Category Archives: Government
Prop Refuses to Serve as Prop
Update:
Politicians are keeping their distance from the president these days. When the presidential seal fell from his podium he made a self-deprecating joke that even it didn’t want to appear on stage with him.
No he didn’t. President Obama doesn’t do self-deprecating. He said, “all of you know who I am…but there’s somebody back there who is really nervous right now“. Yes, Mr. President, we all fear you.
Yesterday even Walter Mondale piled on, telling him to lose the “idiot boards”.
Woodward
The Voters Have Spoken… The Bastards.
Actually, the voters haven’t spoken yet but Rich Lowry, in a column about Democratic leaders’ current contempt for the electorate, remembered that quip from Mo Udall in 1976. President Obama’s quip is that Democrats need to “buck up”. John Dickerson in Slate says this suggests he considers them “ignorant, inattentive, or lazy”. Biden just calls them “whiners”. And John Kerry adds that, “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson sums it up this way, “The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.” All this flattery is nicely covered in Victor Davis Hanson’s column here.
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.
