couer, clocking in at 449 meandering pages of disputations on the power (but not so much the efficacy) of big tech companies. To absolutely no one's surprise, [...]
By: Andrea O'Sullivan September 29, 2020 Did you know that major communications companies monitor all conversations to report suspicious activities to the government? By law, companies that facilitate the transfer of information are required to file what is called a "Suspicious Activity Report" (SAR) anytime a conversation veers in a [...]
By: Andrea O'Sullivan September 9, 2020 Innovation is the best critique. Anyone can sit around and complain about something they don't like. If you have power and influence, you might even be able to get the government to do what you want—for better or worse. But building something that makes [...]
It is easy to see why Americans may be uneasy about Chinese technology companies. Setting aside recent policy efforts to ban or reorient Chinese apps like ByteDance's TikTok and Tencent's WeChat, Westerners worry that these companies may engage in certain activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Laws such as the Cybersecurity Law and Encryption [...]
By Andrea O'Sullivan, Director of the Center for Technology and Innovation, The James Madison Institute CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL PDF Introduction Florida can and should become a leader in the advancement of cryptocurrency. In one short decade, Bitcoin (the most widely known cryptocurrency) has grown from a little-known [...]
