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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Privacy for Me, But Not for Thee

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 30 2008, 9:57 AM ET Comment

160px-Sam_Brownback_official_portrait_3.jpg

US Senator Sam Brownback is outraged that China may monitor the internet use of hotel guests in Beijing for the Olympics. I mean, what kind of a country would engage in electronic surveillance without any kind of warrant or due process? Only an authoritarian nightmare like China. Or, well, the United States of America. Brownback explains the difference thusly:

We don't put the hardware and software on hotels. If there is a targeted individual that seems to be a likely prospect of terrorists, they must go through the FISA court and ask for a court to determine that there is probable cause to be able to listen in on that information.


That's great. That really is the difference between a bad policy and a good one. In a country with meaningful privacy rights, the government would need to go to a court and get someone to agree that there's probably cause before they're allowed to listen in. But that's exactly what the Bush administration didn't do and what the new legal framework will let them get away with not doing. Maybe Brownback wasn't briefed?

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