A Bad Case of the Vapors

By John Tierney
https://www.city-journal.org/war-on-nicotine-vaping
September 16, 2019



The war on nicotine vaping has reached a new level of absurdity. It was bad enough when public health officials, politicians, and the press reacted to the recent outbreak of respiratory illness among vapers of marijuana by failing to warn the public in a clear manner. Instead of explaining the specific danger from vaping a certain kind of THC-infused oil, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told the public to stop using any kind of electronic cigarette—which is like responding to an outbreak of food poisoning by telling people to stop eating.

But now officials are using the panic they sowed to justify policies that could shorten the lives of millions of Americans. The governors of New York and Michigan have moved immediately to ban the most popular flavors of nicotine e-cigarettes used by adult smokers to quit, and the Trump administration plans to ban them nationwide. “People are dying from vaping,” Trump said, justifying the Food and Drug Administration’s plan, but there is scant evidence that nicotine vaping has contributed to any of the recent deaths or illnesses. The evidence so far clearly points to a problem with marijuana vaping, in particular to an oil derived from Vitamin E that has been added to THC in vaping cartridges sold mainly on the black market.

So why go after nicotine e-cigarettes? It’s true that a small minority of the stricken vapers said they had used nicotine, not THC, but researchers say they may have been loath to admit to illegal activity. Their symptoms don’t seem plausibly related to ordinary nicotine vaping. Nicotine, unlike THC, is water-soluble and can be vaped without the additives used to vaporize THC—like the oil blamed for the recent epidemic. It’s conceivable that some people were harmed by dangerous ingredients that were added to nicotine in liquids that were home-made or purchased on the black market, but that’s no reason to ban commercial e-cigarettes like Juul, which have been used by millions of people without causing respiratory problems. In an article published last month in Expert Review of Respiratory Medicine, a team of Italian, Canadian, and American scientists surveyed the clinical research into e-cigarettes and reported that “no studies reported serious adverse events” or “significant changes in pulmonary functions.”

Their findings jibed with the conclusions by British medical authorities that nicotine itself is no more harmful than caffeine, and that e-cigarettes are at least 95 percent safer than tobacco cigarettes. While the U.S. public-health establishment has been misleading the public—so that a majority of Americans now mistakenly believe that e-cigarettes are as harmful or even more harmful than cigarettes—the Royal Society for Public Health has been urging smokers to switch to vaping, and British hospitals have been promoting e-cigarettes by allowing vape shops to operate on their premises.

The FDA is doing just the opposite with its new policies, which it tried to justify last week by releasing the latest results of the National Youth Tobacco Survey. The survey showed that 27.5 percent of high school students in 2019 had vaped at least once in the previous month, an increase from the previous year’s figure of 20.8 percent. No one wants teenagers to develop a nicotine habit, but vaping it is far safer than smoking, and in any case much of the increase in vaping has nothing to do with nicotine. Many of the students are vaping non-nicotine liquids, notably THC, which has surged in popularity among teenage vapers, especially in states that have legalized marijuana.

Meanwhile, the FDA (and most of the press) ignored the most important result from the new survey: the sharpest one-year decline in teenage smoking ever recorded. The fraction of high school students who’d smoked in the previous month declined by 28 percent, from 8.1 percent of students in 2018 to 5.8 percent in 2019—a historic low reached thanks to the availability of cigarette alternatives. Since e-cigarettes first appeared in 2010, smoking rates among teenagers, young adults, and older adults have fallen much faster than during the pre-vaping years. 

But this remarkable progress against the leading preventable cause of death is now jeopardized by the FDA’s proposal to ban Juul and other companies from selling anything except tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes. Anti-smoking activists claim that flavors like mango and mint are being used to entice teenagers, but it’s already illegal for teenagers to buy any kind of e-cigarette, and these non-tobacco flavors are favored by more than three-quarters of the adult smokers who switch to vaping. In fact, one of the benefits of e-cigarettes is that once smokers become accustomed to getting nicotine from something that tastes better than tobacco, they can become repulsed by the taste of regular cigarettes.

