Mr. Gonzales said that the administration promoted and respected the right of the press that is protected under the First Amendment. "But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said.

U: You can download the video. This IS essentially what he said. He kind of stumbles around a bit and its a live interview and an unanticipated question. If this wording appeared in print it would be a more serious problem. As it is, its troubling, but it remains to be seen what they are going to do.

Its also worth pointing out that the question he was asked was about the collection of dialed phone number information from journalists. The answer he gave was about the legal authorization process that he goes through before doing content surveillance, which is NOT dialed phone number information. He simply answered a totally unrelated question. Most viewers would not pick up on the distinction.

Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists Are Possible - New York Times

My thoughts exactly on the new Mac ads.

Ctrl Alt Del

But disregarding the text of the Constitution because it does not comport with your vision of the "rule of law" is as much judicial "activism" — if one must use this phrase — on the right, as it is when the Left discards the text because it does not meet their vision of "Justice." In either case, judges are substituting for the text something they prefer, which in this case is silence where the Constitution is in fact speaking quite eloquently.

More writing related to the idea below...

Randy E. Barnett on National Review Online

I propose adopting a "presumption of liberty" by which the burden is placed on Congress to establish that its laws are truly "necessary and proper"—what it used to debate but no longer.

Now thats an idea I could really get behind. This collection of posts on Volokh is perhaps the most vital conversation that I've seen about the nature of the Constitution in a long time, mostly because it seems for some reason to have broken from the partisan arguements that often follow from policy objectives.

We used to have a limited government and a conservative judiciary. In the 30's the power of the legislature was vastly expanded because people expected the government to solve social problems. The power of the judiciary expanded in reaction to that.

In theory it is that case that conservatives want a limited government and liberals want an expansive one. You'd think conservatives could really get behind the idea in the above passage. However, in practice conservatives mean limited only in a fiscal sense and not really with regard to liberty. So they've been arguing that the judicial branch, which is the only present mechanism that actually limits the power of the government, stop doing that, so that the legislature can do whatever it wants, particularly with regard to cracking down on immoral behavior. This is supreme irony. It is also supremely ironic that support for a powerful judiciary is considered a liberal idea.

The next person who talks to me about judicial activism will get a response about legislative activism.

The idea of a limited government is something I could really get behind in a general sense, and you'd think in a general sense conservatives would be wonderful allies in that endevor, but in practice the Republicans seem much more interested in limiting a handful of things that I think really matter (like healthcare) and not limiting the plethora of pork and useless over-regulation that I'm not interested in, and I think they're unlikely to swallow the pill of individual liberty that would be required by legislative analyses about whether laws are "necessary and proper." I wish they were, but there is something to be said for reclaiming the words "limited government," which neither party is really interested in.

The Volokh Conspiracy - On 'legislating from the bench'

The State Secret Privilege was used dishonestly in its first case!

United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953) is a landmark legal case in 1953 that saw the creation of the State Secrets Privilege, an unofficial but judicially-recognized extension of presidential power.

The widows of 3 crew members of a B-29 Superfortress bomber that had crashed in 1948 sought accident reports on the crash, but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission.

In 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and were found to contain no secret information. They did, however, contain information about the poor state of condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case. Many commentators have alleged government misuse of secrecy in the landmark case.

United States v. Reynolds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A federal judge yesterday threw out the case of a German citizen who says he was wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA, ruling that Khaled al-Masri’s lawsuit poses a “grave risk” of damage to national security by exposing government secrets.

OK, I'm linking to this instead of the link I posted earlier, because it contains a link to the actual decision, which is worth reading if you are interested in the subject. The judge is quite comfortable with the idea that you cannot litigate matters relating to state secrets and that only political remedies are available when there is a perception that a crime has been committed. The EFF's case seems likely to get the boot.

On the subject of State Secrets

The Supreme Court overturned a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized court that hears appeals in patent cases, which had ruled earlier this year that injunctions should be granted as a "general rule."

A patent holder, the Supreme Court ruled, must prove four facts: that it has suffered an "irreparable injury"; that there are no other adequate legal remedies; that taking into account the balance of harm to both parties, an injunction is warranted; and that the public interest would not be hurt by an injunction.

This is a good ruling. The public interest in access to the technology should not be hurt by an injunction. The law, optimally, should enable only reasonable license fees to be obtained. A patent is a legal privledge intended to serve the public interest, its not a private property right as argued by this jackass.

Robust economic performance depends on strong protection of property rights from invasion without and the enforcement of voluntary contracts between parties.

I could not disagree more. This isn't even well put (without?!). Keeping important technologies off the market place or making them prohibitively expensive to employ prevents technological evolution that has a far greater impact on overall economic performance then these free contractual relationships. This is where I have a bone to pick with people who are so libertarian that they have no problem with monopolies. Technological development, and not the market, creates the efficiencies that contribute to your standard of living. The market is useful in so far as it creates an environment that incents creative innovation and ensures that those innovations are actually used and can be built upon. The problem with centrally controlled economies is that they inhibit innovation. If free markets are not kept competitive and someone ends up holding all of the cards, they become just like centrally controlled economies in that you have to get permission from the card holder in order to change things, and the card holder has a disincentive to change. The result is technological and, ultimately, economic stagnation.

Justices Set Aside Patent Ruling Against eBay - New York Times

Feith's team, Hayden said, had set out to prove a case by assembling "every possible ounce of evidence" and ignoring contradictory information. Using that method, he continued, analysts can build a convincing case against even innocent targets.

"I got three great kids, but if you tell me, 'Go out and find all the bad things they've done, Hayden,' I could build you a pretty good dossier," Hayden said. "You'd think they were pretty bad people because that's what I was looking for and that's what I built up. That'd be very wrong, OK? That would be inaccurate. That would be misleading."

Hayden on Iraq intel

A hearing on the Bush administration's request to dismiss the case on national security grounds has been scheduled for June 23.

I guess I misread one of the EFF's postings. It will be a month before they discuss whether or not they're going to allow this case. The article here seems to indicate that AT&T may have other ways of shutting this down quickly.

Legal loophole emerges in NSA spy program | CNET News.com

Episode 148 - Rainbow Tables #
Airdate: 2006-05-17
Length: 1:34:32
Size: 16.15 MB
Hosts: StankDawg & Decius

I was on BinRev Radio talking about Rainbow Tables on Tuesday night. Its hard to explain something like that without a whiteboard, but hopefully it comes across well. The key points are:

Microsoft should have used salted hashes.
For password cracking, most passwords are dictionary based, and a hash table for a large dictionary is going to be smaller then a decent Rainbow table.
Rainbow tables are a neat technology nonetheless, but the most interesting application is cracking symetric ciphers.

Binary Revolution - The Revolution will be Digitized!