Category Archives: regulation

Liberty, Security, and Encryption

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Moves by Apple Inc and Google Inc to put some smartphone data out of the reach of police and the courts are raising alarms inside US law-enforcement agencies, current and former officials say.

Of course the government is upset. Heaven forfend anything should interfere with its convenience in fishing for wrong-doing in our private correspondence. Privacy, though, is a necessary component of individual liberty and responsibility.

There is a trade-off, to be sure, between that and government’s ability to do the job of protecting us from others and from extra-national threats that we’ve hired it to do, but we must be very wary about how much of our liberty we surrender and how much of our responsibility we foist off, and we must be extremely chary of the trade-offs we make in that regard.

One Justice Department official said that if the new systems work as advertised, they will make it harder, if not impossible, to solve some cases. Another said the companies have promised customers “the equivalent of a house that can’t be searched, or a car trunk that could never be opened.”

“Harder to solve,” perhaps. “Impossible,” though, is a coarse exaggeration: our cops are better than that. Additionally, it’s long been American philosophy that it’s better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man gets locked up. Today’s threats aren’t enough to walk away from that bastion principle of liberty.

As to that second plaint, it’s another exaggeration. The searches might get harder, but the devices are easily controllable, and get a warrant.

And this:

Andrew Weissmann, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel, called Apple’s announcement outrageous, because even a judge’s decision that there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed won’t get Apple to help retrieve potential evidence. Apple is “announcing to criminals, ‘use this,’ ” he said. “You could have people who are defrauded, threatened, or even at the extreme, terrorists using it.”

However. It isn’t Apple that’s being accused, or suspected, or against whom probable cause is being alleged, it’s the cell phone owner. Searching Apple’s facility because the light is better there is…faulty.

Weissman also ignores both the right of an American citizen to protect himself against a government that has shown itself increasingly intrusive, avaricious, and controlling, and the fact that a warrant must be obtained on the one hand, and on the other, once a warrant has been obtained, the government can use its own facilities to conduct the search. These facilities include both the ability to sanction the phone’s owner for not providing the password and the use of government’s IT facilities for cracking the password.

Then there’s another question. Government cannot assume our responsibilities in our place morally. If government does assume our responsibilities in our place legally, we will have lost our individual liberties and responsibilities.

Without individual liberty and responsibility not only can there be no security, there can be no hope of security.

More Actual Facts

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…about climate change. In a paper, Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012, released last Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, roughly translated for us laymen by the AP, authors Jim Johnstone, at the time of his research with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, and Nathan Mantua, research scientist with the NOAA Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz, CA, found that northeast Pacific (that’s abeam the US) ocean warming since 1900 correlates better with naturally occurring wind pattern changes than with any pattern of human greenhouse gas injection into the atmosphere. According to Johnstone,

What we found was the somewhat surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve. So clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting those temperatures[.]

Also damaging to the climate panic-mongers’ case were these facts:

[O]ne steep ocean warming period from 1920 to 1940 predates the big increases in greenhouse gases, and an ocean cooling period from 1998 to 2013 came while global average temperatures were at or near all-time highs.

Of course the climate pseudo-science folks demur.

They pointed out that the study sees a correlation but did not do the rigorous statistical and computer analysis to show that the cause of the wind changes were natural—the kind of analysis done when scientists attribute weather extremes to global warming.

This would be the same computer analysis—computer modeling—that has found itself unable to predict, simultaneously, the past and the present, and which predictions of the future have been wildly variable and heavily dependent on the specific values assigned to a myriad of model inputs.

The abstract is here; the full article is behind the PNAS‘ login wall.

Democrats and Inversions

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Inversions in this context, to oversimplify, are when American companies buy foreign companies and then relocate their headquarters to that foreign country in order to take advantage of that country’s lower tax rates. That this is part of an American company’s management fiduciary duty to the owners to minimize costs and maximize profits is unimportant to the denizens of the present administration and to too many “Republicans” as well.

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, had some thoughts about the evils of inversions.

These transactions erode the US tax base, unfairly placing a larger burden on all other taxpayers, including small businesses and hardworking Americans[.]

Of course, Lew and Obama carefully ignore the fact that half of us Americans already pay little or no taxes, “unfairly placing a larger burden on all other taxpayers.”

They also ignore the fact that it isn’t their money in the first place; the money belongs to the companies’ owners.

They also ignore the fact that our “tax base” already is excessively progressive and that it has the highest business rates in the world.

Lew went on:

These first, targeted steps make substantial progress in constraining the creative techniques used to avoid US taxes, both in terms of meaningfully reducing the economic benefits of inversions after the fact, and when possible, stopping them altogether.

A better way to reduce the economic benefits of inversions would be to do the patriotic thing: lower, drastically, the tax rates on American businesses. Taxes, after all, are at the foundation of our Revolutionary War—not only the stereotypical taxation without representation, but also the point of that demand of representation: so we could keep tax rates from getting out of hand.

If our business tax rates were lowered sufficiently—Ireland, for instance, taxes businesses at 12.5%, compared to our 35% rate—a couple of things would occur. The first would be a cessation of inversions, and if our business taxes were lowered significantly below 12.5% (I’ve been advocating all along for an elimination of taxes on our businesses), foreign businesses would be attracted to the US, bringing with them the jobs they have.

The other thing that would occur involves the $2 trillion that American companies with foreign branches, affiliates, and so on are holding overseas in order to avoid our usurious tax rates. With those tax rates vastly reduced, that money would come home. $2 trillion is a lot of jobs and capital investment (which is more jobs in the nearby future) waiting to happen.

But tax rate reductions are anathema, if not inconceivable, to Democrats.  And to too many “Republicans.”

A Man Jumped a Fence

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…surrounding the White House Friday night and was able to get all the way inside the White House before he was stopped. A little birdie has told me how the penetrator was able to get so far.

The Secret Service successfully detected the man as he was climbing the fence, and they responded to him promptly. They committed their initial effort at stopping him to remonstrating with him as he moved across the lawn: this is the sort of thing that was done in the 19th century; such things are unseemly in the 21st. The man was on the wrong side of history, and his effort was doomed to failure, anyway. And so on.

When that didn’t appear to slow the man’s progress, the Secret Service sought to form an interdepartmental task force to intercept him. They tried to enlist the Capital Police, the DC police, they even went as far afield as the Montgomery and Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Departments. By the time the Secret Service realized that that effort wasn’t bearing fruit, the man was entering the North Portico—the front door of the White House—and they were forced to act unilaterally to apprehend him.

This was a devastating episode for the Secret Service.

More Party-of-No Yeses

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The House passed three more bills in this short period before the mid-term election campaign recess.

One bill makes it illegal for IRS workers to use personal email accounts to conduct official business.

It’s already illegal to do this in many circumstances, as all official business communications must be recorded and saved. It’s also already contrary to IRS policy; although the IRS has ignored this policy whenever that became convenient.

This is, at bottom, an obvious move, too: private enterprise has, for years, held the flip side—the use of company equipment to conduct personal business—to be a fire-able offense; although they allow some limited personal use.

Another bill guarantees groups that are denied tax-exempt status the right to appeal the decision to a separate IRS office.

Also an obvious move. No government decision should be appeal-proof at the outset.

The third bill addresses complaints from groups that have had their confidential taxpayer information improperly disclosed by IRS employees. The bill allows the IRS to tell victims about the status of investigations into the disclosures. Current law forbids the IRS from releasing such information.

Here, I disagree slightly: the bill should require the IRS to disclose status information, not merely permit it. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

Watch these three obvious moves die in the Democratic Party-controlled Senate.