American values

It’s that time of year: a Tuesday near the end of January. It’s just past another anniversary of the president’s inauguration, and time for the annual tradition, the State of the Union address.

In this case, it’s President Obama’s third anniversary, and tonight he’ll give his third SotU speech. According to the Washington Post, this year’s talk will stress a return to American values.

All right, here it is: I’m sick to death of hearing about values. Values has turned into a codeword for reactionary politics, repression, and censorship. I don’t want to hear a speech about those kinds of values, especially from a president who has done little to fix the overstepping excesses of his predecessor, and, to the contrary, seems to embrace many of them.

American values used to be about freedom and opportunity, not control and rigidity. America was a country that didn’t abuse and arrest people for assembling peacefully. It didn’t arrest people for documenting how the police were handling situations. It didn’t keep political prisoners, detaining people indefinitely with no chance of formal accusation, trial, and defense. It didn’t limit the rights of people because of who they are, it didn’t restrict their access to medicines and medical procedures, it didn’t try to teach children mythology in science class, and it did not march a conservative Christian agenda down the streets everywhere.

You want to return to American values? Demilitarize the police, and get them back to engaging with the communities they serve and protect. Don’t send people off to secret prisons, close Guantánamo, and give everyone there a proper, open trial. Stop using terrorist the way dictatorships have used denunciation, as a way to whisk troublesome people away. When people get angry and want to protest, encourage them and give them a venue, don’t beat them down and throw tear gas at them as they sit non-aggressively. Allow yourself to be held accountable for your actions, and don’t threaten people who want to record what you’re doing. Don’t get involved in people’s private lives and personal decisions. And keep religion out of the government and public education. You can start that by not saying God bless in your speeches. Try it tonight.

Remember that American values came from our flight from having to live under someone else’s values. We can’t just replace the king’s values with those of your family, your church, or any other relatively small subset of Americans. Our values were set up to protect our rights and our freedom — everyone’s — and that is what we need to return to.

Oh, and fix the economy, yeah? Don’t just talk about it.

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill that provides for continued operation of the U.S. military. But this year’s 680-page bill includes yet more civil rights violations sanctioned by our legislature. Here’s NPR’s Steve Inskeep introducing their report:

The senate last night passed a defense bill that includes controversial provisions for handling terrorism suspects. The bill would send most detainees into military custody, not into the hands of the FBI, and it would allow the U.S. government to hold some suspects indefinitely, without charge, without trial. Those ideas ran into strong opposition from national security experts across the Obama administration, setting the stage for a possible veto by the president.

About halfway through the NPR report is this:

Carrie Johnson (NPR): But some Democrats and civil liberties groups said that left up in the air whether U.S. citizens could be detained in this country indefinitely without charges. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, says there’s nothing wrong with taking a hard line against American terrorists.

Senator Graham: I’m just saying to any American citizen, if you wanna help Al Qaeda, you do so at your own peril. You can get killed in the process, you can get detained indefinitely, and when you’re being questioned and you say to the interrogator, I want my lawyer, the interrogator will say you don’t have a right to a lawyer, ’cause you’re a military threat.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: what Senator Graham and those who spout the same rhetoric are missing is that we’re dealing here not with adjudicated cases, but with accusations. The rights they’re threatening were put in place to protect Americans from improper accusations — unfair, unwarranted, trumped up, perhaps specifically intended to put away someone who’s turned out to be inconvenient.

Back in the old days of tyrannical rule, the king would accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation alone would be cause to lock the accused in a dungeon indefinitely, with no hope of help or justice. When we formed this country, we put together a system of rights and guarantees to prevent such abuse and to protect our people from that sort of thing.

And yet that’s exactly what Senator Graham and others want to put us back into: a situation wherein a government that wants to silence someone and make him disappear need only make an unsubstantiated accusation of working with terrorists, and that person can be whisked away by the military, held in secret forever, and denied access to anyone — no family, no lawyers, no advocates of any kind to help him refute what may well be false accusations. No charge of an actual crime and no evidence are necessary.

I agree with Senator Graham that we should take a hard line against people who wanna help Al Qaeda. I’m just not willing to take accusations as fact and throw away the protections we have against abuse, and neither should anyone who supports the tenets this country was founded on be willing to do so. By all means, arrest people suspected of working with terrorists. Then give them access to legal support, tell them what crimes they’re charged with, and have fair and public trials, just as we do with people accused of murder, rape, arson, and all other horrible crimes.

These provisions need to be removed from the bill, and President Obama must veto it until they are removed.

New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

Yesterday, the New York State Senate approved the bill, 33 to 29.

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

It’s about time!

Illinois Governor Signs Capital Punishment Ban

Yesterday, Illinois joined the civilized world, including 15 other states, by abolishing the death penalty. Their reason? One of sense:

Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it, Mr. Quinn [Illinois Governor Pat Quinn] said in a statement.

In 2000, at the same time that Texas Governor George W. Bush was crowing arrogantly that every one of the people executed in his state during his reign — well over 100 — was guilty and deserved to die, the governor of Illinois at that time, George Ryan, suspended the death penalty because DNA evidence proved that a disturbing number of the death-row inmates there were, in fact, innocent.

Before then, George Pataki won the election for governor in New York with the promise of reinstating the death penalty here. And our state’s top court subsequently declared the law unconstitutional. No one has been executed in New York since 1963. The Massachusetts law has also been declared unconstitutional by its state courts.

The thirteen other states that do not have death penalty statutes at all are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In contrast, Texas has killed 466 inmates since 1976. Virginia is a very distant second, at 108. In fact, Texas has executed more people than the next six states, combined (Virginia, Oklahoma (96), Florida (69), Missouri (68), Alabama (50), and Georgia (49)).

Illinois executed 12 prisoners between 1976 and Governor Ryan’s moratorium in 2000. Hooray for them for making it clear that they’ll kill no more.

“Hey, that’s my camera, Charlie!” “This is my farm, Clyde!”

Here: What do you do when people (such as animal-rights activists) take pictures of your farm in order to document abusive practices?

