Liberty's Torch: privacy

Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Your Dwindling Privacy

Books have been written about it. Commentators have ranted about it. Vast arguments between supposed “policy wonks” have addressed it. But very few people are paying attention.

I suppose we’re too busy diddling one another on social media. Hah! Yet another Orwellian phrase: the “social media” conduce to sociability and social health in no way discernible by Man. Indeed, they’re a front in the ongoing war on your privacy.

But you, being a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, know better, right? You’ve watched the newsreels. You’ve seen the interviews with the field commanders and the wounded just back from the front. You’re too intelligent and too well informed to take part in a war against your own interests.

Then again, you might be a conscript.

I’ve said on several occasions that privacy, properly understood, isn’t an enforceable right in and of itself. Whatever degree of privacy Smith can secure for himself derives from his legitimately owned property and his rights over it. Hearken to this older essay:

     What is privacy? An informal definition would be the privilege of "keeping yourself to yourself": that is, restricting others' access to you, to your property, and to information about those things to only those whom you approved. But access to you and your property is covered by another, better grounded right: the right of a legitimate owner to the control and disposition of his property. It's the informational component of the privacy claim that causes the problems.
     If there's something about you that you don't want known, and you have a "right" to control the dissemination of that information, how do you exercise your "right" once someone has learned the critical fact? Murder? Lobotomy? Hypnosis? A voodoo curse? If you elect to have an interaction with some other person, and he refuses to agree to keep silent about it, how would you enforce your "right" to privacy and still have the interaction?
     As your Curmudgeon has previously written, rights are those claims that can be simultaneously asserted without generating clashes that can only be resolved by a recourse to force (the "test of arms"). As we can see, privacy claims don't satisfy that criterion.

Nevertheless, most Americans value their privacy and would like better protections for it. At least, that’s what we say. But our behavior is at odds with such statements:

An increasing percentage of our purchases are made through the Internet;
Nearly all purchases that cost $100 or more are made with a credit instrument;
Our interactions with one another are conducted ever more through “social media;”
“Smart” devices that monitor our choices and behavior are proliferating at great speed;
The number and size of our governments – we have over 88,000 of them – continue to increase.

With the exception of item #5, no one can be blamed for the incremental losses of privacy enumerated above. No one, that is, but ourselves.

Nearly every transaction that involves two or more of us results in the release of information about us into the public domain: information that can no longer be kept private. And a host of organizations and institutions are sucking it up repackaging it, and selling it as we speak.

Welcome to the Age of the Fishbowl. It’s a seemingly benign habitat that lures you in with promises of efficiency and convenience. However, once you’ve entered, you can never escape.

I first set my fingers to the keys this morning with this article in mind:

     ‘No Cash’ signs are popping up everywhere in Sweden as payments go digital. More than 4,000 Swedes have had microchips implanted in their hands to pay for things.
     Sweden is the most cashless society.
     Last year, the amount of cash in circulation in Sweden dropped to the lowest level since 1990 and is more than 40 percent below its 2007 peak. The declines in 2016 and 2017 were the biggest on record, Financial Post reported.
     Sweden’s worried and they are not sure what to do.

Cash matters because a transaction conducted in cash conduces to greater privacy than one conducted through a credit instrument or the Internet. In the former case, only a buyer and a seller are involved; in theory at least, information about the transaction can be confined to those two persons. When a credit card or the Internet is involved, the information passes through an unknown number of hands and is stored in an unknown number of places – and neither the buyer nor the seller can compel any of those parties to observe any degree of constraint about how the information is used.

Yet a number of “economists” – yes, those are “sneer quotes” – are arguing that cash ought to be completely eliminated. Why? Their reasons vary, but not one of them will hold water for five minutes. That’s largely because they don’t grasp what makes cash important.

Cash is a broader concept than money or currency. Anything a seller will accept on prima facie grounds in exchange for what he sells constitutes a form of cash.

Note that checks, promissory notes, credit, and digital transactions don’t qualify. These are not prima facie instruments; their “value,” such as it is, arises from the guarantees made by intermediating organizations and institutions. Commodities – e.g., gold, silver, copper, buckskins, whiskey, tobacco, seed corn – offered in trade are a kind of cash. Federal Reserve Notes, as little as I think of them, are a kind of cash. A promise to provide service at some future time is a kind of cash. These things don’t depend for their negotiability on the guarantees of a third party.

Its advocates claim that Bitcoin, the best known of the “cryptocurrencies,” qualifies as cash. Considering what’s been going on with Bitcoin lately, I’m not so sure.

Cash offers the possibility of privacy in transaction. That’s why governments are hostile to it.

A swelling number of organizations and institutions want to know as much as possible about you and everything you do. The information has value to them. They trade it among themselves. That trade is often characterized as being to everyone’s advantage, including yours. But this is far from certain.

Perhaps Amazon can serve us all better by remembering what we’ve purchased from it. Perhaps our television providers can better tailor their offerings to our tastes by learning what we’ve been watching. Perhaps various lesser firms can offer us what we want or need more efficiently by learning other details about our lives and interactions. But the price should be kept in mind: it involves the sacrifice of a considerable degree of privacy.

Here’s an example that chilled me somewhat. Imagine that John and Mary, a married couple, live in a detached, single-family home with “smart” electrical metering technology: a device that continuously reports on electrical power consumption. Mary takes a trip, perhaps for business purposes, while John remains at home. During that interval their provider of electricity notices a sharp increase in electrical power consumption at their home, which drops back to previous levels shortly before Mary’s return.

Shortly after Mary returns from her trip, she and John receive email solicitations from divorce lawyers.

Fanciful? Yes, for the moment...but every increment in the stream of information we allow others to accumulate about us brings it closer to reality.

It’s up to you to decide whether or not you care.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Re-Privatization

“Opinions are like assholes: Everybody’s gotta have one.” – Porretto’s Principle of Personal Assertion

I feel a change coming on. I’ve been ranting and raving and generally bellyaching about politics and government, here and at other sites, for more than twenty years. Yet I’ve accomplished nothing except to alert a few kindred spirits to the existence of a cranky old bastard who sees things approximately as they do. Those two decades of effort have wearied me in several ways. My will to continue is lower than it’s ever been.

I think I know why my efforts, and the efforts of innumerable other thinkers and writers, have produced so little progress. And if you have the patience for just one more tirade, I’ll attempt to explain.

“The personal is political.” – Leftist mantra.

Once in a great while I get my fangs into something with broad explanatory power. It might not unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces, but it seizes my imagination, and my desire to explore it thoroughly, even so. The recent one that strikes me as being of the most value is the one I explored in this piece:

I’ve long held the belief that any man who’s willing to assert the absolute truth of even one statement must eventually accept that every well-formed statement – i.e., a statement that either posits a fact or a causal mechanism -- is either absolutely true or absolutely false, men’s contrary opinions notwithstanding. The concept behind that assertion is, of course, that there is such a thing as absolute truth – objective reality itself – which makes my notion quasi-tautological. For all that, note how few persons are willing to contradict the anti-objectivity propagandists of our time. That latter sort is permitted to gambol about screaming that “There are no absolutes!” virtually without contradiction – not even a murmur of “Including that one?”

This is not an utterly new and fresh observation by any means. Bishop George Berkeley and Dr. Samuel Johnson had it out over the existence of absolute truth nearly three centuries ago. As it was Johnson’s foot that recoiled, his position remains the more persuasive.

Consider in this context the oft-repeated tale of a first-grade class that was asked how to determine the sex of a kitten:

     Years ago I supervised the Indian seminaries. On a visit to a school at Albuquerque, the principal told me of an incident that happened in a first grade class.
     During a lesson, a kitten wandered into the room and distracted the youngsters. It was brought to the front of the room so all could see it.
     One youngster asked: “Is it a boy kitty or a girl kitty?”
     The teacher, unprepared for that discussion, said, “It doesn’t matter; it’s just a kitten.”
     But the children persisted, and one little boy said, “I know how we can tell if it is a boy kitty or a girl kitty.”
     The teacher, cornered, said, “All right, you tell us how we can tell if it is a boy kitty or a girl kitty.”
     The boy answered, “We can vote on it!”

This episode, if it’s factual, occurred several decades ago. Yet it pertains with a terrible power to the major sociopolitical problem of our time. That problem is summarized in the quote at the head of this segment.

