I sat through the painful House debates on the FISA deal, so you wouldn’t have to.  My writeup is over at Ars. Possibly my favorite moment of the proceedings is up in the lede:
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” Rep Trent Franks (R-AZ) intoned on the floor of the House of Representatives, purporting to [...]

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One of the things we keep hearing from the apologists for the FISA bill that just passed is that it provides wonderful new protections for Americans abroad. I’m not so sure. (See update—I jumped the gun slightly here.) I’ve run this by some ACLU attorneys I know, who are studying the bill to attempt to [...]

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Really, they’re not that strange anymore: Bob Barr and the American Conservative Union have been working with the American Civil Liberties Union to oppose executive overreach for years now. But the “strange bedfellows” narrative is probably helpful insofar as it helps to puncture the notion that it’s only the “far left” that has a problem [...]

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Democratic leadership wants you to believe the bill that’s about to pass is a compromise.  Which is funny, because here’s what Republicans are saying about it:
Republican leaders described this narrow court review on the immunity question as a mere “formality.”
“The lawsuits will be dismissed,” Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 2 Republican in the [...]

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I allude to it briefly in my Ars piece, but the talking points going around in reply to a New York Times editorial condeming the FISA deal show just how important it is for supporters of the “compromise” that nobody have time to actually read the thing. Here’s what the talking points say:
FISA Legislation now [...]

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I wonder how many hard-line Republicans are going to Google “Operation Chaos” looking for information about Rush Limbaugh’s plan to bolster Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and instead discover that—back in the golden age before we passed that awful, restrictive, un-American FISA law—”Operation Chaos” was the CIA’s clever name for the practice of systematically spying on the [...]

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At the risk of inducing commenters to start demanding “Freebird,” here’s a quick take on Andy McCarthy’s recent NRO column on FISA and border searches. You have to wade through a few paragraphs of talk-radio style throat clearing, in which McCarthy uses his psychic powers to divine that congressional Democrats have blocked expanded executive [...]

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Adam Thierer links a sound post on the way concerns about privacy in the digital context seem inconsistent with our reactions in the physical realm:
Let’s say you are a tall, dashing, smartly dressed Chief Research Officer at a major Internet audience measurement company, and you walk into Nordstrom’s. A sales clerk you recognize comes up [...]

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Last month, I wrote a short piece for the American Spectator in which I argued that the position Republicans have taken on executive-branch spying powers in recent decades is as much a historical accident as a natural outgrowth of conservative principles. I wish that at the time I’d read Kathryn Olmstead’s fine book Challenging the [...]

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When I covered the Republican National Convention in 2004, I kept tabs on the protest actions surrounding the convention via a handy-dandy Twitter-like text blasting service called TXTmob. Now those text messages are being subpoenaed by lawyers for New York City.  The messages themselves were relatively public—I was on the list, after all—and I’d be [...]

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