Category Archives: rights

Surveillance vs Freedom

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It is an either/or case.  We can’t have our individual freedoms with Government looking over our shoulders all the time.

To be sure, whenever men form a social compact led by a consensual government, we give up a small measure of our freedoms to that government to enable it to help us protect our freedoms.  This protection includes protecting for us that component of our freedom given over to our government for the purpose.  But that’s voluntary at the time of the compact’s formation, and it does not authorize the consensual government to arrogate ever more of our liberties—or of our responsibilities—to itself on its claimed need.

When Government does such usurping, even “for the greater good” (how Benthamite is that?), that can only come at the direct expense of individual liberty.  After a very low threshold, the trade-off becomes a zero-sum game.

“Surveillance” foiled a train plot, says an intel official.  I’ll elide here the questionable circumstances of this claim by a carefully anonymous official.*

Tim Murphy, a former No. 2 official at the FBI, says the programs [emphasis added]

have been successful in connecting the dots [to prevent attacks].  I can positively say, because of programs like this, people were identified in this country with terrorist ties, and we were able to stop possible attacks[.]

(Never mind that this logic is invalid, in the minds of many, when used to argue against gun control laws.)

On the other hand, alert citizens foiled a bomb plot in New York City.  Courageous citizens foiled an airliner-as-bomb attack on the White House.  Incompetence foiled an airliner bomb plot over Detroit.

We’ve also seen, further, that “surveillance” has been used to make direct attacks on individual Americans and groups who disagree with the present administration.  “Surveillance” has been used to directly and overtly attack our free press and individual members of that facility.  “Surveillance” also has been used to turn over personal information of American individuals and groups to foreign countries—even when the citizens or groups are wholly unrelated to the subject of the…investigation…but are simply caught in the Government’s generalized dragnet:

[T]he British government has also been secretly gathering intelligence from US Internet companies via the US National Security Agency data-mining project.

President Barack Obama has insisted this broad surveillance isn’t Big Brother in action, but then he said,

[T]he modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers and duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net it was worth us doing[.]

Phone numbers without names is an utterly disingenuous claim to make.  It’s child’s play to attach a name to a number after the number has been collected.  See White Pages, for instance, and Get Human, and Spokeo.  Those are just some of the publicly available sources.

Next, how do we know Government isn’t “looking at content?”  The process is secret.  Further, we know Government is looking at content through PRISM; that’s the purpose of that blanket surveillance.

As even The New York Times is beginning to figure out,

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.

With the demonstrated dishonesty of the present administration (in truth, the dishonesty isn’t unique to this administration—which emphasizes the danger—this one’s transgressions are just the present and most publicized ones), how is it possible to accept Government assurances of “trust us?”

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who declassified information about the programs this past week so he could defend their use, warned: “Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.”

That’s certainly a risk we run in an open, and so free, society.  The obverse, however, of keeping such invasive programs secret and away from the public’s discourse is a far more terrible risk to our security.

Again: there is no balancing our individual liberties with our security.  Additionally, the Constitution doesn’t protect our liberties “except when Government asserts a greater need.”  We have no security without our liberties.  There is a need for surveillance, under certain closely specified conditions; however, there cannot be surveillance and freedom under Obama’s cynical “trust us” conditions.

 

* This official is behaving suspiciously along two dimensions: he’s making a “trust government” claim, and he’s saying “trust me” while telling us things he’s not authorized to tell us.  On what basis do we believe him?

The Wall Street Journal’s Embarrassing…Naiveté

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In a Friday op-ed, the editors of the WSJ had this to say, among other things, about the government’s invasion of American privacy in the name of “security.”

The effectiveness of data-mining is proportional to the size of the sample, so the NSA must sweep broadly to learn what is normal and refine the deviations.  A nongovernment analogue might be the credit card flags that freeze payment when, say, a New Yorker goes on a shopping spree in Phoenix.

This is beyond naïve, it’s disingenuous.  The “analogue” has nothing to do with what the government is doing.  The credit card company that does such flagging—data mining—is a private enterprise away from which any and all customers easily can walk should they disagree with the data mining.  Americans can’t walk away from our government without emigrating.  And waiting for the next election lets the government’s damaging invasion continue apace in the interim.

Moreover, that credit card company is data mining a single customer, albeit it’s likely doing this for each of its customers.  It’s not routinely aggregating, by…credit card number…those data with every other customer’s data.  But wait—the government, in its Verizon data mining isn’t collecting personally identifiable data—only phone numbers called and called from.  Please.  The point of the government’s data mining is to find out who and to whom—phone numbers aren’t the terrorists.  It’s breathtakingly easy to attach a name to a phone number.

Then they write this:

The Washington Post also revealed Thursday that NSA has a parallel metadata program for Internet address packets called Blarney.

If the NSA’s version of a computer science department operates like the rest of FISA, the government is cautious to ensure that its searches are narrowly tailored and specific protocols are reviewed by FISA judges.

On what basis does the WSJ make their assumption of that monumental “if?”  Do they really think a government (not just Obama’s administration) that has the present IRS, the present DoJ, the present HHS, the present EPA, etc can be trusted to honor secret limits?

Further, the Washington Post led their article with this:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs….

That’s content, not just address packets (the Internet’s analogue to phone numbers).

Given all of this, and the associated secrecy, I have to wonder who else is being investigated.  Conservative Americans, perhaps?  Americans who disagree with this government’s policies?

Finally, and this can’t be emphasized enough: we have no security without our individual liberties.  Ben Franklin understood this; it’s unfortunate that this conservative newspaper has made this mistake.

