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What happened in 2020? Governments and politics fed an insatiable press and social media to threaten the world with fear and misinformation. World forces and powers slowly but surely swung the pendulum toward the far LEFT in the names of safety and unity. Governing authorities around the world did not waste the crisis, but used it to build power over people.

Next year will be better and worse than 2020. Nations will welcome America back into the world community, agreements will be made, and resources will be shared mainly from here to there. Which historic empire brought the most peace and safety to all the peoples of the world? What attributes and powers do all world empires share? What will 2021 bring?

The strongest drive within the heart of the human race is for power. State and local politicians made the rules and mandates for fighting the pandemic. In his December 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Scott Atlas, special adviser to President Trump this past fall, noted, nearly all states used the same draconian policies that people now insist on hardening, even though the number of positive cases increased while peoples movements were constrained, business activities were strictly limited, and schools were closed.

Atlas continued, Mobility tracking verifies that people restricted their movement. Gallup and YouGov data show that 80% to 90% of Americans have been wearing masks since early August. Lockdown policies had baleful effects on local economies, families and children, and the virus spread anyway. If one advocates more lockdowns because of bad outcomes so far, why dont the results of those lockdowns matter? Good question, Dr. Atlas!

Then he wrote, empirical data from the U.S., Europe and Japan show that lockdowns dont eliminate the virus and dont stop the virus from spreading. They do, however, create extremely harmful health and social problems beyond a dramatic drop in learning, including a tripling of reported depression, skyrocketing suicidal ideation, unreported child abuse, skipped visits for cancer and other medical care.

In other words, the draconian policies mandated by local and state authorities in the name of health and safety brought even more problems which were predicted though not reported at the time. Meanwhile, the press and social media scared us into giving up our First Amendment freedoms with false and misleading political warnings of life and death.

In the next few years world leaders will join forces to bring nations into ruling coalitions. This in turn will draw rogue nations into wars around the globe, and those wars will cause famines that will increase the spread of inevitable pestilences. World leaders will unite in declaring that wars are leading to peace and that famines will be replaced with prosperity for all ... not for the first time.

What will people believe? Will we believe explanations for what we see with our own eyes? Explanations will supersede science and evidence, because people will believe rational lies and deny truth. Later, people will tire of hearing the truth to the extent that they will hate the truth believing it is evil and the source of all problems.

What really happened in 2020 is prelude to what will happen quickly over the next few years. It wasnt the pandemic. Watch world leaders and politics, and critically examine whats being peddled as news and facts.

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Daniel L. Gardner is a syndicated columnist who lives in Starkville, Miss. You may contact him at PJandMe2@gmail.com.

Read the original here:
What really happened in 2020? - Daily Mountain Eagle

The years-long legal battle between a Warren company and an Indiana County township has taken a new turn.

Pennsylvania General Energy, based in Warren, has filed suit in federal district court against Grant Township seeking an injunction that would prohibit the township from enforcing a home rule charter that purports to prohibit PGEs intention to operate an oil and gas wastewater injection well.

In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued permits for PGE to convert the well and, in response, Grant Township crafted a Community Bill of Rights aimed at prohibiting PGEs proposed activity as a means of protecting the water supply in their community.

PGE challenged the constitutionality of the ordinance and ultimately settled with Grant Township for $1 dollar while elements of the ordinance were struck down on constitutional grounds.

In 2017, the state Department of Environmental Protection approved the injection well proposal and took the township to court to determine if its local rules would supersede state law. DEP won that case.

That did not stop the township.

According to an order from federal Western District of Pennsylvania Judge Susan Paradise Baxter filed in late March 2019, the township even after the ordinance was adjudged preempted by state law, Grant Township sought to make an end-run around the judicial determination by amending its form of government and adopting the preempted and constitutionally deficient provisions in the form of a Home Rule Charter.

The two parties settled a case in the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals back in 2019. A stipulation in that case stated that all participated in the Third Circuits Mediation program, amicably resolving the claims of all parties and resulting in the withdrawal of all appeals and the discontinuance of all appellate proceedings with prejudice.

This most recent suit was filed on Dec. 9.

PGE alleges in that filing that DEP issued a permit to use the well as an injection well in March 27 but rescinded the permit due to the home rule charter (HRC). They claim they have tried to sell the well but cant do so because of the conditions in the home rule charter.

