Ethics Newsline®

My first driver’s license was a small card printed in black, without a picture. Our hundred-year-old New England house had a maid’s quarters and a back stairs. My mother wrote checks all around town and was never, to my knowledge, asked to prove her identity.

All that may seem irrelevant to the case of Sultaana Freeman, a Muslim suing the state of Florida because her driver’s license was revoked. The reason: When the license was issued in February 2001, it showed her wearing a full-face veil with only her eyes visible. Responding to tightened security following the terrorist attacks seven months later, the state now says she must remove the veil for a new photograph or forego the license. Mrs. Freeman says that would violate her religious convictions.

The case has made national news (and Court TV) for a good and a bad reason. On the good side, it deserves our attention as a classic dilemma that pits the community’s need for security against an individual’s freedom of religion. But it also raises easily sensationalized right-versus-wrong issues of prejudice against Muslims in U.S. culture. Yet as with so many post-9/11 issues — Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the detention of suspected terrorists — it asks a crucial moral question: Have we got the right balance between liberty and lockdown?

It also asks a sharper question, related to my boyhood and stretching into our global future: What is a driver’s license?

On one level, of course, it’s simply a permit to operate a motor vehicle. The state of Florida, noting the public ownership of the roads and the state’s duty to protect its citizenry, argues that driving is a privilege rather than a right. Mrs. Freeman may have her license, says the state — not by virtue of any inherent right to drive, but only on condition that she fulfill the requirements for this privilege.

Florida has a point. But life has changed since my boyhood home was built. Before the age of cars, people walked to town to shop. Houses had been designed as communities accommodating hired help (though not in our time) who lived and worked in the same place. So traveling was not, for many people, an economic requirement: You could live a decent life within a walking radius of home.

Not so today, especially in Florida, where topography, population density, city planning, and the absence of good public transportation make cars almost essential. If earning a living is a right rather than a privilege — and few argue otherwise — and if we’ve created a car culture wherein economic survival requires a license, we’re hard pressed to make the moral case that a driver’s license, like a fishing license, is simply a privilege.

Besides, today’s polychrome and counterfeit-resistant driver’s licenses, complete with mug shot, double for something Americans have long disdained but now find they must have: national identity cards. If you doubt that, try getting your hotel key or boarding an airplane without one. Never mind that the cards aren’t issued by the U.S. government. The state standards are common enough that, for all intents, a license is our version of citizenship papers.

Why the change? Because this is not my mother’s Massachusetts. Identifying each other today is far more demanding than when merchants knew their customers personally. As the technology both brings strangers closer and permits more anonymity, the need to identify each other grows. And that plunges us squarely into yet another right-versus-right dilemma: personal privacy versus public recognition. As technology exposes our personal data to inspections we’ve never approved, our thirst for privacy grows. Yet as we move about in public, we demand protection from the unrecognizable dangers of a faceless and inscrutable mayhem. Hence the deal we strike with democracy: I’ll allow myself to be identified by photograph, but only if everyone else does, too, so we all can be more secure.

What if one person like Mrs. Freemen doesn’t? The risk is not simply that she might commit some heinous act on an aircraft. It is that anyone her size and shape could don a veil and use her Florida/national ID card to commit that act. They could readily steal, in other words, her identity.

That’s no small problem these days. Identity theft is usually done by hackers who gain access to your intimate details and pretend to be you in online transactions. But it can also be done in person, especially when the identifying details are so erased — a black cloth in place of a face — that anyone can pretend to be you.

This thing in our wallets, then: Is it a license to drive, or a license to be? The Florida judge won’t be ruling on that, thank goodness. But she’ll need to focus on something almost as large: the clash between Islam and technology. Someday, technology will come to the aid of Islam: Iris scanning, which reads the unique configuration of our eyes, could spot the real Mrs. Freeman even behind her veil. For now, however, the judge’s ethical choice remains between the utilitarian position of protecting the greater good and the Kantian demand to respect an individual’s deepest principles. Both sides are right.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“What would have been unacceptable on September 10, 2001, is now becoming almost the norm…. The United States continues to pick and choose which bits of its obligations under international law it will use, and when it will use them.”

– Irene Khan, secretary-general of London-based Amnesty International, accusing Washington of worsening human-rights conditions through its war on terrorism. A fierce new Amnesty International report accuses the U.S. government of adopting an “a la carte” approach to human-rights protections, including turning a blind eye to abuses in countries that have provided help in fighting terrorism. (“Amnesty: ‘War on Terror’ Has Made World Worse,” Reuters, May 28.)

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“We reject any criticism, any allegations that our human rights efforts have diminished.”

– U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, responding last week to the Amnesty International report. (“U.S. Rejects Amnesty Charge,” CNN, May 29.)

WASHINGTON
A highly conflicted Supreme Court last week eased the way for police and investigators to coerce someone into providing evidence, even when self-incriminating, without regard for Miranda rights.

The court’s 6-to-3 ruling upholds the right of police to violate Miranda rights as long as the information obtained by such violations is used in investigation, not criminal prosecution, reported the New York Times.

The ruling marks a potential turning point by upending the public’s perception of the Miranda warnings — “You have the right to remain silent,” for example. Last week’s ruling effectively recasts Miranda as an evidentiary protocol instead of a constitutional right.

Accordingly, police have the right to disregard the Miranda warnings when gathering information against a detainee’s will, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority opinion, cobbling together a consensus from six separate opinions in the case.

Last week’s ruling is expected to have widespread ramifications for the U.S. government’s war on terrorism, in which hundreds of people have been detained and interrogated without criminal charges filed against them, reported CNN.

The ruling came in the case of Oliverio Martinez, who was blinded and paralyzed during a 1997 scuffle with police who shot him in the face and back, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Screaming in pain and begging to be left alone while on the way to the hospital, Martinez was harried by a California policeman who ignored his pleas in a rush to collect information before he died, pushing him to provide evidence that was self-incriminating.

Martinez, who survived the ensuing surgery, later sued, saying the policeman had violated his rights by behaving in a cruel and illegal manner and essentially coercing his testimony.

While the Supreme Court upheld Martinez’s right to pursue the first claim, the threw out the latter charge, which centered on Miranda rights, noting that the California police never filed charges against Martinez.

“A violation of the constitutional right against self-incrimination occurs only if one has been compelled to be a witness against himself in a criminal case,” Thomas wrote for the majority. “The absence of a ‘criminal case’ in which Martinez was compelled to be a ‘witness’ against himself defeats his core” claim.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, issued a strong dissent against the ruling.

“This is no small matter,” Kennedy wrote. “To tell our whole legal system that, when conducting a criminal investigation, police officers can use severe compulsion, even torture, with no present violation of the right against compelled self-incrimination can only diminish a celebrated provision in the Bill of Rights. Our cases and our legal tradition establish that the self-incrimination clause is a substantive constraint on the conduct of the government, not merely an evidentiary rule governing the work of the courts.”

The court upheld Martinez’s right to pursue his due-process claim centered on the policeman’s behavior. That claim will be tried in California’s courts, according to the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON
U.S. states must obey a federal law guaranteeing both men and women time off to care for new children and seriously ill family members, the Supreme Court ruled last week.

The 6-to-3 ruling marks a rare recent rebuke for states’ rights proponents, which have won a series of decisions under the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

In two recent decisions, Rehnquist’s conservative court has blocked private citizens from suing states in federal court for violations of U.S. laws barring age and disability discrimination.

Observers expected last week’s case — filed by a Utah man who was fired from his state social services job after taking 12 weeks of family leave to care for his wife — to follow a similar path, noted the Washington Post.

But Rehnquist, a strong supporter of states’ sovereignty, last week ruled against Utah, swinging the court while denying that he was reversing course or his anti-federalism philosophy.

Unlike with other anti-discrimination statutes, Rehnquist said Congress deliberately meant to make states subject to the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which guarantees at least 12 weeks of unpaid leave in some circumstances.

That law, Rehnquist noted, was designed to combat pervasive gender stereotypes that were keeping women out of the workplace and keeping men out of the house when care was needed. The problem of gender discrimination is severe enough that states should be forced to comply with the federal law, he concluded.

“Stereotypes about women’s domestic roles are reinforced by parallel stereotypes presuming a lack of domestic responsibilities by men,” Rehnquist wrote for the majority. “These mutually reinforcing stereotypes created a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination” that have injured all parties, he argued.

“By creating an across-the-board, routine employment benefit for all eligible employees, Congress sought to ensure that family care leave would no longer be stigmatized as an inordinate drain on the workplace caused by female employees and that employers could not evade leave obligations simply by hiring men,” Rehnquist wrote.

QUEBEC CITY
Two dozen Canadian soldiers are filing suit against the Canadian military, saying they have been largely abandoned after suffering mental disorders caused by their exposure to violence while on duty.

The soldiers — both active and retired — are asking the Canadian Armed Forces to pay up to $51 million in penalties for failing to adequately address and treat illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Twelve soldiers have filed suit, 12 more are preparing to file, and eight are considering cases, reported the CBC.

“(If I die), the army will treat my body with honor and pride. If I become ill, if I suffer from post-traumatic symptoms, they crumple me and brush me aside before discharging me,” plaintiff George Dumont told the Reuters news agency.

Plaintiffs charge that the military has shunted them into retirement with an insufficient pension, rather than treat the mental disorders as they currently treat physical disorders.

The Defense Department has not yet commented on the lawsuit, according to Reuters.

LONDON
Watchdog groups last week rapped three of Britain’s business sectors for questionable practices, saying self-regulation should be bolstered by government action if abuses continue.

A consumer magazine called Which? was among those voicing complaints last week, warning that the real estate industry is indulging in unethical and sometimes illegal methods to boost commissions and sales prices.

In an undercover investigation, Which? found that agents were lying to prospective customers, concocting high offers in order to stimulate steeper bids, and failing to follow industry standards, reported the BBC.

“Although [U.K. law] sets out the way estate agents are meant to behave, there is no systematic way to prevent these types of breaches of the law, because no one sees it being broken,” Which? editor Helen Parker said.

“Our undercover investigation cast light on parts of the house-buying process the public doesn’t usually see, with worrying results,” Parker added.

The National Association of Estate Agents last week responded by saying it was working to enforce self-regulatory standards and warning agents to uphold best practices.

Britain’s car dealers also came under fire last week after warranty specialist Warranty Direct released a report chronicling an anomalously steep spike in labor rates charged by dealers.

Those rates — much higher than those at independent auto repair shops — are charged to consumers increasingly required to have their cars serviced at the dealers under newer warranties, reported the BBC.

Volkswagen led the charge on accelerated rates, with hourly labor charges 95 percent higher than they were five years ago. BMW (85 percent) and Volvo (79 percent) followed. Mazda (2 percent), Citroen (3 percent), and Renault (3 percent) anchored the other end of the list, according to the Warranty Direct.

The energy industry also took heat last week, with industry regulator Energywatch accusing the sector of failing to self-police unethical sales teams pitching abusive contracts and forging customers’ signatures.

While complaints about such sales tactics have dropped by two-thirds over the past year, 12,000 alleged abuses were still reported during the period, noted the BBC.

The Association of Energy Suppliers last week said it is taking steps to curb abuses by unveiling a new code of practice and revoking the accreditation of salespeople who commit abuses.

Energywatch last week urged the U.K. Office of Fair Trading to investigate the sector, saying previous industry promises to self-regulate had fallen far short of genuine and needed reform.

“The industry has got to convince us that this code is more than just smoke and mirrors,” Energywatch chair Ann Robinson told the BBC.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien is being accused by opposition parties and some in his own party of gratuitously insulting the Bush administration after remarks he made to reporters on a trip to Europe, which in part will include a meeting with President Bush at the G8 meeting in Evian, France.

