Month: December 2017

Categories
Law Privacy

New York ruling that lets police follow cellphone locations without a warrant highlights significance of Supreme Court review in Carpenter case

New Yorkers have no constitutionally protected right to privacy in information about our whereabouts that can be deduced from the data emitted by our cellphones, an appeals court in Rochester has ruled in a case that underscores the significance of a ruling expected this spring from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sharhad Jiles was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after being found guilty in the shooting death of Sheldon Hepburn during a 2011 robbery. At trial, prosecutors used records obtained from the company that provided Jiles’ cellphone service to place him in the location of the murder.

Jiles asked the judge to exclude the records, which revealed his location over a period of four days beginning on the data of the robbery; information that Jiles contended prosecutors needed a warrant to obtain.

Prosecutors had acquired the records, which track every time our cellphones register with the nearest tower, via a subpoena issued to the provider pursuant to the federal Stored Communications Act, which allows the government to obtain such data without a showing of probable cause of a crime. The trial judge sided with prosecutors and Jiles appealed.

On appeal, Jiles argued that so-called cell site location information is protected by the Fourth Amendment by two rulings of the Supreme Court: a 2012 decision that overturned the conviction of a Maryland man based on evidence obtained from a GPS device that police, acting without a warrant, affixed for 28 days to the underside of his automobile; and a 2014 ruling by the court that police may not, without a warrant, search the contents of a cellphone obtained from someone who has been arrested.

The New York court disagreed, citing a series of rulings by federal courts that suspects have no constitutionally protected privacy in records they voluntarily supply to a third party such as checks, deposit slips and other records filed with banks or telephone numbers they dial.

“We remain bound by the third-party doctrine when interpreting the Fourth Amendment [until] a majority of justices on the [Supreme] Court instructs us otherwise,” Justice Gerald Whalen wrote on behalf of the court in a Dec. 22 ruling.

The instruction should arrive this spring, when the Supreme Court is expected to rule in an appeal from Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison for a series of robberies in Ohio and Michigan.

At trial, prosecutors introduced evidence of Carpenter’s location they gleaned from records obtained from his cellphone provider that revealed his movements over a period of 127 days.

Like Jiles, Carpenter contended that the government should have obtained a warrant for the records, but both the trial judge and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the appeal on Nov. 29. Nathan Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued on behalf of Carpenter, distinguished business records such as those filed with a bank from the location data collected by the towers that carry calls from our cellphones.

“The information in bank records can be quite sensitive, but what it cannot do is chart a minute-by-minute account of a person’s locations and movements and associations over a long period regardless of what the person is doing at any given moment,” Wessler said in response to a question by Justice Alito.

Such data gives the government “a categorically new power that is made possible by these perfect tracking devices that 95 percent of Americans carry in their pockets,” he said later in response to a question from Justice Kennedy.

Arguing for the government, Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben dismissed the distinction. By obtaining records that reveal a suspect’s historical location, the government “is doing the same thing” it did in the case of bank records, he told the justices. “It is asking a business to provide information about the business’s own transactions with a customer. And under the third-party doctrine, that does not implicate the Fourth Amendment rights of the customers,” Dreeben added.

As Amy Howe at Scotusblog noted, the challenge for the justices may be where to draw the line between information that is entitled to protection of the Fourth Amendment and that which the government can obtain with a subpoena.

“This is highly personal information,” Justice Breyer remarked, referring to location data that can be gleaned from cell towers.

Justice Sotomayor took note of the erosion on privacy that can accompany developments technology. “Right now, we’re only talking about the cell sites records, but as I understand it, a cell phone can be pinged in your bedroom, “she said. “It can be pinged at your doctor’s office. It can ping you in the most intimate details of your life. Presumably at some point even in a dressing room as you’re undressing. So I am not beyond the belief that someday a provider could turn on my cell phone and listen to my conversations.”

Justice Alito pushed back, challenging Wessler to distinguish cell site location data from bank records or telephone numbers called. Cellphone service contracts advise subscribers that the company can disclose location information to the government pursuant to a court order.

Wessler replied that the Stored Communications Act provides two ways the government can obtain records: either by a court order or a warrant. That, he argued, suggests that anyone looking at the law “would be quite reasonable and right to assume that the reason there’s a warrant prong is to deal with records like these in which there’s a strong privacy interest.”

