We’re going in circles. Even if the system is designed to hide or assist fraud (which includes an assumption of intent for which you have no basis, IMHO) that still doesn’t mean fraud has occurred. Your argument seems analogous to saying that if I leave my front door open, then by definition, I’ve been robbed.

I don’t understand why you’re more lenient with election systems.

Again, I say, no argument from me. Electronic voting needs to be vastly improved, including audit trails. But there’s no evidence we’ve had election fraud above & beyond the stuff we have every year (local scheisters trying to keep certain groups away from the polls, giving out misinformation about polling locations/times, etc.)

1) Is a law broken if it’s not prosecuted? I’d say yes. I can think of several thousand times that I’ve broken the law or witnessed it happening, but I’ve never been prosecuted. That’s true of most of us.

Yes, the law has been broken. But, in our legal system, the perpetrator is still innocent until he/she is proven guilty in a court of law. Subtle, but important difference. And, more to my point above, if the law was indeed broken, proving guilt should be an academic exercise.

2) If something is reported in the media, is it true? Much fuzzier question, but I think generally assertable for some media, especially in correlation with other media reporting the same thing.

My best answer would be “usually.” But writing something down doesn’t make it true, even if you work for the New York Times. I want to know your sources and, depending on the claim, see independent verification, before I’ll believe it. It’d be nice if I could trust a given source more than that, but that’s not the world we live in (anymore).

So, yes, I can put those two thoughts together and say that, in the case of massive wiretapping without warrants of Internet and phone traffic, felony laws were broken by the Bush administration. I can also say that it’s obvious that this is not being prosecuted because the people involved are presently so powerful that they are effectively above the law. What astonishes me is the erroneous conclusion that since there was no prosecution, there was no lawbreaking. By the same argument, I never drank or gambled underage, or did drugs, or traveled in a speeding car.

No, you can’t. You can accuse the Bush administration of breaking those laws, but since the best evidence you have is hearsay, it remains an accusation. Also, your theory as to why they’re not being prosecuted is just that – your theory. It is not “obvious” to me that your theory is guaranteed to be accurate.

As for my “erroneous conclusion that since there was no prosecution, there was no lawreaking,” that’s not what I said. I said that since there was no prosecution, there is no guilt. My theory (just as valid as yours) is that the Bush administration took shortcuts, justified their decisions as “necessary in time of war,” and then covered their asses by informing bipartisan leaders and FISA officials. I think there’s been no prosecution because there are no prosecutors who think they can make a case that will hold up in court, and they don’t want to risk being bound by double-jeopardy rules by prosecuting with the evidence they have. Under our justice system, that may make them sleazy, it might make them reprehensible, it might make them heroes (depending on your poltiical bent), but it definitely makes them innocent, since they haven’t been proven guilty.

I’m in the “one warrant, one wiretap” camp

It strikes me as odd that someone who’s written so extensively about the cell phone industry can still be in a “one warrant, one wiretap” camp. What would you suggest we do with digital phonecall data that is stored in a central database? Isn’t that one warrant, millions of wiretaps? What about monitoring phone calls through central “trunks” that contain millions of phone calls & phones? Same deal, right?

Hence my suggestion that the law has to catch up with the technology.

You’re right about that — my point was that it’s not the acceptance of immunity, it was the immediate political necessity of passing the immunity law which showed complicit agreement by the lawbreakers in government that laws had been broken.

Now you’re making stuff up. Immunity was a stipulation in the revised FISA law, which has been under discussion for several years now. There was no “immediate political necessity” and no “immunity law.”

I think what we’re actually debating here is the nature of crime. You’d probably say that the crimes I’ve broken were not immoral; I think widespread wiretapping is a moral crime, hence my vituperance. You think most people have nothing to hide, so it’s no big deal (and the felony penalties on the books are therefore asinine).

No, no, no. I think you’re innocent until proven guilty, and once you’re guilty you deserve whatever penalty the law provides for. I think the current wiretapping laws assume telephone technology from the 1950s, which makes them difficult to apply. If they were applied and someone were found guilty, though, I think the felony penalties are just fine…

Feh. Completely untrue. I’m sure both of us could list any number of groups whom we “side” with as a kneejerk action; it’s our nature as humans. And it’s my observation of you (as yours surely is of me) that you have chosen to side with many political causes which then biases the nature of the information you choose to hear about that cause. Cf. your earlier incredulity about whether any wiretapping laws were broken, which honestly, is so well documented that it’s One of Those Things I’m Surprised We Debate — a category long deserving initial caps.

Maybe you, my friend, but not me. I tend to agree with Republicans more than Democrats, because I tend to prefer free markets and am willing to count on personal responsibility to govern behavior, rather than government regulation. But I’m pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-gay rights. I don’t change those positions because my “group” has reached another conclusion. This would be why you are constantly amazed that I could vote for Clinton in ’96, Bush in ’00 and ’04 and Obama in ’08. It’s also why you subscribe certain opinions to me that I simply don’t have – other republicans have said it, so Brian must agree. It’s just simply not true.

As to the wiretapping laws, I covered that above, but to reiterate – we don’t know if the laws have been broken, because there hasn’t been a trial. Doesn’t mean they haven’t, doesn’t mean they have. “We don’t know” means “we don’t know.” You and the New York Times (and others) seem willing to skip the whole “trial” step, which I find ironic, given the subject matter. What we should be able to agree on is that all parties are currently innocent (cf. the Constitution), but we seem to be arguing that as well…

The stated reason [for showing ID when you pay cash for a train ticket] was much what you’d expect: it was to “improve security” after 9/11. How this improves security has never been explained, except in the general cloud of “if we can trace everyone’s movements at all times, that’s safer” thinking.

Best I can imagine is some underlying assumption that an “evil-doer” would be more hesitant to show an ID than anyone else. But I agree – that’s a weak argument. I can tell just from our conversation that it’s not, as you say, to “trace everyone’s movements at all times,” since you’re telling me they’re not collecting your name when you show ID, or checking it against any kind of list. It may also be something as morbid as being able to notify family members (or the media) if a disaster were to occur. I can tell you, having lived through 9/11 in New York, that a complete list of everyone who was in the World Trade Center when the towers fell would have saved everyone a great deal of grief, time and money.

Protraction faction, what’s your action? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses….

No argument here. But it doesn’t mean it’s been tampered with. Remember, you started with “The move to computer-mediated voting has introduced places where the wholesale theft of elections becomes feasible [and] as I’m sure you’re aware, there is evidence that this is already occurring.”

Hmm — okay, so perhaps the issue here is that you’re not aware of the things I’m sure you’re aware of. Try verifiedvoter.org. Long story short, there is substantial evidence of errors in computer tabulation, which is the factual part of the statement. The inferred part of the statement is that when an election system is designed to make verification impossible, I think it’s reasonable to ask whether the system that is designed to hide fraud, is also designed to assist fraud.

