Is there any better demonstration that members of the Gang of Four cannot exercise oversight over such programs without staffer assistance than the way former Gang of Four member Rockefeller talks about the machines that collect and store data on you?

The White House wants to add just four words to the law that empowers the government to collect information on you w/o a warrant. But it would represent a huge expansion of the what the government could (legally) collect on you.

While you work within the constraints put on any Speaker, to implement the agenda of the president who’s in your own party, please let San Francisco have real representation again. San Francisco values really matter to America. The City needs a Congressperson again. Let San Franciscans elect someone who needn’t compromise on their every viewpoint for the sake of the Speakership. You can do this, Madame Speaker. Please make it so. Finally, as I always close my letters and emails to you, more and more futile though they seem because of your dual role nowadays: Thank you for your service to San Francisco, to California, and to the United States of America.

Recently, I had the good fortune to be invited by NPR to submit an essay on a favorite thriller of mine. I decided to write about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is both an excellent thriller and an increasingly powerful and relevant political warning — a combination readers of my latest novel, Inside Out, will know I find appealing.

Though I’m of course pleased that NPR decided to run the essay (which you can find here, along with an unrelated radio interview I did with Michelle Norris on All Things Considered), I’m also disappointed that NPR insisted on watering down the essay through successive drafts. The NPR editor I was in touch with, Miriam Krule, found the first three drafts “too political” (my response — that an essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four that’s too political is like an essay about the Bible that’s too much about God — was unpersuasive), and though Ms. Krule didn’t articulate the precise nature of her objections, the parts of the essay that had to go nicely demonstrate what in this context “too political” really means.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems that a somewhat coercive but nevertheless voluntary monitoring of cybersecurity via a program like “Perfect Citizen” for things like a nuclear generating plant isn’t such a bad thing.

From Elena Kagan’s first comments about Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program yesterday, it sounds almost like she’d vote for rule of law in the al-Haramain case (though the case is probably in the gray area of cases on which she should recuse herself).

Main Justice reports that Pat Leahy and DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine have been chatting about further IG review of the FBI’s use of the several PATRIOT provisions that were contentious issues in last years attempt to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. This means that Fine is going to do what the legislation would have mandated — conduct further reviews of these authorities — on his own. But I’m also interested in the scope Fine lays out for his review in his response to Leahy.

Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau tell a sort of weird story of how a House Intelligence Committee staffer, Diane Roark, tried to reach out to William Rehnquist to get him to review Dick Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program.

I’m thoroughly unsurprised by the news of Dennis Blair’s ouster. After all, it’s an impossible job that appears to serve one purpose: to provide a deck chair you can rearrange every two years as a scapegoat for our continuing inability to detect terrorists even with all the surveillance toys we’ve got.

The government has responded to Plaintiffs’ al-Haramain’s proposed judgment. To put it lightly, the DOJ is NOT going to give up and pay.