Hollywood, Inc., is about to win another battle in the war on Fair Use and flexible technology. The FCC is set to approve something called the Broadcast Flag, which will require that personal computers and other devices contain technology to block unauthorized copying of copyrighted content. This will make just about every existing computer and operating system illegal, and is unlikely to sit well with just about anybody who isn’t Jack Valenti. The Electronic Frontier Foundation — a fine organization you should support — has coverage here and provides a way for you to make your voice heard here. The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Krim summarizes the issue in a column from a week ago.

Read. Act.

A trade group representing Diebold & others is working on a PR offensive designed to counter critics’ charges that the machines are unreliable, insecure, and tailor-made to facilitate election fraud. This, presumably, in lieu of manufacturing a secure, auditable system that we could, you know, TRUST. From the story:

David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University who runs a website called VerifiedVoting.org , said: “The voting machine industry doesn’t have a PR problem. It has a technology problem. It is impossible to determine whether their machines, in their current form, can be trusted with our elections.” Instead of trying to convince people the machines are safe, the industry should fix the technology and restore public confidence by “making the voting process transparent, improving certification standards for the equipment and (ensuring) there is some way to do a recount if there is a question about an election,” Dill said.

In a surprise move, however, Diebold has reversed its position on issuing paper receipts to voters.

I hate to keep baning the Diebold voting machine danger drum, but dammit, it’s important. The Independent has a great story on the direction voting technology is taking in this country, and how dangerous it is to the very idea of one man, one vote. READ IT. A sample:

The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal – on pain of stiff criminal penalties – for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up.

If that doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, I don’t know what will.

The Agonist has a great rundown of a variety of stories on the leak investigation, including the ongoing call for a special prosecutor as well as the first public appearance by Plame herself. Novak, of course, continues to hide behind his (negligable) journalistic integrity (never mentioning, of course, his own anger when Mike Spann was “outed” as a CIA operative in the early days of the Afghan war — after he was killed; for Novak, outing the dead is apparently wrong, but the living are fair game).

Easily the best story of the lot is also covered in a Slacktivist post. It seems Bush is really upset about this whole leak thing, and he’s made it clear on no uncertain terms that such leaks from his staff will have serious consequences. How do we know this? To quote the Philadelphia Inquirer:

WASHINGTON -Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush – living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge – told his top officials to “stop the leaks” to the media, or else. News of Bush’s order leaked almost immediately. Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he “didn’t want to see any stories” quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

A more accurate description of this turn of events is almost certainly “theater for the masses;” they want to look like they’re doing something, when in reality they’re anything but serious about this investigation.

Just ask the Stars and Stripes.

The White House is using the Secret Service and local police to sequester dissenting voices in “free speech areas” far from motorcades, media, and the public at large at Presidential appearances. Just dissenters, not supporters, mind you.

There is no reasonable justification for this behavior. It’s certainly not safety; do we think a militant anti-Bush nut bent on violence can’t pretend to be a supporter long enough to get closer? I think not. This is about control, about scripting appearances, and about hiding and marginalizing dissent. This is not American. We’re said to be fighting those who “hate freedom,” but what do actions like this suggest about those leading that fight?

Lots, I’ll tell you. Actually, instead of telling you, I’ll point you at Slacktivist again, who provides an excellent discussion of the idea of NMPW. It is pretty much without exception a bone thrown to the hard right, for whom protecting marriage means making sure gay people don’t get married. That we could have such an “official” week without discussing issues like domestic violence should make clear what the actual agenda is.

Homeland Security sent a Homeland Security employee’s fiancee back to Germany for no good reason last week. Read this. There have been dozens of stories like this, and some turn out to be fabrications or misrepresentations. I’ll be very interested to discover that rationale, if any, DOHS is able claim for holding her for 20 hours and shipping her home despite her valid documents.

Well, Mr. Bush, among other things it prohibits collective punishments, like bulldozing orchards because their owners won’t tell you anything about the resistance attacks.

That the owners may not know anything is, of course, immaterial.

The embattled White House — in the midst of an avoidable quagmire in Iraq, an utter lack of WMD, no real connection between Saddam and Al Queda, and a complete failure in locating either boogeyman we’ve been chasing for 2+ years (not to mention the Plame affair) — has gone on the offensive. Powell, Rice, and Cheney have all given aggressive speeches in the last week (Cheney’s was apparently the standout) wherein they insist again how justified the action in Iraq was, how bad Saddam was, how useless the UN was, and how (PNAC-style) we can and should do anything we want. (They leave out the whole lies-about-yellowcake bit, not to mention the complete-lack-of-postwar-planning bit, and don’t even ask about the how-can-we-afford-to-do-this-alone problem.)

Also included in this PR offensive may be a campaign of identical letters from different soldiers published in newspapers across the country this week. Gee, I wonder who wrote them?

Did David Kay find evidence of Iraqi WMD or not? It’s hard to tell from the media, which can’t be trusted to actually, you know, ask questions, but fortunately there’s handy examination of the findings disclosed so far. Hint: the White House isn’t happy.j

Yeah, you read that right. A Fresno, California liberal group (Peace Fresno) discovered that the quiet guy taking notes in their meetings who claimed to be “independently wealthy” was in fact an undercover sheriff’s detective (who died in a motorcycle accident on August 30; coverage of his death in the paper included a photo that members noticed).

Local law enforcement insists there was no investigation of the group (described in the article as “a bunch of Unitarian schoolteachers”), and that there are no documents or notes resulting from his surveillance. The officer’s family insist he was unlikely to be a member of the group on his own time, however, and he was using an assumed name for his role there.

In July, state attorney general Bill Lockyer told California law enforcement to not collect intelligence on religious or political groups without evidence of criminal activity. But under the federal Homeland Security Act of 2002, intelligence agents can look at acts of civil disobedience and minor law-breaking.

Shit like this gives me The Fear.

This Administrations’ Drug Czar (John Walters) wants to institute random drug tests of schoolkids. I have a notion that treating kids like criminals isn’t the best way to teach them to be citizens, but maybe there are folks who think it’s best if they’re just brought up to do what they’re told. (via TalkLeft)

Does anyone else think it’s curious that the “War on (Some) Drugs” is being ramped up when we’re in a quagmire in Iraq, we can’t find Saddam or Osama, and the economy is languishing?

With all the attention focussed on the White House and the DOJ’s investigation thereof vis a vis the Plame affair, one basic avenue appears essentially unexplored: why not go to Bob Novak himself and insist that he disclose his source? Journalists are subpoenaed every day to participate in trials and investigations, with varying degrees of success. There’s certainly a stance that suggests that pursuing Novak would be inappropriate and contrary to our free press, but, as Mark Dowie points out in Salon, there is little doubt what Ashcroft’s DOJ might have done had Novak been a partisan columnist for that other party.

Remember before, when I noted how the grad student at Princeton may well have violated the law by pointing out the using the shift key will bypass SunnComm’s new “copy protection” on CDs? Go on back and read the other entries, if you want: one and two.

SunnComm is suing him. Excellent response, boys: rather than, you know, selling a product that doesn’t suck, or (failing that) abandoning the snake oil business altogether, you sue the guy who points out that your emperor is as naked as a jaybird. It’s worth noting, I’m sure, that SunnComm’s stock is down 20% — to something like twelve cents a share — since the introduction of this “technology” (which they tauted as serious best-of-breed stuff, shockingly enough; I’m not sure if it’s fair to blame the guy that says your boat’s full of holes if it turns out not to float).

N.B. that the complaint utterly ignores the whole idea of Fair Use:

SunnComm is taking a stand here because we believe that those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used. Owning copying technology is not an unconditional ‘free pass’ to replicate or distribute protected work.

I guess that only applies to them owning the copyright, and not to me owning the CD, huh?

The Vatican is insisting now that condoms do not in fact stop the AIDS virus, so there’s no reason for people in AIDS-ravaged countries to use them.

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass – potentially exposing thousands of people to risk. The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to the HIV virus. A senior Vatican spokesman backs the claims about permeable condoms, despite assurances by the World Health Organisation that they are untrue.

Do we really need further proof how absurdly out of touch this Church is? It’s a political organization with a right-wing agenda. Given the AIDS rate and horrifying life-expectancy statistics in many African countries, it’s hard to see claims like this as anything but pure, unadulterated evil.

The White House’s response to the Plame affair has been pretty absurd so far, but now they’re into theater. By insisting on disclosure from 2,000 people, they’ve cast the net so wide they’re almost certain to allow the real culprit to escape. Novak’s “Senior Officials” must have come from a group much smaller than 2,000 Executive employees, and smart money is on folks very close to the Oval Office.

Not that they care, of course. They have aggressively tried to shape this as an issue of an innocuous leak, not one that put real people in real danger and that really, honest-to-God violated Federal law. Now Bush is saying he has “no idea” whether Justice will find the person responsible. I’m sure Ashcroft’s DOJ is working overtime on this one, too, aren’t you?

(All via Prof. Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog)

SunnComm’s president asserts in today’s Boston Globe that nothing in Alex Halderman’s report (noted yesterday) is surprising to them. BMG spokesperson Nathaniel Brown insists even they were completely aware of how trivial the new “protection” is to circumvent (to recap: press “shift” when you put in the CD). The Globe continued:

”There’s nothing in his report that’s surprising,” said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ”There’s nothing in the report that I’m concerned about.” Whitmore said his company’s system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a legal way to make copies for personal use, not to stop large-scale piracy.

I suppose pointing out that we already have a legal way to make copies for personal use with perfectly normal CDs would be rude, huh? I’ll go ahead and say it anyway: making copies for personal use — say, to put on your iPod, or to use in your car — is perfectly legal. It’s called Fair Use, but the RIAA would like very much to make that go away.

Whitmore goes on to note that future versions of this protection will be harder to circumvent, since they will interact directly with the computer’s operating system, and that “the deployment of this mechanism will be throughout all operating systems.” Really, Bill? Even Linux and FreeBSD and Mac OS X? I doubt it.

A few things are worth noting here. First, I wonder if they’re deploying something so trivial to bypass simply because of the anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA — i.e., as sort of an additional gotcha on top of the RIAA’s sue-kids-and-grandmothers strategy.

Second, you gotta wonder how much BMG paid for this absurdly trivial “copy protection” mechanism. I mean, c’mon, people; this is a bad joke. As Halderman points out, this isn’t some “dark secret of computer science.” Anyone with a brain can figure out how to bypass this “security.”

Finally, I want to point out that what he means when he says this tool will be integrated into your operating system, he means that future computers from Microsoft (and maybe others, but probably not) will include code specifically designed to STOP YOU from doing things that those computers can do now. Music files aren’t distinct from other files, nor are video files. Music files you make with a kazoo and a $5 microphone aren’t distinct from copies of the new OutKast CD. The flexibility of computing is that you an do anything you want to any of these files. DRM means, basically, removing that flexibility. This is why it’s unlikely that the programmers behind Linux and FreeBSD will support such schemes: removing flexibility is anathema to these people, and for good reason.

Food for thought.

Professor Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker weblog is an excellent resource for those of us concerned about copyright, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and the survival of Fair Use. As I noted before, rightsholders were pretty successful in getting the DMCA passed 5 years ago; this law tilts the playing field drastically in favor of folks like the RIAA. Here’s a real-world example.

Big Music hates the idea that you can copy your CDs to your computer and share those files. Actually, they hate the idea that you can even copy the files to anything, since every copy you make, to them, represents a lost sale (a wholly false assertion, but never mind that for now). Consequently, they’ve been working for years to figure out a way to copy-protect their CDs so that digital reproduction is, if not impossible, then very restricted. These efforts have not met with much success; quite famously, one copy-protection method tauted as “the best ever” a year or so ago turned out to be circumventable with a green sharpie.

Well, they’re not giving up (notwithstanding the “success” the software industry has had with copy protection; many of you may remember what a PITA that was with the likes of Lotus and dBase 15 years ago). SunComm has released what they insist is the most secure anti-copying technology yet.

