December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

PC Beta Download (was Re: Download Info (Form) PC)
by jason roks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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No Privacy for Privacy Hypocrites
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Oh, *this* is rich... Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 15:12:46 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: love(a)cptech.org Originator: info-policy-notes(a)essential.org Sender: info-policy-notes(a)essential.org Precedence: bulk From: James Love <love(a)cptech.org> To: Multiple recipients of list INFO-POLICY-NOTES <info-policy-notes(a)essential.org> Subject: No Privacy for Privacy Hypocrites MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Comment: To unsubscribe from this list, send the message "unsubscribe info-policy-notes" to "listproc(a)essential.org". Leave the "Subject:" line blank. No Privacy for Privacy Hypocrites A grass-roots citizen group is forming to address the unrestrained assault on privacy represented by the Kenneth Starr/Congressional investigations into President Clinton's sex life. The group, named "No Privacy for Privacy Hypocrites," (on the web at http://www.noprivacy.org) intends to make Congress confront the privacy concerns that are raised by the investigation, by asking Members of Congress to declare their own standards regarding privacy, and deal with the consequences. The group is concerned that the investigation into the President's sex life is having a negative impact on privacy that will affect ordinary citizens. "This whole sad affair is the product of decades-long disrespect for privacy, for which our political leaders are responsible," said Evan Hendricks, Editor and Publisher of Privacy Times and one of the organizers of the group. "This effort is intended to arrest the free fall of privacy rights triggered by the stunning abuses of power by the Starr investigation and the Congressional dissemination of personal information," said Jamie Love. "This should be a wake-up call for Congress," said Gary Ruskin. On Monday, September 28, 1998, the group will distribute a survey to Members of Congress asking: Do you believe any branch of government should investigate allegations that elected officials have committed adultery, including allegations that they have lied about it? If a Member answers yes or if the Member refuses to answer the first question, then (and only then) they will be asked: Have you ever committed adultery, and have you ever lied about it? The survey is designed so that Members of Congress who support privacy will not be asked about their own private lives. The answers to the survey will be placed on the web at http://www.noprivacy.org, as soon the surveys are returned. CITIZEN INVOLVEMENT There are several ways people can participate in this effort. 1. You can join the group by sending a note to info(a)noprivacy.org. 2. You can join an Internet discussion about the campaign by sending a note to listproc(a)essential.org, with the message: sub noprivacy Jane Doe (If your name is Jane Doe). 3. You can offer suggestions for the web page, which needs some work. 4. You can encourage your own Members of Congress to answer the survey. For more information, see the No Privacy for Privacy Hypocrites web page at http://www.noprivacy.org Organizers of the Committee gave different reasons for joining. Audrie Krause said "Wasn't there something in the New Testament that says let he who is without sin cast the first stone? And since we are heading toward a public stoning, we should ask, is anyone in Congress qualified to cast the first stone?" Jim Warren, the well-known Internet activist, said: "If politicians are going to compete with the Jerry Springer Show, let's make sure that ALL of the best actors have an EQUAL opportunity to expose their bedroom activities to the world. . . . Any member of Congress who refuses to answer this simple survey, but votes to pursue hearings about some other politician's private sex-life, should be voted out of office." Catherine Gavin said "All this looks as if some people in this country had decided to drive a car going faster and faster, without caring that there were no brakes on the car. Something has to be done before all of us get hurt in the final crash. This is about a lot of things, but it is mostly about privacy, or the prospect of living in a world with no privacy." Initial Organizing members of the Committee Initial Organizers of the Committee, which is an Ad Hoc group, include: Gary Ruskin, Marc Rotenberg, Jim Warren, Manon Anne Ress, Jamie Love, Catherine Gavin, Audrie Krause, Noe Hatchuel, Charles Bennington, Evan Hendricks. To contact the Committee, send email to info(a)noprivacy.org --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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IP: Microgov't: Old Red Tape Looks Good in Comparison
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com X-Sender: believer(a)telepath.com Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 07:51:20 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Microgov't: Old Red Tape Looks Good in Comparison Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: list Reply-To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: Government Executive Magazine http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0998/092398t2.htm September 22, 1998 DAILY BRIEFING The dawn of the era of microgovernment By Jonathan Rauch, National Journal On Feb. 12, Americans awoke to read in their newspapers that the U.S. government-settler of the West, vanquisher of totalitarianism, conqueror of the moon-now writes the rules of golf. Casey Martin is a professional golfer who suffers from Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a congenital circulatory disorder that gives him pain and swelling in his right leg. Because Martin cannot walk the links, a federal judge ruled that he had the right, under the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, to play the PGA Tour using a golf cart. "Mr. Martin is entitled to his modification because he is disabled," said