Some experts say the march of technology means it’s time for the court to discard the third-party doctrine entirely. Writing recently in The Washington Post, Bruce Schneier, a technologist and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, noted that we store most of our data on computers that belong to other people.

“It’s our email, text messages, photos, Google docs, and more — all in the cloud,” Schneier wrote. “All this data will be collected and saved by third parties, sometimes for years. The result is a detailed dossier of your activities more complete than any private investigator — or police officer — could possibly collect by following you around.”

Police should be able to draw on the data to help solve crimes, Schneier said. But they first should be required to have probable cause and obtain a warrant.

“It’s long past time the Supreme Court recognized that… my emails and other personal data deserve the same protections, whether they’re on my laptop or on Google’s servers,” he noted.

Categories
Asides

What social media showed us in 2017

On May 26, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio to talk with the American people about mobilizing for war. The address was the 14th “fireside chat” by the president, who during the Depression began the practice of using the airwaves to address Americans directly.

In “No Ordinary Time,” her history of the Roosevelt administration on the home front in World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that during such talks the public could imagine that they were sitting beside the president in his study.

Kearns Goodwin quotes Richard Strout, a journalist who worked for The New Republic during those years. “You felt he was talking to you,” Strout recalled about FDR. “Not to 50 million others but to you personally.”

The idea of talking directly to Americans (and the world) found its footing anew in 2017 thanks to social media. Twitter alone reaches more than three times as many people each day as FDR reached via the radio.

Just over a year ago, Leslie Stahl of CBS News asked then President-elect Donald Trump whether he planned, after he became president, to keep up the use of Twitter that he had wielded during the campaign.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump replied. “I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication… It’s where it’s at… I really believe that, the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.”

As we now know, Trump has not held back. In 2017, he used Twitter to speak to supporters. But he also used it to endorse a hate group, antagonize allies, threaten nuclear war, bully civil servants, and sow discord at home and abroad.

Of course, social media works two ways. When Trump appeared to disinvite the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the White House, LeBron James, who reaches nearly as many people on Twitter as the president, rebuked him.

As Christopher Clarey noted on Friday in the Times, social media also gives athletes the means to amplify their messages – an opportunity for activism that many athletes have seized this year. Clarey notes:

What is evident is that the internet’s capacity to make the distant seem personal is not going away. Whether they are asked political questions or not, athletes, like other celebrities, will continue to be able to deliver their messages — be they solipsistic or deeply civic — directly and immediately to the public, no gatekeepers required.

Experts may debate whether a president actually can launch a nuclear strike at the touch of a button. But this year has showed that a president can risk apocalypse at the touch of a smartphone.

If anything, 2017 underscored that we are less likely to experience the moment at a remove. The year also highlighted, as the reaction to the tweet by James – which was liked by seven times as many people as the tweet by Trump that provoked it – the collective intelligence that modern media make possible.

Abraham Lincoln died a dozen years before Thomas Edison invented the first device that could record and playback sound. We infer what the 16th president sounded like by piecing together accounts of those who heard him speak.

Now, thanks to Twitter, we know what the president just watched on cable news.

“They can’t handcuff him,” Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for the Times, told CNN recently. “They can’t break his fingers to keep him from tweeting. They do tell him: ‘Please don’t do this.’ He does these things anyways.”

Of course, the technology does not release the messenger from responsibility for his message.

As it happens, one of the protests that resonated the loudest this year was also the quietest.

It began a year earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, sat during the national anthem, a day after tweeting a message that compared the American and Confederate flags.

At least one reporter captured the portent of the moment. “At a time when NFL players are criticized for not speaking out on social issues, Kaepernick has provided a very significant and conspicuous gesture,” wrote Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk. “As the team noted, it’s his right to do so. But given that Kaepernick opted to make a stand by sitting during the traditional pregame honoring of the country and its flag — which is so tightly woven into the DNA of the NFL — there surely will be a reaction.”

Categories
News Politics

GOP Congress passes tax bill

Congress on Wednesday passed an overhaul of the U.S. tax code that supporters and opponents claim will benefit Americans. But they disagree on which ones.

