Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Annals of Wealth Distribution

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Just 6 Walmart heirs have as much wealth as 30% of Americans.

That works out to about six people having the wealth of 90 million people in the US.

Posted in 99%, Econ & Money | 3 Comments

Froomkin on Anonymity at the Surprisingly Free Podcast

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I just did my first-ever podcast, in which I was interviewed about online anonymity by Jerry Brito. He is not only a Senior Research Fellow of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University but also an important contributor to the Technology Liberation Front blog, which is an essential provocation for anyone interested in cutting-edge issues about online freedom.

Jerry’s podcast series, which seems to feature a who’s who of people doing internet scholarship, is called Surprisingly Free; here’s the direct link to Brito interviewing Froomkin, and here’s his summary of the interview:

Michael Froomkin, the Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Miami, discusses his new paper prepared for the Oxford Internet Institute entitled, Lessons Learned Too Well: The Evolution of Internet Regulation. Froomkin begins by talking about anonymity, why it is important, and the different political and social components involved. The discussion then turns to Froomkin’s categorization of Internet regulation, how it can be seen in three different waves, and how it relates to anonymity. He ends the discussion by talking about the third wave of Internet regulation, and he predicts that online anonymity will become practically impossible. Froomkin also discusses the constitutional implications of a complete ban on online anonymity, as well as what he would deem an ideal balance between the right to anonymous speech and protection from online crimes like fraud and security breeches.

(I have not had the courage to listen to this yet. If you do, please let me know how I did. Unless it’s awful.)

Posted in Law: International Law, Talks & Conferences, The Media | 2 Comments

“Birdseed Plot” Leads to Firing of North Miami Beach Police Officer

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Only in South Florida could a police officer be fired for the attempted spreading of birdseed in a boss’s office.

Because, as South Florida readers will surely have guessed, the bird seed wasn’t a prank but a bit of black magic. Let’s cut to the Miami Herald’s account:

The North Miami Beach police officer accused of trying to cast a Santeria spell over the city manager’s office to stop him from slashing police jobs was fired Monday.

City Manager Lyndon Bonner, the target of Officer Edith Torres’ allegedly magical plot, fired the 24-year veteran for conduct unbecoming of an officer.

Her attorney insisted the officer was simply behaving in a “lighthearted nature” and argued the publicity surrounding the Santeria escapade would hurt the veteran officer’s chances of getting another job.

According to an internal affairs report, Torres tried to recruit the help of a janitor to sprinkle birdseed in the manger’s office. Torres believed the birdseed held mystical powers which would make the city manager “go away.”

The janitor refused to carry out the birdseed plot and reported Torres to her boss.

An office manager with the police department was also fired after the janitor told city officials she was involved in the birdseed plot.

This sort of thing is almost routine down here, although I’ve never before heard of birdseed being used in an office to prevent a reduction in force. Usually it’s dead chickens on the steps of the courthouse to influence the outcome of a trial.

That said, there’s almost a nice legal issue here. On the one hand, if spreading the birdseed had no religious aspect, it’s hard to see how a prank of this nature would have triggered this dismissal. On the other hand, does making this a firing offense require the City to take a view as to the likely efficacy of the curse? Or of the propriety of invoking Santeria? I don’t think so: the malign intent plus the attempted break-in probably suffices, but it does lead to a few hypos.

Suppose the facts were different.

Version 1: Imagine that the facts were that the janitor overheard the police officer praying in church for the Lord to smite the city manager. Same result or different?

Version 2: The police officer carried out a curse ritual in some other minority religion — say, Satanism — that allows curses to be conducted entirely off the premises. Same result or different?

Version 3: The police officer attempted to enlist the janitor in an effort to put a banner in the City Manager’s office saying “NO CUTS”. Same result or different?

Version 4: The police officer attempted to enlist the janitor in an effort to put a “secret Santa” gift in the City Manager’s office. Same result or different?

What these examples try to get at is whether it the attempted intrusion + the curse that makes this an offense, or just one part or the other. I think most people would say (1) is not a firing offense. I would be prepared to argue that (2) is not a firing offense either, on First Amendment grounds. (3) is the hardest call for me. Breaking into people’s offices seems like it could be a good neutral principle for firing police officers. But shouldn’t that make us also ready to fire in case (4)? If pushed I could maybe invoke some theory of implied consent for the gift, but suppose that it wasn’t a gift, but prank Halloween decorations or something. Would that be a firing offense? If your answer is that (4) is not a firing offense, why does adding an intent to cast a curse change the facts? Or would you say that (2) — the Satanic curse with no attempt at a break-in — was a firing offense also? Then why not (1), the plea for divine smiting, as well?

