Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2003, 03:08:08 PM
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Upholding liberty in America
Edward Crane and William Niskanen
Published: June 24 2003 20:17
In the aftershock of September 11 2001, there is a greater awareness among most Americans of how precious their freedom is. They also realise the need for better government intelligence work to fight terrorism. But they should not let the government usurp basic liberties.
This is a danger as more and more anti-terrorist laws and rules strait-jacket the nation. There is a congruent danger: the rise of neo-conservatism on the right. The movement is using the threat of terrorism to expand government at home and abroad. America must safeguard its freedoms in the fight against terrorism, but protect itself from pernicious policies that erode freedom in the name of liberty.
Since September 11, Congress and the Justice Department have implemented laws and rules to protect America. But some of these new steps threaten civil liberties. One example is the Patriot Act. This 131-page law, which few legislators read, abandons procedural norms and expands the power of the executive branch, which is already too powerful.
Under no circumstances should an American be held captive in the US indefinitely, with no charges filed and no legal representation afforded. Yet this has happened under the Patriot Act. And now there is talk of a Patriot II. James Buchanan, the Nobel laureate, argues that governments will acquire more power when the opportunity arises. History shows this to be true, and the Patriot law reflects it. Today, with the war on terrorism, the opportunities for the state to expand are ubiquitous. Both liberals and conservatives are turning a blind eye to unnecessary usurpations of power, if not openly calling for them.
Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, has mooted the idea of "torture warrants", by which courts could authorise the use of torture to elicit information. The neo-conservative agenda is a particular threat to liberty - perhaps greater than the ideologically spent ideas of left-liberalism. Always a movement of bright intellectual leaders, neo-conservatism has mostly been a movement with a head but no body. One rarely runs into a neo-con on the street.
Underlying neo-conservatism is a desire to reshape America and the world through the efforts of a robust federal government. For years The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative magazine, has pushed for initiatives to reinforce US international power. Merely living in a free society appears to be insufficient for neo-conservatives.
During George W. Bush's campaign for president, the neo-conservative influence was felt in domestic policy ideas such as faith-based initiatives that would involve the federal government in private local charities, often with a religious orientation. It was also seen in the call for a greater federal role in local education. These are both inconsistent with the concepts of limited government and federalism.
But neo-cons tend to be dismissive of the idea that the federal government should be limited to the protection of an individual's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As William Kristol, editor of the Standard, has put it: "Are we willing to say that the country is worse off because of FDR or JFK or LBJ? I'm not willing to say that." So much for limited government.
During his campaign, Mr Bush said many sensible things about foreign policy, including the need for the US to have "humility" in its relations with other nations. But since September 11, neo-conservative influence on US foreign policy has reached new heights. We have grave concerns over the doctrine of preventive war and the seeming abdication of the responsibilities of Congress with respect to committing lives and treasure to armed conflict.
Some in the neo-conservative movement have openly called for an American empire around the globe. Max Boot, the writer, recently praised what he termed America's "imperialism" and said it should impose its views "at gunpoint". James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has called for a decades-long campaign to reorder the entire Middle East along neo-conservative lines. Such thinking is profoundly un-American.
All is not gloom. What is needed now is for limited government conservatives of the variety exemplified by President Ronald Reagan and Senator Barry Goldwater to join forces with libertarians and enlightened liberals who respect civil liberties. They should speak out in support of America's heritage of liberty.
Globalisation has been primarily an American undertaking and it has been good for the world's poor. The country's science, technology and entrepreneurship are healing the sick, cleaning the environment and making the world a better and more enjoyable place in which to live. The US is a great nation with little to apologise for. It has an enemy to defeat. The challenge is not to defeat itself.
Edward Crane is founder and president of the Cato Institute and William Niskanen is its chairman
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June 25, 2003
The Road to Oceania
By WILLIAM GIBSON
VANCOUVER, British Columbia
Walking along Henrietta Street recently, by London's Covent Garden, looking for a restaurant, I found myself thinking of George Orwell. Victor Gollancz Ltd., publisher of Orwell's early work, had its offices there in 1984, when the company published my first novel, a novel of an imagined future.
At the time, I felt I had lived most of my life under the looming shadow of that mythic year ? Orwell having found his title by inverting the final digits of the year of his book's completion. It seemed very strange to actually be alive in 1984. In retrospect, I think it has seemed stranger even than living in the 21st century.
I had a valuable secret in 1984, though, one I owed in large part to Orwell, who would have turned 100 today: I knew that the novel I had written wasn't really about the future, just as "1984" hadn't been about the future, but about 1948. I had relatively little anxiety about eventually finding myself in a society of the sort Orwell imagined. I had other fish to fry, in terms of history and anxiety, and indeed I still do.
Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts. Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the closed-circuit system's designers.
Orwell knew the power of the press, our first mass medium, and at the BBC he'd witnessed the first electronic medium (radio) as it was brought to bear on wartime public opinion. He died before broadcast television had fully come into its own, but had he lived I doubt that anything about it would have much surprised him. The media of "1984" are broadcast technology imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of North Korea today ? technologically backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society.
Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states.
Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.
Certain goals of the American government's Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness initiative may eventually be realized simply by the evolution of the global information system ? but not necessarily or exclusively for the benefit of the United States or any other government.
This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of everything that we do with information.
Had Orwell known that computers were coming (out of Bletchley Park, oddly, a dilapidated English country house, home to the pioneering efforts of Alan Turing and other wartime code-breakers) he might have imagined a Ministry of Truth empowered by punch cards and vacuum tubes to better wring the last vestiges of freedom from the population of Oceania. But I doubt his story would have been very different. (Would East Germany's Stasi have been saved if its agents had been able to mouse away on PC's into the 90's? The system still would have been crushed. It just wouldn't have been under the weight of paper surveillance
files.)
Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.
That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.
It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.
In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.
I say "truths," however, and not "truth," as the other side of information's new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily.
Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I've seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don't have to. I like to think there's some truth in that. But the ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations. Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either ? except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place.
This is not to say that Orwell failed in any way, but rather that he succeeded. "1984" remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.
We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.
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William Gibson is author of the novels "Neuromancer" and, most recently, "Pattern Recognition."
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Your Papers, Please
"...How did [Americans] manage to reverse [their] thinking? When did appeals to the lessons of history become treasonous? How did philosophic principles collapse into patriotic slogans? The answers to such questions underlie explanations for the much broader phenomenon of the collapse of Western civilization itself. Our very survival -- both as individuals and as a civilization -- depends upon a radical transformation of our thinking, one that compels us to confront those silent voices within us that can so easily erupt into bloodbaths..."
Butler Shaffer
Georgetown, Texas. Like a lynch mob fueled by a fear of the unknown and a willingness to see strangers as threats to be quickly dispatched, the herd impulse has, since 9/11, become mobilized on behalf of a war against shadows. Even beyond the violent and repressive reactions of the American government, the most unsettling consequence of the WTC attacks has been the nearly total collapse of the minds of most Americans.
For the duration of the war -- which government officials tell us will go on forever! -- men and women have rationed their intelligence and allowed what they would have heretofore regarded as their "fundamental principles" to be conscripted into the service of the state.
Americans who, five years ago, were so incensed at Bill Clinton's perjured testimony that impeachment proceedings were brought, now exhibit a willingness to be lied to about matters of far greater concern than oval office shenanigans. As the Bush administration continues to pile lie upon lie, it is evident that most Americans are completely indifferent to the purposes for the attack upon Iraq. I suspect that, if Bush and his fellow war conspirators were to publicly announce that the Iraqi invasion was deigned for no other purpose than to put money into their pockets, most Americans -- led by their electronic cheerleaders on talk-radio and cable television -- would praise them for showing "ambition" and "leadership!"
America is becoming the Nazi Germany we feared in my childhood. For those who were not around during those years, you can get a flavor for the anti-tyrannical sentiments of the time by watching any number of movies depicting the Nazi police-state. The constant presence of police; the insistence upon showing "your papers" to whichever government underling demanded them; the awareness that neither your person nor home was immune from state searches or seizures; the disappearance of people into unknown prison camps; neighbors spying upon neighbors, and children betraying their parents to the state; and the domination of society by a military and bureaucratic arrogance, arbitrariness, and absolutism, were constantly chilling examples of the dangers of state power.
How did we manage to reverse our thinking? When did appeals to the lessons of history become treasonous? How did philosophic principles collapse into patriotic slogans? The answers to such questions underlie explanations for the much broader phenomenon of the collapse of Western civilization itself. This is a topic around which my articles revolve, and has been addressed by numerous historians, as well as Carl Jung, whose psychological explanations add a depth to the inquiry unmatched by others.
A preoccupation with war has long been symptomatic of the decline of societies that practice it. Wars are essentially conducted by governments against their own people -- with "others" being held up as fear-objects around which to enlist the obedience and submission of their own citizenry. Any nation in wartime is telling us what George Bush, John Ashcroft, Tom Ridge, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, et al., are now telling us -- if we will suspend our indifference to truth long enough to observe -- namely, that society can only be held together by armed force, threats, imprisonment, and death. When coercion supplants cooperation; when the inviolability of the individual is sacrificed to some alleged collective security; and when violence is equated with "patriotism" and peace with "un-Americanism," the days of such a society are numbered.
<?<?For those who desire to understand the attraction that this violent, destructive system has for most of us, a new book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, offers one of the most powerful critiques of the war system since Randolph Bourne. Not content to moralize against war or to call it names, Hedges analyzes the topic from an historical, psychological, and institutional perspective, drawing upon literary and mythological works to illustrate his observations. At the same time, his book is quite critical of war, not the kind of read that flag-waving, "United We Stand" jingoists will find comforting.
Hedges has been a foreign correspondent for some fifteen years for such news organizations as the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times. You may be more familiar with him as the recent commencement speaker at Rockford College, where he was hooted, heckled, and air-horned by war-lovers in the audience. Intellectual bankruptcy is another symptom of a dying culture, wherein discomforting ideas and criticisms can only be met with the kind of unfocused, thoughtless rage that is becoming increasingly evident in radio and television programming. For the herd-oriented, a new idea can only be countered not by clear thinking, but by blasts from an air-horn!
Hedges observes that "tates at war silence their own authentic and humane culture" and, in so doing, "erode the moral fabric" of a society. He adds: "[w]ar breaks down long-established prohibitions against violence, destruction, and murder," and leads to a situation in which "the domination and brutality of the battlefield is carried into personal life." "War," he goes on, "fills our spiritual void," and helps to erase "unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation" in our lives. In words that reflect the disquieting climate in which we live, Hedges observes "a growing fusion between those in the state who wage war...and those who believe they understand and can act as agents for God."
I cannot exaggerate the importance of these observations. They force us, as do the writings of Jung, Krishnamurti, and others, to confront the "dark side" forces that reside within each of us no less than they did within tyrants and their supporters in other times and places. They also compel us to reconsider our thinking. The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge.
Hedges reminds us of the culture of war, which "is peddled by mythmakers" throughout society, including the modern media. You can observe such mythmaking as the media struggles to find evidence of "heroism" in a "war" that is more realistically described as a campaign of brutish bullying. A truckload of soldiers take a wrong turn on a road, are captured by Iraqi forces and later released, then brought back to America as "POW heroes"; the irresponsibility of single mothers leaving their infant children at home to go fight in a war; and the Hollywood-like staging of the "rescue" of Private Lynch, who is then brought back to America as a "heroine", are among the more apparent examples of the war system playing with smoke and mirrors in an effort to convince boobus Americanus of the nobility of the cause.
While the institutionalized butchery of the war system makes it difficult for me to equate it with heroism, one does, on occasion, find individual acts of a heroic quality even in battle. My favorite candidate for this role is Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War who came upon the scene of what we now know as the "My Lai Massacre." After becoming aware that what he was observing was not the ordinary combat of warfare, but a calculated slaughter of Vietnamese civilians by troops led by Lt. Calley, Thompson set his helicopter down between the civilians and the American troops. He then ordered his own crew to turn their machine guns on the American soldiers and, if they persisted in the slaughter, to fire on them. Thompson then took the civilians to safety and reported the incident, which led to the prosecution of Calley.
I doubt that there will be any statues of Hugh Thompson erected anywhere soon, or that he will be leading any Memorial Day parades. His actions were too heroic, for he stood up to the very excesses of butchery that Hedges informs us destroys our sense of humanity and, with it, our civilization. I would much rather have Hugh Thompson as my neighbor than I would any of the myriad of retired generals who became television network fixtures in the mythmaking to which we have become accustomed these past many months.
Our very survival -- both as individuals and as a civilization -- depends upon a radical transformation of our thinking, one that compels us to confront those silent voices within us that can so easily erupt into bloodbaths. While most of us continue to focus on the "Nazi holocaust" as the epitome of statist butchery, we must recall that the 20th century was the "holocaust century." Some 200,000,000 of our fellow human beings were slaughtered in various wars and genocides, and tens of millions more were wounded, both physically and spiritually, in ways that never heal.
Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us. The poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, declared: "I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy." While I share his sentiment, it is nonetheless evident that wars only bring up from the depths of our dark side the kinds of moral flotsam and jetsam that have surfaced in Washington, D.C. In the process, they destroy those qualities of peace, liberty, spiritual centeredness, mutual respect, and sense of individual responsibility which, alone, make for the greatness of any civilization.
Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law.
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MIT Students To 'Track' Politicians
Turn tables on feds with website to
monitor government officials
Posted: July 7, 2003
5:00 p.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Modeled after a Defense Department concept that
ostensibly could keep tabs on every American, a
pair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology
students have created a website in which users
can "track" politicians and government officials.
The project, called Government Information
Awareness, or GIA, was developed by Chris
Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT
Media Lab, and graduate student Ryan McKinley.
The goal was to design a site that would act as
"sort of a citizen's intelligence agency,"
Csikszentmihalyi told the Boston Globe.
The GIA model was inspired by a Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency creation
known as Total Information Awareness, or TIA,
which later was renamed the Terrorism
Information Awareness system after it was
learned TIA could be used to monitor the activities
of millions of Americans in the government's
search for possible terrorists.
TIA is capable of analyzing financial, medical,
consumer, educational and travel data, among
other pieces of information, to formulate a pattern
of behavior that would match pre-determined
terrorist profiles.
"The goal of the Terrorism Information Awareness
program is to revolutionize the ability of the
United States to detect, classify and identify
foreign terrorists ? and decipher their plans ? and
thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to
successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts,"
says a DARPA description of the program.
Congress limited the scope of the program after
complaints from a number of civil liberties
organizations.
Many of those concerns were addressed in a letter
to the U.S. Senate by the Association for
Computing Machinery, which stated that
"because of serious security, privacy, economic,
and personal risks associated with the
development of a vast database surveillance
system, we recommend a rigorous, independent
review of these aspects of TIA."
"There are important steps that the government
can take now to increase our security without
creating a massive surveillance program that has
the potential of doing more harm than good," said
the letter. "Federal, state and local governments
already have information systems in place that
could play major roles with highly focused
'terrorist spotting.'"
Nevertheless, the architects of GIA say their goal is
similar, only in reverse; they want average citizens
to be able to keep track of information relating to
government employees and politicians.
GIA's mission is "to empower citizens by providing
a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of
information on individuals, organizations, and
corporations related to the government of the
United States of America," according to a
description posted on the GIA website.
Also, GIA's mission is "to allow citizens to submit
intelligence about government-related issues,
while maintaining their anonymity" and "to allow
members of the government a chance to
participate in the process."
"In the United States, there is a widening gap
between a citizen's ability to monitor his or her
government and the government's ability to
monitor a citizen," says the website. "Average
citizens have limited access to important
government records, while available information is
often illegible. Meanwhile, the government's
eagerness and means to oversee a citizen's
personal activity is rapidly increasing."
McKinley told the Boston Globe "total
information" should be a two-way street between
government and civilians.
"If total information exists, really the same effort
should be spent to make the same information at
the leadership level at least as transparent ? in my
opinion, more transparent," he said.
Part of the technology involved in the site is
similar to data mining software used by such
search engines as Google. That includes, said the
Globe, "independent political sites like
opensecrets.org, as well as sites run by
government agencies."
Also, Csikszentmihalyi and McKinley took
advantage of round-the-clock political coverage by
cable channels such as C-SPAN. The MIT students
use video cameras to capture images of people on
screen, which are generally accompanied by their
names.
The Globe says a computer program then "reads"
each name and matches it to existing information
about that person already stored on site.
Jon E. Dougherty is a staff reporter and columnist for
WorldNetDaily.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33455
Government Information Awareness......a 'citizens' intelligence agency'.....
I like it.
http://opengov.media.mit.edu/GIA/TIA/
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With permission from Rick, I post his email to me here. He is occupied with other matters and will not be participating.
I think this is a quality analysis and presents important points for
consideration. Do note that there are some lawyerly specific terms here,
such as "dicta" that have very specific meaning. No time to comment now, I'm out the door to "do The Dune" and train sticks.
If I have a chance later, I will offer a brief summary of my preference for
structuring the issue in 9th amendment terms.
Marc
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Marc,
As I saw that case, two issues existed. First, did the State of Texas
possess the power to ban "deviate sexual intercourse" between two persons of the same sex? Second, if Texas did possess that power, then does the US Constitution prohibit the State of Texas from exercising that power?
The majority opinion in Lawrence does not deal with the first issue. It only
addresses the second issue when it holds that the term "liberty" in the US
Constitution includes a right of two persons of the same sex to engage
consensually in anal or oral sex in private. Justice O'Connor opined that
the statute violated equal protection because it applied only to persons of
the same sex.
I do not agree with the majority's opinion for several reasons.
The 14th Amendment clearly provides that a State may deprive a person of liberty with due process of law. Until Lawrence, two main violations of due process could occur in a State statute: A) the statute's language was so vague or overbroad as to provide a normal person with insufficient notice of the prohibited conduct; or, B) the conduct prohibited by the statute was a fundamental right "deeply rooted in this nation's history and traditions". If alternative B applies, then the reviewing court was supposed to apply strict scrutiny to the law in question and determine if a rational basis for prohibiting such conduct exists.
The majority opinion in Lawrence does not argue that private, consensual
anal or oral sex are fundamental rights deeply rooted in this nation's
history and traditions. It cannot do so, because no such history or
tradition exists in the U.S. At the time of its ratification, the Constitution took effect in 13 States, all of which banned sodomy. As of 1961, sodomy was prohibited in all 50 States.
Instead, the majority creates a new, less severe requirement for applying
the rational basis test. In Lawrence, the majority cited an "emerging
awareness" that liberty to gives to adults in conducting their sex lives,
p.11. As evidence of this "emerging awareness", the majority cites the ALI Modern Penal Code, a 1981 European Court of Human Rights decision, a 1957 British Parliamentary recommendation to decriminalize sodomy, the reduction of sodomy prohibitions from all 50 States in 1961 to 13 States today, dicta in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992) and an equal protection decision, Romer vs. Evans (1996). That's very weak legal precedent upon which to base this substantial dilution in due process review.
My major objection to this reasoning is that legislative policy decisions to
decriminalize certain conduct do not amount to a per se recognition of a
federal constitutional right. At most, the legislative decriminalization of
certain conduct creates a State statutory right or privilege to engage in
the previously banned conduct. But the majority had to rely upon this false constitutional argument in order to obtain its desired result, the
nullification of the Texas statute.
The long term damage of this decision to the rule of law is incalculable.
Now, it will be sufficient for courts to apply rational basis review if the
petitioners merely demonstrate "an emerging awareness" through a change in legisltive policy in half of the States. This creates another means by which the amendment process can be circumvented. Now, a petitioner does not need even to show a 3/4 majority of the States to cause constitutional change. According to the majority, Bowers was incorrectly decided in 1986 because 25 States had decriminalized sodomy.
I support the legislative policy to decriminalize sodomy between consenting adults. However, the US Constitution says what it says. Some of what it said in 1787 was not right; e.g., the 3/5 capitation and its recognition of slavery. Maybe the drafters should have foreseen the need to define more clearly personal liberty as it related to all sorts of various sex acts in private. They did not do so.
More importantly, I resent the majority's sloppy analysis, its use of dicta,
and its use of foreign legislation. Most importantly, I resent the
majority's lack of courage to hold that private consensual sodomy between adults is a fundamental right deeply rooted in this nation's history and traditions. Instead, its expediency to achieve a popular policy result has opened a Pandora's box that subjects all of us to a judicial tyranny that could nullify any legislative policy decision because it does not comport with the political views of 5 appointed Justices. In the long run, this is the real danger from this decision.
Rick
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Hi, Marc,
Thanks for passing that along. Have you read the decision?
"It only addresses the second issue when it holds that the term "liberty" in
the US Constitution includes a right of two persons of the same sex to
engage consensually in anal or oral sex in private."
This is what they said:
"a) Resolution of this case depends on whether petitioners were free as
adults to engage in private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under
the Due Process Clause. For this inquiry the Court deems it necessary to
reconsider its Bowers holding. The Bowers Court's initial substantive
statement--"The issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy ... ," 478 U. S., at 190--discloses the Court's failure to appreciate the extent of the liberty at stake. To say that the issue in Bowers was simply the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim the individual put
forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it said that marriage is just about the right to have sexual intercourse. Although the laws involved in Bowers and here purport to do not more than prohibit a
particular sexual act, their penalties and purposes have more far-reaching
consequences, touching upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home. They seek to control a personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to choose to enter upon relationships in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons. Pp. 3-6. "These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed
under compulsion of the State." Ibid.
Persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexual persons do. The decision in Bowers would deny them this right.
(d) Bowers' rationale does not withstand careful analysis. In his dissenting
opinion in Bowers Justice Stevens concluded that (1) the fact a State's
governing majority has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice, and (2) individual decisions concerning the intimacies of physical
relationships, even when not intended to produce offspring, are a form of
"liberty" protected by due process. That analysis should have controlled
Bowers, and it controls here. Bowers was not correct when it was decided, is not correct today, and is hereby overruled. This case does not involve minors, persons who might be injured or coerced, those who might not easily refuse consent, or public conduct or prostitution. It does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. Petitioners' right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in private conduct without government intervention. Casey, supra, at 847. The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the individual's personal and private life. Pp. 17-18."
Notice they said the TX statute furthers no legitimate state interest.
That's a rational basis review, a low standard. That is, they compared the
right to fundamental rights, but didn't use a strict level of review. From
what I can tell, they threw the TX law out using the lowest of the three
standards.
"Until Lawrence, two main violations of due process could occur in a State
statute: A) the statute's language was so vague or overbroad as to provide a normal person with insufficient notice of the prohibited conduct; or, B) the conduct prohibited by the statute was a fundamental right "deeply rooted in this nation's history and traditions". If alternative B applies, then the reviewing court was supposed to apply strict scrutiny to the law in question and determine if a rational basis for prohibiting such conduct exists."
There are alternatives besides A and B. You have a high standard of review for the B cases, and when the right being taken away isn't "fundamental" you have a lower standard of review which looks for a legitimate state interest. Something in the middle would be the right to abortion.
"Instead, the majority creates a new, less severe requirement for applying the rational basis test."
He's got it backwards.
"....According to the majority, Bowers was incorrectly decided in 1986
because 25 States had decriminalized sodomy...."
Not what they said. (see above)
"Instead, its expediency to achieve a popular policy result has opened a
Pandora's box that subjects all of us to a judicial tyranny that could
nullify any legislative policy decision because it does not comport with the
political views of 5 appointed Justices."
The TX law failed to meet a constitutional test, as it should have. So Marc,
if depriving people of an interest in the non-criminalization of their
personal, private and consentual relationships, requires a legitimate state
interest, maybe you can to explain to me what the legitimate state interest in this case was?
Ilene
--------------------------
Hi Ilene:
The next several days are extremely busy for me but quickly:
I have read the entire decision (can someone print it here?)and its why I
find Rick's reasoning so strong.
To summarize my position, the law is wrong and should be repealed. This does not change the fact that the LEGAL reasoning of the decision is suprisingly weak upon examination and I can understand Scalia's concerns. IMHO the correct analysis would be through the still sleeping 9th Amendment, combined with the "pursuit of happiness" of the Declaration of Independence, which is, IMHO, a form of "legislative history" of the Constitution.
Rick has drawn my attention to the problem presented by my analysis by the 10th Amendment and the fact of sodomy laws in all 13 states in 1789. I need to refresh my memory on the law/issues presented by the Bill of Rights applicability to the States before answering him.
But, as clever as I am, ;-) my superior interpretation :-p is a digression from the question presented here of the merits of the Lawrence decision.
This is a very broad decision, and like Roe, the logic used can and will be
used to take the Court very deep into the cultural wars. And, like Roe, the
socio-political-legal trends already in play, make this end run of democracy, via logic that masks judicial imperialism, unnecessary even to the ends desired. Many of the results of the coming incursion into the cultural wars may please me, and others not, but at the moment (and I do confess to mixed feelings) I am of the thought that the opinion's reasoning is as unsound as the result is pleasing.
Question: Where else might this decision's rationale be applied? I see
already that an officer thrown out of the military for open gayness has
filed suit on its basis.
---------------------
(Folks, what follows here is pretty damn high level legal thinking IMHO-Crafty)
Ilene,
IMO, the Lawrence decision is very dangerous. If left unchecked, it
undermines the entire rule of law. It is based upon Justice Stevens' dissent in Bowers vs Hardwick. There, with sweepingly loose language, he argued that majority votes on moral choices alone were insufficient to constitute a rational basis for any law that restricts personal liberty.
Well, all laws restrict personal liberty. And all laws constitute moral
choices about individual conduct. The value of the majority view as to what constitute those choices is the heart of representative democracy in our republic. That is the heart of the social contract. It is the fairest way
for society to make those choices.
If "liberty" as set forth in the US Constitution includes private,
non-commercial, consensual sodomy between adults, then that conduct must constitute a fundamental right. Isn't liberty one of the three unalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence? But Lawrence vs Texas did not come to that conclusion.
Bowers vs Hardwick had two holdings. First, it held that sodomy between
consenting adults was not a fundamental right guaranteed by the
Constitution. Second, it found a rational basis for the Georgia anti-sodomy
statute.
Lawrence vs Texas only deals with the second part of the Bowers holding. It refuses to hold that the proscribed conduct is a fundamental right. But, as you point out correctly in your post, rational basis analysis alone is used in cases where fundamental rights are not involved. Private, consensual, non-commercial sex between adults is part of liberty, says the Lawrence majority. But we need only use a rational basis test. Therefore, liberty is not a fundamental right?!@#
In our republic, how do the people make their moral choices about laws? They make them through their elected representatives by voting for them in elections. Or they vote directly for those moral choices in referenda or constitutional amendment initiatives.
But Lawrence adopts Stevens' dissent and says that majority vote alone is
insufficient to prove a rational basis for the moral choice to ban sodomy.
Then, why are the majority votes to decriminalize sodomy alone sufficient to prove an emerging awareness of sodomy's inclusion in liberty?! Why is the majority vote of the American Law Institute sufficient to prove no rational basis? Why did the majority votes to decriminalize sodomy in 25 States prove the absence of a rational basis in 1986 sufficient to make the Bowers decision wrong when it was made? That's what one of your excepts from Lawrence says in your post above.
I guess the relevance of majority votes to the Lawrence court depend upon whether the majority of Supreme Court justices agree with the value judgments made by the different majorities. That can be the only logical extension of an opinion that fails to find a fundamental right to privacy under the facts of Lawrence. That creates a dangerous precedent that can be used by unscrupulous people for their own personal aggrandizement. For, in its current form, Lawrence can now be used to impose restrictions as long as the politicians pack the court with justices who share their moral choices. Liberty is not a fundamental right. Or, at least, some portions of liberty are not fundamental rights. Then, we can watch as other parts of liberty slip from fundamental to non-fundamental rights.
Where will the line be drawn? Who will draw it? What will be their criteria?
That is what I was trying to convey to Marc.
So long,
Rick
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http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030710.html
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US may adopt Fla. antiterror database
By Robert O'Harrow Jr., Washington Post, 8/6/2003
olice in Florida are creating a new counterterrorism database designed to give law enforcement agencies around the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about both criminals and ordinary Americans.
Organizers said the system, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for example, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup within a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.
The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an aviation passenger-screening system.
The Florida system is another example of the ongoing post-Sept. 11, 2001, debate about the proper balance between national security and individual privacy. Yesterday, Washington, D.C., and Homeland Security Department officials announced plans to launch a pilot law enforcement data-sharing network that will include Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Paul Cameron, president of Seisint Inc., the Boca Raton, Fla., company that developed the Matrix system and donated it to the state, said: ''It is exactly how law enforcement worked yesterday, except it's extraordinarily faster. In this age of risks that appear immediately, you have to be able to respond immediately.''
Some civil liberties groups fear Matrix will dramatically lower the threshold for government snooping.
''It's going to make fishing expeditions so much more convenient,'' said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that monitors privacy issues.
''There's going to be a push to use it for many different kinds of purposes,'' Schwartz said.
The Justice Department has provided $4 million to expand the Matrix program nationally and will provide the computer network for information-sharing among the states, according to documents and interviews. The Department of Homeland Security has pledged $8 million, state officials said.
In some ways, Matrix resembles other data-driven counterterrorism initiatives that began after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Pentagon's controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program also sought to use personal data in new ways, but on a far larger scale. Started by retired Admiral John Poindexter, the idea was to create a global data-surveillance system that might detect hints of threats. Lawmakers sharply limited the program's funding several months ago, and now some intend to shut it down.
A Justice Department document from early this year describes Matrix as an effort ''to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.''
Florida officials say the system will be used only by authorized investigators under tight supervision.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE ?
Feds slammed for not protecting privacy
Government findings support charge of medical-records vulnerability
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: August 12, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Health-care advocates say a General Accounting Office report that found the federal government could not guarantee patients' medical privacy is not only accurate, but provides a glimpse of how helpless health-care consumers are when their privacy is breached.
The GAO report, released late last month, found of 25 federal agencies, compliance with Privacy Act requirements and those of the Office of Management and Budget ? which oversees implementation of the act ? was "uneven."
President George W. Bush embraces Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson after speaking about health-care reform issues.
"As a result of this uneven compliance, the government cannot adequately assure the public that all legislated individual privacy rights are being protected.
The GAO said while it found 100 percent compliance among the agencies in issuing a rule "explaining to the public why personal information is exempt from certain provisions of the act," the congressional watchdog estimated "71 percent compliance with the requirement that personal information should be complete, accurate, relevant and timely before it is disclosed to a nonfederal organization."
The agency also said OMB leadership was needed to improve overall federal-government compliance.
Sue Blevins, spokeswoman for the Institute for Health Freedom, said the government's inability to protect medical records and privacy was obvious.
"I don't even need to read [the GAO report] to know the government can't guarantee privacy," she told WorldNetDaily. "How can the government guarantee medical privacy when under the new massive federal privacy rules, when [a consumer] goes to complain about a breach, there is no guarantee that it will even be investigated?"
"That is such a major loophole in the law," Blevins added.
Worse, Blevins said, patients whose privacy has been abused "get nothing, even if the government fines the guilty party." She said firms or health-care facilities that release private patient information inadvertently may have to pay a fine to the government, but the patient "is left empty-handed," with privacy information out in the public domain.
There is "almost an incentive for [the government] to allow the privacy breaches," she said, said the feds collect the fines.
As WorldNetDaily reported, critics of the government's medical-privacy rule never had much faith in it to begin with. They have said the rules, first developed during the Clinton administration, actually strip patients of protections rather than strengthen them.
"The ? rule eliminates patient consent and gives the federal government access to each and every citizen's personal medical records ? without patients' permission," Blevins said in an interview in April.
The government has defended the rule, which took effect April 14.
"From the time of Hippocrates, privacy in medical care has been of prime importance to patients and to the medical profession," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said in announcing the rule's implementation.
"? As electronic data transmission is becoming ingrained in our health-care system, we have new challenges to insure that medical privacy is secured. While many states have enacted laws giving differing degrees of protection, there has never before been a federal standard defining and ensuring medical privacy," he said. "Now new federal standards are coming into force to protect the personal health information of every American patient."
But Twila Brase, RN, a spokeswoman for Citizen's Council on Health Care, said the GAO report spells out a different story.
"This report should give Congress a good reason to reconsider building yet another database of citizen information," she said, referring to the proposed National Patient Safety Database under consideration in Congress.
"One system of records holds data on 290 million people. If that system happens to be one of the system that's out of compliance, the privacy rights of every citizen have already been violated, perhaps many times," said Brase.
Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, says government bureaucracy can't guarantee privacy.
"Demanding lots of mandatory reports will compromise patients' privacy and overload the system with trivia, hampering its ability to respond to what is really important," she told USA Today.
And Kathyrn Serkes, public affairs counsel for AAPS, added the new rules are so invasive patients will need "Miranda warnings" before answering medical questions.
AAPS has developed a standard privacy form patients can download, sign and give to their physicians.
"While masquerading as patient protection, the rules would actually eliminate any last shred of confidentiality and risk lives," she said. "The frontline defense for medical privacy always has been the patient's right to give or withhold consent to how his records are used and who sees them. These rules throw that out the window."
Related stories:
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Item Number:24
Date: 08/18/2003
USA - FAA AUTHORIZES GLOBAL HAWK FOR DOMESTIC FLIGHTS (AUG 18/DN)
DEFENSE NEWS -- The Federal Aviation Administration cleared the
Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for routine flights in
U.S. airspace, reports Defense News.
The Global Hawk is the first Air Force UAV to receive such
certification. The certification clears the long-range Global Hawk for possible homeland-security missions.
Paid Periscope subscribers can get more information on the Global
Hawk at:
http://www.periscope.ucg.com/weapons/aircraft/rpv-dron/w0004373.html
-
AT WAR
Civil Liberties After 9/11
Alarmism puts Americans' safety at risk.
BY ROBERT H. BORK
Monday, August 25, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
When a nation faces deadly attacks on its citizens at home and abroad, it is only reasonable to expect that its leaders will take appropriate measures to increase security. And since security inevitably means restrictions, it is likewise only reasonable to expect a public debate over the question of how much individual liberty should be sacrificed for how much individual and national safety.
That, however, is not the way our national debate has shaped up. From the public outcry over the Bush administration's measures to combat terrorism, one might suppose that America is well on the way to becoming a police state. A full-page newspaper ad by the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, informs us that the Patriot Act, the administration's major security initiative, goes "far beyond fighting terrorism" and has "allowed government agents to violate our civil liberties--tapping deep into the private lives of innocent Americans."
According to Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington office, Attorney General John Ashcroft has "clearly abused his power," "systematically erod[ing] free-speech rights, privacy rights, and due-process rights." From the libertarian left, Anthony Lewis in the New York Times Magazine has charged President Bush with undermining safeguards for the accused in a way that Lewis "did not believe was possible in our country," while from the libertarian right, William Safire has protested the administration's effort to realize "the supersnoop's dream" of spying on all Americans.
The charge that our civil liberties are being systematically dismantled must be taken seriously. America has, in the past, overreacted to perceived security threats; the Palmer raids after World War I and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II are the most notorious examples. Are we once again jeopardizing the liberties of all Americans while also inflicting particular harm on Muslims in our midst?
Civil libertarians insist that we are. They condemn the indignities of security checks at airports, the tracking of Muslim visitors to the U.S., detentions of suspects for indefinite periods without access to the courts, and, when criminal charges are brought, the government's attempt to limit the accused's access to important evidence. Still worse in their view is the administration's evident intention of using military tribunals to try suspected terrorists. Finally, and most frightening of all to critics, the government has proposed the Terrorism Information Awareness program--initially and even more ominously known as the Total Information Awareness program--which would employ computers to gather and assess vast amounts of data relating to the transactions of, among others, unknowing American citizens.
There is no denying the rhetorical force of these accusations, or the success with which they have been used by the left as a rallying cry against President Bush. What is less clear is their validity, not just on their own terms but in relation to the radically altered domestic security situation we have faced since the attacks of 9/11. There may be a case to be made concerning the measures we have taken so far; but it is not the one presented by the critics.
Security and Ethnic Profiling
According to Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, American Muslims have already lost many of their civil rights. "All Muslims are now suspects," Mr. Hooper has protested bitterly. The most salient outward sign of this is said to be the ethnic profiling that now occurs routinely in this country, particularly at airports but elsewhere as well--a form of discrimination widely considered to be self-evidently evil.
For most of us, airport security checks are the only firsthand experience we have with countermeasures to terrorism, and their intrusiveness and often seeming pointlessness have, not surprisingly, led many people to question such measures in general. But minor vexations are not the same as an assault on fundamental liberties. As for ethnic profiling, that is another matter, and a serious one. It is serious, however, not because it is rampant but because it does not exist.
That profiling is wicked per se is an idea that seems to have originated in connection with police work, when black civil-rights spokesmen began to allege that officers were relying on race as the sole criterion for suspecting someone of criminal activity. Profiling, in other words, equaled racism by definition. Yet, as Heather Mac Donald has demonstrated in "Are Cops Racist?," the idea rests on a false assumption--namely, that crime rates are constant across every racial and ethnic component of our society. Thus, if blacks, who make up 11% of the population, are subject to 20% of all police stops on a particular highway, racial bias must be at fault.
But the truth is that (to stick to this particular example) blacks do speed more than whites, a fact that in itself justifies a heightened awareness of skin color as one of several criteria in police work. Of course, there is no excuse for blatant racism; but, as Ms. Mac Donald meticulously documents in case after case around the country, there is by and large no evidence that police have relied excessively on ethnic or racial profiling in conducting their normal investigations.
The stigma attached to profiling where it hardly exists has perversely carried over to an area where it should exist but does not: the war against terrorism. This war, let us remember, pre-dates 9/11. According to Ms. Mac Donald, when a commission on aviation security headed by then-Vice President Al Gore was considering a system that would take into account a passenger's national origin and ethnicity--by far the best predictors of terrorism--both the Arab lobby and civil libertarians exploded in indignation. The commission duly capitulated--which is why the final Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System specified that such criteria as national origin, religion, ethnicity and even sex were not to be taken into consideration.
This emasculated system did manage, even so, to pinpoint two of the September 11 terrorists on the day of their gruesome flight, but prevented any action beyond searching their luggage. As Ms. Mac Donald points out, had the system been allowed to use all relevant criteria, followed up by personal searches, the massacres might well have been averted.
Ironically, it is the very randomness of the new security checks that has generated so much skepticism about their efficacy. Old ladies, children, Catholic priests--all have been subject to searches of San Quentin-like thoroughness despite being beyond rational suspicion. According to the authorities, this randomness is itself a virtue, preventing would-be terrorists from easily predicting who or what will draw attention. But it is far more probable that frisking unlikely persons has nothing to do with security and everything to do with political correctness. Frightening as the prospect of terrorism may be, it pales, in the minds of many officials, in comparison with the prospect of being charged with racism.
Registration, Tracking and Detention of Visitors
Ethnic profiling, it is charged, is also responsible for the unjustified harassment and occasional detention of Arab and Muslim visitors to the United States. This is said to be an egregious violation not only of the rights of such persons but of America's traditional hospitality toward foreign visitors.
An irony here is that the procedures being deplored are hardly new, although they are being imposed with greater rigor. The current system has its roots in the 1950s in the first of a series of statutes ordering the Immigration and Naturalization Service to require aliens from countries listed as state sponsors of terrorism, as well as from countries with a history of breeding terrorists, to register and be fingerprinted, to state where they will be while in the U.S., and to notify the INS when they change address or leave the country.
Historically, however, the INS has been absurdly lax about fulfilling its mandate. When a visitor with illegal status--someone, for example, thought to have overstayed a student visa or committed a crime--is apprehended, the usual practice of immigration judges has been to release him upon the posting of a bond, unless he is designated a "person of interest." In the latter case, he is held for deportation or criminal prosecution and given a handbook detailing his rights, which include access to an attorney. It is a matter of dispute whether the proceedings before an immigration judge can be closed, as authorities prefer, or whether they must be open; the Supreme Court has so far declined to review the practice.
The procedures are now being adhered to more strictly, and this is what has given rise to accusations of ethnic or religious profiling. But such charges are as beside the point as in the case of domestic police work, if not more so. There is indeed a correlation between detention and ethnicity or religion, but that is because most of the countries identified as state sponsors or breeders of terrorism are, in fact, populated by Muslims and Arabs.
Stricter enforcement has also led to backlogs, as the Justice Department has proved unable to deal expeditiously with the hundreds of illegal immigrants rounded up in the aftermath of September 11. A report by the department's inspector general, released in early June, found "significant problems" with the processing of these cases. There is no question that in an ideal world, many of them would have been handled with greater dispatch, but it is also hardly surprising that problems that have long plagued our criminal justice system should reappear in the context of the fight against terrorism. In any case, the department has already taken steps to ameliorate matters. The only way for the problems to vanish would be for the authorities to cease doing their proper job; we have tried that route, and lived to regret it.
Discovery, Detention and Prosecution of Suspected Terrorists
According to civil libertarians, the constitutional safeguards that normally protect individuals suspected of criminal activity have been destroyed in the case of persons suspected of links with terrorism. This accusation reflects an ignorance both of the Constitution and of long-established limits on the criminal-justice system.
Prior to 1978, and dating back at least to World War II, attorneys general of the United States routinely authorized warrantless FBI surveillance, wire taps, and break-ins for national-security purposes. Such actions were taken pursuant to authority delegated by the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and as the officer principally responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs. The practice was justified because obtaining a warrant in each disparate case resulted in inconsistent standards and also posed unacceptable risks. (In one notorious instance, a judge had read aloud in his courtroom from highly classified material submitted to him by the government; even under more conscientious judges, clerks, secretaries and others were becoming privy to secret materials.)
Attorneys general were never entirely comfortable with these warrantless searches, whose legality had never been confirmed by the Supreme Court. The solution in 1978 was the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Henceforth, sitting district court judges would conduct secret hearings to approve or disapprove government applications for surveillance.
A further complication arose in the 1980s, however, when, by consensus of the Department of Justice and the FISA court, it was decided that the act authorized the gathering of foreign intelligence only for its own sake ("primary purpose"), and not for the possible criminal prosecution of any foreign agent. The effect was to erect a "wall" between the gathering of intelligence and the enforcement of criminal laws. But last year, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review held that the act did not, in fact, preclude or limit the government's use of that information in such prosecutions. In the opinion of the court, arresting and prosecuting terrorist agents or spies might well be the best way to inhibit their activities, as the threat of prosecution might persuade an agent to cooperate with the government, or enable the government to "turn" him.
When the wall came down, Justice Department prosecutors were able to learn what FBI intelligence officials already knew. This contributed to the arrest of Sami al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, on charges that he raised funds for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its suicide bombers. Once the evidence could be put at the disposition of prosecutors, al-Arian's longstanding claim that he was being persecuted by the authorities as an innocent victim of anti-Muslim prejudice was shattered.
Treatment of Captured Terrorists
According to critics, by depriving certain captured individuals of access to lawyers, and by holding them without filing charges, the government is violating the Geneva Convention's protections of lawful combatants or prisoners of war. This is nonsense.
Four criteria must be met to qualify a person as a lawful combatant. He must be under the command of a person responsible for his subordinates, wear a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance, carry arms openly, and conduct operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. The men the United States has captured and detained so far do not meet these criteria.
The government's policy is as follows: If a captured unlawful enemy combatant is believed to have further information about terrorism, he can be held without access to legal counsel and without charges being filed. Once the government is satisfied that it has all the relevant information it can obtain, the captive can be held until the end of hostilities, or be released, or be brought up on charges before a criminal court.
The government chose one of these options when it charged John Lindh, an American citizen who fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Zacarias Moussaoui, who is thought to have been involved in the planning for September 11, with crimes. Lindh entered into a plea agreement under which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Moussaoui's case has proved more complicated. The government proposes to use only unclassified materials in its prosecution, but Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan heritage who has admitted in open court to belonging to al Qaeda and swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden, has demanded to see classified materials and to have access to other captured terrorists for the preparation of his defense.
For obvious reasons, Moussaoui's demands are unacceptable to the government, which does not want to divulge classified information or allow terrorists to communicate with each other. But the prosecutors' offer of an alternative procedure was rejected by the presiding judge. If the government continues to be unsuccessful in its determination to protect classified information, it may decide to prosecute Moussaoui in special military tribunals created for trying terrorists. That would surely trigger the outrage of civil libertarians, even though it is plainly arguable that Moussaoui could and perhaps should have been prosecuted there in the first place. I will return to this issue below.
In a somewhat separate category from Lindh and Moussaoui, both of whom have been charged with actual crimes, are the cases of two American citizens who have been detained rather than brought to trial because the government believes they possess undivulged valuable information. Yaser Esam Hamdi remains confined to the Norfolk, Va., Naval Brig, and Jose Padilla is confined at the Consolidated Naval Brig in Charleston, S.C.. Neither man has yet been charged.
Hamdi filed a petition for habeas corpus challenging the legality of his detention. Although he was captured in Afghanistan, where he was carrying an AK-47 during a time of active military hostilities, and although he was classified by the executive branch as an unlawful enemy combatant, Hamdi claimed the full protections of the Constitution as an American citizen. He argued that his detention without charge and without access to a judicial tribunal or the right to counsel was in violation of the Fifth and 14th amendments.
The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held otherwise. Although the detention of U.S. citizens is subject to judicial review, that review must be "deferential." The Constitution explicitly confers war powers on the political branches; in going to war in Afghanistan, the president had relied both on those powers and on Congress's authorization of "all necessary and appropriate force" against nations, organizations, or persons he determined to be involved in terrorist attacks. Hamdi, the court said, was indeed an enemy combatant subject to detention. It elaborated its rationale:
The detention of enemy combatants serves at least two vital purposes. First, detention prevents enemy combatants from rejoining the enemy and continuing to fight against America and its allies. . . . In this respect, "captivity is neither a punishment nor an act of vengeance," but rather "a simple war measure."
Second, detention in lieu of prosecution may relieve the burden on military commanders of litigating the circumstances of a capture halfway around the globe. . . . As the Supreme Court has recognized [in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950)], "it would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defense at home."
Hamdi's petition was denied, as was his right of access to an attorney or to seeing government documents.
Padilla was arrested upon his arrival at Chicago's O'Hare airport from Pakistan. The government indicted him, claiming he planned acts of terrorism, including the explosion of a radioactive "dirty bomb." When, like Hamdi, he petitioned for habeas corpus, the court held similarly that "the President is authorized under the Constitution and by law to direct the military to detain enemy combatants." Nevertheless, and over the government's objection, the court said it would allow Padilla the assistance of counsel to litigate the facts surrounding his capture and detention. (The government is now appealing this.) At the same time, the court disallowed the presence of counsel at Padilla's interrogations, and averred that the government need only show "some evidence" to prevail.
Anthony Lewis went ballistic. It is, he wrote, a "fundamental truth" that an individual cannot get justice against the state without the effective help of a lawyer, and this truth was "being challenged in a way that I did not believe was possible in our country." But Mr. Lewis was completely wrong. Despite his attempt to conflate the two categories, detention is not punishment; its purpose, rather, is to prevent members of enemy forces from causing harm while hostilities are in progress. Nor is Padilla the subject of a criminal proceeding; criminal-law rules do not apply when detention of an enemy is ordered by the President under his war powers. Hundreds of thousands of lawful prisoners of war have been held by the United States without the right to a lawyer, and unlawful enemy combatants are entitled to even fewer rights.
This makes perfect sense. A judicial system with rights of due process is crucial to a free society, but it is not designed for the protection of enemies engaged in armed conflict against us. Nor can we divert resources from the conduct of a war to the trial of every POW or unlawful combatant who wants to litigate. Besides, giving someone like Padilla a lawyer would frustrate the very purpose of his detention, and place American lives in danger. A lawyer's duty, acting within the bounds of ethical behavior, is to create delay and confusion, keeping alive his client's hopes of going free. Armed with such hopes, Padilla would be all the less likely to divulge what he knew, and plans for future terrorist attacks might thereby go undetected.
It might be argued that Padilla is not like other unlawful enemy combatants because he is a U.S. citizen taken on American soil. But the Supreme Court disposed of that distinction as long ago as 1942 in Ex parte Quirin. In that case, German would-be saboteurs had entered the U.S. illegally with the intention of attacking war industries and facilities. Upon capture, they sought habeas corpus, claiming a right to trial before a regular court rather than a military tribunal. In denying the petition, the court deemed it irrelevant that one of the captives claimed U.S. citizenship and was on U.S. soil when apprehended.
This is where there is a role for military tribunals, an institution that has played an important and honorable part in American jurisprudence throughout our history. In Quirin, the court made clear that such tribunals rightly enjoy a separate constitutional track from grand juries and trial by jury, which "at the time of the adoption of the Constitution [were] familiar parts of the machinery for criminal trials in the civil courts." Quite properly, however, the procedures followed by these civil institutions were, and had to be, "unknown to military tribunals[,] which are not courts in the sense of the judiciary articles" of the Constitution.
Consistent with this understanding, military tribunals have been used by several presidents in time of war. In the Revolutionary War, before there even was a Constitution, George Washington employed them freely. So did Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War and Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. Although we remember the Nuremberg trial, with its many trappings of a civilian court, the victorious Allies did not always regard such open trials as the only or preferred method of proceeding. As the legal scholar Mark Martins reminds us, "German regular army soldiers were also defendants in many of the thousands of military courts and commissions convened by the Allies after the war in different zones of occupation."
In any event, the image of military tribunals as drumhead courts manned by stony-faced officers ready to convict regardless of the evidence is a fantasy. In reality, military courts may achieve just and equitable results more frequently than the run of civilian juries. Military judges tend to be more scrupulous in weighing evidence, in resisting emotional appeals, and in respecting the plain import of the laws. There are no Lance Itos or Johnnie Cochrans in military trials. If, as the war against the terrorists drags on, we are forced to have recourse to military tribunals, there may well be clear gains for both justice and security.
There are, to be sure, costs to be paid for going the route of military courts. It was no doubt partly out of a desire to placate critics, both at home and abroad, that President Bush first announced that U.S. citizens would be tried in our regular courts, and that the decision was made to try even Moussaoui in a federal district court. In the future, moreover, some of our allies may refuse to extradite captured terrorists if it is known they are likely to land before a military tribunal.
But the critics show every sign of being implacable, and in any case the cost of staying with the civil route is likely to be higher. In a district court a defense attorney will almost inevitably demand access to classified information; continued disclosure of such information in court would inform not only Muslim terrorists but all the world's intelligence services of the information we have and our methods of gathering it. If compromising national security is one alternative that may be forced on government by the demand for access to classified material, the other is to drop charges. Neither alternative is acceptable.
The Terrorism Information Awareness Program
Among menaces to American liberty, this has been widely held to be the most sinister of all. Here is William Safire:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every website you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend--all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you--passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance--and you have the supersnoop's dream.
What is the reality? The Terrorism Information Awareness program, or TIA, is still only in a developmental stage; we do not know whether it can even be made to work. If it can, it might turn out to be one of the most valuable weapons in America's war with terrorists.
In brief, the program would seek to identify patterns of conduct that indicate terrorist activity. This entails separating small sets of transactions from a vast universe of similar transactions. Since terrorists use the same avenues of communication, commerce, and transportation that everybody else uses, the objective is to build a prototype of an intelligence system whose purpose would be to find terrorists' signals in a "sea of noise." Taking advantage of the integrative power of computer technology, the system would allow the government to develop hypotheses about possible terrorist activity, basing itself entirely on data that are already legally available.
But we may never find out whether the program's objective can be achieved, since TIA has been effectively gutted in advance. Impressed, no doubt, by the ideological breadth of the opposition to TIA, Congress was led to adopt a vague prohibition, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, draining TIA of much of its value. The amendment specifies that the program's technology may be used for military operations outside the U.S. and for "lawful foreign intelligence activities conducted wholly against non-United States persons." By inference, TIA may therefore not be used to gather information about U.S. citizens or resident aliens--despite the clear fact that significant number of persons in these categories have ties to terrorist groups.
Writing in National Journal, Stuart Taylor Jr. has offered a hypothetical instance of how the Wyden amendment can cripple intelligence gathering. Suppose the government learns that elements of a deadly gas have been smuggled into the U.S. on flights from Germany by unidentified al Qaeda operatives during a particular time frame. A TIA-based query of foreign databases might generate a list of possible terrorists. The Wyden amendment, however, would prohibit a search for the names of any who might be Americans, and might even put beyond reach any mixed databases that happened to include Americans. It would similarly bar looking in U.S. databases for passengers on the relevant flights whose names are also on government databases of known or suspected terrorists. Likewise out of bounds would be queries directed at legally accessible commercial databases--asking, for example, about purchases of canisters suitable for the deployment of the deadly gas.
Are there techniques that could be devised to prevent TIA from becoming the playground of Mr. Safire's hypothetical supersnoop without disabling it altogether? In domestic criminal investigations, courts require warrants for electronic surveillances. As we have seen, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act also requires judicial approval of surveillances for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. While there would be no need for a warrant-like requirement in initiating a computer search, other safeguards can be imagined for TIA. Among them, according to Mr. Taylor, might be "software designs and legal rules that would block human agents from learning the identities of people whose transactions are being 'data-mined' by TIA computers unless the agents can obtain judicial warrants by showing something analogous to the 'probable cause' that the law requires to justify a wiretap."
Critics of TIA have made much of another circumstance--that the technology is being developed by a Defense Department agency known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, until recently headed by John Poindexter. A former Navy admiral, Mr. Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress in the 1980's in connection with the Iran-contra affair. It is hardly clear, however, what relevance this has to the development of software for TIA, and in any case, if and when the development succeeds, TIA will be operated by another agency.
Still another line of criticism zeroes in on constitutional issues that may arise under the First and Fourth amendments. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has already dealt with the former--protecting the free-speech rights of Americans--by providing that "no United States person may be considered a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution"; a similar provision could be made to apply to TIA. As for the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, TIA is designed to acquire information not from individuals or other entities but only from other government agencies and third parties (such as credit agencies) to which the information has already been divulged or that have themselves conducted a search. As the Supreme Court held in Smith v. Maryland (1979), an individual "has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties." We limit or waive our rights to privacy all the time, by, for example, giving financial records to a bank, filling out a public questionnaire, or dialing a phone number.
The benefits of the TIA program are palpable, and potentially invaluable; the hazards are either hyped or imaginary. There is nothing to prevent Congress from replacing the Wyden amendment with oversight provisions, or from requiring reasonable safeguards that would preserve the program's efficacy.
What Remains to Be Done
That opponents of the Bush administration's efforts to protect American security have resorted to often shameless misrepresentation and outright scaremongering does not mean those efforts are invulnerable to criticism. They are indeed vulnerable--for not going far enough.
In addition to the lack of properly targeted security procedures at airports, and the failure to resist the gutting of TIA, a truly gaping deficiency in our arrangements is the openness of our northern and southern borders to illegal entrants. In the south, reportedly, as many as 1,000 illegal aliens a day enter through Arizona's Organ Pipe National Monument, where they have become so brazen that they have cleared their own private roads. In the north, there are plenty of easily accessible and unmanned entry points from Canada. So far, Washington has not adequately responded to calls for more park-ranger staffing and military assistance, let alone addressed the lamentable condition of our immigration procedures in general.
There is, in short, plenty of work to go around. The war we are in, like no other we have ever faced, may last for decades rather than years. The enemy blends into our population and those of other nations around the world, attacks without warning, and consists of men who are quite willing to die in order to kill us and destroy our civilization. Never before has it been possible to imagine one suicidal individual, inspired by the promise of paradise and armed with a nuclear device, able to murder tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Americans in a single attack. Those facts justify what the administration has already done, and urgently require more.
Of course, to say this, or to question the arguments of critics, is to risk being accused of censorship, actual or pre-emptive, or even McCarthyism. Here is an article in the New York Times raising the alarm about statements by Attorney General John Ashcroft:
In the past, Mr. Ashcroft has gone so far as to question the loyalty of those who challenge the constitutionality of his tactics. In a defining moment in December 2001 at a Senate hearing, Mr. Ashcroft declared: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."
As it happens, "phantoms of lost liberty" is a perfectly apt description for much of the commentary that has been offered on the administration's initiatives. It is demonstrably true, moreover, that people who recklessly exaggerate the threat to our liberties in the fight against terrorism do give ammunition, moral and otherwise, to our enemies. Asserting as much does not impugn the loyalty of such people. They are perfectly free to say what they think, and as loudly as they please. But neither should they themselves be immune from criticism, even by a government official.
Mr. Bork is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Tad and Dianne Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. This article appears in the July/August issue of Commentary.
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YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE ...
Group sues feds over medical privacy
Doctors, patients, advocates claim new rules 'threaten essential liberties'
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Posted: September 6, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
A group consisting of patients, doctors and privacy advocates has filed suit in federal court charging a new government rule actually "eliminates the right to privacy" of past and future communications between doctor and patient.
In papers filed in U.S. district court in Philadelphia, the group ? Citizens for Health, represented by Washington, D.C. lawyer James Pyles ? accuses "the federal government of ignoring overwhelming public opinion to prevent the widespread use of medical records and instead implemented new regulations that threaten essential liberties guaranteed by the Constitution."
Specifically, the group alleges the new rule, which was implemented under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, of 1996, eliminates medical privacy and "jeopardizes the privacy of past and future communications between patients and their physicians."
President George W. Bush embraces Secretary of Health and Human Services and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson after speaking about healthcare reform issues at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Wis., February 11, 2002.
Under the rule, which was implemented by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson April 14, "virtually all personal health information about every aspect of an individual's life can be used and disclosed routinely without notice, without the individual's consent and against his or her will," the group said in a statement.
Some of the allegations mirror findings by the General Accounting Office, Congress' watchdog agency, which reported in July the federal government could not guarantee patients' medical privacy.
The GAO report found that of 25 federal agencies, compliance with Privacy Act requirements and those of the Office of Management and Budget ? which oversees implementation of the act ? was "uneven."
"As a result of this uneven compliance, the government cannot adequately assure the public that all legislated individual privacy rights are being protected," said the agency.
The privacy rule, which was under consideration during the Clinton administration, has been routinely criticized by health advocates as being too revealing of privacy, not protective of it. But that's a charge the government has just as regularly denied.
"From the time of Hippocrates, privacy in medical care has been of prime importance to patients and to the medical profession," Thompson said.
As electronic data transmission is becoming ingrained in our health-care system, we have new challenges to insure that medical privacy is secured. While many states have enacted laws giving differing degrees of protection, there has never before been a federal standard defining and ensuring medical privacy," he continued. "Now new federal standards are coming into force to protect the personal health information of every American patient."
But critics say the government's standards aren't the problem. Rather, they say the problem is medical records are now much too easy to access by a multitude of third parties.
Indeed, says the group, Health and Human Services' "own findings show that the rules affect the medical privacy rights of 'virtually every American,' and allows more than '600,000 entities' access to their records ?" That list includes insurance companies, banks, employers, and law enforcement agencies.
Pyles initially filed suit in April, but Thursday's filing is for summary judgment. In court documents he alleged "that HHS changed the privacy requirement, even though the agency officials had received thousands of comments from citizens urging them to preserve their rights."
"Further," he argued, "the amended privacy rule provides no opportunity or mechanism for individuals to object or refuse to have their personal health information used and disclosed for routine purposes repeatedly."
Kathyrn Serkes, public affairs counsel for the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, said the new rules are so invasive patients will need "Miranda warnings" before answering medical questions.
"While masquerading as patient protection, the rules would actually eliminate any last shred of confidentiality and risk lives," Serkes said. "The frontline defense for medical privacy always has been the patient's right to give or withhold consent to how his records are used and who sees them. These rules throw that out the window."
Pyles represents 10 national and state associations, seven individuals and two "interveners," as well as 750,000 members of the associations.
Among them, Dr. Deborah Peel ? an Austin, Texas psychiatrist who has testified before Congress on the issue of medical privacy ? says Americans should be concerned about the manner in which their rights were disregarded and their opinions discounted.
"The 'HIPAA privacy rule' was turned into a massive 'disclosure rule,'" she said.
Related stories:
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LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Group to protest 'spy chips'
Inventory technology also can be used to track consumers
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Posted: September 11, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
A consumer-protection group is planning to lead a demonstration against the introduction of electronic identification technology critics say violates basic privacy rights.
According to a statement issued by Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, opponents will protest the launch of the Electronic Product Code, or EPC, network during a Sept. 16 symposium at Chicago's McCormick Place Convention Center.
Enlarged graphic of RFID tag.
Currently, all products are identified by a series of lines and numbers via the Universal Product Code, or UPC ? which is commonly referred to as "bar coding." But industry and manufacturing leaders want to adopt the EPC network, which involves embedding computer chips that emit radio signals inside products. The signals, which can be picked up by "readers" at varied distances, will alert in-store and warehouse managers to current stock levels, streamlining product management while aiding in the prevention of theft.
But opponents of the technology say the so-called "spy chips" could also be misused by industry and government to not only identify products but also consumers who buy them. By incorporating Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, technology within the EPC network, corporations can identify shoppers as well as products.
"We have serious privacy and civil-liberties concerns about this technology. Corporations and governments could use it to register products to individuals and secretly track them after purchase," says Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of CASPIAN.
Peter Fox, a spokesman for shaving supply giant Gillette ? one of the first companies planning to use EPC technology ? downplayed concerns about civil-liberties violations.
"There seems to be a level of misunderstanding" about the use of the technology, Fox told WorldNetDaily.
Back in 1999, Fox said Gillette was "a founding sponsor" of the AutoID Center, a corporation helping to develop both barcode and EPC technology, because "our goal is ? to have our products on retail shelves where consumers can buy them."
"That may be a simple goal, but the truth of the matter is, that doesn't happen," he said. "Each year billions of dollars are lost by manufacturers and retailers because products get lost in the supply chain, and for lots of different reasons."
Data error, mistakes in inventory and outright theft are some ways products can get "lost" in the system. As the cost of covering those losses rises, so too does the cost of the product, he explained.
But Albrecht says RFID technology is much more than an "improved bar code," and she believes industry is dismissing "consumer concerns."
"These RFID spy chips can be read silently from a distance, right through your clothes, wallet, backpack or purse by anyone with the right reader device," she said. "For example, the chips can be secretly embedded in credit cards or sewn into the seams of pants where they can be used to observe people's movements without their knowledge or consent."
As WorldNetDaily reported, CASPIAN led a boycott against Gillette for the company's decision to use the technology.
Days later, Gillette renounced some uses of the technology.
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LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Gillette renounces
'smart-shelf' technology
Controversial plan called for tracking merchandise, photographing customers
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Posted: August 15, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
The Gillette Company ? the world's leading shaving-supplies manufacturer ? says it is scrapping plans to deploy its controversial "smart-shelf" product-tracking technology, which would have involved planting tiny computer chips in its product packaging and surreptitiously photographing customers.
As WorldNetDaily reported, the tracking technology, called Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, centered on small tracking chips being affixed to Gillette products. The chips can track items at a distance, even through personal items such as a purse, backpack or wallet, and have been anticipated to replace eventually the bar codes now used to track all retail items.
Close-up of RFID tag.
Gillette, a leading backer of RFID, wanted to go a step further. The company was also planning to install tiny cameras on shelves containing its products in stores, which would then photograph customers as they removed items from the shelf, consumer advocate Katherine Albrecht told WorldNetDaily last month.
However, Gillette has now decided to shelve its "smart-shelf" plans, perhaps for as long as a decade, reports the Financial Times.
The shaving supplier had ordered some 500 million of the RFID tag chips from a small California tech company, Alien Technologies. The chips were to be delivered this year, according to the Times.
"Gillette denied it had abandoned an earlier plan to use the technology in individual products on store shelves. But a spokesman said the company did not now expect RFID tags to be used to monitor individual products in stores for at least 10 years," the report said.
Rather, Gillette has now decided to place the chips on pallets of merchandise, so it can track them from warehouse to warehouse and from warehouse to store, said the Times.
In January, Gillette announced plans to use the RFID tags. "If successful, up to half a billion tags could be placed on Gillette products over the next few years," according to a company statement.
News of Gillette's plan to cancel its "smart-shelf" trials comes a day after WorldNetDaily reported a group founded by Albrecht had begun a boycott of Gillette products as a protest against RFID.
The boycott, sponsored by Albrecht's parent group, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, sought to punish Gillette for utilizing in-store and in-product technology capable of tracking buyers.
Although it's unclear to what degree, if any, Gillette's decision to abandon in-store RFID was based on the boycott, Albrecht told WorldNetDaily she "absolutely" believes it impacted the company's announcement.
"We've gotten quite a few letters and quite a few phone calls," she said. "It's been hectic."
An e-mail forwarded to WorldNetDaily by Albrecht contains a customer reply from Paul Fox, a spokesman for Gillette. In it, Fox claims the corporation is interested only in using RFID technology to monitor its "supply chain."
"We have not and have no intentions to use this technology to track, videotape or photograph consumers," Fox said in the e-mail.
Fox did not respond to inquiries by WorldNetDaily before publication of this report.
Despite Gillette's denial, Albrecht said the boycott would continue until the company completely and publicly renounces the use of the RFID tags in its individual products.
"What I'd really like to see is Gillette say they're not putting these tags in individual products because when they do, it invites abuse," said Albrecht. "If Gillette claims they have no control over [the abuse], I say sure they do ? stop putting the tags in the packages."
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Auto-ID: Tracking everything, everywhere
Katherine Albrecht, CASPIAN
[The following is an excerpt from the article, "Supermarket Cards: Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg," accepted for Publication in the Denver University Law Review, June 2002]
"In 5-10 years, whole new ways of doing things will emerge and gradually become commonplace. Expect big changes."
- MIT's Auto-ID Center
Supermarket cards and other retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel.
A new consumer goods tracking system called Auto-ID is poised to enter all of our lives, with profound implications for consumer privacy. Auto-ID couples radio frequency (RF) identification technology with highly miniaturized computers that enable products to be identified and tracked at any point along the supply chain.
The system could be applied to almost any physical item, from ballpoint pens to toothpaste, which would carry their own unique information in the form of an embedded chip. The chip sends out an identification signal allowing it to communicate with reader devices and other products embedded with similar chips.
Analysts envision a time when the system will be used to identify and track every item produced on the planet.
A number for every Item on the planet
Auto-ID employs a numbering scheme called ePC (for "electronic product code") which can provide a unique ID for any physical object in the world. The ePC is intended to replace the UPC bar code used on products today.
Unlike the bar code, however, the ePC goes beyond identifying product categories -- it actually assigns a unique number to every single item that rolls off a manufacturing line. For example, each pack of cigarettes, individual can of soda, light bulb or package of razor blades produced would be uniquely identifiable through its own ePC number.
Once assigned, this number is transmitted by a radio frequency ID tag (RFID) in or on the product. These tiny tags, predicted by some to cost less than 1 cent each by 2004, are "somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a speck of dust." They are to be built directly into food, clothes, drugs, or auto-parts during the manufacturing process.
Receiver or reader devices are used to pick up the signal transmitted by the RFID tag. Proponents envision a pervasive global network of millions of receivers along the entire supply chain -- in airports, seaports, highways, distribution centers, warehouses, retail stores, and in the home. This would allow for seamless, continuous identification and tracking of physical items as they move from one place to another, enabling companies to determine the whereabouts of all their products at all times.
Steven Van Fleet, an executive at International Paper, looks forward to the prospect. "We'll put a radio frequency ID tag on everything that moves in the North American supply chain," he enthused recently.
The ultimate goal is for Auto-ID to create a "physically linked world" in which every item on the planet is numbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked. And the technology exists to make this a reality. Described as "a political rather than a technological problem," creating a global system ?would . . . involve negotiation between, and consensus among, different countries.? Supporters are aiming for worldwide acceptance of the technologies needed to build the infrastructure within the next few years.
The implications of Auto-ID
"Theft will be drastically reduced because items will report when they are stolen, their smart tags also serving as a homing device toward their exact location." - MIT's Auto-ID Center
Since the Auto-ID Center's founding at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999, it has moved forward at remarkable speed. The center has attracted funding from some of the largest consumer goods manufacturers in the world, and even counts the Department of Defense among its sponsors. In a mid-2001 pilot test with Gillette, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, and Wal-Mart, the center wired the entire city of Tulsa, Oklahoma with radio-frequency equipment to verify its ability to track Auto-ID equipped packages.
Though many Auto-ID proponents appear focused on inventory and supply chain efficiency, others are developing financial and consumer applications that, if adopted, will have chilling effects on consumers' ability to escape the oppressive surveillance of manufacturers, retailers, and marketers. Of course, government and law enforcement will be quick to use the technology to keep tabs on citizens, as well.
The European Central Bank is quietly working to embed RFID tags in the fibers of Euro bank notes by 2005. The tag would allow money to carry its own history by recording information about where it has been, thus giving governments and law enforcement agencies a means to literally "follow the money" in every transaction. If and when RFID devices are embedded in banknotes, the anonymity that cash affords in consumer transactions will be eliminated.
Hitachi Europe wants to supply the tags. The company has developed a smart tag chip that -- at just 0.3mm square and as thin as a human hair -- can easily fit inside of a banknote. Mass-production of the new chip will start within a year.
Consumer marketing applications will decimate privacy
"Radio frequency is another technology that supermarkets are already using in a number of places throughout the store. We now envision a day where consumers will walk into a store, select products whose packages are embedded with small radio frequency UPC codes, and exit the store without ever going through a checkout line or signing their name on a dotted line."
Jacki Snyder, Manager of Electronic Payments for Supervalu (Supermarkets), Inc., and Chair, Food Marketing Institute Electronic Payments Committee
Auto-ID would expand marketers' ability to monitor individuals' behavior to undreamt of extremes. With corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart, Target, the Food Marketing Institute, Home Depot, and British supermarket chain Tesco, as well as some of the world's largest consumer goods manufacturers including Proctor and Gamble, Phillip Morris, and Coca Cola it may not be long before Auto-ID-based surveillance tags begin appearing in every store-bought item in a consumer's home.
According to a video tour of the "Home of the Future" and "Store of the Future" sponsored by Proctor and Gamble, applications could include shopping carts that automatically bill consumer's accounts (cards would no longer be needed to link purchases to individuals), refrigerators that report their contents to the supermarket for re-ordering, and interactive televisions that select commercials based on the contents of a home's refrigerator.
Now that shopper cards have whetted their appetite for data, marketers are no longer content to know who buys what, when, where, and how. As incredible as it may seem, they are now planning ways to monitor consumers' use of products within their very homes. Auto-ID tags coupled with indoor receivers installed in shelves, floors, and doorways, could provide a degree of omniscience about consumer behavior that staggers the imagination.
Consider the following statements by John Stermer, Senior Vice President of eBusiness Market Development at ACNielsen:
"[After bar codes] [t]he next 'big thing' [was] [f]requent shopper cards. While these did a better job of linking consumers and their purchases, loyalty cards were severely limited...consider the usage, consumer demographic, psychographic and economic blind spots of tracking data.... omething more integrated and holistic was needed to provide a ubiquitous understanding of on- and off-line consumer purchase behavior, attitudes and product usage. The answer: RFID (radio frequency identification) technology.... In an industry first, RFID enables the linking of all this product information with a specific consumer identified by key demographic and psychographic markers....Where once we collected purchase information, now we can correlate multiple points of consumer product purchase with consumption specifics such as the how, when and who of product use."
Marketers aren't the only ones who want to watch what you do in your home. Enter again the health surveillance connection. Some have suggested that pill bottles in medicine cabinets be tagged with Auto-ID devices to allow doctors to remotely monitor patient compliance with prescriptions.
While developers claim that Auto-ID technology will create "order and balance" in a chaotic world, even the center's executive director, Kevin Ashton, acknowledges there's a "Brave New World" feel to the technology. He admits, for example, that people might balk at the thought of police using Auto-ID to scan the contents of a car's trunk without needing to open it. The Center's co-director, Sanjay E. Sarma, has already begun planning strategies to counter the public backlash he expects the system will encounter.
******
Sources:
This passage has 27 footnoted references associated with it. I will be happy to send a copy of the entire article, including footnotes and references, as an email attachment on request.
http://www.nocards.org/AutoID/overview.shtml
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RFID blocker may ease privacy fears
Richard Shim
CNET News.com
August 28, 2003, 11:05 BST
Tell us your opinion
RSA Security will develop technology that jams the signals emitted by radio frequency identification tags
Researchers at a major security firm have developed a blocking technique to ease privacy concerns surrounding controversial radio frequency identification technology.
The labs at RSA Security on Wednesday outlined plans for a technology they call blocker tags, which are similar in size and cost to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags but disrupt the transmission of information to scanning devices and thwart the collection of data.
The technique, one of few RFID-blocking technologies being worked on by researchers, is still a concept in the labs. But the next step is to develop prototype chips and see if manufacturers are interested in making the processors, according to Ari Juels, a principal research scientist with RSA Laboratories. Blocker and RFID tags are about the size of a grain of sand and cost around 10 cents.
RFID technology uses microchips to wirelessly transmit product serial numbers to a scanner without the need for human intervention. While the technology is potentially useful in improving supply chain management and preventing theft in stores, consumer privacy groups have voiced concerns about possible abuses of the technology if product-tracking tags are allowed to follow people from stores into their homes. Many retailers view RFID as an eventual successor to the barcode inventory tracking system, because it promises to cut distribution costs for manufacturers and improve retailing margins.
RSA's technique would address the needs of all parties involved, according to Juels. Other options, such as a kill feature embedded in RFID tags, also are available, but with blocker tags, consumers and companies would still be able to use the RFID tags without sacrificing privacy.
"This is not meant to be a hostile tool," Juels said. "It balances consumer privacy and retail use in a profitable way... Tags are too useful to completely disable them."
Retailers have been testing how to use RFID technology in their warehouses to improve inventory management and have dipped their toes into product-level tracking.
Juels said that he foresees a day when tags in clothes can tell washing machines the proper way they need to be washed.
The idea isn't to disable RFID tags, but instead to disrupt the transmission of certain information to scanning devices when consumers want privacy. Blocker tags could be embedded in watches or bags.
Juels said the issue of privacy with regards to RFID technology has been overblown but that there is a need to establish how to best address those concerns before the technology becomes more prevalent.
"If we don't think of it now, it will be more difficult in the future," he said.
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http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/FBI_eyes/index.html
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NEWS FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY
2600 Virginia Avenue, NW, Suite 100
Washington DC 20037
World Wide Web: http://www.LP.org ====================================
For release: October 16, 2003 ====================================
For additional information:
George Getz, Communications Director
Phone: (202) 333-0008
====================================
America owes talk host Rush Limbaugh a debt of gratitude, Libertarians say
WASHINGTON, DC -- The entire nation owes radio broadcaster Rush
Limbaugh a debt of gratitude, Libertarians say, because his ordeal has
exposed every drug warrior in America as a rank hypocrite.
"One thing we don't hear from American politicians very often is
silence," said Joe Seehusen, Libertarian Party executive director. "By
refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been
exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite. And that's good news,
because the next time they do speak up, there'll be no reason for
anyone to listen."
The revelation that Limbaugh had become addicted to painkillers --
drugs he is accused of procuring illegally from his housekeeper -- has
caused a media sensation ever since the megastar's shocking, on-air
confession last week.
As the Limbaugh saga continues, here's an important question for
Americans to ask, Libertarians say: Why are all the drug warriors
suddenly so silent?
"Republican and Democratic politicians have written laws that have
condemned more than 400,000 Americans to prison for committing the same 'crime' as Rush Limbaugh," Seehusen pointed out. "If this pill-popping pontificator deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card, these drug warriors had better explain why."
Given their longstanding support for the Drug War, it's fair to ask:
Why haven't President George Bush or his tough-on-crime attorney
general, John Ashcroft, uttered a word criticizing Limbaugh's law- breaking?
Why aren't drug czar John P. Walters or his predecessor, Barry
McCaffrey, lambasting Limbaugh as a menace to society and a threat to
"our children?"
Why aren't federal DEA agents storming Limbaugh's $30 million Florida
mansion in a frantic search for criminal evidence?
Why haven't federal, state, and local police agencies seized the
celebrity's homes and luxury cars under asset-forfeiture laws?
Finally, why aren't bloviating blabbermouths like William Bennett
publicly explaining how America would be better off if Limbaugh were
prosecuted, locked in a steel cage and forced to abandon his wife, his
friends, and his career?
The answer is obvious, Seehusen said: "America's drug warriors are
shameless hypocrites who believe in one standard of justice for
ordinary Americans and another for themselves, their families and their
political allies.
"That alone should completely discredit them."
But there's an even more disturbing possibility, Seehusen said: that
the people who are prosecuting the Drug War don't even believe in its
central premise -- which is that public safety requires that drug users
be jailed.
"The Bushes and Ashcrofts and McCaffreys of the world may believe,
correctly, that individuals fighting a drug addiction deserve medical,
not criminal treatment," he said. "That would explain why they're not
demanding that Limbaugh be jailed.
"But if that's the case, these politicians have spent decades tearing
apart American families for their own political gain. And that's an
unforgivable crime."
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The Libertarian Party http://www.lp.org/
2600 Virginia Ave. NW, Suite 100 voice: 202-333-0008
Washington DC 20037 fax: 202-333-0072
-
YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE
U.S. foreign travelers
to be fingerprinted
Critics assail plan as ineffective,
serious threat to civil liberties
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Posted: November 13, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Sherrie Gossett
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Some 25 foreign nations are planning to require visiting Americans to be fingerprinted, according to a prominent biometrics expert and president of the company that produces the computerized desktop booking stations used by many law enforcement authorities.
The plans to screen American travelers represent a form of retaliation against new U.S. Department of Homeland Security requirements for foreign travelers entering the country, said Joseph J. Atick, president and chief executive officer of Identix, Inc., a biometrics company that won a five-year blanket purchase agreement for its TouchPrint 3000 line fingerprint biometric live scan booking stations and desktop systems, which will be provided to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Atick made the statement at a recent Biometrics Consortium Conference in Virginia.
The CIS anticipates expanding the Application Support Centers Program in 2004 to worldwide operations on up to five continents. The overseas ASC Program will allow biometrics capture for background checks prior to an applicant entering the United States.
WND asked Identix spokesperson Meir Kahtan for a transcript of the address, which reportedly referenced the ?25 countries.? Kahtan responded that there was no transcript or audio record available. Dr. Atick?s powerpoint presentation foresees entry/exit systems throughout the world as an significant opportunity for identification management development.
Kahtan did not respond to other WND inquiries about Atick?s comments, including the time frame for implementation of the program and whether Identix was to be the lead provider of equipment for foreign efforts to fingerprint American travelers.
WND asked Nuala O?Connor Kelly, chief privacy officer for Homeland Security, to verify the report. Kelly deferred comment to the DHS press office, adding, ?The questions you're asking call for conjecture about activities that are beyond the scope of DHS's purview, but that are rather the activities of other countries, and so beyond the scope of my ability to answer.?
Nuala O?Connor Kelly was a moderator at the Biometrics 2003 convention.
On October 29, Homeland Security director Tom Ridge told a Berlin news conference that an agreement between America and Europe on ways to combine fingerprints and facial recognition in travel documents could lead to a global standard.
When asked whether DHS was aware of the plan, spokesman Dennis Murphy told WND, "I?m not personally aware of that," but added, "I?m not surprised. There's an ICAO standard for machine-readable passports that need to be linked to biometrics by October 2004. Optical finger scans will be linked to a database."
When asked whether data collected abroad, including Americans? travel itineraries and fingerprints, would be shared with U.S. agencies, Murphy deferred to the U.S. State Department, saying, "All that would have to go through State Department protocol and agreements as to which information comes back ? if so."
Atick?s PowerPoint slides from Biometrics 2003 reference "Building and linking databases to uncover identities that could pose a threat," and include a graphic of a smart-card information being routed through FBI and Interpol databases.
State Department spokesperson Joann Moore would not comment on whether her department or other federal agencies would be able to obtain the data from foreign countries.
About the plan to fingerprint American travelers abroad, Moore said, "Each country has its own regulations on how it processes travelers. That would be up to the countries," adding, "Maybe we'll know more when it happens."
When pressed for more details, Moore said the Bureau of Consular Affairs could give out no more information at this time, "about countries that are considering doing this."
Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, isn?t surprised Americans will be fingerprinted ? a procedure traditionally reserved for criminals ? and warns that employing biometric systems without sufficient attention to their dangers makes them likely to be used in a way that threatens civil liberties.
?When it comes to terrorism versus ordinary crime we have extremely sparse information on terrorism,? Tien said, ?There isn?t anything even remotely resembling a solid biometric list of known or suspected terrorists.?
Tien argues that such a system can facilitate the positive identification of someone who is not a terrorist, but adds, ?It?s no help with threat identification, where we have all the problems.?
That conclusion was also reached by the General Accounting Office.
Homeland Security's Murphy contends that biometrics ?back up the integrity? of travel documents and prevent alteration of machine-readable passports.
But the EFF argues that a terrorist with a fake passport would be issued a U.S. visa with his own biometric attached to the name on the phony passport.
?Unless the terrorist has already entered his biometrics into the database, and has garnered enough suspicion at the border to merit a full database search, biometrics won't stop him at the border,? said Tien.
Tien?s organization contends that biometrics do not represent a substitute for quality data about potential risks. No matter how accurately a person is identified, EFF argues, identification alone reveals nothing about whether a person is a terrorist. Such information is completely external to any biometric ID system.
The lack of a well-considered threat model has been a focus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation?s opposition to certain uses of biometrics.
Before deploying any such system on the national stage, EFF emphasizes that a realistic threat model must be obtained, specifying the categories of people such systems are supposed to target, and the threat they pose in light of their abilities, resources, motivations and goals.
?What if the terrorists don?t come in through the checkpoints?? asks Tien. ?How hard is it for a dedicated terrorist to get on shore if they want to??
He adds, that the notoriously porous Mexican border and the exemption of Canada from the program ?makes a mockery of the notion that this is for security.?
Although the excuse for exempting Canada was one of practicality vs. commerce concerns arising from feared traffic snarls, Tien chastised the government for failing to conduct adequate cost-benefit analyses.
Even Homeland Security's Murphy calls the press reports of potential traffic snarls and disrupted commerce along the Canadian border ?folklore.?
?It only adds about 4 seconds to processing time, since the document would be swiped as the border guard is asking questions they routinely ask anyway,? explained Murphy.
Ironically, Rep. John M. McHugh, R-NY, recently met with Delegate General Michel Robitaille of Quebec to discuss rising concerns about traffic snarls arising from the Canadian government?s apparent understaffing of New York border crossings, such as crossings at Champlain-Lacolle and Landsdowne.
At Champlain-Lacolle, a recent backlog of cars at the Canadian checkpoint can apparently be attributed to the availability of only one open inspection lane and the low number of Canadian inspection agents stationed at the border. The Canadian government is said to be planning significant upgrades at its border crossings, specifically in Lacolle
In addition to being ineffective and the Canadian-Mexican border leaks, Tien warns of the privacy threats of such a system.
?It becomes very easy to track innocent people,? he said. ?The government?s fragmented attempts to address physical security issues are resulting in ?solutions? that will be heavily sucking in data about people.?
Political pressure for increasing use of biometrics appears to be informed and driven more by marketing from the biometrics industry than by scientists, EFF asserts.
David Ray, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, supports the program and the fingerprinting of Americans overseas.
?Visiting a country is a privilege, not a right,? Ray said, contending that such checks are a reasonable ?cost? of international travel.
Ray is also highly critical of the Canadian exemption though, calling it ?very risky.?
?Canada is known as a place where it?s easy to make asylum claims, and where persons with terrorist affiliations reside,? he said.
Asian smuggling rings operating in the Vancouver area, and the possibility of obtaining fake Canadian drivers? licenses were also cited as concerns.
?We?ve got 9 to 11 million illegal immigrants in the country that we know nothing about,? Ray said, ?There?s been no criminal background check of them, no running of their identities against a terrorist database. US officials are not very interested in detecting and deporting these people.?
?Iraq has more secure borders,? said Ray, ?That $87 billion should?ve gone to securing our borders before we spent a dime in Iraq.?
?We don?t seem to be able to lock our own back door. We?ll just be tracking people who want to play by the rules.?
At the Biometrics 2003 conference, Atick noted that the ?privacy pendulum? has shifted ?over the last two years,? and, that after Sept. 11, 80 percent of people polled supported biometrics and ID cards. He also noted the majority of privacy complaints were with the USA Patriot Act and its alteration of wire-tapping, subpoena and disclosure law.
Looking forward, Atick noted that building certain testing databases ?may require changes in law,? and he predicts that identity management with biometrics will keep the industry and government busy for the next decade.
Illustrating the close relationship between the biometrics industry and the U.S. government, Atick pointed out, ?Without NSA, DARPA, DOJ, NIST, etc. the biometric industry today would be a decade or two behind.?
So what does the biometrics industry expect from its relationship to government in the future?
According to Atick: ?Unwavering commitment to programs despite election-year politics.?
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There's only to be more and more of reports like this one people-- Crafty
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LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Wal-Mart used microchip to track customers
High-tech devices monitor product from manufacturer's headquarters
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: November 15, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Wal-Mart customers who picked up lipstick off the shelf at a Broken-Arrow, Okla., store were part of a little-mentioned experiment earlier this year that tracked consumer habits using Radio Frequency Identification technology, or RFID.
Proctor & Gamble teamed with the retail giant in the test over a four month-period which allowed researchers to view the Wal-Mart shelves from company headquarters some 750 miles away in Cincinnati, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Also, the Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick had RFID tags hidden inside that allowed the inventory to be tracked leaving the shelves.
The Chicago paper said it was informed of the study by a disgruntled P&G employee.
Wal-Mart first denied the test, but then admitted it had allowed customers to be watched.
A P&G spokeswoman said a sign at the Lipfinity display "alerted customers that closed-circuit televisions and electronic merchandise security systems are in place in the store," the Sun-Times reported.
She insisted the system could only track lipstick leaving the shelves. Once the product was taken away, it would be out of range.
A privacy rights group, however, has called for mandatory labeling of the products with RFID chips.
"On the surface, the Broken Arrow trial may seem harmless," Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, told the Sun-Times. "But the truth is that the businesses involved pushed forward with this technology in secret, knowing full well that consumers are overwhelmingly opposed to it."
As WorldNetDaily reported, Gillette, the nation's largest shaving-products manufacturer, planned to conduct a trial of RFID last summer at a Brockton, Mass., Wal-Mart store.
The plan called for Gillette to embed a tiny microchip in each of its products so store managers could track Gillette store stock and alert them if products were running low. Eventually, say critics, the technology could be used to literally track products from store shelves to homes.
However, according to the Washington Times, Wal-Mart abandoned its "smart shelf" experiment for the time being. Instead, the paper said, the retailer would incorporate RFID technology at each of its 103 distribution centers around the country to monitor inventory.
The decision, said the Times, came after Albrecht and CASPIAN called for a letter-writing campaign against Wal-Mart. But retailer spokesman Tom Williams denied that was the motivation for Wal-Mart changing its "smart shelf" plans.
"We didn't cancel anything. We just didn't follow through with this particular idea," he told the paper.
But the Times report said other large retailers, such as Target and Home Depot, were testing the RFID technology to monitor inventory in their storerooms and distribution centers.
Wal-Mart and the U.S. Department of Defense have been the biggest boosters of the technology.
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Bio-chip implant arrives
for cashless transactions
Announcement at global security confab unveils syringe-injectable ID microchip
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: November 21, 2003
7:42 p.m. Eastern
By Sherrie Gossett
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
At a global security conference held today in Paris, an American company announced a new syringe-injectable microchip implant for humans, designed to be used as a fraud-proof payment method for cash and credit-card transactions.
The chip implant is being presented as an advance over credit cards and smart cards, which, absent biometrics and appropriate safeguard technologies, are subject to theft, resulting in identity fraud.
Identity fraud costs the banking and financial industry some $48 billion a year, and consumers $5 billion, according to 2002 Federal Trade Commission estimates.
Verichip portable reader
In his speech today at the ID World 2003 conference in Paris, France, Scott R. Silverman, CEO of Applied Digital Solutions, called the chip a "loss-proof solution" and said that the chip's "unique under-the-skin format" could be used for a variety of identification applications in the security and financial worlds.
The company will have to compete, though, with organizations using just a fingerprint scan for similar applications.
The ID World Conference, held yesterday and today at the Charles de Gaulle Hilton, focused on current and future applications of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies, biometrics, smart cards and data collection.
The company's various "VeriChips" are RFID chips, which contain a unique identification number and can carry other personal data about the implantee. When radio-frequency energy passes from a scanner, it energizes the chip, which is passive (not independently powered), and which then emits a radio-frequency signal transmitting the chip's information to the reader, which in turn links with a database.
ADS has previously touted its radio frequency identification (RFID) chips for secure building access, computer access, storage of medical records, anti-kidnapping initiatives and a variety of law-enforcement applications. The company has also developed proprietary hand-held readers and portal readers that can scan data when an implantee enters a building or room.
Verichip pocket reader
The "cashless society" application is not new ? it has been discussed previously by Applied Digital. Today's speech, however, represented the first formal public announcement by the company of such a program.
In announcing VeriPay to ID World delegates, Silverman stated the implant has "enormous marketplace potential" and invited banking and credit companies to partner with VeriChip Corporation (a subsidiary of ADS) in developing specific commercial applications beginning with pilot programs and market tests.
Applied Digital's announcement in Paris suggested wireless technologies, RFID development, new software solutions, smart-card applications and subdermal implants might one day merge as the ultimate solution for a world fraught with identity theft, threatened by terrorism, buffeted by cash-strapped governments and law-enforcement agencies looking for easy data-collection, and corporations interested in the marketing bonanza that cutting-edge identification, payment, and location-based technologies can afford.
Verichip
Cashless payment systems are now part of a larger technology development subset: government identification experiments that seek to combine cashless payment applications with national ID information on media (such as a "smart" card), which contain a whole host of government, personal, employment and commercial data and applications on a single, contactless RFID chip.
In some scenarios, government-corporate coalitions are advocating such a chip be used by employees also to access entry to their workplace and the company computer network, reducing the cost outlay of the corporations for individual ID cards.
Malaysia's "MyKad" national ID "smart" card is the foremost example.
Meanwhile, privacy advocates have expressed concern over RFID technology rollouts, citing database concerns and the specter of individuals' RFID chips being read without permission by people who have their own hand-held readers.
Several privacy and civil liberties groups have recently called for a voluntary moratorium on RFID tagging "until a formal technology assessment process involving all stakeholders, including consumers, can take place." Signatories to the petition include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy International and the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a British think tank.
Commenting on today's announcement, Richard Smith, a computer industry consultant, referred to what some "netizens" are already calling "chipectomies": "VeriChips can still be stolen. It's just a bit gruesome when to think how the crooks will do these kinds of robberies."
Citing MasterCard's PayPass, Smith pointed out that most of the major credit-card companies are looking at RFID chips to make credit cards quicker, easier, and safer to use.
"The big problem is money," said Smith. "It will take billions of dollars to upgrade the credit-card networks from magstripe readers to RFID readers. During the transition, a credit card is going to need both a magstripe and an RFID chip so that it is universally accepted."
Some industry professionals advocate having citizens pay for combined national ID/cashless pay chips, which would be embedded in a chosen medium.
Identification technologies using RFID can take a wide variety of physical forms and show no sign yet of coalescing into a single worldwide standard.
Prior to today's announcement, Art Kranzley, senior vice president at MasterCard, commented on the Pay Pass system in a USA Today interview: "We're certainly looking at designs like key fobs. It could be in a pen or a pair of earrings. Ultimately, it could be embedded in anything ? someday, maybe even under the skin."
Related stories:
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Global Eye -- Naked Gun
By Chris Floyd
Don't kid yourself -- and don't let them kid you. When they come at you with that pious sugar, telling you how they're going to protect you, secure you, keep you free, you better run and check the back door ? because that's where their goons will be breaking in.
Last week, the U.S. Congress approved an expansion of FBI powers that will allow Attorney General John Ashcroft's federal police to arbitrarily seize records from a range of private businesses without bothering a judge or grand jury with any silly-billy nonsense about evidence or even suspicion of criminal intent. All Ashcroft's boys have to do is say, "Boo! Terrorism!" and they can take whatever they want.
This expansion of Patriot (sic) Act powers was smuggled into the funding bill for the Bush Regime's security organs. Although the FBI is technically under the supervision of the Judiciary committees, Bushist bagmen in Congress routed the measure through the secret sessions of the intelligence committees to avoid any public debate, Wired Magazine reports.
As usual, the power grab was accompanied by earnest pledges that it would only be used in the most extreme cases of genuine terrorist danger. This was also the line given out when the Patriot (sic) Act was first passed in 2001. Ashcroft -- who is so holy that he had his daddy pour cooking oil over his head after his 1994 election to the Senate to signify that he, like King David, had been anointed with the Lord's "dominion over men" -- solemnly swore that the draconian measures would never be applied to anything but dire threats to the national security.
This was, of course, the usual load of mule manure we've come to expect from the incontinently mendacious Regime. Witness the scene in Las Vegas this month, where Ashcroft's agents invoked the Patriot (sic) Act's anti-terrorism powers to run roughshod over due process in a local probe of a lap-dancing joint. The club owner was suspected of offering bribes to Vegas officials to win approval of a law allowing a more hands-on approach between dancers and customers, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. While the case had nothing to do with terrorism, obviously the very thought of naked flesh being fondled constituted a dire threat to the national security in Ashcroft's oily mind. And obviously, nothing will prevent Ashcroft and his minions from using the Act to pursue any other personal bee that's buzzing in their fully armed federal bonnets.
While Ashcroft's sexual anxieties are mildly amusing (last year he installed an $8,000 curtain to hide the wantonly bare breast of a statue at his Washington headquarters), there's a far more sinister side to this corrosion of America's few remaining liberties. For the very day after the Congressional rubberstamps gave their Viagra-like boost to the FBI's reach, another legislative committee released its report on "one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement" -- the FBI's eager participation in Mob murders, carried out with the full knowledge and approval of the highest levels of government, The New York Times reports
It began in the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover, the cross-dressing martinet who reigned supreme in Washington for decades, blackmailing presidents, wiretapping dissidents (his sex tapes of Martin Luther King Jr. were said to be a particular favorite) and generally playing merry hell with American liberties all across the board. In the 1960s, the FBI formed a partnership with a Boston gangland outfit, using its hitmen as informants to finger other gangs. It was a sweet deal for both parties: the Bureau got high-profile collars for its PR mill, and the gangsters got to knock off their enemies with the blessing -- and cover -- of the biggest "roof" around: the U.S. government.
Not only did the FBI cover for its pet killers; agents actually allowed four men to be convicted (two of them sentenced to execution) for a murder that Hoover knew had been committed by one of his "informants." Two of the innocent men died in prison; the others were freed after serving 30 years of hard time. In all, the FBI's informants murdered more than 20 people in Boston -- "often with the help of FBI agents," noted the Congressional report. And lest you think this blood work was just something from the "bad old days," consider this: the FBI-Mob death squad was still operative at least as late as 1995, when a helpful fed tipped off Boston's top mobster, Whitey Bulger, before he could be arrested by some nonmobbed cops. Whitey is still at large -- and presumably still enjoying the shelter of his trusty "roof."
And by the way, not a single FBI agent has ever been arrested -- or even disciplined -- for their part in this murderous enterprise.
So don't kid yourself that these new powers won't be abused. They will. Power -- the armed power of the state, the power over life, death and the liberty of the individual -- will always go just as far as you let it. It will trample every ethical and moral boundary, pour itself into every nook and cranny of life, public and private, seeking dominance at every level -- unless you maintain a rigorous system of checks and balances to balk the flow of power, frustrate it, channel it, disperse it, subject it to reason, humanize it.
But in the militarized, one-party state of Bushist America, where law is scorned and reason has fled, those restraints are being swept aside. The back door is wide open.
Annotations
FBI Let Innocents Get Death Sentences
New York Times, Nov. 22, 2003
Congress Expands FBI Spying Power
Wired, Nov. 24, 2003
Corruption Investigation: FBI Used Anti-Terrorism Law
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 4, 2003
FBI Hoover's Long Shadow Looms
Pacific News Service, Nov. 25, 2003
Mission Creep Hits Home
Los Angeles Times, Nov. 23, 2003
Lawmakers Approve Extension of FBI Powers
New York Times, Nov. 19, 2003
Patriot Act Said Misued in Vegas
Washington Times, Nov. 11, 2003
Terrorism Law Used on Vegas Vice Lord
The Guardian, Nov. 7, 2003
Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress
Common Dreams, Nov. 21, 2003
FBI Eye on the Antiwar Guy
Antiwar.com, Nov. 24, 2003
The Miami Model: Paramilitaries, Embedded Journalists and Illegal Protests
Democracy Now, Nov. 24, 2003
The War on Dissent
Common Dreams, Nov. 25, 2003
Unraveling the Constitution
TomDispatch, Nov. 25, 2003
Gulag Americana
CounterPunch, Nov. 24, 2003
Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack
Newsmax, Nov. 20, 2003
The Coalition of the Shilling
Progressive Review, November 2003
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The US military: A creeping civilian mission
By David Isenberg
It seems that the United States military coup of 2012 has arrived about 10
years early. Well, okay, not the full-fledged classic coup, led by a general
on horseback. But, as they say, close enough for government work.
First, more about that coup. In 1992, a then little-known deputy staff judge advocate lieutenant-colonel by the name of Charles J Dunlap Jr published an article titled "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012" (1) in the US Army War College's military journal Parameters. In a plot that was a cross between Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and the movie The Siege, he depicted an America in which a military coup had taken place in the year 2012, and General Thomas E T Brutus, commander-in-chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the United States, occupies the White House as permanent military plenipotentiary. A senior retired officer of the military is one of those arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup. Prior to his execution, he discusses the origins of the coup, arguing that it was the outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992. These trends were the massive diversion of military forces to civilian use, the monolithic unification of the armed forces, and the insularity of the military community.
While Dunlap, now a brigadier-general at the Air Combat Command, has not weighed in on this recently, the last two trends have been evident for many years. The Goldwater-Nichols reforms passed by Congress in the 1980s greatly strengthened jointness among the traditionally separate armed forces and the increasingly conservative and republican nature of the armed forces, which is well documented by journalists and academics.
But a report in the November 23 Los Angeles Times by respected military
affairs analyst William Arkin provides the latest evidence that the
supposedly inviolate wall keeping the military out of traditional civilian
activities is eroding, due the diversion of the military to civilian
missions.
That wall is embodied in the US by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, enacted to preclude federal troops from doing the bidding of local politicians in the occupied South following the Civil War. It prohibits the military from conducting domestic law enforcement operations. Congress wanted to make it crystal clear, as Richard Nixon might have said, that there is a great difference in a democracy between protecting our nation from foreign attack and policing our neighborhoods. But the law also allows Congress and the president to make exceptions, and over the years they have done so.
They did so notably in the 1980s in the Ronald Reagan era when the US
military was dragged kicking and screaming into counter-drug operations.
Ironically, then defense secretary Caspar Weinberger wrote in 1985,
"Reliance on military forces to accomplish civilian tasks is detrimental to
both military readiness and the democratic process."
On May 20, 1997, a Marine anti-drug squad stalked, shot and allowed to bleed to death Ezequiel Hernandez, an 18-year-old high school sophomore, while he was herding goats near his home in Redford Texas, near the Rio Grande River, the site of heavy military drug interdiction activity. Hernandez's death was the first fatal shooting of a US civilian since the military began anti-drug missions in the 1980s and is the first American killed by soldiers on US soil since the 1970 National Guard killings of four students at Kent State during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
In fact, Congress already has passed several laws relaxing the strictures of the act in order to deal with potential attacks on American soil. In 1997,
Congress gave the Pentagon authority to cooperate with the Justice
Department in responding to biological or chemical attacks. Another law
gives the president authority in an emergency to use the armed forces to
perform work "essential for the preservation of life and property". Another allows military personnel to assist the Justice Department in collecting intelligence or conducting searches and seizures if "necessary for the immediate protection of human life". Section 104 of the USA Patriot Act passed last year further authorizes the emergency use of the military in "case of attack with a weapon of mass destruction".
Taken together, all these measures give the president authority to use the
military in most conceivable emergency situations. But after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Pentagon picked up extra responsibilities focused on preventing future terrorist attacks on US soil. US Air Force pilots were and are now authorized to shoot down commercial airliners, if necessary. The Air National Guard flew thousands of combat air patrols (Operation Noble Eagle)over major American cities
Some US military officials want to put unmanned aerial vehicles in the skies above the continental US to conduct surveillance and intelligence
operations. The North American Aerospace Defense Command wants to use a high-altitude airship to detect cruise missiles and monitor vessels and other potential threats approaching the continent.
Initially, the Pentagon expanded the role of the US Joint Forces Command
(JFCOM), giving it additional authority to coordinate and deploy military
forces to fight terrorism in the continental US. The commander was placed in charge of the land and maritime defense of the continental US, as well as providing military assistance to civil authorities. JFCOM already was responsible for providing support to civilian authorities responding to
attacks or disasters, and for planning the land and maritime defense of the continental US. Now, it would also have the power to deploy military forces domestically to fight terrorism and defend the homeland, an authority previously left to the defense secretary.
But this was deemed unwieldy, and thus led to the creation of the Northern Command, an organization that consolidates all existing military homeland defense and security operations. Concerns about possible violations of the Posse Comitatus Act caused Congress, in the 2002 Defense Authorization Act, to "conduct a study on the appropriate role of the Department of Defense with respect to homeland security".
Last year, however, the Bush administration's Homeland Security strategy
document said: "The threat of catastrophic terrorism requires a thorough
review of the laws permitting the military to act within the United States
in order to determine whether domestic preparedness and response efforts would benefit from greater involvement of military personnel and, if so, how."
Since then the Defense Department also has been inserted into two very
visible new agencies. It transferred about 50 new employees in the new
Department of Homeland Security to the White House's newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which is designed to make sure the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation share information.
At Homeland Security's United States Northern Command (Northcom)
headquarters at the Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, more than 200 people will be engaged in gathering domestic intelligence, receiving information from local and state police as well as US intelligence agencies.
But as Arkin's article makes clear, Northcom is doing more than mere
coordinating. "Under the banner of 'homeland security', the military and
intelligence communities are implementing far-reaching changes that blur the lines between terrorism and other kinds of crises and will break down
long-established barriers to military action and surveillance within the
US."
According to Arkin, Northcom has defined three levels of operations, each of which triggers a larger set of authorized activities. The levels are
"extraordinary", "emergency" and "temporary". During emergencies, the
military can provide similar support, mostly in response to specific events
such as the attacks on the World Trade Center. It is only in the case of
extraordinary domestic operations that the unique capabilities of the
Defense Department are deployed. These include not just such things as air patrols to shoot down hijacked planes or the defusing of bombs and other explosives, but also bringing in intelligence collectors, special operators and even full combat troops.
Some say this is nothing new. In a speech to the Council on Foreign
Relations in January, former US senator Gary Hart said American founders "created such an army and called it the militia: citizen-soldiers under the immediate command of the various states that can be deployed in times of emergency. Since the late 19th century these militias have been known as the National Guard, and they were created and given constitutional status as the first responders and the first line of defense in the case of an attack on our homeland".
Indeed, on December 2 Paul McHale, former Democratic congressman and now the Defense Department's assistant secretary for homeland defense, said at the Defense Manufacturing Conference in Washington that military studies of potential domestic terrorist attacks have determined that the National Guard should not only protect the defense industrial base but also critical infrastructure that has previously been defended by civilian law enforcement agencies.
In the future, the National Guard will be the lead organization that
coordinates military and civilian responses to terrorist threats and attacks
against some critical infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants, McHale
said.
He also said the Pentagon reviewed the Posse Comitatus Act and determined that it would not be a violation to deploy the National Guard to protect critical infrastructure in some circumstances. He said he expects more presidential directives in the future to expand the military's homeland defense role.
But the same basic concerns about military involvement still remain
relevant. From a civil liberties viewpoint, while members of the armed
forces take an oath to uphold and defend the constitution, they are not
trained, like the police, to uphold Americans' rights to privacy and due
process. Civil libertarians' fears about due process have been heightened
since September 11 by the indefinite detention of citizens and immigrants,
and by proposals to try them before secret military tribunals.
Note:
(1) The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
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" yes, you would like to make government smaller, but your desire to stay in power is larger. "
What is the difference between Republicans and Socialists? Socialists confess that the will make Government bigger. ;-)
Bob
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1391
Power Over Principle
by James Ostrowski
[Posted December 11, 2003]
I write this dutifully and joylessly in the manner of someone taking out the garbage or performing some other unpleasant task that's been done before but which must be done once more.
The Republicans have done it again. With their new Medicare bill, they've made government even bigger. This is not new to us here. We've been saying that for years. The Republicans have been expanding the size, scope and power of government ever since they first got their mitts on power in 1861. Their Civil War set the blueprint for modern America, according to liberal historian James McPherson. In modern America, unrestrained democracy?of the greedy people, by the greedy people, and for the greedy people?leads special interest groups to continually expand the size of the state for their own benefit and everyone else's loss. Does any intelligent person not know this by now?
The Rushians and the Republican rank and file apparently do not know it. Why? They confuse talk and action. Republican politicians do speak the language of individual freedom and free markets and limited government. Most regular folks don't have the time or energy or money to hang out in the Republican hacks' palatial digs on Capitol Hill to see if their heroes actually do what they've promised. (They don't.)
This explanation is not enough, however. There are just too many examples of Republican sell-outs and cop-outs and logrolling over liberty. Reagan failed to cut the two useless departments he promised to cut. The 1994 "revolution" of Newt and the Gang was a flop. Yes, but we needed to get control of all three branches of government. Okay, you did that in 2002. What's your excuse now? The federal government is bigger than ever; its debt is colossal; the U.S. is in two wars; and there isn't even talk of abolishing HUD, the textbook example of a corrupt, destructive and unlawful federal agency.
There must be something that keeps the troops anteing up their votes and legwork and contributions to the mendacious Republican machine. There is. Hillary was right. There is a vast, right-wing conspiracy to whip up hatred of liberal Democratic icons like Bill and Hillary primarily for their personal peccadilloes. My response to most of the Clinton scandals? A big yawn. What politicians do in broad daylight is much worse than what they do at night or behind closed doors.
Yet, the Republican hacks can hardly talk about issues. They just did what we were supposed to fear from the Billary?they socialized medicine even further. Talk about scandals and side-issues like burning the flag, is designed to cloud the minds of the Rushians with emotions that blind them to the disingenuousness of the Republican elite. And it works! It looks like the Republicans will retain control of their beloved federal government once more.
Here's the key to the scam. All things being ideal, the Republicans actually would make small cuts in government. Things are never ideal, though. The Republicans always worry that if they cut government, they will lose votes from the special interest groups. That would bring on the worst of all possible worlds: people in charge who, like the Republicans, also support and nurture big government, but are called "Democrats". Horrors. Check out of the Russell palace and go back to Palookaville? No way, no how! If any of the troops disagree, Hammer 'em!
Now, I know what the hacks will say in response. That fella doesn't know how Washington works. We just need to get a lock on power for another four years, and then we'll lower the boom on big government. But I do understand, fellas. I've been watching you guys for 25 years. As I said previously about George Pataki, you have sold out for the same reason that Republicans usually sell out: yes, you would like to make government smaller, but your desire to stay in power is larger.
Okay. I've taken out the garbage one more time.
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1:00 a.m. Eastern
? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
I've got some questions for you. Think carefully.
Your medical information is safe and protected in your doctor's or hospital's files.
Right?
Your financial information and records are protected by your bank, according to legal safeguards.
Right?
Your tax returns are private and privileged information between you and your tax preparer and the IRS.
Right?
Are you sure?
The truth is, there's no way to be certain.
Two recent incidents in the San Francisco area are enough to put the fear of God in you and more than enough to give corporate executives severe heartburn or worse ? they deserve worse.
In November, the office of a Bay Area business consultant was robbed. The thief broke into the building, but the consultant's office door had been left unlocked. It was an easy heist of the computer and decorative items. Other offices weren't touched.
It first appeared to be a routine burglary until police learned that the stolen computer contained the names, addresses, social-security numbers and financial information of hundreds of thousands of Wells Fargo Bank customers, nationwide. The potential for stolen identities and worse, if there is worse, was beyond imagining.
Fortunately, the thief was caught relatively quickly when officials tracked his Internet surfing on the computer. At the man's apartment, police found the stolen items, along with piles of stolen drivers licenses and other such documents. It seems the guy had a nifty business making and selling fake ID's. Whether he did anything with the bank's confidential information hasn't been revealed.
But the real issue is why highly confidential financial information and files of banking customers were given to an outside consultant to be stored on his own computer.
Wells Fargo publicly expressed concern about the theft and notified customers by letter of measures taken to protect them from possible security problems.
However, the bank hasn't said what the consultant was doing with all that confidential information, nor has it explained why he was allowed to store the information away from secure bank premises.
Think that's bad? How about this? In October, officials at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center got an e-mail extortion threat. It essentially said, be certain I get paid properly for my work or all your patient medical records and voice files will be put on the Internet.
The information in question would include all patient records from the UCSF Mt. Zion and the Parnassus facilities. That's a lot of confidential data.
If that wasn't bad enough, the person making the threat was a woman in Pakistan! How would she get private medical records?
It turns out that for years, the hospital had farmed out medical transcription work locally. But the local subcontractor had a lot of work, so they subbed it out to more than 15 others, who in turn, subbed again. Ultimately that work went offshore and that meant trouble.
One woman claimed she hadn't been paid and put pressure where it would get attention. It did. She got her money, but the problem remains. Or at least the medical center hasn't announced that it changed its ways.
Offshore work isn't unusual. Tech help for computers routinely is done in India or Pakistan, or other countries. The key is an educated, skilled, English-speaking and lower-wage work force.
Tech help is one thing, but medical or financial records is another. However, bottom line: It's money. That comes first, apparently even before the confidentiality of your private information.
I talked with David Lazarus, business columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who broke the medical story in his column and then followed with his investigation of the banking story. But he told me another which caused my blood to boil.
According to him, some accounting firms are sending tax-return preparation offshore. He said the number doing it is growing by leaps and bounds. According to his research, individual tax preparers are also getting involved in outsourcing the preparation of your federal and state tax returns. Even worse, there's an indication the IRS might do the same with some of its work. How about that!
Would you know? Probably not. Are you told? Probably not. Do you really think they'd tell you the truth. I doubt it. In fact, would your accountant know if his domestic outsourcing were subbed offshore? Probably not ? UCSF didn't, and they're big enough to know.
It appears we're all guinea pigs in a worldwide privacy invasion. While liberals and malcontent conservatives wail about the so-called privacy invasions of the Patriot Act, we've already been sold out by financial and medical institutions (and who knows what others) we've trusted.
It will only get worse.
Don't say you weren't warned.
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PATRIOT Act used to snag Rush Limbaugh?
Critics decry misapplication of terror law's money-laundering provisions
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Posted: December 29, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: WorldNetDaily is pleased to have a content-sharing agreement with Insight magazine, the bold Washington publication not afraid to ruffle establishment feathers. Subscribe to Insight at WorldNetDaily's online store and save 71 percent off the cover price.
By John Berlau
? 2003 Insight/News World Communications Inc.
It was widely reported as an outrage, a use of the USA PATRIOT Act by the puritanical Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Justice Department to go after a crime that had nothing to do with terrorism.
FBI agents conceded using Title III, the section of the USA PATRIOT Act that covers money laundering, in Operation G-string ? an investigation of corruption allegations against a strip-club owner in Las Vegas. The agents used Section 314 to seize the financial records of local elected officials the FBI thought might have taken money from the owner.
That section allows the government to conduct wide-ranging searches of "financial institutions" in cases involving suspected "terrorist acts or money laundering." And the "or" apparently is the key word in this case.
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., whose district includes Las Vegas, expressed anger about the use of these provisions in a case in which the FBI conceded terrorism was not involved. In a letter to Ashcroft, Berkley wrote, "In my opinion, the use of the PATRIOT Act in this context violates both the spirit and intent of this important legislation." She asked Ashcroft for a "full explanation of your views on the scope of the PATRIOT Act and other investigative areas [in which] you foresee using the PATRIOT Act in the future."
But other critics of the action say that, if Berkley really were concerned with the scope of the USA PATRIOT Act's Title III, she'd be better off addressing questions to members of her party in the U.S. Senate who wrote the money-laundering provisions and who insisted they be attached to the final bill. Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, simply had tweaked a draconian money-laundering proposal already in the drawer before Sept 11.
After 9-11, Republican House leaders and the Bush administration wanted it considered only as separate legislation but, as confirmed by a LexisNexis database search of this period, Democrats were adamant that it be attached to the USA PATRIOT Act. To do otherwise is "just something we cannot accept," then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was quoted as saying in October 2001 by The Hill newspaper.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., now campaigning for president and vigorously criticizing the USA PATRIOT Act and Ashcroft, complained at the time that Republicans were trying to remove the money-laundering provisions "by fiat." An October 2001 Associated Press article quoted Kerry as declaring, "This is not a moment for politics as usual to rear its ugly head in the Capitol." The article noted that Kerry "underlined the political influence of Texas bankers."
The senatorial offices of Daschle, Sarbanes and Kerry did not return Insight calls asking for their views about the nonterrorism uses of the USA PATRIOT Act provisions they championed, and neither did Kerry's presidential campaign.
Newsmax.com reporter Wes Vernon has written that Daschle and Sarbanes did not answer his inquiries about their roles in creating this part of the act either.
"I don't blame this on Ashcroft at all," says David B. Smith, who serves on the Money Laundering Task Force of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, or NACDL. When it comes to their populist causes many Democrats, Smith says, "have no appreciation for civil liberties, and they consistently are on the side of the government, more so than the most conservative Republicans in the House and the Senate." And money laundering, Smith and others note, is a populist issue that such Democrats use to bash business and "the rich."
Yet, in comparison to other USA PATRIOT Act provisions, the money-laundering provisions may be the most intrusive and costly, say experts. These provisions encourage the Treasury Department to mandate broad "know-your-customer" surveillance requirements not just for banks but also auto dealers, jewelry stores, travel agents and other businesses that earlier statutes put under a broad definition of "financial institutions."
The financial-services research firm Celent Communications estimates that for banks, securities dealers and insurance companies alone, compliance with the regulation will cost $10.9 billion by the end of 2005.
David Aufhauser, then general counsel of the Treasury Department, candidly admitted to the Washington Post in 2002 that "the PATRIOT Act is imposing a citizen-soldier burden on the gatekeepers of financial institutions." But he defended the provisions, saying that, "in many respects, they are in the best position to police attempts by people who would do ill to us in the U.S. to penetrate the financial systems."
But the costly mandates are not just being used for terrorism cases. Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff found that two-thirds of the financial records obtained through the same Section 314 of the USA PATRIOT Act used in the strip-club cases "were in money-laundering cases with no apparent terror connection." Among the government divisions making requests were the IRS, the U.S. Postal Service and the Agriculture Department in "a case that apparently involved food-stamp fraud," he wrote.
Paul Rosenzweig, a former Justice Department official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and who now is an adjunct professor at George Mason University Law School and a senior legal research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has defended many USA PATRIOT Act provisions as necessary to combat terrorism. But he says the strip-club case and Isikoff's statistics, if they are true, show that law enforcement is in danger of "mission creep" which could undermine public confidence and even jeopardize the war on terrorism.
"If that's true, and it proves to be a long-term trend, it would be unfortunate," Rosenzweig tells Insight. "If we're using the new terrorism money-laundering laws to broaden our tax-cheat powers, that would be a mistake."
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo says although the Ashcroft team didn't ask for the anti-money-laundering powers, it will use them whenever feasible to fight crime.
"We don't believe we ought to be tying our hands behind our backs and saying, 'We can go after terrorists, but we can't go after drug dealers or other criminals.' That's silly," Corallo tells Insight. "If these provisions are good enough to go after terrorists, they're good enough to go after drug dealers and child molesters."
The Justice Department's pro-USA PATRIOT Act website, lifeandliberty.gov, defends the Democrat-written Title III, and Corallo defends the specific provision that allows financial-record searches related to terrorism "or" money laundering.
"Money laundering is a federal crime," he says.
But critics warn that some prosecutors are defining the term very broadly.
Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, for instance, reportedly is being investigated by Palm Beach, Fla., authorities for "structuring" ? that is, withdrawing money from his bank accounts just below the $10,000 threshold under which banks are required to report cash transactions to the government. There are provisions against "structuring" in both federal and Florida money-laundering laws.
"I was not laundering money," Limbaugh said on his radio show in November, just after coming back from treatment for addiction to prescription pain pills. "I was withdrawing money, for crying out loud!"
That doesn't matter, says Charles Intriago, publisher of the Money Laundering Alert newsletter, and it also doesn't matter for what Limbaugh was withdrawing his money.
"He could have gone out and bought rosaries for Mother Teresa's convent," Intriago tells Insight. "It doesn't matter what he was doing with the money; the crime is in the structuring." Intriago, a former federal prosecutor, says if the allegations are true Limbaugh could and should be prosecuted for structuring.
"The United States government decided that it's of extremely high value for the enforcement agencies of the United States to have reports that are filed reflecting the withdrawal or deposit of more than $10,000. ... Therefore, the public policy of the United States as reflected in the law that President Reagan signed is that it should be made a crime for people to structure their transactions to avoid or evade the filing of that form."
But Edwin Meese, who was attorney general in the mid-1980s when Reagan signed the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 that made money laundering a federal crime, tells Insight the Limbaugh case appears to be just one more example of prosecutorial overreach with money-laundering laws. Meese, now director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, says, "I think there have been instances in which money-laundering laws have been used in circumstances that are considerably different from the original intent of the law. When money-laundering statutes are used simply to pile on charges where major financial manipulation was not the intent nor was it related to syndicated crime, then I think the statutes would be misused."
The laws, Meese says, were pushed to "specify a certain type of aiding and abetting" in drug and crime rings. And indeed they often are used to go after people whom many agree are genuine bad guys. But in those cases it's usually one of several criminal charges filed.
In the indictment of American Muslim Council founder Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is alleged to have helped fund terrorism, a structuring charge is included with several others, including smuggling cash and violating sanctions by taking money from terrorist-sponsoring Libya.
But there also are increasing numbers of prosecutions in which a money-laundering charge appears to be added just to beef up cases where the underlying charges are minor, say critics. In a case to which Meese points that now is on appeal to the Supreme Court, money-laundering charges were added to the weak "environmental-crime" case of David McNab. The fisherman was charged in 2000 with violating the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to "import fish or wildlife taken in violation ... of any foreign law."
The foreign law in question was a Honduran regulation that made it a crime to harvest lobsters with tails less than 5.5 inches long. While Honduran government officials testified that the law actually was null and void, and only about 3 percent of McNab's lobsters had tails less than 5.5 inches, prosecutors somehow convinced the courts that McNab's depositing of the proceeds of this "crime" in his bank account constituted money laundering.
Heritage's Rosenzweig and civil-liberties groups, such as NACDL, have signed a letter urging the Supreme Court to hear the case and free McNab, who has spent the last four years in prison. (The Justice Department had no comment on McNab's case.)
And, say critics, the USA PATRIOT Act's Title III will catch more McNabs, while doing little to catch terrorists, by demanding that even more businesses defined as "financial institutions" act like police spies. Treasury's Financial Crime Enforcement Network, which runs a database accessible to various domestic and foreign law-enforcement agencies, already has applied customer-monitoring requirements originally drafted for banks to "money-service businesses," which include the Postal Service as well as small convenience stores that offer money orders and smart cards, and brokerage houses. It has put out drafts of rules for real-estate brokers, travel agents and car dealers.
Most contentious are proposed requirements that these businesses not only must report transactions above a certain dollar threshold, but also file "suspicious-activity reports" on customers who deviate from a certain pattern.
"One of the things I worry about is that sometimes people buying cars do a lot of odd things," says Greg Lanker, president and co-owner of Acura of Modesto [Calif.]. "Most of the reason is they're trying to get a good deal. They try all kinds of tricks and trades, and sometimes their behavior is quite strange. For us to interpret what is strange and what is criminal is sometimes a little difficult."
Critics say businesses will have an incentive to overreport because of the criminal and civil penalties in the USA PATRIOT Act. In 2002 alone, more than 300,000 suspicious-activity reports were filed, in addition to the more than 12 million reports for currency transactions above the threshold.
Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil and other books on money laundering, says that criminals and terrorists launder money in a variety of ways and reports from a variety of businesses are crucial. While she says the Limbaugh case is "an abuse," she maintains innocent people have little reason to worry about their transactions being reported to the government.
"We need all the information we can get" to stop the terrorists, she says. "It is our lives that we are talking about, and it's time that the American people understand this. If you have legitimate money, you shouldn't be concerned about the government knowing how much money you have. I'm not concerned."
But Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear and founder of Counterpane Security, a Silicon Valley-based technology-security consulting firm, says that even if the government were using the programs exclusively for fighting terrorism, the millions of reports would be incredibly difficult to sift through to sort out the real terrorists.
"A nation of spies will catch some bad guys but will also catch an enormous number of good guys," he tells Insight. "Investigations from false alarms will be enormous, and the false-alarm rate will likely be overwhelming."
And since criminals often are familiar with money-laundering laws and how to get around them, they likely will find ever more ingenious ways of hiding money. This could lead to even more businesses potentially caught in money-laundering schemes, and calls for more financial-reporting requirements from ever more types of business establishments, Schneier says. "You have to look at trade-offs, and broad surveillance measures just don't give a good return," he says.
What likely will give a better return is human intelligence, Schneier and others say.
"Take the millions you would have to spend to get these programs working and fund more FBI agents," he says. After all, it was old-fashioned interrogations that finally led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in his hole.
Better targeting of money-laundering laws for serious crimes and reducing surveillance requirements for businesses dealing with customers not suspected of any crime likely would lead to law enforcement using resources more effectively, Rosenzweig says.
"Nobody at Heritage doubts the need for enhanced data information to track and trace terrorist funds," he says. "But the problem is you don't really need to get information from auto dealers to do that."
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http://www.sacurrent.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10705756&BRD=2318&PAG=461&dept_id=482778&rfi=6
news: headlines
WITH A WHISPER, NOT A BANG
By David Martin 12/24/2003
Bush signs parts of Patriot Act II into law stealthily
On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the signing - on a Saturday - as "the President signs bills seven days a week." But the last time Bush signed a bill into law on a Saturday happened more than a year ago - on a spending bill that the President needed to sign, to prevent shuttng down the federal government the following Monday.
By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.
By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote.
The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."
Congress passed the legislation around Thanksgiving. Except for U.S. Representative Charlie Gonzalez, all San Antonio's House members voted for the act. The Senate passed it with a voice vote to avoid individual accountability. While broadening the definition of "financial institution," the Bush administration is ramping up provisions within the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which granted the FBI the authority to obtain client records from banks by merely requesting the records in a "National Security Letter." To get the records, the FBI doesn't have to appear before a judge, nor demonstrate "probable cause" - reason to believe that the targeted client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Moreover, the National Security Letters are attached with a gag order, preventing any financial institution from informing its clients that their records have been surrendered to the FBI. If a financial institution breaches the gag order, it faces criminal penalties. And finally, the FBI will no longer be required to report to Congress how often they have used the National Security Letters.
Supporters of expanding the Patriot Act claim that the new law is necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks on the U.S. The FBI needs these new powers to be "expeditious and efficient" in its response to these new threats. Robert Summers, professor of international law and director of the new Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University, explains, "We don't go to war with the terrorists as we went to war with the Germans or the North Vietnamese. If we apply old methods of following the money, we will not be successful. We need to meet them on an even playing field to avoid another disaster."
"It's a problem that some of these riders that are added on may not receive the scrutiny that we would like to see."
Robert Summers
Opponents of the PATRIOT Act and its expansion claim that safeguards like judicial oversight and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, are essential to prevent abuses of power. "There's a reason these protections were put into place," says Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, and a historian of U.S. political repression. "It has been shown that if you give [these agencies] this power they will abuse it. For any investigative agency, once you tell them that they must make sure that they protect the country from subversives, it inevitably gets translated into a program to silence dissent."
Opponents claim the FBI already has all the tools to stop crime and terrorism. Moreover, explains Patrick Filyk, an attorney and vice president of the local chapter of the ACLU, "The only thing the act accomplishes is the removal of judicial oversight and the transfer of more power to law enforcements agents."
This broadening of the Patriot Act represents a political victory for the Bush Administration's stealth legislative strategy to increase executive power. Last February, shortly before Bush launched the war on Iraq, the Center for Public Integrity obtained a draft of a comprehensive expansion of the Patriot Act, nicknamed Patriot Act II, written by Attorney General John Ashcroft's staff. Again, the timing was suspicious; it appeared that the Bush Administration was waiting for the start of the Iraq war to introduce Patriot Act II, and then exploit the crisis to ram it through Congress with little public debate.
The leak and ensuing public backlash frustrated the Bush administration's strategy, so Ashcroft and Co. disassembled Patriot Act II, then reassembled its parts into other legislation. By attaching the redefinition of "financial institution" to an Intelligence Authorization Act, the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies avoided public hearings and floor debates for the expansion of the Patriot Act.
Even proponents of this expansion have expressed concern about these legislative tactics. "It's a problem that some of these riders that are added on may not receive the scrutiny that we would like to see," says St. Mary's Professor Robert Summers.
The Bush Administration has yet to answer pivotal questions about its latest constitutional coup: If these new executive powers are necessary to protect United States citizens, then why would the legislation not withstand the test of public debate? If the new act's provisions are in the public interest, why use stealth in ramming them through the legislative process?
?San Antonio Current 2003
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And a rejoinder thereto:
<< On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping new powers. >>
1. Bush signed the bill before he knew of Saddam's capture. The raid did not occur until 12 noon EST. The first reports of his possible capture did not reach Bush until 3 PM EST. SH's identity was not confirmed until 5 AM on December 14th.
2. NSL's are not search warrants. Also, the NSL is a letter that instructs the records' custodian not to notify you of the search of their records about you. The law enforcement agency still needs probable cause to search those records; and, the custodian of the records can require a judicially reviewed search warrant before consenting to that search.
3. TV Example - On Law & Order, Det. Lenny Briscoe asks the phone company for the Lugs on a certain phone number. The phone company gives Briscoe a list of every number that made a call to the phone number in question as well as a list of every number called by that number. If Lenny also served an NSL on the phone company, the phone company would be prohibited from telling the holder of that phone number that the police requested info on that number.
4. But, folks, the FBI and State law enforcement have always been able to execute a search warrant on your bank, your securities broker, or your telephone company and obtain information about your finances or phone records without having to notify you before or after the fact. Nor has your financial institution ever been required to notify you after the fact of any warrants executed against a broker's records of your transactions with that broker.
5. Why? Because the bank's, broker's or phone company's records are their records - not yours. Also, if they were your records, the 4th Amendment protects YOUR person and property against "unreasonable" searches and seizures without warrants.
Now, I'm not here to advocate the elimination of the probable cause requirement. However, I'm here simply to point out the facts about NSL's and records that other people have about transactions that occurred through them or with them. When you engage in those type of transactions, you are giving up the absolute right to privacy of your dealings.
Rick
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Court Opens Door To Searches Without Warrants
POSTED: 3:55 pm CST March 26, 2004
UPDATED: 4:36 pm CST March 26, 2004
NEW ORLEANS -- It's a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business.
Leaders in law enforcement say it will provide safety to officers, but others argue it's a privilege that could be abused.
The decision was made by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Two dissenting judges called it the "road to Hell."
The ruiling stems from a lawsuit filed in Denham Springs in 2000.
New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new power will go into effect immediately and won't be abused.
"We have to have a legitimate problem to be there in the first place, and if we don't, we can't conduct the search," Defillo said.
But former U.S. Attorney Julian Murray has big problems with the ruling.
"I think it goes way too far," Murray said, noting that the searches can be performed if an officer fears for his safety -- a subjective condition.
Defillo said he doesn't envision any problems in New Orleans, but if there are, they will be handled.
"There are checks and balances to make sure the criminal justce system works in an effective manor," Defillo said.
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Is Military Creeping
Into Domestic Spying
And Enforcement?
By ROBERT BLOCK and GARY FIELDS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In a little-noticed side effect of the war on terrorism, the military is edging toward a sensitive area that has been off-limits to it historically: domestic intelligence gathering and law enforcement.
Several recent incidents involving the military have raised concern among student and civil-rights groups. One was a visit last month by an Army intelligence agent to an official and students at the University of Texas law school in Austin.
The agent demanded a videotape of a recent academic conference at the school so that he could identify what he described as "three Middle Eastern men" who had made "suspicious" remarks to Army lawyers at the seminar, according to the official, Susana Aleman, the dean of student affairs.
The Army, while not disputing that the visit took place, declined to comment, saying the incident is under investigation.
Last year, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the nation&s primary source of global maritime intelligence, demanded access to the U.S. Customs Service&s database on maritime trade, saying it needed information to thwart potential terrorist activity. Customs officials initially resisted the Navy&s demands but eventually agreed to give naval intelligence much of what it wanted.
In an interview earlier this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection chief Robert C. Bonner said he shares data only after getting Navy assurances that the information won&t be abused. Navy spokesman Jon Spiers says the Office of Naval Intelligence first approached customs about sharing inbound foreign cargo information in December 2002, and he denies there is anything improper about the request. The agency "has not overstepped any authority or crossed the line dividing law enforcement from military operations," he says.
Lt. Spiers adds that when the Navy&s top spy agency gains access to data about American companies and individuals, the information will be "subjected to a meticulous legal review" and will be retained only if it is directly related to the agency&s mission to identify potential foreign threats.
In another sign of military interest in domestic information-gathering, the Defense Intelligence Agency&s new antiterrorism task force is looking to share information with law-enforcement officials in California and New York City, according to an August 2003 General Accounting Office report.
Historically, Americans haven&t trusted the military to do domestic police work. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, passed in response to abuses by federal troops in the South after the Civil War, prohibits the use of the military "to execute the laws" of the U.S. That&s been widely interpreted as a ban on searching, arresting or spying on U.S. civilians by federal troops.
But the law has been violated, notably during the Vietnam War, when Army operatives spied on antiwar activists on campuses. Meanwhile, Congress has eased the law&s limits to allow the military to help prosecute the war on drugs.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House sought to further loosen restrictions to allow the military to take on a new domestic-security role. It has mostly been rebuffed. In May the House refused to approve a White House-backed proposal to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the military authority to scrutinize personal and business records of U.S. citizens. And the Senate last year blocked funding for a Pentagon project known as the Total Information Awareness program, which was supposed to collect a vast array of information on individuals, including medical, employment and credit-card histories.
The issue of an expanding military role in domestic affairs also surfaced last year with the Pentagon&s creation of the Northern Command, or Northcom, based in Colorado Springs, Colo. The new command, the first such military command designed to protect the U.S. homeland from a terrorist attack, has responsibility for the U.S., Canada, Mexico, portions of the Caribbean and U.S. coastal waters. Northcom&s commander, Gen. Ralph "Ed" Eberhart, is the first general since the Civil War with operational authority exclusively over military forces within the U.S.
Gen. Eberhart has stoked concern among civil-liberties advocates by saying that the military and civilians should be involved in developing "actionable intelligence" for the government. In September 2002, he told a group of National Guardsmen that the military and the National Guard should "change our radar scopes" to prevent terrorism. It is important to "not just look out, but we&re also going to have to look in," he said, adding, "we can&t let culture and the way we&ve always done it stand in the way."
Northcom officials and other military leaders play down his remarks. "No one ran out after that speech and started snooping," one official says. Gen. Eberhart echoed that last September on PBS&s "News Hour": "We are not going to be out there spying on people, " he said, though he added, "we get information from people who do."
Further evidence of the blurring of the lines between the civilian and military worlds comes in a job-vacancy notice for a senior counterintelligence advisor to Northcom. The duties, according to the notice, include providing advice that goes beyond potential terrorism to include "other major criminal activity, such as drug cartels and large-scale money laundering" -- work usually under the purview of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service.
Another little-known Pentagon group, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, was set up two years ago. With 400 service members and civilians stationed around the globe, the CIFA was originally charged with protecting the military and critical infrastructure from spying by terrorists and foreign intelligence services. But in August, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, issued a directive ordering the unit to maintain a "domestic law-enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense."
The CIFA also works closely with the FBI and is conducting some duties for civilian agencies. For example, according to Department of Agriculture documents, the CIFA is in charge of doing background checks on foreign workers and scientists employed by the department&s agricultural-research service. The group also provides information to the Information and Security Command, or Inscom, the Army&s main intelligence organization, based at Fort Belvoir, Md.
The Army intelligence agent who investigated the law-school conference was assigned to Inscom. Army officials reviewing the Texas incident are investigating whether the agent may have overstepped his boundaries and whether may have tried to win the voluntary cooperation of the faculty and students. But they say that he was reacting to a possible counterintelligence threat to the military. It isn&t clear why there were Army lawyers at the conference in the first place, though some officials say the attorneys wanted to learn more about Muslim traditions and Islamic law.
Civil-rights advocates are skeptical. Robert Pugsley, professor of law at the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, says the Texas incident is "a chilling example" of the military&s overreaching. "It&ll multiply like fleas on a dog" if left unchecked, he says.
"What we are starting to see is 50 years of legal refinement and revisions for oversight being quietly jettisoned," adds Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit, left-leaning think tank in Washington.
But James Carafano, a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, says he believes the military has honored posse comitatus. His concern is that hard distinctions have been created between who has jurisdiction in homeland defense versus homeland security. It's distinctions terrorists might exploit, he says. "We may potentially be creating vulnerabilities."
Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com and Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com
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Derivative Crimes and Federal Injustice
by William L. Anderson and Candice E. Jackson, March 2004 [Posted March 10, 2004]
One of the common complaints levied against criminal justice in the United States is that criminals often are acquitted because of ?legal technicalities.? For example, defendants who seem to be guilty find charges dismissed because police did not properly inform them of their ?Miranda Rights,? or evidence that clearly demonstrates guilt is kept from legal proceedings because of the ?exclusionary rule.?
Indeed, the average person might believe that American justice clearly favors the guilty over the avenging angels of the prosecutorial staffs that are unable to put predators away. In the wake of the O.J. Simpson ?not guilty? verdicts in 1995, for example, commentators and much of the outraged public called for an end to the jury system, stronger controls against defenses, and an overhaul of the nation?s judicial system to help better weight the proceedings in favor of the prosecutors.
Think again. At least in the federal system, the vast majority of the estimated 170,000 prisoners are incarcerated for what one can only call ?legal technicalities.? In fact, most federal crimes listed on the federal statutes are not crimes at all in the historical sense, but at best are imaginary charges that are derived from other alleged wrongdoing. Thus, we call them ?derivative crimes.?
Financial ?derivatives? are securities that obtain their value from the value of other securities, such as stock mutual funds or hedge funds. We have chosen to apply the term ?derivative? to classes of federal crimes that in and of themselves are works of fiction, but that are created as an umbrella term to include a number of other real violations of the law.
Take the crime of ?racketeering,? for example. In the real world, no one ?racketeers? another person. However, thanks to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (dubbed RICO) the federal government deems racketeering to be a pattern of wrongdoing such as running illegal gambling operations and prostitution rings.
Of course, the activities upon which racketeering is based are already illegal under most state laws. The reason that racketeering laws exist is not to redefine the crime, but rather to push defendants into federal court, where the rules of evidence clearly tilt in favor of the prosecution ? and where winning convictions is easier.
Furthermore, the racketeering laws are written in order to do an end run around the double jeopardy provisions of the U.S. Constitution and, in a technically legal way, to turn into federal cases what the Constitution clearly intended to be matters for the states.
Racketeering is not the only federal derivative crime. The prosecutor?s arsenal includes charges such as money laundering, mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy, all of which carry stiff sentences, but which are not really crimes unto themselves.
Take money laundering. If federal investigators believe that at least part of someone?s money was obtained illegally, then if one either spends that money or deposits it in a bank, prosecutors can charge that individual with money laundering.
Keep in mind that the activities such as spending money or putting it into a bank by themselves are innocuous. Furthermore, once charges such as money laundering or conspiracy are filed, prosecutors do not have to prove the alleged underlying crime in order to win convictions. Instead, the burden of proof is similar to that of civil court, which is mere preponderance of the evidence.
