Mission to Mercury
Late on St. Patrick’s Day, Eastern time, a spacecraft called Messenger, weighing a little more than a thousand pounds, slipped into an elliptical orbit around the planet Mercury, becoming the only manmade object to orbit the planet closest to the Sun.
Through the coming days, scientists from NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will check Messenger’s systems and begin turning on its instruments. On April 4, observations begin.
Messenger spent nearly seven years in transit and traveled about five billion miles. It will spend one Earth-year studying the mineralogy of Mercury, mapping its surface and magnetic and gravitational fields, and trying to identify the substance covering the planet’s north pole. All the while, a ceramic-fabric sunshade will be protecting Messenger from the ferocious heat of the nearby Sun and the solar reflection from Mercury. The craft will eventually plummet into the planet.
It really doesn’t matter how many space missions you’ve followed or how many Hubble photographs you’ve marveled over. There is still a sense of raw excitement about reaching a critical stage in an expedition like this, an excitement that will only grow as data begins to stream toward Earth.
Part of the thrill is knowing that this is the pure pursuit of knowledge, the scientific impulse — a human impulse — carried to a remarkable conclusion. It’s hard to know just what we will learn about Mercury. Like all scientific missions and experiments, this is a journey to a more refined sense of what we don’t yet know.
The Broken Machinery of Death
The Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia’s sodium thiopental supply this week, after a complaint that the sedative used in the three-drug protocol for execution by lethal injection was imported illegally. The American producer of sodium thiopental stopped making it and the complaint says the purchase of it from an unlicensed British supplier calls into question “the legality and integrity” of how Georgia administers injections.
Texas’s supply is running out and it has now announced that it will switch to a one-drug protocol, following the lead first of Oklahoma, then of Ohio, in using another sedative, pentobarbital, for executions. In none of these states have scientific studies been done ensuring that this drug will meet the Supreme Court’s requirement that executions not cause severe pain.
The death penalty is capricious, discriminatory and barbaric. The shortage of sodium thiopental has stripped what Justice Harry Blackmun called “the machinery of death” of even a cloak of scientifically based reliability.
We were unpersuaded when the court, by a highly fractured 7-to-2 vote in Baze v. Rees in 2008, upheld the death penalty and the three-drug protocol used by almost all states. It said that the manner in which the State of Kentucky administered it did not pose an unconstitutional risk that someone being put to death would suffer pain that was severe yet undetectable.
Chief Justice John Roberts argued then that the court could make that finding because of an extensive trial record about the use of sodium thiopental. There is far less of a record for the one-drug protocol, which should raise serious doubts about its constitutionality, even with this court.
When Illinois joined New Jersey and New Mexico this month as the third state to abolish the death penalty in the last four years, it made the choice compelled by a long record of judicial abuses, false convictions and other fundamental problems. That should be enough for all states to abandon the penalty once and for all.
A New Internet Privacy Law?
Considering how much information we entrust to the Internet every day, it is hard to believe there is no general law to protect people’s privacy online. Companies harvest data about people as they surf the Net, assemble it into detailed profiles and sell it to advertisers or others without ever asking permission.
So it is good to see a groundswell of support emerging for minimum standards of privacy, online and off. This week, the Obama administration called for legislation to protect consumers’ privacy. In the Senate, John Kerry is trying to draft a privacy bill of rights with the across-the-aisle support of John McCain.
Microsoft, which runs one of the biggest Internet advertising networks, said it supports a broad-based privacy law. It has just introduced a version of its Explorer browser that allows surfers to block some tools advertisers use to track consumers’ activities online.
It is crucial that lawmakers get this right. There is strong pressure from the advertising industry to water down rules aimed at limiting the data companies can collect and what they can do with it.
Most oppose a sensible proposal by the Federal Trade Commission for a do-not-track option — likely embedded in Web browsers. They have proposed self-regulation instead, and we applaud their desire to do that, but the zeal to self-regulate tends to wane when it is not backed by government rules and enforcement.