Again, you wouldn’t do business with a bank that gave you nothing but a bank balance without a transaction history — and your first reason would be wondering why the hell there isn’t one. I don’t understand why you’re more lenient with election systems.

Ah yes, the New York Times. How could I forget the fourth branch of our government? Seriously, though, laws have been broken because the NYT says they have? SERIOUSLY?!?

And this is the sort of thing that makes me really wonder about your media comments in the other threads.

Okay, so we have two questions here, both nearly philosophical in nature.

1) Is a law broken if it’s not prosecuted? I’d say yes. I can think of several thousand times that I’ve broken the law or witnessed it happening, but I’ve never been prosecuted. That’s true of most of us.

2) If something is reported in the media, is it true? Much fuzzier question, but I think generally assertable for some media, especially in correlation with other media reporting the same thing.

So, yes, I can put those two thoughts together and say that, in the case of massive wiretapping without warrants of Internet and phone traffic, felony laws were broken by the Bush administration. I can also say that it’s obvious that this is not being prosecuted because the people involved are presently so powerful that they are effectively above the law. What astonishes me is the erroneous conclusion that since there was no prosecution, there was no lawbreaking. By the same argument, I never drank or gambled underage, or did drugs, or traveled in a speeding car.

the new law, which we both seem to agree we need

Heh. Not in the slightest. I’m in the “one warrant, one wiretap” camp, and I think even the FISA court is pushing the boundaries beyond where they should be. Given my druthers, I’d prefer everyone to have cryptologically perfect communications which would make wiretaps impossible to begin with. The social value of that privacy is far higher than the cost of making law enforcement more difficult.

Granting them immunity removes the risk of litigation, and greatly increases our ability to move forward, which is (or should be) the point.

You presume that we agree on the forward direction. Yes, I think this increases our ability to move forward to an unfree police state, hence my opposition.

Your suggestion of the act of accepting immunity as proof of guilt is as wrong as the oft-refuted belief that pleading the 5th is also proof of guilt.

You’re right about that — my point was that it’s not the acceptance of immunity, it was the immediate political necessity of passing the immunity law which showed complicit agreement by the lawbreakers in government that laws had been broken.

Let’s take a quick philosophical tangent to try to find common ground, okay? I think what we’re actually debating here is the nature of crime. You’d probably say that the crimes I’ve broken were not immoral; it would be different if the crimes I weren’t prosecuted for were murder or rape. Drinking underage is a “crime I can break so long as I don’t get caught.” Our argument here is probably based more on that — I think widespread wiretapping is a moral crime, hence my vituperance. You think most people have nothing to hide, so it’s no big deal (and the felony penalties on the books are therefore asinine).

If Timothy McVeigh was brown (or any other color), he’d have engendered just as much outrage, and we’d have dealt with him with the same criminal justice system.

Sigh. Yes, okay, “brown” is a hyperbolic code word. But I use it because it replaces the entire paragraph of “we treat people, who make terrorist threats or attacks, as criminals, when they reside, or are citizens of, nations with a stable rule of law, but when such people reside, or are citizens of, any nation without such rule of law, we validate their lack of rule of law by claiming such behavior is transcendent of our entire legal system, and therefore justifies the creation of an entire supralegal method of attack, including military action, secret prisons, and torture.”

Or I could just say “brown”. It’s much shorter.

The difference between homegrown and foreign terrorism is not the color of the terrorists skin, it’s the jurisdiction of our legal system.

Yes, which is why the effective means of combating terrorism is extending the jurisdiction of the global legal system through treaties, diplomacy, trade policies, yadda yadda yadda Jeff’s head explodes from sheer repetition.

First off, if you insist on calling a group of people “your side,” that’s fine, but don’t go calling anyone “my side.” My opinions are my own – I don’t subscribe to the platform of some mythical conservative group.

Feh. Completely untrue. I’m sure both of us could list any number of groups whom we “side” with as a kneejerk action; it’s our nature as humans. And it’s my observation of you (as yours surely is of me) that you have chosen to side with many political causes which then biases the nature of the information you choose to hear about that cause. Cf. your earlier incredulity about whether any wiretapping laws were broken, which honestly, is so well documented that it’s One of Those Things I’m Surprised We Debate — a category long deserving initial caps.

Secondly, sufficient power to make sure those who disagree with you can’t get what they want fits my definition of “control of everything,” so I stand by my previous statement.

Sufficient power such that every individual has complete privacy and information security means “control of everything”. Huh. That’s going to take me a looooooong time to wrap my head around, but I think it’s pretty much the most Orwellian thing I’ve ever heard you say.

I’ll trust you on requiring a photo ID to pay cash, but I’m curious: what is the stated reason? Are you suggesting they run your name against a “no-train list?”

The stated reason was much what you’d expect: it was to “improve security” after 9/11. How this improves security has never been explained, except in the general cloud of “if we can trace everyone’s movements at all times, that’s safer” thinking. So far as I know, there is no “no train” list, but I don’t see any legal protection separating “no fly” from “no train” or “no bus” — which in your case says that I’m being hysterical, and in my case is an excellent reason to abolish all three by law as unconstitutional.

As to the rest, now you seem to be saying “we’re one regulation away from needing papers to travel around the US,” which is a far cry from “we need papers to travel around the US.”

Brian, please stop redefining what I say. You have to uniquely identify yourself to board most forms of interstate public transportation. That is my definition of “showing papers”. We have ways that make it very convenient to “show papers” (such as using a credit card) and there are ways to get around the system (such as using someone else’s credit card, forging their name, and committing several felonies), but it’s still showing papers. You want to make this into a permission issue — which I think is a terrifying prospect given that we do it on flights — but that is in addition to the tracking issue.

Sorry, I’m not going to let you off the hook on this one. My driver’s license refers to me as an individual….

Alright, I’m going to call myself officially bored of this subthread, which means I guess you can say you “won”. Suffice to sum up: yes, children are harder to track than adults. Cars are easily traceable, and getting easier, but you might not always be in your car. Or it might be stolen. Whatever.

Personally, it seems to me that your physical presence or lack thereof, and your right to be somewhere without anyone knowing or being able to follow you, is an inherent aspect of privacy. Maybe the inherent aspect of privacy. If you don’t get that, you’re not going to get any argument stemming from it.

If you have a GPS device, then you also have a foolproof device to prevent tracking of your GPS device. It’s called the “OFF” switch on your GPS device. Funny how many people forget that…

Sure, if you have a GPS you can turn off. Some of them can’t be (such as ones installed by police without your knowledge). Some of them trickle power to the GPS when turned off. And some devices, like cell phones, are a pain in the ass to power down. It’s just a matter of time before we all have GPS always-on; I’d rather have more concrete protections than an off switch.

You’ll note that each and every case described in the article was a criminal trial – not terror-related at all.

I repeat myself: I’m in favor of one-warrant, one-wiretap policies. I have no problem with GPS data when it’s behind the “needs warrant” firewall. I am concerned by examples that show that this is not always the case.

