All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Hillary Clinton: Cold Creepiness with a Side of Corruption

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Photo from MaxPixel, Creative Commons CC0.

 

On October 16, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took her public pity party (and not so subtle hopes of somehow magically overturning the 2016 election) abroad, calling out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a tool of Russian intelligence …. a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator” in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s show “Four Corners.”

Clinton’s evidenceless accusations don’t seem to  carry much weight with Assange himself. He doesn’t find her “a credible person.” “It is not just her constant lying,” he says. “It is not just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement. Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen.”

Was Clinton’s latest lunge at Assange and WikiLeaks a preemptive strike? An attempt, perhaps, to get ahead of extreme ugliness in the coming news cycle?

On the same day, the US  Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that its former director, James Comey, had begun drafting his concluding statement on the “Servergate” investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information — a statement technically exonerating Clinton, although between the lines the final draft clearly admitted that she didn’t face indictment because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton — months before even interviewing Clinton and other key witnesses.

Then, a day after Clinton’s diatribe, news broke that the FBI knew as early as 2009 about Russian attempts to gain control of 20% of the US uranium supply and new uranium sales opportunities in the US through corrupt means, but covered that information up for several years.

In fact, the cover-up remains at least partially in force. The Hill reports that in the run-up to last year’s election, the US Department of Justice (then under control of Hillary Clinton’s co-partisans in the Obama administration) threatened the FBI’s confidential informant in the case with criminal prosecution for violating a non-disclosure agreement if he sued to recover the money he’d spent helping the FBI make its case.  The informant’s lawyer is now seeking DoJ permission to talk to Congress about the case.

During the period in question, Russian sources paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to Hillary Clinton’s husband (former president Bill Clinton) and donated millions more to the family’s Clinton Foundation. And Clinton, at the time serving as US Secretary of State, dutifully bulldozed a  path through the American bureaucracy for Vladimir Putin. That sequence of events looks like what most people would call “bribery” and “influence peddling.”

What was that about nihilistic opportunists who do the bidding of dictators again?

If there was in fact collusion between the Russian government and a 2016 presidential campaign, it’s reasonable to ask: Were the Russians working with Trump’s campaign to defeat Clinton, or were the Russians paying back Clinton’s campaign for her faithful service to them by helping her gin up her claims of a Trump/Putin conspiracy? Or both? Or something else?

The effort to “Get Trump” may eventually bear fruit, but it’s starting to look like the effort to “Get Clinton” may do so first.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Microsoft Corp. v. United States: Jeff Sessions Wants Open Borders, But Only for Police

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On October 16, Morgan Chalfant of The Hill reports,  the US Supreme Court agreed to  hear the Justice Department’s appeal  in Microsoft Corp. v. United States.  The question before the court: Are search warrants issued by American courts valid abroad?

In 2013, Microsoft refused to turn information from a customer’s email account over to law enforcement pursuant to a warrant in a narcotics investigation. The information, Microsoft noted, was stored on a server in Ireland. Ireland, as you may have learned in elementary school, is neither one of the fifty states nor a US territory.  It’s a sovereign state with its own laws. US search warrants carry no weight there.

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with Microsoft, and the full court denied the government’s request for a rehearing. Apparently they learned geography as youngsters, too.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, maybe not so much. But he does seem to have a perpetual burr under his fur about “national sovereignty.” Sessions is on record criticizing both “illegal immigration” (under the US Constitution there’s no such thing) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as attacks on US sovereignty. So why is the Justice Department he leads seeking a declaration from the US Supreme Court  that US search warrants override the sovereignty of Ireland? American exceptionalism much?

Hopefully the court will uphold the Second Circuit’s decision and make it clear to Sessions that the whole border/sovereignty thing goes in both directions.

But the tech sector and individuals who value their privacy shouldn’t just sit still and hope for the best. What we need is a the continued erosion of “national” borders and the perfection of individual borders that are, as a practical workaday matter, mostly impenetrable to people like Jeff Sessions. While the former may take some time yet, the latter are already partially available and the unavailable part represents opportunity for reasonably entrepreneurial “sovereign states.”

The available part, as you might guess, consists of strong encryption. The sooner Microsoft and other email and data storage providers implement well-crafted end-to-end encryption for their users — encryption the providers do not hold the keys to — the sooner the data in question will become useless to the Jeff Sessionses of the world. “Oh, you have a warrant? OK, fine, here’s what you asked for. Good luck reading it.”

The unavailable part consists of (hopefully more than one) “data haven” states: Countries whose governments are willing to write strong data privacy and freedom protections into their laws, believably commit to sticking with those protections, then stand back and watch as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, et al. build huge data centers and perhaps even decide to re-domicile themselves (presumably paying lots and lots of taxes in both cases).

Sometimes the Supreme Court gets things right, but it’s definitely an imperfect and untrustworthy vessel to entrust with the protection of our privacy and our rights. Better to take those rights into our own hands with encryption, and decentralize their protection across friendly sovereignties.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Excessive: Bail Isn’t Meant to Enable the Holding of Political Prisoners

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The US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment forbids “excessive bail” in criminal prosecutions. That prohibition seems somewhat vague. I guess we’re just expected to know excessive bail when we see it. Two current cases demonstrate not just excessive bail, but abuse of the whole idea of bail for the purpose of holding un-convicted defendants as political prisoners.

In August, podcaster Christopher Cantwell of Keene, New Hampshire traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to join his fellow white nationalists in a violent race riot. Cantwell ended up as the central figure in a Vice documentary on the event — and under arrest for felony assault.

Cantwell’s bail was initially set at $25,000, but on appeal from the prosecutor it was revoked entirely and Cantwell was slapped into solitary confinement (“protective custody”) at the Albemarle County jail until his trial, scheduled for November. Why the sudden turnabout? The prosecutor claimed that Cantwell a) was a flight risk, and b) had evil political views.

Cantwell was clearly not a flight risk. He turned himself in on demand, having stayed in Virginia and in touch with police in anticipation of doing so once he heard rumors of a warrant for his arrest. And Cantwell’s political views should under no circumstances have been treated as relevant to bail. The purpose of bail is to incentivize a defendant to appear at trial, full stop.

Meanwhile in Georgia, Reality Leigh Winner languishes in the Lincoln County jail, also denied bail since her June arrest for “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.”

The initial bail denial was premised on the possibility that she might have taken, and might disclose, more classified information. But in a second bail hearing, as in Cantwell’s case, the judge’s denial of bail was obviously conditioned solely on the content of Winner’s supposed political beliefs.

Winner was not a significant flight risk. She had no criminal record, her passport had been confiscated, and her mother had offered to move to Georgia to act as her pre-trial custodian. The prosecutor’s only real argument for denying bail was the claim that Winner’s admitted admiration for fellow whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange indicated “contempt for our country and our security.” The judge bought that argument.

Again: The sole legitimate purpose of bail is to ensure that the defendant shows up for trial so as to not forfeit some significant amount of money or property.

Conditioning bail on the defendant’s political beliefs — or, worse, denying it entirely over those beliefs — is by definition “excessive.” Judges who commit such violations of the Eighth Amendment in particular and of due process in general should be removed from the bench — and possibly given a taste of confinement themselves.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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