More on your authoritarian media….

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Welch ran off a list of newspaper editorial boards who are lining up behind TSA. The headline to this post is the actual headline from the L. A. Times’ editorial. Given such cowardice about defending civil liberties in the face of hysterical hand-wringing about national security, I was going to post a snarky comment about how the L.A. Times would probably have told Japanese-Americans to “shut up and report to your internment camp” back in 1942, too.

Then I did some Googling, and discovered that the paper pretty much did exactly that. As did a number of other papers.

. . . looks at Eleanor Odom, a Georgia prosecutor who pulled a ridiculous stunt during a 2007 murder trial.

So far, not only has she not been disciplined in any way, the stunt appears to have won her a regular commentator slot on Nancy Grace’s show. She’s also applying to become a judge.

Defenders of the TSA nudie scanners and enhanced pat-downs keep pointing to public opinion polls showing strong support for the new measures. Nate Silver explains that expressing support to pollsters is one thing, bearing that support out in deciding whether or not to fly is something else.

In the past, more cumbersome security procedures have had deleterious effects on passenger demand. A study by three professors at Cornell University found, for instance, that when the T.S.A. began to require checked baggage to be screened in late 2002, it reduced overall passenger traffic by about 6 percent. (You can actually see these effects a bit when looking at the air traffic statistics: passenger traffic on U.S.-based airlines dropped by about 6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2003 — greater than the usual seasonal variance — even though the economy was recovering and travelers were starting to get over the fear brought on by the Sept. 11 attacks.)

More stringent security procedures, in essence, function as a tax upon air travel, and produce a corresponding deadweight loss.

And not just economic loss. Opting to drive instead of to fly is to opt for a more dangerous form of transportation.

According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.

If the TSA procedures were nabbing terrorists at a rate suggesting they were preventing anywhere near that many air attack deaths, they might have an argument for the procedures. But there’s no evidence for that.

This guy created it.

Louisville, Kentucky.

• TSA pat-down leaves bladder cancer patient soaked in his own urine.
• Marijuana may stop the spread of breast cancer.
• Obama says he supports new TSA security measures.
• Defenestration: The Movie.
• UN vote gives the okay for member countries to execute gay people.
• Classism and the Four Loko ban.
• More unintended consequences from ObamaCare.

This story has been making its way around the Internet this weekend, I guess because of the freak show factor. Me, I think it’s the saddest, most poignant manifestation of the malevolence of vice laws that I’ve seen in quite a long time.

I hope Miami residents sleep safer knowing their tax dollars were spent to prevent this poor guy from getting laid.

• NYPD tickets woman for not having her dogs’ “paperwork” with her while she was out walking them. Between this and the chess raids last week, I’m starting to think New York has run out of black people for the cops to stop and frisk.
• TSA agents hate doing the pat-downs? Makes sense. I’m sure they’re not fond of being vilified, either.
• Good piece from Russia Today on former DHS Sec. Michael Chertoff’s media shilling for the scanners, note that the major newspapers identify him as the former DHS chief, not as a paid lobbyist for one of the companies that manufactures the machines.
• Virginia Supreme Court turns down Ryan Frederick’s appeal.
• This is pretty bizarre.
• Yes, this is a huge part of the problem. And it’s probably why all those Senators expressed such solidarity with TSA last week. They never have to endure the theater.
• Police union succeeds in having hearings on questionable uses of force closed to the public. Fun experiment: Next time you see a lefty defend teachers unions, substitute “police union” and see if they’re willing to make the same arguments. The procedure could probably be reversed for your favorite law-and-order conservative.

Never really got into Futurama, but someone linked to this in the Hit & Run comments. Pretty great.

Two more data points for my theory that the legacy media aren’t liberal, they’re just authoritarian.

First, while covering this week’s Senate TSA hearings, Time Washington correspondent Alex Altman rises above the the fray, and bravely throws cold water on all you shrill anti-TSA types. Here’s his lede:

Some dramas seem tailor-made for the Internet’s ephemeral obsessions, and the kerfuffle over the Transportation Security Administration’s new airport screening procedures is a perfect example. It’s got all the ingredients to feed a media circus: a whiff of government overreach, children prodded to tears, bold push-back, splashy protests, federal employees apparently frisking nuns–an irresistible  recipe seasoned by the immediacy of next week’s Thanksgiving travel crunch.

Altman then goes on to debunk all this infantile Internet screaming by citing a poorly-worded public opinion poll showing support for x-ray scanners, and helpfully pointing out that members of no less an esteemed, august institution than the U.S. Senate expressed solidarity with the TSA.

Well. I guess we stand corrected, then.

Altman doesn’t really get into whether these invasive new measures will actually make flying any safer, or whether the x-ray machines themselves are safe for passengers (where’s that damned Precautionary Principle when you need it?). No, his evidence that all this talk about the government abrogating our rights in the name of security theater is mere “drama”, “tailor-made for the Internet’s ephemeral obsessions” is a series of quotes saying as much from . . . members of the government.

