The World and Everything in It - September 20, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Technology, online privacy, and the law. They often don’t align to protect you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today the Monday Moneybeat: retail sales up and a common measure of price inflation not up as much as expected. We’ll talk about the meaning and the misconceptions.

Plus the WORLD History Book. Today, the 25th anniversary of the Defense of Marriage Act.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, September 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time now for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: U.S. begins flying Haitian migrants back to home country » The United States began flying migrants from Haiti back to their home country on Sunday. That after more than 10,000 mostly Haitian migrants arrived en masse at the southern border.

Guerline Jozef is a migrant advocate with Haitian Bridge Alliance. She said those being flown back to Haiti really have nothing to return to.

JOZEF: People have literally been spending five months on a journey, dying on the way.

The U.S. government is citing the Title 42 policy adopted during the pandemic. That allows officials to expel most would-be asylum seekers.

Haitian migrants have been massing at the border for weeks. Some stopped and set up camp along the Rio Grande—others simply found other ways into the country.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said border officials have been overwhelmed.

ABBOTT: And they asked the Texas Department of Public Safety if the Texas Department of Public Safety would be responsible for manning, I think it was six ports of entry.

Officials on Sunday tried to block the Mexican border at an isolated Texas town where thousands of migrants have set up a camp.

About a dozen Texas Department of Public Safety vehicles lined up near the bridge and river where Haitians have been crossing into Del Rio, Texas. But the migrants quickly found other ways to cross nearby.

Collins: FDA may soon approve COVID-19 vaccines for young children » The FDA could soon approve COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 5.

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said Sunday...

COLLINS: The data submitted by Pfizer to FDA for kids 5 to 11 is supposed to arrive in FDA’s hands later this month. I know they will work 24/7 to go through it and try to assess whether it’s time to grant an approval, and that will happen in weeks, not months.

He also predicts that booster shots will be available for most Americans “in the next few weeks.”

A government advisory panel has recommended temporarily limiting a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine to people 65 and older and other high risk Americans. But Collins told CBS’ Face the Nation “I think there will be a decision in the coming weeks to extend boosters beyond” high risk individuals.

Drone strike survivor demands accountability » Emal Ahmadi, a survivor of an errant U.S. drone strike that killed 10 members of his family in Afghanistan is demanding accountability.

On August 29th, a U.S. hellfire missile struck the car that Ahmadi's brother had just pulled into the driveway of the Ahmadi family compound as children ran to greet him. Seven children died in the strike, including Ahmadi’s 3-year-old daughter Malika.

On Friday, U.S. Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie called the strike a “tragic mistake.”

MCKENZIE: I am now convinced that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children, were tragically killed in that strike. Moreover, we now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K or were a direct threat to U.S. forces.

Ahmadi said Washington’s apology is not enough. The family is also seeking financial compensation and relocation to the United States or another country deemed safe.

The U.S. military initially defended the strike. The Pentagon said it had targeted an Islamic State group's “facilitator" and disrupted the militants' ability to carry out attacks during the chaotic final stage of the withdrawal last month.

Taliban tells female govt workers in Kabul to stay home » Meantime, the Taliban continues to return to familiar patterns of subjugating women.

Taliban officials in Kabul have told female employees in the city government to stay home. The city’s new interim mayor said women will only be allowed to work if they cannot be replaced by men.

The move is another sign that the Taliban, who overran Kabul last month, are enforcing their harsh interpretation of Islam despite initial promises by some that they would be more inclusive. In their previous rule in the 1990s, the Taliban had barred girls and women from schools, jobs and public life.

In recent days, the new Taliban government issued several decrees rolling back the rights of girls and women.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: legal protections for online privacy.

Plus, sharing the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 20th day of September, 2021. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, where your personal data and the law intersect.

Lots of electronic devices create and store personal data—especially personal fitness tracking devices, products like the Fitbit. It measures steps, heart rate, activity, sleep, and more.

Lots of different parties covet this kind of information, including law enforcement. Police can use data on your personal trackers to investigate crimes, like this one from 2018, that led to an indictment:

AUDIO: When police took a closer look at the Fitbit tracker Navarra wore on her left wrist. Investigators say it showed her heart rate spiked at 3:20pm on September 8, and stopped a few minutes later, right before her stepfather left the house.

