Category Archives: Blogger
Don’t Let the Back Door Hit You
The FBI wants a “backdoor” to the web.
Since 9/11 the government has relied on phone wiretaps for national national security purposes. That practice, under the Bush administration, created an uproar (here’s a 2007 James Risen NYT story). With more sensitive information being encrypted on the web, the current administration wants to require that all internet communication be wire-tap friendly.
Apparently this would be a step backward, requiring an internet retrofit. Here’s Jack X. Dempsey, V.P. of an outfit called the Center for Democracy and Technology, in Monday’s New York Times:
“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”
Valerie Caproni of the FBI claims the government is just trying to preserve authority it already has.
“We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”
Wouldn’t be the first enterprise seeking special favors to avoid being bypassed by technology.
Not Exactly The Pentagon Papers
ProPublica compares the WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers and finds them wanting. Only in America can you dump 90,000 classified documents and have nothing new. (Unless you consider 2 media entities with 4 capital letters something new.)
Post-Racial Polling Place
It began this week with the NAACP accusing the tea party of harboring racists. The tea party, such as it is organized, excommunicated a California member for a post mocking the NAACP in a racial way. Seemingly in exchange, the NAACP got an agriculture department employee fired for racial comments posted on Breitbart. Except, when her remarks were considered in their full context, she was making a point against racism. Tea Party types say all the racism talk is an attempt to distract from the butt kicking Democrats are taking in the polls due to the Obama agenda. But that whould require a conspiracy – a cabal. Oh wait, it turns out there actually was a sort of media cabal- on a list serve called Journolist. And an ambition of one of its members, Spencer Ackerman, was to create a diversion to get the Jeremiah Wright story off the front page. The diversion? Random accusations of racism.
Here’s a quote from Ackerman’s email as posted by the Daily Caller: “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
Here’s a great essay by Victor Davis Hanson about the racial mess we find ourselves in today.
And another good one from Slate’s William Saletan. He goes into the details to conclude that Andrew Breitbart lied about Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP.
Not Chris Matthew’s Leg Tingle
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein ran a listserv limited to about 300 liberal media types called Journolist. Apparently the 300 included a whistle blower . The Daily Caller reported that Journolist archives include an NPR producer who would get a tingle out of Rush Limbaugh’s bug eyed death by heart attack – not surprising, an ignorant academic who thought that the FCC could shut down Fox News – also not surprising, and that real journalists discussed how to stop media coverage of Jeremiah Wright – way surprising.
It’s a Surprise
Chris Dodd and Nancy Pelosi explain here that you have to pass their 2000 page bills to find out what’s in them.
William Saletan has an interesting piece in Slate detailing how Kagan, while working in the Clinton White House, doctored a report on partial birth abortion by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynocologists. He points out that the report was taken as expert opinion in court rulings. If she gets on the Supreme Court and overturns a ruling because it was based on her original lie, would that make her an activist judge?