The answer, of course, should be obvious: you make it a felony to photograph farms.

Yes, the Florida state senate is considering a bill, SB 1246, that will do just that. From the Times:

Photographers — perhaps including some ghosts from Farm Security Administration days — are astir at news of a bill introduced by State Senator Jim Norman of Florida that would make it a felony to take a picture of a farm without the owner’s permission.

The bill is short, so let’s include the text, as introduced in the Florida Senate yesterday, here in its entirety. Paragraph (2) is the operative one.

A bill to be entitled

An act relating to farms; prohibiting a person from entering onto a farm or photographing or video recording a farm without the owner’s written consent; providing a definition; providing penalties; providing an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Florida:

Section 1. (1) A person who enters onto a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084, Florida Statutes.

(2) A person who photographs, video records, or otherwise produces images or pictorial records, digital or otherwise, at or of a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084, Florida Statutes.

(3) As used in this section, the term farm includes any tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals, or the storage of a commodity.

Section 2. This act shall take effect July 1, 2011.

Get all your Florida farm picture-taking done by June, now.

[I’ll note in passing that this also seems to make it illegal for someone to snap pics of your back-yard marijuana crop. Just sayin’.]

---

Update, 14:20 — Adding something I said in a comment elsewhere:

When I was in college (at University of Florida), I would see a great sunflower farm as we drove up I-75. When the sunflowers were blooming in row after row, it was really beautiful and striking.

The idea that if one’s passenger should snap a shot of that on the way by, without first stopping at the farmhouse for a written photo release, then one might be liable to prosecution for a felony... is pretty insane.

And the idea that they’re even considering this is equally insane. This is not the country I grew up in.

When do your wacky ideas get in the way of your job?

There’s been a lot of talk around blogland about the case of Martin Gaskell. Dr Gaskell is an astronomer, and was, in 2007, up for a position at University of Kentucky, where he would be director of the MacAdam Student Observatory. According to all reports, he was highly qualified, and would have been likely to get the job. They then, as we Internet technologists refer to it in very technical terms, Googled him, and found aspects of his religious beliefs that led them to hire someone else.

This, of course, is where the accounts begin to differ. Dr Gaskell sued the University of Kentucky on grounds of religious discrimination; the university said that it wasn’t his religion, in general, that was a problem, but his specific views on things like the age of the universe, things that have direct bearing on the job at hand, that informed their decision.

In November of 2010 (things don’t always move quickly in the court system), a federal judge ruled that the case could go forward, and a date was set for February. Last week — what has prompted the new interest in talking about it — they settled out of court, ending the legal proceedings. The University of Kentucky will pay Dr Gaskell $125,000, without making any admission of wrongdoing.

Paying to make the problem go away is common, but unfortunate: it leaves everything fuzzy. Dr Gaskell’s supporters will claim that they won, and that there was, indeed, improper discrimination against him. His detractors will say that he extorted money from the university. Neither is really true.

More broadly, though, this case isn’t just about Dr Gaskell, and settling with him leaves open the question of when a person’s beliefs — religious or otherwise — make it reasonable to rule that person out for certain jobs. And should religious beliefs have any more protection in that regard than beliefs rooted elsewhere?

Richard Dawkins, in a BoingBoing guest post, has given his opinion on the matter. I mostly agree with him, but I can’t say that unequivocally. Read his essay, either now or after you’re done here.

I’ll answer the second of my questions two paragraphs up before I discuss the first: No, I do not think the reason one believes what one does has any bearing on how we should treat that belief. If you believe, say, that people should be at peace with each other, and that war is always evil, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Quaker or you come by that from somewhere else. If you’re vegetarian, what’s the difference whether it’s because you’re Hindu or because you simply can’t bear to see animals die? If you believe that the Universe is about 6000 years old, whether you get that from the bible, from a science fiction story you once read, or from a private sense that came to you one evening, it’s all the same. We shouldn’t be any more critical of what you think because you learnt it in church... but neither should we be more tolerant of it for that reason, if it gets in the way of what we’re working with you for.

And that leads us to the other question: When is it acceptable to say that what you believe is inconsistent with the job we’re hiring you for? Can a vegetarian expect to get a job as the sole food critic for a small newspaper? There’s an obvious issue there, but, surely, a vegetarian Hindu couldn’t reasonably sue the paper and claim religious discrimination. You have to be able to do your job.

Of course, there’d be no reason to prevent a vegetarian from, say, being the director of a university astronomical observatory. It’s likely we’ll all agree on that point.

At issue here, though, is that certain beliefs can damage your credibility to the point that, while they might not stop you doing your job, they could easily make it impossible for people to take you seriously in it. Were I, for instance, to apply for a job as Internet technology advisor for a right-wing tea-party senator, I might very well be able to give sound technical advice while choking back my revulsion to the senator’s political agenda... but could the senator ever trust that I wasn’t trying to undermine her in some way, given what I’ve written in these pages? Of course not.

Where I have a little trouble fully agreeing with Professor Dawkins is about where we draw the line. Between beliefs that can live in the background without having any effect and those that clearly whack one’s job in the face, there’s a continuum, and we have to decide when there’s enough effect to matter.

To be sure, we often think of college professors as being a bit kooky. It’s clear to me that the University of Kentucky people made a reasonable decision in this case, and it bothers me that they had to agree to pay Dr Gaskell off. But other cases are bound to be less clear, and it may be fine to hire the professor with the nutty ideas sometimes... even if the students do have a laugh once in a while, he’ll still have enough credibility to teach them what needs to be taught.

Ideally, of course, I fully agree with Professor Dawkins: we want clear thinkers in our universities, and accepting people who support discredited or fringe ideas in areas not connected to their main expertise still pollutes the clear-thinking pond. We’d like to select, say, Holocaust denialists, moon-landing skeptics, homeopathists, and idiots who still think that President Obama was not really born in Hawaii, and make sure none of them are teaching at our colleges and universities. It’s a nice goal. In practice, though, we have that sort of situation all the time, and I’m not sure how rigorous I want to be in avoiding it. Should Stanford University have distanced themselves from William Shockley because of his ideas about eugenics? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What’s clear, though, is that we have to prevent every employment decision from being the basis of a religious discrimination suit. In this case, the judge who allowed it to go forward made the wrong choice. It only cost the university $125,000, but it’s set a precedent that makes me very queasy.

