John W. Whitehead2013-06-19T20:41:44-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=john-w-whiteheadCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for John W. WhiteheadGood old fashioned elbow grease.Orwell Revisited: Privacy in the Age of Surveillancetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.34543912013-06-17T11:53:12-04:002013-06-17T17:19:29-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."--George Orwell, 1984
There's a reason George Orwell's 1984 is a predominant theme in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (available now on Amazon.com and in stores on June 25). It's the same reason Orwell's dystopian thriller about a futuristic surveillance society has skyrocketed to the top of book charts in the wake of recent revelations by former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that the nefarious spy agency is collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers, with the complete blessing of the Obama administration.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!" ― George Orwell
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people -- even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs. As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
The fact that the U.S. government now has at its disposal a technological arsenal so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void, and these technologies are being used by the government to invade the privacy of the American people should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade.
Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the "security/industrial complex" -- a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance -- has come to dominate our government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."―George Orwell, Animal Farm
What many fail to realize, however, is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending by the government to private corporations is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course, and you can be sure that it will take a toll on more than our pocketbooks. "You have government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets," says Peter Swire, the nation's first privacy counselor in the Clinton Administration. "Once this is done, you will have unprecedented snooping abilities. What will happen to our private lives if we're under constant surveillance?" We're at that point now.
"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." -- George Orwell
Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one's every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, "Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity."
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of terrorists hiding amongst us -- the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed it -- the government has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centers across the country. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched -- especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations. When you drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
As I document in A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any "threatening" words are detected -- no matter how inane or silly -- the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. And in recent years, federal and state governments, as well as private corporations, have been amassing tools aimed at allowing them to monitor Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, just before leaving office, President Bush granted the FBI wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. " -- George Orwell
Here's what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it's not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We've already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called "hateful" thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance is merely the next logical step in the government's attempts to predict and, more importantly, control the populace -- and it's not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared. Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability."
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is coming to a close. If Orwell's predictions prove true, what follows will be even worse. "If you want a picture of the future," he forewarned, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."]]>If Edward Snowden Is a Criminal, Why Aren't the Rest of Us Criminals as Well?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.34228332013-06-13T11:07:17-04:002013-06-13T11:07:27-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remoreseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?" - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1943
In the wake of recent revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) program of mass surveillance directed at all American citizens, Edward Snowden, the alleged leaker of the documents proving the government's misdeeds, is being hailed as a hero by some, a traitor and criminal by others, while some simply don't know what to think.
Here's what I think: Snowden and the countless others like him who are daring to stand up to the government machine are acting as the moral conscience for a nation that has lost its way.
In our current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one's conscience can well render you a criminal. Or as George Orwell put it, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
As I discuss in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, some of history's most pivotal events came about because someone or some group chose to speak out against wrongdoing at great personal cost, even if it meant "breaking" the law. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian with a brilliant future before him and a refuge in the United States, opted instead to take part in a plot to overthrow Hitler and his despotic regime, believing that "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." For his "crime" against the Fuhrer, Bonhoeffer was put to death at Flossenburg Concentration Camp.
Examples of "lawbreakers" who follow their conscience in order to stand against tyranny abound in our own history, starting with the colonists who rose up in opposition to the British crown criminals. The engineers of the Underground Railroad and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were also considered criminals of their day. Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested upwards of 20 times, most often for violating Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation in public facilities.
While technically violating the laws of their time, these individuals chose to speak and act against injustice, whether in the form of tyranny, slavery, or segregation. Instead of keeping their heads down and going with the flow, they raised their voices and sacrificed their security, comfort, and even their lives.
This brings me back to Edward Snowden, who not only has provided a window into the inner workings of American government but is holding up a mirror to American society and reflecting back our inaction, our acceptance of corruption in high places, and our indifference about the steady erosions of our freedoms.
While Snowden's revelations about the NSA were dismaying, they were not surprising. Indeed, what I have found more disconcerting is the left-right response to Snowden's revelations, namely, the willingness by those on both sides to join forces in maintaining the governmental status quo, at all costs.
Talk about showing one's true colors. When politicians with such disparate views as Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lindsey Graham (R-NC) both give a full-throated defense of the Obama administration's undeniably egregious and invasive surveillance activities, it's obvious that we are no longer dealing with questions of freedom, or surveillance, or terrorism, but rather the defense of government power at all costs.
What this collusion reveals is that we currently live under a regime which has fully embraced the Nixonian mantra of "If the president does it, it's not illegal." The system of checks and balances, which is supposed to protect Americans from government overreach like the NSA spying program, is obviously not working.
Even President Obama, the former constitutional law professor, understands this, albeit in a perverse, backwards sort of way. In a recent speech in San Jose, Obama declared: "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." However, when all branches of government are condoning clearly unconstitutional activities by the government against the citizenry, that's a problem.
Moreover, there is no room for trust in the relationship between the government and its citizens. Remember it was James Madison who warned that "All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." Thomas Jefferson's solution was simple: "bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution."
As for the claim that the government is protecting us from further acts of terrorism by systematically violating our civil liberties, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic effectively exorcised that particular demon when he pointed out that the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack is astronomically low, lower than the chances of dying in a car wreck or being hit by lightning.
Thus, the question we should be asking is not whether Edward Snowden is a criminal but why the rest of us aren't criminals as well? What are you doing to push back against the excesses of government, to reclaim our freedoms, and to live up to the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? What are you doing to stop the emerging American police state?]]>America's New Normal: Mass Surveillance, Secret Courts and Punishment for Whistleblowerstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.34150762013-06-11T12:36:08-04:002013-06-11T16:54:10-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it." -- New York Times editorial board
"Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten - and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state." -- Edward Snowden, alleged source of NSA leaks
There is a deep and abiding sense of unease permeating American society. From the IRS targeting politically conservative groups to the Department of Justice targeting journalists for surveillance, from the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is tracking the telephone calls of most Americans to the public spectacle of whistleblower Bradley Manning's trial, in recent weeks there has been no shortage of evidence that the new "normal" in the United States is not friendly to freedom.
The America we learned about in school, the one celebrated in songs and poems, the one to which our ancestors flocked in hopes of starting a new life based upon promises of wealth and liberty, is getting harder to find with every passing day. As I document in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the American ideal of freedom and civic involvement is being replaced by a technocratic nightmare in which government bureaucrats and their allies in the corporate sector rig the rules of society in order to protect the power and privilege of a select few politicians and businessmen. All the while, the majority of the American people are kept in check via debt, imprisonment, and a vast surveillance network which keeps us monitored, controlled and marching in lock step with the government's dictates.
If any of this sounds fantastical, it's only because people haven't been paying close enough attention. Why, in the past week alone, the government has doubled down on its attacks on individual liberty, government transparency, the rule of law, and basic human decency.
On Wednesday, June 5, it was revealed that the NSA has been systematically collecting information on all telephone calls placed in the United States via the Verizon network. Based upon a top-secret order handed down by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) in April 2013, Verizon has been forced to hand over its records to the NSA on an "ongoing, daily basis." While the government insists that the content of telephone conversations are not recorded, they acknowledge that telephone numbers, location data, call duration, and other unique identifiers are sent to the NSA for analysis. The NSA collects information on about 3 billion phone calls per day.
Immediately following the revelation of the secret court order allowing the NSA to record the telephone activities of Verizon customers, The Washington Post released a top-secret document outlining a project code-named PRISM, which involves the NSA and FBI "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets." These companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.
PRISM was born at the tail end of President Bush's disastrous program of warrantless surveillance. It depends in part on legislation passed by Congress in 2007 and 2008, the Protect America Act and FISA Amendments Act, which provide immunity to private companies that voluntarily cooperate with government efforts to collect private data on users. Government officials are increasingly relying upon PRISM for data collection as the program has become the "most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief" and nearly one in seven intelligence reports rely primarily on information extracted via the program.
While shocking to some, these revelations are par for the course for our out-of-control government. Relying on secret orders handed down from government officials and the courts and emboldened by members of Congress with little concern for protecting the rights of the citizenry, government agents are now able to flout all safeguards to privacy while still claiming that they are technically acting within the bounds of the law.
This is no trifling matter. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) have warned that Americans are the subject of a surveillance program that knows no bounds. As Udall has warned, "there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans." For his part, Wyden has asked NSA staff to disclose the number of Americans whose communications have been collected, but NSA officials continue to stonewall, even going so far as to suggest that estimating the number of Americans whose communications have been collected would violate their privacy rights.
In full damage control mode, the government wants us to believe that the surveillance is primarily directed at communications coming from foreign sources and that "reasonable procedures [are] in place to minimize collection of 'U.S. persons' data without a warrant." However, as we are learning, the government rarely tells the truth.
In typical fashion, intelligence officials spent the week attacking journalists for reporting on the NSA's secret surveillance programs, with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper calling the leaks "reprehensible" and vowing to prosecute whomever chose to leak the information. On Sunday, former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden came forward as the source of the NSA leaks. Speaking from Hong Kong, Snowden insisted that the information needed to be seen by the American public, in part to "send a message to government that people will not be intimidated."
