Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2021

Do US intelligence agencies only work on domestic surveillance these days?

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibbi discusses the (recent?) US intelligence agencies’ apparent concentration on domestic “enemies” like Republicans, Jewish organizations, conservative broadcasters, and US Presidents and their appointed officials:

The scene was perfectly representative of what the erstwhile “liberal” press has become: collections of current and former enforcement types, masquerading as journalists, engaged in patriotic denunciations of critics and rote recitals of quasi-official statements.

Not that it matters to [Fox TV host Tucker] Carlson’s critics, but odds favor the NSA scandal being true. An extraordinarily rich recent history of illegal, politically-directed leaks has gone mostly uncovered, in another glaring recent press failure that itself is part of this story.

It’s admitted. Go back to December, 2015, and you’ll find a Wall Street Journal story by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron quoting senior government officials copping to the fact that the Obama White House reviewed intercepts of conversations between “U.S lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

The White House in that case was anxious to know what congressional opponents to Obama’s Iran deal were thinking, and peeked in the electronic cookie jar to get an advance preview at such “incidentally” collected info. This prompted what one official called an “Oh, shit” moment, when they realized that what they’d done might result in “the executive branch being accused of spying.”

After Obama left office, illegal leaks of classified intercepts became commonplace. Many, including the famed January, 2017 leak of conversations between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, were key elements of major, news-cycle-dominating bombshells. Others, like “Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin,” or news that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials in foreign intercepts, were openly violative of the prohibition against disclosing the existence of such surveillance, let alone the contents.

These leaks tended to go to the same small coterie of reporters at outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, and not one prompted blowback. This was a major forgotten element of the Reality Winner story. Winner, a relatively low-level contractor acting on her own, was caught, charged, and jailed with extraordinary speed after leaking an NSA document about Russian interference to the Intercept. But these dozens of similar violations by senior intelligence officials, mainly in leaks about Trump, went not just unpunished but un-investigated. As Winner’s lawyer, Titus Nichols, told me years ago, his client’s case was “about low-hanging fruit.”

June 23, 2021

Bad legislation rammed through in the small hours of the morning

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist on how one of the worst pieces of legislation to get extruded from the bowels of the Liberal minority government got pinched off by main force and now sits, steaming, on the docket for the Senate to … well, “rubber stamp” isn’t quite the right phrase but it’s pretty rare for our unelected senators to do anything to benefit ordinary Canadians, so we’re depending on them somehow managing to display an almost supernatural effort to slow down this shitty bill until the end of the session:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

The Liberal government strategy of multiple gag orders and a “super motion” to limit debate bore fruit last night as Bill C-10 received House of Commons approval at 1:30 am. The Parliamentary process took hours as the government passed multiple motions to cut short debate, re-inserted amendments that had been previously ruled null and void, and rejected a last-ditch attempt to restore the Section 4.1 safeguards for user generated content. The debate included obvious errors from Liberal MPs who were presumably chosen to defend the bill. For example, Julie Dabrusin, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, said that Section 2.1 in Bill C-10 “specifically excludes content uploaded by users.” Only it doesn’t as Dabrusin should know given that 2.1 covers users not content and she was the MP who introduced the amendment at committee to remove Section 4.1, which was the provision that excluded content uploaded by users.

Given the public support from the Bloc for cutting short debate, the outcome last night was never really in doubt. Perhaps the most interesting vote of the night came with a motion from Conservative MP Alain Rayes, which once again called for the re-insertion of Section 4.1. While the motion was defeated with the support of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc MPs, there were several notable exceptions. Liberal MPs Nate-Erskine Smith and Wayne Long both abstained and former Justice Minister (and now independent MP) Jody Wilson-Raybould voted in favour of the motion. The report stage was limited to one hour of debate, which meant that the 23 amendments were again subject to no real debate or discussion. Once the bill passed the report stage, it was on to third and final reading, which was limited to 15 minutes of debate per party. The vote followed just before 1:30 am with the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc once again supporting Bill C-10. Wilson-Raybould joined with the Conservatives in voting against it.

