If you object to what Bush did because you believe strongly in checks and balances, and think the harm of his actions in those political terms outweighs their good in national security, that is a good basis for an argument. But there's way too much bullshit out there because everyone has their own little agendas.
Paul's latest.
Basically says that he used to do illegal stuff that he doesn't think should be illegal, so he objects to domestic spying because it might lead to more people like him getting busted. I assume his past crimes were drug related. It comes across like he has more interest in protecting people's secret illegal drug habits than increasing our ability to thwart terrorists.
And here I was concerned that too many people are raising hell about the wiretaps just because they don't like Bush.
To be fair, the reason he cites for his objection is the reasonable idea that if you give someone a power with the understanding they'll use it for good, eventually they'll use it for bad. He brings up the drug issue as the reason why he cares so much - the drugs so near and dear to him are the obvious next target for domestic spying.
I'm open to discussion about legalizing drugs. But given that they're illegal now, I guess those of us with nothing to hide should be put at greater risk so Paul can keep smoking up without fear of big brother.
17 comments:
So you wouldn't mind submitting a blood sample every time you get in your car to make sure you aren't taking anything that would impair your driving? Better not get a stuffy nose and take anything with pseudophoedrine in it before you go to McDonald's. And, you wouldn't mind if someone kept track of every web site you ever visited? Hope your wife never finds out about your hits to midgetinabarn.com...because lord knows the government really keeps all it's information on lockdown. Or maybe every time you venture out of your house, someone could drive behind you to make sure you don't break any traffic laws?
Also, the argument of "if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind" holds little water, because you probably don't have nothing to hide. If someone can listen in on your conversations and follow you around, they will find some law that you're breaking. Hell, wasn't getting a blowjob illegal at some point? If you have unfettered access to every aspect of someone's life, you can definitely find something to use against them.
[insert bad analogy about gentile germans during the holocause having nothing to hide]
My argument wasn't 'nothing to hide' but your reason isn't why that argument isn't a good one.
I have a problem with many of those things because they are more costly to implement than the good they do. I wouldn't mind a devise in cars to make sure you're legal to drive if it was cost-effective.
I mind spying on non-suspicious people because I do value privacy. I don't mind spying on people who talk to our enemies.
Also I wouldn't mind if there was some computer thing that flagged me if I visited certain kinds of sites and then kept track of me for a certain amount of time after that (kiddie porn, terrorist related).
But that could be a slippery slope and I'd want to make sure it wasn't abused. I don't think it is impossible for that to happen.
they actually have devices to use in cars that can track where you are, what speed you're going, if you've braked too hard, etc. they advertise them to parent's to use on their teenage kids. you seriously would have put up with that as a kid? and if those devices exist, i'm sure it's not too long until they make ones that can actually modulate your speed for you, to make sure you're not going over the speed limit, it's ok to put those in everyone's car, so we don't hurt each other? i'm sure they wouldn't be that expensive...
"I don't mind spying on people who talk to our enemies. "
What if the "enemies" change, to say, people who play poker? Now do you mind the spying?
It's a pretty slippery slope when you allow the president and his minions to break the law because it makes you safer now. You might not be so "safe" tomorrow.
I do agree that the wiretap fiasco is entirely based in partisanship. In fact, I think there's a fairly solid legal argument (based in the SC's recent Hamdi decision) that he was well within the powers granted him by congress. They wrote a dumb law when they wrote the Authorization to Use Military Force, and they gave him powers that they didn't think about through their use of flowery language in the preamble.
I have resisted the urge to post such on PaulP's LJ, as he doesn't care about the spearation of powers issues. He dislikes that our government is spying on citizens, even if all the legislative hurdles have been properly cleared.
Rejecting my examples from before based on the cost-effectiveness is missing the point. Suppose that it were absolutely free to put a GPS tracking device and an RFID tag in your arm. That way, a government agency could track where anyone was at any time using GPS, and assure that it is in fact you with RFID. That would be acceptable to you? I can't believe you value privacy that little that you would say that it's OK for someone to listen in on your conversations because somehow somewhere someone might be caught doing something bad.
The hardest part about supporting or opposing domestic spying is that you never know the good that it does. So, if you support it, you just have to assume that it's all on the level, and to oppose it, you have to assume that it isn't. I personally don't trust anyone I haven't met to be honest about anything, so I don't for a second believe that domestic spying will result in all warm fuzzy happy endings where we catch bad guys with bombs and nothing bad ever happens.
On a somewhat related note, I have seen how narrowly the scope of the PATRIOT act has been restricted in its use to combat terrorism. My brother's girlfriend's brother, a citizen of England and a legal US resident, went to England to go to his grandmother's funeral. When he came back, he was stopped at the airport because he had a several year old felony conviction in the US for drug possession (for which he had already served a prison sentence). He was taken to jail, where he was held for a few weeks and not allowed to see his family, and then was deported back to England under some provision of the PATRIOT act. At least that's one terrorist we've taken down. That probably has something to do with why I'm skeptical that we're only spying on the guys with the nerve gas and shoe bombs.
Breaking an unjust law is not necessarily a bad thing, if you truly believe the law is unjust.
Continuing my streak of bad analogies:
"I'm open to discussion about legalizing drugs. But given that they're illegal now, I guess those of us with nothing to hide should be put at greater risk so Paul can keep smoking up without fear of big brother."
"I'm open to discussion about abolishing slavery. But given that it's legal now, I guess those of us with nothing to hide should be put at greater risk so Paul can keep sneaking [Africans] out of South Carolina."
Cara - I wouldn't have a problem with a device that made sure you weren't drunk before you drove. I'm not sure about a speed modulation device, but I think I wouldn't have a problem with it if everyone else wanted it. I doubt our country would support anything like that any time soon though, and I would have a problem with it being forced upon an unwilling public.
Ice - If poker becomes a criminal act that is often prosecuted, I will either stop playing or move somewhere else. I'm not interested in living a criminal life, even if I have no ethical problem with the actions considered criminal.
Walt - Your slavery analogy is ludicrous and you know it. Freeing slaves was a noble act by people who tried to correct a severe injustice. Doing recreational drugs that are illegal where you are ins't a heroic fight against tyranny. Furthermore, I'm not sure how I'd feel about an escape operation that risked thousands of lives to save one. That kind of a problem is a tough one. But I know I don't like a rule that makes me more likely to get blown up so we can protect people's right to do illegal things.
And you are right that we don't know how effective the domestic spying is. Is a very tiny chance of stopping a nuclear attack worth 100% loss of freedom? Probably not. Is a large chance of stopping an attack worth a loss of the privacy to smoke weed in your house? I think so.
Your personal story about the Patriot act sucks for that guy, but that's what war is. War is about being very very careful who you can trust, and a foreign guy with a sketchy history should raise some flags. I'm not saying they handled that the way I'd like it to be handled, but better safe than sorry until we figure out a better system.
Basically a lot of you seem to want to stop giving the government powers they can use for good because you assume they'll use them for bad. I say let them use them for good, but fight agaisnt their misuse, not against giving the powers at all.
A few points that are hard to make flow well, since there are a few different topics being kicked around:
1. Notice how i prefaced that analogy with "to continue my streak of bad analogies". Of course it was ridiculous. So was my comment about Hitler. However, the fact remains that law does not imply justice, and therefore breaking a law does not imply evil.
2. Given that your chance of getting blown up by a terrorist is comparatively low to your chance of being murdered by an American citizen, it seems ridiculous that we should have to grant the government unchecked power to combat that one specific thing. Where is the war on murder? The war on rape? A lot more people have been murdered than have been killed by terrorists in this country, but the police still need to follow due process to catch the culprits. Terrorism is the new communism - a new boogeyman to use to create compliance through fear, especially when it comes to politicians who have to worry about their constituencies seeing them as terror sympathizers. Obviously, people that oppose the state taking away personal freedoms to fight the boogeyman obviously is an opponent of the state. That's how the PATRIOT act got passed right after 9/11 with only one dissenting vote. And being careful of which peopls from which countries to trust? Add a bit of state-controlled production to that xenophobia and removal of personal freedoms, and you're right on the road to fascism.
3. The only powers that a democratic government should be granted should be the ones that can't be used for evil in the first place. Granting broad powers and then fighting their misuse is like giving a 10 year old boy a gun, and then hoping we can take it away if he shoots somebody. If you're going to let the government spy on citizens, a properly authorized warrant should be issued, which arguably should not be kept secret (after the fact...I suppose it would defeat the purpose if they published a surveillance warrant in the NY Times).
4. Being careful about who you trust also led to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Also, I wasn't aware that Englishmen in their mid-20s who had been caught with weed fit the profile of an airplane hijacker.
5. So they can spy on terrorists, and weed smokers. Who's to say where it stops? What's next - mob bosses? Fine. Those subversive labor unions like the NY Transit Workers? Ehhhh... Those dangerous LaRouche supporters? If there isn't a rigorous method to watch the watchers, then there really is no limit to where it will go. Think that it's ridiculous that the president wouldn't spy on political enemies? No one would know about the spying. Blackmail doesn't usually get publicized that often (since, well, that's the whole point). You can say you would fight it's misuse, but first you would have to know about its misuse.
I know if I had the ability to spy on anyone I wanted, and no one would ever know, there would be a camera in a all female dorm shower somewhere.
1) what does this have to do with anything?
2)
a- "Murder" isn't an organized attack on our nation. Nor is "rape." We don't declare war on anything that kills people. We declare war on organized groups of people who are out to destroy our nation.
b- the government doesn't have "unchecked power" nor am I saying it should. I'm saying I don't mind giving the government greater leeway in surveilence (sp?) to fight a war.
c- people can and should support personal freedom. they have every right to ask questions and have opinions. i think paul phillips has a right to his opinion, but I don't like that opinion, and I think his priorities might be out of whack.
3) This is a terrible point. We grant our government a near monopoly on the legitamite use of violence. It is a rare circumstance that any non-agent of the government can use force against another person. Often this power is abused, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have this power. Come on man. And you are right that publicizing suveillance warrants is a terrible idea. Maybe 10 years later or something.
4) It is possible that what happened to your friend was grossly inappropriate. If they are using powers granted to help fight terror to fight drugs instead, that might be an abuse of those powers. I don't know enough about the Japanese internment situation to comment extensively on it but I can say this. If those peoeple were physically abused, that is terrible, just like the abuse of those people down in Abu Grave (sp?) was terrible. But that alone doesn't mean they shouldn't have been there.
5) "Who's to say where it stops?" WE SAY. There are and should be rigorous methods. It seems likely to me that what the President did was not illegal either because it was suffiently in grey area or because it was explicitly legal. We have a good system of checks and balances in our country, and when one group oversteps their bounds, it is on all of us to make sure they back down.
Hopefully your point in 5 is that we should be wary of granting powers that we can't monitor for misuse. That is a good point. When we quickly grant powers in response to an immediate threat, and those powers might not be able to be monitored, we should weigh the benefits those powers provide against the potential negatives of their misuse, and also factor in that we can develop a way to monitor them while they are already in use.
1)
Not much. Well, not anything.
2)
a) I. "Terrorists" aren't an organized group of people. There are Iranian terrorists, Palestinian/Israeli terrorists, crazy white man in a shack in montana terrorists...terrorists can act alone, or in small groups. And as for being out to destroy our nation...the Detroit Lions were out to win the super bowl last September, but no one needed to pass new laws to keep that from happening.
a) II. There has not been a formal declaration of war
a) III. The president has been quoted as saying that finding Bin Laden is not a priority. Instead, we attacked Iraq.
a) IV. How many terrorists have we found and brought to justice? I can't think of any. You'd think they would publicize it out the wazoo if they actually used all this spiffy legislation to, you know, arrest ONE terrorist.
a) IV. (flippant) "Drugs" is an organized group of people out to destroy our nation?
a) V. Roman numerals kick ass.
b) Expanded power to spy on enemies? Yes. Expanded power to spy on citizens? Not so much.
c) Asking questions is good, as long as they are answered. Agencies who perform spying don't answer many questions from citizens.
3)
Government agents allowed to use force are very publicly accountable for their actions. Secret spies are not. What I should have said was that the level of oversight should correlate to the gravity of the given power. By "can't be abused", I should have said "can't easily be abused without lots of people knowing". Why would you wait 10 years to publish a warrant? Why not immediately after the alleged threat is over? If you wait 10 years, then the people responsible will have been long since out of office, and the whole point of publishing is moot. If you tell me that someone will check some magical device in my car 100 years from now to see if I ran a red light, what would be the point? I'd be dead and wouldn't care.
4)
So you agree that racial profiling of the American Japanese who hadn't done anything wrong was appropriate? I really have no response to this because your opinion that they "might have belonged there" just seems absurd to me. If there is a report of a rape by a white guy in your neighborhood, I'm sure you would volunteer to hang out in jail until they found the guy that did it. You know, just in case it was you and you tricked the DNA test and faked your alibi.
5)
I'm not sure how we're all supposed to say where it stops. It seems to be a Supreme Court decision, and Supreme Court officials aren't elected. Joe Citizen doesn't get to make the laws, we just vote and hope for the best. The only way I know that a citizen can get a law repealed is if it is unconstitutional, the citizen breaks the law and is arrested, and uses the defense that the law is unconstitutional - not the friendliest process. If citizens tried to take matters in their own hands in some less civilized way, they'd get hit with a big beefy piece of your #3. Or, they'd get round up into camps, which you probably would approve of anyway.
This is starting to get like talking in circles. I'm not sure how many different ways there are to say the same thing. Obviously I'm not going to change your mind, and you aren't going to change mine.
DAMMIT - I think i've botched the first word verification every time i've tried to post today
I think we agree on the following
1. There is a tradeoff between security and personal liberties.
2. We're willing to sacrifice some liberties for greater security. Determining exactly how much of each is difficult.
3. People tend to abuse powers, therefor power should not be lightly granted.
4. It is appropriate to monitor people who have great power. The extent of the monitoring should usually be proportional to the power.
5. Terrorism is a threat.
6. The liklihood and severity of that threat should determine how much liberty we're willing to surrender to protect against it.
7. Partisan political bullshit gets in the way of honest evaluation of that threat.
8. Liberties surrendered/power granted because of the terrorism threat have potential to be abused.
9. The likelihood and severity of that threat should be factored into our decision to grant those powers.
10. Partison political bullshit gets in the way of honest evaluation of that threat.
11. Liberties surrendered/power granted because of the terrorism threat might be difficult to retract once the threat is reduced. I consider this different than abuse (abuse is how they are misused, this part is how long they are used.)
12. The liklihood of being able to retract them when we want to should be factored into the decision to grant them. (I don't think this is likely because of the way our government is designed, but I acknowledge the legitimacy of the concern so I included it.)
13. Political bullshit might make it difficult to determine when the reduction of the terrorism threat makes a reduction of power/restoration of liberties appropriate. This should be factored into decisions.
14. If one of us was bored we could make all that into an equation and the debate could be reduced to arguing the coeffiecients of certain terms.
Where we at?
1) This tradeoff is one of the defining features of this debate. It's actually a lot like the discussion of abortion in Freakonomics. The tradeoff is really a discussion of the utility of the two options including straightforward parameters (how much do the options cost? What is the net change in human lives between the alternatives? etc.) and the totally not straightforward subjective stuff (how much are civil liberties "worth" in terms of some common currency?). Just like with abortion, you can construct whatever logical argument you want to discuss the straightforward details, but it will likely come down to what a fetus is "worth" to you, subjectively, in terms of human life (or in this case, what "privacy" is worth, in terms of some potential cost of terrorism). You or I may or may not think its crazy to value a fetus infinitely (abortion is absolutely wrong in all cases) or to value civil liberties infinitely (government should have no powers that infringe on the liberty of citizens, ever), but the fact remains that there is likely a huge spread of beliefs out there running the gamut, including the absolutes, and this variance will have the most effect on what people think is right and what they don't. Most people are probably somewhere around the mean, leading to a vague concensus about whether or not something is ok, always with people thinking the option is too extreme and always with people thinking the option doesn't go far enough. And yes, this means I think the whole discussion is pretty much futile.
You sell yourself short, calling it futile, after making a great point that it all boils down to a subjective worth of something. Using the abortion example, it is awesome if the outcome of a discussion is the realization that your stance boils down to "I think a human fetus is worth 0.59 human lives" or whatever.
Most people (myself included on many issues) don't have everything thought through all the way. They fit their reasoning to a belief they just picked up somehow. If the discussion of 2 opposing parties can reduce a big vague issue to a derivation of several smaller and more well-definied issues, that is progress.
Plus it is pure joy to prove that your counterpart in a debate takes self-contradictory or otherwise absurd stances.
For example Walt's contention that spying is wrong, through the series of steps we discussed, means that he believes that the votes of British drug users should count for 7 times as much as the votes of American-born people with asian names. Furthermore Walt's distrust of the execute branch stems from deeply repressed homosexuality, although curiously, not his own homosexuality... mine. QED.
"For example Walt's contention that spying is wrong, through the series of steps we discussed, means that he believes that the votes of British drug users should count for 7 times as much as the votes of American-born people with asian names."
Huh?
I wish we could have used wiretapping pre-9/11
Because we wouldn't have known about it using conventional methods
Why, oh why, didn't we let the spying occur when we could have caught the hijackers?
[op-ed]At least in the future, it will actually matter
NOTE: no sources really examined for bias, etc
NOTE2: no, this doesn't have much to do with the arguments above. I'm just wondering exactly how worthwhile the wiretapping activities would actually be.
Those are interesting, but I don't think we're very surprised that we knew some of that stuff.
That does illustrate to me how much people tend to go with the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to life. Our country was cruising along just fine, we'd been getting scattered reports of a terrorist scheme but we'd been hearing those for years, let's just maintain the status quo and we'll all be fine.
I think a weakness of our form of government is that it is much harder to convince a group that drastic changes are needed than it is to convince 1 person. A single ruler with excellent foresight could make changes happen much quicker, making his country much more flexible and adaptive.
Be clear that I'm not suggesting there aren't significant strengths we acheive from our checks and balances and beaurocracy (sp?).
But even if Bush or Clinton or any other President had become convinced that terrorism was a greater threat than everyone was giving it credit for pre-9/11, they wouldn't have had the authority to take drastic actions, and it would have taken months or years to convince Congress to act on it. I don't think the Presidents were powerless, just that they don't have as much flexibility. I assume it is for that reason that the President has special powers during war time. If this war on terror is considered a situation where the President should have those greater powers, and if the war on terror lasts a long time, maybe we should have a more powerful executive for a long time. And maybe that will cause other problems that we'll have to solve. But there are elections every 4 years so we won't get stuck with a tyrant for very long anyway.
End long disjointed verbal puke
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