Dialogue on Diversity, in a midday program January 27th, offered a glimpse of the -- perhaps disquieting -- technological future in an early-bird program leading off its 2009 public policy series. This week's program, held as Washington was catching its breath after the exertions of the recent inauguration, was presented as part of the observance of Data Privacy Day,  January 28th,  organized by a variety of governmental bodies, large IT firms, and an array of academic and civil-society groups, among these Dialogue on Diversity.  The festal day, dedicated to a ramifying cluster of concerns, that have grown apace with the ever broader use of the internet and e-mail, has long been in observed in Europe,  but is only now being taken note of in America.  This year's marks the second observance.  Rep. David Price of North Carolina has sponsored a Resolution, approved this week by the House of Representatives, with its Proclamation claiming the Day for the Cause.

 

The Dialogue's symposium on the 27^th was the Pre-Data Day observance setting out the factual and logical underpinnings of the Internet Privacy story, part of the larger narrative of the progress of Information Technology and its problematic spawn, the harms, potential and actual, to the integrity of a society avid of its benefits.  The symposium was staged, before an overflow group of IT professionals, civil society experts, Congressional staff,  and Dialogue friends in the ornate conference salon at the Washington Home of Stewart R. Mott.  The Mott House, as it is known, is situated at the angular corner of Maryland and Constitution Avenues near Capitol Hill.  It was built in 1821 and has passed through a series of owners, all august figures on the Washington scene, up to its purchase in 1974 by the philanthropist and colorful American original Stewart R. Mott (who died in June of 2008).  During the more than three decades of its existence as the busy focus of activity on behalf of a vast array of nonprofit enterprises concerned with poverty, civil liberties, and like social and political causes, it has hosted the programs of civil society organization of greatly varied political and ideological coloration.  A capsule history of the Mott House and its eponymous guiding spirit is to be found later in this newsletter

 

Manuel A. Rosales, of the Latino Coalition and formerly Assistant Administrator of the Small Business Administration for International Trade, served as the genial and able moderator for the several Internet Privacy symposium presentations.  Ms. Rosales is a friend of long standing to the Dialogue and is an unflagging source of wise and creative counsel, benefiting many non-profit entities and individual entrepreneurs with his experience and discerning in matters economic and civic.  

                                                                                                                        

Overview

The Symposium agenda led off with an overview of the state of the Information Technology (IT) revolution at the outset of a fresh Administration (and perhaps the dawning of  a modestly enhanced public ethos in the Capital.), as assessed by the Hon. Gregory L. Rohde, the former assistant secretary of Commerce who presided over the busy National Telecommunications and Information Administration in an early, pre-2001 Executive Branch rιgime, and now spearheads design and planning work in his engineering-consulting firm's IT projects for companies and cities around the world.  Conclusion:  the revolution has far from run its course, and the U.S., through lethargy and an institutionalized stodginess, has fallen grievously behind many other countries in the adoption of the newest technological instrumentalities.  Example:  a driver in rural southern Spain rounds a curve and sees a messy traffic collision ahead.  Driver presses the emergency number on the mobile phone.  Gets instructions from the authorities to turn car around and, using the phone, transmit a video generated through the rear view camera.  Police and medical emergency crew view event in motion, in color, and in real time, promptly moving to the scene.  In U.S. no such capability with the mobile phone, no facility at the police/medical stations to receive video information, no serious interoperability among such information capabilities as exist with emergency services, etc.  Not seldom, indeed, U.S. governmental bureaucracies bar adoption of clearly improved technology, and do so with the frankly avowed purpose of protecting incumbent suppliers.  At a cost of rather modest amount, moreover, as seen next to the massive quantities of money being hefted by the federal government in the economic slowdown, it would be possible, Mr. Rohde averred, to upgrade the country's broadband capabilities to a qualitatively new level of reach, speed, and efficiency. There is hope that the efforts apparently now in the cards for the medical information project – see the list of infrastructure projects in the current spending bill -- will extend to broadband capability and IT generally. The broadband project is a prime part of those novel dimensions of infrastructure that, in this opening decade of a new century – ought to be front and center in the drive to enhance the sadly eroded capital capacities of American society.

 

Medical Information and Privacy: The Rival Imperatives 

On the specific, very crucial project of placing medical history/treatment data in a contemporary IT vehicle, Deven McGraw, head of the medical information studies at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, gauged the state of information technology deployment in the medical sector as alarmingly primitive, and the statutory and institutional privacy protection rιgime as fragmented, inconsistent, and doubtfully effective.  An instinctive conservatism among practitioners in the industry, it appears, insists on the comforting facticity of paper-and-pen records, while ancient practice makes it a long and costly process for patients to obtain their own medical records, which are often maintained in paper copies at a remote off-site depository.  The problem is most dramatically displayed in the case of delivery of a patient in an emergency condition to a service point.  Action must be taken without delay, yet next to nothing is known of the patient's medical state generally, his allergies, his medications, organ weaknesses of any variety, etc.  The providers have to guess and pray for good luck in designing treatment in a matter of minutes.  They grow accustomed to playing at this game of blind man's buff with the life and limb of scores of patients, and the cost in the inescapable medical missteps is massive in both pecuniary and personal terms.  It is thus an imperative that a universal interoperability among medical information systems around the country, and globally, be put in place, that the totality of medical histories and treatment details, identifiable for individual patients, be inscribed digitally in an information bank.  But this proposition instantly swivels the spotlight to the opposite imperative, that safeguards have to be erected to keep this now instantly accessible plenary personal data cache out of the hands of all but the immediate treating providers. In a further complication, patients themselves often conceal embarrassing or disagreeable facets of their own medical condition using a multiplicity of providers to cover the trail.  Here privacy, zealously self-protected, runs sharply up against the goal of that efficiency that could be achieved by aggregating the treatment details in a single real-time accessible file.  Does a social interest in getting a clear fix on the medical condition of such patients justify overriding their resistance?                              

Note on a Special Information Problem in Health Care Policy

A further note on privacy versus health-care expediency:  a recent federal statute bars use of genetic data in setting medical insurance premiums.  This in the immediate short run will put premiums at a single level for all insureds sufficient to permit payment of medical expenses for the relatively "safe" insureds, those with no dangerous genetic indications, and also to pay the much greater expenses of those who do exhibit negative prognoses as disclosed by the genetic information.  Thus those with the safe prognoses will pay more for insurance than they would if the insurer could fragment the pool of insureds into normal-risk and high-risk insured parties.  For reasons of moral rectitude a decent society does not want to give the unfortunate a still rougher ride than nature itself has destined them for.  Under most of the proposed health care reform schemata a system more or less resembling Medicare would take over the insurer's role and public funds would be employed to provide for all persons under the system regardless of risks.  The medical item in the federal budget (that is, in the resultant tax rate) would be higher than if the high-risk parties were excluded from the system, but the community will have determined that the ill luck of some in the genetic lottery will not be left to rest with them but will be borne, or shared, evenly across the lucky and unlucky, that is to say, this particular species of risk will be "socialized".  Fair enough.   But at this point the story is only half told.  The embargoed health information (here genetic information), even if it is not employed for the purposes of excluding the afflicted from the low-cost insurance pool,  once it exists,  clearly has its uses, and the health-care imperative requires that it be so used.  That is to say, it can be put into service for preventive purposes.  The genetic predisposition may well, for example, indicate particular diets, particular forms of medication, a resorting to certain salubrious climates, and what not -- all with the purpose of deflecting or mitigating the maladies that are likely to befall the individual, or at least, with appropriate monitoring,  one may spot the onset of the malady when it can be treated at an early, rather than a late, expensive, and less tractable stage.  The result would be that the medical expense incurred on account of high-risk persons would be significantly less than it would be in the absence of the information-plus-monitoring-plus-preventive action package that might be put in place.  This implies that the high risk subject will be freely amenable to the preventive measures that are contemplated.  For the individuals balking at the proposed interventions, perhaps a surcharge would be persuasive, one gauged, to be sure, by income and with humane waivers to be had.        

Commercial Data Collection

The practices that have already developed in the realm of commercial transactions,  an amassing of substantial clues to an individual subject's buying history, along with other online traces, can yield,  once appropriately sorted, a telling profile of the subject's tastes, income, domestic relationships, cast of mind, and other features – a process that evidently may constitute a threat to privacy, and in the hands of abusive parties, the actual violation of privacy.  S. Jenell Trigg of the Washington law firm Lerman Senter, PLCC, joined by Katrina Blodgett, Attorney with the Privacy and Identity Division at the Federal Trade Commission, analyzed these practices, which have grown pervasive in internet commerce, and carefully delineated the privacy threats posed.  Ms. Trigg cheerfully noted that she relished filling out the quiz forms and preference polls that are found on many sites, but only when there is a clear account of the use to be made of the information, and an option in the internet user to shut off any disclosure at will.   The harm comes when the user is not meaningfully aware of the scope of data being collected and collated, and apprised,  in particular, of its projected delivery to any third parties -- other sellers, and conceivably even government or law enforcement agencies.  The most alarming feature of these collection practices lies in the range of the collecting agent's data dragnet when it reaches beyond the transactions of its own with the user, to draw in the history of the subject's use of all internet sites, the time and frequency of such visits, the content of transactions with other counter parties/sellers, together with other data stored in or accessible through the subject's computer.  Remedies for the feared invasions of privacy have been sought in statutes and regulation by public agencies, causes of action by aggrieved users, and industry self-regulation.  The identity of the collection agents, moreover, may be a matter of mystery.  In dependence upon present and future technical capabilities, the seller or other direct party to an internet visit may be joined by ranks of phantom entities, the internet service provider and others in the chain of transmission, for example, or, of course, clandestine invaders of the online world.  In existing circumstances the internet user, or consumer, may be seen as a transparent figure, essentially the lucite man, whose innards, the thoughts, the emotional quirks,  the features of the soul, all are made available for inspection at will by entities unknown.   The potential harms flowing from such data collections delivered into the hands of an abusive government, for example, are deeply alarming,  but that can't happen here.                

The Social Networking Sites and their Perils for the Uninstructed

 In a final segment Shireen Mitchell, Director of Digital Sisters, an organization diffusing IT information and operational skills to the residents of minority communities, swaths of the population otherwise under- or un-served in the midst of a technically sophisticated society,  held forth on the plague of ill-advised disclosures being made on every hand by the young and inexperienced as they navigate the variety of social networking sites,  of which Ms. Mitchell reeled off the names of half a dozen.  Such expedients as blocks on a computer used by one's teen-aged offspring (not to say "children") and other attempted technical barriers are all less than effective, since an ingenious teen can easily enough,  with the  help of a circle of friends and co-conspirators, devise perfectly serviceable work-arounds.   It was Ms. Mitchell's conclusion, based on long experience with both the technical apparatus and its capabilities, and    on a non-ivory tower perception of social and human facts on the ground in the neighborhood, that the remedy lies in earning the confidence of children (if achieving this rapport is to be very effective, it should be earned long before they are in their teens)  and instilling the lessons that there is a realm of privacy to be observed and defended, and that disclosures, if made at all,  should not be uttered outside a circle of well known and trusted friends, treated with face to face.   The sensitive items -- among others --  to be held close to the chest, are last name, address, telephone numbers, and, a fortiori,  such codes as passwords,  Social Security number (very like an internal passport, or, heaven forfend, the much decried national identification card), and financial account numbers. .

Government Data Collection 

 

The larger problematic of data privacy, in another of its aspects, has to do as well with the government's collection of information, both overtly, as with tax forms, licensing applications, and the like, and surreptitiously, like the proposed data mining projects bruited about in both public and not so public discourse over the last several years.   It is here that perhaps the most ominous menaces to privacy and the personal security of U.S. residents is apprehended.  The Dialogue on Diversity Public Policy Forum, set for March 5^th at the Rayburn Building's Gold Room on Capitol Hill, has scheduled an agenda item -- part of a program segment on Information Technology generally – reviewing government data collection practices and assessing popular concerns over their present and potential impingement on privacy interests.  

 

The Washington Data Day observances have been primarily organized by AT&T and the Intel Corporation, which sponsored a briefing-cum-reception January 28, the Data Day itself, with Rep. Price and the very gracious Mr. Alexander Alvaro (a German national of Portuguese descent), of the European Union, who is visiting in Washington in connection with the Data Privacy cause. 

 

Internet Privacy – Some Reflections on its Historical Dimensions

Among the confused intentions of Dr. Frankenstein may have been an inchoate hope that his remarkable creation would come to be a useful servant to his household and to the human family -- while, as the history recounts, the bizarrely begotten figure was soon disclosed as a force of its own, compassing its own destruction and the undoing of Dr. Frankenstein as well.  From the products of the twentieth century's information technology, a vast and fantastically speedy knowledge machine, of worldwide reach, and the first intimations of a mechanical intelligence analogous to the mind, has taken form, and much concern is abroad lest we find ourselves,  two hundred years on, the unhappy heirs and successors of Dr. Frankenstein.

