| Other People's Writing Archives | Main |
April 07, 2006 | Ex-AT&T Employee on NSA Wiretap Room
An ex-At&T employee has made public a summary of his statement he provided in support of a lawsuit against AT&T, alleging that the telecom giant has built out secret wiretap rooms that funnel internet and phone call data to the National Security Agency.
AT&T provided NSA eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.
On Wednesday, the EFF asked the court to issue an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing the alleged wiretapping, and filed a number of documents under seal, including three AT&T documents that purportedly explain how the wiretapping system works.
According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.
"I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician workforce was not allowed in the room."
Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the WorldNet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein said wrote.
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T's was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.
The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.
Full story here. Justin Scheck of The Recorder had the story first, and has some great info on the story and Klein's lawyer, Miles Ehrlich, a former U.S. attorney, over at the CalLaw's blog, Legal Pad.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 11:52 AM | TrackBack
April 04, 2006 | The ChronicleThe San Francisco Chronicle has been beaten up in the journalistic world for decades, perhaps because of the infamous line in "All the President's Men" when Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee dismissed a pitch for a feature that would recap yesterday's weather for people who were too drunk the day before to remember if it rained or not. He said he'd sell that story to the Chronicle.
I thought back to that story the other day, since to read the Chronicle, one should really pay attention to the bylines. I'll never skip a story written by Anna Badkhen, whose work in Iraq deserved way more professional praise than it got. The Sunday magazine is mostly fatuous lifestyle pr0n for suburbanites, except for Sam Whiting's insanely good reporting on little Bay Area neighborhoods (note to Chron management: the mag might be better if editor Alison Biggar bothered to respond to pitches).
Reyhan Harmanci is the Chron's latest treasure, filling the new 96Hours Thursday section and filing great pieces on everything from online social networking to this great piece taking on fake trend stories run by the New York Times. You should also be on the lookout for the rare, but prized, byline of Seth Rosenfeld, the Chron's best investigative reporter.
But what started me on this was a story my friend Chris Ulbrich sent me which was penned by the Chron's wittiest and most versatile writer, Steve Rubenstein. As Chris puts it, Rubenstein got assigned to write a color piece on Daylight Savings Time. Here's the fine piece he turned in, a story every journalist in San Francisco should be wishing they were good enough to write. (I'd excerpt it, but you should start at the start.)
Posted by Ryan Singel at 04:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 07, 2005 | Making a List or Checking It TwiceI saw this correction coming a frequent-flier mile away.
The ever vigilant Richard M. Smith sent this News.com story by Anne Broache to Dave Farber's Interesting People list this morning.
Tens of thousands mistakenly put on terrorist watch listsWASHINGTON--Nearly 30,000 airline passengers discovered in the past year that they were mistakenly placed on federal "terrorist" watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday.
Jim Kennedy, director of the Transportation Security Administration's redress office, revealed the errors at a quarterly meeting convened here by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.
Actually, that's not quite what Kennedy said according to reports I heard about the meeting.
And I'm pretty sure the TSA press office gave Broache a call to say they were very unhappy about the story.
Here's the corrected lede and hed:
Tens of thousands mistakenly matched to terrorist watch lists
WASHINGTON--About 30,000 airline passengers have discovered since last November that their names were mistakenly matched with those appearing on federal watch lists, a transportation security official said Tuesday.
Full story here.
Kennedy works in the redress office.
Even the correction doesn't really get the story right.
What he said, according to my sources, is that 30,000 people had gone through the non-trivial process of submitting forms and identification and had received letters that would help them get through security faster.
These 30,000 are people whose names match or come close to matching names on the no-fly or selectee lists.
This is a *very* touchy subject for the TSA.
I got a call from TSA after I ran the story about Sister Glenn Anee McPhee matching on the list, because they were mad about something I quoted her saying (something to the effect of how happy she was she got off the list).
It didn't matter that I made sure in my story not to make clear the difference between being on the list, and matching an entry on the list. I still got an earful.
But, back to the real story. The redress office has been very busy to issue 30,000 letters in a year. The TSA likely ran background and FBI checks on each of them. That's not an inexpensive or automated endeavor.