Snowden's actions speak to the need for greater citizen action and transparency in government, two qualities sorely lacking in America today. Typical of Beltway politics, however, rather than holding the government accountable for its systematic and illegal surveillance of American citizens, they're looking to shoot the messenger. Indeed, the heads of both the House and Senate Intelligence committees, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) have already come out in favor of Snowden's prosecution.
This is par for the course for the Obama administration, which has relentlessly pursued whistleblowers intent on exposing government crimes. Just ask Bradley Manning, whose court martial is underway. The government plans to call over 140 witnesses to the stand in an attempt to prove that Manning knowingly "aided the enemy" when he released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables outlining various government and military abuses to Wikileaks.
If the government's case succeeds, not only will Manning face life imprisonment, but whistleblowers and journalists alike who dare to hold a mirror to the bloated face of American government will find themselves targeted for censure and prosecution by government agents. Yet as veteran journalist Walter Lippmann once declared, "There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil."
Frankly, we should all be doing our part to shame this particular devil.]]>Now More Than Ever, Everybody's a Target in the American Surveillance Statetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33978342013-06-06T14:18:51-04:002013-06-07T17:43:15-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target."--A senior intelligence official previously involved with the Utah Data Center
The recent revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers, with the complete blessing of the Obama administration, should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade.
As I document in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (available now at Amazon.com), what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations). What too many fail to realize, consumed as they are with partisan politics and blinded by their own political loyalties, is that the massive bureaucracies--now computerized--that administer governmental policy transcend which party occupies the White House.
This explains why the civil liberties abuses carried out by the Bush Administration have not been corrected by the Obama Administration. Rather, they have been expanded upon. Take, for instance, the warrantless wiretapping program conducted during the Bush years, which resulted in the NSA monitoring the private communications of millions of Americans--a program that continues unabated today, with help from private telecommunications companies such as AT&T. The program recorded 320 million phone calls a day when it first started. It is estimated that the NSA has intercepted 15 to 20 trillion communications of American citizens since 9/11.
To our misfortune, the Obama White House has proven to be even worse than the Bush White House when it comes to invading the privacy rights of Americans. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin notes, "We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state. [Obama has] systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration." Unfortunately, whereas those on the Left raised a hew and cry over the Bush administration's constant encroachments on Americans' privacy rights, it appears that the political leanings of those on the Left have held greater sway than their principles. Consequently, the Obama administration has faced much less criticism for its blatant efforts to reinforce the surveillance state.
Insisting that terrorists "will come after us if they can and the only thing that we have to deter this is good intelligence to understand that a plot has been hatched and to get there before they get to us," Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, is defending the NSA's actions, as well as the secret court order requiring Verizon to turn over its phone records to government agents. It's a tired, overused line that preys on Americans' fear of another terrorist attack and offers phantom promises of security while ensuring neither safety nor greater freedom. Even the vague and unsupported claim put forth by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) that the NSA surveillance program "helped thwart 'a significant case' of terrorism in the United States 'within the last few years'" fails to justify a program of this magnitude, which makes everyone a target and turns us all into a nation of suspects.
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is coming to a close. We have moved into a new paradigm in which surveillance technology which renders everyone a suspect is driving the bureaucratic ship that once was our democratic republic. It will not be long before no phone call, no email, no Tweet, no web search is safe from the prying eyes and ears of the government. People going about their daily business will no longer be assured that they are not being spied upon by federal agents and other government bureaucrats.
Thus, the question looms before us. Can freedom in the United States continue to flourish and grow in an age when the physical movements, individual purchases, conversations, and meetings of every citizen are constantly under surveillance by private companies and government agencies?
Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for so-called "worthy" (read: politically expedient) reasons such as preventing another terrorist attack, does not surveillance of all citizens gradually poison the soul of a nation and render us all data collected in government files? Does not such surveillance completely eviscerate our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as guaranteed by our Constitution?]]>Without Mavericks Like Nat Hentoff, Age 88, Freedom Would Be a Word Without Contenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33908292013-06-05T12:37:23-04:002013-06-05T17:51:02-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life, they would not recognize this country. We have been through some troubling times before in our nation's history. I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep our country free from our own government. Whereas we once operated under the Constitution, we are now, for example, under the USA Patriot Act, among other government dragnets, that permits pervasive electronic surveillance with minimal judicial review. The government listens in on our phone calls. It reads our mail. You have to be careful about what you do and say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, since the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious. We have no idea how much the government knows about average citizens. This is not the way the government born under the Declaration of Independence is supposed to operate."--Nat Hentoff, Introduction to A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State
I've had the privilege of working with some remarkable individuals in my lifetime--celebrities, politicians, writers, artists, musicians, journalists, people whose names are legendary and others whose impact, no less significant, was only felt by a small few--yet for sheer nerve, integrity, tenacity, vision and a love of America that has weathered the best and worst this nation has had to offer, no one can match Nat Hentoff.
Even at the ripe age of 88, Hentoff is a radical in the best sense of the word, a feisty, fiercely loyal, inveterate freedom fighter and warrior journalist with a deep-seated intolerance of injustice and a well-deserved reputation for being one of the nation's most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers.
Armed with a keen understanding of the law and an enviable way with words, brandishing a rapier wit and teeming with moral outrage, Nat has never been one to back down from a fight, and there have been many over the course of his lifetime--one marked by controversy and fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. There was the time Nat testified for stand-up comic and political satirist Lenny Bruce during his obscenity trial; stood up for a woman rejected from law school for being white; called into Oliver North's talk show to voice his agreement about liberal intolerance for free speech; and resigned from the ACLU in protest of their position on assisted suicide, as well as their position against revealing the results of HIV tests on newborn babies.
This is also a man who has walked among political and cultural giants and lived to tell the tale. He was friends with Malcolm X, was labeled "the Antichrist" by Louis Farrakhan, and came to know some of the most talented jazzmen of all time--Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Dizzy Gillespie, to name a few. He attended John Lennon and Yoko Ono's famous Toronto Bed-In. He also wrote album liner notes for such musical greats as Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, and Aretha Franklin.
A self-described uncategorizable libertarian, Hentoff adds he is also a "Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro-lifer." Born in Boston on June 10, 1925, Hentoff received a B.A. with honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. From 1953 to 1957, he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He went on to write many books on jazz, biographies and novels, including children's books. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Commonwealth, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for more than 25 years. In 1980, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Education and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1985, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Northeastern University. For 50 years, Hentoff wrote a weekly column for the Village Voice. When that position was terminated on December 31, 2008, Hentoff joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow.
Despite an illustrious career as a journalist, there has been no shortage of derogatory labels applied to Nat by his critics, including, as he notes in his memoir, Speaking Freely:
a radical (according to the FBI): an "enslaver of women" (according to pro-choicers); a suspiciously unpredictable civil-libertarian (according to the ACLU); a dangerous defender of alleged pornography (according to my friend Catherine MacKinnon); an irrelevant, anachronistic integrationist (according to assorted black nationalists); and, as an editor at the Washington Post once said, not unkindly--"a general pain in the ass."
Indeed, in keeping with his role as a socio-political gadfly, Nat has managed to anger nearly every political faction by sticking to his principles, regardless of the trouble it stirs up. When Nat first declared himself an "atheist pro-lifer," women in his Village Voice office actually stopped speaking to him. Likewise, although ACLU affiliates around the country had for years invited him to speak at fundraising dinners, after declaring himself a pro-lifer, all such invitations stopped.
Even his forced departure from the Village Voice could not dampen Nat's zeal nor temper his voice. In fact, Hentoff has been a vocal critic of the last three presidents. As he remarked in a 2012 interview he did with me:
With Bush, Cheney and Obama, we are seeing the same attacks on the Constitution. One of my biggest fears is as this goes on, and it can go on, kids will not make the Constitution part of their lives. They won't know much at all about the Bill of Rights -- the centerpiece of our democracy. We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment, for example.
At the end of the day, what sets Nat Hentoff apart is the fact that he has never lost his sense of rage, nor his eternal optimism. "Nat Hentoff has never allowed his thought to harden into ideology," writes Allen Barra for the Village Voice. "He's never lost his talent to agitate us and make us rethink our own positions--to make sure that our minds watch ourselves."
It's people like Nat Hentoff who keep us honest, inspire us, and push us to think. Certainly, he has inspired me time and time again to not give up, even when all seems hopeless, and to never stop working for the greater good. With such a rich assortment of famous characters populating his own life, I wondered which one he would credit with having most inspired him to spend his life tilting at windmills, at it were. Was it a Supreme Court justice? Bob Dylan? Malcolm X?
Just when I thought nothing about this Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro-life, socio-political gadfly could surprise me anymore, Nat threw me another curve ball by naming a devout Catholic woman I'd never heard of as the greatest source of his inspiration:
Frances Sweeney is the one who has most influenced my life. She was a devout Catholic. She was also furious at the anti-Semitism in Boston, spoke against it, wrote against it and was very angry that the Catholic press never said anything about it. So she went to see then Cardinal O'Connell, not O'Connor -- I knew O'Connor later. O'Connell paid no attention to it. He almost threatened her with excommunication if she didn't stop. Of course, she wouldn't. Frances got some of us to attend various meetings including meetings of anti-Semitic groups. And that is when I learned not to take notes when people are watching you. But anyway, I so respected her and what she did for us. Then one day, she had us take a test as to what our prejudices were. The next meeting she threw the papers on the desk and said, "You are all a bunch of bigots." Our own prejudices came out. That impressed me. But I supposed what most impressed me was she never stopped doing what she wanted to do. Her doctors told her to soften up her schedule. She had a heart condition. She had a heart attack on one of the main streets in Boston. She fell into the gutter and could not speak. But she did remember afterwards when she could speak that people would come by -- I guess she looked very Irish to them -- they didn't do anything to help her. Some people would say, "See? Another Irish drunk." She recovered from that for a short time. This encapsulates the kind of life I most admire.
