"What I Did Over Summer Vacation"

My summer was swell. I interned at EPIC. This was my first chance to apply my new "legal skills" to practical problems, and I had to adapt school habits to the workplace. In the fast-paced world of Capitol Hill, and of electronic privacy, assignments changed too quickly, and their subject matter was too novel and complex, to permit me the luxury of analyzing every facet and contingency of every possible issue. I learned to mass-produce sufficient work rather than hand-craft perfect work. With each project that passed my desk, my intensity loosened a little. As a result, my first project was my favorite.

On Monday -- our first day -- we learned that Marc had been invited to testify on Wednesday on S.1625, the "Counter-Spy Act" -- a bill to expand the FTC's leverage against purveyors of spyware. By Tuesday night, he needed a briefing on FTC's existing authority to pursue spyware. A staff attorney assigned each intern a subtask. Mine was to summarize this this list of FTC enforcement actions. "My gut feeling --" Marc mused as we returned to our desks, "-- is that this bill will have a hard time defining spyware."

I would rather not talk about how that summary turned out. We interns all underperformed as a team; besides, Marc held the staff attorney accountable for all that.

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