Jim Hoft, still the dumbest man on the internet.
Archives for June 2013
Mexico v Italy Open Thread
Sorry, I’m a little late. Can El Tri end their recent run of scoreless ties?
Their appeal is becoming more selective
Elias Isquith makes a good point about the much-ballyhooed “conservative reformers” — that they’re largely all about W-style “compassionate conservatism” minus the attempts to court non-white voters:
What’s especially troubling is that these changes, though small, tend to lean in the direction of making compassionate conservatism even worse. Whereas compassionate conservatives tried to woo minority voters by focusing on education reform, the conservative reformers prefer instead to lock in that dwindling subset of sometimes-Republicans: working-class whites. Douthat and Salam’s essay has much to say about “pro-family” tax reform — they even flirt with endorsing wage subsidies and Romneycare — and the struggling economic station of the working class. But when it comes to minority voters, the authors rather blithely conclude that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has rendered futile any attempts to court African Americans. Gobry, meanwhile, is too busy unpersuasively explaining why Ronald Reagan was secretly pro-government.
I don’t believe conservative reformers have so little to say on race due to bigotry. But the focus on lower-scale whites is not only strategically questionable…
In many ways “Sam’s Club Conservatism” is admirable, in that it’s a plan to do something for working class voters instead of relying on Nixon/Buchanan backlash identity politics to appeal to hardworking white Americans (heh). But it won’t accomplish much politically, unless it’s accompanied by a plan to compete for non-white voters.
Maybe by giving white working-classs voters something more than bigotry and Gods, guns, and gays, Republicans can continue to do well with that demographic while at the same time retreating from the culture wars they are now badly losing. But that seems like a very long-term plan to me.
Their appeal is becoming more selectivePost + Comments (129)
The STELLARWIND Came Blowing In
Apparently the fight at John Ashcoft’s bedside was over a surveillance program, codename STELLARWIND, that collected Internet metadata, according to Barton Gellman’s piece in today’s Post:
STELLARWIND was succeeded by four major lines of intelligence collection in the territorial United States, together capable of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications, according to the interviews and documents.
Foreigners, not Americans, are the NSA’s “targets,” as the law defines that term. But the programs are structured broadly enough that they touch nearly every American household in some way.
[…]Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents.[…]The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON.
For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.
The Post has a good backgrounder on metadata. According to that piece, the NSA stopped collecting Internet metadata in bulk in 2011, but previous leaks have indicated that roughly a trillion pieces of metadata were collected worldwide last year.
I had to read the STELLARWIND piece a few times to understand what, exactly, is being reported, and came to the conclusion that the vagueness was intentional. Gellman has sources, apparently other than Snowden, who are feeding him classified information, but what’s been leaked so far just confirms that these programs exist, not how much they collect.
Yesterday’s disclosures by Microsoft and Facebook show counts of requests for content, not metadata, and do not break out NSA requests. That’s why both Twitter and Google are fighting with the government to be allowed to release the number of content requests made by the NSA. The question of how much metadata they’re releasing to the NSA hasn’t even been broached.
Happy Father’s Day
My dad sent me this ad from real America. I’m not sure they got the imagery quite right.
Sunday Morning Garden Chat: “GadZukes!”
From faithful commentor Marvel:
And so it begins….
They look so peaceful when they’re young — what could possibly go wrong?
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One of the local restaurants has started offering a “grilled bruschetta” made with zucchini slices & a sliver of prosciutto standing in for the local tomatoes that aren’t yet available. Darn tasty!
On the north-of-Boston gardening front, my local gardening center turned out to be almost out of basil plants. I had to settle for a couple of very young Italian Sweets and a lemon basil, which is my own fault for waiting until mid-June. But there were quite a few tomato plants — some of them with full-sized fruits! — still waiting for a home; I found the Ramapo I’d been hunting unsuccessfully online. On an impulse, also picked up a “Sweet Seedless“… can’t be any worse a mistake than last year’s Indigo Rose, which was a waste of space & sunlight. We’ll see!
What’s going on in your gardens this week?
Another Shoe Drops
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
Declan McCullagh, at CNET:
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”
There are serious “constitutional problems” with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. “It epitomizes the problem of secret laws.”
The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week’s disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)…
Much more detail at the link.