I read an article from Fox News earlier this evening regarding Mitt Romney’s energy independence plan. According to the article:

In a campaign speech in Hobbs, N.M., a few weeks ago, the GOP presidential nominee told the crowd, “I will set a national goal of North American independence by 2020. That means we produce all the energy we use in North America.

Seems like every presidential candidate since Carter has had one of those. None of them achieved it but they did bring us close. In spite of its many critics, NAFTA did do one good thing for the United States: made Canada and Mexico our two biggest oil providers, providing us with more than half of our oil. Saudi Arabian imports are now between 13-15%, which means less American money being redirected to terrorist groups and theocratic uprisings. Venezuelan imports are even less. OPEC’s stranglehold over us has been substantially reduced. And North American energy production is rising. All of this is good. But someone with no understanding of basic supply and demand or cost-benefit analysis decided to attack the GOP nominee.

Here’s what the beef was all about:

In addition to opening up new areas for offshore drilling, Romney says his energy independence goal can be accomplished by speeding up the time it takes to get permits to drill on federal lands. The way to do that, he says, is by putting state regulators in charge of the federal process just as they already are on state and private lands.

Said the article.

My immediate reaction: FINALLY! This is the Mitt Romney I’ve been wanting to see. After a mediocre campaign with mediocre positions, not much detail on how to get government out of our lives, and poor understanding of the duties of the federal government, Mitt Romney took a tenth amendment position that is much needed. A great deal of the mountain west is federally owned land. It should be given back to the states and the states should be in charge of any resources within their borders–with the federal government only involved in cross-border disputes.

But Pete Maysmith, executive director of Colorado Conservation Voters wasn’t exactly happy. He said:

“Governor Romney’s energy proposal … ignores the facts and is a giveaway to his big oil campaign supporters at the expense of our air, land and water. Energy production in the United States is at a 20-year high. So the problem is not regulations, the problem is not lack of access to federal lands.”

I don’t care what your political views are or who you are voting for. And there are many reasons not to like Mitt Romney. However, this is not one of them!

I don’t know if Mr. Maysmith is right or wrong about energy production being at a 20 year high. What I do know is this: IT DOES NOT MATTER!

That’s right. His conclusion might be partially factual in this and only this: most large energy companies are more than willing to comply with basic safety regulations. I’m a member of the Houston Economics Club, and such was the position that Andrew Slaughter, a former Chair of the National Petroleum Council, took at one of our meetings last January.

Most of the anti-fracking hype has been factually incorrect; I won’t get into detail on that but I’m just giving you an example: energy companies have engineered new methods of groundwater protection. So the private sector has addressed the problem, to the point where regulation should be toned down to a property-damage perspective. Not all regulation is bad. Property rights are paramount, and property damage must be prevented.

If you want more information on groundwater protection you can find it in this presentation by Slaughter found here

The point of my article is simply this: his premise is patently false, as is his conclusion that we should not increase access to federal lands.

It is not a matter of energy being at a 20 year high it is a matter of IT COULD BE HIGHER!.

Just because an industry is doing better than ever is no excuse for them not to try and do even better. America needs cheaper energy to prevent an economic collapse. I’m going to go through the dynamics here to justify my premises.

Our demand is probably higher than its even been, which means unless the supply goes up the price of your electric bill or filling up your gas tank will never be lower. It’s bad enough that Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing policies devalue the dollar and enable speculators to drive up the price. It’s also bad enough that because of the globalized 21st century economy, prices rise even further due to the unrest in the Muslim world driving down production in the OPEC countries. Finally there is the rapid industrialization of several large emerging economies: China, India and Brazil. Brazil has a growing offshore oil supply and is ramping up its production, but China and India are not oil rich nations and cannot do the same.

So your energy prices are high, and they will only go higher if there isn’t more expansion of domestic energy production, not just in oil, but in natural gas, wind, nuclear, clean coal, and even–when cost effective–solar. Quite frankly, claiming our production being at a 20 year high (if that’s true) as a reason to stop expanding is pure economic dumbassery.

With our rising national debt, our lackluster job growth, our politicians’ inability to lessen the uncertainty on the private sector, and the Federal Reserve’s massive injections of new dollars into the market–that aren’t backed by economic growth–we face a much bigger problem than the problems conservationists tackle on a regular basis. We face the threat of an economic meltdown, the fall of the United States as a superpower and a much more difficult way of life than anyone in this country who is under the age of 70 or didn’t grow up in an undeveloped country could ever imagine. Its not a matter of Democrats vs. Republicans (and I know the irony of me saying that from a Republican website), its a matter of supply and demand.

Fiat money, when not backed by a hard asset such as silver or gold, is only good if there is demand for it. Demand for the US dollar is not rising as fast as the Federal Reserve is running its printing presses. This will lead to inflation, as long as the Fed continues to pursue this while keeping its interest rates low. Even Keynes, whose followers today laugh at the thought of a dollar collapse and who didn’t predict the housing bubble or 2008 economic crash (with the exception of Nouriel Roubini and few others), knew that increasing money supply should be done during a period of strong economic growth, not the anemic year-to-year growth we have seen over the past couple of years. If you increase the supply when the demand isn’t nearly as strong, you devalue the dollar.

Some Austrian school economic alarmists believe hyperinflation is inevitable. While they deserve credit for predicting the 2008 crash years before it happened, I can’t say I agree with its inevitability. However, I do see it as a possibility. Continuous increases in the money supply, with weak increases in demand for that dollar, and politicians’ inability to tackle our national debt could lead to a fall in confidence of our dollar. That’s the difference between hyperinflation and inflation. The latter is rising prices, the former is when other countries see a significant reduction in the value of your currency, and begin to dump it for other currencies or commodities. Demand for your currency plummets and as a result, the price of everyday living requirements skyrockets.

It’s not a risk worth taking, and neither is inflation. So while our politicians bicker like children and fail to address the debt, economic growth is the only thing that will stop the two.

Increasing our domestic energy production is perhaps the best shot we have at this for many reasons.

Ramping up energy production will create jobs in the industry. More unemployed people go back to work, start paying taxes again, and revenues to the federal government increase.

When people aren’t unnecessarily wasting as much of their money on gasoline and utilities they can be more productive with that spending by spending it on other industries or investing it into new capital. This creates even more jobs. And I do say we are wasting because if the price can be much lower, you’re being inefficient. Inefficiency is a waste.

Lower energy prices  cause the price of other goods to come down across the board, because transportation costs pretty much affect everything. So this offsets some of the inflation that will happen as a result of quantitative easing.

The growth in the economy will strengthen demand for the US dollar, further offsetting  Bernanke’s disastrous easing policies and preventing a dollar collapse prior to his replacement in 2014 (in the case of a Romney victory).

I imagine that Bernanke’s replacement in the event of a Romney victory will be Martin Feldstein. My familiarity with his work suggests to me he would finally allow interest rates to rise and roll back QE3. If this were to happen, we could prevent a debt crisis and a dollar collapse provided our politicians finally figure out how to balance the federal budget. With economic growth, balancing the budget comes much easier.

What I hope everyone takes away from this article is: WE SHOULD NEVER STOP! We should never stop trying to ramp up energy production so long as it cannot meet the demand at the cheapest possible price–and for you conservationists out there, I mean we will do it in a responsible manner. Pete Maysmith–who I hope reads this and learns a thing or two–made a huge error in his premise by ignoring the laws of supply and demand. This line of thought is poisonous, and I ask of my readers that you share this article with as many people as you can. The less people believe his ridiculous notion, that the goal for any or industry to stagnate or decrease production at any level, for any reason, other than falling demand or maxed out capacity, the better off we will be. And as the research shows, rising global energy demand is inevitable and we are far from incapable of increasing the supply in a responsible manner.

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Aaron Alghawi obtained a B.S. in Economics from Texas A&M University in 2012, and is a National At-Large Board Member of the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Remember the 4th Amendment? How does a remote controlled drone knock on your door and present a search warrant?

The answer is that it can’t.

In the name of security our government at the federal, state and local level, has launched another assault on oiur 4th Amendment rights by authorizing the use of military style drones to monitor the activities of civilians with no warrants and no due process of law. With penetrating scanning technology these drones can watch you and listen to your conversations through the walls of your house and even read your email remotely without you even being aware that you are under surveillance, all of this without any kind of Constitutionally required due process of law – no hearing, no charges, no search warrant. Under the PATRIOT Act that drone might as well be sitting in your living room or bedroom, invading every private aspect of your life.

Senator Rand Paul has introduced the Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act (S. 3287) which would require a legal warrant issued by a judge before drones were used for any purpose other than patrolling the borders or pursuing known terrorism suspects. It would keep drones from engaging in preemptive surveillance or broadly tasked data gathering missions as proposed in the PATRIOT Act. It would protect you and other law abiding citizens from being monitored by drones for nothing more than the convenience and curiosity of the NSA or local law enforcement.

Read more about the bill in The Hill and please use our convenient tool below to write your Senators today and ask them to join on as sponsors.

On Thursday the House of Representatives is expected to begin debate on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), leading to a vote next week. This is yet another bill similar to SOPA which is designed to limit privacy and individual liberty on the internet. Now is the time to take action to let them know you don’t want the government accessing and sharing your email and personal data.

CISPA would massively reduce the privacy and security of your online communications and personal data. It would give government agencies and many private companies access to your personal communications and financial information and would allow government security agencies like the National Security Agency unprecedented power to access your data including medical records, private emails and financial information – all without a warrant, oversight by any court or due process of law.

This access to your records would require no misbehavior on your part, not even an accusation of terrorism or criminal activity and it would take place without your knowledge or any opportunity to protect your information or your privacy interests.  That information could then be passed on to private companies or other agencies or used against you with no real rules or restrictions on who could access it or what hands it would end up in.

The Republican Liberty Caucus  joined with other concerned groups like the Liberty Coalition and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to promote “Stop Cyber Spying Week” last week, but now the real push is on to break down support for CISPA and send it to the legislative shredder as we did with SOPA a few months ago.

We urge you to email your representative  in Congress and urge them to oppose CISPA and keep government agencies out of our private online data and communications.

As you all know, I’ve come out pretty strongly against these from the get go.  I have always been against “anti-file sharing” legislation. I blasted Kimba Wood for shutting down Limewire. And I’ve been warning about SOPA for months and PIPA for weeks. Now, the American people are finally waking up. And all it took was 24 hours without Wikipedia. First, let’s discuss exactly what this bill is. Corporatist [quasi-socialist] Hollywood executives, the California Teamsters Union, and greedy entertainers got together with their lobbyist friends and said “hey, get congress to write a bill that lets us make money every time someone so much as looks at us or listens to us, we deserve it!”. Intellectual property laws in this country predate the world wide web by decades, and the lobbyists knew it would be easy to manipulate them for maximum control.

Government also liked the idea. Those in congress that wrote and supported the bill up to this point saw it as an opportunity for unprecedented government power over an area–both an economy and a society in and of itself–that has remained extremely free: the internet. These statists had the ultimate opportunity now to monitor us, influence us, control us, and further consolidate their power as time goes on. That is what awaits us if these bills pass. Unprecedented power for the political class. All it takes is a few greedy people to abuse their power. Let’s go back to the entertainment industry and how they’ve abused IP laws over the years to make a dime every which way they can:

You can clearly tell the effect of Big Hollyweird lobbyists on the net worth of entertainers. Elvis was once at the top of the world. At his death, his net worth was $7 million (1977 dollars) which is anywhere from 18-25 million in 2010 dollars. (see inflation calculator: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/)

Now compare that to Katy Perry. She’s a top artist of today, but she’s not as popular today as Elvis was in his time. Her current net worth after about 5 years being mainstream (and the entire time during a recession) is $55 million.

Someone like Snoop Dogg with 20 years of fame may be a better comparison. His net worth is $150 million.

I’m not trying to single out Snoop as greedy or anything, he’s had a lot of time to invest. And of course there are exogenous factors like a more globalized economy. Powerful emerging economies of like Russia, Brazil, South Korea and Taiwan wouldn’t have been able to access American entertainment with such ease and in such high quotas prior to the fall of the Soviet empire and the advent of internet music. But that can’t possibly be the only cause of so much more wealth among musicians (not to mention actors, directors, crew, writers, etc) today. I’m trying to point out that Hollywood corporatism has amassed what is a disproportionate and most-likely unfair amount of money for entertainers. Why do you think they have lobbied so hard for SOPA and PIPA? They are trying to milk us for every dime they can.

