I think I’ve written to this effect before, but let me just cast my lot here with Kevin Drum contra Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Whether it’s particularly clever is a matter of taste—I usually find the execution as stale as the concept—but there’s clearly nothing groundbreaking about Stuff White People Like. It’s a species of well-worn yuppie/hipster satire-by-taxonomy that had been beaten into the ground well before Spy stopped publishing. The likes of The Yuppie Handbook and The Hipster Handbook have been staples of airport bookstores and remainder bins for decades. This sort of stuff is David Brooks’ bread and butter, fer chrissakes—which I think automatically disqualifies it as “edgy,” even if the headline vaguely promises some kind of racially subversive message.

This just in from Slate: Many applications and sites on the Interwebs encourage you to upload a headshot or profile picture of some kind! Some people obsessively update theirs, in search of the perfect profile pic. Others remain anonymous by using a humorous or ironic image! Are we sure “Michael Agger” isn’t a pseudonym for John McCain?

Dressing as a suicide bomber for Halloween is offensive! It’s like dressing as a Klansman! Or wearing blackface! How are those analogies remotely related? Shut up and be offended!

I can’t believe it’s still possible for me to find this depressing, but ThinkProgress has an interview with a former U.S. attorney who’s claiming that John Ashcroft was pushed out of the administration because he refused to override the acting AG from his hospital bed in order to authorize warrantless wiretaps. No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

Since I’ve written about this topic at some length in the past, a quick note on John McCain’s recent statement about gay adoption:

I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no I don’t believe in gay adoption.

Now, possibly there’s new or better data since last I looked at this, but my understanding is that this isn’t quite true. What we’ve proven is that both biological parents are important in the success of the family. That is, kids raised by their biological mother and father do, indeed, tend to do better on a whole host of measures than kids raised by single parents or in step-parent families. But especially if you control for the advantages of a second income, adding a second non-biological parent actually delivers pretty negligible benefits, on average, over the single-parent household.

In other words, there’s very good evidence supporting the general proposition that, other things equal, the best family structure is two biological parents. By definition, this is not what you have in cases of adoption. There’s some reason to think it’s better to have a second (non-biological) caretaker than not, but really much less than you might expect. But if we’re not talking about both biological parents, then as far as I’m aware, there is actually no good evidence at all supporting the idea that having one mommy and one daddy, rather than two moms or two dads, gives you any real benefit.

One aspect of the newly-passed FISA law that deserves a bit of extra scrutiny is the amount of pressure it puts on “minimization procedures,” one of the few points of contact between the surveillance program and the FISA court. This is arguably part of a drift we’ve already seen a fair amount of in foreig intel surveillance.

With traditional wiretapping, most of the protection of civil liberties is done up front: Law enforcement marshalls its evidence, shows that there’s probable cause to suspect a particular person or group, shows that there’s reason to expect that they will be using a particular communications facility, shows that the information sought can’t be obtained by ordinary investigative methods, and gets a judge to sign off in advance. For intel surveillance, even under traditional FISA warrants, the rules have always been a little different: You’d get a broader up-front collection mandate, with the understanding that you were probably going to collect a lot of irrelevant information, and then “minimize” that information after the fact, when you had  chance to sort it out and figure out what was important and what wasn’t. And there are good reasons for this: Spies and terrorists often speak in coded language, or just in other languages that can’t be immediately translated.

Still, given that surveillance under the new FISA bill shift almost the whole burden of civil liberties protection to post hoc minimization, it’s worth considering exactly what that means.

Minimization takes place in three stages: Acquisition (filtering what’s kept right at the moment of interception), Retention (what’s saved and what’s discarded—or, as we’ll see, “discarded”), and Dissemination. Acquisition is allowed to be pretty broad. At the “retention” stage, the rules are similarly loose. A recent FISC opinion describes the applicable standard:

The most critical step in retention is the analysis in which an informed judgment is made as to whether or not the communications or other data seized is foreign intelligence information. To guide FBI personnel in this deterinination the Standard Minimization Procedures for U.S. Person Agent of a Foreign Power in Section 3.(a)(4) Acquisition/Intereeption/Monitoring and Logging provide that “communications of or concerning United States persons that could not be foreign intelligence information or are not evidence of a crime . . . may not be logged or summarized.” (emphasis added). Minimization is required only if the information “could not be” foreign intelligence. Thus, it is obvious that the standard for retention of FISA-acquired information is weighted heavily in favor of the government.

