lookin

It usually improves mine.

Perhaps RA1 could give him a lift.

Tomorrow, there will be a group marching in the SF Pride parade in support of Bradley Manning. Daniel Ellsberg, 82, will be among them. There was a kerfuffle in April when the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee board named Manning Grand Marshal, and then rescinded the nomination a few days later. I hope he is aware of the strong support he has.

Plus the District of Columbia!

They can save their money as far as I'm concerned. I was at a small winery last year and asked the winemaster - mistress, actually - why there were two different-colored oak barrels. She told me the darker ones were French toasted oak barrels that weren't as harsh as the lighter local oak barrels. It finally dawned on me that the harshness I picked up in some white wines was from oak. She went on to tell me that oak had become a fad in recent years and, to reduce the time it took to impart oak flavor, the Australians had gone so far as to flow the wine over a bed of oak chips. Yech! She said that, thankfully, the fad was starting to die out and that she was glad the emphasis was swinging back to the grapes. I've found that most places will be able to make a recommendation for low-oak whites, and I always ask.

Everett prepares to diagram the sentence. He has requested a large piece of chalk, and a footstool.

Some nest! I think there's an egg in there somewhere but how am I supposed to sit on it underneath all those shoes? You promised me you'd add on a nursery after the last one. That was three weeks ago. All you ever do is sit around here drinking all day. And I'm still waiting for that worm you went out to get this morning. I told you you'd have to leave early if you wanted to stand a chance but, no, you had to stay out all night crapping on windshields. It's a good thing I'm so patient and sweet. And it's starting to smell in there, worse than the last time and I'm getting sick and tired of just putting up with it and suffering in silence. By the way, your mother called and she wants you to . . .

Just make sure he's not working for Rick Santorum. You may find yourself honeymooning in Cuba.

Aw, baby, she means nothing to me. And the burrow was so dark, I thought it was you! Honest!! Here, have another cranberry.

One thing for sure is that the harder the feds make it for him, the harder it will be to shove the genie back in. Snowden wanted a national dialogue and he's got one. I, for one, am very glad. Imagine if this issue had stayed in the closet for another decade.

That reminds me, I've got to clean the fridge this weekend.

Gosh, does this mean that every annoying, hypocritical, racist TV personality will be leaving the airwaves?

I'll go out on a limb here and speculate that the NSA is collecting a lot of stuff, particularly voice calls, that they haven't shared with us yet. I don't know that they're processing all the info in real time; in fact, I'd be surprised if they were. But I bet they're storing it in case it comes in handy some day. And, once it's stored, I wouldn't bank on its being destroyed after five years, as some have said it will be. Once it's in those servers, my guess is that it will stay there. And, if you'll permit me one more presumptuous prediction, I'll posit that this trove of data will be mined for purposes other than "making us safer from terrorists". Once the records are there, why wouldn't they be mined for all manner of federal, state, or local purposes? Suppose one day we find ourselves with a government that's down on hanky panky and decides to see who emailed an escort or called him to see if he was all tied up for the weekend. Just as I can't say with any certainty that this will happen in the foreseeable future, I also can't say that it won't. Once the capability exists to dig into someone's daily activities in detail, why would it not be used? And, if the government continues to be as secretive as it is today, I think it will be happening long before we know about it. Maybe it is already. There was a terrific Bill Moyers interview a few days ago with Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig who is all over this privacy issue. I totally agree with him that the infrastructure itself is something to be careful about, no matter for what good reasons it's used today. He seemed amazed that it's as open as it is to access by a contractor, and argued that the same technology that is used to collect the data can be used to make sure it is used only as the law allows, with auditability of civil protections built right into the software code. He said that hardly anyone is even thinking about having that discussion today. If you decide to watch the whole interview, hang on to your hat for the second part. He explains exactly why Congress is broken and lays out a plan to fix it. Not an easy plan, but a necessary one. The guy's got a head on his shoulders.

Well, maybe you've got the right idea. The politicians that I've been supporting advocate food, housing, and health care for all. As we are now often reminded, that can get pretty expensive. So maybe what we should be doing is giving everyone a gun instead. There's a modest one-time up front cost and the lucky ones can use the gun to get everything they need. And the unlucky ones won't need anything at all. Problem solved.

Wonder what I could get for 40.

It sure looks pretty.

From your lips . . .

A thread I can't even kibitz in. The ACLU says it all.

