Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 21, 2016

News Flash: Only “Customary” Speakers Protected From Prior Restraint

Filed under: FBI,Free Speech,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 7:53 pm

National Security Letters Upheld As Constitutional

From the post:

A federal judge has unsealed her ruling that National Security Letter (NSL) provisions in federal law—as amended by the USA FREEDOM Act—don’t violate the Constitution. The ruling allows the FBI to continue to issue the letters with accompanying gag orders that silence anyone from disclosing they have received an NSL, often for years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents two service providers in challenging the NSL statutes, who will appeal this decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Our heroic clients want to talk about the NSLs they received from the government, but they’ve been gagged—one of them since 2011,” said EFF Deputy Executive Director Kurt Opsahl. “This government silencing means the service providers cannot issue open and honest transparency reports and can’t share their experiences as part of the ongoing public debate over NSLs and their potential for abuse. Despite this setback, we will take this fight to the appeals court, again, to combat USA FREEDOM’s unconstitutional NSL provisions.”

This long-running battle started in 2011, after one of EFF’s clients challenged an NSL and the gag order it received. In 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston issued a groundbreaking decision, ruling that the NSL power was unconstitutional. However, the government appealed, and the Ninth Circuit found that changes made by the USA FREEDOM Act passed by Congress last year required a new review by the District Court.

In the decision unsealed this week, the District Court found that the USA FREEDOM Act sufficiently addressed the facial constitutional problems with the NSL law. However, she also ruled that the FBI had failed to provide a sufficient justification for one of our client’s challenges to the NSLs. After reviewing the government’s justification, the court found no “reasonable likelihood that disclosure … would result in danger to the national security of the United States,” or other asserted dangers, and prohibited the government from enforcing that gag. However, the client still cannot identify itself because the court stayed this portion of the decision pending appeal.
…

The district court’s decision has many low points, perhaps the lowest is its quoting of the Second Circuit in John Doe, Inc. v. Mukasey:

Although the nondisclosure requirement is in some sense a prior restraint,… it is not a typical example of such a restriction for it is not a restraint imposed on those who customarily wish to exercise rights of free expression, such as speakers in public fora, distributors of literature, or exhibitors of movies. And although the nondisclosure requirement is triggered by the content of a category of information, that category, consisting of the fact of the receipt of an NSL and some related details, it far more limited than the broad categories of information that have been at issue with respect to typical content-based restrictions.

In the court’s judgment since customary speakers weren’t at issue, there’s no protection from prior restraint.

What a bizarre concept.

Are you a speaker in a public fora, distributor of literature, exhibitor of movies?

Well, I don’t qualify as an exhibitor of movies.

Nor do I qualify as a distributor of literature, at least in the sense of a traditional publisher.

Hmmm, do you think I qualify as a speaker in a public fora?

Perhaps, perhaps, but considering the tortured lengths the court went to reach its decision, what do you think the odds are that Wolf Blizer is a speaker in a public fora and I’m not?

Or you for that matter?

Support the EFF in this fight, it’s your right to be informed about FBI excesses and to raise those with your elected representatives that is at stake.

April 10, 2016

A Challenge for Wannabe LamdaConf 2016 Censors

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech — Patrick Durusau @ 10:46 am

LamdaConf 2016 has become the target of a long list of self-confessed censors, who have taken it upon themselves to object to the selection of Curtis Yarvin as a speaker at that conference.

Authors aren’t identified in the program listing.

Here’s the challenge to wannabe LamdaConf 2016 censors: Which of these talks promote racism, etc.? (You can see the full descriptions here. I omitted the prose in the interest of space.)

  • 4 Weird Tricks to Become a Better Functional Programmer
  • A Board Game Night with Geeks
  • All About a Fold
  • An Immutable State Machine
  • Coding Under Uncertainty
  • Dialyzer: Optimistic Type Checking for Erlang and Elixir
  • Discrete Time and Race Conditions
  • Exotic Functional Data Structures: Off-heap Functionally Persistent Fractal Trees
  • Extracting Useful Information from your Code Repository using F#
  • Functional Algebra for Middle School Students
  • Functional Programming is Overrated
  • Functional Programming: Destination or Origin?
  • Functional Reactive Programming for Natural User Interfaces
  • Functional Refactoring
  • Functional Relational Programming In UI Programming
  • Functional Web Programming: An Empirical Overview
  • How Environment and Experience Shape the Brain
  • How to Get Started with Functional Programming
  • How to Use Covariance and Contravariance to Build Flexible and Robust Programs
  • Interactive Tests and Documentation via QuickCheck-style Declarations
  • Make Your Own Lisp Interpreter in 10 Incremental Steps
  • Mastering Apache Spark
  • MTL Versus Free: Deathmatch!
  • Named and Typed Homoiconicity
  • No If’s, Cond’s, or Bool’s About It!
  • Panel: The Functional Front-End
  • Program Derivation for Functional Languages
  • Purely Functional Semantic and Syntax Expression Composition
  • Queries Inside Out: The Algorithms of your Relational Database in Clojure
  • RankNTypes Ain’t Rank at All
  • Real-World Gobbledygook
  • Servant – How to Create a Clean Web API
  • The Easy-Peasy-Lemon-Squeezy, Statically-Typed, Purely Functional Programming Workshop for All!
  • The Keys to Collaboration
  • The Missing Diamond of Scala Variance
  • The Next Great Functional Programming Language: Year 2
  • Type Kwon Do
  • Type Systems for Alchemy
  • Type-Level Hold’em: Encoding the Rules of Poker with Shapeless
  • Types for Ancient Greek
  • Typesafe Data Frames with Shapeless
  • Urbit: A Clean-Slate Functional Operating Stack
  • What Would Happen if REST Were Immutable?
  • Who Let Algebra Get Funky with my Data Types?
  • Witchcraft: Experiments Getting Higher-Order Abstractions into Elixir
  • Your Esoteric Benefactor: The Simple Richness of Lambda Calculus

Identify the objectionable talk(s) in your comments below.

As far as Curtis Yarvin, reflect on how your attempts at censorship have given a broader stage to his non-programming ideas. That’s all on you, not Yarvin.

Yet another illustration of why censorship is such a very bad idea. Always.

PS: As far as diversity, practicing diversity is far more effective than self-righteous denouncement of failure to practice diversity in others. Self-practice of diversity requires day to day effort.

April 1, 2016

Takedowns Hurt Free Expression

Filed under: Fair Use,Free Speech,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 9:00 pm

EFF to Copyright Office: Improper Content Takedowns Hurt Online Free Expression.

From the post:

Content takedowns based on unfounded copyright claims are hurting online free expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the U.S. Copyright Office Friday, arguing that any reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should focus on protecting Internet speech and creativity.

EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply.

“One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.”

As EFF also notes in its comments, however, the notice-and-takedown process is often abused. A recent report found that the notice-and-takedown system is riddled with errors, misuse, and overreach, leaving much legal and legitimate content offline. EFF’s comments describe numerous examples of bad takedowns, including many that seemed based on automated content filters employed by the major online content sharing services. In Friday’s comments, EFF outlined parameters endorsed by many public interest groups to rein in filtering technologies and protect users from unfounded blocks and takedowns.
…

A must read whether you are interested in pursuing traditional relief or have more immediate consequences for rightsholders in mind.

Takedowns cry out for the application of data mining to identify the people who pursue takedowns, the use of takedowns, who benefits, to say nothing of the bots that are presently prowling the web looking for new victims.

I for one don’t imagine that rightsholders bots are better written than most government software (you did hear about State’s latest vulnerability?).

Sharpening your data skills on takedown data would benefit you and the public, which is being sorely abused at the moment.

March 31, 2016

Onlinecensorship.org Launches First Report (PDF)

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Social Media,Tweets,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 2:36 pm

Onlinecensorship.org Launches First Report (PDF).

