Month: December 2013

• Drugstore Walgreens has
  announced that it will provide
  one month’s prescription of drugs, free, to customers who have
  signed up for Obamacare but have been screwed over by the system
  and still don’t have an identification number. They should be sure
  to include a good mood stabilizer.
• By putting together numbers from different studies and
  estimates, the Council on Foreign Relations believes more than
  3,500 people have been
  killed by U.S. drone strikes, more than 450 of which were
  civilians.
• The ACLU has filed another suit in connection with the National
  Security Agency’s snooping, this one to
  get information about the executive order that governs
  surveillance abroad that occasionally sweeps up information about
  American citizens.
• In addition to its serious data breach issues, Target has
  apparently
  failed to properly activate thousands of holiday gift cards. At
  this point their public relations folks are probably calling the
  White House for advice.
• A flute player had all of his bamboo instruments, 11 of them,
  
  destroyed by customs officials at JFK airport in New York City.
  He says customs told him they were all “agricultural products.”
  (Hat tip to Popehat)
• We must expand the war on drugs!
  Even the dolphins are getting high! (Hat tip: everybody on the
  entire Internet)

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New York City’s mayor has to pay a $9
registration fee when filing his oath of office form, a
bureaucratic procedure the city’s other elected officials also have
to complete, a fact highlighted by the Wall Street
Journal, which also notes that in 2001 the fee was only 15
cents, the amount it had been for a century.  The
Journal
reports:

From a legal standpoint, the signing of the form, the
payment of the $9 fee and the signature in the official register
are the only requirements for Mr. [Bill] de Blasio to assume the
powers of the mayor at 12 a.m. Wednesday.

For ceremonial purposes, Mr. de Blasio plans to recite the oath of
office at two different points on Wednesday. The first is scheduled
to take place at Mr. de Blasio’s home in Park Slope at 12:01 a.m.,
with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman officiating. That event is
considered private for family and other special invitees, but will
be streamed live on the web at nyc.gov.

A private event streamed live for the world to see is an apt
encapsulation of the way de Blasio has been able to capitalize
politically on his private life. When de Blasio’s adult daughter
announced last week she had a substance abuse problem, in a video
produced by the de Blasio campaign, Chris Smith
explained in New York:

Yet packaging and releasing the news after De Blasio
has been safely elected, on Christmas Eve, when many civilians and
much of the media is otherwise occupied, muffles the immediate
headlines — though it will stoke questions about how De Blasio can
make his family such a prominent part of his political life and
demand privacy at the same time… When I asked De Blasio, not along
ago, about whether it was dangerous to turn his wife and kids into
media figures, he answered serenely but emphatically. “You have to
understand, our family is different in the way we think about
things,” he said, describing how his politics and his family were
so intertwined as to be inseparable. “This is who we are, this is
how we live, this is how we’ll always live.”

The “public” inaugural ceremony to be held at noon tomorrow at
City Hall, meanwhile, will have Bill Clinton swearing in de Blasio
in an event the mayor-elect
promised would be “for all New Yorkers.” The Journal
doesn’t specify whether that ceremony is taxpayer-funded, though
it’s safe to assume that at the very least the security-related
expenditures will be, and that the $9 fee won’t come close to
covering them.

For
some high-profile people who publicly told the government to go to
hell, 2013 was, personally, a bit rough. Information freedom
activist Aaron Swartz took his own life under threat of a brutal
prison sentence. Revealer of inconvenient government secrets
Bradley/Chelsea Manning actually ended up in prison. And
surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden went into exile in Russia
to escape what promised to be a “fair” trial followed by a
first-class hanging. But tough consequences aren’t unusual for
people who defy the state. What was different and encouraging,
writes J.D, Tuccille, was how many people rallied behind Swartz,
Manning, Snowden, and other rebels, explicitly siding with them
over the government, in opposition to the powers-that-be.

View this article.

A district court judge in
Florida granted summary judgment for the plaintiff in a case
challenging the constitutionality of a law requiring welfare
recipients to submit to drug testing. The law was in effect for
four months after being passed in 2011, before being temporarily
suspended by a court order. During that time only 2.6 percent of
recipients tested positive for drugs, most commonly marijuana,

according to the Miami Herald blog, which also cites a
1998 study that found welfare recipients in the state had a lower
rate of drug use than the general population. The crux of the legal
case against the drug testing, via the Herald:

But in the Dec. 31 ruling, the court agreed with the
11th Circuit’s conclusion that “There is nothing so special or
immediate about the government’s interest in ensuring that TANF
recipients are drug free so as to warrant suspension of the Fourth
Amendment. The only known and shared characteristic of the
individuals who would be subjected to Florida’s mandatory drug
testing program is that they are financially needy families with
children. Yet, there is nothing inherent in the condition of being
impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a concrete
danger that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use or that
should drug use occur, that the lives of TANF recipients are
fraught with such risks of injury to others that even a momentary
lapse of attention can have disastrous consequences.”

You can peruse the whole ruling
here.

More Reason on drug
testing and on the Fourth
Amendment

The Federal Aviation Adminstration
(FAA) announced that Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas,
and Virginia will serve as test sites for drone planes, and some
sites will be operational within 180 days. While we have good reason
to be wary of the government’s military and surveillance drones
clouding our skies, there’s no need to
blast these particular drones out of the sky. The FAA tests
will focus not on building better bombs, but better commerce.

Twenty-five states applied to be drone testing locations, likely
enticed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems
International’s (AUVSI) study that speculates within the “first
three years of integration more than 70,000 jobs will be created in
the United States with an economic impact of more than $13.6
billion.”

How did the agency make their pick of those six states? The
Associated Press (AP) states that “the designation as a test site
doesn’t come with a financial award from the government,” and

explains:

In choosing Alaska, the FAA cited a diverse set of test site
locations in seven climatic zones. New York’s site at Griffiss
International Airport will look into integrating drones into the
congested northeast airspace. And Nevada offered proximity to
military aircraft from several bases, [FAA Administrator Michael]
Huerta said.

The extent that lobbying influenced the selection of the sites
was unclear.

[…]

The testing will determine whether drones can detect and avoid
aircraft and other obstacles, and if they can operate safety when
contact is lost with operators.

In 2012, Congress gave the agency three years to
integrate “civil unmanned aircraft systems into international
airspace.” Currently, the vast majority of drones flying over
American skies are government operated, though the FAA has begun to
permit commercial use on “a case-by-case basis,” according
to CNN.

The Washington Times
warns that bureaucratic sluggishness has already set plans for
widespread private use “more than a year behind schedule” and
further delays “could put the brakes on the drone revolution and
the economic benefits it would bring.” Brendan Schulman, who works
as special counsel within the drone industry told the
Times:

What we’ve experienced the past several years is a lot of
regulatory delay. In the meantime, other countries have moved ahead
with permitting and embracing commercial use. Countries
like Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom
already have a framework for commercial use of drones. That’s where
you’ll see companies going to do the work. That’s where you see
investment dollars going.

Although the FAA assures that
individuals’ privacy will not be compromised by these tests, some
have still not warmed up to the idea of more drones in America’s
skies. “Someday drones will be commonplace in U.S. skies and,
before that happens, it’s imperative that Congress enact strong,
nationwide privacy rules,” ACLU attorney Catherine Crump told the
AP.