Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2024

QotD: The ever-growing state

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Inconvenience would seem to be a small price to pay for peace of mind.”

That one phrase sums up all the problems we are having with government in this country. It justifies the humiliating personal searches at airports. It justifies the police state tactics of “sobriety checkpoints” or “identification stops”. It justifies the Patriot Act, and the new Intelligence Reform Act, with all their draconian intrusions on personal privacy, including the repulsive, illegal and un-Constitutional parts, such as no-warrant-required searches, a national ID card, federal snooping into our reading habits at libraries and book stores. It justifies any intrusion into private, personal, or intimate matters. After all, if someone has more than one wife (or husband), doesn’t your peace of mind require that that person be harassed, jailed, or otherwise punished for violation of your religious or moral code? It doesn’t matter that the people involved are adults who freely and willingly consent to live in that situation. For that matter, if two men or women live together, doesn’t your peace of mind require that their “immoral and ungodly” lifestyle be exposed, and the people involved publicly pilloried?

Ron Beatty, “Peace of Mind”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-03-06.

February 24, 2024

QotD: Big government

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m Canadian and have a romantic fondness for the famous motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the one about the Mounties always getting their man. But the bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the country’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favourite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.

[…]

What should have died on September 11th is the liberal myth that you can regulate the world to your will. The reduction of a free-born citizenry to neutered sheep upon arrival at the airport was the most advanced expression of this delusion. So how’s the FAA reacting to September 11th? With more of the same kind of obtrusive, bullying, useless regulations that give you the comforting illusion that if they’re regulating you they must be regulating all the bad guys as well. We don’t need big government, we need lean government — government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials. If Hillary and Co want to argue for big government, conservatives could at least make the case for what’s really needed — grown-up government.

Mark Steyn, “Big Shift”, National Review, 2001-11-19.

January 3, 2024

They all spy on you, the FBI, RCMP, MI5 … and apparently your Subaru

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova linked to this disturbing little article explaining what legal rights you give away merely by being a passenger in a modern Subaru vehicle:

Subaru is a Japanese car company started back in the 1950s. Their all-wheel drive, sporty SUVs and cars are popular with outdoor types and the LGBT+ community (and your privacy researcher’s Mom … Mom swears by Subaru and has since the 1980s). Popular models in the Outback, Forester, Crosstrek, Impreza, Legacy, the sporty WRX, and the electric Solterra. The MySubaru app and Subaru’s Starlink connected services offer up all the usual connected car things like remote start/stop, lock/unlock, honk your horn and flash your lights from bedroom, automatic collision notification, multimedia services like navigation and news, trip logs, and a way to manage other people who might drive your Subaru with boundary, speed, and curfew alerts. So, do we love Subaru’s privacy? Not really. But hey, they aren’t the worst car company we reviewed, so there’s that.

Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants“, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes“. Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.

If you go read Subaru’s privacy policy (or don’t, we did it for you, you can just read our review here), you’ll see at the very start they say this: “This Privacy Policy applies to each user of the Services, including any ‘Vehicle Occupant’, which includes each driver or passenger in a Subaru vehicle that uses Connected Vehicle Services, such as Subaru Starlink (such vehicle, a ‘Connected Vehicle’), whether or not such driver or passenger is the vehicle owner or a registered user of the Connected Vehicle Services. For the avoidance of doubt, for purposes of this Privacy Policy, ‘using’ the Services includes being a Vehicle Occupant in a Connected Vehicle.” So yeah, they don’t want there to be any doubt that when you sit in a connected Subaru, you’ve entered the world of using their services.

