ARS TECHNICA has more on the technology angle to the NSA story. Note the lengthy history.

BLOGGING: Bigger than sex? Maybe. But is it bigger than sex with apes?

And who knew that when Bart Simpson said “God, Schmod, I want my monkey-man!” he was channeling Joseph Stalin?

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has thoughts on blogging and sex that mirror my own.

But whatever you think about ape sex, ape art rocks!

JONAH GOLDBERG = HITLER? They both like dogs.

PLAME UPDATE: BOB WOODWARD says that Novak’s source wasn’t in the White House. Hmm. Was it Jay Rockefeller?

Oops, wrong leak scandal. (I think). Meanwhile, Tom Maguire has a candidate.

GOT THE XM antenna/headphone combination that I mentioned last week, and it works very well. Definitely an improvement over the clipon that comes with the set.

DARFUR UPDATE: Alas, it’s more bad news.

PROF. TOM SMITH on the NSA flap: “There probably is a law review article here (though one a top 20 review would never publish, because they would not be able to understand it) about how to adapt the law of search to technologies that depend on much more sophisticated treatments of probability than ‘probable cause.'”

The Belmont Club has related thoughts.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Mark Tapscott reports that the Alaska “Bridge to Nowhere” is a family matter for Alaskan Republican Rep. Don Young:

Whatever the policy grounds underlying Young’s determined advocacy of the projects, evidence has emerged that the issue is also a family matter, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

The Alaska paper reports that Young’s son-in-law, Art Nelson, is a minority participant in a partnership that owns a prime 60-acre tract of land near the Knik Arm project. Nelson, who is also Chairman of the Alaska Board of Fisheries, owns a 10 percent share of Point Bluff LLC, which has four other members.

I’m shocked, shocked to hear this.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Wells emails:

The benefits of Young’s family are not disputed, but a quick correction: that’s not the bridge to nowhere. The bridge to nowhere would link Ketchikan, a city in the extreme southeast of Alaska, with Gravina Island, which has a population of 50 people. It also is where the Ketchikan airport is. The bridge that would benefit Don Young’s family, though, is across the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet. It would be a bridge across a tidal inlet right next to Anchorage and would open up a great deal of acreage in close proximity to Anchorage as well as cut substantial commute time from some outlying communities. It really is not a bridge to nowhere and would be beneficial.

However, having said that, I want to say that 1) I’m not at all surprised that Don Young’s family will benefit; and 2) Alaska has more than enough money to pay for the bridge itself and we should not rely upon Congress to pay for it. I would make this modest proposal: Alaska, whether through the State or through private enterprise (which would be much preferable to my libertarian/anarchist politics), builds both bridges and Congress lets us drill in ANWR.

Yes, that’s clear if you follow the link to read the story, but I guess not really from the excerpt.

THE NYC TRANSIT WORKERS’ UNION has an unofficial blog, and it’s getting an earful in the comments. Here are some excerpts:

[S]econdly, if i could meet the masterminds behind this strike, i’d personally spit in each of their faces. I know fifty people at my campus who now cannot return to their families for the holiday season, and are being forced to spend their break in a hotel off campus until the transit system is running again. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves doing something this stupid this time of the year. Every single worker participating in the strike is extremely selfish and short sighted.

MORE ON THE WHOLE NSA STORY: I don’t have much to add on the legal analysis linked to earlier, though I still wonder why, exactly, the Administration didn’t just go through FISA. Noah Schachtman continues to pursue the technological theory — that the methodology being used didn’t fit under the FISA umbrella.

Independent from the question of whether this is legal, of course, is the separate charge that the program represents a Bushitlerian departure from prior standards. That seems to be hard to maintain — in many ways, Bush’s policies are merely a continuation of those under Clinton, only with somewhat more vigor post 9/11. If you want to look back on the Clinton Administration as some sort of civil-liberties golden age, you probably shouldn’t read this report from the CATO Institute entitled “Dereliction of Duty: The Constitutional Record of President Clinton.” But here’s a relevant excerpt:

The Clinton administration has repeatedly attempted to play down the significance of the warrant clause. In fact, President Clinton has asserted the power to conduct warrantless searches, warrantless drug testing of public school students, and warrantless wiretapping.

The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for “national security” purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the president “has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes.” [51] According to Gorelick, the president (or his attorney general) need only satisfy himself that an American is working in conjunction with a foreign power before a search can take place. . . .

