Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists to Hold Public Policy Program in Washington, D.C., March 6, 2012

Philadelphia, PA (PRWEB) January 18, 2012

What: Through intensive lectures and hands-on exercises, the Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists, led by the Wharton Schools most prominent professors, help reporters gain better understanding of key business and economic issues. This free, one-day program will feature Wharton Professors Mark Duggan and Susan Wachter on “Health Care Policy and Real Estate and Mortgage Policy respectively.

The Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists program, now in its 44th year, offers participants an opportunity to expand their knowledge, increase their exposure to leading experts and broaden their perspectives in a stimulating environment. This program is free of charge and open to a limited number of journalists.

When: March 6, 2012, 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Registration deadline: March 1, 2012.

Where: The Seminar will take place at the offices of Morgan Lewis, 1111 Pennsylvania Ave., NW,

Washington, DC 20004-2541

How: Applications are required to attend this free Seminar. Visit the Seminar application

Who: In recent years, reporters have come from media outlets such as the New York Times, China News,

CNN, Les Echos, CNBC India, Nikkei, Marketplace, Reuters, Bloomberg, Forbes, East African

Standard, and the Washington Post.

Eligibility: Applications are open to those employed as a print, broadcast, or online business journalist for legitimate media companies.

Key Take-Aways: Todays global economy requires a strong foundation in business and economic

knowledge for business journalists. At the Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists, participants:

Feds returning funds to online Ponzi scam victims (AP)

WASHINGTON – Federal authorities say they are torn again based on $ 55 million through a Ponzi scam people on the Internet.

The Justice Department and the Secret Service announced on Monday that they are the means of 8,400 victims at the sites managed by daily AdSurf Inc. invests

Company founder Thomas "Andy" Bowdoin Jr., Quincy, Florida has been indicted in connection with the investigation, but has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. He is with the development of promising investors returns 125-150 percent of your money collected if you see web pages for a few minutes each day.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington got the money for the victims by the seizure of numerous bank accounts, real estate, luxury vehicles and boats to pay. Information for victims, please call 1-800-644-1535.

Facebook policies tricky for employers, workers (AP)

WASHINGTON – In the age of instant tweets and impulsive Facebook posts, some companies are still trying to figure out how they can limit what their employees say about work online without running afoul of the law.

Confusion about what workers can or can’t post has led to a surge of more than 100 complaints at the National Labor Relations Board — most within the past year — and created uncertainty for businesses about how far their social media policies can go.

“Employers are struggling to figure out what the right policies are and what they should do when these cases arise,” said Michael Eastman, labor law policy director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In one case, a Chicago-area car salesman was fired after going on Facebook to complain that his BMW dealership served overcooked hot dogs, stale buns and other cheap food instead of nicer fare at an event to roll out a posh new car model.

The NLRB’s enforcement office found the comments were legally protected because the salesman was expressing concerns about the terms and conditions of his job, frustrations he had earlier shared in person with other employees.

But the board’s attorneys reached the opposite conclusion in the case of a Wal-Mart employee who went on Facebook to complain about management “tyranny” and used an off-color Spanish word to refer to a female assistant manager. The worker was suspended for one day and disqualified from seeking promotion for a year.

The board said the postings were “an individual gripe” rather than an effort to discuss work conditions with co-workers and declined to take action against the retailer.

Those cases are among 14 investigations the board’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, discussed in a lengthy report last month on the rise in social media cases. Solomon says federal law permits employees to talk with co-workers about their jobs and working conditions without reprisal — whether that conversation takes place around the water cooler or on Facebook or Twitter.

“Most of the social media policies that we’ve been presented are very, very overbroad,” Solomon said in an interview. “They say you can’t disparage or criticize the company in any way on social media, and that is not true under the law.”

The number of cases spiked last year after the board sided with a Connecticut woman fired from an ambulance company after she went on Facebook to criticize her boss. That case settled earlier this year, with the company agreeing to change its blogging and Internet policy that had banned workers from discussing the company over the Internet.

