Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers’ personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes.

In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources–including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors’ online behavior–to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads.

At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom (ACXM), privacy advocates and others.

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Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller. Technologist Tim O’Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different–perhaps something more realistic. O’Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation.

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The back-and-forth in Washington over who should run the cybersecurity program for the federal government has reached a fever pitch, as lawmakers, federal agencies and other interested parties jockey for position and budget dollars in the run-up to the release of the results of the Obama administration’s review of cybersecurity operations in the federal government. But perhaps the question isn’t which agency or office should have ultimate authority over cybersecurity, but whether any of them should.

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On March 10, Dan Spatz joined hundreds of other people who crammed into a 500-seat auditorium at the Commerce Dept. building in Washington, D.C. The crowd of executives, entrepreneurs, and local officials had gathered for the first public hearing about how the federal government plans to distribute $7.2 billion in grants and loans to improve broadband Internet access in the U.S.

Spatz, a city official from The Dalles, Ore., took the microphone to ask a relatively simple question: How would the government determine which regions in the country are “unserved,” a critical definition because those areas without broadband service are supposed to take priority under the legislation passed by Congress.

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Everyone knows how well Barack Obama’s presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama’s CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

What is the goverati? It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.

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If there’s any one thing that stands to determine the future of news brands, it is the current debate in Washington over net neutrality legislation. Why is net neutrality so important?

It is the building block of the abundance-based economy on the Internet.

Changing the cost structure of online publishing would allow the larger organizations to, essentially, raise the cost of publishing back to its former level. If it suddenly costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to publish again, then news brands have their monopoly back, and the ad dollars start rolling in.

Let me explain how this works.

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Apple’s highly successful retail stores may be lauded for their sleek modern design and smart layout, but the Georgetown district in Washington, D.C., doesn’t seem to care.

Both the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commission and the Old Georgetown Board, a design committee that must approve designs for all buildings in the historic district, rejected a resubmitted proposal from the Cupertino, Calif., company for the third time earlier this month, according to the Georgetown Current.

Apple announced more than a year ago that it was planning to build a store in Georgetown. Though Apple won’t confirm it, the Old Georgetown Board says the company has a site on Wisconsin Ave. in the heart of the historic district. Apple so far has been unable to come up with a plan that passes the review process.

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It’s difficult to avoid the comparisons between the current sad state of financial affairs and the Great Depression. “This is not like 1987 or 1998 or 2001,” Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain said at a conference on Nov. 11. “We will in fact look back to the 1929 period to see the kind of slowdown we are seeing now.” Time depicted President-elect Barack Obama on its cover as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in Washington, the buzz is all about what the new team will do in its first 100 days. What’s next? Show trials in Moscow?

All this historically inaccurate nostalgia can occasionally make you want to clock somebody with one of the three volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s history of the New Deal. The credit debacle of 2008 and the Great Depression may have similar origins: Both got going when financial crisis led to a reduction in consumer demand. But the two phenomena differ substantially.

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State legislators look at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and other digital download services stealing away business from offline retailers and you know what they see? A piggybank.

News.com reports today that at least nine states this year have considered enacting “download taxes” on digital goods–and five of those states have adopted them, including Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah. Similar laws are already on the books in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

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Plantronics (PLT) this afternoon reported better-than-expected results for its fiscal first quarter ended June, thanks in large part to strong demand for Bluetooth headsets. The demand surge, the company noted, reflected the July 1 adoption of “hands-free” driving laws in California and Washington.

Revenue in the quarter was $219.2 million, above the Street consensus of $209.1 million, and ahead of the company’s guidance of $205 million to $210 million. Non-GAAP profits of 45 cents a share were well ahead of guidance of 33 to 36 cents and the Street at 34 cents.

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I don’t think it should come as much of a surprise that the market is going sideways with an occasional run-up followed by a small collapse, moving along the sand like a crab waiting to get washed out to sea.

Old-timers will say this is because of the uncertainty as to who will be the next president. The technology sector’s particularly vulnerable to this, since none of the three leading candidates is known for tech expertise or appreciation.

Technology needs an Asian candidate or maybe a Swede, or even a white guy from Canada running for president. The three front-runners don’t cut it; I’m not hearing a lot of tech vision from any of them, that’s for sure.

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