After a dozen years of legal tussles, seven years in the crosshairs of ambitious prosecutors, and five-and-a-half years fighting a federal case that saw his business forcibly shuttered, his assets seized, and his longtime partner dead by suicide, alt-weekly newspaper impresario Michael Lacey was found guilty Thursday on just one of the 86 criminal charges levied against him in connection with the online advertising platform Backpage. But the government's fanatical pursuit of Lacey and his four other Backpage co-defendants is far from over.
Lacey, an award-winning investigative journalist, was found guilty of international concealment money laundering, which could land him in prison for up to 20 years, and not guilty of international promotional money laundering. But after a week of contentious deliberations, the jury could not come to agreement on the other 84 charges, prompting U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa to declare a second mistrial in this case. That means Lacey could face a third federal trial essentially for the crime of running a classified ads site that knowingly enabled and profited from illegal, if consensual, transactions involving sex.
Thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the speech and conduct of website consumers is considered to be the legal responsibility of the speakers themselves, not the owners of the platform. This has been a thorn in the side of politicians and other would-be censors ever since. In 2013, Kamala Harris and 46 other state attorneys general sent a joint letter to Congress urging a rollback of Section 230; the letter started like this: "Every day, children in the United States are sold for sex. In instance after instance, state and local authorities discover that the vehicles for advertising the victims of the child sex trade to the world are online classified ad services, such as Backpage.com."
Seven weeks before her election to the U.S. Senate, Harris, along with her Texas counterpart Ken Paxton, brought the first criminal case against Lacey, his partner Jim Larkin, and other executives at Backpage, who were paraded in a Sacramento courtroom cage wearing orange jumpsuits. That case was tossed out by a judge who pointed out: "Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech….It is for Congress, not this court, to revisit."
But just three days before leaving the A.G.'s office for the Senate, Harris filed yet another Backpage case, which was yet again thrown out (partially) because of Section 230. Once in Congress, Harris helped push through the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which does peel back Section 230 to make websites liable for the "facilitation" or "promotion" of prostitution by their users, even though prostitution itself is not a federal crime.
This latest retrial did not rely on FOSTA, but the defense was barred by the judge from even bringing up Section 230, on grounds that the law is only applicable to state crimes, not federal crimes. That was one of many odd bench rulings in the case; the defense filed five unsuccessful motions for a mistrial, with a sixth still pending over possibly exculpatory material withheld by the prosecution until after closing arguments had been made.
As part of the jury verdict Thursday, former Backpage executives Scott Spear and John Brunst were found guilty of conspiracy to facilitate prostitution, as well as on over 20 counts apiece for money laundering, plus an additional 18 prostitution counts for Spear. The two men could very easily spend the rest of their lives in prison. The other two defendants, Andrew Padilla and Joy Vaught, were found not guilty on their 51 prostitution counts, with Vaught's attorney Joy Bertrand saying after the verdict, "My client should have never been in this case. She was charged and pressured to cooperate and assist the government, and she had the courage to say no," and also, the case "should never have been brought…[because] it's an offense to the First Amendment." Bertrand also added, "They come after this platform, they come after other platforms next….This affects everybody."
This precedent, in combination with FOSTA's degradation of Section 230, means that publishers of websites that include user-generated content are considerably more vulnerable to being held criminally liable for the conduct of their customers. It will chill speech, by design. Politicians wanted first Craigslist, and now Backpage, to get out of the online sex-ads business; now that activity has moved to more shadowy areas of the black market.
This has had bad consequences for sex workers, sex consumers, and vice cops alike. When Backpage was still active, the federal government praised it in detail for assisting law enforcement in identifying sex traffickers and other criminals. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in a report that the FBI's ability to identify victims and sex traffickers has decreased significantly because, "with backpage.com no longer in the market, buyers and sellers moved to other online platforms, and the market became fragmented."
All of this heavy-handed prohibitionism has come in the name of fighting underage sex-trafficking, yet literally none of the criminal charges against Backpage during these many years has had anything to do with the stuff. In fact, the unsubstantiated accusation that the company was a party to sex trafficking is why the first federal case was declared a mistrial in 2021—prosecutors couldn't stop using the phrase.
Mike Lacey and the late Jim Larkin, with nearly a half-century between them fighting free speech battles against intrusive politicians, both insisted from the outset of their legal odyssey that the Backpage prosecutions were an attack on the First Amendment. Yet this case, and the lives prosecutors have wrecked, has received scant national attention from journalists and free speech advocates. Decades ago, gleeful smut-peddlers like Larry Flynt were hailed as First Amendment heroes and given the Hollywood biopic treatment; these days, the mere act of publishing sex ads online is enough to send most potential free speech allies scurrying for the exits. Lacey and Larkin deserved more from us, and the government deserves to do much less.
Music Credits: "Blue Beings" by Tamuz Dekel via Artlist; "Im on Your Side" by IamDayLight via Artlist
Photos Credits: Jose Luis Villegas/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Hector Amezcua/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Joel Lerner / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; US House TV via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom; Associated Press
The post Backpage: The Monumental Free Speech Case the Media Ignored appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In April 2018, the founders of the online classifieds website Backpage.com, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, and five people who worked for them, were indicted. One of the employees has already pleaded guilty. Lacey and Larkin were accused of facilitating prostitution in violation of the Travel Act, money laundering, and conspiracy.
The irony was that Backpage had been working with the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help police investigate instances of sex trafficking, and the police had come to rely on its cooperation.
In September 2021, federal Judge Susan Brnovich was forced to declare a mistrial in the case. Lacey and Larkin's determination to fight all the way to the end is laying bare what Reason has been reporting for years: The government's case against Backpage is a house of cards.
Produced by Paul Detrick; music by Lex Villena, Jeremy Black
Rod Lamkey—CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom, Howard Lipin/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Sonia Moskowitz/ZUMApress/Newscom, Graylock/ABACAUSA.COM/Newscom, Gage Skidmore, Mirrorpix / MEGA / Newscom, Hector Amezcua/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Marc Raishbrook / Splash News/Newscom
The post The Collapsing Federal Prostitution Case Against Backpage.com appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before Los Angeles temporarily eased its zoning requirements and allowed restaurants to expand outdoor seating during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parking lot of The Golden Bull wasn't very "appealing," recalls hospitality consultant Marvin Wells.
Today, it has artificial grass, tiered levels, heat lamps, and a gardener to take care of the landscaping. "It is actually the biggest part of the restaurant that we've had," says Wells. "We're busier than we've ever been."
This change not only unlocked a new world of possibilities for restaurants—entire parts of the city were remade as more pedestrian-friendly.
Will this lead to a permanent loosening of zoning requirements that for decades have constrained the choices that L.A. residents and business owners have been able to make about how they work and live?
"I think the government can comfortably step back from trying to dictate how much parking every single property owner provides on their property," says Michael Manville, an urban planning professor at UCLA. "In stepping back, they will make cities more efficient, more equitable, and more environmentally sustainable."
Produced, shot, and edited by Paul Detrick; graphics by Detrick
Photos: Underwood Archives/UIG Universal Images Group/Newscom; Frank Worth/ZUMA Press/Newscom; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; Image of Sport/Newscom; Álex Segura/EFE/Newscom
The post L.A. Finally Lets People Eat In Parking Lots appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Richard Montañez, the self-proclaimed inventor of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, has a memoir out this week called Flamin' Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man's Rise from Janitor to Top Executive. It's also being made into a movie by actress and producer Eva Longoria.
But last month, the Los Angeles Times published allegations that Montañez fabricated his role in the snack's creation.
"None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin' Hot test market," Frito-Lay said in a statement. "We have interviewed multiple personnel who were involved in the test market, and all of them indicate that Richard was not involved in any capacity in the test market."
Whether or not the Flamin' Hot Cheetos origin story is a legend, what matters most is how this fiery snack has been embraced, repurposed, and re-interpreted by legions of fans.
These puffy and pungent snacks have been featured in rap songs, YouTube challenges, TikTok cooking videos, clothing, jewelry, and a variety of food dishes with roots all over the world. Singer Katy Perry dressed up as a Flamin' Hot Cheeto for Halloween in 2014.
This fan culture helped make Flamin' Hot Cheetos resilient to attacks by food regulators who object to artificial dyes and high-calorie cornmeal.
They're also a culinary phenomenon. "Either before school or after school you were going to get a bag of chips and the only one you were going to get was Flamin' Hot," says Tirsa Farah, co-owner and chef at Tirsa's Mexican Cafe in Los Angeles, California. Farah's menu features Flamin' Hot Cheetos in sopes, nachos, and esquites. "It's not just a flavor—it's a memory, it's an occasion. You just flash back to all the times you ate Flamin' Hot."
Bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos appeared on American store shelves in the early '90s. They came to symbolize the poor eating habits of America's youth. The panic intensified with the rise of social media. There were claims that kids were showing up at doctors' offices with heartburn and red stool.
YouTube creators like Matt Stonie mocked the calorie intake concerns of school administrators and dietitians—perhaps unintentionally—with Flamin' Hot Cheetos challenges where contestants try to eat as many as they can in 10 minutes.
Mexicana YouTube creator Wendy, from the Wendy's Eating Show channel, made a video in 2018 where she added Flamin' Hot Cheetos to her sushi and took part in a Korean YouTube trend called mukbang: videos where someone eats food and talks to the audience about it.
"You guys want to know why I picked these sushi rolls? Because they have cream cheese in the middle and Hot Cheetos and cream cheese also go together like peanut butter and jam," Wendy explains.
The way fans are able to engage with and fuse cultures together make Flamin' Hot Cheetos deeply American. Those flavors combine into something new, surprising, and better practically every single day.
"You can be as different as you want to be, or non-traditional as you want to be, and still make delicious, yummy food," says Farah. "It's just the different chip."
Produced by Paul Detrick. Shot by Zach Weissmueller and Detrick. Graphics by Detrick.
Music: Turn Up by Monako, TipToes by Myuu, Shibuya by Bad Snacks, The Beacon by Zachariah Hickman, Fundy by Rew.
Richard B. Levine/Newscom, FCA/ZOJ/WENN/Newscom, Jonathan Wong/SCMP/Newscom, Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom, Will/MEGA/Newscom, Paul Bersebach/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Eve Edelheit/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Orange County Register/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Photo 145166139 © Suriyapong Koktong | Dreamstime.com, Sharyn Jackson/TNS/Newscom, Richard B. Levine/Newscom, Cheetos/MEGA/Newscom
The post How Flamin' Hot Cheetos Became a Cultural Sensation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1980, Lyman and Charlene Smith were found bound and bludgeoned to death in their Ventura County home. Charlene had also been raped, and investigators managed to retrieve semen from the crime scene. It would take 38 years to find the killer.
"It was a sensational, godawful murder in a small town," recalls Jennifer Carole, Lyman Smith's daughter. The way they had been murdered "had a lot of feeling and emotion behind it," she recalls. "There was a lot of reason why you would think that someone they knew did this."
Carole would eventually learn that her father and stepmother had been victims of a notorious serial rapist and killer who had 87 individual victims at 53 separate crime scenes from 1975 to 1986.
Known as the Golden State Killer, the assailant avoided detection for decades.
In 2018, police finally identified and arrested the killer, a retired police officer and truck mechanic named Joseph James DeAngelo. They solved the case thanks to the advent of online genealogy databases, in which individuals voluntarily share their DNA online to obtain information about their personal health and heritage and to connect with family members.
These databases were what allowed investigators to bring DeAngelo to justice, and they went on to be used to name suspects in dozens of other cold cases across the United States, ushering in a new technological leap that the law is still catching up with.
The Golden State Killer story was told in magazines, books, podcasts, an HBO series.
But the capture of the Golden State Killer also has troubling implications for civil liberties. The use of genealogical databases for crime fighting makes it possible for the government to search through personal information of innocent citizens—their genetic code—in ways that violate privacy norms enshrined in the Constitution.
Police had DNA from the Smith crime scene genotyped in the same way customers would, using a single nucleotide polymorphism test. They compared the raw data with that of other people who had uploaded their data to genealogy websites, including YSearch, MyHeritageDNA, FamilyTree DNA, and GEDMatch. Connections between family members revealed a family tree that would lead to DeAngelo.
"The idea is not that the police are supposed to indiscriminately rummage through the lives of citizens looking for crime," says Erin E. Murphy, a law professor at New York University and the author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. "They're supposed to have probable cause, targeted suspicion to believe somebody involved in criminal activity and then from that suspicion perhaps develop reason for arrest or prosecution."
According to the Los Angeles Times, investigators believed their genealogy searching was legal. "We were entirely confident that it would pass legal muster," former Golden State Killer investigator Paul Holes told the Times. "But we understood that there could be a fallout in terms of public perception."
"Rifling through the lives of thousands of innocent people, people you know are not the perpetrator of the crime, is a pretty serious thing to encourage law enforcement to do," says Murphy.
Shot, written, produced, edited, and motion graphics by Paul Detrick; additional camera by Zach Weissmuller.
Music credits: Kiss of Death by Kadir Demir; Hope and Heisenberg by Spearfisher; Psycho Bill by Jordan Hatfield; Speed Freak by Evgeny Bardyuzha; Null by Neshza
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The post How Detectives Caught the Golden State Killer—and Unleashed a Catastrophe for Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With a Democrat in the White House and a $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan on the table, excitement about high-speed rail is on the rise again. A map by graphic designer and transit advocate Alfred Twu, featuring possible routes for bullet train lines crisscrossing the U.S., has been making the rounds on Twitter. The map was the subject of a recent Vox article that was tweeted out by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
"Gen Z is dreaming big," he wrote. "It's time we all did the same."
"I want her so fucking much," which was accompanied by a picture of Twu's map, was how one viral tweet summed up the prevailing mood back in January of 2020.
But anyone taking the promise of high-speed rail seriously should consider California's disastrous attempt to build a bullet train in recent years—the project is unfinished and over budget, and one of its key political backers has turned against it.
Building high-speed rail requires bulldozing neighborhoods and disrupting communities, and would be a drain on a state's finances if completed. In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed building 8,600 miles of high-speed rail and received $10.1 billion from Congress toward that goal. The money went to upgrading Amtrak instead.
The Cato Institute's Randal O'Toole estimates that based on the costs and setbacks of the California project, building 8,600 miles of high-speed rail would have cost "well over $1 trillion dollars."
Buttigieg's definition of "dreaming big" is applying 20th-century technology to 21st-century problems.
When funding for the initial part of the California High-Speed Rail line was voted on in 2008, it was supposed to link Los Angeles with San Francisco for about $33 billion and take about a decade to complete. As the years dragged on, the cost ballooned to $100 billion at one point and the project had to be scaled back significantly to a shorter section between Merced and Bakersfield in California's Central Valley.
Even with all the setbacks, including a lack of private investment that champions of the California rail line were always banking on, local California politicians continue to push for federal dollars.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to make sure that America had the "cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world." Buttigieg and Congress should pay more attention to California's costly disaster than a map circulating on Twitter.
Produced by Paul Detrick
Music: "Hall of the Mountain King" by Kevin MacLeod, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Photos: Murray/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, Oliver Contreras / Pool via CNP / SplashNews/Newscom, Ken Cantrell/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Gary Reyes/TNS/Newscom, Photo 98224660 © Blackzheep | Dreamstime.com, Photo 136151613 © Cougarsan | Dreamstime.com
The post High-Speed Rail Advocates Should Pay Attention to California's Costly Disaster appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Carl Hart is a 54-year-old Air Force veteran, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, and an unapologetic recreational user of heroin.
"I use heroin," he tells Reason, "in part because it's really good at helping me to unwind, to be more forgiving of other people, to look at my own behavior and see where I need to modify in order to be a more responsible person, in order to be a better person."
Hart's new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, is a provocative manifesto for legalizing all drugs and letting responsible adults use the intoxicants of their choosing. He is coming out of the "chemical closet" because he says the costs of the drug war—the violence that attends to black markets, the creation of a prison-industrial complex, the destruction of minority neighborhoods, the perversion of justice, and more—are too great to bear.
He says prohibition is based on a series of lies about substance abuse, and he documents that the overwhelming majority of drug users—even of hard drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine—use responsibly and are no more likely to develop problems than drinkers.
More important, Hart says drug prohibition is inimical to the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, which "guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, as long as we don't disrupt anybody else's ability to do the same. We get to live our life as we choose, as we see fit and taking drugs can be a part of that. And it is a part of that for a lot of Americans."
