Thursday, April 26, 2007

Money, Speech, and Corporate Personhood

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard the latest challenge to the McCain-Feingold Act, the act that set stringent limits on the ability of unions and corporations to air ads that specifically mention a candidates name within 60 days of the election.  Wisconsin Right to Life (a corporation under federal law) sued, claiming that this restriction violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment.  And, judging by the questions of the Supreme Court Justices during yesterday’s arguments, it looks like there’s a decent chance that the Roberts court will overturn this portion of the McCain-Feingold Act when it releases its decision sometime before June.

The United States has the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)on the books that make it illegal for another country or non-citizens to donate money to candidates (see the FEC foreign national guidebook).  Because of the FECA, foreign governments, individuals, corporations, organizations and associations, and parties are not permitted to donate money because doing so may unduly influence the candidate(s) who received those donations.  Because we don’t want people like President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and President Vladomir Putin of Russia interfering with our internal politics, even the political activities of allies and their citizens are severely constrained within the United States.

Unfortunately, in a world where Wal-Mart has the 22nd largest economy in the world and thus has more economic power than even Saudi Arabia, and where each of the top four automobile makers (GM, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, and Ford) individually have more economic clout than Venezuela and combined have a larger economy than Russia, why is it we keep allowing corporate money to equal free speech?

A large part of the problem is that the U.S. permits corporations to claim to be “juristic persons”, or a group that is not a human being but nonetheless has the responsibilities of a real person.  Juristic persons can be charged with crimes, have their property seized, etc. just as real people can.  The problem comes when you give a legalistic construct intended to codify the legal rights and responsibilities of groups of people the rights of a living, breathing individual human.  Our natural or God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution do not inherently apply to human-created organizations such as corporations.  And when you’ve got companies like Nike claiming the right to lie in advertising and public relation as free speech under the First Amendment, something has gone horribly, terribly wrong.

In an era where 95 of the 150 most powerful economies in the world are corporations, we should stop treating them as if they are people and start treating them as if they are nations instead.  Since we don’t permit foreign nationals to influence our elections, we should similarly not permit corporations to spend corporate money in order to influence our elections.  Individual corporate employees are citizens and are natural human beings, and as such they have their naturalistic right to free speech (although no-one ever said that speech couldn’t be sensibly regulated – if the Congress has the authority to invoke laws on libel and threatening speech, I don’t understand why they lack the authority to regulate laws on campaign speech).  But the corporate entities themselves are not people – they are artificial constructions of people, and as such they have only the rights and privileges we choose to grant them.

It’s time to recall some of the very rights that corporations claim that they simply do not deserve.

[Crossposted to Scholars and Rogues and The 5th Estate]

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Security Failures at the White House

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card a letter requesting that Mr. Card testify before Rep. Waxman’s committee regarding an issue of national security.  Specifically, Rep. Waxman has evidence that “there may have been a systemic failure to safeguard classified information at the White House during and after” Mr. Card’s tenure.  If true, this is a major problem that, at a minimum, requires that several people lose their jobs over it and may rise to the level of federal crimes.

According to Mr. Waxman’s letter, “multiple current and former security officials who work or worked at the White House Security Office” described what could only be described as a wholesale breakdown of security procedures, including regularly ignoring security breaches, blocked security inspections of the West Wing, and mismanagement of the White House Security Office.  These issues have, according to those same security officials, resulted “in the departure of more than half of the White House security officers within the last year.” (emphasis mine)

According to the letter, the security of Security Compartmented Information (SCI), a level of classification even higher than Top Secret, has regularly been breached.  In one case, a “senior assistant to the President” disclosed SCI material to an uncleared junior aide.  In another, a “White House official” left SCI material behind in a foreign hotel.  In neither case were the individuals responsible for the security breaches investigated or disciplined in any way.  According to Executive Order 13292, section 5.5 paragraph b1:

“Officers and employees of the United States Government, and its contractors, licensees, certificate holders, and grantees shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently: disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified under this order or predecessor orders;”

Appropriate sanctions are defined, also according to section 5.5, as “reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions in accordance with applicable law and agency regulation.”

It’s a given that White House officials and aides traveling with the President take Secret, Top Secret, and SCI material out of the country with them all the time.  But there are documents that anyone with a security clearance must sign, specifically the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, form SF312.  This document makes it abundantly clear what the signer’s responsibilities regarding classified material are.  For example, Question 13 in the document answers the question of “am I liable for releasing classified information if” with the following:

A party to the SF 312, SF 189 or SF 189-A may be liable for disclosing “classified information” only if he or she knows or reasonably should know that: (a) the marked or unmarked information is classified, or meets the standards for classification and is in the process of a classification determination; and (b) his or her action will result, or reasonably could result in the unauthorized disclosure of that information.

Certainly leaving SCI material at a foreign hotel qualifies, as does talking SCI to an uncleared junior aide.  In addition, some White House officials have left classified materials out on their desks instead of physically securing the material.  All three meet my understanding of the legal definition of “negligence”.  As such, all three must be investigated, because by some interpretations of Executive Order 13292, failure to do so also qualifies as negligence.

But Rep. Waxman’s letter doesn’t end there.  According to the original Executive Order 12958 section 5.3 (amended by 13292), an arm of the National Archives known as Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) is supposed to “have the authority to conduct on-site reviews of each agency’s program established under this order.” Yet the letter says that the ISOO has been denied access to the West Wing.  Technically, the Executive Order allows agencies to request that access be severely restricted.

An agency head may limit access to a special access program to the Director and no more than one other employee of the Information Security Oversight Office; or, for special access programs that are extraordinarily sensitive and vulnerable, to the Director only.

But that’s not what happened – access was totally denied, and without a contravening Executive Order, that’s grounds for sanctions up to and including dismissal.  Yet that doesn’t appear to have happened.

Finally, Rep. Waxman’s letter points out that the two highest officials in the White House Security Office, Director James Knodell and Deputy Director Ken Greeson, have been “loath to inconvenience or embarrass White House officials.” The security of classified information is not an issue of inconvenience – it’s national security, and should be treated as such.  The letter continues to discuss how Mr. Knodell and Mr. Greeson regularly brought prohibited electronic devices into the sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) including Blackberrys and cell phones and, worse yet, allowed others to do the same against their own responsibilities to safeguard the sensitive information contained in the SCIF.

Obviously you don’t want a Blackberry or cell phone in a secure area lest a spy email or call out of the area with sensitive data.  SCIFs are supposedly secured against most forms of intrusion, including electronic eavesdropping.  As an engineer with a background in antennas and electromagnetics, I suspect that the SCIF would use of a Faraday cage to block nearly all EM radiation (radio, cell phone signals, etc.), but this only works if the signals are weak enough that they can’t penetrate the Faraday cage, something that may not be true of cell phones and Blackberrys.  And cell phones and Blackberrys also have on-board memory that could be modified to store sensitive data that could also be smuggled out physically.  But there’s one interesting problem with cell phones (and many phone-equipped Blackberrys too) – they can be turned on remotely.

According to Schneier on Security, cell phones are never completely off, and so someone could theoretically hack into your phone and listen in.  In fact, the link above describes an instance when such a thing was done to tap a phone in an ongoing criminal investigation.  Essentially, any spy who knew that Mr. Knodell, Mr. Greeson, or any of their various guests were going into a SCIF could potentially gain access to the entire contents of a secured conversation using their cell phone.

According to U.S Code Title 18 Section 793, paragraph f:

Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any [material] relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—

Shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

I’m not a lawyer, but many of the security breaches described in Rep. Waxman’s letter appear to break Executive Order 13292.  Many of the breaches might also rise to the level of “gross negligence” that could be against federal law.  If the White House Security Office truly has not been doing its duty as Rep. Waxman suggests, then this is a serious breach of national security that, at a minimum, demands the individuals responsible must be disciplined appropriately.

But this is only a minimum.  If national security truly was compromised by lax White House security procedures, then the individuals responsible should be investigated and, if they’re guilty, they should go to jail.

[Thanks to Raw Story for the original story.  Crossposted from Scholars and Rogues]

Monday, April 23, 2007

The Micro-Pundit:  VA Wiccan Symbol

Finally, after too many years and a few lawsuits, the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs will finally allow the Wiccan pentacle as an official symbol in national cemeteries and on government-issued gravestones.  For a little more information, check out this San Francisco Chronicle link and this Stars and Stripes article.  For a complete list of presently allowed symbols on headstones, check out the official VA page

[Thanks to The Raw Story for pointing out this good news earlier today.]

Sunday, April 22, 2007

A Story of Dubai

Picture this for a moment:  A company that is based in an Middle Eastern country providing vital services for the United States, and yet only a few Representatives and Senators have come out to oppose the company’s providing those vital services.  And the media uproar is deafening in its silence.  And the name of the company?

Halliburton.

On March 11, Halliburton announced that they were going to be relocating the CEO’s office (and thus the company headquarters) from Houston to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.  So, now one of the biggest U.S. government contractors and military suppliers is moving to Dubai.

Does the name “Dubai Ports World” (DPW) sound familiar?  The Arab company bought controlling interest in a British company that ran a significant number of U.S. ports, and the media and Congress went totally crazy over it.  Lindsey Graham, Bill Frist, Hillary Clinton, Bob Menendez, and John Kerry all came down hard on rejecting the DPW deal, and the uproar eventually drove DPW to sell their U.S ports business to AIG.  And what’s happening with Halliburton?

Near silence.

Congress and the media complained that no foreign entity should be allowed to control U.S. strategic assets like ports (never mind that 80%+ of U.S. ports are foreign owned now and the ports that DPW bought were owned by a U.K. company).  Ok, so how “strategic” should we consider responsibilities for U.S. Army and Marines fuel supplies in Iraq?

People went ape over how a foreign entity would be in charge of U.S. security (even though everyone employed at a U.S. port would be a U.S. citizen and a member of the Longshoreman’s Union).  And Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary is responsible for the construction of mulitple new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities.

And still others were upset about how no country not based in the United States could avoid conflicts of interest and divided loyalties.  And yet Halliburton’s own move to Dubai will enable the company to focus more on the oil development and sales opportunities to eastern countries like Russia, Libya, and Vietnam, to name a few.

What’s the biggest differences between Halliburton and DPW?  Dick Cheney didn’t used to be CEO of DPW, and Halliburton isn’t run by an Arab Muslim.  (Note:  Dubai and the UAE are some of the U.S.’ greatest allies in the Middle East, providing us with valuable intelligence on the region and with a safe port for our navy.  Any bets that the DPW deal may have been arranged as a way to reward a vital ally?  And bigots scuttled the deal.)

Now, it’s not all bad - Halliburton will remain encorporated in the United States, so the company doesn’t expect to change their tax status in any way.  Any bets how long that lasts.

Sources:
NYTimes article
CBS News article
Wikipedia entry on Dubai Ports World
ABC news article
NPR

[Crossposted to Scholars and Rogues and The 5th Estate]

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Free Speech Lawsuit vs. White House Volunteers - An Update

In March of 2005, President Bush gave a speech about Social Security at the Wings Over the Rockies Air Museum in Denver, Colorado.  Three Bush opponents, Leslie Weise, Karen Bauer, and Alex Young, were thrown out of the eventbecause they arrivedin a car sporting a “No Blood for Oil” bumpersticker.  In response, Ms. Weise and Mr. Young filed a lawsuit in federal court against the two individuals who threw them out, Michael Casper and Jay Bob Klinkerman (aka “the defendants"), and they have recently filed suit against three White House staffers for breaching Ms. Weise’s and Mr. Young’s free speech rights.  (For my original comments on this, please read my first post here).

Today, various news outlets (including the two used for this post, the NYTimes online and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) reported that the defendants’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit had been rejected by Federal District Court and that the defendants had filed an appeal with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.  The rationales used were twofold:  first, that the federal government has the same legal authority as a private corporation with regard to controlling its message to the people and second, that the defendants should be granted governmental immunity to prosecution for their actions.

I’m not a legal scholar, but with what I know about private corporations vis a vis the government, the government is only peripherally similar to a private corporation.  For example, the federal government has the authority to raise a standing army, levy taxes, enter into and break alliances with other nations, print money, and make and enforce laws.  Private corporations are not permitted to do any of those things.  Citizens and residents of the United States are given a choice whether they wish to be an employee of a particular corporation (essentially a type of freedom of assembly), but they are not given any choice over whether they are subject to the authority of the federal government.  Because there is such a radically different level of power and authority between the federal government and private corporations, the parallels between private corporations and the federal government are few.

Given that corporations are considered to be people and the federal government is not, corporations are given certain rights that the government is not, including the right to free speech, assembly, etc.  However, until the government is granted “corporate personhood” via Constitutional amendment, the government will not be permitted “free speech” as an entity.  Because of the radical differences between the federal government and private corporations, I believe that the “government should be considered a corporation in regard to free speech” argument will fall upon deaf ears.

The second ground for appeal, that the defendants, as volunteers for a governmental function, should be granted government immunity to prosecution, is a little thornier, but in my opinion, still wrong-headed.  I don’t know if there are laws that address this directly, but even if there are, there are no laws that may be passed by Congress and signed into law by the President that can remove the Constitutional rights of a private citizen without due process.  And last I checked, “You look like you could be a threat to the dissemination of the President’s message” doesn’t qualify as “due process.” Free speech rights cannot be taken away so easily, so I believe that, even if the Appeals Court does buy into this argument, it will be overturned in a likely inevitable Supreme Court appeal.

Ultimately, however, what bothers me the most about this whole issue is that the White House used volunteers to stifle dissent at a taxpayer-funded event.  My fellow Coloradoans and myself paid for President Bush’s speech, and so every Coloradoan should have had an opportunity to attend, supporter or not.  The defendant’s lawyers stated outright that the fact that Ms Weise and Mr. Young had different opinions than the President was reason enough to eject the two.  Last I heard it, freedom of speech meant that you had the right to speak, even if that occasionally meant that you annoyed or frustrated anyone who happened to be listening.  And that means that hecklers have just as much right to heckle (at least at a publicly-funded event) as the President has a right to “control his message.”

And, quite frankly, if our president can’t think well enough on his feet to handle a heckler or three, then I don’t want him running the country.  Oh, never mind....

[Crossposted to Scholars & Rogues]

The Micro-Pundit:  Cellulosic Ethanol

Ethanol is all the rage - President Bush wants us to produce billions of gallons of the stuff by 2050.  But ethanol from corn (then most common source of the fuel addititive in the U.S.) is already increasing the global price of corn and thus increasing food prices both here at home and in countries as diverse as China, India, and Mexico.  The increased food prices are already generating some criticism from people like Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez, but there will less shrill and more rational criticism coming from other quarters soon enough.

I’ve discussed ethanol previously and pointed out that the only way that largely switching over from oil to ethanol makes any sense is if we can start producing ethanol from sources of cellulose instead of feed products.  Some sources of cellulosic ethanol include corn stalks and cobs, bagasse left over from the processing of sugar cane, wood chips left over from any number of wood products, and even good old fashioned grass.  Well, today’s New York Times ran a story on the technological and business challenges to large-scale cellulosic ethanol production.  In a nutshell, the enzymes needed to break cellulose into sugars that yeast can then ferment into ethanol are too expensive at this time.  But now there is finally a much needed influx of capitol to fund breaking through the technological and biological barriers to solving this problem.

It’s too early to say for sure whether the organizations and individuals involved will be successful, but I hope so.  I’d like ethanol to be a part of the massive equation that gets us to a decarbonized economy, but only if ethanol makes economic and technological sense, and only if it can be done without government subsidies.  And until the issues discussed in the NYTimes article above are addressed, our taxes would be better spent on other projects that give more bang for the buck.

[Crossposted to Dr. Slammy in 2008]

Monday, April 16, 2007

The Micro-Pundit:  “Never Again” Propaganda from Xinhua

Yesterday was April 15, Holocaust Remembrance Day. While I’ve never visited Europe and thus have never had the opportunity to visit a concentration camp or Jewish ghetto, I have visited the National Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C. as part of a Fascism and Nazism undergraduate class, and that trip remains one of the most profound moments in my life. Witnessing photographs and relics of what may be one of the best (or, if you prefer, worst) examples of man’s inhumanity to man made me more sensitive to human rights and reports of genocide than I had been up until that point. Which is why I’m suffering some serious cognitive dissonance over a headline I read today.

“Holocaust, never again”.

No problem. I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly, to the point that I have advocated for the United States and other nations to say “screw you” to Sudan and send troops into Darfur with or without Sudan’s permission (and if that results in the toppling of the government of Sudan, so much the better). But then I realized that this particular headline came from an unexpected source: the official mouthpiece newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and government: the Xinhua News.

To have the Chinese government, which has a remarkably poor human rights record of its own, using this headline is pure propaganda. I understand it - no-one wants to be compared, favorably or unfavorably, to the Holocaust. (Can’t you see it: “But Stalin only killed millions of his political enemies, so it was ‘better’ than the Holocaust because he murdered people of all races and religions.” No thanks.) And I don’t know any nation that doesn’t have a checkered past regarding human rights if you go back far enough, if for no other reason than the entire concept of “human rights” is a relatively recent development in human civilization. But China is further from the ideal than most.