     “Skinwalker is a Native American concept, the gist of which is a person who can turn themselves into an animal by wearing the skin of that animal. The tradition is most developed among the Navajo and is part of the Witchery Way, along with another branch known as the Frenzy Way that was used by a witch to influence the minds and emotions of others.
     “Why?” a girl in the front row asked.
     “Excuse me?” Pitcairn asked.
     “Why would they call it the Frenzy Way when it only influenced an emotion or two?” she clarified.
     “Have you ever seen video footage of a mob or riot?” he asked.
     She nodded.
     “Heard of the Salem Witch trials?” he asked.
     Again she nodded.
     “And you still wonder how much power there is in influencing emotions and thoughts? My dear, the entire marketing and advertising industry is dedicated to influencing emotions and thoughts, not to mention a little branch of human endeavor called politics.”
     [John Conroe, Brutal Asset]

Politics has become the biggest sector of human involvement and maneuvering in American life. Today it affects everything. There is no area of life in which government, and therefore politics, does not intrude.

The reason is the great skill at manipulating human emotion which those who strive for power have acquired. If you can elevate the emotions of a substantial group over some “issue,” you can politicize that issue: i.e., you can make it seem like a proper subject for governmental action. And of course, in our “democracy” – yes, those are “sneer quotes” – that implies decision-making governed by electoral processes, whether directly or indirectly.

Do you doubt this? Consider only one example, because it underpins everything else: the cherished right to freedom of expression. No right is more clearly expressed by the Bill of Rights. Yet today that right is under sustained attack by persons who demand that an “exception” be made for “hate speech” – and who demand the sole and absolute authority to decree what constitutes “hate speech.” Could there ever be a clearer linkage of politics to emotional appeals?

You’d think the Left’s campaign to achieve that end would be laughed aside on the grounds of Constitutional law, three hundred years of Anglo-American tradition, and simple logic. If our power to express our opinions and convictions is politicized, then nothing remains outside the political orbit. A country once nearly wholly free would become a country wholly enslaved, a rightless chattel at the mercy of the whims of the Omnipotent State. Yet that is the abyss at whose edge we stand.

“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” – John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton

When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, “Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?” Franklin said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” – Lawrence Lessig

Emotional manipulation is the means, but the politicization of everything is the end. Needless to say, the Left’s aim is to become and remain the master. Yet even if the Right were to prevail and to exterminate the Left utterly, the consequences would be just as bad.

When we in the Right allow a subject to become political, we collaborate in our own destruction. Granted that there are some subjects which are inherently political: our military and how it’s employed, international relations, the defense of acknowledged rights by the courts. But all else is at least potentially private.

The proper role of the American patriot in this Year of Our Lord 2018 is to preserve and re-expand the private sphere. When we depart from that role – i.e., when we engage in politics over a subject that can be made a matter for private decisions and actions – we fail of our duty.

The Constitution of the United States was written to define and delimit the public sphere. Most of our state-level charters were made in accordance with the same ideals. Indeed, the word republic, which was once understood to be the quintessentially American term for our polity, derives from the Latin phrase rei publicae: “public matters.” If there are properly public matters, any of the Founders would have told us, there are therefore properly private matters as well – and keeping the two separate is the critical activity of men determined to remain free.

“And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

I’ve come to feel that the “Mishnory road” essays, which are grouped here, plus this older piece that addresses the commonalities and divergences between “orthodox” conservatism and ideological libertarianism, are the most salient of my contributions to American political discourse. Everything else I’ve ever written is a consequence of the thoughts expressed in those pieces.

That recognition has me pondering whether to continue on with these interminable, often repetitive op-eds. If the appropriate logic for dealing with a specific “issue” can be found in something I’ve already written, why go on to write further about it? Why surrender implicitly to the Left’s endless temptation to treat every subject, great or small, as something to view through a political lens?

Politics can be fascinating...much in the same way as torture, which it’s coming ever more to resemble. But one does not immerse oneself in a horrifying subject without sustaining personal harm.

I harbor no illusions about my vulnerability...or my mortality. Advancing age presses those subjects upon one’s mind. So I hope you’ll bear with me as I make a number of adjustments to the sort of material I post here at Liberty’s Torch. While I appreciate the value my regular Gentle Readers place upon these screeds...candidly, often without understanding why...I hope you’ll appreciate the sense of urgency under which I labor.

The most private of all things is one’s own life and what one chooses to do with it. Let’s resist the temptation to drown our lives in politics.

“Keep thine eye fixed upon the doughnut, lest thou pass unaware through the hole.” – The Curmudgeon’s Carbohydrate Aphorism

Saturday, February 3, 2018

America’s Secret Police

You’d better be wearing your seat belt, Gentle Reader. It’s not often I get to start an essay with a title that provocative, so you can be confident that what’s coming will have a bit of an edge to it.

Is there a phrase in the lexicon of politics and government more ominous than “secret police?” Doesn’t it give you a little chill to imagine that We The People suffer such an indignity? It’s a pretty good distance from MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” comic, you know. Back when that was popular, we had a Cold War, an arms race, and mandatory hide-under-your-desk drills to keep us mindful of the Red Menace.

But what is a secret police, anyway? Is it a police agency whose existence is concealed? Is it an agency that enforces secret laws – laws John Q. Public isn’t allowed to know about until he’s been accused of violating them? Or is it an agency whose existence is openly acknowledged, but whose operatives, operations, and methods are kept secret? Have you ever given it any thought?

Maybe it’s time.

The Soviet Union of late, unlamented memory possessed a number of police agencies. Two of them, the KGB and the GRU, were often referred to as secret police, despite being well known to the USSR’s people. Most of the agents of those agencies were open about their jobs. Indeed, a post in the KGB or GRU was regarded as a sign of status in the USSR. It marked you as one not to be trifled with.

If the KGB and GRU qualified as secret police by any standard, it could not have been that they or their operatives were kept secret. However, what those operatives were doing at any given time was kept secret...at least, until the agency was ready to pounce on a target.

The Soviet Union’s secret police conducted their “investigations” in secret. They selected their target quietly. They operated to gather “evidence” against him quietly, and by means that were seldom disclosed. Most telling of all, they operated under the presumption that a citizen of the Soviet Union had no right to privacy – in other words, no right to have any secrets.

That was the pattern for the secret police of all the Warsaw Pact countries, for Communist China, North Korea, and Cuba, and for every other totalitarian hellhole this sorry planet has ever endured. The secret police weren’t secret. Their methods weren’t secret either. What they were doing at any given moment was kept secret. That was necessary if they were to penetrate the secrets of their targets.

Secret police are about your secrets, not theirs.

To the extent that Americans have any privacy – i.e., any capability to keep secrets – it lies in the right of private property, which the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees. In recent years, the courts have extended property-like protections to our electronic communications: telephone calls and the Internet. However, the police are unhappy about that. They argued, successfully, that those privacy protections obstruct their investigations of individuals and organizations suspected of felonious activities. So systems were erected to permit police wiretapping and electronic monitoring of such persons and organizations, subject to the approval of the courts.

At that point we’d already hit a stunning departure from the traditional scope of police work. Yet it’s likely that you didn’t notice it.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are extensions of that earlier police argument. The averred aim was, of course, to better guarantee our “national security.” Ironically, and despite the rather phantasmal aspect of “national security,” the argument has greater plausibility at the international level than it does at the domestic level. However, the fly in the ointment remained the same.

For covert surveillance of a target to yield worthwhile evidence of wrongdoing, the target must be kept from knowing that his communications are being monitored. In other words, he must be induced to be a witness against himself without ever knowing it.

Consider also that such monitoring almost always takes place before there’s any other evidence of an operation against the United States, its properties, or its wider interests. The monitors are looking for evidence of a crime that might not have been committed at all. That same logical flaw invalidates the argument for police wiretapping of suspicious domestic persons and organizations. A court that grants a communications surveillance warrant without first being presented credible evidence of a crime already committed or in progress has violated the rights of privacy-in-communication that an American is supposedly guaranteed.

And the target is not allowed to know.

By the argument above, the FBI, CIA, and NSA constitute secret police agencies materially indistinguishable from those that terrorized the Soviet Union. They exist to penetrate Americans’ secrets, regardless of whether their targets have done anything criminal by our domestic laws, or averse to America’s “national security” according to the National Security Act or Espionage Act. Their very nature renders them largely beyond effective supervision, for the elected executives and legislators nominally tasked with supervising them are often themselves targets. It is in the nature of clandestinely gathered “intelligence” that an imaginative “analyst” can concoct an accusation of heinous conduct from the surveillance capability alone. Who could falsify the allegations of an agency permitted to work in such a fashion? Who is so completely without secrets of his own that he would dare?

