Yesterday, I blogged about a startling story in the NY Times about President Bush’s authorizing the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without a warrant or even a court order. According to the NY Times story, the “legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified.”
Today in the NY Times is a follow-up story about the legal basis for the President’s actions. According to the story:
Responding to reports that revealed that the President authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance within the US, President Bush said:
The New York Times has an in-depth story about how President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to engage in surveillance after 9/11:
Paul Secunda over at Workplace Prof Blog brings news about an update to the Seigenthaler Wikipedia defamation case I blogged about recently. In the case, an anonymous individual wrote in Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia entry that Seigenthaler was involved in President Kennedy’s assassination. Seigenthaler complained that he was unable to track down the identity of the alleged defamer.
What do Santa Claus and DHS have in common? They both keep a list of who’s naughty or nice. DHS’s list isn’t quite as large as Santa’s, but it’s getting quite big. From the AFP:
A USA Today story raises the issue about whether divorce records should be public or private. The article has a good discussion of the law of divorce record confidentiality, and it has examples of several cases where reporters obtained divorce records of celebrities and politicians in order to glean juicy bits of gossip. One of the most interesting cases involves Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan, who ran in Illinois in 2004:
From ZDNET:
About 30,000 airline passengers have discovered since last November that their names were mistakenly matched with those appearing on federal watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday.
Jim Kennedy, director of the Transportation Security Administration’s redress office, revealed the errors at a quarterly meeting convened here by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.
Here’s a selection of headlines for stories about the Texas court’s recent decision throwing out the conspiracy charge against Tom DeLay but retaining the money laundering charges. But by these headlines, it appears that there were two very different results in the case:
So much for concurring opinions . . . I’ve been attacked by not only one co-blogger, but two. Earlier on, I posted a critique of the court’s decision upholding the NYC subway searching policy against a Fourth Amendment challenge.
The gloves are off. Dave Hoffman has lodged another challenge to my position, and I want to take a quick moment to defend myself.
I believe that Dave mischaracterizes my arguments in several places and exaggerates some of my claims. So I’ll attempt to clear up any confusion as to my positions and try to defend my turf.