Judge Thomas M. Coffin. "It will not alter what's taking place out there on the course." To Martin and the judge, this was a "reasonable accommodation," fair to Martin and therefore required by law. To the Professional Golfers' Association of America, it was an unreasonable intrusion, unfair to all the players who must wear themselves out trudging picturesquely from hole to hole. One interesting question was whether walking is part of the game of golf. A more interesting question, however, was how the government got into the business of deciding whether walking is part of the game of golf. This was a line of work that the most ambitious New Deal economic planner would find startling. Today, conservatives denounce law-making courts, communitarians denounce the "rights industry," businesses denounce the litigation explosion. Each critique has some merit, as far as it goes; but this article posits that none of them goes far enough. If you want to understand the full implications of the Casey Martin phenomenon, you need to view it-and the many thousands of other cases in which individuals and their lawyers (or lawyers and their individuals) press rights-based lawsuits-as nothing less than America's third and most extraordinary wave of regulation. Call it microgovernment: a style of regulating based on the premise that each individual is entitled to a safe, clean or, especially, fair personal environment. Microgovernment is not the same thing as small government-far from it. In fact, it is remarkably expansive government, but its immensity takes the peculiar form of an infinity of microdecisions, each building upon, yet separate from, all the others. In this, it is radically different from earlier periods of regulatory activism. The first two waves of regulation dealt in big, clunky agencies issuing one-size-fits-all rules aimed at making people better off, on the average. Microgovernment comes as a steady drizzle of court decisions, seeping through the pores of civic life. Regulatory agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, are involved, but mostly as plaintiffs rather than as bureaucratic rule makers. The main regulators are, indeed, not agencies at all, but claimants and lawyers and judges and juries, all working independently to spin, in the fashion of a mass of caterpillars, a cocoon of intricate social regulation that enfolds even the most minute details of everyday life. "It's basically just an accumulation of micro-outcomes," says Pietro S. Nivola, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution (where I am a writer in residence). "You're not even setting broad targets or goals. You add up a million cases, and that's what you get." So today, there is nothing unusual about waking up one morning to find the government writing the rules of golf. The New York State Board of Law Examiners is required to give extra time on the bar exam to a woman who claims (contestedly) to have a reading disability. A group of gay municipal workers in Seattle is told it must include a hostile heterosexual man who outspokenly believes in "biblical values." A television production company is ordered to pay a $5 million judgment for refusing to cast a visibly pregnant woman in the role of a seductive vamp. The Supreme Court, in its majesty, decides when a coach may and may not smack a football player on the rump. This article examines a cluster of familiar, sometimes overfamiliar, goings-on and tries to look at them in a new way: not as artifacts of jurisprudence but as a system of social control. In other words, as regulation-but of a sort that has eluded the scrutiny that regulation ordinarily gets. Regulation, of course, is necessary, and no system is perfect, and top-down, bureaucratic rule-making has more than its share of problems. But microgovernment is fundamentally different from other regulatory systems: It is less accountable, less rational, and more intrusive than anything the New Deal or the Great Society tried. The Third Wave In the standard account of things, there have been two great and distinct waves of regulation in America, one now decrepit, the other still robust. The first was economic regulation, which began a century or so ago, in the days of the robber barons, and lasted through the New Deal; the second was social regulation, which blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Each wave had its distinctive theory. For the economic regulators, the problem was that markets were unstable and prone to manipulation by cartels. The solution was to establish agencies to control prices (passbook interest rates, airfares, farm prices) and regulate entry into markets (banking, communications, peanut-growing). For social regulators, the problem was that markets dump social harms ("externalities") on individuals who can't readily organize to protect themselves. The solution was the creation of agencies to reduce pollution (the Environmental Protection Agency) or to act on behalf of consumers (the Consumer Product Safety Commission), workers (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), drivers (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Although the two waves were distinct, they had in common their decision-making style, namely bureaucratic rule-making, otherwise known as red tape. That is where the standard history ends. It is also where the third wave begins. Like the earlier two, the third is rooted in a theory of market failure: that markets are often unfair or hurtful. Its solution, however, breaks sharply with the earlier two models, by rejecting the bureaucratic model. Instead of looking to the executive branch to issue rules, individuals (or agencies standing in for individuals) have gone to court for redress. Under pressure from activists with regulatory agendas and ordinary people with genuine grievances, the courts have responded. In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of decisions broadened the traditionally narrow tort laws to allow people to collect damages for more harms and for more reasons. The result lies in a peculiar gray zone between a traditional, negligence-based tort system and a randomly enforced right to personal safety. Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, a management consulting firm, reports that, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, tort costs more than doubled as a share of the economy (to more than 2 percent), with lawyers getting about 30 percent of the take and plaintiffs less than half. In general, the tort system is not so much unreasonable (the horror stories are exceptions) as ambitious. People howled in 1992 when a grandmother named Stella Liebeck spilled hot coffee on herself and won a $2.7 million punitive judgment against McDonald's. In fact, the case was not silly: Liebeck's burns required hospitalization and skin grafts, McDonald's acknowledged having received 700 prior burn complaints, and the punitive judgment was eventually reduced to $480,000. The larger significance, however, was that juries were colonizing the territory previously reserved for bureaucrats and politicians. A National Restaurant Safety Administration, if it existed, could conduct rule-making to decide whether one burn for every 24 million McDonald's coffees sold is a problem worth worrying about, or whether, in the big scheme of things, other safety problems are more important. In the court case, however, the jury saw just a burned grandmother and an arrogant corporation that had dismissed 700 burns as "trivially different from zero." "The case prompted McDonald's, and other restaurants, to turn down the heat on the coffeepots," reported The Hartford (Conn.) Courant. America must be the only country in the world where juries regulate the temperature of coffee. The people who worried that product-liability law was becoming a right to safety were not particularly noticing that, on a separate track, another series of lawsuits was establishing a right to fairness. For instance, the courts waded into a swamp of workplace-harassment litigation and embarked upon what became an astonishingly ambitious regulatory project. The courts construed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial or sexual discrimination in the "compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment," as covering not just hiring and firing and wages but as striking "at the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women in employment." That was a pretty big spectrum, and striking at it required, among other things, that each individual's workplace environment be free of sexual harassment, as defined by juries and judges. Other decisions established a parallel right to be free of other forms of discriminatory harassment, which was left for entrepreneurial plaintiffs and puzzled juries to define. The chart on page 2152 shows the result: Federal anti-discrimination lawsuits have almost tripled in this decade. By 1998, regulating through the courts had become, in effect, Washington's default mode. Why bother with a new bureaucracy to regulate health maintenance organizations, when you can just pass a "patients' bill of rights," meaning (in some versions) regulating HMOs through private litigation? No need to hire bureaucrats, make painful political choices or spend taxpayers' money; regulation by lawsuit is self-financing and self-propelled. "It's really a shift to off-budget governance," says Nivola. The trouble is that it is off-accountability, too. Digging a Tunnel Imagine that, instead of a Clean Air Act, with its endless rules for sulfides and scrubbers, we just had a Clean Air Bill of Rights: "No corporation or business establishment shall impose an unfair, excessive or unreasonable burden of air pollution on any person or group." Then suppose that, instead of creating an EPA, we granted everybody standing to sue for large sums of money. In effect, we would give every individual the right to a clean set of lungs and leave it to juries to decide what that means. Instead of viewing, say, Los Angeles as a big patch of air containing 10 million people, we would view Los Angeles as 10 million pairs of lungs, each equipped with a lawyer. The government's perspective is inverted: What was seen from the top down, as a large environment with many difficult trade-offs, is instead seen from the bottom up-as 10 million microenvironments, each to be regulated in its own right. It is this inversion of perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior. Over the past few decades, economists and good-government types have learned a thing or two about good regulatory hygiene. Some of the basic rules are: Set an overall goal before putting particular rules in place; Target outcomes, not process-success means reducing pollution or reducing on-the-job injuries, not writing rules or levying fines; Look at the big picture; weigh overall social costs and benefits to avoid chasing wild geese (ever since the 1970s, all major federal regulations are subject to cost-benefit review); Propose rules in advance (in the Federal Register), and give all affected interests plenty of time to comment; Write down the finished rules, and make them clear enough to comply with; Don't give bureaucrats a financial stake in their actions-for instance, don't let them pocket the fines they levy, lest they turn regulation into a money-making scheme; Allow for at least arm's-length supervision by politicians, so that Congress and the White House can hold regulators to account. Our hypothetical Clean Air Bill of Rights offers not a single one of those protections. Indeed, it regards them as irrelevant or improper. Courts and juries can't target outcomes, because they control only each particular case. There is no big goal, just the million microgoals of justice in a million particular cases. And so, with our imagined Clean Air Bill of Rights, particular justice always trumps regulatory efficiency. The EPA can say, "Air that is clean for 95 percent of the people is clean enough," but no self-respecting court can say to a plaintiff, "Because other people's lungs are clean enough, you're not entitled to clean lungs yourself." Clear rules, known in advance? No such thing; instead, a million court decisions, often conflicting. Cost-effectiveness? The mandate is to do justice, not to count cash, and in any event, courts are neither equipped nor expected to conduct economic analyses of the decisions they reach. Disinterested regulators? The agenda is driven by angry complainants and entrepreneurial lawyers who have everything to gain from finding new behaviors to punish. Through it all, the politicians are relegated to the peanut gallery as commentators, except on the rare occasions when they manage to rewrite a whole law, which is far harder to do than summoning a regulator to testify before an oversight committee. "An agency can be punished in a lot of different ways," says Thomas F. Burke, a political scientist at Wellesley College. "You can intimate that they're not going to get the same budget through Congress next year. It's much harder to discipline courts all across the country, and individuals who are bringing lawsuits all across the country." So what happens with our proposed Clean Air Bill of Rights? Some juries do sensible things, such as finding for plaintiffs who were exposed to high concentrations of lead. Other juries do weird things, such as finding for plaintiffs who claim that trees pollute. Some courts decide that an "unreasonable burden" means a high likelihood of lung disease, but others decide that "unreasonable burden" means more pollution in one area than in another, or any pollution at all. Over the years, things settle down a little, as precedents accumulate in each old area of litigation, but meanwhile complainants keep opening new areas of litigation. In any case, no one can be sure what the environmental rules are, because no one knows what the next jury may decide, or what the next plaintiff may dream up. The result is what Burke has called a "floating legal crapshoot." Anything could happen. And anything does. One-Eyed Regulating In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled more than 10 million gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound. The ship's captain, Joseph Hazelwood, had been drinking (though a jury cleared him of intoxication) and was known to have sought treatment for an alcohol problem four years before the accident. In 1990, with the Justice Department's encouragement, Exxon established a policy barring employees with histories of drug or alcohol abuse from 1,500 safety-sensitive jobs, "where an accident could have catastrophic consequences"-about 10 percent of the company's positions. For people transferred out of such jobs, the company tries to find positions of comparable rank and pay. Nonetheless, the EEOC is now suing Exxon for discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). United Parcel Service requires that its delivery drivers, who pop in and out of city traffic, have sight in both eyes. It, too, is being sued by the EEOC under the disability act. Walter K. Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the author of The Excuse Factory: How Employment Law Is Paralyzing the American Workplace, points out that this is not exceptional. Omaha paid $200,000 in damages for refusing to rehire a policeman who had lost his sight in one eye and had suffered loss of peripheral vision in another; Northwest Airlines is being sued for declining to hire a woman with monocular vision to drive maintenance trucks between airplanes. Aloha Islandair Inc. is being sued for declining to hire a pilot with vision in only one eye. (If a plane piloted by such a pilot were to crash, the airline could, of course, be sued.) Maybe one-eyed drivers and alcoholic tanker captains are unsafe on the average, maybe not. But the important thing to note is that the ADA never reaches that question, because it forbids basing policy on averages. A bureaucratic rule might say that if 90 percent of Exxon's jobs are available to recovering alcoholics, that is enough. But all microgovernment "sees" is each job, and each disabled person, and each person's right to accommodation. Microgovernment is one-eyed. The threat of ADA lawsuits may not create either jobs or goodwill for the disabled. In a recent study, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists, Joshua Angrist and Daron Acemoglu, found that the ADA "had a substantial and statistically significant negative effect on the employment of disabled people under 40." But who knows? Given that court decisions are often nebulous or conflicting, that companies respond to those decisions in many different ways, and that lawsuits often chase deep pockets and settlement prospects rather than urgent national problems, microgovernment does not actually know what it is doing, let alone whether it is doing it well. The question is not whether helping the disabled is a good idea; it is whether letting lawyers do the regulating is the best method. Successful regulatory systems work by paying attention to measurable outcomes and by feeding knowledge about success or failure back into the system. Goals set by bureaucrats and politicians may or may not be wise, but usually it is at least possible to know whether a given regulation succeeds at, say, reducing sulfur emissions or stabilizing freight charges. The microgovernmental model, by contrast, sets no overall goals, measures no outcomes, allows for little or no evaluation of effectiveness or cost vs. benefit, writes few unambiguous rules, allows no formal public comment even in cases with sweeping ramifications, exiles politicians to the fringe of policy-making, and buys us-well, we have no idea what it buys us. If your goal was to design a regulatory regime that violated every standard rule of good regulatory practice, you could hardly do better. Strip Search Microgovernment is micro in another sense: not only is it radically decentralized, but it pokes its nose into everything, and no corner of life is too small for it to reach. Its mandate-attaining fairness in every personal environment-acts as a little microlever, prying here and prying there, opening one door after another to the onslaught of legal process. Ask the PGA. Or ask Bill Clinton, whose sex life was scoured in fine detail by Paula Corbin Jones' lawyers, thus giving an enthusiastic microregulator a taste of his own medicine. Clinton's alleged conduct with Jones