I guess I should blush to admit that my Washington Examiner column this week focuses on “Weinergate.”  But who among us can resist snickering at a scandal this hilarious—who so sober and serious that they could ignore the crotch pic that launched a thousand puns?

As I argue in the column, among all the horselaughs to be had, there are also lessons to be learned:

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a good old-fashioned political sex scandal. They’re entertaining, and they may even be edifying — reminding us that self-styled “public servants” are often less responsible, more venal, and just plain dumber than those they seek to rule.

Some writers with whom I’m normally simpatico disagree. Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway deplores “the odd American obsession with political sex scandals.” The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf also condemns the attention given the Weiner kerfuffle:

there is a significant cost to obsessing over these things. The opportunity cost, for the media, is covering lots of other matters that are actually of greater import to the public, whatever one thinks of sex scandals.

I just don’t see it. Sure, in a better world, the news cycle might consist of a dignified 24/7 seminar on debt limits, insurance exchanges, the War Powers Resolution, and the like. But here on earth, Weinergate’s mainly crowding out more coverage of Sarah Palin’s bus tour.

“And for the politician in question,” Friedersdorf continues, “scandal consumes all the time he’d otherwise be dedicating to his official duties.”

I confess, I have a hard time not seeing this as win-win.

Both Mataconis and Friedersdorf argue that “private” sexual behavior tells us little about how politicians do their jobs. And I see their point, to a point. I sometimes joke, lamely, that one of my favorite presidents was a draft-dodging, womanizing Democrat elected in ’92 (wait for it)… Grover Cleveland.

But whether or not we should care about congressional “sexting”—in the context of the modern media Panopticon, isn’t someone, like Weiner, who engages in it (especially after GOP Rep. Christopher Lee’s downfall) at least a reckless idiot? And isn’t that relevant to his job?

In a recent hand-wringing editorial, the New York Times fretted about disgraced former Senator and VP candidate John Edwards.

What the Times found unfortunate wasn’t the runaway prosecution–a legitimate complaint–but the fact that it would draw attention to yet another giant political phony. It’s “the last thing the nation needs: another cautionary tale of hubris,” says the Grey Lady, 
”the woeful courtroom coda to [Edwards'] once flourishing political career can only invite a further slide toward wariness and cynicism for American voters.”

Oh no! Not more “wariness and cynicism”! Surely, that’s the “last thing the nation needs” in an era of promiscuous warmaking and reckless spending!

There’s a story (perhaps apocryphal) where F. Scott Fitzgerald says to Ernest Hemingway, “the rich are different from you and me,” and Hemingway supposedly replies, “yes, they have more money.” I don’t know about the rich, but the political class is, by and large, different from the rest of us–and not just because they have more power.

By reminding us of how untrustworthy and reckless these people can be–how little control they often exhibit in their own lives–political sex scandals may even serve an important social purpose: they remind us that we should think twice before granting them more control over ours.

“Weinergate”: It’s Entertaining–and Edifying! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It might be tempting to laugh at France’s ban on words like “Facebook” and Twitter” in the media. France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel recently ruled that specific references to these sites (in stories not about them) would violate a 1992 law banning “secret” advertising. The council was created in 1989 to ensure fairness in French audiovisual communications, such as in allocation of television time to political candidates, and to protect children from some types of programming.

Sure, laugh at the French. But not for too long. The United States has similarly busy-bodied regulators, who, for example, have primly regulated such advertising themselves. American regulators carefully oversee non-secret advertising, too. Our government nannies equal the French in usurping parents’ decisions about children’s access to media. And the Federal Communications Commission endlessly plays footsie with speech regulation.

In the United States, banning words seems too blatant an affront to our First Amendment, but the United States has a fairly lively “English only” movement. Somehow, regulating an entire communications protocol doesn’t have the same censorious stink.

So it is that our Federal Communications Commission asserts a right to regulate the delivery of Internet service. The protocols on which the Internet runs are communications protocols, remember. Withdraw private control of them and you’ve got a more thoroughgoing and insidious form of speech control: it may look like speech rights remain with the people, but government controls the medium over which the speech travels.