Senator Kerry has not yet proposed specific legislation, but he has laid out sound principles. Companies that track people’s activities online must obtain people’s consent first. They must specify what data they are collecting and how they will use it. They need consumers’ go-ahead to use data for any new purpose. They are responsible for the data’s integrity. And consumers should have the right to sever their relationship with data collectors and ask for their file to be deleted.
But there are potential areas of concern. Senator Kerry so far has not called for a do-not-track option. He would allow companies to write their own privacy plans and submit them to the F.T.C. for approval.
That would give companies flexibility to adapt their solutions as technology evolved, but it lacks the simplicity and universality of a do-not-track feature. It could yield a dizzying array of solutions that would confuse consumers about their rights and options and make it more difficult to enforce clear standards. Moreover, it would make it tougher for consumers to keep track of how their information is used and to whom it is sold.
Advertising firms still argue that privacy protections could undermine the free Internet, depriving it of ad revenue by reducing advertisers’ ability to target consumers. This is overstated. Advertisers will still need to advertise. If many people opt out of behavioral targeting, the firms will find other ways to do it.
Privacy protections are long overdue. We hope the swell of support will lead to significant legislation.
Settling Foreclosure Abuses
State attorneys general are the traditional defenders of consumers. So when all 50 of them announced an investigation last fall into foreclosure practices at the nation’s big banks, there was hope for an unsparing inquiry and a meaningful settlement. Most of all, we hoped that banks would be compelled, at long last, to aggressively modify millions of additional loans.
Unfortunately, a draft settlement recently presented to the nation’s biggest banks is unclear on how to achieve that goal. And even before the terms have been clarified, House and Senate Republicans are attacking the proposal. They are arguing, in effect, that banks should not be held accountable for their misdeeds.
The proposal would impose sound reforms, like requiring banks to halt a foreclosure while a loan modification is pending and to streamline the modification process. But there is no mention of how much money banks would have to put toward reworking bad loans or a target number of new loan modifications. It is also impossible to know the extent to which banks would be shielded from future lawsuits in exchange for settling. Without those details, it is all too easy to envision a settlement in which homeowners receive little and banks win broad release from legal liability for unspecified abuses.
Our doubts about the outcome are worsened by the dissension among government officials about what a settlement should achieve. The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — the banks’ staunchest defenders — have argued for minimal fines. State officials, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau want the broader redress that would come with more loan modifications. Since the aim is for state and federal agencies to join in one global settlement with the banks, differences among people who should be on the same side do not bode well.
Into that mix, The Times’s Gretchen Morgenson reported this week that before the release of the draft settlement, the attorneys general did not conduct a full inquiry with subpoenaed documents and sworn depositions. A spokesman for Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general, who leads the group, defended the investigation. He said the state attorneys, long steeped in foreclosure issues, had extensive knowledge of the problems and needed solutions.
Of course, knowledge is good, but in settlement talks, leverage is better. Banks are vulnerable to prosecution because of robo-signing, as the practice, exposed last year, of filing false court documents in an effort to speed foreclosures is known. But will their feet be held to the fire over other damaging practices? A brief sampling of violations — aired in court cases, Congressional testimony and academic research — include excessive fees, improper denial of loan modifications, irregularities in the packaging of mortgages and conflicts of interest that lead banks to favor foreclosures over modifications.
Unless an inquiry uncovers the extent of those and other violations, it will be impossible to gauge if a settlement is fair. Even the seemingly large settlement sum of $20 billion that has been floated would be a small price for banks to pay if the quid pro quo is to sweep potentially widespread abuses under the rug.
For too long, bank misbehavior has been indulged by lawmakers, regulators, Obama officials and Bush officials before them. As a result, foreclosures have proliferated and loan workouts have lagged, devastating homeowners and the housing market, and Americans’ trust in political and financial institutions.
A powerful settlement could begin to repair all that. If it is not forthcoming, state attorneys general should keep open their options to pursue the banks in courts across the land.
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