What happens if those other flavors get banned? One consequence would be a black market in flavored liquids—and more risk of unsafe ingredients being added. Another consequence would be an increase in smoking, as Laura Pacek of the Duke School of Medicine and colleagues reported this summer in the journal Substance Use & Misuse, based on a study of 240 young adults who use e-cigarettes as well as tobacco cigarettes. When asked how they would respond to a ban on flavored nicotine e-cigarettes, the young adults said that they would smoke more tobacco cigarettes.

That’s the same conclusion reached by Wall Street, which reacted to the FDA’s new plan by sending tobacco stocks higher. Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who studies tobacco-control policies,says that Wall Street’s reaction “may be the best evidence yet that the FDA’s flavored e-cigarette ban will result in a substantial increase in smoking-related morbidity and mortality.” He calls it a “public-health disaster,” and the numbers back him up. By exploiting the panic they created over a few hundred cases of respiratory illness almost certainly unrelated to nicotine e-cigarettes, the federal government is in effect encouraging smokers to maintain a habit that is responsible for the deaths of 1,300 Americans per day. The U.S. public health establishment remains, more than ever, a hazard to public health.

John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal and a contributing science columnist for the New York Times.

Vaping Is Good, Vaping Works, So Government Is Trying To Kill It

By Derek Hunter
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2019/01/17/vaping-is-good-vaping-works-so-government-is-trying-to-kill-it-n2539149
January 17, 2019



I used to be a smoker. It was stupid, I know, but I did it for a very long time. I'm not alone, not unique, plenty of people made that same choice I did to take up the nasty habit when we were young and convinced we were invincible. Like tens of millions of Americans, I managed to quit and haven’t looked back. I would still be smoking today if not for the miracle (and it is indeed a miracle) of the e-cigarette. I vaped like a madman...and it was my bridge to a much healthier and happier lifestyle.

To paraphrase one of the greatest modern cinematic scenes: Vaping is good. Vaping works.

You’d think the scolds who lecture everyone about the dangers of smoking would be ecstatic about the dramatic drop in smoking rates in the United States thanks to this technology, but you’d be wrong.  The government always wants more control over people, and more of our money, so anything new, popular and effective always ends up in its regulatory crosshairs. A few decades ago, government geniuses nearly shut down a nascent and thriving company called Microsoft, for crying out loud.

There aren’t many people who, when they get exactly what they wanted for Christmas, complain about what they got for Christmas. That's what our busybody government regulators (often quietly or not-so-quietly fueled by competitors or sectors at risk from the societal benefits brought by the innovators) are like. The sad record shows that these people are more easily manipulated than babies, basically.

For decades, the nanny state has been lecturing smokers about quitting. They went after private property rights of restaurant and bar owners, mandating that they eliminate the rights of adults to engage in a perfectly legal (even subsidized, which huge amounts of our tax dollars going to tobacco farmers) activity in their establishments. As if people went to bars for the health benefits.

After having chased smokers out onto the streets, they’ve started chasing them out of anywhere in public, and even in their own homes in some cases. What they’ve never done is eliminate subsidies to tobacco farmers or simply declared cigarettes to be illegal. They won’t do that, there’s too much money in it for them.

Cigarettes are more and more heavily taxed, which makes them a large and important revenue stream for all levels of government. Banning them means that money dries up. So, while talking about the evils of smoking, they’re benefiting from it, at this point likely more than the behemoth companies that make them.

That’s why, even though these big government advocates are getting their way as smoking rates drop to their lowest levels in history, they have been complaining about what may be the most effective stop-smoking aid to come along ever. And, unlike the war on combustible tobacco products which has been nearly the exclusive purview of liberals, supposed free marketeers in and out of the Trump administration have joined the war on innovation by going after e-cigs.

I quit smoking on my wedding day in 2015. That was it, I was done. But I didn’t go cold turkey. Anyone who’s ever smoked knows how hard that is. So, as I mentioned earlier, I started vaping.

Vaping, for anyone living under a rock for the last couple of years, is a battery-powered device that allows people to inhale vapor mist with nicotine in it (though you can get it without nicotine, or even step down the levels of it incrementally) and doesn’t contain all the tar and other harmful chemicals traditional cigarettes have in them. It’s “healthy smoking,” if you will. It doesn’t smell, which is something you (not to mention those around you) become acutely aware of once you quit, and the exhale is water vapor.

It’s a great tool for anyone looking to quit because, as former smokers know, what to do with your hands while you engage in the activities you did when you were a smoker is why a lot of people go back to the cancer sticks.

Rather than embrace this incredibly helpful stop-smoking option, the same crowd who were hounding people to quit are, armed with some puzzling new allies, starting to treat vaping the exact same way they treated smoking. They’re banning it in places, trying to restrict sales (thereby restricting access), taxing it like crazy, condemning it as just as evil, etc. People who love government don’t actually like it when people quit smoking because it means less money from cigarette taxes. That’s why they’ve never considered making it illegal, they want their taste; they want to wet their beaks.

They won’t take success lying down. And since it’s 2019, and everything is about race to the political left, they’re even whining about who is quitting smoking now.

The LA Times lamented, “Cigarette smoking is at an all-time low in the United States, but the benefits of this public health achievement are not being shared equally by all Americans.” They’re upset at the racial and socioeconomic make-up of those quitting. They write, “people who live in neighborhoods with the highest smoking rates are more likely to be poor, less likely to be white, and more likely to have chronic heart or lung diseases.”

People are quitting, but the wrong people are quitting, laments the left and their media pets. This is the same left that wants to further restrict access to the e-cigarettes that are helping many Americans kick the habit. This is nuts.

Smoking is down across the board, which is something that should be celebrated. They just can’t bring themselves to. They should be embracing anything that helps people break the habit, but they’re demonizing one of the newest and most effective tools to come along in generations, and are actively looking to prevent its use. Like Microsoft a few decades ago, the e-cigarette industry is closer than it probably realizes to being annihilated by the government and the left. Like Microsoft smartly did a few decades ago, they'd better fight like there's no tomorrow.

Dear TSA, Please Stop Molesting Kids At The Airport

By David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/19/dear-tsa-please-stop-molesting-kids-at-the-airport/

November 19, 2018

The other day, after slogging through a check-in line at one of the nation’s busiest airports, dutifully removing my shoes and belt and checking my bag and pockets for other potentially dangerous items (water and loose change), I was pulled aside by a crack Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent so he could further investigate the contents of my carry-on. While waiting, I took this picture of what looked to be a ten-year-old boy being molested by a 250-pound man.

Now, normally I would have reported this incident to the proper authorities. Inappropriate contact with a child, inside or outside his clothing, is a criminal act. But, in this case, the proper authorities were the ones feeling up the kid and the father had already protested the frisking—although, like all of us, he probably understood that no matter how vociferously he objected to this bit of state-sanctioned criminality it wasn’t going to change anything.

Who knows? Maybe the kid had earned the attention of TSA by sporting that Minecraft hoodie? Or maybe his laptop had set off the explosive trace detection machine? Or maybe he was randomly picked. The boy looked innocent enough to me—which might be exactly what the little would-be villain had in mind. When the father inquired, the agent told him, right before touching his son’s crotch, that this sort of thing had become necessary due to drug mules using children.

If you don’t think the terrorists have won, you probably haven’t visited an airport in a while. Not only do these places needlessly gobble up hours of our day and billions of our dollars, but here that we collectively lose all dignity and act like a bunch of automatons just so they’ll let us out of the place. Though sometimes it seems like we might never escape. If we really wanted to slow the caravan from Central American down, we would make them enter through a TSA checkpoint.

It is at those checkpoints that we suspend our disbelief and pretend that (often) disheveled and (very often) rotund government agents who separate us from our water bottles possess the expertise to ferret out terrorist plots. (By the way, is there not a single physical requirement needed to hold this allegedly vital security job? There are many good reasons  I’m not a pro-basketball player or a male model. If you’re not in relatively good physical shape, maybe law enforcement isn’t the profession for you. The only way these agents are the “the last line of defense against terrorism” is if the terrorists are unable to squeeze by them to get on the airplanes.)

Then again, it’s one thing to force millions of adults to schlep through these slow-moving lines so  their toiletries can be scanned by some disinterested government worker—on occasion, sharing a few moments of rough intimacy with a blue-gloved stranger—and another for kids to be used as props in this production of Security Theater.

If you’re thinking, “Hey, David, you have no expertise on issues of security and you know nothing about how to stop bad people from getting on planes,” you’re 100 percent correct. That only means I could probably work for the TSA.

Let’s not forget that in 2015, the TSA sent internal investigatory units, “red teams,” to airports around the nation to see if they could sneak explosives and guns through the screening process and onto planes—which they did 67 out of 70 times. Although I’m no security specialist, by my rough calculations that means that the terrorist success rate was over 95 percent. Maybe the 5 percent who were nabbed by TSA agents posing as preteens.

This information, incidentally, was only leaked to the public. We have no idea if the TSA is performing any better today. But even if it had vastly improved—say, they are now stopping 70 percent of fake terrorists—it would mean the billions of dollars spent on airport security is still being wasted. In a merit-based environment, this would result in mass termination and a complete overhaul of the system. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security –a cabinet department formed in 2002 to ensure that a number of inept agencies could work together incompletely—is still patting down old ladies and pre-teens. Nothing has changed.

The TSA claims that it has employed “modified screening procedures for children 12 and under that reduce the likelihood of pat-down.” Is there any evidence of this? And why do we allow any children to be patted down after they’ve walked through body scanners and metal detectors, anyway? There is no plausible reason for a grown man or woman to put their hands on a child in this way.

Obviously security isn’t going anywhere. Obviously security measures also act as a deterrent and can’t always be properly measured. Of course, I understand the agent was only doing his job. Whether his contention about drug mules was true or not, though, you might not be surprised to learn that this kid didn’t end up having heroin stuffed in his underwear. Even if he did, is it really worth subjecting hundreds (thousands?) of boys and girls—not to mention septuagenarians, the disabled, etc.–to this kind of search on a daily basis? There has to be a better way.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

Santa Barbara Authorizes Jail Time for Handing Out Straws

Yes, you read that right.


By Katherine Timpf
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/plastic-straw-ban-santa-barbara-jail-time-punishment/
July 24, 2018



The city of Santa Barbara has passed an ordinance that will allow restaurant employees to be punished with up to six months of jail time or a $1,000 fine for giving plastic straws to their customers.

The bill was passed unanimously last Tuesday, and covers bars, restaurants, and other food-service businesses. Establishments will still be allowed to hand out plastic stirrers, but only if customers request them.

Santa Barbara’s ordinance “is likely the most severe straw ban in the country,” according to Reason, but it’s far from the only straw ban. Seattle banned plastic straws earlier this month, mandating a a $250 fine for violators. Santa Barbara, however, has gone much further than Seattle — even aside from the harsher punishments its law imposes. Santa Barbara has banned not only plastic straws, but also compostable straws. Oh, and each individual straw counts as a separate infraction, meaning that if someone got busted handing out straws to a table of four people, he or she could end up facing years behind bars.

Now, I’m a reasonable person. I may be a libertarian, but I’m glad that we live in a society with laws. For example: I am glad that if a person, say, murders another person, then that murderer has to go to prison. That seems totally fair to me. But six months in jail for handing a little piece of plastic to another person? I feel like you’d have to be bananas to think that’s even close to fair.

This is especially true when you consider just how small an impact these straw bans are going to have on the environment. As Reason notes, straws represent only 0.02 percent of the amount of plastic waste that is estimated to go into the ocean each year. What’s more, the United States is responsible for only about 1 percent of the total amount of plastic waste that’s in the ocean overall. All things considered, this new ordinance isn’t going to be making a real dent in the problem it’s intended to solve — but it could create some harm. As Reason explains, straw bans could end up having a negative impact on disabled people who cannot drink without them.

Still, plastic-straw bans are becoming more popular. There are efforts to ban them in New York City, San Francisco, Portland, and Washington, D.C. Colleges nationwide — from Knox College in Illinois to the University of Portland to Duke University — have already banned them.

As I’ve written in the past, I have absolutely no problem with individual businesses making the decision to stop using plastic straws. But getting the government involved in what people choose to drink liquids out of seems like a bit of a stretch, and sending people to jail over it is just plain asinine.

FCC RESTORES MARKET FREEDOM TO THE INTERNET

Net Neutrality repeal jettisons Obama-era regulatory meddling.

Joseph Klein

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

December 15, 2017

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Federal Communications Commission has jettisoned the heavy-handed regulatory burden placed on a free and open Internet during the Obama administration. The FCC voted 3-2 on December 14th, along party lines, to repeal the so-called “net neutrality” rules adopted by the regulatory agency in 2015. The Obama-era rules had prohibited Internet service providers, such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast as well as smaller Internet service providers, from blocking, slowing access to or charging more (priority pricing) for fast delivery of content above some specified threshold of high bandwidth usage. High-speed delivery of Internet services will no longer be heavily regulated on par with a common carrier utility monopoly service. However, the Internet service providers will have to disclose to the FCC changes to their access policies, which can consider any alleged abuses on a case by case basis. The Federal Trade Commission, which shares antitrust enforcement responsibility with the Department of Justice, will be tasked to take action against any anti-competitive behavior. 

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who championed getting rid of the misleadingly named “net neutrality” rules, said that the net neutrality rules purported to fix something that was not broken when they were adopted in 2015. "Following today’s vote, Americans will still be able to access the websites they want to visit. They will still be able to enjoy the services they want to enjoy," FCC Chairman Pai said. "There will still be cops on the beat guarding a free and open internet. This is the way things were prior to 2015, and this is the way they will be once again." Chairman Pai noted that with the heavy regulatory hand of FCC micromanagement removed, “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas.”

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat and daughter of South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, condemned the FCC Republican majority for “handing the keys to the Internet" to a "handful of multi-billion dollar corporations.” She had lots of support from the left, which displayed its usual hysteria.

A bomb threat delayed the FCC meeting for several minutes as the room was cleared until the security team dispatched explosive-sniffing dogs to ensure that it was safe for the meeting to proceed. Protesters gathered outside, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Chairman Pai has got to go!” 

Consumer activists and some state attorneys general are planning to go to court to invalidate what New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called the FCC’s “illegal rollback” of the “net neutrality” rules. “The FCC just gave Big Telecom an early Christmas present, by giving internet service providers yet another way to put corporate profits over consumers,” Attorney General Schneiderman said in a statement. 

Democrat Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts claimed that overturning the “net neutrality” rules is “like letting the bullies develop their own playground rules.” Announcing his intent in a tweet to “introduce a Congressional Review Act resolution that would restore the Open Internet Order and reverse the FCC’s historic mistake of repealing Net Neutrality," he vowed that the “fight is far from over."

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the other Democrat Senator from Massachusetts, tweeted: “The FCC just voted to hand control of the internet over to giant internet companies, but this isn’t over.”

California Democrat Senator Kamal Harris tweeted that the FCC’s repeal of the “net neutrality” rules handed “a big win to multi-billion-dollar broadband companies.”

Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted to his followers, "This is the end of the internet as we know it. In Congress and in the courts we must fight back."

Fake news CNN ran a headline after the FCC vote echoing Senator Sanders’ doomsday prediction that the vote represented the "end of the Internet as we know it."

Hollywood celebrities also got into the act. Chris Evans of Captain America fame, for example, tweeted that the FCC’s repeal decision “benefits no one unless you're a faceless, mega corporation.”

The left would have us believe that the battle over “net neutrality” is between greedy, monopolistic, multibillion dollar Internet service companies and John Q. Public. This is the left’s typical class warfare rhetoric, helped along ironically by multibillion dollar content providers such as Netflix, Google and Facebook that hide behind slogans such as “net neutrality” and “open and free Internet” to obscure their own economic self-interest. Companies the size of Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the new Disney company that may emerge if its purchase of content assets from 21st Century Fox is approved by antitrust officials do not need FCC utility-style regulatory protection from Internet service providers. The FCC should not have placed itself in the position of picking industry sector winners and losers or coming down on the side of content providers, some of whom such as Facebook and Google have substantial market power of their own that allows them to censor content they believe is too controversial.   

Moreover, “net neutrality” may be a nice slogan, but it does not reflect the reality of Internet usage. To understand why this is so requires a brief technology discussion.

Different types of usage place different levels of demand on available Internet bandwidth, which Digital Unite defines as “the rate at which data can be transferred to your computer from a website or internet service within a specific time.” The higher an Internet connection’s amount of bandwidth capacity, usually measured in bits per second, the more data can move through the connection in a given amount of time.  Groups of bits strung together that computers use to represent a character such as a letter, number or an image are called bytes.

The bandwidth capacity is not infinite and often shared by multiple users with different volumes of traffic to be transported that may vary by time of day. As Scientific American explained, “the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it.”

Streaming content can use massive amounts of bandwidth. Watching Netflix on high resolution, for example, can utilize at least 2 gigabytes (i.e., 2 billion bytes) of data. As streaming becomes more and more popular, consuming massive amounts of bandwidth capacity relative to other less volume intensive types of usage, heavy data usage by even a limited number of streaming content providers’ customers, at times and places of competing demands for available bandwidth, can negatively affect the service for all Internet users. There needs to be some means to modulate the level of usage by bandwidth-guzzlers through priority pricing or by placing network management controls (for example, blocking or throttling) over usage above specified thresholds. Otherwise, the guzzlers may negatively affect the Internet experience of other users without incurring the full economic cost of the harm they cause to those other users.  

The economics of supply and demand should be permitted to play out under free market conditions. Internet service providers, just like the large content providers, are not monopoly utilities that require utility-style regulation. That said, there will need to be antitrust enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission to prevent anti-competitive abuses, such as an Internet service providers favoring their own affiliated content providers in terms of quality of service, ease of customer access, or discriminatory pricing. The FCC’s repeal of the overly burdensome “net neutrality” rules in no way undermines the ability of the FCC or the Federal Trade Commission to step in and address any abuses that may arise.

The left detests the free market, whether in the context of the Internet or virtually any other segment of the economy. Government knows best, leftists believe. Fortunately, elections have consequences and President Trump put in place at the FCC someone who understands the benefits of the free market. Under Chairman Ajit Pai’s leadership, the FCC removed the dead weight of intrusive regulation on Internet innovation and investment in infrastructure. It also restored the market freedom under which the Internet has thrived.

Giving Terrorists a Heads-up

A proposed law would force the NYPD to publicize the details of its surveillance technology.

Heather Mac Donald
https://www.city-journal.org/
June 18, 2017



A bill in New York’s city council would require the New York Police Department to reveal crucial details about every surveillance technology that the department uses to detect terrorism and crime. Ninety days before the NYPD intends to implement a new surveillance technology, it would have to post on the Internet a technical description of how the new tool works, and how the department plans to use it. The public would have 45 days to comment on the proposed technology; the police commissioner would then have 45 days to respond to the public comments before he could actually start using the new capacity.  Existing technologies would also have to be retroactively submitted to public review. 

Perhaps aware that this moment may not be ideal for promoting what would be, in effect, a terrorists’ manual on how to evade discovery in New York City, the bill’s supporters have hilariously taken to casting it as a pro-illegal alien, anti-Trump gesture. New York is a “sanctuary city, now in open resistance to the Trump administration,” two members of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in an op-ed advocating for the so-called Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act.  (The Brennan Center wrote the POST Act for council members; the center has pushed similar bills across the country, including in Seattle and Oakland, two cities that have been particularly vulnerable to “anti-fascist” violence.) The city council press release claims that the bill “strengthens New York City’s commitment as a sanctuary city . . . as the Trump administration seeks to increase surveillance across America.”

In fact, the proposed law has nothing to do with New York’s deplorable status as a sanctuary city. Criminal illegal aliens avoid lawful deportation in New York because city and police officials release them back to the streets in defiance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests, not because of sophisticated surveillance technologies. But though the bill would have no effect on the city’s campaign to thwart immigration enforcement, it would impede the city’s ability to stay one step ahead of terrorist planning. Memo to the council: counterterrorism is not a leisurely activity compatible with lengthy public review and administrative red tape. It requires nimbleness and speed in the face of a rapidly evolving threat. And disclosing to the enemy the extent of, and details about, your surveillance capacities provides an invaluable blueprint for foiling those capacities. 

Supporters of the bill are playing the race card as well, claiming that the bill is necessary to counter the NYPD’s historic tendency to oppress minorities. The managing director of the Bronx Defenders claims, without evidence, that the NYPD has illegally surveilled Black Lives Matter activists. Council members Dan Garodnick and Vanessa Gibson argue that “Surveillance technology often has a disproportionate, harmful impact on communities of color.” This claim is ludicrous. The radiation detectors that ring the city looking for nuclear threats, say, or the network of public cameras that protect critical infrastructure and sensitive buildings, have no disproportionate impact on minorities or any other group, other than on someone looking to do the city harm. 