In a true free market, they wouldn’t make half the money they do. File sharing like Limewire would still exist without limits on their content. Youtube would stream content. Nobody could do anything about it unless the person sharing or streaming was making money off of the “stolen” content (like those bootleg DVDs from China). You wouldn’t be put in prison for playing a pop music song in a home movie uploaded to Youtube…a song that pretty much everyone has heard because we live in the internet age. File sharing of songs obviously occurred because the market did not demand the music enough to pay large amounts of money for it. iTunes came along with a la carte music purchasing and over time, people would switch to one of the two as opposed to buying CDs. Did this really make entertainers poorer? NO! They got richer! And so did the film industry! In 2010, in a weak economy, Hollywood execs raked in more money than they did in 2007 when the economy was strong; right before the recession began its onslaught on our jobs and investments.

It’s also been very interesting to watch America’s unity against SOPA. This is going hard! Liberals, conservatives, moderates, libertarians; all coming out against Big Hollyweird. I love it! Al Gore and Ron Paul agreeing on something? I don’t think America has ever been more united on something in my lifetime other than killing Osama bin Laden. (Now, try to imagine the blowback of a hypothetical Santorum Administration shutting down the porn industry )

As for Nancy Pelosi and even some of my fellow Republicans that have come out against this in recent hours….I mean days….it’s clearly to save their own skin. Let’s take a good hard look at the people who wrote the bill and pushed it for so long. Make sure to be unforgiving at the polls (Lamar Smith, look out!)

I do want to say one more thing. It’s amazing what 24 hours without Wikipedia can do. They and the folks at Reddit shut down to get people’s attention. It WORKED! This is an example of what will happen if we continue this move toward socialism and continue to raise taxes and regulations on the entrepreneurial class. One day, they will say “enough!” and quit investing and creating jobs. When that happens, this recession we recently had will look like a boom by comparison. Wikipedia can just go back online tomorrow. Economies….not so much. I am confident that the House will strike down SOPA. Call your senators, and make sure that their equivalent–the Protect IP Act–is killed as well!

In Liberty,

Aaron Alghawi ’12

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Aaron Alghawi is a senior economics major at Texas A&M University, as well as an alternate board member and Director of Student Outreach for the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Now is the Time to Speak Up!
Write or Call Your Representatives in the House and Senate

In response to lobbying from media industry groups like the MPAA and Creative America, the House and Senate are now both considering bills which would allow large media businesses to shut down virtually any website with nothing more than an unfounded accusation and no due process of law whatsoever.

In the Senate this takes the form of the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act” (S 968), which was blocked this Spring by Senator. Ron Wyden (D-OR) but is now back on the docket for consideration and appears to have widespread bipartisan support.  In the House it’s the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (HR 3261) which was introduced by the leaders of the House Judiciary Committee, led by the notorious Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) who also brought us the PATRIOT Act, E-Verify and a recent bill to punish travellers for smoking marijuana in foreign countries.

The ostensible purpose of the bills is to go after large-scale media pirates, many operating offshore, who the supporters claim pirate more than 500,000 movies every year, which seems like a reasonable claim.  But as is too often the case with government solutions to complex problems the proposed solution is excessive and open to enormous abuse.  The problem is that as it is written, the language of the PROTECT IP bill is so broad  that it would allow anyone owning a copyright to accuse any website of infringing that copyright and shut the website down by court order, actually scrubbing its IP address from the internet, all with no due process or hearing of any evidence or ruling from a court.  The mere filing of a complaint would result in preemptive shut-down of the accused website, requiring backbone service providers to block any access to it, treating the owner of the site as guilty until he could prove his innocence, likely at a considerable cost in legal fees.

The potential for abuse in this sort of legislation has already been demonstrated by the misuse of existing laws to shut down websites with potentially criminal content. There was a notable case last year where the FBI issued a simple query to a hosting service about one website with suspect content and it led to the shutdown of 73,000 websites out of concern over liability under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and other draconian laws which are already on the books.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has made its concern over the potential for abuse in these acts very clear, and has raised a further concern. They believe that fear of unmerited shutdowns under the act will lead to excessive self-policing by frightened service providers, stifling free speech and many forms of commerce on the internet.

