Tag Archives: rights

A Slip of the Mask

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When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deleted for a few minutes last week, it looked like an isolated mistake by a customer service employee “on his last day at work,” as Twitter, Inc, representatives had it.

Maybe not.  Now, more information is coming to light about that incident.  Seconds thoughts are occurring about the likelihood of a single employee in such a position having the authority to delete an entire account.  There’s more, too.

Inside Twitter, the brief deactivation elicited celebration or amusement even in the upper ranks. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey Liked a tweet with an image of his face superimposed on celebrity painter Bob Ross standing before a canvas depicting Mr Trump’s deactivated account. “There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents!” the caption said.

And

One former employee said that deleting Mr Trump’s account was a “running joke” among employees about things they wanted to do on their last day.

And

Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former head of entertainment and talent partnerships, retweeted a post about the rogue employee that said, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

“Doing good on the way out the door,” is how another former employee described the episode.

And

A former employee involved with Twitter Moments, a product that highlights tweets curated by the platform or users, said on a number of occasions during the campaign that senior executives expressed displeasure with Moments that portrayed Mr Trump in a good light.

It’s also instructive that so many of these Twitter, Inc, responses are exposed by ex-Twitter employees, and not by current ones.

The mask has slid away momentarily, quickly reset, and the slip has exposed what free speech would be under a Left-leaning government.  And it looks a lot like the “free” speech of our colleges and universities.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals of.

The Louisiana court system, all the way up to the State’s Supreme Court, has upheld police denial of a (black) defendant’s demand for a lawyer during a police interrogation.  At one point during the interrogation, the suspect said, quite clearly IMNSHO,

If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ’cause this is not what’s up.

The Supreme Court said the suspect’s statement was too ambiguous to constitute a demand for a lawyer.  Justice Scott Chrichton, in concurring, actually wrote in all seriousness,

In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview….

Elie Mystal, in his article at the link, generously attributed the ruling to an inaccurate transcript—”lawyer dog” vice the defendant’s clearly stated “lawyer, dawg,” even as he, rightly, decried the blatant racism in denying the suspect his lawyer.  Over that “ambiguity.”

I’m not so inclined.  Even without the comma, “lawyer dog” is a pretty clear slang phrase identifying the object of the suspect’s call.

Dawg.

Mao is Dead

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Long live Mao.

People’s Republic of China’s newly crowned Emperor and President-for-Life Xi Jinping has mounted his throne and is starting to exercise his power.

Under Mr Xi’s orders, mandatory political-study sessions emphasizing his speeches and policies were revived for all party members.

And

So was the Mao-era practice of members criticizing others and themselves.

Can we look forward to reeducation camps, too?  Maybe.  Here’s Xi on necessary fervor and “right thinking:”

We must continue to rid ourselves of any virus that erodes the party’s fabric[.]

And

Many government agencies and state-owned businesses require party members to attend study sessions at least once a month. Some officials organize weekly discussions, ask members to spend an hour a day on political self-study or arrange field trips to revolutionary landmarks.

And here’s an indication of the level of Orwellian micromanaging control over individuals that Xi expects the party to exercise:

Rank-and-file Communist Party members must take notes in standard-issue journals and submit them for review, as well as spend spare time studying for regular political discussions and quizzes.

We’re going to live in interesting times.  And so are the Chinese people on the mainland.

Mobile Encryption is a Huge Problem

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That’s the position of FBI Director Christopher Wray.

To put it mildly, this [mobile device encryption] is a huge, huge problem.  It impacts investigations across the board.

Certainly, consumer-done encryption of our communications devices can temporarily hinder investigations of the criminals who also use this encryption.  But as the FBI demonstrated regarding an encrypted cell phone involved in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, its initial claims notwithstanding, the encryption can be broken without the cooperation of the device’s owner.

Every tool can be misused.  The problem is not the misuse of the tool but government efforts to apply one-size-fits-all solutions to the misuse that end up harming all the rest of us more than the bad guys.

The FBI’s continued demand for a “government-mandated backdoor” that the government’s agents can use whenever they take a notion puts a premium on the encryption side of the question.  Think Government wouldn’t misbehave?  Ask anyone on the right about the behavior of the Obama administration.  Ask anyone on the left about the behavior of the Trump administration.

It’s always going to be an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys.  It’s a critical arms race, though, when it’s our own government that wants to pry into all of our private communications because a few of us are bad guys.

Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”

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After being unable to get a job with any team in the NFL this season, Colin Kaepernick has filed a formal grievance against the NFL, each of the 32 team owners, and President Donald Trump—who supposedly “influenced” league management and team owners into not hiring him—alleging that they colluded to not sign him at quarterback, or end-of-bench monitor, this season.

Coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he routinely attacked our flag and national anthem and insulted our veterans by taking a knee during the pre-game playing of our national anthem.  Also coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he led his last employer, the San Francisco 49ers, to a 1-10 record before the team tired of losing and benched him.

Let’s set aside Kaepernick’s beef against Trump.  Aside from being utterly laughable, it casually insults the team owners as being cowards unable to run their businesses in the face of a Presidential tweet parade.  That’s a minor point.

What illustrates the risible nature of Kaepernick’s grievance is its centering on his free speech rights and his claim that he’s been blackballed as a result of his so-called protests.

Carefully elided is everyone else’s free speech right to object to his behavior, just as vociferously, including with ticket dollars and TV viewing.  This particularly includes team owners, who don’t give up their free speech rights to respond in the same forum to Kaepernick’s, et al., free speech “protests.”

Also: a private company employee’s free speech rights, within very broad limits, are matters of employment contract parameters. The 1st Amendment limits Government, not private entities.

Beyond all of that, neither a broad functional consensus—paralleling the fans’ broad consensus—of owners disliking this particular misbehavior, nor a separate broad functional consensus that employees publicly disparaging our national symbols and insulting those who fought to defend them is bad for business, even remotely approach collusion.

There is no case in this lawfare assault.