Category: reason

On a Saturday afternoon in April 2016, Arlene Harjo let her 38-year-old son borrow her two-year-old Nissan Versa for what he said was a trip to the gym with his friends. He was gone all day, and the next morning Harjo learned that Albuquerque police had arrested him for driving while intoxicated. The cops had also taken custody of Harjo’s car, which the city planned to keep.

Harjo’s response to Albuquerque’s theft of her car culminated this week in a ruling that highlights two especially troubling aspects of civil forfeiture, Jacob Sullum says. The practice, which allows confiscation of assets allegedly tied to crime even when the owner has not been accused of breaking the law, gives the government a financial incentive to take people’s property and requires them to prove their innocence if they want to get it back.

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Evelyn Strahle, 91, says she is trapped in her home after Prince George’s County, Maryland, officials forced her son to remove a wheelchair ramp he’d built in front of the house she shares with her 94-year-old husband. Officials say the son had not gotten the necessary permits.

The internet is defying a federal judge’s attempt to block Defense Distributed from publishing instructions showing how to create 3D-printable firearms.

A few hours after U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik, a Clinton appointee, muzzled Defense Distributed with a court order Tuesday evening, the CodeIsFreeSpeech.com mirror site appeared. It’s a project of the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and other civil rights groups, and includes freely downloadable computer-aided design (CAD) files for the AR-15, AR-10, Ruger 10-22, Beretta 92FS, and other firearms.

Soon after the court order, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson announced that his site, DEFCAD.com, was “going dark.” The files his company was hosting there have been replaced with a notice saying they have been removed as a result of Lasnik’s ruling.

But the court order does not apply to the advocacy groups behind CodeIsFreeSpeech. They were not named as defendants in the lawsuit brought by the Washington state attorney general. Therefore, they don’t need to comply with the ruling.

“We, and many others around the country, completely support Cody and Defense Distributed,” Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, tells Reason. “Some governments and elected officials might want to censor this speech because they prefer a police state. We don’t. I don’t really give a damn what they’d prefer.”

Lasnik wrote in today’s opinion that Washington state has “a clear and reasonable fear that the proliferation of untraceable, undetectable weapons will enable convicted felons, domestic abusers, the mentally ill, and others who should not have access to firearms to acquire and use them.” The judge predicted that there would be a “proliferation of these firearms” if he did not grant the state’s emergency motion to censor the files from Defense Distributed’s website.

Absent from Lasnik’s 7-page ruling is any consideration of the First Amendment implications of censoring information about building firearms. This has been legal since before the United States was founded; Reason‘s special Burn After Reading issue even includes helpful instructions for constructing a handgun from legally available parts.

Crucially, also absent from the opinion is any recognition of the difficulty of censoring information once it’s already been published to the web.

DEFCAD.com’s files are not only being mirrored at CodeIsFreeSpeech—they or something like them are also available on innumerable other sites. Directions for the AR-10 lower receiver chambered for .308 caliber ammunition (the “lower receiver” part of the weapon is what the government defines as a firearm) are posted on GrabCad.com. Plans for the famous Liberator, a printable single-shot handgun, are available on Github. TheTruthAboutGuns.com is linking to a Dropbox archive of the Defense Distributed files.

And there’s a handy Github code repository that lets you mirror the FOSSCAD data archive, which includes the files for scores of firearms, using only four commands. An extra three lines of typing are necessary if you’d like your mirror site to update itself automatically.

Federal judges are supposed to issue injunctions only if there’s “immediate and irreparable” harm that the order can prevent from happening. In this case, the CAD files have already proliferated online; Washington state is at least a few years too late. Even NPR acknowledges this.

Look for Defense Distributed’s attorneys to argue that this is yet another reason the temporary restraining order should be dissolved. A hearing is scheduled for August 10 in Seattle.

As Reason‘s Brian Doherty has chronicled, the Seattle lawsuit is one of a flurry of warning letters and legal challenges from anti-gun states aimed at forcing Defense Distributed not to publish its files. The company recently won the ability to publish after reaching a settlement with the Justice Department in its lawsuit claiming that restrictions on sharing firearm code violate the First Amendment—a clear echo of earlier litigation over encryption code nearly a generation ago.

It’s possible that Defense Distributed may lose this legal skirmish and be prevented from returning its instructions to the DEFCAD site. But for anyone who wants to manufacture a firearm at home, the CAD files are readily available. The Second Amendment, it turns out, is protected by the First.

The whole world, including President Donald Trump, seems to be going nuts about the fact that the feds have settled a long-simmering lawsuit that challenged its attempt to prohibit the company Defense Distributed from making available certain software that could instruct certain devices to manufacture weapons.

