Category: Politics

Banning The Boogeyman

Does the boogeyman exist? Most people would say he doesn’t. But some might point out that there’s no way to prove with absolute certainty that he doesn’t exist. Technically that would be a true statement. However, few people would change the way they live their lives based on the infinitesimal possibility that the boogeyman may exist.

The arguments in favor of these bathroom restriction bills sounds an awful lot like arguments in favor of creating laws to ban the boogeyman. Most of the arguments in favor of these bills are based on the hypothetical threat that a cisgender male will pretend to be a transwoman to gain entry into the women’s restroom for the purpose of committing sexual assault.

I call the threat hypothetical because there hasn’t been a notable number of such crimes being perpetrated. In fact I’ve only found one instance of such a crime and it occurred in Canada and only after this debate started making headlines (which is important to note because it’s quite possible the perpetrator wouldn’t have attempted to use such an excuse had the politicians not been waging this war). That’s two less incidents than the number of Republicans arrested for misconduct in bathrooms.

The arguments in favor of these bathroom bills are no more valid than arguments in favor of passing legislation to ban the boogeyman. Both are built on a foundation of unfounded fear mongering.

What gets me is the hypocrisy of some of the proponents of these bills. Some of the people supporting these bathroom bills on the grounds of a hypothetical threat were also the ones arguing against restricting people from carrying firearms on the grounds that the anti-gunners’ hypothetical threats were never been realized. If hypothetical threats aren’t a valid foundation to build laws off of for one thing then they shouldn’t be valid for anything.

The Only Argument In Favor Of A Cruz Nomination

I find almost nothing redeemable about Ted Cruz. The same goes for his competitors — and his party — and the opposing party — and its candidates. But somebody has finally given a valid reason to support Cruz as the Republican nominee:

Just when it seems that Rep. Peter King must have exhausted his venom for Ted Cruz, he fires off another poisoned dart.

“I hate Ted Cruz, and I think I’ll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination,” the New York Republican told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, as voters prepared to cast ballots in the state’s primary.

I admit that the thought of Peter King voluntarily consuming cyanide fills my heart with joy.

Religious Freedom*

Mississippi recently passed House Bill 1523 [PDF] into law. The bill was described by its proponents as legislation to protect religious freedom by prohibiting the government from discriminating against actions performed due to strong religious convictions. What the proponents of the bill forgot to mention was the giant asterisk that noted the restrictions. House Bill 1523 only protects your religious freedom as long as you believe the right things:

SECTION 2. The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

If your religious beliefs our outside of those three criteria this bill does not protect them. For example, members of the Church of the Phenomenological Agorist hold a strong moral conviction that participation in the black market is not only righteous but a holy duty. Even though black market participation is a strongly held moral conviction the government will still ruthlessly pursue discriminatory action against them.

Do your religious beliefs acknowledge polygamy? If so those beliefs actually directly go against this bill since it only protects beliefs that acknowledge marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Don’t like it? Tough shit. You should have chosen a governmentally protected religion.

So long as you believe one of the three approved beliefs the government of Mississippi will not prosecute you for refusing to perform a wedding or bake a cake nor will it prosecute you for enforcing bathroom assignments. It will not restrain itself from prosecuting you for, for example, refusing service to police officers, something the Church of the Phenomenological Agorist strongly encourages, or people who discriminate against polygamous families.

This bill isn’t about religious freedom, it’s about religious discrimination. It creates two tiers for religions: those that subscribe to the beliefs specifically noted in the bill and those that do not. Members of religions in the first tier receive special treatment from the Mississippi government. Members of all other religions have to suffer the full brunt of the government’s boot stomping down on their faces.

For Statists The Only Response Is Attacking Individual Freedom

When a problem, perceived or real, arises there is only one response for statists: attacking individual freedom. As I noted last week, the knowledge that the Paris attackers used burner phones instead of encrypted communications would likely inspire useless legislation aimed at prohibiting burner phones. Jackie Speier seems hellbent on proving me right because she has introduced legislation to do exactly that:

Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a Democrat representing California’s 14th district, has introduced a the “Closing the Pre-Paid Mobile Device Security Gap Act of 2016,” or HR 4886, which will require people who purchase a prepaid device to provide proper identification.

“This bill would close one of the most significant gaps in our ability to track and prevent acts of terror, drug trafficking, and modern-day slavery,” Speier said in a blog post. “The ‘burner phone’ loophole is an egregious gap in our legal framework that allows actors like the 9/11 hijackers and the Times Square bomber to evade law enforcement while they plot to take innocent lives. The Paris attackers also used ‘burner phones.’ As we’ve seen so vividly over the past few days, we cannot afford to take these kinds of risks. It’s time to close this ‘burner phone’ loophole for good.”

Regardless of Speier’s claims, burner phones are not a significant gap in the State’s ability to prevent acts of terror, drug trafficking, or modern-day slavery. Setting aside the fact that most acts of terror, negative aspects of drug trafficking, and modern-day slavery are created by the State, we’re still left having to accept the fact that pervasive communication technology has rendered any ability to control communications practically impossible.

