Quotulatiousness

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

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

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

August 1, 2026

Supreme Court of Canada surprisingly rules against the federal government

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For the last ten years, it’s been a running joke that the federal government’s conflicts of interest would, at most, result in a $500 fine and an insincere promise not to do it again. Because that’s pretty much what has been happening since the early years of the Trudeau government. In a shocking development, however, the Supreme Court of Canada kicked over the apple cart and struck down the relevant section of the Conflict of Interest Act which the feds had found so useful over the years:

So the Supreme Court of Canada just did something almost no one in Ottawa expected. They ruled against the government. Unanimously. On a case the people who run this country spent five years trying to kill.

Yesterday the Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Richard Wagner, said section 66 of the Conflict of Interest Act is unconstitutional. That was the clause designed to keep the federal Ethics Commissioner’s rulings largely beyond the reach of the courts. Errors of fact. Errors of law. None of your business. Parliament put a lock on the door and the Supreme Court just kicked it in.

This is not some abstract legal theory. This is the shield that protected Mario Dion’s May 13, 2021 report clearing Justin Trudeau in the WE Charity scandal. That clearance is no longer sealed. Stage 2 of Democracy Watch’s case now goes forward at the Federal Court of Appeal. The actual mistakes in that report finally get examined in open court.

You remember the scandal. Summer of 2020. The Trudeau government hands WE Charity a near-billion-dollar sole-source deal to run the Canada Student Service Grant program. WE had deep family connections to the Prime Minister. Sophie Grégoire Trudeau volunteered as an ambassador and hosted a podcast for them. Margaret Trudeau and Alexandre Trudeau had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. Justin Trudeau himself had been a regular at their events for years.

The optics were so bad even Trudeau eventually admitted there was an appearance of conflict and that he should have recused himself. Bill Morneau got dinged. Dion cleared the Prime Minister.

Democracy Watch filed for judicial review in June 2021. They pointed to four specific problems with Dion’s ruling.

First, Dion refused to find a real or potential conflict of interest. He had previously defined private interests to include social and political interests. The grant advanced Sophie’s standing with WE and the family’s political brand. Dion simply ignored his own earlier reasoning.

Second, he claimed the Conflict of Interest Act does not cover apparent conflicts, only real or potential ones. That is not what the statute says. The purpose clauses and the prohibitions in sections 4 and 6 are broader. A Federal Court of Appeal decision from 2009 already confirmed the Act reaches appearances. Dion’s own report noted that recusal is always advisable when an appearance exists. Trudeau had already conceded the point.

Third, Dion would not find that Trudeau and the Kielburger brothers were friends. The Act prohibits furthering the private interests of friends. Craig Kielburger had publicly called Trudeau a friend. Trudeau had described them the same way in a speech. The relationship was not distant. Dion waved it away.

Fourth, he refused to apply the broad prohibition against improperly furthering another person’s private interests. In his earlier SNC-Lavalin report, Dion treated violations of the Prime Minister’s own ethical code as improper. That code specifically bans appearances of conflict. Dion carved the law into pieces to reach the result he wanted.

These are not technicalities. They go to whether the Ethics Commissioner enforced the statute Parliament wrote or rewrote it to protect the Prime Minister.

Then the system did what the system always does. The Attorney General of Canada, not the Ethics Commissioner, defended the ruling in court. The same government whose Cabinet is regulated by the Commissioner gets to defend the Commissioner when he clears those same people. Classic.

