Both the Left and the Right Are Exaggerating the Threat Posed by Facebook


dpaphotosfive013141

Charged with determining whether Facebook erred in suspending former President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riots, the Facebook Oversight Board—which exists solely for the purpose of taking difficult content moderation decisions out of Mark Zuckerberg’s hands—essentially shrugged and returned the decision to Facebook. The board did rule, however, that the indefinite suspension was inconsistent with the the company’s policies, and Facebook should revisit the matter in the next six months.

A conceivable outcome of this ruling is that Facebook will eventually decide, sometime later this year, that it has little choice but to un-ban Trump. Indeed, the board criticized Facebook for “applying a vague, standardless penalty.” One might have expected tech-skeptical conservatives to be somewhat pleased with this ruling, since it was ultimately a rebuke of Facebook, and one that hints at the potential return of Trump.

Instead, the right had a meltdown.

“Twitter and Facebook are Fascist companies,” tweeted (yes, tweeted) Candace Owens. “We should all begin slowly migrating away from their platforms.”

Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute opined that the actual issue was Facebook’s “hegemonic control over global political speech, reinforced today by the platform anointing itself with the moral authority to memory hole future world leaders at their own discretion.”

Facebook has neither hegemonic control over political speech nor memory-hole powers—indeed, the former president recently engaged in political speech with Owens, possibly offering her the veep slot if he runs again—and yet many conservatives argue that the Facebook Oversight Board’s decision was not merely wrong but evidence that Facebook’s powers supersede the U.S. government’s.

“A multi-national corporation just assumed a supranational level of sovereignty and is LARPing as a government,” fretted Will Upton, a conservative public relations specialist formerly with the U.S. Treasury.

J.D. Vance, a likely Republican candidate for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat in 2022, upped the hysteria even further: “The Facebook oversight board has more power than the United Nations,” he said.

Facebook is indeed a powerful and influential company, but these people all need a reality check. The social media site does not wield nearly as much power as actual governments. Facebook doesn’t drop bombs on its enemies or send troops to bust down their doors and kill them. Facebook can’t put people in jail, or confiscate their money, or forbid them from gathering in groups, or force children as young as three to wear masks while they play sports outside. The only thing Facebook can do is stop people from posting on Facebook.

The right’s escalation of Facebook moderation policies to an extinction-level threat is extremely unhelpful, as it obscures some legitimate concerns about how the media bullies the company into making bad calls, as well as issues with the various hypocrisies—often unintentional—produced by uneven enforcement. But to hear conservatives tell it, we are supposed to believe that Facebook’s existence has singlehandedly ended the American experiment in representative democracy.

“Allowing near-trillion dollar companies like Facebook to act as political partisans, censoring one side while amplifying the other, is tantamount to election interference and represents an existential threat to our democracy,” asserted Jon Schweppe of the American Principles Project in a characteristic post on this subject. “It simply cannot be allowed to go on. We all know what happened in 2020. By censoring advertisements, banning conservative influencers, and falsely fact-checking verifiably true content, Facebook and other social media companies swung the election to Joe Biden.”

What’s especially telling about this sort of panic is that it perfectly mirrors liberals’ own ongoing freakout about Facebook. Indeed, with only minor changes to Schweppe’s statement, it would be identical to something Rachel Maddow or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) might say: We all know what happened in 2016. By allowing Russian-backed influence operations to spread viral disinformation, Facebook and other social media companies swung the election to Donald Trump.

Forget the millions of dollars the campaigns spent on their own advertising on television, the radio, in print, and elsewhere: A handful of misleading Facebook posts and/or bad moderation calls were the decisive factors. Clearly.

While liberals and conservatives can’t agree on which side is supposedly receiving an unfair advantage from social media, they increasingly agree on the solution: break up Big Tech. Progressives like this approach because punishing big corporations for sheer bigness is a time-honored liberal tradition, and conservatives like this approach because it will make Mark Zuckerberg rue the day he crossed them. Why anyone should expect Facebook’s smaller successor companies to have superior moderation policies is never explained.

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

A 5th Federal Court Has Struck Down the CDC’s Eviction Ban


reason-cdc

A judge for the U.S. District Court of D.C. ruled today in a case brought by two realtor associations in Alabama and Georgia that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) ban on landlords filing to evict non-paying tenants vastly exceeded the agency’s powers.