]]>Maryland v. King and the Total Loss of Our Bodily Integritytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33801382013-06-04T12:00:11-04:002013-06-04T15:46:26-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason." -- Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting in Maryland v. King
As I document in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, our freedoms -- especially the Fourth Amendment -- are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
Now, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's devastating decision in Maryland v. King -- in which a divided Court determined that a person arrested for a crime who is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty must submit to forcible extraction of their DNA -- you can add invasive DNA sampling to the list of abuses being "legally" meted out on the long-suffering American populace.
Once again the Court has sided with the guardians of the police state over the defenders of individual liberty in determining that DNA samples may be extracted from people arrested for "serious offenses." While the Court claims to have made its decision based upon concerns of properly identifying criminal suspects upon arrest, what they have actually done is opened the door for a nationwide dragnet of suspects targeted via DNA sampling.
The case revolves around Alonzo King, who was arrested on April 10, 2009, and charged with assault. Relying on a state law that authorizes DNA collection from people arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, while processing King's arrest, police obtained his DNA via a forcible cheek swab without first procuring a warrant. This information was not used to identify him, but rather sat in a police file, and then a crime lab, before finally being tested some months later. In the meantime, King was positively identified via fingerprinting and other methods. Once his DNA was finally tested, over three months later, the results were entered into Maryland's DNA database, alongside other personally identifying information. This information was then forwarded to the FBI's national DNA database, where it was found to be a match to evidence taken from the scene of an unsolved rape that occurred in 2003. King was then tried and convicted of the 2003 rape.
On appeal, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in April 2012 that the state law used to forcibly extract King's DNA violated the Fourth Amendment. In an unusual move, in July 2012, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a stay of the lower court's ruling, prior to the Court's even agreeing to hear the case, using the rationale that collecting DNA from people accused of serious crimes is "an important feature of day-to-day law enforcement practice in approximately half the states and the federal government."
When King's lawyers mounted their appeal to the Supreme Court, insisting that the police had not obtained a warrant in order to extract King's DNA and had no particular reason for obtaining his DNA during his arrest, Roberts sided with the police, justifying the practice as being a legitimate means of identifying individuals suspected of having committed "serious offenses." With Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito joining Roberts in affirming the practice of warrantless DNA grabs by the police, the Court's 5-4 ruling further guts an already severely disemboweled Fourth Amendment and goes so far as to equate forcefully obtaining a DNA sample to "fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment."
The only glimmer of reason came from Justice Antonin Scalia, who wasted no time dispatching the Court's dubious claim that DNA is necessary for suspect identification. Scalia was joined in his biting dissent by the three female justices on the Court (Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan). As the minority opinion pointed out, Maryland actually took a full three months to test King's DNA before handing the DNA over to the FBI to be matched against a database of unsolved crimes (that is, crimes in which the suspect has not been identified). Clearly, the state's intention was not to identify King, but to potentially implicate him in a crime other than the one for which he was accused.
While the Court majority attempted to delineate a difference between collecting DNA in general versus cases in which the suspect is accused of a "serious offense," Scalia rightly pointed out how meaningless this distinction really is, given that the Court's ruling succeeds only in burdening "the sole group for whom the Fourth Amendment's protections ought to be most jealously guarded: people who are innocent of the State's accusations." For example, if such a questionable practice were to prevail simply for the sake of "solving more crimes," as Scalia suggests, it would not take much to justify the "taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the "identity" of the flying public), applies for a driver's license, or attends a public school."
As disheartening as this ruling is, it is simply one more volley in a long line of attacks on our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. In the past few years, the Supreme Court has determined that freedom from unreasonable government intrusion, a core component of the United States Constitution, is of little importance in an age of surveillance and security at any cost.
Any American who thinks they're safe from the threat of DNA sampling simply because they've "done nothing wrong," needs to wake up to the new reality in which we're now living. As the Supreme Court's ruling in Maryland v. King shows, the mindset of those in the highest seats of power--serving on the courts, in the White House, in Congress--is a utilitarian one that has little regard for the Constitution, let alone the Fourth Amendment. Like Justice Scalia, all I can hope is that "today's incursion upon the Fourth Amendment" will someday be repudiated.]]>The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporationstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33317942013-05-24T14:13:57-04:002013-05-24T14:08:21-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"[F]orce alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war -- through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments -- will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." -- Barack Obama, May 23, 2013
President Obama's declaration that "America is at a crossroads" in the fight against terror, a fight that is increasingly turning inwards, setting its sights on homegrown extremists, should give every American pause.
We have indeed reached a crossroads. History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let's call it the age of authoritarianism.
Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America's new normal. Don't believe me? Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself: the landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.
The Executive Branch: Whether it's the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers, the systematic surveillance of journalists and regular citizens, the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, or the occupation of Afghanistan, Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in terms of his abuse of the Constitution and the rule of law. Despite his prior stint as a professor of constitutional law, President Obama, like many of his predecessors, has routinely disregarded the Constitution when it has suited his purposes, operating largely above the law and behind a veil of secrecy and specious legal justifications.
Drone Strikes on American Citizens: For almost two years, the United States government has been targeting American citizens abroad for death by drone, with at least four American citizens assassinated by drones outside the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. These assassinations of individuals entitled to the full protection of the Constitution have been carried out without any due process whatsoever -- no charges detailing their alleged wrongdoings were brought before them, no trial was conducted to determine their guilt or innocence, and no convictions of guilt were found. Obama has also gone to great lengths to give the impression that the drone assassination program is a carefully controlled, highly selective process, within the bounds of the rule of law. Yet when hundreds of individuals, innocent women and children among them, are being killed as a result of these drone strikes, clearly the process is far from controlled or selective. These "signature strikes," which involve targeting groups of unknown men who resemble al Qaeda members, are the equivalent of bombing a fraternity house because there are young men inside who may be up to no good. It is a practice that is inhumane, immoral and illegal, and no amount of legal parsing or political whitewashing will remove this particular stain.
Expanding the War on Terror: Although Obama insists he has no intention of continuing the wars in which the United States is embroiled, administration officials are sending an altogether different message -- namely, that America's engagement in the ongoing war on terror spans the entire globe. At a recent congressional hearing, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, cited the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) law as justification for the administration's ability to send American troops to places such as Yemen and the Congo without first seeking congressional authorization. Sheehan also asserted that the United States conflict with al-Qaeda will last for another ten or twenty years. As Senator Angus King (I-Maine) remarked to Sheehan: "You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today... I don't disagree that we need to fight terrorism. But we need to do it in a constitutionally sound way."
Law Enforcement: By and large the term "law enforcement" encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, the police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America's law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
The Legislative Branch: It is not overstating matters to say that Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office run the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public's increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. Thus, it is little wonder that a recent Gallup poll shows Congress with a 79 percent disapproval rating.
The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.
A Suspect Society: Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Making matters worse are Terrorism Liaison Officers (firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees) who have been trained to spy on their fellow citizens and report "suspicious activity," which includes taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs and buying items in bulk. TLOs report back to "fusion centers," which are a driving force behind the government's quest to collect, analyze, and disseminate information on American citizens.
We the People: Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government -- or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time, in this case it being the Obama administration. In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government's repeated failures in this department. In the second camp are those who not only don't trust the government but think the government is out to get them. In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound "down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution." Then there's the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government, so much so that they barely vote, let alone know who's in office. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government's job far easier than it should be.
I haven't even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate, unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.]]>'Round the Clock Surveillance: Is This the Price of Living in a 'Free, Safe' Society?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32672142013-05-14T12:00:18-04:002013-05-14T12:06:29-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"If you're not a terrorist, if you're not a threat, prove it. This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It's just the way it is." -- Sergeant Ed Mullins of the New York Police Department
Immediately following the devastating 9/11 attacks, many Americans willingly ceded their rights and liberties to government officials who promised them that the feeling of absolute safety could be restored.
In the 12 years since, we have witnessed the onslaught of a full-blown crisis in government, starting with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, continuing with the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and coming to a head with the assassination of American citizens abroad, the importing of drones and other weapons of compliance, and the rise in domestic surveillance.
Still Americans have gone along with these assaults on their freedoms unquestioningly.
Even with our freedoms in shambles, our country in debt, our so-called "justice" system weighted in favor of corporations and the police state, our government officials dancing to the tune of corporate oligarchs, and a growing intolerance on the part of the government for anyone who challenges the status quo, Americans have yet to say "enough is enough."
Now, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, we are once again being assured that if we only give up a few more liberties and what little remains of our privacy, we will be a free, safe society. The reality of life in America tells a different tale, however. For example, in a May 2013 interview with CNN, former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente disclosed that the federal government is keeping track of all digital communications that occur within the United States, whether or not those communicating are American citizens, and whether or not they have a warrant to do so.
