Flying Towards Anarchy



 In a move that some say is a preview of coming attractions for a debt ceiling shutdown, the Federal Avaiation Administration lost all funding as of 12:01 Saturday night.  As a result, thousands of workers are being laid off nationwide -- the total could quickly go  up to 90,000, and the government is losing an estimated 30 million a day in tax revenues.  The ostensible reason is that Republicans are refusing to authorize funding unless Democrats agree to a 16.5 million dollar cut in subsidies to small airports -- a mere blip in a $9,793 million budget.  But the real reason for the shutdown is the Republicans' insistence on a rider to the legislation overturning a National Mediation Board decision that allows unionization in the industry based on a simple majority of workers who actually vote, rather than needing a majority of all workers.

Perviously, the profoundly anti-democratic rule for the airline and rail industry was that a majority of all workers was needed in order to unionize, not just those who vote.   In essence, under the old rule someone who didn't bother to vote was counted as a "no" vote regardless of his or her actual preference.  This is different from workers in other industries, where the rule is that a majority of workers actually voting is what counts.  Last year, the National Mediation Board changed the rule to make it like the National Labor Relations Act.  Unsurprisingly, business leaders and their Republican allies in Congress protested the change, claiming it was a sop to "Big Labor."

I have yet to see a reasoned explanation of why the rule shouldn't be that a majority of votes cast is what determines a union election.  It's particularly rich hearing politicians decry the ruling.  After all, they are elected by a majority of votes cast, and they pass legislation based on a majority of votes cast.  Shouldn't politicians be in favor of more democracy, not less?

The FAA debacle shows the extent to which the Republican leadership will go for business and against workers.  They simply don't care about the consequences of their actions, even if it means millions of dollars in taxes and thousands of jobs lost.  Like the debt ceiling crisis, the FAA shutdown shows that the sometimes those who cry the loudest about democracy and patriotism are the least democratic and patriotic among us.

Privacy and the Internet

Remember that photo you posted of yourself on Flickr five years ago when you were on vacation in the Caribbean?  You know, the one where you are in a bikini downing a rum and coke and giving a thumbs-up?  Or how about the one night you were feeling lonely, and posted on a personal dating site that you were looking for some company?  Or the time you joined a Yahoo discussion group called "divorced moms who suffered child abuse"?  You probably don't remember.  But your potential employer will, if they use one of the new background check services that scours everything about you ever put on the internet.

As the paper of record reported yesterday, some employers are using Social Intelligence, a service that scours the internet for everything a potential employee may have done, said, or posted for the past seven years.  Everyone knows (or should know) by now that what you post on Facebook might not be so private.  Social Intelligence digs deeper though, looking at what Yahoo Groups you may have joined, any blog posts or comments you may have made, bulletin boards you may have posted on, Craigslist postings, and anything else that bears your prints on the internet.

The internet has made us all into amateur detectives.  Who hasn't googled someone to see what they can find out about them?  Yet the internet is also changing and forever altering our notion of privacy.  What Social Intelligence does is the equivalent of interviewing friends, family, and everyone else an employee may have known to find out embarrassing information.  I think most people would be outraged if employers had the right to dig that deep into our personal lives.  Somehow, though, because it is done through the internet, people seem to accept these deeper invasions of privacy.

In their influential article "The Right to Privacy," future Supreme Court Justices Warren and Brandeis argued that in a legal sense "the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life, -- the right to be let alone...."  This basic right, later found to "emanate" from the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, has been under attack for years, mostly by abortion rights activists, who say there is no such right in the Constitution.  Companies like Social Intelligence further undermine whatever right to privacy is left.

Privacy, of course, implies that a person is doing something in private.  By doing something in public, a person essentially waives his right to privacy with respect to that thing.  The internet confuses these two domains:  when a person posts something in an internet chat room, he is assuming it is private.  However, the reality is that nothing going out on the internet is private.  The best practice is to assume that everything going out over the internet is public.