REICHARD: Solving crime is an upside to using digital footprints, if used lawfully.

Then there’s cybercrime, one of the downsides.

AUDIO: Lockbit Ransomware isn’t a new technique we’ve seen from cybercriminals but it is making a surge here lately this past summer and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down...143 million people were affected by the Equifax data breach

The law hasn’t kept up with rapidly changing technology. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has dealt with the problem in a piecemeal manner. Let’s go back to 2014 during oral argument in a case called Riley v. California. Let’s listen to the now retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.

KENNEDY: I don't think it's odd to say that we're living in a—in a new world...someone arrested for a minor crime has their whole existence exposed on this little device. From your argument, you want us just to adopt a categorical rule; it's in the custody of the police, they can search it. Do you have any limiting principles that we should consider at all as a fallback position?

EICHER: The justices in that case agreed to this limiting principle: that, during an arrest, police must get a warrant before searching the digital contents of a cell phone.

So that decision drew some boundaries around law enforcement and privacy rights.

REICHARD: It did, but I wanted to find out the general lay of the land beyond that.

Kurt Opsahl is general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital age.

First, Opsahl echoed Justice Kennedy:

OPSAHL: Basically, your life is online at this point. For most people, they are using email or using cloud storage, they have a smartphone that is connected constantly telling what they're, everything from like, what they should pick up at the grocery store to when their appointments are. We've moved into an age in which so much of our lives are intertwined with the internet.

That “intertwining” is what makes drawing boundaries so difficult. But one way is by consent. What about my consent to use or not use my personal data?

OPSAHL: Well, for everything that you're using, there probably was a privacy policy and a terms of service that have explained some things about how that data will be used. And if you tried to read each and every one of them before you used any given service online, you would spend your entire day reading privacy policies and Terms of Service and never actually using the products….But it's also beyond the capabilities of most people to really sort of keep track of all the possible information that can be collected and how it will be used. And a lot of that information, if it's stored online, might be a target for somebody who wants to have information for use.

Opsahl pointed to ECPA—that’s an acronym that stands for the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, enacted back in the 1980s. Information stored online is somewhat protected by that law. Police can get that information with appropriate legal procedures: subpoenas, warrants, under EPCA with a court order, for example.

But when the law can’t keep up with technology, absurdities result.

OPSAHL: One of the issues with ECPA is that at the time, most people were downloading their email onto their computer and then taking it off of the server. And so the law had a notion in it that if you left your email on a server for 180 days, then you obviously didn't care about it. And they reduced the requirement for law enforcement to be able to access that information. And then you know, while you have things like Gmail comes about 20 years later, and everybody is keeping their email on a web mail server indefinitely. So this six months rule makes absolutely no sense for what ordinary people are doing.

One problem Opsahl sees is a lack of political will to put in more safeguards, as well as big tech trying to weaken proposed privacy protections that are made.

OPSAHL: In addition, there are some other investigative tools like a national security letter, can be also used to get certain subscriber information. And that can be issued by the FBI for National Security Investigations even more easily than a subpoena. And it comes with an automatic gag order. One which we believe is unconstitutional. But it puts an automatic gag on the recipient to not tell people that they received it. For foreign intelligence investigations, they can go to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, go to a special secret court that meets inside an electronically shielded room. The public is not allowed, and get an order to get information concerning foreign intelligence. So there's a lot of different ways that the government may seek information.

Opsahl sees some reform trickling in.

OPSAHL: At this point, all the major service providers say that we will insist on warrants for content nationwide. So I think that issue, I think, has been greatly helped over the last 30 years by service providers pushing back, courts agreeing, so I'm using this as an example of a long time battle. But it would still be good to have some reform.

The COVID-19 era ushered in more privacy concerns. Contact tracing apps created by different states, for example, that send you a notification if it’s likely you’ve been exposed to COVID.

OPSAHL: It ended up being that there was a system that was proposed and fairly widely adopted from Apple and Google working together, that would use a pretty secure Bluetooth notification system, which would not reveal people's identities. But there still for a while a number of states who wanted to have ones which would do location tracking and give a whole bunch of information collected in the name of exposure notifications. Also seen some of the controversies around things like vaccine passports, where people who show proof of vaccine, then sometimes were involved in more things than just whether or not you had a vaccine or additional information that might be revealed.

This is an area of the law very much in flux. It leaves individuals vulnerable as technology rapidly changes and the terms and conditions for use remain unreasonably difficult to ascertain.

OPSAHL: So you want to be able to take advantage of the technology, and not lose all of your privacy while doing so….Because you kind of need both. You want to make sure that the best protection you can have for your information is either that it wasn't collected in the first place; if it was collected, it wasn't stored; and if it was stored, it was encrypted, where you have the key. So actually strengthening encryption is something we care a lot about, and it is a good defense to a lot of potential data leaks.

During my research, I read about the “right to be forgotten.” That is, the right to have private information removed from Internet searches. The European Union, Argentina, and the Philippines have put this into practice, in certain situations.

OPSAHL: So the right to be forgotten, and there's sort of a related concept of the right to erasure. It has some challenging aspects to it. There are instances in which the Europeans' right to be forgotten was used to suppress information. So if a politician had some embarrassing things from the past that they didn't want the public to find out about before the vote, they would try to use the right to be forgotten to remove stories about their prior scandals and things like that. And that that really comes up against freedom of expression. In the form of the people who want to say things about scandals in the past, for the public to receive that information, so they can make an informed choice.

The notion of a right to erasure has come up. If you give information to somebody say, you know, Facebook, the right to erasure will be like this, go back to them and say, "you know, what, I'm removing my consent, please remove all of my data." And that is not quite being forgotten, which is to say that like to try and get it so that there is no mention of this anywhere, but rather, that the information that you provided can be taken back.

Opsahl says change is what we need: privacy by design, with protections baked in so that the average person need not make it a full time job just to protect his or her own privacy.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Say you’re at the big box appliance store and you just found the perfect oven or fridge, whatever. You buy it and realize once you get home that’s not going to go through the door.

Oh no! Buyers remorse.

Well, the Dutch military has a case of buyer’s remorse times 1,600.

The military ordered a new fleet of trucks to replace the outdated fleet. What the brass forgot to do was run it by legal.

Turns out, the maximum height for vehicles is a little over 13 feet (4 meters), but the trucks the military bought were taller than 4 meters—too big, can’t use them.

The moral of the story: measure twice, cut once—as in cut the check once.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen joins us now for our weekly conversation and commentary on markets and the economy.

David, good morning.

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Good morning, good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, David, we received a couple of government economic indicators for August and I’d like your read on those.

One was the consumer price index—it’s a regular report from the Labor Department that you often hear referred to in media reports as “inflation.” Financial journalists will frequently interchange the term “inflation” and “cpi” and that can be misleading if you’re not careful. We’ll get to that in a minute.

I’d like to begin with consumer spending, that fraction of spending that happened in the nation’s retailers. So retail sales. According to the Department of Commerce, August retail sales bounced back month-on-month over July and registered a seven-tenths of a percentage point increase.

I think a lot of people hear the headline or the lead sentence and take the meaning of the report from that, and I want to read one typical mainstream media econ story on the retail number: “The U.S. economy is proving resilient in the face of the Delta variant. Americans briskly increased spending at retailers last month …” and then it went on from there. Seems like a suggestion of cause: retail sales growth—and effect: economic resilience.

