Tag: in-the-news

From a decision yesterday by U.S. District Court Judge Dee Benton in Seaver v. Estate of Cazes (D. Utah):

This action arises from the death of G.S., a 13 year-old boy, caused by ingesting the illicit drug U-47700. The parents of G.S. have brought suit against the website that sold the drug to G.S., the service provider that created the network through which G.S. was able to access the website on the dark web (Tor), and the mail service that sent the drug to G.S. Plaintiffs have brought claims for strict products liability, negligence, abnormally dangerous activity, and civil conspiracy….

Tor provides software for enabling anonymous communication and transactions on the internet. To use the Tor Browser, an individual must visit Tor’s website to download the software. When downloaded, installed, and used by an end-user such as G.S., the Tor Browser automatically starts Tor background processes and routes Internet traffic through the Tor network, which relays traffic through a worldwide network. The Tor network provides security to a user’s location and Internet usage to anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

The Tor Browser operates through a group of volunteer-operated servers whose users employ the Tor network by connecting through a series of virtual tunnels, or relays, rather than making a direct connection. Tor estimates, on average, between 350,000 and 400,000 directly connecting users in the Unites States over the past three months. Information regarding the location of these users and relays is not publicly available. Via its website, Tor invites users to run a relay in order to help the network grow….

Plaintiff’s claims are barred by the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230 …. The CDA provides that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The CDA further provides that “[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.” Through these provisions, the CDA “creates a federal immunity to any state law cause of action that would hold computer service providers liable for information originating with a third party.” … The purpose of this immunity is to “facilitate the use and development of the Internet by providing certain services an immunity from civil liability arising from content provided by others.”

First, Tor qualifies as an interactive computer service. An “interactive computer service” is “any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet….” 47 U.S.C. § 230(f)(2). Tor fits this definition squarely because it enables computer access by multiple users to computer servers via its Tor Browser.

Second, Plaintiff seeks to hold Tor liable for information regarding the illicit drug U-47700 that G.S. was able to access through the Tor Browser. In other words, Plaintiff seeks to treat Tor as the “publisher or speaker” of third party information—”a result [the CDA] specifically proscribes.”

Third, the content that provides the basis for liability here—information regarding U-47700 and the ability to purchase it on the dark web—was not created by Tor. Rather, a third party provided the information and G.S. accessed it through use of the Tor Browser. “A service provider must ‘specifically encourage[ ] development of what is offensive about the content’ to be ‘responsible’ for the development of offensive content. Plaintiff has not alleged that Tor played any part in the creation of the content accessed by G.S.

All of Plaintiff’s claims are state law causes of action that would hold Tor, an internet service provider, liable for information originating with a third party. Those claims are barred by the CDA. Accordingly, Plaintiff’s claims against Tor are dismissed.

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Drug-sniffing dogs in states that have legalized marijuana should be worried about their job security in light of a decision that the Colorado Supreme Court issued yesterday. Confirming the 2017 judgment of a state appeals court, the justices said an alert by a dog trained to detect marijuana as well as other drugs no longer provides probable cause for a search in Colorado, where possessing an ounce or less of cannabis has been legal for adults 21 or older since 2012. Furthermore, the court ruled in Colorado v. McKnight, deploying such a dog itself counts as a search and therefore requires probable cause to believe a crime has been committed.

The case involved Kevin McKnight, who in 2015 was pulled over in Craig, Colorado, by Cpl. Bryan Gonzales, ostensibly for failing to signal a turn. Gonzales had been following McKnight because of behavior he deemed suspicious: He saw McKnight’s pickup truck parked the wrong way in an alley near an apartment complex as a man stood by the passenger door. Although Gonzales “saw no behavior consistent with an exchange or transaction,” he followed the truck to “a residence where police had found drugs almost two months earlier, and it remained parked there for approximately fifteen minutes,” during which time no one left the house or the truck. When Gonzales stopped McKnight, he “recognized the passenger as someone who had used methamphetamine ‘at some point in the past,’ but he wasn’t sure how recently.”

Gonzales called Sgt. Courtland Folks of the Moffat County Sheriff’s Office, who arrived with Kilo, a dog trained to bark when he smells marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, or MDMA. Kilo barked at the driver’s door, prompting a search that discovered a pipe with methamphetamine residue in a storage compartment under the rear seat. After McKnight was convicted of possessing methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia, he appealed, arguing that Kilo’s barking could not justify a search and that police needed more evidence to use the dog in the first place. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed on both points, overturning his convictions.

