Tag Archives: government

A Thought on Privacy

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an absolutely awesome expression of governmental hubris, says that New Yorkers should just “get used to” the city’s rapidly proliferating surveillance cameras.

You wait, in five years, the technology is getting better, they’ll be cameras everyplace…whether you like it or not[.]

Amazingly, Federal Judge Richard Posner agrees.

Obviously, surveillance cameras didn’t prevent the Boston Marathon attacks.  But they may well have prevented further attacks planned by the bombers, including whatever destruction they may have attempted to cause in New York City.  Moreover, the criticism ignores deterrence.  By increasing the likelihood that terrorists or other criminals will be apprehended, surveillance cameras increase the expected cost of punishment.  That will not deter all attacks, but it will deter many.

Surveillance cameras also can be expected to increase the cost—and difficulty—of maintaining individual freedoms in the face of a constantly snooping government.  But surveillance cameras are of a piece with the lockdown imposed on Boston during the recent manhunt.

Ben Franklin was right.  Posner and Bloomberg are wrong.  But the latter plainly are speaking from the perspective of government and not from the perspective of government’s employers.

The Convenience of Government

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President Barack Obama has decided to appeal last fall’s ruling of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that invalidated his “recess” appointments of three people to the NLRB.  The Court ruled that since the Senate wasn’t in recess, the appointments were unconstitutional and so invalid.

Obama’s grounds for appeal would be laughable if the matter weren’t so serious.  He

urged the Supreme Court to rule that presidents have broad authority to make certain appointments without Senate approval.

This from a Lecturer in Constitutional law.  Presidents have the authority to “make certain appointments” that the Constitution gives them, and not a particle more.

He, through his Solicitor General Donald Verrilli,

defended the recess appointment powers of the president, disputing the court’s conclusion that it can only be used in the period between formal sessions of the Senate.

Sorry, Ace, “in recess” means in recess, not on lunch break, and not any period a president finds convenient.  What part of the DC Circuit’s writing on this is unclear to you?  After all, it was written in plain language with simple words:

…the inescapable conclusion that the Framers intended something specific by the term “the Recess,” and that it was something different than a generic break in proceedings [an adjournment].
…
The natural interpretation of the [Recess Appointments] Clause is that the Constitution is noting a difference between “the Recess” and the “Session.”  Either the Senate is in session, or it is in the recess.  If it has broken for three days within an ongoing session, it is not in “the Recess.”

Then ObamaVerilli included in his brief this gem:

If the appeals court ruling was left to stand, it would “dramatically curtail” the president’s authority[.]

Well, yeah.  That’s sort of the point, given how far you’ve overstepped your authority.

Finally, this laugher:

The ruling “threatens a significant disruption of the federal government’s operations[.]”

You just don’t seem to get it, Ace.  The convenience of government does not take precedence over the Constitution.

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.