It’s especially rich to see this in Time, a magazine with a long history of ginning up hysteria over the likes of Pokemon, satanic cults, dirty words, Internet porn, and has never met a faddish new drug that wasn’t just as bad as heroin. Of course, Time’s attempts to gin up moral panic have always at root been about people exercising their personal freedom in ways Time writers and editors find objectionable; the stories are always wrapped in urgent we must do something appeals for government to protect people from themselves. The TSA backlash is about government violating personal freedom. So of course now is the hour for a Time correspondent to step up all sober-minded like to call foul on the protests.

The other example comes from Glenn Greenwald, who had a bizarre exchange with NPR National Security Correspondent Dina Temple-Raston over the Obama administration’s plan to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, and, more broadly, its assertion that it has the power to assassinate American citizens without trial, oversight, or even letting anyone know it happened. You can watch video of the exchange at the link, but here’s a summary from The American Prospect‘s Adam Serwer:

It’s really an amazing exchange — Temple-Raston snaps at Greenwald, asking him, “Isn’t it possible that I’ve seen something you haven’t seen?” When asked about the evidence of al-Awlaki’s operational role in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, she smugly tells him that “he doesn’t do national security for a living.”

As Serwer explains, the point here isn’t whether al-Awlaki is a good person, though let’s not forget that we were repeatedly told that only the “worst of the worst” were housed at Gitmo. The issue is whether the executive can be trusted with this sort of power, not just with al-Awlaki, but in the future.

There’s no more important function of the press than government watchdog. Whether it’s to protect or curry favor with official sources, preserve access, or just a jones for authority and the cult of expertise, the legacy media too often comes off as government’s biggest fan. And it’s a problem that transcends left-right ideology.

Sorry it’s been down.

I guess the plug-in I’ve been using isn’t compatible with the most recent WordPress upgrade.

Looking into possible alternatives.

Photo via the Denver Post.

• Conservatives’ fondness for execution without trial.
• James O’Keefe reaches new depths of despicableness. Worse, he’s spawning imitators.
• Meanwhile, Balloon Juice reaches new depths of libertarian-bashing hackery. It’s probably better to first read Julian Sanchez’s thoughtful post before reading the Balloon Juice reaction, which is really the intellectual equivalent of sitting in the back of the room and flinging spitballs. Note that in the comments DougJ, the post’s author, acknowledges that maybe Julian does good work, “but I just can’t support anything to do with the Koch brothers anymore.” How mature. At least he got the headline right.
• The NYPD raids . . . men playing chess in a city park.
• New Jersey town bans sleeping in public.
• Jacob Sullum has more on the silencing of Siobhan Reynolds.
• The Medal of Honor should honor Jesus by celebrating soldiers who kill lots of people. Or something like that.
• More fun with iPhone autocorrect.

“Acid Tongue,” by Jenny Lewis.

Columbia, Missouri.

You serve one of the wealthiest, best educated counties in America.

And this is your website.

“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.”

– Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).

Perhaps the Citizens United hating hysterics at MSNBC will now start to see how easy it is for politicians to jump from banning critical campaign ads to openly pining for the ability to censor any and all of their critics, and with the same bullshit justifications—improving poltiical discourse and restoring faith in government.

Perhaps. But probably not.

• ACLU gets victory in Annapolis case where authorities were blacklisting undesirables from stepping foot into public housing.
• This explains a lot about Steelers’ fans.
• I think there should be more acts of publicly declaring someone a scoundrel.
• I normally find Congress’ habit of declaring various national days of observance to be silly, but I think I’d support this one, even though I didn’t participate this year.
• I’m all for public corruption investigations, but it’s telling that despite a long history of abuse and misuse of force, the feds never (to my knowledge) arrested any Prince George’s County cops for civil rights violations. It took an untaxed cigarette and alcohol operation (i.e. denying the government tax dollars) to bring actual indictments.
• Feds want more Internet-related wiretap powers.
• What a stupid, self-indulgent way to use the pardon power. To be fair, it was Crist who pardoned Richard Paey. But that ought to demonstrate to Crist that there are more worthy ways for an outgoing governor to use the power than proving to a dead rock star that Crist is his biggest fan. Sadly, most governors use the power like this, by which I mean in a way that makes it all about them.

Columbia, Missouri.

Tonight at 9:20pm ET on NRA Radio, I’ll be discussing my column about New Jersey resident Brian Aitken, currently serving a seven year prison sentence for (not really) violating the state’s gun laws.

Tune in to Sirius 144, XM 166, or NRANews.com to hear the interview.

Columbia, Missouri.

• Ridiculous Obama criticism of the week.
• ObamaCare and the war on drugs.
• Arizonans angry about construction of a mosque . . . that’s actually a church.
• I’ll never understand the right’s obsession with Google’s holiday doodles.
• Animated map of European history.
• So why is TSA insisting on the nudie scanners despite public backlash and a GAO report stating that they probably wouldn’t have prevented the sort of attempted bombing they were implemented to prevent? Might have something to do with the fact that former Capitol Hill Staffers, DHS brass, and former DHS Sec. Michael Chertoff are lobbying for the companies that make them.

