Category: reason

Some schools
secretly spy on their students. Others make it official
policy.

Last week the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) joined together to
send a
letter to a Tennessee school board accusing the district’s
technology
policy of grossly violating its students’ First and Fourth
Amendment rights.

The Williamson County Board of Education’s “Acceptable Use,
Media Release, and Internet Safety Procedures” grant school
administrators broad, vaguely defined discretionary powers over the
electronic devices and communications of some 35,000 students.
These powers include the authority to restrict off-campus speech on
social media sites, to search any electronic devices on school
grounds without reasonable suspicion, and to access any
communications sent or stored on the school’s network.

The policy ominously states that “students are subject to
consequences for inappropriate, unauthorized, and illegal use of
social media,” even when off-campus. The consequences include “loss
of network privileges, confiscation of computer equipment,
suspension…and/or criminal prosecution.”

The policy also gives the district the ill-defined power to
“collect and examine any device at any time for the purpose of
enforcing the terms of this agreement, investigating student
discipline issues, or for any other school-related purpose.” Which
roughly translates to “for any reason whatsoever.”

More worrisome yet, administrators have the authority to
search and read student communications on the district
network, also without a modicum of reasonable
suspicion: “All network users may be monitored at any time by
authorized personnel.”

All of this is done in the name of (surprise!) protecting The
Children: “The district has taken measures designed to protect
students and adults from obscene information and restrict access to
materials that are harmful to minors.”

In their letter, the ACLU and the EFF argue that the authority
claimed by the district “infringes on students’ fundamental
constitutional rights” of free speech and freedom from unreasonable
searches and seizures—rights that more than one judge has ruled
don’t stop at the school door.

The two civil liberties organizations picked up the case from
parent Daniel Pomerantz, who says he was effectively coerced into
signing a waiver subjecting his daughter to the district’s
policies, Wired
reports:

He initially refused to sign the policy at the start of the
school semester, but relented after the school prohibited his
5-year-old daughter from using the computers at Nolensville
Elementary School without the agreement.

“The first time they were using the computers [in her
classroom], they told her she had to go sit aside and do something
else and she started to cry and complain…It was not a pleasant
experience as a family. They told her it was all because of me,
that [because] I wouldn’t do this was why she couldn’t learn on
computers with all the other students.”

The letter notes that “requiring students to sign an agreement
waiving constitutional protections in order to participate in
fundamental school activities is not permissible.”

But perhaps the administrators are just preparing their charges
for the world after school, where free speech
isn’t always free, unreasonable searches and seizures are
considered
reasonable, and all your communications belong to the government.

Former Reason intern Jeff Winkler takes a close,
though in the usual course of these sort of articles a bit comedic,
look for the Texas Monthly at the
people running for governor in Texas who are not Democrat Wendy
Davis or Republican Greg Abbott.

There’s Libertarian Kathie Glass, whose exclusion from the
debates because she isn’t polling well in polls from which she’s
excluded is discussed at length. She’s only raised about $141,000,
and only about $40,000 of that was from people other than herself.
But this return candidate is still fighting, campaigning harder
than most L.P. candidates:

Glass ran in the 2010 gubernatorial race and placed third, with
2.18 percent of the vote. This time, she’s upped her game and
turned it into a real professional outfit. Her campaign manager
husband, Tom, does logistics. She has a full-time staffer with more
than a dozen steady volunteers statewide. They’ve conducted
“internal polling.” She even produced an ad in Spanish. And then
there’s her ambitious tour through all 254 counties in Texas in
a Straight-Talk-Express-sized
campaign bus .

“We go to places and events and things and go visit the TV
stations and newspapers. And that’s what we do [in every county].
We try to get coverage and get connected to an event,” Glass said.
“In smaller counties there’s just nothing that we can really make
happen there. But every county has a county courthouse.”

The campaign also stops at nearly every single radio station
they come by. “I’m not talking about the talk radio shows. I’m
talking the tiny rock shop, country-western, Christian music,
whatever they’ve got there.”…..

Some libertarian-minded folks task themselves with the Sisyphean
effort of dismantling governmental overreach brick-by-brick; Glass
wants to bulldoze, presumably with private contracts, the whole
structure to the ground. As someone who is a libertarian
sympathizer, even I cringed during an exchange in which she said
that if the Supreme Court issued a decision she didn’t like, she
would simply ignore it. “I’m going to be guided by my own
conscience,” she explained.

Smith followed up with what seemed an appropriate query: ”Are
you running for governor or to be queen? Because this sounds like a
monarchical view of government.”

“I’m sorry it sounds that way,” Glass replied. “It only sounds
like that because we haven’t followed [the Constitution] for so
long that it can seem extreme.”

Smith said he was “trying to take this serious.” But this was
particularly hard since Glass would politely say, “I don’t know”
when asked a question for which she didn’t have an answer. Real
politicians never do that.

Then there’s the Green Party’s Brandon Parmer, who, as Winkler
relates at length, is impossible to contact or find, for either
media or his own party.

Then there is officially registered write-in candidate Sara
Pavitt:

Becoming a write-in candidate for Texas governor requires 5,000
signatures or $3,750. Since Pavitt’s basic campaign strategy is
“sitting back and [getting] into it in the fourth quarter, like a
football game,” she paid the fee. “My friends think I’m crazy to
run,” said Pavitt, “but I’m bipolar.”

….She’s pushing for legalization of marijuana because, yes,
like millions of Americans she enjoys getting high, but also
because it provides medical relief. The VA doctors had her on
medications, the antipsychotic Risperdal, which has a whole
smorgasbord of side-effects (Parkinson-like symptoms, drooling,
constipation, vomiting, etc.). “Risperdal is the one making men
grow tits. And I said, ‘if it’s doing that to guys what do you
think it’s going to do to me?’” (The answer, I discovered, is
amenorrhea, which in English means no menstruation.)…..

Pavitt is practiced in hand-to-hand politics, too. She worked
for Representative Lloyd Doggett three years ago and volunteered
for Wendy Davis before “she pissed me off.” Apparently, Davis
“bolted” when Pavitt once tried to talk to her about marijuana.
Then came the limelight and greed.

“You can’t even email her, she’ll go gimme money, gimme
money, gimme money,” said Pavitt. “And I thought, ‘you’re
supposed to be representing the people. Some of us don’t have
money.’ Like I say, she got off the mark. I don’t even know what
she represents because all she does is bitch about Greg Abbott and
that’s not helping.”

…..“I’m not planning on probably being governor. I just
wanted to screw with them.” But even Pavitt follows the rules. Her
campaign flyers, which she’ll pass out soon, are all stamped with
“Political Ad Paid for by: Sarah M. Pavitt,” as is required by law.
“If you don’t take care of it, they fine you $5,000. I’m trying to
do everything legal.”

If she does get elected, Pavitt said she will “light that bong
up and tell everybody they can smoke marijuana.” And if she
doesn’t? “I’m going to lay up [on my new deck] naked and smoke
marijuana.”

Winkler ends with a stirring quote from Libertarian Glass,
presenting the best spirit of the ideologically committed third
party candidate: “That’s another thing in our Texas history. We
just don’t accept long odds as a reason not to try.”

It’s that time again, when cheerful boosters of political
participation start chirping a familiar Election Day tune:

If you don’t vote, you can’t complain!

This sentiment has become such a cliché you probably barely
notice it anymore, right? But it’s popping up everywhere from the
Santa Monica
Daily Press to random New
Jersey signboards.

In everyday life the admonition makes sense, of course: I asked
you what you wanted for dinner earlier today and you didn’t have
any good ideas, so now you’d better sit down, shut up, and eat your
tofu stroganoff, thankyouverymuch.

But this same notion, when applied to behavior at the ballot box
is actually a troubling perversion and conflation of the concepts
of consent and free speech. 

