The CNN version of a current law suit against the NSA hoovering:

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of metadata — phone records of the time and numbers called without any disclosure of content — apparently violates privacy rights.

His preliminary ruling favored five plaintiffs challenging the practice, but Leon limited the decision only to their cases.

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” said Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”

Leon’s ruling said the “plaintiffs in this case have also shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits of a Fourth Amendment claim,” adding “as such, they too have adequately demonstrated irreparable injury.”

The government will surely appeal, but at least one Federal judge seems to have read the Constitution and believes that it means what it says in the Fourth Amendment.

The judge notes that the government has not shown credible evidence that the bulk collection actually does anything useful.

If this was effective, there would have been no Boston Marathon bombing. It is really that simple. It doesn’t work because there is too much data and there is no targeting.

Part of what has been tying me up for a couple of weeks is looking for a replacement for a failed faucet stem in a shower. This stem is probably 50 years old and almost all of the reliable local hardware stores have been killed off when the ‘big boxes’ arrived.

I took all of the measurements and a picture of the part and went on the ‘Net to get a part number. After all of that, I think it’s time for someone to buy some rulers for the people who write the specifications for plumbing parts, because they are not on the same continent as ‘accurate’. Let me just say that no one has ever made a shower faucet stem with an overall length of 55 inches. There are sites who do make an effort by photographing samples on ¼-inch graph paper that are really useful.

As this was an older part, I found it and bought it at ACE Hardware, the small store with an amazing collection of actual hardware.