-Caveat Lector- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25499
WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! 'Patriot Act' or privacy slap? Metcalf interviews professor on government use of surveillance ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Editor's Note: The latest round of "anti-terrorism" legislation wasn't the first time the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI misled Congress to obtain new tools to perform surveillance on ordinary Americans, says economist Charlotte Twight, a contributing editor of the "Independent Review" and professor at Boise State University. "Although represented prior to passage as an innocuous measure intended only to maintain existing government authority," writes Dr. Twight, "[the 1994 federal Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)] immediately became a springboard in the government's quest for increased surveillance power." WorldNetDaily writer and talk-show host Geoff Metcalf interviewed Twight about government abuse of power, particularly as it relates the new Patriot Act, recently signed into law by the president. Metcalf's daily streaming radio show can be heard on TalkNetDaily weekdays from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time. By Geoff Metcalf © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com Q: I continue to hear from readers and listeners (including some real snotty e-mail) who say, "Hey, if you don't have anything to hide, what do you care if the government is looking into your stuff?" A: Oh, I know a lot of people have that belief. My answer to it is, first of all, we can't be sure if we have anything to hide, because nowadays there are so many vague and conflicting laws and so many laws and regulations that an ordinary person can't know if he or she is in compliance with all those things. Q: Ayn Rand had it right: They'll eventually make everything illegal, and then they can just cherry pick who they want to go after. A: Right. And also, from my point of view, the logical implication of that – the argument that "I have nothing to hide" – is that if you have nothing to hide, then it would be perfectly OK for the government to have a surveillance camera in your home. And I don't think that's the kind of country I grew up in or the type of country that most Americans want to live in and have lived in historically. Also, there is the danger of abuse of power that we always have to be concerned about. Q: Some folks come back and say, "Yeah, but it's been sunsetted!" So that at the conclusion of the Bush administration it has to be revisited. But hey, come on … we know the way these things happen. At the eleventh hour, late night in Congress: "All in favor, opposed, so voted," and you've got these draconian powers gifted to arguably another administration like the one we just survived for the last eight years. A: Exactly so. And as you say, some of the provisions in the new, so-called "U.S. Patriot Act" don't actually expire. They just have to be looked at again. I think there is a good likelihood that they will just continue. Q: This isn't a unique happenstance. I wrote a piece a while back, noting that multiple times in U.S. history – going back to the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the McCarren Act, the Smith Act – the government has pretty regularly chosen either to undermine or abrogate the First Amendment. Your piece on "Privacy and the 1994 federal Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act" (CALEA) was fascinating. A: What was very interesting to me about that 1994 law was, again, the rationale was simply to help law enforcement maintain existing powers. The whole idea was simply to sort of bring law enforcement up to the modern technological standard. The FBI made very clear, repeated, but false claims that it did not intend to do certain things with this legislation, that it would not create any new authority, that it would not give them authority to go after cell-phone location information, that it would increase, rather than decrease privacy protection, and almost as soon as … Q: In other words, they lied! A: Exactly. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on that statute, they completely reversed the position they had taken before Congress in their own testimony. Q: Echelon has been around for about 50 years, Carnivore – they can change the name as many times as they want – and now there's a new one. What's the latest one? A: There is one called "Digital Storm" that they are after. But I read a very charming article a few months ago saying it really seemed like the FBI and the Department of Justice had a tin ear on these things. One commentator suggested that perhaps their program should be called "Vegetarian." Q: I don't find this stuff funny. A: I don't either. Q: Obviously, the opportunity for abuse of power is legion. I want to ask you, when the FBI was trying to sell the 1994 CALEA thing, were they intentionally being duplicitous and lying? You "try" to give them the benefit of the doubt and say hey, maybe things changed after the fact – which, by the way, I am reluctant to accept. Were they intentionally lying? A: I would urge your readers to read my full article, because it is very difficult to make just a flat-out statement about something like that without being able to present the evidence. But I have, as you have seen in the article, perhaps 20 to 25 places where the director of the FBI explicitly said that they did not want phone location information, and then through just a little clever changing of the wording, they made it such that after the fact they could claim exactly the opposite. And I don't understand how they could repeat something like that so many times and then just immediately reverse themselves. Q: In the hearings back in '94, Louis Freeh, of whom I got the impression was just Jonesing any and all kinds of privacy invasion, wanted complete and absolute "Big Brother," but he repeatedly misled Congress. Now, if you mislead Congress once, it might be a whoops. If you mislead them two or three times, maybe you're trying to push the envelope. But this guy made a career out of it. A: So it seems. That's why I felt justified in having the main title of my article to be "Conning Congress," because that is what seemed to happen in this case. Q: Is Congress really that dumb? A: I think there are some very smart