Category: reason

No net-neutrality rooted attack on FCC servers. For a second time, David Bray, former chief information officer for the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), seems to have been caught fabricating stories about distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) on FCC servers. Bray’s most recent fable came in May 2017, as John Oliver of HBO’s Last Week Tonight was asking viewers to flood FCC comments with support for “net neutrality” legislation, and is the subject of an upcoming Office of Inspector General’s report.

“Bray had previously leaked baseless claims that the FCC was struck by a cyberattack in 2014,” Gizmodo discovered.

The inspector general’s report has not yet been made public, but FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel have both commented on its contents.

“The Inspector General Report tells us what we knew all along: the FCC’s claim that it was the victim of a DDoS attack during the net neutrality proceeding is bogus,” said Rosenworcel. Here’s her spin:

What happened instead is obvious—millions of Americans overwhelmed our online system because they wanted to tell us how important internet openness is to them and how distressed they were to see the FCC roll back their rights.

And here’s Pai’s:

With respect to the report’s findings, I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former Chief Information Officer (CIO), who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable.

“On the other hand,” Pai continued,

I’m pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes. Indeed, as the report documents, on the morning of May 8, it was the former CIO who informed my office that ‘some external folks attempted to send high traffic in an attempt to tie-up the server from responding to others, which unfortunately makes it appear unavailable to everyone attempting to get through the queue.’ In response, the Commission’s Chief of Staff, who works in my office, asked if the then-CIO was confident that the incident wasn’t caused by a number of individuals ‘attempting to comment at the same time . . . but rather some external folks deliberately trying to tie-up the server.’ In response to this direct inquiry, the former CIO told my office: ‘Yes, we’re 99.9% confident this was external folks deliberately trying to tie-up the server to prevent others from commenting and/or create a spectacle.’

FREE MINDS

Internet companies cancel Alex Jones. On Monday, Facebook permanently banned the Jones-helmed website Inforwars from the platform, YouTube removed all Infowars videos, and Apple deleted all Infowars podcasts from its store. A few perspectives…

Washington sees in Silicon Valley a chance to control speech in a way never before possible under the 1st Amendment and to roll back the clock to a pre-internet age of media gatekeepers. The way to achieve this is by continually leveraging the threat of regulation. https://t.co/xHTW5HQ5M6

— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) August 7, 2018

Who said anything about private? The constitution guarantees the freedom to speak one’s mind, not the right to a Facebook page. Alex Jones can scream in his basement all he wants. Nobody is obligated to give him a platform.

— Ben Grimes ★ (@softreeds) August 7, 2018

Whether you hate Alex Jones is beside the point. Do you love the fact a handful of tech monopolists have the power to simultaneously purge him from the internet?

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 6, 2018

Alex Jones interviewed politicians, activists, journalists, and all kinds of public figures over the years. Now those archives are simply gone. Too bad for researchers and historians. It was more important that we be protected from his bad speech

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 7, 2018

First they came for Alex Jones, and I did not speak out

Because “they” were individual people and entities

And they “came for” him by making their own choices about how to exercise their own speech and association

And that’s liberty, not tyranny

— QHatSecretMessages (@Popehat) August 6, 2018

There was Alex Jones content on YouPorn? I have questions. https://t.co/7Wuxriz1Ue

— Christoph (@Halalcoholism) August 7, 2018

FREE MARKETS

Iran “faces a choice,” said President Trump in a Monday statement announcing that the U.S. would reimpose economic sanctions on Iran, after lifting them in 2015. The country can “either change its threatening, destabilizing behavior and reintegrate with the global economy, or continue down a path of economic isolation,” said Trump.

The Iran sanctions have officially been cast. These are the most biting sanctions ever imposed, and in November they ratchet up to yet another level. Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States. I am asking for WORLD PEACE, nothing less!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2018

QUICK HITS

• • A man who opened fire at a Florida park yesterday was thwarted with a shot from an armed bystander in the crowd.
  • A man in federal custody who was swept up in a slaughterhouse immigration raid went blind in one eye after authorities refused to provide him with diabetes medication.
  • Reihan Salam tackles “the utility of white bashing.”
  • Trump is losing his Hollywood Walk of Fame star.
  • The Department of Defense tells employees to turn off their Fitbits.
  • Brazil is closing its borders to refugees from neighboring and crisis-torn Venezuela.
  • There is only one company in the U.S. that makes paper straws, and it has become mighty popular as ill-conceived plastic-straw bans have been taking hold.
  • Civil asset forfeiture means cops “accuse your stuff of a crime, and you as the owner have to prove that your stuff is innocent.”
  • American Express has pulled all ads from Sky News over an interview that it didn’t like.
  • Facebook has been pitching big banks on “potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger.”

