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Just When You Thought “Russiagate” Couldn’t Get Any Sillier …

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April 20 is cannabis culture’s high holiday, and  the Democratic National Committee celebrated it with fervor this year: Blaze up, get silly, file a bizarre lawsuit accusing the Russian government, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and transparency activist group WikiLeaks of conspiring to steal an election.

The suit  confirms that after more than a year, special counsel Robert Mueller still hasn’t amassed the evidence required for a successful criminal prosecution, requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” A civil suit lowers that bar to “a preponderance of the evidence.”

But even that’s a long shot. The only credible evidence produced so far implicates only the Trump campaign, not the other two defendants, and only to the same extent that it likewise implicates the Clinton campaign.

That is, both campaigns admittedly tried to tap “Kremlin-connected” sources (defined as “anyone who’s ever been in Moscow”) for dirt on their opponents. Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer in hopes of getting the goods on Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign commissioned a British former spy to work his Russian regime sources for salacious tidbits on Trump the Elder.

Central to the suit’s claims is alleged “Russian hacking” of the DNC’s servers, followed by an embarrassing release of emails showing, among other things, attempts by DNC to rig the 2016 primaries in favor of Clinton and against her main opponent, Bernie Sanders. Problems with the case:

First, the DNC refused to turn those servers over to the FBI for forensic analysis, instead hiring a friendly cybersecurity firm to announce the results it wanted announced.

Secondly, metadata in the “hacked” files released by “Guccifer 2.0” indicates transfer speeds consistent with an internal source at DNC copying the files directly to a USB drive rather than an external hacker accessing the servers.

Thirdly, while the subsequent announcement by the US intelligence community of its conclusions claims methods and IP addresses “consistent with” Russian state hackers, those methods and IP addresses are also “consistent with” every other type of hacker on Earth.

Fourthly and probably decisively, the DNC makes the mistake of dragging WikiLeaks into the matter. The next time WikiLeaks gets caught making a false statement will be the first time. On the other hand, the leaked emails themselves demonstrate that the DNC lies constantly and without hesitation. When it comes to credibility, WikiLeaks is the gold standard and the DNC is something one tries to wipe off the bottom of one’s shoe before entering a respectable household. WikiLeaks says no, its source was neither the Russian government nor any other state party.

This lawsuit is simply the latest version of what the DNC has been doing since 2016: Trying to fob blame for its loss of an election it should have won in a walk off onto someone, anyone, but itself and its insanely poor choice of presidential nominee.

It’s very a risky move. In civil suits “discovery” runs in both directions. We’re about to learn a lot more about how the Democratic Party really works behind the scenes.

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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Shadow Protectionism: The US Government vs. Chinese Phone Makers

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English: Company ZTE in the Shenzhen High-Tech...
English: Company ZTE in the Shenzhen High-Tech Industrial Park (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In February, US intelligence community leaders told the US Senate’s Intelligence Committee that Chinese phone manufacturers Huawei and ZTE represent a national security threat. FBI director Christopher Wray warned of the Chinese government finding ways to “maliciously modify or steal information” and “conduct undetected espionage” through these inexpensive consumer products.

In March, Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai proposed a new rule forbidding use of the two companies’ equipment in phone and Internet access projects financed through the commission’s Universal Service Fund, pointing to similar national security concerns.

On April 16, the US Department of Commerce banned American firms from selling vital components to ZTE for seven years, citing the company’s violations of trade sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Or, to put it a different way, citing national security.

Are cheap Chinese phones and Internet routers really a significant threat to national security? Probably not. The more likely motive behind these moves is the inclination of US president Donald Trump, and his administration, toward “economic nationalism” in the form of protectionist trade policies directed with particular venom toward China.

Simply put, the Trump administration would rather see Americans buying phones made by American companies (e.g. Apple and BLU) or at least by companies in countries more closely tied to the US (e.g. Samsung and LG in South Korea, Sony in Japan, and HTC in Taiwan) than phones made by Chinese companies.

In other areas, Trump’s protectionism has been more overt, as with  his tariffs on steel and aluminum. Why this different, under-handed approach with phones? Because it’s hard to put an “America First” spin on phone protectionism.

For one thing, he knows Americans are going to buy foreign phones.  Apple’s price point is a bit high for most, and BLU has recent consumer confidence problems over Chinese malware (sort of inconvenient to the “national security” story, huh?) Americans on a budget buy cheap foreign Android phones; more well-heeled buyers who prefer Android to iOS choose Samsung.

Secondly, he’d rather not have his base see as him throwing a bone to foreign phone makers (although you can bet he’ll bring it up in trade negotiations), while at the same time hitting the  bottom lines of American companies like Qualcomm, Intel and Microsoft.

This dog and pony show is less about “America First” than it is about “Get China.” It’s sure to put American firms in other market sectors on edge. Who will the next victims be and how bad the damage? The administration’s anti-China scheming is the trade equivalent of Russian roulette.

In a globalized economy, it’s impossible to hurt one country or firm without also hurting several enterprises in your own country — and your own country’s general economy. More domestic companies will be harmed than helped, and the harm will exceed the benefits.

Hiding protectionist schemes behind appeals to “national security” doesn’t reduce the damage. It merely shifts  blame and conceals motives. Every time Trump indulges his urge to “Get China,” American companies and American consumers will feel the pain.

 

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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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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