Monthly Archives: March 2020

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…but no cigar.  Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) has some thoughts on fixing the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its secret FISA Court.  He’s on the right track, but his ideas fall short.

Lee wants to fix the FISA Court and tighten the parameters under which it operates. This Star Chamber cannot be fixed; it must be disbanded and the sections creating and empowering it must be rescinded from the FISA altogether.

There remains a need to guard against and to respond to espionage and interference efforts, and there remains a need for that response to involve investigations of American citizens who might be involved in those foreign assaults.  There remains a need to keep many of our responses and investigations secret—for a time—so as not to tip off the targets of our investigations, whether they’re foreign or American.

Counterbalancing that is the even more crucial need to protect Americans’ individual liberties, including those being investigated.  Especially the latter need protection; they’ve not been shown to have done anything wrong, but public suspicions would ruin the reputations of those actually innocent.

Our present Article III courts already are well-versed in handling secret warrants where necessary for domestic criminal investigations and for sealing records until it’s useful to release them or after sufficient time has passed that their release will not harm an ongoing investigation.  FISA warrants can be handled here.

Many of Lee’s other ideas, with some adjustments, will work just fine in a sealed Article III court.

He wants to expand the role of an amicus in FISA warrant applications beyond warrants involving a novel or significant interpretation of law.

amicus should advocate for the privacy and civil liberties of the person targeted.

The role needs to be expanded further. This new amicus should overtly act as Devil’s advocate and seek to expose weaknesses in the warrant application with a view to getting the application denied. The target legitimately cannot be present, yet in most domestic criminal cases, the target has opportunities to contest the warrant, even if only after the fact.  Such a contest needs to be present with FISA warrants, as well.

Lee wants relevant agencies to be required to provide all information in their possession as part of the application, including any exculpatory evidence. The FBI Director and the Attorney General should be required to certify that this has been done, and there needs to be heavy sanctions applied to the agents, the Director and the AG if this requirement has been found, after the warrant’s submittal, to have gone unsatisfied. It’s almost never enough merely to punish the workers directly responsible; too often they acted improperly because they were actively allowed to or because they were permitted to by too lax supervision.

It’s critical that we take these kinds of measures in response to the failures of and abuses from the present FISA setup so that this sort of violation of United States citizens never happen again.

Tight Schedule

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Negotiations are in progress on the nature of the, primarily economic, relationship between Great Britain and the European Union now that the former has taken its leave of and independence from the former. The relationship being negotiated is primarily economic; although, law enforcement, judicial cooperation, foreign policy, security, and defense are under discussion, also.  The functional deadline for these negotiations is 31 December 2020, after which the Brits have said they’re done, deal or no deal.

Ten rounds of meetings are scheduled every three weeks from Monday, March 2, until October when a deal is desired.

Following which enacting legislation would need to be passed by both sides in order to bring the deal to life. “Most experts” think this is a tight schedule.

It need not be, though: the putative tightness of this schedule is directly and strictly a function of the degree of intransigence that will be exhibited by the EU’s negotiators.  I hold out no great expectations here; the EU has been operating in bad faith, using its position to discourage other dissatisfied nations from going out from the Union, ever since the Brits voted for sovereignty.

In this current round of negotiations, too, the Brits appear more serious than the EU.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened to accelerate [the schedule] further last week, saying the UK would end talks as early as June if negotiations had failed to progress by then.

It needn’t be a tight schedule, nor need it be “tightened” further. Again, that’s up to the continental Europeans.

Sadly, the EU’s intransigence is demonstrated in a couple of areas:

  • EU wants the UK to enact EU regulations and laws regarding business subsidies, labor law, the environment
  • EU wants its Common Fisheries Policy to apply in British territorial waters, especially British coastal waters

Nor is the matter of EU labor movement entirely settled; the EU still hopes for free access—essentially waiver of British national borders—for EU workers to British territory.

These run directly counter to Great Britain’s national sovereignty; of course, the continental Europeans know this full well. It’s why they demand these accessions.

Privacy

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Here is why more needs to be done to protect our privacy—primarily by us, but with Government’s assistance. Below is an example, quoted from a bulletin board I follow. The author is talking about an investment during a time of coronavirus disruption of supply chains, but the subtext should be obvious.

re: GOOG
They don’t build physical widgets in Wuhan that might get hard to obtain…the ad biz will probably keep on rolling.
We just bought 2 new Android smartphones and 1 new Android tablet. Coming from a dumb-phone flip phone and a Kindle.
Google [Alphabet, which owns Google] OWNS that market. You cannot even download/install an app without having a google account. And every time you do something, Google prompts you to set up a payment method. No way to say “Hell no, never.” The choices are: google play card, credit card, debit card, and “skip for now, maybe later”.
So, clever me, I created a dummy google/gmail account. And logged in so I could install some free apps from Google Play. Fine.
But within 2 days it somehow associated my wife’s gmail account with the Android tablet. And she has NEVER touched that tablet. Now every time I go to use it, it asks me which account I want to log into—the dummy account or her account.
Google OWNS that market.
—————
Near as I can figure out, her name is on our Amazon Prime account. And our Sony Bluray player and our Roku smart TV are both registered to Amazon Prime Video—so obviously in her name.
Now, we do not get cell phone coverage at our house, so all our external internet network access goes through our internet ISP. And the way that works is that, to the internet, every device in our house has the same IP address.
So something managed to figure out that her gmail account was associated with our external IP address, and also that same IP address was associated with the Amazon Prime Video account, and that her gmail account is accociated with that Amazon account. Therefore every device in our house that contacts the external internet has some sort of connection to her gmail address.
At home, the Android smartphones and the tablet can only access the internet via our internal network, on WIFI, since we get no cell coverage. So if somebody puts all these pieces together it is easy to figure out the connections.
Google managed to figure it all out. Took them 2 days.

Heads up.

Because It’s Time Again

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Especially on this day….

I got fired from my job because I kept asking my customers whether they would prefer “Smoking” or “Non-smoking.”
Apparently the correct terms are “Cremation” and “Burial.”

An Englishman and an Irishman go to a bakery. The Englishman steals three buns and puts them into his pockets and leaves. He says to the Irishman: “That took great skill and guile to steal those buns. The owner didn’t even see me.”
“That’s just simple thievery,” the Irishman replied. “I’ll show you how to do it the honest way and get the same results.”
The Irishman then proceeded to call out the owner of the bakery and says: “Sir, I want to show you a magic trick.” The owner was intrigued so he came over to see the magic trick.
The Irishman asked him for a bun and then he proceeded to eat it. He asked two more times and after eating them again the owner says: “Okay my friend, where’s the magic trick?”
The Irishman then said: “Look in the Englishman’s pockets.”

A Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar; the Minister ducked.

“Hey, I’ve got a great new joke for you,” the barman says.
The NSA agent smiles. “Heard it.”

A grasshopper walks into a bar, bartender says, “Hey we have a drink named after you.”
Grasshopper says, “Really? You have a drink named Larry?”

The past, present, and future walk into a bar.
It was tense.

A Frenchman walks into a bar with a cat on his shoulder.
The cat is wearing a little baseball cap.
“Hey, that’s neat,” says the bartender. “Where did you get that?”
“France,” the kitty says, “they’ve got millions of them!”

Infinitely many mathematicians walk into a bar.
The first says, “I’ll have a beer.”
The second says, “I’ll have half a beer.”
The third says, “I’ll have a quarter of a beer.”
Before anyone else can speak, the barman fills up exactly two glasses of beer and serves them. “Come on, now,” he says to the group, “You guys have got to learn your limits.”

Knock, knock
Who’s there?
To.
To who?
No, to whom.

Q: What has four legs and one arm?
A: A happy pit bull.

And finally,

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

Paying Their Fair Share

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Progressive-Democrats, including their Presidential candidates, are fond of saying the Evil Rich aren’t paying their fair share in taxes; they should pay more.  Those same Progressive-Democrats also carefully decline to say what that fair share should be, other than their “more.”

Here’s a graph of what those Evil Rich do pay, compared with the income those same Evil Rich earn, courtesy of the Center of the American Experiment:

Notice that. That’s even after those Evil Rich have taken all the adjustments to their top line income that our tax code allows them to take, including the Progressive-Democrats’ much disliked preferential tax treatment for capital gains and interest income.

The graph shows the rates for the top 50%.  The top 10% pays a skosh over 70% of all income taxes paid Uncle Sugar, while earning only a bit under 48% of the private sector’s income.

Ninety per cent, seventy per cent—in what way are these not the Evil Rich’s fair share, much less more than their fair share?  Especially compared to those bottom 50% who earn a bit over 10% of the private sector’s income, but pay only 3%?

The Progressive-Democrats won’t say. The only conclusion is that they consider the fair share to be “all of it.”