Kennedy also said that 60 people who wrote in weren't able to be helped. That means that 60 of them were or were deemed likely to be the person on one of these lists.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 08:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 03, 2005 | Blog UpdateThe Electronic Frontier Foundation had a nice little 15th birthday party last night and I ran into fellow Wired News freelancer Ann Harrison.
She's got a great story up today about people who strive to stay out of Google's index.
She's also blogs at On the Record and that's been added to the blog roll.
SSN pal and Reuters superstar Andy Sullivan is still in love with his new blog, which I belatedly added to the blog roll.
Check out his post on media coverage of Katrina and some of his photos from New Orleans here.
Chris Hoofnagle, now King of EPIC West, also showed up at the EFF's to-do, and he's been blogging anew over here, following some junk fax news and cataloging the companies who you do business with who are selling your personal information. Also added to the blog roll.
And finally, I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago of meeting Daniel Solove, a George Washington University professor who focuses on privacy issues and who started a group blog for up and coming lawyers. PrawfsBlawg is now officially added to the link list.
Solove, whose recent book Digital Person makes a convincing argument that those concerned about privacy should be thinking Kafka -- not Orwell, had this to say about last week's No Flying Nun story.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:30 PM | TrackBack
September 27, 2005 | Andy Sullivan ReduxAndy Sullivan, SSN pal and intrepid reporter, got on a jet plane today to head back to D.C. and his lovely wife after 10 days of covering post-Katrina New Orleans.
His penultimate New Orleans story, focusing on a family returning to the Terrebonne Parish, is here.
Hopefully Andy will forgive me for quoting liberally:
The mud boat skirts down the bayou past trapped dogs, ruined hunting cabins and capsized shrimp boats, carrying Alcide "Joe" Boudwin back to his flooded trailer.The state troopers have set up a roadblock to stop residents from returning to the low-lying areas of Terrebonne Parish that Hurricane Rita flooded on Saturday.
But they can't block off the bayou. So Boudwin, 56, his granddaughter Tiffany, 15, and his son-in-law Junior, 45, keep an eye out for alligators and cottonmouth snakes as the flat-bottomed boat noses around the bridge, past the flooded sugar cane fields, over the road where the Bayou Strangler, a local serial killer, dumped his tenth victim a few months ago.
All the way to 4894 Shrimper's Row, to see what nine feet of salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has done to their home.
Three dogs bound out of a rust-streaked trailer and swim across the yard, tails wagging above the water. The bearded Boudwin's Old Testament features light up with joy as he sloshes out to meet them.
But his spirits sink as he looks around his property.
"Look at my lawn mower, it was brand new," he says, waving his hand toward a sunken riding mower. "How'm I going to cut the grass now?"
Out back of the rust-streaked trailer, Junior shouts: "Look at where the washing machine's at!"
The Boudwins are the type of family whose most valuable items are the ones they keep outside. Now the washing machine, the Soloflex strength trainer, and a toilet and sink sit under several feet of water. The shrimp boat out front has cracked its hull when it drifted off its trailer.
SWIMSUIT TOP
Wooden framing shows where the front deck used to be before it washed away. Only the swimsuit top and the cutoff jeans on the clothesline are dry.
"We had $5,000 sunk into that sucker," Junior says, pointing to a mammoth boat engine.
What's Andy think about coming home?
I'm ready to go back to DC. Back to the lobbyists, public-relations attack robots, and 22-year-old congressional aides who have never washed their own dishes but think they know how to run the world.It's a lot easier to write about people who are more powerful than you than it is to write about people who are way, way, way less powerful than you. People who had nothing before and even less now.
I'm trying to think of the best way to put this. Compassion is much more draining than contempt, that's one way of saying it. Another way, perhaps: afflicting the comfortable is a hell of a lot easier than comforting the afflicted.
Go read the whole post here.
Terre
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:16 PM | TrackBack
September 26, 2005 | The Other WorldSSN pal, Andy Sullivan, a damn fine technology policy reporter for Reuters, has been in New Orleans for the last 10 days.