You can catch up on what’s going on with Reason‘s reporting on the frantic wave of attempts in the past week—by upset gun control groups, threatening petty officials, and litigious state governments—to scuttle the settlement.

There are three important points that the public panic over this rather limited and technical legal story miss, or misunderstand:

1) Nothing of any new significance to anyone but Defense Distributed really happened. That company, founded by Cody Wilson, a provocateur who designed the first functional 3D-printed plastic gun, is now out from under an expensive multi-year lawsuit against the federal government. The suit challenged the feds for using arcane International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) rules to restrain his group from distributing potentially gun-making software. The organization can now pursue its business/cause of distributing hardware and software for home gun use freely.

Supposedly. Except now a bunch of authorities below the federal level are trying to stymie them via threat and lawsuit now that the federal government has stopped.

So is this a huge, alarming change in law and culture? Has the crazy Trump administration decided to making home gun manufacturing legal, at great potential peril to the republic?

Making guns at home for personal use has always been legal. (Reason provided a step-by-step guide on doing so in our July issue!) And since 1988, it has been and remains illegal to make or sell a gun that “is not…detectable…by walk-through metal detectors” or “when subjected to inspection by the types of x-ray machines commonly used at airports, does not generate an image that accurately depicts the shape of the component.”

The federal government’s decision to settle, based at least in part on arcane shifts in regulatory authority between the State Department and the Commerce Department, does not change that. And there was never, as far as I know, any attempt to enforce ITAR regulations on anyone else who might be distributing the same or similar files, which were already widely available on the internet. (There is, and should be, a difference between actually violating the law and spreading information that could allow someone to violate the law.)

So anyone and everyone else was in practical terms free to distribute and use software that instructed devices such as computerized CNC mills and 3D printers to make things that could function as guns. Many people were already doing exactly that. Most of the hobbyist action is now in CNC mills, used to make metal guns. The feared plastic ones? Well, as Wilson described his original “Liberator” to me in 2013, “to reduce it to materiality, it still is a crude plastic gun that few people can make.”

2) This is not about the Trump administration being wild pro-gun ideologues. Despite speculations spread, for example, in a Wired story on the settlement, the decision was a specific technical decision based on ITAR. As one of Defense Distributed’s lawyers, Alan Gura, told me, the Trump administration continues to fight against gun rights in all the same cases the Obama administration did, and the most likely reason for settlement was that the government “realized that not a single 5th Circuit judge offered that they were likely to succeed on the merits. To the contrary, the centerpiece of their victory was that they could somehow avoid the merits. When they could avoid the merits no longer, suddenly the national security threat faded away.”

Donald Trump tweeted today that he is “looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!” The settlement has nothing to do with any pro-gun agenda on the part of Trump.

For their part, the NRA, which has mostly avoided any comment on the 3D printed weapon matter, issued a press release this afternoon in which their executive director Chris Cox reiterates that at least when it comes to plastic homemade guns, they are and have always been against them: “Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRA’s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.”

3) The case is as much about free speech as it is about gun rights. Since the case ended via settlement and not a decision, no explicit precedent has been set that these specific computer instructional files count as expression protected under the First Amendment. But that was the core of the legal argument Defense Distributed was making, and is still having to make against all the new authorities trying to restrain it.

As the company’s legal team wrote in the lawsuit, “the use of the ITAR to impose a prior restraint on publications of privately generated unclassified information into the public domain violated the First Amendment of United States Constitution,” a point with which they believed previous Department of Justice doctrine agreed.

In a court filing responding to the multi-state lawsuit to stop Wilson’s organization from distributing the files, one of Defense Distributed’s lawyers, Josh Blackman, said that such attempts to legally prohibit Americans ability to “access, discuss, use, reproduce, or otherwise benefit from the technical data” are not constitutionally permitted, as such acts are “expressly protected by the First Amendment. In Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. [2011], the [Supreme] Court recognized ‘that the creation and dissemination of information are speech within the meaning of the First Amendment.'”

As Blackman rightly stated, this latest state lawsuit to limit Defense Distributed’s activities constitutes a

demand [of] a prior restraint of constitutionally protected speech that is already in the public domain. We know that “[a]ny system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.” That presumption of liberty is even heavier where, as here, the speech is already available on the internet, and has been available for years….Yet, nine Attorneys General, who swore an oath to the Constitution, failed to even mention the First Amendment in their emergency pleadings. Such a careless disregard for the Bill of Rights fails to meet the “heavy burden” needed to justify a prior restraint.

