Category: reason

Strange Bedfellows Oppose Improving Maine’s Food Sovereignty Law


farmersmarkets

Maine lawmakers are considering a set of bills that would expand and improve the state’s already good food sovereignty law. But some unlikely foes oppose the changes.

As I detailed in a 2018 column, Maine’s food sovereignty law, adopted in 2017, allows local governments in the state to opt in to the state law by passing a local ordinance to exempt many direct-to-consumer food sales from burdensome state licensing and inspection requirements.

The food sovereignty movement began to emerge in Maine a decade ago in response to an absurd state law that required farmers who wished to sell as little as one chicken per year to spend tens of thousands of dollars to slaughter and process the bird. Supporters of the law, me included, consider food sovereignty an immediate expansion on the freedoms of Mainers and their right to economic choice.

To date, at least 86 cities and towns have opted in to the state’s popular food sovereignty law. That’s a fourfold increase from 2018.

Currently, two amendments to the law are being considered. The first, An Act To Clarify the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, would eliminate the current requirement that all sales must occur as “a  face-to-face  transaction… at the site of production.” That change would allow transactions instead to take place theoretically between buyers and sellers outside a home or farm and allow such sales to occur online, over the phone, at a farmers market, or in any other direct (rather than just face-to-face) manner. The second, An Act To Provide Equal Access to the Benefits of the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, would require counties to allow unincorporated areas inside their borders to take advantage of the food sovereignty law.

As the Bangor Daily News reported recently, these changes are intended to “make the state’s local food economy stronger by increasing opportunities for unlicensed home-based food businesses.”

Not everyone supports the amendments. While opposition to these food sovereignty amendments is coming from predictable foes—the state’s larger, licensed food businesses—it’s also coming from a surprising quarter: Maine’s farmers markets. They’re worried that sales of uninspected foods will give farmers markets and their vendors a bad name.

“I think there is a lot of value for an individual to be familiar with the way food is produced and to know if it has been produced in a facility that does or does not meet food safety rules,” Mark Guzzi, president of the Maine Federation of Farmers Markets, told the Daily News. “By limiting the site of sale to the site of production, you are allowing consumers to have a better understanding of where and how that food is produced [when the purveyor is unlicensed].”

Guzzi’s fears are unfounded. First, the number of farmers markets in Wyoming has grown by 70 percent since that state’s groundbreaking food freedom law took effect. (Food freedom laws are inherently better than food sovereignty laws because the former deregulate many food sales throughout a given state, while the latter apply only in the cities and towns that have opted in by passing a local ordinance.)

Second, there have been no reports of any foodborne illnesses caused by foods sold under Maine’s 4-year-old law. The exemplary food-safety record of Maine’s law tracks with the experiences under Wyoming’s food freedom law and the growing number of such laws in other states.

The complete absence to date of any reported cases of foodborne illness caused by uninspected foods sold under food sovereignty and food freedom laws is not the reason these laws should exist. After all, we don’t allow, say, ground beef to be sold only because it’s never sickened anyone. It has.

But the lack of foodborne illnesses is certainly evidence that critics of food freedom and food sovereignty were wrong when they predicted these laws would have a negative impact on food safety. Instead, the food-safety successes to date of food freedom and food sovereignty laws should cause fair-minded people to ask whether current federally mandated inspection processes truly make food—and consumers—safer.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3iHEIY9
via IFTTT

The Conversion of Thomas Sowell


riley

When Thomas Sowell arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1959 to begin his Ph.D. studies, Milton Friedman had been on the faculty for more than a decade. But Sowell hadn’t gone there to study under Friedman, and the University of Chicago hadn’t been his first choice. The original plan was to pursue his doctorate at Columbia University, where he had just earned his master’s degree, and study under another future Nobel economist, George Stigler.

As an undergraduate at Harvard in a course on the history of economic thought, Sowell had read an academic article by Stigler on the theories of the classical economist David Ricardo. Sowell was so taken by the subject matter, and so impressed by Stigler’s command of it, that he turned his own focus toward the history of ideas and resolved to do his graduate work at Columbia under Stigler’s guidance. After Stigler left Columbia in 1958 to join the faculty of the University of Chicago, Sowell followed him there.

Sowell hadn’t been a big fan of the intellectual atmosphere at Columbia or at Harvard, his undergraduate school, and he was looking forward to a change of scenery. At Harvard, “smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic,” he recalled. There was a tendency “to assume that certain things were so because we bright, good fellows all agreed that it was so.” Sowell had little patience for such elitism. His classmates seemed to think they “could rise above reasons, and that to me,” Sowell said, “was the difference between pride and arrogance, and between the rational and irrational.” Nor did he ever quite adjust to the social atmosphere in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I resented attempts by some thoughtless Harvardians to assimilate me, based on the assumption that the supreme honor they could bestow was to allow me to become like them,” he said. “I readily accepted all aspects of what Harvard had to offer that seemed worthwhile, and readily rejected all that struck me as nonsense. The fact that I was avidly reading W.E.B. Du Bois did not keep me from Shakespeare or Beethoven. Indeed, I noticed that Du Bois liked Shakespeare and Beethoven—and had attended Harvard.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the severity of the learning curve Sowell had faced when he entered college. It’s not just that he hadn’t been a full-time student in almost a decade. He also was unfamiliar with the basics of the academy to a degree that was startling but perhaps not unusual for someone who was the first in his family to reach seventh grade.

Before transferring to Harvard, he had attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C. “As an example of my academic naivete at this point, when I heard professors referred to as ‘doctor’ I thought they were physicians and marveled at their versatility in mastering both medicine and history or medicine and math,” he later wrote. “It came as a revelation to me that there was education beyond college, and it was some time before I was clear whether an M.A. was beyond a Ph.D. or vice versa. Certainly, I had no plans to get either.”

Sowell’s issues with his fellow undergraduates also may have stemmed to some degree from their age differences. He was 25 when he entered Harvard, had been on his own since leaving home at 17, and had already completed a stint in the Marines. Thus, he was not only older than the typical college freshman but also had significant experience living in the real world. His year at Columbia, a school he described as “a sort of watered-down version of Harvard intellectually,” was only a slight improvement.

By contrast, the University of Chicago was “itself,” he recalled, “and not an imitation of anything.” The Chicago economics department was extremely demanding, and the vetting was brutal, said Ross Emmett, an authority on the history of the Chicago school of economics. “During that period of time, Harvard took in 25–27 students and graduated 25 of them, whereas Chicago took in 70 students and graduated 25 of them.” The department also had a reputation for being conservative, and Sowell’s political views at the time were, in his words, “still strongly left wing and very much under the influence of Marx.” Nevertheless, he had no qualms about leaving Columbia for Chicago: “I was far more impressed by the fact that we shared similar intellectual values.” Graduate economics “is a technical field and not an ideological battleground,” he reasoned. “As I came to understand the Chicago views on economic policy, they seemed less and less like any conservatism that I knew about.”

The interest in Karl Marx had started in Sowell’s late teens, after he purchased a secondhand set of encyclopedias that included an entry on the German philosopher. It’s not hard to contemplate why a black person born during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow South and then raised in urban ghettos might find the precepts of Marxism persuasive. The cruel capitalists, the greedy bourgeoisie, the oppressed masses, the coming revolution that will finally relieve the struggling proletariat from despair—this outlook had a certain appeal to Sowell. “These ideas seemed to explain so much and they explained it in a way to which my grim experience made me very receptive,” he later wrote.

Back then, young Tommy was eking out a living as a messenger for Western Union. “When I left home, I had not finished high school and had a number of these low-level jobs,” he said. “It was a trying time. I had always been in school and so on, and this was starting at the very bottom.”

