The debate between Cato adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny and the Manhattan Institute’s Ted Frank continues today over at PointofLaw, as Svorny points out that while no system is entirely rational, a liability system offers certain benefits that the alternatives proposed do not.

This week, experts at the (neo)conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a report on how to deal with a nuclear-armed Iran.

The authors argue that because of the “rising consensus” that a preemptive attack is unappealing, and that sanctions likely will fail, they recommend “a coherent Iran containment policy.” That approach entails, among other things, that America “work toward a political transformation, if not a physical transformation, of the Tehran regime.” Leaving aside the fact that Washington has already once “physically transformed the Tehran regime” — when alongside the British it overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953 and restored the Shah — there is a broader problem that comes with listening to proponents of the calamitous decision to invade Iraq.

Take, for instance, report co-author Danielle Pletka, who years ago decreed “Saddam’s entire Ba’athist government must be replaced.” Little surprise that someone who promoted a war based on a web of misleading information is now peddling the notion that Iran is less than a year from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

More credible voices suggest otherwise. The nonprofit Arms Control Association (ACA) observed that the most-recent IAEA report suggests “[I]t remains apparent that a nuclear-armed Iran is still not imminent nor is it inevitable.” Iran was engaged in nuclear weapons development activities until it stopped in 2003, and as Cato’s Justin Logan observes, the IAEA’s own report shows there is no definitive evidence of Iran’s diversion of fissile material.

When Pletka was called out for her “less than a year” prediction, she turned up her nose and snapped:

Quibblers will suggest that there are important “ifs” in both these assessments. And yes, the key “if” is “if” Iran decides to build a bomb. So, I suppose when I said “less than a year away from having a nuclear weapon,” I should have added, “if they want one.” But… isn’t that the point? Do we want to leave this decision up to Khamenei?

Confronted with ambiguous information, and forced to infer intentions, hawks evince the very same arrogance and overconfidence that helped open the door for Iranian influence in the region in the first place by toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime (Pletka advocated repeatedly for this leading up to the 2003 invasion). Pletka and others who years ago had the gall to argue that Iraq “will end when it ends” are today worthy of being ignored on Iran.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Cato adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny’s recent paper, “Could Mandatory Caps on Medical Malpractice Damages Harm Consumers?,” has sparked a debate with the Manhattan Institute’s Ted Frank at PointOfLaw​.com.

My new post at Huffington Post looks at a dinner of the Panetta Institute and what it says about cozy relationships among the Washington establishment:

So let’s see … an institute founded by and bearing the name of the secretary of defense, who also served 17 years in Congress, including four years as chairman of the House Budget Committee, and as director of the Office of Management and Budget, White House chief of staff, and director of the CIA, is giving an award to his immediate predecessor, who also served as CIA director, and to a quintessentially establishment Washington journalist, and to a scholar at both Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution who in addition to her time at the Federal Reserve has served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, director of OMB, co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Task Force on Debt Reduction. That is like an entire Washington establishment at one head table.

More on what this establishment has wrought, and right and wrong ways to break up the iron triangle, at the link.

Two years ago the Washington Post reported that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency brought dangerous Mexican drug traffickers to the U.S. who, while continuing their criminal activities in Mexico and the U.S., also served as informants to the federal authorities in their war on drugs.

In June, Operation Fast and Furious came to light where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed suspicious straw-purchasers of firearms to buy weapons in the U.S. and smuggle them into Mexico. The purpose was to track the guns all the way to the ultimate buyer—a Mexican drug trafficking organization. Overall, the ATF facilitated the purchase of hundreds of guns by Mexican cartels. Many were later found in crime scenes in Mexico, including one where a U.S. Border Patrol agent was assassinated.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the Drug Enforcement Agency has been laundering millions of dollars for Mexican cartels. The goal of the undercover mission is to follow the money all the way up to the top ranks of the criminal organizations. However, as the NYT notes, “So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels’ operations and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain.”

So there we have it: in the name of the war on drugs, the federal government has provided safe havens to Mexican drug traffickers, facilitated their purchase of powerful firearms, and has even laundered millions of dollars for the cartels.

After spending millions of dollars toward fighting the drug war in Mexico, the United States has little to show for its efforts. It seems Washington is becoming more desperate each year to produce new leads and results. These three incidents display a stunning lack of foresight and borders on the federal government aiding the Mexican drug cartels, with little to show in return. The unintended consequences of these programs aimed at dismantling the cartels would be laughable were it not for the thousands that have died in Mexico’s drug related violence.

It is time for the United States to rethink the war on drugs and consider policies that will successfully undermine the Mexican drug cartels.

Next week trade officials representing the more than 150 members of the World Trade Organization will gather in Geneva for a ministerial meeting. Most of the agenda will be a snoozer. The Doha Round is stuck in neutral, with no compromises in sight on agricultural protection, services trade liberalization, or anti-dumping reform. But one item of business will mark a major milestone: the admission of Russia into the club of trading nations.

