Archives: June, 2013

Thank You, Canadians—We’re With You

By
K. William Watson

The Department of Agriculture has refused to comply with World Trade Organization rules even after U.S. country-of-origin labeling (COOL) regulations were conclusively determined to be incompatible with international trade obligations. In short, the U.S. law imposes dramatic and unwarranted costs on any American meat processors who buy foreign cattle. This is harmful to Canadian cattle raisers in a way that does not serve any public interest in the United States. 

In preparation for possible retaliation to continued U.S. refusal to abide by the WTO decision, the Canadian government released today a list of U.S. goods for which it is considering raising tariffs in accordance with WTO rules. The goal of the tariffs would be to incentivize American industries that export to Canada to lobby Congress or the administration to remove the offending COOL regulations. This interplay is one of the clever ways that WTO dispute settlement furthers trade liberalization—by pitting competing special interests against each other.

Unfortunately, the retaliation will prove costly to the Canadian people. Here are some of the goods that Canadians will now have to pay higher prices, so that some American bureaucrats can force other Americans to pay for useless information:

  • cheese, not including the following: fresh (unripened or uncured) cheese, whey cheese, or curd; grated or powdered; processed cheese; blue-veined cheese or cheese containing veins produced by Penicillium roqueforti
  • apples, fresh
  • corn (maize)
  • Semi-milled or wholly milled rice, whether or not polished or glazed
  • maple sugar and maple syrup
  • chocolate and other food preparations containing cocoa-preparations in blocks, slabs, or bars weighing more than 2 kg or in liquid, paste, powder, granular, or other bulk form in containers or immediate packings, of a content exceeding 2 kg
  • pasta, whether or not cooked or stuffed (with meat or other substances) or otherwise prepared, such as spaghetti, macaroni, noodles, lasagna, gnocchi, ravioli, cannelloni; couscous, whether or not prepared
  • bread, pastry, cakes, biscuits and other bakers’ wares, whether or not containing cocoa; communion wafers, empty cachets of a kind suitable for pharmaceutical use, sealing wafers, rice paper and similar products
  • certain potatoes, prepared or preserved otherwise than by vinegar or acetic acid, frozen
  • frozen orange juice
  • tomato ketchup and other tomato sauces
  • wine of fresh grapes, including fortified wines; certain grape must
  • articles of jewelry and parts thereof, of precious metal or of metal clad with precious metal
  • wooden furniture of a kind used in offices
  • mattresses of materials other than cellular rubber or plastics, whether or not covered

Hopefully these tariffs won’t ever go into effect because the U.S. Congress will intervene and end mandatory COOL labeling. If the tariffs do go into effect before Congress acts, I would like to offer sincere and heartfelt condolences to Canadian consumers. When all of this is over, we should not so easily forget your involuntary sacrifice.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

There’s No Such Thing as ‘Good Government’

By
Michael F. Cannon

National Journal’s Ron Fournier:

I like government. I don’t like what the fallout from these past few weeks might do to the public’s faith in it…

The core argument of President Obama’s rise to power, and a uniting belief of his coalition of young, minority and well-educated voters, is that government can do good things–and do them well.

Damn. Look at what cliches the past few weeks wrought.

Fournier then runs through how the various Obama scandals show:

Government is intrusive … Orwellian … incompetent … corrupt … complicated … heartless … secretive … [and] can’t be trusted.

And that’s when the good guys are running the show!

Maybe Fournier needs to brush up on his Common Sense:

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil… Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence… For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least.

Translation: there’s no such thing as “good government.”

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

San Francisco’s Self-Inflicted Housing Problem

By
David Boaz

Housing is expensive and hard to find in beautiful San Francisco. In today’s New York Times, one would-be housing provider explains why. Scott James writes:

[A]fter renting out a one-bedroom apartment in my home for several years, I will never do it again. San Francisco’s anti-landlord housing laws and political climate make it untenable….

[A] complex legal structure has been created to make evictions for just cause extraordinarily difficult.

At first many of these rules governed only apartment complexes and larger properties with many units. But in 1994 the city applied the regulations to homes if they included just one rental on the property. In other cities, including New York City, such small-time landlords have far more rights over their own homes.