The U.S. Supreme Court, whose Fourth Amendment reasoning the Colorado Supreme Court has largely followed in applying the state constitution’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” has long maintained that an olfactory sweep by a drug-detecting dog does not count as a search because it reveals only the presence of contraband, a fact that people have no legitimate privacy interest in concealing. The Court has also held that such a dog’s alert by itself is enough to justify a vehicle search, which requires probable cause but not a warrant (under the “automobile exception” to the warrant requirement).

As the Colorado Supreme Court observed, neither of those assumptions holds true any longer in Colorado. “Marijuana is not only decriminalized in Colorado, it is legalized, regulated, and taxed,” the court said. Furthermore, Colorado’s legalization initiative amended the state constitution to say that possessing an ounce or less of marijuana in public is “not unlawful and shall not be an offense under Colorado law.” Hence cannabis consumers “have a state constitutional right not guaranteed by the federal constitution.”

Since Kilo’s barking could have indicated nothing more than a legal quantity of marijuana, the court said, it did not provide probable cause for a search, even when combined with Cpl. Gonzales’ vague suspicions (and leaving aside all of the other reasons to question the accuracy of a police dog’s purported response to car odors). Since Kilo’s sniffing can reveal information about legal (but potentially sensitive) conduct, the court added, it qualifies as a search in itself.

“Because persons twenty-one or older may lawfully possess marijuana in small amounts, a drug-detection dog that alerts to even the slightest amount of
marijuana can no longer be said to detect ‘only’ contraband,” the majority said. “An exploratory sniff of a car from a dog trained to alert to a substance that may be lawfully possessed violates a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in lawfully possessing that item. Because there was no way to know whether Kilo was alerting to lawful marijuana or unlawful contraband, Kilo’s sniff violated McKnight’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Therefore, under state law, Kilo’s sniff was a search that had to be constitutionally justified.”

Since it wasn’t, the court reasoned, the sniff was illegal under Colorado’s constitution. So was the ensuing car search, meaning that the evidence it discovered should not have been admitted and McKnight should not have been convicted. “We are the first court to opine on whether the sniff of a dog trained to detect marijuana in addition to other substances is a search under a state constitution in a state that has legalized marijuana,” the justices noted, but “we probably won’t be the last.”

If Colorado police officers continue to deploy marijuana-detecting dogs, they will not be very helpful as an end run around privacy protections, since cops will need probable cause to justify the use of a tool that is supposed to provide probable cause but no longer does (except in conjunction with other evidence). In theory, a dog can be trained to stop alerting to marijuana, but it is not easy or cheap, and to be reliable a retrained dog requires periodic testing to show it continues to ignore pot. Alternatively, pot-sniffing dogs can be replaced by newly trained animals that are not taught to detect marijuana. Lest you think that the need for such expenditures means marijuana legalization is costing taxpayers money, note that drug dogs cost up to $10,000 each, or roughly what the government spends on a couple of pot busts.

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Telling stories for money should not require a government test and license in a country with a First Amendment, a federal judge in Georgia has ruled. The decision came as a result of a lawsuit challenging Savannah, Georgia’s past attempts to force tour guides to pay fees, pass tests, and get licenses before taking people around the city and saying things to them.

Judge William T. Moore, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, in his decision in Freenor v. Mayor and Aldermen of the City of Savannah, issued yesterday, concluded that the city had offered no reasonable justifications for its tour guide licensing scheme.

Savannah actually repealed the challenged law back in 2015, after the Institute for Justice (I.J.) filed this suit in 2014, but the case was not mooted by the law’s repeal since the suing tour guides and would-be tour guides also sought compensatory damages for harms that the law caused when it still existed.

A press release from I.J. spells out the pointlessness of the unconstitutional requirements which Savannah first put in place in 1978: “Tour guides who wanted this storytelling license had to pass a hundred-question multiple choice exam on Savannah history—even if they had no interest in discussing history on their tours. For instance, some tour guides focus on art and architecture or tell ghost stories.” Along with the written test, licensed tour guides also needed to pass a criminal background check and to provide notes from licensed physicians certifying their fitness to work as tour guides.

