Day: June 30, 2012

When a bad idea meets a functional tool, nothing good comes of it

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Last weekend I was having a conversation with a friend and the topic of the recent expansion of government surveilance via drones came up.  There is genuine concern over how the information will be used, and, considering the manuverability of some of the drones being employed, where they go, and what they will be able to see is of extreme concern.

I aruged that the drones will be used, but they will be fairly restricted, and the government is going to find out very, very quickly that they are not the best tools for the job when it comes to law enforcement.  As if on queue The University of Texas, challenged by the Department of Homeland Security, downed a drone in mid flight.

Not to take some shine off of the University of Texas’ achievement, but this is old hat.  Iran dropped a stealth drone, piloted by the best and brightest, and slapped together by DARPA and operated by the DoD.  In terms of intellectual firepower, I imagine that the DHS has quite a few brilliant minds, but the military has an entire organization devoted to development everything from quantum encryption to weapons systems that fire 1.2million rounds a minute.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Stealth drone was harder to drop, but when it was released that they went through the GPS system to bring it down, I fell over laughing.

A paper I wrote in my last year at the Old Dominion University was on robotics on the battlefield, and the number one issue with these devices have is the communication and GPS systems.  Avionic systems have some play, but the real bugs were in terrestrial based sword bots, so named because they have monikers like ‘claymore’ and ‘saber’.  These battle bots were failing remote tests because they could not respond fast enough, did not respond at all, or did things like firing off around 45 seconds after being issued the command to do so.  You could strip away the electronic protection on them, and give the operator faster reaction time, but then there is nothing to stop a local Al Qaeda operative, trained by a technician from a relatively unfriendly state, with a wireless connection and few tools of the electronic warfare trade, to hack in and either disable the robot on the field, or, in the worst case scenario, take remote control of these electronic weapons platforms and turn them on the soldiers standing right next to them.  Granted, that scenario is half a world away, but imagine small drones with live video feed hovering about, each one supposed protected by encryption on par with, say, any of the banks that have recently been hacked, or the police departments that have had their records compromised (and I can guarantee that the LAPD servers are not going to have the same encryption as government security contractor companies, or  international banking systems).

Lastly, the drones offer an odd stretch of police power reaching into the personal domain.  Currently police can fly over your house and if they see pot being grown in the back yard, they can get a warrant and conduct a raid.  It’s legal, there was a supreme court case on it, and it flew.  Drones will be able to do the same, but there is a twist regarding that maneuverability issue. Smaller drones means that they can go places helicopters and larger drones cannot.  So we can’t see anything in your yard, but what about that shed at the corner of your property.  We’re still flying, technically we’re not trespassing (you wait, this will be one of the first legal arguments), and we happened to peek in this window and saw that you had a shotgun.  We checked the state gun registration and you don’t have a shotgun on record with us.  That’s a bust.

Is it a silly scenario, absolutely, but it is completely plausible. Why put a GPS tracker on a criminal’s car when you can just tail him incessantly with a drone?  Easy way to get around that pesky warrant problem:

“no your honor, the drone was not following the individual in question.  It just happened to be everywhere he was going.”

You can see where this is going.

I am all for the thin blue line doing its thing and bringing in the bad guys, but with great power comes great responsibility, and this is another example of military tech rolling down to police departments that don’t need more military tech.  For the price of a drone operation system and related drones you could probably hire another dozen cops.  Humans that need jobs, can form intellectual and emotional bonds with the community, grown and learn, become leaders of the community, and, best of all, can’t be hacked to dive bomb cars on the I-95.

Stop frothing at the mouth for a moment and realize the long game moments

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My stomach fell out when the decision on Thursday rolled down.  I was a staunch believer that any variation of the individual mandate was a legal faux pa and had to be struck down.  Then I read the Roberts decision and was illuminated to an entirely new way of operating in the government.  I was seeing, for the first time, not a decision based on party politics or personal interest.  No, I saw a straight out of myth ruling based on pure constitutional reasoning. Okay, there may have been some political wranglings in there, and I am thrilled that other pundits and writers like Michael Medved and Paul Begala were quick to point out the true victory for Republicans in the bill.

At the root of the Roberts decisions, aside from defining the mandate as a tax and throwing the life of the bill back into the hands of Congress which may very well fall into Republican hands in November, there was this little gem:

2. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS concluded in Part III–A that the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the
Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. Pp. 16–30.
(a) The Constitution grants Congress the power to “regulate Commerce.” Art. I, §8, cl. 3 (emphasis added). The power to regulate commerce presupposes the existence of commercial activity to be regulated. This Court’s precedent reflects this understanding: As expansive as this Court’s cases construing the scope of the commerce power have been, they uniformly describe the power as reaching “activity.” E.g., United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549, 560. The individual mandate, however, does not regulate existing commercial activity. It instead compels individuals to become active in commerce by
purchasing a product, on the ground that their failure to do so affects interstate commerce. (link)

Roberts effectively stopped the government from mandating that a lack of participation in a specific filed of commerce amounted to having a direct impact on interstate commerce.  In writing the decision this way he took the congressional, and largely Democratic, insistence to tell Americans what to do with their money, even when they are not spending it, and locked it away in that nasty little box known as ‘unconstitutional’.

Labeling the mandate as a tax was something the President was specific about avoiding during the creation and vote on the bill.  Even after it was enacted they President and Democratic members of congress were adamant that it was not a tax, but when they went to the line the only legal way to argue it, and to save any resemblance of the mandate, was to label it just that. However, in doing so it lost that shiny aspect of a social program that could be administered by an Executive Branch organization, and was put back in the hands of Congress.

Lastly, there is the matter of the tax itself.  I’ve seen the posts on social websites and heard my conservative friends gnash their teeth and scream to the heavens about how individual liberty is dead, how freedom is no longer found in the United States, and I chuckle.  The issue will be revised. CNN pointed out, not 30 minutes after the decision was made, that the tax can only be challenged, by law, after it has gone into effect.  That means in January of 2014, the first year the penalties, excuse me, Taxes are in place, there will be another lawsuit, another challenge, and another Supreme Court decision,

Chief Justice Roberts looked to the future on this decision, and he ruled, not as a conservative or a liberal, but as any judge should.  He put the balls back in their respective courts, taking the power to create taxes away from the executive and giving it back to the legislative, and told the nation that the President would not be playing with that ball anymore.  At least, not in that capacity.

UPDATE: A site I frequently visit (www.neveryetmelted.com) has a fantastic article on this and links to several other articles.  I’d strongly recommend bookmarking it if you get a chance.