Press Releases: Protecting liberty

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Newspapers need to be stronger watchdogs about government attempts to intrude on individual rights.
Let's look at how five local newspapers (the three weeklies covering the city, and the two Portland-based dailies) covered a recent civil-liberties debate.

The South Portland Police Department purchased a car-mounted system that can take digital images of every license plate it passes (whether the cars are parked or moving) and compare them to an electronic database, immediately alerting officers if a nearby vehicle has been reported stolen or otherwise involved in a crime. The system will store all the images — not just those it alerts on — in a searchable electronic database for up to 30 days.

Proponents say the technology will help make people safer, by helping cops identify wanted cars instantaneously, and by allowing them to search through past records to find vehicles that were not flagged in real time, but are later being sought for some reason.

Opponents (including Democratic senator Dennis Damon of Hancock County, who has introduced a bill that would outlaw use of the system) say this kind of monitoring, and especially the storage of the data collected, amounts to excessive government surveillance, mostly of innocent citizens.

Most of the papers had the same basic information, but reading them all revealed useful information that reading any one would have failed to provide.

The CURRENT offered the most substantive coverage, including lengthy interviews with parties on all sides, and even sending a reporter to ride with police to observe the system — with a bonus for getting the cops to scan her license plate as a demonstration of what personal information would and would not be recorded or accessible to police. Nevertheless, the piece downplayed the police's desire to keep data on innocent drivers.

The PORTLAND DAILY SUN distilled the question most clearly and simply: whether the technology simply allows police to improve performance of a routine task, or whether it amounts to a massive new surveillance program. The paper also, in a quote, pointed out that people give massive amounts of personal information to corporations (such as Facebook), but did not note that they do so willingly, and that those corporations don't have the power to lock you up, as cops do.

The PORTLAND PRESS HERALD put out the first story on the issue, and explained it clearly, noting importantly — and exclusively, as it turned out — that the police want access to more data on cars and drivers, to expand their ability to do real-time searches.

The SOUTH PORTLAND SENTRY offered anemic coverage, quoting five people and a Web site. The story was published a week later than its competitors' versions, and omitted important facts that had been previously reported and that could be easily verified (such as the fact that a lawmaker the paper quoted supporting the system had initially co-sponsored the bill to outlaw it).

The SOUTHERN FORECASTER, despite being third to press (after the PPH and the Current), broke the news that Democratic senator Larry Bliss, who lives in South Portland and represents part of the city, had originally co-sponsored the bill banning the use of the system, but had seen a demonstration and reversed his position. However, it failed to capitalize on that scoop, allowing Bliss to explain his change of heart with vague platitudes rather than specific things he saw during the demo. ("I think people will be safer," the paper quotes him as saying, without detailing what he learned that changed his mind 180 degrees.)

Time to step up the skepticism, people.

(Two disclosures: I live in South Portland. And from 2001 to 2005, I worked for the Current, whose ownership remains the same but whose editorial staff is entirely different than when I was there.)

Not a modest proposal: The US Supreme Court has saved us from financial ruin

Published in the Portland Phoenix

There has been powerful criticism of the recent US Supreme Court ruling that corporations are truly people, and deserve all the rights people have, including the right to spend as much as they wish to support or oppose candidates in elections. But we should stop this sniping and thank the justices for their guidance: They have offered us a way out of this financial disaster we are in, with state spending plummeting, taxes rising, and an increasing federal debt load. Here's how it works:

-According to the recent Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission ruling, corporations are people.

-People can be charged with crimes. Let's use murder as an example.

-Corporation-people can be charged with murder (and not just negligence or wrongful death).

-When people are convicted of murder, they are typically imprisoned. (Though sometimes they're put to death, and other times involuntarily committed to mental institutions.)

-When a corporation-person is convicted of murder (it's only a matter of time before a smart prosecutor uses the bizarre logic of the Citizens United ruling to accomplish this) it will launch a new sub-specialty in the practice of law: Arguing about how to imprison a corporation. We can hardly lock up every employee, so who do you choose? The CEO? The board of directors?

-This is where we can learn from the Supreme Court's Citizens United logic: People have the right to speak without restriction from the government, and money equals speech, so corporation-people can spend unlimited amounts of money to directly influence elections.

-Following this argument, money equals freedom, so we should not bother arguing about whom to lock up when a corporation-person is convicted, but simply fine the company an amount appropriate for the crime committed.

-And now let's do as the Supreme Court did one more time, and take this logical progression to its logical conclusion, no matter how ridiculous it might sound: If corporation-people can pay fines in lieu of imprisonment, there's no reason people-people shouldn't be able to.

This presents us with the glorious situation that will extract us and our governments from this horrendous financial disaster. Not only can we abolish the prison system, which costs billions in taxpayer dollars every year (with little actual rehabilitation to show for it), but we can use the new revenue from all these criminals' fines to cover all sorts of wonderful programs, like schools, roads, and police officers.

Thanks, justices! Who would have thought that among all the people in Washington and around the country wringing their hands about the state of the economy, that you would turn out to be the geniuses who showed us the way?

Show Your Work: Nickelodeon to screen local flicks

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Eddy Bolz, a projectionist at the Nickelodeon Cinemas, wants local filmmakers to send him their feature-length movies for possible showing on the big screen.

He's shown a couple — David Camlin's documentary about the 48-Hour Music Festival, and Allen Baldwin's Up Up Down Down — and gotten good response, so now he reports the Nick's management have given him the green light to solicit more.

It won't be a regularly scheduled feature — "every two months roughly," Bolz reports — likely a double-showing on a Thursday evening, in the Nick's largest theater, which holds 220 people.

David Scott, whose family owns the Nickelodeon and affiliated cinemas around New England, says the company has in the past shared box-office proceeds with the filmmakers (or, as with last weekend's Maine African Film Festival screening of a movie about Haiti to benefit earthquake relief, donated all the money to charities).

We'll keep you posted as the films are scheduled. In the meantime, drop them off or mail them to Bolz at the Nickelodeon, 1 Temple Street, Portland ME 04101.

Mapping the Internet: Starting to clear Maine’s broadband backlog

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The biggest obstacle between Mainers and more, better, faster broadband Internet access (or, in many rural communities, anything better than dial-up) is actually a very basic one: there's a lack of information about what kind of Internet service is already available where. But $1.3 million in new federal money may help solve the problem.

The public has an interest in knowing as much as possible about the state's Internet infrastructure — where it is, how fast, who offers it — because of how much that information can affect the spending of tax dollars and economic-development efforts. It's almost a truism among business and state-government leaders that high-speed Internet access is key to saving what remains of Maine's economy. (For example, Democratic 

Governor John Baldacci said back in October, "As we work to grow Maine's economy and provide opportunities to our people, improved broadband access is critical.")

But big businesses like TimeWarner Cable and smaller ones like Maine Wireless in Waterville know where their own coverage areas are, but keep it to themselves as proprietary information that could help competitors.

Last year the state's ConnectME Authority began a two-part project to map the companies providing Internet access in Maine and the types of service they provide. The first part, worth $450,000, was to be paid for with state funds over three years beginning in September, with James Sewall Company, an Old Town-based mapping and engineering company, compiling a list of Maine providers, getting basic information from them, and updating the records every six months.

The second phase, which was contingent upon the $1.3 million in federal funds just awarded to ConnectME as part of the Obama administration's stimulus package, will expand the amount of data gathered and make the maps far more detailed.

The goal, according to ConnectME executive director Phil Lindley, is to get "granular data" on where Mainers do — and don't — have high-speed Internet access. The idea is that a person could come to a state Web site, enter their home address, find out what companies provide what types of service, and even connect directly to those companies to learn more details, such as monthly cost and installation fees.

Lindley's organization (he's the only staffer, but he has a board of advisers) is primarily focused on giving state money (collected from Internet and telephone users in their monthly bills) to projects that extend broadband services to areas presently without it. He doesn't have much money — over the past three years he has given out less than $3 million, and is accepting grant applications for roughly $1 million in new money to be given out later this year.

So far, he has been limited to areas where there's no doubt about a lack of Internet access. But as the work progresses, those areas shrink, and a map becomes more necessary to determine where future projects should receive public funding. (The authority is barred from funding projects that would be built independent of public money.)

He's not sure how much of the information the survey gathers will be public in the end — those companies are often quite secretive about the actual equipment and speeds they offer, not wanting competitors to know or guess their plans for the future.

No laws require the companies to cooperate — unless they receive federal funds to expand their own broadband operations. And federal and state laws and rules allow lots of protection of company data. "A lot of it's going to be moral suasion on my part," Lindley says. But apart from some basic questions about the rules for confidential and proprietary information, "we haven't gotten any pushback yet."

A key piece of information is about the actual speeds available to customers. While at the moment, state efforts are focusing on getting broadband to where people are still suffering with dial-up, at some point state efforts will need to boost broadband speeds too. (And there's no time like the present, in the wake of the latest Akamai "State of the Internet" report, which shows that other countries — even non-tech-mecca places like Romania and the Czech Republic! — are boosting broadband speeds far faster than the US, which actually saw speeds fall in 2009.)

Lindley is hoping to get very detailed information that will at least be available to state officials planning where to spend public money, even if it's not available to the wider public.

He expects preliminary results before summer, which will give a taste of how much Maine's 21st-century utility companies support openness. What info there is will be online at www.maine.gov/connectME.

Quake Response: Boston organization fighting good fight in Haiti

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix

Good news from Haiti: the catastrophic earthquake that struck this Caribbean nation last week did no damage to the 10 Haitian-run hospitals and clinics aided by the Boston-based charity Partners in Health (PiH). Each of the 10, which offer free care to all comers — and were founded by Paul Farmer of Harvard's medical school, in conjunction with Haiti's health ministry — swung into action immediately after the quake struck.

Bad news from Haiti: those clinics and hospitals, which are staffed almost entirely by Haitians, are in the rugged rural interior of the country, hours — and in some cases days, on rough roads and mountain paths — of travel from the hard-hit capital city of Port-au-Prince.

Even worse news from Haiti: conditions in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere are so terrible, and medical help so scarce, that quake victims, some with grievous injuries requiring amputation, have no choice but to make the difficult overland journey to the PiH centers.

"It's been a horrifying catastrophe," says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tracy Kidder, whose 2003 best-selling book Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House) introduced the world to the dauntless, tireless Farmer and his organization.

Many outlets offering relief and support to Haitians were headquartered in Port-au-Prince and were effectively decapitated by the January 12 quake, which struck just 16 miles west of the capital city and measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. But PiH, which employs more than 100 Haitian doctors and thousands of community health workers, is intact — its major hospital is in Cange, several hours northeast of Port-au-Prince.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, that hospital has expanded to make use of space in a neighboring church and a school. "There are patients all over the place," says Kidder of the reports he and PiH are getting from the clinics, adding that PIH is also striving to send medical workers to the urban-relief efforts even while handling the massive influx of new cases.

Kidder, who lives in Massachusetts and Maine, is adamant that Haiti needs not just relief money, but a societal change in which its people have more of a say in how the nation develops. He has argued that the international aid now pouring into one of the world's poorest countries be the start of a new chapter for Haiti, rather than just a temporary boon to assist with rescues.

Many people — worried about the looting and civil disorder in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake — are skeptical of giving aid and about Haiti's future, but Kidder asks, "how would New Yorkers, or any Americans, respond" in identical circumstances, with no food, shelter, water, and only the clothing on their backs — and with no certainty that loved ones were safe, or even alive?

The relief effort has also been hindered by the racism and religious intolerance of those like evangelist Pat Robertson, who blamed the tragedy on a "pact with the devil." Kidder's response to Robertson? "If there's an Antichrist, then he might be it. You can quote me on that."

Kidder remains hopeful about Haiti's future, but only so long as international support is both generous and concerned about the long term. He recalls the Haitian proverb that inspired the title of his book on Farmer, PiH, and Haiti: "Beyond mountains there are mountains." Haitians use this proverb in two ways, he says: "There is no end to obstacles — but there is no end to opportunities."

To make a donation to Partners in Health, visit http://www.pih.org/.