The Crockpot: Utne's Weekly Guide to What You May Have Missed 

The North Atlantic may finally be home to hundreds of floating wind turbines: According to Treehugger, Britain and the U.S. are set to collaborate on a multimillion-dollar floating wind farm initiative that will eventually generate as much as 7 megawatts of electricity. The agreement is years in the making, but could be operational by 2016. And while European countries have been moving on offshore wind farms for years, the U.S. has lagged behind, that is until very recently. Read More 

And don't miss... 

Tokyo’s terrifying, beautiful tire monster and other playground masterpieces.

Why Google’s CEO wants to pan for gold on an asteroid.

How New Orleans became a filmmaking Mecca in the years after Katrina.

Why heavy drinking makes you feel like a kid again.

The totally amazing and/or laughably obsolete USB typewriter.  

Why 4G means precisely nothing.

The surprisingly accurate and informative colored-pencil Europe.

Why the family farm is now code for dangerous child labor.

How a small group of freethinkers smuggled banned books back into Tucson.

Why the philosophical roots of happiness and enjoyment are easily forgotten. The pursuit of happiness pervades modern society, but in an earlier, Augustinian sense, enjoyment referred to a deeper spirituality that went far beyond consumption or entertainment. The loss of this ideal, argues one 21^st century philosopher, means a loss of intrinsic value in anything. Read More 

Image by Dirk Ingo Franke, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Baghdad’s beautiful, enduring street of books.

***

Why bachelor pads changed American culture forever, and why no one actually has one.

***

The Twitter account that won a Pulitzer Prize.

***

How to get a price tag to tell the full story.

***

A veteran climate activist throws in the towel. 

***

Why that shiny new iPad isn’t as clean as you may think.

***

Why tax day can be downright dangerous for drivers.

***

Was Ben Franklin secretly a serial killer? Probably not, but his friend liked to rob graves.    

***

How to take a bike from a perfect stranger (and eventually give it back).

***

What the Affordable Care Act looks like as a map.

***

Manmade earthquakes? In the Midwest, a recent uptick in seismic activity has geologists stumped, but new data from the USGS suggests that fracking may have something to do with it. The same is true of underground wastewater disposal, a much more common practice that usually accompanies the fracking process. Yet another reason why fracking is a totally awesome and sensible idea.  

Image by Tom Murphy VII, licensed under Creative Commons. 
 

What would happen if the government had access to information you share on Facebook and could access it without you knowing? For now, the Orwellian question remains hypothetical. But if a bill before Congress is approved, it might enable that very thing. 

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing Protection Act, or CISPA, boasts bipartisan support and the approval of many high-profile businesses, notably Facebook. Its creators claim it will prevent “catastrophic attack to our nation’s vital networks - networks that power our homes, provide our clean water or maintain the other critical services we use every day.”

But the bill has received harsh criticism from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and Anonymous. Now, get ready to put all those acronyms to use. The EFF accuses Congress of using fear of cyber threats to distract the public from the bill’s infringements on free speech. To that, CDT adds encroachment on Americans’ fourth amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. According to CDT, “CISPA has a very broad, almost unlimited definition of the information that can be shared with government agencies […] is likely to lead to expansion of the government’s role in the monitoring of private communications [… and] is likely to shift control of government cybersecurity efforts from civilian agencies to the military.” 

It's scary stuff, and groups like Free Press, Demand Progress, and Avaaz.org have jumped to action. Their “Stop CISPA” petitions are currently circulating through social media channels, including Facebook. The response has been extensive enough to warrant a response from Facebook’s Vice President of U.S. Policy, Joel Kaplan. On Friday, Kaplan wrote a letter assuring users that Facebook would not betray their trust. The comments below the letter are overwhelmingly negative, with many using the space to share information about the bill and others threatening to move to Google+.

Facebook isn’t the only one responding. To combat negative press, “House Intel Comm” launched a Twitter account on April 11^th. The tweets were composed in glowing Newspeak. “Rogers-Ruppersberger #cyber bill keeps the federal govt’s hands off the Internet, & doesn’t allow the govt to stop access to websites.” Spin this fine would give George Orwell a run for his money. Fortunately, such tweets only show how out-of-touch its authors are with people who actually use the internet. A “best of” collection has been immortalized by the bloggers of Techdirt, where the comment section shows that few have been fooled by the propaganda campaign. 

If anything, it is the comment areas of these sites that should give us hope. Americans are not the passive, blundering fools we have been made to seem in the past. When given room to voice our opinions, we’re a feisty bunch (no wonder they’d like to keep tabs on us). The major thing missing from discussion in the comments section is that CISPA is not the only option. The CDT supports a bill proposed by Dan Lungren (R-CA) called the PRECISE Act, calling it “a strong alternative to CISPA by balancing cybersecurity, industry and civil liberties concerns.” This is the bill we should be talking about, in Congress and comments sections alike.

Sources: Congressman Mike Roger’s press release, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Center for Democracy & Technology,Techdirt, Facebook, CISPA homepage  

Image: "A New Method of Macarony Making, as practised at Boston in North America," satirical illustration depicting two American colonists tar and feathering an English customs agent at Boston, Massachusetts. Mezzotint, 152 mm x 113 mm. Courtesy of the British Museum, London. This work is in the public domain in the United States. 

 Why honeybees haven’t been doing so well lately.

***

Is Google erecting its very own paywall?
 

***

Recreating San Francisco streets with 100,000 toothpicks and an incredible level of commitment.

***

Why are so many solar panels made in China?

***

Do Americans believe race relations are getting worse?

***

A house in Japan blurs the line between living room and garden.

***

How fictional sociopaths captured our hearts.

***

What dachshunds can teach us about the public sector. 

***

Sherman Alexie on why banning a book only makes it more significant.  

***

Five economic ideas more important than GDP.

***

What to say if you offend your 9^th century Chinese dinner guests.

***

Why a really good bicyclist absolutely belongs in the circus.

***

A nifty infographic on why more Americans don’t recycle.

***

How to own your very own one-horse town in Wyoming.

***

Sneetered by a snollygoster, and other truly wonderful phrases from across the country. The new Dictionary of American Regional English has picked up on hundreds of local gems like these, from the great state of Kentucky. But if you aim to make use of these whoopensockers, be warned: most have multiple spellings and a handful of contradictory definitions. Which of course makes them that much more fun.

Image by Christopher Down, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Check out Utne Reader's new Facebook, with links to new feature articles on cell phone radiation, atheism in Mormon country, and what the government does that is actually really, really good. You can also check out our new music sampler and regular blog posts by Utne editors. View it now!
 

In July 2010, Pew Research Center released a report on the online habits of Millennials. The experts involved in the study, who were mostly academics and leaders at companies like Google and Microsoft, concluded that social networking will only grow in importance despite privacy concerns. In particular, many argued that sites like Facebook had created new social norms around which the barriers between “public” and “private” information were being recast. The study echoed a controversial statement by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg made earlier in 2010—that, among young people, privacy is no longer a “social norm.”  

That argument may be a little harder to make today. In addition to debates over Facebook privacy settings, over the past several weeks, controversies have erupted in a number of states over employers and schools asking for Facebook passwords from applicants, employees, and students. And while everyone seems to agree that those employers are overstepping their bounds, actually doing something about it is tougher than you might think.

For one thing, legislation is woefully outdated, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. The closest thing to a law protecting online privacy is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was passed in 1986—a good 10 years before widespread Internet use, not to mention smartphones and other new media. So most of the law’s provisions apply only to landline phones and physically stored data, rather than the smartphones, social media, and “cloud” storage that have become such a large part of 21^st century life. For something like email, the rules are complex and cumbersome, reflecting an early understanding of the technology, says the Center for Democracy and Technology. If you happen to store your email on a home computer, it is fully protected and requires a warrant to be searched. But if you use a cloud computing service (say, Gmail), anything you store online can be accessed without a warrant. That includes webmail, photo sharing sites like Flickr, spreadsheets and documents on Google Docs—basically, much of what now makes up many people’s personal and professional lives.

The rules for social networking sites are even more complicated. While law enforcement generally needs a search warrant to access a suspect’s social network account, they can do so without the knowledge of the suspect, reports GOOD. Facebook actually seems to be alone on this policy, as Twitter and Google have their own rules about notifying their users of law enforcement action. In fact, Twitter had to fight for its notification rule against a federal court ruling in Virginia. And, according to EPIC, at the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has an ongoing program of setting up fictitious user accounts on Facebook and Twitter to follow suspects’ posts (also without their knowledge). 

Whether or not the DHS program is legal or constitutional is not all that clear. Without more relevant legislation, no one really knows where to draw the line—high courts being no exception. In 2010, the Supreme Court heard two cases on email privacy, and both times, they chose not to address constitutional privacy issues, reports the National Legal Research Group. Wrote Anthony Kennedy in the first case’s majority opinion: “The judiciary risks error by elaborating too fully on the Fourth Amendment implications of emerging technology before its role in society has become clear.” The implication apparently being that until innovation stops and lets us take a breather, we should be careful about fleshing anything out too much.  

To be fair, Congress has (half-heartedly) taken up some of these issues. Late last month, Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter proposed an amendment to the FCC Process Reform Act called “Mind Your Own Business on Passwords,” says The Atlantic. While the amendment—which was almost immediately voted down—did not address government snooping, it would have prohibited employers from asking for workers’ passwords on sites like Facebook. The strange reality is that, because of the vote and Facebook’s own reaction to the controversy, the social networking site now has stronger privacy rules than the U.S. government—at least when it comes to password protection.        

That fact should be pretty alarming. But if we go back to Zuckerburg’s “social norm” argument, it does make some sense. Because technology moves so quickly, and because it has such a big influence over our lives, it’s easy to simply accept new customs and rules without seriously thinking about their impact. The Facebook password cases are unique because they don’t involve government agencies or third parties breaking and entering to access private data. Rather, they involve users willingly giving up their privacy when pressured by people in positions of power.

The real danger here is that social media are still very new, so if a practice like that became more accepted, it could be difficult to undo. Laws and court rulings can be repealed or overturned, but social norms can be much more permanent. Challenging them might mean rethinking our place in the brave new interconnected world. 

Sources: Pew Research Center, The Guardian, Electronic Privacy Information Center,Center for Democracy and Technology, GOOD, National Legal Research Group, The Atlantic, Tech Crunch.  

Image by rpongsaj, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Why America’s schools are doing better than you think.

***

The world’s first comic-book dissertation.

***

A new map helps community gardeners find vacant land in New York City.

***

The full-size office that doubles as a giant suitcase.

***

37 million people try to access the 1940 census archives at the same time.

***

The House of Commons hacks Wikipedia.

***

Why the subprime mess was bad for segregation.

***

A nifty graph on copyright law and the midcentury book desert.   

***

My Liberal Party MP can beat up your Conservative Party Senator.

***

A college professor wants to pay you to go to school.

***
 

A Japanese photographer floats across Tokyo (or so it seems).

***

Why NPR owes a lot to the sinking of the Titanic. Like much of the ship itself, the Titanic’s radio equipment was among the most advanced in the early 20^th century world. It’s failure to properly alert maritime authorities was something of a wake-up call for radio engineers to develop a more reliable and more standard system of communication.

Image by Andrei Niemimäki, licensed under Creative Commons.