Tag Archives: freedom

In Which Zuckerberg is Right

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Attorney General William Barr has taken up ex-FBI Director James Comey’s battle for government backdoors into private citizens’ encrypted private messages.  Apple MFWIC Tim Cook won a similar fight regarding iPhone passwords and a demand that government should be allowed backdoors into those, and Comey’s FBI was shown to have been dissembling about that difficulty by the speed with which a contractor the FBI hired successfully broke into an iPhone the FBI had confiscated.

Now Barr has broadened the fight, demanding Facebook give Government backdoors into Facebook’s planned rollout of encryption for its messaging services.  He wants Facebook, too, to hold off on its rollout until Government is satisfied it has such backdoors.  Barr’s cynically misleading plaint includes this tearjerker:

Companies cannot operate with impunity where lives and the safety of our children is at stake, and if Mr Zuckerberg really has a credible plan to protect Facebook’s more than two billion users it’s time he let us know what it is[.]

Zuckerberg has been quite clear on what it is.  It’s facilitating private citizens’ ability to encrypt their private messages on Facebook’s platform.  Many of whom live in outright tryannies, others of whom live in so-far free nations, but whose government officials want to be able to pierce the protections of enforceable privacy at will.

The concern that bad guys, terrorists as well as common criminals, will take advantage of such encryption to evade government law enforcement facilities is entirely valid.  Two things about that, though. First is Ben Franklin’s remark about the relationship between safety and security.

The other is for law enforcement to do better with their own IT skills and with their own human policing skills.  Just as the FBI did in cracking that iPhone after Apple refused to give break-in assistance to Government.

Racism in School Admissions

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Federal District Judge Allison Burroughs, of the Massachusetts District, has ruled in a Harvard admissions case that racism in its admissions process is entirely jake.

Race conscious admissions will always penalize to some extent the groups that are not being advantaged by the process, but this is justified by the compelling interest in diversity and all the benefits that flow from a diverse college population.

With that, Burroughs has exposed her own racist bent.  Her “justification” is just her cynical rationalization of her racism. It stinks.

The WSJ editors in that piece also noted Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s own tortured effort to correct racism in school admissions in his Fisher v University of Texas opinion:

…he wrote that different treatment of an individual because of race is “inherently suspect” and requires “strict scrutiny.”

No, different treatment of an individual because of race wants no strict scrutiny; it wants no scrutiny at all. Such treatment needs to be proscribed altogether from our schools.  To start with.

These folks, Harvard management personnel and bench-sitters alike, more than merely being racist, insult minorities, and actively hold them down, by insisting they just can’t cut it in an evenly done endeavor; they must have that artificial handicap applied. It’s redolent of Woodrow Wilson on segregation: “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

And they punish the successful by telling them they’re too good for their own good.

Hong Kong Police out of Control?

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Or is it President Xi Jinping’s staff member, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who’s out of control? Or has she simply lost control?

First, the police shot, at point blank range, an 18-yr-old student (and arrested him for his role in the shooting), during the then-latest round of violence that Lam’s police have been provoking with their approved-thug attacks, water cannon, pepper spray, cudgels, brandished firearms, and then shooting those firearms into the air.

Then, Lam made a classic despotic move: banning facemasks during public gatherings of three or more folks (imagine getting fewer than that at a pedestrian crosswalk).  She even invoked a British colonial law to rationalize that ban.  In response to that latest attack on freedom, Hong Kong citizens protested in their tens of thousands again.

And one of Lam’s policemen—who wasn’t even in uniform—shot a 14-yr-old child.  Then arrested him for rioting and assaulting police. Apparently, it really is illegal in Xi’s/Lam’s Hong Kong to interfere with a police bullet making its lawful rounds.

“Rioting”

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Recall the teenage protestor in the Hong Kong protests earlier this week, the one who was shot in the chest at point blank range by a Hong Kong cop who thought he was being threatened by the boy.

A Hong Kong court charged 18-year-old student, Tsang (Tony) Chi-Kin, with rioting, a charge carrying a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Tsang was among seven people charged with rioting on Thursday.
The secondary school student also faces two additional counts of attacking two police officers, punishable by up to six months in prison.

Riotous bastard dared to interfere with the cop’s bullet.  Nor were the cops in any great hurry to get the boy treatment or to let any protestors help him.  Despite that, he’s in stable condition in a Hong Kong hospital.

This is the kind of despotic tyranny that People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping intends to impose on Hong Kong.  And on the Republic of China later.

Strength of Consent

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The people of Hong Kong are in their 15th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

  • independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality
  • amnesty for arrested protesters
  • electoral reforms to allow Hong Kongers to vote for their own leaders
  • formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens (and anyone else arrested) to be sent to the PRC for trial and jail
  • Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation

Lam has “promised” to formally withdraw the extradition bill, but she has not honored her promise, and she has categorically rejected the others. Lam’s “promise” was a cynical effort to divide and weaken the protest movement.

However, as The Wall Street Journal put it in the article at the link,

The scale of the crowds Sunday evoked mass marches earlier this summer, suggesting efforts by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to weaken and divide the opposition movement are having little effect, and the crisis remains a challenge for the Chinese leadership in Beijing.

This protestor illustrates the matter.

The PRC’s President Xi Jinping has a golden opportunity, here, to demonstrate the strength of consenting to the citizens’ demands, but he’s overtly eschewing it. He, and his Chinese Communist Party cronies, are simply too insecure to take the step.  And not just politically: they’re personally and emotionally too insecure.