Democratic primary voters need to pay close attention to independents. The polls suggest hard-core Democrats would be happy either with Hillary Clinton or Mr Obama. But there is no doubt who does better with independents. Until this week, Mrs Clinton's strength has been her ability to turn out the vote in solid Democratic states such as California and solid Democratic constituencies such as blue-collar voters. But she repels many independents who associate her with Beltway business-as-usual.

In contrast, Mr Obama sounds the themes that most appeal to independents—frustration with America's broken politics; hope of finding pragmatic solutions by reaching across the partisan divide. And independents have not disappointed him. Mr Obama beat Mrs Clinton among such voters almost everywhere, even in her strongest states such as New York and California. A recent Pew poll suggests Mr Obama has a 62% approval rating among independents, the highest of any candidate.

This should weigh heavily on the minds of the Democratic “superdelegates” (office holders and party elders who have an ex officio vote in the convention) if they are called upon to break a tie in the delegate race. Mrs Clinton's biggest problem is not that she is being out-campaigned by the silver-tongued Mr Obama. It is that she seems to belong to the previous era of American politics—the one of battling political machines. Republicans have accidentally stumbled through to the next age of politics, although the message has not yet reached the backwoods wing of the party. The big question now for many Democrats is whether their party can do likewise.

A declaration on independents

In Mosul last March, the Provincial Reconstruction Team took me to a meeting of one of Iraq's new terrorism tribunals. Three judges were trucked up from Baghdad to preside over Baghdad-related terrorism cases -- all in Mosul, so the insurgents wouldn't, you know, kill the judges. Interesting idea, heavily billed as a rule-of-law achievement, but boring as hell to watch.

Then at the end, as people are milling about and chatting on their way out the door, one of the PRT officials tells a judge how important it is to stand up against terrorism and promote equality and fairness before an impartial system of law. The judge nods at the platitude. "Tell me," he says through a translator, "is it true that in America, Bush can fire prosecutors he doesn't like?"

Have you seen John Yoo in Taxi to the Dark Side?

Rule of Law

As if on cue ...

A technical glitch gave the FBI access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

FBI officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

'Overproduction'

Many Americans are jumping into the fast, mobile, participatory Web without considering all the implications. If nothing really bad has happened to someone, they tend neither to worry about their personal information nor to take steps to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online. This finding dovetails with our previous work related to spyware -- software that covertly tracks a user as they navigate the net. Internet users who said they had not encountered spyware were less likely to view it as a serious threat and more likely to say it's just part of life online.

Privacy Implications of Fast, Mobile Internet Access

Issued for Public Comment; Deadline is March 10.

An interagency subcommittee of the White House's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) issued a draft document today that lists recommended standards to enable government agencies to easily share biometric data. The NSTC Subcommittee on Biometrics and Identity Management is requesting public comments on the draft by March 10.

Biometrics involve identifying individuals by unique characteristics such as fingerprints, faces, irises and palms. Because biometrics are unique and nearly impossible to forge, they help prevent fraud and identity theft. At the same time, they provide a convenient way for consumers to establish and verify their identities. Biometric technologies are increasingly being used to restrict access to secure work areas, to make identity documents such as passports or government IDs more tamper-resistant, and to conduct terrorism-related screening, check for prior criminal history, or assess whether an individual previously violated immigration law, as part of government program eligibility determinations or security risk assessments.

The NSTC Policy for Enabling the Development, Adoption and Use of Biometric Standards established a framework to reach interagency consensus on biometric standards for the federal government. It ensured that federal agencies such as the Departments of State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security collect and exchange different types of biometric data in specific standardized formats. For example, the use of such standards ensures that biometric data on known or suspected terrorists collected by the Department of Defense in war zones are also useable by Department of Homeland Security’s screening operations at U.S. border crossings. The standards registry* is the result of interagency analysis and deliberation on numerous, often contradictory, standards currently available, and specifies which standards U.S. government agencies should use.

Biometrics Standards Registry for US Government

You are being watched. From street corners and roadsides, bank machines and satellites, video cameras record our every move. For police forces, photo radar, street surveillance, cruiser cams and tiny cameras have become efficient crime-fighting tools, gathering irrefutable proof of criminal activity and deterring would-be lawbreakers. For others, video surveillance is an uncomfortable erosion of civil liberties, the unblinking eyes of Big Brother.

The Long Lens of the Law

The man who in times of popular excitement boldly and unflinchingly resists hot-tempered clamor for an unnecessary war, and thus exposes himself to the opprobrious imputation of a lack of patriotism or of courage, to the end of saving his country from a great calamity, is, as to “loving and faithfully serving his country,” at least as good a patriot as the hero of the most daring feat of arms, and a far better one than those who, with an ostentatious pretense of superior patriotism, cry for war before it is needed, especially if then they let others do the fighting.

–Carl Schurz, “About Patriotism,” Harper’s Weekly, April 16, 1898 in: Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 5, p. 461 (F. Bancroft ed. 1913)

Real Patriotism

The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close.

Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen.

Proposition: Security in the modern age cannot be established without some erosion of individual privacy.

A debate on the theme of Zero Sum.

Economist on security and privacy in the modern age

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have two different approaches to fixing the economy, and the country. It's less about what to do than how to do it.

The Democrats' Choice: Manager or Visionary