Former President Clinton walks into a trap on Fox News Sunday, but it doesn't turn out exactly as planned.

The Washington Post has an interesting article from a former Soviet dissident on the perils of state-sponsored torture.

Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting, the recently released book that tells the story of Johns Hopkins computer security researcher Avi Rubin's efforts to highlight the dangers of electronic voting, contains some amazingly discouraging anecdotes. From the Slashdot review: Is this is really the mindset of the majority of people running elections? Exposing the means by which democracy can be subverted in a virtually undetectable manner by a small number of motivated and unscrupulous individuals is somehow itself a threat to democracy?

Federal judge rules NSA wiretap program unconstitutional. The ACLU has the text of the ruling.

In case anyone was wondering how the data provided by the NSA's domestic spying programs was being used, two ABC investigative reporters have been told that the government is tracking the phone numbers they call in order to identify confidential sources. According to the senior federal law enforcement official that tipped them off, "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick."



In addition, other reporters at ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are also being investigated in relation to several embarrassing leaks from within the CIA.

UPDATE

FBI confirms that it is acquiring phone records in leak investigations, using National Security Letters introduced by the Patriot Act. NSLs require no signature from a judge, and prevent the recipient from disclosing the fact that the NSL has been received.

USA Today broke a story today on the NSA's efforts to secretly collect phone call records of American citizens, with the goal of creating "a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders. Several American telecom companies have been identified as collaborating with the NSA to provide phone record data.



This revelation comes as the US government is fighting legal challenges to another domestic spying program operated by the NSA, in which AT&T is alleged to have provided access to the contents of all Internet and telephone communications traversing AT&T's network. The government has responded by seeking to dismiss the suit by asserting "military and state secrets privilege."

From a piece in the current IEEE Security and Privacy magazine, the FBI has been gathering data on individuals from the data aggregator ChoicePoint since 2002. Discovered through a FOIA request: So, the FBI has effectively privatized its data collection operations? How many other checks and balances on government power are open to this kind of "free market solution?"

Hot on the heels of reports that Mr. Deutsch took part in a broad campaign to "limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration" comes news that he has been forced to resign, ostensibly for falsely claiming to have received a degree from Texas A&M. Not surprisingly, however, James E. Hansen, one of the scientists who came forward with claims that he was actively discouraged from discussing topics such as global warming, warned that the underlying problem has not yet been addressed:

Simply amazing. From the NYTimes:

Here's an interesting blog post from Andrew Leonard at Salon that alludes to collusion between the US government and American IT corporation SAIC to sabotage Venezuela's oil industry during the December 2002 labor strike against Chavez, and why this may be one reason that Venezuela is making public moves towards open source.