A Thin Blue Line? What to do about bad cops. Light is our best friend.

The "thin blue line" is a monicker used to stand for police, asserting they are the slender bulwark which keeps society from descending into violent chaos. A more extreme, adversarial emblem of cop solidarity in the face of oppression by an ingrate citizenry - often appearing on tattoos -  is the skull symbol from the Punisher comic series. These memes have spread avidly, now in counter-beat to “Defund the Police” and both of them elicit hand-rubbing glee in Kremlin basement troll farms. (And so - to an extent - does the ill-chosen phrase "defund the police.")

This time I plan to discuss Police Unions, focusing on how to continue protecting ‘good cops’ while finally delivering at long last on 50 years of solemn promises to ‘eliminate the bad apples.’  Indeed, in the short term we need a slogan like: “Protect both citizens AND good cops from the calamity of bad cops.”

Over the long term, though, we’ll see below that that entire point may be moot. Police forces will professionalize and gain accountability, just as they will get much smaller. 

It will happen for many of the same reasons that are playing out  now, in our streets, and that I predicted in The Transparent Society.

== The debacle of Police Unions - a practical reform ==

The New York Times published an investigation explaining how police unions have amassed political power and blocked change. Ever more it’s become clear that the unions are central to the entire mess and their members need to be told: “You can either continue to reflexively protect all your bad apples, using procedural and contractual and legal maneuvers… OR protect the vast majority of your members who are good cops from the deterioration that those bad apples bring to their working lives. You cannot do both.”

Yes, some of those procedural protections had reasons. If a chief or mayor can fire police officers at-will, that power will often be misused politically, or for graft, or blame-deflection. Moreover let’s be clear that eliminating such protections for civil servants, in general, is the top priority – often stated openly – of the Republican Party, bringing back the spoils system and ending the autonomy that has made the 4^th branch of government the biggest obstacle to oligarch feudalism.

So, while we aim to bring the cop unions around, turning them into forces for good, that does not mean elimination of procedural safeguards!

Is there a way to get a win-win? There is… and this method can apply to Teachers Unions, too!  Here’s how.

== Simple, direct and practical ==

Set up FIVE STAKEHOLDERS. City officials, senior cop management, neighborhood citizen oversight commissions… and an annual confidential poll of all officers in the precinct.  All are asked to “name cops you know are rotten, or loose cannons, or threats to public safety or professionalism, or who just scare you.”

The fifth input is automatic… from complaints filed against officers.

Now the rule is simple. If an officer is in the bottom 5% according to ALL FIVE stakeholder groups, ejection for cause is automatic. No appeal. No buyout. No nothing. Get lost.

If it’s four out of five, an appeal is allowed, but the presumption favors firing and the appealing cop bears burden of proof it should be otherwise,

If it’s three out of five stakeholders who denounce him, all of today’s processes play out before an impartial board, with firing entirely up to the board. But even if the officer is retained, she or he is publicly named and warned and given retraining.

If the officer is denounced by just two out of five stakeholders, or just one, the board inquires confidentially into causes and determines if a full hearing is called for, and remedial training is needed, but presumption is made in the officer’s favor the first or second time.

This approach allows the union to stand up for members against capricious bias or political interference, or else a public smear campaign. But if the public in a precinct and the cop’s secretly-polled peers AND a citizen oversight panel all agree, shouldn’t the bad apple get to speak… but then (default) go away?

(Note that this entire process is a matter personnel management and not for dealing with specific complaints of particular crimes or wrongdoing, which are handled separately, though they can initiate this process. Here we are talking about simply saying: "Whether or not your misdeeds are proved: we don't want to work with you anymore!")

The same should hold for teachers. We recall one awful fellow who all the parents and students and fellow teachers hated, who was protected by tenure. With those three stakeholders, plus administration and outcome test scores in play, shouldn’t the same sort of arrangement give us a win-win? A way to protect teachers from any one kind of bias campaign or unfair railroading… but also to eliminate the worst, when diverse and competing stakeholders agree?

