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.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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_%28book%29.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?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.