As it happens, Prof. Felton cites a paper today pointing out that you can probably circumvent it by holding down the shift key in Windows when you load the CD. (He’s citing this, which is an interesting read.)

The not-so-interesting part? Publishing this paper may well be a criminal violation of the DMCA, since it contains information on how to circumvent a copy protection scheme. Does this sound right to you? No? Well, that’s the DMCA for you. It doesn’t matter what you plan to DO with the copy — e.g., putting tracks from a CD you own on your iPod is just as bad as uploading them to a thousand college kids via Kazaa. All they’d care about is that you circumvented their copy protection, and that’s illegal — and criminal, not civil.

The Agonist — an interesting read most days, by the way — is running a summary of the Diebold voting machine saga, including a rather exhaustive list of their attempts to silence critics through legal skullduggery (instead of, say, actual responses and rebuttals). Read this. No, really.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (a fine group you should join) has released a report on the unintended consequences of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), a far-reaching revision of American copyright law that essentially erases the concept of Fair Use. Please read this, and then contact your congresspeople. Job One: Axe PATRIOT. Job Two: Axe the DMCA.

NPR may have edited a transcript to remove commentary about Justice giving the White House a day’s reprieve on the “preserve all evidence” order in re: the Plame affair. This is tantamount to a license to destroy evidence, and (if granted) came directly from Ashcroft.

The questions, then, are “Why did NPR do this, if they did?” and “When will we here more of this story, if ever?”

Sen. Arlen Spector (R-Penn) has joined the voices calling for John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the CIA leak investigation. Ashcroft employed possible suspect and White House aide Karl Rove during a number of campaigns prior to his appointment as A.G.

The Guardian is reporting that the White House censored and edited an EPA report on global warming so much as to completely undermine the scientists’ findings, apparently because “global warming” isn’t part of the GOP platform.

It’s a shame how things like science can get in the way of politics, isn’t it?

In the days and weeks ahead, I suspect we’ll hear calls for an independent counsel to investigate the Wilson/Plame affair. I’m just as certain that the GOP will insist that such a thing is not needed, that we can trust Ashcroft and his existing criminal investigation, and that there’s no reason to worry.

When they say that — and they will — consider these quotes from GOP legislators concerning possible campaign fundraising law violations and the conflicts of interest involved in the Justice Department investigating a sitting president. Then consider which is the greater sin: campaign finance violations, or outing a covert operative of the CIA?

Slacktivist — a fine site worth visiting frequently — has a nice rundown of the Administration’s efforts since the weekend. His post title says it all: “Smear, smear again.” Smearing Wilson is just a bit difficult, though, since he has served Democratic and Republican administrations with distinction, and was singled out for praise by the other President Bush.

The Feds are invoking PATRIOT in letters to journalists insisting that they retain all their materials related to the Adrian Lamo hacking case (Lamo gained notoriety for breaking into companies’ systems, and then offering to help fix the holes he exploited; Lamo turned himself in on September 9). An FBI spokesman stated that “all reporters who spoke with Lamo” should expect such letters.

This flies in the face of traditional subpoena power, and in fact may well be in violation of the DOJ’s own guidelines, not to mention New York law. Of course, that those so notified aren’t allowed to tell disclose that they’ve been contacted, so these actions by the Feds are only now coming to light. The best part may well be that they’re using clauses of the Act designed to apply to ISPs and the like, not journalists (the specific language is apparently “providers of electronic communication”). More coverage here.

This time, it’s Federal judges from both parties, including Rhenquist.

After a long conversation at dinner when I suggested there was little to be optimistic about in the current political landscape, I came home to discover that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate the White House in the “let’s-blow-the-CIA-agent’s-cover” scandal I noted here months ago, and which the mainstream media essentially ignored. The CIA has no enforcment powers of its own, but it surely has done its own investigation or it wouldn’t be hassling Herr Ashcroft. Of course, emnity between the CIA and 1600 Pennsylvania is no secret; the spooks from Langley have been somewhat marginalized by the neocon “don’t bother us with the facts” worldview pervasive in the West Wing, and have resisted providing intelligence to support assumed conclusions (instead of, say, gathering intelligence and acting on what one discovers).

