Kind of a long one...
Oct. 21st, 2003 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usernamenumberI came across an article recently:
http://bowlingfortruth.com/moore/online/patriotact.htm
As you can probably guess from the url, it's from a site who's primary reason for existance is to discredit everything Michael Moore ever said. I've learned a lot from reading sites like that, as well as Michael Moore's own responses. The results have, I think, been good for me. I've always enjoyed Moore's work and I certainly don't buy every argument made on those sites, but it's useful to have a ready-made resource for the counterpoint to any given point in the interest of forming a more informed opinion.
Conservative sites like this and books like Al Franken's latest, which I really enjoyed, have led me to a conclusion that I'd given lip service to before, but never really taken to heart: Second-hand opinions are worse than none at all, be they from Bill O'Reilley, Michael Moore or whoever else. I always appreciated footnotes in rants before, but I never demanded them like I do now. I feel like this is something I should have realized years ago but it never clicked. So anyway, I read the article linked to above and that led to a series of events and reflections which have ultimately left me feeling very upset.
The webmaster introduces the piece sounding very sincere: "I too was concerned with the Patriot act until I found out the truth and actually read the actual facts & I felt stupid. I hate feeling stupid". The introduction ends with a link to the text of the Patriot Act and an encouragement to go read it. This was followed by a side-by-side comparison of two positions on the act entitled "Michael Moore vs. The Truth". Speaking on behalf of "The Truth" was an editor for that bastion of impartialness, The National Review, who's wife is a policy advisor and chief speechwriter for Dan Ashcroft[1].
Ummm...
Anyway, I didn't realize just what kind of a publication the National Review was or who "The Truth" was married to until after I'd read both sides of the "debate" and then done something I'm ashamed to say I have previously not been in the habbit of doing. Instead of picking which idealogue I identified with the most and rationalizing why that one must be right, I actually went and read the source material. Fortunately, both Moore and "The Truth" had singled out a couple of the more controversial sections so I didn't have to read the entire act just to get a sense for where they were coming from.
While I would like to say I fit somewhere between the extremes of Moore and "Truth", if I had to pick between Moore's "There's something very wrong with this" and "Truth"'s "There's nothing wrong with this" positions, I would without hesitation side with Moore. There is something wrong with the Patriot Act and this leads to what's got me so upset: First, I would never have actually read the act and reached these conclusions if it hadn't been for that article. But the people who wrote the article and so willingly linked to it were promoting a view very different from the one I came away with.
I don't get it.
The innocent in me wants it to just be a difference of opinions, but the defenses they make of the act, like saying that requests for records require a court order as though that means something, are contradicted by the actual text of the act, which makes it very clear that having met two minimal requirements, the judge _must_ provide an order for whatever the FBI wants. The cynic wants to say they were just trying to sound sincere and hoping that noone actually reads the material but, well, I'm just not that cynical. So maybe I'm wrong. But the conclusions that I reached in reading the act are backed up by many other critical pieces written by actual scholars of law. So what are they getting at? What are they thinking? Why do they believe what they believe? Idunno.
Anyway, I emailed my take on the text to both the webmaster of the site and "The Truth" himself (aka, Jonah Goldberg, if any of you were dying from the suspense). That was Friday, 10/17/03 and I haven't gotten a response yet.
I'm going to archive what I wrote here and, if anybody's actually read this far, solicit comments from anyone who feels they have soemthing to add:
-------------
Dear Sirs,
I'm willing to give Mr. Goldberg the benefit of the doubt with regard to his sincerity, but I believe he's misread the text of the USA PATRIOT act, specifically section 215, which he goes out of his way to defend. I, like Mr. Goldberg, am not a lawyer, but here is my response:
Goldberg:
First, "third parties" is vague enough to include libraries and other "secular holy sites", which Goldberg claims there is no reason to believe are implicated in the act. In fact, the USA PATRIOT act doesn't even get as specific as saying "third parties". It doesn't stipulate at all from whom the FBI can and cannot obtain items, only that items so requested must be "tangible things" (215/a/1).
Second, such requests do not require "approval" of a judge except in a relatively trivial sense. If the FBI asserts that the items being requested are pertinent to an ongoing investigation and the judge agrees that said investigation is not being "conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States", then the judge must approve it (sec 215/c/1). Note that the judge does not get to judge the relevance of the material being requested or in any other way decide whether or not the FBI's request is reasonable. The only criteria is that there exists an ongoing investigation not based soley upon protected activities (215/a/2) and that the FBI says the "tangible things" being requested are relevant to that investigation (215/b/2).