It is unclear why the president made warrantless roving wiretaps a priority matter since judges routinely approve wiretap applications by federal prosecutors. According to a 1995 report by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, it had been years since a federal district court turned down a prosecutor’s request for a wiretap order. [68] President Clinton is apparently seeking to free his administration from any potential judicial interference with its wiretapping plans. There is a problem, of course, with the power that the president desires: it is precisely the sort of unchecked power that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant clause was designed to curb. As the Supreme Court noted in Katz v. United States (1967), the judicial procedure of antecedent justification before a neutral magistrate is a “constitutional precondition,” not only to the search of a home, but also to eavesdropping on private conversations within the home. [69]

President Clinton also lobbied for and signed the Orwellian Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which is forcing every telephone company in America to retrofit its phone lines and networks so that they will be more accessible to police wiretaps.

Whether this view is right or not is a separate question from the easy-to-refute claim that it’s an entirely unprecedented creation of the power-mad Bushitler Administration. It’s odd, then, that it’s the easy-to-refute claim that’s being pushed.

If you’d like more on this topic, Jeff Goldstein has a huge, link-rich roundup.

UPDATE: Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 1979!

GOOD NEWS FROM FREEDOM HOUSE: “The number of electoral democracies around the world rose from 119 to 122 this year, setting a new record as freedom made inroads in the Middle East and Africa, an independent monitoring group said.”

I THINK MICHAEL KELLY would have loved Michael Yon. What do you think?

IN THE MAIL: Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels, and a President’s Mission to Destroy the Press, by Jeff Manber and Neil Dahlstrom. Some of the rhetoric sounds, um, familiar.

Also a new documentary, Saddam Hussein: Weapon of Mass Destruction. It’s got a very positive blurb from Ben Stein: “I watched it and was overwhelmed. You are a saint to have made it.”

The house documentarian was anxious to watch it, so perhaps she’ll post a review, too.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN found to be a “pretext” for religious instruction in public schools. You can read excerpts from the opinion here, courtesy of AP.

UPDATE: Via Howard Bashman, here’s the opinion in full.

A MESSAGE from someone with “absolute moral authority.” I eagerly await Maureen Dowd’s reaction.

EVEN THOUGH I put up the big book recommendation post last night, people keep sending stuff in. I’ll see what I can do with it.

MARSHALL WITTMAN thinks the Democrats are blowing it on national security. “Rather than the 2006 election being about the GOP’ s weak ethics, it may be about the Democrats’ anemic defense credentials.”

Personally, I wish the two parties were both good on defense, so I could pay more attention to other issues.

WORKING AT HOME: The Wall Street Journal reports that telecommuters get less respect:

Many people seem to think that jobs that can be done at home aren’t real jobs. Never mind that home-office dwellers are their own cafeteria staff, shipping-and-receiving clerks and janitors. They never get credit for cutting an employer’s costs, or saving commuting time to do more work. Instead, managers believe that if they aren’t there to witness someone working, it can’t be happening. They envision homebound workers getting away with something, like lounging in their bathrobes and watching “General Hospital.”

It’s as if they believe that the people working under their noses don’t waste a tremendous amount of time talking about last night’s college basketball game, making bids on eBay, or reading only like-minded blogs while on company time. The misconceptions are yet another indication that vacuous symbols of productivity, rather than productivity itself, are all that really count.

Read the whole thing. This sounds funny, but it actually matters, in terms of energy efficiency and environmental cleanliness.

EARLY ELECTION RESULTS are coming out in Iraq. Omar has a report, and people aren’t happy about how well the religious parties did. Here’s more from Kerry DuPont.

Note that, as Omar reported yesterday, the preliminary results leaking out aren’t official, aren’t complete, and seem to be being leaked as an effort to stir things up on behalf of various factions. So stay tuned to see how things develop.

UPDATE: And, in fact, see Omar’s update to see how fast things change.

NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT WORKERS ARE ON STRIKE: This leads Evan Coyne Maloney to comment:

So, we should all give a big Christmas thank you to the Transit Workers Union, who in calling the strike, have become the Grinches for many New Yorkers. We should also reassess the wisdom of allowing our governments and transportation systems to be held hostage by unions.

Read the whole thing.

WHY A FEDERAL VIDEOGAME LAW is a bad idea: My TechCentralStation TCS Daily column is up.

THIS WEEK’S GRAND ROUNDS is up!