Tag Archives: regulation

OPM

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The FBI paid a non-governmental third party over $1 million for technology that allowed the agency to unlock an iPhone 5C that belonged to San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook, according to a remark made by FBI director James Comey at a moderated discussion in London on Thursday.

And

The bureau’s top official added that the purchase of third party tools for the purpose of unlocking encrypted devices is not the preferred road the FBI would like to travel in investigating crimes and terrorism cases.

Of course not.  The FBI would prefer to use OPM to pay for such invasions, in this case Apple’s money to pay for forcing Apple to destroy its own customer-desired and -centered encryption.  Then Comey added in wide-eyed innocence,

I’m hoping that we can somehow get to a place where we have a sensible solution, or set of solutions, that doesn’t involve hacking and doesn’t involve spending tons of money in a way that’s unscalable[.]

That sensible solution includes no back-door, government-mandated accesses to encryption, which Comey has demanded earlier as part of his “sensible” solution.  He’s declined to explain how such backdoors don’t expose American citizens to government snooping and abuse, other than to say, “Trust us.”  He’s declined to explain, in any fashion, how such backdoors don’t expose American citizens to hacking by criminals and other nefarious types.

No, this push to use OPM for gaining entry is just another bit of government disingenuosity.

Another Intrusive Government Regulation

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US regulators proposed requiring the nation’s largest banks and financial firms to hold back executives’ bonus pay for four years, extending by a year the common industry practice on Wall Street incentive payouts.

The plan would also require a minimum period of seven years for the biggest firms to “claw back” bonuses if it turns out an executive’s actions hurt the institution.

In a free market economy—that is to say, a healthy economy—this would be a business decision, validated or rejected by that business’ owners and its marketplace customers.  However, in this Progressive-Democrat Party administration, this is a Government Decision, made by Government Know Betters, because those actually participating in an economy, with their own money on the line, can’t possibly understand the situation.

Another hint of a Government with too many employees and too little work: this…rule…was developed by no less than six agencies.

A State Appeals Court Missed the Point

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Recall the California case, Vergara v California, in which nine students and the nonprofit advocacy group Students Matter, sued the State of California, arguing that the State’s tenure laws and its firing and layoff policies made it too hard to fire bad teachers, thereby denying students a decent education.  At trial, the students won, and the laws were struck as unconstitutional.  Naturally, teachers unions—California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers—anxious to protect its tenure perks, appealed.

Last Thursday, a State appellate court

said the plaintiffs had not successfully proven that some students were indeed getting an inferior education because of job protection provisions.

The appellate court wrote, with a straight face,

Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would, the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers.  Instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach.

What the appellate court carefully ignored is that it doesn’t matter where bad teachers are assigned to teach.  The statutes in question require that they be assigned somewhere, to inflict their incompetence on unfortunate students somewhere.

That was the point of the suit: the statutes…lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers….

Score another victory of union prerogative over the welfare of our children.

No Stone Unturned

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And they’ll regulate how to turn the stones, too [emphasis added].

The European Union could require Internet search engines, such as Alphabet Inc’s Google, to provide more transparency about advertising systems and conditions of use as part of new rules to regulate Web platforms.

Just gotta fill that regulatory vacuum.  Just gotta.  ‘Cos the people can’t be left to their own devices; they can’t handle not being told what to do and not do.

Here’s European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip on the matter:

We have to deal with all those problems, but separately.

Notice that.  We have to deal, not the people should be left to deal.  They’d just be no good at it.  Besides, the more…targeted…the more regulations the Regulatory State gets to write.

A Presumption of Guilt

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The White House’s Office of Management and Budget earlier this week accepted for final review a rule that would force banks to identify the owners of companies behind shadowy financial transactions, such as the firms revealed in the Panama Papers scandal or the ones used to buy real estate.  It would close a loophole that critics say allows criminal money into the US financial system.

Never mind that the vast majority of the Panama Papers’ shell companies are entirely legitimate.  Never mind that, in a free country, there has to be probable cause driven by a presumption of innocence to go looking for “criminal money,” not just a government man’s idle suspicion, or a dislike for a person or an entity, or a liking for fishing expeditions.

Of course Government must be above such petty concerns.

A spokesman for FinCEN [Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the originator of this rule] said the agency couldn’t provide specifics on the contents of any final rule, nor could he predict the timing for publishing a final rule.  He declined to comment further.

Of course not.  And of course.

This also represents another instance of this Democratic administration’s post-America attitude.

The International Monetary Fund weighed in as well, criticizing the US in July 2015 for failing to move quickly enough on identifying beneficial owners, saying the rule, as proposed, was too weak.

“There were no requirements for [financial institutions] to look beyond a customer to establish the identity of the beneficial owners in all cases,” the IMF said at the time.

Nor need there be, absent a court’s order based on probable cause, but hey—it’s an extranational institution that’s objecting.  That matters.

Sure.