The search warrant can be viewed here, but very quickly I want to draw your attention to this extract from p. 17 of the search warrant:

As the FBI Washington Field Office agent who submitted the affidavit noted earlier in the document (pp. 4–5), “HCS” stands for human intelligence (HUMINT) control system. In other words, the documents marked HCS and observed by the FBI agents who conducted the search and seizure involved information derived from living persons, undoubtedly foreign nationals, who supplied information to the U.S. government.

The compromise of HCS information can lead to the imprisonment or death of the source. I’ll have more to say about this in the near future but I raise it now because of the gravity of the stakes involved.

Concerned by high and volatile global energy prices, New England’s six governors—Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Gov. Daniel McKee of Rhode Island, and Gov. Philip Scott of Vermont—dispatched a letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm last month asking for assistance. At the top of their wish list: exploring the conditions under which the Jones Act might be suspended to allow the region expanded access to U.S. natural gas. It’s an eminently reasonable request that Congress and the White House should embrace.

Although geographically part of the U.S. mainland, in terms of energy New England is almost an island. Lacking pipeline connections to refining centers outside the region, it also has insufficient pipeline capacity to transport natural gas—New England’s dominant fuel for electricity production—from other parts of the United States during wintertime spikes in demand. Instead, the region must turn to marine deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet its needs. That means imports. While the United States is one of the world’s top exporters of LNG, there are no ships to transport it to New England.

More accurately, there are no ships to transport it that comply with the Jones Act.

Of the world’s nearly 600 LNG tankers, none are U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built and mostly U.S.-crewed and owned as required by the 1920 law to transport goods within the United States. And such a vessel isn’t likely to appear anytime soon, if ever. With U.S.-built LNG tankers estimated to cost over $500 million more than those from foreign shipyards—although no one knows for sure, since no such vessel has been constructed in this country since 1980—the economic case for building and operating one is non-existent.

The result is that the Jones Act has effectively placed U.S. LNG off-limits to New England (and Puerto Rico). While bulk quantities of U.S. LNG have been exported to 37 countries since 2016, they cannot be sent by ship to other parts of the United States.

Hence the New England governors’ letter.

While the inability to access domestic LNG has been an irritant to the region for years resulting in some absurd outcomes, addressing it has now taken on a new sense of urgency amidst turmoil in global energy markets. As the governors’ letter pointed out, global LNG prices—the prices New England must contend with given their limited access to domestic natural gas—have increased by almost 300 percent over the last year. Contracts for gas this winter in the region are already hitting record highs.

At a time when New England needs maximum flexibility to reliably meet its energy needs at the lowest possible cost the Jones Act effectively ties one hand behind its back.

Unfortunately, prospects for a waiver or suspension of the Jones Act appear remote. Congress has shown no appetite for such a move, with a Senate amendment proposed earlier this year to permit the domestic transport of LNG on foreign vessels defeated on a 26–2 committee vote. Secretary Granholm, meanwhile, made no apparent mention of the Jones Act suspension request in a letter to New England governors last week urging them to stock up on oil ahead of the coming winter and hurricane seasons.

In other words, Washington appears more interested in maintaining protectionism for a non-existent service—the domestic waterborne transport of LNG—than in providing relief to its citizens’ energy bills. New Englanders better hope for a mild winter.

Update: On September 8 the Financial Times reported that in an August response to the New England governors’ letter Secretary Granholm stated the Biden administration would quickly review any requests for Jones Act exemptions (something the Department of Homeland Security is already obligated to do) but that it could not issue “blanket waivers”.

Federal law prohibits many people from owning and possessing both firearms and ammunition. This includes convicted felons, illegal aliens, people who’ve been dishonorably discharged from the military, people who’ve been convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence offense, and “unlawful users” of controlled substances. The last one is difficult to define and, taken literally, it could mean anyone who has ever tried any controlled substance even once. An important new petition at the Supreme Court asks the justices to clarify the definition. 

In 2013, Keith Carnes was pulled over by police. The officer smelled marijuana, which Mr. Carnes admitted to smoking earlier that day. Mr. Carnes also informed the officer that he possessed a registered handgun, which the officer found in his waistband during a pat-down search. Mr. Carnes was charged with driving under the influence, but those charges were eventually dismissed.

Three years later, Mr. Carnes was in court on new criminal charges. One of the charges alleged that Carnes was an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance—marijuana—and was therefore prohibited from owning or even possessing a firearm under federal law. The charge stemmed from the 2013 stop where Mr. Carnes admitted to smoking marijuana on the same day he was found in possession of his firearm. The question of what makes someone an “unlawful user” of controlled substances is unclear, but most lower courts have interpreted it to require some degree of regular drug use—meaning one-time use is not enough to sustain a conviction. The Eighth Circuit, however, disagreed, and it affirmed Mr. Carnes’s conviction even though the government only had proof of one-time marijuana use in 2013.