He's filed a bunch of stories and he's also talking to the blog.
New Orleans has flooded again, but you already know that. I spent the day driving around with Jessica Rinaldi trying to get a handle of the scope of the problem -- while everybody knew about the overtopping of the Industrial Canal on the Lower Ninth Ward Side, the other side of the canal proved vulnerable as well and neighborhoods flooded for miles.So it was a day of Mad Max driving and sending in updates via text message when the voice link crapped out. This picture shows me doing the wire service equivalent of those grainy stand-up shots you see on CNN, where the correspondent reports over a low-bandwidth video link: OMG!! New Orleans floods!!! WTF?!?!?
All my good-driving habits painfully cultivated over the past few years with Meg went straight out the window. Barrrelling through intersections, driving the wrong way down one-way streets, hopping curbs and inching through puddles that turn into lakes while we're halfway through. This SUV, a Chevy Trailblazer, is really earning its keep, except it keeps reminding me to keep my seatbelt on. It's going to be a painful adjustment back to civilization.
[...]
Some highlights from the day:
- We stumbled on a convoy of dump trucks trying to deliver rocks in a spot where water comes in. They're pulled over, arguing and gesticulating wildly. I tell them which roads are flooded and which are passable, and we convoy to the spot together. So journalists sometimes can be good citizens too.
- Jessica: "They need to build everything out of the material they use for those Virgin Mary statues, because those things are indestructible."
- I interview a local official, accompanied by a local journalist. As we wallk away, he says, "That guy's cool. I buy my pot from him." Only in New Orleans do reporters get their illegal drugs from government officials.
As I think I've said before, it's going to be tough to write about Internet stuff after this.
Go start on this page and follow the links to the stories from there.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:20 AM | TrackBack
September 09, 2005 | Battelle Review 2.0My review of John Battelle's The Search ran in an abbreviated version in today's Wired News. It can be found in all its shortness here.
It started off as a much longer piece -- some 1,300 then 1,100 words about Battelle's fine book.
I managed to get it just on the short side of 800 words, which was trimmed down further for publication..
For those of you that care, here's the full review (the 800, not 1,100 word version):
After the internet boom turned to bust, the curiously blank front of Google stood out as a shining anomaly in the ruins, an interactive Victorian gazing glass that seemed to foretell the Web’s second future.John Battelle, a longtime tech journalist, became fascinated with what he glimpsed and spent three years wandering Silicon Valley, talking to the wizards, the investors and the nay sayers
His new book, The Search (Portfolio, $26), is a surprisingly gripping story of hackers turning insights about informational conundrums into billion dollar businesses and corporate behemoths battling to shape the web to meld with their profit models.
At the same time, Battelle shows how search is pushing technology towards the dream of artificial intelligence, while thousands of small businesses thrive and die by the whims of search engine algorithms, and an unorganized consortium of non-profits, bloggers, and corporations are rebuilding the Library of Alexandria in a digital, distributed and democratic form.
Battelle, who launched one of the internet's seminal business magazines, The Industry Standard and co-founded Wired, is certainly qualified to tell the story of how pure search triumphed over bloated portals and in the process, revitalized the dream of a revolutionary wired world.
With the exception of a dry, early chapter on the mechanics of search, Battelle's The Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with a evangelical drive to make his audience feel the import of the search revolution.
"Search is no longer a stand alone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on… the World Wide Web. Increasingly search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world and our place in it. It's how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge."
Battelle is at his journalistic best in his chapters on Google’s early days, the travails of an oversize shoe merchant devastated by a change to Google's ranking methods and the story of Overture's Bill Gross, who started a search engine and sold it for $1.6 billion, yet to this day, rues a single decision that might have kept him from the laurels bestowed upon Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.The latter is one of the many tales in The Search that center on business models – in Gross's case, arbitrage.
Business models fascinate Battelle, who at one point asks rhetorically, "after all, what are publishers but content-based intermediaries between a customer and an advertiser."
The saving grace for lay readers is that Battelle conveys the excitement of a counter-intuitive idea and explains business models clearly.
