So, I was pretty excited to see that Manson had recently been interviewed by talk show bully Bill O’Reilly. Now, O’Reilly and Moore couldn’t be more different so I was please that Manson still avoided taking the bait and responded to all of the questions thoughtfully, intelligently, and with humor. 

Manson seems like a neat guy – too bad I can’t stand his music.

Why then do most colleges and universities have explicit rules forbidding student affairs staff from participating in sites like FaceBook or MySpace? Paradoxically, it is precisely because of student candor. If a student were to post, say, morbid poetry and then attempt suicide and it were found that school employees had read the poetry and did not act, the school might be held liable. But students post lots of morbid or disturbing work but engage in comparatively little self injurious behavior. And there’s no way even a highly trained professional, like my wife, could separate the dangerous from the banal.

Parents and students interviewed seemed most upset about the invasion of privacy, the inappropriateness of holding students responsible for activities outside of school, and for usurping parental responsibility. I hope that the school board has also considered their liability if students and their families come to expect monitoring? (via Consumerist)

I might also say, this is a little different time, in terms of what existed in 1976. Of course, we are at war. And we have briefed certain members of Congress.

What could be more dangerous than tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at our cities, military installations, and industry? What does the AG know about the current risks to our republic that we do not? I was perusing plot summaries for Fox’s drama 24 when it hit me: terrorists are known to have planted nuclear weapons in our country’s major cities and are planning to detonate. The only thing more dangerous than the risk of nuclear holocaust is the certainty of nuclear holocaust.

I’m joking of course. Gonzales didn’t mean to imply that the physical risk was greater. He probably just meant that the changes to telecommunications technologies over the past 30 years were so significant that FISA no longer applies. This is an interesting argument with considerable merit. It is unfortunate, then, that part of Gonzales’ defense of the wiretaps includes comparisons to the wartime actions of Washington, Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt.

Gonzales called Bush’s program part of “a long tradition of wartime enemy surveillance — a tradition that can be traced to George Washington, who made frequent and effective use of secret intelligence, including the interception of mail between the British and Americans.”

“And for as long as electronic communications have existed, the United States has conducted surveillance of those communications during wartime — all without judicial warrant. In the Civil War, for example, telegraph wiretapping was common, and provided important intelligence for both sides. In World War I, President Wilson ordered the interception of all cable communications between the United States and Europe.

“The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt authorized the interception of all communications traffic into and out of the United States,” Gonzales added.

So which is it? The same world or a new world?

I am not a lawyer. Richard cites conservative Heritage Foundation’s Paul Rosenzweig in suggesting that the patrons’ privacy was not in fact protected by the Constitution. He weakens his point, though, when arguing that the Constitution must sometimes be circumvented to be protected. Which is it?

It hardly matters, in the end. As I’ve said before, the police and FBI, as armed law enforcement officers, always have a remedy available should they consider the public safety put at risk by an overzealous privacy activist. That they did not could suggest something more dangerous: were these officers simply attemptingf to test their authority and set a precedent for future searches? Or, even worse, did they actually believe that they had the authority to seize library records?

Glick-Weil’s point, entirely missed by Cravatts, was not that the police did not have the right to examine the records of a potential criminal or terrorist. Her concern, which I share, is the privacy of other library patrons. The police should be concerned as well. Any evidence of illicit activites gained through such illegal search and seizure could likely be excluded from prosecutorial evidence as poisoned fruit. Or something. Anyways, I’m not a lawyer.