I printed off your article of Misguided Theory of Privacy and Transparency and will read it. Thanks for your time and if you have a moment, please email me.

Donna Stuntz

I printed off your article of Misguided Theory of Privacy and Transparency and will read it. Thanks for your time and if you have a moment, please email me.

Donna Stuntz

13482 US Hwy # 6,

Plymouth, Indiana 46563

574-784-3310 tjpclp@att.net

This is in response to Professor William J. Stuntz’ offering in your April 17th issue, as submitted to TNR this day.

The burden of Government is to manage the entire body politic (Stuntz’ analogy) and not just the diseases and injuries that must be continuously overcome. To excuse poor leadership because of the ‘disease’ of privacy, dismisses the remaining tenets of liberty and is a misdiagnosis. To characterize transparency in Government as an impediment to effective leadership is to accept political laziness that avoids the full measure of our Social Contract.

Any threat to the body, whether complex or visceral, internal or external, must not be made an ally to reduce the Government’s burden of constitutional responsibility to the People. The same constitution also tasks the People to bear the burden of scrutinizing our Government’s performance, not the inverse.

Thus, while leading well and constitutionally, during war, is an Executive burden, the People, Congress and Supreme Court also bear an equal responsibility to hold the Executive accountable, publicly, and without tolerating a cover of darkness, conveniently justified by national security.

Scrutiny always illuminates, tests our democracy and helps discover the latent cancers of dictatorship and fascism from which we have no special immunity, save through the preservation of dissent and liberty.

Professor Stuntz’ expectations of Government are too lenient.

Perhaps the easy solution to that is to eliminate second terms. If there were no need to fight for a second term, maybe policy decisions would extend beyond the first.

Your implication that few if any countries have tax discrimination based on citizenship is correct. But America should – you would think – know better. It was built from stuff like ‘no taxation without representation’. It is one of the few nations – maybe the only nation – that clearly articulates a belief in liberty as an unalienable right.

The problem is, it seems to have forgotten that. It’s not clear it any longer has the “right” to claim to be the Land of the Free. Increasingly, it’s just like the sad old European democracies.

Such a shame.

Assuming government will act in the interests of the country is silly. An overlapping set of interests all act self-interestedly, and set terms of rule enforce short sightedness.

If data will be collected, then it should be public. Afterall, such a windfall of data will certainly enable new businesses, which wil finance even wider wars against whatever threat is being talked up today (not to mention the industries of Wars On Whatever past).

Modern data mining techniques make it much less likely that a piece of data will exist as a needle in a haystack. So I find it almost silly when Stuntz says that more wiretapping and more invasive information gathering equals less of a threat to freedom.

Agree totally. In fact, it is the truth of this statement that Stuntzs’ argument depends on. If we can’t find the terrorists in the proverbial haystack of personal information, what is the point of collecting the personal information in the first place?

Maybe Stuntzs believes that technology can only be used to locate bad guys, and that good guys are rendered magically “anonymous”? (as you note, Stuntzs confuses anonymity with confidentiality) If so he is seriously mistaken.

Is there a country in the world where there’s tax discrimination based on citizenship? I don’t think so. Like you, I’m a foreigner. I recognise the government requires revenues to carry out its programmes, however horrible they are. I’d be more comfortable if the US merely changed its spending priorities.

The biggest abuser of tax filings is the government. They are routinely used by FBI in background checks.

Once the data exists, there can be NO privacy. Actually most folks confuse what privacy means and I think you are one of them.

We recognize it and accept it because it was hammered into our heads in school about “No taxation without representation,”

Well, if that was the case then legal immigrants wouldn’t have to pay taxes. I’m a legal permanent resident. I pay taxes. I don’t get to vote.

Not being able to vote makes some sense. Foreign countries can’t influence elections by just dumping a boatload of tourists at the polling station… but if you truly believe that I should have representation then you should be campaigning for it.

The other alternative is equally attractive to me. I wouldn’t mind not paying taxes. I’m not sure what federal services I use for my tax dollars, but surely you could just raise taxes on those people who get to vote to cover it… or increase the national debt. It would probably have less of an effect on the economy than the war on terror/Iraq.

I pay taxes because it is one of the conditions of living here, not because I expect it to pay for services, or because I like the government, but because it is expected.

Z.

It was a good experiement tho – who could’ve predicted in advance that Americans would be so craven as to advocate against their own rights?

The founding fathers could have — and did. Repeatedly.

His rationale for justifying more gov’t secrecy is that gov’ts are inherently stagnant in the ‘idea factory’ sense, and a system where gov’t could operate less transparently would allow it to be more bold, creative and efficient because it would no longer be forced to defend bad decisions, since the governed wouldn’t know of them. This argument is a lot scarier than the privacy argument. Stuntz relies on deeply flawed presumptions about human nature and how it confronts power. Benevolence is not a byproduct of consolidated power and secrecy.

While it’s true that much debate over gov’t activity becomes a who-knew-what-when debate–sadly drifting away from the substantive debate–permitting the gov’t to avoid who-knew-what-when debates will not result in ‘better ideas’ (Although Stuntz’s example of ‘which energy lobbyists were in the room with Cheney’ is telling because Stuntz obviously can’t even see that the question of whether oil companies had so large a hand in crafting our energy policy IS substantive rather than procedural).

The current administration is not engaged in tangential non-substantive debate as a result of its shyness or lack of ideas. Indeed, it’s precisely its *bad* ideas that have forced it into such tangential debate, as Stuntz defines it. More secrecy would merely permit bad ideas to flourish like undetected cancer–bad ideas will merely become worse ideas, as links back to the public are removed and power is further consolidated.

While he doesn’t explicitly saying so, Stuntz seems to be suggesting a repeal of both the 4th and 5th Amdts based on the ‘9/11 changed everything’ rationale, and replacing those Amdts with a ‘Trust Us’ model. Stuntz isn’t clear on how this would work out, but he seems to believe that if we allow the gov’t to invade our privacy more, and become less transparent, the gov’t can somehow be limited as to the ways in which it could use it, or would have less incentives to use it. This stands reason on its head. Our Constitution wisely doesn’t trust politicians, and neither should we, knowing what we know at this point in time.

No doubt many on the right will take comfort in Stuntz’s article–Big Brother is fine if he’s part of your family. But this particular administration, whose reign has been consistently marked by obsessive secrecy, Constitutional power grabs, and actual invasions of actual privacy, is a living lab experiment on just why Stuntz couldn’t be more off base. It’s bad enough we have to watch Gonzalez appear before the Senate every few days to reinterpret the White House’s eroding Constitution model. Based on what we’ve seen so far, there is no reason to believe that when expressly handed the power it seeks, it would act benevolently, competently, or wisely.

Every year, tens of millions of Americans fill out their tax returns, giving the IRS a tremendous amount of information about their finances. The affront to privacy mostly goes unnoticed. Why? Because anonymity matters more than privacy.

To which you reply, “I don’t think that the issue here is anonymity. It’s confidentiality. There are strict rules and strong expectations that tax information will be kept confidential. Also, filing tax information is mandatory.”

I disagree with you both (but with Stuntz moreso than you). I don’t think the underlying issue with respect to filing detailed tax returns is either anonymity or confidentiality. I think that the majority of Americans recognize and accept the legitimate role of government in raising revenues through taxation. We recognize it and accept it because it was hammered into our heads in school about “No taxation without representation,” and most of us view our current system as legitimate and consistent with the intention of the Founding Fathers. Warrantless wiretaps, however, do not appear to be the intention of the Founding Fathers or of Congress, and hence are rejected by many conservatives and liberals.

Stuntz’s premise is wrong and so are his resulting propositions that the more lives that are invaded, the better, and that we shouldn’t try to limit information-gathering but simply limit disclosure.

–

http://www.pogowasright.org/dissent/dissent.html

Chronicles of Dissent

You guys are so doomed.

Oy…

Americans clearly don’t want an America any longer – the responsibility of freedom is too much for them. That’s the only explanation for the popularity of rightwingerism

It was a good experiement tho – who could’ve predicted in advance that Americans would be so craven as to advocate against their own rights?