A rational government would comprehend that their pitch that the real purpose of the bill is to “make the web giants pay” is completely undermined by the obvious and deliberate attempt to introduce government censorship of what ordinary Canadians watch on the internet and share through social media. It’s all about the control, not about any imaginary financial windfall from shaking down tech companies for spare change. Why the rush to get it rammed through parliament right now, with so many other rather more pressing concerns at hand?

June 9, 2021

Bill C-10 – “… what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In another country it might be a fascinating and amusing thing to watch Steven Guilbeault faff about pretending to understand what his own bill says and how it will cause havoc for ordinary Canadians, but being in Canada the humour is lacking as Michael Geist shows:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Several weeks after Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault introduced Bill C-10, I started a 20 part blog post series called the Broadcasting Act Blunder (podcast edition here). The series examined many of concerns with the bill, including issues such as over-broad regulation and discoverability requirements that would only garner public attention many months later. I thought about that series yesterday as I watched Guilbeault try in the House of Commons to defend the indefensible: a gag order on committee review of the bill, the first such order in two decades. While the bill is in dire need of fixing, what occurred yesterday was far worse than a blunder. It was a betrayal. A betrayal of the government’s commitment to “strengthen Parliamentary committees so that they can better scrutinize legislation.” A betrayal of the promise to do things differently from previous governments. A betrayal of Canada’s values as a Parliamentary democracy.

The 23 minute and 30 second question and comment period – the House Speaker ruled there could be no debate and that the period could not extend beyond 23 minutes and 30 seconds – notably featured NDP MP Peter Julian and Green MP Elizabeth May, two of the longer serving MPs in the House as among the first to speak. Julian was first elected in 2004, when Guilbeault was only a few years removed from activist stunts such as climbing the CN Tower. Meanwhile, May became the founding Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1989, the same year Guilbeault started as a university student. It seemed to me that both had a message for an inexperienced cabinet minister elected less than two years ago, namely that some things are bigger than single bill. Bills come and go, but principles – or betrayal of those principles – endures.

Guilbeault clearly did not get it, wondering how the NDP could possibly reject the gag order and effectively support potential delays to his bill. Both the NDP and the Greens may ultimately vote for Bill C-10, but both understand that defending democracy and the freedom of expression of MPs (much less the freedom of expression of all Canadians) is far more important than a delay to any single bill. As May noted, the gag order will do real long term damage. One day it will be a different government on a different issue seeking to use the same procedure to cut short committee study. And the Liberals will have no credible response with no one to blame but themselves.

But we don’t need to look far into the future to see the consequences of the Guilbeault gag order. This past weekend, the Canadian government joined with other countries to criticize the Nigerian government for blocking Twitter and establishing registration requirements for social media. Yet calls for respecting freedom of expression rings hollow when you are shutting down Parliamentary debate on a bill with profound implications for freedom of expression. Indeed, Canada’s lost moral authority on Internet freedoms is an undeniable consequence of Bill C-10 and the Guilbeault gag order.

May 30, 2021

QotD: Pornography

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

The more important effect of home video — and, even more so, of the Internet — has been to create a wide and wild array of market segments, a diversity so dizzying it defies the very idea of a mainstream. A couple decades ago, feminists could argue plausibly that porn was partly responsible for the unrealistic body images they blame for bulimia and anorexia. Today, every conceivable body type has an online community of masturbators devoted to it.

Jesse Walker, “Guess Who’s Coming: Progress at the cineplex”, Reason, 2005-03-28.

May 26, 2021

The Line refutes arguments recently posted in … The Line

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Recently the editors at The Line accepted an article from the astroturf “advocacy” group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, pushing the establishment line that all of us peons and useless idiots in the blogosphere and even a few undisciplined malcontents among the actual mainstream media are totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting what the government is trying to do with their “tax the web giants” initiative. Peter Menzies responds to the latest bullshit propaganda offensive:

[Mouthpiece for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting Daniel] Bernhard makes a great case for the regulation of tech giants, pointing to some truly dreadful things such as the New Zealand massacre streamed on Facebook, and exploitive content uploaded to Montreal’s PornHub.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the people listed above disagree with the Friends on this point. In fact, many have made the case that Bill C-10 is an unnecessary diversion from more serious online industry problems — some of which are addressed in another bill (C-11).

The big matters that need to be addressed by the government involve algorithms, data collection, privacy protection, and anti-competitive practices — not the facility of the Netflix search tool, nor whether the search term “Canadian” should pop up as a default selection.

My main point of disagreement to Bernhard’s piece is that the Internet is no more broadcasting than a cow is a caribou. Further, it’s ridiculous to think that an outmoded relic such as the 1991(!) Broadcasting Act is the proper tool to use to govern communications in the 21st Century (for those inclined, there is a complete policy paper available here that fleshes that out.)

In terms of the sections 2.1 vs 4.1 legal arguments, I’m pretty certain I will lose most of The Line readers if I delve into those details. I’m more than comfortable deferring to my fellow “militants” such as law professors Laidlaw and Geist, whose arguments have been so overwhelming that not even Attorney General David Lametti attempted to refute them in the defence of Guilbeault, who has now established himself as the most regressive Heritage Minister in the history of that ministry.

All readers really need to know is that, yes, Bill C-10 makes it legal for the CRTC to regulate your video or audio uploads if they are posted to “social media”, the definition of which will be left entirely up to the nine government-appointed CRTC commissioners. Who knows what they’ll come up with. There are no minutes of their meetings, so it’s impossible to know what they might be thinking.

I mean, if it was easy to define social media you’d think the government would have just done it, right? Similarly, if the legislation is aimed only at the bad behaviour of the “Web Giants” — the pejorative term Guilbeault has engaged — the bill ought to simply say that. But it doesn’t.

And as for the government-approved Canadian Content industry’s argument that it didn’t want to regulate/suppress the user generated content produced by the rest of us . . .

Oh Yes They Did.

May 24, 2021

QotD: The internet is rewiring our brains

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… there’s a reason 99.998% of the Internet is porn, and that reason is: The Internet, itself, has rewired our brains.

Yeah, I’m a history guy, not a biologist, and no, I can’t show you the specific spots on the fMRI that prove it, but look, you can test this yourself. Ever been around kids? It’s easiest to see in the early grades, so go to a daycare or afterschool program. Trust me, you can pick out right away, with 100% accuracy, the kids who spend more than 3 hours a day at daycare. This is not a knock on daycare providers, lots of whom are good, dedicated people doing hard work. Rather, it’s a knock on the situation, because if a kid’s in daycare that long, it means the parents both work long-hour, high-stress jobs. How do you think the kid’s home life is, under those conditions?

You know as well as I do that when the kid gets home from day care, he gets plunked in front of a tv, a video game, an iPad, a smartphone, some kind of glowing box. That’s what’s rewiring their brains. That’s not “ADHD,” which doesn’t really exist. “ADHD” is a cope, a bit of shorthand, to describe what’s actually going on, which is: These kids’ heads have been rewired. They need constant stimulation. Everything needs to be in five-minute chunks for them, because they’ve never known anything different. Asking them to sit down and pay attention for any length of time – say, in a 60 minute lecture, like our old Prussian (from the 18th century!) system requires – is like asking one of us to suddenly run a marathon, or bench press 300 lbs. It can’t be done; we don’t have the equipment.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

May 21, 2021

Mission creep – to “make the web giants pay”, the feds will “need” to regulate everything Canadians view or post online

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist explains why we can safely discount any new lies that the Heritage Minister spews about his Bill C-10 censorship bill:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has tried to deflect public concern with the regulation of user generated content under Bill C-10 by claiming the intent is to make the “web giants” pay their fair share. Yet according to an internal government memo to Guilbeault signed by former Heritage Deputy Minister Hélène Laurendeau released under the Access to Information Act, the department has for months envisioned a far broader regulatory reach. The memo identifies a wide range of targets, including podcast apps such as Stitcher and Pocket Casts, audiobook services such as Audible, home workout apps, adult websites, sports streaming services such as MLB.TV and DAZN, niche video services such as Britbox, and even news sites such as the BBC and CPAC.

The regulations would bring the full power of CRTC regulation over these sites and services. This includes requiring CRTC registration, disclosure of financial and viewership data, Canadian content discoverability requirements (yes, that could mean Canadian discoverability for pornography services), and mandated payments to support Canadian film, television, and music production. The list also notably identifies potential regulation of Youtube Music, Snapchat Originals, and other social media services whose supposed exclusion has been cited as the rationale to extend regulation to user generated content.

The document was obtained by Postmedia journalist Anja Karadeglija, who first reported it last weekend, focusing on departmental warnings about the importance of excluding user generated content from the scope of regulation in Bill C-10 and the necessity of Sections 2.1 and 4.1 (Section 4.1 was removed by the government). The memo states:

    Social media services like YouTube and Facebook greatly expand the number of individuals and other entities that can be said to be transmitting programs over the Internet. This provides an important limitation on the application of the Act by ensuring that under the Act the CRTC cannot regulate the audio or video communications of individuals (or other entities) simply because they use a social media service.

The government obviously ignored the warning and removed the limitation. The document continues by identifying a non-exhaustive list of services that “are likely to regulated under the Act.” The department acknowledges that some services may be exempted by the CRTC, though there are no specifics in the bill that identify thresholds for exemptions. Even if exempted, services may still be required to register with the CRTC and provide confidential commercial data in order to obtain an exemption. Indeed, the default approach is that all services are subject to Canadian regulation, leading to a dizzying array of regulated services identified by the department.

Emphasis mine.

May 12, 2021

Critics are all conspiracy theorists says minister actively planning to regulate speech online

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has come a long, long way from those far-distant days when they were all about “openness” and “accountability” and especially about protecting free speech:

Last night, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault posted a remarkable tweet that should heighten concerns about Bill C-10, forthcoming online harms legislation, and the government’s intent with respect to free speech. In the weeks since it opened the door to treating all user generated content as a “program” subject to CRTC regulation, there has been mounting public criticism and concern about the implications for free speech. While the tech companies have remained relatively silent, Canadians have been speaking out. Those voices now include the Government of Saskatchewan, with Minister of Justice Gord Wyant writing to Guilbeault to urge the federal government to stop Bill C-10 from proceeding or amend it to ensure that “all creative Internet content generated by Canadians will be exempt from any regulatory supervision by federal government agencies.”

Given the opposition – as well as Guilbeault’s well-documented disastrous interviews on CBC and CTV – one would have thought the Minister would be seeking to assuage public concern. Instead, Guilbeault took to Twitter last night to suggest that the public anger over Bill C-10 was a matter of “public opinion being manipulated at scale through a deliberate campaign of misinformation by commercial interests that would prefer to avoid the same regulatory oversight applied to broadcast media.”

Over the past few weeks of intense Bill C-10 debate, nothing has left me angrier or more concerned than this tweet. First, the conspiracy theory amplified by Guilbeault is plainly wrong and itself quite clearly misinformation. The concerns regarding the bill have been backed by law professors, experts, Justice Ministers, former CRTC chairs, and hundreds of others. To claim this is a tech-inspired misinformation campaign lends support to the view that Guilbeault still does not understand his own bill and its implications. Moreover, not only have the tech companies remained relatively quiet, but most did not even appear before the Heritage Committee as part of its study. To suggest that having largely ignored the bill, the companies are now engaged in some grand conspiracy is lunacy.

One of the fun notions of C-10 is having some sort of popularity cut-off for regulation to kick in … the more popular your online output becomes, the closer you’ll get to having one of Justin’s CRTC apparatchiks censoring your work:

May 5, 2021

Michael Geist’s overview of the federal government’s steady retreat from their 2015 election promises on protecting Canadians’ online privacy and free speech rights

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Reposting his most recent Maclean’s article on his website, Michael Geist explains why the federal government’s blatant hypocrisy over Canadians’ rights online has finally gotten many people paying closer attention:

The government had maintained that it had no interest in regulating user generated content, but the policy reversal meant that millions of video, podcasts, and the other audiovisual content on those popular services would be treated as “programs” under Canadian law and subject to some of the same rules as those previously reserved for programming on conventional broadcast services.

