The Economist:

Wiretaps, which have increased almost tenfold since data was first reported in 1969, are only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. In 2011 federal and state courts approved a total of 2,732 wiretaps; but government agencies made over 1.3m requests for data to mobile-phone companies. That figure includes wiretaps and pen/traps, but it also includes requests for stored text messages, device locations and tower dumps, which reveal the presence of everyone—suspects and not—within range of a particular mobile-phone tower at a particular time. Most of these requests require no warrants at all. Sometimes all it takes is a subpoena from a prosecutor.

Internet companies have also seen a sharp rise in requests from law-enforcement agencies for information about their users. Between July and December 2010 Google received 4,601 requests; in the same period last year that number jumped to 6,321. Among the things that Google is typically asked for are account information and location data. Twitter, a microblogging service, received 679 requests from American authorities for information about users in the first half of this year, which is more than it got in all of 2011. The firm says it complied with three-quarters of these requests, though it does not say whether it handed over all or simply a fraction of the information requested in each case. Google, which says it complied with 93% of the requests from American officials in its most recent reporting period, is similarly vague about what it coughs up.

Dan Chung:

2012 has been the year that smartphones have started to dominate the world of still photography. Kodak has fallen apart, the cheap digital camera market is in decline, Facebook has offered $1 billion for Instagram. How would a smartphone camera in the hands of a professional photographer perform during this year’s biggest sporting event?

Charles Murray:

The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.

“Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole” is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements “earned success.” Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.

Evgeny Morozov:

The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms. With their never-ending talk of Twitter revolutions and the like, techno-globalists such as Khanna have a bright future ahead of them.

John Torinus:

Health care inflation in the Milwaukee area has dropped from double-digit to single-digit percentages, and there’s no big mystery why.

There is a thundering stampede in the private sector toward real reforms of the failed business model for the delivery of health care. It’s reform from the bottom up versus mandates from the mandarins in Washington D.C. It’s all about pragmatic solutions to the root cause problem: costs that have screamed upward for four decades.

The telling statistics are spelled out in the 10th rendition of HCTrends, an analysis put together by Pewaukee-based Benefits Services Group that probes Milwaukee area health care delivery. The increases in 2012 are expected to be in the 5% to 7% range, compared to a high point of 17% in 2004 and 8% to 10% in 2011. That’s huge progress.

Catch the scene above the Duomo via this fourth panorama.

I was inspired to post these scenes after reading Machiavelli – S.P.Q.F. @ exurbs.com (Via Jasper Janssen and Horace Dediu). Florence was a wonderful place to simply wander.