Eavesdropping on Journalists

After Lemonheart, my least favorite Obama administration official is Holder, the Attorney General. Now he's defending the seizure of email records of journalists. The media in this country is in a sorry state as it is, with newspapers and news magazines folding left and right, and here's the Administration hassling the few remaining journalists and undermining their work. I think the Obama administration behaved in a short-sighted and politically naive manner. Don't mess with the media, Mr. Nixon Obama!

Of course, the Republicans were worse under the Bush administration, and that's why the Democratic administration feels like it can get away with dirty tricks like this. That's what's so bad about electing a mediocre President like Bush--the bar is set so low that the next President feels like he can get away with this, that, and the other, because at least he's better than so-and-so. What a lousy state of affairs for a great country like the U.S. That's why we need a third party in this country, a liberal left-wing party to oppose the two conservative, right-wing parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.

The Democrats are conservative right-wingers of the modern era, and the Republicans are conservative right-wingers from the previous century. Stodgy, old-fashioned and out-of-touch doesn't say the half of it. I do like some representatives in Congress, current and former, but they are all Democrats. I don't know of a single senator or representative in the Republican party that fills me with awe, other than possibly Ron Paul on occasion, who is capable of surprising good sense. But when Ron talks about arcane points of economic policy or the value of gold and silver as currency or his opposition to gay marriage, the shine fades from his halo, and one perceives that he, too, is from the previous century, a time traveller just passing through.

Someone in the Obama adminstration was born yesterday. Baby thinks that everybody has one email address and it's their work account. Baby thinks you just spy on that one account and presto, problem fixed. Tee-hee! Baby is so cute.

Guess what, people have a lot of email addresses, because it's plain common sense. One needs an email address to offer up to the big corporations that are always hungry for ways to pester victims customers. That email account is the designated spam box, which companies can spam all they want, because it is only monitored once in a blue moon. Yahoo is a great choice for disposable email accounts of no importance, because it is easy to sign up for Yahoo. One has an email address for friends and family that the spammers don't know about--that will most likely by the ISP email account, which must be kept private, because once the spammers get hold of it, forget about it. One has an email address for business contacts that are untrusted, new contacts that potentially might be spammers or at any rate unreliable. One has an email address for trusted business contacts, and this email account will be monitored daily--Gmail is the best choice, because Gmail supports a mail reader which alleviates the need for password entry, a key feature of mail readers that is totally beyond the understanding of KDE developers, who think that everyone wants to enter their password each and every time they check their Kmail.

I imagine that the investigators at the Justice Department found a lot of politically useful information that they had no right to find, which they then shared with political operatives in the White House, but did not find the source of the leak, because it also stands to reason that the leaker would have used an untraceable throwaway email address. And I'm not at all persuaded that the Obama administration did not purposefully leak the information about Yemen after all. There is really no excuse for spying on journalists, and those who do so should be prosecuted for first-degree burglary.