The backlash undoubtedly caught the government by surprise, particularly since the policy change garnered little discussion at committee. As the public concern mounted, Guilbeault retreated to his standard talking points about how the opposition parties were unwilling to stand up to the web giants. The arguments fell flat, however, since the new rules were directly targeting users’ content, not the Internet companies. Further, the public reaction pointed to a government increasingly out-of-step with the public, which may support increased Internet regulation, but not at any cost.

The fact that the Liberal government was open to regulating millions of TikTok and Youtube videos was a reminder of how unrecognizable its digital policy approach has become in recent years. The party was elected in 2015 on a platform that promised to entrench net neutrality, prioritize innovation, focus on privacy rather than surveillance, and support freedom of expression. Most of those positions now seemingly reflect a by-gone era.

It is still anxious to demonstrate its tech bona fides, but now progressive policies appear to mean confronting the “web giants” with threats of regulation, penalties, and taxes. Cultural sovereignty has replaced innovation as the guiding principle, which has meant the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has been replaced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage as the digital policy lead.

And so for the past 18 months, Guilbeault has been handed Canada’s digital policy keys. In Guilbeault’s eyes, seemingly everything is under threat – Canadian film and television production, a safe space for speech, the future of news – and the big technology companies are invariably to blame.

Few would dispute that an updated tech regulatory model is needed, but evidence-based policies are in short supply in the current approach. For example, the use or misuse of data lies at the heart of the power of big tech, yet privacy reforms have been curiously absent as a government priority. Indeed, Bill C-11 was promoted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November as legislation to give Canadians greater control over their personal information, but under newly named ISI Minister François-Philippe Champagne, it has scarcely been heard from again.

The government has similarly done little to address concerns about abuse of competition, the risks associated with algorithmic decision-making, or the development of a modernized framework for artificial intelligence. Years of emphasis on the benefits of multi-lateral policy development and consensus-building were unceremoniously discarded the recent budget in order to commit to a digital services tax in 2022 that could spark billions in tariff retaliation. In fact, the US-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement that the government trumpeted as a major success story restricts Canada’s ability to even establish a new liability regime for technology companies.

April 30, 2021

Bill C-10, despite frequent government denials, would regulate user-generated content on the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist continues to sound the alarm about the federal government’s bill to vastly increase CRTC control over Canadians’ access to information and entertainment options online, including the Heritage minister’s mendacity when challenged about how the CRTC’s powers will increase to censor individual Canadians in what they post to online services like YouTube:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the Liberal government’s response to mounting concern over its decision to remove a legal safeguard designed to ensure the CRTC would not regulate user generated content has been denial. The department’s own officials told MPs that all programming on sites like Youtube would be subject to regulation, yet Guilbeault insisted to the House of Commons that user generated content would be excluded from regulation as part of Bill C-10, his Broadcasting Act reform bill.

However, based on new documents I recently obtained, it has become clear that Guilbeault and the government have misled the Canadian public with their response. In fact, the government effectively acknowledges that it is regulating user generated content in a forthcoming, still-secret amendment to Bill C-10. Amendment G-13, submitted by Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin on April 7th and likely to come before the committee studying the bill over the next week, seeks to amend Section 10(1) of the Broadcasting Act which specifies the CRTC’s regulatory powers. It states:

    (4) Regulations made under paragraph (1)(c) do not apply with respect to programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service – if that user is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate, or the agent or mandatary of either of them – for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users of the service.

The amendment is a clear acknowledgement that user generated content are programs subject to CRTC’s regulation making power. Liberal MPs may claim the bill doesn’t do this, but their colleagues are busy submitting amendments to address the reality.

But it is not just that the government knew that its changes would result in regulating user generated content. The forthcoming secret amendment only covers one of many regulations that the CRTC may impose. The specific regulation – Section 10(1)(c) of the Broadcasting Act – gives the CRTC the power to establish regulations “respecting standards of programs and the allocation of broadcasting time for the purpose of giving effect to the broadcasting policy set out in subsection 3(1).”

April 17, 2021

“Today’s Liberal government is […] the most anti-Internet government in Canadian history”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist gives both barrels to Justin Trudeau’s government, then reloads and fires again:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

As I watched Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault yesterday close the Action Summit to Combat Online Hate, I was left with whiplash as I thought back to those early days. Today’s Liberal government is unrecognizable by comparison as it today stands the most anti-Internet government in Canadian history:

  • As it moves to create the Great Canadian Internet Firewall, net neutrality is out and mandated Internet blocking is in.
  • Freedom of expression and due process is out, quick takedowns without independent review and increased liability are in.
  • Innovation and new business models are out, CRTC regulation is in.
  • Privacy reform is out, Internet taxation is in.
  • Prioritizing consumer Internet access and affordability is out, reduced competition through mergers are in.
  • And perhaps most troublingly, consultation and transparency are out, secrecy is in.

This is not hyperbole. The Action Summit is a case in point. I was part of the planning committee and I am proud that the event produced two days of thoughtful discussion and debate, where the both the importance and complexity of addressing online hate brought a myriad of perspectives, including from the major Internet platforms. There was none of that nuance in Guilbeault’s words, who spoke the evil associated with the “web behemoths” and promised that his legislation would target content and Internet sites and services anywhere in the world provided it was accessible to Canadians. The obvious implications – much discussed in Internet circles in Ottawa – is that the government plans to introduce mandated content blocking to keep such content out of Canada as a so-called “last resort”. When combined with a copyright “consultation” launched this week that also raises Internet blocking, Guilbeault’s vision is to require Internet providers to install blocking capabilities, create new regulators and content adjudicators to issue blocking orders, dispense with net neutrality, and build a Canadian Internet firewall.

If that wasn’t enough, his forthcoming bill will also mandate content removals within 24 hours with significant penalties for failure to do so. The approach trades due process for speed, effectively reducing independent oversight and incentivizing content removal by Internet platforms. Just about everyone thinks this is a bad idea, but Guilbeault insists that “it is in the mandate letter.” In other words, consultations don’t matter, expertise doesn’t matter, the experience elsewhere doesn’t matter. Instead, a mandate letter trumps all. If this occurred under Stephen Harper’s watch, the criticism would be unrelenting.

In fact, one of the reasons that the government finds itself committed to dangerous policy is that it did not conduct a public consultation on its forthcoming online harms bill. Guilbeault was forced yesterday to admit that the public has not been consulted, which he tried to justify by claiming that it could participate in the committee review or in the development of implementation guidelines once the bill becomes law. This alone should be disqualifying as no government should introduce censorship legislation that mandates website blocking, eradicates net neutrality, harms freedom of expression, and dispenses with due process without having ever consulted Canadians on the issue.

April 9, 2021

QotD: Instant expertise

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As every journalist and lawyer knows, it takes about half an hour to become an expert on any subject. In the days when I wrote for some of the less cerebral but well-paying publications of the British press, my protestations that I knew nothing whatever of the subject on which they wanted me to write was no discouragement to a commission. At most, it produced a slight prolongation of the deadline — about half an hour, in fact.

One of the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic has been to reveal to a very large percentage of the population the joys of instant expertise. The world now has hundreds of millions, if not several billions, of epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians, all of whom know best how to deal with the pandemic. The only problem is that their solutions are at variance with one another.

It sometimes seems as if the certainty with which views are held is inversely proportional to the solidity of the factual basis on which they are founded. If commentary on the internet is anything to go by (it might not be, of course, for those who avail themselves of this means of self-expression are a self-selected rather than a representative sample), people often take a religious attitude toward their own doctrine and condemn as heretics all those who express doubts about it. I don’t want to sound like a psychoanalyst, that class of person who believes that he unfailingly knows the real meaning of what is said rather than its merely apparent meaning, but stridency of views is often indicative of unacknowledged uncertainties. Zinc supplementarians and others of the type cling to their beliefs with a fervor that evidence does not merit.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Everyone’s an Expert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-10-16.

February 12, 2021

Calls for the federal government’s Broadcasting bill (Bill C-10) to be withdrawn

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist updates the situation with the federal government’s attempt to massively rework the Canadian broadcast and internet regulation framework without proper scrutiny or transparency:

I have not been shy about expressing my concerns with the Bill C-10, the Broadcasting Act reform bill. From a 20 part series examining the legislation to two podcasts to a debate with Janet Yale, I have actively engaged on policy concerns involving regulation that extends far beyond the “web giants”, the loss of Canadian sovereignty over broadcast ownership, the threat to Canadian intellectual property, and the uncertainty of leaving many questions to the CRTC to answer. Yet beyond the substance of the bill, in recent days an even more troubling issue has emerged as Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, his Parliamentary Secretary Julie Dabrusin, and the Liberal government abandon longstanding commitments to full consultation, transparency, and parliamentary process.

Last week, I appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of what it is calling a “pre-study” on Bill C-10. In this case, “pre-study” is euphemism for avoiding the conventional parliamentary process. Bill C-10 has not yet passed second reading in the House of Commons and has not been referred to committee for study. There have been extensive debates in the House and last week Conservative MP Michael Kram called for the bill to be withdrawn, noting that politicians could do Canadians a lot of good by “rewriting it from scratch.” That move drew criticism from Guilbeault during an interview at the CMPA Prime Time event, as he called for pressure on the Conservatives to support referring the bill to committee. There are instances of pre-study, but doing so concurrently with second reading makes no sense since a pre-study allows for a wide range of amendments, whereas after second reading the permitted amendments are more limited.

In an earlier era (or with a different government), the prospect of conducting a study of the bill while simultaneously engaging in second reading would garner loud objections. In fact, at the Heritage Committee hearing last week, opposition MPs wondered why they were already being asked for amendments to the bill when they had yet to hear from witnesses, much less conduct an actual study of the bill. Indeed, for a government that once prized itself on robust consultation, it seemingly now wants to avoid any genuine consultation on Bill C-10, content to have potential amendments presented through lobbyists, rather than on the public record in open hearings.

The secrecy does not end there. At the same hearing (I was a witness and waited patiently for these issues to play out), Conservative MPs raised questions about promised data on how the government had arrived at claims that the bill will generate over $800 million in new money. Leaving aside the fact that Guilbeault has often inflated that figure to over $1 billion, there has no public disclosure about the source of this claim. Cartt.ca reports that officials told the committee that the calculations could be “confusing” without a verbal explanation. Days later, Dabrusin told the committee that in fact the data had been provided to the committee late last year but perhaps not distributed to committee members.

When I was questioned by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh during my appearance before the committee, he again raised concerns about the claim. Dabrusin interjected with a point of order to make it clear that the data had been provided to the committee, albeit not distributed to MPs. What made the exchange so striking was that Dabrusin – a parliamentary secretary – seemingly did not give any thought to the fact that the data has not been made publicly available. Promoting long overdue disclosures to a handful of MPs while the public is kept in the dark is hardly the stuff worthy of praise or a point of order.

February 6, 2021

“WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander discusses why WebMD is not the be-all and end-all of internet medical resources:

WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice. Consider drug side effects. Here’s WebMD’s list of side effects for a certain drug, let’s call it Drug 1:

    Upset stomach and heartburn may occur. If either of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. If your doctor has directed you to use this medication, remember that he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. Tell your doctor right away if you have any serious side effects, including: easy bruising/bleeding, difficulty hearing, ringing in the ears, signs of kidney problems (such as change in the amount of urine), persistent or severe nausea/vomiting, unexplained tiredness, dizziness, dark urine, yellowing eyes/skin. This drug may rarely cause serious bleeding from the stomach/intestine or other areas of the body. If you notice any of the following very serious side effects, get medical help right away: black/tarry stools, persistent or severe stomach/abdominal pain, vomit that looks like coffee grounds, trouble speaking, weakness on one side of the body, sudden vision changes or severe headache.

And here’s their list of side effects for let’s call it Drug 2:

    Nausea, loss of appetite, or stomach/abdominal pain may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. This medication can cause serious bleeding if it affects your blood clotting proteins too much. Even if your doctor stops your medication, this risk of bleeding can continue for up to a week. Tell your doctor right away if you have any signs of serious bleeding, including: unusual pain/swelling/discomfort, unusual/easy bruising, prolonged bleeding from cuts or gums, persistent/frequent nosebleeds, unusually heavy/prolonged menstrual flow, pink/dark urine, coughing up blood, vomit that is bloody or looks like coffee grounds, severe headache, dizziness/fainting, unusual or persistent tiredness/weakness, bloody/black/tarry stools, chest pain, shortness of breath, difficulty swallowing.

Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD’s side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said “aspirin is pretty safe and most people don’t need to worry about it”, people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said “warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one”, people might refuse to take warfarin because “the Internet said it was dangerous”, die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.

This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn’t. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated. For the more serious version of this, read Get Ready For False Side Effects. Why does the FDA keep doing this if they know it makes their label information useless? My guess is it’s because they don’t want to look like cowboys who unprincipledly consider some things but not other things. What if someone accused the person deciding what things to consider of being biased? So the FDA comes up with a Procedure, and once you have a Procedure it has to be “take everything seriously”, and then it falls on random small-fry people who aren’t the FDA to pick up the slack and explain which side effects are worth worrying about or not, and then those small fries don’t do that, because they could get sued.

I think the same concern motivates WebMD diagnosing everything as cancer. If they said something other than cancer, then people might sigh with relief, not bother to get a cancer screening, die from some weird cancer that doesn’t present the way normal cancers do, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD.

Of course, WebMD and other online medical information sites didn’t invent hypochondria, they merely made it easier to do to yourself what Jerome K. Jerome did one fine London morning in 1888:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch — hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into — some fearful, devastating scourge, I know — and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever — read the symptoms — discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it — wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance — found, as I expected, that I had that too, — began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically — read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. […] I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

January 30, 2021

“The only thing ‘dangerous’ about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Taibbi says “Suck it, Wall Street!”

Meme stolen from Ace of Spades H.Q.

The press conveyed panic and moral disgust. “I didn’t realize it was this cultlike,” said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, without irony denouncing the campaign against firms like his as “just a get rich quick scheme.” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said the Redditor campaign had “no basis in reality,” while Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge funder whose bets against subprime mortgages were lionized in The Big Short, called the amateur squeeze “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”

The episode prompted calls to regulate Reddit and, finally, halt action on the disputed stocks. As I write this, word has come out that platforms like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are curbing trading in GameStop and several other companies, including Nokia and AMC Entertainment holdings.

Meaning: just like 2008, trading was shut down to save the hides of erstwhile high priests of “creative destruction.” Also just like 2008, there are calls for the government to investigate the people deemed responsible for unapproved market losses.

The acting head of the SEC said the agency was “monitoring” the situation, while the former head of its office of Internet enforcement, John Stark, said, “I can’t imagine there isn’t an open investigation and probably a formal order to find out who’s on these message boards.” Georgetown finance professor James Angel lamented, “it’s going to be hard for the SEC to find blatant manipulation,” but they “owe it to look.” The Washington Post elaborated:

    To establish manipulation that runs afoul of securities laws, Angel said regulators would need to prove traders engaged in “an intentional act to push a price away from its fundamental value to seek a profit.” In market parlance, this is typically known as a pump-and-dump scheme …

Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked about “manipulation” and “what’s going on on Wall Street right now,” said “we’ll all be reviewing it,” as if it were the business of congress to worry about a bunch of day traders cashing in for once.

The only thing “dangerous” about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a “pump and dump scheme” to push prices away from their “fundamental value” is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?

H/T to Larry Correia for the link.

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