Opera house: Photo 29350232 © Serban Enache | Dreamstime.com, Methamphetamine: Photo 59084394 © Daniel Kaesler | Dreamstime.com, Heroin: Photo 175304146 © Feriansyah Pz | Dreamstime.com, Men: Photo 85566591 © Wisconsinart | Dreamstime.com, Field: Photo 191556262 © | Dreamstime.com, Binocular: Photo 17693275 © Ron Sumners | Dreamstime.com, Heroin: Photo 209101787 © Majo1122331 | Dreamstime.com, House in field: Photo 149474381 © Charmphoto | Dreamstime.com, Teenagers: Photo 180950138 © Dmytro Tolmachov | Dreamstime.com, Couple: Photo 129923072 © Mariia Kalinichenko | Dreamstime.com, Statue of Liberty: Photo 108954099 © Byelikova | Dreamstime.com, Cocaine: Photo 135335692 © Chernetskaya | Dreamstime.com, Photo 101949361 © Ded Mityay | Dreamstime.com, Adderall: Photo 178129745 © Colin Temple | Dreamstime.com MDMA: Photo 109474106 © Couperfield | Dreamstime.com, Photo 181220345 © Eskymaks | Dreamstime.com, Photo 177051537 © Olha Karpovych | Dreamstime.com, Pills: Photo 159435400 © Fortton | Dreamstime.com; Alcohol and pills: Photo 69273380 © Feverpitched | Dreamstime.com; Columbia University: Photo 53231440 © Gabriel Robledo | Dreamstime.com, Leslie Spurlock/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Kristopher Skinner/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Stan Carroll/ZUMApress/Newscom, Yuko Saito-Miller/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, Yuko Saito-Miller/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, Sam Harrel/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, Allen Eyestone/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Allen Eyestone/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Allen Eyestone/ZUMA Press/Newscom
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]]>President Donald Trump is willing to veto defense spending unless Congress repeals Section 230, the law that gives internet service providers, website operators, and social media platforms the right to moderate content however they see fit and broad legal liability from content generated by users. President-elect Joe Biden believes that Section 230, often called "the internet's First Amendment" and the "26 words that created the internet," should be "revoked immediately." If Section 230 is repealed or significantly revised, online life will be radically altered.
Enter Ajit Pai, who has served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) since 2017, when Trump appointed him. During his time in office, he has championed deregulation (he repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules), auctioned off record amounts of spectrum, and pushed market-friendly policies for the rollout of 5G networks. Such actions earned him the Sixth Annual Savas Award for Privatization, an annual prize awarded by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.
In mid-October, after Trump exploded when Twitter and Facebook restricted access to a New York Post story critical of Joe Biden's son Hunter, Pai announced that the FCC would be working to "clarify" the meaning of Section 230 in the coming weeks. Although he has also announced he will be leaving the FCC on January 20, anything that he does could have a lasting impact.
In an exclusive Reason interview, Pai discusses what he thinks should happen regarding Section 230 and the future of free speech in America. "I am pessimistic about where this goes in the future," he tells Nick Gillespie. "We've grown up…with a culture of free speech and free expression. And I think we've often taken that for granted…Once that culture frays, who puts it back together? It's not going to be a politician. It's not going to be a regulator. It has to be the aggregated decisions of millions of Americans to say, no, we want pluralism again."
Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Paul Detrick.
Laptop: Photo 9514172 © Alsos | Dreamstime.com; Ajit Pai testifies; Credit: Alex Wong/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom, Abaca Press/Pool/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom, CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom, MIKE THEILER/UPI/Newscom, Chip Somodevilla/CNP/AdMedia/Newscom, Alex Wong/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom; 5G network box: Mikhail Pochuyev/TASS/Sipa USA/Newscom; Card holder: Photo 18091464 © Matthew Valentine | Dreamstime.com; Trump at podium: UPI/Newscom; Joe Biden: KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom, D 47099856 © Palinchak | Dreamstime.com; FCC building; Credit: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom; Joe Biden; Credit: Trump at podium; Credit: Alex Edelman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Apps on phone; Credit: maxphotostwo137435; Facebook on phone; Credit: JakubPorzycki/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Twitter headquarters; Credit: John Nacion / SOPA Images/Sipa U/Newscom
The post FCC Head Ajit Pai on Section 230 and Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Where would the Black Lives Matter movement be without the right to free speech?" asks Ira Glasser, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1978 to 2001. "There is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement to justice, to help its movement survive."
Glasser is the subject of the new documentary Mighty Ira, which chronicles his efforts to secure the speech rights of Nazis, undermine government attempts to regulate internet content, combat hate speech laws, and abolish campus speech codes. It is a portrait of a First Amendment hero who managed to have friends across ideological divides while remaining civil, engaged, and effective.
The 82-year-old Glasser is troubled by his former group's seeming embrace of identity politics over free speech, and he worries that younger social justice activists view the First Amendment as an adversary rather than an ally. "John Lewis said that without free speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings," Glasser says. "That's historically and politically true without exception."
Written by Nick Gillespie. Produced and edited by Paul Detrick.
Neo-Nazis; Credit: Alexandra Buxbaum/ABACAUSA.COM/Newscom; Ira Glasser; Credit: Mario Ruiz/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Neo Nazi marcher; Credit: ID 132745286 © Patrick Morrissey | Dreamstime.com; Black Lives Matter protesters; Credit: Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire CBW, Tim Evans/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Adam J. Dewey/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Women's rights marcher; Credit: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom; Anti-war activist; Credit: Zach D Roberts/ZUMA Press/Newscom; David Duke; Credit: file UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Eldridge Cleaver; Credit: Underwood Archives/UIG Universal Images Group/Newscom; Supreme court protesters; Credit: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom; Gay rights protester; Credit: Louis Brems/ZUMA Press/Newscom; AIDS activists; Credit: Frances M. Roberts/Newscom, Ezio Petersen UPI Photo Service/Newscom, Michale Smith UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Civil rights movement; Credits: akg-images/Newscom; ICE protest; Credit: John Marshall Mantel/SIPA/Newscom; Joseph McCarthy; Credit: Everett Collection/Newscom; Richard Nixon; Credit: JT Vintage/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Rudy Giuliani; Credit: Jason Winslow / Splash News/Newscom; Donald Trump; Credit: Paul Hennessy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Bill Barr; Credit: Jeff Roberson/UPI/Newscom; ACLU legal observers; Credit: Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Lannis Waters/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom, Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; ACLU clients; Credit: GDA Photo Service/Newscom, Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Romain Blanquart/MCT/Newscom; Neo-nazis; Credit: Jim De Pree/TNS/Newscom; Unite the Right rally; Credit: Stephanie Keith/Reuters/Newscom; ACLU protesters; Credit: ID 173780741 © Jerry Coli | Dreamstime.com
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]]>Presidential nominee Joe Biden gave his acceptance speech from the Democratic National Convention last night.
Since what he had to say wasn't particularly libertarian, we fixed it.
Photo by Gage Skidmore.
Produced by Paul Detrick.
The post What if Joe Biden Were a Libertarian? We Fixed His Acceptance Speech. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before Senator and former California Attorney General Kamala Harris was chosen as Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 election, she played a role in a campaign to force a website called Backpage.com to stop operating on the grounds that it was used to facilitate sex trafficking.
"Backpage.com needs to shut itself down, when it has created as its business model the profiting off of selling human beings and the purchase of human beings," Harris said at a 2012 press conference.
She would go on to spread misinformation about the site and its co-founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, and she co-filed criminal charges that were quickly dismissed but succeeded at garnering headlines and photo ops that raised her political profile. In reality, Backpage.com had become a powerful tool for law enforcement to help catch sex traffickers because of the cooperation and commitment of the site's founders to that cause, whom Harris and many other states' attorneys general had painted as villains.
Reason's Elizabeth Nolan-Brown revealed secret Justice Department memos showing prosecutors spent years trying to build a child sex trafficking case against Backpage but failed "to uncover compelling evidence of criminal intent or a pattern of reckless conduct regarding minors." Instead, Justice Department officials found Backpage was "remarkably responsive" to law enforcement requests and proactively sent ads containing minors to authorities
The memos revealed a story that didn't match the characterization that Harris and other politicians, attorneys general, and activists had been pushing for years.
This is an excerpt from a longer documentary, available here.
Produced by Paul Detrick.
Sen. Kamala Harris at podium and microphone: CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS/Newscom; Harris campaigning: Howard Lipin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Harris walking: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Lacey and Larkin in the courtroom: Hector Amezcua/TNS/Newscom; Harris on election night: ARMANDO ARORIZO/EFE/Newscom; Backpage screen: ZUMA Press/Newscom; Photos of Sacramento courtroom: Hector Amezcua/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Harris: Hector Amezcua/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Harris in the elevator: Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS/Newscom; Harris at the podium: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS/Newscom; Harris; Credit: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom
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]]>"An open society is a place that has a lot of intellectual pluralism," says Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the landmark 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought.
"Canceling comes from the universe of propaganda…it's about making an idea or a person socially radioactive."
In this short video essay, Rauch explains why canceling is different from criticism. The open society "is the most successful social principle ever invented" because it allows individuals to make errors as they seek out the truth.
This video is excerpted from a recent podcast interview with Nick Gillespie.
Edited by Paul Detrick; interview by Nick Gillespie; graphics by Lex Villena and Detrick; music by Villena.
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The post How Cancel Culture Violates Intellectual Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It might sound real but it's fictional. I love that my imagination gets to you," Drakeo the Ruler rapped over a telephone line inside the Los Angeles Men's Central Jail. The line was being recorded and could be used against him in court by prosecutors trying him on crimes linked to a 2016 murder. The song is part of his new album "Thank You For Using GTL"; GTL stands for Global Tel Link, the private phone company that handles the telephone calls from prison. Pitchfork called the album "mesmerizing" and The Washington Post called it the "most urgent rap album of the year."
With criminal justice reform in the spotlight, Drakeo's new album may help bring attention to the story of how he ended up in prison in the first place. At the rapper's first trial, prosecutors used his lyrics and videos as evidence that he murdered 24-year-old Davion Gregory at a Los Angeles party. Drakeo, whose real name is Darell Caldwell, maintained he had never been in a gang and that his lyrics were art, not meant to be taken literally.
The jury convicted Caldwell on only one count of illegal gun possession. L.A.'s district attorney refiled charges on criminal gang conspiracy and shooting from a vehicle. Because of California's harshly written gang laws, he could face life in prison if convicted.
"I think many people find it difficult to imagine that these young men are doing something complex, sophisticated that could be considered literary, artistic," says Erik Nielson, the co-author of Rap on Trial, which chronicles the growing phenomenon of criminal prosecutors using hip hop music as evidence.
The evidence prosecutors point to can border on the absurd. One video used in Caldwell's first trial featured him rapping and dancing with his crew while holding guns and wearing monkey masks. It comes across as hyperbole, but prosecutors put it in front of a jury anyway.
"I think many of them understand that they are misrepresenting rap lyrics. They know that they're doing that. They're doing it because they want the jury to see this stuff that is salacious, it's profane, and therefore you're compromising somebody's right to a fair trial."
It's a prosecutorial tactic that typically works and has been deployed over and over again since the early 1990s. But, with the rise of Soundcloud, Spotify, and YouTube in the 2000s to 2010s, more rappers found their music used against them in actual criminal cases.
Drakeo talks about this experience in one of his new songs: "I don't want my words twisted or misconstrued. […] Treat rap the same way that you're going to treat any other genre. You're not going to hold Denzel Washington accountable for his role in Training Day, so don't do the same thing with my music."
Caldwell's trial was supposed to happen in early 2020 but has been delayed until August 2020 because of the COVID-19 quarantine.
Correction: The YouTube version of this video misstates the name of Drakeo the Ruler's new album as"Thank You For Choosing GTL." It is "Thank You For Using GTL."
Produced by Paul Detrick; opening graphics by Lex Villena; additional graphics by Detrick and Isaac Reese.
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]]>"I thought it would honestly be really funny if I read my blog posts naked," says Cathy Reisenwitz, a former Reason staffer and freelance writer who joined the web-camming site OnlyFans during the COVID-19 quarantine. OnlyFans reports that with the world on lockdown, its traffic has grown at a rate of 150,000 new users daily.
OnlyFans is a social network like Instagram or YouTube, except that creators get to charge for their content, and they keep between 70 and 80 percent of the proceeds. Nudity is common. Reisenwitz says her goal is to break down stigmas around mixing sex and money. People assume that "you're either someone who makes money from their brain or their body," Reisenwitz told Reason. "And I think that's dumb."
OnlyFans is another milestone in the long fight for sex worker freedom, who have embraced peer-to-peer platforms as a way to eliminate middlemen, thwart the vice police, and ply their trade with more creativity and autonomy.
"So many more women are able to be their own producers now," Film Studies Professor Constance Penley told Reason. In the early 1990s, she and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, were among the first academics to give pornography serious scholarly attention. Penley says that camming has birthed a new world in which performers are calling more of the shots, edging out studios and distributors.
It's also turned sex work into a more common side hustle. "It's not the main part of their living," says Penley.
Professional sex worker and writer Siouxsie Q started in the industry after college, performing on stage and in live peep shows at San Francisco's Lusty Lady Theater. But she eventually migrated her career online, where it's possible to interface more directly with her customers. Q has seen many camming sites come and go, but over time, platforms have shifted to giving performers more autonomy and the freedom to be creative.
Siouxsie Q runs part of her webcam business through a website called Modelcentro, which owns Fancentro.
"Modelcentro really created essentially the adult industry's Squarespace and the ability to just plug and play your own site where you could feature your own content and then users can access that via their smartphones," she says. "That really changed the game,"
Before the commercial internet, sex work was done mostly on the street through pimps. It was a dangerous trade. The internet has made the industry safer by integrating customer screening tools and reputation networks, which mitigate risk even when sex workers choose to meet their clients in person. OnlyFans and websites like it mean sex workers get to decide who they let into their world.
"It's funny, I've been on social media, I'm super active on Twitter. I have been for a really long time," says Reisenwitz. "OnlyFans is like the nicest place on the internet for me right now. Like, by a lot."
Written and produced by Paul Detrick. Graphics by Lex Villena. and Detrick.
Lips: ID 88920708 © Fotorince | Dreamstime.com; Man looking up: ID 60556668 © Wavebreakmedia Ltd | Dreamstime.com; Woman sketch: ID 116515384 © Evgenyi Gromov | Dreamstime.com; Woman sketch: ID 116926384 © Evgenyi Gromov | Dreamstime.com; Woman sketch: ID 116515432 © Evgenyi Gromov | Dreamstime.com; Red box: ID 50864816 © Rostislav Zatonskiy | Dreamstime.com; Girl: ID 117512663 © Sakkmesterke | Dreamstime.com; Curtains: ID 37594 © Billyfoto | Dreamstime.com; Couch; Photo 4179109 © Photogl –Dreamstime.com; Camera: ID 106343209 © Lapandr | Dreamstime.com; Vintage Browser: Illustration 158058717 © Arseniukoleksii—Dreamstime.com; PA Guy: ID 137727227 © Arne9001 | Dreamstime.com; Pillar: ID 7454980 © Katja Wickert | Dreamstime.com; Cow Skull: ID 3721312 © Clint Cearley | Dreamstime.com; iPhone: ID 45051192 © Zedcreations | Dreamstime.com; Statue of David: ID 122117097 © Xbrchx | Dreamstime.com; Statue of Venus: ID 15161506 © Kmiragaya | Dreamstime.com; Statue of Venus behind: ID 85363425 © Siarhei Kazlou | Dreamstime.com; Queen tattoo: ID 136950172 © Polinaraulina | Dreamstime.com
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]]>Dressed in his blue medical mask and scrubs, Justin Barbour looks like a doctor on a break from treating COVID-19 patients. He's actually a biomedical technician, or BMET—someone who fixes medical devices. He's on staff at a Houston hospital that he asked that we keep anonymous.
Barbour's job has suddenly become dangerous. "If one of us gets sick, then, obviously, multiple technicians in a room, somebody else is probably gonna get sick, and you could take down a whole hospital just by taking down your biomed staff," he tells Reason.
Barbour, who has been working as a BMET for over a decade, often uses service manuals when repairing equipment, but he lacks a lot of essential documentation. So he turns to online forums and relies on his intuition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, BMETs have turned especially often to this decentralized information-sharing network to repair essential hospital equipment. But they've been using it for years, trading information on Reddit, Facebook, and websites like MedWrench and DotMed.
