disconnect

One of the reasons why I created this site (and created a similar site before the Iraq war started) is to put down, in writing, as clearly as possible, the reasons why I have certain opinions on things. The Patriot Act is a good example of this. I know why I don't like the Patriot Act, and I'm guessing most of you do too. But there are quite a few people who like it. And, more importantly, there are almost certainly a lot of people out there who don't like it, or think that they don't like it, but can't exactly put their finger on why. Then when the President comes around town drumming up support for extending the Patriot Act's provisions, they can't figure why that might be a bad idea, so they end up supporting it. I myself have a hard time often expressing why I think certain things are right and wrong, both to others and even to myself. I was thinking that I might be able to do a decent job of explaining my feelings about the Patriot Act now, so I'll give it a shot.

(And since I'll get tired of typing out "Patriot Act", I'll just call it PA. "Patriot" is supposed to be all in caps anyway but I don't like holding down shift that much.)

Let me start by addressing the main (and probably the only) argument behind having the PA: that it's a vital weapon in the war on terror. Someone who supports it might ask me, "If there are terrorists in the US, and the PA is in place, isn't it more likely that they won't be able to carry out their goals?" I would have to agree that the PA makes it more likely that terrorist activities will be disrupted. I mean, that was the whole point of the thing. It's not like Congress got together after 9/11 and said, "Hey, let's pass a kneejerk reaction to undermine our civil liberties!" Whatever its side effects, I don't think that you can assert that more terrorists would be caught or tracked without it. But I think 95% of what the PA attempts to accomplish can be done through ordinary legal means, as the difference between requesting a wiretap from a judge and doing so in secret are fairly meaningless, as are most of the "improvements" the PA gave us.

Of course, the side effects in terms of degradation of civil liberties are everything. If, let's say, gang violence became a big issue, Congress passes legislation saying that the LAPD could arrest any black man they wanted to without probable cause of a crime and the LAPD rounded them all up and threw them in jail, I'm guessing gang violence would probably go down, with the side effect being that hundreds of thousands of people were deprived of their rights under the Constitution. But hey, if you're against the "Round Up The Darkies Act", you must be pro-gang violence, right?

The bottom line is that under the Patriot Act, the government can spy on you without a warrant, for whatever reasons they want. They can force you to give up information on others, for whatever reasons they want, without anyone else being allowed to know about it. And the President can lock you up and throw away the key, if he deems it a matter of national security. This would all be legal (correct me if I'm wrong), and there would be nothing you can do about it.

Now the standard defense to all this would be, "Well, the government would only use this if they had to. Plus, I trust our leaders." I don't have the energy right now to list abuses of the PA that have already occurred - perhaps some readers might want to post some in the comments here if they have some handy. I have heard of some, and the bottom line is that it's already happening, at least on a small scale (though we really would have no way of knowing if it was being abused on a large scale, since speaking out about it would likely be a crime).

Then you have the "trust" angle. Perhaps you've heard the phrase "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely". I don't particularly feel like testing this theory in the United States, but I believe it to be true. History tends to show that dictators who have abused absolute power in the past have been evil, but it's pretty likely that none of them believed themselves to be evil. I don't know what went on in Hitler's mind, but I'm guessing he didn't wake up one morning and think to himself, "Gee, I'm feeling particularly evil today. I think I'll kill millions of Jews and conquer Europe!" Even Saddam Hussein, evildoer of the year, believed him actions to be necessary in order to keep a fractious bunch of tribes and ethnicities together in Iraq, as I understand it. My point being that a dictator abusing their power tends to do it for reasons he/she/they believe are good and right, regardless of whether or not they are right, and thus it is more likely to happen than you perhaps believe. The framers of the Constitution knew this, and there's a reason the protections they placed in there exist.

So after all this, maybe you still believe in the rightness of the Patriot Act. Maybe you're so frightened of the possibility of more terror attacks that you're willing to accept the seemingly imperceptible loss of freedoms and risk of abuse of power. Then I'm sure if you don't mind if the government implants a radio-frequency chip in your body and in every other person who lives in or visits the country so that everyone's movements can be monitored at all times. I'm not a tinfoil hat type of person and I don't think that this will happen (at least I hope not), but isn't that the next logical step? If, God forbid, another attack happened (and I doubt we can go without another terrorist attack in the US in my lifetime), and the PA couldn't prevent it, well we'll just have to try harder next time, and knowing where everyone in the country is at any given moment would be a great way to do it, especially when we can single out people who make one too many trips to the fertilizer store, or even easier, identify illegal immigrants/terrorists by those without the chips. Is that alright by you? After all, you didn't mind when they granted themselves the authority to spy on you and detain you without officially charging you with a crime. Might as well go all out, especially if the PA didn't prevent the next attack. In fact I'm pretty sure that implanting transmitters in every person in the country would disrupt more terrorist plots than the PA, which I already said disrupts more terrorist plots than not having it in place. Perhaps we can invent even more ways of limiting our freedoms in exchange for security, as long as we trust our government. Or maybe we could simply live with all of the freedoms our President likes to tout on a daily basis, and not pick them off one by one for a marginally more secure country which can be secured in other ways anyway.

I made a post a while back about the history of disconnect.net, where I mentioned the online version of the underground newspaper I did in high school (appropriately named "The Underground Online"). In addition to the articles myself and some friends did are some issues done by the kids in the year after us, including one spoof article on all crimes being punished by chemical castration (hey, I didn't write it). So today I find the following referer link in the disconnect.net logs:
http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/archive/LM_NET/2004/May_2004/msg01569.html

This is the full text of that post to a mailing list, for those too lazy to click or in case it goes away (by the way, the "Dan" being referred to is not me):

* To: LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
* Subject: Hoax sites and info literacy
* From: Darlene Yasick
* Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 17:36:31 -0700
* Reply-To: Darlene Yasick
* Sender: School Library Media & Network Communications

Our senior English teacher brought me a paper this afternoon and saifd I might want to add this site to the one that Dan sent about the cicadas. It was the last paper of one of out seniors, a very bright and conscientious young lady whose paper was on the subject of using chemical castration to cure sxx offenders. (hopefully this will get past the filters) I read the part of the paper that he pointed to and literally laughed until the tears rolled down my face. Here is an approximation of what she had written (the link to the page is http://www.disconnect.net/underground/volume2/castration01.html

( you might want to add this to your hoax list)

In 1997 Arkansas passed a law that provides for chemical castration as the standard punishment for each and every crime or infringement upon the law. It is being hailed as the best determent for crime ever. Under this new law, instead of receiving fines or jail sentences, most criminals will simply be castrated. Traffic violators will still have to pay fines along with the castration, because of the important revenue they bring to cities. Past offenders will be castrated. Does this make sense?
( at this point I am nearly on the floor) She correctly cited her source as Ed the Moose. The teacher's first red note was whether she thought someone named Ed the Moose was a realiable source for a college English term paper. She was so earnest that it was nearly a crime.
After I got done laughing I was struck my how scary it was that this bright intelligent girl couldn't judge her sources better. If she is this guillible how much more so will others be? It is scary to think of the future in the hands of a generation who can be so easily persuaded of the truth of whatever they find on the internet.

Next time you're wondering why a majority of the people believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, try to keep this in mind. I had to reread this before I noticed that this was a college term paper she was writing. At least she has a bright future ahead of her in the Bush administration's intelligence services.

I found this legal case being documented over on the ACLU. It appears that through the ACLU, the president of an ISP is suing Ashcroft and the federal government generally over provisions of the Patriot Act requiring him to disclose various information about his clients. I say "appears" because it's very difficult to tell what's going on in this case, which is, of course, entirely intentional. Basically, the Patriot Act is being used to stifle dissent about the Patriot Act. This press release may help explain it a little better.

What I found most disturbing perhaps was this declaration in the court documents that were unsealed. You can't even tell what it's a declaration of, because the title is "Declaration of XXXXXX" (XXXX being blacked-out text). Entire pages are blacked out. The entire document is interesting, but I'll quote some of it here (where XXXXXX denotes blacked-out text of varying lengths):

Until I filed this lawsuit, I was unsure whether I could disclose XXXXXX. The government has now prohibited the disclosure of my name and my company's name in connection with this case. They have provided no further clarification what I can and cannot say XXXXXX.

Because of the gag provision in Section 2709(c), I have not disclosed information XXXXXX about this lawsuit XXXXXX. This has been particularly difficult because XXXXXX I engaged in ongoing communications XXXXXX on a variety of issues. I did not want to cut off all communications and I also thought that doing so could raise suspicions and possibly lead the government to believe I had violated the gag provision. Because of the gag provision, however, I have found it very difficult to have any kind of normal conversation XXXXXX used to discuss topics related to politics and current events, but now I feel wary when I communicate XXXXXX I have steered clear of numerous topics of conversation, as I am afraid XXXXXX might come up XXXXXX. The gag has put me in a very compromising situation, as I do not want to be dishonest in my communications XXXXXX but also do not want to violate the gag.

Based on the extreme secrecy going on here, you would think this guy was leasing bin Laden a dialup account or something. But if that was the case, there would have been plenty of well-established methods to track the activity. It's not like the government couldn't issue subpoenas and tap phones before 9/11. This is just some normal guy running an ISP who's having his words blacked out like he was describing how to make sarin nerve gas or something. But he's not, he's simply challenging a particularly draconian law that happens to be on the books, and we're not even allowed to know his name. Actually, to my knowledge, he could not be censored for publishing directions on how to make sarin, though I'm not 100% clear on that.

The really chilling thing is that this could happen to anyone who has information the government might want on someone else. And not only can you not tell anyone that you've been issued these National Security Letters, but this shows how you can't even openly fight the constitutionality of them. Not only that, but you can see the effect it could have on someone who was involved in political discussions on the subject already.

What drives me nuts is all the conservatives who used to preach about getting government out of our lives. Lower taxes, get rid of the "nanny state", etc. We couldn't possibly keep a database of gun owners because the insidious government might use it to take them away from us. But those same people are vigorously defending the government's right to seize information from you and not let you tell anyone about it, or seize information about you without your right to know. So now the government can spy on you without anyone knowing, and lock you up incommunicado, without anyone knowing. And this is all legal (at least until the Supreme Court ruling on the Padilla case), because, you know, there are people out there who "hate freedom" and want to kill us. Because that's obviously never happened before in the history of this country.

Today's Paul Krugman op-ed talks about Bush's economic policy. By now you've probably gotten the picture that it helps rich people and screws poor people a lot. If you're a member of the Heritage Foundation you're probably saying, "Well, good! I've had enough of those poor people taking my hard-earned money! As CFO of FooCorp I worked long and hard to discover new and inventive ways to shelter our income from Federal taxes and overstate our operating profits to investors and I deserve to keep my income, not give it to some freeloading single mother on food stamps! I have to pay for my groceries (or at least pay people to pay for my groceries) and so should they. Bah!" But then again I doubt you'd be reading this blog in that case, so I digress.

Of course most people don't think that way, so Bush touts various "compassionate conservative" projects like education and promises a bunch of money for them... except after the election it disappears, says Krugman and this Washington Post article citing this OMB memo. Here's an excerpt I like:

Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige told House members in February: "It is my understanding that long-term estimates are calculated by formula. OMB has advised us that the numbers beyond 2005 do not reflect detailed policy decisions by this administration."

. . . (earlier in the article) . . .

The administration has widely touted a $1.7 billion increase in discretionary funding for the Education Department in its 2005 budget, but the 2006 guidance would pare that back by $1.5 billion. The Department of Veterans Affairs is scheduled to get a $519 million spending increase in 2005, to $29.7 billion, and a $910 million cut in 2006 that would bring its budget below the 2004 level.

So... there's a formula that dictates big increases during election years followed by big cuts? Is this some of that "fuzzy math" Bush talked about in 2000? Or does the formula simply mandate cuts across the board (and an increase that doesn't keep pace with inflation is a cut), and they decided to put a one-time increase in for the election (paid for with money we don't have)? It's almost certainly the latter - Bush putting in a nice chunk of change for programs people obviously want until he wins the election, at which point it gets gutted to finance more tax cuts. So aside from it being bad fiscal policy and an obviously unpopular funding decision, he lies about it during the election to boot. Four more years my ass.