Her excuse that it "protects privacy" is not only ridiculous, it's insulting (that they think people will buy it).
I feel that this happens more and more, where leaders and elected officials will present completely transparent bold-faced lies to the public, with a straight face, when everyone involved (the speaker and the audience) knows it to be a lie, but because there is no practical or legal way to disprove the lie, it is presented anyways..
Whatever happened to integrity? Do you really think it just recently vanished?
To quote from Machiavelli's Il Principe, from the 1500's: "The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present."
Want to go earlier? Let's get Julius Caesar: “If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”
And I'm sure he wasn't the first one to say or think so, either. Integrity is not a quality we can ever assume in existence - the only thing that will guarantee a semblance of it is accountability.
Too cynical, and perhaps dangerously so, yet plausible.
Everyone is subject to temptation and self-justification. Anyone given too large a pass for "integrity" will start to veer to self-aggrandizement of some sort. That doesn't make people inherently bad, it does mean we all benefit from perspective and inspection.
To me the take-away is that an assertion of incorruptibility is a leading indicator of trouble. Anything you aren't allowed to question or discuss is a breeding ground for trouble.
I'd be cynical if I assumed integrity didn't exist. Some people seem to have it, and many more strive for it.
But I'd be hopelessly naive if I ever assumed it to exist, or if I assumed public displays of "integrity" were connected to an internal state.
These latter assumptions might be true, but the cost of them being not true is too high, and the occurrence of "not true" is too frequent. Or, shorter, "Trust, but verify" :)
That's a really good question. I think the answer is partly that it was never there to begin with, just a thin veneer to cover the filth underneath. The difference is that there is now not even a pretence at integrity any more.
No, the difference is that we now have the Internet, which serves as a safe place to point these things out and spread the word. In the past, it was a lot easier to sweep it under the rug.
In this case, privacy could be a concern. If an officer is wearing a body camera during a search, suddenly there's a permanent record of the inside of your home and plenty more opportunity to spot unrelated crimes to hold against you.
I was thinking more of the barge-down-the-door-without-a-warrant sort of search.
I'm overly sensitive to it because I live in a college town with a 4th amendment violating county ordinance. If the police suspect underage drinking, they can enter the premises and arrest occupants for any other violations they see.
I feel that this happens more and more, where leaders and elected officials will present completely transparent bold-faced lies to the public, with a straight face, when everyone involved (the speaker and the audience) knows it to be a lie, but because there is no practical or legal way to disprove the lie, it is presented anyways..
Whatever happened to integrity?