Every step you take
The Washington Post's Rick Weiss reports ("Vast DNA Bank Pits Policing vs Privacy"):

With little public debate, state and federal rules for cataloging DNA have broadened in recent years to include not only violent felons, as was originally the case, but also perpetrators of minor crimes and even people who have been arrested but not convicted.

Now some in law enforcement are calling for a national registry of every American's DNA profile, against which police could instantly compare crime-scene specimens. Advocates say the system would dissuade many would-be criminals and help capture the rest.

And Congress is working hard to make that vision come true, one step at a time:

While the debate goes on, some in Congress are working to expand the database a bit more. In March, the House passed the Children's Safety and Violent Crime Reduction Act.

Under the broad-ranging bill, DNA profiles provided voluntarily, for example, in a dragnet, would for the first time become a permanent part of the national database. People arrested would lose the right to expunge their samples if they were exonerated or charges were dropped. And the government could take DNA from citizens not arrested but simply detained.

H.R. 4472 was sponsored by -- surprise, surprise -- James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). Thus the measure is also packed with draconian provisions making it tougher to release death row inmates based on exonerating evidence and increasing mandatory minimum sentences -- all drafting in behind this or that sex-offender monitoring program named after a murdered and/or abused child; slick, sick packaging, indeed.

While also opposing these and other provisions of the bill in a March letter to Congress, the ACLU particularly urged representatives to oppose the widened scope of DNA registration:

H.R. 4472 would permit voluntarily submitted samples to be included in CODIS [Combined DNA Indexing System] and would eliminate the expungement provision for people whose DNA was incorporated in the federal database based on an arrest that never resulted in a conviction. Retaining a person's DNA in a criminal database renders him or her an automatic suspect for any future crime. This is problematic for any category of tested persons, but especially for those who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime.

(Emphases added.) Think this wouldn't affect you? You might be surprised -- DNA tests are starting to be used for "familial" analysis. This refers to using partial DNA matches to learn that the person of interest is not in the system -- but is related to someone who is. Think that wouldn't affect you, either? Again, not so fast. Weiss notes that sloppy lab work has made unwitting suspects out of innocent people. In the future, this will include people who would not have even been on the radar screen when DNA samples were not routinely collected from convicts and now from arrestees as well. Even voluntary DNA samples are now to be uploaded to CODIS for permanent archival.

The Fourth Amendment states,

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

These words may not rise to quite the sacrosanct level of a"Speech and Debate" clause protecting Congressmembers from having their place of work searched when warranted. But they are still fairly clear and fairly important words, ones that all members of Congress are duty bound to honor. Instead, they are on the verge of creating -- by voice vote in the House, and likely by somnolence in the Senate -- a surveillance tool that will make automatic suspects of more and more of us, via bits of our or a relative's DNA permanently on file.

Sure, today it's supposedly mainly about sex crimes -- and I despise those people, too. But tomorrow it'll be tax evaders or litterbugs. And the day after, it'll be about who was at the demonstration against the "war on terror," or who was at the library computer googling "Qaeda Seattle" for their term paper.

Whatever. Too bad there won't be a "separation of powers" issue at stake -- you and I don't have any separate powers worth worrying about. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:45:00 PM -- |    

 
Every move you make
You knew it was coming. The New York Times' Saul Hansell and Eric Lichtblau report "U.S. Wants Companies to Keep Web Usage Records":

The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives from Internet companies, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department. The meeting included representatives from America Online, Microsoft, Google, Verizon and Comcast.

Via firedoglake, where Christy Hardin Smith, a former prosecutor, acknowledges the value to law enforcement, but concludes:

But with the Bush Administration and its disconnect from the Constitution in so many ways, I fear the mis-use of this information.

I'm not sure I'd trust any administration any more, given the way leading Democrats appear to have rolled over for the NSA's warrantless wiretaps -- if Hayden's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee is to be believed. Even if Democrats are ever in charge again someday, many of them will apparently have few serious qualms about cutting corners in the pursuit of bad guys -- defined as child pornographers one minute, and terrorists the next. From the Times article:

An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller's reply was, "We want this for terrorism."

Based on past experience, the Bush people will certainly begin mining this stuff with or preferably (as far as they're concerned) without warrants, law or no law -- after all, seeking a warrant might give away the game, right? And both the legitimate uses of this data and the definition of terrorism will probably get pretty elastic in the hands of people like Gonzales -- especially when "oversight" is being run by Arlen "Asleep at the Wheel" Specter and his fellow lickspittle Republicans.

