EFF: The U.S. CLOUD Act and the EU: A privacy protection race to the bottom

Metro: Facebook can predict people’s behavior by spying through their smartphone, patent reveals

WSWS: Behind the Facebook data scandal: The drive to censor the internet

The Hill: It would have taken more than privacy laws to prevent the Cambridge Analytica scandal

Reason: A bunch of Senators just showed they have no idea how Facebook works. They want to regulate it anyway.

Mashable: When ICE asks Facebook for help, Zuckerberg pledges to say ‘no’

National Review: Mark Zuckerberg’s insufferable tripe

The Week: The case for doing nothing in Syria

The American Conservative: Trump’s rush to judgment on Syria chemical attack

SHELDON RICHMAN: Who’s afraid of Russian propaganda?

Activist Post: Homeland Security thinks wearing black means you’re an anarchist

Mises: Why big government, big banks, and big tech all hate cash

Reason: Beware censorship by proxy: “Just as one effective end-run around the Fourth Amendment is to ask private companies for data they slurped up on their own, the First Amendment can be sidestepped when officials pressure the private sector into self-censorship. The end result can be rules more restrictive than the companies would impose on their own—and more intrusive than the government could get away with if it tried to impose them directly.”

Washington Post: How the FBI uses the Freedom of Information Act to track down whistleblowers

City Lab: The evolution of domestic spying since MLK in Memphis

Independent: Is YouTube spying on your children? FTC complaint warns of improper data collection

Futurism: World’s most valuable AI startup also happens to be a part of “the world’s biggest system of surveillance”

Bloomberg: America’s virtual border wall is a 1,954-mile-long money pit

The Federalist: How eradicating bad bots can quickly mutate into cracking down on free humans

Variety: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak deactivates Facebook account over privacy concerns

Mises: What makes AI dangerous? The State.

Techdirt: FBI is using classified tools for regular investigations and that’s going to end up hurting everyone

LA Times: Trump’s impulsive, falsehood-laden call to militarize the U.S.-Mexico border

Volokh: Wells Fargo resists union threats aimed at getting it to drop gun manufacturer clients

From his essay, The State vs. Liberty:

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”

If taxation isn’t theft, then the implication is that the government owns every bit of your property, allowing you to keep what you currently have as a privilege.  In other words, the master/slave dynamic.

The Hill: New push to break deadlock over encrypted phones

Ars Technica: How to keep your ISP’s nose out of your browser history with encrypted DNS

Futurism: Facebook sought medical data. Yes, that should raise red flags.

Activist Post: Homeland Security wants to create profiles of journalists and “media influencers” who mention its name

The Week: Gun owners against police violence

Zero Hedge: How gun control laws for “mentally ill” could disarm those who question authority

Reason: Was Trump elected to take revenge on job-stealing robots? If so, he’s doing great work

The American Conservative: Sinclair and the fake news battle that never ends

WENDY MCELROY: Violence Against Women Act is a true product of Washington’s swamp

Daily Beast: Why does Nanny-State California hate coffee so much?

And more on the bizarre story from Cato: California’s coffee chaos

FreeThoughtProject: Coincidence? Every time the US threatens to pull out of Syria, Assad uses chemical weapons

FEE: Could Amazon buy a country?

High Times: 5 over-the-counter medications that are more dangerous than weed

The Conversation: Best way to solve back pain? Lift heavy things

From Chapter 6 of his masterwork, The Constitution of Liberty:

“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position,6 and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time. The equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality. Our argument will be that, though where the state must use coercion for other reasons, it should treat all people alike, the desire of making people more alike in their condition cannot be accepted in a free society as a justification for further and discriminatory coercion.

We do not object to equality as such. It merely happens to be the case that a demand for equality is the professed motive of most of those who desire to impose upon society a preconceived pattern of distribution. Our objection is against all attempts to impress upon society a deliberately chosen pattern of distribution, whether it be an order of equality or of inequality. We shall indeed see that many of those who demand an extension of equality do not really demand equality but a distribution that conforms more closely to human conceptions of individual merit and that their desires are as irreconcilable with freedom as the more strictly egalitarian demands.”

Thank you for the continued page views.  For new readers, this is basically a stripped-down news-aggregation site from the point of view of an active participant in the Ron Paul Revolution. I’ll try to post around 20 stories of the day, depending on the amount of free time I have in the evening. Some nights you’ll get more, and some (like now) you’ll get less.  But they are all important for understanding the issues of the day, and offer a perspective you won’t find among more mainstream outlets. Thanks for reading.

Ars Technica: Homeland Security defends media-monitoring database, calls critics “conspiracy theorists”Ed: They want to track journalists and their sources, just like every other authoritarian government since the dawn of man

Motherboard: Facebook promises not to secretly delete more of Zuckerberg’s messages for now

CityLab: Police shootings are also gun violence

LA Times: There’s no pot of gold at the end of a trade war with China

Cato: From “opioid epidemic” to “stimulant epidemic”

FEE: Which state will be the first to suffer fiscal collapse?