Note that our supposed guarantees of communications privacy are essentially irrelevant to the above. What matters most is the covert targeting.

How about it, Gentle Reader? Are you at all disturbed by the notion that America’s secret police might be after your secrets? Have I got you looking over your shoulder yet, or are you certain that your comings, goings, and miscellaneous doings couldn’t possibly be of interest to our national snoops?

Consider Harvey Silverglate’s “three felonies a day” argument before you answer.

“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” – Lavrenti Beria, the first head of the OGPU, later to be renamed the KGB

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Is It Impossible To Go On Offense?

There are certain modern innovations of which your Curmudgeon is, to put it gently, not a fan. However, fair consideration has caused him to conclude that it’s not the innovations themselves but the ways in which they’re exploited that leave him cold.

The one your Curmudgeon’s longtime Gentle Readers surely expect to hear about first – and with excellent reason – is the smartphone. Yes, this seemingly miraculous device, which packs the power of a mainframe of old into a package that fits a human hand, is near the top of your Curmudgeon’s Hate Parade. As he’s raved against the pernicious phenomenon of “absent presence,” in which whatever the afflicted one is doing with his smartphone takes priority over the reality around him then and there, on at least two previous occasions, he’ll forbear to assault your eyes with it this morning. Still, the smartphone deserves at least this brief mention.

Another, which your Curmudgeon’s Gentle Readers probably do not expect to see mentioned, is the Internet itself. No, not the way it’s put all of human knowledge at one’s fingertips. Not the way it makes possible the dissemination of news and opinion near to instantaneously to the entire globe. And not the way it facilitates these periodic dissipations of bile lest the accumulation perturb your Curmudgeon’s cherished serenity. Rather, the way it’s used by vicious, small-minded persons to harass those with whom they differ from behind an anonymizing moniker.

This article is the morning’s stimulus. The first sentence should suffice to tell you the essentials:

Four prominent conservative women who support gun rights have been targeted with death threats, rape threats and threats to their children simply because they have championed the right to own a gun for self-defense.

Please read the entire article. If you reach the conclusion without doubling your blood pressure, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

Because the Internet makes the concealment of one’s real name and locale so easy, barrages of vilifications and threats such as the ones Corban, Loesch, Jacques, and Washington have endured are effectively impossible to counter. While it might be possible, given a lot of time and effort and the cooperation of generally indifferent law enforcement authorities, to ferret out the identities of a few of the attackers, the price of the effort plus the number of assailants make it unlikely that anything of the sort will be done. Thus, the one effective response to such a hateful phenomenon – going on offense to hunt down the miscreants, bring them to book, and punish them severely – is denied to these women.

And the Internet is what makes it possible.

When person-to-person communication was limited to letters and landline telephones, a campaign such as the one the women above have suffered could be redressed by law enforcement. Letters could be traced back to their senders. Phone lines could be monitored. Law enforcement’s ability to sniff out the offenders made it next to impossible to get away with sustained harassment. The Internet has eliminated that course of action in the name of a specious “right to privacy” whose dark side is dark indeed.

The funny thing about that “right to privacy” is how easily it’s used to destroy the lives of completely innocent persons. You’d think a “right,” which should be something all persons can enjoy simultaneously without engendering conflicts that can only be resolved by the use of force, would present a more innocent aspect. However, the conundrum can be answered simply: There is no right to privacy divorced from the rights of property.

What “right to privacy” inheres in an individual outside his own home? Passers-by can see him, note his appearance, and watch where he goes. Those with whom he speaks can remember and record his words. Cameras that monitor the street can retain his image indefinitely. Merchants who interact with him can make records of the transactions. If he makes a purchase with a credit card, his identity is stamped onto that transaction and its details forevermore.

Any privacy an individual can sensibly enjoy begins and ends at his threshold. When he emits a signal intended to reach the world at large, he loses any imagined “right to privacy” over the information carried by that signal. Why, then, have we fetishized the “privacy” – really, the anonymity – of the Internet attack squadrons that have made the lives of Corban, Loesch, et alii a season in hell?

One of your Curmudgeon’s most valued colleagues has chosen to conceal his identity behind a moniker. He has good reasons: he and his family have been scurrilously attacked by persons who disagree with his views, which are conservative and patriotic. His wife is of a delicate disposition and cannot endure the stress from such things. He also fears for the safety of his children. Yet he would not have had to resort to a pseudonym were it impossible for his attackers to do so.

Your Curmudgeon is on record as saying that he respects those who choose to stand behind their words far more than those who don’t. Plainly, attaching one’s right name to one’s emissions is integral to that choice. Yet the Internet’s privilege of anonymity in expression has made it effectively impossible for many persons to express themselves under their right names. They cannot expose their attackers and haul them up for public shame and disgrace.

Perhaps there is no legal or technological solution, though your Curmudgeon, who was a communications specialist before he retired, finds that proposition dubious. But the cancer that has made it risky to express an opinion for public consumption has already had a poisonous effect on our public discourse. Present conditions continuing, it will only get worse.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

The “Are You Paranoid Enough?” Edition

I’ve never been a fan of what’s become known as “the Internet of Things.” Bandwidth around here is precious – too many people are online at all hours, and we have only one viable broadband provider – and I pay extra to make sure I’ll have what I need. I may be an old crank, but I’m neither old enough nor cranky enough to need light switches I can throw digitally from the smartphone I don’t own. I certainly don’t need for my appliances to be having conversations with their distant colleagues about how unappreciative I am.

I have no idea whether mine is a majority or a minority opinion. I know that some people have embraced the Fully Wired Home with great enthusiasm. I’ve often wondered whether those folks have grasped what they’re letting themselves in for. Today we have some thoughts on just what that might be:

The government is already spying on us through spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our credit cards and smart meters (see this), television, doll, and in many other ways.

The CIA wants to spy on you through your dishwasher and other “smart” appliances.

NO! Our omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent State wants to transform The Land of the Free into a Total Surveillance Society? Say it ain’t so!

Granted, the amount of digital traffic monitoring required to conduct effective surveillance of 330 million Americans is staggering. The amount of computer power required even to search for keywords that would trigger closer attention is even more staggering. The amount of storage required to save all that traffic for later perusal by analysts, or for use as evidence? Thank you no, I’m already staggered enough. But the more I think about it, the more plausible it seems.

The key is the motive.

My memory isn’t firing on all sixteen cylinders this morning so I can’t be certain of the provenance of the following, but I think it was Lavrenti Beria, the first head of the Soviet Tcheka (later to become the KGB), who said “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Harvey Silverglate’s recent book Three Felonies a Day provides great insight into the peril the ordinary American faces in our era of law grown luxuriant beyond all justification. The prospect of a database sufficiently expansive and well organized to support Beria’s boast should send a chill down the spine of anyone sensible enough to distrust government.

But why would a government want such a database? For intimidation purposes, of course! Imagine that the following conditions were to be satisfied:

All electronic communications is monitored and stored by the NSA or an equivalent.
The storage technique is sophisticated enough that an analyst can isolate one particular person’s traffic in no more than a day.
WiFi “hotspots” have expanded to map the entire United States.
Commercial transactions, whether by dint of convenience or through the effective elimination of cash, have become entirely digital.
Internet-enabled devices capable of monitoring and digitizing domestic conversations have become ubiquitous; at least one such device is “awake and alert” in every household, at every instant of every day.

Would anyone dare to criticize an entity (or one of its masters) that has access to the entirety of his stored transactions and conversations? Would anyone dare to ponder a move against it, whether political or practical?

Don’t know about you, Bubba, but I wouldn’t.

The question isn’t whether they who desire power above all other things would want such a system, but rather how close technology has come to making it possible.

“Motive, means, and opportunity” are and will remain the keys to analyzing any conceivable crime. In truth, they’re the keys to analyzing why anyone does anything, legal or otherwise. When power-seekers view their prospects for gaining, retaining, and increasing their power, the motive for adopting some particular means and maneuvering toward the opportunity will be obvious.

Back when I was still slinging bits, communications was one of my sub-specialties. Based on what I know, and on the current state of technology as I perceive it, I would say that the practical possibility of such a total-surveillance system is not yet here. A few things are still required:

Computer systems capable of indefinitely expanding their immediately accessible storage without impacting their capabilities;
Artificial intelligences dedicated to storage in, searches of, and retrieval from such systems;
The aforementioned ubiquitous digital monitoring devices;
The elimination of cash.