His job was located in Lower Manhattan, and after work he usually took the subway back up to Harlem, where most of New York City’s black population lived. Occasionally, however, Sowell would ride home atop one of the city’s double-decker buses and marvel at the shifting urban landscape as he headed north. The bus traveled up 5th Avenue, past the upscale department stores that catered to the wealthy. At 57th Street it would turn left, pass by Carnegie Hall, snake around Columbus Circle, proceed up Broadway, and continue north on Riverside Drive through affluent residential neighborhoods. “And then somewhere around 120th Street, it would go across a viaduct and onto 135th Street, where you had the tenements,” he said. “And that’s where I got off. The contrast between that and what I’d been seeing most of the trip really baffled me. And Marx seemed to explain it.” In his 1985 book on Marxism, Sowell wrote that the philosopher “took the overwhelming complexity of the real world and made the parts fall into place, in a way that was intellectually exhilarating.”

Sowell would self-identify as a Marxist throughout his 20s. His senior thesis at Harvard was on Marxian economics, and his master’s thesis at Columbia was on Marxian business cycle theory. Even his first scholarly publication, in the March 1960 issue of American Economic Review, was on the writings of Karl Marx. But like many others who are attracted to Marxist philosophy in their youth, Sowell would abandon it as he became older and more experienced.

It helped that he was never a doctrinaire thinker to begin with and kept an open mind. “I read everything across the political spectrum” in those days, he said. “I understood that there were reasons why people have different views, as I see even today, that it’s not just a question of being on the side of the angels and against the forces of evil.” Even “at the height of my Marxism,” he continued, “I read William F. Buckley and Edmund Burke, because I’d gotten in school, particularly in a ninth-grade science class, the idea of evidence, the importance of evidence and the need to test evidence. That was always there.”

Perhaps that’s what made him such a good fit years later for Chicago, where the importance of thinking empirically wasn’t merely stressed but written in stone. The University of Chicago’s Social Science Research Building, which housed the economics department, had an edited version of Lord Kelvin’s dictum etched over the entrance: “When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.” The idea was that theorizing is necessary but insufficient. Data and evidence are needed to verify what we think we know.

Sowell had been thinking like a Chicago economist before he ever set foot on campus.

Friedman and Stigler were hardly the only scholars of future renown that Sowell was exposed to in his student days, even if he didn’t always appreciate it at the time. His professors also included Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek, who would both win Nobels and profoundly impact Sowell’s own scholarship. Becker did pioneering research on the economics of racial bias, and Sowell told me that “anything that dealt with discrimination on my part was within the framework of what Becker had said.” Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions, which he and other economists count among his best professional work, was inspired by a 1945 academic paper by Hayek on how societies function.

Still, there is a case to be made that no one had a greater impact on Sowell’s career path than Stigler and Friedman. They were his instructors and his mentors. They served on his dissertation committee and even helped him with material needs. When a problem arose with Sowell’s student aid and he contemplated leaving graduate school to find a job, it was Stigler who, without Sowell’s knowledge, secured a generous grant for promising academics from the Earhart Foundation. Sowell later said that grant “enabled me to complete the studies that led to my receiving a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and to having a career as an economist.” And it was Friedman who, years later, brought Sowell to the attention of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he became a senior fellow in 1980 after he left teaching. Both Friedman and Stigler saw something in Sowell early on that led them to nurture his development as a scholar.

Richard Ware, the longtime head of the Earhart Foundation, recalled receiving the grant request for Sowell. The foundation held Stigler and Friedman in such high regard that the Sowell recommendation was basically rubber-stamped. “When he got nominated, the letter was very short. I don’t know whether Stigler signed it or Friedman or both of them,” said Ware. “They nominated him for the fellowship, and they said he’s a socialist, but he’s too smart to remain one too long. That was the way they put it to the trustees.”

Given that some nine winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics have been Earhart fellows, the foundation obviously had a nose for talent. “Friedman and Stigler say give him a fellowship, we give him a fellowship,” said Ware. “That’s the way we did the program, totally on [that] basis. I think Tom should have a Nobel Prize. I’m not sure he’ll ever get one.”

According to Sowell, he didn’t abandon socialism because he was bamboozled by his Chicago professors. What ultimately began his drift to the political right was a summer job at the U.S. Department of Labor in the summer of 1960: “The job paid more than I had ever made before, enabling me to enjoy a few amenities of life,” he said. “Inadvertently, it also played a role as a turning point in my ideological orientation. After a year at the University of Chicago, including a course from Milton Friedman, I remained as much of a Marxist as I had been before arriving. However, the experience of seeing government at work from the inside and at a professional level started me to rethinking the whole notion of government as a potentially benevolent force in the economy and society. From there on, as I learned more and more from both experience and research, my adherence to the visions and doctrines of the left began to erode rapidly with the passage of time.”

At the Labor Department, Sowell was tasked with analyzing the sugar industry in Puerto Rico, where the U.S. government ran a program that set minimum wages for workers. He noticed that over a certain period, as the minimum wage had been raised, employment had fallen. At the time, he was a supporter of minimum wage laws out of a belief that they helped the poor earn a decent living. But faced with the facts, he started to wonder whether minimum wage laws were pricing people out of jobs.

He also noticed that his coworkers, the department’s permanent staff, didn’t much care either way. “It forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of those for whom a program has been set up,” he wrote. “Administration of the minimum wage law was a major part of the Labor Department’s budget and employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there. Whether or not minimum wages benefited workers may have been my overriding question, but it was clearly not theirs.”

It was this realization, not a lecture at the University of Chicago, that made him “want to re-think the larger question of the role of government in general,” he recalled. “The more other government programs I looked into, over the years, the harder I found it to believe that they were a net benefit to society.”

Sowell came to his free market beliefs by way of reflection and observation. But then, so did Friedman and Stigler, who both spoke of having liberal political inclinations in their student days. Sowell’s readers often express surprise when they discover that he started out as a Marxist, but Sowell said he suspected that at least half his colleagues at the conservative Hoover Institution were also on the left in their 20s.

That’s certainly true of any number of notable black dissident thinkers, from Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele to Walter Williams, Glenn Loury, and Robert Woodson, who have faced regular attacks from black liberals and other critics often far more interested in questioning their motives than in addressing their arguments.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3whPCHV
via IFTTT

The Conversion of Thomas Sowell


riley

When Thomas Sowell arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1959 to begin his Ph.D. studies, Milton Friedman had been on the faculty for more than a decade. But Sowell hadn’t gone there to study under Friedman, and the University of Chicago hadn’t been his first choice. The original plan was to pursue his doctorate at Columbia University, where he had just earned his master’s degree, and study under another future Nobel economist, George Stigler.

As an undergraduate at Harvard in a course on the history of economic thought, Sowell had read an academic article by Stigler on the theories of the classical economist David Ricardo. Sowell was so taken by the subject matter, and so impressed by Stigler’s command of it, that he turned his own focus toward the history of ideas and resolved to do his graduate work at Columbia under Stigler’s guidance. After Stigler left Columbia in 1958 to join the faculty of the University of Chicago, Sowell followed him there.

Sowell hadn’t been a big fan of the intellectual atmosphere at Columbia or at Harvard, his undergraduate school, and he was looking forward to a change of scenery. At Harvard, “smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic,” he recalled. There was a tendency “to assume that certain things were so because we bright, good fellows all agreed that it was so.” Sowell had little patience for such elitism. His classmates seemed to think they “could rise above reasons, and that to me,” Sowell said, “was the difference between pride and arrogance, and between the rational and irrational.” Nor did he ever quite adjust to the social atmosphere in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I resented attempts by some thoughtless Harvardians to assimilate me, based on the assumption that the supreme honor they could bestow was to allow me to become like them,” he said. “I readily accepted all aspects of what Harvard had to offer that seemed worthwhile, and readily rejected all that struck me as nonsense. The fact that I was avidly reading W.E.B. Du Bois did not keep me from Shakespeare or Beethoven. Indeed, I noticed that Du Bois liked Shakespeare and Beethoven—and had attended Harvard.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the severity of the learning curve Sowell had faced when he entered college. It’s not just that he hadn’t been a full-time student in almost a decade. He also was unfamiliar with the basics of the academy to a degree that was startling but perhaps not unusual for someone who was the first in his family to reach seventh grade.

