Opinion
Supreme Court's DNA ruling is yet another blow to civil liberties
A divided US supreme court ruled this week to uphold a Maryland law that allows the police to collect without warrant DNA material from persons who are arrested. The 5-4 decision was greeted with dismay by civil liberties advocates who see it as a body-blow to privacy and a further erosion of the US constitution's fourth amendment, which is supposed to protect individuals from excessive government intrusion. The truth is, in an era of mass surveillance, we have little privacy left to lose – and the courts have shown little willingness to resist law enforcement claims that access to our personal and physical data is necessary for them to do their job.
This willingness to forgo the privacy of the many to identify the misbehavior of the few is already well established in America's warrantless surveillance program. In January, President Obama signed into law a five-year extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows for the monitoring of personal phone calls and emails as long as one of the communicants is outside the US. We have also recently been given reason to believe that all our domestic phone calls may be "captured as we speak" and that no "digital communications are secure."
If that is the case, one might think that our court system would at least want to investigate the possibility that the government's warrantless surveillance might fall into the category of "unreasonable searches and seizures" that the fourth amendment is supposed to protect us from. Instead, this past February, the US supreme court rejected a challenge to FISA – prompting concerns it will never rule on the constitutionality of the warrantless surveillance law.
At the very least, it seems that the courts are reluctant to interfere with the government's ability to gain access to our private and personal communications – the content of our minds, if you will – when national security and law enforcement agencies claim that this information helps them pursue their objectives. Now, with this warrantless DNA ruling, the court has paved the way for the erosion of our physical privacy as well.
In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that DNA sampling was merely a means of identifying a suspect, in the way that fingerprinting and photographing does, and claimed that when an officer makes an arrest supported by probable cause, taking a DNA swab was a "legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the fourth amendment."
In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia rubbished the notion that DNA sampling was nothing more than an identification tool, saying it "taxes the credulity of the credulous" to suggest that it was not going to be used to attempt to solve other crimes. While no one doubts that DNA samples are a useful tool for solving cold cases or exonerating the wrongfully accused, the concern shared by the minority dissent and civil liberties advocates is that using an individual's DNA to investigate a crime when the state has no incriminating evidence against that individual represents a drastic overextension of police powers. As the ACLU's national legal director Stephen R Shapiro, said in a statement:
"The fourth amendment has long been understood to mean that the police cannot search for evidence of a crime – and all nine justices agreed that DNA testing is a search – without individualized suspicion. Today's decision eliminates that crucial safeguard."
As regards the future of our genetic privacy, it's important to note that the law upheld by the US supreme court ruling in the Maryland v King case only allows for DNA to be taken from people who have been arrested and charged with a serious crime, and that this DNA can only be tested after a judge has found there to be probable cause that the person has committed a crime. The attorney Michael Risher who authored the ACLU's amicus brief in that case points out, however, that other states' laws and the federal government allow the police to take DNA from people arrested for much less serious crimes, such as drug possession or intentionally bouncing a check. These laws also allow the government to have that sample analyzed even if the person is never charged and when there is no incriminating evidence.
The fear is that this recent decision has paved the way for these much broader laws that allow the violation of our fundamental rights to (genetic) privacy to be upheld also. As Scalia wrote in his dissent:
"Make no mistake about it: as an entirely predictable consequence of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason."
So, where does all this leave the fourth amendment and that supposedly inalienable right it bestows on us to be secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures"?
Thanks to previous US supreme court rulings, we can be stopped in the street and frisked by police without probable cause for arrest. Our international phone calls and emails (and possibly our domestic ones) can be captured and recorded by the state. And now the court has paved the way for our genetic blueprint to to be made available to the government as well.
These successive attacks on the fourth amendment are always justified by law enforcement and national security concerns. If the loss of privacy is the price we have to pay, then it doesn't feel like a fair bargain.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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[DNA illustration via mathagraphics / Shutterstock]
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Rupert Murdoch is now an old man on a lonely throne
In his 80s, with no clear successor, the media mogul and his spun-off newpaper operation are in a precarious position
Matthew Parris went to the Orwell prizegiving the other day and suddenly saw red. Chris Mullin MP was giving a speech lauding fine investigative journalism – like that of this year's winner, Andrew Norfolk of the Times – which he firmly asserted was achieved "despite" the efforts of newspaper proprietors. "What sneery, snivelling, ignorant, leftie rubbish," wrote Parris.
"Who does he think pays for Norfolk's investigations, or for my columns? Does he know nothing about the losses being clocked up by quality newspapers all over the world? … Does he realise how precarious now is the whole future of daily newspapers in Britain?" Call it, on second thoughts, a Rupert red mist.
These are testing times for star performers like Parris. Over in New York last week the old, soiled master of News Corp revels was unveiling his "new News Corp", otherwise a distinctly vulnerable collection of papers from around the globe, many of which have proved a longstanding licence to lose his money. The Times, Sunday Times, New York Post and Australian are not profitable, to put it mildly. No wonder Murdoch's new chief executive, Robert Thomson, pledges "relentless cost-cutting" across the shrivelled empire.
There's a balance-sheet bonne bouche of $2bn and a wiping away of debts that will help News Corp mark two ride briefly high when it goes solo and public – though no longer listed in London – at the end of June. But there will also be no more lush, adjacent pastures of satellite TV or Hollywood blockbusters to assure US shareholder peace when loss-making papers have to be supported. 21st Century Fox won't be indulging the boss's little foibles any longer. Once the presses roll, he's on his own.
Murdoch says his papers are "undervalued and underdeveloped". Thomson (who used to edit the Times) says "print is still a particularly powerful platform". This is the clearest possible test of their faith. If News Corp 2 can't make it through the night, then all Parris's worst fears come true. Murdoch may be non-executive chair of the enterprise. His family stockholding and reputation may still give him great influence, reputational or direct. But now, ploughing deeper into his 80s and surrounded by New York board colleagues who don't share his love of printers' ink, the vulnerability is obvious.
This is a fractious, uncertain empire now: a game of thrones as well as Wall Street. It will be governed, frankly, by how the markets behave. If they don't like Rupert's underdeveloped and undervalued babies, then the pressure will mount inexorably – and wash over to damage his rule of the film and TV giant. He hasn't a son who can take up this burden. Hacking finished James's ambitions in that direction. There is no frontline succession.
Perhaps the digital world will provide some answers – though his tablet-only Daily perished rather too fast for comfort. Perhaps subscription revenue can, in time, begin to make up for the print advertising streams running into the sand. Place no bets: this is precarious, edge-of-the-seat stuff, just as Parris perceives.
But I wish Thomson was slightly less keen on CEO-speak rhetoric ("We will boldly try new businesses and models, unafraid to learn, confident of overall success together"). And I'm especially anxious about the replacement News Corp logo, written in a sweeping semblance of Rupert's fair hand. Does that mean he's absolutely in charge – or only that he will still have to pay the bills at the end of a bruising day?
■ Newsweek used to sell 3.3m copies per edition. Even when it was sold for a dollar, then folded in with Tina Brown's Daily Beast in a digital merger last December, there were more than a million customers out there wanting their old print fix. So the story that Newsweek online was blazing a path into the future rather than lurching towards oblivion seemed to have some validity. But today? What's left is up for sale again: think 50 cents. The owners want to "concentrate" on the Beast instead.
