Here’s a sobering story.

Two weeks ago when USA TODAY published their famous story about a database of telephone records maintained by the NSA on all Americans, I decided to test my luck and see if I can get a copy of those records via a Privacy Act request. Following instructions on NSA’s FOIA page, I sent them a digitally signed email with my request (I have never seen any other federal agency accept signed email in liue of a written request). The email is as follows:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. subsection 552 and the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. section 552a, please furnish me with copies of all records about me indexed to my name, social security number and phones numbers specified below. To help identify information about me in your record systems, I am providing the following required information…

And the reply? It went like this:

Because of the classified nature of the National Security Agency’s efforts to prevent and protect against terrorist attacks, the fact of whether or not any specific technique or method or activity is employed in that effort is exempt from release pursuant to the exemption provisions of the FOIA.

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter in accordance with Executive Order 12958, as amended. Thus, your request is denied pursuant to the first exemption of the FOIA, which provides that the FOIA does not apply to matters that are specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign relations and are properly classified pursuant to such Executive Order.

Moreover, the third exemption of the FOIA provides for the withholding of information specifically protected from disclosure by statute. Thus, your request is also denied because the fact of the existence or non-existence of the information is exempted from disclosure pursuant to the third exemption. The specific statutes applicable in this case are Title 18 U.S. Code 798; Title 50 U.S. Code 403-1(i); and Section 6, Public Law 86-36 (50 U.S. Code 402 note)…

Mary Riddell, writing in today’s Observer about the way the female vote is beginning to slip back to the Tories.

It is a minor tragedy that Brand Gordon is so difficult to sell. No modern politician has a better record on doing good things for women and children. Unlike Cameron, he has a proven track record on social justice, child poverty, SureStart and daycare. Up close, he is engaging, good fun and heartfelt in his attachment to his family. All my female colleagues and friends prefer Brown’s policies and saturnine style to Cameron’s porridge-cooking, apron-wearing, PR-driven smarm.

But we may be in a minority. If women are going Dave’s way, then what is Gordon to do? The usual answer is that he will have to lighten up. That, though, may be neither possible nor prudent. Brown might be much too leaden, but he is never going to win a levity contest with a man liable, if he sheds any more Tory ballast, to shoot heavenwards like a helium balloon.

According to the Pew Research Center,

At the moment, the American public strongly prefers non-military approaches to dealing with Iran’s nuclear technology program. Only three-in-ten (30%) favor bombing military targets in Iran, while 37% support efforts to overthrow Iran’s government, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Among Republicans, support for these two options is greater but less than a majority (46% back bombing, 49% favor trying to unseat the Iranian government). However, the public is evenly divided (46%-46%) on the option of giving Iran energy-generating nuclear technology in exchange for the abandonment of any efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

… can be downloaded from here. But don’t do it unless you have a fast connection — it’s 234 MB. Gore’s rehabilitation is a really interesting phenomenon. I’m looking forward to seeing his film.

Splendid rant by Charles Moore arguing that Blair’s discovery of the absurdities wrought by his Human Rights Act is analogous to the Black Wednesday when the Major government had to scuttle from the ERM in September 1992.

In popular conversation now, “human rights” in this country is the subject of mockery. It is understood, essentially correctly, to be a system by which judges defend bad people from the consequences of their actions and impose duties upon good people which are unreasonable. Every nasty school pupil knows that his human rights can be invoked if the teacher gets too angry with him; every conscientious teacher knows that 20 years of unblemished conduct will count for nothing in his favour if he can be shown to have breached a child’s human rights.

Every grumpy prisoner, second-rate employee, suspected terrorist, mixed-up trans-sexual, Muslim schoolgirl who wants to wear the most extreme forms of religious outfit – these, and countless others, know that they can get lawyers, attention, legal aid and often, money, out of “human rights”.

Human rights are also understood, also correctly, to be an arrangement by which British citizens derive no advantage from their citizenship and foreigners can ride on their backs. Because the laws of human rights regard most of those rights as being universal, you do not have to qualify for them by becoming a citizen of our country.

All you have to do is get inside the perimeter fence. Then your rights to religious freedom and social security and privacy and founding a family and paid holidays and free health treatment are all there. And so is the delay that so much law involves, the public expense of keeping claimants and their dependants, the fees for people like Mrs Blair, and the virtual breakdown of all administrative systems – policing, immigration, criminal justice, prisons, deportation, extradition – which relate to the problems involved…

He’s right about one thing — the desire to incorporate Human Rights into British law was one of the ruling passions of the incoming New Labour regime in 1997. It’s funny now to see Blair railing against its counter-intuitive absurdities.

Absurdities? Well, it turns out that even companies can have ‘human rights’.

Interesting Washington Post piece which helps to explain why Bush’s poll ratings aren’t even lower.

After three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war. The Washington Post interviewed 100 of them — many of whom were still in the service, others who weren’t — to hear about what their war was like and how the transition home has been.

Their answers were as varied as their experiences. But a constant theme through the interviews was that the American public is largely unaffected by the war, and, despite round-the-clock television and Internet exposure, doesn’t understand what it’s like…