A Bad Week For Liberty

It’s been a rough week for liberty.

To begin with, we had two terrorist style attacks, the moderately successful Boston Marathon bombing, and the failed ricin poisoning. I doubt either attack was because “they hate our freedom” (few attacks are) but the attacks themselves are attacks on our freedom. As is often the case, just as the human body’s immune system sometimes overreacts to a contagion and does more damage than the disease, the overreaction of the government to terrorism often does a great deal of harm.

In this case, the overreaction was triggered after one of the bombing suspects was killed in a shootout, but the other was on the run, a state of affairs which prompted the easily alarmed Boston Police to shut down the whole city while they tried to catch him. I don’t know what law gives them the right to order citizens off the streets of the whole city — perhaps they used an absurdly broad interpretation of their power to order people away from danger at the scene of a hostage taking or bank robbery — but I’ m guessing they seriously exceeded their constitutional powers.

It’s also kind of stupid to detain millions of people in their homes for no good reason. These people faced real costs, not just in wages losses but also in time, convenience, and freedom, all to avoid a risk that was actually very small. Police should have warned them, and then let them make their own choices.

Then there’s the fact that police allowed Dunkin’ Donuts to stay open so police officers could get food while on duty. As Clark at Popehat brilliantly points out this demonstrates that the Boston Police Department is run by insincere hypocrites:

The government and police were willing to shut down parts of the economy like the universities, software, biotech, and manufacturing…but when asked to do an actual risk to reward calculation where a small part of the costs landed on their own shoulders, they had no problem weighing one versus the other and then telling the donut servers “yeah, come to work – no one’s going to get shot.”

Like minor bureaucratic authoritarians everywhere, they completely dismiss the concerns of anyone who isn’t them.

And then there’s Senator Lindsey Graham, who released an asinine statement from himself and Senator John McCain:

It is clear the events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city. The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorist trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans.

Actually, Senator, they didn’t just try to injure, maim, and kill innocent American. They succeeded. But go on, I’m sure you’re making a point…

Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel. Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks.

What a tool. The suspect wasn’t part of some foreign invasion force. He’s a criminal who killed some people. We put criminals in jail all the time. There’s no need for this Jack-Bauer-national-security bullshit.

We will stand behind the Administration if they decide to hold this suspect as an enemy combatant.

I won’t.

(On the other hand, the whole issue of him being questioned without Miranda warnings is something of a distraction for reasons explained here.)

Meanwhile, as everyone was watching other news, the House passed CISPA.

For the second year in a row,  the House voted to approve CISPA, a bill that would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government.

…

“This bill undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users,” said Rainey Reitman, EFF Activism Director.  “Hundreds of thousands of Internet users opposed this bill, joining the White House and Internet security experts in voicing concerns about the civil liberties ramifications of CISPA.  We’re committed to taking this fight to the Senate and fighting to ensure no law which would be so detrimental to online privacy is passed on our watch.”

Finally, I’ll leave you with a few depressing comments from Rick Horowitz.