The National Labor Relations Act protects both union and nonunion workers when they engage in “protected concerted activity” — coming together to discuss working conditions. But when online comments might be seen by hundreds or thousands of eyeballs, companies are concerned about the effect of disparaging remarks.

Doreen Davis, a management-side labor lawyer based in Philadelphia, said many of her corporate clients are often “surprised and upset” when they learn they can’t simply terminate employees for talking about work online.

“All of us on the management side are being inundated with calls and inquiries from clients about this,” Davis said. “A lot of companies want their social media policies reviewed or they want to establish one for the first time.”

But the NLRB’s Solomon also warns workers that not everything they write on Facebook or Twitter will be permissible under the law just because it discusses their job.

“A lot of Facebook, by its very nature, starts out as mere griping,” Solomon said. “We need some evidence either before, during or after that you are looking to your fellow employees to engage in some sort of group action.”

In one case, an employee at an Indiana emergency transportation and fire protection company was fired after writing on the Facebook wall of her U.S. senator, Republican Dick Lugar, to complain that her company skimped on wages and that its cheap service compromised the quality of care.

The NLRB’s enforcement office declined to take up her case, saying that the employee didn’t discuss her complaints with other workers or show any attempt to take employee complaints to management. She may have been trying to make a public official aware of problems with emergency medical services in Indiana, but board attorneys said that wasn’t enough to protect her under the law.

While there are more than 100 cases pending before the board, only one has actually led to a formal ruling. Earlier this month, an administrative law judge at the agency found that a Buffalo, N.Y., nonprofit group illegally fired five workers after they posted Facebook comments complaining about workload and staffing issues.

The judge ordered the group, Hispanics United of Buffalo, to reinstate the five employees and award them back pay.

The Chamber of Commerce’s Eastman said it’s too early to criticize how the board is interpreting the law, but he wants to see what happens in closer cases where an employee goes “over the top” with criticism of a supervisor of employer.

“Where will the board draw the line between concerted activity and an employer’s legitimate non-disparagement policy?” Eastman said.

More headaches for US with new WikiLeaks releases (AP)

WASHINGTON – The accelerated public disclosure of tens of thousands of previously unreleased State Department cables by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy organization has raised new concerns about the exposure of confidential U.S. embassy sources and is proving a source of fresh diplomatic setbacks and embarrassment for the Obama administration, current and former American officials said Tuesday.

The Associated Press reviewed more than 2,000 of the cables recently released by WikiLeaks. They contained the identities of at least 14 sources who had sought protection and whose names the cable authors had asked to protect.

Officials said the disclosure in the past week of more than 125,000 sensitive documents by WikiLeaks, far more than it had earlier published, further endangered informants and jeopardized U.S. foreign policy goals. The officials would not comment on the authenticity of the leaked documents but said the rate and method of the new releases, including about 50,000 in one day alone, presented new complications.

“The United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. “In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals’ security at risk, threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems. We remain concerned about these illegal disclosures and about concerns and risks to individuals.

“We continue to carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can,” she told reporters.

Neither Nuland nor other current officials would comment on specific information contained in the compromised documents or speculate as to whether any harm caused by the new releases would exceed that caused by the first series of leaks, which began in November and sent the administration into a damage-control frenzy.

But some officials noted that the first releases had been vetted by media organizations who scrubbed them to remove the names of contacts that could be endangered. The latest documents have not been vetted in the same way.

“It’s picking at an existing wound. There is the potential for further injury,” said P.J. Crowley, the former assistant secretary of state for public affairs who resigned earlier this year after criticizing the military’s treatment of the man suspected of leaking the cables to WikiLeaks. “It does have the potential to create further risk for those individuals who have talked to U.S. diplomats. It has the potential to hurt our diplomatic efforts and it once again puts careers at risk.”

Crowley set up a crisis management team at the State Department to deal with the matter and said officials at the time went through the entire collection of documents they believed had been leaked and warned as many named sources as possible, particularly in authoritarian countries, that their identities could be revealed. A handful of them were relocated, but Crowley said others may have been missed and some could not be contacted because the effort would have increased the potential for exposure.

