Schneier on Security

brasscount • October 10, 2008 4:50 PM

@Bill Clinton

As a former police officer, I can only say, fie to the lawmakers, and judges who allow this type of activity to occur.

Law enforcement is by its very nature consumptive. It consumes every law and uses it as a means to control the populace. That is its nature. Community Policing ensures that law enforcement remains a part of the community that it controls, not apart from it. That generally creates a control over law enforcement that keeps it from becoming a tyrannical force.

However, when laws are written that require officers of the law to take action that violate the rights of the subject, then those law enforcement officers will violate the rights of the subject. It is their role to enforce the law, fairly, and impartially. They are not authorized to make value judgements. The lawmakers write the laws, and the law enforcement officers enforce them. Regardless of how evil, wrongheaded, or horrible the law may be. Some officers may draw the line and leave law enforcement, rather than enforce an unjust law. Most will not, however.

The courts will then decide whether the law enforcement officer’s action was correct, and whether the law violates the rights of the citizens. The courts are both a part of the community and apart from it, however. They are not held accountable for their actions, except where the judge is elected, and in many places, like Virginia, they are not governed by popularity. If the judge finds no wrong, then there is no wrong.

So, if judges never overturn unjust laws, and lawmakers continue to create unjust laws, and law enforcement continues to enforce unjust laws, eventually we live in an unjust society. It is this that this board is concerned with, because we want to live in the America of Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. We want to believe in Common Sense as defined by Thomas Paine.

We also want to live without fear of the people who are supposed to be protecting us.

But when a normal person can have their right to property abrogated because Target corporation wants to build on the plot that the citizen owns, and the government can and has chosen to use eminent domani to remove the property of the private citizen, we must fear our government.

And when a normal person is no longer secure in their property or papers, because the government can and has given itself the administrative authority (not subject to congressional oversight) to search the laptop computer of a traveller at the border without a warrant, even if that traveller is a citizen, we must fear our government.

And when a citizen is no longer guaranteed his liberty, because the government can label him an enemy combatant, and hold him without the right to an attorney or a trial of his peers, then we must fear our government.

I am not afraid of terrorists anymore. They can kill some of us in relatively small numbers. I am afraid of my government, for it can take from me my right to life, liberty and property without due process of law. And this is supposed to be America. Where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights guarantee those things. Slowly, they are being stripped away. I can run for office, but since I have written this post, or told that only those with a reason to be afraid of their government are, and those people all are criminals.

So, “Mr. Clinton,” I ask you, what about fearing the absolute power of increasingly absolutist government makes me a despiser of my country? I love my country precisely because of those things that are being taken away, one by precious one.