Tag Archives: government

Police Surveillance

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Little Rock, AR, is expanding the surveillance capability and power of its police patrols:

A police car with a device that photographs license plates moves through the city and scans the traffic on the streets, relaying the data it collects to a computer for sifting. Police say the surveillance helps identify stolen cars and drivers with outstanding arrest warrants.

It also allows authorities to monitor where average citizens might be at any particular time. That bothers some residents, as well as groups that oppose public intrusions into individual privacy. The groups are becoming more alarmed about license plate tracking as a growing number of police departments acquire the technology.

More (worse?) [emphasis added]:

Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said the law enforcement benefits outweigh any concerns about possible abuse of the information, which, as a public record, is legally available for anyone to see.  He said the department may get more of the devices.

No irony there at all.  Nosirree.  Thomas went on:

Should that potential of misuse therefore eliminate the capacity of law enforcement to collect data which has a legitimate purpose for the safety of our officers or the appropriateness of enforcement actions?  I don’t think so[.]

But he misses the point.  This isn’t a private citizen, for whom prior restraint constraints are properly illegal—there has to be a crime committed (of which conspiracy is one, but which requires probable cause to interrupt).  This is a government, which is hard enough to control.  Prior restraint of government is a necessary precondition for freedom.  It’s why probable cause and warrants are a for restraining governments.

There are other dangers of the police—the government—creating this particular database, also pointed out in the article.

[City Director Ken] Richardson said he didn’t hear about the device until after it had been collecting data for months.  He said he said he hasn’t heard many complaints.

“It’s hard for you to have a problem with something if you don’t know it’s going on,” he said.

So, Chief, why all the secrecy, if it’s so innocuous?

And as [Catherine, of the New York American Civil Liberties Union] Crump points out,

Given how few rules are currently on the books to protect our privacy, it’s plausible that private investigators and data-mining companies could acquire this location data[.]

And nefarious individuals posing as those.  This is a neat-sounding idea that’s highly dangerous.

Score One for the Other Part of the 1st Amendment

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The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog describes a victory for religious freedom.  In a case about which I first wrote just after its inception, a gang known as Freedom From Religion Foundation sued the village of Warren, MI, for having the temerity to put up a Christmas display without permitting FFRF to put up a sign next to it announcing that religion is “myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

First, Mayor James Fouts told them to take a hike, followed by their suit:

If you requested permission to put up a sandwich board saying that there is no Santa Claus, you would be met with the same response.  Santa Claus lives in the minds and hearts of many millions of children.  The belief of God and religion lives in the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people and is as much a part of the fabric of America, as the belief in democracy and freedom….

Your non-religion is not a recognized religion.  Please don’t hide behind the cloak of non-religion as an excuse to abuse other recognized religions.

Then a Michigan district court told these folks to take a hike.

Then the 6th Circuit told this…crowd…to take a hike.  On the matter of Warren’s alleged favoring of the religious over the secular, they had this:

That is not true even on its own terms.  All but one of the objects in the holiday display are nonreligious.  Ribbons, ornaments, reindeer, a lighted tree, wreaths, snowmen, a mailbox for Santa, elves, wrapped gift boxes, nutcrackers, poinsettias, candy canes, a “Winter Welcome” sign—all of them, all that is but the nativity scene—are secular…

A city does not run afoul of the Establishment Clause by including a creche in a holiday display that contains secular and religious symbols.

On the matter of the “Winter Welcome” greeting in particular, the 6th expanded with this [emphasis added]:

When one neighbor greets another in mid-December with “Happy Holidays,” it is the rare person who hears “Happy Holy Days.”  What was once the most religious of invocations has become one of the most faith-neutral, even secular.  One indeed can fairly wonder who has co-opted whom over time with these displays and words.  But that is a matter for another day.

On the gang’s bellyache that Fouts’ letter was itself some sort of cynical violation, the 6th had this:

These are not the words of someone trying to establish any one religion or religion in general; they are the words of someone trying to explain the common sense risks of disparaging faith-based and secular symbols, whether a creche or a Santa, alike….

It may be true that the Mayor misapprehended the Religion Clauses when he implied that atheists receive no protection from them by saying that the Foundation’s “non-religion” was “not a recognized religion.”  In this respect, the Mayor, apparently untrained as a lawyer, may not have missed his calling….  But this defense of his actions, premised on a misreading of precedent, does not transform his actions or the City’s display into an establishment.

On the gang’s crying about their free speech rights, here’s the 6th, again:

[Warren] could choose to add a Santa.  And it could choose to deny a sign saying, “There is no Santa.”  It could choose to incorporate a message about Ramadan.  And it could choose to deny a message disparaging any one religion or religion in general.  Just as Congress’s creation of a National Day of Prayer on the first Thursday of May does not compel the legislature to recognize a National Day of Non-Prayer each year, so too the City of Warren could opt to have a holiday display without a Winter Solstice sign.  Such holiday displays are quintessentially government speech….

And the Foundation, like everyone else, is free to urge the City to add or remove symbols from the display each year or to try to elect new officials to run the City—the customary answer to permissible government speech and the customary answer to policies with which citizens disagree.

FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor responded to her loss without any sense of irony:

Apparently we are a Christian nation, and cities may prefer religion over non-religion[.]

On the first, well, duh.  On the second, she needs to ask her lawyer to read the 6th‘s opinion to her.  It’s not what they said.  Her lawyer can find that opinion can be found here.

Thus we see the benefit of not taking the easy way out—the coward’s way out—and acceding to the demands of such anti-freedom fighters as these as soon as the latter threaten.

These lose—as all bullies lose—when faced with forthright and just opposition.

Facing down bullies is expensive, certainly.  However that expense pales beside the expense of meekly surrendering freedoms for the demanding.  Once you pay the Danegelt, you never get rid of the Dane.

Progressive “Capitalism”

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The Wall Street Journal describes some concerning our illustrious Treasury Secretary nominee.

The terms of Mr Lew’s original employment contract with Citi included a bonus guarantee if he left the bank for a “high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.”

Most companies include incentives for top employees not to leave, but in this case the contract was written to reward Mr Lew for treating the bank like a revolving door.

There’s more:

…former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was paid more than $115 million while encouraging the risk-taking that would have destroyed Citi if not for a taxpayer rescue.

Mr Rubin was Mr Lew’s patron at the bank.  Mr Lew’s contract suggests that Citi knew from the start that Mr Lew was headed back to a powerful job in Washington, and that it wanted him to remember the bank fondly when he left.

Hmm….

 

h/t Falkenblog

Obama and our Constitution

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Michael Mukasy, President George Bush the Younger’s last Attorney General, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed described President Barack Obama’s leaked (should I say “surreptitiously released?”) white paper memo concerning presidential authority to conduct drone warfare, including against American citizens overseas.  Mukasey had this to say, in part, about the memo:

The memo mentions the president’s constitutional responsibility under Article II to defend the country, but it grounds the president’s authority to act not in the Constitution but in “the inherent right of the United States to national self-defense under international law…and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida under international law.”

A moment’s reflection yields the insight that the US government’s powers are defined by the Constitution, not by international law, and that in any event international law is a highly elusive concept, there being no universally recognized source for it.  Yet here the Obama administration seems to prefer abandoning the Constitution altogether rather than relying on an inherent presidential power….

Because the Constitution is more than 100 years old, hard to understand, and not binding on anything, anyway.  And a law “professor” says we ought to just do away with it.  Plainly, our president buys that line, too.

Poverty and Welfare

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The connection isn’t only moral.  It’s economic, also, as new research is showing.

Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University says that our exploding welfare state has led to an American poverty rate of 14%—these welfare programs actually are

creating a dependency on government, which is unhealthy both for the individuals involved and their children, and also for the broader society[.]

Specifically, Department of Labor statistics show four programs in particular contribute to  Americans’ increasing dependence on government.

  • Food stamps, or The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as it’s now known.  Nearly 30 million more Americans receive them than in the year 2000.
  • Social Security Disability: 3 million Americans  received payments in 1990—today it’s 8.6 million.
  • Pell grants: 3.9 million students were awarded them in 2000.  Today it’s 9.7 million, even though  nearly half of graduates work in jobs that require no degree.
  • And extended unemployment benefits: 26 weeks had been the standard—today it’s 52 weeks or more for many [and during the Panic of 2008 and ensuing Obama Recovery, it’s run as long as 99 weeks].

This isn’t just academic theorizing, though.  Doug McKelway, in his article at the above link, talked, among others, to a sandwich shop owner in Maryland:

Kyle Murphy…described how anecdotal evidence he sees as an employer jibes with Vedder’s assessment.  He often sees new hires quit to seek government benefits.

“The people who know how to use the system best get the most out of it.  It’s not necessarily the people who need the assistance the most,” he said.  Murphy has seen many of his employees quit jobs, then claim they were fired to obtain unemployment benefits.

Vedder concludes,

We have had nearly four decades with growing incomes, rising standard of living for the majority, yet the poor have grown in number even as a proportion of the population.  So some of these policies are not working.

I’m more cynical: since they create a captive collection of voters for the hander-outers in government, maybe they are working.  Never mind that the outcome puts our republic at risk.