VIDEO: Armstrong Tells His Son

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What do you do when your 13-year-old son is denying your doping charges in the hallways at school? On part two of Armstrong’s interview with Oprah, the former cyclist chokes up as he describes telling his son the lies were true. ‘Don’t defend me anymore.’

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Feds Can Get Twitter Users’ Data Without Warrant, Judge Says

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The Twitter page of Birgitta Jonsdottir, one of the WikiLeaks associates involved in the case.

The Twitter page of Birgitta Jonsdottir, one of the WikiLeaks associates involved in the case.

Should the government be able to collect information related to your Internet use without a warrant?

According to a U.S. District Court opinion in the case of three WikiLeaks associates, it should.

Judge Liam O’Grady ruled Thursday that the associates had no reasonable expectation of privacy when they used Twitter services, even if the information in question was known only to Twitter and not publicly disclosed. The government is seeking data from their accounts including their devices’ Internet protocol (IP) addresses, which can reveal information about location, and data on people with whom they communicated.

The WikiLeaks associates – Jacob Appelbaum, Birgitta Jonsdottir and Rop Gonggrijp – “voluntarily chose to use Internet technology to communicate with Twitter and thereby consented to whatever disclosures would be necessary to complete their communications,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

Judge O’Grady also denied the trio’s petition to unseal the parts of the government’s secret requests to Twitter and other service providers.

The ruling represents a setback for the WikiLeaks associates, who have not been charged with wrongdoing. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the government also has made requests to other Internet companies for information on Mr. Appelbaum, a computer developer for a nonprofit that provides free tools that help people maintain their anonymity online.

More broadly, the order raises questions about how much privacy people can expect as they use technology. The requests for information in this case were made without a search warrant, which requires a finding of “probable cause.” Instead, the government relied on a law that allows access to certain data if law enforcement shows “reasonable grounds” that the records would be “relevant and material” to an investigation – a lower standard.

That law is used routinely to get data such as IP information, addresses of people a user has emailed and messages that have been stored at a service provider longer than 180 days. It does not allow the collection of newer message contents or wiretaps of communications without a warrant.           More

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John Stossel – The FDA Kills

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It would be nice if politicians and regulators left us alone. But they don’t. They always want to do more. Recently, there have been shortages of some medicines. Cancer patients can’t get drugs they need. Why not?

One reason is that a big drugmaker shut down for a year in part to meet Food and Drug Administration rules. The FDA makes it so expensive and difficult to sell drugs that there isn’t an eager pack of companies rushing to the fill the gap. The free market would provide that, but government intervention, such as low Medicare reimbursement, strangles it. So people suffer.

Does the FDA say it’s sorry for its part and back off? Of course not. Regulators almost never do that. In fact, the FDA wants more power.

It wants to regulate how your doctor uses his smartphone. I’m not kidding! The FDA wants the power to approve mobile medical apps that let doctors monitor patients’ vital signs over their phones. As one doctor put it, “Even though I’m away from the hospital, I can still look at … real-time wave form data just as if I were at the patient’s bedside.”

Sounds great. It makes doctors more efficient. But the FDA basically says, “No, you just can’t put something on your phone if it’s a medical device. What if it doesn’t work right? We have to approve it first.”

That caution makes sense to people. Our first instinct is to say, “I don’t want someone getting rich off a device that might not work right. It might kill me. I want the FDA to make sure everything is safe and effective.”

But lawyer Jonathan Emord says our instinct is wrong.

“It is wrong because these regulations are costly, burdensome, and they prevent essential medical apps from getting into the marketplace,” Emord said.           More