The new releases “could be used to intimidate activists in some of these autocratic countries,” he said. He said he believed that “any autocratic security service worth its salt” would probably already have the complete unredacted archive of cables but added that the new WikiLeaks releases meant that any intelligence agency that didn’t “will have it in short order.”

The AP review included all cables classified as “confidential” or “secret,” among the more than 50,000 recently released by WikiLeaks. In them, the AP found the names of at least 14 sources whose identities the cable authors asked higher ups to “protect” or “strictly protect.” Several thousand other of the recently published cables were not classified and did not appear to put sources in jeopardy.

The accelerated flood of publishing partly reflects the collapse of the unusual relationships between WikiLeaks and news organizations that previously were cooperating with it in exchange for being given copies of all the uncensored State Department messages.

Initially, WikiLeaks released only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material. The news organizations advised WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents. The Associated Press was not among those news organizations.

But in recent months, those relationships have soured noticeably. WikiLeaks complained Tuesday that a reporter who wrote about the group’s efforts for The New York Times — one of the news organizations it was working with closely — was a “sleazy hack job.” And it said a reporter for the Guardian in Britain — another of its former partners in the release of documents — had exhibited a “tawdry vendetta” against WikiLeaks.

___

Associated Press writer Cassandra Vinograd in London contributed to this report.

Debt fight could bring more airwaves for broadband (AP)

WASHINGTON – The debt ceiling battle could produce an unlikely winner: smartphone users.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s current plan would direct the Federal Communications Commission to auction off highly valuable radio spectrum to wireless carriers desperate for more airwaves. Companies such as AT&T and T-Mobile USA say they need more capacity to keep up as their customers increasingly use iPhones, tablets and other portable devices to handle mobile applications, online video and other bandwidth-hungry services.

The plan could generate critical revenue for a government spending beyond its means. Congressional budget officials estimate the auctions would raise $13.1 billion for deficit reduction.

Reid’s proposal would also deliver a big victory to public safety officials: It would set aside airwaves and money for the construction of a nationwide wireless broadband network that would let police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers communicate with each other across agencies and jurisdictions.

“Spectrum auctions are a win-win-win,” said Tim Doyle, a spokesman for the Consumers Electronics Association.

But the proposal still faces significant hurdles. For one thing, a competing debt ceiling plan from House Speaker John Boehner, which will be voted on Thursday, contains nothing on wireless spectrum auctions. Boehner’s focus is on spending cuts, not finding new sources of revenue. What’s more, Reid’s proposal has run into major opposition from television broadcasters, which are under pressure to give up spectrum that would be sold to wireless carriers.

The haggling over wireless spectrum auctions comes as Congress rushes to try to agree on a plan to stave off an unprecedented U.S. default on its debt, which could have catastrophic consequences for the global economy. The Treasury Department has warned that the government will run out of money to pay its bills after Aug. 2 if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling. Reid and Boehner are pushing competing proposals to lift the debt limit and slash spending.

No matter how the current fight plays out, many in Washington see spectrum auctions as an attractive way to chip away at the federal deficit.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst David Kaut, for one, says spectrum auction legislation has a good shot of passage in Congress — whether it is part of the current debt ceiling package, a deficit reduction measure down the road or even a stand-alone bill.

“You have wireless pressures, budget pressures and public safety pressures,” Kaut said. “The forces are aligned.”

Reid’s proposal would give the FCC authority to auction off airwaves voluntarily relinquished by government agencies such as the Pentagon and television broadcasters with extra spectrum. It would allow broadcasters to share in the auction proceeds.

Congressional budget officials estimate those auctions would raise a total of $24.5 billion over 10 years. Reid’s plan envisions $13.1 billion going to the Treasury Department to help narrow the federal deficit. The remainder would largely go to compensate television broadcasters that give up airwaves, cover the expenses of broadcasters and government agencies that move to different parts of the spectrum and fund the construction of the public safety wireless network.

