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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With former DHSer Stewart Baker on Wikileaks and intelligence oversight:

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I already linked the C-Span stream of my panel on digital privacy and the urgent need for reforms to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but for those who missed it the first time, here’s a Cato YouTube clip of my portion for your viewing pleasure:

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Here’s Kevin Drum on trading personal information for discounts—at the supermarket and the newsstand: Today, overall supermarket prices are still the same as they’ve always been, they’re just tiered differently: those with cards pay less and those without cards pay more. So on average, consumers haven’t benefited. What’s more, competition is generally fierce in the […]

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The wires are reporting that former senior NSA executive Thomas Drake has been indicted for leaking classified material to a reporter at a national paper. The paper and reporter are unnamed, but we get a date range for the articles published using Drake’s information: late February 2006 through November 2007. I can’t help but notice […]

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Believe it or not, I didn’t pick the headline “The Corrosion of War Without End”—a preposterously obscure quotation from legendary Autobot leader Fortress Maximus (in Marvel Comics’ “Headmasters” #1, 1987):

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It’s always hard to predict the effects of new legislation: Congress can call it a “job creation” bill, but at the end of the day, they’ve got to hope the world cooperates with their good intentions. But for the democratic process to function, legislators at least need to feel reasonably confident that they understand the […]

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I’ve got a longish piece over at The American Prospect that looks at how the Obama administration worked to kill the National Security Letter reforms that Obama once campaigned on—and even borrowed a page from Bush by retroactively reinterpreting the law to excuse systematic illegal surveillance.

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When it’s a carefully-worded statement from Lindy Matsko, the vice principal implicated in the Pennsylvania school webcam spying lawsuit: “At no time have I ever monitored a student via a laptop webcam,” said Matsko, who is in her 25th year working for Lower Merion School District, “nor have I ever authorized the monitoring of a […]

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