If you’re not happy unless your package has been thoroughly inspected by trained professionals on its way to the destination, you’ll want to stock up on this new item available from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
September 4, 2012
Want to ensure that your shipment is opened and fully inspected at least once?
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September 2, 2012
The importance of encryption for private citizens
Wendy McElroy relates one of the earliest examples of private encryption in the young American republic:
In America, the tug of war between privacy and forced access to encrypted data is as old as the nation’s formation. As always, forced access was executed by authorities against individuals.
In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the United States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, like George Washington, to complain of mail tampering. According to various historians, it also led James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to correspond in code. That is, they encrypted their letters to preserve the privacy of their political discussions.
The need for Founding Fathers to encrypt their correspondence is high irony. The intrusive post office against which they rebelled had been established specifically to provide a free flow of political opinion. In the 1770′s, Sam Adams urged the 13 colonies to create an independent postal system because the existing post office, established by the British, acted as a barrier to the spread of rebellious sentiment. Dorothy Ganfield Fowler in her book Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office observed, “He [Adams] claimed the colonial post office was made use of for the purpose of stopping the ‘Channels of publick Intelligence and so in Effect of aiding the measures of Tyranny.’”
Alas, the more government changes, the more oppression remains the same. Soon the Continental Congress itself wanted to declare some types of matter ‘unmailable’ because their content were deemed dangerous. Anti-Federalist letters and periodicals became one of the first types of information to become de facto unmailable. (Anti-federalists resisted centralized government and rejected a Constitution without a Bill of Rights.) During the ratification debates on the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were unable to circulate their material through the Federalist-controlled post office.
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August 22, 2012
Reason.tv: Can legal cannabis revolutionize the US economy?
“How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?” asks Doug Fine, investigative journalist and author of new book, Too High To Fail.
Fine sat down with ReasonTV’s Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss his time spent in the cannabis capital of California, Mendocino County, and why he thinks this drug can help save the American economy. And it’s not just about collecting taxes.
“The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels,” says Fine, “already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers.”
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August 21, 2012
The 21st century equivalent to the enclosure movement
Joseph R. Stromberg reviews The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth, by Fred Pearce.
The Land Grabbers is a wonderful primer on the newest manifestations of an ancient form of plunder: the seizure of other people’s resources and destruction of their livelihoods. The author, Fred Pearce, is a well-established British environmental journalist. Here he surveys the ongoing alienation of allegedly “unused” or “underused” land in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Australia, and elsewhere at the hands of international corporations, both private and state-owned. Politicians in the affected countries are key partners in operations that resemble the late-19th-century scramble for control of Africa. The land grabs aim at enriching privileged companies and their political allies, usually at the expense of those already on the land. States, companies, and their frequent close friend, the World Bank, see no reason to respect sitting owners and resource users, whatever their rights under customary law and (sometimes) postcolonial statutes. Pastoral nomads get even less respect. In Tanzania, for example, governments and safari capitalists have reduced the traditional grazing lands of the Maasai herdsmen to a fraction of what they were. And in Ethiopia, the government’s “villagization” policy, Pearce writes, resettles peasant farmers “in the manner of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot,” clearing the way for deals with foreign capital.
Where agriculture is concerned, the effort goes forth under an ideology that claims that only industrial-scale farming, modeled on subsidized American agribusiness, can feed the world. The ideologues in question include John Beddington, chief UK government scientist; Paul Collier, former research head at the World Bank; and Richard Ferguson of the investment company Renaissance Capital, who hopes to see “industrial-sized farms of a million hectares.” To realize that vision, smallholders, hunters, gatherers, and pastoralists must get out of the way and submit themselves to wage-labor, wherever they find it. The ideology goes hand in hand with the form of globalization that relies on the power of the United States and some associated countries to dictate the contours of world trade. While the U.S. has toppled states seen as hostile to American business interests (as in Guatemala in 1954), today’s methods are often more subtle. They include USAID programs, American domination of World Bank policies, and a web of treaty obligations, especially international investment agreements.
Pearce is an environmentalist, but his book is not especially ideological. He’s more interested in presenting data. Wherever possible he has figures for acreage (or hectares) and tells us who did what to whom and where. He also faults wealthy environmental idealists and NGOs, noting that their parks and preserves can displace local people and their property, just like commercial hunting preserves, sugar plantations, logging operations, and the rest can.
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August 17, 2012
Even Guardianistas are puzzled by Assange’s Ecuador gambit
There are few newspapers who have been as supportive of Julian Assange in his legal plight than the Guardian. When even Guardian columns find it difficult to figure out why he turned to Ecuador, we’ve moved into a different universe:
Julian Assange’s circus has pulled off another breathtaking stunt: he has won political asylum in Ecuador. Assange’s flight from Sweden, a decent democracy with a largely excellent justice system, takes ever more absurd forms. After the decision of Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, the Swedish Twitterverse filled with mocking jokes.
Assange has few fans left here. On the contrary, his unholy alliance with Ecuador’s political leadership casts a shadow over what was, despite everything, his real achievement: to reveal shattering news through the revolutionary medium of WikiLeaks.
Patiño praised Assange as a fighter for free expression, and explained that they had to protect his human rights. But Ecuador is a country with a dreadful record when it comes to freedom of expression and of the press. Inconvenient journalists are put on trial. Private media companies may not operate freely.
President Rafael Correa is patently unable to tolerate any truths that he does not own. Reporters Without Borders has strongly and often criticised the way that media freedoms are limited in Ecuador. Assange is a plaything for the president’s megalomania.
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The police war on photographers and videographers: the Canadian front
Karen Selick in the National Post confirming that Canadian police are also under the impression that their work cannot legally be photographed:
What have cops got against cameras these days? Increasingly, people are getting arrested, charged or even assaulted by police officers, merely for attempting to take photos or videos of officers at work. Often, police simply command people to stop photographing. Scared into thinking they must be breaking some law, citizens comply.
When Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski died after being tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, police seized the now famous video made by witness Paul Pritchard, who had to hire a lawyer and threaten court proceedings to get it back.
[. . .]
There is no law in Canada that prohibits people from openly photographing police. Section 129 of the Criminal Code prohibits “wilfully obstructing” police in the execution of their duty, but it is hard to imagine how standing by peacefully and videotaping as police searched the premises and piled up items for seizure could be considered obstructing. After all, the police themselves were videotaping on Ms. Jones’ premises — but selectively. They probably didn’t capture themselves ordering her friend to refrain from taking the pictures she was legally entitled to take.
That same day, three other search warrants were executed at the homes of other individuals the CFIA suspects of conspiring with Ms. Jones to save her healthy sheep. At Michael Schmidt’s residence, all cell phones were immediately confiscated. When a visitor from outside arrived with his cell phone, Schmidt’s wife borrowed it and took photos of police inside her home. Officers seized the phone even though it was clearly outside the scope of the warrant. They returned it three hours later, with the photos erased. When the victim of this apparently illegal seizure objected, police responded, “We can do whatever we want.” But of course, that arrogant response was not permitted to be recorded.
[. . .]
Police must be made to understand that being on duty or executing a search warrant does not transform an officer into a petty dictator with carte blanche to issue arbitrary orders to everyone in sight. Police cannot do “whatever they want.” Citizens have the right to hold them accountable for their actions. Personal cameras are important tools in implementing that right. Bullying people out of using them must cease.
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August 16, 2012
Kheiriddin: Quebec xenophobia on display in election campaign
In her National Post column, Tasha Kheiriddin discusses the topic that most of the Canadian media is being ultra-careful about:
Racist or not? When it comes to the Quebec election campaign, remarks made this week by a variety of politicians provided considerable fodder for debate, and considerable distraction from the real issues — health, taxes and corruption — that voters actually want their elected officials to talk about.
First, Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault lambasted young Quebecers for being interested in living “the good life,” unlike children in Asia whose parents all want them to become engineers, and have to stop them from studying lest they make themselves sick. When he was attacked for this remarks, he retorted that the fault lies with Quebec parents, and that they should review the values they are transmitting to their children.
[. . .]
His remarks pale in comparison, however, to the xenophobic tone of those made by Parti Québécois ledaer Pauline Marois, and worse yet, the mayor of Saguenay, Jean Tremblay.
On Tuesday, Ms. Marois unveiled her party’s desire to implement a “Secular Charter” which would ban the wearing of any religious symbols by government employees. With, as my colleague Chris Selley tartly notes on these pages, one notable exception: Symbols of Christian faith, such as the cross which hangs over the Speakers’ Chair in the National Assembly. In other words, a crucifix necklace, good: hijabs and yarmulkes, bad.
[. . .]
Then on Wednesday, Mr. Tremblay took xenophobia one step further, when he launched a tirade against Djemila Benhabib, the Parti Québécois candidate in Trois Rivières. On a popular radio show, Mr. Tremblay let loose: “I am shocked that we, the softies, the French Canadians, will be told how to behave, how to respect our culture by a person who comes from Algeria, and we can’t even pronounce her name.”