Before transferring to Harvard, he had attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C. “As an example of my academic naivete at this point, when I heard professors referred to as ‘doctor’ I thought they were physicians and marveled at their versatility in mastering both medicine and history or medicine and math,” he later wrote. “It came as a revelation to me that there was education beyond college, and it was some time before I was clear whether an M.A. was beyond a Ph.D. or vice versa. Certainly, I had no plans to get either.”

Sowell’s issues with his fellow undergraduates also may have stemmed to some degree from their age differences. He was 25 when he entered Harvard, had been on his own since leaving home at 17, and had already completed a stint in the Marines. Thus, he was not only older than the typical college freshman but also had significant experience living in the real world. His year at Columbia, a school he described as “a sort of watered-down version of Harvard intellectually,” was only a slight improvement.

By contrast, the University of Chicago was “itself,” he recalled, “and not an imitation of anything.” The Chicago economics department was extremely demanding, and the vetting was brutal, said Ross Emmett, an authority on the history of the Chicago school of economics. “During that period of time, Harvard took in 25–27 students and graduated 25 of them, whereas Chicago took in 70 students and graduated 25 of them.” The department also had a reputation for being conservative, and Sowell’s political views at the time were, in his words, “still strongly left wing and very much under the influence of Marx.” Nevertheless, he had no qualms about leaving Columbia for Chicago: “I was far more impressed by the fact that we shared similar intellectual values.” Graduate economics “is a technical field and not an ideological battleground,” he reasoned. “As I came to understand the Chicago views on economic policy, they seemed less and less like any conservatism that I knew about.”

The interest in Karl Marx had started in Sowell’s late teens, after he purchased a secondhand set of encyclopedias that included an entry on the German philosopher. It’s not hard to contemplate why a black person born during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow South and then raised in urban ghettos might find the precepts of Marxism persuasive. The cruel capitalists, the greedy bourgeoisie, the oppressed masses, the coming revolution that will finally relieve the struggling proletariat from despair—this outlook had a certain appeal to Sowell. “These ideas seemed to explain so much and they explained it in a way to which my grim experience made me very receptive,” he later wrote.

Back then, young Tommy was eking out a living as a messenger for Western Union. “When I left home, I had not finished high school and had a number of these low-level jobs,” he said. “It was a trying time. I had always been in school and so on, and this was starting at the very bottom.”

His job was located in Lower Manhattan, and after work he usually took the subway back up to Harlem, where most of New York City’s black population lived. Occasionally, however, Sowell would ride home atop one of the city’s double-decker buses and marvel at the shifting urban landscape as he headed north. The bus traveled up 5th Avenue, past the upscale department stores that catered to the wealthy. At 57th Street it would turn left, pass by Carnegie Hall, snake around Columbus Circle, proceed up Broadway, and continue north on Riverside Drive through affluent residential neighborhoods. “And then somewhere around 120th Street, it would go across a viaduct and onto 135th Street, where you had the tenements,” he said. “And that’s where I got off. The contrast between that and what I’d been seeing most of the trip really baffled me. And Marx seemed to explain it.” In his 1985 book on Marxism, Sowell wrote that the philosopher “took the overwhelming complexity of the real world and made the parts fall into place, in a way that was intellectually exhilarating.”

Sowell would self-identify as a Marxist throughout his 20s. His senior thesis at Harvard was on Marxian economics, and his master’s thesis at Columbia was on Marxian business cycle theory. Even his first scholarly publication, in the March 1960 issue of American Economic Review, was on the writings of Karl Marx. But like many others who are attracted to Marxist philosophy in their youth, Sowell would abandon it as he became older and more experienced.

It helped that he was never a doctrinaire thinker to begin with and kept an open mind. “I read everything across the political spectrum” in those days, he said. “I understood that there were reasons why people have different views, as I see even today, that it’s not just a question of being on the side of the angels and against the forces of evil.” Even “at the height of my Marxism,” he continued, “I read William F. Buckley and Edmund Burke, because I’d gotten in school, particularly in a ninth-grade science class, the idea of evidence, the importance of evidence and the need to test evidence. That was always there.”

Perhaps that’s what made him such a good fit years later for Chicago, where the importance of thinking empirically wasn’t merely stressed but written in stone. The University of Chicago’s Social Science Research Building, which housed the economics department, had an edited version of Lord Kelvin’s dictum etched over the entrance: “When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.” The idea was that theorizing is necessary but insufficient. Data and evidence are needed to verify what we think we know.

Sowell had been thinking like a Chicago economist before he ever set foot on campus.

Friedman and Stigler were hardly the only scholars of future renown that Sowell was exposed to in his student days, even if he didn’t always appreciate it at the time. His professors also included Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek, who would both win Nobels and profoundly impact Sowell’s own scholarship. Becker did pioneering research on the economics of racial bias, and Sowell told me that “anything that dealt with discrimination on my part was within the framework of what Becker had said.” Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions, which he and other economists count among his best professional work, was inspired by a 1945 academic paper by Hayek on how societies function.

Still, there is a case to be made that no one had a greater impact on Sowell’s career path than Stigler and Friedman. They were his instructors and his mentors. They served on his dissertation committee and even helped him with material needs. When a problem arose with Sowell’s student aid and he contemplated leaving graduate school to find a job, it was Stigler who, without Sowell’s knowledge, secured a generous grant for promising academics from the Earhart Foundation. Sowell later said that grant “enabled me to complete the studies that led to my receiving a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and to having a career as an economist.” And it was Friedman who, years later, brought Sowell to the attention of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he became a senior fellow in 1980 after he left teaching. Both Friedman and Stigler saw something in Sowell early on that led them to nurture his development as a scholar.

Richard Ware, the longtime head of the Earhart Foundation, recalled receiving the grant request for Sowell. The foundation held Stigler and Friedman in such high regard that the Sowell recommendation was basically rubber-stamped. “When he got nominated, the letter was very short. I don’t know whether Stigler signed it or Friedman or both of them,” said Ware. “They nominated him for the fellowship, and they said he’s a socialist, but he’s too smart to remain one too long. That was the way they put it to the trustees.”

Given that some nine winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics have been Earhart fellows, the foundation obviously had a nose for talent. “Friedman and Stigler say give him a fellowship, we give him a fellowship,” said Ware. “That’s the way we did the program, totally on [that] basis. I think Tom should have a Nobel Prize. I’m not sure he’ll ever get one.”

According to Sowell, he didn’t abandon socialism because he was bamboozled by his Chicago professors. What ultimately began his drift to the political right was a summer job at the U.S. Department of Labor in the summer of 1960: “The job paid more than I had ever made before, enabling me to enjoy a few amenities of life,” he said. “Inadvertently, it also played a role as a turning point in my ideological orientation. After a year at the University of Chicago, including a course from Milton Friedman, I remained as much of a Marxist as I had been before arriving. However, the experience of seeing government at work from the inside and at a professional level started me to rethinking the whole notion of government as a potentially benevolent force in the economy and society. From there on, as I learned more and more from both experience and research, my adherence to the visions and doctrines of the left began to erode rapidly with the passage of time.”

At the Labor Department, Sowell was tasked with analyzing the sugar industry in Puerto Rico, where the U.S. government ran a program that set minimum wages for workers. He noticed that over a certain period, as the minimum wage had been raised, employment had fallen. At the time, he was a supporter of minimum wage laws out of a belief that they helped the poor earn a decent living. But faced with the facts, he started to wonder whether minimum wage laws were pricing people out of jobs.