Reid’s plan, based largely on a Senate Commerce Committee bill, would also dedicate a highly contested piece of airwaves to that network. Such an “interoperable” network was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, and is becoming an urgent priority for lawmakers as the 10-year anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks approaches. The shortcomings of existing networks became apparent after the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, when emergency workers could not talk to one another because they were using incompatible — and sometimes antiquated — systems.

At this point, perhaps the biggest hurdle facing any spectrum auction proposal is opposition from television broadcasters reluctant to give up their existing airwaves. Dennis Wharton, an official with the National Association of Broadcasters, noted that many broadcasters fear being moved to different channels that would reach fewer viewers.

He added that many broadcasters want to use their existing airwaves to deliver television signals to mobile devices and to “multicast” more than one television signal at a time. Broadcasters worry that they could be moved to a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is less conducive to such broadcasts.

Wharton said that while the proposals in Congress are intended to be voluntary for broadcasters, those that want to hang onto their airwaves are concerned that they could face user fees and other government sanctions intended to force them to give up their spectrum anyway.

Ultimately, Wharton said, it will be viewers who suffer in the face of “incredibly shrinking free and local television.”

Internet privacy controls challenge tech industry (AP)

WASHINGTON – The federal government has put Google, Microsoft, Apple and other technology companies on notice: Give consumers a way prevent advertisers from tracking their movements across the Web — or face regulation.

Yet for all its innovative know-how and entrepreneurial spirit, the technology industry has yet to agree on a simple, meaningful solution to protect consumer privacy on the Internet.

So privacy watchdogs and lawmakers are stepping up the pressure, calling for laws that would require companies to stop the digital surveillance of consumers who don’t want to be tracked. They argue that effective privacy tools are long overdue from an industry that typically moves at breakneck speed.

“I want ordinary consumers to know what is being done with their personal information, and I want to give them the power to do something about it,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said at a recent hearing.

Washington’s call to arms is a response to growing concern that invasive Internet marketing practices are eroding privacy online as every consumer move is observed, analyzed and harvested for profit.

Online publishers, advertisers and ad networks use “cookies,” Web beacons and other sophisticated tracking tools to follow consumers around the Internet — monitoring what sites they visit and what links they click, what they search for and what they buy. Then they mine that information to deliver what they hope will be relevant pitches — a practice called behavioral advertising.

“Right now we have a lawful system for tracking all of our movements online,” says Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “And not only is it legal. It’s the business model.”

Calls for online privacy protections began with the Federal Trade Commission, which has challenged the industry to offer a digital tracking off switch. The FTC envisions something akin to the government’s existing “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers. Consumers who don’t want to receive telemarketing calls can add their numbers to the list online or over the phone.

Companies including Microsoft and Mozilla have responded with various “Do Not Track” technologies. But an industry-wide solution is not close at hand.

That’s because putting the Do Not Track concept into practice is much more complicated than simply adding phone numbers to a database. The challenge is in reaching industry consensus on what Do Not Track obligations should mean, designing standard technology tools that are easy for consumers to use and setting common rules that all Websites and advertisers will follow.

One big part of the problem is that the industry needs to find a way to let consumers halt intrusive online marketing practices without preventing tracking critical for the Internet to function. After all, Internet companies rely on tracking not just to target ads, but also to analyze website traffic patterns, store online passwords and deliver customized content like local news. Nobody wants to stop those things.

Also complicating efforts to reach broad agreement is the lucrative nature of behavioral advertising.

Industry leaders argue that many consumers like targeted ads since they deliver personalized pitches that people may want. And because these ads tend to be more effective, advertisers are willing to pay more for them, says David Hallerman, an analyst with eMarketer.

Research firm eMarketer projects U.S. spending on online behavioral advertising will hit $2.6 billion by 2014, up from $775 million in 2008.

That enables Internet companies to offer everything from online stock quotes to unlimited email storage for free, says Anne Toth, Yahoo’s chief trust officer. Without sophisticated advertising technology, more websites and services could wind up behind pay walls, companies warn.

The problem, argues Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy group, is that many consumers don’t know they’re being tracked. And even if they do, they have no idea what happens to their information — whether it is used to create personal profiles, merged with offline databases or sold to data brokers — and no practical way to stop the data collection.

