Dominik’s Blog

I recently sent this to the good senator’s office via his web page’s e-mail feature.

I wonder if I’ll receive a reply.

Senator Sessions:

I heard of your remarks on the Senate floor: “Some people in this chamber love the Constitution more than they love the safety of this nation. We should all send President Bush a letter thanking him for protecting us.”

I cannot help but note the content of your oath of office:
“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

Thus, I am confused by your comments, since the oath you took clearly mandates that you defend the Constitution first and foremost, even above your private opinion as to any unconstitutional measures for the “safety of this nation.” The reason for this is that the Constitution is the ultimate safeguard of what makes our nation great, namely our freedom and liberty.

Your comment seems to imply that it is possible to defend the “safety of this nation” without defending the Constitution, or worse, instead of defending the Constitution. I cannot believe this was the intent of your remarks, since that would directly contradict your oath of office.

President Bush deserves our thanks only to the extent that he has worked to defend the Constitution. Any of his efforts that served to undermine the Constitution in the name of “national security” or “fighting terror” deserve not our thanks but rather our reprimand, in that they directly countermand the oath that both he and you have taken.

I hope that this e-mail will recall to you your solemn oath and that, in the future, you will profess that the first and most important step to defending our safety of this nation is defending our Constitution, which preserves and protects the very freedoms and liberties that lie at the heart of America.

To close, defending American soil without defending the American Constitution is no defense at all, for what does it profit a nation to gain the illusion of security but lose its soul?

Sincerely,

Dominik Rabiej

Edit: As far as I can tell, the quote I sent the Senator was a paraphrase, as I’m not able to find any video feeds with that statement. However, the substance of quote is the same, as I was able to find this in the Congressional Record of the 110th Congress, under pages S15723, S15724, emphasis added:

I would point out to my colleagues that we have made two dramatic errors some years ago in a situation just like this, on emotion driven by our civil libertarian friends, such that a wall was put up between the FBI and the CIA which barred the sharing of information between those two critical agencies.

We also mandated that the Central Intelligence Agency officers could not obtain information from people deemed to be dangerous. Bad people. How do you get information in the world and protect America and our legitimate national interests without sources? Those became laws.

[Page: S15724]

And what happened after we were attacked on 9/11? Both those rules that we imposed on our military intelligence agencies were deemed to be bogus, wrong, and mistaken, colossally so. Many Members of this body were warned when they were made the law of the United States, they were warned then that if we did these things it was not wise. But, oh no, the others loved the Constitution more, they loved liberty more, so these unwise laws were passed. And what happened afterwards, after 9/11? Well, we properly removed both of those silly rules. We have taken them off the books, in a bipartisan, unanimous way. They were never required by the Constitution. They were never sensible from the beginning. But we passed them on emotion not reason. Some ideas being promoted now are not sensible either and can leave our country in dangerous straits. So this is an important matter. These things are life and death issues.

Last year, a Federal court ruled, based on changes in technology, that those laws we passed effectively limited the collection of critical communications of foreign intelligence. It was not the intention of Congress when we passed it, I am sure, that the law would, in effect, end up gutting perhaps the most important surveillance program we have against international terrorists, but that was the effect of it.

Admiral McConnell was flabbergasted. He came to us and pleaded with us to give him relief. So what happened? Well, he said this to us. Listen to these words. Basically this is what he said: The United States was unable to conduct critical surveillance of ….. foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside our country.

That is basically–that is what he said to us.

That is a dramatic thing.

So what happened? Congress went through an intense study, and we passed the Protect America Act this past summer. Some people said: This is a rush, though we spent weeks on it. Congress spent a lot of time working on it. But we said: OK, it will come back up for reauthorization in February. As of this date, there has been no example of abuse of that act.

Senator Feingold says these intelligence procedures were illegal wiretapping. I think that is really not a fair thing to say. A court ruled that these procedures we had been using for some time, must, according to statutes we passed, go through a certain number of procedural hoops that, as a practical matter, would have eliminated the possibility of us continuing these surveillance techniques. That is what they ruled. I don’t think we ever intended this to be the effect, but the court probably ruled fairly on the law. I am not sure. We are stuck with the ruling regardless.

I don’t think it is fair to say the program was illegal. But certainly the procedures were not unconstitutional because this summer, when we passed the Protect America Act, we effectively concluded the program was good and constitutional. We affirmed the program.

I want to say, if we have any humor left on this subject, perhaps we ought to write President Bush a letter and tell him: Thank you. We are sorry we accused you of violating our Constitution and basic civil liberties. After the Congress spent weeks studying this, we passed a law that basically allowed the program to continue as it was.

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Fortunately we don’t get snow like this often:

All my photos from this evening’s snow.

I’ve closed my Facebook account. Or, rather, since one can’t close a Facebook account per se, I’ve deleted friends and removed all that I could from my profile. Finally, I set my account to ‘inactive’ in Facebook, which is as close as one can come to deleting it.

I opened my account back in March 2004, when Facebook was a small, quiet, private site open only to few colleges around the country. I never amassed more than 400 friends (I think my final tally was somewhere in the low 300s), but it was a nice way to vaguely keep in touch. I found myself checking in on the site perhaps once or twice a month, if that.

Back in September 2006, I defended Facebook’s mini-feed, with the tagline of “If you aren’t comfortable now, you shouldn’t have been comfortable before.” My logic there was that the mini-feed didn’t expose any information that wasn’t available before, it just made it far more accessible. I did find it bad marketing on Facebook’s part to launch it without even so much as an opt-out option available, but I figured they’d learn from that mistake in the future. Finally, I found it a touch ironic that all the “Stop the New Facebook” groups grew virally in large part thanks to the very mini-feed they were railing against. In the end, Facebook made it possible to opt-out and control what was posted in the mini-feed, restoring the option to maintain the security-through-obscurity regime that many of its users had accustomed themselves to.

Facebook didn’t learn from its mistakes. Beacon, which differs from the mini-feed in the important aspect that it reveals previously non-public information to the public (and select Facebook advertisers). Where the mini-feed merely made what was already knowable easier to know, Beacon published previously unknowable information for all to see. Once again, without even so much as an opt-out provision at the start, though this has since been added.

Beacon, combined with Facebook’s slow slide towards something resembling selling out, convinced me that the small, quiet, cool way to keep in touch with friends online that I knew from March 2004 was gone forever. I “closed” my account, as best I could, having to put up with the final indignity of having to delete each of my 300+ friends one by one.

Fundamentally, Facebook is trying to reconcile its revenue model with what makes people use its site. The weakness of its traditional banner ad model is that people ignore the banners and instead look to see what their friends are up to. Beacon tried to one-up this by putting ads into what their friends were up to. Rent a movie from Blockbuster? Facebook will let your friends know what you rented and when, so they can rent it from Blockbuster too, which conceivably gives Facebook a cut. An ingenious idea, except, as Seth Godin puts it: “People don’t truly care about privacy . . . What people care about is being surprised.” Had Facebook allowed people to opt-in to Beacon from the start, those people who wanted to then could do so, and they would not be surprised to find their rentals being broadcast to their friends. In fact, they’d be happy that the service they opted into was working. Instead, we have a nasty shock to all Facebook users who suddenly find that their previously private actions on Facebook advertisers’ sites are suddenly — without clear warning or any action on their part — being broadcast to all their friends. Worse: without a way to turn it off. This caused the uproar and backlash.

Farewell Facebook.