The Economist:

Speed in spending is prized above all; but this is no way to build something that lasts as long as infrastructure.

Freeman Dyson:

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale.

Ethics are the art of doing that.

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Back to The Economist:

Last year a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, killing 13 people.

Recently, in the NYT:

Officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications.

Roads to nowhere

Jeffrey Rosen:

Six years on, the Department of Homeland Security is still a catastrophe.

Man-Made Disaster

Sue Halpern, in The New York Review of Books:

What you get is the war without the war story.

Freed from those conventions -- from the demands of plot, from the typically false dichotomy between good guys and bad guys, and unburdened of ambiguity, of bravado, of cant, there is only one thing in sight, and that is consequence.

The brutal honesty of these cases demands a brutally honest response.

It is no wonder that the military censors tried hard to keep this book from commercial release.

From the archive:

Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker’s book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true.

From a review of a book by Roger Penrose:

"What a joy it is to read a book that doesn't simplify, doesn't dodge the difficult questions, and doesn't always pretend to have answers."

Have you seen Happy-Go-Lucky?

The film opens with her visiting a bookshop and fingering a copy of Roger Penrose's book, The Road to Reality. "Don't want to go there," she mutters to herself. Meanwhile, outside, her bicycle is being stolen.

The War We Don't Want to See

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.

Also, Charlie Stross:

Think of it as Google for real life.

From the archive, McLuhan:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

Also:

A brilliant surgeon, Dr. Génessier, helped by his assistant Louise, kidnaps nice young women. He removes their faces and tries to graft them onto the head on his beloved daughter Christiane, whose face has been entirely spoiled in a car crash. All the experiments fail, and the victims die, but Génessier keeps trying ...

Never Forget:

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

Big Brother is Watching Them. OK?

Hendrik Hertzberg:

What is a “Clinton person”?

People Who Need People

Michael Froomkin:

This book chapter for "Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) -- a forthcoming comparative examination of approaches to the regulation of anonymity edited by Ian Kerr -- surveys the patchwork of U.S. laws regulating anonymity and concludes the overall U.S. policy towards anonymity remains primarily situational, largely reactive, and slowly evolving.

Anonymous speech, particularly on political or religious matters, enjoys a privileged position under the U.S. Constitution. Regulation of anonymous speech requires a particularly strong justification to survive judicial review but no form of speech is completely immune from regulation. Anonymity is presumptively disfavored for witnesses, defendants, and jurors during criminal trials; the regulation of anonymity in civil cases is more complex. Plaintiffs demonstrating sufficiently good cause may proceed anonymously; conversely, defendants with legitimate reasons may be able to shield their identities from discovery.

Despite growing public concern about privacy issues, the United States federal government has developed a number of post 9/11 initiatives designed to limit the scope of anonymous behavior and communication. Even so, the background norm that the government should not be able to compel individuals to reveal their identity without real cause retains force. On the other hand, legislatures and regulators seem reluctant to intervene to protect privacy, much less anonymity, from what are seen as market forces. Although the law imposes few if any legal obstacles to the domestic use of privacy-enhancing technology such as encryption it also requires little more than truth in advertising for most privacy destroying technologies.

Anonymity and the Law in the United States

Paul Starr reviews On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship:

At the root of the rise of partisanship is a change in what parties and party attachments in America signify. The standard observation used to be that the United States, unlike Europe, had no mass ideological parties. Both the Democrats and the Republicans were alliances of convenience that included both liberals and conservatives, and the more ideologically defined third parties, such as the Socialists, were too small to be of consequence. Activists tended to form protest groups to influence the major parties from the outside, while the parties themselves often seemed intellectually vapid at best, unprincipled and corrupt at worst. Learning whether someone was a Republican or Democrat did not necessarily tell you much about that person's beliefs. If you took political ideas seriously, it was hard to take party spirit seriously.

That is no longer so.

