Obama pick for NSA review panel wanted paid, pro-government shills in chat rooms
For context, Cass Sunstein is a prominent law professor (formerly at U Chicago, now at Harvard). He writes a lot about law and economics and also about the mechanics of democracy.<p>He writes a lot about behavioral economics and is a proponent of government mechanics to get people to do the right thing when they would ordinarily fall prey to fallacious reasoning: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_%28book%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_%28book%29</a>.<p>The referenced article arises from the intersection of his interest in democracy and his interest in behavioral irrationalities. Essentially, it asks: "how do you have democracy when lots of people believe nutty irrational things?" E.g. most people, when polled, regularly believe that the U.S. spends > 5% of its budget on foreign aid. They also think that something like half the U.S. population is black and the other half is Hispanic. How do these ideas impact democracy?<p>The article tries to paint him as some scary pro-surveillance type, but he's not. He's no anarco-libertarian--he has a very strong belief in the ability of the state to improve society. But he is a professor and likes to throw out ideas and the paper should be viewed in that context.