Tag Archives: freedom

Independent Monitor

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Recall Special Counselor Robert Mueller’s raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s offices and seizure of Cohen’s records, especially targeting communications between Cohen, the lawyer, and Trump, the client.

Cohen went in to Federal court Friday to try to get the subpoena under which the raid was conducted revoked and the confiscated materials returned.  Some discussion surrounding the events centers on the alleged ability of special monitors—a “taint team”—doing the sorting so as to isolate the privileged communications from the rest of the material sought under the warrant.  Furthermore, this team would, supposedly, conduct its sort before Mueller’s team has gone into the material they seized.

I’ll elide the blatant conflict of interest here centered on the taint team’s members being, at bottom, colleagues of the those who ran the raid and of Mueller: they’re FBI agents and DoJ lawyers.

I’m interested in a larger question that’s not being addressed.  Say Cohen wins his case and the subpoena is quashed and the seized materials returned to him in toto.  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team hasn’t already copied all of those seized materials and separated the copies from the originals?  That by itself, incidentally, would be a good practice with legitimately confiscated materials; reviewing the copies would ensure against accidentally damaging the originals and thereby destroying their legal provenance (as well as their utility for their rightful owners).  On what basis do we conclude that, on Cohen’s victory, those copies would be returned, also?  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team isn’t already reading and evaluating those copies of the seized materials?

Government Surveillance by Regulation

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Loosely related to a nearby post, now it seems the government is getting worried about the size of the “private” capital market, where folks can place investments in enterprises, particularly startups, without having to go through the public—stock—markets and government regulations that are broadly extensive and deeply intrusive.

The boom is transforming how companies grow, concentrating investing in fewer hands and raising concerns about oversight

The linked-to article’s subhead lays out the whole misunderstanding. Government doesn’t need to be in the business of regulating every little thing we do.  We can manage our investments just fine without Government’s “help.”  And we can suffer our own outcomes if we choose badly or fortune moves against us despite our otherwise correct decisions.

[Some] private placements require no disclosure at all, said Anna Pinedo, a partner at law firm Mayer Brown. “It’s impossible to know who’s raising money this way or from whom.”

It’s none of government’s business to know unless it’s prepared to allege specific crimes.

Michael Piwowar, a[n SEC] commissioner, questioned “the notion that nonaccredited investors are truly protected by regulations that prevent them from investing in high-risk, high-return securities….

It’s not government’s job to protect us from ourselves. That’s our job.

The way to entice investors back to the publicly traded markets is to reduce those regulations and their intrusiveness.

AI Surveillance

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Police forces around the nation are on the verge of getting Artificial Intelligence assistance in identifying folks of interest to them in real time on our cities’ streets.  The image below and its caption illustrate the thing.

I’m all for assisting the police, especially regarding the subject of that cynically tear-jerking caption.  But this sort of thing needs to be looked at with a very jaundiced eye.  It isn’t too far away from what the People’s Republic of China already is doing in terms of routine surveillance and tracking of everyone.

It’s not that everything the PRC does is bad, but some things are inherently dangerous, no matter who developed them or uses them extensively.  This sort of technology can very easily become a direct assault on our ability to be anonymous in public spaces.

TaeWoo Kim, chief scientist at One Smart Labs, a New York-based startup that is working on such software, said the technology is “creepy and a bit Big Brother-y,” but said it is “purely intended to fight crime, terrorism and track wanted subjects.”

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Governments can’t be trusted with such capabilities, and we don’t even need to invoke nefarious intent or “Big Brother-y” conspiracies to see that. Governments will end up misusing, even abusing, this sort of thing just in the ordinary outcome of normal bureaucratic imperatives to justify the bureaucrat’s and his bureaucracy’s existence, to grow, to expand the bureaucracy’s power and budget.

William Bratton, the former commissioner of the NYPD, says that the public was similarly worried about DNA testing when the technology first emerged. The technology has been credited in freeing wrongfully convicted people from prison.

This is a false analogy, though.  DNA testing isn’t used for routine, real-time surveillance of the population or even of small groups or of individuals, and current technology doesn’t allow such use.  AI-based image surveillance technology lends itself to exactly that real-time watching.

Democracy

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A thought on its underpinnings, from Peter Wilson at the end of his The Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire:

Democratic legitimacy derives from the openness of debate, not the practice of voting.

He’s not far wrong, as comparisons between nations like Russia on the one hand and the United States or Great Britain on the other illustrate.

Too Much Privacy?

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That’s actually a serious question.

The firestorm over Facebook Inc’s handling of personal data raises a question for those pondering a regulatory response: is there such a thing as too much privacy?

And

Law-enforcement agencies rely on access to user data as an important tool for tracking criminals or preventing terrorist attacks. As such, they have long argued additional regulation may be harmful to national security.

Unfortunately, no government can be trusted with citizens’ privacy, as the Star Chamber secret FISA court, the FBI leadership (and not just the current or immediately prior crowd—recall J Edgar Hoover), prior DoJ leadership, the Robert Mueller “investigation,” and much more demonstrate.

If our government wants to learn things, it needs to get back into the HUMINT business rather than relying so much on hacking IT systems.  And get an honest warrant, not just a FISA one.