Sometimes going online-only is the sensible thing to do; but more often than not, it can seem like euthanasia with a buoyant press release.
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Five reasons Democrats will miss Michele Bachmann
Michele Bachmann's departure from the US congress is great news for my little corner of the world. Her retirement is another step in the right (or, technically, left) direction for Minnesota's progressives, who are on something of a roll lately with the defeat of a voter ID law and the passage of marriage equality legislation. (We did lose gay rights advocate and Vikings football punter Chris Kluwe, and spring seems to have been cancelled – but other than that, it's been a great year.)
Still, there's a bittersweet aftertaste to Bachmann's announcement for Democrats at the national level. Here are the five reasons for Democrats to regret not having Bachmann to kick around anymore.
1) Her outrageous comments were a fundraising goldmine
The Democratic National Committee started going to the Bachmann well of crazy during her early rise as a Tea Party leader, featuring her in an ad about GOP leaders who want to "abolish" Medicare. As her profile grew, and she kept talking, the DNC kept putting up videos about her and using Democrats' appalled reactions to solicit donations.
It's impossible to know how much cash came into the committee on the back of Bachmann's kookiness and fact-mangling – though the DNC could definitely tell us – but it must've been working, because political parties don't keep doing things that don't work. It should be noted that Bachmann herself was a prodigious fundraiser, garnering over $15m for her race in 2012 – but Democrats can't even celebrate a blow to Republicans' coffers, as Bachmann was notoriously stingy with using her funds to support other GOP candidates. The GOP can't be hurt by losing money they never had.
2) Her seat is likely to stay Republican
Another Republican will almost certainly succeed her, albeit a more moderate one who will be harder to defeat. Bachmann was an outlier in Minnesota for many reasons, not the least of which being how she fit terribly with her district. Indeed, for the 2014 election, Bachmann wouldn't even live in the newly redrawn district boundaries. Still, historically, voters in the region tend to elect moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans, including one Republican, Rod Grams, that publicly flirted with both parties. The causes of Bachmann's close call last November's with her Democratic challenger can easily be traced to ambivalent Republican voters, who had to choose between the Democrat they didn't know or the nutcase they did. Given an opportunity to vote for a Republican talking sense, they will mostly likely be happy to support him or her.
3) She might get even crazier
Bachmann's constituents tolerated her conspiracy theories because she brought federal bacon back home. Minnesota's sixth district has been the recipient of $1bn in federal spending in the past three years alone.
As difficult as it might be to believe, Bachmann did occasionally censor herself, as when she carefully departed from the spotlight in the aftermath of that close election. Having some sane constituents (though if she is to be believed, she had some real bonkers ones, too) perhaps reined her in. She also backed off her birther claims during the 2012 election. Untethered from good, practical Minnesotan oversight, Bachmann is free to propound whatever messages her fillings are picking up these days – and the DNC can't even easily fundraise off them.
4) She'll likely end up on TV
Put "Tea Party politician leaving elected politics" through the Beltway-to-English translator and you get "new Fox News contributor", or, depending on the emphasis, "think tank president". Herman Cain, Jim DeMint, Allen West, Newt Gingrich – the list of her predecessors is a long one. Bachmann's camera-ready hair and makeup, combined with her facility with a soundbite, make the transition an obvious and natural one. She could arguably have more influence as a talking head than as a legislator, especially considering her rather lackluster attendance record as an actual congressperson. Gingrich, after all, even managed to come back to horserace politics with increased legitimacy after a tour as paid speaker and children's book author.
5) She's probably not done stirring up a far-right frenzy
If Bachmann gets traction as a pundit, her popularity among sympathetic, far-right groups can be leveraged more effectively. She could focus her crazy and be a fundraising powerhouse for issue-oriented crowds and hyper-local politicians.
Rick Santorum has been scary good at this; even after bowing out of the presidential race, he uses his earnest fearmongering to gin up excitement at venues such as the National Rifle Association convention and, more significantly, Republican gatherings at the county level, where his support can help the creeping far-right agenda that continues to eat away at civil rights in state legislatures. (The most alarming attempts to chisel away at reproductive rights are largely taking place in statehouses.) Bachmann is probably an even more effective messenger than Santorum for these audiences, and she'd be doing it off the radar of many critics – fueling right-wing flames one town at a time.
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Gloria Steinem's 'A Bunny's Tale' – 50 years later
Steinem's groundbreaking article exposing the 1960s world of Playboy Bunny clubs is as fresh and relevant as ever
Fifty years ago this month, Gloria Steinem created a sensation with the first installment of her two-part series, "A Bunny's Tale". At the time Steinem was a decade away from gaining fame as the co-founder of Ms magazine, but her personal account of going undercover to work as a bunny at the Playboy Club riveted readers, giving them insight into a male bastion that few knew firsthand. "A Bunny's Tale" appeared in the May and June issues of Show magazine in the same year that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar were published. That's tough competition, but in hindsight, it is clear that "A Bunny's Tale" complements Friedan and Plath and deserves to be honored, rather than forgotten as it has been, for the serious muckraking journalism it is. At the core of "A Bunny's Tale" is Steinem's belief that the sexual revolution will fail if men are the only ones allowed to define it. In taking on Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Clubs, Steinem showed she could more than hold her own against an opponent with his own media empire. By 1960 Playboy was reaching a million readers a month, and in 1963, when "A Bunny's Tale" was published, the Playboy Clubs were flourishing. Hefner, who had started Playboy in 1953, was at the height of his influence, and not content with making himself rich. He had in 1962 begun penning monthly essays that he insisted would be "the Emancipation Proclamation of the sexual revolution". Steinem was unimpressed. She did not hesitate to treat Hefner's emancipation claims as bunk. She went after him where he was most vulnerable, showing readers what it actually meant to work at a Playboy Club.
"A Bunny's Tale" takes the form of a diary and moves from Steinem's initial decision to adopt the alias of Marie Catherine Ochs to her last day on the job when she overhears another Bunny say of a customer, "He's a real gentleman. He treats you just the same whether you've slept with him or not." In between, Steinem learns the requirements of being a Bunny. On the club's orders, she is tested for venereal disease, and after being hired, she is told which club members she can date (Number One keyholders) and which she cannot (all the rest).
Her new status leaves no room for doubting how she is viewed. A guard greets her by calling out, "Here bunny, bunny, bunny!" The club wardrobe mistress stuffs a plastic dry cleaning bag down the front of her Bunny costume to increase her cleavage. Finally, the job doesn't come close to paying the $200 to $300 weekly salary the Playboy Club advertizes that Bunnies earn. At every turn, Steinem and the other Bunnies are nickeled and dimed. They must, she notes, pay for the upkeep and cleaning of their costumes as well as the false eyelashes they are expected to wear. The club also takes 50% of the $30 in tips they make on food and liquor bills that are charged. It's a no-win trap for the Bunnies, whose vulnerability Steinem captured by sharing their ordeal. In taking this approach to her article, Steinem was doing what many new journalists did in the 1960s when they made their personal experiences central to the events they reported on. Tom Wolfe took this path in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night, and Hunter Thompson in Hell's Angels. In Steinem's case the great challenge was resisting the temptation to lash out against those who were alternately patronizing and exploiting her. She had to know that when "A Bunny's Tale" appeared in print, she was going to be accused of exploiting her good looks. A homely woman, as the Playboy Club made clear in its ads, could not be a Playboy Bunny. Since "A Bunny's Tale" first appeared, it has taken on a life of its own. In 1985 "A Bunny's Tale" was made into an ABC television movie starring Kirstie Alley, and today Steinem's story, which she retitled "I Was a Playboy Bunny" when she included it in a collection of her own writing, retains its freshness.
In the college writing class I teach, I often assign "A Bunny's Tale" to students who want to do first-person reporting. The majority of them begin by not knowing who Gloria Steinem is and being unfamiliar with Ms magazine. None of that matters though after they have finished "A Bunny's Tale." They are thrilled by Steinem's daring, and they recognize a kindred spirit when they read her.
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Why should Apple have access to consumers if it refuses to pay its fair share of taxes?
Countries are competing to provide the biggest tax breaks, the cheapest labour and the easiest regulation to attract the likes of Google, Apple and Amazon, to the disadvantage of their own citizens. But there is another way
The chairman of a parliamentary committee investigating Google for tax avoidance calls the firm "devious, calculating, and unethical", yet British officials court the firm's CEO as if he were royalty.
David Cameron urges tax havens to mend their ways and vows to crack down on tax cheats, yet argues taxes must be low in the UK because "we've got to encourage investment, we've got to encourage jobs and I want Britain to be a winner in the global race".
The same disconnect is breaking out in the US. A Senate report criticises Apple for shifting billions of dollars in profits into Irish affiliates where its tax rate is less than 2%, yet a growing chorus of senators and representatives call for lower corporate taxes in order to make the US more competitive. The American public wants to close tax loopholes and shelters used by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes, yet the loopholes and shelters remain in place.
These apparent contradictions are rooted in the same reality: global capital, in the form of multinational corporations as well as very wealthy individuals, is gaining enormous bargaining power over nation states.
Global companies are not interested in raising living standards in a particular country or improving any nation's competitiveness. Their singular goal is to maximise returns to their investors. "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems," said an Apple executive last year. "Our only obligation is making the best product possible" (he might have added "in order to make as much money as possible"). Likewise, the wealth of rich individuals flows all over the world in search of the highest returns and lowest taxes.
Such single-mindedness is abetted by a new wave of technologies, represented by the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon and other new tech behemoths: advanced software applications combined with enormous computing power, all available on the internet in such a way as to enable users to shift resources almost anywhere on earth at the speed of an electronic impulse.
Not only does money move immediately to wherever it can summon the highest return and be subject to the least tax, but jobs can be dispatched almost as quickly to wherever workers get the lowest wages for the most output.
Yet such technologies are simultaneously making nations ever more dependent on global capital, as "brick and mortar" investments in plant and equipment (requiring commitment to a particular geographic location) are replaced by intellectual capital and portfolio investments that are essentially rootless.
These technologies are also displacing workers from assembly-line and routine service jobs (bank tellers, telephone operators, petrol station attendants), as well as any skilled jobs that can be replicated by software (brokers, accountants, insurance claims adjusters). They're even starting to threaten higher-level professionals (how long before doctors are replaced by diagnostic software and professors by online lectures?).
All this, in turn, is putting increasing pressure on politicians to produce more investments and jobs. Because citizens don't like it when global corporations or wealthy individuals are found to avoid taxes; such practices elicit indignant reports, hearings and warnings from political leaders. But little or nothing is done to end these practices because nations are too dependent on those corporations and individuals.
Nations are in a fierce "global race" for investments and jobs, as Cameron says. But it's rapidly turning into a race to the bottom. Effective tax rates on global companies and wealthy individuals are declining almost everywhere; regulations are being dismantled (not even the worst financial disaster since the 1930s has produced much by way of new financial rules); government subsidies to corporations are growing; and real wages are dropping.
In the US, the UK and other rich nations, the percentage of gross domestic product going to wages continues to decline while the percentage going to profits steadily increases. Almost all the economic gains in the US since the Great Recession have gone to the wealthiest 1%, who own the lion's share of financial assets, while the bottom 90% has become poorer.
Individual states in the US have embarked on their own races to the bottom, seeking to lure investments and jobs – often from neighbouring states – with lower taxes, higher subsidies, reduced regulation and lower real wages. Here again, the new generation of information technologies is intensifying the race.
But these trends are not inevitable.One way for nations (as well as individual states or provinces) to regain some bargaining leverage over global capital would be to stop racing against one another and join together to set terms for access to their markets.
After all, global capital depends on consumers, and access to large consumer markets such as the US and the EU is essential if global capital is to earn a healthy return. Why should Apple have access to US consumers, for example, if Apple refuses to pay its fair share of taxes to finance the infrastructure and education that Americans need to improve their living standards? Americans could buy from one of Apple's competitors instead.
Likewise, it makes no sense for regions or provinces in any nation to compete against one other for jobs and investment; such races only further strengthen the hand of global capital and reduce the bargaining power of the nation. These contests don't produce net new jobs or investment but only move the jobs and investments from one locale to another and should be prohibited by federal law.
Similarly, the EU could be a bargaining agent for its citizens if it were to condition access to its hugely valuable market on paying taxes in proportion to a global corporation's EU earnings, as well as making investments (including research and development, and jobs) in similar proportion. As a member of the EU, Britain would have more bargaining leverage than it would if it bargained separately. Hence, an important reason for Britain to remain in the EU: rather than a race to the bottom, the UK would thereby join in a race to the top.
Any move toward enhancing the power of nations or groups of nations relative to global corporations and wealthy individuals would surely provoke fierce resistance. Corporate-financed lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, media empires, campaign donations, thinktanks and the potential lures of lucrative jobs and directorships awaiting high government officials will all be deployed in opposition.
This doesn't make the goal of countervailing the power of global capital any less important. It just makes it difficult to achieve.
Robert B Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, was labour secretary under President Bill Clinton
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On Memorial Day, it's time to make sure our veterans suffering from burn pit diseases get the care they need
This Memorial Day weekend, amid barbeques and picnics, many Americans will make time to remember the troops that have died in the twelve years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the number, 6,521, tells only part of the price our troops have paid. The longest wars in U.S. history have actually claimed far fewer American lives than our other extended foreign wars in the past century (WWI: 116,516; WWII: 405,399; Korea: 36,574; and Vietnam: 58,220). It's in the living that we see the full catastrophic toll of our recent wars on our service men and women. Over 900,000 of the 1.6 million veterans of these wars are patients in the VA system, and over 800,000 have applied for disability benefits. The dead are at peace, we hope, but the living casualties still suffer the wounds of war.
Traumatic brain injury, post traumatic stress disorder, amputations, burns and facial disfiguration -— all these we have seen on our TV screens, however fleetingly. But another signature injury that has scrawled its misery across veterans' lives remains largely unknown. It goes by different names -- Burn Pit disease, Gulf War 2 Syndrome, Iraq and Afghanistan War Lung Injury, Post-Deployment Illness -- but what veterans and contract workers who have it, and the small cadre of physician-scientists dedicated to understanding and treating it, agree on is that, like Gulf War Illness, its cause is wartime toxic exposure. An inhalational injury, it attacks the airways and lungs first, and then can wound most every other organ and system. "Burn pits were constant," Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said, and most everyone was exposed to them "sometime during their deployment." In 2009, the military admitted that as many as 360,000 veterans may have suffered traumatic brain injury, an, in turn, established programs for research and treatment. But about the systemic disease of our recent wars, the brass is admitting -- and doing -- almost nothing.
