“The Biden administration,” CNN reports, “is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online.”

Federal law enforcement agencies are legally and constitutionally  forbidden to monitor the private activities of citizens without first getting warrants based on probable cause to believe those citizens have committed, or are committing, crimes. The feds can browse public social media posts and so forth, but secretly trawling private groups and hacking encrypted chats is off-limits.

Private companies and nonprofit civic organizations, not being government entities, don’t need warrants or probable cause to access those private discussion areas.  The administration’s bright idea is that through partnership with these non-government entities, they can get around legal and constitutional barriers:  “WE didn’t collect the information. THEY collected the information, then gave it to us.”

There are several flies in that ointment. Here’s a big one:

It’s entirely understandable that — to use an entirely hypothetical example — someone with the Southern Poverty Law Center might impersonate a fictional white supremacist to get into a private Ku Klux Klan chat room and see what those people are up to.

But the US Department of Justice says it’s illegal  (under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) to evade terms of service with false identities.

A government partnership with an organization that gathers information in that way is no different than the government partnering with a burglar to find out what you have in your house, without the bother of convincing a judge there’s probable cause to issue a search warrant. It is, quite simply, criminal conspiracy.

As with so many political and social issues arising in the Internet age, we’re coming up against a big question that urgently needs answering:

At what point does “working with” government amount to “being part of” government?

Much of the “private” tech sector makes big money on government contracts. NBC News reports, based on  a 2020 Tech Inquiry expose,  that Microsoft enjoys thousands of subcontracts with the US Department of Defense and federal law enforcement. Amazon has more than 350 such subcontracts with agencies like ICE and the FBI. Google, more than 250.

What about the “nonprofit” sector? According to the National Council of NonProfits, 31.8% of nonprofit revenues are tied to government grants and contracts.

When  these entities do things FOR government, they should be held to the same standards and limits AS government. And those standards and limits should put our freedom and privacy 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “How the Biden Administration Could Step Up Warrantless Spying on Americans by Using Private Firms,” by Ekaterina Blinova, Sputnik News (Russian state media), 05/09/21

After half a century, the New York Times will no longer publish an Op-Ed page — or at least not one under that name. Commentaries on the news written by contributors outside of the newspaper’s regular staff will be called “guest essays” to explain their role without using what opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury calls “clubby newspaper jargon” (“Why We’re Retiring the Term ‘Op-Ed’,” April 27).

Today’s readers may not realize that “op-ed” is shorthand for placement “opposite the editorial” page in the layout of unfolded newsprint.  Yet while some of its format is specific to what one book title called “The Vanishing Newspaper” as early as 2004, the op-ed’s essentials deserve better than to silently crumble like the yellowing journalism of last week’s newspaper.

The format might seem to exemplify what Noam Chomsky calls mainstream media’s efforts “to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views.” Chomsky’s own views were among the most critical and dissident solicited by the Times, an offer he declined because his academic background made “it enormously more difficult to write 700 words than 7000.”

Yet a tight argument made with a few hundred well-chosen words can lead general readers to more in-depth takes, and the range of disagreement that can be squeezed into them is broad indeed.  Nearly a century ago, the immense newspaper chain of William Randolph Hearst gave Bertrand Russell the space to recommend the individualism of anarchist philosopher William Godwin as an antidote to “docility, suggestibility, herd-instinct and conventionality” and the notion “that social conformity is the beginning and end of virtue.”

Kingsbury insists that the ability of the public to have its perspectives heard directly via websites like Facebook and Substack “is to be welcomed” rather than feared, but wonders whether “ideas can linger a while” in a cyberspace even more fixated on immediacy than the daily or weekly news cycles of print. The unfiltered energy of such formats, and of older ones like blogs and zines, can be focused rather than squelched by the sharpness and clarity pioneered by the humble op-ed.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “If you don’t op-ed, will you get enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 04/30/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, 04/30/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, 05/03/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Ledger, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Forest Hills/Rego Park [New York] Times, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Glendale [New York] Register, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Leader/Observer [New York City], 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Long Island City/Astoria [New York] Journal, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Examiner, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Greenpoint [New York] Star, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Brooklyn [New York] Downtown Star, 05/04/21
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, 05/07/2021
• “If You Don’t Op-Ed, Will You Get Enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 05/08/2021
• “If you don’t op-ed, will you get enough?” by Joel Schlosberg, Chicago [Illinois] Weekend Citizen, 05/19/21

The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reports that the Biden administration is poised to propose a ban on menthol cigarettes. The reason? Well, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 85 percent of black smokers choose the flavored cigarettes over “plain” tobacco, versus 29 percent of white smokers.

In the fantasy world that Joe Biden (and the anti-tobacco crusaders and fake civil rights advocates who have his ear) live in, a menthol cigarette ban will “protect” the black community from the effects of “aggressive marketing” by the tobacco industry, whether that community really wants to be “protected” or not.

In the real world, what Biden and company are saying is that black Americans are too stupid to make the “right” choices on their own and that government must therefore make those choices for them.

There’s a word for that kind of attitude toward people based on skin color.  The word is “racism.”

Not that Biden’s racism has ever been a secret. In 1986, he led the legislative fight to punish black cocaine users (who, on average, preferred their cocaine in “rock,” or “crack” form) more harshly than white cocaine users (who, on average, preferred their coke in powder form).

Oh, he apologized, sixteen years later, saying he’d made a “profound mistake.” But he obviously neither learned from that mistake nor reconsidered his racist attitudes. By 2020 he was claiming the expertise to evaluate the “blackness” of voters based on their choice of presidential candidate.

In addition to believing that black Americans are too stupid to be allowed to make their own choices on smoking, Biden apparently also believes they’re too stupid to figure out that they can “season” plain tobacco cigarettes with menthol flavoring from crushable capsules or eye-droppers.

A federal ban on menthol cigarettes will be even less effective as a way of reducing tobacco use among black Americans  than higher mandatory minimum sentences were as a way of reducing drug use among black Americans.

If there’s an up side to Biden’s continuing racism, it’s that he’s gone from harshly punitive to annoyingly paternalistic. Instead of throwing black Americans in prison cells for endless years to punish them for their choices, he just wants to inflict endless minutes of inconvenience on them in the name of “helping” them.

As a menthol smoker myself, I have to hope that “cancel culture” swings into action and de-platforms Biden over this racist silliness.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Menthol Cigarette Ban: At Least This Time, Biden’s Racism Won’t Put His Victims in Cages,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 04/29/21
• “Menthol cigarette ban — At least this time, Biden’s racism won’t put his victims in cages,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Havasu City, Arizona News-Herald, 05/01/21
• “Menthol Cigarette Ban: At Least This Time, Biden’s Racism Won’t Put His Victims in Cages,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 05/07/21
• “Racism Hiding in the Menthol,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Florence, Alabama Courier Journal [web and print], 05/11/21