Archive for March, 2010
Stunner: Strip-Search Machine Used to Ogle
An airport security staffer faces discipline after using a whole-body imaging machine to ogle a co-worker, according to this report. It’s another signal of what’s to come when the machines are in regular use. (In a previous post, I aired my doubts about the veracity of reports that a famous Indian movie star had been exposed, but the story foretells the future all the same.)
I’ve written before that whole-body imaging machines in airports create risks to privacy despite TSA’s efforts to minimize those risks with carefully designed rules and practices.
Rules, of course, were made to be broken, and it’s only a matter of time — federal law or not — before TSA agents without proper supervision find a way to capture images contrary to policy. (Agent in secure area guides Hollywood starlet to strip search machine, sends SMS message to image reviewer, who takes camera-phone snap. TMZ devotes a week to the story, and the ensuing investigation reveals that this has been happening at airports throughout the country to hundreds of women travelers.)
Rules against misuse of whole-body imaging are fine, but they are not a long-term, effective protection against abuse of “strip-search machines.”
New Obama Mortgage Plan: A Backdoor Bank Bailout
Today President Obama announced an expansion and modification of his Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). While one can debate the merits of incentives to keep unemployed families in their homes while they search for jobs — I personally believe this will more often than not keep those families tied to weak labor markets — what should be beyond debate is the various bailouts to mortgage lenders contained in the program’s fine print.
Several of the largest mortgage lenders, including some that have already received huge bailouts, carry hundreds of billions worth of second mortgages on their books. As home prices have nationally declined by almost 30 percent, these second mortgages are worthless in the case of a foreclosure. Second mortgages are usually wiped out completely during a foreclosure if the price has decreased more than 20 percent. Yet the Obama solution is now to pay off 6 cents on the dollar for those junior liens. While 6 cents doesn’t sound like a lot, it is a whole lot more than zero, which is what the banks would receive otherwise. Given that the largest lenders are carrying over $500 billion in second mortgages that may need to be written down, we are looking at tens of billions of taxpayer dollars again being funneled to the very banks behind the mortgage crisis.
If that bailout isn’t enough, the new plan increases payments to lenders to not foreclose, all at the expense of the taxpayer. While TARP was passed under Bush’s watch, and he rightly deserves blame for it, Obama continues these bailouts in the name of avoiding a much needed correction in our housing market.
Your Medical Records Aren’t Secure
I have one observation about, and one minor difference with, the very good—and very concerning—Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Deborah Peel of Patient Privacy Rights. The piece announces PPR’s “Do Not Disclose” campaign around health information, which will soon be pouring into promiscuous, government-designed “electronic medical records.”
In a January 2009 speech, President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year’s stimulus bill allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday [now signed into law] requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic health records. Electronic records, Mr. Obama said in his 2009 speech, “will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests [and] save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health-care system.” But electronic medical records won’t accomplish any of these goals if patients fear sharing information with doctors because they know it isn’t private…
Describing how the Health Insurance Portability and Accoutability Act (HIPAA) undermined health privacy, Peel says, ”In 2002, under President George W. Bush, the right of a patient to control his most sensitive personal data—from prescriptions to DNA—was eliminated by federal regulators…” Other than the quibble about whether federal law ever gave patients anything that could be genuinely called a right, this is correct and concerning.
What’s interesting is that the policy is routinely ascribed to President Bush (not only by Peel). My suspicion is that blaming President Bush props up the dream that privacy can be maintained in a system that centralizes control of health care—if only the right party is in power.
In fact, the passage of HIPAA in 1996 (under President Bill Clinton) set the course for this outcome. The fact that HIPAA privacy was undone during the Bush administration is a coincidence convenient for his ideological and political opponents. If I’m mistaken, the proof will be the reversal of the policy during the current administration. I’m not aware of any plan for that to happen.
“Electronic record systems that don’t put patients in control of data or have inadequate security create huge opportunities for the theft, misuse and sale of personal health information,” says Peel. I agree, but more importantly, I think, public policies that don’t put patients in control create the same—or at least parallel—problems.
Transferring control of health care to the federal government transfers control of health information to the federal government. The government has interests distinct from patients, and no matter how hard one fights to protect patients’ privacy interests, the government’s interests in cost control, social engineering, and such will ineluctably win out.
Public policies that restore power to patients will restore health privacy to patients. A decade or two of exploring alternatives to patient empowerment may drive the lesson home.
Comparing Military Spending
As a follow-on to my post yesterday, I’ve been working on two charts using data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies to compare U.S. military spending with that of our European allies. I’m grateful to Charles Zakaib for his help crunching the numbers.
I think that the charts are pretty evocative.
