Technology Justice - Practical Action: Fill & Download for Free

My position throughout the presidential campaign was that Trump probably cannot keep his worst promises, such as banning Muslims from entering the US, because the president alone does not have that authority. The biggest thing I have been consistently concerned about is the Supreme Court.I don’t think it’s that likely that Roe v. Wade is going to be entirely overturned even if Trump manages to appoint several justices. I think it’s even less likely that Obergefell v. Hodges is going to be overturned, given public support for same-sex marriage. I also don’t think it’s likely that Clinton-appointed justices (or even Sanders-appointed justices) would overturn Citizens United, which I consider to have been a (gasp!) correct decision based on the First Amendment, so on that issue it didn’t matter who was elected.However, new cases come before the Court all the time, and I don’t think anyone is surprised that I usually root for the “liberal” side. With a liberal majority on the Court, I would expect that capital punishment would eventually be declared unconstitutional. There is no chance of this if the Court remains conservative. So Trump’s victory is saddening in that sense. Issues involving digital technology are also important to me. A liberal Court could act to outlaw certain forms of surveillance that I consider a gross abuse of state power. (See, e.g., NSA Spying by the EFF.) A liberal Court could also interpret the constitution in a way that guarantees that Americans will be able to use end-to-end, backdoor-free encrypted communication technologies such as WhatsApp even if Congress or the state legislatures try to make such technologies illegal. A conservative Court is likely to uphold such abuses of state power.So yeah, I’m very concerned about the composition of the Court—that has been true and remains true.Besides the Supreme Court, there is also the issue of DACA beneficiaries. Their situation is quite concerning to me. President Trump will have the authority to order ICE to deport all of them, although there are obvious practical difficulties with doing so. He will also have the authority to simply not let them renew their work permits—unlike having all of them deported, this is quite doable. Whether he will actually take such action remains to be seen—it’s quite possible that he will be convinced by his advisers not to. That doesn’t make it not concerning, though.Some people are much more concerned than I am—they believe that a Trump presidency poses an existential threat to the rule of law and constitutional democracy. I would not go that far—I think the US has strong institutions and elaborate checks and balances, so that it would take Trump more than eight years to erode them to the point where the US would become a de facto autocracy. (And unless he manages to do so within eight years, he can’t remain president after those eight years have passed.)

U.S. legal answer.Like all good legal answers… it depends.The main case where a right to privacy has been explored and articulated is Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), but the concept itself was explored earlier than that.Arguably, the first mention under the Constitution of any sort of “right to privacy” is the Fourth Amendment, which reads: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.The Fourth Amendment was drafted in direct response to a British practice of the use of what were called general warrants and writs of assistance.General warrants were essentially a blank check to law enforcement. They gave license to law enforcement to enter any building or ship to search for anything they thought might be contraband. They did not expire, and did not require any particularity to them, so once an officer had one in his hands, he was pretty much free to invade any colonist’s home whenever he wanted for whatever reason he wanted, and could just keep digging until he found something.Writs of assistance allowed law enforcement officials to co-opt any local resources they wanted to execute these warrants. They could dragoon local sheriffs and officials, and even subjects of the crown. The king’s man needed a lift to the next town? Doesn’t matter how busy you are, guess where you’re going.Evidence of criminal activity could be as simple as a pamphlet criticizing the King.The Colonials fucking hated these writs and warrants. Prominent Boston attorney James Otis, Jr. called them “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”In part, the use of these warrants was because quite a few of the Patriots (especially the Boston Patriots such as John Adams and John Hancock) were actually organized criminals.They were tea smugglers, as it turns out.They smuggled other things, but tea was the big one. Tea was lucrative. People wanted it, badly. People were as addicted to tea as they are to coffee today. The British had invested massive resources into the tea industry, establishing shipping lanes primarily for that purpose.And the Boston Tea Mafia, led by some of those revered founding fathers, were trying to undercut it by selling cheaper black market tea.The British were footing a massive bill for security for the Colonies against the French and the indigenous peoples of North America. And the colonies didn’t want to chip in on that bill. The British levied taxes. The colonists refused to pay. So, the British required all imports to the Colonies to go through England to control the flow of goods and make sure they got their cut.Including tea.The organized criminals that would go on to become the most revered statesmen in American history ran shipping through the