Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey sent a letter to House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes. Note this sentence:
We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress’ failure to act.
My previous post on this subject is here.
At midnight on Saturday, certain statutory authorizations for the interception of terrorist communications were allowed–by congressional inaction–to expire. See the National Review article with the headline: When the Clock Strikes Midnight, We Will Be Significantly Less Safe; also President Bush’s radio address here.
A couple of months ago, Shannon Love addressed some of the issues involved in commuications intercepts. This seems like an appropriate time for some additional discussion on the topic.
Some other useful resources:
1)The White House fact sheet
2)A fairly long article (PDF) which discusses some of the technical complexities which affect this debate.
Thoughts?
UPDATE: Robert Novak says: The true cause for blocking the bill was the Senate-passed retroactive immunity from lawsuits for private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation’s torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity.
The recess by House Democrats amounts to a judgment that losing the generous support of trial lawyers, the Democratic Party’s most important financial base, is more dangerous than losing the anti-terrorist issue to Republicans.
I’m not much of a Robert Novak fan, but in this case, I’m afraid his statement contains a strong element of truth.
UPDATE 2: William Kristol on Orwell, Kipling, and the responsibilities of governing, with particular reference to the communications-intercept issue.
See also this post and discussion at Neptunus Lex.
I usually carry my cell phone in my trouser pocket. My previous cell phones were non-folders and occasionally made calls on their own even though I used the “key lock” feature. (One phone dialed 911. I found out about it because a 911 dispatcher called back to ask if I was OK.) So I made sure that the next phone was a folding model.
Last August in my post, The Amazing Psychic Shannon, I predicted that the investigation into the Minneapolis bridge collapse would find:
The engineering investigation will reveal the bridge collapsed due primarily to design or construction flaws dating from the time of the bridge’s construction in 1968. Poor maintenance sometime in the bridge’s history will have played a role.
A little less than a year ago, I wrote a post titled Any Color as Long as it’s White, about the project at Tata Motors (India) to create the cheapest car ever built–cheaper even, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the Ford Model T. Here’s the car. See commentary from India, here and here.
And in China, a company called BYD Auto is launching a plug-in hybrid which is supposed to be available for sale (in China) this summer. Interestingly, the parent company of BYD is a battery manufacturer.
These cars won’t be available in the U.S. anytime soon, and will likely never be available in the U.S. in their present forms. There are issues of regulatory compliance, of consumer expectations, and of the need for a sales and support structure. But any U.S. auto executives who think that these announcements aren’t very relevant to them need to do some remedial reading. In their book The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor point out that disruptive innovations–those destined to change the structure of an industry–tend to attack from below. They usually first appear in a form that is in some ways inferior to the existing dominant technologies, and hence are unlikely to get the attention or respect of industry incumbents. I think it is quite likely that innovations developed by companies such as Tata and BYD–whether product design innovations or manufacturing process innovations–will in the not-to-distant future have a significant impact on the U.S. auto industry.