Tag: in-the-news

Kicking off a packed episode, the Cyberlaw Podcast calls on Megan Stifel to cover the first Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) Report. The CSRB does exactly what those of us who supported the idea hoped it would do – provide an authoritative view of how the Log4J incident unfolded along with some practical advice for cybersecurity executives and government officials.

Jamil Jaffer tees up the second blockbuster report of the week, a Council on Foreign Relations study called “Confronting Reality in Cyberspace Foreign Policy for a Fragmented Internet.” I think the study’s best contribution is its demolition of the industry-led claim that we must have a single global internet. That has not been a realistic prospect for a decade, and pursuing that vision has kept the U.S. from fully defending its own interests in cyberspace, so CFR’s realism is welcome. Less welcome is its utterly wrong claim that the U.S. can resolve its transatlantic dispute with Europe by adopting a European-style privacy law. Europe has no real remaining beef with us on privacy regulation of industry (we surrendered); now the fight is over Europe’s demand that we rewrite our intelligence and counterterrorism laws, a demand that new privacy legislation won’t satisfy. Jamil Jaffer and I debate both propositions.

Megan discloses the top cybersecurity provisions added to the House defense authorization bill – notably the five year term for the head of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and a cybersecurity regulatory regime for systemically critical industry. The Senate hasn’t weighed in yet, but both provisions now look more likely than not to become law.

Regulatory cybersecurity measures are the flavor of the month in Washington. The latest evidence: The Biden White House is developing a cybersecurity strategy that is expected to encourage more regulation. Jamil reports on the development but is clearly hoping that my prediction of more regulation does not come true.

Speaking of cybersecurity regulation, Megan kicks off a discussion of Department of Homeland Security’s CISA weighing in to encourage new regulation from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to incentivize a shoring up of the Border Gateway Protocol’s security. Jamil thinks the FCC would do better looking for incentives than punishments.

Tatyana Bolton and I try to unpack a recent smart contract hack and the confused debate about whether “Code is Law” in web3. Answer: it is not, and never was, but that does not turn the hacking of a smart contract into a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Megan covers North Korea’s tactic for earning dollars while trying to infiltrate U.S. crypto firms – getting remote work employment at the firms as coders. I wonder why LinkedIn is not doing more to stop scammers like this, given the company’s rich trove of data about job applicants using the site.

Not to be outdone, other ransomware gangs are now adding to the threat of doxing their victims by making it easier to search their stolen data. Jamil and I debate the best way to counter the tactic.

Tatyana reports on Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-Va) effort to strongarm the intelligence community into supporting Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) antitrust law aimed at the biggest tech platforms – despite its inadequate protections for national security.

Jamil discounts as old news the Uber leak. I agree; we didn’t learn much from the orgy of coverage that we didn’t already know about Uber’s highhanded approach in the teens to taxi monopolies and government.

Jamil and I endorse the efforts of a Utah startup devoted to following China’s IP theft using China’s surprisingly open information. Why Utah, you ask? We’ve got the answer.

In quick hits and updates:

• Josh Schulte has finally been convicted for one of the most damaging intelligence leaks in history.
• Google gets grudging respect from me for its political jiu-jitsu. Faced with smoking gun evidence of its political bias after the company spam-blocked GOP but not Dem fundraising messages, Google turned the tables. It managed to kick off public  outrage by saying it wanted to fix its bias problem by forcing political spam on all its users. Now the GOP will have the burden of explaining that it’s not trying to send us more spam; it just wants Gmail to stop favoring Democrats in running Gmail spam filters.
• And, finally, we all get to enjoy the story of the bored Chinese housewife who created an interlocking universe of fake Russian history on China’s Wikipedia. She’s promised to stop, but I suspect she’s really just been hired to work for the world’s most active producer of fake history – China’s Ministry of State Security.

Download the 417th Episode (mp3)

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The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.

The post Cybersecurity's First Crash Report appeared first on Reason.com.

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Two months after it first scrapped the Disinformation Governance Board, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now admits there is “no need” for the board at all.

A DHS advisory subcommittee made the declaration on Monday, according to The Washington Post. Previously the board had technically been “paused.”

