Quotes

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, 'Mad Men' offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy - and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.

Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like 'the right to bear arms.'

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.

The worst excesses of the dot-com era are gone.

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' delivers both.

Age discrimination is illegal. But when compared with discrimination against racial minorities and women, it is a second-class civil rights issue.

There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

Even a single Justice can have a profound impact on the country.

Congress needs to toughen the laws protecting elections and make clear that anyone interfering with democracy will pay a stiff price.

The remarkable thing about 'Avatar' is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na'Vi natives in 3-D because 'Avatar' is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully.

The first thing to understand about surveillance video in public places is that there is already a lot of it going on - though it is impossible to know how much.

Amazon is holding its own because the service it provides - offering millions of books and other items quickly and easily from home at any hour of the day or night - is a real one, and one that was impossible before there was an Internet.

Supporters of tough voter ID laws are not afraid of vote fraud - they are afraid of democracy.

Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right - and the national government should protect it.

There is no actual need to tighten voter ID rules: there have been extraordinarily few instances of people committing fraud at the polls.

If the courts regarded tweets and other social media information as private, it would not prevent the law enforcement from getting information it really needs. But the government would have to get a search warrant, which requires it to show that it has probable cause connecting what is being searched to a crime.

A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.

When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.

A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

If the FBI gets the 'back doors' it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public.

After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.

The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.