was, at least, patently disgusting. In many cases, distinguishing workplace harassment from ordinary flirting is difficult; courts must go to great lengths to do it. Workplace harassment law was entirely cooked up by the courts, and is entirely driven by the mandate for fairness in particular cases. It therefore serves as a good example of the microgovernmental regulatory style in its purest form. In Oncale vs. Sundowner Offshore Services Inc., the Supreme Court ruled this year that discriminatory same-sex harassment is illegal. What exactly is harassment, and when is it discriminatory, as opposed to merely, say, mean? The court helpfully announced that a male football coach may smack a player on the behind as the player runs onto the field, but may not smack a secretary (male or female) on the behind in the back office. Well, what about the locker room? In case the exact line of demarcation eludes you, the regulators-meaning the court-provided this guidance: "The real social impact of workplace behavior often depends on a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships which are not fully captured by a simple recitation of the words used or the physical acts performed. Common sense, and an appropriate sensitivity to social context, will enable courts and juries to distinguish between simple teasing or roughhousing among members of the same sex, and conduct which a reasonable person in the plaintiff's position would find severely hostile or abusive." This is rather as if the EPA had defined illegal pollution by saying: "We know it when we see it." To decide whether harassment has occurred, the court needs to sort through "a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships"-in other words, the intricacies of each relationship in each workplace situation in each case. Every joke, every dinner invitation, every friendship becomes a courtroom exhibit, aswarm with lawyers. Who told which dirty joke, how often? Who was friends with whom? What did that dinner invitation signify? In a recent racial-harassment case involving a black plaintiff and an Asian plaintiff suing their former employer in Los Angeles, lawyers busied themselves debating who was more offensive to whom. Remarks to plaintiffs: "You don't sound like you're black." "Why are your people's faces so shiny?" "You know, we bombed you [Japanese] once. We'll do it again." Remarks by plaintiffs: "dumb Polack," "white trash," "crackers," "redneck," "fucking Korean." The jury decided the workplace was hostile and ordered the company to pay $1.9 million. Given that a microgovernmental lawsuit is often the legal equivalent of a strip search, the prudent employer understandably takes no chances on jokes, teasing, or personal comments around the office. Lately, legal experts are advising employers not to let workers recount stories from the movie There's Something About Mary, a sophomoric comedy whose scenes include, for instance, some business about genitals caught in a zipper. "If you are telling these kind of jokes, no matter where they're coming from, you're exposing yourself to a sexual-harassment claim," Allen Rad, an employment lawyer, told The Dallas Morning News in July. "You're better off just not talking about it." Subjecting each workplace, each job, each relationship, each joke to exhaustive legal scrutiny can devastate communities that depend on trust. In Seattle, two successive support groups for gay city employees have collapsed under the weight of legal processes launched by a hostile heterosexual man who was determined to attend their meetings. "I was attempting to find out what special privileges they were being given," says Philip Irvin, a city engineer who favors biblical morality and secular laws criminalizing sodomy. When the gays tried to keep him out, he filed discrimination charges, and last year the city's civil rights office found in his favor. The case grinds on through its eighth year of appeals. Exhausted by the wrangling, the group has not met since 1997. At the end of the day, as the law thrashes about and tries to make every personal environment fair, the results often become simply bizarre. In one notorious recent case, the restaurant chain Hooters, whose calling card is its scantily clad waitresses, paid a $3.75 million settlement (of which almost half went to lawyers) after three men were turned down for waitressing jobs. A bureaucracy looking at the labor market as a whole, with its 370,000 places to eat, might have decided that letting some restaurants specialize in underdressed female servers is not a terrible thing. Microgovernment, however, sees only the unfairness in each particular case. Discrimination in allocating even one serving job is too much. The law (under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments) forbids sex discrimination in education programs. In classic micro style, judges and juries have interpreted this to mean that each particular school needs to spend as much on women's sports as it does on men's; because women are less interested in sports, this has meant achieving equality by shutting down men's college teams across the country. According to a National Collegiate Athletic Association survey, men's gymnastics teams are down to 32, from 133 in 1975. To comply with a legal settlement, California State University (Northridge) dropped baseball, soccer, swimming and volleyball. Elementary and secondary schools are now getting the same treatment. ABC's 20/20 noted in May that a lawsuit by two softball players, Jennifer and Jessica Daniels, required Merritt Island High School, in Florida, to mothball a concession stand, a scoreboard and bleachers that parents donated for the boys' baseball field unless the same items were also donated for the girls' softball field. When the program asked the girls' lawyer why she was requesting quadruple legal costs, she replied, "Because we put that money into other lawsuits." She is currently suing 10 high schools. Thus the mindless totalism that gives microgovernment its characteristic resemblance to a lawnmower propelling itself through a rose garden. Termite Attack No doubt it is intrusive, in some sense, to require steel makers to put scrubbers on their smokestacks, or landowners to preserve wetlands. Yet the relationships interfered with are business relationships, and the requirements are, at bottom, economic. Microgovernment is of a different complexion. "It's us and our personal behavior," says Robert E. Litan, a Brookings Institution economist and former Clinton administration regulator. "This is telling people how they have to behave." For government, policing jokes at work, or ordering colleges to set up as many press interviews for female athletes as for males, or fining the producers of Melrose Place $5 million for refusing to allow a pregnant actress to play a bikini-clad seductress, represents a higher and stranger order of intrusiveness. Never before has the government concerned itself so minutely with the detailed interactions of everyday life. Moreover, microgovernment creeps toward you like a swarm of subterranean termites, rather than charging you like an angry elephant. There is no city hall to fight, no bureaucrat to argue with. "There is no forum in which you're having a national, public dialogue about these questions," says Nivola. "It's not happening in a legislature. It's taking place in a myriad of courtrooms, and the cumulative effect of it is the regime. It's so decentralized that it doesn't offer a visible target." No one has any idea how much microgovernment costs. It may well be less expensive than traditional regulation, given the high costs of such old standbys as trade protections and price controls. However, microgovernment's costs are best measured not in money but in government's loss of respect for people, and people's loss of respect for government. If the excesses of 1960s and 1970s regulation destroyed the public's confidence in the bureaucracy, what will the greater and weirder excesses of microgovernment do to the public's confidence in the judiciary? And how much grinding up of personal and professional relationships is required before someone figures out a way to stop the lawnmower? Eventually, somehow, someone will. But no one has done so yet. Microgovernment is in its gaudy first flowering, protected from the traditional checks on regulatory excess by its moral prestige as a defender of rights. Indeed, few people even realize that it is regulation. President Bush embraced the ultramicro Americans With Disabilities Act, even as his own vice presidential Council on Competitiveness swore to thwart regulation. President Clinton thinks nothing of demanding a patients' bill of rights, even as his own vice president drums away at the importance of holding regulators accountable to results rather than to process. In time, either there will be reforms-of a sort not yet invented-or microgovernment will simply collapse, as irrational and unaccountable forms of governance eventually do. America's extraordinary experiment in regulation without regulators will fail, and the country will move on. But what will be the condition of the law when that time comes? ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ********************************************** --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Inquiry
by Tyrone W. Grandison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CAn someone point to where I may find a good documentatio on a NNTP server (and possibly documentation) ? Thanks, T

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Apologies: mistakes on my statistics... Reality is *worse* than I believed or remembered!
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

----------- from CFD V2 #602 ---------------- >From a post by Jean Hogue <jean_hogue(a)sympatico.ca> (Wed, 23 Sep 1998 Subject: a few impressions on the rallye) [snip] - Quebec is waking up and joining in - the ban on "purse-sized" pepper spray -- that says it all. - 60 millions/year forever for gun control bureaucrats, 4 millions/year for 5 years for cancer research 38 women murdered with a firearm last lyear 3900 women died of breast cancer last year if this is not a feminist issue, what is ? - the 60 million/year maintenance cost is almost as high as the "total 7-year cost" of 85 millions promised for the entire program. by 2015, the total tab will be 1 billion dollars. - the gripping testimony of John St-Amour (Marstar) - the brutality of the search for mere _papers_ SWAT with the finger on the trigger of HK MP-5 weapoons and using the weapons to point where to go to - the systematic harrassment of the government pursuing a non- case demanding St-Amour plead guilty to some trivial charges as condition to stop this 3-year long harrassment - over $100,000 in legal fees - the role of Canada Customs, describing St-Amour as "violent" - the government has unlimited funds (taxpayers' money) and can outspend anyone and drag anyone through court forever - trumped-up charges of "unsafe storage" to justify the fiasco. - this can happen to _anyone_. C-68 allows searching for records, unsafe storage charges are routinely fabricated Spin doctoring from McLellan [minister of Justice] - talk of confiscation is paranoid - the registry will be cost-effective - used weeping mothers of Polytechnique killings as prop for C-68 [snip] --------- end of quote ---------------- Ciao jfa Definition: FASCISM: n.: a political and economic movement, strongly nationalistic, magnifying the rights of the state as opposed to those of the individual, in which industry, though remaining largely under private ownership, and all administrative political units, are controlled by a strong central government. ------------------------------------------------- "One of the ordinary modes by which tyrants accomplish their purpose, without resistance, is by disarming the people and making it an offense to keep arms". - Joseph Story, U.S. Supreme Court Justice. ------------------------------------------------- the German gun control laws were enacted by the "liberal" Weimar Republic government that preceded Hitler, and were a strong aid to his coming to power -- because they disarmed Hitler's opponents, and Hitler's adherents ignored them -- as criminals have always ignored gun control laws. Disarming the public is a frequent first step toward dictatorships and genocides. Once the disarming is complete, the public is helpless against those who have the guns. ------------------------------------------------- PGP keys: http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pks-toplev.html PGP ID:C58ADD0D:529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 PGP ID:5B51964D:152ACCBCD4A481B0 254011193237822C

