Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2013

British police chiefs to conceal the names of arrested from the media

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Freedom of the press is taking another battering in Britain:

Britain’s police chiefs are drawing up draconian rules under which the identities of people they arrest will be kept secret from the public.

The move, which follows a recommendation by Lord Justice Leveson in his report into press standards, has been branded an attack on open justice and has led to comparisons with police states such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Under current arrangements, police release basic details of a person arrested and in many cases will confirm a name to journalists. But the practice varies from force to force.

Under the new guidance, to be circulated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), forces will be banned from confirming the names of suspects, even when journalists know the identity of someone who has been arrested.

Without official police confirmation, the legal risks of incorrect identification will prevent the media from publishing the names of suspects.

The police plan for ‘secret arrests’ is being opposed by the Government’s own adviser on law reform, the Law Commission, which believes it is in the interests of justice that the police release the names of everyone who is arrested, except in very exceptional circumstances.

April 5, 2013

What to do when the law is wrong

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

J.D. Tuccille explains why he’s teaching his son to break the law:

In 1858, hundreds of residents of Oberlin and Wellington, Ohio — many of them students and faculty at Oberlin College — surrounded Wadsworth’s Hotel, in Wellington, in which law enforcement officers and slavehunters held a fugitive slave named John Price, under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Act. After a brief standoff, the armed crowd stormed the hotel and overpowered the captors. Price was freed and transported to safety in Canada [. . .] I know these details because my son recently borrowed from the library The Price of Freedom, a book about the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, as the incident is called (PDF). My wife and I used it as a starting point for telling our seven-year-old why we don’t expect him to obey the law — that laws and the governments that pass them are often evil. We expect him, instead, to stand up for his rights and those of others, and to do good, even if that means breaking the law.

Our insistence on putting right before the law isn’t a new position. I’ve always liked Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentiment that “Good men must not obey the laws too well.” That’s a well-known quote, but it comes from a longer essay in which he wrote:

    Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting …

Rope of sand the law may be, but it can strangle unlucky people on the receiving end long before it perishes. John Price could well have ended up with not just the law, but a real rope, around his neck, just because he wanted to exercise the natural freedom to which he was entitled by birth as a sapient being.

John Price ended his life as a free man because he was willing to defy laws that said he was nothing but the property of other people, to be disposed of as they wished. He got a nice helping hand in maintaining his freedom from other people who were willing to not only defy laws that would compel them to collaborate in Price’s bondage, but to beat the hell out of government agents charged with enforcing those laws.

April 2, 2013

QotD: In praise of cheap, gimcrack, run-of-the-mill manufacturing

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

For the first time ever, labourers were able to purchase cheap goods for themselves. The first factories focused on mass production of cheap goods for the poor. Shoes, for example, were produced for the proletariat — the rich bought made-to-measure shoes. This was different from France, where the government’s mercantilist product standards, designed to uphold quality, ensured that nothing was produced for the poor at all. In France, mercantilism continued to be state policy for much longer than in England. This is the reason why industrialisation took fifty more years to arrive on France’s shores.

J.P. Floru, Heavens on Earth: How To Create Mass Prosperity, quoted by Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata, 2013-03-29.

March 31, 2013

The question is not whether armed drones will be deployed domestically, but when

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

Glenn Greenwald presents a strong case that it is inevitable that armed drones will be deployed over the US:

The use of drones by domestic US law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage. As a result, civil liberties and privacy groups led by the ACLU — while accepting that domestic drones are inevitable — have been devoting increasing efforts to publicizing their unique dangers and agitating for statutory limits. These efforts are being impeded by those who mock the idea that domestic drones pose unique dangers (often the same people who mock concern over their usage on foreign soil). This dismissive posture is grounded not only in soft authoritarianism (a religious-type faith in the Goodness of US political leaders and state power generally) but also ignorance over current drone capabilities, the ways drones are now being developed and marketed for domestic use, and the activities of the increasingly powerful domestic drone lobby. So it’s quite worthwhile to lay out the key under-discussed facts shaping this issue.