Thousands of sick veterans trace their illness to the burn pits, which the military as well as their contractors KBR and Halliburton used -- instead of closed incinerators -- to process garbage on US bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. Acres wide and hundreds of feet deep, the open furnaces burned day and night, morphing solid human waste, body parts, blood specimens, plastic water bottles, Styrofoam plates, Humvees, computers and more into black fumes and ash that covered the sky and ground. In the earliest grades, young children learn that solids and liquids when heated at high temperatures becomes gases, and that there are certain things we do not burn in the open air because they become poison gases, which can make us sick or dead.
The torments endured by Captain LeRoy Torres, a Texas state trooper and Army Reservist, are alarming but not uncommon. Stationed at Balad Air Base, the biggest base with the baddest pit, LeRoy immediately felt sick, but the "black goop" that he and the soldiers around him were hacking up was just a sign of "Iraq Crud," caused by a passing irritation to desert air, commanders said. But back home, LeRoy coughed and wheezed constantly and unable to work or walk more than a few feet, he went from doctor to doctor, from local facilities to the VA War Disease Center in DC. Respiratory infection, mild asthma maybe, the doctors said, as their CT scans and spirometry showed no pathology and they were unaware of war-zone associated lung disease. Finally, a lung biopsy diagnosed constrictive bronchiolitis, a debilitating and often degenerative lung disease associated with inhaling industrial chemicals. Today, LeRoy has spleen cysts and a brain lesion, suffers excruciating headaches and is bed-bound most days. A registry that his wife, Rosie, founded to document and help the many troops suffering profound illness they trace to the burn pits now has thousands of names, though sadly some on the list have died, a couple from cancer.
As early as 2006, Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, a bioenvironmental flight commander at Balad, warned of "an acute health hazard" of exposure to toxins and "chronic" health hazards from the smoke of the base pit. In 2007 Army and Air Force health teams found dioxin at 51 times the EPA's acceptable levels and cancer risk from exposure to dioxins at eight times acceptable levels for people at the base for more than a year. They also found particulate matter at 50 times the acceptable levels -- a high toxicity associated with premature death and serious disease of most every organ according to Dr. Anthony Szema, an allergist and pulmonologist at Stony Brook University School of Medicine and pioneer in the field of post-deployment lung disease. "It's clear that the burn pits spewed health-threatening toxins into the air," Dr. Szema said. "Burning plastic, styrofoam, and jet fuel, widely used as a pit fire accelerant, yields known carcinogens. Burning medical waste and body parts and solid waste in the open air can disperse dangerous microbes. And burning computers and other electronics yields metal particulate matter, from aluminum to lead to titanium." Dr. Szema and his colleagues, who are studying biopsied lung tissue of post-deployment pulmonary patients, have identified what they're calling "titanium lung." In the condition, lung tissue is riddled with titanium in a form (bound to iron in a fixed ratio not found in nature) thought to be from toxic exposures such as those pluming from burn pits.
The pit fumes, though a prime and powerful offender on their own, appear to often operate with accomplices -- the distinctly fine sand of Iraq and Afghanistan and the extreme winds and sandstorms brought on by climate change. "A working theory is that extreme winds disperse fumes and ash from the base to the outlying desert," Dr. Szema said. "The toxins attach to and infiltrate the fine sand, which barreling tanks and more winds and sandstorms further disperse over great distances, in the form of sand dust." And the research is bearing this out. Dr. Szema's team has exposed mice to Iraq sand dust and found "titanium lung" along with reduced immune function. Captain Mark Lyles, a scientist at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., has studied the sand of the region and found viruses, funghi, bacteria and heavy metals linked to a host of serious and potentially deadly diseases. Dr. Robert Miller at Vanderbilt, who performed LeRoy Torres's biopsy, has found metal particulates in the scarred tissue of veterans with the same severe constrictive bronchiolitis LeRoy suffers. As Dr. Miller and his colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, the vast majority of the veterans whose lungs they've biopsied have the disabling disease.
The VA and DoD have stopped sending pulmonary patients to Dr. Miller for lung biopsies and its own facilities do not perform them, viewing them as an undue expense of taxpayer money for a what will prove a largely minor and temporary condition.
Powerful and deceitful governmental bureaucracies vs sick troops and veterans -- it's a repeated plot in the tragic drama of war. In 2008, Michael Kilpatrick MD, the Deputy Director of the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Health Protection and Readiness said that the military had done extensive sampling of the air in Balad but had "not identified anything, where there are troops, where it would have been hazardous to their health." And as Deputy Director of the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illness, Dr. Kilpatrick similarly denied obvious scientific findings. Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center charges that during Dr. Kilpatrick's five years in charge of oversight of research and treatment for Gulf War Illness, the office spent $25 million but failed to even issue research reports, let alone develop treatment programs. According the General Accounting Office, Kilpatrick's fixed position that psychological stress alone could explain Gulf War Illness discouraged scientists from even applying for research funds, and thwarted progress. Pioneering scientists in the field, like epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley at Southwestern Texas University, depended on private funding from millionaire Ross Perot for his investigations of the biological origins of Gulf War Illness, which as early as 1998 had suggested that brain injury from wartime toxins was the source of the problem.
With only occasional breaks, the VA and DoD have evaded responsibility for medically ill veterans from Desert Storm. In 2008, after extensive re-examination of scientific investigation, a group of high-level scientists making up the congressionally-mandated Research Advisory Committee (RAC) for Gulf War Illness concluded that the cause of the illness plaguing more than 200,000 veterans was not psychological but physical. While depleted uranium was not ruled out, neurotoxins that the military had released through experimental anti-nerve gas pills, as well as pesticides and sarin gas from bombed Iraqi munitions facilities were the exposures most conclusively linked to the multi-symptom, multi-system conditions of Gulf War Illness. The RAC, headed by eminent Boston University neruoscientist Dr. Roberta White, urged quick action on the VA's part not only because ill Gulf War veterans had been neglected for years but because veterans of the new wars were returning reporting similar symptoms. This January, the RAC charged the VA with still promulgating "fictions" that Gulf War Illness's causes were unknown and could be psychosomatic despite the RAC's clear determinations five years earlier.
In March, a leading VA epidemiologist told a House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee that VA officials routinely manipulate or hide data linking exposure to wartime toxins and Gulf War Illness, as well as illnesses emerging in veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. Dr. Steven Coughlin, who resigned his post last December, testified that VA's Office of Public Health buried and even destroyed data that demonstrated the organic nature of veterans' illnesses in both the earlier and more recent wars. His own research showing a "sizable percentage" of veterans had been exposed to burn pits and a significant association of exposure with pulmonary disease was quashed, and important data of congenital disorders in children of Gulf War veterans has gone missing "permanently," he's been told. Dr. Coughlin said his conscience forced him to leave a VA sick with "an epidemic of serious ethical problems."
President Obama promised that the burn pits of Iraq and Afghanistan will not be America's new Agent Orange. But neither the President nor Congress has put forth any comprehensive treatment or research programs for victims of burn pits and other war-zone exposures. In large part through Rosie Torres's lobbying, the VA must now establish a national burn pit registry -- just a start for gathering data. But there is nothing to mandate benefits or treatment for veterans who register.