Beginning in September 2020, the CDC has prohibited such evictions on the grounds that they would result in evicted tenants moving in with family and friends or into crowded homeless shelters, potentially spreading COVID-19 along the way.

As a legal justification, the agency cited the Public Health Service Act, which grants federal public health officials the power to make regulations “reasonably necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of communicable diseases.

The CDC’s eviction ban proved immediately controversial with property owners, who complained that the policy effectively required them to provide their product for free.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed by landlords against the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) arguing that if the agency could use public health laws to justify an eviction moratorium, then it could justify practically any policy.

It’s an argument that proved persuasive with U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich.

“Though the Public Health Service Act grants the [Health] Secretary broad authority to make and enforce regulations necessary to prevent the spread of disease, his authority is not limitless,” she said, writing that that broad authority does not “encompass the nationwide eviction moratorium set forth in the CDC Order.”

Friedrich’s ruling marks the fifth time that a federal court has ruled against the CDC’s eviction ban. Two federal courts have upheld the policy.

“The CDC has absolutely no authority to enforce its eviction moratorium against anyone,” said Luke Wake, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. In March, a U.S. District Court in Ohio ruled in favor of the group’s challenge to the CDC’s eviction ban in the case Skyworks Ltd. vs. CDC. “Today’s decision builds on our victory in Skyworks and affirms that landlords should be allowed to use the eviction process and not be compelled to provide housing for free.”

Supporters of the eviction moratorium have urged the Biden administration to continue fighting to uphold its eviction ban.

“While this latest ruling is written more starkly than previous ones, it likely has equally limited application impacting only the plaintiffs who brought the case or, at most, renters in the district court’s jurisdiction,” said Dianne Yentell, president of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). “The DOJ should immediately appeal the flawed ruling and the Biden administration should continue to vigorously defend and enforce the moratorium.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, writes in The Volokh Conspiracy that, contra Yentell’s claims, “it is possible to interpret this ruling as holding that the CDC order is now invalid throughout the country, not just with respect to the parties to the case.”

“It is worth noting that the jurisdiction of the [U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia] extends to federal administrative agency rulings throughout the country, and thus is not limited to a specific geographic area (unlike that of most other lower federal courts),” Somin added.

Time will tell how impactful today’s ruling is. It nevertheless represents another loss for the CDC and its efforts to push the envelope on the bounds of its powers.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3xOTGR5
via IFTTT

9th Circuit Hears Contradictory Arguments on Whether People Aged 18 to 20 Have a Right To Buy Weapons


thumb

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, considering the case of Jones v. Bonta, asked each side to submit briefs addressing the “original public meaning” of aspects of the Second Amendment, as it considers whether California is violating that amendment by barring those ages 18 to 20 from legally purchasing guns.

The plaintiffs are a team of citizens under 21 and various gun rights lobbying groups, including the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Second Amendment Foundation. A lower court back in November 2020 denied those challenging California’s age-based gun purchase ban their request for a preliminary injunction to stop California from enforcing the law, and the 9th Circuit is now considering an appeal of that decision.

The law in question, California Penal Code 27510(a), insists licensed firearms dealers “shall not sell, supply, deliver, or give possession or control of a firearm to any person who is under 21 years of age.” There are some exceptions for people like military or National Guard members or those with valid hunting licenses (though even they still can’t buy handguns or “semiautomatic centerfire rifles”).

This week each side submitted their briefs. Here are the arguments for and against the right of someone aged 18, 19, or 20 to buy a gun.

California insists that “Founding-era sources confirm that such individuals were considered infants without the full panoply of rights at the time, and consistent with that reality, jurisdictions have long restricted firearms access for individuals under the age of 21.”

Those suing California insist early Americans under age 21 were, in Founding times, part of organized militias, which are mentioned explicitly in the Second Amendment. California says that doesn’t matter, and confuses the duty of people in that age group to bear arms in an organized militia with a right to do so—that one can have the duty without having the right.

“The fact that the first Militia Act included persons below the age of 21 in the organized militia—and imposed an actual duty to keep and bear arms in militia service—does not dictate that those individuals had a corresponding right to keep and bear arms,” California’s brief insists, “much less to purchase them rather than procuring them through their parents or guardians” and insists that in those days, those under 21 “were generally understood to live under the authority of their parents.”

