Rand Paul: Big Brother Really Is Watching Us
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
What is objectionable is a system in which government has unlimited and privileged access to the details of our private affairs, and citizens are simply supposed to trust that there won't be any abuse of power. This is an absurd expectation."
I think one of the reasons we libertarians have had such a hard time over the years talking about the security state we're building is that Paul is right: this is absurd. People simply do not believe that such a thing is actually happening. Sure, they think, some bad guys are being monitored, and the usual crackpots are complaining, but overall the government is doing a good job. After all, there hasn't been another 9-11, right?
I appreciate Paul's efforts, but we're going to need massive reform in the surveillance policies of the U.S. As a start we need something like another Church Committee.
One thought is this: how about making it a felony not to disclose information that an agency is clearly violating the constitution.
The obligation to whistle blow is usually an explicit part of "honor codes," such as "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do."
The US military uses this honor code in various contexts, see for example US Navy's Bootcamp http://www.bootcamp.navy.mil/recruits.asp and Officer Candidate Guide, US Army National Guard http://dmna.ny.gov/arng/ocs/forms/ocs_guide.pdf
In practice however, I believe authority usually interprets these honor codes as "snitch on your compatriots when they compromise authority", not "snitch on authority when they compromise your compatriots."
What we've always done is get warrants for searches. No warrants were required to monitor someone (say, to have a cop follow them around). That is still the case. The FISA warrants allow monitoring. An Article III warrant is still necessary for a real search. What's changes now is that people openly broadcast, in clear text, the kind of information that previously would've required a search pursuant to a warrant to find out.
I understand why Rand Paul, as a libertarian, has to pretend that we're deviating from historical practice, though. It's much easier to redefine the status quo them claim you just want to go back to it than to admit that we face an unprecedented situation (protecting the privacy of a populace that seems happy to broadcast their private information all over the internet) which might require novel solutions.
The rest of it is just a legal discussion around property rights and Rand Paul's strategy, both of which are not really germane. It doesn't work. It's not that it's illegal, it's not that Rand Paul has to take this position to glorify himself or whatever, it's simply that it doesn't work.
You can get away with "novel solutions" that won't work long-term for a while, but not indefinitely. Setting up this permanent monitoring infrastructure amounts to a cataclysm for our grandchildren. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Nuclear terrorism is example #1 of why "by any means necessary" is considered appropriate for surveillance. Since it's hard to argue this will "never" happen, well, it justifies a lot. Whether that is right or wrong, I still don't know.
With regards to the latter point, I think it's both inevitable and not likely to be the downfall of democracy. There is no future scenario in which the government does not have the kind of insight into our lives that Google, Facebook, etc, have. Not necessarily because the government will ignore any laws and collect that data anyway, but because people desensitized to privacy issues by a computer at Google scanning their e-mail just aren't going to care about a computer at the NSA doing the same.
If the government was just browsing Facebook or doing Google searches, nobody would complain. But they are using government powers to get the information, which means that it is a search.
That's what we suppose, anyway.
Of course, we don't know whether or not rayiner has acquaintances who work for your carrier who have access to it, or perhaps law enforcement who have access to a portal that the carrier voluntarily provides.
And we don't know if the carrier has freely entered into any private agreements to sell call data to others... which they might be free to do even in the face of aggressive bans on law enforcement or national security organizations ever even breathing at carriers.
Do you ever think the framers contemplated you being able to invoke the 4th to protect other people's letters about you?
A thought experiment: the Founding Fathers specified that individuals' "papers" must be safe from casual government search. They did not say that by handing a sealed letter to a postman, I'm implicitly making it public. If someone had invented a machine to see through envelopes and read letters, they would not have approved of its warrant-less use.
Why should email or phone calls be different? Technically, the communication leaves my control. Technically, there are ways to snoop on it. But the law concerns itself not with what is possible, but what is permissible. A machine that could see through envelopes wouldn't make letters a "broadcast" medium; only the intention of the sender to make something public could do that.
Snooping on phone calls and emails without a warrant specifying which people's communications should be investigated and why is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation.
Actually, the 4th doesn't protect sealed letters you hand to just anyone, only USPS carriers. And not what's written on the outside (metadata). Also, in this hypothetical you didn't write the "paper" in question. A CDR isn't your data. Its verizon's data about you.
So take away the special status of the USPS, and add in the fact that its verizon's tracking data for you, and its more like the government hitting up your local steamboat company for a list of all the shipments you sent through them. And I think that would not have required a warrant in 1810.
Snowden is quoted as saying:
>> “I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal e-mail,” he added.
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/06/10/on-first-glance-...
The IRS reportedly thinks it has the authority to read the contents of emails, not just metadata:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-sec...
The NSA reportedly has fiber cable taps at AT&T:
Its not a "search" of you to get information google keeps about you using government powers. It just isn't. The framers did not contemplate that people would freely hand over private information to third parties who have no legal obligations to protect it.
They are -- you can question whether they are a good steward or not, but that is irrelevant as far as I can tell. The government didn't give them the option of keeping their users' information private.
"Its not a "search" of you to get information google keeps about you using government powers."
You assert that, but I don't see why. Clearly they were trying to find something in all of that data -- if trying to find something is not a search, what is?
"The framers did not contemplate that people would freely hand over private information to third parties who have no legal obligations to protect it."
It doesn't matter whether they have a legal obligation to protect it or not. They weren't given an option to protect it. If I write you a letter about a new political party platform, you have no legal obligation to keep that a secret. But do you think it's reasonable for the government to come in and demand all of the letters you've ever received, and then browse through them to see if someone might be starting a radical political movement?
At some point a difference of degree becomes one of kind. At some point, "monitoring" becomes searching.
While I'm sure some small government fans would say this is a good thing, the answer is that very little would get done. Symbolic gestures and the like would pass, but very little of real substance. It's commonly the case that most everyone agrees that something needs to be done, but often they disagree on what exactly needs to happen. You can see what happens in the senate when 60+ votes are needed to pass anything.
Yet I am surprised that it was that element of my statement that people ran with. For me having a built in shelf life of a law is not nearly as important as having clearer legislation and the cessation of co-mingling unrelated laws into one bill.
Libertarians are mostly pretty nice once you get to know them. Some of us are downright friendly at times.
Unless I myself run for office, I don't think I'll ever find a political party that closely aligns with my beliefs and also takes them seriously.
All parties start with one voice, regardless the exercise will bring clarity to the beliefs and values you hold most dear.
Suppose you want to vote for the Libertarian candidate but you'd prefer the Republican candidate to the Democratic one. By voting for the Libertarian, you "take" a vote from the Republican and make the Democrat's success more likely. (Or reverse the scenario: voting for a Green Party candidate hurts the Democratic candidate and gets you a Republican.)
Thus the system discourages you from expressing your true preference.
This is a major flaw in the most basic idea of democracy. All citizens, and especially all parties outside the Big Two, should work toward a better voting system.
One proposed system: http://rangevoting.org/
>"For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9845595-7.html
This goes to show you why you should believe what politicians vote and do, and ignore most of what they say. Obama isn't unique in this regard.
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ar_libertari...
Like it or not, they adhere to a fairly strict view of the constitution and that's admirable in the current poll-based world of politics.
That said, Paul (and father) were never good communicators. Both vocally and even prosaically. I'm surprised he is not using the IRS scandal and tie it to the NSA's potential abuse of power.
As we know the metadata can be used to see if a person had an abortion, may have sought mental health (calling suicide hotlines, etc.) may have feared STDs (calling aids hotline) may have had cosmetic surgery or slew of other things.
Any of these information, can for example, be misused against a political contender running against the current administration. Comparisons to IRS' supposed targeting of certain political entity would have been tangible and palpable example of the unchecked power of NSA and would have been farm more visceral than the heady, "Big Brother" argument.
Actually, he does mention the IRS scandal:
"The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?"
I saw that. However, it's made in passing and the core of his argument and the title of his article is about "Big Brother". Which sounds heady and usually associated with the conspiracy types.
Here's a video I came across the other day of Ron Paul in 1984: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAWmKpBeEz0
The traditional narrative that youngsters in the US are taught is that the revolution was fought over taxes, but if you closely read the declaration of independence, that's not really the bulk of the argument. Historically speaking, it was violations of personal freedoms and the "home is a man's castle" principles that rankled the colonists the most.
To add another point: for one election I was deeply involved with the party. I found that many Libertarians went overboard in conspiracy theories: vaccines with trackers, 9/11 truthers, anti-GMO nonsense, etc. I have a really hard time calling myself a Libertarian along with these people.
Regardless, it's an important point to make that politicians are complex creatures, just like the rest of us. It's best not to hold them in high regard as people and to instead focus on their policies.
Pretty much all politicians are awful right now so if you're not going to run yourself you're going to have to make compromises in who you vote for. Please make practical ones.
A person acting against that belief in order to satisfy your own personal beliefs would be a hypocrite, no?
My overall point is there is no conflict in accepting his good faith position that you agree with while rejecting his other good faith position you don't agree with.
Only if you accept a priori an answer to the core issue which is debated in the abortion issue: whether an unborn baby should be protected as a human life.
Nobody argues that government is invasive if it forbids stabbing a toddler to death behind closed doors. People do argue that one may stab a fetus to death behind closed doors.
The point of contention is not privacy, but the definition of human life. Pretending that the issue is already settled even as you argue for a particular policy is either naive or disingenuous.
It's not really that hard to grasp is it?
Regardless, that has nothing to do with this issue.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/30223/rand-paul-abortion-b...
It kind of does, since a few posts above started with the Libertarian plug. One typical response to that plug is to point out that libertarians often care only about liberty as it pertains to them personally. This is a fourteen-year-old's view of the world and it's one of the things that marginalizes libertarians as it is depressingly common among them.
1) don't we have more track record on Paul regarding this issue than we did on Obama? 2) isn't it possible that having a senator express this opinion publicly could influence other elected officials?
Reading his statements regarding his commitment to the Republican party & its goals as well as the right-wing "Libertarian" principles he habitually talks about and then comparing that to the analysis of the actual text of his proposals; it's obvious that he is simply using these "Libertarian" talking points as blunt weapons against the Democrats.
Many of Rand Paul's proposals don't actually do or change anything at all, instead they are designed only to make the news cycle and then to disappear. Many lack many of the details actual legislation is required to have or because they are designed such that a voting majority is impossible to develop. It's clear that they were never intended to go further than a news cycle... and they don't.
Besides often being couched in language Democrats are unlikely to ever accept, they're also consistent with the proposals from other Hard-Right Republican's who don't associate themselves with the right-libertarian political movement at all. So it's not like he's making non-partisan basic pro-freedom proposals, which the Democrats (being the anti-freedom party) reject. He's only making proposals about issues which can be expressed in the hyper-partisan language and which support the hyper-partisan strategy that is currently dominating D.C. politics. Moreover, he's studiously avoided good-faith, non-partisan, basic policy reform proposals which could get through the legislation process.
Assuming that Rand Paul continues to be successful with this gambit, the obvious influence it will have on other elected officials is that this sort of deceptive and manipulative strategy is politically effective and that they should be doing it too.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/31/232182/rand-pau...