Tag: hit&run

Brian Thiede, the prosecuting attorney for Mecosta County, Michigan, wants to put Keith Wood in jail for handing out pamphlets. Yet Thiede says the pamphlets are perfectly legal, and so is handing them out.

The solution to this riddle lies in Thiede’s interpretation of Michigan’s jury tampering statute, which he says turns constitutionally protected speech into a crime. If the Michigan Court of Appeals agrees, Jacob Sullum says, it will be giving officials like Thiede a versatile tool to censor and punish people who offend them.

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We’ve been told conservatives don’t believe in science and that there’s a “Republican war on science.”

But John Tierney, who’s written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, told John Stossel that “the real war on science is the one from the left.”

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Malaysian officials have proposed a law that would ban fake news and impose prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines of up to $128,000 on those who violate the law. Critics say the law is aimed at stifling dissent.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary and Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s insufficient efforts to protect users’ personal data.

In doing so, many of the senators betrayed a general lack of knowledge about how Facebook operates. Imagine trying to explain social media to your grandparents—this was essentially Zuckerberg’s task.

Sen. Roy Blunt, (R–Mo.), for instance, didn’t seem to understand that Facebook lacks a means of accessing information from other apps unless users specifically opt-in. The same was true of Sen. Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), who needed a lot of clarification on how Facebook Messenger interacts with cellular service. Zuckerberg had to carefully explain to Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii) that WhatsApp is encrypted, and Facebook can’t read, let alone monetize, the information people exchange using that service. Zuckerberg had to explain to multiple senators, including Dean Heller (R–Nev.), that Facebook doesn’t technically sell its data: the ad companies don’t get to see the raw information.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D–Vt.) brought along a poster on which his office had printed out images of various Facebook pages. Leahy asked whether these were Russian propaganda groups. “Senator, are you asking about those specifically?” Zuckerberg asked. He of course had no way of knowing what was going on with those specific pages, just from looking at pictures of them. “I’m not familiar with those pieces of content,” Zuckerberg finally conceded.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) offered this metaphor to explain Facebook’s recent troubles: “the way I explain it to my constituents is that if someone breaks into my apartment with a crowbar and takes my stuff, it’s just like if the manager gave them the keys.” But that metaphor doesn’t quite work—Facebook didn’t willfully assist in a crime. Meanwhile, Sen. Debbie Fischer (R–Neb.) didn’t understand, at a fundamental level, that if you’re using Facebook, you have agreed to let Facebook know a lot of information about you.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) asked whether Facebook had any major competitors. Zuckerberg tried to explain that the company competes across different categories related to Facebook’s several main functions—as a tech giant, against Google, as a social media site, against Twitter, and so on—which led Graham to fret about Facebook being a monopoly and thus incapable of self-regulation. Nevertheless, Graham asked Zuckerberg whether the CEO would be willing to propose regulations that Facebook might like the government to impose on it.

Some senators, including Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), asked perceptive questions about Facebook’s data collection practices. Even so, Blumenthal also asked whether users should be able to access all the information Facebook has on them—prompting Zuckerberg to point out that Facebook already lets users download their data.

Throughout the hearing, Zuckerberg maintained that he wasn’t against regulation, “if it’s the right regulation.” However, he expressed concern that regulations aimed at preventing Facebook from functioning as a monopoly might backfire and simply make it more difficult for smaller firms to compete.

But senators on both sides of the political aisle were clear about their concerns—and more than willing to step in.

“If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix their privacy invasions, then we are going to have to,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D–Fla.). “We, the Congress.”

What Nelson and his colleagues largely failed to do was demonstrate that “we, the Congress” possess the requisite knowledge to regulate Facebook, or that those regulations would improve upon the policies Facebook would like to implement on its own. Ignorance breeds bad policy: consider the terrible Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), passed by “we the Congress” recently, which has already dealt serious blows to free expression on the internet.

The home genome testing company 23andMe has been fighting for the right to inform consumers about their DNA for five years now, ever since speculative fears led the Obama administration to clamp down on the industry. Last month, the company scored a win for the field and for its customers when it won federal approval of the first home BRCA test.

The Food and Drug Administration announced in March that 23andMe would be allowed to market a “Personal Genome Service Genetic Health Risk Report” for three variants of a gene linked to breast cancer in Ashkenazi Jews. While the variants for which the test was approved are not the most common BRCA mutations in the general population—and are, in fact, just three of more than a thousand—the agency’s signoff is nevertheless an important step for the democratization of science and the empowerment of the individual.

And it has a rather significant historical precedent. In an article published Monday in STAT News, 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki notes the story of Margaret Crane, a product designer at Organon Pharmaceuticals who argued in the late 1960s the company’s pregnancy test could be simplified and sold directly to consumers. Crane’s bosses resisted, not wanting to upset their physician clients, who then had a monopoly on testing women’s urine for pregnancy hormones. After the company eventually adopted Crane’s position, vendors of the test faced pushback from the United States Public Health Service and the Texas Medical Association.

It’s been 50 years since Crane built her prototype, and home pregnancy tests have not caused a rash of suicides or psychotic breaks (as her bosses at Organon initially predicted); nor do women find them inscrutable or impossible to use. There are no contemporary arguments for revoking the right to test at home, and I can’t imagine any obstetrician would argue that women are worse off for the invention. Decades from now, if patriarchal forces continue to retreat and retrench in the face of sound science, we will be able to say the same thing about the products offered by 23andMe.

“We know from our research and the work of others that you don’t have to be an expert to handle genetic health risk information,” Wojcicki writes. “We also discovered through our research that a number of our customers who learned that they carry potentially harmful BRCA-related genetic variants never knew they were at risk for breast or ovarian cancer and would never have been tested for them through the traditional system. For some of these people, the information they got from a direct-to-consumer genetic test truly saved their lives.

I find arguments about the wrong and right sides of history to be pretty cloying, but in this case, I think home testing advocates will eventually win out.

Critics of California’s SB 35, a 2017 law that created a streamlined, state-level building approval process for housing developments, are begrudgingly starting to see the benefits of the bill.

Earlier this month, the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA)—a San Francisco nonprofit—submitted an application to use the streamlined SB 35 process to build a 100 percent affordable, 130-unit apartment building.

If that application is approved, MEDA will be spared the onerous reviews required by the California Environmental Quality Act. It will also avoid to need to get approval from the San Francisco Planning Commission, which has the power to alter, shrink, and otherwise condition the approval of projects.

Instead, the San Francisco Planning Department would have to issue permits for the project within 60 days, which MEDA Development Director Karoleen Feng tells The San Francisco Chronicle will cut six months to a year off the approval process.

When SB 35 was first proposed, MEDA opposed it. Last July Luis Grandos, the agency’s executive director, co-wrote an op-ed claiming that SB 35 would spur too much market-rate housing, in turn acting as “a short-term catalyst for displacement of low-income communities of color.”

Though it is now using SB 35 to build more below market-rate housing—which MEDA thinks is the key tool to limit ever-higher housing costs—the agency remains opposed to SB 35, with Feng telling the Chronicle that it’s “a one-size-fits-all policy of streamlining.” At the risk of sounding cynical, this criticism boils down to MEDA, which can obviously see the benefits of streamlining when it comes to its own projects, wanting to retain the power to delay and suspend projects it doesn’t like.

For instance, MEDA has a been a major opponent of Mission District business owner Robert Tillman’s plan to turn a laundromat into a mostly market-rate 75-unit housing development.

Feng herself called this development “unjust,” “unconscionable,” and “unfair” while demanding that Tillman make his property into 100 percent affordable housing. Members of the activist group Calle 24, despite their professed support for affordable housing, have argued that even if Tillman’s project were 100 percent affordable, it would still be unacceptably large and bulky.

Calle 24 and Mission anti-development activists have, through the many appeals and reviews afforded them by the San Francisco permitting process, forced Tillman to spend four years and $1 million trying to get approval for his development.

Elsewhere in the city, residents have demanded that affordable housing projects be modified to accommodate “neighborhood character.”

In January, the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council wrote a letter demanding that a 100 percent affordable housing project be shrunk by some two floors to preserve “neighborhood character.” (The project would replace a reportedly crime-ridden McDonald’s.) San Francisco’s Discretionary Review process, which SB 35 allows developers to skip, would allow the council to demand just that through a laborious process of Planning Commission hearings and departmental reviews that can add months (and sometimes years) to a project’s completion time.

San Francisco needs more housing to accommodate new residents as well as the natives who wish to stay there. From 2005 to 2015, the city added three jobs for each new unit of housing. Since 2010, rents have risen 43 percent; they are now the highest of any major U.S. city. A huge impediment for building more housing is a restrictive permitting process that bogs down projects in endless quests for building approval. This is true of both below-market and market-rate housing.

SB 35 is by no means a perfect solution to this problem. In September of last year, I argued against it, saying that the bill’s requirement that projects pay a prevailing (union) wage would increase costs considerably, undermining the bill’s goal of cutting down on housing costs. While that’s still a valid critique, I now think my opposition was misplaced, given how the bill in practice is forcing through previously hamstrung projects.

In March, a 260-unit, 50 percent below-market-rate development in Berkeley—one that had been in the works for five years—became the first to apply for SB 35’s streamlined review process. That was followed later in the month by a Cupertino developer hoping to convert a vacant mall into 2,400 units of housing, half of which would be rented out at below-market rates.

These are baby steps compared to the scale of California’s housing shortage. But they are steps nonetheless.

Aaron Booth, 36, is in jail in Galveston County, Texas, for felony drug possession. He would be free if he could afford the $20,000 bail. But he can’t, and so in jail he remains.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the law firm Arnold and Porter filed a class-action suit Monday on behalf of Booth and people like him. They argue that because Galveston County courts determine bail from a schedule and do nothing to determine whether defendants can afford it or whether defendants are flight risks or dangers to the community, a person’s pre-trial detention status is based entirely on income. According to the complaint, magistrates and deputies at these initial hearings will even threaten to raise a defendant’s bail if they upset the magistrate. (We’ve seen claims like this before in Texas.)

This is not how bail is supposed to work. As a result, people who are poor—like Booth—end up stuck in jail. According to the lawsuit, they can end up waiting there for more than a week before getting any meaningful hearing. And the ACLU says that the next hearing they’ll be offered, days later, is only for the purpose of soliciting guilty pleas. Judges won’t consider bail changes, and someone who pleads innocent can end up behind bars for another week before a status conference.

The consequences are obvious. From the lawsuit: “Rather than face an extended delay before a bail hearing, many people charged with low-level crimes plead guilty rather than spending weeks sitting in jail in order to assert their innocence.”

It takes only a few days for imprisonment to affect people’s livelihoods. People can lose their jobs and be unable to pay various debts. Entire families can suffer. As a result, they plead guilty and often get harsher penalties than they would had they been free to fight. They have much less negotiating leverage for plea agreements when they’re stuck behind bars.

The lawsuit notes the dramatic difference in outcomes between those who are stuck in pretrial detention versus those who are freed:

An audit by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission showed that, in Galveston County, misdemeanor arrestees who can afford to pay bail and fight their cases from the outside are six times likelier to have their charges fully dismissed. Felony cases show similar patterns in case outcomes: for example, a felony arrestee who cannot afford to pay bail is four times likelier to be sentenced to more than a year in prison, and is half as likely to be sentenced to probation or deferred adjudication.

The suit argues that the lack of any meaningful hearings about bail amounts or pretrial detention constitutes a violation of defendants’ due process and right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Defendants are not provided access to lawyers until after their bail has already been set, which the ACLU argues is a violation of the Sixth Amendment.

Booth’s lawyers are requesting an injunction to require the county to change its practices so that defendants can be represented at initial bail hearings, where they should be able to make a case that they aren’t a flight risk or a danger to the community and that they shouldn’t have to front such large amounts of money if they cannot pay.

The suit is part of a push in recent years to force changes—either via lawsuits or through legislative action—to reform the way bail operates. The federal courts have ordered Harris County, also in Texas, to stop doing exactly what Galveston County is doing here: relying on bail schedules rather than risk assessments and pretrial monitoring. The ACLU has filed a similar suit in Dallas County too.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Galveston County officials are not entirely opposed to reforming the system, and they’ve committed $2 million to make changes. But the ACLU apparently would like to see more urgency. The county’s jail population has been increasing, in large part because of people’ inability to pay for bail. Pretrial detainees now comprise 71 percent of the county jail’s population.

Read the complaint here.

Today at 2 p.m. ET, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees on the social media platform’s use and protection of user data (watch live at C-SPAN). Tomorrow, he’ll sit down with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

What will he be asked and how will he answer? Republicans and Democrats are lining up to use Zuckerberg as a social-media punching bag. Liberal Sen. Dick Blumenthal (D–Conn.), whose bluster in the past has included lying about serving in Vietnam, has said, “it’s really kind of a high noon” for Zuckerberg and warned the young billionaire to come prepared with a better answer than, “‘I made a mistake.’ He didn’t just spill milk on the breakfast table. There is a more fundamental issue related to Facebook’s business model—they sell your information without your consent. That’s what has to change.”

From the right, Zuckerberg can expect to be grilled over questions about tamping down conservative news and opinion at Facebook. Recall it was only two years ago that Zuck met with prominent media conservatives to assure them that not only was Facebook’s trending news system not biased against right-wingers but that Donald Trump and Fox News were big fish in the platform’s pond. Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), who was the first Republican presidential candidate to contract with Cambridge Analytica, the data-scraping service at the center of the current controversy, has said he’s “very concerned” about political bias at Facebook. Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) has opined that, “our promised digital utopia turned out not to be all the land of milk and honey.”

The political dynamic at today’s hearing should actually be excrutiatingly fun to watch. Historically, Congress has made a fool of itself when weighing in on technology and new media (“a series of tubes,” “Buffcoat and Beaver,” etc.). But its ignorance also comes with a heavy dose of power. Zuckerberg is a liberal and presumed to share more with the very Democrats who will be grilling him over how his company cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election (which it didn’t, but dreams die hard). Russian trolls, fake news, fake ads—that’s what Dems will be talking about.

Republicans will be threading a different needle. To satisfy conservatives, they need to attack Zuckerberg as a millennial snowflake who is running the greatest con around. In the representative words of National Review‘s Rich Lowry (channeling a very old man), Zuck “pretends to have stumbled out of the lyrics of John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine.’ To listen to him, Facebook is all about connectivity and openness—he just happens to have made roughly $63 billion as the T-shirt-wearing champion of ‘the global community,’ whatever that means.” Yet if Republicans suggest that Facebook somehow “let” or helped Trump win in an underhanded way, they will be accused of undermining their own party’s fearless leader. Cruz, one of the most camera-hogging, tendentious interrogators to hit the Senate in decades, is in a particularly tight squeeze, since he was the original client of Cambridge Analytica and yet failed to make much good use of whatever data it stole or bought (depending on who’s talking) from Facebook.

Expect both Dems and Reps to puff up their chests and demand restitution in the form of favors of going forward. That will include threats to sic the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after Facebook. There’s a 2011 consent decree in which Facebook admitted it deceived users into thinking some information was private when in fact it was being sold to app makers and other third parties. Expect Dems to push for more protocols on who is allowed to advertise and under what circumstances, especially when it comes to political speech. Republicans will push more on the idea that their views are grossly and systematically under-represented on the site and they therefore want more visibility on the site.

For Zuckerberg, it will be easy to give both sides what they want. What he wants is not fully clear, but he has already said he’s open for federal regulation of social media: “The question is more ‘What is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘Yes or no, should we be regulated?'” In North America, the platform’s most-lucrative market, Facebook has recently lost daily, active users for the first time in its history—and that was before the latest flap.

If history is any indication, what Zuckerberg will push for is a form of regulation—either explicit or implicit—that will allow Facebook to maintain its pole position in the social-media landscape. As the socialist historian Gabriel Kolko discovered, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries this took the form of railroad owners actually calling for regulation to bolster falling profits and declining market share. “In their desire to establish stability and control over rates and competition,” wrote Kolko, “the railroads often resorted to voluntary, cooperative efforts…. When these efforts failed, as they inevitably did, the railroad men turned to political solutions to [stabilize] their increasingly chaotic industry. They advocated measures designed to bring under control those railroads within their own ranks that refused to conform to voluntary compacts…. [F]rom the beginning of the 20th century until at least the initiation of World War I, the railroad industry resorted primarily to political alternatives and gave up the abortive efforts to put its own house in order by relying on voluntary cooperation.” The regulations took the form of uniform, guaranteed rates, routes assigned and enforced by the government, and more that ended up costing customers more than they paid during the dread era of laissez-faire.

Of course, the barriers to entry in industries such as railroads are infinitely higher than in social media (the massively popular messaging and VOIP service WhatsApp was started in 2009 by a handful of people and was sold to Facebook in 2014 for almost $20 billion). In written testimony for Wednesday’s hearing in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Zuckerberg runs through actions Facebook has already taken to address the Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference issues. “It’s not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure those connections are positive. It’s not enough to just give people a voice, we have to make sure people aren’t using it to hurt people or spread misinformation,” he writes. “It’s not enough to give people control of their information, we have to make sure developers they’ve given it to are protecting it too.” Actions that have already been implemented include automatically disabling unused apps’ access to user data, increased opt-ins from friends contacted by a user’s apps that request access to personal information, higher levels of identity verification for users and advertisers, and “cooperating with the U.S. and foreign governments on election integrity.”

Given his earlier statements about welcoming regulation and bottom-line concerns about Facebook’s growth, look for Zuckerberg to sign on to broad recommendations about how safeguarding people’s privacy is absolutely essential to any and all new and existing social-media platforms. Exactly what those rules might look like, who will ultimately enforce them (governments, civil courts, or businesses), and whether they will work in any way other than to degrade the ability of new competitors to flourish and grow is anybody’s guess. What isn’t in question is that in the sped-up life cycle of internet businesses, Facebook is entering its middle age despite only being 14 years old. Its revenue growth is enviable by virtually any measure but it is flattening out, too, which is surely sending chills down the spine of managers who have pushed unsuccessful strategies such as Facebook Live, a “pivot to video,” and the promotion and sponsorship of original content in recent years.

For much of the past three years, the conversation about the future of the internet has centered on issues such as “Net Neutrality” and reining in internet-service providers (ISPs) who were assumed to be figuring out ways to squeeze more money out of customers and content providers in an era of cord-cutting and declining ratings for cable TV. But a bigger and more meaningful concern actually involves platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google (including YouTube) that have massive audiences and opaque-at-best systems for internal governance. Whatever Wild West days the World Wide Web once enjoyed are mostly over and today’s internet more closely resembles a suburban shopping mall rather than a rough-and-tumble part of town. (Kudos to the folks at Blockstack, Ethereum, and elsewhere that are working to decentralize the internet.) Facebook’s “walled garden” has succeeded in many ways to make online space safe and accessible for over 2 billion users, a sort of Club Penguin for adults. The challenge in front of all of us is to make sure that in saving Facebook’s business model and vision, Mark Zuckerberg and Congress don’t put the screws to an online world that has barely been mapped.

For individuals seeking work in many low-income professions, state licensing laws serve as a barrier to entry by requiring time-consuming and expensive classes before a job can be had.

Even after obtaining one of those important government-issued permission slips, new research suggests, workers in many licensed professions continue to suffer from the economic burdens imposed by occupational licensing laws.

“Licensing may limit entry into a profession and reduce the potential earnings of those attempting to enter that profession,” say researchers from St. Francis University in Pennsylvania, Campbell School of Business in North Carolina, and Central Michigan University. Their findings are contained in a study released Tuesday by the Archbridge Institute, a nonprofit that works to promote economic mobility for workers. “In addition to raising prices for consumers, occupational licensing may be creating barriers to opportunity that prevent the least fortunate Americans from achieving the American dream of prosperity.”

Economic mobility is closely tied to physical mobility. But licensed workers often end up locked into place by licensing laws that create not only a barrier to entry, but a barrier to exiting certain states in favor of looking for work somewhere else. A 2017 study by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that workers whose jobs require a state-issued license lose out on between $178 million and $711 million they could have earned by moving to a different state. The new report from the Archbridge Institute is an attempt to go a step beyond that calculation and determine how that lost income affects economic inequality.

Workers in low- and moderate-income professions in states with high levels of licensure—like Louisiana, where Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, has called for a reduction in licensing requirements—demonstrate less upward mobility than workers in states that have lower licensing burdens, like Oklahoma. Louisiana licenses 59 out of 60 low-income professions included in the study, while Oklahoma licenses only 15 of those same professions. The growth of licensing corresponds with a decrease in economic inequality by between 4 percent and 15 percent depending on the state, the study suggests.

State policymakers who are serious about tackling the issue of income inequality need to consider the role that licensing plays in perpetuating that problem. It does not make sense to prevent someone from earning a living as, say, a barber merely because they did not finish high school and therefore do not meet an arbitrary requirement for a state license. And it makes even less sense for states to require expensive and time-consuming re-licensure processes when workers move from somewhere else.

A possible solution to the second problem is the establishment of interstate compacts that recognize out-of-state licenses and allow reciprocity across state lines. That’s something the Federal Trade Commission has been encouraging state lawmakers to consider.

Fixing the first problem requires a complete reevaluation of why licensing laws exist in the first place. They are meant to protect the public, but too often become tools for incumbent license-holders to wield against would-be competitors. But it’s now become clear that fencing out competition does significant damage to more than just the specific workers who are unable to obtain a license—such restrictions also drive an economic wedge between licensed workers and unlicensed ones. The former group benefits when opportunities are removed opportunity from the latter. Economic inequality increases as a result.

This makes perfect sense. If state policy is stopping some individuals from obtaining employment, those individuals are naturally going to fall behind their gainfully employed peers, particularly if the same state policy is boosting the earnings of those who are able to work in a protected profession. Loosening licensing laws, therefore, must be a fundamental part of tackling economic inequality.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need our sympathy when he appears before Congress this week for his ritual humiliation at the hands of the Washington establishment. But the anti-Facebook proposals already being advanced should be cause for concern.

Zuckerberg’s appearance—his first on Capitol Hill—was prompted by news reports that a third-party Facebook app masquerading as a personality quiz extracted data that was sold to Cambridge Analytica, which in turn provided consulting services to Republicans. Since then, a Delete Facebook campaign has mushroomed, coupled with calls for Zuckerberg’s ouster, despite the inconvenient fact that he owns over half of his company’s voting shares.

Complicating matters for Zuckerberg is that both major parties have joined together for a thoroughly bipartisan denunciation of his company’s alleged misdeeds, writes Declan McCullagh.

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