It’s called NON-ZERO SUM thinking and one of our goals, after winning this year’s life-or-death fight for civilization, should be to reinstate it as something that we normally try to do. You’ll find lots of other examples in POLEMICAL JUDO.

Of course for now, all of the above is just blather. Sure, it would work and all that, finding a win-win overlap of interests. But with black folks being outright murdered before our very eyes, the time for subtle solutions lies ahead of us by months, not days.

For now, we march. We shout. We must.

== A simpler alternative ==

Discussed on NPR - a much more basic solution using market forces to eliminate bad cops …requiring them to individually have (along with their respective police forces) liability insurance, as we require doctors, lawyers, barbers, and hairdressers to do. Sure, the department subsidizes premiums on a matching basis. Still, cops with bad records will be viewed, properly, as bad risks who raise everyone else’s premiums.

Yes I talk about insurance as the libertarian alternative - never mentioned by libertarians - all the time. Including in POLEMICAL JUDO.

== Did I say it’s about light? ==

        

Will you forgive me if I say that much of this ‘cop problem’ ought to go away organically? And for a reason I discussed in The Transparent Society (see especially page 160!) 

The reason is simple, but you may have to pause and step back a minute.

It's long been proved that criminals are not deterred so much by envisioning punishment, as they are by the relative certainty of getting caught.  It matters far less what penalty awaits than knowing “I’ll be seen and identified, so I better not do it.”

And yes, we are seeing it today, on our streets, as the prevalence of phone-cameras has made it harder to conceal misdeeds performed out of doors. Even back in the 1960s, Martin Luther King credited the presence of primitive newsreel and TV cameras with saving his life, multiple times, and verifying the testimony of civil rights workers before the eyes of an appalled public. As Will Smith recently said: “It’s not that things are as bad as the 1860s, they aren’t. It’s not that things are as bad as the 1960s, they aren’t. It’s that they are filmed.”

What I find strange is that no one seems willing to put all this together and extrapolate what happens when citizens become ever-more omniscient, with their pan spectral Augmented Reality goggles supplemented by tiny drones you can order to peek down that dark alley over there. Do you honestly think one top outcome won’t be less violent crime? 

And if there’s a lot less crime, then won’t there be fewer police, allowing us to hyper-professionalize those who remain?

Oh, once, just for once will you curb the cynical reflex and not just leap to assume the worst Orwellian outcomes? Actually work with me, here.

 Let’s suppose citizens calmly do as recommended in The Transparent Society and elsewhere, aiming light of sousveillance at all elites, preventing Big Brother.

Further let's all strive to ensure that we evade the trap of “social credit” homogenization that is being erected in some countries right now, as a means of conformity enforcement and social control. I go on elsewhere about how we can achieve that.

But no, for now let's stick to the street crime that the Thin Blue Line is set up to protect us from. Now squint and consider a future in which you are safe on any street at night, not because every streetcorner has a cop, but because your own augmented senses guarantee it. Most crime is deterred by us, not by armed agents of the state. 

Is that the ultimate overlap of liberal and libertarian goals? That the thin blue line grows thinner as the need diminishes?

And don’t you think the good cops of today – the best ones who remain – would rather practice their calling like doctors, both skilled and relatively rare?

Yes, we have battles in the here and now. I am as hip deep in those as any of you! 

But we are supposed to be the ones who also lift our gaze farther ahead. And the very trends that make us vexed today may also be the ones offering a path to sunlight.

Your right to see, under attack!

The most important advance in civil liberties in this century so far, in the U.S. and by extension the western world, was in 2013 when the Obama Administration and then five U.S. district courts ruled that citizens have a powerful right to record the actions of officials - especially police - in public. No interaction with authority is more needful of accountability than at the level of the street. Moreover, a citizenry who are accustomed to that right will apply sousveillance also upward, as I have long held and as I describe in The Transparent Society and in EARTH. 