I’m going to focus here most on domestic surveillance drones, but I want to say a few words about weaponized drones. The belief that weaponized drones won’t be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It’s not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones “could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun.” The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won’t be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

March 28, 2013

Challenging Prohibition-era federal laws

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Michael Pinkus updates us on a hopeful sign that we may soon see the end of one of Canada’s surviving Prohibition-era laws:

Almost two years ago I published in these very pages an interview I did with Ian Blue, a lawyer who had turned his focus to liquor laws, constitutional issues and even more importantly, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA). Now, many think the law was struck down but in fact there was just an amendment made to the federal law that now allows you to carry a certain amount of booze for personal use across provincial borders without fear of being charged by your provincial liquor board. So why am I bringing up this “ancient history” — well it seems the constitutional challenge that Ian was hoping for has finally got a name and a voice in the form of Vin de Garde wine club, and the challenge is going forward — before you blindly blow this off as another soon-to-be failed attempt to challenge the power and might of the LCBO I suggest we revisit the interview, the article and the issues that surround it; there seems to be more relevance here than ever before. This is going to get very interesting.

    Have you ever been out to British Columbia and brought back a couple of bottles of wine? Better yet, have you ever driven across the border to Quebec and brought back a case of beer? If you have done either of these things then you my friend are a felon, capital F-E-L-O-N. That’s all according to the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA) of 1928, which is still on the books and very much in use by our liquor board (the LCBO). What it boils down to is, you can travel to Cuba and bring back 2 bottles of rum, go stateside and return with two bottles of wine, go to Mexico and carry back 4 cervesas; but you can’t cross Canadian provincial borders carrying any booze back with you. So, who’s ready to turn themselves in?

    Not so fast says lawyer Ian Blue, who has been looking into the matter for us. Ian is an energy lawyer who found himself in a conversation with fellow lawyer, Arnold Schwisberg, about the IILA and like an ear-worm (a song that won’t leave your head) Ian couldn’t stop thinking about the absurdity of the Act. “The constitutional issues around inter-provincial and international sales of energy have equipped me admirably to look at the IILA … it stuck with me until I wrote my paper on the subject ‘On the Rocks’.” Ian subsequently wrote a second article on the same topic (On the Rocks; The Gold Seal Case: A Surprising Second Look); both appear in Advocate Quarterly.

    [. . .]

    “Liquor boards would continue to exist, their power would just be diminished,” but they would definitely put up a fight, “You’re fighting entrenched interests, so if you’re diminishing their power they’re going to fight to try and keep it.”

    How big a fight? “I would be fighting 10 sets of lawyers one each from every attorney general’s department; probably 10 sets of lawyers from the provincial liquor commission; and probably lawyers from the police associations,” estimates Ian, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “What [a win] would mean is that if I wanted to have a private liquor store I could set one up and I could buy directly from the wineries in Niagara or British Columbia or foreign countries. Nova Scotia restaurants could order wines from Ontario. It would just loosen up the system. [It] doesn’t mean licentiousness; the province could still legislate standards for people who work in liquor stores, store hours, security, all safe drinking training, all that stuff; it’s just that you would not need to have liquor and wine sold through publicly funded liquor stores; being sold to you by unionized staff on defined benefit pension plans.”

    But what about those who claim a loss of provincial revenue as their argument for keeping the liquor boards as is? According to winelaw.ca, “The Provincial Governments make their money regardless of whether the sale is made in a government store or a private store. In fact, the revenue that government makes from liquor on a per capita basis for 2007/2008 was as follows: $192 for BC [a mix of private and government stores], $190 for Alberta [all private stores], and $139 for Ontario.”

March 26, 2013

QotD: “[T]he sexual revolution is over … and the forces of bourgeois repression have won”

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:20

At this point, it’s just a matter of time. In some sense, the sexual revolution is over … and the forces of bourgeois repression have won.

That’s right, I said it: this is a landmark victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality. Once gays can marry, they’ll be expected to marry. And to buy sensible, boring cars that are good for car seats. I believe we’re witnessing the high water mark for “People should be able to do whatever they want, and it’s none of my business.” You thought the fifties were conformist? Wait until all those fabulous “confirmed bachelors” and maiden schoolteachers are expected to ditch their cute little one-bedrooms and join the rest of America in whining about crab grass, HOA restrictions, and the outrageous fees that schools want to charge for overnight soccer trips.