The government has sought to control protocols in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The “crypto wars,” in which government tried to control secure communications protocols, merely presage struggles of the future. Perhaps the next battle will be over BitCoin, an online currency that is resistant to surveillance and confiscation. In BitCoin, communications and value transfer are melded together. To protect us from the scourge of illegal drugs and the recently manufactured crime of “money laundering,” governments will almost certainly seek to bar us from trading with one another and transferring our wealth securely and privately.

So laugh at France. But don’t laugh too hard. Leave the smugness to them.

Government Control of Language and Other Protocols is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

That will be the subject of a Cato on Campus session this afternoon entitled: “The Internet and Social Media: Tools of Freedom or Tools of Oppression?” Watch live online at the link starting at 3:30 p.m., or attend in person. A reception follows.

The delight that so many felt to see protesters in Iran using social media has given way to delight about the use of Facebook to organize for freedom in Egypt. But this serial enthusiasm omits that the “Twitter revolution” in Iran did not succeed. The fiercest skeptics even suggest that the tweeting during Iran’s suppressed uprising was mostly Iranian ex-pats goosing excitable westerners and not any organizing force within Iran itself. Coming to terms with the Internet, dictatorships are learning to use it for surveillance and control, possibly with help from American tech companies.

So is the cause of freedom better off with the Internet? Or is social media a shiny bauble that distracts from the long, heavy slog of liberating the people of the world?

Joining the discussion will be Chris Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Cato; Alex Howard, Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media; and Tim Karr, Campaign Director at Free Press. More info here.

Does the Internet Cause Freedom? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This weekend, we learned that the U.S. government last month demanded records associated with the Twitter accounts of several supporters of WikiLeaks—including American citizens and an elected member of Iceland’s parliament. As the New York Times observes, the only remarkable thing about the government’s request is that we’re learning about it, thanks to efforts by Twitter’s legal team to have the order unsealed. It seems a virtual certainty that companies like Facebook and Google have received similar demands.

Most news reports are misleadingly describing the order [PDF] as a “subpoena” when in actuality it’s a judicially-authorized order under 18 U.S.C §2703(d), colloquially known (to electronic surveillance geeks) as a “D-order.” Computer security researcher Chris Soghoian has a helpful rundown on the section and what it’s invocation entails, while those who really want to explore the legal labyrinth that is the Stored Communications Act should consult legal scholar Orin Kerr’s excellent 2004 paper on the topic.

As the Times argues in a news analysis today, this is one more reminder that our federal electronic surveillance laws, which date from 1986, are in dire need of an update. Most people assume their online communications enjoy the same Fourth Amendment protection as traditional dead-tree-based correspondence, but the statutory language allows the contents of “electronic communications” to be obtained using those D-orders if they’re older than 180 days or have already been “opened” by the recipient. Unlike traditional search warrants, which require investigators to establish “probable cause,” D-orders are issued on the mere basis of “specific facts” demonstrating that the information sought is “relevant” to a legitimate investigation. Fortunately, an appellate court has recently ruled that part of the law unconstitutional—making it clear that the Fourth Amendment does indeed apply to email… a mere 24 years after the original passage of the law.

The D-order disclosed this weekend does not appear to seek communications content—though some thorny questions might well arise if it had. (Do messages posted to a private or closed Twitter account get the same protection as e-mail?) But the various records and communications “metadata” demanded here can still be incredibly revealing. Unless the user is employing anonymizing technology—which, as Soghoian notes, is fairly likely when we’re talking about such tech-savvy targets—logs of IP addresses used to access a service like Twitter may help reveal the identity of the person posting to an anonymous account, as well as an approximate physical location. The government may also wish to analyze targets’ communication patterns in order to build a “social graph” of WikiLeaks supporters and identify new targets for investigation. (The use of a D-order, as opposed to even less restrictive mechanisms that can be used to obtain basic records, suggests they’re interested in who is talking to whom on the targeted services.) Given the degree of harassment to which known WikiLeaks supporters have been subject, easy access to such records also threatens to chill what the courts have called “expressive association.” But unlike traditional wiretaps, D-order requests for data aren’t even subject to mandatory reporting requirements—which means surveillance geeks may be confident this sort of thing is fairly routine, but the general public lacks any real sense of just how pervasive it is. Whatever your take on WikiLeaks, then, this rare peek behind the curtain is one more reminder that our digital privacy laws are long overdue for an upgrade.

Wikileaks, Twitter, and Our Outdated Electronic Surveillance Laws is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There are a number of ways for you to stay connected to the Cato Institute on the web, outside of our main website (Cato.org), this blog (Cato@Liberty), our Spanish language site (El Cato), our political theorists’ digital round table (Cato | Unbound), or our hub for high school and college students (Cato on Campus). As we have grown since our founding in 1977, so have we grown online in recent years, in an effort to provide more opportunities to interact with our research and experts.

We appreciate your interest in our work and we encourage you to leverage any and all of our information resources–both at our main website, on this blog, and across the reaches of new media space. We have recently made many of our multimedia resources available for embed to bloggers, and we are looking continuously at ways to try to connect you to our projects. After the fold, check out a sampling of ways you can connect to Cato online and for ways you can use our multimedia resources.

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Be sure to check the calendar–we stream some of our events over the web in real time, and we try to provide opportunities to web participants to submit questions, especially in our student forums.

Check back with us often in the coming weeks and months–as we said, we are always looking for new ways to connect with you, and we are proud to be able to offer these resources to you online.

Cato 2.0 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

By now the name of Yoani Sánchez has become common currency for those who follow Cuba. Through the use of New Media (blog, Twitter and YouTube) Yoani has challenged the Castro regime in a way that various U.S. government-sponsored efforts have  failed to do before, earning the respect and tacit admiration of even those who continue to sympathize with the Cuban regime. As my colleague Ian Vásquez put it a few months ago, Yoani keeps speaking truth to power.

Although she’s a remarkable individual, Yoani is not alone in fighting repression with technology. Other bloggers are making their voice heard, and that makes the Castro dictatorship nervous. As Yoani wrote in a paper recently published by Cato, despite the many difficulties and costs that regular Cubans face when trying to access Internet,

… a web of networks has emerged as the only means by which a person on the island can make his opinions known to the rest of the world. Today, this virtual space is like a training camp where Cubans go to relearn forgotten freedoms. The right of association can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networks, in a sort of compensation for the crime of “unlawful assembly” established by the Cuban penal code.

As recent events in Iran and elsewhere have shown, once a technology becomes pervasive in a society, it is extremely difficult for a totalitarian regime to control it. A new paper published today by the Cuba Study Group highlights the potential of technology in bringing about democracy and liberty to Cuba. The document entitled “Empowering the Cuban People through Technology: Recommendations for Private and Public Sector Leaders,” also recommends lifting all U.S. restrictions that hinder the opportunities of companies to provide cell phone and Internet service to the island. For example, the paper reviews the current U.S. regulatory framework on technology investment in other repressive regimes such as Iran, Syria, Burma and North Korea, and finds that “the U.S. regulations governing telecommunications-related exports to Cuba are still some of the most restrictive.”

By removing these counterproductive restrictions, Washington could help unleash an Internet revolution in Cuba. More Yoanis will certainly bring about more change in the island than 50 years of failed U.S. trade and travel bans.

Unleashing an Internet Revolution in Cuba is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Wired News reports on another bill proposing to create government authority to take over the Internet—this time, because of “cyberattacks.”

Most revealing is the part of the report exposing how Senate staff must fish around for reasons why the authority would be exercised, never mind to what effect:

In order for the President to declare such an emergency, there would have to be knowledge both of a massive network flaw — and information that someone was about to leverage that hole to do massive harm. For example, the recent “Aurora” hack to steal source code from Google, Adobe and other companies wouldn’t have qualified, one Senate staffer noted: “It’d have to be Aurora 2, plus the intel that country X is going to take us down using that vulnerability.”

A second staffer suggested that evidence of hackers looking to leverage something like the massive Conficker worm — which infected millions of machines and was seemingly poised in April 2009 to unleash something nefarious — might trigger the bill’s emergency provisions. “You could argue there’s some threat information built in there,” the staffer said.

These scenarios will never happen. And we wouldn’t want the government grabbing control of the Internet if they did.

The idea of government “taking over” the Internet for security purposes is equal parts misconceived and self-defeating. It’s a packet-switched network, meaning that it routes around the equivalent of damage that would be caused by anyone’s attempt to “control” it. The government could certainly degrade the Internet with a well-coordinated attack, of course.

And that’s the way to think about government controlling the Internet in some kind of emergency: It would be an attack on the country’s natural resilience.