Carnes has asked the Supreme Court to review his case, and Cato has filed an amicus brief in support of reversing the Eighth Circuit’s decision. Under the Eighth Circuit’s holding, anyone who has ever used a controlled substance even once can be permanently disarmed. The Second Amendment requires more.

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms and any attempt infringe on this right requires affirmative proof that such action is justified by the amendment’s text, history, and tradition. The importance of historical analysis was emphasized by the Court in its recent opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That case was decided before Carnes’s case, so the Court has an opportunity to clarify how to apply the Bruen decision.

Cannabis, and of course alcohol, were common in the Founding era, and so were guns. While there were some old laws that punished people for using or carrying guns while intoxicated, punishing someone for having a gun because they had once been illegally intoxicated is unknown in American history until at least the mid-20th century. And, according to recent polls, 49 percent of Americans have tried marijuana at least once. It would be constitutionally absurd to claim that all those people no longer have the right to own or possess a gun. Moreover, “unlawful users” of controlled substances are much broader than users of Schedule I drugs like marijuana or heroin. Someone who takes a Xanax prescribed to their friend, or a spouse’s prescription sleeping pill on a long flight, is also technically an “unlawful user.”

The Supreme Court should grant Keith Carnes’s petition for certiorari. This case presents an ideal opportunity for the Court to articulate and update the relevant analytical framework for lower courts. Without guidance, lower courts will continue watering down the Second Amendment by allowing the government to strip individuals of their right to keep and bear arms without proper justification.

Democrats are reportedly gearing up to move the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 5723) in the House Ways and Means Committee this fall. Their goal is to bring the bill to the House floor before the election.

Introduced last year by Rep. John Larson (D‑CT), Democrats announced their plans earlier this month, around the time Social Security marked 87 years since enactment. President Biden also jumped on the bandwagon along with 202 Democratic co-sponsors.

This is not the first time that Rep. Larson introduced a Social Security reform bill. Yet, the version before Congress now is very different from previous iterations. A closer look at the changes to the Social Security 2100 Act indicate that Democrats’ election timing is likely no accident.

H.R. 5723 would expand Social Security in size and scope, to the detriment of workers. And it would do so in a politically driven way that lacks transparency and good policy principles.

While I was no fan of the original bill nor of the version introduced last Congress, I could appreciate what Rep. Larson was trying to accomplish by making the program solvent over the 75-year projection period. The new version of the bill gives up on long-term solvency, undermining one long-standing principle.

H.R.5723 is also far less transparent and far more political than its previous version (H.R.1902). H.R. 1902 introduced last Congress would have raised taxes and benefits across the board, growing this outdated and poorly targeted old-age entitlement program in size and scope. As my then-colleagues Rachel Greszler and Drew Gonshorowski at the Heritage Foundation pointed out, the Social Security 2100 Act would have doubled down on what’s already a raw deal for most workers:

A comparison of the additional Social Security benefits that workers would receive under the Social Security 2100 proposal versus what they would earn if they set those taxes aside in their own personal retirement accounts shows that all workers would be better off keeping their own money and saving it for retirement. […] if a median-income worker who retires today had been able to invest his payroll taxes […] he could have purchased a private annuity that would provide at least $25,000 more every year than the amount he receives from Social Security.

And yet, the new version is even worse. H.R. 5723 adopts more than a dozen benefit increase provisions, but only for five years. Previous changes to Social Security have always been permanent because workers are supposed to be able to plan for how much to save to supplement their Social Security benefits in retirement. Temporary changes that introduce legislative uncertainty undermine that goal.

The temporary nature of the benefit increases is rarely mentioned by lawmakers or by the media. In an interview with The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Jon Schwarz, Rep. Larson explained that the intention is for these benefits to be made permanent. In his own words: “once that benefit is implemented it would be extraordinarily hard to take off.”

Rep. Larson also points to President Biden’s proposal that there would be no tax increases for families making $400,000 or less to explain changes to the payroll tax provisions in the bill. Even in this respect, critical details go unmentioned.

The $400,000 threshold level is a fixed amount that is not indexed to price inflation or the national average wage index (AWI). This means that more and more earnings would be subject to payroll taxes as time goes on. Eventually, all covered earnings would be subject to payroll taxes, as the current-law taxable maximum rises with AWI to exceed $400,000. Social Security projects that this will occur in 2050. Technically then, this proposal would automatically increase taxes on households earning $400,000 in the future.

The Social Security Administration provided estimates of all provisions of H.R.5723 and their impact on Social Security’s finances assuming legislative changes were to take effect as enacted. This assumes that benefit increases would be allowed to expire after five years. This is a common gimmick in spending and tax bills to obscure long-term budgetary impacts from provisions that will most likely be made permanent.