He had a dream

In honour of today’s remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr, today’s entry is a pointer to a Fresh Air radio program to air today, a talk with Clarence Jones, who helped write Dr King’s famous I Have a Dream speech.

Text without context, in this case especially, would be quite a loss. One might imagine standing before an audience and read­ing Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech verbatim, but it is a stretch to believe that any such per­formance would sow the seeds of change with, as Dr. King put it that day in Washington, the fierce urgency of now. The vast crowd, the great speaker, the words that shook the world — it all comes as a package deal. We are truly fortunate to have a record.

More on search warrants and electronic data

Varying a bit from this item, last week the California state Supreme Court decided that police can seize and search a mobile device that an suspect has with him when he’s arrested.

This differs from the first decision in a couple of ways. For one thing, the former was by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a court that covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee; California is covered by the Ninth Circuit, and the Sixth Circuit’s decision is not binding there. For another, this decision is by a state court, not a federal one, so it applies in the state of California only.

But more significantly, this is specifically about things that someone who’s arrested has on his person at the time of arrest. The decision is based on a more general rule that police are allowed to examine whatever a suspect has when he’s arrested:

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedents, this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee’s body ... but also to open and examine what they find, the state court said in a 5-2 ruling.

The majority, led by Justice Ming Chin, relied on decisions in the 1970s by the nation’s high court upholding searches of cigarette packages and clothing that officers seized during an arrest and examined later without seeking a warrant from a judge.

As in many other cases, this highlights a need to be clear that data storage devices and devices that can access online information are not like cigarette packages and clothing. I don’t think any of us doubt that the police can and should look for cocaine hidden in a cigarette pack, or a switchblade in the back trouser pocket. But if I’m carrying my laptop when I’m arrested, do they have reasonable access to all my stored email and other personal and financial information?

The minority of two justices say no, as do I:

The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn’t be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data.

Monday’s decision allows police to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee’s person, said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, joined in dissent by Justice Carlos Moreno.

They argued that police should obtain a warrant - by convincing a judge that they will probably find incriminating evidence - before searching a cell phone.

The courts need to sort out these differences, and set up a legal understanding of where personal effects end and private data begins. Unfortunately, the current U.S. Supreme Court does not have the composition to come up with a reasonable answer to that question.

On full-body scans and air-travel safety

To go along with opt out day last week — a loosely organized day in which air travelers were encouraged to resist the new body-scanner machines, and in which some travellers did some special things to protest the feel your genitals ‘pat down’ that has been set up as an apparently punitive alternative — the New York Times published one of their Room for Debate columns on the topic.^[1]

I agree particularly with what Bruce Schneier and Rafi Sela have to say about it. That won’t surprise many, and it’s also not surprising that I have comments about the segments by Arnold Barnett and David Ropeik. Both present the standard false dichotomy, asking whether you’d rather be scanned and be safe, or opt out and let a bomber onto your plane.

Professor Barnett:

But then I remember a basic question. What if the 9/11 terrorists had been thwarted at the security checkpoint? We would have been spared not only the worst terrorist attack in American history, but probably two wars that have gone on for nearly a decade.

Mr Ropeik:

Flying any time soon? Would you rather the T.S.A. folks kept their hands off your body, or terrorist bombs off your plane? Seems like a simple choice, but as National Opt-Out Day looms, it’s worth considering why what seems like a simple question isn’t.

They both give us the same, basic argument: the scanners will thwart the terrorists. The arguments start with the presumption that they make us safer. The trouble is that there’s no clear evidence that they do. It’s not a choice between scanning and terrorist bombs. There are other inspection and investigation techniques, there are other ways to block the terrorists, and it’s easily arguable that these scanners are neither sufficiently effective to make us willing to submit to them, nor sufficiently cost effective for the expenditure to be worthwhile.

Mr Ropeik goes on to say this:

Compare those concerns against the reduced fear of being bombed on a plane. The emotional sharpness of September 11, 2001, and our fears, have faded. The threat hasn’t. We’ve had a shoe bomber, an underwear bomber, liquid bombers. But since our fear has ebbed, feeling coerced into taking a radiation risk or having our privacy invaded carries more weight.

He mentions three bombing plots. He doesn’t mention how many were successful: none. The shoe guy and the underwear guy were prevented, by older inspections that didn’t involve x-ray scanners, from bringing effective bombs aboard. What they did manage to get on board didn’t work, and they were apprehended in the process of trying to make them do something, anything. These weren’t screening failures, but screening successes. If we stop someone from bringing a sword into the plane and he has to try to make do with a plastic knife from the cafeteria, we don’t call that a failure, and suggest cavity searches to find plastic cafeteria-knives.

The liquid bombers, whether or not their plot would have worked, were stopped by investigation before the fact. They never made it to the security checkpoints at all, so screening was irrelevant to that case. Our security money should be going to more of these sorts of investigations, so we’re aware of the terrorist plots before they reach the airports, the train stations, the shopping malls, or the sports arenas.

Professor Barnett dismisses criticism without really addressing it:

The critics instead make two other arguments. The first is that the backscatter machines are ineffective because they cannot detect explosives in body cavities. The second is that recent security measures are very literally reactive: after the Shoe’s Bomber’s effort, the liquid-explosives plot, and the Underwear Bomber’s attempt, procedures were adopted to respond to these specific menaces. Indeed, the Yemeni bombs have led to a ban on printer cartridges in carry-on luggage.

All he has to say about either argument is, The more options we take ‘off the table’ from the terrorists, the more they are driven to more desperate plots that are less likely to succeed. But the point isn’t that we shouldn’t be taking terrorist options off the table. The point is that we have limited resources to throw at the problem, and we should be using them wisely.