Easier convictions and harsher punishments
The result is that federal prosecutors have an easier time obtaining convictions than do their state counterparts. Furthermore, federal law calls for harsher sentences for defendants who proceed to trial ? and subsequently lose ? than for those who plea bargain. The prospect of spending decades in prison for activities that for all intents and purposes are not real crimes can be horrifying to someone who has never had a brush with the law before.
Take the case of former Enron treasurer Ben Glison, who recently pleaded guilty to one count of ?conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud.? While the simple association with the disgraced Enron firm is enough for someone to be judged a criminal in the public eye, the charge to which Glison pleaded guilty is a legal absurdity. To put it another way, he pleaded guilty to a derivative crime of another derivative crime. (For that, he received five years in prison.) The government did not have to prove that he had committed an actual crime of securities fraud (which is highly derivative in itself); it simply concocted a chain of phantom crimes in order to win a conviction.
It gets even worse. Three Christian anti-abortion activists in western Virginia were involved in civil litigation over an adverse possession case in which they cut timber on land to gain possession (all in accordance with Virginia state law). However, in subsequent litigation they settled out of court for $90,000 with an alleged landowner (who did not have title but to whom the land was later awarded by adverse possession by a federal judge).
When the men cut the timber (after they had carefully researched Virginia law on adverse possession and were convinced they were acting within the law), the government moved in and charged them with conspiracy, wire fraud, and mail fraud. While the charges might seem ominous, they are even more specious than most derivative crimes, which are filed to cover activities that are alleged criminal violations of state codes. In this case, however, no underlying crime was committed, as the original legal proceedings took place under civil litigation. The men were tried and convicted in federal court and are awaiting sentencing at this time.
(Moreover, during the investigation, federal officials offered the defendants a ?deal? if they would inform on or testify against some anti-abortion activists. They refused. Thus, one can see that political issues also have a role in the decision-making process of federal prosecutors.)
The filing of criminal charges in regard to a civil case is a major step forward in the federal prosecutorial system, as it greatly increases the possibilities for future ?white-collar crime? convictions. U.S. attorneys can simply troll through civil lawsuits, pick the losers, and charge them with various federal crimes such as conspiracy and mail fraud.
If this sounds as though the federal government is increasingly criminalizing normal business conduct, it is because that is exactly what is occurring. Keep in mind that the prospect of going to prison for sending letters or faxes in the course of lawsuits is going to keep a number of business owners and executives up late at night. It will also serve to drive a large portion of investment out of the United States, as the reality of ?lose a lawsuit, go to prison? begins to strike home.
In the wake of the Enron and WorldCom debacles, politicians from both sides of the aisle have been calling for more criminal penalties for business executives who seemingly engage in shady conduct. Indeed, new laws such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act have further expanded the definitions of conspiracy and money laundering in the hope that the nets of criminality can be spread more widely in the business world.
Anyone who believes that expanding the already unjust list of federal crimes will help make business markets more secure and increase ?honesty? in economic dealings should look again. By their nature, federal criminal statutes are nebulous and people often do not realize that someone in authority regards their conduct as criminal until it is too late. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the USA PATRIOT Act increase the uncertainty of what is criminal behavior and what is not.
The great English jurist William Blackstone, who articulated the ?Rights of Englishmen? upon which law in this country was built, declared that law must be a shield to protect the innocent from predators, both private and public. Furthermore, he argued, law has to be consistent and certain, with clear boundaries to enable individuals to feel secure in the law.
The days of law having a Blackstone-like character are gone in the United States. Federal criminal law has made law more uncertain and has increased the arbitrariness of enforcement. The legal fences that once protected ordinary Americans are being torn down, and tyranny is moving into the void.
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Covert Searches Are Increasing Under Patriot Act
Civil liberties groups see a dangerous trend, but the Justice Department says added surveillance shows improvements in fighting terrorism.
By Richard Schmitt, LA Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON ? Underscoring changes in domestic surveillance allowed under the Patriot Act, the Justice Department said in a report released today that it had conducted hundreds more secret searches around the country last year.
The department said the use of covert search powers, which were enhanced under the Patriot Act, showed how federal investigators had stepped up the war against terrorism in the United States over the last 32 months.
But civil liberties groups expressed concern over the increase because the targets of the searches were given fewer legal protections than suspects in normal criminal cases. The process of obtaining approval and executing the searches and surveillance is also shrouded in secrecy.
In an annual report to Congress, the Justice Department said it obtained approval to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches in more than 1,700 intelligence cases last year. According to the department, the number of searches had surged 85% in the last two years; about 1,200 searches were authorized in 2002, and 900 in 2001.
The report did not identify or discuss specific cases.
U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said in a statement that the data illustrated how the Justice Department and the FBI were "acting judiciously and moving aggressively" to uncover and prevent terrorist attacks.
"These court-approved surveillance and search orders are vital to keeping America safe from terror," Ashcroft asserted.
The burst of activity was a direct result of the easing of standards for intelligence-gathering that was authorized by the Patriot Act, the terrorism-fighting law enacted by Congress six weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
Under the new law, the government can obtain secret warrants by showing that a significant purpose of the search has to do with intelligence-gathering, as opposed to a criminal investigation.
Before the change, the law was interpreted as requiring the government to show that intelligence-gathering was the primary reason for the request.
Many experts think the old rules were too restrictive, and unduly impeded the hunt for potential terrorists. The new procedures were upheld in court in November 2002. The search applications are reviewed by a federal tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court was set up in the mid-1970s as a check on government power amid revelations of massive illegal spying on political dissidents and other citizens by the FBI.
But the court, which conducts secret proceedings, has become a lightning rod for civil liberties concerns in the post-Sept. 11 era as the number of surveillance applications and the volume of the court's work has rapidly grown.
A major fear is that investigators are using the so-called FISA procedures to bypass the stricter requirements that cover the issuance of search warrants in criminal cases, in which the government must show probable cause that a crime was committed. The concern is that the process is enabling the government to chip away at protections afforded defendants under the 4th Amendment prohibition against illegal searches.
Information gleaned from the intelligence searches can later be used in criminal prosecutions, but defendants in such proceedings have fewer rights to attack the basis of the searches or to obtain intercepted information.
Moreover, if the intelligence searches do not lead to criminal prosecutions, the targets are never told that they were under surveillance; in criminal cases, suspects must receive notice of any surveillance even if they are never charged.
"The real mistakes never come to light" in intelligence cases, said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington think tank. He said he was concerned that "an increasing number [of the FISA cases] are likely to end up in criminal prosecutions."
"I am troubled by the secrecy." Dempsey said. "There is no way to know whether the pendulum has swung too far."
Adding to the concern is the fact that the number of intelligence searches in recent years has come to rival and possibly exceed the number of searches in criminal cases, as the government has marshaled federal resources against fighting terrorism instead of other crimes.
According to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, federal and state courts authorized the use of wiretaps and other electronic surveillance in about 1,400 cases last year, compared with the 1,700 FISA warrants, which also cover physical searches.
"They are shifting the government apparatus for surveillance to a much more secret process with much less judicial oversight," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.
By classifying cases as intelligence cases, he said, "they are doing an end run around the 4th Amendment."
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If true, this is evil, wicked, mean, nasty, fascist and Orwellian.--Crafty
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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078
LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Bush to screen population for mental illness
Sweeping initiative links diagnoses to treatment with specific drugs
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Posted: June 21, 2004
5:00 p.m. Eastern
? 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
President Bush plans to unveil next month a sweeping mental health initiative that recommends screening for every citizen and promotes the use of expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs favored by supporters of the administration.
The New Freedom Initiative, according to a progress report, seeks to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," the British Medical Journal reported.
Critics say the plan protects the profits of drug companies at the expense of the public.
The initiative began with Bush's launch in April 2002 of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, which conducted a "comprehensive study of the United States mental health service delivery system."
The panel found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children.
The commission said, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders."
Schools, the panel concluded, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.
The commission recommended that the screening be linked with "treatment and supports," including "state-of-the-art treatments" using "specific medications for specific conditions."
The Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP, was held up by the panel as a "model" medication treatment plan that "illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes."
The TMAP -- started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas -- also was praised by the American Psychiatric Association, which called for increased funding to implement the overall plan.
But the Texas project sparked controversy when a Pennsylvania government employee revealed state officials with influence over the plan had received money and perks from drug companies who stand to gain from it.
Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General says in his whistleblower report the "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that developed the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."
Jones points out, according to the British Medical Journal, companies that helped start the Texas project are major contributors to Bush's election funds. Also, some members of the New Freedom Commission have served on advisory boards for these same companies, while others have direct ties to TMAP.
Eli Lilly, manufacturer of olanzapine, one of the drugs recommended in the plan, has multiple ties to the Bush administration, BMJ says. The elder President Bush was a member of Lilly's board of directors and President Bush appointed Lilly's chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, to the Homeland Security Council.
Of Lilly's $1.6 million in political contributions in 2000, 82 percent went to Bush and the Republican Party.
Another critic, Robert Whitaker, journalist and author of "Mad in America," told the British Medical Journal that while increased screening "may seem defensible," it could also be seen as "fishing for customers."
Exorbitant spending on new drugs "robs from other forms of care such as job training and shelter program," he said.
However, a developer of the Texas project, Dr. Graham Emslie, defends screening.
"There are good data showing that if you identify kids at an earlier age who are aggressive, you can intervene ... and change their trajectory."
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Surveilance cameras: http://www.notbored.org/maps-usa.html
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Privacy Activism: http://www.privacyactivism.org/
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"The report listed three ways in which government agencies obtain data from the private sector: by purchasing the data, by obtaining a court order or simply by asking for it. Corporations freely share information with government agencies because they don't want to appear to be unpatriotic, they hope to obtain future lucrative Homeland Security contracts with the government or they fear increased government scrutiny of their business practices if they don't share."
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,64492,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
Big Business Becoming Big Brother
By Kim Zetter
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,64492,00.html
02:00 AM Aug. 09, 2004 PT
The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that works to protect civil liberties.
Data aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases -- and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people.
Because laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance. Congress needs to close such loopholes, the ACLU said, before the exchange of information gets out of hand.
"Americans would really be shocked to discover the extent of the practices that are now common in both industry and government," said the ACLU's Jay Stanley, author of the report. "Industry and government know that, so they have a strong incentive to not publicize a lot of what's going on."
Last year, JetBlue Airways acknowledged that it secretly gave defense contractor Torch Concepts 5 million passenger itineraries for a government project on passenger profiling without the consent of the passengers. The contractor augmented the data with passengers' Social Security numbers, income information and other personal data to test the feasibility of a screening system called CAPPS II. That project was slated to launch later this year until the government scrapped it. Other airlines also contributed data to the project.
Information about the data-sharing project came to light only by accident. Critics like Stanley say there are many other government projects like this that are proceeding in secret.
The ACLU released the Surveillance-Industrial Complex report in conjunction with a new website designed to educate the public about how information collected from them is being used.
The report listed three ways in which government agencies obtain data from the private sector: by purchasing the data, by obtaining a court order or simply by asking for it. Corporations freely share information with government agencies because they don't want to appear to be unpatriotic, they hope to obtain future lucrative Homeland Security contracts with the government or they fear increased government scrutiny of their business practices if they don't share.
But corporations aren't the only ones giving private data to the government. In 2002, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors voluntarily gave the FBI the names and addresses of some 2 million people who had studied scuba diving in previous years. And a 2002 survey found that nearly 200 colleges and universities gave the FBI information about students. Most of these institutions provided the information voluntarily without having received a subpoena.
Collaborative surveillance between government and the private sector is not new. For three decades during the Cold War, for example, telegraph companies like Western Union, RCA Global and International Telephone and Telegraph gave the National Security Agency, or NSA, all cables that went to or from the United States. Operation Shamrock, which ran from 1945 to 1975, helped the NSA compile 75,000 files on individuals and organizations, many of them involved in peace movements and civil disobedience.
These days, the increasing amount of electronic data that is collected and stored, along with developments in software technology, make it easy for the government to sort through mounds of data quickly to profile individuals through their connections and activities.
Although the Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from keeping dossiers on Americans unless they are the specific target of an investigation, the government circumvents the legislation by piggybacking on private-sector data collection.
Corporations are not subject to congressional oversight or Freedom of Information Act requests -- two methods for monitoring government activities and exposing abuses. And no laws prevent companies from voluntarily sharing most data with the government.
"The government is increasingly ... turning to private companies, which are not subject to the law, and buying or compelling the transfer of private data that it could not collect itself," the report states.
A government proposal for a national ID card, for example, was shot down by civil liberties groups and Congress for being too intrusive and prone to abuse. And Congress voted to cancel funding for John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness, a national database that would have tracked citizens' private transactions such as Web surfing, bank deposits and withdrawals, doctor visits, travel itineraries and visa and passport applications.
But this hasn't stopped the government from achieving the same ends by buying similar data from private aggregators like Acxiom, ChoicePoint, Abacus and LexisNexis. According to the ACLU, ChoicePoint's million-dollar contracts with the Justice Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies let authorities tap into its billions of records to track the interests, lifestyles and activities of Americans.
By using corporations, the report said, the government can set up a system of "distributed surveillance" to create a bigger picture than it could create with its own limited resources and at the same time "insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny."
Most of the transactions people make are with the private sector, not the government. So the amount of data available through the private sector is much greater.
Every time people withdraw money from an ATM, buy books or CDs, fill prescriptions or rent cars, someone else, somewhere, is collecting information about them and their transactions. On its own, each bit of information says little about the person being tracked. But combined with health and insurance records, bank loans, divorce records, election contributions and political activities, corporations can create a detailed dossier.
And studies show that Americans trust corporations more than they trust their government, so they're more likely to give companies their information freely. A 2002 phone survey about a proposed national ID plan, conducted by Gartner, found respondents preferred private industry -- such as bank or credit card companies -- to administer a national ID system rather than the government.
Stanley said most people are unaware how information about them is passed on to government agencies and processed.
"People have a right to know just how information about them is being used and combined into a high-resolution picture of (their) life," Stanley said.
Although the Privacy Act attempted to put stops on government surveillance, Stanley said that its authors did not anticipate the explosion in private-sector data collection.
"It didn't anticipate the growth of data aggregators and the tremendous amount of information that they're able to put together on virtually everyone or the fact that the government could become customers of these companies," Stanley said.
Although the report focused primarily on the flow of data from corporations to the government, data flow actually goes both ways. The government has shared its watch lists with the private sector, opening the way for potential discrimination against customers who appear on the lists. Under section 314 of the Patriot Act, the government can submit a suspect list to financial institutions to see whether the institution has conducted transactions with any individuals or organizations on the list. But once the government shares the list, nothing prevents the institution from discriminating against individuals or organizations on the list.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI circulated a watch list to corporations that contained hundreds of names of people the FBI was interested in talking to, although the people were not under investigation or wanted by the FBI. Companies were more than happy to check the list against the names of their customers. And if they used the list for other purposes, it's difficult to know. The report notes that there is no way to determine how many job applicants might have been denied work because their names appeared on the list.
"It turns companies into sheriff's deputies, responsible not just for feeding information to the government, but for actually enforcing the government's wishes, for example by effectively blacklisting anyone who has been labeled as a suspect under the government's less-than-rigorous procedures for identifying risks," the report states.
Last March, the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, created by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to examine government data mining, issued a report (PDF) stating that "rapid action is necessary" to establish clear guidelines for responsible government data mining.
The ACLU's Stanley said companies are in the initial stages of the Homeland Security gold rush to get government contracts, and that the public and Congress need to do something before policies and practices of private-sector surveillance solidify.
"Government security agencies always have a hunger for more and more information," said Stanley. "It's only natural. It makes it easier for law enforcement if they have access to as much info as they want. But it's crucial that policy makers and political leaders balance the needs of law enforcement and the value of privacy that Americans have always expected and enjoyed."
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U.S. Erred in Terror Convictions
The Justice Department admits possible criminal misconduct. Key charges may be dropped.
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON ? The Justice Department conceded Wednesday that in its zeal to win convictions in a terrorism case in Detroit last year, prosecutors engaged in "a pattern of mistakes and oversights" that may constitute criminal misconduct.
The case was the first major terrorism prosecution after the Sept. 11 attacks and had been hailed by U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft as an example of the government's successful campaign to disrupt terrorist "sleeper cells" in the country.
In its 60-page court-ordered filing, the Justice Department supports the Detroit defendants' request for a new trial and states that it will no longer pursue terrorism charges against them.
A ruling by the judge in the case could come as early as today.
The filing details a wide range of misdeeds, while offering a rare glimpse inside the government's war on terrorism. It includes allegations that the main prosecutor in the case ? Richard G. Convertino ? disregarded dissenting views from experts and suppressed or withheld evidence that might have been helpful to the defense.
Prosecutors accused four defendants, arrested in Detroit in a roundup of Arab immigrants a week after the Sept. 11 attacks, of conspiring to launch attacks in the United States, Jordan and Turkey.
Federal agents had been looking for another man when they went to a second-story apartment in the middle of the night and found the men, some of whom had worked at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. They were arrested and charged with canvassing the airport and other locations. In Washington, Ashcroft announced that federal officials believed that the men had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, a statement he later retracted.
In June 2003, a jury in Detroit convicted two of the men on charges including conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism. A third defendant was convicted of document fraud, and a fourth was acquitted. When problems in the case came to light last fall, Convertino, an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, was removed from the case. In February he sued the government, claiming that he was never given adequate support.
Among other findings, the report issued late Tuesday found that prosecutors had withheld a jailhouse letter discrediting the government's star witness and used a federal defendant in a separate cocaine case to translate sensitive audiotapes.
The report found that prosecutors had suppressed evidence supporting a defense position that sketches found in a day planner in the defendants' Detroit apartment were the doodlings of a mentally ill man ? rather than evidence that the defendants were casing possible terrorist targets, as the government asserted at trial.
And it also revealed that the department's public integrity section launched a criminal investigation into the handling of the case. A Justice Department spokesman declined to elaborate or say who was the target.
The findings come as vindication for defense lawyers who, throughout the case, had complained that the government withheld evidence and was not playing fairly.
The Justice Department's admissions present a counterpoint to claims by the Bush administration that it is winning the war on terrorism, which have been reverberating in speeches this week at the Republican National Convention in New York.
It also underscored the government's mixed success in prosecuting terrorism cases since Sept. 11. Although the Justice Department has won numerous highly publicized guilty pleas ? often by dropping the most serious charges ? it has been handed partial or outright defeats in major terrorism cases it has taken to trial. Most recently, a computer student in Boise, Idaho, was acquitted of federal charges that he used the Internet to raise money and recruit people for terrorist causes.
U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen is expected to rule as early as today on whether to order a new trial on document fraud charges alone. Defense lawyers are expected to seek a dismissal of all charges and the defendants' release.
"There is actual evidence that there was a deliberate withholding of evidence that is inconsistent with the government theory of terrorism and consistent with our defense, and that is a subversion of justice," said James Thomas, a Detroit lawyer who represents one of the defendants.
"That is not a way to win a war on terror. That is not what the Constitution is talking about. It certainly isn't the way that prosecutors should conduct business," he said.
A lawyer for Convertino strongly disputed that characterization. "Even if Rick was aware of the material that the government characterizes as disclosable to the defense, that material was insubstantial and cumulative and would not have encouraged the reasonable probability that a different verdict would have resulted after trial," attorney William Sullivan Jr. said.
"As with every other case he has prosecuted, Rick Convertino pursued this one fairly and justly, with the safety and security of his community uppermost in his mind in the wake of 9/11," Sullivan said.
The case began unraveling late last year after Rosen learned that prosecutors had not turned over to the defense a letter from a Detroit gang leader who was once held in the same prison as the star witness for the government. The letter suggested that the witness, Youssef Hmimssa, a former roommate of the defendants who had a history of credit card fraud, had lied to the FBI. Hmimssa testified that they were all Islamic fundamentalists involved in terrorist activities.
Convertino, a 14-year Justice Department veteran, became the target of an ethics investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility. After being removed from the case, the prosecutor sued Ashcroft, saying the department had violated his rights and that he was a target of retaliation because he had complained internally that department red tape had hobbled the prosecution.
In its report, the Justice Department acknowledged that the letter about Hmimssa should have been turned over. But the inquiry also found additional evidence that the department now says should have been shared with the defense, and exposed deep differences of opinion within the government over the handling of evidence and testimony.
The report raised new doubts about a central piece of the government's case ? a day planner found in the defendants' apartment that the government said included surveillance sketches of a Turkish air base used by American fighter jets and a military hospital in Jordan.
The report said the government attempted to create the "false impression" at trial that "diplomatic red tape" prevented them from obtaining photos of the hospital to compare to the sketches. In fact, the report said, the facility bore little, if any resemblance to the sketches.
The report also found that a retired CIA officer, whom Convertino had consulted about the supposed air base sketch, told the prosecutor on numerous occasions that he did not believe the sketch "conveyed any useful information," and that the former officer believed "Convertino was shopping for an opinion consistent with his own."
The report also cast doubt on the testimony of an FBI supervisory agent in Detroit who said that a videotape found in the defendants' possession included "casing" shots of Las Vegas, Disneyland and New York.
The report found that the prosecutors had evidence that the Las Vegas office of the FBI disagreed with that view, but did not turn that information over to the court or the defense.
"In its best light, the record would show that the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence (including impeachment material) and created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist," the department said in its memo. "Accordingly, the government believes that it should not prolong the resolution of this matter pursuing hearings it has no reasonable prospect of winning."
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy36.html
Feds seek to impose mental health testing :shock: :evil:
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A Lengthy piece out of ReasonOnline. Is DBMA represented in New Hampshire?
Revolt of the Porcupines!
The Free State Project wants libertarians to take over New Hampshire. Is this a revolutionary plan or a pipe dream?
Brian Doherty
It?s not often that libertarians are enough of a threat to anyone else?s interests that they generate protests. But that is what has been happening in New Hampshire lately. In June, 200 residents showed up at a heated town meeting in tiny Grafton township to challenge a trio of libertarian activists they feared were trying to conquer their community. Less than a week later, a squad of protesters picketed a fund-raising dinner in Plymouth, featuring Republican Governor Craig Benson, sponsored by the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance.
Both protests were triggered by the Free State Project, or FSP, a recently hatched plan for libertarians to roll back the government of New Hampshire and thus create a flagship for a freer America.
The FSP is the brainchild of a 27-year-old political science instructor named Jason Sorens. The Yale lecturer?s idea is both simple and grandiose: Given libertarians? eternal lack of political traction as a thinly spread minority, their most realistic chance to wield political power is to congregate in one state. Sorens figured it would be best if the state had a population below 1.5 million and a political culture already sympathetic to libertarian thinking.
Sorens introduced the idea in a 2001 essay in the webzine Libertarian Enterprise. He then sired an organization dedicated to executing it. FSP leaders and spokesmen proselytize for a freedom lovers? exodus wherever sympathetic listeners are likely to gather, encouraging their fellow libertarians to take the FSP Pledge. The pledge commits you to the proposition that, once 20,000 like-minded libertarians have also made the pledge?thereby solving what might be called the ?you go first? problem?you will within five years move to New Hampshire and be an activist for increased liberty in that state.
Sorens, a married man with no children, had studied small separatist and decentralist movements such as the Mormons and the Parti Quebecois. He became fascinated by recent successes in devolved local control in Wales, Scotland, and Spain, and decided that, when it comes to effecting radical political change, smaller localities, not huge federal states, are where the action is.
Sorens identified 10 American states where he thought 20,000 libertarians could make significant strides toward such goals as lowering taxes, achieving school choice, and creating more vibrant and decentralized local authorities. In September 2003, after 5,000 people had signed up, the FSP pledgers voted on their favorite. New Hampshire, whose slogan is ?Live Free or Die,? won by a 10 percentage-point margin over second-place Wyoming.
That?s why I spent the last weekend in February, the mellow end of a fierce Granite State winter, hanging around with a group of FSP ?Porcupines? and interested parties. (FSPers have adopted the porcupine as their totem?a creature that's peaceful when left alone but capable of causing great harm in self-defense.) We lounged around talking politics in the sitting room of the Inn at Danbury, a cozy family-run bed and breakfast, checked out nearby towns such as Grafton, and enjoyed winter sports such as snowmobiling.
The people I met didn?t seem to be libertarian versions of the Unabomber, desperate to live separated from the ideologically uncongenial like a modern-day Thoreau. They just think contemporary government is too expensive, too intrusive, and too active, and are eager to embrace the most effective way to change that.
As peculiar and radical as it might seem when you first hear about it, the FSP has received widespread, serious attention in the media. The New York Times ran a respectful 1,500-word piece about it last October. Playboy has given the Porcupines props, as has Reader?s Digest, which seems to indicate an impressively wide appeal.
To be sure, it's a lot easier to garner favorable press reports than it is to get people to actually schlep to an often brutally cold, sparsely populated state. But whether or not the FSP ever hits its target membership goal, much less turns New Hampshire into a libertarian paradise, it retains real significance as a thought experiment. It forces people to confront the reality of how much they are willing to sacrifice for their notions about political liberty?and how much people with different grievances against government might have in common.
?My Best Friends Are Nonlibertarians?
The Free State Project is the most recent and successful face of libertarian separatism?or, as some call it, libertarian Zionism. To be sure, many involved in the search for new libertarian communities reject such terms. Roderick Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University and the brains behind the Libertarian Nation Foundation, a group dedicated to theorizing about the possibilities for libertarian polities, tells me he doesn?t like the term separatist because ?the attraction is not that I don?t want to live near or interact with nonlibertarians. Most of my best friends are nonlibertarians. We don?t want to live by ourselves but simply want a chance to demonstrate to the world that libertarian principles actually work. We want to escape from government, not escape from ordinary decent people? who happen not to share their political philosophy.
Ever since Ayn Rand presented the self-sufficient, regulator-free paradise of Galt?s Gulch in her 1957 epic Atlas Shrugged, people have periodically popped up to sell the idea that the only sure path to liberty is for libertarians to gather together in close proximity. Then no one would mooch or rob or force paper fiat money on their fellows. Freely minted gold coins would clink on the counter of brothels and, if you please, opium dens. And the weasels who in a statist world would be telling brave producers what they had to make or what they had to pay their employees would need to find new work?perhaps as toll booth operators on private roads, or tort lawyers, since lawsuits for proven harms would replace the regulatory state.
Sorens? originality lies in his common sense, seemingly feasible suggestion about how to act on this impulse. His predecessors never quite managed that.
One of the earliest postwar proposals to actualize the Galt?s Gulch fantasy was one of the most outr?: the idea that libertarians, driven to the edges of the continental shelf by an ever-expanding Leviathan state, should retreat to the high seas. Libertarian uberfreak Kerry Thornley was the early apostle of this idea, in a series of articles in the seminal ?60s libertarian zine Innovator. (This was before he decided he had been a CIA mind-control patsy possibly involved in the JFK assassination as a ?second Oswald.? See ?Historia Discordia,? August/September.)
A wealthy pharmaceutical company owner named Werner Stiefel was the first to try to create an ocean-based libertarian society, not just write about it. In 1968, under the name Operation Atlantis, Stiefel began recruiting eager young libertarians to move into an old motel in Saugerties, New York. From that humble base they were, according to the plan, eventually to obtain sovereignty over some island?the Prickly Pear Cays in the British West Indies were an initial target?and turn it into a fresh, uncorrupted country. Under that new nation?s flag, Stiefel and his freebooters could sail ships that would build artificial platforms in the ocean, which would become the real new nation.
The Stiefelers coined their own silver money, the deca, and earned a brief mention in Esquire in September 1970. ?Operation Atlantis is a real mind-blower,? Esquire said. ?They?re not just interested in a floating community, but an honest-to-God independent country.?How are they going to do it? They?re going to build an island, baby, in the middle of the ocean.? In 1971 the group changed the price of its newsletter from 24 U.S. cents to 32 ?deca-cents.?
In the early ?70s Stiefel and his crew built from scratch a rebar-and-mortar boat inside a geodesic dome. They managed, with many difficulties along the way, to sail the homemade vessel from Saugerties down to the Silver Shoals area, near the Bahamas. There, according to Erwin Strauss? book How to Start Your Own Country, they eventually ran afoul of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had designs of his own for the area where Stiefel tried to build a nation. (Sunken Spanish galleons with unclaimed treasure were thought to be in the area.) Stiefel and his crew were driven away, and no new Atlantis rose above the waves.
But the dream of an aquatic Galt?s Gulch was too sweet to die. Around the same time that Stiefel ran afoul of Baby Doc, Mike Oliver, a concentration camp survivor, coin dealer, and land developer from Nevada, was inflaming libertarian minds with his 1968 book called A New Constitution for a New Country. In it he presented a model constitution for a nation whose extremely limited government could be financed voluntarily. Oliver did more than just write constitutions for sand castles in the sky and imagine ocean-bound libertarian strongholds; he actually gathered teams and money to build them. (Who would actually inhabit them always seemed a bit of an afterthought.)
In 1972, Oliver supervised the sea kingdom of Minerva, built on a South Pacific reef that was dry only at low tide. Minerva was quickly conquered, in one assault with one gunboat, by the king of Tonga. Oliver and his circle?which eventually included John Hospers, a philosopher at the University of Southern California and the Libertarian Party?s first presidential candidate?a couple of years later tried to make common cause with a separatist movement on the Bahamian island of Abaco, but that effort fizzled out.
Oliver?s most serious reach for libertopia came on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, part of the New Hebrides. In 1980 representatives of Oliver?s Phoenix Foundation?which for a while had former Reason editor and Reason Foundation founder Robert Poole on its board of directors ?supplied advice and some technical skill to Jimmy Moly Stevens, leader of a Vanuatu separatist movement. The French and British, who had a peculiar dual protectorate over the islands, were pulling out. While some questioned Stevens? libertarian bona fides, we never got a chance to find out how sincere he was.
This nascent nation also was strangled in its crib. At least this time it took more than one Tongan gunboat. Troops from both Papua New Guinea and Australia, in service of the socialist government that inherited the New Hebrides after the French and British left, suppressed Stevens? rebellion. He spent a decade in jail, and the Phoenix Foundation caught the eye of the feds, who briefly considered prosecution of the parties involved for violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from interfering in U.S. relations with foreign powers.
?Grab Them by the Scruff of Their Necks?
Jason Sorens? dream is off to a better start than the soggy failures of the past. Choosing dry land was probably a wise move. Another vital ingredient has been the Internet, the most useful tool for the seeding, crafting, and guiding of intentional communities ever invented.
The FSP has made effective use of the Internet?s potential: At freestateproject.org, you can take the pledge, communicate on public message boards, and register your personal information, which, if you like, eventually will be available to other Free Staters. So all the Porcupines will be able to talk among themselves about moving plans and job and housing prospects, or just hash out libertarian ideas and how to actualize them. At press time, 6,103 people were pledged, and about 100 already had moved, although the pledge does not require them to do so until the target of 20,000 participants has been reached.
The Free Staters I visited in New Hampshire assure me that if and when the exodus begins, the traveling Porcupines will find many great things already awaiting them. For starters, there?s Article 10 of the state constitution?s Bill of Rights, which reads:
?Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.?
As Sorens has written, New Hampshire has a history based on ?settlement patterns centered around small towns occupying rills, dales, and valleys? that gave rise to a ?town meeting system [that] allowed citizens to keep their government officials close enough to ?grab them by the scruff of their necks? if they overstepped their power. Essentially what developed was a kind of ?communal libertarianism? different from the individualism of the West, where one could simply escape the company of others.?
That system, argues Sorens, is still largely intact, which increases the Porcupines? confidence that they can make a difference in New Hampshire. Still, it is treacherous to make assumptions about how human beings today are influenced, bound by, or carrying on attitudes prevalent among their ancestors hundreds, or even dozens, of years ago.
Beyond matters of inchoate political culture, New Hampshire has a good head start on many specific issues important to libertarians. It lacks both sales and personal income taxes?though many complain the property taxes are too high, and there is an 8.5 percent business profits tax. About two-thirds of the property taxes go to public schools, so a successful school privatization would have a huge impact on the tax burden.
The state?s gun policies are relatively libertarian: Open carry is legal without a permit, and concealed carry requires a permit that is easy to get, with localities forbidden to impose tougher rules. There is no legal requirement for automotive liability insurance, though New Hampshire does have government-enforced ?community rating? for health insurance. The state lacks annoying bits of nanny statism such as seat belt and helmet laws for adults.
Free Stater Keith Murphy, an urban studies graduate student at the University of Maryland, tells me that on his visit to New Hampshire to scout it out, he did something every day that would have been against the law in his home state. These exercises of freedom included driving without a seat belt, buying fireworks and shooting them, and even the humble but profound act of buying beer at a grocery store.
New Hampshire boasts a median household income of $53,910, more than 20 percent above the national median, making it fourth-ranked of all states by that measure. It also has the lowest percentage of population below the poverty line of any state. It has a healthy high-tech economy, which is important for the types of jobs that attract people who will be able to easily move to the Free State. One Porcupine, Robert Gibson, is already moving his computerized process-serving corporation, Corbadex, up to Manchester and offering jobs to fellow Free Staters.
For libertarians who crave genuine political influence, perhaps the most encouraging thing about New Hampshire is that it has the largest state legislature in the country: 400 representatives, most with constituencies smaller than 3,000. (The downside of this is that each legislator is commensurately rather powerless to get things done.) You could realistically shake hands with every single voter in your district, and probably have a cup of coffee with every voter you?d need to win. House members are paid a pittance of $100 a year, making government in New Hampshire a game for enthusiastic amateurs and the retired. And ballot fusion is legal there, so Libertarian Party types could conceivably also win major-party nominations and gain straight party votes.
At the Free State gathering in Danbury I met Henry McElroy, a charming and dedicatedly anti-state Republican state representative whose libertarianism is so radical that it?s difficult to imagine him holding office anywhere else. McElroy thinks he?s making some headway with a bill that would return New Hampshire to the gold standard. Other bills introduced in the New Hampshire legislature (all unlikely to become law) would nullify the 16th amendment, reduce the business profits tax by half over five years, and make jury nullification an established legal right.
Another advantage of New Hampshire?which has some sea coast, lots of mountains, lots of small rural towns, and a few sizable metropolises?is how well suited it seems to philosopher Robert Nozick?s vision of a libertarian utopia as a framework for lots of different mini-utopias. There are many different ways for Free Staters to build their dreams in New Hampshire. They could live in the snowy mountains or in a big city within an hour?s drive of Boston; run for state legislature or join the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws; fight to loosen homeschooling requirements or to lower property taxes; live in an anarchist commune in the woods or in a downtown apartment.
New Hampshire?s libertarian-leaning governor, Craig Benson, even signed on as a friend of the FSP. ?Come on up,? he has told the Porcupines. ?We?d love to have you. You?re active, you want to make the state or the towns and cities you hope to live in a better place.? The chairwoman of the state Democratic Party predictably complained (even as she ticked off three good reasons to join the movement), ?Why is Governor Benson supporting a group that wants to legalize prostitution, legalize drugs, and eliminate public schools??
In mid-April, the Concord Monitor reported that ?a panel authorized by the governor to find inefficiencies in the state health and transportation departments is composed almost entirely of members of the Free State Project.? Gov. Benson had befriended Libertarian Party state chair John Babiarz while running against him for governor in 2002; they discovered they had some common attitudes toward the size and inefficiency of state government. Benson appointed Babiarz to a state commission seeking out government inefficiencies, and Babiarz brought on a bunch of Free Staters to assist him in that role. Babiarz tells me he has his eye on cutting state spending on transportation and child services, and has already advised the state to cut or curtail its role in running plant nurseries and prisons. Unusual as this might be on the national level, the head of the state Libertarian Party is a serious political player in New Hampshire.
Despite any head start they might have, Sorens recommends that Porcupines take things slowly upon moving to New Hampshire. He writes that ?we will have to do our best to blend in, lay down roots in the community?If we come in trumpeting an ?abolish everything? platform, we will make enemies out of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to us.? Some heated opposition to the FSP is already evident, provoked by a splinter group called the Free Town Project.
The Free Town Project advocates that Porcupines concentrate themselves in Babiarz?s home of Grafton, which already lacks most local regulations. Radical talk on Web sites and listservs associated with the Free Town Project got some locals riled enough that one mailed an anti-FSP flier to everyone in Grafton. This was followed by the June town meeting, at which FSP representatives were asked to explain themselves. FSP organizer Tim Condon tells me he got a lynch mob feeling from many of the Graftonites. Condon came up from his Florida home to defend the project?s honor against what he considered the ?libertarian exhibitionism? of a few outliers who were talking up Grafton as a home for freewheeling dueling, bums fighting in the streets as low-paid entertainers, and bestiality.
Sorens? expressed wishes are less extreme but still radical. He speculates about ordering federal law enforcement agents out of localities, for example. But unlike in Grafton, which has a population of only 1,000 or so, there is little risk that the FSP will ?flood? the whole state. It plans an influx of 20,000 over several years; lately, New Hampshire has been gaining about that many newcomers every year.
"I Can?t Sit by and Watch It Happen Without Me"
The Free Staters earned a major bit of local media attention the weekend I was with them in February. We all gathered in a friendly Irish pub to watch the Massachusetts-based TV newsmagazine Chronicle dedicate a half-hour to the FSP. Prominently featured was FSP?s current president, Amanda Phillips. Phillips is a single mother in her early 30s, a former Air Force special investigator turned accounting supervisor, currently living in Massachusetts. She is an anarchist, a matter of some controversy among Free Staters, though it didn?t seem to faze the TV reporters.
The TV cameras showed Phillips curled up with David Friedman?s anarcho-capitalist classic The Machinery of Freedom and spotlighted her sneakers emblazoned with the circle-A anarchy symbol. Most Porcupines were delighted with the piece, but certain touches clearly were intended to make Free Staters seem a little silly, if not bordering on lunatic and dangerous. A fair amount of screen time was given to the Dalton Gang, a group of cowboy-emulating vintage weapon enthusiasts exercising their liberty to openly carry their guns. Also featured was a Porcupine tooling down the street in his smoke-belching Unimog, a bizarre, hulking German military vehicle. Ultimately, the anchors of the show concluded that the FSP is an ?interesting? development, as opposed to an alarming one.
Which is good, Phillips thinks. While she knows people like the Daltons probably seemed like comic-relief freaks to most viewers, right now her audience is not a standard TV audience. It is fellow libertarians, the ones she is trying to convince to move. And they will be aware that if people want to carry their old guns or drive German military vehicles, that?s just fine.
To Condon, an ex-Marine and Florida attorney, that sort of colorful eccentricity is more than just fine. He is nostalgic about his old college days in Gainesville, Florida, remembering ?all these junky trailers from the ?50s and ?60s, people building sheds, old junky cars?it was terrific! Pimps, whores, poets, law students, geneticists, all mixed up?great, but very poor-looking.? He?s hoping to find a similar dynamic mix in a Free State, unburdened by the officious ?little Hitlers? who insist that other people paint their houses or maintain their yards or behave the way they want them to behave.
But Condon can?t move right away. He?s taking care of his elderly mother down in Florida. This sort of personal-life conflict no doubt will keep even many excited liber-tarian activists out of New Hampshire. Indeed, given all the advantages New Hampshire already has to the libertarian-minded, one wonders why the market hasn?t already taken care of this problem, so to speak. Why were entrepreneurs like Sorens and Phillips needed to sell the idea of migrating to New Hampshire, if lower taxes and less government dominate libertarians? decisions about where to live?
Despite rhetoric from Porcupines about how their move is easy compared to the difficulties that early migrants to America faced crossing the oceans in search of liberty, most Americans, even most libertarians?assuming they manage not to run afoul of drug laws, eminent domain, or IRS prosecutions?just don?t feel so tyrannized on a day-to-day basis that they feel an urgent need to uproot themselves.
So who are these people ready to move to New Hampshire for political reasons? The people I met and talked to in the Free State movement are varied, but not all that varied. They are overwhelmingly white and white-collar, though not very wealthy. They include chiropractors, programmers, college students in both social and medical sciences, business supervisors, financial planners, and hair stylists.
What they do not have in common is horror stories about state persecution that ruined their lives. I heard no stories of drug arrests, land grabs, regulation-driven business failures, or children snatched away by government agencies. A zoology student with a Green Party background hopes the Free State will be a more genuinely communitarian world, one where people have to cooperate to meet the social needs government now tries to meet. Tim Condon speculates New Hampshire will become not just a freewheeling social scene but also an American Hong Kong, a low-regulation mecca that will snatch away businesses and wealth from the rest of the country, shoring up the Porcupines? enclave.
While most rebel at the notion when I float it, the Free Staters? disgust with the state seems more theoretical and philosophical than experiential?though the desire to more conveniently homeschool their children and have less of their income snatched are motivations for many. Amanda Phillips sums up the FSP spirit that motivates even people who might not, to the normal American?s view, seem particularly oppressed: ?My gosh, I could actually have a society where I could walk around carrying a concealed weapon without having to ask permission, and keep the money I earn, and send my daughter to a private school that?s reasonably priced, and live in a world where what women do with their own bodies is their own business? When I see this vision of what could be, now that there is a real chance it could happen, I can?t sit by and watch it happen without me.?
?Migrating for Freedom?
The major problem with the notion that the FSP will bring liberty in our times to New Hampshire is that many of America?s tyrannical impositions, from the most evil to the most petty, come from the federal level. And the FSP is very vocally not a secessionist movement.
Thus, what the FSP can achieve even in a best-case scenario is limited. We have seen what the feds think of states that try to relax their drug laws. How would the No Child Left Behind president deal with an attempt to end mandatory public schooling? Or to avoid or evade the enforcement of regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, or the Federal Communications Commission?or to dodge a new military draft?
In response to the question of whether the FSP idea really can work, Sorens says that in effect it already has?just not with libertarians. Vermont has, since the 1960s, evolved from the home of rock-ribbed Yankee conservatism to the home of Ben & Jerry?s, self-described socialist U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders, and Howard Dean. This transformation has even inspired a Take Back Vermont counterrevolutionary back-lash. The hippies and the crunchies and the liberals targeted Vermont, Sorens claims, using as evidence an April 1972 Playboy article. That article, written by Richard Pollak, was based on a proposal floated in the Yale Journal of Law and Social Policy by two firebrand law school students named James F. Blumstein and James Phelan.
Blumstein and Phelan wrote, ?What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political take-over of that state through the elective process.? Sound familiar? Like Sorens? original essay, their piece didn?t even name a state. But in the Playboy article, Pollak fingered Vermont as the most appropriate state for ?the nation?s alienated young.?
Blumstein, today a law professor at Vanderbilt University, is loath to credit his idea or Pollak?s expansion of it with Vermont?s change. He rightly notes that he has no evidence the piece was a direct influence on anyone, much less tens of thousands. By contrast, Sorens, with the FSP?s database, will have a better idea of whether any change in New Hampshire?s future can be attributed to his proposal.
?The whole American experience is based on migrating for freedom,? Sorens rightly notes. While the corpses of many attempts at intentional communities dot the American landscape, the FSP idea is more ecumenical and less insistent on a specific central location (New Hampshire is a state, not a commune) and way of life. The example of the Mormons could cheer the Porcupines: They migrated en masse to a state and succeeded in dominating its political culture for the long haul. But when they rubbed up too hard against the feds, they abandoned one of their key practices, polygamy.
A similar fate for the Free Staters seems likely?perhaps some significant moves in tax and service cutting in New Hampshire, but a fully libertarian society stillborn under the watchful eye of federal tyranny. And this is assuming the Free Staters actually summon the 20,000.
A Porcupine get-together in the kinder month of June, one I was not able to attend, attracted 300 people, 10 times as many as showed up in February in Danbury. Yet there?s been little growth in the number of FSP pledgers since New Hampshire was chosen last year. Sorens blames a downturn in press coverage; he hopes that with more funding for advertising and outreach the Free Staters can break out of the slump. But it may well be that libertarian separatism is still too eccentric to win over tens of thousands.
Still, history is not always predictable, and funny things can happen when people have something specific to rally round. The FSP experiment is opening up paths of communication to, and between, people who have not normally been likely to embrace the libertarian political message. Ryan Lazarotta, a gay man and a personal stylist, is the FSP coordinator for the Las Vegas area. He and his partner already have their New Hampshire move mapped out. Lazarotta, who had never had anything to do with libertarianism, stumbled upon the FSP on the Web and found it made sense of a lot of things.
Lazarotta had been on his own since age 14, his unpleasant experience in public schools ?100 percent? responsible for his leaving home so young. Now he wants to tell his fellow gays that they don?t need to be slaves on a Democratic plantation. ?I want to spread the idea of freedom among my peers,? he says. ?As far as FSP is concerned, [gay men] should be a great target. They are mobile, often self-generate their income, don?t necessarily want to have to pay to educate other people?s children,? and when it comes to the legal status of their intimate relationships, are faced daily with insults based on unequal legal treatment.
?I?m new to this whole frame of thought,? Lazarotta says, ?and through personal meetings I?m building comfort levels and trust between groups that don?t necessarily encounter each other on a regular basis. As Democratic-leaning as I?d been, I wasn?t comfortable, say, with gun rights people. But when we all meet at a table we realize we all can get along great and have a common denominator in what we are trying to achieve. Our special interests might be related to our personal lives, but our greater ambitions and fates have us wrapped up together.?
That sort of common understanding might not be as romantic as life on a liberated oil platform, free as the sea breezes that blow. But it?s a vital step toward making the many sorts of people who are disenchanted with statism realize that they already live together on an island, one that will be liberated only if they fight together.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man (Little, Brown).
http://www.reason.com/0412/fe.bd.revolt.shtml
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Woof All:
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January/February 2005 Issue
The Condemned
Gary Greenberg
In Ohio, and across the country, homeowners are battling cities and developers conspiring to seize their property.
From his office at the top of Rookwood Tower, the seven-story, glass-and-steel building that his family?s real estate company built, Jeffrey Robert Anderson Jr., or J.R. as he is known here in Norwood, Ohio, can easily survey his empire. Directly below the tower and its 185,000 square feet of professional and financial services offices is Rookwood Pavilion, 23 acres of shopping and eating. A little farther to the left is Rookwood Commons -- not, Anderson advises me, a shopping plaza, but a "lifestyle center" containing a Gap, Ann Taylor, and 46 of the other usual suspects. This former brownfield, abandoned when a machine tool factory left Norwood, is now the premier shopping destination in Greater Cincinnati, if not all of Ohio, according to anyone around here that you ask. It?s an impressive sight, and perched high up in his well-appointed office with its sculptures and paintings and enormous glass-topped table, you might believe that this tall and fit 32-year-old with flaxen hair and bright blue eyes rules over all that he sees, or at least all that lies this side of the interstate.
And he would, were it not for the 13-acre, triangular spit of land directly below the tower. There, under the spruce and maple trees, are the asphalt-shingled roofs of a tidy neighborhood of modest houses. Bounded by the Cincinnati city line to the east and Rookwood to the south, and cut off from the rest of Norwood by an interstate highway, these 97 homes and small businesses are glaringly out of place, a mid-20th-century remnant amid all this 21st-century glitz. They?re also in Anderson's way. He wants to expand the Rookwood complex, but he has to buy and raze all these houses first, and while most property owners have eagerly accepted his offer to buy their houses at a premium price, five have refused. And so the $125 million-plus project, known as Rookwood Exchange, slated to be under construction by now, is at a dead standstill.
But Anderson has an ace up his sleeve. At his behest, and using his money, the city of Norwood has invoked its powers of eminent domain -- the right, granted by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, of a government to seize private property and turn it to public use -- to condemn a neighborhood and order residents out of their homes. Norwood is not the first city to act as a real estate broker whose offer can?t be refused, nor is Anderson the first businessman to benefit from this kind of largesse. A 1954 Supreme Court decision stating that the economic benefits of private development are a legitimate "public use" has forged an unholy alliance between cities strapped for cash and entrepreneurs promising economic bounty. (Anderson, for example, forecasts that Rookwood Exchange will net Norwood, a city with an annual budget of $18 million, between $1.5 and $3 million in annual taxes.) Struggling cities have placed their urban renewal hopes in the hands of developers like Anderson, who in turn rely on governments to assemble the parcels for their projects.
According to the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public-interest law firm, this is a growing trend. The institute analyzed eminent domain cases between 1998 and 2002 and found more than 10,000 instances where local governments had attempted to use a power once reserved for indisputably public projects like highways and railroads to obtain properties for private development projects such as box stores and golf courses.
No properties are off-limits -- working-class communities, ski chalets, and one-tenth of San Jose, California, have all been targets of condemnation proceedings on behalf of enterprises as varied as casinos, Costco, and the New York Times -- and no one has yet been able to thwart this newly privatized version of eminent domain. But by litigating against what it calls "eminent domain abuse," the IJ has succeeded in creating enough disarray in state courts to achieve its ultimate goal: convincing the Supreme Court to revisit the issue. This spring, for the first time in 50 years, the court will address the parameters of eminent domain, and the institute hopes the justices will rein in the private use of what the court itself once called government?s "despotic power."
"It was the day before Mother?s Day in 2002," Joy Gamble says. "They said they were going to build this fabulous project, and we were going to be gone. The roof fell in." The Gambles, who have lived in Norwood their entire lives, made an immediate decision. They weren?t selling, no matter what price Anderson was paying. "And start life all over again?" Carl adds. "We started here, we raised two kids here, we finish up here."
"Here" is the Gambles' two-story stucco home a few doors up tree-lined Atlantic Avenue from its terminus at the I-71 off-ramp. An American flag is planted by the brick front stairs, next to a hand-lettered sign that says, "IF YOU WANT THIS PROPERTY YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT IN 1969." Inside, a hunting supply catalog sits on the coffee table, a Ronald Reagan calendar hangs from the kitchen wall, and vivid tapestries and paintings of stags and partridges give the overall effect of Field & Stream on acid. The Gambles, who won?t give their ages ("I forgot," says Carl; "I don?t tell," says Joy), appear to be in their 70s, and they speak in clipped sentences inflected with the local twang. "The first time we had contact with these people," Joy tells me, "[Anderson] wanted to meet with us. I said, 'We don?t want to sell.' He said, 'Thank you.' I said, 'You're welcome.' I hung up. Very nice." Joy goes on to list several other unsuccessful attempts, noting that Anderson?s people were always extremely polite.
But what the Gambles didn't know was that in January 2002, before he called them or any of their neighbors, Anderson had asked the City Council to undertake an urban renewal study, the prerequisite to condemning properties. "I figured we wouldn?t have to go through with it," Anderson says. "Just pass the urban renewal study and get things rolling." When he built Rookwood Tower back in 1997, Anderson had easily convinced the city to authorize such a study -- although he was ultimately able to assemble the necessary properties on his own. But in 2003, three years after he was indicted for corruption, the longtime mayor -- whom Anderson had given $23,000 in campaign contributions ("an astronomical sum around here," says one city official) and an undisclosed amount toward legal fees -- resigned. The council, perhaps eager to seem less cozy with its largest private taxpayer, had earlier told Anderson "to go out and pound the doors, go assemble as many houses as possible," he says. "Once I?m completely at a stalemate, then come back and discuss urban renewal."
While Anderson was going door to door in the early summer of 2002, so was Joe Horney, a 35-year-old construction manager. Sitting on the Gambles' couch, bouncing his two-year-old daughter on his lap, Horney proudly recounts how he used an inheritance to buy a two-family house across from the Gambles when he was 21. When he heard the news, he says, "I decided to go out and meet the neighbors. I found out from a lot of people that they were perfectly happy here, they'd like to stay. So we started a petition." At first, about half of the homeowners vowed not to sell. But in September, Anderson and his partners announced their terms: They'd buy everyone's house at a 35 percent premium over its fair market value, but only if they had all the neighbors under contract. If any residents held out, the developers would ask the city to condemn those properties, and a jury would decide the price. Throughout the fall, many of Horney's erstwhile allies signed contracts. In the meantime, Anderson eliminated from his plans a 28-house section of the neighborhood in which resistance was most concentrated, and by year?s end, with 5 of the remaining 69 owners still refusing to sell, Anderson had his stalemate -- in no small part, as it turns out, because condemnation had been in the air all along. "Where I made my decision is when eminent domain was threatened from day one," says Horney. "Once they threatened my rights, my decision was made."
The City Council authorized the urban renewal study, which Anderson paid for, in April 2003. Citing certain facts -- small driveways, narrow streets, lots that don't conform to current zoning regulations, houses that are more than 40 years old, a neighborhood subject to all the light and noise and traffic that progress (much of it Rookwood-related) has brought -- the study declared the neighborhood blighted and thus eligible to be seized, emptied, and razed.
Standing in the Gambles' tranquil back yard, with its lilacs and bird feeders, it's hard to understand how anyone could think this property was blighted. Horney points out that by the study's criteria, nearly anyone's home could be taken by the government. "You could call the White House blighted because it's over 40 years old, it's got a lack of parking, it's surrounded by commercial development. I'm sure there is noise. If you tore it down and put in a big office building, certainly it would generate more taxes than Mr. Bush living there." The City Council proceeded to condemn the five properties not under contract with Anderson. According to Mayor Tom Williams, they took this action reluctantly, partly to secure tax revenues for the city. "I was a cop for 34 years, got shot once and shot people twice," Williams says. "It's the same with this thing. You hate to pull the trigger, but sometimes it?s a necessity."
When Institute for Justice lawyers Scott Bullock and Dana Berliner first visited Norwood in December 2002, they were pleased with what they saw: "a classic mixed-use neighborhood, in perfectly fine condition," as Bullock puts it. That boded well for the institute -- which Bullock describes as an "unabashedly libertarian" organization and which gets much of its funding from wealthy opponents of big government like energy magnates David and Charles Koch -- and its overall goal of reversing what it sees as a disastrous half-century of eminent domain jurisprudence.
Governments have always taken land on behalf of private interests; owners of mines and railroads relied heavily on condemnations for their rights of way, which were granted because, as one Pennsylvania court put it, "the necessities of a great public industry, which although in the hands of a private corporation, [serve] a great public interest." But in Berman v. Parker, a 1954 case, the Supreme Court ruled that the District of Columbia could seize a fully functional store in a blighted neighborhood on the grounds that, as Justice William O. Douglas wrote in the unanimous opinion, "It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled." It was not up to the courts to insist "that public ownership is the sole method of promoting the public purposes of community redevelopment projects." Legislatures, in other words, were free to determine -- as the Norwood City Council did -- that one private use of a property was better for the overall community than another, and to use eminent domain to enforce this finding.
According to the IJ?s Berliner, the Berman decision has devolved into a license for cities to "rent out" their eminent domain powers to private developers, with bogus blight designations providing the legal cover. But Jason Jordan, a government affairs director at the American Planning Association, sees the decision as underpinning the "hottest" trend in urban renewal: replacing economically obsolete neighborhoods with large-scale, tax-generating developments like Rookwood Exchange. "Eminent domain is an important tool for communities interested in revitalizing themselves," Jordan told me, and, according to Jeffrey Finkle, head of the International Economic Development Council, it's also a needed tool for reducing sprawl. "Unless we want to pave over all the land outside cities, we have to be able to do these projects inside the urban ring. How can we reposition cities if they don?t have the power to acquire private land?" The ability to team up with developers is indispensable to this agenda, Finkle adds. "Communities have to respond to market opportunities," he says. "If you have a developer willing to invest millions of dollars, it?s important to make that happen."
Rick Dettmer, who runs Norwood?s one-man municipal development office out of the basement of City Hall, says this is precisely why Norwood couldn't turn Anderson away. "The reality is that you need to rely on developer interest in order to facilitate projects. We're not paying for this party." If he were, Dettmer says he might throw it elsewhere -- perhaps in Norwood's decaying downtown, less than a mile from the Rookwood complex. But Norwood, which has suffered two decades of factory closings, and which has a $1.5 million budget deficit, desperately needs this party, wherever it is held.
Many American cities are in a similar predicament, and in the wake of Berman and related state and federal court decisions, cities and entrepreneurs have worked out an elaborate courting ritual in which local governments offer up their eminent domain authority while developers tout the economic benefits of their projects to the electorate. "All the developer has to do," says the IJ?s Bullock, "is to convince the city that it?s good for them and that he will pay for it, and the city will start taking away people?s property." He adds that cities often offer more than condemnations. "Eminent domain is part of a whole set of incentives -- tax breaks and deferrals and other public subsidies -- that add up to massive corporate welfare. Often the numbers fail to live up to expectations. Jobs don't materialize or the economic benefits don?t outweigh the subsidies or the drain on public services that the development creates." When this happens, Bullock says, cities are left holding the bag.
The IJ took on its first eminent domain case in 1996, winning a favorable ruling for an elderly homeowner who refused to sell her Atlantic City property for a Donald Trump casino. "After that decision, we were swamped with phone calls," Bullock recalls, "and we started to think that courts might be willing to revisit this issue." The IJ has since taken on several cases nationwide, and saw Norwood -- with its unblighted neighborhood, its developer-driven condemnations, and its questionable public use -- as another opportunity to illustrate to a court how wrongheaded the private use of eminent domain is. An Ohio judge, however, was unswayed, ruling in June that although the neighborhood was not blighted, it was "deteriorating," and on these grounds, Norwood could go ahead and condemn the holdouts' properties; they are appealing.
In the meantime, a series of jury trials will decide the value of the five condemned properties. (In September, in the first of these trials, Horney?s house was valued at $233,000, money that, he says, "I hope I never see.") But developments elsewhere might make these trials irrelevant. In August 2004, the Michigan Supreme Court invalidated its 1981 landmark Poletown v. Detroit decision, which had determined that "one entity's profit maximization contributed to the health of the general economy." Stating that "Poletown's 'economic benefit' rationale would validate practically any exercise of the power of eminent domain on behalf of a private entity," the court refused to allow Wayne County to condemn land for an industrial park. "State courts from Nevada to Connecticut have relied on Poletown in upholding condemnations," Berliner said. "Now the same case will work for our side."
Add this case to those roiling communities across the country, and you have the kind of confusion in lower courts that begs for clarification from the U.S. Supreme Court. And indeed, shortly after the Poletown decision, the court agreed to hear another IJ case, in which the city of New London, Connecticut, condemned an unblighted neighborhood in order to make way for a hotel and condominium complex. Bullock hopes the Supreme Court will revisit the scope of the Berman decision, and rein in the privatization of eminent domain.
Out here on Edwards road, yellow signs bearing messages like "HELD HOSTAGE" and "WE SUPPORT ROOKWOOD EXCHANGE" sprout like dandelions from front lawns, and a king-size bedsheet banner hanging from Sandy Dittoe's pink stucco one-story declares, "64 OF 65 RESIDENTS WANT OUT. I AM ONE OF THEM." Dittoe bought her house for $82,000 seven years ago, and she's almost completely rehabbed it since. In 2002, speculating on Anderson's plans, she bought a house around the corner, which she rents out. When Anderson offered her $175,000 for each property, "it was a godsend," she told me. "I was thrilled." She began to make plans to move and to pay off the loan for her Northern Kentucky nightclub. But she has to wait for Anderson to make deals with all her neighbors before she'll receive a penny.
In the meantime, Dittoe's in limbo -- a maddening situation that she blames on her holdout neighbors. "Sure I'm pissed. They're screwing everybody. I've been stuck in a house for two years. There's no point in putting any more money into it, but I still have to live here," she says, pointing out the unfinished trim in her kitchen and the place where she left off putting purple paint on a bedroom ceiling. Her neighbor, Bill Pierani, a part-time security guard for the Cincinnati Reds, agrees. "We'd have been out of here years ago if it wasn?t for them."
Pierani and Dittoe are glad to show me evidence of "blight": the streaks of grime in eaves; an overgrown back yard, home to rats and snakes; the foundations cracked, they say, by the heavy truck traffic; the "foot traffic" and the "element" it brings in; the guys -- "I won?t tell you what color they were," Pierani says -- who broke into someone's house. They point out the oil change place and the muffler shop down the street and describe how they've long wanted to get away from these nuisances -- although there's little evidence that they or their neighbors tried to sell their homes or otherwise flee the neighborhood before Rookwood Exchange came along. Pierani compares the neighborhood, in which he has lived for nearly all of his life, to the cancer he once had. "The job is to go in and cut it off completely. Not to keep hacking at it."
At a meeting the previous night, the residents' impatience turned on Anderson's lawyer, who assured them that the end was in sight. This statement left resident Walter Sims hopping mad. "That lawyer pissed me off because he stood up there and misled these people," Sims, who is settled into his rocker on the front porch, says in his Kentucky drawl. "He knows these people" -- he points to a holdout's house next door -- "ain?t gonna ever sell to him. But he?s relying on the city to do it for him in court. And he knows that until all these appeals are resolved, they can't do nothing. You know how slow the judicial system is? It takes them months to wipe their a$$."
But the residents reserve most of their seething fury for the holdouts, and when Pierani says, "Twenty-five years ago, there would have been a homicide by this point," it's not clear if he's nostalgic or relieved. When Sims says, "I think people are mad and disgusted because they ain't got their money. Why haven't you done something by now to get us the money?" you feel how ugly things might get. And when a man smoking a cigarette on his porch first refuses to talk to you because "the papers always get this story wrong," and then calls you back to say, "Wait a minute. You can quote me on this. f*ck the Gambles. Yeah. f*ck the Gambles, and throw Joe Horney in there, too," you're pretty sure things already have.
In this kind of atmosphere, it's no surprise that the residents don't believe that the Gambles and the others are standing on principle. Explanations vary -- some think that they're angling for a better price, others that they're just stubborn -- but most people seem to agree with Dittoe's assessment that "this project is going to benefit everyone, all the residents here and the whole city." She adds, "There's more to it than just what these people want." But whatever NIMBY concerns may have motivated the holdouts in the first place, they have become galvanized by the large-scale implications of their battle. "What I want to protect is not just myself, but virtually everyone else in the USA from having their constitutional rights undermined," says Horney. "I mean, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. We're allowed to go out and buy property, and that's being taken away." As they dig in for the appeals, it's clear that these folks are in it for the long haul, that, even with his rented eminent domain powers, Anderson has a lengthy wait before he can extend his empire into this neighborhood. "He can have the house when we're on our deathbed," says Carl Gamble. "Not a minute before."
Gary Greenberg is a psychotherapist, college professor of psychology, and occasional journalist. His writing on science and public policy has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Harper's
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HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS
BEFORE THE US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS COMMITTEE
January 6, 2005
Government IDs and Identity Theft
Mr. Speaker, today I introduce the Identity Theft Prevention Act. This act protects the American people from government-mandated uniform identifiers that facilitate private crime as well as the abuse of liberty. The major provision of the Identity Theft Prevention Act halts the practice of using the Social Security number as an identifier by requiring the Social Security Administration to issue all Americans new Social Security numbers within five years after the enactment of the bill. These new numbers will be the sole legal property of the recipient, and the Social Security administration shall be forbidden to divulge the numbers for any purposes not related to Social Security administration. Social Security numbers issued before implementation of this bill shall no longer be considered valid federal identifiers. Of course, the Social Security Administration shall be able to use an individual's original Social Security number to ensure efficient administration of the Social Security system.
Mr. Speaker, Congress has a moral responsibility to address this problem because it was Congress that transformed the Social Security number into a national identifier. Thanks to Congress, today no American can get a job, open a bank account, get a professional license, or even get a driver's license without presenting his Social Security number. So widespread has the use of the Social Security number become that a member of my staff had to produce a Social Security number in order to get a fishing license!
One of the most disturbing abuses of the Social Security number is the congressionally-authorized rule forcing parents to get a Social Security number for their newborn children in order to claim the children as dependents. Forcing parents to register their children with the state is more like something out of the nightmares of George Orwell than the dreams of a free republic that inspired this nation's founders.
Congressionally-mandated use of the Social Security number as an identifier facilitates the horrendous crime of identity theft. Thanks to Congress, an unscrupulous person may simply obtain someone's Social Security number in order to access that person's bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial assets. Many Americans have lost their life savings and had their credit destroyed as a result of identity theft. Yet the federal government continues to encourage such crimes by mandating use of the Social Security number as a uniform ID!
This act also forbids the federal government from creating national ID cards or establishing any identifiers for the purpose of investigating, monitoring, overseeing, or regulating private transactions among American citizens. At the very end of the 108th Congress, this body established a de facto national ID card with a provisions buried in the ?intelligence? reform bill mandating federal standards for drivers? licenses, and mandating that federal agents only accept a license that conforms to these standards as a valid ID.
Nationalizing standards for driver's licenses and birth certificates creates a national ID system pure and simple. Proponents of the national ID understand that the public remains wary of the scheme, so proponents attempt to claim they are merely creating new standards for existing state IDs. However, the ?intelligence? reform legislation imposed federal standards in a federal bill, thus creating a federalized ID regardless of whether the ID itself is still stamped with the name of your state. It is just a matter of time until those who refuse to carry the new licenses will be denied the ability to drive or board an airplane. Domestic travel restrictions are the hallmark of authoritarian states, not free republics.
The national ID will be used to track the movements of American citizens, not just terrorists. Subjecting every citizen to surveillance diverts resources away from tracking and apprehending terrorists in favor of needless snooping on innocent Americans. This is what happened with "suspicious activity reports" required by the Bank Secrecy Act. Thanks to BSA mandates, federal officials are forced to waste countless hours snooping through the private financial transactions of innocent Americans merely because those transactions exceeded $10,000.
The Identity Theft Prevention Act repeals those sections of federal law creating the national ID, as well as those sections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 that require the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a uniform standard health identifier--an identifier which could be used to create a national database containing the medical history of all Americans. As an OB/GYN with more than 30 years in private practice, I know the importance of preserving the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship. Oftentimes, effective treatment depends on a patient's ability to place absolute trust in his or her doctor. What will happen to that trust when patients know that any and all information given to their doctors will be placed in a government accessible database?
By putting an end to government-mandated uniform IDs, the Identity Theft Prevention Act will prevent millions of Americans from having their liberty, property, and privacy violated by private and public sector criminals.
In addition to forbidding the federal government from creating national identifiers, this legislation forbids the federal government from blackmailing states into adopting uniform standard identifiers by withholding federal funds. One of the most onerous practices of Congress is the use of federal funds illegitimately taken from the American people to bribe states into obeying federal dictates.
Some members of Congress will claim that the federal government needs the power to monitor Americans in order to allow the government to operate more efficiently. I would remind my colleagues that, in a constitutional republic, the people are never asked to sacrifice their liberties to make the jobs of government officials easier. We are here to protect the freedom of the American people, not to make privacy invasion more efficient.
Mr. Speaker, while I do not question the sincerity of those members who suggest that Congress can ensure that citizens' rights are protected through legislation restricting access to personal information, the only effective privacy protection is to forbid the federal government from mandating national identifiers. Legislative "privacy protections'' are inadequate to protect the liberty of Americans for a couple of reasons.
First, it is simply common sense that repealing those federal laws that promote identity theft is more effective in protecting the public than expanding the power of the federal police force. Federal punishment of identity thieves provides cold comfort to those who have suffered financial losses and the destruction of their good reputations as a result of identity theft.
Federal laws are not only ineffective in stopping private criminals, but these laws have not even stopped unscrupulous government officials from accessing personal information. After all, laws purporting to restrict the use of personal information did not stop the well-publicized violations of privacy by IRS officials or the FBI abuses of the Clinton and Nixon administrations.
In one of the most infamous cases of identity theft, thousands of active-duty soldiers and veterans had their personal information stolen, putting them at risk of identity theft. Imagine the dangers if thieves are able to obtain the universal identifier, and other personal information, of millions of Americans simply by breaking, or hacking, into one government facility or one government database?
Second, the federal government has been creating proprietary interests in private information for certain state-favored special interests. Perhaps the most outrageous example of phony privacy protection is the ?medical privacy'? regulation, that allows medical researchers, certain business interests, and law enforcement officials access to health care information, in complete disregard of the Fifth Amendment and the wishes of individual patients! Obviously, "privacy protection'' laws have proven greatly inadequate to protect personal information when the government is the one seeking the information.
Any action short of repealing laws authorizing privacy violations is insufficient primarily because the federal government lacks constitutional authority to force citizens to adopt a universal identifier for health care, employment, or any other reason. Any federal action that oversteps constitutional limitations violates liberty because it ratifies the principle that the federal government, not the Constitution, is the ultimate judge of its own jurisdiction over the people. The only effective protection of the rights of citizens is for Congress to follow Thomas Jefferson's advice and "bind (the federal government) down with the chains of the Constitution.''
