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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mrknowitall who wrote (5440)	9/26/1998 8:34:00 AM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

The age of the internet has made access to information pretty amazing, if you develop a well indexed set of bookmarks, and the like. Still takes some application, but not the army of helpers it once did. Seems to me. Doug

To: mrknowitall who wrote (5440)	9/26/1998 8:43:00 AM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Another excerpt from a Salon piece. (First time I ever looked at it. Some of this stuff is pretty good.) BY GARY WOLF \| The Clinton-Lewinsky investigation is a test of the technology of total communication. What an American twist: This advanced experiment with publicizing an entire life takes place not with a prisoner or subversive who is captured, humiliated and executed nor with an artist, but rather with the leader of our country. The official record shows President Clinton's every call. The investigators have his schedule down to the minute; they know every visitor; they also have all Monica Lewinsky's calls and her pager record; they have done a blood test, a DNA analysis and identified his semen from a 2-year-old ejaculation; they know everything he purchased for her and everything he received. They have organized the information in convenient form and broadcast it to the world. In Times Square, his interrogation became an element of urban design. Something like this will happen to you. Not on such a grand scale, of course -- the ambition, intelligence, access to wealth, narcissism and good luck of a Bill Clinton are granted to only a few people in every generation. But Clinton's martyrdom to total surveillance foreshadows the fate of the "little guy." You may never be addressed fondly by the charming intern at the office, you may have lips uncontaminated by illicit love -- or by love of any kind. But the past will haunt you anyway. This is common knowledge, so much so that it is very boring to trot out the evidence. Perhaps key words will suffice: credit cards, legal records, tax statements, phone bills, insurance payments, Usenet posts, office e-mail, Amazon purchases. These are the raw materials of data mining that create a sophisticated record of your habits, tastes, aberrations, misdeeds and physical condition. Your only hope is to remain obscure enough that nobody will care to torment you with what they could know if they tried. This hope is futile. You may not be tormented by special prosecutors, but a certain amount of general persecution is inevitable. At minimum, you will be the target of endless seductive appeals for your attention based on a sickeningly explicit portrait constructed out of the trails of the purchases you make. And if you think purchases are unrevealing and harmless, you haven't been paying attention to the great national surveillance demonstration currently under way. Rarely have public leaders been called upon to make personal sacrifices to technological progress. Their relationship to new technologies is ceremonial, encouraging and third-hand. They may be asked to break a bottle of champagne over the prow of a new factory or to hug an executive who founded a software company, but this puts them at little risk. Clinton, by contrast, is on the front line. The process of specifying and publicizing his every movement has created a new kind of document (the paperback is on sale now in bookstores) that owes its existence to the ever-present technology of surveillance and broadcast. Smaller experiments have been undertaken before: Richard Nixon, obviously, and all the various security state functions of the old South Africa or the old East Germany. But this is the fullest human trial yet attempted of complete surveillance as, simultaneously, a tool of jurisprudence and a form of entertainment. The complete mapping of the world with global positioning devices, the protection of our safety with 24-hour-a-day security cameras and the deep archives of e-mail messages and Usenet posts offer ever more tempting resources for the aspiring dramatists of the media and the courtroom. Certainly Clinton would not have volunteered for this mission. But the fact that he was drafted -- or, more accurately, maliciously ordered to the front by rivals at headquarters -- does not erase a certain heroism. Importantly, he has not yet run away. He could get out of the spotlight by resigning. He would never have to hold another press conference. The House Judiciary Committee would quickly move on to other business. The fine-grained image of a minor episode of untruth and self-infatuation -- so small, so human and so unappetizing that it could only be handled, in fiction, by the most ruthless comic writer -- would fade from view within a month. Privacy, as we are all becoming aware, can best be safeguarded by conformism and inoffensive obscurity. And yet Clinton stays at the front. He even moves forward into the line of fire. Again, he is no volunteer. But again, he is nonetheless a hero. Because he has such fortitude, we are all going to find out something about how much of this a person can stand. Such experimental opportunities are, for obvious reasons, difficult to come by. It continues. salonmagazine.com Doug

To: mrknowitall who wrote (5440)	9/26/1998 10:00:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

On one other matter - (and this is cc:'d to Dan) is it me, or do you also notice how much information Dan seems to have so handy? What a pleasure to be smeared by the honorable Mr. K. No biggie, though, pretty gentle innuendo compared to Mr. Vaughn's well-reasoned "facts". Mr. K, you ever heard of cut and paste? It ain't so hard. Then, there's the internet, always good for catching up on things. You can believe it or not, but I hadn't followed the Starr affair closely since the Monica Bimbogate broke. The news was too grim. I got in this ridiculous argument with my mother, who started listening to Rush somewhere along the line. I was temporarily cured of the political part of my information jones. That Walsh piece- I stumbled on it while looking for the Nixon articles of impeachment I remembered as being voted down. Got sidetracked there, but I thought the story made quite a telling contrast to current matters. Never found anything on the missing articles net , so I went to the library (well, actually, I was going there anyway to pick up some holds for my wife), and checked out "The Final Days", Woodward and Bernstein. From P. 309, describing events on July 29, 1974: The Committee was completing its task. It passed the third article of impeachment, for the President's defiance of its subpoenas. The vote was 21-17. Two additional articles, accusing Nixon of illegally concealing the bombing of Cambodia and of committing tax fraud, were rejected by votes of 26-12. Yuck, I had to fix about 8 typoes there, cut and past works much better. I'd remembered 8 articles, though not any specifics besides the secret bombing; I don't know if some weren't voted on or I just remembered wrong. Funny thing about The Final Days- The portrait of Nixon is not unsympathetic, though there's a bit of bathos. The book was controversial at the time because sources weren't identified, although W&B put all their source material away for posterity. As I said, things were a bit less partisan at the time, believe it or not. There was a certain degree of civility. Journalistic standards were a bit higher too, a leak to Matt Drudge wouldn't have been immediately propagated across front pages everywhere. Cheers, Dan.