I.J. celebrates that this week’s Georgia decision continues a national trend toward squashing these sorts of unconstitutional occupational licensing laws:

Federal courts in Washington, D.C., and Charleston, South Carolina, have also struck down guide licenses in those cities in response to IJ litigation, and late last year Williamsburg, Virginia, repealed a similar licensing requirement to avoid a lawsuit. Only one similar licensing law—in New Orleans, Louisiana—has ever been upheld by a federal court.

Judge Moore found that the city’s claims of any threat to the safety or enjoyment of tourists from improperly tested tour guides were not proven, nor were any provable harms prevented by a criminal background check that was also part of the tour guide licensing scheme. “Ultimately, a handful of anecdotes is not sufficient to sustain the city’s burden to demonstrate that the tour guide licensing scheme actually serves its interests,” Moore wrote.

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According to his own text messages, a border patrol agent standing trial for hitting a Guatemalan migrant with his work vehicle harbored strong feelings against immigrants. Despite his objections, prosecutors hope to use his words against him in court.

AZCentral reports that Matthew Bowen worked as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent in Nogales, Arizona, when the incident occurred in December 2017. Bowen and others confronted a 23-year-old man suspected of jumping the border near a port of entry. As the man ran back towards the port of entry, Bowen sped behind him in his truck and struck him twice. Bowen’s vehicle came within inches of running the man over. The man survived the incident with abrasions to his hand and knees.

Bowen has been charged with depriving the man of his right to be “free from the use of excessive force” by someone acting under the color of the law. He’s also been accused of falsifying records after the incident. Bowen sent a text saying that he was trying to give the man “a little push” with his truck. After learning of the investigation into the incident, he later told the chief patrol agent that he was unaware of the force of the truck and whether or not he struck the man.

When Bowen’s case comes to trial in August, prosecutors hope to be able to use such text messages to show that Bowen’s actions were the result of intense bias and discrimination against immigrants.

In one message, for instance, Bowen refers to immigrants as “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire.” In another, he asks if President Trump will allow his fellow agents to “PLEASE let us take the gloves off.”

Bowen also sent a text message about the December 2017 incident which refers to the man he hit with his truck as a “human pit maneuver.” The person receiving this text message was a fellow Border Patrol agent named Lonnie Swartz. Swartz was acquitted in November 2018 after fatally shooting a Mexican teenager through the border fence.

Bowen’s defense team objected to the seizure and use of his text messages. In one document filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, federal prosecutors argued that Bowen’s text messages were directly relevant to the case and recommended that his motion to suppress the messages “be denied in full,” as was previously done by a magistrate judge.

This is not the first time Bowen displayed questionable behavior. He was tied to other misconduct incidents, including an unjustified search and tackling an immigrant without cause.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol received additional unwanted attention last year after 10-year veteran Juan David Ortiz of the Laredo sector confessed to kidnapping, assaulting, and killing several sex workers. That same year, two other agents in his sector, which saw the highest number of misconduct incidents, were accused of an unrelated homicide and a killing incident on the border involving immigrants.

Audits from the agency show that border patrol has long struggled with misconduct issues as well as creating a reliable system for documenting incidents.

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As the father to sons who are 25 and 17 years old, I love Millennials and Gen Z. But it’s getting harder and harder to feel sympathy for kids born between 1981 and 2012 (give or take).

It’s not all or maybe even mostly their fault. Much of the problem stems from the ways in which the media covers the plight of younger Americans, especially the supposedly catastrophic amount of student-loan debt they have taken on simply to get a college degree which is now, we’re told, a nearly meaningless piece of paper that no longer “automatically” guarantees admission to the “middle class.” A recent story in The Wall Street Journal exemplifies this approach. It’s titled “Playing Catch-Up in the Game of Life: Millennials Approach Middle Age in Crisis” and promises “New data show they’re in worse financial shape than every preceding living generation and may never recover.” Mostly, it highlights individuals and couples who have tons of student debt and, as a result, supposedly can’t buy houses, have kids, or even get married.

In fact, it’s far from clear that crude economics is driving, say, the reduction in fertility rates, which have been dropping for decades everywhere in the world and are tied to increases in female autonomy. And for all the talk about generational poverty, it’s not immediately clear that all is darkness. According to a Pew study in 2018, Millennial households now “match the highest household income for their age group.” Throw in higher rates of advanced education and the future actually looks promising. And it appears that Millennials may be better off in various ways than Gen X was at the same stage of life.

