Few books are more famous for what subsequent forgers do with them than for their original contents. Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, first published in Brussels in 1864, is indeed a very strange book. And its strangeness is multiple.

REVIEW: The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu

Wyden's remarks at the Center for American Progress.

Wyden Speech on NSA Domestic Surveillance at Center for American Progress

In a cross-Solar System interplanetary first, our Earth was photographed during the same day from both Mercury and Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft now the gas giant. Pictured on the right, the Earth-Moon system is seen against a dark background, as captured by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft now orbiting Mercury. In the MESSENGER image, the Earth (left) and Moon (right) shine brightly with reflected sunlight. MESSENGER took the overexposed image last Friday as part of a search for small natural satellites of the innermost planet, moons that would be expected to be quite dim. During this same day, humans across planet Earth snapped many of their own pictures of Saturn.

APOD: 2013 July 23 - Two Views of Earth

Service Provider Meta-Data Retention - US: http://www.aclu.org/cell-phone-location-tracking-request-response-cell-phone-company-data-retention-chart … (years) EU: http://blogs.wsj.com/brussels/2010/08/02/exclusivedata-retention-limits-per-eu-country/ … (months)

Twitter / _decius_: Service Provider Meta-Data Retention

Congress is growing increasingly wary of controversial National Security Agency domestic surveillance programs, a concern likely to erupt during legislative debate _ and perhaps prod legislative action _ as early as next week.

Mood shifting, Congress may move to limit NSA spying | McClatchy

My reply to Stewart Baker's Congressional Testimony:

Suffice it to say that I think that a model that says "collect everything, and let agents analyze it without individualized suspicion, but try to flag questionable searches" is a radical departure from our current approach, which requires justification before collection, and it is also a radical departure from a model that says "collect everything, but require individualized suspicion before analysis."

I don't agree with your assertion that "the risk of rule-breaking is pretty much the same whether the collection comes first or second." If the collection comes first, the data is there to be abused and the risk that it might be abused exists as long as it is there. For example, if the data is stored for 5 years, than at any point in that 5 year period of time an agent decides to make an abusive query, the data will be there waiting for him.

However, if collection comes second, then the data isn't there. It disappears the minute the phone company decides that it is no longer needed for their purposes, and at that point, the risk that it will be abused is over. Any new data created after the point that the agent decides to do something abusive will be available, but the old data will not be. Therefore, the risk to an individual person is significantly lower, and individual people can make real time risk assessments regarding the situation going forward.

For example, lets say you phone Martin Luther King because you support his views on civil rights. Two years later, King makes a public statement opposing a war in Vietnam. At that time, it occurs to you that the military might target King and his associates because King is an influential person who opposes a war that the military wants to get into and they want to shut him up and they want to shut up anyone he might have influenced.

In the collect first scenario, you have to wait for five years after that phone call before you no longer have to worry that the military will find out that you associated with King and target you personally for having done so. In the collect second scenario, you only have to wait six months, or a year at most, until the phone company destroys the data.

The total risk to you in associating with King is significantly reduced the second scenario. Therefore, your likelihood of feeling free to associate with King is significantly greater. Furthermore, if at some point King does something that might make him the target of an illegal government crackdown, you can choose at that point to stop associating with him if thats what you want to do, without having to worry about all of your past associations being exposed.

In other words, the collect first model places a significant chill upon your exercise of your right to freedom of association, because if you ever associate with anyone who later does something that makes him a target of a illegal government crackdown, you could be targeted as well. In the collect first society, you're best off avoiding contact with anyone that might, in the future, be considered an enemy of the state. In the collect second society we don't have to go around worrying about that kind of thing, because, you know, we live in a free society.

The Volokh Conspiracy » Intelligence Under Law — Judiciary Testimony

None of these has gotten much ink, and what continues to remain striking is that, for all the intense media attention to the NSA story, almost no attention has been given to efforts such as these that would actually do something about the problem, or at least one important dimension of the problem. There is not nearly enough media coverage of the various policy fixes that would begin to correct an aspect of this that everyone should agree is problematic, no matter what people think of the NSA programs themselves — the secrecy that shrouds their legal rationales.

Keep chipping away at NSA secrecy

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD's most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA's teaching academy, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

"This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence," Kleinman said in an interview. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

EXCLUSIVE: "Guidebook to False Confessions": Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released

Brennan admits that in affirmations to the FISC relating to the continuation of “certain programs” — that is, the “scary memos” — he relied on information from the CIA’s torture program.

The one that was designed to elicit false confessions from the start.

John Brennan’s admission sure seems to indicate that that original dragnet opinion, the one the others have built on, relies on the unreliable information elicited by CIA torture.

The Torture That Underlies FISA Court’s “Special Needs” Decisions | emptywheel

The Supreme Court has the power to issue an order called a “writ of mandamus” to deal with lower courts that overstep their legal authority. This type of order is only supposed to be used in “exceptional circumstances.” But EPIC argues that the NSA’s phone records program is exactly the kind of situation that merits the Supreme Court’s intervention.

Could the Supreme Court stop the NSA?