He also noticed that his coworkers, the department’s permanent staff, didn’t much care either way. “It forced me to realize that government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of those for whom a program has been set up,” he wrote. “Administration of the minimum wage law was a major part of the Labor Department’s budget and employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there. Whether or not minimum wages benefited workers may have been my overriding question, but it was clearly not theirs.”

It was this realization, not a lecture at the University of Chicago, that made him “want to re-think the larger question of the role of government in general,” he recalled. “The more other government programs I looked into, over the years, the harder I found it to believe that they were a net benefit to society.”

Sowell came to his free market beliefs by way of reflection and observation. But then, so did Friedman and Stigler, who both spoke of having liberal political inclinations in their student days. Sowell’s readers often express surprise when they discover that he started out as a Marxist, but Sowell said he suspected that at least half his colleagues at the conservative Hoover Institution were also on the left in their 20s.

That’s certainly true of any number of notable black dissident thinkers, from Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele to Walter Williams, Glenn Loury, and Robert Woodson, who have faced regular attacks from black liberals and other critics often far more interested in questioning their motives than in addressing their arguments.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3whPCHV
via IFTTT

Feds Seize CNN Reporter’s Data, Then Gag CNN


BarbaraStarr

On Wednesday, CNN Executive Vice President and General Counsel David Vigilante made a revelation sure to startle those unaware of the state’s vast power to not just seize information from journalists but bully their employers into silence about it under penalty of jail time.

“Since July 17, 2020,” Vigilante wrote, “I have been bound by a gag order or a sealing order that prohibited me from discussing, or even acknowledging, that the government was seeking to compel the disclosure of the professional email communications of CNN reporter Barbara Starr.”

The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr had been requesting email header data and phone logs of Starr, a Pentagon reporter, dating from June 1 to July 31 of 2017, for reasons that are still unknown to any third parties aside from some federal judges operating a secret court. (Starr herself was not the target of the investigation, the feds confirmed to reporters.)

The Trump administration launched a crackdown in 2017 against national security-related leaks, an effort that led to the secret seizure of three Washington Post reporters’ phone records, which was revealed only last month. In doing so, former President Donald Trump’s DOJ prosecutors followed the rules and legal justifications established by their predecessors in the Obama administration, which prosecuted more leakers than every prior presidency combined, even charging Fox News White House chief James Rosen as “at the very least, either…an aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator.”

A CNN piece last month laid out the chilling and expansive framework for secret government seizures:

Under DOJ regulations, the department can secretly obtain journalists’ records through a court order, without the journalists knowing. […]

“The level of secrecy is something we’ve been very focused on for years. From our perspective it impacts reporter source privilege and the protections for the reporter,” said Katie Townsend, legal director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “These things are routinely filed under seal and kept under seal and maintained under seal indefinitely.” […]

DOJ policy also allows prosecutors to obtain journalists’ communications without their knowledge through the courts—if the attorney general signs off and the Justice Department determines the case falls under “extraordinary measures,” such as harm to national security, and after all other reasonable attempts have been made to obtain the information elsewhere.

“On paper, DOJ established these guidelines and levels of approval that appear fairly stringent,” CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig said. “But it is entirely and solely within DOJ’s discretion to seek issuance of a subpoena.”

The process in some ways is similar to how federal investigators can secretly obtain communications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act through the FISA Court.

As with the FISA Court, the secrecy of these proceedings is an excellent tell that the underlying legal justifications for bulldozing Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable government search and seizure are quite poor. Indeed, one of the only judges to lay eyes on the DOJ’s reasoning for harassing CNN concluded that it was based on “speculative predictions, assumptions, and scenarios unanchored in any facts.”

Commented CNN’s Vigilante: “This was the first characterization of the evidence we had seen, and it was stunning: After months of secret proceedings and heavy-handed enforcement tactics, a neutral judge said that, in large part, the emperor had no clothes.”

The CNN general counsel seems to think such doubly punitive measures—the seizure, and the stifle—are rare in the journalism and communications world. “I was aware that such secret orders were used by DOJ on matters of national security,” he writes. “However, in the 20 years I have been at CNN, we have never been subject to one. That is likely because the law and existing DOJ regulations establish (at least on paper) a very high bar for such an order to be issued directly against a media organization.”

Well, not exactly. As Nick Gillespie and I wrote six years ago, “From press accounts of similar actions at other news publications and social media sites, we know that it is increasingly common for the federal government to demand user information from publications and websites while also stifling their speech rights with gag orders and letters requesting ‘voluntary’ confidentiality.”

We were then especially conscious of the practice because it had just happened to us. On June 2, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sent Reason a grand jury subpoena demanding personal information of six people who had left hyperbolic comments about the judge presiding over the controversial federal conviction and sentencing of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

The comments ranged from speculative fantasy violence (“judges like these that should be taken out back and shot”) to darkly referential humor (“Why waste ammunition? Wood chippers get the message across clearly. Especially if you feed them in feet first”), to 100 percent normal Internet speech (“I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman”). None represented a true threat, yet that’s how U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara took it.

From our account:

The original subpoena, received late on Tuesday, June 2, did not come with a gag order. However, it came with a letter from Bharara and Assistant U.S. Attorney Niketh Velamoor requesting that we refrain from informing any other parties about the subpoena so as to “preserve the confidentiality of the investigation,” and that we notify his office in advance if we intended to do so, even though it also said that we were under “no obligation” to keep the subpoena confidential. […]

So we decided, against the government’s request but well within our legal rights, to…notify and share the full subpoena with the six targeted commenters so that they would have a chance to assert their First Amendment rights to anonymity and defend themselves legally against the order.

At about 10:30 am ET on Thursday, June 4, our attorney Gayle Sproul (of Levine, Sullivan, Koch, & Schulz) called Velamoor to discuss the subpoena. The call did not go well. Sproul asked Velamoor to consider scaling back the scope of the subpoena by omitting the more benign commenters. Velamoor said simply, “No.” Then Sproul informed him that we would be notifying our commenters about the subpoena to give them the chance to defend their rights to remain anonymous, and that we would not comply with the subpoena as it related to any commenters who moved to quash the subpoena before our compliance deadline. Sproul explained to him that there is case law firmly establishing that these commenters have the right to speak anonymously, and that we would withhold the information of anyone fighting the subpoena. Velamoor disputed that any such free speech rights exist. He asked that we delay notifying the commenters so he could get a court order prohibiting us from disclosing the subpoena to them. We refused. Sproul pointed out that we were perfectly within our rights to share the subpoena given the law and the wording of his own letter. Velamoor then suggested that Reason was “coming close” to interfering with the grand jury investigation. The call ended abruptly.

We notified our commenters immediately, and less than seven hours later came the gag order, preventing us from discussing even the existence of the original subpoena to any outside third party for the next six months. Because none of the six commenters decided to fight the case, and because successfully challenging such grand jury subpoenas is virtually unheard of, we grudgingly complied with the original government records request. But not before word of Bharara’s heavy-handed response leaked out, generating a tremendous amount of media criticism, which surely helped us get the gag order lifted.

CNN had no such luck, regaining its free speech rights only after the DOJ-mandated 90 days following compliance with the (somewhat scaled-down) records request. “I’ve never encountered a situation like this,” Vigilante told his colleagues after getting his tongue back. “I felt like there was a sword of Damocles over me for the year.”

The CNN general counsel also only learned last month that “the government had also been sweeping other electronic accounts where Barbara communicated about work-related matters. CNN was afforded no opportunity to protect any communications that were maintained by these third-party hosts. And other than knowing none of the other accounts were held by our parent company, AT&T, we have no way of knowing how these responses were handled.”