Those conditions are not yet met...but we’re getting closer. While the steady pressure to make everything Internet-enabled is worrisome, even more ominous is the increasingly visible hostility of all governments to cash. Cash is the indispensable requirement of privacy in transaction. Should it be eliminated (or reduced to a trivial relic), no one would be able to buy or sell without the State knowing everything about the transaction down to the last detail. There’s more at stake here than keeping one’s tax bite tolerable.

Even today, it’s likely that a Beria-like inquest would have no problem catching and burning you or me, Gentle Reader. The subconscious awareness of our vulnerability is what makes that recent reality-TV show about ordinary citizens trying to evade detection and capture by professionals in that art lodge unpleasantly in our backbrains. Could you escape the agents of the State if they were determined to get you? I know I couldn’t.

The recent revelations about the CIA’s hacking abilities and the arsenal of tools it commands are enough to keep a lot of Americans – not all of us on the right of the political spectrum, but preponderantly so – awake at night. A total-surveillance system that employs the devices in our very homes, communicating over “hotspots” generously provided by regional broadband suppliers, is more threatening still. Given the luxuriance and ambiguity of the law today, we ought not to be assisting the State in constructing such a nightmare.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

The Secrecy Syndrome

To gauge from the Liberty’s Torch email-bag, something I wrote yesterday has struck a nerve, specifically this:

Just as governments strive to do everything in secret, they strive with equal fervor to eliminate the privacy of their subjects.

One correspondent pointed me to this article:

Rather than ameliorate the situation, those in power have doubled down on the stupid. In what only can be described as a move of sheer brilliance, the Virginia Senate has already passed a bill to keep police officer’s names confidential. To my knowledge there is no state or national precedent for this, at least here in the U.S. Clearly precedents exist in such democratic strongholds such as East Germany, pre-1945 Germany, post-Czar Russia, Democratic Republic of China, Iran, and virtually every African country since the 1950’s.
The issues are obvious. The potential for abuse becomes astronomically higher. It very nearly incentivizes lawless behavior from law enforcement....Becoming an anonymous badge removes an important impetus for morality and legal behavior. The Milgram experiment makes this point abundantly clear. Make the individual anonymous, put them in a room with an authority figure, and watch the magic happen. I have no doubt this correlates closely with the various threats and cries for the identity of Levoy Finicum’s shooter in Oregon. Like all things, it will be done in the name of safety, ‘for the children’ and wives of law enforcement and take us yet one step closer to the gaping maw of tyranny.

Even in states without such legislation on the books, it can be extremely difficult to determine the identities of the badge holders. Indeed, as governments at all levels strain to expand their coercive powers – often by arming bureaucrats – they intensify their efforts to “protect” the identities of those who are sent out to wield “lawful authority.”

Ponder that for a moment while I fetch more coffee.

The attack on citizens’ privacy has been a headline item for quite some time. The Snowden revelations about the NSA’s wide-spectrum capture of cell phone and Internet traffic were only the most dramatic of the lot. The “Stingray” cell phone interceptor disclosures have commanded quite a bit of attention, as have the FBI’s recent efforts to coerce Apple into unlocking cell phones.

The ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operation was intended to compel gun dealers to report multiple-gun transactions, in the name of preventing “straw purchases” of firearms for illegal purposes. Look how well that worked out. Several states now require the reporting of anyone who makes a bulk purchase of ammunition, under a similar rationale.

Being married to an accountant makes me privy to certain other invasions of our privacy. We all know that financial institutions are compelled by law and regulation to report all the details on cash transactions above $5000, but did you know that the IRS requires professional tax return preparers who file electronically to register their computers with the IRS?

Mind you, the IRS requires this in the name of “protecting taxpayer information.” But who – or what – has been responsible for the illegal disclosure of taxpayer information? Wasn’t it the IRS itself?

For those of us who employ gold and silver as inflation hedges, the news is equally disturbing: Coin and bullion dealers must report all transactions over certain thresholds. Your hard-asset hoard might not be as private as you’ve thought.

Remarkable how the government can screw up royally, then lay the penalties for the screwup on wholly uninvolved private citizens, isn’t it?

Low intentions go hand in hand with a desire for secrecy. That’s so obvious it doesn’t require an explanation. The desire to penetrate the privacy of others kicks in when the holder of those low intentions is a government agency.

Many are the areas of human activity where governments seek to pierce our privacy. However, their concentration will always be on those things that support the free action of private citizens:

Weaponry;
Communications;
Money.

The citizenry can resist State coercion, if it has the resources with which to educate itself, acquire arms, and organize for resistance. But to be effective, resistance must be directed at the proper targets: i.e., those that seek to shackle us. A spirit of resistance that remains merely a targetless desire not to be coerced has very little prospect for success over the long term. As the saying goes, no one ever won a war by playing defense.

When the State succeeds in penetrating the privacy of the citizen, it forearms itself against efforts to resist it. If it can shield the identities and activities of its own agents, it is largely immunized against counterattack. Under a regime that succeeds at both those things, there is very little prospect for freedom.

The 88,000 governments – federal, state, county, municipal, and local – in these United States have proved adept at both tasks. In aggregate, they employ many millions of persons and spend more than $6 trillion per year. The most important details of our lives are laid bare to them. Yet, except for the half-million officials we elect to those governments, we know almost nothing about those who claim to act under their authority.

It’s appallingly clear that a secret law is an instrument of tyranny, intolerable on its face. Why isn’t it equally clear that secret law enforcers are tyrants in their own right?

Think about it.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

The War On Cash: A Further Look At The Dynamic

At the 1987 California State Libertarian Party convention, legendary Austrian economist Murray Rothbard was asked for his opinion of the then-current discussions about making all paper currency digitally readable and writable. Dr. Rothbard immediately zeroed in on the underlying intention: the effective elimination of cash.

Say what? But isn’t paper currency “cash?” It’s what we use in routine, day-to-day transactions, without the need for an intermediating financial institution to perform the transfer. How would it cease to be “cash” if it merely became possible to write a readable transaction trail onto it?

Dr. Rothbard noted that one fundamental property of cash is its anonymity. A medium of exchange that carries a record with it is the reverse of anonymous: it can be made to testify to where it’s been and for what it was used. Once all currency was so equipped, the federal government could mandate that all new “cash registers” be equipped with the technology to write and read the embedded record. Then as now, the rationale was “to impede criminals,” especially drug dealers.

Furthermore, such currency would have a built-in invalidation period. When the embedded record was full, such that no additional transactions could be recorded on it, the holder would be required to exchange it for a fresh note at an authorized facility. Thus, the government’s control of all financial transactions would be ironclad, impossible to escape.

That was 1987, Gentle Reader. Before the civilian-accessible Internet. Mobile phones were analog only; cell phones were still being developed. The “PDA” was a pathetically limited item, no more than a digital notepad. And the writing was already on the wall.

Just as governments strive to do everything in secret, they strive with equal fervor to eliminate the privacy of their subjects.

Privacy – alternately, anonymity – is what makes it possible for Smith and Jones to transact without the State knowing about it. It makes it possible for Smith to keep all knowledge of his liquid assets to himself. Cash of the traditional, impossible-to-trace sort facilitates the export of one’s wealth to a place far from the State’s reach. That’s why the federal government has imposed export controls on American currency. God help you if you’re discovered trying to leave the U.S. with a large amount of cash; you’ll be treated more roughly than any suspected terrorist.

Today’s First World countries are heavily festooned with monitoring devices: cameras, microphones, cell-phone-tracking systems, taps on Internet backbone traffic, and so forth. Micro-seismic detectors listen to the rumble in our streets. Satellites equipped with optics of phenomenal resolution watch us from orbit. Everywhere we go, we’re identified, traced, and followed by the all-seeing eyes of the Omnipotent State. Only in our hand-to-hand dealings in the most cloistered of locales do we enjoy any privacy at all. Is it any wonder that those who worship power are so determined to deny all possibility of financial privacy to us who want only to be left alone?

“But criminals!” You’ve heard the cry. It’s almost as constant as “For the children,” and even more specious. Consider the current foofaurauw over the cell phone the FBI has demanded that Apple unlock. Why? Because it might provide a lead to a possible third party to the mass shooting in San Bernardino a couple of months ago. The precedental power of compliance by Apple is difficult to overstate.

We have here another case of that most vicious of legal canards, "compelling government interest." This time, it appears not to be sufficient. Too many people are aware of the range of their activities that would subsequently be monitorable...and far too many people have a compelling interest of their own in keeping a substantial part of their affairs entirely private.

That desire for a private space in which individuals can transact without fear of prying government eyes is strong enough to reinvent cash, should the valueless cash foisted upon us by the Federal Reserve System be shorn of its anonymity.

The reinvention of cash will require both determination and trust. As any new cash won’t be “legal tender,” which the seller is required by law to accept “for all debts, public and private,” any new cash will be required to have some of the properties of a commodity money:

Valued for their intrinsic properties;
Easily recognizable;
Difficult or impossible to counterfeit;
Durable under use;
Relatively stable in quantity;
Divisible into very small quantities without degradation.

The traditional money metals – gold, silver, and copper – possess all those qualities. For hand-to-hand transactions between strangers, all of them would be highly desirable at the very least. Should the transactors know and trust one another, qualities 1, 2, and 3 would remain absolutely required, while the others would be of less importance.

It’s unlikely that a single “standard cash” would arise swiftly after the Fed’s destruction of the privacy of its notes. More likely, there would be many “local cashes,” perhaps a few “regional cashes,” for a long time afterward. There would also be a great deal of barter, unmediated by cash of any sort. Some items that would start out as common barter would be “promoted” to the status of a cash: ammunition in the most common calibers has frequently been mentioned in this connection.

The one thing of which we can be sure is the dynamic: the desire of millions of Americans for a zone of privacy in which they can transact without notice by the State.

Americans’ most important protection against the State is the State’s own nature: its predictability and the stupidity of its adherents. A slice of an underappreciated novel from one of the greatest of contemporary storytellers has much point:

     Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens.
     “The point is,” Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, “those two thieves didn’t beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don’t beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were assholes and the safe beat them.”
     [Stephen King, Firestarter]

Should our political masters “kill the money” in the currently anticipated non-explosive way, they’ll have pitted themselves and their monolithic coercive skills against the ingenuity and determination of millions of Americans determined to preserve what remains of their privacy. One lumbering Goliath will face off against millions of small, quick, inventive Davids, each with a sling of his own choosing.

Which way would you bet, Gentle Reader?

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Exponential Curves

About twelve years ago – yes, I’ve been doing this for that long; since 1997 in fact – I wrote an essay titled “Curves” that appeared at the old Palace of Reason, about the curve of technological advance. Its peroration went like this:

The test of any political theory is what results it produces in practice. Just-war theory holds that we must wait to be struck before striking back. Now that a modest sum will buy the expertise and components with which to fabricate devices that can kill thousands, even millions, the cost of waiting to be struck has become unacceptable.

At that time I was mainly concerned about its implications for terrorism and the safety of Americans and our nation. My central point was that the rate of technological advancement is directly proportional to the prevailing level of technology. If we let y represent the level of technology at time t, the equation becomes:

dy/dt = C₁y

...where C₁ represents some arbitrary (in this case, unknown) constant. This is one of the first differential equations any calculus student learns to solve:

y = e^C₁t + C₂

...where C₂ is an indeterminate constant and e is the familiar exponential base:

e = limit((1 + 1/n)ⁿ)

...as n increases toward infinity: approximately 2.71828.

And now that I’ve exhausted some of you and baffled the rest with (“I was told there would be no...”) mathematics, let’s talk about our situation as regards personal privacy.

It’s well known that the public streets of every significant city in the U.S. are heavily stippled with surveillance cameras. I don’t think we’re yet at the level of Person of Interest, but we’re approaching at an accelerating clip. Indeed, the rate of acceleration is itself increasing. Extrapolating the current trend not too unreasonably, by 2025 every district in the nation with a non-negligible population density will be so heavily equipped with surveillance devices that there will be no public space free of them.

What follows from that, Gentle Reader? What follows from that plus license plate readers, vehicle recognition systems, government backdoors into credit-card-payment-processing systems and large cellular communications services, and the rest of the we can see you trends of the Twenty-First Century? How much meaning will the concept of privacy have at that point?

For that matter, would the trend toward total government surveillance necessarily stop there? Might it not extend its feelers into nominally private spaces? After all, if “they” can see and hear you at any and every moment of your life, wouldn’t it cut down on crime, and quite sharply at that? Wouldn’t “they” be likely to argue that it would make offenses like insider trading and domestic abuse things of the past, and that it would therefore constitute a matter of “compelling government interest?”

Think about it.

He who knows where you are at every moment can exert a great influence upon you through that mechanism alone. He who also knows, to a fairly detailed degree, what you’re doing and with whom can exert still more influence. When the “he” in question is a State without Constitutional bounds, equipped with every imaginable coercive instrument and ruled by men to whom only power matters, we arrive at the genuinely total totalitarianism Orwell imagined but which 1948 technology could not produce.

Am I dead certain that such a future is headed toward us? No; as I said above, I’m “extrapolating the current trend not too unreasonably.” After all, how long ago did the Supreme Court rule that a government may seize private property and simply turn it over to another private party, as long as it was “for a public purpose?” Your privacy depends entirely on your property rights; once the latter are dissolved, the foundation beneath the former must collapse.

The irony of the Left’s habitual demands for incursions upon private property should be plain at this point. But no one expects the run-of-the-mill Leftist to grasp it; his “compact and unified church” will shield him against such an intellectual excursion.

As technology advances, monitoring devices will become ever smaller and harder to detect. Yet they’ll be as sensitive as their predecessors, if not more so. The exponential curve of technological advance guarantees this, until we reach some limit imposed by the laws of physics. The consequences strike me as both irrefutable and dire. I cannot take the attitude that Bob Shaw’s protagonists took at the conclusion of his blockbuster novel Other Days, Other Eyes:

In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere.

Privacy – space and time in which what we do, and with whom, and to what end, is entirely at our discretion, such that we may choose and act without fear of politically imposed consequences – is one of the main reasons we value freedom. It’s not a right apart from the property rights that make it possible, but it’s a great part of the reason we value those property rights. It is severely reduced today. It might well be gone entirely tomorrow.

Can you imagine enjoying such a future, Gentle Reader? Enduring it without complaint or regret? If your answer is no, there’s another, much harder question you must confront: once it’s in place, can you imagine successfully rebelling against it? Overthrowing the regime that’s imposed it?

Food for thought.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Naughty Words Part 3: “Security”

Senator Rand Paul has drawn quite a lot of flak for his firm stance against the bulk collection of phone call metadata. Some of that flak has come from persons who really ought to know better:

     During debate over renewing the Patriot Act:
     People here in town think I'm making a huge mistake. Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.

     Takeaways: 1) It's all about Rand, 2) There can be no legitimate disagreements over the pros and cons of the Patriot Act, and 3) If you do disagree with him on this, you're probably a bloodthirsty, spiteful f*ck.

And in a similar vein:

Rand Paul is not just criticizing his named enemies in the Senate, then. He's criticizing the millions of GOP voters whose instincts tend to be more conventional and interventionist than his own.

Mind you, it’s quite all right to disagree with Senator Paul on this or any other issue. But why tar him as self-absorbed, interested solely in his prospects for the presidency? It should be clear by now that he has essentially no shot at gaining the GOP nomination; all the big guns of the Republican establishment have aligned against him. Therefore, we must seek elsewhere for the reason.

Fortunately for my aching fingers, we don’t have far to seek.

The following comes from Daniel Yergin’s Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State:

In the autumn of 1945, civilian and military heads of the different services trooped up to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate committee on the question of the unification of the military services. Whereas in an earlier round of such hearings, in spring 1944, “national security” barely came up at all; in these 1945 hearings, a year and a half later, the policy makers constantly invoked the idea as a starting point. “Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front,” argued the most forceful advocate of the concept, Navy Secretary James Forrestal. “I am using the word ‘security’ here consistently and continuously rather than ‘defense.’” “I like your words ‘national security,’” Senator Edwin Johnson told him.

That was the origin of the pernicious phrase national security, which has come to dominate every discussion of military posture, of information classification and handling, of the gathering of intelligence, and of federal surveillance of the American homeland. Pick an arbitrary member of Congress, invade his bedroom at two AM, and dump a bucket of ice water on him, and he’ll come awake sputtering “National security!” But I have a question: What does it mean?

