Feb 20 2006
Democrats — Civil Rights? Wha…?
LewRockwell.com Blog: Chicago Under Surveillance
This is a good example of why I’ve been so shocked by the Democrats picking up the mantle of “Civil Rights Defenders”. The major programs that they propose — nationalized healthcare being a big one here — are really based entirely around the government taking on more power and becoming yet more invasive. The social security act created SSNs which powers the most egregious tracking systems and is key behind the major privacy violations that have been occurring — Hell, in my own industry (health care), SSNs are so bad that the government had to go and create yet more bureaucracy, overhead, and to deal with them (HIPAA).
I’m not saying businesses should be left to their own devices, or somehow that a free-market system won’t become invasive and offensive (e.g.: credit reporting). I am just extremely frustrated that our two choices are the Republicans (who remove civil rights for “national security”) and the Democrats (who remove civil rights for “domestic reform”). Both of them use the excuse of “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?”, and it’s not convincing from either.
Popularity: 4% [?]
As much as I am a strong supporter of civil rights, I think there are many times where the principal of privacy gets taken far beyond where it should be. For example, I have no problem with the government placing surveillance cameras in public places. I think any expectation of privacy an indivdual can have in a public place is minimal at best. This is not to say that cameras should be placed frivolously or excessivly, for a number of good reasons. But when placed “well” are a reasonable step to promote public safety. Note, when I say “public place” I mean somewhere which is actual public property like street corners or public parks. The placement of surveillance cameras in privately-owned “public places”, i.e. bars, gas stations, etc…, is much more touchy. While I think that any individuals expectation of privacy is still limited at best, it is private property and the rights of the owner should not be ignored. At best I would say that the government should with “good reason” be able to require such businesses to install (and maintain) surveillance cameras. The contents of such cameras would have to be required to be kept in some “reasonable” format for a “reasonable” period of time. The contents would then only be available to government agencies if voluntarily provided by the owner, or if compelled by a court order. In general I would expect that any such requirements would be surperfluous, since most such businesses place surveillance cameras as they feel necessary for their own security.
The issue is that we don’t have a good check on that power. There was recently an issue (check out Bruce Schneier’s blog for the cite) where cameras intended to watch traffic were aimed into a woman’s apartment, which got views of the place that included her bathroom. The case was in Britain, but there’s no reason it couldn’t happen here.
Take a look what what you’re saying: “good reason”, “reasonable format”, “reasonable period of time”. You’re the libertarian — you should see the inherent problem with these statements. After all, who determines what “good reason”, “reasonable format”, or “reasonable period of time” are? The government. Who carries the cost for such decisions? The businesses. So who is going to want more expansive, more epic, and deeper regulation? The government, because they’ve got the carrot (”better performance” for the system) and the stick (continuation of crime) both encouraging them to become more expansive, and they’ve got no impetus to not expand. And who is going to pay for the program, the regulation, the enforcement, and the? Businesses and taxpayers, reducing effective tax revenues. Isn’t there a better, less invasive way for the government to spend our money? For that matter, is there strong enough evidence that installing additional cameras reduces the occurrence of crime enough to validate this expenditure?
Civil rights violations are like cockroaches — you only hear about the ones that were caught, but there’s certainly more out there. That’s why each and every issue that comes up is so important: you have to fight the battles as they present themselves.
More important to me, though, and most startling, is the mayor’s *ACTUAL, LITERAL STATEMENT* of “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” That mindset is the out-and-out criminalization of the civilian population, assuming you’re going to be committing a crime until we’ve got documentation that you aren’t. That’s a death knell for democracy, because it means that the country isn’t trusting its own citizenry.
I’m with the people at LRC who say that we should install cameras in his office, make tampering with them a felony, and make the contents publically available (read: live feed to internet). After all — if he’s not doing anything wrong, he has nothing to fear.
I agree with you entirely. I think that any implementation of surveillance cameras to increase public safety is extremely tricky at best. I would certainly be against any thing whihc gave atything like carte blanche permission to place/require surveillance cameras. I think any such legislation (and I believe it should have to be passed as legislation) would have to be very specific and organized. For that we have the same oversight power we have with any other piece of legislation.
And I agree, probably the most concerning part of the whole thing is the “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear”. That statement is oversimplistic and completely defies the principal of “inoccent until proven guilty”. I don’t know if installing cameras to watch him is the mature response, but it at least makes the point.
I totally disagree that major Democratic initiatives signifigantly decrease civil rights. Take your example of SSNs. By law, they can only be used to track social security contributions. If we actually enforced the damned law, they wouldn’t be a privacy violation. But the law isn’t enforced, so companies violate the law to encroach on your privacy, but the goverment (and more specifically, the liberals) are blamed. Typical.
That said, there is some need to universally recognize a unique individual. Addresses don’t work, because people move. Names don’t work, because too many people have the same name. For example, I was unaware until not too long ago that my Dad, whom I always thought was a tone-deaf white programmer, is, in fact, a black jazz musician. I wonder if mom knows? There are times- you mentioned credit reporting- where it is important to keep individuals straight. Everyone knows horror stories of misfiled credit statements. IMHO, the credit agencies aren’t doing enough to keep things straight. Or are you arguing against credit reporting as a concept? This is the driving force behind using SSNs are universal ID numbers. I strongly agree that a better way of managing this needs to be worked out.
Now, with single payer health care, the situation is even easier. If anything, less information about the individual needs to be kept- as we no longer need to keep payment information. Who your employeer is, what your address is, etc. become a lot less important if the hospital knows it doesn’t need to track you down to extract payment out of you. The only information that will have to be kept is medical history- which is already being kept.
So on one side, we have the evil liberals, who want to make sure you have your retirement money properly accounted, and want to make sure you aren’t accidentally given penicillin if you’re allergic to it. And on the other side, we have the conservatives who want to put surveillance cameras in your home And you wonder why the Democrats can claim the mantle of the pro-civil-rights party?
By the way, as a liberal, I’m opposed to surveillance cameras in general as a method of law enforcement. They don’t work. I’m kind of picky that way.
Look at it this way- I’m a mugger, who wants to safely mug people. Which would I rather have- ten cops, out roaming the street, or two cops watching me on surveillance cameras? I’d pick the latter. With ten cops out roaming the street, I don’t know where the cops are. The nearest one may be a dozen blocks away, or he may be around the corner. It’s risky mugging people.
If, on the other hand, I know that there are only two cops, sitting in the station watching the video cameras, I know where all the cops are. So now all I need to do is prevent me from being identified on camera. By the time the cops witness me mugging someone, and leave the station and travel to where the crime happened, I’m long gone. Now all I need to do is prevent anyone from being able to identify me on video. One big hat, comming up. Mugging just became a whole lot less risky- and thus more common.
And if any liberal, or even any Democrat, is dumb enough to say “if you’re not guilty, you have nothing to hide”, let me know and I’ll pummel them. If for no other reason than the Bush administration’s compulsive secrecy screams how guilty they are.
Would you believe its illegal in Minnesota to conceal your identity in public… MN Statute 609.735. But the point is there and I would certainly not argue that cameras are a perfect protection, and are less there for immediate protection and more for later identification and prosecution. And I’m starting to get really concerned by the number of different officials using that “if you’re not guilty” line.
As am I. But it’s important not to paint with too wide a brush. Otherwise you’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater (as Chia was doing).
I note that I’ve seen this sort of thing before- never this bad, but then I wasn’t around for McCarthyism. This is a common tactic of those who want to install a police state, and isn’t particularly new.
One thing I have noticed. I was re-reading Carl Sagan’s wonderful and required reading “Demon Haunted World”. His description of the witch hunting hysteria of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. There are excessive similiarities in form (if not subject matter) between the witch hunting of those days, and the terrorist/criminal hunting of these days.
For example:That most accusations were not based on evidence, but instead on revenge, jealousy, fear, or simple greedThe simple fact that someone was accused was sufficient proof of guiltThe use of torture to extract confessionsA general climate of fear being engendered- you never know who might be a witch, or a terroristThe use of that fear to centralize power into the hands of the corrupt and to engender open-ended barbaric warsPersecution of the powerless, unpopular, and minorities (jews and gypsies for witches, muslims and hispanics for terrorists- although I note that despite the fact that they have lunch with Osama, the royalty of the UAE are not considered terrorists)The disturbing sexual and religous overtones both hysterias acquiredAnd so on.
The Founding Fathers of this country knew well the hysteria of witch hunting- it was no more remote to them than the Civil War is to us, and they were better acquintated with History than most people are (then or now). They explicitly designed the American justice system to prevent a repeat. They had, in the paralance of the day, “been there, done that, and gotten the embroidered tunic”. There is some question as to wether outbreaks of witch hunting hysteria are simply part and parcel of the human psyche and just happen every so often, or wether the current outbreak is being engineered (or at least encouraged) by the forces of darkness. But in either case, those supporting the hysteria must undermine the constraints put into the constitution explicitly to prevent this from happening.
Or, to put it another way, anyone who says that the innocent shouldn’t worry about cameras in their home because they have nothing to hide, is an anti-American traitor and enemy to the founding fathers of our country.
This is all rooted in one of the common libertarian conceits… that the government is the sole danger to privacy. Private businesses, and insurance companies in particular, are FAR more intrusive into my privacy than any government agency. Insurance companies, in particular, constantly monitor their customers, in order to set rates by risk, and to look for excuses to cut off expensive customers. Single-payer health care systems do not suffer from that problem.
You mentioned credit reporting, albiet belittling it compared to the abject horrors of the two-party system. Credit reporting is FAR, FAR more invasive than the IRS at its worst. The credit bureaus track the most intimate details of your financial life, and then sell it without your permission.
Frankly, I’d write that whole last paragraph off as shoddy regurgitation of conventional wisdom and Libertarian Party theology. Your comments on HIPAA are wrong, too… the bulk of the HIPAA law is not about SSNs, but rather information sharing and privacy. SSNs are just the vectors for the disease - the actual disease is corporate greed, and the fact that “privacy” is meaningless to corporations except where the evil government steps in with its horrible laws and regulations.
Brian was absolutely right. All that needs to be done is to prohibit the use of SSNs for anything that isn’t tax-related. This liberal is all for that, and I suspect most would be. It’d make it much harder for private business to aggregate data about me and intrude on my privacy.
Actually, I think we need a more general response to privacy concerns (which, I comment, I share). SSNs got used because they fill a need- coporations want to invade my privacy, give me nothing in return, and make money off that invasion. If it wasn’t SSNs, it’d be some other number. Attacking SSNs is attacking the symptom, not the disease.
I think what we need (but aren’t going to get) is the legal concept that data about me is owned by me- even if it’s collected by someone else. I own my identity- which includes medical history, credit history, shopping habits, address, etc. Once it’s assumed that I own this data, it’s obvious that it shouldn’t be sold, or even distributed, without my knowledge and consent, just like anything else I own. That and rules about what is reasonable for people to ask to see- for example, it’s reasonable for my doctor to see my medical history, and for my loan provider to see my credit history- it is not reasonable for my loan provider to want to see my medical history, or my doctor to be checking up on my credit history.
The reason we won’t see this is because we have a much bigger problem on our hands- corporatism. This is a classic example, but it’s just one of many, where the desires of large corporations are more important to our goverment than the needs of real human beings. Large corporations make money off of invading your privacy. Note that this is a problem for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Do you really think that Joe Biden (D-MBNA), Joe Lieberman, or even Hillary Clinton would back as radical an idea as this?
As someone who is in health care, I’ll tell you that HIPAA does zilch to actually protect privacy. All it required was a bunch of paperwork to be signed and lawyers to be paid before the same violations of privacy can continue.
Note what I’m saying here, because Analog is attacking a straw man. I explicitly acknowledge that businesses violate ethical privacy boundaries. I explicitly acknowledge that they do things that look a whole lot like violating privacy laws to a non-lawyer person like me.
However, I refuse to say that because business has all kinds of privacy violations, the government is somehow absolved of their guilt. There’s two fights that Joe Blow on the street has to face off against when defending his privacy: one is the government, the other is business. Neither are on his side, and neither have any impetus to be on his side.
Where I and BHurt and (more significantly) Analog differ is that I don’t see putting more power into the government as being a win here. Crying to the government because the Big Bad Business invaded your privacy is just sick, because it’s not like the government really cares or really want to stop it.
There is one advantage that the Goverment has over Corporations- citizen influence. Modern corporations have the same totalitarian control structures that Stalinist Russia had. If you’re not a major shareholder or C*O level manager, you have zilch to say about how the company is run, any more than the citizens of the Soviet Union had anything to say about how that country was run.
If you don’t beleive this, try and change how Walmart is run.
With much pain and bloodshed, we have finally gotten a govermental structure that can be influenced by individuals and arbitrary groups of people- imperfectly, yes. But much, much, MUCH more so than any totalitarian power structure will.
Anti-goverment “conservatism” is encouraged by the corporations explicitly because it moves power away from the imperfect goverment and towards the impervious corporations.