It started with an open window. Stumbling from my bedroom in my typical bleary, pre-caffinated state Tuesday morning, I was befuddled to feel a blast of cold air blowing through a gaping living room window that I had no recollection of having opened the night before. But I shut it, shrugged, and proceeded to shower and dress. It was only a bit later, hunting about with increasing frustration for my wallet and shoulder bag—hadn’t I left them right on my desk chair?—that I noticed the depressing rectangle of pristine black lacquer in the thin patina of dust covering the base of my television stand. It was a precisely Playstation-sized rectangle. I could be quite certain of this because I had, until just a few hours earlier, been the owner of one.

I’d always taken a measure of comfort in my buiding’s position on the edge of a moderately busy traffic circle—exposed enough, I thought, to deter most prospective burglars. Unfortunately, the local power company had been doing some work—protracted far beyond the initial estimate—upgrading our electric hookup, with two unfortunate consequences. First, their digging had left a mound of packed dirt outside a window normally a bit too high for the average person to easily reach. Second, they’d stretched an enormous tarpaulin over the work area to guard against rain—with the side effect that anyone perched under the window on that mound of dirt could now take the time to force it open without making too much of a spectacle of themselves. So thank you, Pepco.

The police arrived and duly dusted for fingerprints, but I wasn’t holding out any hope of recovering anything until it occurred to me a few hours later that the PS3 is, after all, a network device with a unique MAC address—and a lot of the cool stuff you can do with it requires connecting it to a network. A little Googling and, sure enough, Sony has the capability, at the request of law enforcement, to flag a stolen system using the serial number (which I still had on the original box) and record the IP address from which it’s connected—even if the thieves (or an unwitting buyer) wipe the machine and try to create a new account. From there, you’re a mere subpoena away* from getting a physical address from the Internet Service Provider. The folks I spoke to at MPD hadn’t encountered this approach before—Sony doesn’t seem to advertise it too widely, perhaps because they’d prefer I just bought another PlayStation—but seemed willing to look into it. Which means, I suppose, that spending as much time as I do thinking about the ways people can be tracked online could wind up having some direct practical benefit.

Another trackable bit of tech the thieves made off with was the SmarTrip card in my wallet. It was only Wednesday morning that I got around to e-mailing the good folks at Metro to ask them to cancel my card and send a replacement. Might one of the crooks have tried to use it?—I wondered. Well, it turned out someone had—and Metro was able to tell me the precise minute that person swiped themselves in at the Van Ness station, and then swiped themselves out at the Shaw station. And come to think of it, didn’t I read just about a year ago that WMATA had gotten a grant to begin installing surveillance cameras on buses and at Metro stations? How many people could there be swiping in and out at those precise stations, at those precise times, on a Tuesday afternoon in November? A comparison of any footage that exists from the two Metro stations at the time the card was used could yield at least a fuzzy image of the person who used it—quite likely the burglar.

I passed all this information on to the police—though all along with that scene from The Big Lebowski playing in my head: “Oh sure, I’ll just check with the boys down at the crime lab… they got us working in shifts!” Police in Washington DC, after all, have plenty of more serious crimes to worry about. Still, there has been a recent spate of burglaries, car break-ins, and muggings in my neighborhood—and plenty of locals believe it’s one or two groups of people responsible for most of them. If their little spree continues, sooner or later they’re likely to break into a lighter sleeper’s home, at which point it’s not a great stretch to think someone might end up getting hurt. So I’m hoping they may decide that finding the culprits is worth more hassle than my isolated burglary alone would merit.

So there you have it. In part because I spend my days thinking about the creepy potential of modern surveillance technologies—and warning against the potential harms of going too far with them—I now find myself hoping the DC police are prepared to go further down that avenue than seems to be customary for a garden variety burglary. If it does manage to get my PS3 back, though, I’ll be willing to love Big Brother just this once.

* I originally wrote “a §2703(d) order away”—that’s the catchall provision covering non-content communications records, and requiring an application to a judge advancing “specific and articulable facts.” But on second thought, the only records the police would really need in practice—the device IP from Sony and the service address from the ISP—are classed as “basic subscriber records” under 18 USC §2703(c)(2), so a mere subpoena should suffice. If I wrote the laws, I’d probably actually want the higher standard to apply to much of that info because of the potential First Amendment implications of revealing the identities of anonymous speakers, though obviously in this case either would be readily met.

But inside the world of many ideological magazines, think tanks, foundations, and other intellectual movement operations, a different dynamic takes hold. The overlap between colleagues and friends, already more pronounced in Washington, D.C. than any other city I’ve observed, is intensified by the fact that standards of loyalty are complicated. It is expected, if lamentable, that ideological movements label fellow travelers to be betrayers of the cause, or useful idiots, on certain occasions when they engage in honestly held disagreement. Even more insidious, however, is the notion that by criticizing someone’s book, or questioning the findings of their research, or calling out their employer, one is betraying a friend, or even an entire circle of friends.

So, two things. First, to the extent he’s describing a real problem, I think it’s a problem with ideological movements and the discipline they impose, not really with mere social relations. People get attacked for betraying the team regardless of whether any of the parties to some particular disagreement also happen to know each other personally. Second, if the problem is these social ties, then I’d think it would be a problem whether or not folks are physically concentrated. Conor and I did not, I hope, stop being friends when he moved out of DC. To really avoid the putative problem, you’d have to cut your social ties with other political writery types wherever they might be. As for myself, I think it’s a tremendous benefit that, on top of our more formal written exchanges, Conor and I used to be able to hash out our ideas on the porch over a couple beers now and again. I’m sure my thinking and writing would be far worse if I were to cut myself off from that kind of conversation.

Now, maybe Conor’s not so much worried about actual friends, but rather these loose acquaintances. And I just don’t think it’s that big a deal. Like Conor, I’ve written some sharp and snarky things about Michael Goldfarb. Like Conor, I occasionally bump into him through mutual acquaintances at a bar or whatnot. And you know what? It’s just not an issue. I lose exactly no sleep over the prospect of having to make small talk with some friend-of-a-friend I called a moron last week. It is, as they say, all in the game.

When we’re talking about actual friends, as opposed to folks you might see around now and again, I think there’s probably an effect, but I think it’s almost entirely limited to tone. I disagree in print with real-life friends (and, for that matter, coworkers) pretty much constantly. It’s honestly never occurred to me that it would be a problem to take a hammer to a friend’s argument because, hell that’s what we do. Now, it’s true I’ll probably refrain from really tearing into a good friend. (And I hope that, by the same token, I’d never find myself on the wrong end of the tone Matt Yglesias reserves for Jonah Goldberg, even if I’d written something incredibly dumb.) But is that really a problem? Is our political discourse really plagued by a stultifying reluctance to be vicious and snarky to folks you disagree with? If, as I think, the effect of social ties is mostly to make us a little more charitable in interpretation and a little more respectful in disagreement, well, that’s a feature, not a bug.

There is this idea among movement conservatives—especially the rank-and-file—that Washington DC journalism is populated by a lot of disingenuous, careerist sell outs. These elites write to enrich themselves, to inflate their sense of self-importance, and to garner social capital, invariably measured by invitations to the dread “Georgetown cocktail party.” Thus they are unconcerned with truth, intellectual honesty, or the actual interests of anyone outside the New York to DC corridor.

This narrative is largely true! Anyone who pays close attention to DC journalism can easily spot intellectually dishonest hacks writing stuff they don’t actually believe, whether to advance their careers or to further a political agenda by the most cynical means imaginable. A blogger could write five posts a day fisking political journalism that is either astonishingly ignorant or disingenuous – and a Washington DC journalist doesn’t have to attend very many happy hours to hear people basically admit that they are hacks who don’t actually believe significant parts of their oeuvres. What vexes me, having observed this game over the last couple years, is that the people accused of being inside-the-beltway sellouts are often the folks who write exactly what they believe; whereas the kinds of publications that rank-and-file conservatives revere for “never selling out” actually do so all the time.

Conor has some examples, and that old post suggests some of the reasons this might be so. The guy at that cocktail party laughingly acknowledging that his last column is a load of crap designed to placate or pander to either the base or allies on the Hill is a lot more likely to be the guy movement types admire as a principled purist than the one they deride as a sellout XINO. And in a way, this is sort of predictable. Over a large number of issues, a thoughtful person applying shared principles to a particular debate or fact pattern is all but guaranteed to sometimes interpret those principles in a different way from the consensus, and so come out at odds with the orthodox movement/party position. Just as being perfectly average in every way is actually quite remarkable,  agreeing with the party-line view every single time as the upshot of serious, honest, independent consideration is actually pretty wildly improbable in the aggregate, even if you assume the same underlying value set. Reasonable people not only can differ, as the saying goes; they do, constantly. But if readers assume—maybe this is a sort of ideological strict constructionism—that different people applying the same broad principles will converge on the same, obviously and uniquely correct, political or policy conclusion, then the only way to seem perfectly principled is to be a perfect hack.

