Trust Us

Or maybe not (from the WSJ):

In a disclosure likely to rekindle privacy-concern fires, AMR Corp.’s American Airlines admitted giving information on 1.2 million passengers to outside research companies vying for contracts with the Transportation Security Administration.

American is the third airline to acknowledge disclosing private passenger records, developments that have alarmed privacy advocates and drawn scrutiny from Congress and government investigators. In September, JetBlue Airways said it turned over passenger records to a defense contractor, and later apologized. And in January, Northwest Airlines said it secretly passed travelers’ records to the government.

The disclosures of passenger records revolve around government efforts to boost air-transportation security following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The TSA, charged with aviation security, has been trying to develop more-effective passenger-screening systems, using information collected on customers by airlines.

Domestic security remains unserious. It is typified by overzealous attempts by government agencies to mine error-filled private databases, by jockeying for lucrative government contracts on the part of security firms claiming to offer bureaucrats painless ways to find terrorists without getting sued, and by private-sector executives who leap at chances to violate the trust of their customers. Meanwhile most of the real security is provided by airline passengers, by alert individual police officers and other government agents who perform informal profiling of suspicious people, and of course by the military, whose success overseas is the main thing that keeps us safe at home.

Happy Easter

The Easter liturgical season commences. Lent ends. And, therefore, so does my blogging fast. It has been difficult but purifying.

So much going on. I find that I have little to add about the key developments of day-to-day news, i.e. the war and the election. But I do hope to put up some posts over the next few weeks about books I’ve read recently, which may be of interest.

Go easy on the leftover chocolate bunnies.

Blog Changes

I streamlined the permalinks by putting each category of links into its own popup window. This makes it easier to find links by category, but also adds an additional step (you have to click on a category to open the popup menu) to each attempt to open a link. I’d appreciate comments as to whether this new link system is an improvement.

Response From The Independent Institute

David Theroux of The Independent Institute responded via email to my recent critical post about his organization’s position on the war. I reproduce below, with David’s permission, the text of his email response. (We have since exchanged additional emails, so I am posting his response in case other readers want to join the discussion.)

In reference to your recent comment about the Independent Institute
on the Chicago Boyz blog, you may be interested in the following new
article from our quarterly journal, THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW (Spring
2004). Here incidentally is the table of contents for this issue of
the journal:
http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/current.html

“The Republican Road Not Taken: The Foreign-Policy Vision of Robert
A. Taft,” by Michael T. Hayes (Professor of Political Science,
Colgate University):
http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/tir84_hayes.html

Also for clarification, the proper term to describe the proposal we
have been making for U.S. foreign policy reform is
“non-interventionism”, not “isolationism.” “Isolationism” was a smear
term originally coined by Wilsonians (“liberal-progressive”
interventionists) to denigrate their opponents (constitutional and
otherwise). The Wilsonian tradition is one of government
interventionism both domestically and internationally, a position
that Robert Higgs and other scholars have shown is inseparably linked
by foreign interventionism (warfarism) being the central
public-choice engine that drives domestic statism
(http://www.independent.org/tii/catalog/cat_crisis.html).

In contrast to “non-interventionism,” “isolationism” properly defined
requires a “Closed Door” (or autarchic) policy severely restricting
the free flow of people and trade internationally.

Most nation states in the world today maintain a foreign policy of
general non-interventionism based on the tradition of international
law, and many also remain strictly neutral in world affairs while
simultaneously pursuing very active trade, travel, cultural, and
other exchanges. Meanwhile, almost alone among nations today, the
U.S. government pursues a deliberate policy of preemptive covert and
overt interventionism, and many scholars now consider such policies a
major cause of economic and political instability and hardship,
upheaval, and terrorism.

Attempts by the U.S. or any government to centrally plan and impose
rule over people is exactly what classical liberals and libertarians
have historically opposed. Non-interventionism is the traditional
policy of the U.S. as a republic as described by Washington, Madison,
Jefferson, and other Founders, based on the simple ethical and legal
position that aggression against innocent, peaceful people is wrong
and a rule of law should be applied universally to prohibit it. For
your review, here is a web page with references that seriously
discuss non-interventionism:
http://www.onpower.org/foreign_non_inter.html

Further information on our program in this regard can be found via
our Center on Peace & Liberty:
http://www.independent.org/copal

Please advise me with any questions.

The Independent Institute’s Counterproductive Email List

Like Steven Den Beste, I also received (note past tense) regular copies of David Theroux’s “would you please post a notice” emails, as I’m sure did numerous other bloggers. I had a more favorable impression of The Independent Institute before I started receiving these emails. It seemed that nearly every issue of the Institute’s online newsletter contained at least one article from the why-do-they-hate-us school of libertarian isolationism. This eventually got under my skin and I asked to be removed from the list. Theroux et al are entitled to their opinions, but they aren’t doing the libertarian cause any favors by associating it with opposition to the war against fundamentalist Islam. There is no contradiction between libertarianism and defending an imperfect liberal society against totalitarian aggression.