For those of you who aren’t reading Cato at Liberty (and why not??), I’ve got a longish post over there that looks at a couple of recent law review articles questioning whether it really makes sense to think about the Fourth Amendment primarily in terms of “privacy.” I find myself pretty sympathetic to the argument that looking at it exclusively through this lens misses a lot of the important interests the amendment ought to protect, and that we should see it more generally as a mechanism for regulating government information gathering, with the understanding that some of the problems with that information gathering are not most usefully analyzed under the rubric of “privacy invasions.”

Apropos of the Very! Exciting! News! that Dismemberment Plan—one of my all time favorite bands—is reuniting for a winter tour, here’s “The City” off the classic Emergency & I. (No, seriously, if you don’t have this album, go download it now.) The city has, indeed, been dead since they’ve been gone:

Yglesias wonders why “intellectual honesty” is any different from plain-old honesty. Noah Millman gets at the difference as I’d understood it:

“Intellectually honest” means you make arguments you think are true, as opposed to making the arguments you are “supposed” to make and/or avoiding making arguments that you think are true that you aren’t “supposed” to make.

Advocates, by contrast, make the best arguments they can think of for the position that they are obliged to take by their position. They are still supposed to be honest – they are not supposed to actually lie. But they are not expected to follow their own consciences with respect to the arguments they make or the positions they advance.

This sounds right. Back when I debated for NYU, I was always honest: I would not knowingly assert factual falsehoods. But I was often intellectually dishonest, because my job in those particular contests was not to engage in an impartial search for Platonic truth; it was to win the damn round. I would happily make arguments I thought were weak if I thought the judges would find them convincing and the weaknesses would be too subtle for the opposition to properly exploit. I would gloss over counterarguments I knew to be potentially devastating if I thought the other side had flubbed the presentation, leaving the audience unaware just how damaging the argument was, and spend more time than was necessary heaping mockery on the weaker arguments, hoping it would make my opponents seem silly and undermine their broader credibility. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer my own doubts about my arguments, or acknowledge responses I thought had hit home—unless strategically, as a prelude to a stronger counter.

So “intellectual honesty” is, in a sense, a higher standard than mere honesty.  And while dishonesty in argument is pretty much always a bad thing—you can imagine extreme “murderer at the door” counterexamples, of course—it’s not clear that “intellectual honesty” is necessary in every context. Sometimes—as in a debate round or an adversarial legal proceeding—you want everyone to make the strongest case they can for whatever position they’re assigned to defend, regardless of their own view, to get a clear contrast—or “good clash,” as we used to call it. Sometimes the point is working consensus rather than a search for some ideal.  If I make the case for school vouchers to a religious audience and point out how it would allow them greater freedom to have their kids educated in their own traditions, this might be “intellectually dishonest” in some sense: I think the religious indoctrination of children is a bad thing! And I’d be pretty queasy if the result of a voucher system were a dramatic increase in the number of schools treating “intelligent design” as a serious scientific theory.  I would be giving reasons why they should want to support a policy that I favor for mostly distinct reasons, not sincerely advancing what I think to be the best arguments—and that’s OK sometimes! It’s also a matter of degree rather than kind: I know many people who are at least as smart as I am disagree strongly with lots of my views, so I’m acutely aware that I could be wrong, and that it’s highly probable I’m mistaken about many things.  But instead of constantly hedging and qualifying—though I do plenty of that—I plunge ahead and trust that everything will work out in the Great Wiki.

All that said, what we often want from writers, above and beyond the minimal requirement that they not deliberately mislead or misinform us, is the full and sincere engagement of their brains, including all the doubts and reservations, rather than the most vigorous defense they can offer of a position. And since so much of politics is ultimately about winning the round, that kind of honesty is a good deal rarer than I think would be healthy.

Update Andrew Sullivan adds:

Sanchez wants writers to give “the full and sincere engagement of their brains, including all the doubts and reservations, rather than the most vigorous defense they can offer of a position.” But in my view, that often is the most vigorous defense. If you can include the obvious counter-points, acknowledge their strengths and still argue forcefully against them, you are much more persuasive.

Absolutely—at least much of the time—which is one of the things I had in mind when I alluded to making concessions “strategically, as a prelude to a stronger counter.” We used to say that if you want to be a really good debater, you have to be able to “opp yourself better than your opp.” There are few things more rhetorically effective than being able to restate your opponent’s best arguments more clearly and forcefully than they themselves did—and if you really want to show off, point out how the argument could be developed or improved—before proceeding to blow it out of the water.  If you really wanted to pull the rug from under them, you’d play the Bunny Rabbit gambit and briefly preview the best arguments before your opponents got up, leaving them sounding lamely like they had nothing original to say.

