During her six years as Citizens’ CFO, she conceived or supported several initiatives aimed at shoring-up the corporation’s finances and spreading its risk to the global capital and reinsurance markets, rather than relying on its authority to impose assessments (taxes) on essentially every Floridian to make up for the deficits it would inevitably incur after a sufficiently bad hurricane season.

The resistance many of her proposals encountered from some legislators and so-called “consumer advocates” meant some were never approved or adopted.  But those that were have yielded positive results for Citizens, and by extension, the state’s taxpayers.

These include brokering take-out agreements between Citizens, state regulators and private companies that over the past several years transferred more than 430,000 Citizens policies and their enormous risk from taxpayers onto the private market.  This has resulted in an overall estimated decrease of 47 percent in potential post-hurricane taxes.

Binnun has also been a strong advocate of private risk transfer as a means to strengthen Citizens’ finances and reduce the likelihood or severity of post-hurricane taxes.  From 2006 through 2010, Citizens’ sole source of reinsurance coverage was the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, another state-owned entity that also has the ability to impose taxes if it runs out of money.  In 2011, Citizens started to wean itself off the taxpayer-backed Cat Fund by purchasing similar coverage from the private reinsurance market. And last year, Binnun brokered the single largest catastrophe reinsurance bond issuance in history, raising Citizens’ profile as a player in global capital markets, and Binnun’s, as well.

But her impressive negotiations with the world’s leading reinsurance brokers came at a price.  Back home in Florida, Citizens was being lambasted in the media for excessive travel expenses.  The media seized on this, especially since the Citizens Board and staff were exploring ways to increase its rates to shore-up the organization’s finances and to accelerate the depopulation process.

It is a reality of the global reinsurance business that executives not infrequently need to travel to London, Zurich, and Bermuda to secure those contracts on the best possible terms. These trips helped Citizens to improve the costs of its protection, saving millions for its own policyholders, as well as the those of private carriers subject to its assessments. These facts have been under-reported, at best.

Binnun was dragged over the coals for spending $73 at dinner in London (which actually sounds like a deal, given the conversion rate); for a $100 hotel upgrade in Bermuda to include breakfast, access to the Internet and use of the office center (not the spa); and for choosing to arrive in Bermuda two days early rather than fly all the way back to Tallahassee from Europe, stay a day, and then fly to Bermuda in time for additional negotiations. Her chosen arrangement actually wound up saving money on airfare for needless, multi-leg flights.

But in politics, perception is reality. The narrative was easy to exploit, so the media and politicians did so relentlessly.  Opponents of Citizens reform used it to demagogue any attempts to raise Citizens’ artificially-suppressed rates. Politicians called for investigations. And so on.

So indeed, it is unsurprising that one of the world’s most coveted insurance executives would opt to transfer to the more lucrative and hassle-free private sector.  Luckily for Florida, she leaves Citizens Property Insurance Corp. substantially better off in just about every measurable way.

But the positive changes she instituted and the deals she negotiated won’t remain in effect forever. Now it’s up to Citizens’ board to find a replacement who will continue Binnun’s commitment to spreading risk abroad, rather than concentrating it; reducing the size of Citizens; and relying less on a taxpayer bailout.

Given her commitment to these issues, her institutional knowledge, and the millions of dollars Florida has saved from her expertise as a global reinsurance negotiator, the board has a tough job ahead.

Yesterday, the Guardian released a comprehensive poll showing widespread concern about NSA spying. Two-thirds of Americans think the NSA’s role should be reviewed. The poll also showed Americans demanding accountability and more information from public officials—two key points of our recently launched stopwatching.us campaign.

But there’s more. So far, Gallup has one of the better-worded questions, finding that 53% of Americans disapprove of the NSA spying. A CBS poll also showed that a majority—at 58%—of Americans disapprove of the government “collecting phone records of ordinary Americans.” And Rasmussen—though sometimes known for push polling—also recently conducted a poll showing that 59% of Americans are opposed to the current NSA spying.

Many of my libertarian friends constantly lament that they’re fighting a losing war for our civil liberties, and that the public will cave on this (one friend even suggests that they’re actively looking for a reason to forget it already!) As we can see, though, the majority of Americans don’t feel that way, and I don’t think they’ll forget this quite that easily.

Many Americans, especially young Americans, are tech-savvy, concerned about their privacy, and are creeped out by some dude in a data center knowing every little bit of data about them–data that is actually in some cases more dangerous than the content of your phone calls.

There is still a lot to do–at least 41% of Americans are either okay with the program or undecided about it–but it seems clear to me: Americans will not take this one lying down.

What gives?

It all comes back to supply and demand. There is a lot of demand for mobile data bandwidth in our increasingly wi-fi world. (Cisco Systems estimates a 13-fold increase by 2017. That’s right; the amount of data we’ll use in just 4 years will go up 13 times.) Unfortunately, there isn’t as much supply as we would like, hence the rise in prices.

