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xI’ve been debating the Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill on the USA PATRIOT Act over at the LA Times all week: You can check out round one and round two, with the final bout scheduled for this afternoon. It’s frankly been a bit frustrating so far—I think it’s telling that PATRIOT defenders are so reluctant [...]

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I’ve got one of a bunch of letters in the Sunday Washington Post objecting to their facile editorial on PATRIOT Act renewal, which weirdly asserted that a “reasonable balance” is struck by a bill that reauthorizes surveillance powers almost unaltered.
My original letter, incidentally, had somewhat more pointedly said that the Post “duly transcribed” the anonymous [...]

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I have a probably excessive analysis over at Cato.

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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 [...]

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And not even resting that much, but as I noted earlier, expect to see a good deal more of my blogging over at Cato@Liberty these days. Here’s a long one on the recent call for more regulation of behavioral ads—which, believe it or not, I only mostly disagree with.

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I’m dating myself with that headline, aren’t I?  Oh well.  The point is, next week, while I try to wrap my head around the prospect of putting on a tie and going into an office every day, I’ll be guesting at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, so check that out.  I’ll probably cross-post some of that stuff [...]

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In case anyone’s interested, I’m joining a bunch of other mostly-political blogger friends who are reading (and writing about) David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer over at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

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Given my recent dramatic increase in free time, the  fine folks at The Economist have invited me back to their (newly Webby award winning!) U.S. politics blog Democracy in America, which you really ought to be reading daily already anyway. This time around, I’m apt to steer clear of the sort of terse horse-racey posts [...]

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Some recent Ars stuff I thought might be interesting to a broader audience: A piece that ran Sunday on Blogger’s oddly opaque policy for dealing with DMCA notices, which seems designed to leave users targeted with C&D takedown notices with too little information to effectively counternotice. Not massively scandalous, but it does seem noteworthy [...]

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