James Risen:

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

George Bush, in February 2008:

First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

We're having a debate in America on whether or not we ought to be listening to terrorists making phone calls in the United States. And the answer is darn right we ought to be.

Decius, in February 2007:

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Decius, in February 2009:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort.

Noam Cohen's friend, in February 2009:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius, in March 2009:

We are very close to the point where the 4th amendment will be an anachronism - a technicality that has very little impact on everyday life - and a radical reconsideration will be necessary in order to re-establish it.

Decius, in August 2008:

Don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Jello, in June 2009:

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from.

Decius, in March 2009:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Rivest, Schneier, Bellovin, Applebaum, Cranor, Cheswick, Soghoian, Spafford, Lynn (!), Moss, Neumann, et al:

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

The signatories of this letter are researchers and academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law. We write to you today to express our concern that many users of Google's cloud-based services are needlessly exposed to an array of privacy and security risks. We ask you to increase users' security and privacy protection by enabling by default transport-level encryption (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs and Calendar, a technology already enabled by default for Google Voice, Health, AdWords and AdSense.

As a market leader in providing cloud services, Google has an opportunity to engage in genuine privacy and security leadership, and to set a standard for the industry.

Extent of E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

So where exactly does Sotomayor stand on the multifaceted issues of free speech? These are the kinds of questions one hopes will be explored in the Senate's confirmation process

Harvey Silverglate joins the chorus calling for examination of Sotomayor's views on the First Amendment.

The Phoenix - Sotomayor's mixed message on free speech

In December, as Nortel moved toward Bankruptcy, they asked employees if they would participate in a "voluntary layoff" - accept a severance package and voluntarily leave their jobs in order to cut company costs. Many thousands did. In January, Nortel declared Bankruptcy, and promptly stopped payment on all of those severance packages. Basically, when Nortel offered those severance packages they were lying.

This ranks as one of the most brazen examples of corporate malfeasence during this crisis. Of course, these executives continue to pay themselves multi-million dollar bonus packages, during bankruptcy, while maintaining that they cannot afford to pay the severance packages they offered to former employees. When the Canadian Parliament asked them to explain this, they refused.

OTTAWA - The chief executive officer of Nortel Networks Corp. will be ordered to appear before a House of Commons committee Thursday...

The House of Commons standing committee on finance had invited CEO Mike Zafirovski and others to appear before it, along with representatives of pensioners and employees, but Nortel declined that invitation earlier this week...

MPs, though, cited ``the supremacy of Parliament'' Tuesday morning in voting to summon Zafirovski to appear Thursday morning.

"It was a transparent attempt to avoid having to avoid explaining why they voted ... millions of dollars in bonuses for themselves when people were being denied their severance. That's exactly the type of thing we're going to get to discuss with (Zafirovski),'' said Mulcair.

Given the "we are unaware that there are health risks associated with smoking" nature of executive testimony to legislatures, "attempt to avoid having to avoid" might not have been a gaffe.

One thing to watch out for as budgets get tight is renewed aggressiveness from people who take money through coercion. This comes in the form of increased crime rates, but it also comes in the form of renewed efforts by governments to assess and collect fines and taxes.

Did you hear a jingling sound on the Akron Expressway a couple of weeks ago?

That wasn't a pebble stuck in your hubcap. That was the city of Akron and the state of Ohio hitting the jackpot.

From May 4 through May 8, eight motorcycle cops imported from the Columbus post of the State Highway Patrol wrote 733 speeding tickets.

The total take for that five-day Expressway binge: $103,902...

Although the patrol has claimed that ''about 98 percent'' of the tickets it wrote that week were handed to people committing ''aggressive violations,'' a Beacon Journal analysis of the tickets shows that only 51 percent could even remotely be said to fit that description.

I recently got caught in a speed trap near Denver. I haven't gotten a speeding ticket in over ten years. Apparently, I'm ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The looting continues...

Sotomayor in reference to Hamdi and Padilla:

We have suspected enemy combatants detained in secret and given different process than criminals. One can certainly justify that type of detention under precedents and current law.

Its possible that this quotation has been taken out of context. On its face it seems to indicate that Sotomayor agrees with the Bush Administration's position on enemy combatants - that the Government may Constitutionally seize U.S. Citizens on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without charges, based soley on the allegation that they are enemy combatants but without presenting any evidence to that effect to anyone.

I certainly would like to read the original source document for this quotation but it doesn't appear to be available online.

New Documents Shed Light on Sotomayor's Thoughts About Sept. 11 Attacks - Political News - FOXNews.com

Opera today unveiled Opera Unite, a new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web. Opera Unite turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers.

Thoughts?

Opera Unite reinvents the Web

While rational expectation is returning to part of the investment community, most investors are still trapped by institutional weakness, which makes them behave irrationally. The Greenspan era has nurtured a vast financial sector. All the people in this business need something to do. Since they invest other people's money, they are biased toward bullish sentiment. Otherwise, if they say it's all bad, their investors will take back the money, and they will lose their jobs. Governments know that, and create noise to give them excuses to be bullish.

This institutional weakness has been a catastrophe for people who trust investment professionals....

Indeed, most people who invest in the stock market get poorer.

Andy Xie: Tight Spot for Fed, Blind Spot for Investors

In the early 90's recession I'll bet everyone on MemeStreams could have predicted a telecom boom. Three and more years ago MemeStreams was predicting a housing crash. If there was an opportunity for growth, you'd think someone here would be tuned into it. I'm not. With gas prices back to normal I don't see the boom in green technologies and urbanization that many people imagine. Political will doesn't create economic opportunity. It comes from pent up demand. The only thing I think we have pent up demand for right now is retirement savings.

Thom Shanker and David Sanger:

The process could ultimately be accepted as the digital equivalent of customs inspections, in which passengers arriving from overseas consent to have their luggage opened for security, tax and health reasons.

Expansion of this hole in the Constitution, now torn, is eagerly sought by the forces of government power, for any and every purpose.

Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Wall Street and the Third World | vanityfair.com

Tom Vanderbilt:

Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

Have you read Vanderbilt's "Traffic"?

Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature.

Data Center Overload