By the way TSA…

Spending millions of dollars to treat every one of the over 2 million people that fly in the US, including pilots and babies, as potential terrorists? Totally means that the terrorists have won. They’ve succeeded in turning American against American, so that we now treat each other as presumed criminals on a regular basis. Fear now rules over liberty. We now abuse our airline passengers more than any other country, including places like China that are notorious for their human rights abuses. The only real gains in this maneuver are to the companies that sell this equipment, and to those people who like seeing the US froth at the mouth with paranoia. I repeat: the terrorists have won.

I am fortunate enough that most of my family lives within easy driving distance, and I don’t need to fly that often. Others are not so lucky. But I did get to experience the new procedures first hand recently as we flew to Hawaii for 2 weeks. It is incredibly impractical to get to Hawaii through any other travel method. Logan has the new body scanners. I got to go through one. And because I was still wearing a pewter pendant necklace, they decided to go ahead and give me a pat-down too. I was annoyed, I was inconvenienced, I was mildly embarrassed. But most of all, I felt sorry for the poor sods who are required to administer these treatments, who are forced to look at things they don’t want to see every day – people they never want to see naked, including toddlers (does taking their image count as child pornography?), medical implants, unfortunate deformities, broken bones, etc. on a daily basis. I hope the TSA has hired counselors, and requires every screener to take the same oath of confidentiality that doctors do.

Freedoms and liberties mean being exposed to a certain amount of risk. I get that. I also understand that one of the things the government does for us is to help minimize those risks. But there’s a law of diminishing returns here, and I, for one, am ready to experience some personal risk in exchange for greater freedom.

UPDATES:

1) I will be posting copies of this to my elected representatives.

2) Part of this is inspired by the reporting and research done by Jeffrey Goldberg over at the Atlantic. I should acknowledge him as one of the tipping forces behind me speaking out, and one of those upon whom I’ve built some of my opinions. Here is a clip of him on the Colbert Report, rather a good bit. I wrote this post before seeing this clip, so it is interesting to see him also give a ‘terrorists have won’ perspective. Jeffrey has called for everyone traveling on the day before Thanksgiving to ‘Opt-Out’ (use that phrase specifically) of the scans and to submit to pat-downs, as a form of protest, tying up TSA resources on a massive scale. I appreciate what he is trying to do, but I am ambivalent about it. Choose for yourself what action to take.

3) Also, here is an article from Gizmodo on body scans that have already been leaked. I’ve not checked to see if I am one of them.

4) Some scanners are using radio waves (millimeter wave) . Some are using backscatter X-rays, and these could pose a health risk. Are the TSA and the FDA taking this into account? According to this Ars Technica article, so far the data has been brushed aside.

5) Toddlers are being put through scanners and subjected to pat-downs.

6) The Pilot’s Union is asking all pilots to reject scanning. Pilots are already exposed to large amounts of radiation as a normal part of their job (flying above some of the protective layers of the atmosphere). Further, as highlighted in the above Colbert video clip, we trust them to fly the planes, we can’t trust them with a pocketknife?

7) The experiences of one individual who refused both the imaging scan and the pat-down, but was willing to go through the still-in-use metal detector, and was in all other respects polite and compliant.

When is a corporation a person?

It seems to me that one of the recent recurring legal questions, and one that fascinates me, is the question of when a corporation is treated like a person, and when it isn’t.  It seems to be dependent on the nature of the question.

If it is a question of business or economics, corporations seem to default to receiving all the rights of individuals, but not always.  See the recent Supreme Court ruling on the freedom of speech rights of corporations in funding support advertisements in political campaigns, notably.  See also intellectual and other property rights, etc.

On the one hand, this makes sense when considering the historical origins of corporations — the pooling of resources from a group of individuals to further a common business goal.  Economically speaking, this is a good thing.  A group of people working together can be more efficient and leverage greater scale benefits than any one individual.  The corporation should be able to exercise the freedoms that any of the individuals would have, as it is in some sense, an extension of the individuals.  On the other hand, corporations are not, in fact, living (or natural) persons.  So, for instance, they are given different tax structures (but so are different individuals sometimes) because they are not subject to some taxes (like an inheretence tax) and get to write off certain capital expenses and development expenses (progress does benefit everyone).

But on matters of moral, ethical, and criminal conduct, it is exceedingly difficult to treat a corporation as an individual, as fundamentally, it is not.  A corporation is made up of many actors, and in theory operates only under the direction of its controlling members.  So there are many times where a corporation is not or can not be held responsible for the actions of the individuals inside, even when those actions are to guide the corporation in an immoral, unethical, or criminal way.  The example I came across this morning is a recent interpretation of part of a very old law (ancient by US standards), called the Alien Tort Statute.  Here a federal appeals court ruled that this 1789 only gave the US jurisdiction over the actions of individuals, and not of corporations.  See the Bloomberg writeup here. In brief, this law was designed to allow the US to prosecute crimes against international laws established in treaty.  It was fairly dormant for a long time until recent decades when it has been plied towards punishing corporations that in some way support or further regimes that engage in human rights abuses.  As further context, the ATS predates by some 30 years the notion that corporations have legal personhood, which only complicates things further, as current US Code reads: “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise– the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals”.  Apparently it has been determined that the context of the 1789 law indicated otherwise.  For other sorts of examples, look at recent legal actions taken in response to the activities of Enron, BP, and several large banking institutions.

So I ask you – when is a corporation a person, and when is it not?

(P.S., to be clear on my stance and reveal any bias I may have, I think it is frequently a mistake to grant corporate personhood.  The same thing that makes corporations efficient economic entities — that corporations are greater than the sum of their parts — is the same thing that, to me, negates their personhood, and gives them power in other arenas influenced by economic activity, such as politics, law, religion and culture.  Of course, corporate personhood can be a double-edged sword, as it is also what allows corporations to sue and be sued, so I am not wholly against the concept, just that it it seems to me to have been stretched and extended beyond reason at times, mostly in favor of corporations.)

(P.P.S., this sort of

Zen and the psychology of invitation services

Lifehacker.com recently ran a poll of its visitors asking them to vote for the best electronic invitation service.  Facebook received the most votes.  This is no big surprise to me, although a modicum of insight would illuminate exactly how terrible a result this is.  Most of you will remember that I am hosting two parties in the next week and a half, and you will also observe that I did not use Facebook to send out invitations.  If you’ve no interest in a rant on this topic, move along.  Seriously, this is scrutiny over something that really doesn’t matter that much. It might even be nitpicky or didactic.  If you’re the sort who likes to think about the applications of electronic tools to daily activities (which is explicitly part of what I’m paid to do), read on.

Continue reading Zen and the psychology of invitation services