Do Drones Fit Under Current Law?

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles -- drone aircraft -- grow more sophisticated and cheaper every day. The Obama Administration has amply proved their effectiveness as weapons, and drones continue to kill people in Yemen and Pakistan almost every week. The political and social impact of those strikes is changing the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, with consequences military officials can not foresee with any accuracy.

As always, such developments have spread beyond their original use. Law enforcement and counterintelligence types now look forward to the day when they can fly drones in US skies to keep  an eye on what's happening in this country. This blog has discussed this possibility before, but the Times considered it again this week.

It's not obvious how drone surveillance fits into current American law. The US Supreme Court recently heard arguments about the use of drug-sniffing dogs, and the way it rules there may indicate how the current justices think about the concept of privacy. The drafters of the 4th Amendment did not envision the government looking at our "persons, papers and effects," and it';s not clear how drone surveillance would affect how "secure" we are in those things, anyway. Police drive back and forth along city streets all the time, and that is not considered an invasion of privacy;   if they watching from much farther away but with much better cameras, might that not be simply a more effective way of doing the same thing? Still, the idea is creepy.

But the main point is that once again life has outstripped law. Obama wants rules in place, and that's a start, but Congress and the courts need to get to work, too.

No Words

I have said before that I can not understand the position of gun-ownership advocates like the NRA. But no gun control proposal short of banning all guns could have prevented the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut on Friday. The woman who owned the guns would have passed every check. The guns themselves do not, I believe, qualify as assault weapons, so even the proposed limits on certain firearms would not help.

NRA-type arguments that her gun possession could have protected her are nonsense, since she was not going to shoot her son as he drove up to her house. And I hope no one is suggesting that we arm teachers at elementary schools.

This is one we just have to swallow. As a father of young children and an uncle of two girls who were in school 20 minutes from Newtown, the story is beyond painful. But let's not pretend it can be fixed.

Is This a Republican Form of Government?

The United States Constitution guarantees to each state a "republican form of government." Nowhere does it explain exactly what that means, but we can assume a few things and the Supreme Court has announced a few others.

First, government must be chosen through democratic elections. For no good reason, the US Supreme Court has said that state legislatures, unlike the federal one, must include two houses both of which are directly elected. It also has created a series of rules about the way election districts can be drawn. (see Reynolds v. Sims)

Second, there ought to be some level of transparency and the rule of law. People ought to be able to understand what the law says and how it was written

By this second standard, the state of New York is like a bizarrely wealthy and high-developed political backwater. For the last few weeks, Albany insiders have been railing on about the way state senate leadership will affect jobs, the economy, minorities and a bunch of other stuff. But I can not find a single explanation for why the back-room dealings a few members of the smaller house of the state legislature should entirely determine the agenda for the government for the next term. How are these decisions made? Once they are made, how do they coerce the rest of the membership to do what they are told?

I have been trying -- admittedly not that hard -- to figure this stuff out for a while, and I can't. But shouldn't it be obvious?

Perspective: Americans Should be Thankful

The United States is not governed well at the moment. Squabbles over the "fiscal cliff," which real adults would have resolved months ago, reflect a loss of perspective and a lack of true leadership.

But at least we are not Russia.


I recently finished Masha Gessen's The Man Without a Face,  a biography of Vladimir Putin, in which Gessen describes the cold-blooded brutality of the Russian president's rise to power. She focuses primarily the effect of this one man's character on Russian political culture, but in the background we see the complicity of many Russians themselves. Gessen and thousands of other Russians try to stand up to the lawlessness of their own government, and those dissenters are to be commended. But too may others -- a critical mass, it would seem -- not only condone the nastiness, but act to support it in quiet but equally callous ways. It takes a nation to allow this stuff.

Putin's new program, typical of tyrants everywhere, and totalitarian leaders especially, is to deny his own failure of governance and to fall back on propaganda to pump up support. He wants Russians to be patriotic, so he's putting together slogans and flags and other nonsense.

At least American leaders accept the basic principle of the rule of law. The GOP accepted defeat in recent elections, and did not attempt to steal the vote in the first place. This is no small thing.