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US Congress Committee Talking About Privacy
rm007 writes "The US House of Representatives Judicial Committee's Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law
is holding hearings on the Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security
and approved
the Defense of Privacy Act.
The DHS Privacy Officer hearings are to examine how well the incumbent,
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, is doing and whether the statute creating the
position sufficiently addresses concerns about the handling of personally
identifiable information. This should be worth watching. Wired News has an
article that covers both of these as does GovExec.com, a newsletter for senior Federal employees."
Personally I think this postion was a sham to begin with and the people who created it knew that or very early on there was a lack of concern for what this position was to be and no one adhered to these rules. Now they will evaluate it? I for one want to see how this turns out. If kelly recvies anything less than a failing grade that will just prove to me (and I'm sure many other) that HomeLandSecurity and no regards for privacy.
Perhaps *you* do, but most of us probably just like to think we are not being spied on all the time. It makes me somewhat uncomfortable to be 'on camera,' so to speak, all the time. And the less privacy we have as a society the more danger there is to those of us who can be victimized by an admittedly small group of crimminal offenders. I would like my children to be safe, but there has to be a balance.
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Does anyone see anything oxymoronic about the people that gave us the Patriot Act talking about privacy?
I've read some Chomsky. He has absolutely no credibility on socio-political affairs. He is a great linguist, however.
His political writings are deliciously fact-free. His ideology warps everything very badly. He is viewing things through an invalid and disproven simplistic theory (Marxism) which has little relationship with actual events. It is like reading stuff where everything is explained by Xemu or orgone energy.
He's also very gullible: if a horrific fascist dictator claims to be a Marxist, Chomsky is instantly in the dictator's camp.
I am in the military, and completely understand the need to protect the United States and its citizens from terrorist. That being said, I am afraid some of the measures put into place by the Patriot Act and other knee-jerk legislation have the two problems: 1) They would not have been effective if they were in place on September 10, and 2) They either infringe on basic rights, or they expose people to addition dangers implicit with having person information stored in a database. The problem starts with people writing the legislation not having a clear understanding of the technology they want to employ. The problem gets worse when the next generation expands the programs to use data for purposes the original drafters of the legislation never intended. For a government built on checks and balances, this is unacceptable. Each agency reviewing the use of personal information only works as well as the people doing the review. We need hard standards that specify what the government can collect, and some kind of legislation that limits access to the information in the future. Blanket cries of national defense are starting to sound a little hollow.
A nice little placebo position really. Let's make people think that privacy rights are being respected. It's like most privacy policies on websites; not worth the bandwidth they waste. Very little value when you don't have strong privacy laws as backup. And what's the point of having a privacy officer for the DHS when "anti-terrorism" laws don't allow for such things as being able to see what kind of information is registered on yourself in the first place?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
The right track? Maybe. They are defintely on the same track though. Using it when its a high profile person and everyone else gets loss in the fray. When the govt' standardizes the HIPPA procedures then maybe I can agree with you. Passing a law and then having people execute/follow the *same* law in differnt ways will lead to loopholes and do more harm than good.
"The Constitution makes no reference to heroin, and so the Federal Laws prohibiting its trafficking are unconstitutional."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Back then, you had people who experianced government infringing on them. They knew what it was like to have the State dictate the course of their life, their religion, their associations.
It seems more and more that in the present day we are heading back into the world you just described.
As you said:
Today you see those freedoms being limited slowly, one peice at a time.
Perhaps we are going to see things turn full circle before they start to get better...
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
I think chipping at privacy is like hitting a block of stone with a hammer.
...
Nothing seems to happen at first, and then you see a few flakes fall - nothing much. It seems nothing is happening to the huge block of stone. And then suddenly with just one more blow the whole block of stone splits apart.
Unfortunately, what is happening to the stone as each hammer blow pounds on it is not visible - and our eyes cannot see what our minds cannot see. Trusting our eyes we don't realize what is happening to the our privacy, and less so as to what effect it shall have on us
.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
It seems to me like we are walking a fine line between our security and our privacy. Some people are screaming to be "safe," while the other half of the population is screaming to keep individual "privacy." The positions in the Department of Homeland Security seem like a good place to set up someone to be shot down. Without a clear cut goal (none of this "make things better" stuff) all of the work that is done is totaly subjective. The department could be doing a great job, but there is no real way to tell. At the same time, if someone is doing a poor job, then we have no way to crucify the fool. With the extreem visibility of this position, it is also absurbly easy for the media to drag down anyone who does not fit what they want. Due to the subjective nature of the job, all the media has to do is make people feel unsafe and then the entire population will be howling for blood.
The thing that we need is well defined goals and some way of measuring preformance. Then I will start to worry about if I am giving up too much of my privacy in the cause of feeling "safe".
If I could get a firm grip on reality, I'd choke it...
Yes, they noted a high politicians are most vulnerable to the personal data mining. Who cares about affairs of an average citizen John Smith? But Everybody would care about an average congressman.
There you are, staring at me again.
Quote: This should be worth watching.
How about "worth getting off your duff and getting involved in?"
Democratic government (insert pfft! here) is not a spectator sport.
Here's the core issue: no one is safe against a sufficiently determined adversary, regardless of preventive measures which may have been put into place "ahead of time."
