As the main signals intelligence agency in the United States, the NSA is the natural choice for a federal agency which would help Google find out how it got attacked by hackers from China. The NSA has little, if any, domestic jurisdiction. As far as law enforcement goes, they are about as threatening to the liberties of John Q. Citizen in this respect as the local dog catcher. Having possibly got hacked through a mechanism used to support CALEA, Google is not going to be sanguine about letting the NSA get another set of tentacles in its infrastructure.

What should concern the public is that law enforcement wants to further streamline its ability to go ahold of ISPs' customer data. The reporting is meager, but at the bare minimum they want a "closed system" that will let them quickly dispatch legal requests to ISPs and are also making noises about data retention mandates going as long as five years for all customers. The data retention mandates are less likely to happen because they will be expensive to impose in terms of the new infrastructure ISPs would have to build out, and the new costs that would have to be passed along to users in a rough economy. For the moment, they're just a specter hanging over Internet privacy.

The problem with the "closed, secure system" for dispatching law enforcement requests is that it will neither be closed, nor secure. It will go over the public Internet for funding reasons, and the police will think it is law enforcement-only, just like the Greek government thought its ministers' cell phones were private. It will also be trusted, which means that less scrutiny will be placed on what records are sent over it since they will automatically have an assumption of having a valid origin by virtue of being on this network. And of course, there are no guarantees that the government machines will be kept up to date which opens up the possibility of a scenario like Russian organized crime or a foreign intelligence service grabbing one machine, turning it into a zombie and then making requests for information on targets.

Considering the fact that Chinese hackers specifically targeted GMail accounts connected to foreign journalists and Chinese dissidents, it should be obvious that such a system would give them the potential to make fake requests for information on servers in the US. Faxing or mailing a warrant may be slower, but it is easier to verify than a message which is signed with a particular computer's SSL certificate and that is just a web service call that comes from a computer that is listed as a trusted source.

Poetry was created by cuikai. To see a live demo of it for the Classic Blog template set, click here. To download it, click here.

zFirst was created by zwooooo, and I would post a link to his/her site, but it appears to be defunct. To see a demo of it for the Classic Blog template set, click here. To download it, click here.

I Like Content was created by John Saddington. To see a demo of it for the Classic Blog template set, click here. To download it, click here.

Some jurisdictions are now proposing to make common cold medicines that contain "meth ingredients" into prescription drugs. This is how far they will go to keep little johnny and suzy from getting high and not blow up their parents' basement in a botch attempt to cook up some bathtub E. Better hope your whole family doesn't come down with a cold at the same time, or you might be accused of gaming the system to get your demon pill ingredients. Meanwhile, meth precursors are being traded in large volumes all around the world and ecstasy is being imported into the United States, mainly from places like Mexico where it can be mass-produced in quantities that put the Midwest's cottage industry to shame.

I wonder what it will take for people to finally just demand the end to drug prohibition. The drug agents can't keep it away from kids, can't enforce the law fairly and demand so many new powers that they have a bigger potential, and often actual, impact on the lives of law-abiding citizens than drug dealers do.

In honor of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I have a proposal for other pro-lifers. Let's designate every January 22nd as Homicide Day. We can send Homicide Day cards to one another, bake cookies shaped like the aftermath of a partial birth abortion and give kids large bags of smartees that have been rebranded to look like RU486 pills.

It's ok when the government does it:

Undercover ATF agents in Virginia have funneled more than 250 million cigarettes onto the nation's streets in the past three years through black market sales targeting smugglers, an Associated Press review has found.

Authorities say the flood of government-provided smokes - a pack and a half for every man, woman and child in New York City, the smugglers' main destination - leads them to organized crime rings and can even cut off financing for terrorists. The stings by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have yielded about five dozen federal arrests, albeit none on terror charges.

Many of those cigarettes undoubtedly wind up in the mouths of minors, since black market vendors have no reason to turn away teenage purchasers.

Despite that, government auditors and anti-tobacco groups want the ATF to do even more.

In their defense, this is the logical progression of a system that allows its agents to commit armed robbery of private citizens. It's only a matter of time before other agencies expand the program further, like pimping out their female agents to catch Johns. Oh wait, they already kinda do that already...

What she really means to say is that wasting one's time is normal for modern women:

Second, it is normal for middle-class women these days not to feel that they have achieved anything much by the age of 30. They leave school at 18, and perhaps take a year out before starting a degree at, say, 19. That degree takes a minimum of three years. With university out of the way, they may undertake further education, or realise they've been on the wrong track and deliberate over a major rethink.

By the time they have got themselves a job worth writing home about, they are in their mid-twenties. Then they have to put in a few years of hard graft in said job (not least to prove that the previous five or so years have been worthwhile). Along the way, they will probably have experienced a healthy, character-forming roller-coaster ride of good and bad relationships - without praying night and day that each one will lead them to the altar.

Assuming that all college-educated men are viable candidates for these women, which we know is not actually true (but let's say it is, for the sake of argument), women will find that they are at a disadvantage as soon as they leave college because the number of male graduates is steadily dropping relative to female graduates. That puts them on a similar footing that they once enjoyed when wars and industrial accidents made it quite conceivable that it would be relatively easy for a normal man to find a wife, but quite possible for a normal woman to never find a husband during her fertile years (this pattern existed even into a good deal of the 20th century). Only now there are little societal expectations on men to commit to a woman before having sex with her; pump and dump is normative behavior now. There are two other factors which exacerbate this problem: many women will settle for a "Mr Respectable I Can Have Right Now" and be reasonably happy, and the Mr. Bigs of the world would certainly not commit to a Carrie Bradshaw over a tight-bodied early 20 something--if he were looking to settle down.

As the women who follow this pattern (waste several years on one or more degrees which aren't what they want to do with their lives, rediscover themselves again and again), they will get older and less fertile while other women recognize the opportunity cost and grab up the majority of decent men. In the sexual marketplace, a woman's body, from the moment she is nearly through puberty in her late teens, a lot like a new car. The moment she reaches that point, her fertility and beauty begin to slowly lose value, with the 30-35 year range (depending on the woman) being the equivalent of a car hitting the 100,000 mile marker. Most women instinctively realize this which is why they try to get married in their early to mid twenties when they still have a lot of "buying power" with men.

I think she is plain wrong. Marriage should not be about bagging the type of man you always thought you'd end up with. Neither should it be based on a checklist of suitable credentials. It should be born of a good, old-fashioned feeling, deep inside, which tells you both that you simply cannot be without each other.

An emotion-based experience here is one that will collapse for most women the moment more powerful emotions come into effect. What if "Mr. Right" gets paralyzed and cannot work ever again? Practically speaking, the burden of caring for him and being the sole provider will produce feelings that will dominate in the vast majority of cases. That is, of course, a more extreme example. Time and routine tend to lead to boredom which leads to unhappiness, which leads to these emotions getting overwhelmed as well by monotony.

Ennui has probably killed more otherwise good relationships than any other factor except, perhaps, infidelity.

Some plugin and theme updates.

• Added support for dynamic publishing to Comment Flag.
• I'm adding support for email notification of a comment getting flagged to Comment Flag (first commit is ready, but not uploaded yet).
• Created a new repository for MTCollect. I took Kevin Shay's plugin and converted it into a config.yaml-based plugin.
• Made a bunch of commits to Movable-Type-Styles to get five new themes ready for an initial release.
  

Seeing as how I am #2 in Google now for "Emotional Pornography."