In any case, there is so much wrong with the narrative about student-loan debt that it’s hard to know where to start. In the first place, more people, including more low-income people, are going to college than ever before and college grads have much-higher lifetime earnings and much-lower unemployment rates than folks with just a high-school diploma, an associate’s degree, or a few years of college. As the economist Scott Winship has written, “If we’re counting rising student indebtedness on the debt side of the ledger, shouldn’t we count the value of the asset financed by the debt (human capital) on the asset side?” As important, despite the aggregate $1.5 trillion out there in student debt, the average and median amounts owed by individuals students are hardly breathtaking.

According to data from Lending Tree, for instance, about 70 percent of the Class of 2018 took out loans and their median monthly payment was $222. The average loan amount (which will be higher than the median) for graduates with debt was about $30,000. According to Pew,

The median borrower with outstanding student loan debt for his or her own education owed $17,000 in 2016. The amount owed varies considerably, however. A quarter of borrowers with outstanding debt reported owing $7,000 or less, while another quarter owed $43,000 or more.

So most borrowers are actually acting responsibly. College grads make about 80 percent more than high school grads, so taking on debt isn’t stupid. And even though college has been getting more expensive, the wage premium remains high enough that the number of years needed to recoup the price of college hasn’t increased for decades, according to work done by the New York Federal Reserve:

It’s extremely difficult to get straight answers about many aspects of education-related debt. Often, it’s not clear if the debt for a given year includes loans for grad school, including law school or medical school, which are not just much more expensive but also much more remunerative and optional. Ninety percent of law school grads borrow, for instance, and the average debt load is $127,000 for people attending private schools and $88,000 for those going to state schools. Three-quarters of med students take out loans that average around $200,000, but the typical doctor makes between $150,000 and $312,000 per year, so the debt isn’t particularly tough. Should we feel bad for lawyers and doctors?

It’s obviously preferable to graduate from college with little or no debt. But media accounts inevitably gravitate to people with eye-popping amounts of debt that are nobody’s fault but their own. Worse still, the reports rarely include any sort of detailed information that would allow a reader to get a better sense of the individual’s life choices. Yes, relatively cheap loans doubtless entice some people to go to college who wouldn’t if they had to pay higher interest rates (if student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings, interest rates—even those offered by the federal goverment, which disburses about 90 percent of student-loan dollars—would be much higher). But ultimately the borrower has to take responsibility for his or her actions. I say that as someone who paid his way through undergraduate and graduate school and sweated blood every time I signed for a student loan. Youth is a time of great folly, yes, but you know exactly how much you’re going to be paying back for exactly how long.

In The Wall Street Journal story, we meet a 32-year-old woman living in Chicago who “is a renter who is single and earns $75,000 a year [working for the city]. She also owes $102,000 in student loans and $10,000 in credit-card debt.” Her salary is actually kind of great, especially for someone her age. The median household income for Chicago is about $53,000 and the median per capita income there is $33,000. She’s got three times the average student debt, but we have no way of knowing where she went to college or whether there’s a grad degree tucked into that.

Making $75,000 a year breaks down to $6,250 a month. Assume she’s paying 33 percent in total taxes, that brings her monthly take-home pay to about $4,200. Assuming she’s paying 7 percent on her loans, she’s on the hook for about $1,200 a month, leaving $3,000 to cover rent, food, and everything else. That’s not great, but it’s doable. In real dollars, it’s about $20,000 more than I was bringing home in the mid-’90s when I started at Reason and lived in Los Angeles with a non-working spouse and one-year-old son. Does she have roommates? Why did she spend so much on college? Reading this story made me think of last year’s Time cover story on teachers who supposedly had to work two or three extra jobs because they’re “not paid for the work [they] do.” So much of household finance is tied to spending levels and those are never really discussed.

We also meet a thirty-something couple that “run a financial-advice website, whittling away at their combined student debt of $377,000.” What? One of them is a lawyer, so let’s assume that explains as much as $127,000 of the debt went pay for a private-school law degree. There’s still a quarter of a million dollars in student debt to account for. The story doesn’t provide any extenuating circumstances and, to be honest, I can’t imagine any that would explain such as situation other than really dumb choices. Should we as a society be ready to forgive such mistakes via universal debt relief programs proposed by politicians such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)? That seems like an insult and an outrage to everybody, parent and student alike, who scrimped and saved and went to schools they could afford.

In an AP story about Robert F. Smith, the billionaire who just announced he would pay off all the student debt of Morehouse College’s Class of 2019, we meet a 22-year-old finance major with an inexplicably and shockingly high amount of student debt: $200,000, an amount that would take him 25 years to pay off “at half his monthly salary, per his calculations.” When Smith made his pledge during Morehouse’s commencement, the student wept.

“I don’t have to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was shocked. My heart dropped. We all cried. In the moment it was like a burden had been taken off.”

Surely I’m not the only one who’s wondering how the hell someone—a finance major, of all people—ended up $200,000 in hock by graduation. Full list price for Morehouse is almost $50,000 a year, but the average net price is $32,000, after grants and scholarships are factored in. Even if he put all four years on loans, that should be $128,000, not $200,000. More to the point, who would do such a thing? The average net price of nearby Georgia State is $15,000. Borrowing $200,000 for a B.A. is simply inexplicable.

I’ve written often about how younger Americans are indeed being screwed by my own generation, the baby boomers. Old-age entitlements are a brutal form of generational warfare that systematically rob from the relatively young and poor and given to the objectively old and rich. The 2008 financial crisis has further beggared the young, who have also grown up in a century with lower-than-average economic growth (thank you, persistent deficit spending and massive national debt).

Older people in America have a lot of explaining to do, and we need to reform all sorts of policies that slow economic growth and direct all sorts of unearned wealth to people who don’t need it. But younger Americans—at least those who manage to royally screw up their finances by graduation day—also need to be held accountable.

 

 

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Unless you are a Washington obsessive you may have missed the news that bipartisan leaders of both houses of Congress are on the verge of agreeing—as soon as today—on a two-year budget deal that waves away the debt ceiling and lifts whatever spending caps that would theoretically go into effect if by some crazy chance the two parties can’t agree to spend more of your children’s money.

This quiet backroom negotiation between the House and Senate majority and minority leaders, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, is in stark contrast to the Tea Party–influenced budget/deficit/debt-ceiling wars of 2009–2014, which were animated by alarm at trillion-dollar deficits, unsustainable entitlements, and a national debt that had recently doubled.

Since those days, and despite the infusion of new fiscal hawks such as Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), the federal government has returned to trillion-dollar deficits, entitlements are even more unsustainable (with reforms nowhere visible on the horizon), and the debt has doubled once more. There is no appetite, from the president on down, for doing anything except spending more borrowed money, forever.

Forget last night’s petty Freedom Caucus (HFC) rebuke of co-founder Amash for saying out loud what many Republicans no doubt think about President Trump—this latest low-key budget travesty, and the smooth congressional sailing it will no doubt face, is reason enough for the once-vaunted bloc to pack it in. “We support open, accountable and limited government,” the HFC mission statement promised in 2015. But that directive gets less fun when the president’s a Republican, too.

The Freedom Caucus was also supposed to be a bulwark against executive-branch overreach and corruption—including enthusiasm for independent special counsels to investigate wayward administrations—but in the Trump era Chair Mark Meadows (R–N.C.) and Vice Chair Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) became two of the president’s barkiest attack dogs toward Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president’s gross behavior.

Mulvaney, himself one of nine co-founders of the Caucus, is a prime cautionary tale about the compromises of power. In March 2015, as I pointed out in this roadmap of GOP fiscal incontinence, Mulvaney

wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined: “The Republican Budget Is a Deficit Bust,” which argued that “There is no honest way to justify not paying for spending, no matter how often my fellow Republicans try.”

What was Mulvaney’s tune just 30 months later as a key economic-policy player in the Trump administration? “We need to have new deficits.”

Mission accomplished!

Stay tuned over the coming hours not just for the horrendous dollar amounts, but also the rank insincerity of supposed fiscal conservatives in claiming that, dang it, their hands are tied when it comes to limiting government.

“We’re all for trying to rein in spending, but at what cost?” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R–Ala.) told The Washington Post. “And I don’t think the president wants to rein in spending at the cost of national security.”

