Look, I’ll turn the conditional around if it helps: if the government can record my phone calls and just needs a warrant to listen to them, then I can download all the music I want and just need to pay to listen to it. Of course it’s ridiculous — I’m trying to show how Posner’s argument comes from a completely screwey understanding of what information is.

What is posession of information? I can’t answer that definitively, but so far neither can anyone else. What I can say is that either having a copy on physical media one owns — be it a song on my hard drive or my phone call on the government’s — is posession before a human looks at/listens to it or it isn’t. You can’t have it one way for music and another for signals intelligence.

Oh, and in case you’ll argue that the copyright issue is a distinction, I see no difference between tapping a phone and making a bootleg recording of a live concert. How can one say that the Rolling Stones playing on stage is immediately copyrighted while me semicoherently ranting into a phone isn’t?

If Americans spent more time researching the web for what Palestinians and Iraqis and Afghanis are experiencing at the hands of the US/Israel military behemoth and their native proxies, and what they have to say about that experience, it quickly becomes clear why “the terrorist menace” grows every day. It grows on two fronts. The state terrorism perpetrated by the US/Israel exarcebates the second front, the desire of those on the receiving end to retaliate. Until Americans plug A into B as a causal relationship, that menace to “the Homeland” will, indeed, leapfrog forward and provide raisons d’etre for the growing surveillance state. The terrorist threat immediately, appreciably diminishes when all Americans get beyond “we know what’s best for the world”. “Manifest Destiny” in all its iterations is Bullshit. As for “what about the Islamo-Fascist-Extremists”? What about the Christian Zionist Extremists in the White House?

Richard Posner has a piece in today’s Washington Post that is likely to befuddle many of his acolytes:

The … National Security Agency…

The real concern is the ease with which someone who is a “sentient” being, can find information from this database whenever they want. Its not the action of shifting through the data as much as the accessibility to that private data that we should be worried about.

Almost all “Patriot Act” kind of arguments can be defended by saying “We will collect information, but we promise we wont use it for anything other than catching (who we think are) terrorists.

But, like President Bush answered when a reporter asked him what the checks on the executive branch

was “I took an oath when I started office. You have to trust me”.

Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals weighs in on the NSA spy flap:

These programs are criticized as grave threats to civil liberties. They are not. Their significance is in flagging the existence of gaps in our defenses against …

LIBERTY AND SAFETY….Richard Posner’s op-ed in the Washington Post has been pretty well picked over already, but this passage really floored me:The information that enables the detection of an impending attack may be scattered around the world in tiny…

LIBERTY AND SAFETY….Richard Posner’s op-ed in the Washington Post has been pretty well picked over already, but this passage really floored me:The information that enables the detection of an impending attack may be scattered around the world in tiny…

This all goes back to my standard rant about the need to come up with a way of treating information properly, rather than with a jury-rigged analogy to physical property. A more clear-cut extension of Posner’s position, though, would go as follows: if I were to download (without paying) a large body of copyrighted music onto my computer that would be perfectly fine as long as I didn’t listen to it. Then it falls on the RIAA to prove that I have listened to it. In particular, all the decisions in suits the RIAA has filed against individual downloaders have to be overturned, since they only showed that the music was downloaded.

What constitutes “posession” of information? If having an mp3 file on my hard drive without listening to it constitutes an illegal posession, then so does an unanalyzed government wiretap.

(reposted from WashMo)

This is the worst of all possible worlds.

By spying on fur protests, vegans, lesbians, Quakers, and political opponents, BushCo totally belittles the need for a new approach to new threats. By saying they couldn’t follow the law *because it involves paperwork* (see AmericaBlog) and they couldn’t try to modify the law (also at America), they’ve made it much more unlikely that Posner’s or Robert Wright’s proposals will ever get a real hearing.

BushCo are both incompetent (Lawrence Wilkerson’s comments about their not preparing for biological attacks; ignoring “bin Laden determined to strike,” Katrina; etc.) and corrupt (DeLay, Frist, trying to slip ANWAR drilling into the Defense appropriations bill, etc.). BushCO have done everything possible to make us less safe – breaking the law re: spying is just the latest, and probably not as serious as pissing off the rest of the world. To avoid terrorism and existential risks, we need allies.

If you want a safer America, you have to throw these criminals out before they destroy everything bin Laden could never touch.

Posner *must* condemn these criminals, and use that condemnation as a call for reevaluating our laws in the face of existential risks.

LIBERTY AND SAFETY….Richard Posner’s op-ed in the Washington Post has been pretty well picked over already, but this passage really floored me:The information that enables the detection of an impending attack may be scattered around the world in tiny…