Tag: hit&run

The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released its highly anticipated report on the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia connection on Monday.

Make no mistake: The report chronicles serious wrongdoing with respect to the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, and is ultimately a damning indictment of the the nation’s top law enforcement agency. All Americans should have serious concerns about the FBI’s respect for constitutional principles, ability to carefully evaluate conflicting information, and its competency in general.

Many in the media have focused on the fact that the IG report failed to turn up any evidence that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia was politically motivated. The Washington Post‘s key takeaway was that the report amounted to a “triple rebuke” of the president and his allies. CNN’s article lead with “conspiracy theories debunked” and called the Russia probe “legal and unbiased,” before conceding “serious mistakes” that the network predominantly attributed to a “low level FBI lawyer.” In general, the Trump-critical mainstream media has treated the faltering of the most fervent pro-Trump partisans’ conspiracy theory about a deep state coup as some kind of full acquittal of the FBI. It’s not. The IG report is a chronicle of massive government wrongdoing.

As Scott Shackford explained in his post on this subject, the report by Michael Horowitz found 17 “serious performance failures” relating to warrants obtained by the FBI through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) courts for the purposed of monitoring Page. The FISA warrant, which was reauthorized three times, contained false and misleading information about Page. It omitted that he had previously disclosed his Russian contacts to a government agency; it overstated the government’s confidence in the Christopher Steele dossier and ignored Steele’s own doubts about one of his sources; it declined to mention that Page had said he and Paul Manafort had “literally never met”; and in general it ignored information that rendered unlikely the theory that Page was a Russian asset.

These are alarming failures. They undercut the government’s position that FISA courts are a sufficient guardian of Americans’ civil liberties, and that the FBI is capable of responsibly exercising the vast powers granted to it. No one should feel confident that a court would block the FBI from engaging in surveillance, even if the information was flawed or faulty.

And yet the FBI and its cable news surrogates essentially spent Monday afternoon and evening taking a victory lap. The agency itself led the charge: A spokesperson for the FBI said the report “does not impugn the FBI’s institutional integrity. It doesn’t doubt—or propose any changes to—the FBI’s mission or our core values. It doesn’t criticize—or even question—the brand that this organization has earned over 111 years.”

On CNN, Erin Burnett uncritically interviewed FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who expressed great pride in his organization. “I know we didn’t do anything wrong,” he told her. “What we did was our job. I’ve known all along that we did the right thing.” MSNBC had more of the same, with host Ari Melber interviewing David Kelley, an attorney for former FBI Director James Comey. The FBI’s wrongdoing was mentioned, but only as an afterthought. Over and over again, the main story was the wrongness of Team Trump, and the absence of evidence that the FBI was ideologically motivated to work against the president.

So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps wires. It was just good people trying to protect America. https://t.co/9nurCaIBq2

— James Comey (@Comey) December 9, 2019

Trump and his supporters were dead-wrong to attribute to malice what is better explained by stupidity. But the latter is no less troubling, and it would be terrific if the media would spend more time holding the G-men’s feet to the fire. It would also be terrific if Republicans could channel their momentary frustration about government surveillance programs into some sort of sustained pushback against civil liberty violations. Alas, the PATRIOT Act has been repeatedly reauthorized along mostly bipartisan lines.

 

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2YDGlKb
via IFTTT

The apparent terror attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola spurs a debate among our panelists about whether the FISA Section 215 metadata program deserves to be killed, as Congress has increasingly signaled it intends to do. If the Pensacola attack involved multiple parties acting across US borders, which looked possible as we taped, then it would be just about the first such attacks since 9/11 – and exactly the kind of attack the metadata program was designed to identify in advance. Now may not be the best time to dump it, after all.

Nick Weaver tells us that China has resurrected the Great Cannon to attack a popular Hong Kong forum for protesters. The Cannon depends on users from outside China connecting without TLS to Chinese sites. I ask why Google hasn’t started issuing warnings to Web users before letting them cross the Great Firewall without enabling HTTPS. That could spike the Great Cannon, but Google employees are too busy complaining about the United States government, I suggest. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working hard to make GitHub, an early Great Cannon victim, an essential part of China’s IT infrastructure. Remarkably, we verify in real time that, despite the lure of the Chinese market, Microsoft has apparently not told GitHub to dump the content that offended the Chinese government.

In more China news, the trial lawyers are circling TikTok as though it were a wounded wildebeest on the veldt. A California class action alleges that TikTok harvested and sent data to China, and an Illinois class action charges the company with violating COPPA by marketing to children without sufficient privacy safeguards.

Paul Rosenzweig and I dig deep into the 20-year history behind DHS’s now-abandoned proposal to conduct airport facial scans on US citizens leaving the country. We reach broad agreement that this is one of the rare privacy versus national security debates in which there’s precious little privacy or national security at stake.

Matthew Heiman lays out the remarkable international food fight over taxes on digital business. USTR is threatening big tariffs on French wine to counter France’s digital tax. Spain is apparently eager to join France in the fight. And the effort to work everything out at the OECD, where the EU has a 20-1 voting advantage over the US, has predictably not worked out well from the US point of view.

Cue the white cat: The United States has actually imposed sanctions on an entity called “Evil Corp.” SPECTRE was apparently unavailable. Nick explains. This is part of criminal charges against two highly effective Russian bank hackers – and arguably a confession of weakness on the US government’s part.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s efforts to avoid tort liability for third-party sales on its site look to be suffering a long strategic defeat in the courts. The latest example is a Sixth Circuit ruling allowing plaintiffs to pursue product tort claims against the Internet giant.

I offer a quick update and some rare kind words for Nancy Pelosi, who is calling for modification of the North American free trade deal to drop the provision turning Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act into international law. This provision has garnered genuinely bipartisan opposition, so perhaps she’ll prevail.

Paul gets stuck explaining two dog-bites-man stories. The FBI says any Russian app could be a counterintelligence threat. Well, what else would they say? And the European Commission, when asked what US regulation of encryption would mean for Europe, says more or less that the EU may have to escalate from eyebrow-lifting to throat-clearing.

Nick closes the program with advice about the new Android exploit that works (in the right circumstances) to compromise apps running on a fully patched and up-to-date Android phone.

Download the 292nd Episode (mp3).

You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed!

As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!

The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2s8GLMu
via IFTTT

The House Judiciary Committee convened another impeachment hearing on Monday that was heavy on the partisan fireworks and light on new information.

The witnesses before the committee were Steve Castor, counsel for the Republicans, and Daniel Goldman, counsel for the Democrats. Both men traded their seats on the bench for seats at the witness table to testify on the evidence for and against impeaching President Donald Trump based on allegations that he improperly leveraged the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals. The two men and the committee members who questioned them hashed and rehashed the testimony that’s been provided to the committee by previous witnesses and offered canned rebuttals.

If you have not watched the impeachment hearings, here is where we stand: Trump is the subject of an impeachment inquiry over allegations that he kept from Ukraine $391 million in security assistance and a desired White House meeting in exchange for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly announcing probes into Burisma Holdings—an energy company where former Vice President Joe Biden’s son sat on the board—and a widely criticized theory that Ukraine carried out widespread election interference to benefit 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Democrats are pursuing the inquiry “because they disagree with his policies,” Castor said Monday, casting the process as nothing more than a politically motivated sham. It’s “baloney,” he testified. The GOP counsel also maintained that Trump’s skepticism of Ukraine was justified and that his desired probes into Burisma and Ukrainian election interference were acceptable diplomatic asks.

“There were certainly individuals in many other countries who had harsh words for both of the candidates,” Dr. Fiona Hill testified in November, describing Ukrainian interference as a “fictional narrative” that serves Russian interests. The evidence of Ukrainian influence in U.S. politics consists of an op-ed, written by a Ukrainian government official, critical of Trump’s position on Crimea; and an effort by some Ukrainians to disperse unflattering documents about Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, who worked for pro-Russian political interests in Ukraine before joining Trump’s campaign.  

Unsurprisingly, Goldman sought to counter Castor’s talking points, telling the committee that “President Trump’s persistent and continuing effort to coerce a foreign country to help him cheat to win an election is a clear and present danger to our free and fair elections and to our national security.” Goldman also disputed criticisms that the recently released call records were inappropriate, telling investigators that the documents only confirm that calls and texts were exchanged but do not actually show the contents of the conversations.

The two men disagreed on even the most basic questions. Did Trump seek an investigation into the Bidens? Goldman said yes, Castor said no. (The rough transcript released by the White House shows Trump mentioning both Joe and Hunter Biden.) Is there enough evidence to proceed? Goldman said it is “overwhelming,” Castor said there is “no direct evidence whatsoever.” Castor also criticized the committee’s reliance on the testimony of Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, who told investigators in November that there was a well-understood quid pro quo in exchange for the White House meeting.

Indeed, the two men not even agree on whether Biden is a frontrunner in the 2020 election. “It’s too early,” Castor said.

Republicans lodged procedural objections at the hearing’s outset, with what appeared to be an intent to delay the hearing by calling constant points of order and insisting on roll calls. Republicans asked Chairman Rep. Larry Nadler (D–New York) to schedule another hearing driven by the minority and if he would agree to strike testimony Republicans found demeaned the president’s character. Republicans also questioned whether the witnesses had been correctly sworn in. 

The hearing comes two days after the Democratic majority released a report outlining a constitutional basis for potential articles of impeachment, invoking the country’s founding and appealing to tenets of limited government. “Impeachment is the Constitution’s final answer to a President who mistakes himself for a monarch,” the report says. 

“A president who perverts his role as chief diplomat to serve private rather than public ends has unquestionably engaged in ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’— especially if he invited, rather than opposed, foreign interference in our politics,” it concludes.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3585L55
via IFTTT

This year began with American officials postponing a planned tariff increase amid encouraging signs of progress on a trade deal with China—and with hopes for the speedy passage of a rewritten deal between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Unless something changes this week, it looks like the year may end with a further escalation of the trade war with China, putting a deal farther out of reach. But there is hope, finally, for the new North American trade pact to pass.

In many ways, this week is the final exam for year two of President Donald Trump’s effort at reshaping America’s most important trading relationships. It’s been a year marked by promises of progress that have repeatedly dissolved, and of tariff hikes that have burdened the economy with billions of dollars in additional taxes without yielding the desired results. If the first year of Trump’s trade wars proved that these conflicts were anything but “good and easy to win,” the second year has demonstrated how easily trade wars can become expensive political quagmires.

But there is still time for a final breakthrough on both fronts.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that administration officials and congressional Democrats were nearing a final deal to pass the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). The updated and rewritten version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been waiting for congressional approval since late last year, when the chief executives of all three countries approved it.

On Monday afternoon, CNN reported that the remaining policy issues had been settled, paving the way for the House to vote on the trade deal later this week. Previously, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) said the deal would have to start moving this week to be able to clear the Senate before its Christmas break begins on December 19.

On the China front, a breakthrough seems less likely—and yet another escalation in the tariffs is set to take effect on Sunday. Chinese officials are demanding the cancellation of those new trade barriers and the repeal of others before agreeing to the first phase of a deal. Trump has been unwilling to make that concession.

Sunday’s deadline is “a very important date with respect to a ‘go,’ or a ‘no-go,'” White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow said Friday during an interview on CNBC.

If the rest of the year has been any indication, bet on “no-go.” Kudlow claimed in April that the two countries were making “good headway,” and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promised a few weeks later that a deal was “getting close.” By June, Mnuchin was telling reporters the deal was “90 percent” finished. At a rally in September, Trump promised farmers that a deal with China would be done “soon.” The following month, with Chinese trade officials sitting in the Oval Office, Trump assured the country that “substantial progress” had been made on “phase one” of a deal—backtracking from the administration’s previous stance that opposed a piecemeal deal. Details, the president said on October 11, would be released within five weeks.

Two months later, no details of the deal have been released. If Sunday’s planned tariff increase—which will hit consumer electronics, toys, and various other items with a new 15 percent import tax—goes ahead as planned, a deal seems to be off the table for now.

The number of almost-there stories on U.S.-China trade negotiations has been impressive. https://t.co/gdyzZTx48L

— Bruno J. Navarro (@Bruno_J_Navarro) April 3, 2019

Needless to say, negotiating major deals with the United States’ biggest trading partners is not an easy task and not a job to be rushed. Still, these are conflicts that Trump chose to take on. Indeed, he promised they would be easy.

And no matter what happens this week, it’s virtually impossible for a limited trade deal with China to balance out the damage done by Trump’s tariffs. Americans have paid more than $42 billion in tariff revenue this year—including $4 billion in the month of October. In fact, Americans paid more tariff revenue to the federal government in October ($7.2 billion in all) than in any other month in U.S. history, according to Commerce Department data.

While the negotiations over the USMCA have not caused as much direct pain as the China trade war, its passage would be a mediocre accomplishment at best. In many ways, the USMCA is a step backward from NAFTA—among other things, the new deal would raise barriers to trade for cars and car parts. The best argument for passing the USMCA is just to would some uncertainty over the future of North American trade.

The administration’s year of fruitless negotiations, overpromised progress, and escalating tariffs is nearly over. If the USMCA can speed through Congress before 2020, the White House might be able to salvage a C-minus. Otherwise, Trump (and the rest of us) might end up having to repeat this class.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2sa90ub
via IFTTT

From Judge Paul A. Engelmayer’s decision two weeks ago in TIG Insurance Co. v. National Union Fire Insurance Co.:

Pursuant to [a Reinsurance] Agreement, respondents submitted the dispute to arbitration …. The panel ruled in favor of petitioner and concluded that the disputed policies were outside the scope of the Contract. Petitioner was ordered to pay respondents any unpaid balance, minus any amount owed under the disputed policies. Respondents, in their correspondence to the Court, state that the award has since been fully satisfied….

On November 4, 2019, petitioners filed their Petition to confirm the Award. Petition. Petitioners seek “an Order of Judgment in favor of [Petitioner] and against Respondents on the Final Award.” … [R]espondents do not oppose the petition….

The court confirmed the award, but rejected the parties’ request “to file the Award under seal, and to file the Petition itself in redacted form”:

In determining whether the parties have overcome the presumption of public filing, the Court applies … Lugosch v. Pyramid Co. of Onondaga (2d Cir. 2006). First, the Court must determine whether the documents at issue—here, the arbitral Award and the Petition to confirm it—are “judicial documents” to which the common law presumption of public access attaches. It is “plain as day” that these documents “are judicial documents…. [These] documents ‘initiated judicial proceedings, are the cornerstone of the case, the very architecture of the lawsuit, and access to’ them is undoubtedly ‘necessary if the public is to understand this court’s decision.'”

Second, having “determined that the documents are judicial documents and … a common law presumption of access attaches, [the Court] must determine the weight of that presumption.” … [S]uch weight “will fall somewhere on a continuum from matters that directly affect an adjudication to matters that come within a court’s purview solely to insure their irrelevance.” Here, there is no question that the documents the parties seek to seal or redact—the arbitral Award and the Petition to confirm it—are front and center in this case. Indeed, they are the documents on which the Court has relied to resolve the Petition. Therefore, the Court concludes that the weight of the presumption in favor of public access in this case is at its “zenith.”

Finally, the Court must balance competing considerations against public access, including but not limited to “the danger of impairing law enforcement or judicial efficiency and the privacy interests of those resisting disclosure.” Here, the parties have not argued that the information contained in the Award or in the Petition, which quotes the Award, is proprietary or that its presence in the public domain will somehow cause harm to either party. Nor is it apparent from the plain text that such could be the case.

Rather, the sole competing interest identified by the parties is the existence of the confidentiality agreement that governed the underlying arbitration. That agreement does not bind the Court and is, without more, insufficient to overcome the public’s countervailing interest in access to the courts. “The common law right of public access to judicial documents is firmly rooted in our nation’s history.” The presumption of access is based on the need for federal courts “to have a measure of accountability and for the public to have confidence in the administration of justice.” Monitoring by the public “both provides judges with critical views of their work and deters arbitrary judicial behavior.” The Court concludes that the fundamental importance of access to the courts is not outweighed by the parties’ desire to extend their confidentiality agreement….

The parties have asked for the imprimatur of the federal judiciary on their arbitral award. The Court is happy to grant that request. However, by availing themselves of the judicial process, the parties must also contend with the values of transparency and public access which undergird its legitimacy.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2P36XkH
via IFTTT

According to a massive report that the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released today, the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s possible connections with the Russian government was justified and not driven by political bias—but it was full of blunders and bad omissions.

The report analyzes the circumstances under which the FBI asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) courts for permission to secretly wiretap Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor in Trump’s campaign. FBI officials were concerned Page might be compromised or working as a foreign agent, and they sought and received permission to wiretap him, permission they renewed three times.

But did anti-Trump bias cloud the attitudes of the officials involved in the decision to open the investigation? Text messages between former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok fueled “deep state” theories claiming that the investigation was launched in order to take Trump down. Their requests to the FISA court relied partly on a dossier alleging that Russian officials had compromising info on Trump—a dossier the former British spy Christopher Steele had developed as a political weapon. That raised the question of whether the FISA court had received adequate explanation about the dossier’s roots and credibility.

After a lengthy investigation involving more than 170 interviews with more than 100 witnesses, the Office of the Inspector General has concluded that the decisions to open an investigation and to request renewals of the warrants were not driven by a bias against Trump. But it did not conclude that everything the FBI did was fine. According to the report, the FBI was not as thorough and as accurate as it needed to be as it was requesting permission to wiretap Page:

Our review found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are “scrupulously accurate.” We identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.

The IG office found seven problems with the very first FISA warrant application. These included: leaving out the fact that Page in the past had provided the FBI with information about his contacts with Russian intelligence officers; overstating the degree that Steele’s prior reporting had been used in criminal proceedings; omitting information from Steele himself that one of his sources was prone to boasting and may have some credibility issues; incorrectly claiming that Steele wasn’t the source of a leak of his information to Yahoo News; and even omitting some comments from consensual interviews with Page where he denied having met certain Russian officials. These errors were not corrected in the renewal applications.

The IG report notes that the FBI was unable to corroborate any of the information about Page that was in the Steele report, even as they kept seeking renewal of the wiretapping. Page has not been charged with any crimes.

The subsequent warrant applications added 10 more errors or omissions to the inspector general’s list, including a failure to inform the FISA court that Steele’s reporting was also going to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and or to make sure the court knew that Steele had been described as “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected.”

The report also heavily criticizes Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr, who met with Steele, the FBI, and the State Department and discussed the contents of Steele’s dossier. Ohr did not inform his supervisors that he was connected to the information, even though those supervisors were among those who signed off on the FISA warrant requests, and even though Ohr was the one who knew that Steele was heavily against a Trump victory. But while the report concludes that Ohr made some serious errors in judgment, he did not violate specific department policies. It does not recommend any charges against Ohr or anybody else, but does recommend that Ohr’s supervisors in the Criminal Division review the findings about Ohr’s performance for “any action they deem appropriate.” That’s a recommendation for possible discipline, but not criminal charges.

So altogether, the inspector general found 17 incidents of “serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications.” But no political bias!

Both sides of the effort to impeach Trump can conceivably claim victory here, which essentially means that both sides lose. One side will be able to argue that the FBI has been cleared of any claims of bias. The other side will be able to argue that there’s plenty of evidence of the FBI playing fast and loose when requesting permission to snoop on a political campaign, deliberately withholding information the FISA court would want to know.

For the rest of us, what’s most important and troubling here is what the report says about how the FBI operates. It’s important not to fall for a false choice here. It’s OK to believe that Trump’s behavior was profoundly corrupt and also to be deeply concerned that the FBI cut far too many corners when it sought permission to secretly snoop on an American citizen. The only reason we know this much information about the investigation is because it was connected to Trump’s political campaign. What we don’t know—and maybe will never know—is how frequently the FBI omits important information in other wiretap requests that involve Americans.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Pt1dQj
via IFTTT

From Midwestern city councils to masked anarchists, everyone seems to be embracing the idea of free public transit.

In late November, fare strikes hit transit systems across the country, with activists hopping turnstiles and vandalizing ticket machines to protest the cost of living, police brutality, neoliberalism, etc.

This was followed last Thursday by Kansas City’s government voting unanimously for a resolution that directs the city manager to create a plan for eliminating fares on all city buses. The legislators didn’t deploy the protesters’ radical rhetoric, but they agreed on this much: Free public transit is better both for the environment and for low-income riders.

“Free bus service is more environmentally friendly, and it provides a transformative advantage for low-income residents who need a ride to work or school,” wrote the Kansas City Star‘s editorial board in an article supporting the elimination of fares.

Free transit, of course, isn’t actually free.

Kansas City’s bus and bus rapid transit services cost about $75 million a year to operate, according to Federal Transit Administration data from 2017. Fare-box revenue made up about $8.5 million of that, or roughly 11 percent of all operating costs.

That’s low, but it’s not nothing. Additional subsidies would be required to make the system whole.

But for some officials, finding $8 million of other people’s money is no big deal. “That’s not a ton of money,” City Councilman Eric Bunch told a local NBC affiliate after the vote. “If we want to prioritize public transportation, it’s something that we can find.”

So long as fares continue to bring in some money, it makes sense to keep them, counters Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation scholar at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website).

“Whether it’s 20 percent of the recovery rate or 40 percent of the recovery rate, it’s a lot better than zero percent of the recovery rate,” says Feigenbaum. “From a fiscal perspective, you should do it just because you need the funding.”

Feigenbaum also argues that transportation—regardless of mode—should follow a “users pay, users benefit” model, where riders pay as close to the full cost of their ride as possible. This gives transit agencies a stronger incentive to provide quality service to riders or else risk losing the revenue that comes with them. Cities concerned about helping low-income riders could just give them transit vouchers, says Feigenbaum, without shifting the cost of everyone’s rides onto taxpayers.

The historical experience of transit systems going fare-free is mixed.

It has proven more successful when implemented in smaller resort and college towns, where populations surge on a seasonal basis and where ill-used transit systems have a lot of spare capacity to add new riders.

Larger cities that experimented with fare-free public transit have seen ridership increases, but also overcrowding and significantly reduced on-time rates .

According to one 2012 report, both Denver and Austin saw major increases in ridership when they temporarily abolished fares. Ridership increased 49 percent in Denver and 70 percent in Austin. But as that same report notes, Denver increased service and redesigned its bus routes at the same time that it eliminated fares, possibly explaining much of the increase in ridership. Likewise, Austin’s fare-free experiment came right as the city’s transit agency extended service to the University of Texas, which also gave students free bus passes.

Both cities eventually abandoned fare-free transit, citing overcrowding, lost revenue, and an increased number of “problem passenger” incidents.

Other large cities’ fare elimination strategies have produced more modest ridership gains. When Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, made its public transportation service free, it registered only a 3 percent increase in ridership over the following five years.

That’s because most riders would rather have a better-functioning bus service than a cheaper one.

According to a 2019 survey of transit riders in seven cities from TransitCenter, a transit advocacy group, most riders—including most low-income riders—said that improved service was a higher priority than lowering or eliminating fares. “If a transit agency had to choose between devoting funds to reducing fares or to maintaining or improving service, most riders would prefer the latter,” reads the organization noted in January.

Kansas City is going in the opposite direction. Time will tell how well that will work.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2RAdgOd
via IFTTT

The porn wars are raging once again, with would-be censors on the right and left trotting out the same tired excuses for suspending the First Amendment—and the same absurd explanations⁠, made even sillier in the digital era⁠, for how a federal porn ban would work.

This round started because four Republican legislators wrote a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr last week asking for the Department of Justice to make obscenity prosecutions a priority once more.

Let’s take a look at some claims from today’s porn prohibitionists…

Claim: The rise of online pornography and digital marketplaces for sex work has coincided with a rise in violence against women.

In fact, the last several decades have seen decreases in all sorts of violent crime rates, including rates of rape and sexual assault. “Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates,” noted researchers Christopher J. Ferguson and Richard D. Hartley in a 2009 article for the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior reviewing studies on the effects of pornography. And “data from other nations have suggested similar relationships.” Overall, “the increasing availability of pornography appears to be associated with a decline in rape.”

People who commit rape appear to consume less porn than the general population. In the U.S., rape rates declined fasted in states with early internet access. And research has suggested that online “erotic services” marketplaces like Craigslist are directly linked to a decline in female homicide rates. Studies “have also reported positive associations between pornography use and egalitarian attitudes,” according to 2015 research from the University of Western Ontario.

Claim: Teens who watch porn are more likely to engage in sexually risky behaviors.

In fact, the proliferation of online porn and minors’ easy access to it has coincided with a significant drops in just about every negative outcome connected to young people and sex. Teenagers have been waiting longer before losing their virginity. When they do have sex, they are using condoms and contraception more often. And they are having fewer unintended pregnancies.

In addition, studies dating back more than half a century show that growing up in an atmosphere of sexual repression and shame is more likely to predict anti-social sexual attitudes and actions than is exposure to pornography.

“Exposure to pornography during adolescence had little effect on persons who later became rapists and child molesters,” reported the Associated Press in 1970, describing a federal commission’s conclusions on the subject. The news agency explained that “sexual deviates generally came from homes where pornography was restricted and sex was never discussed” and that “most deviates had been severely punished as teenagers by their parents when caught with pornographic material.”

Claim: Online porn is uniquely addictive.

In fact, there’s nothing uniquely dangerous about digital porn that’s getting people “hooked.” People who have an “addiction” to watching online porn appear to suffer from the same lack of self-regulation and other underlying cognitive and psychological issues that affect people with other compulsions or problem attachments.

We shouldn’t dismiss or mock those who struggle with compulsive porn consumption any more than we should those trapped in other self-destructive behaviors, but we also shouldn’t structure society around catering to such pathologies. That’s only asking for the same old problems plus a host of new ones.

Claim: Porn desensitizes men to regular sex.

In fact, we don’t have much research on this—what we do have suggests the opposite. When the UCLA neuroscientist Nicole Prause studied the subject, she found no relationship between porn consumption and erectile dysfunction. And contrary to popular claims, Praise found that watching porn did not make men “unable to respond sexually to ‘normal’ sexual situations with a partner.”

Prause’s study, published in 2015 in the journal Sexual Medicine, concluded that the “oft-repeated link” between porn and poor penis functioning is “perpetuated by data-poor literature.”

Claim: Legal porn increases human trafficking.

In fact, previous bouts of prohibition have shown us that making something illegal doesn’t actually stop that thing from existing—but it does make engaging with the banned thing more dangerous for all involved. Porn production and distribution would still happen in an America where online porn was banned. But organized crime would have much more control over it, performers would not have the standard legal protections against violence and exploitation, and it would be harder to prevent the production of porn involving minors or others who cannot or did not consent.

As in all sexual matters, the line between legal and illegal pornography should turn on the willing participation of those involved, not the tastes of whoever shouts the loudest.

The internet has fueled a resurgence in a once-dormant porn panic. But the internet hasn’t just enabled more porn access; it has allowed a much more diverse porn landscape, one that features more diverse body types and sexualities and where independent adult entertainers and content creators have more control over their income, image, and work conditions than ever before. There’s still much room for improvement, but declaring a new war on obscenity would only set that work back.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2qBLzcV
via IFTTT

You may have been minding your own business the past 72 hours, but our illiberal-con friends certainly were not. On Friday, four members of Congress sent a hysterical letter to Attorney General William Barr asking him to “declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority,” and “bring prosecutions against the major producers and distributors of such material.” Then conservative commentator Matt Walsh spent the whole damn weekend demanding jail sentences and denouncing libertarians for being all libertarian-y.

On today’s Reason Roundtable podcast, editors Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch unpack the porn prohibitionists’ phony statistics and openly big-government philosophies, while introducing some pragmatic considerations that hobbled previous conservative crackdowns during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. We also talk about lessons from today’s big Washington Post “Afghanistan Papers” project, field still more listener questions (because of our annual Webathon, which you should totally donate to before it’s too late!), and explore the deepest ocean cracks with James Cameron and Randy Newman.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

‘Infados’ by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Relevant links from the show:

“Pornography Is Protected by the First Amendment,” by Damon Root

“The Fight Conservatives Are Having Over Theocracy and Classical Liberalism Obscures How Beaten Their Movement Is,” by Nick Gillespie

“Anti-Porn Republicans Haven’t Gone Anywhere,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Rick Santorum: ‘Federal Obscenity Laws Should Be Vigorously Enforced,’” by Mike Riggs

“Reason.tv: All Charges Dismissed! John Stagliano Reacts Outside the Courthouse,” by Reason Staff

“Stagliano on Obscenity, Justice, and His Upcoming Animated Video on the Federal Reserve,” by Matt Welch

“Xtreme Measures,” by Greg Beato

“Reagan’s Smutstompers,” by Martin Wooster

“The Government Has Been Lying About Afghanistan All Along,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Trump Just Can’t Quit Afghanistan,” by Matt Welch

“In Afghanistan, We Persist in Futility,” by Steve Chapman

“The Forever War in Afghanistan,” by Jesse Walker

“Obama Brainwashes the Public on Afghanistan,” by Sheldon Richman

“Knitting Afghanistan,” by Brian Doherty

“You Asked Reason Editors Anything. Watch How We Answered!” By Matt Welch

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/354wGi5
via IFTTT

A veteran Houston narcotics officer’s handwritten responses to questions from internal investigators document the unraveling of the story he concocted to obtain the warrant for a no-knock drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple last January. “I screw[ed] up,” Gerald Goines, who was shot in the face during the raid, wrote as he lay in a hospital bed, “because I made a buy without the correct man power there.”

Inadequate manpower was the least of the problems with Goines’ investigation of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, which the Justice Department says was based on a false tip from a neighbor. Goines, who faces state murder charges and federal civil rights charges as a result of the deadly raid, claimed in his search warrant affidavit that a confidential informant had bought heroin from a middle-aged “white male, whose name is unknown,” at the house on Harding Street where Tuttle and Nicholas lived. After the raid, which found no evidence of drug dealing, Goines could not identify an informant who would confirm that story.

In the handwritten notes, which were obtained by KPRC, the NBC station in Houston, Goines finally fesses up, sort of. “What is the name of your C.I. [confidential informant] that you used for 7815 Harding?” the investigators ask. “Gerald Goines,” he replies. “There was no confidential informant….I made the purchase myself. I was looking to buy from a female. I bought from the male. I had info regarding people at the residence. I’m not sure if the guy I bought from was the male listed in info.”

That “info,” according to a federal indictment unsealed last month, was fabricated by Patricia Garcia, who lived across the street and described Tuttle and Nicholas as armed and dangerous drug dealers in telephone conversations with police on January 8. Although Goines supposedly investigated that tip for two weeks, he does not seem to have known the names of the purported drug dealers and, by his own account, did not know what Tuttle looked like. But that did not really matter, because the heroin purchase he said he made never happened, according to the indictment.

Goines also admitted to investigators that Steven Bryant, the narcotics officer he claimed had confirmed that the “brown powder substance” supposedly purchased at 7815 Harding Street was black-tar heroin, never saw the alleged contraband. “Officer Bryant never observe[d] the narcotic which was purchase[d] from the residence,” Goines wrote. “I placed that statement in the [affidavit].” Bryant, who like Goines retired after the raid, faces state and federal charges for backing up Goines’ fictional narrative.

In his written responses, Goines said he bought “two small baggies” of a “powdery substance” from the unidentified white male on the evening before the raid, and he was sure the man “would still be in possession” when police searched the home. But the only drugs that police found in the house were personal-use quantities of marijuana and cocaine. In his affidavit, Goines also claimed that his informant had seen “a semi-auto hand gun of a 9mm caliber” in the house; no such weapon was recovered.

All of this makes you wonder what Goines’ plan was. Had he not been shot during the raid he engineered, would he have planted the heroin and the gun he had described in his affidavit? Goines’ expectation that his fabrications would go undetected does not reflect well on the alertness and integrity of his colleagues and supervisors. As it turned out, Bryant did cover for Goines, confirming his own role in the transaction that Goines invented.

If the raid had not ended so disastrously, Goines might very well have succeeded in framing Tuttle and Nicholas. He had a history of mishandling evidence and making dubious statements under oath. Over 12 years, The Houston Chronicle found, Goines obtained nearly 100 no-knock warrants like the one used in this case, almost always claiming that informants had seen firearms in the homes he wanted to search. But he reported recovering guns only once, a pattern no one seems to have noticed.

That track record, combined with the loose supervision that allowed this operation to unfold as it did, suggests that imposing limits on no-knock raids and finally requiring narcotics officers to wear body cameras when they execute search warrants—two reforms that Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo instituted in response to this scandal—do not go far enough to root out the problems in the Narcotics Division. “How do you reassure the public something like this isn’t going to happen again?” a reporter asked Acevedo on the day the federal indictment was unsealed. His response was revealing:

Police officers have been engaged in misconduct since the advent of time. Human beings have been sinning since…the days of Adam and Eve, right? I mean, we’re imperfect beings. I can’t guarantee that nothing will ever happen again….What I can guarantee is that, number one, we will continue to be vigilant in our processes and our systems and our audits….We will always ask the tough questions when we take a life. What I can tell you is that the chances of this being systemic are not going to happen because of the processes in the systems that we have in time. But at the end of the day, there is an element of trust when you have employees….No matter what systems or processes are in place, there is no such thing as 100-percent fail-proof process.

Acevedo says “we will continue to be vigilant in our processes and our systems and our audits,” which implies that the Houston Police Department already was vigilant about potential abuses by narcotics officers. Yet the Chronicle found that the Narcotics Division had gone two decades without an audit. It also found that, despite an expert consensus that undercover officers should be frequently rotated to other assignments, 71 officers have served a decade or more in the Narcotics Division. Michael Doyle, a lawyer hired by Nicholas’ family, says supervisors let the raid go forward even though they knew Goines had not properly documented his contact with the informant he described. Goines’ belief that he could get away with inventing a drug purchase by a nonexistent informant does not speak well of the HPD’s “processes.”

Acevedo puts “the chances of this being systemic” at zero, even as he concedes that something like this is bound to happen again. In the face of a scandal that should make all Houstonians worry about the security of their constitutional rights, Acevedo’s observations about the fallen nature of humanity are hardly reassuring.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/34aehiV
via IFTTT