From the archive, Stanley Fish:

The assumption is that if we were all independent voters, the political process would be in much better shape.

This seems to me to be a dubious proposition, especially if the word “political” in the phrase “political process” is taken seriously.

From Super Tuesday, a dose of Hofstadter:

While most of the Fathers did assume that partisan oppositions would form from time to time, they did not expect that valuable permanent structures would arise from them ...

The Fathers hoped to create not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

... Although Federalists and Anti-Federalists differed over many things, they do not seem to have differed over the proposition that an effective constitution is one that successfully counteracts the work of parties.

On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties & Partisanship

Before the election, In These Times published a version of Slavoj Žižek's Use Your Illusions essay.

To get the true Republican message, one should take into account not only what is said but what is implied.

"In a way, it’s better for you not to know."

Let us not be naïve here: Republican voters know there will be no real change. They know the same substance will go on with changes in style. This is part of the deal.

The Republicans’ between-the-lines message was this: We allow you to continue to dream.

The dream is over.

Through the Glasses Darkly

"This week we learned that a number of Verizon Wireless employees have, without authorization, accessed and viewed President-Elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone account. The account has been inactive for several months. The device on the account was a simple voice flip-phone, not a BlackBerry or other smartphone designed for e-mail or other data services.

"All employees who have accessed the account - whether authorized or not - have been put on immediate leave, with pay. As the circumstances of each individual employee's access to the account are determined, the company will take appropriate actions. Employees with legitimate business needs for access will be returned to their positions, while employees who have accessed the account improperly and without legitimate business justification will face appropriate disciplinary action.

"We apologize to President-Elect Obama and will work to keep the trust our customers place in us every day."

From the archive, a CRS report on Selected Laws Governing the Disclosure of Customer Phone Records by Telecommunications Carriers:

Telephone records contain a large amount of intimate personal information. Recent years have seen a rise in the use of this information for marketing and even for criminal purposes. The purchase and sale of telephone record information, therefore, became a booming business. Websites and data brokers claiming to be able to obtain the phone records for any phone number within a few days abounded.

See also:

The actual work of obtaining the phone records was given to other subcontractors, one of which is said to have worked in or near Omaha. The methods were said to have included the use of subterfuge, a practice known as pretexting, in which investigators pose as those whose records they are seeking.

On the HP case:

"He was the most hawkish member of the board for finding the leaker," she added. "He wanted us to bring in lie detectors."

Personal Cell Phone Account Of President-Elect Obama Accessed By Unauthorized Employees

Section 802 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 is a blatant attempt to prevent this Court--and every other court, federal or state--from deciding whether the carrier defendants conducted dragnet, warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans' communications and communications records in violation of the Constitution and numerous statutes.

The carriers and the government portray section 802 as merely a decision by Congress about plaintiffs' remedies; after all, they say, plaintiffs may instead sue the government. But statutes cannot override the constitutional protections all Americans enjoy from the government's agents any more than the government itself can. This attempt to destroy plaintiffs' constitutional claims alone dooms section 802. Moreover, the sham proceeding established by section 802 violates due process in myriad ways.

But section 802 is far, far more: it is an attempt to manipulate the judiciary and subvert the Constitution. Underlying the Constitution lies the bedrock, structural principle of the separation of powers, by which the Framers sought "to assure as nearly as possible, that each branch of government would confine itself to its assigned responsibility. The hydraulic pressure inherent within each of the separate Branches to exceed the outer limits of its power, even to accomplish desirable objectives, must be resisted."

Section 802 crosses those limits by explicitly giving the Attorney General the power to partially repeal previously enacted law, delegating standardless discretion to the Attorney General, and requiring courts to accept the Attorney General's factual findings without independent judicial review. It also violates the Constitution by giving the Attorney General the unilateral authority to gag the court and hide court processes from the plaintiffs and the public. Accordingly, this Court must find section 802 unconstitutional.

From the archive:

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.

EFF Files Brief in FISA Case