California further points out the ruling Heller decision does state that certain categories of Americans may be barred from legal gun ownership, such as felons and the mentally ill, so, hey, why not people aged 18 to 20? Furthermore, California insists, precedent is on its side: “Every federal court to have considered age restrictions on the ability of 18-20-year-olds to purchase, procure a license to carry, or even possess a firearm has answered that question by concluding that there is a longstanding history of regulating access to firearms by those under 21 that either places such regulations entirely outside Second Amendment protection, or permits them to survive intermediate scrutiny.”

The Supreme Court has never declared “intermediate scrutiny” as the proper standard for this core constitutional right, that standard roughly meaning that the government must prove a substantial fit between an important state interest and the law under challenge. Scrutiny analysis post-Heller has been a mess and one that usually redounds to the benefit of the restricting government, not the citizen seeking to have a right vindicated in court.

Also, since the law does not fully bar the “possession, use, inheritance, or acquisition of firearms”—merely the legal purchase from licensed dealers—California further argues it does not infringe Second Amendment rights meaningfully.

Those suing to overturn California’s law, on the contrary, made these arguments about the age restriction on legal gun purchase and the Second Amendment in their filing.

First, they fall back on reasserting the vital importance of what California wants to deny matters: “Because it is undisputed that 18-to-20-year-olds were part of this Militia, at the Founding, it necessarily follows that these adults are protected by the Second Amendment’s sweep.” This whole “well they may have had the duty to bear arms but not the right to” thing California tries to argue, the plaintiffs dismiss out of hand as

nonsense. Whatever the interpretive weight of “firearms-related duties when determining the scope of the Second Amendment right” in other contexts, we know from Heller that militia duties necessarily entailed Second Amendment “rights to perform those duties,” because the very “purpose for which the right was codified” was “to prevent elimination of the militia.”

Arguments on California’s part trying to re-litigate Heller by insisting that without state regulation of militias, the right cannot be assumed to apply to all citizens potentially part of a militia, are dismissed with this argument:

we know that the Founding generation had no linguistic difficulty referring to a “well regulated Militia” that was composed of the whole “body of the people” because both the Virginia ratifying convention and James Madison’s original draft of the Second Amendment did exactly that.

The plaintiffs also attack California’s assertion that in the Founding era anyone under 21 was essentially legally still an “infant” thusly: “California once again trots out the assertion that at the founding, ‘the age of majority was 21.’…As we have twice explained, however, it is simply not the case that 18-to-20-year-olds ‘were considered infants’ for all purposes in 1791—and one context where we know they were treated as adults was membership in the militia.”

As for California’s assertion that existing law and precedent mark this age ban as one of the presumptively still legal “longstanding” restrictions on Second Amendment rights, the plaintiffs assert California’s new argument “provides no answer to our briefing explaining, at length, that: (1) restrictions that appeared for the first time in the late nineteenth century can shed no light on the original meaning of the Second Amendment…and (2) anyway, the smattering of outlier historical restrictions cited by the State do not show any historical understanding that 18-to-20-year-olds could be barred from acquiring common firearms.”

Heller, while insisting it was applying original understanding to Second Amendment jurisprudence, created a new lens through which it insists the right should always have been viewed. Thus, it can’t be a simple winning argument to say, well, lots of states did this pre-Heller so these laws must be OK. New thinking through the implications of Heller needs to be applied to these laws, and now the 9th Circuit has seen arguments on both sides in this case. Which set of arguments the Court will find convincing remains to be seen, and a state full of 18-20-year olds awaits learning the extent to which California intends to infringe their right to armed self-defense.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3h56Rr2
via IFTTT

Both the Left and the Right Are Exaggerating the Threat Posed by Facebook


dpaphotosfive013141

Charged with determining whether Facebook erred in suspending former President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riots, the Facebook Oversight Board—which exists solely for the purpose of taking difficult content moderation decisions out of Mark Zuckerberg’s hands—essentially shrugged and returned the decision to Facebook. The board did rule, however, that the indefinite suspension was inconsistent with the the company’s policies, and Facebook should revisit the matter in the next six months.

A conceivable outcome of this ruling is that Facebook will eventually decide, sometime later this year, that it has little choice but to un-ban Trump. Indeed, the board criticized Facebook for “applying a vague, standardless penalty.” One might have expected tech-skeptical conservatives to be somewhat pleased with this ruling, since it was ultimately a rebuke of Facebook, and one that hints at the potential return of Trump.

Instead, the right had a meltdown.

“Twitter and Facebook are Fascist companies,” tweeted (yes, tweeted) Candace Owens. “We should all begin slowly migrating away from their platforms.”

Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute opined that the actual issue was Facebook’s “hegemonic control over global political speech, reinforced today by the platform anointing itself with the moral authority to memory hole future world leaders at their own discretion.”

Facebook has neither hegemonic control over political speech nor memory-hole powers—indeed, the former president recently engaged in political speech with Owens, possibly offering her the veep slot if he runs again—and yet many conservatives argue that the Facebook Oversight Board’s decision was not merely wrong but evidence that Facebook’s powers supersede the U.S. government’s.

“A multi-national corporation just assumed a supranational level of sovereignty and is LARPing as a government,” fretted Will Upton, a conservative public relations specialist formerly with the U.S. Treasury.

J.D. Vance, a likely Republican candidate for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat in 2022, upped the hysteria even further: “The Facebook oversight board has more power than the United Nations,” he said.

Facebook is indeed a powerful and influential company, but these people all need a reality check. The social media site does not wield nearly as much power as actual governments. Facebook doesn’t drop bombs on its enemies or send troops to bust down their doors and kill them. Facebook can’t put people in jail, or confiscate their money, or forbid them from gathering in groups, or force children as young as three to wear masks while they play sports outside. The only thing Facebook can do is stop people from posting on Facebook.

The right’s escalation of Facebook moderation policies to an extinction-level threat is extremely unhelpful, as it obscures some legitimate concerns about how the media bullies the company into making bad calls, as well as issues with the various hypocrisies—often unintentional—produced by uneven enforcement. But to hear conservatives tell it, we are supposed to believe that Facebook’s existence has singlehandedly ended the American experiment in representative democracy.

“Allowing near-trillion dollar companies like Facebook to act as political partisans, censoring one side while amplifying the other, is tantamount to election interference and represents an existential threat to our democracy,” asserted Jon Schweppe of the American Principles Project in a characteristic post on this subject. “It simply cannot be allowed to go on. We all know what happened in 2020. By censoring advertisements, banning conservative influencers, and falsely fact-checking verifiably true content, Facebook and other social media companies swung the election to Joe Biden.”

What’s especially telling about this sort of panic is that it perfectly mirrors liberals’ own ongoing freakout about Facebook. Indeed, with only minor changes to Schweppe’s statement, it would be identical to something Rachel Maddow or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) might say: We all know what happened in 2016. By allowing Russian-backed influence operations to spread viral disinformation, Facebook and other social media companies swung the election to Donald Trump.

Forget the millions of dollars the campaigns spent on their own advertising on television, the radio, in print, and elsewhere: A handful of misleading Facebook posts and/or bad moderation calls were the decisive factors. Clearly.

While liberals and conservatives can’t agree on which side is supposedly receiving an unfair advantage from social media, they increasingly agree on the solution: break up Big Tech. Progressives like this approach because punishing big corporations for sheer bigness is a time-honored liberal tradition, and conservatives like this approach because it will make Mark Zuckerberg rue the day he crossed them. Why anyone should expect Facebook’s smaller successor companies to have superior moderation policies is never explained.

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

A 5th Federal Court Has Struck Down the CDC’s Eviction Ban


reason-cdc

A judge for the U.S. District Court of D.C. ruled today in a case brought by two realtor associations in Alabama and Georgia that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) ban on landlords filing to evict non-paying tenants vastly exceeded the agency’s powers.

Beginning in September 2020, the CDC has prohibited such evictions on the grounds that they would result in evicted tenants moving in with family and friends or into crowded homeless shelters, potentially spreading COVID-19 along the way.

As a legal justification, the agency cited the Public Health Service Act, which grants federal public health officials the power to make regulations “reasonably necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of communicable diseases.

The CDC’s eviction ban proved immediately controversial with property owners, who complained that the policy effectively required them to provide their product for free.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed by landlords against the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) arguing that if the agency could use public health laws to justify an eviction moratorium, then it could justify practically any policy.

It’s an argument that proved persuasive with U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich.

“Though the Public Health Service Act grants the [Health] Secretary broad authority to make and enforce regulations necessary to prevent the spread of disease, his authority is not limitless,” she said, writing that that broad authority does not “encompass the nationwide eviction moratorium set forth in the CDC Order.”

Friedrich’s ruling marks the fifth time that a federal court has ruled against the CDC’s eviction ban. Two federal courts have upheld the policy.

