“THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT HAVE A SECURITY SYSTEM, it has a system for bothering people.” That’s what an Israeli security expert says in this Christian Science Monitor story. It sounds about right to me. And so does this: “The difference between the Israeli and American systems is that we are looking for the terrorist, while the Americans look for the weapons.”

THE FBI’S “CARNIVORE” EMAIL SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM turns out to have been Osama’s best friend:

The FBI mishandled a surveillance operation involving Osama bin Laden’s terror network two years ago because of technical problems with the controversial Carnivore e-mail program, part of a “pattern” indicating that the FBI was unable to manage its intelligence wiretaps, according to an internal bureau memorandum released yesterday.

Hey, but that’s okay. It may not have worked on bin Laden — but it managed to give the FBI warrantless access to innocent people’s email instead:

An attempt in March 2000 to secretly monitor the e-mail of an unidentified suspect went awry when the Carnivore program retrieved communications from other parties as well, according to the memo.

Oh, I’m sleeping better knowing about this.

BOY: I know a lot of people suffering from NIMDA and KLEZ. My firewall apparently stops NIMDA, but as I remarked last week, I get a KLEZ-infested email almost every time I check mail. Is this cyberwar? It certainly seems worse than I’ve ever seen.

Question: I’m about to install the home network. Will my Linksys WAP-11 be sufficient firewalling, or should I put Norton on each computer?

UPDATE: Hey, thanks for all the advice in the comments section (er, except for Richard Bennett’s comments about my daughter. Jeez.) and by email.

LIBYA SEEMS AWFULLY ANXIOUS to get out from under the “terrorist” designation. What does Qaddafi think he knows that makes him so anxious to get on our good side?

JOE KLEIN SAYS that France reminds him of America in the 1970s. Now that’s a bummer.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE on the growth of anti-semitism, and note the Algerian connection. But here’s the clincher:

The little accidents and odd behaviors do add up. The new wind is definitely blowing. A few months ago no one was chanting for murder. In those days it was pretty unusual to stumble across diatribes against Judaism or anti-Semitic phrases in the intellectual press. But look what has happened. Something has changed.

STEPHEN GREEN directs us to this story on smuggling dildoes into Texas. In Tennessee, I’m proud to report, both dildoes and guns are legal. If only New York and Texas could be as liberated.

Actually, there was an attempt to ban the sale of vibrators and dildoes in Tennessee a few years ago, but the morning-drive DJ’s (and a fictitious group named “Well Endowed Tennesseans”) spread the word that it was because the legislators sponsoring the bill were, ahem, insecure in their masculinity. It died a quiet death, and I’m told the sponsor still doesn’t like to talk about it.

READER BARRY MOLEFSKY notes that an unaccustomed ray of common sense is shining across the Arab world.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: British solicitor and frequent correspondent Martin Pratt writes:

BTW After nearly a year of reading your site I have come to the conclusion that on firearms ownership at least, you have just about succeeded in changing a long standing opinion of mine. Just thought you may like to know you are doing some good!

I’m amazed. But Eugene Volokh tells a similar tale.

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Here’s an article from the Sacramento Bee.

ICE ON MARS GOOD, big NASA management problems bad. This article is mostly on-target, though one passage is a bit unfair: “When the shuttle was being designed in the 1970s, NASA unwisely chose to build a vehicle with high operating costs because it would reduce the expense of initial development.” This was NASA’s “choice” only in the sense that “your money or your life” is a choice — OMB and Congressional budget folks made clear that there wasn’t more money for initial development. It was a bad idea, and NASA maybe should have squawked more, but NASA had no leverage — and the people who did have the leverage didn’t care about the problems they were saddling the nation with down the line.

UPDATE: This Slashdot thread has some interesting observations on human missions to Mars, along with links to a couple of new pieces about the difficulties of such a mission, one from the BBC (which also opines that the U.S. should pay, but that a representative from the poorest nation on Earth should stop onto Mars first) and one from USA Today on NASA’s infrastructural problems.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an article suggesting that there’s really a lot of ice on Mars, enough to flood much of the planet if it melted. (Which, by the way, would be a good thing). And here’s another. A reader observes that the biggest Mars flood so far is the rate at which this information is leaking out of NASA prior to the scheduled announcement.

