“Ag-gag” laws – which ban the collection of evidence of wrongdoing on
farms, from animal cruelty to food-safety violations – are a sterling
example of how monopolism perpetuates itself by taking over the
political process.
As American agribusiness has grown ever-more concentrated – while
antitrust regulators looked the other way, embracing the Reagan-era
doctrine of only punishing monopolies for raising prices and permitting every other kind of monopolistic abuse – it has been able to collude, joining industry groups like ALEC,
the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts
industry-favoring “model legislation” and then lobbies state
legislatures to adopt it.
ALEC’s contribution to Big Ag is the nationwide epidemic of “ag-gag” laws,
which felonize the collection and disclosure of true facts of intense
public interest. Ag-gag laws are plainly unconstitutional, but that
hasn’t stopped state authorities from prosecuting and imprisoning animal
rights activists and food safety whistleblowers.
Invalidating ag-gag laws is an expensive, state-by-state process, and
activists and impact litigators have already overturned the laws of
Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, and fifteen other states, and now they’ve just
scored a victory in Iowa, after a victory in a lawsuit filed by the
Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Iowa Citizens for Community
Improvement (CCI), Bailing Out Benji, People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals (PETA), and the Center for Food Safety struck down the
state’s 2012 law.
The court took notice of the legislative history of the ag-gag law,
which was passed after evidence of extreme animal cruelty was published
by activists.
Ag-gag laws remain on the books in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Montana,
North Carolina, and North Dakota, with challenges pending in Kansas and
North Carolina.
I eat meat, and I go to real lengths to make sure that I’m buying from
sustainable, free-range producers who treat their animals with respect
and dignity. The idea that markets are best served if I’m not allowed to
know when a producer fails to live up to those standards is absurd, and
reveals late-stage capitalism’s lip-service indifference to markets:
markets exist to extract from consumers, not to discipline producers
according to the desires and preferences of their customers. If
customers don’t like a producer’s conduct, the remedy is to hide that
conduct from the customer, tricking them into buying inferior products.
Last month, I published a post
discussing the mountains of abandoned Bird Scooters piling up in city
impound lots, and the rise of $30 Chinese conversion kits that let you
buy a scooter at auction, swap out the motherboard, and turn it into a
personal scooter, untethered from the Bird company.
In Bird’s legal threat, they imply that by linking to a forum in which
the existence of conversion kits was under discussion, I had violated
the anti-trafficking clauses of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, the 1998 law that limits the dissemination of
“circumvention tools” that bypass access controls for copyrighted works
– for example, tools that let you extract the video from an encrypted
DVD.
First of all, talking about a place where people are talking about
circumvention isn’t circumvention or illegal “trafficking” in
circumvention technology. The US Copyright Office – which oversees the
DMCA – publishes a report every three years
in which they extensively discuss the existence of circumvention
methods. It’s just not illegal to talk about circumvention technology.
But the hits keep on coming: the conversion kits that I wrote about aren’t even circumvention devices.
The DMCA prohibits bypassing technological measures that effectively
control access to copyrighted works, and prohibits trafficking in those
technologies or technologies that bypass technological measures that
prevent infringement. The conversion kits don’t bypass a locked
bootloader to access or alter the firmware on a Bird Scooter. You get
the kit, remove some screws, and put in the new logic board. If
motherboard swaps were circumvention, then selling someone a screwdriver
could be an offense punishable by a five year prison sentence and a
$500,000 fine. Obviously, it’s not.
We’ve been doing this for decades, and every year, the number of
baseless legal threats from corporations that don’t like being
criticized goes up. Thin-skinned corporations have always been with us,
but the media has never been more vulnerable: cash strapped,
underinsured, and easy to frighten.
We don’t back down. We aren’t rich and we aren’t powerful, but we know our rights (attentive readers will know that I’ve pledged myself to killing Section 1201 of the DMCA
– you’d be hard pressed to find someone harder to bullshit about DMCA
1201). We’ve got good friends: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has
our back.
Did you get a nastygram like this from Bird? Tell us about it. There’s strength in numbers.
…third-party email tracking technologies will try to
share and correlate your email address across different emails that you
open, and even across different websites that you visit, further shaping
your invisible online profile. And since people often access their
email from different devices, email address leaks allow trackers (and
often network observers) to correlate your identity across devices.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
The nutshell: it’s not enough to block remote images in the client
anymore. But you’re probably not even doing that. For many, many of you,
here’s the first step:
In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck
since Trump’s border wall shutdown; it’s hard to say who will be worst
hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that money (but who
may have been able to pick up some other work while they were off the
job to cover their bills); or the “essential” federal employees who’ve
had to show up for work every day without pay, but who will, someday,
get a paycheck to cover their forced labor.
In the latter group are 51,739 TSA “officers” (TSA screeners aren’t
cops, but they’ve adopted the “officer” honorific in a bid to secure
flyers’ obedience while they confiscate their apple-pie filling). Since
the shut-down began, TSA officials have insisted that screeners were not
staging “sick outs” (for example, to avoid daycare expenses by staying
home with their kids) and that the extra waiting time that passengers
were suffering through (53 minutes in Laguardia!) was the result of
heavier than usual travel.
But after Friday, TSA screeners will have to decide whether they want to
stay on the job without pay, and it’s a sure bet that lots of them will
stay home, and there’s not much the TSA can do about it. A TSA walkout
would cripple the nation’s businesses and strike directly at
higher-income Americans (that is, the people who supported Trump as he
used racist wall promises to secure the votes needed for a
two-trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the wealthy).
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Trump’s probably right that giving
in on the wall will lose him any chance of re-election as discouraged
racists stay home from the polls (as they had done historically, until
Trump gave them something to vote for), and deliver victory to Democrats
who have a small but meaningful chance of taxing the shit out of
looters and oligarchs. But the patience of looters and oligarchs – with
the exception of a few long-term thinkers like Charles Koch – is in
notoriously short supply. If Trump loses the racists, he won’t be able
to help the billionaires. But if he loses the billionaires, he won’t be
able to afford to court the racists.
![chewedcorn:
“know your econoline vans [OC]
”](https://66.media.tumblr.com/00001cea8ab45318eaab3b2096e7ce00/tumblr_pl4tiqA97r1ww71zpo1_500.jpg)