Orkney Islands, Amsterdam, and other locales, counterfeited shipping manifests, bribed customs officials, and circumvented the British as much as they could.So the British lowered the price of legal tea, and allowed the struggling East India Company to ship direct to North America, undercutting the black market for tea.The Boston Patriots were incensed, and responded by dressing up as Mohawks one night, sneaking onto an EIC ship, and dumping almost $2 million (in today’s currency) worth of high grade tea into the Boston Harbor.The British cracked down on them with more general warrants and writs of assistance to find and disrupt the movement. Tensions rose further. The British raided the homes of Patriot leaders, discovered and confiscated weapons caches, imprisoned various high profile individuals, and more.After the Revolutionary War, this loathing of the general warrant didn’t fade, and specific limitations and prohibitions on it were codified into the Fourth Amendment.Surprisingly, not everyone was concerned about abuse by the executive branch. Madison was actually more concerned about abuse by Congress, and feared that Congress would use general warrants to enforce tax laws.The Fourth Amendment requires warrants except in special circumstances. Those warrants need to be issued by a judge or magistrate, based on probable cause, and spell out with particularity when they will be executed, how long they would be valid, and what exactly the police can look for. No warrant = no seizing and searching you and your shit (again, subject to some exceptions).That implicates a sense that people ought to have some degree of privacy from the government.After all, the government could conceivably always catch bad guys and probably even before they do something bad, if they had complete and total access to every aspect of our lives, right? I mean, if they could read every text message on your phone, listen to your every conversation, track you with facial recognition everywhere you go, and use data mining of your every search and view to predict your behavior, imagine what they could do?If Amazon can predict my every next thought, to the level where I swear to God my phone is spying on my brain, imagine what the government could do with that?And that thought probably horrifies you. That’s essentially the grave warning of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is it not?While the Framers probably didn’t envision the level of invasive technology we have today, it’s essentially a modern-day revival of the general warrant, and they saw that unchecked, unlimited invasiveness of the government into the day-to-day lives of the citizens as anathema to their notions of ordered liberty.One of the first explicit mentions of a specific “right to privacy” was in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Samuel Warren and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Warren and Brandeis explored the concept as one of “natural rights,” and focused on how such a right would be relevant to developing technologies such as photography, and the advent of “yellow journalism” and muckraking tabloids.Brandeis applies the principles he developed in that law review article to his dissenting opinion in the landmark 1928 case Olmstead v. United States, arguing that warrantless telephone wiretaps were an invasion of that right to privacy. Brandeis wrote that “"Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet."Brandeis’ dissent would prove prophetic, and forty years later, the Warren Court would find in Katz v. United States that warrantless wiretaps violated the Fourth Amendment.The common law of torts also acknowledged some degree of privacy, well prior to the drafting of the Constitution.Public disclosure of embarrassing facts of a private person, even if true, was and still is a recognized tort in many states. Publicity that paints even a public figure in a “false light” is a recognized tort almost everywhere. Misappropriation of a name or likeness is a recognized tort in most states and at the federal level. Some states even include a tort of “invasion of solitude or seclusion.”Physical invasion of privately owned property is a tort called trespass, because one of the associated rights of property ownership is the “right to exclude.” That trespass is considered damaging all on its own, even where the trespasser caused no damage at all. (See Jacque v. Steenberg Homes, 563 N.W.2d 154, (Wisconsin, 1997) upholding $100,000 in punitive damages even where only $1 in actual damages was awarded.) That has long been the case, stretching back well into ancient English property law.That action for trespass by default implicates a fundamental underlying concept of a right to privacy. Without some notion of a right to privacy, there would be no reason that the invasion of a trespasser would be damaging to a property owner unless they actually damaged something.In general, where justices have sought to find “unenumerated,” yet still fundamental rights has been an open debate since the drafting of the Constitution. The primary vehicles today are the doctrine of “noneconomic substantive due process,” and the use of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.The justices of the early 20th century developed a framework centered around looking for fundamental rights as being “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” and “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”While 20th century justices have generally agreed that some form of a right to privacy exists, there’s been a great deal of disagreement over where precisely that right to privacy can be found in or under the Constitution.Some textualist jurists argue that because the word privacy doesn’t appear in the text, it is not protected at all, but this is still a fairly fringe view.Other justices have found it under the Fourth Amendment as applied under the Fourteenth Amendment.The justices in Griswold v. Connecticut found it under the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights.Justice Goldberg in that case wanted to find it under the 9th Amendment.And that brings us back to Griswold itself.In 1879, Connecticut, like many states of the era, passed a Comstock act, which made it illegal for doctors to prescribe or patients from seeking contraceptives. The law imposed a fine on doctors for even discussing contraception with patients.As a side note, this law was sponsored and heavily championed by none other than P.T. Barnum, of the circus fame, who had gone on from the entertainment business to become a state legislator. True story.By the 1950’s, most states had abandoned these statutes. Only Massachusetts and Connecticut still had them on the books at all, and they were almost never enforced.Various individuals had attempted to challenge these laws throughout the 1940’s and 50’s and met with no success. Courts almost uniformly found that the issues were just not justiciable, either for lack of standing, or for mootness or ripeness.That held true until Planned Parenthood tried to open a clinic in New Haven, Connecticut in 1961. Estelle Griswold, Planned Parenthood’s executive director, and a volunteer, Dr. C. Lee Buxton saw ten patients the first day of the clinic and received dozens of requests for appointments from married women who wanted to know more about birth control.Griswold and Buxton were arrested, tried, found guilty of violating Connecticut’s Comstock Act, and fined $100 each.They took their case, as they say, all the way to the Supreme Court.The majority opinion in Griswold found that the Connecticut law was invalid and violated the right to privacy, which the justices in the majority opinion found in the “penumbras and emanations” of various provisions of the Constitution, including the 5th Amendment’s right against self-incrimination, the 1st Amendment’s right of free association, and more. Two justices wrote a concurring opinion finding the right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.And in a lone concurrence, Justice Goldberg opined that it was one of the unenumerated rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment.So, the answer is maybe. Nobody is really sure. In practice, no. In theory, possibly, if you happen to like Justice Goldberg and think that he was given short shrift in Griswold.Generally, most jurists seem to agree that it exists somewhere in the constitutional ether, they just can’t quite agree on precisely where.Thanks for the A2A.If I don’t post a picture of some sort of adorable baby animal, someone is going to whine about it. So, here. Have a picture of this owl.

I know everyone hates having a question answered with "it depends," but...It depends. WHICH Batman, the one in the current film franchise, the one from the current monthlies, the one from the Justice League, etc etc?I am going to make an assumption here, in order to best answer your question. We'll put aside the issue of Batman trained by ninjas in the films, or the question of whether in the comics Batman operates with sort-of-superpowers when interacting in stories alongside Superman and other such characters. By "become Batman" you mean the basic concept of Batman that we all could agree upon -- a master of martial arts, of forensic and detective skills, of gymnastics, of science and chemistry, of history and geography, of the workings of organized crime, of criminal psychology and physiology, and a man with a suit offering protection against bullets and knives and electrocution but which allows him to move as fast as an Olympian runner and acrobat.The simple answer is, no. Unless you really boil Batman down to a very diluted level as just a really strong, fast, good fighter who can jump far and with good street smarts plus an education in crime and psychology, and who wears a lot of armor and a mask.The genius of Batman is that it pretends to be realistic, it lets us convince ourselves that with enough money and training, we could become Batman, too. But it's still fantasy, it's just a fantasy that is more compelling and convincing and thus more fun.If you joined the military and became something like a Delta Force commando of the highest quality, while studying nights to get a double-major in criminal justice and psychology (with a minor in chemistry), then you might also have time to take weekend courses in detective work and get a P.I. license. Then, after probably 10 years to reach all of those levels combined, you might be 28 (if you started right out of high school) and would then need to maintain your physical level while getting a job as a police officer in order to learn real crime solving and detective work on the streets and at crime scenes, to get the experience it would really take to be a master. Let's say you are so good it only takes you perhaps three years to become a top detective and expert in these regards -- now you are 31, and just finished the most basic level of preparation you need to be an expert in just some of the most obvious fields required to match Batman.Now you have to quit the force, and develop a good cover story for yourself so nobody suspects that Batman might be the guy who is an expert in all of those fields Batman is a master at. You have to have made sure you lived your life never revealing your true feelings about crime and vigilantism etc, and in fact