But there are caveats. You’d do this when you knew you could actually answer the argument, or when you were confident enough that the net weight of the arguments was so disproportionately on your side that you could afford a minor concession to seem gracious and reasonable. But it was pretty risky if the round was substantively a close call. It wouldn’t work to be too dismissive, to simply try to ignore a counterargument that clearly raised serious problems—obvious hackery is definitely unpersuasive. But the appearance of confidence and authority really are pretty powerful, and when the balance of arguments is even enough or the issues complex enough, the tiebreaker for judge or audience is often simply who seems most certain. I mean, there is a reason that when it comes to appealing to a broad audience, the standard bearers for political movements tend to deal in sound-bites delivered with an air of uncompromising, apodictic certainty. If intellectual dishonesty were really less persuasive—to the average voter, anyway—it would be a mystery why we see so much of it.  I’d assume it’s less persuasive when the audience recognizes it as such, but most of the audience, having lives and jobs and whatnot, aren’t paying that close attention.

Update 2 One last thing worth adding is that while normally “dishonesty” implies something intentional—the difference between a lie and an error is whether you know what you’re saying is false—I don’t think intellectual dishonesty is necessarily like this, at least as the term seems to be commonly used. You can, I think, be uncharitable to opponents, give their arguments the worst possible interpretation, utterly fail to examine your own biases or assumptions, and dismiss inconvenient facts as presumptively somehow tainted—all while consciously imagining you’re a warrior for unvarnished truth. In that sense, “intellectual honesty” seems a little more like “journalistic responsibility,” say, than plain vanilla honesty: It’s an active and reflective process, as opposed to a mere absence of conscious deception.

The program of warrantless NSA wiretapping (and data mining) authorized by the president shortly after the 9/11 prompted a flurry of intense debate over its legality when it was disclosed by The New York Times back in 2005. Those arguments have, by now, been so thoroughly rehearsed that there’s not a whole lot new to say about it.

But like Monty Python’s Black Knight, some of those old arguments keep popping up — as evidenced by John Eastman’s contribution to the Cato Unbound roundtable on the digital surveillance state we held last month. So while the roundtable’s over, I thought it would be convenient to round up a compact version of the main arguments in one place, for the convenience of folks who might not want to slog through the many law review articles that have been written on the subject.

The touchstone for modern analysis of executive war powers is, by general consensus, the tripartite schema elaborated by Justice Jackson in his concurrence in the Youngstown steel seizure case :

1. When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate. In these circumstances, and in these only, may he be said (for what it may be worth) to personify the federal sovereignty. If his act is held unconstitutional under these circumstances, it usually means that the Federal Government, as an undivided whole, lacks power….

2. When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain….

3. When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter…. Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution, for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.

Using this as our starting point, it becomes clear that an analysis of the NSA program entails answering a series of distinct (though related) questions. First, we need to determine which level of the Youngstown schema applies. If we’re in Youngstown’s Category I, then the NSA program was illegal only if it exceeded the constitutional constraints on government surveillance established by the Fourth Amendment. If, on the other hand, we’re in Category III, a constitutionally permissible surveillance program might nevertheless be illegal. So I’ll consider three questions in turn: Did the NSA program violate federal statute? If so, does the statute trump whatever inherent power the president might enjoy as commander in chief in this context? Finally, does the program as it’s been publicly described violate the Fourth Amendment? An affirmative answer to either the first pair of questions or the third will entail that the NSA program was illegal.

The AUMF

The statutory question may seem like something of a no-brainer: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 states explicitly that its procedures establish the “exclusive means” by which domestic electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. In this case, the obvious answer is the right one. But the Justice Department has attempted to claim that Congress cleverly managed to repeal the “exclusive means” language without telling anyone about it back in 2001, when it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Probably the most decisive demolition of that argument was offered by David Kris, who currently heads the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, but it’s worth reviewing briefly why this argument is so implausible.

The central problem with reliance on the AUMF is that FISA itself contains a provision providing a 15-day surveillance grace period following a declaration of war. As the legislative conference report explains, this was intended to provide time for Congress to consider whether any wartime modifications to the FISA structure were necessary. Plainly, then, Congress did not imagine or intend that a declaration of war (or “authorization of force”) would in itself implicitly loosen FISA’s fetters beyond that grace period.