In fact, as we reported here six years ago, while the increasing but still comparatively rare open clashes between the DOJ and news organizations tend to make headlines, the real data collection is happening every day, quietly, in the form of requests and subpoenas to social media companies and other third-party vendors. More:

There has been a mounting conflict between the values of free speech and constitutional due process, with government making increasing demands–often under threat of punishment–for all sorts of information from innocent citizens. Coupled with the rise of a secretive and pervasive surveillance state, this tension means that Americans have no way of knowing just how unfree their speech really is.

While it is impossible to fully ascertain the frequency of information requests from local, state, and federal law enforcement, there is every reason to believe websites are subjected to thousands of demands each year. It is also not clear how other websites interpret the type of letter requesting “voluntary” confidentiality that Reason received. How often is that letter sent along with subpoenas? And how often does it achieve its intended effect of securing silence? In other words, does it have the same effect as a gag order?

In 2013, for instance, Mother Jones reported that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft have between them received “tens of thousands of requests for user data from the US government annually,” covering hundreds of thousands of accounts. Using corporate transparency reports, the magazine estimated that the companies complied with the demands between 72 percent and 89 percent of the time, and that it’s impossible to know how many of those requests were filled without the affected users ever knowing their information had been targeted.

Officials from CNN, the Washington Post, and The New York Times are reportedly scheduled to meet next week with Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss the DOJ’s guidelines and practice when it comes to seizing the data of journalists who are not targets of any investigation. In a free society, and with a government that took seriously its duty to secure Americans’ constitutional rights, that would lead to an abolition of such Fourth Amendment transgressions altogether. Alas, we are far away from any such world.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/35clXnz
via IFTTT

Feds Seize CNN Reporter’s Data, Then Gag CNN


BarbaraStarr

On Wednesday, CNN Executive Vice President and General Counsel David Vigilante made a revelation sure to startle those unaware of the state’s vast power to not just seize information from journalists but bully their employers into silence about it under penalty of jail time.

“Since July 17, 2020,” Vigilante wrote, “I have been bound by a gag order or a sealing order that prohibited me from discussing, or even acknowledging, that the government was seeking to compel the disclosure of the professional email communications of CNN reporter Barbara Starr.”

The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr had been requesting email header data and phone logs of Starr, a Pentagon reporter, dating from June 1 to July 31 of 2017, for reasons that are still unknown to any third parties aside from some federal judges operating a secret court. (Starr herself was not the target of the investigation, the feds confirmed to reporters.)

The Trump administration launched a crackdown in 2017 against national security-related leaks, an effort that led to the secret seizure of three Washington Post reporters’ phone records, which was revealed only last month. In doing so, former President Donald Trump’s DOJ prosecutors followed the rules and legal justifications established by their predecessors in the Obama administration, which prosecuted more leakers than every prior presidency combined, even charging Fox News White House chief James Rosen as “at the very least, either…an aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator.”

A CNN piece last month laid out the chilling and expansive framework for secret government seizures:

Under DOJ regulations, the department can secretly obtain journalists’ records through a court order, without the journalists knowing. […]

“The level of secrecy is something we’ve been very focused on for years. From our perspective it impacts reporter source privilege and the protections for the reporter,” said Katie Townsend, legal director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “These things are routinely filed under seal and kept under seal and maintained under seal indefinitely.” […]

DOJ policy also allows prosecutors to obtain journalists’ communications without their knowledge through the courts—if the attorney general signs off and the Justice Department determines the case falls under “extraordinary measures,” such as harm to national security, and after all other reasonable attempts have been made to obtain the information elsewhere.

“On paper, DOJ established these guidelines and levels of approval that appear fairly stringent,” CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig said. “But it is entirely and solely within DOJ’s discretion to seek issuance of a subpoena.”

The process in some ways is similar to how federal investigators can secretly obtain communications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act through the FISA Court.

As with the FISA Court, the secrecy of these proceedings is an excellent tell that the underlying legal justifications for bulldozing Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable government search and seizure are quite poor. Indeed, one of the only judges to lay eyes on the DOJ’s reasoning for harassing CNN concluded that it was based on “speculative predictions, assumptions, and scenarios unanchored in any facts.”

Commented CNN’s Vigilante: “This was the first characterization of the evidence we had seen, and it was stunning: After months of secret proceedings and heavy-handed enforcement tactics, a neutral judge said that, in large part, the emperor had no clothes.”

The CNN general counsel seems to think such doubly punitive measures—the seizure, and the stifle—are rare in the journalism and communications world. “I was aware that such secret orders were used by DOJ on matters of national security,” he writes. “However, in the 20 years I have been at CNN, we have never been subject to one. That is likely because the law and existing DOJ regulations establish (at least on paper) a very high bar for such an order to be issued directly against a media organization.”

Well, not exactly. As Nick Gillespie and I wrote six years ago, “From press accounts of similar actions at other news publications and social media sites, we know that it is increasingly common for the federal government to demand user information from publications and websites while also stifling their speech rights with gag orders and letters requesting ‘voluntary’ confidentiality.”

We were then especially conscious of the practice because it had just happened to us. On June 2, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sent Reason a grand jury subpoena demanding personal information of six people who had left hyperbolic comments about the judge presiding over the controversial federal conviction and sentencing of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

The comments ranged from speculative fantasy violence (“judges like these that should be taken out back and shot”) to darkly referential humor (“Why waste ammunition? Wood chippers get the message across clearly. Especially if you feed them in feet first”), to 100 percent normal Internet speech (“I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman”). None represented a true threat, yet that’s how U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara took it.

From our account:

The original subpoena, received late on Tuesday, June 2, did not come with a gag order. However, it came with a letter from Bharara and Assistant U.S. Attorney Niketh Velamoor requesting that we refrain from informing any other parties about the subpoena so as to “preserve the confidentiality of the investigation,” and that we notify his office in advance if we intended to do so, even though it also said that we were under “no obligation” to keep the subpoena confidential. […]

So we decided, against the government’s request but well within our legal rights, to…notify and share the full subpoena with the six targeted commenters so that they would have a chance to assert their First Amendment rights to anonymity and defend themselves legally against the order.

At about 10:30 am ET on Thursday, June 4, our attorney Gayle Sproul (of Levine, Sullivan, Koch, & Schulz) called Velamoor to discuss the subpoena. The call did not go well. Sproul asked Velamoor to consider scaling back the scope of the subpoena by omitting the more benign commenters. Velamoor said simply, “No.” Then Sproul informed him that we would be notifying our commenters about the subpoena to give them the chance to defend their rights to remain anonymous, and that we would not comply with the subpoena as it related to any commenters who moved to quash the subpoena before our compliance deadline. Sproul explained to him that there is case law firmly establishing that these commenters have the right to speak anonymously, and that we would withhold the information of anyone fighting the subpoena. Velamoor disputed that any such free speech rights exist. He asked that we delay notifying the commenters so he could get a court order prohibiting us from disclosing the subpoena to them. We refused. Sproul pointed out that we were perfectly within our rights to share the subpoena given the law and the wording of his own letter. Velamoor then suggested that Reason was “coming close” to interfering with the grand jury investigation. The call ended abruptly.

We notified our commenters immediately, and less than seven hours later came the gag order, preventing us from discussing even the existence of the original subpoena to any outside third party for the next six months. Because none of the six commenters decided to fight the case, and because successfully challenging such grand jury subpoenas is virtually unheard of, we grudgingly complied with the original government records request. But not before word of Bharara’s heavy-handed response leaked out, generating a tremendous amount of media criticism, which surely helped us get the gag order lifted.

CNN had no such luck, regaining its free speech rights only after the DOJ-mandated 90 days following compliance with the (somewhat scaled-down) records request. “I’ve never encountered a situation like this,” Vigilante told his colleagues after getting his tongue back. “I felt like there was a sword of Damocles over me for the year.”

The CNN general counsel also only learned last month that “the government had also been sweeping other electronic accounts where Barbara communicated about work-related matters. CNN was afforded no opportunity to protect any communications that were maintained by these third-party hosts. And other than knowing none of the other accounts were held by our parent company, AT&T, we have no way of knowing how these responses were handled.”

In fact, as we reported here six years ago, while the increasing but still comparatively rare open clashes between the DOJ and news organizations tend to make headlines, the real data collection is happening every day, quietly, in the form of requests and subpoenas to social media companies and other third-party vendors. More:

There has been a mounting conflict between the values of free speech and constitutional due process, with government making increasing demands–often under threat of punishment–for all sorts of information from innocent citizens. Coupled with the rise of a secretive and pervasive surveillance state, this tension means that Americans have no way of knowing just how unfree their speech really is.

While it is impossible to fully ascertain the frequency of information requests from local, state, and federal law enforcement, there is every reason to believe websites are subjected to thousands of demands each year. It is also not clear how other websites interpret the type of letter requesting “voluntary” confidentiality that Reason received. How often is that letter sent along with subpoenas? And how often does it achieve its intended effect of securing silence? In other words, does it have the same effect as a gag order?

In 2013, for instance, Mother Jones reported that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft have between them received “tens of thousands of requests for user data from the US government annually,” covering hundreds of thousands of accounts. Using corporate transparency reports, the magazine estimated that the companies complied with the demands between 72 percent and 89 percent of the time, and that it’s impossible to know how many of those requests were filled without the affected users ever knowing their information had been targeted.

Officials from CNN, the Washington Post, and The New York Times are reportedly scheduled to meet next week with Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss the DOJ’s guidelines and practice when it comes to seizing the data of journalists who are not targets of any investigation. In a free society, and with a government that took seriously its duty to secure Americans’ constitutional rights, that would lead to an abolition of such Fourth Amendment transgressions altogether. Alas, we are far away from any such world.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/35clXnz
via IFTTT

The FBI Returned This Innocent Couple’s Safe Deposit Box. It Refuses To Give Back Many Others—and Is Trying To Seize $85 Million in Cash.


snitkos

“The silence is deafening,” said attorney Jennifer Snitko, who briefly choked up on Thursday as she exited the West Los Angeles Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard, home to the FBI’s area field office.

She’d just piled into a small interrogation room to meet with two agents. Rifling through a brown paper bag, she furnished a series of documents and items recently withdrawn from sterile bags marked EVIDENCE. None seemed more out of place than a folded, thin white paper with a cross. It was a baptismal certificate.

“Evidence of what?” asks her husband Paul Snitko.

They’re still not sure. Jennifer wasn’t there to defend a client. It was her and her husband in the hot seat, tasked with proving that they were worthy of retrieving a trove of deeply personal items that the FBI seized about three months ago—without a warrant—from the U.S. Private Vaults (USPV) in Beverly Hills, California.

Eric Boehm, who reported this story for Reason last month, notes that on March 22, law enforcement officials with the bureau raided the establishment as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the business itself. The warrant allowed agents to confiscate a laundry list of things: the company’s security cameras, computers, the steel frames that nest the containers. Deemed off-limits: “a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safe-deposit boxes.”

The agents were unfazed. They did it anyway, wantonly rummaging through the personal property in approximately 800 boxes—belonging to people who were not suspected of committing any crimes—and then holding those items hostage. (If you feel like getting mad today, feel free to watch them in action.)

“It’s changed me,” says Jennifer. “The emotional impact this has had on me is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced….To have this type of sustained stress, insecurity, uncertainty as to what’s happening next…to constantly have to be making this a priority in your mind to get your stuff back is just, it’s not only emotionally draining.” She pauses. “I don’t even know how to describe it….I will not look at life the same.”

Paul’s reaction has admittedly been a bit more erratic. “There was the shock, and the anger, and then the extraordinary anxiety that came the day after I read [about the raid],” referencing a Los Angeles Times article in April detailing the search—which is how he found out about it. His apprehension makes sense for obvious reasons. Yet that’s only exacerbated by the fact that the piece partially reads like an FBI press release, centered around prosecutorial allegations that agents seized the bulk of the property from “drug dealers” who were anonymously allowed to “stash guns, fentanyl, and stacks of $100 bills in security boxes.”

In the Snitkos’ box, along with the baptismal certificate: a pilot’s log, heirloom jewelry, collectible coins, a marriage certificate, a birth certificate.

The day after he read it, “I woke up,” he says, “and I was looking at the ceiling, and my heart was racing, and I’m like ‘Now what?’ The FBI has my stuff. Where is it? Why do they have it? How long are they going to keep it? Am I a criminal? You start to make ridiculous assessments like that.” He notes that he fell into a depression after processing the news. 

“Not only was my stuff taken without just cause…It was taken by my own government, and they were asking me to prove my innocence and subject myself to an investigation to get my stuff back, which was unlawfully taken to begin with, and had no evidentiary value.”

Perhaps most pitiful is that the Snitkos are two of the lucky ones in this story. That word feels ill-fitting for anyone in their shoes. But while the FBI has acquiesced to giving select deposit boxes back, including the one owned by the Snitkos, they are refusing to surrender others, seeking instead to keep a collective $85 million in cash and an unspecified amount of gold, silver, and precious metals from unsuspecting people.

That includes Travis May, who stored gold and $63,000 in cash, and Joseph Ruiz, who had $57,000 in his box—his life savings, which he uses to pay his living and medical expenses, according to a recently amended lawsuit.

“After the government seized this property on March 22, 2021, [Ruiz] filed a claim with the FBI to retrieve it,” notes the complaint from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm representing both men. “However, the government has informed attorneys for USPV that it intends to civilly forfeit Joseph’s property. At this time, the government has not provided Joseph with any notice of the purported civil forfeiture proceeding.”

Travis May

May, who is on the board of trustees at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, is “not the least bit surprised,” he says. “I never suspected it in a million years, but on the other hand, when it happened, I just wasn’t surprised.”

He is, however, righteously angry. “We’re raised with the understanding that you have a right to privacy in this country,” he tells Reason. “They targeted [USPV] for the specific reason that there’s privacy there.”

It appears agents at the West L.A. Federal Building care a great deal about their own privacy, however. A group of officers threatened to arrest me yesterday for waiting outside in the courtyard, where I posted up to take pictures of the Snitkos exiting the building. I needed a media permit, they said.

Yet parsing through the clients listed on the lawsuit, it’s hard not to conclude that this is part of the federal government’s war on privacy. It’s also likely part of their war on cash tender. The FBI seemingly has little desire to hold onto baptismal certificates or personal documents, but when it comes to silver, gold, and cold hard cash, they suddenly have an interest. Should the government succeed, plaintiffs Jeni Verdon-Pearsons and Michael Storc, for instance, will forcibly donate their silver, though the suit notes that they, too, have not been provided with “the factual or legal basis for the purported civil forfeiture proceeding.”

There’s the obvious implication: The government wants the proceeds. But there’s also the notion that carrying or storing large sums of money somehow incriminates you in the drug trade, evocative of the Department of Homeland Security’s sordid record of habitually seizing large sums of cash from airport travelers.

“What happened in this case is just an absolute staggering Fourth Amendment violation,” says Robert Johnson, an attorney with IJ. “There was no probable cause to think any of the box holders committed a crime.”

That includes the Snitkos, who finally have their stuff back. But it also includes May, Ruiz, Verdon-Pearsons, Storc, and numerous others who don’t, and who might never.

“What about the people who are so scared to come forward, that didn’t do anything wrong, that don’t feel like they have a voice, that don’t have someone supporting them?” asks Jennifer. “It makes me feel like the government is preying on the vulnerable and the weak to line their own pockets.”

I ask Paul how he’d respond if all of the systems, levers, and agents who violated his rights were aggregated into one person standing before him. What would he say? The Fourth Amendment “is not a lesson in civics,” he responds. “The Bill of Rights was established in 1791—read it.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3iBx1Cs
via IFTTT

The FBI Returned This Innocent Couple’s Safe Deposit Box. It Refuses To Give Back Many Others—and Is Trying To Seize $85 Million in Cash.


snitkos

“The silence is deafening,” said attorney Jennifer Snitko, who briefly choked up on Thursday as she exited the West Los Angeles Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard, home to the FBI’s area field office.