Reposting:

Onlinecensorship.org is pleased to share our first report "Unfriending Censorship: Insights from four months of crowdsourced data on social media censorship." The report draws on data gathered directly from users between November 2015 and March 2016.

We asked users to send us reports when they had their content or accounts taken down on six social media platforms: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. We have aggregated and analyzed the collected data across geography, platform, content type, and issue areas to highlight trends in social media censorship. All the information presented here is anonymized, with the exception of case study examples we obtained with prior approval by the user.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • This report covers 161 submissions from 26 countries, regarding content in eleven languages.
  • Facebook was the most frequently reported platform, and account suspensions were the most reported content type.
  • Nudity and false identity were the most frequent reasons given to users for the removal of their content.
  • Appeals seem to present a particular challenge. A majority of users (53%) did not appeal the takedown of their content, 50% of whom said they didn’t know how and 41.9% of whom said they didn’t expect a response. In only four cases was content restored, while in 50 the user didn’t get a response.
  • We received widespread reports that flagging is being used for censorship: 61.6% believed this was the cause of the content takedown.

While we introduced some measures to help us verify reports (such as giving respondents the opportunity to send us screenshots that support their claims), we did not work with the companies to obtain this data and thus cannot claim it is representative of all content takedowns or user experiences. Instead, it shows how a subset of the millions of social media users feel about how their content takedowns were handled, and the impact it has had on their lives.

The full report is available for download and distribution under Creative Commons licensing.

As the report itself notes, 161 reports across 6 social media platforms in 4 months isn’t a representative sample of censoring in social media.

Twitter alone brags about closing 125,000 ISIS accounts since mid-2015 (report dated 5 February 2016).

Closing ISIS accounts is clearly censorship of political speech, whatever hand waving and verbal gymnastics Twitter wants to employ to justify its practices. Including terms of service.

Censorship, on whatever basis, by whoever practiced, by whatever mechanism (including appeals), will always step on legitimate speech of some speakers.

The non-viewing of content has one and only one legitimate locus of control, a user’s browser for web content.

Browsers and/or web interfaces for Twitter, Facebook, etc., should enable users to block users, content by keywords, or even classifications offered by social media services.

Poof!

All need for collaboration with governments, issues of what content to censor, appeal processes, etc., suddenly disappear.

Enabling users to choose the content that will be displayed in their browsers empowers listeners as well as speakers, with prejudice towards none.

Yes?

March 24, 2016

2016 Freedom of Expression Awards shortlist

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 1:51 pm

Index unveils 2016 Freedom of Expression Awards shortlist.

From the post:

An Aleppo-based journalist training women to report on the crisis in war-torn Syria, an Indonesian comic who jokes about Islamic extremism and a 19-year-old campaigner against repression in Eritrea are among those shortlisted for the 2016 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards.

Drawn from more than 400 crowdsourced nominations, the Index awards shortlist celebrates artists, writers, journalists and campaigners tackling censorship and fighting for freedom of expression. Many of the 20 shortlisted nominees are regularly targeted by authorities or by criminal and extremist groups for their work: some face regular death threats, others criminal prosecution.

Judges for this year’s awards are Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka, pianist James Rhodes, tech entrepreneur Bindi Karia, Colombian journalist Maria Teresa Ronderos, human rights lawyer Kirsty Brimelow QC and Bahraini campaigner Nabeel Rajab.

“Censorship is not something that happens ‘somewhere else’,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship. “It occurs on a daily basis in every country, in every part of the world. The shortlist honours those who are among the bravest and most creative in tackling such threats.”

Awards are offered in four categories: journalism; arts; campaigning; and digital activism.
…

Spread the word about these awards and contribute to the defense of freedom of expression.

March 21, 2016

New La Résistance Forming At Apple – How You Can Help

Filed under: Cybersecurity,FBI,Free Speech,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 7:49 am

The New York Times reports that a new La Résistance may be forming at Apple in anticipation of a potential order conscripting Apple to create a new OS that breaks existing iPhone security. Apple Encryption Engineers, if Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist.

High level architects are the focus of the article but software projects aren’t composed solely of high level architects.

The architects will readily find new positions but what of lower level resistance fighters? The software/hardware community needs to prepare now to aid and shelter lower level resistance fighters from Apple.

They will be defending our rights and should know ahead of time that they don’t stand alone. Against the U.S. or any other coercive government.

Ask your management to earmark and advertise Apple La Résistance positions so that potential resistance fighters know they aren’t in this fight alone.

Support Apple now and resistance fighters online, offline, in any manner available to you.

Conscription, let’s be honest, enslavement at government demand, is wrong. (full stop)

What are you doing to stop it?

March 7, 2016

Preserving Unobserved Spaces (Privacy) For American Teenagers

Filed under: Free Speech,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 8:35 pm

The privacy of American teenagers is under full scale assault by the FBI.

From: Preventing Violent Extremism In Schools (2016):

…
Unaccountable or unobserved space provides a window of opportunity for students engaging in activities contrary to their family norms or desires, thus creating additional vulnerabilities and opportunities for exposure to violent extremists or violent rhetoric. Students in unobserved space may contact or be contacted by a known violent extremist, who assesses the youth for possible future recruitment. Students’ consumption of violent propaganda while in unobserved space may ignite the radicalization and mobilization process. Limiting idle times and unobserved space provides less time to engage in negative activities. Replacing idle times with positive social interactions may reduce activities in unobserved space.
…

Idle time or unobserved space wasn’t my only priority as a teenager but I certainly enjoyed both when the opportunities arose.

Without writing them down, think about the top ten things you remember from high school that occurred in unobserved spaces.

Physical intimacy, your first drink, cigarette, marijuana, pranks, general teenage mischief, all happened in unobserved spaces.

How many of those experiences would you want to give up now?

Same here.

The FBI has decided that teenagers should not have “unobserved spaces,” as reported in: The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students Across the Country by Sarah Lazare.

From the post:

Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.

Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools” guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.

This overwhelming threat is then used to justify a massive surveillance apparatus, wherein educators and pupils function as extensions of the FBI by watching and informing on each other.

The FBI’s justification for such surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim to lead to acts of violent subversion, even if those people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model has been widely discredited as a violence prevention method, including by the U.S. government, but it is now being imported to schools nationwide as official federal policy.
…

Sarah’s post will leave you convinced the FBI has gone completely insane.

American teenagers, not to mention the rest of us, deserve unobserved spaces in which to grow, explore and be different from the thought police lemmings at the FBI.

If you see an FBI agent at any school, post their picture and school name, city, state, with #IspyFBI.

If nothing else, it will be a way to see how FBI agents like living in a fish bowl.

February 5, 2016

Is Twitter A Global Town Censor? (Data Project)

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Government,Tweets,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 9:51 pm

Twitter Steps Up Efforts to Thwart Terrorists’ Tweets by Mike Isaac.

From the post:

For years, Twitter has positioned itself as a “global town square” that is open to discourse from all. And for years, extremist groups like the Islamic State have taken advantage of that stance, using Twitter as a place to spread their messages.

Twitter on Friday made clear that it was stepping up its fight to stem that tide. The social media company said it had suspended 125,000 Twitter accounts associated with extremism since the middle of 2015, the first time it has publicized the number of accounts it has suspended. Twitter also said it had expanded the teams that review reports of accounts connected to extremism, to remove the accounts more quickly.

“As the nature of the terrorist threat has changed, so has our ongoing work in this area,” Twitter said in a statement, adding that it “condemns the use of Twitter to promote terrorism.” The company said its collective moves had already produced results, “including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off Twitter.”

The disclosure follows intensifying pressure on Twitter and other technology companies from the White House, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and government agencies to take more action to combat the digital practices of terrorist groups. The scrutiny has grown after mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., last year, because of concerns that radicalizations can be accelerated by extremist postings on the web and social media.
…

Just so you know what the Twitter rule is:

Violent threats (direct or indirect): You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism. (The Twitter Rules)

Here’s your chance to engage in real data science and help decide the question if Twitter had changed from global town hall to global town censor.

Here’s the data gathering project:

Monitor all the Twitter streams for Republican and Democratic candidates for the U.S. presidency for tweets advocating violence/terrorism.

File requests with Twitter for those accounts to be replaced.

FYI: When you report a message (Reporting a Tweet or Direct Message for violations), it will disappear from Messages inbox.

You must copy every tweet you report (accounts disappear as well) if you want to keep a record of your report.

Keep track of your reports and the tweet you copied before reporting.

Post the record of your reports and the tweets reported, plus any response from Twitter.

Suggestions on how to format these reports?

Or would you rather not know what Twitter is deciding for you?

How much data needs to be collected to move onto part 2 of the project – data analysis?

Suggestions on who at Twitter to contact for a listing of the 125,000 accounts that were silenced along with the Twitter history for each one? (Or the entire history of silenced accounts at Twitter? Who gets censored by topic, race, gender, location, etc., are all open questions.)

That could change the Twitter process from a black box to having marginally more transparency. You would have to guess at why any particular account was silenced.

If Twitter wants to take credit for censoring public discourse then the least it can do is be honest about who was censored and what they were saying to be censored.

Yes?

January 12, 2016

[Don’t] …Join the National Security State

Filed under: Free Speech,Government,Privacy,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 10:13 pm

Social Media Companies Should Decline the Government’s Invitation to Join the National Security State by Hugh Handeyside.

The pressure on social media companies to limit or take down content in the name of national security has never been greater. Resolving any ambiguity about the how much the Obama administration values the companies’ cooperation, the White House on Friday dispatched the highest echelon of its national security team — including the Attorney General, the FBI Director, the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA Director — to Silicon Valley for a meeting with technology executives chaired by the White House Chief of Staff himself. The agenda for the meeting tried to convey a locked-arms sense of camaraderie, asking, “How can we make it harder for terrorists to leveraging [sic] the internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?”

Congress, too, has been turning up the heat. On December 16, the House passed the Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act, which would require the President to submit a report on “United States strategy to combat terrorists’ and terrorist organizations’ use of social media.” The Senate is considering a far more aggressive measure which would require providers of Internet communications services to report to government authorities when they have “actual knowledge” of “apparent” terrorist activity (a requirement that, because of its vagueness and breadth, would likely harm user privacy and lead to over-reporting).

The government is of course right that terrorists use social media, including to recruit others to their cause. Indeed, social media companies already have systems in place for catching real threats, incitement, or actual terrorism. But the notion that social media companies can or should scrub their platforms of all potentially terrorism-related content is both unrealistic and misguided. In fact, mandating affirmative monitoring beyond existing practices would sweep in protected speech and turn the social media companies into a wing of the national security state.

The reasons not to take that route are both practical and principled. On a technical level, it would be extremely difficult, if not entirely infeasible, to screen for actual terrorism-related content in the 500 million tweets that are generated each day, or the more than 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute, or the 300 million daily photo uploads on Facebook. Nor is it clear what terms or keywords any automated screening tools would use — or how using such terms could possibly exclude beliefs and expressive activity that are perfectly legal and non-violent, but that would be deeply chilled if monitored for potential links to terrorism.

…

Hugh makes a great case why social media companies should resist becoming arms of the national security state.

You should read his essay in full and I would add only one additional point:

Do you and/or your company want to be remembered for resisting the security state or as collaborators? The choice is that simple.

December 31, 2015

A Greater Threat to the U.S. Than the Islamic State

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 11:43 am

Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS by Glenn Greenwald.

From the post:

In 2006 — years before ISIS replaced al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain — Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights — using them as they once used passenger jets — to threaten and kill Americans.” In that speech, Gingrich argued:

Either before we lose a city, or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up (terrorists’) capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech [protections] and to go after people who want to kill us — to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

In a follow-up article titled “The First Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact,” Gingrich went even further, arguing that terrorists should be “subject to a totally different set of rules,” and called for an international convention to decide “on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims.”
…

Greenwald writes that limits on freedom of speech are not a historical nutty-idea from the past but are being raised by Cass Sunstein (Obama adviser) and Eric Posner (law professor).

Even the advocates of limits on free speech concede the legal system won’t, yet, accept limits on freedom of speech, that could change.

Imagine telling parents in the 1990’s that post-2010 that allowing strangers to fondle your genitals and those of your children were a prerequisite to air travel.

Who would have said then they would meekly line up like sheep to be intimately touched by strangers?

Or allow their children to be groped by strangers?

But both of those have come to pass. With nary a flicker of opposition from Congress.

Read Greenwald’s post in full and know that limits on freedom of speech, like restrictions on your right to travel (rejection of state driver licenses as identification), violation of your personal space (groping at airports), are not very far away at all.

October 16, 2015

Metadata that kills

Filed under: Free Speech,Metadata,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 2:56 pm

Metadata that kills by Peter Brantley.

From the post:

Recently I was advising a friend who works at a not-for-profit that distributes ebooks to underserved populations around the world. “Is there a way,” she asked, “to limit or select what portions of an ebook catalog are displayed to readers in one country versus another?” Was this an issue of rights, I wondered? “No,” she said. “In some countries, particularly for women, being caught reading the wrong book can have mortal consequences.”

It was a poignant point which caught me flat-footed. This is not a hard technical problem; depending on the distribution platform and reading system, title masking is not difficult. But it hadn’t occurred to me that metadata — or the lack of it — could quite literally translate into the death by stoning of a young girl brave or foolish enough to read a forbidden book. This is a world where there may need to be an ebook catalog for open societies, and another for countries in which the lives of women, for example, have no value.
…

A great read where the consequences of your choices may be paid by others. In full measure.

Puts a different spin on the knee-jerk insistence of no restrictions on free speech at all.

Certainly relevant to what content you would include in a topic maps based upon its likely readership.

I’m in the no restrictions on publications whatsoever camp, but, I’m not willing to have others to pay for the consequences for my choices.

You?

September 15, 2015

Pope Francis: Target of FBI Terror Farce

Filed under: Free Speech,Government,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 5:01 pm

ABC News has revealed that Pope Francis, was the target of an FBI terror farce.

Melissa Chan reports in FBI arrests teen for plotting ISIS-inspired attack on Pope that:

The FBI has arrested a 15-year-old boy near Philadelphia for allegedly plotting to attack Pope Francis and unleash ISIS-inspired hell during the pontiff’s upcoming U.S. visit, it was revealed Tuesday.

…

The 15-year-old “obtained explosives instructions and further disseminated these instructions through social media,” according to the bulletin.

He was charged with attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to provide material support to terrorist activity.

His “aspirational” threats were not imminent, sources told ABC.
…

The drought of terrorists in the United States began on September 12, 2001 and continues to this day. The FBI has been hard pressed to find anything that even looks like potential terrorism. To the point that the FBI gins up terrorism cases by supplying support to Walter Mitty type terrorists.

While details are sketchy, the Pope Francis terror farce appears to be another one of those cases.

For example, obtaining “explosives instructions,” is certainly not a crime. You may be curious, you may want to experiment, you may want to know what to look for in terms of someone constructing explosives. All of which are perfectly innocent under the US Constitution, prior to 9/11.

Dissemination of “explosive instructions” over “social media” is also not a crime.

Well, thanks to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, also known as the Wicked Witch of the West in First Amendment circles, we did have 18 U.S. Code § 842 – Unlawful acts, which reads in part:

…
(p) Distribution of Information Relating to Explosives, Destructive Devices, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.—

(2)Prohibition.—It shall be unlawful for any person—

(A) to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction, or to distribute by any means information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture or use of an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction, with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence; or

(B) to teach or demonstrate to any person the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction, or to distribute to any person, by any means, information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture or use of an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction, knowing that such person intends to use the teaching, demonstration, or information for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence.