Politico‘s Jake Sherman put it best:

The transformation truly started in 2017 when the freedom caucus leadership abandoned spending restraint for the president. But now they’re caught up in the Republican Party. Not conservatism. If I told them in 2015 what they’d become in 2019, they wouldn’t believe me.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) May 21, 2019

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For those of us who live in Washington, D.C. and rely on public transportation, Unsuck DC Metro has been a dose of sanity in a world gone mad. The beloved Twitter account has long spotlighted train delays, broken escalators (of which there are many), false promises, and other problems.

For daring to bring a measure of accountability to an embarrassingly dysfunctional transit system, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or Metro, Unsuck DC Metro has now been doxed by a local media reporter for DCist.

The account’s owner was not happy. He had always valued his privacy.

“The whole anonymity thing started way back when this project started to get some traction,” Unsuck DC Metro told Reason in an interview. “I’ve always been generous with the press. If my anonymity bothers people, they don’t have to follow me.”

The formerly anonymous proprietor of the account mostly retweets other users’ pictures and comments about Metro malfeasance. Unsuck DC Metro has also called out specific Metro employees for bad behavior; two weeks ago, it posted a picture of an employee, a black woman, eating lunch on the train, which is a violation of Metro rules designed to keep the trains as clean as possible. The photo was taken by a World Bank employee, Natasha Tynes, who was subsequently accused of cruelly shaming a black person. The Twitter backlash against Tynes was so significant that the publisher of her upcoming book, They Called Me Wyatt, pulled out of the deal.

“Black women face a constant barrage of this kind of inappropriate behavior directed toward them and a constant policing of their bodies,” wrote Rare Birds Books in a statement. “We think this is unacceptable and have no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way.”

Tynes eventually apologized, to no avail.

Unsuck DC Metro also came in for criticism, but remained defiant. Then, on Monday, DCist‘s Rachel Kurzius published a long profile of Unsuck, titled “From Watchdog to Attack Dog: The Story of Unsuck DC Metro.” According to Kurzius, over the last 10 years, “the tenor of the Unsuck D.C. Metro account changed sharply. Service updates are mixed in with hostility and public shaming. The targets of his attacks—often low-level Metro employees or the riders themselves—don’t have access to the same large social media platform.”

Kurzius unilaterally decided that Unsuck’s anonymity was now forfeit, and identified him by name in the post. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Unsuck told Reason that anonymity was important to him because he has previously received intimidating messages from people who didn’t like his coverage.

“I didn’t get outright threats, but they were meant to intimidate,” he said.

I object to social media mobs in general, and thus I don’t agree with the decision to call out individual Metro employees—at least if the callouts include identifying details (like pictures of their faces). But it also seems vindictive to cancel Tynes’ book, and out Unsuck against his wishes.

For anyone who undervalues the Twitter feed, Unsuck has also filed an important lawsuit against the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority for failing to fulfill a public records request.

“Back in February, Metro came out with the results of their customer satisfaction survey, which is a phone survey, and I thought the results were kind of weird, so I asked for the questions to the survey,” said Unsuck. “They denied me, I appealed, then they sent me 29 pages, 28 of which were completely blacked out.”

Metro representatives also informed Unsuck that they wouldn’t respond to any more of his requests until he paid a $300 processing fee. The conservative legal group Judicial Watch is representing him in the suit.

As for the doxing and online hate, it isn’t going to make Unsuck do anything differently.

“When you bow to these woke scolds, they accept it as weakness,” he said. “Such miserable people.”

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It’s been quite a day for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Atlantic announced that Emanuel is coming aboard as a contributing editor to the venerable magazine’s “ideas” section. Meanwhile, ABC News announced it has hired Emanuel as a contributor. All within 48 hours of his leaving office.

The former Obama White House chief of staff has almost seamlessly transitioned to the next phase of his career: a sage political observer with his finger on the pulse of what 2020 Democrats need to do to defeat Trump. It’s completely predictable but still inexcusable for media outlets to hire him.

Besides the fact that Emanuel has been a mercenary politician his entire adult life, which should be disqualifying on its face, he should at the very least be blackballed from media gigs for his unrepentant and habitual violations of Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Under Emanuel’s leadership, the city government was notorious for stonewalling public records requests from news outlets and activists, most notably in the case of the 2014 fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police.

Police dash cam video clearly contradicted the police narrative that McDonald “lunged” at an officer with a knife, but the Emanuel administration sat on the footage for more than a year—an election year, it so happens—citing an ongoing investigation. The city settled with McDonald’s family for $5 million, but part of the agreement forbid the family from releasing the tape until the “investigation” was complete. Chicago only released the video after it lost a FOIA lawsuit brought by an independent journalist, who was later barred from the press conference where the video was first shown.

The fight over the McDonald tape was only the most high-profile instance of Chicago dragging its feet or wrongly denying public records requests. In 2015, an Illinois judge ruled, in response to a Chicago Tribune lawsuit, that Emanuel’s office illegally withheld emails and texts from Emanuel’s private devices regarding the city’s controversial red light camera program. In 2016, Chicago paid out $670,000 in public records lawsuits. In 2019, another judge ruled that the Emanuel administration owed the Tribune $387,000 in attorney’s fees over the lawsuit for his private communications. The total cost to taxpayers exceeded $1 million. Those communications, by the way, showed a number of people illegally lobbying Emanuel.

It’s no wonder that one of new Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s priorities is improving compliance with FOIA requests—”a marked reversal from outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting FOIs during his two terms,” The Washington Post notes.

Not content with shielding police records from public scrutiny, Emanuel also resisted, slow-walked, and tried to negotiate his way out of forcing the Chicago Police Department, and its politically powerful unions, to clean up its act in response to a damning Justice Department report. He’s now trying his hand at revisionist history, claiming in a New York Times op-ed that he successfully reformed the Chicago Police Department.

But as the Chicago Tribune editorial board wrote in a sharp-tongued rebuttal, “Wherever there was an escape hatch allowing him to avoid court oversight, Emanuel was lifting the lid.”

If national news outlets want to hire and promote a man who abetted lies about the fatal police shooting of a teenager, and who continues to spin that record, I suppose that’s their business, and their reputation.

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Around the globe, governments have attempted to legislate away the gender pay gap, designing systems intended to shame employers into improving pay for women. But these efforts have not always worked quite as well as some might hope.  

In 2006, for example, Denmark attempted to equalize pay between genders by forcing companies to disclose compensation data. Although it closed some of the difference in pay between genders, it didn’t eliminate the gap, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And in firms subject to the requirement, the result wasn’t that women were paid significantly more than they otherwise would have been; it was that men were paid less than they likely would have been, via smaller raises. Meanwhile, productivity at affected firms dropped by 2.5 percent.

So men and women were somewhat more equal—but firms produced less, and, statistically speaking, no one was better off. In one sense, the policy accomplished its primary goal, or part of it, anyway. But it’s far from an unqualified success.

Yet Kamala Harris now wants to replicate it, or something similar, but with an additional punitive component. In doing so, she is courting a variety of unintended consequences—and forcing a one-size-fits-all solution to a complex issue.

Not only does she want to force companies with over 100 people to disclose salary data by gender in order to get an “equal pay certification” from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an arm of the federal government that enforces workplace civil rights, she also wants to fine companies for discrepancies in pay.

If a company fails to prove that it meets the standards of equal pay, it would be fined 1 percent of its profits for every 1 percent of the gap between what men and women are paid. This proposal would require legislation from Congress, but if no legislation were to pass, Harris, as president, would implement similar standards for federal contractors working on projects worth more than half a million. Her campaign estimates that the fines would raise $180 billion over 10 years, which she says would be used to fund paid leave programs.

Harris, in other words, wants to micromanage private employer compensation in the name of equality, penalizing firms that don’t comply with her ideal. Which makes it exactly the sort of misguided idea you can expect from Harris, whose career and campaign have tended to combine hardline progressive politics with policies that emphasize punishment. (For much more on this, be sure to check out Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s feature on Harris in the forthcoming issue of Reason.)

There are plenty of things that could go wrong with a plan like this: For one, it might end up backfiring if firms responded to the threat of fines by avoiding hiring women for certain types of jobs. Overt discrimination would be prohibited, but with incentives to discriminate in place, and the threat of penalties looming, some firms would probably find a way, at least at the margins. It could also encourage firms to outsource jobs that might have gone to women, in order to keep them out of the reporting data.