I think the paradox arises, not because readers are blinkered, but because normal people don’t actually have the time, energy, and information to formulate their own position on each of the myriad issues out there after serious, honest, independent consideration. I mean, God knows I don’t: There’s a handful of issues I know well, and a bunch more where I trust people who seem both smart and simpatico. In an area where you’re outsourcing, it’s especially easy to conclude that the general consensus view is therefore the uniquely, obviously principled one. More so when the outsourcers in the base adopt the consensus view held at the outset by, say, 60 or 70 percent of the pundits, and suddenly it’s the overwhelming majority view of the “movement” as a whole. Perversely, people then forget that the consensus itself was originally substantially elite-driven, and dismiss the dissenters as out-of-touch elites. Psychologists call this an information cascade, and while cascades have their uses, they’re probably especially unhealthy for a movement whose current trajectory is toward increasing marginalization.

Based on a cursory scan, most of the people in the database seem to have committed truly vile acts—rape or sexual assault or child molestation. But there are a significant minority who—reading between the lines, using the rather vague wording of the offenses and the relevant ages of perpetrator and victim—basically seem to fall in the category of “young 20-something who had some kind of sexual contact, possibly consensual, with a 15-year-old.” Now, I have no problem with the state deterring and punishing that conduct, but I do wonder whether it’s wise to permanently and publicly group those people with violent rapists. A college student dating a high school girl may be displaying questionable judgment, but I’m not sure he’s therefore a danger to anyone else’s children 20 years later. Of course, the concerned parent can just pull up the rap sheet and see who’s guilty of what, but some states employ particularly confusing terminology: Florida’s legal system apparently classes age-inappropriate sexual contact as “lascivious battery.”

Many other cases are similarly unclear. I don’t know about you, but in my mind, the words “misdemeanor” and “sexual abuse” do not belong together—certainly not in a case involving a man in his 50s and a victim of 13. Yet there they are juxtaposed on my neighbor’s rap sheet. What exactly does that mean? Was that a conviction at trial or a plea? How dangerous should a concerned parent consider this guy?

That sort of uncertainty highlights a point legal scholar Jeff Rosen likes to make: Loss of privacy tends to cascade, because when one piece of information is exposed, it may require further disclosures to put it into context. In the case of sex offenders, of course, the privacy interests of the victims will often limit the amount of detail it’s advisable to put online, since a description of circumstances may well be enough to identify the victim to people who know the offender.

That aside, I’d be fascinated to see whether putting this information online actually has any other measurable effects. When registries are easily searchable, to neighborhoods with higher concentrations of sex offenders see relative declines in propety values? Lower rates of school registration? Does that accellerate such clustering by reducing the number of landords willing to rent to registered offenders? If we’ve got any social science grad students reading, this sounds like an easy road to a potential blockbuster paper.

As James Joyner notes, protests are generally pretty ineffective, and these seem likely to be, if anything, unusually counterproductive. At any rate, signs demanding Obama’s birth certificate or endeavoring to remind him that this is a “Christian nation” don’t bode well, even if they’re unrepresentative. Even without them, it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the conservatives jumping on the bandwagon now weren’t nearly as exercised about exploding spending under Bush, bolstering the perception that this has less to do with any principle than with partisan animus—and desperation. Finally, it seems a little tone deaf to claim the mantle of revolutionary resistance to colonial government when your actual beef is with the scope of an elected administration’s borrowing and spending.

Still, I think Andrew Sullivan puts it a bit too strongly when he suggests that it’s pointless to complain about excessive spending unless you’ve got a detailed notion of what you want to cut. It probably makes sense to stress that there’s popular discontent with  a general lack of fiscal restraint, rather than with any particular set of budget items. Certainly there’s no coherent policy program detectable at these rallies, but a big public demonstration doesn’t seem like a terribly good venue for laying that out anyway. If events like these serve any useful function—my suspicion is that they don’t, but one lives in hope—it’s in moving people from anger to engagement, preparing the ground for more useful and targeted activism down the road. I’m waiting for signs they’re actually moving people past the “anger” stage.

