Eleutherian

I recommend this great article by James Stephenson, Seen Not Heard: How Obscure Security Makes School Suck. It's not very long and worth the read to get an idea of what our children are exposed to under the guise of security.

One of my favorite points made in the article (emphasis mine):

A common justification for cameras is that they make students safer, and make them feel more secure. I can tell you from first hand experience that that argument is bullshit. Columbine had cameras, but they didn't make the 15 people who died there any safer. Cameras don't make you feel more secure; they make you feel twitchy and paranoid. Some people say that the only people who don't like school cameras are the people that have something to hide. But having the cameras is a constant reminder that the school does not trust you and that the school is worried your fellow classmates might go on some sort of killing rampage.

See my previous post on why 'I Have Nothing to Hide' Is a Poor Argument against Privacy.

The White House’s new cyber-security chief, Howard Schmidt, recently declassified the highly-secretive policies behind the much rumored NSA-backed Homeland Security cyber attack defense program known as Einstein.

Mr. Schmidt deserves credit for taking the steps to declassify this important information, regardless of his motives. However, this should not make us feel any more at ease about this program. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The program is designed to look for indicators of cyber attacks by digging into all Internet communications, including the contents of emails, according to the declassified summary.

Homeland Security will then strip out identifying information and pass along data on new threats to NSA. It will also use threat information from NSA to better identify emerging cyber attacks.

As Homeland Security increases the size of the haystack from which they are trying to find the needles, they will increase continue to increase the number of false positives, treating innocent law-abiding strands of hay as if they were treasonous needles. Yes, in this analogy, hay is the U.S. population and needles are terrorists.

In a previous post on privacy, I stated:

Advocates of security over privacy will often justify their position on data mining by touting the technology as the solution to finding a needle in a haystack. However, the combination of surveillance and processing created the haystack in the first place. These techniques also create a problem known as the false positive paradox.

Let's assume that a terrorist test is 80 percent accurate. In New York City, the test would indicate false positives for over 4 million citizens. Instead of finding 10 terrorists, the test would label millions of citizens, who likely love their country, as enemies of the state.

Even if you do not plan on ever committing any serious crimes, the odds of you being falsely accused will continue to increase with the expansion of programs like Einstein.

I recently began reading the first book in John C. Wright’s Golden Age science fiction trilogy. While it was a slow read at first (which I now see as necessary to fully understand the futuristic society), the philosophical themes have taken shape, and it has become a joy to read. This is not the first time I have written about a science fiction book on this blog. Oddly, I had never even read a science fiction book until I started this blog several months ago. Several books on the Libertarian Reading List fall in this genre, and they are among the best books for challenging the stubborn remnants of traditional, reactionary thinking in any self-proclaimed libertarian.

Returning to Wright’s The Golden Age, the paragraph at the bottom of page 114 shook me from my blogging lethargy. The story’s main character, Phaethon (a reference to the Greek myth), is suffering from voluntary memory loss but cannot understand why his full-memory self would voluntarily agree to it. He is questioning Rhadamanthus (an artificial, self-aware entity/servant with thought capacity far beyond that of a normal being) why he didn’t stop him from making such a foolish decision (as he now sees it). To this, Rhadamanthus replied:

If we were to overrule your ownership of your own life, your life, would, in effect, become our property, and you, in effect, would become merely the custodian or trustee of that life. Do you think you would value it more in such a case, or less? And if you valued it less, would you not take greater risks and behave more self-destructively? If, on the other hand, each man’s life is his own, he may experiment freely, risking only what is his, till he find [sic] his best happiness.

The themes in this one paragraph have countless “real world” applications. I will expand on the two main points: the nanny state mentality (or as I often refer to it, legislating morality) and encouraging risk.

Whenever the government attempts to legislate morality or dictate behavior, it is overruling your ownership of your life. If Rhadamanthus is correct in implying that lacking ownership of your life will cause you to value it less (and I believe he is correct), then this will increase feelings of depression and thoughts of suicide among the owned people. On top of that, governments often pass absurd legislation to prohibit people from ending a life they no longer value. (See David Hume’s essay Of Suicide for more on this topic). Most of all, when the government overrules your ownership of your life, it increases your dependence on the government.

The relationship between ownership and risk is a topic that deserves a post of its own, but I will briefly touch on it here. Risk homeostasis is when increased safety measures (for example) have the unintended effect of promoting riskier behavior. An example of this can be seen in the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis. The government wanted to encourage people to purchase homes (because they apparently have something against renting – but I digress), but banks were not willing to approve loans to people who did not appear capable of making payments over the life of the loan. To solve this, the government stepped in and offered to guarantee these loans that the banks would not have otherwise made. This encouraged the banks, related financial intuitions, realtors, and potential homeowners to engage in risky behavior.

I apologize for the long hiatus since my last post. I've had this story on my desk for weeks, but the sheer brilliance of it finally brought me back to this blog.

New York City's first completely non-smoking apartment building will soon open at 1510 Lexington Avenue. Residents will be prohibited from smoking both inside and within the immediate outside perimeter of the building.

This story might upset a lot of people - after all, the building is banning a legal activity. However, allow me to explain my positive excitement over this news.

The government did not have a finger in this decision. This is not a public housing project. Rather, this is a private, family-owned apartment building that saw unmet market demand for smoke-free housing. CBS New York reported:

And even with a surplus of apartments on the market, Kenbar [Management] feels theirs will be in demand. Backing that up was a Zogby poll in July, which found that 58 percent of New Yorkers would be willing to pay more for a smoke-free home.

If you want to be free to smoke in your apartment - fine, live someplace else.

All levels of government can learn a valuable lesson from this story. There is no need to force private businesses to ban smoking in their establishments. If a market for smoke-free establishments exist, the private sector will respond to it. The government will cause more harm than good by intervening in these matters that lie outside its proper scope.

For example, Ireland's smoking ban in pubs has been highly lauded around the world. However, it is not as widely known that in the first year of the smoking ban, over 100 pubs went out of business. According to Stephen Kelly, chief executive of the Federation of Retail Licensed Trade:

The much-promoted view that non-smokers would be rushing to premises has not materialised. We expect another 100 to close next year.

If non-smokers want to spend their money only at smoke-free establishments, the private market will react far more appropriately than the government in taking actions to accept their money. Government intervention is tailored to only meet the needs of the majority (or, more specifically, the majority of the electorate). The private market, on the other hand, meets the needs of every individual - an incomprehensible concept to supporters of big government.

Child labor is a sensitive subject for many people around the world. However, this must not discourage objective analysis of the practice. A simple search for "benefits of child labor" turns up very little relevant information. Due to the sensitive nature, I recognize that not everyone will appreciate this post, but I hope you can appreciate the spirit in which it is written - the spirit of reason over emotion.

I want to remove your cultural blinders with regard to child labor. In most of the more developed countries of the world, child labor is seen as a dark memory from the past, virtually inexistent in these countries today. However, stating the obvious, not all countries developed at the same rate. Many countries are significantly less developed, and as such, child labor practices are still common.

Before going further, I feel obligated to draw a distinction between forced and unforced child labor. Forced child labor includes any form or slavery or indentured servitude, including prostitution. While adult prostitution is a legitimate enterprise, children are not mindful beings with regard to sex.

Unforced child labor includes agricultural and factory work, barring the previously stated distinctions. These children are free to work or not to work. No one is forcing them to hold these jobs. This is unforced child labor, and it should not be condemned by people not living in the given country.

Growing up in the United States, I was only eligible for one kind of job at the age of thirteen - agricultural work (with strict limitations on the number of hours and the times of day I could work). No one forced me to work. I wanted to work. However, the International Labour Organization would still have classified me as a child laborer - and therefore, someone needing rescued. I did not need rescuing and neither do many of these children who want to earn a little extra money to help their families - or simply to stay alive.

In some countries, there are more orphans than orphanage capacity. These children must not only sustain themselves but also any siblings they may have. Why should they not be allowed to earn income? Why do foreign governments pressure these countries to prevent these children from earning an honest living?

Before factory jobs were available in these countries, many children simply died. These "sweatshops" pay wages significantly lower than the wages in more developed countries, and sometimes significantly lower than wages after you factor for purchasing power parity. However, they are still better than other job alternatives.

I have seen the jobs and working conditions of children in non-factory jobs in several lesser developed countries. Instead of hauling large amounts of recyclables or firewood over long distances, these children could be sitting in a factory making textiles, AND earning higher wages. Why should we deny them this luxury?

I am stating the obvious to say that child labor creates a trade-off between labor and education. However, if your choices are death and education, would you really choose education? Education is a goal many families in lesser developed countries hope to attain for their children. Studies show, and I have seen with my own eyes, that when these families receive any surplus income at all (after paying for their basic necessities), any children who were working are sent back to school instead.