Moreover, Congress has repeatedly amended FISA since the 9/11 attacks, both in the PATRIOT Act passed almost simultaneously with the AUMF, and in subsequent legislation over a period of years. As Glenn Greenwald recounted in his lead essay for the Cato roundtable, it has expanded government surveillance powers in a variety of ways, but none of these prior to the Protect America Act of 2007 (superseded by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008) approached the breadth of the NSA program, and even these establish at least a modicum of judicial oversight, however inadequate. Again, this history sits uneasily with the premise that Congress understood itself to have authorized such broad domestic surveillance when it passed the AUMF.

Indeed, as former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle explained in a Washington Post op-ed shortly after the revelation of the warrantless wiretap program, the Senate explicitly rejected language sought by the White House that would have extended the authorization to actions within the United States. Then–Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has publicly acknowledged that the Bush Administration contemplated asking for a more specific amendment to FISA authorizing something like the NSA program, but concluded that it would be “difficult, if not impossible.” We are being asked to believe, in other words, that Congress intended to implicitly grant authority that the administration was certain would be refused had it been requested overtly. It is, as Justice Frankfurter put it in Youngstown, “quite impossible… to find secreted in the interstices of legislation the very grant of power which Congress consciously withheld.”

Basic principles of statutory construction disfavor inferring implicit repeal of specific statutory language from more general authorizations, except in the face of “overwhelming evidence” of congressional intent—and the Court has accordingly rejected parallel arguments in several recent War on Terror cases, as in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the court found “nothing in the text or legislative history of the AUMF even hinting that Congress intended to expand or alter the authorization” for military commissions spelled out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The evidence here is indeed overwhelming, but it uniformly cuts against the fanciful proposition that Congress somehow enacted a kind of sub silentio repeal of FISA. I’m inclined to assume this argument was offered primarily because of an understandable reluctance to rely entirely on a radical theory of inherent and preclusive executive powers, to which I turn next.

The President’s Inherent Authority

The first thing to observe with respect to claims of inherent executive authority here is that if we exclude non-binding dicta, the evidence for a constitutional power to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes is almost wholly negative. That is to say, it turns on inferences from questions the Supreme Court has declined to directly address rather than on its affirmative holdings. As we’ll see, this is a thin reed on which to hang ambitious claims.

Consider, for instance, the so-called Keith case. In addressing the scope of presidential power to authorize warrantless surveillance against domestic national security threats, the majority noted that they had “not addressed, and express no opinion as to, the issues which may be involved with respect to activities of foreign powers or their agents.” But in that very case, the unanimous majority held that a warrant was required in cases involving domestic national security threats, resolving a lacuna expressed in very similar language in a footnote to a previous ruling involving wiretaps:

Whether safeguards other than prior authorization by a magistrate would satisfy the Fourth Amendment in a situation involving the national security is a question not presented by this case.

The arguments deployed against unchecked executive discretion in Keith clearly have substantial cross-application to the War on Terror, which in many respects bears as much resemblance to those domestic threats as it does to traditional nation state–sponsored espionage and warfare. It will suffice to note, however, that declining to foreclose a power because the fact pattern under consideration provided no occasion to consider the distinct issues involved, as the Court did in both Katz and Keith, is not at all the same as affirmatively asserting it, let alone defining its scope—a point to which I’ll return in the next section.

Nevertheless, let’s suppose arguendo that there is some such inherent power, whether broad or narrow. Eastman and other defenders of the NSA program stil err in conflating inherent power with preclusive or indefeasible power. As a simple conceptual matter, this cannot be right, or else the third Youngstown category would collapse into the second: If all “inherent” presidential powers were per se immune to Congressional limitation, Category III would be superfluous, since it would never yield a result different from analysis under Category II.

Fortunately, we need not restrict ourselves to conceptual analysis, because precedent and practice both speak directly to the question, and both support robust legislative power to constrain even those presidential powers grounded in Article II. The legislature has, from the founding era on, assumed that its Article I power to make “rules for the government of the land and naval forces” enabled it to cabin the discretion of the commander in chief, often in frankly picayune ways, by establishing general rules limiting the conduct of a conflict. Prior to the Truman administration there was little indication that presidents saw this as encroaching upon sacrosanct executive prerogatives. Even Lincoln—probably the most obvious early example of a wartime president acting without or contrary to statutory authority—did not claim some general constitutional power to defy Congress. Rather, he argued that when hostilities commenced during a congressional recess, he had acted as he thought necessary given the impracticality of securing advance approval, while acknowledging that it fell to the legislature to ratify or overrule his judgment once it reconvened.

