Miranda as Prophecy - A Better Subversion

Along with news of the Marathon Bombing, the F.B.I. disclosed that an unknown person had mailed letters containing suspected ricin powder to the president and senator Wicker.  Far more important than the tittle-tattle risk which neither of the "intended victims" came close to incurring was the more ominous inference, which could be deduced from the incident, that the country has been taken into custody.

Within hours, it was reported that the F.B.I. had detained a man "in the area" with a backpack in which sealed envelopes had been found. (BBC) [1] Aha!  Sealed envelopes.  Q.E.D.

What area? we wondered; and how did the agents know that that backpack on that person had contained suspicious "sealed envelopes"?  The reports were devoid of such details -- the question of probable cause apparently is of no interest to the Fourth Estate.  Well they must have had something.... Indeed, but what?  Apparently nothing because the man with the suspicious envelopes was released. 

However, the following day it was reported that the F.B.I. had located a suspect on the basis of tell-tale word patterns.  As it turns out, both letters had used the phrase "I am KC and I approve this message."  The suspect, Kevin Curtis,  had also used the identical phrase in an online comment on a blog post in 2007, the only difference being the use of his full name.  (REUTERS) [2]

The speed and efficacy of the F.B.I. was breathtaking.  They had managed to obtain and serve warrants on an untold number of I.S.P's in a plethora of jurisdictions and plow through six years of global chat in order to discover the telltale needle in a heaping haystack of billions upon billions of chitter in the chatter.

Or, had they merely flipped a switch in a massive datamine of internet traffic filtering bytes through algorithms in search of a phrase?  In either case: Chill out dude -- Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. 

Although the press was content to repeat whatever facts F.B.I. news releases presented to them, they appeared oblivious to the disturbing inferences which might be drawn from the facts the authorities saw fit to disclose.

If the incriminating phrase had been retrieved from a massive datamine of all our on-line (and telephone) communications, then the Government should at least give all of us  the proverbial Miranda warnings.

As a legal matter, Miranda warnings are required only upon being taken into custody. By the same token, the giving of them implicates being in custody.  But equally significant is the fact Miranda states; i.e. that anything said will be used against the declarant.  When anything we say "can and will" be used against us we are no longer free.

It is no doubt true that any statement anywhere can be used to a person's detriment.  But statements made in the open air of freedom get disbursed and lost.  There is a natural haphazardness to their being remembered or, just as likely, forgotten.  In contrast, statements made in custody are recorded. They are taken down as much as the suspect is locked up and this applies equally to statements made during interviews or personal telephones calls.  There is no privacy in custody; and where there is no privacy, there is no freedom.

Most people think of "custody" as a restraint of movement -- of being locked up in a tight space.  But that is only a derivative meaning.  More primarily the word custody means: "A keeping or guarding; care, watch, inspection, for keeping, preservation, or security." (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), p. 358.)

It is necessary to distinguish confinement as punishment and custody as a precaution.  Accused miscreants were locked up in earlier times because it was next to impossible to keep watch over them otherwise. But it is not always necessary to lock up in order to watch over. Black slaves in the United States and collared Roman slaves in Rome were allowed to roam with an appearance of freedom because their colour or their collar rendered them under watch and inspection automatically.  No one would argue that these slaves were not in custody.  On the contrary their status was their detention.

Similarly, the fact that our words are being taken down for keeping and inspection means that we ourselves are being watched for security and are therefore ipso facto in custody even if we are allowed every appearance of free roaming.

The elimination of privacy -- that is to say, the taking custody of a nation -- was most irreversibly the creation of the Patriot Act.  But the ideological underpinnings which allowed the Act to be rationalised under an appearance of logic go back to California v. Greenwood (1988) 486 U.S. 35, which held that there is no expectation of privacy in garbage. Having deposited one’s garbage “in an area particularly suited for public inspection and, in a manner of speaking, public consumption,” a person “could have had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the inculpatory items that they discarded.” (Ibid.)

Yes, the High Court, actually said that.  They said it on the precedent of Smith v. Maryland (1979) 442 U.S. 735 which had held that dialled telephone numbers were not private. Entrusting garbage, the Greenwood Court intoned, was no different than dialling telephone numbers and “we doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.”   To be sure they did not; for, after all, the most very High Court had told them they did not.

We reported on Greenwood back in 2006 because we felt that it was significant in view of the Security Actions being taken by the Government at the time.  (And the Lord will not hear You on that Day )  But little heed was taken of chips in the wind as the Nation moved with determination to eliminate all potential dangers (as they have been called).

