"Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Surveillance Law."

"In a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, the Supreme Court on Tuesday turned back a challenge to a federal law that authorized intercepting international communications involving Americans."

This was a predictable decision based on existing standing doctrine.

Mark-of-the-beast tag for school kids.

"Plaintiff's objection to wearing the Smart ID badge without a chip is clearly a secular choice, rather than a religious concern."

"Treating OWS as 'potential criminal and terrorist threat' was exactly the right thing to do."

"No one knew whether these protests were going to stay peaceful or not. OWS certainly wanted it to turn into a phenomenon of national civil unrest. Why the FBI wasn't supposed to treat it as if it had the potential to go that way is beyond me."

Writes one Metafilter commenter, who gets 3 "favorite" votes from the community and — 8 minutes later — this response:

Treating OWS the Tea Party movement as "potential criminal and terrorist threat" was exactly the right thing to do. No one knew whether these protests were going to stay peaceful or not. OWS The Koch Bros. certainly wanted it to turn into a phenomenon of national civil unrest. Why the FBI wasn't supposed to treat it as if it had the potential to go that way is beyond me.

FTFY

The response now has 33 "favorite" votes.

The notion that technology is the reason the murder rate has fallen by half.

"Are gun owners now going to be stigmatized like sex offenders?"

Asks TalkLeft.

I think it's an attempt at intimidation. I wonder if any of those whose addresses were published are immediate family members of federal officials or employees, and covered by 18 USC Section 119, which prohibits publishing home addresses for intimidation. Or if the internet publication of home addresses of gun owners can be considered cyber stalking, cyber-bullying, harassment or invasion of privacy under state laws? Just because the information is available under a FOIA request, does that mean it can be publicly disseminated? I'm sure they checked with their lawyers and felt like they were on safe ground, but I hope somebody sues them.

This incident reminds me of the mailings that went out last spring showing the names and addresses of residents in one's neighborhood and whether they'd voted in recent elections. At the time, I called it "incredibly creepy":

This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and harass you about it is violating your privacy, and the assumption that I will become active in shaming and pressuring my neighbors is repugnant. 

In a second post on that topic, a commenter, The Drill SGT, pointed to some social science research on the effectiveness of manipulating social pressure with this sort of information about what neighbors are doing. Apparently, if this sort of thing works, they'll be plenty more of it.

Get ready.

"Secret Service: We do not consent to our store being searched. It’s not that there’s anything illegal in here..."

"... but we just employ several Colombian prostitutes and we don’t want to tempt you guys."

Sign in the window of a store called Raygun — someplace in Iowa where Obama was appearing. The shopkeeper, Mike Draper, was told he'd have to close 4 hours early and then that he could stay open if he let the Secret Service search the place.  Draper said no to both and got away with it. This actually is America, you know. If you admire Draper, you can buy stuff from him here.

"A challenge to a federal law that authorized intercepting international communications involving Americans appeared to face an uphill climb at the Supreme Court..."

"... on Monday, but not one quite as steep as many had anticipated," observes Adam Liptak at the NYT.

The question in the case was whether journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates could show they had been harmed and so had standing to sue, and several justices seemed open to the idea....

The possibility that the courts may never rule on the constitutionality of the law seemed to rankle some of the justices. “Is there anybody who has standing?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked....

Justice Antonin Scalia [said] “We’ve had cases in the past where it is clear that nobody would have standing to challenge what is brought before this court... That just proves that under our system of separated powers, it is none of our business.”

Here's the transcript.

Camille Paglia, who voted for Obama in '08, delivers a fine rant about why she's not voting for him this time.

She's interviewed on video here, by Glenn Reynolds. Most of the interview is about art in America and her new book "Glittering Images" (which I just bought, in Kindle). But in the end, she's asked why she's not voting for Obama — she's voting for Jill Stein — and out flow the words, which I started transcribing without knowing how long she'd go on. I kept transcribing, because it was all such great material, so here it is (with a few screen grabs, taken from the art section of the interview):

I was very excited about him. I thought he was a moderate. I thought that his election would promote racial healing in the country. 

This is the point at which I started transcribing, thinking: This is how I felt, when I voted for Obama in 2008. Except I wouldn't say I was "very excited." I wasn't caught up in the ecstasy. I thought it was the better bet, compared to the GOP alternative, and I hoped for the moderation and advancement in attitudes about race.

It would be a tremendous transformation of attitudes. And instead: one thing after another. Not least: I consider him, now, one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it's going to take years to undo the damage to relationships between the races. 

Yes, this hope for racial transformation got squandered early, over that awful Henry Louis Gates incident. Back to Paglia:

But beyond that, I am just sick and tired of endless war. I was in favor of bombing the hell out of the Afghanistan mountains after 9/11, but I would have never agreed to this land war in Afghanistan, this endless land war, as well as things like this Libyan incursion that Obama appears to have been pushed into by these women, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, the chaos in foreign policy, the bowing to foreign leaders.

Also the Obamacare: of course, we need health care reform in this country. What a mess! Everyone agrees about that. But the Obamacare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion — okay? — into American culture.

The creation of this culture of surveillance, from these bureaucracies, which is also carried over into Obama's endorsement of drones on the military level as well as for police control of the population. I mean, I don't understand how any... veteran of the 1960s who's a Democrat could not see the dangers here, that Obama is a statist. It's exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," okay?

I paused the video at "It's exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about" and asked Meade what song she's about to name, and he said "Masters of War," and I said "That's what I thought." But it's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and as soon as she says it, we know why. (Look out kid/They keep it all hid/Better jump down a manhole/Light yourself a candle...)

You don't want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people's lives like this. The controlling force in Obamacare is the IRS! Okay? This flies in the face of what the Free Speech Movement was about at Berkeley or about any of the values, I feel, of my generation.

Yes. Exactly. This is how the Democratic Party lost me — by trading freedom for statism.

So I feel the Democratic Party needs to be shattered and remade to recover its true progressive roots. I don't see progressives. All I see is white upper-middle-class liberals who speak in this unctuous way about the needs of the poor.

Unctuous. Yes. White upper-middle-class liberals lubricating themselves.

They have no connection whatever with the working class. Okay? It's the professional class gone amok. And that's why they don't notice what a bureaucratic nightmare Obamacare is.

"Austrian artist... built an installation at a Vienna café that allowed men in the adjacent restroom to see the inside of the ladies room through a two-way mirror."

Alexander Riegler was simply commenting on our "age of social media and omnipresent video surveillance," the “voyeurism and surveillance in everyday life." What philistines are outraged?

Though he has installed a sign alerting customers in the café bathroom that they are being watched, café owner Alexander Khaelssberg remains enthusiastic about the project. You could only see women “while washing or applying makeup,” he said. “95 percent of our clients, whether male or female, find it funny.”

Facebook is watching you.

It can recognize you when you walk into a store.

We have uploaded the information that makes this surveillance possible.

Motivated by "the absurdity" of the TSA trying to see him naked via machine, John E. Brennan got real-flesh naked... and arrested... and prosecuted.

And acquitted... by an Oregon state judge:

Citing a 1985 state appeals court ruling stating that nudity laws don't apply in cases of protest, [Multnomah County judge David] Rees said, "It is the speech itself that the state is seeking to punish, and that it cannot do...."

Brennan said he knew he wasn't breaking the law when he dropped trou partly from his experience riding in Rose City's annual Naked Bike Ride, during which Portland cops traditionally look the other way....

"The irony that they want to see me naked, but I don't get to take off my clothes off. You have all these machines that pretend to do it."

From a legal standpoint, I have a few questions. Is Rees saying that the state only prosecuted him because he was expressing an opinion via nakedness or that a consistently applied anti-nakedness law must have an exception for people who want to use nakedness as a way of expressing an opinion? Also, if a city allows one naked protest, does that mean — under Oregon law — that people can take their clothes off anywhere — in Oregon — as long as they're trying to say something via nakedness?

Here's some more detail about nudity in Portland, which might like a reputation as the "Naked City."

In recent years, Portland police have taken a reserved approach when they encounter residents in the nude. They receive 9-1-1 calls about naked people in public "off and on" and especially in the summer, said Sgt. Pete Simpson. Police will use nudity laws to pursue charges against people caught urinating or defecating in public, or having sex in cars, on lawns or in full view of others.

But how about those who are naked for the sheer sake of being naked? "We don't necessarily encourage people to be naked in public, but generally speaking ...being nude in public is not enough to go to jail," Simpson said. "You've got to be doing something more."

Case-in-point, each year officers look the other way when thousands fill the streets for the World Naked Bike Ride, he said, "because of the sheer number of naked people."

