Free Thought | Colorado Libertarian

The Fourth Amendment Loves You Anyway

November 16, 2011 by mannieokellydavis 5 Comments

One month and 40 pages of Master’s capstone later, here’s what I know: the Fourth Amendment is a tricky thing.

I’ve spent the last month exploring Katz and Olmstead and Miller and nearly every other aspect of the Fourth Amendment’s intersection with online data. I’ve explored how and where your data is protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, seen the lines that the government can cross (see the current Jones case for a prime example), and yet, at the end of the day, the only reaction I can get from anybody is…

So?

In the last two weeks, I’ve had no fewer than four people tell me, in some form or another, “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

Just yesterday, I had a protracted INTERNET ARGUMENT with people who could not put it between their ears that forcing all welfare recipients to take a drug test was a massive violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It’s a fascinating thing, the Fourth Amendment, protecting us regular citizens from unwarranted suspicion, from intrusions on our privacy, from unreasonable searches and seizures. But we’re willing to throw it away because “we’re not doing anything wrong.”

But here’s the thing: no.

You don’t have to look any further than the Transportation and Safety Administration for that argument to fall apart. After all, regular folks who did nothing guiltier than book a flight are subjected to unreasonable searches every day.

The thing is, the law changes. What raises no suspicion today is illegal tomorrow. When we stop caring where unreasonable searches and seizures start and stop, we hand over our ability as citizens to be free from suspicion.

More succinctly: me today, you tomorrow.

Freedom as a whole is a tricky thing. It means the freedom to let people do whatever they want, whether you approve or not. It means the freedom to live in peace. It means the freedom to pursue your own life, liberty and property in the way you want.

I guess that’s my point: freedom is hard. It doesn’t always make sense. But the alternative is constant suspicion, constant surveillance. I choose that hard path. And I’m thankful our founders did, too.

They Have Their Exits and Entrances

July 29, 2011 by mannieokellydavis Leave a Comment

The discussion boards I’ve had to use throughout my Master’s program have been endlessly fascinating. They’re almost always apolitical — after all, colliding the worlds of Oracle SQL or Microsoft SQL server and political theory isn’t particularly easy — with rare exceptions.

In my Application Security class, this week’s discussion is about the “scourge” of bad software coming from overseas and what might be done about it. The contention being that without intervention, bad software might flood our markets, causing, in the words of a classmate, “small irritations that on my iTouch, the cover of the audible book does not match the actual book to a Toyota software bug that causes my Prius brakes to fail.”

She goes on to say:

Software applications control my diabetic son’s insulin pump that he needs to stay not only alive but healthy so that he can go to college next month. Software applications control my banking which wouldn’t make anyone very rich but would devastate us if our money was stolen. Software applications run the ticket distribution of the World Series, Super Bowl, World Cup and cause riots when the systems fail.

The point my classmate made was ultimately that she “believe[s] strongly that the ‘bad’ practices and software applications need fixing!”

Now I’ll grant you, it wouldn’t be fair of me to infer that my classmate was demanding government intervention. She didn’t finish her post by demanding that the government pass a bill that specifically sets standards for application security. And as such, I think my biggest beef is the prompt, the notion that there are things in this world that demand something be done.

Whether you’re talking application security or national security, doing “something” because people demand it is security theater, the fever-delusion of believing that running around looking busy makes people safer in anything other than name.

All of which is to bring you this heartbreaking and terrible reminder of just what security theater actually means:

If we cannot prevent an event like Utøya, the worst killing spree ever in world history and the worst terrorist act in entire Europe in two decades, by any means conceivable — why are we playing this security theater and giving up hard-won civil liberties one after another?

The only thing that would have caught Breivik would have been frequent police raids turning his farm inside out, leaving no room to hide his experiments in chemistry. Turning all industries and homes inside out with sharp regularity might have prevented this. Even still, a person as determined as Breivik would likely have been able to blend in even under such circumstances.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, that “a people who gives up its freedom to gain a little security will lose both and deserve neither”. But now that it has been shown in the most gruesome, in-your-face way that we don’t even gain a little security by giving up these freedoms, then why are we doing so?

At its most benign, “security theater” means expensive, incomplete security which leaves all parties exposed without knowing it. When government takes up the yoke of security theater, that expensive, incomplete mess comes with the additional price of rending our civil liberties asunder.

No matter its intentions or its well-meaning missions, government cannot hide us from the creeping specter of death. We are never terribly long for this earth, no matter how many civil liberties we sacrifice. People will always aim to maim and terrify and torture and hurt and, really, that leaves us with a tremendous choice: we can choose to accept the gifts of life and liberty and the ability to pursue what makes us happy and embrace those gifts to the fullest…or we can hand them away in hopes that we can delay the unavoidable end for a moment longer.

The Snorting Warthog of Intemperance in the Other Room

July 19, 2011 by mannieokellydavis Leave a Comment

We have a houseguest.

My wife’s friend is visiting for an overly-long five days this week, and I’d be done with the whole matter — upstairs reading my Kindle in peace — but that this particular houseguest is giving me an increasingly rare chance to observe wildly retarded politics in action.

For anonymity’s sake, I will call our houseguest “Thor.”

And for clarity’s sake, it should be said right up front that Thor is a gay man. They are old college friends, and it’s our turn to put him up for — and I’ll reiterate this — an overly long five days.

Thor is periodically yelling at his computer from the other room, trying in vain to sucker my wife into a two-man political rally in favor of the Democratic Party. My wife, though I can’t see her, is probably nervously laughing, changing the subject, staring blankly into the television, because (and here’s the crux of this whole post) we don’t see wildly retarded politics in action very often any more.

There was a moment in college when I got angry at a very good friend during a political argument and threw a copy of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government at him. It hit him in the chest and we stared dumbly at each other before he — in the role of “better man” he’s so often played in our friendship — walked away.

My attraction to politics flipped polarity that night. My empire of dirt — political columnist, editor of a small start-up magazine, growing power in the College Republicans — began to crumble away.

“Friendships trump politics” was the lesson I took away that night. “Everything trumps politics” was the bigger lesson.

I’ve been reading The Declaration of Independents by Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie for the past few nights, and I think that’s the conclusion they’re building to. It’s not that freedom doesn’t matter. Liberty matters intensely. It’s that tribal loyalty brings out the very worst in us, causes us to disavow friends, fractures our relationships. And in the case of Thor, it hangs a pea soup-thick cloud over our judgment.

Thor’s loud pledge of allegiance to the Democratic Party is a sad reminder of the price of politics. He has convinced himself that his team is better at providing civil liberties, that it can provide a clear path to a balanced budget; he has convinced himself that the other team is the source of all budget woes, that it is actively seeking to trample his civil liberties (though of course this last part is true). He is literally unable to comprehend life outside of the binary, and it is periodically turning him into a snorting warthog of intemperance in the other room.

Politics is a sorry thing. It’s the process of using force to uphold your causes that a massive amount of people — given their druthers — would never want for themselves. It is a thing of coercion, of rage, of force and hate and the belief that you — you — know better than other people what they should or should not be doing.

When that book sank sadly to the floor that night, my political life was over. My friend — always the better man — forgave me. He later asked me to be the best man at his wedding, and at the reception dinner, I explicitly avoided telling the story about my John Locke-related childishness, bygones being better off buried.

I guess that’s the point of this post: politics may make for good allegiances, and it may make for a cathartic moment every other November, but it doesn’t make us one iota more free, and it sure as hell doesn’t make for good friendships.

Tyranny Sincerely Exercised

April 23, 2011 by mannieokellydavis Leave a Comment

In a single excerpt from a single essay, I’m pretty sure I can recap the several years of deep reflection that took me from conservative Republican to anarcho-capitalist libertarian.

If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners. Observe how the ‘humane’ attitude to crime could operate. If crimes are diseases, why should diseases be treated differently from crimes? And who but the experts can define disease? One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory ‘cure’? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ The Straightener will reply: ‘But, my dear fellow, no one’s blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We’re healing you.’

This would be no more than an extreme application of the political philosophy implicit in most modern communities. It has stolen on us unawares. Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.

As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.

C. S. Lewis
Willing Slaves of the Welfare State

(Whole essay, very much worth reading, is here.)

My conversion went like this:

I’m fighting for the government to control how people act.
The people I support won’t always be in control.
If the government has the power to control how people act and I don’t agree with the people in charge, I’m at risk to have myself and my behavior controlled in exactly the same way I’m advocating.
The only way to avoid tyranny is to take away the power to control behavior from the state.

In other words, I’m not a libertarian because I hope for libertine squalor or because I hope to hasten the moral decay of society (whatever that means). I’m a libertarian (and border on anarcho-capitalist) because I dread tyranny.

And lest there be any misunderstanding, just because you agree with the outcome doesn’t make your particular brand of government-run behavioral control any less tyrannical:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis
God in the Dock

Listen, people: you can’t pass laws that make people better or fix society’s ills. All you can do is make everyone less free in the process. Make no mistake: government-run healthcare is a tyranny no less sincerely executed for the good of its victim than the moral do-gooding of the religious right. In the end, we’re left only with less freedom and heavier chains.

I wish I could shout this from the rooftops.

Stunningly Useless FCC Now Also Unable to Ruin Future of Internet

April 6, 2010 by mannieokellydavis Leave a Comment

On the heels of announcing that its long-term goals were to…well, to do what was already going to happen without their help, the FCC today had its favorite solution in search of a problem, Net Neutrality, taken away. Says the NYT:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

Here’s the issue, simplified: video and VOIP take more bandwidth than static websites. If you force the ISPs to use a dumb pipe, you’re restricting the growth of bandwidth-heavy resources (who wants to watch a choppy video or use a spotty VOIP service?) By allowing the ISPs to manage the flow, you’re not inviting the industry to censor, you’re allowing them to make the best use of their resources.

The NYT article continues:

Members of Congress have expressed concern that the acquisition could give Comcast the power to favor the content of its own cable and broadcast channels over those of competitors, something that Comcast has said it does not intend to do. Now, members of Congress could also fret that Comcast will also block or slow down customers’ access to the Web sites of competing television and telecommunications companies.

And there’s the essence of the debate: the concern from members of Congress is over the ability for Comcast to harm their customers, not about any actual harm being done. There’s no fraud taking place, no theft, no damages…but there could be someday, which means we must act!

Or not. Maybe we could all just let a company and its customers enter into private agreements without inviting government into the middle of it?

Everything old is new again

March 23, 2010 by mannieokellydavis Leave a Comment

But this modern world, modern civilization, does exist only where men have been, for a short two centuries, free from these ancient state tyrannies, called controls. Free thought, free speech, free action, and freehold property are the source of the modern world. It cannot exist without them. Its existence depends upon abolishing these reactionary state controls and destroying the socialist State.

The task before Americans is to end these police-controls of peaceful, productive American citizens, to repeal all the reactionary legislation and rescind the Executive orders that established the national socialist regime, to abolish the Federal corporations, departments, bureaus and agencies that dictate and enforce these State controls, to return three million Federal tax-eaters to useful, tax-paying work, to release American farmers from Bismarck’s socialization and to lift from American industrial workers the burden of Bismarck’s Sozialpolitik, called here “Social Security,” and to require men in public office to recognize again every American’s natural right, as a free person, to own and sow and reap his own land, to manage and to profit or lose by his own business enterprise, to own and to save or spend his own money, to join or not to join a labor union, to sign or not to sign a contract, to choose his own work and to do his own bargaining for wages earned or paid, either individually or as a member of any group of other free men.

No politician, yet, has asked American voters to give him the power to strip any State of the powers it has usurped from its citizens, nor to strip the Federal Government of the powers it has usurped from the States; to restore the rights of the citizens, the rights and powers of the States, and the political structure of this Union of States; nor to add to the original list of restrictions upon political power – the list known as the Bill of Rights – further restrictions that will adequately protect the property, liberty and lives of persons living in the modern world and make the United States again the world-champion of human rights and the leaders of the world-liberating revolution.

The Americans who already are undertaking this task, and will do it, are individuals – the individual who is called “nothing” and patronized as “the little man” in Germany, and as “the common man” here, the individual who makes and re-makes the world.

Just finished reading Rose Wilder Lane’s Give Me Liberty. Do yourself a favor and make time to read it.