It doesn’t appear to mean:

Protection of Americans’ rights;
Enforcement of America’s borders or immigration laws;
Rational provisioning and employment of our armed forces.

If you can define it, please help me out, because the only coherent meaning I can assign to it is:

That which can justify any violation of Constitutional constraints and any abridgement, infringement, or suspension of individuals’ rights.

Think about it.

Senator Paul has called into question the use of national security as a password to extra-Constitutional power. The federal government is nowhere granted the power to do what the NSA’s metadata-collection program is doing. It’s neither necessary nor proper to the defense of the United States. Indeed, it’s openly acknowledged that the program has yielded no actionable intelligence. Its masters cannot point to even one terrorist plot that metadata-collection has foiled...and they’re open about it.

Even leaving Constitutional considerations aside, the metadata-collection program is very difficult to defend. It has yielded nothing of consequence to anti-terrorism efforts. When combined with facilities such as EZ-Pass and cell phones’ GPS facilities, it equips the federal government with the means to determine, within about a quarter mile, exactly where any cell-phone-owning American is at any time. When combined with other data available from the Internet, it provides Washington’s busybodies with an extensive dossier on every last individual within our borders: who and where you are, what you’ve been doing with your money, and how you go about your day.

Who and what are being secured? Whose interests are being protected in this fashion? Is it not transparently obvious that this program is of far more value to the political establishment than to any private citizen? Is it not equally obvious that it would be invaluable in ferreting out pockets of resistance to unConstitutional federal activity and squashing them before they can become numerous or well organized? And is it not mind-shatteringly obvious that this invasion of our privacy could only have been justified by the claim that it’s “essential to national security” -- ?

Of course, obvious does mean overlooked.

Don’t imagine for an instant that it’s only Republicans who constantly plead “national security” to justify the invasion of Americans’ rights. The Democrats do it, too. Indeed, as Daniel Yergin points out in Shattered Peace, it was the Democrats who started it: the Truman Administration, which rationalized its actions as politically necessary to fend off the GOP. “National security” is immensely useful to all elements of the political establishment, for not only does it justify all sorts of unConstitutional federal activity; it also functions as a shield against disclosures that would topple many a political edifice and end many a political career.

The redaction of documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, which robs the Act of the greater part of its value as a watchtower against federal corruption and overreach, is justified entirely by “national security.” Try to imagine how such excisions could be justified on any other basis. I can’t.

Just how secure are you feeling right now, Gentle Reader?

In a rather different context, Robert A. Heinlein wrote:

I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or "security." There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be.
Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.

The entire notion of “security” is a phantasm, a shiny bit of colored glass used to lure us away from that which is possible and attainable, and toward that which is not, has never been, and never can be. This is true at any level of organization, from individuals to nation-states. Indeed, the Earth itself is irremediably insecure, as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, meteorites, near-encounters with asteroids, and the occasional solar flare should demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction.

There is risk in everything. There are defenses against some sorts of risks, but no defense is “secure” in any sense that holds water. Human life is an ongoing game of rock / paper / scissors. So also is the bizarre perversion of social organization we call government – but no member of the political class, high, middle, or low, has ever dared to admit it. That is, until Rand Paul, United States Senator from the state of Kentucky, dared to challenge the concept in open Senate session, at least by implication.

No, Senator Paul will not be the GOP nominee for president, nor should he be. But it would bring a smile to this old face if a larger fraction of the Republicans on Capitol Hill were to admit what’s become so glaringly obvious since 2001:

That we are not “secure;”
That we cannot be made “secure,” even at the cost of all freedom;
That only the Leviathan on the Potomac has any interest in imagining otherwise.

Remember you read it here first.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

What’s Yours...Isn’t

I suppose it’s time to head back to the salt mine. After all, the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch might find their moods improving and their blood pressure de-escalating otherwise, right? Right?

I don’t read Zero Hedge nearly as often as I should:

     Imagine going to the bank to withdraw some cash.
     Having some cash on hand is always a prudent strategy, and especially today when more and more bank deposits are creeping into negative territory, meaning that you have to pay the banks for the privilege that they gamble with your money.
     You tell the teller that you’d like to withdraw $5,000 from your account. She hesitates nervously and wants to know why.
     You try to politely let her know that that’s none of the bank’s business as it’s your money.
     The teller disappears for a few minutes, leaving you waiting.
     When she returns she tells you that you can collect your money in a few days as they don’t have it on hand at the moment.
     Slightly irritated because of the inconvenience, you head home.
     But as you pull into your driveway later there’s an unexpected surprise waiting for you: two police officers would like to have a word with you about your intended withdrawal earlier…

It might not be local cops, either. We’re talking about federal action here. So they might be Justice Department agents. Possibly even FBI types. And all you need to do to land in prison is say something to a fed that some federal prosecutor can construe as an attempt to deceive him – a federal crime under the United States Code. Ask Martha Stewart and Lewis “Scooter” Libby about their experiences in that regard.

With the costs of everything under the Sun rising steadily as the Federal Reserve weakens the dollar, Americans are becoming frantic about finding ways to save a few bucks. One way to do so is to hold cash and inquire discreetly into whether the vendor or artisan with whom you’re transacting would offer a cash discount. Many will do so upon request. But the price of the item or service involved must be substantial: typically four or more digits to the left of the decimal point.

Thinking of buying new windows or vinyl siding? Perhaps a new driveway or a backyard fence? What about having central air conditioning or a generator put in?

Even if you’re not in the market for some “consumer durable,” you might be thinking of going to the precious metals to retard the deterioration of your dollars. Many Americans have done so in recent years. But such transactions are almost always conducted in cash, whether as a wire transfer or by counting out actual greenbacks. And the federal government is very interested in knowing who’s making such purchases.

Scared yet?

Privacy as a reliable fact of life is gone.

It’s been some time since the intrusions escalated from relative nuisances, such as the requirement for a permit to add a deck to the back of your home, to genuine threats to freedom such as the “suspicious activity report.” As with so many other aspects of the loss of our liberty, the key to the process was gradualism: taking thin slices of the freedom salami, spaced some time apart, so as not to alarm ordinary folks into going for their pitchforks. We’re near the terminus of the process today. If we judge by the old definition of property as the right to exclude others from access or appropriation, there’s essentially no private property left in these United States.

Maybe that spring-assisted folding knife in your hip pocket qualifies as entirely and only yours...but don’t be seen fiddling with it when a “law enforcement officer” is nearby. They frown on such things, don’t y’know. You’d probably go home without it.

Say, weren’t street predators – rapists, muggers, and the like – a lot rarer back when no gentleman would be seen in public without his sword? But I digress.

As the prices of goods and services escalate, there will be more, not less, federal intrusion into what we once regarded as our routine transactions with one another. Indeed, one of the reasons the feds are not unhappy about the deterioration of the dollar is that it justifies precisely such intrusions. The War on Drugs has been immensely useful to the statists for that reason, though it’s done nothing to reduce the consumption of illegal narcotics, cocaine, Ecstasy, and the like.

If you pay attention to the news, you’ve surely read an article or two about “policing for profit:” the use of the War on Drugs to justify arbitrary seizures, whether of “suspicious” cash or of real estate where a drug transaction might have once taken place, from wholly innocent Americans. In that particular case, local “law enforcement” has led the pack. However, the feds are right behind them in their exploitation of the highly convenient “asset forfeiture” laws.

What’s that you say? Asset forfeiture is an important tool for fighting “drug crime?” Sorry, both the practice and the results speak otherwise. It’s more about “deficit reduction”...but not the sort of deficit of which a naive sort would be thinking.

For all the odium I and other commentators heap upon the Obamunists, we can’t lay this entirely upon them. It started a long time ago, under Richard Nixon. The legal theory upon which it was justified is that an inanimate object can be guilty of breaking the law, and so can be detained, indicted, and tried as if it were a living man. Think about that for a moment.

Gives a whole new meaning to those jokes about “guns running amok,” doesn’t it? But that is indeed the legal theory behind asset forfeiture, whether the asset is a physical item such as your home or a more abstract one such as your life savings.

Now about those IRAs and 401(k) accounts...

Oh, never mind. All stand for the Pledge. And have a happy Saturday.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Better-Off-Without-It Dept.

No. Please! No discussion of Super Bowl XLVIII! My constitution is too delicate for the subject, especially at this hour.