It Doesn’t Get Much More Naked Than This

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Recall Connecticut’s recently passed extensive gun ban law, a bill passed in the emotional aftermath of the Newtown shootings.  Essentially, it banned firearms the State’s government has defined as “assault” weapons.

Last Monday, the legislature “tweaked” that bill to “clear up confusion;” Governor Dannel Malloy (D) is expected to sign it.  One of the tweaks cleared up confusion surrounding the legal possession of these weapons that had been on order before the original legislation was signed into law but not received until after enactment.  Such firearms can now be legally possessed.

It’s another tweak that’s of interest here, though: this one expanded the list of those who can legally acquire these “assault” weapons, now that the gun ban law has been enacted:

  • sworn and certified officers at the department of motor vehicles
  • the chief state’s attorney office
  • the department of energy and environmental protection
  • some constables with police certification

Additionally, the tweak

  • exempts [the above] officers from the certificate requirement for long gun ownership
  • allows them to [retain their “assault”] weapons and large capacity magazines after their service ends by registering them.

Notice that: the citizenry are being denied the ability to possess weapons adequate for their own purposes (an inalienable right and a right acknowledged by the 2nd Amendment), but a broadened list of government officials is granted the ability to possess “assault” weapons.

State Senator Joe Markley (R) is on the right track, but he was a lone voice in the Connecticut wilderness:

I think if we acknowledge that we are putting law enforcement officers at risk by limiting their ability to defend themselves [thus, the allowed expansion of weapons possessions], I think we have to acknowledge that we’re putting homeowners at risk by limiting their ability to defend themselves.

Now why would a government seek to disarm the citizenry while expanding its own arsenal?

Hmm….

It’s Time

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…to fire some school “leadership.”

Just a few short weeks ago the Kountze High School Cheerleaders and all of America celebrated when Liberty Institute secured a victory in the famous Bible Banner Case.

But now, joining a host of radical left groups like the ACLU and the extremist Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Kountze ISD wants to eliminate the free speech rights of its students.

Faith.  Jesus Christ.  Hope.  Love—these are dirty words for students in Kountze, Texas.

Maybe not for the students, but certainly for the Kountze ISD School Board.  Or maybe not even for them, maybe joining the appeal is a measure of their timidity in the face of FFRF or ACLU pressure.

In the end, though, this assault on our religious freedom—which includes both clauses [emphasis added]

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

—must be stopped.  Groups like FFRF actively wish to deny us that second freedom—to freely exercise our religion, demanding that the only religion to be allowed to be freely exercised is the religion of atheism.

And a primary way of stopping the attack must include firing leadership that is too timid to defend the freedom or that actually agrees with the FFRFs of the country that such a freedom cannot be had.

The Kountze ISD school board must be replaced.  En masse.  Right away.

Insurance Fraud

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President Barack Obama and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, are bragging about their army of community organizersnavigators that they’re prepping to go out and entice Americans, especially young Americans, to sign up for Obamacare.

The reasons for needing young Americans to sign up include these two, in particular: Obamacare fails in an enormously expensive fashion (even more so than its spectacularly expensive present failure, even before it’s fully implemented) unless young—healthy—Americans sign up so their premiums (artificially inflated compared to the cost of truly risk-based health premiums) can be used to subsidize old(er) Americans’ (which includes me) premiums (artificially suppressed compared to the cost of truly risk-based health premiums).  The second reason is that Americans, including young Americans, aren’t economically, or fiscally stupid—that’s just a projection of the Progressives’ on shortcomings onto others—and so they’ll need to be…persuaded…to sign up.

It’s useful, then, to understand what these community organizersnavigators (dang—I keep getting these terms confused) will do and what their backgrounds will contain.  What they’ll do is contained in the “navigate” root term.  In order to guide their charges to an “appropriate” policy and to assess eligibility for their own premium subsidy (too low income, for instance, which in a free market world would be another argument for a young, healthy American not to spend any money on health insurance), these guys will need to collect extensive financial and personally identifying information from each young American.

What are the acceptable backgrounds for these “navigators?”  Apparently, any background is acceptable; HHS will do no background checks at all.  Any felon will do.  Any person lacking the education of a high school graduate will do.  These wonders won’t even need to be bonded or carry Errors and Omissions coverage.  There isn’t the first particle of a pretense of consumer protection in their navigator function.

Can you say, “identity theft?”  Can you say, “incompetence?”  Can you say, “Government sponsored insurance fraud?”

Aside from that, there’s a simple exercise that all Americans should do, but especially young Americans just starting out in the world; it’s easily done on a spreadsheet.

The penaltytax for not buying health insurance acceptable to the government (e.g., an Obamacare policy) is $695 for a single person (as many (most?) young Americans will be, at least for a significant portion of the period covering this exercise).  A typical health insurance premium (not the cheapest or most expensive) for a healthy, single 25-year-old man runs to $1,600 per year.

Here’s the exercise: take the difference between that tax and that premium and grow it at, say 3% per year, which is roughly what could be had in a mutual fund that invests in a stock market index.  “Invest” those $905 every year in that hypothetical mutual fund at those 3%, and see the value will accumulate by the time our young American has reached early middle age.  I get a skosh (that’s the technical term) over $25,000 for our young man.  That’s money he could use for his own purposes, rather than government’s, purposes that might include being socked away, year on year, into his retirement plan, being committed toward his rent or mortgage, being spent in real time on food and clothing, even being spent on health insurance—of his choosing, and especially in a free market, from a constellation of policies that might be available.

Certainly, the actual value represented by those example $25k will vary widely, depending on individual circumstance and actual market performance, but the idea is clear.