The EFF’s Corynne McSherry writes that it “would authorize massive interference with the Internet, all in the name of a fruitless quest to stamp out all infringement online.” She points out that the potential for abuse under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is minimized by the “Safe Harbor” provisions of that bill, but that this new legislation would eliminate or bypass many of those protections and would “threaten to effectively eliminate the DMCA safe harbors that, while imperfect, have spurred much economic growth and online creativity.” She concludes that SOPA is “the worst piece of IP legislation we’ve seen in the last decade.”

It is not unreasonable for the government to be able to shut down websites which are engaging in criminal activity, but it should be the outcome of legal due process.  It should require the presentation of evidence to a court and a ruling that there is just cause to shut that sight down.  It should not be done solely on suspicion or through intimidation or as an act of prior restraint, with the presumption of guilt and the burden of proof transferred to the accused.  This is directly contrary to the fundamental legal principles outlined in the Bill of Rights and recognized under common law.

Please help support our work to bring our government under control and restore our liberties by donating using the PayPal link below. You can also join the RLCto become part of our network of member-activists. To make a recurring monthly donation try this link: Enter the maximum amount to pay each month: $ USD Sign up for

Small business leaders and internet entrepreneurs recently sent a letter to Congress, warning that the PROTECT IP Act threatens their ability to continue to expand new and innovative online businesses.  They observe that “the bill will ensnare innocent victims” and “create uncertainty for many legitimate businesses and in turn undermine innovation and creativity on those services,” while “the dedicated pirates who use and operate ‘rogue’ sites will simply migrate to platforms that conceal their activities.”

The amazing freedom to innovate and to engage in entrepreneurial creativity which the intenet has empowered is genuinely under threat from the proliferation of this kind of legislation.  As the United States has lost the lead in traditional manufacturing, we have seen most of our growth in the online business sector.  This is where the jobs of the new millenium are and it is where most of the hope for economic recovery lies.  PROTCT IP and SOPA will have a chilling effect on this increasingly important sectory of the economy and lead to wholesale violations of the privacy rights of individuals and businesses.  It’s another bad idea from a government which has become too big and too eager to interfere in every aspect of our lives.

Some elements of this article appeared previously in Blogcritics Magazine.

The patently unconstitutional “REAL ID” implementation has been delayed for the third time. Passed in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security has extended state implementation of the law to January 2013.

Homeland Security officials said the deadline was extended because most states would not be able to meet all the federal requirements of the so-called Real ID Act by May 11, 2011.

Twenty-four states are refusing to comply with the regulations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Sixteen of them — including Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Utah — have passed laws prohibiting compliance with Real ID, citing privacy and funding issues. The other eight — including Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois and Nevada — have passed resolutions opposing the law.

Republican Reps. Darrell Issa, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Lamar Smith were outraged at the delay on implementation. “The administration should not prolong Real ID implementation. By doing so, they disregard the law of the land. Delaying Real ID unnecessarily places Americans’ lives at risk and threatens national security,” said Smith, of Texas.

There is no evidence that REAL ID — a national ID card — is constitutional. If implemented, it would prohibit freedom of movement and violate individual privacy like no other law in American history.

Earlier this week, freshman Texas state Representative David Simpson (R-Longview) has filed two bills to try to counter the threat of the TSA in Texas airports. One bill would ban airport body scanner in Texas. The legislation already has 18 co-sponsors from both parties. The other bill would make sexual contact with airline passengers by TSA agents a state felony.

David Simpson was endorsed by the RLC last year. He also spoke at a RLC meeting in November.

The bill, HB 1938, makes it a civil penalty for anyone working in a locally owned airport to install or operate whole-body imaging equipment — “including a device that uses backscatter x-rays or millimeter waves, that creates a visual image of a person’s unclothed body and is intended to detect concealed objects.” The penalty is capped at $1,000 per day per violation.

Simpson may also have the backing of U.S. Congressman John Carter of Texas, a member of the U.S. House Appropriations and Homeland Security committees. “On Thursday I met with U.S. Congressman John Carter to discuss strategies for stopping the federal Transportation Safety Administration’s implementation of unconstitutional and unreasonable searches of U.S. citizens as a condition of travel,” Simpson wrote in a blog post.