She’d just piled into a small interrogation room to meet with two agents. Rifling through a brown paper bag, she furnished a series of documents and items recently withdrawn from sterile bags marked EVIDENCE. None seemed more out of place than a folded, thin white paper with a cross. It was a baptismal certificate.

“Evidence of what?” asks her husband Paul Snitko.

They’re still not sure. Jennifer wasn’t there to defend a client. It was her and her husband in the hot seat, tasked with proving that they were worthy of retrieving a trove of deeply personal items that the FBI seized about three months ago—without a warrant—from the U.S. Private Vaults (USPV) in Beverly Hills, California.

Eric Boehm, who reported this story for Reason last month, notes that on March 22, law enforcement officials with the bureau raided the establishment as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the business itself. The warrant allowed agents to confiscate a laundry list of things: the company’s security cameras, computers, the steel frames that nest the containers. Deemed off-limits: “a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safe-deposit boxes.”

The agents were unfazed. They did it anyway, wantonly rummaging through the personal property in approximately 800 boxes—belonging to people who were not suspected of committing any crimes—and then holding those items hostage. (If you feel like getting mad today, feel free to watch them in action.)

“It’s changed me,” says Jennifer. “The emotional impact this has had on me is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced….To have this type of sustained stress, insecurity, uncertainty as to what’s happening next…to constantly have to be making this a priority in your mind to get your stuff back is just, it’s not only emotionally draining.” She pauses. “I don’t even know how to describe it….I will not look at life the same.”

Paul’s reaction has admittedly been a bit more erratic. “There was the shock, and the anger, and then the extraordinary anxiety that came the day after I read [about the raid],” referencing a Los Angeles Times article in April detailing the search—which is how he found out about it. His apprehension makes sense for obvious reasons. Yet that’s only exacerbated by the fact that the piece partially reads like an FBI press release, centered around prosecutorial allegations that agents seized the bulk of the property from “drug dealers” who were anonymously allowed to “stash guns, fentanyl, and stacks of $100 bills in security boxes.”

In the Snitkos’ box, along with the baptismal certificate: a pilot’s log, heirloom jewelry, collectible coins, a marriage certificate, a birth certificate.

The day after he read it, “I woke up,” he says, “and I was looking at the ceiling, and my heart was racing, and I’m like ‘Now what?’ The FBI has my stuff. Where is it? Why do they have it? How long are they going to keep it? Am I a criminal? You start to make ridiculous assessments like that.” He notes that he fell into a depression after processing the news. 

“Not only was my stuff taken without just cause…It was taken by my own government, and they were asking me to prove my innocence and subject myself to an investigation to get my stuff back, which was unlawfully taken to begin with, and had no evidentiary value.”

Perhaps most pitiful is that the Snitkos are two of the lucky ones in this story. That word feels ill-fitting for anyone in their shoes. But while the FBI has acquiesced to giving select deposit boxes back, including the one owned by the Snitkos, they are refusing to surrender others, seeking instead to forfeit a collective $85 million in cash and an unspecified amount of gold, silver, and precious metals from unsuspecting people.

That includes Travis May, who stored gold and $63,000 in cash, and Joseph Ruiz, who had $57,000 in his box—his life savings, which he uses to pay his living and medical expenses, according to a recently amended lawsuit.

“After the government seized this property on March 22, 2021, [Ruiz] filed a claim with the FBI to retrieve it,” notes the complaint from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm representing both men. “However, the government has informed attorneys for USPV that it intends to civilly forfeit Joseph’s property. At this time, the government has not provided Joseph with any notice of the purported civil forfeiture proceeding.”

Travis May

May, who is on the board of trustees at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, is “not the least bit surprised,” he says. “I never suspected it in a million years, but on the other hand, when it happened, I just wasn’t surprised.”

He is, however, righteously angry. “We’re raised with the understanding that you have a right to privacy in this country,” he tells Reason. “They targeted [USPV] for the specific reason that there’s privacy there.”

It appears agents at the West L.A. Federal Building care a great deal about their own privacy, however. A group of officers threatened to arrest me yesterday for waiting outside in the courtyard, where I posted up to take pictures of the Snitkos exiting the building. I needed a media permit, they said.

Yet parsing through the clients listed on the lawsuit, it’s hard not to conclude that this is part of the federal government’s war on privacy. It’s also likely part of their war on cash tender. The FBI seemingly has little desire to hold onto baptismal certificates or personal documents, but when it comes to silver, gold, and cold hard cash, they suddenly have an interest. Should the government succeed, plaintiffs Jeni Verdon-Pearsons and Michael Storc, for instance, will forcibly donate their silver, though the suit notes that they, too, have not been provided with “the factual or legal basis for the purported civil forfeiture proceeding.”

There’s the obvious implication: The government wants the proceeds. But there’s also the notion that carrying or storing large sums of money somehow incriminates you in the drug trade, evocative of the Department of Homeland Security’s sordid record of habitually seizing large sums of cash from airport travelers.

“What happened in this case is just an absolute staggering Fourth Amendment violation,” says Robert Johnson, an attorney with IJ. “There was no probable cause to think any of the box holders committed a crime.”

That includes the Snitkos, who finally have their stuff back. But it also includes May, Ruiz, Verdon-Pearsons, Storc, and numerous others who don’t, and who might never.

“What about the people who are so scared to come forward, that didn’t do anything wrong, that don’t feel like they have a voice, that don’t have someone supporting them?” asks Jennifer. “It makes me feel like the government is preying on the vulnerable and the weak to line their own pockets.”

I ask Paul how he’d respond if all of the systems, levels, and agents who violated his rights were aggregated into one person standing before him. What would he say? The Fourth Amendment “is not a lesson in civics,” he responds. “The Bill of Rights was established in 1791—read it.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3iBx1Cs
via IFTTT

Amazing New Chinese A.I.-Powered Language Model Wu Dao 2.0 Unveiled


AINewscom

Earlier this month, Chinese artificial intelligence (A.I.) researchers at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) unveiled Wu Dao 2.0, the world’s biggest natural language processing (NLP) model. And it’s a big deal.

NLP is a branch of A.I. research that aims to give computers the ability to understand text and spoken words and respond to them in much the same way human beings can.

Last year, the San Francisco–based nonprofit A.I. research laboratory OpenAI wowed the world when it released its GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) language model. GPT-3 is a 175 billion–parameter deep learning model trained on text datasets with hundreds of billions of words. A parameter is a calculation in a neural network that shapes the model’s data by assigning to each chunk a greater or lesser weighting, thus providing the neural network a learned perspective on the data.

Back in November, The New York Times reported that GPT-3 “generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs, all with very little prompting.” GPT-3, move on over. Wu Dao 2.0 is here.

Wu Dao 2.0 (Chinese for enlightenment) is ten times larger than GPT-3, using 1.75 trillion parameters to simulate conversational speech, write poems, understand pictures, and even generate recipes. In addition, as the South China Morning Post reports, Wu Dao 2.0 is multimodal, covering both Chinese and English with skills acquired by studying 4.9 terabytes of images and texts, including 1.2 terabytes each of Chinese and English texts.

“Wu Dao 2.0’s mulitmodal design affords it a range of skills, including the ability to perform natural language processing, text generation, image recognition, and image generation tasks,” reports VentureBeat. “It can write essays, poems, and couplets in traditional Chinese, as well as captioning images and creating nearly photorealistic artwork, given natural language descriptions.” In addition, Wu Dao 2.0 can predict the 3D structures of proteins, like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, and can also power “virtual idols.” Just recently, BAAI researchers unveiled Hua Zhibing, China’s first A.I.-powered virtual student (see image below).

In 1950, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions asked of both.

Would Wu Dao 2.0 pass this test? Perhaps. “Wu Dao 2.0 aims to enable machines to think like humans and achieve cognitive abilities beyond the Turing test,” said Jie Tang, the lead researcher behind Wu Dao 2.0. If not Wu Dao 2.0, the rapid progress being made in the development of language models makes it clear that one will soon pass the Turing test.

“The way to artificial general intelligence is big models and big computer [sic],” BAAI chair Dr. Hongjiang Zhang added in a statement. “What we are building is a power plant for the future of AI. With mega data, mega computing power, and mega models, we can transform data to fuel the AI applications of the future.”

“The technology could be used as an intelligent assistant — less Siri, more Janet from The Good Place — to help people navigate life admin tasks, such as applying for a new driver’s license,” notes Politico Europe, adding, however, that there are darker possibilities. “Critics also say that these language models could be used as a surveillance tool, for example, to analyze social media for critical comments, or as powerful disinformation and propaganda machines.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3cyRnII
via IFTTT

Amazing New Chinese A.I.-Powered Language Model Wu Dao 2.0 Unveiled


AINewscom

Earlier this month, Chinese artificial intelligence (A.I.) researchers at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) unveiled Wu Dao 2.0, the world’s biggest natural language processing (NLP) model. And it’s a big deal.

NLP is a branch of A.I. research that aims to give computers the ability to understand text and spoken words and respond to them in much the same way human beings can.

Last year, the San Francisco–based nonprofit A.I. research laboratory OpenAI wowed the world when it released its GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) language model. GPT-3 is a 175 billion–parameter deep learning model trained on text datasets with hundreds of billions of words. A parameter is a calculation in a neural network that shapes the model’s data by assigning to each chunk a greater or lesser weighting, thus providing the neural network a learned perspective on the data.

Back in November, The New York Times reported that GPT-3 “generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs, all with very little prompting.” GPT-3, move on over. Wu Dao 2.0 is here.

Wu Dao 2.0 (Chinese for enlightenment) is ten times larger than GPT-3, using 1.75 trillion parameters to simulate conversational speech, write poems, understand pictures, and even generate recipes. In addition, as the South China Morning Post reports, Wu Dao 2.0 is multimodal, covering both Chinese and English with skills acquired by studying 4.9 terabytes of images and texts, including 1.2 terabytes each of Chinese and English texts.

“Wu Dao 2.0’s mulitmodal design affords it a range of skills, including the ability to perform natural language processing, text generation, image recognition, and image generation tasks,” reports VentureBeat. “It can write essays, poems, and couplets in traditional Chinese, as well as captioning images and creating nearly photorealistic artwork, given natural language descriptions.” In addition, Wu Dao 2.0 can predict the 3D structures of proteins, like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, and can also power “virtual idols.” Just recently, BAAI researchers unveiled Hua Zhibing, China’s first A.I.-powered virtual student (see image below).

In 1950, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions asked of both.

Would Wu Dao 2.0 pass this test? Perhaps. “Wu Dao 2.0 aims to enable machines to think like humans and achieve cognitive abilities beyond the Turing test,” said Jie Tang, the lead researcher behind Wu Dao 2.0. If not Wu Dao 2.0, the rapid progress being made in the development of language models makes it clear that one will soon pass the Turing test.

“The way to artificial general intelligence is big models and big computer [sic],” BAAI chair Dr. Hongjiang Zhang added in a statement. “What we are building is a power plant for the future of AI. With mega data, mega computing power, and mega models, we can transform data to fuel the AI applications of the future.”

“The technology could be used as an intelligent assistant — less Siri, more Janet from The Good Place — to help people navigate life admin tasks, such as applying for a new driver’s license,” notes Politico Europe, adding, however, that there are darker possibilities. “Critics also say that these language models could be used as a surveillance tool, for example, to analyze social media for critical comments, or as powerful disinformation and propaganda machines.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3cyRnII
via IFTTT

Study Finds Vapers Not More Likely To Get COVID-19


dreamstime_xl_173347395

Vapers are at no greater risk of being diagnosed with COVID-19, and smokers are significantly less likely to be infected. That’s according to a new study published in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health.

The study’s authors are researchers at the Mayo Clinic who wanted to investigate whether electronic cigarette use might affect risk for testing positive for COVID-19. One of the difficulties in determining the relationship between vaping and COVID-19 has been a lack of data. There is a plethora of data on smoking status among those infected and hospitalized, but the same cannot be said for e-cigarettes.

To remedy this problem, from September 15, 2019, to November 30, 2020, the researchers screened 78,547 patients seeking medical care for e-cigarette and cigarette use during ambulatory appointments at their medical facility. After removing patients below the age of 12 and those who didn’t want to be a part of the research, 69,264 patients were analyzed.

Patients who used only e-cigarettes were no more likely to have a COVID-19 diagnosis than those who don’t smoke or vape. Those who smoked only cigarettes, on the other hand, were 57 percent less likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19. The results may come as a surprise to many as it was widely thought at the beginning of the pandemic that both smoking and vaping would cause more COVID-19 infections with worse symptoms.

But as the Mayo Clinic researchers make clear in their study, “the impact of tobacco use on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity remains unclear.”

There’s been little research on whether vaping increases one’s risk of testing positive for COVID-19. The most widely reported study was published last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which claimed young people who vaped were significantly more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than those who didn’t. The study was severely criticized for faulty methodology and communication of results, including by Reason Foundation Policy Analyst Jacob James Rich who co-authored one of several letters to the journal highlighting the study’s flaws. The study was used as justification by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D–Ill.) to demand a federal ban on all e-cigarettes during the course of the pandemic.

E-cigarettes were an early villain of the pandemic, despite no evidence of how they were affecting infections or hospitalizations. In February 2020, the New York State Academy of Family Physicians urged Gov. Andrew Cuomo to ban the sale of flavored e-cigarettes. The justification for the prohibition was an early study that found smokers were at increased risk of a severe outcome after being infected with COVID-19. Considering e-cigarettes are not combustible cigarettes and have been proven to be significantly safer and effective at helping smokers quit, it’s hard to discern why the initial data on smoking from China would justify banning flavored vaping in New York. Nevertheless, flavored e-cigarettes were banned in New York in May 2020.

Appearing on NBC’s Today Show on March 23, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams postulated, without evidence, that vaping could be the reason young people may be at higher risk from COVID-19 than previously thought. “There are theories that it could be because we know we have a higher proportion of people in the United States and also in Italy who vape,” said Adams.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine that vapers could be at high risk for COVID-19. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey went so far as to issue an advisory warning that vaping could worsen the spread of COVID-19. In March 2020, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed, “If you are a smoker or a vaper that does make you more vulnerable.” These claims essentially went unchallenged, aside from a handful of scientists and tobacco harm reduction advocates who raised the alarm.

The finding that smokers are less likely to be infected with COVID-19 is not a novel one. The vast majority of studies across the world show a similar result. These results hold in the majority of studies that adjust for factors such as age and gender.

The lack of clear and accurate communication about the relationship between smoking, vaping, and COVID-19 from public health authorities such as the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration has had real-world consequences. Smokers were prioritized for vaccination despite there being no clear evidence they were at increased risk compared to the elderly or the obese.

Erroneously linking vaping to COVID-19 may have also increased skepticism among smokers about the benefits of switching to safer nicotine alternatives like e-cigarettes. Thanks to bad data and unsupported assumptions, members of Congress demanded the full-scale prohibition of a product that has helped millions of Americans quit smoking.

Smoking is widely known to be bad for your health, and everyone agrees youth should not be vaping. These messages don’t need to be augmented with noble lies about COVID-19 to achieve a beneficial public health outcome.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3ze4nxc
via IFTTT