With growing alarm in Washington, a coalition of industry trade groups_ called the Digital Advertising Alliance — has established a self-regulatory program that places icons inside the online ads of participating advertisers, ad networks and websites. The icon links to a site that explains online targeting, and lets consumers install an opt-out cookie if they just want standard ads.

Among the groups participating in the alliance are the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Direct Marketing Association, as well as individual companies including Google and Yahoo.

Even so, these efforts don’t go far enough for the FTC. While the agency has not endorsed any particular Do Not Track technology, it believes one promising approach could involve including a setting inside Web browsers. Now the browser companies, led by Microsoft and Mozilla, are responding with different approaches:

• Microsoft has a feature called “tracking protection” in Internet Explorer 9.0 that lets users create “black lists” of Web sites to be blocked and “white lists” of sites that are deemed acceptable. Users can set their browsers to automatically build these lists or can download existing lists.

• Mozilla has a setting in its Firefox 4 browser that sends a signal to alert websites, advertisers and ad networks if a user does not want to be tracked.

Apple is expected to include a similar feature, called a “header,” in its Safari browser. Microsoft, too, recently added the feature to IE 9.0.

• Google’s Chrome browser is piggybacking on the Digital Advertising Alliance by offering a plug-in that saves opt-out cookies even if other cookies are erased. One criticism of the industry program is that users lose their opt-out preferences whenever they clear their cookies.

For such tools to work, however, there must be industry consensus on what Do Not Track obligations should actually mean. And right now, there is little agreement.

Nearly everyone accepts that publishers should be able to measure traffic volumes on their own sites, for instance. But should advertisers be allowed to track how many visitors see or click on their ads?

The industry’s self-regulatory program, for one, does not turn off data collection. Consumers who install an opt-out cookie no longer receive targeted ads from participating companies, but may still be tracked for non-advertising purposes. That doesn’t satisfy privacy watchdogs.

Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Erich Andersen says tracking protection offers a way around this debate since it lets consumers decide what to block. But this approach worries advertisers since it can block ads altogether, even generic ads.

And anyway, with Do Not Track signals in several popular browsers, websites and advertisers need to agree on how to respond, says Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry-backed group. Otherwise, he says, Do Not Track obligations could get defined for them by browsers or government officials.

Equally important for Do Not Track to succeed, the technology must be easy to find and use. If Do Not Track tools are too confusing or involve too much effort, people won’t embrace them, warns Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “We can’t expect users to spend a lot of time reconfiguring their browsers,” he says.

Privacy watchdogs are gravitating to Mozilla’s approach as particularly user-friendly. But it presents a different challenge: ensuring websites, advertisers and ad networks respect user requests not to be tracked. While Microsoft’s tracking protection blocks unwanted content — and requires no compliance by Websites and advertisers — a signal in a browser means nothing if it is not honored.

“Without anyone on the other end to recognize it, it’s a tree falling in the woods without anyone to hear it,” says Mike Zaneis, general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Zaneis insists the Digital Advertising Alliance offers the best approach since so many Websites and advertisers are on board.

Alex Fowler, Mozilla’s global privacy and public policy leader, says the browser maker is talking with many big websites, advertisers and ad networks about honoring its Do Not Track signal. And many are open to the idea. Still, so far only a handful of industry players have actually pledged to honor the signal.

And that, privacy watchdogs say, shows why the government needs to get involved.

Senator Rockefeller is sponsoring a bill that would direct the FTC to write binding, industry-wide Do Not Track rules. There are similar bills in the House and the California legislature.

The Internet marketing industry wants to head off those efforts and insists it just needs more time to establish meaningful privacy controls.

For now, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz is willing to give the industry a chance before calling for legislation. Even without a government mandate, he noted, it’s in the industry’s self-interest to make Do Not Track work. After all, Leibowitz says, “nobody wants to be on the wrong side of consumers.”

ISPs, movie, music, TV groups in copyright deal (AFP)

ISPs, movie, music, TV groups in copyright deal

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Major US Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and music, movie and television industry associations unveiled a long-awaited agreement on Thursday aimed at curbing online copyright infringement.