In the few cases where the Supreme Court has had occasion to rule on the scope of executive power at “lowest ebb,” it has repeatedly confirmed that federal law binds the president even in war. In Little v. Barreme, during a conflict with France, the Court found that a specific Congressional authorization for the seizure of ships bound to French ports rendered invalid an executive order that also permitted seizure of ships bound from those ports. And this was so, the Court noted, even though the president’s own commander-in-chief powers would have permitted him this discretion had Congress not spoken. Since the inauguration of the War on Terror, the Court has reaffirmed the validity of such statutory limits on executive discretion, as in Hamdan. Bush’s own Office of Legal Counsel ultimately repudiated a series of memos, penned by John Yoo, that had relied on a more expansive conception of executive power to justify the administration’s War on Terror programs, concluding that they were “not supported by convincing reasoning.”

There is, by general consensus, some “preclusive core” to the executive’s commander-in-chief authority. This includes, at the least, a prerogative of “superintendence”: Congress could not appoint Nancy Pelosi commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and forbid the president to remove her. Most commentators see it as similarly foreclosing efforts to achieve the same end by a series of micromanagerial statutes commanding specific tactics be employed at particular times. But the notion that this preclusive core encompasses discretion to unilaterally disregard a general statutory framework governing protracted electronic surveillance of U.S. persons on American soil is simply insupportable in the face of both history and precedent. The argument is, if anything, more absurd when it comes to the government’s illegal acquisition the statutorily protected calling records of tens of millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom obviously have no ties to terrorism or Al Qaeda. Attempts to stitch together a countervailing line from desultory snatches of language about the president’s role as “sole organ” in foreign affairs are entertaining as a sort of exercise in experimental Burroughsian cut-up narrative, but as legal analysis they seem pretty desperate.

The Fourth Amendment

Finally, we turn to the Fourth Amendment. I will, for the most part, consider how the Fourth Amendment applies to the NSA surveillance program prior to the 2008 passage of the FISA Amendments Act.

As Eastman notes, while in most contexts the prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures” requires surveillance to be authorized by a probable cause warrant based on individualized suspicion, there are a variety of circumstances in which warrantless searches may nevertheless be reasonable. While this is not the place to conduct a detailed survey of such “special needs” exemptions, such exceptions tend to involve cases in which the subjects of the search are already understood to enjoy a diminished expectation of privacy (students in school), where the searches are standardized and minimally intrusive, where the targets are in a position to raise challenges before a neutral magistrate if necessary, and where prior court authorization would be highly impractical. No exception that I am aware of can plausibly be stretched so far as to permit sustained, discretionary, warrantless electronic surveillance of members of the general population—a method recognized to be so intrusive that in the criminal context, federal statute requires investigators to meet a higher standard than applies to ordinary physical search warrants.

It’s worth noting in passing that the existence of the statutory FISA framework is at least arguably relevant to the Fourth Amendment analysis here. What measures are “reasonable” will often depend on context, and upon the available alternatives: The use of lethal force in self-defense might be found reasonable as a last resort, but not when the victim has an easy avenue of escape or a taser handy. Similarly, if the only alternative to conventional criminal courts were warrantless surveillance—if Congress had made no provision for a highly secretive court to consider classified applications under secure conditions, with ample flexibility in cases of emergency—one might be more inclined to sympathize with some degree of executive improvisation. In light of the elaborate mechanisms Congress has provided, an appeal to impracticality is considerably less compelling.

But let’s bracket that for the moment, and again suppose for the sake of argument that the president has some inherent authority to conduct warrantless domestic wartime surveillance. Let’s further assume away any statutory problems. Can the NSA program be squared with the Fourth Amendment injunction that searches be reasonable, based on what little we know of it? It seems highly unlikely.

Multiple accounts suggest that the NSA program involved algorithmic selection of surveillance targets, possibly triggered by keywords within the communications themselves, almost certainly based on pattern analysis of calling records or other transactional data. The result, according to the Bush administration, was that the international communications of approximately 500 persons within the U.S. were being intercepted at any given time. Since the program operated for several years, both before and after being disclosed, a conservative estimate would place the total number of persons subject to surveillance in the thousands, and most likely in the tens of thousands.

What did all this spying yield? In 2006, under the headline “Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects,” the Washington Post reported:

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well.