Now, I'll grant that the "not soley upon..." clause, at first glance, gives some relief. But consider this example: Suppose that the FBI recieves inteligence regarding a terrorist threat near our hometown and has some evidence implicating a particular citizen in the plot. Section 215 is worded vaguely enough that, since the judge does not actually get to judge the relevance of the FBI's request to their investigation, there is no reason the FBI could not then request and recieve _all_ records from, say, the local library-- including yours, mine and anyone else's simply by virtue of claiming (but not demonstrating) that the items are relevant to an investigation. The fact that neither you nor I have ever engaged in any non-protected actions doesn't even enter into the equasion. There is also no stipulation that I could find with regard to how the information so obtained may or may not be used.
So the "not soley upon" clause, section 215's apparent failsafe, does not provide nearly as much protection as it sounds like but Mr. Goldberg calls the section as a whole "relatively innocuous".
I agree that there are a number of alarmists out there who exhaggerate how problematic the USA PATRIOT act can be, but I am likewise bothered by conservatives who are overly appologetic for this broadly worded, extremely vague but extremely powerful piece of legislation. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to believe that laws should be written in a way that precludes the possibility of abuse. The details of the USA PATRIOT act in too many places lend themselves too easily abuse. And as for the point about section 215 not having been used yet-- I am willing to bet that just about anyone reading this can think of some person who is or has been voted into power that they would not trust with the ability to gather what has traditionally been protected, personal information under the pretext of an official investigation. Just because the gun hasn't been fired doesn't mean you oughtn't take it away.
--------------------
[1] = I found this out upon visiting The National Review's website an looking up his bio: http://www.nationalreview.com/masthead/masthead-goldberg.asp -- You'd think someone interested in Truth and not just supporting their own agenda would have at least acknowleged that teensy little possible conflict-of-interest before introducing a man as someone who simply "wants you to know the truth". I guess that's the part that offends me the most. I really want to believe that these people are just interested in telling the truth as they see it, but to leave out something like that... well, it's exactly the kind of thing they accuse Michael Moore of all the time.
http://bowlingfortruth.com/moore/online/patriotact.htm
As you can probably guess from the url, it's from a site who's primary reason for existance is to discredit everything Michael Moore ever said. I've learned a lot from reading sites like that, as well as Michael Moore's own responses. The results have, I think, been good for me. I've always enjoyed Moore's work and I certainly don't buy every argument made on those sites, but it's useful to have a ready-made resource for the counterpoint to any given point in the interest of forming a more informed opinion.
Conservative sites like this and books like Al Franken's latest, which I really enjoyed, have led me to a conclusion that I'd given lip service to before, but never really taken to heart: Second-hand opinions are worse than none at all, be they from Bill O'Reilley, Michael Moore or whoever else. I always appreciated footnotes in rants before, but I never demanded them like I do now. I feel like this is something I should have realized years ago but it never clicked. So anyway, I read the article linked to above and that led to a series of events and reflections which have ultimately left me feeling very upset.
The webmaster introduces the piece sounding very sincere: "I too was concerned with the Patriot act until I found out the truth and actually read the actual facts & I felt stupid. I hate feeling stupid". The introduction ends with a link to the text of the Patriot Act and an encouragement to go read it. This was followed by a side-by-side comparison of two positions on the act entitled "Michael Moore vs. The Truth". Speaking on behalf of "The Truth" was an editor for that bastion of impartialness, The National Review, who's wife is a policy advisor and chief speechwriter for Dan Ashcroft[1].
Ummm...
Anyway, I didn't realize just what kind of a publication the National Review was or who "The Truth" was married to until after I'd read both sides of the "debate" and then done something I'm ashamed to say I have previously not been in the habbit of doing. Instead of picking which idealogue I identified with the most and rationalizing why that one must be right, I actually went and read the source material. Fortunately, both Moore and "The Truth" had singled out a couple of the more controversial sections so I didn't have to read the entire act just to get a sense for where they were coming from.
While I would like to say I fit somewhere between the extremes of Moore and "Truth", if I had to pick between Moore's "There's something very wrong with this" and "Truth"'s "There's nothing wrong with this" positions, I would without hesitation side with Moore. There is something wrong with the Patriot Act and this leads to what's got me so upset: First, I would never have actually read the act and reached these conclusions if it hadn't been for that article. But the people who wrote the article and so willingly linked to it were promoting a view very different from the one I came away with.
I don't get it.
The innocent in me wants it to just be a difference of opinions, but the defenses they make of the act, like saying that requests for records require a court order as though that means something, are contradicted by the actual text of the act, which makes it very clear that having met two minimal requirements, the judge _must_ provide an order for whatever the FBI wants. The cynic wants to say they were just trying to sound sincere and hoping that noone actually reads the material but, well, I'm just not that cynical. So maybe I'm wrong. But the conclusions that I reached in reading the act are backed up by many other critical pieces written by actual scholars of law. So what are they getting at? What are they thinking? Why do they believe what they believe? Idunno.
