Quotulatiousness

June 8, 2013

Feingold was right, back in 2001

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Former US senator Russ Feingold was the only member of the senate to vote against the original Patriot Act:

He took a stand against the legislation because it increased the federal government’s authority exponentially and didn’t require enough judicial oversight.

Now here we are more than a decade later and it has been revealed that the U.S. government has been collecting massive amounts of data on millions of Americans every single day, using provisions found in the Patriot Act as justification.

Through the secret “PRISM” surveillance program and court orders compelling at least Verizon to provide records on all its customers, the FBI and NSA have enjoyed access to unthinkable amounts of Americans’ data, all without ever informing the public of alarming domestic surveillance.

In his address on the Senate floor in 2001, Former Sen. Feingold seemingly warned the U.S. about the exact thing so many Americans are outraged over today.

[. . .]

“In 2001, I first voted against the PATRIOT Act because much of it was simply an FBI wish list that included provisions allowing our government to go on fishing expeditions that collect information on virtually anyone,” the statement read. “Today’s report indicates that the government could be using FISA in an indiscriminate way that does not balance our legitimate concerns of national security with the necessity to preserve our fundamental civil rights.”

“This is deeply troubling. I hope today’s news will renew a serious conversation about how to protect the country while ensuring that the rights of law-abiding Americans are not violated,” he added.

June 7, 2013

Who is Glenn Greenwald?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

The New York Times profiles Glenn Greenwald:

After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.

On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”

June 4, 2013

LCBO intransigence triggers constitutional challenge

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

This is kinda fascinating:

What started out as a simple privacy commissioner complaint has turned into a constitutional challenge of the validity of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) — and this time the Board has only itself to blame for the brouhaha, proving once again that Ontario’s LCBO is so far out of touch with the realities of today’s world, it’s downright scary. At a time when they should be thinking about transitioning out of the alcohol business, the Ontario provincial government and the LCBO seem to be clinging to its very existence with even more tenacity and verve than before. They’re like the old boxer clinging to past glories who just has to show you the right hook he can still throw — yet only ends up throwing out his shoulder. In the LCBO’s case, the word “Control” won’t be pried away from its “cold dead hands” anytime soon… or will it? In its most recent fight, the LCBO is proving it is a government entity most in need of being on the chopping block — if not the auction block — of government institutions that should be moved over to the private sector.

[. . .]

Why the LCBO has chosen to play hardball over such a trivial matter is incomprehensible; according to reports, the LCBO has decided to appeal the order and has asked that the records be sealed in the process. This seems to contravene common sense. “A government entity has chosen to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to fight an order by the Privacy Commissioner whose sole purpose is to make these decisions,” Porter says.

Now fed up with the collection of information, Porter and his team have decided to question the entire existence of the LCBO as it contravenes the Constitution Act of 1867 by challenging the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA) itself — which bans the free flow of goods (including alcohol, wine and beer) between the provinces. The argument hinges on Section 121: “All articles of Growth, Produce or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” This challenge could, and would if successful, lead to the downfall of the LCBO. Social networks were abuzz with the news about the challenge. Alfred Wirth, president and director at HNW Management Inc., applauded the news on Facebook: “Any progress towards competition among merchandisers is to be appreciated – even if it’s for domestically-produced products. Several years ago, when I questioned why Ontario couldn’t privatize the LCBO, the then Minister of Health said that alcoholic beverages were a crucial health matter which the province had to control. Despite the risk of people (including underage youth) freezing to death during our cold Ontario winters, he did not explain why the sale of crucial winter coats could be entrusted to Sears, the Bay, etc…” While Porter himself posted an analogy to cigarettes: “How about this one. Cigarettes are so dangerous that you cannot advertise them on TV, print, billboards or even display them behind a counter… but they can be sold at any store. Alcohol is so dangerous that it has to be sold at a government store with specially-trained people… but the government itself floods the market with advertising and even publishes a free magazine where 50 per cent of the content is about consuming the product.”

Energy lawyer Ian Blue has joined the Vin de Garde team for the action. I interviewed Blue in 2010 about the IILA, which is now under fire. Here’s what Blue had to say: “The law that gives provincial liquor commissions a monopoly and the power they have, is federal law, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act; it’s highly arguable that the law is unconstitutional. It’s also pretty apparent to government constitutional lawyers, who are knowledgeable in these matters… [If the Supreme Court of Canada] takes a hard look at the IILA, and if they do an intellectually honest interpretation, the IILA probably cannot stand up to constitutional scrutiny.”

In 2009, lawyer Schwisberg commented to me when speaking about the IILA: “The very underpinning of Canada’s liquor regulatory system is unconstitutional. Isn’t that a mind blower?” Blue said: “There is nothing natural or logical about the existing system. It bullies, fleeces and frustrates wine producers and the public… If the IILA were to fall… wine producers could probably make quantum leaps of progress towards a fairer and more rational system of liquor and wine distribution in Canada.”

June 3, 2013

“I believe in freedom of speech and defend his rights to say what he wants, but once it starts offending people then it’s a police matter”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

A Welsh shopkeeper gets a visit from two police officers after a slogan on a T-shirt gets someone upset:

A Newport shopkeeper has been forced by police to remove a T-shirt from his shop window because they felt it “could be seen to be inciting racial hatred.”

Matthew Taylor, 35, the owner of Taylor’s clothes store on Emlyn Walk in the city, printed up and displayed the T-shirt with the slogan: “Obey our laws, respect our beliefs or get out of our country” after Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, was killed in near Woolwich barracks in London last week.

But following a complaint from a member of the public, police came to his store and threatened to arrest him unless he removed the Tshirt from sight.

Mr Taylor said: “I had a visit from two CSOs (community support officers) because it has been reported by someone who felt it was offensive.

What was rather more depressing is how some elected officials view free speech:

Chairman of the Welsh affairs select committee, David Davies MP said: “I think the police are well aware of that (the current heightened tensions between communities) and I can see their point of view.

It’s a very sensitive time.

“But I can see this guy’s point of view and the statement he is making. You should not be in this country if you are not prepared to obey the laws.

I think the vast majority of people in this country of all races would agree with that.

So I don’t think it is a racist matter at but I can see the police’s point of view.”

Newport city councillor, Majid Rahman said: “I believe in freedom of speech and defend his rights to say what he wants, but once it starts offending people then it’s a police matter and it’s up to them whether they think it’s broken any laws.”

So, under this concept, you’re free to say anything you want, unless someone is offended and then the police have to get involved. I think someone misunderstands what “free” really means.

June 1, 2013

You can never have too much Firefly

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

May 31, 2013

Everyone is watching – the rise of “Little Brother”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

In The New Yorker, Maria Bustillos talks about the ubiquity of non-government surveillance:

… the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story. We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us. This has become immeasurably easier and more likely with the near-ubiquitous proliferation of high-quality recording devices. (As I learned after publishing this, the term had been coined earlier, and Cory Doctorow used it in 2007 for his book of the same name.)

The era of Little Brother was perhaps inaugurated in November, 1963, with the Kodachrome II 8-mm. film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination inadvertently captured by the Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. George Holliday’s videotape of the March, 1991, beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and Scott Prouty’s forty-seven-per-cent video, which arguably cost Mitt Romney the Presidency last year, fall into the same class.

There is a surprisingly rich and dynamic academic literature developing around the concept of “sousveillance,” a term coined by the University of Toronto professor and inventor Steve Mann to describe privately made recordings that can serve as a counterweight to institutional and government surveillance. Mann is famous for approaching these questions from the perspective of wearable computing, a field in which he is one of the earliest pioneers; his apparent eccentricity is belied by the gravity and lucidity of his writing, which is heavily influenced by Foucault’s views on panopticism:

    One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and “veiller” to watch.

    Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism,” a term invented by Mann (1998) for a philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations. Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: “Do you like what you see?” If you do not, then you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

May 29, 2013

“One imagines this isn’t the response the administration was expecting”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto talks about the surprising recent uniformity of opinion among media outlets:

Hey, kids! What time is it? “TIME TO GO: HOLDER OK’D PRESS PROBE,” shouted the always subtle homepage of the Puffington Host last Thursday evening. It was in response to the news, broken by NBC, that Attorney General Eric Holder had participated in “discussions” about “a controversial search warrant for a Fox News reporter’s private emails.” That’s in contrast with the Associated Press phone-log subpoena case, from which Holder told Congress he had recused himself.

The New York Times‘s reaction, while not as breathless, was more dramatic. The paper’s editorial appeared a week ago tomorrow — before Holder’s involvement had publicly emerged — under the headline “Another Chilling Leak Investigation.” The editorial was straightforward and reasonably argued. That may not sound like a great compliment, but this is the New York Times editorial page we’re talking about.

The editorial was remarkable as much for what it didn’t say as for what it did. There were no snide asides about Fox News, or qualifications along the lines that “even Fox” has First Amendment rights. Nor did the Times editors take any shots at George W. Bush, congressional Republicans or any other familiar antagonist. They simply defended Fox News‘s right to engage in news-gathering and denounced the Obama administration’s assault on it.

One imagines this isn’t the response the administration was expecting.

May 28, 2013

Unseemly worship of the military state

Filed under: History, Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

L. Neil Smith received one of the many email chain letters from a conservative acquaintance about “thanking a veteran” and indulged in a bit of fisking:

So with all that in mind, let’s consider the Memorial Day claims my friend sent to me, and I can only hope he’ll be my friend after this.

“It is the veteran, not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion.”

The truth is that neither the veteran nor the preacher ever gave us such a right, it is ours, under natural law, the very moment we are born. It can certainly be suppressed, and has been other places in the world, and here, as well — ask any Mormon — but this government hasn’t fought a war to defend any American’s rights since the Revolution.

“It is the veteran, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.”

Once again, not so. When the War of 1812 “broke out” — the U.S. was attempting to bestow the blessings of American life upon Canada whether Canada wanted them or not — and people objected (New England nearly seceded over it) people were accused of “sedition”, a charge that should be impossible under the First Amendment, and thrown in jail.

Later, Abraham Lincoln used the Army to smash the printing presses of his political opposition and intimidate voters during the 1864 election.

“It is the veteran, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.”

Freedom of speech and of the press are natural rights, as well, which governments in general, and the American government in particular, have always regarded as a threat. If any single individual can be thanked for it, that honor belongs to John Peter Zenger (look him up). At some point, the establishment press became so corrupt, concealing or excusing government atrocities, that they became a part of government, and a new press — the Internet — had to evolve in its place.

“It is the veteran, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.”

Having once been a “campus organizer” myself, I am well aware how little we had to do with defending the right to assemble, and how very badly it was done. But please, don’t be ridiculous. Two words: Kent State.

“It is the veteran, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.”

Actually, to the extent that any human institution is responsible for the right to a fair trial, it’s a thousand years of English Common Law.

“It is the veteran, not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote.”

A dubious gift, at best, but it didn’t come from any politicians or veterans. Thank the Greeks, and don’t forget the Basques, whose methods of self-government were consciously imitated by the Founding Fathers.

I like and admire veterans, My dad was a vet and his dad before him. But name any war the United States ever fought to defend American rights.

May 26, 2013

The war on drugs is “a holocaust in slow motion”

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

To my surprise, the creator of the TV series The Wire has come out against legalization of marijuana:

David Simon surged into the American mainstream with a bleak vision of the devastation wrought by drugs on his home town of Baltimore — The Wire, hailed by many as the greatest television drama of all time. But what keeps him there is his apocalyptic and unrelenting heresy over the failed “war on drugs”, the multibillion-dollar worldwide crusade launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

When Simon brought that heresy to London last week — to take part in a debate hosted by the Observer — he was inevitably asked about what reformers celebrate as recent “successes” — votes in Colorado and Washington to legalise marijuana.

