Adam Dick

College of William & Mary Professor Lawrence Wilkerson, a member of the Ron Paul Institute’s Academic Board since the institute’s 2013 founding, has provided some advice to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, according to an article by Michael Crowley in Politico on Thursday.

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In the fall of 2015, American privacy supporters were relieved that draconian legislation requiring companies to create backdoors for the US government to overcome encryption of individuals’ private information did not make its way through Congress. In fact, the Obama administration then represented that it would both stop seeking such legislation and refrain from otherwise pressuring companies to provide the government with backdoor access to customers’ encryption-secured information.

However, everything is not as the Obama administration desired the public to believe. It appears that the Tuesday court order demanding that Apple breach an iPhone’s built-in privacy protections so the government can access the secured information is a materialization of the executive branch’s stealth “plan B” effort to obtain its anti-privacy objectives via other means.

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Judge Andrew Napolitano, in a new Fox Business interview with host Stuart Varney, said he applauds Apple CEO Tim Cook for “defending the Constitution” by resisting a United States magistrate judge’s order that Apple aid the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in breaching Apple encryption that protects the customers.

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The violence in Syria has been devastating for years. New military actions in the country by the Turkish government threaten to escalate the situation into a much larger war.

Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director Daniel McAdams wrote about the most recent developments in the RPI Weekly Update sent out via email early this morning. Because of the great importance of sharing McAdams’ Syria comments with the largest audience possible, those comments from this morning’s email are posted below as well.

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Ken Womble has written convincingly regarding legal matters, including the desirability of prosecuting cops who lie about other cops’ killings. However, Womble, in a Monday Mimesis Law article, provides several not-so-convincing arguments for repealing the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution while keeping in place other constitutional provisions Womble lists — “freedom of speech, assembly, due process, voting, etc.”

Womble provides three arguments in support of his conclusion. First, he says that the right to keep and bear arms is distinguishable from other rights mentioned in the Constitution because, “[i]n our nation’s almost 240 years of existence, the 2nd Amendment is the only time our leaders have granted a constitutional right to possess tools.”

When you think about it, this is not much of a distinction. The freedom of speech that Womble seeks to distinguish from the right to bear arms would be of much less value without the ability to use microphones, telephones, video cameras, audio recording equipment, radio and TV, the internet, means of transportation, and many other tools. Indeed, listed rather redundantly in the First Amendment is the freedom of the press along with the freedom of speech. A major tool of the press is the printing press and its modern analogues such as a computer providing word processing, video editing, and website posting capabilities. Say you print your communication on paper, then you can use additional tools, such as trucks to transport the printed communication and distribution bins from which people can pick up the printed communication.

Tools do not play a major role in the exercise of only the freedom of speech and its cousin the freedom of the press. Tools also permeate the exercise of the other rights Womble lists. Assembly uses the tool of a suitable room in which people can meet, along with other tools including microphones, loudspeakers, chairs, and tables. And the tools of speech and press can be used to alert people about a future assembly or about what occurred at a past assembly. Due process would be tough if a defendant were deprived of access the tools with which to conduct legal research and to draft and submit legal briefs. Imagine voting without any tools — no ballots and voter rolls, for example.

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