Child labor is an unfortunate practice that prevents children from receiving a proper education. However, it is also a godsend to many children and families who would otherwise not earn enough money to survive. Allow these lesser developed countries the chance to improve their situations themselves rather than pressuring them to adopt our customs, which evolved only after achieving a more advanced state of development.

One of my favorite organizations is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). I previously posted on their defense of free expression at Bucknell University.

Always on the prowl, FIRE has recently come to the aid of Thomas Thibeault, a recently fired (and suspended, which I'll soon explain) professor at East Georgia College. Prior to his firing/suspension, Prof. Thibeault was a respected professor who never received a negative review and was recently placed on tenure track.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Prof. Thibeault engaged in the following conversation at a routine sexual harassment training session:

The story Mr. Thibeault told related to a conversation he said he'd had with a student a week earlier. She was complaining that she did not want to go to another professor's office because the professor stared at her cleavage. At the meeting, Mr. Thibeault said the student was wearing a very low-cut top "designed to draw attention to her cleavage," according to his written statement. She also had a tattoo on her chest, he said, and her cleavage was "decorated" with glitter (or maybe it was barbecue sauce, he said).

"I told the student that she shouldn't complain if she drew such attention to herself," Mr. Thibeault says he related at the meeting with the vice president. Then he says he asked the vice president what provisions in the college's sexual-harassment policy protected against "complaints which are malicious, or in this case ridiculous."

Mr. Thibeault says Ms. Smith, the vice president, said there were no such provisions, and he says she instructed people to report to the college any stories they had heard about sexual harassment by other professors. Mr. Thibeault says he told Ms. Smith the policy was "flawed."

First, the college believes professors should have no protection against unfounded sexual harassment claims. Second, the college wants professors like Prof. Thibeault to report other professors for unfounded sexual harassment claims. As I told my own college's disciplinary review board during my undergraduate years, "Finger-pointing is not accountability."

Two days after challenging the school's sexual harassment policy, Prof. Thibeault was fired by EGC President John Bryant Black for "sexual harassment," calling Thibealt "a divisive force in the college at a time when the college needed unity." He was given the choice of resigning or being fired. Thibealt, who was denied the right to face his accuser or even here the accusation made against him, refused to resign. Black then threatened him with arrest if he did not leave the campus and not return by 11:30am.

Less than one week later, Thibealt received a letter from Black, stating, "EGC has begun dismissal proceedings....Their charge is to advise me whether or not dismissal proceedings shall be undertaken." Apparently, Black realized he violated Thibealt's right to due process as guaranteed by the Georgia Board of Regents. The dismissal proceedings led to Thibealt's suspension.

Here's a quick summary of events:

• Black fires Thibealt
• Black threatens Thibealt with arrest if he does not leave the campus
• Black informs Thibealt his case is under review
• Black suspends Thibealt

After all of this, Thibealt still has not been informed of either his accuser or the accusation made against him. According to FIRE director Adam Kissel:

It is hard to imagine a worse failure of due process in this case. Nobody knows what the actual allegations are because they are being kept secret, even from Thibeault himself. In the stunning absence of any charges, evidence, or hearings, it is clear that EGC has punished Professor Thibeault for speaking out against a flawed harassment policy.

By November, every classroom (over 3,000) in the Jersey City school district will have a hand sanitizer dispenser in an effort to combat the dreaded swine flu, and teachers will be required to force students to use them multiple times each day.

The worst part of this nonsense is that people are applauding these unnecessary, wasteful, and potentially hazardous decisions. As I previously wrote:

...the difference now is that there is no backlash against the schools for enacting it. Public schools have finally found a parental fear they can exploit...

Students will be forced to apply hand sanitizer before entering class in the morning, before and after lunch, and after every use of the restroom. The school has not stated what the punishment will be for students who decide they don't want to be forced to sanitize their hands and refuse to use it.

After quickly researching the negative side effects of excessive hand sanitizer use, it seems you can easily categorize the products as either alcohol-based and non-alcohol-based. The products without alcohol run the risk of creating drug resistant strains of various diseases - certainly a very bad thing.

Alcohol-based products must contain at least 60% alcohol to effectively kill bacteria (any less and you're just moving the bacteria around on your hands). Excessive use over several years has led to reports of arthritic-like pain. Additionally, this level of alcohol is highly flammable. I feel sorry for the poor students using Bunsen burners after lunch.

