Category Archives: regulation

Criminalizing Speech

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.

Tariffs and Fairness

Posted on by
Reply

In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the way tariffs involved in the People’s Republic of China/US trade “dispute” and the simmering EU/US trade dispute impact a Scottish town, Alistair MacDonald posed a question.

Is it fair for the US, in its pursuit of trade concessions, to hurt smaller businesses that make iconic products in nations such as Scotland?

The question is a non sequitur.  The correction is, “Is it fair to single out particular subgroups for special treatment when addressing the rest of the group or the group as a whole?”

No, of course not.

Or MacDonald’s question is not a non sequitur (other than the business about iconic products, which is irrelevant in any case): the group that, at this stage, should be being addressed is the group known as Great Britain. In that light, it would be both fair and politically sound to exempt Scottish industries from tariffs applied in response to EU trade abuses. Scotland, after all, is first a part of Great Britain, and only through Great Britain a part of the EU.

Security Considerations

Posted on by
Reply

The Securities and Exchange Commission is building a massive central database in order to facilitate regulators’ market surveillance, and they’re forcing all brokerages to sign contracts to connect their systems to this Consolidated Audit Trail.

Proponents say the CAT will help regulators make sense of complex US financial markets, by putting data from disparate markets in one place and pinning down the time of each trade to the millisecond. … When complete, it is expected to ingest more than 58 billion records a day to become the world’s largest repository of stock-trading data.

Brokers and the ACLU both object vehemently to the requirement. The ACLU says,

We are concerned that the CAT will pose significant risks to the privacy of millions of investors….

because

the project for plans to store the personal data, such as Social Security numbers and birth dates, of individuals behind stock trades.

Of course, this just provides a convenient site for the government to peruse, at whim, the personal data of any one or group of us. Government, though has no need of these data and no right of access to these data absent search warrants issued solely on

probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But it’s more than that. Stipulate that explicitly personal data won’t be collected, after all, that only those stock trades and timing data would be collected.

It’s not enough.

It’s like these guys have never heard of OPSEC or COMSEC.

This is a move aimed solely at the personal convenience of bureaucrats, which makes it useless as well as dangerous.

Privacy and DoJ

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t often disagree with Attorney General Bill Barr, but on this I most certainly do.

Attorney General William Barr demanded Monday that Apple help the US government unlock two iPhones in its terror investigation of the Saudi air cadet who last month killed three sailors at a Navy training base in Pensacola, Florida. “This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr Barr said.

“The public,” not “the government” or “the police investigators.”  Now, it’s clear that Barr could have been speaking metaphorically in this, so I’ll not pursue this aspect beyond pointing out the possibility of misunderstanding or of misplaced priority.

The larger matters, though, are two.

Apple has no need to help DoJ on this, neither empirically nor legally.

Empirically because DoJ is crying wolf. The agency bleated about the need for Apple’s…cooperation…after San Bernardino, and then a 3rd party cracked that phone for DoJ. Now DoJ is at it again. In the last couple of days, though, WSJ published an article listing a number of phone cracking software packages already on the market. DoJ no longer has credibility in this.

It simply wants Apple to do the DoJ work because DoJ doesn’t want to drop a dime on some software and, more, because DoJ wants to put its boot on Apple’s neck to demonstrate just who it is who’s in charge.

Legally because there is no Constitutional requirement for any private enterprise to destroy its software—which opening the software for Government, at Government’s veriest demand, would do. More, we—neither us individual citizens nor our private enterprises—are here to give Government something to do.

Government is here to work for us. That Apple’s intransigence—our intransigence generally—on this sort of thing is a matter of government convenience not a matter of compelling government investigative need.

Maybe Build Their Own Connections

Posted on by
Reply

Idaho wants to connect several of its western communities to a renewable energy hub in eastern Oregon, and the green citizens of eastern Oregon agrees with the sentiment.  Just don’t use actual power lines to do the connection.  Brian Kelly, Restoration Director for the Greater Hells Canyon Council in eastern Oregon:

We need to develop more renewable energy, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of damage to our last remaining wild places….

Yep.  Dan Shreve, Head of Global Wind Energy Research at Wood Mackenzie:

Regardless of where you go, there’s always some issues—whether it’s bats, whether it’s birds, whether it’s wealthy landowners who don’t want their view interrupted. As a consequence, you see these initiatives drag on forever.

These worthies put greater value—economic and otherwise—on sights and terrain than they do on actual power to support the folks living there to enjoy those sights and that terrain, as well as telling others elsewhere that local sights and terrain are more important than those others’ access to power.

Perhaps utilities should walk away from such areas, build their hubs and their transmission lines elsewhere, and let these folks who think energy is not all that important develop their own clean power sources and provide their own accesses to them. Surely, they’ll be able to do so much more cheaply and efficiently while preserving their views than can utilities.