Going for Gold in the Race to the Bottom

When I was young, I was a fool; I thought the Olympics were a good thing. These days, reading the news that comes out of the United Kingdom puts me in the same frame of mind as watching a chemical train derailment in slow motion--there may be something oddly beautiful in the way so many tons of steel can dance when given the opportunity, but the end result isn't going to be pleasant for anyone around. Only a few days are left until the Summer Olympics get underway, and already the Games have provided an unparalleled view of what a twenty-first century police state really looks like.

You may have heard about some of the more glaring abridgements of Londoners' everyday freedoms: entire lanes reserved for use of the "Olympic family," which in practice means the bigshots of the International Olympic Commission and their corporate guests; businesses, like pubs looking to draw in a crowd to watch the events on their bigscreen, are restricted from advertising with terms even as innocuous as "2012 Games," thanks to starkly overzealous government legislation, and Olympic spectators can't even bring in potato chips in their original packaging--that is, unless they were made by McDonald's, Coca-Cola or Cadbury, the official Olympic sponsors who would evidently shrivel up and die if their advertising dominance was questioned. Nevertheless, the Olympics isn't just corporate brand policing festival or the world's largest showroom for modern security methodologies. It's also pioneering the enforcement of precrime--that is, official sanctions preventing people from doing things that the Powers That Be suspect they might possibly do. No word yet on whether they're getting their information from hairless precognitives, though.

It's cold comfort to Darren Cullen, though. Billed as a "professional graffiti artist" in the Guardian, Cullen has worked for major companies including Adidas, one of those Olympic sponsors, with the creation of advertising murals and so on. Nevertheless, earlier this week Cullen and three others alleged to be graffiti artists were arrested on charges of suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage - incidentally, that sounds like the sort of charge name I'd come up with to imply an out-of-control police state - and while none were charged, they were subjected to onerous bail conditions on their release. Namely, they cannot go near any Olympic venue, they cannot own unset paint, etching equipment, spray paint or other artists' tools, and outside of a tightly defined set of circumstances, they are forbidden from accessing "any railway system, including tubes and trams, or [being] in any train, tram, or tube station or in or on any other railway property not open to the public."

And these conditions last until November, well after the Olympics become nothing but a huge balance sheet liability and a massive throbbing hangover for the British taxpaying public.

Well, you see, freedom is all well and good, but in certain circumstances...

This is the first time I've heard of restrictions like this being handed down, so I don't know how common it is, but no matter what it's a terrible precedent to set or uphold. As someone who relies on a public railway system to get around, the prospect of such a senselessly limiting restriction being passed down is chilling. Bans from public transit make sense only in limited and relevant circumstances, such as a person who habitually hits the silent alarm strip for no reason or keeps starting fistfights on the platform. Not when the "crime," if there even is one in this circumstance, has nothing to do with the railway.

This shouldn't stand. Think of it this way - if people could be arrested on suspicion of some crime that had nothing to do with activities behind the wheel, immediately released, but barred by law from using their automobile, would that be reflective of a government that's responsive to the rights and liberties due to the people it serves? Or would it represent more a government out of control, thrashing about madly, casting suspicion and blame hither and yon in a feverish daze?

When I look at this, it isn't about justice or crime prevention at all. As far as I'm concerned, it's about control. It's a reminder that the agents of the state can ruin you, should they but feel the need to do so. It's yet another data point reinforcing my view of the United Kingdom as a land that's on a downhill slope toward a police state. I wouldn't be surprised to see the UK descend into velvet-gloved authoritarianism in my lifetime, because I keep seeing news like this. Harsh news for one of the crucibles of democracy.

Quebec's Demonstrations of Authority

Quebec is no stranger to authoritarianism. In 1970, the only peacetime declaration of martial law in Canadian history came as a result of Quebec's FLQ crisis. From 1937 to 1957, the province's Padlock Law allowed the government to close properties and incarcerate people found to be involved in the propagation of "Communism or Bolshevism" - concepts which weren't defined in the law - until it was struck down as unconstitutional. In the 1930s Adrien Arcand, one of Canada's most prominent fascists, operated out of Montreal.

So it wasn't particularly surprising when I heard that the National Assembly passed a bill that, in small but significant part, hews back to these traditions. Though Bill 78 is primarily concerned with things like preventing the forcible denial of peoples' access to educational institutions, there is one clause buried within it that goes rather broadly beyond the current student crisis. Because, you know, there ain't nothin' you can't justify if you first hitch it up to the maintenance of peace, order, and public security.

DIVISION III
PROVISIONS TO MAINTAIN PEACE, ORDER AND PUBLIC SECURITY

16. A person, a body or a group that is the organizer of a demonstration involving 10 people or more to take place in a venue accessible to the public must, not less than eight hours before the beginning of the demonstration, provide the following information in writing to the police force serving the territory where the demonstration is to take place:

(1) the date, time, duration and venue of the demonstration as well as its route, if applicable; and

(2) the means of transportation to be used for those purposes.

The police force serving the territory where the demonstration is to take place may, before the demonstration and to maintain peace, order and public security, order a change of venue or route; the organizer must comply with the change ordered and inform the participants.

Now there's a triumph of our democratic freedoms right there.

Not a demonstration - or maybe it is. How does one tell the difference?

Even though I don't live in Quebec, and these provisions will fall out of force on July 1, 2013, I have some big problems with this bill. The biggest one is this: who defines what a "demonstration" is? The bill comes with definitions for such arcane terms as "college," "employee," and "student association," but what they're talking about when they refer to demonstrations is left frustratingly vague. What's the difference between a simple gathered crowd and a demonstration? Who's responsible for making the call? What if a group doesn't believe they're a demonstration, but the police does?

The last thing a government needs is more legislated leeway to restrict personal rights. The vagueness of this law, its unwillingness to define just what qualifies as a demonstration, leaves it ripe for abuse.

The usual suspects, like the Globe and Mail, are already working to shore this up. On Friday, it published an editorial reminding us that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides for "freedom of peaceful assembly." Yes, it does - but that doesn't make a difference. The Charter rights of people in Quebec are still being abridged by this bill, because it does not distinguish between peaceful and violent protests; it does not make reference to "a demonstration involving 10 people or more who plan to wreck shit."

Demonstrations have a place within a healthy democratic society - but when all demonstrations are clamped down upon to restrain the violent ones, that health is diminished.

Dealing in Absolutes

You know, it sure is thoughtful of the Conservatives - now that they've got a majority in the House of Commons and can thus do whatever the hell they want thanks to the wonderfully broken system we call Westminster-style parliament - to keep giving us reasons why it was such a bad idea to elect them into power in the first place, because they don't have to face the electorate for another three years and by then most people will have forgotten.

The latest was a zinger of a punch delivered by Vic Toews, the Minister of Public Safety - a position, incidentally, that immediately brings to mind Revolutionary France - in response to an opposition MP who attacked the Conservatives for overstepping their bounds with their latest controversial law, which would substantially increase the ability of the police to conduct potentially invasive investigations into Canadians' digital lives without first obtaining a warrant to do so. Michael Geist provides a good look into the implications of this bill - I encourage everyone to check it out.

"He can either stand with us," Toews said of his critic, "or with the child pornographers."

Just don't think about that for a minute - here's a picture of a bunny.

It's rare that things are so utterly black-and-white in politics. Usually people have to dig a bit for things like this. As the Globe and Mail says, though, this is completely in-character for the Conservatives; eight years ago, when they were still trying to crack Liberal fortunes in the House, the party issued press releases claiming that the Liberals and the New Democratic Party supported child pornography. Now that they don't have to worry about the opposition or the electorate, why should we be surprised that this sort of talk is resurfacing?

The way I see it, there are only two options here - Vic Toews is either a manipulator or a shithead. Either he's fully aware of what he's doing and is using the argument to marginalize opposition, or he honestly believes that an ordinary, law-abiding citizen would have no reason to oppose what the Conservatives are putting forward. I can't figure out which is worse.

It's easy to realize why they actually use this charge: it's indefensible, horrific, political poison to touch and thus they toss these claims like grenades. The fact that the Conservatives do use it, and have used it consistently, likewise explains a lot about the way the party as a whole thinks. For the Conservatives, it seems, everything boils down to a binary choice - this or that, us or them, good or evil.

That's no way to run a government. It's a cynical ploy to marginalize their opponents in the eyes of their core supporters, the people who will follow them solely because they are Conservatives - like, say, Alberta, which seems to have an inexplicable political reflex in that it consistently gives absolute majorities of its votes to the big blue machine. It's that kind of automatic support, support given without regard to whether the party acts in a manner to make it worthy of that support, that energizes things like this. If the Conservatives were still a minority government, Harper would likely have already thrown Toews under the bus by now. Here's hoping that this causes at least some of those automatic supporters to consider throwing the Conservatives under the bus instead come 2015.

At its core, it's completely indefensible - equivalent to me saying that either one stands with the opposition or with the fascists. If an opposition MP stood up in the house and suggested that the Conservatives were supporters of fascism, I have no doubt that that MP would shortly find out what it felt like to be raked over the coals.

