government

Of the remaining mysteries surrounding the Watergate break-in, none confound conspiracy buffs more than the 18 and a half minutes of tape deleted from the June 20th, 1972 meeting in the Oval Office. Now, after 37 years and several forensic analyses of the audio tape itself, the National Archives will turn its attention to the only physical notes taken during that meeting in the hope of extracting more information about the famous recording gap.

It's time to call your bookie, because the line on global warming is in. A new paper from MIT breaks down the odds of different outcomes from global warming, based on whether governments take action now or later. And if you're taking that action, bet on "government getting involved" to beat the spread, as last week an important climate change bill made it out committee in the House of Representatives.

Call it the "green" team or even the "dream" team, but what environmentalists can now say with affirmation is that change really is here. President-elect Barack Obama's picks for his administration's green team are among the best and brightest scientists and advocates of environmental change.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey has served in Congress for a decade, but he’s not your average politico. The physicist is a five-time Jeopardy champion, an inventor of a solar collector, an arms-control expert and a former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. He likes to pop into science conferences so that he can drop terms like “impedance matching” and not catch weird stares.

In addition to drowning polar bears and winning Al Gore a Nobel Prize, climate change may have serious public health consequences. But thanks to Vice President Cheney, you may not find out what those health implications are until you feel them. Today a former Environmental Protection Agency official said Cheney pushed for the deletion of key components of congressional testimony.

As if the security in airports and controls at border crossings weren't slow and intrusive enough, governments around the world are quietly passing laws to allow them to search the contents of your laptop and other electronic devices, like iPods and cellphones. A United States court last month gave border agents carte blanche to hold a laptop for days and even copy its entire contents. The UK government has given its agents authority to search computers at its borders for pornography. But in what may be the most baffling and cumbersome move of all, the US, Canada, UK, and other EU nations are working behind closed doors on a new trade agreement which could turn border agents into the copyright police.

While the private sector is making strides toward a paperless office environment, the government appears to be stumbling backward. Last week, the Department of Commerce canceled plans to use handheld devices for door-to-door canvassing during the 2010 census. The devices failed on a surprising number of counts. They could not properly transmit large data files; they did not meet over 400 technical requirements; and they proved too complex for temporary workers to figure out.

That was anticlimactic. A little more than a week after announcing that he was considering running for a recently vacated seat in California's 12th congressional district, tech thinker and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig announced yesterday on his blog that he wasn't running after all. The reason is simple enough. A pollster showed Lessig that there was "no possible way" for him to win. And it wouldn't be pleasant.

Sean Captains extensive guide last week to next year's nationwide digital TV conversion featured some interesting comments from the vice president of Centris, a company that recently published a study suggesting the upcoming switchover to digital-only television broadcasts may leave millions of people across the country without a TV signal. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is offering people who have an analog TV a $40 coupon to put toward a converter box. Unfortunately, Centris VP Barry E. Goodstadt says, in certain pockets of the country, using a converter box still wont give you a signal if you dont have a powerful-enough antenna.