American officials say that the NSA is actually only vacuuming up about 30% of all American telephone metadata, at least in part because of the explosive proliferation of cell phones over the last decade. Whenever I hear stuff like this, I think of the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," in which the Enterprise crew foil a godlike adolescent by overwhelming him with stuff to control. I also remind myself that these American officials could be fibbing.
New York police department tests the notorious Google Glass as a surveillance tool. I'd say it's fine, as long as you get a warrant, which law enforcement doesn't like doing anymore now that Messrs. Bush and Obama made that OK. But there's hope: Google will start selling the glasses to the public later this year, which means we'll be able to spy on the spies.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the FCC can't save net neutrality. Why? Their argument essentially boils down to "the FCC stinks at its job" and "government overreach is also bad," but our duty as citizens is to make our government do its job correctly, not throw up our hands at the difficulty of that task and hope for a series of solutions that won't even happen without our government doing our will.
Speaking of bad government, John Boehner says he can't push immigration reform because of the "widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws." You mean the administration that's deporting more immigrants more quickly than any other in history? And where does he get off complaining about this administration's "untrustworthiness" when the last one acted as if enforcing the law wasn't even part of its job?
Wellesley College students protest the placement, outside, of a statue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear -- part of an art exhibit, but not a part installed inside the museum. I don't think the whole inside-outside art-life thing is bunkum, nor do I think consumers of art should only get the art they want or expect, but I get tired of being told "it was meant to evoke response," because any idiot can provoke a "response" these days, and too many idiots do just that. I just hope this thing doesn't cause an accident.
Finally, former Navy chaplain and anti-gay activist says that folks who are "not going to get eternal benefits in Heaven" don't deserve any "government rewards here on this Earth." What provoked that? Oh, he's mad about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, because he thinks it'll let men use women's bathrooms, though he doesn't cite any language from the bill that would support that claim, possibly because doing so would require reading and reflecting. I'd never heard of Gordon Klingenschmitt before, though given the circumstances of his Naval discharge perhaps I should have; still, let's never speak of him again.
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