A Newsweek poll has been released on the NSA warrantless surveillance of Americans.

According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA's surveillance program "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.

New Jersey lawyers Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer filed suit yesterday in Manhattan federal court against Verizon for contracting with the Government to provide it with customer phone records. They are contemplating additional suits against AT&T and Bell South.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

"This is not a happy day for the general counsels" of the phone companies, he said. "If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that's 10 million times $1,000 -- that's 10 billion."

Lawyers for the Duke Lacrosse players held a press conference yesterday to respond to reports of new DNA testing implicating one or two of the players. You can view it here. Here's more from WRAL today:

The nail was found in a bathroom trash can at the off-campus house where the party took place, and was among items -- such as Q-Tips and Kleenex -- that defense attorneys suggested might have contaminated the nail."Does it absolutely exclude all of the Duke lacrosse players with absolute certainty from this one fingernail? No," Cheshire said. "Does it say that any of the Duke lacrosse players' DNA is conclusively on this fingernail? No."

What an ugly story. Allegation: Robert Ray, former Ken Starr associate independent counsel in Monica-gate, is charged with stalking his former lover after they broke up while he was still married. He's also a former N.J. candidate for the U.S. Senate.

The ex-lover says he lied while they were dating and said he was divorced.

His ex-girlfriend, Tracy Loughlin, had told police that Ray - a former GOP Senate candidate from New Jersey - had obsessively followed her and blanketed her with unwanted calls and e-mails after their breakup four months ago.

Interesting side-note:

by TChris

TalkLeft has repeatedly (e.g., here, here, and here) called attention to the Census Bureau's unfair practice of counting prisoners as residents of the counties in which the prisons that house them are situated. The practice boosts the population counts of the rural areas in which the prisons are located, which boosts their representation in Congress and state legislatures, and increases their share of government spending. Rural areas tend to vote Republican, so Republicans have little incentive to change the system.

The good news is that courts may be willing to remedy the problem, even if legislators fail to act.

[L]ast week, a federal appeals court in New York hinted that counting prisoners as upstaters might illegally dilute the voting rights of downstaters.

If that legal argument is pursued and upheld, the political implications could be profound. Republicans now have a four-seat margin in the [state] Senate. A shift in only a few seats could give the Democrats, who already control the Assembly, a majority in the Senate, and with it, enormous power over legislative and Congressional redistricting.

by TChris

On Thursday, BlackBoxVoting released this report exposing security flaws with Diebold's electronic voting touch-pad terminals.

"It is like the nuclear bomb for e-voting systems," said Avi Rubin, computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. "It's the deal breaker. It really makes the security flaws that we found (in prior years) look trivial."

States have been slow to respond to the problem, as this report describes. Pennsylvania was the first state to recognize the need to act. Iowa and California have also directed local election officials to take additional security steps to prevent unauthorized software from being loaded into the machines.

There's a new blog spat emerging. It's between left wing bloggers and Pajamas Media. I've received several e-mails today telling me that TalkLeft is in the dust-up. But, really, I'm not. I've been aware for several months that PJM excerpts or links to TalkLeft posts occasionally. And I don't mind at all.

Here's the deal: Pajamas Media, which highlights blog posts in their center space, is trying to be more non-partisan and excerpting posts of left-wing blogs, (with multiple links to the originating blog). Several of these blogs are upset and demanding PJM cease the practice immediately.

Breaking....Jason Leopold at Truthout reports Karl Rove has told Bush he will be indicted and that he will resign immediately when the charges are announced.

Rove's announcement to President Bush and Bolten comes more than a month after he alerted the new chief of staff to a meeting his attorney had with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in which Fitzgerald told Luskin that his case against Rove would soon be coming to a close and that he was leaning toward charging Rove with perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators, according to sources close to the investigation.

A few weeks after he spoke with Fitzgerald, Luskin arranged for Rove to return to the grand jury for a fifth time to testify in hopes of fending off an indictment related to Rove's role in the CIA leak, sources said. That meeting was followed almost immediately by an announcement by newly-appointed White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten of changes in the responsibilities of some White House officials, including Rove, who was stripped of his policy duties and would no longer hold the title of deputy White House chief of staff.

As several commenters have noted, the transcript of the eyewitness identification procedure used by police in having the accuser ID players is here. It's a big topic, and deserves its own thread.

I just finished reading it and I believe it is even more flawed than previously reported.

The first thing that leaps out at me is police failed to tell her the suspects may or may not be in the photos. This instruction is essential. (See here (pdf), pages 41 to 43.) Research is clear that if you don't give that admonition to the eyewitness, there will be more "false hits" and the chances of a reliable ID are dramatically reduced. From Wisconsin's guidelines(pdf):

Tony Snow's first informal press gaggle this morning didn't go too well. Snow himself said, "This is just a mess."

Think Progress has more.

TPM Muckraker has the full transcript.

ABC's World Newser on the gaggle is here.

Senate Judiciary Committee Minority Leader John Conyers (D-MI) has written this letter (pdf) asking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appoint a special counsel in the phone jamming investigation.

Conyers wrote: "A special counsel outside of the Department is needed, however, because there are possible connections between the plot and the White House, as well as potential federal electionlaw violations stemming from state Republican Party reporting of Native American tribedonations connected with Jack Abramoff, that have yet to be examined."

Here's the basics of the phone-jamming case from Conyer's press release (received by e-mail, thus no link.)

Federal agents searched the house of the resigned CIA agentKyle "Dusty" Foggo this morning:

Federal agents Friday morning raided the home of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who stepped down this week from the No. 3 post at the CIA amid accusations of improper ties to a defense contractor named as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

...Foggo resigned his post at the CIA on Monday, after the FBI began investigating whether he improperly steered contracts to Brent Wilkes, a Poway defense contractor and longtime friend of Foggo's. The CIA's inspector general has been investigating Foggo for at least three months.

The home was a rental, not owned by Foggo.