Tag: privacy

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privacy

Tearing Into the Apple

“Any kind of back door . . . access for the ‘good guys’ can also be exploited by the ‘bad guys,’” observes a Technology & Innovation Foundation report.

We can omit the skeptical scare quotes around “bad guys”; cyberhackers stealing your private information are bad guys.

Example: the China-affiliated hackers who looted U.S. telecommunications systems with the help of U.S.-mandated back doors.

But “good guys” demanding unlimited access to encrypted information are also bad guys.

Example: the United Kingdom officials behind a secret order last month, recent divulged by the Washington Post, demanding that “Apple allow access to all cloud content from users worldwide.”

Reporter Joseph Menn observes that this hitherto undisclosed order requiring “blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, has no known precedent in major democracies.”

Apple is not commenting, now, to avoid legal jeopardy. But in March, when told the order was impending, Apple said: “There is no reason why the UK should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption.”

Apple may stop offering encrypted storage in the UK rather than obey the order. This probably wouldn’t satisfy the Starmer government. If Apple sticks to its guns, its products may even end up being banned in the UK.

The alternative is open season for private and state-backed cyberhackers.

Meanwhile, time to remove your secrets from the cloud.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights general freedom privacy

GOP Fails on FISA

FISA, surveillance, privacy

“The House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702 — which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant — without requiring the government to get a warrant,” tweeted Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) on X last weekend.

“The U.S. government uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Americans without a warrant,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) seconded, also on X. “This week, the House will vote to require the Feds to get a warrant to snoop on Americans. Sadly this vote is likely to fail. I will demand a recorded vote & post results.”

The “sadly” indicates that the Republicans in Congress are split, despite years of complaining about how the FISA courts treated Trump . . . and us. (A common complaint has been that the courts almost never say No to a FISA request from the Deep State.) 

The Electronic Freedom Foundation explains the nitty-gritty of Section 702: “As the law is written, the intelligence community cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications.”

So while de jure the Deep State is disallowed from peering into our digital data, de facto our paid government snoops do it all the time. 

Rep. Massie seeks to add a warrant process to FISA requests, but it looks like his amendment will fail. In that case, Massie urges Republicans not to re-authorize the whole FISA program.

But that effort will probably fail, too.

Our representatives are just not that into the Fourth Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture privacy

Something to Protect

privacy, security, surveillance

Some people, enemies of drawing the curtains, say: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.”

Doesn’t follow. Hiding is a form of protecting. We all have things to protect. Innocent people advisedly hide information from neighbors, from bureaucrats eager to erode liberty, from plain criminals.

And from the political fanatic who acts as a criminal. 

If you’re a political activist with a public profile, or even just a voter, it may be a good idea to prevent ideological criminals from knowing where you live or work. That’s why God gave us post offices boxes and commercial mail receiving agencies.

Somebody recently firebombed the offices of Powerline’s John Hinderaker, a pro-liberty activist. One fire was set in an office that he subleases in “the building that houses Center of the American Experiment,” Hinderaker’s organization, another near a law center that he works with in the same building.

The suspects are many. Why? Well, as Hinderaker told federal investigators, CAE is “unusually effective across a broad range of issues.”

If bad guys can do something to hurt you — doxxing, stalking, firebombing — once they’ve got certain information about you, it is eminently reasonable to keep that information as private as possible.

Even when such data is already circulating, you can take significant steps to improve your privacy. Among the better books on how to do so is How to Be Invisible by J. J. Luna. More current and comprehensive is Michael Bazell’s Extreme Privacy.

Worth consulting, since — without the recourse these resources provide — the cost of political activism could induce us to cede to evil people the future of our country and the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship Regulating Protest

Home of the Surveilled 

surveillance, banking, Congress, government, privacy

Abusive investigations that must themselves be investigated are piling up.

In the case commanding our attention today, the meta-investigating organization is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It is investigating the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Who does FinCEN pursue? True scoundrels? Hapless executives caught in a regulatory net?

Nope. FinCEN has been on fishing expeditions. It hasn’t been going after persons suspected of either willfully committing crimes or even tripping over regulations accidentally, or at least not only such types.

It has been going after anybody whose purchasing history puts them in the category of wrong-thinking rightists — hence, I guess, crypto-terrorists.

