Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2013

Steps towards a police state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Rick Falkvinge thinks that the United States is at the point of no return as far as civil liberties are concerned:

While this may seem a trivial observation, it is critical in this context: people tend to be focused on what affects them in the here and now. While some people can connect the dots and follow the line with their eyes into the future, the vast majority of people don’t bother with something that doesn’t affect them directly, personally, and in the present. In 1932, families were still skating in the park in Berlin on weekends. All that nasty stuff was theoretical, rumored, and somewhere else. People who look ahead and try to sound the alarm bell tend to be regarded as tinfoil hats, eccentric, and nuts.

One of the first things that happens past the point of no return into a police state is the persecution of reporters. As a society is closing down, those persecuted first are those with the audience and an interest in reporting the worrying trends that society seems to be closing. This is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. This is the alarm bell. Once that happens, get out of the mine.

An event horizon is a term from astrophysics. It is the edge of a black hole – so the event horizon appears like a black sphere, if you like. Nothing, not even light, can escape from within the event horizon – hence the term black hole. But if you were traveling through space, in direction of the black hole (which may be as large as an entire solar system), then you would notice absolutely nothing as you crossed the event horizon. You would pass a point of no return, and register not a single thing while doing so. The analogy is depressingly apt.

I’ve written before that I believe that the U.S. is lost to encroaching totalitarianism, which it will likely endure for a number of years before it collapses under its own weight (as all empires do sooner or later). With Edward Snowden being hunted relentlessly across the globe for leaking evidence of systematic abuse of power, Glenn Greenwald – who published Snowden’s leaks – was recently criticized for aiding and abetting the leak itself. This is a key choice of words, for aiding and abetting a crime is itself a crime – the wording suggested that the reporter who published evidence of abuse of power is himself a criminal.

June 29, 2013

Jeff Jarvis calls for private encryption

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

In the Guardian, Jeff Jarvis makes the case for internet communications to be protected by encryption:

Assuring the security of private communications regardless of platform — email, VOIP, direct message — should be a top priority of the internet industry in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations that US and UK governments are tapping into the net’s traffic.

The industry needs to at least come together to offer encryption for private communications as protection against government surveillance.

Guarantee of private communications should be a matter of law already. But, of course, it is not. In the US, only our first-class physical mail is protected from government surveillance without a warrant. In the UK, it was a case of opened mail that led to the closing of the Secret Department of the Post Office. As a matter of principle, the protection afforded our physical mail should extend to any private communication using any means. Just because the authors of the Fourth Amendment could not anticipate the internet and email, let alone Facebook, that should not grant government spies a loophole from the founders’ intent.

That protection could come from Congress, but it won’t. It could come from the courts, but it hasn’t.

I argued in my book Public Parts that government may try to portray itself as the protector of our privacy, but it is instead the most dangerous enemy of privacy, for it can gather our information without our knowledge and consent — that is the lesson of Snowden’s leaks — and has the power to use it against us.

June 28, 2013

QotD: In praise of Bastiat’s “What is seen and what is not seen”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

For me, [Bastiat’s “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen“] is the pinnacle of economic profundity. You can call it obvious. But when I first started learning economics at the age of 17, none of Bastiat was obvious. I was an honors student at a well-regarded California high school. Yet as far as I can remember, I had never heard any argument against the minimum wage, Social Security, or the FDA in my entire life.

Every teacher and book I ever encountered treated naive populism like the Law of Gravitation. Evil businesses aren’t paying workers enough? Raise the minimum wage; problem solved. The elderly are poor? Increase Social Security payments; problem solved. Evil businesses are selling people bad drugs? Impose more government regulation; problem solved.

If you favor these programs, you can call these arguments straw men. But I assure you: These “straw men” were never presented by opponents of these policies. On the contrary, these “straw men” were invariably presented by people who favored these policies. How is that possible? Because during my first 17 years of life, I never encountered an opponent of any of these policies! You might assume I was grew up in a weird Berkeley-esque leftist enclave, but bland Northridge, California hardly qualifies.

What was going on? The best explanation is pretty simple: I only heard straw man arguments in favor of populist policies because virtually everyone finds these straw man arguments pleasantly convincing. Regardless of the merits of the minimum wage, Social Security, and the FDA, economic illiteracy is the reason for their popularity. If someone like Bastiat convinced people that the pleasantly convincing arguments are inane, proponents would have to fall back on arguments that are intellectually better yet rhetorically inferior.

Bryan Caplan, “Who Loves Bastiat and Who Loves Him Not”, EconLog, 2012-08-15

June 27, 2013

Section 13 repealed

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

In all the news from the US yesterday, this little civil liberties tidbit got pushed off the front page:

As I write this I am still only being updated by text message on the proceedings in the Senate chamber but I am told Bill C-304 has passed third reading and will receive Royal Assent tonight making it law.

What does this bill do?

There are a number of amendments to the act that help limit abuse but the main one is this:

2. Section 13 of the Act is repealed.

To put it bluntly, the means you can’t take someone through the federal human rights apparatus over hurt feelings via a blog post or a Facebook comment.

Now the bill is passed and will become law but like many acts of Parliament it will not come into force for a year.

Still after a long hard battle to restore free speech in Canada, this is a victory.

June 26, 2013

Buh-bye, DOMA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

I was away from my computer for about an hour this morning and when I came back online, my Twitter feed had exploded with news and opinion links about the US Supreme Court striking down the Defence of Marriage Act. While I’m delighted with the result (check my posts tagged Same Sex Marriage if you’re curious), it’s interesting to watch the reactions on all sides of the issue.

June 25, 2013

Snowden’s character doesn’t matter – Snowden’s revelations matter a great deal

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:08

Gene Healy says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed:

Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that information is a potential treasure trove for political abuse — it can be used to ferret out the sort of information governments have historically used to blackmail and neutralize political opponents: who’s leaking, who’s organizing, who’s having an affair. The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations.

In an post last week, Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith makes the key point: “You Don’t Have to Like Edward Snowden.” Snowden, Smith argues, is “a source,” and the information sources convey is far more important than their “moral status” or the “fate of [their] eternal soul[s].”

Smith mentions Mark Felt, the FBI honcho who served as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” during their investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Felt, it turned out, was simply settling scores in a bureaucratic power struggle. He had no scruples against criminal violations of privacy — in 1980 he was convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans through warrantless break-ins as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

It was important for Americans to know that their president was a crook. That Mark Felt was also a crook is neither here nor there. As Smith puts it, “who cares?”

Portugal’s experience with drug decriminalization

Filed under: Europe, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:38

The Cato Institute sent out a Twitter update, reminding everyone about the 2009 White Paper by Glenn Greenwald on how the Portuguese drug experiment played out after 2001:

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were “decriminalized,” not “legalized.” Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.

While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization — whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution — Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be “decriminalized.” Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal’s decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.

Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal’s decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for “drug tourists” — has occurred.

The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.

“You cannot have a functioning democratic republic when the laws are so voluminous no one can know what the law is”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

I really did think they were kidding about needing to pass the law to be able to find out what was in it, but this appears to be the way US laws are made nowadays:

When a bill is amended in a sneaky manner, as this one has been, no responsible senator could just read 100 new pages. The amendments are interspersed thoughout the bill — it’s not like you could sit and read them as a unit, even if you had the time. Since the proponents are clearly trying to pull a fast one, prudence, as Senator Cruz pointed out, would dictate rereading every line of text, old and new, to search for insertions — and, indeed, news reports indicate that numerous new buy-offs and pot-sweeteners have been inserted.

But there is a larger point: no “important legislation” should be 100 pages long, much less 1,200 (or the even more mind-boggling girth of monstrosities like Obamacare). The United States Constitution is about 4,500 words long — outfits like Cato and Heritage publish it in small pamphlets that can be read in a few minutes. Nowadays, not only are the bills so gargantuan that no one could conceivably master them and predict their consequences; each page produces even more pages of regulations. They can’t even be lifted, much less digested.

You cannot have a functioning democratic republic when the laws are so voluminous no one can know what the law is. And that is especially the case when (a) the rationale for passing new laws — according to “reform” proponents like Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan — is that we don’t enforce the laws currently on the books; (b) key parts of legislation consist of commitments to do what previously enacted law already commands; and (c) the president, notwithstanding his oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, claims the power to refrain from enforcing whatever laws he disapproves of. Washington has made a farce of the legislative process and of the once proud boast that we are ”a nation of laws not men.”

June 24, 2013

Read an excerpt from Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:09

There is an excerpt from the book Rise of the Warrior Cop in the July issue of the ABA Journal:

Are cops constitutional?

In a 2001 article for the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, the legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that question. Roots, a fairly radical libertarian, believes that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow for police as they exist today. At the very least, he argues, police departments, powers and practices today violate the document’s spirit and intent. “Under the criminal justice model known to the framers, professional police officers were unknown,” Roots writes.

The founders and their contemporaries would probably have seen even the early-19th-century police forces as a standing army, and a particularly odious one at that. Just before the American Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement. This wariness of standing armies was born of experience and a study of history — early American statesmen like Madison, Washington and Adams were well-versed in the history of such armies in Europe, especially in ancient Rome.

If even the earliest attempts at centralized police forces would have alarmed the founders, today’s policing would have terrified them. Today in America SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than 100 times per day. The vast majority of these raids are to enforce laws against consensual crimes. In many cities, police departments have given up the traditional blue uniforms for “battle dress uniforms” modeled after soldier attire.

Police departments across the country now sport armored personnel carriers designed for use on a battlefield. Some have helicopters, tanks and Humvees. They carry military-grade weapons. Most of this equipment comes from the military itself. Many SWAT teams today are trained by current and former personnel from special forces units like the Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. National Guard helicopters now routinely swoop through rural areas in search of pot plants and, when they find something, send gun-toting troops dressed for battle rappelling down to chop and confiscate the contraband. But it isn’t just drugs. Aggressive, SWAT-style tactics are now used to raid neighborhood poker games, doctors’ offices, bars and restaurants, and head shops — despite the fact that the targets of these raids pose little threat to anyone. This sort of force was once reserved as the last option to defuse a dangerous situation. It’s increasingly used as the first option to apprehend people who aren’t dangerous at all.

June 23, 2013

Ecuador press law to mandate coverage of government propaganda items

Filed under: Americas, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

Ecuador has a new law on the books that may force the media to carry government propaganda or risk prosecution:

Under Ecuador’s new Communications Law, however, journalists may have to pay far more attention to ribbon-cutting ceremonies and other government PR events. Article 18 of the law forbids the “deliberate omission of … topics of public interest.” But this wording is so vague that nearly any action by local, state, or national government official could be considered of public interest.

“Newspapers don’t have enough journalists or space to cover all these events. Radio programs don’t have enough air time,” Paúl Mena, president of the Ecuadoran Journalists’ Forum, told CPJ. “If the government starts demanding coverage, there are going to be problems.”

More conflict between the media and the Correa government seems inevitable under the Communications Law, which was approved by the National Assembly on June 14 and will go into effect next month. Not only does the law create a state watchdog entity to regulate media content, but it is filled with ambiguous language demanding that journalists provide accurate and balanced information or face civil or criminal penalties. “This is completely crazy,” Monica Almeida, an editor at the Guayaquil daily El Universo, told CPJ. “The law is designed to regulate everything we do.”

[. . .]

The 44-page law contains 119 articles. In interviews with CPJ, Ecuadoran journalists were at a loss to pick out the worst provisions since they view nearly all of them as serious violations of press freedom.

For example, under the law reporters are now required to earn a journalism degree. Rather than serving as a neutral referee, the Superintendence of Information and Communication — the government’s new watchdog agency — could be used by Correa to simply bash the press. And reporters are especially incensed by Article 26 that prohibits “media lynching.” This is defined as “the dissemination of concerted and reiterative information … with the purpose of undermining the prestige” of a person or legal entity. Media outlets found violating this provision could be ordered to issue public apologies and would be subject to criminal and civil sanctions that are not specified in the legislation.

One magazine editor in Quito, who asked to remain anonymous, said the article seems designed to thwart investigations. That’s because such in-depth reporting often requires publishing a series of stories over several days or weeks that could be construed as harassment.

June 22, 2013

Interesting – and probably inevitable – legal wrinkle for the NSA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

At Outside the Beltway, Doug Mataconis links to an interesting article:

It’s only been a few weeks since we learned to true scope of the National Security Agency’s data mining of the phone records of American citizens, but already lawyers in civil and criminal cases across the country are seeing the database as a potential discovery goldmine:

    The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.

    “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess,” said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. “In a way, it’s kind of ironic.”

    Defendant Terrance Brown is accused of participating in the 2010 murder of a Brinks security truck driver. Brown maintains his innocence, and claims cellphone location records would show he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. Brown’s cellphone provider — MetroPCS — couldn’t produce those records during discovery because it had deleted the data already.

    On seeing the story in the Guardian indicating that Verizon had been ordered to turn over millions of calling records to the NSA last month, Brown’s lawyer had a novel idea: Make the NSA produce the records.

[. . .]

This particular criminal case is, of course, on where the Federal Government is a party to the case as a prosecutor. As such, the Judge must weight not simply the government’s argument that the information requested is classified and thus should not be disclosed, but also the question of whether the prosecution has a duty to turn over the evidence to the Defendant. As a general rule, the prosecution must turn over any evidence that is potentially exclupatory or which tend to call some aspect of the prosecution’s theory of the case into doubt. The rules for what must be turned over vary from state to state, and the Federal Courts have their own rules, but they all generally follow the principles set down by Brady v. Maryland, which established the general rule that Defendants are entitled to be provided with exculpatory evidence that prosecution may have against them.

Of more interest, though, is the likely hood that attorneys may try to gain access to this NSA metadata in cases where the Federal Government is not involved, such as state court criminal proceedings or even civil matters such as divorces

June 21, 2013

How many laws have you broken today?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

Alex Tabarrok on the changes to US criminal law over the years: No One is Innocent.

I broke the law yesterday and again today and I will probably break the law tomorrow. Don’t mistake me, I have done nothing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have broken. Nevertheless, I am reasonably confident that I have broken some laws, rules, or regulations recently because its hard for anyone to live today without breaking the law. Doubt me? Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

Harvey Silverglate argues that a typical American commits three felonies a day. I think that number is too high but it is easy to violate the law without intent or knowledge. Most crimes used to be based on the common law and ancient understandings of wrong (murder, assault, theft and so on) but today there are thousands of federal criminal laws that bear no relation to common law or common understanding.

[. . .]

If someone tracked you for a year are you confident that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law .

Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.

“Nobody is listening to your calls” … because the metadata is far more useful

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

John Naughton explains why the calming statement that “nobody is listening to your calls” is far from re-assuring:

‘To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks.

So in this business at least, content isn’t king. It’s the metadata — the call logs showing who called whom, from which location and for how long — that you want. Why? Because that’s the stuff that is machine-readable, and therefore searchable. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an NSA operative in Fort Meade, Maryland. You have a telephone number of someone you regard as potentially “interesting”. Type the number into a search box and up comes a list of every handset that has ever called, or been called by, it. After that, it’s a matter of seconds before you have a network graph of second-, third- or fourth-degree connections to that original number. Map those on to electronic directories to get names and addresses, obtain a secret authorisation from the Fisa court (which has 11 federal judges so that it can sit round the clock, seven days a week), then dispatch a Prism subpoena to Facebook and co and make some coffee while waiting for the results. Repeat the process with the resulting email contact lists and — bingo! — you have a mass surveillance programme as good as anything Vladimir Putin could put together. And you’ve never had to sully your hands — or your conscience — with that precious “content” that civil libertarians get so worked up about.

June 20, 2013

The world map of modern slavery

Filed under: China, Law, Liberty, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:05

In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan talks about the countries that appear on this US State Department map of human trafficking:

World Map of Slavery, 2013

China, Russia, and Uzbekistan have been named among the worst offenders when it comes to human trafficking, according to a State Department report released Wednesday, joining Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, and Zimbabwe on the bottom “tier” of the U.S. human trafficking rank.

Their lower designation means the U.S. may sanction those countries with measures like cancelling non-humanitarian and military assistance, ending exchange visits for government officials, and voting against any IMF or World Bank loans.