The Internet's impingements on privacy, the subject of our attention this late January, form one aspect of the menacing side of the internet and the associated devices produced by contemporary technological advances.   The encouraging thought is that, in past eras, the invention of guns and gunpowder, the invention of poison gas, and the technique of wiretapping, while each startled its contemporaries with a set of newly minted dangers,  have been more less effectively contained by the growth apace of a sternly binding custom, by law, and by the sanctions of an alert society.  The menaces of information/communications technology doubtless are subject to the same suppressing force of good sense and the combined power of law and custom.  The shadow ringing this bright thought is that the remedy comes with a fearsome lag – the mechanization of warfare, for example, the practice of aerial bombing, the existence of atomic bomb technology, has made the wars of the twentieth century very considerably more dangerous than those of earlier times.  Europe, having seen the horror close up, has reacted over the half century just past with a historically novel comity, at least partly abolishing the divisions into nation states that had given rise to its conflicts, abolished death penalties in revulsion against the practice of its recent extermination factories, and the like.  The barriers of similar institutional change, unfortunately, have not to date tamed the above-mentioned dangers in most other parts of the globe.

 

In our own time the threat of harm from technology is a soft, subtle threat, very much like the steadily rising water temperature that boils the lobster before warning him to jump for safety.  It is appropriate, then, to analyze the modes of attack on privacy and individual autonomy that arise from the practice of the internet, and to inquire whether their blandishments are to be ignored, to be resisted outright, or, more creatively, detoxified by a benign technological stroke before they may be used on real persons, etc.   It is a commonplace that, in the contests of adverse interests in a society,  the technology doing the bidding of one interest, or proprietary of one kind of effect, is soon countered by a technological innovation of an opposing party that limits or undoes it -- upon which the first interest creates its own further sally, which in turn evokes a deflecting response from the defenders.  Computer security gurus vs. the hackers, government sleuths vs. the recalcitrant populace,  record producers armed with encoding or keys vs. the clever young that, for sport or profit,  are determined to copy the music and propagate it nevertheless.          

 

Acceleration in a Season of Slowdow

   .  .  .  The Public Budgets, Money, and Social Resources 

If anything, in a long term view of the American polity and society, is wanting in this society's stock of resources,  two large deficit categories, by a consensus in the public discourse over the last few years, display the prime gaps in the country's inventory of assets, or capital.   One is its human capital, that is, the sum total of capacities residing in its population, the ability of each person in the society to hit the ball every day with adequate vigor, and to exercise the skills owned by an informed soul, enabled with a dexterity honed by training and a practiced problem-solving faculty.  The other weak area is that of the so-called mechanical, or physical infrastructure – the means of transport, broadly conceived, the buildings for school systems, together with their equipment, and the apparatus of communications – in which radical transformations have been wrought by technological innovation over the last two decades.  It has been traditional in the life of the American republic that involvement of the state in both these fields is the expected and proper course for the society's economic functioning.  Education, road building, air and rail links, and other like activities,  have for the most part – and for nearly 200 years running -- been a task for governmental action.  The tradition in America lies at least as far back in its origins as the early 19th century, when "internal improvements" was a familiar slogan for public sponsorship of road and canal building.  While theorists of libertarian tendency have in recent years persuasively argued that most or all of these feats of infrastructure development could be as well (indeed better) accomplished by private-sector firms, perhaps with governmental aid in collecting the proper fees from potential free-loaders – historically, and even now, it has been a mainstream consensus that the governmental role is to be the dominant one,  especially since the fruits of a well-articulated schema of national transport, and of a highly skilled and law-respecting population, appear to confer social benefits in a highly diffuse way throughout the national, and even global, community.  Under the rule that the beneficiaries should pay, therefore, a substantial public subsidy for all these activities is probably the most refined workable way to set up realistic incentives for producers, users, and remote beneficiaries of the several infrastructure-building activities.  It appears probable, moreover, that the magnitude of the benefits achieved through improved infrastructure (both human and mechanical), that is to say, by incurring costs for its building and maintenance, is surprisingly large.  Especially is this the case in the effects of a structure of law and civic order, and a generalized social comity, a vibrancy of popular culture, manners, and an innovative spirit – an obviously intangible and diffuse stuff, but a thing fostered by liberal views of intellectual and artistic activity, a continuing stream of immigration, bringing fresh and novel cultures and ethnicities from around the world, and the like.  It is these several forms of social infrastructure that are the more or less invisible, but tellingly powerful engines of useful and productive activity in American society.

