but not yet.
Soon enough, though. The wind's rising and the sky's getting quite dark.
Just a bit ago, I was walking up the hill on 17th, getting to Jackson. To my right, there was a cop on a motorcycle, cruising slowly up to a stop sign. The vibe I got was pretty relaxed. Still, a cop.
Since the time I first sat in front of a TV watching thugs with guns and badges beat civil rights marchers, and ever since I got caught up on the losing side in a police riot in Chicago in 1968, and all the times since that I got myself thrown to the ground and handcuffed, when I see a cop my first response is to assess possible risks.
But at the Dayton Voice in the 1990s, I had a very different, and somewhat sustained, experience of a cop who was always getting himself in trouble with other cops, particularly chain of command-type trouble--Lt. David Sherrer. Constantly in conflict with his superiors during his career with the Dayton police department, Sherrer came to the Voice in '97 or '98 with a story about how the department was persecuting him for criticizing other cops who didn't follow procedure, and brutalizing people on the street. Sherrer was also detailed in his criticisms of the way the department dealt with African-American officers in general.
Early in our collaboration, I told Sherrer that I didn't trust police very much and had my doubts about him. Suck it up, he responded. After all, he observed, he was in a postion where he had to trust a white newspaper publisher.
David was pretty much always angry. There didn't seem to be much happiness in his life. He's gone now; here's his obituary, which tells quite a lot about his difficulties with his employer and the troubles in his life generally.
So, there was the cop on the bike. He looked around at the stop sign and rolled through. He looked at me and nodded. I waved a hand and laughed. He was still a cop, and he looked pleased to be one, but it didn't look like he was so full of the power of his position. He just looked like he felt pretty good on a warm day, looked as though something like joy pulsed through him. A feeling that David Sherer didn't have very often.
All of that is probably beside the point that needs to be made, which is this: Cops are the shock troops for maintaining the status quo in communities where the status quo is generally a painful thing. That's not going to change, not until the status quo stops hurting so much, stops being a matter of unemployment and dim prospects, a matter of exclusion from social benefits, a matter of brutal policing and false arrests and wrongful convictions. David Sherrer knew this, I think, and in his small way waged a difficult fight to change it. Sherrer died too young and the struggle that laid heavy on his mind and heart was one of the reasons for it.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Privacy, security and umbrage
I have concerns I'd like to discuss,
but I don't share the apparent hysteria.
Is it too blunt to say so? To suggest that so many on the Left--colleagues and allies and heroes and Facebook friends--are overreacting to the news that the NSA is capturing data about the phone habits and patterns of tens of millions of Americans? I mean, I love Daniel Ellsberg, but I sure don't share his assessment that Edward Snowden's actions in revealing a classified NSA-operation is an act of courage and sacrifice even remotely close to Ellsberg's actions in stealing, compiling and releasing the Pentagon Papers.
The publication of those classified documents in 1971 made clear for the first time that government strategists believed that the Vietnam War could not be won and that elected officials were lying about what they were doing and what they intended to do. The New York Times was briefly enjoined from publishing the documents and Ellsberg, who made no claims about his own courage and sacrifice, was systematically and illegally investigated and harassed by the same Nixon-administration operatives central to the Watergate break-in.
History may one day affirm the notion that Edward Snowden did a great thing, but it can never show that Snowden revealed anything that most of the Left and much of the rest of the country didn't already know. For evidence, I submit a column by Walter Pincus, "A surveillance history lesson," in today's Washington Post.
More than 40 years ago, Pincus tells us the NSA was engaged in a whole range of spying activities that surprised staff of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, collecting data from ordinary eavesdropping, but also from "cables and intercepts from satellites," Pincus writes. The committee demanded and eventually received "a full description of the NSA's then expanding worldwide collections, how the material was being used, and the means by which the NSA minimized reading or listening to non-relevant material on U.S. citizens."
In his piece, Pincus also notes a 1979 Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court ruling that said, in part, "there is no constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed into a telephone system."
One can, of course, object passionately to the court's decision, but it is another matter for anyone on the Left to experience shock at the notion that our government is engaged in surveillance of all sorts of people and all manner of activities that seem routine and ought to be private. We know better than that. We know our history. We know that governments, both democratic and otherwise, will use every available technology to gather any information that the government deems necessary to protect and/or control. And we know that the U.S. government spies on us in ways that we'd rather not think about.
We also know that government will go too far in defense of its prerogatives and that some agents of the government will try to evade oversight in the exercise of police power. Snowden may not be a hero (check out Richard Cohen's take on Snowden, "A scoop of hot air"), but it is a demonstration of overreach to characterize him as a traitor. He must not be punished for telling us what we already knew.
Marrianne McMullen, the person to whom I am married (and a federal employee), points out that the Department of Health and Human Services manages a database that has the name, salary, social security number and other information about every single legally employed person in the United States. The database is used only for child support enforcement and may be one of the most important factors in reducing poverty in single-parent households. Access to the database is absolutely restricted to authorized personnel engaged in child support collection activities.
Ultimately, the employment/income database exists because the technology to collect and manage the information exists. Not collecting it would be a grievous government failure.
Do I believe that the government may go too far in collecting data? Yes, absolutely. But I also believe that if an extended computerized analysis of information that does not compromise individual identities or jeopardize people without probable cause can help identify danger to Americans, it's worth doing. The important questions go way beyond whether such data collection is occurring. The areas that need full public discussion are connected to who collects the data, who oversees the collectors, and where the line between privacy and security is drawn.
but I don't share the apparent hysteria.
Is it too blunt to say so? To suggest that so many on the Left--colleagues and allies and heroes and Facebook friends--are overreacting to the news that the NSA is capturing data about the phone habits and patterns of tens of millions of Americans? I mean, I love Daniel Ellsberg, but I sure don't share his assessment that Edward Snowden's actions in revealing a classified NSA-operation is an act of courage and sacrifice even remotely close to Ellsberg's actions in stealing, compiling and releasing the Pentagon Papers.
The publication of those classified documents in 1971 made clear for the first time that government strategists believed that the Vietnam War could not be won and that elected officials were lying about what they were doing and what they intended to do. The New York Times was briefly enjoined from publishing the documents and Ellsberg, who made no claims about his own courage and sacrifice, was systematically and illegally investigated and harassed by the same Nixon-administration operatives central to the Watergate break-in.
History may one day affirm the notion that Edward Snowden did a great thing, but it can never show that Snowden revealed anything that most of the Left and much of the rest of the country didn't already know. For evidence, I submit a column by Walter Pincus, "A surveillance history lesson," in today's Washington Post.
More than 40 years ago, Pincus tells us the NSA was engaged in a whole range of spying activities that surprised staff of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, collecting data from ordinary eavesdropping, but also from "cables and intercepts from satellites," Pincus writes. The committee demanded and eventually received "a full description of the NSA's then expanding worldwide collections, how the material was being used, and the means by which the NSA minimized reading or listening to non-relevant material on U.S. citizens."
In his piece, Pincus also notes a 1979 Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court ruling that said, in part, "there is no constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed into a telephone system."
One can, of course, object passionately to the court's decision, but it is another matter for anyone on the Left to experience shock at the notion that our government is engaged in surveillance of all sorts of people and all manner of activities that seem routine and ought to be private. We know better than that. We know our history. We know that governments, both democratic and otherwise, will use every available technology to gather any information that the government deems necessary to protect and/or control. And we know that the U.S. government spies on us in ways that we'd rather not think about.
We also know that government will go too far in defense of its prerogatives and that some agents of the government will try to evade oversight in the exercise of police power. Snowden may not be a hero (check out Richard Cohen's take on Snowden, "A scoop of hot air"), but it is a demonstration of overreach to characterize him as a traitor. He must not be punished for telling us what we already knew.
Marrianne McMullen, the person to whom I am married (and a federal employee), points out that the Department of Health and Human Services manages a database that has the name, salary, social security number and other information about every single legally employed person in the United States. The database is used only for child support enforcement and may be one of the most important factors in reducing poverty in single-parent households. Access to the database is absolutely restricted to authorized personnel engaged in child support collection activities.
Ultimately, the employment/income database exists because the technology to collect and manage the information exists. Not collecting it would be a grievous government failure.
Do I believe that the government may go too far in collecting data? Yes, absolutely. But I also believe that if an extended computerized analysis of information that does not compromise individual identities or jeopardize people without probable cause can help identify danger to Americans, it's worth doing. The important questions go way beyond whether such data collection is occurring. The areas that need full public discussion are connected to who collects the data, who oversees the collectors, and where the line between privacy and security is drawn.
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