I’ve got a quickie overview over at Ars Technica; something more analytic soon.

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Sen. Orrin Hatch just had the balls to denounce “fear-mongering” on the FISA issue. Not, mind you, fear-mongering from the White House, such as the bogus 11th-hour warnings of an attack on Capitol Hill that was used to ensure hasty passage of the Protect America Act. No, that’s cool. Rather, he’s worried about fear-mongering on […]

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The Senate just passed a cloture vote to proceed with consideration of the More Evil version of the FISA amendment bill, by 76-10.

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I survey the coming fight over FISA reform over at Ars Technica. An excerpt: The battle in the Senate over how to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act begins on Monday when, over the objections of prominent Democratic colleagues, Majority Leader Harry Reid will introduce the White House–supported version of a FISA reform bill approved […]

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Reid’s introducing the Intel version of the FISA reform bill. More shortly.

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I meant to link last week to Maia Szalavitz’s solid Prospect article on boot camps for troubled teens.

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If you’re dying to hear me hold forth on FISA and surveillance while I’m on hiatus, I’m going to be on a Center for American Progress panel tomorrow morning with Spencer Ackerman, Caroline Fredrickson from the ACLU, and Nita Chaudhary from MoveOn. Update: Those of you not physically located in Washington, D.C., can watch the […]

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Perhaps you’ve noticed the near-unanimous condemnation of the Protect America Act by people not currently, formerly, or in their fevered daydreams employed by a Republican administration? Fear not! As Andy McCarthy explains, the urgency and consensus with which people are objecting just shows how little weight the objections should be given, as it’s proof that […]

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Nota bene, New Republic: the whole “counterintuitive” shtick has its merits, but it’s sort of cheating when the argument is counterintuitive because obviously wrong. The trick is to run pieces with premises as superficially implausible as Ben Wittes’ lukewarm endorsement of the Protect America Act, but which actually turn out to be at least somewhat […]

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Wired‘s invaluable Threat Level blog has a detailed account of hearings earlier this week to determine whether a pair of lawsuits challenging alleged government wiretapping can continue. Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has a good short summary of the tortuous logic that prompted one judge to announce he felt like a character in Alice in Wonderland. The […]

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