Jim Kunstler:

If central casting called for a poised, straight-talking, and capable-seeming president, it would be hard to come up with someone better than the Barack Obama who walked and talked around the White House grounds with Steve Croft on "60-Minutes" Sunday night. He may perfectly represent the majority who elected him, though, because he also appears to be in full commanding denial of the realities overtaking our American experience.

For those of you sitting on US Treasury bonds and bills, now would be a good time to get out.

See also, from Emergent Chaos:

This reminded me of a conversation I had over a beer with a banking regulator back in August 2006 or thereabouts. He reported on a IM conversation he had had with a colleague whose expertise lay in the area which subsequently imploded. After jokingly asking "Time to buy gold, huh?", there was a pregnant pause. Then came the response: "Buy ammunition".

Full Commanding Denial

John Heilemann:

It’s not pretty at this moment.

This is not, in short, an us-versus-them moment. It could be, should be, an all-hands-on-deck moment. Obama, I suspect, understands this better than most of the people around him. Late in his campaign, Obama gave a speech in Indianapolis in which he unfurled a kind of optimistic, soft populism that was both eloquent and perfectly calibrated for the times.

“We will all need to sacrifice, and we will all need to pull our weight, because now more than ever, we are all in this together,” Obama said. “What this crisis has taught us is that at the end of the day, there is no real separation between Wall Street and Main Street. There is only the road we’re traveling on as Americans, and we will rise and fall on that as one nation, as one people.”

He should say that again. Not just because it’s a great set of lines—but because, like all the best rhetoric, it also happens to be true.

Two from the Economist:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself. But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Inside Obama’s Economic Brain Trust

James K. Galbraith:

Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think.

A paradox of the long view is that the time to embrace it is right now. We need to start down that path before disastrous policy errors, including fatal banker bailouts and cuts in Social Security and Medicare, are put into effect. It is therefore especially important that thought and learning move quickly. Does the Geithner team, forged and trained in normal times, have the range and the flexibility required? If not, everything finally will depend, as it did with Roosevelt, on the imagination and character of President Obama.

From 1998, Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

No Return to Normal

Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone:

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked.

It's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

Michael Lewis:

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over.

From 2004, Paul Graham:

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it.

Peter Schiff:

I think things are going to get very bad.

The Big Takeover

Libby Purves:

There is something fundamentally unnerving about being watched.

“But,” splutters government when we jib at this, “it's for your own good! We're protecting you!” The same tone of hurt ministerial outrage will be heard more and more as people come to realise exactly what is involved in the vast new “e-borders” system, currently being set up to track everybody's international travel just because a tiny minority are up to no good.

Have you seen "The Lives of Others"?

From the NYT coverage of a recent TRUSTe survey:

More than half of respondents said government should be “wholly” or “very” responsible for protecting an individual’s online privacy.

E-borders - the new frontier of oppression

Here is NYT on a recent survey:

As arguments swirl over online privacy, a new survey indicates the issue is a dominant concern for Americans.

More than half of respondents said government should be “wholly” or “very” responsible for protecting an individual’s online privacy.

Here is TRUSTe's press release on the survey they conducted:

The TRUSTe survey found that consumers still hold themselves responsible when it comes to online protection: respondents indicated that “Individuals” and “Website owners” are most responsible for an individual’s online privacy, with four fifths of respondents indicating each was very or wholly responsible. A large percentage also reported that ISP’s and Browser manufacturers were very or wholly responsible – 70%, while government was seen as having the least responsibility with only 57% of respondents indicating the government was very or wholly responsible for protecting an individual’s online privacy through legislation or regulation.

From the recent archive, Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Spinning

Another front beckons.

Ruthless drug cartels in Mexico are battling against each other and against the government for control of the drug trade. 2008 was the most violent year in Mexico, with around 6,000 drug-related murders. 2009 looks like it could be even worse. And there are fears that Mexico's narco-violence could spread north of the border into the U.S. In this one-hour Vanguard report, Laura Ling travels to the border towns of Juarez and Tijuana, Mexico where drugs gangs are fighting for control of the drug routes into the United States. Ling also goes to the city of Culiacan in Sinaloa State, a region that's known as the birthplace of narco-trafficking in Mexico. Despite the 40,000 federal troops that are patrolling cities across Mexico, violence is increasing and the methods of killings are becoming even more brazen and grotesque. Ling speaks with gun dealers in El Paso, Texas and U.S. officials about the illegal smuggling of weapons into Mexico--90% of the weapons seized in Mexico have been traced back to the U.S. She examines the culture of corruption and lack of public trust in a police force that has become known for working with the cartels.

Recently:

"We're throwing everything into this. We are cleaning the house," said President Felipe Calderon in an interview on Mexican television.

From further back:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Narco War Next Door

Jed Rubenfeld, in the Stanford Law Review:

This Article is about the Fourth Amendment. It is an attempt to recover that amendment’s core meaning and core principles.

By revitalizing the right to be secure, Fourth Amendment law can vindicate its text, recapture its paradigm cases, and find the anchor it requires to stand firm against executive abuse.

Julian Sanchez, on Rubenfeld's essay:

Rubenfeld's essay is not another catalog of privacy threats, but rather a provocative reexamination of the meaning of the Fourth Amendment—one that manages to be simultaneously radical (in the sense of "going to the root"), novel, and plausible in a way I would not have thought possible so late in the game.

Rubenfeld's big apple-to-the-noggin idea is this: mainstream jurisprudence regards the Fourth Amendment as protecting an individual right to "privacy"—which in the late 20th century came to mean the individual's "reasonable expectation of privacy"—with courts tasked with "balancing" this against the competing value of security. This, the good professor argues, is basically backwards: the Fourth Amendment explicitly protects the "security" of our personal lives. Excavating a neglected 17th and 18th century conception of "security" leads to a new reading that both avoids well-known internal problems with the "reasonable expectation" view and helps us grapple with the thorny privacy challenges posed by new technologies.

The End of Privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

From the archive:

Money for me, databases for you.

From last year's best-of:

Focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps pose to a democratic society.

Jon Evans, at The Walrus:

I can’t shake the notion that police cameras are only the thin edge of the panopticon wedge, and that the loss of privacy will lead slowly but inevitably to the loss of liberty.

From FPF, which includes Daniel Solove and Peter Swire, among many others:

Society is approaching a turning point that could well determine the future of privacy.

Finally:

Said Diffie, "The future will be a golden age for intelligence."

The SSD Project | EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

From the archive:

If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

More recently:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not its reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort. This is just another brick in the wall.

As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes