WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been imprisoned in London for five years, while Texas journalist Priscilla Villarreal was only briefly detained at the Webb County Jail. But both were arrested for publishing information that government officials wanted to conceal.

Assange and Villarreal argue that criminalizing such conduct violates the First Amendment. In both cases, the merits of that claim have been obscured by the constitutionally irrelevant question of who qualifies as a "real" journalist.

Assange, an Australian citizen, is fighting extradition to the United States based on a federal indictment that charges him with violating the Espionage Act by obtaining and publishing classified documents that former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked in 2010. He has already spent about as much time behind bars as federal prosecutors say he would be likely to serve if convicted.

President Joe Biden says he is "considering" the Australian government's request to drop the case against Assange. But mollifying a U.S. ally is not the only reason to reconsider this prosecution, which poses a grave threat to freedom of the press by treating common journalistic practices as crimes.

All but one of the 17 charges against Assange relate to obtaining or disclosing "national defense information," which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Yet all the news organizations that published stories based on the confidential State Department cables and military files that Manning leaked are guilty of the same crimes.

More generally, obtaining and publishing classified information is the bread and butter of reporters who cover national security. John Demers, then head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, implicitly acknowledged that reality in 2019, when he assured reporters they needn't worry about the precedent set by this case because Assange is "no journalist."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit took a similarly dim view of Villarreal in January, when it dismissed her lawsuit against the Laredo prosecutors and police officers who engineered her 2017 arrest. They claimed she had violated Section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code, an obscure law that makes it a felony to solicit or obtain nonpublic information from a government official with "intent to obtain a benefit."

The cops said Villarreal committed that crime by asking Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman to confirm information about a public suicide and a fatal car crash. As interpreted by the Laredo Police Department, Section 39.06(c) sweeps even more broadly than the Espionage Act, making a felon out of any reporter who seeks information that is deemed exempt from disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act.

Gliding over the alarming implications of making it a crime for reporters to ask questions, the 5th Circuit dismissed the idea that Villarreal is "a martyr for the sake of journalism." The majority opinion by Judge Edith Jones dripped with contempt for Villarreal, an independent, uncredentialed journalist who posts her unfiltered reports on Facebook instead of publishing vetted and edited stories in a "mainstream, legitimate" news outlet.

Seemingly oblivious to what quotidian news reporting across the country entails, Jones faulted Villarreal for relying on a "backchannel source" and for "capitaliz[ing] on others' tragedies to propel her reputation and career." But like the judgment that Assange is "no journalist," such criticism fundamentally misconstrues freedom of the press, which applies to anyone who engages in mass communication.

The 5th Circuit's decision provoked four dissents authored or joined by seven judges, and it is not hard to see why. "If the First Amendment means anything," Judge James C. Ho wrote, "surely it means that citizens have the right to question or criticize public officials without fear of imprisonment."

In a petition it filed on Villarreal's behalf last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression urges the U.S. Supreme Court to vindicate that right. "Villarreal went to jail for basic journalism," it notes. "Whatever one may make of Villarreal's journalistic ethics, they are of no constitutional significance."

© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post Journalism Is Not a Crime, Even When It Offends the Government appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden says, "I know how to make government work!"

You'd think he'd know. He's worked in government for 51 years.

But the truth is, no one can make government work.

Biden hasn't.

Look at the chaos at the border, our military's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt.

In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because "even the best person can't implement change….The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower."

I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.

Yet politicians want government to do more!

Remember the unveiling of Obamacare's website? Millions tried to sign up. The first day, only six got it to work.

Vice President Joe Biden made excuses: "Neither [Obama] and I are technology geeks."

Stringham points out, "If they can't design a basic simple website, how are they going to manage half the economy?"

While bureaucrats struggled with the Obamacare site, the private sector successfully created Uber and Lyft, platforms like iCloud, apps like Waze, smartwatches, etc.

The private sector creates things that work because it has to. If businesses don't serve customers well, they go out of business.

But government is a monopoly. It never goes out of business. With no competition, there's less pressure to improve.

Often good people join government. Some work as hard as workers in the private sector.

But not for long. Because the bureaucracy's incentives kill initiative.

If a government worker works hard, he might get a small raise. But he sits near others who earn the same pay and, thanks to archaic civil service rules, are unlikely to get fired even if they're late, lazy, or stupid.

Over time, that's demoralizing. Eventually government workers conclude, "Why try?"

In the private sector, workers must strive to make things better. If they don't, competitors will, and you might lose your job.

Governments never go out of business.

"Companies can only stay in business if they always keep their customer happy," Stringham points out. "Competition pushes us to be better. Government has no competition."

I push back.

"Politicians say, 'Voters can vote us out.'"

"With a free market," Stringham replies, "the consumer votes every single day with the dollar. Under politics, we have to wait four years."

It's another reason why, over time, government never works as well as the private sector.

Year after year, the Pentagon fails audits.