As I argue in a Washington Times column this morning, and in a Cato Free Trade Bulletin co-authored with Douglas Petersen and released this week, Russia’s entry into the WTO will help to bring more rule of law to the former communist nation. It will also open its market further to U.S. exports, especially civilian aircraft, heavy machinery, computer software and hardware, and beef and poultry.

Approval by WTO members is a near certainty, but what remains an open question is whether the U.S. Congress will grant Russia permanent normal trade relations (PNTR). This will determine whether U.S. companies are granted the more favorable access to Russia’s market offered to other WTO members once it joins the organization. If Congress does not grant PNTR, Russia will join the WTO anyway, but U.S. companies will be at a competitive disadvantage.

In coming weeks, Congress will have an opportunity to welcome one of the world’s largest economies into the rules-based global trading system—and benefit the struggling U.S. economy in the bargain.

I wrote on Monday that a cybersecurity bill overwhelmingly approved by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence risks creating a significantly broader loophole in federal electronic surveillance law than its boosters expect or intend. Creating both legal leeway and a trusted environment for limited information sharing about cybersecurity threats—such as the idenifying signatures of malware or automated attack patterns—is a good idea. Yet the wording of the proposed statute permits broad collection and disclosure of any information that would be relevant to protecting against “cyber threats,” broadly defined. For now, that mostly means monitoring the behavior of software; in the near future, it could as easily mean monitoring the behavior of people.

A recent—and somewhat sensationalistic—Fox News article rather breathlessly describes a newly-unveiled security system dubbed PRODIGAL, or Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning, which “has been built to scan IMs, texts and emails … and can read approximately a quarter billion of them a day.” The article explains:

“Every time someone logs on or off, sends an email or text, touches a file or plugs in a USB key, these records are collected within the organization,” David Bader, a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering and a principal investigator on the project, told FoxNews​.com.

PRODIGAL scans those records for behavior — emails to unusual recipients, certain words cropping up, files transferred from unexpected servers — that changes over time as an employee “goes rogue.” The system was developed at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army’s secretive research arm that works on everything from flying cars to robotic exoskeletons.

Don’t panic just yet: This is strictly being deployed on the networks of government agencies and contractors that handle sensitive information—places where every employee is well aware that their use of the network is subject to close scrutiny, and with good reason. There’s not really anything to say in principle against the use of such systems in this context, or for that matter on closed business networks where users are on clear notice that such monitoring occurs.

It would, by contrast, be a clear and quite outrageous invasion of privacy for such large-scale behavioral monitoring to be conducted on the residential or mobile broadband networks Americans rely on to provide their personal Internet connectivity—a fortiori if the goal is to share the results with the government without a court order. As I read it, however, House Intel’s cybersecurity bill would at least arguably permit precisely that.

Under the current language, as long as an Internet provider had a credible good faith belief that it was collecting and sharing behavioral information for one of several broadly defined “cybersecurity purposes”—say, by creating behavioral profiles of potential hackers, disruptive cyberactivists, or “misappropriators” of intellectual property—they’d enjoy full civil and criminal immunity for such actions. That would make any contractual promises to abstain from such monitoring unenforceable—in the highly unlikely event that ordinary users were even able to determine reliably what sort of information was being shared. It would be, to put it as mildly as possible, extraordinarily poor civic hygiene to enable the construction of this kind of quasi-public/quasi-private monitoring and profiling architecture.

This is not, I believe, the sort of thing the bill’s own architects aspire to bring about. But the abstract language employed in pursuit of technological neutrality here avoids the risk of obsolescence only by sacrificing predictability. Courts have recently begun signalling that they’re belatedly inclined to start insisting on full Fourth Amendment search warrants whenever government seeks digitally stored private contents, closing down statutory loopholes that sometimes gave investigators easier access. And now, just as one backdoor closes, a new backchannel granting access to otherwise private and protected material without any judicial process opens up? It does not take a cynic to predict that there will be a potent and persistent incentive to stretch any such channel as wide as the elastic bonds of the English language will permit.

The cleanest way to foreclose this is not to paste in a bunch of after-the-fact usage controls, minimization protocols, or special reports to Congress—though those aren’t bad ideas either. It’s to admit that Congress lacks psychic powers, which may entail that statutes regulating protean areas of technology have to be (or ought to be) swapped for the newer model about as often as iPhones. The specific, narrow categories of sharing everyone thinks are important and unobjectionable from a privacy perspective can be specifically, narrowly authorized now. In a decade, when we’re beaming thoughts directly to each other via quantum-entangled biomechanical brain implants, we can decide what specific statutory language solves the novel security problems of that technology, in a manner consistent with the Fourth Amendment.