BAHNSEN: Well, it's funny, I absolutely agree that the economy showed resilience through the Delta strain. And I don't think that the retail number is proof of that at all. So it's one of those cases where I think they're looking for evidence of a conclusion. And they have the conclusion, right, and then the evidence is disconnected. I want to keep saying this, though, to the world listeners, America's economic strength does not come from its ability to spend money. It's a fallacy, but it is sort of the major economic fallacy of the last 100 years. On the government side, we believe we can fix economic problems by government spending more money. But on the household side, we believe economic strength comes from our ability to go buy things. And my contention is that economic strength is always in forever, for since the Garden of Eden, all the way to 2021, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, K Street, Hollywood, economic strength is from production. And so despite the philosophical bias I have towards production, not consumption, which is both spiritual and economic. For me. The retail number in America is absurd. There is no question that Americans are very happy to spend money As long as they can. And so whenever we have periods where consumption drops the financial crisis, that one month of the COVID locked down and things like that, it's always because of credit. It's not because demand went down. There's no less demand for food and beverage, and vacations and toys, and cars and electronics. It's just simply that the ability to spend more went away when the housing crisis kept people from being able to refinance out of their homes, when credit cards get maxed when banks tighten where you know, and so I think that the retail number was a surprise to people because they expected auto sales to drop so much, which they did, that it would take the overall retail number down month over month. But second of all, the total retail number actually went higher by point 7%, even with autos dropping because people spent so much more money in malls, restaurants, etc. Well, I spent a lot of time in Southern California, I spent a lot of time in Manhattan. I'm in airplanes, I'm out and about. I didn't see one iota of indication this summer that people were going, Oh my gosh, delta strain, I'm not going to go spend money. And so the reality is that that narrative didn't make sense. And then the data just sort of smacked the narrative around this week a little bit.

EICHER: Let’s jump into that inflation question— the consumer price index for August—and it ticked up but at a slower pace month-on-month from July and June and again we hear these reports and hear that this is a sign that “inflation is easing.”

That goes against a political narrative. We hear Republicans decrying inflation and you do see pockets of rising prices, but you make a distinction about types of inflation and public policy choices that drive inflation. Could you address that?

BAHNSEN: Let me first address the issue about the politicians that are going to continue making hay of it. I happen to think they're Doing something and saying something that's politically wise and advantageous, but I happen to think they're getting it wrong, but I don't think they know they're getting it wrong. So I'm not down on them. But certainly to the extent prices are elevated, and it taps into an overall theme of attacking the competence of the current administration, I think that there's a lot of political wisdom in trying to hit the point home. But if one is talking in the world I'm in which is about the actual soundness of the economic claim, and projection. I just think there's no question you have rising prices in some areas, for reasons that are not inflationary. And this isn't as much of a debate as people say it is. Because we continue to have the only data points we need to answer the question. As money supply went up last year significantly, at first, it's still now projected about 6%, money supply growth, loan demand is still down 15%. And so there just isn't any proof of monetary inflation. But prices can go higher for other reasons than that. When there's a supply shortage like we saw earlier in the year with lumber skyrocketed up, it's now dropped over 70%. And I do think the better word to use this month was disinflationary, then deflationary prices still rose on the month, but they rose at a much lower rate than they had been. And so as that rate of inflation is dropping what we call disinflation, it will eventually change the political narrative. But in the meantime, I understand why whatever side of the fence, you know, would want to exploit the political data points. And I do believe that there are parts of policy creating pricing challenges. And the greatest example continues to be in housing. There's just simply no excuse for rates being so low for the Fed buying so many mortgage bonds, stimulating more borrowing activity, and then combine that with more state and local supply problems and housing, environmental regulations, zoning issues that keep more housing stock from getting built, which the Biden ministration is attempting to remedy some of that I don't think their remedies are going to go anywhere. They don't have the authority at a federal level to do much here. It's a state and local problem. But housing is an area where I think you have inflationary problems. I just don't think it's monetary inflation. And so there's a lot of lanes to cover and simplistic two-sentence you know, kind of analysis that a lot of people want right now. Inflation, bad. Biden, bad. You know, those things don't work in the present moment. We have to unpack it a little better to get this right.

EICHER: David Bahnsen—financial analyst and adviser. He writes at dividendcafe.com. And that’s your Monday Moneybeat. Thanks David, appreciate it.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: The WORLD History Book. 

Today, a few milestones from recent history and some from ancient history.

Here’s senior correspondent Katie Gaultney.

MUSIC: "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel," Michael Levy

KATIE GAULTNEY, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Kicking things off today with a modern milestone that has ancient origins. Thirty years ago, on September 22, 1991, the Dead Sea Scrolls became available to the public for the first time.

The scrolls themselves were discovered by shepherds in the caves of Qumran in the Judaean Desert during the mid-1900s. No one knows for sure why they were in those caves. But Biblical scholars consider that discovery one of the most important of the 20th century. Historian and filmmaker Dave Stotts of Drive Thru History explains.

STOTTS: The scrolls contain an important history of the time, but more importantly, we can now compare the 2000-year-old manuscripts with a copy of our modern Bible. What we find is that except for very minor variations, such as synonyms or word order, the Dead Sea Scrolls are virtually identical to the later Masoretic text of the Old Testament…

With little change from the text of ancient time to modern day, the scrolls help validate the Bible’s textual authenticity.

But, it took decades more for those in possession of the scrolls to reproduce those important texts in manuscript form. And it didn’t need to take so long. Scholars outside of the scroll bubble believed the small publication team was needlessly delaying the opportunity for others to review the work.

Herschel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Society convinced a graduate student working closely with the scrolls to get bootleg images of the ancient papyrus…

SHANKS: The scrolls were kept secret for 40 years by a small group who had been assigned to publish them, and they hadn’t. In the end, the scrolls were freed by underground photographs that we managed to get…

The result was the 1991 “Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” The publication spawned a surge in public interest in the scrolls—along with a lawsuit. A court ordered the Biblical Archaeology Society to pony up around $100,000 for the unauthorized facsimile. But, Shanks says, it was worth it.

SHANKS: So that was kind of the bittersweet ending, but everybody’s friendly now…

And jumping ahead half a decade now to September 21, 1996, when the U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA.

SONG: “Love and Marriage,” Frank Sinatra

That act defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, for purposes of the federal government. It also allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

Socially conservative groups began vocally opposing same-sex marriage in the twilight years of the 1980s. Lawmakers Bob Barr and Don Nickles, both Republicans at the time, introduced the bill in May 1996. It passed both houses of Congress with a significant majority, making a presidential veto impossible. Clinton reluctantly signed the bill into law.

In the ensuing years, DOMA remained a hot-button issue, vulnerable to legal challenges. Moderators often called on political candidates to make their position on the matter known.

BUSH: I’m not for gay marriage. I think marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.

GORE: I did support that law, but I think we should find a way to allow some kind of civic unions…

KERRY: I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. But I also believe that because we are the United States of America… you can’t discriminate in the rights that you afford people.

PALIN: I will tell Americans straight up that I don’t support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman…

Years more of back and forth, a little dancing around the issue, with the left claiming “nuance” and entertaining the idea of exceptions, while the right invoked traditional and Biblical values. And in 2012, a sea change, when in May of that year, President Barack Obama became the first president to endorse making same-sex marriage legal.

OBAMA: I’ve been going through an evolution on this issue…for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

The Supreme Court rendered DOMA unenforceable in its decisions on United States v. Windsor in 2013 and, famously, Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. DOMA is now defunct.

And our final entry, not too far a leap—either in time or in subject matter. It’s been a decade since the U.S. military ended its “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Beginning on September 20, 2011, the military permitted openly gay men and women to serve for the first time.

In 1993, President Clinton signed a law directing military personnel not to “ask,” “tell,” “pursue,” or “harass” about fellow servicemen and women’s sexual orientation.

Over 18 years, the military discharged north of 13,000 troops under “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” On the day of the repeal, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said:

PANETTA: I believe we move closer to achieving the goal at the foundation of the values that America is all about...

Military chaplains worried the change would jeopardize their ability to adhere to a Biblical view of sexuality. Others saw it as a slippery slope, wondering if lifting the ban on LGBT servicemembers would lead to treating transgenderism as a civil rights issue, rather than a medical or psychological condition.

Many of those concerns have proven valid. For another decade after Obama signed the repeal, limitations on transgender people serving in the armed forces remained in place. But as of January 26th, 2021, military officials removed those restrictions, even providing medical care to transitioning individuals.

That’s this week’s History Book. I’m Katie Gaultney.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: gas prices and U.S. oil production. One’s going down—production—and that’s pushing the other—prices—up. We’ll tell you the why of the supply squeeze.

And, electric vehicles. They’re more popular than ever, but that might not be enough for car makers to hit their sales goals.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

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If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. If anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.

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