SPYING: Massachusetts Court Rules That Warrantless Access Of Cellphone Location Data Violates State Constitution.

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POLICE: If you’re carrying condoms, you might be a hooker. “Imagine a city that passes out condoms for free and busts people who carry condoms. That’s what seems to be happening in New Orleans, where the city’s health department doles out protection while the city’s police department doles out harassment.”

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Iranians hacked Navy network for four months? Not a surprise.

PROGRESS: Startup Quanttus is developing a device that monitors heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure from your wrist.

HEY, FDA: Poop Is Not A Drug!

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Wait, There’s Nanotechnology in My Food?

GREG STEIN: Will Ticket Scalpers Meet the Same Fate as Spinal Tap Drummers? The Sale and Resale of Concert and Sports Tickets.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 287.

#WARONWOMEN: Today is White House Equal Pay Day, the day to which women staffers must work through in 2014 to earn as much as male staffers did in 2013.

MEGAN MCARDLE: For Auto Unions in South, Is Chattanooga Waterloo?

There have been some fitful attempts to blame this on Republican legislators who launched a public-relations war against the union drive (a big union in the state would presumably divert some of those union dues to campaigning for Democrats). This is weak tea — weaker even than complaints that companies “sabotage” union drives because they are allowed to argue to employees, within tight legal constraints, that the union might not be so great.

If the UAW can’t win in the South when the company basically invites them in, then it can’t win in the South, where all the new auto plants are. Is the problem native anti-union sentiment among Southerners? Did the events of 2008 convince workers that a union would be nothing but trouble? This is a fascinating, and unresolvable, academic debate. It doesn’t change the outcome, which is that the UAW lost when it had things stacked in its favor.

That’s terrible news for the UAW, which desperately needs to grow. It’s not great news for the labor movement at large, either. Auto plants are relatively easy to organize: You have a lot of workers in one place, and those workers create a lot of value with their labor, which means that there’s some room for the union to promise fatter paychecks even after union dues are deducted out. Most of the places unions would theoretically like to organize, such as Walmart, are considerably more challenging — and have bosses who will fight their efforts.

You’d think that now, at a time of great economic insecurity, a union drive would have a lot of appeal. But perhaps that worked against it. The jobs at Volkswagen pay better wages than most in the area. The workers don’t want to risk losing them. And there’s one thing we all know now: Even the mighty UAW can’t guarantee you a job.

Just ask Detroit.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Money for nothing: Feds in D.C. closed 25% of the time. “Between snow days, official holidays and the government shutdown, federal employees have worked a normal business day less than 75 percent of the time since Oct. 1, marking a startlingly chaotic beginning to the fiscal year.”

ED MORRISSEY: CBO Shoots an Arrow in the Heart of Obamanomics.

WITH, QUITE POSSIBLY, MORE AMERICAN CASUALTIES BEFORE IT’S OVER: Michael Barone: ObamaCare Is Obama’s Iraq War.

I think a lot of Democrats would say, and I think they may very well be right, that this is George W. Bush in Iraq. An ambitious policy that was entered onto with great hopes, that was not attended to with sufficient care and willingness to change tactics, and at this point in 2006, things looked pretty bad there for the president, and — though Karl Rove and I were late to pick up on it — for his party.

One difference is that, unlike Bush, Obama has the press on his side. But I don’t think that’ll be enough.

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NEXT WEEK IN KNOXVILLE, a Tennesssee Law Review symposium on the Second Amendment, a sort of followup to the groundbreaking one from 1995. Description:

Symposium: New Frontiers in the Second Amendment

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recognition of personal Second Amendment rights in Heller and McDonald, as well as the recent national debates over gun control, questions have arisen as to exactly what rights the Second Amendment protects and what rights it ought to protect.

