I recently was talking with a Senator who said to me, “Professor, we didn’t ask the terrorists to sign the Geneva Conventions. How can you expect us to abide by commitments that they don’t adhere to?” To which I replied, “Yes, and we didn’t ask the whales to sign the Whaling Convention either. We sign these treaties to protect us from ourselves, not from them.”

See also: Confessions and Hazards.

Quotable Quotes from the Fordham Law Review Symposium

Following up on an August op-ed by Susan Landau, Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford have come together on an important paper:

The Protect America Act passed in August 2007 changes US law to allow warrantless foreign intelligence wiretapping from within the US of any communications believed to include one party located outside the United States. US systems for foreign intelligence surveillance located outside the United States minimize access to the traffic of US persons by virtue of their location. The new law does not—and could lead to surveillance on a unprecedented scale that will unavoidably pick up some purely domestic communications. The civil-liberties concern is whether the new law puts Americans at risk of spurious — and invasive — surveillance by their own government. The security concern is whether the new law puts Americans at risk of illegitimate surveillance by others.

We focus on security.

If the system is to work, it is important that the surveillance architecture not decrease the security of the US communications networks. The choice of architecture matters; minor changes can have significant effects, particularly with regard to limiting the scope of inadvertent interception. In attempting to collect communications with one end outside the United States, the new law allows the development of a system that will probably pick up many purely domestic communications.

How will the collection system determine that communications have one end outside the United States?

How will the surveillance be secured?

Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the “Protect America Act”

Now this is what I call a "No Parking" sign:

No Parking!

Design your own USB blank cassette just like the old mix tapes.

Then plug it in, fill it up with your music, photos, video and other digital goodies.

Make it for you, make it for someone else, make a MIXA.

Make a MIXA - a USB cassette for your digital stuff!

Heck of a job, "Pat"!

"I hope readers understand we're working very hard to establish credibility and integrity, and I would hope this does not undermine it," said John P. "Pat" Philbin, FEMA's director of external affairs.

"I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I've seen since I've been in government," (*) Michael Chertoff said.

(*) Chertoff's first job after law school was as a clerk for Murray Gurfein, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. That was in 1978.

Philbin's last scheduled day at FEMA was Thursday. He has been named as the new head of public affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I thought someone had lost their head last week ...

As if on cue, Bob Herbert's latest column picks up on the topic which I attributed to the Automatic Bob Herbert only a week ago. (Have you seen Eastern Promises yet?)

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

Perhaps Bob Herbert reads MemeStreams ... ?

Today’s Hidden Slave Trade

Zivity [2] hits the Sunday NYT, in a profile about the young super-rich ...

They are happy to be wealthy, of course, but many of these baby-faced technology tycoons often seem indifferent to the buying power of their money, at least at this stage of their lives. Instead, nearly all of them have chosen to throw themselves back into a start-up, not so much because they want a spectacular new home or a personal jet — though many of them do — but because they are in a competition with themselves and one another.

Several times a week, he would listen to the gentle hectoring of older, well-dressed men and women whom he playfully mimicked, employing a basso profondo, game-show announcer’s voice.

“Think of the kids you don’t have,” Mr. Levchin quoted them as saying. “Think of your unborn grandkids.”

“This ‘next race’ attitude really shapes your brain.”

“Spending money is a fine pursuit, and anyone’s welcome to do it,” said Scott Banister, a close friend of Mr. Levchin’s since college who recently sold an antispam company to Cisco for $830 million and is now working on a social networking site, Zivity, which he describes as a “cross between Playboy and American Idol.”

“But then obviously at that point, you’re spending,” he said, “not producing.”

After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review.

FRONTLINE: cheney's law | PBS

Some ideas are reeled into our mind wrapped up in facts; and some ideas burst upon us naked without the slightest evidence they could be true but with all the conviction they are.

The ideas of the latter sort are the more difficult to displace.

Wrapped Up In Facts

As the United States and Iran are locked in a battle for power and influence across the Middle East—with the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming in the background—FRONTLINE gains unprecedented access to Iranian hard-liners shaping government policy, including parliament leader Hamid Reza Hajibabaei, National Security Council member Mohammad Jafari and state newspaper editor Hossein Shariatmadari.

Frontline continues to be worth the hour. This report paints a damning picture of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory in US/Iranian relations mostly due to incompetence. Watch it online.

FRONTLINE: showdown with iran | PBS