Tag Archives: government

Be Careful what you Wish For

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As the Wall Street Journal notes,

Video cameras played a critical role in helping authorities track suspects in this week’s Boston bombings.  Now calls for increased camera surveillance in the US are putting a spotlight on the technology and the debate about its use.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about that city’s surveillance system.  It can

alert police to abnormalities it detects on the street, such as an abandoned package that is left on a corner.

Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Police Commissioner, said on Fox News Sunday:

It gives you that historical record.

But such a ubiquitous government-run surveillance system also can alert government to abnormalities of which it disapproves—like individual citizens taking part in “right-wing extremist” peaceful rallies and meetings.  And there’s that government record on us private citizens thing, again.

In the present case, though, the matter of the Boston Marathon bombing, whose cameras were they?  The government’s cameras were involved in the data collection and subsequent hunt, certainly.  However, so were thousands of privately owned still and video cameras—all those smart phone cameras in the hands of Marathon fans and other ordinary citizens just out taking care of their own business in the area.

It was private citizens’ imagery and private citizens’ eye witness reports (one injured witness: “he looked right at me” and the boat owner’s sighting and 911 call) that generated the imagery, descriptions, and location data that so thoroughly supported the hunt, the tracking, and the capture.

Does government, today, really need such a widespread surveillance system?  No doubt the government’s surveillance cameras were highly useful, too, in this incident.  A tool for keeping track of the citizenry that’s in government hands, though, is subject to misuse, even if the tracking is for the best of reasons, as our government might assure us.  A tool for tracking one’s neighbors—or strangers—in private hands is subject to misuse, also, certainly.

Think, though, about which misuse is capable of the greater damage.

Think, also, about the extant government abuse of its surveillance capability.  Already, for instance, the present administration (and both national political parties) are scraping social media for personally identifying data for government (and party) purposes.  The IRS already is asserting its authority to read, without a court’s order, private email as part of its investigations (while denying it actually does so).  Do we need government actively tracking us private citizens?

Hmm….

More Government Intrusion

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Although the Internal Revenue Service denies that it actually does this, of course.  Documents obtained from the IRS by the ACLU pursuant to an FOIA request demonstrate that the IRS believes that it can snoop into private email without first obtaining a search warrant.  The warrant, of course, would require the IRS to convince a court both that they know with some specificity for what they’re searching and that they have probable cause for the searching.

According to a 2009 IRS employee handbook, though, the tax agency said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users don’t “have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.”

And

…the current online version of the IRS manual says that no warrant is required for emails that are stored by an Internet storage provider for more than 180 days.

Never mind the degree of mind reading required of the IRS (and the courts) to arrive at a conclusion concerning what a private citizen has in his own mind concerning his own expectations.  This is a blatant attempt by the IRS simply to slide past our courts as if they had no existence—or relevance to the Internal Revenue Service.

On that matter of email older than 180 days, or on opened email not requiring a warrant, it seems to me that the age and opening criteria create a false dichotomy in privacy and 4th Amendment rights.

Age is wholly irrelevant.  Privacy has no expiration date.

Having opened a correspondence in no way puts that correspondence, of necessity, into the public arena.  Opening a letter and leaving it on a table next to my couch at home certainly does not, nor does leaving an email on my personal PC or laptop.  Nor does having a copy of my email on an Internet service provider’s servers, whether I’ve opened the email or not.  The ISP’s failure to manage its storage in no way causes any alteration of my privacy.

Too, in what way are providers required to turn over that which does not belong to them—they’re pipelines, not publishers or authors in this context, after all?

Finally, a question: what’s the government’s “view” on encrypted correspondence that’s been left on a provider’s server for more than 180 days?  Am I obligated by that, somehow, to give up the encryption key on government demand with no warrant extant?

The Mouse that Roared?

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With The People’s Republic of China confirming the northern Korea has been conducting live-fire drills near its border with the PRC, and with northern Korea having closed the Kaesong factory complex jointly run by northern Korea and the Republic of Korea—the last formal tie between nK and the RoK—a rude thought occurs to me.

Is Kim the Youngest smarter, more Machiavellian, than we give him credit for?

He has to know, after vacationingschooling in Switzerland as a younger youth just how badly off the northern Korean people are.  He might even consider them “his” people.  If he does, and if he’s of a mind to do anything about it, he also has to know that proposing reunification talks—a lá occupied Germany and the FRG—both is a death sentence for him and will blow up the government.  After all, the PRC has not fallen, and so it can still prop up a follow-on nK government, even if like the failed Soviet Union, it has no interest in bettering the lives of commoners.  The blowup, then, would have no effect vis-à-vis the outside world; although it would make things even worse internally, especially during the turmoil.

So, what’s a boy to do?  Start a fight he knows he can’t win, lose the fight, and get occupied.  If he burns a few (tens of thousands of) innocent bodies in the process, well, he is the product of three-plus generations of give-a-s*t about human life.

About all of his bluster and buildup: it might be of a piece with prior blusters, now getting out of control in the hands of a tyro.  But his actions sure are guaranteeing that the ones he’s going to attack are very well prepared for that attack.

The rat that roared?

Nah.  Probably not.

Gun Control…Ignorance

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…or outright dishonesty.  As one demonstration, we have a breathtakingly ignorant claim from the Congresswoman who’s pushing a gun control bill in the House of Representatives.  Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D, CO) actually said this, out loud and in public, about firearm magazines and the usefulness of banning them:

These are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available[.]

For another demonstration, we have Barack Obama’s similarly ignorant (or, in his case, deliberately distorting) claim about the weapons used in the Sandy Hook massacre—the latest crisis this Progressive is trying not to let go to waste.  It’s interesting to note, also, that he made this remark at one of his campaign stops in in San Francisco [emphasis in the original].

…it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon—by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.

Leaving aside his arrogance in presuming—contra the 2nd Amendment—that the Federal government has authority to determine the permissible purposes for owning weapons, Obama knows two things about this: he knows that that Lanza killed his victims with a semi-automatic rifle, not a fully automatic one, and he knows the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a fully automatic one.

It’s Bad

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…when the court pokes fun at a case.

In Bayou Lawn, et al., v Department of Labor, Bayou Lawn, the Chamber Of Commerce of the United States of America, the National Hispanic Landscape Alliance, the Silvicultural Management Associates, Inc., and the Professional Landcare Network, among others, objected to a number of wage rules and bureaucratic requirements related to the H-2B visa program that had been promulgated by DoL.  Among other things, these groups doubted DoL’s authority even to write such rules.

Nor were DoL’s rules insubstantial:

These rules would decrease the maximum number of months an employer may employ an H-2B worker from ten to nine; require employers to guarantee that H-2B employees will work at least seventy-five percent of the hours certified in any twelve-week period and, if not, pay the employees the difference for the time not worked; require employers to pay non H-2B workers’ wages and benefits at least equal to those paid to H-2B workers if the two perform “substantially the same work;” require employers to pay for the round-trip airfare and subsistence costs of H-2B workers; and impose additional bureaucratic requirements, such as the filing of job orders, performing extensive domestic recruitment, and applying for a temporary labor certification.

A Federal court in Florida agreed and enjoined DoL from enforcing its rules.  DoL appealed, even while conceding that it had no actual authority for promulgating these rules [emphasis in the original]:

The DOL does not dispute that it has no express authority to make rules for the H-2B program.

Rather, DoL argued in all seriousness,

DOL counters that its authority may be inferred from the “statutory scheme [that] shows a Congressional intention to grant [it] rulemaking power.”

And here is the scheme that DoL argued [emphasis still in the original]:

[Federal law] instructs the Secretary of DHS to consult with the “appropriate agencies of the Government” in resolving whether to grant a foreign worker a visa upon the “petition of the importing employer.”  Although there is no grant of rulemaking authority to DOL in this statutory section, DOL asserts that as the result of the permission it grants to DHS to consult with it, DOL “has authority to issue legislative rules to structure its consultation with DHS.”  The end result, in DOL’s view, is that it is empowered to engage in rulemaking, even without the DHS.

The 11th Circuit thought this pseudo-reasoning…foolish.

We reject this interpretation of “consultation.”  Under this theory of consultation, any federal employee with whom the Secretary of DHS deigns to consult would then have the “authority to issue legislative rules to structure [his] consultation with DHS.”  This is an absurd reading of the statute and we decline to adopt it.
…
DOL was designated a consultant.  It cannot bootstrap that supporting role into a co-equal one.
…
DOL next argues that the “text, structure and object” of the INA evidence a congressional intent that DOL should exercise rulemaking authority over the H-2B program. This would be a more appealing argument if Congress had not expressly delegated that authority to a different agency.

And so on.

Just what is the competence level in this administration?

The 11th‘s ruling can be read here and here.

 

h/t Law Blog