Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 6 of 9

Snowden, Manning and the role of government secrecy

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On August 2, 2013

15 Comments

I’ve stayed out of the Manning and Snowden imbroglio because most of what needs to be said is being said by other people.

However there is one issue that is not being made clear enough, but which under-girds all the arguments about their acts: the role of government.

Think of there as being two main ways to view government:

1) Government exists to rule over the people.  The people may have some say in who their rulers are, but once those rulers exist, they make the rules and the people obey.  Government in this view is an independent entity to whom subjects owe their obedience.  Government knows best, and we should do what government tells us to.

2) Government is an instrument acting on behalf of the people. Its position is similar to being a trustee—it is a relationship in which the public gives the government certain powers and resources, and expects the government to act on behalf of the people.  Government, in this view, is a solution to the collective action problem.  How do we act together for the benefit of everyone?

If we are ruled by government, we do not have a defacto right to know what government is doing.  Government knows best, we don’t have all the information, and we should go about our lives, obeying the laws and those who are in positions of power over us.

Imagine that you have a trustee, whom you have given money and the right to make rules to, in order that they might take care of certain of your affairs.  In order to be sure that they are taking care of your affairs, and not their own, or someone else’s who once the money and power is in their hands, is bribing or browbeating them, you must know what actions they are taking.

Transparency, in a democratic system, is predicated on the idea that citizens are the ultimate repository of legitimacy and that citizens have a responsibility and a right to know what is being done on their behalf.  Citizens cannot execute their responsibilities, including voting, volunteering, running for office and supporting primary candidates, if they do not know what government is actually doing.

Thus, in a democracy, the government must be transparent on virtually everything.  Short of actual military secrets, of which there are startlingly few (major deployments are obvious, and often announced), and very specific details like the actual identity of spies, plus personal information not relevant to job performance of government employees, there is almost nothing the government does which should not be available to the public.

Government works for the population. It is the servant of the people.  You cannot supervise your employee, you cannot discipline or fire or even properly reward your employee, if you do not know what your employee is doing with your money and the power you have given your employee.

It is now necessary to talk about the relation of citizens to the government.  The government works for citizens, citizens do not work for the government.  It is not a symmetrical relationship.  Because government works for the people, the people have the right to know what the government does.  Because the people, with the exception of some officials, do not exist to serve the needs of the government, the government does not have a right to know what the people are doing.  Transparency is required by the government, so that its masters, the people, can supervise it.  Again, transparency is not required of the people, except in very specific ways (for example, how much money they made) because they are not in a trustee relationship with the government: it is not their duty to act on behalf of the government.

Every time someone says, “well, if Snowden/Assange/Greenwald/Welsh/ believes in transparency, they should release on their personal emails”, it is a misunderstanding of the relationship between government and the people.  Individuals do not owe government transparency, government owes people transparency because government works for people and has power and money only because it is granted that power by the People.

Now, you can use this argument in support of spying on all the people.  The argument is as follows: “the people have given us the responsibility to protect them, and we believe the only way to protect them is to know everything they do online and as much of what they do offline as possible.  They have given us that grant of authority, and we are using it.”

I am willing to admit that the people could give their government that grant of authority. However, to do so they would have to know that that is what was being done and most people did not know that pre-Snowden.  There would also have to be an election in which “spy on everyone” was the main issue, and there was a party to vote for which was against it.  And, prima-facie, one would expect to at least see polls which showed that citizens wanted to be spied on all the time.

I believe that if such a grant was made, effective democracy would still end (if it hasn’t in many Western countries already).  Once people know they are being spied on 24/7 they change how they behave, and those who have access to that information can easily manipulate them, both overtly through blackmail and covertly by knowing what makes them tick (the exact contents of everything you search online, every email you send, every text you send and every phone call you make, plus in many cities the possibility of a fair bit of tracking of where you go physically each day). Information, in this case, is power.  Once they know how you tick, it’s not hard to figure out how to present information and incentives in such a way that you do what they want.

In this case government becomes the master, the people the servants.  To give full, free democratic consent for a surveillance society, is to sign the death warrant to the type of democracy which is “for the people, by the people”.  Something may remain, it may have elections, it may be called democracy and have all the forms, but it will not be democracy in the essentials.  There are other ways to lose effective democracy, like allowing money to buy the system, of course, and in some countries it appears that has occurred, but the surveillance state is additive (or perhaps multiplicative.)

In the Gilded Age, it was widely recognized that the “Trusts” (that Ages equivalent of our great megacorporations) controlled government. Eventually Americans were able to undo that.  But conditions were different then, there was no surveillance society, and there was still a very vibrant culture of civic association.

If we believe that government serves the people, then we must be way of any government that either doesn’t wish to tell the people what it is doing on their behalf, or which believes it has a right to know everything its people do.

The final argument is the safety argument, the “we need a surveillance society to be safe from bad men.”  I don’t believe this argument, and others have dealt with it, so for the time being, I will simply end with words from Benjamin Franklin:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

And though Franklin didn’t say it, I agree that those who who believe that those give up liberty for safety will lose both liberty and safety—and deserve neither.

Yeah, rape < Hacking to out rapists

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On June 7, 2013

6 Comments

Maybe the backwards data shows rapists getting longer sentences than hackers, but I doubt that’ll be the case in 10 years, just as for a long time we thought America had the most social mobility in the West, when that hasn’t been true for a couple decades, at least.

This is your justice system. This is what they think of women.  Remember, Prosecutors have discretion, even in the face of bad laws.  Let’s see what this prosecutor does.  Lostutter is the hacker who outed the Steubenville rapists.

If convicted of hacking-related crimes, Lostutter could face up to 10 years behind bars—far more than the one- and two-year sentences doled out to the Steubenville rapists.

 

Heckling Mrs. Obama is entirely productive

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On June 6, 2013

4 Comments

Yes, yes it is.  You get things from our elites by making their personal lives miserable. Hammer them everywhere they go.  This has been particularly true of gay protestors, who have received support from Obama, to the extent they have, by cutting donations till they got it, and by heckling him.

Why should Obama, or any politician, or any oligarch, give you anything if you can’t hurt them, or help them, and won’t make not hurting them, or helping them, conditional on them doing what you want?  You think you can reason ethically with them?

Amazing, just amazing.

Is it possible to be stupider than Gloria Feldt, Former Head of Planned Parenthood?

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On January 26, 2012

178 Comments

Ms. Feldt:

Where have you been these last three years, Mr. President? Welcome back.

He was doing what he believed in.  Now it’s an election year, and he’s pandering.  You, Ms. Feldt, are exactly why women are losing their abortion rights.  With leaders like you and Obama who needs enemies?

(h/t Americablog)

When Medicare is destroyed is only a matter of when

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On April 5, 2011

55 Comments

Folks, this won’t pass this year, but a version of it will pass:

That plan would transform Medicare from a government insurance program to one in which seniors would chose from private, federally subsidized coverage. Americans 55 and older would stay in the current system.

Remember, Obama’s health care reform was essentially the Republican plan from the 90s.  The Republicans, whom everyone was sneering at for running crazies, have put in place a team of hard right ideologues, who have moved DC significantly to the right even of where it was.  At some point they will pass this, because they want it badly, and the Democrats have no alternative vision other than “right wing, but not as right wing”, which goes nowhere.

I’ve said this before: get out.  If you can’t get out, get your kids out.  This is not going to end well.  Obama has institutionalized Bush rather than rolling him back, and in some areas, such as civil liberties and unilateral Presidential war powers, has actually moved further to the right than Bush was.  It is not impossible that this will get better in the next couple decades (as 5 year old Ian once argued, almost nothing is impossible), but it is unlikely.  Americans spent the last 35 years spending their retirement, their children’s retirement and running infrastructure and capital into the ground, and they were good with that.  Every effort to repeal Prop 13, for example, failed miserably.  America is the culture of the free lunch, what Americans don’t realize is that they’re the free lunch.

That doesn’t mean the US couldn’t fix its problems, in theory, but the point is that socially and politically, the US does not want to fix its problems.  It wants to continue to make them worse.  Yes, a majority of Americans may prefer different policies on some issues, but they aren’t willing to MAKE it happen or to actually pay for it (see Prop 13 above).  They aren’t willing to die for it, and at this point, that’s what it would take because your elites see no reason not take everything you have and turn you into slaves in all but name.  You will be debt slaves, who own almost nothing, not your house, not your phone, not your car, not your books.  Anything which can be rented to you, rather than than sold, will be.

Welcome to the Repo culture.  Everything you have, everything you are, can be taken away from you, and you are nothing but a series of revenue streams to your lords and masters.  Fail to pay, and you won’t even be allowed to be a debt and wage slave, you’ll be in a cardboard box or a debtor’s prison.

Modern Americans are mostly descended from people who didn’t say “this pisshole country is worth fighting for”, they’re descended from people who said “screw this, I’m outta here”.  Emulate them and leave, if you can’t leave do the other thing they were willing to do: prepare for a revolution and be willing to die in it.

Or accept your fate as slaves.

Your choice.

Because a lot of so-called Liberals don’t seem to get it

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On December 20, 2010

126 Comments

Governments and individuals are different types of entities.   The presumption for government is that its proceedings and actions should be transparent to its citizens because it exists to serve its citizens, and they can only know that it is doing so, and doing so in ways they would approve of, if they know what it is doing.  The presumption for citizens is that they have the right to privacy, unless a judge determines there is reasonable cause to believe they may have committed a crime, and even then that information should be kept private until the trial proper.

The confusion of the right of individuals to privacy and the need to for transparency in what governments do is a  classification error.  A liberal may use the government to do things, but is always suspicious of concentrations of power, public or private.  As someone famous once said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  And that means knowing what your government is doing.  It doesn’t mean the government smearing those who oppose it by releasing private information on individuals.

Still, I’ve really appreciated the Wikileaks imbroglio, not so much for the information it revealed, but because it has revealed the authoritarians for who they are.

An American Future

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On December 6, 2010

91 Comments

So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.

It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class.  The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe.

This is not a stable situation because the economics of it is not stable.  In order to bail themselves out they are enforcing austerity policies which are wreaking and will continue to wreak economic havoc in the real physical and social economies of the countries whose policies they control.  They are contracting the franchise, the membership of the oligopoly, pushing more and more people out of it, even as they impoverish millions of peoples at the bottom end of the economy.

They have created a two tier system of laws, where important people who commit trillions of dollars of systematic fraud are not prosecuted and where war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands are winked at, while small people are locked up for the most minor of crimes, where bankruptcy is essentially impossible for the small people, but the big people skate and are given whatever amount of money is necessary to bail them out of any bad decisions they have made.

They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.

When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional.  Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it.  If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information.

Meanwhile, in Congress, politicians of both parties, with Obama’s blessing, are set to extend tax cuts.  A few months ago the mantra was “deficits, deficits, deficits”, but now deficits don’t matter.  This isn’t to argue whether they do or not, simply to note that their real ruling ideology is that governments should only spend money on rich people, and that money spent on the middle class or poor is bad.

It will also, and I guarantee this, not help the economy.  The past 30 years, and the past 10 years in particular, have been a huge experiment in tax-cutting, and for ordinary people, the result has been stagnation and now an absolute decline.  Because ordinary people do not have pricing power, either as workers for their labor (since there are plenty of people who need jobs) or as consumers (because the oligopolies who sell food, energy, telecom and so on know you must have their services) every single red cent of tax cuts which go to the middle and lower class will be taken away by corporations and the rich.  Those corporations and rich will then use that money to either play leveraged financial games or to offshore jobs to low cost, low regulation domiciles.  Not only do tax cuts not do any good, they accelerate the loss of US jobs.  No, this isn’t what you’ve been told, indeed propagandized, for the last thirty years.  But how has trickle down economics worked out for you?  Are you going to believe your lying eyes, or the talking heads who tell you that tax cuts create jobs?

So the economic situation is going to get worse. That doesn’t mean there won’t be cyclical ups and downs, just that the trend line is down, down, down.  And every trend line reaches its end.  My guess, at this point, is that the US has only one business cycle left before a Russian style collapse.  The rest of the world just does not need to sell you oil for lousy dollars which don’t buy the future and don’t buy anything else, either.  At this point what must be gotten from the US are a few capital goods, jetliners (well, from the US or Europe), some software,the very best military equipment and some miscellanea.  That’s it.  That’s all.

The rest can be bought from other countries.  Now, if the next tech revolution was going to happen in the US, they’d have to keep their hands in, but it’s now clear that, no, that isn’t going to happen either.  American producers don’t, American consumers can only do so if heavily subsidized by China, and American technology is more and more a joke at anything other than killing people.

The US is going to be cut loose.

The reaction to that will be war.  Maybe in Iran, maybe in Korea, maybe in Saudi Arabia. Where doesn’t really matter, but it’s going to happen, because it’s the only card the US will have left and after Obama destroys the Democratic party by gutting Social Security, Veterans benefits and overseeing the cutting of Medicaid, yes, President Teabag is going to get in, whether Obama is primaried or not.  And the only way to both provide stimulus and get the resources the US is going to need and no one else will soon want to sell to the US, is going to be war.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  If you can get out, get out.  If you can’t get out, but you have children, get them overseas—send them on exchanges, send them to overseas relatives for a year, send them to a foreign university (they’re better and cheaper).  Get them out, even if you can’t get out.

The game isn’t over in the US, but the smart money is that the first revolution in the US isn’t going to be a revolution of the left, it’s going to be a nutbar revolution from the right, and it is going to be extraordinarily ugly.

In the meantime, if you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family.  Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust.  (Don’t trust any corporation.)  And, if you can, organize.  Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally.  Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system.  It’s over.  We tried, and we failed.  It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.

Wikileaks And The End of the Open Internet

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On December 4, 2010

62 Comments

Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks.  It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information.  This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile.  Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet.

The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State.  As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire.  In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired.

This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability.

Meanwhile a worldwide alert is out for the horrible Julian Assange for rape, aka: not using a condom.  I certainly won’t defend not using a condom when your partner wants you to, if that’s what happened, but those guilty of such crimes don’t usually have worldwide manhunts called against them, do they?  Meanwhile the squishy left wrings its hands and wails.  Let me put it to you this way: no one who was willing to put themselves out there the way Assange did is not a massive risk taker.  Going into this he had to know that eventually he would be locked up, discredited, killed or some combination.  Prudent men and women who would never do anything stupid (like sleep with groupies) would not have created Wikileaks in the first place and would not have leaked the inflammatory material that Assange has put out there in the second place.

In the spirit of a rambling post, let’s move back to the internet.  Leaving aside censorship, which is older than writing, and is banal, boring and predictable, especially from states on auto-pilot to authoritarianism like the US, the economic model to use when thinking about the internet is the old railroads of the 19th and early 20th century.  The railroads were the only way to get your products to market if you weren’t on the coast, a major river or canal.  They were hated, loathed with a passion, by farmers.  Why?  Because they took all the surplus value, all the profit.  If you weren’t willing to pay, you went out of business.  Even if you were willing to pay, you wound up in hock to them.  You worked for the railroad, period.  All or virtually all of what would have been profit went to them.

When the only way to get your product to market is an unregulated monopoly or oligopoly they will take it all.  The result isn’t just unprofitable businesses, it’s failed businesses and businesses that never get off the ground, because they can’t afford to pay the freight, or more accurately, the vig.  Oligopolies in between producers and consumers always strangle the economy.  Always.

And, on top of p0litical repression of free speech, that’s what’s coming to the internet near you.  The essentially free and open internet is dying and it will soon be dead.

(Note: text changed from Hilary Clinton to State department telling students)

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