With the chorus of calls for an “independent counsel” or “special prosecutor” to investigate the Russian hacking scandal, there has been one element that remains rather ambiguous: what is the specific crime to be investigated? Clearly there is the hacking but that crime is well-known and was committed by Russians who are unlikely to be subject to any real investigation. A special counsel, as opposed to a bipartisan commission, would require the articulation of a crime and the basis for the investigation. I am all in favor of independent investigations of this and other issues. However, if we are going to move beyond a special commission to special counsel we need to have more evidence and a notion of what we are investigating. That may come but we are not there yet. Below is my column in The Hill Newspaper on the subject — and the moral outrage over hacking.
Continue reading “Hacking and the Politics of Moral Outrage”
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Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demanded that African-American students be given free tuition and housing because blacks were denied access to college educations for much of our history. They also
Northwestern University is facing an interesting controversy that captures the new reality for schools in dealing with alternative gender identifications. A freshman at the school was born a female but now identifies as a male. Adam Davies wants to participate in Greek life but is not ready to join a fraternity. So Davies has asked to join a sorority as a male with a female body. He insists that his interest “transcends the gender binary” but some have objected to leaving such choices to the individual’s determination on gender.
There is a bizarre case out of Indianapolis where fired IT employee Triano Williams took the password for a school account that controlled access for emails and course material for over 2000 students. Williams accused the American College of Education of firing him for racial reasons and allegedly refused to hand over the password. The for-profit college accused Williams of effective extortion in offering to hand over the password in exchange for a clear letter of reference and $200,000.
We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on 