Government Data and the Invisible Hand
If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy:...
View ArticleFollowing the Money: A Better Way Forward on the Protect IP Act
The Internet addressing and filtering provisions of the proposed PROTECT IP Act should not become law. They cannot promise efficacy, and they threaten significant collateral harm. However, the bill...
View ArticleThe New Ambiguity of 'Open Government'
“Open government” used to carry a hard political edge: it referred to politically sensitive disclosures of government information. The phrase was first used in the 1950s, in the debates leading up to...
View ArticleAccountable Algorithms
Many important decisions historically made by people are now made by computers. Algorithms count votes, approve loan and credit card applications, target citizens or neighborhoods for police scrutiny,...
View ArticleDanger Ahead: Risk Assessment and the Future of Bail Reform
In the last five years, legislators in all fifty states have made changes to their pretrial justice systems. Reform efforts aim to shrink jails by incarcerating fewer people— particularly poor,...
View ArticleThe Challenges of Prediction: Lessons from Criminal Justice
Government authorities at all levels increasingly rely on automated predictions, grounded in statistical patterns, to shape people’s lives. Software that wields government power deserves special...
View ArticleRoles for Computing in Social Change
A recent normative turn in computer science has brought concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability to the core of the field. Yet recent scholarship has warned that much of this technical work...
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