Saturday, September 7, 2013
ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE LATE 1940s AND 1950s.
Marjorie Heins, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (New York: New York University Press, 2013) (The book's title comes from Justice Frankfurter opinion in Wieman v. Updegraff: "'To regard teachers--in our entire educational system, from the primary grades to the university--as the priest of our democracy is not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens.'--Justice Felix Frankfurter, Wieman v. Updegraff." Id. at vii. Unfortunately, teachers have fallen from the pedestal. In these increasingly anti-democratic, conformist, intolerant, and uncritical times, few would think of teachers as priest of democracy. Even in today's law schools, law professor's focus is increasingly on training students jobs (law firms want new associates to be "practice ready"), and not in teaching students to think critically and to act in the pursuit of justice. And recent attacks on legal education and law schools focuses on the instrumental value of a legal education, suggesting that it is not worth the money. "Well before the SISS arrived in Manhattan in 1952, there had been years of debate all over America--in courts, in educational institutions, and in the press--about whether the First Amendment principle of free speech protected suspected communists and, more specifically, about whether the concept of academic freedom barred political inquisitions against teachers and professors..." The Supreme Court confronted the question in a case that challenged New York State's 1949 Feinberg Law, which required detailed procedures for investigating the loyalty of every public school teacher and ousting anyone who engaged in 'treasonable or seditious acts or utterance' or joined an organization that advocated the overthrow of the government by 'force, violence, or any unlawful means.' It was a typical Cold War-era loyalty law; hence, Adler v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court 1952 decision upholding it had nationwide repercussions." Id. at 2-3. "Fifteen years later, in 1967. Justice William Brennan borrowed Douglas's image of a pall hovering over education, in a case that overturned Adler and invalidated the Feinberg law." Id. at 3. "Some Supreme Court decisions over the previous decade had cautiously chipped away at loyalty programs, but Justice Brennan, with in Keyishan [v. Board of Regents], rejected wholesale the idea that restrictions on expression, ideas, and political associations are permissible under the First Amendment as conditions of public employment. And because the Feinberg Law targeted teachers, Brennan had particular words to say about education. 'Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom,' he wrote, 'which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.'" Id. at 5. Sadly, I don't think Brennan could muster a majority from the current membership of the Supreme Court. The post-9/11 American looks more and more like an updated version of the Anti-Communist America of the late 1940s and the 1950s. "Liberty depends on the understanding and support of the public--when it dies in 'the hearts of men and women,' as Judge Learned Hand memorably said, 'no constitution, no law, no court can save it.' But courts also have a role to play, especially in times of public intolerance." "As at other moments in our history, in the 21st century it is sometimes argued that the need for political loyalty trumps free speech, including--or especially--speech by teachers. Meanwhile, some courts and commentators have sought to ignore, distinguish, or interpret out of existence the academic-freedom principles announced by Justice Brennan in Keyishian. A primary lesson of the history recounted in this book is that the American political system is all too vulnerable to political repression and to demonizing the dissenter, both on campus and off. I hope the story told here helps make the case for a renewed appreciation of academic freedom and of the role played by teachers as priests of our democracy. Just as the anti-communist panic of the Cold War triggered a political, and eventually a judicial, recognition of academic freedom, so in our post-9/11 world teachers, students, universities, judges, and the whole body politics should adhere to the promise of Keyishian." Id. at 282-283.).
Thursday, September 5, 2013
CRITICAL REFLECTION AND MORAL ARGUMENT
Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From W. G. Runiciman, 'Righteous Rebels: When, Where, and Why?', 317-334: "Recent research in paleoanathropology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and brain science gives strong reason to conclude that long before the advent of written records, human beings were talking to each other in a world of myths, ritual, art, technology, and emotionally charged interpersonal relationships in which past encounters were recalled and discussed and patterns of part-cooperative, part-antagonistic behavior toward others established and sustained. Our human ancestors had inherited from their primate forbears, and shared with their primate cousins, innate mental capacities for beliefs about the workings of the world on the one hand and attitudes toward the things and people in it on the other. But, as Darwin himself had always recognized, for all the similarities between humans and other primates in quarreling, collaborating, befriending, deceiving, imitating, learning from, and showing off to one another, only human beings have the capacity to reflect, as Darwin put it, on whence we come and whither we go, on what is life and death, 'and so forth.' Thus there are numerous rebellious chimpanzees seeking to reverse the existing rank order in the troops to which they belong. But no primatologist claims that they share the ideals set out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Although field research and laboratory experiments have combined to demonstrate that chimpanzees have mental capacities and cultural traditions of a kind that Darwin's successors were for a long time unwilling to credit them with, critical reflection and moral argument are unique to us, with our larger neocortices and modified vocal tracts and the linguistic skills made possible by them." Id. at 317-318.).
