Vol. 1 No.
The Newsletter of the
Commonweal Institute
http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/
“Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions,
slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.”
– John F. Kennedy
TALKING POINTS
Huge amorphous stories tend to wend their way into the mainstream press slowly, if at all. This one is no exception. The core of the story is straightforward: new computerized voting machines are vulnerable to tampering. The details and the implications become much more murky and complex: Who owns the companies that manufacture the voting machines? What are the technical issues involved? What does the law say? How can ordinary citizens best assert their rights to have their votes counted fairly and accurately? A few vigilant souls have been asking these questions; thankfully, the mainstream press is beginning to notice.
We all
remember the fiasco of the 2000 election, when the voting system in
But the
idea that computerized voting machines are infallible, or incorruptible, holds
about as much water as a bamboo sieve.
The essential problem is that only a handful of people – programmers,
technicians, and perhaps their bosses – really know what’s going on inside the
black box. In a letter to the House
Committee on Science, dated
The vulnerabilities are multiple. First, while one might assume that an actual human being at least double-checks electronically recorded votes, in fact all such data resides entirely within the machine. That means that the machine’s software is in total control. Moreover, the software code itself is considered proprietary information and therefore exempt from outside review. Finally, there’s no paper trail – or “audit” – to provide voters or election officials with an independent record of votes cast.
Compounding
these vulnerabilities is the fact that electronic results will be harder to
check against exit poll data, given the fact that the television networks have
discontinued their use of Voter News Service, which until 2002 had provided
them with that information. (On the gruesome demise of VNS, see Larry
Barrett’s article in the
So has any
evidence of hanky-panky come to light?
Hard to say. The story that’s
getting the most attention right now involves the business relationship between
Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Election Systems & Software, the
largest voting machine company in the
It’s hard to know whether the Hagel case involves anything more than coincidence and the appearance of something fishy – but that merely illustrates the point. The lack of transparency surrounding the entire process makes it difficult to reach firm conclusions. Certainly, it points up the necessity of cutting through the obscure corporate-political connections when it comes to voting, the defining right of any democracy.
At least
one case has resulted in conviction. Centered in
Fortunately,
momentum is building for a comprehensive approach to the problems raised by
paperless electronic voting. On
The essential need is for transparency and accountability. To achieve that, the Commonweal Institute supports a number of recommendations:
In the meantime, there’s stuff you can do to help. Most importantly, make noise. Contact your local election officials – probably the county board of commissioners or supervisors – and request information about the voting machines being used (or contemplated) in your district. Find out the political and corporate affiliations of the major shareholders and executives at the companies that make electronic voting machines. (Ecotalk.Org has compiled detailed financial and managerial information on the major vote-machine manufacturers.) Write to the secretary of state for your state, and to your Congressional representatives, and bring the issue to their attention.
The election of 2004 will be upon us before we know it. Let’s do all we can to make sure it’s run by the people, not the programmers.
WIT AND WISDOM
“The state of Texas executed its third prison inmate this week. This week. In fact, they don’t even have a last meal anymore; now it’s a buffet.” – Jay Leno
AROUND THE CORNER
“The progress of science is not likely to stop with wiretapping,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1928, recognizing then that the telephone – still a relatively new technology – enabled new forms of “trespass” beyond any contemplated by the framers of the Constitution. Yet Brandeis’s prescience was not reflected in law until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Katz v. United States that electronic surveillance fell under the “search and seizure” limitations of the Fourth Amendment. The following year, the U.S. Congress enacted the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which included the first codified guidelines for electronic surveillance: namely, that the content of wire communications could be seized only in criminal cases, with a court order and probable cause, and that wiretapping could be used only as a “last resort” for the most serious crimes, and carried out so as to minimize interception of innocent conversations.
Yet as Brandeis predicted, the “science” of surveillance has not stopped evolving, and some of its technological innovations now make wiretaps seem positively quaint.
