Sadly, No!

Baseball thread below the fold…
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Here’s what I understand is up with the NSA surveillance program. I’m going to be brief and cursory here, but I can fill in some of the cracks later from the notes and cites I’ve been accumulating.

It’s not ‘wiretapping,’ per se, and it isn’t a searchable database of call data. The ‘big database’ that people keep mentioning apparently refers to two things — or, rather, one thing with two separate components. The first and less interesting is a very large store of archived communications traffic, comprising phone calls, email, web pages, and probably IM and text messages, etc.

Now, the problem with giant piles of data like this is sorting them so that they’re in any way useful. People have been speculating about keyword searches and other such kinds of data mining, but that would be a stupid way to set things up. Besides just the practicalities, somebody who’s a terrorist would probably be less likely than other people to use (for example) the words ‘bomb’ or ‘terrorism’ in his or her communications. The way you want to organize a database like this is by personal connections. In fact, this is a standard Internet-age solution for such things, and that’s what they did.

The NSA program is based on a network of personal connections very much like Friendster. Except what it is, is ‘enemyster.’ For instance, if Osama bin Ladin’s cousin’s valet sent an email to your sister-in-law’s friend, who also emailed you, you’re in the database. People are scored according to their degree of separation from other people who are considered high-risk or interesting. Presumably, there’s a threshold or series of thresholds at which levels of surveillance are automatically kicked in, such that a person with a high enough score would have their communications monitored.

Now, everyone knows the thing about six degrees of separation, from the Stanley Milgram study. It’s easy to trace a single connection from one individual to another using a small number of steps. A grandmother in Dubuque would tend to have not a more distant connection to interesting or high-risk individuals, necessarily, but fewer close connections. One truly interesting thing about the NSA program is that people in fields such as journalism and politics are going to be scored extremely high because of their proximity to newsworthy figures including genuine terrorists. Christiane Amanpour, for instance, who is Iranian and is chief international correspondent for CNN, would have multiple, perhaps hundreds of high-interest connections lighting up the system like a Christmas tree. We’ve already heard an intriguing niblet about Amanpour being surveilled. Arianna Huffington, as well, is going to be all up in that shack. And that’s where things get very, very interesting.

Here, you’re the NSA. You can do this right now. Amanpour is married to James Rubin. Click on a name in James Rubin’s profile. Then go to that page and click another name, and so on.

That’s who’s in the system at levels of high interest, unless a given individual is intentionally and manually exempted from the database. You can see why this would be a problem, and why an investigation of this program is strenuously not desired by the current administration.

Are they abusing it for political purposes? Well, that’s a question, isn’t it?

In passing — and this is the thing I know the least about — it seems that the ‘net neutrality’ issue has a lot to do with Congress offering an incentive to the telcos for allowing their networks to be used (illegally). That’s not a point I’d be confident arguing right now, but it has the telltale corona of something that may later turn out to have been obvious.

From Lambert at Corrente:*

Know what that is? That’s a diagram of the Internet ‘choke points’ necessary for wholesale surveillance of email and Net traffic.

[email protected] adds: It is not! Oh wait, shit. Uh, nice site! Online poker!

* Update: Lambert’s site just got hosed, but Jane’s on it as well. If you’re into some tasty late-afternoon paranoia kabuki, let’s repost this photo in a bunch of places. ‘Cause why not?

From Tacitus, in comments:

Hold tight for a shocking disclosure here, but bloggers in the daily fray of point/counterpoint tend to come across all sorts of private information about political figures, pundits, and each other that they hold back from posting. Sometimes it’s merely rumors, such as — to give one example — tales of Karl Rove’s apparently brazen habits with regard to young men in the DC metro area. Whether those are true or not, only certain people can say with total confidence; but the set of active, daily-posting bloggers on both the left and the right who’ve never heard about such matters is, one would guess, roughly null.

To give a more troublesome example, sometimes it’s things like Karl Rove’s home phone number, which was spammed out to a lot of people’s email addresses and comments awhile ago. The recent Malkin affair is another one. In passing, there was an incorrect version of Malkin’s home address spammed out all over the place, and also a correct one. Finding out which was which would’ve been an extremely trivial exercise to anyone who really wanted to know.

Now, not only am I dead certain that Atrios had Josh Treviño’s name back when he was still anonymous as Tacitus, but I’d go a step further and say that there’s never been any such thing as a high-profile anonymous right-blogger. People, in short, talk like crazy. People talk, talk, and then talk some more. Especially right-bloggers, who talk bigger than left-bloggers, and indeed are impossible to shut up once you get them going.

Tangent: I was lucky enough to know some ex-CIA guys once — whom you’d think would be pretty tight with all that secret stuff they’re supposed to be down with — and learned the valuable, although astonishing, lesson that people in intelligence are the biggest yappers ever in the history of the world. They’d be like, “Well, don’t tell anyone I told you this, but…” and the floodgates would open spilling 900 billion gallons of pure Holy-Crap-You-Didn’t-Just-Actually-Say-That. (These were contractor-type guys, not employees. When you go up the chain a bit, it seems, things are different.) The secret, and the similarity to right-bloggos: They love above all else to prove that they’re in the loop, that they have information and power that ordinary people don’t have.

In part because of that, the issue of blogger ethics (if that term doesn’t cause glaucoma on contact by now) is different on the left than on the right. If Treviño is still hanging around here, maybe he can post a nice, rollicking Bwaa-ha-haa in comments to illustrate, because the right has their whole Bwaa-ha-haaing thing, where they unmask people in dramatic fashion or send legions of henchlings to jump up and down on people’s birthday cakes and azaleas — often with the characteristic Bwaha move of being all like, “Thus you have by your own actions forced me to take this extreme and otherwise-regrettable measure.” It’s probably good they’re all signing a pledge to cut that shit out. There’ll be some interesting fireworks when they start ‘being forced’ to break it.

On the Left, the problem is quite a bit more nuanced. As the eternal gossip typhoon eternally typhoons around, sweeping up Post-Its and cocktail napkin jottings and ephemeral notes-to-self, et alia, the problem is not slipping up by revealing information that ought to be private. Check out what just happened above. Atrios says he slipped up before, and Treviño is being all like, “Whose information did you reveal, bwaha,” trying to make him slip up again. In fact, Treviño knows who it is, and linked to this very incident not long ago. It was a sucky thing for Atrios to do, but also a much less serious offense than ‘outing’ someone who prefers to be anonymous, or publishing personal information that could be harmful. It was a cranky, didn’t-have-one’s-coffee-yet kind of deal — a lapse.

And this is the sort of line that the major left-bloggers have to walk: Probably the biggest anonymous blogger on the left is Digby. The fact that Digby’s gender is unspecified makes the use of pronouns when referring to Digby an exercise of some delicacy. I actually don’t know for super-certain what gender Digby is, although I imagine I could find out pretty easily if it were in any way important or relevant (one could, for instance, ask Digby). It isn’t relevant. But some people do know, and it’s something of a syntactical marvel that hundreds of posts have been written referencing Digby with no pronoun in them. That’s not easy. Mistakes can, and have, undoubtedly happened. (And speaking of syntax, I’m never sure how to do a sentence like that, where the tense changes from one clause to the next.)

But to finish hammering this particular nail, Treviño apologized for a couple of past incidents, and that’s…well, there ought to be an olive branch extended for that — a laurel and hearty handshake, at least. One often finds that right-bloggos are ‘nice guys in real life,’ and it wouldn’t be surprising if Treviño were a perfectly pleasant guy to have a beer with. But we generally don’t interact in real life, with this whole blogowhatsis conversation in which we’re all engaged; and you know, I really forget what else, honestly, but Retardo’s post before was extremely mild compared to the concussion bomb it could have been, using only fair sources. You guys on the right complain we’re playing rough, but you have no idea. We just don’t have the same taste for Bwaha. It’s an acquired one, maybe.

Update:

Well, that settles that particular grammatical question.

Well, he could be. He probably won’t be. But it’s almost, sorta, kinda possible if everyone in North Carolina were to take a lot of drugs right before election day.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Nathan Tabor:

National day of regret

Nathan Tabor
May 10, 2006

To hear liberals tell it, George W. Bush doesn’t have a prayer of succeeding.

Pretty much, yeah.

What with the war in Iraq, soaring gasoline prices, and the high cost of medical care, the President’s critics dismiss him on good days as ineffectual…on bad days as a dunce.

It’s not just liberals who are saying this, Natester. It’s just about everyone. Or have you not noticed that G-Dubs’ approval rating has hit a stunning 31%?

Yet, the President, with his cockeyed optimism and can-do American spirit, seems to believe he can and will succeed. And he believes that much of the credit can be attributed to prayer.

Nope, I can’t believe he said it either. Before you continue reading, it might be wise to clean up whatever bodily fluids you may have just excreted on your chair or desk. Seriously, it’ll start to stink really bad if you wait until you’re done reading this piece. Go ahead. I’ll be waiting right here.
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Josh Trevino (a.k.a. Tacitus, a.k.a. The Marble Douchebag), in the conclusion to one of his patented ‘I’ll Concentrate On The Mote In Your Eye If You’ll Please Ignore The Huge Pole Up My Ass’ diatribes (perfectly summarized here), states:

One closing note: when the major left-bloggers — including but not even nearly limited to Hamsher — began their campaign against the nonpartisan, nonideological Online Integrity, one major excuse given (besides the Ackbar thesis) was that the blogospheric left is more than capable of policing its own — and does so with alacrity. So, Georgia10, Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller, Stirling Newberry, Oliver Willis, dKos editors, et al.: let’s see it. Let’s see the left enforce some basic decency in its own ranks. I, for one, have the greatest confidence in your integrity and your word.