Pick a policy and be consistent. I remember the time last year when I was down at the Capitol Square here in Madison, checking out another anti-Scott-Walker protest, talking to a man on the street, and the naked bike riders suddenly appeared:



"That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

(That video of mine includes a racial analysis of the naked bikers and — if you watch to the end — an Ayn Rand point of view.)

"Austrian Politician Photographed Having Sex In Forest By Hidden Wildlife Camera."

Oh, no!

Have you ever considered this possibility when you were having sex in the forest?

IN THE COMMENTS: AprilApple points to the part of the linked article that says the politician "will get up to $25,000 in compensation if the court rules his privacy was invaded." That does shed a different light on it — a less gentle, dappled light.

"Have you noticed that the left’s nightmare is a small town where everybody sees and comments on whatever you do..."

"... but they try to turn every place into a small town where everybody sees and comments on whatever you do?"

ADDED: And they love diversity, but they're hot to run you out of town for nonconformity.

"We have seen the power of a single mailer disclosing the voting behavior of oneself and one’s neighbors."

"Does this effect persist over time, in the form of newly created voting habit?" asks an academic study (PDF) linked by Professor Jacobson, as he discusses that creepy mailer that showed my name and my neighbors' names and whether we'd voted in the last 2 elections. From the study:

The remarkable effectiveness of the social pressure appeals contrasts with the relatively modest effects observed in previous studies of the effectiveness of direct mail voter mobilization campaigns....

The difference between our intervention and mail used in previous experiments is that ours harnesses one of the most formidable forces in social psychology, pressure to conform to social norms....

Decades of survey research have suggested that people implicitly defer to the norm of voting, insofar as they tend to exaggerate their past rates of voter turnout....

From a theoretical vantage point, the sheer magnitude of the surveillance effect suggests an important new line of attack for scholars seeking to explain long-term declines in voter turnout.... 

The surveillance effect! It's important for people to know when political organizations, like the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, are deliberately using a psychological manipulation that has been tested and studied. Please, get out the word that mailers like this are trying to mobilize...

The Surveillance Effect.

"The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone..."

"... in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time."

But Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis said... "What this is talking about doing is not focusing on terrorists or criminals, it's absolutely everybody's emails, phone calls, web access...

"All that's got to be recorded for two years and the government will be able to get at it with no by or leave from anybody."

"Voters Are Gung-Ho for Use of Drones But Not Over the United States."

76% favor the use of drones to kill terrorists, but when asked about using drones for surveillance — not even killing — only 9% are drone-friendly.

This gives real insight into how Americans perceive rights: We see ourselves as having strong rights as Americans. We don't have an international human rights perspective.

Remember the famous debate between Justices Scalia and Breyer about using foreign law in the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? I live-blogged it here:

Justice Scalia [says] it might be "nice" to know our law is like that of the rest of the world, but it isn't. The Framers would have been "appalled" if you'd have told them what they were doing is making us like the rest of the world. They didn't have much respect for European countries. He notes that Madison was contemptuous of countries that were "afraid" to let their citizens bear arms.

We think we're different. We think we're special.

"The Pentagon already includes unmanned drone attacks in its arsenal."

"Next up: housefly-sized surveillance craft, shape-changing 'chemical robots,' and tracking agents sprayed from the sky."

The future of war.

"Rebekah Brooks has been arrested..."

"... by police investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World and allegations that police officers were bribed to leak sensitive information."

... Brooks, 43, resigned on Friday as News International's chief executive. She is a former News of the World editor and was close to Rupert Murdoch and the prime minister, David Cameron.

The artist who wanted to document that expression people get on their face when they interact with a computer.

The Secret Service got involved.

The photographs: here.

Are you disturbed by the way the human being looks when he is interfacing with the machine?

ADDED:

What is most troubling here?
	What machines are doing to us.
	How the government swooped in.
	That Apple personnel (apparently) gave him permission to invade the privacy of customers.
	That activity like this is portrayed as art.
pollcode.com free polls

AND: More here.

But what crimes did he actually commit? None of the immediately obvious arguments would appear to be viable when you consider the facts of the situation...

"People who fill out so-called bubble forms — known to anyone who’s taken a standardized test — use distinctive pencil strokes that can later be used to identify them..."

"... Princeton University computer scientists have found. The techniques they developed could be used to catch cheaters on tests, the researchers say, but also for less benign purposes."