“I was the magazine’s poetry editor for 35 years. Never once did we apologize for publishing a poem.”https://t.co/5KCjIMbYR5

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 6, 2018

Yet again, the renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is facing the consequences of expressing himself in a country that does not embrace free expression.

It’s been just seven years since the dissident artist was arrested and incarcerated in a secret location for 81 days. (The government suspected him and other activists of trying to start a “Jasmine Revolution.”) Ai also had his passport confiscated and was forced to pay a steep fine of $2.4 million after authorities charged him with tax evasion.

Now Ai has posted several Instagram videos of his “Zuoyou” studio being destroyed without warning over the weekend. As he explained in one video, he had worked in this Beijing studio since 2006. Ai tells NPR that some of his art was damaged in the process, as he had not been given any time to prepare. The neighborhood where Ai’s studio was located is scheduled for redevelopment, and Ai argues that the demolition was not simply an attempt to quiet an artist; it’s a state-driven gentrification effort aimed at the migrant workers who live in his part of the city.

“Free speech and free expression have simply never existed in China or in its artist communities,” he tells NPR. He also notes that in a Communist country, “Art is seen as either party propaganda or as Western spiritual pollution.”

As Reason recounted in 2013, Ai has a long history of criticizing the Chinese government: “chastising the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a ‘fake smile‘ to the world, detailing the deadly results of shoddy school construction after the Sichuan earthquake, or meticulously documenting the increasingly aggressive police measures used against him.” That’s a family tradition: The artist once told Reason that his poet father, the famed Ai Qing, was exiled and was “forbidden to write for 20 years.” The Chinese government was “trying to reduce my voice or my possibility for creativity,” he said in the same interview.

Winter came for Alex Jones yesterday: The conspiracy theorist and proprietor of far-right fever swamp Infowars was kicked off several social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

This isn’t a First Amendment issue. Private companies are under no obligation to provide a platform to Sandy Hook conspiracy theorizing, 9/11 trutherism, or any of the other insane ideas Jones has propagated. Even so, I can’t help but worry that the bans—which were aimed at curbing Jones’ hate speech, not his spread of fake news, according to the statements of the various companies—signal an intention to police harmful speech under a definition that is nebulous and likely to be applied selectively.

Jones is a thoroughly unsympathetic victim. The things he says on his podcast and publishes on its website are vile. He is currently being sued for libel by families of the Sandy Hook victims for airing claims that the attack was a false flag operation organized by the U.S. government. Libel is a category of speech that is not protected under the First Amendment, and if you believe there are any situations where an individual should be held legally accountable for wrong speak (I do, albeit with great retience), there is certainly a case to be made that this is one of them.

Facebook doesn’t actually need a reason to ban people from its platform. It can take virtually any action it thinks will improve the user experience. It could ban all conservatives tomorrow if it so desired.

Facebook did give a reason for banning Jones, though, and it’s a fairly weak and ill-defined one. “As a result of reports we received, last week, we removed four videos on four Facebook Pages for violating our hate speech and bullying policies,” the company explained. The problem was not that Jones was lying, or engaged in libel, or spreading fake news. The problem was hate speech. But we don’t know which statements he made were deemed hateful, or why. We don’t know if Jones is being singled out, or if anyone who said the things he said would be banned. We don’t know if a statement has to be targeted at a particular person to count as bullying, or whether generic trutherism could fit the bill.

I’m saying this for a third time so that I’m not misunderstood: Facebook can define hate speech however it wants. I am criticizing the lack of clarity in its definition, not because I think the government should intervene, but because I am a user of Facebook who worries that a stronger anti-bullying policy will be difficult to apply evenly.

Jones has been engaged in the same shtick for years. I can’t imagine that no one had ever complained about him before. So why now? What is so hateful or bullying about his speech that wasn’t apparent last week? What prompted the clearly coordinated campaign to remove him from so many major publishing platforms?

When Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April, Sen. Ben Sasse (R­-Neb.) grilled him on how Facebook defined hate speech. It was an interesting exchange. Zuckerberg was straightforwardly uncertain about how the site would handle such accusations moving forward:

As we are able to technologically shift toward especially having A.I. proactively look at content, I think that that’s going to create massive questions for society about what kinds of obligations we want to require companies to fulfill and I do think that that’s a question that we need to struggle with as a country. Because I know other countries are, and they are putting laws in place, and America needs to figure out a set of principles that we want American companies to operate under.

The argument that Facebook should not policing any speech—unless it is clearly unprotected by the First Amendment because it, say, advocates imminent lawless action—is strong. As I wrote last month:

In our modern political discourse, Facebook plays a role very much akin to the public square: a massive one, involving the entire world. The arguments for letting nearly all voices—even deeply evil ones, provided they do not organize direct violence or harassment—be heard on this platform are the same arguments for not taking the European route on hate speech: Policing hate on a very large scale is quite difficult given the frequently subjective nature of offense; we risk de-platforming legitimate viewpoints that are unpopular but deserve to be heard; and ultimately, silencing hate is not the same thing as squelching it.

I elaborated on these views in a podcast debate with Reason‘s Mike Riggs, who took the opposite position.

I will shed no tears for Jones. But social media platforms that take a broad view of what constitutes unacceptable hate speech have given themselves an extremely difficult task—one that will likely prompt yet more cries of viewpoint censorshipdown the road.

It would be nice, writes J.D. Tuccille, if the courts were to acknowledge that sharing the designs for firearms online is just like printing them up and distributing them in a book—that is, an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It would be nice, and it’s a point even conceded by at least one of the state attorneys general trying to stop Defense Distributed from sharing such plans online.

The internet is a nearly perfect medium for distributing information no matter what the law says, notes Tuccille. Just like shared music and movie files, downloadable gun plans are here to stay.

View this article.

The official Twitter account of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress appeared to call all of the nation’s white citizens murderers and said it was a mistake to consider their views. The tweet was later deleted and a subsequent tweet said they were quoting someone else. But critics note the tweet wasn’t a retweet, wasn’t in quotes and wasn’t attributed to anyone and that the ANC hasn’t explained why it quoted that person to begin with. The ANC explained further that they were quoting somebody who came to speak at a public hearing of the parliament’s constitutional review committee.

Against the advice of Washington D.C.’s rail transit authorities, I decided to take D.C.’s rail transit system this morning.

As a wave of station closures and service reductions has hit D.C.’s Metro this summer, the agency responsible for operating it—the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA)—has been urging riders to steer clear of its trains.

In pamphlets warning of major delays on segments of the Orange, Silver, and Blue line trains, WMATA has told riders to “only take Metro if you have no other option.” Similar advice to “consider alternative travel options” has been offered to riders on the city’s Red line, segments of which WMATA has closed to allow for badly-needed repairs at the Rhode Island Avenue station.

There are 3 guarantees in life: death, taxes, and @wmata screwing you over. August is gonna be ~grand~ #MetroFail @unsuckdcmetro pic.twitter.com/eN7U1gBHrq

— Mina Radman (@minaradman) July 31, 2018

Seeing as the Rhode Island station is the one closest to my home, and one that had been making headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons, I wanted to see just how bad things are. What I found was not so much a Metro system in crisis, but rather one that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the city it’s supposed to serve.

Approaching the station this morning I saw construction crews at work repairing structural damage that was first discovered back in 2016, when concrete started falling from the ceiling. That incident saw emergency repairs performed during a 25-day shutdown in October and November of 2016. It also triggered an internal investigation that uncovered Metro safety inspectors at the station had taken to just cutting and pasting positive evaluations from prior year reports instead of actually checking for damange in some hard-to-reach areas of the station.

Now WMATA is closing the station for another 45 days to finish the job.

I assumed this closure would mean hard times for businesses near the station. WMATA, after all, likes to tout Metro as “the key to the region’s economic vitality,” bringing in the customers and workers necessary to make the city’s retail sector run. But while talking to a cashier at the Dunkin Donuts across the street from the station, I was told there had been no slow-down in business. It was the same story at the CVS further down the block, where a manager said customer volume had “been about the same.” A few other restaurants around the Rhode Island station were uninterested enough in the morning crowd of commuters, however diminished, that they weren’t even open.

