(1) One of my first thoughts upon getting my hands on an iPad was: “You know, once they get a camera in this thing and come up with a well-tailored group video chat client, this could really change the way people socialize.” At present, in-person, face-to-face socialization and digital communication with people not present are [...]

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Reading Orin Kerr’s new paper outlining an “equilibrium-adjustment theory” of the Fourth Amendment, I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly the language of “balancing” pervades our thinking about legal and political judgment. The very words “reasonable” and “rational” are tightly linked to “ratio”—which is to say, to relative magnitude or balance. We hope to make [...]

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Explaining the government’s order seeking Twitter information in the WikiLeaks investigation on The Alyona Show:

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Earlier this week, I learned that the roommate of an old friend of mine—a highly regarded technologist named Bill Zeller—had taken his own life. I didn’t know Bill, but the lengthy and unnervingly lucid and reflective suicide note he posted online may be the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read. In it, he reveals that [...]

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Some of the lyrics to Blur’s “Pressure on Julian” are eerily appropriate to this week’s big story:

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Proof, if proof were needed, that whatever higher power might be steering our fates must be possessed of a perverse sense of humor: I have spent the better part of five years writing about the ways sophisticated electronic surveillance tools, in the hands of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, might pose a threat to privacy [...]

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For those of you who aren’t reading Cato at Liberty (and why not??), I’ve got a longish post over there that looks at a couple of recent law review articles questioning whether it really makes sense to think about the Fourth Amendment primarily in terms of “privacy.” I find myself pretty sympathetic to the argument [...]

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The program of warrantless NSA wiretapping (and data mining) authorized by the president shortly after the 9/11 prompted a flurry of intense debate over its legality when it was disclosed by The New York Times back in 2005. Those arguments have, by now, been so thoroughly rehearsed that there’s not a whole lot new to [...]

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I seem to have been a busy little bee this past week, so for those of you who aren’t following me on Twitter, here’s what I’ve gotten up to instead of, you know, blogging here: In an essay for Newsweek, I argue that Barack Obama should withdraw his threat to veto added GAO oversight of [...]

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