As he goes on to describe his experience with the last tenant in his downstairs apartment—a story featuring a sledgehammer, a flooded apartment, and a plugged-in appliance in an overflowing sink—I was reminded of the 1990 movie Pacific Heights, not coincidentally set in San Francisco.

It’s a thriller that is almost a documentary on the horrors of landlord-tenant law—and that is confirmed by today’s story. A young couple buys a big house in San Francisco and rents an apartment to a young man. He never pays them, and they can’t get him out, and then things get really scary. The lawyer lectures the couple—and the audience—on how “of course you’re right, but you’ll never win.” When I saw it, I just knew this happened to someone—maybe the screenwriter or someone he knew. Sure enough, when Cato published William Tucker’s book Rent Control, Zoning, and Affordable Housing, and I asked Pacific Heights director John Schlesinger for a jacket blurb, he readily agreed to say, “If you thought Pacific Heights was fiction, you need to read this book”; and he told me that the screenwriter had a relative who had gone through a tenant nightmare.

Want to instantly create 10,600 rental units in San Francisco? Reform landlord-tenant law so that small landlords come back to the market. In the meantime, watch Pacific Heights.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Regulatory Studies

(Unintentional) Praise for ‘50 Vetoes’

By
Michael F. Cannon

The Fiscal Times:

So far, officials in 34 states have elected not to create insurance exchanges under the law where the uninsured can go to purchase affordable or subsidized health care coverage. And only 20 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to expand Medicaid programs for the poor and disabled…

Earlier this year, Cannon published a lengthy Cato “white paper,” a handbook of sorts for gumming up the works. Entitled “50 Vetoes: How States Can Stop the Obama Health Care Law,” the report urges governors and state officials to refuse to set up insurance exchanges in their states and to refuse to opt into an expanded Medicaid program for the poor…

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, and a board member of Enroll America, complained…that Cannon’s handbook was designed to “throw sand into the machinery of state implementation of the Affordable Care Act.”

“So has it been a factor? Of course,” added Pollack.

Click here to read “50 Vetoes.”

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Government and Politics, Health Care

Hat Tip, Glenn Greenwald

By
Tim Lynch

Today’s New York Times has a nice profile on Glenn Greenwald, the man who has helped expose the federal government’s widespread surveillance of tens of millions of Americans. Here is an excerpt:

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.

On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”

A few years ago, Cato invited Greenwald to participate in a Cato Unbound exchange on government surveillance. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to his essay:

The digital surveillance state is out of control. It intercepts our phone calls, keeps track of our prescription drug use, monitors our email, and keeps tabs on us wherever we go. For all that, it doesn’t appear to be making us safer. Accountability has been lost, civil liberties are disappearing, and the public-private partnerships in this area of government action raise serious questions about the democratic process itself. It’s time we stood up to do something about it.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Government Spying on Foreign Customers Is Bad for U.S. Business

By
Simon Lester

I’ll leave the privacy/con law issues related to the latest government spying reports to my Cato colleagues who know about these things. I just wanted to mention one economic aspect of all this. Orin Kerr notes the following over at the Volokh Conspiracy: 

Here’s an excerpt from a forthcoming article of mine … :

The reality of global Internet access means that U.S.-based Internet services often have a heavily foreign customer base. Consider Gmail, the popular e-mail service provided by Google. Google is headquartered in California, and its servers currently reside there. But Gmail’s business is truly international, and slightly less than 30% of Gmail’s users reside in the United States. This chart shows the percentage of Gmail’s users that are in a handful of different countries as of 2012:

United States 29.7%

India 8.9%

Japan 3.4%

Russia 3.3%

Brazil 3.2%

United Kingdom 2.9%

China 2.7%

Iran 2.6%

Facebook’s user base is even more heavily foreign than is Gmail’s user base. To be sure, using Facebook has become as American as apple pie: About 54% of Americans presently have a Facebook account. At the same time, only about 16% of Facebook’s users are located in the United States. The rest, about 84%, access Facebook from abroad. For United States-based services like Gmail and Facebook, United States users form a small subset of its global customer base.

