Category: reason

An 11-year-old boy apparently needed less than 10 minutes to hack into a replica of Florida’s election website last week and change election results.

The boy was attending DEFCON 26, an annual hackers’ conference in Las Vegas. PBS reports:

The boy, who was identified by DEFCON officials as Emmett Brewer, accessed a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website. He was one of about 50 children between the ages of 8 and 16 who were taking part in the so-called “DEFCON Voting Machine Hacking Village,” a portion of which allowed kids the chance to manipulate party names, candidate names and vote count totals.

He wasn’t the only young person to have such an easy time with the election website replica. An 11-year-old girl named Audrey was able to accomplish a similar feat in about 15 minutes.

Both 11-year-olds pointed out that the websites they hacked weren’t all that well protected. “Basically what you’re doing is you’re taking advantage of it being not secure,” Audrey tells BuzzFeed News. She was able to make it look like Constitution Party candidate Darrell Castle had won Florida in the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s actually kind of scary,” Brewer tells TechCrunch. “People can easily hack in to websites like these and they can probably do way more harmful things to these types of websites.”

Nico Sell, CEO of the secure communications firm Wickr, thinks the U.S. isn’t taking election security seriously enough. “By showing this with 8-year-old kids we can call attention to the problem in such a way that we can fix the system so our democracy isn’t ruined,” Sell tells TechCrunch.

But while state elections websites are definitely hackable, it’s a bit alarmist to suggest that 11-year-olds can change actual results in a matter of minutes.

For one thing, replica websites aren’t the real thing. As the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) notes in a statement, “many states utilize unique networks and custom-built databases with new and updated security protocols.” Thus, “it would be extremely difficult to replicate these system.” Sell might claim the sites the young hackers used are “very accurate replicas.” But unless you’ve actually tried to hack the real thing, you can’t know for sure.

Plus, state election websites are not repositories of actual vote counts. Instead, they’re merely unofficial election night tallies. “[E]lection night reporting websites are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media,” the NASS says. “The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results.”

Americans should be worried about election security, particularly when it comes to Russian agents hacking our voting systems. But are we so vulnerable that an 11-year-old can change results so quickly? Probably not.

A former agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is facing upwards of four years in prison after using his position and partnership with a shady lawyer to take advantage of immigrants.

The Detroit Free Press initially reported that then-ICE agent Clifton Divers used his proximity to immigrants hoping to avoid deportation to carry out a bribery scheme with a lawyer named Charles Busse. In one instance, one of Busse’s supposed clients, a woman believed to be from Albania, paid Divers $20,000 in hopes that the money would help her remain in the country. After taking the money, Divers then worked behind the scenes to make sure the woman would be safe from deportation. The woman was later revealed to be a government plant and her encounter with the men was enough to bring an end to their operation.

Over a six-year period, Divers took money from at least four of Busse’s clients to shield them from deportation. At least one report says the men accepted more than $990,000 in cash.

“Where many saw an overtaxed and broken system in need of reform, Mr. Busse saw an opportunity to enrich himself,” criticized acting U.S. Attorney Daniel L. Lemisch. A court document accused Busse of making thousands by “exploiting the inexperience, trust and desperation of his clients and their families.”

After taking money from immigrants, who were often left with no other options, the men then found a way to classify the immigrants as undercover informants working with federal investigators. This classification would make them eligible for a deferred action program that was reserved for immigrants helping federal agencies with cases like drug trafficking and terrorism.

Divers was reportedly motivated to help Busse in exchange for free legal representation, worth about $5,000. He also secured summer jobs for his daughter via Busse.

Drivers was charged with bribery and conspiracy in 2016. He entered a plea of guilty to the charges in January. He is currently facing four years in prison and will be sentenced on Monday. Busse is already serving a three-year sentence behind bars. Prosecutors defended harsher punishment for Divers because of his security clearance and proximity to sensitive documents.

President Donald Trump’s trade war with China has already hurt American farmers. Soon, Alaskan fishermen might suffer the consequences as well.

Alaska exports about $1 billion worth of seafood to China every year, according to Reuters. That’s the result of years of diplomacy between the Alaskan and Chinese governments. Last year, for instance, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Alaska, and earlier this year, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker returned the favor.

Then in June, China responded to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods with duties of their own—namely, 25 percent tariffs on a variety of American seafood exports.

According to the United Fishermen of Alaska, the biggest seafood trade group in the state, the burgeoning trade war could have “devastating” consequences. “This isn’t an easily replaced market,” the group’s executive director, Frances Leach, tells Reuters. Leach expressed concern that “China is just going to stop buying Alaska fish.”

Alan Noreide, a black cod and halibut fisherman based in the port town of Seward, expressed similar sentiments. “We’d rather be left to our own challenges that we have. We don’t need any more,” he tells Reuters.

Though Chinese consumers like Alaskan fish, higher prices could lead them to give their business to other countries, like Russia and Norway.

Alaska’s concerns over Trump’s trade war with China aren’t new. “It has clearly rattled my state,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) told U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Robert E. Lighthizer last month, referring to Trump’s tariffs. “Our seafood industry is the number one private industry in terms of the jobs and the economic opportunity it brings.”

Murkowski indicated fishermen in her state should get the same treatment as American farmers, to whom the Trump administration is giving $12 billion in subsidies to offset the harm done by tariffs. “The administration’s announcement of $12 billion in aid is an admission that tariffs are hurting, not helping, our country,” the Alaska Republican said. “Yet, farmers are hardly the only ones caught in the crossfire—so, too, are our fishermen, the energy industry, and many others.”

It’s not just the Alaskan fishing industry that should be worried, the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) said in June, right after China announced its seafood tariffs. “It is not clear where these trade actions will ultimately lead, what is clear is that they will negatively impact American seafood jobs,” NFI President John Connelly said in a statement at the time. “It is Maine lobstermen, the men and women on boats in Alaska and families harvesting and processing seafood in the Pacific Northwest who will feel the brunt of the Administration’s misguided policy.”

It doesn’t look like Trump’s trade war is going to end anytime soon. Last month, the administration announced plans to impose tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods. China responded last week by imposing 25 percent tariffs on $16 billion worth of U.S. exports.

Too many cybercooks. The federal government can’t stop creating new task forces to tackle the same problems. Right now, the hot issue is “cybersecurity” and social-media control. “Federal agencies have launched several offices and programs since the 2016 election that are intended to secure cyberspace, but some are warning that this is only creating more confusion among the private sector,” reports the Washington Examiner. The result has been “a dozen independent cybersecurity operations with overlapping agendas” and “only sporadic information-sharing between agencies.”

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new National Risk Management Center initiative. This comes in addition to the Justice Department’s recently launched Cyber-Digital Task Force, the Commerce Department Cybersecurity Office, the Department of Health and Human Services Cybersecurity Collaboration and Education Center, the Director of National Intelligence’s Cyber Threat Framework, and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, National Crime Information Center, Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, and National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, among others.

April Doss, chair of the cybersecurity and privacy practice at the law firm Saul Ewing Arnstein and Lehr, told the paper it’s overwhelming for anyone trying to actually keep up with and report threats. “I think there is a need for somebody whose job it is to look across the government,” said Doss. “We don’t seem to have that position existing anywhere in the administration.”

But while no one is watching the watchers, folks in Congress want to give just about everyone more power (and mandates) to watch us. Two weeks ago, a leaked draft paper from Warner’s office showed Warner—vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—was at least mulling over a massive range of incredibly invasive tech regulations.

The paper described these plans as a response to Russian propaganda campaigns, online harassment, and the overall entrenched and secretive nature of Facebook, Google, and other major technology companies. But as Andy Kessler notes in the The Wall Street Journal, “most of his proposals would end up locking the big guys in place while freezing innovation.” Surely, folks could see the danger? Nope:

The shallow-analysis pundit class jubilated. Mr. Warner and Democrats could “crack down on Big Tech,” “tame social media,” and “knock Silicon Valley into shape.” Woo-hoo. The cheerleaders’ only complaint is the lack of a 21st proposal: breaking up the tech giants. Still, Mr. Warner wants to show that techland has gotten too big for its breeches and that the center of power radiates from the Hill—not the Valley. But he forgets that there’s one market to rule them all. […] If even a handful of these proposals become law, faceless bureaucrats would control the internet instead of energetic entrepreneurs. No one would win under this new internet. And compliance costs would be so massive that no new startups would emerge.

Kessler takes particular issue with Warner’s suggestion of (further) meddling with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and his reverence for the European Union’s disastrous General Data Protection Regulation.

An American GDPR would turn the U.S. into Europe, making America’s technology industry french toast. But that’s one of Mr. Warner’s goals.

Consider the sop to lawyers. One of the magical characteristics of the online world is that anyone can post anything. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity to the Facebooks, Googles and Twitter s of the world with one simple sentence: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This allows platforms to host almost anything, as well as block content based on community standards, without being sued.

Mr. Warner proposes to change all that and “make platforms liable for state-law torts.” Specifically, “a revision to Section 230 could provide the ability for users who have successfully proved that sharing of particular content by another user constitutes a dignitary tort.” I can imagine campaign contribution manna and

Mr. Warner proposes to change all that and “make platforms liable for state-law torts.” Specifically, “a revision to Section 230 could provide the ability for users who have successfully proved that sharing of particular content by another user constitutes a dignitary tort.” I can imagine campaign contribution manna and long lines to file class-action suits in the plaintiff paradise known as the Eastern District of Texas. But no one would ever create an online platform again.

Of course, maybe the internet is about to wash into the sea in 15 years anyway. But until then, we’ve got a lot of things to sort out, and it would help if we could keep a little perspective.

Pushing back on Adrienne LaFrance’s recent condemnation of Twitter, journalism professor Jeff Jarvis writes: “We are often doomed to see the future as the analog of the past. Journalists see screens that contain familiar text and images, and that serve what used to be their ads—and they call that media. Such a mediacentric and egocentric worldview brings too many presumptions and misses too many opportunities.”

“To call these platforms publishers,” as LaFrance did, “is to presume that their task is merely to produce content,” suggests Jarvis.

It is to presume, then, that the internet should be produced, packaged, and polished, and that when someone says something bad anywhere on it then the entire internet is beschmutzed. In Europe, it also means that the internet should be regulated, and in a growing list of authoritarian nations—China, Russia, Iran, Turkey—it means that the internet and the public’s speech on it should be controlled.

The larger question, of course, is what the internet is and how it fits into society and society into it. We are just beginning to see what it can be. The essential value of the internet is conversation, not content. The larger question, of course, is what the internet is and how it fits into society and society into it. We are just beginning to see what it can be. The essential value of the internet is conversation, not content. The internet connects more than 3 billion people and enables a grand diversity among them to speak, if not yet to be heard. “Republics,” said the late Columbia University professor James Carey, “require conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should be noisy places.” That sound you hear, which sometimes grates, is the racket of society negotiating its norms and standards, its future. It is the messy sound of democracy.

Jarvis does not think the mass banning of Infowars from the platforms was a bad thing—quite the opposite. “The banning of Infowars from most major platforms is a sign of that process beginning to work,” he writes. But he also warns that “it is prudent that we ban what we see rather than everything we might fear…. [W]e need to understand the problem we are trying to address: not technology, but human behavior using technology, the bad acts of some small—yes, small—number of propagandists, trolls, misogynists, bigots, thieves, and jerks.”

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Kavanaugh doc dump presages September hearings. Over the weekend, the Senate Judiciary Committee “released more than 87,000 records from Brett Kavanaugh’s tenure in the George W. Bush White House,” notes USA Today.

To date, more than 103,000 pages of materials from the Supreme Court nominee’s past work have been made public. They are part of a record million-plus pages of legal opinions and emails from his career as a federal judge, White House lawyer and assistant to the prosecutor who investigated President Bill Clinton.

The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings are now scheduled to start September 4.

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Island territory could become first legislative OK for legal weed. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. territory of about 54,000 people, is preparing to legalize recreational marijuana. “In May, CNMI’s Senate voted in favor…of drafted legislation that would end the prohibition of cannabis and allow adults over age of 21 to grow, possess, and use marijuana,” as well as for stores to sell it, reports the Motley Fool.

What makes this legalization even more unique is that it’s being done entirely through the legislative process. In other words, residents of the CNMI aren’t voting on whether they want recreational weed to be legal—it’s being done entirely by lawmakers in the House and Senate. If you recall, Vermont became the first U.S. state to OK the use of recreational pot in January through the legislative process. The previous eight states to green light adult-use weed had their measures approved by voters via state ballot. However, Vermont doesn’t allow the retail sale of marijuana. That means the CNMI’s legislative approval of recreational marijuana would represent the first of any U.S. state or territory to allow the retail sale of adult-use cannabis.

QUICK HITS

• Counter protesters far, far outnumbered white nationalists of the “alt right” at a much-hyped Sunday protest in front of the White House.
• Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Michael Soliman said “his crew has seen trashed scooters in a 10-foot-high pile.”
• How Rand Paul wooed Trump.
• MIT professor Sherry Turkle on robots and why “there will never be an age of artificial intimacy.”
• Russia is dealing with an epidemic of public park copulation that might be some sort of secret viral marketing campaign.

V.S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at the age of 85. He was born and raised in Trinidad and set many of his early novels there. South Asian Indian by ethnicity and a longtime resident of England, his novels and non-fiction works engage colonialism and typically level biting criticism at both the lordly and liberated classes. Raised as a Hindu who was a non-believer in his adult life, he was an early and vociferous critic of radical Islam.

His 1981 book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, was controversial for its argument that radical Islam was merely the latest iteration of demonstrably failed revolutionary Third-World ideology and a potential source of global violence. Reason‘s reviewer, Paul Hornak, found Naipaul’s book

a relentlessly pro-Western account of the delusion prevalent in four countries of the East: Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Khomeini’s Iran. Iran, despite its monumental failures, is taken as a guiding light by the other three. The author, V.S. Naipaul, talks to an eccentric selection of Muslims. A few of them sound like they’ve got a mean streak, but the “hanging judge,” Khalkhali, comes across as genuinely dangerous. He boasts that he killed the Shah’s prime minister. Another Iranian, a communist, calls Khomeini a petty bourgeois….

Naipaul concludes that the impoverished are swelling the ranks of Islam because it validates their preconceptions. They like its message—basically, that poor is beautiful. They like its authority. It organizes the affairs of a believer down to the level of small matters of personal hygiene. It is tough on infidels, who coincidentally are the believers’ enemies in the secular realm. The Western businessmen, the successful immigrants, the native rich: all will perish in the purifying flame of Allah.

“Millions will have to die,” says an otherwise placid Pakistani predicting the Islamic future. Naipaul thinks so too. In calling for “a society cleansed and purified,” he says, the Islamic Jeremiahs seem to long for ruin.

Read the whole piece here.

Less than a year after 9/11 Naipaul said something about Islamic terrorists that was wise, accurate, and mostly ignored:

The idea of [the terrorists’] strength is an illusion….The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can’t do is build a plane. What they can’t do is build those towers.

The point, of course, isn’t that terrorists such as the ones behind the 9/11 attacks couldn’t be dangerous and deadly, or even take over countries. It’s that it’s a mistake to equate them with existential foes against whom all aspects of modern society must be hardened and regimented. Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials and supporters called for exactly that sort of permanent soft-war footing, even calling the war on terrorism a “new Cold War.” That fundamental mistake gave them a fiscal and moral blank check when it came to funding operations that were as morally sketchy as they were militarily ineffective (we’re still in Afghanistan, aren’t we?). On the domestic front, the overreaction Naipaul warned against had a similar, mostly unchecked impact. The 9/11 attacks, I wrote in 2002,

restructur[ed] American life in myriad ways, ranging from the innocuous (continued strong sales and displays of U.S. flags) to the bizarre (airport security guards forcing nursing mothers to drink their own milk as a condition of boarding a plane).

While 9/11 hardly killed libertarianism, as Francis Fukuyama dreamed a while back in the Wall Street Journal, it has sanctioned expansive government spending (even new and improved farm subsidies managed to hitch a ride on the Homeland Security gravy train) and even more expansive government action when it comes to denying due process (hey, what’s up with “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla anyway?), spying on citizens, and stonewalling various sorts of open-government protections (a John Ashcroft specialty that had even the conservative mag Insight on the News yelling, “Bush Team Thumbs Its Nose at FOIA“).