The filing raises 11 specific counts including First Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment as well as due process and equal protection issues and asks for a preliminary and permanent injunction prohibiting any action to enforce the home rule charter and an entry of judgement declaring that the HRC is void and unenforceable in its entirety.

PGE further argues that they have been precluded from operating the Yanity Well for legally permissible injection purposes.

Most recently, in November 2020, Grant Township relied on the HRC in part to order PGE to stop hauling oil and gas well drilling equipment on Township roadways despite the existence of a valid highway permit to do so, they write. Grant Townships conduct in abrogating PGEs interest in environmental and UIC permits at the Yanity Well is deliberate, arbitrary, and irrational, exceeds the limits of governmental authority, amounts to an abuse of official power, and shocks the conscience.

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

Read more from the original source:
PGE, township back in court over injection well in Indiana Co. - timesobserver.com

L. Lin Wood had a message from God to deliver.

Dont believe the media. Theyre liars, the celebrity defamation lawyer declared in October at a gathering of evangelicals in Atlanta.

Then he vowed, Were going to take them down, bringing the crowd to its feet.

Mr. Woods speech to a packed ballroom at the Faith and Freedom Coalitions annual conference was a preview of the role he would soon play as one of the most relentless promoters of President Trumps conspiracy theories and baseless claims about election fraud.

It is a turn that has surprised many former associates of the theatrical lawyer, whom Dan Rather once described as the attorney for the damned for his roster of high-profile clients like Richard A. Jewell, who was wrongly suspected of setting off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, and the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old whose murder became a tabloid frenzy.

But Mr. Wood has reinvented himself into an extreme Trump advocate, one who has found fame among Mr. Trumps supporters not because he is good at notching victories for the president, but because he will amplify Mr. Trumps wildest accusations and dive head first into the culture wars.

Mr. Woods lawsuits seeking to undo the election in Georgia and to ask the Supreme Court to overturn votes in other key states have been soundly rejected by judges and riddled with errors, including a misspelling of his own name.

Still, many Republicans have grown worried that Mr. Wood is harming the partys chances of holding the Senate. His repeated suggestion that people should sit out the Georgia runoff elections to punish Republicans who werent sufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump led Newt Gingrich to condemn Mr. Wood as totally destructive. The editor of National Review described him as an exceptionally talented demagogue.

Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a veteran of Georgia politics, said that control of the Senate was too important to squander.

I like Lin. I think hes a very brilliant guy and a first-class litigator, Mr. Reed said. But the stakes of the Senate races are too high to use them as a platform to express outrage about the results of the presidential election.

Former colleagues described Mr. Wood as someone who shares many traits with Mr. Trump. He claims to loathe the mainstream media but has used it effectively to build his brand. He intimidates adversaries with lawsuits. And he thrives on shocking those around him.

Mr. Woods recent clients have included highly polarizing figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who supports the QAnon hoax and was recently elected to Congress; Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who brandished weapons at demonstrators outside their house; and Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with fatally shooting two protesters in Kenosha, Wis. He is also representing Nicholas Sandmann, a student whose encounter with a Native American protester made national news, in his libel suit against The New York Times.

Before the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn raised the possibility with Mr. Trump of declaring martial law, the notion of enlisting the military to oversee a do-over of the election was an idea that Mr. Wood had floated in interviews with right-wing media.

Legal experts said Mr. Wood, who is well aware of what the law says about defamation and libel, appears to be betting that the targets of his most baseless claims wont sue him because he is protected by the First Amendment and they dont want the hassle. He has insinuated, for instance, that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. may have associated with the now-deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

And at a rally this month in Atlanta, where Mr. Wood appeared alongside Mr. Flynn and another pro-Trump lawyer known for pushing conspiracy theories, Sidney Powell, he accused Gov. Brian Kemp of corruption and led the crowd in chants of Lock him up!

His antics have earned him an audience with Mr. Trump. Mr. Wood said in an email that they had spoken about fraud and illegality in the election on more than one occasion, though he is not an official member of the presidents legal team.

Lawyers who have worked with Mr. Wood, 68, described him as animated and aggressive inside and outside the courtroom someone known for showing up uninvited to the news conferences of his opponents and belittling witnesses in depositions.

But few who know him professionally said they expected him to descend into the miasmic swamp of right-wing conspiracy theories.

The Lin Wood I see today bears basically no resemblance to the Lin Wood I knew back then, said Timothy Terrell, a law professor at Emory.