Free speech zones are most common around Very Important Events, not so much Very Important People. As Jeff is fond of pointing out to me, the Free Speech Zones around the political conventions are in place regardless of who is speaking. Their stated purpose are to keep protests safe and nonviolent, and despite Jeff’s inherent problem with them, they have never once been declared unconstitutional. I’m not even sure they’ve been challenged…

As to Time Magazine and GPS devices, a few quick thoughts:

1) If you have a GPS device, then you also have a foolproof device to prevent tracking of your GPS device. It’s called the “OFF” switch on your GPS device. Funny how many people forget that…

2) Let’s not forget this line in the article, conveniently buried in the third to last paragraph: “GPS data is usually just one part of the criminal case because attorneys also have to prove the defendant possessed the unit and entered the information into it.”

3) You’ll note that each and every case described in the article was a criminal trial – not terror-related at all. Criminal trials require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. GPS evidence is circumstantial evidence that goes toward removing doubt. It’s not physical evidence.

Any system of tabulation which cannot document its totals is broken.

No argument here. But it doesn’t mean it’s been tampered with. Remember, you started with “The move to computer-mediated voting has introduced places where the wholesale theft of elections becomes feasible [and] as I’m sure you’re aware, there is evidence that this is already occurring.”

Me: It’s a giant leap to suggest that we know laws have been broken.
You: It was all in the New York Times. The reporter won a Pulitzer for his work.

Ah yes, the New York Times. How could I forget the fourth branch of our government? Seriously, though, laws have been broken because the NYT says they have? SERIOUSLY?!?

Or, to put it in very simple terms: how does the president insist upon the need for “retroactive immunity” under the law without simultaneously admitting that this immunity is required to protect people from the laws they have already broken? It’s right there in the public language we’re using to debate this.

It’s actually very simple: the new law, which we both seem to agree we need, requires assistance from the private sector that cannot legally be mandated. The private sector is unlikely to participate if their lawyers are running around trying to figure out their potential legal exposure. Granting them immunity removes the risk of litigation, and greatly increases our ability to move forward, which is (or should be) the point.

Your suggestion of the act of accepting immunity as proof of guilt is as wrong as the oft-refuted belief that pleading the 5th is also proof of guilt.

Make you a deal — let’s put this on hold until 2010, when I’m hoping the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will start making some of what I’ve been screaming about very public and very prosecutorial.

Deal. I’m all for putting criminals in jail.

Let’s note that of the four major terrorist attacks under general discussion, two of them were homegrown, and were dealt with by the American criminal system using methods that were, with several major exceptions, perfectly within the purview of our historical rights and protections. It’s just when the brown foreign people are involved that we go collectively apeshit.

Sorry, this was a strawman then and it’s a strawman now. If Timothy McVeigh was brown (or any other color), he’d have engendered just as much outrage, and we’d have dealt with him with the same criminal justice system. And, given that he was executed, I think we can agree the punishment would not have been worse.

The difference between homegrown and foreign terrorism is not the color of the terrorists skin, it’s the jurisdiction of our legal system.

Insofar as “my side” includes the civil libertarian movement, the premise that we want “total and complete control of everything” is downright offensive. Yes, we want sufficient power so that your movements, actions, and political speech are purely as private and untraceable as you want it to be. To rephrase that as “control” is, well, somewhere anathema and complete ignorance.

First off, if you insist on calling a group of people “your side,” that’s fine, but don’t go calling anyone “my side.” My opinions are my own – I don’t subscribe to the platform of some mythical conservative group. Secondly, sufficient power to make sure those who disagree with you can’t get what they want fits my definition of “control of everything,” so I stand by my previous statement.

And if you pay cash, you have to show photo ID. (You also have to show photo ID if you use a credit card at the counter; the machines let you skip that step, because you’re providing a computerized trail for them.) The distinction between “leaving a paper trail” and “requiring permission” is one TSA regulation; I personally don’t see anything in the supporting legislation and case law behind the “no-fly” list that would prevent it from being used for a “no-board” list on trains and buses.

I’ll trust you on requiring a photo ID to pay cash, but I’m curious: what is the stated reason? Are you suggesting they run your name against a “no-train list?”

As to the rest, now you seem to be saying “we’re one regulation away from needing papers to travel around the US,” which is a far cry from “we need papers to travel around the US.”

But I also note that the ability to drive comes at the end of a massively long paper trail documenting your existence to the DMV (which is the nation’s de facto identification method), your insurance, and your car’s ownership. These databases were the start of the American surveillance society. I don’t think the uses to which these data have been put are particularly inducing of trust in our government’s restraint.

Sorry, I’m not going to let you off the hook on this one. My driver’s license refers to me as an individual. My car’s ownership (i.e., registration & license plates) refer to my car, not me. And my insurance refers to the intersection of the two. This is why all three exist. You can have a driver’s license without owning a car and you can own a car without having insurance (caveat: some states require certain kinds of insurance).

As to proof that Avery & Brandon were in Boston:

My car: Nope – my car is in New Jersey right now and I am not. Thrown out of court faster than an anti-war prostester at the RNC. Cameras & face recognition software? Yes, but we’re way past “papers to travel around the country” again…

electronic toll system: Again, nope. That’s the car, not me.

RFID’s that may one day be required: Well, maybe one day, but not now.

Satellite monitoring: Back to tracking, not permissioning.

Lojack, GPS, cell phones, credit cards: All the same issue – tracking, not permissioning. All after-the-fact too, so I’d argue they could never be used to prevent me from going to Boston. For that, you basically need checkpoints.

Clearing through the clutter, I ask again: what makes you say “we need papers to travel in the US?” ‘Cause we really don’t…

Free speech zones are still somewhat anomalous here, but are common near political conventions and speeches. And yes, as the name implies, it picks an arbitrary point around a Very Important Person Whose Safety and Convenience Exceeds the Importance of the Constitution, and restricts protest speech to a “zone”, usually around a half-mile away and surrounded by barricades and police.

Meanwhile, this hit my radar today, an article on GPS usage for prosecution, with shoutouts to cell phones, epass technology, and warrantless tracking:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1837470,00.html

Again, I’m in favor of using these technologies for law enforcement at the end of the usual process of grand juries and warrants. But if some parties are tagging suspects with GPS without warrants, I expect that it’s only a matter of time before there is a call for police access to existing, universal GPS data “to save them time and money”, much as antiterror efforts have been “restricted” by our pesky civil rights.

LOL! I guess travelling for you people means going from one State to another. The World is so much bigger. Even America has many countries to explore and learn from (the USA being *just one of them*). That may be the reason for being so surprised of the existence of a blogosphere in China.

**I’m simply calling you on that tipping point where you go from “concerned about our civil rights” to “warning of the impending apocalypse.”**

I have the impression some people wouldn’t see the Apocalypse even if they were in the middle of it. And, even if they did, how useful would that be if it’s too late? And they wouldn’t even admit their mistake to the people who had warned them hundreds of times. This is why we are still arguing if the global warming is human-generated or not, instead of work to reduce non-sense pollution, over-exploitation of resources, and improve efficiency in all fronts.