In February, CNN broadcast a bogus reality TV show produced by the Bipartisan Policy Center called “cyber.shockwave.” A variety of technically incompetent government officials talked about pulling the plug on the Internet and cell phone networks in response to some emergency. Commentator D33PT00T captured the idiocy of this idea, Tweeting, “ok my phn doesn’t work & Internet doesn’t work – ths guys R planning 2 run arnd w/ bullhorns ‘all is well remain calm!’”

The Internet may have points of weakness, but it is a source of strength overall. A government take-over of the Internet in the event of emergency would be equivalent to an auto-immune reaction in which the government would attack the society. Proposals for the federal government to take control of the Internet under any circumstance are unfounded and dangerous.

Unfounded Government Plans to Take Control of the Internet is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In their 2006 Cato Policy Analysis, “Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture,” Gregory Lastowka and Dan Hunter wrote about how the functions that make up the creative cycle—creation, selection, production, dissemination, promotion, sale, and use of expressive content—are undergoing revolutionary decentralization and disintermediation.

The only thing professional in the clip below was the writing of the song. It deserves its credit, but the performance itself, production of the video, its selection, dissemination, and promotion (Twitter users, YouTube) are all amateur or amateur supported by a professionally managed, ad-supported platform.

Watch it a second time to take in the reactions of the girls sitting in front of the map. If you like, compare it with the tacky, overproduced, and flat “professional video“.

This is amateur entertainment that rivals any professional production, in part because it’s amateur. Assuming this performer dedicates himself further to his craft, he can rival or surpass anything put out by yesterday’s professionals.

(And, yes, I’m waiting to learn that I’ve been duped by some clever marketing scheme, but I hope this is real.)

Leaves Lady Gaga in the Dust is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday the D.C. Circuit ruled that Congress hadn’t given the Federal Communications Commission power to regulate the Internet and the FCC couldn’t bootstrap that power from other authority. It was a rare but welcome affirmation that the rule of law might actually pertain in the regulatory area.

But the Open Internet Coalition put out a release containing threat exaggeration to make Dick Cheney blush:

“Today’s DC Circuit decision . . . creates a dangerous situation, one where the health and openness of broadband Internet is being held hostage by the behavior of the major telco and cable providers.”

That’s right. It’s a hostage-taking when consumers and businesses—and not government—hammer out the terms and conditions of Internet access. Inferentially, the organization representing Google, Facebook, eBay, and Twitter believes that Internet users are too stupid and supine to choose the Internet service they want.

What these content companies are really after, of course, is government support in their tug-of-war with the companies that transport Internet content. It’s hard to know which produces the value of the Internet and which should gain the lion’s share of the rewards. Let the market—not lobbying—decide what reward content and transport deserve for their roles in the Internet ecosystem.

As I said of the Open Internet Coalition’s membership on a saltier, but still relentlessly charming, day: “[T]hese companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.”

Consumers in the Driver’s Seat—Oh, the Humanity! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

By now, you’ve probably heard the story—and seen the video.  During the weekend’s Snowpocalypse™ in DC, a gaggle of young urbanites, using Twitter and other social media, announced a big group snowball fight at the corner of 14th and U Streets.  For a while, it was all good fun, with the participants periodically stopping the skirmish to help dislodge a motorist for a snowdrift, amid collective cheers. But an off-duty plainclothes cop whose Hummer had been hit by a few snowballs lost his cool—and advanced on the crowd to berate them with his gun drawn. You’d think an angry, out-of-uniform guy brandishing a gun might set off a dangerous stampede in the snow, but true to form, the DC crowd responded with chanting: “You don’t bring a gun to a snowball fight!”

Initially, the Metropolitan Police Department “reviewed the evidence” and concluded that the officer had only been holding a cell phone after all—folks who’d said it was a gun must have just imagined it, what with all that snow. But it turns out there were a whole lot of video cameras and phonecams there, and still shots and recordings began to circulate on the Internet, making it impossible to deny what had happened.  By Monday, the chief of police had issued a statement calling the officer’s behavior “totally inappropriate” and announcing that he’d be relegated to desk duty pending further inquiry.