Update: Convenient timing suspects Don Macpherson.
https://twitter.com/MacphersonGaz/statuses/236059349817122816
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August 15, 2012
Canadian liberty, 1776-2012
F.H. Buckley has an interesting article in the National Post, comparing the American and Canadian “flavours” of liberty from the American Revolution down to today:
The Fathers of Confederation had seen the American constitution close up and didn’t want any part of it. They didn’t foresee just how we’d turn out. Overall, however, our good fortune would not have surprised them, for they knew that they were founding a free country.
On reading the Confederation debates, one is struck by how the Fathers insisted that we had real liberty in Canada, more so even than Americans. That comes as a bit of a shock, as we had thought that Americans had property rights in liberty. They owned it, and on occasion were kind enough to try to export it to lesser countries, as they did 200 years ago in the War of 1812 (where they came in a very strong second).
[. . .]
When McGee and the other Fathers looked south, they saw a country with more of Constant’s liberty of the ancients but less of the liberty of the moderns. Moreover, of the former, the right of self-government had been corrupted by political machines and trivialized by elections for dogcatchers. The high ideals of the American Founders had been forgotten, and their republican virtue was now, in the era of Boss Tweed and Jay Gould, little more than American braggadocio. As for the liberty of the moderns, there was that little matter of slavery and its aftermath. True, Americans could express themselves through lynch-parties, but that was the kind of liberty the Canadians did not want.
Many of the differences between the two countries remain, but Canadians no longer have more of the liberty of the moderns than Americans. In both countries, benign neglect has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s officious nudges, giving us ugly light bulbs, toilets that don’t flush and idiotic playground rules. Could one have predicted this 25 years ago? I think not. Back then I had legal scholar Cass Sunstein over for dinner. Until a few days ago he was Obama’s regulatory czar, and over dinner in 1987 he predicted how the regulatory state would expand, in the name of risk reduction. “Americans won’t stand for this,” my wife told him. They prize their freedom too much. “Ah, but we’ll change their preferences,” he replied. And he was right.
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August 14, 2012
Brian Doherty on the Ron Paul Revolution
An excerpt from Brian Doherty’s new book Ron Paul’s Revolution in the National Post:
Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he’s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, in 2010 and 2011 he’s won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the seedbed of young right-wing activists.
He’s got traditional conservative bona fides, too. He’s for ending the income tax and killing the Internal Revenue Service, and for stopping illegal immigration; he also thinks abortion should be illegal. Despite this, right-wing politicians and thought leaders from Giuliani to Bill O’Reilly to the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol deride and despise him.
Paul’s appeal is a curious mixture of populist and intellectual. He attacks the elite masters of money, banking and high finance at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. But his philosophy on politics and economics was forged through decades of self-driven study of abstruse libertarian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Nobel Prize–winning F. A. Hayek.
He’s a staggeringly successful politician by some measures — the only congressman to win a seat as a nonincumbent three separate times. He continues to be re-elected to the House election after election, almost always by a higher margin than the time before. He does this while violating most traditional rules of politics. He doesn’t strive to bring home the bacon. His 14th District in Texas is highly agricultural, rife with rice and cattle farmers, but he always votes against federal agriculture subsidies. In a district with 675 miles of coastline, struck violently in 2008 by Hurricane Ike, he votes against flood aid and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — even calling for the latter’s abolition on national TV. He vows to never vote for any bill for which he doesn’t see clear constitutional justification. Yet by some people’s standards of a “successful legislator” he’s a bust — nearly every bill he introduces never even makes it out of committee.
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August 13, 2012
PQ promises to “strengthen” language laws in Quebec
It’s mind-blowing that a minority in Canada are legally oppressed by their provincial government, but in Quebec, it’s just language business as usual. The opposition Parti Quebecois, who brought in the language law in question, are promising to make it even more oppressive to non-French-speaking Quebecers:
It’s an easy political move for Marois. It will appeal to her separatist base and thoroughly annoy the anglophones … which will also appeal to the base. And given that the stated intention of her party is to go pick fights with Ottawa and drive a wedge between Quebec and the Rest of Canada, it’s a good plan. Language politics are always hot-button issues in Quebec, and Marois is pushing those buttons gleefully.
But it is interesting to note her position on the issue. Marois holds that the Liberals, under Premier Jean Charest, have not done enough to promote the French language in Quebec. From the perspective of the PQ, that’s almost certainly true. But Bill 101 is a creation of the Parti Quebecois. The provincial Liberals have certainly left it intact and haven’t dared to try and strengthen it, but fundamentally, Bill 101 is a PQ law. If it isn’t working, that’s not Premier Charest’s fault.
The bigger issue, of course, is that such a law already exists. Uninformed citizens in the Rest of Canada would be rightly horrified to learn that such a bizarre, anti-democratic law exists in their country at all. Bill 101′s intrusions into the private interactions of businesses and the decisions of individual families are justified as being necessary by Quebec nationalists to preserve the primacy of French in Quebec, but to anyone who is not a language warrior, seem more like a cross between a French tutor and a Orwellian nightmare.