Medical device manufacturers have responded by imposing software locks, proprietary code, and requirements that users obtain special authorizations. They've also fought against DIY repair services in court. So biomedical technicians have had to think especially creatively—because in a pandemic, one broken machine could be the difference between life and death.
Kyle Wiens, the CEO and founder of the third-party repair company iFixIt, says medical device companies have adopted certain tactics pioneered by Apple.
"Well, we'll sell it to you, but we're not going to let you service it," he says. "We want to be the ones to service it."
Manufacturers frequently claim that the information in manuals is their intellectual property—a result of broadly written copyright laws that date back to the 1990s. These were intended to protect the music and film industries from pirates, which were taking their work and sharing it first through physical bootlegs and then online.
But in the 2000s, software began to get integrated into phones, household items, cars, farming equipment, and medical devices too. Manufacturers claimed that copyright laws established that they're the only ones the law permits to repair consumer devices.
"There [are] some manufacturers that won't even sell us parts. It's proprietary and we have no access to it," says Barbour.
BMETs around the world began to rely on Frankshospitalworkshop.com, a website started by a technician in Tanzania named Frank. Frank (who kept his last name private) was having trouble servicing medical devices that had been donated to hospitals in Africa, since he lacked the proprietary keys to make them useable. He figured other people might be in his same position, so he started a website where he posted manuals and wrote about how the equipment worked.
Frank's site was, "from my experience, the most comprehensive, most used resource for medical service information," says Wiens.
Then manufacturers started sending Frank takedown requests. Now, when businesses forbid certain downloads of manuals, his site is limited to featuring the companies' names.
A right-to-repair movement has been fighting to change federal copyright law—or to pass state-level laws that let people fix their own devices. But medical device companies fought back with letters to lawmakers, saying right-to-repair laws could endanger the lives of patients if devices were fixed improperly by untrained personnel.
The trade association AdvaMed, which represents medical device companies, has even lobbied the Food and Drug Administration to regulate third-party device repairs. But after the agency did an assessment in 2018, it concluded that third parties provide high-quality, safe, and effective servicing of medical devices.
iFixit recently announced an initiative to begin collecting service manuals and information about medical devices on its website. They are looking for more info, as well as for people to help organize the information for BMETs.
Produced by Paul Detrick
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]]>The delay in COVID-19 testing in the United States meant that for weeks doctors and public officials were flying blind about who was infected and where major outbreaks were located. This means that they had little hope of containing the virus before it started spreading out of control.
Why did the U.S. fall behind almost every other country in this regard?
The root of the problem is the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) culture of extreme caution, which led to needless suffering and loss of life long before the coronavirus pandemic. In this case, its impact is so high profile and far-reaching that the episode could finally bring lasting reform.
The genetic sequence for COVID-19 was published on January 10th by Chinese scientists and uploaded to the National Institute of Health's website, allowing laboratories around the world to create their own diagnostic tests.
German scientists had one within the week, and other countries and private labs quickly followed suit. The World Health Organization shipped 250,000 German-made tests to labs around the world.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) decided it needed to rely on its own version of the test, which could be certified by the FDA, but it wasn't ready until early February.
On February 6 and 7, 90 tests were shipped to state public health labs around the country, but the kits had a technical flaw and needed to be returned to the CDC for testing.
Meanwhile, the virus continued spreading.
On February 4, the FDA said it would allow government-approved labs with high complexity testing capabilities to create their own tests, provided they copy the CDC's approach and send all of their results to the agency's headquarters in Atlanta for verification.
As former FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein told The New Yorker: "You certainly wouldn't want to say, 'Any lab can advertise a coronavirus test.' Because then it's going to be chaos. There are a lot of people who will sell things that may or may not work."
Though well-intentioned, the rule became a stumbling block.
Take the case of Alex Greninger, a doctor and researcher at the University of Washington, who, according to a report in GQ, submitted his application to create a coronavirus test via email. Then he learned that he also needed to submit a paper copy, and then another version burned to a compact disk or loaded onto a drive and delivered to the FDA's Maryland headquarters.
After he complied, the FDA did not approve his test right away, according to a report in ProPublica. They asked him to make sure his test didn't cross-diagnose with SARS and MERS, other coronaviruses which hadn't been seen in the U.S. in years. His test was finally certified on February 29, at which point the fatal outbreak in his home state of Washington was already underway.
As the crisis worsened and the testing shortage drew headlines, the FDA simplified the process. But then on March 20, it shut down efforts to rapidly make available at-home testing kits on the grounds that they were unvetted and could be fraudulent.
The first documented cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and South Korea were discovered around the same time. Yet, as of March 17, 1 out of 4,300 Americans had been tested. In South Korea, it was 1 out of 17. Had diagnostic tests for COVID-19 been available sooner, they would have helped public health officials isolate, quarantine, and provide medical supplies to areas of the U.S. affected by the virus.
How could this happen? This tragic testing delay has brought national attention to the FDA's longstanding, overly cautious approach to regulating American health care. To minimize risk, the agency has sacrificed speed—preventing doctors and patients from accessing the tools they need—until it's too late.
The agency's risk reduction over speed of approval goes back to the 1960s, when a sleeping pill called thalidomide marketed to pregnant women for nausea caused babies to die in utero or to be born with serious birth defects. The crisis was mostly contained to Europe because concerned FDA regulators had kept the untested drug out of the U.S.
In 1962, President Kennedy signed a landmark bill increasing the agency's oversight powers. It resulted in a culture of extreme caution that led to long approval times for experimental drugs and devices, keeping potentially life-saving tools out of the hands of patients.
The beginning of the movement to relax those rules, and rethink the tradeoff between risk and speed in the FDA approval process, began during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Gay rights activists were outraged that the FDA wouldn't quickly approve more experimental drugs like AZT, which blocks HIV's replication, or thalidomide, which could be used to treat some of the symptoms of AIDS.
After lobbying and protests, including the 1988 shutdown of the FDA building, the administration slowly began to loosen its rules, leading to the approval of highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART in 1996. Because of HAART, contracting HIV wasn't a death sentence anymore.
Gay rights activism during the 1980s and 1990s created a framework for patient advocacy for people with life-threatening illnesses, leading to the Right to Try movement, which has allowed terminally ill patients to access experimental drugs and devices that are still undergoing FDA testing.
The movement pushed the agency to streamline its own compassionate use program to help the same kinds of patients.
But the COVID-19 testing debacle underscores the limits of those reforms. Once a full investigation comes out about the agency's failures, perhaps it will finally bring fundamental reform, at last giving Americans rapid access to potentially life-saving tools.
Produced and edited by Paul Detrick.
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]]>School choice has proven consistently popular among one very dependable constituency: parents. And unpopular among another: unionized teachers. The rapid spread of school choice over the past 20 years has triggered an increasingly fierce union pushback, setting up an inevitable clash.
Enter an insidious yet helpfully descriptive new term in policymaking: "controlled choice." Yes, parents still get to "choose" their desired schools, but public education bureaucrats get to "control" the final outcome. And lately, from New York to San Francisco, Charlotte to Polk County, the main criteria that matters is not student performance, but race.
"New York City Schools Got A Little Less Segregated This Week," my local City Councilman in Brooklyn, Brad Lander, wrote at the beginning of this school year. "The Winner Is Everyone." Well, about that.
In 2007, the Supreme Court barred school districts from assigning students to schools based on race. So instead they use income as the primary determinant, and characterize the resulting admissions changes as "desegregation." The goal is to have poorer kids, homeless kids, and English-language learners spread evenly among schools, while crossing fingers that parents won't bolt and all schools will improve.
When this system was tried in my kids' Brooklyn school district, it ended up being hellishly complicated. The team that designed New York City's school-picking algorithm literally won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Fun fact: One of those designers didn't like where the system placed his kid so he opted out and chose a charter. And I don't blame him!
The good news this year is that some kids who had never even considered some of the high-performing schools both applied and were admitted in higher numbers. School choice for the win!
But turns out parents don't much enjoy being controlled. One-size-fits-all schemes may look good on paper to progressives, but when applied to their own special snowflakes, suddenly lefty parents start sounding as skeptical of central planning as F.A. Hayek, or at least quietly eyeing the exits. After more than a half-decade of increasing enrollment, my district's 6th grade class shrunk by a whopping 7 percent this year.
What happens in Brooklyn, alas, doesn't stay in Brooklyn. The same policy process is underway in Queens, and parents are already revolting. The New York City school chancellor is not winning many new converts to these changes with his habit of calling skeptical parents "racist." Meanwhile the city is considering a mandate that would require every traditional public school have roughly the same racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic makeup within 10 years. Good luck with that.
Parents of means can always take the expensive options of private school or physically moving to a new district. But the main off-ramp for the non-rich has been New York's extensive charter school system. Now just guess what kind of schools New York politicians are placing an artificial cap on?
So how has "controlled choice" worked out in the world? The Cato Institute's David J. Armor looked at a half-dozen controlled choice districts and found that enrollment went down, richer families fled, and schools didn't even end up more integrated!
So a friendly reminder here from the People's Republic of Brooklyn: "Controlled choice" is an oxymoron. Top-down systems look bad from the bottom up. Choking off supply, then browbeating demand, is no way to run a service. New York and other cities would be better off allowing more competitors to provide public education, and more choice to meet the idiosyncratic needs of a challenging, diverse, and high-achieving city.
Written by Matt Welch. Edited by Paul Detrick. Shot by Jim Epstein.
"Beatles Unite" by Rachel K Collier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Reason is celebrating National School Choice Week. This story is part of a series that will be published over the course of the week highlighting different K-12 education options available to children and families.
The post Bureaucrats Are Trying to 'Control' School Choice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Los Angeles rapper Drakeo the Ruler's violent but clever lyrics about life in South Los Angeles have captured the attention of millions on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Spotify. The Washington Post called his 2017 album "Cold Devil" among "the most mesmerizing and intimate rap albums to ever float out of L.A," and the Los Angeles Times said Drakeo the Ruler was on his way to joining the city's rap elite, along with Snoop Dogg, N.W.A., and Dr. Dre.
Then Drakeo the Ruler, whose real name is Darrell Caldwell, was arrested for the murder of 24-year-old Davion Gregory in 2018. At his July 2019 trial, prosecutors used his lyrics and music videos as evidence of his guilt.
Prosecutors alleged Caldwell was a part of a botched gang plot to kill a rap rival at a party he attended in December 2016. They accused him of then boasting of his crimes in his lyrics and videos. Caldwell pleaded not guilty, maintaining that the group prosecutors alleged was a "gang" was actually his rap crew, Stinc Team.
The jury in Caldwell's trial rejected the prosecution's theory, convicting him on one count of illegal gun possession. But the jury couldn't come to a decision on the charges of criminal gang conspiracy and shooting from a vehicle, so prosecutors opted to retry Caldwell. If convicted, he could face 25 years to life.
Erik Nielson, a professor at the University of Richmond, suspects that Caldwell's lyrics and music videos will be used again in court. Nielson is the co-author, along with law professor Andrea Dennis, of Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, which chronicles the growing use of rap lyrics and videos by prosecutors in criminal proceedings.
"I think many people find it difficult to imagine that these young men are doing something complex, sophisticated that could be considered literary, artistic," Nielson told Reason. "It's much easier to say, 'Oh, they're just rapping about their lives.'"
Nielson says that when their music is used against them, rappers aren't getting a fair shake. Juries generally don't possess a deep understanding of rap's history, use of figurative language, hyperbole, and wordplay. Since the 1990s, however, prosecutors have found that using rap lyrics as evidence can be an effective way of securing convictions. The strategy caught on with the rise of social media, as more amateur rappers shared their work online.
Nielson's legal testimony and writings about the misuse of rap in criminal proceedings have brought more attention to the issue. In March 2019, he partnered with Grammy Award-winning rapper Killer Mike in filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of a Pittsburgh rapper named Jamal Knox, who was sent to prison for making terroristic threats to police officers in a song. The case would have answered the question of whether Knox's lyrics constituted a true threat, or a threat that falls outside of First Amendment protection. The high court declined to hear the case and Knox, having served his time, still has a terroristic threat conviction on his record.
Caldwell's trial is expected to begin in March. He's tweeting from jail under the handle @IamMRMOSELY.
Produced by Paul Detrick. Shot by Meredith Bragg and Regan Taylor.
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The post Rapper Drakeo the Ruler Was Accused of Murder. Prosecutors Used His Music as Proof of His Guilt. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Television personalities and politicians, from Tucker Carlson to Nancy Pelosi, are calling for changes to the law that has protected the internet since the '90s. But they don't seem to have a clue about what it actually says, or whom it really protects.
Section 230 is a portion of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. It has made the internet as we know it possible by establishing that tech companies are not responsible for what their users post on their apps, websites, and devices. Section 230 allows for the free exchange of ideas on the internet—and it may be just as important to online free speech as the First Amendment.
Section 230's most important sentence reads as follows:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Critics have come up with creative ways of distorting what the law says. Here are four myths to watch out for:
Myth 1: Tech Companies Must Be Neutral
"Neutrality" is not a condition of the law. Section 230 was designed in part so that internet companies could discriminate by filtering out content that's illegal, indecent, or otherwise objectionable. Before Section 230, online companies feared that any moderation would make them legally liable for user content. Section 230 explicitly says that's not the case—"good faith" and "voluntary" attempts to filter out unwanted posts and users are OK.
Without Section 230, it would be hard for companies to avoid lawsuits and criminal charges without either becoming cesspools of totally unmoderated speech or banning user-generated speech entirely.
Myth 2: Section 230 Makes a Distinction Between Platform and Publisher
There is no legal distinction in Section 230 between a "publisher" and a "platform." The word "platform" doesn't even appear. What matters for legal purposes is who is responsible for creating particular web content.
Judgment calls about user speech—however poorly executed, and whatever ideological biases are apparent—just don't affect whether a company is broadly protected by Section 230 or not.
Myth 3: Section 230 Shields Big Tech From Legal Liability
People like to pretend 230 created a legal "loophole," but the congress that passed Section 230 back in 1996 was explicit: Section 230 would not apply when it comes to federal criminal laws or intellectual property law. That means copyright violators and serious criminals do not get a free pass because of Section 230.
What the law does provide is limited protection from criminal charges brought by state or local law authorities and some immunity from getting sued in civil court.
This immunity is lost if a company:
Section 230 is meant to leave room for holding online operators accountable for their own sins but not for those of their customers.
Myth 4: Section 230 Is Only for Large Tech Companies
Section 230 doesn't only benefit companies. As attorney Jeff Kosseff, author of The 26 Words That Created the Internet, puts it: "There also are significant free speech benefits to the public."
Section 230 shields not just the providers of digital services from litigation but the users of these services, too. Without it, anyone could find themselves liable for retweeting, reblogging, or posting links to content that is later found to break the law.
Yet for all the protections it provides to readers, writers, academics, shitposters, entrepreneurs, activists, and amateur political pundits of every persuasion, Section 230 has somehow become a political pariah.
The political class wants everyone to believe that the way the U.S. has policed the internet for the past quarter-century has actually been lax, immoral, and dangerous.
Don't believe them. The future of free speech—and a lot more—may depend on preserving Section 230.
Written by Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Edited by Paul Detrick.
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The post Politicians Want to Destroy Section 230, the Internet's First Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One hundred thousand to 300,000 underage people are sex trafficked every year in the United States.
The anti-child sex-trafficking movement has cited that statistic repeatedly. It was used to build a case against Backpage.com, the online classified site that's now the focus of a criminal trial. In 2011, Ashton Kutcher recited the claim several times, including on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight in 2011.
The number sounded fishy to Backpage.com's former co-owner Michael Lacey. Reporters at The Village Voice, which Lacey also co-owned, traced it back to a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study by Richard J. Estes and Neil Weiner. That paper estimated that there were 100,000 to 300,000 children deemed at risk for sexual exploitation in the US, Canada, and Mexico—not just the United States.
The Voice also found out that the study's methodology was flawed because its figures were based on guesses at who might end up a victim of sex trafficking, instead of actual cases. Furthermore, the data was more than 12 years out of date by the time Kutcher and others were citing it. The Voice published its findings in a cover story called, "Real Men Get Their Facts Straight."
The Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire told researchers and journalists in 2008 not to cite the study and its lead author, Estes, told the Washington Post that "clearly, a new, more current study is needed for research."
The 100,000 to 300,000 number still appears in online stories and newspaper op-eds and it's often attributed to outdated government publications.