A security mechanism that’s expensive and intrusive, that violates some of the basic rights we hold dear, that causes delays in travel and anger among the travellers, and that has an enormous potential for abuse by the authorities who administer it... had better be sufficiently effective to be worth all the expense, intrusion, violation, delay, anger, and abuse.

These machines don’t appear to meet that requirement.

---

^[1] I have not yet experienced either the machines or the enhanced pat downs. I’ll report in these pages if and when I do.

On the right to DNA testing: Skinner v. Switzer

Our criminal justice system is sometimes arrogant.

We believe — at least, as the written code tells it — that our juries are infallible, or that their fallibility is an acceptable ill. And we must do so in order to keep the system working, to keep the problems contained. Most of the time, I agree with the acceptable ill attitude. But we often cling to that belief too doggedly, refusing to reconsider convictions when we should.

At no time is our responsibility to reconsider greater than when we decide to execute someone. Before we impose an irreversible sentence, we must take every opportunity we can to correct any possible mistake. We shouldn’t stand on process when someone’s life is at stake.

It would be wrong to refuse to hear a death-row appeal because the paperwork was filed a week late.

It would be wrong to refuse to consider new evidence that had surfaced after the jury made its decision.

And it would be wrong not to allow examination of evidence that existed but that had not been examined.

Yet that last is the concern of a case that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear tomorrow, the case of Hank Skinner (click through, then search for skinner):

The Texas state and federal courts — hearing Skinner’s habeas corpus pleas — refused to allow post-conviction testing of biological evidence, including blood, hair, fingernail clippings and vaginal swabs. The courts held that, under Texas law, a convict must prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that he or she would not have been prosecuted or convicted had DNA testing been performed. To get DNA testing, a Texas inmate must also demonstrate that his failure to seek such testing at trial was not a strategic decision.

The law shifts the burden onto the defendant, who must show not just that doing the DNA testing would be reasonable, not just that the DNA testing might exonerate him, but that by a preponderance of the evidence, the state would have let him go without even going to trial if they’d done the tests then. And he has to do that just to get the testing done. Then to top that, he also has to explain away the procedural aspects of why this hadn’t been requested earlier.

Now, I’m as curious as the next guy, and I certainly want to ask why his defense team didn’t deal with this before. But I can’t imagine my decision on the testing hinging on that aspect. And I don’t want him to prove anything in order to get the biological evidence tested. The fact is that it’s available and it wasn’t tested, for whatever reasons, and, here: they’re going to kill Mr Skinner; they owe him an assurance that they did everything they could to be sure they’re right about that.

As if that weren’t enough, we have the heads of the justice departments of twenty-two states giving another crazy reason we should deny the request: they say that the states should get to decide this, and the federal government should keep out of it. If they’re short on money and personnel for testing, condemned prisoners will just have to accept their fates.

At least 22 states told the justices that granting Skinner DNA testing through a civil rights suit would undermine their individual statutes, which spell out when an inmate is entitled to it.

To allow this type of procedural legerdemain would both diminish the sovereign interests of the states and at the same time impose a significant burden on the states’ limited law enforcement resources, attorneys general from the 22 states wrote.

That sort of callousness seems enough of a reason, in itself, to demand that they take a step back and think. If it were your child standing accused, how would you want it to be handled? That couldn’t happen? Don’t count on that; sure, it could.

This should never have gotten to the Supreme Court, but now that it has, the court should require the testing. I’m not very confident that it will, though, with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts sure to vote against it. The outcome will likely rest on how Justice Kennedy votes, as I suspect this will be a five-to-four decision.

Haven’t there been enough people set free because DNA evidence showed that their convictions had been wrong? Can’t we see that this testing only makes sense from every just perspective? The only reason to refuse such a request is to stand with an arrogance that says, We did everything according to the law, and it’s too bad for you. If you think Mr Skinner is just a low-life who just isn’t worth keeping around, line up on that side.

But if you want to be more certain that the right man is being executed, do the tests.

Fascist bullies

There’s a guy in Arizona — yeah, Arizona, that noted hotbed of anti-liberalism that fosters (I want to say festers) delightful folk like Joe Arpaio, Ev Mecham, and Russell Pearce (not to mention John McCain) — who’s having a fight with his homeowners’ association about the flag he’s chosen to fly. The association allows a handful of flags that are specifically listed in Arizona state law (in other words, they can’t stop you from flying those), but Andy McDonel is displaying a different one, the Gadsden Don’t Tread On Me flag.

They don’t like that.

Now, Mr McDonel says that his use of the flag has no connection to the Tea Party movement, which has recently adopted it. It’s a patriotic gesture, he says. It’s a historic military flag. It represents the founding fathers. It shows this nation was born out of an idea.

I don’t really care why he wants to fly it. I only care that no one has any moral right to tell him that he can’t. And, as yesterday, this is my opinion, not coming from any legal expertise (and this time legal precedent is against me). Similarly, folks who are proud of their heritage have every right to display a Union Jack or an Irish flag, a French or German or Italian one, an Israeli flag, a Palestinian flag, an Egyptian flag, or an Iranian flag, if that’s what they want to do.

The problem is that homeowners’ associations, as they currently exist in many places, should simply not be. They have turned into organizations of fascist bullies, they have no place in a country such as ours, and they should be outlawed.

Their premise looks appealing, at least to many people: folks in a community want to get together and make sure their community meets a reasonable set of standards. They want a neat community, a pretty community, a community that maintains high property values. They want to make sure people keep their lawns trimmed, don’t let their houses fall into disrepair, don’t paint their houses unattractive colours, and don’t have half-disassembled cars parked in their driveways in front of God and everybody.

The problem is that what’s an attractive colour to me might not be to your taste, there’s a difference between a two-day rebuilding of a classic Mercedes engine and half a dozen broken-down jalopies that have been sitting around for two years, and some people prefer other sorts of ground cover to grass lawns. Homeowners’ associations do not take such reasonable variations into account.

They are, in general, authoritarian and lacking in any flexibility, taking people to court for minor violations, forbidding people from making normal use of the houses and land they bought, and seizing people’s property, sometimes for just being a month or two behind on their payment of association fees.