But it won't be just Gonzales, Specter, and the Republican Party; the disease may have spread. There was a time when I might have trusted this country's institutions enough to say "go ahead, store it all, I trust you'll have probable cause and will get a warrant if you want to look at it." That trust is badly eroded now. And it's not likely to be fully restored even if Democrats ever regain Congress or the White House -- not unless they've made respecting civil liberties and the rule of law the very heart of their platform and their government. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:00:00 PM -- |    

 
Horrors - a deliberate program of bilingualism
Muttering to himself at the Corner, John Derbyshire discovers there's a Spanish immersion school in his community and decides it's an elitist plot:

No offense to anyone, but I think this is awful. I wouldn't mind if it were being done with some other language—-Latin, say, or Hungarian, or Sumerian, or Chinese. Since it's being done —- and ONLY being done —- in Spanish, it's hard to resist the conclusion that this is part of a deliberate program of Hispanicization on the part of our political and bureaucratic elites.

Relax, Derbyshire, it's not necessarily a pro-immigrant conspiracy. In my county (Montgomery County, Maryland), anyway, there are Chinese, Spanish and even -- ulp! -- French immersion programs in public grade schools as well. The idea is that by challenging very young children to have to understand and speak a second language, they will do so.

It works -- my little girl, now in 2d grade, has been in a French immersion program since kindergarten and speaks French quite well now (at least as far as I can tell: better vocabulary and much better accent than mine). To answer a common concern, there's also been no perceptible impact on her ability to read English -- she just picked up that up in passing, possibly either because we read to her a lot, because she's bright and figured out the skill wasn't all that different, and/or because most children have a knack for learning stuff they're interested in. Who knows? I was never all that worried about it.

Derbyshire continues:

The logical end-point of this path will be the situation in Quebec, where a person not bilingual — in our case, in English and Spanish — will be at a disadvantage in the job market. Is this a thing Americans actually want? Did anyone ask us?"

"The situation" in Quebec -- saints preserve us! To answer his questions: yes; yes. (Of course, perhaps no one specifically asked you how to educate the young, John; I can't imagine why.) I admit I sometimes talk about "poor monolinguals" when I'm at home, but that's just my particular elitist sense of humor.

But seriously, it's hard to know what to make of this, other than that maybe it's a joke. While Derbyshire seems to prefer relatively useless languages -- Sumerian? Hungarian? Latin? -- if a real-world school district in this country could afford only one such program, it would stand to reason it would be Spanish. And as Matthew Yglesias remarks,

Speaking a foreign language well is, after all, a useful skill which is precisely why there are so many people on the planet who know more than one. ... It'd be good to have more people who know foreign languages better, just like it'd be good to have more people who know math better, and to have a better educated, more knowledgeable population generally.

To be fair and balanced -- always a goal here at "newsrack" -- distaste for bilingual education can cut across political divides. Back when we were deciding whether to try to enroll our girl in the French immersion program, you could sometimes pick up the impression from other parents in our (relatively liberal) neighborhood that we were selling out on values like "diversity" or "neighborhood schooling" by seeking out a more distant school and a program that didn't emphasize diversity per se.

The common thread is that enriching the education of our child is deemed to be some kind of luxury -- and one that's supposed to take a back seat to whatever political agenda is being peddled. Sacre bleu, Dummkoepfe! Schools are where kids should learn as much as they can. The rest is gravy at best, and a distraction at worst.


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UPDATE, 6/2: A followup e-mail clues "Derb" in about "dual immersion" programs -- half in English, half in Spanish, for half native English and half native Spanish speaking students. The correspondent describes it as an "upscale" and a "Yuppie" thing (I wish), and Derbyshire seems not to like it, either. Whatever. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:00:00 PM -- |    

 
An Inconvenient Truth
We're in, tomorrow in Bethesda -- thanks, Brett! More after I've seen it.

Here are some previous posts about global warming and climate change at this blog:

• Regional model CO2 rule on tap -- without Maryland*
• Global warming, coming soon to a coastline near you
• Earth's energy imbalance
• Earth's albedo falling
• Every day is Earth Day
• Terraforming today
• ...and, of course, Waah -- Gore challenged professor 14 years ago
  

More valuably, here are some other good sites that are focused on the issue of climate change:

• ClimateCrisis.net -- associated with Gore's movie.
• Climate Crisis Coalition -- the site has a climate news archive blog that's good all by itself.
• StopGlobalWarming.org -- political- and lifestyle-action oriented
• RealClimate blog -- My favorite, an excellent blog by climate scientists. Not surprisingly, co-blogger Eric Steig has already reviewed the movie:

...it is an inspiring film, and is decidedly non-partisan in its outlook. [...]

For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don't detract from Gore's main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change. [...]

I'll admit that I have been a bit of a skeptic about our ability to take any substantive action, especially here in the U.S. Gore's aim is to change that viewpoint, and the colleagues I saw the movie with all seem to agree that he is successful.

In short this film is worth seeing.

Emphasis and knocks on wood added.


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* This is about the RGGI, or Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Maryland joined in later.
UPDATE, 6/1: Good article about Gore and the movie, "Gore Warms Up," by David Corn. See also Tom Toles' cartoon, and Gore ex-roommate Bob Somerby's review and thoughts:

In parts of the film which we thought were too brief, we sit beside the Caney Fork River on the Gores’ Tennessee farm (You know? The farm that doesn’t exist? The farm which proved that Gore was “delusional?”) and Al Gore, speaking directly and quietly, tells us why he loves that river, the river he swam in as a child. For ourselves, we thought we finally understood something about Gore as we watched those fleeting passages: No one acquires that much erudition unless he deeply and massively cares. Al Gore cares about these topics–about the stewardship of that small river.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Smile and the world smiles with you
...or so it's often said. So make your world a little happier -- share some of these with people you think would enjoy them, and/or people you would just enjoy sharing them with:

Presidential Outtakes (Saturday Night Live cartoon, hosted at PistolWimp) --- "quiet Bill" ("The Agonist") writes: "Things that make you go pfffft."

Overtaxed National Guard To Use Illegal Immigrants To Guard Mexican Border (Tom Burka, "Opinions You Should Have") ---

"We see it as a very special guest worker program," explained Guard Commander Sergeant Leon Rocknard.

Rocknard conceived the plan when he learned that President Bush wanted the Guard not to perform any law enforcement operations while "guarding" the border.

"Once I learned that we'd be mostly cooking and cleaning, the idea came naturally," he said.

Hoffa taunts U.S. in new video ("The Borowitz Report") --- “You can dig all you want, but you’re never going to find Jimmy Hoffa,” he said in the just-released video, adding, "I’m going to Disneyland!"

All the news that titillates (Jesus' General) --- In the wake of the New York Times' recent speculation on the state of the Clinton marriage, many bloggers want to emulate their ethical mentors in the mainstream media by gathering prurient information about them. For his part, JG left this comment at the Times: "What I want to know is if, like the praying mantis, Judith Miller eats the head of her lover during coitus. Can you ask Mr. Sulzberger?"

The nation that knew too much ("Fafblog", March 2006; come back, Fafblog!) ---

Tragically, Senator DeWine’s bill simply doesn’t go far enough. It’s one thing to ban journalists from talking about the NSA program, but what’s truly needed is a law to prevent the public from thinking about it. Classified information has been leaked to a public that was never meant to know it, and as long as Americans are free to think classified thoughts, they can silently undermine the president in a time of war from deep within seditious skulls. The occupation of America’s frontal lobes by the United States military may be long and costly, but the cause of freedom requires many a sacrifice.

Top Ten Tuesdays: What changes will we be making at the CIA? (Brando, "Circle Jerk at the Square Dance") --- My personal favorites:

...11) Taking Jack Bauer seriously when he tells us there's something fishy going on at the airport. [...]
...4) Improving readability of the President’s Daily Brief by changing it to a picture-based format.
3) Banning use of Magic 8-ball when writing National Intelligence Estimates. [...]
...1) Respecting the rights of sovereign nations, even when we disagree with them...just kidding, we’re going to ask Pat Robertson which world leaders God says have to go.

And don't forget "...simply getting it right more often."

I'd say sorry for the sparse output lately -- except that I'm not sorry. I had a great Memorial Day weekend, and hope you did, too.


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NOTES: Hoffa taunts via the Henleys.
UPDATE, 5/31: Gary Farber has it on good authority that Fafblog will resume "soon." Or so he says.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:04:00 AM -- |