Tag Archives: government

Talk, But Don’t Act

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Now the White House policy is hitting the State Department’s ability to keep secrets from our enemies.

Weeks before the State Department’s Nov 16 shutdown of its unclassified email system in the face of unprecedented hacking attacks, auditors took the department’s management to task for ignoring warnings about their lax security habits and chronic failure to enact protections against high-tech intruders.

The situation was so bad, the auditors say in a highly censored report, that they “identified control deficiencies across a total of 102 different systems reviewed over five years, yet many of the same deficiencies have persisted.”

State’s leadership, though, claims it’s no big deal, and certainly not as bad as the auditors say.

The State’s bureaucracy disputes the audit’s finding that State’s info-tech weaknesses amount to a “significant deficiency” in its security….

And anyway, according to State’s Chief Information Officer Steven Taylor,

[W]e have created a foundation for correcting several existing weaknesses and an ability to address new issues as they arise.

Talking about talking. Never mind that the auditors noted that

OIG [State’s Office of the Inspector General] has reported deficiencies related to risk management since its FY 2010 audit. Many of the same deficiencies remained uncorrected in FY 2014.

And

[W]e identified control deficiencies across a total of 102 different systems reviewed over 5 years, yet many of the same deficiencies have persisted.

These all are highly intelligent people, professionals in their field, who surely know what they’re doing—and not doing. I have to wonder about the motivations behind their decision to talk, but not act.

The audit can be read here and here.

Free Speech, PRC Style

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During visits to more than 20 schools, the regional paper [Liaoning Daily] wrote last week, it found exactly what it said it was looking for: some professors compared Chinese Communist Party co-founder Mao Zedong to ancient emperors, a blasphemy to party ideology upholding Mao as a break from the country’s feudal past. Other scholars were caught pointing out the party’s failures after taking power in 1949. Some repeatedly praised “Western” ideas such as a separation of powers in government.

“Dear teachers, because your profession demands something higher of you, and because of the solemnity and particularity of the university classroom, please do not speak this way about China!” implored the article….

Yep.

Recall, also, the PRC’s ongoing suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, in cynical repudiation of its commitment to the Hong Kongese and the Brits as part of the turnover agreement between the Brits and the PRC.

Privacy and Government

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…and government shoe-squeezing.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department [Deputy Attorney General James Cole] delivered a blunt message last month to Apple Inc executives: new encryption technology that renders locked iPhones impervious to law enforcement would lead to tragedy. A child would die, he said, because police wouldn’t be able to scour a suspect’s phone, according to people who attended the meeting.

The naked panic-mongering is something we’d expect to get out of the press, but for a high-ranking government official to spout such nonsense is…unseemly. For Cole to masquerade his extreme outlier as the trend that must result, though, is dishonest. But it’s all good—DoJ must be able to snoop into Americans’ communications on DoJ’s own recognizance. Because, of course, no American administration would abuse its discretion.

This comes on the heels of another DoJ overwrought claim.

Last month, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said new Apple and Google encryption schemes would “allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

This is the risk a free people take; it’s a risk the free American people have said repeatedly we’re willing and anxious to take. Because such encryption schemes also would “allow people to place themselves beyond an overreaching government.” Which overreach the crocodile tears and manufactured crises of Cole and Comey demonstrate this government is committing.

Give up some freedom—some privacy from government snooping—in order to have security? Pssh. Without the freedom, without the privacy from government snooping, there can never be any security.

Wrong Answer

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At this week’s G-20 meeting in Australia, British Prime Minister David Cameron outlined his proposed restrictions on speech as a mechanism for combatting terrorism and youth radicalization at home.

Cameron told the Parliament the root cause of extremism was not poverty, social isolation from the mainstream or foreign policy.

“The root cause of the challenge we face is the extremist narrative. So we must confront this extremism in all its forms,” Cameron said.

“We must ban extremist preachers from our country. We must root out extremism from our schools, universities and prisons[.]”

This is the wrong answer.

Youth “radicalization” is a part of growing up as children test boundaries, learn more, test more boundaries, and so on. It’s how they learn initiative and individual responsibility.

“Extreme” speech also is a way of pushing boundaries. More importantly, it’s a way of drawing the public’s and government’s attention to this or that problem, and of pushing authorities to take corrective action—where appropriate. The public, after all, is fully capable determining for itself whether the problem described really is worth any hoo-raw.

Most importantly, though, it’s an extremely dangerous thing for government to limit speech or radical behavior. What’s the limiting principle for such limits? In what way government draw the line here, and not one syllable further? In what way can government say this is too radical, but that is not? In what way can government discriminate incitement to riot from a misunderstood speech?

“I know it when I see it,” as a Supreme Court Justice said about pornography, is a poor standard, and it leaves the matter open to government abuse. If this speech is too extreme, then what about that speech? And the next speech? Absent a clearly stated limit—and Cameron appears to have offered none—there’s nothing to keep government from adding limits, extending them, barring, for instance, criticism of government as prejudicial to good order.

No, a better answer is to let the speech fly, let the “radicalization” occur. Give parents and schools the tools to teach better (which begins with holding the parents accountable for their failure to be parents). Let the “radicalized” go join the terrorists overseas—don’t let them come back. Punish the domestic crimes when they occur, don’t make additional crimes through legislation. There is already a sufficiency (and perhaps too many) conspiracy laws on the books which can be used to preempt domestic crime and terrorist activities; enforce these, don’t create more conspiracy crimes legislatively.

Cameron’s proposal is disappointing from the leader of the birthplace of John Locke.

What Emails?

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They can’t be there, because I didn’t look for them. If they had been there, I’d have looked.

Attorneys for the IRS have told a federal court that they have not searched various “other sources” for the missing emails of former agency official Lois Lerner, claiming that doing so would be fruitless.

… The IRS has said that potentially thousands of emails belonging to Lerner, a central figure in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, were lost in a hard drive crash in 2011.
…
[T]he IRS said that it did not search the agency’s servers for the emails because it determined doing so “would not result in the recovery of any information.”

So there.

And

In addition, the IRS said did not search the agency’s disaster recovery tapes because the tapes are reused or destroyed every six months, therefore rendering them useless in the hunt for Lerner’s emails from or before 2011.

It’s time to impound the servers and conduct a forensic search. Time, also, to arrest the IRS officials involved. This willful destruction is a violation of the Federal Records Act, which

requires executive branch departments and agencies to collect, retain, and preserve federal records, which provide the Administration, Congress, and the public with a history of public policy execution and its results..

It’s also evidence tampering.