Newer “packet-switched” telecommunication technologies merge voice, data and video. Open and networked, they are capable of cheaply storing and widely distributing huge quantities of personal information, and, in the case of wireless phones, can provide real-time location tracking. At the same time, the refinement of digital video technology, with its superior picture quality, means the cheaper transmission of far-flung video feeds and the cheaper storage, retrieval, and distribution of high-resolution images. Indeed, it will soon be technically and economically feasible to deploy cameras – linked by via wireless data networks to a centralized database – throughout every metropolitan area in the U.S., enabling authorities to “monitor” public activity across the entire nation. Fiction? Far from it. That line has already been crossed in Britain, where, as The Economist recently reported, the average citizen is now recorded by public surveillance cameras about 300 times a day.
Meanwhile, several other new surveillance technologies are moving beyond the R&D stage into practicability: video surveillance by drones on unmanned aircraft, night-time sky surveillance over U.S. cities by “spybots” using infrared technology, and GPS (global positioning satellite) “bugs” that can record a targeted vehicle’s position.
Individually and in tandem, these technologies have radically expanded the means by which authorities can monitor citizens – much faster than the legal system has been able to adapt. As of early 2003, for example, no comprehensive regulation of the acceptable parameters of video surveillance of public areas by government or private organizations exists. At the same time, as attorney James X. Dempsey has demonstrated in “Communications Privacy in the Digital Age”, the strict guidelines for government surveillance established by the 1968 Omnibus Crime Act have been steadily relaxed in regard to newer technologies. To take just one example, the FBI has used the 1994 Community Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to require wireless phone companies to collect location-signaling information on network users, and to allow the interception of packet-data communications without probable cause or a search warrant.
Predictably, such encroachment on the Fourth Amendment has accelerated since 9/11. The USA Patriot Act allows federal authorities to monitor Internet activity such as web browsing and e-mail without establishing probable cause – even if the person monitored is not a criminal suspect (see Section 216). (The Homeland Security Act of 2002 extends this power to state and local police.) In addition, the Patriot Act expands the scope of information that law enforcement can subpoena from Internet Service Providers, including records of session times and duration, temporary network addresses, and means and source of payment (see Sections 210 and 212). The “Roving Wiretap” provision of The Patriot Act gives investigators the right to expand wiretaps to include unspecified third parties, potentially undermining the letter and spirit of the “minimization” requirement of traditional law (see Section 217).
In this ever-changing technological era, one of the most important progressive political projects should be the campaign for a comprehensive (and ongoing) renovation of surveillance law that balances legitimate security needs with sacrosanct Constitutional protections. Among the critical components of such an “architecture of privacy”:
§ Expansion of existing wiretap law to protect citizens against the unreasonable search and seizure of wireless and packet-switched data
§ Federal guidelines regarding video surveillance of public spaces, specifying its legitimate uses in law enforcement and intelligence gathering
§ Regulation of video and Internet surveillance in the workplace, ensuring standards for notice, access to information, and use limitations. (Former Senator Paul Simon’s “Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act,” drafted in 1993 and defeated in committee, would be a good place to start)
We at the Commonweal Institute recognize that the politics of privacy are complicated, that privacy interests must be weighed against other social needs, and that privacy means different things to different people. But the kinds of changes Americans are now witnessing (or experiencing) should not take place without full public awareness and a vigorous debate – and perhaps not even then. The greatest strength of the United States lies in the character of its democracy and its public life; we must guard therefore not only against terrorism, but against the fear that would lead us into undermining one of our most treasured principles.
– Philip Leggiere
QUOTED!
“I know there are some people that are worried about the faith-based initiative that the President supports. And most of the distress is about that, ‘We don't want the federal government coming into our business.’ Well, my answer to that is, don’t accept the money. But I see it as a great opportunity to bring God back into the public institutions of the country. God has been removed from all of our public institutions.” – House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), speaking at an July 10 luncheon for Congressional staff organized by TV preacher the Center for Christian Statesmanship
EYE ON THE RIGHT
As they work on D.S.M.-V (the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the professional bible for psychologists and psychiatrists), the tome’s editors might want to consider including “Pathological Hatred of Bill Clinton” as one of their standard maladies.
