Privacy? Forget it now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is at it again. CNET reports that the FBI is working overtime to ensure that Internet service providers (ISPs) will be forced to retain records of their customers’ use of the ‘Net for years after the fact and to make those records available to government…
Category: Privacy
Cass Sunstein, Obama Confidant, Supreme Court Possibility, Repressionist
I frequently don’t see eye-to-eye with Glenn Greenwald, but his latest post about Cass Sunstein, a close confidant of President Obama and current head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is a must-read given the talk that Sunstein could become a Supreme Court nominee should another opening present itself to the president. Glenn…
The Virtue of Minding One’s Own Business
Catholic Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho’s excommunication of the mother of a 9-year-old girl who had an abortion after being raped by her step-father has infuriated many people in Brazil and elsewhere. This is a case when being right in principle results in being wrong in fact. Sobrinho: Abortion is much more serious than killing an…
No Crime in Doing What They Had to Do
John Yoo’s name has become synonymous with what some on the left consider egregious unethical and illegal behavior on the part of the recently departed Bush administration. Today Yoo fired back, saying that the administration did what it had to do to protect the nation and what happened in Mumbai in November might have happened…
Obama Eliminates Bush’s Executive Privilege Order
On his second day in office, Barack Obama fulfilled a campaign promise when he replaced George W. Bush’s executive order pertaining to executive privilege and the release – or withholding, in Bush’s case – of presidential records. Obama: Going forward, anytime the American people want to know something that I or a former President wants…
Birth and Death Control
Hillary Clinton writes that the Bush Administration’s impending clampdown on access to birth control and "morning after" pills is outrageous interference in the lives of women. She’s right, of course, although the decision also impacts men only a little less directly. These rules pose a serious threat to providers and uninsured and low-income Americans seeking…
Liberals Who Simply Can’t Let Well Enough Alone
Unhappy with the deal reached between the parties about the legal fate of telecom companies who helped the feds in the aftermath of 9/11, two of the looniest of the left are banding together in an attempt to filibuster the bill in the Senate: "If the Senate does proceed to this legislation, our immediate response…
FISA Immunity
In what must be a blow for folks like Glenn Greenwald, Democrats and Republicans have come to the logical, inevitable conclusion that telecom firms who aided the Bush administration by compromising records of Americans’ telephony activities shall be immune from prosecution if asked to do so by the government. Dan Froomkin hates the "compromise", which…
Telco Immunity Deal Coming?
That’s what Jane Hamsher thinks. According to the ACLU, there is rumor of a backroom deal being brokered by Jay Rockefeller on FISA that will include retroactive immunity. I’ve heard from several sources that Steny Hoyer is doing the dirty work on the House side, and some say it will be attached to the new…
Obama Adviser Favors Telecom Immunity; Barack Demurs
ABC’s Justin Rood reports that John Brennan, Barack Obama’s intelligence adviser, has gone on-record as being strongly in favor of granting immunity to telecoms that provided information to the national security apparatus in advance of a new law granting them that authority. "I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA…