Category: reason

If his selection of Antony Blinken as secretary of state is any indication, President Joe Biden’s promised return to normality will extend to his administration’s foreign policy.

A veteran of the U.S. State Department and Democratic Party foreign policy establishment, Blinken, 58, will bring competence and professionalism to the job of America’s top diplomat. But he offers little hope for “a new and fresh foreign policy that doesn’t involve global military primacy, continued intervention overseas, and [a] massive military footprint,” says Kelley Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, a noninterventionist foreign policy think tank.

As then–Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, Blinken supported the Obama administration’s disastrous Libya campaign, despite Biden’s opposition to that intervention. In 2015, Blinken, then assistant secretary of state, favored the Obama administration’s policy of shipping arms to and sharing intelligence with Saudi Arabia to support its war in Yemen, which has proven to be a humanitarian catastrophe. Blinken also served as Biden’s chief policy adviser in 2002, when Biden, then a senator representing Delaware, voted in favor of using military force in Iraq.

“In short, Blinken has agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama made, and he has tended to be more of an interventionist than both of them,” Daniel Larison, a senior editor at The American Conservative, noted in a November article for the Quincy Institute publication Responsible Statecraft.

Blinken has expressed some regret over his support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and he has criticized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet he also has faulted the Obama administration for doing “too little” in Syria. “Without bringing appropriate power to bear, no peace could be negotiated, much less imposed” there, Blinken and Robert Kagan wrote in a 2019 essay published by the Brookings Institution. “Today we see the consequences, in hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, in millions of refugees who have destabilized Europe and in the growing influence of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.”

Vlahos suspects Blinken has not absorbed the lessons of America’s foreign policy adventures during the last couple of decades. For “a lot of people who have offered some regrets [about] specific foreign policy mistakes, whether it be Libya or Vietnam or Iraq,” she says, it is “because they cannot deny the consequences. The consequences are so awful, and public opinion has already decided.”

A few progressive intervention skeptics have offered a rosier assessment of Blinken. Matt Duss, who advises Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) on foreign policy, described Blinken as “a good choice,” saying on Twitter he has “the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding U.S. diplomacy.” Mainstream press coverage of Blinken’s nomination likewise emphasized his diplomatic experience, contrasting it with Trump’s own “ricocheting strategies and nationalist swaggering,” as The New York Times put it.

Eric Gomez, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, thinks supporters of a less militarized foreign policy can find a silver lining in Biden’s pick for secretary of state. “A lot of what Trump did while in office,” Gomez says, “hurt all the parts of the tool kit that weren’t the military or weren’t sanctions. He was heavily dependent on U.S. threats of force. Having a more effective and resourced and utilized diplomatic corps, and using those peaceful, nonmilitary parts of U.S. foreign policy, is not sufficient, but it is necessary. We have to have those.”

At the same time, Gomez cautions, a more efficiently run State Department means Biden could enact a foreign policy vision that has little to do with restraint or rolling back America’s role as global policeman. If there’s cause for optimism about Biden’s foreign policy, he argues, it’s that more pressing domestic concerns will prevent the incoming president from doing anything very dramatic.

“Any coming Biden administration foreign policy will be restrained by circumstance, but not design,” wrote Gomez and Cato senior fellow Brandon Valeriano in a November American Conservative essay. “The domestic, political, and economic environment in the United States will significantly constrain the Biden administration’s ability to adopt ambitious foreign policy goals.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2P7ZJhX
via IFTTT

Brittney Strupe got engaged over Valentine’s Day weekend, and her fiancé bought roses for the occasion, more that $300 worth. Rather than toss them all away, Strupe decided to show a little love for others. She, her sister, and her daughter went to a Coshocton County, Ohio, Walmart and left them on vehicles. Customers and store management didn’t didn’t know what to make of this, so they called the cops. In turn, the sheriff’s office posted a warning on Facebook about people leaving flowers on windshields, calling it a “human trafficking related technique” though adding “it is unclear at this time if this incident is related to such type of crime.” Strupe saw the post and contacted the sheriff’s office to explain what happened.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3somU5V
via IFTTT

On Monday, the Court issued a lengthy order list. This order purged from the docket many Trump-related cases, and set the stage for other Trump-related cases to fall off the docket.

First, the Court granted certiorari in challenges to Trump Administration’s Title X policy and “public charge” rule. Soon enough, the Biden Administration will ask the Court to take these cases off the calendar, since the policies are being reversed. And, in time, the Court will likely vacate the lower-court decisions.

Second, the Court denied review in a handful of election-related cases:

• Two cases from Pennsylvania raised the independent state legislator doctrine: Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Degraffenreid and Corman v. Pennsylvania Democratic Party. (I will write more about those cases in another post).
• The Court denied two other cases from Pennsylvania seeking to bock the certification of the election: Kelly v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Boockvar. (John Eastman was counsel of record in the latter case).
• The Court denied review in Trump v. Biden. Here, President Trump challenged the modification of absentee balloting rules in Wisconsin. The Court denied review without even calling for a response.
• The Court denied review in Wood v. Raffensperger. This case, brought by L. Lin Wood, Jr., challenged the method of evaluating mail-in votes in Georgia. The Court didn’t call for a response on this petition.
• The Court denied review in Ward v. Jackson. This case was brought by Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona GOP. She challenged a ruling based on allegations of election fraud. The Court also did not call for a response here.
• The Court denied review in King v. Whitmer. Sidney Powell brought this suit against the Michigan Governor, raising seven questions presented about voter fraud. The petition states, “Petitioners presented substantial evidence consisting of sworn declarations of dozens of eyewitnesses and of experts identifying statistical anomalies and mathematical impossibilities, as well as a multistate, conspiracy, facilitated by foreign actors, including China and Iran, designed to deprive Petitioners to their rights to a fair and lawful election.”

(If I missed any election-related cases, please let me know).

Third, the Court denied a stay in Vance v. Trump. Before the election, President Trump filed a last-ditch effort to get the Supreme Court to block the release of his tax returns to the New York City grand jury. With a one-line order, the Court denied that relief. Co-Blogger Ilya Somin wrote about the order.

Fourth, the Court denied review in Clifford v. Trump. Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, sued Trump for defamation. The lower court held that Trump’s statements were hyperbolic, and dismissed the suit under the state anti-SLAPP statute. And yes, the caption actually reads “Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, Petitioner v. Donald J. Trump.”

As best as I can tell, the Court held onto a bunch of pending Trump-related cases, and dismissed, or granted-as-a-way-to-dismiss them all at once.

Soon enough, all things Trump will be purged from the Court’s docket.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ZK0jUM
via IFTTT

On Monday, the Biden administration revoked changes to the citizenship test for immigrants that were adopted in the waning days of the Trump administration. The official announcement from US Citizenship and Immigration Services is here. With the exception of a few test administrations over the next few weeks (where some applicants will have the option of taking either the new or old versions of the test, in order to accommodate those who studied for the 2020 version on the expectation that it would be the one they would have to pass), USCIS is going to revert to the 2008 version that the Trump administration tried to supplant.

As I explained in this December post on the Trump revision, some of the changes made by the former administration were reasonable, including increasing the number of questions from ten to twenty, and eliminating some questions focusing on geography, while adding more about history, law, and political institutions. The latter types of knowledge are more useful for purposes of being an informed voter, which is presumably the purpose of the test in the first place. But the Trump administration also introduced many new questions that incorporated factual errors, smuggled in disputable normative assumptions in the guise of factual knowledge, or some combination of both. I went over examples of both problems in my December post.

On balance, it would have been better if the Biden administration had kept the defensible aspects of the Trump reforms, while getting rid of the biased and inaccurate questions. But if we can only have one of the two, I would say it is better to get rid of the latter, even at the cost of also junking the former. Including questions based on factual errors and disputable normative assumptions is both counterproductive and egregiously unfair, in so far as it punishes applicants who know enough to realize that the official “correct” answers are actually wrong, or who just happen to disagree with the normative assumptions behind the nonfactual questions. But, as noted in my earlier post, some of the questions on the 2008 version of the test also have significant flaws. So far at least, the new administration has not tried to fix them.

Regardless of which version of the test is used, neither Trump reform nor the Biden reversal of it address some of the deeper issues raised by the use of tests to screen applicants for the citizenship. I discuss some of them in my earlier post:

Unlike the right to live and work in a given location, the right to vote is not just a personal liberty, but also, as John Stuart Mill put it, the right to exercise “power over others.” Thus, there is some potential justification for restricting the franchise to those with at least a minimal level of political knowledge. That is, at least in theory, what the citizenship test is supposed to do. And it is also the reason why we deny the suffrage to children, among others….

Despite the flaws in the current citizenship test, I am not on principle opposed to requiring would-be voters to pass a test of basic political knowledge. Voter ignorance is a serious problem, and such a requirement might potentially curtail it, at least at the margin. Even the current flawed test might still be better (or less bad) than no test at all.

But that, in turn raises the question of why it should be imposed on immigrants, but not native-born citizens. One possible answer is that we can reasonably assume that natives already know these things. But, sadly, that isn’t true. Studies show that almost two-thirds of current American citizens would fail even the old citizenship test if they had to take it without studying….

Perhaps the answer is that voting is an inherent right of citizenship, so all citizens should be given the franchise, regardless of how ignorant they might be about politics and government. But this runs into the fact that we already deny the franchise to large numbers of citizens based on their real or imagined lack of competence to be good voters: children, many of the mentally ill, and numerous convicted felons. In combination, these groups add up to a third or more of the population. If it is morally permissible to deny the franchise to incompetent (or supposedly incompetent) children, mentally ill people, immigrants, and felons, why not to ignorant native-born adults?…

Discrimination between politically ignorant immigrants and similarly ignorant natives is another example of morally arbitrary discrimination based on parentage and place of birth, on which most immigration restrictions are based. Why not just impose a knowledge test that applies to all would-be voters regardless of whether they are immigrants or natives, children or adults, mentally ill or not?….

One possible answer to this question is that we cannot trust the government to come up with an objective test, as opposed to one calculated to weed out opponents of the party in power. This problem is already evident in some of the Trump administration test questions discussed above, which seem designed to privilege more conservative answers to questions (such as the one about who members of Congress represent). The incentive for the government to “rig” the test would be even greater if it applied to all potential voters, not just immigrants.  The history of voting tests is not a happy one; it includes, for example, “literacy tests” used to weed out black voters in the Jim Crow-era South. This is the main reason why I am skeptical of adopting knowledge tests as a general solution to the problem of political ignorance….

But even if they cannot be easily changed, we should at least acknowledge the morally questionable aspects of the citizenship test for immigrants. And if we are going to continue to have one, it should be more competently designed. Perhaps the people hired to design the citizenship test should be required to meet certain standards of civic knowledge themselves! To the classic problem of “who guards the guardians,” we might add the issue of “who tests the testers.”

I discuss a variety of issues related to immigrant voting rights in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6 of my recent book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3qXL5Yg
via IFTTT

This episode features an interview with Jason Fagone, journalist and author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies. I wax enthusiastic about Jason’s book, which features remarkable research, a plot like a historical novel, and deep insights into what I call NSA’s “pre-history” – the years from 1917 through 1940, when the need for cryptanalysis was only dimly perceived by the US government. Elizebeth and William Friedman more or less invented American cryptanalysis in those years, but the full story was never known, even to NSAers. It was protected by a force even stronger even than classification – J. Edgar Hoover’s indomitable determination to get good press for the FBI even when all the credit belonged elsewhere. And, at all its crucial stages, that prehistory is a love story that lasted, literally, right to the grave. Don’t miss this (long!) interview with Jason Fagone, or his book.

Meanwhile, in the news roundup. Dmitri Alperovitch covers the latest events in what we just can’t call the SolarWinds hack any more. There’s no doubt that Microsoft code is at the center of the hack, though not because of unintended flaws; the hackers showed great interest in Microsoft’s code and took full advantage of its most easily abused features. Dmitri predicts multiple executive orders from Anne Neuberger’s review of the matter, and he hopes it means more centralization of federal civilian security monitoring and policy under CISA.

Dmitri and I agree that the Congressional effort to turn the cybersecurity director position into a Senate-confirmed White House office is more trouble than it’s worth.

The Maryland law taxing Google and Facebook ad revenue is ground-breaking, and for that reason is will also be heavily litigated. First time caller, first time listener David Fruchtman explains the tax and the litigation it has already spawned.

Which came first, China’s dream of a rare-earth boycott or U.S. nightmares of a rare-earth boycott? We ask Jordan Schneider, who suggests that neither the dream nor the nightmare is likely to come true any time soon.

Is Australia going to war with Big Tech?  I take on Oz’s link fee and end up siding, improbably, with Mike Masnick and Facebook and against the fee. Meanwhile, the Australian infrastructure protection bill is drawing fire from Microsoft. Dmitri leans toward Microsoft’s view that the law should not give government authority to intervene when a private sector entity is unable or unwilling to respond to an attack.  I lean toward the government’s position.

Jordan Schneider reviews the latest stories of tech companies getting a little too close for comfort to the Chinese surveillance state. The ByteDance censorship story is compelling but not new.  The Oracle story is compelling, new, and a clever piece of journalism by another alumna of the podcast, Mara Hvistendahl. 

Finally, in a series of quick bites, we cover:

• U.S. charges against three North Koreans who boosted their nation’s GDP appreciably with their hacks.
• The ongoing Jones Day Doxtorsion.
• France’s discovery that GRU successfully targeted Centreon servers for years, and
• Sultan Meghji’s departure from The Cyberlaw Podcast for some damn thing or other

And more!

Download the 350th Episode (mp3)

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

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

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