Tag Archives: regulation

Personal Secrecy vs National Security

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The latest batch of 3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to “classified” since they landed in the former Secretary’s personal inbox. That brings the total number of classified docs found in the emails to 1,274. A State Department official told Fox News on Thursday that two of those emails were upgraded to “secret,” while most of the others were upgraded to “confidential.”

Because Democratic Party Presidential candidate and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s desire to keep her doings in our name as a Cabinet Secretary were more important than our national security.

We don’t need four more years of this from within the White House.

Government’s Gotta Regulate What A Man’s Gotta Do

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It is taking home buyers longer to get a mortgage, which some in the real-estate industry say is the result of new federal rules meant to make mortgage terms easier to understand.

It wasn’t broke, and mortgages were moving as much apace as this Obama Recovery permitted, but it also wasn’t regulated. Government abhors a control vacuum.

Mortgages took an average of 49 days to close in November…the longest closing time since February 2013….

That’s only a three day increase over October, but it’s an entirely unnecessary and a completely government caused delay.

The rules…require lenders to give borrowers final terms of a loan at least three business days before closing to ensure they have time to understand the agreement.

Never mind that consumers already can walk away from any purchase contract, including mortgage contracts, within three days after signing—the “cooling off” period.

Advocates for the changes say they are a common-sense response to the housing crisis, during which it became apparent that many borrowers didn’t understand the ramifications of terms such as teaser rates or growing principal balances.

Of course a Liberal will say it’s common sense to regulate. It couldn’t possibly be common sense to educate instead.

The outcome of this demand to regulate anything and everything is more than just a delay in closing. Sales of existing homes have fallen sharply, 10.5% in November, the first month these wonderful new regulations have been in place, compared to October.

Maybe It’s Time

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I’ve written before about the…suboptimality…of the SEC using its own “court” system (in quotes because it’s more of a kangaroo court system, with the SEC serving as accuser, prosecutor, judge (no jury), punisher, and appellate “court”). The SEC has even pretended to be changing its ways.

Now, this.

After five years, four judges, three rulings, two appeals and the loss of their careers, John Flannery and James Hopkins this month won their legal battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The former State Street Corp executives’ long legal fight took place almost entirely in the SEC’s in-house court system, which agency officials have lauded as offering a fast-track alternative to federal court.

Their problem is all too typical of this SEC.

Since Mary Jo White became SEC chairman in April 2013, the median time for the agency to decide appeals of its in-house judges’ decisions has increased to 19 months….

Then there’s the excuse.

A key part of the agency’s argument has been that the internal tribunal is more efficient.

You bet it is. The conviction and upholding rate is through the roof compared with the rates from those cases that make it out of the SEC and into an actual Federal court.

Since the bureaucrats at the SEC place their own imperatives ahead of their job, maybe it’s time to disband the SEC and replace it with a securities industry overseer that will place its job ahead of the imperatives of the new, fresh personnel who will populate it.

Alternatively, maybe it’d be sufficient to replace the head bureaucrat with someone who understands for whom she works.

Maybe It’s Time

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Banks fear a growing number of employees are unwittingly exposing valuable information to hackers or in some cases leaving digital clues that make a breach possible.

And

Several banks are also increasingly testing whether their employees unintentionally leave them susceptible to hackers by falling prey to “spear-phishing” attempts, in which criminals lure recipients to click on links.

And

Weeks after JP Morgan Chase & Co was hit with a massive data breach that exposed information from 76 million households, the country’s biggest bank by assets sent a fake phishing email as a test to its more than 250,000 employees. Roughly 20% of them clicked on it, according to people familiar with the email.

There’s no excuse for employees, in this day and age, being so gullible or so careless.

If employees are going to continue to be willfully irresponsible, maybe it’s time for employers to get hard-nosed in the workplace: company equipment is for company business exclusively, including during lunch or other breaks. With firing being the default sanction for misuse.

Full stop.

Encryption and Backdoors

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Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) wants (this is old news) a means for Government to read our private communications, most especially those we’ve chosen to encrypt. She wants Government to be able to penetrate that encryption, via, perhaps, a backdoor.

I think that Silicon Valley has to take a look at their products. [I]f you create a product that allows evil monsters to communicate in this way,…that is a big problem.

They have apps to communicate on, which cannot be pierced even with a court order[.]

On the one hand, perhaps hammers and screwdrivers should be Government controlled—they get used by evil monsters to commit mayhem.

Perhaps guns should be Government controlled—oh, wait….

Then, there’s this:

A major breach at computer network company Juniper Networks has US officials worried that hackers working for a foreign government were able to spy on the encrypted communications of the US government and private companies for the past three years.

The FBI is investigating the breach, which involved hackers installing a back door on computer equipment, US officials told CNN.

Yet, Government, folks like Feinstein who should know better and others who are simply pandering, wants a deliberate backdoor inserted into our private communications.

I’ll say it again. There is no safety without intact individual liberty.