On Rick Perry - Constitutional Scholar Edition

At the signing ceremony for the "Merry Christmas" Bill

Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion.

If the term is to have any meaning at all, yes it does mean that if you so choose.

Rick Perry really knows a good pander when he sees it.

on Glenn Greenwald and fatal flaws

Driftglass' take on this is about the same as mine.

Right now, Mr. Greenwald has the world by the tail, and the story he is breaking is important and consequential.  And yet at the moment of his greatest triumph he appears incapable of rising above his need to use his megaphone to settle petty scores with his enemies...a group which seems to include anyone and everyone he perceives of as disagreeing with him in the slightest. 

On the real NSA scandal

It seems to have been legal.
Call your Congresscritter and demand they change the law.

Oh, you would rather be outraged?
You are the problem.

On Surveillance By The Good President

If you have to rely on the fact that the President is a good person and wouldn't abuse any information that was gained from questionable surveillance laws you need to understand that you are well and truly fucked.

You should look at any such law and say to yourself, what is the worst possible case a bad actor could put to this. If you still think it is OK then god bless. If you don't ...

On Why Data Mining Is Useless at Preventing Terrorism

Over at The New Republic, Rachel Levinson-Waldman has a great piece.

Credit card companies are held up as the data-mining paradigm. But the companies' success in detecting fraud is due to factors that don’t exist in the counterterrorism context: the massive volume of transactions, the high rate of fraud, the existence of identifiable patterns (for instance, if a thief tests a stolen card at a gas station to check if it works, and then immediately purchases more expensive items), and the relatively low cost of a false positive: a call to the card's owner and, at worst, premature closure of a legitimate account.

By contrast, there have been a relatively small number of attempted or successful terrorist attacks, which means that there are no reliable “signatures” to use for pattern modeling. Even in the highly improbable and undesirable circumstance that the number of attacks rises significantly, they are unlikely to share enough characteristics to create reliable patterns.

via Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money

This is my field. If you don't have a pattern you have nothing to match against.

On The Closing of Google Reader

With the deadline for Google Reader coming soon I have a question...

Anyone found a good replacement?

On Marriage based Green Cards

I don't know how folks that aren't financially comfortable can afford it. I know they do though.

They have my great respect.

Stay tuned to this space for my adventures as I  go through the process. Hopefully a series of "another check to the lawyer and everything is proceeding apace " posts.

So far I have found out that leaving the country while married to an American citizen is a bad idea for someone of TN status. Good to know but wish I had known sooner.