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No Huawei! US Spy Chiefs Reverse Course on Phone Spying

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If it seems like only a year ago that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was telling us how dangerous it is for Americans to have encrypted smart phones that make it hard for the FBI to poke around in our data, that’s because yes, it really was only a year ago.

In early 2017, James Comey took Apple to court, demanding that the company help the FBI hack into the iPhone used by San Bernardino terrorist/murderer Syed Farook. Other officials have kept up a steady whine against strong encryption ever since.

But now, CNN reports, the FBI and other US intelligence agencies are suddenly and ever so deeply concerned with preserving your smart phone privacy.

Testifying before the US Senate Intelligence Committee, officials from the FBI, CIA, NSA, et al. warned Americans against using phones made by Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE.

Why? Because, Christopher Wray (Comey’s successor at the FBI) explains, the Chinese government might equip, or find and exploit weaknesses in, such phones to “maliciously modify or steal information” and “conduct undetected espionage.”

I feel Wray’s pain. The US spy community has presumably been playing catch-up with China and everyone else since last March, when WikiLeaks released its “Vault 7” series of documents exposing the CIA’s tools and methods for compromising your electronic privacy. Wikileaks then went to work helping American tech firms harden their gear against those tools and methods. Wray and friends must really hate the idea of being in second place behind Beijing when it comes to eavesdropping on, and rifling through the files of, Americans.

Who would you rather have crawling around inside your cell phone: The FBI or China’s Ministry of State Security? It’s not a tough call for me.

We’re separated from China by an ocean, and their government probably doesn’t give a hoot about the three felonies author Harvey Silverglate says the average American commits every day. Unless I’ve got the  military’s nuclear launch codes or pictures of Donald Trump and someone else naked together on my phone (eww!), the Chinese probably aren’t interested.

The FBI, on the other hand, seems to spend a lot of its time charging people with crimes that shouldn’t even BE crimes. Like, for example, lying to the FBI.

If I didn’t already own a Samsung, I’d be temped to tell the FBI to shut up and get the heck out of my Huawei.

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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Purpose versus Excuse: Why Congress Might Buy Trump’s Food Stamp Reform Plan

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English: Logo of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Politico reports that the Trump administration wants to partially replace “food stamps” with “a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month.” Under the plan, recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which these days are delivered as debit card balances rather than as physical coupons — “stamps” — would receive about half as much money to buy food with. The other half would be replaced by the “America’s Harvest Box,” stuffed with “100 percent U.S. grown and produced food” such as shelf-stable milk and canned goods.

From the initial response, one might expect this plan to go nowhere. Its cost-cutting benefits are debatable (the US Department of Agriculture says it would save $129 billion over ten years, but they’re not including the cost of actually delivering the food). Grocers oppose it for the obvious reason that it would reduce the amount of money flowing through their cash registers. Smaller-government types point out that it would entail a bigger USDA and that families are better judges of their own food needs than some box-packing bureaucrats.

But it still might pass. Why? Because the purpose of “food stamps” is not what most people think it is.

What is that purpose?

No, it’s not to feed the poor. That’s a happy side effect and a convenient excuse.

The real purpose of the program is to justify welfare checks to Big Agriculture.

That’s where the program came from, starting during the New Deal, when US Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace proposed it as a bridge across “a gorge, with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other.”

That’s why low-income households received “government cheese” in the 1980s when the federal government got caught warehousing enormous quantities of dairy products it bought for the purpose of propping up milk prices.

And that’s why SNAP remains the largest appropriation line in the “Farm Bill” that Congress passes every five years (the 2014 Farm Bill dedicated $756 billion to “food stamps and nutrition”).

Good arguments against Trump’s proposal notwithstanding, the “America’s Harvest Box” would serve the program’s true purpose well in one particular respect:

It would let government direct money to specific farm welfare queens in a way that can’t happen if SNAP recipients can buy whatever they want to eat using the debit card.

If the dairy industry is the squeaky wheel this week, more milk and cheese goes into the box. Next week maybe it’s more cereal because the grain farmers hired a sharper lobbyist. And the week after that, more canned beef stew or ham after those industries make smartly targeted campaign contributions.

Yes, the whole thing has to be sold pursuant to the excuse, and it will be. The box will deliver more balanced nutrition than people are inclined to buy for themselves, and more food at less cost to the taxpayers. And so on.

All of which may be true, but the decision, as always, will be made in favor of special interest groups with more clout than the hungry.

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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No Voting Rights for Felons: Unfair, Anti-Democratic, and, Yes, “Nonsensical”

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In late January, US District Judge Mark Walker struck down Florida’s rules for restoring the voting rights of former convicts, finding those rules not just unconstitutional (on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds) but “nonsensical.”

Why nonsensical? Because “disenfranchised citizens must kowtow before a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida’s governor has absolute veto authority. ”

If a panel of  appointed bureaucrats (or the governor) doesn’t like you, you don’t get to vote. Maybe they don’t believe you’ve truly “reformed.” Maybe they don’t like your perceived partisan affiliation. Maybe they just don’t like your skin color.

In fact, the system would be “nonsensical” even if it didn’t leave the decision in the hands of partisan hacks. If the Declaration of Independence is to be taken even a little bit seriously, that system is completely out of line with American values.

Only four states  (Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) fail to automatically restore the vote to convicts at the ends of their sentences. Maine, Vermont, and the US territory of Puerto Rico don’t just restore voting rights at end of sentence — they allow prisoners to vote.

The Declaration of Independence lays out a clear bottom line standard for the legitimacy of government: The consent of the governed.

We could argue about what consent really means, but where democracy is the form of government, the vote is traditionally deemed the instrument of that consent, and in America expanding the franchise — to former slaves, then to women, then to all citizens down to the age of 18 — has been the trend for 150 years.

Prisoners are certainly “governed,” and to a far greater degree than most of us. They live in cages. They’re told when to get up, when to go to sleep, and what to do in between, with draconian punishments for disobedience.  Once their sentences are completed, they’ve supposedly “paid their debt to society” (would that our justice system emphasized restitution to real victims rather than the myth that “society” is or can be owed anything, but that’s a subject for another column). On what grounds can former — or, for that matter, current — be legitimately forbidden the vote if “consent of the governed” is truly the standard and the vote is truly its expression?

Florida’s existing voters will have an opportunity this November to pass a constitutional amendment ending their state’s “nonsensical” system and restoring voting rights automatically to felons who complete their sentences.

That’s a good first step.

Next, how about a federal voting rights suit on behalf of  all those who are governed but forbidden the legal ability to supposedly consent?

And, finally, how about a dramatic reduction in the scope and severity of government power that we supposedly consent TO?

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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