covering it up unless you want to be arrested as a suspect the first time Batman has been around town. You need to spend some time doing dry runs around town to find your way around rooftops and fire escapes, practice running around at night in the shadows and not being seen, and presumably start practicing using your ropes and grappling hooks and other equipment you need for nightly patrols. Do some dry runs, make final preparations in case of emergencies, etc.And you need to have been investing money and amassing a fortune the entire time, because the technology you'll need to even get close to a real-world version of Batman will cost millions of dollars. So you've done that, and now you start spending the money to get an armored suit full of electronics to communicate with assistants and have night vision and so on. You need a base of operations, so you buy one of those old used missile silos the military sells (yeah, they really do that, and it's pretty cool inside them) and turn it into a secret headquarters for the computers and monitoring equipment and car and bike and other equipment you need for your vigilante life.Conservatively, you should probably be about 32 at this point. And you are only about to go out on your first night as Batman. Okay, it's taken longer than expected and been pretty hard, and honestly you are not quite as much a master of all fields as Batman, but at least you got the basics and are pretty well trained and smart and equipped. So off you go, looking to stop crime......and you're looking. And looking. Oh, wait, you hear police sirens or you get a transmission from picking up the police radio calls, there's a domestic disturbance in progress... well, that's not really what Batman does, so you let that one go to the cops. Then you get another call about a robbery, ah ha! Finally Batman is going into action! You run across those rooftops, swing across to another roof -- whoa crap, that was a lot more dangerous than it looks in the comics! But you're booking it, running flat out and probably hitting, what, a good 10 miles per hour? Maybe less actually because of having to dodge things and stop at the edge of the roof to swing down again.Anyway, there you are, rooftop to rooftop, and it occurs to you that the cop cars are so far gone now that you barely hear the sirens. So you think "Hmm, no wonder the real Batman has a car, this rooftop thing looks cool but I'll never make it in time to stop a crime that isn't happening within a block or two."And you don't -- make it in time, that is. The first few nights, you keep showing up and the robberies or shootings or whatever are already over, and you realize that this makes sense because most reports about crimes are only after it happens, not while it's taking place. And you also remember that as a cop, you almost never just walked up or drove up accidentally right where a crime happened to taking place. In fact, you were just one of several thousand cops in your city, and most of you never just stumbled right across a significant crime in progress.By your second week, you are getting unhappy that 90% of the crimes you've even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to support his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid who you saw punch a lady and take her purse, but you can't really pursue that kind of thing by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk... in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep there's a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it's YOU he's after. Great, you have to let the kid go so you can run down an alley and climb up a fire escape to the roof to get away.At last, week three, you get lucky -- an armed robbery, right there across the street! You leap down onto the hood of their car, cape over the windshield just like in The Dark Knight Returns. And a teenage kid in the passenger seat fires a shotgun though the windshield in panic, blasting your torso.You are wearing armor, though, haha! So it merely shreds your costume and knocks you off the car onto the street, but man that hurts! And it takes your breath away just long enough for the car to speed off. You get up, angry and just in time to see everyone taking your photo again and staring at your shredded outfit. Then the police come around the corner, and you run off again but this time you are injured because although the armor stopped the slug it still bruised you and broke a rib. You are fast, but not fast enough this time. The police draw their guns and order you to stop. You turn and grab for the smoke pellet on your belt to help hide your getaway, but unfortunately for you the cops see you reaching for something and open fire... and you suit's armor is already a mess from the shotgun blast earlier. Uh oh.When you wake up in the ICU, your mask and costume are gone, you're in a lot of pain, but the doctors successfully removed the bullets and re-inflated your lung. The downside is the set of handcuffs trapping you in the bed. As a master detective, you can of course easily pick the lock on the cuffs to escape, but on the other hand the staph infection you caught after surgery is pretty bad and you feel like s**t. So you wait until night to sneak out -- except you fall asleep on your pain meds, and wake up the next morning to the police coming to pick you up and take you to the infirmary at the state prison. Where you will spend a month recuperating until they can transfer you to the county jail for your first court appearance. During which your only comment to the judge is, "I guess it's not really possible to become Batman."Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na! Batman!