I had half forgotten until last week’s Cato forum how much I enjoy a good live debate, but it does invariably mean you spending the next couple days thinking of points you wish you’d made—either because they didn’t occur to you, or because there just wasn’t time to get through everything you scribbled down while […]

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I’m going back over the transcripts from last week’s PATRIOT hearings and still a little gobsmacked by the shameless stupidity of the remarks from grown men who actually get to decide what the law will be.  Remember, this isn’t what they say to the rubes from the stump; it’s how they talk to each other […]

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Last week, the House Judiciary Committee marked up its version of a bill to reauthorize and reform some expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.  Plenty of interesting things happened there, and I’ll write about them elsewhere.  But I want to try to draw some special attention to a rather subtle change I only just […]

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If you tell me there’s a squabble between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my instinct is to side with EFF before I even ask what it’s about.  If you tell me some group is trying to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get a critical website taken down, I’m […]

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So, the video in my previous post—rather half-assedly assembled on a late-night whim in my apartment (and judging by the comments, I should really tidy up said apartment a bit next time such a whim strikes)—seems to have become a whole lot more successful than I’d have thought possible. What I’d love to do in […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Richard Koman at ZDnet on proposed legislation to block FCC net neutrality rules: The amendment is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to assert Congressional control of an executive function. They try to get around this by controlling “expenditures,” and I certainly don’t know the Supreme Court holdings on such approaches, but it seems to me that […]

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If I can amplify a bit on a post at the Cato blog earlier today, I want to clarify that I fully agree some of the ISP behaviors that net neutrality proponents have identified as demanding a regulatory response really are seriously problematic. My point of departure is that I’d rather see if there are […]

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In the context of health care reform, Ilya Somin puts on a brave face and makes the traditional textual case for reading the Commerce Clause as a relatively narrow grant of power to legislate about actual commercial activity occurring across state lines, rather than an infinitely flexible mandate to Do Good so long as some […]

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