On 10/6/06, Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To focus this, let me ask one question. What liberties have American citizens lost during the last 5 years? Now, I think an argument that privacy has been reduced carries some weight, but I don't think that's the same as a reduction of liberty.
I don't buy into the argument that changes that focus on non-citizens do not affect our rights. We cannot treat others unfairly -- witness the failure of our government to treat like cases alike for the detainees -- without threatening our court system. We have established that it is sometimes okay not to treat like cases alike, whereas it was never, in any situation, okay before. This has an enormous impact on our freedom abroad. As it becomes acceptable under U.S. law to treat foreigners unequally (not just unequally to citizens, but unequally to each other), as we permit torture, secrecy and spying, we give tacit permission to other nations to treat our citizens similarly. Further, we actually encourage other nations to suspend liberties when we ask them to work outside of their own courts and laws. I don't think we should underestimate this ripple effect. As for privacy, is there still an assumption that access to information is a necessary ingredient for democracy? Seems to me that that idea vanished sometime in the last few years. We used to have a government that was open to scrutiny and high barriers to spying on our own people. Now it seems to be quite the opposite -- it has become acceptable for the government to operate in secrecy via the Patriot Act and such, while it has far greater freedom to scrutinize us secretly, with no requirement to show that we have done anything wrong. The tight controls on media in Iraq, often U.S. media, curtail our rights to access information that is necessary to make informed voting choices. The media has been complicit in this, but the government is the one with the weapons. Even in this country, the government restricts coverage, most notably by banning pictures of returning coffins. We used to regard immigrants as an asset in this country. In the last few years, the default seems to have become to regard them as a threat. They threaten our security, our economy, etc. They are not given due process, even when they are here legally. In a broader context than 9/11, our liberties have been diminished by conservative politics that assume that a rising tide lifts all boats, when it is clear that it actually only lifts all yachts, since the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Economic freedom is diminishing. Educational liberties have been infringed by an administration that insists on equal treatment of scientific and non-scientific teachings. I don't think it is any coincidence that in this environment, a company that formerly was a shining example of a well-behaved, ethical corporation -- Hewlett-Packard -- engaged in unlawful surveillance to plug "leaks" in its boardroom. HP was doing what the NSA did when it asked for phone records without a warrant. They were following the example of an administration that behaves as though it is no longer accountable to the citizenry or the judiciary, a reversal of the most fundamental value of a democracy. Nick -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
