Category: reason

Last week, Reddit
user “Creq” blew the lid on the apparent censorship of hot-button
topics being discussed on the site’s technology page,
“r/technology.” Moderators responded in kind this week by banishing
the highly trafficked discussion board from the site’s front
page.

Backing up his claims with graphs that show sudden, conspicuous
silence on major issues, Creq
alleged that over the last eight months r/technology has been
automatically removing discussions for which the title features
words and phrases such as “National Security Agency,” “Obama,”
“Bitcoin,” and “Comcast,” among many others. The Daily Dot
points
out that “almost all of them have at least two qualities:
they’re commonly found in the intersection of technology and
politics, and they can be seen as controversial, or at least likely
to inspire anger in a few people.”

This came a surprise, since Reddit bills itself as a highly
democratic platform for information cultivation and the
r/technology board alone has over five million subscribers.

Why did the tech moderators censor posts? One of them, assuring
everyone that he never approved of the tactic,
explained that the volunteer staff turned an automatic filter
into an overzealous crutch when some of the moderators became lazy.
Still, discussions about some topics, such as Tesla cars, seemed to
be deliberately gagged
by moderators motivated by bias.

Reddit’s director of communications, Victoria Taylor,
has told the BBC that
r/technology will not be featured on the site’s main page or be
included among new users’ default subscriptions. “The moderation
team lost focus of what they were there to do: moderate
effectively,” she said. “We’re giving them time to see if we feel
they can work together to resolve the issue. We might consider
adding them back in the future if they can show us and the
community that they can overcome these issues.”

Humorist Ron Hart on similarities
between Vlad Putin and Barack Obama:

Putin is seeking a fourth term in 2018 and doesn’t want to be
too closely associated with Obama, whose favorability poll numbers
are in the 30s versus Putin’s in the 70s – Putin has his career to
consider.

Yep, ole Putin is running again in 2018. He said he looks
forward to the voters of Russia being heard at the polls – then
chuckled uncontrollably for a few minutes. I predict Putin will win
first, second and third in that race.

Obama appears politically weaker each day. He is not going to
use military force against Putin’s march for Ukraine. It’s not like
there is a Nevada Tea Party rancher grazing cows on federal lands.
Yet, he is serious, sending Joe Biden to Kiev. Dennis Rodman must
have been on assignment.

Read the whole thing.

Former Reason Editor in
Chief and current Bloomberg View columnist
Virginia Postrel offers up “four specific questions that demand
factual answers” to gauge a college or university’s commitment to
the free and open exchange of ideas.

The whole list is a must-read but this one caught my eye
especially because it’s so true and generally underappreciated:

3) What is the administrator-to-professor ratio? How
much has that grown in the last 10 years?

This question illuminates where the university’s priorities lie
— in teaching and research or in overhead — while also offering a
clue about attitudes toward academic freedom and students’ rights.
Administrators, not professors, are the ones making and enforcing
rules against speech. They are the ones more concerned with
maintaining order and a shiny institutional image than with
intellectual inquiry and the marketplace of ideas.

“The administrative class is largely responsible for the
hyperregulation of students’ lives, the lowering of due process
standards for students accused of offenses, the extension of
administrative jurisdiction far off campus, the proliferation of
speech codes, and outright attempts to impose ideological
conformity,” writes [Greg] Lukianoff in his book “Unlearning Liberty: Campus
Censorship and the End of American Debate.” He argues that “the
dramatic expansion of the administrative class on campus may
be the most important factor in the growth of
campus intrusions into free speech and thought.”

Read the whole thing.

Reason TV interviewed Postrel about her new book, The Power of
Glamour, and much more. Watch below:

The
U.S. Supreme Court handed down a major ruling today with profound
implications for the Fourth Amendment rights of all persons who
drive or ride in automobiles on public roads. At issue in
Navarette v. California was a traffic stop prompted by an
anonymous call to 911 claiming that a truck had driven the caller
off the road. Going by the information supplied in that call alone,
the police located a matching truck in the vicinity of the alleged
incident and pulled it over on suspicion of drunk driving. That
stop led to the discovery of 30 pounds of marijuana stashed in the
truck.

The question before the Supreme Court was whether that single
anonymous tip to 911 provided the police with reasonable suspicion
to stop the truck. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence
Thomas ruled that the “the stop complied with the Fourth Amendment
because, under the totality of the circumstances, the officer had
reasonable suspicion that the driver was intoxicated.” While this
is a “close case,” Thomas acknowledged, it still passes
constitutional muster. Joining Thomas in that judgment was Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer,
and Samuel Alito.

Writing in dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia came out swinging
against Thomas. “The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying
cocktail,” Scalia declared, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. It elevates an anonymous and
uncorroborated tip above the bedrock guarantee of the Fourth
Amendment. “All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a
traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly
if necessary, by the police.” That state of affairs, Scalia
declared, “is not my concept, and I am sure it would not be the
Framers’, of a people secure from unreasonable searches and
seizures.”

Last month Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
signed a directive banning the employees of some government
agencies from discussing intelligence-related work with the
media.

Read the directive below:

In the directive “media” is defined as “any person,
organization, or entity” that is “primarily engaged in the
collection, production, or dissemination to the public of
information in any form, which includes print, broadcast, film and
Internet” or is “otherwise engaged in the collection, production,
or dissemination to the public of information in any form related
to topics of national security, which includes print, broadcast,
film and Internet.”

In an email, the Government Accountability Project’s national
security and human rights director, Jesslyn Radack, rightly
points out that the directive “is a clear extension of the
executive branch’s war on national security whistleblowers.”

This latest action is a clear extension of the executive
branch’s war on national security whistleblowers. It is a grotesque
twist for James Clapper to limit public knowledge about government
activity when he himself has been responsible for lying to Congress
and misleading the public about the government’s overreaching mass
surveillance programs.

The lie in question can be watched below. In March last year
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)
asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on
millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded,
“No, sir.” Wyden went on to ask, “It does not?” Clapper responded,
“Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently
perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”

Under a heading titled “Policy,” the directive says:

The IC [Intelligence Community] is committed to sharing
information responsibly with the public via the media to further
government openness and transparency and to build public
understanding of the IC and its programs, consistent with the
protection of intelligence sources and methods.

Remember, the Obama administration is supposedly “the
most transparent administration in history.”

If
there is an organizing principle in Detroit’s bankruptcy settlement
last week, it is that those at the forefront of fleecing the city
will get the sweetest deal and the innocent victims will get the
shaft.

There is no other way to interpret the recent efforts by both
the Democratic White House and the Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to
look for ever-more creative ways to handover taxpayer money to city
retirees. Left out of the equation are residents who have paid for
such profligacy by having to live in an unlivable city.

Looking back, the entire bankruptcy exercise will seem like a
giant missed opportunity to put Detroit on a path of fiscal sanity
— and recovery.

View this article.

Around this time last year, Health and Human
Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius came under fire for
making a series of calls to private companies and a foundation
requesting support for Enroll America, a non-profit organization
dedicated to boosting enrollment in health coverage under the
Affordable Care Act.

The calls were questionable because Sebelius was reportedly
calling companies that HHS regulated, and because Enroll America is
run by a former Obama administration campaign staffer and HHS
political appointee.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigated the
incident and released its report to
the public yesterday. The report doesn’t attempt to judge the
legality of the HHS secretary’s actions, but focuses instead on
establishing the facts of the matter.

Here’s the short version: Between January and April 2013,
Sebelius called five outside groups and requested that they provide
either financial or technical assistance to Enroll America. In the
months following the calls, one of those groups, the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation (RWJF), gave Enroll America two grants totaling
$13 million.

Sebelius wasn’t the only government official who spoke with RWJF
about supporting Enroll America. The former White House deputy
assistant to the president for health policy—Jeanne Lambrew, who is
identified in the report only by her title—also spoke with the
foundation about the need to raise $30 million to finance outreach
efforts surrounding the health care law. Lawbrew didn’t name a
specific amount. But she “indicated a hope that RWJF would provide
a significant financial contribution to support such efforts.”

Basically, the administration asked, and then, some time later,
RWJF gave.

Was there a relationship between the request and the funding?
The foundation claims there wasn’t. An RWJF representative who
spoke to the GAO said that the “two grants were not made in
response to the Secretary’s call.” The foundation representative
also noted that RWJF had supported the creation of Enroll America,
and, prior to the call from Sebelius, provided an early grant for
the group’s strategic planning.

Fair enough, I suppose: RWJF, a foundation that supports lots of
work in the health policy realm, had an existing relationship with
Enroll America, and it’s certainly plausible that they might have
donated anyway.

What the report really underscores, though, is how closely
linked the Obama administration is with Enroll America. The GAO
looked into whether HHS was aware that RWJF had donated following
the call from Sebelius, and HHS responded that while there was no
official tracking, staffers had heard about the donation. How did
they find out? From Enroll America, which told GAO that “they had
an ongoing relationship with HHS and likely discussed which
organizations had decided to contribute.”

So Enroll America is an organization run by a former HHS and
Obama campaign staffer, dedicated to boosting participation in the
Obama administration’s most prominent legislative achievement, and
which meets with senior White House officials and maintains an
ongoing relationship with a key administration agency. It’s no
wonder the cabinet-level head of this agency makes fundraising
calls in support of this organization. It’s practically an arm of
the administration. 

Is this arrangement uncommon? Perhaps in some of the
particulars, but in general, no, it’s not entirely unusual for
administrations to work closely with friendly outside groups. But
it’s rare to see the inner workings detailed so clearly.  

Beulah Toombs, an 89-year-old resident of Ohio,
is being forced out of her home for refusing to quit smoking.
Toombs lives in Cincinnati’s AHEPA 127 Apartments, a building for
low-income seniors whose rent is subsidized by the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

According
to the Cincinnati Enquirer, building residents were
given one year to quit smoking when the building went totally
smoke-free in 2013. Toombs refused. “I don’t think so,” she told
the Enquirer. “This is my home, and I think you can do
whatever you want to in your home.”

Clearly, Beulah is a badass (and a healthy one at that—the
Enquirer reports that despite her lifelong cigarette
habit, Toombs is in remarkably good health). But badassery is
frowned on by building management, who deemed Toombs
“non-compliant” after maintenance workers spotted ashtrays and
cigarette butts in her apartment and another resident reported
seeing a lighter and cigarette inside. Toombs is now being forced
to evacuate by the end of April. 

“My mom is getting older, and this is causing her so much
stress,” her daughter, Mary Ann Burgoyne, told the
Enquirer. “She kept telling me that she was paying her
rent. She was a little confused. She thought they might put her in
a debtors prison.”

Burgoyne approached a senior-advocacy group for help, but said
they declined, saying her mom should quit
smoking. 

The group probably couldn’t have done much anyway—and that’s
somewhat as it should be. Toombs’ apartment building is private
property, and owners are free to impose whatever rules they like on
tenants who choose to live there. If tenants don’t like the rules,
they’re free to move somewhere else, as Toombs is doing. “This is
the free market at its best,” one commenter on the
Enquirer article wrote. 

I wouldn’t go that far. Private properties subsidized by the
government aren’t exactly “free market.” Toombs’ building is part
of a national network of HUD-subsidized AHEPA apartment buildings
for low-income seniors. 

HUD doesn’t have the authority to force subsidized but
privately-owned apartments buildings to go smoke-free. But it has
been encouraging them to do so. Since 2010, HUD has been
sending notices to property owners pressuring them to implement
smoke-free housing policies.

When the folks in charge of your financing strongly suggest
something, that’s a strong incentive to do it. I’d wager many
low-income buildings wouldn’t be instituting no-smoking policies if
it weren’t for HUD butting in. 

At Toombs’ building, it doesn’t seem like residents were calling
for the change. “I have been in this apartment bulding many times
as my Mother lived there before she passed away a year ago this
March,” Trisha Dufresne commented on the Enquirer article.
“It is very clean and you can’t smell the smoke from inside the
tenants apartments, so no one is really getting second hand
smoke.” 