As anyone who follows the excellent work of my colleague Radley Balko will be well aware, things often play out quite differently—with departments circling the wagons, and no serious accountability for far more egregious abuses of authority. But video—increasingly ubiquitous and portable—can make a difference. And it strikes me that, in one sense, it helps remedy other kinds of social inequality.  Reviewing that video of the snowball scene, you might point out that the crowd is full of white 20-somethings, many of whom (given the city’s demographics) are almost certainly college-educated professionals, while police misconduct toward less privileged groups is far more likely to be ignored.

What is privilege, though? In cases like these, it consists largely in the ability to be seen and heard—to attract media attention, to articulate your story in a clear and compelling way, to be considered credible by press and the community. All of these, unfortunately, depend enormously on class, status, race, and education. Unless there’s video. And video is democratic these days. You’d have to poke around a bit to find even a bottom-of-the-line cheapo cell phone that didn’t come with at least a still camera, and likely video capture to boot. So while there’s been some attention paid to the potential of this kind of “Little Brother” surveillance to increase accountability—the to lessen disparity in power between citizen and cop—it’s also worth stressing the way it can lessen certain kinds of disparities between citizens.

That said, and just going by memory, it seems like most of the stories I encounter in this vein still involve white, middle-class, college-educated young people. One possibility is that this shows I’m wrong, and that other aspects of privilege still play into their videos circulating while others languish. Another, though, is just that they’re both accustomed to this kind of routine use of technology and sharing of data, and that they take their social power for granted. That is, it occurs more naturally to them that the right response to this kind of misbehavior is to record and circulate it. If it’s mostly the latter, we’re on an interesting precipice, where the main remaining precondition for the leveling effect to kick in is just awareness that the other preconditions are in place.  If that’s right, the next few years should be interesting.

Do Bring a Phonecam to a Snowball Fight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Some of the most prominent Internet companies sent a letter yesterday asking for protection from market forces. Among them: Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter.

A Washington Post story summarizes their concerns: “[W]ithout a strong anti-discrimination policy, companies like theirs may not get a fair shot on the Internet because carriers could decide to block them from ever reaching consumers.”

No ISP could block access to these popular services and survive, of course. What they could do is try to charge the most popular services a higher tariff to get their services through. Thus, weep the helpless, multi-billion-dollar Internet behemoths, we need a “fair shot”!

Plain and simple, these companies want regulation to ensure that ISPs can’t capture a larger share of the profits that the Internet generates. They want it all for themselves. Phrased another way, the goal is to create a subsidy for content creators by blocking ISPs from getting a piece of the action.

It’s all very reminiscent of disputes between coal mines and railroads. The coal mines “produced the coal” and believed that the profitability of the coal-energy ecosystem should accrue only to themselves, with railroads earning the barest minimum. But where is it written that digging coal out of the ground is what creates the value, and getting it where it’s used creates none? Transport may be as valuable as “production” of both commodities and content. The market should decide, not the industry with the best lobbyists.

What happens if ISPs can’t capture the value of providing transport? Of course, less investment flows to transport and we have less of it. Consumers will have to pay more of their dollars out of pocket for broadband, while Facebook’s boy CEO draws an excessive salary from atop a pile of overpriced stock holdings. The irony is thick when opponents of high executive compensation support “net neutrality” regulation.

Another reason why these Internet companies’ concerns are bogus is their size and popularity. They have a direct line to consumers and more than enough capability to convince consumers that any given ISP is wrongly degrading access to their services. As Tim Lee pointed out in his excellent paper, “The Durable Internet,” ownership of a network service does not equate to control. ISPs can be quickly reined in by the public, as has already happened.

A “net neutrality” subsidy for small start-up services is also unnecessary: They have no profits to share with ISPs. What about mid-size services—heading to profitability, but not there yet? Can ISPs choke them off? Absolutely not.

Large, established companies are not known for being ahead of trends, for one thing, and the anti-authoritarian culture of the Internet is the perfect place to play “beleaguered upstart” against the giant, evil ISP. There could be no greater PR gift than for a small service to have access to it degraded by an ISP.

The Internet companies’ plea for regulation is bogus, and these companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.

Internet Companies’ Bogus Plea for Regulation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato health care policy experts offered live-commentary to President Obama’s address to Congress on Wednesday night. To review their comments, click the replay button below.

The video player has the speech in full.