In January, a small group of mad-dog Clinton haters led by former New York Congressman John LeBoutillier announced plans to build the “Counter Clinton Library” in Little Rock, Arkansas, within walking distance of the official Presidential Library that is due to open later this year. The mission of this dismal doppelganger, according to the Counter Clinton Library website, will be “setting the record straight about the Clintons’ White House years – and about Hillary’s certain campaign to become the next President of the United States.”
The pitch for money is straight down the ultraconservative plate: “Our Counter Clinton Library will be a permanent thorn in the side of the Clintons as they try to hide and distort their anti-American, anti-family, anti-military legacy.”
Good Lord! Who knew!?
Fortunately, there’s a fine line between venom and silliness, and the C.C.L. impresarios can’t help drifting into the latter: “One of the Counter Clinton Library’s exhibitions will be the National Insecurity Hall in which we detail – often in the Clintons’ own words and actions as captured on video – their systematic destruction of our military and intelligence capability, their hatred for the military uniform and flag of the United States, their cozying up to Red China, their tolerance of ‘leaking’ Top Secret information to our enemies – and their total devotion to undermining America’s superpower status.”
And how would such a production play in Peoria? Pretty well, according to Little Rock political consultant Jerry Russell, who told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in December that “from a business standpoint, it’s a hell of an idea. It would be profitable a lot of the time. People are more interested in negative things than they are in positive things.”
Well – maybe, maybe not. But the impeachment proceedings of 1998-1999 certainly illustrated the American public’s distaste for the kind of harsh, bilious negativism that seems to rise up from the bowels of the ultra-Right.
And more importantly, the very idea of their counter-library runs counter to the essential spirit of commonality that makes a pluralistic democratic society possible. It’s the principle of loyal opposition that seems violated by such efforts to demonize – and to keep on demonizing after his return to private life – a public figure who has already generated more than his fair share of animosity. We are, after all, all on the same team, and though Bill Clinton’s personal life is not above reproach, nor his policies above debate, the same can be said of every President in the history of the union. Presidential libraries are historical repositories and monuments of respect. They represent a place where political divisions and personal wounds can be understood in light of the broader cultural traditions and aspirations that bind Americans together.
Next to that ideal, the Counter Clinton Library would stand as a festering sore. It’s time to let it go. What’s next? Hangings in effigy? Advance tickets to urinate on a mock-up of Bill Clinton’s grave? One hesitates, even in jest, to raise the idea.
HAPPENINGS
On January 28 and January 29, the Commonweal Institute co-sponsored two presentations at Stanford University by author Janine Benyus. The first, at the Stanford Business School, sold out, with over 400 people in attendance. The second, a breakfast meeting at the Stanf Faculty Club, attracted about 125 people and had to relocate to a larger space.
A third event, hosted by the Commonweal Institute, was by invitation only. Nearly 40 leaders from the business, venture capital, and nonprofit sectors in the San Francisco Bay Area met with Benyus at a reception held in a private home in Portola Valley, CA. As a result of the networking and brainstorming that took place, the attendees are planning further actions to advance sustainable business practices that incorporate the principles of “biomimicry.”
Commonweal Institute Fellow Dave Johnson has published an article in the History News Network titled “Who’s Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors?” Taking as his starting-point a conservative attack on two history professors who had dissented from the administration’s position on Iraq, Johnson traces the money and the media coordination that lay behind the effort to discredit them. It is a revealing article to check out if you want to see an encapsulated analysis of how the right-wing messaging machine works.
ENDORSEMENTS
“America needs a true marketplace of ideas, not a one-sided monologue by the right. At a time when airwaves and emails are filled with conservative voices, the Commonweal Institute is more important than ever.” – Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, University Professor at Brandeis, and co-founder of The American Prospect magazine
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