Good thing HUD was around to stop the menace of an old lady
unobtrusively smoking within the confines of her apartment!

More proof that government will use any particular power you
grant it (in Toombs’ case, by living in subsidized housing) as an
excuse to reach into totally unrelated areas of your life. But hey,
I mean, people should quit smoking anyway, right? I’m sure Toombs
will be comforted through her stressful move knowing HUD was
just trying to help her.

Last year, in
response to a lawsuit over death-by-drone assassinations of
American citizens overseas, including Anwar Al-Awlaki, his teenaged
son Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan, the Obama administration
admitted it had done the deed, and claimed that it did so
completely legally.

Howzzat? asked the plaintiffs and a curious judge.

We can’t tell you, it’s a secret, the administration replied.
And—nyah nyah—the
courts have no say in this anyway.

The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees, and says the
Obama administration must turn over its legal rationale for
snuffing Americans with flying killer robots.
Writes Judge Jon O. Newman for the court:

We emphasize at the outset that the Plaintiffs’ lawsuits do not
challenge the lawfulness of drone attacks or targeted killings.
Instead, they seek information concerning those attacks, notably,
documents prepared by DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) setting
forth the Government’s reaso ning as to the lawfulness of the
attacks.

Note that the the plaintiffs, including
The New York Times and the American Civil
Liberties Union, don’t challenge the legality of the assassinations
because they have no idea what the government’s argument for their
legality might be. It’s a secret, remember, unknown, and therefore
unimpeachable.

But the Obama administration has pushed the limits of the legal
protections it claims for its arguments in Lois Lerner style, by
publicly discussing the drone killings, boasting legal
authorization for its actions, and then coyly refusing to say
anything more. The
leak of a Justice Department white paper revealing part of the
legal argument and hinting at more also undermined the
administration’s insistence on secrecy.

Too cute by half, says the court. “Voluntary disclosures of all
or part of a document may waive an otherwise valid FOIA
exemption.”

As a result:

With the redactions and public disclosures discussed above, it
is no longer either “logical” or “plausible” to maintain that
disclosure of the legal analysis in the OLC-D OD Memorandum risks
disclosing any aspect of “military plans, intelligence activities,
sources and methods, and foreign relations.”

So cough it up, says the court. Tell us why you think it’s legal
to send drones to kill Americans.

To
find oneself an unmarked automatic weapon required either knowing
exact addresses on the deep web or
a prominent California Democrat. One of those options recently
got a lot harder (sorry,
Leland Yee) but the other may be on the verge of getting
easier. For black market goods most people turn to hard-to-access
places on the Internet, which haven’t been conducive to browsing.
Last week, an anonymous individual launched a search engine called
Grams that caters to all kinds of contraband needs.

Known only as “Gramsadmin,” the engine’s creator explained
to Wired, “I noticed on the forums and reddit people were
constantly asking ‘where to get product X?’ and ‘which market had
product X?’ or ‘who had the best product X and was reliable and not
a scam?’ I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they
wanted on the darknet and figure out who was a trustworthy
vendor.”

So, he spent two weeks building Grams, which looks a lot like
Google, primary color scheme and “feeling lucky” button included.
He built it to function like Google, too. Gramsadmin has
discussed his project on Reddit:

I am working on the algorithm so it is a lot like Google’s it
will have a scoring system based how long the listing has been up,
how many transactions, how many good reviews. That way you will see
the best listing first….

Within the next two weeks Grams will have a system similar to
Google AdWords where vendors can buy keywords and their listings
will go to the top of the search results when those keywords are
searched for…. They will be bordered with an advertisement
disclaimer so users know those are paid results.

Although it’s only a beta version and only accessible through
the Tor Browser, which facilitates anonymous Internet activity at a
tedious pace, Grams has an average time of one second for a
search to load, which is “super fast, especially for Tor,”
Vice‘s Meghan Neal
reports.

Also, Grams currently only shows results from eight different
marketplaces, such as SilkRoad2, Agora, and BlackBank.

For those who want to give it a whirl, “grams7enufi7jmdl.onion”
is the address.