Now the U.S. Eighth District Court in Missouri has declared the exact opposite, allowing cops to seize or break your camera or arrest you, even when you are clearly not interfering. This case will go to the Supreme Court, and we are on notice. No electoral defeat can harm us as much as this, if upheld. Historians will see it as a turning point, toward Orwellian nightmare or revolution.

Read the article and note that the lawyers arguing for this right base it on the 1st, 2nd, 5th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Using the 2nd in this context is clever! Because indeed, the "arms" that most benefit the citizenry nowadays are - indeed - cameras, the new Great Equalizer. But I have long maintained all the ACLU attorneys etc are missing something terribly important. 

This right is most-fundamentally protected by the Sixth Amendment! 

The under-rated and almost never-mentioned and utterly vital Sixth! The one that guarantees citizens a right to demand and command access to exculpatory witnesses and evidence that can prove their innocence of an accused crime.  And what could fill this need better than video proof of your story? Why isn’t this obvious?

I'm putting out an alert! This really matters. The rising world oligarchy does not want citizens embedded with an impudent, core-level assumption of a right to look at elites. 

And here's how you can help.

== Stand up for the opposite. For freedom ==

Remember Lawrence Lessig? He tried to make election corruption and finance reform a major issue during the 2016 US campaigns. You know that I urge all citizens to join at least ten NGOs that suit your own notions of what needs doing. I rate Larry’s Equal Citizens as one of the more important ones. Now he and colleagues launch an experiment—a podcast series called “Another Way” — designed to give the listeners a chance to reflect and think, and view our culture as a way to progress. You can subscribe to the podcast, and get the first episode to get a thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective. 

Did you join your own ten chosen NGOs, where for a small membership you get others to fight to save the world for you, in whichever mix of priorities you want? Not yet? Do five before New Years and you'll be glad.

As for you millionaires out there, there are loads of ideas for ways that you might help make things much better!

Here's one that some of you have seen before. It would transform the world.

== Let the usual cleanup of henchmen commence ==

And so it begins, accidental death of no-longer-convenient loyal servants and enforcers, as the leaders of mafia clans prove once again they expect loyalty to flow in just one direction. 

Calling all Henchmen! 
Indeed Some mere millionaire could change the world more than the Gates Foundation, by simply offering what I call a “Henchman’s Prize,” luring out of the shadows some flunky who could then bring a wretched conspiracy crashing down.

My proposal for a "Henchman's Prize" goes back two decades — a million dollars plus a new identity for whoever blows the whistle — with full evidence — on the "worst" concealed plot or scheme that year! I suspect nothing would be more cost-efficient at helping poor nations eliminate corrupt kleptocracies and convert to a diamond-shaped social pattern... or help developed nations maintain their healthy accountability systems. (See: The Transparent Society. See also Witness.org.) 

“A permanent office might be created, outside the justice or intelligence communities, that will confidentially and securely advise any person, in America or around the world, who may be thinking about revealing information about bad activities, including those that are illegal or harmful to the people, or that impair the effective operation of justice, democracy, or fair markets. According to each individual's needs, the informant may be steered toward intelligence or law-enforcement services, or toward open source networks, or even toward mass media. Judiciously, some varying types of protection and/or rewards would be made available to brave whistleblowers. Yes, this one will confuse some people. But I hope it will percolate in the minds of some.” See other political suggestions.

And yes, I have repeatedly called upon folks to pass this suggestion, especially, to the new president of Mexico, who could use it to rip the guts out of endemic corruption and set an example to transform the world.

== And finally... get ready for bad stuff ==

 I cannot emphasize enough that a critical mass of Americans must view the 1969 Costa-Gravas film “Z.” Academy Award winner, though you must endure subtitles. It’s based on the true story of the Greek coup that ended democracy in its birthplace, though it also seems startlingly pertinent to the Mueller investigation. Above all, the last five minutes of the film has an M. Night Shyamalan twist that carries a savage bite and warning. 

Only in our case, it’s not the military to be feared. But a world mafia.

