The erosion of civil liberties: we have slipped down the slope

Quick thought:

Generally speaking, the pattern for many civil liberties arguments is of the form, "we must protect the rights of X, for tomorrow the government may go after Y", where X is someone or something unsympathetic and universally reviled, and Y is someone or something seen as meriting praise and protection from government abuse. And so we protect Larry Flynt's right to publish filth so that some future muckraker may be protected; we give an undisputedly guilty monster of a human being all the trappings of a trial and due process to insulate some future target of a witch hunt from injustice; and so on. In all these cases, we apply a general prohibition on government power in order to protect against those relatively rare instances (well, hopefully they're rare) when government power really is misused to imprison the innocent or silence dissent.

It occurred to me that perhaps what has gotten me so wound up about the Wikileaks case is that--in my opinion at least--what we're witnessing is a violation of civil liberties against not a reviled X, but a praiseworthy Y. Since 9/11, throughout the Bush years and right on up through the Obama years to today, we as a society--and the political and media establishment--have stood idly by while the government has opened up huge exceptions into the general prohibitions on its powers--the prohibitions whose very generality is the means of protection from government abuses. And now we're seeing those exceptions expand and swallow up the legal system whole, to the point where now a media organization, Wikileaks--who in the case of Cablegate has done nothing different than any other media organization--must struggle to remain online as one corporation after another bows to government pressure and withdraws its services from Wikileaks.

Even if you disagree with me that Wikileaks is serving a legitimate role, the government's due-process-free campaign to silence the organization should be causing alarm bells to go off. Should the government's campaign be successful, a precedent will be set that could allow it to target (or threaten to target) mainstream publications like the New York Times in the future. Of course, at that point we would have fallen very far down the civil libertarians' slippery slope. But as the Wikileaks case shows, we've fallen quite a ways already.

Yahoo, Verizon, and others profit by handing over your information to the government

Yahoo and Verizon are trying to block a Freedom of Information Act request as to how much they charge the government for wiretaps and such.

Learning about the Church Committee

Via Ackerman, a very good, not-too-lengthy article on government secrecy and how the Church Committee worked to reign it in in the 1970s. Very much worth reading if you are at all interested in government secrecy/civil liberties issues and the current political dilemma facing the White House about whether to pursue investigations into Bush-era abuses.

A Debate Question

By the end of the primaries there will have been something like 20 debates between the Democratric candidates. Through all that, there haven't been very many interesting questions posed to them--the debates are typically moderated by creatures of the 24 news cycle, and so the issues and questions raised have almost all been along the lines of whatever media narrative was being played up at the time. At its worst, the CNN moderators were actually changing the wording of audience members' questions when they were deemed not hackish enough.

The question I've always wanted asked was this: "What, if anything, has the Bush administration done in the last 8 years to violate the Constitution?" I think a question like this would really pin down the candidates' views on the limits of executive power, and reveal how serious they are about protecting civil liberties. It would be disappointing to me if they talked around this question in a platitudinous way instead of giving an impassioned condemnation of (what I believe to be) Bush's various abuses of executive power. And there might even be a substantive difference between Clinton and Obama on the issue.