President Bush again defended his program of warrantless surveillance Thursday, saying "there's no doubt in my mind it is legal." He suggested that he might resist congressional efforts to change or expressly endorse it.
"The program's legal, it's designed to protect civil liberties, and it's necessary," Bush told a White House news conference.

Finethen wrote:

Its...designed...to...protect...civil...liberties? i have trouble even coming up with a good joke for this comment.

How about:

President Bush again defended his program of warrantless house to house searches with robots Thursday, saying "there's no doubt in my mind it is legal." He suggested that there is a clear 4th amendment distinction between searches performed by computers and searches performed by people.
"The program's legal, it's designed to protect civil liberties, and it's necessary," Bush told a White House news conference.

BREITBART.COM - Bush Confident Warrantless Wiretaps Legal

noteworthy wrote:
That's it! A public algorithm. What we need here is a global-scale collaborative filter. We could resume the draft, but for NSA instead of the Army. You could work from home, or even in your car, for an hour each day, listening in on phone calls. But mind you, as the President said, that "There is a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring." This is just the detection phase. If you hear something suspicious, you just press a number key, 1 through 9, to indicate how urgently dangerous it seems. The call is then forwarded to a professional for further handling, including FISA procedures as necessary.

A national "nosey neighbor jury" is a tremendously bad idea, but I underline it because its innovative and it would make a great science fiction short story. 80% of the phone calls flagged by it would likely be flagged because of various prejudices.

The meme that has been going around that "its not really an invasion of privacy if its just a computer listenning to the phone call" is absolutely falicious. Those computers serve human ends. Next they'll be arguing that there is no 4th amendment implication if they randomly send a drug sniffing robot into your house without a warrant. If thats the direction our legal jurisprudence heads we might as well roll up the Constitution and smoke it.

There are two reasons we don't do random searches:
1. Such things are inevitably abused for political purposes.
2. They contribute to a culture of fear and suspicion.

In the context of preventing significant terrorist incidents, if it is in fact useful to do this, then I think that where you've removed the court oversight from the data collection you need to add it to the data application. The people involved in this surveillance are firewalled from the people involved in pursuing leads and they have to present the information they collect to a FISA style court before they can share it. Such a check would ensure that the information is specifically related to national security issues and isn't about a political enemy or a minor crime.

RE: Wired News: Mass Spying Means Gross Errors

Mass surveillance isn't just illegal, it's probably a bad idea. We need to ferret out real terrorists, not create a smoke screen of expensive and distracting false positives that they can hide behind. More information doesn't make us smarter. We need smarter information.

Jennifer Granick checks in on TMS.

Wired News: Mass Spying Means Gross Errors

I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

This article has gotten the talk shows all riled up. Its inceditary. If you're really a pacifist and you think war is immoral, obviously you'd offer that those involved are immoral. My problem with pacifists is that there are times when you have to fight. We didn't ask for 9/11, and the people who got involved in the military in its wake largely sought to defend America from aggressive foreign threats. There is an arguement that pre-emptive war is immoral, but this wasn't a choice those involved with the armed services at the time made, and today, I think, walking away from the situation after creating the security vacuum we've created there is also immoral. Eventually, you do get to a point where continuing to support the armed forces is a tacit approval of the things they are doing, but the U.S. is a long, long way away from that point today. If you buy the conspiracy theories about "blood for oil" I suppose I can see reaching this point, but I don't. The strategy in Iraq is hard to understand and there are questions that can be raised about its correctness, but it shouldn't properly be an invitation to fill in the blanks with worst case scenarios. If we just wanted the oil it would have been cheaper to buy it.

I don't support the troops

Iran has started moving its foreign exchange reserves out of Europe in a bid to shield the country from the threat of sanctions, reports suggest.

9/11 may have caught you by suprise, but whatever goes down with Iran, say you knew it was coming...

BBC NEWS | Business | Iran 'moves assets out of Europe'

The post points to broadcast flag draft legislation sponsored by Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) that contains provisions which appear to limit digital broadcast media reception devices to "customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law and that prevents redistribution of copyrighted content over digital networks."

U.S. Senate moves to ban innovation outright.

Big Content would like to outlaw things no one has even thought of yet

Decius and I where lucky enough to be able to attend the last day of witness testimony for the Samuel Alito Confirmation Hearing. Thanks to Tim Ball and John Flym, we were able to acquire a pass to witness part of an important historic event.

As the story goes, Professor Flym was having a problem with his laptop causing him to be unable to file his statement in time to give testimony. Tim's boss told him to do anything necessary to solve his problem. In the process, due mostly to chance and good timing, "anything necessary" wound up involving Tom and I. We were not able to completely fix John's problem the first night, but we were able to get him in a position where he could get his work done. The next day we returned to completely fix the problem, and John gave us a witness pass he had.

Having watched what must amount to several solid months of C-SPAN, being on the other side of the cameras was interesting. The hearing room in the Hart building is like being in a pressure chamber, more so than any court I've been in. I can only imagine the stress felt by those testifying. Tim was busy the entire day, so Tom and I took shifts attending the hearings. I was present during Flym's testimony, as well as that of Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Amanda Frost, Reginald M. Turner, Jr., Theodore M. Shaw, among others, and the closing of the hearings. Tom will probably chime in with his take on the hearings, but I remember him being very happy about being there for the testimony of Fred Grey, who defended Rosa Parks.

Later at Shmoocon, there was some humorous discussion about if the badge qualified as a ticket to the "Nerd SuperBowl" or the "Nerd World Series". At the time, I was strongly on the side of "Nerd SuperBowl", but lacking a well worded concise argument for why. Given some time to think about it, its clear that "Nerd SuperBowl" does fit best. The "Nerd World Series" would better fit a string of WTO and G8 summits, while the Security Council would be the "Nerd World Cup". Its good to be a nerd.

Anyway, joking aside, this was a really cool experience. Both Tom and I spend much time thinking about legal problems. It was a honor to be present in person for even the small portion of proceedings we were. On the linked page, I included a few pictures and screen captures from C-SPAN where I can be spotted. I was unable to find any screen shots where Tom was present. Since he knows where he was sitting and at what time, maybe he will have better luck.

Rattle and Decius at Alito Confirmation Hearing

I find this highly amusing. The folks at StopTheACLU think that they're actually going to be able to intervene in the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA. Intervention is a term of art in the law. It means that you actually get added as a party to the proceedings. An attorney named Debbie Schlussel, who appears to be more of a spokesmodel than a scholar (her bio notes proudly that her online fan club is the second largest, behind only Ann Coulter), is apparently going to file motions to intervene on behalf of citizens who disagree with the ACLU and our pals at StopTheACLU jumped at the chance to be the first ones in line.

blahahahaahahahaahahahahahahahaharomfflmgdao!@#!!@#
Please Please Please let these guys get a huge amount of press coverage out of this so they can look at themselves through the mirror of mainstream america and see how crazy they are!

Intervention in NSA Lawsuit - Dispatches from the Culture Wars

How should the United States think about Iran? What explains the fanaticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and what can America and its allies do to change it?

Containing Tehran

The question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They
do not yet have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have
now hinted that (a) they plan to build nuclear weapons and have
implied, as clearly as possible without saying it, that (b) they plan
to use them against Israel. On the surface, these statements appear to
be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are many things
one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force is
not usually one of them.

This analysis is troubling. It suggests that Iran will provoke the U.S. into attacking it, because they want to get attacked.

Stratfor on what the hell Iran is up to...