Category Archives: ethics

Information Privacy

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In a burst of good sense, the Federal Trade Commission is on the right track.  Earlier this week, it “issued a strong call for commercial-data collectors to adopt better privacy practices and called for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation.”  While I have no great confidence in Congressional skill at protecting our privacy, this would be a better choice than leaving our information to the tender mercies of “commercial-data collectors.”  As FTC Chairman, Jon Leibowitz, notes,

Simply put, your computer is your property.  No one has the right to put anything on [your computer] that you don’t want[.]

The FTC’s initial solution, though, is at best naïve.  Putting a “Do Not Track” button into Web browsers is doomed to failure as Google’s decision to ignore even user-deliberate attempts to prevent their browsers from yielding up personal information demonstrates.  Such a button will not prevent the data collection; it can only rely on a “Pretty please, Mr Data taker, don’t take my data” plea.  Beyond that, the data collectors already are weasel-wording the meaning of “Do Not Track.”  The online-ad industry, for instance, has decided it means “Do Not Target,” and it will still collect your data for “market research,” “product development,” and the like.  Oh, and “trust us.”

The need for overt controls that actually block the collection rather than relying on begging and the good offices of the collectors is demonstrated by, even more than the equivocations, the rank cynicism of those collectors and their objections.  The Wall Street Journal article at the first link cites the Executive Vice President of the Direct Marketing Association, Linda Woolley—whose group represents many of those data hounds—as saying her Association opposes

giving consumers access to marketing information because it would be expensive, difficult to keep secure and the type of data used by marketers doesn’t harm consumers.

Sorry, Madam, your costs aren’t relevant to my privacy.  You don’t get to hide from me what you’re trying to take from me because that might hurt your pocketbook.  As to your plaint that such data would be “difficult to keep secure,” it’s not secure now.  You’re already taking it without our permission, and often without our knowledge, and as Google has demonstrated, and as Apple has demonstrated with its unauthorized tracking via our smart phones.  Worse, your view of “security” is markedly different from ours.  And on what basis should we believe your claim that the data you’re taking from us to be “used by marketers” doesn’t harm us when you’re at such pains to hide those data from us?

Woolley says,

We are very wary about taking the information out of the information economy[.]

Since it’s not your information in the first place, and we’re only looking to recover that which you’ve taken without authorization, no data are being taken “out of the information economy.”  Your argument could be used by the burglar, who having successfully stolen the jewelry from our house, also is “wary of taking…out of [his] economy.”

More than just Cheating

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last Sunday the results of its extensive investigation into standardized testing results across the country, and its discoveries were appalling.  The links under “Related” in the left margin tell the tale (read them all; the series is illuminating).  I’ll just offer a few highlights.  It’s important to note that the AJC makes no bones about their analysis: the statistical results do not prove cheating.  However, the results to demonstrate utterly anomalous test scores and score movements from year to year.

Extreme swings in test scores, the paper reported,

occurred in several major urban school systems, including Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Mobile County, Alabama.

In Houston,

test results for entire grades of students jumped two, three or more times the amount expected in one year, the analysis shows.  When children moved to a new grade the next year, their scores plummeted[.]

One particularly egregious example occurred at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy in St. Louis. MO.  The AJC reported that in 2010 42% of fourth-graders passed the state’s math test (an appalling teaching performance in its own right). The following year, just 4% of those same students passed the state’s math test when they took it as fifth-graders.  The AJC added that while the 2011 tests were administered, the school was under intense scrutiny as a result of earlier cheating allegations.

Dr Andres Alonso, Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore, MD, school district, noted that the AJC’s analysis found very large year-on-year changes that, in general, were score reductions following intensified efforts by his staff to prevent cheating in his Baltimore schools.  That intensified effort was a result of Alonso’s own investigation, triggered by a complaint at a PTA meeting.

Others, though, like Nashville, TN, district officials, responded by challenging the AJC’s methodology.  These officials emphasize both the high turnover of children in and out of their districts and that for many of their children English is not the primary language.  The AJC, though, while addressing Nashville’s concerns, points out that lots of other districts—vis., Chicago, Los Angeles, Amarillo, Texas—have similarly high student turnover, and similarly high numbers of students for whom English is not their primary language, and these districts did not have a similarly high incidence of suspicious test results.

