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Wednesday, December 21, 2005Privacy and Government Wiretapping: The Government should keep wiretapping illegally.Mickey Kaus says that what the latest "illegal wiretapping" scandal shows is that we need to lower the bar on wiretapping. This is one of those places where his earnest liberalism shows through. A smart conservative, as opposed to an earnest liberal (and, perhaps, the Bushies) knows the value of hypocrisy. There is a value in honoring things in the breach. Even if you are to ignore or violate a principle, that doesn't mean you have to unaware of or dismissive of it. Mickey Kaus' solution is not a solution - it is an outright weakening of privacy protections. The Bush administration's actions may violate those protections, but they don't weaken them in principle because they are approached in an extralegal manner dependent upon the idea that the point is to fight a war. The problem with Mickey's approach is that it opens the door for the government to further push its idiotic drug war and more while creating explicit pathways for doing so. The beauty of the Bush approach is that with the outrage it engenders, anything they act on better be both damn actionable and damn critical. In Mickey's approach, the Feds can pick up granny calling and vowing to bring her knitting along on the flight by sticking it in the bottom of her bag, and a court may seriously be asked to legitimate the government's actions. With Bush's extralegal program, if they act on information about anything other than terrorism, there are serious associated political costs. Perhaps I'm the only one, but I would much rather have my communications monitored by the NSA as part of a massive anti-terrorism program than have the Justice Department John Ashcroft use to run be given any broadened authority. If I were to e-mail - hypothetically speaking - about the cool CD I'd ripped for a friend, I'm relatively assured that the NSA/NRO 1) won't give a damn and 2) won't want to get in trouble for messing with privacy rights over it. A Justice Department trying to win over Orrin Hatch for funding, on the other hand, might just push things if they found out I was distributing free copies of the SpyKids 2 soundtrack through a server in Germany but via a U.S. ISP. Bottom line: The NSA monitoring communications relevant to terrorism in order to gather information that probably isn't actionable in court but could be useful in deciding who our forces need to shoot is hunky dory by me, as it protects me from terrorists without subjecting me to the government powers from which the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect me. Loosened rules where the courts and Justice Department can dig deeper, increasing the degree to which government can intrude other than to prevent against clear and present threats isn't. Call it the pragmatic libertarian take. 
posted by gbarto at 11:13 PM Live from Pollyanna Central... I know the news from Iraq isn't good, but... in the view of a lot of people, the news from the 2004 elections here wasn't good... the news from the French elections a few years back wasn't good... the news from the Spanish elections was dispiriting... Democracy is a messy business. Government of the people reflects the people, and to mangle the quotes, that's the worst thing possible except for everything else. So, the Islamists have had a good day in the Iraqi elections. Next, they get to govern. That's not as easy as it looks. Just ask the Republicans. In a few months, factionalism among the Shia comes. They're on top of the world right now. But the top dogs are most likely not thinking about how they can work together now that they've got a mandate. Rather, the leaders are each thinking, individually, about what they can do with the mandate. And when disagreements arise, there are only two real possibilities: they figure out how to work them out and start evolving into the sort of political party with which business can be done or they split off so that none has the power they used to have collectively. That a) the second possibility seems more likely and b) firearms will probably be involved is unnerving. But we've been there ourselves. The greatest danger right now, I think, is not what the Shiites will do, but whether they'll step aside should it backfire. Once a government has lost power in Iraq and has peacefully stepped down, we can declare the thing a success. That only took what, 40 years, to happen in Japan?
posted by gbarto at 1:49 PM Tuesday, December 20, 2005If Jesus is the reason for the season, then Christ is the cause for rejoicing, no?Guytak has some interesting thoughts.
posted by gbarto at 10:41 PM On the Iraqi elections The results don't look so good, apparently. That's was PJM is reporting. There's only one thing to do, it seems to me: Live with it. This is a critical moment not just for Iraq but for the West. Will we have the good sense to respect the Iraqi voters' wishes? Or will our actions suggest that we just wanted a more neatly legitimated puppet? The joy of democracy, the Iraqis will soon find, is that you have to live with the results of what you vote. We shall see what the final tallies bring, of course. But if they bring the results now discussed, there is only one logical thing to do: Wait. These religious parties may soon discover they don't know what hit them. Winning elections in this part of the world usually means that you've strongarmed enough people to take control. The religious parties may find life more difficult when they have to work within a semi-secular constitution and with a society whose religious devotion is strong but, perhaps, not that strong. Should the religious partisans win, they must be forced to govern, and the people to live with the government they chose. At that point comes the real test: If the religious parties blow it and are voted out, will they step down? And if they don't blow it and aren't voted out, will we stand by our fellow democrats? The bottom line is that Middle East democracy will have differences from Western democracy. These will lessen as the universal values unleashed by life in free society bubble up, but we're in a long term project here. As long as the Iraqis are able to take back such mistakes as they make - by freely electing someone else - but are also permitted to make them - by our support for what their democratic process brings forth - we'll be fine in the long run. Recall, however, that it took 60 years for us to leave Germany, ostensibly part of the West to begin with. We're in for a long haul. But if we stick to it, we'll be well rewarded.
posted by gbarto at 12:05 PM I'd say this Instapundit post has it about right. Let's hope Bolivia floods the market, driving prices down further. Steven Leavitt noted (in Freakonomics) that most drug dealers live with... mom. Only the big guys make any dough. Let's get the "big guys" moving in with mom too. While we're at it, let's throw in the towel on the idiotic drug war. As Instapundit notes elsewhere, the ostensibly Bushhitlerian wiretapping we're hearing about now was in use a decade ago. Just that then it was used for important things like making sure drug thugs and crackheads had a hard time getting together, as opposed to pissant little projects like preventing the mass murder of our citizens.
posted by gbarto at 11:48 AM |
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