Of course, tougher laws will still not accomplish the intended task: forcing everyone in Quebec to speak French at all times.
August 12, 2012
Wendy McElroy on the Myth of the Greater Good
Have you been punked by your philosophy professor?
In entry-level philosophy class, a professor will often present a scenario that seems to challenge the students’ perspective on morality.
The argument runs something as follows: “The entire nation of France will drop dead tomorrow unless you kill your neighbor who has only one day to live. What do you do?”
Or “You could eliminate cancer by pressing a button that also kills one healthy person. Do you do so?”
The purpose is to create a moral dilemma. The questions pit your moral rejection of murder against your moral guilt for not acting to save millions of lives.
In reality, the questions are a sham that cannot be honestly answered. They postulate a parallel world in which the rules of reality, like cause and effect, have been dramatically changed so that pushing a button cures cancer. The postulated world seems to operate more on magic than reality.
Because my moral code is based on the reality of the existing world, I don’t know what I would do if those rules no longer operated. I presume my morality would be different, so my actions would be as well.
As absurd as they are, these are considered to be the “tough” moral questions. In grappling with them, some students come to believe that being true to morality requires the violation of morality in a profound manner; after all, there is no greater violation than the deliberate murder of another human being.
But how can the life of one outweigh those of millions in your hands? At this point, morality becomes a numbers game, a matter of cost-benefit analysis, rather than of principle. This is not an expansion of morality, as the professor claims, but the manufacture of a conflict that destroys morality. In its place is left a moral gray zone, a vacuum into which utilitarianism rushes.
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August 10, 2012
Justification for Thomas Szasz?
An interesting post at the Hit and Run blog by Jacob Sullum:
Last year, I was surprised to see Allen Frances, who headed the panel that produced the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, tell Gary Greenberg: “There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” This week Frances surprised me again, declaring in his contribution to a Cato Unbound debate about psychiatric coercion that “mental disorders most certainly are not diseases.” Rather, he says, they are “constructs” that may justify treating people against their will as “a last resort.” Go here for my response. But start with Jeffrey Schaler’s opening essay, where he lays out the Szaszian position on mental illness, which Frances, the lead editor of psychiatry’s bible, says he basically agrees with, although “Schaler and Szasz go way too far in their total rejection of any need ever for involuntary treatment.”
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Drink some rainwater, go to jail
A 1925 law still applies in Oregon:
You just can’t make this stuff up. A man in Oregon is currently in jail serving a thirty day term – along with a $1500 fine – for collecting rainwater and snow melt on his own property for drinking and household use. You think I’m kidding? I’m not.
Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore.
“I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who said “This is just a little weird […] But does the fact that I can see the point of the law — preventing people from messing with a watershed area, I guess — mean that I’ve consumed the nanny state kool-aid?”.
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August 9, 2012
August 5, 2012
Tolerance Is Different From Approval
In his Forbes column, Tim Worstall explains his puzzlement over the ongoing Chick-Fil-A uproar in the US and why tolerance is not the same as approval:
As to the basic point about gay marriage I can only offer my personal opinion: all for it. On the grounds that everyone’s going to understand the miserableness of us middle aged heteros a great deal better after 20 odd years of societally enforced monogamy. Slightly more seriously gay marriage or not gay marriage has little to do with a business column.
What does have to do with a business column is that this whole idea of a market means that we don’t have to care about the personal beliefs of either those who supply us or whom we supply. It’s the very impersonality of market exchange that means that it just doesn’t matter a darn what anyone’s sexual (or indeed any other) preference is. We get to care only about whether it’s a good chicken sandwich or whether the customer has enough money for one.
[. . .]
The other point that occurs to me is that we seem to be separating tolerance from approval in a way that some in the US are not.
Just as background, in the country I live in, Portugal, there is as far as a legal marriage ceremony goes, only civil marriage. Any two consenting adults, in whatever mixture of genders and sexes makes sense to those two individuals, can be married by the State. Religion doesn’t even get a look in.
If you do want a religious marriage, according to the rites of a church, then off you go after your civil marriage and have one. That marriage will be limited by whatever that church decides the limitations upon marriage are. It has no legal effect at all.
At which point everyone tolerates gay marriage but no one demands approval of it. For the two are different. Tolerance being the necessary requirement for a free and liberal society: that you get to do what you want to do as long as everyone else is also given the same freedom to follow their path from cradle to grave. Approval is something else again. I, to take a very trivial example, certainly tolerate the existence of Simon Cowell and his shows but that doesn’t mean that anyone can demand that I approve of them.