December 15, 2023

Bill S-210 “isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”

You sometimes get the impression that the only person in Ottawa who actually pays attention to online privacy issues is Michael Geist:

“2017 Freedom of Expression Awards” by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship https://flic.kr/p/Uvmaie (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking, there is a need to pay attention. Bill S-210, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, was passed by the Senate in April after Senators were reluctant to reject a bill framed as protecting children from online harm. The same scenario appears to be playing out in the House of Commons, where yesterday a majority of the House voted for the bill at second reading, sending it to the Public Safety committee for review. The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, is not a government bill. In fact, government ministers voted against it. Instead, the bill is backed by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs. Canadians can be forgiven for being confused that after months of championing Internet freedoms, raising fears of censorship, and expressing concern about CRTC overregulation of the Internet, Conservative MPs were quick to call out those who opposed the bill (the House sponsor is Conservative MP Karen Vecchio).

I appeared before the Senate committee that studied the bill in February 2022, where I argued that “by bringing together website blocking, face recognition technologies, and stunning overbreadth that would capture numerous mainstream services, the bill isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”. As I did then, I should preface criticism of the bill by making it clear that underage access to inappropriate content is indeed a legitimate concern. I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. Moreover, if there are Canadian-based sites that are violating the law in terms of the content they host, they should absolutely face investigation and potential charges.

However, Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies. The government establishes this regulatory framework and is likely to task the CRTC with providing the necessary administration. While there are surely good intentions with the bill, the risks and potential harms it poses are significant.

The basic framework of Bill S-210 is that it creates an offence for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations (broadly defined under the Criminal Code) can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a “prescribed age-verification method” to limit access. It would be up to the government to determine what methods qualify with due regard for reliability and privacy. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

The enforcement of the bill is left to the designated regulatory agency, which can issue notifications of violations to websites and services. Those notices can include the steps the agency wants followed to bring the site into compliance. This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access. If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers. The regulator would be required to identify which ISPs are subject to the blocking order.

March 20, 2023

“It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors of The Line have strong opinions on the federal government’s decision to batter Google, Facebook, and other online “giants” over their opposition to the proposed internet legislation in bills C-11 and C-18:

As a result of C-18, both Google and Meta have considered dropping news distribution from their platforms, or have outright promised to do so. To which we have responded: “Well, no shit, Sherlocks.” We have, in fact, warned all of the parties involved with this misguided bill that that’s exactly what was going to happen.

Nonetheless, the dim-witted government officials and corporate media barons who have pinned their hopes of survival to the apparent money spigot of Big Tech didn’t believe us. So when Meta came right out and said it would drop news last week, the ashen-faced Minister of Heritage accused them of using “intimidation and subversion” tactics. And, thus, these demands for private correspondence appear to have been drafted.

It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies — and, by extension, the many independent media creators like ourselves.

Well. Okey Dokey then.

*cracks knuckles*

Let’s start with two very obvious points: firstly, we at The Line don’t object to forcing these tech companies to disclose funding to third parties for the purpose of opposing C-18 et al. That is perfectly reasonable, in our minds. Further, if these companies are being accused of anything illegal, by all means, investigate away — after you get a warrant.

The rest of these demands are nothing short of banana crackers; it’s an extraordinary interpretation of the committee’s mandate. It’s the kind of overbroad dragnet that will necessarily create privacy breaches for the unknown numbers of ordinary citizens, dissidents and journalists who have corresponded with these companies about these bills.

We will remind the government that private citizens and private companies do not owe the government a full accounting of their private business or communications. The government is subject to this kind of transparency and disclosure because the government works for us. Not the other way around.

We will also point out the irony. The government is demanding years worth of correspondence from private entities within a very short time frame: this is a level of transparency that no government department would subject itself to. Don’t believe us? Just try to draft a similar ATIP request to any ministry; it would take years to get such a request fulfilled, and half if it would come back redacted.

March 19, 2023

Disagree with the Canadian government’s attempt to take over significant parts of the internet? Get ready for administrative punishment, citizens!

Michael Geist, who often seems like the only person paying close attention to the Canadian government’s growing authoritarian attitudes to Canadians’ internet usage, shows the utter hypocrisy of the feds demanding access to a vast array of private and corporate information on a two-week deadline, when it can take literally years for them to respond to a request for access to government information:

Senator Joe McCarthy would be in awe of the Canadian government’s audacious power grab.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The government plans to introduce a motion next week requiring Google and Facebook to turn over years of private third-party communication involving any Canadian regulation. The move represents more than just a remarkable escalation of its battle against the two tech companies for opposing Bill C-18 and considering blocking news sharing or linking in light of demands for hundreds of millions in payments. The motion – to be introduced by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage (yes, that guy) – calls for a series of hearings on what it describes as “current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to avoid regulation in Canada”. In the context of Bill C-18, those tactics amount to little more than making the business choice that Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez made clear was a function of his bill: if you link to content, you fall within the scope of the law and must pay. If you don’t link, you are out of scope.

While the same committee initially blocked Facebook from even appearing on Bill C-18 (Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he was ready for clause-by-clause review after just four hearings and no Facebook invitation), bringing the companies to committee to investigate the implications of their plans is a reasonable approach. But the motion isn’t just about calling executives before committee to answer questions from what will no doubt be a hostile group of MPs. The same motion sweeps in the private communications of thousands of Canadians, which is a stunning disregard for privacy and which could have a dangerous chilling effect on public participation. Indeed, the intent seems fairly clear: guilt by association for anyone who dares to communicate with these companies with an attempt to undermine critics by casting doubt on their motivations. Note that this approach is only aimed at those that criticize government legislation. There has been a painfully obvious lobbying campaign in support of the bill within some Canadian media outlets, but there are no efforts to uncover potential bias or funding for those that speak out in favour of Bill C-18, Bill C-11, or other digital policy initiatives.

It is hard to overstate the broad scope of the disclosure demands. Canadian digital creators concerned with Bill C-11 who wrote to Youtube would find their correspondence disclosed to the committee. So would researchers who sought access to data from Google or Facebook on issues such as police access to social media records or anti-hate groups who contacted Facebook regarding the government’s online harms proposal for automated reports to law enforcement. Privacy advocates focused on how Google administers the right to be forgotten in Canada would ironically find their correspondence disclosed as would independent media sites that wrote to Facebook about the implications of Bill C-18.

December 5, 2022

QotD: Open concept house designs

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The shift from open concepts demanded by necessity to widespread construction of separate rooms to open concepts demanded by style is relatively recent. Before the 17th century, especially for the poor, “rooms did not have specialized functions”, explains architect Witold Rybczynski in Home: A Short History of an Idea. “Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown.”

A single room could serve as a study in the morning, a dining room at noon, a living room in the evening, and a bedroom at night. Beds were couches, and couches were beds. Your house was your workspace, and your minimal furniture typically had no fixed arrangement, as it was constantly moved about to accommodate different uses of the only room available. (The French and Italian words for “furniture” still hint at this history: You can see the similarity to “mobile” in meubles and mobilia.)

These open concepts of old were not only motivated by different conceptions of privacy and the expense of building additional walls. They were also required for the lower classes by premodern heating technologies. A single open hearth, or, later, fireplace or stove, could warm one large room but could not do much for other, closed-off spaces. A lord or king could build a heating element into every room, but for the average family, winter warmth required most of life to happen in a single space.

As technology advanced, ideas about privacy changed, and standards of living improved over the last 500 years, ordinary people were increasingly able to move away from an open concept home, and they eagerly did so. “Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves,” notes Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Though the transition was slow — toilets long had “multiple seats, for ease of conversation” — rooms were increasingly devoted to particular uses, and those uses were separated from one another as much as resources permitted.

Bonnie Kristian, “Open concept homes are for peasants”, The Week, 2019-05-12.

November 8, 2022

QotD: Marx was right about “commodification”

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Marx was right. Not for the right reasons, and not in the way he intended, but right for all that. Think of one of those medieval plague doctors in the bird masks. They think the plague was caused by a conjunction of the planets, and they want to give you a poultice made from sheep rectum to cure it … so, you know, they’re wrong about big important stuff. But they’re right about the critical, live-or-die thing: You’ve got the plague, and they know it better — and, crucially, faster — than anybody.