The Copyright Alert System calls for ISPs to send a series of email notices to Internet subscribers whose accounts have been identified by content owners as illegally downloading music, movies or television shows.

After five notices, subscribers could be subject to "mitigation measures" by an ISP, including temporarily reducing their Internet speed or redirecting their account to a landing page with information about copyright infringement.

The voluntary agreement does not oblige the ISPs to take punitive action, however, which they have been reluctant to do in the absence of a court order.

ISPs will not provide customers' names to rights owners and subscribers can seek an "independent review," at a cost of $35, to determine the validity of an infringement claim.

The Center for Copyright Information, a new group founded by the ISPs and entertainment associations, stressed that the alert system "does not, in any circumstance, require the ISP to terminate an Internet subscriber's account."

But digital rights groups Public Knowledge and The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) warned that it "lists Internet account suspension among the possible remedies" to copyright infringement.

"Today's agreement has the potential to be an important educational vehicle that will help reduce online copyright infringement," Public Knowledge and the CDT said in a joint statement.

"A voluntary, notification-centric approach can sidestep many of the serious concerns that would be raised by government mandates, the adoption of new snooping or filtering technologies, or a draconian 'three strikes' approach centered on disconnecting Internet users," they said.

"But whether the agreement will meet its educational promise or instead will undermine the rights of Internet users will depend on how it is implemented," they said.

"We believe it would be wrong for any ISP to cut off subscribers, even temporarily, based on allegations that have not been tested in court."

Participating ISPs will begin sending out copyright alerts later this year and next year.

AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon signed on to the agreement along with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA) and the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).

US ISPs already forward copyright violation notifications from content owners to subscribers but the new agreement standardizes the practice.

The Center for Copyright Information and supporters said the escalating notification system will help reduce online copyright violations.

"We are confident that, once informed that content theft is taking place on their accounts, the great majority of broadband subscribers will take steps to stop it," said James Assey, executive vice president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

RIAA president Cary Sherman said the "groundbreaking" agreement ushers in a "fresh approach to addressing the digital theft of copyrighted works.

Verizon general counsel Randal Milch described the agreement as "a sensible approach to the problem of online-content theft and, importantly, one that respects the privacy and rights of our subscribers."

The Obama administration welcomed the agreement.

"The administration is committed to reducing infringement of American intellectual property as part of our ongoing commitment to support jobs, increase exports and maintain our global competitiveness," said Victoria Espinel, the US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.

"The joining of Internet service providers and entertainment companies in a cooperative effort to combat online infringement can further this goal and we commend them for reaching this agreement," Espinel said. "We believe it will have a significant impact on reducing online piracy."

Obama tweets for the first time, tweaks Republicans (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama took to Twitter on Wednesday to press his economic agenda, using the popular social media site to tweak Republicans and advocate for a deal to reduce the deficit.

In a "town hall" style meeting that lasted about an hour, the president fielded questions posted by users of the Twitter site and sent his first live tweet from a laptop in the White House East Room — making what he called presidential history.

Sitting on a tall stool with a screen that showed tweeted questions nearby, Obama responded aloud before an audience of 140 invited guests who came to the White House for the event.

That number was a nod to a key part of "tweeting."

Twitter users send short, 140-character messages through the Internet about issues large and small.

The White House has tried using Twitter and other new media outlets to reach American voters, sometimes making announcements that way instead of through more traditional journalistic venues. The White House's @whitehouse account has some 2.25 million followers.

Obama, who is not known for brevity, touched on topics ranging from the weak housing market to NASA to the debate about the U.S. debt ceiling.

He did not stick to concise answers and did not send further tweets himself.

"One last point — I know Twitter, I'm supposed to be short," he said while answering a question about education, drawing some laughter.

Another funny moment came when Republican John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, managed to get in a question through a Twitter message of his own.

"After embarking on a record … spending binge that left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?" read the moderator, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, from Boehner's tweet.

The tweet had some typos, however.

"First of all, John obviously needs to work on his typing skills," Obama joked.