The bill is supported by the Travis County Republican Party, ACLU-Texas, and the Austin-based Texans for Accountable Government. Co-authors so far include: Reps. Jose Aliseda (R-Beeville), Leo Berman (R-Tyler), Joe Deshotel (D-Beaumont), Allen Fletcher (R-Tomball), Dan Flynn (R-Vann), John V. Garza (R-San Antonio), Larry Gonzales (R-Round Rock), Ryan Guillen (D-Rio Grande City), Charlie Howard (R-Sugar Land), Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), Jason Isaac (R-Dripping Springs), Jim Landtroop (R-Big Spring), Jodie Laubenberg (R-Rockwall), Charles Perry (R-Lubbock), Debbie Riddle (R-Houston), Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston), and James White (R-Hillister).

(I guess it’s about time I set down this bit of history. In the context of the Net Neutrality debate it seems like something which ought to be made public, and as the youngest participant in these events I may eventually become the last surviving eyewitness. Photo to right is me in 1979 with hair and everything.)

In 1979 I was a junior at Franklin and Marshall College. I was also a fledgling Science Fiction writer with several professionally published stories, a libertarian activist who had worked on a couple of campaigns and formed a chapter of Students of a Libertarian Society and also what passed for a hacker in those early days of computers. Somehow that summer I lucked into the perfect internship in Washington, DC. Because I attended the right high school and with some pull from my mother, who worked for Senator Mac Mathias, I got an internship as a writer and editor for What’s Next newsletter published by the Congressional Clearing House on the Future, which was largely under the oversight of a dynamic young Congressman named Al Gore.

Gore and I had both attended St. Albans School in DC, about 10 years apart. At that point he was in his second term in the House of Representatives and he had decided that his way to make a mark was to become the leading Congressional voice for the emerging world of high tech. The Congressional Clearing House on the Future was his vehicle for doing this. It basically brought in information from the frontiers of science, analyzed it and put it into a form where busy politicians could figure out what to think about it. My job was to do research and write introductory articles on a wide variety of topics, including satellites, solar energy, microwaves, charged particle beam weapons, space exploration and research, and the frontiers of computers and communications. I was good at taking technical topics and summarizing them for a more general audience and got lots of practice at it while I was with the CCF.

As a lowly intern I really had very little direct contact with Congressman Gore. He did call on the phone a few times and I got to field a couple of technical questions in areas where I had some expertise. Apparently somewhere along the way someone must have passed on to him that I knew more about computers than anyone else on staff and I guess I had proved pretty adept at using LexisNexis (one of the very first major online databases) for research, plus I had a background in computer typesetting. So I got pegged to do a lot of work relating to a series of meetings called the Chautauquas for Congress sponsored by CCF and Rep. Gore. These meetings had begun in March and I came in towards the end. They brought together experts from private industry, government, the military, academia and the press to discuss emerging aspects of technology. One of those was computers and communications, and it was the results of that meeting which gave Al Gore some claim to having invented the internet, though to be fair his role in sponsoring the chautauquas was more that of a facilitator who brought the work of many inventors together than that of an actual inventor.

The primary session on computers and telecommunication had taken place in March and I didn’t get to CCF until May, but I got to be involved in the processing of reports from the meetings so I was one of the first people to see the very speculative early proposals for what would become the internet and I got to work at the later sessions, including the June meeting where final reports on various topics were presented. Admittedly, my role at those sessions was mostly to make sure chairs and tables were set up and that snacks were on hand, but I had also gone through the reports and helped prepare summaries of some very interesting discussions, and I got to stand in the back and hear the presentations.

It was the initial panel discussions at the Chautauquas which had led to the first consensus on what would emerge not long afterward as the fledgling internet. The ideas developed there would soon be implemented and the result was a shared network which first became accessible to a rapidly growing segment of the public in the form of Usenet in the early 1980s. It was that concept, of adopting common protocols to bring together existing private and government networks which created the internet as we know it and for which Al Gore has taken credit with some justification, as the point man on bringing all these experts together through these Chautauquas. I guess I can take some small credit to for helping the process along. Looking back at what was discussed at the time it surprises me how perceptive many of the participants were about the implications of technology which was really only just beginning to emerge and also how quickly the ideas were put into action. Usenet first went online by the end of that year.

