Category: Privacy

drones

EPIC Asks D.C. Circuit to Review Decision Endorsing Secrecy of Drone Advisory Committee Working Groups

EPIC has petitioned the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a recent decision by a three-judge panel allowing the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee to conduct much of its work in secret. EPIC filed suit in 2018 against the industry-dominated Committee, which consistently ignored the privacy risks posed by the deployment of drones—even after identifying privacy as a top public concern. As a result of EPIC’s lawsuit, the Committee was forced to disclose hundreds of pages of records under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. But the lower court ruled that the Committee did not need to disclose records from its secretive subcommittees—a decision that divided panel of the D.C. Circuit affirmed in April. Circuit Judge Robert L. Wilkins, writing in dissent, accused the majority of “doing violence to the text” of the FACA and argued that the decision “undermines FACA’s purpose and greenlights an easily abusable system[.]” EPIC’s petition highlights ways in which the panel’s opinion conflicts with past D.C. Circuit decisions and warns that the ruling gives federal agencies “a legal roadmap to evade the public scrutiny that Congress intended FACA to provide. ” The case is EPIC v. Drone Advisory Committee, No. 19-5238 (D.C. Cir.).

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consumer Federal Trade Commission FTC Lina Khan

Updated: Lina Khan Named Chair of Federal Trade Commission

Lina Khan was confirmed to the Federal Trade Commission by the U.S. Senate and named chair of the Commission by President Biden today. Khan received bipartisan support, with senators voting 69-28 in support of her confirmation. Khan is an expert on antitrust enforcement and served as counsel to House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline during the Subcommittee’s groundbreaking investigation last year. She has written extensively on the problems of concentrated power in the context of digital markets and said during her confirmation hearing that “I worry that some of these companies may think it’s just worth the cost of business to actually violate privacy law.” EPIC has long argued that the FTC is not doing its job to protect privacy and that the U.S. needs a Data Protection Agency. “Commissioner Khan has a tremendous opportunity as Chair to transform the FTC at a moment where anticompetitive and invasive business practices have proliferated,” said Alan Butler, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “Large tech companies have increasingly infiltrated our lives to the most minute level, and it will take a keen and aggressive regulator to ensure that these powerful entities don’t monopolize our markets and our data.”

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Policymakers know they hold immense power to regulate and punish firms that don’t play ball. Industry leaders know this too. So it’s likely both sides will indeed end up “playing ball.” 

The Democrats in Congress want comprehensive regulation of social media which will ultimately allow regime regulators to decide what is and what is not “disinformation.” This has become very clear as Congress has held a series of Congressional hearings designed to pressure tech leaders into doing even more to silence critics of the regime and its preferred center-left narratives.

Back in February, for instance, Glen Greenwald reported:

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

(The February hearing wasn’t even the end of it. Big Tech was summoned yet again on March 25.)

Greenwald is probably right. The end game here is likely to create a permanent “partnership” between big tech in which government regulators will ultimately decide just how much these platforms will deplatform user and delete content that run afoul of the regime’s messaging.

It might strike many readers as odd that this should even be necessary. It’s already become quite clear that Big Social Media is hardly an enemy of mainstream proregime forces in Washington. Quite the opposite. 

Jack Dorsey, for instance, is exactly the sort of partisan regime apparatchik one expects out of today’s Silicon Valley. For example, during October of last year, Twitter locked down the account of the New York Post, because the Post reported a story on Hunter Biden that threatened to hurt Biden’s chances for election. Over 90 percent of political donation money coming out of Facebook and Twitter goes to Democrats.