Republicans say the measure, the biggest rewrite of the tax law in more than 30 years, will boost paychecks for middle-class households. Democrats contend the bill represents payback by Republicans to the party’s wealthiest donors.

Among other changes, the legislation will cut the rate on corporate taxes to 21 percent from 35 percent, lower the top rate paid by the highest earners to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, nearly double the dollar amount of the so-called standard deduction ($6,350 for single taxpayers in 2017), and expand both the tax credit for child care and the deduction for medical expenses.

The measure lowers the tax bill for owners of so-called pass-through businesses via a deduction of 20 percent.  (Pass-through entities constitute roughly 95 percent of U.S. businesses and sweep in everything from sole proprietors to law firms and hedge funds.)

The bill would limit, to $10,000, deductions for state and local taxes, curb deductions that homebuyers can take for the interest on mortgages, and reduce taxes on inheritances.

All but 12 Republicans voted for the measure, which Democrats opposed unanimously.

Here are a few of the reactions to the bill, which President Trump is expected to sign on Jan. 3.

President Trump: “The typical family of four earning $75,000 will see an income tax cut of more than $2,000.  They’re going to have $2,000, and that’s, in my opinion, going to be less than the average.  You’re going to have a lot more than that.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.”

Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic leader: “There are only two places where America is popping champagne over the #GOPTaxScam: The @WhiteHouse & the corporate boardrooms, including Trump Tower.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan: “Tax rates are going down and paychecks are going up.”

Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas: “We will be cleaning up this mess and the blunders in this bill all of next year.”

Keith Hall, director of the Congressional Budget Office: “[The legislation] would reduce revenues by about $1,649 billion and decrease outlays by about $194 billion over the period from 2018 to 2027, leading to an increase in the deficit of $1,455 billion over the next 10 years.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, conservative economist: “Faster productivity growth will translate into more compensation — wages and benefits — for workers.”

Kimberly Clausing, liberal economist: “These tax cuts are unlikely to spur large increases in wages; careful cross-country evidence fails to find benefits to wages from corporate tax cuts.”

Stephen Myrow, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and now a policy adviser based in Washington: “Whether or not people feel it does something for them, it enables Republicans to reclaim the governing narrative they lost after failing to repeal Obamacare. People like winners.”

TJ Helmstetter, communications director of Americans For Tax Fairness: “This is not tax reform, it’s a money grab by the ultra-wealthy, including the multimillionaires in Congress and Trump’s own cabinet, who will benefit.”

Chad Moutray, chief economist, National Association of Manufacturers: “Our members are very happy about the tax bill as it’s written. You wouldn’t see that level of optimism if they didn’t think this was something that’s going to benefit them.”

Alec Phillips and Blake Taylor, analysts at Goldman Sachs: “We note that the effect in 2020 and beyond looks minimal and could actually be slightly negative.”

Dennis Mullenburg, CEO, Boeing: “The [tax bill] is the single-most important thing we can do to drive innovation, support quality jobs and accelerate capital investment in our country.”

Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve: “It’s not a gigantic increase in growth.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization: “The bottom line is that while tax cuts can help accelerate economic growth in some circumstances, they will not generate anywhere close to enough growth to fully offset the revenue losses they create.”

Vice Money:“Republicans argue that these measures will be good for economic growth, which slowed markedly after the Great Recession. Maybe. But they will also likely shrink the American middle class even further in the years to come, as American inequality hits levels once considered, well, Latin American.”

Categories
News

Cyril Ramaphosa elected to lead South Africa’s ANC: reactions

South Africa’s ruling party elected Cyril Ramaphosa as its new leader on Monday, setting the stage for the passing of the country’s presidency from the embattled Jacob Zuma.

Ramaphosa, a lawyer, businessman and former colleague of Nelson Mandela who campaigned on a platform to root out corruption, unify the party and shore up South Africa’s economy, edged Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the president’s former wife, by fewer than 200 votes.

The rand surged against the dollar in response to the victory, as investors voiced relief at rejection of the populism espoused by Dlamini-Zuma and the prospect for reform following years of corruption that have scrambled South Africa’s prospects and led ratings agencies to lower their assessments of the country’s creditworthiness.

