Welcome To "Taking Liberties"
An introduction is in order. I'm a national correspondent for the Web site of CBS News; previously I was the chief political correspondent for CNET News (aka News.com) starting in 2002. You can see some of my contributions here. Before that I was Wired's Washington bureau chief and a reporter for Time.com and Time magazine. Along the way, I've taught First Amendment law and graduate journalism.
I spent a decade living in Washington, D.C., where I did everything from traveling with the president on on Air Force One to interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. Most of it, though, was the humdrum (but reasonably important) business of writing about topics like privacy, free speech, antitrust, and the economics of government regulation. My wife and I now live in the San Francisco Bay area.
The reason for this introduction? Last fall, I started writing a weekly column for CBS News on politics and economics called Other People's Money. But its focus wasn't quite broad enough to encompass gun rights and other topics that I wanted to write about -- and so Taking Liberties was born.
I welcome your feedback/story ideas/random thoughts. One thing I've learned is that journalists should be more humble; at least some of my readers know more about any particular topic than I do.
My personal Web site is www.mccullagh.org; I'm on Twitter as declanm; and my AOL and Yahoo IM screennames are "declanindc" (encrypted conversations preferred). Feel free to bookmark the Taking Liberties RSS feed. E-mail is the best way to reach me, and you can do that at declan@cbsnews.com.