China, Russia, and Uzbekistan had previously been on the “Tier 2 Watch List,” a middling designation for countries that show little progress in making strides in preventing forced labor. Because they had been on the “Watch List” for four years, the State Department was obligated to either promote or downgrade them.

In China, the one-child policy and a cultural preference for male children perpetuates the trafficking of brides and prostitutes.

“During the year, Chinese sex trafficking victims were reported on all of the inhabited continents,” the report found. “Traffickers recruited girls and young women, often from rural areas of China, using a combination of fraudulent job offers, imposition of large travel fees, and threats of physical or financial harm, to obtain and maintain their service in prostitution.”

However, the State Department also singled out the country’s epidemic of forced labor, in which both internal and external migrants are conscripted to work in coal mines or factories without pay, as well as its continued use of re-education hard labor camps for political dissidents.

However, it’s also worth keeping in mind that there are two common definitions of human trafficking in use, one of which is an outrage to common decency while the other is an attempt to conflate sex work with slavery:

1) The transport of unwilling people (usually women, but of course can at times be either men or children) into forced prostitution. This is of course illegal everywhere: it’s repeated rape just as a very start. It is also vile and we should indeed be doing everything possible to stamp it out.

2) The illegal movement of willing people across borders to enter the sex trade. Strange as it may seem there really are people who desire to be prostitutes. People would, other things being equal, similarly like to be in a country where they get a lot of money for their trade rather than very little. Given these two we wouldn’t be surprised if people from poorer countries, who wish to be in the sex trade, will move from those poorer countries to richer countries. And such is the system of immigration laws that many of them will be unable to do this legally: just as with so many who wish to enter other trades and professions in the rich world. You can make your own mind up about the morality of this but it is obviously entirely different from definition 1).

Addressing India’s rape problem

Filed under: India, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Reason, Shikha Dalmia looks at the reality of life in India for far too many women:

… the Indian government has been following the feminist script for nearly half a century with little effect. It would serve the cause of gender equity far better if it simply did its job and provided safe streets, timely justice, and other basic public goods for everyone. The absence of such amenities that are taken for granted in the West is arguably the strongest pillar of patriarchy in India.

India’s official rape statistics — which registered 1.8 rapes per 100,000 people in 2010, compared with the United States’ 27.3 — might suggest that India has no rape problem. But everyone knows that rape is vastly underreported in traditional cultures where women fear stigmatizing themselves and dishonoring their families, especially since the chances of justice are remote. Whatever the correct statistics, they can’t capture a crucial qualitative difference in the rape problem between India and in, say, America.

Setting aside incest and sexual assault by friends and relatives that unfortunately happens in all cultures, in America, a lot of rape is “date rape” that occurs when women exercise their social and sexual freedom. The police rarely have an opportunity to intervene in such situations and the only way of combating this problem is by addressing male attitudes. By contrast, in India far more rapes originate in public settings — parks, streets, and buses — as women go about their daily business. This is eminently preventable, which is why, unlike in America, every new episode triggers fresh protests in India.

The very lack of public safety that allows rape also strengthens patriarchy. For starters, it limits women’s employment options. It is too dangerous for them to take jobs that require evening shifts or long commutes. Some companies offer rides home to women who work late, but this makes women more expensive to hire. Single rural women rarely move to cities, where the bulk of job growth is occurring, as men can. All of this undermines women’s ability to maximize their earning potential and gain financial independence.

Above all, it forces women to rely on their patriarchal families for protection, opening them up to all kinds of restrictions. A woman who has to wait for her father or brother to pick her up from college or work — rather than taking a cab or a bus — can’t just meet whomever she wants, wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Everything she does becomes subject to time, place, and manner restrictions by her family and its moral code.

[. . .]

Feminism will never get rid of patriarchy without first getting rid of the need for it. Patriarchy’s staying power stems not just from backward belief systems but a gritty ground reality. The lack of basic law-and-order means that women have to rely on male physical strength for security making men socially more valuable and more dangerous. This makes men, as feminists point out, both protectors and rapists. Electing female politicians and demanding more gender equality won’t cut this Gordian knot—only good governance that promotes public safety for all will.

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