“I’m against it,” Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. “The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed.

“I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that’s very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail,” he continued, “and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do.”

If marijuana were exempted from the war on drugs, he insisted, “it’d be another 10 or 40 years of assigning people of colour to this dystopia.”

[. . .]

Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on — and the curse of — drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore’s case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.

The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, “excess Americans”: once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs “a holocaust in slow motion”.

Simon said he “begins with the assumption that drugs are bad”, but also that the war on drugs has “always proceeded along racial lines”, since the banning of opium.

It is waged “not against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans,” he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: “We do not need 10-12% of our population; they’ve been abandoned. They don’t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.”

May 24, 2013

The first amendment applies to everyone, not just the professional media

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Jonah Goldberg on the bits of the first amendment that the mainstream media tends to forget about:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

That’s the full text of the First Amendment. But (with apologies to the old Far Side comic), this is what many in the press, academia, and government would hear if you read it aloud: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, blah blah blah, or abridging the freedom of the press, blah blah blah blah.”

[. . .]

The press can always be counted upon not just to speak up for itself, but to lavish attention on itself. “We can’t help that we’re so fascinating,” seems to be their unspoken mantra.

And that’s fine. What’s not fine is the way so many in the press talk about the First Amendment as if it’s their trade’s private license.

The problem is twofold. First, we all have a right to commit journalism under the First Amendment, whether it’s a New York Times reporter or some kid with an iPhone shooting video of a cop abusing someone.

I understand that professional journalists are on the front lines of the First Amendment’s free-press clause. But many elite outlets and journalism schools foster a guild mentality that sees journalism as a priestly caste deserving of special privileges. That’s why editorial boards love campaign-finance restrictions: They don’t like editorial competition from outside their ranks. Such elitism never made sense, but it’s particularly idiotic at a moment when technology — Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Vine, etc. — is democratizing political speech.

Australian police in a lather over 3D printed guns

Filed under: Australia, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

In The Register, Simon Sharwood covers the anguished response of police in New South Wales over the availability of “The Liberator”:

The New South Wales Police Force, guardians of Australia’s most-populous state, have gotten themselves into a panic over the Liberator, the 3D-printable pistol.

The Force’s Commissioner Andrew Schipione today appeared at a press conference to denounce the Liberator and urge residents of the State not to download plans for the gun.

Schipione offered this advice after the Force’s ballistics team acquired a 3D printer, downloaded plans for the Liberator and assembled a pair of the pistols.

One, when fired into a resin block said to simulate human flesh, is said to have penetrated to a depth of 17 fatal-injury-inducing centimetres.

The other experienced “catastrophic failure”, as we predicted a couple of weeks ago. […] That failure didn’t stop Schipione declaring the Liberator a threat to public safety.

To understand why, you need to know that NSW has of late experienced gun violence at rather unusual levels by Australian standards (which means over a year all of Sydney had about half an episode’s worth of gun violence on The Wire). That spate of shootings has led to Operation UNIFICATION, an effort kicking off this weekend that encourages Australians to rat out strike a blow for public safety by informing Police about illegal guns.

May 23, 2013

QotD: The two core political “philosophies”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the final analysis, there are only two political “philosophies” in the world, comprised, as Robert Heinlein suggested, of “those who think that people should be controlled, and those who do not”. The latter sort are called “individualists” and the former are called “collectivists”.

Naturally, the reason for controlling people is so that whatever they create or earn can be taken from them easily, using a variety of excuses, by those who are capable of creating or earning nothing themselves.

To the individualist, individual rights are the supreme value. Only individuals have rights, and they are not additive in character. Two people, or two thousand people, or two million people have no more rights than a single individual, and to the extent that a society is permitted to exist at all, it is to protect and advance the interests of its basic, indispensable building block, the individual. Every single relationship within such a society must be explicit and totally voluntary.

To collectivists, however, there are no individual rights, and the individual’s interests and opinions count for nothing in the broader, grander, collective scheme of things. Individuals are born with what amounts to an unpayable obligation to society. They are nothing more than worker-ants, whose talents and labor are there to be exploited by the collective. Anybody who objects is anti-social, as both Josef Stalin and Barack Obama would tell us, and most likely insane and in need of confinement.

L. Neil Smith, “Right Wing Socialism”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2013-05-19

May 21, 2013

Conflating rules for “sexual harassment” with “sexual assault”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

Wendy Kaminer on the issues of sexual harassment rules on campus:

What’s the difference between an unwelcome request for a date and rape? Pursuant to the Obama administration’s definition of sexual harassment, this is not an easy question to answer.

You have to read the administration’s latest diktat to colleges and universities to believe it. In a joint letter to the University of Montana (intended as ‘a blueprint’ for campus administrators nationwide), the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) define sexual harassment as ‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’, verbal or non-verbal, including ‘unwelcome sexual advances or acts of sexual assault’. Conduct (verbal or non-verbal) need not be ‘objectively offensive’ to constitute harassment, the letter warns, ignoring federal court rulings on harassment, as well as common sense. If a student feels harassed, she may be harassed, regardless of the reasonableness of her feelings, and school administrators may be legally required to discipline her ‘harasser’.

They are also required to promulgate detailed policies parroting the DoJ/OCR definition of harassment, as well as procedures for reporting and prosecuting alleged offences: ‘Federal government mandates unconstitutional speech codes at college and universities nationwide’, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) accurately declares:

‘Among the forms of expression now punishable on America’s campuses by order of the federal government are:

  • Any expression related to sexual topics that offends any person. This leaves a wide range of expressive activity — a campus performance of The Vagina Monologues, a presentation on safe-sex practices, a debate about sexual morality, a discussion of gay marriage, or a classroom lecture on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — subject to discipline.
  • Any sexually themed joke overheard by any person who finds that joke offensive for any reason.
  • Any request for dates or any flirtation that is not welcomed by the recipient of such a request or flirtation.

There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these “offences”. Any attempt to enforce this rule evenhandedly and comprehensively will be impossible.’

FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it’s intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists or gay-rights advocates if their speech of a sexual nature is ‘unwelcome’ by religious conservatives.

“… and Lord Tebbit as the Bursar”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:05

In case you didn’t catch it, this is a Discworld reference.

May 20, 2013

18-year-old charged with two felonies due to relationship with 15-year-old

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

An 18-year-old Floridian is facing two felony charges of “lewd and lascivious battery on a child 12 to 16” due to a relationship with a 15-year-old girl:

“These people never came to us as parents, never tried to speak to us… and tell us they had a problem with the girls dating,” Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother, Kelley Hunt-Smith, wrote in an statement posted to Facebook. “…They were out to destroy my daughter. [They] feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay.”

According to Hunt-Smith, police arrived at the family’s home Feb. 16 and put her daughter in handcuffs. Local news website TCPalm.com listed Kaitlyn Hunt’s arrest for “lewd and lascivious battery” on Feb. 18, and the girl’s mug shot is still easily accessible on the Internet.

But the trouble didn’t stop there. The other girl’s parents repeatedly tried to have Kaitlyn, a senior, expelled from school. Despite the Sebastian River High School administration’s denial of their request, and a judge’s order allowing Kaitlyn to remain in school (so long as the girls had no contact), the 15-year-old’s parents successfully petitioned the school board to have Hunt removed from school weeks prior to graduation.

On the one hand, it’s outrageous that Hunt has been charged, but it’s oddly re-assuring that even though it’s a lesbian relationship, it’s being dealt with exactly the same way that a comparable heterosexual relationship would be: treated as a sex crime. And yes, in either case it’s absurd that teenagers are being classed as sexual predators for relationships that would have been considered quite ordinary a decade ago.

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