The ideal of government is consensus, not dominance. Binary choices have no place there. Nevertheless, there are far too many people out there who can only think in terms of one or zero - good or evil.

Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge

A Den of VIPRs

At this point, it's unlikely that we'd be able to go back to the way things were twelve years ago; too many variables have changed, too many vested interests have entrenched themselves. It's difficult to project a near-term future where the security theatre that's become increasingly dominant in the West in general and the United States in particular will take a step back - instead, what's easiest to see is a future where that security theatre keeps moving forward, grimly and relentlessly, and in the name of security it may stamp freedom into the dust.

On the face of it, Canada and the United States responded to the September 11 attacks in similar ways; where the US set up the TSA under the Department of Homeland Security to take over airport security, which up until then had been overseen by one of the airlines using that airport, Canada established CATSA. The airport experience in both countries is broadly similar; airports on both sides of the border have pornoscanners, though you won't necessarily have to go through them, and while they didn't made me take my shoes off in the screening lines at Vancouver or Fredericton, that's been the case in Toronto and Los Angeles. The liquid restriction rule, intended to prevent binary explosives like in Die Hard With a Vengeance being brought on board, is universal, which for me just makes Amtrak that much more attractive for cross-border travel.

There is, however, one key difference; it's right in the names. CATSA is the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority; it's specifically responsible for security in airports, and nowhere else. The TSA is the Transportation Security Administration, and while many people consider it to be just the agency that deals with airport security, its actual bailiwick is "[to protect] the Nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce."

That's right, the TSA's authority isn't just limited to airports, but extends to all transportation systems within the United States... which is rather a large point of responsibility, don't you think? It's also a rather unsettling one when you take into account issues of the sort that were raised in the Orange County Register's editorial of December 28th, which shines a light on the TSA's moves after ten years to expand their presence outside the airports. Right now there are twenty-five Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response, or VIPR, teams active in the United States.

What are they doing, you might ask? Well, according to NewsChannel5 of Nashville, back in October some of them were in Tennessee, establishing security checkpoints at two bus stations and five Interstate weigh stations in the state - giving Tennessee the somewhat dubious honor of becoming the "first state to fight terrorism statewide," as the headline rather bombastically puts it.

I'm sorry, sir or madam, but federal regulations dictate that no person may travel outside their homes with unscreened liquid in excess of 100 mL in a clear plastic bag. Please exit your car for secondary screening.

This is how it starts - not with a bang, but with a whimper. This is how control is extended. This is where police states begin. Sobriety checkpoints are one thing, but these are something else again; if anyone had suggested establishing security checkpoints on the highways to combat terrorism twenty years ago they would have been dismissed as a lunatic, and from 1992 to 2012 we get the entrenchment of lunacy as policy. How far can this go? Will security checkpoints along the highways, in metro stations and train stations, and on the streets be facts of life? Will there be something that, although it would never be called as such, acts like the internal passports of the Soviet Union - something to justify the warnings of "your papers, please?"

I'm thankful that, for now at least, Canada's version is specifically limited to airport security. There have also been pushbacks in the United States; in 2011, Amtrak ordered VIPR teams off its property for a time in response to some of these searches. Freedom of movement is an integral right in a free and open state, and while these random security checkpoints on previously open routes are justified by the spectre of terrorism, the real threat is what this sort of thing normalizes. Ten, twenty years from now - who knows?

Plus, that's if there isn't another major attack. If terrorists strike the United States again in a big way, all bets are off.

I Don't Know Why They #RIDE-in' So High

Happy New Year! If you're reading this, it means that you weren't struck and killed by a drunk driver last night; good for you! New Year's Eve is one of those dates that draws drunks to steering wheels like moths to a flame, and though it doesn't appear that anyone in the Lower Mainland is dead thanks to a drunk driver, the lead story on CBC British Columbia deals with a suspected drunk that totalled an RCMP cruiser. Hell of a way to start 2012, right?

The fact is, even if that's the case, there were people out and about yesterday doing what they could to help people drive drunk.

I'm not sure if it's done in British Columbia, but for the last thirty-five years Ontario's RIDE program - initially just in the city of Etobicoke, but province-wide for as long as I can remember - which is essentially a series of checkpoints on the roads where police officers might pull you over to find out whether or not you blow high on the breathalyzer. The program is active all year and news articles about drunks arrested at RIDE checkpoints aren't unheard of no matter what month it is, but the only time you're actually likely to encounter a checkpoint is around a long weekend, Christmas, or New Year's Eve, for the simple reason that more people tend to drink and drive at those times. As I've never been stopped at a RIDE checkpoint, nor do I know of anyone who has been, I can't really give any more details than that. A similar program is, I understand, run in Alberta under the Checkstop name.

