Privacy Through Walls

A few years ago now, I wrote a thesis about a type of surveillance and included a quote from a 1928 dissent in the Supreme Court of the United
Justice case Olmstead v. U.S. 277 U.S. 438 (1928):

Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in Court, and by which it will be enabled to expose a jury to the most intimate occurrences of the home.

…

…as time works, subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy will become available to the government. The progress of science in furnishing the government with the means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring beliefs, thoughts and emotions.

The Supreme Court of Canada recently reviewed a case, R. v. Tessling, similar at least in the use of such new intrusive technologies:

The RCMP used an airplane equipped with a Forward Looking Infra-Red (“FLIR”) camera to overfly properties owned by the accused. FLIR technology records images of thermal energy or heat radiating from a building. It cannot, at this stage of its development, determine the nature of the source of heat within the building or “see” through the external surfaces of a building. The RCMP were able to obtain a search warrant for the accused’s home based on the results of the FLIR image coupled with information supplied by two informants. In the house, the RCMP found a large quantity of marijuana and several guns. The accused was charged with a variety of drug and weapons offences.

The headnote to the Tessling ruling in summarizing the Court’s ruling states that the accused had a privacy interest in the activities taking place in his home and it may be presumed that he had a subjective expectation of privacy in such activities to the extent they were the subject matter of the search. However, everything shown in the heat-generated photograph exists on the external surfaces of the building and, in that sense, it recorded only information exposed to the public. Although the information about the distribution of the heat was not visible to the naked eye, the heat profile did not expose any intimate details of the accused’s lifestyle or part of his core biographical data. It only showed that some of the activities in the house generate heat. Thus, the Court held, when one considers the “totality of the circumstances”, the use of the technology did not intrude on the reasonable sphere of privacy of the accused.

It is interesting to note that the ruling in 2004 was about a fact situation in 1999 and 1999 technology. Despite this delay between the facts before it and its own ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada stated in Tessling:

In my view, with respect, the reasonableness line has to be determined by looking at the information generated by existing FLIR technology, and then evaluating its impact on a reasonable privacy interest. If, as expected, the capability of FLIR and other technologies will improve and the nature and quality of the information hereafter changes, it will be a different case, and the courts will have to deal with its privacy implications at that time in light of the facts as they then exist.

So what can Forward Looking Infra-Red see now? Ratheon sell it to the US Air Force promoting these features. SgmaTel made this press release last month. The US Army Research Laboratory announced this earlier this year. Not exactly a simple infra-red camera hanging from a police helicopter now. Smart image processing is occuring.

As was stated in the dissent in Olmstead,

…the makers of the US Constitution understood the need to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, and the protections guaranteed by this are much broader in scope, and include the right to life and an inviolate personality — the right to be left alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men… It does not matter if the target of government intrusion is a confirmed criminal. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.

This was written by Justice Louis Brandeis and conccurred with by Justice Oliver Wendle Holmes, two fairly strong swimmers. Do you believe that this is a relevant statement regarding the limits of surveillance given the advance of technology? Does a court that reviews the facts of a case five years after the fact inspire you with great confidence that the law has a good handle on advancing surveillance technologies and your privacy?

The Government Store, Canada

When I was a kid old O.H. Armstrong in our church called it the “Government Store”. In the South Shore of Nova Scotia apparently it is called the “Power House”. What ever you call them, there is a little left over from prohibition in every province in the country – the need to control…which also leads to the inability to shop around much. We are lucky here in eastern Ontario with the shops of Quebec and New York state not that far away, so that an hour and a half or two gets you into another world with another set of wacky regulations. If you are looking for something different when you travel, you can plan ahead with the web…but just don’t get too depressed from what you read:

What do you learn from looking at these sites? Don’t go beer hunting in PEI right off the top: no selection, six imports three of which are Heineken, Becks and Stella – mmm, macro-industrial North Sea lager. Quebec has very interesting beers, allows you to find out if a bottle is actually in your shop and shop on-line but if you are in a northern village you have to let the local authorities know what you have ordered. Newfoundland calls beer from New Brunswick imported. Alberta has privatized the shops in 1993 and has since only regulated but still they are left, according to the Bar Towel in 2002, with limited selection.

So – what do you do with a country that cannot organize itself better than a cornerstore in a suburb of a small US city or a pub in Halifax

Corporate Deadbeatism

Sensitive readers will recognize my advocacy of respect for reasonable and
lawful taxation as a cornerstone of the new
morality. It is with that purpose I suggest that readers have a look at this
story wherein billions have gone unpaid all in the name of smuggling coffin
nails. Next time you wonder why there is a shortage of money for your favorite
public project, ask a shareholder of JTI-MacDonald, a subsidiary of Japan
Tobacco. While respect for the processes of the court is another cornerstone,
one has to ask if the taxes have gone unpaid, who else could be responsible? Is
this a case of res ipsa locuitur loquitur?

Book Review: Terry Foster, Beer Writer

Terry Foster is one of my favorite beer writers and the most interesting thing about him as a beer writer these days is he does not have a website. I don’t know how you can exist without a website these days. How else will all the Google bots be able to share your daily musings. Google bots…bots…Google…[Ed.: Giving author a good shake] Oh, right…there is no money and no audience in a website and others are doing it already so why bother. Good point.

I encountered Terry Foster as a home brewer. He is the author titles #1 and #5 in the Classic Beer Style Series published by the Association of Brewers, a US company promoting the homebrew industry. Pale Ale is the first in the series and Poer the fifth. These books are now over a decade old but recently I noticed that Foster has been writing articles for Brew Your Own magazine regularly as well. These sorts of writings as well as my years of one hundred gallons of output have convinced me that the appreaciation of beer is uniquely advanced by learning about and undertaking its production.

A number of the early homebrewing authors started me on that path and it would be my suggestion that Terry Foster is a continuation of that line of thinkers and writers about beer. In April 1963, month of my birth, the British Government ended the taxation of homebrewing under the Inland Revenue Act of 1880 which required records to be kept and a one ound license to be paid. As W.H.T. Tayleur states in his text Home Brewing & Wine-Making (Penguin, 1973) at page 15:

This legislation reminaed in force for eighty-three years, but although at first many thousands of private brewing licences were taken out the number of home brewers steadily declined over the years until by the middle of this century, and after shortages of the necessary ingredients caused by two world wars, hardly any of the few that were left bothered to take out licences.

By removing the need to license, the government created an industry and changed brewing, to my mind, for two reasons. First, self-trained home brewers became self-trained micro-brewers as the opportunities to make money with the skill became apparent. Second, consumers gained access to well-made home brews which were much cheaper and much tastier than the standardized industrial kegged beer the 1960s were foisting upon people. Without men like the 1960s authors C.J.J. Berry and Ken Shales as well as David Line in the 1970s, all writing primarily through Amateur Winemaker Publications, many a brew-pub or craft brewery on both sides of the atlantic would simply not exist.

C.J.J. Berry, Ken Shales and David Line

Foster is perhaps the last of this tradition of British home brewing writers – and not just because his slicked back hair, styled in common cause with them. His two books, Pale Ale and Porter each provide a history of the style, a description of the elements, a guide to making them and a discussion of the commercial examples. Like those earlier authors he provides the context of the style and also deconstructs the mystery of how the brews can be made. Context and technique are two things modern industrial commercial brewers would like to shield from their customers – they more they were to know about what is out there and what it costs, the less likely the concept of brand loyalty might hold the customer.

Foster’s recent articles in Brew Your Own magazine continue this tradition. I have copies of the following articles:

“Pale Ale”, BYO September 2003, page 30.
“Old Ales”, BYO, September 2004, page 27.
“Anchors Away – A History of Malt Extract: Part 1”, BYO October 2004, page 30.
“Let’s Get Rid of the Water – A History of Malt Extract: Part 2”, BYO, November 2004, page 34.

As is the mandate of the magazine, Foster provides context and technique, showing how historical styles can be recreated with confidence. For example, in the third article he discusses how the British Navy invented malt extract in an effort to provide beer to sailors as a necessary food while in the fourth he describes how later extracts were used to avoid the stupidities of prohibition.

Foster’s style is attractive in that he is a plain speaker. In a world of where reputation and brand is all important, he can write of Yuengling’s Pottsville Porter:

…this is in some sense a classic porter, although it is bottom-fermented. Unfortunately, although it has many adherents, I am not one of them as I find it a little disappointing.

Not only is he not looking for the next PR opportunity when he writes, he is a bit folksy while also well researched. He is a trained chemist and has been a professional brewer for over 40 years, according to his BYO bio. He is interested and as a result interesting.

Pieces of Memory

I have small moments of memory that persist like character flaws, fragments of memory that run like three second movies taken from my early childhood. Standing outside a store in Toronto in rain, being carried at night on my father’s shoulders looking past the parking lot lights at a deep black night sky perhaps for the first time, getting a needle, a sun bear cub living in a cage on a low shelf in a department store at a mall in Sydney when I was in grade one or maybe even earlier when I was in Mississauga before we moved in 1970.