Considering that 18 U.S. Code § 844 – Penalties provides that:

(2) violates subsection (p)(2) of section 842, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

For completeness, 18 U.S. Code § 3571 – Sentence of fine provides the fine in such cases:

…
(b)Fines for Individuals.—Except as provided in subsection (e) of this section, an individual who has been found guilty of an offense may be fined not more than the greatest of—

(3) for a felony, not more than $250,000;
…

Even so, distribution of explosives instructions via social media is not unlawful if:

(A) … with the intent that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence; or

(B) … knowing that such person intends to use the teaching, demonstration, or information for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence.

Of course, if your website regularly features photos of government officials or others in rifle scope cross-hairs, and similar rhetoric, you may have difficulty asserting your First Amendment rights to disseminate such information.

The FBI doesn’t fare much better under the unconstitutionally broad and vague:

…material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to provide material support for terrorist activity.

18 U.S. Code § 2339B – Providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations, reads in part:

(a) Prohibited Activities.—

(1)Unlawful conduct.—

Whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life. To violate this paragraph, a person must have knowledge that the organization is a designated terrorist organization (as defined in subsection (g)(6)), that the organization has engaged or engages in terrorist activity (as defined in section 212(a)(3)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act), or that the organization has engaged or engages in terrorism (as defined in section 140(d)(2) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1988 and 1989).

It doesn’t take much to see where this fails.

The 15-year-old would have to:

  • provide material support or resources to
  • foreign terrorist organization
  • knowing
    • that the organization is a designated terrorist organization (as defined in subsection (g)(6))
    • that the organization has engaged or engages in terrorist activity (as defined in section 212(a)(3)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act),
    • or that the organization has engaged or engages in terrorism (as defined in section 140(d)(2) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1988 and 1989).

The simple defense being, name the organization. Yes? Social media by its very nature is public and open so posting any information is hardly directed at anyone.

The government doesn’t fare much better under 18 U.S. Code § 2339A – Providing material support to terrorists, which reads in part:

(a)Offense.—

Whoever provides material support or resources or conceals or disguises the nature, location, source, or ownership of material support or resources, knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out, a violation of section 32, 37, 81, 175, 229, 351, 831, 842(m) or (n), 844(f) or (i), 930(c), 956, 1091, 1114, 1116, 1203, 1361, 1362, 1363, 1366, 1751, 1992, 2155, 2156, 2280, 2281, 2332, 2332a, 2332b, 2332f, 2340A, or 2442 of this title, section 236 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2284), section 46502 or 60123(b) of title 49, or any offense listed in section 2332b(g)(5)(B) (except for sections 2339A and 2339B) or in preparation for, or in carrying out, the concealment of an escape from the commission of any such violation, or attempts or conspires to do such an act, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life. A violation of this section may be prosecuted in any Federal judicial district in which the underlying offense was committed, or in any other Federal judicial district as provided by law. (emphasis added)

You could disseminate bomb making instructions along with:

(hypothetical) meet me at the intersection of Highway 61 and Route 666 with your bomb made according to these instructions for a concerted attack on (target)

but I can’t imagine a 15-year-old, unassisted by the FBI at any rate, being that dumb.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein should voted out of office by California voters. It is difficult to imagine anyone more disconnected from national priorities than her.

Given the near non-existence of terrorism in the United States, fear of terrorism is an emotional or mental disorder, from which Senator Feinstein suffers greatly.

Fear of terrorism has resulted in a grave distortion of the government from providing services and opportunities to its citizens to cutting those services and opportunities in order to fight a fictional enemy.

If federal budget transparency is ever achieved, you will be able to list who drove and profited from that fear.

Apologies for the length but I do tire of largely fictional terror threats that fuel the fear – spend cycle in government.

I would post on the ease of real terrorist activities but then, as you know, some FBI agent would take offense at proof of the futility of their efforts and the consequences could be severe. That’s called “chilling of free speech” by the way.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress