Category: reason

When the US District Court of Central California ordered Apple to assist the FBI in unlocking a phone that beloged to one of the San Bernadino shooters, CEO Tim Cook announced that the company would oppose the order. “For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe,” Cook wrote in a statement. “We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.”

The Department of Justice filed a motion on Friday to compel Apple to comply.

There’s another way that customers can protect their private communications from the government—and Apple: Use proper encryption tools.

Reason TV recently put together a handy guide for how to chat anonymously online:

View this article.

Americans think that addressing human trafficking should be a “high” or “top” priority for the government, according to public opinion research commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department. In a survey of some 2,000 American adults, 80 percent said they have “some” or “a lot” of concern about human trafficking in America and 51 percent think that thwarting it should be a government priority. 

Only 45 percent of those surveyed said they have “some” or “a lot” of concern about U.S. prostitution. 

The research was conducted in the spring of 2014 and released as part of a large report on “legislative, legal, and public opinion strategies that work” to combat sex and labor trafficking. The first two sections of the report examined state strategies, arrests, and prosecutions for human-trafficking offenses from 2003 through 2012. The third section was aimed at identifying “what the public knows, thinks, and feels about human trafficking,” as well as “factors that may cause people to change the way they think about and engage with the issue.”

This section is especially interesting because—based on both the questions asked and the way researchers discuss responses—you can see how the federal government prefers to frame the issue of human trafficking and what rhetorical ploys they’re hoping will catch on. For instance, most survey respondents had “a solid understanding that human trafficking is a form of slavery,” the researchers state, brandishing this idea—human trafficking is modern slavery—as simple fact rather than an emotionally charged frame. 

Overall, the public still holds many “incorrect beliefs about human trafficking,” researchers say.

Many of these “incorrect beliefs,” however, describe what were previously (and in many places still are) common and legally accepted notions about human trafficking: that it is “another word for smuggling immigrants,” that it “always requires threats of or actual physical violence,” and that it “requires movement across state or national borders.” Others are only “incorrect” if you use an incredibly expansive definition of human trafficking (i.e., one that includes all prostitution as sex trafficking).

For instance, researchers note with seeming dismay that while most people (73 percent) say human trafficking is widespread or occasional in the United States, few believe it is widespread in their own states or communities. But there is no evidence to suggest that human trafficking is “widespread” anywhere in America, let alone in every community. The majority of these people are probably correct.  

The report also cautions that “the public has not made the connection between how their own attitudes and behaviors can either help or hinder the movement against human trafficking.” Yet it offer no further information about what this alleged “connection” is. 

Republicans, men, and whites were the least likely to be concerned about human trafficking in America or to say it should be a government priority. Democrats, older adults, racial minorities, and women were the most likely to be concerned and to want the government to take action. Meanwhile, “sex related behaviors” such as having visited a strip club or watched porn within the last year corresponded to greater knowledge about human trafficking but less concern and less belief that it should be a government priority.

The researchers recommended “public awareness campaigns directed toward reticent groups, which includes males, whites, Republicans, those that consume pornography, and those that visit strip clubs.”

Other messages the government would like people to take away include that that people “who knowingly enter prostitution can still be trafficked” (73 percent of respondents agreed to this) and that helping a minor engage in prostitution is always sex trafficking (78 percent concurred). 

Has the media narrative shifted when it comes to certain types of drug users? While it’s increasingly common to find news reports describing heroin and opioid use as an “epidemic,” a “plague,” and even “an apocalypse,” media are also paying attention to what a new type of “user” looks like, and have adjusted their moral panic accordingly. 

Overall, coverage of U.S. heroin use inflates the scope of the problem by failing to provide relevant context. Americans use drugs like cocaine and hallucinogens at higher rates than heroin, there are still less than a million current heroin users in the U.S., and more Americans died from alcohol-induced causes than heroin and opioids combined in 2014, to provide some perspective. 

But a “new face of heroin” is shifting the discourse on drug addicts in the media. Since introduced by ABC 20/20 in 2010, the “young, middle-class, white” American heroin addict has captured much media attention, and it’s become accepted as truth that middle-class, suburban youth are now heroin’s biggest customer. The drug addicts du jour are no longer so “other”—neither the poor, urban blacks that fueled crack cocaine panic nor the poor, rural whites of methamphetamine lore. They’re “our sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters,” they’re community members. As one father told The New York Times in 2015, “[heroin users are] working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom—they are my daughter.”

