I’m finally home
I checked the mail and the phone
Now I must drink beer

Update (3/31): It’s already in our collective unconscious . . . the time is now!

(See also, the Minnesota Historical Society Soul Asylum Record Series Finding Aid)

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

They’d listen in on phone calls from aid workers and members of the military — U.S. citizens, mind you — calling home from overseas. Then they’d carelessly pass around the audio to their co-workers and laugh about it.

Think about this… it took what, 6 months since the wiretapping legislation (FISA) passed congress for this kind of abuse to start? Where will we be in 6 years?

And look, before you dismiss it by saying, “well, they’re just listening to my phone calls, who cares?” Don’t think it stops there. I try not to be hyperbolic about these things, but when you put the pieces together, the legal precedents the Bush administration has assembled over the years (Padilla, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld), the collected impact is truly scary.

Can Martha Stewart take a pie in the face — even one she baked herself? Fine Living Network is about to find out.

On Sept. 16, Fine Living will unveil a new original comedy series built around a provocative premise: mocking Ms. Stewart. For a half hour, two hosts will critique — in “candid and often acerbic” language, according to the channel — old clips from her 1990s cooking and craft show. Fine Living, part of the E. W. Scripps Company, calls the series “Whatever, Martha!”

For Fine Living, a fast-growing but small channel available in about 50 million homes, the endeavor comes with a built-in punch line that doubles as an insurance policy. The co-hosts of “Whatever, Martha!” are Ms. Stewart’s daughter, Alexis Stewart, and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, who is the daughter of the chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Charles Koppelman.

Martha Stewart is not widely known for her sense of humor. But she is in on this particular joke. In fact, she created it, dreaming up the premise after watching reruns of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” during a sleepless night. That series, produced from 1988 to 1999, delivered sarcastic commentary about old horror movies, and had blossomed into a cable cult hit.

“They promised not to be mean, and I had to trust them,” Ms. Stewart said in an interview. “I’m not going to have a heart attack.”

Basically they partnered with online retailers who would notify your friends of your purchases. “Frank just bought Dr. Scholl’s Wart Remover,” for example. Or, “Frank just sold his X-Men comic book collection on eBay.” You can see why this might be problematic.

The idea is compelling, in terms of sharing data. If I were a fantasy sports player I might want to update my Facebook friends that I’d drafted new players to my fantasty team, for example. That sounds kinda neat. But Facebook’s problem is that they don’t really have a good revenue stream yet. Ad money is coming in, sure, but to really make it sing, to justify their $15 billion market cap, they need to target it, to take advantage of the socail graphs they’ve built (or, rather, that we’ve built on their site). So the pressure to come up with a way to monetize our relationships is, I’m sure, intense.

I get the sense that in a few years, a company will come around –maybe Facebook, maybe not — will get this mix right, and no one will complain. And then Facebook will become like Vanilla Ice with sampled music: pilloried for something that’s now so commonplace we barely think about it.

Some companies pay millions to have their logos on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s racecar, but others prefer to pay Brian Katz $500 or more a month for space on his Ford Expedition.

Mr. Katz, 32, of Manhattan, is one of the tens of thousands of motorists who have signed up to have their cars and trucks wrapped in advertisements in exchange for a stipend up to $800 a month.

These offers are becoming so popular that car owners have been willing to limit where they shop and abide by a code of conduct while they are behind the wheel.

Even with the restrictions, a free car or a hefty subsidy is attractive to motorists like Mr. Katz. “One of my friends read something about someone giving away free cars for being a moving advertisement, which didn’t sound like anything that could actually happen,” Mr. Katz said, adding that it struck him as “a little shady.”

But he found the offer to be legitimate and has been paid handsomely to wrap his car for several companies, including Jamba Juice and Verizon Wireless.

True, he does not always feel like rolling down his window to answer strangers’ questions about, say, Verizon’s calling plans. “It can be a little intrusive sometimes, but that’s nothing in the grand scheme of things,” Mr. Katz said.

. . .

Some companies are taking mobile advertising into their own hands. Brian Morris, the owner of We Fix Ugly Pools, a pool repair and construction company in Phoenix, wrapped more than 30 vehicles in his fleet in ads for his company. He monitors how customers find him, and attributes more than $1 million in revenue over the last year to people seeing one of his trucks in a driveway.

Or in traffic.

“I tell my guys, ‘If you’re in rush hour, find the slowest lane and sit in it,’ ” Mr. Morris said. “I’ll pay for the time and gas. The people behind you can’t help but sit and stare.”

As much of a new-media guy as I am, I still believe in intermediaries. This feature is designed to more or less circumvent the journalist. It makes journalism even more of a he-said-she-said game than it already is. If a journalist interviews someone, and that person turns out to be a quack, I want the journalist to tell me, “this guy’s a quack.” I don’t want to have to read his whole quacky “comment.”