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
RONALD COASE, 1910-2013
"A scholar must be content with the knowledge that what is false in what he says will soon be exposed. As for what is true, he can count on ultimately seeing it accepted, if only he lives long enough."
THE TRUTH ABOUT BEING AN ADDICT
Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Knopf, 2013).
Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend: A Novel, with an Introduction by Blake Bailey (New York: Vintage, 1944, 2013) ("And from there, the next one was" Why did you drink?" "Like the others, the question was rhetorical, abstract, anything but pragmatic; as vain to ask as his own clever question had been vain. It was far too late to pose such a problem with any reasonable hope for an answer--or, an answer forthcoming, any reasonable hope that it would be worth listening to or prove anything at all. It had long since ceased to matter. Why. You were a drunk; that's all there was to it. You drank; period. And once you took a drink, once you got under way, what difference did it make Why? There were so many dozen reasons that didn't count at all; none that did. Maybe you drank because you were unhappy, or too happy; or too hot, or too cold; or you didn't like the Partisan Review, or you loved the Partisan Review. It was as groundless as that. To hell with the causes--absent father, fraternity shock, too much mother, too much money, or the dozen other reasons you fell back on to justify yourself. They counted for nothing in the face of the one fact: you drank and it was killing you. Why? Because alcohol was something you couldn't handle. It had you licked. Why? Because you had reached the point where one drink was too many and a hundred not enough." Id. at 224-225.).
Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend: A Novel, with an Introduction by Blake Bailey (New York: Vintage, 1944, 2013) ("And from there, the next one was" Why did you drink?" "Like the others, the question was rhetorical, abstract, anything but pragmatic; as vain to ask as his own clever question had been vain. It was far too late to pose such a problem with any reasonable hope for an answer--or, an answer forthcoming, any reasonable hope that it would be worth listening to or prove anything at all. It had long since ceased to matter. Why. You were a drunk; that's all there was to it. You drank; period. And once you took a drink, once you got under way, what difference did it make Why? There were so many dozen reasons that didn't count at all; none that did. Maybe you drank because you were unhappy, or too happy; or too hot, or too cold; or you didn't like the Partisan Review, or you loved the Partisan Review. It was as groundless as that. To hell with the causes--absent father, fraternity shock, too much mother, too much money, or the dozen other reasons you fell back on to justify yourself. They counted for nothing in the face of the one fact: you drank and it was killing you. Why? Because alcohol was something you couldn't handle. It had you licked. Why? Because you had reached the point where one drink was too many and a hundred not enough." Id. at 224-225.).
Monday, September 2, 2013
DRUG AGENTS USE VAST PHONE TROVE
Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s
By SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: September 1, 2013 41 Comments
For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.
Edouard H.R.Gluck/Associated Press
A New York training site for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which includes federal and local investigators. AT&T employees are embedded in the program in three states.
Multimedia
Cliff Owen/Associated Press
Jameel Jaffer of the A.C.L.U. says a slide presentation on the Hemisphere Project raises “profound privacy concerns.”
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.
The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.
The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.
Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.
The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.
The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.
“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.
The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.
But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.
Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.
Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”
Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”
He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.
Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.
Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia, said he sympathized with the government’s argument that it needs such voluminous data to catch criminals in the era of disposable cellphones.
“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”
(Page 2 of 2)
But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question: whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data, rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.
Multimedia
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”
“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” he said.
Mr. Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T’s possession, “the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns.”