One of the problems, therefore, is that if governments are to be the driving force in building and husbanding a country's various species of infrastructure, how is it to ensure that its efforts are  reasonably allocated among particular kinds of infrastructure investment and, again, how much is to be directed toward infrastructure vis-a-vis current governmental activity (police and fire protection, defense, transfer payment systems such as unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and the like), private-sector consumption, and the multiform initiatives in the busy world of private investment.  This is a maximizing problem of the kind that economic theory is well acquainted with, although the practical solutions are not to be attained through exercises in the relatively simple outlines of a theory, but by a highly particularized texture of judgments on each of a myriad of activities.  The moral, of course, is that much of the detailed direction of government investment should be devolved to private, market-guided decision making.  David Brooks, for example, writing very recently in the NY Times, expresses a certain wariness in the apparent direction of  the new Administration's infrastructure proposals – is it simply a matter of spending funds on the conventional modes of infrastructure, Mr. Brooks queries with worried mien, with no heed to the potential of quite innovative forms that a properly maximizing authority would take into account. 

A perhaps too ready tendency to assign blame ascribes to "market failure" the discontents of the complex and powerful economic engine that alternately both supports and, it is said, gives the bum's rush to American society.  This is a curious misdirection of the term "market" since the market is necessarily a description of what in fact happens in the interactions of a large number of agents.  What is meant is that the outcome of market activity from time to time, because of information anomalies, momentary scarcities because of lags in adjustment to external shocks, and the like make it seem expedient that a countervailing force should be superadded to those of the individual agents.  This, in the present era of painful stresses, is an indication of due and proper government spending if not precisely of government size or activity – that is, spending should be carried out at ground level by the usual  complement of private sector firms and institutions, without an enlargement of the federal government bureaucracy itself, without the government's buying and operating bulldozers, making lesson plans for the third grade, and on to the other activities that the government, in these circumstances, prescribes in magnitude, not in detail.

One should probably not speak of market failures, since that phrasing tends to deflect political discussion toward the casting of blame on an alien, impersonal entity, The Market, for the discontents and anguish of a society, thus shielding the crucial public discourse from the essential fact that certain operation of a population of agents with certain tastes and capacities are disagreeable, objectionable, offensive to a moral sense and thus fall, arguably, within the ambit of governmental action.  In short, the existence of a technological horserace, a marketing free for all, and a liberal intellectual milieu generate change with a swiftness that is not only exhilarating and productive of tangible benefits in health, comfort, and enrichment of the broadest range of life experiences, but also prone to unnerving swoops in labor market conditions, the anguish of financial panics, the destruction of trades and lines of business that citizens are heavily invested in, the often grotesque and unsightly growth of new towns and new popular entertainments, and much more to be complained of.  The often painful instability and harshness of the contemporary commercial/financial/industrial ("economic") system is the other side of a dizzying rate of amelioration of living conditions, the rising from a deadening poverty of persons whose humanity itself had before been more a dry theory than a vital reality.  The propriety of governments' springing into vigorous action proportionate to the ugliness of a commercial society's downsides, is thus, when seen in this perspective, a normal, expected, and salutary element in a complex social system, all of which, the actions of the government included, can be fruitfully analyzed as a market.  The government exists to pick up the downside swoops of the private sector.  Its job, if one turns on its head the current sloganeering, is to grant the private sector the boons of the boom times and to pick up the slack in the depressed periods.     

The implications of this analysis for the present drive toward a curative "stimulus' to commercial activity and for the longer run commitment of resources to the innovation of human and physical infrastructure will be discussed further in the February newsletter.

 

Immigration and Economy – The Tangled Causal Web 

The Migration Policy Institute in Washington once again offers important intelligence on a topic of especial concern to the friends of an organization, like Dialogue on Diversity, that offers a forum for discussion on the mechanisms of the growth and of changes in pattern experienced by diverse cultures and nationalities within the U.S., and, by extension, in similarly multicultural places in the world.  The brief statements by four MPI migration experts sought to throw into clearer relief the effects that the economic slowdown now going on in the U.S. itself was producing in the immigrant communities here, and to discern how these affects differ as between the legally present and the undocumented present in the country.  One of the most notable effects of the bleak economic scene is the reduction of "remittances" by persons of foreign provenance residing in the U.S. to the countries of origin, that is, the portion of their incomes that are regularly transferred to family and friends in their home cities and villages, in Latin America and elsewhere.   These payment flows have sharply fallen off in recent months.  This is not a fringe consideration from the point of view of the receiving countries, where the remittances constitute often a quarter or, in one case, Tadjikistan, almost half the GDP.  A significant diminution in these flows, therefore, clearly exacerbates any difficulties otherwise afflicting the aggregate income and the public budgets of the affected countries.  This is another, seldom analyzed, avenue of American influence on the economic, and indeed social, affairs of peoples at the remotest corners of the world.  The position of the U.S. as a leading country, in the sense of the sheer magnitude of its economic functioning and its operation as a population magnet drawing migrants from around the world  -- all this, the accoutrements proper to the greatest nation on earth,  is likely to charge it with the duties of taking a sympathetic account of conditions in other places that are affected as a reflex of the movements of the American economy.  Noblesse oblige.  But it may well be that elementary justice so obliges, hang the noblessse.    

