New Frames

The false argument against privacy

I keep reading letters (scroll to bottom of page in the link) to the editor in the O that support the NSA's warrantless spy operations with a stupid and dangerous argument.  The argument goes something like this:  Hey, credit card companies do it, phone companies do it, pharmaceutical companies do it... for cryin' out loud, everyone has information about all of us... you can purchase it, you can look it up on the Internet, it's all over the place.  So what's the big deal if the government collects all the same info on us?

I'm certainly not thrilled that all these corporations know that I watch The Office every Thursday night and that I grocery shop at Food Front and New Seasons Market, or that I make financial contributions to the Bus PAC, but do I want the government to know that?  Look, the government is not, I repeat NOT a corporation.  There seems to be some confusion between the two these days.  Corporations are NOT put in place by and for the people.  The government is.  The government's duty is to uphold the Constitution, which has a Bill of Rights.  In that Bill of Rights there is the Fourth Amendment, which advocates of presidential authoritarianism seem to think is dated, or perhaps "quaint."

I wonder if those who believe the false argument that government collection of personal info is no different than corporate collection of personl info, and therefore harmless to the state of our constitutional democracy, will feel the same way if H.C. becomes president with Democrats in control of Congress.  Hmmm... I wonder.

No fan of Qwest, but when it comes to govt. spying...

I'm always bitching about Qwest and have been checking out some VOIP companies like Sun Rocket to replace my Qwest service, but I have to say when it comes to the massive NSA spy program, Qwest's refusal to participate in it without a FISA warrant is truly commendable.  Out of all the nation's largest telecommunications providers Qwest was the lone holdout:

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order - or approval under FISA - to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

...Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

...The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

...Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Wowza!  I guess the potential for a massive class action lawsuit outweighed a lucrative illegal government contract.

The truth about how legal immigrants feel

There seems to be an emerging myth out there that presumes legal immigrants in the US feel some animosity towards illegal immigrants.  The myth goes something like this: "I stood in line and followed the law.  They should too."  Even an article in yesterday's Oregonian added some fodder to this mythical fire:

...among Asians and African circles, in which the vast majority are legal migrants or refugees, opinions diverge: Significant numbers oppose legalization of the undocumented, saying it disrespects people who have entered the United States "the right way."

The phrase "significant numbers" obviously implies that a majority of legal immigrants feel this way, but the reporter of this article failed to provide any kind of background information to this supposed "factual" statement.  If the reporter, Angie Chuang, had done her research, she would have discovered that the opposite of her reporting was true.

Recent polls have shown that a majority of legal immigrants in the US support a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 to 12 million undocumented workers.  Many feel that the immigration debate directly impacts them since much of the rhetoric has become "anti-immigrant" in nature.  One poll (audio), co-sponsored by New American Media found that 76% of legal Latino immigrants support legislation that would provide a path to citizenship, while 62% of European and African immigrants support such legislation and 51% of Asians do.

Another poll (audio) found that a majority of legal immigrants oppose a crack down on illegals, they find the dogmatic rhetoric threatening, they have little animosity towards the undocumented and generally have positive feelings towards them.

My husband, a legal immigrant from India, falls into those majority opinions and like most legals, has great sympathy for them in that they all have fundamental things in common, such as separation from their families and native homes, which is a feeling that runs deep in America's immigrants.  Although my husband's views, on their own, are not representative of the legal immigrant community, it doesn't surprise me that these polls demonstrate that his views are in the majority.

Wyden: Is Bush's spy program Total Information Awareness reborn

Ron Wyden stepped up to the plate yesterday in the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings and hit hard on TIA, I mean Bush's Spy Program:

A...sparring session came when Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, pressed the intelligence officials about whether a controversial Pentagon data-mining program called Total Information Awareness had been effectively transferred to the intelligence agencies after being shut down by Congress.

Mr. Negroponte and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, both said they did not know. Then came the turn of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who headed N.S.A. for six years before becoming the principal deputy director of national intelligence last spring.

"Senator," General Hayden said, "I'd like to answer in closed session."

Not much of a guessing game on this one!  Every single member of Congress who helped put a stop to TIA should be red-faced stompin' mad that the Bush administration has completely ignored them.  Not only did the admin pick up TIA in Bush's Spy Program, but they expanded on it. 

Let our Senator Wyden know that you support his tough line of questioning on this constitutional matter.

Feds want to wiretap your Netware

And you thought Bush's first phase of warrantless domestic spying was bad.  Here's the second:  The FCC filed a brief last week with the US Circuit Court of Appeals that would force all net hardware and software makers to build a wiretapping backdoor into their products.  If the mandate is approved, vendors will have 18 months to comply.

As Networking Pipeline notes this will not only have a huge impact on our privacy, but it will create an environment where the government can decide which software and hardware makers stay in business, which would stifle innovation.  Moreover, Pipeline points out that such a setup "is an open invitation to hackers. So we may be faced with a double-whammy: The feds and hackers working their way into our systems."  These jackasses couldn't even connect the 9/11 dots, and now they're going to muck things up even more while hacking alongside hackers!

No doubt, the soon to be new Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito is a true believer of this emerging Orwellian system we have here in America... land of the free...

Durbin: filibuster against Alito possible

Only a week ago Senate Dems were talking "no filibuster" on Alito, which left many of us progressives wondering "who the f#%@# did we vote for when we sent our Democratic Senators to DC."  But today Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who's job it is to count the votes, said there is such strong opposition to the right wing jurist that the Dems may have enough votes to filibuster:

"In case after case, he has voted -- often as the lone dissenter on his court -- against the dispossessed, the poor and the powerless who finally made their way to his court," Durbin said.

What does this mean for those of us who convinced our Senator Ron Wyden to vote against Alito?  It means we need to keep calling Wyden and tell him that we support a filibuster.  Otherwise, what do the Democrats stand for...  This is their time to show that they support Roe v. Wade, the Family Medical Leave Act, a government with checks and balances, and much more.  And it's their time to prove to America that they aren't a bunch of namby pambies.

Call Wyden every day until the vote.  And I mean every day!  And after you have called send him an e-mail.

DC Switch Board 1.877.762.8762

Gay marriage advocates need to reframe for rural voters

All Things Considered on NPR had an interesting story (audio included in link) this evening about the passing away of Dr. Stanley Biber, sex-change surgeon king of the world.  He was 82 years old and performed over 5,000 sex-change operations.  Contrary to what most would believe, Dr. Biber didn't have his famous international practice in New York City or San Francisco.  No, he had it in a little rural town in Colorado where he lived comfortably and at ease among his fellow small town residents.  He even ran a cattle ranch and led the cattle drive to Nebraska this year, where he caught pneumonia and later died.

But not all residents were happy with Dr. Biber's practice.  A local preacher tried to start a campaign to put an end to Biber's sex-change practice, but as NPR reports the unique values of the west, as in western states, prevailed and the preacher walked away with his tail between his legs.  And what are those values?  According to a town resident whom NPR interviewed, it's pretty simple:

You take care of your business.  I'll take care of my business, and what you do is your business and what I do is mine, and that's it.

Is it possible that this philosophy, this frame, could be used in rural Oregon, particularly eastern Oregon to get residents to be less threatened by gay marriage or civil unions?  Maybe the "equal and civil rights" meme just doesn't click with voters outside the urban areas.  Maybe it's just too urban.  If you're not used to hearing a certain language, you're not going to understand it.

I don't know what Basic Rights Oregon's campaign strategy was in the rural areas in their effort to defeat Measure 36 in November of '04, or even if they tried to reach those areas, but perhaps there has to be a paradigm shift in how rural voters learn about gay marriage.  If some town in rural Colorado stood up for a sex-change doctor, why couldn't rural Oregon voters accept gay marriage?

White House press sec. takes swipe at bloggers

Today White House press secretary beam-me-up-and-get-me-outta-here Scottie McLellan tried to punch bloggers in the gut, but fortunately for us bloggers, Scottie punched in the wrong place.  When asked by a reporter about the administration's policy of rendering detainees to Syria, a country that sanctions torture, Scottie acted all befuddled.  Via Salon's War Room (free day pass required):

McClellan said he'd never heard of such a thing. "You've never heard of any allegations like that?" a reporter asked. "No," McClellan said, "I've never heard that one. That's a new one." Told that U.S. renditions to Syria had been "well publicized," McClellan sneered, "What, by bloggers?"

Ouch!  O.K., I'll admit I wrote about renditions to Syria last year on the first of January.  I'm one of those guilty bloggers.  But poor Scottie doesn't realize that those of us who wrote about this linked to traditional journalism sources that had already reported on it.  In fact, as Salon notes:

...the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press and the New Yorker have all written about U.S. renditions to Syria. Moreover, the Justice Department is currently fighting a lawsuit filed on behalf of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who says U.S. authorities sent him to Syria after taking him into custody at a New York airport.

I used both the Washington Post and Boston Globe in my entry on this.  In fact, it was a reporter from the traditional media who told me about the story in the first place.  Every blog I read that wrote about renditions to Syria linked to traditional journalism sources.  The reason I even wrote about this was due to the fact that the CIA has a front company (Bayard Foreign Marketing) in Portland, Oregon that they're using as part of their cover-up on the whole rendition deal. 

Poor Scotty.

Why was Ashcroft queasy about Bush's spy op?

You know Bush is in trouble when his own rightwing nutjob Attorney General had problems with the King George concept...

In a nutshell, Bush's peons, Andrew and Alberto, needed to get then Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on Bush's illegal spy program.  Ashcroft happened to be recovering from an operation in the hospital, so they went to the Deputy AG, James Comey (no fan of the ACLU,) who refused to do it.  That's right folks, when Ashcroft's own deputy looked at the program he wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pen. 

Andrew and Alberto then trotted off to Ashcroft's hospital bed and begged him to sign off on it.  According to the NYT, even Ashcroft was queasy about the spy program, and it's unsure whether or not he eventually approved (if he did it was only after Andrew kept pushing on the button that administered shots of morphine through Ashcroft's IV.)

Next thing we know Bush will be standing in front of a bunch of reporters declaring while shaking his finger, "I did not spy on that Quaker woman!"

Soldiers told to stop fighting for freedom

Donald Rumsfeld, in his last trip to Iraq, informed the US soldiers there to stop thinking that they are fighting for freedom and liberty.  He told them that they needed to get a grip and stop living in their "la la fantasy land."  Instead, he insisted they fight for George W. Bush's right to secretly spy on American citizens without obtaining a FISA warrant or any kind of judicial oversight.

When a soldier wondered aloud about the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty and what it stands for, Rumsfeld snapped back, "That piece of French junk?"  He proceeded to walk out of the room, but turned around to remind the soldiers that they were fighting for the right for Bush to have unchecked executive powers, and to "not forget it."  He said "Freedom isn't free... you need an authoritarian government to grant you freedom.  So fight for that."

Note:  Regular readers of this blog know that periodically there are entries that are fictional.  This is one of them.  One of my readers actually believed one of my fictional entries and got in an argument with her boss about it... it also happened to be posted on April 1st.