In addition, Rep. Timothy Bishop (D-NY) is currently developing legislation that would establish centers of excellence for treating burn pit injuries and diseases, like those established in 2011 for veterans with traumatic brain injury. Hopefully, Congress will do the right thing and found and fund such centers, where veterans with profound post-deployment disease can benefit from state-of-the-art research and therapies—without bureaucrats' obstruction.
But still more is needed. Compensation, of course, as well as full and permanent benefits for those afflicted with systemic post-deployment illness, instead of the need to file claims symptom-by-symptom until the veteran gives up or dies. And certainly an investigation into the relationship between PTSD and toxic exposures (which are linked to neurological damage and psychiatric symptoms) But none of these can be accomplished without resecting and disinfecting a morally diseased bureaucracy.
In the wake of the VA backlog scandal, four high-level VA officials resigned in the last month. Will VA's obfuscation of science and denial of medical services provoke comparable outrage and shake-ups? Will there be resignations? Investigations? What do we even call it when a government sickens hundreds of thousands of its own and then hides the truth, purposely thwarting scientific study and medical treatment? A human rights violation? Amnesty International tells us that victims of extraordinary acts of systematic and extreme cruelty "have a right to know the whole truth about the crimes they suffered and the reasons behind it" and the affected society has a right to know "the circumstances surrounding and reasons that led to violations being committed to ensure that they will not be committed again."
On Memorial Day and every day, Americans have a right to know about the environmental and health disasters our government and its contractors inflicted on our own service men and women and why, and the right to be sure it will never happen again.
Nora Eisenberg's articles, interviews, and fiction have appeared in the Village Voice, Tikkun, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Guardian and Alternet, among others. Her novels include The War at Home,a Washington Post "Rave Book of the Year" in 2002; Just the Way You Want Me, the Foreword Magazine's Fiction Book of the Year 2004; and When You Come Home (Curbstone, 2009), a Grubb Street Fiction Prize finalist. Eisenberg, who holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, is academic director of the Faculty Publications Program at the City University of New York.
["Men's Tears. Marine U.S. Army In Sorrow. Soldier'S Longing. Love Of Country. Sadness For The Victims" on Shutterstock]
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The reality is Americans aren't that concerned about drones
Few Americans pay attention to the drone program, and the few who have largely support targeted killings abroad
President Obama is expected to discuss the use of drone strikes today in a speech on national security. For those who read this website, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to take out suspected terrorists is a hot topic, but what exactly do Americans think of the practice? Frankly, most don't seem to care. Those that do have an opinion approve, in principle.
Following Senator Rand Paul's filibuster aimed at shining light on the drone program, interest in the media peaked. Yet most Americans yawned – only 14% in aGallup poll said they were following the news very closely, and 35% said they were following the news somewhat closely. Combined, the percentage of Americans following news stories about drones "closely" was below 50% (and equal to the percentage who were not following the news closely). The percentage following closely was over 10pts lower than the average percentage who follow a "big news story" closely.
You might expect that the percentage of Americans following the drone news would largely oppose the use of drones, but you'd be wrong. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans, who are most likely to support drone strikes, were following drone news at least somewhat closely, compare with only 45% of Democrats following the story. That's in line with other data that suggests Republicans generally follow news more closely when it could possibly trouble the Obama administration. Either way, most Americans against drone strikes don't seem to care much about it.
Indeed, most Americans at least partially favor drone strikes. Although differences in the wording of questions reveals different results, the median result falls along the lines of an April CBS News report, which found that 70% favored "the US using unmanned aircraft or 'drones' to carry out bombing attacks against suspected terrorists in foreign countries".
Even the least favorable response, a Pew poll in February, found majority support for the the use of drones: 56% favoured, while only 26% opposed "conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia".
Support for the drone program varies across demographic and political groups about like you'd expect. Across pretty much all polling, Republicans, by about 10pts, are more likely to support drone use in general than Democrats, though majorities of both parties support it. Men are more likely to favor it than women, by anywhere from 7pts to 20pts. Again, however, more women favor the drone program in general than oppose it.
Why are Democrats and women more likely to oppose drone usage? It's not because of the program's murky legality. Among both groups, only 35% or less are "very concerned" about legality. With regard to the drones, Americans' number one worry is that the program endangers civilian lives. It's the only concern that garners a majority among the American people and among either Democrats or women.
Of course, striking non-American citizens on foreign soil is only part of the picture. The polling is less conclusive when the pollster specifically mentions killing Americans citizens via drone attack. The aforementioned Gallup poll found that a tiny majority, 51%, were opposed to using drones to kill US citizens overseas, per the following question: "Do you think the US government should or should not use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against US citizens living abroad who are suspected terrorists?"
A Fox News poll found a majority, 60%, approved of this question: "Do you approve or disapprove of the United States using unmanned aircraft called drones to kill a suspected terrorist in a foreign country if the suspect is a US citizen?"
What accounts for the difference? The Gallup poll was taken after Rand Paul's filibuster, so that could be part of it. However, CBS News showed no changed before or after Paul's polemic, and used consistent question wording. It's more likely that more proactive words, like "airstrikes" and "launch", might have raised the hackles of respondents and made a few more people oppose the program. As usual, truth probably lies between the surveys. A February CBS News poll discovered that 49%, a plurality, but not a majority, favored "the US targeting and killing American citizens in foreign countries who are suspected of carrying out terrorist activities against the US".
The one thing all the polling agrees is that Americans are opposed to using drones to kill Americans in the United States. According to both Fox and Gallup, the majority is against this practice. Wording, again, makes a difference on the exact percentages, but Americans are strongly against this fantastical scenario.
The fact remains, however, that on drones writ large, most Americans just don't seem to care, and aren't paying attention to the news. Those who are paying attention mostly favor the program, which fits with the overall public support of using drones to kill non-US citizens overseas. The polling is more split on killing citizens in other counties, but it seems that more American support than oppose the policy.
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Stop whining about Millennials
Everyone is allowed to have pet peeves, and here is one of mine: When people talk about generations. There is nothing more annoying and dilettantish than when a faux-intellectual tries to explain the mindset or behaviors of a particular generation. “The thing about…
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Six ways the GOP could screw up the Obama administration's scandals
Republicans could waste the White House's 'worst weeks ever' to a lack of strategy and rogue members of their own party
There's something already dangerously smug about the way that the Republican Party – and the media, for that matter – have described the past two weeks as the White House's "worst weeks ever". There have been some exceedingly bad weeks over the past five years, including the one in April that began with the Boston Marathon bombings and ended with an earthquake in Tokyo. One can plausibly assume that all this schadenfreude about the Obama administration, done in its optics-y, win-the-news-cycle way, seems to be the only way that our political press is capable of talking about scandals.
But just because the White House has had a difficult time managing this waterfall of negative stories doesn't mean that the Republicans on the Hill won't drown in the torrent. The GOP is the only party, after all, that impeached a sitting president yet still came out more unpopular than the man they targeted for character assassination.
Surveying their management of the situation thus far, I've had a few ideas about how they might yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
1. Full-volume hysteria over every new detail makes it difficult for normal people to distinguish the issues that are actually important – within each scandal and among the scandals themselves. Republicans are not so much acting like the "boy who cried wolf" as the "boy who cried and cried and just wouldn't stop crying".
And the party itself seems unable to decide from which vat of scandal-tar they could do the most damage. Is it #Benghazi, which the GOP has been hyping for months (with little success)? Is it the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS? That one is easy for a non-wonk to understand, but difficult to prove as having done actual harm. Maybe they should harp on the confiscation of the press' phone records, which doesn't sit well with civil libertarians but forces conservatives to make common cause with – gulp – the media, whom they have trained their base to instinctively distrust.
Gun-rights theologian and political cryptographer Glenn Beck thinks conservatives don't have to choose! "I want to go back to the name of the scandals," he said on yesterday's program. "We have Benghazi, IRS and the AP," correctly naming all three. "In the end, what do these three scandals have in common? What they have in common is the arrogance of transforming the world." He has a chart.
2. Speaking of overreaching: overreaching. This is a risk that many Republicans themselves seem to be aware of! Veteran pols told the Washington Post that their compatriots on the Hill should remember, there's "no need to gorge themselves", and "[They] need to pace themselves." Specifically, said another, "The area we have to avoid is not to use the 'I' word – impeachment." Columnist Charles Krauthammer cautioned that discussion of impeachment – especially given that none of the scandals have direct connections to Obama, "feeds the narrative of the other side that it's only a political event".
3. Which GOP politicians has gleefully ignored this advice? Representative Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota, who slunk away from the spotlight after her embarrassingly close re-election and until recently had hid quietly in her bunker, unable to find other Republicans willing to be seen with her. This week, she was out in front of the cameras again, not just urging impeachment but proclaiming that we should get on with the impeaching already!
"I will tell you, as I have been home in my district, in the sixth district of Minnesota, there isn't a weekend that hasn't gone by that someone says to me, 'Michelle, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren't you impeaching the president?'"
I live not too far from Bachmann's district, and have to wonder where she spends her weekends, and why exactly her constituents aren't more concerned about cuts in services and the lagging economy. Perhaps she's just meeting the same constituent over and over again, since the one she quoted this week sounds a lot like the one she quoted in a 2010 interview:
"Everywhere I go, people ask me, 'Michele, can we impeach the president?'"
She may be referring to that strident voice in her head, and/or that one guy on the campaign trail who did ask her, "When will we impeach him and get him out of the way? We should be." Maybe he moved to her district?
In any case, the more Bachmann's wild-eyed conspiracy mongering gets attention, the more the Democratic National Committee raises money. To paraphrase "Arrested Development": Never promise crazy an impeachment.
4. Similarly, Rep Louie Gohmert (TX) is a GOP nut just waiting to pop out of the can. He blipped into national consciousness this week for a delightful malapropism, which he made during the interrogation of Attorney General Eric Holder over the FBI investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing: He decried that Holder "will not cast aspersions on my asparagus".
Like Bachmann, Gohmert is no stranger to the dog-whistling demographic that continually demands for the president's impeachment and possible arrest. He whipped up opposition to Obama's executive order that institute some limits on gun ownership by saying, "the American Revolution was all about fighting such a monarchy." Even more recently, Gohmert asserted that the administration has ignored the threat of Muslim terrorism because:
"This administration has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America."
Gohmert also bears the distinction of being one of the few Republicans to draw a direct connection between limits on gun magazines and bestiality:
"And I pointed out, well, once you make it ten, then why would you draw the line at ten? What's wrong with nine? Or eleven? And the problem is once you draw that limit; it's kind of like marriage when you say it's not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?
There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage and it's the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it's just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal."
Sure, sometimes an asparagus is just an asparagus, but with the twin obsessions of violence and sex, I see a future Todd Akin in the making. By all means, put this man on television.
5. If Republicans relentlessly pound the IRS's targeted investigation of conservative groups filing for tax exemption, they remind people that that the IRS had a reason to do so; there's a substantial amount of evidence that certain conservative groups were, in fact, violating tax law. Republicans this week burned up the internet by pointing to a ProPublica story about the IRS being a little too generous sharing conservative groups' information.
But the story also contained a rather significant detail: ProPublica had initially requested to learn more about a successful investigation into "how dozens of social welfare non-profits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns." So, you know, it's difficult to claim that certain groups were unfairly targeted when some of that targeting turns out to be well-founded.
6. Last but not least, there's the blatant hypocrisy. The Justice Department's application of informational thumbscrews to the Associated Press is the scandal nearest and dearest to my heart, the one with which I'm most likely to side with the Republicans. It was a breach of governmental trust; it has a chilling effect on freedom of the press; and it's a threat to the valuable role whistleblowers play in the unofficial balance of power. It's everything the Republicans say it is! "A sweeping intrusion"! They "suggest a pattern of intimidation by the Obama Administration"! And, hey "the first amendment is first for a reason."
And the whole thing might have been prevented by a proposed bill that would shield journalists from revealing sources, and that Republicans, including one pronounced fan of first amendment, Darrel Issa, voted against.
Certainly, hypocrisy has never stopped a politician from making accusations. You can look back to the Clinton administration and see rampant hypocrisy – actually, you don't have to look back that far at all. But hypocrisy is perhaps the one sin that voters have trouble forgiving, especially if the original scandal has nothing to do with them.
And that's maybe the saddest thing about the whole situation: none of these scandals tie into the concerns that voters keep expressing. Make that "concern", as "economy and jobs" (or some variation, including "unemployment") tops every single recent poll, aobve every other perfectly legitimate concern, such as "gun policy" and "health care", by double digits. Remember the economy? It was the reason Mitt Romney was going to beat Obama, until the magic of his missteps diverted conversation to his personal failings and the GOP's unrelentingly and backward social policies.
What I'm saying here is that as bad as the past couple of weeks have looked for Obama, the Republicans are playing on his court. Obama isn't on the defensive, he's just marking time until they make a mistake. They probably already have.
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Pregnant women need Congress to pass legislation that protects them from being fired
"In my fourth month of pregnancy, I gave my employer a doctor’s note that restricted my lifting to no more than 20 pounds. When my coworkers had injuries, they routinely were given alternative tasks for weeks or months. But my supervisor told me that pregnancy was different and that I had to leave immediately and not return until I had no restrictions whatsoever. I was stunned. I went home and cried. How would we get by financially?"-- Amy Crosby, hospital cleaner in Florida
Across the country, employers routinely make adjustments to jobs when workers need them because of disability or injury. But too often, pregnancy is a different story. Pregnant workers who need temporary accommodations to continue working safely are often flatly denied and forced to confront an impossible choice: risk their own health and pregnancy to keep their job or be forced out. And even though the Pregnancy Discrimination Act has been the law of the land for almost 35 years, all too often when women challenge their employers’ behavior in court, they lose.
Take Heather Wiseman, a Wal-Mart sales floor associate in Kansas. When she became pregnant, she developed bladder infections and started carrying a water bottle at work on her doctor’s advice to stay hydrated. But a company rule said that only cashiers could have water bottles at work, so Wiseman was fired. If a disability other than pregnancy required her to drink more water, company rules would have required that she be accommodated.
Or look at Peggy Young, who delivered UPS packages that had been shipped by air. The packages she delivered were relatively light and she rarely had to lift more than 20 pounds. Nevertheless, when her midwife recommended that she not lift more than 20 pounds during her pregnancy, UPS required her to go on unpaid leave, even though it had a policy of accommodating workers with disabilities, workers with on-the-job injuries, and those who had lost their certification to drive a commercial vehicle for health or other reasons. Young lost her income and her medical coverage at a time when she needed it the most.
Then there’s Amber Walker, the only female truck driver for a beer distributor in Iowa, who asked for help with heavy lifting or a temporary assignment to a different position during the final months of her pregnancy. Although the company routinely accommodated employees with injuries—and even had a policy allowing drivers who lost their license from drunk driving to apply for new positions in sales—it denied Walker’s request and forced her to take unpaid leave. Six days after her baby was born, Walker’s leave was already used up. When she failed to return to work one week after giving birth, she was fired.
These women all brought Pregnancy Discrimination Act claims that were rejected because courts concluded that pregnancy wasn’t comparable to the disabilities or on-the-job injuries that their employers regularly accommodated. The courts concluded that it was not discrimination for employers to treat pregnant workers worse than other employees.
That’s why a new law is needed and why the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) is being reintroduced in Congress today. This bill would provide a crystal clear rule for workers, employers, and the courts: employers must make the same sorts of reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions that they are legally required to extend to workers with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In other words, an employer would no longer be allowed to fire a pregnant employee or force her to take leave to avoid making any job modifications—as long as these changes did not cause undue hardship.
Women with jobs that require physical activity like lifting, standing, or repetitive motion—activities that pose challenges to some pregnant women —especially need the PWFA’s clear guarantee.
Under the PWFA, for example, an employer might be required to modify a no-food-or-drink policy, provide a stool to an employee who is usually required to stand all day long or reassign occasional heavy lifting to other employees for part of an employee’s pregnancy.
When employers make reasonable adjustments, pregnant workers can work longer under safe conditions and provide for their families. Employers would retain their trained workforce and avoid the high costs of employee turnover. This is a win-win proposition for pregnant workers and their employers.
The bill’s commonsense protections for maternal health and workplace fairness are long overdue, and Congress should pass it without delay.
Emily Martin is the Vice President and General Counsel of the National Women's Law Center.
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3D printed guns are going to create big legal precedents
A test case between Cody Wilson and the US government could have implications for regulation of the internet
By now, everyone's heard about the 3D printed gun that Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. The Texas-based group has been steadily working its way up the 3D printed firearms evolutionary ladder, making parts for guns, then guns themselves, then firing a gun, then making the plans for running up your own pistols on a nearby 3D printer. If Defense Distributed had set out to create a moral panic over 3D printing, they could have picked no better project.
The prevailing opinions on 3D printed guns fall into two major categories: the apocalyptic and the nonchalant. The apocalyptics – including grandstanding politicos like New York State senator Steve Israel, who's already introduced legislation aimed at banning 3D printed guns – greet this news with hysterics: the age of the undetectable plastic gun to be upon us, and Something Must Be Done. The nonchalant point out that the 3D printed gun that Defense Distributed fired cost a small fortune and requires a highly specialised and even more expensive 3D printer to produce; is fragile and liable to self-destruction after a few rounds are fired, and remind the apocalyptics that it's much, much easier to go and buy a traditional gun in the criminal underground than it is to produce a working 3D printed item.
There's some truth in both points of view, but it's hard to get at the truth when you're talking about an issue as polarising as guns. It doesn't help that Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson describes the project in ideologically loaded terms, calling his first gun "the Liberator" in homage to the cheap single-shot pistols that the Allies made for distribution in Nazi-occupied France – Wilson here implying that the ability to print a gun and arm yourself is integral to the defence against tyranny. Wilson's nomenclature is classic internet rhetoric: by invoking the Nazis with his pistol design, he follows in the tradition of a million internet arguments that prove Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
For my part, I think that 3D printed guns are both interesting and scary, and certainly important, though not for the reasons most commonly invoked by either camp.
Jumbo problems
The most interesting part of the whole affair is what it says about all forms of technological regulation in the future. All technologies are being subsumed into general-purpose computers connected to the general-purpose internet, from thermostats to hearing aids to pharmaceutical factories to automobiles to radios. Many of these technologies have historically been regulated through rules about how they must be built, used and monitored, and in addition, there's a kind of de facto regulation that comes from the complexity of building complex devices from readily available parts. Anyone with enough resources can build a jumbo jet, but that's a pretty specialised use of the word "anyone" – if you're building a jumbo jet, you're in a relatively small pool of people to begin with, and the act of building a jumbo jet throws off enough detectable signs that it's hard to keep secret.
Inherent in the notion of regulating a technology is the regulatability of that technology. It's the idea that you can figure out who's making or using a technology and dictate terms to them. That's where computers come in. Computers make it possible for semi-skilled people to do jobs that used to require highly skilled people. A computer program, computer-readable model-file and computer-based 3D printer can (in theory) encapsulate the expertise of a skilled machinist and deploy it on demand wherever a 3D printer is to be found. If that's hard to grasp, think of recorded music versus live performance: before sound recordings, you needed to find (and possibly pay) a musician every time you wanted to hear music; after recordings, the musician was only needed for the initial performance, which could be captured and reproduced at will.
The existence of a 3D printed gun that can be output on a high-end machine by a skilled user doesn't do much to change the regulatability of guns. After all, you could already "print" a much more powerful gun by ordering it, piece by piece, from any of the many overnight-shipping custom metal fabrication companies that will turn a 3D model into a precision-machined piece of metal and FedEx it to your door. Such a gun would keep firing as long as you kept feeding it ammo, too – unlike a plastic gun, which is likely to experience critical failure after a comparatively small number of rounds fired.
That said, 3D printers keep getting better and cheaper and today's uncommon professional model is likely to be tomorrow's ubiquitous home hobbyist machine. If there comes a day when more powerful printers are common, then the regulatability of guns will shelve off dramatically.
Guns and ammo
Of course, there's no such thing as 3D printed ammunition, and there's nothing on our immediate horizon that is likely to produce it. However, the current security model for reducing the danger from guns involves a multilayered defence that relies on the regulation of both guns and ammunition. If guns can be readily made at home, then a major piece of the regulatory model is dead. The ability to encapsulate the expertise of a gunsmith in a bit of code becomes more more significant then. But "then" is not "now." Though 3D printers might change the regulatory picture for firearms in years or decades, the regulatability of guns remains intact for now.
More interesting is the destiny of the files describing 3D printed guns. These model-files have been temporarily removed from the internet at the behest of the US State Department, which is investigating the possibility that they violate the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Wilson says that he's on safe ground here, because the regulations do not cover material in a library, and he says the internet is like a library. As this is taking place in the US, there's also the First Amendment to be considered, which limits government regulation of speech.
Here's where things get scary for me. Defense Distributed is headed for some important, possibly precedent-setting legal battles with the US government, and I'm worried that the fact that we're talking about guns here will cloud judges' minds. Bad cases made bad law, and it's hard to think of a more emotionally overheated subject area. So while I'd love to see a court evaluate whether the internet should be treated as a library in law, I'm worried that when it comes to guns, the judge may find himself framing the question in terms of whether a gun foundry should be treated as a library.
Hard cases make bad law
Likewise for the question of whether computer code is a form of protected, expressive speech. In 1996, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals legalised the civilian use of strong cryptography, thanks to Bernstein v United States, which asked whether US spy agencies should really be in the business of regulating how academics talked about maths. The court in Bernstein held that code was a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and struck down the US National Security Agency's ban on publishing code that could be used to make effective cryptographic systems.
However, in 2000's Universal City Studios Inc v Reimerdes, the court got it wrong when considering the question of whether a magazine should be forbidden from publishing computer code that could be used to decode a DVD. The difference between Reimerdes and Bernstein is that Reimerdes concerned itself with a magazine called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and Bernstein was about a nice academic mathematician called Daniel Bernstein. They both turned on the same principle, but the court couldn't see past the words "Hacker Quarterly" to see the principle underlying the case.
I agree with Cody Wilson that we've entered into a new world of regulation, and it's one that could go very wrong if things aren't well handled. I just fear that Wilson's asking the right questions – how do we regulate technologies when they can be produced with general purpose computers and networks – in the wrong way: "Should everyone be able to print a gun at home?"
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'Purity' culture: bad for women, worse for survivors of sexual assault
Virginity has no bearing on a person's worth, yet 'purity balls' and shaming victims make our culture more medieval than modern
Where does a woman's value lie? In her brain? Her heart? Her spirit?
According to right-wing culture warriors, "between her legs". That's what underlies the emphasis on virginity as "purity", and the push for abstinence-only education. And it has very real consequences, most recently articulated by Elizabeth Smart.
Smart, who was kidnapped and held for months while her captor repeatedly raped her, recently discussed how her religious background made her feel worthless after the first rape – how she understands why others wouldn't even try to escape, if, like her, they were taught that a sexually "impure" woman had nothing to offer.
Smart's speech is largely being interpreted as a critique of abstinence-only education, but she's pointing to an entire culture that fetishizes purity. The more extreme versions of our collective obsession are seen in conservative Christian churches, which offer purity rings, purity balls and sermons that insist wives give their virginity as a "gift" to husbands. But purity culture is mainstream, even in a country where sexualized images of women are on every magazine rack and "Girls Gone Wild" series thrive.
Abstinence-only education is just one example of our bizarre relationship with sex, which can be seen most clearly in the way we treat women. Women and girls being sexy for someone else is more or less OK, as long as no actual sex occurs, and as long as the version of "sexy" has appropriate markers of being middle- or upper-class. Women who exhibit a degree of sexual agency by acting – rather than only appearing attractive – or women perceived as inappropriately powerful or aggressive inevitably face being branded sluts and whores.
The idea that sexual activity damages women and makes them lose their value was articulated by Smart:
"I think it goes even beyond fear, for so many children, especially in sex trafficking. It's feelings of self-worth. It's feeling like, 'Who would ever want me now? I'm worthless.'
That is what it was for me the first time I was raped. I was raised in a very religious household, one that taught that sex was something special that only happened between a husband and a wife who loved each other. And that's how I'd been raised, that's what I'd always been determined to follow: that when I got married, then and only then would I engage in sex.
After that first rape, I felt crushed. Who could want me now? I felt so dirty and so filthy. I understand so easily all too well why someone wouldn't run because of that alone."
Smart's case is an extreme example. But right-wing purity culture damages all women, not just survivors of sexual assault. Feminists have been making this point for decades, perhaps most comprehensively in Jessica Valenti's book The Purity Myth. Valenti notes that the cultural emphasis on virginity teaches young women that their moral center is in their crotch, not in their minds or hearts.
This culture tells women that their bodies aren't really theirs; bodies are only bargaining chips, which can be devalued like a new car driven off the lot. Women aren't inherently valuable, the thinking goes, except so long as we have untouched vaginas to give our husbands (because our partners are always husbands). Virginity trumps intelligence, humor and compassion. The notion that both partners might benefit from having dated around, experimented, and figured out what they enjoy and want from a healthy relationship? It doesn't even register.
It's a view so out of touch that calling it "retro" seems quaint. It's more medieval, harkening back to when women were sold into marriage by their fathers and virgins were the most valued goods. Yet it's on display in schools across contemporary America, at father-daughter "purity balls", on right-wing radio, and in church youth groups.
The dehumanization that purity culture inflicts was described by Smart in her speech when she talked about the sex education:
"I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence, she said, 'Imagine you're a stick of gum and when you engage in sex, that's like getting chewed, and if you do that lots of times, you're going to become an old piece of gum, and who's going to want you after that?"
Smart says those words rang in her memory. She felt ruined.
Of course, Smart wasn't ruined. There are a lot of words that come to mind when listening to her – resilient, intelligent, thoughtful, wonderful – and neither "ruined" nor "devalued" are among them. Her message is crucial: value isn't maintained, lost or compromised with sexual penetration. We are inherently valuable.
Smart emphasizes a crucial point: sexual assault is a crime, plain and simple, and survivors should be supported, not judged. A cultural emphasis on sexual purity leads to the kind of judgement that Smart internalized. Surely, purity advocates would say that they don't intend to hurt victims – that rape isn't a woman's fault, that she can still be pure of heart after the assault. But that, too, speaks to the fundamental misogyny of purity culture: a woman who has sex forced upon her may still be "good", even if her stock has decreased. Women who act on perfectly natural sexual desire, on the other hand, are tainted physically and morally.
It goes without saying, but it's too important not to repeat: men are not judged as women are for consensual sexual activity. Men who have sex aren't chewed up pieces of gum or moral failures – they're studs.
Men who are raped or sexually assaulted, however, find themselves similarly marginalized. While the feminist movement has done excellent work in creating space for survivors to report crimes and open up, American-style masculinity doesn't leave a lot of room for understanding male victimization. Abstinence education routinely teaches young women that they need to control the brakes of sexual responsibility, putting a halt to the men who only know how to accelerate. There's little recognition of male agency, much less encouragement of men and boys as anything but tough, aggressive and brutish. That has devastating consequences for men and boys who are sexually violated; there's not much language that doesn't feel emasculating.
The same churches that peddle purity don't tend to think very highly of homosexuality; that homophobia, coupled with sexual shame, silences many boys and men who are assaulted by other men. For those who are assaulted by women, the broader cultural assumption that men always want sex puts up even more barriers to reporting and dealing with that abuse.
Purity culture hurts all of us, and it adds an extra level of shame to sexual assault. Smart is just one example. Imagine if the young woman from the Steubenville case lived in a world where consensual sex and sexual assault were understood as two very different things, with no grey area. Imagine if there weren't anything shameful about consensual sex or being sexually assaulted, and that the latter were considered an awful violation – taking a good, healthy, mutually pleasurable activity and turning it into an act of violence. If Jane Doe from Steubenville lived in that world, the media would have told her story quite differently, if there even were a media narrative. No photos, no crude, jokey captions. Her own friends wouldn't have testified against her at trial; they would have stepped in to stop the assault as it was happening.
Imagine, too, if the young women who tragically committed suicide after similar photos circulated around their school, had lived in a world where "sexual purity" didn't exist as a concept, and where women's bodies were considered fundamentally their own. In that world, the shame would fall on the young men who allegedly assaulted them. There would be no bully's satisfaction for circulating photos of either any sexual activity, consensual or not, because neither scenario would be considered humiliating.
As Frank Bruni says in an excellent column about the sexual double-standard:
"Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way."
We all have have qualities and make choices that speak to our kindness, empathy, ethics and intelligence. Whether or not we're sexually "pure" simply has no bearing. But a culture that fetishizes virginity is a culture that's awfully bad for women and men, and that's particularly painful for the survivors of sexual violence.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Elizabeth Smart via Flickr user KOMUnews]
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