Places without associations deal with the same issues of community standards, but it’s done by peer pressure. There are ordinances, to be sure, that address health and safety concerns, so one mayn’t throw one’s garbage on the front lawn and leave it there, and one must repair exposed electrical wires, broken glass, and the like. Beyond that, well, if one is in the habit of mowing only every two months, one will hear suggestions — sometimes gentle, sometimes less so — from the people next door and down the street. It works well enough.

Not well enough for some.

Well, hey, you say, you know the rules when you move in. Just don’t buy in such a community. As the lawyer for the Arizona HOA in the Times article says, Bottom-line, anyone considering residing in a community association should carefully review the association’s governing documents beforehand to ensure that the community is a good fit for them.

The problem is that people often have little choice in the matter. In some areas, HOAs are ubiquitous, as all new communities have had them for several decades. Where I live, I can make that choice. In other areas, that’s not true.

What’s more, people often find themselves violating things they never imagined would be a problem when they moved in. Rules change after you’re there, and unless you were right on top of it and had the time to garner a large base of support to defeat the proposal, you’re stuck with the result. In new communities, the developer often retains a controlling vote on the association board anyway, so it doesn’t matter how much support you can get.

Years ago, a friend of mine found the outside of her back fence vandalized with spray-painted graffiti... and then was told that she had only a week to paint over it, or face fines. Ah, and the paint had to be exactly colour X, purchased from the local store. Another friend with a white house and green trim found that he liked the blue trim of another house down the street. He was told that the colours were planned from house to house, and even though he wanted to use an already approved colour, that colour wasn’t assigned to his house. He would have to apply to the association board — and, here’s a surprise, pay a substantial, non-refundable application fee — and hope that they said yes to the change.

And then there are the foreclosures.

Of course, we do limit the HOAs in some ways. Much as some might want to, they may not refuse to allow blacks, Hispanics, or gays into the neighbourhood, for example. Yet, they can make everyone live their lives in the same white-bread middle-of-the-road way, under threat of losing their houses. This isn’t right.

They’re just abusive, tyrannical bullies, bent on telling everyone else what to do. They have to go.

One nail in Prop 8’s coffin

After a busy IETF meeting and a nice few days off in Bruges and Brussels (photos forthcoming, when I get time to sort through them), and a break from both news and blogging (I’ve written somewhere in these pages about being out of touch with the news when I’m travelling), I have a few moments to write. I thought I’d mention what was one of the most significant news items I missed last week:

A U.S. District Court has tossed out Proposition 8, that vile, homophobic ban on same-sex marriage in California.

Proposition 8 cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, wrote Judge Walker. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.

Indeed, and well said. And one has to laugh at things like this:

But Andrew Pugno, a lawyer for the defense, said Proposition 8 had nothing to do with discrimination, but rather with the will of California voters who simply wished to preserve the historic definition of marriage.

The other side’s attack upon their good will and motives is lamentable and preposterous, Mr. Pugno said in a statement.

Preposterous? Right, they really just want an old-married-couples’ club. They don’t want those people to be able to join, but that’s not discrimination, not at all. Oy.

Nothing is settled yet, of course; this will clearly be appealed. The Ninth Circuit will have to weigh in — they’ll almost certainly uphold this decision. And then it’ll go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Maybe we can hope for a Scalia resignation before that happens.

---

Update, 19 Aug: The delays continue. Here is Thom’s blog post (see his comment to this entry) from yesterday.

So, what was I doing on Monday, the day the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied my right — you may argue that it merely delayed it, again, but the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accurately noted that a right delayed is a right denied — to marry the man I love, the man with whom I’ve spent the past seven years, and the man I intend to be with until the day one of us stops breathing? What sinful, un-American civilization-destroying immorality was I indulging the day our hopes were dashed again?

Go read the whole thing.

Expectation of privacy?

A few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a privacy-rights case: a police officer had a pager issued to him by the police department. He used the pager for official business, but he also used it for personal messages — some very personal. Wisdom would advise against that, but being unwise is often not against company policy.

In this case, though, the department decided to audit the use of the pagers, to determine whether they had chosen the correct payment plan for the number of work-related messages used. They got a dump of the messages.

The officer sued, claiming a privacy breach — he did not want his hot-sex messages to be read by his bosses, if you can imagine that. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the department, which owned and provided the pagers, violated his privacy by reading his messages. He had, they held, an expectation of privacy in the use of the pager.

Normally, you do not have an expectation of privacy if you use company equipment for personal messages or activities. Not, as we say, on company time or furniture. In this case, though, a boss, a lieutenant, said that as long as they paid for their personal messages, the messages would not be read, and it’s that statement that turned it for the Ninth Circuit Court.

The New York Times agrees, in an editorial about the case.

The Ninth Circuit was correct. Sergeant Quon had a reasonable expectation that his messages were private. Under the Fourth Amendment, the city had a duty to seek less-intrusive methods of searching, and as the court noted, those methods were available. The City of Ontario could have had Sergeant Quon and others request the transcripts and allowed them to redact anything personal.

The Supreme Court should affirm the appellate court’s well-reasoned decision. If it rules for the city, it should do so in a narrow way, closely tied to the specific facts of this case.

Courts across the country have been unclear about what privacy rights apply to e-mail and texting, which are fast eclipsing postal mail and conventional telephones. The Supreme Court should make clear that the Fourth Amendment’s robust privacy protections apply just as robustly to 21st-century communication.

I agree with the Times in its final paragraph: searches of our personal effects, which are controlled by the Fourth Amendment, must also include searches of our electronic media, files, and messages. This is absolutely clear. We must be secure in our electronics, as well as being secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects.

I’m less comfortable agreeing with the two previous paragraphs. The Ninth Circuit Court is probably right in this case, but only because “the lieutenant was speaking for the department” when he said that the employees’ messages would not be read. He established an expectation of privacy that would not normally be there in the case of employees using company equipment.