Despite that talent, The Search at times feels like a internet business theory primer, and passages such as the one detailing how future search technology will help shoppers from paying too much for Merlot can feel like retreads of pre-bubble hype.
Those occasions come when both Battelle and the reader lose sight of the reason why Google is so loved, hated and dissected.
In short, Google is closest thing to a deity on the Internet.
It is powerful, whimsical, arrogant, omniscient and secretive. It asks us to trust that it is not evil, even as it knows more about many of us than our friends do.
It told Wall Street and the world it was not interested in short-term profits.
The company handed the world a free gift and then later, figured out how to make money.
Its homepage, along with GMail and Google Maps, brought graceful design back to the internet.
Ironically, Google's technological insight into search, the famed PageRank algorithm, saved search from spammers by finding that the web has a human order.
What's revolutionary about this approach is that Google figured out that every time people add links to the web, they are adding intelligence to the web, which makes Google a god created collaboratively by everyone with a homepage.
Despite his business model obsession, Battelle is also fascinated by the cultural ramifications and promises of Google and ubiquitous information.
He bookends The Search with chapters teasing out the cultural meaning of our online lives, our searches and the paths they take us across the internet.
That participation underlies the concept of Web 2.0, which re-imagines the web as a cacophonous metropolis, not a strip mall.
Battelle finishes by riffing on the possibility of a database of the world's knowledge, built with meta-data, ubiquitous blogging, trackable devices and fuzzy folk tags.
Together, Battelle posits, these might transform the search box into a "reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge."
"Perfect search—every single possible bit of information at our fingertips, perfectly contextualized, perfectly personalized—may never be realized. But the journey to find out if it just might be is certainly going to be fun."
The same could be said of Battelle's Search—not perfect, but a great journey.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 05:43 PM | TrackBack
August 10, 2005 | Me and Manjoo And All the Web We UseSeems Salon's Farhad Manjoo and I are thinking the same thing about the future of the web (not that others aren't way smarter about seeing the signs than I am, I'm just smart enough to know to call people smarter than I am).
Go read his piece if you want to learn about some Rubies and 37 Signals and why your browser is happy they exist.
My Wired News piece on the remodeling of the Internet is here.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 10, 2005 | Fear Not, Report NotHomeland Security chief Michael Chertoff says Americans should not worry having to give their date of birth when buying an airline ticket as part of a new proposed airline screening system, according to a Thomas Frank USA Today story.
Chertoff said there is too much worry over a plan by the Transportation Security Administration to collect passengers' full names and birth dates before they board."The average American gives information up to get a CVS (drugstore discount) card that is far more in-depth than TSA's going to be looking at," Chertoff told reporters and editors at USA TODAY's headquarters in McLean, Va. "But I actually make that case that giving up a little bit more information protects privacy."
"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"
Chertoff vowed to implement Secure Flight, a plan by the federal government to screen out potential terrorists by scrutinizing the backgrounds of passengers. Under the plan, passengers will be encouraged - but not required - to give their full names and birth dates when reserving a seat. The TSA hoped to begin testing Secure Flight this month but that timetable is in doubt.
I'm dumbstruck by Thomas Frank's absurdly lousy reporting.
He gets a chance to interview the head of Homeland Security and then writes up this press release?
First, the government hasn't yet even announced that airlines would have to start collecting dates of birth, but Frank allows Chertoff to pretend that its the main issue about Secure Flight.
Yes, the requirement been talked about for a while and is widely acknowledged by those familiar with the program to be a necessity if watchlist checking is going to be done in D.C. and not by airlines (How else would a government agent tell the difference between the senior senator Ted Kennedy from a watchlist entry Ted Kennedy, age 25?)
But the travel industry, not Americans concerned about privacy, are the strongest opponents of the birthdate requirement, since they will, at their own expense, have to revamp the second largest computer network in the world to accommodate this request.
If Frank hasn't been paying attention as he is paid to, the main issues with Secure Flight are:
- How good are the watchlists?
- How do people accidentally snagged by the lists get off the list?
- How much will Secure Flight cost?
- Will it be effective without being overly intrusive?
- Should commercial databases be used and if so, for what purpose? To verify identity? To do background checks?
