WASHINGTON, May 13 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the second of several wrap-ups for May 13. Contents: Iraq war and the media; technology, privacy and law enforcement.
The Reason Foundation
LOS ANGELES -- Gulf of misunderstanding: what this war says about the state of the media
By Nick Gillespie
Back during the first Gulf War, most of us got our news from the grimy, black and white pages of daily newspapers and from safari-jacket-sporting broadcast bobbleheads on ABC, CBS, and NBC (only the grim visages of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw could have made a "Scud Stud" out of the likes of itinerant correspondent Arthur Kent).
Established in 1980 yet still earning its cub reporter stripes 10 years later, the (relatively) new kid on the block was Ted Turner's CNN, whose live-from-Baghdad reports circumvented the Pentagon's info clampdown and whose 24/7 coverage rewrote the rule book on how to cover war.
This time around, not only has Saddam Hussein's self-glorifying statuary been dragged to the ground, so has much of the media establishment. Ted Turner is an also-ran as a media mogul and the trailblazing news network he founded is basic cable's equivalent of your father's Oldsmobile. Even before but especially during the new war, CNN has been thoroughly smoked in the ratings by the six-year-old Fox News Channel, whose relentless "fair and balanced" mantra, delivered with a knowing wink and a smile, amply proves that irony survived the Sept. 11 attacks in fine form.
Another outlet that wasn't around for Gulf War I, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, routinely delivers reports that are as fanciful as anything in The Arabian Nights -- and highly useful as supplements to Western media sources. Other news channels, both foreign and domestic, add yet more to the mix.
Peter and Dan and Tom are still around, of course. They're older, wiser, and richer than ever -- and watched by fewer and fewer people. Broadcast news audiences have declined by at least one-third during the past decade, leaving us all to wonder whether street thugs nowadays would even bother insisting that Dan Rather finally -- finally! -- tell us all about the frequency.
Thanks to the World Wide Web -- still a year away from going live when U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in 1991 -- we can supplement whatever we find in the now-color-filled major U.S. dailies with virtually every newspaper in the world, from established press organs such as Le Monde and the London Times to truly alternative rags such as The People's Korea, which promotes the greater glory of the Dear Leader better known as Kim Jong Il (and if you can't read a paper's language, a translation site is only a click away).
On top of the exponentially larger cyber-newsstand at our fingertips, whole new forms of participatory journalism have come into existence between Gulf wars, perhaps none more striking with regard to Operation Iraqi Freedom than Salam Pax's pseudonymous, haunting (and possibly faked) Baghdad-based blog at http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/.
We've got news and opinions galore coming out of our ears -- and our TVs, our radios, and our computers. Yet in a world so flush with proliferating information sources and media-based creative destruction, in a world overflowing with more and different voices (big and small, smart and dumb) than ever before, it's comforting to know that some things never change.
Hence, just as Saddam's statues were being dragged through the streets of Baghdad and that news was being reported, critiqued, and discussed in more ways than have ever been possible in all of human history, alarums were being sounded that what we really need in the United States is stricter regulation of media.
Speaking at April's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, Barry Diller, the former poobah who oversaw Universal Studios TV production unit, solemnly intoned that, "The big four networks have in fact reconstituted themselves into the oligopoly that the FCC originally set out to curb in the 1960s."
Never mind that the big three networks became the big four under the very "deregulation" Diller assailed. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal report, he insisted, "We need more regulation, not less."
Maybe Diller and his broadcaster pals need more regulation. But if the media world is any indication -- and it is -- the rest of us don't.
(Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.)
LOS ANGELES -- Eyes in the sky: technology and privacy, fighting it out
By Brian Doherty
The Washington State Supreme Court will soon be deciding if cops in that state need a warrant to track suspects with global positioning satellite, or GPS devices. The question arises from a particularly heinous case where a man murdered his own 9-year-old daughter. Using GPS, the cops were able to trail him conveniently as he returned to gussy up the site where he buried her corpse.
The cops are arguing -- and lower courts have already agreed -- that in principle this is no different than just following him around to see where he's going, which is perfectly legal without a warrant now. But Doug Klunder, an attorney who filed a brief in this case on behalf of the Washington State American Civil Liberties Union, isn't convinced; he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that "there's just something that feels more underhanded about it."
In old cop shows, savvy private eyes and crooks had to master the art of figuring out who is tailing them and who might just happen to be going their way. Maybe scanning your vehicles for GPS implants (and I imagine more and better techniques for doing so will arise and evolve in lockstep with the GPS trackers themselves) will just have to become something that those who really care about their privacy will learn to do. (And why couldn't you successfully argue that the act of placing the device on your car is a trespass, illegal without a warrant?)
In a coming world rife with radio frequency ID devices, which can keep track of where we are through what products we bought or have on us, what we can easily keep private will become more and more limited.
Technological advances can make principles seem less important than our delicate sense of underhandedness. Sometimes the law changes to recognize this, as in Katz v. United States, the 1967 Supreme Court case that recognized that even if personal property had not been trespassed on, one's privacy interest could still be violated by modern audio surveillance techniques. Though the decision didn't stress the technological aspect so much as considerations of "what (someone) seeks to preserve as private, even in areas accessible to the public," it is a sign that the law's widening ability to intrude and gather information can have legal significance.
Technological advancements have made it so much harder to keep information about ourselves to ourselves that some visionaries like science fiction writer David Brin think that we should readjust our attitudes and learn to appreciate the wonders of a completely open society, with eyes looking not just top-down but bottom-up. Openness and information flow, not secrecy, Brin argues, have been and can remain the key strategies that fortify our quite wealthy and quite free Western society.
Certainly, the particular circumstances of this unpleasant case fairly beg supporters of a GPS free-for-all to bring up that ancient battle cry of the nosy: "Only the guilty have reason to fear!"
As Klunder's comment noted, many of us who haven't murdered our daughters would still feel uneasy or violated by the notion of having all our movements tracked by computerized GPS surveillance and record keeping, even if it's in public, and would like to keep the traditional legal bulwarks against unrestricted snooping from cops in place in this arena.
A fellow anonymizing himself as "Sam Cyber" regales us with an account of the strenuous effort one has to put in to really keep personal information private these days. While even his techniques are no protection against GPS, he does try to keep himself out of any databases by living a purely cash-based life. Just use money orders, endorse any check anyone gives you over to people to whom you owe money, patronize anonymous mailing services, make sure no utilities are in your name, and create a private "address" for yourself by nailing up your own mailbox in the mailbox cluster in a trailer park and painting the next highest, unused, number on it. No problem at all, right?
Those as deeply concerned with moving through life untracked and unmolested as Mr. Cyber will have to continue to learn new tricks. The technologies aren't going away, and the police aren't going away. Whether the optimal solution is a change in attitude, as Brin suggests, or a continually ratcheting technological arms race is something we'll all have to decide for ourselves.
But court decisions will certainly help shape the social consensus and the legal possibilities. The law ought to recognize that technology can and sometimes should change the way we interpret old-fashioned legal principles. As the frontiers of the possible expand, sometimes the frontiers of the acceptable must contract.
(Brian Doherty is an associate editor of Reason magazine.)
