Sen. Obama and I faced off in the Kansas City Star last week over the FISA bill. Well, sort of. Here are Obama’s comments in defense of the legislation. And here is my response, lifted from this blog post. So we’ve got Sen. Obama defending the White House position on illegal surveillance, while I got tapped to defend civil liberties. Something to keep in mind next time someone accuses the Cato Institute of being a right-wing think tank.
Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.