Indeed, managing the particulars of the reporting would almost certainly be a headache, as it has been in the U.K., which has imposed its own disclosure requirement for companies of 250 or more. Those companies were ordered to report data on 14 different data points, but doing so proved onerous and difficult, and the agency in charge of collecting the data has been accused of negligence. In the U.K., the government was criticized for being too lax in its enforcement, but it’s easy to imagine an enforcement regime becoming unnecessarily burdensome as well.

Trying to determine exactly which jobs are comparable, and what other factors might be in play, is more art than science; legislation along the lines that Harris is proposing would probably result in the implementation of hard and fast rules that probably wouldn’t capture the complex reality of different types of employment and individual compensation decisions. Those rules, in turn, would probably end up creating the conditions for further rules and requirements, and a large bureaucracy built up around examining (and implicitly dictating) pay for large employers.

Big firms, meanwhile, would probably respond to such legislation by seeking to standardize compensation decisions, subjecting more and more workers to pre-determined pay rates and salary bands, rather like the pay scale the federal government uses.

The transformation wouldn’t happen overnight. But one-size-fits-all policies are the inevitable endgame for systems like the one Harris envisions. Instead of performance-based pay for individuals, employers would move to rote compensation schemes that treat people as anonymous groups while making little room for rewarding individual excellence or initiative.

That’s bad for employers who want to provide more for workers who achieve more, and bad for employees who want to take initiative in order to stand out. And, as seen in Denmark, it’s bad for the economy, which is already struggling with weak productivity growth.

It’s not that compensation equality is a bad ideal, necessarily, or that gender discrimination at the workplace is pure myth. But the circumstances and particulars are often more complex and difficult to pin down than simple headline numbers seem to suggest. Analyses like the one that went around earlier this year purporting to find pay discrepancies even larger than previously known are often deeply flawed and widely misinterpreted. At the individual firm level, things become even more complicated: Google, for example, was accused of systematically underpaying women, but when it looked at its salary data, it was men who were being paid relatively less. And advocates for a legislative approach to eliminating pay gaps tend to ignore or downplay the role of women’s choices: Even in Iceland—which last year put in place an equal pay law similar to what Harris proposes, and which already has one of the world’s smallest gender pay gaps—women tend to take significantly more paid parental leave than men. 

But Harris apparently prefers to ignore all of this in favor of a sweeping, uniform policy that probably wouldn’t fully accomplish her goals, but would almost certainly backfire in other ways. As she is wont to do, Harris is going all in on a flawed idea, consequences—intended or otherwise—be damned.

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So the Eighth Circuit held yesterday—correctly, I think—in Willson v. City of Bel-Nor:

[The ordinance] is content-based because whether a fabric is a sign or a flag—and whether it is prohibited by the Ordinance—depends on the “the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed.”

And the court also concluded that, even setting aside the content-based exception, the ordinance would likely be unconstitutional even under the more relaxed scrutiny applied to content-neutral restrictions:

The Ordinance’s expansive definition of a sign, combined with its strict sign restrictions, applies to a substantial amount of expressive conduct.  Willson offers examples of expressive conduct that are prohibited by the Ordinance:

– “tacking up a ‘Welcome Home’ banner on the garage” (“No sign shall be affixed to any … garage … ; [t]he following … types of signs are prohibited … any material that flutters”);

– “sticking an ADT Security window cling to the front window” (“[n]o sign shall be displayed from the interior of any window”);

– “displaying Christmas lights” (Ordinance 983 prohibits any “object … . used
to attract attention to an … event … by any means, including … colors,” and
“[i]llumination in any manner is prohibited”);

– tying a “Happy Birthday” balloon to a front door on the day of a birthday party (“The following materials … are prohibited … [t]he use of balloons”)….

Bel-Nor’s interests in traffic safety and aesthetic do not justify such a broad restriction of residents’ constitutionally-protected conduct. Ordinance 983 is overbroad and facially invalid because “the impermissible applications of the law are substantial when judged in relation to the statute’s plainly legitimate sweep.” …

Lastly, Ordinance 983’s severe restrictions do not “leave open ample alternative channels for communication of the information.” “While the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to employ every conceivable method of communication at all times and in all places, a restriction on expressive activity may be invalid if the remaining modes of communication are inadequate.”

“[R]esidential signs have long been an important and distinct medium of expression.” …  Due to the special significance of the right to speak from one’s own home, severe restrictions of this right do not afford adequate alternatives.

Thanks to Gene Summerlin for the pointer.

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