If a private company repeatedly does that, they get shut down. But government never gets shut down.

A Pentagon spokeswoman makes excuses: "We're working on improving our process. We certainly are learning each time."

They don't learn much. They still fail audits.

"It's like we're living in Groundhog Day," Stringham jokes.

When COVID-19 hit, politicians handed out almost $2 trillion in "rescue" funds. The Government Accountability Office says more than $100 billion were stolen.

"One woman bought a Bentley," laughs Stringham. "A father and son bought a luxury home."

At least Biden noticed the fraud. He announced, "We're going to make you pay back what you stole!

No. They will not. Biden's Fraud Enforcement Task Force has recovered only 1 percent of what was stolen.

Even without fraud, government makes money vanish. I've reported on my town's $2 million toilet in a park. When I confronted the parks commissioner, he said, "$2 million was a bargain! Today it would cost $3 million."

That's government work.

More recently, Biden proudly announced that government would create "500,000 [electric vehicle] charging stations."

After two years, they've built seven. Not 7,000. Just seven.

Over the same time, greedy, profit-seeking Amazon built 17,000.

"Privatize!" says Stringham. "Whenever we think something's important, question whether government should do it."

In Britain, government-owned Jaguar lost money year after year. Only when Britain sold the company to private investors did Jaguar start turning a profit selling cars people actually like.

When Sweden sold Absolut Vodka, the company increased its profits sixfold.

It's ridiculous for Biden to say, "I know how to make government work."

No one does.

Next week, this column takes on Donald Trump's promise: "We'll drain the Washington swamp!"

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post No One Can Make Government Work appeared first on Reason.com.

This column was written before police entered Columbia University's Hamilton Hall

One challenge of free speech advocacy is holding the line even when the speech in question is vile. Then you must make distinctions between acceptable forms of expression and those that violate the rights of others. That's why it's important to have clear, firm principles applied equally to all points of view. In the absence of clarity, you find yourself making things up as you go along—like too many institutions of higher learning at a moment of campus unrest.

Muddled Boundaries for Expression

"Early this morning, a group of protestors occupied Hamilton Hall on the Morningside campus," Columbia University advises. "In light of the protest activity on campus, members of the University community who can avoid coming to the Morningside campus today (Tuesday, April 30) should do so."

The school subsequently locked down the campus. That was two weeks after over 100 protesters were arrested at an encampment on campus grounds and days after administrators then muddled boundaries by vowing not to summon police again to handle demonstrations against Israel's response to the October 7 attack by Hamas. The protests frequently feature antisemitic language, sometimes turn violent, and passed the point of violating Columbia's rules and control over its own property weeks ago.

Columbia has done a poor job of defining what is and isn't acceptable. Without firm guidelines, the protests have lingered and spread to other institutions. Some are dealing with the protests better than others—particularly those that respect speech rights but also make clear where the line is drawn.

Free Speech With Respect for Others

"Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, college administrators are confronting a flurry of student activity on campus that includes peaceful protest and lawful self-expression, punctuated at times by bursts of severe disruption and even isolated acts of violence," notes the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which consistently calls for respect for expression and regard for the equal liberty of others. "Separating First Amendment-protected speech from illegal conduct in these situations can present challenges, but it's not an impossible task."

The key is setting expectations ahead of time. That's true at public universities bound by the First Amendment and at private schools educating students to function in a society where people disagree.

"Whenever you have protests, universities will define the time, manner and way in which it's done," Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, told NPR last week. "So for example, you're not allowed to disrupt classes, and you're not – you know, injuring a security guard and forcing your way into a closed building is not an expression of free speech."

When Vanderbilt students did exactly that in March, police ejected them within a day. Three were expelled and about two dozen others received lesser discipline. They were punished not for their message—others criticized Israel without consequence—but for occupying property and attacking a guard. There's a distinction between the two that must be maintained if institutions are to simultaneously preserve speech rights while forestalling chaos.

"To provide clarity—and to ensure freedom of expression—universities must adopt free speech principles and enforce them consistently," emphasizes FIRE. "Harmful, hateful, and offensive speech" is protected by the First Amendment, the organization points out. That includes expression directed at specific groups, like the antisemitic slogans sometimes encountered at recent protests.

That said, FIRE adds that "a campus where unprotected conduct and expression—such as violence, true threats and intimidation, incitement, and discriminatory harassment—go unaddressed is a campus where faculty and students will be afraid to speak."

A Difficult Balancing Act

Yes, that is a balancing act. It's one that leaves room for criticism of both Columbia's paralysis over its campus encampment as well as the crackdown by public colleges in Texas on demonstrations that may be offensive but are peaceful and conducted within constitutional boundaries.

In March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed state institutions "to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution." That impermissibly targets speech protected by the First Amendment.

A better take is found in the Chicago Principles developed in 2014 at the University of Chicago and adopted elsewhere with varying degrees of consistency. The principles embrace freedom of expression and state that "it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive," but also that "the University may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University."

