Month: March 2014

In April the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a

pair of cases asking whether the police must obtain a warrant
before searching the cell phones of people they have under arrest.
At The Connecticut Law Tribune, the lawyer who writes
under the name Gideon’s Trumpet makes the
case
against giving the cops free rein to snoop:

Think about any random day. You make phone calls, which tells
the phone companies where you are and who you’re talking to. You
send text messages, which stores the content of your conversation.
You take pictures, which are stored on your phone. And you download
apps that have your bank account and credit card information, maybe
even some medical records.

So, if you’re arrested—and remember, almost anyone can be
arrested; that doesn’t mean they’re actually guilty of
anything—should the police have the authority to simply open your
phone and look through every personal email, Twitter update,
Facebook status, credit card statement and nude picture? For that
matter, should the police have the authority to track your
movements without a warrant?

In a recent column on these two cases
I posed a similar question: “Should getting arrested for a
minor offense like jaywalking be sufficient to allow the police
virtually unlimited access to your private affairs in search of
additional wrongdoing?” Unhappily, the Obama administration thinks
it should. “Although cell phones can contain a great deal of
personal information,” the administration has
argued in a legal filing, “so can many other items that
officers have long had authority to search, and the search of a
cell phone is no more intrusive than other actions that the police
may take once a person has been lawfully arrested.”

The problem with that argument is that a cell phone search has
the potential to be far more intrusive than any search
incident to arrest of your pockets, briefcase, purse, or backpack.
That’s because, as noted above, cell phones contain not only photos
and messages; they also contain GPS tracking data. Thanks to the
wonders of technology, our most sensitive and private
information—including our whereabouts at various times—is now
accessible in the palms of our hands. It’s no mystery why law
enforcement wants to take a peek. Yet as Gideon’s Trumpet observes,
“the real reason why police want unfettered access to the phone is
precisely the reason why they should not get it.”

• Journalists actually went to
  examine that alleged Russian military buildup at the border to
  Ukraine but
  found little.
• HealthCare.gov, which was malfunctioning this morning, is
  
  still malfunctioning this afternoon.
• Following the pasting the ruling Socialist Party got at the
  polls,
  France’s prime minister stepped down. President Francois
  Hollande named the interior minister as the replacement.
• The Supreme Court today heard an important case on
  software patent law and what sort of creations could or should
  actually qualify for patents and how abstract a protected idea may
  be.
• In a reminder of how utterly useless and unneeded the Federal
  Communications Commission (FCC) is, today it prohibited companies
  controlling more than one television station in the same market
  from
  sharing sales staff, which hurts the very small television
  stations the FCC chairman claims it will protect.
• The State of New York is joining New York City in suing FedEx
  for
  illegally shipping contraband cigarettes to customers in the
  state, costing the state more than $10 million in tax revenue.

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is being hailed as “the
most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade”
by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. The Economist says the
book may revolutionize “the way people think about the economic
history of the past two centuries.” Ira Stoll has read it and
reports that it’s better than you would expect. In fact, Stoll
notes, there is quite a bit in the book that free-market types can
embrace. But unfortunately, Stoll adds, Piketty also ignores many
of the most significant failings of modern liberal economics.

View this article.

Last week Nigel Farage, the leader of the
United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and Nick Clegg, British
deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, faced
each other in the first of two scheduled debates on the U.K.’s
membership in the European Union.

Polling suggests that most Britons who watched the debate
believed that Farage beat Clegg in the first debate, which was more
of an extended Q and A session with a studio audience than it was
an actual debate.

In the build-up for the second debate, scheduled to take place
this Wednesday, Farage is being criticized for comments he made
about the crisis in Ukraine during the first debate and for
praising Russian President Vladimir Putin as an “operator” after
being asked which world leader be admires the most in a
still-to-be-published interview with GQ magazine.

Farage said in response:

We should hang our heads in shame. The British government has
actually geed up the European Union to pursue effectively an
imperialist, expansionist – and even Mr Barroso the commission
president once himself said we are building an empire. We have
given a false series of hopes to a group of people in the western
Ukraine. So geed up were they that they actually toppled their own
elected leader. That provoked Mr Putin. I think the European Union
frankly does have blood on its hands in the Ukraine. And I don’t
want a European army, navy, air force or a European foreign policy.
It has not been a thing for good in the Ukraine.

Watch footage of Farage’s response below (starts at 57:35):

The BBC has the
following to say about Farage’s comments on Putin in an unpublished
GQ interview:

In an as yet unpublished interview for the magazine GQ, details
of which have been released, the UKIP leader was asked which world
leader he most admired.

He reportedly replied: “As an operator, but not as a human
being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing.
Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically. How many
journalists in jail now?”

Without reading the whole interview, it sounds to me like Farage
is praising Putin’s brutal effectiveness and commitment, not his
moral judgments. That said, Farage’s recent comments on the
crisis in Ukraine and Putin do betray a strange understanding of
moral responsibility that is unlikely to help him attract more
support in future elections. 

The State Department sure is in anguish from
“deep” budget
cuts (like
every year). Heck, the cupboards are so bare, they even

bled $30 million from the Fulbright Program this month. What
can the department still afford?

How about a “500 lb. fiberglass, aluminum, stainless steel,
acrylic and painted”statue of a camel to be put on display at the
American embassy in Pakistan? And it only cost $400,000. And it’s
not even a
one-of-a-kind work.

Buzzfeed got access to a
document about the procurement of “Camel Contemplating a
Needle” and has an exclusive
report:

The work, by noted American artist John Baldessari, depicts a
life-size white camel made of fiberglass staring in puzzlement at
the eye of an oversize shiny needle — a not-so-subtle play on the
New Testament phrase about the difficulty the wealthy have in
entering the kingdom of heaven.

Personally, I thought the camel’s expression was more like “a
smug realization of its own sticker price,” but I digress.

To emphasize Baldassari’s fame, the contracting officials
pulled a section from
Wikipedia. “John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an
American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found
photography and appropriated images.”

In a statement, State Department press spokeswoman Christine
Foushee said the proposed purchase comes from the department’s
“Office of Art in Embassies.” In new construction projects, she
said, a small part of the total funds, about 0.5%, is spent on art
purchases.

The State Department may have gotten a pretty good deal on the
camel, since Baldessari has sold
even less inspiring works for millions. But they could have
done even better if they had opened the opportunity to competition.
The department didn’t do that though, insisting that only this
camel could satisfy the “unique artistic criteria” for the
embassy.