Still, the scale of South Africa’s challenges – including an economy that is growing about 1% annually and one in three workers unemployed – will confront Ramaphosa, who as head of the ANC is likely to become South Africa’s next president. He’ll also have to fend off threats from within the party, where he will be surrounded in the leadership by supporters of Dlamini-Zuma.

Here’s a sampling of reaction across South Africa and around the world:

Eusebius McKaiser, South African journalist and political analyst: “The central problem Ramaphosa will face as he takes the helm of the ANC is that the party is so politically damaged that he might find himself becoming the first ANC leader to lose a general election since South Africa became a democracy in 1994.”

Win Thin, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman: Ramaphosa “will not have a magic wand that can make South Africa’s structural problems vanish overnight.”

William Gumede, executive chairman of the Democracy Works Foundation, “Ramaphosa has a better chance of renewing confidence, not only in the markets but also inside the A.N.C., where reformers may now feel they have a place.”

Fatima Hlongeni, a community worker in Soweto who grew up there with Ramaphosa: “I’m happy that we now have a president of the ANC from Soweto. We hope that he can help to bring development here.”

Steven Friedman, political scientist at the University of Johannesburg: “He’s not the kind of muscleman politician that will go in and clean up. He’s more of a conciliator and bridge mender. There are all these wild expectations now.”

Richard Calland, professor at the University of Cape Town and expert on the ANC: “The ANC will struggle to rebrand itself as a party of the progressive center … the paradox is that Dlamini-Zuma lost but her faction won.”

Ben Payton, head of Africa Research at Verisk Maplecroft, a risk advisory firm in the U.K.: “It stretches credibility to imagine that Ramaphosa could win the ANC leadership without striking deals with key power brokers who seek to maintain a patronage-based political system.”

Julius Malema, leader of the EFF, one of South Africa’s two main opposition parties, and a former member of the ANC: “Nothing has really changed‚ the core of the corrupt premier league [referring to the party’s provincial leaders] is at the center of the organization.”

Zwelethu Jolobe, political scientist, University of Cape Town: “What we have seen here‚ however‚ is that there are mixed slates. Both camps [Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma] have people in the top six.”

Oscar Mabuyane, ANC chairperson, Eastern Cape province: “This will collapse factionalism in how we elect leaders. We think we got a collective leadership that will take us to 2019 (general elections).”

Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand: “It is a split leadership team but maybe that is for the better. For those who worry about Ramaphosa being paralyzed‚ remember that he has both Mantashe [elected ANC national chairperson] and Mashatile [elected ANC treasurer general]‚ both of whom are politically astute. He has political support and should use it.”

Categories
Film New York City

The Lincoln Plaza Cinemas near the end

We arrived at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas with anticipation recently to see “Darkest Hour,” a film about a newly appointed Winston Churchill confronting the threat of invasion from Nazi forces.

But we also looked forward to a film at the Lincoln Plaza, which you reach by descending a level from the box office on Broadway.

Tan carpet covers the lobby. The walls are painted lavender. One corner features a display case that holds memorabilia. There’s a concession stand that sells coffee and cake along with the candy and popcorn. An office across from the stand holds a desk and houses the management.

The six theaters themselves are throwbacks to an era before the horrors of stadium seating and moviegoers who text from their seats. The floors slope gently toward the screen. If the hallmarks of a great theater are the view and sound from the last row (where we like to sit) then the Lincoln Plaza may be the best in the city.

Happiness. At least until next month, when the Lincoln Plaza is slated to close, a victim of technology and rising rents across the city. The tale is one that recurs nowadays. “The Lincoln Plaza is the latest art house hit by a historic confluence of forces, including the streaming boom and New York gentrification,” noted Deadline, which broke the news.

Milstein Properties, which owns the building, said in a statement that “vital work” is needed to waterproof the plaza surrounding the building and that it expects “to reopen the space as a cinema that will maintain its cultural legacy far into the future.”

A spokesman for the company refused to say whether the theater would reopen with its operators, Daniel and Toby Talbot, at the helm.

If you like the Lincoln Plaza, thank the Talbots, who opened the six-screen theater in 1981. The Talbots, who are married for 68 years, have displayed independent films in the city since 1960. The theater reflects their stewardship.

