Insurance Companies Hesitant to Cover Schools with Armed Guards

July 8, 2013Danny Vinik 1 Comment

After the school shooting Newton last December, the NRA’s proposed policy solution to help make schools more secure was to add armed guards to each location. At first blush, the argument made sense: at sporting events, concerts and nearly every other public gathering, armed security is present. Why not at schools?

The answer soon became clear. Students feel less safe when armed guards are around and it inhibits their learning. In addition, it’s unclear whether those guards even help reduce crime. The NRA was proposing a massive investment in beefed up security that hurt students’ learning and had an uncertain effect on crime. Upon further review, it didn’t seem like a very good policy.

Well, a New York Times article today splashes even more cold water on the proposal:

As more schools consider arming their employees, some districts are encountering a daunting economic hurdle: insurance carriers threatening to raise their premiums or revoke coverage entirely.

The insurer of 90% of Kansas school districts has said it will deny coverage to any school that allows any personnel to carry a concealed gun. Many other insurers are close to following suit and schools that can’t find coverage will open themselves up to huge amounts of liability. It will force them to forego armed guards in order to retain insurance coverage.

Effectively, what insurers are saying is that adding armed guards to schools increases the risk of costly injury and thus requires higher premiums. In Kansas, the main insurer, EMC Insurance Companies, is saying that the potential costs are so high that it can’t provide any coverage at all. Through these policies, insurers are communicating that this policy makes schools less safe, not more.

So now that insurers have spoken out and the NRA’s proposed policy is technically unfeasible, what else do they propose to make our schools more secure?

Does a Longer Copyright Term Reduce the Availability of Books?

July 8, 2013July 8, 2013Danny Vinik 5 Comments

Georgia law professor Paul Heald’s new working paper suggests so:

By examining what is for sale “on the shelf,” the analysis of this data reveals a striking finding that directly contradicts the under-exploitation theory of copyright: Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability. Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners. For example, more than three times as many new books originally published in the 1850’s are for sale by Amazon than books from the 1950’s, despite the fact that many fewer books were published in the 1850’s.

Copyright law provides artists with a limited monopoly over their work to incentivize the creation of such works. Many copyright owners want the copyright length extended so that they can have a monopoly over both their past works and future works for a longer period (See the Mickey Mouse Curve). But extending the copyright term for past works has no effect on incentives – after all those works have already been created. Congress should have no reason to grandfather in those artistic creations.

In return, lobbyists have argued that increasing the duration of copyright protection will allow owners to profit from their work for a longer period and give them greater incentive to make their works widely accessible. They maintain that extending the copyright term for past works is in the public’s best interest even if it has no effect on incentives.

Heald’s paper pushes back on this argument, finding that works in the public domain are more widely available than those still under copyright protection. He took a random sample of 7000 books on Amazon and matched them up with their year of publication in the Library of Congress. For a couple of technical reasons, he was only able to match 2317 of the 7000. Here’s the distribution of when those books were published:

All books published before 1923 are currently in the public domain. All those afterward are not. The graph shows that when a book enters the public domain, its availability spikes.

The usual caveats apply here. There’s nothing that suggests with certainty that copyright law causes this distribution. Correlation does not equal causation. The sample size is not huge and Amazon does not represent all retailers. Amazon probably finds it most profitable to license and sell recently published books as well as those that are in the public domain (no license necessary). Books in the middle – not recently published but still copyrighted – are least profitable. There certainly could be many other factors that caused this distribution as well.

Heald continues on to look the availability of songs in the public domain versus songs that are not. That analysis is less convincing thanks to some strange proxies. Nevertheless, Heald’s analysis of Amazon’s book offerings stands. It’s not decisive empirical proof by any means, but at the very least, the next time someone says that a longer copyright term will increase the availability of a work, take it with a grain of salt.

Should We Trust the NSA?

June 22, 2013Danny Vinik Leave a comment

I haven’t posted on Edward Snowden’s leaks on the National Security Agency (NSA), because in general, I’m conflicted over them. I’m very sympathetic to the view that this mass data collection helps protect our national security and has already stopped dozens of terrorist attacks. The fact that we are the center of the digital world and can collect a vast amount of data on foreign citizens is a huge advantage that we’d be insane not to take advantage of. However, with such mass data collection comes the need for very strict rules and strong oversight. We currently have neither.

In particular, the lack of oversight has shocked me. Congressmen who should have been watching carefully over the program didn’t even know about it (the fact that just 47 of a 100 Senators showed up to a classified briefing on the NSA’s surveillance programs AFTER Snowden’s leaks came out is outrageous). The courts rubber stamped warrants without really examining them. This amount of data in the government’s hands has potential for abuse and we don’t have the right protocol in place to ensure that that doesn’t happen.

That’s why today’s story in the Los Angeles Times that Edward Snowden had shown previous signs of disdain towards the NSA and the government’s surveillance scare me. Here’s the important part of the piece:

On the surface, at least, Edward Snowden was hardly unusual at America’s largest and most powerful intelligence agency. A self-taught computer whiz who wanted to travel the world, Snowden seemed a perfect fit for a secretive organization that spies on communications from foreign terrorism suspects.

But in hundreds of online postings dating back a decade, Snowden also denounced “pervasive government secrecy” and criticized America’s “unquestioning obedience towards spooky types.”

At least online, Snowden seemed sardonic, affably geeky and supremely self-assured. In 2006, someone posted to Ars Technica, a website popular with technophiles, about an odd clicking in an Xbox video game console. A response came from “TheTrueHOOHA,” Snowden’s pen name: “NSA’s new surveillance program. That’s the sound of freedom, citizen!”

This is the exact type of person the NSA needs to be careful about hiring. The agency has 30,000 employees and vetting everyone to make sure none would disseminate government secrets is a difficult task, but failure isn’t an option. It can’t relax its standards because it needs more people. If it can’t find enough capable workers that pass background and security checks, then it must find other ways to secure our homeland without them. The NSA must balance hiring an extra analyst who has expressed doubt in America’s power in his past with the risk that that doubt may manifest itself into a larger problem. What are the odds that the extra analyst will save lives versus turning on the NSA and divulging state secrets?

That’s why this article scares me. Snowden clearly demonstrated anti-surveillance and anti-NSA characteristics before joining the agency. He should’ve been flagged as someone at risk of leaking secrets. Maybe the NSA was wary of him – I haven’t seen anything on this though. Maybe it was Booz Allen Hamilton that didn’t vet him properly. Either way, he got through the system and that means we have a problem. If the LA Times can dig up these message board postings in just a few weeks, I expect the US government found them as well. If they did and deemed him worthy of high-level security clearance, why?

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Did the NSA or Booz lower its standards because they were in need of workers? Is this a common characteristic among analysts they hire? Did Snowden offer other evidence that those were past views and he was now committed to the NSA? I’m not sure any answer to those questions will be entirely satisfying, because in the end, he got through the system and leaked the program.

And if the NSA didn’t even know about those online postings, then we need to entirely rethink our security system. If the agency can’t find background information as simple as message board postings, then it undoubtedly missed important evidence regarding the security clearance of dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of other NSA employees. That’s a much scarier proposition.

All of this just reinforces the need for strict hiring standards, tight protocols and thorough oversight over these programs and over the entire agency. Without them, the potential for abuse and leakage is high. We can’t risk that.

*It’s also why I’m in favor of prosecuting Snowden. As much as his leaks have demonstrated flaws in our surveillance system, we also cannot incentivize future potential leakers to do the same. Snowden made a judgment call that releasing these classified documents would reveal a program that had flaws and deserved to be out in the open while not putting national security at risk. Given that the Guardian and Washington Post only published four of the 41 slides that he gave them, his judgment does not seem to have been good enough. We don’t know what’s in those other 37 slides, but it may be information related to national security that neither organization felt comfortable releasing. It just goes to show the huge risk involved in leaking. What if either the Guardian or the Post had published the other slides and harmed national security? If we do not prosecute Snowden, we are telling future leakers that it is acceptable for them to make that judgment call. That puts a huge amount of responsibility on the leaker – responsibility that I’m nowhere near comfortable giving him.

(h/t Kevin Drum)