As a counter to the official Chinese propaganda from Xinhua, here’s some good links for anyone who wants to educate themselves regarding China’s human rights record:

• Amnesty International’s entire list of China reports
• AI’s China Report, 2005 Summary (the latest summary)
• Human Rights Watch China and Tibet page
• The U.S. State Departments’ 2006 China Report

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Extra-Solar Water and Alien Plants

Today, the first extra-solar water was reported (the link is the BBC, but the original article is in Astrophysical Journal).  It looks like a gas giant planet is having its atmosphere evaporated by its sun, and in the process water vapor was discovered in the gas giant’s atmosphere.  Which is a bummer for the planet, but great for those of us who believe that life of some kind pretty much has to exist elsewhere in the universe.  The more water there is out there, the more likely it is that there is life as we more-or-less understand it.

I also came across an article about what color alien plants would likely be.  Of course, it depends on the atmosphere of the planet and the specific energy output of the star in question, but the article gives a few examples (how about purple foliage for plants bathed in the high ultraviolet light of the star AD Leo?).  All the possible examples are educated guesses, of course, since we’ve never seen alien plants and are remarkably unlikely to do so in our lifetimes.  But picture in your head a black rose with bright red or puple leaves (or subsitute your own favorite plant) and tell me that isn’t cool.

Monday, April 09, 2007

The Micro-Pundit:  Gays at Disney

Our culture is changing, and while some people will view this as another sign of the apocalypse, I view it in a far better light. Disney is allowing gay couples to buy the company’s Fairy Tale Wedding package, allowing gay couples to exchange vows at Disney theme parks and aboard Disney cruise ships. As someone with a number of gay, lesbian, and bisexual friends who would like the same rights and responsibilities as married couples (with or without the word “marriage"), seeing a company that is considered the epitome of family friendly for tens of millions come out and say “we support the right of gays to partner at our parks” is a good step forward.

Of course, Disney’s doing this not necessarily because the company believes that homosexuals should have the right to marry, but more because the gay commitment/marriage market is huge, untapped, and will bring just that much more money in to the company’s coffers. “Family friendly” at Disney really means “friendly to the families of the top executives and their pocketbooks,” but I digress....

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Automotive X Prize

A few years ago, a group was formed to give a prize to the first commercial, non-governmental team to get into space twice in a single week using the same vehicle and carrying at least three people (or the mass equivlalent).  This prize was the Ansari X Prize, and the $10 million prize was awarded to Mojave Aerospace Ventures and Scaled Composites LLC, builders of SpaceShipOne. The goal of the X Prize foundation was to use prize money to get smart, out-of-the-box thinkers to dream up wild ideas that could be applied to reduce the cost of human space flight.  While it hasn’t done this yet, there are a lot of indications that it will, since the Ansari X Prize has spawned off Spaceport America in New Mexico and Virgin Galactic, a budding space tourism subsidiary of Virgin Atlantic.

The X Prize Foundation’s mission is “To bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity,” and they plan to do so with a series of X Prizes along the lines of the Ansari X Prize for space flight.  The X Prize Foundation has just offered its third X Prize:  the Automotive X Prize.

In a nutshell, the automotive X Prize is an award of $10 million to the first team who successfully designs and builds a commercially viable, mass producable vehicle that gets better than 100 miles per gallon of gasoline and also releases no more than 200 g of carbon dioxide per mile.  Oh, and the car also has to win long one or two long-distance road races to be held in 2009.  So we’re talking amazing gas mileage, low pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, and performance, and all of it manufactured/manufacturable on standard automotive assembly lines.  Sure, anyone can make a single custom, hand-made car that will do all this (probably made from high-strength aircraft aluminum and carbon composites), but doing it cheaply enough that the vehicle can compete with the best of Detroit, Japan, and Europe and win, well, that’s a whole lot harder.

I applaud the X Prize Foundation for their focus on automotive development.  And I’m looking forward to seeing what else they come up with in the fields of energy and education (two areas in which they’re considering future X Prizes).  We need groups like the X Prize Foundation to shake up areas like automotive development, energy policy, and education with solutions that are disruptively innovative.  And the fact it’s a prize means that there will be multiple options by the end, and even the second and third place winners are likely to generate excellent products and ideas that are themselves tremendously useful.

Good luck to all the future contestants for the automative X Prize.  The world will be better for your success.

[Crossposted to Dr. Slammy in ‘08 and The 5th Estate]