Section 215.

I was going to post a standard newsie post, the things I saw today. There is some good stuff. The cover of The Economist is hilarious this week. A youth pastor has been arrested for trying to smuggle a 16 year old girl into Canada in the trunk of his car, apparently to have sex with her. The Saudis contemplate the bomb. Viruses become payloads for chemotherapy treatments. And, last but not least, Bush can't really say why we went to Iraq, all post-hoc reasoning aside.

No, what I'm going to rant about today is something known as Section 215. That's the paragraph in the USA PATRIOT Act that authorizes the FBI to obtain business records, including library records, without the need to obtain a warrant from a bench court. Byron York had the sheer gall in an article entitled Patriot Games to repeat Ashcroft's assertion that concerns over Section 215 are overblown and "hysterical," and to belittle those who over the past 18 months have attacked section 215. He points out that, after all the worry, Section 215 "has never been used."

At least, that's what Ashcroft is telling us now. And Ashcroft's been saying for months that he can't tell us how often Section 215 is invoked "in the name of national security." When asked why the information was classified until recently, Ashcroft's spokesminion said, "We don't want the terrorists to know what we're doing. We want them to be afraid. We want them to feel as if we are looking over their shoulder whenever they go into a public building, like a library."

The problem with this is that Section 215 makes everyone feel as if "the government is looking over their shoulder." And that's an un-American way to feel. We don't appreciate the government looking over our shoulder.

Ashcroft says we shouldn't worry. We're only after the bad guys. Well, the fact is, we're all "bad guys" of one kind or another. Even if you don't do anything prosecutable, goddess knows your reading habits are sure to be the subject of ridicule by someone. Do you want to give Ashcroft and company the power to make that information public?

"Justice" in a purely philosophical sense relies completely on there being some give to the system, that sometimes bad guys get away, and that that's the price we pay for having a sense of freedom. It's the presumption of liberty. Ashcroft and his ilk would prefer that we presume that governmental power is more important than liberty until we prove that their actions lead to totalitarianism.

Section 215 is bad law. I'm not reassured by Ashcroft's "We've never used it." I don't want him to have it, period. I don't want to feel afraid when I go to the library, or the bookstore.

I want to be an American. A sovereign citizen, not a subject of the state.

Kidopolis, Physical Therapy Day 3

Last night, Omaha was feeling a bit pressured and out of sorts, so I agreed to take both of the kids to Kidopolis, a local indoor playground that they both love. After dinner, I let them loose and went to sit down and watch. With my wrist brace on, I was reluctant to try and chase them down inside the twisty, turny, not-sized-for-an-adult facilities.

There was a quite lovely redheaded woman talking to Yamaarashi-chan and watching the girls run about, and after a while she came and sat next to me, and we chatted. She wondered how I managed to get the girls to get along so well when most sisters fought; I thought that they were just too young to be rivalrous, and too different, too much into their own worlds, to fight over little things.

She really seemed to want to have someone to talk to. Her husband was aloof, standing off on the side with a book, looking vaguely resentful. She said that she spent most of her day at home, alone, with her three-year-old son, who looked like he was having as much fun as the girls were. When she asked where my wife was, I mentioned that I'd taken the kids out to let her have a quiet evening at home. "Aren't you the super dad. That's so nice of you." I got this strange feeling that her husband over there was a bit clueless about what to do with a kid all by himself.

After dropping Kouryou-chan off at home, I took Yamaarashi-chan back to her mother's house, then finally got to home and bed myself. Kouryou-chan awoke in the middle of the night, very upset, and nobody got much sleep.

I went to the pool at 5:30 am again. Didn't do as well as Wednesday. Managed 750 meters and towards the end it wasn't the exhaustion that drove me out of the pool, it was a vague but persistent sense of nausea. The lifeguard asked me if I was an ex-team swimmer and I allowed that I was. She nodded and said, "You look like it. Good luck." I wasn't quite sure what that meant.

Omaha expressed worry that three times a week is "too much"; I objected that 90 minutes a week of workout is probably not enough to undo fifteen years of neglect. The nausea accompanied me all the way up on the ride into work, but by the time I sat down at my desk I was okay. Still feel tired, though. Tonight's the first night of Foolscap. I hope I'm not too spacey.

Vague Anxieties

I'm bored.

We're right at the end of this project and the applications team is more or less done. I'm supposed to be working on another project for a special hardware upgrade release, but I can't really do anything until the underlying API is finished (or, at least, designed) and we've come to some agreement on what it should say.

There's an all-company meeting today at 4:00, and an all-developer's meeting at 3:00. I can't miss the all-developer's meeting, and I really shouldn't miss the all-company, but I'm probably going to do so in favor of going to Foolscap.

And maybe Elric's right. Nobody in that vague middle ground between management and labor, the project managers, seems to think that this is a build-and-run operation, but y' never know. I just hate "surprise" meetings, and that's what the all-dev meeting is: a surprise. It's just a "rah-rah," "let's get this thing out the door" kind of show, or so I'm told, but still... I've been through too many mergers, acquisitions, and layoffs in my life to be comfortable.