FinCEN has been instructing banks to scan customer records for evidence of suspect purchases. Not illegal purchases. Just “suspicious” in light of an ideological filter, unconstitutionally applied.

On Twitter, Representative Jim Jordan reported recently that the subcommittee now knows that FinCEN required financial institutions to screen transactions in which terms like “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Bible,” and “Bass Pro Shop” popped up. 

Apparently, if you’re fishing while wearing a MAGA cap and quoting Genesis, you just might be on the verge of shooting up your local post office.

Please don’t ask me to explain what anybody involved with FinCEN could possibly be thinking by engaging in this illegal spying. Or whether they have even a glancing acquaintance with constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

I’m just glad Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee are on the job, “watching the watchers.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Limits “Of” not “To”

anonymous, masks, privacy, freedom

When people talk about “limits to free speech,” do they know what they’re talking about?

“Is there a limit, in your opinion,” an audience panel member on Fox’s The Faulkner Focus asked former U.N. Ambassador and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, “to free speech?” 

The questioner explained that “we all know you can’t go into an airport and shout ‘bomb,’ and yet, right now, you can chant, on college campuses, to ‘kill all the Jews. . . .’” She demanded to know what the limits are.

Freedom of speech is a term of art for the speech that liberty allows; speech involving actual crime — in planning — has always been (and should now be) illegal. 

But don’t demand limits to free speech. Instead enforce the limits of free speech. There is a logic to the notion.

How did presidential candidate Nikki Haley respond?

She said we never want to give up on free speech, but “the difference is when you are pushing violence.” Then Haley went to a more mainstream set of arguments blaming current ideological turmoil on misinformation online. Her response: End anonymity on the Internet. 

This struck many critics as rather extreme. In a “partial” walk-back, yesterday, Haley told CNBC, “I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech; what I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.”

But of course if all are not required to register to speak, name attached, then there is no way to catch the non-Americans.

As inheritors of a political and legal system that was achieved, in no small part, by pseudonymous speech — think Cato and Publius and the Federal Farmer — I suggest another kind of limit: caution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment election law privacy

Donors Don’t Donate Their Privacy

donor, privacy, crime, law, surveillance

Alabama recently passed a law to prohibit public agencies from disclosing information “that identifies a person as a member, supporter, or donor of a 501(c) nonprofit organization . . . except as required by law.”

SB59 is comprehensive, stating that “notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary,” no public agency may compel disclosure of such information or itself publicly release such information. 

The initial delimitation “except as required by law” seems ambiguous. But SB59 goes on to specify that exceptions would pertain to things like the requirements of a “lawful warrant” or a “lawful request for discovery of personal information in litigation.”

Passage is a big deal because, until now, agencies in the state had been permitted to collect and disclose such information.

Many nonprofits are political or ideological in character, promoting causes that are controversial. When this is so, who especially appreciates unfettered access to donors’ names and addresses? Obviously, opponents of the cause who would like to target donors with propaganda or even actively harass them.

On the national level, recognition of the problem is represented by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. The court threw out a California requirement that nonprofits in the state had to divulge the names and addresses of their biggest donors to the attorney general. The Foundation plausibly argued that the requirement would deter people from contributing.

Several other states have also enacted SB59-style legislation. The number we need is 50.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly Fourth Amendment rights property rights

Can They Do That?

Zion, Illinois, apartment, inspection, civil liberty

Residential tenants in Zion — and their landlords — can breathe a sigh of relief.

The Zion, Illinois, government can no longer send officials to barge into rented homes at will to conduct obnoxious inspections.

The inspection regime was instituted in 2015 by a mayor who blamed an excess of renters for the town’s financial troubles. The motive for the searches, then, may have been to make it more uncomfortable to rent in Zion. Seriously. As dumb and thuggish as that.

Robert and Dorice Pierce and their landlord were among the victims of this regime.

When an inspector showed up at the Pierces’ door, they told him to get a warrant. But judges don’t generally accept “important to harass tenants” as a reason for issuing warrants. In any case, any respect for constitutional constraints was incompatible with the very nature of these intrusive practices.

So Zion’s response was to threaten the landlord, Josefina Lozano, with daily and mounting fines until she compelled the Pierces to capitulate. That’s when the trio turned to the Institute for Justice and decided to go to court.

