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Daily Archives: February 2, 2015

Council of Europe Report on Mass Surveillance

Provisional version – Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights – Mass surveillance. Rapporteur: Mr Pieter Omtzigt, Netherlands, Group of the European People’s Party.

“Our freedom is built on what others do not know of our existences” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
A Draft resolution
1. The Parliamentary Assembly is deeply concerned about mass surveillance practices disclosed since June 2013 by journalists to whom a former US national security insider, Mr. Edward Snowden, had entrusted a large amount of top secret
data establishing the existence of mass surveillance and large-scale intrusion practices hitherto unknown to the general public and even to most political decision-makers.
2. The information disclosed so far in the Snowden files has triggered a massive, world-wide debate about mass surveillance by the US and other countries’ intelligence services and the lack of adequate legal regulation and technical protection at the national and international level, and/or its effective enforcement.
3. The disclosures have provided compelling evidence of the existence of far-reaching, technologically advanced systems put in place by US intelligence services and their partners in certain Council of Europe member states to collect, store and analyse communication data, including content, location and other metadata, on a massive scale, as well as targeted surveillance measures encompassing numerous persons against whom there is no ground for suspicion of any wrongdoing…”

Does a Flexible Labor Market Amplify the Impact of a Credit Crunch?

Ji, Yan and Zhibo, Tan, Does a Flexible Labor Market Amplify the Impact of a Credit Crunch? (February 1, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2558864 “We demonstrate that a flexible labor market amplifies the impact of a credit crunch on the duration of a recession through the credit trap channel. We illustrate this channel’s… Continue Reading

World Development Report 2015 explores “Mind, Society, and Behavior”

“The WDR 2015 holds new insights on how people make decisions; it provides a framework to help development practitioners and governments apply these insights to development policy. Research in the WDR suggests that poverty constitutes a cognitive tax that makes it hard for poor people to think deliberatively, especially in times of hardship or stress.… Continue Reading

EFF Joins Coalition to Launch Canarywatch.org

“Warrant canary” is a colloquial term for a regularly published statement that an internet service provider (ISP) has not received legal process that it would be prohibited from saying it had received, such as a national security letter. The term “warrant canary” is a reference to the canaries used to provide warnings in coalmines, which… Continue Reading

2012 Economic Census Geographic Area Series: Real Estate and Rental and Leasing

“This is a series of national-, state-, county-, place-, and metro area-level data files with statistics for all industries in the real estate and rental and leasing sector down to the six-digit NAICS level. These include statistics for real estate, rental and leasing services, and lessors of nonfinancial intangible assets (except copyrighted works). The files provide data… Continue Reading

CBO Report – Medicare’s Payment to Physicians

“The table, Medicare’s Payment to Physicians: the Budgetary Effects of Alternative Policies, includes estimates for several replacement and short-term alternatives to the current rules for setting Medicare’s payment rates for physicians’ services. The starting date for all of these alternative policies would be April 1, 2015.The table includes an updated estimate for H.R. 4015 and… Continue Reading

Fiscal Year 2016 Budget of the United States Government

“Issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Budget of the United States Government is a collection of documents that contains the budget message of the President, information about the President’s budget proposals for a given fiscal year, and other budgetary publications that have been issued throughout the fiscal year. Other related and… Continue Reading

How to access Pew Research Center survey data

“Earlier in January [2015], the Pew Research Center released the full dataset from our largest study ever conducted on U.S. politics, the 2014 Political Polarization and Typology survey, to make it available to researchers. For the study, we interviewed 10,013 adults on landline and cellphones. The dataset includes more than 150 measures of political attitudes… Continue Reading