The Periscope Post

USA Today: “These ‘cookies’ aren’t tasty; they leave you hungry for privacy”

Companies of all kinds are using the internet to monitor you – “keeping tabs on your interests, purchases, likes and dislikes and making major assumptions about you,” USA Today explained – and it’s creepy. “The surveillance is intrusive, pervasive and largely unregulated,” the paper complained. “Most consumers haven’t a clue how much information about them is being gathered and stored for sale, nor do they have a reliable way to stop it.” It’s time to put up some “legal guardrails before the road toward decreasing privacy becomes too slippery”, the paper concluded.

The Los Angeles Times: “FCC’s plan for ‘Net neutrality’ rules falters”

“Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s first major initiative — a proposal to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all legal Web traffic — is foundering,” The LA Times reported. The problem? Google and Verizon have been negotiating in private for almost a year and are poised to propose their own, “less regulatory” framework for net neutrality. “Genachowski is right about the need for enforceable rules that prevent broadband providers from blocking or slowing access to websites and services they don’t favor,” the paper claimed. But a major impediment to the FCC’s adopting such rules is that it’s unclear whether it has the authority to do so; in previous talks with internet service providers, like Verizon, Genachowksi had been hoping to come up with legislation that make the FCC’s control over broadband explicit. Now, he may need to rethink his plans.

The Boston Globe: “Low standards, more suicides”

Army suicides have more to do with “lax recruiting standards” letting in too many troops with troubled histories than the mental scars of battle, a recent report from the Army indicates. “One way to bring down the suicide rate, which recently exceeded the civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, is to ensure that recruitment standards do not sink as low as they did before the current recession,” The Boston Globe advised.

The New York Times: “As the economy slows…”

The economic news coming out of America is pretty bad, especially with this latest jobs report, and a slow-down is “well underway”, The New York Times complained. But the response from Washington “has been inadequate, at best, with Democratic initiatives too timid and Republicans bent on obstruction.” “With unemployment persistently high, the economy is losing whatever momentum it had after last year’s stimulus. Recovery, such as it is, appears to be a repeat of the lopsided growth of the Bush years, with corporate profits rebounding and jobs and incomes lagging. Back then, policy makers advised patience, saying that with time, economic gains would distribute themselves more evenly. We know how that ended,” groused the paper. “There is no one way to foster job growth. There are many ways, and they should all be deployed. Maybe after Congress gets back from vacation.”