Transparency: sense and nonsense

Every breakthrough in communications was misused, before it gradually made us better. The printing press horribly exacerbated Europe’s religious wars. Radio and loudspeakers amplified the voices of demagogues and helped make the 1930s-40s hell on Earth. But eventually each new tech does expand what people can know and feel and understand.

Concerned about the malignant effects of social media?  Watch this video.  Of course it is 90% public relations. Still, I consulted with Facebook a year ago about the problems of misinformation and “echo chambers” on the web and social media, and I’m pleased they are implementing some of my suggestions, though it will be far from enough. As predicted in my 1989 novel EARTH (it had web pages), these poisonous effects will grow and expand before our more mature angels lead us back to amiably and positively argumentative citizenship.  

In the same theme: 3,517 Facebook ads were bought by Russians. Their dominant strategy: Sowing racial discord. Often taking both sides of the argument, as in vaccination, in order to sic Americans against each other.

Still, be pragmatic. You could be one of those people who actually sets your settings for privacy.  This article shows how.

== A ‘landmark’? ==

This is an important ruling and a minor victory for liberty -- but hardly a "landmark." 'A U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Friday barred police from accessing cellphone records such as call listings and location data without first obtaining a search warrant.' It sounds marvelous right? But all such restrictions on the ability of elites to see will prove ephemeral. Accelerating tech ensures that any "walls" you erect will become transparent or useless across the following decade. Please, name one counter-example? Those who tried to ban face-recognition systems learned that the ability is proliferating into scads of apps.

There was a recent "landmark" -- in 2013, the best year for civil liberties in this century, so far -- when both the U.S. courts (Glik v Cunniffe) and the Obama Administration declared it to be "settled law" that a citizen has the right to record his or her interactions with police in public places.

No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of "sousveillance" or looking-back at power, that The Transparent Society is all about. It is also fundamental to freedom. For in altercations with authority, what other recourse can a citizen turn to, than the Truth?

Notice the crucial difference. One 'landmark' encourages us to limit the power of an elite by hiding from them. It won't -- it cannot possibly -- work for long. 

The other encourages us to limit the power of an elite by looking back at them (sousveillance.) The first can be rendered moot, tomorrow. The second can be tech-enhanced ever onward, if we choose the braver-assertive path of active citizenship.

See more at my posting: Cops and us: Keeping an eye on each other.

== The same old foolishness ==

An interesting article by Mariana Mazzucato on MIT Tech, suggests that many of our modern information age problems – such as being “farmed” by Internet giants for our information – might be addressed with a socialist approach… making most of the information about us into a “commons” where we all might benefit.  While I have some problems with some details, it is certainly in such a commons that we might at least get to see what is being done with our information, who is using it, and possibly even get paid for “interest” in knowledge about us, in a manner talked about by Jaron Lanier.

Caustically rejecting Dr, Mazzucato’s proposal is Aral Balkan, who insists that every individual should have sovereign control over his or her own portion of a balkanized infosphere, many billions of isolated cells, with every human attentive to which items of personal information are allowed to pass.  

“The crucial point here, however, is that this toxic way of building modern technology is not the only way to design and build modern technology. We know how to build free and open, decentralised, and interoperable systems where your data originates in a place that you – as an individual – own and control.”

What stunning, staggering towering malarkey. An example, please. Show us one example of such a system that has worked, persistently, at closing information flows in ways that stymie elite view and empower privacy and citizenship through concealment. There are no large scale examples, because it is technologically, logically and historically impossible. Nor is it even distantly related to the methods that we have used, across 200 years, to create a briefly flourishing era of individual creativity and freedom.

Again and again, since writing The Transparent Society, I’ve asserted. It’s not a important to fret over what elites know about you, as it is to have active, assertive power over what they can do to you. And that power is only derived from your knowledge of what they are up to. Balkanization of a secretive, cellular infoWeb can only benefit the mighty, who will have every tool to exploit cracks in those cell walls… and show me one such system – one, ever! – that did not have such exploitable cracks. 

