Category Archives: Op-Eds

What Difference at This Point Does the Trump Dossier Make? None.

Trump Dossier from RGBStock

‘Twixt and ‘tween daily news on Russiagate (the investigation into alleged “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump) and Uraniumgate (the investigation into Russian bribes paid to a number of people, quite likely including Hillary Clinton, to smooth US government approvals for buying a good deal of, you guessed it, uranium) comes new information on Dossiergate (the question of who paid a British inteligence operative a trove of dirt on then presidential candidate Donald Trump).

Dossiergate first reared its ugly head during the general election campaign in 2016, then more or less disappeared for more than a year until late October. Now we’ve learned that several organizations paid Christopher Steele to get the goods on Trump. Of the three we know of, one was a Republican newspaper (the Washington Free Beacon, during the GOP primaries) and two were Democratic Party organizations (the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign).

Breathless updates notwithstanding, Dossiergate is what Democrat politico Van Jones got caught calling the Russiagate investigation: “A big nothing burger.”

All political campaigns — or at least all political campaigns worth their salt — do what’s called “opposition research.” They dig as deeply as possible (or as they can afford to) into their opponents’ political, business, and personal lives looking for dirt that can be used to win elections. The better campaigns do opposition research on their own candidates as well, because nobody likes surprises and because politicians lie, even to their friends and supporters.

If this sounds like a bad thing to you, think again. The more you know about the candidates asking for your vote, the better equipped you are to make decisions about how to cast that vote. Does it get ugly? Yes, it does. The truth isn’t always pretty, but it’s the truth and more truth is always better than less truth.

Naturally, you don’t want to just take one candidate’s word that another candidate did something bad. In addition to finding the dirt, the opposition researcher’s job is to substantiate that dirt, giving you real evidence to chew on so that you can be confident in your own conclusions.

I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton, or for that matter of Donald Trump. But she and her campaign staff would have been doing a disservice to the public as well as to themselves if they hadn’t looked for the dirt on Donald Trump, and then aired any dirt they could authenticate. To the extent that democracy works, its fuel is information. And information is opposition research’s finished product.

Dossiergate is not and never has been a scandal per se. However titillating the details, it’s merely been the story of presidential campaigns and candidates doing their jobs.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Twitter versus RT: Which One is State Media Again?

English: An article clipping of the New York T...
English: An article clipping of the New York Times publishing of the Overman Committee report. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

America’s New Red Scare escalated in mid-October as the US Department of Justice demanded that the US division of television network RT (formerly known as Russia Today) register as a “foreign agent” under the aptly named Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The obvious purpose of DoJ’s demand is to keep the guttering flame of panic over “Russian election meddling” from going completely out. It’s a publicity stunt and that’s pretty much all it is  (no word of similar registration demands to personnel working in the US for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Kol Yisrael, et al.). But yes, RT is in fact an enterprise owned and operated by the Russian government, so fair enough, I guess.

Enter social media giant Twitter with two announcements.

First, while it has been accidentally over-counting its user base for some time, there are in fact more than 300 million Twitter users,the majority of them in countries other than the United States.

Second, Twitter won’t be selling advertising to RT (or to Sputnik, a Russian state news agency and radio broadcaster) any more.

Whether Twitter really buys into the “Russian election meddling” theatrics or not, it’s pretending to. It’s appeasing to the US government in the same way American film producers did with their post-World War Two “blacklists,”  and with respect not just to RT and Sputnik, but to anything and everything its masters in DC deem unacceptable (for example, accounts linked to Islamic and other alleged “extremists”).

Twitter is fast becoming a branch of US state media itself. For a company with such a large international user base, that seems like a bad business plan. And it’s certainly a bad thing from the perspective of achieving the not quite realized, but clearly to be pursued, promise that the Internet holds out to humanity — connecting people around the globe without  kowtowing to the increasingly obsolete and disintegrating concept of national borders.

Of course, Twitter and other tech firms relying on ad revenues are in both an enticing and difficult position. Uncle Sugar can be very generous with, say, military recruitment advertising dollars when he gets his way. When he doesn’t, he can get downright abusive and start looking for legislative hooks — sanctions violations, for example — to hang the offenders from.

All the more reason for tech companies whose clienteles sprawl across national borders to find more freedom-friendly countries to locate their offices in.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Encryption: Christopher Wray’s “Huge, Huge Problem” is an Age-Old Inconvenience

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Less than three months into his tenure as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray wants you to know that the Trump administration’s policy on encryption is business as usual: Keep trying to break it, keep pretending it’s a new obstacle, keep thumping the rail and demanding unrealistic limitations on it.

In an October 22 speech to the International Associations of Chiefs of Police, Wray complained that in the first 11 months of 2017, his agents found themselves unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices.

“To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,” Wray complained, citing various criminal activities as hobgoblins before going on to the usual faux-reasonable claim that “there’s a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to make the public safe.”

Wrong, Mr. Wray. There’s no “balance” involved. Encryption is a fact of life that you’re just going to have to live with. And it’s been that way for a long, long time.

Theoretically unbreakable encryption has been around since at least as early as 1882 when Frank Miller invented and described the “one-time pad.” A pen, a piece of paper, and a way to generate random numbers is all anyone needs to frustrate Christopher Wray’s desire to read our mail.

In the Internet age, Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy “public key” encryption framework is more than a quarter century old, still going strong, and available in various forms for most computer operating systems.

Yes, encryption can frustrate criminal investigations. Some of the Zodiac Killer’s hand-encrypted messages remain unbroken more than 40 years after his killings ceased.

Whining about it won’t change it. The “balance” Wray and his counterparts in other federal agencies and abroad (such as UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd) keep calling for amounts to outlawing properties of math and logic that they find inconvenient.  Maybe they should do something about that pesky gravity while they’re at it.

If the encryption whiners get their way on policy and legislation, they’ll face two utterly predictable outcomes:

First, “the bad guys” — terrorists and criminals, real and imagined — will continue to use strong encryption. The problem with outlawing math and logic is that neither criminals nor math and logic give a hoot about human desires masquerading as “laws.”

Second, countries where governments try to require “back doors” in encryption and other similarly stupid ideas will become losers in the race to the future. Tech companies in those countries will either go out of business or move their operations to jurisdictions where they’re allowed to serve their customers without Christopher Wray’s permission.

Government is not an immovable object. Encryption is an unstoppable force. Go away, Wray.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY