"Just out of curiosity though, how many posts did you throw up at C&L before they banned you and over what time frame did you do your posting?

Once again, Congratulations! You are The Man!

-- Jebbie "

like on this site. How many peanut gallery bobble heads attack me and warrent defense. That's the way it works right? 5 gop nazi's gang up on the free thinking. When he/she responds it gets them banned. That's the game you republcains play right? Only works if the blog editor is stupid enough to buy it, and not see what's going on. If you republcains would ignore and let everyone type their mind, if wouldn't be an issue, would it?

Rufus11, I read all of your posts over at C & L (at least the ones which were not deleted). It seems you became a bit argumentative. And as I read it you didnt exactly understand the topic thread. It was about being bilingual. Not about HAVING to learn a second language.

Bill Timberman is alive and well as of this morning ~8:40 PDT.

Thanks for the piece today -- I'm glad to see an acknowledgement that by all measures Obama is getting more flack than praise/ equivocation from his supporters on his FISA stance. Yet I was surprised to learn that Larry Lessig was included in the list of those who support Obama but brush off his FISA position. What's the support for that? As of only two days ago, you mentioned Lessig and quoted him as being rather critical of Obama. Has he really done an about-face on this?

First off, I still don't think it's safe to post here, I'm making an exception because my post on this subject got swallowed elsewhere on Salon yesterday, and a similar post on the NYTimes site got deleted (maybe the new law is already in full swing?).

So, Thank You, Glenn for all the very tough work on this, and the clear explanations, and for raising the profile of the ACLU efforts, and for marshalling money and preparing ads, and for working with Chris Dodd, and for everything else. It really has been impressive.

Please don't chase bernbart away, you need her. She is expressing the opinion of a very large sector right now, she is the canary in the coal mine on how bad the misinformation about this issue really is. Be careful to watch how she forms and argues her opinions, those are the opinions you really have a chance to change.

Shooter, yes, it is about data mining. Your comments make clear that you have no idea what is in the new law, you have no idea what the Senate voted to immunize, and that you have no idea what the hell you're talking about when you get on the subject of data mining.

You aren't alone. The comments made by a good many senators before the vote indicated that they had no idea what was in the new law. I'm not sure anyone can truly guess how a John Yoo or a Jack Goldsmith or a David Addington, or a Jim Haynes would interpret what was just signed. I'll give you a clue, though. Every indication is that they would interpret it exactly the way a corporate lawyer would: find each and every perversion of the text that will support what their client wants to do, regardless of what any intents were, or plain English interpretation was, when the ink was put to paper.

The comments of Russ Feingold make it abundantly clear you have company on not having the slightest idea what was immunized. He didn't make those comments on a blog, or a commentary on Balkinization. He made them on the floor of the Senate to all the senators who knew as he was talking that he was talking about them. On top of many of them voting for a law they plainly hadn't read or paid attention to, they literally voted to immunize companies for crimes they were allowing another branch of the government to refuse to tell them about.

Reflecting on history, it generally appears that things have to deteriorate to a significant degree to incite a critical mass of people to action.

Let's hope that, in this instance, things will soon appear bad enough to enough people actually to do something, rather than waiting until things are really, really bad.

But I also know from history that it is very hard to wrest power from the powerful.

What's the support for that? As of only two days ago, you mentioned Lessig and quoted him as being rather critical of Obama. Has he really done an about-face on this?

Yes - I linked to his post on Leftist "hysteria" -- see here:

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/07/the_immunity_hysteria.html

And you're not alone in being clueless on data mining, even though, as you rightly point out, that's what this fight was all about. You mention private companies doing data mining as if that's an indication of how harmless it is. Are you freakin' kidding?

For your information, a subset of those clueless senators who voted to immunize, left the Senate floor, and went into a hearing room, where they heard testimony from major data mining companies, ISPs, Google, Microsoft, about privacy rights. To wit, about the rights those same U.S. persons have against deep packet inspection and user preference data collection and commerce. The senators listening to the testimony made no bones about the fact that they didn't understand what they were listening to. They said so, over and over again.

