Integrity and Courage

A lot of noise has been made in the past year about Barack Obama's "present" votes in the Illinois state Senate. The Illinois chapter of NOW has recently joined the Clinton campaign in implying that Obama's present votes on certain bills while in the Illinois state legislature mean he is weak on women's rights; on the contrary, Barack Obama received a 100% positive rating from Planned Parenthood during his state senate career, and has consistently received 100% positive ratings from both Planned Parenthood and NARAL since being elected to the national Senate. Anyone who knows how the state Senate works in Illinois, however, realizes that Present votes are merely procedural votes, and are usually actually a sign of support for the bill . These assertions that Obama is weak on women's rights were so fallacious that former Chicago NOW president (1995 - 1999) and strong Hillary Clinton supporter, Lorna Brett Howard, publicly changed her affiliation and now supports Obama and is now being slimed by NOW and the Clinton campaign.

These tactics are bad enough on their own, but something that happened today in the Senate slams home the irony. Many of you know I have been supporting Sen. Dodd's fight against retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the government in illegally wiretapping American citizens. This fight has been delayed time and again through numerous procedural tactics, even though Democratic Majority Leader Reid fought hard to bring it to a vote. A civil rights betrayal succeeded today in the Senate when a version of the FISA bill including immunity provisions passed despite Senator Dodd's objections (fortunately the House did not pass the retroactive immunity clause so the fight does go on). In the vote for cloture (end the debate) only 29 people voted against, among them Sen. Obama. Also voted on at the same time was an amendment proposed by Sen. Dodd to remove the retroactive immunity; this vote failed 67 to 31, again with Sen. Obama voting to remove the immunity.

Sen. Clinton on the other hand didn't even have the political courage to vote "present"; she chose not to be there at all.

It doesn't take much integrity to twist your opponent's votes in such a way as to make him appear weak on women's rights. It takes a complete lack of integrity to launch such attacks when you aren't willing to put your voice on either side of the debate for everyone's rights. Sen. Obama has fought for 26 years, from the beginning of his public career for women's, minority, and everyone else's rights - from his time as a community organizer in Chicago, through his time as a civil rights lawyer to his state and federal Senate positions. It takes true political courage to stand up for what is right when it is not popular.

As a side note, my local Senator, Claire McCaskill (also an Obama supporter), voted to bring cloture and against the anti-immunity amendment, a vote which seriously lessens the likelihood of my voting for her again two years from now. We'll have to see.

The EFF has much more information on what the FISA provisions mean for you; check it out and while you are at it throw them some support.

From my cold dead hands

Or, Amendment IV, redux

It becomes even more obvious that the executive branch has no comprehension of the privacy implications of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has ruled time and again in support of personal privacy. This has often gone against various national intelligence agencies' agendas, but now they are pushing to throw personal privacy right out. In a recent speech, the principal deputy director of national intelligence has said we shouldn't have privacy from the government and private companies; we should trust them not to misuse private information.

Just focusing on his speech for a moment, he brings in a number of non-sequiturs:

• "Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs." - There is a very big difference between a person talking about their private information and private information being taken without one's consent.
• "[People are] perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an (Internet service provider) who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data." - Where do I begin? What does privacy have to do with the immigration debate? Are illegal immigrants the only people ISPs employ? What is an ISP doing monitoring my traffic? As for that last one, I know there is no binding net neutrality legislation (yet), but as has been shown in the recent Comcast and AT & T kurfluffles, ISP customers expect traffic agnostic internet connections.
• "Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety. I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up" - Not a non-sequitur, its actually a false dichotomy. My privacy and other rights are independent of my and this nation's security. "Those who are willing to give up their civil liberties to preserve their safety, deserve neither and will lose both." - Ben Franklin.

If our founding fathers knew that this would happen after all of their sacrifices, we would still be part of England. There are hundreds of issues with these statements. The biggest issue is the call to "just trust us." I'm sure the veterans, the TSA workers, and who knows who else trust the government's handling of private information. I also don't trust what the government will do with that information: a) I don't know how they will sift through it all, b) I don't want to pay someone to do that sifting, and c) what will keep the false positive (whatever constitutes a positive...) rate down?

Thus I will keep my anonymizing and encryption tools, and, as Charlton Heston was known to say in defense of another Constitutional amendment (although I don't completely agree with his views on that): You can pry my software from my cold dead hands.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now, I know this whole Constitution thing has already been sent through the shredder a couple times in the past 7 years (well, and before that too, but I'm not going to go into it right now), but this is becoming ridiculous. The government has been saying for a long time that internet communications should have no expectation of privacy. This case is being fought currently in the federal courts to determine that fact for sure.

The way I see it. Anything I post on a bulletin board, blog, forum, or any other publicly read webpage is fair game. Read it all you want, thats why I put it there. If it is sent in a "private" email however, I expect it to be treated the same as any snail mail envelope. You can read who its from and who it is to, but without a court's approval, you should not be allowed to read the contents.

The government argues, however, that email, for the most part, is sent as plain text and that if they look at the full packet, they didn't really open it... Personally I believe that the headers constitute the envelope and the content is inside it, but if thats the way you want to play it, I am not waiting for a court to give the government a blank check. I have just recently downloaded and installed GNU Privacy Guard on my system. I already had Thunderbird (a great mail client, for anyone out there looking for one, a good replacement for Outlook or hopping between web mail clients). I also downloaded the engimail extension for Thunderbird. Now all of my email is signed (so no one can mess with it and anyone can tell I sent it), and if anyone wants to send me their public key (see sidebar links for more information on what these are and for my public key) I will send them only encrypted emails. Trianglman is the address, gmail is the domain.

Protect your rights. Demand that the Constitution be upheld. Don't sell your rights for a false sense of safety.

Those who would sacrifice their liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both.