Tag Archives: freedom

Russia’s New Gulag

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…is on the verge of becoming the whole nation.

Russia’s media watchdog [Roskomnadzor, a government agency] has written to Google, Twitter and Facebook warning them against violating Russian Internet laws and a spokesman said on Thursday they risk being blocked if they do not comply with the rules.

Carefully crafted rules: the three companies encrypt their transmissions, which means the Russian government can’t tell who’s saying all those nasty things about Putin and his fellows in that government.

To comply with the law, the three firms must hand over data on Russian bloggers with more than 3,000 readers per day, and take down websites that Roskomnadzor sees as containing calls for “unsanctioned protests and unrest[.]”

This is “free” speech and rule by law in action, Russian style.

Another Judge Gets It Right on Guns

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People in the nation’s capital no longer have to show a good reason to get a permit to carry concealed handguns outside their homes and businesses.

The District of Columbia’s police chief said Tuesday that she’s dropping this requirement, a centerpiece of the city’s handgun-control legislation, after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against it.

That’s entirely appropriate since government does not get to dictate the reasons for a man owning a gun.

The city’s law, one of the nation’s toughest, says a person must show a “good reason to fear injury to his or her person or property” or another “proper reason for carrying a pistol” to get a concealed-carry permit.

Balance that against the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Try as I might, I can’t find anything in that Amendment, neither clause nor syllable, that says “agreeable with reasons approved by the government.”

Help, or Watch?

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Unfortunately, we already know which President Barack Obama will select, as he’s made clear in another venue.

The cause for concern this time is the economic strait in which Ukraine finds itself.

The contraction in Ukraine’s economy accelerated to 17.6% in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the State Statistics Service said Friday, hammered by a conflict with Russia-backed separatists in its eastern industrial heartland that has slashed industrial output.

Obama—and Europe, to be fair—have already refused to supply Ukraine with the wherewithal to defend itself militarily against Russia’s invasion and support of the rebels in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Indeed, his Secretary of State already has surrendered both areas to Russian occupation with his offer to lift economic sanctions against Russia if only they will agree to go no further.

If we—or the Europeans, but they seem even more timid than our own administration—don’t start providing serious economic aid to the Ukrainians, Russia won’t need further military advances in order to gain control over all of Ukraine. Ukraine’s economic collapse will hand what’s left of the nation to the Russians without any further ado.

Instead, we should be arming the Ukrainians and ratcheting up the sanctions on Russia, driving the Russians into economic collapse. It’s anybody’s guess, though, whether Ukraine can hold out for another year and a half at which point we might have a more responsible and capable White House.

Gun Control

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Or just control.

One guy, Cody Wilson, worked out a way to make pistols out of plastic and a 3-D printer, posted the information on the Internet, and tried to start a business out of the thing. Nothing secretive here; he wasn’t trying to hide anything.

The technology will break gun control. I stand for freedom[,]

he said.

But

…Wilson’s invention also caught the attention of the State Department, which came after him with both barrels blazing. The feds claimed Wilson violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which “requires advance government authorization to export technical data,” and as a result, could spend up to 20 years in prison and be fined as much as $1 million per violation.

Wilson was ordered to remove the blueprints for The Liberator from his web site. The government also told him they were claiming ownership of his intellectual property.

Never mind that the “international arms trafficking” beef has no basis, unless simply identifying where firearms can be obtained and how to obtain them are somehow trafficking. Never mind that the “technical data” are old technology: 3-D printing is years old, and anyone can write a printing program. Nor is there anything magic about the plastic that is the printer’s ink. Indeed, that’s a major drawback for these 3-D weapons: they wear out quickly.

No, this is just an overreaching government trying to control for control’s sake. Nothing else.

A Proper Ruling

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And by Article III judges….

The Second Circuit appellate court has ruled in favor of individual liberty, privacy, and free speech all in one ruling.

[The Second Circuit] ruled Thursday the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of millions of Americans’ phone records isn’t authorized by the Patriot Act, as the Bush and Obama administrations have long maintained.

The Court held, in part,

…we hold that the text of [the law in question] cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program. We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far‐reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously. Until such time as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well‐established legal standards.

Indeed. The question is a political one and not a judicial one. It may be that Congress will screw this up and authorize the thing, but in that event we have recourse: we can fire the blackguards in an upcoming election and select, instead, representatives who understand our rights as free men.

The court’s ruling was based on one of the core questions regarding this law:

[T]he government takes the position that the metadata collected—a vast amount of which does not contain directly “relevant” information, as the government concedes—are nevertheless “relevant” because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant. We agree with appellants that such an expansive concept of “relevance” is unprecedented and unwarranted.

Sorry guys—no fishing expeditions, either.

The Second Circuit’s ruling can be read here.