PS: and what the hell are those “free speech zones”?!?? Do you need to demonstrate in a specific place in the USA? What kind of demonstration is that? It’s like saying, “look, that dark small room at the end of the corridor where nobody can see you or will give a damn what you’re shouting about… there.. there you can go and complain and demonstrate about whatever you fancy”.

Brian, I can’t believe we’re arguing this. Any system of tabulation which cannot document its totals is broken. You would immediately fire anyone who proposed such a system at BofA, or for that matter, at Avery’s PTA.

My statement is that our current electoral system is designed to make fraud both easy and impossible to prove. This is well-documented, for anyone who cares to read the documents. Your statement that I have to prove the impossible before I can argue that the system is irredeemably fucked up beyond all recognition is, quite simply, an argument in favor of the Machiavellian brilliance of this method of stealing elections.

Movie recommendation: http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/stealingamericavotebyvote/. I don’t plan on watching this, as I’ve heard these people first-hand. But it seems that you should.

The FISA warrants and the Internet wiretapping have both, appropriately, been the matter of much discussion, but it’s a giant leap to suggest that we know laws have been broken.

Again, I’m reduced to using blitheringly condescending language. It was all in the New York Times. The reporter won a Pulitzer for his work. Last I heard, what he reported on has not been substantively changed.

Or, to put it in very simple terms: how does the president insist upon the need for “retroactive immunity” under the law without simultaneously admitting that this immunity is required to protect people from the laws they have already broken? It’s right there in the public language we’re using to debate this.

Filing charges, in the case of impeachment, requires the House of Representatives passing actual articles of impeachment, which has only happened twice in our history – Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999.

Feh. I’ll give you this one, solely because we’re debating the meaning of the word “filing”. Make you a deal — let’s put this on hold until 2010, when I’m hoping the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will start making some of what I’ve been screaming about very public and very prosecutorial. I think we’ve got the makings of a Constitutional Nuremberg coming up, and the only question in my mind is whether the Democrats will have the cojones to do something about it.

I was talking more about special prosecutors, who could bring charges against anyone in the Bush administration if they were to investigate and find evidence of an actual crime.

Well, yes, and part of that was due to the unprecedented amount of document shredding that’s been going on (Bush IT officials being unable to maintain an email archive, which in and of itself is criminal). Last I heard, Karl Rove was an unindicted coconspirator, and there were a few fingerprints left by Cheney himself. My mention of an upcoming Nuremberg is based on the expectation that the stone walls that met Patrick Fitzgerald might no longer exist when an entire presidential administration is not doing everything in its power to cover its own ass.

But then again, I can already hear you calling me a vindictive bastard who doesn’t care about the country for wanting these Constitutional crimes prosecuted, and that’s exactly the sort of reaction that causes Democratic leaders to lose their spines — so I’m not placing any bets on whether any of this will ever happen.

A “constant state of potential loss,” which is a very fancy way of saying “no loss at all.” Note that I’m not suggesting at all that your concerns are unwarranted, I’m simply calling you on that tipping point where you go from “concerned about our civil rights” to “warning of the impending apocalypse.”

I think I’ve been very clear on this: I don’t think the apocalypse is impending, I think this particular apocalypse has already happened. It scares the living spit out of me how much data about me personally is available to tens of thousands of government and corporate bureaucrats at the touch of a button. The sole barriers to that dataset becoming one of intimidation and control is computerized datamining efficiency, and explicit laws protecting our rights. The former is constantly improving, and the latter is damned near nonexistent.

that’s not to mention the variety of safety hazards we’ve all collectively agreed to live with for fear of violating others’ right to free speech (e.g., second-hand smoke, drunk driving, undetected HIV, semi-public display of violent/pornographic materials, etc.)

Dude, I’m not sure what you think you’re arguing here. With the exception of “violent and pornographic material”, none of those are free speech issues. (And in the case of those materials, about 60 years of research indicates that explicit materials are not physically dangerous to the community.)

As for your other point about “limit[ing] the powers of the FBI and the CIA”, it comes down to this: the Stazi and the KGB were highly effective anticriminal organizations. They also reigned in cultures that were not free by our definition. I don’t believe it’s possible to build the mechanisms of an American Stazi and then expect it not to be used in precisely the same manner it was used in East Germany. And yes, I consider building such to be an apocalyptic event in American history. Computers are Marcus Wolf’s wet dream addition to the mix.

I’ve lived before and after an anthrax attack. I’ve lived before and after two terrorist attacks (including one experienced from a mere 35 floors away). Unfortunately, what they’re talking about is not theoretical, it’s actually happened.

Yes, and I’ve argued repeatedly that those attacks drove you a little bit insane in terms of what you consider to be a measured response. Let’s note that of the four major terrorist attacks under general discussion, two of them were homegrown, and were dealt with by the American criminal system using methods that were, with several major exceptions, perfectly within the purview of our historical rights and protections. It’s just when the brown foreign people are involved that we go collectively apeshit.

I hate to spew the party line on this, but they only need to be right once to be right. So: True, there were no WMD’s in Iraq. True, Iraq wasn’t buying yellow cake from Niger. But two guys did enter the northwest US to try and blow up the Golden Gate Bridge.

Alright, here’s where I go off the deep end again, and repeat the lesson I learned on 9/11: terrorists cannot defeat us. They can kill us in horrifying numbers, sure. I don’t want to see another terrorist attack on home soil. But the American system of government is too strong, and our population too large and too dispersed, to be at risk from terrorist attack in any real way. Take out the Golden Gate Bridge or the Harbor Tunnel, and you’ve got a national disaster — but what you do not have is the destruction of America.

That said, our system of government was substantively changed by 9/11, and we did that to ourselves. Wasn’t necessary, and as Al Gore pointed out in his speech last Wednesday, it wouldn’t have happened under a different president.

Now, pardon me for putting on airs, but one area in which I consider myself an expert is on weapons of mass destruction, and the only way that I can see an attack that causes America to cease to function is one involving nuclear and biological weapons. The Bush administration has completely dropped the ball on this, and, if they had their way on admitting Georgia into NATO, might have already embroiled us in a hot war with one of the few nations whom still have the capacity to destroy us.

On the other hand, the continued existence of America can include the possible changing of our culture so that we live in ways that would have been unimaginable to the Founders and many of the generations that followed them. This is a much more credible threat to “America” as I believe her to be than terrorism, and we seem awfully willing to sell that birthright when we start wetting our pants.

On the one hand, it speaks more to the nature of the problem – protecting civil rights often requires transparency while defending against terrorism often requires secrecy.

And that would be a load of horseshit. We defend against criminals using transparency, and that’s a cornerstone of our legal system dating back to the Magna Carta. Again I’ll remind you that we continue to use our criminal system against the white American terrorists who blew up Oklahoma City and put anthrax in the mail, and it seems to me that what’s good enough for white people is good enough for nonwhite people.

This idea breaks down at certain borders, such as… Berlin. A problem which was solved by extending the rule of law into East Germany and making it “Germany.” Which was working for a while in Moscow, but which seems to have gone astray in the last, oh, eight years or so. Gee, I wonder if that’s a coincidence. Personally, I think that over time, this is the way to find and stop the terrorists in Karachi, Kabul, and Jakarta as well, and it’s a damn sight more effective than our recent attempts to blow the hell out of other countries until they stop wanting to hurt us.

My gut (read: unsupported) instinct on the matter is that both sides contain a majority of people who are generally concerned about their issue and looking for ways to protect the American people, and that both sides contain radical nutcases who see their issue as a way to scare people into giving them total & complete control of everything.

Insofar as “my side” includes the civil libertarian movement, the premise that we want “total and complete control of everything” is downright offensive. Yes, we want sufficient power so that your movements, actions, and political speech are purely as private and untraceable as you want it to be. To rephrase that as “control” is, well, somewhere anathema and complete ignorance.

On the other hand, my opposition has expressed its desire for complete knowledge and control of certain people, actions, and communications. This is a moral distinction between opposing sides. Saying that these are equivalent is precisely missing the entire point of the debate, and precisely why you scare the hell out of me when you say such things.

That’s because you’re likely in the recently created camp of “the economy has never been this bad and couldn’t possibly get any worse.”

Yeah, and here’s where you cross that little gray line into the offensive statement again. Remember, Master’s degree, American Civilization, right? We spent some time on the Great Depression. I even remember some of it. I also did some comparative anthropology and figured out that, for most of human history, our main political concern was amassing sufficient calories for survival without providing sufficient calories to nearby predators. This would be a “worse economy” than the one we have now.

Which perhaps is a distinction that you miss about my politics. My patriotism stems from comparing the last 200 years of how Americans have lived to the prior 250,000 years of how humans have lived, and how in that 200 years many of the ideals that were once unique to us infected the world and caused billions to live better lives. What my Am Civ degree taught me was how utterly fragile a political system can be, and how many times political advances similar to ours (although not nearly as successful) were utterly destroyed and their citizens returned to survivalist poverty.

You think I’m being apocalyptic, but I think I’m just trying to avoid repeating history.

I take an interstate train every day and don’t show identification. Granted, I’m in the northeast corridor, which you listed as one of your exceptions. But I just went to Amtrak’s website and was one click away from reserving a train from New York to Los Angeles, and no one asked me for ID

Well, you’re simply wrong here. If you use a credit card, you’re leaving a paper trail. And if you pay cash, you have to show photo ID. (You also have to show photo ID if you use a credit card at the counter; the machines let you skip that step, because you’re providing a computerized trail for them.) The distinction between “leaving a paper trail” and “requiring permission” is one TSA regulation; I personally don’t see anything in the supporting legislation and case law behind the “no-fly” list that would prevent it from being used for a “no-board” list on trains and buses.

And all of that ignores my ability to connect regional rail system to regional rail system and move (slowly) across the country that way. Or, for that matter, walking.

Right, it’s entirely realistic to say that our Constitutional right to assemble is limited to our ability to spend six months on a cross-country trip. It’s right there in the Constitution: we may assemble freely, but only once or twice a year.

Personally, I take it as axiomatic that “freedom to travel” is independent of method, and should allow for anonymity whenever we wish it. Walk up, pay cash, board planes, and let’s prevent them from blowing up by making sure that we’re not carrying any explosives when we do so. That’s an issue of security, not identification.

All of that said, your underlying premise is still false, since “papers to travel” in other parts of the world (e.g., communist USSR) involved the government deciding whether or not you were allowed to travel to your destination based on who you are.

Which differs, how exactly, from a no-fly list? And what protections do you perceive against similar restrictions being placed on other forms of travel?

I worked for the DMV for a year, so I know of which I speak here. All you can prove if you have video of a car driving down the road is who owns the car, not who’s driving it. This is why a radar speed trap can issue you a speeding ticket, but can’t give you points on your license

Well, here you’re conflating the (reasonable) rules in place for preventing criminal behavior, with the (unreasonable) rules that are in place for preventing terrorism. You have many protections for how this data can be used for driving infractions, but those protections tend to go away when were dealing with the war on terror (and to lesser extents the wars on drugs and prostitution, which you’ll learn if anyone ever leaves a few grams of pot in your SUV, in the few remaining hours in which you own it).

And admitted: I am much more sensitive to the non-car means of transportation because I don’t drive. But I also note that the ability to drive comes at the end of a massively long paper trail documenting your existence to the DMV (which is the nation’s de facto identification method), your insurance, and your car’s ownership. These databases were the start of the American surveillance society. I don’t think the uses to which these data have been put are particularly inducing of trust in our government’s restraint.

Prove to me that Avery & Brandon were in Boston two weeks ago. Tell me how anyone else would prove it. QED.

A partial list. Note that some of what I’ll say here refers to networks of information that may or may not exist (our government keeps these secrets closely), and technologies that are in their infancy. I say this by way of agreeing that we do not live in the police state that I fear, but that these are indicators of how it can be built. (Also: obviously, some tracking mechanisms don’t apply to children, so let’s presume that finding you or Sherry is generally a good way to find Avery or Brandon.)

1) Your car. License plates traceable to you, of course. Occupants easily verified by numerous traffic cameras, especially with the aid of facial recognition systems.

2) Your electronic toll system, nicely documenting when you got to where you were going.

3) Any RFIDs you might have on you, which will be required by law when the REAL ID act is implemented.

4) Satellite monitoring, whose resolution is good enough to uniquely identify people based on gait analysis.

5) Have a Lojack or a GPS in your car?

6) Anyone carrying cell phones?

7) Use any credit cards on the trip?

8) Did you go outside anywhere near Newark, New York, Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Worcester, or Boston? If so, you’re likely picked up on over 100 CCTV cameras over the course of a day. (The equivalent number in DC is 330. I’m guesstimating at 100 in midsized cities. Might be higher, and might also be true in many smaller townships.)

Finally, a key point to make: I presume that a first-year FBI cadet could prove that Avery and Brandon were in Boston, and what they did there, as a training exercise, without resorting to any of the means I listed above. We’ve been in that line of work since the Pinkertons were doing it in the 19th century.

I don’t object to this, because I have reasonable faith (still) that FBI resources are largely not squandered, and that targets of observation get that status only after a series of internal checks and balances to defend our freedoms. The danger of the monitoring devices I list above, in conjunction with networking of these systems and efficient data mining, is to make it trivially easy to track everyone without these checks and balances.