“The CDC has absolutely no authority to enforce its eviction moratorium against anyone,” said Luke Wake, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. In March, a U.S. District Court in Ohio ruled in favor of the group’s challenge to the CDC’s eviction ban in the case Skyworks Ltd. vs. CDC. “Today’s decision builds on our victory in Skyworks and affirms that landlords should be allowed to use the eviction process and not be compelled to provide housing for free.”

Supporters of the eviction moratorium have urged the Biden administration to continue fighting to uphold its eviction ban.

“While this latest ruling is written more starkly than previous ones, it likely has equally limited application impacting only the plaintiffs who brought the case or, at most, renters in the district court’s jurisdiction,” said Dianne Yentell, president of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC). “The DOJ should immediately appeal the flawed ruling and the Biden administration should continue to vigorously defend and enforce the moratorium.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, writes in The Volokh Conspiracy that, contra Yentell’s claims, “it is possible to interpret this ruling as holding that the CDC order is now invalid throughout the country, not just with respect to the parties to the case.”

“It is worth noting that the jurisdiction of the [U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia] extends to federal administrative agency rulings throughout the country, and thus is not limited to a specific geographic area (unlike that of most other lower federal courts),” Somin added.

Time will tell how impactful today’s ruling is. It nevertheless represents another loss for the CDC and its efforts to push the envelope on the bounds of its powers.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3xOTGR5
via IFTTT

9th Circuit Hears Contradictory Arguments on Whether People Aged 18 to 20 Have a Right To Buy Weapons


thumb

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, considering the case of Jones v. Bonta, asked each side to submit briefs addressing the “original public meaning” of aspects of the Second Amendment, as it considers whether California is violating that amendment by barring those ages 18 to 20 from legally purchasing guns.

The plaintiffs are a team of citizens under 21 and various gun rights lobbying groups, including the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Second Amendment Foundation. A lower court back in November 2020 denied those challenging California’s age-based gun purchase ban their request for a preliminary injunction to stop California from enforcing the law, and the 9th Circuit is now considering an appeal of that decision.

The law in question, California Penal Code 27510(a), insists licensed firearms dealers “shall not sell, supply, deliver, or give possession or control of a firearm to any person who is under 21 years of age.” There are some exceptions for people like military or National Guard members or those with valid hunting licenses (though even they still can’t buy handguns or “semiautomatic centerfire rifles”).

This week each side submitted their briefs. Here are the arguments for and against the right of someone aged 18, 19, or 20 to buy a gun.

California insists that “Founding-era sources confirm that such individuals were considered infants without the full panoply of rights at the time, and consistent with that reality, jurisdictions have long restricted firearms access for individuals under the age of 21.”

Those suing California insist early Americans under age 21 were, in Founding times, part of organized militias, which are mentioned explicitly in the Second Amendment. California says that doesn’t matter, and confuses the duty of people in that age group to bear arms in an organized militia with a right to do so—that one can have the duty without having the right.

“The fact that the first Militia Act included persons below the age of 21 in the organized militia—and imposed an actual duty to keep and bear arms in militia service—does not dictate that those individuals had a corresponding right to keep and bear arms,” California’s brief insists, “much less to purchase them rather than procuring them through their parents or guardians” and insists that in those days, those under 21 “were generally understood to live under the authority of their parents.”

California further points out the ruling Heller decision does state that certain categories of Americans may be barred from legal gun ownership, such as felons and the mentally ill, so, hey, why not people aged 18 to 20? Furthermore, California insists, precedent is on its side: “Every federal court to have considered age restrictions on the ability of 18-20-year-olds to purchase, procure a license to carry, or even possess a firearm has answered that question by concluding that there is a longstanding history of regulating access to firearms by those under 21 that either places such regulations entirely outside Second Amendment protection, or permits them to survive intermediate scrutiny.”

The Supreme Court has never declared “intermediate scrutiny” as the proper standard for this core constitutional right, that standard roughly meaning that the government must prove a substantial fit between an important state interest and the law under challenge. Scrutiny analysis post-Heller has been a mess and one that usually redounds to the benefit of the restricting government, not the citizen seeking to have a right vindicated in court.

Also, since the law does not fully bar the “possession, use, inheritance, or acquisition of firearms”—merely the legal purchase from licensed dealers—California further argues it does not infringe Second Amendment rights meaningfully.

Those suing to overturn California’s law, on the contrary, made these arguments about the age restriction on legal gun purchase and the Second Amendment in their filing.