Finally, there have been numerous reports of alcohol intoxication from ingesting hand sanitizer. Intoxication can occur by simply licking your hands after applying the hand sanitizer. But it's ok...it's not like children ever put their hands in their mouths...

Besides, as Jersey City Superintendant Dr. Charles T. Epps stated, forcing students to apply hand sanitizer is the "best way to keep them safe."

--

In other news, Chinese universities are forcing international students to take their temperature every day and report the results to the university. Getting ideas New York and New Jersey?

I'm still upset that UBS caved to the U.S. government's demands to break Switzerland's secrecy laws by providing the names of 4,450 UBS clients. However, I'm not nearly as upset as the Swiss. RealClearWorld reports, "The Swiss public is critical of UBS but resentful of outside meddling with its secrecy laws." Great, more people that are upset with the United States over invading privacy.

The author, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, makes a solid point:

Blaming bank secrecy for the illegal origin of funds that find their way to Swiss banks is like advocating press censorship because deceitful politicians give TV interviews to win votes. Governments that blame foreign banks for tax evasion and money laundering are whitewashing their own incompetence. Incidentally, not a few dictators -- Robert Mugabe comes to mind -- with Swiss bank accounts obtained their cash from foreign aid provided by the very governments that accuse those banks of harboring illegal funds.

The United States needs to stop looking to other countries to solve U.S. problems. Most problems involving money held overseas are a result of the cumbersome U.S. tax code. More on this in a future post.

Continuing my assault on political overreactions to swine flu (yes, people are still talking about it), the Massachusetts state assembly is trying to pass legislation that will allow the authorities to ignore your Constitutionally guaranteed liberties in the event of a "pandemic."

According to WorldNetDaily:

[The bill] would allow authorities to forcefully quarantine citizens in the event of a health emergency, compel health providers to vaccinate citizens, authorize forceful entry into private dwellings and destruction of citizen property and impose fines on citizens for noncompliance.

If citizens refuse to comply with isolation or quarantine orders in the event of a health emergency, they may be imprisoned for up to 30 days and fined $1,000 per day that the violation continue.

I wish I could say that I can't believe the state's Senate actually passed this bill. I can only hope the state's House has enough sense to table it - never to be seen again (at least until another over-hyped disease comes around to spur politicians into a liberty-taking frenzy).

Here are a couple of great lines from the proposed bill:

• to require the owner or occupier of premises to permit entry into and investigation of the premises
• to close, direct, and compel the evacuation of, or to decontaminate or cause to be decontaminated any building or facility
• to decontaminate or cause to be decontaminated, or to destroy any material
• to restrict or prohibit assemblages of persons
• to require a health care facility to provide services or the use of its facility
• to procure, take immediate possession from any source, store, or distribute any anti-toxins, serums, vaccines, immunizing agents, antibiotics, and other pharmaceutical agents or medical supplies located within the commonwealth as may be necessary to respond to the emergency
• to collect specimens and perform tests on any animal, living or deceased

I don't want to know how many liberties the Massachusetts government wants to take from its residents through this one bill, but I'm pretty certain the Constitution was designed to protect U.S. citizens from exactly this kind of government intrusion.

Swine flu! *gasp*

Those two words have caused a panic in public schools across the United States. Why? It's basically just the flu with an "exotic" name. Yet, schools are taking extreme measures "for the children" - and parents are letting them get away with it.

In New York (surprise, surprise...), schools are passing new "hands-off" rules. The schools are banning all physical contact. Now, a rule like this is a school's dream-come-true. Several schools have tried to implement similar rules in the past. However, the difference now is that there is no backlash against the schools for enacting it. Public schools have finally found a parental fear they can exploit to allow them to ban all physical contact.

Schools are going so far as to request athletes to limit skin-on-skin contact during practice and games. According to one parent:

Less contact would mean less germs and less illnesses and I think it's a good recommendation.

Only it's not a recommendation - it's a rule. More accurately, it's a punishable offense. Fearful parents see this rule as a means to protect their children. Schools see this as an opportunity to gain further control over the lives of their students.

Due to the popularity of my previous post on abortion, I felt a follow-up was necessary. The previous post focused on the question, "If abortion was illegal, what should be done with the women who have illegal abortions?" This post focuses on the legality of abortion and what rights, if any, do a fetus possess.

Before beginning, a clarification is necessary. The abortion issue is not an argument between pro-choice and pro-life. Rather, it is an argument between pro-choice and anti-choice. Many people who are pro-choice are also pro-life. They would not personally condone or perhaps even recommend an abortion, but they also will not impose their morals on others. Therefore, even if you are anti-abortion, you can still be pro-choice. In this post, I will only use the terms pro-choice and anti-choice.

One of the strongest anti-choice arguments was made by Jim Stone in his essays Why Potentiality Matters (1987) and Why Potentiality Still Matters (1994). Russell Blackford responded to Stone's arguments in a 2002 essay, The Supposed Rights of the Fetus. He summarizes Stone's argument as such:

Stone introduces the idea of "strong potentiality", arguing that a fetus is, in a strong sense, "a potential adult human being". Since he believes that no ethical right to life is entailed merely by membership of the species homo sapiens…he emphasises that certain "goods" are typically enjoyed by adult human beings, including self-awareness, social interaction, and the possibility of moral stature. The argument is that a fetus has the capacity to develop into a being which is capable of enjoying these goods, and that this is prevented by abortion.

Stone's concept of a person, borrowed from John Locke, is that of a being which has "reason, reflection and self-awareness"....Stone's argument, then, can be revised, without any material distortion, along the lines that to abort a fetus is to frustrate its potential to develop into a person and enjoy goods typically available to persons living socially with other persons.

Stone defines weak potentiality as an entity, such as sperm or an unfertilized egg, which cannot become an adult human being by itself. Blackford notes that Stone's definition of strong potentiality required him to also define "normal development." Stone defines this by stating an entity "develops normally if it follows to the end the developmental path primarily determined by its nature which leads to the adult stage of members of its kind."

This definition of "normal development" holds the first flaw (albeit, a minor one) in Stone's argument. By his definition, if a fetus's DNA indicates a disorder which will limit its lifespan so drastically that it will never reach adulthood, then it does not possess strong potentiality and can be aborted.

A second flaw is found in Stone's response to Feinstein's argument:

Without awareness, expectation, belief, desire, aim, and purpose, a being can have no interests; without interests he cannot be benefited; without the capacity to be a beneficiary, he can have no rights.

Stone argues that given Feinstein's argument, it would also be permissible to painlessly kill an infant. However, the 14th Amendment states that only born citizens have the rights granted to individuals by the U.S. Constitution.

A stronger argument against Stone's analysis is made by Blackford:

For example, we could imagine that a powerful computer has been developed, and has been programmed in such a way that it will continually upgrade itself and eventually reach self-awareness. Are we now under an ethical obligation to provide it with electrical power until such a time as it becomes self-aware? Perhaps we must ascribe to the computer a right to continue in existence, without being reprogrammed, once it has become a person, but it is not obvious that we are ethically obliged to supply it with a continuous source of electricity prior to that point.

Yet this device seems to have a "nature" in an analogous sense to the genetic program of a fetus. Unless specifically religious considerations are introduced, or some kind of quasi-religious significance is imputed to functional "design" arising from biological evolution, the situations of the fetus and the advanced computer cannot be distinguished.

Apart from potentiality, there is a fundamental different between morality and legality. Wendy McElroy compares abortion to gambling and drug use - activities that some may consider immoral but are not actual violations of rights. This comparison will upset many people, but let's look at her rationale before angrily judging her.

McElroy rests her argument on the sovereignty of the individual and that the fetus is merely a biological aspect of the pregnant woman's body:

The principle of self-ownership states that every human being, simply by being a human being, has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body. Thus, even if the fetus possesses rights, those rights could never include living within and off of the woman's body, for this would be tantamount to asserting that one human being could own the bodily functions of another...that two people can have rights in one body. The word used to describe a system in which one man has property rights in another is slavery [emphasis added].

You cannot compare this situation to a simple case of trespassing. When a person with rights trespasses on your property, you can ask them to leave before shooting them. You cannot ask a fetus to leave your most private of properties - your body.

McElroy makes a most libertarian argument in support of abortion. Yet, there are still libertarians who oppose its legalization. While Libertarians for Life do not base their beliefs on potentiality, they do believe that rights are granted to the fetus at the moment of conception. First, this does not fit with John Locke's definition of a person (previously stated) or the 14th Amendment, but stronger arguments exist.

In response, McElroy refers to Ayn Rand's fallacy of the stolen concept:

In this fallacy, a word is used while the conceptual underpinnings which are necessary to the definition of the word are denied. Thus, the antiabortionists use the concept of 'rights' without regard for the fact that the fetus is not a discrete individual, the alleged rights conflict, and the rights involve two people claiming control of one body. Whatever version of rights is being attributed to the fetus, it is not the natural rights championed by libertarianism.

