Ag-Gag Law Struck Down

An Ag-Gag Law has been struck down by an Iowa Federal Court. Trespass is already prohibited and those who trespass can be punished for trespassing. Ag-gag laws go further and impose additional penalties on those who seek to engage in free speech regarding the things they notice while trespassing. Here is an excerpt from the Des Moines Register:

A federal judge has struck down the third attempt by the Iowa Legislature to stop animal-welfare groups from secretly filming livestock abuse, finding once again that the law passed last year violates free-speech rights in the U.S. Constitution.

The decision Sept. 26 rejected the law approved by Iowa lawmakers in April 2021 that makes it a crime to trespass on a property to place a camera to record or transmit images. The law, which had support from Republicans and some Democrats, made the first offense punishable by up to two years in prison and subsequent offenses a felony.

The case is one of many so-called ag-gag laws that have surfaced in the U.S. in recent years that pit the right of farmers to protect their property from trespassers against animal-welfare advocates. Farmers argue intruders could track in disease and want to unfairly portray their livestock practices, while animal-welfare groups say producers don't want the public to see how farm animals are treated.

Here is the conclusion of the court:

[T]he Act provides protection with respect to the exercise of a First Amendment right. The United States Constitution does not allow such a singling out of the exercise of a constitutional right. The decision to single out this conduct is most plainly shown by Defendants' description of the Act as “enhancing the penalty for conduct that is already prohibited by law.” That is the issue with the law—it is enhancing a criminal penalty based on the exercise of speech (or a predicate component of speech). The law does not limit its reach to specific instances of using a camera, such as a peeping tom situation. Rather, the Act only punishes a trespasser exercising a constitutional right. Section 727.8A burdens the exercise of speech and Defendants have not proffered a sufficient justification for such a burden.

The case is ANIMAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND, PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF ANIMALS, INC., BAILING OUT BENJI, FOOD & WATER WATCH, and IOWA CITIZENS FOR COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT, Plaintiffs, v. KIMBERLY REYNOLDS, in her official capacity as Governor of Iowa, TOM MILLER, in his official capacity as Attorney General of Iowa, Case No. 4:21-cv-00231-SMR-HCA, United States District Court, S.D. Iowa, Central Division.

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished . . .

From the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a story where one of the heroes goes to prison:

A year on from the FinCEN Files investigation, the United States Treasury unit at the heart of the global exposé is now “working overtime” to implement major anti-money-laundering reforms, while the whistleblower whose leaked documents sparked the investigation languishes in prison.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, BuzzFeed News and more than 100 media outlets published the FinCEN Files in September 2020, uncovering more than $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions flowing through the global financial system, passing through U.S.-based banks with relatively few impediments.

. . .

While the FinCEN Files has been widely lauded and cited over the past year as a key driver for global money-laundering reform, the former FinCEN official-turned-whistleblower who originally provided the thousands of documents at the core of the investigation reported to prison earlier in September to serve six months for sending the confidential documents to a BuzzFeed News reporter.

Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards was first arrested in 2018, more than two years before the FinCEN Files was published. After pleading guilty last year to sending highly secretive suspicious activity reports from FinCEN to a reporter, she was finally sentenced in June this year.

“I’m absolutely proud of what I did,” Edwards told BuzzFeed News in an interview before reporting to a federal women’s prison in West Virginia earlier this month. “My motive was accountability, and the American people had a right to know what was occurring within Treasury and that it was a national security issue and that American lives were in jeopardy.”

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Ed Snowden Talks Shop with Daniel Ellsberg

Ed Snowden invited Daniel Ellsberg to have a conversation. These two men who are heroes to me (and to each other), discuss the importance of whistle-blowers, free speech and the war powers of the United States. Ellsberg points out (at min 8) that he did not disclose the Pentagon Papers because the government was lying or because the Vietnam war wasn't winnable. Almost everyone knew these things at that time. He did it because the war was "wrong" and it was "getting bigger," at a time where Nixon knew that he might be drawing the Chinese into the war and he was considering the use of nuclear weapons.

