Category: reason

Ring, the Amazon-owned company that makes video doorbells and other home security devices, aired its first Super Bowl ad this year. As Reason reported, the commercial’s intent was to advertise a new feature, but it caused a backlash given the company’s track record of privacy violations.

Within days, Ring announced it would terminate its partnership with Flock Safety, which makes products like automated license plate readers that are used by law enforcement. The move is a rare win for data privacy.

The commercial advertised Search Party, a feature that allows users to upload a picture of a lost dog, which Ring cameras will then monitor for using AI. While the sales pitch is perfectly wholesome and heartwarming, there are serious privacy implications.

“In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything—human, pet, and otherwise,” writes Beryl Lipton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “People need to reject this kind of disingenuous framing and recognize the potential end result: a scary overreach of the surveillance state designed to catch us all in its net.”

Part of the controversy stemmed from Ring’s history of partnering with law enforcement and security companies. For years, Ring supplied police departments with free or discounted Ring video doorbells to give away. Some agreements required police to conduct “outreach efforts…to encourage adoption” of Ring products and software.

Police in these communities could then easily request footage from Ring users, who could approve or deny the request. But Ring also regularly furnished police with footage in response to “emergency” requests through its website—bypassing not only the user but the need for a warrant. The company ended this feature in 2024, but less than two years later, it partnered with Flock Safety, which CNBC noted at the time “works with an estimated 6,000 communities and 5,000 law enforcement agencies.” The partnership would allow Ring users in those communities to more easily share footage requested by their local police department.

Like Ring, Flock has a poor history of privacy. Police in California repeatedly shared data from Flock license plate readers with federal agents, in violation of state privacy law.

In response to accusations that the company would share footage with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), both Ring and Flock denied working with any federal agencies and said they only work with local police. But local police departments throughout the country have routinely searched Flock’s database on ICE’s behalf.

This week, amid backlash, Ring terminated its partnership with Flock.

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring announced Thursday. “As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”

Of course, Ring’s explanation is almost certainly an excuse made in an attempt to save face. After all, note the announcement’s timing, just four days after the company aired an ad that over 120 million people saw and that many voiced their concerns about. But regardless of the motivation, Ring users and their neighbors can breathe a sigh of relief, as it may have just gotten a little more difficult for police to access their data without a warrant.

The post Ring Drops Controversial Partner After Super Bowl Ad Backlash appeared first on Reason.com.

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Rep. Tom McClintock (R–Calif.) describes himself as a “tariff skeptic.”

In that regard, his judgment seems sound. President Donald Trump’s tariffs are hiking costs for businesses and prices for consumers. They are not delivering the promised boom in manufacturing jobs. Polls show that most Americans dislike them.

Unlike most Americans, however, McClintock was in a position this week to translate that skepticism into action.

Given that chance, McClintock (and the vast majority of his Republican colleagues) chose cowardice and voted to continue Trump’s unilateral executive control over American trade policy.

The first of the two key House votes this week came on Tuesday night, when lawmakers narrowly voted to clear the way for resolutions directly challenging Trump’s tariff powers, as Reason‘s Jack Nicastro detailed. That was followed by a vote on Wednesday to disapprove of tariffs on Canadian imports—the first of what could be several similar resolutions brought to the floor in the coming weeks and months.

Opponents of the tariffs technically won both votes, thanks to a small faction of Republicans who broke ranks. But the margins were so thin that a presidential veto seems inevitable and likely insurmountable.

“This is a fruitless exercise and a pointless one, and I’m disappointed in it,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) said shortly after the second vote.

If it were a pointless exercise, the blame does not lie with the six Republicans who voted to end the tariffs on Canada. It lies with Republicans like McClintock.

“I remain a tariff skeptic. I believe that free trade is the surest path to a nation’s prosperity,” McClintock said in a statement on Tuesday, before adding that “it would be unwise to alter the status quo until we know the full scope and implications” of the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on the tariffs.

That’s not the approach that suggests Congress is a coequal branch of government. It is, however, an easy excuse to avoid voting for your beliefs.

Few other Republicans said it as openly as McClintock did, but he’s hardly the only coward in the crowd. The “baseline House Republican position” is tariff skepticism, an unnamed administration official told Politico on Wednesday.

That makes a lot of sense, because you don’t have to be an economist to be a tariff skeptic at this point. Consider the amount of bonkers tariff-related news that happened just this week:

• Trump admitted he placed tariffs on Switzerland—tariffs that are ostensibly a response to a “national emergency”—because he was grumpy about how the country’s “prime minister” spoke to him on a phone call. (Switzerland has no prime minister.)
• Ford said it plans to spend an extra $1 billion this year due to tariffs on imported aluminum, which is pretty essential if you’re in the business of building cars.
• Goodyear announced that it expects to lose $175 million to tariffs this year due to tariffs, and that it would cut 450 jobs to offset some of those costs.
• The Congressional Budget Office reported that American consumers are bearing roughly 95 percent of tariff costs.
• Republican leaders reportedly tried to sway Rep. Don Bacon’s (R–Neb.) vote on a tariff matter by promising tailored tariff relief to businesses in his district.

Let’s dwell on that last item for just a moment. Faced with a possible Republican revolt over tariffs, the White House was reportedly trying to cut deals to reduce tariffs for certain parts of the country while maintaining them broadly.

First and foremost, that’s an admission that tariffs are being paid by American businesses and consumers (otherwise, there would be no relief to be offered).

“Reports of tariff carve-outs offered to win votes against the tariff resolution and of discussions about rolling back the steel and aluminum tariffs are both clear signs the Trump administration is increasingly aware of the damage its signature tariff policy is doing,” noted Erika York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation.

Second, it reveals what little regard the executive branch has for Congress. The Constitution vests trade and taxing power with the legislative branch. Trump’s use of emergency powers to set tariffs on imports from Canada (and lots of other places) is subject to serious constitutional questions. But even against that backdrop, the administration views Congress as caring so little about its power that lawmakers can be easily bought off.

In fact, the reality is worse. Congress is so supine that most lawmakers don’t even need to be bought off. Republican leaders spent months trying to avoid a direct vote on tariffs—Johnson even borrowed a tactic from former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to do that—and then overwhelmingly caved to Trump when the moment arrived.

This week’s tariff votes were technical things. The first was a vote on some arcane procedural maneuvers, and the second was a joint resolution disapproving of an emergency declaration. The nuts and bolts of legislating are rarely thrilling at that level.

But in a very real sense, these were two votes where lawmakers were asked whether they even want to have a role in governing the country. Is this a republic with a duly elected legislature that exercises constitutional power independent of the executive branch? Or are lawmakers there merely to rubber-stamp any executive action—even foolish and obviously harmful ones, and even when the supposed national emergency is obviously a pretext and nothing else?

With a few exceptions, Republicans failed that test this week. The cowardice of “tariff skeptics” erodes the republic.

The post The Cowardice of the Republican 'Tariff Skeptics' appeared first on Reason.com.

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As Steven Calabresi notes, this is the tenth anniversary of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. The American Enterprise Institute hosted a two-day conference on his work and his legacy featuring scholars, judges, former clerks, and family members. On the second day, I participated in a panel focused on originalism and textualism. Other panels focused on such topics as the separation of powers, religious liberty, and administrative law.

The video of the first day can be found here.

The second day can be found here.

The overall agenda is here. The event was co-hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The post AEI's Conference on Scalia's Legacy appeared first on Reason.com.

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The article is here; from the Introduction:

John Stuart Mill continues to stir trouble in the twenty-first century. Nowhere is Mill’s liberal legacy more fiercely contested than in academia, where scholarly opinion ranges from something approaching idolatry to icy disapproval. Heterodox Academy invokes Mill as a leading light, with Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves publishing an abridged version of On Liberty (entitled All Minus One) as a manifesto for the movement. Other scholars have tried to “update” Mill for a new era by adapting his notion of “harm” to include psychological and civic harm. Still others dismiss Mill as an engineer of and apologist for empire, another hypocritical nineteenth-century liberal who supported freedom for the metropole while advocating despotism for the colonial other.

How to reconcile the various versions of Mill—liberal apostle, Romantic utilitarian, faithful servant of the East Indian Company? The volume of Mill scholarship may hinder any effort to answer the question more than it helps: It is now so vast that it seems impossible to master without the help of artificial intelligence: Even if we restrict the topic to Mill and freedom of expression, JSTOR alone houses some 6,000 books and articles that mention Mill and free speech, enough to intimidate even the most energetic reader. The prospect of saying something new about Mill is perhaps yet more daunting.

To their credit, Drs. Christopher Barker and Fara Dabhoiwala have recently paved a fresh pathway through Mill’s oeuvre, attempting to explain why Mill did not extend his full-throated support for free speech to what he termed “barbarous” countries. Why, they ask, did Mill insist that colonial Indians, for instance, did not deserve the right (or privilege) of free speech? While copious research has been devoted to Mill’s arguments on free speech and to his opinions on empire, surprisingly little has been written on the intersection of the two.

The problem, however, is that the query on India, as posed, est une question mal posée, a complex question that assumes the conclusion and then seeks to explain it. Barker’s claim, for instance, that “Mill consistently supports East India Company (EIC) policy restricting publicity and debate in British India” is belied by a more sensitive examination of the evidence. Dabhoiwala’s forays down the documentary trail in his new book, What Is Free Speech?, are even more misleading. The real question is how two respected scholars could have limned such skewed portraits of Mill.

The post Journal of Free Speech Law: "John Stuart Mill and Colonial India: Liberalism, 'Barbarism,' and Free Speech," by Randy Robertson appeared first on Reason.com.

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The article is here; some excerpts:

One of the greatest privileges of being a federal judge is the honor of presiding over a naturalization ceremony. I do it every year in May, to celebrate the anniversary of my own naturalization in May 1982.

I wasn’t born in the United States. I didn’t enter this world as an American. But I wake up every morning thanking God that I will leave this world as an American.

I like to say that I’m Taiwanese by birth, Texan by marriage. But most importantly, I’m American by choice.

If you’ve never attended a naturalization ceremony, there’s nothing more inspiring. People from all around the world come together in one room, for one purpose—to become Americans….

In a nation of over 300 million Americans, we’re bound to disagree on virtually every issue under the sun. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that….

We’ve all heard the maxim, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” … [But i]f you truly detest what someone says, why on Earth would you want to defend their right to say it—never mind defend it to the death?

Do you know anyone that altruistic? I don’t.

So if the statement makes any sense, it must be because it’s not altruistic at all. In fact, it’s quite self-interested. In fact, I would say that it’s self-interested in at least three distinct ways. With your indulgence and patience, I’ll spend a few moments examining each one.

First: On any given issue where people disagree, you may well be right—and those who disagree with you may well be wrong. But you could always be better.

Or put it another way: You may be right. But you should also want to win. And the way to maximize your chances of winning is to constantly expose yourself to competing viewpoints—and to do so as vigorously and frequently as possible….

[Second, i]n any particular disagreement, you may well be right. But you also could be wrong.

And you need to be okay with that. Because if your goal is not to soothe your ego, but to discover the truth, then you need to be prepared to be wrong at any given moment, on any given issue….

[Third,] regardless of whether you’re ultimately right or wrong on a particular issue, I would submit that respecting disagreement will make your life much better. It will also make the world a far more pleasant place to live….

The post Journal of Free Speech Law: "Cancel Culture and the Constitution: Three Reasons Why We Should Embrace Free Speech," by Judge James Ho appeared first on Reason.com.

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