According to Blackford:

[A fetus] cannot experience any frustration of its desires, because it has no desires. The mere failure to meet this interest does not inflict any pain. It does not experience fear, so the wrongfulness of our action cannot consist in inflicting upon a entity something that it fears. Nor has it begun a life whose coherence or value may be ruined by being cut short. We do not reveal ourselves as cruel if we terminate the development of a merely potential person painlessly, or with minimal pain. It is difficult, in short, to see why the interest is one that must command our respect. It seems to be a totally theoretical interest. It might unkindly be called a contrived one.

I will end with a funny, yet true, story.

In college, a friend and I engaged a Catholic priest in a debate on abortion during a Newman Club meeting. It was a surprisingly civil, academic debate with my friend and I holding opposing viewpoints from the priest. My friend then engaged the priest in the following dialogue:

[Friend]: "When does a fetus receive a soul?"

[Priest]: "At the moment of conception."

[Friend]: "What happens when the fertilized egg splits and becomes identical twins?"

[Priest]: *stunned blank stare*

The U.S. government apparently does not like the fact that they infringe on less civil liberties than the UK government. Last week, I posted on a British law, allowing the government to shut-off Internet access to private citizens if they are caught illegally downloading. I stated:

In the United States, state government can revoke a citizen's driver's license because driving is a privilege, offered by the state. The Internet is not a privilege. If the government does not provide Internet access, then it cannot revoke your access to it.

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia wants to change that with Senate Bill 773. The proposed bill will allow the President to disconnect private Internet connections - in cases of national security - of course.

Why should citizens be upset about trading civil liberties for security? After all, it's not like disconnecting private Internet connections will prevent Americans from receiving unbiased information from around the world or essentially shutdown our Internet-dependent economy.

The British government has declared that they will begin to cut-off Internet access to people who illegally download movies and music. Despite claims by groups such as Open Rights Group that this decision limits free expression, the British Phonographic Industry openly supports it as a new tool to fight piracy. The movie and music industries would trample every personal liberty to fight piracy.

In the United States, state government can revoke a citizen's driver's license because driving is a privilege, offered by the state. The Internet is not a privilege. If the government does not provide Internet access, then it cannot revoke your access to it.

This post concludes a series on privacy, stemming from Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother (on the Libertarian Reading list).

A common response in support of trading privacy for security is "I have nothing to hide" or some variation to that regard. However, the "nothing to hide" argument assumes privacy is about secrecy/deception, or as Bruce Schneier puts it, "...they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not." Rather, privacy is most often an issue of accountability and trust.

Here's an extreme example of this point from Little Brother:

There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you....There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about [getting naked or squatting on the toilet]. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?

However, one of the handicaps in the battle against privacy invasion is the vague definition attributed to "privacy." Daniel J. Solove does not attempt to provide one standard definition, instead referring to privacy as a "web of related problems."

This web goes beyond the typical complaints of surveillance, including information processing and dissemination. Solove expanded, "The problems still exist regardless of whether we classify them as being 'privacy' problems."

Since "I have nothing to hide" is a poor argument, Solove rephrased it to make it stronger:

The NSA surveillance, data mining, or other government information-gathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Only those who are engaged in illegal activities have a reason to hide this information. Although there may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy. Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information.

While this argument is stronger, it is still flawed. First, the original assumption of "hiding a wrong" remains. Second, intense data mining, especially impersonally by computers, looks for irregular/nonstandard trends in collected data. Essentially, this data mining approach creates suspicion out of irregular/nonstandard behavior. This promotes conformity and discourages free expression, as the surveillance of even legal activities discourages their use.

Advocates of security over privacy will often justify their position on data mining by touting the technology as the solution to finding a needle in a haystack. However, the combination of surveillance and processing created the haystack in the first place. These techniques also create a problem known as the false positive paradox.

Wikipedia provides a good definition and example:

If there is a medical test that is accurate 99% of the time...about a disease that occurs in 1 out of 10,000 people, then the expected value of testing one million people would be the following:

Healthy and test indicates no disease (true negative)
1,000,000 * (9999 / 10,000) * .99 = 989901
Healthy and test indicates disease (false positive)
1,000,000 * (9999 / 10,000) * .01 = 9999
Unhealthy and test indicates disease (true positive)
1,000,000 * (1 / 10,000) * .99 = 99
Unhealthy and test indicates no disease (false negative)
1,000,000 * (1 / 10,000) * .01 = 1

However, as Doctorow points out in Little Brother:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

Terrorism tests aren’t anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all (means) is that the Department of Homeland Security (has) set itself up to fail badly. They (are) trying to spot incredibly rare events - a person is a terrorist - with inaccurate systems.

