“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Trevor Timm: Yahoo may have let the government spy on emails. Now will we embrace encryption?
In a blockbuster scoop, Reuters’ Joseph Menn is reporting that Yahoo secretly built a software program in 2015 that scanned all its millions of customers’ incoming emails at the behest of US intelligence officials, which led to its chief security officer resigning in protest.
We don’t know exactly what the US government might have been searching for, but we do know that this is potentially a huge privacy violation that strikes at the heart of the fourth amendment’s prohibition on indiscriminate search and seizure. Yahoo’s reported secret collaboration with the US government also brings up several points that warrant further investigation. (“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.) [..]
Now the question reporters should be asking is: if Yahoo received this secret order, what about the other tech giants? Did Google, Facebook and Microsoft receive similar demands to wiretap their own systems for searching all emails at the behest of the US government or others?
The Yahoo story, if borne out, would be the quintessential example of how government-mandated backdoors are dangerous for everyone’s security, and why end-to-end encryption needs to be standard on all our communications platforms.
John Paul Brammer: Don’t be fooled by the presentation: Mike Pence is a rightwing zealot
The task that sits before Mike Pence at the vice-presidential debate tonight is gargantuan: make Donald Trump’s breathless rants sound like legitimate policy proposals.
It’s a challenge that requires the exact opposite of Trump’s skillset. Pence, if he does his job correctly, will be the great normalizer. He will take a pile of angry Trump tweets and off-color remarks and shape them into something mainstream conservatives can recognize and work with. [..]
Trump’s daily scandals have had the effect of making other Republicans seem tame by comparison, and his running mate is no different. Standing at Trump’s side, Pence is the cool head, a man who reminds us of what Republican presidential candidates used to look like before the circus came to town.
But he is also a man who, if Trump were to win the White House, would be one major impeachment-worthy Trump-Up away from the presidency, and when we turn a critical eye to his track record, a President Pence is nearly as scary as a President Trump.
Steven W. Thrasher: Rudy Giuliani is Donald Trump’s ‘elder statesman’. How fitting
This weekend, as Donald Trump went into freefall so drastic and self-defeating we had to wonder if he was the one who mailed his tax forms to the New York Times, his campaign sent out a supposed elder statesman to defend him: Rudy Giuliani.
That Giuliani should be viewed as a credible and authoritative voice is as laughable as Trump’s combover.
To people around the world, Giuliani may still seem like a paragon of leadership, the man who saved New York City in the dark days after the twin towers fell 15 years ago. But if you can cast your mind back to those days, you’ll also remember how he crudely tried to manipulate the fear of that moment in a naked power grab. Giuliani considered running for a third term or delaying his departure from office (despite the law).
And if you think of how people love to say that Giuliani’s follies can be excused by the fact that he “made New York safe”, remember: his signature technique, “stop and frisk”, is a fraud, and he did not make it safe for young black and Hispanic men, for the mentally ill, or for the poor.
Steven B. Bright: The punishment for having a bad lawyer shouldn’t be the death penalty
A deeply troubling truth about the death penalty is that it is often handed down not to people who commit the worst crimes, but on those assigned the worst lawyer to represent them. Buck v Davis, a Texas case that will be argued before the US supreme court on 5 October, offers an extreme example of just how deadly bad lawyering can be.
Duane Buck was charged with capital murder in Houston, Texas, in 1997. He was too poor to hire his own lawyer so the judge appointed two lawyers to defend him, one of whom has such an abysmal record in capital cases that the New York Times called him: “A Lawyer Known Best for Losing Capital Cases”. His performance in Mr Buck’s was consistent with this record.
A deeply troubling truth about the death penalty is that it is often handed down not to people who commit the worst crimes, but on those assigned the worst lawyer to represent them. Buck v Davis, a Texas case that will be argued before the US supreme court on 5 October, offers an extreme example of just how deadly bad lawyering can be.
Duane Buck was charged with capital murder in Houston, Texas, in 1997. He was too poor to hire his own lawyer so the judge appointed two lawyers to defend him, one of whom has such an abysmal record in capital cases that the New York Times called him: “A Lawyer Known Best for Losing Capital Cases”. His performance in Mr Buck’s was consistent with this record.
In order for a death sentence to be imposed, Texas law requires the prosecutor to prove, and the jury to unanimously find, that the defendant is likely to be dangerous in the future. In Mr Buck’s case, future dangerousness was the central disputed issue at sentencing. The prosecutors did not have a strong case that Mr Buck would be a danger in the future. Indeed, the evidence showed that Mr Buck was not likely to not pose a danger while in prison. But the court-appointed defense lawyers, with Mr Buck’s life on the line, handed the prosecutors powerful evidence for sentencing him to death: Mr Buck was more likely to be dangerous because he is black.
Robert Reich: Don’t overlook Donald Trump, and don’t give Republicans a free pass
The Clinton campaign is relentlessly focusing on the defects of Donald Trump rather than the defects of the Republican agenda. That’s understandable, and it could be a winning strategy. But it has pitfalls.
The campaign’s goal is to attract a wide swathe of voters who might ordinarily lean Republican on issues, as well as unenthusiastic Democrats who need the specter of a Trump presidency to get to the polls.
As Hillary Clinton told a crowd a few weeks ago at the American Legion convention, “this is not a normal election” and “the debates are not the normal disagreements between Republicans and Democrats.” [..]
Vilifying Trump and creating a broad bipartisan coalition against him are entirely justified. Trump is indeed a menace.
It’s also a winning strategy if Hillary Clinton’s only goal is to get elected president.
But a singular focus on Trump poses two big risks for what happens after she wins.
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