First, we note that the NYT has characterized said program as both huge and hugely ineffective:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 – In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. NYT via Daily Kos

Today brings notice of the group of hardcore conservatives now on record as opposing this program, including folks like Bob Barr and Grover Norquist. Salon has more on the diverse groups bringing suit over this illegal behavior. If this keeps up, Bush may well turn out to be a uniter after all, but perhaps not in the way he would prefer.

Salon also has an editorial up on the overall efficacy of such a program, and the legitimacy of the Executive Presidency theory that allows it. If it’s behind a paywall, somebody holler and we’ll PDF it.

Bruce Schneier points out that the DHS is funding an Open Source security project. As he notes, this is an excellent use of public funds. N.B. that only OPEN SOURCE tools can benefit from this investment, which will surely produce an even larger gap between FOSS and proprietary tools.

1. Start a war of choice;
2. Tell them that we “go to war with the Army we have” when they complain about lack of armor and supplies;
3. Do nothing about a Pentagon study showing that 80% of Marine fatalities in Iraq wouldn’t have happened with better body armor;
4. Threaten soldiers with loss of death benefits for using commercially available body armor of higher quality.

“He can wiretap whomever he wants, it’s really helped, but we can’t tell you how because it’s classified, so you’ll have to trust us.”

Um, Alberto? We have checks and balances in our form of government precisely because government isn’t trustworthy. But your boy Bush can’t be bothered to follow those laws even though FISA warrants are rubber-stamped 99% of the time. How’s that work?

Update: ThinkProgress debunks his smear of Gore and Clinton in his remarks quoted above. Nice try, torture boy.

Salon has an unofficial transcript of Gore’s speech from Monday.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens — Democrats and Republicans alike — to express our shared concern that America’s Constitution is in grave danger. In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power. As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses. It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored. […] [O]ne month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on “large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States.” The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program “without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection.” During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place. But surprisingly, the President’s soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end. At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently. A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution — our system of checks and balances — was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution — an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, “On Common Sense” ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America’s alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that “the law is king.” Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

You probably oughta read the whole thing.

Celeb gossip site The Superficial is horribly, horribly mean. But hilarious:

Frances seems like a nice enough girl. It’s kinda inspiring to see her defend a woman who spends most of her time either a) drunk, b) high, c) naked, d) dressing monkeys in bikinis, or e) all of the above. This really surprises me, because I figured any daughter of Courtney’s would either be sold into prostitution or so strung out on drugs that she’d look like a cross between Keith Richards and Sloth. Only with boobs. And then I’d call her Sloobs.

Also, apparently, if you’re any sort of media, you get to grope Scarlett Johanson. Who knew?

Mmmmmm. Scarlett Johansson.

Taiwanese scientists have made glow-in-the-dark pigs.

“Thank God for drugs. I don’t care if they’re slowly turning Lindsay into a ring-wraith; if it keeps her playing tongue-monkey with supermodels, they should be sprinkling angel-dust on her cereal.” (Thanks, LM!)

Sienna Miller paints with her boobs. And thank God for that.

Remember Cory? He’s the guy who shot and killed a home invader who happened to be a cop serving a no-knock warrant on the wrong house. He’s on Mississippi’s death row.

Well, the part-time public defender who’s been working on his case has apparently irritated the Prentiss, MS, altermen by doing so, as they’ve fired him for doing so. Way to go, Prentiss! (Said attorney will continue to represent Maye; he just won’t be the PD anymore.)

What tools.

Marcus Vick just doesn’t know when to quit.

Juan Williams is a douchebag. After last week’s dustup on the Letterman show, Williams went on O’Reilly’s program and sided with . . . O’Reilly. Whatever, Juan.

The Oklahoma Lewdness entry is fixed now.

Lonnie Latham, a highly-placed member of the Southern Baptist Convention was busted on lewdness charges for trying to pick up a plainclothes cop outside an Oklahoma City hotel.

From the article:

Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, [police Capt. Jeffrey] Becker said. Calls to Latham at his church were not immediately returned Wednesday. When he left jail, he said: “I was set up. I was in the area pastoring to police.” The arrest took place in the parking lot of the Habana Inn, which is in an area where the public has complained about male prostitutes flagging down cars, Becker said. The plainclothes officers was investigating these complaints.

My attorney wishes to alert everyone to this particular scene in downtown Austin, TX.

Go read this right now. Here’s a bit:

When the New York Times revealed that George W. Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap the foreign calls of American citizens without seeking court permission, as is indisputably required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978, he faced a decision. Would he deny the practice, or would he admit it? He admitted it. But instead of expressing regret, he took full ownership of the deed, stating that his order had been entirely justified, that he had in fact renewed it thirty times, that he would continue to renew it and–going even more boldly on the offensive–that those who had made his law-breaking known had committed a “shameful act.” As justification, he offered two arguments, one derisory, the other deeply alarming. The derisory one was that Congress, by authorizing him to use force after September 11, had authorized him to suspend FISA, although that law is unmentioned in the resolution. Thus has Bush informed the members of a supposedly co-equal branch of government of what, unbeknownst to themselves, they were thinking when they cast their vote. The alarming argument is that as Commander in Chief he possesses “inherent” authority to suspend laws in wartime. But if he can suspend FISA at his whim and in secret, then what law can he not suspend? What need is there, for example, to pass or not pass the Patriot Act if any or all of its provisions can be secretly exceeded by the President?

Where does this lead us? Schell goes on:

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush’s abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war (“war of choice,” in today’s euphemism) on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

Bush must be stopped. If he does not stop, he must be impeached. His doctrines and actions endanger our country far more than bin Laden ever has.

Every year, Ed Felton over at Freedom-To-Tinker makes some predictions. This year, his list includes an event we’ve been saying was coming for a while:

(19) A name-brand database vendor will go bust, unable to compete against open source.

The power of tools like PostgreSQL is undeniable, and the growing popularity of its rival MySQL has definitely made it safe to pilot or deploy with an open-source database instead of paying big bucks to Oracle and the like. We’ve seen what can be done with these tools, and it makes us wonder why the hell someone would BUY something like SQL Server.

Still, we’re not sure a vendor bust is in the cards for 2007. Collapse takes time, and so far I don’t think the FOSS options have grown quite enough yet. However, Felton is usually more right than wrong, and there’s no denying that this year will see PSQL and MYSQL take more market share from their commercial competitors. The effects of that market grab will definitely be interesting.