From my November 2012 Reason cover
story, “Your
Vote Doesn’t Count“:

For someone who complains about politics, policy, and
politicians for a living, the prohibition on complaining by
nonvoters strikes close to home. Again, this Election Day cliché is
intuitively appealing. If someone invests in an enterprise, we
generally recognize that he has more right than an outsider to
determine the course of that enterprise. And voting feels like an
investment: It takes time and perhaps costs money.

In his 1851 book Social Statics, the English
radical Herbert Spencer neatly describes the rhetorical jujitsu
surrounding voting, consent, and complaint, then demolishes the
argument. Say a man votes and his candidate wins. The voter is then
“understood to have assented” to the acts of his representative.
But what if he voted for the other guy? Well, then, the argument
goes, “by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to
abide by the decision of the majority.” And what if he abstained?
“Why then he cannot justly complain…seeing that he made no
protest.” Spencer tidily sums up: “Curiously enough, it seems that
he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said yes,
whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward
doctrine this.” Indeed.

Whether there is a duty to be civically engaged, to act as a
good citizen, is a separate question from the issue of voting. But
if such a duty exists, there are many ways to perform it, including
(perhaps especially) complaining. According to Mankiw’s argument,
the ignorant voter is a far less admirable citizen than the
serial-letter-writing Tea Partier who can’t be bothered to show up
on Election Day.

The right to complain is, mercifully, unrelated to any
hypothetical duty to vote. It was ensured, instead, by the
Founders, all of whom were extraordinary bellyachers
themselves. 

Read
the whole piece for handy replies to other Election Day
commonplaces, such as “every vote counts!” and “voting is a civic
duty” and “voting is fun.”

Dan
Malloy Is Progressives’ Dream Governor. So Why Isn’t He
Winning?

From immigration to gun control and the minimum wage, Connecticut’s
Dan Malloy signed into law a wish list of lefty priorities. But
he’s locked in a tie with his Republican challenger.

That’s the actual headline and sub-head to a Daily
Beast piece about Dan Malloy, the incumbent governor of
Connecticut whose re-election
is looking pretty shakey.

Higher taxes on the rich? Check. A state earned income tax
credit for the poor? Check. A higher minimum wage? Connecticut was
the first state to raise it to $10.10 an hour after President Obama
called for it. There is more: mandatory paid sick leave, repeal of
the death penalty…strict new gun control laws, and massive new
spending on public education, higher education, and
infrastructure.

Full Beast piece here.

Here’s a hint as to why Malloy is in a pickle: Most of the
things he did, especially when it comes to taxing and spending
more, are genuinely unpopular. Indeed,
just 23 percent of Americans (a recent high, by the way) see
themselves as liberal.

He’s not in a tight race despite his legislative
victories but because of them. You know, kind of like the
way Barack Obama’s first two years of complete free run led to a
GOP-controlled House.

Voting is important, writes Ed Krayewski, who’ll
be voting in his 39th consecutive election tomorrow. There are a
lot of shitty reasons to vote, and there’s reason to think
low-information voters can be dangerous. Being a low-information
voter is one of several great reasons not to vote. And
trying to intimidate people into voting, as some groups around the
country are doing, is ridiculous. True, individual votes matter
very little. They almost certainly never tip an election.
Nevertheless, writes Krayewski, voting is important, because in a
democratic system the absence of a vote enforces the illusion of
the consent of the governed.

View this article.

Attention, D.C. residents! On
Wednesday, I’ll be part of a great program at The Newseum being put
on by the great Brit site Spiked. Tickets are free and all are
welcome!

Details:

Across the Western world, it is no longer just governments that
see a free and rowdy press as a bad thing. So, increasingly, do
many ostensibly liberal campaigners, and even many writers and
journalists. There are many new threats to press freedom; not only
laws, but also conformism, pressure from reformers, and a tendency
to blame tabloid media in particular for every social and
intellectual ill of our age. The modern, democratic West was born
from the efforts of people who believed passionately in a free
press – from England’s Levellers to America’s founding fathers to
Europe’s men of the Enlightenment – yet today, it is often the
upper echelons of Western intellectual society who feel most
uncomfortable with the ideal of a free press.