In case you’re confused, the precis is this: columnist Robert Novak named Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative in his column, apparently tipped off by (unnamed) senior officials in the White House. This woman was the wife of Joseph Wilson, who was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium — and who discovered that, well, there was no real evidence that they had. Never mind that; of course; the administration used the Niger story as part of its smoke-and-mirrors cassus belli for invading Iraq. Wilson publically criticized the administration for using this dubious and ultimately unsupportable claim, and smart money says they outed Plame in retaliation, and the Post (see link below) even has a source saying so:

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson’s account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush’s use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

In any case, Novak did indeed name her, and was apparently correct — the CIA has been doing damage control. Wilson himself said in an August 21 forum in Seattle that he believes White House adviser Karl Rove is the culprit, and that he’d like “to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.”

The Talking Points Memo interview with Wilson is here (PDF link). TPM’s post on this is here, and is worth reading as well. More coverage:

• CBS News
• New York Times (nogators/nogators, as always)
• Washington Post
• Time

Now: what happens next?

There’s another site up at BlackBoxVoting.com (as opposed to .org) that covers much of the same stuff, and appears to also be a promotional effort for Harris’ book. Check it out.

In other news, Maryland is planning to approve a contract (NYT link; nogators/nogators) for the Diebold machines despite a STATE OF MARYLAND report detailing a host of security flaws. Good God.

Remember that story I noted yesterday, about the Diebold election machine problem? And how Bev Harris had unearthed company memos more or less admitting how wholly fscked the system is, and that they didn’t care? If not, go read it again; I’ll wait.

Bev Harris’ site is shut down today, courtesy of Diebold. This ought to tell you something, and it’s not something good.

Salon is running an interview with Bev Harris, a writer who has spent a great deal of time investigating the electronic voting industry for her upcoming book, “Black Box Voting.” In the course of her investigation, she uncovered confidential memos that Diebold has attempted to copyright rather than disavow; this is most disturbing, since they describe a level of security I wouldn’t use for Nogators, let along our country’s voting systems.

Oh yes: these things are already being used in 37 states. This has got to stop. Any voting system MUST be both tamper resistant and auditable; Diebold offers no features in either department, and is aggressively attempting to avoid doing so. Moreover, there’s an utter lack of security in their product that they know about, but refuse to fix. People need to know this.

The Sacramento Bee is running a long piece on the erosion of our personal freedoms and civil liberties at the hands of Ashcroft, et. al., since 9/11. The news isn’t good. (via Electrolite)

The Bush folks have been suggesting that their critics were engaging in “revisionist history” in some of their complaints about the WMD search, the threat of Iraq, etc. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian McPherson explores what this means in his September column from the American Historial Association’s journal, Perspectives. (via Electrolite)

Former US Senator Max Cleland has a scathing editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the quagmire that could be Iraq. Cleland was hounded from office by a chickenhawk Republican for being “soft on the military.” It should be noted that Cleland knows Vietnam rather well, since he lost two legs and an arm there.

“Now hold on a minute, Mr. Gator Man! Who the hell is this Cincinnati person?”

Well, I’ll tell you. Actually, I’ll just point you at this article, and all will be revealed. Therein you will find this bit as a footnote, which provides a convenient rundown of the generals in our history who have sought or achieved the Oval Office:

The president generals are George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight Eisenhower. Unlike the other six, who were famed for their battlefield achievements, Pierce, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison were not known for their military records. Generals who have lost general elections include Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, George McClellan, and Winfield S. Hancock. Douglas MacArthur and Al Haig are among the generals who planned presidential runs but never got close to the November ballot.

Everybody, I reckon, knows about the 9th Circuit’s ruling halting the California recall, and how their ruling cites Bush v. Gore. Slate’s running this commentary, which is pretty darn funny without being terribly partisan either way.

Joey deVilla (aka Accordian Guy) has an excellent rundown of what’s going on in lay terms. Read this.