Nearly all the “leads” produced by the program appear to have been dead ends. Indeed, despite the assurances of the Bush administration that the NSA program had saved thousands of lives, a postmortem review by the intelligence community’s Inspectors General found that officials they spoke to “had difficulty citing specific instances where [NSA program] reporting had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes,” though a classified version of the report apparently cites a handful of instances in which the program “may have contributed.”

As a point of reference, the government’s reporting suggests that under criminal wiretap orders, about 30 percent of intercepted communications contain incriminating content. Since “minimization” of innocent communications is necessarily imperfect, and since even the most hardened criminals presumably spend most of their time conversing about more mundane matters, the number of targets engaged in at least some incriminating communication is clearly far higher. That’s what one would expect when evidence establishing “probable cause” must justify surveillance—and Bush officials have claimed the NSA program’s targeting met the same standards. The evidence suggests otherwise.

I’m happy to grant that we should accept a somewhat lower “hit rate” when interception is geared toward protecting the nation from major terror attacks. But if the requirement that searches be “reasonable” is not to be rendered completely vacuous, or totally severed from even a diluted standard of “probable cause,” there must be some substantive test of whether such highly intrusive techniques are actually in service of that vital state interest. It cannot possibly be enough to simply observe that the president has uttered the magical incantation “war on terror.” And it cannot possibly be enough that a program involving interception of the private conversations of thousands or tens of thousands of U.S. persons “may have contributed” to a handful of successful investigations. The question is closer with respect to post-FISAAA programs of interception, which are at least subject to some modicum of independent oversight, but unless we have gotten vastly better at sifting the guilty from the innocent, grave constitutional doubts should remain.

So, I figured there wasn’t much point in my commenting on the New Yorker profile of the Koch brothers, mostly because as someone who’s directly or indirectly benefited from Koch largess for most of my adult life—the Koch Fellowship as a student; gigs at Koch-funded Reason and Cato—I’d expect folks to be justly skeptical of anything favorable I might write about them. So why bother looking like a suck-up?  But I’ll say this much. The idea that they’ve poured a hundred million and change into funding libertarian think tanks, advocacy groups, and educational programs over the years in order to line their own pockets or boost the corporate bottom line seems kind of bizarre. I mean, it’s an insanely inefficient, almost Rube Goldbergesque way to go about it, isn’t it? The big organizations they fund work on a whole spectrum of libertarian issues, so only a fraction of each dollar goes to advocating policy change that would yield some direct financial benefit to them. I mean, we don’t have to mention this to them, but if there’s a percentage for Koch Industries in subsidizing my writing on surveillance, or Radley Balko’s stuff on police abuses, it’s a mystery to me. Maybe it’s elaborate misdirection?

Insofar as most of those groups are trying to change the broader climate of ideas, it’s an awfully long game with a highly uncertain payout.  And as the New Yorker piece goes to show, it’s a strategy that’s apt to draw a lot more attention and flak than limiting themselves to doing what every other big business does, which is throwing those millions at lobbying shops that push for concrete, near-term legislative changes with some reasonable likelihood of yielding an immediate and quantifiable return. I’m sure they also like the thought that a society where libertarian ideas have more traction might yield lower taxes and regulatory burdens for them, but isn’t the more parsimonious explanation just that they honestly believe in these wacky ideas they’re funding us to defend?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my monograph, “In Defense of Earth Plunder.”
Update: Yglesias writes:

And it certainly doesn’t mean that people should accept Julian Sanchez’ contention that the Koch brothers’ backing of a broad libertarian ideology is something they do to the exclusion of conventional rent-seeking…

I didn’t mean to suggest the two were mutually exclusive, or that the Kochs don’t engage in both; just that a million dollars you spend subsidizing libertarian philosophy seminars for college students is a million dollars you didn’t get to spend on more immediately rewarding lobbying.  Also:

The point is that thanks in part funding dynamics, you couldn’t very well be working at the Cato Institute and start doing a lot of writing about how one reason libertarians ought to ally themselves with the progressive coalition in the United States is that unregulated carbon dioxide emissions constitute a massive violation of the property rights of the adversely effected…

I’m probably not going to start doing a lot of writing about this, because it’s not really my jam.  But one reason libertarians ought to ally themselves with the progressive coalition in the United States is that unregulated carbon dioxide emissions constitute a massive violation of property rights.

So, I inadvertently started a pretty ridiculous Twitter meme yesterday. I wrote:

Painfully tempted to do a parody rewrite w/John Galt as hipster & Gulch in Williamsburg RT @thecalebbacon: Atlas shrugged and said “meh.”

