Via Julian, diarist at Daily Kos has repeated the complaint that libertarians have been AWOL on FISA. This is beyond silly. Let me offer a quick timeline:
Feb 1: Cato’s daily podcast features me discussing the FISA debate. And on Cato’s blog, I debunk the idea that telecom immunity is about trial lawyers.
Feb 3: Reason’s Julian Sanchez pens a piece for the popular tech news site Ars Technica titled “Unchecked surveillance threatens security as well as privacy.”
Feb 4: Julian criticizes the White House for letting the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board sit empty.
Feb 13: Cato president Ed Crane pens a piece titled “No, a President Can’t Do as He Pleases.” The same day, I have a piece in Slate wondering why conservatives are so opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants, but are gung-ho for telecom immunity. And Jacob Sullum asks some pointed questions about the Senate bill.
Feb 14: In a post for Techdirt, Julian praises House Democrats for standing up to Republican fearmongering and letting the Protect America Act expire. The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Slater quotes my Slate piece.
Feb 15: Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias cites my Slate article.
Feb 16: The Protect American Act expires. The Washington Timesruns a story that quotes me saying that the PAA expiration won’t endanger Americans’ safety.
Feb 18: Keith Olberman quotes me on national television saying that the PAA’s expiration is no big deal. Cato’s Daily podcast features me explaining that the expiration of the PAA hasn’t caused the sky to fall. I also discuss FISA with Cato’s WIll Wilkinson on Bloggingheads.tv.
Feb 19: Speaker Pelosi quotes my Slate piece on her blog. Gene Healy and I have a piece in the Orange County Register describing the history of abuses that led to FISA’s original passage.
Feb 20: At Cato’s blog, I criticize a post at NRO defending the White House on FISA.
Feb 21: Julian covers the Republicans’ discharge efforts at Techdirt.
Feb 23: The ACLU cites Cato in a press release related to FISA.
Feb 28: Cato releases a statement by me disagreeing with the president’s statement on FISA.
That’s nowhere close to an exhaustive list, and that was all in February. I’ve been writing about this subject since 2006, and so has Julian. Maybe our friends at Daily Kos could do a little bit of research before making sweeping statements about what libertarians have or haven’t been doing?
Aw, you libertarians only vocally oppose FISA because you don't want the gummint listening in when you trade your hedge funds, hook up with your pot dealers and hire call girls.
Also, you resist forcing people to buy health insurance. So, you know, this doesn't really count.
I wouldn't say that you've been AWOL on the FISA issue. Libertarians have a good record in criticizing government agencies for their transgressions against individual liberties.
But where is the Libertarian concern about the actions by private companies that trespass freedoms?
In the case where they are part of a government effort, Libertarians do criticize governemnt, and those business entities that acted on the governments behalf.
But where a private entity has acted to restrict freedom, where is the libertarian outrage about that?
So, looking at the following items, can you direct me to a similar list of libertarian articles/post?
1. WHNT’s Technical Glitches The New York Times | Editorial Wednesday 27 February 2008 In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: “Sorry, Cable Trouble.” Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a “60 minutes” segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama’s former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.
2. It seems Julius Baer, the venerable Swiss Bank, has managed to suppress the site wikileaks. The site was a magnet for whistle blowers of all kinds, but now has been taken off-line in USA.
3. Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2007 Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off...
4. In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.
5.In 2005, Canada’s telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute.
6. Shaw, a big Canadian cable TV company, is charging an extra $10 a month to subscribers in order to “enhance” competing Internet telephone services.
7. In April, Time Warner’s AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com - an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.
8. In addition to the well-noted censorship of Pearl Jam, here's a list of acts that AT&T; has censored:
Alleged: Nightwatchman (Tom Morello) @ Bonnaroo 2007 (Nightwatchman message board) Did anyone else watch The Nightwatchman live stream from bonnaroo? Everytime Tom began to talk the audio would cut out. I’m assuming that it wasnt just me.
Alleged: Lupe Fiasco @ Lollpalooza 2007 (Pearl Jam message board)
I actually missed the Pearl Jam set, but I saw Lupe Fiasco’s performance earlier in the day. He has a song called “American Terrorist”, and while the song itself seemed to go by untouched… Lupe’s lead in to the song was. It went something along the lines of “Some of you might know him as George W. Bush… The President. I know him as George W. Bush ___________ (dead air)”. Having seen Lupe in concert before, I know that muted out section was a “American Terrorist”. He pretty much yells it into the mic before launching into the song.
Alleged: Lily Allen @ Bonnaroo 2007 (Lollapalooza message boards) They were definately censoring what Lily Allen was saying in between songs. When there are technical problems, the picture will stop and sometimes the word playlist above the buttons on the video screen will change to buffering. During Lily Allen my picture would keep playing fine and the sound was gone. The sound while the Roots were talking in between songs just cut out for the first time.
Alleged: Ozomatli (and everyone else!) @ Coachella 2007 (MicheBella on Rotten Tomatoes) In nearly every band I watched, there was a moment when said band spoke to the crowd. Suddenly, the sound disappeared. I just watched Ozomatli, a very political band, and at the end of a long segment of talking with no sound, the guy turned around and had a picture of George Bush on his back for a split second.
Alleged: Tom Petty (and everyone else!) @ Bonnaroo 2006 (FunknJam Productions messageboard) A big WTF? to the people in charge of streaming this webcast!! At first I thought that maybe it was a glitch in the streaming or my computer behaving funny. But every so often, the audio would cut out. And it always cut out while there seemed to be some interesting lyrics going on. I didn’t fully realize that the webcast was being CENSORED FOR CONTENT until Tom Petty sang for the third time, and had censored for the third time, “Let’s get to the point, Let’s (dead air) and turn the radio on….” Like that song hasn’t been played on the radio to death?!??! I can’t help but think this all had something to do with…. “Hey Wakarusa Policeman…”
Alleged: Buddy Guy @ Bonnaroo 2006 (webcast setlist) Talks about Hip Hop/sings about a Cow/Bull/Mule ( censored )
9. A tough California bill that would have prohibited companies and individuals from using deceptive “pretexting” ruses to steal private information about consumers was killed after determined lobbying by the motion picture industry, Wired News has learned… The bill won approval in three committees and sailed through the state Senate with a 30-0 vote. Then, according to Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the measure encountered unexpected, last-minute resistance from the Motion Picture Association of America. “The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, ‘We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading,’” Goldberg said.
10. Bush administration fights testing for mad cow disease The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too. The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry. A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. U.S. District Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government didn’t have the authority to restrict it. The ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal — effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge plays out.
So, when governments misbehave, libertarians are out there, but where are the libertarians who are concerned about oppression by corporations or private agencies?
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