At minute 12, Ed Snowden explains that he acted not because he was against spying (though he was against spying), but because the government was acting outside of the knowledge and control of the People. The government was reinterpreting the Constitution outside of the knowledge of the People (and outside of the knowledge of most members of Congress) in a "secret rubber-stamp court." The People were no longer "partner" with the government, but "subjects" of the government. Snowden continued, from Bush to Obama to Trump, "the government is becoming less accountable to the People, and the people are becoming more accountable to the government."

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Long Form Podcasts as a Remedy for Tribal Thinking

A friend is quite perturbed at me for (as I view it) not adopting the top-to-bottom progressive platform. The friend found it disturbing that I would get some of my information from sources that the friend considered to be the other team. I told this friend: "You are the 1,000th person to get frustrated with me for wanting to get my facts straight without reference to the prevailing narratives of political tribes. I am prepared to die on this hill."

I am wired to make sense of things as best I can, letting the chips fall, regardless of whether I offend people in the process (with rare exceptions).  I was prepared for this way of learning during a childhood where my father force-fed me buckets of religious dogma, resulting in this five-part essay.

I am willing to get useful information from anyone who has information that seems useful.  I'm working hard to not divide the world into "good" people and "bad" people.  Good people often say untrue things and bad people often say things that make sense. Everyone has a batting average. Everyone is flawed. It is my act of faith that we need to listen to all of it and then pretend that we are emotionally detached Martian anthropologists in order to decide what is accurate. In other words, we need to pay close attention to John Stuart Mill, who is as relevant as ever.

Hence, I reject any Manichean outlook. I fear that our two main political tribes and their respective news silos (amplified by social media) are poisoning our national dialogue. In fact, ruining our national dialogue to the point where, truly, our de facto national motto is getting to be "Fuck e pluribus unum!"  It's gotten to the point where people are hating other people for ideas, whereas I think we can hate the idea but must always love the person. I am not religious, but I think that Jesus' "Love your enemy" is one of the most radical, brave and brilliant things ever said.

We need to listen to people that others call the "enemy" because sometimes they are right--sometimes it takes years for it to become apparent that they are correct. I have long been ridiculed for listening "to the enemy." That is, and will forever be, my plight, because the world is complex, not a cartoon, and no tribe has it completely right. We need to actively listen to each other and test each others' claims without feeling like this is a threatening thing to do, in order to make good sense of our world. Without each other, we are all prone to become ideologues who "win" all of our arguments because we refuse to consider competing views (and in fact many of us actively work to muzzle competing views). Hard earned, carefully distilled facts first to prepare the way for meaningful opinions, is the only way to make sense. Whenever we do the opposite, indulging in thinking and opinion-vomiting as a team sport, we are poisoning all dialogue and shutting down human flourishing.

I believe that real conversation (not the pundits barking at each other on CNN, or regular folks on the street, imitating the pundits) will dissolve many of the differences we see in each other. That brings me to an inspiring dialogue I recently heard: a discussion involving Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald. This is an odd couple in many ways. At the beginning of the show they both admitted that, in prior years, they weren't each others' favorite people. But they reached out, sat down for three hours and had a riveting conversation that covered many issues, including whistle-blowers, corruption in Brazil, Hunter Biden. My favorite part is where Joe and Glenn discussed the importance of reaching out to people who think differently in order to understand them and to better understand yourself.

Rogan and Greenwald both tout the long-form podcast as one of the best ways to dissolve the pundit-coating that people construct around themselves and to then get down to some interesting conversation--the kind of conversation where people learn interesting things about each other and about themselves. You can be a politician for a short session on FOX or NPR, maybe even 30 or 40 minutes, but you can't hide it for several hours. Rogan mentions that he stumbled upon this powerful revelation because he was too lazy to edit his long podcasts, but then he started to appreciates incredible power of the long-form podcast to reveal who people really are.  This conversation between two wide-open complex minds is pure gold, and I invite you to listen to the entire podcast, but especially from 118 min mark to the 140 min mark.  You can also read along here (beginning at 2:01:38).

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