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Op-Eds

Freedom is Winning in the Encryption Arms Race

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Bitcoin (stock photo from http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com, CC0 license)
Bitcoin (stock photo from http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com, CC0 license)

At tax time in the US, as Gaurav Sangwani  of India’s Financial Express reports, many American cryptocurrency users weren’t interested in discussing that aspect of their lives with the Internal Revenue Service. In an early April TeamBlind survey of 2,600 people who earned money from crypto, 46% said they wouldn’t be reporting those earnings to Uncle Sam. Meanwhile, per Investopedia’s Nathan Reiff, fewer than 100 of Credit Karma Tax’s 250,000 most recent filers  had reported cryptocurrency transactions as of April 13.

That’s bad news for the IRS, but great news for America. People whose ancestors fought a revolution nearly 250 years ago on the slogan “no taxation without representation” are finally acquiring the weapons to fight a new revolution on a new slogan: No taxation without CONSENT.

Taxation as we know it is really nothing more than the typical mob protection racket: “Nice livelihood you got there — be a shame if anything happened to it.” And since the birth of employer “withholding” during World War Two, the mobsters have mostly had it easy. They rake what they want right off the top of your paycheck and encourage you to think of any partial refund as a gift.

The racket has always had two weak points, though.

One is that it’s dependent on a model of employment — centralized workplace, lots of employees, one employer — that’s increasingly giving way to a “gig economy” in which more and more people are becoming de facto self-employers.

The other is that it’s dependent on an easy access to personal information that once favored the mobsters but that has likewise been breaking down since the dawn of widely available Internet access.

Since the late 1980s, Americans have been engaged in an arms race with the federal government: Our strong encryption versus their attempts to compromise that encryption. Win some, lose some, but cryptocurrency is potentially our side’s decisive super-weapon.

If you thought the perpetual whining from law enforcement about encryption was about fighting terrorism, think again. It’s mostly about the money. Like other mobsters, politicians and their accomplices hate the idea of their rackets coming to an end.

Government will get much smaller and much less powerful once it has to ask nicely for a share of the wealth you produce, and justify the request, instead of just taking what it wants. That day draws closer as the percentage of people using cryptocurrency and declining to tell Uncle Sam about it grows.

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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Op-Eds

Trump Isn’t the First War Criminal President. He Should be the Last.

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Nuremberg Trials at courtroom 600, November 1945
Nuremberg Trials at courtroom 600, November 1945 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Only a couple of weeks ago, US president Donald Trump stated his desire to bring American troops home from Syria: “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon …. Let the other people take care of it now.”

As if on cue: An alleged chemical attack in Douma, where the Assad regime’s forces are rooting out rebel resistance in their re-taking of the eastern Ghouta region.

Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical weapons are only now arriving to look into the claim, but Trump (as well as the UK’s Theresa May and France’s Emmanuel Macron) wasted no time proclaiming the allegations proven and Assad the culprit. On April 14, the three governments launched missile strikes on supposed Syrian chemical facilities.

The strikes were illegal under both US and international law. Congress hasn’t declared war on Syria. Congress hasn’t even passed an extra-constitutional “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” regarding Syria. Nor has the United Nations authorized military action versus Syria.

The strikes on Syria constitute war of aggression. The Syrian regime has never attacked, nor threatened to attack, any of the three countries which just attacked it, nor are its alleged domestic crimes, however horrible, the bailiwick of those three governments.

And as the Nuremberg Tribunal noted, “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Donald Trump, Theresa May, and Emmanuel Macron are war criminals.

They’re certainly not the first war criminals to hold positions of power in their countries. Every living former US president with the possible — possible — exception of Jimmy Carter has a lot to answer for, as do Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, et al.

Not the first by any means. But there’s no good reason why they shouldn’t be the last.

In the US, at least, Congress has the power of impeachment, and reason to use it. An increasingly imperial presidency has, since the end of World War Two, eaten away at its constitutionally vested war powers. Congress should finally re-assert its power in that sphere by removing an offending president. In fact, it should have done so long before Trump took office. He just happens to be the current perpetrator.

Beyond impeachment, it’s time to reconstitute something like the Nuremberg Tribunal and give it teeth. I personally oppose the death penalty, but if it is a deterrent to retail murder, presumably it would also deter mass murder in the form of wars of aggression.

These people won’t stop committing these crimes on their own. They must be stopped. And there’s no time like the present.

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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Op-Eds

The Senate vs. Facebook: Beware Untrustworthy Partners, Revisited

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“Congress must determine if and how we need to strengthen privacy standards to ensure transparency and understanding for the billions of consumers who utilize [technology] products,”  Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said at a US Senate hearing held to grill Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg on April 10.

“[I]f Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix the privacy invasions,” opined Bill Nelson (D-FL), “then we are going to have to — we, the Congress.”

Lindsey Graham (R-NC): “What do we tell our constituents, given what’s happened here, why we should let you self-regulate?”

Richard Blumenthal (D-CT): “I think legislation is necessary. The rules of the road have to be the result of congressional action.”

John Kennedy (R-LA): “I don’t want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will.”

Back in early 2015, when then-president Barack Obama signed an executive order on cybersecurity “information sharing,” I pointed out in a column that the federal government is the last organization any sane human being would trust to secure the privacy of his or her data.

My opinion was swiftly and irrefutably vindicated: That same year produced revelations of government database breaches compromising the personal information of 22 million former government employees, 330,000 taxpayers, and 191 million voters.

So here we are, three years later, and the US Senate wants you to believe that it can, if it deems itself called upon to do so, excel the efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to safeguard the information you entrust to social media.

Cue laughter, followed by horror as the realization dawns that yes, the US Senate will undoubtedly soon deem itself called upon to do that.

It’s not that the rest of us need their help. We don’t, and even if we did they couldn’t help us.

It’s that we don’t understand the real problem, and they do.

The real problem is not with Facebook’s handling of your information.

The real problem is that politicians never have as much power as they want to have.

The solution to that problem is obvious: All they need to do is just award themselves a little bit more power. More power over Facebook. More power over the Internet.  More power over your information. More power over you.

You didn’t really believe this was about your information, your privacy, or your freedom, did you? Politics is always about who’s in charge, and politicians always sincerely believe that it should be them.

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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