As for privacy concerns, the anti-surveillance Left has never grasped the constitutional principle that the Fourth Amendment has no bearing on activities conducted in the open. A police officer does not need a warrant to observe a suspicious individual on a street casing a target; the police department does not need a warrant to erect a camera in a public space capturing activities visible to other members of the public. The NYPD does need to persuade a court that it has probable cause to surveil any activity involving a legitimate expectation of privacy, such as a cell-phone conversation, and the department complies with those warrant requirements. Any surveillance that could implicate political activity already is subject to extensive judicial and civilian oversight.  

Pretending to have expertise on terror tactics, the Brennan Center declares that none of the information disclosed through the POST Act will be of value to a potential terrorist or criminal. The chance that Brennan Center lawyers understand better than the NYPD’s counterterrorist experts how terrorists leverage information is zero. 

The council press release frankly acknowledges that the bill is just a “first step” toward “limiting the unchecked use of surveillance technologies that . . . feed into a broader national surveillance state.”  In other words: If we get this bill, we’re coming for more.  Many of the law’s supporters, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, oppose all government secrecy, no matter how essential to public safety. But the agenda of the POST Act is broader even than shutting down lawful surveillance. It is the latest outgrowth of the movement to eviscerate all policing, a movement that encompasses the council’s ongoing effort to end public-order enforcement (also known as broken-windows policing). That movement now drapes itself in anti-Trump fervor. If it succeeds, the public will have much more to fear than the fictitious “national surveillance state.” 

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

California threatens to shut down book signings and therefore small booksellers

By Anastasia Boden

http://blog.pacificlegal.org/california-threatens-shut-small-booksellers/

May 11, 2017

Today we filed this First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of beloved Bay Area bookstore Book Passage, and its co-owner, Bill Petrocelli.

Book Passage is a hub of literary activity and free expression.  In addition to selling books, it hosts over 700 author events a year—in which authors give talks, read passages, interact with readers, and autograph their books.  Bill keeps copies of these signed books to sell later—which you can see scattered down the aisles of his store.  Book Passage also curates a monthly book club, wherein readers are sent a first edition book signed by an up-and-coming author.

Book Passage doesn’t charge a premium for the autograph; all of its books are sold for their cover price. But a newly enacted California law makes it extremely risky, if not impossible, for Book Passage to continue selling autographed books or hosting author events.

Acting on purported consumer protection concerns, the legislature recently expanded its autograph law (which formerly only applied to sports memorabilia) to include any signed item worth over $5—including books.  Under that law, sellers must produce a certificate of authenticity and maintain detailed records of every sale for seven years.  Sellers must, among other things:

1. Note the purchase price and date of sale,
2. specify whether the item is part of a limited edition,
3. note the size of the edition, anticipate any future editions,
4. disclose whether the seller is bonded,
5. divulge any previous owner’s name and address,
6. if the book was signed in the presence of the seller, specify the date and location of the signing, and identify a witness to the autograph.

Failure to disclose any of the required details, or to keep the certificate for the full seven years, results in outrageous penalties.  Even an inadvertent omission can subject a seller to actual damages, plus a civil penalty of up to 10 times the damages, plus court costs, plus reasonable attorney’s fees, plus expert witness fees, plus interest. Professional plaintiff’s lawyers must be chomping at the bit.  If Bill sold just 100 signed copies of a $30 book, but six years later, couldn’t locate the records noting the size of the edition, he’d be liable for (at minimum) $30,000.  Bill sells tens of thousands of signed books each year.

For many booksellers like Bill and Book Passage, this massive threat of liability will make holding author events too much of a risk.  And the loss to California’s marketplace of ideas will be gargantuan.  Book signings aren’t just central to Book Passage’s business model, they’re vital to up-and-coming authors with less represented views, who use book signings to lure new readers.  Many famous authors got their start by doing signing events.  While Book Passage hosts such big names as Isabelle Allende and Khaled Hosseini, it also frequently hosts local poets, fiction writers, and even chefs who have authored cookbooks.

Even worse than irrational, the law is pernicious: despite the law’s vast breadth (it also covers paintings, sculptures, and auctioneers), certain sellers have secured exemptions.  Online retailers and pawn shops, those places where uninformed buyers are most vulnerable, do not have to comply.

We are challenging this poorly written, overbroad, yet underinclusive, bill in court.  To find out more, visit our case page here, or watch the video below.

How About Freedom for Dinner?

The regulatory state determines too much of what and how we eat.

Aaron M. Renn

https://www.city-journal.org/

March 15, 2017

Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, by Baylen J. Linnekin (Island Press, 280 pp., $30)

Mariza Ruelas currently faces up to two years in jail in California for the crime of selling ceviche through a Facebook food group. Welcome to the mad world of American food regulation. In Biting the Hands That Feed Us, Baylen Linnekin  looks closely at a system that can take pride in a historically safe food supply but that also imposes too many rules that defy common sense.

Linnekin traces the system’s origins to The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the appalling conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, and to the New Deal’s hyper-regulation of agriculture. Such intrusiveness culminated in the case of Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Americans don’t even have the right to consume food they grow themselves, on their own land. Food regulation has marched steadily onward ever since.

While working conditions and food safety improved dramatically thanks to these efforts, the move to regulate all food products according to uniform standards also produced a system with a host of strange rules—such as requiring organic skim milk that is free of additives to be labeled “Non-Grade ‘A’ Milk Product–Natural Milk Vitamins Removed.” Bans on urban agriculture have outlawed backyard chicken coops and front-yard gardens. Seemingly random changes in safety requirements force the shutdowns of businesses with no incidents of contamination or sickened customers. In some jurisdictions, it’s illegal to slice off a sample of cheese or cut the stalk off of lettuce at farmer’s markets. Microbreweries were threatened with having to register as pet-food manufacturers if they wanted to donate their spent grains for animal feed (a long-standard practice even for big breweries). In public parks, foraging of any sort—such as picking wild berries—is often banned.

Mariza Ruelas made her ceviche at home, which is why she’s in trouble with the law: food-safety mandates have made home production of food for sale, even in small quantities, illegal. You might be in trouble, too, if, say, you contribute a pan of brownies to the bake sale at your child’s school. That’s probably illegal.

States and localities are starting to push back at this regulatory insanity. Some states have instituted “cottage-food laws” allowing home preparation of small amounts of food for sale in limited venues, such as at farmer’s markets. Wyoming passed a comprehensive Food Freedom Act reducing regulation of food sales, so long as no middleman is involved. Some cities have legalized the raising of chickens or urban beekeeping. But there’s a long way to go.

For Linnekin, a food-law professor, the goal is to make traditional and “sustainable” agricultural practices legal. Much of what he argues for makes good sense, but there’s another side to the issue. Because so many urban hipsters want to produce (or at least consume) artisanal food products, food law, along with zoning, often serves as their point of entry into the vast regulatory web that smothers so many American businesses. This awareness doesn’t necessarily turn urban epicures into liberty-minded activists, though. Many small-scale organic-food producers and their customers simply want to make their preferred practices legal and easier to practice—while saddling major corporate producers of food with added regulations. In general, food activists aren’t much interested in establishing better rules and then letting the market determine outcomes. Instead, they seek specific outcomes—more composting, for example—and deem any rule that fails to support such goals to be a bad one.

Linnekin seems somewhat sympathetic to this small-is-better tendency. He wants to eliminate “ag-gag” laws that protect farmers from harassment by activists. He thinks that many food products carry antiquated grading standards and wants to see them changed. But many of these standards have solid rationales. Linnekin objects, for example, to the USDA’s “prime” grade for beef being determined by the level of fat marbling. But fat is the driver of taste, and many small producers of leaner, grass-fed beef sell products that often don’t taste very good. They don’t deserve a “prime” grading.

While regulations hostile to industrial, mass-scale agriculture—which feeds a global population of 7 billion people—should be avoided, rationalizing archaic and protectionist regulations makes sense. So does exempting small-scale producers from many regulations and embracing a more general “food-freedom” philosophy. As Biting the Hands That Feed Us makes clear, our current food-regulatory approach is too often a theater of the absurd.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.