Yet, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t going to be enough to convince politicians to pack up and decide to leave social media companies alone. The regime is unlikely to be satisfied with anything other than full state control of social media through permanent regulatory bodies that can ultimately bring the industry to heel. Regardless of the ideological leanings of the industry players involved, they’re likely to see the writing on the wall. As with any regime where the regulators and legislators hold immense power—as is the case in Washington today—the regime will generally be able to win the “cooperation” of industry leaders who will end up taking a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join…

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biometrics facial recognition policy

Senator Markey Introduces Bill to Ban Face Surveillance

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), along with Senators Merkley, Sanders, Warren, and Wyden, as well as Congresswomen Jayapal, Pressley, and Tlaib today introduced legislation to stop government use of biometric surveillance, including facial recognition tools. The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act prohibits the use of facial recognition and other biometric technologies by federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection. “Facial recognition poses a significant threat to our democracy and privacy,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, Deputy Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “Facial recognition technology has been shown time and time again to be biased, inaccurate, and disproportionately harmful to people of color. The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2021 would effectively ban law enforcement use of this dangerous technology. EPIC is proud to support it.” EPIC leads a campaign to Ban Face Surveillance and through the Public Voice Coalition has gathered support from over 100 organizations and experts from more than 30 countries. Recently, in an open letter EPIC and a coalition of more than 175 civil society organizations and prominent individuals called for “an outright ban on uses of facial recognition and remote biometric recognition technologies that enable mass surveillance and discriminatory targeted surveillance.”

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EPIC Amicus Filing LinkedIn

Supreme Court Sends Web Scraping Case Back to Lower Court

The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated the Ninth Circuit’s decision in LinkedIn v. hiQ Labs but will not decide the merits of the case, instead sending the case back to the Ninth Circuit for a new decision in light of Van Buren v. United States. EPIC had filed an amicus brief in support of the Petition for Certiorari. The LinkedIn v. hiQ petition asked whether hiQ lacked authorization to access LinkedIn’s servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after LinkedIn used a combination of technical and verbal methods to cut off hiQ’s access to the website to stop the company from scraping user data. hiQ sued LinkedIn to regain access to the website, arguing that its business model depended on access to LinkedIn user data. A district court granted hiQ’s request for an injunction, which LinkedIn appealed. EPIC filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit arguing that the injunction was “contrary to the interests of individual LinkedIn users” and contrary to the public interest “because it undermines the principles of modern privacy and data protection law.” The Ninth Circuit upheld the injunction, finding that hiQ’s economic interests outweighed the interests in protecting users’ personal information. In its amicus brief in support of LinkedIn’s petition for cert, EPIC explained that the Ninth Circuit’s decision “makes it impossible” for companies to protect personal data and sets “a dangerous precedent that could threaten the privacy of user data.” The EPIC amicus brief highlighted the business practices of Clearview AI, a company that scraped billions of photographs to create a secretive facial recognition system. The case will most likely be sent back to the district court for a new decision that accords with Van Buren v. United States.

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international Privacy Shield Schrems

EPIC, Coalition Tell Biden Administration: No Data Flows Deal Until Congress Enacts Privacy Laws

EPIC and 23 other leading civil society groups sent a letter to President Biden today urging his Administration to ensure that any new transatlantic data transfer deal is coupled with the enactment of U.S. laws that reform government surveillance practices and provide comprehensive privacy protections. “The United States’ failure to ensure meaningful privacy protections for personal data is the reason that a growing number of countries are concerned about trans-border data flows,” the groups wrote. “Until the United States addresses this problem, concerns about data transfers to the United States will remain, and data flow agreements are likely to be invalidated.” In 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor agreement. And in July 2020, the successor agreement, Privacy Shield, was also invalidated by the same court. [PRESS RELEASE]

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Twenty twenty was the year college changed forever. How many US universities have been mortally wounded?

Covid was the pretense. But the writing was on the wall for decades. Skyrocketing tuition. Useless majors and degrees. Leftist ideologues masquerading as professors. Woke curricula instead of rigor and truth. Many students leave with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. And for countless graduates, little to show for it all in terms of marketable skills or job prospects.

The Mises Institute, in stark contrast, held one of its most successful Mises University programs in 2020. And we need your help to reach more and more young people before their professors ruin them!

