-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Fascinating article in last Saturday's New York Times about INS plans to revoke the U.S. citizenship of 5,000 people who got that citizenship sans criminal background checks so they could vote for Clinton in '96. Now, the INS revokes a big 25 citizenships a year so they really have a job ahead of them. Demonstrates the enforcement challenges of bureaucracies living in a mass society. They think they can get away with administrative revocations but even those can be appealed to federal court. 5,000 appeals would be quite a burden. If they wait too long and two years pass from time of granting, the Service will lose the administrative option and will have to do full court proceedings to revoke. Even if they revoke, the "aliens" will still have their old proofs of citizenship (passports, etc) as well as their former status as permanent residents so revocation may be meaningless in any case. That's not the cutest bit, though. In addition to the 5,000 new Clinton voters with provable criminal records, they had to go through 180,000 records of people with various sorts of documentation problems to see if any of them were criminals. But the Feds couldn't do it themselves. They lacked the capability. They hired one of the big accounting firms (Peat-Marwick?) to CHECK THE NAMES against the NCIC. They got some 9,000 positive matches but naturally, they can't tell how many of those 9,000 matches are false positives. Lots of work ahead. The gloom and doom types like to claim that it is trivial for the almighty Feds to find out everything about every one, look inside the souls of all of us, separate the good from the evil and unerringly punish the evil. Omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. Oddly enough, this claim is often made by people who, otherwise, don't believe in God. But this article on citizenship revocation gives lie to this claim of state power. Citizenship applicants have submitted vast quantities of information about themselves to the Feds. They have undergone years of a staged and complex process to move from nonresident alien to resident alien to citizen. At every point, they NARCed themselves out in detail directly to the federal government. And yet, that same government can't even tell if these people are "criminals." If they can't efficiently surveil and regulate this group, what chance do they have to regulate and surveil the other 260 million of us? DCF -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 5.0 beta Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM43tToVO4r4sgSPhAQHhcAP+O3Kn/rTtonspM+fWF7S/MeoV/zENTgll Di4GCB1oZTlvU9je6ucRxpXvezsjgibmurApR22j3J0rhgHAVOCT8+EjNLAi3yGh mwXXuCH/Z55nAXVit8mZvXSrJ8OPFWMn57Nma33uaD48QJ7AFqVxISi7+pSI91Mx LR0oZ1nJE/8= =oo4o -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----