Columbia, Missouri.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a SWAT raid on New Haven nightclub. The raid was for suspected underage drinking. In addition to the obvious overkill show of force, police also threatened and allegedly arrested a Quinnipiac University student for attempting to record the raid with their cell phones (the police say the student was arrested for assaulting officers and disrupting the raid). This was a big story in New Haven, and it prompted a statement from both the mayor and the chief of police affirming that it is perfectly legal to record on-duty cops in New Haven.

At about the same time, another man was arrested in New Haven for recording the cops. On September 25, Luis Luna was arrested for filming an arrest outside of a New Haven bar with his cell phone. Officially, Luna was charged with interfering with police, but the police report itself specifically says that Luna was arrested for “filming”, and makes no mention of him interfering with the arrest in any other way. (You can read the report here [PDF].)

The report also says that Luna’s arrest was ordered not by a rank-and-file cop, but by Assistant Chief Ariel Melendez, as in the assistant chief of the New Haven Police Department. According to the New Haven Independent, when Luna got his phone back, the arrest video had been deleted. His phone did, however, include the photo at right, which looks to be an image mistakenly captured while the cops were fiddling with Luna’s phone.

After nightclub incidents made headlines, New Haven Police Chief Frank Limon assured the local media that he told his officers, “Assume you’re being videotaped all the time when you’re out there.” And here’s what New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said on October 4 in response to the nightclub raid:

This is America. Anyone can film anytime they want, including you, me and the PD while on duty. It is not my understanding that this is why the QU student was arrested.

Perhaps not. But it is why Luis Luna was arrested. And on October 8, four days after DeStefano unequivocally affirmed the legality of recording on-duty cops, Luna appeared in court to answer the charge. Here’s what happened next:

“I approached the prosecutor and he said they would drop my charges and that I would have to pay a fine for creating a public disturbance,” Luna said. Luna said he thought to himself that he shouldn’t have to pay anything, that he hadn’t done anything wrong. But the prosecutor told him he probably wouldn’t qualify for a public defender, Luna said. He said when he asked where he might find a lawyer, he was referred to the yellow pages.

Without the time or money to fight the case, Luna decided to agree to the deal. He was charged with the lesser crime of creating a public disturbance.

When the judge asked if he was guilty, he said no, Luna recalled. “The judge explained I have to plead guilty,” he said. “At that moment when I said I’m guilty, I felt like I was going against myself.”

If, according to DeStefano, “[a]nyone can film anytime they want, including you, me and the PD while on duty,” why was Luna arrested, charged, and convicted for doing precisely that?

If the law in New Haven is as clear as DeStefano makes it out to be, not only should Luna have never been arrested, but in ordering the arrest, Assistant Chief Melendez clearly violated Luna’s civil rights—and he, of all people, should have known as much. New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington (or whatever subordinate handled the case) also should have known that carrying out the prosecution of Luna was also a violation of Luna’s rights. Finally, the cop or cops who deleted the video on Luna’s phone destroyed evidence, of both the arrest Luna was filming and of the illegal arrest of Luis Luna himself.

So who will be punished? Will the cops who deleted the video face criminal charges, as any citizen who destroys evidence of unlawful activity likely would? Will they be charged for destroying Melendez’s property? Will Melendez be disciplined for ordering an arrest that was, very clearly, a violation of New Haven law and Luis Luna’s civil rights?

Here’s the thing: It’s all well and good for Mayor DeStefano to state that it is perfectly legal for citizens to record on-duty cops in New Haven. But if New Haven police are permitted to arrest and jail—and if prosecutors are permitted to charge and convict—citizens for doing precisely that, it pretty clearly isn’t legal, by any definition of the word.

It’s also about damned time that cops who delete citizen-shot video that may incriminate them or their colleagues get the same punishment a citizen would get for doing the same thing. They can’t play dumb with the “Gosh, if the videos aren’t there, you must have never taken them” excuse this time. The police report clearly states that Luna was arrested for “taking pictures” and “filming”. The bumbling cops then inadvertently provided photo evidence of their tampering with Luna’s phone. Luna should take the phone in to see if the videos can be recovered, and if it can be discerned when they were deleted.

As it stands, the only person to suffer any consequences in Luna’s case is Luna, the one party who, according to the mayor and chief of police, didn’t do anything wrong.

Just received this email from the father of Brian Aitken, the guy I wrote about in my column today. He gave me permission to publish it.

Dear Mr. Balko,

Thank you for your article today about my son, Brian.

As a parent, I could almost always clear up a misunderstanding or transgression by one of my children with a phone call to another parent… a coach… or a guidance counsellor.

But who do you call when people within the legal system decide in-private that your child is guilty… and then put on a make-believe show that gives the illusion of a fair trial? It’s been an insane journey.

I must confess that I have never read your magazine before today, but now that I have, I am a new subscriber… it strikes me as a refreshing forum for logic and reason.

Thank you again,

Larry Aitken

Another data point for my theory that libertarianism happens to people.