"Obviously John's the speaker of the House. He's a Republican. And so, this is a slightly skewed question."

Obama went on to say that the United States had not seen fast enough job growth relative to U.S. needs.

HOUSING WOES

Asked by one Twitter user what mistakes he had made in office, Obama singled out the moribund housing market.

"The continuing decline in the housing market is something that hasn't bottomed out as quickly as we expected," he said.

"We've had to revamp our housing program several times to try to help people stay in their homes and try to start lifting home values up."

Obama is locked in a dispute with congressional Republicans about how to reduce the deficit and raise the debt ceiling, and he used many of his answers during the town hall to press his case for ending tax loopholes while reducing spending.

He said the country could face a second recession or worse if Congress did not raise the borrowing limit and suggested Republicans were using the debate like a gun to the head of the American people to support tax breaks corporate jet owners and the wealthiest Americans.

The Twitter town hall came after hackers took control of a FoxNews.com Twitter account on Monday, sending six false tweets saying Obama had been shot dead and prompting an investigation by the Secret Service.

Obama was at home at the White House on Monday, celebrating the July 4 holiday with his family.

The White House has declined comment on the hacking event.

(additional reporting by Laura MacInnis and Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Can’t ban violent video sales to kids, court says (AP)

Leland Yee

WASHINGTON – States cannot ban the sale or rental of ultraviolent video games to children, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, rejecting such limits as a violation of young people’s First Amendment rights and leaving it up to parents and the multibillion-dollar gaming industry to decide what kids can buy.

The high court, on a 7-2 vote, threw out California’s 2005 law covering games sold or rented to those under 18, calling it an unconstitutional violation of free-speech rights. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia, said, “Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply.”

Scalia, who pointed out the violence in a number of children’s fairy tales, said that while states have legitimate power to protect children from harm, “that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”

Justices Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision, with Breyer saying it makes no sense to legally block children’s access to pornography yet allow them to buy or rent brutally violent video games.

“What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?” Breyer said.

Video games, said Scalia’s majority opinion, fall into the same category as books, plays and movies as entertainment that “communicates ideas — and even social messages” deserving of First Amendment free-speech protection. And non-obscene speech “cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them,” he said.

This decision follows the court’s recent movement on First Amendment cases, with the justices throwing out attempts to ban animal cruelty videos, protests at military funerals and political speech by businesses.

The court will test those limits again next session when it takes up a new case involving government’s effort to protect children from what they might see and hear. The justices agreed to review appeals court rulings that threw out Federal Communications Commission rules against the isolated use of expletives as well as fines against broadcasters who showed a woman’s nude buttocks on a 2003 episode of ABC’s “NYPD Blue.”

The decision to hear the FCC case was one of the last the full court made this session. Before leaving on their annual summer break on Monday, the justices also:

• Voted 5-4 to strike down a provision of a campaign financing system in Arizona that gives extra cash to publicly funded candidates who face privately funded rivals and independent groups.

• Agreed to hear arguments in the fall or winter on whether police need a warrant before using a global positioning system device to track a suspect’s movements.

• Refused to hear an appeal from former detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who wanted to sue defense contractors over claims of abuse.

More than 46 million American households have at least one video-game system, with the industry bringing in at least $18 billion in 2010. The industry has set up its own rating system to warn parents which video games are appropriate for which ages, with the rating “M” placed on games that are considered to be especially violent and only for mature adults.

That system is voluntary, however. California’s 2005 law would have prohibited anyone under 18 from buying or renting games that give players the option of “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.” Parents would have been able to buy the games for their children, but retailers who sold directly to minors would have faced fines of up to $1,000 for each game sold.

That means that children would have needed an adult to get games like “Postal 2,” the first-person shooter by developer Running With Scissors that includes the ability to light unarmed bystanders on fire. It would also apply to the popular “Grand Theft Auto” games, from Rockstar Games, that allow gamers to portray carjacking, gun-toting gangsters.

The California law never took effect. Lower courts have said that the law violated minors’ constitutional rights, and that California lacked enough evidence to prove that violent games cause physical and psychological harm to minors. Courts in six other states, including Michigan and Illinois, reached similar conclusions, striking down similar bans.

