January 2020

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

In years gone by there existed an understanding that one’s personal information surrendered to private companies was a voluntary choice – the “cost,” if you will, to obtaining the benefit of a company’s goods or services.  Importantly – and constitutionally – such a “trade off” was far different from the government obtaining personal and private information by way of surveillance or other information-gathering actions undertaken without a warrant.  

There was a relatively clear line between private company collection of personal information voluntarily provided, and the government gathering such information without one’s knowledge or consent.  Today, that “line” has been blurred to the point of near erasure.

Government officials, of course, have never been short on creative ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on unreasonable and warrantless gathering of information.  We all are familiar, for example, with the abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures by previous administrations, whereby the federal government was able to unlawfully surveil U.S. citizens’ private communications.  Some of us also may recall the FBI’s use of Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” technicians to browse computers for illegal content while on service calls. 

But with the digital age have come new opportunities for companies and government agencies alike to spy on citizens. 

The rise of social media and other technological advancements — geo-tracking and at-home DNA testing — have led to an explosion of highly personal information shared openly with third parties — and in turn, government agencies as well. Like throwing chum in the water to attract sharks, this treasure trove of data in the hands of private companies has caught the attention of government agencies at all levels; especially law enforcement agencies suddenly freed from the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. 

While some companies, like Apple, have at times put up a principled fight against such incursions, despite backlash from the Department of Justice, most others have shown little hesitancy to cooperating with government agencies. 

Earlier this year, one of the largest at-home DNA testing companies, FamilyTreeDNA, was outed for voluntarily helping the FBI with criminal investigations, without notifying its customers of how their DNA samples were being used. Just this month, a company called Clearview AI boasted it had scraped three billion facial images from public sources, including from social media, to create a facial-recognition product, which it happily shares with law enforcement.

While users may trust that a company or app will protect their data, recent revelations of the cozy sharing relationship between companies and the government prove that such trust is badly misplaced. Even what many people might consider nominal and unimportant data points, such as photos or geolocation information, can be harvested, bundled, and databased in ways that far exceed what is expected, or known, by the users – data over which the original collection company loses control once shared with other companies or government agencies. 

Today’s privacy reality is that it is now impossible to draw a distinction between data harvesting undertaken by the private sector, and that of the public sector. The only realistic assumption must be that any data collected by third parties in the private sector can, and at some point, will, be subjected to law enforcement investigations regardless of when that information was first shared by the consumer, or under what privacy policies. 

The willingness of companies in the private sector to cooperate with law enforcement officials has become the new norm. Absent meaningful state or federal statutory protections of consumer data explicitly stating this data is off-limits to law enforcement without a warrant, this trend will only worsen.

Any breach of personal privacy is a danger to individual liberty, but the true threat is the consolidation of these breaches over time, eventually leading to a comprehensive profile of every citizen that includes information such as DNA profile, facial recognition, health and financial histories, online activity, and real-time location. This is, after all, precisely what China is doing with the massive “social credit” system it is quickly implementing for its entire population. You can bet social media companies and internet search engines in our country are paying rapt attention to how that process unfolds, and explains why these companies are opposed to even the most basic legislative reform proposals.

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

The list of reasons Iran should not become a nuclear nation is lengthy; but recent events present the starkest reason yet why that must never happen.

In the broadest sense, nuclear power should not belong to a nation that openly talks about eliminating an entire race of people from the planet. Rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, Iran’s theocratic regime clearly cannot be trusted to use such power only for deterrent purposes. 

The recent downing of a civilian aircraft by its military forces serves as a glaringly obvious, practical reason why Iran must never gain access to military nuclear technology — incompetence. 

Contrary to the visage of Iran as a mega-presence on the world stage (a view regularly promoted by the regime’s leaders), the country is not a formidable military presence by modern standards. Our Defense Intelligence Agency notes that the Iranian regime in recent years has emphasized military improvements to its forces.  However, as a result of embargoes on foreign-produced technology, such improvements have been hamstrung by sanctions and internal financial troubles.  Iran’s once modern air force now is comprised of aging fighter jets, and its ballistic missile arsenal – the backbone of its military power – includes many that the DIA believes to be old and inaccurate.

As calculated by the military-tracking organization GlobalFirePower.com, Iran’s military power ranks 14^th in the world, behind countries such as Egypt and Brazil. While the military threat posed by Iran is not one to be taken lightly, it is not one that warrants the same degree of concern as Russia’s or China’s. Iran’s offensive strength lies in its ability and predisposition to engage in asymmetrical warfare; causing regional or cyberspace disruptions as opposed to full-on military conflict.

Becoming a nuclear power, however, remains an obsession of Iran’s leaders. And it is in this regard that what happened earlier this month must remain at the forefront of efforts by the United States and our allies to ensure Iran’s dream never materializes.  The demonstrated inability by the country’s military to properly use a rudimentary missile air defense system, resulting in the accidental shoot-down of a civilian aircraft, underscores the practical need to keep more lethal weapons out of the regime’s hands. 

Arming Iran with nuclear weapons, or even non-nuclear weaponry significantly more advanced and powerful than is currently available to them, is akin to putting a teenager behind the wheel of a 707-horsepower Dodge Charger Hellcat; a move irresponsible in the extreme.

Complicating matters further is the serious disconnect between Iran’s military leaders and its civilian authorities, a problem that was on full display following the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. The lack of transparency and accountability displayed in the aftermath of that tragedy is symptomatic of the manner by which the country has been governed for more than four decades.  It is a dysfunctional system that breeds mistrust and secrecy, to the point that one hand does not know what the other hand is doing.

In such a closed theocratic system, true accountability is neither fostered nor tolerated.  If forced by domestic or outside pressure to admit mistake, the action taken will be as limited and short-lived as possible; resulting in no systemic or long-term reform and essentially guaranteeing future blunders.  

Though much more limited in scope, Iran’s downing of Flight 752 is reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Chernobyl was the byproduct of political obsession, shoddy engineering, systemic fear of voicing concern, cultural hubris and overall breakdown in communication between civilian and government agencies.  As we later learned, the catastrophe was very nearly global in scope; but also one that would have been avoidable in virtually any non-totalitarian society. In Soviet Russia, however, Chernobyl was the result of government hubris and dysfunction.  

Similarly, Iran appears un-phased by the killing of 176 civilians in a completely avoidable accident; choosing instead to cast blame on the United States for the tense regional environment in which the catastrophic military blunder happened. This, on top of its general incompetence, is all the more reason for a reinvigorated global effort to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran’s reach.  A key element of this effort must be to renew the U.N. arms embargo currently set to expire in October, which would free Iran to update its military and pursue far more deadly and advanced weaponry.

Iran has offered the world absolutely no reason to suggest it is morally or practically capable of being trusted with weapons of mass destruction, and the downing of Flight 752 this month is only the latest reminder. We need not give them more opportunities to further prove us right.