Now let’s set aside the fact that Tacitus’s demand for decency from the Left was written in ostensible defense of a true shithead, Jeff Goldstein, a man who deserves most everything he gets — on the grounds that, well, he earned it after he seriously threatened another blogger with sexual assault (scroll down). Let’s also set aside the fact that most of the bile in Tacky’s post comes from his obsession with Jane Hamsher, who had the temerity to call a spade a spade in characterizing Goldstein as psycho. Hamsher had already earned Tacky’s eternal enmity when her muckraking skillz helped usher-out the gloriously brief Ben Domenech era at the Washington Post‘s website — Domenech being Tacitus’s great and true pal and all. Tacky’s also still probably pissed about this, one of those great hoisted-by-your-own-petard moments that gives delight to those of us who like to see the intolerably pompous cut down to size. Let’s set all that aside (I promise to deal with such things comprehensively in a future post). What I want to address now is Tacky’s Online Integrity scheme that he’s using to bash the Left with.
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I posted a thing just before about Ben Shapiro being caught visiting here via Sitemeter. That was rude and I shouldn’t have done that.

Golden rule, yo.

Update: Here’s something insouciently awesome:

Free Advice for President Bush

Oh, darling. I don’t care what you done, what those other people think. They don’t have your interests at heart like I do. Just tell me you care, baby. Just gimme a sign…

Tell ’em anything, anything. Tell ’em how you’re still the man. ‘Cause you listen to me, baby: You’re still the man. You go tell ’em. Don’t make me feel shame, darling. I’m not ashamed of you, I feel shame for them. Truly.

“You’ll never find,
It’ll take the end of all time,
Someone to understand you,
Like I do.
You’ll never find,
The rhythm, the rhyme,
All the magic we shared,
Just us two…”

[cue boinging sounds, cuckoo-cuckoo noises, eep-wow! sound of Little Rascals baking an eep-wow cake]

The La’s – ‘That’ll Be the Day’ (2:23)

Hindenfreude: The pleasure experienced whilst watching the spectacular intellectual collapse of John Hinderaker, of Time Magazine’s 2004 Blog of the Year.

The Editors has posted his Ten Most Humiliatin’ Blog Posts EVA. I’d like to add this one to the mix. The piece itself is actually pretty damn funny, as it imagines several right-wing pundits as Gollum (“It must have been … libruhlss!! Yes, libruhs, all conspirings and scheme-ings! Tricksy, sneaksy, and false! Libruhls have always hated the precious!”). But at the end, The Editors adds this serious note about the Valerie Plame affair:

My own personal take on this is that I haven’t a clue who’s responsible, but someone, somewhere, has fucked up royally, and the Bush folks need to get on top of this pronto, like a month ago.

The Editors assumed that “the Bush folks” actually gave enough of a shit about people working in the CIA to hold someone accountable for the Plame outing. This isn’t a particularly shameful thought, because under a normal administration, holding people accountable for gross malfeasance is standard. But given everything we now know about how the Bushies operate, shrugging off the burning of an undercover CIA operative seems like a drop in a large and ever-expanding bucket. Back in Aught-Three, many of us still thought the administration had enough integrity to take these things seriously. We were so innocent back then. So, so innocent.

Gavin adds: Hey, T-shirt idea: “Every time you kill a kitten, God masturbates.”

No, on second thought that’s disgusting. Never mind.

C’mon, y’all, let’s git ‘r done!

Shorter Daniel Son: Environmentalists are hopeless hypocrites for advocating policies that prevent the world’s poor from building their own power plants.

Shorter Walter Williams: Self-interest is virtually indistinguishable from charity.

Shorter Dustin Hawkins: It’s too bad Jeb Bush can’t simultaneously serve Florida as both governor and senator. Also, Harold Ford is raising an awful lot of money for his senate race from outside the State of Tennessee (draw your own dark conclusions).

Shorter Michelle Malkin: Mollycoddling minorities is undermining our national security in more ways than one.

Shorter Linda Chavez: The president’s plan to circumvent FISA and wiretap Americans’ phones isn’t just legal — it’s good politics!

Shorter Brent Bozell: No one ever lost an election by promoting voter cynicism.

Shorter Ben Shapiro: According to a National Guardsman I spoke to, things are actually going pretty great in Iraq nearly all the time.

Shorter John Stossel: Despite what the mainstream media report, we’re living in a virtual utopia of health, safety and — hey, my book’s out this week!

Shorter Thomas Sowell: Are criminals in black ghettoes to blame for high gasoline prices? Not exactly, but an analogy could be drawn.

Shorter Jacob Sullum: And now a word from our sponsors, the sodapop manufacturers.

Shorter Joel Mowbray: I thought of some more reasons why Bush was right to invade Iraq.

Shorter Terence Jeffrey: In order to prop up his ailing approval rating, Bush should vigorously defend his warrantless wiretap program, dispatch troops to the Mexican border, cut government spending and veto some bills.

Shorter Mike S. Adams: Did I ever tell you about the time I wrote a column insulting some secretary in my department, and she went home crying? That was awesome.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: True academic freedom would essentially prohibit the criticism of ideas with which you disagree — but try telling that to campus leftists, who are hypocrites.

Shorter Kathleen Parker: Men are the true victims of date rape.
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