I’m aware that Obama, Napolitano, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a host of organized collectivists have been working hard for a long time to defame and smear everything and everybody that once made this nation great. They want as many of its people as possible to believe that knowing the Constitution, or calling upon its provisions at need, is as good as a criminal act. I have been concerned that in television dramas from CSI, through NCIS, to Castle, whenever the accused demands to see a lawyer, it’s considered a confession of guilt.
L. Neil Smith, “Madison’s Ghost”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-07-31
August 1, 2011
QotD: Redefining guilt
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A quick plug for a useful EFF plug-in for Firefox
I’ve mentioned this before, but I was just reminded about it as I started using the new laptop with its new install of Firefox:
This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser’s communications with some other sites:
- Google Search
- Wikipedia
- Twitter and Identi.ca
- EFF and Tor
- Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines and lots more!
Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere by following this link.
As always, even if you’re at an HTTPS page, remember that unless Firefox displays a colored address bar and an unbroken lock icon in the bottom-right corner, the page is not completely encrypted and you may still be vulnerable to various forms of eavesdropping or hacking (in many cases, HTTPS Everywhere can’t prevent this because sites incorporate insecure third-party content).
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July 29, 2011
“This is the first global human rights legislation. How can people not know about it?”
I’m ashamed to say that this was news to me:
Monday, August 1, is a holiday in Canada. Everyone knows that. But what is the name of the holiday?
[. . .]
It is “Emancipation Day.”
You’re scratching your head, aren’t you? Don’t be embarrassed. Be angry — angry that you have been denied a truly majestic story all Canadians should know and cherish.
On August 1, 1834, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. “Emancipation Day” has been celebrated ever since in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and elsewhere.
[. . .]
In 1793, a free black man named Peter Martin – who had served with Butler’s Rangers in the American Revolution – told the legislature of the abduction of Chloe Cooley, a black slave who had been bound, gagged, thrown in a boat, and taken to the United States for sale. Simcoe seized the opportunity and moved to immediately abolish slavery.
It was a radical, audacious move. And it was too much. Wealthy slaveowners in the legislature resisted and Simcoe was forced to compromise: Existing slaves would be denied their freedom but the importation of slaves would stop and the children of slaves would be freed when they reached age 25. In effect, slavery would slowly vanish.
It was not the sweeping victory Simcoe wanted. But it was the abolitionists’ first legislative victory anywhere in the British Empire.
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July 26, 2011
The implied relationship between traffic tickets and corruption
Tim Harford linked to this Forbes graphic showing an interesting correlation:
This nicely illustrates what he wrote in 2006:
An alternative view, popular among the common-sense crowd, is that corruption is a problem in Indonesia because Indonesians are crooks by nature; poor countries are poor because they are full of people who are lazy or stupid or dishonest. I disagree out of faith, rather than because the evidence is compelling. But then, what evidence could there be? You would need to take people from every culture, put them somewhere where they could ignore the law with impunity, and see who cheated and who was honest.
That sounds like a tall order for any research strategy, but the economists Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel have realised that diplomats in New York city were, in fact, the perfect guinea pigs. Diplomatic immunity meant that parking tickets issued to diplomats could not be enforced, and so parking legally was essentially a matter of personal ethics.
Fisman and Miguel found support for the common-sense view. Countries with corrupt systems, as measured by Transparency International, also sent diplomats who parked illegally. From 1997-2005, the Scandinavians committed only 12 unpaid parking violations, and most of them were by a single criminal mastermind from Finland. Chad and Bangladesh, regularly at the top of corruption tables, produced more than 2,500 violations between them. Perhaps poor countries are poor because they are full of corrupt people, after all.
July 24, 2011
Amartya Sen’s “no universal justice” notion
Eric Falkenstein is reading Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice and pulls out this example from the book:
Take three kids and a flute. Anne says the flute should be given to her because she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob says the flute should be handed to him as he is so poor he has no toys to play with. Carla says the flute is hers because she made it.
Sen argues that who gets the flute depends on your philosophy of justice. Bob, the poorest, will have the support of the economic egalitarian. The libertarian would opt for Carla. The utilitarian will argue for Anne because she will get the maximum pleasure, as she can actually play the instrument. Sen states there are no institutional arrangements that can help us resolve this dispute in a universally accepted just manner.
This supposedly shows that there is no single theory of justice, rather one should look at enhancing the redistribution of life-saving goods and removing ‘injustice’.
I haven’t read Sen’s book (and have no immediate intention to do so), so perhaps I’m getting the wrong notion from the example here, but let me rephrase it a tiny bit to clarify why the example didn’t work for me:
Clara makes a flute, which is then taken from her because it might be “awarded” to someone who knows how to play it, or to someone who has no toys. Clara might, under some notions of “justice” be given back the flute she made.
I don’t see this as an example of “justice” so much as a form of theft.
July 20, 2011
Heinlein’s influence on the evolution of the libertarian movement
In a post to correct an assertion by SF author David Brin, Eric S. Raymond shows just how influential the writings of Robert Heinlein were to the early libertarian movement:
Robert Heinlein was a complex man whose views evolved greatly over time. The Heinlein of 1942, who put into the mouth of one of his characters the line “Naturally food is free! What kind of people do you take us for?” was only five years on from having been enchanted by social credit theory, which underpins his “lost” novel For Us, The Living; in later years he was so embarrassed by this enthusiasm that he allowed that manuscript to molder in a drawer somewhere, and it was only published after his death.
Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.
But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.
[. . .]
(When time has given us perspective to write really good cultural histories of the 20th century, Heinlein is going to look implausibly gigantic. His achievements didn’t stop with co-inventing science fiction and all its consequences, framing post-1960s libertarianism, energizing the firearms-rights movement, or even merely inspiring me to become the kind of person who not only could write The Cathedral and the Bazaar but had to. No. Heinlein also invented much of the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture through his novel Stranger In A Strange Land; it has been aptly noted that he was the only human being ever to become a culture hero both to the hippies of Woodstock and the U.S. Marine Corps. I am told that to this day most Marine noncoms carry a well-thumbed copy of Starship Troopers in their rucksacks.)
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July 19, 2011
Tax-wary millionaires flee to . . . Canada?
Jason Kirby is either smoking some really premium weed, or the world is changing even faster than we thought it was, in an article titled “The Great White tax haven”:
For decades, Canadians have been told this country is a high-tax, unwelcoming place for business people and the wealthy. It’s a reputation we came by honestly. But a shift has taken place both here and abroad, say experts. While Canada is reforming and lowering its taxes, politicians in other developed countries — those faced with crushing debt loads and economic stagnation — are turning a hungry eye to the bank accounts of their richest citizens. At the same time, instability in the Middle East and Asia means wealthy individuals are looking for a safe place to move their families. Where they might have flocked to the U.S. in the past, many now see Canada as the better option. Tax specialists even use terms like “the Great White tax haven” and “Switzerland of the North” when talking about Canada.
The world’s rich are restless, says Lesperance, whose clients are worth between $30 million and $1 billion. Most work in financial services, but in every sector and every country wealthy individuals are on the move. Lesperance calls these ultra-rich the Golden Geese, arguing that wherever they go, they generate economic benefits—they start companies, buy real estate, keep restaurants busy and spend money on big-ticket items. Along with Ian Angell, a professor at the London School of Economics, he’s writing a book entitled Flight of the Golden Geese, which argues that as countries squeeze wealthy taxpayers, they will pull up stakes and flee. “Canada has an unprecedented, once-in-several-generations opportunity to put up its hand and offer itself as an alternative,” he says.
The migration is well under way. Last year, nearly 12,000 people moved here under the federal government’s Immigrant Investor Program, up from 4,950 a decade ago, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. (The figure includes spouses and dependents.) To qualify, immigrants must have a minimum net worth of at least $1.6 million, and are required to “invest” $800,000 with the government, which is returned after five years. (Ottawa says the money is used to fund economic development programs, though critics call it a cash grab.)
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July 12, 2011
Another end-run around privacy expectations
Julian Sanchez thinks the government has stopped caring whether you are innocent or guilty online:
Thanks to an unwise Supreme Court decision dating from the 70s, information about your private activites loses its Fourth Amendment protection when its held by a “third party” corporation, like a phone company or Internet provider. As many legal scholars have noted, however, this allows constitutional privacy safeguards to be circumvented via a clever two-step process. Step one: The government forces private businesses (ideally the kind a citizen in the modern world can’t easily avoid dealing with) to collect and store certain kinds of information about everyone — anyone might turn out to be a criminal, after all. No Fourth Amendment issue there, because it’s not the government gathering it! Step two: The government gets a subpoena or court order to obtain that information, quite possibly without your knowledge. No Fourth Amendment problem here either, according to the Supreme Court, because now they’re just getting a corporation’s business records, not your private records. It makes no difference that they’re only keeping those records because the government said they had to.
