Monthly Archives: April 2018

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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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Mueller is Desperate — But For What?

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On April 9, federal agents raided the office, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, personal attorney to US president Donald Trump. Cohen has come under fire, with potential legal implications, for paying  $130k to silence adult film actress and alleged Trump paramour Stephanie Clifford, better known as “Stormy Daniels.”

That hush money seems to be the excuse for the raids, but as the Washington Post reports, they are “part of an investigation referred by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to federal prosecutors in New York …”

Poor  Mueller. After nearly a year as special counsel in the “Russiagate” probe, he has yet to accomplish either of his missions.

His putative job is to expose “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election, especially with respect to possible collusion between the campaign of now-president Donald Trump and the regime of Vladimir Putin.

His real goal, of course, is to overturn that election by “getting” Trump on something — anything will do — that Congress can treat, and that the public will accept, as  impeachable/indictable.

So far Mueller’s secured indictments of a few Trump associates on charges having little or nothing to do with his overt mission, and of a few Russians for running an Internet “troll farm” that posted some cheesy social media ads. But he has yet to put real meat on his mandate and doesn’t seem to be getting much closer to Trump himself than when he started.

Now he’s hitching his wagon to Stormy Daniels’s star. Why? There are two plausible reasons.

One is that he hopes to get Trump on something other than “collusion with Russia.” Trump has publicly denied the affair with Daniels, and has also denied knowledge of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. If he’s lying, and if the payment violated any laws, proof of that might be enough to get impeachment proceedings rolling in Congress and move a grand jury to indict.

The other possibility is that Mueller is baiting Trump to fire him, something sure to be followed by  the usual suspects crying “obstruction!” and “constitutional crisis!” then demanding Trump’s head on a platter, and possibly getting it.

No one is likely to mistake me for a Trump supporter. I wouldn’t be at all sorry to see him go. But there are larger and more troubling implications here.

If attorney-client privilege can be so casually breached versus the president of the United States, just how secure do you think it will remain for the rest of us?

And if this president is successfully removed, will there ever again be a presidential election that isn’t immediately followed by an open-ended “find something, anything” probe like Mueller’s?

The decline and fall of the American empire seems to be speeding up.

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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First They Came for Backpage

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Backpage's Domains Stolen
Notice that the US government stole Backpage’s domains

The First Amendment to the US Constitution is pretty clear: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”

The Communications Decency Act is similarly clear: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

But even after repeated judicial rebuffs on these grounds the federal government continues to attempt to “get” Backpage.com for allegedly “facilitating” sex work by accepting advertisements  — usually, and usually falsely, described by rabid demagogues like US Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) as “human trafficking.”

On April 6, several federal agencies stole (the word they used was “seized”) the site’s domain names and raided its co-founder’s home, arresting him pursuant to a 93-count indictment from a grand jury.

As of the raid, the indictment remained “sealed,” legalese for “why should the US government be obliged to tell mere serfs what it is up to or why?” That’s a rotten kettle of fish in and of itself. A “justice system” that operates in secret has no legitimate claim to the title.

News accounts that may be based on leaks (I’ve been unable to verify that the indictment has been un-“sealed”) describe the charges as relating to “money laundering” and “human trafficking.”  The “money laundering” nonsense brings an additional disturbing element with it to the extent that it’s described as being about the use of cryptocurrency (Bitcoin), another activity that the feds would like to bring under their control.

I hesitate to describe the secrecy and cryptocurrency angles as distractions. They’re absolutely important. But the most urgent problem from my point of view is that the federal government has openly arrogated to itself the power to outlaw speech and punish publishers for allowing that speech on their platforms, so long as it clicks its collective heels together and says “there’s no crime like human trafficking” three times first.

In 2016, after a court slapped down the attempts of Kamala Harris (D-CA), then attorney general of her state and now a US Senator, to prosecute Backpage for “pimping,” I suggested that merely dismissing the charges was not enough. I am still of that opinion.

The ringleaders of the Backpage crackdown — legislators, prosecutors and law enforcement chiefs — need to be charged with conspiracy against rights under United States Code, Title 18, Chapter 242:

“If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same … They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years …”

These bad actors have completely abandoned rule of law, and they’ve done so for the express purpose of violating the First Amendment. If they are not brought to bay and severely punished, Backpage will merely be their first, not their final, victim.

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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