Timothy is not a friend of mine, Mr. Wood said. But I am pleased that Timothy has noticed a change in my life. God changed my life when I realized that He is real.

Mr. Woods biggest break came in 1996 when he represented Mr. Jewell, a security guard wrongly suspected of planting a pipe bomb in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics that killed one person and injured more than 100 others.

For the next 20 years, he built a reputation as a pit bull plaintiffs lawyer who sued the news media for a pantheon of aggrieved clients. He represented John and Patsy Ramsey in their struggle to clear their names in their daughters killing and the former congressman Gary Condit after the death of his intern Chandra Levy.

Though the defamation cases were headline-grabbing, his more lucrative legal work has been in areas like medical fraud and malpractice.

James Rawls, an Atlanta-based lawyer who helped Mr. Wood with some of the Ramsey family matters, said working with him was easy when we were all on the same team. But their relationship became untenable, Mr. Rawls said, because his firm, Powell Goldstein, had a large practice defending media companies and Mr. Wood was unwilling to stop attacking the media.

Mr. Wood was raised in Macon and experienced tragedy as a teenager, returning home one day to discover that his father an abusive alcoholic had beaten his mother to death. Watching the murder trial that followed inspired him to become a lawyer.

His professional life has been messy. His former law partners are suing him for unpaid compensation, alleging that he displayed bizarre, messianic behavior. They claim that he referred to himself as Almighty Lin and indicated that, according to a prophecy he saw on YouTube, he expected to be named chief justice of the United States.

I have assessed my mental health, he wrote in an email to his partners that is cited in the suit. I am a little crazy, but Im also mainly sane and possess a healthy mind.

Mr. Wood contends that the suit is littered with false statements and completely irrelevant factual allegations.

After his speech at the Faith and Freedom event, Mr. Wood returned to his seat on the dais and his date, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, jumped up to hug him.

Mr. Reed, the M.C., raised his voice to be heard over the applause.

Thank you for bringing the thunder, Lin, Mr. Reed said.

Go here to read the rest:
How Lin Wood Became a Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorist - The New York Times

In summary

California worked with social media companies, created an internal database and developed threat levels to fight 2020 election misinformation.

One post on YouTube claimed a voter registered to vote under a fake name. A tweet alleged thousands of 2020 ballots were tossed out. Another tweet claimed a voter used an alias to vote in person.

These are just a few of two dozen social media posts deemed to be misinformation and removed from online platforms this year at the request of a newly formed cybersecurity team within the California Secretary of States office.

The Office of Election Cybersecurity in the California Secretary of States office monitored and tracked social media posts, decided if they were misinformation, stored the posts in an internal database coded by threat level, and on 31 different occasions requested posts be removed. In 24 cases, the social media companies agreed and either took down the posts or flagged them as misinformation, according to Jenna Dresner, senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity.

We dont take down posts, that is not our role to play, Dresner said. We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social media companies and we let them make that call based on community standards they created.

Even with the new cybersecurity efforts, misinformation still was a primary cause of frustration for Californias registrars of voters. A CalMatters survey of 54 of Californias 58 counties found that registrars dealt with everything from false or misleading information coming from the White House to all sorts of preposterous claims posted to the internet.

As the state works with social media companies to quell speech it considers misinformation, First Amendment advocates and privacy experts say they are concerned about increased censorship of online discourse and the implications of a database that stores posts indefinitely.

The goal of the Office of Election Cybersecurity is to coordinate with county election officials to protect the integrity of the election process. Its duties also include monitoring and counteracting false or misleading online information regarding the electoral process and its integrity.

The office was established in 2018 because of foreign meddling in the 2016 election. With the passage of Assembly Bill 3075, the California state legislature established the Office of Election Cybersecurity with an annual budget of $2 million.

One of the first things the Office of Election Cybersecurity did was launch a 2018 voter education awareness campaign called VoteSure that encouraged voters to be on the lookout for misinformation. Initial monitoring was sparse the Office mostly followed hashtags and tracked narratives via a complaint database. Dresner centralized the monitoring when she joined the office in July, and created a formal tracking system.

We rely on the generous support of our readers. If you found our work valuable in this crisis-filled year for California, please consider supporting our newsroom.

In 2018, state officials also started developing relationships with federal intelligence agencies and reaching out to social media companies. The Office of Election Cybersecurity worked to fully understand what happened in the 2016 election and the extent of foreign interference, Dresner said. One of the federal agencies it began working with was the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also a new agency formed in 2018, but with a multi-billion dollar budget and a national purview.

During the 2020 election, the Office worked closely with CISA, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and other groups to measure the extent of misinformation facing Californians andAmericans alike. Rene Diresta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said that unlike the 2016 election, during which Americans saw disinformation generated and spread by foreign state actors, misinformation and conspiracy theories were largely generated domestically.

Besides the incident with Iran that pushed the Proud Boys emails, most of the other actions taken by state actors appear to have been broadly attributable because they were put out by their [state-owned] media, Diresta said.

Even if they have no particular political candidate that they wanted to get behind, putting out that the American election is in chaos is beneficial to them.

She saw foreign state media outlets take American social media posts and livestreams, repurpose them and then amplify them on foreign state media outlets to give a perception of widespread chaos.

Presenting us as a nation in chaos that cant get its election straight weakens the perception of the U.S. in the world abroad, which serves their broader interests, Diresta said. So even if they have no particular political candidate that they wanted to get behind, putting out that the American election is in chaos is beneficial to them.

Diresta has been studying the effects of misinformation for five years and calls this period of cyberattacks a warm war something that is a few steps beyond previous Cold War tactics between the U.S. and former Soviet Union, but stops short of open armed conflict.

An information war is not the same thing as a war, but you can find a dynamic that is taking shape of all different factions fighting each other on the internet to try and gain attention to move policy or to move politicians, Diresta said. The introduction of foreign actors into that space, took it up to a level that we hadnt seen before.

Those new levels of conflict are behind Californias decision to ramp up cybersecurity efforts to surveil the online posts of Californians.

Dresner is one of two people in the Office of Election Cybersecurity, which reports to Paula Valle, chief communications officer for the Secretary of States office.

Dresner defines misinformation as inaccurate information unintentionally spread.

That might include posts that either break a platforms community standards policy or posts that violate California election laws.

If someone is offering to get paid to vote on a certain behalf, that would be an example, she said.

Every sort of misinformation requires a different tactic (of response) and it is a sort of ongoing process to determine what that is, Dresner said. There is no clear threshold, it is a fine line between opinion and misinformation.

Keep tabs on the latest California policy and politics news

Whether the posts are removed is up to the social media companies. Dresner said the state does not have access to private Facebook groups, direct messages or similar social posts and communication.

Instead, the Office of Election Cybersecurity monitors what is playing out in the public sphere. Staff use commonly available services that allow users to set parameters for search options and others that charge for the monitoring itself.

Twitter for example has an option called Tweetdeck, that allows users to view multiple columns of searches or feeds. To isolate a search column to a specific area, a user can enter whats called a geocode to limit a search to that area.

Dresner said her office uses what they call a Misinformation Tracker to collect screenshots of posts and then they report each to the respective social media platform.

The office stores the screenshots indefinitely in the Misinformation Tracker to maintain a paper trail.

Such indefinite storage and the ways in which the state is surveilling its residents concerns David Greene, civil liberties director for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I dont think the government should store any peoples personal information any longer than it needs to, indefinite seems unnecessary, Greene said. If there is some type of coordinated disinformation effort that poses a serious danger to the state, then I think they could retain it for investigative purposes, but you dont want to be keeping dossiers just for the possibility that something may be useful for the future.

Typically it is the federal government that removes content from websites, usually because it concerns instances of child abuse or what is known as Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content. Greene said he wasnt surprised California is surveillancing misinformation, especially when it comes to election integrity, and he expects similar efforts surrounding coronavirus vaccinations. He just wants the state to be more transparent about what it is doing.

To me this is something they should do publicly and not behind the scenes, Greene said. After all, Californias data privacy laws do not prohibit the state from looking at publicly available information.

For Dresner, she said she doesnt think her office is violating the privacy of Californians.

It is all public information and that is what we monitor, the public sphere, she said. We arent worried about what people are saying in the privacy of their own homes, we are worried about what they are putting out there for the world to see.

Katie Licari,a reporter at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, contributed to this story.

This coverage is made possible throughVotebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. In California,CalMattersis hosting the collaboration with the Fresno Bee, the Long Beach Post and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Read the original here:
California worked with social companies to remove election misinformation - CALmatters

from the make-section-230-boring-again dept

The other day Senator Schatz tweeted, "Ask every Senator what Section 230 is. Dont ask them if they want to repeal it. Ask them to describe it."

