Day: July 2, 2002

Robert Crawford out further Congressional efforts to defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — for record companies. Observe:

One Congressman wants to legalize cracking — so long as it’s a big corporation breaking into your computer.
While content owners now can try to block access to intellectual
property pirates, they cannot use the range of technological options
that they want, chiefly because some tactics are illegal under state and
federal law. Berman’s bill would legalize some techniques over the
protests of file-sharing advocates.
This brought a question to my mind. Given that (I believe) we’ve already got laws on the books against unauthorized entry into computers owned by somebody else, has any consumer ever actually tried to get a company prosecuted under criminal law for spyware or other intrusive programs?
These cases always seem to be discussed in terms of consumer privacy and consumer protection statutes — but in actual spyware cases where a program is transmitting data back to a company without the users consent, why wouldn’t there also be a violation of anti-cracking statues?
Anybody with any case references and/or legal opinions, please chime in…

And I thought California had budget problems. Seems Tennessee is suffering from unpassed budgetitis, which means they’ve shut down all non-essential state government services until the state legislature can stop squabbling and actually pass a budget.
Media outlets covering the story have noted one particularly intriguing impact of the shutdown, including Tennessean:
As one of the first orders of business when the House convened at 10 a.m. yesterday, Naifeh noted one impact of the partial shutdown in the government — the cleaning contract expired at 12:01 a.m.
So, Naifeh said, members will responsible for keeping their desks and offices clean. Throughout the day, lawmakers, lobbyists and even the assistant clerk of the Senate emptied trash cans overflowing from garbage that accumulated during the marathon weekend of meetings on the budget.
So, quite literally, the legislators are forced to stew in an ever-growing pile of their own filth until they can play nicely enough together to fix the mess they’ve created.
I find this a most promising motivational technique for lawmakers, which bears further exploration at the Federal level…

Dean Peters has appears to be a scoop: seems the WayBack Machine has been hacked:
PORN WARNING – it may just be my leg of the network, but any time I enter a web site to view on the The Internet Archive: WayBack Machine – I’m getting re-directed to a PORN site. Especially disturbing when I wanted to see the 1998 version of RedlandBaptist.org.
Now that’s just not right. Bad hackers! No treats.
Others have confirmed; I’m not going to try, as I’m at my place of business now, and well, there’s just no reason to tempt fate, now is there?

KCRW radio’s The Point focused on illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexican border yesterday; RealAudio is here.
At the center of the show was the statistic that since 1994, nearly 2000 immigrants have died attempting to cross the desert, despite the U.S. border patrols’ efforts to a) stop them from trying at all and b) capture/rescue them if they do try.
So the question is, what to do? One fellow on the show wanted 20,000 U.S. troops (real military, not border patrol) to take up station down south and truly seal the border. Another took the opposite view, pointing out that many U.S. businesses actually depend on the illegal workers coming into the country; that the U.S. economy is inextricably linked with Mexico’s; and that the rational thing to do is to legalize much of the immigration occuring now.
For me, either of these solutions seem better than the current reality. The 20,000 troop option, obviously, is the simplest conceptually, which always has appeal to some. Build a wall, and all that. And in the days of wholesale terrorism, having truly controlled borders doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
But I keep thinking about the second fellow, and the points he made about the American economy depending on immigrant labor — legal and illegal. And that made even more sense to me.
It seems to me that illegal immigrants serve — and have served for a long time — to fill a gap in the U.S. economy. They take the lowest-rung jobs; that’s obvious. But those jobs also have one other very significant characteristic — they’re being paid under the legal minimum wage.
And so it seems to me that to face the question of illegal immigration in a truly open and rational way, you have to also look at the minimum wage. On the one hand, if you put those 20,000 troops down there, who’s going to do the jobs currently being done by illegal immigrants? Can the employers afford to just start hiring legal workers at full legal wages? Or do they just go bust?
And on the other hand, what if you do legalize immigration? Doesn’t the same thing happen? If you let all the immigrants coming in illegally enter legally; well then, they’ll have the full protection of the law which they lack today. And presumably, the employers who are hiring them today will be under much more scrutiny and pressure to pay them the legal minimum. So again: can they afford it or do they go bust?
I don’t know the answers here, and so at this point, I’ll give a big shoutout to Jane Galt and Prof. DeLong — either of you two care to pick up the ball from here and help me out with the hardcore economics side of this equation? What’s the economic impact, in theory, to the U.S. economy of suddenly turning all the undocmented immigrant jobs currently being paid under minimum wage into fully legal minimum-wage jobs?
Supplemental Linkage:
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – One group supporting broader legal immigration.
National Border Patrol Council – Labor union for Border Patrol officers. Hear from the people on the front line.
Operation Gatekeeper – Department of Justice doc on one of the recent attempts to crackdown on immigration.