Although, as a libertarian, I am chronically skeptical of the efforts of government, this experience was one which demonstrated how positive the role of government can be when it is primarily a passive and not an activist role. All the Chautauquas did was to bring people together to share information. There were no official conclusions, no real legislative outcome, no government initiatives to create the internet, just a promotion of ideas and innovation coordinated from a position of governmental neutrality. It did informally give the stamp of approval to government agencies and even the military in opening up their networks and sharing technology, but what it did not do was lay out rules and regulations, though Gore did eventually author legislation formalizing some of the relaxation of access required. The technical and administrative aspects of the internet were left to develop naturally.

Since that time this has pretty much been the rule of the internet. It’s the wild west. Everyone does what they want to do and no one, including the government, looks at it too closely. The benefits it has produced are enormous. It’s the great revolutionary development of its time on a par with the train and the automobile. It seems almost crazy to do anything which might interfere with it. For a government it might even be a terribly dangerous thing to attempt.

Yet today we see government attempting to get more heavily involved. With the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act we’ve seen government working as a hired thug for corporate interests attempting to control dissemination of data through high-speed transfer portals like BitTorrent. Congress is considering even more draconian legislation to control internet content in Patrick Leahy’s (D-VT) very broad Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. And most recently the FCC has weighed in with its attempt to impose “net neutrality”, ostensibly to protect the interests of citizens, but with the potential to make the government the arbiter of bandwidth allocation and from there of every aspect of access and functionality on the net. Further legislation and further regulation from the FCC is expected and increasingly the focus seems to be shifting to regulating content itself. This carries disturbing implications for free speech in the medium which has become the dominant outlet for public speech in the world.

When the internet was created, this level of government involvement was never the intent. The conclusion coming out of the Chautauquas was that great things would happen if we opened up the netwroks and lifted restrictions and let the people have free and unfettered access to this kind of network, even if at the time we could barely conceive of what it would become. And the cornerstone of the internet as it was created was neutrality. Not as imposed by the government to try to level the playing field according to some contrived criteria, but as it developed naturally by not restricting access and opportunity. That hands-off approach is the definition of true net neutrality.

When asked what role government should play in this process, Professor Manley Irwin, who was on the Panel on Information and Communication commented “The single most important action Congress can take is to get out of the way.” That approach worked brilliantly for 30 years and has brought us incalculable benefits. What justification is there for changing it now?

Despite the fact that over 70 Representatives were not present in Congress to vote, December 21 was a terrible day for advocates of individual liberty and limited government.

First, the Federal Communications Commission’s 3 Democrat majority voted to approve proposed rules that amount to a hostile takeover of the Internet by a government agency. The proposal — misleadingly described by proponents as an attempt to insure “net neutrality” by guaranteeing equal access to the Internet — was introduced a year ago by Obama’s appointed FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.

A federal court has ruled that the commission has no authority to regulate the Internet, and a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives warned Genechowski not to attempt to impose a regulatory regime on the Internet earlier this year. The FCC, an unelected bureaucracy, still has not released the full text of its net neutrality rules yet.

You better believe that this unconstitutional power grab to secure “net neutrality” by the FCC is just a small sign of whats to come in the realm of federal regulation of private citizen behavior.

And, on that note, the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate both passed the so-called Food Safety and Modernization Act — the largest government power grab as it relates to food since 1938 (when Congress gave the FDA the authority to oversee the safety of food, drugs and cosmetics).

But, have no fear, it will only cost $1.4 billion to implement the new “safety” regulations.

The law will give the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the FDA tremendous control over the U.S. food supply. It also puts all food and all U.S. farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. The bill includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals. And it will allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs.

Not only did 74 members of Congress fail to vote on the measure, but the bill also passed the Senate without a single dissenter. Fortunately, the new Congress will be in session soon, where I have no doubt there would have been someone with the courage to hold up this anti-liberty legislation.

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”

The Who’s line is as true now as it was in 1971 and as true as the similar old French saying, “the more things change the more they stay the same.” The same idea is repeated again and again in folk wisdom from every culture, which suggests that it’s based on a shared element of human experience. Change is inevitable, but too often its results are only superficial.