By eliding what’s really at stake here—more a matter of free expression than any meaningful expansion of the already existing legal ability to make a gun at home—the states suing, and alas too much of the media, are ginning up unwarranted fear to expand the government’s power to restrict speech.

Just this hour, Blackman tweets that in one more of the relentless barrage of actions against them, an attempt in New Jersey state court to get a temporary restraining order against Defense Distributed failed today, though for now Wilson says he’s blocking I.P. addresses from New Jersey and Pennsylvania pending final resolution of the various legal actions.

Should a licensed doctor have to ask the government and industry competitors for permission before purchasing potentially life-saving medical equipment? That’s the question at issue in a new lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s “certificate of need” laws.

In 2017, Dr. Gajendra Singh opened a medical imaging center in the town of Winston-Salem with the goal of providing MRIs, ultrasounds, and other screenings to patients at prices that were both lower and more transparent than what they were paying at the existing local hospital.

Singh was able to either purchase or lease the X-ray scanner, CT scanner, and ultrasound machines he needed without incident. But when it came to getting an MRI machine, he hit a wall.

The state of North Carolina requires medical service providers like Singh to go through an arduous application process to prove that they need an MRI machine before they are allowed to buy or lease one. Need, mind you, is determined not by how many patients are asking for services, but rather by how many MRI’s the state’s Department of Health thinks an area requires.

In Singh’s case, the Health Department had determined that two local hospitals operating MRI machines is more than enough for the Winston-Salem area. Thus, Singh has been denied the “certificate of need” that would allow him to get a machine of his own. Instead, he has been forced to rent a portable MRI machine two days a week, limiting the number of scans he can perform, and effectively preventing him from competing with the incumbent hospitals.

The good doctor is now suing the state Department of Health as well as the governor and members of the state legislature in order to overturn the law that’s hamstringing his practice and depriving his patients of medical services he would otherwise be able to provide them.

“As a medical doctor, Dr. Singh took an oath to help people in need, yet the state is standing in his way to protect established medical providers from competition,” says Renée Flaherty, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm representing Singh. “That’s plainly unconstitutional.”

North Carolina’s constitution prohibits the granting of either monopolies or exclusive “emoluments” i.e privileges to the private entities.

In a compliant filed today, the Institute for Justice argues the state—by requiring that medical service providers obtain a certificate of need to own an MRI machine, and then give out a limited number of such certificates to select health care providers—is in effect handing out monopolies and exclusive privileges to those providers lucky enough to get the certificates.

Not only is this practice potentially unconstitutional, it raises prices for consumers. Singh’s lawsuit claims the average MRI costs just under $2,000 in the state of North Carolina, a service the doctor’s imaging center usually provides (when it has a machine available) for somewhere in the $500-$700 range. Because his practice posts all their prices on line, patients are not left with unexpected bills.

Absent North Carolina’s certificate of need laws, Singh would be able to service far more patients than he currently does, helping them get access to the care they need. Subject to the competitive pressures of a freer market, the hospitals in his area would likely have to lower their prices to stay in business.

Singh’s practice is not the only one stifled by certificate of need laws. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm reported last January, two providers in Brunswick County have had to fight tooth and nail for permission to open the one new surgery center the state is allowing in that county, while a local hospital has done everything it can to sabotage this effort.

Should Singh’s lawsuit prevail, the state would be prohibited from enforcing its certificate-of-need laws, allowing most any qualified medical service provider to offer whatever services people are willing to pay for.

That would be a blessing for patients’ financial and physical health alike.

Facebook announced today that it has removed 32 accounts that it believes were fraudulently attempting to use divisive politics to influence the midterm elections.

Only a handful of pages had any significant number of followers, but in total, 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the pages, all of which were made since 2017. Based on the information Facebook released, this particular group of fake pages was targeting people on the left. One of the fake pages—for a group called “Resisters”—created a Facebook event called “No Unite the Right 2” in Washington, D.C., to take place on August 10; it apparently coordinated with five real organizations to co-host it. Facebook canceled the event and warned the other groups what was going on. The event had attracted 2,600 interested users, and 600 people said they would attend.

This campaign sounds similar to the fraudulent pages and rallies that preceded the 2016 election, which were ultimately blamed on the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). At this point, Facebook does not have enough information to say with any certainty that Russian interests are responsible for this latest round of content and advertising ($11,000 worth). The people responsible for these pages are doing a better job at covering their tracks, but Facebook says some of the activity is “consistent” with the behavior they saw the IRA doing during the run-up to the 2016 election.

Facebook doesn’t offer any evidence that these campaigns are targeting any particular candidate.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, is already responding to demand changes in laws to censor these campaigns: “Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity. I also expect Facebook, along with other platform companies, will continue to identify Russian troll activity and to work with Congress on updating our laws to better protect our democracy in the future.”

But what Facebook has released so far is really just an attempt to magnify already existent cultural divisions. These pages are peddling anger and outrage. People can choose whether to care or be outraged. This apparent threat to democracy is a handful of outside actors telling a certain group of people exactly what they want to hear. If that’s a threat to our democracy, it’s way too late.

When details of the Russian social media trolling attempt to influence the 2016 election came out, Reason‘s Jacob Sullum looked it over and questioned how much impact it actually had. It’s probably worth asking the same questions this time. Watch below:

Because everyone enjoys a good catfight, and journalists in particular like it when two of their biggest bogeymen go at each other’s throats, today’s big political news is obviously the Trump-Koch feud.

There’s a significantly underreported aspect to the Koch donor network’s growing objection to the Trumpian GOP’s anti-libertarian actions on trade, spending, and immigration. Two of the three Senate races in which the network is reportedly declining to back Republicans—Nevada and Indiana—are not just widely considered by prognosticators to be “toss-ups“; each features Libertarian Party candidates who have previously cracked the 5 percent mark in elections.

Nevada’s Tim Hagan, an engineer and longtime Libertarian activist, has on three occasions trounced the point spread in a swing-district state Senate election, earning 5.1 percent of the vote in 2016 (the Democrat won 47.9 percent to 47.0), 4.8 percent in 2008 (46.5–45.8), and 7.6 percent in 2006 (47.6–44.8). Hagan has never dipped below 3 percent in any of the nine elections he has run in, hitting a high of 23.7 percent in a 2014 race for Clark County assessor (in which no Republican ran).

And yet in this crucial swing-state race between vulnerable Republican incumbent Dean Heller and Democratic challenger Jacky Rosen, who the Real Clear Politics polling average separates by less than a percentage point, Hagan is nowhere to be found in six of the seven publicly available polls that have been conducted since he secured the L.P. nomination in early March. Only a Suffolk University survey of 500 likely voters last week included Hagan’s name, showing him with 2.4 percent. (Heller edged Rosen in the poll, 41–40, while 8.6 percent were undecided and 5.4 percent went for none of the above.)

To reiterate a point I made a month ago about the New York gubernatorial race, not listing Hagan as an option constitutes journalistic malpractice. The last time Heller ran for re-election, winning by 1.1 percentage points, an Independent American Party candidate named David Lory VanDerBeek pulled down 4.9 percent of the vote. Gary Johnson won 3.3 percent in the Silver State two years ago, more than Hillary Clinton’s 2.4-point margin over Donald Trump.

Nevada is a swing state, Heller-Rosen is neck-and-neck, and Republican control over the Senate rests on a 51–49 knife’s edge in a possible Democratic wave year. If you want to know what’s going to happen in (and to) this country, you need to put the damn Libertarian in your poll.

Indiana is arguably even more interesting as a disaffected-Republican thought experiment, since A) the Libertarian candidate in question is pro-life (though she doesn’t think the federal government has any role in abortion policy), and B) she’s going to be in the televised debates.

Lucy Brenton, who like Hagan has been active in Libertarian politics since the early 1990s, is a real estate entrepreneur and mother of 10 who in 2016 got 5.5 percent of the vote in the U.S. Senate race won by Republican Todd Young. Brenton this time is facing Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly and Republican Mike Braun for a seat that in 2012 drew 5.7 percent of the vote for Libertarian Andy Horning (who was accused, innumerately, of spoiling the election for losing Republican Richard Mourdock).

Indiana has one of the country’s strongest Libertarian Party chapters. Four times in the past 12 years, L.P. senatorial candidates there have drawn more than 5 percent of the vote, twice as many as the next best state. So how many polls has Brenton appeared in since securing her party’s nomination in May?

Zero. In fairness, there has been only one public survey since then. (The lack of good state-level data on Senate races is shocking, given the stakes involved.) Whenever you hear conjecture about the Indiana race, know that it’s only that—until we start getting more and better polls that include the letter L.

The broader fact remains that there are alternatives on the ballot plausible to Republican voters who are weary of President Trump’s illibertarian words and deeds. Matt Waters, the L.P. Senate candidate in Virginia, is very consciously providing a conservative-friendly option to the super-Trumpy GOP nominee Corey Stewart (drawing calls from the likes of Larry Sabato to have Waters included in polls).

I wouldn’t bet on the Koch network flowing any money in a Libertarian direction—when you’re into two-party politics, you’re into two-party politics, which helps explain why CEO Emily Seidel of the political Koch group Americans for Prosperity is saying stuff like, “If you are a Democrat and stand up to Elizabeth Warren to corral enough votes for financial reform that breaks barriers for community banks and families, you’re darn right we will work with you.”

But as Nick Gillespie observed this morning, both major parties are shrinking by the day, rallying hardest around populist-nationalism on the right and populist-socialism on the left. Even David Brooks is yearning for a “third-party option” that stresses constitutionalism and decentralization, even if he can’t quite bring himself to name the only national political party that does just that.

The 2018 midterms might end up being not just a referendum on Donald Trump, but an early indicator of whether the country’s only other 50-state party is ready to meaningfully grow from its current position in a distant third place.

David Koch has long been a member of the Reason Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

By the time she arrived last year at The New York Times to help write and edit its Opinion section, 34-year-old Bari Weiss had already done stints at the online magazine Tablet and The Wall Street Journal. She had also made a number of enemies who accused her of being a narrow-minded, right-wing, pro-Israel, anti-Arab bigot. Far from bringing some fresh ideas to The Gray Lady’s leftish commentary section, her hire, wrote The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald, emodied the paper’s “worst failings—and its lack of viewpoint diversity.”

In Greenwald’s reading, Weiss “has churned out a series of trite, shallow, cheap attacks on already-marginalized left-wing targets that have made her a heroine in the insular neocon and right-wing intelligentsia precincts.” Her widely read pieces about the identity-politics excesses of a lesbian march in Chicago and of the #MeToo Movement, and her chronicling of the “intellectual Dark Web” didn’t represent anything new, just more of the same. Greenwald wrote an attack on Weiss’s student days at Columbia, claiming that she defamed anti-Israel professors as racists and tried to silence them academically. That charge prompted National Review‘s David French, who in a previous life was the president of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), to write that Greenwald and others were “sliming” Weiss.

I sat down to talk with Weiss at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held every July in Vegas. She was in town to attend the Reason Media Awards because she was a finalist for the Bastiat Prize which “honors writing that best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence. Indeed, she took home the top prize, besting finalists Jake van der Kamp of South China Morning Post, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, Gustavo Arellano of The Los Angeles Times; and Bonnie Kristian of The Week. We talked about Israel and Jewish identity in America and her work, why she considers herself a liberal (among other things, she’s pro-marriage equality and abortion), how to avoid becoming the cartoon version of your most-outspoken critics, and more. She’s no libertarian, but she’s also nobody’s conventional liberal or conservative either.

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House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) wants Twitter to ban a congressional candidate who called first lady Melania Trump a “hoebag.”

In a tweet yesterday, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk pointed out that Trump has significantly fewer staffers than her predecessor, Michelle Obama. Mark Roberts, an independent running to represent Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District, responded by suggesting Trump is a prostitute:

Did you know the First Lady works by the hour? #thinkdirty #hoebag

— Mark Roberts (@RobertsforCD2) July 30, 2018

I’d call that tasteless but harmless and move on. McCarthy called it “disgraceful” and declared that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey should ban Roberts from the platform as soon as possible:

.@jack this attack on @FLOTUS is disgraceful. Comments like these have no business on any platform. This account should be banned ASAP. https://t.co/sIGO4ggeAM

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) July 31, 2018

The punchline: McCarthy has spent the last few months accusing social media companies of censoring conservative viewpoints. Apparently, it’s not the censorship part that offended him.

An entire North Carolina police department has been suspended and placed on paid leave following the arrest of the chief and another officer on corruption charges.

Southport Police Chief Gary Smith and Lt. Mike Simmons are accused of working second jobs at a trucking company while on department time. A press release from the State Bureau of Investigations states that Smith and Simmons “were completing overnight shifts during the same hours they had claimed on their daily activity reports to be working at the Southport Police Department.” Brunswick County District Attorney Jon David said at a press conference that Smith and Simmons had a “habitual and repeated pattern” of leaving their posts to do their second jobs.

Smith and Simmons were arrested last week and charged with obtaining property by false pretense. Smith faces additional charges, including willful failure to discharge duties and obstruction of justice.

The Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office will take over police duties in the city until further notice.

The investigation began in April after whistleblowers within the department tipped off the authorities. “The arrests were unexpected,” City Manager Bruce Oakley tells Reason, “and the City felt the temporary suspension of operations was necessary in order to let all the officers have ample time to process the information. It was in no ways meant to punish the other officers. It also gives the City time to prepare for their return and make sure there is a strong leadership presence in place.”