Quotulatiousness

February 2, 2012

In Arizona “any time two or more people work together to influence a vote … they instantly become a ‘political committee'”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

What’s all this about “free speech” if you are legally encumbered with ridiculous regulations even before you speak?

Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of the desert community of Fountain Hills believes you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.

Last October, Galassini became annoyed — like many Ron Paul supporters, she is easily annoyed by government — about the city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, to be voted on by mail by Nov. 8. On Oct. 6, she sent emails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure. On Oct. 12, before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a stern letter from the town clerk: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”

State law — this is the state of John McCain, apostle of political purification through the regulation of political speech — says that any time two or more people work together to influence a vote on a ballot measure, they instantly become a “political committee.” This transformation triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filing forms, establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has raised no money and does not intend to. This must be done before members of this fictitious “committee” may speak.

January 30, 2012

Irish bishop accused of hate speech

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Blogger “Archbishop Cranmer” is calling for an “I’m Spartacus” response to this pending prosecution of Bishop Philip Boyce:

The Most Reverend Dr Philip Boyce is the Catholic Lord Bishop of Raphoe. He preached a homily on 20th August 2011, entitled ‘To Trust in God’. His Grace reproduces it in its entirety, for the two sentences highlighted in bold have landed the Bishop in a bit of hot water.

Apparently, they constitute an incitement to hatred, at least according to ‘leading humanist’ John Colgan. And so the Gardai have thoroughly investigated the complaint and compiled a file which they have handed to the Republic’s Director of Public Prosecutions.

So what horrible things did the Bishop utter in his “incitement to hatred” that has John Colgan so upset?

The moment of history we live through in Ireland at present is certainly a testing one for the Church and for all of us. Attacked from the outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture: rocked from the inside by the sins and crimes of priests and consecrated people, we all feel the temptation to lose confidence. Yet, our trust is displayed and deepened above all when we are in troubled and stormy waters. It is easier to be confident when we ride on the crest of a wave, when the tide is coming in. Not so easy, however, yet every bit as necessary, when what is proclaimed by the Church namely the truth of faith with its daily practice and influence on behaviour, is under severe pressure.

[. . .]

Indeed unless we trust in a higher power, in God himself, what hope can we have? St. Paul told his converts at Ephesus that before they came to know Christ, they were “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). We need the radiance of a hope that looks beyond the horizons of space and time, one as Pope Benedict teaches “that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance” (Spe Salvi No. 35). For the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is “the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness…. To come to know God — the true God — means to receive hope” (Ibid, No. 2.3). We thank God for the faith, that enables us to trust in Him.

Perhaps I’m just particularly dense but the bold sentences above are apparently the “hate speech” nuggets in question. I don’t see it myself…

John Colgan said of these two sentences: “I believe statements of this kind are an incitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaning of the (Incitement to Hatred) Act, who are perfectly good citizens within the meaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathy towards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in the ostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share the aims of the Vatican’s Irish Mission Church.”

January 29, 2012

EFF says “Keep Twitter Honest”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the facts about Twitter’s recent announcement that it will be able to remove Tweets on a country-by-country basis:

Yesterday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis, as opposed to taking it down across the Twitter system. The Internet immediately exploded with allegations of censorship, conspiracy theories about Twitter’s Saudi investors and automated content filtering, and calls for a January 28 protest. One thing is clear: there is widespread confusion over Twitter’s new policy and what its implications are for freedom of expression all over the world.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Twitter already takes down some tweets and has done so for years. All of the other commercial platforms that we’re aware of remove content, at a minimum, in response to valid court orders. Twitter removes some tweets because they are deemed to be abuse or spam, while others are removed in compliance with court orders or DMCA notifications. Until now, when Twitter has taken down content, it has had to do so globally. So for example, if Twitter had received a court order to take down a tweet that is defamatory to Ataturk — which is illegal under Turkish law — the only way it could comply would be to take it down for everybody. Now Twitter has the capability to take down the tweet for people with IP addresses that indicate that they are in Turkey and leave it up everywhere else. Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

Twitter’s increasing need to remove content comes as a byproduct of its growth into new countries, with different laws that they must follow or risk that their local employees will be arrested or held in contempt, or similar sanctions. By opening offices and moving employees into other countries, Twitter increases the risks to its commitment to freedom of expression. Like all companies (and all people) Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates, which results both in more laws to comply with and also laws that inevitably contradict one another.

