Several recent stories caught my attention as to why requiring a real “probable cause” to get a search warrant is a good idea, even if law enforcement thinks it’s just an evil plot to make their job harder.

A Boston College computer science major recently had his computer, disk drives, flash drives, iPod, cell phone, and Ubuntu Linux CD impounded by college police investigating whether he might have been the person who sent an email to a college email list claiming that another student is gay.  This seizure happened on March 30, and as of now he still does not have his possessions back.  First of all, why are the police involved at all?  At worst, this is a civil case involving some sort of defamation law.  It is not a criminal case.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation is assisting the “perp” in getting the ridiculous warrant quashed.  The student is suspected of criminal activity because he, among other normal activities for a computer science major, often tested and repaired computers for fellow students, and used Linux as well as the “official” operating system at Boston College.  I guess I need to stop fixing computers for family and friends and using Linux in some virtual machines before my computers get seized because the police and judiciary are so ignorant that they take the word of a disgruntled jerk as “probable cause”.

An even more serious matter (because this one is by design and not just incompetence) is the report by the New York Times April 16 that the NSA has routinely exceed even the ridiculously loose limits set by the Patroit Act and the FISA bill of 2008 in wiretapping Americans talking to Americans without a warrant or even any real suspicion of terrorist activity.  At some point in 2005 or 2006, they apparently came very close to wiretapping a member of Congress on an overseas trip.

We may have passed the year 1984, but George Orwell’s nightmare society where you are always under observation and the word of a neighbor is all it takes for law enforcement to totally disrupt your life is not as farfetched as we would like to believe.

In 2008, Candidate Obama promised to filibuster any FISA bill which included amnesty for the telcos assisting President Bush’s illegal spying on American citizens without a warrant or anything near the probable cause it should take to get one. He then turned around and not only did not filibuster it, but actually voted for the bill.

As President, Obama has promised only to “review” this activity and the use of the states secrets excuse to avoid having to face accountability in court to defend the shredding of the Fourth Amendment.

In arguments in the Jewel vs NSA case, the Obama Department of Justice has gone even further. Besides invoking the states secrets privilege claim, the DOJ argues that the Federal government is IMMUNE from ever being sued for violating privacy laws. They claim that the Patriot Act grants the government immunity from lawsuits filed over violations of the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.

Franklin Roosevelt said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Be afraid – be VERY afraid. The Hope and Change seem to be forgotten, but Fear Itself remains. We had to bail out the perps who wrecked our economy (and don’t stop to think about what we are doing, or Fear Itself, Banking Edition will catch you) and we have to give up our freedom and security or Fear Itself, the Terrorist Edition, will kill you.

“All this has happened before and will happen again.” Unless we do something differently (you know, actually Change).

Remember the days when it was legal to read a book to your kids? Apparently those days are gone, if you believe the position of the Authors Guild. They contend that if you buy a book to read with your eyes, you need to pay for it again if you want to turn it into a spoken word performance.  Amazon apparently believes it too.

April 7th, about 300 blind people, plus dogs and kids, gathered outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York to protest their bogus copyright claim and the fact that Amazon caved into it and disabled the text-to-speech capability found in the original Kindle when they released the Kindle 2.

The Authors Guild is showing the usual short-sightedness typical of the media industry, as it will cost their authors sales in what could have been a way to open up the market without the expense of producing Braille books. Amazon’s willingness to throw their customers under the bus shows where their loyalty lies as well. I’ve worked in distribution much of my life, and siding with your vendor against your customer is just bad business.

By the way, you have my permission to read this article to your kids, and anybody else who will listen. Then email your Barnes and Noble receipts to Amazon along with a copy of it.

I really should have made this number one. This is the place where we can have the biggest impact on economic growth, job creation, the environment, and national and international peace and security. Even if you think global warming is a myth and/or there really were WMDs in Iraq, there is still enough here that makes reducing fossil fuel usage and replacing it with clean renewable energy a good idea.

Last summer, I drove out to Arizona for business, stopping in Albuquerque to visit my sister on the way back. Along both I-20 and I-40, I saw some windmill farms, but I also saw lots of empty space where many more could be. As I got closer to my home, I really wanted to turn around and head back out West. Heading east through Mississippi and Alabama, on any part that is elevated, you see a nasty brown cloud in the sky. Welcome to Georgia Power, a Southern State. They don’t even bother with the delusion of “clean coal”. Only with action at the Federal government level is that ever going to get cleaned up. The Georgia Legislature point of view is “we’re keeping power as cheap as possible even if it kills you.”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Changing our energy infrastructure means we have to pay more today to get a benefit in the future. It’s not just big corporations who are stuck on making this quarter’s financials look good at the expense of sustainability. We all do it. We have become a nation whose largest product is debt. Too many of us look at purchases not as “Do I have the money in the bank to pay for this?” but as “Do I have enough room under my credit limit to pay for this?”

The way to overcome this is to change the cost structure via taxes, tax credits, and government spending habits. The same Congressmen who decry bailouts as socialism had no problem giving Big Oil tax credits during the years they were making record profits. The US has the lowest gasoline taxes of any developed nation. Companies get special tax treatment for purchases of pickups and truck-based SUVs, the least fuel efficient vehicles out there. We sort of have tax incentives to buy hybrids, but there is a cap on the number of vehicles sold that qualify. All this is backwards!

When gas prices hit $4.00 a gallon last year, we finally started to see a change in car buying habits. Adding $1.00/gallon tax would raise $127 billion dollars in a year, based on Energy Information Administration statistics. Use this money to increase the tax credit for hybrid purchases. As hybrid production increases, the difference in price between hybrids and standard versions will decrease. (The research and development costs are the same whether you sell 1,000 or 1,000,000. The R&D cost per car changes drastically.)

The other piece of this is in the generation of electricity. The technology exists for large scale solar and wind generation. What is needed is the infrastructure to store and distribute power from areas where it can be generated most efficiently to areas where it cannot. We need large scale production and investment in a “smart grid” that can do efficient distribution.

This investment can come from the market, but only if there are clear and consistent policies that investors can rely on for years to come. You can’t expect people or companies to invest in something if they have to fight with Congress each year to keep the rules from changing. There is a company in Ohio that developed a cheaper solar panel suitable and economical for use on private houses. They are doing well and have built a new plant that created lots of new jobs. But it’s not in Ohio. It’s in Germany, where their customers are. Why is it there and not here? Because the German government requires utilities to buy back your excess power from your solar panels at the same rate it costs them to generate electricity.

These tax policy changes are not socialism. This is not “redistribution of wealth”. This is “We the People” acting in concert to prevent individuals from escaping paying for the environmental and health care costs of fossil fuel pollution. As oil usage decreases, the profits of oil producers decrease. On a national security level, this reduces terrorist capital. Oil money is what keeps the House of Saud in business, and splinters of the House of Saud form both the financial and ideological backbone of Al-Qaeda. Oil money funds Iran, which uses the same ideology to promote its national self-interest. If we didn’t need to meddle in the Middle East in the name of securing our energy supplies, we would further undercut terrorist propaganda and recruitment. This in turn would reduce our defense spending requirements, and let us use that money instead to pay down debt and invest in production, not destruction.

“All this has happened before and will happen again.” Unless we do something differently.