Creative Commons photo copyright Kraftwerck. Some rights reserved.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

Nailed It

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

The Onion captures a great deal of what is wrong with the US in one headline: Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn’t Know China Has Nuclear Weapons.

Posted in 2012 Election | Comments Off on Nailed It

My Brother Says It’s Obama’s Economy

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

In Suskind's Confidence Men Raises Questions About Obama's Credibility, my brother Dan Froomkin makes the case for the prosecution against Obama’s management of the economic crisis.

It starts with Obama’s bold but unfulfilled promises:

In October 2008, he promised to "take on the corruption in Washington and on Wall Street to make sure a crisis like this can never, ever happen again."

And one day before he was elected president, he told a Florida audience: "Tomorrow, you can turn the page on policies that have put the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street."

Obama’s most seminal speech on the crisis was his March 2008 address at Cooper Union. There, he laid part of the blame for the disaster on Clinton-era financial deregulation, including the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. That repeal, which broke down barriers between commercial and investment banking, led to the growth of financial behemoths that were able to take enormous risks with impunity because they were "too big to fail."

"[I]nstead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one, aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight," Obama said. "In doing so we encouraged a winner take all, anything goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy."

But in fact, Obama appointed an economic team that was either not up to boldness, or set against it.

While the appointments of these men and a slew of similarly pedigreed subordinates reassured the financial markets, their leadership undermined Obama’s populist promises.

Many of them had already spent their interregnum feeding at the Wall Street trough.

Dan’s extensive tying of Obama’s top advisers to millions in Wall St. remuneration will undoubtedly anger many inside the Beltway, where it’s not considered polite to suggest that government servants — especially those taking a pay cut to be powerful — might be motivated by money. But whatever one makes of that, it is telling that so many of the key Obama economic team were men (yes, men) with Wall Street affinities and salaries.

I haven’t read Suskind’s book, and I don’t have a clear theory for the root causes of the Obama failures on the economy. Yes, they got dealt a crisis. But they wasted it, after Rahm Emanuel promised not to.

The list of failures is long: the administration failed to be more aggressive pushing for a stimulus, it failed to demand, much less get, an equity stake in the banks you and I paid to bail out, it failed to do anything at all meaningful to help underwater homeowners, and did next to nothing to punish anyone responsible for the financial debacle economically — much less criminally. Those are clear, real failures, they were not (with the possible exception of the stimulus which required Republican support that certainly could not have been guaranteed even with a more confrontational strategy) hard to foresee nor all that hard to prevent. Nor, unlike the underlying economic problem itself, are any of them things you can blame on George W. Bush.

That the GOP seems poised to choose its nominee between someone utterly unprincipled and someone crazy and dangerous as well as unprincipled, suggests Obama may be lucky. That luck may get him re-elected. It’s a certainty that if re-election happens, it won’t be because of his handling of the economic crisis.

Posted in 2012 Election, Dan Froomkin, Econ & Money | 3 Comments

Bugs in the System (Resolved) (Not)

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Formatting on the blog seems to have suddenly gone all weird. If I had to guess the cause, it’s some misbehavior of WP Super Cache, which I started using about a week ago instead of W3 Cache. (The change was to placate my ISP, which claimed that timeout problems were related to not having their favorite cache software in place.)

Why this should happen a week later, I don’t know, and odds are I will not figure it out until late tonight or tomorrow because I have to go out very shortly.

Sorry about that.

Update (18:30): it is fixed. I really don’t think it is anything I did.

Update 2 (12/2): Mobile stuff is borked. I’ve put a band-aid on so that it renders legibly, but comment reading and writing on the mobile version is broken. I believe this is connected to what broke comment preview on the main site. I also believe I know a solution — change WP Super Cache from mod_rewrite to PHP mode, then tag the AJAX code with stuff that tells the cache how to process it. But that’s not a trivial change, and it will create server load, at least initially, so I have to clear it with the ISP (who claim to be investigating why the server crashes at random intervals since they upgraded Debian, and asked me not to change anything while they investigate).

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments