Tag: Panel C: “Technology and Government”

Big Brother is Watching: Government Surveillance v. Right of Privacy

Presenter: Josephine Woolington (Journalism, Political Science)

Mentor: Kyu Ho Youm

Oral Presentation

Panel C: “Technology and Government” Coquille/Metolius Rooms

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Melina Pastos

The U.S. government in the past two decades increased its ability to access personal online information. Often, government accesses online information without a search warrant or proper court order due to archaic federal privacy laws, sweeping surveillance laws and the third-party doctrine of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. My research examines how the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures applies to cyberspace. Outdated federal privacy laws allow law enforcement in the digital era to access revealing and sometimes incriminating information about people through Facebook, Twitter, email and Internet searches. Federal privacy laws and court decisions have been slow to apply Fourth Amendment protections to cyberspace, threatening the fundamental right of privacy. My research focuses on three federal laws: the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Each law gives law enforcement power to access online information. I also examine the third- party doctrine that allows law enforcement to access information posted to a third-party, such as Facebook, without a warrant or court order. Several members of Congress attempted to update privacy laws last year, but failed. Online privacy rights are not prioritized in Congress because little is known about the archaic laws and doctrines. My research helps inform Internet users about fundamental privacy rights in cyberspace.

A Healthy Doctrine – Examining Sebelius’s Effects on Congressional Regulatory Powers

Presenter: Carl Windrup (Political Science, Philosophy)

Mentor: Alison Gash

Oral Presentation

Panel C: “Technology and Government” Coquille/Metolius Rooms

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Melina Pastos

This project examines the effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius on the Commerce and Taxing and Spending Clause doctrines. The goals of this thesis are twofold. First, it seeks to parse out the details and ambiguities surrounding the decision in Sebelius, and show how this fits with the doctrinal history of the Commerce Clause. To this end I have devised a new framework for thematically arranging the Court’s vast Commerce Clause case history. Through this new framework, I am able to show that the case marks a return to the Obstructionist pre-1937 Court jurisprudence. This novel thematic analysis is the main significance of this paper, and my main contribution to the field of political science. Secondly, this paper has shown that Sebelius not only limits the scope of Congress’s commerce power, but also how Chief Justice Roberts, through a very deft move, also limited the scope of the Government’s taxing power. Specifically, by appeasing the opposing side with a victory in the short-term, Roberts has forced Congress to turn to its taxing power for major legislations dealing with economic regulation. Given the hostile political climate around taxation, this move will come to limit this power in the long-term. Importantly, the inquiry in this paper is not merely an intellectual exercise. There are real political implications at stake in this discussion of Sebelius’s effects on Congress’s commerce and taxing powers. The case directly effects congressional proceedings, and thus, the political process.

Solyndra as a Symptom of Regulatory Capture

Presenter: Jacob Valleau (Political Science)

Mentor: Joseph Deckert

Oral Presentation

Panel C: “Technology and Government” Coquille/Metolius Rooms

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Melina Pastos

Conservatives cite the failure of a stimulus package loan to the (now-defunct) solar company Solyndra as one of president Obama’s administrational failures. The quality of regulation of the funds appropriated from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is still up for debate. Solyndra LLC’s bankruptcy is a symptom of pervasive regulatory capture during the 2009 economic stimulus package. My research will explore the relationship between these allegations of administrative mishandling (command and control policy, rushed loans, and crony capitalism), and the phenomenon known as regulatory capture. In regulatory capture theory, government oversight favors industry insiders over free market principle of competition. My analysis shows that Solyndra’s subsidization was mishandled. The subsidization of the multiple sectors of the industry has to be carefully crafted in order to guarantee global market share for the United States. In Paul Boudreaux’s “Carrots and Sticks from Obama’s Solyndra and Beyond”, the law professor claims that regulatory failures created Solyndra’s bankruptcy. I respond by arguing that the failure of Solyndra is a broader sign of regulatory capture during the appropriation of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Population in Lane County- A Project with United Way of Lane County

Presenter: Man Nguyen (Economics)

Co-Presenters: Eric Wittkop and Emily White

Mentor: Joe Stone

Oral Presentation

Panel C: “Technology and Government” Coquille/Metolius Rooms

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Melina Pastos

Many US households earn an income greater than that specified by the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), a measure of poverty that does not vary across the 48 contiguous states, however, many households in the U.S who stand above the FPL still struggle to meet their basic needs and be financially self-sufficient. Although the FPL does not take into account the actual quantity of money required to meet the basic cost of living expenses across the United States, many financial assistance programs are designed solely to assist people below this line, especially federally administered programs. As there exists a percentage of population who stands above the 100% FPL but still not able to be self-sufficient, it is the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) population. We are working on the research with United Way of Lane County who seeks a way to calculate the percentage population of ALICE and its distribution in Lane County. It is important to know the ALICE population as ALICEs has been suffering without sufficient income that will lead to a short and long-term suffering to the whole community. Our methodology is focused on meeting two separate objectives. The first objective is to calculate the number and percentagage of ALICE population in Lane County. The second objective is to create a predictive model that will give United Way a tool to estimate future fluctuations in the size (but not the distribution) of ththe Lane County ALICE population so that they can better direct their programming to serve this group.

libPacForge: a Library for Automated Packet Generation in C++

Presenter: Peter McKay (Computer and Information Science)

Mentor: Kevin Butler

Oral Presentation

Panel C: “Technology and Government” Coquille/Metolius Rooms

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Melina Pastos

This paper concerns the automation of arbitrary packet crafting and transmission, in order to test functionality at the transport layer of the internet protocol suite and above. Although libraries such as libpcap exist to make it easy for programmers to carry out network packet analysis, no such library exists specifically to ease the creation of programs that craft and efficiently transmit arbitrary packets (i.e. software testing suites and network protocol prototypes). This paper will detail this author’s creation of such a library, libPacForge, and the results of tests to compare its usability and efficiency against a manually crafted packet generator in C, as well as against a program created using the Metasploit Framework. These tests measured efficiency by comparing transmission rate of rapidly changing packets, and measured usability by analyzing the time necessary to write a functional program. In the course of carrying out these tests, a marked increase was observed in terms of both efficinecy and usability. From this we can deduce that automation can reduce the time needed to write effective tests and prototypes.

War and the Benign State: The Second World War and the Growth of the British Welfare State

Presenter: Walter James (History)

Mentor: James Mohr

Oral Presentation

Panel C: “Technology and Government” Coquille/Metolius Rooms

Concurrent Session 1: 9:00-10:15am

Facilitator: Melina Pastos

Historians and social scientists of Britain have noted its rapid transition from the Second World War to its modern welfare state. The causal relation between World War II and the British welfare state had been a subject of scholarly debate since the 1950s. After tracing this scholarly discourse, this article shows how the “warfare state” acted as a catalyst in the formation of the postwar “welfare state.” It does this by examining several wartime factors. What were the effects of air raid evacuations and the military episodes in 1939 and 1940 on wartime social policy? How conducive was the war economy to the transition to peacetime welfare state? How did academic and public opinion develop before and during war, and what was the popular and political significance of the Beveridge Report? Answering these questions shows the war and the need to sustain public morale compelled the government to implement several social policies and to make promises of a postwar welfare reform, which in turn helped create a wide agreement among the public and academic circles on the need of a fundamental social reform after the war. The Second World War, in short, played a significant role in enabling the postwar Labour government to establish the British welfare state. The implication of this conclusion is that the first modern welfare state owes its birth in large part to the most destructive war in history.