Marx was right about three critical things: Commodification, alienation, and class consciousness (again, bearing in mind that “right” in this context means “correct diagnosis”, not “correct in every particular”).

If it helps, you can swap in financialization for commodification. Briefly, it’s the ever-accelerating phenomenon we’ve all observed: burning through social capital in order to make a buck. Things that should not be subject to market forces are not only turned into commodities, but soon become the only commodities, or the only ones that matter.

Consider pretty much everything about the “laptop class”. E.g. the laptop itself. It commodifies time. Now you have the “ability” to work even when you shouldn’t. It is now virtually impossible to leave work at the office. For those of us who are independent contractors, this is a nice bonus — we can invoice every minute of our time, which means we can work as much (or as little) as we want to. For everyone else, though …

See what I mean? It’s simply understood that you’re never off the clock. Throw in the rest of the paraphernalia of laptop-class work — smartphone, social media, etc. — and nobody thinks twice about sending you stuff on a Saturday, a holiday, at your kids’ dance recital, at a funeral, whatever. People still have the residual social habit to say “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry for your loss” when you explain that you couldn’t get to that email because you were at your Mom’s funeral … but not for long, because you can already hear it in their voices: “Yeah yeah, sucks to be you, now will you please get me that TPS report!”

Same way with social media. You will be fired for expressing certain kinds of opinions, even on your “private” accounts, because the assumption is that there is no privacy. You don’t own you. You are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GloboPedo, and while we’re tempted to get outraged at the kinds of opinions for which you will get fired, that’s why those old Leftists — the ones we’re increasingly coming to resemble — would say “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The kind of opinion is epiphenomenal; it’s the principle that matters, because you are not a commodity.

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

November 6, 2022

The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:

There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.

The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.

But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.

And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.

So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?

As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.

June 15, 2022

“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.

May 25, 2022

“What is a reasonable general concern?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:

What is a reasonable general concern?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.

And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.

Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.

Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.

It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.

A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.

But a general concern? A general preoccupation?

That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.

It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.

How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.

Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.

The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.

That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.

March 21, 2022

For some reason, Canadians’ interest in alternative currencies has risen substantially since February

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m far from alone in taking the Canadian government’s absurd over-reaction to the Freedom Convoy 2022 political protest in February as a reason to be concerned about the Canadian banking system. Until then I’d paid very little attention to alternative currency options like Bitcoin and the like, but I now understand that they may be a key element in future financial planning. At Quillette, Jonathan Kay explains that he realized at the same time he needed to know much more about crypto:

“Bitcoin – from WSJ” by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On February 15th, following weeks of anti-vaccine-mandate protests in downtown Ottawa, Justin Trudeau lurched from complete inaction to absurd overreaction by declaring a national emergency. One effect of this was that banks were suddenly authorized to freeze the personal assets of citizens linked with the protests, civil liberties be damned. Around the same time, moreover, hackers acquired and published identifying information associated with thousands of people who’d donated money to the protest movement. Rather than denounce this apparent criminal data breach, many public figures — including Gerald Butts, who’d been Trudeau’s right-hand man before resigning amid scandal in 2019 — actually celebrated this doxxing. Some media outlets even tried to mine the dox information for clickbait before being stung by a public backlash. While I hadn’t donated to the Freedom Convoy movement, I was sufficiently appalled by these developments that I started educating myself about how one might donate to a similar cause without government officials and social-media hyenas exploiting these transactions as a pretext to attack my assets and reputation.

The easiest way to get into the crypto market, I learned, is simply to open an account at an exchange platform such as Coinbase or Wealthsimple. But while they’re easy to use, exchange platforms also generally require clients to supply government-issued ID when they secure their accounts, and transactions are traceable by authorities. To assure myself of real anonymity and theft-protection, my tutor instructed me, a better (if more complex) option is “cold storage”. This is a real physical device — in my case, something called a Ledger — that acts as a personal crypto wallet.

My Ledger (which looks like a large USB key drive) contains the data required to generate the “private keys” (which look like long passwords, though that isn’t quite what they are) that allow me to send my crypto to other people. And that spending can be done only in those moments when the device is connected to the Internet, after which it can be relegated to a drawer or safe (thus the metaphorical concept of “cold storage”). On the other hand, I can receive money even if the Ledger is offline, so long as the sender has my public key, which (unlike a private key) is generally safe to give to others (such as, say, a prospective donor to any charitable cause that I might establish).

Bitcoin’s basic mechanics were set out in 2009 by the much-mythologized pseudonymous author (or collective) known as “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a legendary white paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Satoshi describes the newly conceived electronic coin as consisting of a chain of digital signatures (a blockchain) that build one upon the next through a mathematical mechanism known as a cryptographic hash function — a one-way function whose output doesn’t expose the original private key to reverse-engineering. So once a bitcoin transaction is recorded and added in verified form to the blockchain by everyone — this being the “public distributed ledger” that bitcoin users are part of — the transaction can’t be erased or reversed (with one important theoretical exception, described later on).

Image contained in Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, demonstrating the use of public and private keys to verify and sign bitcoin transactions.

Of course, you don’t need to understand how this cryptography works to use cryptocurrency. But it is worth getting your head around an important concept that fundamentally separates crypto from conventional assets such as, say, money that sits in a bank account. Your bank account number doesn’t have any value in and of itself: It’s just an institutional convenience that tells you and your bank where your actual money’s been filed (which is why that account number sits in plain sight on every physical check you sign, assuming you still use checks). But in the case of bitcoin, a private key basically is money — in the sense that anyone with access to such a key can spend the associated funds. And so if you lose your private-key information, or it gets stolen by a thief, there’s no 1-800 helpdesk number. It’s gone forever.

February 11, 2022

QotD: “By their proposals, shall ye know them”

Of politicians in power it might be said, “By their proposals, shall ye know them.” What they say they want to do is almost as significant as what they actually succeed in doing, for it offers an insight into their fundamental philosophy or state of mind. This is especially important, of course, when they seek to cling on to power by re-election or by some other means such as behind-the-scenes-influence.

That is why the proposal that the IRS should have access to the data of all bank accounts from which or into which more than $600 a year are paid (hardly a king’s ransom) is so important, despite the fact that it has not been enacted. The very fact that someone wanted to enact it, and thought it right that it should be enacted, is highly significant — and sinister — in itself, for the proposal demonstrates a totalitarian mindset.

The ostensible purpose of the proposal, of course, is the elimination of tax evasion. (Incidentally, I have noticed recently an increasing tendency, in the press and elsewhere, for the term tax avoidance to be used interchangeably with that of tax evasion, as if the difference between legality and illegality were of no real importance. This conflation is itself indicative of a totalitarian attitude, according to which a governmental end may be reached without the necessity for any law.)

The people who proposed that, in effect, every bank account should be routinely available for examination by the IRS, without any specific warrant for such an examination, thereby revealed that they thought that the gathering of tax so important that it superseded all other considerations.

Psalm 24 begins: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”

A better version, according to the proposers, would be: Money is the government’s, and the fulness thereof, money and they that have any. For it hath founded it upon the printing press, and established it as legal tender.

I do not go as far as some economists of my acquaintance, who believe that tax evasion is a citizen’s civic duty: at least it is not in the circumstances prevailing in any western country, however unsatisfactory they may be. In my own case, I do not evade taxes and even my attempts to avoid them are rather feeble, for unfortunately there is so little at stake.

But I reject completely the idea that, morally, the first call on anyone’s money is the government’s, which in effect has the right to leave you pocket money by its grace and favor after you have paid your taxes at any rate that it likes. This is the very tyranny that the founders of America feared in majoritarian democracy, untempered by inalienable rights — inalienable even, or especially, by or to the government.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Monitoring Bank Accounts Would Make the People of the Government, Not the Government of the People”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-01.

May 5, 2021

Michael Geist’s overview of the federal government’s steady retreat from their 2015 election promises on protecting Canadians’ online privacy and free speech rights

Reposting his most recent Maclean’s article on his website, Michael Geist explains why the federal government’s blatant hypocrisy over Canadians’ rights online has finally gotten many people paying closer attention:

The government had maintained that it had no interest in regulating user generated content, but the policy reversal meant that millions of video, podcasts, and the other audiovisual content on those popular services would be treated as “programs” under Canadian law and subject to some of the same rules as those previously reserved for programming on conventional broadcast services.

The backlash undoubtedly caught the government by surprise, particularly since the policy change garnered little discussion at committee. As the public concern mounted, Guilbeault retreated to his standard talking points about how the opposition parties were unwilling to stand up to the web giants. The arguments fell flat, however, since the new rules were directly targeting users’ content, not the Internet companies. Further, the public reaction pointed to a government increasingly out-of-step with the public, which may support increased Internet regulation, but not at any cost.

The fact that the Liberal government was open to regulating millions of TikTok and Youtube videos was a reminder of how unrecognizable its digital policy approach has become in recent years. The party was elected in 2015 on a platform that promised to entrench net neutrality, prioritize innovation, focus on privacy rather than surveillance, and support freedom of expression. Most of those positions now seemingly reflect a by-gone era.

It is still anxious to demonstrate its tech bona fides, but now progressive policies appear to mean confronting the “web giants” with threats of regulation, penalties, and taxes. Cultural sovereignty has replaced innovation as the guiding principle, which has meant the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has been replaced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage as the digital policy lead.

And so for the past 18 months, Guilbeault has been handed Canada’s digital policy keys. In Guilbeault’s eyes, seemingly everything is under threat – Canadian film and television production, a safe space for speech, the future of news – and the big technology companies are invariably to blame.

Few would dispute that an updated tech regulatory model is needed, but evidence-based policies are in short supply in the current approach. For example, the use or misuse of data lies at the heart of the power of big tech, yet privacy reforms have been curiously absent as a government priority. Indeed, Bill C-11 was promoted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November as legislation to give Canadians greater control over their personal information, but under newly named ISI Minister François-Philippe Champagne, it has scarcely been heard from again.

The government has similarly done little to address concerns about abuse of competition, the risks associated with algorithmic decision-making, or the development of a modernized framework for artificial intelligence. Years of emphasis on the benefits of multi-lateral policy development and consensus-building were unceremoniously discarded the recent budget in order to commit to a digital services tax in 2022 that could spark billions in tariff retaliation. In fact, the US-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement that the government trumpeted as a major success story restricts Canada’s ability to even establish a new liability regime for technology companies.

January 23, 2021

Scott Alexander returns

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Having been driven from his original blog due to a doxxing threat from a New York Times reporter, Scott Alexander has resumed his public blogging, this time on Substack:

Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.

I’m happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta.

Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It’s related to English “rationality” and “arithmetic”, but also “art” and “harmony”. And “right”, both in the senses of “natural rights” and “the right answer”. And “order”. And “arete” and “aristos” and all those other Greek words about morality. And “artificial”, as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively “reign” and related words about rulership, and “rich” and related words about money.

(also “arthropod”, but insects creep me out so I’ll be skipping this one)

The dictionary defines ṛta as “order”, “truth”, or “rule”, but I think of it as the intersection of all these concepts, a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest. What are the laws of thought? How do they reveal themselves, at every level, from the flow of electricity through the brain to the flow of money through the global economy? How can we cleave to them more closely, for our own good and the good of generations still to come?

In practice, articles (another ṛta relative!) here tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics. The political posts sometimes stray into choppy waters, and I have immense sympathy for people who are sick of that and prefer to pass.

As with most Substack blogs, it’s a subscriber-supported effort with limited public posts available to non-paying subscribers (like me).

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