It's more than a little disheartening when the FBI protects themselves against prosecution by using gag order clauses in the Patriot Act.

Quoted: While the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been quite willing to announce that it has not used Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act to seek records from libraries, the FBI has balked at public disclosure of its use of National Security Letters, another method to gain such records and the one that American Library Association officials consider a more likely avenue.

An interesting piece on AppleMatters about the cultural trends towards full disclosure (a la twitter, personal blogs, and the like) being embraced by people who believe they'll be the next reality stars.

Quoted: I want to believe that this trend, like all trends, will eventually pass. I want to believe that one day people will wake up and realize that it is more important to live your life than to document it.

I was telling some folks about this at lunch today. Looks like even AOL is up in arms about it. They're saying it was a big mistake. Ummm - Oops?

This makes me pretty angry.

Quoted: CALEA (Computer Assistance Law Enforcement) is quietly in the background of current news again, because the FBI is pushing congress to mandate that all future routing equipment manufactured will include back doors for law enforcement.

An excellent little piece in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh.

Quoted: Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA “it would have got them.” He told me, “The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this.”

I used this little app on my work machine (which was getting a bit slow). It sped things up wonderfully. Props to Mohit for finding it in the first place...

Kinda freaky. A new service called "Root Vaults" (root.net) allows users to see their own clickstream in a graphical environment. Yikes.

Quoted: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns. If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers, for the first time, will be able to sell information from individual returns — or even entire returns — to marketers and data brokers.

Blog post where I encounter the first hurdle in stopping dreaded "saturation mailings" and find out exactly what that means.

Quoted: A life less cluttered: Step #1 - Get pissed off