Deep packet inspection is reading your online communications, pure and simple. When questions came up on collection of user preferences and tracking in standards negotiations a few years ago, I was among a group of people who proved that no matter what regulation you created to prohibit personal identifiers and require aggregate data only be saved, personal targeting can be done from the aggregate data, and the personal identifiers re-acquired. That was important because the Europeans have laws prohibiting private companies from acquiring personal information.

The data acquired by those companies is the property of the companies, something they have fought for quite hard, and something that is in any click contract you've ever clicked OK to. They have communications abroad. They are also electronic service providers under the new FISA (actually for a while now). When they transfer their data, it is open to inspection. This isn't a speculation, shooter, I've examined user files with data mining programs legally because my company altered the user agreement and posted notice of the change at some fine print site. And I've sent them up the line to the FBI when necessary. An entire industry is reading what you say, and any and all of them are "electronic service providers". Even the people who store your medical records are service providers. Where is the clause in the new law that requires all your medical records to remain in the U.S.? Because there is a clause that says that your doctor and all the recipients of the data have to be in the U.S. for it to remain U.S. data. How many times have you clicked on an agreement that allows them to send your information to others. Have you read every click license you were ever presented with?

The crap that you wrote about tapping in London is officially a thing of the past, the new law does not require any particular location for the tap. It doesn't even require one party to be in London, the person tapping just has to think they are there. I believe that will be interpreted in the NSA as, "You had your wish all along. You just need to click your heels three times and say, 'There's no place like home.'" If someone can say, under oath, to Congress, "I don't remember", then they can say under oath, "I thought they were in London." The minimization under the new law says they need to destroy that data if they find out they weren't in London, except if it's important to the foreign policy of the United States, or if they need to retain it to because it helps interpret something else in their database.

Lastly, I would like to address Kit Bond's comment that you don't have to worry unless you have al Qaeda on your speed dial.

Do any of you people know anybody who's occupational title is "Electrical Engineer" and works in R&D? I thought so. Then next time you see them, ask them if they know MATLAB. Affirmative again? Good. How about have they ever talked to a technical representative, either to purchase a license, or for technical assistance. Bingo, three in a row? Listen to this Kit Bond:

Mahar Arar is a Canadian citizen in his mid-thirties who was born in Syria and emigrated to Canada with his family as a teenager. He was educated in Canada and has worked both in Canada and the United States, as a software engineer....In September 2002, while on a family vacation, Arar received an e-mail from his former employer, The MathWorks, asking if he was willing to return from his vacation early to consult with a prospective client in Ottawa....

[..]Over the next three days, until October 1, 2002, Arar repeatedly asked to see a lawyer and to make a telephone call, but every one of these requests was ignored. On October 1, 2002, and MDC official handed him a document stating that the INS had foun that he was "inadmissable" to the United States (an immigration determination making him immediately deportable) because he belonged to an organization designated by the secretary of state as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, namely, Al Qaeda. Arar was never given the opportunity to contest this finding. (source, B. Olshansky, Democracy Detained, pp.199-201,ff.)

It makes no difference if you really have al Qaeda on the speed dial, only that the government "reasonably believes" you have someone the government "reasonably believes" is al Qaeda on your speed dial. And once they start tapping you, your friends have al Qaeda on their speed dials too. "Reasonably believes" means "product of a data mining operation", and people who believe you need to have used a word on a short list of bad words are nuts. Here's an example: They search for patterns of word usage. If your vocabulary on a given day is very different from the vocabulary you usually use, you could be transmitting coded messages, so they will watch. Even if you are talking about the big wedding (or maybe especially) ;-).

So if you know an engineer who uses MATLAB frequently enough to talk to software engineers from Canada at The MathWorks...