As revelatory as the disclosure was, it caused barely a ripple of dismay among Americans, yet it confirms what has become increasingly apparent in the years after 9/11: The federal government is literally tracking any and all communications occurring within the United States, without concern for the legal limitations of such activity, and without informing the American people that they are doing so.
Clemente explained that authorities would have no trouble determining the nature of communications between deceased Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his widow Katherine Russell. "We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation," stated Clemente. "All of that stuff [meaning phone conversations occurring in America] is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."
In other words, there is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor -- phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, Internet video chats, etc., are all accessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents.
At one time, such actions by the government would not only have been viewed as unacceptable, they would also have been considered illegal. Some still are. However, the government seems unfazed. For example, despite federal court rulings to the contrary, the Department of Justice continues to assert that it does not require a warrant to access Americans' emails, Facebook chats, and other forms of digital communication.
Making matters worse, these government-initiated spying programs depend in large part on the willingness of corporations to hand over personal information about their customers to government officials, one of the so-called benefits of the corporate state merger. Some web companies, such as Skype, have already altered their products to allow government agents backdoor access to American communications. Corporations are also working on technologies to allow government agents even easier access to Americans' communications. For example, Google has filed a patent for a "Policy Violation Checker," software that would monitor an individual's communications as they type them out, whether in an email, an Excel spreadsheet or some other digital document, then alert the individual, and potentially their employer or a government agent, if they type any "problematic phrases" which "present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual." The software would work by comparing the text being typed to a pre-defined database of "problematic phrases," which would presumably be defined on a company-by-company basis.
The emergence of this technology fits in well with Google chairman Eric Schmidt's view on privacy, which is, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Unfortunately, this is not just the attitude of corporate benefactors who stand to profit from creating spy technology and software but government officials as well.
Additionally, police officials throughout the country have become increasingly keen on monitoring social media websites in real time. Rob D'Ovido, a criminal justice professor at Drexel University, has noted that, "The danger of this in light of the tragedy in Boston is that law enforcement is being so risk-averse they are in danger of crossing that line and going after what courts would ultimately deem as free speech."
For example, Cameron Dambrosio, a teenager and self-styled rap artist living in Metheun, Mass., posted a video of one of his original songs on the Internet, which reportedly included references to the White House and the Boston bombing. Police officers arrested Dambrosio and charged him with communicating terrorist threats, a felony charge which could land him in prison for 20 years.
Unfortunately, cases like Dambrosio's may soon become the norm, as the FBI's Next Generation Cyber Initiative has announced that its "top legislative priority" this year is to get social media giants like Facebook and Google to comply with requests for access to real-time updates of social media websites. The proposed method of encouraging compliance is legal inquiries and hefty fines leveled at these companies. The Obama administration is expected to support the proposal.
The reality is this: we no longer live in a free society. Having traded our freedoms for a phantom promise of security, we now find ourselves imprisoned in a virtual cage of cameras, wiretaps and watchful government eyes. All the while, the world around us is no safer than when we started on this journey more than a decade ago. Indeed, it well may be that we are living in a far more dangerous world, not so much because the terrorist threat is any greater but because the government itself has become the greater threat to our freedoms.]]>Pete Seeger: Changing the World One Song at a Timetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32227582013-05-06T10:04:35-04:002013-05-06T16:34:19-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple." -- Pete Seeger
Before the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Jim Hendrix, Bob Dylan and others, there was Pete Seeger. With his five-string banjo in hand, Seeger helped to lay the foundation for American protest music, singing out about the plight of everyday working folks and urging listeners to political and social activism. In fact, Pete Seeger is one of the most important musical influences of the 20th century.
Born in New York City on May 3, 1919, Seeger, whose father was a pacifist musicologist, was plunged into the world of music and politics from an early age. He studied sociology at Harvard University until 1938, when he dropped out and spent the summer bicycling through New England and New York, painting watercolors of farmers' houses in return for food. Looking for but failing to get a job as a newspaper reporter in New York City, he then worked at the Archives of American Folk Music at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In 1940, Seeger met Woody Guthrie at a Grapes of Wrath migrant-worker benefit concert. Seeger, Guthrie, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell joined together to form the Almanac Singers, which became known for its political radicalism and support of communism.
In 1942, Seeger was drafted by the U.S. Army and sent to Saipan in the Western Pacific. After the war, he helped start the People's Songs Bulletin, later Sing Out! magazine, which combined information on folk music with social criticism. In 1950, Seeger formed The Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. Targeted for the political messages behind some of their songs, the group was blacklisted and banned from television and radio.
In 1955, the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed Seeger to appear before them (read his testimony). During the hearings, Seeger refused to disclose his political views and the names of his political associates. When asked by the committee to name for whom he had sung, Seeger replied, "I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches, and I do this voluntarily. I have sung for many, many different groups--and it is hard for perhaps one person to believe, I was looking back over the twenty years or so that I have sung around these forty-eight states, that I have sung in so many different places." He was sentenced to one year in jail but, quoting the First Amendment, successfully appealed the decision after spending four hours behind bars. However, he has been blacklisted most of his life from normal radio and television work.
During the 1960s, Seeger traveled around the country, continuing to play his folk songs for the peace and civil rights movements. Deeply offended by the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Seeger, along with other folk singers such as Joan Baez, led many protests.
"Wherever he was asked, when the need was the greatest, he, like Kilroy, was there. And still is," said his long-time friend, Studs Terkel. "Though his voice is somewhat shot, he holds forth on that stage. Whether it be a concert hall, a gathering in the park, a street demonstration, any area is a battleground for human rights."
In 1963, Seeger recorded the now-famous gospel song "We Shall Overcome." In 1965, he sang it on the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, with Martin Luther King, Jr. and 1,000 other marchers. That song would go on to become the anthem for the civil rights movement and be translated into many languages. Seeger also turned his attention to cleaning up the Hudson River that ran past his home. In 1966, he helped form Clearwater, an organization dedicated to educating the public on environmental concerns such as pollution and protecting the river. The group offers educational programs for children on a 76-foot replica of a traditional Hudson cargo sloop and holds a two-day festival on the banks of the Hudson River every June.
Seeger was awarded the Presidential Medal of the Arts and the prestigious Kennedy Center Award in 1994. In 1996, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his contribution to music and to the development of rock and folk music. In April of that year, he received the Harvard Arts Medal, and after decades of creating songs, in 1997, Seeger won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for his album, Pete.
Seeger, however, has not always been so lavishly praised. Often chastised for his "communist beliefs," Seeger has dealt with criticism and misunderstanding. "I say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other," he says.
While many of the legendary men and women Seeger associated with are gone, he continues his political and environmental endeavors. He still seems to subscribe to the same philosophy he held to four decades ago, when he advised young people to follow their hearts and take initiative: "Well, here's hoping all the foregoing will help you avoid a few dead-end streets (we all hit some), and here's hoping enough of your dreams come true to keep you optimistic about the rest. We've got a big world to learn how to tie together. We've all got a lot to learn. And don't let your studies interfere with your education."
At 94 years old, Pete Seeger is still speaking out. Indeed, in an interview I conducted with Pete Seeger several years ago, I asked him whether he had found an answer to the question "When will they ever learn?" which he repeatedly posed in his song, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." Seeger's response is one for the books:
We will never know everything. But I think if we can learn within the next few decades to face the danger we all are in, I believe there will be tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of human beings working wherever they are to do something good. I tell everybody a little parable about the "teaspoon brigades." Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is on the ground because it has a big basket half full of rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air because it's got a basket one quarter full of sand. Some of us have teaspoons and we are trying to fill it up. Most people are scoffing at us. They say, "People like you have been trying for thousands of years, but it is leaking out of that basket as fast as you are putting it in." Our answer is that we are getting more people with teaspoons every day. And we believe that one of these days or years--who knows--that basket of sand is going to be so full that you are going to see that whole seesaw going zoop! in the other direction. Then people are going to say, "How did it happen so suddenly?" And we answer, "Us and our little teaspoons over thousands of years." But I don't think we have forever. I now believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years before they died on the same day. They asked, "How can one have prosperity without commerce? How can one have commerce without luxury? How can one have luxury without corruption? How can you have corruption without the end of the Republic?" And they really didn't know the answer. Today I would ask, "How can one have a technological society without research? How can one have research without researching dangerous areas? How can one research dangerous areas without uncovering dangerous information? How can you uncover dangerous information without it falling into the hands of insane people who will sooner or later destroy the human race, if not the whole of life on earth?" Who knows? God only knows!
The Seeger interview in its entirety is available here.]]>50 Years After Birmingham, Injustice Is Still Heretag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31798212013-04-29T16:49:57-04:002013-04-29T16:50:08-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here." -- Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
No one is happy -- not the politicians, who want more power, more control and less oversight; not the citizenry, who want fewer taxes, fewer regulations and greater freedom; and not small business owners, who are being strangled to death by the glut of bureaucratic red-tape being directed their way. Indeed, the only two sectors that might be reasonably content with the status quo, profiting as they do from our misery, are the corporations (especially the security and military industrial complexes) and, by extension, the corporate media.
The times are definitely calling for a change, and a significant change at that, not the cosmetic pandering that passes for political and social rhetoric today. What we are grappling with is how that change will be brought about. Clearly, the political process hasn't worked, as evidenced by the failure in recent years by both political parties and independent movements to achieve any meaningful change. Clearly, violence is also not the answer, neither on the government's part nor on the part of disgruntled citizens. Violence only leads to more violence.
So where does this leave us?
It was exactly fifty years ago this year that Martin Luther King Jr. found himself faced with a similar dilemma. His answer to a white populace largely satisfied with the status quo and critical of his call to activism and a black citizenry hungry for equality and immediate change was what he would later refer to as "military nonviolent resistance."
The seething stew that was racial conflict finally boiled over in 1963, with King at the helm, leading demonstrations and marches in one segregated city after another. Jailed for participating in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala., -- one of the most racially segregated cities in the country at the time, King found himself on the defensive after eight prominent "liberal" Alabama clergypersons, all white, published an open letter castigating King for inciting civil disturbances through nonviolent resistance and calling on him to let the local and federal courts deal with the question of integration.
Although King rarely bothered to defend himself against his critics, he used his time behind bars to put pen to paper and refute those who not only opted to stand silently on the sidelines and do nothing in the face of injustice and oppression but found fault with any who took a more activist stance in the face of an urgent need. The result was King's stirring "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," written on April 16, 1963.
King understood that if justice and freedom were to prevail, African Americans could not afford to be long-suffering. Quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, King wrote, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied."
Action was needed immediately. In his letter, King declared:
"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.... Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.... We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.... You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern.... One may well ask, 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that 'An unjust law is no law at all.'... Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.... I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.... We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.' It was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.... It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will.... But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love--'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.'... Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist--"This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist-- 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love?"
The word "extremist" has taken on negative connotations over the years, but it is appropriate here. When talking about the urgent need for transformative change, there can be no room for timidity or lukewarm emotions. What we need is passion and dedication and courage.
Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. urged Americans to stop standing on the sidelines and become extremists for love and gadflies for change, relying on militant nonviolent resistance as the means for that change, we're in dire need of that pep talk once again, because injustice is still here.]]>Roaches, Mosquitoes and Birds: The Coming Micro-Drone Revolutiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30849652013-04-17T12:48:15-04:002013-06-17T05:12:01-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"[Drones are a] game-changing technology, akin to gunpowder, the steam engine, the atomic bomb -- opening up possibilities that were fiction a generation earlier but also opening up perils that were unknown a generation ago." -- Peter Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
America will never be a "no drone zone."
That must be acknowledged from the outset. There is too much money to be made on drones, for one, and too many special interest groups -- from the defense sector to law enforcement to the so-called "research" groups that are in it for purely "academic" reasons -- who have a vested interest in ensuring that drones are here to stay.
At one time, there was a small glimmer of hope that these aerial threats to privacy would not come home to roost, but that all ended when Barack Obama took office and made drones the cornerstone of his war efforts. By the time President Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act into law in 2012, there was no turning back. The FAA opened the door for drones, once confined to the battlefields over Iraq and Afghanistan, to be used domestically for a wide range of functions, both public and private, governmental and corporate. It is expected that at least 30,000 drones will occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, ushering in a $30 billion per year industry.
Those looking to the skies in search of Predator drones will be in for a surprise, however, because when the drones finally descend en masse on America, they will not be the massive aerial assault vehicles favored by the Obama administration in their overseas war efforts. Rather, the drones coming to a neighborhood near you will be small, some nano in size, capable of flying through city streets and buildings almost undetected, while hovering over cityscapes and public events for long periods of time, providing a means of 24/7 surveillance.
One type of drone sensor, the Gorgon Stare, can keep track of an area 2.5 miles across from 12 different angles. Another sensor system, ARGUS, can find an object that is only 6 inches long, from 20,000 feet up in the air. A drone equipped with this kind of technology could spy on an entire city at once. For example, police in California are about to begin using Qube drones, which are capable of hovering for 40 minutes at heights of about 400 ft. to conduct surveillance on targets as far as one kilometer away. Michael Downing, the LAPD deputy chief for counter-terrorism and special operations, envisions drones being flown over large-scale media events such as the Oscars, using them to surveil political protests, and flying them through buildings to track criminal suspects.
These micro-drones will be the face of surveillance and crowd control in the coming drone age.
Modeled after birds, insects, and other small animals, these small airborne surveillance devices can remain hidden in plain view while navigating spaces off limits to conventional aircraft. Able to take off and land anywhere, able to maneuver through city streets and hallways, and able to stop and turn on a dime, these micro-drones will still pack a lethal punch, equipped with an array of weapons and sensors, including tasers, bean-bag guns, "high-resolution video cameras, infrared sensors, license plate readers, [and] listening devices."
You can rest assured, given the pace of technology and the fervor of the drone industry (and its investors), that the sky is the limit when it comes to the many uses (and abuses) for drones in America. The following is just a small sampling of what will be descending from the skies in the near future.
Cyborg drones. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has begun to develop a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) for the manipulation of insects into "cyborgs." Through genetic engineering, they are aiming to control the movement of insects and utilize them for surveillance purposes.
Dragonfly drone. First reportedly spotted in 2007 hovering over protesters at an anti-war rally in Washington, DC, it turns out that the government's dragonfly drones are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to small aerial surveillance devices designed to mimic nature. Just a year later, the U.S. Air Force "unveiled insect-sized spies 'as tiny as bumblebees' that could not be detected and would be able to fly into buildings to 'photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.'"
Hummingbird drone. Shaped like a bird, the "Nano Hummingbird" drone is negligibly larger than an actual hummingbird and fits in the palm of one's hand. It flits around effortlessly, blending in with its surroundings. DARPA, the advanced research division of the Department of Defense, gets the credit for this biotic wonder.
Nano Quadrators. Similar to the hummingbird drone, these small, four-propellered nano quadrator drones, developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, operate based upon the flight dynamics of insects, enabling them to operate as a swarm. Using 20 drones, researchers demonstrated how, moving compactly as a unit, the drones were able to navigate obstacles, form complex patterns, and even execute a fluid figure eight arrangement.
Black Hornet Nano drone. Weighing in at roughly half an ounce and four inches long, comparable to a finch, the Black Hornet Nano helicopter drone was designed to capture and relay video and still images to remote users, and can fly even in windy conditions.
DASH Roachbot drone. Developed at UC Berkeley's PolyPEDAL Lab, DASH, a 10-centimeter long, 16-gram Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod strives to mimic a cockroach's speed and ability to remain covert and a gecko's speed and agility. Trained to perform "rapid inversion" maneuvers that include dashing up to a ledge and then swinging itself around to end up underneath the ledge and upside-down, DASH is being trained to make rapid transitions between running and climbing.
Samarai drone. Lockheed Martin's compact "Samarai" drone, inspired by the design of a maple seed, is capable of high speeds, low battery consumption, vertical movement, and swift ground deployment.
MicroBat drone. Additionally, CIT Group, Aerovironment, and UCLA have produced a "MicroBat" ornithopter; it was designed in part by zoologists who have attempted to make the MicroBat mimic the movement of birds and other flying animals.
Spy-butterfly drone. In 2012, Israel unveiled its new insect-inspired drone which they dubbed the "spy-butterfly" because of its two sizable wings. Weighing in at only 20g, this drone was developed for indoor surveillance, including public places such as "train stations and airport terminals -- or office buildings." The size and muted sound of the "virtually noiseless" machines makes them unnoticeable and therefore ideal for intelligence gathering. The spy-butterfly is so realistic that, when tested, "birds and flies tended to fall behind the device arranging into a flock."
Switchblade drone. A more sinister example is the Switchblade, a small military drone intended to act as a kamikaze weapon. Weighing in at a mere six pounds and two feet in length, it flies effortlessly through urban environments before zeroing in on its target, a person, at which point it explodes, unceremoniously killing him or her.
Mosquito drone. More lethal than its real-life counterpart, the mosquito drone, while an engineering marvel, is also a privacy advocate's nightmare with its potential to land on someone and use a needle-like-pincer to extract DNA from its victims or, alternatively, inject drugs or other foreign substances. As software engineer Alan Lovejoy notes:
Such a device could be controlled from a great distance and is equipped with a camera, microphone. It could land on you and then use its needle to take a DNA sample with the pain of a mosquito bite. Or it could inject a micro RFID tracking device under your skin. It could land on you and stay, so that you take it with you into your home. Or it could fly into a building through a window. There are well-funded research projects working on such devices with such capabilities.
Raven drone. Weighing in at 4 pounds, the RQ-11 Raven drone is not as small, nor is it as agile as its smaller counterparts, but with more than 19,000 out there already, it is the most common. Useful for seeing around corners and sending footage back to its handlers, the Raven resembles a rudimentary model airplane and crumbles like Legos upon landing.
With 63 active drone sites across the nation and 56 government agencies presently authorized to use drones, including 22 law enforcement agencies and 24 universities, drones are here to stay. Indeed, the cost of drones -- underwritten by a $4 million Homeland Security program which encourages local law enforcement to adopt drone technology as quickly as possible -- makes them an easy sell for most police departments. Moreover, while manned airplanes and helicopters can cost $600/hour to operate, a drone can be put in the sky for less than $25/hour. That doesn't even begin to cover drone use by the private sector, which is already chomping at the bit at the prospect.