Will such policies remain in place after the current crisis plays out? If the past is any guide, it’s likely that they will, as citizens forget what things used to be like (who remembers, for instance, exactly when you had to start showing photo I.D. to board domestic flights?). Given all that, we can look forward to a future filled with more headlines such as this chilling one from today’s Washington Post: “Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft: Justice Dept. Chided on Misinformation.”

More here.

I’ll leave it to others more versed in his novels and essays to evaluate his place as a world author. But Naipaul was perfectly on target when it came to identifying the brilliant truth about Islamic terrorists’ lack of real power and strength to bring down a world that continues to move, however imperfectly, toward the mix of markets, civil rights, representative rule, material progress, and general modernity that was once proclaimed as the “end of history.”

As a society, we ignored Naipual’s insight at seemingly endless costs that continue to sanction indefensible military actions abroad and mass surveillance and fear of immigrants at home. We are now well into a second decade of perpetuating a political, cultural, and strategic blunder that equates flying planes into buildings with the ability to destroy our way of life. If the latter is happening at all, it’s not because of Osama bin Laden or his terrorist descendants.

Contrary to popular myth, cynically promoted by Donald Trump and other outside critics, Chicago is not an exceptionally dangerous city, writes Steve Chapman. In terms of violent crime, it is less afflicted than a number of large cities, including St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

Republicans blame unbroken Democratic control of Chicago for its mayhem. But partisan coloration is an unreliable indicator of crime patterns. Of the 10 states with the highest rates of violence, seven voted for Trump. Los Angeles, whose homicide rate is enviably low, has had only Democratic mayors since 2001.

View this article.

Officials in London, England, fined roofing contractor Stewart Gosling £300 ($380) because he’d tossed some empty water bottles, sandwich wrappers and chips bags in the back of his van. He was fined for hauling waste without a license. “They were talking about a plastic bag around two feet high, which was filled with rubbish from my lunch,” he said.

“I really think we should just ignore them,” counterprotester Glen Hellman told Reason outside the Vienna Metro station this morning, where Unite the Right II rally participants boarded a subway headed into downtown D.C. “We’re validating them, and that is a problem,” he added, describing himself as “torn” over whether to ignore the rally or protest it.

As expected, it was a chaotic scene outside the White House on this rainy Sunday, as white nationalists staged a rally in the nation’s capital.

But the core “Unite the Right II” group managed to draw only about two dozen people, compared with thousands who showed up in response, including plenty of anti-fascist (antifa) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters.

The white nationalist rally in Washington, D.C., served as a sequel to last year’s “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia, where violent clashes broke out and one counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was killed. In light of the events in Charlottesville, D.C. authorities made sure they were prepared for unrest. There was a huge police presence in Lafayette Square (where the rally was held) and the surrounding area. Cops guarded the white nationalist protesters wherever they went.

There just weren’t that many of them. Rally organizer Jason Kessler predicted in his National Park Service permit that 400 people would participate. Less than 30 actually showed up.

The rally’s actual size didn’t stop antifa protesters from getting all riled up. Decked out in black with their faces covered, they screamed chants like, “Any time, any place, punch a Nazi in the face” and “Whose streets? Our streets!”

But there were also plenty of level-headed counterprotesters, like Hellman.

“Anti-fascism isn’t just punching Nazis in the face. It’s giving food out to people who don’t have food,” says Marina, who declined to give her last name.

Many counterprotesters say they support the white nationalists’ right to hold a rally. “Everybody has to have a right to free speech, but man, there can be some disgusting messages out there,” one anonymous protester told Reason. “You can’t stop it. That’s the way our country is built.”

Paul Mitchell, a counterprotester wearing a U.S. Army veteran cap, compared the white nationalists’ right to hold a rally to NFL players’ right to kneel during the pre-game playing of the national anthem. “I would never do it, but I do support their right to make a statement,” he says.

The range of emotions was perfectly represented by the variety of signs counterprotesters were clutching outside the Vienna Metro station. Some, like “Hate has no home here” and “We were all created equal” had anti-hate, pro-equality messages. Other signs were much blunt. “Give them a platform,” read one, next to an illustration of a guillotine. “Fuck you fascist fuck,” read another.

Edison Township, New Jersey, could become the first municipality in the nation to require restaurants and caterers operating there to post information about the presence of allergens in every dish they serve.

The proposed ordinance, included in a recent committee report, requires warnings for the eight foods for which the FDA requires warnings if the foods are packaged—including milk, eggs, and peanuts—as well as MSG (monosodium glutamate) and added sulfites (such as those found in wines).

Food allergies are a real problem, and people who have them are most likely to encounter allergens while dining out. But as Baylen Linnekin writes, the law could saddle restaurants and caterers with huge liabilities. And for many consumers, the ordinance also wouldn’t likely solve the main problems it’s intended to address.

View this article.

The debate about the environmental impact of plastic straws has gone global, and so have inaccurate and unverified statistics about the little suckers.

The original bad-straw-stat sin was the claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day, a number that popped up in just about every news article, blog post, or government press release on the topic before Reason revealed that its source was a small phone survey by a nine-year-old.

This revelation sparked some mea culpas from National Public Radio, The New York Times, and other outlets that cited it (although the National Park Service, CNN, and San Francisco politicians still use it from time to time), but these sadly came too late to prevent the bad stat from infecting the debate abroad.

When city government employees in Vancouver decided to gauge Canada’s use of plastic straws in the run-up to that city’s straw ban, they merely imported the 500 million figure and then adjusted it for our northern neighbor’s population.

This was only slightly less rigorous than what has been going on in the United Kingdom.

Back in April, when the British government announced plans to prohibit plastic straws, it did so on the basis that that country’s citizens use an intolerable 8.5 billion straws a year. Government press releases cite the figure, as do countless environmental groups, and media reports.

Then the BBC investigated. Apparently, the figure comes from the waste management consultancy Eunomia. Eunomia—appropriately named after the Greek goddess of legislation—arrived at this figure by taking the anti-straw group Straw Wars’ estimate for how many straws McDonald’s uses every day, looking up the E.U.’s statistics on what percentage of the fast food industry consists of McDonald’s, and then “multiplying up” to get to 8.5 billion.

On top of that, Straw Wars’ estimate of how many straws McDonalds’s uses turns out to be twice as high as the company’s own figures.

8.5 billion, incidentally, was only supposed to be an estimate of straw use at fast food restaurants, not everywhere, a fact that got lost in transmission as other groups picked the number up. Eunomia has an estimate for total British straw use too—about 42 billion a year. But its methodology there is questionable too.

To get the figure, Eunomia looked at market data on the aggregate weight of straws consumed in the E.U. each year, then divided that number by each member state’s GDP. This is obviously going to inflate estimates of richer countries’ straw consumption, since the number of straws a country uses is going to plateau pretty quickly as they get wealthier. (If you got a 20 percent pay increase, do you think you’d use 20 percent more straws?)

Then there is Australia’s ubiquitous straw stat, whose origins are a total mystery.

This was discovered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after it aired a documentary, Waste Wars, that said the country uses 10 million straws a day. When a viewer asked where that figure came from, the network found itself unable to answer. The number nonetheless turns up not just on television but in government press releases and on environmentalist websites. And even without a good count of how large the purported problem is, some Australian senators are pushing for the country to ditch plastic straws by 2023.

The fact that dubious numbers keep surfacing in the straw debate suggests that activists are at best unconcerned with the trade-offs involved in their anti-straw crusade. So does their defensive hand-waving when confronted with the bad stats.

Take Peter Allan of the Australian group Sustainable Resource Use, who told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “I think it’s important we get good data but in the end I think we can say with this there’s enough consumption and enough of it is superfluous that it’s worth focus.”

Or take Milo Cress, the kid who gave us that 500-million-straws-a-day figure. He told USA Today, “Why I use this statistic is because it illustrates that we use too many straws. I think if it were another number, it still illustrates the fact that there is room for reduction. That’s really my message.”

If we’re going to ask people to give up a convenience—or in the case of disabled people, a necessity—and impose new costs on businesses, you shouldn’t wave away such a basic question.