Surveillance State Delayed

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

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Fascinating article in last Saturday's New York Times about INS plans to 
revoke the U.S. citizenship of 5,000 people who got that citizenship sans 
criminal background checks so they could vote for Clinton in '96.

Now, the INS revokes a big 25 citizenships a year so they really have a job 
ahead of them.  Demonstrates the enforcement challenges of bureaucracies 
living in a mass society.  They think they can get away with administrative 
revocations but even those can be appealed to federal court.  5,000 appeals 
would be quite a burden.  If they wait too long and two years pass from time 
of granting, the Service will lose the administrative option and will have to 
do full court proceedings to revoke.

Even if they revoke, the "aliens" will still have their old proofs of 
citizenship (passports, etc) as well as their former status as permanent 
residents so revocation may be meaningless in any case.

That's not the cutest bit, though.

In addition to the 5,000 new Clinton voters with provable criminal records, 
they had to go through 180,000 records of people with various sorts of 
documentation problems to see if any of them were criminals.  But the Feds 
couldn't do it themselves.  They lacked the capability.  They hired one of
the 
big accounting firms (Peat-Marwick?) to CHECK THE NAMES against the NCIC.  
They got some 9,000 positive matches but naturally, they can't tell how many 
of those 9,000 matches are false positives.  Lots of work ahead.

The gloom and doom types like to claim that it is trivial for the almighty 
Feds to find out everything about every one, look inside the souls of all of 
us, separate the good from the evil and unerringly punish the evil.  
Omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. Oddly enough, this claim is often
made 
by people who, otherwise, don't believe in God.

But this article on citizenship revocation gives lie to this claim of state 
power.  Citizenship applicants have submitted vast quantities of information 
about themselves to the Feds.  They have undergone years of a staged and 
complex process to move from nonresident alien to resident alien to citizen.  
At every point, they NARCed themselves out in detail directly to the federal 
government.  And yet, that same government can't even tell if these people
are 
"criminals."

If they can't efficiently surveil and regulate this group, what chance do
they 
have to regulate and surveil the other 260 million of us?

DCF
 


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