Let's assume that a terrorist test is 80 percent accurate. In New York City, the test would indicate false positives for over 4 million citizens. Instead of finding 10 terrorists, the test would label millions of citizens, who likely love their country, as enemies of the state.

Unfortunately, the U.S. judicial system has consistently ruled in favor of security over privacy. Solove concludes, "...the lack of Fourth Amendment protection of third party records results in the government’s ability to access an extensive amount of personal information with minimal limitation or oversight."

The courts ruled this way because plaintiffs were unable to meet the court's demand to prove harm caused by privacy invasion. However, like the environment, overtly harmful single events rarely occur. Rather, harm occurs as very small events compile over time.

The extent of harm caused in an individual case should not be the judicial litmus test for its legality. In Smith v. City of Artesia (1989), the court ruled, "Privacy is inherently personal. The right to privacy recognizes the sovereignty of the individual." Privacy holds a social value; it need not conflict with the interests of society as a whole.

I touched on this social value in a previous post:

Data from the World Values Survey has dispalyed a significant correlation between confidence in state institutions with effective democracy (Confidence in non-state institutions shows no correlation). If government security measures continue to intrude on privacy, the relationship between citizens and government institutions will continue to decline.

The courts risk further eroding institutional trust if they do not, at the very least, begin upholding the privacy clauses in contracts. One of the very few proper roles of government is upholding contracts, maintaining the trust necessary for the free market to work effectively.

Privacy is not all about secrecy and deception ("hiding a wrong") - although it can be used for such purposes. Privacy is, first and foremost, about trust and accountability.

The idea for this post came from a video by the Motorhome Diaries crew interviewing Steve Horwitz, blogger and professor of economics at St. Lawrence University. I recommend checking it out (under five minutes).

As recently as one hundred years ago, in many more developed societies, husbands had nearly total control over the family. Going back another hundred years, families were essentially enterprises. Today, it's difficult to think in such callous terms, but each family member was essentially a unit of production. Families had many children, not out of love, but out of necessity. At the time, many children increased economic security through additional units of production and to ensure that parents had a safety net if they reached old age.

Economic freedom allowed families to hire workers outside the family (by extension, allowing children to find work outside the family). Previously, the only work found outside the family was through an apprenticeship with a tradesman, guild, or clergy. However, they required family connections. This is a similar process found in labor unions today. In postmaterialist societies, unions are backward (i.e. reactionary), antiquated entities, continuing a practice that is no longer necessary in more developed countries.

Additionally, increased economic freedom reduced the average family size (so carbon Malthusians should give credit where credit is due). Children are no longer viewed as a necessity (except in Russia, which speaks volumes as to the country's level of economic freedom). Rather, children are born out of a loving couple's honest desire for children. Instead of forcing them to work, parents are now able to invest in their children, demonstrating societies' changing views with regard to children.

Increased economic freedom changed families for the better. In today's society (at least in more developed countries), arranged marriages are a rare and antiquated practice. Families no longer require the political and/or economic benefits of marriage. Marriage has become about love over finances (for the most part).

This same process (one might call it the human development process) has increased homosexual rights, particularly with regard to same-sex marriage. As marriages are no longer about economic/political partnerships and families no longer need to rely on children as units of production or to provide a future safety net, it is financially realistic for gay and lesbian couples to marry.

At the end of the video, Dr. Horwitz makes the following statement:

You have people on the right, conservatives, who love (or they say they love) free markets but don't like these sort of changes [e.g. homosexual rights] that capitalism has brought forward....If you're going to really have markets, you can't stop this kind of ongoing cultural change.

On the other hand, people on the left have the opposite problem. They like the cultural change but refuse to give credit where credit's due, which is to recognize the role that capitalism has played in bringing those about. To the extent that they're stifling capitalism, they're stifling the very dynamism that produces those social changes they like so much.

The hypocrisy by both major political parties is rather amusing (and sad). Katherine Mangu-Ward with Reason Magazine touched on a related issue regarding homosexuals and the major political parties, stating:

But you know who your real friends are, LGBTers. And we're going to help you get through this. Besides, who knows better than libertarians what it's like to be in a long-standing lopsided love affair with a mainstream political party?