I know, it feels like we’re riding an exciting wave away from the moral dark ages and into the bright, judgement free future. But moral history is not a long road down which we’re all marching; it’s more like a track. Maybe you change lanes a bit, but you generally end up back where you started. Sometimes you’re on the licentious, “anything goes” portion near the bleachers, and sometimes you’re on the straight-and-narrow prudish bit in front of the press box. Most of the time you’re in between. But you’re still going in circles. Victorian morality was an overreaction to the rather freewheeling period which proceeded it, which was itself an overreaction to Oliver Cromwell’s puritanism.

Megan McArdle, “Why Gay Marriage Will Win, and Sexual Freedom Will Lose”, The Daily Beast, 2013-03-26

“It’s as if Doctorow … figured out how to be a novelist and a blogger in the same book”

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

At Reason, Tom Jackson reviews Cory Doctorow’s Homeland, the sequel to 2007’s Little Brother:

By day, Yallow works within the system, taking a job as a webmaster for an independent candidate for the California senate. By night, he’s a part of a guerrilla WikiLeaks-style operation, trying to deal with goons who are out to get him and hackers trying to control his computer and his information. Life gets even more complicated when he starts participating in large outdoor demonstrations that attract the attention of the police. The story should resonate with any reader who worries about online privacy and the government’s ability to use the Net as a tool for political repression.

Although Yallow and his buddies are fictional, Homeland is studded with educational bits. One early chapter, for example, includes a recipe for cold-brew coffee. A librarian delivers a lecture on copyright reform. While at Burning Man, Doctorow meets four heroes of the Internet — Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, Wil Wheaton, and John Perry Barlow — and the reader is duly educated on how they relate to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the creation of Lotus. The infodump continues after the novel ends, with an afterword by Jacob Appelbaum of WikiLeaks and another by the late Aaron Swartz. (Swartz, facing a federal trial and possible prison on felony charges for downloading academic documents, committed suicide on January 11. His exhortations here not to give in to despair and a feeling of powerlessness make for sad reading, but he also explains how political movements to preserve the Internet from censorship have a chance to succeed.) There is also a bibliographic essay on the topics the book covers. It’s as if Doctorow, well-known both as a science fiction writer and as a contributor to Boing Boing, figured out how to be a novelist and a blogger in the same book.

The encounter with Kapor and company isn’t the only way the novel intersects with reality. Yallow logs on to his laptop using the Paranoid Linux operating system, created to maximize the user’s privacy. Paranoid Linux was fictional when Doctorow invented it in Little Brother, but it inspired the creation of a real, albeit short-lived, Paranoid Linux distro. And if you Google “Paranoid Linux,” you’ll learn about current Linux distributions that emphasize security, such as Tails and LPS. As Doctorow notes in his afterword, Googling terms in the book that might be unfamiliar to the reader — “hackerspace,” “drone,” “Tor Project,” “lawful intercept” — provides many of the novel’s educational experiences.

March 23, 2013

Human Achievement Hour 2013

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

Oh, right. It’s once again time for the Gaia-worshippers to do an hour’s penance for the crime of being alive in an industrialized society. The Competitive Enterprise Institute proposes a different way of using that hour:

On Saturday, March 23 at 8:30pm (local time), some people, businesses and governments around the world will choose to sit in the dark for one hour as a symbolic gesture to take action against climate change. The organizers of Earth Hour say that they [no] longer expect energy use to actually drop during the hour, but instead see it as a way for people to show their commitment to reducing energy use and taking action beyond the hour.

It’s absolutely every person’s right to decide if they want to conserve energy for whatever reason; they are free to sit in the dark as long as they want. However, it should not be their right to impose their beliefs or opinions on others. And that is what is at the heart of the environmentalist movement. While many participants in Earth Hour sincerely want a cleaner environment — a desire most of us share — the environmentalist movement whether implicitly or explicitly seeks to clamp down on human progress by reducing energy consumption whether through regulation and taxation. They want to make fossil fuels, which they see as dirty, more expensive to encourage the use of renewable “greener” energies.

Despite any good intentions, the ultimate result of environmentalist policies is not a healthier, cleaner environment. Instead we will see a population that is sicker and poorer. The only way we achieve technology that is “greener” is by building on older “dirtier” technology. As we make it harder and more expensive for those in the business of creating new technologies, all we do is slow progress and make it that much longer to reach more environmentally friendly solutions.

