Whose interests are served?

It's not always right to nail a corporation's balls to the wall, but you can count on Bushists and other Republicans to handle corporate scrotums with much greater solicitude than they would ever extend to you and me. A deferred prosecution agreement can be pretty onerous - I work for a corporation that recently came out the other end of one - but it's not something that you or I will ever get.

Yeah, we got email

What this says is that the ISPs are cavalier about what they give to the government and are likely to err on the side of too much. They don't really care about their customers' privacy or legal rights. They just want to keep the government happy and doing business with them.

He knows if you've been bad or good

Another quaint Constitutional right that the Bushists are shitting on:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Let me get this straight: Telecom amnesty is required because one or two phone companies declined an illegal Bushist surveillance program at some point? Telecom amnesty furthers the government's goal of spying on all of us in violation of the Fourth Amendment? And that's the reason I should support telecom amnesty?

They obviously think we're idiots.

Update: See Glenn Greenwald, who is brilliant as always. A sample quote:

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values.

They don't care

The Bushists will do whatever they want to do. They will accept no legal or practical restraint from democracy. The Congress has three powers that matter:

• Impeachment
• Impeachment
• and impeachment

There has never in my lifetime been an administration as corrupted by its own lust for power as the Bush administration. Ollie North was not this corrupted by power. The Bushists all belong in jail.

If we Americans actually gave a shit about self-government, we wouldn't stand for this.

Oh, and by the way, if Dana Perino says that Duhbya has "no recollection", then he ordered the destruction of the video evidence of torture.

Petition for redress

So, another right bites the dust. You can no longer sue the government even with physical evidence of its acts if only the government says that your evidence reveals a state secret - even if that government has previously revealed related "state secrets" and the government sent the now-suppressed evidence to you.

Oh, I suppose that the appeals court - a panel from the Ninth Circuit, now defanged I guess - could hold differently in the divided cases brought by Americans, uh, non-Muslims. Don't bet on it, though.

Perfect template

FBI data mining, which I thought they denied doing but now seems to be universally accepted as fact, went too far. Surprise, surprise!

Eric Lichtblau can write as many stories as he wants on this template. We are all under surveillance for our own protection, so these little tidbits will keep leaking out as long as anyone is interested in them.

The surveillance culture didn't start with the Bushists. They only used fear to perfect it.