by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
They’re all a-twitter, I tell you, a-twitter, over the ridiculously unjust banhammer use by Musk against journalists.
Well, no.
A few days back a dude that had stuck a little script on the front of a public-facing data page which, given an aircraft’s tail number you can follow it whenever it is in the air and since all air travel begins and ends on the earth’s surface you can also determine where it is.
There are plenty of things that fall into this general category. If you know someone’s name and the general area where they live you can usually figure out exactly where they live, if they own real estate, because the tax and title rolls are public. It takes a bit of work but you can do it. Its a bit tougher if the person is renting since that’s not generally registered in public data somewhere.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Ditto if you know or suspect someone owns a business; most of the time LLC and Corporate records are trivially searchable and by law “assumed name” (that is, doing business as something other than your actual name) must be public too. Therefore figuring out who the actual owners are for a smaller company is usually not hard at all. In some places you have to go to a courthouse or similar, but in most locales these days the records are online and, being public, you don’t have to pay for it.
Musk claims to have had an incident in which a vehicle carrying his child was accosted by a stalker. In response to this he put forward a rule on Twitter: Publishing the real-time location of any person is a bannable offense.
I can argue both sides of that in terms of reasonableness, particularly when it comes to public records, because the usual exception to them (what in many states is called “publication of private facts”) doesn’t really apply. But the reason I argue its not so clear as it used to be, and there is a clean argument for such a policy and perhaps even a law, is that today it is all too easy to gin up a lynch mob using so-called “social media” and other means of mass distribution. This is a relatively new thing; you could always, for example, post a sign on a telephone pole (or tree, before there were telephone poles) but your reach was at least somewhat limited and local. This is no longer true; now you sit in Washington DC and gin up a lynch mob in California at zero cost and trouble.
This isn’t theoretical; “modern media” has been used for this, almost-exclusively by the left, to do exactly that. A sitting Congressperson who lives on a houseboat was relentlessly targeted to the point they couldn’t go get groceries without being harassed. Their decision to live on a boat where ingress and egress is limited for obvious reasons certainly entered into the problem but there’s nothing wrong with living on a boat — plenty of people do and its a perfectly-legitimate choice. Several justices of the USSC have been similarly targeted at their homes and again, this was ginned up by persons all over the United States using capacity that didn’t used to exist. In the latter case the law was broken, yet the government refused to enforce said law.
It is already illegal, by the way, to communicate threats using interstate means or to travel for such a purpose between states. That’s a violation of federal law as it stands today. States also have “anti-stalker” laws with similar provisions. The exact intersection of all of these laws, basic human decency and the generation of “rage mobs” is a worthy matter for public debate.
But what’s not under debate is what happened here. This was a pure bad-faith set of actions taken by a bunch of people. Whether they explicitly coordinated their actions is not known and doesn’t matter; the facts are:
- Musk announced that any real-time “doxxing” of positions was a banhammer offense.
- These “journalists” did it anyway, in rapid succession from one another, knowing in advance that it was an offense.
Musk banhammered them all immediately and refused to apologize.
The left went nuts.
Good.
Let them go nuts.
Tell me what the lawful and legitimate purpose is for real-time information on someone’s location? Is there a perfectly-legitimate public purpose, for example, in disclosing that “Joe X” travels by private jet on a regular basis while advocating that everyone else should be forced to “de-carbon” (e.g. attending some climate confab)? Absolutely; that has a reasonable and possible purpose of exposing hypocrisy.
What reasonable and lawful purpose is there in knowing where some particular person is on a mass-distribution basis and by what rubric does that meet the “reasonable public purpose” test?