The prime minister criticized the growing budget deficit in the United States while pointing to his success in eliminating the budget deficit in Canada.

Chrétien went further and pointed out other differences between the “right-wing government” of George W. Bush on issues like gun control and abortion, labeling Mr. Bush a “southern conservative” while he was a “Canadian Liberal.”

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer shot back at Mr. Chrétien by asserting that the difference between the two administrations is that Mr. Bush was a tax cutter, that the United States was attacked on 9/11 and Canada was not, and that the United States had paid the price to liberate Iraq.

Many in the media and elsewhere have pointed out that the timing of Mr. Chretién’s remarks was most unfortunate and “graceless” given the mounting trade and other issues between the two countries, including disputes over softwood lumber, import bans against all Canadian beef products due to the mad-cow threat, and most recently the U.S. Center for Disease Control travel alert on Toronto due to the new cluster of SARS cases in two Toronto hospitals. The renewed SARS flare-up has led to at least two more deaths and more than 5,000 people being quarantined in the past week.

LAGOS, Nigeria
Bank fraud in Nigeria skyrocketed last year to nearly $10 million, the country’s banking regulator warned last week.

The bulk of the fraud took the form of forgeries and unauthorized withdrawals from customers’ accounts. The chief culprits, according to the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, are bank employees.

The BBC reports that while $10 million was actually pilfered, nearly $100 million in attempted fraud was blocked before customers were bilked.

LAS VEGAS
Thousands of documents were disinterred last week from a 45-foot-deep hole in the desert near Las Vegas, exposing what may have been a bid to conceal evidence related to an oil spill in the early 1990s.

The documents — financial ledgers, environmental reports, and other papers — were unearthed following a tip from a former employee of Texas-New Mexico Pipeline Co., reported the Associated Press.

The documents are suspected to shed light on the circumstances of an oil spill that occurred in the early 1990s in Midland County, Texas.

After discovering their well water was contaminated from the spill, residents sued Texas-New Mexico Pipeline, as well as EEOT Energy, which purchased a portion of the Texas-New Mexico operations in 1999.

That sale was contingent on full disclosure from Texas-New Mexico regarding liabilities and environmental records — documents EEOT believes were hidden in the hole in the desert until last week.

Oil giant Shell, which owns the Texas-New Mexico Pipeline, last week declined to comment on the discovery of the burlap-wrapped documents, reported the BBC.

The dug-up documents, which filled at least 157 boxes, have been taken to a guarded EEOT facility for examination by company lawyers and U.S. regulators, who say they are looking into the matter, according to the AP.

NEW YORK
Pulitzer-wining reporter Rick Bragg last week resigned from the New York Times following a controversy over his decision to file a recent feature story without the byline of an intern who reported large portions of the piece.

The story — about Florida oystermen — was assembled by Bragg using significant research and reporting by J. Wes Yoder, a recent college graduate volunteering as an intern for Bragg.

Yoder spent four days in the town of Apalachicola, Florida, gathering interviews and picturesque details that informed much of the story. Bragg, who took the sole byline, did little more than a quick touch-down in the Gulf Coast town.

Still reeling from the plagiarism scandal of Jayson Blair, the Times suspended Bragg for two weeks.

Bragg, who won the Pulitzer prize for feature writing in 1996, last week resigned, telling the Washington Post that he is being made a whipping boy for a practice that is widespread and widely accepted.

Commenting on what he said is the prevalent practice of “taking feeds” from lower-level journalists, Bragg told the Post, “I will take it from a stringer. I will take it from an intern. I will take it from a news assistant. If a clerk does an interview for me, I will use it. I’m going to send people to sit in for me if I don’t have time to be there. It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don’t have time to conduct. It’s what we do.”

Not so, Bragg’s colleagues insisted last week. In notes posted on the Web site of the Poynter Institute, Times staffers rebutted Bragg’s comments.

Reporters “often make calls for each other without expecting credit. Here or anywhere else, it’s a deadline business, and when you’re asked to pitch in, you do,” Times business reporter Alex Berenson wrote on the Poynter site.

“But I don’t know anyone here, aside, I guess, from Rick Bragg, who believes that someone who contributes significantly to a story doesn’t deserve credit in the byline. There are no hard and fast rules here — maybe there should be,” Berenson added. “I was shocked that any reporter would hire a personal intern, pass off the intern’s reporting on a non-deadline feature story as his own, and then defend the practice.”

Bragg told the Post that he had twice postponed his departure from the Times as a favor to executive editor Howell Raines. Citing post-Blair politics at the Times, Bragg said he would quit and begin work this summer on a $1 million, two-book contract with Random House.

SEATTLE
Ending a lawsuit brought a year and a half ago, Microsoft last week agreed to a settlement with AOL Time Warner over the technology company’s alleged violation of antitrust law and illegal promotion of its Internet Explorer browser.

Under the deal, Microsoft will pay $750 million and grant AOL, which owns the rival Netscape Navigator browser, a seven-year, royalty-free license to use the firm’s technology.

“A lot has changed in the last few years, not only in the marketplace, but also for Microsoft and AOL Time Warner,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said in a prepared statement released to Reuters. “We’re pleased to reach this new agreement that’s forward-looking and provides for a higher level of technical cooperation while, at the same time, the companies will continue to compete in a number of areas.”

The companies also agreed to closer cooperation on digital media distribution and to combat online piracy of music and videos. In a non-exclusive agreement, AOL will now support Microsoft’s Windows Media Player in addition to independent RealNetwork’s RealOne media player, according to USA Today.

USA Today also reports that Microsoft has agreed to stop pressuring PC makers to exclude AOL’s Internet service on their machines. The two companies have pledged to make their competing instant messaging services interoperable.

Additionally, the New York Times reports that Microsoft will grant AOL increased access to its Windows operating system — a provision that should make AOL’s online service work better with Windows-equipped computers.

“This is the end of a long war,” Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie told the Times. “AOL Time Warner is much more of a pure media company, while Microsoft has returned much more to its software roots.”

With this settlement behind it and nearly $40 billion in cash still in the bank, according to the Times, Microsoft still faces an antitrust investigation by the European Union and a private suit by Sun Microsystems, a technology competitor.

From the Gallup News Service:

“Jayson Blair’s reporting will be discussed for years to come in the nation’s journalism schools — as an example of how not to be a reporter. Blair resigned under pressure from the New York Times May 1 after he was caught faking news stories and plagiarizing from other reporters. The revelation has since been the subject of an exhaustive report in the Times, as well as other publications. In addition, another Times correspondent, Rick Bragg, resigned earlier this week after being suspended for relying extensively on the work of a freelance journalist for stories that carried his byline.

“While Americans have historically viewed the news media with a jaundiced eye, a new Gallup Poll conducted May 19-21, in the wake of the Blair scandal, found that 62 percent of Americans now believe news organizations are often inaccurate in their reporting. Just 36 percent believe media outlets ‘get the facts straight.’

“This feeling has grown considerably since Gallup first asked the question in 1985. At that time, 55 percent of Americans felt that news stories were accurate, while 34 percent said the reports were often inaccurate. In later years, feelings became more evenly divided, but a sea change took place following the 2000 presidential election. A Gallup Poll conducted in December of that year — during the post-election controversy in Florida — found that 65 percent rated news stories as ‘often inaccurate,’ while just 32 percent called the coverage accurate. The same question asked in a Gallup Poll conducted February 17-19, 2003 found that 58 percent rated news stories as ‘often inaccurate,’ compared to 39 percent who rated them as accurate.

“For all the perceived anti-media bias among conservatives, there is remarkably little difference between the politically conservative and the politically liberal on this question. Among conservatives, 68 percent rate news stories as ‘often inaccurate.’ However, 61 percent of liberals say the same thing. There are more striking differences based on education — those with only a high school education or less are far more likely to be critical of news organizations than are those who have attended college….”

“I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.”

– Woodrow Wilson (28th U.S. president, 1856-1924)