Photo: Gage Skidmore There are a number of things wrong with Mitt Romney’s now infamous suggestion that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax will automatically support larger government, because those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” can never be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” For one, as both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein note, t...

Photo: Gage Skidmore There are a number of things wrong with Mitt Romney’s now infamous suggestion that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax will automatically support larger government, because those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” can never be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” For one, as both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein note, t...

Photo: blog.tsa.gov Over at the New York Times, reporter Scott Shane announces the beginning of a running dialogue about how to strike “the proper balance between liberty and security” more than a decade after the terror attacks of 9/11. I want to suggest, however, that framing the question the way Shane does, in terms of optimizing the “trade-off” between these competing values, begs the crucial question: Has there been a trade-off? Have all the billions of dollars and intrusive new surveillan...

Photo: natural.tv [Last] weekend, the New York Times reports on a sweeping electronic surveillance operation carried out not by the FBI, NSA, or CIA, but by… the Food and Drug Administration. Not only that, but correspondence from several congressional offices apparently got swept up in the dragnet—and inadvertently posted publicly: Charles E. Grassley As Marcy Wheeler notes, there’s an irony here, in that Grassley is a supporter of the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes warrantless, progr...

The annual Wiretap Report released by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts only captures the tiny tip of our vast electronic surveillance iceberg, but it does at least provide a lot of useful data about one type of government spying: Eavesdropping on phone calls in the course of criminal investigations. And so each year, the handful of journalists who keep an eye on this sort of thing dutifully report the bottom line number, and how much of an increase (usually) or decrease (very occasio...

[Yesterday], I wrote about an important New York Times report revealing, for the first time ever, the astonishing scale of government surveillance of cell phone users. In response to queries from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), most of the nation’s major cell providers revealed the number of government requests they process each year. The total—covering everything from traditional wiretaps to location tracking orders, “pen registers,” and subpoenas for basic subscriber records—came to an astonishing 1...