If you're checking-in to read this blog, thank you for hanging in with me. I went away on a long trip over the holidays to India (among other places).
This just in: Carnivore is dead. The FBI is instead turning to private sector software to do the job of tapping into our e-mails. In a (tangentially) related story, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) has FOIAed the DoJ to find out if they are or are not collecting URLs to determine which websites people are reading/visiting.
Today/yesterday, Bush told a CNN reporter that we need better human intelligence, explaining, " 'Human intelligence, the ability to get inside somebody's mind, the ability to read somebody's mail, the ability to listen to somebody's phone call -- that somebody being the enemy.' " Meanwhile, (via the CDT and Dave Farber) the number of Federal ID proposals for US citizens and non-citizens increase in number and scope. The CDT also reports (in the same recent policy brief) initiatives for fingerprints in US passports and new driver's licenses.