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A long New York Times profile this weekend advances the proposition that philosopher Robert P. George—whose work I first encountered back in college—is now “this country’s most influential Christian conservative thinker.” I have my doubts, but to the extent the profile itself helps make the claim more true, that’ll be welcome.  Andrew Sullivan argues—and I […]

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I’ve written about this at some length before, but I want to quickly repeat the point because I keep seeing reader submissions to Andrew Sullivan’s running colloquy on free will that make a point to the effect that, whatever the metaphysical truth of the matter, we all have this “illusion of free will,” and ordinary […]

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I have enough of my own issues to pay attention to, so I’ve been doing my best to scrupulously ignore the running health reform debate, but in this town there are limits to what can be blocked out.  As I understand the current state of play, we will still have a mandate and a “non-discrimination” […]

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It’s something of a cliche among privacy researchers that “anonymity loves company“: Anonymizing mix networks (e.g. Tor) are more secure and more anonymous the more people are using them. Glossing the geekalicious details, the basic idea is lots of different encrypted communications, going to and from lots of different people, get chopped, scrambled, and sent […]

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One more thought about Chris Soghoian’s great post from last week on telecoms and surveillance. The government is able to get an enormous amount of information about your online activity—short of actually reading your e-mails—using tools like National Security Letters and pen/trap orders, which don’t require the showing of “probable cause” required by the Fourth […]

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This is put a bit more bluntly than anything Hayek says, but I do think there’s a strand of it running through some of his arguments: What Rawls doesn’t see is how [a society based on the Difference Principle] would create conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of resentment: in it, I would know that my […]

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John Searle makes a game attempt to give an account—what Nozick would call a “philosophical explanation”—of how there could possibly be free will, of what it would have to look like if there were, in spite of all the familiar problems with the concept. He admits, frankly enough, that it is a loose and sketchy […]

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What can I say, despite myself, I’ve got a soft spot for the old Marxist.

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It’s been a good week for document dumps—especially if you’re interested in surveillance policy. On top of Chris Soghoian’s revelations about telecom location tracking requests and a slew of leaked telecom and social networking site surveillance manuals for law enforcement at Cryptome, I’ve also been poring over the FOIA documents on cell phone lojacking obtained […]

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