The vice of Greenwood is that it perverts our concept of privacy and, doing so, degrades our understanding of freedom.  The premise of Greenwood was that a person has no privacy in public because in public one is exposed to general view.  But, to say as much is to resort to a tautology masquerading as an argument.

It is true that "in public" a person is "in general view" but these two terms are not interchangeable with "no privacy."  What the tautology overlooks is the equally salient fact that "general view" and "surveillance" are not the same thing.  The former is haphazard and indifferent and it is these qualities which create the  space for freedom.  In public, others may notice what we do but for the most part are indifferent to our doings. Because passers-by are not keeping us under watch we are  able to go about our private business in public being left alone.  In contrast, ongoing, purposeful surveillance is the very core definition of custody because it does not leave one alone but rather follows, tracks, records one's every move with the very opposite of indifference.  What Greenwood allows is for the Commons to be turned into a jail and for freedom to be confined to the privacy of one's closet.

To say as much is not a sophistical switching of terms between "privacy" and "freedom."   It is an interchanging of terms which reflects the true meaning of "custody".  Freedom is not simply a question mobility and action.  It is, most essentially, a question of being not under guard.  We are free in public because we are not being watched and, not being watched, we are about our private business in the open.

The roots of Greenwood's misnformed constitutionalism lie in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis entitled, and inceptionally defining, The Right to Privacy.  Not atypically, Brandeis' quill cut both ways.  While the article is credited with birthing the concept of "the right to be left alone," it used medieval English property law as a paradigm and analogised the right of privacy to the fee simple absolute.  In a much quoted paragraph, Warren and Brandeis wrote,

"The common law secures to each individual the right of determining, ordinarily, to what extent histhoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others.  ... [H]e can never be compelled to express them.  ...  The right is lost only when the author himself communicates his production to the public, -- in other words, publishes it. ... [But]  the common-law right is lost as soon as there is a publication."

In so stating, the authors analogised "privacy" to "curtilage" and "publication" to "conveyance." While the analogy suited the article's overriding purpose of delineating the contours of intellectual property it did not deal with and thus provided only a defective basis for assessing privacy in a constitutional context.

In that context, the focus must as much be on the limits of governmental power as on the individual's supposed choice to "disclose" himself.  Between the privacy of one's curtilage and ambit of restrained governmental power lies that in-between space known as "public freedom". 

The concept of voluntary "exposure" may be an adequate foundation for assessing the extent of commercial rights granted or retained in remainder.  But it is not adequate for determining the political contours of freedom. The idea that civic privacy is "lost" by a decision to "expose" one's self (or to "publish" one's garbage) tacitly assumes that everywhere else, not hidden, is government's unimpeded domain to do whatever it wants.   Likewise, it  implicitly converts public conduct to  an at-risk activity.

Taken to extremes, as it has been by the Government's asserted "right" to monitor and record e-mail and social chats, the ambit of privacy gets reduced to the curtilege of our skin.  Any contact outside of one's self becomes an "exposure" subject to surveillance, search, seizure.  Society is effectively atomized and the individual is left to what the Germans once called "inner emigration."   Life is turned into loneliness.

From all time, the world has understood how the existence of spies and delatores (professional snoops and denouncers) chills and snuffs out freedom. The Roman historian Tacitus called them  "a class invented to destroy the commonwealth." (Annals of Imperial Rome  Bk IV,  ch. 30)  But the United States Supreme Court has been impervious to the obvious.  While it has prohibited direct and specific infringements on freedom of expression it has consistently bent over acutely to affirm the Government's prerogative to gather intelligence.

Thus, in Laird v. Tatum (1972)  408 U.S. 1 the Supreme Court famously rejected a claim that  First Amendment rights were chilled "by the mere existence, without more, of a governmental investigative and data-gathering activity."  The information gathered, the Court intoned, was "nothing more than a good newspaper reporter would be able to gather by attendance at public meetings and the clipping of articles from publications available on any newsstand."  Previously in Uphaus v. Wyman, (1950) 360 U.S. 72 the high Court upheld a State's prerogative to "gather and publish information on a person's potentially subversive associations."

Laird's reasoning was beyond specious. Reporters do not have the power to prosecute, imprison and execute.  Government does not investigate to inform but to suppress.  State activity can simply never be analogised to private conduct.  In fact, because of what the State is as such, government participation in or open access to data-gathering of itself transforms the nature of the process. A billing error can be corrected, a libel can be sued; but no imprisoned dissident has successfully sued his government for malicious prosecution.

Equally specious is the argument that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Because all meaning is contextual a speaker who is being recorded is forced to pre-check and reconsider anything he says for possible misinterpretation and use against him in the future.

Specious as it is, the High Court's doctrine could be summarised as, "Far be it from us to second-guess the Government's legislative purposes; if you don't like it, stay at home."  We may now add, "And avoid chat or email."

