FunctionalAmbivalent

In Which We Continue To Search For a Freedom Republicans Won't Willingly Surrender

The government gives itself the power to detain information at the border, holding laptops and other other data carrier as long as they like. They can copy the information contained within, distribute it to other government agencies, and use it however they like.

The purpose of this is to protect us from terrorists, who would presumably be crafty enough to stash critical information somewhere besides the most obvious data carrier in the world. So, like gun control laws that disarm law-abiding citizens but not criminals, the government now declares itself powerful enough to control the flow of information to those people who don't make efforts to conceal it. In other words, the only people to be affected by this will be law abiding citizens.

You would think, at some point, that Republicans who fancy themselves in favor of small government would object to the current administration's massive expansion of government power. But Republicans are so afraid, they'll let the government do anything it wants as long as the government promises to protect them from a risk so minuscule it can barely be quantified.

They do this, ironically, in the name of freedom.

You'd Think Conservatives Would Understand This

A basic fact of government that conservatives have forgotten is this: when you grant bureaucracy a power, the bureaucracy uses and expands that power.

For the last few years, conservatives terrified of terrorism have insisted that government needed extraordinary powers. One of those powers is the ability to, with no court oversight, sift through massive amounts of private consumer data to locate individuals who fit a terrorist profile, and then listen in on their phone calls and Internet transmissions.

The technique of mining data and tapping phone calls pre-dates 9/11, of course. Back in the Clinton Administration the FBI debuted a controversial technology called Carnivore that could identify and pull certain data "packets" out of the Internet bitstream, with or without a warrant. As I recall, President Clinton -- no enemy of big government -- was all aboard the Carnivore train, while assuring all of us the technology would never be misused. At the time, conservatives were skeptical.

For those of you too young to remember, conservatives used to be skeptical all the time.

The war on terrorism has done away with conservative skepticism about big government. Oh, yeah, conservatives still want lower taxes, but more than that they want a Big Daddy government that will protect them from people they don't like -- mostly Arabs and Mexicans -- no matter what the cost in freedom. So they've empowered the government to do all kinds of previously unthinkable things confident in their belief that government won't misuse that power.

Yes, well: It seems those powers are already being used for more than fighting terrorism. Tom DeLay used homeland security authority to track dissident Texas legislators during a political squabble and phone tapping capabilities justified as necessary to foil terrorist plots were used instead to thwart journalists doing their jobs. And now the New York Times notes that all that anti-terrorist leeway is being used to fight drug trafficking as well:

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with fighting crime. That's the political counter-argument: surely you're not in favor of illegal drugs. In the culture of contemporary politics, that's the winning argument, and down the slippery slope we go. The extra-Constitutional powers we grant the President to fight terrorism today will prove to be handy tools in fighting every subsequent crisis du jour. Surely you can't be in favor of child pornography, the argument will go, and politicians who live in fear of 30 second attack ads will quiver in fear and give the all-powerful Big Daddy State even more access to what had always been private. Watch the bureaucracy sprawl from terrorism to narcotics to porn to online gambling to tax evasion to trafficking in illegal fireworks. Surely you can't be in favor of children with their fingers blown off.

Here we see a fine example of how it starts, and soon enough the extraordinary powers granted in moments of fear will become ordinary powers used in moments of political expediency.

They Said It Would Never Happen

Security teams at Los Angeles International Airport are breaking out of their routines and randomizing the things that they do.

Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, NEWSWEEK has learned, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable.

The goal is to make it harder for would-be terrorists to detect patterns in the security routines that they can exploit.

Typical plots start when would-be attackers begin watching their target "18 months to four years prior to an attack" to look for security weaknesses, says James Butts, deputy executive director of law enforcement at Los Angeles World Airports, which runs LAX and other city-owned airports. "Part of it is to look for patterns in the deployment of assets. We're trying to block the surveillance cycle" by making the security patrols appear in unpredictable places at unpredictable times.

In April, I wrote about airport security:

Doesn't routine provide opportunity? Think of every bank heist or prison escape movie you ever saw; doesn't the plan start with an analysis of the guards' routines, looking for security cracks that can be exploited? Wasn't that the first thing the 9/11 plotters did? So why have we settled on a security system that is so heavily dependent on routine? Why don't we put some unpredictability into the system, some complexity, by shaking the routines up? At the very least, why don't we break the routines into sub-routines, and mix and match those at random so there's no telling which security configuration you're going to run into on a given day?

So, after several long years of blogging, we have at last found an instance in which I was both right and ahead of the curve.

They Hate Our Freedom 2

Apparently, Homeland Security attracts a lot of self-dramatizing, self-important people. Reason magazine has an excellent round-up of anti-terrorist overreach in airports. Here's my favorite:

Travelers who assert their legal rights can find themselves bounced. Della Maricich was banned from a Portland-to-Seattle flight on May 1, 2002, after she asked an airport screener to keep her purse where she could see it while he searched it. (Many airport screeners have been accused of theft since the new search procedures were introduced.) The screener refused, and Maricich demanded to speak to his supervisor. A National Guardsman arrived on the scene a few minutes later and, Maricich later told The Wall Street Journal, "He told me that because I had disrupted the line by calling for a supervisor, I would not be allowed to fly out of PDX that day. He told me that I was a troublemaker and I was the only one who had ever complained."

Because that's what are security people are there for: to teach us lessons about respecting authority.

They Hate Our Freedom

An ophthalmologist and his sister face felony charges for sprinkling flour in a parking lot.

The siblings set off the scare while organizing a run for a local chapter of the Hash House Harriers, a worldwide group that bills itself as a “drinking club with a running problem.”

“Hares” are given the task of marking a trail to direct runners, throwing in some dead ends and forks as challenges. On Thursday, the Salchows decided to route runners through the massive IKEA parking lot.

They marked the route with harmless, biodegradable flour. Shoppers who saw the flour trail being laid, in an apparent attempt to turn their Saturday afternoon into a wacky sitcom script, called the police to report that terrorists were mounting an attack on assemble-it-yourself furniture. The police, trained to react as if the world is coming to an end and equipped with way-cool, federally funded bio-terror gear they almost never get to wear out in public, arrived in massive force, closed down the IKEA and evacuated the area.

Daniel Salchow biked back to IKEA when he heard there was a problem and told officers the powder was just harmless flour, which he said he and his sister have sprinkled everywhere from New York to California without incident.

The police arrested Salchow despite his honesty, since they were all dressed up and needed to do something to keep from looking foolish. Though I'm not sure they succeeded in that, since the people they arrested hadn't meant any harm, straightened the situation out as soon as they heard there was confusion, and hadn't broken any laws in the first place.

Salchow and his sister are charged with First Degree Breach of Peace, one of those ill-defined catch-all violations that give over-reaching police the power to arrest and hold just about anyone, any time they like.

Rather than apologizing to Salchow for the confusion and slinking away in embarrassed silence, New Haven, Connecticut, city officials plan on pursuing the case even further. Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga (who, according to this profile, enjoys music, dancing and tennis) said the city will burn up even more taxpayer dollars seeking restitution, since it costs a lot of money to stage a live-and-in-color Keystone Kops event.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Salchow, in other words, should pay for the fact that New Haven police are self-important pricks who see powder and chalk on the sidewalk and immediately think: terrorist attack. So now Salchow is at least theoretically in a position where he can go to jail if he doesn't pay the cost of his own unreasonable arrest.

I will bet you, right now, that the charges will be dismissed before a city attorney has to stand up in front of a judge and explain why police think this incident is worthy of court time. Cops and politicians are more tolerant of looking like jackasses than are most lawyers.