Wed Jul 26, 2006 18:09 EST (UTC -5)
It's time for a follow-up to my post about our vanishing civil liberties. On June 26, I said:
Let me begin by saying that I was wrong. I did not see our civil rights being chipped away every zarking day. But I've been able to rip plenty of examples from the headlines nonetheless. For one day, I'm playing the pundit. Let's begin!
June 27: A columnist for the Washington Post reported on the Senate's debate on the proposed constitutional amendment that would make it a crime to burn or otherwise desecrate the flag:
The Citizens Flag Alliance, a group pushing for the Senate this week to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, just reported an alarming, 33 percent increase in the number of flag-desecration incidents this year.
The number has increased to four, from three....
The chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country.
We've got bigger problems than flag-burning. The idea of criminalizing this exceedingly rare act just can't hold water. In the first place, the Flag Code, which sets down guidelines (not laws) on how the US flag should (not must) be treated, states: "The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning." It's okay if you want to destroy the flag because it's old, but according to some people, it shouldn't be okay if you want to destroy the flag to make a statement. Determining intent could get touchy, and so flag-burning might have to be a thoughtcrime. If you ask me, freedom of speech means tolerating people's opinions and how they express them, and if it makes you mad, you always have the right to give your own opinion in response. Burning a flag would be a victimless crime; it does not make soldiers die in Iraq or cause senior citizens to lose their Medicare benefits.
Also, the potential exists for lawmakers to take the definition of the US flag way too far. A flag-burning bill under consideration would define the flag as "any flag of the United States, or any part thereof, made of any substance, in any size, in a form that is commonly displayed as a flag and that would be taken to be a flag by the reasonable observer." That's odd, because the US flag is defined very specifically in other legislation. Moving along...
June 29: News.com.com.com.com.com reported on Congress and social networking web sites.
Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, originally proposed legislation... in April that would require Internet service providers to retain activity logs to aid in criminal investigations, including ones involving child abuse.
Now DeGette and some of her colleagues in the House of Representatives are suggesting that social-networking sites should be required to do the same thing....
Data retention legislation could follow one of two approaches, and it's not entirely clear which one U.S. politicians will choose.
One form could require Internet providers and social-networking sites to record for a fixed time, perhaps one or two years, which IP address is assigned to which user. The other would be far broader, requiring companies to record data such as the identities of e-mail correspondents, logs of who sent and received instant messages (but not the content of those communications), and the addresses of Web pages visited.
There's a difference between spying on people and trying to keep them safe. It's difficult and unnecessary to record the browsing habits of Internet users just to weed out a few bad ones. Why make everyone feel unsafe? Why don't they wait until they suspect that certain people are up to no good? Isn't that the way you get criminals? From the Internet to airports, it's terrible for law enforcement (or pseudo-law-enforcement) to investigate just everybody (or worse, random people). They'd be wasting all their time on innocent, innocuous people when the real criminals could be getting away. If they're doing their job right, they should know how to spot the bad guys by other means.
June 30: This is very disturbing: Has This Country Gone Completely Insane?
This afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee while sitting in the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center on Chicago’s south side, a Veterans Administration cop walked up to me and said, "OK, you’ve had your 15 minutes, it’s time to go."
"Huh?", I asked intelligently, not quite sure what he was talking about.
"You can’t be in here protesting," officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt....
"You’ll either go or we’ll arrest you," Adkins threatened.
"Well, you’ll just have to arrest me," I said, wondering what strange land I was now living in.
You know the rest. Handcuffed, led away to the facility’s security office past people with surprised looks on their faces, read my rights, searched, and written up.
Again I say unto you: don't think it can't happen here! All I can say is watch out, Michelle. Could poetry readings be the next target? (By the way, Michelle, does Coral Springs for Peace sell t-shirts? I'd like to get the chance to exercise some basic civil rights before they get taken away.)
July 8: Another incident of schools acting as though their students have no civil rights. This time cell phones are the issue. (The original article is here, but you have to pay to read most of it.)
Fearing their wireless freedom may be in jeopardy, students at Framingham [Massachusetts] High School were fuming over a new school policy that allows administrators to seize cell phones and search their contents....
“People shouldn’t get power based on suspicions, people should be considered innocent until proven guilty,” said senior Adam Goldberg. “It feels like our rights are stripped away when we walk through the doors.”
“It’s kind of ridiculous,” said Dayna Green, who recently graduated from Framingham, and is headed to Fitchburg State College in September. “They try to make us feel independent, but then they invade our privacy.”
Most schools would say that if you're a student, you can be subjected to random, meaningless searches without probable cause. I don't think this is right at all. Maybe it's the fact that I'm a student, maybe it's the fact that I love my freedoms, I don't know. It's one of those two. But making students think that unconstitutional searches are okay only teaches them to accept future unreasonable searches when they're adults.
July 11: MSNBC reported on the future of the Internet and where it lies: Washington.
After years of benign neglect, the Federal government is finally involved in the Internet — big time. And the decisions being made over the next few months will impact not just the future of the Web, but that of mass media and consumer electronics as well....
Network neutrality: This argument has received by far the most publicity. It pits network owners such as Verizon and AT&T against the companies who buy their bandwidth, such as Google and Amazon, and it hinges on whether the network owners can charge extra to deliver certain kinds of bits — bill more for streaming video, for example, than simpler data like text e-mail....
One side argues that access providers will use pricing to lock out competitors or even censor certain Web sites. The other side contends that Federal pricing regulation would permanently cripple the development of the Internet because network owners won’t be able to charge enough to upgrade their infrastructure.
No! What's wrong with benign neglect? This basically boils down to an argument of free speech vs. big business, and we all know who's going to win. Unfortunately, this is not a question of "if," but of "when." Enjoy your free speech while it lasts!
July 25: Finally, we look at a federal judge throwing out a lawsuit against AT&T that would have required them to state whether they had given the government their customers' phone records. The Associated Press reports:
"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said....
Justice Department attorneys had argued that it would violate the law against divulging state secrets for AT&T to say whether it had provided telephone records to the supersecret spy agency [the NSA].
I think that people have a right to know if they're being spied on so that they can do something about it. I don't think that saying whether a company gave phone records to the government is tantamount to letting the terrorists win. Terrorists are not stupid. If they know that they can't communicate by phone, they'll find some other way. And it would seem that they know they can't. The government will probably spy on people no matter what, and the terrorists are going to have to get craftier if they want to kill us all.
Okay, that's enough punditry for a long time. I'm glad I got that out of my system. But wait, there's more! The links, that is.
If you've been to an airport within the past, say, five years, you may have had your bags searched without probable cause. (I know I have!) In case this happens to you, be prepared to let the Homeland Security guys know how you feel with your Fourth Amendment luggage tag.
Last week on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart was given a briefing on net neutrality (YouTube link) by the show's "resident expert," John Hodgman (best known as the PC guy from Apple's Get a Mac ad campaign). It's worth watching, even if you already know what net neutrality is all about.
One year ago: "Such a long way, but the only way. I'm determined to work for it."
Two years ago: "I say bypass all the funny squiggly lines and learn to type instead."
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First: I do shirts now.
Make a foul, sticky mess in the the collective ear of the NSA. We seem to be heading on a collision course with them.
Luke — Wed Jul 26, 2006 22:59 EST