The voting machine fight is heating up. This time, the IEEE committee charged with creating the standard has become badly politicized, and is working to create a situation where actual performance metrics — you know, like on accountability and auditability — aren’t part of the picture. Diebold, et. al., badly want these standards in place quickly, and with a minimum amount of fuss — but if we get machines without adequate safeguards, fair elections will become a thing of the past. These firms are also lobbying to have the mechanisms of their electronic voting machines labeled trade secrets, which means “trust us; it works just fine.” Does this strike you as a good idea?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a petition. Go there, read, and sign if you agree. You can read more about this via this BoingBoing post and this post from JWZ’s livejournal; both link to other stories as well.

This is important, people. Pay attention.

Dick Cheney, who insisted he’d sever all connections with Halliburton upon taking office, has done no such thing. He earns more from their payroll than he does from the Treasury, and holds nearly half a million stock options to boot.

Let’s see: we impeached the last guy who lied about sex; what will we do with a guy who lies about money and influence?

Heretofore widely admired low-cost, big-seat carrier JetBlue has apparently been passing the full travel histories of many of its fliers on to a private security firm as part of the CAPPS II program, and then denying it after the fact.

This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and then posted on the Internet.

If you fly JetBlue, please stop if you believe privacy is something worth preserving.

Supply Side Jesus

Yup, it’s true, despite the fact that many Americans believe otherwise. Where might they have gotten that idea, I wonder? From the endless War-on-Terror rhetoric coming from 1600 Pennsylvania? From Bush’s own nebulous, bait-and-switch cassus belli where Iraq was concerned? Naah. Couldn’t be that. It also couldn’t be that such obfuscation was deliberate, and designed to distract pretty much everyone from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and that Saudi money underwrote the whole operation, right?

Right?

A bit of bombastic Flash, courtesy of the folks at Spacetaker.org. Don’t forget what Harris did in Florida.

Retired Army Gen. Wes Clark is gathering his political team in Arkansas, presumably to prepare for an announcement. I think we’ve got a good chance of getting rid of Bush’s team in ’04 already; with Clark in the field, though, those chances look a lot better to me.

Ashcroft dismisses anti-PATRIOT protests as “hysteria.” If you read this piece carefully, you’ll note that he says “[we] don’t care what you read,” with the implication being “but we get to know anyway,” or, in other words “trust me.”

No thanks, John. Especially not when you say things like

“The hysteria is ridiculous. Our job is not,” Ashcroft said.

Apparently, some folks are playing the Star Wars Imperial March (1.5M mp3) whenever Ashcroft appears publically. I love those guys.

This may be why Ashcroft is no longer talking to print journalists (who presumably tend to ask hard questions), and has been speaking in support of PATRIOT only in front of very specific groups.

In any case, his DOJ has been given seminars to local law enforcement on how they may use the USA PATRIOT act to prosecute drug crimes as terrorist acts, which can presumably produce lots of good law-and-order press for reelection time. Before PATRIOT, making crystal meth was merely a silly, stupid thing to do; now, it’s terrorism! (more)

I know I post about this all the time, but dammit, it’s important. Another weblog has a fine rundown of a recent Nightline segment wherein Ted Koppel examines PATRIOT and questions its supporters and critics. Frankly, it’s some astounding stuff. The blog author, Lisa Rein, has some trouble with punctuation and spelling in her transcripts, but she’s also providing some fine clips from the show. Please take a few minutes and read, if nothing else, the transcript of Barbara Comstock’s defense of the act, and note — as Koppel does — how she seems to keep forgetting that those “terrorists” she mentions are actually only “suspected terrorists;” none have sat for any trial.

Koppel closes with this, which is as clear an evisceration of Ashcroft’s DOJ as any I’ve seen:

The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the priviledged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes, the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.

Food for thought, kids. Remember, too, that on this past 9/11, our president was insisting that PATRIOT didn’t go far enough.

This commentary — by a member of Parliament, no less — from The Guardian, a British newspaper, says nothing we haven’t seen before, but it does say it all at once, and very clearly. Why journalists on this side of the pond aren’t also saying this is beyond me, especially since the PNAC documents are widely avaiable, and the events of the last two years match PNAC’s goals awfully closely. Even if you don’t agree with his points, at least consider his comments.