We're Innocent When We Rant

I stole that title (and modified it a bit) from Tom Waits, and I hope he doesn't get all mad at me again, because I just got over the last time. OK, then.

So, if you read my last entry, I was in Charlotte and bored. Which, I still am. But now it is several hours later and I have consumed beer. Well, two bottles. I am a lightweight. That's probably good.

My coworker and I dined at the "Omaha Steakhouse" which is across the street from the La Quinta Inn where we're staying tonight. I had a Sirloin that was mighty good, but I waited too long to eat the mashed potatoes and they became a solid block of some sort of solid blocky thing. Almost no effort to make it go airborne, is what.

So my sister called me the other night, just checking to say hello. Or maybe she wanted something. With my family, I am never sure. She accused me of once saying that my family was stupid or evil or something, because I complained in this blog that they continue to send me those emails warning me about the evils of Doctor Pepper, or informing me that if I forward this email to six of my closest friends, Bill Gates will give me his favorite car as compensation for having them kick my butt for spamming them or something. Well, she's not the one who does it, but I've got a few familial members who do persist in that sort of thing. Although, come to think about it, I haven't heard from them in awhile. Egads, maybe I did say something awful about my family. I'm sorry, family! None of you are stupid. I'm the stupid one, because getting your family mad at you is not a good thing, it pretty much sucks.

Anyway, my sister wanted me to post something on my blog for her coworkers up there in North Dakota, which apparently they read this from time to time and find it amusing for some reason. She said she got into some kind of heated debate over fingerprinting. That's right, those unique little identifiers that ever buddy with fingers has. Some of her coworkers apparently feel that ever buddy should just march on down to the local police department and put their fingerprints on file with the police. And why not? If they've done nothing wrong, they've nothing to hide, right? Solve a lot of crimes, is what. And no harm done to the average citizen.

Really? Well, I have to agree with my sister and take the opposing viewpoint here. My fingerprints are mine. That is, they are unique to me, they're attached to the ends of my fingers. They belong to me, as it were. Yes, I leave them ever where, but that's a side-effect of having epidermis, more or less. And yes, if I'm sitting in a smoky bar with an undercover agent for the FBI and a mastermind in the ways of espianage, and he picks up a glass I've used to drink highballs in and sends it to the lab for analysis, they can get my fingerprints, sure enough. But that's property I've abandoned, eh? Once I put my trash out at the curb, the police can paw through it if they want to. Why they'd want to, I have no idea, but still.

In the meantime, my fingerprints are mine. The government may not have them voluntarily under any circumstances.

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone."

-Justice Louis D. Brandeis

The right to privacy itself is built on this simple building block - that we all have the right to be left alone. Privacy itself means that all that conveys meaning about me is my possession, to be given out or withheld as I wish. There are limits. For example, if I go out in public, I may be photographed. In this case, I have chosen to go out in public - I did not have to do so, and in fact, if I wished not to be photographed, I had only to remain inside my house like Howard Hughes.

Privacy also means to be secure in my property and my possessions. Few things are more personal to me than my fingerprints, which they say are unique in all the world. Well, I've got some nasty old skivvies that are pretty unique, but let's not go there, this here is a family blog.

Now let's take another look at that argument about giving up one's fingerprints voluntarily. If we have done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. Is that right?

Once upon a time, it was legal to drink alcohol in this country. Then, it was illegal. Then, it was legal again. During the time it was illegal, if your fingerprints could have been found on a beer bottle (presuming they had that technology at the time and cared to use it for this), the police could have arrested you and convicted you of violating the law. That was a very unpopular law. How would you have come down? Would you have given up a glass of wine with dinner, a beer after a barbecue? Or would you have been one of that nation of scofflaws who continued to drink?

Let's take it a little farther. Let's install a device in your car that will report to the police any time you speed. If you don't speed, you have nothing to fear, right? What about a device that notes when you do a rolling stop at a stop sign or red light. And we're not going to install it in a traffic light, we're going to install it in your car. Your car will inform on your to the police if you break any laws. You ok with that? How long will you have your license, do you suppose? And assuming you're some kind of goody-two-shoes, what about the 90% of your coworkers who will soon lose their licenses and not be able to come to work because they can't drive anymore and the public transportation system can't handle all of them at once? Say bye-bye to your nice economy, to the company you work for, to your job.

And what about laws that haven't been thought up yet? It was once legal in the USA to own machine guns. Not anymore, that law was changed in the 1930's. We're seeing more and more laws against things that used to be legal - I think we can all take a guess and agree that someday fairly soon, smoking tobacco will become illegal. You a smoker? How do you like the idea that your fingerprints on a cigarette butt might send you to jail? I'm just using this as an example, folks. If you think 'That could never happen' you might want to think again - lots of things become illegal over time and from the perspective of the person living when it was legal - they would have thought the very idea preposterous. Why on earth would the government ban cocaine in patent medicines, the stuff is good for you, right?

Then you've got the whole issue of state's rights. This USA is a union of states. The whole idea was that the federal government was supposed to be somewhat weak, given only enough power by the states that formed it so that it could raise an army and treat with foreign nations with one voice. That and regulate interstate commerce, which turned into a real nightmare, but we don't have to go there now. So you may have heard - there is no such federal crime as 'murder'. That's a state issue, and every state defines it differently. It may not seem like it now, but the various and several US states were supposed to be essentially little sovereign nations of their own - they just agreed to have a caretaker-type government over them to keep one state from doing things like leaving the union or imposing cross-state taxes, or closing borders, etc. So what in the world would the federal government be doing collecting fingerprints for anyway?

OK, winding down now - as it happens, you fingerprint happy folks are in luck anyway. You already have your index fingerprint on file if you have a driver's license in most states. And if you've ever been in the military, they've got your fingerprints on file. And so too with most federal licenses, like gun dealers and so on. The issue is not really the right to collect fingerprints anymore - I may not like it, but that battle's mostly over. The battle now is over the right of the federal government to collect them up and store them in a cross-referenced database that any law-enforcement agency can examine.

Paranoid I am. Fair enough. But mark my words - best intentions aside - if you give the federal government free reign to collect, store, and search private information on all American citizens in one massive database, the day will come when not the kind of crooks you imagine will be getting arrested. It will be your neighbor for checking out a book from the library that is on the now-restricted list. It will be a teacher who said something unapproved where the microphone in her classroom could hear it. It will be something derogatory you said about an elected official into a telephone or via an email message to a friend in an unguarded moment.

And if you don't believe me - tell me this. NAME ONE TIME (just one) when the federal government has instituted new regulations making a given status or action a crime and then later removed it voluntarily. Even prohibition had to be removed by the states. The federal government does not give power back to the people. EVER. Keep giving up your rights voluntarily, because "you have nothing to hide." Remember that when they come for you or your children's children.

Now, getting back to the serious issues at hand - on my woozy way back from the Omaha Steak House, I recall my coworker asking me something about Hilary Clinton. I started channeling my late father, with a statement about the futility of gun control, suggesting instead that the government needs to start giving away guns and ammunition to citizens, and ended up by nearly shouting that "Hilary Clinton is not just wrong, she's evil." I think I pantomimed horns on the top of my head and ran around the street yelling "It takes a village to raise an idiot" or something like that.

So that evening ended well.

I anticipate a quiet ride back to Wilson tomorrow.

Peace Out,

Wiggy