Video game makers and sellers celebrated their victory, saying Monday’s decision puts them on the same legal footing as other forms of entertainment. “There now can be no argument whether video games are entitled to the same protection as books, movies, music and other expressive entertainment,” said Bo Andersen, president and CEO of the Entertainment Merchants Association.

But the battle may not be over. Leland Yee, a child psychologist and California state senator who wrote the video game ban, told The Associated Press Monday that he was reading the dissents in hopes of finding a way to reintroduce the law in a way that would be constitutional.

“It’s disappointing the court didn’t understand just how violent these games are,” Yee told the AP.

Thomas argued in his separate dissent that the nation’s founders never intended for free speech rights to “include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”

And at least two justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, indicated they would be willing to reconsider their votes under certain circumstances. “I would not squelch legislative efforts to deal with what is perceived by some to be a significant and developing social problem,” Alito said, suggesting that a narrower state law might be upheld.

States can legally ban children from getting pornography. But Scalia said in his ruling that, unlike depictions of sexual conduct, there is no tradition in the United States of restricting children’s access to depictions of violence. He noted the violence in the original depictions of many popular children’s fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Snow White.

Hansel and Gretel kill their captor by baking her in an oven, Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves and the evil queen in Snow White is forced to wear red hot slippers and dance until she is dead, Scalia said.

“Certainly the books we give children to read — or read to them when they are younger — contain no shortage of gore,” he said.

And there is no proof that violent video games cause harm to children, or any more harm than another other form of entertainment, he said.

One doctor “admits that the same effects have been found when children watch cartoons starring Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner or when they play video games like Sonic the Hedgehog that are rated `E’ or even when they `view a picture of a gun,” Scalia said.

Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, said the decision created a constitutionally authorized “end-run on parental authority.”

“I wonder what other First Amendment right does a child have against their parents’ wishes?” he said. “Does a child now have a constitutional right to bear arms if their parent doesn’t want them to buy a gun? How far does this extend? It’s certainly concerning to us that something as simple as requiring a parental oversight to purchase an adult product has been undermined by the court.”

The case is Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 08-1448.

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Associated Press writers Paul Elias and Derrik J. Lang contributed to this story from California.

Supreme Court to review warrantless GPS tracking (AP)

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court will weigh in a major privacy issue for the digital era: if the police need a warrant before using a device global positioning system to track suspicious movement.

The judges said Monday it will hear the appeal of the Obama of a court decision that favored a criminal defendant. The federal appeals court in Washington to set aside the convictions because police had no GPS device order, are covertly installed on the car of a man.

Other appeals courts have ruled that the warrant is not required for GPS tracking.

The Justice Department contends that the warrantless use of GPS devices do not violate the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches. He said the quick resolution of the divergent views is extremely important for judicial enforcement.

A three-judge panel of Democratic and Republican appointed unanimously threw conviction and life sentence, Antoine Jones of Washington, DC, a nightclub owner convicted of running a cocaine distribution ring.

Police put the GPS unit on Jeep Jones and followed his movements for a month. The judges said the long-term monitoring was a factor in their decision.

High Court directed both sides to resolve whether a warrant or consent, regardless of how long it can take control.

The government has claimed that using a GPS device is no different than using a pager authorities, with the blessing of the High Court in 1983 to help track a suspect that his drug lab. The judge said that people on the way any reasonable expectation of privacy.

Ministry of Justice said the GPS devices are particularly useful in the early stages of an investigation if they can eliminate the use of time-consuming than marking point officers to gather evidence search.

Four other appeals judges in Washington, said the entire appeals court should have heard the case, faulting her colleagues for the decision in favor of Jones.

In another case in California, upheld a three judges in San Francisco using a GPS device without a warrant, saying that it was no different than with officials tail a suspect.

This decision resulted in a blistering dissent by Judge Alex Kozinski,, the Court said that "the government power to track the movements of each of us every day in our lives."

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Sherman to follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com / shermancourt