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[From Wired.com]

By Kevin Poulsen
It was a year of soul searching at THREAT LEVEL, every day a fresh challenge to our fundamental beliefs and convictions: Alberto Gonzales made us pine for John Ashcroft; Google made us love roving surveillance cams; and Jammie Thomas’ internet spoofing defense was enough to make us secretly root for the RIAA.

If you missed any of it, not to fear: here’s the year-end wrap up that will push your personal threat level to code orange.

Former attorney general John Ashcroft’s declassified redemption narrative was the WTF revelation of aught-seven. It turns out the Patriot Act champion took a heroic stand against a version of president Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program in 2004, resisting White House pressure even while lying in an intensive care unit bed.  Bush, you’ll recall, later assured America that he’d consulted with his AG before authorizing the program; technically that wasn’t a lie — he just left out the part where Ashcroft said “no,” and Bush did it anyway.

Lacking Ashcroft’s backbone, lawmakers in both parties this year gave the NSA program a wet, sloppy six month rubber-stamp, and the Senate nearly approved retroactive immunity for the telephone companies that played ball while the program was illegal.  The only senator to stand tall against telco immunity was Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd, whose threatened Mr. Smith-style filibuster forced fellow Dems this month to meekly slide their Get Out Of Jail Free card back into the Community Chest. That’s good news for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bad news for the 9th Circuit, which stays stuck at Bush administration’s mad tea party with AT&T lawyers wearing the big hat.

Continue reading THREAT LEVEL’s Year in Review — 2007 at Wired.com

Filed Under Commentary, News  

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