The video above is an excerpt from Reason's documentary "The War on Backpage.com Is a War on Sex Workers." Watch the complete film.
Darkest Child A by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100783
Artist: http://incompetech.com/
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The post Ashton Kutcher Helped Promote a Bogus Sex Trafficking Claim. Will We Ever Shake It? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Michigan Congressman Justin Amash announced he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent, he didn't just say goodbye to the GOP—he opened up a whole new set of possibilities in American politics.
In choosing principle over party, the 39-year-old son of a Palestinian refugee has become the spokesman for all Americans who believe in limited government. Since taking office in 2011, Amash has been an outspoken critic of out-of-control government spending, state surveillance, and unauthorized wars. He believes that President Donald Trump engaged in impeachable behavior, but he's primarily motivated by the belief that Congress is no longer doing its job of writing laws that the Executive branch implements.
"The founders envisioned Congress as a deliberative body in which outcomes are discovered," Amash wrote in The Washington Post. "We are fast approaching the point, however, where Congress exists as little more than a formality to legitimize outcomes dictated by the president, the speaker of the House, and the Senate majority leader."
Amash doesn't believe the system can be reformed from within, telling CNN's Jake Tapper:
"I don't think there's anyone in there who can change the system…. It's pretty rigid. It's top-down. It comes down from leadership to the bottom. And over the years it's gotten more rigid. It's more difficult now to change the process than it was a few years ago."
This is something Amash has been consistent on for his entire time in Congress. He's called out Nancy Pelosi for strait-jacketing the way legislation is introduced, debated, and voted on—a criticism he leveled against her Republican predecessors. In a 2018 interview with Reason, he lodged this complaint against then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R–Wis.):
The speaker has not been protecting the institution. You need a speaker in there who is an institutionalist, who cares about the institution first, who is not a partisan…. Let Republicans and Democrats and others offer their amendments, and let's have votes on all sorts of things, substantive things, not just post offices like they do now.
Modern politics is "trapped in a partisan death spiral," says Amash. But there is a way out if Congress will actually do its job and if the House and Senate become less fixated on partisan advantage. "What you have right now are two parties that are relatively small and weak, and, actually the reason they are so partisan right now is because they are small and weak," he told Reason. "The future I see is one where there are no strong parties and more independent candidates. We don't really need the parties anymore."
Amash says he will run for Congress as an independent and is confident that he can retain his seat. But he also hasn't ruled out running for president, possibly as a Libertarian.
Whether that happens, Justin Amash has already stirred things up by doing what he believes in rather than what is convenient for partisan purposes. For that alone, he deserves our attention—and commands our respect.
Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Paul Detrick.
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Assembling by Asher Fulero is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Asher Fulero
The post Justin Amash Left the GOP—Opening a New Set of Possibilities in American Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On the morning of April 6, 2018, the FBI arrested Michael Lacey and James Larkin and seized Backpage.com, the website they created in 2004, on allegations that it was a platform for underage sex trafficking. Lacey and Larkin were later charged with money laundering, conspiracy, and facilitating prostitution. The two men have maintained their innocence and are now confined to Maricopa County, Arizona, via ankle monitors. Their trial is scheduled for 2020.
Veteran newspaper publishers, Lacey and Larkin see their arrest and prosecution as an assault on the First Amendment. In the early 1970s, they built an alt-weekly empire specializing in muckraking journalism. In the process, they made enemies of powerful figures in Arizona politics, including John McCain, his wife, Cindy, and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
After the internet and Craigslist gutted their business model, Lacey and Larkin launched Backpage.com, an online version of the classified sections of their print newspapers. Illegal activity was never allowed on Backpage, but sex workers advertised their services via innuendo. Connecting with clients online turned out to be considerably safer than walking the streets or working for a pimp. The internet empowered sex workers.
Lacey and Larkin were able to fend off legal challenges thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which said that website platforms aren't responsible for third party content. As sex work became conflated with sex trafficking, that defense was eroded.
Lost in the panic was Lacey and Larkin's behind-the-scenes collaboration with law enforcement in responding to subpoenas and even training vice officers on how to use the site to catch traffickers. Backpage's Carl Ferrer even received a certificate from then-FBI Chief Robert Mueller for his outstanding cooperation helping with sex trafficking investigations.
This is the story of the rise and fall of a newspaper empire, and how a new moral crusade is endangering sex workers, shielding traffickers, empowering pimps, and undermining free speech online.
Written, shot, produced, edited, graphics, and narrated by Paul Detrick. Additional camera by Todd Krainin, Zach Weissmuller, Meredith Bragg, Alexis Garcia, Mark McDaniel, and Justin Monticello.
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Artist: Jeremy Blake
Dreams Become Real by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Timelapsed Tides by Asher Fulero is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Asher Fulero
A Stranger Thing by Bruno E. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Bruno E.
Under Cover by Wayne Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Wayne Jones
Fresno Alley by Josh Lippi & The Overtimers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Josh Lippi & The Overtimers
Bellissimo by Doug Maxwell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Doug Maxwell
Darkest Child A by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Darkest Child by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Dark Matter by Chasms is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Chasms
Feather Waltz by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Dreaming Blue by Sextile is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Sextile
Their Story, Them Seeing by Puddle of Infinity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: Puddle of Infinity
The post The War on Backpage.com Is a War on Sex Workers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Since World War II, the U.S. military has been sending teams of soldiers onto the battlefield with film and photography gear to document the action. These so-called Combat Camera teams often capture the only depictions of major military operations, and their work helps shape public perceptions.
They've been called propagandists, guilty of sanitizing the realities on the ground. In 2003, for example, when army soldier Jessica Lynch was captured by Iraqi forces, it was a Combat Camera team that captured her rescue by U.S. Special Operations. The Pentagon was later accused of dramatizing details of the rescue to lift waning public support for the war.
In 2008, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate named Miles Lagoze signed up for the Marines and became a Combat Camera videographer for his unit in Afghanistan. After his deployment in 2011, Lagoze went rogue, capturing footage that undermined official messaging, including scenes of Marines smoking hash and joking about death.
After discharging from the Marines, Lagoze compiled that footage into Combat Obscura, a new feature-length documentary that aims to show the real story of what's happening on the ground in Afghanistan.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Shot by Jim Epstein. Edited by Paul Detrick.
The post This Marine Videographer Went Rogue To Show the Brutal Reality of War appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former Gov. Jerry Brown was a steadfast supporter of the California's bullet-train boondoggle despite cost overruns, lawsuits, and a lack of private support. But in his first State of the State Address, current Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he would scale back the project.
"He's spit in Jerry Brown's eye," says Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University.
Gov. Newsom says he'll push forward with one portion of the high-speed rail line—the stretch running from Bakersfield to Merced, or span of about 175 miles. But neither city is a big job center, and it's not a heavily traveled route. "This is the ultimate train to nowhere," says Kotkin.
He says that backers of the Green New Deal, a plan that would crisscross the country with new bullet trains, should take notice. "The real battle in the Democratic Party is between reality and fantasy. And this was a big win for reality," says Kotkin.
"Is any other state going to be as stupid as we are?"
Produced by Paul Detrick.
Photo of Gavin Newsom; Credit: Mike Blake/REUTERS/Newscom
Photos of Jerry Brown in legislature; Credit: Hector Amezcua/MCT/Newscom
Photo of Jerry Brown; Credit: Fred Greaves/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of Joel Kotkin; Credit: Nick Agro/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Credit: G. Ronald Lopez/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of trains; Credit: Chapman University urban studies fellow Joel Kotkin says Governor Gavin Newsom's scaling back of a high-speed rail project in California is a shot across the bow for the Green New Deal, which hopes to use high-speed trains to combat the effects of climate change.
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Former Gov. Jerry Brown was a steadfast supporter of the California's bullet-train boondoggle despite cost overruns, lawsuits, and a lack of private support. But in his first State of the State Address, current Gov. Gavin Newsom annoucned that he would scale back the project.
"He's spit in Jerry Brown's eye," says Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University.
Gov. Newsom says he'll push forward with one portion of the high-speed rail line—the stretch running from Bakersfield to Merced, or span of about 175 miles. But neither city is a big job center, and it's not a heavily traveled route. "This is the ultimate train to nowhere," says Kotkin.
He says that backers of the Green New Deal, a plan that would criscross the country with new bullet trains, should take notice. "The real battle in the Democratic Party is between reality and fantasy. And this was a big win for reality," says Kotkin.
"Is any other state going to be as stupid as we are?"
Produced by Paul Detrick.
Photo of Gavin Newsom; Credit: Mike Blake/REUTERS/Newscom
Photos of Jerry Brown in legislature; Credit: Hector Amezcua/MCT/Newscom
Photo of Jerry Brown; Credit: Fred Greaves/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of Joel Kotkin; Credit: Nick Agro/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Credit: G. Ronald Lopez/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Trains; Credit: Imagine China/Newscom
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The post California's High-Speed Rail Disaster Is a 'Shot Across the Bow for the Green New Deal' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You may have already seen season one of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel after ordering books, paper towels, or whatever you buy on Amazon Prime. The series took home eight Emmy awards in 2018—including the prize for "outstanding comedy series"—and critics have applauded the series for its portrayal of a woman in a man's world.
But just as important is the portrayal of a newborn New York counterculture that didn't want anything to do with the state. These people just wanted to be left the fuck alone.
Midge Maisel is a fictional late-1950s Upper West Side New York housewife, who discovers after her husband leaves her that she has a knack for stand-up comedy. The domestic life she thought she wanted goes up in smoke. With nowhere to go, she stumbles onto an East Village comedy club stage and in a self-deprecating manner tells the audience exactly how she feels. The night ends with Maisel flashing her breasts to the audience and getting arrest for indecent exposure. En route to jail, she runs into Lenny Bruce, a real comedian of the era who was routinely arrested for telling allegedly obscene jokes onstage. Bruce just wanted to pursue cutting-edge comedy for an audience that wanted to hear it. Maisel is cut from the same cloth.
As Maisel is arrested, the comedy club erupts in support. It's indicative of a time when Village residents were feeling the encroachment of the state all around them. In one episode, Maisel encounters a protest against the building of the Lower Manhattan Expressway—a real project spearheaded by Robert Moses—slated to slice through middle of Washington Square Park. The rally is lead by Jane Jacobs, the real-life activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Jacobs thought central planners shouldn't get to decide what a city should be, but rather individuals should be left to make the choices that determine how a community grows and functions. (Reason on Jacobs.)
Perhaps the most individualistic theme of the show is that Maisel doesn't even fall into the second-wave feminist category that history books associate with her time. Her brand of feminism is less about being part of a movement and more about personal choice. She wants to skip between her proper Upper-West-Side life and the loose, pot-smoking world of a downtown comedy club whenever she sees fit.
Maisel is building her own world. And that includes pearls, bright red lipstick, and saying fuck a lot. And it's pretty fucked up to send in the cops for just that.
The second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel premieres December 5 on Amazon Prime.
Produced by Paul Detrick. Shot by Meredith Bragg and Austin Bragg.
Photos of Lenny Bruce; Credit: LFI/Photoshot/Newscom
Photos of Jane Jacobs in home; Credit: Ron Bull/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of Jane Jacobs in front of house; Credit: Frank Lennon/ZUMA Press/Newscom
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The post In <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</em>, Everyone Just Wants to Be Left the Fuck Alone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the 1980s and '90s, novelist Bret Easton Ellis captured more fully than anyone the excitement and ennui of a wealthy and smug America that was stumbling without knowing it into a century filled with terror, disruption, and generalized hostility. In the book and movie versions of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, Ellis dissected what happens to a society in which depth of feeling is synonymous with failure to thrive. In this century, Ellis is back in his hometown of Los Angeles writing and producing movies like The Canyons with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen, whose shambled personal lives might as well have been scripted by Ellis in one of his most darkly comic moments.
He's also putting out one of the most engaging and insightful podcasts available on Patreon, in which he talks with guests like Kanye West, Rose McGowan, and veteran writer/director Walter Hill about the ways the entertainment industry is built on an unstable foundation of economic, sexual, and political hypocrisy.
Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ellis about the ways Hollywood is failing to come to terms with ever-changing methods of production and distribution, what Ellis sees as the excesses of the #MeToo movement, our rapidly changing and failing public discourse, and the enduring interest and relevance of his work in 2018.
Produced and edited by Paul Detrick. Shot by Detrick and Zach Weissmuller.
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"Shibuya" by Bad Snacks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary_download?vid=bf4634fcab6e0d97
Photos of Bret Easton Ellis, Credit: Marechal Aurore/ABACA/Newscom
Photo of James Deen, Credit: David Tonnessen, PacificCoastNews/Newscom
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The post Bret Easton Ellis on <em>American Psycho</em>, Hollywood Hypocrisy, and the Excesses of #MeToo appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"When we buy into this narrative that free speech is a conservative value and censorship is a liberal value, we basically invite this chasm where the First Amendment and free speech values steadily get less and less support," says attorney Ken White, who's the proprietor of the legal blog Popehat, the host of the Make No Law podcast, and a contributing editor at Reason. "Saying that the First Amendment is conservative is historically completely illiterate. It's [protected] mostly progressives from being suppressed through most of the twentieth century."
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with White, who spends his days as a criminal defense attorney at Brown White & Osborn in Los Angeles. They talked about Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, the dismissal of director James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy series, what limits should be put on employee speech inside and outside the workplace, and his libertarian views on law and society.
Government is the "giant, vicious dog you bring in to protect you from robbers," says White, and it "traditionally ends up protecting the interests of the moneyed, the connected, and the powerful."
Produced by Paul Detrick. Edited by Lorenz Lo. Graphics by Austin Bragg.
"Massive" by Podington Bear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Driving/Massive
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The post <em>Popehat</em>'s Ken White: 'Free Speech Is in Just as Much Danger from Conservatives' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The late Jonathan Gold wrote about food in Southern California with an intimacy that brought readers closer to the people that made it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic visited high-end brick-and-mortar restaurants as well as low-end strip malls and food trucks in search of good food wherever he found it. Gold died of pancreatic cancer last month, but he still influences writers like Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.
Arellano sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about Gold's legacy, political correctness in cuisine, and why Donald Trump's love of taco salad gives him hope in the midst of all of the president's anti-Mexican rhetoric. The interview took place at Burritos La Palma, named by Gold as home to one of the five best L.A. burritos.
Produced and edited by Paul Detrick. Shot by Detrick, Zach Weissmuller, and Lorenz Lo.
Photos of Jonathan Gold, Credit: Patrick Fallon/ZUMA Press/Newscom
"Hang for Days" by Silent Partner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music
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The post Cultural Appropriation Tastes Damn Good: How Immigrants, Commerce, and Fusion Keep Food Delicious appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congress is "given a pile of papers, sometimes a couple thousands pages long, a few hours before the expiration of a spending deadline," says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). "When there's no opportunity for debate, for discussion, for amendment, for individual members to improve [legislation], you've effectively disenfranchised almost 300 million Americans."
Since toppling longtime incumbent Bob Bennett in a 2010 primary and then riding the Tea Party wave to become the junior senator from Utah, Lee has been one of the most careful and liberty-friendly legal minds in public office.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he'll participate in the upcoming confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. But he was almost in the hot seat himself: Lee was one of the seven finalists Trump considered to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Lee talked with Reason about the Supreme Court selection process, Kavanaugh's Fourth Amendment views, and the senator's longstanding goal to get a sentencing reform bill on President Trump's desk.
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Shot by Paul Detrick and Alexis Garcia. Edited by Detrick.
Photos of Sen. Mike Lee, Credit: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom
Photo of Sen. Mike Lee walking, Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom
Armadillo by Silent Partner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary_download?vid=cfa8d2f35697f58e&f=m
The post Sen. Mike Lee on Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's Tariffs, and Congressional Dysfunction appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Eric Lundgren, an e-waste entrepreneur who built the first electronic hybrid recycling center in the U.S., will begin a 15-month prison sentence this month after a six-year legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2012, Lundgren plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and criminal copyright infringement for copying and selling CDs for restoring the Windows operating system on broken PCs—CDs that Microsoft gives away for free.
So why did Lundgren's crime result in a jail sentence? The answer cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own. Repair advocates say that in their quest to protect their intellectual property, manufacturers are trampling on our First Amendment rights.
The Rise of Independent Repair Shops
To better understand why Lundgren posed a major threat to the tech industry, consider the third party repair shops that have popped up all over the country, allowing consumers to get their devices fixed faster and cheaper. Repair.org, a trade association representing independent repair workers, estimates that over 3 million repair and reuse professionals operate in the U.S.
iFixit is one example of a thriving independent repair organization. Kyle Wiens, who co-founded the online community in 2003 from his dorm room in San Luis Obispo, Calif., has become a passionate advocate for consumer repair rights.
