"What I Did Over Summer Vacation"

My summer was swell. I interned at EPIC. You have to admire how Marc Rotenberg has stretched a small office, small resources, and a select team into outsized influence among many issues and bureaucrats. We interns helped make that ratio possible: for every Marc Rotenberg there were three full-time staff and seven full-time interns (plus an eighth, a GW undergrad who signed on mid-summer, was a tad boastful about his side business investing his friends' profits from dealing pot, invited me to participate, and on the third day vanished without explanation. And what charisma.)

This was my first chance to apply my new "legal skills" to practical problems. My transition from school to career would succeed, I discovered, only so much as I was willing to abandon the intensity that had succeeded, somewhat, in school -- particularly if I wanted to transition into the fast-paced world of Capitol Hill, even more so if I was interested in the faster-paced world of electronic privacy. Assignments changed too quickly, and their subject matter was too novel and complex, for me to put off work until I had analyzed every facet and contingency of every possible issue. With each successive project that passed my desk, my intensity loosened a little, my ability to satisfy myself with sufficient work-product rather than perfect work-product grew a little. As a result, my first project was my favorite.

Marc had been invited to testify before a Senate committee on S.1625, the "Counter-Spy Act" -- a bill to expand the FTC's leverage against purveyors of spyware (whatever that means -- the key question, as I will show). We learned this on Monday. Showtime was Wednesday, and Marc needed a briefing on FTC's existing authority to pursue spyware, and Andrew, why don't you focus on ... summarizing this list of FTC enforcement actions. Your lucky, you got the easy job. "My gut feeling --" Marc mused as we returned to our desks, "-- is that this bill is going to get hung up trying to define spyware."

http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:L2VCFbJp9MoJ:epic.org/privacy/dv/Spyware_Test061108.pdf+site:epic.org+spyware&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/documents/

-- AndrewGradman - 18 Dec 2008