Tag Archives: regulation

Telecommunications and Backdoors

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It turns out that Huawei has been able to use legislatively mandated backdoors into telecommunications software—backdoors ostensibly for the sole benefit of law enforcement, and then only usable within judicially allowed limits, search warrants duly sworn, in the US, for instance—for years.

But we would never do that, says Huawei in its wide-eyed innocence.

“The use of the lawful interception interface is strictly regulated and can only be accessed by certified personnel of the network operators. No Huawei employee is allowed to access the network without an explicit approval from the network operator,” the [senior Huawei] official said.

The existence of the interface is the access pathway. The bar to its use is wholly a matter of the integrity of the humans involved. This is not a hard concept to understand; Huawei’s management is being disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Further, PRC law requires PRC companies to cooperate with the government on the government’s demand.

Huawei “has never and will never do anything that would compromise or endanger the security of networks and data of its clients,” the company said.

Huawei’s CEO Ren has also made that preposterous claim. He and his management team insult our intelligence, assuming as they do that we would believe that Huawei would actually defy the PRC government.

Markets in Internet Domains

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ISOC, which owns the .org Internet domain, wants to sell the address to a company called Ethos, which wants to go into a for-profit business managing Internet domains or Internet addresses. ICANN has to approve the sale before it can go through.

The free market competition that would result from the sale and others like it is supposed to knell the end of the Internet. The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board likes the idea.

They’re both wrong, and they’re both being hysterical about it.

ICANN, and ISOC, come to that, have done a fine job of managing the domains within their purview. I’m not sure that’s a thing needing fixing, so I’m spring-loaded against the sale of any their domains to Ethos or any other organization.

Competition? Of course. Let Ethos generate its own domain or suite of domains to compete with the .org domain. Let Ethos and other private enterprises create their own domains or suites of them to compete with the existing ICANN-overseen domains like .com, .edu, .[whatevs].

Simply passing a domain from one manager to another does nothing for competition; that’s just a game of Two-Card Monte.

Government Knows Better Than Owners

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That’s what the SEC is claiming with its latest shenanigan.

[T]he Securities and Exchange Commission wants to make it harder for small shareholders to get resolutions onto company ballots, known as proxies.

After all, the SEC says, with some accuracy,

responding to resolutions can pose an undue burden on companies, costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece for research, and printing and mailing of ballots.

However.

Corporate by-laws are set by the owners of the company, and the owners can, via their by-laws, set the parameters surrounding shareholder resolutions and thereby manage their own costs just fine, thank you.

Every one of the ills imagined by the SEC are capable of being handled by each business in its own way, whether by doing things the SEC wants to impose on all company owners, or with steps each company’s owners deem best for their specific situation.

Or they would be able to, did Government regulations, existing as well as proposed, not interfere so extensively with the way in which owners manage their property.

Gun Control

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is a strong fan of gun control to the point of, ultimately, seizing all of our guns.  He’s even running a Super Bowl ad to that effect. Tim O’Brien, one of Bloomberg’s senior campaign advisors even says about the ad and its gun control subject,

This [gun question] is something that touches families. It most profoundly touches communities of color.

You bet it does. Gun control was something enormously expanded by the Democratic Party to disarm newly freed blacks so they could more easily be lynched by the Democratic Party’s KKK.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party, and its leading politicians, want to continue that disarmament; they want to prevent blacks, and Hispanics in this 21st century, from being able to defend their families from thugs; they want to maintain gun free zones so people of any skin color or religion are unable to defend themselves.

Criminalizing Speech

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That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.