Tag Archives: freedom

Futile Gestures

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President Barack Obama (D) sent the guided missile destroyer USS William P Lawrence to sail to within

12 nautical miles of a land feature in the South China Sea known as Fiery Cross Reef[.]

Fiery Cross Reef is a terraformed “island” that the People’s Republic of China has transformed and on which it’s built a 10,000 foot runway and associated military support buildings; the facility is in the Spratly Islands in the southern part of the South China Sea, a body the PRC has seized, occupied, and been claiming as an inland PRC lake.

The sailing is the

third time in less than a year that the US has conducted so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea in an effort to challenge what the US sees as the excessive maritime claims of China and other nations to the islands there.

Obama presents this as a brave and bold challenge to the PRC and a brave and bold assertion of the excessivity of those Chinese claims.  Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel wondered out loud,

If the world’s most powerful navy cannot sail where international law permits, then what happens to the ships, the navy, of a smaller country?

But stopping at the 12-mile limit is not an assertion of a right to sail where international law permits; on the contrary, it’s an acknowledgment of the PRC’s claims to the island(s), if not a tacit admission of the PRC’s claim to the entire Sea.

Notice:

The choice of Fiery Cross for the US warship’s operation was likely part of the US signal.  Last month, a high-ranking Chinese general visited Fiery Cross, marking the highest-level Chinese military official to visit any of the islands in the South China Sea in recent years.

The better time to make this sailing—to 12 miles or to my limit—would have been while General Fan Changlong, Vice Chairman of the PRC’s Central Military Commission, was visiting the island.

If Obama were truly interested in sailing where international law permits, he’d have our Navy sail as close to each of those islands as navigable waters physically permit, and he’d have our Navy also do it in conjunction with the navies and fishing and other commercial shipping of the other nations surrounding the South China Sea.

Stopping at 12 miles is futile for everyone except the PRC.

Free Assembly

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Beginning with the freshman class that enters in fall 2017, Harvard University students will no longer be allowed to hold leadership positions in campus groups while also maintaining membership in the exclusive, single-gender final clubs that dominate the school’s social scene.

And

The policy barring students from holding leadership positions in official groups while being members of what the school calls “unrecognized, single-gender social organizations,” also extends to the younger fraternities and sororities.  Students will also not receive the dean’s endorsements for elite scholarships and fellowships if they’re found to be members of the groups.

Whatever happened to freedom of association?  It’s true enough that Harvard is a private institution, but as the Supreme Court has held about private enterprises on a number of occasions vis-à-vis other venues, it has enough of a public institution characteristic—accepting a broad reach of students, just as any other private business, a store for instance, accepts a broad reach of customers—that it needs to act like one here.

It’s also true enough that the 1st Amendment’s right of the people peaceably to assemble only enjoins the Federal government.  However, the principle is no less valid in its applicability to a university.

Sovereign Choices

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Holger Schmieding, London’s Berenberg Bank Chief Economist, is dismayed that the UK might quit the EU.  The subtitle of his op-ed piece in the WSJ fully sums up his concern:

Rules from Brussels can border on the absurd, but what hurts the UK most are the policies its own politicians enact.

It also demonstrates how badly he misses the point of the movement to leave the EU.  It’s certainly true that Parliament is fully capable of enacting, and it often does enact, utterly foolish policies.  But at least they’d be sovereignly done, and not forced on them by a remote, extra-national quasi-government.

The PRC and the RoC

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The Republic of China has elected a patriot as its president to replace Ma Ying-jeou, who spent his term acquiescing to nearly every PRC demand.  Tsai Ing-wen, with her countrymen’s welfare in mind as well as her nation’s short-term interests, is interested in stable relations with the PRC, but she’s not interested in “reunification.”  That’s why she was elected, too: neither are her fellow RoC citizens.

Despite this, The Wall Street Journal has editorialized in a different direction:

Ms Tsai faces a challenge of resetting Beijing’s expectations.  One way to do so might be to present herself as a mediator between Chinese leaders and increasingly nationalistic Taiwanese citizens.

No.  There’s nothing to mediate.  There’s no need to equivocate, either; equivocation just plays into the PRC’s hand and facilitates its long-term effort to conquer the RoC.

Encryption and Safety

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Senators Richard Burr (R, NC) and Dianne Feinstein (C, CA), in their op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, demonstrated their lack of understanding of the relationship between security and safety.  Their piece’s title, Encryption Without Tears, illustrates their basic misunderstanding of the inherent tension between the two, here encryption and safety.

In an increasingly digital world, strong encryption of devices is needed to prevent criminal misuse of data.  But technological innovation must not mean placing individuals or companies above the law.

Neither can technological backdoors be allowed to place government above the law.

Over the past year the two of us have explored the challenges associated with criminal and terrorist use of encrypted communications.

But they’ve apparently spent not a red sou on exploring the challenges of a private citizens or private enterprises need for and use of encryption to protect themselves from criminal, and terrorist, and yes government misbehaviors.

Then they cited a couple of examples to illustrate their thesis; I’ll cite one of those below, because it so clearly illustrate the opposite and some interlinkage of the Left’s position on American safety (and disappointingly, Burr’s lack of thought).

…the Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack last year in Garland, Texas.  FBI Director Jim Comey said the attackers “exchanged 109 messages with an overseas terrorist” the morning of the shooting, but the FBI cannot access those messages to determine the exact role of Islamic State in the shooting and how to help prevent future attacks.

There’s no doubt that being able to read those messages would have been very useful.  However, Burr and Feinstein carefully neglect to mention that the Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack was stopped in its tracks and the terrorists killed on the spot by armed American citizens who were alert, on the scene, and unafraid to act.  The San Bernardino attack, for which Comey went to court to try to force Apple to break its own security algorithms (under the false claim that Apple’s efforts were absolutely necessary, mind you—until the FBI broke the algorithms with other means), occurred in a by-government-mandate gun-free zone, which ensured that only the terrorists had guns.  We’re left to speculate on how far the casualty list would have been reduced had the victim population been allowed to be armed themselves.  As the Left likes to say, though, “If it saves only one life….”

Yet Burr and Feinstein are “circulating” a draft bill:

The draft proposal requires a person or a company—when served with a court order—to provide law enforcement with information (in readable form) or appropriate technical assistance that is responsive to the judicial request.  This will enable law enforcement to conduct investigations using the communications involved in criminal and terrorist activities.

Our draft bill wouldn’t impose a one-size-fits-all solution on all covered entities….

The judicial request.  Carefully vague.  It may be the case, though, that their bill wouldn’t impose a one-size-fits-all solution.  No, it’ll just require an ex post back door to be created, one that’s usable for future “situations,” too, and the aggregation of which will allow government snooping.

It’s just this sort of Government arrogance, or even merely disingenuousness, against which we have such extensive protections against overreaching government men.  The government isn’t even pretending to act in good faith on this matter, as Comey’s behavior in that Apple case demonstrates.

Private encryption, with no backdoors, and an armed population.  That permits an optimum mix of security and safety and encryption with a minimum of tears.  Backdoors on Government demand permits the least mix of security and safety, broken encryption guaranteed to generate tears.