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Op-Eds

Twitter versus RT: Which One is State Media Again?

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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.

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Op-Eds

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.

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Op-Eds

The Cure for Weinstein is a Cultural Change

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Woman Being Stalked (stock photo from Pond5)

How many women did Harvey Weinstein victimize?  When did he  start down the continuum leading from Hollywood’s shamefully tolerated “casting couch”  overtures to  increasingly flagrant sexual harassment, and finally (if we believe his accusers, as I think we should) open sexual assault? We’ll probably never know.

But one thing we do know: There was a first time, a Victim Zero. While neither that victim nor the others should be blamed for what happened to them, it’s worth asking why there followed a Victim One, and a Victim Two, and so forth, spanning decades, before Weinstein was finally brought low for his depredations. And why so many others remain in the shadows, sexually victimizing women and men, adults and children, with impunity.

We need a culture change. The current culture of planting seeds of fear — the “stranger danger” mentality and such — before victimization and offering sympathy after clearly isn’t getting the job done. Instead of #MeToo after the fact pageantry, this problem calls for the inculcation of a strong, affirmative #NotMe attitude — an unwillingness to be Victim Zero, or to remain silent as other victims inevitably follow.

What must be rooted out is the sickness in our culture that lets sexual predators leverage fear into opportunity to commit their crimes and shame into an ability hide those crimes.

It has to start with parents and  extend to friends, mentors and  communities. Our children need to be brought up to understand that there’s nothing they can’t bring to the rest of us, and that we will back them completely should they encounter someone who attempts to victimize them.

We have to shift the fear away from would-be victims and strike it into the hearts of would-be victimizers. We have to make it preemptively clear that we will always ostracize those who harass and punish those who assault, not those who are harassed or assaulted.

We must send our young people out into the world understanding that when they walk away from — or, if necessary, run away from or defend themselves against — a Harvey Weinstein, it will be Weinstein, not them, who pays the price. And while systems of criminal  justice must and should presume innocence and work diligently to establish the truth, victims must know, to their very core, that they enjoy a starting presumption of belief from the rest of us.

The goal is simple, but this is a war. As Carl von Clausewitz pointed out, “everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” It’s not going to be easy. But I believe we can prevail, for ourselves and for our loved ones. Let’s make a better world, a world in which our Harvey Weinsteins become outcasts, not billionaires.

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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