No matter what the future holds, however, we must ensure that Americans have a semblance of civil liberties protections against the drones. Given the courts' leniency towards police, predicating drone use on a warrant requirement would provide little to no protection. Thus, the only hope rests with Congress and state legislatures that they would adopt legislation specifically prohibiting the federal government from using data recorded via police spy drones in criminal prosecutions, as well as preventing police agencies from utilizing drones outfitted with anti-personnel devices such as tasers and tear gas.
Either way, we'd better get ready. As Peter W. Singer, author of Wired for War, a book about military robotics, warns: "The debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this. There's no stopping this technology. Anybody who thinks they can put this genie back in the box -- that's silliness."]]>The Psycho-Therapeutic School System: Pathologizing Childhoodtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30371942013-04-09T14:36:50-04:002013-06-09T05:12:01-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"There's a tremendous push where if the kid's behavior is thought to be quote-unquote abnormal -- if they're not sitting quietly at their desk -- that's pathological, instead of just childhood." -- Dr. Jerome Groopman, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School
According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control, a staggering 6.4 million American children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), whose key symptoms are inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity -- characteristics that most would consider typically childish behavior. High school boys, an age group particularly prone to childish antics and drifting attention spans, are particularly prone to being labeled as ADHD, with one out of every five high school boys diagnosed with the disorder.
Presently, we're at an all-time high of eleven percent of all school-aged children in America who have been classified as mentally ill. Why? Because they "suffer" from several of the following symptoms: they are distracted, fidget, lose things, daydream, talk nonstop, touch everything in sight, have trouble sitting still during dinner, are constantly in motion, are impatient, interrupt conversations, show their emotions without restraint, act without regard for consequences, and have difficulty waiting their turn.
The list reads like a description of me as a child. In fact, it sounds like just about every child I've ever known, none of whom are mentally ill. Unfortunately, society today is far less tolerant of childish behavior -- hence, the growing popularity of the ADHD label, which has become the "go-to diagnosis" for children that don't fit the psycho-therapeutic public school mold of quiet, docile and conformist.
Mind you, there is no clinical test for ADHD. Rather, this so-called mental illness falls into the "I'll know it if I see it" category, where doctors are left to make highly subjective determinations based on their own observation, as well as interviews and questionnaires with a child's teachers and parents. Particular emphasis is reportedly given to what school officials have to say about the child's behavior.
Yet while being branded mentally ill at a young age can lead to all manner of complications later in life, the larger problem is the routine drugging that goes hand in hand with these diagnoses. Of those currently diagnosed with ADHD, a 16 percent increase since 2007, and a 41 percent increase over the past decade, two-thirds are being treated with mind-altering, psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall.
Diagnoses of ADHD have been increasing at an alarming rate of 5.5 percent each year. Yet those numbers are bound to skyrocket once the American Psychiatric Association releases its more expansive definition of ADHD. Combined with the public schools' growing intolerance (a.k.a., zero tolerance) for childish behavior, the psychiatric community's pathologizing of childhood, and the Obama administration's new mental health initiative aimed at identifying and treating mental illness in young people, the outlook is decidedly grim for any young person in this country who dares to act like a child.
As part of his administration's sweeping response to the Newtown school shootings, President Obama is calling on Congress to fund a number of programs aimed at detecting and responding to mental illness among young people. A multipronged effort, Obama's proposal includes $50 million to train 5,000 mental health professionals to work with young people in communities and schools; $55 million for Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), which would empower school districts, teachers and other adults to detect and respond to mental illness in 750,000 young people; and $25 million for state efforts to identify and treat adolescents and young adults.
One of the key components of Obama's plan, mental health first-aid training for adults and students, is starting to gain traction across the country. Incredibly, after taking a mere 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities, for instance, a participant can be certified "to identify, understand and respond to the signs of mental illness, substance use and eating disorders."
While commendable in its stated goals, there's a whiff of something not quite right about a program whose supporting data claims that "26.2 percent of people in the U.S. -- roughly one in four -- have a mental health disorder in any given year." This is especially so at a time when government agencies seem to be increasingly inclined to view outspoken critics of government policies as mentally ill and in need of psychiatric help and possible civil commitment. But I digress. That's a whole other topic.
Getting back to young people, Dr. Thomas Friedan, director of the CDC, has characterized the nation's current fixation on ADHD as an over diagnosis and a "misuse [of ADHD medications that] appears to be growing at an alarming rate."
Indeed, not that long ago, the very qualities we now identify as a mental illness and target for drugging were hallmarks of the creative soul. Many of the artists, musicians, poets, politicians and revolutionaries whom we have come to revere in our society were unable to sit still, pay attention, concentrate on their work, and stay within the confines which had been set out for them in the classroom.
Visionaries as varied as Mahatma Gandhi, Richard Feynman, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill might have all been labeled ADHD had they been students in the public schools today. Legendary filmmaker Woody Allen claims to have "paid attention to everything but the teachers" while in school. Despite being put in an accelerated learning program due to his high IQ, he felt constrained, so he often played hooky and failed to complete his assignments. Of his school days, Gandhi said, "They were the most miserable of his life" and "that he had no aptitude for lessons and rarely appreciated his teachers." In fact, Gandhi opined that it "might have been better if he had never been to school."
One can only imagine what the world would have been like had these visionaries of Western civilization instead been diagnosed with ADHD and drugged accordingly. Writing for the New York Times, Bronwen Hruska documents what it was like as a parent being pressured by school officials to medicate her child who, at age 8, seemed to have "normal 8-year-old boy energy."
Will was in third grade, and his school wanted him to settle down in order to focus on math worksheets and geography lessons and social studies. The children were expected to line up quietly and "transition" between classes without goofing around... And so it began. Like the teachers, we didn't want Will to "fall through the cracks." But what I've found is that once you start looking for a problem, someone's going to find one, and attention deficit has become the go-to diagnosis... A few weeks later we heard back. Will had been given a diagnosis of inattentive-type A.D.H.D....The doctor prescribed methylphenidate, a generic form of Ritalin. It was not to be taken at home, or on weekends, or vacations. He didn't need to be medicated for regular life. It struck us as strange, wrong, to dose our son for school. All the literature insisted that Ritalin and drugs like it had been proved "safe." Later, I learned that the formidable list of possible side effects included difficulty sleeping, dizziness, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, headache, numbness, irregular heartbeat, difficulty breathing, fever, hives, seizures, agitation, motor or verbal tics and depression. It can slow a child's growth or weight gain. Most disturbing, it can cause sudden death, especially in children with heart defects or serious heart problems.
As Hruska relates in painful detail, each time the overall effects of the drugs seemed to stop working, their doctor increased the dosage. Finally, towards the middle of fifth grade, Hruska's son refused to take anymore pills. From then on, things began to change for the better. Will is now a sophomore in high school, 6 feet 3 inches tall, and is on the honor roll.
The drugs prescribed for Ritalin and Adderall and their generic counterparts are keystones in a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry that profits richly from America's growing ADHD fixation. For example, between 2007 and 2012 alone, sales for ADHD drugs went from $4 billion to $9 billion.
If America could free itself of the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on our medical community, our government and our schools, we may find that our so-called "problems" aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. As Hruska concludes:
For [Will], it was a matter of growing up, settling down and learning how to get organized. Kids learn to speak, lose baby teeth and hit puberty at a variety of ages. We might remind ourselves that the ability to settle into being a focused student is simply a developmental milestone; there's no magical age at which this happens.
Which brings me to the idea of "normal." The Merriam-Webster definition, which reads in part "of, relating to, or characterized by average intelligence or development," includes a newly dirty word in educational circles. If normal means "average," then schools want no part of it. Exceptional and extraordinary, which are actually antonyms of normal, are what many schools expect from a typical student.
If "accelerated" has become the new normal, there's no choice but to diagnose the kids developing at a normal rate with a disorder. Instead of leveling the playing field for kids who really do suffer from a deficit, we're ratcheting up the level of competition with performance-enhancing drugs. We're juicing our kids for school.
We're also ensuring that down the road, when faced with other challenges that high school, college and adult life are sure to bring, our children will use the coping skills we've taught them. They'll reach for a pill.
]]>Millbrook v. U.S.: Holding the Government Accountable for Misconduct by Law Enforcement Officialstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29930992013-04-02T10:46:39-04:002013-06-02T05:12:01-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/Thomas Paine
At a time when the courts are increasingly giving deference to the police and prioritizing security over civil liberties, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Millbrook v. United States is a glimmer of hope in a sea of gloom.
Handed down on the second day of the Court's same-sex marriage arguments, Millbrook has been largely overshadowed by the debate over marriage equality. However, this ruling should not be overlooked -- not only for what it says about the need to hold law enforcement officials accountable to abiding by the law, but more importantly for what it says about the extent to which the government has given itself free rein to abuse the law, immune from reproach.
In its ruling in Millbrook v. United States, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the U.S. government may be held liable for abuses intentionally carried out by law enforcement officers -- whether they're police officers or prison guards -- in the course of their employment. Critics of the government's tactics hope the Court's ruling will send a strong message to the government's various law enforcement agencies that they need to do a better job of policing their employees and holding them accountable to respecting citizens' rights, especially while on the job.
The facts in Millbrook are particularly egregious.
Although Millbrook claims the guards threatened to kill him if he reported the incident, he filed a complaint with prison officials, which then led to a formal investigation. During the course of the investigation, a prison physician determined that Millbrook did not show signs of having been choked, a prison psychologist concluded that Millbrook did not exhibit trauma consistent with a sexual assault, and the prison guards and Millbrook's cellmate all testified to having no knowledge of any such assault taking place against him. Prison officials also noted that Millbrook had filed a similar complaint against guards at his previous prison, which was eventually dismissed when the charges could not be substantiated.
Neither the federal district court nor the Third Circuit Court of Appeals proved to be receptive to Millbrook's argument that the prison guards should be held liable under a provision of the Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA), which allows individuals to sue federal law enforcement officials for misconduct. As reporter Ailsa Chang explains:
Under the law, the government allows itself to be sued when a government representative commits a tort. A tort is an act done negligently or intentionally that results in injury to someone. However, if the tort was intentional, the law does not allow the lawsuit to proceed -- except in cases where the defendant is a law enforcement official. And even in those cases, the federal government can be liable only if the officer was acting "within the scope of his office or employment."
Although both courts noted that the prison guards' alleged behavior was troubling, they ducked the issue and dismissed the case on the grounds that the federal government has sovereign immunity -- that is, although an egregious wrong may have been committed by a government employee, they cannot be held liable for money damages for their behavior. Specifically, the courts reasoned that the FTCA only applies to "police officers" while they are in the process of making an arrest or seizure, or executing a search.
Undeterred, Millbrook filed a handwritten petition, in pencil no less, to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in a rare show of magnanimity, the Court agreed to hear his case and assigned a lawyer to represent him. Curiously enough, after the Court announced it could hear the case, the U.S. Justice Department -- which had defended the government's actions at every level of the judicial proceedings, including asking the Supreme Court not to take the case -- did an about-face and switched its position to argue that the FTCA does apply to prison guards as law-enforcement officials.
The Supreme Court's subsequent ruling, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is a technical analysis of the FTCA, to whom it applies and in what circumstances. The bottom line, according to the nine justices in a rare show of agreement, is that the lower courts misconstrued the FTCA, which clearly provides for the government to be held accountable for wrongdoing carried out by law enforcement officials in its employ while on the job. (Although even the FTCA, it must be said, is notable for the many exceptions it provides to shield government officials from wrongdoing.)
Having been given the green light for his lawsuit to proceed, Millbrook still has an uphill battle ahead of him. Indeed, Millbrook has to prove to the lower courts that he was, in fact, sexually assaulted by the guards. Whether or not his allegations prove to be true, however, his case is a painful reminder that such kinds of abuses are not only par for the course in our nation's overcrowded prisons but are often tolerated by prison officials.
Inmate Jens Soering's insightful book One Day in the Life of 179212: Notes from an American Prison (Lantern Books, 2012), with its accounts of therapeutic beatings, rapes and the sense that one is in constant peril, may be the most vivid first-person portrait of the failure of America's penal system to date. As Soering writes:
Repeated anonymous surveys have determined that 20 percent of all inmates are forced to have sex each year, and 10 percent are violently raped. The overwhelming majority of these crimes are never reported: a silence maintained out of fear of retaliation from the perpetrators and because of the indifference of prison officials. In 2004, only 8,210 sexual assaults were documented, even though correctional experts testifying at a U.S. Senate hearing in 2003 estimated the actual number of cases to range from 250,000 to 600,000 per year.
The question that we must ask ourselves is what kind of government not only turns a blind eye to such abuses but absolves itself of any responsibility for righting such wrongs?
The answer is a government whose system of "checks and balances" has given way to a concerted effort by all branches of the government, including the courts, to maintain their acquired powers at all costs. Looked at from this perspective, while Millbrook was, indeed, a welcome respite from the Supreme Court's usual practice of giving law enforcement officials a "get out of jail free" card, it may prove in the long run to be little more than a bone tossed to a dog, a small concession amidst a sea of abuses.
In other words, it's just business as usual, with the taxpayer forced to pay the penalty for the government's misdeeds. In days gone by, this payment to right a wrong was called "blood money," and it was paid by the guilty party to his victim. Could it be that the government has managed to slip the noose from around its own neck, leaving us to hang for the crime--figuratively speaking, of course?]]>Attorney General Eric Holder: If the President Does It, It's Legaltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29006472013-03-18T17:14:58-04:002013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/"I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, that the Supreme Court would have to order the president of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention, never thought that I would see that a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens. This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive."--Eric Holder, June 2008 speech to the American Constitution Society
Since the early days of our republic, the Attorney General (AG) of the United States has served as the chief lawyer for the government, entrusted with ensuring that the nation's laws are faithfully carried out and holding government officials accountable to abiding by their oaths of office to "uphold and defend the Constitution."
Unfortunately, far from holding government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the attorneys general of each successive administration have increasingly aided and abetted the Executive Branch in skirting and, more often than not, flouting the law altogether, justifying all manner of civil liberties and human rights violations and trampling the Constitution in the process, particularly the Fourth Amendment.
No better example is there of the perversion of the office of the AG than its current occupant Eric Holder, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009. Hailed by civil liberties and watchdog groups alike for his pledge to "reverse the disastrous course that we have been on over the past few years" and usher in a new era of civil liberties under Obama, Holder has instead carried on the sorry tradition of his predecessors, going to great lengths to "justify" egregious government actions that can only be described as immoral, unjust and illegal.
Indeed, Holder has managed to eclipse both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, whose tenures under George W. Bush earned them constant reproach by Democrats and other left-leaning groups for justifying acts of torture, surveillance of American citizens and clandestine behavior by the government. Holder, however, has largely been given a free pass by these very same groups in much the same way that Obama has. The reason, according to former Senate investigator Paul D. Thacker, is that "Obama is a Democrat. And because he is a Democrat, he's gotten a pass from many of the civil liberty and good-government groups who spent years watching President Bush's every move like a hawk."
Despite getting a "pass" from those who would normally have been crying foul, during his time as attorney general, Holder has "made the Constitution scream"--that according to one of his detractors. The colorful description is apt. Some of the Justice Department's (DOJ) "greatest hits" under Holder begin and end with his stalwart defense of the Obama administration's growing powers, coming as they do at the expense of the Constitution.
Moreover, as head of the DOJ, Holder's domain is vast, spanning several law enforcement agencies, including the United States Marshals Service; FBI; Federal Bureau of Prisons; National Institute of Corrections; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; and Office of the Inspector General (OIG), as well as the U.S. National Central Bureau for INTERPOL. To say that the agencies under Holder have struggled to abide by the rule of law is an understatement.
The following are just some of the highlights of the dangerous philosophies embraced and advanced by Holder and his Justice Department.
The military can detain anyone, including American citizens, it deems a threat to the country. Not only has the DOJ persisted in defending a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that sanctions indefinite detentions of Americans, but it has also blasted the federal judge who ruled the NDAA to be vague and chilling as overstepping the court's authority and infringing on Obama's power to act as Commander in Chief.
Presidential kill lists and drone killings are fine as long as the president thinks someone might have terrorist connections. Holder has gone to great lengths to defend Obama's use of drones to target and kill American citizens, even on U.S. soil, as legally justifiable. In fact, a leaked DOJ memo suggests that the president has the power to murder any American citizen the world over, so long as he has a feeling that they might, at some point in the future, pose a threat to the United States.
The federal government has the right to seize the private property--cash, real estate, cars and other assets--of those suspected of being "connected" to criminal activity, whether or not the suspect is actually guilty. The government actually collects billions of dollars every year through this asset-forfeiture system, which it frequently divvies up with local law enforcement officials, a practice fully supported by the DOJ and a clear incentive for the government to carry out more of these "takings."
Warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans' telephone, email and Facebook accounts is not only permissible but legal. According to court documents, more Americans have had their electronic communications spied on as a result of DOJ orders for phone, email and Internet information--40,000 people alone in 2011--and that doesn't even begin to take into account agencies outside Holder's purview, terrorism investigations or requests by state and local law enforcement officials.
Judicial review is far from necessary. Moreover, while it is legal for the government to use National Security Letters (NSL) to get detailed information on Americans' finances and communications without oversight from a judge, it is illegal to challenge the authority of the Justice Department. Administrative subpoenas or NSLs--convenient substitutes for court-sanctioned warrants that require only a government official's signature in order to force virtually all businesses to hand over sensitive customer information--have become a popular method of bypassing the Fourth Amendment and a vital tool for the DOJ's various agencies. Incredibly, the DOJ actually sued a telecommunications company for daring to challenge the FBI's secret order, lacking in judicial oversight, that it relinquish information about its customers. The FBI alone has issued more than 300,000 NSLs since 2000.
Due process and judicial process are not the same. In one of his earliest attempts to justify targeted assassinations of American citizens by the president, Holder declared in a March 5, 2012 speech at the Northwestern University School of Law that "The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process." What Holder was attempting to suggest is that the Fifth Amendment's assurance that "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law" does not necessarily involve having one's day in court and all that that entails--it simply means that someone, the president for example, should review and be satisfied by the facts before ordering someone's death. As one history professor warned, "Insert even a sliver of difference between due process and judicial process, and you convert liberty into tyranny. Holder, sworn to uphold the laws of the United States, is the mouthpiece of that tyranny, and Obama is its self-appointed judge, jury and executioner."
Government whistleblowers will be bankrupted, blacklisted, blackballed and in some cases banished. As AG, Holder has reportedly prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks than all his predecessors combined. Relying on the World War I-era Espionage Act, the DOJ has launched an all-out campaign to roust out, prosecute, and imprison government whistleblowers for exposing government corruption, incompetence, and greed. Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is merely one in a long line of so-called "enemies of the state" to feel the Obama administration's wrath for daring to publicly criticize its policies by leaking information to the media.
Government transparency is important unless government officials are busy, can stonewall, redact, obfuscate or lie about the details, are able to make the case that they are exempt from disclosure or that it interferes with national security. As Slatereports, "President Obama promised transparency and open government. He failed miserably." Not only has Holder proven to be far less transparent than any of his predecessors, however, but his DOJ has done everything in its power to block access to information, even in matters where that information was already known. For example, when asked to explain the "Fast and Furious" debacle in which government operatives trafficked guns to Mexican drug lords, DOJ officials--unaware that much of the facts had already been revealed--"responded with false and misleading information that violated federal law." When pressed for further information, the Justice Department retracted its initial response and refused to say anything more.
When it comes to Wall Street, justice is not blind. As revealed in a PBS Frontline report, the Obama administration has driven federal prosecutions of financial crimes down to a two-decade low, buoyed in its blindness to corporate corruption by campaign donations from Wall Street banks (whom Holder has determined are too big to prosecute anyhow) and staffers whose lucrative financial portfolios came about as a result of chummy relationships with financiers. As David Sirota points outs:
After watching the [PBS] piece, you will understand that the word "justice" belongs in quotes thanks to an Obama administration that has made a mockery of the name of a once hallowed executive department... Rooted in historical comparison, it contrasts how the Reagan administration prosecuted thousands of bankers after the now-quaint-looking S&L scandal with how the Obama administration betrayed the president's explicit promise to "hold Wall Street accountable" and refused to prosecute a single banker connected to 2008′s apocalyptic financial meltdown.
Clearly, it's not the Constitution that Eric Holder is safeguarding but the power of the presidency. Without a doubt, Holder has taken as his mantra Nixon's mantra that "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." It may be that the time has come to create a "non-political" and "independent" attorney general, one who would serve the interests of the public by upholding the rule of law rather than justifying the whims of the president.]]>Move Over, Traffic Court, It's Time for a New Money-Making Scheme: School Truancy Laws That Jail Parents and Levy Excessive Finestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28077562013-03-11T13:03:36-04:002013-05-11T05:12:01-04:00John W. Whiteheadhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/
As a result, we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process. This profits-over-people mindset has taken various forms in recent years, ranging from the rise of privatized, for-profit prisons, which require the states to keep their jails full to capacity, to the overcriminalization phenomenon which has subjected Americans to a slew of inane laws that outlaw such innocuous activities as making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, and feeding a whale. Included in the mix are the preponderance of red light cameras, sold to communities as a means of minimizing traffic accidents at intersections but in fact are just a vehicle for levying nuisance fines against drivers often guilty of little more than making a right-hand turn on a red light.
The most recent ploy to separate taxpayers from their hard-earned dollars and render them criminals comes in the form of school truancy laws. Disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools, these truancy laws are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences, while the ones being singled out for punishment -- more often than not from middle- to low-income families -- are the very ones who can least afford it.
Under this increasingly popular system of truancy enforcement, instead of giving students detention or some other in-school punishment for "unauthorized" absences, schools are now opting to fine parents and force them, or their kids, to serve jail time. ("Unauthorized" is the key word here, of course, since schools retain the right to determine whether an absence sanctioned by a parent or even a doctor is acceptable.)
For example, California students are ticketed for missing or being late to school. One ticket for tardiness can cost a family $250. Tardiness is a particular problem in Los Angeles, where the city's poor transit infrastructure and overcrowded buses often leave student passengers stranded at the bus stops. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, 12,000 students received tickets for truancy in Los Angeles in 2008. Of those students, about 80 percent received tickets simply for being late to school. In order to avoid a $250 ticket, some parents from low-income households go so far as to keep their children home from school if there is any chance they will be late. As Barbara Ehrenreich, writing for the New York Times, points out, "it's an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school."
In 2011, more than 400 parents in Baltimore City were brought up on truancy charges because their children had missed more than 15 days of school, while a dozen parents were sentenced to jail. One mother of four school-aged children, Barbara Gaskins, was jailed for 10 days (served on five consecutive weekends) after her son allegedly missed 103 out of 130 days of school. Her son insists he was in school but wasn't marked present.
Parents in Florida can be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor and face up to two months in jail if their kids have 15 or more unexcused absences from school over the course of three months. Truancy laws in Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina, among other states, have also resulted in parents doing jail time for their kids' absenteeism.
As problematic as it may be for states to levy excessive fines and jail time on families that, in many cases, are already struggling to make ends meet and stay together, it's the motives behind these programs that are particularly troubling. Much like the profit incentives behind privatized prisons and red light traffic cameras, there are also profit motives driving most of the states that are pushing for stricter truancy laws and establishing truancy courts for those parents and students unlucky enough to run afoul of them. Those profit motives range from state funding in exchange for proof of higher school attendance (a clear factor behind the rapid adoption of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking badges in certain Houston schools), to increased revenue from fines and more bodies in the jails.
Consider, for example, the case of Diane Tran, a 17-year-old honor student. She was sent to jail for 24 hours and forced to pay a $100 fine for breaking Texas' truancy laws, which define truancy as "missing three full or partial days in a four-week period, or 10 days in six months." Tran, who had been helping support her family by working two jobs on top of her strenuous schoolwork, was shown no mercy by the court. Unfortunately, Tran's case is standard operating procedure throughout the United States as more and more states and localities make truancy enforcement a high priority.
In Texas, where schools have taken truancy enforcement to extreme lengths in an effort to qualify for state funds based upon having the highest attendance rates possible, truancy cases ballooned from 85,000 incidents to 120,000 between 2005 and 2009, according to The Atlantic. More truancy cases mean increased profits for truancy courts, which function much like traffic court, and hefty profits for the state. Dallas courts, for example, pull in roughly $2 million from prosecuting 35,000 truancy cases per year. As Deborah Fowler, deputy director of the legal advocacy group Texas Appleseed, has noted, "They've developed a whole system in Dallas that has to feed itself to justify its existence." The targets, of course, are school children and their families.
Unfortunately, these money rackets posing as courts of law are not unique to any one state. In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, the school district filed 8,000 truancy violations between 2005 and 2010, collecting $1.3 million in fines. The district is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from parents subjected to fines far in excess of the $300 limit set out by state law. One plaintiff, single parent Omary Rodriguez-Fuentes, received 29 truancy tickets over three years, totaling almost $7,000. Incredibly, in an attempt to pay off the fines, Rodriguez-Fuentes had to resort to using revenue from his monthly disability checks.
As illustrated by Rodriguez-Fuentes' case, truancy laws tend to be applied most vigorously against the most defenseless members of society, punishing those who need the most help in continuing their education with little regard for the root causes of absenteeism, which tend to be family problems, financial issues, mental illness, and simply being sick. For example, a judge in Rhode Island threatened a 13-year-old student suffering from sickle-cell anemia and his mother with arrest and jail time. The student had been missing school due to extreme bouts of pain. In fact, he was ordered to attend school on a particular day in February 2010. Once there, however, the school had to call an ambulance because of his critical condition.
Truancy laws have gotten so absurd that adults are even being put in detention facilities for skipping school when they were children. For example, Francisco de Luna, an 18-year-old who racked up $11,000 in truancy fines over the course of five years, was sentenced to 132 days in jail. De Luna's truancy was related to the death of his father at age 13, at which point his family's finances and his own mental health faced a steep decline and he ended up dropping out of school.
Elizabeth Diaz, also 18 years old, received 18 days in jail for failure to pay $1,600 in fines imposed on her when she was 14 years old. Diaz's past truancy was related to health problems -- bipolar disorder and fibromyalgia. Diaz was set to graduate on time until she was jailed, at which point the school withdrew her enrollment, causing her to miss exams she was required to take before graduation.
Despite outcry from parents and activist groups alike, strident truancy laws are still being proposed and strengthened in cities across the country. Officials in Washington, D.C., are currently debating proposals that would allow Child and Family Services Agency officials to investigate cases of truancy for minors up to the age of 17, a significant expansion of the city's already extant authority to punish parents and children with fines and jail time.
Living under the threat of zero tolerance policies, tagged and tracked with surveillance devices, and facing exorbitant fines and jail time in cases of truancy, America's youth are now finding themselves in a protracted battle brought about by those whom they are supposed to trust: teachers, police officers, and courts of law. Tasked with protecting young people, these once-trusted figures and institutions are instead serving the interests of the state, which is less concerned about educating the next generation, and more concerned with encouraging obedience and extracting wealth.
All the while, America continues to find itself ranking the lowest among developed nations in terms of quality of public education. Despite an array of standardized tests meant to boost student performance, young people are not taught higher-level thinking skills, putting them at a distinct disadvantage upon entering college or the workforce. It's a dire situation made worse by the profit-over-people, total-security mindset that has overtaken our governing institutions and undermined our freedoms.]]>