First announced in April, the disinformation board attracted scrutiny from conservatives and civil libertarians due to concerns that its director, Nina Jankowicz, was a progressive ideologue with a poor track record of identifying misinformation. She had fallen for narratives that had hoodwinked other liberals, including the false notion that the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story was a hoax of Russian origin. Federal law enforcement officials played a prominent role in providing cover for this false notion; 50 of them signed a letter asserting the story was Russian disinformation, which provided the mainstream media and social media companies with intellectual cover to suppress the story. There is good reason to worry that Jankowicz’s disinformation board could have done the same had it been up and running at the time.

Given all that, DHS’ decision to affirm the board’s demise seems wise. If even the federal Homeland Security bureaucracy—which still requires airline passengers to remove their shoes and belts before boarding a plane, for no legitimate safety-connected reason whatsoever—thinks a program, agency, or protocol is pointless, you can bet that it’s really pointless.

The post Homeland Security Agrees That the Disinformation Board Was a Bad Idea appeared first on Reason.com.

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For the past few years, government officials and agricultural groups in California have been fighting over the question: Are bees fish?

The California Court of Appeal for the 3rd District ruled on May 31 that, legally, they are.

At the heart of this issue is the state’s Endangered Species Act, which prohibits the import, export, possession, purchase, sale, or killing of listed species. Roughly 250 plant and animal species are protected by the California Endangered Species Act (CESA).

In 2018, environmentalists petitioned the California Fish and Game Commission to add four bumblebee species to the list of at-risk plants and animals governed and protected by the CESA. The Commission provided notice in 2019 that the four bumblebee species were candidates for CESA protection.

Birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, plants, and fish are categories of endangered species eligible for protection in California, but insects aren’t. So how did state officials, at the behest of environmental groups, end up getting those bumblebees added?

By declaring them fish!

Citrus growers, almond producers, and other large agricultural groups in the state that would be affected by the classification quickly filed a lawsuit, but the appeals court agreed with the classification—bees are fish.

So what is a fish? According to the CESA, the word refers to “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.”

The key word there is invertebrate. Because they don’t have backbones, the appeals court ruled that bumblebees could reasonably be designated as fish since the word is considered a “term of art,” meaning it has a definition within a specific field that diverges from common usage.

“We certainly agree section 45 is ambiguous as to whether the Legislature intended for the definition of fish to apply to purely aquatic species,” the court’s decision explains. “A fish, as the term is commonly understood in everyday parlance, of course, lives in aquatic environments.” Because a snail (a terrestrial invertebrate) was previously listed under the act “and could have qualified as such only within the definition of fish,” the court opted to liberally construe the act and the Legislature’s intent when drafting it.

A problem with this reasoning is that it “seriously undercuts the idea that law is supposed to be clear and accessible to ordinary people,” notes George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. The average person has a particular understanding of what the word fish means and, when reading the law, “would be hard-pressed to figure out that harming bees is a no-no.”

And yet, any farmer who harms or kills one of these protected bees could be punished with fines or have their pesticide permits rescinded. That could prove problematic since farmers will have to distinguish the four protected types of bees from the 21 other bumblebee species that can be found in California.

The court’s ruling might also empower activists to further stretch the legal definitions of the CESA as they try to get more critters protected. The California Fish and Game Commission “may list any invertebrate as an endangered or threatened species” if the invertebrate meets the requirements of the relevant statutes, the court ruled.

Ladybugs, scorpions, moths, butterflies. Maybe someday they can be fish, too.

Editing and graphics by Isaac Reese; additional editing by Danielle Thompson

The post California Environmentalists: Bees Are Now Fish appeared first on Reason.com.

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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dropped a murder charge against a bodega worker who stabbed a customer during a highly publicized altercation that reinvigorated a debate around self-defense and victimization.

Bragg acknowledged in Manhattan Criminal Court that his office could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the 61-year-old clerk, Jose Alba, “was not justified in his use of deadly physical force.”

Around 11 p.m. on July 1, Austin Simon, 35, entered the store shouting profanities at Alba after Simon’s girlfriend’s payment was declined for a bag of chips. Simon then came behind the cashier’s counter, shoved Alba, hovered over him, and appeared to try to forcibly remove him from behind the cash wrap. Alba subsequently grabbed a knife and stabbed Simon, ultimately killing him.

Additional surveillance footage shows Simon’s girlfriend telling Alba that Simon was about to come in and “fuck [him] up.” And while the fight was ongoing, she can be seen stabbing Alba—although no charges have been filed against her, including for unlawful possession of a weapon.

Bragg has certainly done the right thing by dismissing the charge against Alba. But the decision to pursue one at all runs contrary to the beliefs of the self-styled progressive prosecutor, who claims to understand that, so often, the process is the punishment.

Nothing demonstrates that amnesia better than a meeting he had last week with the United Bodegas of America, during which he reportedly said he wasn’t sure “why people [were] jumping to conclusions” about his decision to pursue Alba for murder. I would argue that’s because Bragg’s office sent the 61-year-old to Rikers Island, originally sought a $500,000 bond to keep him there, and charged him with murder. It’s not a mystery.

Those decisions would’ve likely raised eyebrows no matter which prosecutor had made them. But Bragg isn’t just any prosecutor, having won office on a promise to reform the criminal justice system. Two platform planks stand out in particular: pledges to “end[] mass incarceration” and “reform[] pretrial detention.” Yet, Alba was not initially fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of those promises, having been locked up in what is arguably one of the most dangerous pretrial detention centers in the country while staring down decades in prison, despite video footage demonstrating convincing evidence of his innocence from the beginning.

People will disagree on why Bragg charted his initial course and why he decided to reverse it. But I’ll posit a theory: Progressive prosecutors, and some criminal justice reformers generally, sometimes have a blind spot for self-defense claims, particularly when they may empathize with the person killed. As I wrote shortly after the murder charge was filed: “Simon was black, poor, and caught up in the criminal justice system. And so now Alba—himself neither white nor well-off—is caught up in the criminal justice system too.” It’s hard to see who wins here.

Some may argue that the law governing the issue should have put this to bed from the start. A person may kill in self-defense if he or she “reasonably believes that such other person is using or about to use deadly physical force,” according to New York Penal Law 35.15, or, notably here, if “he or she reasonably believes that such other person is committing or attempting to commit a…robbery.” Based on the footage, it’s my view that Alba met that standard. But even if you may hesitate, it’s near-impossible to square Bragg’s promises to liberally use discretion with his initial treatment of Alba.

Prosecutors, after all, exercise discretion every day. It’s part of the job. Bragg ultimately came around and exercised it appropriately, and for that, we should be grateful. But not every defendant is lucky enough to attract national media attention and a groundswell of outrage.

The post Manhattan DA Drops Murder Charge Against Jose Alba. It Never Should Have Been Filed. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Food prices in the U.S. have ballooned alongside inflation, now up 10.4 percent over the past year. One solution to that issue may come in the form of an immigration bill that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are now negotiating.

Known as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, the measure was sponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.) and Dan Newhouse (R–Wash.) and passed the House twice last year. It aims to improve the immigration mechanics behind the U.S. agricultural workforce, expanding legal pathways available to foreign workers and the domestic farmers who hope to hire them.

The ability to hire more agricultural workers translates into more helping hands for farmers and increased production of goods, which then means fewer food shortages and lower prices at the grocery store. “Consumers are seeing high costs of milk, produce, fruits, meat, and eggs in the supermarket because the Senate has not acted,” said Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Immigration Business Coalition, in a press conference last week. Likewise, Newhouse expressed that the bill is an important step necessary to “fix our broken immigration system and combat the rising cost of food in our country.”

A broad coalition with multi-pronged interests backs the legislation. It attracted the support of 30 Republican representatives, over 250 farmers/producers associations, and over 100 organizations involved in immigration advocacy, labor, and economic growth.

The bill would establish a program for foreign agricultural workers “to earn legal status through continued agricultural employment.” That status would be contingent upon an individual working “at least 180 days in agriculture over the last 2 years” and would then be renewable if he or she performs farm work at least 100 days per year.

The legislation would also reform “the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program to provide more flexibility for employers, while ensuring critical protections for workers.” Particularly notable is a section that would help address the high demand for agricultural workers by “providing up to 20,000 H-2A visas per year (for 3 years) for dairy and other year-round agricultural employers,” “allowing the year-round H-2A cap to increase or decrease annually thereafter based on labor metrics” and worker shortages, and “increasing the number of green cards that are available for employer sponsorship.”

