Surveillance State Delayed
-----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-----
Duncan Frissell wrote:
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 The important thing to remember about police state tactics is that it is not a case of hyper-efficient use of the police -- it is hyper-use of
<<snip>> those powers to harass and harrangue those that they Feel like doing it to. No need to worry about guilt or innocence or any of that, just pick a target and get what you can, if it isn't enough - invent.
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-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Paul H. Merrill Merlyn Enterprises paulmerrill@acm.org I have no opinions (just facts) so it doesn't matter what my employer thinks.
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.
not sure if you are referring to TCM here as a "gloom and doom" type. but it seems that we ought to be able to design a government that does not rely on the supposed inherent incompetence of bureacrats and or humans in general for security of the citizen. in other words, your general argument that "see!! feds are really STUPID!! they wouldn't be SMART enough to infringe on your rights!!" is a pretty lame argument overall.
But this article on citizenship revocation gives lie to this claim of state power.
state power in the US, as it stands currently. but what the past shows is that government can change abruptly. it only matters who is in power. I think what people here are worried about are abrupt changes in the government, which can happen quite fast with e.g. new laws that are legislated. there are plenty of cases where the entire government has changed radically *without* even law changes. the manipulation of the ITAR and e.g. the recent changing in policy relative to the amount of money that is reported to FinCEN by banks are good examples. the government can change its mind on a dime. 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?
a totalitarian state is quite possible, although difficult to conceive of. it's a problem that some people are interested in solving. what is most difficult is an "invisible tyranny" in which the inhabitants are not even aware of their imprisonment, and perhaps even defend such a situation. a system that we live in right now, imho. (but to elaborate on this would rely on conspiracy theories)
participants (3)
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Duncan Frissell -
Paul H. Merrill -
Vladimir Z. Nuri