"I like to say if you can't fix it you don't really own it," says Wiens. "There was this dark period in the '80s and '90s where we had all these new gizmos that were coming out and nobody knew how to fix them. Now that we have the internet, all this information can get shared online."
According to Inc., iFixit has delivered 30 percent growth year over year since its launch 15 years ago. The company did more than $21 million in sales of tools and repair kits in 2016 and has approximately 10 million monthly visitors to its site. iFixit relies on its community of over 50,000 contributors, who offer repair tips that comprise a growing library of open source manuals.
The company is best known for its teardowns of popular tech merchandise like the iPhone. Wiens was one of the first in the world to purchase an iPhone X and take it apart so he could give customers practical advice on how to fix the device.
Tech companies have responded by integrating special screws and adhesives that aren't available from third-party sellers. And for a period of time Apple was disabling iPhone 6s when the company detected work had been done at independent repair shops. The company was later served with a class action lawsuit and reimbursed thousands of affected consumers.
But none of these tactics have slowed the growth of independent repair industry. So tech companies have increasingly turned to a provision in U.S. copyright law, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that makes it illegal to break digital locks protecting copyrighted work. The law's intent was to protect creative content like movies, music, and software from being stolen and copied. With software overtaking hardware under the hood of our devices, companies are using copyright provisions to extend their control over a multitude of products.
Lundgren's Crime
Before Lundgren got in trouble with federal authorities, he managed an e-waste facility in Chatsworth, California that recycles about 40 million pounds of e-waste annually.
"Everybody in the whole town just knew me as the recycler," he says. "By 18, I was doing it for American Airlines, for Coca-Cola. It just blew up very fast." When Lundgren was 19 he moved to Shenzhen, a city in China's Guangdong Province that's known as "the Silicon Valley of hardware," and began learning more about e-waste and sourcing replacement parts for broken electronics.
In 2011, Lundgren was approached by a computer broker named Bob Wolff with the idea to duplicate Windows restore discs, which are commonly supplied by computer manufacturers so users can restore their Windows operating system if their computer malfunctions. The software is usually supplied for free and can only be used if the person already has purchased the license for the Windows operating system. Lundgren thought that by providing people with CDs, he could make it easier for consumers to fix their computers.
"My grandmother and my aunt—they don't know how to burn an ISO image or download something from the internet," says Lundgren. "But everybody knows how to put a repair tool inside of a computer, click enter, and let it do its thing."
The idea was that Lundgren would create the discs in China and Wolff would sell them to PC refurbishers in the U.S.
"When Lundgren took this restore CD to the duplicate shop in China, they didn't just duplicate the software on there," says Jake Swearingen, a tech reporter for New York magazine. "They duplicated everything about the CD. So that includes the labeling on it, the Dell logo, the Microsoft logo, everything about it."
In 2012, one shipment of CDs got flagged by U.S. customs. Wolff was approached by the feds and participated in a sting operation targeting Lundgren, which ultimately led to a federal raid on Lundgren's house in Florida.
After initially facing a 21-count indictment, Lundgren plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and criminal copyright infringement. In April a federal appeals court upheld Lundgren's conviction, sentencing him to 15 months in prison.
"Microsoft may be firm on the law but we can question if their motives are really about protecting the software," says Tom W. Bell, a law professor at Chapman University specializing in intellectual property and copyright.
"When copyright is criminalized, it's not just making a criminal out of this Lundgren fellow," says Bell. If you "sit down and examine what we do everyday," he says, we're all "violating copyright law."
Copyright Protections Grow
U.S. copyright protections have grown increasingly broad over the years, and sanctions against infringing parties have become more punitive.
Bell says this trend doesn't balance public and private interests.
Kit Walsh, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that defends free speech and civil liberties in the digital sphere, says the ubiquity of software has changed the meaning of copyright law.
"The list of products and technologies that are affected by this restriction is practically infinite because it's anything that has software embedded in it," says Walsh. "There's a lingering hook that the seller has in your property that they are arguing gives them really broad powers to dictate how you use that property going forward."
Walsh says these restrictions are having unintended consequences, in particular for security researchers and creatives who are prohibited from even looking at the code that controls our everyday appliances. She says this violates our First Amendment rights.
"Code is a form of speech," she says. "Courts have grappled with that because code also feels a lot like a tool…Even though we have case law that says if you publish instructions…even instructions that are dangerous to the reader, then that's still speech."
While EFF is challenging copyright protections in court, right to repair advocates are pushing for legislation at the state and federal level. There are at least 18 states considering fair repair bills. The legislation is modeled off the 2012 Automotive Right to Repair law in Massachusetts which led to a national agreement with the auto industry to allow independent repair shops to work on cars.
"What we want is competition in the marketplace," states Wiens. "We want the free market. The independent repair shops shouldn't have an advantage over the Apple store, they should just be able to compete on an equal footing."
"Who owns the products that you buy? You do," says Lundgren. "You need to be able to repair those and use those…If I have to go to prison and it's going to raise awareness, and it's going to spark a conversation, and people are gonna start looking into this, I'm happy to go."
Produced by Paul Detrick and Alexis Garcia. Narration by Garcia. Cameras by Detrick, Garcia, and Jim Epstein.
"A Stranger Thing" by Bruno E. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFqBejp9VY
"Air Hockey Saloon" by Chris Zabrinske is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/vendaface/
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"Neptunea" by Scanglobe is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scanglobe/Instrumental_1564/Neptunea Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scanglobe/
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The post Do You Have a Right To Repair Your Phone? The Fight Between Big Tech and Consumers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Why does a well-aged glass of smokey whiskey taste so good? It's all about the chemistry of sitting in a barrel for decades. "The polymer structures make the wood slowly fall apart," says Bryan Davis, a pioneering distiller who learned the science of liquor production by watching MIT classes on YouTube. "They shed all of these precursor chemicals that turn into different stuff that tastes really good." This time-consuming process is the reason distillers have to charge five figures for a top-shelf bottle.
Not anymore. Davis, cofounder of the Los Angeles–based Lost Spirits Distillery, has figured out a way to compress a 20-year aging process into about six days.
Davis created a reactor that mimics the natural aging process of booze left in a barrel. The result: bottles of spirits with the same chemical signature as those aged for the lifespan of a young adult. His products have won multiple awards, and the technology could transform the aged spirits market by bringing bottles that used to cost more than $1,000 within reach of the masses.
The liquor world has been forbidding to small distillers since the repeal of Prohibition. When Davis and Joanne Haruta (his significant other and business partner) arrived in Monterey, California, more than a decade ago, they wanted to get into the aged whiskey and rum market. First they needed to raise half a million dollars.
"We would just be literally sitting there going, 'OK, we'll sell our first bottle of booze when I'm 60," you know?'"
In search of short cuts, Davis decided to study the chemistry of a well-aged bottle of booze. He began by watching YouTube videos of MIT chemistry classes, pausing only to look up vocabulary words on Wikipedia.
"You can just sort of tunnel your way down the rabbit hole until all of a sudden one day you read a paper and go, 'Wow, I understood everything that said,'" he says.
By 2013, Davis had figured out how to force the chemical reaction called "esterification"—the main driving force behind barrel aging. But he couldn't come up with a natural way to break the polymer structures in a wooden barrel, which is what gives a well-aged bottle its taste. One day, while thinking about how he had to replace the sun-damaged wooden deck attached to his mobile home, he had an epiphany: By blasting wood with light, he could speed up the process of degrading wood.
Today Davis licenses his technology to other distillers, and his invention is the talk of the industry. An art major in college, Davis wants to bring an artistic sensibility back to liquor-making, pushing the limits of the form. He dreams of a future when liquor-store shelves are lined with bottles that customers don't recognize.
"I sort of view myself as that same antagonist to those canonistic systems," he says.
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"Marxist Arrow," by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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"Aourourou," by Blue Dot Sessions, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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"Frost Waltz (Alternate)," by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Photo Credits:
Photo of whiskey bottles, Credit: RICHARD B. LEVINE/Newscom
Photo of bourbon bottle, Credit: RICHARD B. LEVINE/Newscom
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The post 20-Year-Old Whiskey in 6 Days: Will This Self-Taught Chemist Upend the Liquor Industry? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The movement and struggle to win rights for corporations," says UCLA Law School Professor Adam Winkler, is "one of the least well-known yet most successful civil rights movements in American history."
An important chapter in that history came in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to keep corporations from spending money on political ads right before an election. Many liberal advocacy groups were outraged over Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Last year, U.S. Senators Tom Udall (D–N.M.) and Martin Heinrich (D–N.M.) introduced a constitutional amendment that would overturn the decision.
In a new book, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Winkler challenges the conventional wisdom about Citizens United. He complicates the narrative about America's founding, too.
Interview by Paul Detrick. Edited by Detrick. Shot by Zach Weismuller and Alexis Garcia.
"Aourourou," by Blue Dot Sessions, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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]]>"The movement and struggle to win rights for corporations," says UCLA Law School Professor Adam Winkler, is "one of the least well-known yet most successful civil rights movements in American history."
An important chapter in that history came in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to keep corporations from spending money on political ads right before an election. Many liberal advocacy groups were outraged over Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Last year, U.S. Senators Tom Udall (D–N.M.) and Martin Heinrich (D–N.M.) introduced a constitutional amendment that would overturn the decision.
In a new book, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Winkler challenges the conventional wisdom about Citizens United. He complicates the narrative about America's founding, too.
Interview by Paul Detrick. Edited by Detrick. Shot by Zach Weismuller and Alexis Garcia.
"Aourourou," by Blue Dot Sessions, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Artist: https://www.sessions.blue/
"Toothless Slope," by Blue Dot Sessions, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Photo of Supreme Court: credit, Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom
Photo of crowd outside Supreme Court: credit, Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom
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Photo of arrest: credit, Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom
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]]>Federal prosecutors have filed charges against 13 Russians who allegedly sought to "sow discord in the U.S. political system" through social media posts, ads, and videos falsely presented as the work of Americans. After the indictment was unveiled in February, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump's "admirers and detractors" both agree with him that "the Russians intended to sow chaos" and "have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." But Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum says a close look at the indictment tells a different story.
Here are "5 Reasons Not to Feed the Russian Troll Hysteria:"
1) Russian trolling was a drop in the bucket.
According to the indictment, Russian trolls associated with the so-called Internet Research Agency (IRA) in Saint Petersburg spent "thousands of U.S. dollars every month" on social media ads, which is a minuscule fraction of online ad revenue. Facebook alone reported advertising revenue of $9.16 billion in the second quarter of 2017. The Russians are said to be responsible for producing 43 hours of YouTube videos, but that doesn't seem like very much when you consider that 400 hours of content are uploaded to the site every minute.
2) Russian trolls were not very sophisticated.
Russian trolls supposedly had the Machiavellian know-how to infiltrate the American political system, but their social media posts don't look very sophisticated. The posts often featured broken English and puzzling topic choices. A post promoting a "buff" Bernie Sanders coloring book, for instance, noted that "the coloring is something that suits for all people." Another post showed Jesus and Satan in an arm wrestling match under this caption: "SATAN: IF I WIN CLINTON WINS! JESUS: NOT IF I CAN HELP IT!" The post generated very few clicks and shares.
3) Russian troll rallies apparently did not attract many participants.
The indictment makes much of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton rallies instigated by Russian trolls, but it does not say how many people participated. The New York Times reported that a Russian-organized rally in Texas opposing Shariah law attracted a dozen people. An anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho drew four people. Attendance at other rallies was similarly sparse.
4) Russian trolling probably didn't change anyone's mind.
Broken English aside, the social media posts were not qualitatively different from content created by American activists, and they seemed to be aimed mainly at reinforcing pre-existing beliefs and divisions. The Russians might have gotten a few Trump supporters to show up at anti-Clinton rallies, but that does not mean they had an impact on the election.
5) Russian troll hysteria depicts free speech as a kind of violence.
The Justice Department describes the messages posted by Russians pretending to be Americans as "information warfare." But while the posts may have been sophomoric, inaccurate, and illogical, that does not distinguish them from most of what passes for online political discussion among actual Americans. The integrity of civic discourse does not depend on verifying the citizenship of people who participate in it. It depends on the ability to weigh what they say, checking it against our own values and information from other sources. If voters cannot do that, maybe democracy is doomed. But if so, it's not the Russians' fault.
Produced and edited by Paul Detrick. Camera by Alex Manning.
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]]>"How can we optimize ourselves personally to live the happiest, healthiest, longest lives possible? What does that look like? What are ethical ways of doing that? What are unethical ways of doing that? Where are the slippery slopes?"
Those are the sorts of questions that Wired co-founder Jane Metcalfe is exploring at Neo.Life, an online magazine that both chronicles and informs "the early adopters of the Neobiological Revolution." Lushly illustrated and beautifully designed, recent articles include "I Study the Female Brain. Here's What 'The Female Brain' Gets Wrong", "Get Ready for Same-Sex Reproduction," and "Will a $5,000 Checkup Save Your Life?"
"The basis of Neo.Life," Metcalfe tells Reason's Nick Gillespie, "is that computer science and engineering thinking have invaded biology….How do we think about human life differently if we start thinking about 'code'?"
If you're interested in the pioneers, dreamers, and tinkerers who are trying not just to edit a few genes but to overhaul the entire human "operating system," cure their own cancer when doctors have given up, and bring back the wooly mammoth, Neo.Life is a must-read.
Photo of Craig Venter, Credit: K.C. Alfred/ZUMA Press/Newscom
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]]>Forty-two years after unbreakable encryption was first conceived, these tools are more widespread than ever before. One milestone came in 2016, when the world's largest messaging service—WhatsApp—announced it would offer default end-to-end encryption on all communications. In other words, the messages can be read only by the senders and recipients; even the platform provider can't access them.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are still reckoning with this new reality. For decades, they demanded that tech companies hand over private data on their users, sometimes without obtaining warrants. So companies like Apple changed their policies so individual users were the only ones holding the keys to their data.
This new era of consumer privacy led to a standoff in 2016, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) demanded access to an encrypted iPhone belonging to Sayed Farook, a deceased terrorist from San Bernardino, California. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, had killed 14 people at a holiday office party in December 2015.
The FBI wanted Apple to write software that would weaken the iPhone's built-in security. Apple refused, saying that such flawed software would jeopardize the security of its customers, who number in the hundreds of millions. Once a back door was created, the company claimed, the FBI could use it on similar phones—and it could be leaked to hackers or foreign enemies. "It is in our view the software equivalent of cancer," Apple CEO Tim Cook told ABC News.
Plenty of consumer data is still unencrypted and can be accessed by large tech companies. From Facebook to Gmail, many online platforms give law enforcement access to their users' private conversations. But the growing use of end-to-end encryption, by Apple in particular, represents a drastic shift.
It's the latest battle in the so-called Crypto Wars, a fight between technologists and the state that's been ongoing for decades.
In 1991, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) introduced an anti-crime bill that required providers and manufacturers of electronic communications to make it possible for the government to obtain the contents of voice, data, and other communications when authorized by law, essentially mandating that tech companies provide back doors for government snooping.
Programmer Phil Zimmerman decided to build a tool that would thwart Biden's efforts. He wrote the first attempt at an encryption program for the everyday user; he called it Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. It scrambled data to everyone except the sender and recipient. PGP was published online, and it spread everywhere.
In the early 1990s, America was getting its first taste of the world wide web, and encryption was making law enforcement agencies nervous. They viewed PGP and similar programs as munitions. In 1993, the Justice Department launched a criminal investigation of Zimmerman on the grounds that by publishing his software he had violated the Arms Export Control Act. To demonstrate that PGP was protected under the First Amendment, Zimmerman got MIT Press to print out its source code in a book and sell it abroad.
The Justice Department eventually dropped the case against Zimmerman, and the government slowly started coming to grips with the legal and technical challenges of regulating software.
At the same time, the National Security Agency (NSA) attempted to preempt stronger domestic encryption by offering its own alternative for telecommunications devices. The Clipper Chip was an encryption tool with a built-in way for the government to gain access to private information. It was the first back door—an intentional flaw in a security system.
The NSA tried to make the Clipper Chip an industry standard by taking advantage of the government's purchasing power. But privacy advocates fought back.
