Daily Archives: 30 November 2017

Showcase Potential

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Brussels is worried, and we should be, too, but for different reasons.  The People’s Republic of China is gaining influence in eastern Europe, and it’s doing it with one of my favorite tactics: international trade as a national policy tool.

In Hungary it is hailed as the “Eastward Opening.” Serbian authorities see it as the glue in a “reliable friendship”, while the Polish government describes it as a “tremendous opportunity.” Yet the 16+1, a grouping of 16 central and eastern European countries led by China, receives more caustic reviews in leading EU capitals, with diplomats fearing it could be exploited by Beijing to undermine union rules and take advantage of growing east-west tensions in the pact itself.

The catalyst for the group is China’s ability to finance and build the roads, railways, power stations and other infrastructure that some poorer central and eastern European countries need. But the scope of its operations has spilled over into overtly political and strategic areas, breeding mistrust among some of the western European powers that dominate the EU’s agenda.

The Financial Times piece at the first link is well worth the read, but the quoted paragraphs are the sum of it.

We should be worried, but not because Europe—the EU—is beginning to lose the contest for the hearts and minds of central and eastern Europe to the PRC, even as it’s beginning to lose the contest for the geography to an aggressively acquisitive Russia.   We should be worried because we’re not taking advantage of the opportunity the People’s Republic of China’s moves in eastern Europe presents us.   This is a contest we cannot lose, were we to enter it at all.

The way we should enter this contest is two-fold, and one of those folds also would serve to counter, and to roll back, the gains being made by that empire-seeking, domineering Russia.  One fold is to engage with eastern Europe—all of those 16, but not the +1—economically through international trade.  We should be busily pursuing free trade agreements with those 16—and contra President Donald Trump, we should be working toward a regional free trade agreement involving the 16 nations.  And Great Britain.  True enough, central Europe also is the heart of the EU, and that would complicate trade agreements, but that shouldn’t stop us from pursuing, separately and in parallel, such arrangements with the nations of eastern Europe.

There’s nothing like free market competition to increase the prosperity of the citizens involved, and so the nations involved, and from that, showcasing—again—both the fatal weaknesses of centrally planned economies in contrast with free markets, and the power of individual liberties and responsibilities for each citizen compared to the stultifying “security” of Big Government doing for the citizens, while firmly controlling what Big Government will allow those same citizens to do on their own.

The other fold is a mutual defense arrangement, much like NATO although separate from and in addition to it, with certain nations of eastern Europe.  As a first stage in setting this up, the treaty nations should include us, Great Britain, each of the Baltic States, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.  This arrangement would profit from a second stage that would include Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.  In addition to the ties generated by trade, the mutual defense imperatives would both move toward a strong barrier to Russian expansionism, and it would spur economic development as a happy side effect—to both the nations’ benefit and further to resist PRC inroads.

Warrantless Searches of Cell Phone Data

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The Supreme Court has a case before it, Carpenter v US (it heard oral argument Wednesday), concerning the 4th Amendment and the personal data of a defendant in the form of his cell phone location data.  The data were obtained from the cell phone company by police without first getting a search warrant.  There is precedent.

The high court reasoned then [in ’70s cases involving business records that banks and landline phone companies maintain about customer transactions and that the Supreme Court then reasoned police could seize without warrants] that individuals had voluntarily revealed their financial transactions or numbers they dialed to a third party—the bank or phone company—and so had forfeited any privacy interest in that information.

Smith v Maryland is illustrative of that general position.

There is growing criticism of that position.

allowing authorities to compile such granular data about an individual’s life, without a judicial warrant, no longer meets society’s “reasonable expectation of privacy”—the touchstone of the Supreme Court’s approach to constitutional limits on searches and seizures.

The objectors’ heart is in the right place, but their criticism is wide of the mark.  Compiling data—seizing a person’s personal information, which most assuredly includes where he situates himself from time to time—without a court’s order never has met society’s or that individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Consumers (the individuals, the particular members of society in question here) have a reasonable—indeed, a loud and vociferously stated—expectation of privacy concerning their personal data, and an equally loud and vociferously asserted ownership of those data held by third parties.  This is clearly demonstrated by the raucous and repeated hoo-raw raised every time a Facebook or a Twitter or a bank or a phone company gets caught using those personal data in ways to which the consumer-owner objects.

This is further and just as clearly established by the even louder hoo-raw raised every time one of those third parties is discovered to have inadequately protected those personal data entrusted to it by being hacked and those personal data stolen, and too often exposed.

The Supreme Court ruled erroneously then, and Carpenter is a good opportunity to correct that error.  The Court should have known at the time that revealing financial transactions or numbers they dialed to a third party was not at all a voluntary action.  The revealing was a mandatory condition of doing business with the bank or phone company, and there was no opportunity to go elsewhere—all the banks and phone companies required that: give up the financial data or the phone numbers, or don’t do business at all.  Take careful note: that the technology of the time—or today—means that [phone numbers] must be revealed to [phone companies] in no way makes the reveal voluntary: it’s still a wholly involuntary privacy exposure.  The data are owned in whole by the consumer; the third party is merely a caretaker, bound to protect the privacy and sanctity of these papers, and effects.

Prosecutors can indict ham sandwiches with their grand juries, and policemen can just as easily get search warrants, but do get the warrant.  Cell phone location data, financial transaction data, et al., all are part of the papers, and effects, of the individual.

Full stop.