Private Context

Senator Russ Feingold sent President-elect Obama a letter today urging him to act on recent recommendations made by the Senate Judiciary Constitutional Subcommittee (full article here - Feingold Urges Obama to Reverse Bush Measures). The subcommittee, which Feingold chaired, heard testimony from forty prominent academics, policy makers, and advocacy group representatives, including John Podesta, the head of Obama’s transition team. Collectively, they endorsed a reversal of most of the policies enacted by the Bush administration since 9/11. Particularly noteworthy is their recommendation to make significant changes to the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act.

My guess is that even the mighty Barack-star won’t risk looking soft on national security issues early in his first term, especially after his bumbling sidekick Biden said there will be an “international…generated crisis” inside of six months. Sure Obama will make a big show of enacting some of the safe recommendations, like closing the Guantanamo prison and establishing a government-wide standard of humane detainee treatment. But I’m feeling pretty confident that government agencies will still be able to monitor our wireless activity without a warrant well into Barack’s second term. Frankly, knowing that some entry-level federal techie will be scrutinizing my communications may actually encourage me to increase the amount of picture messages of my scrotum that I send my buddies during their interoffice meetings.

Maybe it’s ok that the government is secretly reading all our text messages? After all, sometimes it’s the people closest to us that we’re really worried about…