a “progressive” case against government transparency & individual privacy. They wasted the web space for garbage like this:

“The 4th Amendment pretty much just benefits the rich”

The poor tend to live in apartments rather than detached houses, spend more of their lives in public spaces than in private ones (because their homes and workplaces tend to be small and unpleasant), and travel more by bus or subway than by car. By contrast, the lives of the wealthy are lived in spacious houses, offices, and cars. Like a tax code that charges the highest rates to those who make the least money, Fourth Amendment law protects houses more than apartments, private spaces more than public ones, and passengers in cars more than those who ride buses and subways.

“If it weren’t for that pesky Constitution, then drug law enforcement would be fair”

For violent felonies and thefts, the decision [of where to place officers] is easy: Go where the crimes are. Drug crimes are different–there are no immediate victims, no 911 calls. The police must decide where to look for them. And, since drugs are omnipresent, where the police look determines whom they catch. […] Inner-city drug policing is often violent and nearly always humiliating to the targets of police attention, the vast majority of whom are innocent. (The nypd arrests only one of every nine suspects its officers stop and frisk.) But the harms are not chiefly to privacy. So they don’t count. We seem to have created the perfect system for policing the police–if the system’s goals are to maximize protection for rich white kids from the suburbs and maximize police authority over poor black kids from central cities.

“people who oppose easy domestic surveillance are just encouraging much worse. Oh, and blahblahterrorismblah”

…remember that different forms of evidence-gathering are substitutes for one another. Anything that raises the cost of one lowers the cost of all others. The harder it is to tap our phones, the more government officials will seek out alternative means of getting information: greater use of informants and spies, or perhaps more Jose Padilla-style military detentions with long-term interrogation about which no court ever hears, or possibly some CIA “black ops,” with suspected terrorists grabbed from their homes and handed over to the intelligence services of countries with fewer qualms about abusive questioning. In an age of terrorism, privacy rules are not simply unaffordable. They are perverse. (emphasis mine)

“policy would be sooo much better if the public knew squat”

Transparency makes politics a running argument about decision-making, not about decisions. A few years back, Washington spent more time discussing which lobbyists were in the room when Dick Cheney crafted energy policy than actually debating energy policy.

Notice a common thread here? Each situation where Stuntz blames political failure on “over-skepticism” of government the scenario itself proves the skepticism justified.

-You do not stop being an individual every time you leave your home. If 4th Amendment law has become that narrow then rather than yelling about the amendment — which is rather clear — it’s time to start questioning the interpretation that led to this.

-He admits himself that with drugs there is no victim involved — then what’s the point of the laws against them? That we have cops flying off the handle over what can best be described as a personal choice is the central issue, that they do this most often in the ghetto & not the suburbs is a mere symptom, they shouldn’t be doing it at all.

-He wants it to be easier for our phones to be tapped. Well geez, we’ve only had that warrantless domestic surveillance program for the past few years, who have we caught with that? Oh, that’s right, nobody. As long as we’re making comparisons between tactics, how about this one: the wider you stretch the definition of reasonable suspicion, the less likely you are to actually find who you’re looking for. By his logic, the best pool of suspects would be the entire population.

-That he blames the energy policy mess on a lack of secrecy is amazing in its audacity. It’s not like this is new behavior, as if politicians one day took note of the change in environment & said “just for that, we’re going to cut side deals with our friends!”. The only real difference is that nowadays we hear about these things while they’re happening or shortly after, instead of when the culprits are long dead & in the history books. Some conservatives — and Stuntz would probably agree — would argue that these arrangements should be accepted because these people are “experts” in their field, but that blows apart the whole point. Citing an example of politicians knowing zilch yet being involved anyway practically indicts itself.

This is way more than such tripe deserves, so I’ll stop now.

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