While it’s certainly true that the department could have used less-intrusive methods that could have accommodated the employees’ privacy, and while a kind employer might choose to do so, they should be under no obligation in that regard. If the courts give employees free rein to use company resources for personal purposes, and hold employers liable for privacy leaks, then employers will have good reason to lock down their equipment and use technology to prevent such use. And there be dragons; that serves no one well.

The better answer is to allow employers and employees to strike a happy medium, wherein employees can make personal use of company equipment, but must do it with circumspection, realizing that what they do on equipment they do not own is not completely private — that the privacy serves at the pleasure of the employer. With that, they can all find a reasonable middle ground.

To alter the Times’ penultimate paragraph, I can agree that the Supreme Court should affirm the appellate court’s decision, but that it should do so, ruling against the city, only in a narrow way, closely tied to the specific facts of this case. The general situation should be that employees not have an expectation of privacy when using their employers’ computers, networks, and other 21st-century technology.

Thinly veiled reasoning

France is considering legislation to ban the burqa or niqab, the full “veil” that some Muslim women wear, which covers the whole face. The surface reasoning is that people need to see each other’s faces — that being able to do so makes people safer by allowing identification, and establishing social connections. What some are critical of is the idea that this is anti-Muslim legislation.

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Jean-François Copé, the majority leader in the French National Assembly (UMP Party, the political conservatives), argues the UMP’s side of the question.

This criticism is unjust. The debate on the full veil is complicated, and as one of the most prominent advocates in France of a ban on the burqa, I would like to explain why it is both a legitimate measure for public safety and a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity.

I’ll note that he doesn’t mention “equality”, the third French ideal.

Setting aside whether or not I agree with the legislation — M Copé is correct that it’s a complicated question, and I have conflicting thoughts about it — I find his particular arguments specious, and I wanted to look at the key points here.

The ban would apply to the full-body veil known as the burqa or niqab. This is not an article of clothing — it is a mask, a mask worn at all times, making identification or participation in economic and social life virtually impossible.

This face covering poses a serious safety problem at a time when security cameras play an important role in the protection of public order. An armed robbery recently committed in the Paris suburbs by criminals dressed in burqas provided an unfortunate confirmation of this fact. As a mayor, I cannot guarantee the protection of the residents for whom I am responsible if masked people are allowed to run about.

M Copé adds that “The visibility of the face in the public sphere has always been a public safety requirement,” but this strikes me as a fairly silly argument. Before we used cameras, when we relied on human identification, the identification of random people in the street was so unreliable as to be essentially useless. Now, with street cameras, we still find that crimes are not solved by finding people on the camera recordings and linking them to the situation. Rather, we’re only able to find them afterward — once we know who the perpetrators were, we can go back to surveillance recordings and say, “Ah, yes, see, there he is.”

Now, facial identification by witnesses or security cameras at the crime scene is much more useful, and such identifications often are the linchpins of prosecutors’ cases. And, as we know, robbers wear masks of all sorts at crime scenes, all the time. I can’t see that banning facial veils in the street will make any difference to someone who wants to put on a ski mask or a gorilla suit in order to rob a convenience store.

What’s more, it is not illegal to walk around most cities in ski masks, gorilla suits, Halloween outfits, or any other form of disguise. I recently saw, in the Times Square area in New York City, someone in a Lion King outfit to promote the Broadway play, and two guys (or girls?) in Elmo outfits, promoting something, one presumes (or perhaps picking pockets; can we be sure?). One often encounters mimes with heavily painted faces, people in clown outfits, and so on. Will all those be banned as well?

For that matter, could I be arrested for covering my face with my hand? A floppy hat might shield one’s face from the surveillance cameras; are floppy hats allowed? Suppose someone worried that young people wearing “cargo pants” might be concealing weapons, and concluded that cargo pants should be banned... along with trench coats and who knows what else?

Public safety is neither ensured by nor compromised by clothing.

The permanent concealment of the face also raises the question of social interactions in our democracies. In the United States, there are very few limits on individual freedom, as exemplified by the guarantees of the First Amendment. In France, too, we are passionately attached to liberty.

But we also reaffirm our citizens’ equality and fraternity. These values are the three inseparable components of our national motto. We are therefore constantly striving to achieve a delicate balance. Individual liberty is vital, but individuals, like communities, must accept compromises that are indispensable to living together, in the name of certain principles that are essential to the common good.

Let’s take one example: The fact that people are prohibited from strolling down Fifth Avenue in the nude does not constitute an attack on the fundamental rights of nudists. Likewise, wearing headgear that fully covers the face does not constitute a fundamental liberty. To the contrary, it is an insurmountable obstacle to the affirmation of a political community that unites citizens without regard to differences in sex, origin or religious faith. How can you establish a relationship with a person who, by hiding a smile or a glance — those universal signs of our common humanity — refuses to exist in the eyes of others?

OK, this one’s just dumb: if someone wants to sequester herself from social interactions, legislation that blocks one way of doing that is pointless. Orthodox Jews in New York City often separate themselves socially from outsiders, and they can do that quite effectively without covering their faces. Fraternité is an ideal, not a demand; there isn’t — and there shouldn’t be — any requirement that anyone, be she a Muslim woman or anyone else, establish social connections with others in French society.

And likening it to nudism is also silly. Leaving aside, too, whether we should be allowed to walk in public in the nude, these are just not the same things.

It’s fine to say that you don’t want to live next to someone who hides her face, but then admit that that’s what’s going on, and be open about it, rather than trying to hide behind community ideals and slogans, and bogus claims about public safety.

Terrorists are so trying

Of course, now that an arrest has been made for the Times Square bombing attempt, the idiots conservatives idiots conservatives in congress are falling over themselves arguing about how the suspect’s civil rights should be curtailed. We’re not surprised, and we’ve seen this before.

The handling of Mr. Shahzad touched off the same sort of argument that followed the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger jet bound for Detroit. Some Republicans urged the Obama administration to interrogate Mr. Shahzad without affording him Miranda rights and to classify him as an enemy combatant, which would allow authorities to detain him indefinitely. But Democrats said his quick arrest and his reported confession showed the system can respond to threats of terrorism without resorting to extraordinary tactics.

What should we do with Faisal Shahzad? According to various folks, we should...

1. ...deny him his rights to remain silent and to be represented by an attorney — these are the “Miranda rights”, which are actually guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
2. ...classify him as an “enemy combatant”, which changes a lot of rules about his handling.
3. ...make him talk with “harsh” interrogation. This seems singularly unnecessary; all reports are that he’s talking all we want him to as it is.
4. ...try him in a military tribunal, definitely not as a civilian.
5. ...revoke his citizenship. This one comes from the delightful Joe Lieberman, who says this about it:

   It’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act.

All this, of course, before he is convicted of anything.

Allow me to remind people that presumption of innocence doesn’t only apply when white Christians are accused of embezzlement and insider trading. It applies also to black people accused of drug possession, Latinos charged with burglary, and, oh yes, Muslims charged with attempted bombing.

Christopher Bond, a Republican senator from Missouri, has this to say:

We’ve got to be far less interested in protecting the privacy rights of these terrorists than in collecting information that may lead us to details of broader schemes to carry out attacks in the United States,

A reminder, Senator Bond: we’re not talking about minor “privacy rights”, here. These are basic rights to fair and due process, guaranteed to every U.S. citizen who’s accused of a crime. Every indication at this point is that he’s guilty of at least part of the plot, here. But he has not yet been convicted. This is important.

It’s very easy to say that the probable cause is enough to whisk him away and leave his rights behind, but think carefully about where that leads us — and where it leaves you. What happens when someone falsely accuses you of a terrorist act? Would you be ready to give up your rights because, after all, we can’t allow terrorists an opportunity to slip through the system?

Don’t think it couldn’t happen to you. You’re protected by the civil rights you’re assured by the constitution and its amendments, and by the interpretations made by the Supreme Court. Without those protections, you’re vulnerable — you’re only safe until the moment you’re accused.

This is an ideal time to show that those protections work the way they’re intended to, and that we can work within the system and still hold criminals, even those we’ve labelled as “terrorists”, accountable for their actions. Damn, even Glenn Beck agrees with that, Senators.

---

Update, 15:30 — Here’s today’s New York Times editorial on the same thing.

TSA will track us at airports

According to USA Today, the TSA will be doing some tracking of our mobile phones at airports:

The Transportation Security Administration is looking at installing devices in airports that home in and detect personal electronic equipment. The aim is to track how long people are stuck in security lines.

They say that they won’t be tracking beyond that, that they won’t use the full “serial number” that they read, and that they won’t retain the numbers. Assuming, of course, that we trust them to keep to that, and that we believe it won’t change in the future.

It seems to me that this is another reason to turn off the bluetooth support when you’re not using it.

You are doing that, right?

Stop-and-frisk, and the 4th amendment

Profiling is a controversial topic — I barely need to say that, really. Among the general public, there are those who feel that they have nothing to hide (though, let’s be honest, those tend to be those who don’t usually “fit the profile”), and those who feel over-burdened by profiled stops. There’s the common sarcastic comment that someone was “pulled over for Driving While Black.”

Even among the police, there are two sides. Stick a “profiler” into a kidnapping investigation, and you’ll see plenty of animosity, as the “real investigators” just want to do their jobs, while the profiler is giving them sometimes-vague, wispy ideas about the kidnapper. His parents are probably divorced. Probably. He doesn’t like his mother. Where’s that going to lead the investigation?

Yet we rely on some sorts of profiles to narrow our searches, to give us a better chance of finding the wrongdoers. Obviously, when we have a specific description for a specific crime, it makes the job possible, especially in a city of 8 million residents. We know the guy who snatched the purse was a young white man with blonde hair, about five-foot-eight, 160 pounds, wearing a denim jacket. There’s a physical profile. There’s no point in stopping black men or Latinos, nor tall white men, nor bald white men (he could have shaved his head after the robbery, of course, but...).

But that profile is sufficient narrow and sufficiently focused on the crime at hand to be useful. What if we just generally thought that purse snatchers are most often young white blonde men, and we just started shaking down every white guy under 25 with blonde hair? Would that be acceptable, do you think?

And so we have New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy, which results in a huge number of blacks being stopped, and a pretty heft number of Latinos as well. Very few of these stops result in arrests, and the police department’s own statistics say that, apart from that, very few really had much cause to be stopped. It’s just that the officers involved felt that they had a plausible reason to stop them.

The fact is, of course, that a police officer can always claim a plausible reason to stop you. You were, he need only say, “acting suspiciously,” such a vague observation that it can’t possibly be contested. Maybe you were looking around furtively — or maybe you weren’t sure which way you needed to go, or maybe the officer just needed something to say.

The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution is meant to protect us from “unreasonable searches and seizures”:

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 trouble is that if the police needed to get a warrant to stop a criminal on the street, every street thug would get away. So the courts have adjusted things, allowing an officer of the law to assess probable cause personally, in minute-to-minute situations, where warrants are impractical. Like when they’re chasing a purse snatcher, or a suspected one.

And, of course, as happens with these sorts of things, that allowance for judgment is being abused. Most disturbing, though, is that it’s not just being abused by officers on the street, but it’s being abused by department policy sent down from the top levels of the city’s government.

New York City’s streets are not being made safer by these shakedowns, nor by the subsequent privacy disaster of keeping permanent records of everyone they’ve stopped. What’s more, the practice is eroding what connections have been established between the police and the communities. This policy has police officers performing unreasonable searches, in violation of the fourth amendment. It needs to be shut down.

The limits of representation

There’ve been a couple of setbacks to marriage equality in the northeast U.S. recently. Thursday’s planned vote in the New Jersey state Senate was postponed, and the New York state Senate’s vote a week earlier shot down our state’s proposal by a vote of 38 to 24. The New York state Senate comprises 32 democrats and 30 republicans; all republicans and eight democrats voted against the bill. This is the third time the state Assembly has sent such a bill to the Senate.

One of the eight democrats who helped vote it down is Joe Addabbo, a first-term senator who represents a conservative district in Queens. Much of Senator Addabbo’s district identifies as Catholic, a group that tends to disfavour the idea of same-sex marriage. Even so, GLBT groups campaigned hard for Senator Addabbo, hoping for an ally on gay rights issues, and his vote is widely viewed as a betrayal.

Local talk-show host Brian Lehrer had Senator Addabbo on his radio program two days later, giving the senator a chance to explain his vote. Here’s how he began, at about a minute and a half into the audio:

[...] but at no point did I ever say “yes”. I always promised all, both advocates of the bill, proponents, as well as opponents of the bill that I would keep an open mind. And up to the vote, nobody in the media, and very, very few of my elected-official colleagues, and very few of my constituents, if any, knew of my position.

The reason being, it was my intention to keep an open mind, and by doing so, I felt that I would get a clear indication of where my district stands on this issue. If I was to say that I was against the bill early on, then the only people I would hear from were those who were for it. Conversely, if I said I was for the bill, then the only people I would hear from were those who were... be against it.

Because, I didn’t indicate either way, I feel that of the over 400 emails, faxes, phone calls, conversations that I had with constituents, the 74% who said that they would not want their state senator to vote for this bill was a clear indication where my district was on this issue. And when I took my oath in January to become a state senator, it was to represent the people of the 15th senatorial district, and certainly when you have a clear consensus of the people of the district on a certain issue, that’s the way I think an elected official has to go.

Now, in a post in November I noted that senators, members of the state assembly, and the like “represent their wards, districts, and states in legislative bodies, and it’s they who are expected to fairly represent the needs of their constituents,” so I get what Senator Addabbo is saying, here. So, is he being straight (um...) with us, or is he being disingenuous? Are there limits to representation? Is there a point where the representative’s own moral and ethical sense should kick in and override what he thinks his constituents want? Or is he obliged always to vote as the collective mind of his public?

Brian Lehrer tries to tease that out with a question, but the senator goes nowhere with it:

Lehrer: But if 74% of your callers said to deport all the Hispanics in your district, would you vote for that?

Addabbo: I think it’s a different issue, it’s apples and oranges. Each issue is very different, and certainly, as an elected official, I am the voice of the people of my district, in Albany. And certainly, we take issue by issue.

Lehrer: This is the basis on which to base a vote on civil rights?

Addabbo: You know what?: This is an issue that people have a strong opinion on, and with marriage equality it’s like the spokes of a wheel, there are conversations that you can have on this issue on many levels. Whether it be on the civil rights issue, on the religious issue, on the morality issue. It’s different issues, and it’s different for everyone. And I understand the magnitude of the issue and I understand what it meant to a lot of people... many of those people who had supported me. But, like I said, it makes me be put in a very serious situation, when I have to represent a district, and be their voice in Albany.

But it’s not “apples and oranges”; this is a serious point. How far would the senator take his — admittedly laudable — calling to fairly and rigorously represent his district, even by going against his own views to do so? The senator (probably wisely) refuses to say.

But what’s alarming, here, is that he’s now brought religion into the political arena, as he talks about the spokes of a wheel. One spoke is civil rights, another is religion, another (is it really another, or mostly an aspect of the second?) is morality. As I look at it from the point of view of how our government should be run, I don’t see the religious aspect as being relevant.

We can bring it partially into relevance, though, by saying that he isn’t making his decision based on religion, but based on the opinions of his constituency, and it’s their opinions that are rooted in religion. Can we really question people’s motivations for their stands, and only give credence to those that don’t emanate from piety? Is that reasonable, or even possible?

But when Mr Lehrer pushes one more time for some clue about where the limits to strict representation lie, Senator Addabbo’s answer, still not committing to anything, but telling in its lack of commitment, brings his whole point crashing down:

Lehrer: Do you consider this a civil rights issue?

Addabbo: I can see that argument. I can see the religious argument. I can see the morality argument. Again, I can see the argument on many levels. This issue has that many levels to it.

Lehrer: Do you believe personally that gay marriage should be legal?

Addabbo: You know what?: I’ve always kept my feelings personal, because I am but one opinion. And it’s really an issue that I don’t have strong convictions on either way. That’s why I did keep an open mind, I felt I was most neutral up until the end.

It was that statement that first had me understand that what he’s really doing is hiding behind his constituents on what is, city-wide, an unpopular vote. And the longer he talked, the more clear that became. By doing that, he hopes to have it both ways: he voted his mind, and he can say, “But don’t blame me; I was only doing my constituents’ bidding. Isn’t that what I was elected to do?”

Even as a public representative, one has also been elected to lead. Sometimes one has to take a stand — for civil rights, for public health and safety, for the good of the environment, for the well being of society as a whole — that’s not in line with what the residents of one’s own district want. In any case, whether it is or it isn’t, one should own the decision, and not pass it off with, “It’s them! They made me do it!”

Support EFF

If you still have a job and you’re still donating to good causes, here’s this year’s recommendation: How about a donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)?

The EFF fights for online privacy rights, network neutrality and independence, reasonable intellectual property rights, fair use rights, and other stuff that we should all care about a great deal. They go over the top sometimes, for my taste, but we need people pushing the limits and paying lawyers to fight these battles.

Go support them, if you can.

Tasers again: this time, a study

New Scientist reports on a study that shows that “[u]sing a Taser to subdue a violent suspect is safer than police batons and fists.”

The team examined over 24,000 cases where police had used force, including almost 5500 incidents involving a Taser. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, they found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 per cent.

Despite the cases of deaths and serious injuries from Tasers, I have no doubt of the conclusion here: beatings are obviously likely to cause injury or death also, and are probably harder to keep under control.

But the key phrase here is “to subdue a violent suspect.” Not to coerce an uncooperative person. Not to quiet someone who’s being loud or boorish. And certainly not to punish someone who has, well, you know, just annoyed the officer, nor because the officer can’t figure out how to non-violently subdue a ten-year-old girl.

We see Tasers used over and over for those other purposes, purposes for which they aren’t meant. I would hate to see someone read an article about this study and conclude that such uses are, therefore, justified.