Category Archives: Regulation

UPDATED: Dennis Hastert, Hoisted On His Own Petard, Or Patriot Act

Criminal Injustice, Homeland Security, Law, Regulation

To pep-up the subject of Dennis Hastert, consider a flash from the past in the form of “Entertainment Interruptus,” a column published in November of 2001: “The film Spy Games reached a crescendo as retiring CIA officer Robert Redford transfers $282,000 of his life’s savings to an account in the Cayman Islands. The money is supposed to help pay for the rescue of Redford’s bureau protégé Brad Pitt, who has been ‘burned’ by his employers at the CIA for going solo.”

Only Redford would be unable to complete such a transaction now, not with the new anti-terrorism laws, approved in 2001. Brad Pitt, as the column observed, would have been “burned” by the Patriot Act, which prohibited “suspicious financial transaction”: Move around more than 10,000 of your own dollars, and you’ll likely be the object of a federal investigation.

Dennis Hastert, who approved the Patriot Act, is being hoisted on his own petard.

Via The Huffington Post:

On Oct. 24, 2001, then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shepherded the Patriot Act through the House of Representatives. It passed 357 to 66, advancing to the Senate and then-President George W. Bush’s desk for signing.

Hastert took credit for House passage in a 2011 interview, claiming it “wasn’t popular, and there was a lot of fight in the Congress” over it.

Little did Hastert know at the time that the law he helped pass would give federal law enforcement the tools to indict him on charges of violating banking-related reporting requirements more than a decade later. …

MORE.

UPDATE (6/10): “The Thin Gruel of the Hastert Prosecution”: We should all be concerned about Dennis Hastert’s strange indictment By SCOTT HORTON.

What #RandPaul Gives With One Hand, He Takes Away With The Other

Homeland Security, Intelligence, libertarianism, Regulation, Ron Paul, Terrorism, The State

Sen. Rand Paul went astray. His rousing remarks against the renewal of the PATRIOT Act were softened by a call for “the hiring of a 1,000 more FBI agents.” “We need more FBI analysts analyzing data,” said Paul.

Moreover, and as reported at Target Liberty, it is the legal opinion of Judge Andrew Napolitano “that the US government is lying to the American people with the claim that the mass surveillance would be suspended upon the expiration of the PATRIOT Act provision used to justify the mass surveillance program.”

Essentially, the Patriot Act will be revamped, only to reemerge as the USA FREEDOM Act.

Napolitano states:There are two other provisions in the law that the NSA relies on which will cause it to continue to spy on Americans even if section 215 of the PATRIOT Act does expire. One of those is a section of the FISA law called section 702, and one of them is a still-existing executive order signed by President George W. Bush in the fall or 2001, which has not been tinkered with, interfered with, or rescinded.

By Robert Wenzel’s telling, the “best analysis of the Patriot Act renewal and the USA Freedom Act” comes courtesy of “Glenn Greenwald in discussion with Jameel Jaffer, the Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU,” at The Intercept.

The question of whether “the sunset of Section 215 will be a meaningful step towards reform” is especially informative:

GREENWALD: That’s what I was going to ask next, actually.

JAFFER: That’s a good question. The problem –

GREENWALD: Let me just interject there: the argument that people make, and I’m sympathetic to it, which isn’t the same thing as saying I agree with it, is how significant would it really be?

The NSA has all of these other authorities. They can cite executive orders and other things, on top of which they’ve done a really good job of co-opting laws in the past. We had this FISA law that said you can’t eavesdrop on Americans’ communications without a warrant, and they did it anyway.

They invented this incredibly radical interpretation of the Patriot Act – of 215 – that says “This lets us collect everything we want,” and that was the interpretation the Second Circuit, ten years later, rejected, finally, just a couple of weeks ago.

So given how adept they are at kind of co-opting the process to do what they want – the other authorities – and their propensity to circumvent the law or even break it to do what they want, how significant would it really be?

… MORE.

And The Co-Conspirator In The Case Of Latest American Jihadi Is…

Affirmative Action, Jihad, Labor, Regulation, The State

The US government, of course. It always is.

It took the Kuwaitis to fire an alleged American Jihadi from a position he held in their country, as an airplane mechanic, in December 2014. It took the Turks to deny him entry into their country. And it took the Egyptians to deport him to the U.S.

Could these backward and benighted countries be looking out for their own better than the US does?

US Army veteran Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh was stopped—why, oh why? “keep jihadis OUT, not in”!—attempting to cross over into Syria, presumably not for the purpose of touring the ruins.

This avid Bin Laden supported was a former U.S. Air Force mechanic and had worked as a mechanic for American Airlines. And that was perfectly fine. So long as Pugh was endangering Americans stateside, he was safe from the American authorities (whose, constitutional duty it is to protect Americans).

Here in the US, labor and civil rights legislation guarantee that business can’t risk discrimination lawsuits should they fire bad people. They’d rather risk the lives of good people.

Cartelizing The Internet

Internet, Regulation, Technology

The regulators have declared net neutrality to be “a triumph of ‘free expression and democratic principles.’” This is a contradiction in terms. A “tiny group of unaccountable bureaucrats operating with the support of the executive lame duck” and in cahoots with a cartelized industry: This is despotic, not democratic.

Jeff Tuckers unpacks the dynamics of net neutrality and regulation, in general, as one whereby “… an elite group of insiders manipulat[ates] the regulations for their own benefits, a left-wing intelligentsia … is naive enough to believe platitudes about fairness, and a right wing … is mostly ignorant and for sale to the highest bidder.”

… Here’s what’s really going on. The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology have decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. To impose a new rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.

What’s being sold as economic fairness and a wonderful favor to consumers is actually a sop to industrial giants who are seeking untrammeled access to your wallet and an end to competitive threats to market power. One person I know compared the move to the creation of the Federal Reserve itself: the creation of an industrial cartel in the name of improving the macroeconomic environment. That’s a good comparison.

Let’s back up and grasp the position of the large content providers. Here we see the obvious special interests at work. Netflix, Amazon, and the rest don’t want ISPs to charge either them or their consumers for their high-bandwidth content. They would rather the ISPs themselves absorb the higher costs of such provision. It’s very clear how getting the government to make price discrimination illegal is in their interest. It means no threats to their business model.

By analogy, let’s imagine that …

MUST READ.