Politics

We know that the Bush administration authorized the NSA to spy domestically against federal law. It's an open question how useful this really was (and is).

Govtrack.us is a relatively well organized site where you can find out about all the latest legislation in Washington. It claims to be a non-partisan just-the-facts site and it pretty much seems to be that way.

Part of the mission of the NYC DOT is to "enhance mobility," but does it always have to be via the motor vehicle? 8 million people in New York City, a constrained amount of land, and the densest built environment in the country -- and still a transit and pedestrian focus seems alien to the DOT.

A recent report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center has some troubling information about personal data collection methods and oversight at the Department Of Treasury/Internal Revenue Service. The most troubling was the recent news that the IRS (and from this report it seems they control the ability of independent tax preparers also) would start selling taxpayer data to other companies.

American society has become more tolerant of many things over the years. We have even inscribed that tolerance into law. In many places that tolerance has recently included the sexual preference of people - you cannot be discriminated against if you are gay or straight or whatever.

So apparently president Bush knew about and directed the Valerie Plame leak. Didn't he previously say he wasn't involved? ("If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.") Or maybe he was just interested in finding out what was going on, knowing that might not happen - hoping that might not happen? Former President Clinton had to get into semantics to attempt to not admit directly fooling around* and the Republicans picked on him mightily for it. I would say that President Bush would be defending himself in the same manner now, but for one big difference - he and his administration don't even bother to defend themselves. They just pretend as if they have done nothing wrong. My guess is that history will not treat them as kindly.

(* Compared to authorizing spying on Americans and now this business with lying about knowledge of the leaking of classified CIA information, what exactly did former President Clinton do wrong?)

Russ Finegold, Democratic senator from Wisconsin, is proposing a measure to censure president Bush for his domestic spying program. Finally, someone in Congress with some balls.

I was working for Sun Microsystems in 1999 when Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." I did not really want to believe him then, but I knew if we did not do something about it we would end up exactly in that spot.

The New York City Police Department is definitely going overboard In in their crackdown on the Critical Mass rides, I wonder if more news coverage like this New York Times article will get them to back off, or if it will take legal action - more than just losing their case to stop the rides.

The Transportation Security Administration Secure Flight program has been suspended, supposedly because they have found a number of security vulnerabilities in it. Maybe they are suspending it (for now) because it does not seem to be working - $150 million spent and only lots of unhappy false positive matches (ordinary people who can't fly because they are matched for the wrong reasons). Not a very good benefit-to-cost ratio.