What is important is
to keep learning,
to enjoy challenge, and
to tolerate ambiguity.
In the end there are no certain answers.
Marina Horner
McCain: Let It Go
John McCain has a problem with Rand Paul. According to The Hill:
McCain, in an interview on CNN's State of the Union, was asked to respond to Paul’s statements calling the National Security Agency’s phone tracking program an "all-out assault on the Constitution." "Right. Just prior to the Boston bombing, he said the battlefield was no longer in America," McCain said.
"President Obama says this," Paul said in that interview. "Some members of my party say the battle has no geographic limitations and the laws of war apply. It's important to know that the law of war that they're talking about means no due process."
After Paul held a 13-hour filibuster on John Brennan's nomination to run the CIA over the nation’s drone policy, McCain called Paul and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who joined the filibuster, "wacko birds."Right, John. As if posing for a photo op with Syrian kidnappers raised your own credibility! Among other things, the Tsarnaev brothers (re: the Boston bombings) were revealed to national intelligence by Russian intelligence. Last year more military deaths occurred from suicide than in Afghanistan. We are outspending the next several countries combined. John conveniently ignores that almost all Islamic radicals have cited American military involvement in the Gulf region and elsewhere as their rationale. Running trillion dollar deficits, we cannot afford to be the world's policeman. And all McCain is doing is rationalizing an increasingly authoritarian government that throws citizen rights under the bus while fear-mongering. We have seen little payback from throwing a disproportionate amount of money at the problem. It wasn't the massive manhunt in Boston that led to the capture of the surviving brother; it was a citizen finally allowed to go into his own backyard. Rand Paul, by insisting on warrants for searches and due process for American citizens, is hardly a "wacko bird". Rand can speak for himself, but John is losing credibility, and providing political cover for the Obama Administration's War on Privacy is no virtue. John has now earned a second nomination for my first Bad Elephant award for his incivility.
The Spin vs the Reality of the War on Privacy
Why might intelligence want to review content of communications involving alleged terrorists? Who? What? When? Where? How? Similar information gathering has been enhanced for financial transactions and Internet usage. As I pointed out in posts last week, our rights are being eroded by technological advances and technologically clueless judges, whom seem to increasingly view our Bill of Rights as more of exceptions to the discretion of the State rather than constraints on the State. The State has been given unprecedented and logically unjustifiable access to personal data that make warrants and legal protections more the exception than the rule.
This is just an extension of things like the allegedly rogue IRS personnel in Cincinnati. There's a lot we don't know about that story. I don't have specific knowledge, but I know most bureaucrats are risk-adverse and cover their asses. There's a reason a top Obama IRS official takes the Fifth Amendment; it's unlikely that the same lack of managerial oversight, a "wink and a nod" under a President whom routinely attacks the Tea Party, doesn't occur elsewhere. It may be that we don't enough to ask the right questions, and she's not about to tell us which questions we should be asking, and she thinks given certain legal opinions and legalistic hair-splitting, she is telling a narrowly defined truth--but it's certainly not "the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
It reminds me of the 2 students I busted for cheating in my undergraduate database class at UTEP. I was tipped off because of a duplicated very unusual answer to an assignment question; the female in question even admitted it in front of the whole class when I reminded the class of my assignment policy without naming the students: "Is it me?" She tried to manipulate university procedures, recruiting class members on her behalf whom tried to argue I had verbally overwritten my syllabus warning. UTEP's process violated due process; none of the allegations were even discussed with me (I found out when one of the students she recruited, a project team colleague in another class, contradicted the lies and found himself attacked by the lowlife Dean of Students). I suspected what was going on because a small number of students confronted me after class, suggesting that the cheating went beyond the 2 rogue students and I was unfairly singling the students out. I, of course, did not discuss the specifics and evidence because of university procedures and privacy concerns. I did not know and/or could not prove other wrongdoing; I suspected the students were implying they themselves had violated my academic honesty policy: I asked them 3 times whether they were confessing to violating policy; they sidestepped the question each time. Of course, if they had confessed, I would have had grounds to pursue them. But it was like if I asked '2 + 2 =?'; if students got it right, they may or may not have worked on it together, but if two students responded "5167", the law of probability is very low they came up with the same wrong answer on their own. I'm sure I probably only detected a fraction of wrongdoing, but other professors never reported any. I was fairly certain if they were cheating in my classes, they were doing it under other professors as well.
In fact, that happened at UWM. I had busted Asian students for plagiarizing in my graduate system analysis course. My new colleague now teaching the graduate DSS course (I taught it the prior year) knocked on my door and asked me to look at work turned in by a student that seemed "too professional"; I immediately recognized it from a classic article on group DSS written by a well-known female professor at the University of Minnesota. Then I looked at the student's name--the ringleader of the Asian group in my class. I then went to my friend Bob's office; Bob was teaching all sections of the graduate MIS survey course; I laughed and said, "You by any chance didn't have so-and-so in any of your classes." Bob said that the name was familiar. I said, "Do you by any chance still have any of his work around?" He shook his head. "Unless he didn't pick up his graded paper at the end of the semester..." Sure enough; Bob had given his paper a B+. But more to the point, the student had copied and pasted material from the IEEE volume of readings I had required for my system analysis class! I retrieved my volume, and Bob's response was [expletive deleted]. It was like the student was rubbing it in my face. Under pressure from the business school administration and senior faculty, my two colleagues refused to pursue action; I myself was the target of insane accusations I was trying to sabotage their foreign student program!
I'm sure that we are only scratching the surface of things like the Obama scandal trifecta. Remember the Acorn scandals? More or less the same type of defensive response. You run across a problem: it's an isolated incident; they throw rogue employees under the bus; it's now under contol, etc. The revelation had surfaced after some Tea Party organizations lodged complaints; it didn't result from ordinary government audits. So when David Gregory and other so-called journalists basically ask for "where's the beef" that wrongdoing went beyond Cincinnati, one clear point is that government audits have been inadequate? Should we be surprised by a government that routinely under-invests in fraud detection, even maintenance of the nation's infrastructure?
We know this via the Washington Times:
"There is a blurring of the line between content and context," said [Stephen B. Wicker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University], whose research focuses on privacy issues in wireless information networks.
“The metadata available is now so fine-grained that it reveals where we’re going, what we’re doing, what our preferences and beliefs might be and who our friends are,” he said.
Federal law and rulings by federal courts have consistently held that metadata, including information about the location of mobile phones, is not covered by the warrant requirements of the U.S. Constitution.
“Unfortunately, technology and the opportunities it presents for surveillance have outpaced our understanding of the Fourth Amendment,” Mr. Wicker said, citing the constitutional ban on unlawful searches and seizures.
Mr. Binney said that, in any case, the NSA already is collecting the content of calls and emails, as well as metadata.
In 2003, according to sworn testimony by a former AT&T engineer, the NSA began building a special room at the company’s switching center in San Francisco and at other AT&T switching centers around the country. Equipment in the room enabled NSA to siphon off a copy of every byte of data running through AT&T’s fiber-optic cable network, according to privacy advocates.
Equal Protection vs. Our Constitutional Law President
More Military Family Reunion Moments
On the Liberation of Commerce From Government Meddling
Don't Let Your Guard Down On The Internet Sales Tax
As I reported last week, the House Judiciary chair dashed cold water on the idea that the House will rubber-stamp the Senate's unconscionable vote exposing businesses to out-of-state tax jurisdictions (beyond the federal vortex). But he didn't close the door to legislation, and it's possible competing bills will go into reconciliation. The fact that Senate Democrats and Obama were willing to throw small businesses under the bus demonstrates the shallowness of their small business rhetoric beyond government "winners and losers" programs like SBA loans.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Bob Gorrell and Townhall |
Simon and Garfunkel, "At the Zoo".