The Tennessee Law Review Symposium will include papers and presentations from varied viewpoints discussing the following topics:

· The nature and extent of possible Second Amendment protection of the right to carry firearms.
· The categories and types of weapons that may carry Second Amendment protection.
· The existence, extent, and scope of penumbral, unenumerated Second Amendment rights, such as the purchasing and transportation of firearms; the purchasing, possession, and transportation of ammunition; and protections for firearm-related locations such as firing ranges and gunsmith shops.
· The extent to which “chilling-effect” doctrine may apply to Second Amendment rights, including potential constitutional limitations on the taxing of firearms and ammunition.
· The validity or invalidity of gun ownership restrictions based on an individual’s status as a felon in light of the proliferation of regulatory crimes designated as felonies.
· The extent to which the Second Amendment sheds light on other constitutional rights, enumerated or unenumerated.

It’s at the UT College of Law next Saturday, March 1, beginning at 9 a.m. Admission is free.

SCIENCE: “We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, WE’D HAVE A PRESIDENT STRETCHING EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE BEYOND ALL LEGALITY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Obama folds on aid order secrecy. “The White House has given up its legal fight to keep secret an unclassified directive President Barack Obama signed in 2010 setting foreign aid policy across the U.S. Government. In a sharply-worded opinion issued in December, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle rejected the administration’s arguments that Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development was protected by executive privilege.”

JAMES TARANTO: Unions vs. Democrats: A difference of opinion about IRS suppression of speech.

All the opponents Johnson quotes are leaders of one or another type of nonprofit and thus have an institutional interest in minimizing IRS restriction–though in the case of 501(c)(3)s, (5)s and (6)s, the interest is indirect. For a political party, by contrast, the paramount interest is winning elections.

The disagreement between Democratic politicians and unions is especially illuminating. Generally speaking, there is a confluence of interest between unions (especially public-sector ones like the SEIU) and Democratic politicians. The unions help elect Democrats, who help maintain and enhance union power, which enables them to help elect Democrats, and so on.

Yet confluent interests are not identical ones. Politicians are interested in winning elections; unions are interested in acquiring and maintaining power; and for each, helping the other is a means to an end. In the proposed 501(c)(4) regulations, the Democrats evidently see an opportunity to help win elections (or at least lose fewer of them) this fall. The unions see a precedent that could pose a long-term threat to their interests.

Read the whole thing.

SMART DIPLOMACY: Obama threatens consequences for Ukraine violence.

Ukraine truce shattered, death toll tops 50.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED SOME BIGGER GILT: Historians Begin to Gild Obama’s Reputation.

ANNALS OF POLICE MISCONDUCT: Woman who recorded traffic stop spends night in jail. I think I’ll start an insurance company — if you’re arrested for something like this, my company will send mimes to follow the cop around, on and off-duty, and mock them. If they arrest the mimes, I send . . . even more mimes. No one can withstand even more mimes, especially if arresting those mimes produces even more mimes than that! Downside: Full employment for mimes.

Also, the cops need to do some remedial reading. I’d assign them to write a 1500-word essay on the importance of citizen monitoring of the police.

THE HILL: Dems press Holder on secret FBI letters.

Two House Democrats are calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to make changes to secret letters that the FBI uses to get information.

In a letter on Wednesday, the lawmakers demanded answers about the FBI’s National Security Letters, which do not require a court order and require communications companies and financial institutions to turn over details about their customers.

“This is deeply troubling and, therefore, addressing the proper use of NSLs must be part of any meaningful reform of government surveillance authorities,” Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said in a joint statement accompanying the letter.

“We look forward to working with the Administration as we find a path forward on this issue.”

Holder, along with top intelligence officials, is set to outline a series of reforms to the country’s surveillance efforts for President Obama. The announcement could come as soon as this week.

The reforms are likely to focus on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) collection of records about phone calls, which have raised alarms among privacy advocates since the program was unveiled in documents from former contractor Edward Snowden last year.

Agents at the NSA need to get a court order to search those records, but no similar order is necessary for the National Security Letters.

Pressure seems to be mounting.

XKCD: Frequency.