Two Pieces of Red Meat for Civil Libertarians

Two big pieces of red meat for civil libertarians to chew on today:

First, the US use of biometrics to track Afghan men of fighting age.

I'm familiar with biometrics -- did you realize that Turkmenistan, that might not even have running water in some of its towns this summer, despite its gas and oil wealth, incorporated biometrics into its passports (which are also helping to weed out Russian-speakers and force them out of their dual passport status). Yes, biometrics from a repressive post-Soviet near-totalitarian regime -- understood -- although none of the same people now salivating about this story ever cared about it, even though Turkmenistan is just over the Afghan border.

So, what is my first reaction? Naturally, there is revulsion that we are penetrating into the privacy and the lives and the affairs of this war-torn nation even further. Does the end justify the means? We naturally ask that about everything to do with this war. But this really seems excessive (and also likely prone to hacking, glitches, technical false firings, etc. etc.) Does it even accomplish its goal? Wouldn't terrorists by nature avoid this sort of process anyway?

I have to wonder, however, as usual when I see the left in indignation about each new outrage of this sort, just what is the plan for restraining terrorists. Terrorists from the Taliban kill 85 percent of the civilians in Afghanistan, not NATO, as you can read on my other blog, Not Killed by American Troops which I started in order to try to get an awareness of this fact. Even the UN is now admitting this and Ban Ki Moon is protesting it. That's really quite a development.

When you see horrific terrorist acts of suicide bombers killing 30, 40, 80, 100 people, you think that the biometric approach may be justified. There's the rationale. Does it accomplish it goals? 

But all you have to do here is to practice a basic Christian truth: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Would you like yourself and your children to be subjected to biometric scanning of this sort? By your own government? By a foreign government? Ok, then.

Whatever the justification, and there are serious ones, when you reach the point in a war where you a squatting down and scanning the irises of Afghan farmers, maybe it's time to go home? You've lost.

Now, as to the other red meat, boy, we'll see endless anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hollering about this one.

Shelly Palmer tells us about a new techno-intrusion.

He mines it not so much for its political value but the larger issues of states and borders and people.

It seems Israel is using "social media listening posts" to gather data about incoming flotilla activists and then ban them at the border. Good! says I. Because I think that inciting and inviting violence is not the role of any decent civic movement and I personally have condemned this sort of activity.

It was very clear during the first flotilla that people were openly plotting and planning deliberately to goad and harass and disrupt border protection in order to force it into some knee-jerk action that would then enable the activists to plead the victim. And that worked perfectly as planned, in true socialist-cadre organization fashion.

But I think it's absolutely disgusting for movements calling themselves "humanitarian" to use those sorts of "direct action" violent tactics. At least admit what you are: extreme political sectarians, not humanitarians guided by the rule of law.

So if the Israeli government wants to sift through the blogs and tweets and pull out names of people planning to provoke like that, I can only say "Go to it," and those people planning confrontation and the instigation of violent responses deserve what they get, which is a block at the border precisely to prevent them from inciting and causing violence. Again, good!

Yes, the civil libertarian flinches at the thought of government trawling social media to compile lists. But, what would you have them do? These are democratically-elected liberal states. There might not be recognition of that on the left that yes, both Israel and the US are democratic, liberal states in the sense that they are free and governments are elected democratically. So why should they be available to have their borders run over by anarchists and have their streets turned into mayhem with anti-globalist demonstrators? They shouldn't. There isn't some social crime in maintaining order in a liberal democratic state -- and there's where I would disagree with the socialists and radicals.

I first saw this phenomenon at the Republican Convention in New York some years ago. I showed up to follow the, um, people's demonstration and was hoping to cover it as a freelance reporter. The ranks swelled larger than anticipated and police were challenged how to deal with the larger column. The organizers insisted on changing the route after the fact, in contradiction to their permit. The police in fact adapted to an extent but insisted that they could not come closer to the venue of the Republican meeting, a hotel on the West side behind Penn Station if I recall correctly.

I remember acidly noting to myself, as the Keningston Welfare action people came marching into view, that the young people marching bedecked with both still and video cameras and cell phones were rather belying the point of their poor welfare status -- their social media apparatus would feed a family for months. These were the sort of affluent lefty urban youth that attach to such movements. I watched in fascination as these new media morons posed and capered and cavorted so that they'd get some great photos for their blogs and emails and edgy radical websites (Facebook wasn't quite as popular then but was available). These new-media characters would climb utility polls and perch dangerously or climb over the curb and stand on police sawhorses and such, and naturally would be told to get down.

Some of them more rambunctious who bragged to indymedia.com and got their photos posted may have been surprised to have the NYPD come hustle them off the scene rather quickly. It didn't take rocket science to see how the police had already figured out how to follow the social media and track trouble-makers. The question is really whether you trust the police to pick out genuine instigators of violence from those merely peacefully protesting. I do. Others may not. It's again, whether you respect the notion of a liberal democratic state or not.

We came to a phalanx of policemen on bikes and there was such a crowd some of us started getting pushed up on to the sidewalk willy-nilly, and found police giving orders to get back in the street that we couldn't always easily fulfill.

I walked up E. 23rd Street by the post office, and was troubled to see suddenly, about 3-4 policemen materializing in the midst of the crowd of marchers and grabbing very specifically several people walking along or carrying banners, and hustling them away. It was the sort of thing you wouldn't see if you blinked. Of course, there were legions of ACLU and other monitors and they hustled off yelping about this in some instances and naturally there was an adversarial process. I don't know what the reason was for these types of arrests; I'm going to guess it was about the photo bragging, or tips that involved these leaders were going to go off route.

Which is of course what happened -- groups began to storm the police barricades up by the hotel and not take the restraints as justified, even though it went against the permit. And of course here, too, the police response was troubling -- I saw a phalanx of police on motorized bikes drive right into a crowd, deliberately, knocking over some unarmed and non-aggressive protesters who weren't doing anything but just standing nearby. And that's what happens when you provoke and provoke and provoke, and then get that police brutality you wished for that allows you to pose fabulously for your movement newsletter, perhaps even with ripped jeans. Or get in the hospital with a broken leg, which isn't what you planned. I still felt it was wrong, and I still felt the police could have found other ways to address the challenges than drive into a crowd. But, so could the demonstrators.

Then a group of us who were reporting got pushed back into a parking lot with no exit and held there for a time by a long row of police who had readied themselves with huge rolls of plastic handcuffs. There's something very definitely creepy about seeing dozens of police vans roll up 7th Avenue with huge rolls of plastic cuffs that haven't been used yet, but will be. We crouched down in the gravel and tried to avoid getting in the way.

There are numerous photos and videos of police brutality on other occasions, including of the NYPD, and sometimes they are presented in highly tendentious fashion.

The point of all of this for me is that if the protesters are watching and shooting images and publishing them, they have to expect the police are, too. And that ultimately, if you come planning to incite and cause violence, you get what you paid for.

There just isn't enough questioning of the violence inherent in the flotillists or the radical demonstrators of New York. I do question it.