"This was really the first crypto war," says Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. It was "a fight it looked like the government might win until a computer scientist named Matt Blaze discovered certain flaws in the Clipper algorithm."
The Clipper Chip died an unmourned death, and the government once again seemed resigned to the new era of encrypted telecommunications. There was even a compromise of sorts between telecommunications companies and law enforcement, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. The trade-off was that telecommunications companies could still offer encryption but they had to preserve the ability to wiretap.
It seemed like technologists had won. But thanks to the Edward Snowden revelations, we now know that intelligence agencies weren't accepting defeat. Snowden's whistleblowing didn't just reveal massive government spying; it revealed how the NSA was targeting encryption.
The NSA corrupted a widely used software program called Dual_EC with malicious code. The program was used, mainly by big companies, to generate the long strings of numbers and letters that make up the private keys used to unlock encryption.
"Not a pure back door, not a 'push a button and decrypt it' attack, but they had what's called a short cut," says Sanchez. But use of the shortcut didn't last. Researchers who used Dual_EC quickly figured out the algorithm was compromised, and the NSA went back to the drawing board.
Intelligence agencies just couldn't beat the math worked into encryption software. As mathematical sophistication and increased speed of processors improved, so did the strength of encryption.
"The answer, when you know you can't break the encryption, is break the end point," says Sanchez.
The end point turned out to be the hardware people used to connect to the internet. The Snowden files showed the NSA was physically planting backdoor spyware in routers before they shipped overseas. Companies who made the routers displayed a fair amount of anger over the news, but unrest was already bubbling around the newly understood far-reaching surveillance state.
Companies such as Apple and Google reacted to the NSA's actions by strengthening encryption in their products. Yet as unbreakable encryption comes into increasingly widespread use, law enforcement agencies still act as if back doors are a viable option.
"The FBI supports information security. We support strong encryption," FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the International Conference on Cyber Security in January. "But information security programs need to be thoughtfully designed so they don't undermine the lawful tools that we need to keep this country safe."
"It's sort of too late to rebottle the genie," says Sanchez. "What would make more sense is to accept that encryption is a good thing, and it makes us more secure, and building vulnerabilities into it is probably going to impose more security harms than benefits it's going to create for law enforcement."
The government is losing the latest battle in the crypto wars, but there are new tools on the horizon, such as quantum computing, that could break many standard encryption algorithms and shift power back into the hands of the state.
But while the fight is never over, technologists have managed to stay one step ahead of the government, developing new tools and strategies that protect individual privacy from the overreaching surveillance state.
Written, produced, shot, edited and graphics by Paul Detrick. Additional cameras by Alex Manning and Todd Krainin.
Photo of WhatsApp phone, Credit: Fotoarena/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Photo of WhatsApp phone, Credit: Fotoarena/Newscom
Photo of San Bernardino crime scene, Credit: MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS/Newscom
Photos of Tim Cook, Credit: STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS/Newscom
Photos of Apple Protest, Credit: JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom
Photos of Apple Protest, Credit: LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of NSA, Credit: DADO RUVIC/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of NSA, Credit: Larry Downing/REUTERS/Newscom
Photo of Eric Schmidt, Credit: picture alliance / Mandoga Media/Newscom
Photo of Marissa Mayer, Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom
Photo of Mark Zuckerberg, Credit: DR5/David R.Rico/WENN/Newscom
Photos of Phil Zimmerman Photos, Credit: Phil Zimmerman
Photo of Clipper Chip, Credit: Matt Blaze
Photos of Christopher Wray, Credit: Chris Taggart/Fordham University
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]]>Are you sick of being warned about anything and everything when it comes to the holiday season?
Me too. That's why I'm ready to throw an icicle at a group called World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH). Every year since 1973, they've published a paranoid list of the "10 Worst Toys" at Christmastime.
These warnings may have been necessary back in 1973 when companies were still selling toy ovens that could smelt ore and chemistry sets that could actually blow things up.
In fact, the toy world was littered with bad ideas—from the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls with mechanical jaws that chewed everything—including chunks of hair from kids' heads—to lawn darts—sharp metal things you'd toss at your friends' toes that caused over six thousand injuries.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission eventually banned those items—and it's hard to disagree with them—but today's toys are so risk averse, so super safe, that there's almost nothing left to warn about. But still the warnings fall like cookie crumbs onto Santa's beard.
It is this zero tolerance for "risk" that WATCH and other consumer groups exploit every Christmas. Among its top 10 dangers this year are the popular fidget spinners.
Also on this year's list is the Wonder Woman Battle Action Sword, which, the WATCH team says, encourages young children "to bear arms"—as if you get a Wonder Woman toy and immediately deploy to Yemen. They also say that the "rigid plastic sword blade has the potential to cause facial or other impact injuries." Yeah…and so does a fork. In fact, so does a candy cane, if you suck it to a sharp point.
Even an innocent looking Disney-themed plush toy did not escape WATCH's nannying notice. The group warns that the toy could be dangerous due to "fabric hats and bows that can detach, posing a choking hazard."
That's a lot of coulds, especially considering the Consumer Product Safety Commission notes on its website that it has had ZERO reports of injuries.
The Toy Association, which is an industry trade group, says WATCH's dangerous toys list is "full of false claims that needlessly frighten parents and caregivers."
It's obvious that toys that explode and toys that are just plain dumb—a boomerang made out of razor blades—are bad. But if they only worked a little harder, I'll bet WATCH could stop kids from playing with toys. Any toys. Ever.
You want a really great gift for the kids? How about they wake up Christmas morning, unwrap the giant package under the tree to find their very own product liability lawyer? Wind him up and watch him sue all the other toys. Hours of fun!
And when the kids get bored, they lock him in the toy chest, and go play with a great toy. A stick.
Written by Lenore Skenazy. Produced by Alexis Garcia and Paul Detrick. Camera by Jim Epstein, Alex Manning, and Paul Detrick.
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]]>Peggy Fontenot has had a successful career as a Native American artist working in beading, silver jewelry and black-and-white photography. She's won numerous awards at art shows and has shown her work at top-tier museums.
Today her career is in jeopardy because of a 2016 state law that says only members of federally-recognized tribes can market their work as "Native American" or "Indian made." Fontenot is a part of the Patawomeck tribe, which is recognized only in the state of Virginia.
Now she's suing the state on the grounds that the law violates her First Amendment rights. "To call every state-recognized tribe fake and illegitimate is just broad sweeping and wrong," Fontenot told Reason.
Anastasia Boden of the non-profit Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing Fontenot, says the law is intended to restrict competition. She notes that State Rep. Chuck Hoskin (D), who sponsored the bill, has also served as the chief of staff for the federally-recongized Cherokee Nation. The group "certainly would have an interest in putting a law on the books that says that only federally recognized tribes can call themselves Native American," Boden says. (Rep. Hoskin declined our interview request.)
Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard law professor, says the Oklahoma law may have been poorly crafted, but was well-intentioned. She says fraud in the Native American art market is big problem.
Oklahoma isn't enforcing the law as the case is being deliberated, allowing Fontenot to continue marketing her work as she always has. A decision is expected by the end of the year.
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The post Should the Government Get to Define 'Native-American' Art? One Woman's Free Speech Fight. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Trump's move to raise "barriers to people, to goods, to services," says Gabriel Calzada Alvarez, executive president of Guatemala's Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM), "is a danger not just for Central America [but] for the U.S. and for the world." The great irony, Calzada says, is that the U.S. has benefited immensely from free trade and immigration and "now wants to raise barriers."
Calzada sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie at Freedom Fest 2017 to talk about the impact of trade restrictions on Latin America, the changing role of higher education, and how students are bringing capitalism to the region. UFM, a private, secular university in Guatemala City, teaches free market economics and emphasizes the importance of intellectual debate on campus.
"Being uncomfortable because of the ideas of others is one of the experiences you have to have," says Calzada.
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This is a rush transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: You run a university in Guatemala that was established in 1971, and it's rare there because it's a private university. What is the essential mission of higher education in the 21st century?
Gabriel Calzada: Well, I think in the 21st century, since you have basically all the content in your mobile device, universities have to move the focus from giving content–they have been doing this for many years–to creating experiences, interactions. We will see a shift from grades, from having focus in the grades, to have a focus in a portfolio of experiences that you can show. The universities that will survive are universities that will create safe space, but not safe space in the sense that we usually hear, that are places where you have the right not to be offended or bothered, but the safe places in the sense that you create a space where students can commit errors and can learn from those errors without the problems of these errors in real life.
Gillespie: In the United States, a lot of the discussion and discourse about higher education has to do with this encroachment of safe spaces, of political correctness, of speech codes, and the inability of faculty and students and outside speakers who come to enrich the environment are not allowed to speak freely. Is that also a problem in Guatemala, or does it take a different form there?
Calzada: Not at all. In Guatemala, students speak freely. We try to foster debate. We think that being uncomfortable because of the ideas of others is one of the experiences you have to have at the university.
Gillespie: You're opening a campus in Spain. How will that help fulfill the vision that you were talking about, about having a portfolio of experiences? What will be going on there?
Calzada: Going to a different culture is already a great experience, but fundamentally, going to a place where regulation has been going so far, so that the students can learn what are the results of big government. Then, of course, we want to offer the European public an opportunity to have a classical liberal, libertarian education that is currently very difficult in the European space. I think with the UFM experience, we can offer new programs that will be very original, very different from the type of programs that Spaniards and Europeans are used to.
Gillespie: Does it make sense to talk about a direction for Latin America, and is that direction going in the right way or the wrong way? I mean, there seem to be so many different things. There's your experiences in Guatemala. There are certain countries that are liberalizing. Then there are countries like Venezuela, which seems to really be in very-
Calzada: Collapsing.
Gillespie: … deep threat. Yeah. Then also in Brazil, as well as elsewhere, you see both good things and bad things happening at the same time. What is your sense? Is Latin America, which has gone through various phases of liberalization and then kind of retrenchment, how are things looking right now?
Calzada: I think right now things are looking pretty good. We are moving in the good direction. You can see this in Argentina. You can see this even in Ecuador. Things so far in the last few months seems to be better than they were a year ago, even if probably what we would have liked, this more radical change, didn't happen. I'm relatively optimistic because you see that in the civil society, more than in the governments, civil society is much more conscious of the need of creating associations to mobilize, in a way similar to what Tocqueville was talking about that was necessary to sustain our liberties. You see this in Ecuador. You see this in Chile. You see this in Argentina, in Bolivia. You see this everywhere. You see associations, organizations, many of them related to students.
You see movements in Guatemala, for example, last year. The new government decided to raise taxes. They were new in the government. They said, well, the solution, like always, is to raise taxes for the rich so we can solve the problems of the country, and suddenly you saw many students going into the streets, first, students, then professionals going to the streets, saying no, this cannot be the solution. Politicians always want to raise taxes. The solution is to look at the expenses of the government and make them more rational, reduce them, so balance the budget in that way.
Gillespie: What's the sense towards America under Donald Trump? He's been explicitly xenophobic towards Mexicans, for sure, but he seems to have a limited understanding or interest or engagement with most of Central America and South America, Latin America more generally. Is he seen as a good person, a bad person, a good president, a good friend, or is there a clear sense of how people think about him in Guatemala?
Calzada: To see a president that thinks that the U.S. has to raise their barriers, all kind of barriers, to people, to goods, to services, it's a danger not just for Central America; it's a danger for the U.S. and for the world. The country that grew for years and for centuries because of free trade and from receiving immigrants now wants to raise barriers to trade and to people.
Gillespie: Well, we will leave it there, and hopefully … I think we agree… hopefully, those barriers will only get to a couple inches high and-
Calzada: Hopefully.
Gillespie: … be easy to walk over. Thanks again.
Calzada: Thank you.
Gillespie: For Reason, I'm Nick Gillespie.
The post Students Are Bringing Capitalism to Latin America appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, can't stop talking about Medicare For All which he says will finally solve all of America's health insurance problems.
In fact, creating a national single-payer plan is a truly terrible idea that will likely bankrupt the country, drive down the rate of health-care innovation, AND not really improve health outcomes.
Established in the late 1960s, Medicare is the nation's health-insurance program for people 65 and over. It is a single-payer system—the government pays participating service providers–and it's also the single biggest driver of the national debt. The taxes levied to pay for the program don't come anywhere close to covering its costs and the number of beneficiaries is expected to grow massively over the coming decade. Payroll taxes and premiums paid by beneficiaries pay for less than half the program's costs, which are expected to double from $700 billion per year to almost $1.4 trillion.
Sanders has proposed a 7.5 percent payroll tax and a new 4 percent tax on income to pay for his plan, but it's not at all clear that such hefty new taxes would come close to covering its costs, which are unknown. This much we know: His home state of Vermont pulled the plug on a less generous universal plan after it became clear that an 11.5 percent payroll tax and a 9 percent income tax wouldn't cover costs.
For all the problems with the U.S. health care system, it sets the pace for innovation and new treatment options in a way that no single-payer system on the globe does. That's because innovators can expect to earn back the cost of developing new treatments in a way that's foreclosed by most single-payer systems, which inevitably come with all sorts of price controls that discourage new products and services *and* rationing that reduces access to the same.
Does having health insurance mean you'll be healthier? That's the implicit promise of Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All program—and Obamacare too. But surprisingly, the evidence for this is thinner than you might think. The two big studies on the link between having insurance and actual health—one conducted by the Rand Corporation and one by the state of Oregon—suggest that merely having insurance doesn't lead to better outcomes. Having insurance can relieve financial and emotional stress, but it's not exactly clear that it will leave you physically better off.
All of which makes the case against expanding Medicare to all. If single-payer couldn't even make it out of Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont, there's no reason to try it out on all of America.
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Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Paul Detrick. Graphics by Meredith Bragg.
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]]>Juggalos marched on Washington, D.C., September 16, to protest a gang label given to them by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2011. The fans of Insane Clown Posse (ICP) say the gang label has lead to Juggalos losing their jobs, getting harassed by police and even being used against them in child custody cases—All over liking a certain band's music.
ICP tried to sue the government to change the label but the case was thrown out of court. They decided their only option was to tell the world in a public way how they felt about their fans being labeled gang members.
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]]>"We have the right to listen to any kind of music we want without being labeled a gang," says Nellie Aldred, a Juggalo and mother of two. Aldred and family traveled from South Carolina to the D.C. area to participate in the Juggalo March on Washington. Juggalos are the fans of the Detroit horrorcore rap group Insane Clown Posse (ICP) and they are protesting a gang classification given to them by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2011.
Aldred says she and family were needlessly stopped by police over a hatchetman sticker on their car (The hatchetman is a symbol that identifies one as a Juggalo.) Further, more Juggalos say the gang label has lead to lost jobs and been used against them in child custody disputes.
"[The march] is our mark on history. It's showing the world who we are. We've been hiding under the streets for way too long and we are about to come up top and show everybody who we are," says Aldred.
"If the government can get away with this, then what the fuck happens to us next," said Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler), one of the members of ICP, to a crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
The march included testimonies from people who have had the gang label negatively applied to them as well as speeches from supporters like writer and Juggalo Nathan Rabin.
"There is no such thing as an ordinary Insane Clown Posse show. It's always a spectacle," says Rabin, author of You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me and 7 Days in Ohio. "The challenge was to show the world that Juggalos are good people. Juggalos are a law abiding people. Juggalos love each other and are a positive force for the community and I think that's been illustrated here."
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]]>The Juggalos aren't just ICP fans— they've built a cultural identity around the music, the rap duo, and what it represents. In turn, ICP has stood up for its followers as they've been harassed and profiled all over the country. Unwittingly, these two white rappers from Detroit have become some of the nation's most determined advocates for free expression.
"[If] Juggalos are being fucked with, we got to do something about it," says Violent J's partner Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler). "If that ties us into some First Amendment movement, whatever, we're First Amendment warriors. I don't know."
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]]>On a hot summer night in July, crowds of people gathered in a remote wooded area in front of a concert stage. Their faces were covered in clown makeup and their arms and legs painted with hatchetman tattoos.
By the end of the night, they'd all be covered in sticky, cheap soda.
This was the annual "Gathering of the Juggalos" in Oklahoma City, where thousands flock to see their favorite rap group, Insane Clown Posse (ICP).
The Juggalos aren't just ICP fans— they've built a cultural identity around the music, the rap duo, and what it represents. In turn, ICP has stood up for its followers as they've been harassed and profiled all over the country. Unwittingly, these two white rappers from Detroit have become some of the nation's most determined advocates for free expression.
