What will you stand for? That’s really the question you’re asking yourself on Election Day, in both of its dimensions. What is it, precisely, that you as a person (and by extension we as a nation) stand for and believe in, and what will you ‘stand for’—or tolerate as we attempt to allay (and sometimes) stoke the fears that we collectively face. It’s an important question because ultimately we are what we do and we are (for better or worse) what we allow to happen under our noses.

As for me, I’ve been thinking of that for some time now and to be blunt, I’m mad as hell. I’m a Libertarian so I don’t typically vote for candidates on party lines, but for those who reflect the values of individual autonomy and respect for other’s worldviews and won’t try to force their views on me. I’m mad at the distortions and short sightedness of our politicians both in their advertising and policies, I’m mad about the way we’ve handled ourselves internationally, the stupid pork projects the lack of real defense and most of all I’m mad about what we’ve become and we’re continuing to become.

I mean:

I don’t stand for torture not least because it is ineffective and a violation of our contractual and moral responsibilities but because it weakens us both individually and as a people. You cannot defeat barbarity by adopting it. There are a great many things you can lose, but none so tragic as your moral center.

I don’t stand for pre-emptive wars because it’s virtually impossible to preemptively counter every threat and because they get distorted into the sorts of massive failures we see today and because it violates centuries of Just War criterion.

I don’t stand for monetary policies that provide tax cuts for estates and capital gains (even when I benefit from them) while the alternative minimum tax remains unchanged placing the burden on those who claim children and homes.

I don’t stand for those who would tell me how to live, or how to die, or that their faith must be mine, and I don’t stand for those who trumpet their morality while privately violating their own standards.

I don’t stand for governments that eaves drop on their citizens, abolish their privacy rights and that hold people without legal charges, representation or the right to due process, and in the past, neither did America.

I don’t stand for a parochialism that stipulates that people who hate us are to be viewed without the context of the repercussions of our policies that empower their oppressors.

I don’t stand for the bigotry that willingly harnesses homophobia to hurt people to hold power.

I don’t stand for the rejection of science to accommodate religious views and poorly thought out theology, whether in the classroom, in Africa, in Hospitals or in medical research.

I don’t stand for undermanned and overworked troops sent to do dangerous work in a half-assed effort with no commitment or strategy to protect them—they deserve far better from us than lack of shared sacrifice and ambivalence about how we squander their lives.

I don’t stand for abandoning those we claimed not to leave behind again in Afghanistan or identifying threatening nations and then ignoring them or even refusing to dialogue with them to defuse the threat.

I don’t stand for the fig leaf of security that is really pork barrel funding and an intrusion into the private lives of citizens.

I don’t stand for lack of transparency in policy making or the costs of our actions.

I don’t stand for hysteria that is nothing more than sleight of hand about our real policies in our politics.

I’m not sure what this administration and majority stands for, but they don’t stand for the conservative values people like me used to support—they don’t stand for liberty or autonomy or truth and they don’t stand for values, and they cannot and do not protect you.

I don’t say this out of malice, but disappointment, and truth be told I am not certain that the opposition is clear on what to fix first or how, but I cannot stand for what is happening today. I won’t stand for the incompetence, the misdirection, the lack of remorse and the thoughtlessness that has become our national face and character.

Make no mistake—there is more than just the House and Senate at stake this Election Day, and more than just policy on Iraq, North Korea, Iran and gay marriage. What it means to be an American and what it will mean to the world for the foreseeable future is being determined.

I’m going to vote (and pray) for change on Election Day because I can no longer stand for what we have become… and because we have an obligation to stand for something better than what we’ve become. Merely standing there while these things continue to occur is both ineffective and moral cowardice.

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
–William Blake

To die for faction is a common evil, but to be hanged for nonsense is the Devil.
–John Dryden

It should come as little surprise that this administration’s first veto is used to stymie science. The administration has had a bone to pick with any science that brushes up against its own notions of morality and sense of manifest destiny from climate change to evolution to biology in the classroom.

What is most disturbing to me about this is the opportunist nature of his posing with the ‘snowflake children.’ This hits pretty close to home for me, being the father of one of those adopted embryos he prattles on about with no understanding. I spoke about this first and at length a year ago here.

What really bugs me here is the conflation—in fact, it is likely that this administration will go down in history as the ‘conflation administration.’ It conflates Al Qaeda with Iraq, conflates Islamic fundamentalists with secular Arab states, conflates science with religion, and today he conflated embryonic adoption with stem cell research.