In its current form, the H-2A program puts farmers and foreign workers through an expensive and complicated process. The program has over 200 rules, and according to a 2014 study by the American Farm Bureau Federation, “72 percent of growers reported that workers arrived” an average of 22 days after the date they were needed—a critical delay in agricultural work. That study also found that “farmers and even professional H-2A agents are routinely forced to hire lawyers” to navigate the process. And because it’s so difficult to secure legal status, only a small share of foreign agricultural workers actually do. As of last year, under 10 percent of all farmworkers in the U.S. were H-2A visa holders. Roughly half of all hired crop farmworkers are undocumented.

“Increasing legal pathways like H-2A will ease pressure on the southern border by decreasing the number of individuals—particularly single adults—who seek to cross without authorization, all while filling critical labor needs,” says Danilo Zak, policy and advocacy manager for the National Immigration Forum. “Passing this bill would demonstrate what real bipartisan compromise on immigration can look like in 2022: An earned pathway to status for a targeted undocumented population paired with proper and effective enforcement of the system.”

A sticking point in Senate negotiations over the bill, according to NPR, has been a provision in the House version that would allow H-2A workers to sue their employers if they think they’ve broken labor laws. Proponents of the bill argue that it already outlines ample protections for migrant workers.

Those deliberations may delay passage, and the upcoming midterms may change the balance of support. Still, at a time when even incremental immigration measures are polarizing, the bill represents a bipartisan agreement that immigration reform can help alleviate some of the country’s most pressing problems.

The post Better Immigration Laws Could Help Lower Food Prices appeared first on Reason.com.

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On Monday, a good samaritan with a gun averted a catastrophe at an Indiana mall. Douglas Sapirman, a 20-year old man brought more than 100 rounds of ammunition and three rifles: a Sig Sauer M400 rifle he bought in March 2022; an M&P15 rifle that was found in the mall bathroom and bought in March 2021; and a Glock 33 pistol discovered on his body. In the span of a few minutes, Sapirman fired 24 rounds, killed three people, and injured two others.

But Victor Gomez, a 22-year old man, was shopping at the mall with this girlfriend. And he was carrying a concealed pistol. The New York Times describes his heroics:

Chief Jim Ison of the Greenwood Police Department called the bystander’s actions “nothing short of heroic,” identifying him as Elisjsha Dicken of Seymour, Ind.”

He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun, was very proficient in that, very tactically sound, and, as he moved to close in on the suspect, he was also motioning for people to exit behind him,” Chief Ison said at a news conference where he described surveillance video footage of the shooting. . . .

All the victims were shot by Mr. Sapirman, who fired 24 rounds, Chief Ison said. Mr. Dicken fired 10 rounds, killing the gunman as he tried to retreat to a mall bathroom where he had spent an hour apparently preparing for the attack. . . . .

Over the past two years, the relatives told the police, the gunman had frequently practiced shooting at a range in Greenwood, which is roughly 15 miles south of Indianapolis. . . .

When the police arrived, they handcuffed Mr. Dicken and took him to a station for questioning, where security camera footage confirmed his description of the events. Chief Ison said that the police could not determine whether Mr. Dicken had a gun permit, but that he was carrying his Glock 9-millimeter handgun legally under the state’s constitutional carry law.

“This young man, Greenwood’s good Samaritan, acted within seconds, stopping the shooter and saving countless lives,” Mayor Mark Myers said on Monday.

This amazing story is simply one data point, but it serves to refute four myths about gun control.

First, a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. Recently, Eugene catalogued other similar instances of defensive gun use.

Second, constitutional carry ensures that good samaritans can carry, even if they do not satisfy onerous carry regimes. I imagine that if this incident happened in New York, the good samaritan would be indicted for illegal possession of a firearm.

Third, a common argument in favor of “high capacity” magazine bans is that defensive gun use never needs more than a few bullets. Here, the good samaritan used ten bullets, and he could have needed even more. In California, for example, magazines are limited to ten rounds. Had the good samaritan needed one more bullet to drop the assailant, he would have been out of luck in California.

Fourth, it is commonly argued that a person armed with a handgun cannot take down a person armed with larger rifles. This incident proves that myth is wrong.

It is difficult to generalize from a single incident, but the situation in Indiana serves to push back against many of the common gun control myths.

The post The Good Samaritan With A Gun In Indiana Serves To Refute Four Common Gun Control Myths appeared first on Reason.com.

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The American fishing industry is caught in the middle of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China—hooked by tariffs imposed on both sides of the Pacific.

As a result, U.S. exports of seafood have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade. That’s in large part due to the tariffs that have made the industry “less competitive and less affordable,” according to a filing by the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group, to the International Trade Commission (USITC) ahead of a hearing scheduled to take place on Thursday. 

In prepared testimony for the hearing, the National Fisheries Institute alleges that trade disputes and subsequent waves of tariffs have eroded decades of growth for America’s commercial seafood industry, which is dominated by small family-owned fisheries. 

When the Trump administration imposed those tariffs in 2018, lawmakers from states with large fishing industries sounded the alarm but were ignored. “It has clearly rattled my state,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) said in a 2018 Senate hearing exchange with then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. “​​Our seafood industry is the number one private industry in terms of the jobs and the economic opportunity it brings.” 

Tariffs on seafood have hit Alaska in particular, Alaska’s fishing industry generates over $5 billion dollars in economic activity and creates nearly 70,000 jobs in the state, making it a vital lifeline for the state. Over 40 percent of U.S.-caught Alaskan salmon and one-third of all seafood from Alaska is exported to China each year. Much of it is processed in China and then re-imported to the United States for sale in grocery stores. 

As the National Fisheries Institute points out, this split processing stream has contributed to rising seafood costs for U.S. consumers, as China’s retaliatory tariffs hit seafood when imported for processing and the original U.S. tariffs hit products upon their return to American shores.

Shipments of fish have consequently seen aggregate duty rates of upward of 45 percent in some cases. These costs are almost always passed along to consumers.

Regulators have, in the past, granted fisheries exclusions from tariffs for some specific re-imported fish products. Lately, though, regulators have refrained from offering broad exclusions to American-caught fish that’s been re-imported from China. 

That has come at the expense of American producers, who have seen Chinese processors pivot away from purchasing U.S.-caught fish, amounting to a $500 million loss in the export market. 

As one Alaska-based operator represented by the National Fisheries Institute, the Freezer Longline Coalition, explained in the filing, tariffs have “caused many FLC member company customers in the U.S., China and elsewhere … to refrain from the purchase of seafood from FLC member companies and other U.S. seafood harvesters.”

Tariffs on fish imported from China have caused some American importers to shift to Russian suppliers. Since 2014, imports of Russian-caught pollock and other fish have increased by 173 percent, with much of that increase coming in the aftermath of the China tariffs. 

For consumers, meanwhile, these costs are discouraging consumption of fish, according to a February study published by data analytics firms IRI and 210 Analytics. That month alone, sales of frozen seafood products decreased by 9.4 percent, while fresh seafood sales decreased by 12 percent. 

Tariffs contributed to seafood prices rising faster than overall inflation in recent months. And consumers are responding by buying less fish: Sales of seafood products have continuously dropped across the board, sparking more worries for the fishing industry as it struggles to compete.

The post America's Fishing Industry Is Getting Caught Up in the Trade War appeared first on Reason.com.

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On March 26, during a speech in Warsaw, Poland, President Joe Biden defined the stakes of the war that had enveloped Ukraine during the previous month: “In the perennial struggle for democracy and freedom,” he said, “Ukraine and its people are on the frontlines fighting to save their nation. And their brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people: the rule of law; free and fair elections; the freedom to speak, to write, and to assemble; the freedom to worship as one chooses; freedom of the press.”

The remarks were in keeping with a widely accepted notion that the conflict constitutes “a battle,” as Biden put it, “between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression.”

There can be no question that the actions of Russia under Vladimir Putin put the country on the side of autocracy and repression. But the West should be clear-eyed about the ways that Ukraine is, and isn’t, living up to its end of the democracy-and-liberty formulation.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been hailed as a classical liberal hero, the inspirational leader who captured the world’s attention with a series of video messages immediately following the Russian invasion in which he celebrated those who had taken up arms to repel the attack and pleaded with foreign governments to lend a hand. But Zelenskyy has not merely urged his fellow countrymen to follow his lead. With the declaration of martial law in February came a prohibition on male citizens aged 18–60 leaving the country. Then in March, the government combined the country’s national TV stations into a single state-approved broadcast and suspended 11 opposition political parties it described as “pro-Russian.” 

With Ukraine scrambling to defend itself against Putin’s lawlessness, the impulse to shut down anyone with Russian sympathies is understandable. But to act on that impulse is to inflict punishment on Ukrainian citizens, including those who voted for the Opposition Platform for Life, which held about 10 percent of seats in Ukraine’s parliament and was the main party challenging Zelenskyy before he disbanded its activities. Ukraine has a large Russian-speaking population, and those who have generally favored maintaining close ties with Russia rather than pursuing greater integration with the European Union have a right to their views, and to representation in government, even at a time of war. 

Meanwhile, all Ukrainians have a right to share and access information. There was a disconcerting irony in Biden identifying the country as a combatant on the side of free speech and freedom of the press at the same time its president was clamping down on television stations’ ability to present the news to their viewers as they think appropriate. At least one outlet with ties to a Zelenskyy rival has been excluded from broadcasting on the new national channel, reported NPR this month. Zelenskyy’s office defended the consolidation, reported Reuters at the time, by “citing the importance of a ‘unified information policy,'” a phrase that should be chilling to anyone who values free expression. 

That used to be most of us. When Putin in March signed a law making it a crime to disseminate “deliberately misleading information” or to discredit Russian military operations, the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Human Rights was aghast. A statement released by that office said the Russian law “​​depriv[ed] the population of their right to access diverse news and views at this critical time.” Russia under Putin does indeed have a lamentable history of censorship, state-backed disinformation campaigns, and persecution of dissidents. But if the Russian people have a right to a diversity of perspectives, surely the Ukrainian people do too.

Even before the invasion, there was evidence that Zelenskyy’s government was less than committed to protecting that right. In early February, he removed three TV stations, again described by the government as “pro-Russian,” from the airwaves. In January, he decreed that print media outlets registered in Ukraine publish in Ukrainian. That move—a follow-up to a 2019 law, signed by Zelenskyy’s predecessor, mandating that Ukrainian be spoken in schools—arguably aided Putin, who has justified his aggression in part by claiming that Ukrainians “who identify as Russians and want to preserve their identity, language and culture are getting the signal that they are not wanted in Ukraine.”

Any defense of these policies would presumably rest on the distinction between Putin’s control of the Russian media for the purposes of spreading false narratives to mislead the public, both in Russia and in Russian-speaking Ukraine, and Zelenskyy’s control of it to set the record straight and protect the Ukrainian public from Russia’s propaganda. Putin is a bad guy, in other words, trying to manipulate people, while Zelenskyy is a good guy trying to inform them. 

We should be exceedingly careful about accepting such premises. Not because the Russians aren’t spreading disinformation. Not even because there’s no danger that Ukrainian consumers of Russian propaganda might fall victim to it. 

By trying to ensure that the people of Ukraine are exposed to one narrative over another, Zelenskyy is himself engaging in a propaganda campaign. Governments have an obligation, particularly during a crisis, to communicate with the public, and it’s natural that officials would seek to bolster the case for their own side. That’s propaganda even if the official narrative is entirely (or very nearly so) based in accurate information. Propaganda isn’t necessarily nefarious.

But when a government interferes with the people’s ability to hear the other side, it ventures into dangerous territory. In a free society, the state should not be trusted to determine what is true or false, or to forcibly deny people access to speech it deems to be contrary to their interests. Even a head of state who really is a “good guy” risks being corrupted by that much power. The same is true of the authority to suspend opposition political parties. (In Ukraine, that move has already led to allegations, as NPR put it, “that Zelenskyy is clearing out political rivals before the 2024 presidential election.”)

Nor are attempts to suppress foreign propaganda likely to help the practical situation. In the era of modern technology, supposedly forbidden content is never truly inaccessible. In fact, censorship attempts often have the perverse effect of making the censors look like they have something to hide and drawing more attention to the targeted ideas, a phenomenon common enough to have earned a nickname: the Streisand effect. 

Zelenskyy would do better to use his platform to debunk the falsehoods spread by Russia than to try to shut them down. Transparency and forbearance on the part of his government would undermine Putin by highlighting for the world the contrast between the two countries’ approaches.