Burner phones are just one method of communicating in a way that’s difficult to surveil. The same effect can be achieved with cloned subscriber identity module (SIM) cards. Furthermore, registrations are easy to bypass. The firearm community is well aware of the term straw purchase. It’s a term that describes having somebody who isn’t prohibited from purchasing firearms to purchase one for somebody who is prohibited. By having somebody else purchase a phone for you you can avoid having that phone tied to your person. Getting somebody to purchase a cell phone for you would be even easier than a firearm since few people see a cell phone as a destructive device. There is also the fact that burner phones from overseas can be smuggled into the country and sold for cash.

Legislation aimed at prohibiting something only accomplish one thing: creating a black market. Not a single piece of legislation aimed at prohibiting something has been successful. This bill will be no different.

Let’s Talk About Privacy Rights

It was bound to happen sooner or later. The Republican lawmakers’ obsession with bathrooms has made its way to Minnesota. Senators Scott Newman, Dan Hall, Dave Thompson, Michelle Benson, and Paul Gazelka introduced a bill to mandate discrimination against transgender individuals:

Republicans in the Minnesota Senate introduced a bill on Friday that would block businesses and other employers from providing gender-neutral restrooms or from enacting policies that allow transgender employees to use appropriate restrooms. Senate File 3002 amends the 1993 Minnesota Human Rights Act — the nation’s first nondiscrimination law to include gender identity.

The bill starts with a specious definition of “sex.” It states, “A person’s sex is either male or female as biologically defined.” The bill does not mention people who fall outside the male-female binary such as those who are intersex, nor those whose sex designations have been legally changed under Minnesota law.

Why do these particular lawmakers feel qualified to define sex? Hell if I know. They probably believe democracy carries some kind of magical power that grants otherwise unremarkable individuals divine knowledge. Either way, their delusions of grandeur are only one absurdity amongst many in this case. Another absurdity is the justification given in the bill for its existence:

No claim of nontraditional identity or “sexual orientation” may override another person’s right of privacy based on biological sex in such facilities as restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, and other similar places, which shall remain reserved for males or females as they are biologically defined.

Emphasis mine. Let’s discuss what a right to privacy is. A right, as it pertains to legal matters, is something that cannot be prohibited by the government. When somebody says you have a right to free speech they mean the government cannot prohibit you from saying something. When somebody says you have a right to a jury trail they mean the government cannot bar you from having a jury trail when it has accused you of a crime. When somebody says you have a right to privacy they mean the government cannot violate your privacy.

A right to privacy in a restroom, lock room, dressing room, or other similar facility means the government cannot surveil you in those facilities. That’s it. Since this bill has nothing to do with government surveillance in these facilities it also as no business arguing that its preserving a right to privacy.

In fact this bill would be a violation of privacy rights. How can a bill restricting what bathrooms transgender individuals can use be enforced? First, the enforcers have to identify transgender individuals. That would require looking through every individuals’ medical records. Second, the enforcers must surveil bathrooms so it can catch anybody violating the restriction. Since victimless violations of the law such at this one have no injured parties the only way to enforce them is through surveillance. That necessarily requires the government to violate everybody’s privacy.

Obama To South By Southwest: Fuck Your Privacy

I normally don’t follow South by Southwest too much but when Obama takes the stage to talk about privacy I can’t help but take note. Unfortunately his speech wasn’t surprising. It could be summed up as fuck your privacy:

President Barack Obama called on the tech community to build a safe encryption key to assist in law enforcement investigations, saying that if it failed, it could one day face a more draconian solution passed by a Congress that is less sympathetic to its worldview. The president said he could not comment on the FBI’s current fight with Apple over its demand that the company build software to unlock data on an iPhone used by one of the alleged San Bernardino shooters. But he spoke broadly about the need to balance privacy and security, and warned that absolutist views on both sides are dangerous.

Balance, in the case of privacy and security, means people like you and me get shitty crypto that the government, and anybody else with the master key, can break while the government gets to enjoy crypto we can’t break.

Obama warned against an absolutist view but crypto belongs to one of those very few things in the universe that is either black or white. There is no gray. Crypto is either effective, that is to say it has no known methods of attack that are faster than brute force, or it is ineffective. I’ve written extensively on this blog as to why this is.

The biggest problem with a master key is that anybody who holds that key can decrypt any data encrypted with a scheme that key can work for. If every iPhone was setup to decrypt the data with the government’s master key it would only be a matter of time, probably an alarmingly short period of time, before the key was leaked to the Internet and everybody in the world had the ability to decrypt any iPhone at will.

So we need an absolutist view because it’s the only view that offers any amount of security. But Obama heads one of the largest surveillance states in the world so it’s no surprise that he holds a total disregard for the security of us little people.

Dianne Feinstein Planning To Propose Legislation To Enslave Tech Workers

Dianne Feinstein may be the Devil incarnate. Whenever there’s a glimmer of freedom slipping through the statists’ fingers she’s there to tighten the grip. Seeing Apple being allowed to fight the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) demand to write a compromised version of iOS, Feinstein is rushing in with legislation that will punish disobedient companies:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Technology companies could face civil penalties for refusing to comply with court orders to help investigators access encrypted data under draft legislation nearing completion in the U.S. Senate, sources familiar with continuing discussions told Reuters on Wednesday.