Why has press freedom fallen so far out of favour? Why are some
people so riled by the existence of muck‐raking, trouble-causing
papers and other outlets, when that is the very business hacks have
been involved in for centuries? If the modern West sprung from a
renewed belief in freedom – including, crucially, press freedom –
does today’s discomfort with a free press tell us something about
the corrosion of Western values more broadly? Can we recover the
Jeffersonian view of press freedom being essential to democracy and
stability?

Joining me on the panel will be Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, Al
Jazeera’s Ray Suarez, and the Committee to Protect Journalists’
Courtney C. Radsch.

10am – 4pm

Weds 5 November

The Newseum
555 Pennsylvania Avenue
NW Washington
DC 20001

RSVP here.

Here’s an interview I did with Spiked about the issues we’ll
discuss:
“The best answer to bad speech? More speech.”

Last month a bunch of celebrities appeared in an

unwatchably bad PSA for Rock the Vote, the record industry’s
love
child with the Democratic Party. The point of the video is that
viewers should participate in this year’s midterm elections, but
The Washington Post now
reports that at least five of the clip’s stars—Lena Dunham,
Whoopi Goldberg, Natasha Lyonne, E.J. Johnson, and Darren Criss—did
not cast ballots in the last midterms.

For this the celebs are being
damned as
hypocrites. But really, it’s perfectly rational to urge large
blocs of people to vote while not bothering to do it yourself.
Casting one ballot isn’t likely to affect the outcome of any major
election. Getting a bunch of your fans to the polls, on the other
hand, might actually have an impact. If the stars have failed as
activists, it isn’t because they don’t always vote; it’s because
their video is more likely to inspire a wave of seppuku deaths than
a great march to the polling stations.

The PSA is embedded below. Here’s a great drinking game: Try to
watch it to the end, then tally up how much liquor you downed in a
desperate effort to blot out what you were seeing. The record was
set by Mrs. Bettina Leach of Albany, New York, who passed out
halfway through the three-and-a-half-minute ad. When she came to a
few hours later, she was surrounded by seven empty bottles of rum,
a half-empty flask of rye, and—this is the scary part—an “I Voted”
sticker. (*)

(* Full disclosure: That story is not actually
true.)

There’s a
somewhat odd notion going around that Republicans have dropped the
campaign against Obamacare. The New York Times, for
example,
reported at the end of last week that, “Republican attacks on
the health care law dominated the early months of the
campaign, but now have largely receded from view.” 

That’s true only if you’re not looking.

Obamacare was the number one issue for Republican Senate races
between October 13 and 19, as Jeffrey Anderson
points out at The Weekly Standard. Anderson cites
research by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group indicating
that the GOP pumped out almost 12,000 ads on the
health law that week. You won’t be surprised to learn that they
weren’t in favor of the law. Obamacare was the top issue for
Republican ads the week prior as well, with a similar number of GOP
ads in opposition.

It’s true that Obamacare is less of an issue, relatively
speaking, than it was last year at this time, when the launch and
failure of the exchanges dominated the news. It’s also true that
several Republicans have tripped up trying to talk about the law
recently, saying that major components are not connected to or part
of the law. Compared with six or eight months ago, Republicans are
also probably focusing a little more on general opposition to Obama
and less to Obamacare.

But it’s not the case that Republicans are avoiding the issue,
or that it has mostly disappeared from discussion. To the extent
that they are campaigning on or against any particular policy at
all, it’s opposition to Obamacare. 

As I noted in a
column a couple of weeks ago, law enforcement agencies have
been warning parents for years that strangers with cannabis candy
might try to get their kids stoned on Halloween by passing off
marijuana edibles as ordinary treats. At that point no actual cases
of such trickery had materialized, and apparently that is still
true even in Colorado, where state-licensed stores have been
selling THC-laced lollipops, chocolate bars, and gummy candies to
recreational customers since January (and to patients for
years).

