The full text of the amicus brief by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Salon and other organizations — filed as part of the ACLU’s challenge to the USA Patriot Act — is now available. (See my original posting on this for more.)

The ACLU also has a lot more information online about the proceeding. Here’s the ACLU’s news release.

One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.

This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!

(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)

Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.

What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.

The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.

(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)

If you haven’t been reading Salon’s War Room blog, here’s an example of what you’ve been missing. Geraldine Sealey notes Tom DeLay’s complaint that Nancy Pelosi, in criticizing President Bush, was endangering American lives, and offers a catalog of recent harsh criticisms of Bush from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Mark Helprin, Bill Kristol, George Will and a handful of Republican Senators. All “dangerous” statements, according to DeLay.

Jeff Jarvis echoes Howard Kurtz’s observation that most U.S. reporters in Iraq aren’t daring to venture outside the Green Zone. Given the chaos there and the danger of being taken hostage or worse, it’s hard to second-guess the decisions these journalists are making. But there’s no question we won’t get the full picture from Iraq this way.

Jarvis suggests we read Iraqi bloggers (and provides a set of links to them). That’s certainly good advice.

But it’s also worth pointing out that Salon’s coverage from Iraq was not “embedded” during the invasion and is not embedded in the Green Zone today. Our correspondent Phillip Robertson has been courageously, and independently, traveling the country, offering eyewitness accounts from the siege of Najaf and Kufa, escaping a thankfully brief detainment by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Al-Mehdi Army, and providing another angle on the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Phillip is a fine writer and a great observer. If you want to read reporting that’s not hunkered down behind the barricades, here it is.

Yes, that was the actual title of a session at the Defense Department conference on software development I attended last month in Utah. It’s taken me some time, but here’s a column outlining some of what I found there — including how “XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America.”

Fiona Morgan used to work here at Salon on our news team; now she’s doing good work at the Durham Independent: Check out this piece on the conservative smear campaign against the group September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, or Fiona’s earlier opus on the copyright wars.

I don’t make a habit of linking heavily to Salon pieces in my blog, since I figure most of you are also Salon regulars — but I do want to make sure you have a look at Joe Conason’s interview with Richard Clarke, our cover story for today. Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is in the eye of the storm right now for his revelations about the Bush administration’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Here’s a taste of the interview.

Clarke on the Bush administration’s mob ethos:
“The Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset.”

Clarke’s response to Dick Cheney’s charge that the Clinton administration had “no great success in dealing with terrorists”:
“It’s possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn’t know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn’t notice.”

Read the rest. Clarke has good, strong answers to every one of the personal attacks the Bush team has thrown his way.

My column about Tuesday’s Supreme Court argument in the COPA case is now
up, here.

Just in time for the reheating of the culture wars, as the social-issues Right tries to scare ma-and-pa America and media megacorporations run for cover, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is rearing its head again.

For those of you who don’t remember COPA, here’s the short version: After the original Internet censorship bill, the Communications Decency Act, was struck down as unconstitutional, Congress passed COPA as a dubious successor. It was attached to a big omnibus spending bill that Bill Clinton signed in fall 1998. The ACLU and a group of online-publisher plaintiffs — including, proudly, Salon (here’s our original editorial on the matter) — immediately challenged the law and obtained an injunction against its enforcement. Since then the case has wended a slow path through the Federal judiciary: first, an appeals court upheld the injunction; then the U.S. Supreme Court kicked it back down to the appeals court; then the appeals court, a year ago, offered a more definitive set of reasons why the law is a very bad way to keep kids away from inappropriate material on the Net.

A more sensible administration would have accepted this ruling and gone home. But we’re cursed with John Ashcroft as an attorney general, so the Justice Department is appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court yet again. (The ACLU site offers tons of information.)

The case will be argued on Tuesday, March 2, and I’ll be there for the argument and for a press conference afterwards. The Court isn’t exactly WiFi enabled — in fact, electronic devices are prohibited — so I’ll have to write something up after the fact.

Light blogging here as we devoted considerable energy this week to the launch of War Room ‘04, our new group blog. Spearheaded by our new senior news editor, Geraldine Sealey, and featuring contributions from across Salon’s staff, War Room will be a centerpiece of Salon’s election-year coverage, and we’ve got more features to roll out in coming days and weeks (including, soon, an RSS feed for it).

We wanted to publish War Room as a blog within Salon’s existing content management system, so its content would be integrated with our search and directory. That meant we couldn’t just pull an existing blogging tool off the shelf; we had to write our own — or rather wrestle the existing software we use to publish articles into a different form. This is something I’ve been waiting for and advocating we do for, well, for as long as we’ve been rolling our own software — since early ‘99, when we were still producing the blog-like “In Box” for Salon Technology but had to update and archive everything by hand. I recall conversations with different developers at different stages of Salon’s evolution about the need to flow small items through our site. We sat and talked about how we might do it (”we’ll call them ’storettes’!”, I recall one programmer deciding), but we never got around to doing it because there was always something more pressing and revenue-related for our production team to focus on.

So hats off to our crew, especially Dominic Dela Cruz and Max Garrone, who did the heaviest lifting, for getting this up and running. I’ll continue to blog here, of course, but you’ll also find some of my commentary over in War Room.