I have a probably excessive analysis over at Cato.

[Read more →]

Addendum: I guess the folks claiming Democrats want to repeal those PATRIOT provisions missed the Senate’s hearings, where Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) says, right around 165 minutes in: Your testimony concludes in very all-or-nothing fashion that the roving wiretap authority, the  215 order authority, and the lone wolf authority should all be continued, should be reauthorized. […]

[Read more →]

Yes, I know I’ve been going on about this nonstop, but humor me, it’s rare enough that I manage to genuinely care about something Congress is doing, and once my soul is crushed on this one, it’ll probably be a while before you have to put up with such a spectacle again.  So for those […]

[Read more →]

Well, this is more than a little dispiriting.  As Kevin Bankston of EFF recounts, this morning’s hearing to mark up Patrick Leahy’s PATRIOT renewal and reform legislation was not flush with good news.  As I outlined over at The American Prospect this morning, and in a post at Cato earlier this week, the hope was […]

[Read more →]

It’s not getting a lot of pickup, but this Thursday’s markup in the Senate Judiciary Committee really could be the single most significant privacy and surveillance event of the Obama administration. There has to be a vote on the renewal of expiring PATRIOT Act provisions.  Thursday will determine whether the renewal legislation is in the […]

[Read more →]

So it looks as though Al Franken reading the Fourth Amendment to DOJ’s David Kris has blown up on lefty and/or privacy-friendly blogs. Look, I appreciate the sentiment, I really do.  I want to see Senators reciting the Fourth Amendment to representatives of the executive branch every time there’s a hearing.  I want them to […]

[Read more →]

With several important provisions of the PATRIOT Act up for renewal before the end of the year, I’m incredibly pleased to see that Russ Feingold has introduced the JUSTICE Act, which is a kind of civil libertarian’s fantasy omnibus bill. It not only reins in the worst excesses of two of the three sunsetting provisions, […]

[Read more →]

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

[Read more →]

Perhaps you caught some of the weekend’s silly fuss over a photo that apparently showed Barack Obama scoping out a callipygous Brazillian teen at a youth conference. If so, you probably also noted that the full video of the scene captured in the picture pretty unambiguously shows that the president was doing no such thing—though […]

[Read more →]

Look, I realize that because Michelle Bachmann is, in fact, completely round-the-bend cuckoobananas, it’s tempting to mock her when she defends her freakout over the census by alluding to the historical use of census data to help round up Americans of Japanese ancestry for internment in World War II. But I’m not sure why it’s […]

[Read more →]