Frank didn't include anything in his story about these questions, and instead let Chertoff set the agenda.
Furthermore, Frank let Chertoff chide the American public about privacy concerns about Secure Flight, without even mentioning that the program just got caught violating the Privacy Act in its latest round of testing.
That was done by an agency that has already been involved in 14 separate secret transfers of sensitive travel records, totaling more than 2 million reservations.
The TSA has also been busted by Homeland Security's own Inspector General for making false statements to Congress under oath and misleading the media and the American people about what it was doing with their personal data(.pdf).
Meanwhile, there is a behind-the-scenes fight in Congress over prohibiting Secure Flight from relying on commercial data brokers such as Choicepoint.
But Frank doesn't even ask Chertoff what he thinks about Secure Flight employees intentionally making an end run around the Privacy Act, let alone get Chertoff on record about his thoughts on previous TSA privacy scandals or the fight in Congress?
What a joke.
Chertoff might have had something interesting to say, but one would be hard pressed to find it anywhere near Frank's pathetic effort.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:23 AM | TrackBack
August 03, 2005 | Hot Chat Gives Lazarus a RiseSan Francisco Chronicle business page columnist David Lazarus often does great work taking on large corporations' shoddy privacy practices and predatory financial business moves, combining some reporter's legwork with a dose of indignation.
But today, Lazarus decides to get condescendingly moralistic on Microsoft and Ebay for holding minority stakes in a company that sells over-the-phone computer tech help, psychic readings and sex chats.
The two West Coast tech titans, along with the influential Washington financial firm, are investors in a small San Francisco company called Ingenio, which offers pay-per-minute telephone advice on a variety of topics.Some of those topics, such as accounting and personal finance, will cause no eyebrows to be raised.
Others might seem, well, a bit unusual for respectable outfits like Microsoft and eBay, not to mention Carlyle, which in recent years has counted among its associates the likes of ex-President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker.
One Ingenio service, NiteFlirt, essentially serves as an online mall at which customers can choose from among hundreds of purveyors of pay-per-minute phone sex.
Another service, Keen, is a dial-a-psychic site that links the spiritually needy with assorted pay-per-minute clairvoyants, pet psychics, astrologers and people claiming a pipeline to "voices from beyond."
Ingenio supplies the online forum through which independent practitioners of these exotic skills seek customers, as well as the technology to facilitate calls.
The company also gets a 20 percent cut of all calls made through NiteFlirt and Keen, which typically cost between 99 cents and $4.99 a minute (although some calls can run considerably more).
Microsoft declined to comment on its relationship with Ingenio.
EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the San Jose company's roughly $2 million stake in Ingenio resulted from an earlier promotional agreement that's since expired.
He said eBay wasn't aware of Ingenio's phone-sex business. In light of this, Durzy said, "we are evaluating this investment."
Yes, that's right. Lazarus just "exposed" that Microsoft and Ebay each have a two-percent minority investment in a company you have hardly heard of that they probably forgot they owned.
Now, oddly, I happen to know something about this operation. Back in 2001, Keen handled all of these services in one storefront where people could search for someone to talk to about what firewall to install, what game codes unlocked the tomb of death in Doom 7 or how Catholic schoolgirl skirts made them feel the right kind of funny.
Back in the days when I worked for a small search company working to make corporate search better, Keen was our only client.
I spent much time building dictionaries so Keen users could find the right person to talk to about their problem or carnal itch. It's not easy to present useful results for queries such as "word hangs" "spirit world" and "ages of empires."
Sadly, it was very clear from the search logs that while Keen really wanted to make its money from technical computer help and advice on how to cook Peking duck, people really just want to know the future and talk dirty.
Now that's not too hard to figure out from how what people were willing to pay for over the phone before the invention of a browser, but you can't blame Keen for trying to create a new market (and to some extent it has).
Now it seems Keen has broken out the sex, psychics and other phone services into several different, more focussed sites.
But Lazarus is shocked, shocked, shocked to find that sex and horoscopes are on the Interweb.