This was familiar territory for IJ, which in the 1990s had successfully fought a similar inspection regime in Park Forest, Illinois.

And now, after three years of judicial proceedings, IJ and its clients have secured a consent decree prohibiting the warrantless inspections and prohibiting the fines.

But those who enacted this outrageous regime deserve a reprimand more stern than merely a loss in court. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights general freedom tax policy

Not Inadvertent

political donations, IRS, government surveillance, privacy

Maybe we can put a stop to the assault on the privacy of donors to political causes.

By “we” I mean The Buckeye Institute and the Institute for Free Speech, who have teamed up to challenge “a decades-old law that forces the IRS to demand that nonprofit charities hand over the private information of their largest donors every year.”

The IRS itself admits that collecting this personal data “poses a risk of inadvertent disclosure.”

Also a risk of fully advertent disclosure. 

The IRS has often been used to harass the political enemies of federal officials in a position to tell the agency what to do.

Buckeye Institute President Robert Alt reports the Institute’s own experience as Exhibit A. In 2013, soon after it had urged Ohio to reject Obamacare-inspired efforts to expand Medicaid, the Institute was subjected to an IRS harassment-audit.

The specter of this investigation was a scary one for the Institute’s major donors, who reasonably assumed that the audit was retaliatory. They worried that if their own names came up during the audit, they too would be subject to IRS attention. Many donors drastically scaled back their giving so they’d be less of a target; others stopped donating altogether.

Prospects for the Institutes’ litigation are good. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in a 2021 ruling that the government must at least consider “the potential for First Amendment harms before requiring that organizations reveal sensitive information about their members and supporters.”

Anonymity in political activism has a long American history — from the start, actually.

It’s what democracy looks like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs privacy

Delivering to Evil

China, privacy, donor, freedom

Will Americans who demand the outing of anonymous donors to political causes listen to Jianli Yang?

One reason that people donate to organizations anonymously — just as they want their votes and other personal information to remain confidential — is to avoid being harassed by political opponents.

But being bullied in a restaurant is hardly the worst that can befall donors stripped of anonymity.

Jianli Yang is a Chinese dissident. In 2008, after spending years in a Chinese prison for his activism, he founded Citizen Power Initiatives for China, a US-based organization working to advance rights and democracy in China.

Yang notes that Chinese supporters of his organization, even if residing outside of China, “can face extreme consequences when they are identified by the Chinese government.” Without the right to protect donor privacy, affirmed in a July 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision on the associational rights of donors, donors can end up being punished by the Chinese government.

The risk isn’t just theoretical. In April 2021, one Mr. Lee, a businessman, was forced to appear on Chinese television to “confess” to supporting Citizen Power Initiatives for China. The government also sentenced Lee to eleven years in prison.

We must fight both the CCP and their wannabe branch in DC. Things are nowhere near as bad in this country as in China. But we don’t know what threats we will face the day after tomorrow even from our own government.

We need every First Amendment protection we can get.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability privacy tax policy

Stay On Call 

facial recognition, taxes, privacy, freedom

Backlash can be good. Against lousy ideas, for example. Sometimes, the response to the backlash is to relinquish the lousy idea, at least temporarily.

We must hope for more than a moment of reprieve from the Internal Revenue Service’s plan to require facial ID recognition of persons who use certain functions of its website.

Both Republican and Democratic congressmen, among many others, were outraged.

It’s good that many congressmen regard some forms of surveillance as beyond the pale. (Meanwhile, legislation to promote scanning of everybody’s online messages at will, Lindsey Graham’s EARN IT Act, is back in Congress. Bipartisan Backlash, can you take a look at this?)

The IRS said that it wanted to use facial recognition technology to help prevent scammers from posing as taxpayers.

But a database of such facial info would itself pose a huge security risk. For decades now, we have been inundated with stories about major databases being hacked.

Nor would legal access have been restricted to the less-than-trustworthy IRS. A third-party vendor would have been involved.

So the IRS has retreated, saying they grasp “the concerns that have been raised” and pledging to pursue “short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The Biden administration has also proposed expanding IRS staff by 80,000+ personnel and permitting minute governmental monitoring of the bank accounts of millions of Americans — notions now in abeyance but undead. And who knows what other innovations in overseeing us are coming up?

Stay on call, Bipartisan Backlash.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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