Civil Libertarians Putting Americans in Harm's Way (7 June 2013)

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground;

Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

— Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Yo, Civil Liberties Pushers complaining about surveillance! (Cheek swabbing for DNA gets into other issues.)

            Are you saying that you would endanger innocent Americans, increasing the risks of death, dismemberment, rape, or maiming to American men, women, and even our children just to defend your right to privacy?!

            'Cause I will say something like that, except I would put it as defense of, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," to quote the US Bill of Rights, Amendment 4.

             To repeat the cliché: Freedom isn't free, indeed, and part of the cost of freedom is avoidable deaths of innocent people. Look, most Americans — that "great, silent majority" — would be safer from terrorism and crime in a police state. Anything less than a police state is a net increase in risk for most Americans. Let's all grant that.

            Let's grant also that John Kerry was right in his gaffe — definition: a politician's letting slip what he thinks and/or the truth — "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance," a deadly threat for the victims, but this side of a loose nuke not a threat to the Republic. Also, with nukes complicating the equation, not a major risk factor in American lives.

             If you're into the Constitution and Liberty and all that, you need to be willing to tolerate some increased dangers, and there has to be "a clear and present danger" before you even start to talk about giving up liberties. Then you have to do risk-assessment.

            You're worried about unlikely but catastrophic risks, and you should be? Well, there's Earth getting hit again by a substantial comet or asteroid, and there's full-scale thermonuclear war. Either could wipe out the human species, and a number of others, or at least blast human civilization back to a pre-industrial era. We can do a better job tracking extraterrestrial threats and we can reduce the number of nuclear warheads worldwide to a level below what risks Nuclear Winter. And we can do both without any reduction in liberty and, if nuclear build-down is done carefully, with an increase in security.

            Climate change is more complicated, but the risk can be reduced with only minimal loss of liberties and none of those of the basic sort. People will lose some of the "right to be left alone" as pollution controls become more rigorous and invasive, but there is no right to pollute. (I have a right to piss in the stream, as we used to say, only if the stream can clean up after me before it gets to humans and other critters that want to drink the water or take a swim.)

           If we really want to reduce the risks for Americans we can work on getting more people decent, affordable medical attention, reduce our production of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and improve our ability to respond to all sorts of lethal and otherwise harmful events, and not get hung up with  terrorism and crime. 

             Indeed, it's better to prevent a terrorist attack than to respond to one; but terrorist attacks are a whole lot less frequent than ordinary fires and explosions and high-speed car pileups. And robust response to all sorts of "Shit Happens" events can come with just about no costs in civil liberties.


            Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were more right than they may have intended with "Find the cost of freedom." Right: calculate the cost and do the bloody value judgments; and that's literally bloody: the cost of freedom has always involved innocent blood. 

Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Threats — Only (24 Jan. 2014)

The makers of our Constitution [* * *] sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts,

their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government,

the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Louis D. Brandeis, Dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).

 
            I'm not going to be handling much of Justice Brandeis's great statement on "the right to be let alone," but I am going to look at one implication of it. I also intend to keep repeating Brandeis's point for the foreseeable rest-of-my-life and to expand it; Americans also have a right to be left alone by people other than the government, people who don't know us, don't give a rat's ass about us personally, and just desire something from us: our votes, labor, and/or, usually, money.
            All I want to deal with here is the very basic idea that if we do have a right to be left alone, especially by the government, then the government shouldn't get intrusive unless they really, really have to, and that those intrusions should be strictly limited.
            Specifically I wish to deal here with the basic principle that extraordinary threats can indeed justify extraordinary intrusions, but only extraordinary threats — not the ordinary kind — and only to the degree necessary to meet the threats.
            What will not be here is my rant on the National Security Agency, or Google, needing to stay the hell away from our transmitted data. I want to go back to older issues with the Government of the United States — and the States and smaller jurisdictions — and the Fourth Amendment in its mostly pre-computer, and both pre- and post-"9/11" applications.
            The Fourth Amendment, as you would recall from high school civics if we still taught such subversive, non-job-training, frills-courses — the Fourth Amendment mandates, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
            Because of the threat of planes' being hijacked, and then planes' being bombed, we Americans submitted to airport screenings.
            All right: extraordinary threats there.
            Along with the searches, however, came the doctrine of what I'll call "What the fuck, if something turns up — anything turns up — in a legal search, we can use it against you." (Please note that I did not do well on the Law School Admissions Test and that it's safe to assume lawyers have more formal labels for the doctrine.)
            Uh, no. By any name, application of that doctrine with required, routine searches is not right.
            If the TSA person thinks s/he sees a half-pound of C4 in your carry-on bag, they have the right to stop you and make you open the bag. If it is not a half-pound of high explosive but only your quarter kilo of cocaine on top of your hotel-room-reading child-porn collection, they should wish you a safe flight and good luck getting through, say, Turkish Customs and Immigration.
            I am serious here: terrorism is an extraordinary, direct, and immediate threat; illegal drugs are not. If you have a kidnapped child with you that you're dragging off as a sex slave: that's an extraordinary, direct, and immediate threat to the child; pornography even of the vilest sort is not.
            Similarly if you want to enter a prison as a visitor. The authorities have the right to put you through a metal detector and even pat you down to make sure you're not smuggling in weapons; they don't have the right to check out your mouth and rectum to be sure you're not smuggling in drugs — not unless they have good reason to suspect you're bringing drugs in for a worker in the kitchen to use as part of a plot for a mass poisoning.
            And similarly the cops have the right to pat you down if they arrest you. They don't have the right to routinely shackle arrested people or to strip search you as part of "Welcome to Jail" routine. Guns are one thing; if you happen to walk around with a condom of heroin in your vagina or rectum, that is another thing: weird, and maybe a threat of some sort, but not an extraordinary threat or a danger to anyone except yourself, if that condom breaks.
            Extraordinary threats, clear and present dangers — oh, yeah! I want the cops and FBI and TSA and the rest of the bureaucratic alphabet to work hard to protect my precious ass. Lesser dangers, though, I want them off of, and out of, my ass, especially literally.
            I also want them out of my computer's information contents if I travel with my laptop. No high explosives in it or what looks like nerve gas or an itty-bitty generator of a massive electro-magnetic pulse? Then pass it through; there's no reason to go figuratively pawing through the files, not even if they are mostly Salafist calls to Jihad and instructions on how to make bombs.
            (If you're pretty sure I have bomb-making instructions, don't stop me from entering or leaving the USA; have me followed to my co-conspirators.)
            I know that there are Americans out there with different value systems; one of my best friends is a good Leftist on most things but a Navy vet strongly into protecting people. How is this, then, at least for airports and as a concrete example for more generalized thinking though the issues?
            Two lines at airport security. Line 1: They do everything they can to keep you safe and secure. Line 2: Back to basics. I want Line 2, where your luggage goes through X-ray (or whatever) and you go through a metal detector and where the plane has a solid door to the cockpit that's locked from the inside during the flight (with plastic urinals for the cockpit crew, female, as well as male). And in Line 2 you're reminded that the rules have changed since the old days when skyjacking was the fear and that nowadays you resist nasty people making threats.
            Hey, if a guy with a nail clipper can take over a planeful of adults — most of us armed with pens and credit cards and a lot of wasted time watching movie secret agents weaponizing pens and credit cards — then we pretty much all deserve to die. If a guy with explosives taped to his scrotum can blow a hole in the plane, hey, Line 2 flying is still safer than driving a car.

            As recent history has shown, Justice Brandeis was wrong about "the right to be let alone" as "the right most valued by civilized men"; at least in the USA, we value it less than marginal increases in safety. The right to be left alone is still, however, "the most comprehensive of rights," and one that we Americans must strive to take back, even when doing so puts us in a bit of danger.

Trigger Warnings

      I've been thinking about "trigger warnings."

      I was thinking about them today especially, since I just saw the movie NEIGHBORS (2014) and thought a couple of times before it was over that it should come with, "CAUTION: The sex and nudity that earned so much of this movie's 'R' rating includes a nude Seth Rogan having sex" (which might cause negative reactions with some people). Let's just say, finish your popcorn somewhere in the first twenty minutes of the film.

      More so, I've been thinking about "TW's" because for once I was ahead of a curve. Thomas P. Dunn and I put our tongues lightly in our cheeks and provided WARNINGs and CAUTIONs in the bibliographies (filmographies, discographies, etc.) we provided in the essay anthologies we edited in the 1980s, The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction and Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, and, much more so, our compilation Clockworks:  [...], our List of Works Useful for the Study of The Human/Machine Interface in SF (1993).

      I immodestly list some of these precursor-TW's below.

      With the SciFi "underwater ALIEN" flick DEEPSTAR 6 (1989), " (Caution: Do not depend upon this film for details about decompression.)"

      With the US/Italian LEVIATHAN (1989), which rips off — sorry, which is more militantly intertextual with — ALIEN than even DEEPSTAR: "Caution: Arguably more sexist and less reliable on decompression than Deepstar Six.) "(Caution: Cronenberg's The Fly can be rough going for people figuratively weak of stomach or literally strong of gag mechanism.)

      On MANN AND MACHINE (1992) and a whole bunch of other movies from the 1970s on, "Caution: Contains material offensive to the 4th Amendment and other parts of the American Bill of Rights."

      On the role-playing game The Cyberpapacy: The Sourcebook of Virtual Reality (1991): "Caution: The Sourcebook is impeccably antiFascist; we're less sure of the game as played." 
Commenting on the novel Codgerspace, by a competent and well-known author whose initials you might recognize: "Caution: In Codgerspace ADF attempts ethnic humor; he's not very good at it."
On the more or less cyberpunk Psychodrome novel, " uses consciously 'the dangerous female' motif. " (I.e., the femme fatale — but we tried to stick to English.)

       On an (otherwise) excellent book from 1963, which became an important movie: " "(CAUTION: Readers who like their prose lean may find long stretches of OBS too ornate for their tastes.) "
Well, etc., especially in Clockworks 2: The Wiki, where I've upped the volume with caps for CAUTIONs (and one TEXTUAL WARNING so far) and have included cautioning people that they might be dealing with a book written in High Theory, so they might want to allow plenty of time to get through it, plus exercise time to work off anger if you are like me and react poorly, though strongly, to jargon and opacity.

      The truly serious warnings in the Clockworks series primarily involve the US Bill of Rights, which is violated casually and frequently in a number of works, especially with Search and Seizure — Warrants are for wimps! — and violence against suspects. In a mutually reinforcing feedback loop with real world violations, such motifs are as dangerous as any scene that might cause a post-traumatic stress reaction and far more dangerous than scenes that might make readers, viewers, and/or auditors merely uncomfortable. 

About that Second Amendment ... (30 Oct. 2014)

Rate: 1 Flag

What TV news I watch is from an elliptical trainer, and I work hard to avoid commercials — every time you listen to a commercial the hucksters win — so I skip channels a bit and set the TV to mute fairly often and listen to an audio book. So I'm often confused about who said what on which program, but I got the clear message that my fellow Libs Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Chris Hayes, and/or Rachel Maddow got fairly shocked by the idea of a Republican candidate for office addressing gun enthusiasts and bringing up potential use of firearms to defend oneself against — i.e., shoot at with intent to wound, kill, or maim — various folk in the Federal government.

Uh, yeah. That goes with a reading of the Second Amendment that I heard from the 1960s on. The logic is straighforward. The Second Amendment is second only to the First — free speech and all that — in that the Right to Bear Arms ensures the other rights against the threat of a tyrannical government.

After all, Tom Jefferson and the guys held as self-evident axiomatic "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights [...] That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Under the Bill of Rights that we eventually got from the Revolution (or Counter-revolution, if that's your theory), citizens of the Republic could exercise our rights and peaceably assemble and shoot our mouths off "to petition the government for a redress of grievances." But let's say there's no redress: not this time, not for a long time. Let's say the newfangled Federal government, or "any Form of Government" starts destroying rights rather than protect them? Well then it is our right, nay, our duty to try "to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as  [...] shall seem" to us "most likely to effect [... our] Safety and Happiness" and renewal of The Tree of Liberty.

Governments, however, don't like to be altered or abolished, and they fight back, with guns. (Mr. Jefferson was clear as to just what would water/manure the figurative Tree of Liberty.)

Now as a practical matter, the real revolutionary parts of revolutions are often pretty bloodless in the initial takeover. The fighting back comes after a bit, and what decides it isn't usually the weapons the peasants and revolutionary pros have but, instead, which way the troops finally decide to point their weapons. When the soldiers refuse to fire on the crowd and shoot instead their officers — or when military leaders join the rebels — that's when the revolution wins, at least for a while (until it gets betrayed ... and eventually the cycle starts all over again).

Still, at least in the initial stage of the revolution and maybe in the following guerilla warfare, it helps to have a well-armed populace to secure The Right of Revolution.

Which "Right," unfortunately, usually means some hotheads or fanatics gunning down cops or a standoff like Ruby Ridge and the siege at Waco leading to a skirmish and death. Or Shay's Rebellion. Or leading up to something as major as the US Civil War.

Which leads to the side of the Second Amendment coming from the other side of Tom Jefferson's life and that of a goodly number of the Founders and Framers: The need for well-armed White folk to put down any "servile insurrection" (or Indian attacks), or, later, just "uppity n*ggers." "[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms," except for brief periods, meant the right of White folks to keep firearms, while you can — or more likely I can — get arrested for "open carry" of a knife.

(The joke is that a Liberal is the guy who brings a knife to a gun fight; in terms of "home defense," I live the joke.)

Anyway, Jon or Stephen or Chris and/or Rachel shouldn't be surprised at gun fans indicating a willingness to shoot agents of the Federal government: Federal Marshals, FBI, ATF — whatever. That's part of the theory. It's also close to rebellion, insurrection, or treason, and the Federal government can be expected to shoot back. Maybe not Sherman's march to the sea this time, or even a drone strike, but far heavier shit than dreamt of by people who hold such theories.

And if they keep talking that way and arming themselves quite so assiduously, then we can expect even more militarization of our police forces and the irony of the Second Amendment working not to preserve the Republic but to put it in danger.