This new (white) face of drug use has led to white families and politicians seeking a “gentler approach to the war on drugs,” The New York Times recently noted. And indeed, there’s some truth to the idea that shifting media coverage of who is using heroin has led to more empathetic responses from law-enforcement leaders and politicians, at least in terms of how they talk about this issue. Increasingly, town halls are being held to discuss how to compassionately combat the “heroin epidemic.”

But has the new, empathetic tone of the coverage and conversation around opioid users actually translated into more humane public policy? Not quite.  

Over the past few years, many states have passed legislation that either requires law enforcement to carry overdose-reversing drugs, such as Narcan, or increases access to these types of drugs with the hope that the number of overdoses will decrease. Yet there are no examples of states decreasing penalties for possession of heroin. And while it appears that law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges are at least talking about being able to use more discretion when handling heroin cases, few statistics are available to see if this talk has translated into action. 

Plus—as with every victim-centered narrative—someone or something has to be blamed. In the case of heroin, the perpetrators have become both the dealer and the drug itself. 

It seems natural that this has begun to happen. When people hear that epidemics, tsunamis, and apocalypses are sweeping through their communities and preying upon community members, it makes sense that they want to blame someone and to “get tough.” Indeed, that’s been the typical response to past perceived drug epidemics, from crack to club drugs. Now we’re beginning to see the same sort of reactionary, tough-on-crime response when it comes to the sale of heroin, although perhaps even more severe than in decades past.

Specifically, we’re starting to see states enact tougher penalties for heroin dealers and “traffickers.” For example, in 2014, Louisiana enacted a law that requires a 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for individuals convicted of selling any amount of heroin. Recently, the inflammatory Republican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, called for the state to bring back the guillotine for drug traffickers.

In many more states, prosecutors are routinely charging individuals who sell heroin to someone who later overdoses and dies with murder, manslaughter, and homicide, though these statutes were rarely used in this way before this heroin “epidemic” started. And other states, such as New Hampshire, Delaware, and New York, are considering legislation that allows murder or homicide charges for these crimes.

Already we’re seeing repercussions from these changes. News stories are popping up at least weekly about individuals who have been convicted of murder, manslaughter, and other violent offenses for selling heroin to individuals who overdosed and died. Here are some examples from the past two weeks alone: 

• In Louisiana, the boyfriend of a woman who died from a heroin overdose was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. 
• In Wisconsin, a man was convicted of first-degree reckless homicide for selling heroin to a woman who gave some to a man who overdosed and died in 2014. 
• In Ohio, a 20-year-old man plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in prison for selling heroin to a woman who overdosed and died. 
• In Tennessee, a 26-year-old man plead guilty to attempted second-degree murder for the heroin overdose death of his girlfriend.

Even more startling, a California doctor was just convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison in connection with the prescription pill overdose deaths of three of her patients. This is the first example in the United States of a doctor being convicted of murder for prescribing medication that patients subsequently fatally overdosed on, and it sets a dangerous precedent.

As these examples show, the narrative surrounding victims may lead to leniency from law enforcement and judges for users, but tough-on-crime policies are still in full swing when it comes to other heroin offenses. And while we wait for media and politicians to sober up, the results of these policies will prove just as unjust as those from previous moral panic related to the war on drugs.

The U.S. and Cuba have finally reached an agreement to lift the ban on direct commercial flights.

Since 2014, when the two countries first began the process of normalizing their relationship, the only way to travel has been on a chartered flight. By next fall, Americans will be able to purchase direct commercial flights to the island, which is just 90 miles from Key West.

So what’s life been like in Cuba for the past half century? In 2009, Michael Moynihan sat down with Gorki Águila, leader to the Cuban-punk-band Porno Para Ricardo, to talk about free speech under communism.

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Donald Trump has backed off from his charge that the Bush administration lied the country into war against Iraq, telling a CNN town-hall broadcast Thursday night that he doesn’t know why Bush invaded. “I’m not talking about lying. I’m not talking about not lying,” he said. “No one knows why we went into Iraq.”

Still, whether George W. Bush lied or not, “it was a horrible decision,” Trump said—perhaps “the worst decision any president has made in the history of this country.” 

Trump’s shameful wimping out under firm questioning from a voter may reflect troubles in the polls, writes Sheldon Richman. Trump was campaigning in South Carolina, where George W. Bush and anything military are popular. But it’s a blow to the badly needed public discussion of the disastrous war. As for Trump, who seems willing to take whatever position serves his purpose at the moment, we now know that he told radio host Howard Stern on September, 11, 2002, six months before Bush started the war, that he favored the mission. Asked by Stern if he approved of the coming invasion, Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so,” adding, “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

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There were more than a few reasons for a libertarian (or anyone) to dislike Jeb Bush: his consistent support for his brother George W. Bush’s administration, his aggressive backing of awful government surveillance programs, his general air of hawkishness, and the easy, entitled comfort with which he slipped into his place as the early favorite of the Republican party establishment. Jeb Bush and his supporters stood for continuity with the GOP under his brother, and all that was wrong with it.

As the race started, I was prepared to dislike him intensely—and yet I somehow developed a soft spot for him, a kind of sympathy, and a respect for the campaign he ran.

Much of that respect stemmed from the fact that, at least early one, Jeb Bush was clearly trying to run a campaign based on policy proposals. Like every Republican, he put out an absurd tax plan based on a fantasy of how cutting taxes works, but he also outlined plans to reform the regulatory state, to overhaul the entitlement system, and a set of ideas on how to reform government hiring and contracting processes, and restrain spending—along with a number of other proposals. Some of these ideas were stronger than others, but they were honest, earnest ideas about how to govern and make policy.

Jeb Bush wanted to be president. But he didn’t seem to want to run for president. His initial campaign strategy was described, more than a little unfortunately, as “shock and awe”—the idea was that he would win in a walk after a show of power.

As in Iraq, that strategy didn’t exactly work out, in part because of the breadth of the GOP field, and in part because of the entrance of Donald Trump. Trump seemed to delight in attacking Bush, in bullying his wonkier, more thoughtful competitor, and for most of the race, Bush struggled to respond effectively. Partly that was because Bush didn’t have the killer instinct attacking Trump required, and partly because Bush seemed to regard Trump as a joke candidate who didn’t need to be dignified with engagement. That was a mistake, but it was a telling one—and one that, to me at least, helped humanize Bush.

Bush didn’t want to stoop to Trump’s level, didn’t want to play Trump’s game, and, fundamentally, didn’t really want to engage in the awful, ridiculous business of campaigning for president. Some of that was an undeserved sense of entitlement, but some of that, I think, was an abiding sense that the campaign circus was silly and undignified, a vulgar reality show contest. And Bush never really wanted to play the game. That Bush so obviously didn’t relish the daily campaign fights, that he clearly didn’t enjoy the stupidity and spectacle, was a big part of what I appreciated about him.

It’s true, of course, that if Bush had been the frontrunner, and won the race in a walk as he initially hoped, I probably would have liked him less. His ineffectiveness made it easier to like him, because the bad parts of his campaign never really represented a threat. And yet I also have to admit that the campaign that Jeb Bush would have preferred is one that, after watching the Trump show for the last several months, I would have preferred too—a contest of issues and ideas and more or less honest arguments about policy and governance. Maybe Bush would have lost that contest too, ultimately, but it’s one that would have served the country, and the Republican party, better. 

Bush announced tonight that he is suspending his campaign. At this point, I’m not that sorry to see him go. But I will miss the smarter, calmer, less spectacular race that, in its best moments, his campaign seemed to represent. 

Donald Trump will win the South Carolina Republican primary, according to multiple news organizations. Just 1 percent of the vote is in, but Fox News, CNN, and NBC have all called Trump the winner of the contest.

The final tally isn’t in yet, but it looks likely that Trump’s win will be smaller than the 10-point-plus lead he’d posted in some polls leading up to the race.

Trump’s win, combined with his strong showings in both Iowa, where he came in second, but garnered more votes than any GOP candidate in history save for the victor, Ted Cruz, and New Hampshire, where he easily beat the competition, makes it clear that Trump is a dominant force in the GOP primary race.

Indeed, Donald Trump is by any measure the clear favorite to win the GOP nomination.

He leads in national polls, and no GOP candidate who has won both New Hampshire and South Carolina has failed to go on to win the nomination. Trump has effectively taken over the Republican party.

In the short term, then, the most pressing question is how his rivals respond. Jeb Bush, whose campaign has disappointed throughout the race, is on track to post a disappointing fourth place finish. It seems quite probable—though not certain—that he will drop out of the race in short order.

That leaves Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are expected to finish in second and third place, as Trump’s main challengers. Both are focused most on becoming Trump’s sole challenger, and consolidating the anti-Trump support in the party, and so both are likely to intensify attacks on each other, as well as on Trump. The GOP race, already rough in tone, is likely to get even more raucous.

Cruz and Rubio will have a tough time, though, with history against them, the near certainty of fierce mudslinging, and Trump’s frontrunner momentum propelling his campaign. At this point both are facing uphill battles—and Rubio in particular looks like a long-shot to win.

Which means that, in the longer term, the Republican party had better begin to reconcile itself to the likely outcome of the primary race, and start seriously thinking about what it means that the GOP has become the Party of Donald Trump. 

Washington, D.C.’s new streetcar will finally—allegedly—open for service on February 27. After years of cost overruns, missed deadlines, and project mismanagement, the 2.2 mile-line is finally set to begin carrying passengers up and down H Street. But to save on operating costs, it’ll have fairly limited service, running just six days a week and once every 15 minutes.

The building of the D.C. streetcar has been a long drawn out saga, and an embarrassment for the District Department of Transportation. The project missed its initial opening date by more than three years, and its total cost has soared, surpassing the $200 million mark. Recently deceased former Mayor Marion Barry put it best in 2014: The streetcar “was ill-planned, ill-thought-out, ill-engineered, ill-everything.”

If D.C. officials knew more about the long history of streetcars in the city, perhaps they never would have attempted such a project. When the last streetcar stopped running in D.C. in 1962, an editorial in The Washington Post summed up the general mood: “There’s not a single redeeming thing that can be said about streetcars…”

Local historian John DeFerrari has a new book out recounting that history, which is titled Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C. I sat down with him recently to discuss:

Looks like Nevada isn’t feeling the Bern. Hillary Clinton appears to have won the state’s Democratic caucus.

With about 70 percent reporting, Clinton has 52.2 percent of the vote, and Bernie Sanders has 47.7 percent. CNN has projected that Clinton will ultimately win the caucus. 

Nevada, a much more demographically diverse state than either Iowa (where Clinton edged out barely head of Sanders in a virtual tie) or New Hampshire (where Sanders won decisively), and as a result, the Clinton camp had long considered it a “firewall” state where Clinton was highly likely to win, and in doing so put a stop to any momentum on Sanders’ part.

Clinton beat Barack Obama in the Nevada caucus in 2008, and campaign manager Robby Mook, who engineered that victory and a young lieutenant in Clinton’s campaign apparatus, was expected to make a similar push this time around. 

But over the last week or so, it became increasingly unclear whether that firewall would hold, as most indicators suggested that the Democratic race in the state was in a dead heat. 

Overall, the results do little to change the state of the Democratic race. The state’s 35 electoral delegates will be split between the two candidates, with Clinton taking home the larger share but not enough to make a lot of difference in the long run. Clinton is still the overall favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, though, as Nate Silver suggests, perhaps only narrowly. 

Clinton’s margin of victory here is not as close as in Iowa, where Clinton lost a 30 point lead before squeaking out a victory. This was a test for her campaign, and she passed it.

Yet even still, the anxiety about the race in the final hours is telling. The uncertainty of this victory as the caucus approached suggests not only that her campaign had overestimated the strength of her firewall, but that they may have overestimated the strength of their candidate as well. 

The Sanders campaign confirmed a photo from the Chicago Tribune archives depicting a young man struggling as cops drag him way was indeed Bernie Sanders when he was a student at the University of Chicago.

Sanders is making a lot of out of his civil rights activism in the 1960s as a reason Democrats should support him in the 2016 presidential primary. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” said Jane Sanders, Bernie’s wife, while responding to perceived attempts by Hillary Clinton “to cast him as not having much of a civil rights record.”

A picture may be worth a thousand words but the 1994 crime bill, which set in motion many of the “law and order” policies that have contributed to the problems of mass incarceration and criminalization of marginalized communities in the last two decades, was far longer than a thousand words. Sanders, a member of the House of Representatives at that time, voted for the bill, which was supported by Hillary Clinton and signed into law by her husband Bill.

And the 1994 crime bill wasn’t the first time Sanders adopted political positions that aligned with the interests seeking to expand the police industrial complex. When he ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981, he received the support of the city’s police union. I am, in fact, unaware of any public statement made by Bernie Sanders to acknowledge the role police unions play in perpetuating problems in the criminal justice system, one of the (oft underreported) lynchpins of the Black Lives Matter critique of police violence.

The Economist covers Sanders’ most recent efforts to appeal specifically to African-American Democrats—he’s enlisted the help of actor Danny Glover and rapper Killer Mike and launched a tour of historically black colleges and universities. The idea that members of any demographic group should vote the same way denies marginalized people agency, marginalizing them even further. There is, however, a widely understood racial disparity in the criminal justice system. And while Sanders and Clinton may acknowledge that racial disparity, their policy proposals are similarly bereft of an analysis that could actually dismantle the system of police violence. Victims of that system know this no matter how many pictures or endorsements come out.