Once upon a time, monitoring someone's communications was a relatively simple matter for law enforcement: they sent someone out to the pole or the side of the house with a hex driver and patched a transmitter into the pair of wires leading into the building that would kick on and send both ends of any conversations to a listening post some distance away. Since then, technology's changed just a bit (consider this my entry for the Understatement of the Year Award) but the powers that be are finding themselves hard pressed to keep up. In the year 1994 a law …

Earlier this week, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) testified before a Senate subcommittee about risks to the health of the public associated with climate change and global warming. As policy dictates, her testimony was recorded, transcribed, and entered into the public archives. As policy does not dictate, however, the transcript of her testimony was edited in interesting ways, with no evidence of redaction left behind. Dr. Gerberding has stated that such edits are routinely made before the transcripts are put online, and has no problem with her text being altered.

Major semantic …

...but the Republican party has been caught using off the record communications to plan things for the past couple of years, and that makes the keepers of the archives sit up and take notice. Spokespeople for the White House have stated that thousands of e-mails were lost and cannot be retrieved because they didn't go through the proper channels but instead used unauthorized, unsecured laptop computers and e-mail servers that did not archive messages sent or received, in violation of federal law. Now that Congress is probing the firings of eight federal attorneys and looking for relevant communications, they aren't …

One Abdul Tawala ibn Alishtari, also known as Michael Mixon, is a noted donor to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and has given in excess of $15kus in donations to the Committee since the year 2002. In fact, he was named a member of "the Inner Circle" of the committee because he's been so monetarily helpful, and was named Businessman of the Year by the state of New York two years in a row. The thing is, he's now up on charges of terrorism and giving financial aid to terrorists because it's come out that he also donated around $152kus …

Network neutrality is back on the docket, in the form of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, introduced to the Senate on 9 January 2007. The last time a bill like this was introduced it was shot down with a vote along partisan lines but thankfully grassroots efforts kept anything bad from happening to the Net as a result. It's time to write your representatives and ask them to vote in favour of this bill, everyone. Get to it.

With regard to the bill yesterday that either could or could not have forced webloggers to register as lobbyists inside the beltway, the bill didn't pass.

At this time, there is a bill before Congress that will change how grassroots lobbyists are treated, namely, requiring them to register on a quarterly basis as lobbyists inside the beltway. This press release has been picked up all over the Net - just about every cause you can think of that would ask people to write in to push for things to go one way or another has noticed this bill. So many have that I had a hell of a time finding the actual text of the bill in question at the Library of Congress. Well, here's the gotcha …