She's right, LGBTers. Given that the libertarian platform has formed the basis for your rights, it's in your self-interest to support the continuation of this platform - libertarianism.

Continuing my series on privacy vs. security, I would like to draw your attention to a recent post at the Blog of Bile. New York City police officers were harassing would-be subway passengers, forcing a bag search or turning individuals away from using mass public transportation (no wonder public transportation can't turn a profit).

However, while the city's police officers were taking time away from pursuing actual criminals to harass innocent pedestrians by invading their privacy, their efforts were completely ineffective. Not every subway station was checking bags. A terrorist would have to be completely incompetent to simply not walk a few blocks to station without a police bag check, affording him/her complete access to the NYC subway system.

New York City wasted taxpayer money and police resources to create a false sense of security by invading the privacy of innocent pedestrians.

Vogue model Liksula Cohen wants to sue an anonymous blogger for calling her a 40-something skank who "may have been hot 10 years ago." A New York court ruled in her favor, ordering Google to unmask the anonymous blogger, making her open for a defamation suit.

First, I can't believe a U.S. court ruled to unmask an anonymous blogger for stating her opinion. Justice Joan Madden rejected the defendant's claim that blogs, "serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting."

This Canadian model is apparently accustomed to Canadian defamation law, where the courts will convict and imprison citizens for speaking their opinion about other people.

The only leg Cohen has to stand on is New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964). However, this precedent only applies to defamation of public officials. Cohen's ego doesn't stretch that high. Additionally, the decision in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974) removes liability for defamation when the defendant is stating an opinion. As far as I know, stating that someone is hot or not is still an opinion.

"Why are New Yorkers nihilists?"

"Because the light at the other end of the tunnel is New Jersey."


I heard this joke in a World Views course in college, and it came to mind immediately when I read that the northern city of Paterson, NJ is debating a curfew on adults (a first in the nation). The city's police officers are incapable of doing their job, so they want to mark every resident of the city as a potential criminal.

The city is currently spending taxpayer money to legally justify the action. However, since the ACLU has promised to file suit against the city, it is a waste of time and money. The city would be better off spending all this money to improve their police force instead of using it to harass its residents and then to defend this harassment in court.

I recently finished reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (found on my Libertarian Reading List). Other than being one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read and one of the greatest dystopian works of literature, Little Brother has had me pondering the issues between privacy and security. The book combined the themes of surveillance in Orwell's 1984 and information processing in Kafka's The Trial. This will be the first of several posts on privacy.

A recurring theme in the book was the sense of powerlessness felt by the innocent victims of government security measures. Daniel J. Solove, in I've Got Nothing to Hide, defines this as a problem of information processing (like in airports):

[Problems of information processing] affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

The relationship of a citizenry with its government institutions holds important implications for human development. According to Ronald Inglehart:

...socioeconomic development, self-expression values, and democratic institutions work together to broaden autonomous human choice....The process starts with socioeconomic development, which reduces constraints on autonomous human choice by increasing people's economic, cognitive, and social resources.

Data from the World Values Survey has dispalyed a significant correlation between confidence in state institutions with effective democracy (Confidence in non-state institutions shows no correlation). If government security measures continue to intrude on privacy, the relationship between citizens and government institutions will continue to decline.

The Transportation Security Administration began collecting additional data on airline passengers taking domestic flights this week to aid in catching terrorists. If a terrorist is clever enough to enter the United States, the terrorist is also clever enough not to get caught on a domestic flight.

Storing more data on innocent U.S. citizens may not reduce false positives as intended. It may actually increase the number of false positives caused by clerical errors and chance similarities.

This brings me to a point I touched upon yesterday when discussing a hypothetical libertarian airline. Passengers do not need to show ID before boarding an airplane. After all, there are countless stories of passengers who lost or had their ID stolen while on vacation. The government should not force airlines to turn these passengers away. If airlines turn passengers away of their own regard...hello, Libertarian Airways.

John Gilmore fought the government on the ID issue and lost to a secret government mandate. The text of the mandate is still not available to the public.

According to security expert Bruce Schneier:

The TSA focuses too much on specific tactics and targets. This makes sense politically, but is a bad use of security resources. Think about the last eight years. We take away guns and knives, and the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and knitting needles, and they put explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, and they use liquids. We take away liquids, and they'll do something else. This is a dumb game; the TSA should stop playing....Oh, and stop the ID checking—the notion that there is this master list of terrorists that we can check people off against is just plain silly.