My next stop was the bus bay near the rail station, where the shuttle buses used to replace the idle trains on the Red Line were pulling in. Social media and news articles from the beginning of the Red Line’s shut down in late July had conditioned me to expect huge crowds pushing their way onto and off of irregularly-timed buses.

Instead I saw a handful of commuters being picked up or deposited at a decent frequency and without incident.

Declining to take one of the shuttle buses, I decided to walk the mile or so to the nearest operating Red Line station at NoMa-Gallaudet. One of WMATA’s performance metrics is the aggregate calories its riders burn walking to their train stations (2.2 million per weekday in 2017!), and I wanted to do my part.

At NoMA, I failed to find even the typical crowding for what should be a busy Monday morning commute. Instead, a less-than-normal crowd of riders waited for trains running at a slightly elongated eight minutes apart. All the stations on my way into the city center appeared less packed than normal save for Gallery Place, where refugees are able to get back onto the Red Line after having taken alternative Green or Yellow line trains that route them around the closed stations.

That I did not find the transit apocalypse I was expecting does not, of course, mean that Metro’s problems are overblown: Escalators still break down with infuriating regularity (not a minor gripe with a subway system as deep as D.C.’s); track fires force periodic delays (there was one this morning); fares are up, service levels are down, and some 20 out of 91 Metro stations still need to be rebuilt (a project that will cost $300-$400 million and see some stations shut down from May to September next year).

The anemic crowds and indifferent businesses I saw today are evidence that commuters are abandoning the system in favor of increasingly abundant transportation alternatives. And that change has been a long time coming. Metro ridership has cratered in recent years, going from a 2008 high of 750,000 weekday boardings to an average of 612,000 in 2017. That’s slightly below where Metro ridership was in 2001, when the D.C area had about 1.3 million fewer residents. Residents have taken in increasing numbers to biking, driving, and or taking rideshare services like Uber, Lyft, and Via.

My guess is that more than a few of these riders are lost for good to the Metro system, even as policymakers shovel an extra $500 million a year to WMATA to stop its rail service from getting even worse. Shovelling money into Metro will probably help those D.C. residents and workers who can’t afford ridesharing or automobile ownership, or are poorly served by WMATA’s equally dreadful bus system. But as service degrades further and costs mount, it is worthwhile to consider whether it’s more cost-efficient in the long run to invest in replacing Metro, rather than endlessly repairing it.

Alex Jones’ professional presence on several major internet platforms has come to an end.

Jones is a noted conspiracy theorist and the founder of the InfoWars website and podcast. In a Monday tweet, he confirmed that Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple had completely unpublished and/or removed his professional pages and podcasts. All four companies stated that Jones’ inflammatory statements about Muslims, immigrants, members of the LGBT community, and other groups violated their terms of service.

“We believe in giving people a voice, but we also want everyone using Facebook to feel safe,” Facebook said in a statement. “It’s why we have Community Standards and remove anything that violates them, including hate speech that attacks or dehumanizes others. Earlier today, we removed four Pages belonging to Alex Jones for repeatedly posting content over the past several days that breaks those Community Standards.” The company also called Jones a “repeat offender.”

YouTube listed some similar reasons for its ban in an email to NBC News. Spotify and Apple removed the InfoWars podcast from their streaming services, though a number of InfoWars apps are still available for download on the Apple store.

Jones’ banishment comes as social media giants attempt to balance free speech, onlight civility, and the fight against “fake news.” Just last month, conservatives accused Twitter of disproportionately “shadow-banning” them when several Republican leaders, including Reps. Mark Meadows (R–N.C.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), found that their Twitter accounts did not appear on the drop-down menu in the search bar. (The shadowbans also extended further right, to people like white nationalist Richard Spencer and right-wing troll Mike Cernovich, though initially at least they did not affect Jones.) Facebook, meanwhile, was thrown into controversy after founder Mark Zuckerberg told an interviewer that Holocaust deniers should be able to post content on Facebook provided they weren’t attempting to “organize harm” or attack someone else.

Though Zuckerberg’s sister responded to that controversy by calling on the government to make certain kinds of speech illegal, she also suggested that social media platforms should not need to “decide who has the right to speech” and “police content in a way that is different from what our legal system dictates.”

During the uproar over Mark Zuckerberg’s comments, Reason‘s Robby Soave argued:

Policing hate on a very large scale is quite difficult given the frequently subjective nature of offense; we risk de-platforming legitimate viewpoints that are unpopular but deserve to be heard; and ultimately, silencing hate is not the same thing as squelching it.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump tweeted that “tariffs are working big time” and said that his trade war would help us pay down the national debt. On today’s Reason Podcast, special guests Eric Boehm and Robby Soave join Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman to talk about the latest escalations in Trump’s trade war and how Trump’s bad trade policies are enabling cronyism.

Also on this week’s podcast: Medicare for all costs how much? Will 3D-printed guns doom us all? And what are we supposed to make of The New York Times hiring technology writer Sarah Jeong, even with a history of controversial tweets? As always, we end with recommendations for books (Manhattan Beach), television (The Affair), and a video game (Wolfenstein II: The New Colussus).

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music by Nine Inch Nails. Licensed under Creative Commons. (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US.)

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Could California’s liberal Democratic attorney general end up asking conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the federal Clean Air Act as an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights?

It sure looks as though things are headed in that direction.

Anti-pollution laws—particularly the standards for automobile emissions—are the latest area where, because of the Trump administration, the left is discovering anew the advantages of devolving authority to state and local governments.

Auto emissions became the newest and perhaps the most heated front in the federalism fight earlier this month when the federal Environmental Protection Agency announced a “Make Cars Great Again” proposal. Part of that plan involves withdrawing a waiver the federal government had granted in 2013 that had allowed California to impose stricter emissions standards on new cars sold in the Golden State.

Why, you might wonder, does California even need to ask permission from Washington to impose such stricter standards? Why can’t the state simply impose them on its own, without begging Washington for an okay, asks Ira Stoll.

View this article.

In order to get back any of the money that the New Hampshire State Police took from him, Edward Phipps has agreed to let federal prosecutors keep most of it, even though he has not been charged with any crimes.

The cops took the cash during a traffic stop in 2016. Phipps wasn’t even in the car at the time.

The police pulled the driver over for tailgating and for going one whole mile per hour over the speed limit. A turned up a bag full of $46,000 cash in the trunk. Police then brought in a drug-sniffing dog, which came up empty.

Though they have presented no evidence of any criminal act, police took the money and federal prosecutors declared their intent to force the forfeiture of the funds, so they could keep it. Phipps came forward in July 2017 to indicate that the cash was his, and he said it was obtained legally.

We took note of this case back in March, and it looks like the Justice Department succeeded in getting its way. As part of a settlement, Phipps has agreed to give the Department of Justice $39,000 of the $46,000 seized.

This is was a case of civil asset forfeiture, where law enforcement officials take and keep people’s assets that they suspect are connected to criminal activity. Often, they can do this without convicting or even charging any person with a crime. Instead the property itself is accused of being linked to misconduct. The “defendant” in this settlement is the cash itself; the Department of Justice is suing a sack of money.

This weird quirk matters because the burdens of proof in civil courts are often lower than the “beyond a shadow of a doubt” required to convict a person. So it’s easier for prosecutors to win, and it flips presumption of innocence on its head: Phipps has to hire a lawyer and prove his money isn’t connected to criminal activity.

As part of the settlement, Phipps not only agrees to give up everything but $7,000 (which will probably have to go to his legal fees). He agrees never to request that the money to be returned, and he furthermore agrees never to attempt to assert any claim that the government did not have “probable cause” to make him forfeit the money. I’m highlighting that part of the story to show how much lower the legal threshold is to take somebody’s stuff and keep it. “Probable cause” is the amount of evidence police need for a search warrant, not nearly enough to convict somebody of a crime.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. New Hampshire reformed its civil asset forfeiture laws in 2016 to require a criminal conviction before police or prosecutors could force people to forfeit money or property. Unfortunately, the state’s reform did not close a loophole that lets local police partner with the feds in a program called Equitable Sharing. In this system, local police use the federal asset forfeiture program instead of their own and then the Justice Department distributes most of the forfeited money back to local law enforcement.

That’s why the Department of Justice is involved here. The state police can’t seize Phipps’ money on their own. So they went to the feds to arrange the forfeiture, and then the Equitable Sharing program lets the Justice Department funnel the funds right back to local law enforcement. It’s not money laundering when it’s the government.