Most universities went online in 2020—condemning students to isolation and inferior teaching. Many are still online, but with no discount on tuition. Across the street from the Mises Institute, Auburn University charges over $30,000 per year for out-of-state students. Foreign students, mostly Chinese and Indian, are cash cows for the school, many spending over $200,000 for an undergraduate degree.

How long can this go on?

Mises University is the antidote to all of this. It is precisely the program every young person needs to jump-start their real education. It may well be more valuable to them than four years of traditional college. Please support our most important and vital outreach to students.

The ramifications of covid and lockdowns will be felt for years, and far beyond campuses. The virus has been an excuse for expanding state power more than perhaps any other time in decades. And younger generations will bear the brunt of the Great Reset narrative now being advanced by the political class across the West. Make no mistake, the propaganda is real and aimed squarely at those under thirty.

One harridan at the World Economic Forum insists that by 2030 Generation Z will “own nothing and be happy.”

No car.
No house.
No apartment.
No appliances or clothes.
No privacy.

Of course, transportation, healthcare, food, and accommodation will be “free.”

This is the absurdity they want young people to accept! A world without private property, family, or any of the civilizing institutions which stand between us and the state. It would rob an entire generation of their autonomy. And proponents use the oldest trick in the book to sell it, namely the idea of a world without scarcity.

This is not just countereconomics, this is antieconomics. It’s also evil and inhuman.

Young people are being bombarded with these kinds of messages. Mises University offers them a radical alternative: a week where civilization and truth reassert themselves. Please support this worthy program by making your most generous contribution today.

Take a look at the undergraduate course offerings at your state’s university. Take a look at the average young person’s social media feed. Or take a look, if you can stand it, at CNN for an hour.

Then compare and contrast that with what Mises U students study during their week with us:

• Praxeology. Economics…

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EPIC Amicus Filing White Castle

EPIC Tells Court Not to Weaken Enforcement of Illinois Biometric Privacy Law

EPIC has filed an amicus brief in Cothron v. White Castle, a case about when violations of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (“BIPA”) can be vindicated in court. Cothron alleges that White Castle collected and disclosed her fingerprints for a decade in violation of BIPA. White Castle is trying to scuttle the case, claiming that an individual is only able to sue the first time a company violates their BIPA rights because it is only then that an individual “loses control” of their biometric data and suffers a legal injury. White Castle argues that, even if the company continued to violate BIPA to this day, they shouldn’t be held liable because the first violation was long enough ago that it falls outside the statute of limitations. But the Illinois Supreme Court held in Rosenbach v. Six Flags that every violation of BIPA confers the right to sue. The district court accordingly rejected White Castle’s argument, but certified the question to a federal appeals court. EPIC filed an amicus brief in the appeals court and argued that White Castle’s proposed rule would effectively “overrule the Illinois Supreme Court on a question of state law” by attempting “to import arguments about Article III standing into the BIPA statutory injury analysis.” EPIC also argued that White Castle is “mistaken about the underlying purpose of BIPA” and that White Castle’s rule “would in fact undermine BIPA’s purposes” because it “would remove the key incentive for companies who previously violated BIPA to come into compliance, adopt responsible biometric data practices, and seek informed consent.” EPIC has filed amicus briefs in other BIPA cases, including Rosenbach v. Six Flags and Patel v. Facebook, and regularly participates as amicus in cases concerning the right to sue for privacy violations.

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ABSTRACT: Isaiah Berlin made the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Since then, prominent contemporary philosophers including Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum have declared negative liberty insufficient or incoherent. This is a critique of those declarations, which have been unduly accepted to a large extent. The critique primarily focuses on Taylor, who made the most direct and complete argument against negative liberty. His argument is shown to be ineffective. And further, his conception of positive liberty is shown to be incoherent.

