Category Archives: Privacy

Not Relevant

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There is a property dispute in Wisconsin centered on a property owner owning a stretch of lake front beach and a neighbor who insists on traipsing across that private property beach, often with his dog, despite repeated warnings, signs, and calls to the police to get him to stop. It even went to trial, and the trespasser fined some $313.

But that’s not the end of it.

In response to the fine, the trespasser

argues it is absurd to say he could wade past but not put a foot higher up the shore.

His pretense here is from his arrogance. It doesn’t have to be not absurd to him; the distinction is set by law, it is quite clear, and all he need do is obey it. His arrogance doesn’t stop there, though.

My personality is such that if I’m confronted with it I don’t back away from [the argument over his access to the property owner’s property[.]

As if his arrogance justifies anything.

And this argument from the presiding judge, who despite her remark, had the integrity to rule on what the law says rather than what she thought it ought to say:

…a decision favoring the landowner over the public was out of touch with the practices in other states.

This isn’t relevant. We’re a federal republic. What other States do regarding privately owned beachfront property has nothing to do with how Wisconsin treats privately owned beachfront property. “Out of touch with the practices in other states” is a non sequitur.

The Strength and the Weakness

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In a Wall Street Journal article regarding Binance’s complicity, allegedly unwitting, in financing Iran’s behaviors despite sanctions to the contrary, there’s this tidbit that is the subject of my post.

The funds are part of billions in crypto transactions that have flowed through Binance to networks financing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the two years preceding the current US-Iran war, according to Binance compliance reports, blockchain data, foreign law-enforcement officials who track terrorism financing, and other crypto researchers and nonpublic documents.

It’s those blockchain data and their role in backtracking to the source of the funding that concerns me.

Blockchain is a highly useful, incorruptible means (so far; hackers and ever-improving computers include blockchain in the cyber arms race between the good guys and the nefarious) of proving the provenance of what’s being tracked, which is mostly financial transactions (again, so far). But that surveillance capability, in the hands of a government (and at bottom, there’s no practical way to keep it out of the hands of government) can be very dangerous to individual privacy, even to individual liberty.

We the People, and free citizens elsewhere in the free world, need especially to be vigilant and to respond quickly when government misuses that capability.

Not a Chance

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In an article about the future of travel coming to us in just 20 years, this prediction jumped out at me. From Scott Fleming, Aon‘s Director Aon Travel Practice:

My [AI travel booking] agent will know the places I like, it will have insight into my finances, my budget, my risk tolerances, all my preferences from the kind of room I like to my pillow type[.]

As British royal butlers and secretaries and other staffers, royal and commoner, British or elsewhere, routinely demonstrate, not even personal staff can be trusted with such personal information in such quantities and breadth. I’m certainly not going to trust a robot or other software package with all that information.

Red Tape Redundancy

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal was rightly concerned about red tape redundancy, but he missed the mark on one form of it.

One can’t work with children without undergoing specific training and, in many states, extensive background checks. There’s value in those measures, but how about some coordination?
While living in New Jersey, I was fingerprinted for my teaching license in Somerset County and, later, in Middlesex County, despite having permanent certification in New York. I was then fingerprinted for gun purchases, coaching recreational soccer, and teaching Sunday school. At some point, it all becomes too exhausting.

There’s nothing redundant about being checked via immutable personal characteristics at each of those application points. Fingerprinting is an important way of determining that the person doing the applying is who he claims to be. Those multiple applications may or may not be by the same person.

Having been IDed by fingerprints and confirmed to be the same person across those multiple applications, though, there should be no need to repeat the rest of the applications beyond what’s unique to the function being applied for. Those repeats are what would be redundant and want better coordination.

“The trade in babies and women’s bodies is an affront to freedom.”

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That Wall Street Journal subheadline is about surrogate motherhood and whether it ought be allowed to exist. Lois McLatchie Miller’s lede and next two paragraphs consist of this:

A New York ballroom filled with men discussing how to procure women’s bodies to produce babies, then discharge the mother from her role.
It sounds dystopian, but the September gathering was the latest conference of Men Having Babies, a group that helps gay couples—and single men, and even groups of three that call themselves “throuples”—form families through surrogacy. Online, they post photos of smiling male couples holding infants still slick from their mothers’ birth canals, celebrating a triumph of “modern family building.”
Those newborns know nothing of politics or reproductive technology. They know only the voice and scent of the woman who carried them for nine months—and whom they will never know again.

That truly is terrible, but it’s far from the norm. Surrogacy is broadly employed to provide healthy babies to families unable to have any of their own.

Alternatively, adopt a baby? Certainly. But the adoption, while also broadly beneficial to both the baby and the new parents, doesn’t get the parents a baby of their own blood, their own genetics. Surrogacy opens a path to that, wherein the father’s sperm is combined with the mother’s egg and the result implanted in the surrogate mother. Or a mother’s egg is combined with a sperm bank donor’s sperm and the result either implanted in the mother, or for her health reasons, implanted in a surrogate mother. Or the same with a donor’s egg and the father’s sperm.

The surrogate mother, then, in those cases carries the baby to term and then turns it over to the baby’s parents. That can be wrenching for the surrogate mother, but it isn’t always, and it does allow the surrogate mother to participate in the formation of a loving family. Even in the wrenching, the surrogacy contract takes care of the surrogate mother’s post-delivery needs.

Miller is a Senior Communications Officer at Alliance Defending Freedom International, so she should know better.

What’s necessary is not banning surrogate motherhood, nor even heavy regulation of it. What’s necessary are strong regulation, with heavy sanctions for misbehaviors and civil sanctions for egregious mistakes, of the outcomes. Along with that is the necessity of producing quality information that will allow childless families and prospective surrogate mothers to identify reliable and effective facilities—and each other—so as to allow both sides of the surrogacy to have satisfactory, rewarding outcomes.

Banning surrogacy altogether is what would be truly an affront to freedom. It would be an affront—a denial—of the freedom of families and individuals to decide for themselves how they will approach a family problem.