Mr. Speaker, those members who are not persuaded by the moral and constitutional reasons for embracing the Identity Theft Prevention Act should consider the American people?s opposition to national identifiers. The numerous complaints over the ever-growing uses of the Social Security number show that Americans want Congress to stop invading their privacy. Furthermore, according to a survey by the Gallup company, 91 percent of the American people oppose forcing Americans to obtain a universal health ID.
In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I once again call on my colleagues to join me in putting an end to the federal government's unconstitutional use of national identifiers to monitor the actions of private citizens. National identifiers threaten all Americans by exposing them to the threat of identity theft by private criminals and abuse of their liberties by public criminals, while diverting valuable law enforcement resources away from addressing real threats to public safety. In addition, national identifiers are incompatible with a limited, constitutional government. I, therefore, hope my colleagues will join my efforts to protect the freedom of their constituents by supporting the Identity Theft Prevention Act.
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Snooping by satellite
Published: January 12, 2005, 11:00 AM PST
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
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When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome, N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state police.
Police suspected the lawyer of ties to a local Hells Angels Motorcycle Club that was selling methamphetamine, and they feared undercover officers would not be able to infiltrate the notoriously tight-knit group, which has hazing rituals that involve criminal activities. So investigators stuck a GPS, or Global Positioning System, bug on Moran's car, watched his movements, and arrested him on drug charges a month later.
A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote. "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway."
Last week's court decision is the latest to grapple with the slippery subject of how to reconcile traditional notions of privacy and autonomy with increasingly powerful surveillance technology. Once relegated, because of their cost, to the realm of what spy agencies could afford, GPS tracking devices now are readily available to jealous spouses, private investigators and local police departments for just a few hundred dollars.
Not all uses are controversial. Trucking outfits use GPS boxes to keep track of their drivers' locations, and companies sell software to dispatchers that instantly calculates which taxi is closest to a customer. OnStar uses GPS tracking to provide roadside assistance to owners of many General Motors vehicles.
What's raising eyebrows, though, is the increasingly popular law enforcement practice of secretly tagging Americans' vehicles without adhering to the procedural safeguards and judicial oversight that protect the privacy of homes and telephone conversations from police abuses.
"I think they should get court orders," said Lee Tien, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We're in a world where more and more of our activities can be viewed in public and, perhaps more importantly, be correlated and linked together."
"We're in a world where more and more of our activities can be viewed in public and...be correlated and linked together."
--Lee Tien, staff counsel, EFFGPS devices work by listening for radio signals from satellites and calculating how long the signals take to arrive.
The result of that calculation provides a highly accurate estimation of latitude and longitude. Depending on the type of GPS tracker, that information is beamed back to an eavesdropper's computer through the cellular network or quietly recorded and divulged when the device is retrieved a few days or weeks later.
Voluntarily agreeing to automotive GPS tracking can be a bargain for some consumers. Progressive Casualty Insurance began a pilot project
in Minnesota last year that embeds GPS devices in a customers' vehicles and offers insurance discounts based on where and when cars are driven.
Norwich Union, the United Kingdom's largest auto insurer, has experimented with a similar "pay as you drive" program involving 5,000 customers. Hertz has implanted GPS trackers in all of its rental cars, and trucking companies have used similar systems for years.
"If something's not totally secret, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
--Dan Solove, law professor,
George Washington UniversityGPS tracking systems are becoming cheap enough--the prices have dropped by about 50 percent in the last few years--that they've become attractive methods for tracing the whereabouts of teenagers and spouses. In 2003, South Carolina police thought they had discovered a bomb under a vehicle, but it turned out to be a GPS bug planted by a man's wife. In another case, a man in Colorado was convicted of tracking his wife with a GPS bug after she began divorce proceedings against him.
Solving crimes
GPS devices have been used to solve crimes from the petty to the heinous. Massachusetts police recently nabbed the driver of a snow removal truck who exposed himself at a Dunkin' Donuts, thanks to the Massachusetts Highway Department's requirement that state contractors outfit their trucks with GPS locators.
In 2000, when William Bradley Jackson called Spokane County, Wash., police to report that his daughter had vanished from the front yard that morning, detectives were immediately suspicious. Jackson seemed unusually nervous, and blood stains were discovered on his daughter's sheets.
Eight days later, after desperate searches failed to locate 9-year-old Valiree, detectives won court approval to secretly attach GPS tracking devices to Jackson's two vehicles.
The tactic worked; the GPS bugs led police to Valiree's shallow grave in a remote, dense forest about 50 miles from Spokane. The case ended in a murder conviction and 56-year prison sentence.
Complicating the privacy risks of tattletale cars is a pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases decided two decades ago. Those cases, U.S. v. Knotts and U.S. v. Karo, established that police don't need court approval to track suspects through a crude radio beeper.
In 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals invoked that logic when deciding that federal agents did not need a court order to slap a GPS tracker on a truck owned by a man suspected of growing marijuana. "In placing the electronic devices on the undercarriage of the Toyota 4Runner, the officers did not pry into a hidden or enclosed area,"
the court ruled, saying the bug did not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Privacy intrusion?
A handful of courts have veered in the other direction, saying GPS technology is so powerful and can reveal so much about a person's life that it requires strict judicial oversight.
The "use of GPS tracking devices is a particularly intrusive method of surveillance, making it possible to acquire an enormous amount of personal information about the citizen under circumstances where the individual is unaware that every single vehicle trip taken and the duration of every single stop may be recorded by the government," the Washington Supreme Court said in the Jackson murder case in September 2003. "Citizens of this state have a right to be free from the type of governmental intrusion that occurs when a GPS device is attached to a citizen's vehicle...A warrant is required for installation of these devices."
Some legal scholars fear that when the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighs in on GPS tracking, it will side with police over privacy. "Unless it changes its view, it's unlikely that the court will think the same way as the Washington Supreme Court," said Dan Solove, a law professor at George Washington University. "The court has a very narrow and crabbed understanding of privacy. If something's not totally secret, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
GPS tracking--even when bugs are installed by police armed with a court order--can be imperfect. One bug used by police to track convicted murderer Scott Peterson sometimes developed glitches that showed him driving at about 30,000 miles per hour. Judge Alfred Delucchi ruled the data could be admitted during Peterson's trial, which appears to have been the first such decision in California.
Even with the occasional glitches, police see great potential in GPS tracking systems, like OnStar, that are built into more expensive cars--and that most people believe will be activated only in emergencies. In one North Carolina case, police used the built-in OnStar system in a 2000 Chevrolet Suburban truck to locate it and arrest the driver, who had bought it with a fake certified check.
An even more creative method of vehicle tracking arose when the FBI used such a system for audio eavesdropping. OnStar and other remote assistance products permit passengers to call an operator for help in an emergency. The FBI realized the feature could be useful for bugging a vehicle and remotely activated it to eavesdrop on what passengers were saying. (The 9th Circuit shot down that scheme in 2003, on the grounds that it rendered the system useless in emergencies.)
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Long before Waco I could be counted among those who think of the BATF (now BATFE) as a police agency in search of a police state. There are a lot of grim stories about these guys circulating in shooting circles; this piece illustrates one of their tactics.
Imagine being a law abiding citizen and having a federal agency try to turn your way of making a living against you with bait and switch and other deceitful tactics. A shameful story that makes me wonder about the ones I don't hear.
Gun Dealer Not Guilty
Tribune Media Group
Last May, federally licensed gun dealer Danny Peterson was arrested for two felony counts of relating to the sale of guns. Peterson, a regular exhibitor at gun shows had worked the "Las Vegas Gun Show" in January.
Eight agents spent three days canvassing the January show. They made a total of three arrests.
A female and two male BATF agents targeted Peterson's booth. During testimony, the female agent, who made contact with Peterson earlier in the show, denied being a part of the meeting during which firearms were purchased. A video shown to the jury revealed her presence. Peterson was charged with 'Knowingly Making False Entry Into Records' and 'Unlawful Selling of a Firearm to out-of-state Resident'.
Peterson's attorney, Robert Glennen III, presented a defense, which included accusations of entrapment by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) agents.
Entrapment, as a matter of law, requires a showing that the government furnished the opportunity to break the law, and that Defendant was not predisposed to violate that law.
Additionally, the BATF agents committed four felonies in order to perfect a gun transaction with Peterson. It is unlawful for a resident from another state to purchase a firearm in Nevada. The female BATF agent, who pretended to be marrying a Nevada resident BATF agent, told Peterson she wanted to purchase three guns as wedding presents for her Nevada husband. Peterson told her earlier that day that the Nevada fianc?e would have to purchase the gun because it was meant for him. The BATF then brought in a third California agent to actually exchange the money for the three wedding presents. In order to purchase the guns, the agents also falsified two documents.
The video of the transaction reveals Peterson specifically telling the agents he would only sell them guns, "As long as it's legal." He also specifically asked the Nevada agent if he was purchasing the guns, to which the Nevada agent stated 'yes'.
On December 15th, a federal jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty on both counts. Peterson, 46, never had any run-ins with the law. He has held a Federal Firearms License to sell guns for fifteen years.
Peterson's attorney, Robert Glennen, commented, "All the new terrorist laws are making it tougher to see justice done in cases like this. Luckily, the jury believed Danny Peterson, and did the right thing by acquitting him."
http://www.lasvegastribune.com/20041224/headline1.html
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FBI Computers: You Don't Have Mail
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Feb. 14 issue - The FBI's computer woes got even worse last week when bureau officials were forced to shut down a commercial e-mail network used by supervisors, agents and others to communicate with the public. The reason, sources tell NEWSWEEK, was an apparent "cyberintrusion" by an outside hacker who officials fear had been tapping into supposedly secure e-mail messages since late last year. FBI spokesmen publicly sought to downplay the damage, saying the compromised commercial server?maintained by AT&T?was used exclusively for unclassified and "nonsensitive" communications that did not involve ongoing investigations. One example, they said, was notices from public-affairs offices' fbi.gov addresses to members of the press. But privately, officials were highly concerned?and recently notified the White House. One top FBI official says he regularly used his shut-down fbi.gov e-mail account to send messages to state and local police chiefs. Another source tells news-week that more than 3,000 old and current e-mail accounts were shut down. Others say the same apparently compromised server also provided accounts to other government agencies. Justice Department officials, who launched their own cybercrime investigation into the apparent intrusion, noted that there was no telling the potential damage at this point, given the common tendency for everybody to say too much?including making references to law-enforcement "sensitive" cases?even in theoretically routine e-mails. "This is an eye-opener for all of us," says one FBI official.
The bigger question, sources say, was how the hackers penetrated the bureau's e-mails?and why it took the FBI so long to notify the rest of the government. The FBI e-mail system was erected with firewalls that were supposed to prevent even sophisticated hackers from penetrating. But while officials stressed there was no evidence that the apparent intruder or intruders were part of any terrorist or foreign intelligence organization, the authorities were still baffled as to how they got into the system. According to sources familiar with the investigation, one suspicion is that hackers either used sophisticated "password cracking" software that tries out millions of password combinations or somehow eavesdropped on Internet transmissions. Over the weekend, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Department of Homeland Security posted a computer-security alert to agencies throughout the federal government urging e-mail users to be more careful about choosing their passwords by avoiding obvious clues?like nicknames, initials, children's names, birth dates, pet names or brands of car. "Such information can be easily obtained and used to crack your password," the bulletin states.
The e-mail compromise couldn't have come at a worse time for the bureau. Just last week, the Justice Department inspector-general released a report sharply criticizing the FBI's management of its new Virtual Case File computer system?a $170 million software upgrade that bureau officials now concede they may have to ?scrap. The VCF system was supposed to make it much easier for agents to electronically access vital information relating to ongoing cases in different FBI offices. But the I.G. found that poor planning and ineffective management have resulted in a system that is nearly unworkable. FBI chief Robert Mueller, who sources say has personally briefed President George W. Bush on the matter, took responsibility "at least in part" for the fiasco before a Senate subcommittee. "No one is more frustrated and disappointed than I," he said.
? 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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Police Accused Of Tasering Suspect To Get Urine Sample
POSTED: 6:26 am EST March 9, 2005
What the heck was this cop thinking?
UPDATED: 10:39 am EST March 11, 2005
ORLANDO, Fla. -- A police officer twice used a Taser stun device on a drug suspect who was restrained to a hospital bed because the man refused to give a urine sample to medical staff, authorities said.
Antonio Wheeler, 18, was arrested Friday on a drug charge and taken to an emergency room after telling officers he had consumed cocaine, police said.
Because Wheeler said he had used the drugs, Florida Hospital officials wanted a urine sample. A police affidavit said Wheeler wouldn't provide a sample on his own, so workers tried to catheterize him to get one.
The police document said Wheeler was handcuffed to a hospital bed and then secured with leather straps after he refused to urinate in a cup. When medical staff tried to insert a catheter to get the sample, Wheeler refused and began thrashing around, the affidavit said.
At one point, police officer Peter Linnenkamp reported, he jumped on the bed with his knees on Wheeler's chest to restrain him. When Wheeler still refused to let the catheter be inserted, Linnenkamp said he twice used his Taser, which sends 50,000 volts into a target.
"After the second shock (Wheeler) stated he would urinate and calmed down enough to be given the portable urinal," Linnenkamp wrote.
At the request of Police Chief Michael McCoy, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the incident.
Linnenkamp, who has more than 18 years on the force, has no history of disciplinary problems, said Sgt. Barbara Jones, a department spokeswoman.
He has been relieved pending the investigation's outcome. Jones said officers in such suspensions usually are paid.
In a Tuesday interview at the Orange County jail, Wheeler acknowledged that he aggressively resisted efforts to insert the catheter because he was scared it would hurt. He said the police officer told him the catheter would be necessary if he wouldn't or couldn't urinate on his own.
"I feel I was basically raped," Wheeler said.
Said Amnesty International USA spokesman Edward Jackson: "If this had taken place in China, it would be an egregious violation of human rights, and the public would be outraged.
"I hope that they don't allow the fact that it happened on U.S. soil deter from the fact that this may very well be a case of torture."
Florida Hospital spokeswoman Melanie Trivento said in a statement Wednesday that hospital officials wouldn't be able to comment on the case until they have thoroughly reviewed it.
"This is a very unusual situation and we are examining all of the circumstances surrounding the incident," the statement said.
Earlier, another hospital spokeswoman, Samantha O'Lenick, said she could not speak specifically about the Wheeler case but said hospital protocol calls for urine samples whenever patients say they have taken drugs or alcohol.
Wheeler was being held on $7,500 bail on charges including possession of cocaine with intent to sell, escape and resisting without violence.
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As someone who has given folks grief for tinfoil hat conspiracy twaddle I suppose I'm risking being lumped that category. It freaks me out, however, that the US if devoting vast resources and criminalizing the behavior of a broad swath of its citizens in its pursuit of pot arrests. As far as I'm concerned stuff like this serves as the model for how various government entities can blithely conspire to deprive citizens of freedom in pursuit of a dubious end.
May 10, 2005, 8:08 a.m.
The War on Pot
Wrong drug, wrong war.
Rich Lowry
As the nation's "drug czar," John Walters is supposed to be saving us from the ravages of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. At least that was the original sales pitch for the "war on drugs" in the 1980s. But the war has evolved into largely a fight against marijuana, which no one has ever claimed is a hard drug. Walters is nonetheless committed, Ahab-like, to arresting every marijuana smoker in the country whom law enforcement can lay its hands on.
It used to be that drug warriors denied that marijuana was much of a focus for them, because they understandably liked people to think they were cracking down on genuinely dangerous, highly addictive drugs. No more. We are waging a war on pot, a substance less addictive and harmful than tobacco and alcohol, which presumably friends of Walters enjoy all the time with no fear of being forced to make a court appearance.
According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, in a trend Walters heartily supports, annual drug arrests increased by 450,000 from 1990 to 2002. Marijuana arrests accounted for 82 percent of the growth, and 79 percent of that was for marijuana possession alone. Marijuana arrests are now nearly half of all the 1.5 million annual drug arrests. Marijuana-trafficking arrests actually declined as a proportion of all drug arrests during this period, while the proportion of possession arrests increased by two-thirds.
Has the use of other drugs declined, prompting the focus on marijuana? No. According to the Sentencing Project: "There is no indication from national drug-survey data that a dramatic decrease in the use of other drugs led to law-enforcement agencies shifting resources to marijuana. Indeed, there was a slight increase in the use of all illicit drugs by adult users between 1992 and 2001. Over that same period, emergency-room admissions for heroin continued to increase." Drug warriors simply think it's a good thing in and of itself to arrest marijuana smokers.
Their crusade bears little or no connection to law enforcement. Crime generally has been declining from 1990 to 2002, even as pot arrests have increased. Are we to believe that crime is at its lowest rates in 30 years, but the nation is beset by rampaging marijuana smokers who are kept under minimal control only by ever-increasing arrests? Every major county in the country, except Fairfax, Va., saw an increase in marijuana arrests during the past 12 years. That Washington, D.C., suburb has not been notably overrun by hemp-crazed hordes.
The fight against marijuana isn't even working on its own terms. According to the Sentencing Project, since 1992, the price of marijuana has fallen steadily, declining by 16 percent. In 1990, 84.4 percent of high-school seniors said it was easy to get marijuana. In 2002, 87.2 percent said it was easy. Daily use by high-school seniors tripled from 1990 to 2002, going from 2.2 percent to 6 percent ? the same level as in 1975.
As Allen F. St. Pierre, executive director of the pro-decriminalization group NORML, puts it, "Increased arrest rates are not associated with reduced marijuana use, reduced marijuana availability, a reduction in the number of new users, reduced treatment admissions, reduced emergency-room mentions, any reduction in marijuana potency, or any increases in the price of marijuana." Besides that, the war on marijuana is a smash success.
Marijuana is not harmless, and its use should be discouraged, but in the same way, say, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day should be discouraged. The criminal-justice system should stay out of it. Twelve states have decriminalized marijuana to varying degrees, fining instead of arresting people for possessing small amounts. They recognize that ? as the authors of a new study for the conservative American Enterprise Institute argue ? "the case for imposing criminal sanctions for possession of small amounts of marijuana is weak."
John Walters, of course, will have a ready answer for the ineffectiveness of the war on marijuana. It's the answer drug warriors always have ? even more arrests.
? Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
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I think their reasons for going after pot users are pretty obvious,
the biggest one being that pot smokers are an easy target. There's so
damn many of them and they're easy to find. I think pot is also seen
as more of a working-class and "liberal" drug, and that probably has a
lot to do with it too.
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Woof, Just out of curiosity, how do you guys feel about cops who sit outside night clubs, bars and the local watering holes and nab guys for dui as they leave?
TG
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Tom asks:
Woof, Just out of curiosity, how do you guys feel about cops who sit outside night clubs, bars and the local watering holes and nab guys for dui as they leave?
Something akin to evolution in action is my feeling. Back in my drug addled youth I dodged my share of cops, Rule 1 was don't do illegal things where they can see you. Outside the bar at closing time, moreover, is often times a dangerous place regardless. If you do get hauled off in cuffs, perhaps you should count it as a cheap lesson.
With that said, I've seen this tactic taken too far. In the 'burb where I grew up there was a bar that opened just over the county line. Annoyed I suspect about missing out on tax revenues as much as anything else the town fathers had the local yokel PD show up in force to pull over anyone leaving the bar most evenings.
Common tactics included an unmarked police car coming up quickly on the rear of a vehicle, if the driver hit his brakes he was pulled over for "improper signaling," or a cop car would pull in front of a car and hit the brakes; when the driver swerved to avoid a collision he was pulled over for "improper lane usage" and so on. After a couple years of these tactics the bar went out of business 'cause no one wanted to run the gauntlet.
IMO the cops more than crossed the line in that instance, but for the most part I've no problem when they go trolling for drunks, though the sobriety checkpoints they've been setting up of late look to me to be a violation of civil liberties.
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Dillinger robbed banks because "That's where the money is."
Looking for drunk drivers coming out of bars seems to me to be equally logical.
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Yeah, I don't have a problem with cops trolling for drunk drivers outside of bars/clubs, in theory anyway. In practice though, they can't do it for the same reason they can't strip-search everybody who tries to board a plane. The negative effect this would have on many local businesses would outweigh any possible safety gains. It's an unspoken rule that we assume certain risks as the price of an open society with a decently-functioning economy.
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Woof, My point was merly, that if you break the law and you do it willingly then you really have no one to blame but yourself.
Just like drinking and driving is against the law, so is possessing pot, smoking pot or possesing drug parafinelia(sp).
So regardless of what a person may think of the law, its still the law.
In refrence to the Kerryist wrong drug wrong wrong war I dont find that it applies. You simply can not say one illegal substance should be more aggressivly attacked than another.
Wouldn't that be the same as a speeding driver saying GEE officer i was onley ten miles an hour over the limit what about the guy who was doing 130 that just flew by me...... Still guilty.
Just to further that thought a bit before i close, i think its totally understated and under reported the abuse of perscription (legal) meds, which have just as high or even higher harmful addictive potentials.
Anyway thats another rant altogether :wink:
TG
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"You simply can not say one illegal substance should be more aggressivly attacked than another.
Wouldn't that be the same as a speeding driver saying GEE officer i was onley ten miles an hour over the limit what about the guy who was doing 130 that just flew by me...... Still guilty. "
Well it sure would make sense to me to say that the guy doing 130 should be more aggressively pursued by the police than the guy 10 over the limit. Indeed most police don't bother to ticket the guy doing 10 over , , ,
Similarly it makes sense to me to note that there is a difference between pot and narcotics like coke and heroin.
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Woof Guru Crafty, I agree with you totally. However should a guy get a ticket for ten over he really has nothing to complain about hes still illegal.
Just the same as the guy who gets pinched for his weed.
Iam merly stating the obivous, its the law.
I haven't heard of any increase in pot busts, around here or in the state of Ohio. So Iam not sure as to the legitimacy of that claim, Rog made a good point though about the vast numbers of pot smokers.
Wouldn't it make more sense that since there are so many of them, that more would get busted, vs hard drug users?
A lot of the people i see around here who get popped usually get nabbed when pulled over for some kind of eratic driving behavior, kinda thing, I really don't see the cops busting down the door to nail grandma for smoking her joint while watching the six oclock news.
I wonder if Buzwardo can give any statistical evidence to back up this claim? Maybe he's just blowin smoke? :wink:
TG
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Tom winks:
I wonder if Buzwardo can give any statistical evidence to back up this claim? Maybe he's just blowin smoke?
Please refer to the Rich Lowry piece posted above. In it you'll find:
According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, in a trend Walters heartily supports, annual drug arrests increased by 450,000 from 1990 to 2002. Marijuana arrests accounted for 82 percent of the growth, and 79 percent of that was for marijuana possession alone. Marijuana arrests are now nearly half of all the 1.5 million annual drug arrests. Marijuana-trafficking arrests actually declined as a proportion of all drug arrests during this period, while the proportion of possession arrests increased by two-thirds.
If you want to wade through the raw data, you can do it here:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm
With that said, this thread is titled "Libertarian Themes" so it shouldn't surprise anyone when exercise of government power is questioned here. Do we really want police agencies enforcing every law on the books, and when they do, telling the folks they haul off that, since they broke the law, they had it coming?
The law is often an @$$, the punishment should fit the crime, and the government should have a compelling end before it hauls a citizen off it handcuffs. And if those notions strike you as too radical, start a "Draconian Themes" thread and post your responses there. :wink:
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Woof buzwardo, I briefly scrolled the fbi.org link and didn't see anything that even remotly eluded to the increase in marijuana busts.
Thats ok. You talk of the penalty fitting the crime, in Ohio its a misdemeanor of 100 dollar fine for possesion of 112 grams or less. I don't find that to be extremly harsh :? . I don't think they haul you away in handcuffs for it either. Pretty sure its just a ticket and on your way type situation.(do you find this harsh?)
When you refer to "all" the laws being enforced i asume your speaking of some law written two hundred years ago type thing. Like beating your wife on the county court steps. Then the answer is of course not.
If your refering to the laws that everyone is aware of and knows the penaltys for and knows are illegal, like the drug laws. yea i want them enforced.
Dosen't my desire to have our drug laws enforced make me as much a liberatarian as your desire to have them challenged and broken?
If not then please give me your definition of a libertarian.
TG
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Tom avers:
Woof buzwardo, I briefly scrolled the fbi.org link and didn't see anything that even remotly eluded to the increase in marijuana busts.
Like I said, it?s raw data. You can pour through it if you?d like and draw your own conclusions. I note the Excel file you can find at:
http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/cius_03/xl/03tbl69.xls
breaks down crime by state and category. Folks like those at the Sentencing Project, whose data you did not comment on, then take that information, render and analyze it. Seeing how I don?t have the time, motivation, or mathematical skills to run my own data analysis, I?m content to use the results of those who do, at least until their analysis is thrown into question. Do you dispute the Sentencing Project?s data?
An aside: I note often when I post a piece I?m then asked to account for the author?s methodology. Sometimes the germane aspects are easily gleaned from the piece itself, other times a second raw data source isn?t hard to find, while in other instances the post is clearly an opinion piece lending itself only to speculation rather than empiric debate.
Bottom line is I?m just another Internet wanderer posting his occasional warblings. If someone wants to pay me to I?d be glad to repost cited material, chase down primary sources, and attempt to interview authors. Until someone with the requisite magnanimity arises, though, I?m not inclined to put more effort into answering questions than the folks who post ?em do.
Thats ok. You talk of the penalty fitting the crime, in Ohio its a misdemeanor of 100 dollar fine for possesion of 112 grams or less. I don't find that to be extremly harsh . I don't think they haul you away in handcuffs for it either. Pretty sure its just a ticket and on your way type situation.(do you find this harsh?)
Do we really want to start scrambling up this slope? Can you abide a year in jail for someone holding 112.25 grams? Are the benefits of incarcerating someone for the substances they imbibe worth the costs of turning a taxpayer into a felon? Are the deaths and health issues caused by the poor quality control the current regimen foists a net benefit for society? Do we really want to line the pockets of distant drug lords and create lucrative markets our enemies can exploit to fund their attacks against our citizens? If a hundred bucks is the issue, I say suck it up. Alas I think the equation is a lot more vast and complex.
When you refer to "all" the laws being enforced i asume your speaking of some law written two hundred years ago type thing. Like beating your wife on the county court steps. Then the answer is of course not.
If your refering to the laws that everyone is aware of and knows the penaltys for and knows are illegal, like the drug laws. yea i want them enforced.
And who makes the call about what ?everyone is aware? of? Ever taken a look at the Annotated Code of the United States? Fills a shelf or two in most libraries. Add on the tomes generated by sundry states and municipalities and the reading list gets kinda long. Bottom line is that I don?t think a law?s efficacy can be measured by who understands what about it. I think analyzing benefits and costs associated with a given law is a much better measure and by that yardstick I?d argue American drug laws are an utter abomination.
Dosen't my desire to have our drug laws enforced make me as much a liberatarian as your desire to have them challenged and broken?
If not then please give me your definition of a libertarian.
Uhm, if the question is whether your willingness to arrest and incarcerate citizens to an unproductive end makes you more libertarian than me, my reply would be both obvious and ardent. If there is some nuance I?m missing, please fill me in.
As for defining the term, I suppose I should confess I?m not really a libertarian so I?m probably the wrong guy to ask. Philosophically the rational anarchy espoused in Robert Heinlein?s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress most closely parallels my thoughts, while neo-antifederalist best describes my political views in an American context. And if you?d like me to explain at length what either of those terms means, tell me what the gig pays and I?ll tell you if I?ll take it.
:wink:
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Woof Buzwardo, While i find this conversation mildly amusing, it is rather obvious that your WAY too much for me.
So in closing this conversation please allow me a suggestion or two. If your concerned about carry too much weed and being sent to prison for it. The next time you pick up your quarter pound of weed (112grams) ask your dealer to short you a couple of grams and dont weigh the baggie just to be sure your under weight. That way if you happend to get busted at least you wont end up in prison over it :wink:
Since you seem to champion the cause of reforming Americas drug laws, I can onley assume that this is important to you. I would suggest you possibly align yourself with the folks from norml, they have been doing this for quite a number of years, and allow me to wish you GOOD LUCK!!
In closing also let me wish you good luck in staying out of prison for something you believe in!
TG
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Tom sez:
In closing also let me wish you good luck in staying out of prison for something you believe in!
My misspent youth is a couple decades behind me so I don't expect to occupy a cell anytime soon. Unless dissing government policy becomes a crime, in which case I'll doubtless be invited to join a very long line.
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Pretty interesting, and disturbing, take on the tobacco settlement. Who needs those pesky legislative and constitutional follyswaddles anyway?
August 09, 2005, 8:05 a.m.
To the Ashtray of History
Taking aim at a greedy government mess.
By Christine Hall
Was this what was promised? Billions of dollars later and more than six years after the tobacco settlement was signed, American taxpayers and consumers deserve an answer. But they won't like it.
Back in the 1990s, state attorneys general sued "Big Tobacco" claiming that tobacco companies had lied about the health risks of smoking and run up state Medicaid costs in treating sick smokers over the years. Eventually, the tobacco companies decided to settle the state lawsuits for $246 billion. In the years since the signing of that settlement ? in reality, a permanent sales tax ? it's clear who are the winners and losers.
State governments did well. They won a staggering sum of money, to be doled out by tobacco companies over just the first 25 years, with payments continuing in perpetuity. States have so far spent most of the money on a wide range of programs unrelated to treating sick smokers or reducing smoking rates, according to an annual report by the General Accounting Office. The particulars can be unseemly. Kentucky, for example, reportedly spent $271,750 for improving the prawn industry, while North Carolina spent $100,000 on "motorsports research."
State attorneys general also came out winners. They discovered a new tool for growing their own power. Now, instead of waiting around for the legislature to raise taxes or pass new laws regulating industries, attorneys general can do it all themselves. As New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has since demonstrated, often all it takes is indictment-by-press conference, and pretty soon he has a settlement that puts (who else?) the attorney general in charge of regulating the industry.
Trial lawyers did well by the tobacco settlement, too. The trial bar was slated to get an estimated $13 billion, which for some worked out to $7,716 per hour, according to legal scholar Robert Levy, assuming the lawyers worked 24 hours per day, seven days per week, for 42 months. Trial lawyers reinvested a lot of the money in political campaigns and developing new litigation campaigns.
Big tobacco companies, as it turned out, did quite well by the settlement. They raised cigarette prices beyond the actual settlement costs and gained the states as partners in a cartel to hamstring competitors. Small tobacco companies that were never part of the state lawsuits or the multi-state settlement were required to make annual escrow payments to the states. Then, when the upstarts did better than expected and carved into the market share enjoyed by the majors ? and state revenue ? states responded by passing laws raising taxes, er, escrow payments. "All states have an interest in reducing ... sales [by non-settlement companies] in every state," Vermont's attorney general admonished his peers in 2003.
So where does that leave taxpayers, consumers, small businesses, and anyone concerned about unchecked government power? Holding the bag. Yet, despite the massive, unprecedented transfer of wealth and ambitious new regulatory regime unleashed by the tobacco settlement, it was all negotiated in a backroom deal. No legislator voted on it, no small businesses were consulted, and no taxpayer had a chance to lobby against the tax increases.
And the agreement, which was entered into by 46 state attorneys general, never gained the approval of Congress, an egregious violation of the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits a state from entering into an agreement or compact with another state without the consent of Congress.
Looking at the tobacco settlement, one begins to understand what the Founding Fathers feared when they wrote the Compact Clause. That's why the Competitive Enterprise Institute launched a lawsuit on August 2 challenging the tobacco settlement: to end such abuse of power and restore one essential constitutional check on government greed.
? Christine Hall is communications director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. To read more about CEI's challenge to the tobacco settlement, visit www.ControlAbuseofPower.org.
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Lessons of smaller states
By Richard W. Rahn
Published September 4, 2005
REYKJAVIK, Iceland.
Why is this cold, rainy land with its stark volcanic landscape, without much in the way of natural resources, one of the wealthiest places on Earth?
Small states, in the past, were most often poorer on a per capital income basis than large states, but in the last half-century many have become much richer then their large neighbors. Among the wealthiest places on the planet, in addition to the United States, we now find Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland, none with many natural resources.
In a just-concluded meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Iceland, some leaders of small states that have developed very successful economies met with some of the worlds' leading free-market economists and policy institute professionals, partly to discuss what lessons the rest of the world can learn from these small states. Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, was the principle architect of his country's remarkable economic transformation from impoverished vassal of the Soviet Union into one of the world's freest (No. 4 in the world according to the 2005 Index of Economic Freedom) and most dynamic economies. Mr. Laar said he succeeded by following the teachings of Nobel Prize-winning economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.
After obtaining freedom 15 years ago, Estonia rapidly moved to establish a rule of law, protect private property and create a sound currency. Estonia removed most price controls, discarded useless regulations, privatized most state-owned enterprises and established a free-trade regime. The result has been the largest percentage increase in real per capita incomes of any of the former communist states.
Estonia has now moved on to create the world's first "e-government": Most government operations are on the Internet, and in electronic form. By moving away from bureaucrat paper, Estonis reduced corruption and cost and created much more transparency and accountability. All proposed laws are placed on the Internet before passage so any citizen can review and comment before they are voted upon.
Former Iceland Prime Minister and current Foreign Minister David Oddsson detailed how he took a typical, economically stagnate, Scandinavian socialist welfare state and turned it into an economic tiger by privatizing state industries, freeing labor markets, and reforming the financial structure. Iceland has been engaged in a massive tax reduction (for instance, the corporate tax rate has been cut from 50 to only 18 percent, and the inheritance tax to a maximum 5 percent). Yet government revenues have steadily increased because of the resulting economic dynamism, and the national debt has fallen from 50 percent of gross domestic product to only 15 percent.
One of their greatest success stories was moving from a pay-as-you-go social security system (like that of the U.S.) to a combination of a limited means-tested government system with a private inheritable system, giving Iceland one of the strongest and soundest systems in the world.
Professor Victoria Curzon-Price of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and president of the Mont Pelerin Society argued Switzerland has succeeded because (with the exception of farming) it is mostly a free-trade nation, with strong fiscal and tax competition between cantons. Switzerland is a voluntary, direct democracy, federal contractual state made up of a couple dozen cantons divided on linguistic and religious lines and more than 3,000 communes -- i.e., small towns.
Having most government power at local levels reduces friction among the various groups that make up Switzerland. It allows the people to decide if they wish to live in a commune with a large government and relatively high taxes, like Geneva, or in a low- tax, limited-government jurisdiction.
In her brief for the Swiss system, Professor Curzon-Price argued "the splitting of political units into tiny elements" provides a "huge gain in terms of the legitimacy of the state." And, "a state obtains obedience in one of three ways: repression, bribery and consent. Most modern democratic states end up using, and abusing, the second of these (with the political class bribing marginal voters to maintain power)." Repression and bribery are costly, but neither is needed if the government can obtain the willing consent of the governed, which is best obtained by direct democracy within small political units.
The lesson is that large states can obtain the economic gains small states have made by freeing up their economies. They also can gain greater democratic legitimacy and a more satisfied electorate by devolving power to states and localities.
Richard W. Rahn is director general of the Center for Global Economic Growth, a project of the FreedomWorks Foundation.
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Will the New National ID Track Your Movements?
8/31/05
by James Plummer
Printable Format
James Plummer is the policy director for the Liberty Coalition.
By the end of September virtually unaccountable bureaucrats inside the Department of Homeland Security will likely have decided whether the new de facto national ID card will broadcast your sensitive identification information wherever you go?Minority Report style.
This comes as a result of the REAL ID Act. REAL ID was signed into law in May. As a result of negotiations over the intelligence-reform bill passed last December, the law had been attached to the first ?must-pass? bill of 2005, which turned out to be ?emergency? spending for the Iraq war. Thus a vote against this national ID would have been spun as a vote ?against the troops? as well.
REAL ID gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the sole right to issue ?design requirements? for driver?s licenses, needing only to ?consult? (that is, ignore) state officials and the Department of Transportation. Though the official publication of the design requirements is still some months off, DHS is expected to make an internal decision on one of those requirements, regarding ?machine-readable technology? standards, by early fall. And there is a lot of pressure on DHS from the surveillance-technology industry to make radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips the required machine-readable technology.
The REAL ID Act repealed a provision in the intelligence-reform bill to assemble a committee of state officials, privacy watchdogs, and federal officials to set standards for state driver?s licenses. As a result, those moderating voices of federalism, privacy, and common sense have now been silenced. One of those voices, the National Conference of State Legislatures, has conservatively estimated compliance costs at up to $750 million initially and $75 million annually thereafter?just another expense to be passed on to the taxpayer for the ?privilege? of driving or flying with a national ID card.
States that don?t go along with the new standards will find that their citizens cannot use their state driver?s licenses for federal identification. That means the Transportation Security Administration won?t let Americans with noncompliant driver?s licenses board airplanes, unless perhaps they have a passport?which themselves are scheduled to have RFID soon.
RFID technology in an identification card consists of an embedded microchip and antenna that broadcasts identity information, decodable by specially designed readers. On an identifying document such as a driver?s license, RFID is an unnecessary, dangerous technology in today?s information-rich world. RFID-enabled identity cards can broadcast identifying information to persons and institutions without the knowledge or consent of the license holder. That information, such as a name, birth date, identification number, or even digital photo, could then be cross-referenced through commercial and government databases to gain increasingly sensitive identity information on the individual.
That kind of technology on essentially mandatory government documents can lead to identity fraud, endangering the victim?s finances, privacy, and even physical safety.
RFID technology could also enable tracking of individuals, as the chip broadcasts the cardholder?s presence to each reader he passes. No matter how secure the RFID protocols allegedly are, broadcasting one?s presence to a series of readers leaves a record of one?s place and time. That information can be taken by hidden readers just about anywhere an American goes?a political meeting, a gun show, a place of worship. It is an open invitation to stalkers and thieves, as well as government agents who regard constitutional proscriptions on search and surveillance as obstacles rather than as American principles.
Advocates of the technology often claim RFID can be set to only broadcast a limited distance, such as a few centimeters. But as security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out, ?This is a spectacularly na?ve claim. All wireless protocols can work at much longer ranges than specified. In tests, RFID chips have been read by receivers 20 meters away. Improvements in technology are inevitable.?
There is no significant security benefit in mandating that driver?s licenses and/or identification cards carry an RFID chip. There are, however, significant risks to security and privacy. If an RFID reader must purportedly be within a few centimeters of the identification card, there is no logical reason not to close the security loop and require the card make contact with the reader.
Tri-National ID
Some quick background: The original version of the REAL ID Act would have had every state join into something called the ?Driver License Agreement,? which would have included states of Mexico and provinces of Canada as well, creating a de facto tri-national ID card. Although that provision was removed from the final legislation after protests by privacy advocates, there is a danger that RFID standards in particular could easily be integrated into international identification schemes. The United Nations? International Civilian Aviation Organization (ICAO) is pushing for standardized RFID on the passports of every nation. The U.S. State Department has already announced plans to include RFID in passports in the near future, with standards based on ICAO recommendations. And meanwhile, the British government?s plans for a national ID card include ICAO RFID standards.
Could DHS be seriously considering turning state driver?s licenses into national ID cards, essentially internal passports based on UN standards? It seems they may indeed be headed that way.
As Americans learn more about RFID technology, they are rightly concerned about these dangers. The California Assembly is considering a bill to ban RFID from state identification documents for at least three years as security questions are studied. The Montana House of Representatives has already passed a bill opting out of any nationalized ID standards. Montana legislators were concerned that such a system would endanger the privacy of that state?s citizens. If DHS adopts mandatory RFID for driver?s licenses, those concerns would be proven valid.
If the Department of Homeland Security takes personal security and privacy, not to mention constitutional values, at all seriously, it will reject RFID or any kind of contactless reading technology as appropriate for driver?s licenses ? the new de facto national identification cards
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Frankly, I don't have the time to follow this important issue of the Eminent Domain and the vile KELSO decision from the Supreme Court as closely as I would like, but for anyone so inclined:
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I get email updates through the Castle Coalition. Hope it helps,
John
Thank you to all who attended and submitted testimony for the Senate committee hearing on the eminent domain legislation!
Here is just one of the many news clips on the events yesterday:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...5092000989.html
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For the time being, there is video available of yesterday's press conference and Senate hearing on eminent domain:
Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,112935,00.html Click on Questioning Eminent Domain on the right side of the page
C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/ Click on Senate Judiciary Cmte. Hearing on Eminent Domain
Also, all the hearing testimony is available online at: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=1612.
You can still submit testimony to the Senate to Dimple Gupta with the Judiciary Committee: Dimple_Gupta@judiciary-rep.senate.gov.
Best wishes,
Steven Anderson, Castle Coalition Coordinator
Elizabeth Moser, Outreach Coordinator
www.castlecoalition.org
www.ij.org
__________________
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September 30, 2005, 4:09 p.m.
Living Constitution, R.I.P.
I know what I learned this summer.
By Curt Levey
Democratic senators claim not to have learned much from the recent confirmation hearings for (now) Chief Justice John Roberts. I, on the other hand, learned a lot by listening to those senators. An analysis of their rhetoric reveals trends in constitutional interpretation and evolution that are sure to influence the looming battle over the president's second Supreme Court nominee.
Observation #1: Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
Judicial activism? has long been a label conservatives use to describe liberal court decisions that seemingly elevate judges? personal views above statutory and constitutional law. The Roberts hearings confirm that the term has now become a favorite invective of Democrats. Senator Ted Kennedy accused Roberts of being an "aggressive activist." Wisconsin?s senator Herb Kohl decried "judicial activists [who] have used [conservative judicial] philosophy to limit our rights and freedoms." And Senator Chuck Schumer labeled Justices Scalia and Thomas as "activist judges" on par with liberal luminary justices Marshall and Brennan.
Many of my right-of-center colleagues found it maddening to watch those senators borrow the judicial activism charge and use it against conservative paragons of judicial restraint. But it's unlikely the Democrats are fooling anybody. Their real concern is that Roberts won?t be activist enough to see the constitutional penumbras and emanations that support Roe v. Wade and, perhaps, a constitutional right to gay marriage.
Democrats? appropriation of the activist allegation should be viewed as evidence that proponents of judicial restraint are making headway. It is an implicit admission that this critique of liberal jurisprudence has proved effective. Moreover, the Democrats? reliance on a ?so are you? argument indicates the absence of a defensible judicial philosophy on the Left. And, like former segregationists embracing civil rights, liberals? calls for judicial restraint ? no matter how insincere ? are a sign that the times have changed for the better.
Observation #2: Living Constitution Dead at 70?
Closely related to judicial activism is the concept of a "living Constitution," one whose principles and interpretations evolve to reflect the changing values of society. While liberals have traditionally embraced the living Constitution, conservative legal thinkers abhor it. They see it as nothing more than an excuse for judges inventing law ? like the Supreme Court's Miranda warnings and the "right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, [and] of the universe."
Given the dependence of the liberal judicial agenda on a living Constitution, it is telling that the term and its equivalents were used only once by a Democratic senator during the Judiciary Committee's five days of hearings and voting. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate reports a similar abandonment in the literature. One can only conclude that liberals now feel the need to distance themselves from the concept. Deprived of the unabashed support of its biggest fans, the living Constitution?s best days are likely behind it.
May the living Constitution rest in peace. The concept is utterly without meaning as a legal standard and, instead, is a recipe for unrestrained judicial power. Because the Constitution is a contract between the people and their government, its modification should require the consent of the parties to the agreement. Thus, a living Constitution can be analogized to an automobile lease agreement that the car dealer feels free to modify as his notions of a fair deal evolve.
Observation #3: Don't Say the "A" Word
The classic defense of the living Constitution is that the Framers could not peer 200 years into the future. But the Framers were well aware of that limitation. Thus, they provided us with a democratic method of constitutional evolution, the amendment process, which has proved to be brilliantly effective. Constitutional amendments are responsible for the greatest achievements of our legal system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the elimination of slavery and the enfranchisement of African Americans and women.
And yet, throughout the Judiciary Committee's proceedings, not a single senator discussed the amendment process except to say that that it was difficult or should be infrequent. This inattention to the Framers? intended method of constitutional evolution is paralleled by the period since 1971, during which there has not been a single substantive constitutional amendment. Compare that to the previous hundred years, which saw about a dozen pivotal amendments.
The Amendment process ? requiring approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states ? is an arduous one, as the Framers intended. But that cannot fully explain senators? disinterest in it. After all, the process is no more difficult than in the heyday of constitutional amendments, and more than 80 percent of the amendments that have been approved by Congress have also been ratified by the states.
The real answer lies in the ascendancy, in recent decades, of a tempting alternative to constitutional amendments, namely the living Constitution and judicial activism. In this age of quick fixes, the amendment process is viewed as too cumbersome by politicians and impatient interest groups. Most significantly, amendments require a solid democratic consensus. That makes them unattractive to the intellectual elite ? in Congress, the courts, law schools, and think tanks ? whose ?evolving values? are often out of sync with those of the larger populace. A living Constitution is seductive exactly because it is undemocratic.
But the tide may have turned. The rhetoric of the Roberts hearings suggests that the political viability of judicial activism is waning. Renewed attention to constitutional amendments cannot be far behind. The battle for a humbler approach to the Constitution is hardly over, but the signs are encouraging.
? Curt. Levey, an attorney specializing in constitutional law and civil rights, was the director of legal and public Affairs at the Center for Individual Rights from 1998 to 2004.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/levey200509301609.asp
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Forwarded to me by a friend:
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I know that Rockwell is way too strident for many of you, but I am posting this piece for one reason -- it is an incredible compilation of control-freak behaviors during this disaster. The problem with FEMA is not so much their incompetence as their possessive bureaucratic tendencies that often prevented anyone from helping people in need. If they were merely incompetent, this disaster would have been handled far better.
If this is the way bureaucrats behave, do we really want them "solving" our retirement problem, our health care problem, ... or even "protecting" us from terrorists? This story is enough to give anyone pause ... I would think. But maybe I am wrong about that.
Tom
Katrina and Socialist Central Planning
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
[Posted on Monday, October 10, 2005]
Watching the Capitol Hill hearings on what went wrong after Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what it must have been like in the Politburo in the 1950s. The Soviet bureaucrats would gather with the party officials and factory managers to figure out why grain production was down or why shop shelves were empty or why the bread lines were ever longer and the quality ever worse.
They gathered under the conviction that they had a workable system that was being rendered unworkable because of the incompetence of certain key players in the chain of command. No one was permitted to say that the command system itself was the problem; this would too contrary to the prevailing political ethos. Instead, they had to place blame on someone, as if all problems could be reduced to issues of obedience. It was always a scramble. Whoever was finally said to be at fault faced certain ruin.
To be sure, there was plenty of blame to go around. With rats in a maze, there is a sense in which they are all responsible for not having found the exit. If those rats could also organize into a hierarchy of control and hold trials, it would surely produce quite a show with many victims. But at the end of the day, the rats would be no closer to getting out of the maze. And so it was in the US Congress: the hearings produced a great show with no results that will make a difference for our future.
The Soviet system had to fully unravel before it became permissible to state what it used to be a crime even to think: you can't manage an economy. You can make every demand, issue a million commands, exhaust every financial resource in the state's account, elevate some people and demote others, dress up in a military costume and make grand pronouncements from a glorified pedestal, cut off fingers, toes, and heads, but in the end, you can't make the economy perform in a way that serves the people unless you let market forces work.
Not just the Soviets had to learn this. Authoritarian regimes from the beginning of time have attempted to defy the laws of economics, step on the interests of the merchant class, control and redirect the wishes of consumers and entrepreneurs, bend and kick prices and wages this way and that, and inhibit trade in every way. But they cannot finally overpower the driving desire on the part of people to control their own fate and not be subject to the slavery that is collectivism of all colors, whether red, green, or brown.
Someday, the US managers of crises will have to realize this same point. But for now, they are like Soviet bureaucrats scrambling to make an unworkable system function, and creating a scene that is as farcical as it is tragic.
Consider first how the much-glorified Department of Homeland Security responded to the Katrina crisis. There is a mysterious missing day between the time the hurricane hit and the levees broke and flooded New Orleans. During this strange Monday, August 29 ? a day in which there was a window of opportunity to prevent the meltdown of civilization ? why didn't federal officials respond or even pretend to respond?
The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said that he read in the Tuesday morning newspaper that, according to the headline, "New Orleans Dodged the Bullet." So, to his mind, there was nothing to do. This was his testimony. This is not exactly an awe-inspiring admission, but it speaks to a truth that few are willing to admit: government officials live normal lives. They do not partake of the mind of God. They get their news just like you and me. And they have far less information than the body of knowledge generated by the signaling process of the market economy and the private sector.
We might even say that they are in effect sub-normal in intelligence, because government officials stand outside of society, cut off from normal channels of information that the rest of us take for granted. They are isolated from markets and the regular pressures of life. They are not owners of what they control, and have no real stake in the value of their product. They are surrounded by some of the most peculiar people in the world, namely lifetime bureaucrats, power-mad politicians, and lobbyists on the make. This is their world and this is what they know.
Now, they enjoy the illusion of being better informed than the rest of us, so it would never occur to a high official to surf Google News to find out what is really going on. Thus was it apparently beyond the capacity of FEMA to find out that the National Weather Service had issued a flood warning soon after the hurricane hit. The National Weather Service in turn was only reporting what many private local media outlets were saying.
Certainly the municipal government of New Orleans got the message. It issued a warning to residents, and then all the officials packed up their stuff and headed to Baton Rouge. I suppose that this was the plan that the bureaucrats came up with after having received a $500,000 federal grant in 1997 to design a comprehensive plan for evacuation. Half a million dollars later, they agreed what the plan should be. Two words: let's go!
Now, we can learn from observing this. It is always the case that the government's first interest in a crisis is the protection of itself. The public interest is way down the list. Government employees have no ancient code that requires them to go down with the ship. The seafaring captain might feel disgrace if he lost his crew and passengers but returned safely to shore, but the government bureaucrat would see this as nothing but rational self-interest at work. From their point of view, public service is not a suicide pact.
If this is so, are we wise to expect government service at times of crisis? Well, here is where it gets complicated. They always promise that they will take care of us. On the day the Hurricane hit, for example, President Bush made the following announcement: "For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we're prepared to help, don't be. We are. We're in place. We've got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the ? once we're able to assess the damage, we'll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas."
Well, given the calamity that followed, this statement by Bush might as well have been a Soviet propaganda poster about the glorious future of socialism.
If the only response by government were to turn and run, they could be accused of hypocrisy, but it would be better than the alternative of bad government that stayed to ruin the work that markets and private individuals do.
As the Hurricane approached, for example, Mr. Bush, along with nearly every office holder in the entire region, immediately announced that there would be no tolerance of so-called price gouging. What is and what is not gouging remain undefined by law, but there are still criminal penalties attached to doing it. If you raise your prices to the point where you attract a complaint, there is a good chance that you will be thrashed as a gouger.
And yet, we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a price is. It is a signaling device that allows market players, including both producers and consumers, to adjust their economic behavior in light of supply and demand. If supply remains the same and demand rises, the price too will have to rise so the market can clear properly. Otherwise there will be shortages and surpluses that will prove to be a benefit to no one. William Anderson has called gouging rules a form of back-door price control, and he is right. They create victims, encourage economic dislocations, and foster black markets.
One might think that a Republican administration would understand this, but reflect on the fact that Iraq still has very strict price controls on gasoline, controls that were instituted by the US after Saddam was overthrown. Don't think for a minute that it is beyond the capacity of the Bush administration to do what the Nixon administration did, which was to believe that the laws of markets can be overridden by regulatory force.
Anti-gouging laws, to the extent they are obeyed, will create shortages. But in telling the sad tale of Katrina, I would like to begin not with a case of shortage, but with a strange case of surplus.
One week after the hurricane, FEMA ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to buy 211 million pounds of ice from IAP Worldwide Services of Florida. Trucking companies were notified of a grand opportunity since the government was paying the bills for delivery, and the dispatchers sent out the word. There is no space to explore the workings of IAP Worldwide, but I will observe that the company, which exists solely to get paid by your tax dollars as a federal contractor, has a new CEO who most recently held the position of vice president of national security programs for the notorious Kellogg Brown and Root. His name is David Swindle.
But back to the story of the ensuing chaos. One trucker picked up ice in Greenville, Pennsylvania, and was told to drive it to Carthage, Missouri. When he arrived in Carthage, he was told by a FEMA official to go to Montgomery, Alabama. After a day and a half sitting in Montgomery, he was told to go to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, after which he was sent to Selma, Alabama, after which he was sent to Emporia, Virginia, where he stayed for a week burning fuel, until he was sent to North Carolina, and finally to Fremont, Nebraska, where he dropped the ice in a government storage unit. That's 4,000 miles over two weeks.
This was hardly the only case.
The news media chronicled the stories of these truckers. A truck full of ice was sent from Dubuque, Iowa, to Meridian, Mississippi, then to Barksdale Base in Louisiana, then to Columbia, South Carolina, and finally to Cumberland, Maryland, where he waited for six days before being sent to Bettendorf, Iowa, where the ice was unloaded. Another truck was sent from Wisconsin to Missouri to Selma to Memphis, before finally dropping off the ice in a storage unit.
Do you know how many drivers were enlisted in this incredible charade? 4,000. No one knows for sure how much ice ever got through or how much good it did, if any.
In one of the first incidents reported of what was to be two weeks of catastrophe, a group of volunteer fire fighters from Houston came to New Orleans wanting to help. They were told to wait. They waited 48 hours and were ordered to go back. A group of doctors from Maryland tried to get in but FEMA sent them on to the Red Cross, which said it could do nothing without the approval of federal health officials.
After the New Orleans mayor made a call for firefighters to come help, hundreds of volunteers were sent to Atlanta, where they were put in a conference room at the Sheraton hotel and subjected to seminars on sexual harassment and other bureaucratic matters. They were then told that their job would be to distribute flyers with a message on it: call 1-800-621-FEMA. Many or even most of these well-trained people caught on to the racket and left town. Those who stuck it out and headed for Louisiana were aghast that their first assignment was not to fight fires, which had been raging for a week, but to escort President Bush on his TV-laden tour of the area.
You can see all the photos on WhiteHouse.gov.
In fact, FEMA refused offers of help of all sorts, mainly because of issues of control. FEMA declined helped from Amtrak in evacuating people from New Orleans. The Chicago municipal government was trying to send volunteers from the fire department, police department, and hospitals. FEMA said no. The same happened to New Mexico, whose governor volunteered equipment and personnel.
FEMA prevented Wal-Mart from delivering three tank trucks of water, and the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel. It even cut the communications lines for Jefferson Parish. The local sheriff ending up posting armed guards to protect the restored lines from FEMA ? an interesting model that many communities around the country would do well to imitate in the future.
A chief medical officer for a large ambulance company says he was unable to find helicopters to pick up dying patients at the Superdome. He walked outside and discovered that two helicopters, donated by an oil services company, had been ordered to wait in the parking lot. Morticians attempted to donate their help. But FEMA said absolutely not, on grounds that they were not officially certified by FEMA to perform such services, so the bodies of the dead piled higher.
As for the National Guard, for days it would not allow reporters into the superdome where tens of thousands were trapped. People were hungry and thirsty, but the National Guard would not allow the Red Cross to deliver any food.
Here is the astounding statement from the spokesperson of the Red Cross: "The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans? Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities?. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders."
The Salvation Army attempted to rescue two of its own officers trapped in a building and on dialysis. They rented three boats for a rescue. But they were not allowed through, though to be fair the Salvation Army did not specifically name the government as at fault, but it did point out that all private efforts were running into similar kinds of obstacles, so the message was clear.
Meanwhile, the USS Bataan, a floating hospital for 600 patients, that had ridden out the storm, was still sitting empty by the third day, not permitted to do its job.
An astounding case of ineptness comes to us from the case of three Duke University students who drove to New Orleans to help but were turned away by the National Guard. They had seen the news and knew that they could help, and wondered why they should be pushed around by bureaucrats. Being college sophomores, they took a risk. They forged press credentials, with fake IDs and shirts and the works. They went back and adopted a haughty tone. The National Guard waved them through.
Then the students drove to the Convention Center. There they found thousands of sick, hungry, thirsty, and dying people in desperate need. They found a man who had welts all over his body. He was in a tree covered with fire ants as the waters rose, and there he stayed there being bitten repeatedly for up to 24 hours.
The boys picked him up along with three others and drove them to a Baton Rouge hospital. They made another trip there and back with more people before they began to become frightened of what the government might do to them. On one return trip, they observed 150 empty buses driving the other way ? and they have a video to prove it.
One can only express astonishment at how the government treated the tens of thousands of people that it had herded like cattle into large public spaces. For reasons that are still unclear, the government couldn't get its act together on transporting them out even as the people themselves were forbidden to leave. Once the central planners decided to move all these people from the Superdome to the Astrodome, no means of transport arrived, even as aerial photos showed miles and miles of public buses available.
Indeed, the first bus to reach Houston was not driven or approved by the government. It was commandeered by 20-year-old named Jabbar Gibson, who drove it from the floods and picked up as many people as he could and drove all the way to Houston, a 13-hours drive! He beat the government's system by a day. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of people who had been shoved into the Superdome on Sunday, before the floods came, were still suffering in that massive calamity by Friday and Saturday.
Perhaps the most astounding case of incompetence has received the least attention. It relates to a 500-boat flotilla stretching over 5 miles that left for New Orleans from Acadiana Mall in Lafayette. It involved 1,000 people who had hoped to rescue hospital patients and take them to safety. It consisted of private boaters, fishermen, hunters, and others who had spent their entire lives navigating the waterways of Louisiana.
Once this caravan arrived, they were turned away by the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, now being run by FEMA. All five hundred boats were ordered out.
After pleading, some people were told that they could take the boats to a rescue operation launch site. They reported that at this site, there were 200 agents of the government standing around doing absolutely nothing even as people were dying in hospitals and thousands were desperate to get out. After three hours, even these few boats were told to go away.
Now, President Bush has been criticized for being out to lunch on all of this. Indeed, some staff members put together a DVD of the evening news coverage for him to watch on Air Force One, which was the only way they could get him to understand the depth of the crisis. The purpose of the action was not so much to help people, of course, but rather to stop the meltdown of the president's reputation.
Now, President Bush has been criticized for being out to lunch on all of this. Indeed, some staff members put together a DVD of the evening news coverage for him to watch on Air Force One, which was the only way they could get him to understand the depth of the crisis. The purpose of the action was not so much to help people, of course, but rather to stop the meltdown of the president?s reputation.
In fact, by the time he actually arrived in Louisiana, food and medicine deliveries, such as they were, had to be halted on order of the White House, to make room for the presidential caravan.
Then there was the matter of the government's proposed cash gifts to the victims of Katrina. Most FEMA employees knew nothing about it when their phones and offices were mauled by people demanding their cash. FEMA's website registration for victims required Internet Explorer 6.0 and could not work with any other browser. Of course this is somewhat academic, since most of the victims had no computer access at all. But those who called the number were often told to go online to register. Most of the time, people couldn't get through on the phone or online.
In one particularly interesting detail, Katrina triggered the first use of the Department of Homeland Security's great accomplishment since it was created after 9-11: the National Response Plan, a 426-page central plan for dealing with a crisis on the level of the post-Katrina floods. Here is how the government describes it:
"The National Response Plan establishes a comprehensive all-hazards approach to enhance the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents. The plan incorporates best practices and procedures from incident management disciplines ? homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public works, public health, responder and recovery worker health and safety, emergency medical services, and the private sector ? and integrates them into a unified structure. It forms the bases of how the federal government coordinates with state, local, and tribal governments and the private sector during incidents."
What happened to the National Response Plan after the floods? It remained what it always was: a colorful PDF download, a thick book on the management shelves, an item in the Government Printing Office catalog, bird-cage liner, and many other things. One thing it was not was a national response plan that did all those glorious things listed above. As with all these plans from time immemorial, it was a dead letter.
As for the National Guard, it did what the military does best: it started harassing the residents. Working with the police, it began to enforce an order for everyone to evacuate. As the New York Times summarized the order: "no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind."
The National Guard allowed themselves to be videotaped going from house to house, and mansion to mansion, knocking down doors, searching for weapons, handcuffing owners and humiliating them. They called them the "holdouts," a phrase out of Baghdad.
One storm trooper ? that's a pretty good name for them ? was asked whether he would shoot residents if they resisted. Yes, he said. He added, "It's surreal. You never expect to do this in your own country."
The police also broke into the offices of a heroic little company in New Orleans that did not flee. Its name is DirectNIC, an Internet Service Provider, and it was staffed by friends of the Mises Institute. Through careful preparations, good generators, lots of fuel, and vast amounts of courage, this company kept providing internet service throughout. For several days after the flooding, it was the only source of information coming out of New Orleans. They had a camera on the streets below, and ventured out to take pictures of the scenes. They were first to report the looting, the explosions, the fires, and to chronicle the craziness. They became so good at acquiring fuel that they military actually came to them for diesel.
Millions were logging into their feed, and for four of the most critical days the Mises Institute actually provided the group with an external server in order to make their broadcasts possible. They were showing what the mainstream media would not show and could not show. But late one night, there was a pounding at the door. The National Guard had seen lights in the window and demanded to know what was going on in this room. Though these young people had already been interviewed on MSNBC, Fox, and were the talk of the blogosphere, the troops knew nothing about them. Astounded and confused at what they saw, the troops allowed their pictures to be taken and went on their way.
I've provided a look at some of the terrible failures by the government ? not only failing to do what it claims it will do, but actively working to prevent others from helping out. The cost to human life and prosperity is incalculable. But, one might say, at least the government is generous now in preparing to spend perhaps $250 billion to clean up and reconstruct what was destroyed.
But who will get this money and where will it go? Cynics could not be more correct: the first companies to receive the money were our old friend Kellogg Brown and Root, a current client of President Bush's former campaign manager and former head of FEMA. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Dick Cheney. Another winner is Bechtel, whose former head is now in charge of Bush's Overseas Private Investment Corporation. The top rebuilding priority: repairing government military bases in Louisiana and Mississippi.
If you work for one of these companies, you will do very well by this aid. As for the victims, everyone knows that what rebuilding they do will come from their own savings. You can expect no assistance from this monstrosity that taxes and controls you relentlessly on the pretext that it will protect you and care for you when no one else will.
Fortunately for people who lived in flooded areas, they did not face the crisis alone. The private commercial sector, along with thousands of religious charities, was there to help. Indeed, John Tierney of the New York Times was one of the few mainstream journalists to note that Wal-Mart improved its image after Katrina. Its stores in the disaster-stricken areas still carried generators in areas. Wal-Mart trucks rode into to areas immediately following the hurricane and gave away chain saws, boots, sheets, and clothes for shelters, plus water and ice. It alone had prepared for emergency with its own emergency operations center.
Chris Westley further noted that Wal-Mart gave $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals, and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers. After comparing FEMA's failures with Wal-Mart's successes, he concluded that the government emergency management ought to be abolished.
Tierney, meanwhile, drew the wrong conclusion. He says that the Wal-Mart CEO "is the kind of leader we need to oversee the tens or hundreds of billions that Washington will be spending on the Gulf Coast. Scott could insist on low everyday prices while still leaving the area as well prepared for the next disaster as Wal-Mart was for Katrina."
In fact, if Lee Scott were given a government job, it would only be a matter of time before he became just another Michael Brown, the disgraced former FEMA head. This isn't a matter of character. It is a matter of the maze in which you find yourself ? the one made by the market so that it has large exit signs, or the one that is government's, that is, the one with no exits at all.
As Walter Block, Mark Thornton, and many others have shown, it was not the storm as such that did the damage, but the failure of the government levees. Combined with the levees-only river management strategy of the Army Corps of Engineers, the floods were a disaster waiting to happen. Just imagine if the town were private like your home or car. Insurance companies would have taken a huge role in risk assessment, not only charging more for higher risk but insisting on management strategies that reduce risk and rewarding those who adopt those strategies with better premiums. This works on the same principles as you home owners' insurance, which combines rules and incentives to reduce the likelihood of losses.
Government insurance, however, makes us less cautious and more willing to take risks. It prices coverage from losses far too low and creates an environment where disasters like flooding are waiting to happen. With programs like subsidized flood insurance, government is like a bad mother who pays her children to run with scissors.
Government ownership is even worse because there are no signaling systems in operation at all. It was also government that created a false sense of security for people in New Orleans, who were led to believe that the levees would hold and pumps would work. And when the floods finally did come, they were told the government would be there to manage the crisis.
But the government cannot manage crisis, as the response to Katrina demonstrated. The local government fled. The state government was dithering. And the federal government actively worked to prevent good things from happening. The thousands and millions of acts of private heroism that took place after Katrina occurred despite the government and not because of it.
And yet what lessons does the political culture want us to take from this? It is the same lessons we are instructed to learn after NASA spends and spends and still can't seem to make a reliable space shuttle. We are told that NASA needs more money. The public schools absorb many times more ? thousands times more ? in resources than private schools, and still can't perform well. So we are told that they need more money.
The federal government spends trillions over years to "protect" the country and can't fend off a handful of malcontents with an agenda. And so we are told that the government needs to start several new wars and erect a massive new bureaucracy and put sections of the country under martial law at the slightest sign of trouble.
So too, Congress can allocate a trillion dollars to fix every levee, fully preventing the last catastrophe, but not the next one. The real problem is the same in all these cases, not insufficient resources but public ownership and management.
Public ownership has encouraged people to adopt a negligent attitude toward even such obvious risks. Private developers and owners, in contrast, demand to know every possible scenario as a way to protect their property. But public owners have no real stake in the outcome and lack the economic capacity to calibrate resource allocation to risk assessment. In other words, the government manages irresponsibly and incompetently.
Actually, it was Mr. Bush who said one of the most sensible things, on September 2, 2005: "If you want to help, if you're listening to this broadcast, contribute cash to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross?. They're on the front lines providing help to the people who need help."
But it was two weeks later when his other instincts kicked in and he delivered a very different message, one that is deeply alarming. He said: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces ? the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."
Interesting that his beloved military was not there at a moment's notice. It now cites its own failures as the great excuse to expand its powers. So the government will spend the next several years preparing for another Katrina that will never come, just as it spent the last several years preparing for another 9-11 that will never come. The next crisis will be something completely unexpected, and once again the government will fail. But we will be left with a government with some very bad habits, among which are declarations of martial law, mandatory evacuations, gun and price controls, and other totalitarian ways.
And given that that this is a Republican administration with its own internal culture, and its attachment to military means, we get what can only be described as the continuation of the fascist track: the militarization of the country under its own armed forces.
So far as I know, this passing remark by Mr. Bush has provoked no commentary in the national press. Commentators in the organized conservative movement have displayed an appalling deference to administration's priorities, with National Review consistently arguing for more spending and militarization, Rush Limbaugh calling for price gougers to be strung up, and even some free-market friends calling for billions to rebuild New Orleans as a way of showing terrorists that we won't let the weather get in the way of progress. On the last point, I kid you not.
Conservatives have been especially bad on tolerating egregious uses of the military. We need to reflect on what it means to have the military take over in the event of crisis. What kind of ideology promotes such things, and looks the other way when it happens? I think I know, and it serves as a reminder that not all threats to freedom come from the Left.
A clue comes from the neo-Nazi novel called the Turner Diaries, sometimes cited as the motivating force for the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building, which ends in what the author regards as a political utopia. After a world war that exterminates all non-whites, a military regime takes over the United States and centrally plans the economy under permanent martial law. All food and water are distributed on military trucks, all production takes place on a planned basis, and the merchant class is required to obey or be shot.
The author describes this race-based national socialism as if it is a system with an inherent appeal to the reader, and perhaps there are people economically ignorant enough and full of enough loathing for humanity and freedom to regard it as attractive. I do know that in our own times there are people waiting in the wings who long for power and who are drawn to the ideal of a militarized society and a centrally managed economy. Some call themselves conservatives, and they are as much a threat to civilization as those who call themselves liberals.
But let me end with several notes of optimism. The first is implied in all that I said above. The government cannot actually do what it promises, and there is a way in which we can only be thankful for that. It cannot succeed in managing a central plan. Its plans will always fail. The government tries to use its failures as an excuse for more power, but with every failure comes a substantial degree of public humiliation for the public sector, and that humiliation can provide a basis for the undoing of government authority.
Some people say that a loss of government authority will mean the breakdown of civilization. Actually it will create the preconditions for the reestablishment of civilization, and in a state of freedom that can happen very quickly. The aftermath of Katrina illustrated in a million individual acts of charity and enterprise that people can manage their affairs, even amidst the chaos.
The calamity following Katrina was an egregious display, one that gave the federal government a black eye. The Democrats will continue to use this to harm the Republicans, which is fine by me, but it is not just Mr. Bush that is suffering, but the whole apparatus of central planning by decree from above. A government that cannot manage a crisis should not be trusted to manage anything at all. Thanks to Katrina and its dreadful aftermath, I think it's fair to say that the age of not trusting government has returned with a vengeance.
It took decades for the rot to give way underneath the Soviet apparatus of central planning. But eventually the implausibility of the entire project was no longer possible to deny. It gave way under an intellectual reaction against the whole of socialism. We are seeing something like that take place today, as government fails in Iraq and New Orleans and in every place around the country and the world where it causes problems and creates no solutions.
The age of confident central planning is behind us. Right now, the state is just trying to keep its head above water. If freedom is to have a future, the time will come when it will sink to an ignoble end, and we will wonder how we ever believed in this myth called government crisis management.
The advocates of freedom and the partisans of private enterprise will be there with the intellectual equivalent of flotillas, barges, buses, helicopters, and the whole apparatus necessary to rescue liberty from every attempt to kill it. And when our City on a Hill comes to be, it will be privately built to withstand any flood.
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Is Your Printer Spying On You?
Help EFF Watch the Watchers
Update, October 13th
Learn to decode Xerox DocuColor tracking dots using our guide - or use our decoding program to decode them.
Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right?
Unfortunately, the scenario isn't fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you're using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what's worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.
The ACLU recently issued a report revealing that the FBI has amassed more than 1,100 pages of documents on the organization since 2001, as well as documents concerning other non-violent groups, including Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. In the current political climate, it's not hard to imagine the government using the ability to determine who may have printed what document for purposes other than identifying counterfeiters.
Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents; only the privacy policy of your printer manufacturer currently protects you (if indeed such a policy exists). And no law regulates what sort of documents the Secret Service or any other domestic or foreign government agency is permitted to request for identification, not to mention how such a forensics tool could be developed and implemented in printers in the first place.
With no laws on the books, there's nothing to stop the privacy violations this technology enables. For this reason, EFF is gathering information about what printers are revealing and how - a necessary precursor to any legal challenge or new legislation to protect your privacy. And we could use your help.
In the preliminary research paper linked below, we explain what we've observed so far, briefly explore the privacy implications, and ask you to print and send us test sheets from your color laser printer and/or a color laser printer at your local print shop. That way, we can watch the watchers and ensure that your privacy isn't compromised in ways that harm your fundamental consitutional rights.
In addition to documenting what printers are revealing, EFF has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and we will keep you updated on what we discover. In the meantime, we urge you to participate and pass the word along about this research project. Thank you for your support!
More information
White paper: "Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers"
Directions for printing test sheets
FOIA request
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide
List of printers that do or do not print tracking dots
Andrew "bunnie" Huang's research on printer watermarking, including a modified scanner that scans only in blue
Articles
Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents PCWorld, 2005
Dutch Track Counterfeits Via Printer Serial Numbers. PCWorld, 2004
FBI Is Keeping Documents on ACLU and Other Peaceful Groups ACLU, 2005
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/
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EDITORIAL
SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT OF OVERBROAD FORFEITURE LAWS:
A Weapon Prone To Abuse
--Brenda Grantland, Esq., F.E.A.R. Chronicles, Vol. 1 No. 2,
(June, 1992)
For years the Justice Department has been lobbying Congress
for expansion of its forfeiture powers, for broader definitions of
property subject to forfeiture, and for procedures which give the
government greater and greater advantages over claimants. Their
lobbying has produced the current statutes, which put the burden of
proof on the claimant, make claimants pay in advance the
government's costs of forfeiture proceedings, and in all other
ways imaginable put a heavy thumb on the scales of justice in favor
of the government and to the detriment of the claimant.
The feds have used their powers to the fullest, declaring
"ZERO TOLERANCE" to be their policy. Zero Tolerance means no
sympathy for innocent owners of ships -- such as the Monkey
Business (of Gary Hart fame) or Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institute's floating lab that surveyed the ruins of the Titanic --
when a crew member is found by raiding customs agents to be in
possession of personal use quantities of drugs.
Zero tolerance also means parents, grandparents, spouses,
friends, business partners, finance companies, landlords and all
manner of unsuspecting people get caught up in forfeiture
proceedings because of something someone else did which is beyond
their control.
Although the statutes are supposed to protect innocent third
parties -- according to the hype the Justice department is feeding
us -- in reality innocent people are losing property as often as
criminals.
These overbroad powers give law enforcement the unlimited
discretion to destroy the financial lives of innocent citizens, to
take away from them their status achieved over a lifetime of hard
work and "upward mobility."
These overbroad powers are often used to discriminate between
the powerful and the powerless. As a prime example of this,
consider the case of Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Ohta of
Hartford, Connecticut -- the Iron Matron of forfeiture. As head of
her office's asset forfeiture unit she was ruthless and extremely
successful, with her unit netting more than $26 million since 1986.
According to the Hartford Courant, "Ohta's aggressive pursuit of
these asset forfeiture cases has won her national recognition in
the ranks of federal prosecutors, and she frequently lectures them
on how to apply the law." (3-22-92).
As head of her unit, Ohta mercilessly pursued Zero Tolerance,
making innocent parents and grandparents pay for the wrongdoings of
their offspring. The Hartford Courant reported that on several
occasions Ms. Ohta argued that "people should know what goes on in
their own homes." (3-22-92).
Presumably Ohta knew what was going on in her own home when
her son Miki began using and selling drugs.
The Hartford Courant reported that the first incident happened
in 1989 when Miki allegedly sold marijuana to an undercover
informant from his parents' home. Miki had another scrape with the
law in December 1991, when he was arrested for allegedly selling 50
"hits" of LSD from his parents' car on September 3, 1991, and for
possession of marijuana when stopped by police, again in his
parents' car, on September 29, 1991. In the September 29 incident,
his companion was allegedly in possession of two "hits" of LSD.
Was Mrs. Ohta's property forfeited? No.
As a result of relentless pursuit of this issue by the
Hartford Courant, and an article by the Connecticut Law Tribune,
the ironies of this situation did not escape public notice. The
U.S. Attorney's Office transferred Leslie Ohta to another unit, at
least temporarily.
In the end, however, the U.S. Attorney's Office decided that
forfeiture of Ohta's property would be "inappropriate".
Most of the forfeiture defense attorneys interviewed by the
Hartford Courant agreed that Ohta's assets should not be forfeited
-- not because she was a well-connected flag-waving forfeiture-
winning Assistant U.S. Attorney, but because, in principle, neither
she nor any of the innocent people she so hypocritically forfeited
property from should be punished for the actions of their children,
grandchildren or acquaintances.
I agree except for the double standard. If the people
prosecuting these forfeiture laws are held to the same standard as
the people they have prosecuted, either Leslie Ohta's house and car
should be forfeited or the government should be forced to give back
the property it took from other innocent parents, grandparents and
third parties. This should include all the innocent victims in the
country since the main Justice Department gave the blessing to
excuse Ohta for her son's crimes.
We want to follow up on this and make sure justice is done.
Please write us if you have any information about Ohta cases or
other Zero Tolerance victims. Send us your opinion (or share it
through the computer bulletin board) on whether Mrs. Ohta's
treatment should also be the standard for forfeiture victims not
employed by the Justice Department. If you want to share your
thoughts with the Connecticut U.S. Attorney's Office, write U.S.
Attorney Albert Dabrowski, Esq., 450 Main Street, Room 328,
Hartford, CT 06103, or you can write Leslie Ohta herself at 2273
Hebron Ave., Glastonbury, CT.
--------------------------
Source articles:
The Hartford Courant and Connecticut Law Tribune news
clippings relied upon for this editorial are available for computer
download through ICSBBS under the filename OHTAW.ZIP OR OHTAA.ZIP.
They are: Rule Lawyer Upholds Might Focus On Her, Lynne Tuohy,
Hartford Courant staff writer, 3-22-92; Feds Reorder House As
Forfeitures Hit Home, Andrew Houlding, Connecticut Law Tribune, 3-
23-92; Let Innocent People Keep Assets; Toss Out Unjust Rules,
Denis Horgan, Hartford Courant Columnist, 3-25-92; Haunted By the
Law She Enforced, editorial Hartford Courant, 4-29-92; Prosecutor
Won't Lose Property in Son's Drug Arrest, Lynne Tuohy, Hartford
Courant staff writer, 4-23-92.
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FBI Patriot Act Plan Concerns Lawmakers
WASHINGTON - Lawmakers expressed concern Sunday that the FBI was aggressively pushing the powers of the anti-terrorist USA Patriot Act to access private phone and financial records of ordinary people.
"We should be looking at that very closely," said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It appears to me that this is, if not abused, being close to abused."
Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed, saying the government's expanded power highlights the risks of balancing national security against individual rights.
"It does point up how dangerous this can be," said Hagel, who appeared with Biden on ABC's "This Week."
Under the Patriot Act, the FBI issues more than 30,000 national security letters allowing the investigations each year, a hundred-fold increase over historic norms, The Washington Post reported Sunday, quoting unnamed government sources.
The security letters, which were first used in the 1970s, allow access to people's phone and e-mail records, as well as financial data and the Internet sites they surf. The 2001 Patriot Act removed the requirement that the records sought be those of someone under suspicion.
As a result, FBI agents can review the digital records of a citizen as long as the bureau can certify that the person's records are "relevant" to a terrorist investigation.
Calling the recent growth in the number of letters a "stunner," Biden said, "Thirty thousand seems like an awful, awful stretch to me."
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Sunday that he could not immediately confirm or dispute the 30,000 figure, but he said the power to use the security letters was justified.
"The Department of Justice inspector general in August 2005 found no civil rights violations with respect to the Patriot Act," he said.
Issued by the FBI without review by a judge, the letters are used to obtain electronic records from "electronic communications service providers." Such providers include Internet service companies but also universities, public interest organizations and almost all libraries, because most provide access to the Internet.
Last September in an ACLU lawsuit, a federal judge in New York struck down this provision as unconstitutional on grounds that it restrains free speech and bars or deters judicial challenges to government searches.
That ruling has been suspended pending an appeal to the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a hearing last week the court suggested it might require the government to permit libraries, major corporations and other groups to challenge FBI demands for records.
The Patriot Act provision involving national security letters was enacted permanently in 2001, so it was not part of Congress' debate last summer over extending some Patriot Act provisions.
As the Dec. 31 deadline has approached for Congress to renew provisions of the act, the House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense.
Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the expanded use of security letters was a "clear concern" and that information gathered on citizens should be destroyed if it does not lead to a criminal charge.
Coburn said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he "certainly will" take steps to ensure that the documents are destroyed immediately.
A message left with the ACLU was not immediately returned on Sunday.
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December 01, 2005, 8:23 a.m.
Wishing Drug-Warrior Thinking
No, the U.S. is not winning a battle vs. Coke.
By Ted Galen Carpenter
If you had received a dollar every time a U.S. government official announced that victory was near at hand in the war on drugs, you would be a rich person. The latest "turning point" proclamation came on November 16 when the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy cited evidence that Washington had achieved a breakthrough in the fight to staunch the flow of cocaine coming into the United States.
What caused this burst of optimism? The street price of cocaine rose 19 percent to $170 per gram between February and November 2005. White House officials contend the price increase indicates a shortage of cocaine, thus validating Washington's $4 billion effort to wipe out drug crops in Colombia through aerial spraying. In addition to the price spike, officials assert that the purity of cocaine on America's streets has declined 15 percent ? another sign, they say, that supply is dwindling. "These numbers confirm that the levels of interdiction, the levels of eradication, have reduced the availability of cocaine in the United States," White House drug czar John P. Walters boasted. "The policy is working."
Yet the government's own data suggest that such optimism is overblown. For the past twelve years, street prices of cocaine have fluctuated between $120 and $190 per gram. Clearly, a price of $170 is well within that "normal" range. Indeed, the price of cocaine has fluctuated 19 percent or more ? both up and down ? many times during the twelve-year period. The latest fluctuation is nothing to get excited about.
If one examines the price trend over a longer period, the "achievement" is even less impressive. During the early 1980s, cocaine sold for more than $500 per gram. The long-term trend has clearly been toward lower prices, suggesting that the supply of cocaine has become more plentiful. As Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center's Drug Policy Foundation, notes: "A small blip upward after so many years of decline in price and increase in purity is essentially meaningless."
Other statistics, including some from the federal government itself, cast doubt on the argument that the cocaine supply coming out of South America is being squeezed in any significant manner. Earlier this year, even after reporting that 336,000 acres of coca plants (the raw ingredient for cocaine) had been eradicated through spraying in 2004, the White House conceded that the amount of coca across Colombia had remained "statistically unchanged" from 2003. The news out of Bolivia and Peru, two other major sources of cocaine, was even worse: According to a United Nations report issued in June 2005, coca cultivation in Peru was up 14 percent from the previous year. In Bolivia it was up 17 percent.
Worst of all, even if by some miracle the supply-side campaign against cocaine (and other drugs) succeeded, it would be a dubious achievement. Let's say cocaine prices returned to the levels of the early 1980s. The inevitable result would be that people who have a cocaine addiction would be driven to commit even more crimes than they do today to support their habit. That would not enhance the peace and safety of America's cities.
The reality is that a supply-side strategy of drug prohibition cannot produce a worthwhile result. If it fails and drug supplies remain plentiful, it is a waste of time and money. If it "succeeds" and creates a supply shortage and a resulting price spike, it drives addicts into lives of greater and greater criminal behavior. One would be hard-pressed to come up with a better definition of an inherently bankrupt policy.
John Walters may boast about the latest alleged triumph in the war on drugs all he wishes. But at best, it is nothing more than a minor, temporary, and dubious achievement in an unwinnable war.
? Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of seven books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/carpenter200512010823.asp
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Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey
From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 22 December 2005
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.
But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.
The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.
In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.
The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of ?24m this year on equipment.
More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.
Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.
"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).
"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.
The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.
According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.
"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.
"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.
Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.
"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.
But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.
The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.
In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.
The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of ?24m this year on equipment.
More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.
Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.
"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).
"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.
The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.
According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.
"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.
"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.
Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.
"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/tra...icle334686.ece
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How the Grinch Stole Nanotech and More
by Michael S. Rozeff
When Richard Feynman gave a visionary talk in 1959 entitled "There?s Plenty of Room at the Bottom," the renowned physicist set out the idea of molecular nanotechnology. He spoke of reducing 24 million book volumes to a cube only 0.02 inches wide. He spoke of atomic-level machines producing other such machines. He spoke of creating molecules atom by atom. None of his visions violated the laws of physics. All were feasible. If big technical problems could be overcome, the practical uses would be phenomenal.
Feynman talked about discovery "just for the fun of it." He talked about "some kind of high school competition." If it took an economic incentive to "excite you to do it," he?d give "$1,000 to the first guy who can" reduce a page by 1/25,000 so that it could be read by an electron microscope. Feynman was sane to think of high school students making breakthroughs. He was sane to think of discovery for the fun of it, coming in first, or a minor prize. Feynman?s still big. It?s the times that have grown small.
Feynman didn?t mention the government. He had just resigned from the National Academy of Sciences (set up by an Act of Congress in 1863) because of its elitism. Earlier, concerned that Hitler would develop the atomic bomb first, he had worked on the Manhattan Project. In 1986 he disapproved of the cover-up politics of the commission investigating the Challenger accident. On television, he gave a simple demonstration of how the vehicle?s O-rings had failed. This took some O-ring material, a glass of ice water, and a clamp. It didn?t require federal funding.
As a schoolboy Feynman learned science by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. At home he set up a lab. He taught himself elementary math. Feynman?s IQ was reportedly between 124 and 137, not at the so-called genius level. He thought intensely about important problems. He knew physics. He knew the great works and theories. Yet he also knew that to generate new ideas, his own ideas, he had to question and disregard, even not know, what everybody else was doing. He had to follow his own instincts. He knew how to nurture his own creativity. This counted for a great deal. It still does.
In his talk, Feynman didn?t mention the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF is a government agency that distributes tax dollars to universities for research. It began in 1951 with a $200,000 budget (in today?s dollars). This grew to $39 million in 1957 and leaped to $133 million when the Russians placed Sputnik in orbit. Feynman was someone very special who kept asking "why" until he found an interesting problem. Intense curiosity drove him, not money. His self-motivated puzzle-solving began years before the NSF started.
Feynman was no libertarian, but he had a healthy skepticism of government. He did very important work without the support of grants. Being a theoretical physicist, he could not help but use the products of experiments supported with government money. He knew that government money corrupted scientific work and objectivity. Concerning the Challenger he wrote:
"Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers."
In a 1974 commencement speech, he put it this way:
"So I have just one wish for you ? the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom."
In a 1963 lecture published in the book, The Meaning of It All, he wrote:
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race."
Federal money does not produce Feynmans. It points them in unproductive directions. Today the NSF pays out $5.5 billion a year, which is one-fifth of what the Federal government pays to colleges and universities. Total federal research spending runs upwards of $75 billion, perhaps 20?30 percent of the total throughout the U.S.
Decades after Feynman?s talk, the NSF and many government agencies have dug their claws deeply into nanotechnology and science. Conventional wisdom makes this support out to be critical for the economy. A Rand report reads: "The positive impact of research and development (?R&D?) investments of the federal government on the U.S. economy is widely recognized by experts and is credited with underpinning much of the nation?s economic growth during the 20th century." The Soviet Union made the same false claim. GNP grew and people stayed poor.
Growth in GNP is not the same as individual well-being. Investments in pyramids, space centers, moon voyages, and nuclear arsenals do not equate to greater happiness, progress in human well-being, or even take-home pay. The truth is the opposite of what the Rand report says. Force, taxes, subsidies, bureaucracies, races to get grant money, academic castles with moats, gold-plated laboratories, and distorted incentives ? none of these are progressive institutions. Freedom is the condition that encourages more ideas, more valuable ideas, more useful ideas. Only freedom can encourage the expression of thoughts and actions that an individual values and that give value and meaning to others. The motivations that stimulate an individual to produce valuable ideas or actions are highly various, very diverse, deeply buried inside people, and hard to discern by the person himself or others. Outsize government grants and free lunches paid for by taxpayers divert and distort these motivations. They undermine creativity and value creation. They corrupt individuals and steer them away from themselves. They channel thought and activity into pathways that give outsize gains to a few and losses to many. Like any robbery, they harm the victim and the robber produces nothing productive.
The universities who receive scientific research money glamorize it as necessary to economic progress. Babies, red wine, word processors, the internet, dreams, recreation, art, and physical activity also affect growth. Shall taxpayers subsidize all of these and more? No one really knows what a statistic like economic growth means or is worth. Still less does anyone know the value of any item in adding to this statistic. No one is in a position to measure human happiness and rearrange taxes and subsidies to increase it. The effort to do so can only decrease happiness.
One may believe that humans are engaging in too little scientific thinking. After all, one is entitled to one?s illusions of knowledge. That is what it is, because there is surely no way to know how much scientific thinking is going on inside people?s heads and surely no way to measure the value of such thinking. To act on such a flimsy proposition and subsidize particular lines of scientific thought is sheer folly. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that subsidizing research projects retards well-being. It directly robs the taxpayers. They are made unable to express their preferences except through a collective and complex political process that is inferior to individual choice. The tax-funding insulates the chosen projects from accountability. It reduces the need to produce something of value that people will pay for voluntarily. University bureaucracies insulate science research from consumers and businesses. The scientific community?s answer to some of these objections is that to filter out poor projects and ideas, government grants are mediated and blind-refereed by panels of expert scientists. This may be so, but since they do not face the risks of an accepted project?s failure and since they do not value its cost as taxpayers might, this "objective" process does not get rid of the system?s ills.
Scientific research is like any other factor that goes into producing a good. It has a cost and a marginal value product. Left alone, it faces market discipline. Government interference with the markets for knowledge makes us worse off.
President Clinton set the nanotech invaders in motion. On January 21, 2000, a White House press release announced the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). Clinton requested a $227 million budget, up from $123 million in the prior year. He named six government agencies as beneficiaries. Later more piled on. This year?s NNI budget is up to $1 billion. Many states have added more. Private sector investment exceeds that of the Federal government, but the federal and state nanotech invaders are pressing forward, aided and abetted by a science lobby.
Clinton twisted Feynman?s clear and accessible vision into a "new frontier" needing tax money. The press release read: "This initiative establishes Grand Challenges to fund interdisciplinary research and education teams, including centers and networks, that work for major, long-term objectives." The Federal Grinch again stole Christmas. He became a fake Santa Claus speaking bureaucratese and writing checks to scientists and their students.
The press release told who?d receive the invoices. The taxpayer will pay for large amounts of university research. The taxpayer will subsidize the costs of training new scientists. The taxpayer will keep paying for decades.
It might take 20 or more years to achieve the research goals, the release opined. This "is precisely why there is an important role for the Federal government," it argued. Ridiculous! If the payoffs of nanotech are that big, then even if they are 20 years off, there is an incentive to research them now. If not, then the research can wait. Resources are limited. Scientists and entrepreneurs may wish to pursue more pressing demands.
Feynman, foreseeing big payoffs, confidently expected bright young scientists to attack the problems and solve them. He also counted on the drives present in human nature. In contrast, the White House fretted about goals that were so far, far off that no one would want to work out the problems on his own. In this view, there were no such things as dedicated or curious scientists, no profit-oriented businesses, and no entrepreneurs. Government must force taxpayers to pay for scientific thought. Government must coordinate team efforts. Government must recruit and pay experts to make the nanotech revolution happen.
Strange that the press release failed to mention the other benefits of subsidies: government control, government growth, dependency of science on government, an image of government progressiveness, attracting voters, and money flowing to universities and scientists.
Danton said "L?audace; toujours l?audace!" Our government has the incredible audacity to suggest that without federal subsidies, nanotechnology will not progress scientifically and technically. Businesses are already proving this false, but government?s false advertising is endemic. Government steals from the taxpayer to set up scientific bureaucracies. It meddles. It stifles, distorts and retards the natural scientific process with infusions of federal money and direction. It absorbs science into government and undermines its ethos. It tampers with a valuable social enterprise and risks wrecking it. But none of this is enough. The government also must deplore the ability of science to act on its own. The government must advertise itself as the savior of scientific progress.
Scientific minds make discoveries and advances for their own reasons and motivations. The reasons are as varied as human beings are. They can be mystical, religious, oddball, deranged, monetary, playful, emotional, or inquiring. Scientists should be let alone, to play or work as they please, to work on basic or applied problems as they please. They should not be diverted or dammed up like a river. When a person works on a problem he chooses in his own way, there is no telling what the outcome will be. The free mind works in mysterious ways. It is common to work on one problem and be led into quite another. Serendipity occurs. Accidental discoveries occur.
Critics of the NNI observe that it is not even supporting Feynman?s vision of molecular nanotechnology (MNT):
"Despite this controversy, the Feynman vision of MNT continues to inspire students and researchers around the world, and the public increasingly expects MNT as part of their future. However, based on false arguments, the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative has rejected MNT, thwarting students and crippling research. This is unfortunate, because research in pursuit of MNT offers fruitful areas for scientific discovery and practical application. It is time to reverse this obstructive policy, opening the door to progress toward understanding, developing, and guiding this revolutionary technology."
Unfortunately, government has the bucks to buy and pay for minds. Government can induce them to build nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Government can suck them into programs to land on the moon or Pluto. Government can direct research in directions it chooses. But who benefits and how much is lost? We have lost untold benefits of inquiry and science by forcing tax money into weapons and rocket development. We have shunted aside what scientists might be curious about or what individuals might truly value. We lose by force-feeding nanotech research. If government stays out of nanotech, entrepreneurs will still develop those new technologies and scientific advances that pay. There will be more and better science. Less capital will be wasted on pyramid-type projects with low or negative returns.
The government is placing bets on the unknown future of nanotechnology. This is the job of risk-taking scientists and entrepreneurs. Businesses know how to form research consortia. They can set up research labs and fund joint ventures. They will do more if government will get rid of capital gains taxes and stop worrying about anti-trust. They will do an appropriate amount of evaluation of risk if the justice system will handle liability issues properly. A company should be responsible for damages it causes and not be responsible for damages it does not cause. Liabilities should not be shifted to taxpayers. Once government gets into the act, private decisions get distorted. Private companies then have an incentive to lobby for federally funded research in order to benefit from the "free" discoveries.
In today?s tech industries, the best brains have trouble divining what consumers will value. They are currently competing over entertainment in the living room or on the streets. Apple guessed at iPod and won. Microsoft is guessing at Xbox 360. Tech investing is no place for government bureaucrats. Governments tax, subsidize and regulate. Tech R&D belongs to a different world.
Subsidized nanotech research makes us worse off. It ignores what we value individually. It ignores risk. It ignores the time value of money and costs of capital. Just as we have government-produced surpluses of food grains, nuclear weapons, missiles, wars, airport inspectors, people in poverty, bureaucrats, regulators, laws, ethanol, and paper money, we will have nanotech-engineered products that people would not willingly pay the unsubsidized price for. If coal workers were subsidized as scientists are, there?d be more coal companies, coal mines and cheaper coal, but taxpayers would have less money to spend on fuels they prefer and everything else. They?d end up worse off. Nanotech subsidies, if not entirely wasted on fruitless research, will end up with nanotech-produced products that do not pay their way.
At present there exist 45 university centers devoted solely to nanotech: four under NASA?s wing, 11 under the National Institutes of Health, 29 more under NSF, and three more under the DOD. These all obtain major research funding from the Federal government, sometimes supplemented by corporate sponsors. The universities rake off significant funds for overhead. The federal grants often help to support graduate students. This system of government support for science and universities is entrenched. It got a boost from the success of the Manhattan Project. Its modern history began with the promotion efforts of Vannevar Bush as early as 1940 for the National Defense Research Committee and later for government-funded research support in general. Its older history begins with the Morrill Act of 1862 that began land grant colleges.
Universities lobby their states and the Federal government, quite successfully. For example, the 1982 Bayh-Dole Act transferred invention rights to universities. While taxpayers pay the bills, individual researchers and universities capitalize on the research, thereby compounding the felony.
The working subcommittee of the NNI has produced a 120-page document titled "Nanotechnology: Societal Implications ? Maximizing Benefits for Humanity." The NNI money is attracting not only physical but also social scientists. They want subsidies for their research on the social impacts of nanotechnology. Some want something far more dangerous than that. They want to control innovation every step of the way. In their own bloated and ornate language, here are a few items on their current wish list.
"...the government should support the implementation of training programs to equip underutilized scientists and engineers with nanotechnology-related skills."
"Federal support should be provided for K-12 curriculum development and educational programs on nanotechnology awareness..."
"It is also recommended that substantial investment be made to explore yet unanswered research questions related to the implications of nanotechnology on national security..."
"Investment in the National Nanotechnology Initiative must be sufficient, both in a broad range of research to advance the technology and in studies on the societal implications, so that the people of the world will gain the maximum benefit."
"Although there was disagreement over our ability to predict either future advances in nanotechnology or their societal implications, workshop participants generally agreed that the government should fund research to identify potential implications to the extent that such can be determined. Furthermore, the government should attempt to facilitate beneficial impacts and to mitigate negative impacts where they might be expected to emerge."
"The government should review research aimed at understanding the human health and environmental consequences of nanomaterials and adjust funding as necessary to address areas where more information is needed."
"The government should review the adequacy of the current regulatory environment for nanomaterials..."
"Increased capabilities and funding should be developed for conducting science and technology studies in educational contexts, in industrial contexts, and among the public. Workforce development should be undertaken across the full spectrum of job roles, not just among research scientists."
"The National Nanotechnology Initiative will proactively fund R&D for new nanoscale capabilities to ensure the maximum improvement of the quality of life at both the individual and societal levels. At the global as well as local levels, we must act wisely to improve the sustainability of the world around us. Four key areas are food, water, energy, and preservation of the environment."
"In order to preserve the environment, we must use nanotechnology to remediate air and water pollution, produce systems and materials that contribute to reducing resource consumption and waste production,..."
"...national security should consider the ease with which information is transferred, particularly in the academic environment...Collaborative networks in the sciences have expanded in size and grown increasingly international. Research is needed on the magnitude of the risk this relatively free exchange of ideas has on U.S. competitiveness and security."
"We need to anticipate and guide change in order to design the future of our choice, not just one of our making. We want society to be prepared for, though not necessarily control, the results of far-reaching research."
"There is a broad consensus that rational management of the innovation process, including nanotechnology innovation, must involve a variety of stakeholders beyond the scientific community, including representatives of the general public. The wide range of interests in society must provide value-based inputs that can be used to balance economic development needs with those of human health, the environment, and, more broadly, the quality of life."
Social scientists armed with the State?s power pose a great danger to society, more so than NSF subsidies. Judging from their rhetoric, there are those who are totalitarian elitists. They want to control the human being the way that a lion tamer controls the big cats. They view human beings as state resources. Humans for them exist to be trained, indoctrinated, manipulated, drugged if need be, and prepared for an occupation. Human endeavor for them is something to be rationalized, managed, measured, maximized, and controlled ? by the social scientists. Public policy and society ? formed and ruled by social scientists ? take precedence over the individual. Their ideal world has no spontaneous order and no market and price processes. Society and humans are mechanisms one controls. They cover their tracks by adopting popular themes of democracy. They espouse themes of environmentalism, safety, health, and public rationality. They use these as wedges to justify and rationalize what they really want ? social control.
We can hope that the development of nanotech and the private economy are so widespread as to be uncontrollable. We can hope that the government de facto ignores and does not enforce its many laws that can impact nanotech. We can hope that the thirst of the public for better living through nanotechnology will override the efforts of the Federal Grinch to steal nanotech. We can hope that the corps of expert grinches who wish to ride herd on nanotech will be satisfied with their money, rhetoric, and reports and leave the rest of society alone.
Hopes will not be enough. The grinches can throw plenty of sand in the gears. They have infiltrated any number of government agencies such as the EPA. They have comfortable bases in most universities in the land. They have the public?s high regard. Intellectuals and media speak in their favor. They have stolen a large slice of science. They did not steal the microcomputer, the computer chip, and the internet; but they won?t give up trying. They?d like to steal nanotech, and some of them wish to steal social life in its entirety, from birth to death.
January 17, 2006
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is the Louis M. Jacobs Professor of Finance at University at Buffalo.
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http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70051-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
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http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=5927
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States review eminent domain
By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
More than 30 state legislatures are considering limits on the power of local governments to condemn private property and transfer it to real estate developers to spur economic growth.
Lawmakers are responding to a Supreme Court ruling in June that permitted eminent domain powers to be used in New London, Conn., to confiscate waterfront homes to build an office complex and condominiums. The 5-4 ruling prompted property rights advocates to take their case to state legislatures.
Five states enacted small changes last year, but most legislatures were not in session after the court ruling.
"This is the crucial year for the eminent domain issue," says Larry Morandi, who tracks eminent domain legislation for the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Bills to restrict eminent domain have moved forward in Georgia, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky and several other states, but none has become law yet. In New Mexico, the state Senate and House both approved limits, but the bill died when the legislature adjourned before giving final approval.
Eminent domain is the power of government to take private property for "public use" if the owner is fairly compensated. It has been used to build roads, schools and utility lines. Cities also have used it to transfer property from unwilling sellers to developers who want to build shopping malls, offices or other projects. Baltimore's Inner Harbor and New York's Times Square were revamped by eminent domain.
Legislatures' strategies
Explicit bans. Some bills would ban the use of eminent domain for economic development. Others would do so indirectly by stating when it can be used and leaving commercial development off the list.
Narrower rules. Many states are considering making it harder for cities to declare a neighborhood "blighted" just for economic development.
Economic penalties. New York and Indiana are among states considering making eminent domain more expensive. The government would have to pay 25% or 50% above market value when it confiscates a property for commercial development.
After the Supreme Court decision, legislatures in Alabama, Texas, Delaware, Michigan and Ohio took modest steps to restrict eminent domain. Michigan approved a constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in November. Ohio approved a one-year moratorium on eminent domain for economic development. Congress also is considering restrictions. (Related story: Ohio town tests eminent domain)
"There's been an explosion of outrage by people across the country and across the political spectrum about what can be done under eminent domain," says Scott Bullock of the Institute of Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.
Last month, Charlotte-based BB&T, the nation's ninth-largest bank, announced it would not lend money to developers who used eminent domain to acquire property. The Rhode Island Economic Development Corp., a quasi-public agency headed by the governor, announced last month that it would no longer use eminent domain for economic development.
Donald Borut, executive director of the National League of Cities, says state legislatures should not rush to act because careful study would show that abuses are rare. "We all feel sympathetic for someone who is losing a home," he says. "But we also have to consider the faces of people of all income levels who benefit from the job creation these projects bring."
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All praise Prof. Alan Dershowitz
By Tony Blankley
February 22, 2006
Next week a vastly important book will be published: "Preemption, A Knife That Cuts Both Ways" by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the very liberal civil libertarian, anti-capital punishment Harvard Law School professor. And but for my lack of his legal scholarship, there is nary a sentence in the book that I ? a very conservative editor of The Washington Times and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich ? couldn't have written.
The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior restraint of dangerous speech, targeted extrajudicial executions of terrorists and preemptive military action, including full-scale preventive war.
In his own words, from his introduction: "The shift from responding to past events to preventing future harms is part of one of the most significant but unnoticed trends in the world today. It challenges our traditional reliance on a model of human behavior that presupposes a rational person capable of being deterred by the threat of punishment. The classic theory of deterrence postulates a calculating evildoer who can evaluate the cost-benefits of proposed actions and will act ? and forbear from acting ? on the basis of these calculations. It also presupposes society's ability (and willingness) to withstand the blows we seek to deter and to use the visible punishment of those blows as threats capable of deterring future harms. These assumptions are now being widely questioned as the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists becomes more realistic and as our ability to deter such harms by classic rational cost-benefit threats and promises becomes less realistic."
Yet, such policies conflict with traditional concepts of civil liberties, human rights, criminal justice, national security, foreign policy and international law. He shrewdly observes that historically, nations ? including democracies ? have resorted to such deviations from law and custom out of necessity, but that it has all been ad hoc, secret or deceptive.
Mr. Dershowitz argues that now, rather, we need to begin to develop an honest jurisprudence of prevention to legally regulate such mechanisms. It is better, he argues, to democratically decide now, before the next disaster, this new jurisprudence ? the rules by which we will take these necessary actions.
To see the difference between traditional Anglo-American criminal jurisprudence and his proposed jurisprudence of prevention, he raises the great maxim of criminal law: better that 10 guilty go free, than one innocent be wrongly convicted. That principle led our law to require proof beyond a reasonable doubt before conviction in criminal trials. Most of us agree with that standard.
But then Mr. Dershowitz updates the maxim thusly: "Is it better for ten possibly preventable terrorist attacks to occur than for one possibly innocent suspect to be preventively detained?" I would hunch that most people would not be willing to accept ten September 11 attacks (30,000 dead) in order to protect one innocent suspect from being locked up and questioned for a while.
Is it possible to go beyond such gut instincts and ad hoc decision making during a crises, and begin to develop a thoughtful set of standards for conduct in this dangerous new world? I don't know.
As Mr. Dershowitz observes, a jurisprudence develops slowly in response to generations, centuries of adjudicated events. But to the extent we recognize the need for it and start thinking systematically, to that extent we won't be completely held hostage to the whim and discretion of a few men at moments of extreme stress.
At the minimum, an early effort at a jurisprudence of prevention would at least help in defining events. Consider the long and fruitless recent debate about the imminence of the danger from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or the current debate on Iran's possible nuclear weapons. Under traditional international law standards they are both classic non-imminent threat situations: "early stage acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a state presumed to be hostile."
But as Mr. Dershowitz points out, while the threat itself is not imminent, "the opportunity to prevent the threat will soon pass." Once they have the weapons it is too late.
Or, a low price in innocent casualties might soon pass. For instance, in 1981 when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear site at Osirak, if it had waited much longer the site would have been "radioactively hot" and massive innocent civilian casualties would have been incurred from radioactive releases. It is simply not enough anymore to say a country violates the norm by acting in its ultimate, but not imminent, self-defense. We need new standards for a new age.
The new realities of unacceptable risk require new ? and lower ? standards of certainty before defensive action is permitted.
As we develop a jurisprudence of prevention, we increase the chance of justice and rationality being a bigger part of such crisis decisions that our presidents will be facing for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Dershowitz's sound, practical scholarship is commendable. But what I find heartening is the political fact that a prominent scholar of the left has finally entered into a constructive conversation about how to manage our inevitably dangerous WMD/terrorist-infested future.
If such as Mr. Dershowitz and I can find common ground, there should be space there for a multitude. And from that common ground can grow a common plan for a common victory.
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Musings About the Drug War
Do you favor decriminalizing marijuana, cocaine and the like?
BY GEORGE MELLOAN
Sunday, February 26, 2006 12:01 a.m.
Economist Milton Friedman predicted in Newsweek nearly 34 years ago that Richard Nixon's ambitious "global war against drugs" would be a failure. Much evidence today suggests that he was right. But the war rages on with little mainstream challenge of its basic weapon, prohibition.
To be sure, Mr. Friedman wasn't the only critic. William Buckley's National Review declared a decade ago that the U.S. had "lost" the drug war, bolstering its case with testimony from the likes of Joseph D. McNamara, a former police chief in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, Calif. But today discussion of the war's depressing cost-benefit ratio is being mainly conducted in the blogosphere, where the tone is predominantly libertarian. In the broader polity, support for the great Nixon crusade remains sufficiently strong to discourage effective counterattacks.
In broaching this subject, I offer the usual disclaimer. One beer before dinner is sufficient to my mind-bending needs. I've never sampled any of the no-no stuff and have no desire to do so. So let's proceed to discuss this emotion-laden issue as objectively as possible.
The drug war has become costly, with some $50 billion in direct outlays by all levels of government, and much higher indirect costs, such as the expanded prison system to house half a million drug-law offenders and the burdens on the court system. Civil rights sometimes are infringed. One sharply rising expense is for efforts to interdict illegal drug shipments into the U.S., which is budgeted at $1.4 billion this fiscal year, up 41% from two years ago.
That reflects government's tendency to throw more money at a program that isn't working. Not only have the various efforts not stopped the flow but they have begun to create friction with countries the U.S. would prefer to have as friends.
As the Journal's Mary O'Grady has written, a good case can be made that U.S.-sponsored efforts to eradicate coca crops in Latin America are winning converts among Latin peasants to the anti-American causes of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Their friend Evo Morales was just elected president of Bolivia mainly by the peasant following he won by opposing a U.S.-backed coca-eradication program. Colombia's huge cocaine business still thrives despite U.S. combative efforts, supporting, among others, leftist guerrillas.
More seriously, Mexico is being destabilized by drug gangs warring over access to the lucrative U.S. market. A wave of killings of officials and journalists in places like Nuevo Laredo and Acapulco is reminiscent of the 1930s Prohibition-era crime waves in Al Capone's Chicago and the Purple Gang's Detroit. In Afghanistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban are proselytizing opium-poppy growers by saying that the U.S. is their enemy. The claim, unlike many they use, has the merit of being true.
Milton Friedman saw the problem. To the extent that authorities curtail supplies of marijuana, cocaine and heroin coming into the rich U.S. market, the retail price of these substances goes up, making the trade immensely profitable--tax-free, of course. The more the U.S. spends on interdiction, the more incentive it creates for taking the risk of running drugs.
In 1933, the U.S. finally gave up on the 13-year prohibition of alcohol--a drug that is by some measures more intoxicating and dangerous to health than marijuana. That effort to alter human behavior left a legacy of corruption, criminality, and deaths and blindness from the drinking of bad booze. America's use of alcohol went up after repeal but no serious person today suggests a repeat of the alcohol experiment. Yet prohibition is still being attempted, at great expense, for the small portion of the population--perhaps little more than 5%--who habitually use proscribed drugs.
Mind-altering drugs do of course cause problems. Their use contributes to crime, automobile accidents, work-force dropouts and family breakups. But the most common contributor to these social problems is not the illegal substances. It is alcohol. Society copes by punishing drunken misbehavior, offering rehabilitation programs and warning youths of the dangers. Most Americans drink moderately, however, creating no problems either for themselves or society.
Education can be an antidote for self-abuse. When it was finally proved that cigarettes were a health risk, smoking by young people dropped off and many started lecturing their parents about that bad habit. LSD came and then went after its dangers became evident. Heroin's addictive and debilitative powers are well-known enough to limit its use to a small population. Private educational programs about the risks of drug abuse have spread throughout the country with good effect.
Some doctors argue that the use of some drugs is too limited. Marijuana can help control nausea after chemotherapy, relieve multiple-sclerosis pain and help patients whose appetites have been lowered to a danger level by AIDS. Morphine, some say, is used too sparingly for easing the terrible pain of terminally ill cancer patients. It is argued that pot and cocaine use by inner-city youths is a self-prescribed medicine for the depression and despair that haunts their existence. Doctors prescribe Prozac for the same problems of the middle class.
So what's the alternative? An army of government employees now makes a living from the drug laws and has a rather conflictive interest in claiming both that the drug laws are working and that more money is needed. The challenge is issued: Do you favor legalization? In fact, most drugs are legal, including alcohol, tobacco and coffee and the great array of modern, life-saving drugs administered by doctors. To be precise, the question should be do you favor legalization or decriminalization of the sale and use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines?
A large percentage of Americans will probably say no, mainly because they are law-abiding people who maintain high moral and ethical standards and don't want to surrender to a small minority that flouts the laws, whether in the ghettos of Washington D.C. or Beverly Hills salons. The concern about damaging society's fabric is legitimate. But another question needs to be asked: Is that fabric being damaged now?
Mr. Melloan is deputy editor, international of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008017
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ANJRPC SUES NY/NJ PORT AUTHORITY FOR JAILING HONEST GUN OWNER
February 27, 2006 - The Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. (ANJRPC) announced that it has commenced a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and one of its police officers for wrongfully arresting and imprisoning for nearly five days a 57-year old Utah man delayed at Newark Airport by a baggage error while traveling from Utah to Pennsylvania.
The lawsuit seeks more than $3 million in damages for civil rights violations and a permanent injunction forcing the Port Authority to follow Federal law on interstate transport of locked, unloaded firearms that have been secured in luggage and declared by law-abiding citizens.
The Utah man, Gregg Revell, a real estate broker and family man with no criminal record and a Utah firearms permit, was flying alone from Salt Lake City, UT to Allentown, PA to retrieve a car he bought and drive it home. He was travelling with a firearm for personal protection. As required by Federal law, the firearm was unloaded, cased, locked and inside his luggage when he declared it at check-in in Salt Lake City on March 31, 2005.
Due to an airline-caused baggage error, Mr. Revell missed his connection from Newark to Allentown and had to stay overnight in New Jersey. When he checked in at Newark Airport the next morning to complete his travels, he again declared his firearm, as required by FAA regulations. He was then arrested for possession of a firearm without a New Jersey state license, and imprisoned in Essex County jail for five days until his family arranged bail, which had been initially set unusually high at $15,000 cash (no bond).
But Mr. Revell?s travels were protected by the Firearms Owner Protection Act, a Federal law passed in 1986 to protect law-abiding citizens who travel with firearms. (See 18 U.S.C. ? 926A.) That law trumps state and local gun laws and protects interstate travel with firearms under certain circumstances, all of which were present in Mr. Revell?s case. Several months after the arrest, all charges were withdrawn and the prosecutor?s case administratively dismissed.
"The Port Authority blatantly violated Federal law when it arrested Gregg Revell," said Scott Bach, President of the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs and a member of the NRA Board of Directors. "Those charged with enforcing the law have a special responsibility to follow it themselves," Bach continued. "Mr. Revell?s arrest is part of a pattern of similar misconduct by the Port Authority throughout the New York-New Jersey metropolitan areas."
"This lawsuit is intended to send a signal not only to the Port Authority but to every agency and officer responsible for policing our airports and highways: if you violate the rights of law-abiding gun owners, you will be held fully accountable." The lawsuit also names the arresting Port Authority police officer, Scott Erickson, as a defendant.
Once inside Essex County prison, Mr. Revell was subjected to numerous atrocities. He was thrown into a holding cell with 28 inmates, many of whom were admitted murderers and rapists. He endured a repulsive vomit-covered bed and toilet, was denied his blood pressure and migraine medication, innoculated against his will, given inedible food, strip-searched, and left only with his wits to survive.
"I did nothing wrong yet was arrested and subjected to the worst treatment imaginable for almost a week," said Mr. Revell, who has 8 children, 8 grandchildren and has been married for 36 years. "I brought this lawsuit together with the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs because I want to stop this kind of abuse from ever happening again," said Revell. "No one should ever have to experience what I experienced," he said. "I paid the price, but I?m committed to making sure no one else does."
http://www.anjrpc.org/fopalawsuit.htm
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It annoys me to no end that the federal govenment regulates toilet tank size and shower head flow rates. Those tidbits and others are bemoaned here.
March 06, 2006, 8:22 a.m.
Toilet Socialism
Can we cut the red-tape crap already?
Deroy Murdock
What is an asthmatic Republican to do?
In yet another GOP contribution to limited government, an advisory committee at the Food and Drug Administration has recommended a ban on Primatene Mist, an over-the-counter asthma spray. This menace to society is propelled by chlorofluorocarbons. CFCs are considered injurious to the ozone layer.
The ozone-friendly FDA suggests that people use CFC-free prescription asthma nebulizers. That?s swell, unless you lack health insurance, pharmaceutical coverage, or the time to see a doctor ? or if you need asthma relief right now.
Primatene is perfect for emergencies. I once suffered an asthma attack while visiting friends in lovely but secluded Bucks County, Pennsylvania. That weekend, I happened to forget my prescription inhaler. Rather than visit a pricey hospital emergency room or locate and awaken a doctor to write a prescription at 11:00 P.M., I had my friends drive me to a drug store where I bought some Primatene for about $12. Yes, I did inhale. And I felt much better.
Now, the Bush administration wants to deny asthmatics that freedom, choice, and comfort. If Primatene?s three million customers routinely emptied their atomizers into the air, this restriction might be ecologically sound. However, as Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst Ben Lieberman says: ?The amounts of CFCs used in these inhalers is so small, it makes sense to exempt them for several more years until comparable alternatives are available.?
?To put people at risk from asthma, in order to address these inconsequential or even imaginary risks to planetary ozone, takes the precautionary principle to unconscionably absurd new levels,? says Paul Driessen, my Atlas Foundation colleague. ?This is a good issue for anyone who favors equal access to affordable health care. This asinine rule would hit poor people hardest, resulting in more frequent, serious, and fatal attacks for them than for upper-crust people, like those who walk the halls of the FDA.?
Alas, this proposed regulation is not alone.
While Republicans deserve credit for cutting taxes, on spending they have earned brickbats. The federal budget just goes up, up, and away, like a not-so-beautiful balloon. Unfortunately, so does regulation.
?This growth in spending naturally means a growth in the regulatory tate,? says Clyde Wayne Crews, a Competitive Enterprise Institute vice president for policy. He notes that the regulation-rich Federal Register has expanded under President Bush from 64,438 pages in 2001 to 73,870 pages in 2005, a 14.6 percent increase. A new Small Business Administration study finds that federal regulations
each year steer America's economy into a $1 trillion headwind.
How, then, could the U.S. economy advance 3.5 percent last year while unemployment now stands at just 4.7 percent?
?Despite those rosy figures,? Crews says, ?industries long saddled with regulations are feeling the pinch; think airlines and the auto industry and pension regulations. The $1 trillion in regulatory costs reflects their (and consumers?) pain, as well as the massive expenses of paperwork, particularly tax compliance. These numbers show that the entrepreneurial sector can create wealth in spite of regulation. That cannot happen forever, not in a country with regulatory costs now well above one third the level of government spending.?
And the new rules keep on coming.
The Federal Communications Commission now wants to impose on cable TV companies something Washington never would force upon restaurants. Consider: I hate pickles. Everyone at my local diner knows to keep them far from anything I order. However, it never occurred to me to ask them to deduct pickles from my bill. Why, then, should the FCC order Time-Warner to subtract the cost of Lifetime Television from my cable-TV package just because I don?t watch it?
This is called ?a la carte pricing.? As customers gravitate toward bigger channels, this idea could jeopardize smaller channels now added into today?s packages. Cable companies should be free, but not compelled, to offer such options. The FCC has outlived its role as sheriff of the three-network town that pre-dated TiVo. Now that people can choose from among broadcast, cable, DVDs, Internet streaming video, satellites, or silence, Uncle Sam should hand back the remote control and ride into the sunset.
On deregulation, the GOP can redeem itself somewhat by revisiting an issue it dropped in 2001. Mandated under the 1992 Energy Policy Act signed by the elder President Bush, 1.6-gallon low-flow toilets have annoyed Americans who prefer the one-flush power of 3.5-gallon traditional toilets. Despite their superior performance, the old toilets are illegal. Amazingly, America now boasts a black market in classic commodes.
Despite ample histrionics during the so-called ?Republican Revolution,? Rep. Joe Knollenberg?s (R., Mich.) bill to repeal the low-flow law languished in committee. This election year, roll-call votes to repeal this regulation should tell Americans whether their senators and representatives favor toilet freedom or toilet socialism.
Here?s an idea: Uncle Sam should retreat from asthmatics? lungs, viewers? cable boxes, and everyone?s toilets. That should give public servants in Washington more time to track and kill terrorists.
? New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200603060822.asp
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Fine for binning rubbish
By JOHN ASKILL
A TOWN hall chief today promised to investigate after a man was fined ?50 for throwing his junk mail in a street litter bin.
Baffled Andy Tierney blasted council busybodies over his ?50 litter bin fine, saying: ?I did the right thing.?
He vowed to fight the pompous fixed penalty notice, issued for dumping two junk mail letters.
And today Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council chief executive Steve Atkinson promised the authority would look into whether it had been too officious.
He said he would personally ensure Mr Tierney was spared a fine if his only offence was to throw away two letters.
Mr Atkinson added: ?There is evidence that there was some junk mail in a bag in a litter bin.
?If the evidence does not stack up and we are potentially guilty of
over-reaction then we need to deal with it in the right way.
?If we have over-reacted we will hold our hands up and acknowledge it.?
It accused him of committing ?an offence under Section 87 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990?. It continued: ?Domestic refuse from your property was dumped into a street litter bin . . . the fixed penalty is ?50.?
The council classes letters as ?domestic litter?, which should not be dropped in public street bins.
Warehouseman Andy, 24, said: ?How on earth can they fine me for being tidy? It?s absolute madness.
?I could have easily chucked those letters on the ground, but I put them in the bin. What has happened is a joke. The council is barmy.
?I never thought you could be fined for putting rubbish in a bin ? that?s what they?re there for.?
Andy was walking from his front door to his car when his postman handed him the junk mail. He opened both letters as he strolled ? then dumped them in the bin on a lamppost.
But council officials traced him from the addresses on the envelopes and issued the penalty.
The heavy-handed council letter threatened Andy with further action and a conviction if he does not pay within 14 days. But Andy, of Hinckley, Leicestershire, insisted: ?There?s absolutely no way I?m paying up.
?You get fined for chucking rubbish on the ground. You get fined for chucking rubbish in the bin. So what exactly are you supposed to do??
?To me ?domestic refuse? is household stuff like potato peelings and tin cans.
?Besides, those letters didn?t even enter my house.?
Hinckley and Bosworth Council last night DEFENDED their action and denied they were being petty.
A spokesman said: ?A fixed penalty notice is served to people who we believe have committed an offence.
?Our litter bins are there to keep streets tidy, as they enable the public to deposit small amounts of litter. They are not provided for household waste.?
But local councillor Julie Price said: ?It seems very severe. I would prefer it if there was a warning first.? She said she would ask the authority to put warning signs on bins.
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April 15: America's 6-Billion-Hour Day
Why a mugger is better than the IRS
Jacob Sullum
Since I was planning a two-week trip to Israel this month, I considered applying for an extension of the deadline for filing my income tax return. As will soon become apparent, this was something I'd never done before.
It turns out you can put off doing your taxes for up to six months, but you still have to pay your taxes by April 17. To pay your taxes, however, you have to do your taxes--i.e., run the numbers to determine how much you owe. You could guess, but there's a penalty for guessing wrong.
Then I noticed you can get an automatic two-month extension, with no application or payment required, "if, on the regular due date of your return, you are 'out of the country.'" This is the extension for me, I thought.
I was wrong. Although I would be literally out of the country, I would not be legally "out of the country." Not only is being abroad not enough to place you "out of the country," I discovered, but you can be legally "out of the country" even if you're actually in the U.S. on the filing deadline. I already had a headache, and I hadn't even begun working on my return.
Which reminds me of a riddle: How is a mugger different from the Internal Revenue Service? Both take your money, but the mugger doesn't make you fill out forms.
Every year the Tax Foundation calculates the cost of this added indignity. Since it's hard to put a dollar figure on annoyance and anxiety, the Washington-based think tank sticks to estimating the time involved in keeping records and completing returns: some 6 billion hours in 2005.
The group's analysts multiply these hours by the average hourly compensation for professional tax preparers or, for the share of taxpayers who file their own returns, the average hourly compensation for U.S. workers. The resulting figure represents the cost of complying with the federal income tax, which the Tax Foundation projects will be $279 billion this year.
That amounts to 22 cents for every dollar collected, about the same as in 2005 but up from 14 cents in 1990. And the compliance burden does not include the costs associated with litigating tax disputes, operating the IRS and the U.S. Tax Court, or tax planning aimed at minimizing liability.
Not surprisingly, compliance costs have increased as the tax code has become more complicated. The number of words dealing with income taxes in the Internal Revenue Code and IRS regulations rose nearly tenfold between 1955 and 2005, from 718,000 to more than 7 million.
This complexity not only maddens taxpayers; it undermines the rule of law. When you can ask five different experts the same tax question and get five different answers, even taxpayers who make a good-faith effort to follow the government's instructions cannot be confident they are complying with the law. As a result, they are exposed to legal and financial peril every time they file their returns.
To add insult to injury, the money extracted through this arduous, intimidating process may be spent on the Stanley Theater in Utica, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, or the Bulgarian-Macedonian National Education and Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. These institutions are among the beneficiaries of the spending earmarks cataloged by Citizens Against Government Waste in its latest Congressional Pig Book.
It's true such pork accounts for a small percentage of the federal budget. But here's another way of looking at it: If you pay $10,000 a year in federal income taxes, your entire contribution amounts to just 1 percent of this year's subsidy for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative and 0.07 percent of the money allotted to the International Fund for Ireland, sponsor of the World Toilet Summit. Now you know you were literally correct when you speculated about where your tax dollars were going.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.
Page printed from:
http://www.reason.com/sullum/041206.shtml
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The Cato Institute has a chilling piece regarding SWAT police raids in the US. The summary is as follows:
Americans have long maintained that a man?s
home is his castle and that he has the right to
defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortun-
ately, that right may be disappearing. Over the
last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing mili-
tarization of its civilian law enforcement, along
with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of
paramilitary police units (most commonly called
Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for rou-
tine police work. The most common use of SWAT
teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usual-
ly with forced, unannounced entry into the
home.
These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per
year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting
nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and
wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having
their homes invaded while they?re sleeping, usu-
ally by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units
dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.
These raids bring unnecessary violence and
provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many
of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The
raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly
target the wrong residence. And they have result-
ed in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not
only of drug offenders, but also of police officers,
children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.
This paper presents a history and overview of
the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an
extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken
raids, and offers recommendations for reform.
The whole (long!) white paper can be found at:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/balko_whitepaper_2006.pdf
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Woof.
Bowser
I'm with you Dogs on this Civil Liberties business.
Stick it to them !
:!:
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Buzwardo,
Unfortunately, cities and PD's see having a SWAT team as a status symbol. They invest heavily in them and then to justify the costs, must use them as often as possible. Whether needed or not.
The problem lies not just in the inappropriate usage of these teams, but also the lack of training, intel, poor planning and safety that their operations neglect. This results in the f*ckups that we read about. I am not against cities having this capability fkor usage in certain situations of true danger, but not for drug busts, etc., where their is no indication of such threats. My problem with these teams is that to perform the tasks that are necessary, one must train consistently and daily. As it stands today, it is similar to having a cop train once every couple of weeks firing his pistol and is then expected to go to competitive shoots. Ain't going anywhere.
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The War on Drugs is a clusterf*ck on so many levels-- this is one of them and an important one too.
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Top 10 Corporate Welfare Queens
Ranked by FreedomWorks.
These organizations grow fat and rich thanks to special treatment from the federal government. They manipulate the political system to get insider deals, government guarantees, fixed prices and other benefits, paid for by taxpayers and consumers.
10. United States Postal Service (USPS)
The USPS is a monopoly more interested in job protection than efficiency or innovation. Labor costs consume 80% of USPS revenue, while UPS and FedEx spend only 56% and 42% of their revenue on labor, respectively. Reform would allow competition for mailbox and first-class mail service.
9. Maritime Shippers and Unions
The Jones Act mandates that all cargo shipped between U.S. ports?including deep-water shipping to Hawaii and Alaska?must be carried on U.S.-built and flagged vessels. That protectionism costs the economy $1.3 billion a year in higher shipping prices, according to a 1999 study by the International Trade Commission. It?s time to repeal the Jones Act restrictions.
8. National Education Association (NEA)
The ultimate monopoly is America?s K-12 government schools, and the NEA is the gatekeeper that opposes almost any reform. Sheltered from competition, public schools continue to decline despite dramatic increases in per-student spending. States should give all students a voucher that allows them to attend the school of their choice.
7. FreddieMac and FannieMae
These are quasi-government companies that purchase wholesale mortgages, but unlike most investment banks, they get special government loans and are backed by an implicit federal guarantee. If the real estate market tanks today, taxpayers could be on the hook for billions. It?s time for Freddie and Fannie to grow up and cut the cord.
6. Big Sugar
Uncle Sam gives sugar special status and protects growers from competition through import quotas and marketing allotments. A handful of industrial growers dominate the industry and receive more than $1 billion a year in subsidies from rigged prices, according to the GAO. Congress should end sugar?s sweet deal.
5. Big Cotton
U.S. taxpayers and consumers provide billions of dollars to cotton growers through a numbingly complicated array of programs that violate U.S. trade agreements. One company, Allenberg Cotton of Cordova, Tenn., collected more than $186 million from 1995-2004 just in cash payments, according to the Environmental Working Group. Congress should terminate the cotton program.
4. Asbestos lawyers
While trial lawyers of all stripes abuse the legal and political system for personal gain, the asbestos litigation attorneys are a special breed. Runaway asbestos lawsuits have already bankrupted more than 70 American manufacturers, destroying 60,000 jobs and costing billions. Yet most of the litigants aren?t sick. Congress should pass medical criteria legislation to stop asbestos pillaging.
3. Amtrak
Passenger railroads are a failure in America, and the Amtrak monopoly is the reason. Feather-bedding union rules and money-losing routes to nowhere are the hallmarks of this national embarrassment, which burns through more than $1 billion a year from federal taxpayers. Amtrak should be completely privatized and opened to competition.
2. Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS)
Big Bird is on welfare, to the tune of about $347 million a year. While taxpayers foot the bills, Sesame Street?s owners make millions from licensing toys and videos. With massive budget deficits and plenty of new channels on cable and satellite radio, it?s time for Big Bird and his buddies to get off the dole.
1. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)
From ethanol mandates to sugar subsidies, ADM is a case study in corporate welfare. New studies show that it takes more fossil energy to create corn ethanol than the fuel provides, but Congress is doubling the amount we have to buy anyway.
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They manipulate the political system to get insider deals, government guarantees, fixed prices and other benefits, paid for by taxpayers and consumers
Funny, for a second there I thought you were going to list a group of senators and congressmen.....
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It would be fun to see what bloggers could do with a resource like this. Budget accountability, what a wild concept.
Fresh Air Fund
By The Editors
For the average citizen, trying to see how the federal government spends money can be a baffling experience. Even journalists and think tankers, who are supposed to specialize in government oversight, have trouble getting a handle on the massive volume of cash that flows from federal coffers. The main reason for this is that there?s currently no system for assimilating, organizing, and releasing information on the hundreds of billions of tax dollars that are spent each year on federal grants and contracts. This lack of disclosure is absurd.
The good news is that the Senate is considering a bill to fix this problem. The even better news is that the bill has drawn bipartisan support. Sponsored by Republican Tom Coburn, and cosponsored by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Rick Santorum, the measure would create a searchable online database of federal grant and contract recipients. The Senate?s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee is set to take up the bill today, and supporters believe it will clear the Senate by the end of the year.
Staffers on Capitol Hill are calling the proposed database a ?Google-like tool for federal accountability.? For the first time, it would shed some light on which companies and organizations are receiving federal money, and how much they are getting. A tool like this is a dream come true for budget hawks. Louis Brandeis famously observed that ?sunlight is the best disinfectant? ? and nothing needs disinfecting like the festering federal budget. Many taxpayers would be surprised and disturbed to learn how much of their money drifts quietly away to various questionable causes ? Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, Alaskan bridges to nowhere, and the like. Making this information readily available to the public ? and especially to the diligent denizens of the blogosphere ? would encourage reform.
Many liberals support the creation of this database because they believe in government oversight ? especially for contract recipients like Halliburton ? and they also believe that most taxpayers will only want more government services once they find out more about them. But there is a precedent for this type of oversight tool, and it should encourage optimism among conservative budget-cutters. After the Environmental Working Group created its online farm-subsidies database in 2001, a wave of outrage over the glut of unjustifiable spending began to spread. Members of Congress felt the pressure from watchdog groups and the press, and this significantly changed the terms of the debate in Washington. The Coburn bill promises to have a similar effect.
The idea of a database has been picking up steam on Capitol Hill. The House has already passed a similar proposal by Republicans Tom Davis and Roy Blunt. Their version would create a public database for federal grants but exclude federal contracts. There is some reason to think it might be best to separate contracts and grants into separate databases, to avoid suggesting a false equivalence between the two. Contractors typically go through a competitive-bidding process and then have to provide a service, whereas grant recipients are simply given funding after being deemed worthy by appropriators. In general, however, there is wide agreement in favor of opening up both grants and contracts to more public oversight.
In the Senate, Republican John Ensign is sponsoring an alternative version of the Coburn bill that would create an even more extensive database. It would require recipients of federal grants and contracts to itemize their expenditures, with the aim of allowing even more detailed scrutiny. While the intention behind this bill is admirable, it suffers from impracticality: The disclosure requirements might place an undue burden on many grant and contract recipients, and threaten to erode congressional support.
Passage of a practical database bill would be an important victory in the battle to control federal spending. It would bring about a systematic, strategic advantage ? rather than just an isolated triumph ? for proponents of spending cuts. While it isn?t enough by itself to restore sensible spending to Washington, it would strongly encourage lawmakers to exercise integrity in their oversight of the federal purse. Let the sunlight in.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGJmZWVmYjZlNjNkMmNhYzFkMDBjOWExYmJjM2RmNzI=
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Stupid Drug Story of the Week
The mothball menace.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, July 28, 2006, at 6:47 PM ET
Journalists have turned the radar up so high in their coverage of illicit drug use that a pair of migrating Blackburnian warblers would look like a squadron of B-52s if they applied the same scrutiny to the skies.
This week's example of journalistic overkill in the pursuit of a drug story owes its origin to a 400-word letter in the July 27 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Twin Girls With Neurocutaneous Symptoms Caused by Mothball Intoxication," in which three physicians in France solve a medical mystery posed by an 18-year-old patient.
The woman had developed a grotty leg rash over the course of month, possessed an "unsteady gait," and displayed "mental sluggishness," among other symptoms. Her twin sister had the same lesions. During her hospitalization the doctors discovered a stash of mothballs in her room. "It turned out that both sisters had been encouraged by classmates to use mothballs as a recreational drug," the physicians write.
The girls had inhaled the fumes, also know as "huffing" or "bagging," and one ate the balls as well. Doctors discovered the active substance in mothballs, paradichlorobenzene, in the young patient's bloodstream. Putting her on a mothball-free diet, she was noticeably better in two months and recovered completely in six. Her sister recovered, too.
How common is paradichlorobenzene self-intoxication? The doctors discovered only three other cases of it the medical literature, dating back to 1961, 1970, and 1992. From this slim medical anecdote, the world press has created a drug panic. Among the first news organizations to post a sensationalized account of the story was the Reuters wire service, which titled its July 26 report "Teenagers Using Mothballs Get High: Study." Yes, teenagers are using mothballs to get high if two young ladies in Marseille constitute a sufficient population to establish a meaningful medical plural.
The next day, CNN.com International published a version of the Reuters story under the headline "Teenagers 'Bagging' Mothballs to Get High." Canada's CBC News Web site headlined a derivative account of the story, "Teens Sniffing Mothballs to Get High, Doctors Report." The Aussie press developed a contact high from the story: "Teens Get High on Mothballs," screamed the country's national daily, the Australian. The Melbourne Herald Sun, the Courier Mail, the Sunday Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Daily Telegraph all combine the words "teens" and "mothballs" in their headlines to announce the plague.
Savvy drug scholars have long blamed coverage like this for popularizing relatively unknown intoxicants among teens and others. Edward M. Brecher devotes a chapter to the topic?"How To Launch a Nationwide Drug Panic"?in his landmark book from 1972, Licit and Illicit Drugs.
To be sure, the inhalation of paradichlorobenzene or any hydrocarbon huffers used to get high?glue, gasoline, household cleaners, paint, furniture polish, paint thinner, et al.?poses serious medical dangers. See this fact sheet from Web MD. Yet the press's headlines blew the "mothball menace" completely out of proportion. The only circumspect headline accompanying the story that I found appeared in the Houston Chronicle. "Mothball-Sniffing Underreported, Teens' Doctors Say," it states.
While the hacks were huffing the mothball story into Earth orbit, three news organizations?UPI, Raleigh News & Observer, and the Globe & Mail?remained sober enough to cover new medical findings about the dangers posed by another household hydrocarbon, 1,4-dichlorobenzene. (Since writing this I've learned that they're actually the same compound. See the addendum below.) The chemical was common in some air fresheners and toilet bowl cleaners until 10 years ago and can still be found in some mothball products, the News & Observer reports. The National Institutes of Health's July 27 press release cited its significant study that 1,4-DCB may reduce lung function and exacerbate existing respiratory problems.
What will it take to get Reuters and the rest to report on 1,4-DCB? A letter to the New England Journal of Medicine about two French kids getting sick after eating urinal cakes?
Addendum, 9:24 p.m.: My chemically minded readers tell me that 1,4-dichlorobenzene and paradichlorobenzene are the same compound, which this EPA Web site confirms. Isn't that rich? The press has devoted tons more coverage and interest on two French girls dosing themselves with the chemical than the potentially ill effects experienced by hundreds of millions exposed to it every day. Chem-head and "Press Box" reader Nathan Okerlund shares this sharp observation with me: "It is very strange that something that makes headlines as an intoxicant is ignored as a pollutant."
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Today, mothballs. Tomorrow, cedar blocks? Send your predictions to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
http://www.slate.com/id/2146827/
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http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...s_clone_r.html
Quote:
It was demonstrated today at the BlackHat conference.
Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country's e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard.
In a demonstration for Wired News, Grunwald placed his passport on top of an official passport-inspection RFID reader used for border control. He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker -- Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies -- but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.
He then launched a program that border patrol stations use to read the passports -- called Golden Reader Tool and made by secunet Security Networks -- and within four seconds, the data from the passport chip appeared on screen in the Golden Reader template.
Grunwald then prepared a sample blank passport page embedded with an RFID tag by placing it on the reader -- which can also act as a writer -- and burning in the ICAO layout, so that the basic structure of the chip matched that of an official passport.
As the final step, he used a program that he and a partner designed two years ago, called RFDump, to program the new chip with the copied information.
The result was a blank document that looks, to electronic passport readers, like the original passport.
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Though not Libertarian per se, I think this piece argues for tools that will underwrite Libertarian beliefs. With that said, I think McGinnis understates the impact of the human penchant for embracing simple fictions rather than complex truths. I think it can also be shown that some interest advocates avoid the light empiricism sheds by embracing complex issues that resist empirical analysis, witness current efforts to use the complexities of climate change toward political ends.
Age of the Empirical
By John O. McGinnis
John O. McGinnis is a professor of law at Northwestern University.
Pundits and politicians alike complain that virulent partisanship and the excessive power of special interests distort modern democracy. As result, it is difficult to elicit the consensus for policies that will promote the public interest. These are not new problems. In the early 1800s, for instance, Federalists and Democratic Republicans clashed sharply and vituperatively, disagreeing on such fundamental issues as whether creating a Bank of the United States was wise. Consensus periods of politics in American history have been few and far between.
But our future politics is more likely to forge consensus than that of the past, because we are on the cusp of a golden age of social science empiricism that will help bring a greater measure of agreement on the consequences of public policy. The richer stream of information generated by empirical discoveries will provide an anchor for good public policy against partisan storms and special-interest disturbances, making it harder for the political process to be manipulated by narrow interests.
Many great social scientists have understood that people are ultimately persuaded more by facts than by abstract theories. That is the reason that Adam Smith filled The Wealth of Nations with a wealth of factual observations to demonstrate the power of his ideas. It remains the case that if supporters of a policy can demonstrate that it leads to greater prosperity, the political battle is often half-won. It is true that facts alone cannot generate values, and thus no empirical evidence by itself can logically mandate support for a specific social policy. Smith?s contemporary, the philosopher David Hume, himself made this clear with his famous ?is-ought distinction.? But politically, most people within modern industrial society adhere to a rather narrow range of values, at least in the economic realm. They favor more prosperity, better education and health care, and other such goods that make for a flourishing life. As to these issues, what is debated is which political program will in fact broadly deliver these goods.
Empiricism has particular power in the United States, where a spirit of pragmatism limits the plausible boundaries of political debate. Republicans try to show that tax cuts will stimulate economic growth, while Democrats argue that the resulting deficits will impede it. Republicans argue that, in the long run, such tax cuts will raise the incomes of all. Democrats tend to disagree. Such consequential arguments are key to persuading the vast middle of American politics. For instance, if the facts show that school choice improves test scores overall, it is unlikely that vague moral claims, like unfairness to teachers, will stop advocates of school choice from making substantial political gains.
Fortunately, we are at the dawn of the greatest age of empiricism the world has ever known. The driving force in the rise of empiricism is the accelerating power of information technology, often referred to as Moore?s law. Moore?s law ? originated by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel ? is the now well-established rule that the number of transistors packed onto an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months. As a result, computer speed and memory have been doubling at approximately the same rates. Such exponential growth will persist for at least another 15 years. Many observers believe that new paradigms will continue the acceleration of computer power in the decades after silicon chip technology is exhausted.
The fruits of Moore?s law will be not only ever fancier gadgets, but also an ever more informed policy calculus. The accelerating power of computers addresses what has always been the Achilles? heel of empiricism ? its need for enormous amounts of data and huge calculating capacity. Pythagoras famously said ?the world is built on the power of numbers.? That is the slogan of empiricists as well, but processing these numbers requires huge computer power. First, the social world must be broken down into numbers that can be calculated, and to deal with matters of any social complexity, that means a lot of numbers. To draw any conclusions, these numbers must then be sliced and diced to test hypotheses about particular social claims, such as the assertion that school choice improves test scores.
But now computers allow more and more facts to be collected and recorded in systematic form, making possible more precise measurements of worldly events. In fact, we can imagine that soon electronic agents will sweep the web to collect data for researchers to use. Greater computer power also permits the construction and implementation of ever more complex equations by which investigators try to exclude the confounding factors always present in the messy social world and thus to reveal the true causes of social phenomena. It also permits methods, like repeated sampling, to produce better error estimates, giving researchers greater confidence in their results. One University of Chicago social scientist is said to have taken the entire summer to run a regression on a mainframe computer 40 years ago. Now researchers can run scores of regressions on their laptops in a few hours. As a result, more empirical papers about social science are written every year, and that trend appears to be accelerating as well.
The resulting rich vein of data and stream of studies analyzing those data will, over time, transform our politics. No matter what the machinations in Washington in a particular week, a new empirical study will likely offer the fruits of some investigation, calculating the effects of a flat tax on economic growth, for example, or of extra school spending on school achievement. The profusion of such work can make a very substantial political difference by changing the information mix in which politics plays out.
Political discussions all have a policy landscape that is shaped by our common knowledge, and it is this common knowledge that empiricists are changing through their discoveries. The effects of any one empirical discovery, to be sure, will be incremental, but the long-run effects of diffusing cumulative empirical knowledge will be enormous. As in science, there will often be good-faith disagreements among different researchers, but, as with other sciences, in the long run empiricists will develop a consensus about the effects of a policy, and that consensus will influence the political world. Greater common knowledge no less than technological innovation is a source of long-term prosperity.
Of course, new facts inimical to their causes will not induce interest groups ? from teachers unions to the automobile trade associations ? to abandon programs that serve their interests at the expense of the public. Nor will the new information change the fact that the public has little incentive to understand the complexities of public policy. Nevertheless, the new information will shift the debate in many areas, little by little, as the results become diffused through elites and the many sources of the modern media. Cumulatively, the information will often force interest groups to give ground.
Two other factors ? themselves a product of our ongoing technological revolutions ? will amplify the power of empiricism. One is the rise of blogs. Blogs help police and expose false studies with which interest groups and partisans may attempt to counter the empirical work that undermines the factual bases of their positions. Academic experts regularly write for blogs and, unlike reporters, are well suited to subject empirical work to searching scrutiny. Recently, for instance, a group of prominent legal scholars has begun a blog wholly devoted to law and empiricism. Such developments will also force empiricists to be more careful and transparent about the discretionary decisions they make, such as their choices of time periods to include in their investigations, because their colleagues will be able to call them to account for misjudgment or bias more easily.
The second development reinforcing empiricism is the rise of information markets. Information markets are sophisticated betting pools that modern information technology has created by making it much easier to gather bets and keep running tallies of the odds that the bets generate. Already, information markets are getting a lot of attention because of their ability to predict current events. For instance, on the eve of the presidential election of 2004, the information market Tradesports predicted the winner of every state correctly. Companies now routinely use them to anticipate which product line will be successful. In the future, individuals may bet on what the growth rate or tax revenue will be, conditional either on the implementation of a specific tax cut or on its absence. Thus, empirical claims about the effects of tax rates will also be tested by those willing to bet on the predictions that flow from them. As the economist Robin Hanson notes, these markets will provide a more democratic check on the empirical claims of experts, making it harder for expert peer review to insulate claims from contestation.
The declining cost of empiricism also promises to transform our universities, because it provides greater incentives to hire empirical investigators in the social sciences. A hundred years ago, armchair speculation was very cheap compared to empiricism, as the cost of the latter enterprise was high, often prohibitively so, in that the available technology rarely delivered any useful results. Thus, it was rational for universities to hire theorists without much interest in comprehensive and statistical inquiry into the social world. But now that the cost of empiricism has fallen, a cascade of empiricists of all kinds ? economists, psychologists, political scientists ? is flowing into our universities and think tanks.
This inflow has several immediate effects, all of them beneficial to a free inquiry that will in turn aid the gathering of facts conducive to consensus politics. First, the hiring of empiricists will tend to decrease any ideological discrimination in academia, because empiricists, whatever their personal politics, will tend to be much more open-minded than their theoretically inclined colleagues. They respect facts themselves and professionally must give a hearing to other empiricists, whatever their views and whatever the results of their empirical investigations. They will also be less prone to discriminate, even in hiring theorists in their social science departments, because empiricists are likely to regard almost all theories as contestable.
Second, the large number of empiricists will create a rich market for empirical work and provide greater incentives to get the facts and models absolutely correct. There are now so many investigators and the computer technology is so pervasive that results are constantly checked. Moreover, the multiple data bases collected in such places as the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research provide a ready resource for the quick debunking of outlandish or mistaken claims. Indeed, I have recently attended faculty workshops where members of the audience have begun checking data and doing alternative analysis on their laptops as the speakers are presenting. The empirical culture, no less than computing itself, will be ubiquitous in the coming years.
The exponential growth in the numbers of empiricists helps resolve another debate as old as that of the Greeks. Platonists are sympathetic to rule by experts and elites. Artistotelians are more receptive to democratic rule. As Aristotle himself puts it in the Politics, ?For the many . . . may be better than the few good, if not regarded individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of the single purse.? Expertise in the form of empiricism straddles these two political poles. It is a more democratic expertise in that it is replicable, transparent, and sharable. Moreover, as discussed above, it is disciplined by the information inputs of blogs and information markets. Thus, expert judgments will no longer be those of the few wise persons who rely on authority to impress their conclusions on society. Instead, they will reflect the collective sentiments of the empirical community. To be sure, this is not the same as the entire democratic society. But the number of empiricists is large enough that it will provide many of the virtues of democratic judgments ? the application of many different perspectives to the same problem.
Already, we are beginning to see that the new culture of empiricism is shaping our conversation. We can see both the work of empiricists generally becoming more prominent and the specific empirical work shaping the debate about matters of national importance. On the prominence of empiricists, one has only to note the remarkable celebrity of Steve Levitt of the University of Chicago. His book, Freakonomics, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year at this writing, and he has been given the prime territory of the New York Times magazine for a weekly column.
The political impact of empiricism is far more pervasive than the efforts of this one prominent and sophisticated scholar. One important point to stress is that many empirical projects do not involve any complex formulas, but rather entail the collecting of data made easier by information technology. An excellent example is the studies that now map the ideologically skewed composition of our universities. From law schools to faculties of arts and sciences, whether measured by party affiliation or campaign contributions, the imbalance between Democrats and Republicans is from five to one to ten to one and occasionally even greater.1
This kind of work demonstrates how empiricism can have influence without generating its own values. The values being assumed here are those implicit in the operations of the academic community itself, which now defends affirmative action on the grounds that faculty and students of different races enrich the educational experience by leading to ?viewpoint diversity.? Accepting that rationale, it would appear that diversity of political viewpoint would be at least as important as diversity of ethnicity to many subjects, including law and most of the social sciences. As a result of the publicity now given to ideological imbalance, administrators have been forced to try to explain how their ideologically monolithic faculties are consistent with their purported educational ideals.
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Far more important to the future of America is the battle over substantive issues. Empiricism has already created a consensus in some areas, crime being one of the foremost among them. In the 1960s and 70s, the political community was very divided about the basic approach to crime. Some experts then attacked prison sentences as destructive rather than useful and even contended that certain criminal acts, like writing graffiti, should not be considered crimes at all.
But criminologists have turned to empiricism to show the truth of claims previously contested. It turns out that that prison sentences sharply reduce crime, as does the greater presence of police on the streets. Steve Levitt recognized that prison-overcrowding litigation created a natural experiment for testing the extent to which prison sentences reduced crime because the litigation released prisoners for reasons that had nothing to do with crime rates. By looking at the consequences of the prison litigation, he was able to show that for each criminal released from the prison population, the number of crimes will increase by about 15. Jonathan Klick and Alex Tabarrock used a similar natural experiment by using Homeland Security alerts to demonstrate the effectiveness of police. Homeland Security alerts increase the number of police in a given area but are otherwise unrelated to crime rates. Their paper suggests that a 50 percent increase in the number of police reduces crime by approximately 15 percent.
The consensus on crime and punishment not only has created agreement on sentencing policies and police practices in the United States, but also has radiated outward both to related fields and to other nations. It is frequently remarked that the area of constitutional law in which the conservative and liberal blocs show most agreement is criminal law and procedure. Given the effectiveness of prison, liberals are much less likely than they were in the 60s and 70s to insist on expanding rights that will reduce the convictions that lead to prison. In Great Britain, the cross-party consensus is similar. New Labour?s popular slogan is ?tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.?
What empiricism has done for criminological research in the past decade it will do for educational research in the next decade. Scholars are focusing on the factors that make for better educational outputs. The marquee issue is whether greater choice of school will improve outputs. An important study here is by Paul Peterson and William Howell, who look at the test case of school choice programs provided by private philanthropists. Because more students applied to those programs than could be accommodated, Peterson and Howell were able to compare the samples of pupils who went to private schools with those left behind in public schools. They found statistically significant improvement among African Americans who attended the private schools, although the improvement among other groups generally fell short of statistical significance.
Such a study is only the beginning of an empirical conversation. First, as with any scientific study, confidence in its results will grow if they are replicated elsewhere. Moreover, this study raises other questions, such as whether the results are scalable. If African Americans go to private schools in greater number, will the results be reproduced, or was the effect largely the result of bringing relatively few African Americans into a better-performing school culture? Second, will public schools be worse as a result of losing such students, or will they improve because of the greater competition? Researchers are now beginning to study these specific issues. In the meantime, Peterson?s and Howell?s work certainly provides reasons to create more experimental voucher programs, like the one the federal government is initiating with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Only through larger-scale experiments are we likely to be able to answer the key questions about the beneficence of vouchers.
But though such serious empirical research on school structure has been welcomed, less serious studies come under withering fire from the new and old media. The New York Times provided a front-page story about a study by the American Federation of Teachers that argued the Education Department was covering up the failure of public charter schools ? a failure the aft claimed was apparent from its own data. The aft noted that these data showed that students at charter schools performed worse than those at ordinary public schools. Unfortunately for the aft, however, these raw discrepancies proved nothing because, unlike the work of Peterson and Howell, their researchers did not control for selection bias ? the fact that those who chose charter schools were not a random selection of the student population. Charter schools have often arisen in poor communities with students who are not doing well; thus, even if they improve the outputs of students, these students may still underperform compared to the average student. Blogs and even some of the mainstream media continuously contested the aft analysis for weeks after it was published.
But school choice is not the only matter about educational outputs that is subject to rigorous study. Educational empiricists are looking at the effect of school funding and class size on school performance. As important, they are considering how different kinds of educational programs affect different students so that better programs can be designed at the micro as well as macro levels. Within a decade, we will know a great deal more about what matters in primary and secondary education. These results will influence the shape of education for the next decade until even better data and analysis refine the hypotheses still further.
Some might counter that entrenched forces arrayed against change, like teachers unions or ideologues of some particular stripe, may prevent this work from having transformative influence. This seems unlikely. To be sure, interest groups will resist even reforms with consensus empirical support, but they cannot prevent the empirical results from seeping out from academics through the new media to the large bloc of genuinely independent voters and a not insubstantial number of conscientious politicians. As some jurisdictions adopt better policies and get better results, they will generate more information for change elsewhere.
If empiricism is good for consensus and bad for special-interest and partisan special pleaders, a culture of better-checked empiricism is even better. The most notable victim of fact-checking in recent years was Emory historian Michael Bellesiles, who won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history with a book claiming that gun ownership was not widespread in colonial America. That claim obviously pleased partisans on one side of the debate about gun control. But James Lindgren, a leading empiricist at my own law school, found that some of his key statistical claims appeared to be based on fabricated evidence. After an investigation by his own university, Bellesiles resigned from his tenured position, and for the first time in its history the Bancroft Prize was withdrawn.
The growing spontaneous order of empiricism is the answer to those who worry that political movements or interest groups can take advantage of the empirical trend by manipulating facts to their advantage. Marxism styled itself scientific, and Marx and Engels did try to support their theories with data. But in their time, the strong culture of replicating the database and calculations underlying theories did not exist. Nor were there powerful statistical tests designed to shed light on social claims from multiple angles. In today?s culture, the factual claims of Marx and Engels would not have withstood the light of empirical scrutiny.
One of the advantages of the empirical approach is that it is not necessarily allied to the narrow view of rational man that dominates many social sciences today. If individuals act for reasons that seem irrational, like valuing something more simply because they own it, empirical methods can test the effects of that behavior on society. Nor is empiricism blind to the importance of values. Indeed, much interesting work has been done on the way religious organizations provide mutual help and raise the incomes of their members. Thus, empiricism is able to cash out the frequent claim of pundits and politicians that values matter; and fortunately, unlike them, it has a neutral metric for establishing which values have what particular effects.
Similarly, in the long run empiricism may be able to narrow the division between the advocates of liberty and the advocates of equity, because empiricists can investigate the extent to which there is a tradeoff between these two great social imperatives. For instance, empirical work has already shown that redistribution policies may create dependence and entrench an underclass, harming equity as well as growth. Empiricists are also considering the long-term effect of tax cuts on both growth and equity.
Of course, empiricism is not going to forge consensus on all issues. Empricists may show that abortions reduce crime or that abortion waiting periods reduce suicides, but these secondary consequences are not going to persuade the great majority of people that abortion is right or that waiting periods should be encouraged. Views about the intrinsic evil of abortion or the beneficence of abortion rights are likely to swamp all empirical considerations. But abortion is an unusual issue in this respect, because it divides citizens on the metaphysical question of when life begins, a subject on which many have strong views but no mechanism for demonstrating to their opponents that they are right. Most issues of our politics are happily not like abortion, where disagreement is fundamental and compromise difficult to imagine.
One might wonder whether the greater consensus on most issues ? particularly economic matters and other areas in which differences revolve around measurable consequences ? may actually increase the salience of intractable moral issues like abortion. Thus, more agreement on more policies may actually generate the political equivalent of the narcissism of small differences, in which individuals overlook the agreements they have to focus even more virulently on the disagreements that remain.
But this danger should not be exaggerated. Empricism has been increasing consensus for some time, yet differences on abortion and other such matters do not appear more virulent than in times past. Moreover, as Adam Smith observed, when religions compete, they have a tendency to become more moderate. Religion in the United States sustains the most important organizations that emphasize the role of values in social life; and as long as they must compete, the rise of consensus politics will intensify, not diminish, that competition, as religious sects will have to offer incentives to attract the many who are influenced by the empiricism all around them. Moreover, groups divided over basic issues of economic and social policy often exploit religious fault lines and other divisions over values to pursue their own partisan agendas. A more substantial policy consensus fostered by empiricism should diminish the impulse for such mischief-making and thus temper clashes over values.
If empiricism is likely to provide a source of consensus and constraint on interest groups in the future, policies that facilitate empirical work will also foster such worthy goals. The first imperative is to make data transparent and accessible, because statistical investigations need data above all. Unfortunately, the government often wants to conceal its operations and hide its failures. But with the rise of empiricism, there are even greater reasons to force what government does in the domestic arena (outside of sensitive national security matters) into the open. The daily activities of government and information about the work of its employees should be posted on the web in machine-readable form. Agencies would do well to follow the lead of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, who has begun an initiative to both tag electronically the data sec receives and make sure that its future data are displayed in the most readily usable form. If necessary, special agencies should be created to monitor the dissemination and accuracy of such information.
Second, the rise of empiricism makes appropriate decentralization of government even more useful. One of the most powerful investigative tools in social science is to compare how different laws work in different states and nations. Such careful comparisons make manifest the consequences of good and bad policies. But that kind of investigation can work only if policies differ from place to place, and politicians in governments everywhere have an inherent tendency to centralize power because they can exercise more control. There are, of course, many reasons to resist this trend. Decentralization creates a market for governance by allowing different jurisdictions to compete to attract people and investment. It also permits the formulation of diverse policies that meet peoples? diverse preferences.
To all these virtues the rise of empiricism adds another: Decentralization facilitates the empirical investigation of the differing consequences of social policy. We can all learn from the effects of the flat taxes sweeping the Baltic states, but only if the European Union resists calls for tax harmonization. Those interested in fostering consensus and restraining interest groups should be even more insistent on the need for appropriate federalism at home and more resistant to international organizations that will force nations to acquiesce in international mandates about domestic matters.
Another policy imperative for advancing empiricism is to sustain the free flow of information that conveys research in useable form to the public. It goes without saying that any regulation of the blogs should be rejected. Unfortunately, some are already suggesting that blog postings should be considered in some circumstances a contribution to candidates and subject to regulation under the McCain-Feingold act. But it is precisely near elections that those with empirical data and expertise are most needed to critique the policies and platforms of candidates.
More generally, campaign finance regulation of all kinds is a threat to the dynamic of increasing the public?s awareness of new empirical conclusions that should help bring consensus. Although information technology has the potential to improve our knowledge of the social world and policies that will improve it, this same technology makes it harder to get the public to pay attention. When thousands of people were willing to attend the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it was the best show in town. But now politicians compete with hundreds of cable television stations featuring people far more attractive than politicians doing things most citizens find far more interesting.
In this new media landscape, we need more, not less money in politics to keep people informed. Of course, the information will be delivered in sound bites that most intellectuals find aesthetically unappealing, but the alternative to 30-second political ads is not a seminar on politics but a beer commercial or sitcom. And since the beginning of democracy, ideas originally generated by intellectuals have always been transmitted to the body public through simplifications and slogans. Such diffusion and general reception has nevertheless taken place over time and overall has been a force for social progress.
If empiricism helps support a consensus politics today, it is likely to be even more effective in the future. We have already reached the threshold where computers can retain billions of pieces of data and make millions of calculations per second. But computer capacity will continue to increase exponentially, making it scores of times more powerful in the next decade. We can expect the amount of data available to grow exponentially as well, as ever more electronic agents sift and collect data. We may even expect there to be computer programs to assess which empirical conclusions are the best when different empirical analyses conflict. Such computer judgments will have the virtue of even greater impartiality. In short, if the fruits of empiricism are now transforming the political information mix, that mix should become only richer in the coming years.
This accelerating power of empiricism does not guarantee enduring agreement on all aspects of the social policy and political structure. I am not here offering a fact-driven version of Francis Fukuyama?s End of History ? his famous theory that the dialectic of ideological debate will end in agreement on free markets and liberal democracy. Interest groups, future technological discoveries, and forces no one can now predict may create counter pressures for division of the polity. But the growing importance of factual investigation will generate a continuing tailwind for politics based on consensus and facts rather than special interests and special pleading.
Notes
1 This is the one area in which I have personally contributed to the empirical literature. See John O. McGinnis, Benjamin Tisdell, and Matthew A. Schwartz, "The Patterns and Implications of Political Contributions by Elite Law School Faculty," Georgetown Law Journal 93:4 (April 2005).
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The View From Guant?namo
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By ABU BAKKER QASSIM
Published: September 17, 2006
Tirana, Albania
I HAVE been greatly saddened to hear that the Congress of the United States, a country I deeply admire, is considering new laws that would deny prisoners at Guant?namo Bay the right to challenge their detentions in federal court.
I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.
I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America?s war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guant?namo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.
It was only the country?s centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right ? or began to. In May, on the eve of a court hearing in my case, the military relented, and I was sent to Albania along with four other Uighurs. But 12 of my Uighur brothers remain in Guant?namo today. Will they be stranded there forever?
Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name ? and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.
Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guant?namo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well.
I am from East Turkestan on the northwest edge of China. Communist China cynically calls my homeland ?Xinjiang,? which means ?new dominion? or ?new frontier.? My people want only to be treated with respect and dignity. But China uses the American war on terrorism as a pretext to punish those who peacefully dissent from its oppressive policies. They brand as ?terrorism? all political opposition from the Uighurs.
Amnesty International reports that East Turkistan is the only province in China where people may face the death penalty for political offenses. Chinese leaders brag about the number of Uighur political prisoners shot in the head. I was punished for speaking against China?s unjust policies, and I left because of the threat to my life. My search for work and refuge took me from Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I heard about the Sept. 11 attacks for the first time in Guant?namo. I was not aware of their magnitude until after my release, when a reporter showed me images online at an Internet cafe in Tirana. It was a terrible thing. But I too was its victim. I would never have experienced the ordeal and humiliation of Guant?namo if this horrific event had not taken place.
I feel great sadness for the families who lost their loved ones on that horrible day five years ago. And I would be sadder still to see the freedom-loving American people walk away from their respect for the rule of law. I want America to be a strong and respected nation in the world. Only then can it continue to be the source of hope for the hopeless ? like my people.
Abu Bakker Qassim was imprisoned at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, from 2002 to May. This article was translated from the Uighur by Nury Turael.
from today's NY Times
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Doubtless misfiled as it speaks to the antithesis of Libertarianism, so let it serve as a reason why liberty should be embraced.
China's Execution Buses
Updated: 02:16, Thursday October 05, 2006
Sky News has obtained chilling new evidence of mobile execution buses being used by the Chinese government.
It comes less than two years before China hosts the next Olympics - an event it was given after promising to improve its human rights record.
China's penal system is surrounded by a wall of secrecy, but an investigation by Sky's China correspondent Dominic Waghorn found that between 3,500 and 10,000 people are put to death each year.
The volume of executions has meant that China has invented new ways of killing, mobilizing and mechanizing its execution system.
Brochure shows execution buses
A brochure acquired by Sky News reveals details of China's new execution buses now operating across the country.
Fitted with lethal injection equipment they can deliver on the spot executions.
Sky News spoke to a number of people affected by the executions including the family of Nie Shubin who was only 20-years-old when he was wrongly accused of rape and murder.
His mother and sister told how he was held in jail for three years, without being allowed to see his family once.
Sky's Dominic Waghorn
Nie Shuie said: "They never let me see him after his arrest. That continued till the end. I never saw him again before he was executed.
"And nobody told us that he had been executed."
Nie was accused of attacking a woman in this field near his home, but only after his execution did another man confess to the attack.
In an exclusive report earlier this year, Sky News gathered evidence linking China's execution system and its booming organ transplant industry.
Amnesty International says the demand for transplant organs may be driving the high number of executions in China.
Even by official figures more people are executed every year in China than the rest of the world put together.
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FBI director wants ISPs to track users
Robert Mueller becomes latest Bush administration official to call for ISPs to store customers' data.
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 17, 2006, 4:18 PM PDT
FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers' online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year.
"Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms," Mueller said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Boston.
ISP snooping time line
In events that were first reported by CNET News.com, Bush administration officials have said Internet providers must keep track of what Americans are doing online.
June 2005: Justice Department officials quietly propose data retention rules.
December 2005: European Parliament votes for data retention of up to two years.
April 14, 2006: Data retention proposals surface in Colorado and the U.S. Congress.
April 20, 2006: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says data retention "must be addressed."
April 28, 2006: Rep. Diana DeGette proposes data retention amendment.
May 16, 2006: Rep. James Sensenbrenner drafts data retention legislation--but backs away from it two days later.
May 26, 2006: Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller meet with Internet and telecommunications companies.
June 27, 2006: Rep. Joe Barton, chair of a House committee, calls new child protection legislation "highest priority."
"All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims," Mueller said. "We must find a balance between the legitimate need for privacy and law enforcement's clear need for access."
The speech to the law enforcement group, which approved a resolution on the topic earlier in the day, echoes other calls from Bush administration officials to force private firms to record information about customers. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for instance, told Congress last month that "this is a national problem that requires federal legislation."
Justice Department officials admit privately that data retention legislation is controversial enough that there wasn't time to ease it through the U.S. Congress before politicians left to campaign for re-election. Instead, the idea is expected to surface in early 2007, and one Democratic politician has already promised legislation.
Law enforcement groups claim that by the time they contact Internet service providers, customers' records may have been deleted in the routine course of business. Industry representatives, however, say that if police respond to tips promptly instead of dawdling, it would be difficult to imagine any investigation that would be imperiled.
It's not clear exactly what a data retention law would require. One proposal would go beyond Internet providers and require registrars, the companies that sell domain names, to maintain records too. And during private meetings with industry officials, FBI and Justice Department representatives have cited the desirability of also forcing search engines to keep logs--a proposal that could gain additional law enforcement support after AOL showed how useful such records could be in investigations.
A representative of the International Association of Chiefs of Police said he was not able to provide a copy of the resolution.
Preservation vs. retention
At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.
A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."
Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)
In addition, Internet providers are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency.
When adopting its data retention rules, the European Parliament approved U.K.-backed requirements saying that communications providers in its 25 member countries--several of which had enacted their own data retention laws already--must retain customer data for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years.
The Europe-wide requirement applies to a wide variety of "traffic" and "location" data, including: the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time and duration of phone calls, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the "content" of the communications is not supposed to be retained. The rules are expected to take effect in 2008.
CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.
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Myths of the Nanny State
by Radley Balko
http://www.cato.org/research/articles/cpr28n5-1.html
The late economist Julian Simon was libertarianism's great optimist. Classical liberals are naturally cynical about government and, as Jefferson famously put it, its natural tendency to grow and for liberty to lose ground. The "upside" of libertarianism, however, has always been the philosophy's ability to see the potential in individuals and in people's proclivity to make good decisions about their own well-being and, in the process, better the plight of humankind.
No one put humanity's explosion of wealth and prosperity into better perspective than Simon. Simon's targets were the doom-and-gloom environmentalists and zero-population-growth activists who in the last half of the 20th century peddled dire predictions of the coming cataclysm they said would be wrought by free markets and American consumerism. Using a wealth of economic, demographic, health, and consumer data, Simon showed how capitalism has made us more prosperous, healthier, better educated, longer lived, and generally better off than we've ever been. Furthermore, he demonstrated how prosperity and technology tend to make scarce resources more abundant, not less.
Though Malthusian prophets still pop up from time to time, Simon seems to have largely won that debate. Today's critics of free markets don't invoke Armageddon as their predecessors did. Nor do they declare that prosperity will be our undoing. Rather, today they argue that we simply aren't equipped to handle our freedom and our success. Instead of invoking government to heavily regulate the economy and redistribute wealth, they now argue that we need government to make many of our personal decisions for us, because individual Americans can't be trusted to make them on their own.
The Rise of Parentalism
In a recent paper published in the journal Public Choice, "Afraid to be Free: Dependency as Desideratum," Nobel Prize?winning economist James Buchanan composes a new taxonomy of socialist threats to liberty. Buchanan argues that the conventional threats to freedom from managerial socialism (central planning) and distributionist socialism (the welfare state) are today joined by paternalistic socialism and "parental socialism," which Buchanan describes as the willingness among many to allow the government to take control of their lives.
The emerging threat to American liberty today, then, is a combination of these latter two forms of socialism?the desire among some in government to interfere in nearly every aspect of our lives, and the lack of concern on the part of many Americans that this is happening. And while conventional critics of capitalism came primarily from the left, the parentalist-paternalist movement isn't as easily marginalized.
From the left, for example, a new class of critics has emerged under the banner of "public health." True public health is, of course, a perfectly legitimate function of government. The collective nature of the threats posed by highly communicable diseases, for example, makes protection from them a legitimate public good, deliverable by government. Today one might also include the threats posed by biological or chemical terrorism.
But modern "public-health" initiatives have moved well beyond what could reasonably be classified as public goods. Today, government undertakes all sorts of policies in the name of public health that are aimed at regulating personal behavior. It began in the 1970s and 1980s with anti-smoking initiatives and today includes a wide range of programs, including efforts aimed at reducing alcohol consumption, encouraging seatbelt and motorcycle helmet use, regulating diet and lifestyle in the name of curbing obesity, federalizing local issues like speed limits and the minimum drinking age, and generally using the power of the state to regulate away lifestyle risk.
But the American right, which has traditionally claimed to favor limited government, is no better. The Republican-led Congress is attempting to prohibit Internet gambling. That same Congress wants to expand the FCC's regulatory power beyond broadcast television to include cable television and satellite radio. President Bush's Department of Justice has declared prosecuting pornography a "top priority." And of course, the Bush administration has enforced the nation's drug laws with particular vigilance, paying little heed to traditional conservative notions of state sovereignty. The White House has vigorously defended the federal government's authority to regulate medical marijuana, physician-assisted suicide, and prescription painkillers, for example, even in states where voters have explicitly indicated their preference for laxer enforcement. In the case of medical marijuana, White House efforts may have resulted in the final deathknell for federalism.
Though the public health movement seems to have come largely from the left, and the "culture war" crusades against gambling, pornography, pop culture, and drugs largely from the right, it's important to point out that there is significant convergence between the two. Fervent anti-alcohol activists such as former Carter administration official Joseph Califano, for example, are every bit as active in promoting drug prohibition. National Review contributing editor David Frum has called for a "fat tax" on high-calorie foods, joining more left-oriented organizations like the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Family values advocates like William Bennett and John DiIulio and Republican Congressmen like Tom Osborne and Frank Wolf have joined with liberal organizations like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in calling for heavy government regulation of alcohol. And there seems to be wide, bipartisan support for a powerful state on issues like continuing the drug war, instituting smoking bans in private bars and restaurants, the aforementioned ban on Internet gambling, and increased government scrutiny over pop culture media such as rap music and violent video games.
On the right, movements like National Review contributor Rod Dreher's "crunchy conservatism" borrow bons mots from Marx in denigrating wealth, consumption, and consumerism. Meanwhile, the left-leaning editorial boards at the Washington Post and New York Times abandoned traditional civil liberties concerns in supporting the Supreme Court's ruling upholding the federal ban on medical marijuana, because a ruling the other way might have adversely affected the federal government's massive regulatory state.
As Reason magazine's Jesse Walker has put it, "There is no party of tolerance in Washington?just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four out of Five Experts Agree."
Progressivism Redux
The lack of a clear ideological affiliation makes today's paternalism-parentalism increasingly resemble the early 20th century's progressive movement. Both are comprised of a motley mix of values crusaders and "nanny staters." Both value the "collective good" over personal choice, precaution over risk, and the community over the individual.
Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that the public discourse of late has been rife with nostalgia for progressivism. People on the left, having sullied the good word "liberal," now call themselves "progressives." Republicans from George W. Bush, the current president, to Sen. John McCain, who some see as a leading candidate to be the next, have publicly expressed their fondness for Theodore Roosevelt, the first president of the Progressive Era.
New America Foundation fellow Joel Kotkin explicitly called for a return to Progressive Era politics in a Washington Post essay, while Michael Gerson, who served as President Bush's chief speechwriter the last six years, recently named progressive icon William Jennings Bryan one of his personal heroes. Perhaps most bizarrely, the Drug Enforcement Administration has recently taken the position that alcohol prohibition? the crown jewel of Progressive Era reforms, and one of the most catastrophic experiments in American history?was in fact a success.
As Buchanan points out, parentalism and paternalism are at heart merely new forms of socialism. They value community and the collective good over choice and individual freedom. Public policy recommendations aimed at curbing alcoholism or obesity, for example, are rarely aimed at alcoholics or obese people themselves. Rather, they're usually aimed at taming "the environment" of alcohol or obesity, code for the food and alcohol industries. Specific recommendations inevitably target marketing and advertising, the tools free markets use to distribute information.
When policies are aimed at individuals, they're generally redistributionist in nature?sin or vice taxes, for example. Proposals like the "fat tax" tax all users of high-calorie foods, with proceeds going to obesity treatment and prevention programs? meaning they redistribute wealth from people who consume calorie-dense foods responsibly to those who don't.
Which brings us back to Julian Simon. Simon used empirical data to deflate claims that capitalism and industry were making us sick, irreparably damaging the earth, and bringing about the end of humanity. Simon instead showed how free markets and liberal institutions ushered in health, wealth, and longevity unprecedented in the history of man.
The emerging paternalist-parentalistsocialist threat to liberty, then, is in many ways the same old threat dressed up in new clothes. Critics of capitalism and consumerism can no longer credibly predict that free markets will eradicate the world's food supply. So today they argue that the food industry has created a nation of gluttons (which, considering that the bulk of human history has been a struggle against starvation, isn't such a bad problem to have). Of course, only a society prosperous enough to do away with child labor can worry about its children having too much to eat. The proliferation of Internet pornography or online gambling isn't of much concern in countries where less than 5 percent of the population has Internet access.
The "problems" this latest form of socialism attempts to solve, then, are afflictions of prosperity. They're problems much of the world would still consider itself fortunate to have.
It's also not clear that they're really problems at all.
Getting Better All the Time
Consider America's "cultural decay"? something conservatives are fond of invoking. Implicit in calls for government regulation of pornography, obscenity, gambling, alcohol, and the like is the assumption that cable television, pop music, the mainstreaming of pornography, and other cultural pariahs are breaking down America's important social institutions. But there's little data to suggest that's the case. In fact, nearly every social indicator is trending in a direction most of us would consider positive.
Here are just a few examples, culled from government agencies and advocacy groups: Teen pregnancy is at its lowest point since government researchers have been keeping statistics. Juvenile crime has been falling for 20 years (though there was, admittedly, a slight uptick last year). Crimes against children are down. The number of reported rapes has dropped dramatically over the last two decades, even as social stigma against rape victims has subsided. Despite a negligible increase last year, overall crime in the United States has also been in decline for 15 years.
There's more: Divorce is down. Teens are waiting longer to have sex. High school dropout rates are down. Unemployment remains low. And over the past decade, the overall abortion rate has dropped significantly. If Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," Internet porn, and violent video games are indeed inducing a nationwide slouch toward Gomorrah, as conservative icon Robert Bork once put it, it's difficult to discern from those statistics.
What's most intriguing is that all of these trends have been taking place since at least the mid-1990s?a period during which technology has given us more freedom to indulge in sin and vice than ever before, and an era in which Americans have become markedly less judgmental. The last 15 years have seen more tolerance for gay lifestyles, with shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy finding mainstream audiences. The 1990s also saw the rise of the Internet, which has given Americans private, unfettered access to gambling and pornography; enabled the anonymous purchase of alcohol, cigarettes, and prescription drugs; and given even the oddest and most bizarre of subcultures the opportunity to find others just like them, and to create communities. The 1990s also saw the rise of gangsta' rap, violent video games, Howard Stern, and South Park.
In 2004, the conservative magazine City Journal reported on a series of polls showing that when it comes to issues of vice, personal behavior, and morality, Americans aged 30 and under are more conservative than several prior generations. Yet they're also more tolerant of other lifestyles, less judgmental, and heavy consumers of the pop culture conservative opinion leaders tell us is so corrupting.
Interestingly enough, the one statistic that bucks these trends is drug use. Drug use among adults is actually up over the past 20 years. But drug use is one area of personal liberty the government has gotten more aggressive about policing, which suggests that government efforts to control our decisions not only stifle individual freedom, they aren't very effective, either.
But even with drug use, there's some evidence that Americans are behaving responsibly. Though recreational use is up among adults, it's actually down over the same period among people under 18. So while people old enough to make their own decisions about their lives might be more likely to relax with the occasional marijuana cigarette, they're also making more of an effort to steer their kids clear of what are clearly adult activities.
Similarly, empirical data strongly suggests that despite claims from the public health alarmists that obesity, smoking, alcoholism, and any other number of ailments are wreaking a health care catastrophe in America, America is actually healthier than it's ever been.
Life expectancy in the United States reached an all-time high last year. Americans at every age can expect to live longer than ever before. The gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites is closing, too. Heart disease is in sharp decline since the early 1990s, as is stroke. Deaths from and incidence of cancer are also in retreat, including all but one of the 10 types of cancer most associated with obesity. The absolute number of deaths due to cancer also fell by 50,000 in 2004, a remarkable feat considering that America's population continues to grow. Yet these heartening trends have persisted despite the fact that, over the same period, many Americans have put on weight. Certainly, advances in medical technology, improvements in screening and treating diseases, and miracle drugs like statins deserve much of the credit (though it's worth pointing out that many of the same public health groups oppose the very free market aspects of U.S. health care that made these advances possible). No one would argue that excessive obesity is something to strive for. But if America's thickening waistline really were the looming disaster it's made out to be, we should at least be seeing the early signs of the cataclysm. That hasn't happened.
Like the doom-and-gloomers Simon fought, then, there simply isn't much evidence to support the sky-is-falling scenarios offered up by proponents of modern paternalism. Just as Americans are wiser, savvier, and more responsible with their own money than the government is, they also seem to be doing just fine when making their own decisions about virtue, vice, and lifestyle. Of course, even if they weren't, there are philosophical objections to government meddling in personal affairs.
The early 20th century journalist H. L. Mencken, a fierce critic of the original progressives, wrote, "the urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." That was true last century, when humanity's saviors were central planners who marched much of the developing world into starvation. And it's true today, when our "saviors" want laws, regulations, and government "awareness campaigns" pushing the hand of government into nearly every facet of our lives.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2006 edition of Cato Policy Report
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November 13, 2006
The Libertarian Effect
Posted by ROSS KAMINSKY | E-Mail This | Permalink | Email RCP
In one closely watched Congressional race (Sodrel v Hill, IN-9) and two critical Senate races (Missouri and Montana), the Republican candidate was defeated by fewer votes than the Libertarian candidate received.
[Note: the last data I could find on the Missouri race still had two of the 3746 precincts to report, so it is possible that statement isn't true for Missouri, but if it is not true it is still very close and does not diminish my point.]
In other words, in these two critical Senate races and if the Republican had gotten the Libertarian's votes, the Republican would have won.
For the rest of this article, please recognize that I am speaking of the small-"l" libertarian, and not the Libertarian Party of the candidates mentioned above. A "libertarian", in the shortest definition I can muster, is someone who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. In other words, it is someone who wants the government to perform a very small set of legitimate functions and otherwise leave us alone.
I can hardly contain my glee at seeing this happen after years of hoping it would. And in such dramatic fashion, with such important results. I did not hope it would because I wanted Republicans to lose, but because the Republicans had become corrupted (by which I do not mean corrupt in the typical sense.) They became enamored of power, and believed that they could get away with expanding the size, intrusiveness, and cost of government as long as they had government aim for "conservative" goals rather than liberal ones. This loss, and the way it happened, was the best thing that could have happened for Americans who care about a government focused on limited government and liberty.
No, the Democrats are not that government. They believe in anything but limited government, and they only believe in liberty in one's personal life, but not in one's economic life. In a sense, Democrats believe that the citizens work for the government.
Republicans on the other hand have acted in just the opposite way: they believe in economic liberty and they know we do not work for government. But they do not believe in personal liberty. The failure of the strategery of the Republicans, to focus on "the base" by trotting out social issues such as the South Dakota no-exception abortion ban (which lost, I'm pleased to say) demonstrated two things: First, social issues do not have long coat-tails. Second, the GOP base is fiscal conservatives more than it is social conservatives.
Fiscal conservatives, even more than social conservatives, were the demotivated voting block. Fiscal conservatives who are not socially conservative, i.e. voters who are libertarian even if they don't know it or wouldn't identify themselves that way, were the key swing vote in this election and were the reason that the GOP lost Congress...the Senate in particular.
In a recent study called "The Libertarian Vote", David Boaz (Cato Institute) and David Kirby (America's Future Foundation) discuss the growing number of American libertarians, the growing dissatisfaction among them (including me) with the GOP, and the continuing shift in voting patterns caused by that dissatisfaction. Tuesday held the obvious conclusion of this shift.
The party which went from reforming welfare to banning internet gambling by sticking the ban inside a port security bill, the party which went from Social Security reform to trying to amend the Federal Constitution to prevent gay marriage, the party which went from controlling the size and scope of government to banning horse meat became a party which libertarians and Republicans alike could not stomach.
The Democrats are a disaster, though they probably realize they need to move to the center. The Republicans have just been taught a brutal lesson that they also need to move to the center (on social issues) and back to fundamental principles of our Founders on issues of economics and basic liberties. No party can rely on the unappealing nature of their opponent to be a strong enough motivation to win elections, nor should we let them win if being just a bit better than the other guys is all they aspire to.
What I love about libertarian voters is that they vote on principle, not on party. The GOP might not like it, but politics should not be about blind loyalty if your party has lost its way. So, I disagree with suggestions that libertarians are fickle and unreliable voters. Instead the Republicans became an unreliable party. The Democrats on the other hand are extremely reliable -- they will always raise spending and taxes, get government involved where it doesn't belong. But other than the tax cuts of several years ago, the Republicans have been no different other than choosing different areas of our lives to intrude upon.
I hope that the result of the Libertarian Effect, particularly on the GOP, will be that the next election may provide us an opportunity to replace this batch of Democrat placeholders with Congressmen who not only have read the Constitution, but respect it. Congressmen who understand that Republican voters do not elect politicians to have them impose their (or our) morality on the people, but rather to keep government from interfering in our lives and leaving us, in the immortal words of Milton Friedman, "Free to Choose".
http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2006/11/the_libertarian_effect.html
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Rise of the Radical Libertarians
by Bill Steigerwald (more by this author)
Posted 02/27/2007 ET
Updated 02/27/2007 ET
Individual freedom, property rights, free trade and limited government are not exactly core values of either major party today, but they were the philosophical and political stuff America was founded on. Brian Doherty, a Reason magazine editor, has written “Radicals for Capitalism,” a “freewheeling” history of the post-World War II libertarian movement whose brilliant, principled and always outnumbered thinkers -- lead by icons Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises -- have greatly influenced American politics and public policy. I talked to Doherty Feb. 21 by phone from Los Angeles.
What's a quick synopsis of your book?
Brian Doherty: It tells the personal stories of the philosophers, economists, politicians and think-tankers who have pursued the often thankless task in 20th century America of pushing the ideas of libertarianism -- the radical ideas that actually were at the root of the American founding. The heart of libertarianism is pretty much in the Declaration of Independence -- that human beings have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not the government guarantee of happiness.
Government’s only purpose is to protect those rights and if it does not protect those rights, we have the right to alter or abolish it. In the 20th century, a bunch of people realized, especially post-Roosevelt and the New Deal, that government was indeed violating those rights, left, right and center, and they strove to alter it, mostly through education.
Libertarians have tended to be a pretty intellectual lot. They have economists and novelists as their great leaders. The very first libertarian think tank was called the Foundation for Economic Education. They were focused on education. They believed that if they could explain the benefits of liberty and free markets to people, that the government would then follow. And while you certainly could not say they’ve been victorious, I think the story the book tells shows a lot of very encouraging successes.
Why should anyone not already a libertarian read your book?
Doherty: Because libertarianism, whether you like it or not, actually has become an idea to be reckoned with on the American political landscape. I argue in my book that such prominent Republican figures as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan had a great deal of libertarianism at their heart and that it was the libertarianism in them that actually was most responsible for what people loved about them.
This notion of trusting the people and getting government off people’s back is a very libertarian message. Social movements from home-schooling, the school voucher movement, the medical marijuana movement, the anti-eminent domain movement, the movement to get rid of the draft, the welfare reform of the '90s, which was based to a large degree on the work of libertarian author Charles Murray -- these ideas have had an enormous impact on the policy scene and I would argue that as the “Entitlement State” of the 20th century faces an inevitable collapse because of fiscal realities, libertarian ideas are going to become all the more significant on the American scene in the 21st century.
What’s a brief definition of libertarianism?
Doherty: The belief that government, if it has any purpose at all -- and there are some libertarians who think it doesn’t -- then that purpose is only to protect its own citizens’ lives and property from direct force and direct attack. The implications of this can get very radical, from no restrictions on peoples’ use of any drug, whether it be for their own personal pleasure or even for medicine; it could mean an end to prescription drug laws. It could mean an end to all of the overseas military commitments the U.S. has been involved in that don’t actually involve defending the actual borders of this country. So while it’s a very Yankee Doodle philosophy, it’s very much rooted in the American founding. It has implications that are very radical -- which is why I put radical in the title of my book.
Is or was America ever a libertarian country?
Doherty: Never in practice. Philosophically, it was extremely libertarian in its founding, but due to the religious and social mores of the time, there were all sorts of restrictions on what people could actually do -- including some vagrancies laws that basically didn’t allow certain people to even walk into certain cities unless they lived there or had jobs. And of course, the status of blacks and women, which were horrendous in libertarian terms pretty much until the mid 20th century, prevented the political philosophy from functioning in a libertarian way. So no, libertarian remains a cause whose full flowering remains for the future while being rooted in core American ideas. The 19th century, despite popular myth, was not an era of rampant laissez-faire, which I discuss in my book.
Do libertarians have more political power today than 30 years ago?
Doherty: They do, though most of that influence is not through the political party with the word “libertarian” in its name. That party’s done very well for itself as a third party. It’s managed to stick around and grow for over 30 years. It drew over 13 million votes at every electoral level in 2006. It’s done nicely for itself, but the real influence of libertarian ideas has been through the two major parties.
Bill Clinton’s welfare reform was highly influenced by libertarian Charles Murray’s ideas about welfare in his book “Losing Ground.” Milton Friedman was a great influence on both federal reserve policy regarding inflation in the early ‘80s and in his work on the draft in the Nixon era, but again, done through Republican politicians. So yes, it has been influential, though not necessarily flying the explicitly libertarian banner in doing so.
What was the most surprising or important thing you learned from doing this book?
Doherty: Exactly how despised and outsider these ideas were in the '40s and '50s. I kind of knew it, but I was shocked to find certain details about it. One was the story of Rose Wilder Lane, the great libertarian author and the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the “Little House on the Prairie” books. She was actually investigated by the FBI in the late '40s for daring to write on a postcard, that an officious postmaster read, that she considered Social Security the sort of socialist central control that we were supposed to be fighting against in World War I and World War II.
Of the big five of the libertarian movement -- Von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard and Friedman -- who is your favorite?
Doherty: Murray Rothbard, and I’ll tell you why. Rothbard, in one way, was the most distinctly libertarian of the libertarians. He was influenced a lot by both Mises and Rand, not so much by Hayek and Friedman. He brought together Mises’ deep economist’s understanding of why government economic intervention tends to fail and Ayn Rand’s sort of natural rights-based philosophy that argued that it is morally wrong for government to do certain things, whether or not it worked better -- even though it didn’t work better.
Rothbard also took them to sort of the most colorful and radical extremes. He actually was a complete anarchist. Unlike Rand and Mises, he didn’t believe there was any role for government. He wrote so well and was so impassionedly in so many fields -- philosophy, economics and history -- and was so intimately involved at an organizational level with lots of great libertarian institutions, from the Cato Institute to the Institute for Humane Studies to the Foundation of Economic Education. He really had his hands in every aspect of the story, was such a colorful and fun writer, and was so bracing in his radicalism, that I found him the most fun to contemplate of all those figures.
Who has been the most influential American libertarian of the last 100 years?
Doherty: Milton Friedman, unquestionably. His success as a technical economist -- he won the Nobel Prize in 1976 -- was combined with a very great skill in explaining technicalities to a popular audience, which he did in a column in Newsweek from 1966 to 1984, and in popular books in “Capitalism and Freedom” and “Free to Choose” and then the PBS series that “Free to Choose” arose from. Unlike a Rothbard, he didn’t try to bang you over the head with sort of the anarchist radicalism, which helped in him being influential.
As my book tells, he really was the guy who convinced the Nixon-era Gates Commission that an all-volunteer army could work and was directly responsible for the end of the draft in the early '70s. His writings on monetary policy were the key intellectual influence that helped shape Federal Reserve policy in the Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan era that brought the inflation level down to a more manageable level. Those were his two biggest polemical victories and certainly vitally important. He was certainly also the most widely respected of the great libertarian thinkers.
Can or should libertarians save the Republican Party?
Doherty: I don’t know if they can and I don’t know if they should. I’d like to believe that they can. George Bush has taken the Republican Party remarkably far away from any of the libertarianism that was at least somewhat inherent in it through the Goldwater and Reagan eras. If Bush’s flight from libertarian and small-government principles helps lead to a further crushing Republican defeat in 2008, I’d like to believe that that could make the Republican Party go back to limited-government ideas. I’m not confident it will, but I hold out some hope that it might.
In this age of drug wars, the war on Iraq, the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department -- a lot of very un-libertarian developments -- do you see the glass half full or horribly empty for the future of libertarianism?
Doherty: Half full. The two greatest dangers for the libertarian activists are, strangely enough, optimism and pessimism. A short-term optimism is very dangerous. It can be easy to think that the evils of the state are so severe and the economic troubles they’re creating are so awful that it has to come to an end right now, and that if you don’t see it come to an end in the next election cycle, you get burnt out and think things are hopeless.
Long-term pessimism is also a mistake, because if you look at the general arc of Western Civilization, there really has been enormous progress for the ideas of private property and individual rights at the heart of libertarianism. If libertarians are correct in their assessment of the practical problems that arise from state intervention and things like the massive Entitlement State, we can be confident that these things that can’t go on will stop. If libertarians have done their job right in keeping the ideas of liberty and free markets alive, then those ideas will be there, as everyone from Friedman and Rothbard recognized, for policy makers to pick up on.
Mr. Steigerwald is a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
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Nice read Buz :-)
Coincidentally enough I ran across a different kind of libertarian thought piece today:
Marc
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Enforcing Virtue
Is social stigma a threat to liberty, or is it liberty in action?
Cathy Young | March 2007 Print Edition
It's the debate that won't die: the endless face-off between conservatives and libertarians over the tension between liberty and morality.
In his foreword to the 1998 anthology Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate-much of it composed of essays from the 1950s and '60s-editor George W. Carey described it as the main fault line dividing the two philosophies.
In Carey's words, conservatives "believe that shared values, morals, and standards, along with accepted traditions, are necessary for the order and stability of society" and that some restrictions on individual freedom, including censorship, may be needed to preserve this social cohesion. Most libertarians, he continued, share the conservatives' alarm about the "erosion of both public and private virtues" but regard individual liberty as the highest value and free choice as the prerequisite for true virtue.
So far, so good. But beyond rejecting moral enforcement by government, what is the libertarian view of moral and cultural standards upheld by a voluntary social consensus?
Some conservatives accuse libertarians of treating all shared values or conventions with contempt.
Take W. James Antle III, a reporter for The American Spectator (and occasional contributor to Reason) who describes himself as a "conservative-libertarian hybrid." In a May 2003 article in Enter State Right, he pointed to the response to the then-recent flap over virtue czar William Bennett's gambling problem.
Antle acknowledged that Bennett "was an unrepentant drug warrior and leading force for using the federal government to promote traditionalist conservative objectives." But he charged that "libertarian criticism was not limited to Bennett's designs for the state: many were clearly put off by his propensity to judge lifestyles, criticize individual choices and espouse limits on personal appetites."
In a Wall Street Journal article published around the same time, Journal columnist Susan Lee, while basically sympathetic to the libertarian viewpoint, wrote that libertarian tolerance "comes from indifference to moral questions, not from a greater inborn talent to live and let live."
Is that a fair description? Libertarians certainly have been known to criticize and ridicule moralists even when they aren't calling for government coercion-for instance, when they wring their hands over the loss of cultural constraints on sexuality. Of course, such hand wringing is often an inviting target.
Consider a November 2006 rant on the American Spectator website by the blogger Carol Platt Liebau. Liebau lamented our culture's alleged failure to stigmatize the crotch-flashing antics of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and the alleged message to young girls that such tawdry displays are a path to empowerment.
In fact, Spears' indecent exposure was cruelly mocked by the same gossip outlets that publicized it, and Rosie O'Donnell, hardly a right-wing moralist, pleaded for a cover-up on ABC's The View.
But the merits of specific conservative pleadings aside, is there anything illiberal about an argument for the cultural stigmatization of, say, casual sex?
Does supporting the free speech right to chronicle your sex life or explore your sexual fantasies online mean that you cannot regard such porno-blogging as tacky and narcissistic?
Must you oppose not just state censorship but the social conventions that generally compel such bloggers to conceal their activities from relatives and employers?
Few libertarians, I think, would argue that stigmatization as such is abhorrent. While no libertarian worth the name would support legal prohibitions on hate speech, the overwhelming majority would agree that racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic slurs should be socially unacceptable, penalized through severe disapproval if not outright ostracism.
To take a less extreme example, many (myself included) would also agree with the mainstream culture's dislike of such voluntary traditionalist initiatives as the Southern Baptists' call for wifely submission.
The question, then, is not whether undesirable conduct should be curbed through social censure. It's which conduct should be seen as undesirable-and on that, self-professed libertarians should be able hold a wide range of opinions.
Within the libertarian milieu, there is a tension between political libertarians, whose chief concern is limiting and reversing the expansion of the state and its powers, and social or cultural libertarians, whose central interest is maximizing individual opportunities and freedom of choice.
For some political libertarians, the centralized government is so unquestionably the greatest enemy that they not only oppose civil rights laws banning private race and gender discrimination but reject the post-Civil War constitutional doctrine that state governments must abide by the Bill of Rights.
(That was the position espoused by the late Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne, who opposed Jim Crow laws but felt they should have been fought on the local level.
State infringements on individual rights, he argued, posed a far smaller danger to liberty than expanded federal power.
Meanwhile, some cultural libertarians are concerned about constraints on individual freedom from government as well as from traditionalist familial, religious, and community institutions-the same civil institutions that conservatives see as necessary for ordered liberty to thrive.
In his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek wrote that his real quarrel with conservatives was not their opposition to drastic change in institutions but their readiness to use government force to curb such change.
To Hayek, moral and cultural standards were the product of spontaneous order emerging from the interplay of economic and social forces, from evolution and experimentation unguided by any central authority.
Yet noncoercive criticism of what some of us deem to be negative social and cultural trends is itself a vital part of that evolution. It's one thing to demand a federal virtue police; it's another to write and market a book about virtue and hope that its lessons will catch on.
As long as the Bill Bennetts of the world are intent on using not just persuasion but force (and public funds) on behalf of their favorite virtues-promoting premarital abstinence through federal programs, banning legal protections for same-sex unions, censoring sexually explicit materials, waging the war on drugs-libertarians can be forgiven for fearing even noncoercive moralizing on their part.
But it's important to remember that cultural progressives have not hesitated to use the government on their side: to promote liberal attitudes toward sexuality and sex roles through public education, say, or to compel landlords to rent to unmarried cohabiting couples even if they have religious objections to such a lifestyle.
The backlash from the social right is directed at such social engineering as well as spontaneous cultural change.
It is also true, of course, that even noncoercive moralizing can be egregiously misguided. If criticism of modern cultural trends is a part of the spontaneous order, so is anti-traditionalist countercriticism.
But this is where libertarian discourse can benefit from a greater variety of viewpoints and a more calibrated approach to social issues.
Just because conservatives are quite wrong (in my opinion) to argue that young women are victimized by sexual freedom doesn't mean that only right-wing killjoys can have misgivings about prepubescent girls parading in T-shirts with vulgar messages and gyrating to music with sexually explicit lyrics.
Just because I think the right is wrong to cling to a family model based on rigid gender roles doesn't mean I'm happy about the growth of single parenthood.
The Hayekian principle that "neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion" is one most Americans will readily embrace.
But if libertarians are seen as championing not simply freedom of choice but a rigidly nonjudgmental attitude toward all choices-if we are seen not simply as tolerant but as indifferent to moral questions-then many people who might be sympathetic to liberty will be pushed into the arms of the authoritarians.
Contributing Editor Cathy Young (CathyYoung63@aol.com) is the author of Ceasefire! (Free Press).
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EMMA GUNBY
Press Association Newsfile
http://www.officer.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=1&id=36197
The UK's first police "spy drone" took to the skies today. The remote control helicopter, fitted with CCTV cameras, will be used by officers in Merseyside to track criminals and record anti-social behaviour. The drone is only a metre wide, weighs less than a bag of sugar, and can record images from a height of 500m. It was originally used for military reconnaissance but is now being trialled by a mainstream police force.
The spy plane was launched as a senior police officer warned the surveillance society in the UK is eroding civil liberties.
Ian Readhead, deputy chief constable of Hampshire Police, said Britain could face an Orwellian situation with cameras on every street corner. However, senior officers in Merseyside, who are trialling the drone, said they did not believe it was the next phase in creating a Big Brother society.
Assistant chief constable Simon Byrne said: "People clamour for the feeling of safety which cameras give.
"Obviously there is a point of view that has been expressed but our feedback from the public is anything we can do to fight crime is a good thing.
"There are safeguards in place legally covering the use of CCTV and the higher the level of intrusion, the higher the level of authority needed within the police force to use it. So there is that balance there."
Police said the drone is expected to be operational by June and will be given a three-month trial.
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Not a Bill Moyers fan, but a good interview with Nick Gillespie from last Friday.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05112007/watch2.html
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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/50450_assets13.shtml
Critics target drug raid seizures
Police often keep property even absent a conviction
Thursday, December 13, 2001
By SAM SKOLNIK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Before dawn, heavily armed officers stormed Shane Hendrickson's Tacoma home. They busted open the front door, grabbed the self-employed painter and hauled him off to the police station.
There, they grilled him, accusing him of participating in a major pot-growing operation. Hendrickson steadfastly denied it, and hours later, detectives had enough doubts to cut him loose.
Chris Jones of Woodinville Public Auto Auction prepares a scooter seized in a drug raid for auction. Law enforcement agencies that make property seizures keep 90 percent of auction proceeds. Jeff Larsen / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Click for larger photo
By the time he returned home that day, Oct. 4, Hendrickson's baby-blue 1984 Chevy van -- with Dialed-in Paint Co. stenciled on the sides -- was gone. So were his business papers, including bids for upcoming jobs. And his girlfriend's new computer and all her disks.
In the blink of an eye, Hendrickson, 27, was out of work.
"It just kind of shut me down for a while," he said. "These people think they're above God."
Hendrickson, though, was more fortunate than most. He hasn't been charged with a crime, and, after a month or so, the last of his property was returned -- albeit with a lawyer's help.
In the past decade, drug-related property seizures have skyrocketed in Washington, with annual proceeds raised from auctions statewide jumping from $1.2 million to a record $6.7 million in 2000. That doesn't count forfeitures made by federal agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration or the FBI.
In King County last year, authorities seized $2.2 million in drug-related assets. But even though four out of 10 criminal cases either never got off the ground or fell apart, the bulk of the cars, cash, cellular phones, stereos and other goods grabbed from those suspects were never returned, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has found.
One out of five people whose property was seized were never charged with a crime. When people were charged, the cases were dropped about 23 percent of the time, according to records obtained from the state Treasurer's Office and a search of computerized court documents.
Washington's powerful property-seizure law, loudly criticized by defense attorneys and civil rights activists, allows police departments, sheriff's offices and drug task forces to take a suspect's property if authorities believe it was used in connection with a drug crime or purchased with tainted money.
Fears of overzealous law enforcement have spurred a drive to revamp the law -- toughening the legal standard for forfeiture and barring police from taking a person's property until he or she is convicted of a crime.
Backers of Initiative 256, which include the American Civil Liberties Union, must collect 197,734 valid signatures by Jan. 4 in order to put the measure before the 2002 Legislature. Lawmakers can pass I-256 outright or put it on the ballot next November.
Forfeiture money helps fund drug enforcement efforts, which critics call a blatant conflict, driving authorities to seize as much as they can from suspects -- even when there's insufficient evidence to support criminal charges.
"There's a huge financial incentive for police to be taking property," said Jerry Sheehan, legislative director of the ACLU of Washington. "That they can do that without any charges ever being brought, let alone any conviction gained, is very troubling."
Legislators adopted modest reforms this year, passing a bill that shifts the burden of proof to police when their seizures are challenged. Law enforcement agencies are also required to pay legal fees if they lose such a challenge. The bill passed only after a tougher measure, similar to the current initiative, failed.
Law enforcement officials say further restrictions would hurt their ability to crack down on drug dealers by choking off some of the money supporting undercover operations.
"We don't want to jump off of the cliff" with an initiative that could effectively end forfeitures in Washington, said Christopher Hurst, a Black Diamond Police Department detective and Democratic state representative. "The answer here really falls somewhere in the middle."
"In reality, money is the engine that drives drug dealers," said Steve Tucker, a King County sheriff's detective who has worked drug cases since 1989. "If you take away the money, it's not only deterrence for new guys, it's stopping repeat offenders. If you dismantle the structure, including the proceeds, they have to start again at ground zero."
But why are so many suspected drug dealers finding their property seized but escaping punishment?
The P-I examined 236 King County cases involving property seizures last year and found that 50 suspects, or 21 percent, were never charged. Of the 186 cases that were prosecuted, 42 (23 percent) dissolved into acquittals or dismissed charges, court records show. There has been no resolution in 19 other cases.
Thus, at least 39 percent of the 236 cases never resulted in convictions, a fact law enforcement officials say isn't surprising.
They say many of the smaller fish turn state's evidence or become informants at the behest of detectives in hopes of busting higher-ranking traffickers. To shield the suspect from liability, the property is often purchased in the name of a different party, a "straw owner," such as a girlfriend. In those cases, the property owner is not the suspected criminal and doesn't get charged.
Even though the criminal cases often crumble, property seizures usually stand up. In the vast majority of cases, people who have property seized never get it back, according to defense attorneys, prosecutors and police.
That's because police have less to prove in taking property than in convicting people of a crime, said Seattle attorney Richard Troberman.
"You are operating under a much lower legal standard, and you are usually not even facing an attorney," he said.
When it comes to challenging property seizures, low-income people don't have the same right to a public defender that they do in the criminal system. Troberman said prosecutors have testified that in about 80 percent of the cases in which people contest the forfeitures, no attorney is present. That's roughly the same percentage of cases the police win, one hearing examiner estimates.
The move to change Washington's law comes in the midst of efforts to reform property-seizure standards nationwide.
After years of failed efforts, Congress last year passed a bill sponsored by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., that toughens the standard for federal forfeitures. And voters in Oregon and Utah passed initiatives last year to change their own laws.
In July, unsatisfied with the legislation passed in Olympia, a coalition of activists -- on the left and the right of the political spectrum -- took matters into their own hands by pushing a citizens initiative. In addition to preventing police from seizing property until a conviction is notched, the Innocent Property Owners Protection Initiative would redirect forfeiture-related proceeds from police to state education and drug-treatment programs.
In a related effort, the ACLU next year plans to introduce a bill to mandate that the state's forfeiture law align itself with a provision in the state constitution that says proceeds derived from forfeitures should be used to fund the state school system.
"There was a purpose in the Bill of Rights," said Erne Lewis, a Libertarian Party activist who is spearheading the initiative effort. "It was to protect individuals and their property. Forfeiture is a weapon, and this is what they'll tell you. 'We use this to get guilty pleas,' they say. Well, so does torture."
A Jeep Cherokee, also seized in a drug raid, was among the items scheduled to be auctioned off in November. Nearly 40 percent of drug cases in which property is seized in King County do not result in a criminal conviction. Jeff Larsen / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Click for larger photo
Under Washington's law, the agency that seizes the goods gets to keep 90 percent of the proceeds, after a public auction.
The rest goes to a state fund that provides assistance to domestic violence victims, AIDS-infected babies and others. The law states that forfeited property "shall be retained by the seizing law enforcement agency exclusively for the expansion and improvement of controlled substances-related law enforcement activity."
But that's not the way some agencies, which have been slapped by state auditors for misusing seized property, have seen it.
It took 2 1/2 years after concerns were first raised internally for the King County Sheriff's Office to stop allowing employees to use vehicles seized in drug cases. At one point, 21 detectives and officials -- including the budget and accounting director, the legal adviser, a volunteer chaplain and the Asian community liaison -- were driving the cars.
In March 1997, a drug unit sergeant, Dawn Grout, raised the issue in a letter to Frank Adamson, chief of the Criminal Investigations Division, apparently to little effect.
The following February, she sent another memo identifying 16 drug-seized vehicles that she said were still "assigned to non-drug enforcement personnel in direct violation of state law."
The issue was still unresolved in September 1999, when the Auditor's Office concluded after a brief investigation that "some vehicles are not being appropriately used" at the sheriff's office. A short time later, the last of the seized cars were returned to the drug unit.
Sheriff Dave Reichert, who was appointed in March 1997, about four weeks before Grout sent her first memo, said that "when the problem rose to my level, I took care of it. I took the cars away."
Not everyone, including long-time budget and accounting chief Jon McCracken, was happy about losing the cars, Reichert said.
McCracken, who had been driving a 1991 beige Buick Park Avenue sedan, referred calls seeking his comment to sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart.
Urquhart said part of McCracken's job is to handle the accounting of large amounts of money involved in drug seizures and undercover buys.
"We thought it was a legitimate use of a vehicle," Urquhart said, defending McCracken's prior use of the vehicle. "Where do you draw the line? If 25 percent of the activity is drug investigation-related, is that enough?"
When Puyallup police arrested Lance Gloor on a drug charge in December 1999, they practically stripped his house bare. Hundreds of items were seized, ranging from two cars and stereo gear to the 22-year-old maintenance worker's collection of music CDs.
"They cleaned me out," he said.
Gloor later pleaded guilty to growing marijuana and hired a lawyer to try to fight the property seizure. When he went to the police station to press his case, Gloor said, he saw his big-screen TV in the break room. His $2,000 stereo speakers, he was told, were in the office of one of the detectives who made the bust.
Neither the detective, Wayne Spencer, nor Police Chief Rodger Cool returned calls for comment.
For the most part, Gloor prevailed. Craig Adams, legal adviser for the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, recommended returning much of Gloor's property, concluding that police went too far.
"I looked at the case, and I didn't think it was a very good one, in terms of search-and-seizure and the like," Adams said. "I said (to police), 'What proof do you have that this is proceeds of drug money?' I don't think there was a whole lot of evidence, quite honestly.
"When they take CDs and stuff, I mean, come on. ... How are you going to prove it was bought with drug money?"
It wasn't the first time Adams has had to tell officials from Pierce County law enforcement agencies, including the sheriff's department, to return seized property.
"I have an obligation to act ethically," he said. "If I don't, I'm dirty."
The Gloor case, however, illustrates how easy it is to cart off a person's belongings and how difficult it can be to get them back.
Two years later, many of Gloor's possessions -- including 150 CDs, a camera, a camcorder, a silver chain, an electronic safe and about $2,000 in small bills -- have still not been returned -- or accounted for.
Police and prosecutors are quick to point out that suspected drug dealers who have property seized are legally entitled to a hearing to try to persuade a hearing examiner to give them back their stuff.
Last year, for example, the King County Sheriff's Office alone seized various items from 155 people, according to state records. Of those cases, 44 people requested hearings to contest the seizures.
But fewer than half ever actually had their hearings, estimated Keith Scully, a deputy prosecutor assigned to the sheriff's office. Some claimants settled their cases before the hearing, he said, and many more simply didn't show up.
Several factors weigh against the claimants. The hearing examiners are often current or retired police officers or prosecutors. And citizens who cannot afford a lawyer to represent them in the civil proceeding often have to go up alone against a police attorney.
Shane Hendrickson of Tacoma was lucky enough to be able to avoid going through the hearing process. Tacoma police returned his property after determining that he merely knew people involved in the marijuana-cultivation plot.
Today, Hendrickson is eager to forget the whole episode.
"I just really, really, really want to wash my hands of this and keep going."
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P-I reporter Candace Heckman contributed to this report. P-I reporter Sam Skolnik can be reached at 206-467-1039 or samskolnik@seattlepi.com
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second post of the morning:
Drug policy of the Netherlands
The drug policy of the Netherlands is based on 2 principles:
Drug use is a public health issue, not a criminal matter
A distinction between hard drugs and soft drugs exists
It is a pragmatic policy. Most policymakers in the Netherlands believe that if a problem has proved to be unsolvable, it is better to try controlling it instead of continuing to enforce laws with mixed results. By comparison, most other countries take the point of view that drugs are detrimental to society and must therefore be outlawed, even when such policies fail to eliminate drug use. This has caused friction between the Netherlands and other countries, most notably with France and Germany. As of 2004, Belgium seems to be moving toward the Dutch model and a few local German legislators are calling for experiments based on the Dutch model. Switzerland has had long and heated parliamentary debates about whether to follow the Dutch model, but finally decided against it in 2004; currently a ballot initiative is in the works on the question.
Public health
The Dutch drug policy is based on the general principle of self-determination in matters of the body. Specifically, that it is not illegal to hurt yourself; however, you remain liable for the consequences of your actions. Because of this, users are not prosecuted for possession of small quantities of soft drugs ("for personal use"). Driving under the influence of drugs is nevertheless prohibited, as is being under the influence in public (of either alcohol or other drugs), mainly from a public nuisance perspective.
Hard drugs/soft drugs
A distinction is drawn between hard drugs (which bear "unacceptable" risks; e.g. cocaine, heroin, etc.) and soft drugs such as the psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms as well as cannabis products: hashish and marijuana (as defined in the Dutch Opium Act). The distinction is drawn on whether the substance is only psychologically addictive (i.e. producing no worse effect than moderate craving when withdrawn) or also physically addictive. One of the main aims of this policy is to separate the markets for soft and hard drugs so that soft drug users are less likely to come into contact with hard drugs. This policy also aims to take the soft drug market out of the hands of the criminals, thus reducing crime.
So-called coffee shops are allowed to sell soft drugs openly, and to keep supplies greater than the amounts allowed by law for personal use, though they are only allowed to sell individual customers the amount allowed for personal use. The coffeeshops' wholesale suppliers, however, are still criminalized. In theory, the limit of the "for personal use" clause is 5 cannabis plants per person for growing, or possession of 5 grams of hashish or marijuana per person. However, to be prosecuted one would need to possess considerably higher quantities than that. An example of a sentence in 2004 for possession of 360 grams: confiscation and a fine of €750. Coffeeshops pay taxes just like any other business, though there are some special exemptions for them, mostly because they cannot show receipts for their supply of marijuana.
Large-scale dealing, production, import and export are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, even if this does not supply end users or coffeeshops with more than the allowed amounts. Exactly how coffeeshops get their supplies is rarely investigated, however. What is certain is that coffeeshops do sell cannabis that comes from countries where it is illegal. Large suppliers tend to be criminals motivated by profit who do not make the distinction between hard and soft drugs. Hence, the soft drug policy, by failing to address the issue of supply, has made the Netherlands the main center for hard drug trafficking in Europe. Creating a highly controlled, legal production chain for cannabis to combat this problem has been proposed by a number of Dutch politicians over the last few years. By the end of 2005, the majority of the Dutch Parliament was in favour of an experiment with controlled cultivation and production of cannabis. It is still uncertain when and how this experiment will take place, due to judicial issues.
Non-enforcement
Cannabis remains a controlled substance in the Netherlands and both possession and production for personal use are still misdemeanors, punishable by fine. Coffee shops are also illegal according to the statutes.
However, a policy of non-enforcement has led to a situation where reliance upon non-enforcement has become common, and because of this the courts have ruled against the government when individual cases were prosecuted.
This is because the Dutch Ministry of Justice applies a gedoogbeleid (policy of tolerance or allowance policy) with regard to soft drugs: an official set of guidelines telling public prosecutors under which circumstances offenders should not be prosecuted. This is a more official version of the common practice in other countries, in which law enforcement sets priorities as to which offenses are important enough to spend limited resources on.
Proponents of gedoogbeleid argue that such a policy offers more consistency in legal protection in practice, than without it. Opponents of the Dutch drug policy either call for full legalization, or argue that laws should penalize morally wrong or decadent behavior, whether this is enforceable or not.
In the Dutch courts, however, it has long been determined that the institutionalized non-enforcement of statutes with well defined limits constitutes de facto decriminalization. The statutes are kept on the books mainly due to international pressure and in adherence with international treaties.
Drug law enforcement
Despite the high priority given by the Dutch government to fighting narcotics trafficking, the Netherlands continue to be an important transit point for drugs entering Europe, a major producer and exporter of amphetamines and other synthetic drugs, and an important consumer of illicit drugs[citation needed]. The export of the synthetic drug ecstasy to the U.S. during 1999 reached unprecedented proportions[citation needed]. The Netherlands' special synthetic drug unit, set up in 1997 to coordinate the fight against designer drugs, appears to be successful[citation needed]. The government has stepped up border controls and intensified cooperation with neighbouring countries.
Although drug use, as opposed to trafficking, is seen primarily as a public health issue, responsibility for drug policy is shared by both the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sports, and the Ministry of Justice.
In contrast with most countries' policies, the Dutch policy has yielded positive results in the war against drugs. The Netherlands spends more than €130 million annually on facilities for addicts, of which about fifty percent goes to drug addicts. The Netherlands has extensive demand reduction programs, reaching about ninety percent of the country's 25,000 to 28,000 hard drug users. The number of hard drug addicts has stabilized in the past few years and their average age has risen to 38 years. The number of drug-related deaths in the country remains the lowest in Europe.
On 27 November 2003, the Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner announced that his government was considering rules under which coffeeshops would only be allowed to sell soft drugs to Dutch residents in order to satisfy both European neighbours' concerns about the influx of drugs from the Netherlands, as well as those of Netherlands border town residents unhappy with the influx of "drug tourists" from elsewhere in Europe. As of 2006 nothing has come of this proposal and Dutch coffeehouses still enjoy robust foreign patronage.
Implications of international law
The Netherlands is a party to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. The 1961 convention prohibits cultivation and trade of naturally-occurring drugs such as cannabis; the 1971 treaty bans the manufacture and trafficking of synthetic drugs such as barbiturates and amphetamines; and the 1988 convention requires states to criminalize illicit drug possession:
Subject to its constitutional principles and the basic concepts of its legal system, each Party shall adopt such measures as may be necessary to establish as a criminal offence under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the possession, purchase or cultivation of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances for personal consumption contrary to the provisions of the 1961 Convention, the 1961 Convention as amended or the 1971 Convention.
The International Narcotics Control Board typically interprets this provision to mean that states must prosecute drug possession offenses. The conventions clearly state that controlled substances are to be restricted to scientific and medical uses. However, Cindy Fazey, former Chief of Demand Reduction for the United Nations Drug Control Programme, believes that the treaties have enough ambiguities and loopholes to allow some room to maneuver. In her report entitled The Mechanics and Dynamics of the UN System for International Drug Control, she notes:
Many countries have now decided not to use the full weight of criminal sanctions against people who are in possession of drugs that are for their personal consumption. The Conventions say that there must be an offence under domestic criminal law, it does not say that the law has to be enforced, or that when it is what sanctions should apply. . . . Despite such grey areas latitude is by no means unlimited. The centrality of the principle of limiting narcotic and psychotropic drugs for medical and scientific purposes leaves no room for the legal possibility of recreational use. . . . Nations may currently be pushing the boundaries of the international system, but the pursuit of any action to formally legalize non-medical and non-scientific drug use would require either treaty revision or a complete or partial withdrawal from the current regime.
The Netherlands policy of keeping anti-drug laws on the books while limiting enforcement of certain offenses is carefully designed to reduce harm while still complying with the letter of international drug control treaties. This is necessary in order to avoid criticism from the International Narcotics Board, which historically has taken a dim view of any moves to relax official drug policy. In their annual report, the Board has criticised many governments, including Canada, for permitting the medicinal use of cannabis, Australia for providing injecting rooms and the United Kingdom for proposing to downgrade the classification of cannabis[1], which it has since done.
Recent developments
In 2005, Gerd Leers, mayor of the border city of Maastricht, criticised the current policy as inconsistent, by recording a song with the Dutch punk rock band De Heideroosjes. By allowing possession and retail sales of cannabis, but not cultivation or wholesale, the government creates numerous problems of crime and public safety, he alleges, and therefore he would like to switch to either legalising and regulating production, or to the full repression that his party (CDA) officially advocates. The latter suggestion has widely been interpreted as rhetorical.[2] Leers's comments have garnered support from other local authorities and put the cultivation issue back on the agenda.
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Crafty and all, My two cents of personal experience with the Dutch system. Amsterdam had a nice reputation for being mostly free of violent crime because of so-called legalization of prostitution and drugs, but I was attacked there while walking down a city street in December 1991. As the article suggests, hard drugs and trafficking were still illegal and so the associated crime still existed, like anywhere else. I can only speculate on my attackers, but they were not Dutch. People there who I told the story to believed them to be "North Africans" and most likely feeding a heroin habit or involved in trafficking. Short story is that they did not get any money from me, but I did need my head stitched up afterward in a Dutch hospital. Wish I had been traveling with one of you that day.
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Thank you Doug.
Jumping to a separate topic now:
There is the matter of RFID chips interacting with Wi-Fi technology creating a Brave New World in which where we go is tracked all the time. :x
This has already begun. I remember in Spain my rent-a-phone rang. It was a commercial message-- from a store that I was passing at that moment. The phone told the phone company where I was at all times, and the phone company had an arrangement with various businesses to call me with advertising when I was near their stores. :-o :x :x
I just ran across this practical solution on the WT forum:
"Your cellphone company keeps a GPS log of where the phone has been and when. Some of the newer phones can contact the tower even after you have turned it off (9-1-1 technology, for your safety of course). If you are traveling somewhere that you rather not have someone privy to, then drop it in one of those camera film bags that you can buy at any camera store. The lead-lined ones that protect the film from airport X-rays and such. On or off your phone will disappear as far as their tower created GPS log goes. I have personally tested this with phones available to me.
"CELL = 800-900 MHZ, PCS = 1850-1990 MHZ (at least here in the Southeastern US). These wavelengths do not penetrate water or lead well."
Technological road kill that I am I cannot vouch for this-- is there someone here who can comment?
As for the RFID & Wi Fi, some people say not to worry, the RFID chip can only read for a few feet, others counter that the point is that its LOCATION can be tracked, which is a separate point. Again, technological roadkill that I am I cannot say, but I am profoundly concerned about the rapidly growing capabilities of these technologies. Not only are they becoming more and more poweful, but they are also becoming incredibly small
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Scary implications for us freedom loving civilians :-o
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Scientist: Military Working on Cyborg Spy Moths
Tuesday , May 29, 2007
By Jonathan Richards
At some point in the not-too-distant future, a moth may take flight in the hills of northern Pakistan, and flap towards a suspected terrorist training camp.
But this will be no ordinary moth.
Inside it will be a computer chip that was implanted when the creature was still a pupa, in the cocoon, meaning that the moth's entire nervous system can be controlled remotely.
The moth will thus be capable of landing in the camp without arousing suspicion, all the while beaming video and other information back to its masters via what its developers refer to as a "reliable tissue-machine interface."
The creation of insects whose flesh grows around computer parts — known from science fiction as cyborgs — has been described as one of the most ambitious robotics projects ever conceived by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Rod Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is involved with the research, said in a speech last week at the University of Southampton in England that robotics was increasingly at the forefront of U.S. military research.
Brooks said that the remote-controlled moths, described by DARPA as just part of its overall research into microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, were one of a number of technologies soon to be deployed in combat zones.
"This is going to happen," said Brooks. "It's not science like developing the nuclear bomb, which costs billions of dollars. It can be done relatively cheaply."
"Moths are creatures that need little food and can fly all kinds of places," he continued. "A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and 'grown' inside it."
"Once the moth hatches," Brooks said, "machine learning is used to control it."
Brooks has worked on robotic technology for more than 30 years and is a founder of iRobot, the MIT-derived manufacturer of both Roomba robot floor cleaners and PackBots, military robots used by the Pentagon to defuse explosive devices laid by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Brooks said that the military would be increasingly reliant on "semi-autonomous" devices, including ones which could fire.
"The DoD has said it wants one-third of all missions to be unmanned by 2015, and there's no doubt their things will become weaponized, so the question comes: Should they be given targeting authority?"
"The prevailing view in the army at the moment seems to be that they shouldn't," he said, "but perhaps it's time to consider updating treaties like the Geneva Convention to include clauses which regulate their use."
Debates such as those over stem-cell research would "pale in comparison" to the increasingly blurred distinction between creatures — including humans — and machines, Brooks told the Southampton audience.
"Biological engineering is coming," Brooks said. "There are already more than 100,000 people with cochlear implants, which have a direct neural connection, and chips are being inserted in people's retinas to combat macular degeneration. By the 2012 Olympics, we're going to be dealing with systems which can aid the oxygen uptake of athletes."
"There's going to be more and more technology in our bodies, and to stomp on all this technology and try to prevent it happening is just ... well, there's going to be a lot of moral debates," he said.
Another iRobot project being developed as part of the U.S. military's "Future Combat Systems" program, Brooks said, was a small, unmanned vehicle known as a SUGV (pronounced "sug-vee"), basically the next generation of the PackBot, one which could be dispatched in front of troops to gauge the threat in an urban environment.
The 30-pound device, which can survive a drop of 30 feet onto concrete, has a small "head" with infra-red and regular cameras which send information back to a command unit, as well as an audio-sensing feature called "Red Owl" which can determine the direction from which enemy fire originates.
"It's designed to be the troop's eyes and ears and, unlike one of its predecessors, this one can swim, too," Mr Brooks said.
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C'mon, libertarian doesn't mean anarchist. It means govt limited to certain functions (e.g. protection of property rights such as copyright in a DVD.) Our Founding Fathers were libertarians. In their essence, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were and are libertarian.
There's no mention of "intellectual property" in any of those documents and I don't think it was even recognized until the mid 1800s, so we probably shouldn't mix that one in there with libertarianism or the Founding Fathers. However, we might note that the FFs did in fact recognize the right to own "human property."
But anyway, I specifically took issue with your use of the term "free market," when you didn't really mean it. In a truly free market, Kellogg's would be able to sell Frosted Flakes "frosted" with crack and wouldn't have to tell you. Do you like the current situation where corporations are required by law to list ingredients and nutritional information on food products? Or is that just another example of "big government" butting into our lives and the labeling should be voluntary? Should people be able to sell their organs? What about child labor and workplace safety laws? More needless government interference?
Yes, I do believe that the FFs were libertarian and I myself subscribe to mostly libertarian principles, believe it or not, but I don't trust corporations as much as you seem to. You obviously agree on the need for some government regulation, I think we just disagree on the details.
-milt
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"I myself subscribe to mostly libertarian principles, believe it or not,"
ROTFLMAO :lol: :lol: :lol:
"but I don't trust corporations as much as you seem to."
This reminds me of a sign I saw in a store once: "In God we trust. Everyone else pays cash."
Theft and fraud are violations of the free market and their prevention is a proper function of government, so your various examples of crack frosted flakes and the like are , , , not on point. Property is a concept and its definition evolves with time.
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VDH wrote about the threat to civil liberties this past week. Always a worthwhile read IMO.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/07/the_real_threat_to_civil_liber.html
July 02, 2007
The Real Threat to Civil Liberties
By Victor Davis Hanson
A common liberal complaint against the Bush administration is its supposed trampling of civil liberties. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, and Guantanamo supposedly have undermined our freedoms--or so we are warned ad nauseam by liberal watchdogs.
True, we have not received any detailed analysis or cost/benefit ratios of how many deadly terrorist plots have been circumvented by these new controversial measures. The administration's past defense of tough interrogations abroad of suspected terrorists sounded to many a lot like an endorsement of torture-light. In any case, as the danger of another 9/11 fades after almost six years, the public seems to be backing off from such anti-terrorism measures--at least until another such mass murder takes place on our shores.
But at least the Patriot Act passed both houses of Congress with wide public support. In contrast, there are a variety of other assaults on personal freedoms, due process, and the sanctity of the law that leftwing moralists not only ignore, but often seem to endorse--as if the liberal ends should justify illiberal means.
First, take illegal immigration. Not only have we neglected to enforce federal immigration statutes, but also local communities, due to pressures from Hispanic lobbyists and tacit approval from employers, have passed local codes barring arrests of suspected illegal aliens.
Tens of thousands of regional and local government officials, along with law enforcements, have taken the law into their own hands by simply deciding not to enforce it.
Both employers and aliens--the former for profit, the latter with the expectation of ethnic solidarity and support--have simply flaunted the law with impunity. We don't talk about massive fraud in our Social Security system due to false names and numbers used by illegal aliens, but only in pragmatic terms of whether such flagrant disregard ultimately puts more into the system than it takes out.
The result is one of the most grievous examples of civil disobedience in our nation's history--with 12 million de facto exempt from the law. In fact, we haven't seen state and local government defy federal laws in such blatant fashion since the Jim Crow days when the states of the Old Confederacy were openly insurrectionist.
Second, every bit as dangerous as wiretaps are prosecutors who manipulate the law, either for personal, ideological or political reasons. And here too reappears a pattern in which perceived political liberalism seems to trump adherence to the spirit of the law.
In the so-called Duke rape case, now disbarred District Attorney Michael Nifong withheld evidence in his holy crusade to convict three innocent Duke Lacrosse players--in hopes of appeasing the lynch mob of local black activists and self-righteous university professors. But even before evidence was adduced--all exculpatory to the defendants--liberal forces had tried and convicted the falsely accused in the media in furtherance of their own leftwing race, class, and gender agendas.
In the case of Valerie Plame, a special prosecutor was selected to find out who outed supposedly covert status at the CIA. The common liberal allegation was that administration lackies had stooped to hound a CIA employee for the anti-war politicking of her husband Joe Wilson.
But very early on in Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's investigation, two inconvenient truths emerged. Ms. Plame was not a covert agent as envisioned by the original mandate of the special prosecutor. And second, the culprit who disseminated knowledge of her employment in with the CIA was almost immediately revealed--former State Department official Richard Armitage.
But no matter. Armitage was out of office and had voiced misgivings about the Iraq war. Thus his early conviction would have earned little public attention, but might instead have ended the investigation before it could snowball in the daily press.
So Fitzgerald barreled ahead anyway on a new mission to satisfy the partisan lust for high-value scalps--hoping to find some top administration official guilty of something else in the growing labyrinth of competing testimonies.
Presto! Scooter Libby, Chief of the Vice President's staff was found to have offered contradictory evidence, and thus convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. We tend to think of smooth Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald as far more professional than the buffoonish Nifong. Maybe. But as was true of Nifong in the Duke rape case, Fitzgerald knew of information that might be fatal to his case--that early on Richard Armitage confessed to the leak--and yet neither apprised the public nor shut down his investigation.
Prosecutors pick and choose what charges to bring. When they either act unprofessionally or beyond their mandates, they have enormous, unchecked powers to undermine the very legal system that employs them.
Everyone has their own particular complaint about the modern Supreme Court's propensity to legislate new rather than interpret existing laws. But two years ago this June, they dismantled much of the constitutional protections of the right to hold private property.
In the Susette Kelo case, the court gave state and local officials unchecked rights of eminent domain to expropriate her house. The property was not condemned for a necessary bridge or public highway. Instead it was seized for "urban redevelopment"--even when the property in question was not blighted, and the urban renewal project was of questionable viability.
City officials were delighted. Their stock and trade have been to confiscate properties, sell them in sweet heart deals to wealthy insider developers--and paper over the entire shanigan with utopian rhetoric about helping the underclass.
Fourth, most recently Democrats have discussed reinstating some sort of "fairness" doctrine aimed at regulating talk radio. They are furious that the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Bill Bennett, Michael Savage, and a host of other conservatives dominate the AM airwaves--while Air America, Jerry Brown, Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and other liberals have failed utterly to carve out a comparable audience in the marketplace of ideas and entertainment.
Once again, liberal civil libertarians are not so liberal about free speech when it is a matter of the public not buying into their own progressive agendas. We should remember that the public is free to choose--and advertisers respond accordingly--about what they wish to hear. Apparently, whiny sermons by nasal-droning elites about the illiberal nature of the yokel middle class is exactly what most on their way to work do not wish to endure.
Of course, conservatives likewise lament the imbalance of left-leaning public radio and television, the major networks such as NBC and CBS, the predominantly liberal print media, universities, the entertainment industry, and foundations. But the difference is that for the most part they are not calling for the government to mandate "fairness" by empowering federal bureaucrats to curb the liberal biases of these institutions.
It is stereotypically easy to identify authoritarians who seek restrict civil liberties during war in the name of "national security." But it is much harder to take on crusading special interest groups, district attorneys, court justices, and liberal Senators who ignore, twist, or subvert our constitutional freedoms under the liberal clarion call of helping minorities, stopping the war, or championing the underclass.
If we are to lose our civil liberties, it won't be all of sudden due to Patriot-Act zealots in sunglasses and flattops, but rather insidiously and incrementally by egalitarian professors, moral crusaders, muckraking journalists, and government utopians all unhappy that constitutional justice is too little and too late for their ever impatient desire to ensure heaven on earth.
Victor Davis Hanson
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NY Times:
Liberties Advocates Fear Abuse of Satellite Images
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: August 17, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — For years, a handful of civilian agencies have used limited images from the nation’s constellation of spy satellites to track hurricane damage, monitor climate change and create topographical maps.
But a new plan to allow emergency response, border control and, eventually, law enforcement agencies greater access to sophisticated satellites and other sensors that monitor American territory has drawn sharp criticism from civil liberties advocates who say the government is overstepping the use of military technology for domestic surveillance.
“It potentially marks a transformation of American political culture toward a surveillance state in which the entire public domain is subject to official monitoring,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
At issue is a newly disclosed plan that Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, approved in May in a memorandum to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, which puts some of the nation’s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials as early as this fall.
The uses include enhancing seaport and land-border security, improving planning to mitigate natural disasters, and determining how best to secure major events, like the Super Bowl or national political conventions. Eventually, state and local law enforcement officials could be allowed to tap into the technology on a case-by-case basis, once legal guidelines are worked out, administration officials said.
Spy satellites, which provide higher-resolution photographs than commercial satellite imagery, and in real time, have traditionally been used overseas to monitor terrorist movements and nuclear tests. Their expanded use in domestic surveillance marks a new era in intelligence gathering, conjures up images of “Big Brother in the sky,” and raises civil liberties concerns.
“This touches so many Americans, it can’t be allowed to be discussed behind closed doors,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The new data sharing comes as Congress passed legislation this month that broadened the Bush administration’s authority to eavesdrop without warrants on some Americans’ international communications.
Administration officials say that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the government has been looking for ways to use spy satellites and other sensors to strengthen the nation’s defenses against terrorism.
“The view after Sept. 11 was that we ought to move this to homeland security and broaden the domain,” Charles E. Allen, the Department of Homeland Security’s top intelligence officer, said Thursday in a telephone interview. “We obviously believe this is a good expansion.”
The new plan largely follows recommendations included in a 2005 independent study group led by Keith R. Hall, a former head of the National Reconnaissance Office who is a vice president of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
“Today, policies and practices governing the use of I.C. capabilities, many of which predate 9/11, discourage rather than encourage use by domestic users especially law enforcement,” the report said. The abbreviation I.C. refers to the intelligence community.
“The ultimate effect is missed opportunities to collect, exploit and disseminate domestic information critical to fighting the war on terrorism, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters natural and man-made,” the report said.
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the active-duty military forces from conducting law enforcement missions on American soil, and Mr. Allen underscored that the new information-sharing would not violate that ban.
Mr. Allen said that the new program would be especially useful for disaster planning, and for policing land and seaports. He said the effort might eventually share information with domestic law enforcement officials but only after a careful review that would take several months.
“We are not going to be penetrating buildings, bunkers or people’s homes with this,” Mr. Allen said. “I view that as absurd. My view is that no American should be concerned.”
A new office within the Homeland Security Department, called the National Applications Office, will be responsible beginning in October for coordinating requests from civilian agencies for spy satellite information.
The Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would be responsible for overseeing the program. Reviews would be conducted by agency lawyers, inspectors general and privacy officers.
Civil liberties advocates complained that the agencies could not be trusted to supervise themselves, and that Congress needed to play a larger oversight role.
An official with the House Intelligence Committee said the panel had been notified of the program last spring but had not been given details of the data-sharing, and would ask for a full briefing when lawmakers returned in September from their summer recess.
“Crystal-clear rules on the use of such information are needed to protect the privacy of the American people,” said Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat who heads the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment.
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An interesting piece from the Boston Globe this week that I think marks the memory of Hong Kong as a free colony. Amazing that we saw in our lifetime this little island of liberty exist within Communist China and then be given back to China.
Hong Kong's heyday
By H.D.S. Greenway | October 16, 2007
HONG KONG
FORTY YEARS ago I came to live here with my family, landing on a heart-stopping thumb of land sticking out in the harbor that served as a runway, where the landing wheels seemed about to snatch the laundry off the clotheslines of Kowloon.
Hong Kong was then what they called a British Crown Colony, with most of it on a 99-year lease - "on borrowed time in a borrowed place."
China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, with unimagined excesses going on just across the border, which Americans were forbidden to cross. Some of it spilled into the colony with Red Guards going around waving the little red books of Chairman Mao's sayings, and bombs that would occasionally kill. Bodies would sometimes float down the Pearl River from Canton, some of them having been tied up and tortured.
And all around the restless rim of Asia there was trouble. The Vietnam War, for which I was headed, raged. Indonesia had recently experienced mass killings of astonishing scale. Singapore and Malaysia's future could not be assured. Thailand faced a Communist insurgency on its northeast frontier, and Laos, "the landlocked kingdom" of newspaper headlines, seemed always to be "teetering on the brink."
Hong Kong was the oasis then, despite the occasional disturbance. My favorite image of those years was watching cricket players on their downtown pitch with the Bank of China in the background draped in huge red Mao banners.
Refugees, as they always had when China was in trouble, tried to sneak or swim into British territory.
The rules were that you would be stopped and turned back if caught. But if you made it you would not be deported.
Britain ran its colony in the most laissez-faire way possible, with few rules on its unfettered capitalism, in stark contrast to the nanny state that was pre-Thatcherite Britain.
As the last governor, Christopher Patten, would write: "Hong Kong's special fortune was to be blessed with a small team of colonial administrators eccentric enough to believe in free markets and cussed enough to stick to their guns. . ." While the home country flirted with "nationalization, high taxation, rigid labor markets, excessive social spending, it allowed its colonial dependency to practice the ancient economic virtues with conspicuous success."
There was poverty, of course, extreme by British standards, but everyone felt better off than their neighbors on the mainland.
There were courts of law with bewigged judges, but just across the way Red Guards trampled laws and Chinese traditions in their political frenzy.
Everyone knew that China could take Hong Kong anytime it wanted. A British general, briefing the press on the colony's defenses, was incredulously asked: "You are not implying that you could actually defend this place from the People's Liberation Army, are you?"
"Perhaps not," the general answered, "but we would give them an interesting afternoon." Despite the turmoil, the Chinese leadership kept its hands off Hong Kong, their invaluable window to the West.
Hong Kong became one of the wealthiest places on earth in the following years. It was a front-page story when the number of registered Rolls Royces passed the number of registered rickshaws.
In time, of course, the borrowed time was up and the borrowed place had to be given back. The idea of "one country, two systems" was a masterpiece of political compromise, allowing Hong Kong, in theory, to run its own show for 50 years.
Ten years ago, when the British flag was being lowered for the last time over its last big - in population anyway - colonial possession, I came back to watch the empire end, Christopher Patten and Prince Charles sail away on the royal yacht, and the Chinese Army rumble in on a monsoon rain.
Today, Hong Kong's spectacular skyline continues to grow ever higher, even as its storied harbor shrinks before ever- increasing landfills. If democracy has not advanced as much as Patten had hoped, neither has totalitarianism as many of us feared.
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/f...ics/index.html
The Next generation of Identification:
I'd expect to see this kind on Alex Jones.
Anyone who is "OK" with this should consider the implications of more weapon bans and domestic spying in tandem with this kind of stuff.
Reads just like "1984".
CLARKSBURG, West Virginia (CNN) -- The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people's physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.
But it's an issue that raises major privacy concerns -- what one civil liberties expert says should concern all Americans.
The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information -- from palm prints to eye scans.
Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's Biometric Services section chief, said adding to the database is "important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbors, our children so they can have good jobs, and have a safe country to live in."
But it's unnerving to privacy experts.
"It's the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project.
The FBI already has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, the bureau wants to compare palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes. The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect.
A lot will depend on how quickly technology is perfected, according to Thomas Bush, the FBI official in charge of the Clarksburg, West Virginia, facility where the FBI houses its current fingerprint database. Watch what the FBI hopes to gain »
"Fingerprints will still be the big player," Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told CNN.
But he added, "Whatever the biometric that comes down the road, we need to be able to plug that in and play."
First up, he said, are palm prints. The FBI has already begun collecting images and hopes to soon use these as an additional means of making identifications. Countries that are already using such images find 20 percent of their positive matches come from latent palm prints left at crime scenes, the FBI's Bush said.
The FBI has also started collecting mug shots and pictures of scars and tattoos. These images are being stored for now as the technology is fine-tuned. All of the FBI's biometric data is stored on computers 30-feet underground in the Clarksburg facility.
In addition, the FBI could soon start comparing people's eyes -- specifically the iris, or the colored part of an eye -- as part of its new biometrics program called Next Generation Identification.
Nearby, at West Virginia University's Center for Identification Technology Research, researchers are already testing some of these technologies that will ultimately be used by the FBI.
"The best increase in accuracy will come from fusing different biometrics together," said Bojan Cukic, the co-director of the center.
But while law enforcement officials are excited about the possibilities of these new technologies, privacy advocates are upset the FBI will be collecting so much personal information.
"People who don't think mistakes are going to be made I don't think fly enough," said Steinhardt.
He said thousands of mistakes have been made with the use of the so-called no-fly lists at airports -- and that giving law enforcement widespread data collection techniques should cause major privacy alarms.
"There are real consequences to people," Steinhardt said. Watch concerns over more data collection »
You don't have to be a criminal or a terrorist to be checked against the database. More than 55 percent of the checks the FBI runs involve criminal background checks for people applying for sensitive jobs in government or jobs working with vulnerable people such as children and the elderly, according to the FBI.
The FBI says it hasn't been saving the fingerprints for those checks, but that may change. The FBI plans a so-called "rap-back" service in which an employer could ask the FBI to keep the prints for an employee on file and let the employer know if the person ever has a brush with the law. The FBI says it will first have to clear hurdles with state privacy laws, and people would have to sign waivers allowing their information to be kept.
Critics say people are being forced to give up too much personal information. But Lawrence Hornak, the co-director of the research center at West Virginia University, said it could actually enhance people's privacy.
"It allows you to project your identity as being you," said Hornak. "And it allows people to avoid identity theft, things of that nature." Watch Hornak describe why he thinks it's a "privacy enhancer" »
There remains the question of how reliable these new biometric technologies will be. A 2006 German study looking at facial recognition in a crowded train station found successful matches could be made 60 percent of the time during the day. But when lighting conditions worsened at night, the results shrank to a success rate of 10 to 20 percent.
As work on these technologies continues, researchers are quick to admit what's proven to be the most accurate so far. "Iris technology is perceived today, together with fingerprints, to be the most accurate," said Cukic.
But in the future all kinds of methods may be employed. Some researchers are looking at the way people walk as a possible additional means of identification.
The FBI says it will protect all this personal data and only collect information on criminals and those seeking sensitive jobs.
The ACLU's Steinhardt doesn't believe it will stop there.
"This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals," he said. "Now we're talking about large swaths of the population -- workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it's going to be everybody."
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http://blog.heritage.org/2008/06/09/...rint-registry/
Housing Bill Creates National Fingerprint Registry
Posted June 9th, 2008 at 12.40pm in Entrepreneurship.
Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) authored a bill (with 11 co-sponsors, including Sen. Barack Obama) that was incorporated into a housing bill passed by the Senate Banking Committee 19-2 before the Memorial Day recess — a bill that creates a national fingerprint registry.
According to a Martinez press release, the language merely “create national licensing and oversight standards for residential mortgage originators.”
One of the standards, John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute says, may “require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries — and not suspected of anything — to send their prints to the feds.”
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Domestic spying? Puh-leeze..... :roll:
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Well, what's the point of the fingerprinting?
Do you favor EVERYONE being fingerprinted?
Why?
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Aside from those whose biometrics are recorded as part of a booking process, everyone else that is fingerprinted/has other biometrics recorded is doing so voluntarily. Why shouldn't law enforcement use modern technology to record other biometrics when it records fingerprints?
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For residential mortgage originators???
How do you feel about these pictures?
http://warriortalk.com/showthread.php?t=40694
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....When they came for the residential mortgage originators, I said nothing.....
Seriously, mortgage fraud has become a staple for organized crime. Part of the housing crisis today is related to fraud. It's a serious crime with a serious financial impact on all of us.
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/financial/fcs_report2006/financial_crime_2006.htm
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/us/25fraud.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
December 25, 2007
Officials Falling Behind on Mortgage Fraud Cases
By JOHN LELAND
The number of mortgage fraud cases has grown so fast that government agencies that investigate and prosecute them cannot keep up, lenders and law enforcement officials have said.
Reports of suspected mortgage fraud have doubled since 2005 and increased eightfold since 2002. Banks filed 47,717 reports this year, up from 21,994 two years ago, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department. In 2002, banks filed 5,623 reports.
“I don’t think any law enforcement agency can keep up with mortgage fraud, because it’s such a growth industry,” said Chuck Cross, vice president of mortgage regulatory policy for the conference of state bank supervisors, an organization of regulators and bankers. “There’s too many cases, not enough agents.”
Mortgage fraud covers crimes like false statements on mortgage applications and elaborate “flipping” schemes that involve multiple properties and corrupt appraisers, title companies and straw buyers.
In one common flipping plot, someone buys a house, has it appraised for more than its true value and sells it to a straw buyer for the inflated price, pocketing the difference. The straw buyer lets the house fall into foreclosure, leaving the bank with the loss.
The cases coming into view reflect the recent boom in mortgages with limited borrower documentation and lax scrutiny.
Law enforcement agencies say they are overwhelmed, especially because investigating and prosecuting fraud can be complex and time consuming. The officials say career criminals and organized-crime rings have increasingly turned from other crimes to mortgage fraud because it offers lower risks and high profits.
“I could hire a dozen investigators and a dozen prosecutors and only scratch the surface,” said David McLaughlin, a senior assistant attorney general in Georgia who coordinates prosecutions of mortgage fraud.
Losses involving federally insured banks totaled $813 million in the 2007 fiscal year, more than double the $293 million lost in the 2002 fiscal year.
These figures most likely represent “the tip of the iceberg,” said the Mortgage Bankers Association, an industry group, because they do not cover mortgage brokers, who arrange more than half of new mortgages. The industry estimates the total loss this year at $4 billion.
Mortgage fraud can damage whole neighborhoods. Derrick Duckworth, a real estate broker in southwestern Atlanta, has watched “about 40 percent” of the houses in his neighborhood, Adair, become vacant as a result of mortgage fraud. The remaining residents cannot sell their houses because of the abandoned buildings and the neighborhood’s reputation for fraud, he said.
“The other day, someone broke into my neighbor’s crawl space and stole her copper plumbing,” he said. “Last week, we had an 18-year-old shot on the street.”
Fraud is especially common with subprime mortgages, the high-price loans for borrowers with poor credit. Lenders and investigators trace part of the foreclosure crisis to mortgage fraud.
For local law enforcement agencies, fraud is increasing as regulatory budgets are tight and other crimes seem more pressing, said Tom Levanti, a fraud investigator in New York.
“You only have a certain amount of resources,” Mr. Levanti said, “and in New York, you need to spend them on counterterrorism, protecting citizens, reducing violent crime. Mortgage fraud cases are long and time consuming, and the victims are usually financial institutions that can write off the loss. So as a police department, return on investment has to be thought about.”
Lenders say they have good relationships with investigating and prosecuting agencies.
“But law enforcement is just absolutely overwhelmed,” said Corey Carlisle, senior director for government affairs for the Mortgage Bankers Association, which has lobbied for more money to fight fraud. “Lenders say they have to market their cases to law enforcement,” meaning showing extraordinarily high sums or multiple criminals.
John Arterberry, executive deputy chief of the fraud section in the Justice Department, said federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. had made progress on mortgage fraud. Mr. Arterberry cited sweeps in 2004 and 2005 that resulted in more than 150 defendants charged in each sweep.
The bureau has 1,210 open mortgage fraud inquiries, up from 436 in 2003. Last year, those cases led to 204 convictions.
“We have limited resources and have to put them where they do the most good,” Mr. Arterberry said. “We’re able to zero in on hot spots and organized efforts.”
This progress is too slow for Kristine Baugh, who said her neighborhood in Dallas had not recovered from a mortgage fraud that left in six vacant houses on her block. Ms. Baugh, a real estate broker, said she discovered what she believed was a fraud scheme in 2005, when six properties sold for far more than she felt they were worth and remained vacant until being foreclosed.
Suspecting fraudulent appraisals, she gathered documents on the sales and took them to the F.B.I., the district attorney and local officials. With neighbors, she sued an investor who she said was behind the fraud.
Years later, there have been no arrests in the case. The residents ran out of money and dropped their civil suit after the investor filed a countersuit. “Our neighborhood is still in shambles,” Ms. Baugh said. “The properties deteriorated and have to be kept up by the city. They’re a health hazard.”
The swimming pools at the vacant sites are breeding grounds for mosquitoes and potential West Nile virus sources, she said.
Such cases are likely to multiply, said Constance Wilson, executive vice president of Interthinx, which develops fraud detection tools for the lending industry.
“The cases we’re seeing today are from 18, 24, 36 months ago, when the market was still good,” Ms. Wilson said. “Now we’re going to see an increase in mortgage fraud, because all those loan officers, brokers and appraisers who were making six-figure incomes, now their back is against the wall. If that loan doesn’t close, they can’t make their home payment.
“So you have a desperation cycle,” she said. “There’s a lot of push for them originate volume.
“The consequences are that people are getting away with it. It’s damaging the entire real estate market. It’s devastating to victims. Not just lenders but consumers. It’s devastating to entire communities.
“When it’s this prolific,” she said, “we just don’t have enough law enforcement or enough prosecutors for all the cases out there.”
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OK, and how will fingerprints solve this?
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If you use it as part of a licensing process, then you can deny for a prior criminal history. If the applicant is a "cleanskin" (meaning no prior criminal history) you use it to identify them should they commit a crime or crimes and attempt to disappear.
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In reference to the "scary" photos from europe. What's the difference between a cop on the beat in a public place and a cop watching a video feed from a camera in a public place? What's the objection to police wearing riot gear? Even weird european riot gear?
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London bombers staged 'dummy run'
Newly released CCTV footage shows the 7 July London bombers staged a practice run nine days before the attack.
Detectives reconstructed the bombers' movements after studying thousands of hours of film as part of the probe into the blasts which killed 52 people.
CCTV images show three of the bombers entering Luton station, before travelling to King's Cross station where they are also pictured.
Officers are keen to find out if the men met anyone else on the day.
Intensive probe
The three, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Germaine Lindsay, were conducting a carefully planned reconnaissance exercise, police said.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch, said: "What we want to know is where else they went and did they meet anybody else while they were in London?
"If any member of the public thinks that they know something about the movement of these men on that day, they should call us on the anti-terrorist hotline."
He added that it was "part of a terrorist's methodology" to check timings, lay-out and security precautions.
Police traced the movements after recovering tickets and receipts from houses connected to the bombers which pointed to their trip.
Mr Clarke said the investigation would carry on for months. More than 3,000 plus witness statements had been gathered and 80,000 CCTV tapes analysed.
Police revealed that two bombs were found in a car left by the attackers at Luton train station on 7 July.
It has also emerged that a landfill site in Skelton Grange, West Yorkshire, is being searched in a bid to uncover more clues.
DUMMY RUN DETAILS
Sidique Khan and Tanweer meet Lindsay at Luton station around 0810 BST
The trio buy tickets and catch a train to King's Cross
The men arrive at King's Cross at 0855 BST and are also seen at Baker Street at midday
The bombers leave King's Cross at 1250 BST and arrive back in Luton at 1340 BST
A dozen officers in fluorescent jackets could be seen on Tuesday afternoon working on the site.
The men, who were wearing overalls under their jackets and white safety hats, appeared to be systematically searching a small area of the rubbish heap helped by two mechanical diggers.
One local resident said: "They've been here for weeks, dozens of them.
"They've been searching the same bit of rubbish every day it seems.
"The diggers skim off a layer at a time and then they move in and search it quite painstakingly."
Detectives believe the site could be connected to the apparent "bomb factory" at a flat in Alexander Grove in Leeds.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda has said for the first time the group carried out the attacks.
In a videotaped message aired on Arab television station al-Jazeera, al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri said the group had the "honour" of carrying out the attacks.
The 7 July bomb attacks killed 56 people - including the four bombers - and injured more than 700.
Tube theory
Three bombs were detonated on underground trains just outside Liverpool Street and Edgware Road stations, and on another travelling between King's Cross and Russell Square.
The fourth explosion took place on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, not far from King's Cross.
Evidence of a reconnaissance mission supports the theory that all four had planned to detonate their rucksack bombs on the Underground system.
It is believed that the bus bomber, Hasib Hussain, was prevented from getting onto the Northern Line on the day of the attacks because the service had been disrupted.
The other bombers - Tanweer, Lindsay and Sidique Khan - detonated their devices almost simultaneously.
Anyone with information in connection with the London bombings should ring the anti-terrorist hotline on 0800789321 .
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4263176.stm
Published: 2005/09/20 17:19:35 GMT
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http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33335.pdf
Transnational organized crime brief
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GM:
Of course you make good points, but viscerally does the idea of always being watched everywhere you go feel right to you?
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Are we not watched everywhere we go where there are other humans? Do the cameras at ATMs and gas stations make you feel oppressed?
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http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC88.pdf
Note the potential use of camera footage in the above investigations.
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The private sector cameras at gas stations etc are not part of an ever expanding web of omnipresent surveillance by the State.
I agree that you can cite many cases where such a capability can be put to the good, but is not omnipotent State destined to become a totalitarian one?
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I can assure you that today, the USG and other levels of government in the US are far from omnipotent. I'm willing to bet that private marketing firms know much more about you than any governmental entity does.
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Interesting discussion regarding cameras, surveillance and privacy. There is quite a balancing act between privacy and security that is hard to sort out. I value both to an extreme and of course they are in conflict. We have a certain privacy at home being one of only two homes on a hidden dead end street. In twenty two years I have never so much as had a pizza delivered so as to not let strangers discover our little piece of paradise. But then the neighbor tore down and rebuilt their house and perhaps two hundred workmen traipsed through, trespassed, worked loud equipment, checked out our things and blocked our driveway over a long period of time. I felt extremely violated.
OTOH, I have faced four, near death, criminal victim experiences, two for myself and two for my young daughter, and in all cases would be thrilled to discover camera footage that could help identify perps and prosecute the crimes.
Leaving my personal stories aside, I'll tell this one about a friend. He was boating on the lake and was apprehended at a checkpoint under a bridge that was the only way home for him. He refused the alcohol test out of stubbornness and the fact that he had drinks earlier that day. Refusing the test puts him with the maximum charge. Since the checkpoint was controversial, there was also a television news camera filming the scene. Officers made (false) claims about his behavior to justify the demand for the alcohol test and subsequent charges. He subpoenaed the news camera footage which revealed their lies. The judge saw the third party camera footage and dismissed the charges.
Part of the cameras-everywhere world to remember is that they are largely unattended cameras. No one is likely interested in my movements near the drycleaners but the information could become helpful later for reasons not known at the time, as it was with the subway bombers.
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I too am glad that we are discussing this.
"I can assure you that today, the USG and other levels of government in the US are far from omnipotent. I'm willing to bet that private marketing firms know much more about you than any governmental entity does."
As someone who has kept a bit of an eye on the trends in technological capabilities, I have a strong sense that they are evolving very, very quickly and will accelerate as time goes by.
While I certainly agree that our government is inherently incompetent in many things, what concerns me here is what happens to the citizen who presents a problem to the interests in power in government and what can be brought to bear against him. The politics of personal destruction has cost we the American people many fine people who otherwise would have run and has brought down many a whistle blower.
Private marketing firms may know quite a bit about you and me (and I do my best to keep that as little as possible) but they do not have the motive or power to cause me damage should I be a threat to vested interests.
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I would argue that technological sophistication actually tend to protect civil rights more than threatening them. Corrupt 3rd. world cops need no technology to arrest or murder dissidents or shake down merchants. I came into law enforcement post-Rodney King. It was emphasized in the academy "Don't do or say anything you wouldn't want your family to see on CNN".
Mao, Stalin and Hitler didn't have video cameras or computer databases and created totalitarian nightmares just fine without them.
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And how much worse would it have been had they had them?
GM, you continue to give good examples of how these technologies can be used to the good, but for me the profound concern raises when the State thinks to use them for control and oppression , , , AND for there is something viscerally creepy about having your everymove watched and recorded.
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I'm not sure what the answer is to your concerns. I'll note that the SCOTUS just wrapped the jihadist illegal combatants in GITMO in the same constitutional protections you and I enjoy. We live in a technology driven society, why should law enforcement not use technology commonly in use in other areas of the public and private sector? Do you avoid Las Vegas casinos because of the surveillance technology? I assure you the private security entities in the average strip casino use technology outside the wildest dreams of most anyone in law enforcement. Why is state of the art video and pattern recognition software good in the Bellagio and lowest bidder, outdated tech in the hands of cops have us on the cusp of 1984?
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fbi10-2008jun10,0,3189496.story
FBI background checks for immigrants are far behind, audit says
Inspector General Glenn Fine reports a backlog years long in some cases. He says the National Name Check Program has outdated technology, poorly trained personnel and overworked supervisors.
By Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 10, 2008
WASHINGTON -- The FBI system for performing background checks on immigrants has become so overloaded since the Sept. 11 attacks that thousands of legal immigrants are waiting years to get into the United States or obtain citizenship, according to findings from an internal investigation released Monday.
The Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the FBI's National Name Check Program is working with outdated technology, and that poorly trained personnel and overworked supervisors are falling far behind. As of March, there was a backlog of 327,000 requests for names to be validated, some of which had been pending for up to three years.
The report also said the breakdown in the name checks means that potentially thousands of criminals are slipping through the system.
"The name-check process can result in lengthy delays and the risk of inaccurate information," said Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He warned that improvements to the system, particularly with the government's ongoing effort to search for potential terrorists in this country, should be "a priority."
The FBI must vet all immigrants before they can get citizenship or a green card. The bureau has been criticized by lawmakers and immigration rights groups for slowing the immigration process.
John Miller, the FBI's head of public affairs, said in a statement that the inspector general's recommendations are being implemented, and that FBI officials will work hard to catch up.
He noted that more than 4 million name-check requests from various law enforcement agencies were made in the 2007 fiscal year alone, and that about 86% were processed within 60 days. The FBI is making 77,000 name checks a week -- completing nearly 97% of all requests submitted in the last five years, he said.
Nevertheless, Miller acknowledged that the 2001 terrorist strikes jammed the system, especially when federal immigration officials asked the bureau to rerun 2.7 million names for more thorough reviews after the attacks on New York and Washington.
"This unexpected deluge of immigration-related name checks overwhelmed existing resources," Miller said. "As a result, the NNCP was not able to address the increasing demand."
In his report, Fine acknowledged the extra burden posed after Sept. 11. Before the terrorist attacks, the system only searched the FBI's main files to see if individuals might be connected to criminal activities. After the attacks, the searches were broadened to encompass information from all sorts of law enforcement databases, adding to the time required for each background check.
"This change was designed to detect derogatory information about individuals who may not have been identified as the direct subject of an FBI investigation, but who are connected to subjects with criminal and investigative histories," Fine said.
The name-check program and its FBI fingerprint database are the largest in the world, containing prints and background histories on more than 50 million people.
The system was taxed all the more after Sept. 11, and the inspector general's investigation turned up processes that are "inefficient and untimely, rely on outdated technology and provide little assurance that pertinent and derogatory information is being retrieved and transmitted."
As of March, 371 employees were working on name checks, an increase of 30% since November. By the end of this fiscal year 300 employees more will be assigned to the system.
But Fine worried that without improvements, "limited training, supervision and quality control measures may result in a higher potential for name-matching errors."
richard.serrano@latimes.com
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http://www.govtech.com/gt/print_article.php?id=90777
Merry CRISmas
Jul 9, 2004, By Jim McKay
If the primary reason to collect crash data is to save lives on the road, evaluating that data more than two years later is counterproductive. But because of outdated technology, those charged with safeguarding Texas roadways have been forced to operate that way for years.
Texas law enforcement, transportation officials and highway engineers will unwrap a big gift from the state Legislature this Christmas that could well solve the problem and save lives -- a built-from-the-ground-up Crash Records Information System (CRIS) to capture, manage and deliver timely and accurate crash data so law enforcement can target areas to patrol, transportation officials can determine the state's most dangerous roadways and engineers can fix them.
Two Years in the Basement
Two years worth of written crash data currently sits in a basement at the Texas Department of Public Safety. The backlog built up because department staff must sift through the paper documents by hand.
"In many cases, the data didn't exist electronically at all. If it did, it was in disparate databases, not one common location where it could be accessed and analyzed," said Amy Thomas-Gerling, an associate partner at IBM Business Consulting Services. "Timely and accurate information is needed to address a lot of the issues Texas and other states are looking at, such as where to put their money for highway improvement projects."
The new system, scheduled to go live in December, will feature electronic data collection, GIS mapping of accidents and a new Web portal to make the information available to officials and citizens immediately. The system will also use a "microstrategy tool" to make sense of all the data, and help officials and engineers develop strategies to make roadways safer.
CRIS should be a vast improvement from the way the data is currently handled. Now, an officer at an accident scene creates a handwritten report that includes time of day, type of vehicle and number of occupants, among other details, and mails it to the Department of Public Safety headquarters -- along with the other 850,000 reports the department receives annually.
One of 96 employees in charge of handling incoming reports processes the report manually and sends it to another group of employees who key the data into the system. The current system is a flat file system, which lacks the hierarchical organization used by most operating systems today, so for instance, there is no "folder" for 2003 crash data. All the crash data that has built up for decades is stored in one repository without categorization.
"You walk in and it's like something from the 1960s," said Catherine Cioffi, CRIS project manager for the Texas Department of Public Safety. "It's really a result of aging technology, the increase in population in Texas, the changes in the roads over the years and the changes in technology that finally got us to the point where we had to upgrade."
Other states have similar problems with crash data and have implemented some of the functions that will be included in this system.
"The crash data is used for a variety of things," Cioffi said. "In the Department of Public Safety, it's used for defining target areas for enhanced law enforcement and the Department of Transportation uses the crash data for prioritization and identification of road projects."
CRIS will be unique in that it will be a complete, enterprisewide system built largely with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, according to IBM's Thomas-Gerling.
"We looked at everything from when you received a crash report from the officer, to when it was needed for federal reports to determine areas that needed specific attention," she said. "We looked at the entire process from the onset and the best way to configure COTS products to address those needs.
"Many states have the GIS mapping component, or they may have the data warehouse or the ability to capture crash records electronically," she added. "But if you looked across all states, very few will have a solution from beginning to end, which is what we're providing."
The Texas Legislature appropriated the money for the IBM contract, which is worth nearly $10 million.
Safety First
That beginning-to-end solution will provide a smooth transition from one process to another, not to mention overhauling some badly outdated individual processes.
Mapping is an example. Engineers currently have access to paper maps only, and the most up-to-date maps come from 1992. The new system will give engineers online maps showing where all crashes have occurred.
"They'll be looking at a screen and seeing all this visually, and be able to have the most recent road information and the tools at hand to do something in seconds that currently takes a manual process that can be very lengthy," Thomas-Gerling said.
All crash data dating back 10 years will be converted for use in the new system -- not to mention the last two-plus years' worth of reports still in paper form down in the basement.
"The system is a major overhaul, but the COTS products allow flexibility as well," Cioffi said. "We want to eliminate all this paper, but we want to be flexible enough so smaller cities that have a couple accidents a month can submit paper if they want and it will be scanned into the system. What we wanted to do with CRIS was to enable the large cities to submit the data to us electronically -- which they can't do today -- or to go onto the Web and enter that data electronically."
The result should provide officials with timely, accurate information that could save lives.
"You're looking at two-year-old data [now]," Cioffi said. "It's difficult to be proactive. If you need to straighten out a curve, you don't know for two years that you need to straighten that curve."
The primary objective of the system is to improve safety on Texas roadways, but it may give the state a leg up on more federal funding. States receive funds based on the crash data they submit, and it won't hurt to have more accurate, up-to-date data, Cioffi said.
"This is something I'm very cautious about because it's one of those unknowns and is unknowable. We can't really put a number on it if there have been losses in construction money, but with the new data, there is the potential for increase."
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/21/earlyshow/printable681949.shtml
'The CSI Effect'
LOS ANGELES, March 21, 2005
(CBS) Call it "The CSI Effect." It seems the popular CBS TV show on crime scene investigators is having an effect on real-life jurors. They want a clear trail of evidence, or they won't vote "guilty."
The latest example: the Robert Blake murder trial, reports The Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman.
She notes that, despite more than one witness testifying Blake had asked them to kill his wife, the jurors wanted more than that. They wanted the razzle-dazzle of "CSI."
Every week, Kauffman explains, stars on the show solve crimes based on intricate analysis of forensic evidence. And that kind of evidence just wasn't available in the Blake case.
"They couldn't put the gun in his hand. …There was no blood spatter. They had nothing," jury foreman Thomas Nicholson said after the trial ended.
It was prosecutor Shellie Samuels' first loss in 50 murder cases. Though she presented more than 70 witnesses against Blake, she couldn't show the jury blood evidence, or conclusive gun-shot residue.
"If she would have had all that information," juror Lori Moore said later, "that would have meant that he was guilty."
More than 60 million people watch the "CSI" shows every week, which means a lot of potential jurors now have high expectations of forensic evidence. "The CSI Effect" is being felt in courtrooms from coast to coast, Kauffman points out.
"Jurors now expect us to have a DNA test for just about every case," laments Oregon District Attorney Josh Marquis. "They expect us to have the most advanced technology possible, and they expect it to look like it does on television."
Trouble is, Kauffman notes, this district attorney works in the small Oregon town of Astoria. The nearest forensic lab is hours away.
Beth Carpenter, who's with the Oregon Crime Lab, says there are expectations well beyond what the reality is, and that has increased the workload quite a bit.
And in a big city like Baltimore, prosecutors blamed "The CSI Effect" when jurors acquitted a man of murder, even though were two eyewitnesses.
"Not even first degree, second degree, third degree, nothing, and they shot my husband," cried Patricia Peterson, the victim's wife.
Even the producers of "CSI" have been surprised at how jurors want to judge fact from their fictional creation.
"CSI" creator Anthony E. Zuiker observes, " 'The CSI Effect' is, in my opinion, the most amazing thing that has ever come out of the series. For the first time in American history, you're not allowed to fool the jury anymore."
In fact, Kauffman adds, at least half the jurors selected for the Blake case say they watch such shows regularly.
"The prosecutor took the approach of, 'We don't need the DNA, we don't need the eyewitness, we've got the big picture here, and if you look at the big picture, who had the motive, who had the opportunity, who acted strangely, who wanted his wife dead -- it was Robert Blake,' " says Loyola Law School Professor Laurie Levensen, a former federal prosecutor.
But clearly, the jury wanted the evidence they see on "CSI" each week.
It may be ironic that a man who made his fame on a TV crime show, "Baretta," was acquitted thanks, in part, to a TV crime show.
Former prosecutor Wendy Murphy, a CBS News consultant, says "The CSI Effect" is real, and an impediment: "When 'CSI' trumps common sense, then you have a systemic problem. The National District Attorneys Association is deeply concerned about the effect of 'CSI.' "
Murphy points out, "This has been a bit of a problem even before the onset of DNA, and shows like 'CSI.' You get jurors who don't have a lot of brain cells asking questions after the case is over about why there weren't any fingerprints on the pillow case. Of course, that makes no sense.
"But once you get the influence of 'CSI,' what they start to expect is not only a lot of forensic evidence, but that this one missing piece would have told them the truth. That's just not reality.
"Most murder cases have a little forensic evidence, but it doesn't really tell the whole story.
"I actually think one of the problems is we're not screening out these jurors who are way too much under the influence of these pop culture programs. They shouldn't be allowed to sit in judgment, frankly."
Defense attorney and CBS News consultant Mickey Sherman disagrees, saying jurors are "a little more educated now, maybe too educated. …If they believe the person committed the crime, forensics or not, they're gonna find him guilty."
The two squared off about the role, if any, of "The CSI Effect" in the Scott Peterson and Blake cases.
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"I'm not sure what the answer is to your concerns. , , , We live in a technology driven society, why should law enforcement not use technology commonly in use in other areas of the public and private sector? Do you avoid Las Vegas casinos because of the surveillance technology? I assure you the private security entities in the average strip casino use technology outside the wildest dreams of most anyone in law enforcement. Why is state of the art video and pattern recognition software good in the Bellagio and lowest bidder, outdated tech in the hands of cops have us on the cusp of 1984?"
Actually I don't go to Vegas-- it is a voluntary tax upon the mathematically impaired :lol:
A big part of what concerns me with all this is not where we are, but where we are going. The logic you use and the technology coming down the pike combine to something that can pretty much keep track of where we go and what we do. Amongst various negatives, this make really deter anyone with a colorful, adventurous life, or simply a sense of privacy, from wanting to go into politics or take on governmental misdeeds.
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Technology will continue to advance. If there is an answer to your concerns, it's from legislation. What legislation do you suggest that will protect your privacy? Would this legislation cover both gov't and private entities? What technology should law enforcement be allowed to use, if any?
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**Loss of freedom? Or rational policy post-9/11?**
EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants
Posted 12/22/05
By David E. Kaplan
In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.
Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government's domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought.
The nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). Two individuals, who declined to be named because the program is highly classified, spoke to U.S. News because of their concerns about the legality of the program. At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat. The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.
FBI officials expressed concern that discussion of the program would expose sensitive methods used in counterterrorism. Although NEST staffers have demonstrated their techniques on national television as recently as October, U.S. News has omitted details of how the monitoring is conducted. Officials from four different agencies declined to respond on the record about the classified program: the FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department, and National Security Council. "We don't ever comment on deployments," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages NEST.
In Washington, the sites monitored have included prominent mosques and office buildings in suburban Maryland and Virginia. One source close to the program said that participants "were tasked on a daily and nightly basis," and that FBI and Energy Department officials held regular meetings to update the monitoring list. "The targets were almost all U.S. citizens," says the source. "A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs. We were told it was perfectly legal."
The question of search warrants is controversial, however. To ensure accurate readings, in up to 15 percent of the cases the monitoring needed to take place on private property, sources say, such as on mosque parking lots and private driveways. Government officials familiar with the program insist it is legal; warrants are unneeded for monitoring from public property, they say, as well as from publicly accessible driveways and parking lots. "If a delivery man can access it, so can we," says one.
Georgetown University Professor David Cole, a constitutional law expert, disagrees. Surveillance of public spaces such as mosques or public businesses might well be allowable without a court order, he argues, but not private offices or homes: "They don't need a warrant to drive onto the property -- the issue isn't where they are, but whether they're using a tactic to intrude on privacy. It seems to me that they are, and that they would need a warrant or probable cause."
Cole points to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Kyllo, which looked at police use -- without a search warrant -- of thermal imaging technology to search for marijuana-growing lamps in a home. The court, in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that authorities did in fact need a warrant -- that the heat sensors violated the Fourth Amendment's clause against unreasonable search and seizure. But officials familiar with the FBI/NEST program say the radiation sensors are different and are only sampling the surrounding air. "This kind of program only detects particles in the air, it's non directional," says one knowledgeable official. "It's not a whole lot different from smelling marijuana."
Officials also reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. "We categorically do not target places of worship or entities solely based on ethnicity or religious affiliation," says one. "Our investigations are intelligence driven and based on a criminal predicate."
Among those said to be briefed on the monitoring program were Vice President Richard Cheney; Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration; and Richard Clarke, then a top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council. After 9/11, top officials grew increasingly concerned over the prospect of nuclear terrorism. Just weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, a dubious informant named Dragonfire warned that al Qaeda had smuggled a nuclear device into New York City; NEST teams swept the city and found nothing. But as evidence seized from Afghan camps confirmed al Qaeda's interest in nuclear technology, radiation detectors were temporarily installed along Washington, D.C., highways and the Muslim monitoring program began.
Most staff for the monitoring came from NEST, which draws from nearly 1,000 nuclear scientists and technicians based largely at the country's national laboratories. For 30 years, NEST undercover teams have combed suspected sites looking for radioactive material, using high-tech detection gear fitted onto various aircraft, vehicles, and even backpacks and attaché cases. No dirty bombs or nuclear devices have ever been found - and that includes the post-9/11 program. "There were a lot of false positives, and one or two were alarming," says one source. "But in the end we found nothing."
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"Technology will continue to advance. If there is an answer to your concerns, it's from legislation. What legislation do you suggest that will protect your privacy? Would this legislation cover both gov't and private entities? What technology should law enforcement be allowed to use, if any?"
Good and fair questions-- and I readily admit to not having answers to them worked out. I do think though that as a society we had really better get to it though, before it is too late to stop things from going too far.
I will say that I have no problem with monitoring radiation as discussed in your previous post :lol:
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"Technology will continue to advance. If there is an answer to your concerns, it's from legislation. What legislation do you suggest that will protect your privacy? Would this legislation cover both gov't and private entities? What technology should law enforcement be allowed to use, if any?"
Good and fair questions-- and I readily admit to not having answers to them worked out. I do think though that as a society we had really better get to it though, before it is too late to stop things from going too far.
I will say that I have no problem with monitoring radiation as discussed in your previous post :lol:
** "A policeman's lot is not a happy one...." Yeah, in general the public shares your ambiguity towards law enforcement. We should be omnipresent and all powerful when needed and invisible all other times. We are heroes only when our loved ones get a folded flag as bagpipes play "Amazing Grace" and donut eating, racist, bullies when we win the fight and face the monday morning quarterbacking, IAs and state and federal prosecution.**
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Ummm, , , is that aimed at me? If so, I don't deserve it.
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CD,
No, it's more generalized towards what law enforcement generally faces from a percentage of the population. What percentage exactly, I don't know, but it's often verbalized under the guise of "civil liberties" or "libertarianism". I've never seen you bash police officers and the part about "donut eating, racist, bullies" was not aimed at you at all. My apologies for my poor articulation of my frustration.
I had a long night at work and was multitasking multiple sites and was viewing www.odmp.org and http://www.sacbee.com/photos/gallery/1017048.html and was in overwrought rant mode.
No disrespect intended towards you.
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GM:
No worries!
May I suggest using this moment as an opportunity to reconsider the concerns that others and I express-- disconnected from the guises and disguises of those who take similar positions for other reasons?
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In the US, we (meaning law enforcement, in it's various versions at the local, state and federal level) work for you (meaning the citizenry as a whole). I would not want it any other way. In most states, the county Sheriff is an elected position and especially in the western US the Sheriff has a very powerful role in shaping local level law enforcement. The US is the only nation in the world with elected law enforcement officials. Something I take pride in. Every other law enforcement executive answers to an elected official or officials and every act a law enforcement officer does in this country faces multiple levels of review and potential legal jeopardy for everything we do or don't do. I knowing accept this burden as does everyone else that goes through the laborious process of becoming a law enforcement officer in this country.
I understand that an inherent skepticism of gov't is a part of the core values our nation was founded on. My frustration is when it isn't rational skepticism but something irrational.
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Would it be rational to be concerned about a Governor such as Eliot Spitzer using police intel capabilities for personal political reasons?
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Absolutely. As long as there is police power, there is the potential for the abuse of the police power. Is the answer then to not have police? That would ensure there were no abuses of police power. There are certainly those who call themselves libertarians that advocate such a position. I think a cost/benefit analysis is a better method of examining the issue.
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts224.html
I'd cite the above as a good example of what I was talking about.
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"As long as there is police power, there is the potential for the abuse of the police power. Is the answer then to not have police? That would ensure there were no abuses of police power. There are certainly those who call themselves libertarians that advocate such a position. I think a cost/benefit analysis is a better method of examining the issue."
Exactly. So what is the cost/benefit of the government being able to keep track of everyone's comings and goings?
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Depends on how the gov't is doing it. If it required a bar code tattoo and rectally implanted GPS tracking device for everyone, then the price would be too high. Certainly that's not even on the distant horizon.
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Well, the GPS device is already mandated in everyone's cell phone, and in this thread we have seen networks of cameras covering everyone's comings and goings.
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You are free to not have a cell phone, in addition there are ways around the cell phone issue. As far as cameras, do you think they are readily searchable in most cases?
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You said that we were a long way from having a GPS on everyone, and I pointed out that in point of fact they already do have a GPS on most people, so it is rather non-responsive to say that one can avoid it by handicapping oneself in the efficiency of daily communication.
As for the ease of searching the database of camera networks, I agree that at present it is a tedious thing to do, but the tedium and the load on the system of doing so in diminishing with extraordinary rapidity. I offer for your consideration that your logic is like the frog in the pot who does not notice until too late that the temperature is heading for boiling. Once the network are in place, do you think it possible to draw some sort of bright line based upon processing speed?
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There is a profound difference between a dystopian system that mandates physically implanted GPS tracking on everyone vs. a free market where you freely chose to purchase technology and carry it. There are people that live in part, or totally "off the grid". Like any choice, it has it's pluses and minuses. As new technology comes on line, it's subject to the same legal scrutiny when used by law enforcement as in decades past. The same standards of "reasonable expectation of privacy" apply as much today as they did 50 years ago. As you are focused on cameras, I would remind you that long ago the courts have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when you are in a public place or public building. Private entities are free to video record their premises at will as well.
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When cell phones first came out, they did not have GPS. Then the State mandated that they do so. Why should I have to allow the State to track me in order to use the telephone?!?
I appreciate the point about no reasonable expectation of privacy in public places, but when developed that doctrine did not have to address as we do now the matter of having all of one's comings and goings tracked.
Private entities are limited to their space, and cannot bring the power of the State to bear on whom they observe; contast Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
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And you are free to use an older cell phone without GPS capacity, given that you'll find a provider that wishes to work with the older phone. I'm sure there is a technical solution to disable GPS. You have the option of buying a prepay wireless phone you buy using cash from a cameraless retailer that would be difficult, if not impossible to trace to you, depending on your use.
Today, just as long ago, the only way to track an individual's movement is by direct surveillance, just like 19th century gumshoes.
Corrupt politicians using their power for corrupt ends are nothing new, like Tammany Hall or the teapot dome scandal.
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Congress's Fingerprint Fine Print
By JOHN BERLAU
June 23, 2008; Page A17
Fingerprints have long been considered to be among the most personal of information. Proposals for creating fingerprint databases are usually controversial and often lead to a spirited public debate. Even when a fingerprint registry will likely help fight terrorism or crime, many still fear it will lead to a surveillance state.
Yet this week a measure creating a federal fingerprint registry totally unrelated to national security or violent crime may clear the Senate with little debate. The legislation would require thousands of individuals not suspected of any wrongdoing to send their prints to the feds.
What issue is so important that it warrants creating a fingerprint database without public debate? Believe it or not, the housing slowdown. The database and fingerprint mandates are contained in the housing bailout bill that will likely come to a vote on Tuesday.
Tucked into a broad, 537-page bill (not counting tax provisions yet to be added) mostly concerned with government backing of mortgage modifications is a requirement for a registration of "loan originators." The provision says that "an individual may not engage in the business of a loan originator without first . . . obtaining a unique identifier." To obtain this "identifier," an individual is required to "furnish" to the newly created Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry "information concerning the applicant's identity, including fingerprints," that will be sent to the FBI and other government agencies.
The bill's definition of "loan originator" could cover a broad swath of employees working for mortgage lenders and brokers and real estate firms, including clerical employees, part-time and seasonal workers. An "originator" is defined as anyone who "takes a residential loan application; and offers or negotiates terms of a residential mortgage loan for compensation or gain." Real estate agents are also covered if they receive any type of compensation from "originators."
The rationale for this new fingerprint registry is thin. Were a significant number of bad loans made by ex-convicts? And how would the targeting of lower-level employees – rather than executives like Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo – stem the creation of problematic mortgages?
But one searches the Congressional Record in vain for any justification. As tech-policy columnist Declan McCullagh recently wrote in CNET.com, "What's a little odd is the lack of public discussion about this new fingerprint database." The fingerprinting requirements are not mentioned in bill summaries and press releases, or even in the table of contents of the Senate bill. Queries to the Senate Banking Committee and various senators haven't been answered.
What is clear is that many senators who fancy themselves champions of civil liberties on national security aren't as troubled in this case. The fingerprint provisions were originally contained in the Senate's S.A.F.E. Mortgage Licensing Act introduced in February. Among the 14 sponsors are two Republicans – Mel Martinez of Florida and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina – and 12 Democrats. Among the Democratic co-sponsors are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
There were also few objections when Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) folded this legislation into the bill that cleared the committee in May. That bill, with the fingerprint provisions, was voted out 19-2, without a single Democrat voting "nay." Perhaps most of the senators haven't read the fingerprint provisions. But if so, what kind of example is that for the lenders and borrowers they are supposedly trying to encourage to use due diligence?
Meanwhile, the free-market activist group FreedomWorks points to a provision of the Senate's housing tax package that would require payment settlement entities, such as eBay and Amazon, to report customer transactions over a certain threshold to the IRS. This would be done as an offset to pay for the housing tax breaks. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a liberal policy group, has testified that a similar proposal "raises serious privacy and data security concerns that are especially significant in the small business context."
As word about these provisions has spread, so has bipartisan outrage. When I wrote on the fingerprint mandate for the Competitive Enterprise Institute-affiliated blog site OpenMarket.org in late May, the post received almost 400 comments. Thom Hartmann, one of the premiere talk radio hosts of the left, has also blasted the database proposal.
But will this outrage be heard by members of Congress hell-bent on "doing something" – anything – on housing? The perverse lesson of these provisions may be that the more trivial the justification for legislation compromising privacy, the easier it is to get through.
Mr. Berlau is director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
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Again, these are not private citizens being fingerprinted for no reason, they choose to work in a field regulated by congress under it's constitutional authority, and for reasons apparently not understood by the author of the article.
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Nor by me , , ,
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In this country, robbing a bank or store will net you a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and you risk a long prison stretch, especially if a weapon is involved. On the other hand, financial crimes can net you millions of dollars and much lower risk of serious incarceration since it's not a violent crime and the ultimate victims tend to be faceless financial entities that eat the loss. Only the key problem is that they really don't suffer the loss, as it's passed onto we the consumers. We all end up paying a "crime tax" to various criminal entities that impact this country's financial infrastructure.
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"The rationale for this new fingerprint registry is thin. Were a significant number of bad loans made by ex-convicts? And how would the targeting of lower-level employees – rather than executives like Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo – stem the creation of problematic mortgages?"
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http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20080429_brodreport.htm
April 29, 2008
Mortgage Fraud Now An Organized Crime Staple
by Broderick Perkins
Mortgage fraud has become a staple in today's organized crime circles.
Fraud associated with home loans first cashed in on the greed that came with the previously booming housing market, when some buyers would do anything to own a home.
The cons used falsified applications, inflated appraisals and other techniques to get home loans approved on the home buying end.
Now, mortgage fraud is taking advantage of vulnerabilities that come with the housing market's down cycle, including homeowners, down on their luck, who face losing their homes and would do anything to avoid losing their homes.
FBI Director Robert Mueller recently testified before the U.S. Senate Appropriations panel that the "tremendous surge" in mortgage fraud investigations has been so great he has diverted agents and resources from other areas of white collar crime.
Suspicious activity reports the FBI reviews for potential mortgage fraud have grown from 3,000 in fiscal year 2003 to 48,000 in fiscal year 2007. In 2008, the FBI is on track to receive more than 60,000 such reports.
The subprime crisis will only aggravate matters, Mueller testified.
"I'm not sure at this point we can see the extent of the surge," he added.
Fraud that once primarily used inflated appraisals, "flipping" schemes and identity theft ruses to target home buying and home equity growth is now muscling in on foreclosures, reverses mortgages and subprime loans.
The FBI says known organized crime syndicates, terrorists and recognized political activists are not currently associated with mortgage fraud, but the crime does come with the hallmarks of what is considered organized crime -- collusion, conspiracy, insider cooperation and now, identity theft, one of the newest growth sectors in organized crime recognized by the FBI.
"We are investigating more than 1,300 individual mortgage fraud matters. Perhaps more importantly, we have identified 19 corporate fraud matters related to the subprime lending crisis -- cases that may have a substantial impact on the marketplace," he said.
The racketeers are also using insider trading violations connected to risky loans and the investments spun off of those loans.
On the consumer level, one of the latest cons is a bold one called "House Stealing". A con artist assumes the identity of a homeowner and transfers the deed into the con's name or sells the home outright -- even while the owner is still living there.
A variation on House Stealing includes the con artist preying on homeowners having mortgage troubles. The con promises to refinance the mortgage, but instead buys the home using a fake identity.
Mortgage fraud hotspots include California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Utah.
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That helps understand the rationale, although I am still not persuaded. And the question remains "Were a significant number of bad loans made by ex-convicts?"
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I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I bet some were. Say you or a loved one were the victim of a mortgage fraud and the perp disappeared after emptying his bank accounts. What leads do I have if as many fraudsters do, he was using a false identity?
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I once assisted in an investigation of an LA based interstate financial fraud ring that racked up more than a million dollars in losses. This was back when a million was real money. One of the tasks I had was putting the real identity of the perps to their dozens of false identities and trying to link all the other players associated with the scheme. Also, at a million plus in losses, it was still too small for the feds to be interested and was left up to the local DA to prosecute.
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http://www.usdoj.gov/ust/eo/public_affairs/articles/docs/idtheftfinal.htm
"Fresh Start or False Start?--
Identity Theft in Bankruptcy Cases"
By Jane E. Limprecht (1)
Executive Office for U.S. Trustees
Washington, D.C. (2)
Janet Doe (3) received an official-looking letter addressed to her son John. She opened the letter and discovered that it directed John to appear at a meeting of creditors convened as part of his Chapter 13 bankruptcy case. Janet was shocked at this notice, because she knew John had never filed for bankruptcy. John was five years old. Janet sought help from the nearest United States Trustee field office. She suspected that John's father--her estranged husband--filed the case to stay an impending foreclosure of the family home. The father had filed for bankruptcy twice before, and his second case had been dismissed less than three months earlier.
Ruth Roe's employment regularly took her away from home for extended periods of time. At some point, another woman began to impersonate Ruth, using Ruth's name, Social Security number, and educational and professional licensing information to take out loans for real property and vehicles in Ruth's name, and even to obtain a professional license and employment in Ruth's field. The woman failed to repay the loans, and ultimately filed a Chapter 13 petition using Ruth's name and SSN. Ruth found out about the long-standing fraud when she returned from her work assignment and discovered that her credit record was severely damaged.
One of Beth Boe's friends asked if she could transfer her house into Beth's name because she had some "tax problems." Beth also co-signed a mortgage note on her friend's house. After falling behind on the mortgage payments, the friend filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in Beth's name. The friend actually made payments on "Beth's" Chapter 13 plan for several years. Beth found out about the bankruptcy when she applied for a vacation loan. The loan was denied because of the bankruptcy filing and large home loan listed on her credit record.
At the request of her landlord, eighteen-year-old Martina Moe signed some documents the landlord needed to "help him own property." Martina did not understand that the documents named her as a co-owner of an apartment building guaranteed by a Federal Housing Administration loan. Some time later, Martina was denied credit because she had two bankruptcy filings listed on her credit record. She discovered that her landlord had filed for bankruptcy in her name to stay foreclosure on one of his rental properties. In fact, he had filed multiple bankruptcy cases in the names of numerous current or former tenants and employees. The U.S. Trustee, the Chapter 13 trustee, and an employee of the Bankruptcy Clerk had flagged the petitions as unusual; they were all filed on behalf of pro se debtors by a bankruptcy petition preparer who had previously used a false SSN, and none attempted to discharge anything but real property debt.
New Law; Federal Initiatives
Each of these cases represents a variation of identity theft--the use of another person's personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain. Historically, the "victim" of identity theft was considered to be the creditor who was deceived into extending goods or services; the person whose identity was actually appropriated had little legal recourse. In October 1998, Congress enacted theIdentity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act, 18 U.S.C. §1028 ("Identity Theft Act") to ameliorate this situation. The Identity Theft Act made it a crime to "knowingly transfer[] or use[], without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of Federal law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable State or local law."
To assist wronged victims, the Identity Theft Act designated the Federal Trade Commission as the federal clearinghouse for receiving and processing identity theft complaints, providing information to consumers, and referring consumers to the appropriate agencies for investigation of their complaints. (4) In July 2000, an FTC official testified before Congress that the agency's Identity Theft Hotline, in operation since November 1999, was already receiving more than 800 calls per week. (5) About two-thirds of these calls were from consumers who suspected they were victims of identity theft.
Violations of the Identity Theft Act are investigated by agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Secret Service, for bank and credit card fraud; the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, for mail fraud; the Social Security Administration's Office of Inspector General, for fraud relating to Social Security benefits; and the Internal Revenue Service, for tax fraud. The Justice Department handles the prosecution of cases under the Identity Theft Act. To help coordinate identity theft investigation and prosecution, the Justice Department created a working group that includes members from Justice components such as the U.S. Trustees, the FBI, and the Criminal Division; from other federal entities including the FTC, Secret Service, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, IRS, and Social Security Administration; and from state and local governments.
Federal agencies scheduled three identity theft workshops for the fall of 2000. These workshops were designed to build upon the Treasury Department's March 2000 identity theft "summit meeting," which brought together federal, state, and local government representatives, consumer advocacy groups, credit organizations, and others in the private sector to develop a public/private partnership to prevent identity theft and help its victims. On October 23-24, the FTC hosted a public workshop focusing on assisting victims of identity theft, which included a presentation by U.S. Trustee staff. On October 25, the Social Security Administration held a second public workshop to address means to prevent identity theft. On December 6, the Justice Department's Criminal Division and the Secret Service will host a workshop on law enforcement, with attendance limited to representatives of law enforcement agencies.
Identity Theft and Bankruptcy
A significant number of identity theft cases are related to bankruptcy in some way. The U.S. Trustee Program's primary role on the Justice Department's identity theft working group is to outline the various ways in which identity theft intersects with bankruptcy, and to explain how the Program can assist law enforcement as it monitors the integrity of the bankruptcy system.
The cases described earlier in this article merely hint at the range of actions that may constitute bankruptcy-related identity theft. Forms of bankruptcy-related identity theft include, without limitation:
Filing for bankruptcy using the name and/or SSN of another known person, such as a parent, sibling, child, or other relative; a spouse, ex-spouse, "significant other" or ex-significant other; a current or former business partner, co-employee, cosigner on a debt, friend, neighbor, or fellow student; or even a deceased person.
Incurring debt under a false name and/or Social Security number and then filing for bankruptcy, using that name and/or number, to discharge the debt. Sometimes this debt is owed to the government, via a farm loan, small business loan, student loan, or similar obligation.
Transferring property into the name of a relative or friend, and then filing for bankruptcy using that person's name and/or SSN to avoid foreclosure. Typically the transferee agrees to the transfer "to help out," but does not understand the legal ramifications.
Filing for bankruptcy using a false name and/or SSN that was apparently randomly chosen, because it does not belong to a person known to the perpetrator.
Transferring a fractional interest in real property into the name of an innocent person whose bankruptcy case is pending. The pending case stays foreclosure on the perpetrator's real property once the innocent debtor is listed as a partial owner.
Using a false SSN when identifying oneself as a bankruptcy petition preparer.
In many instances, it appears that bankruptcy cases are filed under a false identity solely to obtain the benefit of the automatic stay, primarily to delay foreclosure or eviction. In such cases, the filer fails to appear at the Section 341 meeting of creditors and the case is dismissed. A record of the filing remains, however, in the court record and on the victim's credit record.
In extreme cases of identity theft, a perpetrator may wholly co-opt another person's identity--obtaining driver's and professional licenses, obtaining employment, applying for apartments, taking out home and automobile loans, applying for credit cards, and even receiving traffic tickets and warrants under the false identity. Illegal immigration rings have used this method to create identities for illegal aliens. The false name and SSN are initially used to obtain employment, and subsequently to establish credit; ultimately, the illegal alien files for bankruptcy using the false name and SSN to discharge the debt incurred. Whatever the circumstances surrounding such a "total identity steal," the bankruptcy filing is only part of a complex scheme of impersonation, which often collapses only when the victim discovers the fraudulent bankruptcy cases listed in his or her name.
Warning Signs
Typically, a fraudulent bankruptcy filing comes to the attention of bankruptcy professionals when the victim contacts the U.S. Trustee's office to inquire why he or she has received notice of a Section 341 meeting in the mail, or why a bankruptcy is listed on his or her credit record. There are other warning signs, however, to which bankruptcy professionals and lenders should be alert. They include:
A client's failure to bring a purported joint debtor to meet with bankruptcy counsel. One debtor wife asked her bankruptcy attorney to let her take the bankruptcy petition home for her husband to sign, because he was too busy to come with her to the attorney's office. In fact, she forged her husband's name on the joint petition and filed it without his knowledge.
A debtor's failure to appear at the Section 341 meeting. In the case described above, the debtor wife appeared at the meeting of creditors with a man who falsely claimed to be her spouse and falsely testified that he had signed all of the documents. It is much more common, however, for the fraudulent filer not to appear at the Section 341 meeting. In such a case, the bankruptcy petition may have been filed solely for the purpose of temporarily avoiding foreclosure or eviction, without the knowledge of the true holder of the name and SSN.
The same real property listed in different bankruptcy cases. This may indicate that a perpetrator is filing serial cases in multiple false names to avoid foreclosure on the property.
Bankruptcy petitions, filed serially in the same or neighboring jurisdictions, that contain the same debtor's name but different SSNs; the same names with different middle initials; or slightly different forms of the same name.
Remedies
Cases of suspected bankruptcy-related identity theft should be reported to the nearest U.S. Trustee field office (6). In addition to harming the victim, identity theft clearly impairs the integrity of the bankruptcy system. U.S. Trustee employees may, if appropriate, pursue various civil enforcement remedies.
By statute, the Program is a neutral party that represents the public interest. Thus, U.S. Trustee staff cannot directly represent the victim, who would be well advised to obtain private counsel to address the specific problems caused by the identity theft. Nonetheless, civil enforcement remedies that promote the integrity of the bankruptcy system often benefit the identity theft victim as well, and staff often work with the victim to obtain information necessary for enforcement actions. Depending upon the circumstances of the case and the procedures preferred by the Bankruptcy Courts in the local jurisdiction, actions by U.S. Trustee staff may include:
Moving to dismiss a pending case in which the bankruptcy filer used a false name and/or SSN. In some cases the U.S. Trustee also seeks a specific court finding that the named person did not file the case or authorize the filing, and that the signature was a forgery.
Moving to expunge or void a pending or closed case. The U.S. Trustee seeks expungement from the case docket as well as the court's automated system, and in some cases seeks to have the hard copy of the case file sealed.
Moving to correct the debtor's SSN in the bankruptcy court record.
Moving to have the discharge revoked or the discharge date extended until the SSN is corrected.
Moving for an in rem order for relief from the automatic stay with respect to all real property interests in the debtor's name.
Moving to vacate the order for relief.
Placing the burden upon the debtor to amend the petition to correct the SSN; to obtain a court order that the true holder of the number did not file the bankruptcy case or authorize it to be filed; and to serve that order upon the three major credit reporting agencies.
As in any other case of suspected criminal bankruptcy fraud, assisting law enforcement by helping to obtain relevant information and documents, advising on bankruptcy law, providing expert testimony at trial, and generally providing expertise on bankruptcy law and procedure.
New Identification Procedure
Over the last few years, a number of U.S. Trustee offices and private trustees have introduced procedures to better detect the use of a false name and/or SSN in bankruptcy cases. In some districts, for example, the U.S. Trustee requires photo identification or notarized verification of SSN for Section 341 meetings conducted by tele-conference. In other districts, Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 trustees require debtors to produce photo identification and proof of SSN.
The U.S. Trustee Program has begun work to initiate, in 19 districts, a pilot program that will require identification at the Section 341 meeting. The pilot program is modeled after the Program's first region-wide debtor identification procedure, launched by Region 11 U.S. Trustee Ira Bodenstein in the fall of 1999. All Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 debtors who file in the region--which consists of Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, with headquarters in Chicago--are now required to provide the panel trustees and standing trustees with proof of identity and SSN at the Section 341 meeting.
Region 11 adopted this policy after uncovering a substantial number of instances of incorrect SSNs on bankruptcy petitions. While some of these were typographical errors, others were instances of Social Security and/or identity fraud that were referred to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution.
Region 11 initiated the identification procedure in September 1999 with the Chapter 7 panel trustees in Chicago. By mid-November 1999, all panel trustees and standing trustees in the region were requiring all debtors to comply. In general, implementation proceeded smoothly, and practitioners in the region now routinely inform their clients that proof of identity and SSN will be requested at the Section 341 meeting. Acceptable forms of identification include a driver's license, state identification card, or passport. Proof of SSN may be provided through documents such as a driver's license, Social Security card, or payroll check stub.
If a debtor fails to provide adequate proof of identity and SSN at the Section 341 meeting, the trustee automatically continues the meeting to the trustee's next date for meetings. If the debtor provides an SSN different from the one listed on the petition, the trustee asks the debtor to explain the discrepancy, reports the matter to the U.S. Trustee field office, and continues the Section 341 meeting; the debtor's attorney is expected to file an amended petition with the correct SSN before the continued meeting date. The debtor's attorney may be required to notify the three major credit reporting agencies that the SSN was used erroneously.
If debtor's counsel does not file the amended petition, the trustee delays the filing of the no-asset report and/or seeks dismissal of the case. Before the continued Section 341 meeting, the U.S. Trustee field office investigates whether the incorrect SSN was used intentionally or inadvertently, using a proprietary public records search data base. If it appears that the use was intentional, the U.S. Trustee or the private trustee files a motion to dismiss the case or deny discharge, and the matter is referred to the U.S. Attorney for criminal prosecution.
Typographical errors in SSNs have declined noticeably since this identification procedure was instituted in Region 11, resulting in a more reliable official record. In addition, the new policy has helped to maintain the accuracy of innocent victims' credit records, by identifying incorrect use of an SSN long before the victim might otherwise have learned of the error.
Clearly, this identification procedure will not catch all instances of bankruptcy-related identity theft. Some filers will fail to attend the Section 341 meeting; others may produce false identification at the meeting. As the nationwide pilot program takes shape, however, the identification procedure will be fine-tuned--with input from the bankruptcy community--to improve its efficiency and effectiveness within each pilot location. Taken as a whole, the Section 341 meeting identification procedure, the civil enforcement remedies pursued by U.S. Trustee staff and private trustees, and the Program's continuing participationwith concerned public and private groups will help fight bankruptcy-related identity theft.
End Notes
1. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the United States Department of Justice or the United States Trustee Program.
2. The author wishes to thank the United States Trustee Program employees who provided information for this article. For more information about bankruptcy-related identity theft, see "'What Do You Mean, I Filed Bankruptcy?' or How the Law Allows a Perfect Stranger to Purchase an Automatic Stay in Your Name," Maureen Tighe (United States Trustee for Region 16) and Emily Rosenblum, 32 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 1009 (June 1999).
3. These examples of identity theft are based on cases reported to the United States Trustees, but the names of all individuals have been changed.
4. To help disseminate information to the public, both the Justice Department and the FTC have developed web sites containing a wealth of information about identity theft. The Justice Department web site is www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fraud/idtheft.html. The FTC web site is www.consumer.gov/idtheft.
5. Testimony of Jodie Bernstein, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information (7/12/00).
6. Contact information for United States Trustee field offices is available at www.usdoj.gov/ust.
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http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fraud/websites/idtheft.html
Part of the bigger picture.
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http://www.mortgagefraudblog.com/images/uploads/Bonneau_Indictment.pdf
An indictment worth reading.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/05/narcoterrorists-i-hate-these-guys/
The global nature of crime in the 21st. century.
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MSNBC.com
Post 9/11 dragnet turns up surprises
Biometrics link foreign detainees to arrests in U.S.
By Ellen Nakashima
The Washington Post
updated 12:49 a.m. MT, Sun., July. 6, 2008
In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.
There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.
The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.
"I found the number stunning," said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. "It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States."
The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond "known or suspected" terrorists.
Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.
Civil libertarians have raised concerns about whether people on the watch lists have been appropriately determined to be terrorists, a process that senior government officials acknowledge is an art, not a science.
Large-scale identity systems "can raise serious privacy concerns, if not singly, then jointly and severally," said a 2007 study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Biometrics. The ability "to cross reference and draw new, previously unimagined, inferences," is a boon for the government and the bane of privacy advocates, it said.
An FBI mission
The effort, officials say, is bearing fruit.
"The bottom line is we're locking people up," said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. "Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That's the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We're pushing our borders back."
In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station.
The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database.
As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.
"Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all," recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified "a potential vulnerability" to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.
The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. "One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad," he said. "They'd already made this commitment."
One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.
Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group.
The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency's database.
While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.
Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. "It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture," he said. "Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas."
Errors in matching, though rare, have occurred. In a noted 2004 case, Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was erroneously named as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. FBI lab analysts matched a print lifted from a plastic bag at the crime scene to his fingerprints that were stored in the FBI's criminal database because of a 1985 arrest for auto burglary when he was a teenager. The charge had been dismissed. After a critical Justice Department Inspector General audit, the FBI made fixes in its system. A recent inspector general report found the FBI fingerprint matching to be generally accurate.
Worries about watch list
Civil libertarians, however, worry that the systems are not transparent enough for outsiders to tell how the government decides who belongs on a watch list and how that information is handled.
"The day when the federal government can tell people the basis they've been put on the watch list is the day we can have more confidence in biometric identification," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Vetting the data is the job of analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center, an office park-like complex in McLean run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Analysts there scour intelligence reports to create the master international terrorist watch list.
"You cannot draw a bright red line and say that's a terrorist, this person isn't," said Russ Travers, an NCTC deputy director. "If somebody swears allegiance to Bin Laden, that's an easy case. If somebody goes to a terrorist training camp, that's probably an easy case. What if a person goes to a camp and decides, 'I don't want to go to a camp, I want to go home.' Where do you draw the line?"
Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person's biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots.
For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.
Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.
Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.
In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.
If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants' prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials.
Steve Nixon, a director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the effort is key to national security.
"When we look at the road and the challenges, globalization and the spread of technology has empowered small groups of individuals, bad guys, to be more powerful than at any other time in history," he said. "We have to know who these people are when we encounter them. A lot of what we're doing in intelligence now is trying to identify a person. Biometrics is a key element of that."
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25550354/
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http://www.nwfdailynews.com/common/printer/view.php?db=nwfdn&id=9057
Think about 911 before ditching your landline
Robbyn Brooks
June 29, 2008 - 8:12PM
In some ways, it makes sense to ditch a landline bill and use a cellular telephone service.
And it may be awfully tempting to switch to a Voice over Internet Protocol phone service, such as Vonage, when the company advertises lower rates and no need for a long-distance service.
However, such choices come at the cost of a potentially longer response time for an emergency call.
"911 is sometimes an afterthought," said Daniel Dunlap, Okaloosa County's 911 coordinator.
When a call comes through a landline, a 911 dispatch center can see the caller's physical address at the least, Dunlap said. If you're choking and can't speak, rescuers will still know where to go.
A cell phone call, on the other hand, uses global positioning technology to create a map that helps rescuers locate a caller. Triangulation between three towers pinpoints the location, but even then the result may be off by about 300 meters.
"It might just give me a general location," Dunlap said. "Sometimes, we get the location of the nearest cell
tower instead of the cell phone."
Even so, that technology has its benefits. Dunlap remembers a caller who said he was in Fort Walton Beach when he really was in Destin Commons' parking lot.
Companies that offer phone service over the Internet (VoIP) don't use a traditional 911 center, said Ken Bass, the 911 coordinator for Santa Rosa County.
A VoIP emergency call placed through Vonage, for example, is routed through that company's 911 center. A customer service representative then patches the call through to police, fire or medical agencies.
A couple of problems can emerge then, Bass said. When the call is patched through to a local dispatch center, the caller's phone number and address don't appear on the screen. Also, if callers fail to update their home address information after a move, the wrong address is passed from the VoIP service to 911.
Portability available with that type of phone service can be a hurdle. Vacationers sometimes bring their VoIP phones on a trip and don't realize they need to register a temporary location with the company.
"Their system doesn't know you packed your phone up and moved it," Bass said.
As a rule, 911 is available all the time, whether a caller is paying for phone service or not, Dunlap said.
With a landline, a person needs only plug a working phone to access the service. However, that line may not register with the correct home address because numbers are reassigned by phone companies.
Cell phones work in the same fashion. As long as a phone is charged, 911 calls can be made even if service is not paid for.
Bass cautions that even landlines aren't foolproof.
Those who pay a phone service that isn't at their home should make certain the phone company knows the 911 address is different from the billing address. That mixup occurs often with people who pay for an elderly parent's phone service or with people who have vacation homes.
"The biggest problem is that people don't think they'll ever need 911," Bass said. "None of us do until we have to use it."
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http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121694247343482821.html
What Bush and Batman Have in Common
By ANDREW KLAVAN
July 25, 2008
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."
Warner Bros. Pictures
There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.
"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.
Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.
Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?
The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?
The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.
Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.
Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless.
The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.
When heroes arise who take on those difficult duties themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."
That's real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.
Perhaps that's when Hollywood conservatives will be able to take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day.
Mr. Klavan has won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. His new novel, "Empire of Lies" (An Otto Penzler Book, Harcourt), is about an ordinary man confronting the war on terror.
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I have to say I believe there is some validity to the argument that it is more OK for blacks to use the N word than whites. There were many times I have seen Jewish comedians over the years poke fun of Jews, "yentas", "making reservations for dinner" (not food), "black belt in shopping" etc. Can one imagine the Jewish outrage we would have heard if a *non-Jew* used these kinds of jokes in their comedy routine?
But I agree with Chuck's point about this. There is a line that gets crossed. The N word is deragatory no matter who uses it. It would be the equivalent of someone making jokes about the holocaust. Even Jews couldn't get away with that outrage. I agree with the notion that black slavery was their "black holocaust". Lets get rid of the N word. And Whoopi stop being a jerk and do not defend the use of that word. You only disparage your own when you do.
With regards to using the "N" word this is Chuck Norris" view:
****Chuck Norris: What the Bleep?!
Thursday, July 24, 2008 10:54 AM
Jesse Jackson (on an off-air mic before "Fox & Friends") and Whoopi Goldberg (and another host on "The View") have raised the cultural language debate to a new level: Who has the right to say the N-word? Their answer: Blacks can, but whites can't. Unfortunately, this derogatory debate has degraded into Don Imus on steroids.
I agree with a lot that Whoopi had to say about the imbalances between the races. But I disagree with her for going off on an intentional N-word marathon, which was bleeped out repeatedly in order to demonstrate her point. There's a reason her diatribe was bleeped and our society still veils our full expression of the N-word: because it still is regarded by most as derogatory and demeaning. (Even among blacks, the N-word obviously can be defamatory, as Jesse Jackson proved when he used it in the same breath he used
This is more than a race issue and far more than a debate over freedom of speech. When will we learn that just because we can say something doesn't mean that we should? Once again, we're confusing liberty for licentiousness. It is a classic example of what happens when a society leaves its moral absolutes: Everything becomes culturally relative, with each deciding what's right in his own eyes. Language is one more infected arena in America's societal degradation.****
By the way, Crafty, have you ever met Chuck?
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Not sure why this is in the Libertarian thread-- I'd have placed it in the Politically (In)correct thread :lol:
In my lifetime I have seen the PC word for blacks go from "negro" to "black" to "African-american". I have been the only white member of a 9 man band and heard them use the N-word amongst themselves. What of it?
For me the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.
PS: I met Chuck once through the Machado Brothers. He seemed very humble and genuine-- which is his reputation.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers' laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold then for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies.
Agents are empowered to share the contents of seized computers with other agencies and private entities for data decryption and other reasons, the newspaper said.
DHS officials said the policies applied to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens, and were needed to prevent terrorism.
The measures have long been in place but were only disclosed in July, under pressure from civil liberties and business travel groups acting on reports that increasing numbers of international travelers had had their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices removed and examined.
The policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes -- as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials, the report said.
The policies require federal agents to take measures to protect business information and attorney-client privileged material. They stipulate that any copies of the data must be destroyed when a review is completed and no probable cause exists to keep the information.
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Quoting from another forum- caveat lector:
"Here's a link to the actual government DHS policies "allowing" them to do this:
http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/..._authority.pdf
There's two current solutions:
1) Encrypt everything (PGP Whole Disk would be my recommendation)
2) Don't travel with electronic media
Keep in mind if you encrypt, shut your computer OFF entirely before travelling - don't leave it hibernating or sleeping, as it's potentially possible to capture the keys out of memory with a hardware hack."
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http://news.cnet.com/
Police blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd
By Declan McCullagh
http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Laptop-border-searches-OKd/2100-1030_3-6098939.html
Story last modified Thu Jul 27 05:30:52 PDT 2006
"Police blotter" is a weekly CNET News.com report on the intersection of technology and the law.
What: A business traveler protests the warrantless search and seizure of his laptop by Homeland Security at the U.S.-Canada border.
When: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules on July 24.
Outcome: Three-judge panel unanimously says that border police may conduct random searches of laptops without search warrants or probable cause. These searches can include seizing the laptop and subjecting it to extensive forensic analysis.
What happened, according to court documents:
In January 2004, Stuart Romm traveled to Las Vegas to attend a training seminar for his new employer. Then, on Feb. 1, Romm continued the business trip by boarding a flight to Kelowna, British Columbia.
Romm was denied entry by the Canadian authorities because of his criminal history. When he returned to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, he was interviewed by two agents of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.
They asked to search his laptop, and Romm agreed. Agent Camille Sugrue would later testify that she used the "EnCase" software to do a forensic analysis of Romm's hard drive.
That analysis and a subsequent one found some 42 child pornography images, which had been present in the cache used by Romm's Web browser and then deleted. But because in most operating systems, only the directory entry is removed when a file is "deleted," the forensic analysis was able to recover the actual files.
During the trial, Romm's attorney asked that the evidence from the border search be suppressed. The trial judge disagreed. Romm was eventually sentenced to two concurrent terms of 10 and 15 years for knowingly receiving and knowingly possessing child pornography.
The 9th Circuit refused to overturn his conviction, ruling that American citizens effectively enjoy no right to privacy when stopped at the border.
"We hold first that the ICE's forensic analysis of Romm's laptop was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine," wrote Judge Carlos Bea. Joining him in the decision were Judges David Thompson and Betty Fletcher.
Bea cited the 1985 case of U.S. v. Montoya de Hernandez, in which a woman arriving in Los Angeles from Columbia was detained. Police believed she had swallowed balloons filled with cocaine, even though the court said they had no "clear indication" of it and did not have probable cause to search her.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court said police could rectally examine De Hernandez because it was a border crossing and, essentially, anything goes. (The rectal examination, by the way, did find 88 balloons filled with cocaine that had been smuggled in her alimentary canal.)
Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented. They said the situation De Hernandez experienced had "the hallmark of a police state."
"To be sure, the court today invokes precedent stating that neither probable cause nor a warrant ever have been required for border searches," Brennan wrote. "If this is the law as a general matter, I believe it is time that we re-examine its foundations."
But Brennan and Marshall were outvoted by their fellow justices, who ruled that the drug war trumped privacy, citing a "veritable national crisis in law enforcement caused by smuggling of illicit narcotics." Today their decision means that laptop-toting travelers should expect no privacy either.
As an aside, a report last year from a U.S.-based marijuana activist says U.S. border guards looked through her digital camera snapshots and likely browsed through her laptop's contents. A London-based correspondent for The Economist magazine once reported similar firsthand experiences, and a 1998 article in The New York Times described how British customs scan laptops for sexual material. Here are some tips on using encryption to protect your privacy.
Excerpt from the court's opinion (Click here for PDF):
"First, we address whether the forensic analysis of Romm's laptop falls under the border search exception to the warrant requirement...Under the border search exception, the government may conduct routine searches of persons entering the United States without probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or a warrant. For Fourth Amendment purposes, an international airport terminal is the "functional equivalent" of a border. Thus, passengers deplaning from an international flight are subject to routine border searches.
Romm argues he was not subject to a warrantless border search because he never legally crossed the U.S.-Canada border. We have held the government must be reasonably certain that the object of a border search has crossed the border to conduct a valid border search....In all these cases, however, the issue was whether the person searched had physically crossed the border. There is no authority for the proposition that a person who fails to obtain legal entry at his destination may freely re-enter the United States; to the contrary, he or she may be searched just like any other person crossing the border.
Nor will we carve out an "official restraint" exception to the border search doctrine, as Romm advocates. We assume for the sake of argument that a person who, like Romm, is detained abroad has no opportunity to obtain foreign contraband. Even so, the border search doctrine is not limited to those cases where the searching officers have reason to suspect the entrant may be carrying foreign contraband. Instead, 'searches made at the border...are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border.' Thus, the routine border search of Romm's laptop was reasonable, regardless whether Romm obtained foreign contraband in Canada or was under "official restraint."
In sum, we hold first that the ICE's forensic analysis of Romm's laptop was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."
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Good contribution GM, as usual.
Still, does not the idea of the government prowling through people's papers (i.e. their computers) make you uneasy?
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Not really. Without googling the numbers, the number of people, cargo and vehicles crossing US borders daily is immense. Only a tiny fraction are searched under the border search doctrine. There is a compelling interest for the US government to control what enters and exits the United States. Also, very few nations you might be transiting to/from have a greater degree of privacy rights than the US, thus your "reasonable expectation of privacy" is very little, if any.
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Left behind on the board and left behind by the country is the libertarian aspect of government-run healthcare. A questioner of soon to be former Sen. Arlen Specter put it bluntly and accurately: ""I have spent 35 years in information technology. I read this bill very closely. You are about to concentrate more information about more Pennsylvanians and Americans in this bill in one place in the computers of Washington that has ever occurred."
If anyone out there is undecided about 'universal' coercive, healthcare or against it but haven't communicated that strongly to all your representatives yet, did you know:
* Besides asking about bike helmets, your pediatrician already asks your kid if there are guns in the house and puts the note in the file, soon to be government file.
* The IRS that some wanted to eliminate is the enforcement agency written into the healthcare bill.
* The U.S. Census will be asking in your MANDATORY questionnaire about your health insurance VERIFICATION and the coverage you carry for all in your household (in spite of the fact that they will communicate nothing they find about illegal immigration to the INS.) http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/hlthins/verif.html "In March 2000, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) added an experimental health insurance "verification" question. Anyone who did not report any type of health insurance coverage was asked an additional question about whether or not they were, in fact, uninsured. Those who reported that they were insured were then asked what type of insurance covered them."
"The Verification Questions
The universe for the March CPS verification questions consists of all households with at least one uninsured person. (The March CPS employs household-level screening questions, so the question universe has to be described in household terms.) The ultimate aim of the questions was to find out which of the 42. 6 million people classified as uninsured from the sequence of questions that ask about specific insurance types are, in fact, uninsured. For all households that fall into this universe, a version of the question below is asked.1
I have recorded that (read names) were not covered by a health plan at any time in 1999. Is that correct?
<1> Yes
<2> No
If the answer is "NO", we ask: Who should be marked as covered?
For all those people, we then ask: What type of insurance was (name) covered by in [year xxxx]?"
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Quoting straight from the Census link above. I will re-post in Census thread, but I felt a strong need to link this to the issue and principle of citizen liberty and government-invaded privacy. - Doug
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Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
By SARAH LYALL
Published: October 24, 2009
POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.
A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.
But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).
It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case, now scheduled to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here.
The Poole Borough Council, which governs the area of Dorset where Ms. Paton lives with her partner and their children, says it has done nothing wrong.
In a way, that is true: under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.
But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs.
“Does our privacy mean anything?” Ms. Paton said in an interview. “I haven’t had a drink for 20 years, but there is nothing that has brought me closer to drinking than this case.”
The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organizations.
Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits and enlist undercover “agents” to pose, for example, as teenagers who want to buy alcohol.
In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” in the year ending in March and that other public authorities carried out roughly the same amount.
Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The Poole Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute illegal fishing in Poole Harbor.
“RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we make limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are no other means of gathering evidence,” Tim Martin, who is in charge of legal and democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London, said in a statement.
The fuss over the law comes against a backdrop of widespread public worry about an increasingly intrusive state and the growing circulation of personal details in vast databases compiled by the government and private companies.
“Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world,” the House of Lords Constitution Committee said in a recent report. It continued: “The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine and almost taken for granted.”
The Lords report pointed out that the government enacted the law in the first place to provide a framework for a series of scattershot rules on surveillance. The goal was also to make such regulations compatible with privacy rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.
RIPA is a complicated law that also regulates wiretapping and intrusive surveillance carried out by the security services. But faced with rumbles of public discontent about local governments’ behavior, the Home Office announced in the spring that it would review the legislation to make it clearer what localities should be allowed to do.
“The government has absolutely no interest in spying on law-abiding people going about their everyday lives,” Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, said.
One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of surveillance are usually unaware that they have been spied on.
Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s telephone billing records.
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“As far as I’m concerned, they’re within their rights to scrutinize all applications, but the way they went about it was totally unwarranted,” Ms. Paton said. “If they’d wanted any information, they could have come and asked.”
She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was moving from their old house within the school district to a new one just outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they were still living at the old address when school applications closed.
At the meeting, Ms. Paton and her partner, Tim Joyce, pointed out that the surveillance evidence was irrelevant because the surveillance had been carried out after the deadline had passed.
“They promptly ushered us out of the room,” she said. “As I stood outside the door, they said, ‘You go and tell your friends that these are the powers we have.’ ”
Soon afterward, their daughter was admitted to the school. Ms. Paton began pressing local officials on their surveillance tactics.
“I said, ‘I want to come in and talk to you,’ ” she said. “ ‘How many people were in the car? Were they men or women? Did they take any photos? Does this mean I have a criminal record?’ ”
No one would answer her questions, Ms. Paton said.
Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners, which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole council had acted properly. “They said my privacy wasn’t intruded on because the surveillance was covert,” she said.
The case is now before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which looks into complaints about RIPA. It usually meets in secret but has agreed, Ms. Paton said, to have an open hearing at the beginning of November.
The whole process is so shrouded in mystery that few people ever take it this far. “Because no one knows you have a right to know you’re under surveillance,” Ms. Paton said, “nobody ever makes a complaint.”
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**I take back everything I've said to those that see every attempt at law enforcement as evidence of the US rapidly devolving into a police state. The evidence for your arguements has become too compelling.**
NH artist protests halt to Bigfoot project
From Associated Press
January 06, 2010 12:42 AM EST
JAFFREY, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire artist and videographer who dressed as Bigfoot in a state park says his rights were trampled by big government.
Jonathan Doyle, of Keene, has complained in a letter to the state parks department that a Mount Monadnock park ranger halted his performance art project in the fall because he didn't have a permit.
Doyle is arguing through the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union Foundation that his free-speech rights were violated when he was expelled from the state park in Jaffrey. He says he and others with him, some also in costume, were on a lesser-used trail and weren't bothering other park visitors.
Doyle says the state hasn't responded to his letter. The Division of Parks and Recreation says it has been forwarded to the state attorney general's office.
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Information from: The Keene Sentinel, http://www.keenesentinel.com
**First they came for those in the bigfoot suits, I said nothing as I did not wear a bigfoot suit.....**
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Now I know why I am avoiding you- why is a permit required? It is simply another means to tax people. The guy is a nut, but does that give you the right to whip out the big "curbside manner" stick?
Too bad there isn't an ignore button mr prison bull.
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Too bad there isn't an ignore button mr prison bull.
Ya know, I'd write a comment on just how futile name calling is likely to prove to be in this particular circumstance, but for the fact that I already know how unrewarding a turn things will soon take.
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Gentlemen:
Let us remember we are sitting at the dinner table having a pleasant post-prandial conversation.
Crafty Dog
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By JOHN R. EMSHWILLER And GARY FIELDS
New York businessman James Lieto was an innocent bystander in a fraud investigation last year. Federal agents seized $392,000 of his cash anyway.
An armored-car firm hired by Mr. Lieto to carry money for his check-cashing company got ensnared in the FBI probe. Agents seized about $19 million—including Mr. Lieto's money—from vaults belonging to the armored-car firm's parent company.
He is one among thousands of Americans in recent decades who have had a jarring introduction to the federal system of asset seizure. Some 400 federal statutes—a near-doubling, by one count, since the 1990s—empower the government to take assets from convicted criminals as well as people never charged with a crime.
Last year, forfeiture programs confiscated homes, cars, boats and cash in more than 15,000 cases. The total take topped $2.5 billion, more than doubling in five years, Justice Department statistics show.
The expansion of forfeiture powers is part of a broader growth in recent decades of the federal justice system that has seen hundreds of new criminal laws passed. Some critics have dubbed the pattern as the overcriminalization of American life. The forfeiture system has opponents across the political spectrum, including representatives of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union on the left and the Heritage Foundation on the right. They argue it represents a widening threat to innocent people.
"We are paying assistant U.S. attorneys to carry out the theft of property from often the most defenseless citizens," given that people sometimes have limited resources to fight a seizure after their assets are taken, says David Smith, a former Justice Department forfeiture official and now a forfeiture lawyer in Alexandria, Va.
Backers of the system say there are adequate protections for the innocent, and describe the laws as a powerful tool for returning money to crime victims.
The government has recovered for eventual distribution to victims more than $650 million from imprisoned swindler Bernard Madoff and others who received money from his scheme. Federal officials are in the process of recovering over $6.5 billion more from the Madoff fraud.
Last year, federal authorities say, some $293 million of forfeiture proceeds were returned to crime victims nationally, nearly double the amount in 2009. The Justice Department filed about 90,000 criminal cases last year. There were forfeiture actions in a total of about 3,700 criminal cases, double the number of five years earlier.
.Supporters further say there should be many more forfeiture actions. Even an imprisoned criminal "can have a smile on his face because he is going to be able to enjoy the proceeds of his crime when he gets out," says Charles Intriago, a former federal prosecutor and now president of the International Association for Asset Recovery, a Miami organization for asset-recovery specialists.
Forfeiture law has its roots in the Colonial days, when it was used to battle pirates and smugglers. In the 1970s and 1980s, Congress began giving law-enforcement officials power to go after the assets of other criminals, such as organized-crime figures.
The more than 400 federal statutes allowing for forfeiture range from racketeering and drug-dealing to violations of the Northern Pacific Halibut Act, according to a December 2009 Congressional Research Service report. The report shows that seizure powers were extended to about 200 of those laws in 2000 in a major congressional overhaul of the forfeiture system.
Top federal officials are also pushing for greater use of civil-forfeiture proceedings, in which assets can be taken without criminal charges being filed against the owner. In a civil forfeiture, the asset itself—not the owner of the asset—is technically the defendant. In such a case, the government must show by a preponderance of evidence that the property was connected to illegal activity. In a criminal forfeiture, the government must first win a conviction against an individual, where the burden of proof is higher.
Raul Stio, a New Jersey businessman, is caught up in the civil-forfeiture world. Last October, the Internal Revenue Service, suspicious of Mr. Stio's bank deposits, seized more than $157,000 from his account. Mr. Stio hasn't been charged with a crime.
In a court filing in his pending civil case, the Justice Department alleges that Mr. Stio's deposits were structured to illegally avoid an anti-money-laundering rule that requires a cash transaction of more than $10,000 to be reported to federal authorities. Mr. Stio made 21 deposits over a four-month period, each $10,000 or less, the filing said.
Steven L. Kessler, Mr. Stio's attorney, says there was no attempt to evade the law and that the deposits merely reflected the amount of cash his client's businesses, a security firm and bar, had produced. Mr. Stio was saving to buy a house, he says.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the case.
Speaking about civil forfeiture broadly, another Justice Department official called it a tool of "critical" importance in taking away the ill-gotten gains of international criminal organizations operating in the U.S. Otherwise, participants in criminal operations such as these might often be beyond federal authorities' reach, leaving asset seizure as one of the ways authorities can target an operation.
In fiscal year 2010, there were more than 11,000 noncriminal forfeiture cases, according to available federal statistics. That figure has held fairly steady the past five years.
It's tough to know how many innocent parties may be improperly pulled into the forfeiture system. Last year, claimants challenged more than 1,800 civil-forfeiture actions in federal court, Justice Department figures show.
Justice Department officials say they rarely lose such cases, a fact they cite as evidence the system is working properly. Forfeiture attorneys counter that the government often settles cases, returning at least part of the seized assets, if it thinks it might lose.
Part of the debate over seizures involves a potential conflict of interest: Under a 1984 federal law, state and local law-enforcement agencies that work with Uncle Sam on seizures get to keep up to 80% of the proceeds.
Last year, under this "equitable-sharing" program, the federal government paid out more than $500 million, up about 75% from a decade ago.
The payments give authorities an "improper profit incentive" to seize assets, says Scott Bullock of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm in Arlington, Va. It's a particular concern amid current state and local government budget problems, he contends.
Justice Department officials say the 8,000 state and local agencies in the equitable-sharing program have greatly expanded the federal government's ability to go after criminal activities, particularly the movement of drugs and drug cash along the nation's highways. The program is monitored to ensure seizures are handled properly, they add.
Seeming abuses occasionally emerge. In 2008, federal Judge Joseph Bataillon ordered the return of $20,000 taken from a man during a traffic stop in Douglas County, Neb. Judge Battaillon quoted from a recording of the seizure, in which a sheriff's deputy complained about the man's attitude and suggested "we take his money and, um, count it as a drug seizure."
The judge's order said the case produced "overwhelming evidence" that the funds were clean.
Douglas County Sheriff Tim Dunning said the remarks made by his officers on the recording were "uncalled for" and "had a potential for tainting the case." But overall, he says, the seizure was handled properly. Since 2002, he says, his department has earned $11 million in equitable-sharing money.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Nebraska said the deputy's remarks were "a rare and isolated event."
About a decade ago, the forfeiture system got a major overhaul. The 2000 Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, or Cafra, put in protections for individuals, including increasing the government's burden of proof in many proceedings. Cafra also extended forfeiture powers to additional crimes.
Cafra's new safeguards didn't go far enough, critics argue. For instance, reformers failed to win a broad guarantee that poor people would have access to a lawyer. "It isn't much good to say you have the right to get your property back if you can't afford a lawyer," said the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) at a 1999 congressional hearing.
Jorge Jaramillo, a construction worker, says he couldn't afford a lawyer after more than $16,000 was seized from him last year in a traffic stop. "I had all of $20 left," he says.
In a Delaware federal-court filing, the Justice Department argued the money was related to drug dealing. It pointed to air fresheners in the car, which could mask the smell of drugs, and a fast-food bag containing cigar tobacco, which the filing said was often a sign that the cigar wrapper had been used to smoke marijuana.
The filing also said a police dog had signaled that the cash carried residue of illegal drugs. Such "dog sniffs" are a common but controversial feature in forfeitures.
Mr. Smith, the Virginia attorney, represented Mr. Jaramillo at no upfront cost. In court documents, Mr. Jaramillo, who wasn't charged with a crime, said he was carrying the money because he was traveling to buy a car from a seller who wanted cash.
The government in May agreed to return Mr. Jaramillo's money, with interest. Mr. Smith was also awarded $6,000 in attorney's fees. Under Cafra, attorneys' fees in civil-forfeiture cases are at least partially payable if the claimant wins.
The Cafra reforms helped Mr. Jaramillo find a lawyer even though he says he had no money. Still, forfeiture attorneys say this feature of the law is being eroded in some instances. In April, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Cafra attorney's fee should be paid to the client, not directly to the lawyer. Lawyers say this makes it possible for the government to seize their fees if the client has a tax lien or other obligation.
Mr. Lieto, the New York businessman, discovered the frustrations an innocent party can face as he worked for months to keep open his check-cashing business after federal agents seized his firm's working capital.
For years, according to court filings, Mr. Lieto used an armored-car company to pick up cash from his bank for delivery to his check-cashing outlets. The sealed bank bags were routinely stored overnight in the car company's vault. In February 2010, the FBI raid seized the $19 million as part of the fraud probe.
Under the law, an innocent third party generally can't seek an asset's return until the underlying criminal case is resolved, which can take time. In this case, two men pleaded guilty last fall to a multi-million-dollar fraud.
An innocent party's money is returnable if it's clearly separate from the fraud. Mr. Lieto's two sealed and marked bank bags with the $392,000 qualified, his attorney, Mr. Kessler, argued in court filings. Others among the scores of customers made similar claims.
The government countered that the crooks' operation, which included the armored-car service, routinely commingled customers' money. Thus, everyone had to get in line as fraud victims.
Court records indicate that fraud victims might get about 25 cents or less on the dollar. However, in February the government agreed to give Mr. Lieto's money back in full.
Mr. Lieto's lawyer, Mr. Kessler, had filed a deposition from a vault manager who had watched Mr. Lieto's two still-sealed bags being loaded onto the FBI's truck. If the bags were opened and commingled, it was done by authorities, a Lieto court filing argued.
Write to John R. Emshwiller at john.emshwiller@wsj.com and Gary Fields at
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Sec. 40304. Revocation or denial of passport in case of certain unpaid taxes.
“Congress has included an item in the Highway Funding Bill S. 1813 – a provision that allows the IRS to order the State Department to revoke a US citizen’s passport if it is believed – not proven – that said taxpayer owes more than $50,000 in back taxes.”
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Sec. 40304. Revocation or denial of passport in case of certain unpaid taxes.
“Congress has included an item in the Highway Funding Bill S. 1813 – a provision that allows the IRS to order the State Department to revoke a US citizen’s passport if it is believed – not proven – that said taxpayer owes more than $50,000 in back taxes.”
That's just creepy.
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In these parts we think of Al Franken as the 60th vote in the Senate that brought us Obamacare.
In Montana, the libertarian candidate in 2006 won 10,000 votes while the red state seat went to the Dems by 3500 votes.
To those voters: How are your new liberties working out for you?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/what-swing-states-senate-majority-hinges-on-red-states-and-blue-states/2012/04/20/gIQAQlVCWT_blog.html
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/congressmen-seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q03cWio-zjk
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/15/1162077/-Libertarians-provided-the-margin-for-Democrats-in-at-least-nine-elections#
Matheson 108,275 Love 105,629 Vein 5,703 2.6% 2,646 -3,057
As we've perused last week's election returns, we'd noticed a number of races where Libertarian candidates appear to have played spoiler for Republicans—certainly, more than we're accustomed to. While we haven't run a comparison with prior cycles, we've identified no fewer than nine contests in 2012 where the Libertarian received more votes than the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates. What's more, none of these involved the typical 1 or maybe 2 percent you ordinarily expect a Lib to garner: Looking at the three-way vote, all but one were over 3 percent, and three took 6 percent or more, with a high of 6.5 percent in the Montana Senate race. These definitely seem like unusually high figures.
So what's going on here? I wouldn't want to speculate too much based on this limited data set. But I could easily believe that a growing proportion of conservative-leaning voters are too disgusted with the GOP to pull the Republican lever, but who won't vote for Democrats either, are choosing a third option and going Libertarian instead. This thesis dovetails with something else we saw this year: independents generally leaning more rightward simply because at least some former Republicans are now refusing to identify with their old party. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that some folks like that don't want to vote for their old party either.
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Is that Mia Love who lost because of the Libertarian vote?
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Is that Mia Love who lost because of the Libertarian vote?
It looks like she is one of them.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/magazine/has-the-libertarian-moment-finally-arrived.html?emc=edit_th_20140810&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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From Ace.mu.nu
Democratic Party: We're so brain-dead, we're on track to completely destroy ourselves by 2020.
Libertarian Party: Hold my beer:
Follow
Libertarianism.org ✔ @libertarianism
Islamic teachings are consistent w many libertarian principles, such as tolerance, property rights & individualism. http://bit.ly/2eZ18lZ
12:08 PM - Sep 5, 2017
Photo published for Islam
Islam
Islamic teachings contribute to or are consistent with many libertarian principles, such as tolerance, property rights, and the strength of individuals.
libertarianism.org
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/377881.php
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/15/1162077/-Libertarians-provided-the-margin-for-Democrats-in-at-least-nine-elections#
Matheson 108,275 Love 105,629 Vein 5,703 2.6% 2,646 -3,057
As we've perused last week's election returns, we'd noticed a number of races where Libertarian candidates appear to have played spoiler for Republicans—certainly, more than we're accustomed to. While we haven't run a comparison with prior cycles, we've identified no fewer than nine contests in 2012 where the Libertarian received more votes than the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates. What's more, none of these involved the typical 1 or maybe 2 percent you ordinarily expect a Lib to garner: Looking at the three-way vote, all but one were over 3 percent, and three took 6 percent or more, with a high of 6.5 percent in the Montana Senate race. These definitely seem like unusually high figures.
So what's going on here? I wouldn't want to speculate too much based on this limited data set. But I could easily believe that a growing proportion of conservative-leaning voters are too disgusted with the GOP to pull the Republican lever, but who won't vote for Democrats either, are choosing a third option and going Libertarian instead. This thesis dovetails with something else we saw this year: independents generally leaning more rightward simply because at least some former Republicans are now refusing to identify with their old party. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that some folks like that don't want to vote for their old party either.
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Respect for the Libertarian.
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Francis Wendt, chair of the Montana Libertarian Party, said his party was not endorsing Rosendale. (even though the libertarian candidate did)
"We do not endorse any candidate in the Democratic or Republican party," he said, adding most Libertarians are pragmatist and know their chances of winning are often slim.
https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2018/10/31/libertarian-withdraws-montana-senate-race/1833577002/
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The candidate dropped out. The chances of him winning are not slim; they are zero. Do the math. Study the science. The odds are exactly zero.
There are ways to advance "libertarian" issues. Helping to reelect a Democrat Senator and helping to cause a future Democrat Majority Senate in a state that Trump won by 21 points is ... counterproductive, understatement, to find a word without profanity.
Not so much respect (from me) in cases like these. Especially when the Democrat has been known to win by propping up the Libertarian siphoner of his opponent's support.
People of Montana, take a good look at the libertarian and small government prospects under Speaker Pelosi, Senate Schumer and President Kamala.
Maybe take a day trip from Miles City to Kalispell and back at 55 mph, or take mass transit, while you're considering your liberties.
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(https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/11/Screen-Shot-2018-11-02-at-1.31.10-PM.png?resize=600%2C345&ssl=1)
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Son: What is the difference between theory and reality?
Dad: Go ask your sister if she would sleep with Brad Pitt for one million dollars. As your mom the same thing for (fill in name of some older handsome actor).
He does and they both answer enthusiastically in the affirmative. He reports this back to his dad, who then says:
“In theory we are worth two million dollars but in reality we are living with a pair of sluts.”
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/libertarian-ideas-are-great-voting-libertarian-self-defeating_3574826.html
Someone else expresses this view.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/libertarian-ideas-are-great-voting-libertarian-self-defeating_3574826.html
Someone else expresses this view.
Libertarian Ideas Are Great, Voting Libertarian Self-Defeating
November 11, 2020 Updated: November 11, 2020 Print
Commentary
As of this writing, the votes separating Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are less than the numbers gained by Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen who garnered close to 1.7 percent of the popular vote.
As Joel Pollak wrote on Breitbart.com, “If Jorgensen’s votes went to Trump, instead of allowing Biden to win these states, the president would win re-election, with 289 Electoral College votes.”
Whether this is absolutely true is, of course, unknowable, but given the current leftward-lurching Democratic Party that seems about as libertarian as Chairman Mao, if push came to the proverbial shove, the majority of Ms. Jorgensen’s voters likely would have gone to Trump.
She seems like a decent person but Jorgensen—interviewed here by Jan Jekielek for his compelling American Thought Leaders series—is a textbook example of what I termed a “moral narcissist” in my 2016 book “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.”
What the moral narcissist claims she believes (in this case Jorgensen, but there are many similar self-described liberals and progressives as well)—not the actual results of those beliefs—is what defines her as a person and makes her good.
Joel Pollak made those results in Jorgensen’s case painfully clear in the link above, but they are arguably even worse in the long run.
The more libertarian ideas are debated within the Republican Party, the more that party’s candidates will have to respond to them and, potentially, espouse them. They will have real world implications.
When you waste them on something as inconsequential as a fringe and almost entirely ignored Libertarian Party candidacy, particularly in something so hotly contested as a presidential election, you vitiate them and are ultimately self-defeating, not to mention, as we have seen, sabotaging the only viable candidate who best carries your ideas.
Trump is far from a pure, or even relatively pure, libertarian, but compared to Joe Biden—especially given what surrounds him from Bernie Sanders to Kamala Harris to AOC—he’s a veritable Ron Raul.
Moreover, the “deplorables” who are, oddly, more libertarian than Trump on the street level—they wish more than anything to be left alone by government—could push or could have pushed Trump more in their direction during a second term, especially after the pandemic.
Which leads to the ultimately more important question of the efficacy of ideological purity. Is it self-defeating in and of itself?
Taking almost any ideology to extremes raises significant problems. On the left, it couldn’t be more obvious because it leads to the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. But ultra-libertarianism has problems as well, though thankfully not as fatal.
I have become increasingly libertarian over the years, but believe that government has a role, and not just in national defense and public safety. Some social safety net is finally necessary too, for moral and practical reasons, but must be designed to lift people out of that net, not keep people addicted to it.
Ideological purity tends to blind you to the reality in front of you or become what Thomas Sterne in the 18th Century termed “hobby-horsical.”
For the 2012 election I spent an hour interviewing Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson for PJMedia (then Pajamas Media). Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, spent the entire time talking about the importance of legalizing marijuana.
Now although I was not and am not adverse to this (with the caveat that potheads can indeed be blockheads and that there are serious potential health issues), I rank and ranked the issue way down the list of presidential priorities, somewhere near the bottom.
But try as I might to raise serious questions of foreign and domestic policy, Johnson kept returning to his hobby horse of legal “grass” as if that were the linchpin of human freedom and the most significant issue we faced.
I walked away from that interview disappointed in much the same way I reacted to the interview linked above with Jorgensen, of whom, I admit, I was only tangentially aware. Her candidacy seemed finally to about her and not even about the ideas she so adamantly espoused.
With all due respect, and I mean this because I don’t know the woman, that’s moral narcissism in action. We see it everywhere.
Be libertarian as you want, but do it in a way that gets results. Otherwise, it’s just another charade.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, a columnist for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). Find him on Parler and Twitter (for now)
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/libertarian-ideas-are-great-voting-libertarian-self-defeating_3574826.html
Someone else expresses this view.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, a columnist for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). Find him on Parler and Twitter (for now)
Yale educated Liberal masquerading as a conservative because he didn't like the OJ verdict.
Our votes just had "real world implications."
I'll end there as to show the requisite amount of respect.
Edit: it bears mentioning, that Libertarians pilot many of the freedoms you're seeing enacted now.
Johnson ushered in legalized marijuana.
Jorgensen ushered in legalized drugs in Oregon.
You'll see more of it.
Libertarians play the long game. It works.
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The leftist coast is crushing the libertarian interior of Oregon in a dozen different ways, yet you think because of drug legalization freedom is winning?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/libertarian-ideas-are-great-voting-libertarian-self-defeating_3574826.html
Someone else expresses this view.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, a columnist for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). Find him on Parler and Twitter (for now)
Yale educated Liberal masquerading as a conservative because he didn't like the OJ verdict.
Our votes just had "real world implications."
I'll end there as to show the requisite amount of respect.
Edit: it bears mentioning, that Libertarians pilot many of the freedoms you're seeing enacted now.
Johnson ushered in legalized marijuana.
Jorgensen ushered in legalized drugs in Oregon.
You'll see more of it.
Libertarians play the long game. It works.
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The leftist coast is crushing the libertarian interior of Oregon in a dozen different ways, yet you think because of drug legalization freedom is winning?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/libertarian-ideas-are-great-voting-libertarian-self-defeating_3574826.html
Someone else expresses this view.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, a columnist for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). Find him on Parler and Twitter (for now)
Yale educated Liberal masquerading as a conservative because he didn't like the OJ verdict.
Our votes just had "real world implications."
I'll end there as to show the requisite amount of respect.
Edit: it bears mentioning, that Libertarians pilot many of the freedoms you're seeing enacted now.
Johnson ushered in legalized marijuana.
Jorgensen ushered in legalized drugs in Oregon.
You'll see more of it.
Libertarians play the long game. It works.
"2020: Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota approve ballot measures to legalize recreational cannabis. Mississippi approves a ballot measure to legalize medical cannabis. South Dakota voters also approve medical cannabis."
Odd. I don't see the "Leftist Coast" in any of that. I'll leave the "dozen ways" ambiguity out of it and speak with specifics.
Libertarians' most powerful weapon of enacting process is by doing exactly the opposite of what Simon says to do, and by actively holding Libertarian votes hostage....until Republicans or Liberals yield.
This tactic is frequently used in countries where three party (or more) politics is the norm. I suggest adherents of the Right and the Left here, accustom themselves with it. Terribly effective.
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy88qy/oregon-just-voted-to-decriminalize-heroin-cocaine-and-meth
https://www.registerguard.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/06/27/oregon-man-arrested-after-refusing-to-wear-face-mask/42108711/
Freedom is on the march!
The leftist coast is crushing the libertarian interior of Oregon in a dozen different ways, yet you think because of drug legalization freedom is winning?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/libertarian-ideas-are-great-voting-libertarian-self-defeating_3574826.html
Someone else expresses this view.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, a columnist for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). Find him on Parler and Twitter (for now)
Yale educated Liberal masquerading as a conservative because he didn't like the OJ verdict.
Our votes just had "real world implications."
I'll end there as to show the requisite amount of respect.
Edit: it bears mentioning, that Libertarians pilot many of the freedoms you're seeing enacted now.
Johnson ushered in legalized marijuana.
Jorgensen ushered in legalized drugs in Oregon.
You'll see more of it.
Libertarians play the long game. It works.
"2020: Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota approve ballot measures to legalize recreational cannabis. Mississippi approves a ballot measure to legalize medical cannabis. South Dakota voters also approve medical cannabis."
Odd. I don't see the "Leftist Coast" in any of that. I'll leave the "dozen ways" ambiguity out of it and speak with specifics.
Libertarians' most powerful weapon of enacting process is by doing exactly the opposite of what Simon says to do, and by actively holding Libertarian votes hostage....until Republicans or Liberals yield.
This tactic is frequently used in countries where three party (or more) politics is the norm. I suggest adherents of the Right and the Left here, accustom themselves with it. Terribly effective.
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Make sure I have this right. I gained a government-run drug industry but lost the right to work and keep and pass on any of the fruit of my labor, lost my right to choose my own Healthcare, lost my right to choose my own vehicle, lost my right to go outside or go to a restaurant, lost my right to choose the school of my children, lost my right to local control over anything, lost my right to bear arms. (Let's discuss that last one in the gun rights thread.) Lousy trade, don't you think?
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The Leftist totalitarian policies are not something any libertarian endorses. Libertarians don't get blamed for the overstepping of either major party, anymore than the Right gets blamed for the Left - as it should be.
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In my humble view, you do everything you can to stop the takeover of socialism, fascism, totalitarianism in this country or you are complicit. Each get to choose how to fight it, but if you don't do everything you can to stop it, you are complicit, IMHO.
Denial that they (the Left) are burning our country down is a difference of opinion. "Let it burn" is being complicit.
Two-thirds of those who voted Libertarian for president in 2016 switched to making the binary choice in 2020. 3/4hs of those lean Trump over Biden, Republican over Democrat. By this metric, the "we" that T speaks of, broke for the binary choice. Only the last 1% did not. Now it looks like the last 7 states were decided by far less than 1%.
The losing party, Republicans in this presidential race it appears, don't have to worry about how to split up the spoils of victory with the different members of the coalition. That problem goes with the winners, the party of coercive paternalism with central government making what used to be your individual choices for you. Opposite of libertarian.
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In my humble view, you do everything you can to stop the takeover of socialism, fascism, totalitarianism in this country or you are complicit. Each get to choose how to fight it, but if you don't do everything you can to stop it, you are complicit, IMHO.
Denial that they (the Left) are burning our country down is a difference of opinion. "Let it burn" is being complicit.
Two-thirds of those who voted Libertarian for president in 2016 switched to making the binary choice in 2020. 3/4hs of those lean Trump over Biden, Republican over Democrat. By this metric, the "we" that T speaks of, broke for the binary choice. Only the last 1% did not. Now it looks like the last 7 states were decided by far less than 1%.
The losing party, Republicans in this presidential race it appears, don't have to worry about how to split up the spoils of victory with the different members of the coalition. That problem goes with the winners, the party of coercive paternalism with central government making what used to be your individual choices for you. Opposite of libertarian.
Solid point. Will address later today.
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(https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-13-at-8.46.54-PM.png?w=1116&ssl=1)
Cocaine: Legal. Plastic straw: Banned. Too dangerous. Liberty Democrat style.
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https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/095/696/873/original/16c9d3c0cfcc7a84.png
(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/095/696/873/original/16c9d3c0cfcc7a84.png)
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https://notthebee.com/article/argentinas-new-libertarian-president-javier-milei-immediately-cuts-number-of-cabinet-members-in-half-after-taking-office?utm_source=Not+The+Bee+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12122023