Tag: hit&run

A lot of ink (and pixels) was spilled over the fact that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost the support of her own state party for her re-election. Members of the California Democrats instead threw their endorsement to one of her many challengers, state Senate leader Kevin de Leon.

Well the results of yesterday’s primaries aren’t official, but unless some sort of miracle happens, Feinstein absolutely wiped the floor with de Leon. With more than 97 percent of the vote counted, Feinstein is ahead of de Leon, 43.9 percent to 11.9 percent.

At least de Leon hit double-digits. Most other Democratic challengers didn’t even hit 1 percent. If you added up the votes of every Democratic challenger to Feinstein and combined them, they didn’t even get half as many votes as she did.

The good news for de Leon (and the bad news for Californians who want actual election choices) is that he’ll probably get a second chance to unseat Feinstein in November. De Leon is currently ahead of the top Republican challenger, James P. Bradley, who has 8.8 percent of the vote. Thanks to California’s terrible “top two” primary, Californians will have the “choice” of two Democrats on the November ballot. The same thing happened in 2016, allowing Kamala Harris to breeze her way into the Senate on the strength of institutional support and name recognition. Many Californians who cast their ballots didn’t even bother with the Senate election because of the lack of actual choices. Don’t be surprised if that happens again this November.

I joked yesterday that yesterday’s vote was the “National Media Finally Learn How California’s Elections Work” primary. The Golden State’s elections typically do not get huge amounts of national attention, given how predictable our voting habits are (both in the blue coastal enclaves and the red inland communities). But the midterms this year are all about whether there’s a real “blue wave” that could change which party controls Congress. The possibility that some seats in California could change party hands led to increased coverage of California politics, and curiosity about whether the state’s increasingly Democratic cast meant that Feinstein (a nannyish big-government liberal who consistently supports the national security state and has only recently finally come around on marijuana legalization) was no longer “left” enough for Californians. This sudden interest resulted in some “Is Feinstein going to lose her primary?” analysis from folks who didn’t quite seem to understand the way California’s system works. Once journalists grasped the system, the story became about whether the open primaries could lead to Democrats being “locked out” of the November vote in some important House races. That does not appear to be happening.

Feinstein’s easy win here is as a corrective to the narrative there’s some sort of insurgent, even-further-left-wing, socialist/progressive, Bernie Sanders–fueled takeover of the Democratic Party brewing. Such an insurgency obviously exists, but we’re not seeing indicators that it represents the party’s future. It’s more a growing sense among some people that the party doesn’t represent them.

Not that Republicans in California are faring any better. As of the end of May, more voters in California are registered as independents than as Republicans. But thanks to California’s run-off elections, the fall ballot won’t reflect the diversity of the voters’ political identities.

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman worries that the recent First Amendment ruling against Donald Trump’s blocking of critics on Twitter could ultimately result in legal restrictions on the ability of social media companies to exclude users or regulate their speech. “This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the First Amendment has ever been applied to a private platform,” Feldman writes in a New York Times op-ed piece. He warns that “applying the First Amendment to social media will make it harder or even impossible for the platforms to limit fake news, online harassment and hate speech—precisely the serious social ills that the world is calling on them to address.”

Feldman argues that “social media should not become a pure free-speech zone,” that “the speech-based online abuses of our age need to be addressed not by the government but by the platforms on which they occur,” that “the platforms’ free-speech rights impose moral obligations on them,” and that “the free market will ensure that the platforms do their best to comply.” I agree with pretty much all of that, but I don’t agree that the Twitter decision, properly understood, poses a threat to those principles.

U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald’s May 23 ruling against Trump was not, in fact, the first time a public official has been rebuked for violating the First Amendment by excluding people from a social media account because of the opinions they expressed. Last July, for instance, a federal judge in Virginia, James Cacheris, concluded that Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudon County Board of Supervisors, had violated a local gadfly’s First Amendment rights by banning him from her Facebook page after he posted a comment suggesting that members of the county school board had taken official actions that benefited their relatives. After that ruling, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan decided to settle a lawsuit by visitors to his Facebook page who complained that his office had deleted their comments and blocked them from posting because they had brought up a touchy subject by urging Hogan to criticize Trump’s ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

In all three cases, elected officials used their social media accounts to conduct government business and presented them as conduits for communicating with their constituents while inviting responses from the general public. By doing so, the plaintiffs argued, the officials had created designated public forums, which cannot constitutionally discriminate against people based on their views. The lawsuits accused government officials, not Twitter or Facebook, of violating the First Amendment, which does not constrain private parties and in fact gives them a right to decide which speech will be allowed on their platforms. A similar analysis would apply to a town meeting in a rented hall or a government website on servers owned by a private company.

Feldman nevertheless sees a threat of judicial control over speech regulation by social media companies. “It’s not only people specifically blocked by President Trump’s account who can’t reply to him on Twitter,” he notes. “It’s also anyone excluded from Twitter by the platform itself, including those barred from Twitter for engaging in harassment or hate speech. Such parties may now sue Twitter, demanding access to the platform so they can post comments on Mr. Trump’s account.”

Anyone can sue anyone over anything, but that does not mean they can survive a motion to dismiss, let alone win. Buchwald’s decision, like Cacheris’s, focused on the actions of a government official; it said nothing about the supposed First Amendment obligations of a social media company. Loosely speaking, Buchwald affirmed a First Amendment right to follow the president on Twitter. But it would be more precise to say she affirmed a First Amendment right not to be blocked from the president’s Twitter account (specifically, the “interactive space” associated with his tweets) by the president (or his underlings) because something you said offended him. Trump is appealing the decision but in the meantime seems to be complying with it by unblocking the plaintiffs.

“If President Trump was able to create a public forum on Twitter without Twitter’s agreement to such a legal state of affairs,” Feldman says, “then it becomes more plausible to think that Twitter itself is a public space, regardless of whether it intends to be one.” Only if you ignore the crucial distinction between government action and private action when applying a constitutional provision that is explicitly aimed at the former. So far there is no evidence that the federal courts are inclined to do that.

Residents of Santa Clara County, California, voted yesterday to recall Aaron Persky, the superior court judge widely criticized for sentencing Stanford student Brock Turner to just six months in prison.

Turner was convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman. Prosecutors had sought a six-year sentence, but Persky thought Turner probably wasn’t a danger to others and was concerned a lengthier prison stint would adversely impact him.

This outraged Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber—whose daughter is friends with Turner’s victim—and so Dauber launched a now-successful campaign to have Persky recalled from office. The point of the recall was to hold “white, privileged men accountable,” Dauber told The New York Times.

The prison component of Turner’s sentence was indeed lenient. But a simple fact has often been absent from this conversation: The six-month sentence wasn’t Persky’s idea, but rather the recommendation of the probation department. And even if Turner should have spent more time behind bars, he is still registered as a sex offender and likely will be for the rest of his life. He will have trouble finding a place to live, holding a job, and interacting with young people. Sex offenders are treated as pariahs and must obey onerous restrictions, even in cases where they pose almost no risk to others.

But even people who can’t muster any sympathy for Turner should still be concerned about what message Persky’s recall will send. I understand why members of the Stanford community were upset about the lenient treatment of Turner, and it’s easy to imagine white privilege had something to do with it. (The California Commission on Judicial Performance, it must be noted, found no “clear and convincing evidence of bias” in Persky’s decision-making.) But this recall is likely to encourage judges to be tougher in general lest angry voters come for them too. This was a blow to leniency for all criminal defendants.

Evidence already exists that judges impose harsher sentences around election time. According to a 2015 Brennan Center study, “The pressures of upcoming re-election campaigns affect judicial decision-making in criminal cases, making judges more likely to impose longer sentences, affirm death sentences, and even override sentences of life imprisonment to impose the death penalty.” When judges are subjected to normal political considerations, they unsurprisingly behave like politicians, for whom being tough on crime is usually a winning stance.

That’s one reason LaDoris Cordell, a retired California judge and self-described liberal feminist, vehemently opposed the recall effort, according to The Times:

Ms. Cordell wears her liberal stripes proudly, but she said she is worried the recall effort could influence judges who might otherwise show leniency in criminal sentencing, undermining a longtime goal to decrease the prison population. The impulse toward harsher sentencing, she said, is reminiscent of the measures that have fed large increases of prison populations, like California’s three-strikes law, which imposed an automatic life sentence for a third felony conviction.

Progressives who support criminal justice reform, the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing, an end to mass incarceration, and rehabilitation should pause before cheering the recall of Judge Persky. The window to punish Turner has shut. The next person to come before a California judge might be a far less privileged defendant, hoping for mercy and less likely to get it.

Were he alive today, William Pitt the Younger might say about national security what he once said about necessity: It is “the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

It is also the go-to argument for President Trump.

The president has used national security as an excuse to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. This has fooled exactly nobody. Not even Jim Mattis—who after all works for Trump and who, given his position as secretary of defense, should be especially sensitive to potential security threats—would buy it. Noting that the military consumes only 3 percent of U.S. steel and aluminum production, he disputed the Commerce Department’s view that national defense needs justified the tariffs. The Pentagon, he said, just didn’t need the help. A. Barton Hinkle explains further.

View this article.

There’s “no evidence that having sex with robots is healthy,” The Washington Post wants you to know. Similar headlines grace the pages of USA Today (“There’s no evidence having sex with robots is healthy, report says“), The Verge (“no evidence that sex robots provide health benefits“), CNBC (“Sex robots offer little evidence of any health benefits“), and many other outlets, sometimes with an added dose of alarmism (“Sex robots could empower pedophiles and sex offenders“) or millennialism (“There’s literally no research proving sex robots are good for society“).

These headlines are all true, more or less, but they omit an important fact: There’s also “literally no research” showing that sex robots unhealthy, that they don’t hold therapeutic promise, or that they will be bad for society. There’s just no evidence about sex robots period, because at present they don’t really exist.

The authors of a new article in BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health—the study behind all those headlines—admit as much when it comes to the lack of evidence. “We found no reports of primary data relating to health aspects of the use of sex robots,” write Chantal Cox-George, a doctor at London’s St. George’s Hospital, and Kings College Professor of Women’s Health Susan Bewley.

They are trickier when it comes to the current state of sexbots. The definition of sex robot that they offer doesn’t include artificial intelligence, or even robotics, as necessary components: “Sex robots are realistic mannequins with variable ages, appearances and textures, and customisable oral, vaginal, and anal openings.” But basically everything else in the paper implies that we are talking about not just mannequins but moving, talking, artificially intelligent creatures.

Cox-George and Bewley assert that there are currently four companies selling “adult sexbots,” but they don’t explain anything more about the products these companies make. If they had, readers would learn that the closest thing to sexbots at present are simply life-size dolls with very basic digital flourishes. (Think Siri inside a RealDoll, not the sentient android denizens of Westworld.)

But maybe it makes little difference: A lack of actual sexbots in the world hasn’t stopped decades of folks freaking out over the possibility of randy AI-enabled companions. The only difference these days is a persistent (and wrong) belief that they are already here or right around the corner.

The Post article quotes all sorts of sexbot alarmists (including the founder of a Campaign Against Sex Robots), as well as pop-media hype about the therapeutic potential of sexual and romantic relationships with robots. Cox-George and Bewley’s article affects an air of more serious scholarship, but it cites only the same sexbot speculation you can find shared on your Facebook feed or gracing Google News every few months.

Using Google and PubMed searches, Cox-George and Bewley relied on results from HuffPost, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the Daily Mail, The Independent, The New York Times, and other consumer-facing media, along with information from the Campaign Against Sex Robots and Foundation for Responsible Robotics websites. From these sources, the doctors absorbed the same old (highly unscientific and culture-war-tinged) controversies surrounding not just sex robots but also sex workers, prostitution, pornography, virtual reality, and sexual assault, then summarized these controversies briefly.

The article does not unveil any new scientific evidence about sex robots, does not synthesize previous evidence, does not even offer any compelling new speculation on the topic. The authors simply regurgitate pop-media coverage and controversies regarding sex dolls and sexbots and then suggest that more research is needed.

Until “robust, scientific, and ethically acceptable research trials” can be conducted, medical professionals should “reject the clinical use of sexbots,” they conclude. They also suggest that “doctors might be advised to avoid using sexbots themselves, given police interest, prosecutions, and the potential negative impact on public trust.”

But whatever doctors do with sexbots—on their own time or in clinical practice—public interest in them isn’t going anywhere. For a more positive view of their potential, check out this feature from Reason‘s 2015 “Hi, Robot!” issue.

Like any president, Donald Trump likes to brag about low, low unemployment rates. Who can blame him? Even his least-favorite paper—what Trump habitually calls “the failing New York Times“—says it literally “Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.” In May national unemployment stood at just 3.8 percent, the lowest figure in more than a decade.

That tight labor market makes it particularly unnerving to read this AP story from Sandusky, a resort town in the northeast corner of Ohio:

More than 100 workers at an Ohio gardening and landscaping company were arrested Tuesday when about 200 federal officers descended on the business and carried out one of the largest workplace immigration raids in recent years….

The 114 arrests occurred at two locations of Corso’s Flower & Garden Center, one in Sandusky, a resort city on Lake Erie, and another in nearby Castalia. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it expected criminal charges including identity theft and tax evasion.

The Sandusky raid wasn’t a one-off. It’s part of an explicit strategy to crack down on businesses suspected of hiring workers with phony documents. Workplace raids are not distinctively Trumpian, of course; they were conducted under both Barack Obama and George W. Bush. What’s different is the rapid increase in the number of business and document audits taking place. More audits mean more raids. More raids mean more prisoners, more family separations, and so on.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean less immigrants. That’s because migrants, especially those willing to operate outside the law, are more motivated by economic opportunity than by fear of punishment. Except in highly authoritarian countries—which are usually trying to keep people from leaving, not from coming in—it has proven nearly impossible to tightly control borders. If we have a good economy, people will want to move here by any means necessary. (That’s the point of the magnet image above. Taken from an early-20th-century issue of Judge, it laments that immigrants are “the only bad feature of our prosperity.”)

The AP continues:

Immigration officials have sharply increased audits of companies to verify their employees are authorized to work in the country. There were 2,282 employer audits opened between Oct. 1 and May 4, nearly a 60 percent jump from the 1,360 audits opened between October 2016 and September 2017. Many of those reviews were launched after audits began at 100 7-Eleven franchises in 17 states in January.

The audit that preceded the Sandusky raid was based on squeezing a vendor who sells fake documents. Here, according to the AP, is what the feds found:

Of the 313 employees whose records were examined, 123 were found suspicious and targeted for arrest and criminal charges of identity theft and, in nearly all cases, tax evasion. [Steve Francis, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit in Detroit] said the identity theft targeted U.S. citizens who had no idea their information was being used at the Ohio business.

Opponents of illegal immigration will seize on ubiquitous charges of identity theft and tax evasion as signs that illegal immigrants are criminals and thus should be kicked out of the country for breaking the law. And indeed, they are breaking the law.

But there’s a better way to resolve this situation, especially in an economy that is everywhere starved for workers, particularly when it comes to manual labor. If more people were allowed to come here legally, that would shred the whole reason for identity theft and cut down on tax evasion too. (It’s noting, incidentally, that even illegal immigrants pay FICA taxes and sales taxes.)

American employers have already used up this year’s quotas for H-1B and H-2B visas (for skilled and unskilled workers in short supply). Our birth rate is falling and our average age is rising. Our unemployment is at record lows, there are more job openings than job seekers, and small businesses say finding workers is a bigger concern to them than taxes and regulations. And the response is to round up 114 people at work?

That’s not going to make America great again. It’s not even going to stop immigrants desperate for work from coming here. There’s a simpler, pragmatic solution that allows the economy to grow, reduces identity theft, and tosses more coins into public coffers: Allow more people to legally enter and work in the United States. This is the immigration issue we need to be debating, not whether all immigrants are animals or just the members of MS-13 (many of whom are actually American citizens).

Related: The 5 Best Arguments Against Immigration—and Why They’re Wrong!

For text and links, go here.

The U.S. military killed 499 civilians and injured another 169 in 2017, according to a new report from the Defense Department. The government is still investigating 450 other potential civilian casualties from 2017, so the official total may eventually move higher. Since 2014, the U.S. and its allies estimate that they’ve killed 896 civilians while fighting ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Those may be severe undercounts.

The British nonprofit Airwars estimates that the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition was responsible for anywhere between 3,923 and 6,102 civilian deaths last year, and a minimum of 6,259 since 2014. It does not have a U.S.-specific total, but given that the United States is responsible for a majority of coalition airstrikes it is reasonable to assume that a good portion of those 6,000+ deaths are on America’s hands.

The Defense Department acknowledges that other groups put the number of casualties far higher than it does, chalking up the disparity to differing methodologies.

According to the Pentagon’s new report, U.S. military gets its tally on civilian casaulties by comparing outside reports from non-governmental organizations, local media, and social media with its own information on the location and activity of its forces, as well as any intelligence it has on the site of alleged civilian casualties.

Airwars depends on a mix of Arabic-language media and social media sites, along with reports from local casualty monitors, NGOs, international agencies, and international media. It is obviously unable to draw on U.S. intelligence.

The big problem, according to Daphne Eviatar of Amnesty International, is that American government, whatever its informational advantages, fails to follow up on most reports of civilian casualties.

“The Defense Department has deemed that the vast majority of claims of civilian casualties are not credible without ever investigating them. Its numbers therefore likely severely undercount the actual civilian death toll,” Eviatar said in a statement. She added that “the investigations that do occur by the Defense Department also do not appear to involve interviews with witnesses nor survivors, nor visits to the locations of the strikes.”

Whatever the ultimate death toll may be, it is unsettling that so many innocent people are being killed by U.S. forces, especially in wars that are not authorized by Congress and have an increasingly tenuous connection to American security.

Good results Tuesday for both GOP and Democrats. Yesterday marked the most crowded primary day of the 2018 election, with eight states voting on candidates for Congress, governorships, and more. Elections took place in Alabama, California, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota.

The bottom line, according to The Hill: “In critical races across the country, Democrats had a good night. But so too did Republicans, who avoided a disaster that could have cost them several seats in the House.”

Making some of the most headlines was a judge recall vote in Santa Clara County, where Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky had angered Californians (and internet observers across the country) with the light sentence he handed to student and convicted rapist Brock Turner. And as of now, it looks like Pensky is out—making him the first California judge to be recalled since 1932. “With 43 percent of precincts reporting, 59 percent of the county’s voters favored recalling Persky while 41 percent opposed the recall,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

California races commanded a disproportionate amount of media coverage, in part due to Democrats’ fears that the state’s top-two-take-all primary system could shut the party’s candidates out of some key races entirely. But in the end, “Democrats appear to have secured at least a second-place finish in every race they targeted,” according to The Hill:

With plenty of votes left to count, Democrats felt confident about their chances of claiming a spot in the November runoff in districts held by Reps. Ed Royce (R) and Darrell Issa (R), who are retiring, and Reps. Mimi Walters (R) and Dana Rohrabacher (R), who are seeking another term.

Other notable California results:

• Longtime Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein will once again face California voters in November, after ousting challengers yesterday. If she wins, it would be Feinstein’s fifth term in Congress.
• Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Trump-backed Republican businessman John Cox secured spots to run against each other for the chance to be state’s next governor.

One of the biggest themes to emerge yesterday—and in the 2018 primaries so far—was the triumph of liberal women candidates over their Democratic male counterparts (with some of this dynamic on the GOP side, too). “So far this cycle, women have won 47 of 68 incumbent-less Democratic primary matchups with male candidates” for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and gubernatorial seats, according to Nathaniel Rakich of Inside Elections and FiveThirtyEight.

In gubernatorial races:

• U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham got the Democratic nod in New Mexico, where she’ll face off in November against GOP Rep. Steve Pearce.
• Rep. Kristi Noem won the Republican nomination for governor in South Dakota, beating out state Attorney General Marty Jackley.
• Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who stepped in last year when Robert Bentley resigned (becoming the state’s first female governor), beat out Tommy Battle, state Sen. Bill Hightower, and evangelical preacher Scott Dawson to become the GOP gubernatorial candidate. “In deep-red Alabama, the Republican [gubernatorial] primary will almost certainly determine the general election winner,” notes The New York Times.

In congressional races:

• New Mexico Democrat Deb Haaland got her party’s nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives, making her the first Native American woman candidate for Congress. She’ll face Republican Janice Arnold-Jones in November.
• Abby Finkenauer, a 28-year-old Iowa state senator, won the Democratic nod for the 1st District congressional seat (beating out challenger Thomas Heckroth with 47 percent of the vote). She’ll face Republican Rep. Rod Blum this fall.
• “The National Republican Congressional Committee backed Young Kim—an immigrant and the first ever Korean-American Republican woman elected to serve in the California State Assembly—who won the GOP primary for Rep. Ed Royce’s seat,” notes Axios.

It also looks like Iowa GOP Rep. Greg Gianforte, best known for body-slamming a journalist, will face a female challenger, former state lawmaker Kathleen Williams.

A few more highlights and lowlights from the June 6 primaries:

Alabama: “If there was any doubt that the Republican Party was now the party of Donald Trump, Tuesday’s results in a deep-red Alabama congressional race should put it to rest,” writes Deirdre Shesgreen in USA Today. “Incumbent Republican Rep. Martha Roby came under fierce fire in her GOP primary for withdrawing her endorsement of Trump in the 2016 presidential race,” and “those attacks took their toll,” with Roby “forced into a runoff on Tuesday after failing to win the GOP nod outright” against Bobby Bright, whose campaign ads accused her of turning “her back on President Trump when he needed her the most.”

Also, this:

Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin, who was found to have “personally pocketed more than $750,000 worth of funds allocated to feed inmates in the county jail he oversees,” lost his re-election bid in the GOP primary tonight in Alabama. https://t.co/otN6O26heY

— Taniel (@Taniel) June 6, 2018

Missouri

Pro-marijuana Democrat wins special election for a state senate seat in NW Missouri that has been held by Republicans since 2004. https://t.co/zzt7yoC5Qk

— Jim Higdon (@jimhigdon) June 6, 2018

Montana: State Auditor Matthew Rosendale got the GOP nod to run for a U.S. Senate seat against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester.

FREE MARKETS

Medicare going broke sooner than expected.

BREAKING: Government: Medicare will become insolvent in 2026, three years earlier than expected, Social Security to follow in 2034.

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 5, 2018

According to a new report from the Medicare and Social Security trustees, Medicare’s expected insolvency date is actually 2026, not 2029 as previously estimated. The projected Social Security insolvency date is still 2034.

QUICK HITS

• McDonalds plans to introduce self-order kiosks at every location by 2020.
• Bill Clinton said his #MeToo interview earlier this week “wasn’t my finest hour.“
• Senators will have to work through August like the rest of us this year.
• A contractor was arrested at the White House yesterday on attempted murder charges.
• Los Angeles County left 118,000 registered voters off its lists.

Five years ago The Guardian published the first of what would be a bombshell series of stories about how the United States (and several other Western countries) were engaged in the mass surveillance of their own citizens, collecting millions upon millions of telephone and internet records.

It wasn’t the first time the feds’ saw some of their secret tech surveillance exposed—you may recall the revelation of AT&T’s secret room 641A, for example—but now Americans got provided evidence of how far-reaching this surveillance was. It became very clear that the targets included all of us.

The name of the source behind the story was initially kept secret, but he soon revealed himself to be a government contractor named Edward Snowden.

Since then, Snowden has become a household name—even as he remains stuck in Russia, wanted on espionage charges in the United States. The Guardian and The Washington Post won Pullitzer prizes in 2014 for their reporting based on the documents Snowden provided.

Five years later, it’s worth looking at the legacy of Snowden’s revelations.

The Snooping Hasn’t Really Stopped—But There Have Been Changes: Among the revelations that emerged from Snowden’s leaks was how much of the surveillance was based on secret interpretations of federal laws. Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act allowed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court to grant the feds approval to secretly collect information from third parties during terrorism investigations. The Department of Justice turned out to have secretly interpreted this section of the law as an authorization to collect the metadata records of millions upon millions of Americans.

This interpretation was so far afield of the law’s intent that Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who crafted the PATRIOT Act, publicly denounced it. And released reports from the FISA Court indicated it sometimes was not fully aware of how extensive the federal data collection reached. Other courts subsequently ruled that this mass data collection was not authorized.

In 2015, Section 215 of the Patriot Act was set to sunset, and a pack of legislators—most famously Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—moved to block it from being renewed. They succeeded, and it was replaced by the USA Freedom Act.

The USA Freedom Act did not, unfortunately, eliminate mass metadata collection. But it did set up actual guidelines that required government investigators to use specific search terms when attempting to look at metadata in records collected by phone companies. The new law also called for annual reports that give Americans a sense of how much secret surveillance is happening. The reports are vague and incomplete, but they’re more than we were getting previously.

Americans Learned What Metadata Is and Why It Mattered: When Snowden’s leaks first started, President Barack Obama and many lawmakers insisted that “Nobody is reading your email.” This became a mantra among those trying to downplay Snowden’s revelations.

It was a deliberate attempt to distract from the reality that we were all leaving electronic fingerprints everywhere we went and every time we communicated with each other. The government was collecting all our metadata—information about where, when, and to whom we were communicating. They were collecting everything but the conversations themselves.

Back in the days of Ma Bell, we thought of “metadata” as simply information about who we were calling and for how long we were talking. These days we all keep huge chunks of information about our lives on our computers, tablets, and smartphones. Experiments have demonstrated that, based on just your metadata, observers can reconstruct a good part of your life and your relationships with others.

This realization about how much privacy we’re losing via our metadata has played out as we worry about government track our social media use—and as we become more aware of the ways that police (and not just federal police) are trying to keep track of our behavior through such tools as license plate readers and facial recognition.

Efforts to Push Forward with Increased Tech Surveillance Get Pushback: Many citizens and even lawmakers aren’t accepting the idea that every form of surveillance that the government demands is necessary. Some states have passed laws requiring police to get warrants in order to track cellphone location data. The question of whether this tracking violated the Fourth Amendment is now under review by the Supreme Court.

Senators have warned the Department of Homeland Security about using facial recognition software to scan Americans boarding international flights. In California, lawmakers are currently considering legislation requiring police to get permission from their local government before implementing new surveillance technologies.

But other officials keep pushing and pushing to implement more surveillance tech, even as the public resists. Immigration enforcers want access to the data the feds have collected. Officials want to use facial recognition systems when monitoring protests via drones, and to combine such systems with police body cameras. Police in Miami Beach are willing to cause massive traffic jams in order to scan everybody’s license plates while searching people with warrants. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to use facial recognition tools on cashless toll roads to identify drivers.

There are stories every day about officials wanting to use technology for surveillance. While some of the news coverage may fall on deaf ears, Snowden’s information has been valuable to help people grasp that whenever the government starts spying, the surveillance will probably be broader and deeper than they actually tell us.

New Encryption Fights Begin: Back in the 1990s, the feds fretted about encryption on personal computers. Their efforts back then to limit our access to encryptionfailed.

Fears of terrorism having given new life to that old fight against encryption. Officials want access to locked phones or other secured devices belonging to people who have allegedly committed crimes, but encryption makes it harder for law enforcement to get in.

For many officials, the public push has been to try to force tech companies to compromise data security by creating so-called “backdoors” that bypass tech encryption or to otherwise provide access on demand. In the wake of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, the FBI had a court fight with Apple over its efforts to force the company to give it access to an iPhone in one terrorist’s possession. While Apple resisted, the FBI managed to get access with the assistance of a third party. It turned out later that the FBI was deliberately looking for a fight to try to establish a precedent.

Privacy and technology experts have warned us over and over that compromising encryption means rendering all of us vulnerable to breaches from anybody who gets their hands on these encryption keys or figures out how to mimic these access mechanisms. Weakening encryption would make everyone susceptible not just to government snoops—ours or those working for malicious foreign governments—but to hackers with identity theft or other crimes in mind.

Many officials demanding an encryption bypass simply refuse to entertain the possibility that this would expose citizens to greater threats. Nor are they understand the ways Snowden’s disclosures have made Americans more skeptical about giving them access in the first place.

But tech companies keep pushing for stronger mechanisms to keep users’ data secure, regardless of the wishes of government officials. Snowden’s own email provider, Lavabit, shut down in 2013 rather than comply with the government’s demands for the encryption key that would let it access Snowden’s communications. Founder Ladar Levison resurrected the company in 2017 with end-to-end encryption that makes it much harder for the government to force its way in.

The Trumpification of the Surveillance Fight: After Donald Trump became president, the surveillance fight took a strange turn. The FBI had gotten the FISA Court’s authorization to snoop on Trump campaign aides in order to probe connections with foreign countries—Russia in particular. As the special investigation plays out, Trump and his supporters have decried the use of these secret surveillance tools against people close to him.

This could have been an opportunity to discuss how the federal government engages in secret snooping against the citizenry in general, how this could be corrupted for political purposes, and why that would be a good reason to limit the feds’ surveillance powers.

But that conversation did not happen. Indeed, some of the people crying the loudest that the “deep state” is coming after Trump also believe that Snowden committed treason by exposing federal surveillance. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a conservative lawmaker who frequently insists the FBI’s investigation of the president is politically motivated, is a huge fan of government surveillance on you. He just doesn’t like it when Trump’s the target.

This preference for simply protecting Trump rather than having an actual surveillance debate became clear when Section 702 of the FISA Amendments came up for renewal last year. Section 702 is another law that’s been commandeered for domestic surveillance even though its stated purpose is to fight foreign terrorism and espionage. During the debate over renewing it, civil rights activists and privacy-minded lawmakers tried to force reforms. But despite all the yelling about spying on Trump that was taking place at the exact same time, most Republican lawmakers (Nunes included) voted not only to renew Section 702 but to expand its ability to target Americans.

Utlimately, Snowden’s biggest accomplishments were to bringing the surveillance debate to the forefront and to encourage tech companies to ramp up their encryption and other security efforts. In the July Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains how you can encrypt your own communications. The fact that strong encryption tools are becoming more available to average internet users is one thing we can all thank Snowden for.

Kamala Harris, a Democratic senator from California, says Jack Phillips should have been forced to bake gay wedding cakes because “our constitution requires equal protection under the law.” Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, says this week’s Supreme Court ruling in Phillips’ favor is “a major victory for religious liberty,” upholding the Colorado baker’s “constitutional right to live according to his faith.”

Although Harris and Cruz are both lawyers, Jacob Sullum says, they are both wrong. Harris conflates discrimination by individuals with discrimination by the government, while Cruz overlooks the Supreme Court’s approval of laws based on that false equivalence.

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