Should Equal Rights Apply Only During Economic Good Times

One of my City Councilmembers, Beth Gottstein, has introduced a proposed ordinance to ban discriminatory dress codes in publicly subsidized redevelopment plans and projects. The ordinance is, of course, a reaction to the dress code that the people at the Cordish Companies have used to deny access to the tax-advantaged Power & Light District for people dressed in, shall we say, an "urban" style. Not surprisingly, the ban on ball caps and white t-shirts was sometimes ignored for shall we say, "suburban" looking people.

Beth Gottstein, along with Terry Riley, Mayor Funkhouser and John Sharp, has come out against having our tax dollars subsidizing discrimination. Who could possibly disagree?

Sure enough, the local blogosphere provides an example of someone willing to stand up for prejudice if it's profitable. Over at the Kansas City Post, we are instructed that "As far as the P&L, our primary concern right now should be revenue." The focus should not be on equal rights in a time of economic crisis, it should be on revenue. "I would like to see the numbers on how many potential patrons are turned away, and what the projected lost revenue is. I doubt it's even a drop in the bucket." It's not that they're too black, it's that they're not green enough?

I'm grateful that Councilmember Gottstein has found a revenue-neutral way to help our city become a better, more welcoming place. Her dedication to building bridges and reaching out to all facets of our community has been an important part of her character for years - long before we were fortunate enough to gain her leadership on the Council.

Some things remain more important than revenue, even during times of economic crisis. While some among us feel that "Hard economic times call for singular focus," leaders like Gottstein realize that good people don't turn on each other during hard economic times. Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed out that "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

Thank you, Beth, for helping Kansas City stand in a goood place at a time of challenge. That's why we voted for you.

53 years ago today

An unknown black woman refused to surrender her seat at the front of the bus for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.

If you were on that bus, brought up in a culture where Rosa Parks was expected to surrender her seat, would you have seen her as a civil rights icon in the making, or as a lazy troublemaker?

Has Privacy Become Outdated?

One of the most frightening trends of government in general and the Bush Administration in particular has been the erosion of privacy. Privacy, in a post 9/11 world, is viewed by some as a frivolous and risky luxury with little legitimate use.

Indeed, unless you're a terrorist or some lesser criminal, why is privacy in your communication or personal space even necessary? If your most provocative statement of the day is a phone call to your spouse discussing what to microwave for dinner, who really cares if the NSA is listening in? And if they claim have to listen in on your grocery list conversations to prevent crazy people from flying into buildings, then a patriot will agree to speak clearly into the microphone, right? If the government needs to rummage through my boxer shorts to make sure my neighbor isn't hiding a nuclear device in in his underwear drawer, that's just the way it has to be.

Why do you need privacy, anyhow, unless you're doing something wrong?

Indeed, the freshly-sworn-in man who is second in command of National Security, Donald Kerr argues that in today's technological world, notions of privacy are somewhat outmoded, and we should not impose our "one size fits all" ideas on people who are willing to waive their privacy. Here's a transcipt of his entire speech (.pdf), and here's the part that has me upset:

And we’ve started to bring down those walls as we require information sharing between intelligence, Homeland Security, and Defense agencies, and law enforcement. Some have grown uneasy. People are asking, just what is it they’re sharing?

And that leads you directly into the concern for privacy. Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. The Long (sic, unless he's talking about some dirty movie) Ranger wore a mask but Tonto didn’t seem to need one even though he did the dirty work for free. You’d think he would probably need one even more. But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Anonymity results from a lack of identifying features. Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I’m just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment.

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured. And it is that framework that we need to grow and nourish and adjust as our cultures change.

I think people here, at least people close to my age, recognize that those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all. It’s a need to have it be adjustable to the needs of local societies as they evolve in our country. Eventually, we can only hope that people’s perceptions – in Hollywood and elsewhere – will catch up.

Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety. This is work that the Office of the DNI has started to do, and must continue and make a high priority. This careful balance we need to strike, however, is nothing new. With the advent of telephones, we entered a new frontier that required careful balancing between safety and privacy. We faced this challenge again at the end of the ’70s in the aftermath of the Church-Pike Hearings. And now, in the era of new technologies, we have to work to continue to keep that balance, to earn that trust, and re-earn it every day through our actions. But we also have to be willing to reopen the laws and regulations that were based on technologies that existed 1978 and adjust them to the realities of 2007 and 2008.

Privacy, in this guy's view, is merely "a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety." Privacy "is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured."

Those quotations are not my fevered reinterpretation of some right-wing whacko blogger - those are actual words from the Deputy Director of National Intelligence! In a nutshell, he's arguing that if you use a credit card to buy something from Amazon, you won't mind if the government examines your financial records. If you use the internet to google symptoms, you won't mind if the government checks out your medical records.

So, while we undervalue the right to privacy, and question its value to good people, the government is questioning whether it even exists any more. Please take a second, though, and remember three primary reasons we need the Fourth Amendment.

First, we know the government will ultimately abuse the power we grant it. Second, the police, FBI, NSA and other security agents are too stupid to get it right. Third, and most important, we don't want anybody messing with us. America has a deep-seated, defiant sense of independence from its government, and will not long suffer being treated like subjects of a superior power.