July 30, 2026

Support for capital punishment is the opposite of a luxury belief

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As noted in City Journal, support for capital punishment is overwhelmingly high … which is why politicians and wealthy progressives whole-heartedly oppose it. As you probably know, a “luxury belief” is one that is usually held by people who will not be in any way impacted by the downstream effects of that belief. It’s not the wealthy and privileged who suffer when murderers get out of prison, so they are generally all in favour of ever greater leniency in sentencing and easing parole conditions. Poor and middle class people are more likely to suffer when violent criminals return to their communities, which is why they generally want longer incarceration for violent crimes and favour capital punishment for certain abhorrent acts of murder. Charles Fain Lehman has more:

Those findings undermine the narrative, routinely advanced by death-penalty abolitionists, that capital punishment is on the decline because the public has turned against it. In reality, both public opinion and the current composition of the Supreme Court militate in favor of expanding the death penalty’s use — and, specifically, relaxing many of the arbitrary and undemocratic restrictions imposed on it by courts over the past several decades.

Abolitionists have based their case for declining public support on polls such as Gallup’s, which for nearly a century has asked respondents if they are “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder”. The share in favor has indeed dropped steadily since the 1990s, from a 64-point difference between support and opposition to just a 6-point split today.

That question, though, artificially reduces support by asking about all murders. Under current precedent, only certain heinous murders — those in which jury-determined aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors — are eligible for the death penalty. There is likely far more support, for example, for executing Dylann Roof specifically than there is for executing all murderers generally.

The new MI poll illuminates this point. It asks about support for capital punishment under a variety of circumstances. The result is lopsided endorsement in the event of, for example, murder involving “extreme cruelty”, mass murder, or the murder of a child — all supported by 3-to-1 margins. Death for premeditated murder generically has 72 percent support, suggesting that even clarifying intent significantly increases support for capital punishment.

Notably, the poll also finds majority support for executing those who rape a child (71 percent) or an adult (57 percent). Yet neither offense would, absent a concurrent murder, be death-eligible. The Supreme Court ruled that applying the death penalty to non-murdering rapists violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” in 1977’s Coker v. Georgia, a prohibition it extended even to child rapists in a 2008’s Kennedy v. Louisiana. With certain exceptions for crimes against the state, the Kennedy majority asserted, a crime that did not result in the taking of someone’s life was categorically ineligible for the death penalty.

Both decisions were justified by reference to the court’s “evolving standards of decency” test. First introduced in 1958’s Trop v. Dulles, the test has led the court to understand “cruel and unusual punishment” through its interpretation of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”. That lens allowed it to reach the conclusions it did in Coker, Kennedy, and numerous other narrowings of the use of the death penalty. In combination with the aggressiveness and gamesmanship of the capital defense bar — which spends decades filing often-frivolous procedural motions to keep clearly guilty clients alive — the result has been a steady choking off of capital punishment.

Update, 31 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 28, 2026

Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation defined

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Gawain Towler kindly provides a précis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry:

The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic, and I argue that it exists for one purpose, to give the state a category under which accurate speech can be treated as a harm. I start by Channelling Ambrose Beirce’s Devil’s Dictionary, with a dictionary entry defining the word as information whose defect is that it is true. Thereafter I proceed to trace its origins, its spread through British and American officialdom, its intellectual kinship with behavioural government, and its practical operation, before closing with a demand for its formal abolition.

First the taxonomy itself. The doctrine of “information disorder” rests on a triad. Misinformation is false and innocent, disinformation false and deliberate. Both turn on falsity. The third category does not. CISA, the American cybersecurity agency, defines malinformation as based on fact but used out of context to mislead or harm, and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council calls it the intentional spreading of genuine information with intent to cause harm. The offence, the essay observes, is not lying but telling the truth on purpose. The term’s coiners, Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, applied it narrowly to revenge pornography, miscaptioned photographs and weaponised leaks, and the essay concedes these are real phenomena. But the concept escaped its paddock. Within four years it had migrated from a Council of Europe research paper to the letterhead of a federal agency and thence into British government training materials.

The British chapter centres on RESIST 2, the Cabinet Office counter-disinformation toolkit issued to government communicators in 2021. The toolkit reproduces the triad, admits the categories are hard to distinguish in practice, and resolves the difficulty by instructing officials to stop asking whether material is true and to focus instead on the harm it can do.

The essay treats those five words as the whole doctrine laid bare, truth demoted from test to complication. From the Cabinet Office the word trickled downward, into Local Government Association guidance, a Stockport Council webpage, even a Met Office blog. The essay notes a telling exception. Ofcom and the Electoral Commission, bodies with statutory exposure and lawyers, avoid the word entirely. Its distribution across the state maps the distribution of accountability. Where courts can reach, the concept hides.

The American experiment, the essay argues, ran to destruction. CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation team spent the early 2020s flagging content to platforms, much of it neither foreign nor false, drawing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing it of collusion and camouflage. When Missouri and Louisiana sued, the case reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, where the government prevailed not on the merits but on standing. The essay relishes the irony of a Justice Department litigating for its own right to withhold context. Britain played a damper version. After Big Brother Watch revealed that the Counter Disinformation Unit had monitored lawful speech by journalists and parliamentarians, the government refused substantive disclosure and renamed the unit National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), in the tradition of Windscale becoming Sellafield.

The essay then traces the doctrine’s parentage to the habit of mind exemplified by the Nudge Unit. RESIST had different midwives, but both traditions live in the Cabinet Office and both treat the citizen as an object of professional influence. They embraced during Covid, when SPI-B recommended raising the perceived level of personal threat through hard-hitting emotional messaging while the information machinery flagged sceptical commentary, some of it correct. Fear turned up on one wing, information turned down on the other.

July 22, 2026

Why progressives are always so eager for more gun control

Filed under: Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR discusses a recently posted chart about firearm homicide rates:

I’m not certain this chart is true, but looking at it shook something loose in my head. I think it explains why ordinary liberals are so obsessive about gun control despite the fact that it’s both bad policy and a persistent election-time loser.

This isn’t a trivial question. I understand why Communists are obsessive about gun control; the last thing they want is a population capable of armed resistance to tyranny. What I have never figured out is why Communists have been so successful at selling gun control to their dupes as an urgent moral necessity.

This chart could be exaggerated, but the figures are at least possible. In the United States, murder and other forms of criminal violence are heavily, heavily concentrated among Blacks. Usually with other Blacks as their victims.

And that’s a problem for your typical normie liberal, because not being “racist” against Blacks is the core of their moral and political identity.

What I now understand — forgive me because I probably should have noticed this sooner — is that gun-control advocacy is a sort of reaction formation. When you’re not an evil Communist, it’s something you do frantically to avert your eyes from unbearable reality.

The truth: outside of a relatively small cohort at the right-hand end of the Black IQ distribution, the people liberals want to treat as sacred victims deserving of infinite indulgence are savages that even intelligent Blacks fear and despise.

That’s the message in the left hand column, there.

IQ denialism, blank-slatism, “poverty causes crime” — these are all defensive formations. They cluster with gun-control advocacy as ways of avoiding the horrible, intolerable truth.

Which makes me wonder: what happens when the strain becomes too great and the protective illusion snaps?

July 11, 2026

Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.

But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:

    Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.

Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:

    The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself

That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:

    The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:

    Habeas Corpus Act 1679

    Bill of Rights 1689

    Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]

    Act of Settlement 1701

    House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975

    Life Peerages Act 1958

    House of Lords Act 1999

Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.

So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.

No.

It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:

British censorship laws do not apply outside the UK’s jurisdiction

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack Notes, Lorenzo Warby links to a fascinating discussion about the ongoing struggle between the UK government’s Ofcom and the US-based 4chan and their legal representatives, saying “The totalitarian wannabes currently running the UK do not apparently grasp that the American Revolution and War of Independence was a thing. Also, being totalitarian wannabes, they have no sense of humour.”

A UK cabinet minister, Rt. Hon. Liz Kendall MP, Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (“DSIT”), discussed the infamous “hamster e-mail” I sent on behalf of my client 4chan to the UK’s Internet censor, on national radio today in the UK. […] My father always told me, when I was growing up, “when a cabinet minister holding the technology policy brief for a G7 Member State is talking about your e-mailed jokes to an audience of millions on national broadcast media, that is the right time to explain the joke, especially if the cabinet minister didn’t get the joke”.

That explanation follows.

The backstory – Hamster #1

The hamster joke has a bit of a history to it. Ofcom, the UK’s Internet censor, first made contact with my American client 4chan in June of 2025 in its attempt to impose British censorship law on that website. I was subsequently retained as defense counsel, pro bono.

Ofcom then “provisionally fined” 4chan on August 16th, 2025 for refusing to obey the UK’s censorship regime. We were invited to make representations to the regulator following that provisional fine decision.

We did two things in response to that. The most newsworthy response was to file a lawsuit against the regulator in the DDC. Before that, however, we explained our position to Ofcom in writing and gave them an opportunity to walk away:

To wit, Ofcom’s fine notices were not properly served and were not enforceable in the United States. Note that we also gave Ofcom fair notice that while this might have been their first attempt to enforce their censorship orders in America, this was not our first rodeo when it came to successfully refusing such orders.

No quantity of officious and haughty foreign demand letters will change our stance. The UK could even pass a bill of attainder – historically Parliament’s most extreme and powerful legislative weapon – against my client, for all I care. My client’s right to operate its service lawfully in the United States is protected by the First Amendment. There is no law Parliament could enact that would change that fact.

I am very familiar with how this movie ends, and it does not end with 4chan paying Ofcom’s fine.

It may end with the UK’s censors getting a blocking order that it serves on its own ISPs; that would be the UK visibly censoring its own people, rather than censoring my client, and doing so ineffectively, at that, as ISP blocks can be circumvented with a VPN. That is a consequence my client is prepared to accept.

England might have the Online Safety Act, but the United States has the U.S. Constitution. These rulesets do not override each other; they are, rather, mutually exclusive. In America’s domain, the Online Safety Act essentially doesn’t exist. It has about as much legal force as a pile of shredded paper one might use to line a hamster’s cage.

Peace was always an option here, but that would have required the UK to abandon the fiction that its rules override the U.S. Constitution on U.S. soil, which we are not prepared to accept.

My clients did not start this fight, but by golly we do intend to finish it.

My client sued Ofcom two weeks later.

There’s much more, so do read the whole thing.

Don’t boast about your online pirating skillz

Filed under: Books, Business, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Larry Correia interacts with a proud book pirate on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

You’d better run, pussy. 😀

Listen, authors are gonna get pirated. We know this. I don’t freak out about it.

But if you are gonna steal, just admit you are a thief and own it. Don’t make a bunch of bullshit posturing excuses why it’s the victim’s fault you’re robbing him. Spare us your commie manifesto about the poor and oppressed, and how you are so brave to stand up for the masses against those cruel wealthy authors taking advantage of the poor (and for most writers, lol wut? They are broke, dummy!)

BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH POORS?!?

Go to the library!

But then we have to listen to these thieving shit weasel cry but what about the RURAL POOR. Which extra fucking pisses me off because now they’re appropriating my culture, because I grew up poor in the sticks. And I choose to live in the country now. Fuck your commie gibberish. Rural people are used to driving long distances to do everything.

Reading is like the cheapest hobby! If you are pirating you are rich enough to have internet.

You aren’t Robin Hood. You’re just a cheap bitch. There’s tons of free books online. My “greedy corporate oligarch” publisher Baen has a free online library with hundreds of titles.

Or KU is like $12 a month for UNLIMITED books. You can read 20 hours a day for a few cents an hour if you feel like it.

If you want to steal, great. Whatever. I don’t give a shit. That’s on you. But just do it with some fucking dignity and spare us from this retarded class warfare justification bullshit. That’s way more pathetic than being a thief.

July 10, 2026

Defensive driving is more important today than ever before

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

At some point, the Canadian and provincial governments decided that the safety of their citizens was a lower priority than ensuring that temporary foreign workers — many of whom apparently understand little or no English or French — had to be given commercial trucking licenses and set loose on the King’s Highways:

Absolutely insane‼️

But this is something I’ve been raising the alarm on for years.

The Canadian trucking industry, which almost a third of it is gray/black market now, have been captured by foreigners and empowered by Ottawa.

100 trucking companies with a history of safety infractions, labour violations and regulatory failures were approved by the Liberals to mass immigrate temporary foreign workers.

Canadians are losing their lives on our roads every day by foreigners who shouldn’t be in Canada that the Liberals allowed scam organizations to bring in and who shouldn’t be behind the steering wheel to begin with. Then the Liberals and activists judges won’t even deport these people.

Many trucking companies that lose license to operate or get hit with infractions would just change provinces of operations and name – sometimes not even the name, and would just keep operating because there is no proper systems raising red flags and no one investigates. Complete incompetence.

Many operate in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario and move around these provinces.

Update: Quebec has taken official notice of the situation.

EU “Chat Control” passes through parliamentary chicanery

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As mentioned yesterday, the EU introduced “Chat Control” which allows the authorities to examine any and all private communications by EU residents “to protect the children”. As eugyppius reports, it got through and was passed into EU-wide law on Thursday:

If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.

Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.

July 9, 2026

A new proposal for limiting “unreasonable searches and seizures”

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

In Reason, Jacob Sullum outlines Justice Gorsuch’s proposed new test for limiting government abilities to surveil and monitor private actions:

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy swears in Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Court’s 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies when people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, continues to shape Fourth Amendment rulings six decades later. That was clear on June 29, when the Court decided Chatrie v. United States, holding that a government-ordered analysis of cellphone location data qualifies as a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information”, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by four of her colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the result but not the rationale. The Katz test, he complained, “has no basis in the Constitution’s text or history”. He added that it has proven unworkable in practice because it has never been clear how courts should determine whether an expectation of privacy is “reasonable”.

Gorsuch is surely right that the Katz test has produced inconsistent and puzzling results. In cases addressing intrusions such as trash searches, demands for bank and telephone records, surveillance by low-flying aircraft, and police trespassing on private property, the Supreme Court has perceived no expectations of privacy it was prepared to recognize as reasonable. Applying the same test, it has repeatedly ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information that people voluntarily share with third parties. Yet the Court has repeatedly rebelled at the disturbing implications of that principle without explicitly renouncing it.

That is what happened in Chatrie, which involved a Virginia bank robbery investigation. Police used a “geofence” warrant to identify the perpetrator by requiring Google to search customer data collected by its Location History feature, which tracks the whereabouts of cellphone users. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Court declined to apply the third-party doctrine, instead reverting to the original, unmodified Katz test.

A better approach, Gorsuch argued, would be to treat Location History records as “effects” covered by the Fourth Amendment — as a form of personal property, in other words. While it is not clear exactly how that property-rights approach would work in other contexts, it does seem less malleable than the Katz test, which gives courts wide discretion in discerning expectations and deciding whether they are reasonable. Gorsuch aptly likened the Court’s understanding of that test to its definition of obscenity in the 1960s: “We know a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ (and an exception to the third party doctrine) when we see it”.

They call it “Chat Control”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam talks about what the EU is calling “Chat Control”:

We need to talk about Chat Control, because it’s all happening this week and almost no one understands what it’s about.

In plain terms: the EU wants to authorize the scanning of your private messages. Your WhatsApp conversations, your emails, your DMs. Not those of a suspect. Those of everyone, all the time, by default.

The pretext is airtight, and that’s the trap: “protecting children”. No one can be against that. That’s exactly why it’s the perfect tool. They’ll never get you to swallow mass surveillance in the name of mass surveillance. They’ll get you to swallow it in the name of children, terrorism, disinformation. Always some cause you won’t dare challenge.

Understand the two-step mechanism well.

Today it’s the “soft” version: platforms have the right to scan, on a voluntary basis, unencrypted messages. Harmless on the surface. It’s the foot in the door.

Then comes the real version, the one under negotiation: mandatory scanning, including of your encrypted messages, analyzed directly on your phone before they’re even sent. Over 500 cryptographers have signed a letter saying it’s technically unfeasible without creating security vulnerabilities that any hacker or hostile state could exploit. You’re breaking encryption for everyone, including the criminals you claim to be targeting.

And the worst part isn’t even that.

The real danger isn’t that Brussels technocrats will be watching you tomorrow. They’re probably too spineless for that. The danger is that they’re building the infrastructure. Once scanning everyone’s messages becomes normal, legal, operational — the track is laid. And on that track will roll everything that comes next. The day a crisis brings ruthless people to power, they won’t have to invent anything. The machine will already be there, ready to go.

No surveillance infrastructure has ever stayed limited to its original purpose. None. It’s a law of administrative nature: a tool built for X always ends up serving Y.

What makes this text dangerous isn’t what it does today. It’s what it makes possible forever.

The decisive vote is Thursday. The last lock.

Auto-translated from the original French by X.

The good folks at Windscribe weigh in:

The EU is not a democracy.

They’re closer to a guy who keeps pressuring a girl to sleep with him despite her saying no.

5 times now.

But he won’t stop.

We’re at the stage where he’s giving her alcohol and making her drunk so she struggles to say no.

Over the last 3 years, Chat Control and similar scanning measures have been defeated or blocked 5 times.

The citizens of the EU and members of EU Parliament have made it abundantly clear — they don’t want Chat Control.

This latest attempt by the EU is the slimiest one yet. Revive dead legislation that was already defeated, flip the passing criteria so that majority don’t need to SUPPORT it, majority need to DEFEAT it, and as the cherry on top, hold that vote on the very last day before Parliament members go on summer break so that many don’t show up. Oh and if they don’t show up, it counts as a vote to pass Chat Control.

You can dress it up in as many legal technicalities and loopholes as you want, what the EU is doing here is fundamentally undemocratic.

No means no.

And if you ever saw a guy pressuring a girl into sleeping with him with disgusting tactics after she said no THIS many times, you would consider him to be a rapist.

So congrats to the EU on adopting rapist strategies to your governance.

July 7, 2026

QotD: “I was just following orders” — the Nuremberg Defence

Filed under: Germany, History, Law, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    JerryRigEverything @ZacksJerryRig
    It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
    It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
    It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
    It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
    It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
    It is illegal to obey illegal orders.
    Congress has not declared War.
    Pass it on.

Hot Take: The “Nuremberg Defense” should be completely legally valid because it was for the entirety of human history until the Nuremberg Trials.

The idea that the average GI Joe has the knowledge and capability to parse the legality of orders in life-and-death situations is one of the best examples of how Liberalism simply does not comport with reality.

Every lawyer knows this to be true, too. Ask any number of attorneys a question on a matter of law and if the question is worth a damn you’ll get as many answers as participants. All good legal questions start with the same answer: “It depends.”

If you can’t even get a team of attorneys to always agree on whether something is legal, with hours to days to weeks of research put into the question, why/how do you expect a normal joe to figure that out?

You don’t. He can’t. You know that.

You just want to inspire doubt, raise mutiny, and have a way to punish people who did things you don’t like on the orders of someone out of your reach.

J.T. Alexander, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-04-06.

July 3, 2026

1977 – when the French intelligentsia rallied to protect pedophiles

Filed under: France, Health, History, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam poinpoints the formal attempt to turn criminal pedophilia into academically supported individuals with “Minor Attraction” (translated from the original French by X):

In 1977, a petition appeared in Le Monde and Libération. It called for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and children aged thirteen. Look at the signatures. Foucault. Derrida. Sartre. Beauvoir. Barthes. Deleuze. Guattari. Lyotard. Sollers. The entirety of the French intellectual aristocracy, the very same that would go on to colonize Yale and Berkeley, gathered under a text that pedantically explains that the child is capable of consenting.

This is not an anecdote. It is the proof.

A few days ago, I wrote that French Theory rested on a single thesis: there is no truth, there are only relations of power. I was told I was caricaturing, that these men were too subtle to be reduced to a slogan. Very well. Then let us observe what subtlety produces when pushed to its extreme.

If every norm is merely domination in disguise, then the prohibition protecting childhood is a form of domination like any other. If every truth is a construction, then innocence is a construction. If every desire is worth every other because no law is legitimate, then there is no longer any reason to defend the most elementary boundary that a civilization has ever established. They did not sign this petition despite their philosophy. They signed it because of it. It was the logical conclusion of the system. They simply had the imprudence to write it down in black and white, before their American heirs learned to wrap the same logic in more cautious vocabulary.

This is the man still taught in undergraduate courses. This is the thinker still cited with reverence at conferences. The one who, in 1977, thought the law protected children a little too much.

A thought is judged by what it makes possible. A thought that, when it reaches its term, no longer knows how to say why one does not touch children is not a subtle thought. It is a dead thought. And a civilization that continues to teach it with deference is not subtle either. It is complicit.

One does not deconstruct innocence. One protects it. It is even more or less the only thing one has no right to fail at.

July 2, 2026

Reining in the administrative state – Humphrey’s Executor overruled by the Supreme Court

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the two US Supreme Court rulings this week that sparked controversy was the court’s decision to overrule a 1935 precedent that enabled the growth of the administrative state:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

The Supreme Court this week restored an old-fashioned constitutional idea: if a principal federal officer exercises executive power, the president must be able to remove him. The justices’ 6–3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which struck down a law prohibiting the president from firing members of the FTC except for cause, is the logical endpoint of a 15-year series of cases that have steadily chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 decision that blessed for-cause removal protections for the heads of so-called independent agencies.

The Court didn’t mince words. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “Humphrey‘s framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time”. Then came the sentence that will launch a thousand administrative-law articles: “If anything more is left of Humphrey‘s, we overrule it”. The New Deal compromise that invented quasi-legislative agencies has finally met Article II of the U.S. Constitution.

That’s good, because the Federal Trade Commission isn’t a debating society. It, along with its alphabet-agency brethren, writes rules with the force of law, investigates private parties, adjudicates violations, and sues in federal court on behalf of the United States. Whatever labels Congress attached to that body in the Progressive Era, the FTC — like the FCC, SEC, NLRB, and so on — today exercises executive power. And the Constitution vests “the executive power” in one president, not in commissioners serving staggered terms, answerable to no one whom voters can fire.

This ruling isn’t a gift to Donald Trump or his successors. It’s a restoration of constitutional accountability. Congress can create executive-branch agencies and specify what they may do, but it cannot create a fourth branch of government and then pretend its officers are independent of the only person the Constitution makes responsible for executing federal law.

Roberts put the point crisply at the end of Slaughter: “Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him”. That’s a unitary, not an imperial, presidency, and it’s a hallmark of republican government. The president remains constrained by statutes, appropriations, courts, Congress, elections, and the Constitution itself. If the people dislike how the FTC enforces the law, they should be able to blame — and replace — the president, not chase a goulash of insulated mandarins.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence adds the important next step. Killing Humphrey’s Executor doesn’t cure every constitutional disease in the administrative state. It simply reallocates the power Congress poured into independent agencies. As Gorsuch warned, “the fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President”. If agencies possess vast legislative and judicial authority, the answer isn’t to hide those powers from presidential control, but to restore legislative powers to Congress. Make Congress great again!

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