Today, Bush said: Each of these children was still adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with a chance to grow, to grow up in a loving family. These boys and girls are not spare parts.”

Indeed they are not as I and every other parent who has gone through the embryonic adoption process can attest. One might think given Bush’s posing—and I use that word very deliberately—that this administration would be a friend to those who wish to adopt to prevent, in his words, the taking of innocent life. The problem is, that’s not the case.

This administration has overseen the passing of new federal state and local regulations that governs the testing of embryos such that those left are virtually stranded. Those participating today at Columbia University and elsewhere are unable to adopt leftover embryos because the new regulations push a tangle upon the system requiring new testing from the donors in ways that doom those embryos—they will be thrown out. They have to be.

Think about that—this tissue won’t be used to save lives, it won’t be used to create families or beautiful children like my son—they will be consigned to oblivion. All because Bush believes that the same unattached four cell blastocysts that routinely flush out during menses on a daily basis without so much as a peep from religious fundamentalists or anyone else are so precious they must be destroyed.

It’s not as if this veto will stop more embryos from being created or save those already in cryogenic stasis—it won’t; the disposition of leftover embryos is decided by the donors who check a box on their forms and opt to save them for another pregnancy, donation for stem cell research (which contrary to popular belief is legal and continuing) or for embryo adoption. Those frozen blastocysts already in fertility clinics are suffering from a terminal condition—lack of womb. Today, Bush in a continuing effort to enforce his own vision of morality condemned childless couples and the ill in one swipe of the pen, vetoing those who would act to save others to throw a bone to his base.

That he uses embryo adoption as a tool to underscore his point is as shameful as it is scientifically wrong. Today, I was speaking at the staff at Columbia about this because as it happens my wife and I would like to have another child. Due to the increased restrictions, embryo adoption is not an option anymore—it must be a donor egg procedure or standard adoption, both of which we will try. The problem is that adoptions are disallowed in many states if one member of the couple is over a specific age (in their 40s) and costs about seven times what an embryo adoption does while a donor procedure costs about four times the amount of an embryo adoption and both carry less chance of success. This means that for a couple that can afford to spend $50,000 with embryo adoption they would almost certainly be able to have a child and attempt it seven times, with standard adoption would have much less chance and would get maybe two chances (we’ve been on the list of adoptive parents for years and had two nibbles, but ultimately the biological mother selects and can always change her mind) or you can try a donor procedure twice (with again less chance of success).

In speaking to the staff today they told me how hard it is to watch people leave, crushed and sobbing, after a failed attempt or miscarriage and how it weighs upon them that there is so little they can now do to address it, and how they are simply watching the embryos that can no longer be donated simply expire until they are discarded, without even at least the consolation of life giving stem cell research as a benefit. It’s appalling.

I realize that reasonable people may disagree about abortion, but nobody ought to pretend that an un-implanted blastocyst is a person—it isn’t, and if we really believed that were the case than we would mourn every fertilized egg that failed to implant in a uterus and washed out during menses or every fertilized egg that attached and never took nourishment or developed a heartbeat and washed out unnoticed, but we don’t–it’s why we don’t baptize tampons and why we don’t have funerals or send mass cards when that occurs, and to pretend that embryos that aren’t in utero (and won’t be) are other than what they are is a lie. The conflation that claims those left over blastocysts are people is both disingenuous and shameful—that’s not the case until (minimally) it can be implanted, a vein is sunk and it can develop.

No destruction of life to save life—just so, but how about letting us save some life that’s in the process of dying? I (for one) and I suspect a great many people who really live these decisions every day would appreciate it if the administration would stop using pat and trite lines that if he really believed would oblige him to mourn the every day common place and natural process of sexual reproduction and to pretend that every failure to implant is akin to murder when it is not—it is merely biology.

As the doctor said today at Columbia: “It’s tissue—if you’re an organ donor, you should consider donating a left over embryo as well. These same objections and fears have always followed biology, from transplants to transfusions.”

But then, when has this administration ever been a friend to science?

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.
–Galileo Galilei

I’d like to believe this is simple stupidity, but I don’t. What it is, is cold, calculating negligence and malfeasance. Bring me the head of Michael Chertoff.

