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Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:01:28 -0400 From: "Aaron Lukas" <aaronl at cato.org> To: <declan at well.com> Subject: Nader's double standard on privacy
Declan:
Ralph Nader declares that "Your personal information is your personal property." If that's true, his own organizations are engaging in "theft" and he doesn't seem to mind. For more on Nader's hypocrisy, See my article from yesterday's National Review Online: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lukas062701.shtml
I wish I'd had his latest privacy screed when I worte it!
Cheers, Aaron
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lukas062701.shtml
Respect Us! (Or Else) The anti-trade left will stoop to anything. By Aaron Lukas, an analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies June 27, 2001 11:20 a.m. The trouble with anti-trade activism is, as you may have noticed, the anti-trade activists. They just can't seem to shake the image of window-smashing radicalism that has dominated television coverage from Seattle to Quebec City. Such pictures have led to a general public perception that the activists will go to any length to advance their menagerie of retrograde causes. No tactic — with the possible exception of careful analysis and reasoned discourse — is out-of-bounds. "Doing whatever it takes," as one prominent protester in Quebec City said, means that vandalism, violence, and harassment are acceptable behavior for the Black Blockheads and Ruckus-Societarians of the world. But such nastiness, we're inevitably told, is limited to small groups of rascally anarchists. (By the way, am I the only one who thinks that people who embrace tariffs and an industrial policy haven't fully grasped what the word "anarchist" means?) The "vast majority" of globalization's critics are respectable, thoughtful, peace-loving pillars of society. They may understand the "frustration" that drives the actions of the fringe, but they certainly don't condone their antics. "Kids will be kids," they say, "We'd like to stop them, but there's nothing we can do!" Well, here's a thought: The "respectable" groups might start by not actively encouraging criminal behavior. For example, an e-mail from Margrete Strand Rangnes, the field director for Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, recently appeared in my in box. Trade Watch is another fine organization brought to us by the Left's patron saint, Ralph Nader, and its goal is basically to dismantle the international economy. In furtherance of that goal, Ms. Rangnes decided to distribute the personal contact information for the steering committee members of USTrade, a business coalition that supports open trade and the passage of trade promotion authority for the president. The names and contact information were collected by a member of the Sierra Student Coalition, the student-run arm of the Sierra Club — another supposedly reputable operation. A Sierra operative "disguising himself as an elite," the e-mail reports, "infiltrated the [USTrade] meeting and emerged with important documents." Public Citizen clearly has no qualm with embracing a "diversity of tactics" in its war against the freedom to trade. While the personal information in its e-mail is offered "only as a public service," the purpose of distributing it is spelled out for those who don't take the hint: "A little birdie has told us that this list could be used to send large numbers of e-mails, faxes, and phone calls to these corporate free-traders." The message concludes with a plea not to "let those wealthy white men from USTrade win this fight!" (Of course, over a third of the names appear to be women, and likely no one on the list is as wealthy as Nader himself.) So, Public Citizen thinks it's acceptable to distribute material encouraging the harassment of specific private individuals. Bravo. Very grown-up, very respectable. Remember, we're not talking about elected representatives here. There wouldn't be anything wrong with Public Citizen and the Sierra Club exhorting their minions — uh, members — to harass congressmen with phone calls and faxes. Listening to complaints is a politician's job. We pay them to take that kind of flak. But prank-calling private citizens to punish them for their political views is another matter entirely. Not that prank-calling isn't fun. I got a huge kick out of dialing random numbers from the phone book
when I was ten. ("Ima Hogg? You've just won a year's supply of pork rinds!") Obviously the anti-globalization folks have some maturing to do. "We could tell who they were at the meeting," jokes Caterpillar's Bill Lane, a member of USTrade and one of the targets of the harassment campaign. "They were drinking Starbucks coffee and brought in their own McDonalds." Lane isn't surprised by the e-mail, and sees it as a desperation tactic. "I think they were a little overwhelmed at the number of people that were there," he told me. Desperation or not, the spectacle of supposedly responsible adults encouraging juvenile behavior is just downright sad. But it's to be expected, really, from people who think tearing down traffic signs or chaining yourself to an oil tanker, as activists did during President Bush's recent trip to Europe, is acceptable behavior. Speaking of Europe, it's interesting to note that the Public Citizen e-mail is illegal under the European Union's Data Privacy Directive. That law forbids the dissemination of personal information over the Internet without the subject's consent. I wonder if the European recipients of this list realize that they're trafficking in forbidden data? The anti-globalization left demands that people take it seriously, but that's hard to do when confronted by a PR strategy that vacillates between tantrums and pranks. I suppose with no facts on their side, that's the best the activists can do.
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Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 08:57:38 -0700 From: lizard <lizard at mrlizard.com> To: declan at well.com CC: politech at politechbot.com, excalibur25 at juno.com Subject: Re: FC: Ralph Nader demands more privacy regulations: Opt-out notenough
> Source: PrivacyRightsNow!
> http://www.privacyrightsnow.com/
>
> Opt-Out for Your Privacy
>
> By Ralph Nader
> June 21, 2001
> Your personal information is your personal property.
But since Nader is a socialist, and socialists believe that 'property is theft', he should be applauding the actions of the corporations! After all, as he himself as noted, corporations are de facto governments, and, under socialism, all personal property is seized by the government. Thus, the current corporate data collection schemes are simply socialism in action -- property taken by the government.
So why does he object?
(It always amazes me how the leftist of the lefties become ardent defenders of private property and individualism once it's their own ox being gored -- or socialized.)
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From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavitt at hotmail.com> To: declan at well.com Subject: Re: FC: Ralph Nader demands more privacy regulations: Opt-out not enough Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:10:53 -0700
Well, I'm certainly going to be sending in *my* opt-out notice ... I was wondering why I suddenly got this, guess now I know.
My immediate reaction was, "How nice. I wish they were required to do an 'opt-in', like all of us in the on-line world." (and I mean, all of us) ... off-line companies an unfair advantage over their on-line competitors when it comes to gathering and marketing customer information.
Off-line corporate America could easily do something similar to the little checkboxes on each form that most on-line companies include - of course, this would result in a significant decrease in the amount of postal spam we all receive, and the level of information they can assemble on us without our consent - so it won't happen.
In a sense, if you think about it, we owe the pioneering spammers a huge debt: their obnoxious behavior forced the "opt-in" standard upon the on-line world - without it, we'd probably still have the same pathetically weak information distribution regulations that off-line companies have.
Of course, of the dozens and dozens of companies who have my information in one form or another, an insurance company I use is the only one who has sent me anything so far, thus it would seem that compliance and/or the number of companies affected, is pretty weak.
I'll give my insurance company this: the notice was clear, and sent separately from my bill. I intended to send it in, even before I saw this note... reading the fine print, the opt-out option is as full of holes as Swiss-cheese, so I don't regard it as counting for much, but anything to stem the flow of crap into my mailbox is welcome.
Regards, Thomas Leavitt
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