That said, most of the anti-teabagger venting I’ve watched unfold over the past 48 hours has been as grating as anything at the events themselves. When it first debuted a decade ago, the “Billioinaires for…” schtick seemed sort of clever. But the thing about satire, as with most other sorts of humor, is that it tends not to age well: That knee-slapper of a joke loses some impact after the ninth or tenth time you tell it, and this one is years past its sell-by date.  In this case, it doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense: To the extent there’s a theme beyond animus for Obama at these protests, it’s populist indignation about massive government handouts to corporate America, a point on which I’d expect these tuxedoed college kids to be on more or less the same page as the middle- and working-class folks they’re mocking.

The big Twitter-meme for the day seemed to be progressives countering the teabaggers by listing all the reasons they’re just absolutely giddy about paying taxes, proving that for every action, there is an opposite and equally vapid reaction. Popular items: Paving roads! Less popular: Cluster-bombing third world countries! Sure, this is the flip-side of the point they like to throw at the protesters: You weren’t complaining when it was Bush’s out-of-control spending. (Some  of them probably were, of course, but Fox News wasn’t screaming “socialism.”) But it’s not actually any more substantive a contribution than “taxes, bad!” I can think of plenty of government spending I’m in favor of. Give me a moderate tax bill that goes to fund the provision of important public goods the market won’t supply and I’ll pay it with a smile. But especially if you’re going to poke fun at the crudeness of teabagger slogans, you might think twice about circulating zingers like “I pay my taxes because I don’t know how to pave roads myself.” (Is that the criterion for government action now? I don’t know how to make an iPod either.) Even if taxes reached a level that everyone agreed was ruinously excessive, some of that money would be spent on things of some value. This is just the leftish equivalent of: “So, you’d rather have Saddam, huh?”

Finally, there’s the “astroturfing” charge. Now, on a gut check, this thing does feel pretty manufactured, and there’s no question that Fox News and a handful of well-funded DC conservative groups were pushing this pretty hard. Whether they were jumping on a bandwagon or cooked up the whole notion in some backroom months ago I have no idea. But the photos of the rallies I saw also seemed a hell of a lot less slickly produced than, say, an ANSWER-organized peace march. The signs looked homemade rather than prefab, and most of the attendees looked like the sort of relentlessly ordinary folks who don’t make a habit of attending the protest du jour. Liz Mair has a fairly persuasive rundown of reasons to think there’s something genuine there, notwithstanding the role of Fox or FreedomWorks. Short version: A top-down orchestrated campaign would have been a lot better orchestrated.

Come to think of it, maybe there’s something to be said for that.  If people are worked up enough to turn out on behalf of fiscal restraint, they may as well do it strategically, and with more coherent talking points. And while inchoate anger about “taxes” or “big government” may not get you too far, channelling it into more specific policy debates—especially at the local level, where a few hundred people with a few hours a month to spare can actually make a difference—might. Not that I’m holding my breath: The right has spent the last year desperately careening from one gimmick to another. I’m betting this is just the latest in a series destined to keep growing for some time.

Addendum: Yeah, that last line was unfair: As organizer Peter Corbett notes, there are only so many places in DC that can host 2,000 carousers for an evening. My snark is aimed at the venue, not the event.

As long as I’m amplifying, though, let me offer up a more general rule of thumb: the Poochie Principle. The Poochie Principle holds that the extent to which the marketing material for a place or product feels compelled to browbeat you with assertions that it is “sophisticated” or “cutting-edge” or “stylish” or “hip” varies inversely with its actual manifestation of any of these traits. Note that the single most common place to find 3 or more of these adjectives in conjunction appears to be in condo listings.

Biggest misconception about pundits: That we all hang out together. I don’t know any of these people. Maybe all the pundits are hanging out and not inviting me. […]

By her bed: Comic books. I read comics sometimes and graphic novels. I appreciate that genre.

So, actually, lots of us do all hang out, and you’re totally invited next time you’re in DC. You can borrow the phenomenal new book by Nate Powell I just picked up at the Small Press Expo.