The distinction is crucial. A wiretap requires a warrant. But ECHELON was recording your international phone calls a decade ago, and AT&T and Verizon were doing the same for at least some portion of domestic traffic. No warrants, no checks and balances, and no accountability. That would be the difference between the FBI operating under the Constitution, and building the American Stazi mechanism.

Into the breach!

So while I can’t prove that elections have been tampered with, you can’t prove that accusations are baseless.

This statement is an oxymoron. If you can’t prove the elections have been tampered with, then that is the very definition of a “baseless” accusation. Burden of proof lies with the accuser. Quite the pain in the ass, that…

No, can’t think of any clear 2nd Amendment felonies, but there damn well have been 4th Amendment felonies regarding FISA requirements. (My bad, I think I mixed these numbers up earlier.) And there’s certainly plenty of documentation in the case of the Internet wiretaps.

Point conceded that no convictions doesn’t mean no felonies, but cf. my point above about burden of proof. The FISA warrants and the Internet wiretapping have both, appropriately, been the matter of much discussion, but it’s a giant leap to suggest that we know laws have been broken. In the FISA case alone, we have the FISA judge who approved the violation of the statute he works to protect.

Not true — charges have been proffered in the House by Dennis Kucinich, which would be the “filing” of charges.

Oh, come on. You know your constitutional law better than that. Kucinich introduced a House resolution to impeach Bush, which the (Democratic) Speaker of the House immediately and repeatedly refused to support, along with the other 433 representatives. This is the equivalent of screaming into the wind, not filing charges. Filing charges, in the case of impeachment, requires the House of Representatives passing actual articles of impeachment, which has only happened twice in our history – Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999. Both were acquitted in their Senate trials.

That said, I wasn’t even talking about impeachment. I was talking more about special prosecutors, who could bring charges against anyone in the Bush administration if they were to investigate and find evidence of an actual crime. The only time that has ever happened was in the case of Scooter Libby, where they caught him for lying under oath about who told him Valerie Plame’s identity. Unfortunately, thanks to our scandal-driven media, most of the country likely believes he was convicted of outing Plame himself – a crime for which he (nore anyone else) has ever been accused, let alone convicted.

That said, yes, I think we have been a constant state of potential loss of freedoms since around the 1970s…

I LOVE that sentence. A “constant state of potential loss,” which is a very fancy way of saying “no loss at all.” Note that I’m not suggesting at all that your concerns are unwarranted, I’m simply calling you on that tipping point where you go from “concerned about our civil rights” to “warning of the impending apocalypse.” The former is worth fighting for (as it has been for 232 years). The latter is, basically, fear-mongering.

a warning about the erosions of civil rights cannot be used as an excuse to erode civil rights?

You’ll excuse the expression, but that’s crap. Just in the last eight years, warnings of the erosion of civil rights have been used to limit the powers of the FBI and the CIA, prevent or delay the arrest of known terrorists, and prevent the collection and analysis of key evidence (source: 9/11 Commission Report). And that’s not to mention the variety of safety hazards we’ve all collectively agreed to live with for fear of violating others’ right to free speech (e.g., second-hand smoke, drunk driving, undetected HIV, semi-public display of violent/pornographic materials, etc.) Note: I’m not suggesting our policies in these latter categories necessarily need to change; just pointing out that we regularly restrict the rights of some out of fear of restricting the rights of others.

Excellent question. I had to pause for quite a long time to formulate this reply. I can come up with three answers — and I’ll ask you to read through them all before hitting the reply button.

I promise – I read them all.

To summarize and refute:

Reason #1: Their fear is scarier than your fear.
Response: I’ve lived before and after an anthrax attack. I’ve lived before and after two terrorist attacks (including one experienced from a mere 35 floors away). Unfortunately, what they’re talking about is not theoretical, it’s actually happened. And we’ve killed or captured others who are working to make it happen again. I’d submit that the reason you feel this way is because you innately believe in your cause, and you innately believe that their cause is trumped up. You’re entitled to your opinion, but that doesn’t mean it’s undeniably true.

Reason #2: You can’t prove you’re right, but you can prove that they’re wrong.
Response: No you can’t. I hate to spew the party line on this, but they only need to be right once to be right. So: True, there were no WMD’s in Iraq. True, Iraq wasn’t buying yellow cake from Niger. But two guys did enter the northwest US to try and blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Several groups have made plans to collapse the tunnels under the Hudson River. A group in Pakistan did make plans to sabotage aircraft bound for the US from London. These examples don’t prove an ever-present threat, but they show reason for concern; in much the same way that Jose Padilla’s case doesn’t prove a policy of prisoner mistreatment, but it does raise cause for concern.

Reason #3: You want transparency and they want secrecy.
Response: This is the best of your three arguments. On the one hand, it speaks more to the nature of the problem – protecting civil rights often requires transparency while defending against terrorism often requires secrecy. On the other hand, the need for secrecy, real or imagined, can make the terrorism fear card more powerful than the civil rights fear card.

All of that said, I reject your conclusion that your actions are “ethical” and their actions are “toxic and reprehensible.” My gut (read: unsupported) instinct on the matter is that both sides contain a majority of people who are generally concerned about their issue and looking for ways to protect the American people, and that both sides contain radical nutcases who see their issue as a way to scare people into giving them total & complete control of everything.

Luckily, our system functions such that these conversations can be ongoing, while both causes continue to make independent progress, despite mutual accuastions of fear-mongering.

I fail to see any possible future where reliance on finite fossil fuels results in a good outcome

That’s because you’re likely in the recently created camp of “the economy has never been this bad and couldn’t possibly get any worse.” Leaving aside the slightly hysterical claims of sudden-onset peak oil, massive military action to secure the last few drops, or distopian, Lord of the Flies society caused by sudden, massive energy shortages, I think there is a very real possibility that seemlingly rational government actions in the next 5-10 years could have significant, negative repercussions to our economy, putting lots and lots of people out of work and causing increases in homelessness, poverty and crime. The scenaro I’m describing is nothing more complex than a rush toward reliance on alternative energy before the market is ready to provide it, causing an intense version of what we just went through with $4/gallon gasoline – including the political finger pointing and hand-wringing about who’s fault it is, the ridiculous “gas tax holiday”-like proposals which a) don’t help and b) never get implemented anyway.

This, to me, is the perfect storm with regard to energy policy. In the public sphere, it would lend itself to internal bickering rather than problem solving. In the private sector, the incentive to solve the problems would be immense, but the solutions could likely be born into an economy where no one could afford to buy them, slowing their up-take. Remember, Clinton’s miracle 90′s were successful not only because of the technological Internet boom, but also because of the presence of capital that allowed those (private sector) companies to implement those technologies. When salvation comes, we need to be ready to accept it.

Regarding “travelling with papers”:

1) with few exceptions which I’ll explore later, you need to show identification to board any plane, interstate train, or interstate bus in the US.

Nonsense. I take an interstate train every day and don’t show identification. Granted, I’m in the northeast corridor, which you listed as one of your exceptions. But I just went to Amtrak’s website and was one click away from reserving a train from New York to Los Angeles, and no one asked me for ID (for those who are curious: $361 and 67.5 hours, including a 5.5 hour layover in Chicago). I could choose to pay by credit card and pick my ticket up at the train station, in which case I’d be asked for ID, but only to verify that I was the one who bought the ticket. If I were to pay cash at the station, I’d be traveling anonymously.

And all of that ignores my ability to connect regional rail system to regional rail system and move (slowly) across the country that way. Or, for that matter, walking.

All of that said, your underlying premise is still false, since “papers to travel” in other parts of the world (e.g., communist USSR) involved the government deciding whether or not you were allowed to travel to your destination based on who you are. No one, to my knowledge, is prohibited from crossing a state line in the United States, unless they’re wanted for some crime and would be arrested if they were found anywhere.

2) if you travel by car, unless you borrow a friend’s, your car is uniquely identifiable to you and can be tracked with roadside cameras and interstate toll systems by its license plate or RFID toll records.

Also nonsense. I worked for the DMV for a year, so I know of which I speak here. All you can prove if you have video of a car driving down the road is who owns the car, not who’s driving it. This is why a radar speed trap can issue you a speeding ticket, but can’t give you points on your license (like an officer would do if he caught you doing the same thing). If someone else is speeding in my car and I get a fine, I can sue them for the money if I want to prove they were driving my car. Points on the license requires the government to prove that I committed a crime, and the presence of my car doesn’t cut it.

And if you’d like to argue that the incidents of people lending each other their cars is too low, I have one word for you: passengers. If I drive across the country in my car and there are six people in the car, the government has an extremely tenuous case for “proving” my presence, but they have absolutely no control/information on the other five people in the car.

And, as above, your underlying premise is still horribly flawed. Even if we are to presume away all of the above, you can’t possibly make the leap between “tracking your movements” and “requiring papers to travel.” One is proactive (sorry, sir, you can’t go to California because you don’t have the proper documentation) and the other is reactive (your honor, I can prove that Brian Greenberg travelled to California on July 24th…). Tracking movement is a very old and well documented topic of discussion, but it’s not nearly the same as “permission to travel.”

Likewise, with the no-fly lists, the question of permission to travel is now no longer automatic.

Again, nonsense. No-fly lists prevent you from travelling by plane, not from travelling. Until there is plane-based public transportation, this is not even close to the same thing.

I’ll simply point to the fact that anonymous travel was once a right protected by the 1st Amendment, which is no longer the case. Obviously, you can choose whether you care, or whether you can picture a personal scenario where you might want to be somewhere and have it be no one’s damn business.

Prove to me that Avery & Brandon were in Boston two weeks ago. Tell me how anyone else would prove it. QED.

Nope, you’re wrong on this score, but not for the reasons you expect. The accusations have been completely unverifiable, because the elections themselves have been unverifiable. Many of the computerized election machines don’t keep the kinds of records that allow voting tallies to be audited. So in the event of a contested election, the best we can do after the fact is say, “hmm, sorry, we don’t keep those logs. You’ll just have to trust us.”

So while I can’t prove that elections have been tampered with, you can’t prove that accusations are baseless. And honestly, that in and of itself should be a standard of elections that is considered Not Good Enough for American democracy.

Beyond that, though, there’s a simple reason why computerized elections lend themselves to wholesale theft: traditional means of tampering with mechanical and paper voting methods don’t scale. Tampering with computerized methods do scale in many instances. The response to this theoretical vulnerability (which, again, has been alleged but not proven to date, as the available data does not allow for either side to have proof) has been, “Hey, trust us.”

Really, here’s the best summary of the voting machine debate I’ve seen recently.

Sorry to be a stickler here, but our government has committed no felonies with regards to the 2nd ammendment.

Oh, please. I can tell you the various misdemeanors and felonies I committed back at Penn, and can even write about them on my blog if I choose to now that the statute of limitations is up, despite the fact that I was never convicted of any of them. No, can’t think of any clear 2nd Amendment felonies, but there damn well have been 4th Amendment felonies regarding FISA requirements. (My bad, I think I mixed these numbers up earlier.) And there’s certainly plenty of documentation in the case of the Internet wiretaps.

And even with the most unpopular president in history, we haven’t found a lawmaker or a lawyer willing to file charges.

Not true — charges have been proffered in the House by Dennis Kucinich, which would be the “filing” of charges. What you won’t see this year is an indictment, in part because you’d need simultaneous conviction of both Bush and Cheney to prevent a Cheney presidency. (And in larger part because I still believe that Congressional Democrats can’t find their asses with both hands, hence they’ve misplaced their spines as well.)

Look, here’s how this particular argument will be resolved: if there’s a Democratic presidency next year, then over the next four years a whole bunch of buried documents are going to be found, and either that body of information will be sufficient to lead to indictments, or it won’t. If there’s a Republican presidency, then it’ll probably stay buried regardless, and we’ll continue sniping at each other until someone writes the definitive historical treatise in 2030.

Ah, but here’s the rub: you can’t be proven wrong, can you? Because your thesis is that the authoritarian state is coming, not that it’s here. And it’s always coming.

As I think I’ve stated, this isn’t a binary either-or proposition. Yes, there is a binary authoritarian state that is one theoretical endgame, in that once achieved it will likely lock itself into place for a very long time. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that (although I could be proved breathtakingly wrong in the event of a major terrorist attack, and by “major” I mean weapons which makes 9/11 “minor”).

That said, yes, I think we have been a constant state of potential loss of freedoms since around the 1970s, in that computer technologies have provided tremendous means of individual control to governments, without concomitant protections ever being discussed. Some losses have been realized, others remain theoretical. You’re absolutely correct that my concerns cannot be falsified; I rather fail to see, however, why that statement suggests that my concerns are unwarranted.

So please tell me this: how is your standing warning as to the erosion of our civil rights different from the neocon’s standing warning of an impending terrorist attack?

Um… for starters, because a warning about the erosions of civil rights cannot be used as an excuse to erode civil rights?

How come when you call people to action, you’re being dilligent and when they call people to action, they’re “playing the fear card?”

Excellent question. I had to pause for quite a long time to formulate this reply. I can come up with three answers — and I’ll ask you to read through them all before hitting the reply button.

1) First, I believe that when the neocons play the fear card on the dangers of terrorism, they are playing on a much more visceral level than I am when I talk about dangers to freedoms. Like you keep saying, I can point to a whole bunch of things that I consider to be awful, and you can say, “hey, I lived before that happened and after, and it’s not that bad.” On the other hand, the threat of an anthrax attack is a hell of a lot more terrifying. The nature of the fear they play to is much more dangerous.

2) Second, by and large I can document that the fears I point to are more truthful than theirs. Granted that we’ve argued endlessly about each of these — but much of what has been said about terrorism has been demonstrably false, while what I say about the erosion of civil liberties (while often not falsifiable) is not demonstrably false. I.e.: “in any statewide election, there is a cadre of computer engineers working for the company who can completely alter the results.” True? False? No one knows — at least, not until the election mechanisms are transparent. Falsifiable? No.

3) Third regards the nature of that falsifiability. I want systems which can prove me wrong. Give me transparency and I’ll shut the hell up. My arguments are in favor of oversight mechanisms and public information that allow for the public, myself included, to know when we have our political heads up our asses. The neocon arguments for the war on terror argue for more secrecy, less transparency, and a greater need to put our faith in Uncle Sam. (Which is a damned ironic place for the conservative movement to be, but we’ll set that aside for now.)

I think it’s all three taken together that provide me with the ethical leg to stand on, when I attempt to scare the hell out of people into political action defending their liberties. I play fear cards, but in my opinion I do so ethically. It’s the combination of raising concerns about death and dismemberment, relying on stretching the truth and the ignorance of the general public, and refusing to provide information beyond demanding a blind faith in government institutions, which together make the neocon fear methods so toxic and reprehensible.

That said — my gut tells me that a better answer to your question would be shorter, so I reserve the right to someday come up with one.

I support actions that make sense regardless of whether the worst-case scenario plays itself out and reject actions that make sense only when the worst-case scenario plays out. Hence: immigration reform = good; multi-trillion dollar, economically disruptive, wholesale changes to our energy usage = not good.

I fail to see any possible future where reliance on finite fossil fuels results in a good outcome. At best, you’ll watch the world’s great powers scrambling to secure a dwindling resource for their own use, and committing massive financial, political, and military resources to do so. Worst case scenario is probably some combination of WWIII and global economic collapse, but there are a hell of a lot of really bad scenarios which are probable enough to make “wholesale changes to our energy usage” a much preferable path.

I would argue that your formulation above gives you near-infinite latitude to relegate problems to “improbable worst cases”, which leads to the mindset of not doing much of anything until the proverbial shit is on a parabolic trajectory into the proverbial fan; at which point, cf. my earlier arguments about America being really good at problems which can be solved with a Manhattan Project, and really vulnerable to problem which cannot.

I’ve heard you say this a dozen times, and have never been able to pin you down. What papers do you need to travel in the U.S.?

First, let me call bullshit on your phrasing, which implies that I’ve somehow avoided answering this question. If I’ve never laid this out precisely, it’s because I’ve never felt the need to, and I’ve never been asked. (I’m fairly sure I have laid this out precisely, verbally if not online.)

That said, “papers” is meant as a euphemism for “identification”, which in turn is a concise way of saying “your right to travel without being tracked, and without asking permission.” Such right is implicit in the 1st Amendment right to congregate, and explicit in 230 years of case law. This right has been eroded as follows:

1) with few exceptions which I’ll explore later, you need to show identification to board any plane, interstate train, or interstate bus in the US.

2) if you travel by car, unless you borrow a friend’s, your car is uniquely identifiable to you and can be tracked with roadside cameras and interstate toll systems by its license plate or RFID toll records.

Ergo, for most point-to-point travel in the US, you are “providing papers” to travel, even though in some cases you don’t physically need to do so. Likewise, with the no-fly lists, the question of permission to travel is now no longer automatic.

Exceptions, to the best of my knowledge:

1) where regional public travel exists, it is possible to travel anonymously within certain islands of interconnected systems. Last time I checked, you could get from parts of Connecticut as far as southern Delaware this way, and from parts of Maryland to parts of Virginia and West Virginia (although these two islands are not connected). Outside the Northeast Corridor, though, public transit is largely reliant on bus and train systems which require identification.

2) you can fly without identification if you charter an airplane (at least for now; the TSA wants to put an end to this). So if you’re a wealthy terrorist, you can travel with greater anonymity than most Americans can afford.

3) there remain further off-the-grid methods of travel; two which come to mind are hitchhiking and Craigslist-style ride shares.

Any statement I might make as to why this is a bad situation is subject to your fear-mongering attack alluded to earlier, so I’ll simply point to the fact that anonymous travel was once a right protected by the 1st Amendment, which is no longer the case. Obviously, you can choose whether you care, or whether you can picture a personal scenario where you might want to be somewhere and have it be no one’s damn business.

If by “this,” you mean the move to computer-mediated voting then I’m with you – there is definitely evidence that this is already occurring. If, as I suspect, you mean that there’s evidence of wholesale election theft already occurring, then I call bullshit – there have been accusations, not evidence. And the accusations have been, for the most part, baseless.

if I were to postulate the existence of a movement to subvert our basic freedoms, those actions and infrastructures are similar to the actions that we have taken.

The same logic has been used to prove that electronic devices run on smoke (i.e., if they ran on smoke, and you let the smoke out – say by banging on them with hammers – they’d stop working. Since they stop working when the smoke comes out, they must run on smoke. QED).

our rights are defined by our laws, therefore our rights are as strong as the enforcement mechanism we apply to those laws. And hence it is extremely troubling that we show no will to apply the law when the government itself has committed felonies as defined under the legal framework built on the 2nd Amendment.

Sorry to be a stickler here, but our government has committed no felonies with regards to the 2nd ammendment. The term felony presupposes a conviction, and a conviction presupposes a trial. As I mentioned above, all we have so far are accusations, and most of extremely biased (and under-informed) sources. And even with the most unpopular president in history, we haven’t found a lawmaker or a lawyer willing to file charges.

I would call it more the nurturing of an authoritarian impulse, which has been identified as a danger to a democratic state since the 1770s. . . . I’d much rather be proven wrong. The issue here is that by the time I’m proven right, I no longer have the tools at my disposal to engage in dissent, therefore the time to get these ideas circulating is very much in the here and now.

Ah, but here’s the rub: you can’t be proven wrong, can you? Because your thesis is that the authoritarian state is coming, not that it’s here. And it’s always coming. Since the 1770′s. The fact that it hasn’t arrived in 238 years doesn’t make you wrong (or paranoid), it simply means your “correct” conclusions have yet to be proven true. And, as you say, if you ever are proven right, it’s too late to do anything about it.

So please tell me this: how is your standing warning as to the erosion of our civil rights different from the neocon’s standing warning of an impending terrorist attack? How come when you call people to action, you’re being dilligent and when they call people to action, they’re “playing the fear card?” Quite frankly, I see no difference between the two. And in both cases, I support actions that make sense regardless of whether the worst-case scenario plays itself out and reject actions that make sense only when the worst-case scenario plays out. Hence: immigration reform = good; multi-trillion dollar, economically disruptive, wholesale changes to our energy usage = not good.

we need papers to travel in the US.

I’ve heard you say this a dozen times, and have never been able to pin you down. What papers do you need to travel in the U.S.? I travel between New York and New Jersey every single weekday, and I don’t have any papers. As far as I’m aware, I can go anywhere in the United States without any papers of any kind, unless I make use of a private-sector service that has their own rules of usage. Please explain to me what I’m missing…