Daily Archives: 29 August 2024

Don’t Only Blame Gensler

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have their panties in a twist over SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s imposing $393 million in fines on 26 companies that fail[ed] to track employee “off-channel” [personal] communications.

It’s certainly true that Gensler badly overstepped his bounds with those fines. The SEC, and no one in it, has any authority to surveil or to require surveillance of private company’s private employees’ personal communications. Gensler and his SEC should be swatted down—hard—in court for that excess.

However.

A major part of the blame for this overstep belongs on the management teams of those 26 companies. Those worthies demonstrated deeply disgusting cowardice when they meekly acceded to the fines. They’ve done a disservice to the companies of which they’re in charge, they’ve betrayed their shareholders, and they’re right next door to betraying the fiscal duties those managers have to their companies’ shareholders. Their meekness serves only to expose their companies to further government overreach, and it exposes their employees to further unwarranted (in both senses) surveillance by an overreaching government.

That betrayal vastly outweighs any financial “savings” from agreeing to pay the SEC fines…because it’s less costly than resisting in court. And it interferes with that necessary swatting-down, an interference that potentiates the likelihood of those future costs.

A Crock

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That’s the only term for the Biden-Harris White House stonewalling of a Fox News FOIA request for the identification of the nationalities of the illegal aliens that those two are allowing into our nation via their open-borders policy. Fox News isn’t even asking for by-name data, just aggregated. Speaking through their Customs and Border Protection manager mouthpiece, though, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris are claiming—and they’re serious about this:

Releasing data for a particular nationality, or nationalities, that reflect a small number of individuals could lead to identification, especially by organizations familiar with the individuals.

And

The privacy interests of third parties (being protected from public disclosure because they could conceivably be subject to harassment and annoyance in his/her private life) far outweigh whatever public interest, if any, exists in having their information released.

This rationalization is a crock in two ways. One is that Biden-Harris are holding up identification of all nationalities because only a few illegal aliens, they claim, are of particular nationalities.

Another crock is the beef that the illegal aliens might be identified. They need to be identified so they can be gathered up and deported for their illegal entry, for their beginning their presence here with breaking our laws.

Biden and Harris also have it precisely backward in counting those third party privacy interests as more important than the public interest. We have a right to know who and what party(s) are aiding and abetting illegal aliens and by extension—intended or not—aiding and abetting human traffickers moving these illegal aliens. These third parties, along with such traffickers as can be identified and caught, need to be hauled into court and held criminally liable for their status as accessories to these crimes.

We also have a right to know who these third parties are so we can have a chance to assess the amount of our tax monies that is being used to support these illegal aliens and those third parties.

And this bit of cynical disingenuousity:

If such an organization were to move ‘X’ number of operatives of one nationality over the relevant period, and the disclosed nationality numbers were substantially lower than X, the terrorist organization could infer a large percentage of its operatives from a particular nationality have been able to move undetected (thereby minimizing the deterrent effect of the TSDS)[.]
…
This information could allow bad actors to reverse engineer effective countermeasures to facilitate undetected movement and activity and thwart CBP interdiction efforts[.]

The terrorist organizations and the cartels operating in Mexico already know these data. They already know who they’ve moved in and who’s been caught; this tells them how successful they are in their trafficking. To the extent the administration is serious with this claim, they’re simply projecting their own inability to conduct serious intel operations regarding who or what is coming across our border and where they’re going once inside.

This is the level of cynicism, or of incompetence, or both, that is rampant in the Biden-Harris administration and in Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ border policy.