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Inquiry (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 17:20:43 -0500 (GMT-0500) > From: "Tyrone W. Grandison" <tgrandsn(a)uwimona.edu.jm> > Subject: Inquiry > > CAn someone point to where I may find a good documentatio on a NNTP server > (and possibly documentation) ? > Linux ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Invading Switzerland in WW2, pro and con (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From: "Richard Redd" <rredd(a)earthlink.net> > To: <consim-l(a)net.uni-c.dk> > Subject: Re: Invading Switzerland in WW2, pro and con > Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 17:56:11 -0600 > Of course there's the old story about some conqueror (I think it was Hitler > saying, "I could invade your country with 100,000 men". The Swiss diplomat > says, "Every man would fire their rifles at the invader". "Well, suppose I > send 200,00?" "Then every one would fire twice." ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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IP: Privacy: FTC Losing Patience w/Business
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Privacy: FTC Losing Patience w/Business Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 07:33:09 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/21privacy.html September 21, 1998 F.T.C. 'Losing Patience' With Business on Web Privacy By JOEL BRINKLEY WASHINGTON -- After more than a year of heated debate within the government, the Federal Trade Commission has all but decided that it is going to part company with the Clinton administration over the contention that business can regulate itself when it comes to Internet privacy. "We are losing patience with self-regulation," David Medine, an associate director in the commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in an interview, reflecting the larger agency opinion on this issue. "It's too bad, but I think industry has lost the opportunity to show that they will do it on their own." What was the last straw? Within the F.T.C., they called it "the Big Surf." >From all corners of the agency's headquarters in the spring, dozens of lawyers trooped to special training rooms equipped with personal computers and high-speed Internet connections. And for two weeks, they spent their days trolling the World Wide Web, searching for privacy problems. Their intention was to find Web sites that collected personal information from visitors but neglected to post any notice about how that information would be used. The presumption was that many of the companies sold the information -- some of it highly personal data on health, income and personal preferences -- to Internet-list brokers, merchants and advertisers. The "surfers" had no idea what they would find; no one had ever dedicated the time and manpower needed for this sort of targeted survey of the vast, tangled, largely unfathomable network that is the World Wide Web. But the Big Surf produced startling results published in a report this summer. More than 90 percent of the roughly 1,400 sites examined collected personal information from visitors, but only 14 percent of them disclosed how that information would be used, convincing the F.T.C. that formal regulation would probably be necessary. For more than a year, the Clinton White House had been saying that businesses using the Internet should be allowed to regulate themselves. "If there's ever an arena that should be market driven, this is it," Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's adviser on Internet issues, said as the White House announced its Internet policy last year. But while the White House was formulating this strategy, a few blocks away at the F.T.C. -- an independent federal agency not beholden to the administration -- agency officials were conducting hearings and workshops on Internet privacy, listening to complaints from members of Congress and interest groups. They were also installing up-to-date computer equipment so the agency could carry out the Big Surf and add the Internet to the list of business arenas subject to F.T.C. scrutiny and enforcement. Now, with results from the Big Surf and the industry's reaction to it in hand, several senior F.T.C. officials said, the agency will give industry just a few more months to respond to the recommendations in its report by demonstrating that it is effectively regulating itself. Medine said he would expect the industry to conduct a survey like the Big Surf and hand over the results. If, as most commission officials expect, industry does not provide such proof, the F.T.C. will draft a bill calling for clear Internet privacy standards and ask Congress to pass it. As an independent agency, the commission does not have to get permission from the Clinton administration to do this. And, given Congress' repeated statements of concern about Internet privacy, a bill would probably get the votes needed to pass. "It's not our intention to over-regulate," said Jodie Bernstein, director of the agency's consumer protection bureau. "We don't want to chill new technologies." But, she added, Web sites must begin "telling consumers if they are collecting personal information, what they are going to do with it and how the consumers can get out of it, if they want to." Generally, that means posting a privacy statement that answers these questions. But since the results of the Big Surf were published in June, commission lawyers have begun to believe that some Web sites are actually choosing not to post privacy statements. "There's now a perverse, reverse incentive," said Ori Lev, an F.T.C. official involved in Internet enforcement. "If you don't post a privacy policy, we can't go after you." That became clear last