The Watchmen

It is, I believe, fashionable to worry about the surveillance state in the United States. As it becomes more and more evident that privacy is undergoing erosion on several fronts (not all of them state actors, to be sure) there are calls to beef up protections for the ability of Americans to do things without being observed, and potentially, called to account for them later.

I am of the opinion that this is, to a certain degree, part of people's search for significance. For the most part, people don't care about what random other people do or say. I'm not aware of very many blackmail attempts that have originated in some random contractor writing down what was said in a recorded snippet of conversation with Siri. Not that most people lack things that they legitimately understand to be worth hiding. But the chances of someone in Eastern Europe coming to see their ticket to wealth being the random chitchat of some Bellevue housewife seem to be somewhere between fat and slim.

Likewise, it's entirely possible that street-safety applications could lead to people "being unfairly tried and convicted in the court of public opinion." Although I would point out that given that the court of public opinion offers no protections against double-jeopardy or self incrimination, has abysmal standards of evidence and fails to guarantee any right to either confront accusers or see the evidence of guilt, describing any proceeding in that particular venue as "fair" stretches the (admittedly subjective) word to its breaking point. But the real problem with the court of public opinion isn't really that much different then the problem a person may have with the formal criminal-justice systems of the local, state and federal level: there are simply too many rules; just in general and that people disagree about.

In the piece from The Atlantic, the author notes: "In San Francisco, license-plate information collected by law enforcement and private operations was stored in a database that Immigration and Customs Enforcement gained access to; privacy and immigration advocates warned that ICE could easily use it to target undocumented immigrants. What if that car blocking the bike lane belongs to someone whose immigration status is uncertain, and their license plate information—and location—is used to speed their deportation?" On the one hand, I get it; The Atlantic is more or less left-leaning, and that means something of an unstated opposition to the idea that current immigration laws should be followed. On the other hand, "undocumented" immigrants are in the country illegally; "undocumented" is simply a euphemism for that status, given the general dislike that activists have for the term "illegal immigrant." And the determination that allowing license-plate information to be accessible to a specific law-enforcement agency is bad springs from this anarchist idea. And a certain amount of irony, given the fact that the article sees the impetus for street-safety applications this way:

In other words, government inaction, not the technology itself, has conscripted this militia into surveilling its fellow citizens through doorbells and smartphones. And government action can quell this need.

Why should "government" be more concerned with whether cars are blocking bicycle lanes than it is with the enforcement of any other of its myriad laws?

In the piece, co-developer of "How's My Driving/OurStreets," Mark Sussman notes: “If you ask any parking-enforcement agency, they’re going to say we don’t have enough resources to [issue the fines], and this is a way to maximize the resources that they do have. All of a sudden, if you have a lot more eyes on the streets that are tagging vehicles that are doing dangerous things, you have a lot more reach across the city.”

And it's this sentiment that often goes unstated in debates about the state of surveillance (and potential surveillance) in the United States today; there are, put simply, far more rules than there are resources to enforce them to most arbitrary levels of satisfaction, and that people want the rules that are important to them enforced. This means that as there are more and more rules, there is a greater and greater drive for technology to allow for efficient enforcement. But there is little will to work for rolling back rules. Sometimes, this is because of process problems. Doing away with immigration rules that advocates for poor immigrants find burdensome would generally take an act of Congress. Despairing of that, people push for a sort of anarchic response, seeking to hobble enforcement efforts. Court of Public Opinion offenses, on the other hand, are simply difficult to do anything with. Encouraging the nouveau riche to tolerate the noise of their less-affluent neighbors, or to see those of different backgrounds as other than potential threats is going to be a long slog. It's understandable why people might want to simply strip them of the tools needed to enforce their will on others.

The apparatus of enforcement, whether that be criminal, civil or informal, will continue to grow until it encompasses the level of effectiveness that some critical mass of people want. Demanding that those people remain unsatisfied doesn't strike me as a winning strategy.

A New Sensation

I understand the impulse to give up on explaining things to people who we understand don't perceive the world in the same way that we do. After all, I don't know how I would explain the difference between Yellow and Red to a blind person. It's the urge to then blame the other person for their inability to comprehend, rather than accept one is unable to overcome the barriers to communicating with them, that becomes a problem. To continue with the analogy of blindness, it's considered inappropriate to blame a blind person for the fact that they're unable to differentiate between different colors that they can't see; it's understood that their disability is not willful. And at the same time, it's not considered especially blameworthy to be unable to effectively explain the differences is hues to someone who has never seen them, and has no real way of directly interacting with them.

And in this, I think that there is value in extending the disability metaphor to discussions of ideas; specifically because it takes the conversation away from the idea that people are being willfully obtuse. Ideas are not necessarily any more accessible to someone with limited or no exposure to them than physical sensations are, because of the role that lived experience plays in how ideas are understood. Without a particular lived experience, certain ideas can be difficult, or even impossible, to fully or accurately comprehend. And the common aspects of our lived experiences are often much more narrow than we give them credit for.

Unfelt

Rollin'

Out for a morning ride with a few hundred of their closest friends... I know the shot is blurry; the camera is more focused on the background. But blurriness implies movement and uncertainty in location, and that works for me this time.

No Time For Losers

James Fallows, in a column in The Atlantic, makes the point that if President Trump were an airline pilot, senior surgeon, CEO of a public company, a United States Navy commander or leader of a university, museum or other public institution, "action would already be under way to remove him from that role." And then he points out that the Presidency of the United States is an exception to this rule, because of the Senate.

"Why the Senate?" Mr. Fallows asks, rhetorically, "Because the two constitutional means for removing a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, both ultimately require two thirds support from the Senate." He concludes with "The GOP Senate continues to show us what it is."

But he never tells us what he thinks the Republican-controlled Senate is. Not that it takes much to guess. There are any number of critics of the current Congress, and for people who understand President Trump to be clearly unfit for the office he holds, the fact that the Republicans in the Senate would absolutely acquit were the President to be impeached by the House of Representatives, proves them to be partisans first and interested in the welfare of the nation second.

There is another recent column in The Atlantic, however, that's worth taking into consideration. It was an interview with one Ben Howe, and it's titled, "Why Some Christians ‘Love the Meanest Parts’ of Trump." In it, Emma Green says that Mr. Howe "is angry that Christians claim they support the president because they want to end abortion or protect religious liberty, when supporting Trump suggests that what they really want is a champion who will mock and crush their perceived enemies." This may be the reason that Mr. Fallows believes that "And people who supported him had already shown that they would continue to swallow anything, from 'Grab 'em by…'  to 'I like people who weren’t captured'."

But if this is the case, then the problem isn't really Senate Republicans. Its the fact that the voters who put them in the Senate, and the President in the White House, are willing to overlook a lot in the service of having a President who will be the "champion who will mock and crush their perceived enemies." Accurately or not, the Senators in question understand that they are accountable to those voters, and they will not be rewarded for depriving the President's supporters of their champion. And while they may understand, "in their hearts of hearts" as the saying goes, that the President and his policy priorities are bad for the United States, they understand that the Executive and Legislative branches in the hands of Democrats are worse. As a group, they may not believe that the United States needs Donald Trump to be in office, but it's likely that they do believe that the United States needs them to be in office. And voting to convict President Trump, and remove him from office, is likely to end with some number of them being removed from their offices in the next election cycle.

The idea that the American public lacks any real power in the realm of politics and/or the good sense to use it properly has become something of a cliché by this point. And expecting that to change would be a clear triumph of hope over experience. But so it the expectation that the role of elected officeholders is to deliver messages that their constituents are opposed to hearing, even at the cost of their seats. If one suspects that politicians are venal, corrupted or cowardly, they have no reason to do anything that threatens their own authority. But likewise, if one views them as genuinely public-minded people who ran for office because they honestly believed that they could be of assistance to the Republic, they still have no reason to do anything that threatens their ability to be of service to their nation, unless and until they effectively give up.

If anger at their fellow Americans is what drives people "to swallow anything," then the best way to erode their support for someone who appears to otherwise be unsuited to the office that he holds is to combat the anger. Otherwise, it will simply give rise to champion after champion. And expecting that elected politicians will hold these champions accountable will remain unrealistic.