The natsec establishment is now engaging in gross distortions of history, calling the founders advocates of warrantless surveillance:

A few examples of the principles and practices of the founding fathers will suffice for now: General George Washington approved of mail openings because of the “innumerable advantages” that arise from such an act, and he went so far as to provide instructions on successful mail opening techniques: “contrive a means of opening them [letters] without breaking the seals, take copies of the contents, and then let them go on.” Washington was not alone in believing in this method of eavesdropping; Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams served on a committee charged with disseminating excerpts from intercepted mail for propaganda purposes.

FWIW, the philosophy of the American Revolutionaries was first articulated in the early 1760's by a lawyer named James Otis in a suit challenging the constitutionality of warrantless searches of people's houses. John Adams was in the room for this hearing and was inspired by it.

Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster in the American colonies. In 1753 he required his employees to swear “not to open or suffer to be opened any Mail or Bag of Letters.” In 1782 Congress passed a law prohibiting the opening of mail without the consent of the addressee or a warrant.

As for Jefferson, in 1798 he wrote “The infidelities of the post office and the circumstances of the times are against my writing fully and freely… I know not which mortifies me most, that I should fear to write what I think, or my country bear such a state of things.”

Publius and the NSA Surveillance Program | Online Library of Law and Liberty

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans | Reuters

There is no visible way to make a clean break with the gigantic, ongoing institutional deceits. There’s no mechanism by which any such honesty could be imposed. It’s like reforming polygamy in the Ottoman Empire.

Bruce Sterling offers a tremendously entertaining set of observations regarding the present state of the Snowden affair.

The Ecuadorian Library — Geek Empire — Medium

An extremely clear cut refutation of the need for domestic surveillance from Rep. Rush Holt:

a majority of members of Congress suspected in the days after September 11, 2001, that there were terrorist cells in every city in America. We’d just heard there were hijackers in Florida and Maine and in Newark, and it made it sound as if they were everywhere. That they had infiltrated our society in every state and county. That turns out not to be true. But there was this rampant fear in Congress that that was happening. And there was a real over-reaction.

Here’s what real reform of the NSA looks like

More on the new political rift in the United States:

There are very few issues in Congress that unite Tea Party Republicans with the more left-wing Democrats. Conversely, establishment Republicans and Democrats, typically at each others' throats, have found a reason to cooperate in their opposition to any changes that they say would hinder the NSA in protecting America from terrorist attack.

NSA controversy gives unfamiliar allies impetus for and against reform | World news | theguardian.com

This geography appears to play a major role in making Atlanta one of the metropolitan areas where it is most difficult for lower-income households to rise into the middle class...

In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters - NYTimes.com

The linked post on Reason's blog provides a perfect example of why I've become disenchanted with Libertarianism as a political movement in the United States and why I think that it actually undermines the purpose that it supposedly serves.

Ostensibly, Libertarianism is concerned with individual liberty. Individual liberty is not a partisan issue. The Republican party is associated with small government and low taxes, values that Libertarians share. It is also associated with efforts to curtail first and fourth amendment rights, the criminalization of recreational drug use, restrictive immigration policies, and a variety of other policy positions that Libertarians abhor. Real Libertarians cannot, therefore, call themselves partisan Republicans. The Democratic party is associated with defense of individual rights and civil liberties, values that Libertarians share. It is also associated with regulation of economic activity and redistributive social engineering, policy positions that Libertarians abhor. Real Libertarians cannot, therefore, call themselves partisan Democrats. In fact, the famous Nolan chart presents libertarianism as exactly orthogonal to the left-right divide.

A Libertarian political movement, insofar as it is unable to successfully promote its own candidates for office, would be most effective at achieving it's goals if was politically independent, and willing to lend its support to any politician, on the left or the right, whose policies are consistent with its values. Both parties might court this Libertarian voting block by putting policies on the table that are attractive to it and which further the interest of individual liberty, and by avoiding policies that Libertarians abhor. Both mainstream political parties have something to offer Libertarians in this respect, and individual liberty would benefit from providing an incentive for both parties to move in that direction.

Instead, the Libertarian movement is consistently partisan conservative. Libertarian writers and bloggers regularly devote column space to reenforcing the idea that conservatism is good and that liberals are bad. This messaging echos the partisan messaging of the Republican party, and serves to reenforce the idea that members of the Libertarian movement should, first, be loyal Republicans.

The linked post provides an example, which starts out as a diatribe about misinformation in the news media regarding the Zimmerman trial, but reveals its true agenda in it's conclusion, arguing that all criticisms of conservatives for promulgating misinformation must be set aside in light of the misinformation that liberals are promulgating about George Zimmerman.

Liberals and disenchanted conservatives who decry fact-free ideological narratives, true-believer hysteria and willful reality-denial on the right should take a good look at the left’s Zimmerman Derangement Syndrome. Some far-right blogs have trafficked in b... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Why Libertarianism is Something of a Sham

A Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey found that 10% of 207 officials at non-U.S. companies have canceled contracts with U.S. service providers following the revelation of the NSA spy program last month. The alliance, a non-profit organization with over 48,000 individual members, said the survey also found that 56% of non-U.S. respondents are now hesitant to work with any U.S.-based cloud service providers.

U.S. cloud firms face backlash from NSA spy programs - ComputerworldUK.com

Each panel shows one day. With 360 movie panels, the sky over (almost) an entire year is shown in time lapse format as recorded by a video camera on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, California. The camera recorded an image every 10 seconds from before sunrise to after sunset and from mid-2009 to mid-2010.

APOD: 2013 July 24 - A Year of Sky on Earth

A corporation has been asking me to delete a blog post from MemeStreams. They claim that the post is an "unnatural or paid for" link to their site and that Google is penalizing their page rank as a result of the post. The post actually isn't "unnatural or paid for" and the evidence that Google is penalizing them for it, it turns out, is dubious at best. I informed them that the post in question is a legitimate post on a real person's blog, and therefore I cannot delete it. Their response:

I do agree that this is crazy but google is google, he have to play according to their rules. Unlinking will be much appreciated.

Update: The corporation that sent me the email above claims that the link in question was flagged as "unnatural or paid for" in a report that they received from a service called linkdetox.com. I contacted linkdetox and informed them about the false positive, and they responded that if I'd like to know why they are calling for the censorship of this website I will need to pay them:

Hello Tom,

Thank you for your message.

If you cannot get access to this information why this backlink was evaluated as harmful then i suggest you buy Link Detox and run a report on [ED: the corporation that sent me the original complaint] so you can see exactly what he see's this way you will be able to the information on why this link that is pointing to the website is harmful.

You can signup for a Link Detox here http://www.linkdetox.com/

Keep in mind that we use very common spam link rules to identify bad links, but can still be wrong in certain edge cases.
We always recommend to our clients to double check and/or manually review all links you'd like to disavow, because if you ignore good links, it might hurt your sites rankings.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best Regards...