China and the censorship state

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Rebecca MacKinnon in the National Post on the ways and means of ensuring “harmony” in China’s corner of the internet:

In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.” Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crime-free.” “Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.

China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions — still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”

January 24, 2012

SOPA Wars II: The Internet Strikes Back

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

Michael Geist on the remarkable results of the anti-SOPA protests:

Last week’s Wikipedia-led blackout in protest of U.S. copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is being hailed by some as the Internet Spring, the day that millions fought back against restrictive legislative proposals that posed a serious threat to an open Internet. Derided by critics as a gimmick, my weekly technology law column [. . .] notes it is hard to see how the SOPA protest can be fairly characterized as anything other than a stunning success. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed its blackout page during the 24-hour protest period. By comparison, the most-watched television program of 2011, the Super Bowl, attracted 111 million viewers.

More impressive were the number of people who took action. Eight million Wikipedia visitors looked up contact information for their elected representatives, seven million people signed a Google petition, and Engine Advocacy reported that it was completing 2,000 phone calls per second to local members of Congress.

The protest launched a political earthquake as previously supportive politicians raced for the exits. According to ProPublica, the day before the protest, 80 members of Congress supported the legislation and 31 opposed. Two days later, there were only 63 supporters and 122 opposed.

[. . .]

It may be tempting for SOPA protesters to declare victory, but history teaches that political wins are rarely absolute. The current Canadian legislation, Bill C-11, is much more balanced than the 2007 proposal, but the digital lock provisions that sparked the initial protest remain largely unchanged. In New Zealand, the government later introduced a more balanced bill with greater safeguards, but the prospect of terminating Internet access was not completely eliminated.

SOPA appears to be headed for the dustbin, but successor U.S. legislation is sure to follow. A political consensus on anti-piracy legislation will eventually emerge, but the day the Internet fought back will remain the elephant in the room for years to come.

January 18, 2012

Why the rent seekers have been pushing for SOPA and PIPA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Max Titmuss at the Adam Smith Institute summarizes the key points that make SOPA and PIPA so attractive to rent seekers:

The provisions put forward in SOPA and PIPA enable the closing down and harassment of websites (not even necessarily located in the US) on the flimsiest of pretences: government censorship masquerading as copyright protection. But what exactly makes the laws so odious? There are four key, objectionable provisions, all of which are ripe for manipulation by rent-seeking parties (summarised from this link):

  1. The Anti-Circumvention Provision, allowing the US government to close sites who offer advise on merely circumventing censorship mechanisms;
  2. The “Vigilante” Provision, which would grant immunity from prosecution to internet service providers who pre-emptively block potentially offending sites, leaving them inherently vulnerable to pressures from a host of interested parties;
  3. The Corporate Right of Action, enabling copyright holders to obtain an unopposed court order which would cut off foreign websites from payment processors and advertisers;
  4. Expanded Attorney General Powers: therein giving the Attorney General the power to block any domain name and have their results barred from search engines: they would effectively cease to exist.

You don’t need to be a rabid libertarian to realise both SOPA and PIPA are anathema to a society which readily proclaims its commitment to spreading liberal democracy; an integral part of which is the freedom of expression. After all, western nations have waged war purportedly in support of ‘freedom’ and regularly (this time rightly) criticise those nations which continually suppress freedom of expression online.

Mother Jones puts on the rose-coloured glasses over SOPA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

In an otherwise good summary of the SOPA/PIPA issues in Mother Jones, Siddhartha Mahanta and Nick Baumann start the touchdown celebration prematurely:

Late Thursday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the House bill, announced that he would consider dropping the DNS-blocking provisions from the bill. Late on Friday, Smith, SOPA’s sponsor, did Leahy one better, removing the provision altogether. Not long after, six Republican senators — including two co-sponsors — released a letter they wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), asking him to hold off on a January 24th vote to end debate on PIPA and move to passage.

By this weekend, the writing was on the wall. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Majority Leader, announced that SOPA would not come for a vote in the House before the controversy over the bill is resolved — essentially killing it for the time being. The White House issued a statement opposing significant portions of the bills. And Issa cancelled the hearing planned for Wednesday, saying he’s “confident” the bill is dead in the House.

Big Hollywood isn’t entirely beaten yet. PIPA, the Senate legislation, could still get a vote and move closer to becoming law, and a modified version of SOPA could conceivably come to the House floor at some point in the future. Wikipedia, Reddit, MoveOn.org, Mozilla (the maker of the Firefox web browser), the blogging platform WordPress, and others are still planning to go dark on Wednesday, just in case. But as of right now, a combination of grassroots activism, blogging, tweeting, boycotts, and the mere threat of having to scroll through 1500 LOLCats without Icanhazcheezburger (another boycott supporter), seems to have beaten an avalanche of money and lobbying. Those 1950s onion farmers would be proud.

Keep your powder dry, boys: the battle is far from won. This is just the latest skirmish in an ongoing campaign, and premature celebration of the victory is just what we don’t need.

January 17, 2012

Stop SOPA!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

Although this is a Canadian blog and SOPA is proposed legislation in the United States, it is extremely likely that Canadian websites and internet users will be directly affected by provisions of it. Michael Geist has a list of reasons why Canadians should be concerned:

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines “domestic Internet protocol addresses” — the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection — as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it. Should a Canadian website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in another way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge (described as a “counter notification”), the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.

Along with thousands of other bloggers and major internet sites like Wikipedia, Quotulatiousness will be marking the anti-SOPA effort tomorrow. Unless I’ve misconfigured it, you should see a “Down Against SOPA” page the first time you visit the blog tomorrow (either on the main page or on a particular post), but then it should allow you to have normal access. I considered going “dark” as Wikipedia will be, but this seems to be a better way of registering my opposition without inconveniencing my readers too much.

January 16, 2012

Cory Doctorow recommends a book on English libel law

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

There’s a reason that individuals and organizations try to sue for libel under English law, rather than their own national legal system:

The Guardian published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen’s forthcoming You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel law, where “money buys silence” for some of the world’s most notorious dictators, thieves, and bad guys. English libel law is so broad that it allows, for example, Russian oligarchs to sue Russian newspapers for punitive sums (“the cost of libel actions in England and Wales is 140 times higher than the European average”) in an English court, merely by demonstrating that someone, somewhere in England looked at the paper’s website. And yet, the libel law in England and Wales doesn’t actually protect people from the most common forms of libelous publication: false declarations of criminal suspicion by the police, false claims of financial irregularities from credit reporting bureaux and false statements in former employers’ reference letters are protected unless they can be shown to have been malicious and negligent.

An unwelcome kind of “Top Ten Reasons” list

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Jonathan Turley, writing in the Washington Post:

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

January 15, 2012

What’s next, allowing only “registered journalists” to report the news?

Filed under: Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

A brief item that should send a frisson down the spine of anyone who collects and disseminates information from the web and social media outlets:

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that emerged from the Department of Homeland Security in November, Washington has written permission to collect and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to DHS, the definition of personal identifiable information can consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.”

H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.

January 12, 2012

When is an “insult” a criminal offence?

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

The answer, in the UK anyway, may well be “any time the insultee cares to call in the police“:

If you are reading this, chances are, you are a moron. There, have I insulted you? I’m asking because I have no idea if what I just stated has insulted you. Only YOU can be the judge of what you find insulting, yet plans are afoot for it to be a criminal offence to “insult” someone. So if you feel insulted, there is nothing to stop you ringing 999 and having the evil perpetrator banged up, DNA’ed and given a criminal record, although they will have had absolutely no idea that their actions or words have insulted you. If we criminalise “insults”, we shut up everyone and everything. For ever. Do you want to live in a society where you dare not speak in case the State decides your words may cause offence to people you will never meet? Now’s your chance to speak against it, USE IT, whilst you still can.

Now, I choose to be anonymous on my many public outings because, well, my face is my business. Unless I am actually committing a crime, it is not the business of the State to know what I look like anymore than it is the business of the State to randomly sweep bus stop queues for fingerprints. One of the reasons I wear a mask is because of the habit of the state to record the faces of those “who might” cause trouble, “for future reference”. The Met employ teams of photographers to take photos of any members of public who may be dissenting, sticks them on a database and cross references them. No thanks. My face belongs to me, it is my property, I will cover it when and if I choose. Naturally, this proposal is stop women wearing Burqas because some sensitive souls “may be offended” (see above), but as always, I say it is not the role of the State to dictate how I may dress.

January 3, 2012

Gary Johnson tops ACLU campaign report, beating Barack Obama and Ron Paul

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

The American Civil Liberties Union is doing something different this year to assist voters in finding the candidates who most clearly support civil liberties. This “ACLU Campaign Report Card” highlighted the good and bad aspects (at least in the ACLU’s view) of each of the current GOP candidates and President Obama:

We may surprise some people in that the scores in the report card — which is viewable here — don’t divide along party lines. In fact, the report card reveals a deep ideological rift in the GOP.

Our experts found that Republicans Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman earned solid scores, with four, three and two torches across most major categories, although both received one torch on marriage equality and none on reproductive rights.

President Obama also achieved solid scores or better across most categories, including four torches for ending the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. However, he received just one torch and none for keeping Guantanamo Bay open and continuing unconstitutional surveillance under the PATRIOT act, respectively.

Republican-turned-Libertarian Gary Johnson scored even better than Paul, Huntsman and Obama, earning four and three torches on most major issues. They stand in stark contrast to the other major GOP candidates, three of whom — Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum — didn’t earn a single torch in any of the seven major categories.

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich received torches in only one category: two torches each for promoting a humane immigration policy, including their support for a path to legal status for some long-term residents.

Ultimately, the good news from the report card is that genuine support for our constitutional values and freedoms has no partisan boundaries. Indeed, Ron Paul’s recent surge in Iowa has been attributed to his adherence to the Constitution and civil liberties.

December 31, 2011

Don’t mess with Firefly (or the right to free speech)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

December 27, 2011

Finding the motivations for those scary “libertarian” folk

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Jacob Sullum on a recent New York Times article that tried to define the typical Ron Paul supporter (and whether Ron Paul is responsible for their views):

Why does the Times think it is relevant to note that libertarians who focus on economic freedom are “backed to some degree by wealthy interests”? Isn’t that true of pretty much every political movement and organization, including Marxism and the Democratic Party? The implication seems to be that defenders of economic freedom are carrying water for special interests, who are in it only for the money.

Weirdly, the Times locates the scary militants in the part of the libertarian movement that focuses on “personal liberty,” which includes not only the rights explicitly protected by the Constitution (such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures) but also such unspecified rights as freedom to engage in consensual sexual relationships, to marry people of either sex, to bet on games of chance, and to ingest psychoactive substances (or even raw milk). So according to the Times, the right-wing extremists attracted to Paul are a tolerant, cosmopolitan group that nevertheless harbors odious views about blacks, Jews, and gay people. Also note that the Times, perhaps unintentionally, says the Constitution “at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.” All the more reason to be wary of defending this radical document.

In short, the libertarian movement consists of two parts: 1) self-interested tycoons seeking low taxes and minimal regulation in the name of economic freedom and 2) crazy right-wingers who take the Constitution too seriously and worry about personal freedom. I always thought the distinguishing feature of libertarianism was defending both economic and personal liberty, based on the insight that they are two manifestations of the same thing. But what do I know? I did not realize that the rule of law was a concept invented by F.A. Hayek until the Times explained it to me.

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