Like the censorship attempts, the restrictions on male citizens’ right to leave Ukraine is a human rights violation that may in fact do more harm than good. “It is one thing to conscript men into military service, providing training and appropriate equipment (although, even in that case, a right to conscientious objection must be respected),” law professor Amy Maguire wrote for The Conversation. “It is another thing entirely to prevent civilians from escaping a war zone … The ban on men leaving Ukraine ought to be lifted, because it is legally and ethically wrong to force civilians to stay in harm’s way when they have the opportunity and desire to escape.”

Recall that one pretense undergirding Putin’s invasion was that many Ukrainians viewed the government in Kyiv as illegitimate and would be glad to be absorbed into Russia’s sphere of influence. When invading troops were not greeted as liberators—when instead the armed forces and civilian population of the country fought back with far more zeal and effectiveness than anyone was expecting—it made a mockery of the Putin line. 

In the earliest days of the war, social media channels were replete with stories like one about a young couple who were “married on the first day of the Russian invasion, and then immediately took up arms” in defense of Kyiv. Ukraine has benefited from the international goodwill that followed from such acts of bravery. Sadly, the policy of holding “fighting-age” men captive erodes the moral high ground from which Ukrainians are struggling to defend their country. 

We in the United States have a lesson from our not-so-distant past to draw on when offering this “fraternal correction,” as Catholics might call it. We know that during times of war, even relatively free countries can succumb to the temptation to violate rights, particularly of those with ethnic ties to the adversary, in ways they will come to be deeply ashamed of. It happened here within living memory. Today we recognize the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II as “one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.”

When Congress later acknowledged that the U.S. government was in the wrong and issued reparations to survivors of the internment camps, no one imagined it was excusing the attack on Pearl Harbor. Likewise, to critique the Zelenskyy government does not lessen the seriousness of the charges against Putin. Russia’s unprovoked military aggression, violation of a neighbor’s territorial integrity, alleged war crimes, and continual refusal to respect the rights of its own citizens, including by jailing those who dare to speak out against the war, are far worse than anything Zelenskyy has been accused of.

It’s possible to condemn the actions of Moscow without forfeiting the right to point out missteps in Kyiv. If we really care about the future of democracy and liberty, we should be willing to do both.

The post If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies appeared first on Reason.com.

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American taxpayers pay to be spied upon. That’s one takeaway from new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been examining how federal agents spent millions to purchase massive troves of cellphone location data and dodge Fourth Amendment requirements.

As part of a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the ACLU obtained thousands of previously unreleased records showing how DHS agencies—including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are purchasing and accessing “huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps.”

These agencies are “sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures,” suggests the ACLU.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court held (in Carpenter v. United States) that under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement must have a warrant before accessing a suspect’s phone location data from cellular service providers. But federal authorities have been getting around this by purchasing aggregated cellphone location data from data broker firms like Venntel and Babel Street. And they’re spending millions of taxpayer dollars doing it.

This was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal back in 2020. The ACLU then set out to learn more, filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and later suing to force DHS, ICE, and CBP to respond.

“Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date,” the ACLU announced yesterday.

Cellphone location data purchased by DHS is aggregated. It doesn’t directly link the names or personal information of cellphone users to specific location data. But there’s still a lot of privacy-infringing information that can be gleaned from such information, says the ACLU:

In the documents we received over the past year, we found Venntel marketing materials sent to DHS explaining how the company collects more than 15 billion location points from over 250 million cell phones and other mobile devices every day.

With this data, law enforcement can “identify devices observed at places of interest,” and “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life,” according to a Venntel marketing brochure. The documents belabor how precise and illuminating this data is, allowing “pattern of life analysis to identify persons of interest.” By searching through this massive trove of location information at their whim, government investigators can identify and track specific individuals or everyone in a particular area, learning details of our private activities and associations.

In the face of the obvious privacy implications of warrantless access to this information, these companies and agencies go to great lengths to rationalize their actions. Throughout the documents, the cell phone location information is variously characterized as mere “digital exhaust” and as containing no “PII” (personally identifying information) because it is associated with a cell phone’s numerical identifier rather than a name — even though the entire purpose of this data is to be able to identify and track people. The records also assert that this data is “100 percent opt-in,” that cell phone users “voluntarily” share the location information, and that it is collected with consent of the app user and “permission of the individual.” Of course, that consent is a fiction: Many cell phone users don’t realize how many apps on their phones are collecting GPS information, and certainly don’t expect that data to be sold to the government in bulk.

The records acquired by the ACLU “shed new light on the government’s ability to obtain our most private information by simply opening the federal wallet,” the group says. “These documents are further proof that Congress needs to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would end law enforcement agencies’ practice of buying their way around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.”

More on the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act here.

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FREE MINDS

House bill would protect same-sex marriage. New legislation in the House of Representatives would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act—the 1996 law saying marriage must be between a man and a woman—and codify the legality of marriage for same-sex couples. The move comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That decision not only overturned Roe v. Wade but also sparked fears that other precedents—like the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal across the country—will be next.

“As this Court may take aim at other fundamental rights, we cannot sit idly by as the hard-earned gains of the Equality movement are systematically eroded,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.) in a statement.

Nadler—one of 44 co-sponsors (all Democrats) of the Respect for Marriage Act, which was introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.)—pointed to a concurring opinion in Dobbs in which Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the Court could reconsider the Obergefell decision. “If Justice Thomas’s concurrence teaches anything it’s that we cannot let your guard down or the rights and freedoms that we have come to cherish will vanish into a cloud of radical ideology and dubious legal reasoning,” said Nadler.

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FREE MARKETS

Lawmakers hope immigration bill could also lower food prices. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would make it easier for farmers and agricultural businesses to hire temporary workers throughout the year—hopefully lowering agricultural production costs in a way that would trickle down to consumers in the form of lower food prices. “Currently, year-round employers cannot use that worker visa program, known as the H-2A temporary agricultural program used by seasonal employers,” notes NPR.

The bill “would also satisfy some goals for labor rights advocates by providing a pathway to legalization for workers who show a dedicated history of farm work,” NPR points out. But while Republicans and Democrats are “inching closer to a deal” on the bill, a provision that would allow H-2A workers to sue over labor violations is still a point of contention:

Advocates say that with the increased number of visa workers, it is even more important to ensure all workers that do the same job have the same protections.

But the Farm Bureau and other employer groups argue the bill could potentially result in frivolous lawsuits costing producers, who are already operating on slim margins, thousands of dollars

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QUICK HITS

The former president is now eyeing a September announcement, according to two Trump advisers.

One confidant put the odds at “70-30 he announces before the midterms.” And others said he may still decide to announce sooner than September. https://t.co/CYStMOIi3W

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) July 14, 2022

• Democrats may be forced to actually pass legislation through the democratic process instead of merely changing the rules by fiat. “Democratic lawmakers’ inability to secure a majority at the Federal Communications Commission has stymied plans for the agency to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules,” notes The Washington Post. Instead, they’ll be attempting to pass net neutrality legislation once again, with the sweeping, soon-to-be-introduced Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act.

• A Maryland Republican running for the U.S. Senate has been charged with making a false report about child sex trafficking. The man—Ryan Dark White, who also goes by Dr. Jon McGreevey—claimed an adult male was forcing a young girl to perform sex acts in an adult bookstore. Police investigation found “at no time were any sex acts performed or offered by any of the individuals in the establishment as reported by White,” according to a press release.

• A judge has temporarily suspended a West Virginia abortion ban from taking effect.

• Arizona is the latest state to get told no, it can’t ban people from recording police activity. “Over the past quarter-century, six other federal appellate courts took up the question, and all reached the same conclusion,” note Institute for Justice lawyers in the Wall Street Journal.

• The Washington Post editorial board urges the Food and Drug Administration to approve HRA Pharma’s application to sell an oral contraceptive pill over-the-counter. “With states rushing to cut off access to abortion, and birth control looming as a potential battleground in the war over reproductive rights, it is important that the FDA make this matter a priority.”

The post Homeland Security Is Buying Its Way Around the Fourth Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.

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From David Daube, the renowned scholar of biblical and Roman law, who was a professor at Oxford and Berkeley among other places:

“As regards interpretation, the author of the Rhetoric to Alexander distinguishes between laws which are clear and laws which are ambiguous. I have never come across any of the former kind.”

(The quote is from Daube’s collected works, volume 4, page 186.)

The post Two Kinds of Laws: Clear and Ambiguous appeared first on Reason.com.

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