March 22, 2013

Nick Gillespie on Libertarianism

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

Katy Bachelder interviews Reason‘s Nick Gillespie:

What do you see as the primary policy goal of libertarianism?

Things that move us toward decentralization of power. The way I used to talk about it when Windows was still a dominant operating system is that the way a computer operates, what you want is an operating system that allows as many different apps to run at the same time without crashing the system. That’s what classical liberalism really does.

How do you think libertarianism as a third party helps achieve those goals?

I’m not particularly interested in electoral politics. Where I think public choice economics is hugely important is what it asks is not simply what the rhetoric of people is, but what are the outcome of their actions. In that way, it gets to what actually matters as opposed to people sprinkling magic words. It’s amazing how much slack people will give if you say the right words as you’re repressing them.

Libertarianism is a pre-political attitude. It can inform you if you’re in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or the Libertarian Party. It can express itself in a lot of different ways, like through Jimmy Carter, who is the great deregulator of the American economy, not Ronald Reagan. He deregulated interstate railroads, trucking, airlines. That all happened under Jimmy Carter and he was abetted in it by people like Milton Friedman. Libertarianism is an impulse, not a set of beads on a string.

[. . .]

Hillary Clinton just endorsed gay marriage. What do you think is the future for that issue?

I think gay marriage is over as an issue. When you look at public opinion polls about gay issues, the moral approbation toward the issue has faded. The larger questions are: what is the connection between the state and individual choices? It’s as big of a deal as it is because the state is involved in bestowing certain benefits such as tax incentives. I think what we’re starting to see is that if you want to live in a society that is truly pluralistic and tolerant, and that doesn’t mean everyone agrees every lifestyle is morally valid, but just tolerant, then we have to start shrinking the scope and the size of the state. The state should recognize all people as equal.

QotD: Battening down the (free speech) hatches

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

I have to confess, as an ignorant inhabitant of North America, that I don’t really understand the current press scandal in the U.K., and I was hoping that perhaps someone could enlighten me.

As I understand it, a number of members of the press committed crimes in the course of gathering material for stories — that is, they committed acts that were already illegal, and which already carried substantial penalties.

It would therefore seem that preventing such acts in the future would require nothing more than diligently enforcing existing law.

I’m therefore curious as to what purpose is articulated for ending freedom of expression in the U.K.

Is it claimed that the laws were not being enforced before on the powerful? Then surely the new restrictions on freedom will be selectively enforced as well, with only the weak being stifled. (That is, of course, universal — the powerful never need permission to do anything. Freedom is a protection for the weak, the strong need no protection.)

Is it claimed that performing criminal acts was somehow insufficiently illegal? Is it claimed that the existing laws against criminal conspiracies are not already broad, vague and all-encompassing?

Perry Metzger, “Doubly-illegal acts”, Samizdata, 2013-03-21

Explaining the title of this post:

Daffy Duck: “Batten down the hatches!”
Bugs: “We did batten ’em down!”
Daffy: “Well, batten ’em down again, we’ll teach those hatches!”

March 21, 2013

The technological imbalance between security and threats

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Bruce Schneier on the power of technology in a security context:

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

The problem is that it’s not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They’re more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They’re not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side — it’s easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don’t think it can.

March 20, 2013

Barack’s secret spying club

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

In Reason, Jacob Sullum explains why the ruling against the promiscuous use of National Security Letters was needed:

After 9/11, Congress loosened restrictions on national security letters (NSLs), a kind of administrative subpoena, first authorized in 1986, that the FBI uses to demand information from phone companies, Internet service providers, and financial institutions. According to the Justice Department’s inspector general, NSL “requests” skyrocketed from a total of 8,500 between 1986 and 2000 to more than 56,000 in 2004 alone.

The Obama administration has made liberal use of NSLs, which in 2010 allowed the FBI to peruse information about 14,212 American citizens and permanent residents — a new record — without bothering to get clearance from a judge. If you were one of those people, the odds are that you will never know, because NSLs are almost always accompanied by instructions that prohibit recipients from discussing them.