Historically speaking, the very most High Court is in the highest of company.   Tacitus reports that when the Senate sought to prohibit the use of roving, undercover spies, Tiberius "with a harshness contrary to his manner, spoke openly for the informers, complaining that the laws would be ineffective, and the state brought to the verge of ruin if their use were abolished 'Better,' he said, 'to subvert the constitution than to remove its guardians.'" (Annals   Bk. IV, ch.30.)

Hail Caesar! 

©Woodchip Gazette 2013

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22190031

[2] http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/04/18/uk-usa-obama-letter-idUKBRE93G0OW2013041

[3] http://wcg-journal.blogspot.com/2008/12/and-lord-will-not-hear-you-on-that-day.html

.

Die Volk Gefühlschaft

Why, we have wondered, do people from coast to coast emote over the "tragedy" in Boston?  Although the press churns out one trivial-detail after another, blaming the emote-fest on the press falls short.  People needed little prompting to fill walls on social networks with poster pictures of the little boy... of the hero who... of flickering candles on the pavement and the full detritus of sentimentality.   We stand by you, Boston! Like. The press simply feeds what it knows the people want.

What then do the people want?  It occurs to us that what people want is a sense of community, of belonging and social empathy which we otherwise lack. But it is the same absence of social empathy, community and belonging which gave rise to the bombing in the first place.  In the end, we are trapped in a circle of anomie which feeds on itself.

There is no doubt that those who were directly impacted by the explosion suffered true and grievous losses which will stay with them for a long time.  There is nothing false or superficial about loosing one's child or an arm or a leg.

Those who were present at the event but who were not injured will suffer a psychological impact which arises from a consciousness of uncertainty and vulnerability.  Most humans live within a hermetic bubble of confidence, acquired from the time we take our third, fourth and fifth baby steps.  We could not live otherwise if we were paralysed by intimations of danger and misfortune lurking at every pass.  From time to time,  however, some event brings upon us an awareness  of our mortality and this fills us with hesitancy until we regain our forgetfulness.

But as for the vast rest of us -- are we affected?  No.  We have not lost a leg or a loved one and any danger of a like bombing on our own morning jog is far more remote than that of being struck by an impatient and inattentive motorist.

We are not affected but we want to be. Or, more precisely, we want to feel as if we are because that feeling is the type of feeling we would feel if we were family, neighbours and friends with those who did suffer.

True community arises out of shared experience in work, success, suffering and defeat.  We feel as one because we have felt together in living our common experience.  Even enemies in battle have a sense of community because they have both felt the common experience of war, as the meeting between Priam and Achilles so exquisitely symbolised.  The aged father and the young warrior were able to weep together and share their sorrows because they had each suffered grief at the hand of the other.  

"So the two men there both remembered warriors who’d been slaughtered. Priam, lying at Achilles’ feet, wept aloud  for man-killing Hector, and Achilles also wept  for his own father and once more for Patroclus. The sound of their lamenting filled the house."  (Iliad, Bk 24.)

This was not forgiveness but it was compassion.  The two men shared meat and drink.  They shared rest.  And Achilles gave Priam 12 days to fittingly bury Hector before resuming the war. 

There are happier communions but, howsoever they are, they all arise from real work and proximate living together.  In contrast, the shared experience and interests San Francisco has with Boston are remote and abstract.  The two cities are united by a vast economic engine and a shared deluge of consumer brands, styles and motifs.  But if either were to disappear from the map, the other would not be affected any more than the rest of the country was affected by the swamping of New Orleans.  The connections are real but they are not essential.

The same communal disconnect between Boston and San Francisco exist even between the denizens of Boston itself.  It is, after all, hardly a secret that mass industrial societies suffer from anomie; and it is the individual's estrangement from a society which denies him a connection that nurses and ultimately triggers the despaired reactions of suicide or homicide.

It is thus that the marathon bomber's act serves to remind us that we are estranged from ourselves.  If we were not, then such alienated crimes would not arise, as they do, among us.  To repeat: the bomber's destructive act reminds us that it is we who are alienated - not just him.  This is why in ancient Rome, for example, when a murder occurred within the walls, the entire city had to be evacuated and purified before being reoccupied.

The ancients acknowledged, in this manner, that there is in truth no such thing as an "individual crime."  The alienation that manifests itself in crime is a hole in our social fabric and it is the fabric which requires mending.  In contrast, the intense atomisation of American society (going under the brand of "individualism") masks the alienation which it itself produces so that we do not see the we in the matter.

But we do feel its absence -- that is, we sense our own lacking -- which is why the alienated action of the bomber(s) triggers an immediate and equally alienated reaction: the junk compassion of feeling as if we were affected.

Since the symptom was diagnosed by Durkheim, Western societies have struggled to deal with the problem of anomie.  For the most part, they have relied of "symptom relievers."  The most direct and candid attempt to deal with societal anomie was mounted by Germany's National Socialists whose Volk Gemeinschaft sought to create a palpable and real sense of "national community" without abolishing the industrialised, mechanised, regimented means of production which engendered the feeling of metropolitan isolation in the first place.

The United States has not been lacking in the attempt. The difference is in the style of the kitsch.  And although we do crowd masses onto the Mall on Independence Day where they can sit, eat and listen to insipid speeches and equally bad music, the Miracle of Television has allowed us to create all manner and layers of false community without having to jam people onto a field. 

But the fact remains: we are an alienated non-community and all the sympathetic emoting from coast to coast only serves to underscore that fact.  

©

A Crown of Unfeeling

Chipsters begin their tribute to Margaret Thatcher with a quotation from Mein Kampf,

"The environment of my youth consisted of petty-bourgeois circles, hence of a world having very little relation to the purely manual worker. For, strange as it may seem at first glance, the cleft between this class, which in an economic sense is by no means so brilliantly situated, and the manual worker is often deeper than we imagine. The reason for this hostility, as we might almost call it, lies in the fear of a social group, which has but recently raised itself above the level of the manual worker, that it will sink back into the old despised class, or at least become identified with it. To this, in many cases, we must add the repugnant memory of the cultural poverty of this lower class, and the frequent vulgarity of its social intercourse. The petty bourgeois' own position in society, however insignificant it may be, makes any contact with this outgrown stage of life and culture intolerable.

"Consequently, the higher classes feel less constraint in their dealings with the lowest of their fellow men than seems possible to the 'upstart.' For anyone is an upstart who rises by his own efforts from his previous position in life to a higher one.  Ultimately this struggle, which is often so hard, kills all pity. One's own painful struggle for existence destroys all feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind. "

It is almost unnecessary to say anything more to explain Thatcher's vindictive small-mindedness.  She was the daughter of a shop-keeper and all that that entails.

It is hard for Americans to conceive the sheer damp gloominess that pervades the English shopkeeper class. When they invite you to a cup of tea, they mean a cup of tea.   That's what Thatcher meant by "frugality."  And if her cup overfleweth not, why should anyone else's?   Which is also what she meant by "self-reliance."  If she had to work hard for her cup of tea, why should anyone else get one for "free" no matter how poor they were?

When Napoleon sneered that England was a nation of shop-keepers, he had Margaret Thatcher in mind.  It was not shopping he disdained so much as the absence of any grand conception and the reduction of everything else to one's petty level; or, in other words, the exaltation of pettiness itself into a grand design.

In seeking to understand why Americans (and to a lesser extent the English) were so prone to a pomposity of speech, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that,

"In democratic communities, each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object: namely, himself. If he ever raises his looks higher, he perceives only the immense form of society at large or the still more imposing aspect of mankind.  His ideas are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague; what lies between is a void. When he has been drawn out of his own sphere, therefore, he always expects that some amazing object will be offered to his attention; and it is on these terms alone that he consents to tear himself for a moment from the petty, complicated cares that form the charm and the excitement of his life.  This appears to me sufficiently to explain why men in democracies, whose concerns are in general so paltry, call upon their poets for conceptions so vast and descriptions so unlimited."

Putting de Tocqueville and Hitler together, what emerges is the picture of a class which is very horrified at what it well knows of the below and very desirous of what it is ignorant and can only imagine from above. 

The result of this dialectical clash from within is an ideological synthesis which projects the petty-at-hand onto the infintude of the cosmos  with the anomaly getting bridged  over by hectoring  and pomposity.  Only a nation of shopkeepers could come up with the utilitarian concept of a sumum bonum comprised of nothing else but a vast heap of boni parvi. 

Of course it is all stuff and nonsense. The cosmic fortunes of industrialists and financiers are not "earned" by frugality and self reliance.  They are a social product even if the benefit of it is lopsidedly allocated. The notion that macro-economics follow the "laws" of micro-economics is simply laughable.

But people like Thatcher believe in their own projections and fight with a vindictiveness far stronger than the zeal of any crusader to protect their pettified concept of general welfare by eliminating "waste" on the spendthrifts below. Thatcher's Preferential Option for the Rich entirely suited the true beneficiaries of neo-liberal capitalism who graciously confirmed her clown act with the well-earned  reward of a dame's coronet. 

But it was the crown of unfeeling for the misery of those who have remained behind.

.