But when elites are also naked, then they are limited in the number of henchmen they can hire without springing their own leaks. And…

…no, I will not try to summarize The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Where I argue we should stay faithful to the impudent method that worked for the only 200 year stretch of rising human freedom and happiness.  If you are actually curious, here are articles and speculations by David Brin about transparency, freedom and technology.  

== And more of the same ==

Continuing in the same vein: In a perfect example of the Aplha-Minus Effect, Rochelle Gurstein rails in the Baffler against “Self-Invasions and the Invaded Self,” denouncing the trend toward self-exposure in the modern world, as if she invented what is - in fact - the hand-wringing stance that’s standard across the depth and breadth of modern intelligencia, denouncing how we live in “a society that offers boundless opportunities for men and women to expose themselves (in all dimensions of that word) as never before, to commit what are essentially self-invasions of privacy.” 

Continues Dr. Gurstein: “Although this is a new phenomenon, it has become as ubiquitous as it is quotidian, and for that reason, it is perhaps one of the most telling signs of our time.”

No, it is not a new phenomenon, not even remotely. Across all the history of our species, most humans lived in either tribes or villages in which power was disproportionately wielded by chieftains and their thugs and priests… and by the busybody gossips who pounced on every minor indiscretion or exposed weakness.  And exposed we were, in those ancestral villages, vastly more than we are today, when both physical walls and the law protect the interior spaces of our large homes.  

No. What is new is not our degree of exposure, but the extent to which it is voluntary - a choice taken by many millions to step out and preen in the open. A choice that wins them patronizing contempt from those who… like Rochelle. Gurstein… are waving their arms and shouting “look at me, instead!” from the page-screens of hifalutin intelligencia zines, not Instagram. This elitist contempt is richly expressed: 

“To get a sense of the sheer range of unconscious exhibitionism, we need only think of the popularity of reality TV shows, addiction-recovery memoirs, and cancer diaries. Then there are the banal but even more conspicuous varieties, like soaring, all-glass luxury apartment buildings and hotels in which inhabitants display themselves in all phases of their private lives to the casual glance of thousands of city walkers below. Or the incessant sound of people talking loudly—sometimes gossiping, sometimes crying—on their cell phones, broadcasting to total strangers the intimate details of their lives.”

To be clear, I agree that much of this modern self-exposure is both puerile and somewhat unwise. Though it does go way back, as she herself refers. 

“As (Henry) James put it in his description of the newspaperman in The Bostonians: “For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and everyone were everyone’s business.””

Professor Gurstein proceeds to erect a series of strawmen to knock down, like the notion that anyone of note today might actually, actually be saying “Why seek privacy; do you have something to hide?” 

Um, please cite one example of that cliché being uttered by anyone of significance? One example? Even just one? Oh, but the series of strawmen continues:

“It is no wonder, then, that the world we inhabit together feels ever more ugly, coarse, and trivial. When the boundary between public and private becomes as extremely porous as it is today, we lose far more than “that kingdom of the mind, that inner world of personal thought and feeling in which every man passes some time,” which would have been disastrous enough.”

In fact, the private individual has never had more sovereignty than in today’s west, wherein personal eccentricity is vouchsafed protection by both law and relentless Hollywood messages. Yes, we continue to reform, always in the same direction of more tolerance, not less. Again and again we find just one limitation that consistently is applied to check that expansion of individual sovereignty, one criterion - is there a victim? 

If your eccentricity is one that hampers the livelihood or eccentric freedom of others, then you face opprobrium.  And note: if my assertion makes you angry, because we do not live up to that image well enough, consider that your very reaction is an example! 

Your eagerness to make it more true is shared by millions. In truth by a majority of your neighbors.

Among her article's few moments of lucidity, Rochelle Gurstein asks: “How can we begin to think about protecting our private experiences and our common world from more and more brazen indifference to their inherent fragility? The first thing we need to recognize is that the law is no help.”

Here we agree. No, law won’t protect you from the tsunami of light, nor will whining, or commanding the tide to go back out. 