Keywords: negative liberty, positive liberty, isaiah berlin, martha nussbaum, charles taylor

Stuart Doyle ([email protected]) is in the US Marine Corps and holds a M.S. degree in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Many conceptions of freedom have been formulated over the centuries. As Isaiah Berlin (1969, 4) pointed out, there are two basic contrasting categories into which most of these conceptions may be seen to fit: theories of negative liberty and theories of positive liberty. Negative theories define freedom exclusively in terms of the independence of the individual from interference by others. Lockean theories are prominent examples. In contrast, the positive theories contend that freedom resides at least in part in collective control over common life toward some positive goal. Theories descending from Rousseau exemplify this category.

In the decades since negative and positive liberty were clearly delineated, the most lauded contemporary philosophers, such as Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum, have categorically denounced all concepts of negative liberty. In an essay titled, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” Taylor argues that a negative definition of freedom cannot be adequate and that we should understand freedom as a positive ability to fulfil our purposes. Nussbaum has not dedicated an entire writing to the topic per se, but in her book Creating Capabilities she declares the idea of negative liberty to be “incoherent” (Nussbaum 2011, 65). Though she does not form an argument in support of this claim, I bring it up only to emphasize a blind spot needing attention. Denouncing negative liberty seems to have become so fashionable that when it is done in a work of philosophy apparently no substantiating argument is needed. This is a strange state of affairs considering that the best arguments which have been made against negative liberty are severely defective. I see Taylor’s essay as the most prominent example. So, my goal here is to show that Taylor’s conception of freedom is incoherent. After we briefly observe the conspicuous absence of Nussbaum’s argument, I will address Taylor’s argument, which seems to have made philosophers comfortable in dismissing negative liberty out of hand.

Nussbaum writes:

Fundamental rights are only words unless and until they are made real by government action. The very idea of “negative liberty,” often heard in this connection, is an incoherent idea: all liberties are positive, meaning liberties to do or to be something; and all require the inhibition of interference by others. This is a point that must be emphasized particularly in the United States, where people sometimes imagine that government…

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ABSTRACT: There have been many calls for reforming the gold standard since the end of the classical gold standard and especially since the end of Bretton Woods. While these calls have somewhat abated in recent years, this article will attempt to show that the gold standard is still a superior monetary system, and that the reform of the monetary system is still a desirable policy.

Key Words: gold standard, monetary policy, austrian economics, populism

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen ([email protected]) is a research assistant at the Institute for Economic Policy at Leipzig University and a PhD candidate at the University of Angers. He is also a Mises Institute research fellow.

The author thanks Dr. Joseph Salerno for comments as well as an anonymous referee.

We will proceed by first analyzing the shortcomings of the present fiat-money order, indicating how it distorts the market and society through inflation, redistribution, by artificially increasing the importance of financial markets, and by hampering US industrial production in international trade. Then we will show that these problems would cease to exist under the gold standard, and we will indicate a possible reform for returning to gold in the US. Finally, we will argue that such a reform in order to be successful must become a popular crusade—i.e., it must become a populist issue.

INTRODUCTION

Politics have become increasingly populist throughout the Western world since the Great Recession. Both left-wing and right-wing parties thunder against political and other elites, suggesting that their specific programs and ideologies will put an end to what they see as unfair exploitation of the people by an unaccountable and increasingly out-of-touch elite. In the United States recent populist movements are the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders used populist rhetoric in their presidential campaigns.

The rise of populism is, in hindsight, perfectly understandable. The war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk”; “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it”; my opponent’s voters are a “basket of deplorables”—mainstream politicians have again and again shown themselves to be out of touch with reality and increasingly, it seems, also with more and more of their voters. Most important for our purposes, the Federal Reserve, charged with managing the money supply and securing low inflation and low unemployment, was oblivious to all dangers on the eve of the Great Recession, and seemed to do what it could to help big banks and investors weather the storm, no matter what the price would be for the rest of the country.

Indeed, the Federal Reserve has proven unable to achieve the goals set for it since its establishment and especially since the final end of the gold standard and the introduction of the fiat dollar in 1971, when its control over the money supply was vastly expanded. The Fed did manage to break the inflationary expectations that had led to double-digit inflation in the 1970s, but this slight improvement has not canceled out the many evil effects of fiat…

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