According to a Pew poll conducted over the last few days, 56% find the NSA's blanket phone call tracking to be an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism. Personally, I belong to the 41% who doesn't. Not only is there what I believe to be a healthy wariness of unbridled government intrusion, but I also am not aware of any tangible benefit offered by the government in return for giving up even some, let alone all, of my privacy. I hear, along with everyone else, that giving up privacy is one of the sacrifices we must make to keep us safer from terrorists. But those statements are nothing but fluff. The phrase "more wiggle room than an anorexic belly dancer" comes to mind. Before I would consider making such a deal, I'd want to know what we'd get in return. For example, how many terrorists would be neutralized if we repealed the Fourth Amendment in its entirety? Has anyone every heard even a single quantifiable benefit we'd receive in return for unending surveillance? And would the NSA stop asking for further loss of rights even then? Is it unpatriotic to ask what kind of a deal we're making before we make it? I also think the paranoid/trusting dichotomy is not a very useful one. Are we ever really one or the other? I have no trouble at all being, at the very same time, both trusting of the intentions of the vast majority of government officials and wary of the intentions of others; and both optimistic about today, and cautious about tomorrow. In fact, if I ever lost the ability to be both, I'd seriously consider upping my sessions to at least twice a week.

I can't believe we won a free trip. Wow! I've never been to Chicago. That Mr. Hormel's such a nice man.

This isn't, of course, the first time the NSA has overreached. I may have posted this link a few years ago, probably over at Daddy's, to the 2007 Frontline program, Spying on the Homefront, after the NSA tapped into AT&T's internet lines at their Folsom Street building in San Francisco. Yes, that Folsom Street. You can watch the program on-line, and click on the "Interviews" tab for some interesting reading. From the interview with Mark Klein, a technician who got access not only to the secret NSA equipment, but also to some documents that were carelessly left lying around: How do you know that it wasn't just some kind of newfangled AT&T thing that was going beyond what had already been established for its security purposes elsewhere? First of all, they wouldn't need the NSA for that purpose, and we would be allowed in by union contract to service the equipment as we always were. So anyway, there's that question right off the bat: Why NSA? Now, in October, while I was working and learning the Internet room, I came across these three documents, which were documents that the technicians had that were given to the technicians so they would know how to install things like the splitter cabinet in particular, because it tells how things are wired up. Those documents were left lying around. Some of the technicians still had them. One of them was just left lying on top of a router. I picked it up, and I looked at it, and I brought them back to my desk, and when I started looking at it, I looked at it more, and I looked at it more, and finally it dawned on me sort of all at once, and I almost fell out of my chair, because this showed, first of all, what they had done, that they had taken working circuits, which had nothing to do with a splitter cabinet, and they had taken in particular what are called peering links which connect AT&T's network with the other networks. It's how you get the Internet, right? One network connects with another. So they took 16 high-speed peering links which go to places like Qwest [Communications] and Palo Alto Internet Exchange [PAIX] and places like that. … These circuits were working at one point, and the documents indicated in February 2003 they had cut into these circuits so that they could insert the splitter so that they can get the data flow from these circuits to go to the secret room. So this data flow meant that they were getting not only AT&T customers' data flow; they were getting everybody else's data flow, whoever else might happen to be communicating into the AT&T network from other networks. So it was turning out to be like a large chunk of the network, of the Internet.

We don't have to follow the Constitution. We're the NSA!

Well, for one thing, I'm no longer getting logged out every five minutes. Thanks!

Then perhaps it's time for him to step aside and let someone more capable have a crack at it. If he thinks that setting aside the Fourth Amendment is appropriate in order to make his job easier, he's been in the position way too long. In fact, I think it's time for the Administration to come at this from a different direction and start thinking about how much security it can provide in the absence of the unfortunately-named Patriot Act, and in the presence of full respect for the Fourth Amendment. We should not be asked to decide between our civil rights and some undefined level of security. I think we need, and deserve, a better definition of the issue than that. It will require some heavy lifting, no doubt, and those who are not up to the task should think about making room for those who are.

It never made sense to me to put my info or my applications under anyone else's control. Even my email is erased from my ISP's server once I download it. Not only do they have you over a barrel with future pricing, but the recent publicity around Snoopgate has highlighted the fact that the government has access to any stored information it fancies, now and forever. I expect that those companies who are building their business models around storing user info will be among the first to start screaming about government intrusion. When the 1% starts taking it in the shorts, we might begin the necessary discussion around the value of privacy.