On the other hand, more information is more information, and it’s more raw information for bloggers to chew on and digest.

In the wake of an appeals court’s decision not to delay the imposition of a new, expensive royalty scheme, Internet radio broadcasters got an unexpected bit of good news from an unlikely source. During a Congressional roundtable initiated by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), SoundExchange executive director Jon Simson said that the licensing group will not enforce the new royalty scheme. Instead, the rate hikes will be postponed indefinitely while SoundExchange and the webcasters attempt to hammer out a more equitable rate schedule.

Right after the court’s decision was announced, SoundExchange released a statement saying that the ruling meant that “recording artists and content owners can move forward confident that they will receive fair pay for their hard work in producing music for all to enjoy.” There was no inkling that the licensing group would do anything other than go forward with the concessions it had previously offered—concessions that were heavily criticized by webcasters.

The specter of Congressional action in the form of the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007, along with Rep. Markey’s unexpected roundtable meeting, which fell under the aegis of the Small Business Subcommittee instead of the more copyright-friendly Judiciary Committee, apparently forced SoundExchange’s hand.

Webcasters large and small are pleased with SoundExchange’s change of heart, and one webcaster said that the outcry from fans of Internet radio was a major factor. “This is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn’t matter, it did,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren told Wired blog Listening Post. “That’s why this is happening.”

Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.

“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”

Her husband quickly added, “It’s like peeping.”

Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the “Best Urban Images” that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, “Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?”

Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” the company said. “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

. . .

Edward A. Jurkevics, a principal at Chesapeake Analytics, a consulting firm specializing in mapping and imagery, said that courts have consistently ruled that people in public spaces can be photographed. “In terms of privacy, I doubt if there is much of a problem,” Mr. Jurkevics said.

Still, the issues raised by the service, thorny or merely funny, were perfect blog fodder. The hunt was on for quirky or potentially embarrassing images that could be found by wandering the virtual streets of the service.

There was the picture of a clearly identifiable man standing in front of an establishment offering lap dances and other entertainment in San Francisco. The site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

Others pointed to pictures of cars whose license plates were clearly readable. One pointed to images captured inside the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a controversial location for photography in this high-security era. On Lombard Street in San Francisco, various tourists who had come to photograph the famously curvy street were photographed themselves.

*Different from this, by the by.

SEATTLE (AP) — A 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised ‘zombie’ computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.

‘He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,’ said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. ‘He’s a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.’

Anyone notice a decrease? I didn’t.

Lorne Michaels seems to agree with the second sentiment at least:

Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live, is a big fan of YouTube.

“I think that YouTube is great, because if you do something like ‘Dick in a Box,’ someone in Pakistan can see it,” said Mr. Michaels in a phone interview.

He was referring to the now-ubiquitous skit by SNL cast member Andy Samberg and guest host Justin Timberlake in which the duo sang about giving your girlfriend the ultimate gift: namely, your dick in a box.

Recently, Messrs. Timberlake and Samberg sang “Dick in a Box” to hordes of ecstatic fans in a sold-out Madison Square Garden. But it’s not hard to imagine a teenager in Islamabad cracking up his friends with those same irresistible lyrics: “One, cut a hole in the box …. ”

“YouTube has been great for us,” Mr. Michaels reiterated.

But of course NBC wants to take it down:

NBC’s legal department, under the helm of Rick Cotton, patrols YouTube for unauthorized NBC content. Once found, the material is promptly removed. Consequently, the network is discouraging the very buzz that was firming up the show’s grip on the American zeitgeist.

As for why NBC doesn’t just post everything on its own site, the issue seems to be a “complicated thicket of guilds, and unions, and copyright issues.”

I’m online looking for a vacation hotel in Austin, TX [jeesh ... I probably shouldn't have said that out loud -- now my groupies will give me no rest when I'm there], and CitySearch — proudly owned by Barry Diller’s own InterActiveCorp — is serving me ads for a very gay version of Match.com. Undoubtedly, this is due to some kind of behavioral targeting technology they’ve developed.

All’s I can say is … Well, it’s very bad.  My real-life alter ego is an online media buyer … let’s just say that this is noted.

Ms. Amero, 40, a longtime substitute, contends that when she arrived that day in October 2004, she asked the regular seventh-grade language arts teacher at Kelly Middle School if she could use his computer to e-mail her husband. But first, she says, she went to the bathroom, and when she returned, the teacher was gone and students were gathered around the screen, watching a hairstyle Web site.

When she tried to close the site, what she got was an endless barrage of pop-up ads for pornography sites. The images continued all day, since “I absolutely have no clue about computers,” she said in an interview.

As a part-time school IT administrator, I empathize all around. The kids will find a way to get into anything, which is why I block all but a half-dozen websites at the school (even Google is blocked). The teachers and parents fully support this policy. There’s no need for the kids to surf Myspace while they’re in class.

And now I have an even better reason for my draconian internet restrictions: I don’t want to go to jail.