So, for decades, this is how it's been. If someone was idiotic enough to drink and get behind the wheel, they ran the risk of being found out by the police - and then the mobile internet started its little revolution. This past Christmas Eve, a number of people got it in their heads to broadcast the locations of RIDE and Checkstop locations over Twitter. After the initial shock and outrage among a wide section of the tweeting population, people struck back on New Year's Eve by appending the #RIDE and #Checkstop hashtags to irrelevant messages - the goal being to bury the messages that actually contained checkpoint information. What followed was something of a hashtag arms race, with the checkpoint-busters switching to new hashtags and using anonymous accounts to spread information by direct messages invisible to everyone but the sender and recipient. In a Twitter war like this it's nigh-impossible to tell with any certainty which side "won," but I suppose the real winners are people who didn't get killed by a drunk driver last night.

Still, why would anyone tweet the checkpoint locations to begin with? Well, it's complicated.

The Christmas lights are there to make drunks doubt their perceptions. Well, not really - but wouldn't that be something?

For some people it comes down to liberty - and as much as it makes me gnash my teeth, I can understand that. Ten American states have outlawed sobriety checkpoints for exactly that reason. For some people, the idea of the police being able to stop people at random with the "reasonable suspicion" being "a lot of people try to drive drunk around now." So, yeah, I can see where they're coming from - but the issue here is there is a world of difference between taking issue with what they see as overly intrusive police, and actively working to subvert the system.

"RIDE was the beginning of the end of civil liberty in Canada," argued one of the checkpoint tweeters, who hid behind an anonymous account but appears to be from the Calgary area. "Once the precedent is established that police can stop you, question you, order you out of your vehicle, demand identification, etc, etc when they have absolutely no reasonable grounds to believe you have or are committing a crime it is all over for our freedoms. In a few decades we have gone from RIDE to cops issuing summary judgements at the side of the road to the G20 outrage. Where will a few more decades take us?"

The slippery slope is an attractive idea when you're standing up against what you feel is dreadfully wrong, a clear and present danger to society as you see it. Arguing that sobriety checkpoints represent the creeping advancement of government controls, however, feels overly simplistic to me; a transition from a free and democratic state to a police state is something that happens on multiple fronts, and the growth of increasingly militarized police forces - witness, say, Occupy Oakland, and the manner in which the Oakland Police Department conducted itself - is far more threatening to liberty than a limited network of flying checkpoints. Washington is one of the ten states that outlaws the checkpoints, and yet it had the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

"Absolutely," our anonymous Albertan said when asked if he or she really believed tweeting the locations of sobriety checkpoints was the right thing to do. "If your government wanted to curb drinking and driving, they'd make alcohol illegal."

It really is amazing what people can justify to themselves. I mean, have people already forgotten about Prohibition? Have people forgotten that the "moral crusade" was a horrific flop that took an honest industry, pushed it underground, gave organized crime an incredible opportunity to grow, and resulted in what may have been the drunkest decades of the twentieth century?

Really, you think that random spot-checks on the roads to catch people who are operating heavy, potentially deadly machinery while drunk is a blow against liberty and a step toward the police state, but banning something as ubiquitous and culturally important as alcohol isn't? What planet did this person come from?

Yes, both the United States Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrine freedom of movement. In a real police state, it wouldn't matter what mode of transportation you're using should you come across a checkpoint, if you're driving or walking or sitting in a little red wagon being pulled by a pony. You'd still need your papers, please. Sobriety checkpoints are targetted specifically at people who are driving - people who do not appreciate the damage that can be easily done with a car at speed. That appreciation is one of the reasons why I gave up my driver's license.

Sure, it's a new year... but people will keep using the same old eyes.

United

Unions have always been a complicated issue for me to pin an opinion on; I've never actually been involved with one, so all my experience is second-hand or filtered, and the only times that unions have ever directly affected me was during the high school teachers' strike back in 1998 or the TTC strike of 2008. Their indirect influence, however, goes far deeper. The actions of labor unions in the twentieth century led to me being able to take lunch breaks and paid breaks during my eight-hour working day, five days a week.

I can remember having unsophisticated views about unions, relatively recently, but also relatively unquestioned and based on a slim foundation. I can recall believing that unions weren't as necessary now as they were in the past - that they had their place in potentially dangerous jobs, like the factories or the coal mines or what have you, but not in more white-collar occupations. I can't remember why, exactly, anymore.