Anyway, I emailed my take on the text to both the webmaster of the site and "The Truth" himself (aka, Jonah Goldberg, if any of you were dying from the suspense). That was Friday, 10/17/03 and I haven't gotten a response yet.
I'm going to archive what I wrote here and, if anybody's actually read this far, solicit comments from anyone who feels they have soemthing to add:
-------------
Dear Sirs,
I'm willing to give Mr. Goldberg the benefit of the doubt with regard to his sincerity, but I believe he's misread the text of the USA PATRIOT act, specifically section 215, which he goes out of his way to defend. I, like Mr. Goldberg, am not a lawyer, but here is my response:
Goldberg:
"It's a relatively innocuous provision of the Patriot Act that allows law enforcement to obtain, after getting approval from a judge, documents from third parties - your credit card company, for example - if they're pertinent to a terrorism investigation."
First, "third parties" is vague enough to include libraries and other "secular holy sites", which Goldberg claims there is no reason to believe are implicated in the act. In fact, the USA PATRIOT act doesn't even get as specific as saying "third parties". It doesn't stipulate at all from whom the FBI can and cannot obtain items, only that items so requested must be "tangible things" (215/a/1).
Second, such requests do not require "approval" of a judge except in a relatively trivial sense. If the FBI asserts that the items being requested are pertinent to an ongoing investigation and the judge agrees that said investigation is not being "conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States", then the judge must approve it (sec 215/c/1). Note that the judge does not get to judge the relevance of the material being requested or in any other way decide whether or not the FBI's request is reasonable. The only criteria is that there exists an ongoing investigation not based soley upon protected activities (215/a/2) and that the FBI says the "tangible things" being requested are relevant to that investigation (215/b/2).
Now, I'll grant that the "not soley upon..." clause, at first glance, gives some relief. But consider this example: Suppose that the FBI recieves inteligence regarding a terrorist threat near our hometown and has some evidence implicating a particular citizen in the plot. Section 215 is worded vaguely enough that, since the judge does not actually get to judge the relevance of the FBI's request to their investigation, there is no reason the FBI could not then request and recieve _all_ records from, say, the local library-- including yours, mine and anyone else's simply by virtue of claiming (but not demonstrating) that the items are relevant to an investigation. The fact that neither you nor I have ever engaged in any non-protected actions doesn't even enter into the equasion. There is also no stipulation that I could find with regard to how the information so obtained may or may not be used.
So the "not soley upon" clause, section 215's apparent failsafe, does not provide nearly as much protection as it sounds like but Mr. Goldberg calls the section as a whole "relatively innocuous".
I agree that there are a number of alarmists out there who exhaggerate how problematic the USA PATRIOT act can be, but I am likewise bothered by conservatives who are overly appologetic for this broadly worded, extremely vague but extremely powerful piece of legislation. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to believe that laws should be written in a way that precludes the possibility of abuse. The details of the USA PATRIOT act in too many places lend themselves too easily abuse. And as for the point about section 215 not having been used yet-- I am willing to bet that just about anyone reading this can think of some person who is or has been voted into power that they would not trust with the ability to gather what has traditionally been protected, personal information under the pretext of an official investigation. Just because the gun hasn't been fired doesn't mean you oughtn't take it away.
--------------------
[1] = I found this out upon visiting The National Review's website an looking up his bio: http://www.nationalreview.com/masthead/masthead-goldberg.asp -- You'd think someone interested in Truth and not just supporting their own agenda would have at least acknowleged that teensy little possible conflict-of-interest before introducing a man as someone who simply "wants you to know the truth". I guess that's the part that offends me the most. I really want to believe that these people are just interested in telling the truth as they see it, but to leave out something like that... well, it's exactly the kind of thing they accuse Michael Moore of all the time.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-21 07:59 pm (UTC)I get the distinct impression Goldberg is willfully misreading the text to support his own agenda.
This reminds me of the email I sent to a preacher in Alabama, who was talking shit about Magic: The Gathering.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-21 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-21 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 12:10 am (UTC)I read the webpage you linked to on bowlingforthetruth.com, and forced myself to read the entire page before jumping back here with guns blazing, (which was a big effort for me as soon as I knew he was attacking Moore, because I really like Moore, dammit, and I think that he is doing something very important, i.e. representing the opposite end, which pulls the median back towards neutral- he isn't TRYING to be unbiased, he is trying to be biased in the opposite direction to balance the tension, and I LOVE HIM FOR IT) but when I read this Jonah Goldberg bitching about how at least HE is trying to represent the truth and be fair and unbiased, and shouldn't we all love him for that, blah blah blah, and how he is "tired of ideologue spinners like Moore... perpetuating this scare tactic propaganda to gain popularity," but then titles his simplistic dichotomy chart (which I never trust anyway, because a simple This/That diagram immediately sets off Propaganda bells with me) with the headers:
"Michael Moore: Conspiracy theorist left wing spinner who wants you to think the Bush administration is the Gestapo"
and
"Jonah Goldberg: Sober thinking right wing editor of National Review Online who wants you to know the truth"
I can't believe someone can be so hypocritical and stand to look at themselves in the mirror. It makes me completely discount this man's opinion because he is so clearly dishonest even to the people he is trying to convince. At least Michael Moore is upfront about his techniques and what he is trying to accomplish- i.e. to represent the opposite end. He never claims to be the voice of middle-of-the-road neutralism, I don't think anyone in journalism who has any kind of integrity or intelligence could ever even try to claim that they are being unbiased.