Mr. Hendricks filed the public records requests while assisting other activists who have filed a federal lawsuit saying that a civilian intelligence analyst at an Army base near Tacoma infiltrated and spied on antiwar groups. (Federal officials confirmed that the slides are authentic.)
Mark A. Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of phone calls made in the United States were covered by Hemisphere, the size of the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has conducted any legal review of the program
“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an e-mail.
Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones. A federal law enforcement official said that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.
The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations. The slides emphasize the program’s value in tracing suspects who use replacement phones, sometimes called “burner” phones, who switch phone numbers or who are otherwise difficult to locate or identify.
In March 2013, for instance, Hemisphere found the new phone number and location of a man who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent. A month earlier the program helped catch a South Carolina woman who had made a series of bomb threats.
And in Seattle in 2011, the document says, Hemisphere tracked drug dealers who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.
INDIA, ECONOMIC GROWTH, AND POVERTY REDUCTION
Jagdish Bhagwati & Arvind Panagariya, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries (New York: Public Affairs, 2013) ("The experience of China, India, and East Asia--whose population amounts to not quite half of the global total population--demonstrates how growth is stimulated and sustained within the policy framework that exploits the opportunities provided by integration into the world economy, and also relies on a sophisticated use of market incentives in guiding production and investment. Conversely, they also demonstrated that a shift away form such a policy framework undermines growth." Id. at xv. "[T]he need for sustained and accelerated growth, which is progressively more inclusive in its impact, remains acute. Likewise, the redistributive programs must be made more effective even as they expand with the intention of providing greater benefits to the poor." "This strategy calls for future reforms to proceed on two tracks: Track I: reforms aimed at accelerating and sustaining growth while making it even more inclusive. Track II: reforms to make redistributive programs more effective as their scope widens." Id. at 96.).
Sunday, September 1, 2013
"STIMULUS JUNKIES" UNABLE TO FACE THE NEW ECONOMIC REALITY: THE MUSIC HAS STOPPED!!
Stephen D. King, When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("For the most part, monetary and fiscal policies have, rightly, been regarded as the equivalent of drugs designed to fix the underlying problem. Interest rate cuts are normally temporary--what comes down eventually goes back up again. Big budget deficits designed to kick-start an economy automatically recede as the subsequent economic recovery tops up tax revenues and reduces social expenditures. Just like a course of antibiotics, economic stimulus is only needed for so long. The economic patient eventually makes a full recovery." "Even when recovery isn't complete, it doesn't mean to say the policy drugs hasn't worked. The recession that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in2008 was bad enough but it could have been a lot worse, The policy stimulus on offer was far greater than anything provided by the Great Depression and, thankfully, the economic outcome was--partly as a consequence--a lot better. The overall peak-to-trough decline in US national income, for example, was 5.1 per cent compared with a whipping 30 per cent or so during the Depression" "Yet we're not satisfied with this 'success'. That things could have been a lot worse is not the kind of argument that wins votes. We have hopes, aspirations and entitlements that need to be met. Stagnation, understandably, isn't good enough. We'd rather hear that economic recovery is just around the corner, And we'll happily believe anyone who can, apparently, lead us to the Promised Land. In the process, we have become addicted to policy-making drugs. We're no longer sure, however, whether they're really doing us any good. Yes, they may be hiding the pain but, in a world of excessive debts and aggressive deleveraging, is there any evidence that policy drugs are fostering lasting economic recovery?" Id. at 69-70. "There is much to be gained from economic and political history: it is such a shame that so little of it is taught to budding economists working their way through their university degrees. History may not repeat itself but it is a brilliant way of highlighting issues that modern-day economists have, foolishly, brushed to one side. And it offers a sobering reminder of risks associated with enduring economic disappointment: inequality, nationalism, racism, revolution and warfare are, it seems, the 'default' settings when economies persistently fail to deliver the goods." "Put simply, our societies are not geared for a world of very low growth, Our attachment to the Enlightenment idea of ongoing progress--a reflection of persistent post-war economic success--has left us with little knowledge or understanding of worlds in which rising prosperity is no longer guaranteed." Id. at 5-6.).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)