In this case, the deja vu we’d rather not be experiencing all over again comes from the Obama Administration’s diligent efforts to out-do his much-reviled predecessor when it comes to shredding our constitutional rights in the interest of national security. Like President Bush, President Obama seems intent on focusing his efforts on rendering the Fourth Amendment utterly meaningless. You know that amendment. It reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s the Amendment that reminds government and other entities that we have an absolute right to privacy which they can’t just violate at a whim. It’s been under assault for years and eroded away more and more with each new governmental initiative to protect us from the latest bogeyman or from ourselves. The War on Drugs with its asset seizures and warrantless searches has been wearing away at our rights for more than 30 years, but nothing has done more harm than the War on Terror which took the cold-war era Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and expanded it into a blanket authorization to execute thousands of warrantless wiretaps against US citizens, often with very little justification and virtually no accountability.

FISA was already blatantly in violation of the Fourth Amendment before the Bush administration got hold of it. They took the blanket authorization for unlimited wiretapping which was implied in the legislation and ran with it, making it the justification for data mining and automated content scanning of telecommunications completely outside the scope of the technology available when FISA was written, but arguably authorized under the overly broad language of the law.

When challenged, they went to the compliant congress and got amendments to the FISA Act in 2008 which protected many of their practices and reduced the level of accountability in the act still further. The ACLU has launched a lawsuit over the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but to date it remains in force, giving unprecedented power to the federal government to basically scan and listen to any telecommunications with no prior approval.

Although you might think that President Obama, riding in on his white horse last November, might be here to save us from the Bush administration’s assault on our rights, it turns out that when it comes to warrantless surveillance, they’re enthusiastic supporters of the program and are even willing to take the idea of complete lack of accountability for violating our privacy to a higher level. In a motion to dismiss the case Jewel v. NSA, the Obama Justice Department they reiterated the Bush-era argument that cases against FISA cannot even be brought because they “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.”

Going even further than did Bush, they also argue that the idea of ‘sovereign immunity’ makes the Department of Justice completely immune from any prosecution for violating the rights of citizens. Not only do we not have the protection of due process under the Fourth Amendment, but now we have no standing to sue and even if we do get a case in court the government is immune from any prosecution. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation interprets it, “Essentially, the Obama Administration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.” So we might as well lie back and take whatever they want to do to us, because those Fourth Amendment rights are just gone forever.

This is a strange and ironic change from candidate Obama who said he wanted more transparency in government, but perhaps even more ominous is the latest move from the administration to take complete control of the internet under the newly proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009 which follows an earlier act which would establish a “Cybersecurity Czar” to oversee internet security. This bill will give the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit internet traffic at any time “in the interest of national security,” a situation whose parameters are left undefined. What’s worse, it gives the Secretary of Commerce “access to all relevant data concerning (critical) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.” This is another attack on the Fourth Amendment, giving completely unaccountable federal officials total access to internet communications without any safeguards of the rights and privacy of citizens. There’s no requirement for a warrant, no need for probable cause, no liability for any harm done and not even any requirement for reporting or limitations on how these powers can be exercises.

This proposed act runs directly counter to the protections provided in the Fourth Amendment and also the Electronic Communications Privacy Act which was passed in the 1980s to reaffirm that privacy rights applied to internet communications. The act is supported by powerful congressional Democrats and by the Obama administration, so it stands a reasonably good chance of passing, and it’s just the first step in a comprehensive strategy to expand government control over the internet and what goes on there. The good news is that unlike FISA and its recent amendments, this bill has not yet passed into law and it’s possible that with enough public opposition it might be altered to include safeguards for the privacy rights of citizens while still addressing legitimate national security needs.

With FISA and the expansion of FISA under the Bush administration we saw too much of our liberty legislated away in the name of national security. It is now clear that the Obama administration wants to continue and expand on that trend. It has never seemed more believable that the future of universal surveillance and the elimination of personal privacy envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984 might become a reality. The Fourth Amendment was a powerful and definitive statement on privacy rights, but as things stand today it is almost as if it never existed. It is not being observed or enforced and seems to mean nothing to the bureaucrats of the security establishment or the current administration.

We may very well need protection from terrorists and malicious hackers and cyberwarfare, but safety from those threats has much less value if we lose our basic freedoms in the process.

It is fundamentally wrong to treat all citizens as criminals to catch the real criminals or to take away everyone’s privacy to expose hidden enemies. The emergence of new technology and new mediums of communication does not make our old-fashioned rights obsolete. We just have to find new ways to preserve and protect those rights within the new worlds which technology has opened up for us.

As we go forward, the preservation of our rights and protection of citizens from government as well as external threats, must be our highest priority.