[. . .]

Secrecy frustrates challenges to counterterrorism tactics even in the case of Obama’s most startling claim to executive power: the authority to kill people he identifies as members or allies of Al Qaeda. In January a federal judge ruled that the Freedom of Information Act does not require Obama to disclose the Justice Department memos that explain the legal rationale for this license to kill.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon expressed frustration with this result, saying, “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.” In his State of the Union address the following month, Obama promised to make his “targeting” of suspected terrorists “even more transparent.” I’ll disbelieve it when I don’t see it.

March 19, 2013

New British press control rules to apply to the internet … the whole internet

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

In Forbes Tim Worstall explains why the British government’s new Ministry of Truth press censorship body will have effective reach across the entire internet:

This isn’t what they think they’ve done, this is true. And it’s also not what they intended to do (or at least I hope they didn’t mean to do this) but it is still what they’ve done. They’ve passed a law which effectively censors the entire world’s media. And they’ve done this simply because they are ignorant of the very laws they’re trying to change. Which is, I think you’ll agree, a little disturbing, that politicians would casually negate press freedom just because they don’t know what they’re doing.

[. . .]

It’s a standard Common Law assumption that publication does not take place where the printing presses (or servers etc) are. Publication takes place where something is made available to be read or seen. We’ve even had two recent cases that show this. Rachel Ehrenfeld published a book in the US and yet was still sued for libel in London. For a few copies of that book had made it over to England and thus it was deemed that publication had taken place where English libel law prevailed. Just in case you think that this is some English peculiarity there was a very similar case with Dow Jones in Australia. Something was published in New York. But it was read in Australia (remarkably, by the man the piece was about, he downloaded it) and this was sufficient for the Australian courts to agree that therefore the potential libel had occurred in Oz and should be tried under Oz law.

This is even clearer with reference to child pornography laws. “Production” of child pornography includes the act of downloading such. For before it was downloaded there was one copy, on the server. Once downloaded, there are two, one on the server, the other in the browser. Thus the downloading is in itself the production of that pornography. This very point is drawn from the standard Common Law principles about publication.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter where your servers are. For that’s not what defines publication. It also doesn’t matter who the material is aimed at: nor even what language it is in. Publication happens if someone in the UK downloads whatever it is. That, in itself, is the act of publication.

March 17, 2013

Proposed British press regulation will apply to bloggers as well

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Guido Fawkes offers a warning to those bloggers cheerleading for the British government to impose controls on the tabloid press:

One thing that surprises Guido is that his comrades in the liberal, progressive blogosphere have seemingly not noticed that the proposed Royal Charter aims to control and regulate them as well as the tabloids.

Schedule 4, Point 1 of both the government and the opposition’s versions of the Royal Charter will bring blogs under the regulator’s control:

    “relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: a. a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or b. a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)”

[. . .]

To all those bloggers who support this press control Charter because they hate Murdoch and Dacre, Guido offers this cautionary counsel, remember that the new regulator will cover you as well. You will have all the expense and bureaucracy of compliance as Murdoch and Dacre face, without the means. Unless like Guido and the Spectator you plan to become media outlaws too…

EFF press release on the win on National Security Letters

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

The EFF posted more information about the court decision that National Security Letters violate the constitution:

The controversial NSL provisions EFF challenged on behalf of the unnamed client allow the FBI to issue administrative letters — on its own authority and without court approval — to telecommunications companies demanding information about their customers. The controversial provisions also permit the FBI to permanently gag service providers from revealing anything about the NSLs, including the fact that a demand was made, which prevents providers from notifying either their customers or the public. The limited judicial review provisions essentially write the courts out of the process.

In today’s ruling, the court held that the gag order provisions of the statute violate the First Amendment and that the review procedures violate separation of powers. Because those provisions were not separable from the rest of the statute, the court declared the entire statute unconstitutional. In addressing the concerns of the service provider, the court noted: “Petitioner was adamant about its desire to speak publicly about the fact that it received the NSL at issue to further inform the ongoing public debate.”

“The First Amendment prevents the government from silencing people and stopping them from criticizing its use of executive surveillance power,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “The NSL statute has long been a concern of many Americans, and this small step should help restore balance between liberty and security.”

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