The chart below combines data showing the growth of U.S. defense spending (DoD only) as a share of GDP, and a corresponding decline among all other NATO countries. Please note that NATO member states are supposed to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense.
The second chart shows changes in defense spending per capita over the same period. I’ve always thought this figure more instructive than spending as a percent of GDP. You can see that Americans are spending much more on our military over the past 10 years, whereas most of our European allies have made only modest increases.
Citizens United Goes to Work
This post was co-authored with John Samples.
Another good day for free speech, and a bad day for campaign finance zealots. Following on the heels of the Supreme Court’s stunning decision two months ago in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and applying that holding, all nine active judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously today that government restrictions on the right of citizens to pool their money for independent political ads are unconstitutional.
Individuals have long been able to spend unlimited funds on independent political ads. But if two or more people joined together and pooled their money for the same thing, they were considered a “political committee” and were subject to numerous burdensome regulations, including limits on how much they could contribute to fund the group’s political speech. Today’s ruling removes those restrictions. Citing the fundamental rationale for campaign finance restrictions, Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote, “the government has no anti-corruption interest in limiting contributions to an independent expenditure group.”
The case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, was brought by the Institute for Justice and the Center for Competitive Politics. Although a major First Amendment victory, the decision was not a complete win. The court upheld regulations requiring SpeechNow to disclose its contributors and their contributions and to organize itself as a committee. The court concluded such requirements would not be much of a burden on the speech of the group. We shall see. Experience may indicate otherwise, especially if disclosure leads to retaliation against groups like SpeechNow.
For today, however, the First Amendment is once again vindicated. Take a moment to pause and smile at the achievement.
Reactions to al Qaeda Terrorism Have Opened a Flank
Excellent recent posts by my colleague David Rittgers have covered the legal (and practical) issues involved in terrorist detention. Take a look at “The Case against Domestic Military Detention” and his follow-up, “Playing Chicken Again.” He has also lectured on the Hill about terrorism strategy, relating themes I used to open our 2009 and 2010 counterterrorism conferences.
The gist is that terrorism seeks overreaction on the part of the victim state. Lacking power of their own, terrorists try to goad states into overzealous and misdirected responses that serve their aims.
A prominent aim among members of the al-Qaeda franchise is mobilization of others, one of five strategies that U.S. National War College professor of strategy Audrey Kurth Cronin lays out in a chapter of the forthcoming Cato book, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix it. Writes Cronin:
Mobilization has been al Qaeda’s most effective strategy thus far. A global environment of democratized communications has increased public access to information and has sharply reduced the cost… If a group is truly successful in mobilizing large numbers, this strategy can prolong the fight and may enable the threat to transition to other forms, including insurgency and conventional war.
Chances are extremely remote that al Qaeda will ever make this transition. But a recent AP story illustrates how groups in the weakened al Qaeda network may be stumbling onto a strategic option that our political leaders opened to them with their reactions to the Fort Hood shooting and the 12/25 bombing attempt:
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- A discussion of the mechanisms that fuel government growth.
- The Postmaster General inadvertently makes the case for privatizing the USPS.
- The growth in federal health spending is almost beyond superlatives to describe it, and it will increase even faster as a result of President Obama’s new health legislation.
- Federal homeownership subsidies have caused lots of trouble, but that doesn’t mean we need more rental housing subsidies instead.
- It’s hard to imagine, but the Congressional Budget Office finds the president’s latest budget to be worse than we thought.
Regardless of the Problem, the European Political Elite Thinks More Centralization and Bigger Government Is the Answer
Greece is in trouble for a combination of reasons. Government spending is far too excessive, diverting resources from more efficient uses. The bureaucracy is too large and paid too much, resulting in a misallocation of labor. And tax rates are too high, further hindering the productive sector of the economy. Europe’s political class wants to bail out Greece’s profligate government. The official reason for a bailout, to protect the euro currency, makes no sense. After all, if Illinois or California default, that would not affect the strength (or lack thereof) of the dollar.
To understand what is really happening in Europe, it is always wise to look at what politicians are doing and ignore what they are saying. Political union is the religion of Europe’s political class, and they relentlessly use any excuse to centralize power in Brussels and strip away national sovereignty. Greece’s fiscal crisis is simply the latest excuse to move the goalposts.
The Daily Telegraph reports that Germany and France are now conspiring to create an “economic government” for the European Union. Supposedly this entity would only have supervisory powers, but it is a virtual certainty that a European-wide tax will be the next step for the euro-centralizers.
Germany and France have [proposed] controversial plans to create an “economic government of the European Union” to police financial policy across the continent. They have put Herman Van Rompuy, the EU President, in charge of a special task force to examine “all options possible” to prevent another crisis like the one caused by the Greek meltdown.