Cato Health Care Experts Live-Blogging Obama’s Address is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

After a morning workout and attending Mass this Sunday, I read El Mercurio (Chile’s paper of record) online. Although I seldom read Chilean newspapers blogs (too many attacks and too much dirt), I did so that morning because I was impressed by the indignation expressed by my friend Luis Larraín in his Sunday blog (titled “Canallas” – Shameless). I had named Larraín Superintendent of Social Security when he was 25 years old. At that time I was 30 and Secretary of Labor and Social Security.

With astonishment I discovered that a certain “Mr. Murillo”, in the comment number 10 on the blog (which I copied immediately, and backed up electronically), explicitly attacked another commenter, Mr. José Fregoso Edelstein, by saying that his previous comment was due to the fact that he is from a “bad race” because he is Jewish.

I immediately logged in to Twitter and posted a ‘tweet’ demanding El Mercurio delete the blog comment, because it is a terrible insult directed at a group of people that have suffered indescribable horrors, not only in the 20th Century, but throughout history. I would have done the same thing if the insult was directed at Palestinians, Lebanese, Croatians, or any other racial/religious/national group.

However, I found an unexpected surprise. Instead of receiving immediate support for an action I thought just and reasonable, several people on Twitter attacked Jews, and me for defending them (one wrote, “You have used your enormous prestige in Chile to become “a shield for the Jews”). They also accused me of “encouraging censorship”, suggesting a “media dictatorship”, etc. . . . I replied inmediately in Twitter to the least offensive ones. Fifteen minutes later I received a ‘tweet’ from an editor at El Mercurio, saying that they had seen my complaint in Twitter and that they were studying the situation. With another tweet I insisted on immediate deletion of the comment. Twenty minutes later the newspaper editors deleted the offensive comment number 10. I want to emphasize that the editorial mistake, even this grievous one, does not compromise the newspaper El Mercurio as a whole, and its fast action in regard to the issue speaks to the newspaper’s chief editor’s integrity. It was an extraordinary triumph of the fast boat Twitter over the “media carrier” in Chile, another demonstration of the liberating potential of the wonderful new technologies being developed in the land of the free and the brave.

What left me very worried, and the reason I wrote this, is having detected a worrisome anti-Semitic sentiment among my fellow countrymen. Is this unjust anti-Semitic sentiment widespread, though hidden, in Chile, or was this only a “black swan?” I declare myself in a state of alert. We are building a free and good country. There should be no place whatsoever for the language of hate and the discrimination of minorities. As the great Albert Einstein said: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

Using Twitter to Confront an Anti-Semitic Attack in Chile’s Paper of Record is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It’s fascinating to watch developments in Iran via Twitter and other social media. (Notably, when I turned on the TV last night to look for Iran news from a conventional source, there was nothing to be found – just commercials and talking heads yapping about politics.)

It was laudable that Twitter delayed a scheduled outage to late-night Tehran time in order to preserve the platform for Iranian users, but contrary to a growing belief, it wasn’t done at the behest of the State Department. It was done at the behest of Twitter users.

Twitter makes that fairly (though imperfectly) clear on its blog, saying, “the State Department does not have access to our decision making process.”

As Justin Logan notes, events in Iran are not about the United States or U.S. policy. They should not be, or appear to be, directed or aided from Washington, D.C. Any shifts in power in Iran should be produced in Iran for Iranians, with support from the people of the world – not from any outside government.

People are free to speculate that the State Department asked Twitter to deny its involvement precisely to create the necessary appearances, but without good evidence of it, assuming so just reflects a pre-commitment that governments – not people and the businesses that serve them – are the primary forces for good in the world.

Twitter and Iran – It’s Not About the U.S. Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So when China blocked social networking sites for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre, were they successful?

Not entirely.

Breaking through the Great Firewall of China is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Obama Speaks to the Muslim World

In Cairo on Thursday, President Obama asked for a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” and spoke at some length on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Cato scholar Christopher Preble comments, “At times, it sounded like a state of the union address, with a litany of promises intended to appeal to particular interest groups. …That said, I thought the president hit the essential points without overpromising.”