First, they fall back on reasserting the vital importance of what California wants to deny matters: “Because it is undisputed that 18-to-20-year-olds were part of this Militia, at the Founding, it necessarily follows that these adults are protected by the Second Amendment’s sweep.” This whole “well they may have had the duty to bear arms but not the right to” thing California tries to argue, the plaintiffs dismiss out of hand as

nonsense. Whatever the interpretive weight of “firearms-related duties when determining the scope of the Second Amendment right” in other contexts, we know from Heller that militia duties necessarily entailed Second Amendment “rights to perform those duties,” because the very “purpose for which the right was codified” was “to prevent elimination of the militia.”

Arguments on California’s part trying to re-litigate Heller by insisting that without state regulation of militias, the right cannot be assumed to apply to all citizens potentially part of a militia, are dismissed with this argument:

we know that the Founding generation had no linguistic difficulty referring to a “well regulated Militia” that was composed of the whole “body of the people” because both the Virginia ratifying convention and James Madison’s original draft of the Second Amendment did exactly that.

The plaintiffs also attack California’s assertion that in the Founding era anyone under 21 was essentially legally still an “infant” thusly: “California once again trots out the assertion that at the founding, ‘the age of majority was 21.’…As we have twice explained, however, it is simply not the case that 18-to-20-year-olds ‘were considered infants’ for all purposes in 1791—and one context where we know they were treated as adults was membership in the militia.”

As for California’s assertion that existing law and precedent mark this age ban as one of the presumptively still legal “longstanding” restrictions on Second Amendment rights, the plaintiffs assert California’s new argument “provides no answer to our briefing explaining, at length, that: (1) restrictions that appeared for the first time in the late nineteenth century can shed no light on the original meaning of the Second Amendment…and (2) anyway, the smattering of outlier historical restrictions cited by the State do not show any historical understanding that 18-to-20-year-olds could be barred from acquiring common firearms.”

Heller, while insisting it was applying original understanding to Second Amendment jurisprudence, created a new lens through which it insists the right should always have been viewed. Thus, it can’t be a simple winning argument to say, well, lots of states did this pre-Heller so these laws must be OK. New thinking through the implications of Heller needs to be applied to these laws, and now the 9th Circuit has seen arguments on both sides in this case. Which set of arguments the Court will find convincing remains to be seen, and a state full of 18-20-year olds awaits learning the extent to which California intends to infringe their right to armed self-defense.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3h56Rr2
via IFTTT

Biden Administration Uselessly Waives COVID-19 Vaccine Patent Rights


VaxMakeDreamstime

Vaccinating billions of people against the COVID-19 coronavirus scourge that continues to rage in South America and South Asia is an urgent matter for the rest of the world. While it appears that the more contagious and lethal B.1.1.7 and P.1 virus variants are blunted by current vaccines, every time the virus infects another person, it increases the risk that other new highly transmissible and deadly variants will emerge. So it is in everybody’s interest to manufacture as many doses of the effective vaccines as quickly as possible and support the efforts to distribute them to poor people around the world. Anything that slows down manufacturing and distribution would be counterproductive for everyone.

The Biden Administration has reportedly chosen, counterproductively, to cave to the demands of progressives at home and of a group of countries led by South Africa and India and waive the patent rights to the COVID-19 vaccines.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai released a statement declaring, “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines.”

Amusingly, Trade Representative Tai issued another statement just last week on the protection of intellectual property that actually explains why waiving patents, in this case, is a bad idea. “Intellectual property rights incentivize our creators, manufacturers, and innovators to invent new products and technologies,” Tai said. “The laws, policies, and practices that protect those rights must appropriately balance the interests of creators with those seeking to use their creations. Failing to adequately and effectively protect those rights in foreign markets hurts the U.S. economy, the dynamism of American innovators, and the livelihoods of our workers.”

The World Health Organization reports that fewer than 25 countries have the capacity to make any vaccines at all, much less the complicated new COVID-19 vaccines. Statista notes that only six countries are actually producing COVID-19 vaccines now (Russia has just made a deal with China to produce 260 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine).

The Biden Administration’s progressive feel-good gesture will in fact discourage future investment and innovation and do nothing to speed COVID-19 vaccines to the people who need them.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3nVxL67
via IFTTT

41-Month Prison Sentence for Multiple Swatting

From a Justice Department press release yesterday:

A former leader of the Atomwaffen Division in Texas, a racially motivated violent extremist group, was sentenced today to 41 months in prison for his role in a conspiracy that conducted multiple swatting events targeting journalists, a Virginia university, a former U.S. Cabinet member, a historic African American church, an Islamic Center in Arlington, Texas, and members of various minority groups and communities across the United States.

