From Albert Jay Nock:

“I once voted at a Presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, and neither candidate commanding any respect whatever, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward’s principle that if we can’t have a live man who amounts to anything, by all means let’s have a first-class corpse. I still think that vote was as effective as any of the millions that have been cast since then.”

And on a more serious note:

“Even a successful revolution, even if such a thing were conceivable, against the military tyranny which is Statism’s last expedient, would accomplish nothing. The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with Statism after the revolution as they were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution, but a coup d’Etat, by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors. There have been many revolutions in the last twenty-five years, and thus has been the sum of their history. They amount to no more than an impressive testimony to the great truth that there can be no right action except there be right thinking behind it.As long as the easy, attractive, superficial philosophy of Statism remains in control of the citizen’s mind, no beneficent social change can be affected, whether by revolution or by any other means.”

Motherboard: Apple’s position on privacy is paying off: “Apple has its own host of issues—labor practices up and down its supply chain, walled gardens, the environmental toll of creating highly intricate devices that are difficult to repair and impossible to upgrade. But Apple’s fundamental business model does not focus on turning its customers into sellable datasets. While Apple has had every opportunity to turn its devices and services into data collection opportunities, it has instead largely focused on a straightforward business model of selling and facilitating the sale of goods, services, and software.

Apple’s focus on protecting its customers’ privacy has given it the moral high ground—both when the FBI asked the company to hack into an iPhone, and now, when it seems Silicon Valley is going to drown with the constant drip-drip-drip of new privacy abuses becoming widely known.”

The Intercept: Department of Justice charges FBI whistleblower under Espionage Act

Washington Times: IG will probe FBI abuses of FISA after Trump campaign surveillance

Activist Post: Five thousand inventions in limbo under “secrecy orders” at the U.S. patent office

EFF: Thinking about what you need in a secure messenger

JOHN WHITEHEAD: If you really want to save lives, take aim at government violence

FEE: Administrative law is the real “Deep State”: “What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? …the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state. Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government… Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution… Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar…says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School… “The government can choose to…use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law…” In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. …“The framers of the Constitution were very clear about this,” Mr. Hamburger says…”Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers to an agency, just as judges cannot delegate their power to an agency.””

Mises: How the White House hijacked the ability to declare war

RealClearScience: Meet your interstitium, a newfound ‘organ’

Motherboard: China is using its facial recognition tech to send jaywalkers fines through text messages

The Guardian: Beware the smart toaster: 18 tips for surviving the surveillance age

NPR: A needle in a legal haystack could sink a major Supreme Court privacy case

Forbes: Can government force you to speak contrary to your beliefs?

Reason: Gerrymandering is out of control

High Times: Marijuana arrests plummet in New Orleans after policy change

Mises: The difference between good globalism and bad globalism

Gizmodo: Could Higgs Boson and primordial black holes explain dark matter?