Month: July 2019

A new round of attacks on our right to secure, hard-to-crack encryption has kicked off.

In separate speeches this month, Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray each insisted that they understand encryption is a necessary tool—particularly as more and more information about us is digitized—to protect our personal data from anybody with ill intent. But both nevertheless believe that apps and tech platforms need to develop tools that let government officials bypass encryption to comply with warrants. Neither seems willing to accept the reality that a back door that lets the FBI in would by its very nature weaken encryption, making it subject to attacks by the very same predators we need to be protected from.

In an address at the International Conference on Cyber Security on July 23, Barr opined [emphasis added]:

At conferences like this, we talk about those costs in abstract terms. They are not abstract; they are real. The costs of irresponsible encryption that blocks legitimate law enforcement access is ultimately measured in a mounting number of victims—men, women, and children who are the victims of crimes—crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence.

Throughout the speech, Barr refers to “warrant-proof encryption” rather “end-to-end encryption” (which appears all of once in the whole speech) or “quantum cryptography” (which doesn’t appear at all). These are types of encryption designed to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for third parties or unintended recipients to access the information. This is an increasingly necessary tool for protecting our data privacy that also has a secondary effect of making it hard for law enforcement to access our private data and communications even with warrants.

This type of encryption also, incidentally, makes it hard for the governments of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and China and others to access our private data. So it’s absurd but telling for Barr to dismiss it as “irresponsible” simply because his agencies can’t gain access. The costs of having your data accessed and copied by foreign governments are not abstract either.

Similarly, Wray gave a speech July 25 at the FBI International Cyber Security in which he insisted that he understands how important data security is, but also declared that government access to encrypted data is equally important:

I don’t want to think about a world in which we lose the ability to detect dangerous criminal activity because a technology provider decides to encrypt this traffic—data “in motion”—in such a way that the content is cloaked and no longer subject to our longstanding legal process. Our ability to do our jobs—law enforcement’s ability to protect the American people—will be degraded in a major way.

Later, he complains: “I get a little frustrated when people suggest that we’re trying to weaken encryption—or weaken cybersecurity more broadly. We’re doing no such thing.” There’s a reason that nearly everybody in the private sector tech security establishment is making that suggestion: because what Wray and Barr want cannot happen without weakening encryption. There is no such thing as a door that only the “good guys” (for whatever definition of good guys you choose) can enter.

Back in 2016, some hackers attempted to show the FBI exactly what would happen with encryption “back doors.” Microsoft had an encryption key to bypass part of its authentication process for its operating system. Developers used it to test new operating builds. The hackers managed to get their hands on this encryption key and publicized how it worked. Their intent was to show the FBI that anything that would allow law enforcement to bypass encryption would ultimately get into the “wild” somehow and that people with malicious plans, be they criminals or foreign governments, would also kick that door wide open. They begged the FBI to pay attention to their example.

Apparently, the FBI is still refusing to listen. We may end up trying to following Australia’s footsteps and making the world a more dangerous place for law-abiding citizens while clever criminals and predatory foreign governments both take advantage of these back doors and use a constantly shifting array of lesser-known, disposable encrypted communication apps that the feds will not be able to stay on top of. We’ll end up in the worst of all worlds.

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President Donald Trump’s trade war is slowing investment in America, taxing American farmers and businesses, and, so far, has not produced any of the new trade deals the president promised.

So it’s little surprise that Americans are increasingly unhappy with Trump’s anti-trade stance. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the Democrats vying to challenge Trump in next year’s presidential election seem mostly unwilling to take advantage of one of the incumbent’s most obvious weaknesses.

New polling data released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center shows that 56 percent of Americans now say the tariffs are “bad for the country.” That’s up from 53 percent in September of last year.

Even more interesting is that the number of Americans who say that signing free trade agreements is a good thing has increased to 65 percent—with majorities of both Democrats (73 percent) and Republicans (59 percent) favoring such deals. Among Democrats, that figure is the highest since Pew started asking about trade in 2009. Republicans’ views on free trade, meanwhile, have recovered to pre-2016 levels.

Other recent polls show similar results. A New York Times/Survey Monkey poll released earlier this month showed that 68 percent of respondents—including a majority of Republicans—said Trump’s trade policies will raise prices, while 53 percent said Trump’s Chinese tariffs will be “bad” for the United States.

Despite clear majorities that oppose Trump’s protectionism and favor more trade with more nations, both major parties seem to be moving in the opposite direction. There’s little hope that the GOP will rediscover the value of free trade as long as protectionist-in-chief Trump and his coterie of economic nationalists occupy the White House. Which gives the Democrats a clear opportunity to seize the high ground on trade.

Some of the 2020 candidates are tentatively trying to do so. The strongest rebukes of Trump’s trade policies, so far, have come from former vice president Joe Biden and from Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“Trump doesn’t get the basics,” Biden said during a speech in Iowa last month. “He thinks the tariffs are being paid by China. Any beginning econ student at Iowa or Iowa State could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs.” Trump thinks he’s being tough, Biden added, but that’s only because he’s forcing American farmers and manufacturers to “feel the pain.” Buttigieg has promised to lift Trump’s tariffs if elected, calling them a “counterproductive” policy unlikely to change China’s behavior while unnecessarily hurting Americans.

Generally speaking, however, the Democrats running for president have criticized Trump’s handling of the trade war and his use of tariffs, while tacitly acknowledging that they believe the problem is Trump, and not the policies themselves.

For example, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) told CNN’s Jake Tapper in May that Trump’s habit of “conducting trade policy, economic policy, foreign policy by tweet” was “irresponsible.” But when pressed by Tapper she admitted that she largely agreed with Trump’s assessment that free trade is a scourge on American workers. This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) unveiled a new trade policy paper that similarly criticized the style, but not the substance, of Trump’s tariffs. “While I think tariffs are an important tool, they are not by themselves a long-term solution to our failed trade agenda and must be part of a broader strategy that this Administration clearly lacks,” Warren wrote, clearly indicating that she would not rule out the use of tariffs if elected.

The subject of trade was raised only once by the moderators at last month’s Democratic presidential debates. “We need to crack down on Chinese malfeasance in the trade relationship, but the tariffs and the trade war are the wrong way to go,” offered Andrew Yang. “I think the president has been right to push back on China, but has done it in completely the wrong way,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D–Colo.). “Tariffs are taxes,” Buttigieg said, before criticizing Trump for being “fixated on the China relationship as if all that mattered was the export balance on dishwashers.”

That was basically the extent of the discussion.

Will anything change this week? Partially, that will depend on the questions being asked. The first debate appeared intentionally structured to sideline the incumbent as much as possible, giving the 20-member Democratic field an opportunity to clash with one another, rather than simply teaming-up to attack Trump.

Breaking into the open on an issue like trade will also require some courage from the candidates. Even before Trump came along, Democrats had turned away from the bipartisan consensus that had helped usher in the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and that stood up to President George W. Bush in the 2000s when he flirted with steel protectionism. By the end of the Barack Obama administration, however, many Democrats (including Warren) were opposing a Democratic administration’s attempt to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade deal meant as a bulwark against China.

What candidate might be willing to break with the party this week? Despite his previous comments, it probably won’t be Biden. As the clear frontrunner in a crowded field, the former Veep has little to gain from putting a target on his back. He is likely to keep playing it safe until after the primaries. Instead, look for a candidate like former congressman Beto O’Rourke to make the pro-trade play. O’Rourke is sinking in the polls and probably seeking a breakout moment—and since trade with Mexico is so critical for the Texas economy, it would make sense for the Texas candidate to embrace the issue.

If they are not going to follow the polls, the Democratic candidates should at least be willing to follow the economic data showing that voters are right to favor trade agreements. A 2017 analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade policy think tank, shows that international trade boosted American household incomes by about $18,000 per household since 1950—and that the gains flowed disproportionately to lower-income households. The Commerce Department says that more than 11 million American jobs are directly related to foreign investment or the export of American goods. And the mere existence of NAFTA boosts the U.S. economy by about 0.5 percent per year. There is no doubt that the past half-century of increasingly freer trade has made America better off.

Polls show that a majority of voters recognize the many benefits of trade. But in a campaign in which Democrats seem determined to outdo one another with offers of “free” healthcare and “free” college tuition, free trade may get ignored.

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America faces some big problems, from endless wars to congressional dysfunction to police abuse to the spiraling cost of health care, housing, and education. Now Josh Hawley, from his perch in the United States Senate, has decided to focus his precious attention on a problem that only the power of the federal government can solve: YouTube’s autoplay feature. No, I am not kidding. 

Today the Missouri Republican introduced a bill that would ban the feature in the name of fighting social media “addiction.” The bill, which Hawley has dubbed the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology—or SMART—Act, would also outlaw such features as infinite scroll and Snapchat’s “streaks,” which encourage users to engage in unbroken communications with friends. The bill would additionally require social media companies to install time-use dashboards, and it would give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Health and Human Services the power to regulate other features in the future. 

Even for Hawley, who has spent his short time in Congress pushing bills that would give the federal government more power to regulate large tech companies, this is remarkably petty. Hawley appears to believe wasting time on Facebook and Instagram is a problem so big it requires the federal government to solve.

You might not be a fan of social media (I certainly have my qualms), but it seems hard to view this as anything but a wild misuse of federal power—and potentially far more sweeping than the bill initially sounds. Hawley is proposing to empower federal agencies to regulate any and every design and interface decision made by a social media company in the name of protecting some nebulous concept of public health. It’s all too easy to imagine this being abused for political purposes to punish or elevate companies that have fallen out of favor with the government. Indeed, punishing social media companies that Hawley doesn’t like for the sin of creating products that people want to use seems like the point of the bill. This is legislation in pursuit of an obvious political vendetta. 

Hawley: “So, you admit that you’ve attempted to make your service functional and easy to use, in hopes that people would… use it more frequently?”
Tech: “Well… yes?”
Hawley: “YOUR FOUL SORCERY ENDS NOW, SVENGALI!"

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) July 30, 2019

It’s also based on a misleading representation of the underlying health issues. Framing the issue as one of addiction, as Hawley’s bill does, misrepresents the current medical consensus around heavy internet use. As Jeffrey Singer wrote for Reason earlier this year, researchers have not come to any firm consensus about whether the perception of heavy internet use—something difficult to pin down even when operating in good faith—constitutes addiction. Hawley’s bill effectively tasks the federal government with determining which tech features are good for you and which ones aren’t, which, given the federal government’s poor record when it comes to making determinations about what’s healthy, seems like a bad idea. 

Hawley has emerged as tech’s most outspoken congressional critic. That makes this bill a fairly revealing example of how he thinks not only about social media companies, but about the ordinary users he claims to want to protect. 

Over the past several months, Hawley has proposed bills banning video game loot boxes and requiring large social media companies to seek a federal certification of political neutrality in order to maintain their current legal protections. He signed a letter to the FTC seeking federal investigations into conservative “censorship” on large tech platforms (in the process evincing a fundamental misunderstanding of what censorship is). In May, he delivered a speech titled “The Big Tech Threat,” warning that tech companies are seeking to devour our attention and raising the question of whether they have any social value at all—as if the job of an elected official was to decide which industries are worthwhile and to eliminate any that doesn’t pass muster from the marketplace. 

Hawley has it in for big tech. But this is more than just a petty political vendetta against Facebook and its peers. It is a larger worldview, one that presumes individuals are inherently powerless, that they cannot make informed decisions on their own, and that the government, via legislation and regulation, must therefore step in to protect them from their own stupidity. It attributes wizard-like mind-control powers to tech companies that simply don’t exist, and it assumes that users are helpless to resist.  

Hawley’s bill even warns, in its introduction, that the “design choices” he wants to ban “interfere with the free choice of users.” But Hawley’s vision of free choice requires the federal government to intervene and make their choices for them, down to the smallest design detail.

The problem with Hawley’s bill isn’t just that it’s so pathetically trivial, or that it’s a waste of resources in the context of our larger challenges. It’s that it’s designed to treat Americans like weak-willed children who need a politician like Josh Hawley to tell them how to live their lives. For someone who claims to champion the idea of individual dignity, Hawley has an awfully condescending view of human agency. 

Hawley’s new bill probably won’t pass. Like most of Hawley’s anti-tech proposals so far, it’s stunt legislation designed primarily to raise public awareness and get press. That’s at least a little ironic for a bill that opens by declaring that “the business model for many internet companies, especially social media companies, is to capture as much of their users’ attention as possible.” He’s been in office less than a year, but so far, capturing people’s attention with time-wasting antics appears to be Josh Hawley’s business model too.

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