Current law already allows law enforcement to require retention of data about specific suspects — including e-mails and other information as well as IP addresses — to ensure that evidence isn’t erased while they build up enough evidence for a court order. But why spearfish when you can lower a dragnet? Blanket data requirements ensure easy access to a year-and-a-half snapshot of the online activities of millions of Americans — every one a potential criminal.
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Settling the Caledonia issue . . . in time for the provincial election
Christie Blatchford finds the timing of the settlement to be “arguably suspicious”:
The last page of the Caledonia class action settlement is the one that tells the shameful truth of what happened five years ago in that lovely small southwestern Ontario town.
The settlement was the result of a lawsuit against the government and the Ontario Provincial Police filed by 440 residents, 400 businesses and a handful of sub-contractors affected by the native occupation there five years ago.
The deal has been repeatedly portrayed purely as a “compensation” package since it was formally announced by the Ontario government last Friday.
The government’s brief press release used carefully neutral language: The settlement is called an “agreement” which “provides compensation” for those who suffered “direct losses” during the course of “the protest.”
It is, in a word, bunk.
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July 11, 2011
Can the government force you to provide your password?
Declan McCullagh discusses a potentially precedent-setting case in Colorado that may determine whether the 5th amendment applies to your personal passwords:
The Colorado prosecution of a woman accused of a mortgage scam will test whether the government can punish you for refusing to disclose your encryption passphrase.
The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to order the defendant, Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home.
Because Fricosu has opposed the proposal, this could turn into a precedent-setting case. No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects Americans’ right to remain silent.
I’d hope that the protections against self-incrimination would apply in this case, but government power has been expended so far in the last ten years that it would not surprise me if the courts gut this right in their deference to the executive (just like every other time, it seems).
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July 8, 2011
Oh, it’s not really “censorship”, say Apple fans
Even if Apple is silently censoring their MobileMe email messages:
Writing on the Cult of Mac, John Brownlee reports that Apple applies silent, unpublished content-filters to outgoing MobileMe Email messages, sometimes deleting the messages you send without notifying you. This doesn’t appear to be in Apple’s published terms of using the service, and while an Apple spokesperson has confirmed that this goes on, she disclaims that it is political in nature. The comments on Brownlee’s post are a study in cognitive dissonance from Apple fans, with responses ranging from, “I don’t send politically charged messages so it doesn’t matter,” to “It didn’t happen when I tried it, so it’s not true,” to “All spam filters work this way” (they don’t), and so on.
It’ll be hard to find a way to make this sound nice to folks who aren’t already fully paid-up members of the Apple Fanboy Club.
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The Canadian right to free speech: not invented in 1982
Mark Steyn responds to former blogger Jason Cherniak about the free speech rights of Canadians:
You claim that the legal right to free speech “did not exist as a legal right before 1982”. This is bollocks de facto and de jure. When you say with all the blithe insouciance of a Dalhousie Law School alumnus that any right to free speech was “only respected by convention”, my response is what do you think the entire Canadian legal inheritance is, genius? It’s “convention”. That’s what the definition of Common Law is: a body of precedent, understandings of inherent authority — ie, “convention”. When Julian Porter, QC filed a motion objecting to the Canadian “Human Rights” Tribunal’s “secret trial”, he cited CBC vs New Brunswick, Ambard vs Attorney-General of Trinidad and Tobago – in other words, the accumulation of precedent, or, in your words, a respect for convention.
England, the mother of Common Law, has no written consititution, and thus no “constitutional rights” at all, but only “conventions”. Those “conventions” were the underpinning of the 1867 British North America Act and, more broadly, the third of a millennium of Canadian legal history before the Charter of Worthless Crap. As Blackstone put it, for lands “planted by English subjects”, “all the English laws then in being, which are the birthright of every subject, are immediately there in force”. In other words, long before 1982, free speech was a Canadian’s “birthright” — through convention. It’s all convention. In the English legal tradition, take away convention, and what’s left?
That’s why more countries have lived in liberty longer under Common Law than any other legal inheritance. Because what you dismiss as mere “convention” is, in fact, an understanding that “law” and laws are not the same thing. It’s not about the government writing down on a piece of paper everything that it will permit you, Jason the Barrister, to do. “Rights” are not those things granted by the sovereign and enumerated in statute, but the precise opposite: They’re restraints upon the sovereign. They’re not about what the state allows you to do, but about what the state is not allowed to do to you. The English legal tradition is imperfect (as all systems are) but it has been a better protector of this principle than any other. What part of that don’t you understand?
All of it, apparently. Because along comes that puffed up poseur Trudeau with all his modish contempt for the Canadian inheritance and he decides that, like you, he’s not big on convention and precedent and he’d rather have everything written down, all nice and “codified”. So now we have your 1982 Charter that, for the first time since Magna Carta, gives citizens what you call a “legal right” to free speech. And whaddaya know? Ever since we got a Trudeaupian “legal right” to it, there’s been less and less free speech than back in the bad old days when (according to you) we had no “legal right” to it at all. Ask yourself this, “Barrister and Solicitor”: Had Guy Earle delivered his lesbophobic putdowns at a Canadian comedy club in 1981, would he have had more or less “legal right” to free speech than he enjoys today?
I said in my post that, for you and yours, Trudeau is Year Zero. Your response confirms it. That a Canadian lawyer is willing to argue that a long, established, settled legal inheritance means nothing unless Father Pierre writes it down in his Napeoleonic Complex Code is bleak confirmation of how thoroughly he vacuumed Canada’s past — and, in doing so, perverted the very idea of what “rights” are. If yours is a typical Canadian lawyer’s view of the law, it certainly explains a lot. God help us all.
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A contrarian view on the News of the World closure
Well, somebody had to point out the cloud to this lovely silver lining that everyone else is enjoying:
Around the world, miles of column inches and hours of television and radio debate have been devoted to the closure of the News of the World. And yet the gravity of what occurred yesterday, the unprecedented, head-turningly historic nature of it, has not been grasped anywhere. A newspaper of some 168 years’ standing, a public institution patronised by millions of people, has been wiped from history — not as a result of some jackbooted military intrusion or intolerant executive decree or coup d’état, but under pressure from so-called liberal campaigners who ultimately felt disgust for the newspaper’s ‘culture’. History should record yesterday as a dark day for press freedom.
In a civilised society we tend to associate the loss of a newspaper, the pressured shutting down of a media outlet, with some major corrosion of public or democratic values. We look upon the extinction of a paper for non-commercial reasons, whatever the paper’s reputation or sins, as a sad thing, normally the consequence of a tyrannical force stamping its boot and its authority over the upstarts of the media. Yet yesterday’s loss of a newspaper has given rise, at best, to speculative analysis of what is going on inside News International, or at worst to expressions of schadenfreude and glee that the four million dimwits who liked reading phone-hacked stories about Wayne Rooney on a Sunday morning will no longer be at liberty to do so. Many of those politically sensitive commentators who shake their heads in solemn fury upon hearing that a newspaper in a place like Belarus has closed down have barely been able to contain their excitement about the self-immolation of a tabloid here at home.
Many people, including us at spiked, had reservations about the News of the World’s mode of behaviour, especially following this week’s revelations of deplorable phone-hacking activity involving murdered teenager Milly Dowler and the families of dead British soldiers. The paper undoubtedly infuriated many people, too. Yet this was a longstanding public institution. Just because a newspaper is the private property of an individual — even if that individual is Rupert Murdoch — does not detract from the fact that it is also a public institution, with an historic reputation and an ongoing political and social engagement with a regular, in this case numerically formidable readership. That such a public institution can be dispensed with so swiftly, that a huge swathe of the British people can overnight be deprived of an institution they had a close relationship with, ought to be causing way more discomfort and concern than it is. How would we feel if other public institutions — the BBC, perhaps, or parliament — were likewise to disappear?
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Shifting in the general direction of legalizing marijuana?
Ace is still not eager to see pot legalized, but he’s had a bit of a change of heart lately:
The liberty argument is a strong one.
The counter-argument, and the one I have previously relied upon/acceded to, was that the state has such a powerful interest in protecting people from harming themselves that our Duty to Protect outweighs the case for liberty.
But I don’t believe that any more. For one thing, I am becoming, little by little, and belatedly, very suspicious of any argument that assigns liberty a lower priority than another value. And I’m becoming, again belatedly, very very suspicious of the general claim that we can use the Coercive Power of the State to make people live better lives.
It’s not so much a slippery slope argument — of the type “If we say the state can do X to supposedly improve our lives, who’s to say they can’t do Y, as well, making the same claim?” — as it is an argument about that first step itself.
I don’t think I want the state using its coercive power to lock people up any more for doing drugs.
What business is it of mine? I do lots of things that others may look down upon but I wouldn’t be at all happy about having State Coercion brought to bear upon me for any of it.
So, cut through all the stuff about medicinal marijuana and the like… it’s really just about respecting a citizens’ basic right to do as he pleases without state coercion, so long as what he pleases does not produce direct harm for anyone else.
And I just don’t buy the case for “direct harm” anymore.
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