On September 16, 2017, ICP will lead the Juggalos in a march on the National Mall in Washington D.C. They'll be protesting the FBI's decision to label the group as a "hybrid gang" back in 2011 in the agency's National Gang Threat Assessment. Since then, local police have used the report as guidance, resulting in rampant harassment and profiling of a group defined by its love for a music group.
ICP sued the FBI in 2014, but after three appeals, the case hasn't made it to trial. So now the group is heading to D.C.
"It's a publicity stunt," says ICP's Violent J (Joseph Bruce). "We want to say to everybody, 'we're not cool with that.'"
"[If] Juggalos are being fucked with, we got to do something about it," says Violent J's partner Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler). "If that ties us into some First Amendment movement, whatever, we're First Amendment warriors. I don't know."
In the early 1990s, the rap duo from Detroit started to notice that its unique brand of scary horror rap was attracting poor, scrubby, white kids also from the Motor City.
"We represent people who weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouth but instead with a rusty fork," said Violent J in a 1995 interview.
So Violent J. and Shaggy 2 Dope started painting their faces like clowns as a point of pride. If society was going to treat the poor like carnival freaks, they would play along. The duo also started bringing bottles of the cheap soda pop Faygo on stage to spray the audience during their sets.
In 1997, ICP had its album pulled from stores by Hollywood Records, a subsidiary of Disney. A few years later the duo had a disappointing experience at Woodstock '99, a corporate reboot of Woodstock '69. So ICP decided to chart its own path away from the mainstream.
In 2000, the group held the first "Gathering of the Juggalos," which was around when their fans started to draw negative attention.
"They're the poor white people that everybody has no problem mocking," says pop culture writer Nathan Rabin, who's the author of the Juggalo-centric books You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me and 7 Days in Ohio.
But ICP used its pop-culture-punchline status to bolster its fan base. Getting demonized by society brought the community closer. Juggalos often refer to each other as family.
"We feel like whatever the magic is that's bringing us all together, whatever the magic is they're hearing, is the same magic we're feeling," says Violent J."This shit saved our lives too."
"It's very validating and exciting to be around people who love you just because of what you do and what you like," says Rabin.
Then came the FBI's gang classification, which ICP initially took lightly.
"When we first heard about it, you know, we were just like, 'yo, that's pretty cool'" says Shaggy 2 Dope.
"Like out of all the nations top gangs, they actually think we're a gang. We must really be out there," says Violent J. "We had no idea of any repercussions that were going to happen because of that."
Then Juggalos started getting harassed by the police for having hatchetman stickers on their cars, and identification with the group started coming up in child custody cases.
"I didn't have a problem with this country. Then all of a sudden they technically made it illegal to be a Juggalo," says Violent J. "It's like they took that one thing away that made me not have a problem with the government."
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]]>Bill Petrocelli doesn't look like someone routinely engaged in illegal activity by the jovial smile on his face as he greets customers around the San Francisco location of Book Passage, a small chain of stores that he co-owns in the Bay Area. But since the beginning of 2017 he's been routinely violating California's newly expanded law regulating autographed items. Small bookstore owners like Petrocelli now must adhere to a laundry list of requirements that threaten their livelihoods and restrict First Amendment rights.
"This law—it's like dropping a bomb," says Petrocelli, "it's terrible."
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]]>Bill Petrocelli doesn't look like someone routinely engaged in illegal activity by the jovial smile on his face as he greets customers around the San Francisco location of Book Passage, a small chain of stores that he co-owns in the Bay Area.
Since the beginning of 2017, however, he's been routinely violating a California's law regulating autographed items. Small bookstore owners like Petrocelli now must adhere to a laundry list of requirements that threaten their livelihoods and restrict First Amendment rights.
"This law—it's like dropping a bomb," says Petrocelli, "it's terrible." Book Passage holds about 800 events each year featuring the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kasich, Caitlyn Jenner, and Ozzy Osborne. "We really kind of thrive on that," Petrocelli says. "I think it's the best part of the book business, when the author and the reader have a get together in your store and have a little discussion. It's wonderful."
The law requires dealers to provide a certificate of authenticity for every signed book, which includes a description of the item, the identity of the person who signed it, the date, time and place of the sale; the dealer's name and address; information about a witnesses to the signing; and information about a previous owner, if the item was obtained secondhand. And they have to retain that information for seven years.
"It's a certificate of authenticity requirement on steroids," says Anastasia Boden, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, who is helping Petrocelli sue the state over the law. "Anything that requires extra paperwork is going to drive up the cost of doing business."
Any violations of the requirements means anyone could sue the bookseller for up to ten times the cost of the book. The seller could also get hit with get court costs, attorney fees, interest, expert witness fees, and any relief the court finds appropriate.
Petrocelli says that beyond the potential cost, the law is also an invasion of his customers' privacy because he must record and store their names and addresses for an extended period.
"It's children who come to a lot of events to see their favorite author, want their book signed, and if we are going to have to go through every record and keep track of every child that buys a book…it's just crazy," Petrocelli says.
But the law wasn't supposed to apply to booksellers. "[It] originated as any law does, and that is with somebody with a lot of political clout and a sob story," says Boden. In this case, it was Mark Hamill, the actor famous for playing Luke Skywalker.
Boden says Hamill approached the legislature after seeing faked versions of his autograph being sold to duped customers online for hundreds of dollars. He teamed up with former State Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar) to expand a pre-existing law applying to autographs. It flew through the California legislature and was signed by Gov. Brown last September.
"Then booksellers kind of got word of this and looked at it and thought, 'oh my God, this could apply to autographed books, right on the face of it,'" says Petrocelli.
Chang declined our interview request, but did tell Reason in an email that she stands by the bill. She also pointed to a letter issued by her office in December 2016 stating that the law doesn't apply to booksellers because its wording states an autograph dealer must be "principally" in the business of selling autographed items in order for the law to apply.
The attorney Boden says the word "principally" here is vague, and arguably Petrocelli is principally engaged in selling autographed books. In addition to holding hundreds of events with autograph signings every year, Book Passage even has a first edition autographed-book club. It's the kind of offering that's allowed Book Passage to hold its own against online retailers.
Boden says the the autograph law's penalties are so high that they may scare people away from engaging in what should be protected speech. "Signatures are protected by the First Amendment."
A bill that was introduced to fix these problems, Assembly Bill 228, tries to exclude booksellers by raising the price of the commodity being signed from five dollars to 50. But that doesn't help Petrocelli.
"He sells books that are worth over $50 all the time," says Boden.
A.B. 228 also limits the autograph law to sports and entertainment memorabilia. But Petrocelli has entertainment and sports books for sale. Olympic gold medal winning track star Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce Jenner) recently promoted her biography at a Book Passage event.
"Is the Caitlyn Jenner biography a sports book or not? It kind of depends on how you think about it and if you have to make that kind of decision on every single book in the store it will drive you crazy," says Petrocelli.
There is one other bill that could help Petrocelli because it excludes books from being covered by the autograph law: Senate Bill 579. According to Boden it isn't going anywhere. "The one that is getting all the publicity is A.B. 228 which is backed by Barnes and Noble and the antiquarian booksellers," she says. "Meanwhile this little bill in the Senate that actually would do some good…doesn't seem to be getting any attention at all."
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]]>Feminist author and Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis wrote the recently released book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which details the insanity of regulating sex on college campuses with administrative tribunals and sexual conduct codes. She sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about feminism, sex on campus, her personal experience with Title IX, the dismissal hearing of her former Northwestern colleague PeterLudlow, which Kipnis has characterized as a "witch trial," and her uneasy new alliance with conservative and libertarian groups.
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]]>"The rules and the codes [on campuses] have been rewritten behind closed doors such that almost all sex can be charged as something criminal," says feminist author and Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis. "It reinforces a traditional femininity that sees women as needing protection, sees women's sexuality as something that is endangering to them."
Kipnis' new book is Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which explores the insanity of sexual conduct codes and attitudes at American universities. It grew out of Kipnis' own experience of being investigated under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act at Northwestern for a 2015 essay she published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
She sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about feminism, sex on campus, her personal experience with Title IX, the dismissal hearing of her former Northwestern colleague Peter Ludlow, which Kipnis has characterized as a "witch trial," and her uneasy new alliance with conservative and libertarian groups.
Read an excerpt from Unwanted Advances.
Watch Matt Welch's 2015 interview with Kipnis.
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This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: This book grows out of your 2015 inquisition for an article you wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education of all places that some of your students said created a hostile workplace or invaded their safe space. The controlling metaphors in your book are McCarthyism, Satanic ritual, child abuse, witch trials. Summarize your case and why you are thinking about it in these terms?
Laura Kipnis: Okay, a slight correction, it wasn't my students who brought me up on charges or marched against the article. It was other students who I had never met, which is to say it's not all students and that's something that gets forgotten. It's a cadre of activists.
Nick Gillespie: And they were grad students, right?
Laura Kipnis: It was two grad students who brought me up on Title IX complaints. There had been this protest march before that against the first essay, which I think was largely undergrads. As far as the metaphors, this is something I have been thinking about and trying to puzzle out because I do think there's this growing climate of sexual paranoia on campus that has fueled these Title IX inquisitions, partly because as people probably know the federal government, the Department of Education dictates that colleges and universities have to conduct these tribunals on campus, but to try to minimize or lower sexual assault and create an atmosphere on campus of gender equity. There are good reasons behind this and everybody does know that sexual assault has been a problem and oftentimes an unaddressed problem, so just to say all of that, but …
Nick Gillespie: Your piece, the first piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, it was basically you were reflecting on your experience as an undergrad and grad student and a looser sexual morality on campus between students and professors or just more broadly … How can people, how could they get upset at that in the sense of somehow then you being on their campus was threatening?
Laura Kipnis: Yes, well part of the promise is I tend toward irony. You're not supposed to be ironic about these things, so there had been this new regulation prohibiting professors and students from dating. Even if they were in different departments or different schools or different campuses, so I thought that went too far because we already had regulations against non-consensual sex, but this was prohibiting consensual relationships, which to my mind was addressed at women and at impeding women from doing things they might want to do. It was like a protectionist … I called it "feminist paternalism." Around the same time there was all the stuff about trigger warnings going on and so I was writing about this atmosphere of regulation that I thought was infantilizing students as opposed to promoting their ability to function in the world after graduation.
Nick Gillespie: As a feminist, was it infantilizing all students or was it specifically kind of denying sexual agency to female students?
Laura Kipnis: Well, they are written in gender neutral language, but yes, of course, they are aimed at women and it's mostly women who are filing the complaints about this stuff. To go back to the McCarthyism or the witch hunt kind of metaphors, part of what's happening is that while we know that sexual assault is the problem, the definition of sexual assault is being expanded and expanded behind closed doors so that when I ended up writing about this Title IX case of mine and I got all of this information about other people's cases around the country, they were being brought up on charges for things like making what somebody thought was a sexual joke in an off-campus bar or eye contact that somebody thought was the wrong kind of eye contact. Even micro-behaviors, jokes are starting to be subject to policing by campus regulators whose budgets increase and whose power increases the more stuff they find to regulate and adjudicate.
Nick Gillespie: A lot of this had to do with a dear colleague letter that was put out a few years ago under the Obama administration that under Title IX, which guarantees equal access to education, any programs that are funded by federal dollars that said universities have to investigate any claim of sexual harassment or sexual assault and lowered the standard of what counts as guilt. Why was that changed or why was it reinterpreted in that particular way?
Laura Kipnis: You're talking about preponderance of evidence, which is a much lower standard. It's 50/50 plus a feather. That's how I have heard it described as opposed to say clear and convincing, which is higher. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that's the bar of proof maybe in other kinds of court cases. I'm not entirely sure, but one of the things that's happening also is that it's up to these individual Title IX investigators as I have learned in this very capricious manner in terms of deciding what preponderance is. In fact, I just read an interesting study about a guy at UCLA who has modeled or predicted the false conviction rate under the preponderance standard as upward of 20%. The lower the standard of proof, the higher the false conviction rate basically.
Nick Gillespie: Well, you talk about and you talk about it in a long chapter which is fascinating and then also come back to it in your coda, which is subtitled Eye Witness to a Witch Trial, it's a chapter about how a yes became a no years after the fact and you talk about a Professor Ludlow. Can you summarize that case for us and then let's talk about some of the implications of it?
Laura Kipnis: I should say I didn't know this professor and I wrote a couple paragraphs about his case in the original Sexual Paranoia article that I wrote and that was partly why I got brought up on the Title IX charges because I had used this phrase "dating." I said he had dated a former graduate student because I had read a court filing of his. This was known on campus. Well, not all of it was known. I later found out a lot after I was asked by him to be his faculty support person in his dismissal hearing and he ended up giving me all the files in his case.
Nick Gillespie: Because strangely in a quirk, he had not signed a confidentiality agreement and all that, so he could actually talk more freely?
Laura Kipnis: Not so much even a quirk as that student protests meant that the university retracted a settlement agreement that was in the works and so he left without any settlement or confidentiality agreement. He had had a consensual three-month relationship with a graduate student in his department and I know it was consensual because when he turned over all this material, part of what he had was transcripts and records of 2000 emails and text messages from this three-month relationship when I read all of it. It's clear that it was consensual and it's even clear that she had the upper hand in the relationship.
The accusation was that he had misused his power. What that doesn't account for is that there are different kinds of power. There is institutional power and there's other kinds of power. There's the power of who is more in love with who, who is younger and more attractive, there's all sorts of power at work here. Anyway, that was part of the case.
Nick Gillespie: But then he ended up getting in trouble for an incident with an undergraduate student?
Laura Kipnis: He had gone out for an evening drinking and going to galleries with a former student of his who had invited him to go to an art event and she wasn't his student. I should say there was no code at the time against professors and students going out and I do say in my own education, which was in our schools and a different era, professors and students went out drinking and all sorts of things all the time, so that would have been no big deal. But maybe in the last, I don't know, five, eight years, 10 years, the atmosphere on campus has changed and this is part of the paranoia story, where I think professors and male professors are increasingly being seen as predators really and as always on the verge of misusing their power for illicit gains, particularly of a sexual nature. Women are passive and at the mercy of this crew of predatory professors. This really infiltrates into how any incident like this is seen and probably I think into the students' own perceptions of what happens to them.
He, Ludlow and this undergrad went out drinking at various art events and bars. She ended up sleeping at his place. They didn't have sex. They were both clothed. They were sleeping on top of the comforter. A few days later she said she tried to kill herself by jumping into Lake Michigan in February because she was so upset about what she said had happened between them. She said he had groped her. He said he didn't. That she had come on to him. She said he came onto her. It was a he said, she said thing, but in campus terms he was pretty much automatically guilty …
Nick Gillespie: And you do an incredible close reading of the administrator who actually was in charge of adjudicating this and you say, it's totally whimsical almost or there's no way he was going to be found anything other than responsible.
Laura Kipnis: Yeah and in my view, and I have to emphasize this is my opinion, there was a lot of gender bias and there was very capricious reasoning where a couple of cases she found in his favor, but in other cases she found against him and in both cases there was no evidence supporting the conclusions. Yes, it's hard to see how she got there.
Nick Gillespie: I think about my own undergraduate. I graduated college in 1985. I have graduate degrees from the late '90 and '96. There were a lot of lecherous professors who were constantly asking girls out, etc. Is that a problem and if it is, then how do you regulate it or not regulate it, but how do you deal with it? We're not talking about rapists here. We're not talking about people, but just lecherous people, what is the way to deal with that if it's an issue?
Laura Kipnis: I would say the way is education and frank discussions. I do think we're doing a terrible job of educating students about these kinds of realities. Yeah, I obviously think nobody in a position of power over a student's career or grading that person should be leching after them. I also think that students have to be educated, and women students particularly, to deal with these kinds of situations because they come up all the time in life. Life is full of power and hierarchical differences between people.
You can regulate away and I, myself, think there's probably something about human sexuality that's always going to evade all attempts to regulate it. I think you have to deal with these situations as they evolve. Obviously, the problem is not just professors, it's students and students, particularly in situations involving alcohol, which I talk about a lot, so education is the answer to this.
Nick Gillespie: You talk about your feminism in the book and also, it's ironic. We ran an excerpt of the book at Reason.com. It's ironic for you because you're a woman of the left. You're on the left. Your political commitments are on the left and the people who are supporting you tend to be more on the libertarian side of things or the libertarian right. How has feminism changed over your professional career, where at various points if you go back to maybe the late 60s, there was a flowering of sexual empowerment of women, then there was people like Susan Brown Miller and talking against rape. The idea that almost all heterosexual intercourse was a form of rape one way or the other because you couldn't escape patriarchy. It's wobbled around since then. What has changed in feminism and what is a good feminist response to sexual paranoia that ultimately treats women without agency or not fully in control of their sexual desire?