And as one of the few Americans who has also read the Patriot Act (what can I say, I have a lot of time on my hands between classes, might as well get hopping mad, it makes the time fly) I am well aware of the references that both men are making to the document, but the problem with this "point counterpoint" is that Jonah is not providing counterpoint, he is simply trying to debunk Moore by relying on semantics and the inattentiveness of the reader.
Let's look at just the first item in the Moore vs. Goldberg (FIGHT!) chart: When Moore says that the government could access anything from email to library accounts to medical records, it is entirely true. Goldberg has no leg to stand on here, and it would seem that he knows it. The blanket statement in the Act "documents from third parties" is sufficiently vague as to support any of these assertions- Moore cited specific examples to show people how serious the matter is, and how this document has been written ostensibly with the goal of allowing as much lenience in the definitions as possible. To the government, everyone is a third party. Goldberg's attempt at rebuttal is to simply go back to the euphemistic term used in the document itself and to claim that "the section doesn't even mention libraries..." Congratulations, Jackass. You are absolutely right, the document doesn't list every single 'third party' it would be able to access. That would put restrictions on it, wouldn't it? That is what Moore is saying, you moron! Goldberg isn't counterpointing the document, he is attempting to counterpoint Moore, and that is pointless unless you are trying to defame someone, the very behavior he supposedly abhores and admonishes Moore for doing. I could go through every single one of his little "Here's the truth" statements and tear them apart, but I think you get the idea.
Who is the idealogue spinner, again?
Man, I write longer comments to you than some of my own journal entries, Brad! You really seem to know how to get me typing, don't you? ;P
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 02:19 pm (UTC)However, it should be noted that much of your... annoyance should be directed toward the fellow who runs the website, one Richard Bushnell, not Jonah Goldberg. If I've understood the introduction correctly the Mr. Bushnell took an article by Mr. Goldberg and pasted it into the "side-by-side" format. Thus I think the "sober thinking..." comment is more likely attributable to him.
Not that I'm crazy about what Goldberg has to say. I was almost thinking he was showing the slightest twinge of moderation when he said
"At minimum, critics should stop talking about the Patriot Act's "trampling of rights" in the present tense."
but then he follows up with:
And lest they claim that they are being "vigilant" in the face of potential threats, someone should remind them that vigilance is fine, but lying and fear-mongering is crying wolf.
What about lying and complacency-mongering?
But then, I still can't bring myself to accuse him of outright lying. If he was lying, why would he have linked to the text? That, and "well, it was all an obvious ploy by the Attorney General's chief speechwriter's husband to lull us into complacency by telling us that because the act hasn't been abused yet it never will be" does make me sound like a conspiracy theorist and, frankly, I don't want to believe that sort of thing. =:(
I'm still oscilating between angry, confused and sad about the whole thing. Not that I haven't seen stuff like this before, it's just that this one has really brought some of these feelings to a head.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 01:29 am (UTC)between the national reveiw and michael moore: almost everything, but one that is still a little left, yet a damn good news magazine it the nation.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 02:29 pm (UTC)One online bit that I've been reading, but haven't really reached a conclusion on, is the News & Politics section of slate.msn.com. It's almost exclusively op-ed stuff, which raises the obvious partiality concerns, but it's been a surprisingly good read. Their Campaign 2004 Field Guide has been an interesting read so far. And there seems to at least be an effort being made to give everybody equal treatment, even if that just means an even spread of cynical jabs.
I feel like I've heard something about The Slate reputation-wise, but I don't remember what it was or if it was bad, so I'm approaching it with a pretty blank uh... Slate.
Haven't read The Nation before. I'll check it out. Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 02:41 am (UTC)Yes, I completely agree. You just so happened to name two people I beleive are full of deception.
Yeah, what you've said all sounds about right to me.
As far as the Patriot Act goes... I've been against it since I first saw the text. I didn't read the whole thing, but I read enough to convince me that it was a bad thing.
Big Brother is watching you!
The sad thing about of our society is that it takes a catastrophie to get people to wake up and take action. It's also easy for a catastrophie to slip by in the shadow of another...
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 06:11 am (UTC)