techPresident - Obama and McCain Surrogates Describe Two Very Different Tech Presidents - Comments

A little knowledge

Richard Bennett — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:59:07 -0400

I've got nothing against lawyers who happen to be fans of technology, but there's no substitute for an engineer when the going gets rough. Danny's position on net neutrality regulations, for example, is deaf to the language of the proposed legislation, and blind to the realities of network traffic.

Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Dan the lawyer

sstruble — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:09:37 -0400

and only a lawyer as foresightful and capable as Danny could have helped the World Wide Web (W3C) consortium navigate its way to a successful revision of its intellectual property licensing policy, making it possibly the first ICT standards organization to have a strong and simple royalty-free licensing policy.

Lawyers

Nancy Scola — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:15:11 -0400

Indeed, like many of the top people working on information sharing, digital privacy, and online speech, Danny is an attorney. In fact, he put time in at two of the main gathering spots for such people -- the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Danny Weitzner is a lawyer

Richard Bennett — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:12:56 -0400

Your article creates the impression that Weitzner is a technologist, but that's not correct. Like the McCain surrogate, he's just another lawyer.

Obama and McCain Surrogates Describe Two Very Different Tech Presidents

Nancy Scola — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:08:23 -0400

I'm at the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, being held at Yale this week, and this morning's opening session on "Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive" featured representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns. The Obama camp sent the co-director of MIT's decentralized information group. The McCain camp sent the former chief patent lawyer for Time Warner. The two seemed almost hand-picked as embodiments of the two very different ways a President Obama and a President McCain would handled tech policy.