It's incredibly ironic that after years of the Patriot Act, and actually sitting on information that the Bush administration had been monitoring millions of Americans' communications without warrants that the media is now up in arms and wailing "First Amendment!" when they find out that the Obama administration got a subpoena to check the phone records of AP journalists in an attempt to find a national security leak.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure that this is the case that the collective media wants to hang their "chilling whistleblowers" hats on. In the case of sensitive counterterrorism (and especially, as in this case, a turned operative), I think maybe it's a good thing that whoever had those loose lips feels chilled from leaking information to the media. This isn't a case where a crusading whistleblower exposes malfeasance. This could have potentially hurt future counterterrorism targets. However, because ultimately, this is about them feeling violated, they ignore the legal subpoena and groundwork they didn't report on when it was established and just clutch their pearls.

In any event, it's time to dispel the laughable notion that any of us has any privacy any more any way. From grocery store buyers cards to Facebook, Americans have essentially waived their privacy away. The amount of information available on any and all of us is astounding, and much of it is freely given away by us. I've logged into my Facebook account only to find friends "checking in" from gyms, restaurants and even holidays (nice to let the world know you're not at home for potential burglers). Amazon crafts special deals based on my browsing history. Tweet about Wegman's Deli and watch Whole Foods send you a tweet about their superior deli department, as happened to a friend of mine.

And yes, the government is listening as well. The Patriot Act has been strengthened, not weakened in the intervening years. To the best of my knowledge, Room 614A in the SBC Building in San Francisco is still operational.

Privacy in the Google age is a myth. The sooner the media catches up to the reality that affects all of us, the sooner we can start discussing the real issues surrounding our privacy and rights.

If you visited Crooks and Liars Thursday evening you may have had an unpleasant surprise. Instead of being able to read your most favorite blog, you were quickly taken to this Facebook page:

Even if you clicked the Okay button on that page you still weren't brought back here. Instead you just ended up on a blank page. You can actually see this in action on this YouTube video.

I noticed the problem early on and decided to remove the only Facebook code we had running on our home page, which was for the Facebook Like button that used to appear on the bottom left. As soon as that code was removed things went back to normal. Within minutes of fixing the problem on Crooks and Liars, I decided to look into the problem a little more and saw an article isolating it to Facebook Connect:

On Thursday, many major websites were taken down by an error that stemmed from Facebook, as Internet mainstays like MSNBC.com, CNN, Yelp and New York Magazine all sent users to redirect pages almost immediately upon loading.

Upon visiting the sites, users were redirected to an error page inside of the Facebook website, which seems to suggest that the error lies in Facebook Connect, the software platform that snakes Facebook’s reach throughout the entire backbone of the Internet. Connect is seen on many third-party-publisher websites in the form of the “Like” button — especially BuzzFeed, the viral news site which relies primarily on social media to spread throughout the Web.

Facebook Connect and Facebook Like are two separate beasts. Connect allows you to sign into a site with your Facebook login. We have that capability here at Crooks and Liars, but we don't use the traditional Connect method. Instead we have a custom implementation that works better with our user management system.

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