Another phenomenon of absorbing interest is the difference in response to the economic slowdown of undocumented migrants as opposed to those with lawful permanent resident status or otherwise licensed with work permits (the latter, the "legal" migrants, tend to be accompanied more often by family, perhaps with citizen children).  In response to worsening labor market conditions in a specified city or part of the country, the undocumented are observed to react rapidly, pulling up stakes and traveling to another city or part of the country, where employments in appropriate lines of work are more readily to be found (but sometimes simply retreating from the field and returning to their countries of origin), while the "legal" migrants tend to remain in place, suffering the blight of unemployment along with the rest of the population.  The very piquant irony of this observation is that the undocumented are performing the useful social function of lubricating markets, of reducing the amount supplied in the face of declining demand (for labor), so that wage rates tend to remain stable and unemployment is minimized.  This, say the advocates of excluding government intervention from the operations of markets, is what "should" happen but usually doesn't, the fault generally lying, it is held, with the stiffnecked workers, who decline to move away or to lower their wage demands to "equilibrate" amounts (quantities of work-hours) demanded and supplied.   At the same time it is persons of like ideological tendency that have railed most vociferously against the presence within the U.S. borders of these same undocumented, poaching on the goods of the republic.  Query:  if the immigration law reforms recommended by such advocates as the Senate liberals, Republican sociologist Tamar Jacoby, and others were put in place, so that large numbers of those migrants now coming as undocumented, were instead welcomed with work permits, would this group remain highly mobile or would they settle in fixed spots like the lawful permanent residents, leaving the labor markets as inflexible as ever?    

                                                                                                    The Mott House

Dialogue on Diversity is grateful to the Stewart R. Mott Foundation for making its very elegant space available for the recent Internet Privacy Symposium,  held as an adjunct to International Data Privacy Day.  The building was acquired several decades ago by Stewart R. Mott, a philanthropist and American original, who had several homes, among them houses in Westchester County and Bermuda, and used the building at 122 Maryland Avenue for offices and an apartment when he was in Washington, while giving over the rest of the generously proportioned space to the activities of a variety of organizations.  Mr. Mott was a scion of the family of Charles Stewart Mott, a notably successful executive with General Motors and at one point the chief shareholder in that company.  Some significant portion of his fortune was available to the son, the younger Stewart Mott, at an early age. 

While Stewart in his mid twenties was seized with a lifelong philanthropic impulse, he also gathered renown as a fabled eccentric, and something of a Renaissance figure.  He cultivated seventeen varieties of radishes (part of his absorbing quest for the perfect radish) among 460 plant species in a garden laid out on the roof of his Manhattan penthouse;  for good measure he taught a course in urban gardening at New York University.  He wrote a monograph on the works of Sophocles.  He staged a giant party for the elder Mr. Mott's 94th birthday, in 1969, at the Tavern on the Green in Manhattan and drove the frail celebrant to the site in his Volkswagen – a ride characterized by his father as "bumpy".  He disliked the name "Mott House", by which the Washington property was from the outset universally referred to, but at length acceded to the term, bowing to an inevitability.  He took no little pride in having been placed on the Nixon White House's enemies list – and three times at that, a distinction shared, he said, by only two other persons (Daniel Schorr was one).                   

Increasingly disturbed by what he saw as pernicious trends in the larger society, he gave over his energies and his fortune to the support of political campaigns in the 1960s and 70s, but more and more to civil society organizations in a variety of causes, all centered on an abiding concern for civil liberties in American life.  This building, standing in the shadow of the Supreme Court, and at the very crossroads of the political and moral civil-society discourse in which he was profoundly engaged,  was one of the centers of the influence he projected through the decades of his work.  Mr. Mott died in June, 2008, having reached the age of 70.