Interested readers can get a better sense of the various provisions in this bill by reading through Social Security’s letter to Rep. Larson. Though you should take the numbers with a heap of salt because I agree with Rep. Larson on this point: once you put a benefit increase in place, good luck trying to get rid of it later.

Yesterday, I assembled my top five reasons to oppose mass student debt cancellation in anticipation of the Biden administration announcing a plan today. The plan is somewhat different from what I expected, and worse than I feared.

All but one of my reasons yesterday applies to the proposal the White House put out today. Number two – cancellation would be skewed to higher-income borrowers – no longer applies.

As expected, Biden will cancel $10,000 for all federal student debtors up to joint filers earning $250,000. That includes, by the White House’s own admission, basically all but the 5% of top-earning households. The big addition is that Pell Grant recipients who also have student loans will get up to $20,000 in debt cancelled. Based on a very rough, preliminary estimate of the share of student debtors who received Pell and their earnings, that changes cancellation from disproportionately helping higher-income debtors to lower.

Meanwhile, my rough new estimate is that the cost to taxpayers will be $427 billion. To put that in perspective, it is more than the gross domestic product of Hong Kong and 182 countries. For those who support federal social programs, it is nearly 36‐​times greater than the federal government spent on Head Start in 2022. And if you support defense spending, it is nearly two‐and-a-half times larger than the U.S. Army’s 2022 budget. And this, by the way, does not include non‐​cancellation elements of the Biden announcement, including proposals to significantly cut many borrowers’ monthly payments and more generous loan forgiveness in the future.

The other major objections to cancellation still apply.

First, people who go to college, and especially who get degrees, typically garner big earnings increases – $1.2 to $3.1 million over a lifetime – and job security that makes them among the least in need of help. And remember, student loans are a much bigger part of how people pay for graduate school than undergrad.

Second, massive debt cancellation will encourage even greater college price increases as schools and future borrowers will both expect more cancellation in the future. Naturally, the White House cited the incredible rise in college prices to justify mass cancellation without acknowledging the huge role aid has had in it. Never owning the problem you largely created is the federal government way!

Last, but absolutely not least, this is grossly unconstitutional. Congress, not the president, has the spending power, and there is no rational way that declaring a loan a grant is anything but spending. Of course, there is also no constitutional authority for these programs in the first place.

The major reasons to object to mass student debt cancellation might have changed somewhat from yesterday, but that doesn’t make cancellation any better. Indeed, what the Biden administration says it will do is worse than expected 24 hours ago, especially for the Constitution, federal taxpayers, and future students hoping for reasonable college prices.

Yesterday, POLITICO’s Brian Bender reported on a new Biden administration effort to “pierce the veil” of excessive federal government secrecy. The mechanism: a new National Security Council-led initiative to reform America’s insanely broad and totally dysfunctional system of classifying and declassifying U.S. government records.

The “both sides” tone of much of Bender’s piece–that declassification advocates have points in their favor, but government bureaucrats have legitimate concerns too–is emblematic of the kind of lazy reporting on this issue that makes it seem like just another inside-the-Beltway dust-up that has no actual impact on people outside of Washington. The truth is that at best, government secrecy fosters waste, inefficiency, and gross mismanagement at taxpayer expense. At its worst, our secrecy system provides a shield for criminal conduct, including murder or deaths that otherwise could have been prevented.

Let’s talk about the former first.

In 2017, Cato initiated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation over documents regarding two cancelled National Security Agency (NSA) programs, codenamed THINTHREAD and TRAILBLAZER, respectively. The backstory is that by the early- to mid-1990s, NSA was confronting the fact that its traditional, analog signal-based collection and analysis systems were being overtaken by the digital communications revolution. Two approaches to problem emerged–one championed by a small, internal NSA team in the Signals Automation Research Center (SARC), the other by then-NSA Director Michael Hayden.

The SARC team had built from scratch a new and revolutionary digital network exploitation system called THINTHREAD. The SARC’s creation could ingest huge volumes of digital data, sort out potential real threat data from the rest of the message traffic, and encrypt anything involving the communications of Americans possibly involved with a hostile foreign power prior to seeking a probable cause-based warrant to decrypt the suspect communications for possible FBI investigative follow up. The THINTHREAD prototype was created for a mere $3 million, according to program participants I and others have previously interviewed.

TRAIBLAZER, in contrast, was a system to be built and operated by defense contractor SAIC (now Leidos). As the documents obtained by Cato via the FOIA litigation demonstrated, TRAILBLAZER not only never worked, it cost the American taxpayer nearly $700 million as of late 2006. The final price tag was likely far more, but NSA has never released the full set of documents about the TRAILBLAZER debacle.

Why does all of this matter? Because as Cato’s FOIA litigation also demonstrated, the THINTHREAD prototype was a success–and had it been fully fielded as Congress directed in late 2000, it’s very likely the 9/11 attacks would’ve been prevented, and the lives of nearly 3000 Americans saved.

And the issue of lives lost brings me to my second real-world example of the pernicious costs of American government secrecy: the Chelsea Manning whistleblower case and the ongoing U.S. government legal war against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

As I’ve noted previously, at issue in Chelsea Manning’s leak of U.S. Army video footage of an AH-64 Apache gunship attack on Iraqi civilians and Western journalists in Baghdad in 2007 is the fact that the video was classified SECRET. The attack was a war crime, and the fact that the Army classified the video to try to prevent its release was done in violation of Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7(a) of which expressly forbids misusing the classification system to conceal criminal conduct. Yet nobody in the Army has ever been held accountable for misusing the classification system to conceal that war crime, and therein lies the key problem: EO 13526, like any other executive order, can be enforced or not at the discretion of the executive branch.

Unmentioned in Bender’s piece is any suggestion that it should be a federal felony for any U.S. government official to knowingly classify a document to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or criminal conduct. But that is exactly one of the real reforms that’s needed to prevent the kinds of abuses noted above. If history is any guide, the impetus for such a change will have to come from Congress.

Indeed, the past major success in declassification efforts have started with House and Senate members who cared deeply about the issue. In the case of records relating to President Kennedy’s assassination, it was the late Senator John Glenn (D‑OH). And thanks to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D‑NY) and then-Senator (now Governor) Mike DeWine (R‑OH), Nazi and Imperial Japanese government war crimes records finally came to light.

Whether one or more new Congressional champions of classification reform and bulk declassification of historical records emerges will be a better indicator of the chances of real change in this area than any executive branch-driven process, one that will likely allow security state bureaucrats to sabotage the effort before it really begins.

Californians voted in 2016 to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. The voter initiative, Proposition 64, provided for taxes, licensing, and a county option on whether to allow marijuana businesses at all (much like the alcohol rules in my home state of Kentucky, where some counties are “dry” to this day). Libertarians applauded the advance for liberty, and mostly understood that some taxes and regulation were inevitable — what product isn’t taxed and regulated in modern America? — but warned that excessive taxes and regulations could keep much of the marijuana trade in the black market.

Well, guess what? As usual, policymakers should have listened to the libertarians.

Scott Wilson, the Washington Post’s California correspondent, has a long look at the state of the taxed and regulated marijuana market in California. It’s a libertarian nightmare:

The once-mystical heart of the nation’s marijuana industry is dying, fast, strangled not by law enforcement but by the high taxes and baffling regulation that have crushed small farmers since state voters approved legalization almost six years ago.…

Following legalization, state officials made several far-reaching decisions that have effectively driven many small cannabis farmers to the brink of insolvency while consolidating a $5 billion-a-year legal market in the hands of industrial-scale growers, most of them based far from these northern reaches [in] the Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties.

It’s a story we’ve written about before, based on an earlier report from Wilson and other reporting from the East Bay Express. Economists and journalists have pointed out for decades that regulation tends to be a greater burden on small businesses and start-ups than on established, successful firms.

Wilson notes complaints that big industrial-scale growers have benefited at the expense of longtime illegal growers trying to go legal.

The state imposed multiple taxes across the cannabis supply chain, a burden unmatched in other nearby marijuana-legal states.…

Since 2018, when the new legalization rules took effect, the state has taxed marijuana three separate times as it travels from farm to consumer. Many counties and cities impose their own taxes, at varying levels, on top of the state levies. In some regions of the state, one pound of cannabis is subjected to as many as five separate taxes.…

California’s cannabis taxes come on top of licensing fees and regulatory permits, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars annually for growers, burying those who used to work without regulation in red tape and state invoices. The option to become legal, which roughly half of Humboldt’s farmers once accepted, has been a stunningly expensive one.

To be sure, some of the small growers have complaints that libertarians wouldn’t endorse. Wilson notes that “the state declined — after initially signaling it would do so — to limit the size of cannabis cultivations or the number of grower licenses it would issue to farmers.” The large growers produce a lot of marijuana, causing prices to fall. “Cannabis, unlike wine grapes, is not classified as an agriculture product here and so farmers are denied state benefits that accrue to other crops.”

There may be economies of scale in marijuana growing, as in many industries. There were hundreds of automobile companies in the early 20th century, but only a handful survived. But there’s no need for the government to add extra burdens to the challenges of small growers. As I said before, this is just another way that regulation contributes to inequality.

For more on this topic, see the new book Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics by economists Robin Goldstein and Cato adjunct scholar Daniel Sumner.