Today's topic was stimulated by my secret love Fausta Wertz. Fausta, a longstanding ornament of the Blogosphere, is one of the ten smartest beautiful tall women on the World Wide Web...yet she didn't manage to avoid this particular wrong turning:

Last year my old cellphone’s charger broke and – since the phone was so old – could not be replaced, no matter where I looked, so I bought a Galaxy S3.
The S3 has more functions than I know how to use or need, and it’s been very reliable. It even gets good signals inside my house, which is a big deal since there aren’t enough cell towers in Princeton.
It’s been a year and now my service provider is sending me emails with tempting “free” phone upgrades, while the Samsung people simultaneously updated the phone.

Please read the entire tale. It's not unique, but it is instructive. Revelatory, even.

Everyone I know has a smartphone.
My wife has a smartphone -- a Galaxy S3, for that matter.
It's never powered down and seldom out of her hand, whether she's texting, checking email, or playing games.
That's the pattern with everyone else I know who has a smartphone, as well.
And they're all equally oblivious to the dangers.

FOOLS! You have leashed yourselves in the most convenient imaginable fashion to the Powers That Be! They know where you are. They know the names of everyone with whom you communicate. They record your conversations and text messages and scan them for keywords with massive arrays of Cray-Blitz computers. As long as the power is on to that devil's device, you cannot escape their clutches!

And what do you do with it? You play games. You send unencrypted text messages. You check TV listings. Oh, you make a phone call now and then, as well, but we've already covered that, haven't we?

But what's the Issue Of The Day? What particular government overreach has commanded the heights of public indignation these past several months? What incursion on individuals' rights currently elicits the greatest degree of outrage?

Privacy.

I know, I know. The smartphone is a marvel. It encapsulates more power and far more functions than an Eighties-edition mainframe computer. You can read books on it. Take pictures with it. Video, too. It will store and play music, if you like. Web access, of course. You can use it as an organizer, a mobile agenda, a portable compendium of your important documents. It's even got a GPS terminal in it. It's all the promise of the digital revolution in a single handheld device, the next best thing to Gandalf's staff. Star Trek communicators? Feh!

But should it ever get out of arm's reach, you immediately begin to feel a formless dread, an ineffable vulnerability, a nakedness of the soul. Just like that, you're out of touch. Things could be happening that you know nothing about. Important things, like the Obamas' vacation plans, or how many prostitutes were seen leaving Justin Bieber's hotel room last night, or the final score of that...that f-f-fff...no, sorry, I just can't. Forgive me.

For that, you've surrendered the last remaining vestiges of your privacy.

I own a cell phone. I didn't want one, but my wife insisted. "What if you get into an accident and have to call for help?" she said. "You can't expect to find a phone booth at the corner any more." "Well, in that case," I said, "why would I want a phone? There'd be nowhere to change into my superhero duds, so who'd want to talk to me?" But Beth can be very persistent, and I dislike to make her nervous. So I got one: a basic-basic model whose only function is phone calls. No Web access. No alphameric keyboard. No capacity to store anything but a list of phone numbers most recently called. My "calling plan" costs about $0.25 per month. You should have seen the sneer on the salesman's face...or maybe that was a grimace over not getting the commission he wanted.

I've had it for several years. I've made about fifteen calls on it, total. It contains absolutely no information about me; on every occasion when I've made a call, I've immediately wiped the numbers-recently-called list. And I don't carry it around with me. I leave it powered off, in the center console of my car.

(Yes, I own a car charger.)

This makes me a technological dinosaur by contemporary standards. (The only member of the species who makes his living doing real-time engineering, who owns three different eReaders, whose home network is protected by a hardware firewall, and whose non-trivial communications undergo military-grade encryption, but we'll pass over that in silence.) I'm out of touch. The happenin' world is charging right past me. I'm missing out on developments in politics, cinema, music, sports, foreign affairs, pop culture, and the doings of the beautiful people. There's no way I'd be able to hold my own at a cocktail party. And I can't pass the time playing Jewel Quest when I'm at the car wash.

But I don't have an electronic shackle around my ankle.

Priorities, people. What are your priorities? Is it really that important to have immediate access to the Perpetual Pile-Up on the Information Superhighway every second of your lives? Is it worth sacrificing your privacy -- and not just to the State, but to your relatives, friends, and coworkers who've internalized as a creed that they can have access to you at all times, and who get ornery and sarcastic should you have the temerity to remain with your book, or prolong your nap, or continue making love to your spouse rather than answer your phone?

Oh, never mind. Forget I said anything. Everyone knows what an old mossback I am. Haven't had a new idea since 1970. Why, my wife has to turn me in the window twice a day so I'll get sun all over.

And go ahead and buy that "smart," Internet-enabled television with built in WiFi. You know, the one with the continuous remote maintenance and automatic upgrades. Just don't bother complaining to me when it starts overruling your choice of programs. Or prompting you about your bedtime, for that matter.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

On Privacy

I hadn't intended to write about this, but it seems to have risen to the top of the public agenda.

The activities of the NSA aren't the only things that have privacy-rights advocates' hair standing on end. The recent, extremely disturbing case of the harassment of John Filippidis by Maryland police must concern any Second Amendment aficionado. And Peter Grant notes that there are private firms collecting and aggregating publicly available data on Americans to sell as a marketing tool. All in all, it's a bad time to be a devotee of peace, quiet, and personal privacy.

The problem isn't that these things are illegal, but that they're not. Worse, in the case of the private marketing companies, no imaginable law could correct the problem without utterly destroying what remains of freedom in these United States.

We release information about ourselves into the public domain with every step we take.

Smith, walking on a public street, is broadcasting his whereabouts to anyone who cares to take note. Should he enter a shop for a commercial transaction, anyone who recognizes him can quite legally record what he's purchased, and when, and from whom. (We don't need to discuss Smith's use of a credit card, do we?) If he gets into a vehicle and drives away, the make and model of the vehicle, its license plate, and its direction and speed are all easily determined. Plausible inferences about where he's going and when he'll get there are easy to draw.

Smith's interactions with regulated utilities and "common carriers" are recorded as a matter of course. They must be, both by law and for routine purposes of billing and maintenance. That includes gas companies, electric power companies, telephone companies, Internet service providers, and in many locales a number of other firms. Such companies must comply to retain some critical legal privilege, for example the privilege of stringing wires along public roads that nevertheless remain their property.

Then there are Smith's interactions with governments and governmental bodies. Every time he pays a tax bill, or uses a public library, or communicates with any person who works for a government in any capacity, he cedes information about himself and his activities into the public domain. Very few such interactions are governed by a statute. In some cases, the publication of the resulting information is required by law: for example, the ownership data, lien status, and tax data about a parcel of land.

Unless Smith resolves to remain behind his own locked front door, never communicating nor interacting with anyone else in any way, he can do nothing about this.

I wrote at Eternity Road, nine years ago:

What is privacy? An informal definition would be the privilege of "keeping yourself to yourself": that is, restricting others' access to you, to your property, and to information about those things to only those whom you approved. But access to you and your property is covered by another, better grounded right: the right of a legitimate owner to the control and disposition of his property. It's the informational component of the privacy claim that causes the problems.
If there's something about you that you don't want known, and you have a "right" to control the dissemination of that information, how do you exercise your "right" once someone has learned the critical fact? Murder? Lobotomy? Hypnosis? A voodoo curse? If you elect to have an interaction with some other person, and he refuses to agree to keep silent about it, how would you enforce your "right" to privacy and still have the interaction?
As your Curmudgeon has previously written, rights are those claims that can be simultaneously asserted without generating clashes that can only be resolved by a recourse to force (the "test of arms"). As we can see, privacy claims don't satisfy that criterion.

Those observations and inferences remain as valid as they were in 2004.

It's ridiculous to blather about whether this is good or bad. It simply is. There's nothing to be done about it. The measures individuals can take to limit their exposure are relatively few:

Pay cash at all times.
Don't buy real estate.
Don't have children.
Stay out of the hospital.
Communicate face-to-face only.
Be discreet about your relationships.
For the love of God, don't apply for a license for anything!
Stay home as much as possible.
If you must go out, walk.
Cultivate taciturnity.

Those are very severe restrictions, particularly in this age of the Internet. Most Americans could go no more than five minutes without violating one of them.

Don't imagine for a moment that laws could do anything for you beyond what you can do for yourself. Private companies are already subject to the weight of the law, and the law often mandates the very activities privacy-seekers deplore, for reasons that are persuasive if not conclusive. Governments? Please, I've already hurt myself once this week from laughing too hard.