Next time, he's looking to figure out who gets paid from such tawdry pursuits perhaps he can check his own pay stub since his newspaper's online presence has, you guessed it, a horoscope page, a feature devoted to sex-based weird news, and a now dormant series devoted to the sex industry, and a page that provides the luckless and ignorant with the day's lottery numbers.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:44 AM | TrackBack
June 27, 2005 | He Knows Interweb RockForget the Supremes singing about Grokster. They're too old to get it.
But if you want rock n' roll ready for web 3.0 (take that Battelle), you got's to be downloading Andy Sullivan's newest tunes. (What you ain't got the earlier ones yet?)
The album is called Rocking the Cash Bar, though Sullivan didn't tell me that.
Start with Wait, which Sullivan calls a "tender waltz about spy satellites." That's a understatement typical of a man trained too well in Reuters copy style.
Here's the defiant central server.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:06 AM | TrackBack
April 21, 2005 | If You're Smoking in San FranciscoDennis Roddy, an old-fashioned reporter (that's a compliment folks), a gentleman intellectual and columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, turned in a little piece on San Francisco a couple of months ago, but it escaped my sight.
Many of you may have read Roddy's absurdly well-written profile of John Gilmore, (c'mon admit it, how many of you EFF-heads knew Gilmore worked as a Tilt-A-Wheel operator and was once shot).
Well, Roddy had a little something else to write on his trip to San Francisco.
Bill Scannell, a public relations consultant with whom I dined here last week, tells of the adventure of ordering a beer in a city in which sex and politics are indistinguishable and all-encompassing."I asked the bartender what beer he would recommend. He said, 'As a gay man and as a gay bartender, I think you should have...' " Scannell shrugged. "Sometimes you want to shake these people and tell them, 'I don't care what you are. What do you do?' "
It has been so many years that it is hard to recall that when my uncle first moved here after the war, San Francisco was a conservative town that occasionally held an earthquake. Forty years later, Jeanne Kirkpatrick stood before the Republican National Convention and dismissed "the San Francisco Democrats." Geography alone was enough to doom the 1984 Democratic slate.
After his wife died, my uncle brought her back to Johnstown, buried her in her family's plot at St. John's Cemetery, and returned to San Francisco. He came here because there was work as a university librarian, an established, even stodgy, community, and weather nice enough for him to golf in early spring and late autumn.
In 1976 one of my closest friends left Johnstown because he was gay. He ended up in famously gay-friendly San Francisco. He was a leftist as well, and San Francisco is so left it is a wonder the cars keep in the correct lanes. It is strange to think about, but as we play the red-state, blue-state game there is much reason to consider the implications of a nation in which someone would select a home not for the climate but its political comfort level.
In San Francisco, the feel-like temperature for the Democrats is a balmy 78. For George Bush, it is arctic. Those of us in the gelatinous middle are left to wonder at a town in which people walk with such moral certainty about everything from smoking (banned) to sex (encouraged) to driving (aggressive). It could be argued, I suspect, that this place is Dallas for lefties.
Finish reading the whole thing here.
Now for the record, I officially doubt Scannell's anecdote, but someday kids I'll tell a real story about a San Francisco bar.
It involves, as one could guess, drinking with Roddy in a San Francisco lesbian bar. A San Francisco lesbian bar that you can, though Roddy didn't, smoke in.
Until then, keep your eyes on his column and wonder to yourself what Pittsburgh has on your city to deserve such well-chosen words in its daily rag.
I'd trade almost all of the Chronicle lifestyle staff and all of its editorial board (hell, Pittsburgh I won't make you take Ken Garcia), for one Dennis Roddy.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 04:01 PM | TrackBack
April 21, 2005 | One Good Linedeserves more credit than it usually gets.
Matt Welch, blogging over at Reason's Hit & Run, takes on the stupidity of the U.S. government's selective restrictions on the number of people a religion can send to Cuba.
Santeria has limits; the Catholic Church doesn't.
Master Welch sez:
"I guess freedom's just another word for Don't Fuck With Our Totally Successful Cuba Policy."
Whole thing here.
Welch's related story on the Cuban ban's effect on baseball history is here.