Tim Lee, writing over at Cato, absolutely explodes a profoundly moronic defense of the Senate FISA bill. Seriously, programmers working on compression algorithms should study this article; it is a work of nearly miraculously dense mendacity, with a ratio of falsehoods to pixels approaching unity. What I really want to second here, though, is not […]

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I heard the following exchange on Morning Edition a couple of hours ago: Renee Montagne: The bush administration says that if the Protect America Act—that’s this surveillance act that’s temporary at the moment—if it isn’t made permanent, it will tie your hands, intelligence hands, especially when it comes to new threats. But isn’t it true […]

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Ars Technica, Democracy in America, Techdirt.

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Perfect.

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…at Ars.

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Cowards.

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I had been meaning to write something more about the way the administration is, even more brazenly than usual, attempting to get its way by manufacturing an intelligence “crisis”—but Slate‘s invaluable Dahlia Lithwick spares me the trouble. The old “ticking time bomb” hypothetical isn’t quite as effective when you’ve planted the bomb yourself.

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I can already hear the talking point: “Even the libertarian Cato Institute thinks the president needs to be able to tap your phone without a warrant…” That will doubtless be the upshot of this phenomenally disappointing Wall Street Journal op-ed by Roger Pilon on the ongoing debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. […]

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Even without FISA reform, police may have an easy means to read your e-mail without a warrant. The full story is over at Ars.

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Got a piece over at Ars Technica on Mike McConnell’s creepy dream of a perfectly-observed Internet.

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