In response to recent protests at the University of Chicago, within hours administrators reaffirmed the school's commitment to free expression. They also reminded participants that the encampment "clearly violates policies" and reserved the right to take "disciplinary action" over disruptions of campus life.

In FIRE's free speech rankings of 248 universities, the University of Chicago ranks "above average" at 13, while Columbia is "below average" at 214.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

Columbia's low score represents not wholesale suppression of all expression, but years of selective tolerance of some points of view and crackdowns on others. That's been a feature of life at many Ivy League and other elite institutions, where those with the "right" ideas have grown accustomed to doing what they please while muzzling opponents. That likely contributed to the current unfortunate moment of confusion over where boundaries lie, if anywhere.

For those concerned over the need to tolerate vile speech, even within limits, it is worth knowing that trumpeting offensiveness to the world may carry its own penalty.

"33% of those making hiring decisions said they are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates today than five years ago," Forbes's Emma Whitford reports of a survey of employers intended to measure the impact of campus chaos. "Only 7% said they were more likely to hire them."

We all have a right to voice our views—peacefully. But we can't make people like them.

The post For Peaceful Campus Protests, Colleges Need Free Speech Principles appeared first on Reason.com.

NOTE: This post largely reprints last year's Victims of Communism Day post, with some modifications.

Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century's other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so….

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had comparably horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

November 7, 2017 was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the establishment of the first-ever communist regime. On that day, I put up a post outlining some of the lessons to be learned from a century of experience with communism.  The post explains why the lion's share of the horrors perpetrated by communist regimes were inherent flaws  of the system. For the most part, they cannot be ascribed to circumstantial factors, such as flawed individual leaders, peculiarities of Russian and Chinese culture, or the absence of democracy. Some of these other factors, especially the last, probably did make the situation worse than it might have been otherwise. But, for reasons I explained in the same post, some form of dictatorship or oligarchy is  virtually inevitable in a socialist economic system where the government controls all or nearly all of the economy.

While the influence of communist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely unreformed communist regimes remain in power in Cuba and North Korea. In Venezuela, the Marxist government's policies have resulted in political repression, the starvation of children, and a massive refugee crisis—the biggest in the history of the Western hemisphere.

In Russia, the authoritarian regime of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin has embarked on a wholesale whitewashing of communism's historical record. Putin's brutal and indefensible invasion of Ukraine owes more to Russian nationalist ideology than communism. But it is nonetheless fed in part by his desire to recapture the supposed power and glory of the Soviet Union, and his long-held belief that the collapse of the USSR was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." It is also telling that most communists in Russia and elsewhere have joined with many far-right nationalists in  backing Putin's line on the war.

In China, the Communist Party remains in power (albeit after having abandoned many of its previous socialist economic policies), and has recently become less tolerant of criticism of the mass murders of the Mao era (part of a more general turn towards greater repression).

China's horrific repression of the Uighur minority is reminiscent of similar policies under Mao and Stalin, though it has not—so far—reached the level of actual mass murder. But imprisoning over 1 million people in horrific concentration camps is more than bad enough.

Far-left support for Hamas since the horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attack is yet another reminder of the inherently evil nature of communist ideology. Backing terrorism is part of a long history of support for repression and mass murder. Not all extreme socialists of the type who support Hamas are communists. But the latter are a subset of the former.

In a 2012 post, I explained why May 1 is a better date for Victims of Communism Day than the available alternatives, such as November 7 (the anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia) and August 23 (the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact). I also addressed various possible objections to using May Day, including claims that the date should be reserved for the celebration of labor unions.

But, as explained in my 2013 Victims of Communism Day post, I would be happy to support a different date if it turns out to be easier to build a consensus around it. If another date is chosen, I would prefer November 7; not out of any desire to diminish the significance of communist atrocities in other nations, but because it marks the establishment of the very first communist regime. November 7 has in fact been declared Victims of Communism Memorial Day by three state legislatures.

If this approach continues to spread, I would be happy to switch to November 7, even though May 1 would be still more appropriate. For that reason, I have adopted the practice of also commemorating the victims of communism on November 7.

I  would also be happy to back almost any other date that could command broad support. Unless and until that happens, however, May 1 will continue to be Victims of Communism Day at the Volokh Conspiracy.

The post Victims of Communism Day—2024 appeared first on Reason.com.

1. Greenpeace vs. Golden Rice.  And Michael Magoon essays on Progress Studies.

2. Brutalist churches.

3. Good piece on Derek Parfit.

4. The case for permitting reform is stronger than you think.

5. GPT2 speculation.

6. UK metascience research grant call.

7. Scott Alexander now has a proper response to Robin on health care.  And Robin’s response.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NEW YORK, NY — The world watched in horror last night as a large group of indoctrinated woke extremists destroyed a woke extremist indoctrination center.