Given the assumption that intelligence targets do not just openly say things like: “So, the bombing is on for next Tuesday, right?” there is probably not a whole lot that could not be foreign intelligence information—and even here, evidence of a crime can be retained whether or not it its related to foreign intelligence.

Even here, though, “retention” does not mean what you probably think it means. Apparently, at least as recently as a few years ago, intercepted information was considered “retained” if it was logged and indexed for easy retrieval. It could be considered “minimized” if not logged, even if a raw recording or copy of the intercept was kept. Bear in mind that while, at the time of FISA’s passage, it was probably true that failure to log a recording rendered it inacessible for practical purposes, the NSA and other agencies have extremely sophisticated search software for both text and audio. A table of contents is less important if you can Google.

David Kris and Doug Wilson, in their absolutely invaluable book National Security Investigations and Prosecutions discuss a 2003 case, U.S. v. Sattar.  In that case, they write, over the course of extended FISA surveillance of a group of targets, “approximately 5,175 pertinent voice calls .. were not minimized.”  But when it came time for the discovery phase of a criminal trial against those targets, the FBI “retrieved and disclosed to the defendants over 85,000 audio files … obtained through FISA surveilance.”  That is, though these communications were “minimized,” when faced with the legal duty to cough up what they had, the FBI was still able to pull up the full records. Let me boldface this part, because it’s pretty important: Just because a communication has been “minimized” doesn’t mean it’s not being kept.

At the dissemination stage, agencies are supposed to redact identifying information of U.S. persons except when necessary to make sense of foreign intelligence information or when it constitutes evidence of a crime. One potential issue here is that given the government’s broad and continuing data mining, there’s at least a reasonable question to be raised as to whether the likely identity of one party to a communication could be pinpointed without enormous effort if the agency receiving a redacted transcript has access to those capabilities.

Now, minimization is great, and as I say above, there are solid reasons why intelligence surveillance probably needs to shift some oversight and checks from the front-end to the back-end, relative to Title III criminal wiretapping. But it is not a substitute for front-end oversight, and certainly not if we now have the capacity to do truly mass-scale acquisition and filtering.

Assuming those of you who are regular readers tend to get something or other out of my scribblings for various venues, do any of you have an opinion as to which of the following two focuses over, say, the next 1-2 years would generate more value added?

• Daily, hard-ish journalism focusing on a few specific topic areas, though with a healthy dose of analysis and commentary. Clarification: When I say “journalism,” I don’t mean “news analysis”; I mean actual reporting.
• Less frequent, less journalistic, but longer and probably more analytic writing on a broader range of topics—possibly even a book.

For the moment, never mind why I’m asking. I’m just curious if people who tend to like/tolerate my writing have opinions about which is a better use of my time, and if so, what their reasons are.

Update: I should add that this is less a question about what I should do on this blog and more a question about, let’s say, the kind of writing I should be doing in general—primarily elsewhere.

For those of you sick of reading me babble on about the FISA amendments, here’s the summary in pictures.

Since the previous post is long and a little technical, I want to pull out one point more succinctly. When Congress amended FISA in the years after 9/11 to allow for “roving” wiretaps, they made some other balancing changes in the law. In particular, since FISA orders can be granted based on a description of a target whose name is not known, Congress added the word “specific”—a FISA application must contain a description of the “specific” target. And they did this because once you let the tap “rove”—once you let intelligence agencies determine on the fly what phone or email or computer the target is using today—there’s the worry that the tap can “rove” to any communication channel being used by anyone meeting the description. Hence “specific,” meaning “you’ve got be talking about some particular person or group, not just stipulating the general characteristics that make anyone subject to surveillance.”  Congress recognized this as a potential problem, and made a point of inserting that word in 2006, to address it.

The very same legislators crafted the FISA amendments that have just been signed into law. Presumably, they all remembered inserting the word “specific” just two years earlier, and they remembered the reason why. The new FISA amendments do not contain that word.  Why?