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« on: April 10, 2018, 05:38:34 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 4-10-2018
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Patriot Post® · Mid-Day Digest
Apr. 10, 2018 · https://patriotpost.us/digests/55265-mid-day-digest
IN TODAY’S EDITION
Trump’s attorney is in Mueller’s crosshairs.
Congress should ignore Zuckerberg and protect user privacy.
Syria is still a big mess with no easy solutions.
Are refugees good or bad? Depends on who you ask.
Plus our Daily Features: Top Headlines, Memes, Cartoons, Columnists and Short Cuts.
THE FOUNDATION
“Nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community.” —Benjamin Rush (1788.)
FEATURED ANALYSIS
Mueller Goes After Trump’s Attorney1
By Thomas Gallatin
On Monday, the FBI conducted no-knock raids on the office and home of President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, taking his phone, computer and personal financial records. The Washington Post reported that Cohen “is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations,” and that this raid is directly tied to special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation.
Upon learning of the raid, a clearly frustrated Trump responded by calling it “a disgrace.” He added, “I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now or longer. It’s an attack on our country in a true sense; it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” Trump then reiterated that he has been repeatedly urged to fire Mueller and end the investigation.
Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, called the FBI’s raid tactics “inappropriate and unnecessary,” pointing out that Cohen has “cooperated completely with all government entities, including providing thousands of non-privileged documents to the Congress and sitting for depositions under oath.”
Cohen has long been a subject/target of the Mueller investigation because of his close working relationship with Trump over the years. When the story broke about Trump’s alleged 2006 affair2 with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and a subsequent large payment of hush money, Cohen defended Trump, claiming that Trump had no knowledge of the payment, which Cohen had paid out of his own pocket, and that he was not reimbursed by Trump. And last week Trump backed up this claim, saying he had no knowledge of a payment3 to Daniels. Cohen further explained, “The payment to [Stephanie] Clifford [a.k.a. Daniels] was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”
Alan Dershowitz, a liberal Harvard Law professor, reacted to the news, saying, “This is a very dangerous day today for lawyer-client relations.” He explained, “I tell [clients] on my word of honor that what you tell me is sacrosanct. And now they say, just based on probable cause … they can burst into the office, grab all the computers and then give it to another FBI agent and say, ‘You’re the firewall. We want you now to read all these confidential communications, tell us which ones we can get and which ones we can’t get.’” Dershowitz astutely noted, “If this were Hillary Clinton being investigated and they went into her lawyer’s office, the ACLU would be on every television station in America, jumping up and down. The deafening silence from the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling.” There is, of course, a big exception4 to attorney-client privilege when it comes to crime, but this instance is murky.
Once again it appears that Mueller is hard at work seeking a serious charge against Trump. And with this latest move it looks as if Mueller is aiming at hanging a campaign-finance violation on Trump. So much for the Russian collusion gambit, but as we have repeatedly warned, these special investigations are given such broad authority and power to investigate that they rarely actually bring charges based on their initial impetus. And yet they rarely come up empty-handed either. Trump’s low moral character5 only makes that more likely.
Ignore Zuckerberg — What Congress Should Legislate6
By Mark Alexander
Facebook’s billionaire CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, an adolescent darling of the Left, is being paraded up Capitol Hill this week, where he will be answering questions about individual data privacy violations7 in the wake of his data-mining deal with Cambridge Analytica. Notably, objections to the latter came to light only after it was discovered that they provided consultation for Donald Trump’s8 2016 campaign. Fact is, Barack Obama’s9 2012 campaign was far more invasive10 with Facebook user data, but there were no objections then.
Zuckerberg’s self-serving objectives11 should not frame congressional legislation objectives.
In his prepared remarks12, Zuckerberg notes, “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. … Just recently, we’ve seen the #MeToo movement and the March for Our Lives, organized, at least in part, on Facebook.”
Attempting to divert from the privacy issues, Zuckerberg hopes Congress will focus on what he claims is the real problem13: “fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech…” According to Zuckerberg, “It’s not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive. It’s not enough to just give people a voice. We have to make sure people aren’t using it to hurt people or spread misinformation.”
In other words, the company is aggressively implementing its Orwellian content-censoring programs to determine what it deems suitable for you to see or not see in your news feeds — regardless of the pages you have selected to follow. And its censorship protocols defining what is “fake, hateful or hurtful” favor leftist ideology14. Consequently, the more than 500,000 followers of The Patriot Post on Facebook are not as likely to see our content in their news feeds.
In other words, yes, Zuckerberg is concerned about the negative press regarding Facebook’s dissemination of data without user consent. Indeed, users have a reasonable expectation that such information would be private. But Facebook’s business model is not about “connecting friends and loved ones15,” as Zuckerberg would like you to believe, but about profiling users to market their information to advertisers and a plethora of other third-party customers.
As we have noted repeatedly in our coverage about Facebook privacy issues, Facebook is not the product; Facebook users are the product. And nobody should be shocked that Facebook is collecting all the user data it can16 to sell that product.
But there are millions of social media users who are clueless about invasive data mining by social media and other companies.
So what should Congress do? Ignore Zuckerberg’s agenda.
Congress has the authority to protect consumer privacy through legislation, and in the case of Facebook and other aggregators of private data (which should be classified as private property), that legislation should include explicit requirements regarding the dissemination of consumer data and profiles. When it comes to invasive privacy violations — the collecting and marketing of individual profiles — a ubiquitous blanket “user agreement” is completely insufficient.
Congress should enact legislation requiring that social media and other aggregators of individual data (Facebook, Google, et al.) be required to obtain specific and explicit user permissions for each and every transfer of such data, prior to the sale or transfer of any individually identifiable profiling data.
The aggregators will argue about what constitutes “private” — that the data they collect is not private. But by any reasonable definition, the individual data in question most certainly is private. |
