No Such Weblog

Read these blogs: Michael Froomkins' discourse.net; Goldstein Howe's SCOTUS blog (this item in particular).

... and this dissent: Stevens in Rumsfeld v. Padilla.

Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no conse-quence. For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.

From Apple's Tiger Preview - Safari RSS page:

Safari protects your personal information on shared or public Macs when surfing the Web. Go ahead and check your bank account and .Mac email at the library or shop for birthday presents on the family Mac. Using Safari’s new privacy feature, no information about where you visit on the Web, personal information you enter or pages you visit are saved or cached. It’s as if you were never there.

Who guarantees that the Safari you see on that public computer hasn't been changed? Who guarantees that there are no programs which sniff the keyboard, and the screen? Who guarantees that no hidden cameras are hidden in strategic places?

Privacy features in some particular piece of software don't mean that software is running in a trustworthy environment. Suggesting that users perform sensitive activities (such as banking) in untrusted environments, using untrusted computers, is terribly bad advice.