“Our theater served as a springboard for a lot of foreign films,” Toby Talbot, already speaking in the past tense, told the Times, which noted that the theater introduced American audiences to such directors as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Daniel Talbot has credited colleagues for the theater’s charms. In a 2004 speech to mark his receiving an award for lifetime achievement from the Independent Filmmaker Project, Talbot thanked the theater’s programmer and “Ewnetu Admassu, the house manager of the Lincoln Plaza… who runs the theatre as if it were his home. There is nobody like him.”

Categories
Tech

Transparency cannot replace net neutrality

Earlier this month, the chief financial officer of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest internet service providers, discussed the build-out of the company’s broadband fiber network to homes.

The network, which goes by the name FiOS, “continues to be a very good product,” Matt Ellis, the CFO, told investors at a conference sponsored by UBS. According to Ellis, consumers who opt out of cable but who subscribe to so-called over-the-top services such as Netflix “want the best broadband experience you can get, and FiOS is the best broadband experience in the marketplace.”

Therein lies the problem with the action led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to repeal so-called net neutrality rules, which prevent ISPs from blocking, slowing or impeding content from providers they don’t own. The rules, to borrow Ellis’ phrase, help to assure the best broadband experience you can get regardless who owns the content you consume.

As the Republican majority at the FCC sees it, net neutrality constitutes “heavy-handed, utility-style regulation” that depresses investment and innovation.

Rather than order ISPs to keep their networks open – which, by the way, is the whole point of the internet’s decentralized design – the FCC will require ISPs “to disclose information about their practices to consumers, entrepreneurs, and the Commission, including any blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or affiliated prioritization.”

According to Pai, the market – backed by laws governing competition and consumer protection – will achieve the ends of net neutrality without the need for rules to achieve it.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Most of us connect to the internet through our ISP. And for most of us, the market for ISPs tends to be a monopoly. In the neighborhood where I live, you can choose Spectrum as your ISP. That’s the choice.

Last February, New York’s attorney general accused Spectrum of misleading consumers with promises of speeds for wired internet that, as it happened, were as much as 70 percent slower than promised. The company allegedly charged customers as much as $109.99 per month for premium plans that could not achieve speeds promised by Spectrum in its slower plans.

Consumers knew they were being ripped off. (You can test the speed of your connection.) But acting alone, there was little they could do to compel Spectrum to honor its promise.

Though a class action may force the company to reimburse consumers for the wrong, a rule that required Spectrum to serve customers at speeds the company promised would have allowed them to receive the service they paid for.

In short, all the transparency in the world won’t help if you’re served by a monopoly.

The internet is the infrastructure of our modern age and, for that matter, the medium of our democracy. It resembles the electric grid more than it does the entertainment, sports and social networks that stream across it.

As most consumers know, ISPs can (and do) charge as much for connections as the market will bear. Net neutrality asks in return that they not privilege one stream of content over another.

Categories
News

Alabama election marks a win for clarity

On Tuesday, the Republican stronghold of Alabama elected Doug Jones, a Democrat, to the U.S. Senate following a campaign marked by allegations of sexual misconduct against Roy Moore, his GOP rival. The outcome signaled that Republicans, led by Donald Trump, backed a candidate that even many of their own supporters (to their credit), rejected, exit polls showed.

Earlier on Tuesday, about 4,482 miles from Birmingham, French President Emmanuel Macron, hosted a climate summit in Paris. He did not invite Trump – a sort of time-out for the U.S. president after the latter backtracked in June from the international climate accord.

Taken together, the results and the rebuke make the week seem like a moment for hopefulness and clarity. Here, in our opinion, are five of the heroes who emerged: 

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: The Democrat from New York called on President Trump to resign and for Congress to investigate multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him. The president, who denies the claims (and, falsely, that he never met the women who leveled them), took to Twitter to attack Gillibrand as a senator who used to come “begging for campaign contributions… and would do anything for them.”

The senator (among others) termed Trump’s reply “a sexist smear” that was intended to silence her. “You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office,” she said.

African-American voters in Alabama: Black voters made up 29% of the vote on Tuesday night, and they turned out overwhelmingly for Doug Jones, who won 49.9% of the vote. Ninety-eight percent of African-American women and 93% of men voted for Jones.

https://twitter.com/BurkeCNN/status/940798133579198464

That compares with 35% of white women and 27% of white men who voted for the Democrat. Turnout by black voters in the off-year contest topped that in the race for governor three years ago. “Following last month’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, when African-Americans helped vault Democrats to victories, the Alabama race is another sign that the party’s most loyal voters are fired up,” the Times reported.

The Washington Post: On Nov. 9, reporters Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites detailed allegations by Leigh Corfman, who said that Moore initiated a sexual relationship with her in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32. Over the weeks that ensued, the Post reported on allegations by a total of eight women who described misconduct or sexual assault by Moore over a period of years. Seven of the women were teenagers at the time of the alleged misconduct; Moore was in his 30s. In the election on Tuesday, two-thirds of women who have children under the age of 18 supported Doug Jones, Moore’s Democratic opponent, giving him a 34-point margin among that group, exits polls showed.

Senator Richard Shelby: In 1994, the Republican from Alabama betrayed Democrats when he switched parties. On Sunday, he made up for it by saying publicly he “couldn’t vote” for Moore and would write in “a distinguished Republican name” instead. Shelby added that the found allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore “credible” and “believable.” The break with his party by the senior senator from the state helped to mark Moore as unfit to hold public office (or any office) on the eve of an election that sent the first Democratic from Alabama to the Senate since 1992.

Emmanuel Macron: The French president hosted a meeting of dozens of world leaders to take steps to address the threat of climate change without the participation of the U.S. government.

The One Planet Summit highlighted the world’s determination to meet climate goals regardless of a decision in June by the Trump administration to abandon the Paris accord. On Tuesday, Macron, called the decision by Trump “very bad news” and warned against complacency in the effort to rein in global warming. The French leader also noted that eight U.S. states have launched an initiative on clean transport.

Categories
World

The cost of recognizing Jerusalem

On Wednesday evening, hours after declaring that the U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, President Trump greeted friends and family who gathered at the White House to mark the start of Hanukkah.

“Well, I know for a fact there are a lot of happy people in this room,” he said to applause. “Jerusalem.” The declaration may have played well in the room, but it flopped everywhere else:

Thousands of Palestinian protestors took to the streets in the West Bank and Gaza; at least two protestors were killed and 98 wounded. (Haaretz)

Israeli forces fired at protestors along the border with Gaza, wounding at least 31 people (Reuters); Israel alleged that rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel. (Washington Post)

Protests took place across Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia and Iran, as well as in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indian-administered Kashmir and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. (BBC)

Fourteen members of the U.N. Security Council have criticized the move. (AP)

The move embarrasses both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of the U.S.’s main allies in the Sunni Muslim world. (FT)

The U.N.’s envoy to the Middle East said that the comments by Trump undermined a decades-old consensus. (Guardian)

The status of Jerusalem is among the top sticking points in the peace process.

For Trump the declaration represented payback to a political base that includes pro-Israel Republicans and evangelical Christians. “While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver,” he said. Today, I am delivering.”

To bolster the point, the White House released testimonials from Republicans (and one Democrat).

No nation has an embassy in Jerusalem. The declaration by Trump affirms America’s status as an outlier in a world that is moving on without the U.S. and that presidents of both parties once worked to inspire.

Categories
Law New York City

Building owners in NYC reminded to remove snow from sidewalks

With the start of winter two weeks away, a pair of rulings from a state appeals court in Brooklyn shed light on the obligation of landlords in New York City to keep sidewalks free of ice and snow.

Building owners in the city are required by law to maintain sidewalks adjacent to their properties in a reasonably safe condition, which includes removing snow and ice.

In the first ruling, the court sided with Maria Michalska, who accused the owner of an apartment building in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn with failing to clear the sidewalk outside the premises.

Michalska said she injured herself after slipping on Feb. 4, 2014 at 9:30 p.m. on ice that covered a path that had been shoveled through snow on the sidewalk adjacent to the building. According to Michalska, the sidewalk was slippery when she had used it a night earlier.

A weather report showed that 6.7 inches of snow fell as of 5 p.m. on Feb. 3, about 26.5 hours before Michalska slipped, and that no snow fell on the day of the accident.

Though the building’s superintendent testified that he could not remember whether he removed snow from the sidewalk on either day, the testimony conflicted with an affidavit in which he stated that he personally checked the sidewalk at the end of his shift at 5 p.m. on the day Michalska fell and observed neither snow nor ice.

The evidence “failed to eliminate all… issues… as to whether the [landlord caused or exacerbated the alleged icy condition on the subject sidewalk or had notice of it,” Justice William Mastro wrote on behalf of three of his colleagues in a Nov. 29 ruling that returned the lawsuit to the trial court.

Storm in progress

In a second ruling the same day, the court sided with Toni Maria Pecoraro, who accused the owners of a building in Brooklyn with failing to clear snow that she allegedly slipped on.

The owners cited a rule that relieves an owner of a building from responsibility to remove snow during a storm or for a reasonable time thereafter.

To bolster their claim, the owners presented weather data that they said showed snow falling at the time of the accident, a claim Pecoraro contested.

The court returned the case to the trial court to resolve the differences in their accounts. “The climatological data submitted by [the owners] … contradicted [Pecoraro’s] deposition testimony… as to whether precipitation was falling at or near the time of the accident,” Justice Ruth Balkin wrote on behalf of three of her colleagues.

Categories
Tech

AT&T disregards the end of net neutrality

The U.S. elections of 2016 marked a shift in spending on political advertising as money for ads moved to cable TV and the internet, which allow campaigns to target with precision the audience for their ads and, in the case of the internet. to collect information from supporters.

Spending last year for political ads that appeared on mobile phones, across social networks and in search results grew 789% from 2012, to $1.4 billion, AdAge reported in January. Candidates and their allies spent roughly the same total on cable TV, where spending rose 52% from four years earlier. Purchases of ads on broadcast TV fell 20%, to $4.4 billion, over the same period.

Candidates “are engaging in more internet communications with each passing election, and citizens and civil society organizations are increasingly able to express their views and organize online,” Facebook told the Federal Election Commission in comments filed in November.

The shift points to more than political activity.

The internet is “the common medium,” as Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, predicted seven years ago that it would become. Forty-three percent of Americans get their news online, up from 38% a year earlier, the Pew Research Center reported in September. The gap between the share of Americans who get their news online as opposed to via TV shrank to seven points in the past year, down from 19 points in 2016.

Thus, the pushback by AT&T against a lawsuit by the Trump administration to block the company’s proposed purchase of Time Warner stands out.

Whatever you think of the merger and regardless (for the moment) of the administration’s motives for opposing it, the consequences for competition will be intensified by developments elsewhere in Washington, where the FCC is moving to scrap rules that prevent internet services providers from blocking or slowing traffic from companies they don’t own.

AT&T is among the world’s largest carriers  of content. Anyone who aims to reach readers, listeners or viewers relies on AT&T, Verizon and other ISPs. The ISPs set the terms of carriage.

Under a proposal likely to be adopted by the FCC this month, ISPs would need only to post their terms of service for all to see. “Individual consumers, not the government, decide what Internet access service best meets their individualized needs,” the FCC says in its proposed order.

But transparency only counts when consumers have a choice. Forty-six million households are served by just one provider of broadband internet, data from the FCC show. (Another 10.6 million households have no broadband service.)

“It’s an ‘open the champagne bottles’ moment for AT&T,” Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia who coined the term net neutrality to describe the principle of equal access to the internet, told the Times. “They can just tell people to pony up.”

Pony up is unlikely to be in the public interest, particularly for the internet, which serves all members of society. “Everybody in the internet community was extremely eager to operate under the delusion that government played no role in the growth of the internet,” noted Hundt, who listed some of the ways that government made the internet the common medium that it has become.

The government allowed computers to use the telephone network to connect to the internet for free, he noted. The government did not tax internet commerce and mandated that a portion of revenue from users be redirected to connect all Americans, including those in classrooms and libraries as well as those who live in tribal lands and rural areas.

A common medium is easy to use, reaches all people, fosters economic growth, provides access to the government, is full of news and – in the U.S. at least – needs to be private, Hundt observed.

AT&T is not Netflix, YouTube, Hulu or Facebook, to name several companies that AT&T cites as evidence of competitors who AT&T says are encroaching on its business. We look to those companies for content, but we count on AT&T and its fellow ISPs for connection.