These memories are reflexive, of their own accord but there are not that many. They cycle. Some are of early dreams, one or two definitely from when I was in the crib. Right now, reading a shareholder’s declaration draft, the chill in the office and the sound of grey rain on the window snapped me back to 1966 or so when the world was all knees and hold my hands.

Moral Majorities

The US after this election is witnessing the results of an effort which has taken the best part of forty years through which socially conservatism has become mainstream. It has been a comprehensive effort which has worked its way through the media, economics, academia, the churches and government to succesfully make that which was utterly unappealing in the mid-60s pop culture today. The rise of country music, pick-up truck manufacture, shift in church attendence, an attack on prudent taxation and an assertion of moral cause for whatever one does are all aspects of this shift.

What is the centre and left to do? One thing it must do is start. Fortunately in Canada, we know that any rightist thought beyond the centre is marginal, as recent elections show. Where 51% of the US population votes for the God-fearing friend of commerce, Canadians can’t get up enough interest in them to get them into the 30% range – because we know they are nuts or are Albertans. Our centre and left (known in the States as the far-left/liberals/socialists/pinkos) only have a problem merely of fragmentation as opposed to purpose. Yet, it is still at risk…so perhaps setting some general principles of the true moral majority would help as ground work for the 2016 US election when the House, Senate and White House might all reasonably be expected next to fall back into our southern neighbour’s Democratic hands:

  • You have to express and assert moral values. The centre and left must recognize that it is the steward of the moral core of liberty and learn to express that convincingly. Currently, the right is asserting a faith-based conception of politics which is set up as opposed to “realty”, whatever that is supposed to mean. One principle that is key in understanding the success of the US right is that the abandonment of thought is not the fulfillment of any relationhip to faith. It is just abandonment to unthought so get into that Bible and point out that Jesus had no time for the bankers and bean-counters in authority, knocked down the temple and wanted the feet of the poor into some reasonable footwear. The centre and left also need to erode what are described as faith-based approaches through asserting that faith and reason are not anti-thetical, that morality and thought is better than morality and not thought. As you Mom said when you couldn’t find your bike – God gave you a brain for something…USE IT!

  • Fiscal prudency. Since the earliest days of Margaret Thatcher, the core economic principle of the right has been imprudence. Favouring the few, wasting natural resources for today, cutting taxes mindlessly and racking up public debt are all rightist economic cornerstones. As a result, the centre and left need to embrace prudence…no, not Prudence, just prudence. Being the best money managers, safe-guarding of the public purse, keeping an eye on the long term, are all key. It is a wide-open field and frankly the one you’ve been sitting in the middle of for years, all the while being told by the misfits, the foxes in the chicken coop, that you are incapable. You believed them. Maybe because of the suits, who knows. Calling this new approach something grand and geographically friendly yet obtuse, like, say, the Houston School, will help. It will not cause fear and may be allowed to infiltrate for the required decade or more without anyone noticing, taking time for adherents to become pundits and then policy makers.

  • Last, the centre and left in North America have to come to believe in themselves. In Europe this is easy having been ravaged by the extremes of the Nazis and Soviets for decades. It is only in the last three years that North America has taken to consider itself the victim of the world. In asserting itself as having risen from that great wrong it has been uneven, a bit unsteady so that we now see that liberty has been protected by cutting back on it fencing it in. Time for the bloom to force itself again. It is good to be free and the centre and left have to make that meaningful again. Next time someone craps on “liberals” say “did you say Liberace? Why would you say that about Liberace? I suppose you didn’t care for Ed Sullivan either, or apple pie and you believe cheating on your taxes isn’t much like cheating on your wife. Are you still cheating on your taxes? Har-har-har!” You can take it from there. Look around your leftie life, stake out what is good and wholesome and, then, proclaim it as the salvation for the nation. A good lesson to remember from the right on this point is it doesn’t have to be true, you just have to say it a lot. It is, though, likely true.

Some will think this scatter-brained and some just copying. But that is what it is going to take to get that 51% needed to keep out the fringe. See, you don’t have to befriend the Ayn Rand set, with their calls to stop pampering children by keeping the out of the work force. You just just have to convince that nice centre-right family on the next street. There you go. You know them. Invite them over for cups of tea, leave out the Toronto Star and New Yorker, maybe put on play a little reggae quietly and see what develops. Remember, you have a decade or two to pull this off so no rush. Find some friends and start a circle – avoid the word “cell” as you do this, please. Adopt the bollo tie as your secret sign. Next time you see someone wearing one, give them a wink. The revolution has begun.