Preble goes on to say:

He did not ignore that which divides the United States from the world at large, and many Muslims in particular, nor was he afraid to address squarely the lies and distortions — including the implication that 9/11 never happened, or was not the product of al Qaeda — that have made the situation worse than it should be. He stressed the common interests that should draw people to support U.S. policies rather than oppose them: these include our opposition to the use of violence against innocents; our support for democracy and self-government; and our hostility toward racial, ethnic or religious intolerance. All good.

David Boaz contends that there are a number of other nations the president could have chosen to deliver his address:

Americans forget that the Muslim world and the Arab world are not synonymous. In fact, only 15 to 20 percent of Muslims live in Arab countries, barely more than the number in Indonesia alone and far fewer than the number in the Indian subcontinent. It seems to me that Obama would be better off delivering his message to the Muslim world somewhere closer to where most Muslims live. Perhaps even in his own childhood home of Indonesia.

Not only are there more Muslims in Asia than in the Middle East, the Muslim countries of south and southeast Asia have done a better job of integrating Islam and modern democratic capitalism…. Egypt is a fine place for a speech on the Arab-Israeli conflict. But in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, or Pakistan he could give a speech on America and the Muslim world surrounded by rival political leaders in a democratic country and by internationally recognized business leaders. It would be good for the president to draw attention to this more moderate version of Islam.

Tiananmen Square: 20 Years Later

It has been 20 years since the tragic deaths of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and 30 years since Deng Xiaoping embarked on economic reform in China. Cato scholar James A. Dorn comments, “After 20 years China has made substantial economic progress, but the ghosts of Tiananmen are restless and will continue to be so until the Goddess of Liberty is restored.”

In Thursday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Dorn discusses the perception of human rights in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre, saying that many young people are beginning to accept the existence of human rights independent of the state.

A few days before the anniversary, social media Web sites like Twitter and YouTube were blocked in China. Cato scholar Jim Harper says that it’s going to take a lot more than tanks to shut down the message of freedom in today’s online world:

In 1989, when a nascent pro-democracy movement wanted to communicate its vitality and prepare to take on the state, meeting en masse was vital. But that made it fairly easy for the CCP to roll in and crush the dream of democracy.

Twenty years later, the Internet is the place where mass movements for liberty can take root. While the CCP is attempting to use the electronic equivalent of an armored division to prevent change, reform today is a question of when, not if. Shutting down open dialogue will only slow the democratic transition to freedom, which the Chinese government cannot ultimately prevent.

Taxpayers Acquire Failing Auto Company

After billions of dollars were spent over the course of two presidential administrations to keep General Motors afloat, the American car company filed for bankruptcy this week anyway.

Last year Cato trade expert Daniel J. Ikenson appeared on dozens of radio and television programs and wrote op-eds in newspapers and magazines explaining why automakers should file for bankruptcy—before spending billions in taxpayer dollars.

Which leaves Ikenson asking one very important question: “What was the point of that?”

In November, GM turned to the federal government for a bailout loan — the one final alternative to bankruptcy. After a lot of discussion and some rich debate, Congress voted against a bailout, seemingly foreclosing all options except bankruptcy. But before GM could avail itself of bankruptcy protection, President Bush took the fateful decision of circumventing Congress and diverting $15.4 billion from Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to GM (in the chummy spirit of avoiding tough news around the holidays).

That was the original sin. George W. Bush is very much complicit in the nationalization of GM and the cascade of similar interventions that may follow. Had Bush not funded GM in December (under questionable authority, no less), the company probably would have filed for bankruptcy on Jan. 1, at which point prospective buyers, both foreign and domestic, would have surfaced and made bids for spin-off assets or equity stakes in the “New GM,” just as is happening now.

Meanwhile, the government takeover of GM puts the fate of Ford Motors, a company that didn’t take any bailout money, into question:

Thus, what’s going to happen to Ford? With the public aware that the administration will go to bat for GM, who will want to own Ford stock? Who will lend Ford money (particularly in light of the way GM’s and Chrysler’s bondholders were treated). Who wants to compete against an entity backed by an unrestrained national treasury?

Ultimately, if I’m a member of Ford management or a large shareholder, I’m thinking that my biggest competitors, who’ve made terrible business decisions over the years, just got their debts erased and their downsides covered. Thus, even if my balance sheet is healthy enough to go it alone, why bother? And that calculation presents the specter of another taxpayer bailout to the tunes of tens of billions of dollars, and another government-run auto company.