There also are the usual cop-out excuses from those more interested in turning a blind eye to the problem than in doing the hard work of actually solving it.  Standardized test scores, they complain, put undue pressure on the teachers to do their jobs.  It’s true enough that test scores typically inform teacher evaluations and/or bonuses.  Other, more interested, educators correctly point out, however, that “cheating is a moral choice.”  No one stuck guns in these cheaters’ ears’, if cheating is what’s going on, and forced the misbehaving educators to misbehave and shortchange our children and their education.

Indeed, the objections to the analysis outcomes do not serve to deny that any cheating is occurring.  The objections instead center on three items: a) justification of the behavior because the teachers are under so much pressure; b) objection to the analysis’ methodology, as with Nashville above; and c) denial of the results.  Detroit, for instance, insisted that its scores were not “unusual or out of line in any way.”

Overall, the AJC reports, 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had tests results whose odds of occurring by chance alone were less than 1 in 1,000.  That’s fully 6% of those largest districts.

Cheating on this scale, if that’s what is behind those suspicious scores, is more than just cheating.  These cheaters are doing more than just defrauding you and I out of our tax money.  These cheaters are doing worse than short-changing our children.  These cheaters are doing worse than abusing our children.  These cheaters are setting a devastating moral example for our children.  These cheaters also are threatening our nation’s security—and threatening the welfare of those children’s children thereby.

How is our nation supposed to compete in the world when our citizens are just adult ignoramuses because teacher and school administrator organizations like this make no effort at all actually to educate our children?  How is our nation supposed to compete in the world—or set an example for it—when tomorrow’s adults are morally destitute?

“Free” Contraceptives and Abortions

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As the Supreme Court takes up the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act this week, I want to talk a bit about a small aspect of that Act that’s also been in the news lately—the mandate to provide free birth control and pregnancy “correction” services.  I’ll have some ramblings on the PPACA itself in a nearby post.

The original Health and Human Services mandate was that employers would be required to provide contraception and abortion health insurance coverage at no additional cost to their employees.  After the hue and cry over this assault on religious freedom—too many faith-based employers exist—President Obama “compromised” by putting the mandate off onto these employers’ insurance companies.  Of course this ignores all those faith-based employers that self-insure, but enough is enough—the Progressives have accommodated, now it’s on the rest of us to compromise by sitting down and shutting up.

The Wall Street Journal, in a recent editorial, talked about the economic aspect of this adjusted mandate, focusing on the still free part of the services.  The WSJ asked

Insurers are banned from charging higher premiums for extra benefits, so out of what mists will the necessary dollars materialize?

Health and Human Services claims that

Actuaries and experts have found that coverage of contraceptives is at least cost neutral, and may save money, when taking into account all costs and benefits for the issuer.

These must be the same actuaries and experts that assured Congressman Henry Waxman (D, CA) that PPACA itself wouldn’t be raising the cost of health insurance, so how dare AT&T, et al., announce just such cost increases in their SEC filings?

On the other hand, goes the argument, faith-based employers can simply hire insurers to run benefits and then directly pay their workers’ bills.  In this way, religious organizations will pay for the contraception and abortion coverage with only a token middle man.   But this is just a cynical sophistry.  Whether paying directly or through a “token middle man,” these organizations are still being forced to pay for a violation of their teachings and their conscience.

And this brings me to a larger problem with this mandate, the reduction on individual freedom that it represents.  Ann Patchett, in another op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, argues with a straight face that

If you are a Catholic, as I am, and birth control is covered in the insurance plan of the Catholic institution that employs you, you still don’t have to use it.

This is certainly true.  But she ignores the critical aspect of this: “you,” woman or man, must still pay for it.  Even though it violates your conscience, your religious teaching, to do so.

She goes on, with a justification all too common among Progressives:

If you are galled by the idea of paying for the birth control of people you do not know, people who might be using it to have wanton sex, stop and make a list of all the other troubling ways your tax dollars are spent. Contraception will probably not make the top 10.

Thus, because others have done wrong, or in this case because there are already a lot of misuses of our tax dollars, it’s OK to commit this wrong.  There’s an interesting logic.  Furthermore, this bit of argument carefully elides the loss of choice: no longer can a woman or a man choose to buy, or not to buy, contraception or abortion.  Now we all must buy them.

Finally, the argument also carefully elides a larger loss of freedom: the freedom of religion and conscience.  Now men and women of faith must violate their religious teachings, their conscience—not of their own free will (and the Progressives have made much of their non sequitor that vast hordes of Catholic women use contraception and even (gasp!) get abortions), but from government fiat.  Government supplants conscience, Government supplants God.

One for the Good Guys

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“The Clean Water Act prohibits the discharge of any pollutant by ‘any person,’ without a permit, into ‘navigable waters’,” noted the Supreme Court in the summary of its just concluded ruling in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency.  It went on in that summary:

The Sacketts, petitioners here, received a compliance order from the EPA, which stated that their residential lot contained navigable waters and that their construction project violated the Act.

A little background at this point: the case got to the Supreme Court because Mike and Chantell Sackett began construction on their dream home in 2007, on a lot completely surrounded by a developed residential neighborhood, complete with lots of already existing sewer lines.

The EPA decided that this completely residentially surrounded lot had wetlands on it connected to navigable waters, and it issued a compliance order to desist from construction and to restore the wetlands (violation of the order carried potential penalties of $75,000 per day—for those keeping score at home, that works out to an accrued penalty of $130 million).  Rather than rolling over and giving up on their dream, the Sacketts sought relief in Federal District Court for the District of Idaho (their property was in Bonner County, ID), arguing among other things an illegal taking under the Constitution’s 5th Amendment.  The Court dismissed and the Ninth Appellate (of course) sided with the EPA and upheld the District Court.  After all, the Ninth held, the CWA has no mechanism for a private citizen to object to the EPA’s diktat, and so there was no standing to sue.  The Sacketts appealed to the Supremes.

The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling was short and sweet in its essence:

The Sacketts may bring a civil action under the APA to challenge the issuance of the EPA’s order.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the Court, also had this to say about the government’s arrogance, particularly its claim that were EPA compliance orders subject to judicial review, the EPA’s ability to enforce clean water protections would be interfered with [emphasis mine]:

The Government warns that the EPA is less likely to use the orders if they are subject to judicial review.  That may be true—but it will be true for all agency actions subjected to judicial review.  The APA’s [Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency rulings and orders] presumption of judicial review is a repudiation of the principle that efficiency of regulation conquers all.  And there is no reason to think that the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties into “voluntary compliance” without the opportunity for judicial review—even judicial review of the question whether the regulated party is within the EPA’s jurisdiction.

Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion, added this about the government’s arrogance [emphasis added]:

The position taken in this case by the Federal Govern­ment—a position that the Court now squarely rejects—would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees. …

Until the EPA sues them, they are blocked from access to the courts, and the EPA may wait as long as it wants before deciding to sue. … In a nation that values due process, not to men­tion private property, such treatment is unthinkable.

Although this particular EPA abuse began under another administration, it remains a glaring example of the unbridled self-importance of the agency and of its routine reach for additional power.

It’s also clear example of the necessity of abolishing this agency: it’s too far, and for too long, out of control, and it is irredeemable.

The Administration And Free Speech

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The First Amendment, as Judge Andrew Napolitano points out,

prohibits the government from infringing upon the freedom of speech, the freedom of association and the freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

But what’s the point if government declines to listen, and/or decides to specify where a citizen might be allowed (which includes a decision to not allow) to speak, even if not speaking to his government, decides to specify where groups of citizens will be permitted (which includes a decision to not permit) to congregate?

We have though, this brand new law, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.  This law, as Judge Napolitano says,

permits Secret Service agents to designate any place they wish as a place where free speech, association and petition of the government are prohibited.

Thus, federal agents whose work is to protect public officials and their friends may prohibit the speech and the gatherings of folks who disagree with those officials or permit the speech and the gatherings of those who would praise them, even though the First Amendment condemns content-based speech discrimination by the government.

Our government has forgotten a critical item, and Judge Napolitano has missed it, also.  This item is far more than a “mere” violation of our Constitution.  As out Declaration of Independence acknowledges,

…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….

Government works for us.  It has no capacity for declining to listen to us (much less to not hear us), or to dictate to us, its employers, where the employee might choose to listen—the conference room is ours, not government’s.  We will gather in the conference room of our choice, gather whom we will in that room—including our subordinate government—and say what we will to that government.  And that government will heed us.

After all, our Declaration of Independence also acknowledges that

…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….

and

…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Our present administration has chosen to ignore all of this.  We have an election coming up, an excellent opportunity to throw off this administration and to institute a new one.