Apparently the idea is: (wait for it)…. We’re going to fight them over HERE—here being New York City, so we don’t have to fight them over THERE—there being Wyoming. Home to such important national monuments as: THE LARGEST PILE OF HOMELAND SECURITY MONEY IN THE NATION!!! Wyoming, the nation’s number one state recipient of homeland security money per capita. (Hey—wait a second—isn’t that where CHENEY is from? Nahhhh…. Couldn’t be… he’d never stoop to lining his pockets with the fruits of tragedy, like, say, sole sourced contracts to his cornies… er… um… well… at least we know he’s a straight shooter… um.. er… never mind.) I think they’ll be OK in Cheyenne, since the state doesn’t even have jet service yet, so a couple of 767s headed for the capital, Cheyenne, seems unlikely. Chertoff’s big idea is apparently an expansion of the ‘fly paper’ theory—fight them here in New York so we don’t have to deal with those guys elsewhere.

It’s the most ridiculous thing imaginable for a city that has 1) sacrificed so much already and 2) continues to be the largest target and 3) in being vulnerable itself makes the rest of the country far more vulnerable. Be clear on this: if New York gets hit again—especially in the financial sector or its infrastructure, the nations’ economy will come grinding to a halt, and you will feel the pain of that almost as much as we will here. It will make the gas price spikes you’ve felt in the wake of Katrina seem like pocket change you’ve thrown into a wishing well.

The thing that really ought to incense everyone about this—and I mean everyone—is the way that this administration has continually paid lip service to New York and how they intend to make sure those things never happen again (think Bush on the rubble pile at ground zero or the GOP convention here to underscore their commitment to preventing another 9-11). Well, it’s clear they don’t mean it, at least, not in any meaningful sense that would allow measures to be taken to protect our investments—yours and mine—like explosive detectors, radiation detectors, fire fighting and emergency response units or the resources to protect the largest commuter rail and subway systems in the nation (Madrid and London anyone?)

After 9-11 many people said that what happened here—to New York—happened to all Americans. I wrote about it here in a post called “Conversations at Ground Zero” after I had been speaking to a man from Carolina about that day.

If you support Chertoff after this, I don’t ever want to hear anyone claim that this happened to all of America, because that’s Bullshit. It happened here. And the government can’t be bothered to stop it from happening again because they’re too busy engaging in an onanistic orgy of self-gratification throwing pork to every person and place insight, except the ones that really need it.

So, when—not if, but when it happens again don’t cry for us when you watch people jumping hand in hand to their death, or brave fire fighters rushing to their death, or be mystified as your investments and your 401-k and the Federal Reserve all go down in flames. You see, we’re fighting them HERE—so you don’t have to fight them THERE.

Somewhere in a campaign office, someone is hanging a sign that reads simply “It’s the arrogance stupid.” That, more than anything else, will be the downfall of this administration. Because another attack here, whether you like it or not, effects all of you. And flypaper eventually is a strip covered in decay and rot that you have to deal with.

Arrogance and stupidity didn’t work so well for Brown—let’s hope Chertoff figures that out before he’s told he’s ‘doing a heckuva job!’

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off”
–Samuel Johnson

When did the presumption of innocence, the distrust of power and the need for oversight and checks and balances go out the window? When did we decide that we were so terrified by the terrorists that we were willing to do anything—anything—to protect ourselves against even the slightest chance of harm?

Hey! You know what would really make us safe? We could put a government agent in every house! It’ll be great—he can watch everything you do—he can watch you when you make a phone call, pay your taxes, hire a nanny, discipline your kids, go to the bathroom, call in sick, drink or smoke or see how well you drive. You’ll probably never get killed by terrorists ever! We don’t do such things, of course, because the calculus we use in deciding how safe we need to be and how much intrusion we can stomach leads us to rightly conclude that privacy is an innate part of being free.

Among the weakest of the arguments in defense of the government’s wireless wire tapping, NSA call records gathering and assertion of the ‘state’s secret privilege’ is the ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to be afraid of’ canard.’ That is nonsense. There are many rejoinders to that (lack of a) rebuttal, such as the fact that information is wrongly used to infer false conclusions all the time, or that it falls into the wrong hands that cause damage to people, or that information can be used to apply pressure to people not because they’ve done anything illegal, but merely to exploit their circumstances to avoid embarrassment or other concerns. You can talk about the opportunities for corruption such discretionary access to information provides and the almost inevitable misuse of it or the distrust in society, law enforcement and government such actions engender or even the pragmatic consequences of a culture of secrecy that creates such an environment of distrust that government agencies fail to cooperate meaningfully while they focus on the minutiae and leave real threats unexposed. All of that is true but today I want to focus on the fundamental reasons why we should not stand by and let our privacy be violated and torn away from us.

Privacy—in and of itself—is a fundamental right. It is our right, and our inherent birth right as Americans. You don’t watch citizens—you watch criminals and mostly only convicted criminals at that. Surveillance of people—of citizens—isn’t what you do in a free country; it’s what’s done in the places where we claim regime change is in order and where we’re trying to bring ‘freedom.’ Isn’t that grand? We’re doing precisely the sorts of things that we abhor in others—state secrets, secret surveillance, no judicial oversight or checks and balances, no access to the courts or the ability to face your accuser, no warrants or due process, torture. Yep, sounds like America.

More Precisely, it sounds like the kind of America our enemies want to create. That’s the deepest irony of all. No terrorist is capable of defeating us, not in total, they can only snipe at best, but we can defeat ourselves. We can become them and disavow our heritage and in the process, of our own volition hand the terrorists the greatest victory of all, grander than any they ever dreamed of grander than the destruction of any city or building. We can give them the elimination of America as a light to the rest of the world if we so choose. We can extinguish hope and all that this nation has historically stood for.

When we’re done bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq and Iran and all of the other places we criticize do you think we might be able to have a little here?

The saying goes that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Make no mistake—secret information is power of the most serious sort but even if it didn’t corrupt, even if you could somehow guarantee me that nobody in this administration would ever misuse the information (and you can’t) the same would not be true for future people who have access and you know what? I am still every bit as violated even if they don’t. I don’t need anyone perusing my data for their personal gratification—and I use that phrase quite deliberately, because peeping-tom like, the government has transformed itself into a furtive secretive organization and the real effect there is their own gratification, not our safety.

The fallacy of those who would defend such secrecy at the expense of privacy as the explicit acknowledgment that freedom and privacy are incompatible—you can’t have ‘security’ under those circumstances. It’s wrong because you have no freedom without privacy!

Even when the guard is your friend and looking out for you, you are still a prisoner under watch, whether you know it or not. A ‘friendly’ tyrant is no friend at all. It is corrupt and intrusive and tyrannical. You should stand up for yourself and reject that because if you don’t you will one day find yourself unable to. Even when you have nothing to hide and have done nothing wrong. There are many names for that, but ‘freedom’ isn’t one of them.

Conservatives used to be the standard bearers of protecting the common man from big government, or stopping government intrusion and of liberty. I charge them and all citizens—you are not, after all, prisoners—with reclaiming their right and their duty, protecting real freedom. Let it begin with the sacrosanct privacy of your person. Because you are not criminals and you are presumed innocent and inviolate in your person—at least when you are when you are free. Those who operate in secrecy and without oversight are despots and worthy of suspicion. Privacy is for the people—the government is answerable to the people and rightly overseen for the protection of all.

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots—suspicion…[] Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.
–Demosthenes

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have spent two decades working in legal compliance related telecommunications recording, call records and other associated information and compliance measures from Wall Street trading floors to E-911 systems across the world.

Being familiar with the field, I find it somewhat remarkable that so many appear to be untroubled by the warrantless wire tapping program and the call records gathering by the NSA. It might be appropriate to spend just a moment or two describing how these things actually work and what they’re used for, the regulations and who has access.

First, the recording piece: The FCC has little enough to say about telephone recording—most of the laws that govern it are state laws and revolve around the issue of one or two party consent. Recording is seldom mandated and generally occurs with a centralized system that taps into the main distribution frame of your switch on premise (MDF or IDF if internal) and replicates the voice stream and copies it into a specific system designed for archival and retrieval and tagging with specific data and monitoring capabilities. Many of these systems are tied into carrier’s CO switches—those are the big ones telephone companies use to provide service to your office PBX or home. In terms of consent, you either live in a ‘one party consent’ state meaning as long as one of the two party’s consents to the recording, it’s legal, or a ‘two party consent state’ in which case both parties must consent to the recording. Consent can be obtained in one of several ways—a beep tone generated on the line every ten seconds or so, someone asking your permission or informing you it’s a recorded line, a prerecorded announcement prior to switching your call through to your party, or the fine print of the contracts you signed with a specific organization you do business with.

In all circumstances ‘no party consent’—that is a third party recording the call without either of the two parties of the conversation consenting (absent a warrant) is considered a felony. This is the first part that ought to concern you; the notion of ‘dumbing down’ the definition of a felony when all that’s required not to do that is procurement of a warrant is unnecessary, prone to abuse, virtually impossible to properly oversee and intrusive in ways that ought to be unacceptable to Americans who espouse the benefits of liberty while acting more like a police state. When there is a conflict between what you say and what you do people inevitably believe your actions over your words. It’s hard to be the beacon of liberty when you’re busy conducting surveillance.

The NSA’s collection of call records is slightly less intrusive—but equally if not more alarming. It’s alarming for several reasons—the first of which is that neither the warrantless wiretapping nor the collection of call records have proper oversight. That may not sound like much of a problem to you now, until you start to think about the facts that 1) nobody can really tell you that this information is being properly used (that’s why we have checks and balances—because we don’t place sole authority with the President) 2) that ‘lack of oversight’ is what traditionally leads to abuse (see the reasons why the FISA court was created in the first place and the conclusion of the reports on Abu Ghraib—lack of proper oversight is one of the conclusions for what went wrong) and 3) those records contain more about you than you think.

Don’t believe me? Go back and look up all of your call records from your carrier(s) over the last six months. I just audited mine—a quick look (mere database, stuff, forget the actual data mining that reveals far more) would tell you who I do business with (what companies and people), where I’ve been and when, where I stay, what airlines I use, where my family lives, where and who my friends are and the nature of my business. That’s information I don’t want any single person in government or any single agency for that matter deciding they are entitled to without some reasonable check on that kind of authority and inherently intrusive breech of privacy.

There are several reasons for that—having been involved in several investigations of this type (the one I’ll use here is the infamous Banker’s Trust scandal years ago that made the cover of Business Week which decried the ‘rip off’ factor traders were building into complex derivative instruments they didn’t understand. In the ‘war room’ set up at that time, I saw federal investigators and regular employees and vendors and all sorts of other people listening to conversations and checking calling patterns. Within 48 hours I could tell you everything there was to know about a particular trader’s social life and business life. The fact is that many people had access to that information and used it to satisfy their curiosity (is he having an affair) or out of sheer boredom (he’s doing what?) or to take an advantage of an opportunity (I hate this guy—wonder who he talks to all day—hey I know that person… what’s going on here?!) The fact is that people who ought not have access to this information routinely do, and with no check or improper oversight, you are vulnerable. You may believe you are not and this is appropriate for the administration. Fine—Hillary Clinton (or whomever the next Democratic nominee will be) is pleased to hear it—remember that this sort of power will not always be with merely those you trust, and that this administration in particular has displayed difficulty in understanding its own limits.

Further, this kind of information so readily available and without checks or balances provides law enforcers with a discretionary authority explicitly reserved for law makers–that in turn opens the door to prosecution based on specific personal biases and agendas, random and haphazard enforcement and creates an opportunity for corruption. All of this has deleterious effects not only on our nation as a democracy, but on law enforcement itself, lessening both respect for and adherence to the law and actions that appear to be both capricious and sporadically acted upon.

Worse, it’s ineffective. I’m not saying that such a database shouldn’t exist, or that it shouldn’t be a focused objective with proper checks and balances, but I am saying that as a primary tool, there’s too little there to go on and investments in human intelligence, information sharing between domestic and international agencies. What would have prevented 9-11 is people paying attention to the warnings about Atta and others prior to 9-11—they were given, just not collated and paid attention too. The call records, amongst so much flotsam and jetsam is at best less useful than other tools and at worst false comfort and a distraction that we can ill afford that undermines the very liberties we are trying to protect.

Tonight, it is anticipated that President Bush will focus on ‘securing our borders’ by deploying the already overextended National Guard to keep out immigrants that are not the people that comprise the terrorist threat the administration keeps pointing to—you hear precious little about protecting the Canadian boarder this is curious given terrorists have actually attempted to enter the country from there and a it has much larger Muslim population than Mexico and a 12-page document recently posted on an al-Qaeda-affiliated on line forum urges would be terrorists to enter the US from Canada.

Cynics would see this speech tonight as a diversion—pragmatists as further incompetence. Perhaps both. I find it somewhat ironic that those so obsessed with ‘securing the borders’ and protecting ‘our way of life’ care so little for their own boundaries and the decisions that actually undermine that way of life in far more subtle and effective ways.

Perhaps it would benefit us not to confuse borders and boundaries, as if security rests entirely with keeping those unlike us out instead of defending our own liberties and integrity—and to start worrying a little less about the former when we seem to understand so little about the latter.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.
–Samuel Johnson