After an all-too-short weekend, it was back to work this morning. And the morning came really early today, thanks to me staying up to watch Breaking Bad last night (which I’m just gonna have to watch again, ‘cuz I’m pretty sure I fell asleep at various points – namely, just after the start, somewhere around the middle, and then towards the end). So don’t tell me what happened yet. Then I need to watch True Blood and The Newsroom. Busy night ahead, and, worse, I have to work until 5:00 tonight, ‘cuz the guy that usually covers Mondays is on vacation. Bastid. It’s also my on-call week, so I have to screw around with all that crap. Plus, tonight they’re doing an upgrade in another location that will have absolutely no affect on our stuff, but because the brain trust that runs things doesn’t seem to fully grasp how things work, I’m supposed to log in once they’re done just to verify that none of our stuff has been affected. And I won’t be done until, like, after 8:00 (PM)!

Implementing any new changes at night is just plain dumb. It’s much better to do it early in the morning. That way, you have a full complement of end users to make sure everything works OK, plus all the support people on hand should trouble arise. Problem is, I’ve noticed that upper mucky-mucks tend to be late risers, so they like everything done after hours, as opposed to before. It’s not like they’re worth a damn if something actually goes wrong anyway, so who needs ’em around.

I don’t read Politico much, but I liked this opinion piece by Trevor Timm.

Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid?

That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.
[…]
…[T]he president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what has changed over the past two months, though, it’s hard not to wonder, “What could be more patriotic than what Snowden did?”
[…]
More than a dozen bills have already been introduced to put a stop to the NSA’s mass phone record collection program and to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment in secret, creating a body of privacy law that the public has never read. A half-dozen new privacy lawsuits have been filed against the NSA. The Pentagon is undergoing an unprecedented secrecy audit. U.S. officials have been caught deceiving or lying to Congress.

The list goes on.

These actions have been accompanied by a sea change in public opinion about surveillance. Poll after poll has shown that for the first time ever, Americans think the government has gone too far in violating their privacy, with vast majorities believing the NSA scooping up a record of every phone call made in the United States invades citizens’ privacy.
[…]
The fact is Obama has had years to initiate a debate about surveillance but instead has actively stifled it. Although…he was a huge critic of the PATRIOT Act as a senator, his administration actively opposed privacy and oversight amendments in 2011. Similarly, in December 2012 — just eight months ago — the administration opposed all oversight fixes to the FISA Amendments Act. It passed unchanged with little debate.

Oh well, back to work. Less than an hour to kill now.