Category Archives: rights

PRC Censorship

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…is reaching into other nations to deprecate their free speech.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Australia’s Charles Sturt University has written a book, Silent Invasion, that details the breadth of influence the People’s Republic of China has achieved within Australia.  His publisher, Allen & Unwin, has decided to “delay” release of the book because the PRC is threatening “defamation action” against the publisher.

What defamation, exactly (and how does a private citizen defame a foreign government, anyway)?  Hamilton says his book is

“very factual, very deeply researched,”…the “first comprehensive national study of Beijing’s program of exerting influence on another nation.”

He said he had documented the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on Australian political parties, universities and cultural organizations, as well as on Chinese living in Australia.

Apparently, on private enterprises, as well.

As Hamilton put it, Allen & Unwin’s decision to acquiesce to the PRC’s threats is

a watershed moment in Australia, when Beijing can suppress free speech.

Hamilton has said he’ll get another publisher, and it would seem he has another instance of PRC “influence” within Australia to describe.  Along the way, I have to wonder why, in future, any author would want to do business with so unreliable a publisher.

Free Speech, Left-Style. Again

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The UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, accused Alan Dershowitz, in black and white, of having “blood on his hands” and of being “culpable for…Israeli atrocities”—of blood libel.  The Harvard law professor emeritus wanted to respond, but

The Daily Californian “absolutely, categorically” refused to print his reply to the op-ed.

As Dershowitz put it in a Fox & Friends segment,

The Daily Cal, as many college newspapers today, are totally one-sided.  You can say whatever you want about people like me if I’m pro-Israel. I don’t get to respond.

Free speech, indeed.

A Slip of the Mask

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When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deleted for a few minutes last week, it looked like an isolated mistake by a customer service employee “on his last day at work,” as Twitter, Inc, representatives had it.

Maybe not.  Now, more information is coming to light about that incident.  Seconds thoughts are occurring about the likelihood of a single employee in such a position having the authority to delete an entire account.  There’s more, too.

Inside Twitter, the brief deactivation elicited celebration or amusement even in the upper ranks. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey Liked a tweet with an image of his face superimposed on celebrity painter Bob Ross standing before a canvas depicting Mr Trump’s deactivated account. “There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents!” the caption said.

And

One former employee said that deleting Mr Trump’s account was a “running joke” among employees about things they wanted to do on their last day.

And

Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former head of entertainment and talent partnerships, retweeted a post about the rogue employee that said, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

“Doing good on the way out the door,” is how another former employee described the episode.

And

A former employee involved with Twitter Moments, a product that highlights tweets curated by the platform or users, said on a number of occasions during the campaign that senior executives expressed displeasure with Moments that portrayed Mr Trump in a good light.

It’s also instructive that so many of these Twitter, Inc, responses are exposed by ex-Twitter employees, and not by current ones.

The mask has slid away momentarily, quickly reset, and the slip has exposed what free speech would be under a Left-leaning government.  And it looks a lot like the “free” speech of our colleges and universities.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals of.

The Louisiana court system, all the way up to the State’s Supreme Court, has upheld police denial of a (black) defendant’s demand for a lawyer during a police interrogation.  At one point during the interrogation, the suspect said, quite clearly IMNSHO,

If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.

The Supreme Court said the suspect’s statement was too ambiguous to constitute a demand for a lawyer.  Justice Scott Chrichton, in concurring, actually wrote in all seriousness,

In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview….

Elie Mystal, in his article at the link, generously attributed the ruling to an inaccurate transcript—”lawyer dog” vice the defendant’s clearly stated “lawyer, dawg,” even as he, rightly, decried the blatant racism in denying the suspect his lawyer.  Over that “ambiguity.”

I’m not so inclined.  Even without the comma, “lawyer dog” is a pretty clear slang phrase identifying the object of the suspect’s call.

Dawg.

Mobile Encryption is a Huge Problem

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That’s the position of FBI Director Christopher Wray.

To put it mildly, this [mobile device encryption] is a huge, huge problem.  It impacts investigations across the board.

Certainly, consumer-done encryption of our communications devices can temporarily hinder investigations of the criminals who also use this encryption.  But as the FBI demonstrated regarding an encrypted cell phone involved in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, its initial claims notwithstanding, the encryption can be broken without the cooperation of the device’s owner.

Every tool can be misused.  The problem is not the misuse of the tool but government efforts to apply one-size-fits-all solutions to the misuse that end up harming all the rest of us more than the bad guys.

The FBI’s continued demand for a “government-mandated backdoor” that the government’s agents can use whenever they take a notion puts a premium on the encryption side of the question.  Think Government wouldn’t misbehave?  Ask anyone on the right about the behavior of the Obama administration.  Ask anyone on the left about the behavior of the Trump administration.

It’s always going to be an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys.  It’s a critical arms race, though, when it’s our own government that wants to pry into all of our private communications because a few of us are bad guys.