The 60-page speech to be replaced by a Tom Verlaine solo…

Which inspired:

ziege19
@normative Who is John Galt? Oh, you probably haven’t heard of him, he’s really obscure. #HipsterShrugged

Which was all it took to set folks off.  Some of my favorites:

normative I guess it’s fair if Hank always pays the rent / And he doesn’t get all bent / About sleepin’ on the couch #HipsterShrugged

normative So, I stopped the motor of the world, which was fine because I got a great deal on this fixie. #HipsterShrugged

radleybalko I stopped contributing to society way before “going Galt” was cool. #HipsterShrugged

SandyS1 Dagny Taggart: Relationship status: It’s complicated. #HipsterShrugged

normative Yeah, it’s my revolutionary new material. As flexible as tights, but you can totally wear them like jeans. #HipsterShrugged

ziege19 I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own face on the T-shirt I am wearing. #HipsterShrugged

jacobgrier I have John Galt’s entire speech… on vinyl #hipstershrugged

sethdmichaels @normative Side A is Side A. #hipstershrugged

normative I swear by my life and my love of it, if I have to hear “Oxford Comma” one more f*ing time… #HipsterShrugged

normative No, it’s *Rearden* Metal. I mean, it looks just like 80s metal, but it’s ironic #HipsterShrugged

laughinghyena13 That hamburger sandwich is fine, but I’ve had much better at a diner in Wyoming. #hipstershrugged

normative Yeah, it’s kinda grungy, but this train tunnel is still a lot cleaner than the bathroom at Northsix that time… #HipsterShrugged

grandmofhelsing Galt’s Speech really isn’t as good as his earlier work. #hipstershrugged

grandmofhelsing But 19th Century Mortors was better. RT @willwilkinson 20th Century Motor Company used to make a sweet hybrid. #HipsterShrugged

normative “We are going back to the 80s.” He raised his hand & over the desolate earth checked his neon Swatch. #HipsterShrugged

normative Yeah, Ragnar was in Sigur Ros for a while, but he bailed when the label got so hardass about piracy. #HipsterShrugged

normative Actually, Francisco’s got this trust fund, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. #HipsterShrugged

willwilkinson Yeah, Francisco’s super-rich, but he’s totally cool politically. #HipsterShrugged

ziege19 I just unlocked the “Helping Is Futile” badge on @foursquare! #HipsterShrugged

petersuderman I used to like the government, but that was before it got big and popular. #HipsterShrugged

conor64 People vilify Dagny Taggart, but I wish more corporate execs always traveled by rail #HipsterShrugged

jacobgrier Camping out for the new iPhone. Rearden Metal finish, Galt motor. Pretty sweet. #hipstershrugged #stilldropscalls

silentbeep3000 Rosa DeLauro is a f**ing moocher #HipsterShrugged

peejaybee Galt’s Gulch used to be pretty cool. Now it’s like, strollers everywhere. #hipstershrugged

David Roberts tweets:

Every ‘winger-driven faux story now has two phases. First headline: “Faux story!” Second: “Faux story becomes huge story!” Pathetic.

This is actually a bit truncated.  The steps are:

1. Faux Story
2. Why is the Em-Ess-Em ignoring this huge Faux Story?
3. After days or weeks of flood-the-zone coverage across multiple conservative media outlets, some significant portion of the base is convinced that the faux story is true and/or significant.
4. Mainstream press takes note of (3) and speculates about the political and electoral consequences
5. Panicked Democrats react as though the faux story is true and/or significant
6. See, we told you it was a huge story!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I seem to have been a busy little bee this past week, so for those of you who aren’t following me on Twitter, here’s what I’ve gotten up to instead of, you know, blogging here:

• In an essay for Newsweek, I argue that Barack Obama should withdraw his threat to veto added GAO oversight of the intelligence community.
• In a piece for The American Prospect, I argue why a proposed change to the FBI’s authority to issue National Security Letters for Internet transactional data ought to be extremely worrying.
• If you’re tired of reading for the week—and I don’t blame you—I discuss both of those things in a new Cato Daily Podcast.
• Or there’s video: The New York Times website picked up a clip of my longer BloggingHeads dialog with Stewart Baker.
• Finally, I’ve got an article in the new print issue of National Review (on newsstands now!) arguing that conservatives ought to regard the sprawling intelligence sector with the same skeptical eye they would any other arm of Big Government.

You can’t stop the press!