Author: Ted Rall

You arrive at work early, work hard, and leave late. You’re quiet, respectful, and well liked. You keep your nose clean. When someone brings up politics, you’re smart enough to shut up or walk away. You wouldn’t want to say anything that might annoy one of your co-workers.

Once you get home, though, you get to be yourself: a committed political activist. You work the phone bank at “Republocratic” headquarters, update your blog with scathing takedowns of opposing politicians, and chat up your neighbors to urge them to vote for your favorite candidates. But when you clock back in, you leave it at the door. You’re cool.

One morning, your boss calls you into her office. “It has come to our attention that you’re a Republocrat,” she says. “We don’t want your type working here. Gather your things and get out. You’re fired.”

Can she do that? Are your political opinions your employer’s business? It depends on where you live.

My friend Jackie’s (not her real name) employer recently gave her a choice: Give up your political blog or be fired. She lives in Florida, where labor laws prohibit discrimination based on sex or affliction with sickle-cell anemia — but not political expression. Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, head of the Miami chapter of the ACLU says: “The [Florida] law is pretty clear that a private employer can fire someone based on their political speech, even when that political speech does not affect the terms and conditions of employment.”

If Jackie lived in California or New York, she could sue her boss for even threatening her with dismissal. Unless you’re spending your free time working for the violent overthrow of the government, California and New York protect a worker’s right to political speech outside the workplace. (Companies may prohibit some workers, such as store clerks, from wearing political buttons or campaigning during work hours.) But only five states have laws protecting workers’ offsite political speech.

Residents of the other 45 states get no help from federal law either. “Do not think you’re protected by the First Amendment,” says Lewis Maltby of the National Workrights Institute. “It doesn’t apply to private employment.” Even contractors that earn income from the government are exempt, as are private offices, shops, restaurants, and factories — where 85 percent of Americans work. Last year’s presidential election campaign exposed the problem.

Lynne Gobbell’s boss fired her from her job after she refused his demand that she remove the Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker from her car. “I would like to find another job, but I would take that job back because I need to work,” she told the Decatur, Tennessee, newspaper. “It upset me and made me mad that he could put a letter in my check expressing his [political] opinion, but I can’t put something on my car expressing mine.” Co-workers confirm that the company attached a pro-Bush letter to paychecks.

Gobbell’s boss has that right under Tennessee law.

On the other side of the left-right divide, Playgirl magazine fired editor Michele Zipp after she wrote an article “admitting” that she was a Republican. “I wouldn’t have hired you if I knew you were a Republican,” Zipp quoted a Playgirl executive. As a New Yorker, she can sue for damages.

Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, every American is entitled to his or her political opinions. But unless you’re so wealthy that you can afford not to work, what good is the right to free speech if your employer can fire you for using it — even after working hours? Our hodgepodge of conflicting state labor laws highlights the absurdity of the situation. Why can the leftover “W” sticker on your car get you canned in Florida but not in California? How can the United States bring democracy to the Middle East while allowing American citizens to be fired for expressing political opinions?

Extending national protection to outside-the-workplace political expression is something that even Democrats and Republicans in this highly partisan Congress ought to be able to agree upon. Neither party wants its supporters to lose their jobs. The obvious remedy is to add the protection of political speech to the list of activities and identifiers already covered under current federal labor laws: whistle blowing, race, color, national origin, religion, age, gender, etc. Only then will we truly be a nation that values and protects free speech.

Jackie, by the way, has ended her blog. In the town where she lives, jobs are hard to find. •

Ted Rall is the author of Wake Up, You’re Liberal! and Generalissimo El Busho: Essays and Cartoons on the Bush Years.

The official seal of the Pentagon’s new Total Information Awareness Office (TIA) bears a spooky eye above a pyramid — you know the one, it’s on the back of the one-dollar bill — peering at the globe. The fact that the TIA was quietly funded under the auspices of the bill creating the new Department of Homeland Security suggests that its mission is a vital part of the war on terrorism. But Europe and Asia, the two main continents of the eastern hemisphere, which appear on the TIA logo, are not, in fact, its principal targets. You are.

Rear Admiral John Poindexter, the scandal-scarred Iran-Contra figure who heads the $62.9 million “data mining” operation for the Defense Department, says that the TIA’s mission is “to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists — and decipher their plans — and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts.” Sounds like a magnificent idea. So why do such unusual allies as the American Civil Liberties Union, The New York Times, William Safire, and Republican senator Charles Grassley say it’s dangerous?

According to the TIA’s Web site, Poindexter’s new office will “develop architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools … invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and [refining] … revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.”

In English: Total Information Awareness will use sophisticated computer-modeling programs to search every database they can get their hands on. They’ll scan credit card receipts, bank statements, ATM purchases, Web “cookies,” school transcripts, medical files, property deeds, magazine subscriptions, airline manifests, addresses — even veterinary records. The TIA believes that knowing if and when Fluffy got spayed — and whether your son stopped torturing Fluffy after you put him on Ritalin — will help the military stop terrorists before they strike.

Most of this raw data is already available to businesses trying to market their products. The TIA represents the first full-scale attempt by a government agency — the Department of Defense — to collect and analyze that information. “There has obviously been a growing problem within the private sector over collection of information for targeted marketing,” says David Sobel, general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “What’s different now is the government is putting major resources into getting access to privately collected data.”

Critics are understandably anxious that the TIA is merely the Bush administration’s latest effort to emulate the most unsavory aspects of Soviet society. “If the Pentagon has its way, every American — from the Nebraskan farmer to the Wall Street banker — will find themselves under the accusatory cyber-state of an all-powerful national security apparatus,” warns Laura Murphy of the ACLU.

Is Poindexter more interested in digging up dirt on Bush’s political foes than fighting Islamist terrorism? Should we believe him when he says that he respects the Fourth Amendment? Short of running a TIA profile on the man, there’s no way to know whether he’s hoping to turn the United States into a police state. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the TIA plans to respect our privacy rights and that it won’t yield to the temptation to use its findings to smear political opponents.

Even if Poindexter and his domestic spying operation means well — and that’s a big if — the TIA is a classic case of fighting your last battle all over again.

Like Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information Prevention System) — the Orwellian Justice Department program that asks cable installers, postal workers, and meter readers to turn in their customers if they see any suspicious behavior — the TIA assumes that the next big attack will be committed by members of Arab “sleeper cells” living in the United States. Why do we assume this? Because that is what happened on September 11, 2001.

Presuming there will be an exact replay of September 11th has led to long security lines at airports and no screenings whatsoever at train stations and bus depots. Which targets would you go after if you were a terrorist?

As proven by their ability to elude arrest, Osama bin Laden and his allies are no fools. As al Qaeda operatives plot their next attack against the United States, they will exploit the weaknesses we aren’t aware of or have chosen to ignore. Another plane hijacking is unlikely, at least for the foreseeable future. So are strikes carried out by illegal-immigrant operatives with a fondness for strip joints living in the United States. Terrorists are opportunists, not serial killers predictably utilizing identical methods for each act.

Whatever you least expect, expect.

Since most of the data the TIA analyzes relates to loyal American citizens, Total Information Awareness creates the potential for abuse of governmental power on an unprecedented scale. Because it won’t track the most likely future terrorists — people who live in, for example, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — it’s a waste of money that furthers the illusion that our government is protecting us.

Since 9/11, George W. Bush has asked us to trade our precious freedoms for a little security. The TIA forces Americans to sacrifice privacy for nothing.

Ted Rall writes for AlterNet, where this article first appeared.