The long-awaited legislation from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, may be introduced as soon as next week, one of the sources said.

Let’s call this proposal what it is: slavery. Under this legislation device manufacturers would be required to either perform labor when commanded or face severe punishment.

There should never be a circumstance under which you are forced to perform labor against your will. If law enforcers want to unlock a device and the manufacturer doesn’t want to help then they should be required to either do it themselves or hire somebody who wants to do it. But that’s a basic market principle and statism is the antithesis of the market.

Brining Fascism Back To Europe

You would think Europe would have learned its lesson about fascism during World War II. Of all the nations of Europe, you would expect France to have especially learned its lesson since it suffered under the boot of Nazi Germany for quite some time. Yet, in a rather ironic twist, France is leading the way to the fascism revival on that continent:

French parliamentary deputies, defying government wishes, have voted in favour of penalising smartphone makers which fail to cooperate in terrorism inquiries, entering a controversy that has pitted the FBI against Apple in the United States.

The move came in the form of an amendment to a penal reform bill that was receiving its first reading in parliament.

Part of me appreciates France’s honesty in its pursuit of absolute power over its people. While I completely disagree with such a philosophy I do prefer an opponent who is honest about their intentions. On the other hand, an honest government is often the most terrifying kind. When the State no longer sees a need to even pay lip service to the rights of individuals it quickly begins perpetrating heinous act after heinous act.

It’ll be interesting if this bill manages to pass into law. I’m sure the French government foresees it as an effective means of compelling smartphone manufacturers to kowtow to law enforcers. But it will likely convince smartphone manufacturers to take their business elsewhere. I can’t imagine many CEOs willing to risk being kidnapped because their company’s devices used effective cryptography. Especially when there are so many other countries around the world willing to take in money making companies.

Political Campaigns Suck At Protecting Your Personal Information

I don’t need more reasons to abandon politics but I realize others do. To that end I feel that it’s important to point out the abysmal security record of political campaigns:

Over the last three months, more than 100 million US voters have had their data exposed online. These data breaches weren’t caused by a sophisticated hack or malware. Instead, political campaigns’ abysmal cybersecurity practices are to blame. Although modern campaigns constantly acquire and purchase massive amounts of data, they often neglect to fully beef up security surrounding it, effectively turning the campaigns into sitting ducks — huge operations with databases left open and vulnerable.

[…]

That might be unsettling, but perhaps more troubling is the fact that political campaigns are terrible at cybersecurity. Not only do the organizations have access to more information than ever before, they’re not able to keep it safe. The incentives to do so just don’t exist, and that’s why we’re seeing so much compromised voter data.

In Iowa last month, the state’s Republican party failed to adequately protect a database containing information on 2 million voters, making it readily available through just a basic scan of the website’s source code. In December, an independent security researcher uncovered a publicly available database of 191 million voter records. Included in that trove was each voter’s full name, home address, mailing address, unique voter ID, state voter ID, gender, date of birth, phone number, date of registration, political affiliation, and voter history since 2000.

I’ve mentioned these sorts of issues to friends before but they always hid behind the “I give campaigns a fake phone number” excuse. But the phone number you gave to a campaign isn’t what’s getting out, it’s your real personal information including your home address.

Politics is continuing to become more polarizing in this country. Both parties have become religions where disagreements with the party being tantamount to heresy. True believers are often willing to shun former friends and family members. Some employers are even willing to avoid hiring or terminating employees based on their form of political worship. There are no signs indicating this trend will cease or reverse so your voting record could become a major problem in the near future.

The amount of personal information many campaigns have on individuals is rather shocking. It’s often enough information for people with access to commit acts of identify theft.

There really isn’t anything to gain for political participation and there’s a lot to lose. Control over your personal information is one of the things you could potentially lose. My advise is to avoid politics since it’s obvious campaigns have no interest in protecting you.

Legalizing Slavery

The United States has a long history of slavery. Since the very beginning of this country through the end of the Civil War black individuals could be owned as slaves in many states. After that the rules were changed. Private ownership of slaves was deemed illegal (a very good thing) but the State gave itself permission to enslave anybody it arbitrarily labeled as a criminal (a very bad thing). Eventually the process was streamlined and Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) was created so manage the federally owned slaves. Individual states used this precedence to establish their own government owned corporations to managed their slaves.

Now a congressman is looking to change the rules yet again by expanding the State’s ability to own slaves. If passed, this bill will allow the State to enslave anybody by issuing a simple court order:

Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reportedly will introduce legislation soon to criminalize a company’s refusal to aid decryption efforts as part of a governmental investigation. The news was first reported Thursday afternoon by the Wall Street Journal.

Aiding decryption efforts requires labor. In the San Bernardino case the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is order Apple to create a custom version of iOS that removes several key security features. Apple has refused and it has every right to do so because nobody should be compelled into performing labor against their will. If the FBI wants the phone unlocked so badly it can either put in the effort itself or hire somebody willing to try.

We’re living in interesting times. The State is seeing less and less reason to conceal its intentions.