RNC Chief Reince Priebus praises crazy Virginia Lt Gov candidate as ‘dynamic’ and ‘articulate’.
Palantir Technologies, the big data mining company, says they have nothing to do with the government’s ‘PRISM’ program.
How did I miss this ad? It’s from the House race in South Dakota in 2012. I’m not sure how to describe it. You just have to watch. After the jump … Read More
Barton Gellman talks about his Washington Post story on PRISM and his source’s expectation that s/he will ultimately be exposed: Read More
Romney: “I wish the hurricane hadn’t happened when it did because it gave the President a chance to be presidential and to be out showing sympathy for folks.” Watch.
It’s easy to say that this makes Romney some sort of massive egotist who only sees the world through the prism of his own self-interest. I don’t think we can say that. What I do think we can say is that Romney has a deep predilection to say stupid or clueless things that was always gonna make the president thing a tough sell.
Michele Bachmann is retiring. But meet her possible replacement, Tom Emmer. He may actually top her on the Crazy scale.
I’m still trying to make sense of and settle my own opinions on all the news we’ve heard about NSA surveillance over the last week. But I found this blog post by David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, at a minimum, a clarifying rejoinder to a lot of the hyperbole and dystopian fantasies I’m hearing and reading about all this.
Give it a read and let me know what you think.
I’ve gotten a lot of great responses to my question below about David Simon’s piece. The only problem is that there are so many good ones it’s a little hard to decide which ones to publish. I’d say they range more somewhat more pro-Simon than anti-. But that’s probably at least somewhat because of how I framed the question.
As I noted, I’m still trying to firm up my take on all this. My gut reaction makes me a surveillance skeptic skeptic, as it were. It is hard for me to get past the mix of hysteria and technological illiteracy. At the same time, it’s hard to evaluate the ‘robust’ privacy protections built into the system when we don’t have any idea what they are.
Please keep the emails coming. And if you didn’t see the post below, I’m looking for responses to this post.
TPM Reader SL sends a very candid note, dissenting from a lot of reaction to the NSA revelations. But also conceding that her reaction to these things significantly depends on her level of trust in the current head of the government, which is obviously a problem, especially in our highly polarized political society.
From TPM Reader SL …
I have to say that I generally agree with David Simon’s article about data collection. I’ve been thinking something along these lines all along as I’ve watched this story unfold, and wondering if I’ve just lost my sense of what freedom and privacy mean or whether the meaning of these events has been vastly over-hyped. I’m kind of relieved to hear that you’re asking similar questions.
TPM Reader NB isn’t buying David Simon’s line about NSA surveillance …
As a fan of the Wire, I was pretty disappointed with Simon’s analysis, but as someone who works with Big Data and knows what it is capable of, not very surprised.