In early August, a Nebraska prosecutor charged  a mother and daughter with violating the state’s ban on abortion after 20 weeks. That ban was passed in 2010, but didn’t go into effect until the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year overturning Roe V. Wade.

Part of the state’s evidence consists of Facebook messages between the two, indicating that the mother obtained “abortion pills” for her pregnant daughter.

Police obtained those messages in the usual way: They presented a search warrant to Facebook and the company turned over the data.

If the two women had used Facebook’s optional “end-to-end encryption,” the police would still have been able to get that data — but they wouldn’t have been able to read it.

Facebook has since announced its intention to make end-to-end encryption the default, rather than an option, in its Messenger service.

That’s a good thing.

Whatever your opinion of abortion in general, or of Nebraska’s laws and the women’s alleged actions in particular, the case illustrates how easy it’s become for government to eavesdrop on our communications in real time, or seize and read our private files after the fact.

Between constantly advancing technical means, the tendency of judges to defer to law enforcement, and government’s willingness to just plain break the law when the law doesn’t suit their purposes (see Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the NSA’s illegal spying programs for examples), it’s become far TOO easy.

Some politicians on both sides of the major party aisle disagree. They don’t think it’s easy enough. They’re constantly working on laws they hope will make strong encryption less available (or, with “back door” schemes, just less strong).

This is the kind of battle that’s easier to fight now than later.

Strong encryption has been widely available for more than 30 years now.

But in order for the government to lose its war on our privacy, we need to see far more widespread adoption at both the individual and corporate levels … and we need that adoption to outpace unscrupulous politicians’ ability to keep up with it.

In a mostly unencrypted world, encrypted communications (of most kinds — there are exceptions) tend to stand out. In such an environment, it’s not unlikely that at some point, encryption will itself be deemed “suspicious” and its use treated as grounds for investigations and searches.

But if we’re all using encryption, all (or even most) of the time, prosecutors will need other pretexts, maybe even real evidence, to get permission to pry into our private affairs.

Which is exactly as it should be.

By using encryption on principle at least some of the time, and by asking your messaging providers to enable it by default, you’ll be protecting your privacy. And everyone else’s.

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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Late last year, US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) ran a Twitter poll asking her followers to weigh in on a “national divorce between “Republican” and “Democratic” states (since her Twitter account has since been suspended, I’m relying on reportage from the New York Post to describe it). The non-scientific results: 43% favored said “national divorce,” 48% opposed it, 9% pronounced themselves undecided.

The “national divorce” talk has only increased since then, and of course there’s nothing new about the concept. As you may recall from high school history classes, hundreds of thousands died in a war over the last attempt at such a thing in the mid-19th century.

I’ve got nothing against secession as such. If people don’t want to remain affiliated with a polity, they should be free to exit the relationship. In fact, the namesake of the media center I write for, William Lloyd Garrison, encouraged NORTHERN secession: “No union with slaveholders!”

On the other hand, the notion of such a “divorce” at the level of the existing states raises some serious questions that most supporters don’t seem interested in addressing.

First and foremost, perceived connection to, or distaste for, a particular political party doesn’t seem like a good way of divvying up territory.

Different pollsters use different formulas to calculate the “partisan leans” of states, but let’s use the 2020 presidential election result as a proxy. Wyoming is the “reddest” state, won by Republican Donald Trump with 69.9% of the vote. Democrat Joe Biden’s best performance (excluding the District of Columbia, which isn’t a state, where he received 92.1%) was in Vermont, where he polled 66.6%.

So even in the “reddest” or “bluest” states, around 1/3 of voters (not to mention the total population) aren’t “red” or “blue.” Secession would maroon them in de facto one-party states, as opposed to offering them representation in national bodies where their preferred parties have a voice.

Even hand-waving all that away, there are other “nuts and bolts” issues to think about.

For example, what happens to Washington’s “national debt” when the states leave? Does it just get defaulted on? Or does it get split up … and if so, how? Pro rata by population? Weighted on the basis of whether the state was an overall “donor to” or “beneficiary of” federal largess?

How about military assets? Does New Mexico suddenly become the world’s second-largest nuclear power because so many US nuclear weapons happen to be stored at Kirtland Air Force Base, or does each state get a few warheads, along with a proportional distribution of aircraft, helicopters, tanks, etc.?

Oh, and we should probably discuss borders and travel. Will the former US operate like the Schengen Area’s 26 European countries which allow mutual travel without passports and border searches, or will a New York to Los Angeles flight with a layover in Denver turn into the customs nightmare equivalent of traveling from Moscow to Buenos Aires via Mozambique?

Divorces get messy even when they’re amicable. Would this one be worth it? Perhaps we should all consult our attorneys first.

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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Another week, another scandal, but the latest — the August 8 FBI “raid” on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida — looks set for a run of a month or more.

Democrats, as usual where Trump is concerned, see the search and seizure operation as an omen of imminent comeuppance for a disgraced politician. Indictments! Convictions! Orange coveralls! Lock him up!

Republicans, as usual where Trump is concerned, see it as politically driven prosecution. Witch hunt! Rogue FBI! What about Hillary Clinton? What about Hunter Biden?

“Confirmation bias,” Scott Adams tweeted back in 2017, “explains how two movies can play on one screen. I see ear plugs and you see rubber bullets.”

Both sides are seeing what they want to see. Each side is convinced that they’re with the “good guys” while the other side’s supporters are mentally deranged and violently criminal.

Why can’t both sides be at least partially right?

What if Republicans and Democrats are both playing politics AND the worst things they say about each other are true?

What if there’s at least a grain of truth in nearly every “scandal” claim AND the accused’s defenses are really just self-serving excuses and evasions?

What if there aren’t any good guys in either of the movies perpetually playing on our shared screen?

It’s comforting to think of politics in binary terms.

We like to believe that, while some politicians may be corrupt, they’re usually on the other side of a partisan aisle from us honest and righteous people. The corrupt or dishonest on our own side are “a few bad apples.”

I strongly suspect that even many of those same politicians believe they’re the good guys, and attempt to remain pure of heart and firm on principle.

But consider:

Politics is ultimately about power.

While most of us see power in terms of using it for good or evil, right or wrong, a certain demographic displays “A lack of empathy and sense of detachment from others for the sake of achieving one’s own goals …. The ability to charm and influence others …. [and] Inability to take responsibility for one’s actions, instead blaming others or rationalizing one’s behavior.”

Think of some prominent politicians and consider how well their personalities and behaviors apparently map to those three items from the Psychopathic Personality Inventory.

While, per Lord Acton, “power tends to corrupt,” it also attracts those who are predisposed to corruption in the form of power for its own sake. They approach it with more zeal and sharper focus, and therefore more successfully, than those who only reluctantly grasp the One Ring.

One screen, two movies? No. We’re all strapped to our chairs for repeated viewings of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

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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