Informed Speculation

As a public service to those readers who don’t want to watch either the game or the ads, I present the following two suggestions for your reading list (both of which we may follow up on later, depending on (a) my laziness, and (b) whether the game is a blowout):

1. The new Washington Post article that seems to bring the whole data-mining / packet-sniffing aspect of the NSA program back into play:

The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.

The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.

Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, “wash out” most of the leads within days or weeks.

2. The affidavit from Patrick Fitzgerald of August, 2004; per the MinuteMan, it contains, among other things, a quite interesting redaction that could point to Libby being Bob Novak’s source…

Go, umm….let’s see….how about…Seahawks! 27-21, the final…