The value of studiously collected information, meticulously organized for aggregation and reference, has simply grown too large for any force to countervail it.

As I've already said, it doesn't matter whether you regard this as good or bad. You can do no more about it than you can about the strong nuclear force...assuming you don't own a really big collider, and that, my friend, would put you on one hell of a lot of lists. These are the times we live in. If they try men's souls, well, men's souls exist to be tried, among other things. In earlier, less technologically ramified eras, the trials were simpler and more visible. We who appreciate electronic communication, automobiles, and indoor plumbing wouldn't much enjoy those times.

Making one's peace with it is, to some extent, the only way forward.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Tightening Down

Yes, you are being watched...and followed...and recorded:

In downtown Seattle, the authorities have installed a system that can allegedly monitor the movements of any personal electronic device (and, therefore, its user) and keep track of their location. After public outrage at the disclosure, it's since been deactivated . . . but it hasn't been removed. It can be reactivated at any time. I'm willing to bet that as soon as the authorities think that the public has forgotten about it, and the system's antennae have become just another part of the urban skyline, they'll do just that.
Public buses across the USA are installing microphones to record passenger conversations.
Las Vegas is installing streetlights that can monitor conversations, record sound and video, and generally monitor everything (and everyone) in their vicinity. The system is called Intellistreets. The manufacturer says of it that "RFID equipped staff can be identified and tracked". If it can track a 'staff member' carrying an RFID chip, it can do the same with almost any RFID chip attached to almost anything, including your cellphone, computer - even your chip-implanted pet or the goods you've just bought at the supermarket. The supplier also claims that the system "provides a platform and many developed applications to assist DHS in protecting its citizens and natural resources"....
DHS is seeking vendors to provide DNA testing of "samples collected from various individuals". It appears that these samples will not necessarily have been obtained through normal criminal investigations or by court order, because the report goes on to speak of identifying individuals "when fingerprints are not available". Given DHS's cavalier disregard for our privacy, I can't regard this development with anything but suspicion.
IARPA is seeking to "improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections...." [T]his software will use any available video camera footage to identify individuals, whether or not they are aware of being under surveillance....
Motor vehicle computers (so-called 'black boxes) are being programmed to record more and more information about their activities, and how their drivers manage them. There are efforts to expand the amount of data recorded, but there are no legal restrictions on how such data may be used.
Late last year the Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzed information on unmanned aerial vehicle activity over the USA, and found a lot of evidence about the growing scale of such operations. It observed that "law enforcement agencies want to use drones to support a whole host of police work", and gave details of several agencies' activities in that regard.
It's just been revealed that the personal information of thousands of American citizens was compromised by a Federal agency without their knowledge or permission, by sharing it with other Federal agencies who could then use it in ways never intended or authorized by those concerned.

[Thank you, Bayou Renaissance Man.]

The representations of a few cranky types aside, there is no right to privacy in the inclusive sense of having a right to forbid others to know who and where you are and what you're doing. Once you step beyond the bounds of your private property, others may observe you to their heart's content, and may record and use the information as they please, as long as they don't use it to commit fraud. As I wrote at The Palace of Reason some time ago:

What is privacy? An informal definition would be the privilege of "keeping yourself to yourself": that is, restricting others' access to you, to your property, and to information about those things to only those whom you approved. But access to you and your property is covered by another, better grounded right: the right of a legitimate owner to the control and disposition of his property. It's the informational component of the privacy claim that causes the problems.
If there's something about you that you don't want known, and you have a "right" to control the dissemination of that information, how do you exercise your "right" once someone has learned the critical fact? Murder? Lobotomy? Hypnosis? A voodoo curse? If you elect to have an interaction with some other person, and he refuses to agree to keep silent about it, how would you enforce your "right" to privacy and still have the interaction?
As your Curmudgeon has previously written, rights are those claims that can be simultaneously asserted without generating clashes that can only be resolved by a recourse to force (the "test of arms"). As we can see, privacy claims don't satisfy that criterion....
All privacy, of whatever degree, derives from the right of property. Your privacy in your home, or your car, or your place of business exists because these are things access to which you, by the right of a legitimate owner, can deny to others. If you were to claim privacy rights on someone else's property, what would he say to you? What would he have the right to do, in the maintenance of his own rights? How could he do that if you truly possessed "privacy rights" distinct from your rights to your own property?

Granted that it would be highly desirable that governments be forbidden to do such monitoring and recording, we haven't yet seen to that niggling little detail. And governments, even when chartered in terms most specific, can be very hard to control.

But of course, the drive of every government is to attain total control over its subjects. In pursuit of that end, complete information about where each of them is and what he's doing is absolutely invaluable.

One of the opening rationales for federal surveillance over all persons and things is the War on Drugs: that massively destructive, internally contradictory, anti-Constitutional boondoggle that all too many Americans continue to believe is right and necessary. The "reasoning" runs that drug transactions being "underground," the pursuit of drug dealers requires that we watch constantly for suspicious activity, such as large bank deposits that arrive in cash. Thus, the Orwellian Bank Secrecy Act was enacted to compel financial institutions to report all transactions over $10,000, with particular emphasis on cash deposits. That Act was later enhanced with legal prohibitions on "structuring," which made it a crime to deposit amounts less than $10,000, if such deposits could be suspected of having been divided up to avoid the federales' watchful eye.

Which brings us to the following atrocity:

The Economist reports on yet another case of “civil forfeiture” by the corrupt and diseased IRS – a Michigan grocery store owned by the Dehkos family:
Fairly often, someone takes cash from the till and puts it in the bank across the street. Deposits are nearly always less than $10,000, because the insurance covers the theft of cash only up to that sum.
In January, without warning, the government seized all the money in the shop account: more than $35,000. The charge was that the Dehkos had violated federal money-laundering rules, which forbid people to “structure” their bank deposits so as to avoid the $10,000 threshold that triggers banks to report a transaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

This is a quintessentially Washingtonian form of shakedown. First, they pass a stupid law that has the effect of making millions of routine, law-abiding transactions appear suspicious (in this case, deposits over $10,000). Then, the vast bloated support state of the Republic of Hyper-Regulation adjusts accordingly (in this case, insurers who’ll cover a mugging of $9,975 decline to cover one of $10,037). But by then, just to cover themselves coming and going, Washington has passed another stupid law making it an additional crime to avoid committing the original crime (thus, “structuring” your deposits to avoid the $10,000 threshold).
Meanwhile, no one has prosecuted or even convicted the Dehkos family — or even charged them with anything. Because these days, unlike in King John’s, the state doesn’t need to:
Prosecutors offered no evidence that the Dehkos were laundering money or dodging tax. Indeed, the IRS gave their business a clean bill of health last year. But still, the Dehkos cannot get their cash back. “They offered us 20%,” says Ms Thomas, “But if we settle, it looks like we’re guilty of something, which we’re not.”

Oh, yeah, the coup de grâce: The grand old federal tradition of “settling.” In the shakedown state, nobody’s guilty or innocent, it’s all about the settling.

That's just one of a legion of similar incidents. In all such cases, the mulcted private citizen has to fight like a regiment of Gurkhas to get even a fraction of his money back -- and in the usual case, he'll spend most of what he'll recover on lawyer's fees, if not even more.

'Fess up now, Gentle Reader: Do you really think the feds perform such seizures out of a sincere suspicion of drug activity or terrorist linkages?

So here we are: The Omnipotent State wants to track each and every one of us at all times, know what we're saying and doing and with whom. More, it claims the power to take what it wants on any pretext it likes -- "civil asset forfeiture" ain't just about cash -- and then force us to plead for its return with no guarantee of success. Meanwhile, ObamaCare solicits the credulous to enter their most personal details into its wholly unsecured website, where persons who have undergone no background check whatsoever will do unspecified things with it. Whatever is done with the information, those credulous types have no legal recourse, as the site says in the "small print" that the user has no expectation of privacy.

Got a "smart phone?" I'd get rid of it if I were you.
Got an EZ-Pass? Pull it off the windshield and leave it home.
Like to use public WiFi "hot spots?" You're taking a big chance, Bucko.
Say what? You plan to go to your local "public library" later today? For God's sake, man!
Those Federal Reserve Notes you've been carrying around? Buy some gold or silver with them.

The Omnipotent State is tightening down. If you don't want to be squeezed to death, learn not to feed it with your routine behavior.