It's a very fair point. Most of the political demands to repeal Section 230 betray a profound ignorance of what Section 230 does, why, or how. That disconnect between policy understanding and policy demands means that those demands to repeal the law will only create more problems while not actually solving any of the problems currently being complained about.

Unfortunately, however, Senator Schatz's next tweet revealed his own misunderstanding. [Update: per this tweet, it wasn't his misunderstanding his next tweet revealed but rather the misunderstanding of other Senators who have proposed other sorts of "reforms" he was taking issue with. Apologies to Senator Schatz for misstating.] "I have a bipartisan bill that proposes changes to 230, but repeal is absurd. The platforms are irresponsible, but we should not have a government panel handing out immunity like it's a hunting license. We must rein in big tech via 230 reform and antitrust law, not lazy stunts."

There's a lot to unpack in that tweet, including the bit about antitrust law, but commenting on that suggestion is for another post. The issue here is that no, Section 230 is nothing like the government "handing out immunity like a hunting license," and misstatements like that matter because they egg on "reform" efforts that will ruin rather than "reform" the statute, and in the process ruin plenty more that the Constitution and our better policy judgment requires us to protect.

The point of this post is to thus try to dispel all such misunderstandings that tend to regard Section 230's statutory protection as some sort of tangible prize the government hands out selectively, when in reality it is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it reads like a rule of civil procedure that, like any rule of civil procedure, is applicable to any potential defendant that meets its broadly-articulated criteria.

For non-lawyers "rules of civil procedure" may sound arcane and technical, but the basic concept is simple. When people want to sue other people, these are the rules that govern how those lawsuits can proceed so that they can proceed fairly, for everyone. They speak to such things as who can sue whom, where someone can be sued, and, if a lawsuit is filed, whether and how it can go forward. They are the rules of the road for litigation, but they often serve as more than a general roadmap. In many cases they are the basis upon which courts may dispense with cases entirely. Lawsuits only sometimes end with rulings on the merits after both parties have fully presented their cases; just as often, if not more often, courts will evaluate whether the rules of civil procedure even allow a case to continue at all, and litigation frequently ends when courts decide that they don't.

Which is important because litigation is expensive, and the longer it goes on the more cost-prohibitive it becomes. And that's a huge problem, especially for defendants with good defenses, because even if those defenses should mean that they would eventually win the case, the crippling cost involved in staying in the litigation long enough for that defense to prevail might bankrupt them long before it ever could.

Such a result hardly seems fair, and we want our courts to be fair. They are supposed to be about administering justice, but there's nothing just about letting courts being used as tools to obliterate innocent defendants. One reason we have rules of civil procedure is to help lessen the danger that innocent defendants can be drained dry by unmeritorious litigation against them. And that is exactly what Section 230 is designed to do as well.

An important thing to remember is that most of what people complain about when they complain about Section 230 are things that the First Amendment allows to happen. The First Amendment is likely to insulate platforms from liability in their users' content, and it's also likely to insulate them from liability for their moderation decisions. Section 230 helps drive those points home explicitly for providers of "interactive computer services" (which, it should be noted, include far more than just "big tech" platforms; they also include much smaller and non-commercial ICS providers as well, and even individual people), but even if there were no Section 230 the First Amendment would still be there to do the job of protecting platforms in this way. At least in theory.

In practice, however, defendant platforms would first have to endure an onslaught of litigation and all its incumbent costs before the First Amendment could provide any useful benefit, which will likely be too little, too late for most if not all of them. The purpose of Section 230 is therefore to make sure those First Amendment rights can be real, and meaningful, and something that every sort of interactive computer service provider can be confident in exercising without having to fear being crushed by unconstitutional litigation if they do.

What people calling for any change to Section 230 need to realize is how these changes will do nothing but open the floodgates to this sort of crushing litigation against so much that the Constitution is otherwise supposed to protect. It is a flood that will inevitably chill platforms by effectively denying them the protection their First Amendment rights were supposed to afford, and in the process also chill all the expressive user activity they currently feel safe to enable. It is not an outcome that any policymaker should be so eager to tempt; rather, it is something to studiously avoid. And the first step to avoiding it is to understand how these proposed changes will do nothing but invite it.

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Filed Under: brian schatz, civil procedure, section 230, subsidy

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Section 230 Isn't A Subsidy; It's A Rule Of Civil Procedure - Techdirt