Laura Kipnis: That was a lot of questions. Yes, I'm finding myself in strange company and a lot of that is on the civil liberties and due process side of things because you have students who consider themselves to be activists and I suppose would think of themselves on the left, I maybe have some questions about that, who are acting like conservatives are acting and you have conservatives acting like liberals. You have these students being increasingly authoritarian and willing to throw out free speech and due process. I'm still trying to figure this out, these anti-democratic tendencies.
Nick Gillespie: Well, it definitely anti-free speech.
Laura Kipnis: Yes, I would say …
Nick Gillespie: … Of free expression.
Laura Kipnis: I will go so far as to say anti-Democratic. In terms of the feminism of the moment on campus, I'm also saying this is feminist conservatism. I stunned a right-wing talk show radio host in conversation when I said, "This conservatism, this sort of feminist protectionism," and he couldn't grasp that concept because the right has instilled in some of their minds that this can only be this form of leftism.
Nick Gillespie: That was moment in the 80s I guess when a bunch of religious fundamentalists and feminists were trying to ban pornography.
Laura Kipnis: Certain feminists so that's the point is it's certain feminists, mostly affiliated with Andrea Dorkin and Catherine McKinnon who are the anti-pornography feminists and Brown Miller maybe would be more in that camp, who did make alliances with the right and it was a puritanical and I think conservative form of feminism. The point to make to maybe say it simply is you have to say feminisms plural, so I would call myself a leftist emancipatory-oriented feminist psychoanalytic. I would at certain points call myself a Marxist feminist. That's why talking to myself, here in the company of Reason we're getting calls from the Cato Institute is surprising to me and I'm trying to figure it out.
What I don't want to participate in with the libertarian/conservative crowd is the feminist bashing because what I want to do is reclaim a kind of feminism or revise, keep what's useful or what I think's leading us toward something more like liberation and autonomy and equality and that kind of stuff.
Nick Gillespie: Within a kind of libertarian genealogy of ideas, there is a strong feminist component and it's people like Rose Wilder Lane, who is the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and is widely credited with writing, editing, she was a professional writer editing the Little House books … Isabel Patterson, who was a well-known book reviewer, obviously people like Ian Rand, who would not be feminist, but as individualists and there's a tradition in the 19th century of individualist, autonomous feminism and autonomy is certainly a big concept for libertarians. Is that a way forward for feminism to …? If it's focusing on autonomy more than inter-sectional elements of where, well it's actually race and class that are more important or power positions relatively speaking? I guess I'll stop talking here for a second.
Laura Kipnis: Many questions piling up.
Nick Gillespie: Well, one of the weird things is when feminist scholars and this happens a lot and I think it's happening with inter-sectional feminism, they put the gender aspect last because there's like, "Oh no, you know what? Actually, race and class is more important."
Laura Kipnis: I don't think the class is even figured in when the students are talking about inter-sectional feminism. Look, I respect this commitment to racial justice with the student activists, but it would be difficult to untangle the genealogy of all this. Yeah, I do veer toward maybe it was reading … I was going to say toward I guess about autonomy and maybe it was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child who was a big influence on me, but I maybe would leave behind the Marxist feminist and say something like democratic socialist feminist, with an emphasis on the Democratic, which I think maybe pushes me toward a liberal kind of view. There is this certain kind of overlap with the liberalism of libertarians on such things as free speech and due process I suppose.
There are these tangled lineages. I suppose where we depart is more on the economic side, where I would be somebody favoring more government control and economic justice and redistribution and that kind of stuff. That's where I'm trying to sort through my alliances with you guys. In terms of feminism, wait, did I answer it or not?
Nick Gillespie: Well, what is a positive feminism that you would like to see become dominant on campus? You're right, it even in the 80s, it wasn't all feminists were men-haters or they were all this or that, but what's a positive vision of feminism that you would like to see become resurgent right now?
Laura Kipnis: I think there isn't a model really. There was when I was coming up, a kind of left wing or materialist or Marxist feminism that was very interesting to me that talked about stuff like, talked much more about class and pay for housework and things like that, addressing material issues.
Nick Gillespie: Right and I would assume also things like can women own property? Can women get credit …?
Laura Kipnis: Well hopefully, we settle that one a while ago.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, but I'm saying these are materials questions of it's stunning that single women couldn't get birth control prescription pills until 1973 and abortion, obviously, also a big issue in that time.
Laura Kipnis: Yeah, huge, yeah and the first wave settled a lot of that stuff did get us the vote, that kind of thing. You know which is why I think feminism has been this historically crucial, important, world-changing movement. Just the fact that women owning property or having economic autonomy, I think people forget how recently that wasn't the case. It's why I can't join in on the feminist bashing and why I also don't think equity feminism goes far enough, like just focusing on pay issues because I think there really are entrenched gender differentials.
Partly, this goes maybe a bit off topic for you, but within the context of heterosexual femininity, I think a lot of women, me included, I know this firsthand, are very just simply self-sabotaging. I think femininity in itself has got a lot of pathological elements and that's where the campus stuff to me is veering. It reinforces a traditional femininity that sees women as needing protection, sees women sexuality as something that's endangering to them. Part of the concept that is I think prevailing in this on campuses is this idea of trauma. Trauma studies has been a huge thing and this idea … I also got in trouble for being a bit not deferential enough to this term "survivor." You have people who have an uncomfortable social experience on a date calling themselves survivors impressing complaint.
Again, not to minimize campus assault, not to minimize the kind of crappy stuff that guys do when they are drunk and have a drunken woman in their sites so all that being said, I also do think in terms of autonomy and I talk about this in the book, women have to take more responsibility for stuff like passing out drunk in places that are dicey. It doesn't mean that you asked to get assaulted, but it means if you are saying a guy is responsible for his behavior when he's drunk, I also think women have to be pragmatically self-protective.
Nick Gillespie: When Joe Biden recently just this week said all drunk sex is rape, is that a farcical statement?
Laura Kipnis: Well then basically, all sex is rape on campus because I just think there's a lot of kids … I had a conversation with Suzy Bright, the sex activist, and she said she talks to kids who never had sober sex and encourages it for them. Biden is talking about criminalizing a vast proportion of the sex on campus and that in fact is what's happened. That the rules and the codes have been rewritten behind closed doors such that almost all sex can be charged as something criminal and particularly those charges go against men. I say this as a feminist that if two people are drunk, they are both responsible for the sex that takes place, not just the guy.
Nick Gillespie: Just to underscore it, you're not talking about if somebody has passed out, it's like they can't consent.
Laura Kipnis: That's right.
Nick Gillespie: We're not talking about that. We're talking about people who might be tipsy or who have been flirting or even are in a relationship but retroactively the definitions can change?
Laura Kipnis: Yeah that happens and the problem with some of these cases, they are very hard to adjudicate because there's he said-she said and yes, I do think a guy who has sex with an unconscious woman can be brought up on criminal charges of rape, but that shouldn't happen on campus because that is a criminal charge.
Nick Gillespie: Would it be helpful if these cases were moved off of the campus and put into the actual criminal justice system, which also has its own problems in dealing with sexual assault?
Laura Kipnis: That also is the important to say that a lot of what's happening on campus is an over-correction to what didn't happen previously in the criminal justice system where sexual assault was trivialized or you couldn't get a case brought forward by a DA or it took years for it to go forward. The campus system was meant to address that, but I think it's doing it ineffectually.
Nick Gillespie: We have talked a little bit about how feminism has changed and where it might go. What in your experience, as you have been teaching college students for years, what happened to students? Because on a certain level and I can say from my undergraduate years, I can see the trajectory where it ends up here, but on things like speech I don't remember at least in the first half of the 80s, I don't remember a student protest that was insisting on less speech. It was always pushing back against the stuffed shirts who were trying to shut things down. Now that seems to be very different and then with sexuality, where is this coming from?
Laura Kipnis: You have to say on campus, there are two very contradictory stories about sex because you do have this prevailing hook-up culture. I should say I teach film and so my students are often times making films and writing screenplays about their own lives and we talk about this stuff and so I do think I find out pretty much what's going on so there's that side, the hook-up culture. Then there's this other side, which is the trauma stuff …
Nick Gillespie: Let's be the hook-up culture, as I think we're both baby boomers. People who were having more sex as baby boomers. Millennial's have less sex than Gen-Xers, who have less sex than baby boomers and the greatest generation never had sex, but that's their problem.
Laura Kipnis: You are saying they have less now?
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, yeah, most surveys show that sexual activity both at the high school level and at the college level is actually lower …
Laura Kipnis: Mmm-hmmm(affirmative) that's interesting.
Nick Gillespie: I guess that would be a different question, but where does that come from? You have a sense of what's going on on campus?
Laura Kipnis: I think I have some sense of what's going on and people are never great at self-reporters about their own sex lives, but I hear how they talk about sex, let's say. It's all very open, pro-sex. There's a lot of discussion about alternative practices and stuff. They are very knowledgeable about all of this stuff, but I do think there is a kind of Puritanism as well and this sense of potential trauma, harm.
I don't know where it comes from? I'm somebody who doesn't like to recycle used up clichés and so all of this stuff about "helicopter parenting" and "coddled students" I don't know? I don't want to recycle that stuff, but yes, there definitely is a change. There's a huge change from our generation to this generation of students. I think in a certain way it actually has maybe something to do with the being best friends with your parents and never having gone through this real rebellion against authority and so they are sort of calling their parents two or three times a day and never really left home.
Nick Gillespie: And not even shouting at them.
Laura Kipnis: Yes, yeah.
Nick Gillespie: They are calling up to say I hate you.
Laura Kipnis: No, they …
Nick Gillespie: No.
Laura Kipnis: Their best buddies.
Nick Gillespie: You do use Freudian analysis. What's going on there then because this is like a radical shift from what 50 or 100 years ago would have been taken as a universal thing that you individuate yourself against your parents and that you struggle to be independent from them and we seem to be witnessing, I say this as a parent, a much more fraternal bond with your children rather than almost an adversarial one?
Laura Kipnis: Here's a something I have been speculating about and don't have an answer to, but maybe you do. When I was coming of age, there was not the same panic about inter-generational sex, so the professor-student question was you know, a lot of women I knew meet some men, had some relationships with professors. One of my best friends married his French professor and he was a sophomore, so he's scarred.
Nick Gillespie: Did he stop? Does he speak French?
Laura Kipnis: Very well, yes.
Nick Gillespie: That's good.
Laura Kipnis: This panic on campus about the professor-student thing, I think is almost related to this question of the best friends and there's something going on about generations. I'm not a smart enough Freudian to answer it, but I do see somehow this stuff is related to itself or each other, however you would put that. I don't have the answer yet. I'll get back to you on that.
Nick Gillespie: The trauma, and again without demeaning people who went through horrible experiences, but the kind of fetishization of survivorship. Where do you think that's coming from? I can remember I guess it was Christopher Lasch's The Minimal Self, which it's a Frankfurt School-influenced thesis about a Marxist-Freudian theory about of, and he was writing in 1980 I think for that, about fetishizing survivorship and that people were appropriating stories about concentration camps. He lit into Betty Friedan for calling, saying that being a suburban housewife in the late 50s was the equivalent of being in a concentration camp and that has proceeded a pace.
Is that where the trauma culture is coming from or is it that we are so worried that our children are … There are effectively no real threats to kids anymore in terms of they don't starve, they don't have childhood diseases, very few get abducted, they go to school longer, but we're acting as if they see one image they're going to be ruined for life. Where does this come from?
Laura Kipnis: I think a lot of it would have to do with identity politics. I'm not somebody who is going to rant about identity politics because it's been very important and my students have been I noticed, really schooled in a multi-cultural curriculum. They are very attentive to all forms of injustice, to marginalization. They're really I think deeply committed in an honest way to including this range of experiences they have been marginalized into the mainstream and they're great about that and very self-aware of their own participations in forms of privilege and hierarchy and that kind of thing.
Another side of that though is that the traumatic experience or the person who is on the margin, that position is the privileged one in campus politics at the moment. I suppose some people might blame that on leftists and leftist professors and that kind of thing perhaps, but I think these things are related, yeah.
Nick Gillespie: Well, that's Dave Chapelle, the comedian, calls this "The Misery Olympics," which might be a really archer. He's in a position where he could say that. I'm not sure that I would. What has been the reaction among your colleagues and among your students because you said it wasn't your students who protested you? What kind of response have you gotten as you explore this material? When you talk about irony in the book, it's very … I don't want to say it's funny, it's not laughable, but it's very ironic, it's very wry and clearly humor on campus it's hard to be funny these days. There's Chapelle is one, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, a number of comedians have said they don't even play colleges anymore. How have your colleagues and how have your immediate students responded to your material?
Laura Kipnis: I should say a little bit about how I'm an anomalist kind of person, which is helpful and probably how I got myself into this situation. I didn't go to university. I went to art schools. I started out as a painter and then a video artist and I ended up teaching in a university teaching film because I was a filmmaker, but I don't do that anymore. I actually write these books. I have always had a bit one foot on, one foot off of campus so it does allow me to be both an insider … I think this book could have only been written by an insider and the criticisms I've made, but also a bit of an outsider, too. Yeah, I think more ironic about a lot of the stuff, so it's been interesting to have this as my material. It's almost like the academic novel or satire that I have always wanted to write but didn't.
On my campus, I think people are terrified actually and don't say anything, so after I got marched on and I wrote about the Title IX thing, my students didn't say a word. They were kind of great about it and at one time said to some students I was close to, "How come nobody ever brought up this protest march thing?" She said, "Oh, we knew about it, Laura," and I have had very colleagues at Northwestern weigh-in to me about the articles that I wrote exposing the Title IX stuff, much more response from people around the country. I don't know if that it's the Midwest and everybody's very polite? I can't really answer it.
Nick Gillespie: You talk about paranoia and McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials. The Salem witch trials was a classic case of hysteria. Samuel Sewell, one of the judges ended his life wearing sackcloth and ashes to pay penance for what he did. Is this bubble going to burst? Do you see any sign of that that people are regaining a more measured sense of where we should be on campus?
Laura Kipnis: Well, an interesting parallel is you have these accusations made by teenage girls in Salem and similarly early oftentimes here. I don't want to be grandiose, I hope this book makes some difference. Partly I hope that it means that people who have been through these kinds of inquisitions or processes are willing to come forward and talk about their stories. What really is happening is a lot of this is ending up in the civil courts, where undergrad men, who have been accused of things that they say they didn't do or the circumstances were more murky, these cases are ending up in courts and it's going to be civil judges that I think turn back the tide of these over-prosecutions.
In fact, there's this really interesting case at Brandeis with two men students, where after a breakup, one guy said that the other guy had kissed him while he was asleep and that was sexual assault because he couldn't consent. This judge, who wrote a really kind of eloquent decision, more or less said, "Are you kidding me?" Sorry, what they called "the special examiner" at Brandeis that was their term. I think that's what they called him or her, had ruled that this was indeed assault because the guy was asleep and couldn't give consent. The judge's very eloquent decision I think will have some effect and other cases like that, so I think that's where it's going to end up.
Nick Gillespie: Of course, your book, I mean on your experience on speaking about it, particularly because you are on the left and a feminist, that's a kind of shot across the bow of saying you're not Rush Limbaugh, decrying this or denouncing this.
Laura Kipnis: Yeah and I was in a position that I could come forward because I'm tenured. I'm in a research university that does support academic freedom, despite what happened to me. That's a complicated sort of issue in terms of who green lit those charges I think, but I think the problem that is about half of the professoriate now is not tenure track. They are on contracts. Those people wouldn't have a chance in hell of coming forward, writing an article as I did.
In fact, if you get brought up on some kind of even specious complaint, you are likely to lose your job. I've seen that happen and know a couple of lawsuits that are going forward. Partly because I suppose the kinds of stuff I've written about, I've written about scandal, I've written about sexual politics. I was I guess a bit more willing to go out on some limbs about it than other people would have.
Nick Gillespie: Well, I'm glad that you did. The book is Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. The author is Laura Kipnis. Thanks so much for talking to us.
Laura Kipnis: Thank you, thanks.
Nick Gillespie: It's a richly reported and fascinating read, so thank you very much.
Laura Kipnis: Thanks.
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