Part of this is because a huge chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum in America is owned by the government. Brent Skorup over at the Technology Liberation Front notes that the government owns around 1500 Mhz of the spectrum, valuable bands that mobile carriers can use to move your data when you want it. (Naturally, the NSA would love a peek.) In 2010, President Obama directed government agencies to free up a third of that spectrum for consumers to use instead.

So far, that hasn’t been going quite well; namely, the Pentagon believes it must have all its spectrum in the name of national security, while other agencies have been digging in their heels as well.

Skorup suggests we take one of two proposals: either a GSA-like entity that would lease the spectrum to government agencies, thus forcing them to economize by actually having to pay for it, or a BRAC-style agency that would go through and clear out the spectrum for use by consumers. I prefer the latter option; the GAO has noted that the government is using its spectrum quite poorly, and I don’t see how the spectrum GSA would function any better than the original.

Congress instructed the FCC to also conduct incentive auctions, buying out private broadcasters to free up spectrum, then selling it again. (Note, this isn’t the digital version of eminent domain; the government will only buy the spectrum at rates the broadcasters agree to.) The idea is that the spectrum will be more valuable for mobile data than for TV broadcasts, which seems likely.

However, the FCC is going about it the wrong way, contemplating banning Verizon and AT&T from participating in the auction of certain spectrum blocks. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Freezing out the two largest carriers is, first, not fair, and second, gets the government involved in picking winners and losers.

Supposedly, the argument is that if Verizon and AT&T expand their spectrum holdings, T-Mobile, Sprint and other small carriers won’t be able to expand their networks. That’s doesn’t seem right. If AT&T and Big Red do a terrible job managing their networks and fail to provide their customers the services they want, said customers will switch to other networks, bringing increased revenue to the smaller players. That will certainly allow T-Mobile, Sprint and others to build out their networks, even potentially buying spectrum licenses from the bigger players. And if AT&T and Verizon treat their customers well, then those customers will be glad they have the extra spectrum to handle their data traffic. The FCC should let everyone participate to make sure consumers get their money’s worth.

In any case, demand is gradually outstripping supply in the spectrum market. If we’re going to avoid sky-high mobile plan costs, we’ll have to free up as much spectrum as we can.

“Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.”

There’s no doubt about that. Last year, the Small Business Administration commissioned a study of the impact of immigrant businesses and found that immigrants, on average, are more likely to start and own a business than non-immigrants. It found that 10.5 percent of the immigrant workforce owned a business, compared to just 9.3 percent of the non-immigrant workforce; it also found that about 620 out of 100,000 immigrants who do not currently own a business start one each month, while among non-immigrants the number is far lower, at only 280. (Fairlie 2012)

Furthermore, a year before that, it was reported that half of all venture capital start-ups had at least one immigrant founder. These are companies that have gone on to deliver impressive services and create new jobs here in the United States. Why should we be turning these people out? They’re exactly what we need to jump-start this sluggish economy.

Jeb Bush is exactly right when he says that immigrants “create an engine of economic prosperity.” After all, America is a nation built by immigrants, and look at the prosperity we’ve had for more than 200 years.

The British bureaucrats justified their decision:

“Our research has shown that existing electronic cigarettes and other nicotine-containing products on the market are not good enough to meet this public health priority [i.e., "reducing the harms of smoking to smokers and those around them"]… Our investigations also found that the amount of nicotine per product differs from batch to batch, so this casts doubt on how useful these products are to people who want to cut down or to stop smoking.”

While the government says it is acting “so that people using these products have the confidence that they are safe, are of the right quality and work,” the need for added regulation is questionable.  The government’s own press release confirms the popularity of available e-cigarettes, which could be seen as consumer confidence, noting that “their use has grown rapidly with an estimated 1.3 million people using them in 2013.”

Clive Bates, former director of Action on Smoking and Health UK, strongly criticized the regulators on his blog:

“They want to substitute their own view of ‘efficacy’ (what works) for the consumers’ view.  Markets work by people buying the good products and the poor products failing, not by regulators deciding what works.”

Bates provides nine other reasons why this decision is a “bad idea.”  His must-read blog is available here.

According to the government release, “smoking is the biggest single cause of avoidable death – killing 80,000 people in England each year.”  Regulation of e-cigarettes as medicines is likely to limit or eliminate the availability of these popular and far safer smoking alternatives.  Removing them from the marketplace only encourages smokers to continue smoking, making the U.K. government a culpable enabler of this deadly habit.

E-cigarettes are recreational tobacco products, not medicines.  They should be regulated accordingly.  The only consolation is that there will be five to ten million British e-cigarette users in 2016, a formidable political force that may not tolerate a regulatory barrier to the continued supply of these life-saving products.