It sounds like the PRISM program takes advantage of that by giving the NSA access to the computers of the major U.S. based providers so it can search for the information of non-U.S. persons—subject to the NSA’s judgment of who is a non-U.S. person—and monitor them in realtime.

It seems to me that this revelation can’t be good for these companies in terms of use by non-Americans. Who wants to use a communication service that the U.S. government uses to spy on you? Not many people, I’m guessing. As a result, there may be a great opportunity here for foreign-based internet companies to market themselves with a slogan along the lines of, “We won’t give the U.S. government access to your email account.” So, in addition to all of the obvious downsides of a massive government spying operation, we may also be driving foreign customers away from U.S. businesses.

Topics: 
International Economics and Development, Law and Civil Liberties

Why The NSA Collecting Your Phone Records Is A Problem

By
Julian Sanchez

Privacy advocates and surveillance experts have suspected for years that the government was using an expansive interpretation of the Patriot Act’s §215 “business record” authority to collect bulk communications records indiscriminately. We now have confirmation in the form of a secret order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon — and legislators are saying that such orders have been routinely served on phone carriers for at least seven years. (It seems likely that similar requests are being served on Internet providers — increasingly the same companies that provide us with wireless phone services).

Some stress that what is being collected is “just metadata”—a phrase I’m confident you’ll never see a computer scientist or data analyst use. Metadata—the transactional records of information about phone and Internet communications, as opposed to their content—can be incredibly revealing, as the recent story about the acquisition of Associated Press phone logs underscores. Those records, as AP head Gary Pruitt complained, provide a comprehensive map of reporters’ activities, telling those who know how to look what stories journalists are working on and who their confidential sources are. Metadata can reveal what Websites you read, who you communicate with, which political or religious groups you’re affiliated with, even your physical location.

In a way, the ground was prepared for this indiscriminate collection of Americans’ data way back in the 1970s, when the Supreme Court held, implausibly, that we surrender our expectation of privacy—and with it, the protection of the Fourth Amendment—just by using modern technology that leaves traces of our activity on someone else’s computers. But Americans were also sold a false bill of goods when Congress passed and reauthorized the Patriot Act powers used here—which we were repeatedly assured were only intended to be used to track “bad guys.” What we weren’t told was that, if the government thinks datamining ALL our records might help identify “bad guys,” then that information too is “relevant” to an investigation.

This collection is probably well enough intentioned. The problem is that these records are likely to be retained in databases indefinitely. Which means we don’t just need to worry about whether the government’s motives are pure when they collect the information. Even if they are, someone with access to that data, maybe in five or ten years, may be unable to resist the temptation to use that information for other purposes. That could mean investigating ordinary crimes: If you can data mine for suspicious terrorist activity patterns—which as Jim Harper and Jeff Jonas have pointed out is likely to be extremely difficult—you can plug in “suspicious patterns” that may identify drug dealers and tax cheats as well. Still more disturbing is the possibility that, the intelligence community has repeatedly done historically, those records could be exploited for illegitimate political purposes, or even simple greed. (Imagine probing communications for signs of an impending corporate merger, product launch, or lawsuit.)

We are, predictably, being told that this program is essential to protecting us from terrorist attacks. But the track record of such claims is unimpressive: They were made about fusion centers, and the original NSA warrantless wiretap program, and in each case collapsed under scrutiny. No doubt some of these phone records have proven useful in some investigation, but it doesn’t follow that the indiscriminate collection of such records is necessary for investigations, any more than general warrants to search homes are necessary just because sometimes searches of homes are useful to police.

In the short term, we should hope for an Inspector General audit of this program, both to look for abuses—as a similar audit of National Security Letters uncovered “widespread and serious” misuse of authority—and to skeptically interrogate the claim that such sweeping collection is somehow indispensable to national security. In the longer term, we need to follow the suggestion of Justice Sotomayor in United States v. Jones and think hard about the “third party doctrine,” which leaves all this increasingly voluminous and revealing metadata stripped of constitutional protection.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

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