Mises: Forget electoral democracy, give “demarchy” a chance

Activist Post: Fake “fake news” is a threat to democracy

Nautilus: Brain implant could help us compete with AI

And now for something entirely different: The greatest single piece of music ever written for solo violin, performed by Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violin who has ever lived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbX3frq3Qyo

Splinter: Muslim Americans win landmark victory against the NYPD’s post-9/11 spying

ACLU: Californians are winning the fight against secret surveillance

Mashable: Activists show up at Facebook HQ to demand better privacy

Gizmodo: Facebook backs off of creepy hospital data-sharing project for some reason

Washington Post: A power that lets police take property for themselves, even when there’s no crime

Ars Technica: Google employees revolt, say company should shut down military drone project Ed: Everyone, and every company, has a price, regardless of whether or not your slogan is “Don’t be evil”

New York Times: Trump’s irrational border plan

Mises: Starbucks and Dick’s can be anti-gun if consumers will let them.  Ed: This article makes an important point. Namely, that property rights trump all other rights.  Property rights, indeed, are the foundational right, from which all other rights spring, you could say.  Which means that, regardless of what the government says about your right to “bear arms”, my rules about what happens on my property supersedes your right to carry a weapon when on it.  If I open a business, it is my right to allow or prohibit firearms as I see fit.  If I open cake-baking business, it is my right to do business with whom I choose.  The ability to choose with whom to interact, the ability to discriminate among people, businesses, organizations, etc., is the essence of liberty.  Forced interaction should be labeled plainly as slavery, which it most certainly is.  Liberty eliminates the master/servant relationship.

Times of Israel: Twitter: 1 million accounts suspended for ‘terrorism promotion’ since 2015

Techdirt: More governments granting themselves extra censorship powers with “fake news” laws

Activist Post: New surveillance camera software allows law enforcement to identify groups of people in real-time

Reason: No, Starbucks coffee won’t give you cancer. But California regulations will let people sue your roasting business into oblivion.

FEE: Venezuela’s president tackles economic crisis by deleting 3 zeroes from currency

Also FEE: China’s ‘Social Credit’ system sounds pretty dystopian, but are we far behind?

High Times: Legal marijuana sales could surpass soda sales by 2030 Ed: We can only hope

Seeker: Here’s how magic mushrooms probably became psychedelic

Quillette: The case for sustainable meat Ed: Personally ambivalent about an entirely plant-based diet, but I understand the moral dilemma present in the consumption of an animal that I couldn’t bring myself to kill. But is my lack of hesitation to kill a plant for consumption due to the fact that its anguish and pain isn’t communicable to me in terms that I understand at an emotional level the way a dog, cat, or cow’s is?  Veggies are a cleaner, more silent kill, but is it not the snuffing out of a life nonetheless? I’ve never given the questions much consideration, mainly because I believe the problem of humans slaughtering and enslaving other humans takes precedence, but the pursuit of humane living is noble, granted that it is done with honest intentions, rather than shallow virtue-signalling.

Aeon: Dungeons and Dragons, no chess and Go: Why AI needs roleplay

The Federalist: How U.S. foreign intervention created our domestic Surveillance State

Variety: Facebook admits to scanning private messages, releases privacy policy updates

BoingBoing: Zuckerberg: Facebook will not stop spying on Americans to comply with EU privacy law

The Hill: The great data robbery

The Guardian: We work for Google. Our employer shouldn’t be in the business of war.

Newsweek: Is the government spying on you? Why ‘Stingray’ tech is so controversial

Reason: Court to cops: Shoot first, think later

Invaluable point: National Review: Shouldn’t police at home exhibit at least as much discipline as soldiers at war?

New York Times: “All it takes is one mistake”: Worries over plan to send National Guard to border

Reason: Hey, Beltway denizens: Spies are tracking your phones, so maybe don’t ruin encryption: “This push to force access into phones comes at odds with the cybersecurity needs of everyone in D.C. who works in politics. You’d think their own sense of self-preservation would put a damper on these efforts, but no.

In fact, the Associated Press notes that the feds don’t seem that interested even in doing something about the cell tower simulators being operated in their own backyard by people or governments unknown. Why? Because “there was no political will to tackle the issue against opposition from the intelligence community and local police forces that were using the devices ‘willy-nilly.'”

That’s the encryption fight in a nutshell. Cops and spies don’t care about your data security if it makes it harder for them to access whatever they want. And that position seems implacable, even if it increases the likelihood that Americans will become victims of criminal hacking.”

From chapter 6 of his invaluable, and under-read, treatise, The Constitution of Liberty: 

“It is neither because it assumes that people are in fact equal nor because it attempts to make them equal that the argument for liberty demands that government treat them equally. This argument not only recognizes that individuals are very different but in a great measure rests on that assumption. It insists that these individual differences provide no justification for government to treat them differently. And it objects to the differences in treatment by the state that would be necessary if persons who are in fact very different were to be assured equal positions in life.”

The protection of the individual sphere of voluntary interaction is the chief duty of government, anything more violates that principle for the sake of expediency.

Hat-tip to the person rereading Hayek with me, resulting in the the rediscovery of hidden gems like the one above.