FORGET TEEN SEX! You want hate mail, just dis Bono. A bunch of people wrote me to say, in near-identical language, that Bono is not just an ’80s rock star, but a ’90s and ’00s rock star, too, and that he knows more about debt relief than most heads of state.

Well, okay. I still thought the headline was odd.

ERIC ALTERMAN says American Jewish settlers on the West Bank shouldn’t be there.

AMERICAN TROOPS ARE PLANNING TO PULL OUT OF THE PHILIPPINES by July 31, according to this report. That pullout isn’t dependent on whether the missionary couple of Martin and Gracia Burnham are released by Muslim rebels.

I’m of two minds on this. The folks at Christianity Today are understandably unhappy about the missionary angle, but I’m not sure I want to make U.S. presence in the Philippines turn on something that is so thoroughly under the control of the bad guys. On the other hand, July 31 sounds pretty soon to me. Perhaps we feel that we’ve done enough good there — or will have by then — to justify the mission. Or perhaps somebody read too many Nick Kristof columns.

The worst thing we can have is a reputation for bugging out quickly. The United States has fought guerrillas successfully all over the world — including in the Philippines, as Max Boot points out in his new book — but we’ve typically done so by being thorough and patient. Have we been thorough and patient in the Philippines? (Via Amy Welborn).

UPDATE: John Weidner says I’m wrong to attach much significance to this. He’s pretty persuasive.

JOHN TABIN reflects on what China might gain from an Indo-Pak nuclear war. I think China loses more, in terms of regional instability, than it gains. But it’s an interesting observation.

PATRICK RUFFINI says the O’Neill / Bono disagreement winds up a victory for O’Neill.

I’ve never quite understood O’Neill’s unpopularity with the press, since most of his objectionable behavior seems to consist of telling the unvarnished truth. But what struck me most about the coverage of the Bono / O’Neill spat was this Reuters headline: “Uganda Tour Deepens O’Neill, Bono Divisions on Aid.” Now, I’ve got nothing against Bono, but, really, this makes him sound like a head of state or something. He’s a frickin’ ’80s rock star! It’s just funny.

Then again, Reuters also informs us that: “Dr. Seuss was an American author who wrote children’s books.”

SEX, DRUGS & ROCK ‘N’ ROLL: Andrew Dodge concludes his series.

“HE’S MORE MACHINE NOW THAN MAN:” Hillary Carter continues her feud with Richard “Darth” Bennett.

Bennett’s a smart guy, but scrolling down his page the other day and seeing attacks on lesbians, breastfeeders, libertarians, etc. it became pretty clear to me that Eric Olsen was right: the man’s trolling. And I fell for it. I’ll be smarter next time.

UPDATE: The Bear says much the same. So does Stephen Green.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden fact-checks the Bennett story and discovers some Usenet history: “Those perplexed to find themselves recipients of abuse from Bennett in his latter-day incarnation as a weblog pundit may be consoled to find that, evidently, this behavior is nothing new. Quite the contrary, it appears to be extensively rehearsed.”

BLOGGER N.Z. BEAR has a lengthy post on the latest Amnesty International report on human rights. Here’s a key observation:

But reading through their report, I’m struck not so much by the specific points they raise — some of which I agree with, some of which I do not — [as] by the tone of the document, particularly where it comes to criticism of the United States. . . .

Amnesty, I think, does themselves a severe disservice simply in the way they present their criticisms. I suspect people often react negatively to their complaints on items such as civilian casualties during our bombing of Afghanistan not because they think bombing civilians is a good thing, but because Amnesty takes such a combative and accusatory approach, with seemingly no recognition at all of the contributions the U.S. (or other Western democracies that they place in their sights) have made to the cause of human rights worldwide.

I guess what I’m saying is, it’s not the fact that they criticize U.S. policy that bothers me; it’s the fact that they’re just, well, such jerks about it.

Yeah, that’s about right. I’ve been a big Amnesty supporter over the years, but they’ve seemed extra-eager to find opportunities to criticize the United States, and much more muted about less savory countries. Sadly, I think that’s an indication that their direct-mail base is more interested in hearing criticism of the United States, and the West in general, than in human rights per se.

WOBBLY WATCH: John O’Sullivan says that the Blogosphere is overreacting. He’s strongly in favor of rope-a-dope.

I’ve been wobbly on wobbliness, as readers know. The problem is that a properly executed disinformation campaign prior to an invasion would look just like wobbliness. So the question of what’s going on depends in no small part on how good you think the Bush Administration and the Pentagon are at at staying on message and controlling leaks.

In defense of the Blogosphere, there’s no real reason to feel guilty if wobblyists turn out to be wrong. If Bush is going wobbly, then he needs to be pressured. If he’s not, and it’s all rope-a-dope, then the Blogosphere’s complaints will just help the disinformation campaign look credible.

UPDATE: Reader Howard Litwak thinks I’m reading too much into O’Sullivan’s piece. He says it’s not really an endorsement of rope-a-dope so much as an observation that Bush has done badly enough in domestic politics that he has no choice but to win the war.

There may be something to this, but I’m not sure it matters. If Bush is serious about winning the war, then a lot of what we’re hearing must be disinformation (hence rope-a-dope). If he’s not serious, then it’s wobbliness. Can he be both wobbly and serious about winning the war? Not for long, if at all.

ASK & YE SHALL RECEIVE: There’s a new logo, which hopefully addresses Dr. Weevil’s unfortunate associations with the old one. Archives are fixed so that links go where they’re supposed to. And I have answers to two popular questions sent in response to the autobiographical part of this post: “Why does Garry Wills hate you?” and “What’s this about your dad and the antiwar protests?”

The two are not connected as far as I know, except by the common factor of Garry Wills, but you can read about the antiwar protests (which also involved Billy Graham and Richard Nixon) here, including a mention of Wills’ article in Esquire, which I have never actually read.

Why does Wills hate me? Well, he doesn’t really hate me so much as he hates guns. But he wrote a rather nasty review in The New York Review of Books, reviewing a symposium issue of the Tennessee Law Review on the Second Amendment. Wills called me one of a cabal of nutty law professors who had dreamed up an unfounded interpretation of the Second Amendment, and offered his own (based on Latin etymology) in its place. Wills purported to demonstrate, using this Latin analysis, that James Madison had managed to hornswoggle everyone else into accepting a Second Amendment that did absolutely nothing at all.

Wills’ theory hasn’t caught on (as one colleague put it, “it would be more persuasive, if the Constitution were written in Latin”) but in an exchange of letters published in the New York Review about his piece he more or less accused me of fraud (he called my reliance “plain false”) for interpreting a letter from Tench Coxe to James Madison the way that pretty much every consitutional scholar (except Wills) interprets it, as indicating support for an individual right to arms. (The letters are not available online, but the discussion is accurately summarized here in the introduction and at fn. 15).

Wills has not been as quick to charge fraud where Michael Bellesiles is concerned, I note. In fact, as far as I know, he’s said nothing since his glowing review of September 10, 2000.

A somewhat modified version of Wills’ thesis, minus bogus charges of fraud, appears in Wills’ book A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, which might have been dedicated, as was a book by Le Corbusier, “To Authority.”

So there you have it.

UPDATE: Reader Don McGregor writes: “A Necessary Evil was a deeply weird book. The Liberals have adopted pre-revolutionary Tory ideology: that the state has a claim to existence above and superior to the wishes and desires of the people it purportedly serves.” Yes. We’re seeing that in Europe with the EU, too. And for similar reasons.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a piece on Garry Wills’ Second Amendment theories that’s more digestible and to the point than the rather long item relating to Tench Coxe that I link above.

JAMES LILEKS has some reflections on a peaceful Memorial Day.

TEEN SEX ON MARS: Nick Schulz challenges me to combine the weekend’s themes into one post on teenage sexual behavior on a newly terraformed Mars. But I don’t have to, because Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, part of his excellent trilogy about a colonized and terraformed Mars, does just that.

THE SITE MOVE seems to have gone pretty well, and most issues have now been dealt with — mostly by Stacy Tabb, who rules (that’s her logo-button on the left, just below the Amazon tip jar.) Speaking of tip jars, I’m now paying for bandwidth on a slick new dedicated server that’s a lot more reliable than BlogSpot, but also more expensive, so your contributions are appreciated.

MICHAEL BARONE looks at gun control and affirmative action and finds a common thread.