people in Congress, but I think it's very difficult for them to understand what is happening when you have high-level government officials that are misrepresenting things to them. Q: The reality is, and this is chilling for most people to recognize, but on these really complex issues – things like NAFTA and GATT, documents than can stack up to the ceiling – most congressmen, before they vote on these things, will get nothing nearly as comprehensive as even your article. Rather, they will get a one- or two-page summary with some bullet points on it. And that is what they base their decisions on. A: Yes, and they don't even read the proposed statutory language. To me, that is incredible – that in a free society, our representatives don't even read the legislation. Q: Not to digress too much, but about 10 years ago, I was (and still am) a big opponent of NAFTA. I was so ticked off by it that I actually did something outrageous. I read the document. A: The whole thing? Q: All 1,472 pages. A: I have not even done that. Q: And in the course of the government trying to sell that to us, there was an Ambassador Myles Frechette who was making the circuit. He was Warren Christopher's special assistant for NAFTA. He showed up for an interview with about 12 talking points, and he was there to explain to me how great and wonderful NAFTA was. I was asking very pointed questions like, "Excuse me, Mr. Ambassador, but on page 827, subparagraph (d), it says …" And he was flummoxed, and unhappy. A: Also, things are complicated by the fact that if there is something really terrible they don't want people to see in a proposed statute, oftentimes it is sandwiched in the most obscure place in a very long piece of legislation. Q: Frequently – too frequently – our lawmakers hide the more egregious items somewhere in the back of a long complicated collection of unrelated language. You have a good example from 1997. A: It was a 1997 statute, and on page 716 of 749 pages of statutory language, there was an outrageous provision that would have given a whole lot of unprecedented power to the central government to control state-issued driver licenses. It was wedged in between the following two provisions: One was a section entitled, "Sense of Congress on discriminatory application of New Brunswick provincial sales tax," and on the other side of it was, "Border Patrol Museum." Q: Stuff like that really ticks me off … A: Me too! Q: … because, allegedly, they are supposed to have – although I don't think the Senate has it – but the House has a germaneness rule. A: That seems to be a dead-letter law. Q: They don't stand by it or enforce it. It's supposed to require them to focus on only one issue. Yet, inevitably, all the smarmy amendments have a wealth of unrelated garbage tacked on that is totally unrelated to the title of the bill. How bad is this latest anti-terrorism legislation? I mean, come on, everybody is for anti-terrorism. Right? A: Right. Q: I mean, what could be wrong with that? Until you actually read the language. A: That's one of the problems. Anytime there is an appealing justification like this – anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, whatever it happens to be – they just throw in the kitchen sink. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent about two days reading through the 131 pages of little, bitty, single-spaced print, and it seems to me just on a first reading that there is an enormous centralization of data collection, an enormous increase in the ability of various government agencies to share information. And the whole pattern of the thing seems to be to mandate increased collection of information by banks, by schools and the like. And then require them to turn that over to the central government. If they comply, then they are exempted from liability, from people like us who might object to having our privacy violated. Q: What if they don't comply? A: Ah … .if they don't go along with the government, then they are going to be punished under this statute. Does that comport with your reading? Q: Sadly, yes. What is so frustrating is that in the wake of Sept. 11, everybody is so incensed, and they want payback. If they said one of the provisions of this new law was Osama bin Laden's head would be delivered on a pike and stuck in Times Square, most everyone would cheer and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it!" But at the same time, what really bugs me is – and this happens all the time, too – Diane Feinstein and others, immediately after the terrorist attack, attempted to exploit it to pursue their agendas, already previously stated. In her case, the often-defeated National ID card. I have a visceral feeling that a lot of the really bad things proposed in the anti-terrorism bill previously, and the Crime Bill of 1993, a lot of these things just keep coming back, and coming back with different ribbons on them. A: Yes. Robert Hicks has written a wonderful book called, "Crisis and Leviathan." He documents all through our history how in times of crisis, everybody jumps on board and creates new powers that, after the crisis subsides, don't go away. And people just get used to an increasing amount of centralized government. Q: It was the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 that actually ended up becoming a political tool for President John Adams to go after his political rivals. And among his political rivals were, I think, Madison and Jefferson. Jefferson ended up beating him in an election, and they actually called it the Silent Revolution of 1800, or something like that. Adams used the Alien and Sedition Act to get at newspapers that were critical of his administration, and all of a sudden they were targeted and subject to the new federal law. A: I think what all of us need to think about is if you are looking at certain powers that are being given to the central government, or any other level of government for that matter, one always has to think about those powers being used by people who totally disagree with you. So I think people one day approve of certain legislation to the extent that they understand it. They are envisioning their friends, people who think just like they do, will be the ones administering these laws. But oftentimes it turns out to be the opposite. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! 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