Category: crime and punishment

The Peace Dividend

legalization, pot, marijuana, crime, drug war, illustration

Has the War on Drugs actually, finally, made some progress?

Well, yes … but, really, no.

“Legal marijuana may be doing at least one thing that a decades-long drug war couldn’t,” explains Christopher Ingraham in The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, “taking a bite out of Mexican drug cartels’ profits.”

Certainly “legal marijuana” is not the drug war. It’s that war’s antithesis.

Let’s recall, too, that legalization didn’t come about after five decades of drug war failure because politicians came to their senses, admitted their mistakes and advocated a different approach.

Instead, frustrated citizen leaders teamed up with successful entrepreneurs to launch ballot initiatives, allowing voters to directly decide the issue.

Domestic production isn’t driven merely by Colorado, Oregon, Washington State and the other Washington, the nation’s capital, where voters fully legalized possession. Marijuana for medical use is legal in 23 states, including California, where most domestic marijuana is grown. In these states, pot is widely prescribed.

Thus, a quasi-legal domestic marijuana industry was created. Lo and behold, now pot produced in the good old USA is outperforming pot grown south of the border.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) acknowledges that U.S. marijuana is being illegally smuggled into Mexico. (Maybe the smugglers will pay for the wall.)

On the other hand, what does it matter that the Mexican drug cartels are losing market share to non-violent American businesses?

Well, those cartels have waged a war with the Mexican government killing more than 164,000 citizens between 2007 and 2014. Less profit to fuel the Mexican drug lords in that bloody war is more for our peace and security.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags cartel, crime, Drug War, legalization, marijuana legalization, Mexico

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Inch, Meet Mile

Give ’em an inch, they will take … a continent.

When Edward Snowden broke the secrecy of the NSA’s illegal surveillance on innocent Americans, many folks (especially those in government) said the snooping was OK, because

it is necessary for our security, and, besides,
the collected data would only be used against terrorists, as supervised by the FISA courts.

Well, it is now known that, whatever “a.” may be, “b.” is a dead letter, swept away by broken promises and a new information practice.

Yes, the National Security Agency now shares its (unconstitutionally obtained) information with various and sundry government agencies, for a wide variety of purposes.

Last week, Radley Balko noted in the Washington Post that “the ‘sneak-and-peek’ provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.”

That didn’t take long, eh?

Many of us have opposed the NSA’s data collection on American citizens because we believed the data would not continue to be used just for the alleged purpose they were collected.

It is not a “slippery slope” argument so much as an “inch-mile” one. Government tends to grow, in size and especially in scope.

And usually at the expense of our freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags National Security Agency, NSA, patriot act, surveillance, surveillance state, terrorism

crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies Snowden

Structurally Opinionated B. S.

Post author By CS Admin
Post date March 10, 2016
2 Comments on Structurally Opinionated B. S.

Edward Snowden, iPhone, First Amendment, privacy, Apple, illustration

Edward Snowden, the infamous American whistleblower now exiled in Russia, says the FBI’s claim that it cannot decode the infamous San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone is, and I quote, “Bernie Sanders.”

Oops.

He used another word-set, also sporting the initials B. S.

I got confused because, though the press has been fretting endlessly about the B.S. coming from Donald Trump, the real corkers of late have come from Bernie Sanders, who seems to think that white people cannot be poor or oppressed* and that the successes of free markets elsewhere serve perfectly as excuses for Big Government interference here in America.**

Mr. Snowden, who knows a lot more about encryption and decryption than I do, has given more weight to my suspicion that the whole FBI case against Apple — demanding that Apple create software to decrypt the company’s customers’ iPhones, and supply (on an allegedly case-by-case basis) the decrypted private information to the government — is a sham.

Snowden insists that there are multiple ways to do the job.

“Other technologists have explained how the FBI could have easily accessed the phone’s latest iCloud backup,” a report on Snowden’s judgment elaborated, “if agents working with San Bernardino County had not reset the iCloud password.”

Once again, a government failure leads to another push by government to correct for its failure, burdening citizens.

In this case: folks at Apple.

Interestingly, Apple’s legal defense appears to rest heavily on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees, arguing that the demanded software is value-laden speech, is literally made up of such.

The exact term is “structurally opinionated,” which I nominate for the jargon phrase of the year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Sanders has recently said, in one of those interminable debates that I can no longer watch in full, “When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged out of a car.” As if “white privilege” amounts to immunity from poverty or oppression.

** Sanders, whose Tweets are as insane as his spoken pronouncements, recently lamented how Romanians in Bucharest have faster Internet speeds than Americans — without realizing they’d achieved these levels of access by wide-open, unrelenting, and wild competition. That is, Laissez Faire capitalism.

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Tags Apple, Apple Inc., Edward Snowden, first amendment, free speech, iPhone, privacy, security

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy too much government

Breaking the Safe

surveillance, privacy, iphone, security, NSA, CIA, FBI, terrorism, illustration

As we tromp repeatedly to the polling booth this year, we should wonder: are we being played?

The answer: yes … at least on the issue of Apple’s iPhone security.

I’ve written about this before. Our politicians and government officials are playing demagogue, trying to convert (too successfully?) the electorate into a mob bent on destroying privacy and private property — out of unwarranted fear.

The case for terrorist worries in this case is not even plausible: the FBI waited too long to be convincing, and the NSA supposedly has the metadata anyway. The government doesn’t need the info. It’s after something else.

As former congressman Bob Barr put it, the government’s case is “pure applesauce … simply the latest chapter in a decades-long push by Uncle Sam to gain access to Americans’ digital technology and place this booming sector of our economy under its thumb.” He goes on:

[T]he government is for the first time demanding that a company actually invent a way to defeat the very encryption safeguards it builds into the devices it sells. Attorney General Lynch has taken to citing an obscure law, the All Writs Act of 1789, to justify this unprecedented exercise of power to compel companies to do the government’s work for it.

To my knowledge, the government has never demanded that Allied Safe and Vault, or any of its competitors, go out of its way to cook up “a way in” to its security systems.

Government is just trying to retain its old relevance. Folks in power see it slipping. And it is, as Americans outsource their privacy and security not to governments, but, increasingly, to private providers.

That’s a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Internet privacy, privacy, security, terrorism

crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies

Guantánamo Gestures

Guantánamo, detention, Cuba, Obama, terrorism

It’s a fun word to say: “Guantánamo!”

Almost like “Geronimo!”

Of course, Guantánamo and Geronimo are nearly opposites. Geronimo was an iconic Native American warrior against the U.S. military. Guantánamo is the famous — or infamous — American military prison located at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

President Obama wants to shut the prison down. Why? Symbolism. He argues the prison “undermines” our national security by reminding the world of the harsh interrogation techniques used on prisoners — the Red Cross called it “torture” — and the indefinite detention of people — so far for 14 years — without any due process.

Republican presidential candidates countered, with Ted Cruz telling Obama, “Don’t shut down Gitmo, expand it and let’s have some new terrorists there.” Donald Trump promised, “We’re going to load [Gitmo] up”

Meanwhile, Obama’s plan to close Gitmo lacks any destination for more than a third of the remaining 91 prisoners. Apparently, part of the plan is to come up with the rest of the plan.

What’s not part of Obama’s plan? Ending the American policy of indefinitely incarcerating suspected terrorists and denying them any opportunity to defend themselves in either a civilian or military court. The president’s scheme is simply to relocate these detainees to U.S. soil and continue to hold them without charge — forever.

That’s why lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights panned Obama’s plan, which “does not ‘close Guantanamo.’ It merely relocates it to a new ZIP Code.”

The Guantánamo Bay facility isn’t the problem. Shut down the policy of holding people indefinitely without any system of justice. Let’s show the world more than symbolism; let’s give them (and ourselves) a little peek at truth, justice and the American Way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo credit: marianne muegenburg cothern on Flickr

Tags Cuba, detention, Guantanamo Bay, President Obama, terrorism

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Zetabytes and Zombies

Zombie government wants to eat our brains. Did I overstate this on Sunday?

Most folks don’t look at the Apple/FBI controversy over digital security quite that starkly.

The National Security Administration sure doesn’t see it that way. The NSA is in the “information harvesting business,” says Business Insider. And boy, “business is booming.” The NSA measures its operations in zetabytes. And in the acreage of its Maryland and Utah sprawls.

The idea is that the NSA protects us.

But notice that government, collecting all that information, and in trying to beat back malicious and sportive hacker attacks from around the world, treats computer companies antagonistically. And it doesn’t provide us, individually, with help on our personal cyber-security: we have to pay for our own cyber-security. When some thief (local or overseas) steals a digital identity and grabs a netizen’s wealth and credit, of what help is government?

Not much.

It’s little different from back in Herbert Spencer’s day, over a century ago, when he noted that government practiced “that miserable laissez faire,” making citizens bear the costs of their own protection, to financial ruin defending themselves in court.

Indeed, for all our reliance upon law enforcement, we have to notice that the real work of defense and conflict avoidance happens best outside of government “help” — as is the case in Detroit, Michigan, where it is private security that does what many expect the police to do.

As long as the police and the federal government operate mainly as antagonists to peaceful citizens as well as to criminals, then looking warily at police power and privilege (and thus the NSA and the FBI) seems like …

… Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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