In fact, from a psychological perspective, putting too many ineffective barriers to harm in place may actually have the effect of lulling the populace (read: target) into a false sense of security. Case in point: grandmothers getting anal cavity searches during "routine" airport screenings (sorry for the nasty mental image, it's for purposes of illustration).
There is simply no way to reliably defend a large land mass against random insurgent attacks from loosely organized parties, especially when said attacking parties are comfortable with the notion of dying for their cause. I don't advocate our leaving Iraq anytime soon, as that would be utterly disastrous in the long term, but you only have to look at CNN each morning to note the steady stream of attacks on U.S. forces. True, the attacks don't have any significant impact on the forces deployed at large, but they will continue as long as people are willing to lay down their lives in the name of rebellion (or freedom, depending on which side of the fence you're standing on).
Personally, I think any measure of success in all of this goes back to people worrying about preserving their own immediate liberty first while still standing ready to defend their country as a whole against attack. This is not to be confused with attempting to play Dad to the entire nation while leaving one's own door unlocked, a practice many people seem somewhat adept at these days.
Of course, I'm probably going to be branded an armchair-this-or-that for my rambling, but so it goes.
Seeking partnerships with web design firms.
was is needed is accountability wrt government use of information about people. even if these bills or this privacy officer start down the road to accountability, true accountability needs either openness or trust. openness in national security issues? i don't think so. that leaves trust, and that doesnt exist right now
This is what you get when people will vote for anyone who will agree to give them something.
Everyone has this idea that the government is there to make the country great. Wrong. The government is there to protect you so you can live your life to your own choosing.
The day has come where YOU are no longer expected to make your country great, you just tell your government to do it for you. Charity, morals, economic power regulation, all of these things have been passed to your lawmakers. Do you think you have more control over these powers in your lawmakers' hands than in your own?
Government is a tool to control power, but the individual action, the individual decision, the individual debate, the individual dollar, the individual volunteer hour... all of these things are tools more powerful than those proxied off to a self-interested, self-perpetuating government.
The problem with government is, it's all or nothing. We either outlaw X or allow X, we take money from group A and give to group B, there are few gray areas.
Government is a sledgehammer and should be used as such and only as such. It might be a good idea to consider making your country great on your own.
At the risk of sounding resoundingly cheesy, I'll end this with a quote:
"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."
-- H. L. Mencken
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
" The real problem here is that there is no Constitutional right to privacy."
And thus, you, like so many before you, have fallen prey to the most diabolical usurption of power in the history of government - that the Constitution grants rights to the people. In fact, the Constitution specifically enumerates a small number of things with which the Federal government is tasked, and goes on to specifically state that anything not mentioned IS a right of the states, or of the people. The primary argument raised against support for the Bill of Rights was that an enumeration of specific rights could, at some point in time, be construed by a corrupt Federal government leadership to mean that the only rights citizens have are those granted to them under the Constitution.
The problem with this line of thinking is that once you begin to argue with the government over which rights you do and do not have, the argument inevitably shifts to which rights the government chooses to grant you. The instant this becomes the topic for debate, you've already lost. A government that grants rights to its citizens is a government that can revoke those rights as soon as they become inconvenient or run counter to the particular goals at hand. Thus, we have government agents who may legally break into a citizen's home, confiscate their property, bug their computers and telephones, and may do so with a secret warrant obtained under secret proceedings where the burden of 'proof' is reduced to an agent's vague and generic answers to questions by a panel of judges whose hands are virtually tied into granting every application.
Let there be no mistake - the FISA court is nothing more than a single degree of seperation between the FBI and the KGB. It is a rubber stamp court whose sole purpose is to lend a sliver of credibility to something which would otherwise provoke riots in the streets.
I don't need an amendment to tell me which rights I have - I need an amendment to punish those who violate my rights with our most severe penalties. I want to see an amendment that provides for life in prison for members of congress who vote up legislation that blatantly violates the God-given/creator-granted/natural-born rights of the citizens of this country. Seeing as some see fit to ignore the highest laws of our land, I think it's time we spelled out specific and severe criminal punishments for those who just can't seem to keep their hands off the rights of the people. While it might be inconvenient to imprison every member of congress who voted up the PATRIOT ACT, it would certainly set the tone for further debate. While we're at it, I think we need a nice, long-winded amendment discussing just which things the Federal government can and cannot stick its nose into. Once we've cleared out all the crap that's accumulated over the past 100 years or so, (things like the 'War on Drugs', Corporate welfare, most of current welfare other such programs), I think we'll find that paying down the national debt is rather simple. Once that's payed down, we can rescind the Federal income tax - an unconstitutional 'head tax' that was passed under the pretext that it was a temporary emergency measure. Your state taxes will go up substantially, but will be nowhere near what they are now, when combined with Federal taxes.
Wiping out 60 - 70% of the Federal government's current tasks, jobs, budget, and powers would bring this country to a century of unparalleled prosperity and freedom. The Federal tyranny began with Lincoln's unconstitutional war against the break-away southern states, and continues to grow in size and power even today. At this point, the titanic beast bleeds money, spits fire, and does little to no good for the American people. Let's give most of this money to the states and get people in state governments who are responsible enough to use it well.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."