month, after the commission reached a settlement with Geocities, a popular site on the World Wide Web that the commission had accused of lying to its 2 million subscribers. The site offered a privacy statement that promised not to give out personal information collected during registration without permission. But the commission found that Geocities was selling the information anyway. That supposed deception was the basis for the government's case. If Geocities had not promised to keep the information private, then it would probably not have run afoul of the F.T.C.. As a result, Medine said, "clearly there are a lot of corporate lawyers advising their Web clients not to do anything now" -- not to post a privacy statement or anything else. Connie LaMotta, a senior vice president with the Direct Marketing Association, calls that idea nonsense. "It's a very bureaucratic way of thinking," she said. "It's upside down. Businesses want to post privacy statements to establish good customer relationships and customer service. Industry is stepping up to the plate on this." Ms. LaMotta said she and others in the industry agreed with the F.T.C.'s stated Internet privacy goals. But Ms. LaMotta added that she was certain that businesses could accomplish the task on their own. "It's our experience that, when you tap them on the shoulder, change happens. They say: 'Oh, gosh. OK."' With just a few minutes' effort, most anyone can find a Web site that collects personal information from visitors, in registration or order forms, without disclosing how that information will be used. But how those sites respond when asked about this can differ markedly. A site called Soccer Patch (www.soccerpatch.com) is a trading post for soccer-playing children who want to trade team patches. It lists the names, e-mail addresses and in some cases the hometowns of children who want to trade patches. That is a red flag for F.T.C. enforcers. They worry that child molesters can use the information to find victims. As soon as a reporter asked Philip Rubin, president of Edge of Chaos, the company that manages the site, about this, he immediately promised to change the policy. And a few days later, he did. "We now require all contributors to provide us with signed permission letters before e-mail addresses/and or names can be posted," he said. "Contributors under the age of 18 must provide a form signed by their parents or guardians." And the Soccer Patch site posted the form so that it can be printed out and mailed. Rosenthal Honda, a Washington area car dealer, had a different approach. The company, like many car dealers, posts a pre-qualification form for auto loans, requesting a variety of personal information, including income, debt load and the amount of rent or mortgage payments. Nowhere on the site does the company say how that information will be used. And when asked about that, the company issued a statement saying, "We will look at the issue with our Web developer." Asked two weeks later what had come of this, Rosenthal Honda did not respond. F.T.C. officials say they are investigating other Web sites and will almost certainly file charges against other companies, as the agency did with Geocities. Dean Forbes, 31, an F.T.C. lawyer, found the Geocities problem and spends most of his time working on Internet privacy issues. "Generally we get ideas from reading the trade press," he said, as well as from "looking at who is linking up with list brokers; we get tips from interest groups, usenet news group postings -- and complaints." Forbes, for one, disagrees with the idea that a Web site can escape trouble if it simply decides not to post a privacy policy. "If you don't make a visible statement," he said, "that does not mean there isn't an implied claim." But while his agency and the rest of the government figure out whether to push for new rules on Web privacy, Forbes sees a bit of improvement on the Web. "I'm not saying everything's great," he said. "But there is movement." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **********************************************

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Re: Jury duty considered harmful, or at least rare (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 19:12:01 -0700 > From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd(a)echeque.com> > Subject: Re: Jury duty considered harmful, or at least rare > To rig a jury by excluding undesirables such as Tim May would > be far too laborious. To rig a jury it would be necessary to Not in the days of computerized records it isn't. ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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From Spyking: DNA Technology
by Albert P. Franco, II 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 09:26:47 -0400 >From: Sunder <sunder(a)brainlink.com> >5) From: "Timothy Robarts" <t.robarts(a)btinternet.com> >Subject: DNA Technology > >London 16/09/98 > >September 16 1998 > >Police Superintendents' Conference: Stewart Tendler on how science is catching >up with the criminal. > >Dr Sullivan, who worked on the identification of the remains of the last Tsar, >Nicholas II, said that the breakthrough in taking DNA samples from dandruff >would allow investigators to take material from the tiny particles of human >skin that are found at every scene. He said: "People are constantly shedding >skin cells. The majority of household dust is made up of dead skin and we know >we can get DNA from an individual skin cell." > If human skin cells comprise the majority of household dust, and dust can so easily move from place to place, then how will they defend against the claim that the suspect passed near by (five blocks away) six months ago and the dust must have slowly made it's way to the crime scene... Don't answer...I know...truth is not the objective, rather conviction of the target. Now they'll have the tools to do it. The same cop investigating your car this month could inadvertently (or not) deposit a few traces of your skin dust at the scene of a crime next month. They keep getting scarier all the time! Al Franco, II

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