“Fears that trick-or-treaters here might end up with
marijuana-laced candy on Halloween appear to have been overblown,”

reports USA Today. “Children’s Hospital
Colorado reported no instances of accidental pot poisonings from
Friday night.” Once again, we see how effective officials warnings
about this threat can be: Cops keep telling parents to be vigilant,
and so far no trick-or-treater has accidentally gotten high.
Imagine what might happen if police let a year go by without
talking about the menace of marijuana-infused Halloween candy.

Alas, the Associated Press
cites some evidence that undermines this banana-vs.-alligators
theory:

A Denver-based testing company offered 1,000 free kits to
parents wanting to screen their trick-or-treaters’ haul for
marijuana’s psychoactive chemical. However, only 45 parents took CB
Scientific up on the offer as of Friday….

“My honest opinion is that’s an overblown fear that was created
by the police,” said CB Scientific CEO Bill Short.

Police may have created the fear, but Short’s company happily

capitalized on it for publicity. Similarly, USA
Today helped promote the scare it is now debunking. In an
October 22
story headlined “Marijuana-Infused Candy Raises Colo. Halloween
Concerns,” the paper reported that “some Colorado parents are
worried their kids might come home with something dangerous after
trick-or-treating this Halloween: marijuana-infused candy.” The
story cited two examples of such parents: Rachel O’Bryan, founder
of SMART Colorado, a group that lobbies for restrictions on
marijuana in the name of protecting children, and Frank McNulty, a
state legislator who is pushing for a regulatory crackdown on
marijuana edibles. USA Today also quoted Patrick
Johnson, the marijuana merchant who appeared in the Denver Police
Department’s
video about pot in Halloween candy. The only skeptic was Dan
Anglin, chairman of the Colorado Cannabis Chamber of
Commerce.

“We see this as a problem,” O’Bryan said, “and we don’t believe
it’s being blown out of proportion.” McNulty was a bit more
cautious. “I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of marijuana
candies in Halloween bags,” he said, but “it is something that
parents need to think about.” Like Johnson, McNulty suggested that
parents worried about this putative pot peril need not take any new
precautions. After all, doesn’t every parent carefully inspect
Halloween candy for broken glass, razor blades, and other puported
hazards to innocent trick-or-treaters? In other words, if you are
already hypervigilant as a result of other
baseless scare stories, what’s one more phony threat?

Cody Wilson, famous for making the first usable fully plastic 3D
printed handgun and for his new project
“Ghost Gunner” which mills metal lower receivers (the milling
machine itself if of course not a weapon, and what it makes is not
itself legally a weapon!) for AR-15s, informs me today that his
online payment processor
Stripe has decided that his companies, all of them, qualify as
forbidden “weapons and munitions; gunpowder and other explosives”
services. This includes the Ghost Gunner and Defense Distributed.

See Stripe’s very impressive list of companies they (or their
“banking partners”) refuse to do business
with, including virtual currency, anything they think violates
IP in any way, fantasy sports leagues, marijuana or tobacco
businesses, or e-cigs, pornography, bankruptcy lawyers, airlines
cruises or timeshares or prepaid phone cards; and any legal
substance that emulates an illegal substance, like salvia.
 

Wilson tells me Stripe isn’t superefficient at enforcing these
rules, and some explicit gun businesses have told him they do use
Stripe and get away with it, though most in the gun world are aware
they are not welcome with the processing company.

In correspondence with Wilson, a Stripe representative referred
to “pushback from our financial partners” regarding his businesses
as triggering the end of their relationship.

“Stripe is a big startup that’s supposed to promote
‘disruption.'” WIlson notes, but obviously wants to do so only with
“minimal intensity. Obviously if something is too distruptive banks
don’t like the risk. I’ve been completely excluded from
the Bay Area payment processing universe.”

This is yet another reason why the world most definitely needs

another of Wilson’s passions, Bitcoin: a means to transmit
value online that depends in no way on censorious intermediaries
like Stripe and their banking partners.