Glenn Greenwald has been back on the warpath against journalitic reliance on anonymous or “background” sources. He argues—and this is clearly true—that officials often game reporters by using the shield of anonymity to provide spin without accountability. “Administration source...

If you devote a sizable chunk of your time to writing about surveillance, you see grim predictions about "the end of privacy" bandied about with a numbing regularity—hell, I've got at least two books by that title on my shelf right now. Which may be why it took me a while to get around to Yale...

A data security company in Pennsylvania this weekend confirmed that sensitive schematics for the Sikorsky VH-60N helicopter—better known by the call sign "Marine One" when used as personal transport for the President of the United States—had been leaked over the Gnutella peer-to-peer fil...

A federal district court in Vermont has ruled that the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination does not bar the government from requiring Sebastien Boucher, who faces charges of possessing child pornography, to decrypt his laptop hard drive. A lower court had previously quashed a subpoena c...

Reading Patrick Ruffini’s jeremiad against “the Joe-the-Plumberization of the GOP,” it suddenly struck me that Joe may well be the first full-fledged metapundit. Here’s what I mean.  It’s hardly new to see political advocates whose non-ideological identities are as imp...

For years, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) has been pressing for legislation that would require Internet Service Providers to retain user data in order to aid law enforcement in hunting down child porn peddlers and downloaders. Last week, he introduced his most recent effort, and today was joined at a press...

Legislators in conference committee have reportedly reached agreement on a final $790 billion stimulus package, and while some details of the final broadband subsidy package are still being hammered out, word from the Hill is that a "network management" amendment proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D...

You'd be hard-pressed to tell sometimes, but the United States Congress actually maintains its own in-house think tank, staffed by a seasoned team of lawyers, economists, and policy experts: the Congressional Research Service. Founded in 1914 as the Legislative Reference Service, CRS now commands an...

There are a million new-media political consultants in the naked city, most of them spectacularly full of crap. One of the exceptions is Josh Koster, a young progressive strategist who has a long essay in Politics (the quondam Campaigns & Elections), worth reading in full, on some of the lessons...

The Bush administration has repeatedly assured the public that controversial programs of "enhanced interrogation" and warrantless wiretapping were thoroughly vetted by government attorneys and determined to be lawful. But thus far, only a select handful of individuals, even within the intelligence a...