MIAMI—In what political observers characterized as the organization’s highest-level staff shakeup to date, the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio announced Monday it would be bringing on a new candidate for the remainder of the 2016 election.
via The Onion por supuesto.
Nice write-up by Nicholas Deleon in Why Google’s Self-Driving Car Crash Doesn’t Change Anything.
As I told him, I think it’s wrong to expect robot cars to be 100% safe; so having a Google self-driving car in a fender-bender is of no real significance. There are a lot of issues with self-driving cars, but their failure to be perfect is not in my opinion one of them. Indeed, until all cars on the road are controlled by compatible (note I said compatible, not centrally controlled!) systems, the interaction between, excuse the term, legacy cars and robotic cars — not to mention pedestrians, stray animals, and debris on the road — means accidents will happen.
As I told Delon, one issue is whether the robot car is (provably) safer than the average human. Another issue is who should pay when the robot car is at fault, wholly or partly, for the accidents. The law has not determined how to allocate responsibility between the passenger, the owner, the programmer, and the manufacturer. We could treat this as a straight-forward problem of product liability law, or we could be more creative. I’m thinking on it.
Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the E.D.N.Y has issued a 50-page order in a case similar to the Apple v FBI case that has been in the news. In this case too, the government sought to have Apple defeat the passcode security limit on an iPhone so the government could extract the data pursuant to a valid search warrant.
The opinion is a slam-dunk win for Apple, rejecting the government’s All Writs Act (AWA) request on multiple grounds. Among them is that Apple does not meet the test in the leading Supreme Court precedent, New York Telephone due to Apple’s distance from the alleged crime and the burden to Apple of complying. There’s two constitutional arguments: one on separation of powers, that an absence of prohibition by Congress should not be treated as permission, and one on the implications of the government’s expansive view of the AWA, under which any of us could be conscripted to do things we might hate doing to help the government in investigations or worse. (Judge Orenstein gives the I hope extreme example of a drug company forced to produce an execution drug against its will if the government has no other source of supply.)
Apple also wins on discretionary grounds.
This opinion is a thoughtful and on just about all points persuasive work, and it should be influential as these cases trundle through the legal system.
Yahoo! Politics has me on Apple and the slippery slope problem of government claiming powers to draf needed helpers under the All Writs Act.
A brief history of the surveillance debate:
2012: "Mass surveillance is fine — if it wasn’t, you’d see major corporations trying to court new business by building in crypto tools that kept out the surveillance agencies. The fact that they’re not doing this tells you that surveillance opponents are an out-of-touch, paranoid minority."2016: "Mass surveillance is necessary — when companies use crypto tools as ‘marketing ploys,’ they’re getting in the way of something we all agree is proportionate and legitimate!"
Time to salute Robert Kagan. I do not share his ideology but I can recognize a patriot writing in Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein Monster. Read it all, savor the historical allusions, but here’s the takeaway:
We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the revolution.
There has been much second-guessing lately. Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power. Some of those Republican leaders and pundits now calling for a counterrevolution against Trump were not so long ago welcoming his contribution to the debate. The politicians running against him and now facing oblivion were loath to attack him before because they feared alienating his supporters. Instead, they attacked one another, clawing at each other’s faces as they one by one slipped over the cliff. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got his last deadly lick in just before he plummeted — at Trump? No, at Rubio. (And now, as his final service to party and nation, he has endorsed Trump.) Jeb Bush spent millions upon millions in his hopeless race, but against whom? Not Trump.
So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
We need more like this.
PS. Has the GOP rehabilitated David Frum yet?
Peter Shane, What Do We Call Options Worse Than “Nuclear?”
Interestingly, every Constitutional stratagem he comes up with for forcing or blocking a Supreme Court nominee seems to have a possible counter-move for the other side. The Constitution really is pretty finely balanced until the Supreme Court mucks it up with decisions like Noel Canning.
Jotwell Dan Froomkin – The Intercept Blenderlaw
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