…The options he will consider include the creation of an “economic government” by the end of the year. “We commit to promote a strong co-ordination of economic policies in Europe,” said a draft text expected to be agreed by EU leaders last night. “We consider that the European Council should become the economic government of the EU and we propose to increase its role in economic surveillance and the definition of the EU’s growth strategy.”
…Mr Van Rompuy, the former Prime Minister of Belgium, is an enthusiastic supporter of “la gouvernement économique” and last month upset many national capitals by trying to impose “top down” economic targets. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has called for the Lisbon Treaty to be amended in order to prevent any repetition of the current Greek crisis, which has threatened to tear apart the euro.
What Censorship Looks Like
The Chinese government has issued instructions to media outlets telling them how they may report on the decision of Google to discontinue providing censored search results in China.
CBO on Obama Debt Orgy
This week the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the president’s FY2011 budget. The CBO projects that combined deficits for 2011-2020 under the president’s budget will be $1.2 trillion (for a total of $9.7 trillion) higher than the Office of Management & Budget’s forecast.
The CBO projects that debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP will be significantly higher:
One major reason why the CBO projects higher deficits than the OMB is because the CBO projects that cumulative revenue over the period will be lower (its economic growth assumptions aren’t as rosy as the OMB’s).
But a lack of revenues isn’t the big problem. The CBO projects that revenues as a percentage GDP would rebound from 14.5 percent in FY2010 to 19.6 percent in FY2020. The big problem is that spending as a percentage of GDP is projected to remain at post-war record highs throughout the decade:
Due Process Victory for Concealed Carry Permit Holder
That’s the outcome in the Second Circuit (full decision here), where a Connecticut man who has held a concealed handgun permit since 1982 was given the run-around when he tried to renew it, prompting a year-and-a-half of delay.
In March 2007, Kuck applied to DPS to renew his permit to carry a firearm. He was subsequently contacted by Defendant Albert J. Masek, an employee of DPS, who requested that Kuck provide a U.S. passport, birth certificate, or voter registration card in support of his renewal application…
Kuck objected to the requirement, arguing that he had submitted proof of citizenship when he first applied for a permit in 1982 and, over the subsequent 25 years, had never before been asked to provide such proof with a renewal application. He claimed then, as he does now, that the DPS requirement was arbitrary, designed to harass, and, in any event, not authorized by state law. Ultimately, he refused to provide the requested documents. As a result, DPS denied his renewal application.
Why the additional citizenship inquiry?
Notably, at the time of his renewal application, Kuck was the Secretary of the [Board of Firearms Permit Examiners]. Members of the Board are appointed by the Governor and include individuals nominated by gun clubs in Connecticut. In 1998, Kuck was nominated by Ye Connecticut Gun Guild, Inc. to the seat on the Board reserved for its representative.
Kuck alleges that, since his appointment, the estimated waiting-period for a hearing has increased dramatically, and that the Board Chairman, Christopher Adams, opposed his efforts to speed up the appeals process. He contends that DPS and the Board have acted to burden gun-owners’ ability to obtain carry permits by improperly denying applications in the first instance and then subjecting applicants to unjustified and prolonged appeals…
It appears that being critical of the discretionary licensing process can earn you extra scrutiny from bureaucratic overseers.
As I’ve said previously (and before that), enforcement of the right to bear arms against the states will force them to abandon discretionary “may-issue” permitting regimes. Where Due Process is owed, Due Process shall be honored.
Chavez Arrests the President of Globovision Television
Today, the Venezuelan government arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, president of Globovision Television, the only remaining television on public airwaves critical of Hugo Chavez. According to the government, Zuloaga made offensive comments about Chavez (which is against the law in Venezuela) while speaking at a conference of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) in Aruba, where media representatives criticized the Venezuelan regime’s crackdown on freedom of speech.
Globovision and Zuloaga have been under constant harassment from the government, and Chavez has promised to close the station. Last July, Cato held a forum in Washington on “Venezuela’s Assault on Freedom of the Press and Other Liberties,” which was to feature Zuloaga. After the event was announced, however, a politically directed court prohibited him from leaving the country. So Zuloaga taped this 3 minute video address to the Cato audience and sent his son and vice president of Globovision, Carlos, to take his place.
Robert Rivard of the IAPA also spoke at the forum. You may also see various short videos prepared by Globovision for the forum starting here.
“It is becoming a crime to have an opinion.” That’s how Carlos Zuloaga summed it up this afternoon when he referred to this incident and the recent arrest of former Venezuelan state governor Oswaldo Alvarez Paz for having said during a Globovision interview that Venezuela has become a drug-trafficking haven.
How will hemispheric leaders and the Organization of American States react to this renewed attack on free speech in Venezuela?
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