What does have a chance of helping individual humans maintain some degree of safety, sovereignty, and even a little privacy is exactly the thing that dour svengalis rail against… light itself. If average people are empowered to see all elites, enforcing MYOB or “Mind Your Own Business”, then they may have deterrence.

This is not theoretical. Everywhere in the West that light has poured, oppression gained stigma and eventually began to fade. It is the thing – the only thing – that works.

Oh, I know what’s going on in China. The Social Credit system is turning light into the enemy of eccentricity, or freedom, or diversity and accountability. It could have that effect here, too. Which is why it’s all the more urgent that we study the west’s immune system against oppression and conformity. Light can be the enemy of those things, if it empowers feudal elites and gossips to push us around, as in the villages of old.  

Or it can empower us to hold elites and busybodies accountable and hold them at bay. What matters is our shared value system. And the pivot could not be more clear:

If I am right about our value systems re: eccentricity and tolerance and MYOB, then we have a chance. If I am wrong, then what does Dr. Gurstein think she’s accomplishing with her jeremiads?

Will transparency be used that way?  Here, at last, I have some overlap with the writer – (disclosure: she and I have had tussles, before) -- because the choice will be ours and it will depend upon our “sensibilities” or values. 

“How can we revive those aspects of the reticent sensibility that we need in circumstances radically different from the world in which they originally emerged? What would be their new foundation? I am sorry to report that I find myself at a complete loss for an answer.”

Yes, yes. That much is truthful and clear. That admission of failed imagination may indeed be the first step on the road to wisdom. The next is admitting that some things have actually worked, in our recent past. And squinting to perceive what they were.

Surveillance: A Golden Age or Dark Days?

My friend and info-perceptive wiseman Peter Swire, who helped to formulate the post-Snowden NSA reforms issued by the Obama Administration, has a series of articles and white papers of interest to anyone who is serious about the core topic of our era.  First, he writes in Slate on The Golden Age of Surveillance: 

“In recent months, law enforcement, led by FBI Director James Comey, has waged war against the “going dark” problem — criminals using secure communications technologies, particularly encryption, to evade justice. Its solution to this problem is to encourage or require technology companies to build in back doors to allow the government to circumvent, say, encryption on your iPhone. But in reality, we are currently in a golden age of surveillance. The “going dark” argument should not be used as a reason to support back doors or other special access by law enforcement to encrypted communications.”  

I agree … only not in the way that he means.  Swire is speaking of legal and above-board means by which law enforcement agencies and other members of our Professional Protector Caste (PPC) can seek information they need, to do their jobs. Making back door access to encryption keys unnecessary.

 I would add that I never deemed it likely the government needs backdoors in order to see. Or rather, I would take odds that they already exist. The real purpose of such lavish public jeremiads by Comey and others -- demanding physical back doors and crypto keys that they'll never, realistically, be given -- may be to make others think there is a “going dark problem.”  

An unusual theory? Oh but I'm skeptical for good reason, having seen it all before – ever since the whole potemkin struggle over “clipper” in the early 1990s. It is blatantly plausible (and not sci fi) that there's more smoke than fire to this show.

== Back to the Swire Papers ==

Peter dials in even closer when he writes about “the declining half lives of secrets.”  Swire maintains that this time metric “is declining sharply for many intelligence activities as secrets that in the past may have been kept successfully for 25 years or more, are now exposed well before.”  

Cogently, he argues: “(that) means that “the front-page” test will become far more important to decision-makers. Even if a secret operation is initially successful, the expected costs of disclosure become higher as the average time to disclosure decreases.” 

This is a matter that I illustrated long ago, in my 1989 novel EARTH, wherein secrecy caching was seen rightly as a temporary and tactical measure, seldom useful beyond the couple of years that efficient law professionals would need, for legitimate investigations. Peter lays out the argument that intelligence officers and other PPC members need to adapt to this new era, when rapidity of information sharing and appraisal can be much more important than the convenience of locking secrets in boxes. I agree. (Though I have always made allowances for short term Tactical Secrecy.) 

He goes on to cite the decline in lifelong (loyal) employment in the Intelligence Community, which has in turn led to what I call the Henchman/T-cell Effect, in which contractors like Edward Snowden are drawn to violating secrecy strictures less by ideology or money or blackmail or any of the old lures, and more for reasons of either idealism or ego. (Generally some mix of the two.) While most members of the IC-PPC express rage at Edward Snowden, for example, 90%+ of Silicon Valley workers deem him to be a heroic whistle blower.  

“The gap between zero and over 90 percent is a sociological chasm,” says Swire. A chasm that the PPC ignores at great peril.

== The grinding process of reform ==

Peter’s third article may seem a bit self-serving, in which he calls passage of the USA FREEDOM Act, ending bulk collection, the biggest pro-privacy change to U.S. intelligence law since the original enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. 

To be clear, he was one of five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology,  who essentially wrote major aspects of the new reform law.  And while I do deem its work to have been an improvement – for example making the FISA Court less of a star chamber farce by including adversarial processes, at last -- it truly was only the beginning of needed reforms.  

(Noting, of course, that even these partial measures would never have been proposed by a Republican president.) 

What should we do next?  The reforms I'd seek are different from those sought by most privacy activists. Instead of prescribing utterly futile and absurd things like concealment, obfuscation, hiding, or forbidding elites from looking at us, I would emphasize new methods of supervision. Rather than the silly concept of trying blind our PPC, restrictions that will simply be bypassed, then removed the next time there's a scare or panic... let them see, while knowing they are thoroughly seen. 

Methods like IGUS -- the Inspector General of the United States --  would offer us the win-win, allowing our professional protectors to do their jobs while ensuring they are never without independent eyes, scrutinizing their overall behavior. Supervision-sousveillance has a chance of staunching any drift, preventing PPC watchdogs transforming into wolves. 

In contrast, “reforms” that try to forbid our public servants from looking are doomed, over the long run, to be futile, or much, much worse.  

This too is an important read.  Peter Swire is one of those special examples of a fairly common phenomenon – men and women who actually think and know a lot about the public policy issues that they ponder deeply.  I hope he will be a cabinet deputy-secretary soon. And continue to be one of those who listens.

== Transparency Miscellany ==

Another revered friend, Vint Cerf, writes about his latest worry: that a Digital Dark Age might descend for an entirely different reason! Because many of our important records will be inaccessible in the future, because we will no longer have the ability to access the digital media on which it is saved.  And then there’s this: Vint Cerf Wants Your Help Re-Imagining the Internet.

And...  You probably lived under a rock if you haven’t heard that a team of hackers recently released the stolen database of people registered with AshleyMadison.com, the adultery matchup site. The email database alone contains 36 million records. Among those records are 15,019 accounts using either a .mil or .gov email address, listed online... This is going to be interesting!

Call it an IQ sieve for public servants and other "adults."  Those who actually imagined that their participation in such a site would remain secret are probably not up to standards of basic intelligence we need especially in civil or military personnel. On the other hand… apparently AshleyMadison.com did no verification on the signup page. For example, I would imagine (and hope!) that some of those 44 whitehouse.gov accounts were phony. Phony acounts also seem like a good way to get people you don't like into trouble, if you suspect the list will become public at some point.

And... Keep on eye on this: Increased privatization of border security, with a massive surveillance web consisting of balloons and drones, cameras, motion sensors, biometrics and face recognition systems.

Potentially transformative… and in keeping with my own pleas to emphasize technology as a great equalizer. Campaign Zero, an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter protests, has released their prescription for reducing police violence. It includes a call for body cameras, increased "witness" filming of police activities, and a nationwide implementation of a Colorado state law that allows citizens to sue police departments for confiscating or destroying video evidence. 

Setting an example for innovative, 21^st Century technique, investigative journalist Bryan Christy embedded fake elephant tusks with specially designed tracking devices. "China is the biggest consumer of illegal ivory.” Surprise surprise.  Some of you will recall a special, heroic scene about this, in EARTH.