Excuse Me? No, We Do NOT Need to Do That

I'm sorry--did you say that we need to CHANGE the definition of privacy?

WASHINGTON — As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering because, as technology has changed, a growing amount of foreign communications passes through U.S.-based channels.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a FISA court order between 2001 and 2007.

Hell no. We're NOT going to do that.

For an official like that--and no wonder it was one of the vast number of assistants and deputies who threw this idea out there to test the reaction--to suggest that the American people have to suck it up and eat a little humility and part with their rights is ludicrous. But what do you expect these days? What do you expect when your outrage is outpaced by your inability to keep up with all the insane things we're supposed to be outraged about.

We never needed to amend FISA for the existing threats to our country. We amended FISA because the Republicans knew they were going to be caught spying on their political enemies, not terrorists. We need better Democrats to learn these issues and fight for the privacy rights of all Americans. You do not turn the eavesdropping intelligence apparatus of this country back onto its own citizens--at least, not without first getting a warrant to ensure that no one is abusing their power.

Republicans will, on January 20, 2009, at about 2PM Eastern, rediscover:

1. The Constitution
2. Privacy Rights
3. The Bill of Rights
4. Every other thing they've taken a dump on

And they will start jumping up and down and screaming about privacy as soon as a Democrat takes office. They will agitate as if the Republic itself is in danger of imminent collapse. They won't just do it for the gun nut lobby or for the paranoids and for the Black Helicopter crowd--which is about all that's left of their shrinking constituency.

No--they'll rediscover that they were supposed to be Americans during the period from January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2009. They're suddenly remember the rule of law and Habeus and the right to be free from unlawful search and seizure. They'll scream as if they've been stabbed with a million poison pens.

I say, let us have that debate now.

When I talk about better Democrats, what I mean is that I want to see Democrats step up and fight hard--don't give the telecoms immunity. They already have all the immunity they need. What we need is accountability. If they broke the law, let's sort out punishing and fining them and get BACK to the rule of law in this country.

I suspect we need to see a few hundred people marched off to jail. So be it.

Opportunist, thy name is Rudy

You know that reduction in violent crime in New York City that Rudy is always crowing about presiding over, as if he arrested every perp in New York personally?

Yeah, well, hold the phone. He was in the right place at the right time. The real reason that the crime rate plummeted was neurochemical, not the hoo-ah, head-crackin’ police state and “zero tolerance” policies that the authoritarians authoritarian instituted.

It turns out that the declining crime rates that Rudy is so fond of standing on are actually the result of (liberal) social and environmental policies enacted in the sixties and seventies that reduced lead exposure and lead poisoning in children.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin, and can have devastating effects on neural development even at low levels. There is a direct causal link between lead exposure and learning and developmental disabilities, decreases in I.Q., and behavior problems. It has also been adequately demonstrated that lead poisoning correlates with a lack of impulse control, and a lack of impulse control is a factor in many criminal acts.

Even tiny amounts can cause reduced IQ, reading and learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder and behavioral problems. As a result, childhood lead poisoning is associated with lower educational achievement, higher rates of high school drop-out and increased behavioral problems. In the long run, children who are lead poisoned may be less likely to be positive contributors to our communities. It is estimated that lead poisoning has tripled the number of children needing special education.

Now…back to Rudy and his chest and assertions that he enacted the policies that reduced crime in New York City. "I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

Well – crime did fall during the Giuliani era, but science says Rudy is claiming the entire pie as his when he really only deserves a sliver.

The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

I have not been able to track down the original studies, but I want to see them, and I want to go so far as to write an Excel worksheet and look at the data in my own format. You see, this issue is right up my alley. I have spent my career straddling medicine and academia. I have volunteered many hours in public health clinics, and in that capacity, I have tested thousands of children for lead levels; and in academia I have done neural research.

What I know about the effects of lead on neural development, and what I have read so far about the studies, I am inclined to believe that Rick Nevin is right on. The obvious questions that were raised in my mind as I was reading the Post article, were answered.

Now we already know what I think of Rudy – that is to say that I have scraped more appealing things from the bottom of my shoe after a visit to the dog park. So I really find it quite delicious that he is claiming the credit for a phenomenon that is actually due to those liberal social programs of the past that he and his ilk have tried mightily to undo.