“The reprehensible conduct in this case terrorized communities across our Nation, as innocent Americans simply tried to attend school, practice their faith, and exercise their First Amendment rights,” said Raj Parekh, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “The defendants caused irreversible trauma to the victims of these hate-based crimes. This case sends an unmistakable message that those who target individuals because of their race, religion, or any other form of bias, will be identified, apprehended, and brought to justice.”

According to court documents, John Cameron Denton, 27, of Montgomery, Texas, participated in a conspiracy that conducted swatting attacks on at least 134 different locations across the United States between October 2018 and February 2019. Swatting is a harassment tactic that involves deceiving emergency dispatchers into believing that a person or persons are in imminent danger of death or bodily harm and causing the dispatchers to send police and emergency services to an unwitting third party’s address. Many of the conspirators, including Denton, chose targets because they were motivated by racial animus.

“Denton’s swatting activities were not harmless pranks; he carefully chose his targets to antagonize and harass religious and racial communities, journalists, and others against whom he held a bias or grievance,” said Timothy Thibault, acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Criminal Division. “Today’s sentence demonstrates the FBI’s commitment to holding accountable anyone who terrorizes communities and threatens public safety by diverting emergency resources, which puts innocent people and first responders at risk.”

Conspirators targeted multiple locations in the Eastern District of Virginia, including a then-sitting U.S. Cabinet official living in northern Virginia on January 27, 2019; Old Dominion University on November 29 and December 4, 2018; and the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Old Town Alexandria on November 3, 2018. In each instance, conspirators selected the targets and called emergency dispatchers with false claims of pipe bombs, hostage takings, or other violent activity occurring at the targeted locations. As a result of these swatting calls, police were dispatched to Old Dominion University and the Alfred Street Baptist Church, and individuals in each location were required to shelter in place while the bomb threats were investigated. According to court documents, a conspirator admitted to choosing the Alfred Street Baptist Church as a target because its congregation is predominantly African American.

Additionally, Denton personally chose at least two targets to “swat”: the New York City office of ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism; and an investigative journalist who produced materials for ProPublica. Denton chose these two targets because he was angry with ProPublica and the investigative journalist for publishing Denton’s identity and discussing his role in the Atomwaffen Division, a U.S.-based violent extremist group with cells in multiple states. The group’s targets have included racial minorities, the Jewish community, the LGBTQ community, the U.S. government, journalists, and critical infrastructure.

During the investigation, Denton unknowingly met with an undercover law enforcement officer and told the undercover officer about his role in the swatting conspiracy. Denton stated that he used a voice changer when he made swatting calls and admitted that he swatted the offices of ProPublica and the investigative journalist. Denton also stated that it would be good if he was “raided” for the swatting because it would be viewed as a top-tier crime, and he felt that his arrest could benefit the Atomwaffen Division….

Assistant U.S. Attorney Carina A. Cuellar prosecuted the case.

I haven’t followed the case, but, based on the press release, the result seems quite right to me. Knowingly false statements to law enforcement are generally unprotected by the First Amendment, especially when they are designed to lead to needless and potentially dangerous confrontations between the police and innocent third parties. And punishing people who target journalists, religious groups, and universities for such behavior itself helpfully protects free speech and religious freedom (though of course such swatting should be punished even when its targets aren’t chosen based on their First-Amendment-protected activities).

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2QUVs2k
via IFTTT

Massachusetts High Court Approves on Zoom Evidentiary Hearings in Criminal Cases

From today’s opinion in Vazquez Diaz v. Commonwealth, written by Chief Justice Kimberly Budd:

This case concerns whether the use of an Internet-based video conferencing platform, Zoom .., for an evidentiary hearing during the COVID-19 pandemic violates certain of the defendant’s constitutional rights. The defendant, John W. Vazquez Diaz, has waived his right to a speedy trial and seeks to continue his suppression hearing until it may be held in person. We conclude that a virtual hearing is not a per se violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nonetheless, where the defendant has waived his right to a speedy trial and there are no civilian victims or witnesses, we conclude that the judge, who had to make a decision in unchartered territory, abused her discretion in denying the defendant’s motion to continue his suppression hearing until it may be held in person. Accordingly, we reverse the judge’s order denying the defendant’s motion to continue….

The court held that Zoom hearings don’t categorically violate the defendant’s right to be present (recognized under the Massachusetts Constitution), right to confront witnesses, right to a public trial, or right to effective assistance of counsel; but it concluded:

Here, where there are no civilian witnesses or victims, the harm to the government’s case caused by any further delay is minimal. The evidence and the testimony of police officers can be preserved adequately. The Commonwealth has presented no evidence that the officers or the evidence that is in their custody will be unavailable if the hearing is continued.

While reducing the backlog of cases is a legitimate interest, there are many other cases that may be ripe for a virtual hearing at this time. The defendant must be aware, however, that when in-person proceedings resume, there will be a significant backlog and he may not be able to obtain a hearing as soon as he might wish.

We emphasize, however, that a defendant does not have an absolute right to continue his or her Zoom hearing until it may be held in person, even where a defendant waives his or her right to a speedy trial. While a defendant’s decision to waive his or her speedy trial right to wait for an in-person hearing does minimize the public health risk presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, delaying the defendant’s motion to suppress for what may be an indefinite period of time does not come without a cost. In other circumstances, it may well be within the judge’s discretion to deny a defendant’s motion to continue.

Justice Scott Kafker concurred, in an opinion that began thus:

I agree with the court’s conclusion that the judge’s denial of the defendant’s motion to continue constituted an abuse of discretion, but I write separately to emphasize that as we zoom into the future of this brave new digital world, judges must be acutely attentive to the subtle and not so subtle distorting effects on perception and other potential problems presented by virtual evidentiary hearings. Although the scholarship of these effects and problems is still developing and requires rigorous testing in court, it raises concerns that require a cautious approach, particularly after the pandemic ends and our court rooms can return to some semblance of normal….

Most notably, it is impossible to make true eye contact via the video conferencing technology available in this case, because the camera and display are not in the same place. Lack of eye contact creates a risk that viewers will perceive the speaker as uncertain or dishonest, and results in an over-all reduction in the ability to use emotional intelligence to assess the communication.

Because they are unable to maintain eye contact, virtual participants using Zoom or like technology “may lose access to the sorts of feedback they would ordinarily receive in the physical courtroom. This ongoing sense of uncertainty about whether they are truly being paid attention to and understood may be reflected in witnesses’ demeanor while testifying, which decision-makers may then construe as a lack of confidence or lack of interactivity ….” …

Both opinions are much more detailed than the short excerpts I’ve given, and much worth reading.

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

Biden Administration Uselessly Waives COVID-19 Vaccine Patent Rights


VaxMakeDreamstime

Vaccinating billions of people against the COVID-19 coronavirus scourge that continues to rage in South America and South Asia is an urgent matter for the rest of the world. While it appears that the more contagious and lethal B.1.1.7 and P.1 virus variants are blunted by current vaccines, every time the virus infects another person, it increases the risk that other new highly transmissible and deadly variants will emerge. So it is in everybody’s interest to manufacture as many doses of the effective vaccines as quickly as possible and support the efforts to distribute them to poor people around the world. Anything that slows down manufacturing and distribution would be counterproductive for everyone.

The Biden Administration has reportedly chosen, counterproductively, to cave to the demands of progressives at home and of a group of countries led by South Africa and India and waive the patent rights to the COVID-19 vaccines.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai released a statement declaring, “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines.”

Amusingly, Trade Representative Tai issued another statement just last week on the protection of intellectual property that actually explains why waiving patents, in this case, is a bad idea. “Intellectual property rights incentivize our creators, manufacturers, and innovators to invent new products and technologies,” Tai said. “The laws, policies, and practices that protect those rights must appropriately balance the interests of creators with those seeking to use their creations. Failing to adequately and effectively protect those rights in foreign markets hurts the U.S. economy, the dynamism of American innovators, and the livelihoods of our workers.”

The World Health Organization reports that fewer than 25 countries have the capacity to make any vaccines at all, much less the complicated new COVID-19 vaccines. Statista notes that only six countries are actually producing COVID-19 vaccines now (Russia has just made a deal with China to produce 260 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine).

The Biden Administration’s progressive feel-good gesture will in fact discourage future investment and innovation and do nothing to speed COVID-19 vaccines to the people who need them.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3nVxL67
via IFTTT