My primary problem in this viewpoint was, of course, projection. In my mind, if I was in charge I wouldn't abuse employees without unions, so wouldn't it be logical that the people actually in charge wouldn't either? In my defense, I never actually thought it out in those words; had I done so, the ridiculousness of it would probably have been made plain far earlier.

Over the last few days, the ongoing demonstrations against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's effort to use the state budget crisis as an opportunity to kneecap the public sector unions' collective bargaining rights, I've had motive and opportunity to examine and re-evaluate my previous beliefs.

In the twenty-first century, unions are still important, but in a different way than they were a hundred years ago. Back then, they were pushing workers' rights up a steep, steep incline: today they've got higher footholds, sure, but now they're keeping those rights from rolling back down to the bottom. I'm of the opinion that in a world where, for whatever reason, unions disappeared, workers' rights would not immediately but would inevitably decline. After all, if these rights were widely perceived as natural, there would have been no need to fight for them the first time.

I feel that unions should be defended and maintained for one simple reason: mutually assured destruction. No, really. Hear me out on this.

The Wisconsin State Capitol, site of the past week's protests in Madison.

It's been nearly seventy years since the Second World War ended. In those seventy years, there has never been a war on the vast scale of those fought around the world, with all segments of society working toward victory - and the biggest reason is the existence of nuclear weapons. Deterrence theory. Knowing what I know about the Soviet Union's postwar actions and inclinations, in a hypothetical world without nuclear weapons, I cannot see a reason why Stalin would not have sent the Red Army marching toward the English Channel by 1953. After all, so much of Russia's grand strategy has been predicated on maintaining a buffer between itself and its enemies - and what better buffer is there than an ocean? With nuclear weapons, however, the risk of any attempted European conquest was far too great.

But back to the point about unions. Just by their existence, they influence employers. Employees could always theoretically form a union, or join one - and even if you're running a non-union operation, that in itself gives employers a motive to provide decent pay and benefits in order to head off labor grumblings. In a world without unions, that motive collapses... not all at once, since there is inertia. Laws by themselves are no defense against this: many employers have deep pockets, and slowly and surely those laws dedicated toward workers' protections would be chipped away and broken down.

The presence of unions indirectly influences people in a manner far more deeply than many may realize. If we allow them to be weakened unduly, we'll only be weakening ourselves a short way down the line.

Freedom to Move

Every weekday morning around 9 Pacific Time, the day's transportation headlines from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Metro Library and Archive show up in my inbox. Over the past couple of months, ever since the midterm elections in the United States ended the Democratic Party's dominance in Congress, I've been seeing more and more stories about transit initiatives encountering heavier and heavier resistance in government committees that are now dominated, or led by, Republican Party lawmakers. Witness the case of planned intercity rail projects in Wisconsin and Ohio, where newly-elected Republican governors moved to cancel these programs.

Highways aren't getting the same rap - something that, to completely honest, comes as absolutely no surprise considering the strength of the Republicans' grip on the wheel. The open road has always carried connotations of freedom, the idea that people can just pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. While the truth is significantly more complicated, the simple meme of "roads mean freedom" is deeply entrenched in the United States' cognitive ecology.

The real barometer of freedom is choice. The infrastructural decisions of the past several decades, decisions which not only continue to echo but are echoed today, prioritized the development of highway networks over railway and urban transit expansion in both the United States and Canada. But we can't just blithely assume that what has held true for the past few decades will likewise continue uninterrupted into the future. We can't assume that people will always be able to pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. What if, for starters, they can't afford the gas?

A population's movements can be controlled by means far subtler than the internal passports demanded by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and which are still used in Russia today. We've already spent decades engineering our society around the idea of automotive mobility - it wouldn't take much now to use that dependence against us.

A China Eastern Airlines A340-600 taxis toward the runway at Vancouver International Airport

Imagine a future where the railways pull nothing but freight between cities... a future where oil shocks have come and gone, and the price of gas has reached such heights that the kind of intercity driving common today simply isn't economical anymore, or a future where the highways have been made limited-access only. It wouldn't be too hard to justify in the wake of, say, a national emergency. Sure, you could still go point-to-point by air; but air travel is the easiest method of transit for governments to control. I would not be surprised - but it would disturb me greatly - to live to see a future where air travel is far more regimented and controlled than it is now, where very few people fly anywhere other than government-approved sun destinations because the pre-ticketing background checks are just too much of a hassle. If you can't afford to drive, you can't get on a plane, and there aren't any trains you can take from one city to another - then how free are you, really?

There always need to be options in how people can get from point A to point B. In business, that competition is necessary to prevent consumer gouging. In government, it's just as necessary - to head off one potential mode of oppression and control.