Where is your Constitution NOW!
A lot of people talk about how great it is to have Constitutional Protections in the United States, but there are constant examples of Constitutional Rights being violated with impunity, and there is basically nothing that any individual citizen can do about it.
Now there is a question as to what sort of communications are public, and what sort are private, and the nature of the Internet rather muddies that distinction, but for review, 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.
Given the connectivity that modern technology grants us, and the way our communications are entrusted to third parties, the question then becomes whether there is a violation when the government accesses communications between parties when there is no warrant. A purely physical example of such a potential violation would be for the government to intercept mail at a post office and read it without an express warrant to do so.
"But wait!" you exclaim. "Tampering with U.S. mail is by statute a Federal Crime as per U.S. Code Title 18 Part I Chapter 83, Section 1703."
To which I reply, "Wow you know your Federal Statutes, or your Web-Fu is pretty decent. But, who investigates and prosecutes such violations?"
"Well, the Department of Justice does..." you reply, already seeing where this is leading.
"And if the Department of Justice is the one that is reading the mail, who investigates and prosecutes?"
Exactly! So, let's pretend that you as are someone that suspects that this is happening because some intrepid reporters managed to uncover a local government mail tampering scheme in your town. The reporters had managed to sneak into the adjunct facility at the mail processing center, and identified the machines that were being used to scan the mail, and even gotten some documentation from the Justice Department detailing the operation. Well, you can try and investigate, but you have pretty limited ability to do so. It's not like you can get a warrant and storm into their offices and take their stuff, but you can file a civil suit. That means you get to spend a fair amount of time and effort filing the suit, but the problem is that since you have only a limited amount of evidence regarding the crime against you/your community. At that stage you get to have a judge review your case. And at this point you can have your civil suit thrown out for "Lack of Standing," because you don't have "sufficient evidence" that you (the plaintiff) have suffered some sort of "injury," and/or a dismissal based on the possible disclosure of "State Secrets." So, if the State wants to keep its unconstitutional activities secret, you can't use the court system for redress...
http://news.yahoo.com/judge-rules-nsa-warrantless-search-case-221514259.html
So, if you believe the Constitution protects your rights even from the Government, WHERE IS YOUR CONSTITUTION NOW?
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Monday, February 09, 2015
Brian Williams, lies, false memories
The latest celebrity that I have noted that is having trouble with memory issues or lying is Brian Williams. Now, I tend to believe that Brian Williams was lying along with the help of having created false memories over time. Research into memory formation and access shows that memories are fairly pliable, and I am guessing that different people have different levels of susceptibility to this phenomena. This really isn't anything new, people that are exposed to the same events can have dramatically different recollections of what happened, and who did what. This tendency has created all sorts of confusion and is probably a big motivating factor in the development of writing and all manner of recording devices through human history.
Froin what I can tell, Brian Williams is a journalist who has done a lot of work, and gone to all sorts of places to be in the midst of events and report on them. He's also a telegenic guy, which is important because of the medium, and he delivers reports in a way that people like to receive them. He is a reflection of the society that enriches him, and it seems highly likely that he is earnest, and believes what he says and reports. Media consumers respond to that, and he makes a good living doing something that he seems quite honest and sincere about.
Thing is, he's more of an actor, a face, than a reporter/chronicler, and he apparently has entered enough of a bubble that he doesn't have his own credibility fact checked for him. For most people, this isn't a big deal, and even for people in the entertainment/media business it's kind of secondary, but Brian Williams is marketed as a Journalist, and as an "on the scene" journalist, he's also marketing/branding himself (or at least he has been marketed/branded as) as a credible source of information. His story seriously damages that brand. It is yet to be seen if that brand will be able to recover. Personally I think it won't, and he will have a fair amount of time on his hands, but given the nature of contractual obligations, NBC may be able to mitigate this and keep Williams on in a major capacity, but if so, it will be based on viewership, and I don't think that Williams will get much support on his behalf. The narrative that Williams had a perfectly normal and natural memory reconstruction that he believed is rather subtle, and it certainly doesn't eliminate the possibility that he sensationalized/embellished/lied in order to increase his standing/popularity/cred as the man who goes where the story is despite the danger.
There is a deeper problem, or revelation anyway, and that is that NBC's news department should have fact checked this story the first time it was told, and they didn't. Or if they did notice, they hoped that the story would disappear, but that seems rather unlikely, since Williams told the story publicly more than once. This chain of events leads to a further zeitgeist of network news being "infotainment" rather than it being an attempt to inform and explain. How this will translate when it comes to ratings is a question that will be answered in time, but at this point it seems that the tide is turning very much against those that inform and explain when it comes to that level of exposure.
It's going to be interesting to see how the medium evolves from here when it pretty much becomes a "trust no one" sort of mindset. I suspect that we are already seeing that though, and the way it seems to be shaking out is that people kind of know that they are probably being lied to, so if that's going to be the case, they want to be hearing the lies that they like. Of course, we may already be there.
Froin what I can tell, Brian Williams is a journalist who has done a lot of work, and gone to all sorts of places to be in the midst of events and report on them. He's also a telegenic guy, which is important because of the medium, and he delivers reports in a way that people like to receive them. He is a reflection of the society that enriches him, and it seems highly likely that he is earnest, and believes what he says and reports. Media consumers respond to that, and he makes a good living doing something that he seems quite honest and sincere about.
Thing is, he's more of an actor, a face, than a reporter/chronicler, and he apparently has entered enough of a bubble that he doesn't have his own credibility fact checked for him. For most people, this isn't a big deal, and even for people in the entertainment/media business it's kind of secondary, but Brian Williams is marketed as a Journalist, and as an "on the scene" journalist, he's also marketing/branding himself (or at least he has been marketed/branded as) as a credible source of information. His story seriously damages that brand. It is yet to be seen if that brand will be able to recover. Personally I think it won't, and he will have a fair amount of time on his hands, but given the nature of contractual obligations, NBC may be able to mitigate this and keep Williams on in a major capacity, but if so, it will be based on viewership, and I don't think that Williams will get much support on his behalf. The narrative that Williams had a perfectly normal and natural memory reconstruction that he believed is rather subtle, and it certainly doesn't eliminate the possibility that he sensationalized/embellished/lied in order to increase his standing/popularity/cred as the man who goes where the story is despite the danger.
There is a deeper problem, or revelation anyway, and that is that NBC's news department should have fact checked this story the first time it was told, and they didn't. Or if they did notice, they hoped that the story would disappear, but that seems rather unlikely, since Williams told the story publicly more than once. This chain of events leads to a further zeitgeist of network news being "infotainment" rather than it being an attempt to inform and explain. How this will translate when it comes to ratings is a question that will be answered in time, but at this point it seems that the tide is turning very much against those that inform and explain when it comes to that level of exposure.
It's going to be interesting to see how the medium evolves from here when it pretty much becomes a "trust no one" sort of mindset. I suspect that we are already seeing that though, and the way it seems to be shaking out is that people kind of know that they are probably being lied to, so if that's going to be the case, they want to be hearing the lies that they like. Of course, we may already be there.
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