Quotulatiousness

July 6, 2012

This might be damage that even the Internet can’t route around

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Tim Worstall on the worst-case interpretation of a recent legal decision in the US courts:

… we now have a ruling that websites are a place of public accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If this ruling holds then this really will break the internet and web as we have come to know it.

The case is discussed here.

    The case involves a Cyberlaw perennial: are websites obligated to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA)? In this case, the desired accommodation is close-captioning for Netflix-streamed video. If websites must comply with the ADA, all hell will break loose. Could YouTube be obligated to close-caption videos on the site? (This case seems to leave that door open.) Could every website using Flash have to redesign their sites for browsers that read the screen? I’m not creative enough to think of all the implications, but I can assure you that ADA plaintiffs’ lawyers will have a long checklist of items worth suing over. Big companies may be able to afford the compliance and litigation costs, but the entry costs for new market participants could easily reach prohibitive levels.

[. . .]

The place of publication is where the reader is, where the browser through which the site is being viewed. Thus would mean that any foreign website which an American might want to read (say, my personal blog) would become subject to the rules and restrictions of the ADA. And believe me, the 6.7 billion people who are not Americans are not going to put up with that. We might all ignore the law, or we might try and ban access from the US (or more alarmingly, ISPs might be told to do so). Or possibly be subject to the tender ministrations of an ambulance chasing lawyer.

Maybe Obama has scaled back the War on Drugs

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

At least, that’s the highly charitable conclusion reached by some supportive media folks. Jacob Sullum explains how they came up with this revelation:

One-upping GQ‘s Marc Ambinder, who recently predicted that Barack Obama “will pivot to the drug war” in his second term if he is re-elected, The Daily Beast‘s James Higdon claims the president already has scaled back the crusade to stop Americans from altering their consciousness in politically disfavored ways. Higdon’s evidence: less money in the administration’s fiscal year 2013 budget for marijuana-spotting helicopters. Seriously:

    Until now, the DEA and state law enforcement could count on the National Guard to fly hundreds of helicopter hours over national forests and other public land, where growers became active following the passage of property-seizure laws in the Reagan years—but the FY13 budget changes that.

    The 50-percent cut is not being apportioned evenly across the states — it’s a two-thirds cut in Oregon and a 70-percent cut in Kentucky, while the Southern border states are receiving less severe reductions in funding. It’s essentially a diversion of Defense Department assets away from the interior American marijuana fields to where the national-security risk is greatest: along our Southern border.

Higdon sees this budgetary rejiggering, which by his own admission will have no impact on the amount of marijuana supplied to or consumed by Americans, as a landmark on “the road map to pot decriminalization.”

I guess you need to pretend there’s a pony somewhere when you’re digging through that much horse shit.

QotD: Criticism is not bullying

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Portraying criticism — even wrong-headed or unfair criticism — as “bullying” and “totalitarian” — is a whine that is not worthy of our respect. It encourages ignorance about the fundamental nature of free speech and the marketplace of ideas. There is no generalized right to be free of offense. But there’s also no right to be free of the words “that’s offensive.” Please. Even if you don’t respect the people you disagree with, have some self-respect.

Ken White, “All This Talk of Harassment Is Harassing Me!”, Popehat, 2012-07-05

July 5, 2012

Cisco “updates” consumer routers to allow tracking of internet usage, automatic bricking for terms & conditions violations

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:08

If you have a modern Cisco or LinkSys router on your home network, you may have just given up a significant amount in the last “update” the company distributed. ESR has the details:

For those of you who have missed the news, last a few days Cisco pushed a firmware update to several of its most popular routers that bricked the device unless you signed up for Cisco’s “cloud” service. To sign up, you had to agree to the following restrictions:

    When you use the Service, we may keep track of certain information related to your use of the Service, including but not limited to the status and health of your network and networked products; which apps relating to the Service you are using; which features you are using within the Service infrastructure; network traffic (e.g., megabytes per hour); internet history; how frequently you encounter errors on the Service system and other related information (“Other Information”).

So in order to continue using the hardware you bought and paid for and own, you have to agree to let Cisco snoop your browser history and monitor your traffic — a clickstream they would of course instantly turn around and sell to advertising agencies and other snoops. Those terms are so loose (“including but not limited to”) that they could legally read your email and sell that data too.

Disgusted enough yet? Wait, it gets better. The cloud terms of service also includes this gem:

    You agree not to use or permit the use of the Service: (i) to invade another’s privacy; (ii) for obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes; (iii) to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights; (iv) to upload, email or otherwise transmit or make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, spam, junk mail or any other form of solicitation; (v) to transmit or otherwise make available any code or virus, or perform any activity, that could harm or interfere with any device, software, network or service (including this Service); or (vi) to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.

Translated out of lawyerese, this gives Cisco the right to brick your router if you use it to view anything Cisco considers pornography, or do anything that it might consider IP theft — like, say, bit-torrenting a movie. Or even if you send anything it considers unsolicited advertising — which doesn’t have to mean bulk spam, see “any other form of solicitation”?

The sum of these paragraphs is: “We control your digital life. We can spy on you, we can filter your traffic, we can cut off your net access unilaterally if you do anything we don’t like, and you have no recourse.”

The idea of replacing your router with one that can load and run an open source rather than proprietary system just became a lot more enticing (such things do already exist, although not for all routers).

July 4, 2012

ACTA rejected decisively by European Parliament

Filed under: Europe, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Apparently even the insulated, protected European Parliament can be moved if enough people are actively against something — in this case it was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Michael Geist explains:

When ACTA was formally signed by most participants in October 2011 in Tokyo, few would have anticipated that less than a year later, the treaty would face massive public protests and abandonment by leading countries. But with tens of thousands taking to the streets in Europe earlier this year, ACTA became the poster child for secretive, one-sided IP agreements that do not reflect the views and hopes of the broader public. This morning, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly against the agreement, effectively killing ACTA within the EU. The vote was 478 against, 39 in favour, with 165 abstentions. This is a remarkable development that was virtually unthinkable even a year ago. Much credit goes to the thousands of Europeans who spoke out against ACTA and to the Members of the European Parliament who withstood enormous political pressure to vote against the deal.

The European developments have had a ripple effect, with the recent Australian parliamentary committee recommendation to delay ACTA ratification and the mounting opposition around the world. ACTA is not yet dead — it may still eke out the necessary six ratifications in a year or two for it to take effect — but it is badly damaged and will seemingly never achieve the goals of its supporters as a model for other countries to adopt and to emerge as a new global standard for IP enforcement. That said, ACTA supporters will not take today’s decision as the final verdict. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect new efforts to revive the agreement within Europe and to find alternative means to implement its provisions. That suggests the fight will continue, but for today, it is worth celebrating how the seemingly impossible — stopping a one-sided, secretly negotiated global IP agreement — became possible.

This has been referred to as the biggest parliamentary defeat ever for a European Commission initiative. In theory, the ACTA treaty cannot be enacted into EU law without being approved by the European Parliament (although, as we’ve seen before, the EU is adept at getting around minor inconveniences like referenda and recalcitrant national governments).

July 1, 2012

Reason.tv: 3 Big Takeaways From Obamacare Decision

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

Here are the three most important things you need to know in the wake of the Supeme Court’s decision on The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare:

1. Government is still unlimited.
2. Mitt Romney is still lame.
3. Health care costs will still soar.

For more details, go to http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/29/3-essential-takeaways-from-the-obamacare

June 29, 2012

Shikha Dalmia attempts to pull some lessons from the confusion of the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling

Filed under: Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:51

The biggest loser in this ruling may well have been the remains of the Supreme Court’s dignity. At Hit and Run, Shikha Dalmia pokes through the smoking ruins of the decision to try to make some sense out of it all:

One: We know a ruling is a going to lead to a holy legal mess when it begins like this:

    ROBERTS, C. J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, and III–C, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined; an opinion with respect to Part IV, in which BREYER and KAGAN, JJ., joined; and an opinion with respect to Parts III–A, III–B, and III–D. GINSBURG, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined, and in which BREYER and KAGAN, JJ., joined as to Parts I, II, III, and IV. SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., filed a dissenting opinion. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

Another instance where a ruling began this way was in the 1978 Bakke case. In it, Justice Powell could not convince a majority of his colleagues to sign off on his tortured claim that the University of California could not reject white candidates because of their race. But it could give blacks and other minorities extra bonus points because of their race. He was against racial quotas, you see, but thought racial preferences were just peachy — a distinction that his conservative and liberal justice had difficulty seeing. The upshot was multiple opinions with multiple dissents and multiple concurrences without any clear guidance as to which one was applicable. This has lead to 40 odd years of conflict and confusion in the lower courts that the Supreme Court is still trying to sort out

[. . .]

Three: No one should ever again believe that conservative justices are opposed to judicial activism, preferring, instead to read and apply the law as written, computer-like. Justice Scalia proved this in his ruling in the Raich case when he happily signed off on an expansive understanding of Uncle Sam’s Commerce Clause authority to nullify state medical marijuana laws duly passed by voters just because he happened to disagree with them. Had it not been for his misguided reasoning, ObamaCare’s constitutionality — or lack thereof — under the Commerce Clause would not have even been an issue.

But Scalia at least chose to exercise one of the two options presented to him: uphold or overrule the law as written. Justice Roberts, on the other hand, as many have already pointed out, has rewritten ObamaCare as per his taste. The law itself repeatedly noted that the fine for not purchasing health care was a penalty not a tax, a designation that Roberts accepts in order to determine if the court had standing to rule under the Anti-Injunction Clause (the Clause bars legal challenges to federal taxes before they have gone into effect). But he rejected that designation and redubbed the “penalty” a “tax” in declaring it constitutional.

Update: Ace gets a bit heated about the political switch of opinion on the part of the chief justice:

What galls me is that a majority of the public wanted this overturned — but we don’t count. What counts is the opinion of the elites Roberts socializes with. They are a decided minority, but continue imposing their political will on the nation as if they were a majority.

And the actual majority? The Little People don’t count. They don’t have the right schooling, nor the socialization to truly understand how to best manage their affairs.

I was just reading a bit about the making of The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Sergio Leone included a brutal Union prison camp; he noted that there was a lot written about the Confederates’ brutal prison camps (like Andersonville) but nothing about the Unions’ similar camps. The winners, he noted, don’t get written about that way.

Roberts has aligned himself with the elites, who he supposes will be the Winners, and will thus have the final say in the history books about him. And he’s probably right that they will have the final say: Conservatives simply do not have much sway at all in some of the most critical institutions in America. And we’ll continue paying a high price for that until we change that.

Update, the second: Mark Steyn, on the other hand, sings the praises of Obamacare, now that it has hurdled the Supreme Court:

Still, quibbling over whose pretzel argument is more ingeniously twisted — the government’s or the court’s — is to debate, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the precedence between a louse and a flea. I have great respect for George Will, but his assertion that the Supreme Court decision is a “huge victory” that will “help revive a venerable tradition” of “viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint” and lead to a “sharpening” of “many Americans’ constitutional consciousness” is sufficiently delusional that one trusts mental health is not grounds for priority check-in at the death panel. Back in the real world, it is a melancholy fact that tens of millions of Americans are far more European in their view of government than the nation’s self-mythologizing would suggest. Indeed, citizens of many Continental countries now have more — what’s the word? — liberty in matters of health care than Americans. That’s to say, they have genuinely universal government systems alongside genuinely private-system alternatives. Only in America does “health” “care” “reform” begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine. It is the perverse genius of Obamacare that it will kill off what’s left of a truly private health sector without leading to a truly universal system. However, it will be catastrophically unaffordable, hideously bureaucratic, and ever more coercive. So what’s not to like?

June 23, 2012

The Turing inquest verdict of suicide may not have been consistent with the evidence

Filed under: Britain, History, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Brilliant mathematician Alan Turing died in an apparent suicide after undergoing chemical castration, but the inquest seems to have rushed to a conclusion:

At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will question the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.

He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict.

Indeed, he argues, Turing’s death may equally probably have been an accident.

[. . .]

The motive for suicide is easy to imagine. In 1952, after he had reported a petty burglary, Turing found himself being investigated for “acts of gross indecency” after he revealed he had had a male lover in his house.

Faced with the prospect of imprisonment, and perhaps with it the loss of the mathematics post he held at Manchester University, which gave him access to one of the world’s only computers, Turing accepted the alternative of “chemical castration” — hormone treatment that was supposed to suppress his sexual urges.

It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once.

[. . .]

In his authoritative biography, Andrew Hodges suggests that the experiment was a ruse to disguise suicide, a scenario Turing had apparently mentioned to a friend in the past.

But Jack Copeland argues the evidence should be taken at face value — that an accidental death is certainly consistent with all the currently known circumstances.

The problem, he complains, is that the investigation was conducted so poorly that even murder cannot be ruled out. An “open verdict”, recognising this degree of ignorance, would be his preferred position.

None of this excuses the treatment of Turing during his final years, says Prof Copeland.

June 21, 2012

Addressing society’s hypocrisy on drugs

Filed under: Britain, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

There’s apparently a call in Britain for the police to be given discretionary powers in certain cases where they could push civil rather than criminal penalties for drug offences. A better solution would be to fix the massive disconnect between the law and reality:

‘Ease drug penalties on the young,” a government adviser has urged. And of course, Professor Les Iversen, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, is absolutely right. After all, if every young man who had dabbled with drugs had felt the fullest penalty of the law, then David Cameron would not be prime minister nor Barack Obama US president.

But in my view, Les Iversen doesn’t go nearly far enough. He talks of police being granted the discretion as to whether to press for civil rather than criminal penalties in certain drugs cases. This, however, is a fudge that doesn’t address the real issue. If our drugs laws are antiquated, expensive, inconsistent, socially damaging, draconian and counterproductive — and they are — then the solution is not to give the police more leeway to turn a blind eye. The solution is to change the laws.

[. . .]

What’s the thing I’m scared of most about my children and drugs? Not the drugs themselves, that’s for sure. The way we class drugs bears almost no relation to their relative degrees of harmfulness, as Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser and Cambridge-educated neuropsychopharmacologist, made himself extremely unpopular by explaining. Alcohol and tobacco, Nutt infamously pointed out, are more dangerous than LSD; Ecstasy is safer than horse riding.

No, what worries me far more about my kids and drugs is the grubby illegality of that culture: the fact that whoever supplies them will, by definition, come from the criminal underworld; the fact that, there being no consumer protection or quality control, their drugs could be cut with any quantity of rubbish; the fact that they risk being imprisoned and having their futures blighted for the essentially victimless crime of seeking an altered state.

There are some authoritarian types, I know, who reading this will say: “And serve them bloody right!” It was a similar warped mentality that, at the height of Prohibition, led the US government to poison the nation’s supply of industrial alcohol (used to make moonshine) with a contaminant called Formula No 5. As Christopher Snowdon notes in his book The Art of Suppression, this resulted in as many as 10,000 needless deaths.

June 18, 2012

New proposal: HTTP Error Code 451 to indicated “content censored by authorities”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:04

Kevin Fogarty at PC World looks at a new HTTP error code proposal:

A high-profile Google developer has proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that it endorse a new HTTP Status Code to warn readers the page they’re looking for has been censored by authorities, according to TheVerge.

Tim Bray, who co-invented XML and works as Android Developer Advocate at Google, is submitting a proposal that pages censored by someone other than the owner of the site or of the user’s local network display the error code “451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons.”

The number in the code is a reference to Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451,” which describes a dystopian future in which book burnings and the censorship of unacceptable material is routine. Google already highlights search terms that may return censored results, in some countries.

The wins and losses in the C-11 copyright reform bill

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Michael Geist on the good and the bad aspects of bill C-11 which will probably pass third reading today in the House of Commons and be sent to the Senate for approval:

There is no sugar-coating the loss on digital locks. While other countries have been willing to stand up to U.S. pressure and adopt a more flexible approach, the government, led by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore on the issue, was unwilling to compromise despite near-universal criticism of its approach. It appears that once Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the call for a DMCA-style approach in early May 2010, the digital lock issue was lost. The government heard that the bill will hurt IP enforcement, restrict access for the blind, disadvantage Canadian creators, and harm consumer rights. It received tens of thousands of comments from Canadians opposed to the approach and ran a full consultation in which digital locks were the leading concern. The NDP, Liberals, and Green Party proposed balanced amendments to the digital lock rules that were consistent with international requirements and would have maintained protection for companies that use them, but all were rejected. [. . .]

Since the Conservatives took power in 2006, there were effectively four bills: the Pre-Bill C-61 bill that was to have been introduced by Jim Prentice in December 2007 but was delayed following public pressure, Bill C-61 introduced in June 2008, and Bill C-32/C-11, which was introduced in June 2010 (and later reintroduced in September 2011). The contents of December 2007 bill was never released, but documents obtained under the Access to Information Act provide a good sense of what it contained (a call was even scheduled on the planned day of introduction between Prentice and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to assure the U.S. that digital locks were the key issue and would not be altered). This chart highlights many of the key issues and their progression over the years as the public became increasingly vocal on copyright:

Issue Pre-Bill
C-61 (2007) 		Bill C-61
(2008) 		Bill C-11
(2012)
Fair Dealing Expansion No No Yes (education, parody, satire)
Format Shifting No Limited (only photographs, book,
newspaper, periodical, or videocassette) 		Yes (technology neutral, no
limit on number of copies, includes network storage, and no reference
to contractual overrides)
Time Shifting No Limited (no network PVRs,
Internet communications) 		Yes (C-61 limitations removed)
Backup Copies No No Yes
User Generated Content Exception No No Yes
Statutory Damages Cap No Limited ($500 cap for
downloading) 		Yes (Max of $5000 for all
non-commercial infringement)
Enabler enforcement provision No No Yes
Internet Publicly Available
Materials Exception for Education 		Yes Yes Yes
Public Performance in Schools No No Yes
Technology Neutral Display
Exception in Schools 		No No Yes
Limited Distance Learning
Exception 		Yes Yes Yes
Limited Digital Inter-Library
Loans 		Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Notice Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Takedown No No No
Three Strikes//Website Blocking No No No
Internet Location Tool Provider
Safe Harbour 		Yes Yes Yes
Broadcaster Ephemeral Change No No Yes
Expanded Private Copying Levy No No No
Commissioned Photograph Change Yes Yes Yes
Alternate Format Reproduction No No Yes

[. . .]

Public engagement on copyright continuously grew in strength – from the Bulte battle in 2006 to the Facebook activism in 2007 to the immediate response to the 2008 bill to the 2009 copyright consultation to the 2010 response to Bill C-32. While many dismissed the role of digital activism on copyright, the reality is that it had a huge impact on the shape of Canadian copyright. The public voice influenced not only the contents of the bill, but the debate as well with digital locks the dominant topic of House of Commons debate and media coverage until the very end. Bill C-11 remains a “flawed but fixable” bill that the government refused to fix, but that it is a significantly better bill than seemed possible a few years ago owes much to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians that spoke out on copyright.

Legal pratfalls ensue

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Scott H. Greenfield at the Simple Justice blog on how the legal equivalent of “two 12-year-olds rolling in the mud” morphed into a lawyer beclowning himself in an epic fashion:

But Matthew Inman, who does the Oatmeal, put the lawyer Charles Carreon’s letter demanding $20k on the web, with his own special touches, in a masterful response, one aspect of which was that rather than succumb to Carreon’s demand, he would raise some money for charity.

[. . .]

Three things to note: First, Carreon started suit in his own name, not that of his client, which suggest that this is for the wrong done him by the mean children of the internet. Second, he’s sued not only Inman, apparently for “incitement to cyber-vandalism,” but the Indiegogo, which handles charitable collections, as well as the two charities to whom Inman’s collection goes.

This is nuts. For a fellow who foolishly stepped in shit, he’s doubled quadrupled down. My guess is that he’s included the charities as stakeholders or beneficiaries of Inman’s actions, and wants the money collected to go to him rather than to fighting cancer or saving bears. He wants money collected to fight cancer to go to him instead. It’s unthinkable [that] anyone could do such a thing.

June 14, 2012

The Commerce Clause: how it evolved to empower government control of everything

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, the entire law “must be declared void.” Judge Vinson cites this Reason.tv video on page 47 of his decision.

What is at stake in the amendment process to the omnibus bill

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

As Andrew Coyne points out, if nothing else the stack of amendments the opposition have proposed does accomplish something (even if none of the amendments are accepted):

The House of Commons was to begin voting Wednesday night on several hundred amendments to Bill C-38, the 425-page monster known as the omnibus budget implementation bill. The voting was expected to go on all night and all day Thursday.

Viewed one way, the whole thing is quite silly. Given the government’s majority, none of the amendments is likely to pass, nor is the bill itself in any danger of defeat. Viewed another way, however, this is an important moment. For the first time since the last election, the opposition is putting up a serious fight against the abuses this government has visited upon Parliament: not only the omnibus bill, which repeals, amends or introduces more than 60 different pieces of legislation, but the repeated, almost routine curtailing of debate by means of “time allocation”; the failures of oversight, misstating of costs, and abdication of responsibility in the F-35 purchase; and the refusal to provide basic information on spending to Parliament or the Parliamentary Budget Officer — to say nothing of the stonewalling, prorogations and other indignities of the minority years.

What’s the point? Once, as in the famous “bell-ringing” episode of 1982, the point would have been to hold up parliamentary business until the government relented: not on the substance of the bill, which a duly elected government is entitled to pass, but on the principle that the bill should be split, that Parliament is entitled to vote on each of its several major parts separately, and to give each the kind of informed scrutiny and debate it warrants. Again, that is not only in the opposition’s interests, or even Parliament’s, but the nation’s: it makes for better legislation.

June 13, 2012

When is a bribe appropriate?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

The British government is trying to crack down on bribery, which on the surface seems like a good thing to do: but will it cripple British businesses in third world countries?

We used to draw a distinct line between what was acceptable business conduct here at home and what we did abroad with Johnny Foreigner.

Inviting Bertie from your major customer to Henley or the Derby, or waving Cup Final and Olympic tickets in his face was entirely acceptable. Slipping him £500 for an order was bribery and both illegal and immoral.

But what you did abroad was an entirely different matter: bribery was until very recently tax deductible.

[. . .]

This is of course very different from the system of old. Which was, essentially, that soft soaping someone with experiences and days out was just absolutely fine while any mention at all of cash was not just legally but also socially verboten.

At home, in Britain, that was. Having worked in some pretty odd and even rough places I’ve done my share of bribing people, but even so I would be profoundly shocked if I was asked for a bung in Blighty. But the system also most definitely facilitated the payment of bribes to Johnny Foreigner.

At one point, working in Russia, I needed to get cheap railway prices out of the Russian railroads to make the numbers on a metals shipment add up. The only way known to do this was to make a deal with the North Koreans who had special state-set prices on said railways. Which is how I found myself inside the N. Korean embassy in Moscow handing over $10,000 in crisp notes to their KGB-style guy after the successful conclusion of the shipment.

Yes, of course, it’s terribly naughty subverting the employees of a communist dictatorship, but the reaction here at home was the most interesting. When I made gentle enquiries to the taxman as to how I might account for this transaction, hinting gently at first, he finally pointed out that since I’d paid the bribe in a foreign currency to a foreign chap that was just fine. Just list it as a business expense and it was tax deductible.

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