Week in Review: A Speech in Cairo, an Anniversary in China and a U.S. Bankruptcy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today marks the 20^th anniversary of the massacre of students and other anti-authoritarian protests in Tiananmen square.

If you want background info, including causes and the wider political context, check Wikipedia.

You can also see stirring videos on Youtube.

There are incredible photos on Flickr.

And of course Twitter has a wealth of real-time information and thinking about the anniversary.  Just search using the hash tag #Tiananmen.

But for those 1.5 billion people trapped behind the Great Firewall of China, absolutely none of those links are accessible.  To mark the event that the government assures never happened, the Chinese government has blocked most social networking sites.

In 1989, when a nascent pro-democracy movement wanted to communicate its vitality and prepare to take on the state, meeting en masse was vital. But that made it fairly easy for the CCP to roll in and crush the dream of democracy.

Twenty years later, the Internet is the place where mass movements for liberty can take root. While the CCP is attempting to use the electronic equivalent of an armored division to prevent change, reform today is a question of when, not if.  Shutting down open dialogue will only slow the democratic transition to freedom, which the Chinese government cannot ultimately prevent.

The leadership of today’s Chinese government should allow that country’s citizens and journalists to communicate openly. The alternative is to suffer eternal loss of face as history records them occupying its wrong side.

New Media, New Repression: China Blocks Social Networking Sites is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s your weekly roundup of bloggers who are writing about Cato research and commentary:

• Liberty Maven blogger Mike Miller cites Jim Harper in a post about the effort to impose a national ID card on American citizens.

• W.E. Messamore, AKA The Humble Libertarian, interviews Cato health analyst Michael D. Tanner about Obama’s plan to overhaul the health care system.

• Insider Online blogger Alex Adrianson covers Cato’s standoff with Hugo Chavez supporters and government agents during a pro-free market conference in Venezuela.

• Writing for Real Clear World’s Compass blog, Greg Scoblete cites Doug Bandow’s commentary on North Korea’s nuclear plans. Also blogging at the Compass blog, Kevin Sullivan links to David Boaz’s commentary on Obama’s speech in Egypt.
  

• At Red State, Ryan Ellis uses Michael Cannon’s research in a post about a market-based alternative to government-run health care.

• Blogging for Young Americans for Liberty, Jeff Hubbard and Elliot Engstrom write about Cato University and Ilya Shapiro’s CNN commentary on Sonia Sotomayor.

• Blogger David Kirkpatrick cites Daniel J. Ikenson’s analysis of the GM bankruptcy.

Let us know if you’re blogging about Cato via email or Twitter.

Who’s Blogging about Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Are you blogging about Cato? Let us know. Send a link our way @catoinstitute or email cmoody@cato.org

• • Georgia Examiner writer and blogger Jason Pye offered his thoughts on Ilya Shapiro’s post about the “Jefferson 1.”
  • Wes Messamore finished his list of the top 100 libertarian blogs and Web sites.
  • Free Marketeros editor James Barcia linked to Juan Carlos Hildalgo’s new report on the success of El Salvador’s free market reforms.
  • Health care writer John Goodman discussed John Cochrane’s recent Policy Analysis on market-based strategies to improve health security.
  • At NRO’s The Corner, Veronique de Rugy is following the debate between Cato scholar Chris Edwards and French economist Thomas Piketty over whether the rich should pay higher taxes.

Who’s Blogging about Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On April 3, Cato hosted a special blogger briefing with Glenn Greenwald, who was here to speak about his new paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.

Here are a few highlights from bloggers who wrote about it:

• Dan Bernath from the Marijuana Policy Project

• Scott Morgan of StopTheDrugWar.org

• Jesse Singal, associate editor of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress

Also, a few links to bloggers who are writing about Cato:

• Citing new research that shows that the DC school choice pilot program was highly successful, Betsy Newmark linked to Andrew J. Coulson’s commentary on the study results.

• Ilya Somin discussed Patri Friedman’s new essay at Cato Unbound about the Seasteading Institute and the history of libertarian activism.

• Blogger Connie Carr wrote about William Niskanen’s essay in the new Cato Policy Report, “How to turn a Recession into a Depression.”

If you are blogging about Cato, let us know by emailing cmoody@cato.org or catch us on Twitter @catoinstitute.

Who’s Blogging about Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog