I sympathize, truly, but the train service to Pittsburgh in particular is almost maximally inconvenient. (The Chicago-Washington line comes through once a day, at five in the morning.)

Shorter Dana Priest and William Arkin: it was a nice republic, while it lasted.
(Also: _this_ is journalism.)

"the new US Embassy in London is intended to be "a 12-storey cube clad in a blastproof glass and plastic façade" surrounded by a 30-metre blast zone. In the proof image above, it looks not unlike a high-end bunker has been simply dropped from space on London, an impregnable and isolated chunk of America. And while security is an obvious and present concern, I think perhaps this building says a little more than it was intended to. In fact, let’s admit it. IT’S A FORTRESS WITH A FUCKING MOAT. It doesn’t say "welcome to a little piece of America, one of the best ideas the world ever had and a country that welcomes the tired and poor and afraid." It says "if you even look at us funny we’ll pour boiling oil on you from the roof. Raise the drawbridge! Release the Mongolian Terror Trout!""

"I want to address all of the criticisms that Obama should have returned to the White House rather than staying in Hawaii after the attempted bombing. While the readers of this blog know that I am very critical of him, I can’t fault him on this one. If you were a black guy with close family in Africa and a Muslim name, would YOU get on an airplane while the TSA is on the alert for Nigerian Muslims?"

I'm sure this seemed like a _brilliant_ solution to the problem of reducing the false positive rate for the No Fly list, by removing ambiguity about whether J. Random Traveler == Jake Traveler == Jacob Traveler == Jacob R. Traveler == Jacob Random Traveler. And it is brilliant, except for being an intrusive and ineffective patch to a system which is a ridiculous violation of civil liberties in the first place.

This is deeply shameful.

"If we could stop seeing terrorists at every ticket counter, pedophiles in every YA section, and baby-snatchers in every hospital, we'd be much happier and healthier as a society."

Happy happy joy joy.

Good riddance; assuming, that is, that the program doesn't just start up again with a different acronym on a different budget (cf. Total Information Awareness)

This makes me want to wander around taking pictures of everything.

"Yes, I certainly feel safer that there are cops on the interstates scanning for terrorists who might be transporting "dirty bombs" and stolen Pakistani/Russian nukes. It's a good thing that they are out there, looking for phantoms and busting the occasio

I agree with all this and have said as much for years - but I get in line and take off my shoes and stick my toothpaste in my checked bag with everyone else.

This sort of thing makes me ashamed of my country, and hence angry...

My reaction to stories like this is: they can't do that, this is America! But I guess I'm wrong.

One of the commenters is right: the weirdest part of this is that the FBI didn't bother to learn anything about Iranian cuisine. (Their loss.)

Watch the scope of legislation change before your very eyes!

On sex discrimination and the like, and using security as an excuse to evade the issues. "'What I think is wrong is an entire fucking security structure that is obsolete and needs to be changed,' says one retired senior officer. 'Not just for the goddamn"

Homeland Security confiscating hard disks (!) from musicians