Unreasonable Search and Seizure: Democracy and The Fall of the 4th Amendement

from Malcontends.blogspot.com

In the name of security the NSA continues to collect Americans' phone and email data. Please read what the Fourth Amendment says. Is there "probable cause" that ALL of us are terrorists? Of course not, and ex-president Jimmy Carter, in between hurling diatribes at Israel and supporting (at one time, democratically elected) radical Islamists in Egypt, complains that something has been lost.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter … in the wake of the NSA spying scandal criticized the American political system. “America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said Tuesday [July 16, 2013] at a meeting of the “Atlantic Bridge” in Atlanta.(link here or  here)

 As usual, Carter isn't quite correct, but this time he is heading in the right direction. As shown by the writings of Aristotle and the actions of Robespierre, a democracy can be a tyranny. A constitutional republic, however, protects minorities from being trampled by the majority. We are not a democracy; we are a constitutional republic. For example, Congress could easily pass a law restricting the free speech of racists, terrorists, and communists, but the courts would not allow it (I hope). The Bill of Rights, that is, our Constitution, protects everyone's liberties, even the liberties of those that are unpopular, and protects those liberties despite the votes of the majority. Does our democracy function? Yes. Is it able to check the power of the NSA? Currently, no! That is what Carter is really saying. How did this come to pass?

Every three months a secret court approves the NSA's searching of American citizens. The (July 7, 2013) New York Times explains:

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said....In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said. The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said. (link here)

Don't worry. Everything is perfectly legal. Justice was executed in exact accordance with the law in Imperial Rome, Communist Russia, and Nazi Germany too, by the way. You have almost no rights against the NSA's unlawful search and seizure because a secret court,  far removed from any democratic accountability, transparency, and checks and balances, broadened a narrow Supreme Court ruling in order to completely gut the Fourth Amendment. The FISA judges may say that NSA's data mining of millions of innocent Americans does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. I believe that our constitutionally accountable John G. Roberts' judicial branch should give an opinion.

If a 2016 presidential candidate comes out strongly against this abuse of federal power (like, ironically, the 2008 Obama), he or she will get a lot of support, especially from Jimmy Carter.

Postscript July 26, 2013: The Obama administration fights a Congressional  amendment to cut the NSA's budget. Unfortunately, the pro-NSA forces won in Congress, though the vote was close. Could this scandal create a left-right alliance? (links here and here) See also how Obama resembles Bush here in W's Apprentice here John Roberts himself picks the FISA judges (link here).

Should You Go To College?

University of California, Berkeley

All parents of high school students and prospective college students themselves should read a poignant analysis in the June 6, 2011 New Yorker magazine: Live and Learn: Why We Have College (link here). The author, Louis Menand, sorts the purposes of college into two competing theories and reviews the literature about whether students actually learn anything from the college experience.

Menand states in his Theory I that college acts as a sorting mechanism and a tool for the American meritocracy. Professional schools can trust G.P.A. as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential (P. 74). Grades matter more than if the student actually learns anything. On average, adults with college degrees do make more money than those without.

Theory II is the opposite. Grades do not matter as much as what is learned. "College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing" (ibid.). The trouble with Theory II is many students, especially those pursuing business degrees, don't learn much (as shown by the results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment) after three years of college. Students spend less time studying than they did fifty years ago. Lastly, the process of college is socially inefficient, since students pursuing vocational degrees don't care about classes in the liberal arts, but still have to take them to get a bachelors degree. It gets worse: "half of all Americans who enter college never finish" (P. 78).

So why force vocational students into these classes? Instead, why not track students? This is what many European countries do. Only the elite go to college. The rest go to vocational schools where they will never have to try to understand Nietzsche and Plato. The vocational schools offer work skills, not a B.A. degree. Menand hints that were we to do this, it would mark the end of our liberal arts schools. Perhaps it should be done anyway. I teach a lot of low-level students this year. Out of my 140 students, perhaps 60 will end up graduating from a four-year institution. Yet when I polled them, almost all of them want to go to college and get a bachelors degree.What a waste! Most of my students and more than half of 18-year-old American kids who enter post-secondary studies would be better served with vocational training. Most people don't want to take the time to understand Nietzsche and Plato, and only a motivated elite will get something out of the process.

Six–Year Undergraduate Completion Rates^a

• The systemwide graduation rate for University of California (UC) students is about 80 percent, compared with just under 50 percent at the California State University (CSU). Only about 30 percent of California Community College (CCC) students who endeavor to transfer or graduate with an associate’s degree or certificate actually do so. (Source, California Legislative Analyst's Office http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2011/calfacts/calfacts_010511.aspx)