Last week I sat through the worst meeting in the world, and survived. It was a perfect cocktail of all the classic ingredients of unbearable meetings: powerpoint slides packed densely with unreadable text; a droning, inflectionless voice on the other end of a conference call reading those slides, verbatim; crushingly dull subject matter; and a [...]
Just came back from watching United 93. When I first heard that they were making this movie, I immediately jumped to lots of conclusions: that it would be exploitative, sentimental, sensationalistic. That it would be a callow vehicle for scoring cheap political points. That it would be hastily thrown together and shoddily, disrespectfully made. I [...]
An article in today’s New York Times, puts the blame for the NSA’s post-9/11 surveillance practices squarely on Dick Cheney’s shoulders: In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants [...]
Here’s an interesting exchange between Knight-Ridder reporter Jonathan Landay and Michael Hayden, Bush’s nominee for CIA Director: JONATHAN LANDAY: My understanding is that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. [...]
Richard A. Falkenrath, the former deputy homeland security advisor and current Brookings Institute scholar, has published an editorial in the Post saying that whoever engineered the massive NSA phone-record grab is a genius and a hero. And if that person turn out to be Michael Hayden, erstwhile NSA head honcho and CIA Director nominee, he [...]
The treacherous phone companies who’ve been pipelining our personal data into NSA headquarters may be hurting soon: Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a [...]
You know that line of Arthur C Clarke’s, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? I have a corollary: any sufficiently annoying pain in the ass is indistinguishable from javascript. I swear to god, building anything with javascript is like making a house out of rubber bands and seagull feathers. It’s like writing [...]
Well, it’s happening. The NSA has apparently been tracking our telephone calls for the past five years: The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. The NSA [...]
I’m reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, a compact memoir that’s both beautifully written and dense with wisdom. It’s also possibly the most discouraging guidebook I’ve ever read, less a description of the writing life than a warning, a skull and crossbones: a gentle reminder to abandon all hope. Here’s a typical passage: I do [...]
Another Jiggy sighting, this time from Daily Kos, which should know better: Yes, it looks like the American people, all of them, are getting jiggy with it. Gas prices got everyone’s attention. The disease spreads. Is this a minor flare-up, or the vanguard of a full-on epidemic? We’ll be watching. And praying.
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