Stewardship, and Our Responsibility to Future Generations

I just read Roy Balleste's excellent post at Circle ID blog, Privacy and the Future: Are We Good Trustees of the Internet? He speaks eloquently about the need to safeguard against the government encroachment on privacy online.  But something about the post makes me think about a conversation I had weeks ago with my 23 year old daughter.

I was talking about the revelations of the NSA and DEA tapping citizen and foreign e-mails, phone conversations, and building or accessing huge databases of both types of traffic. I was just amazed and dismayed when my daughter's reaction was, "DUH! We always assumed they were listening. What are you upset about?"

It is one thing to be cynical about your government.  (and sneer at your parents regarding technology)  It is something else entirely to cede your Fourth Amendment rights without a blink. 

Once you give up Constitutional rights, I think you probably will have to shed blood to get them back. Just like the Minuteman decorating this blog post. Frederick Douglass told us, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will."

The image is the The Minute Man, a statue by Daniel Chester French erected in 1875 in Concord, Massachusetts. The photo was originally at the National Park Service page,  http://www.nps.gov/mima/education.htm, which now is a 404 message. The image is on Wikimedia Commons.

Italy Jails Former Officials for Extraordinary Rendition

The New York Times reported Feb. 12, 2013 that an appeals court in Milan, Italy sentenced Italy's former military intelligence chief, Niccolo Pollari, to a 10 year prison sentence for his part in the U.S. plot for extraordinary rendition kidnapping of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in 2003.  Recall that extraordinary rendition was used by the U.S. government to kidnap people suspected of terrorism and whisking them away to a territory where torture is common for questioning. Three Italian secret service officials who were involved in the plot were also sentenced to serve six years each.

Twenty-three Americans, including the former CIA base chief in Milan were tried in absentia in this case in 2009 and convicted.  Three other Americans in that case were acquitted as having diplomatic immunity, including the former CIA station chief in Rome.  This appeals court vacated the acquittals this month and convicted those three in absentia.

The 2009 decision was the first case successfully prosecuting rendition as a crime, and was viewed as a very courageous decision.  In that earlier decision, Mr. Pollari was given only 8 years' sentence, and the others got five year sentences. So the sentences on this appeal were raised, as well as adding more.

I know I was deeply troubled by my government's efforts at extraordinary rendition.  Now the drones are a somewhat similar ethical problem. According to a Justice Department memo, the President has authority to send drones to assassinate citizens.  The government, un-checked by courts, and behind closed doors, is declaring death sentences on citizens and non-citizens alike, and using unmanned drones to carry them out. There is also the use of drones for surveillance against citizens. The ACLU has filed suit to stop drone killings and drone surveillance.

I find several several federal and state bills to also stop drone surveillance within their borders --  Rand Paul's bill in the Senate; Fox news story that lists Virginia, Montana, California, Oregon, Texas, Nebraska, Missouri, North Dakota, Florida, Virginia, Maine and Oklahoma.  Here is a balancing story from the ACLU with some useful links noting that Florida's legislation seems the closest to passing as of Feb. 4, 2013.

Federal bills, from the 112th Congress, which have now been superseded by the 113th Congress.  Nothing comes up in the 113th Congress yet on the topic of drones (search Thomas website by text "drones").  Keep in mind that past bills can give you an idea of future bills.:
 1.  HR 6199 ( --> Preserving American Privacy Act of 2012, currently referred to both the House Judiciary, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committees) 
2.   HR 5925 ( --> Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act of 2012 (Introduced in House, passed from the House committee on Judiciary to the House Committee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Has a companion bill in the Senate).
3.  S 3287 ( Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act of 2012 (Introduced in Senate - IS, -- This is Senator Rand's bill.  Read twice and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee).
4.  HR 5950 (NADA of 2012 or No Armed Drones Act of 2012;  Referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committees and then to the subcommittee on Aviation.)
5. HR 6676 (Drone Aircraft Privacy and Transparency Act of 2012; Referred to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and in addition to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, then to House Transportation and Infrastructure, then to House Energy and Commerce, and finally to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade, where it simply ran out of time on Dec. 19, 2012.)
 6.  HR 3467 ( --> To establish a moratorium on aerial surveillance conducted by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. (Introduced in House - IH; This is related to the other drone limitation bills, but not quite the same in that it is aimed at a specific agency.  Read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. )

Here is a very handy link to the Drone Journalism Lab website which is tracking each state that introduces legislation to limit drone surveillance.  

It seems so ironic that this President used to teach Constitutional law and received a Nobel Peace Prize! The image at the top of the blog post is the shadow of a drone across the U.S. Constitution, of course.  Courtesy of Hammer of Truth blog post, Drones Across America.

New Institute at Yale Law School

Yale Law alumnus and legendary constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams has given his alma mater $3,000,000 to found an institute to promote free speech, free press, and access to information. The Yale Daily News article quotes Abrams on the reason for his gift:

'We live in a time of acute polarization of views in our nation ... It is of critical import that no voice be stilled and that government play virtually no role in determining who speaks and to what extent. The First Amendment makes us the envy of the world and it is worth learning and relearning why that is so.'

The Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression will be overseen by the Law School's Information Society Project, which is led by Professor Jack Balkin. According to Balkin, the main beneficiary of Abrams's largesse will be the Media Freedom and Information Access clinic, a Yale initiative that assists journalists with "freedom of information and open access issues." Some of the donation will ge used to hire a permanent faculty member to lead the MFIA, as it is known, allowing it to "take on more cases and broaden its legal scope."

Constitution Worship

The Constitution of the United States has been much in the news of late. Members of the Tea Party movement express reverence for the original language and meaning of the document, while others look upon the Constitution as a document intended by the Founders to adapt to meet the changing times. Jill Lepore's article in the January 17 issue of The New Yorker, "The Commandments: The Constitution and Its Worshippers," comes down on the side of those who believe that the Constitution has been and must be subject to interpretation by the courts and by the citizenry:

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out. Felix Frankfurther once wrote that the Constitution "is most significantly not a document but a stream of history." The difference between forty-four hundred words and a stream of history goes a long way toward accounting for the panics, every few decades or so, that the Constitution is in crisis, and that America must return to constitutional principles through constitutional education. The two sides in this debate are always charging each other with not knowing the Constitution, but they are talking about different kinds of knowledge.

"We'll keep clinging to our Constitution, our guns, and our religions," [Sarah] Palin said last spring, "and you can keep the change." Behind the word "change" is the word "evolution." In 1913, Woodrow Wilson insisted, "All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word--to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is a recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing." Conservatives called for a rejection of this nonsense about the "living Constitution."

Lepore is a Professor of American History at Harvard, and she treats her readers to a brief but compelling history of the physical Constitution starting with its signing in Philadelpha in 1787. Three delegates would not sign, but the rest did and their signatures appear "at the bottom of the fourth page." The original document was written on parchment, and then the text was "made public, printed in newspapers and broadsheets, often with 'We the People' set off in extra-large type." The original was carried to New York to be presented to Congress, which was meeting at City Hall. Congress forwarded the Constitution to the states for ratification. What happened to the document?

The original Constitution was simply filed away and, later, shuffled from one place to another. When City Hall underwent renovations, the Constitution was transferred to the Department of State. The following year, it moved with Congress to Philadelphia and, in 1800, to Washington, where it was stored at the Treasury Department until it was shifted to the War Office. In 1814, three clerks stuffed it into a linen sack and carried it to a gristmill in Virginia, which was fortunate, because the British burned Washington down. In the eighteen-twenties, when someone asked James Madison where it was, he had no idea.

In 1875, the Constitution found a home in a tin box in the bottom of a closet in a new building that housed the Departments of State, War, and Navy. In 1894, it was sealed between glass plates and locked in a safe in the basement. In 1921, Herbert Putnam, a librarian, drove it across town in his Model T. In 1924, it was put on display in the Library of Congress, for the first time ever. ... It spent the Second World War at Fort Knox. In 1952, it was driven in an armored tank under military guard to the National Archives, where it remains, in a shrine in the rotunda, alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

It is worth noting that Herbert Putnam was more than just "a librarian"; he was the first individual with professional library experience to serve as Librarian of Congress; he established an interlibrary loan system; and he introduced the Library of Congress classification system, which libraries around the world use to this day. He also served two terms as president of the American Library Association. Putnam was a graduate of Columbia Law School, and what a thrill it must have been for him to have the Constitution in his keeping, if only for a short period of time!

Lepore's article is a fascinating read. I particularly enjoyed the section on originalism which amounts to about half of the article.