Guest Post - John Whitehead on The Deep State’s Christmas Present to America: Surveillance That Never Ends

By John W. Whitehead
December 11, 2017

“He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!”
—“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

Just in time for Christmas, the Deep State wants to give America the gift that keeps on giving: never-ending mass surveillance.

I’m not referring to the kind of surveillance carried out by that all-knowing and all-seeing Jolly Old St. Nick and his informant the Elf on the Shelf (although, to be fair, they have helped to acclimate us to a world in which we’re always being watched and judged by higher authorities).

No, this particular bit of Yuletide gift-giving comes courtesy of the Deep State (a.k.a. the Surveillance State, Police State, Shadow Government and black-ops spy agencies).

John Whitehead

If this power-hungry cabal gets its way, the government’s power to spy on its citizens will soon be all-encompassing and permanent.

As it now stands, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal basis for two of the National Security Agency’s largest mass surveillance programs, “PRISM” and “Upstream”—is set to expire at the end of 2017.

“PRISM” lets the NSA access emails, video chats, instant messages, and other content sent via Facebook, Google, Apple and others. “Upstream” lets the NSA worm its way into the internet backbone—the cables and switches owned by private corporations like AT&T that make the internet into a global network—and scan traffic for the communications of tens of thousands of individuals labeled “targets.”

Just as the USA Patriot Act was perverted from its original intent to fight terrorism abroad and was used instead to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of Americans’ emails, phone calls, text messages and other electronic communication without a warrant.

Under Section 702, the government collects and analyzes over 250 million internet communications every year. There are estimates that at least half of these contain information about U.S. residents, many of whom have done nothing wrong. This information is then shared with law enforcement and “routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security.”

Mind you, this is about far more than the metadata collection that Edward Snowden warned us about, which was bad enough. Section 702 gives the government access to the very content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats), your photographs, your emails. As Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., warned, “This is not just who you send it to, but what’s in it.”

Unfortunately, Big Brother doesn’t relinquish power easily.

The Police State doesn’t like restrictions.

And the Surveillance State certainly doesn’t look favorably on anything that might weaken its control. Even after Congress limited the NSA’s ability to collect bulk phone records, the agency continued to do so, vacuuming up more than 151 million records of Americans’ phone calls last year alone.

A government that doesn’t heed its constituents, doesn’t abide by the law, and kowtows to its police and military forces? That’s a dictatorship anywhere else.

Here in America, you can call it “technotyranny,” a term coined by investigative journalist James Bamford to refer to an age of technological tyranny made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.

The short answer: they have become one and the same entity.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation’s soldier cops into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more.

This is the new face of policing in America.

Enter big data policing which gives the nation’s 17,000 police agencies access to a growing “investigative” database that maps criminal associates and gangs, as well as their social and familial connections.

As Slate reports, “These social network systems, which target ‘chronic offenders,’ also include information about innocent associates, family members, and friends, creating extensive human maps of connections and patterns of contacts.” Those individuals then get assigned a threat score to determine their risk of being a perpetrator or victim of a future crime.

In Chicago, for example, “individuals with the highest scores on the Chicago Police Department ‘heat list’ get extra attention in the form of home visits or increased community surveillance.”

In Baltimore, police are using Cessna planes equipped with surveillance systems to film entire segments of the city, then combining that footage with police reports in order to “map the comings and goings of everyone—criminals and innocents alike.”

In this way, big data policing not only expands Big Brother’s reach down to the local level, but it also provides local police—most of whom know little about the Constitution and even less about the Fourth Amendment—with a new technological weapon to deploy against an unsuspecting public.

The end result is pre-crime, packaged in the guise of national security but no less sinister.

All of those individuals who claim to be unconcerned about government surveillance because they have nothing to hide, take note: pre-crime policing—given a futuristic treatment in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report—aims to treat you like a criminal before you’ve ever even committed a crime.

This hasn’t fazed President Trump who, much like his predecessors, has thus far marched in lockstep with the dictates of the police state.

For months, the Trump Administration has been actively lobbying Congress to reauthorize Section 702 in its entirety. Now, according to The Intercept, Trump is actively considering a proposal to establish his own global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies and answer directly to the White House.

If approved, this would be yet another secret government agency carrying out secret surveillance and counterintelligence, funded by a secret black ops budget that by its very nature does away with transparency, bypasses accountability and completely eludes any form of constitutionality.

According to The Washington Post, there are more than a dozen “black budget” national intelligence agencies already receiving more than $52.6 billion in secret government funding. Among the top five black ops agencies currently are the CIA, the NSA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Program, and the General Defense Intelligence Program.

A significant chunk of that black ops money has been flowing to Silicon Valley since before there was an internet, itself a creation of the military/security industrial complex.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it would be storing classified information for U.S. spy agencies in its digital cloud, part of a $600 million contract with the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Two decades earlier, America’s spy agencies tapped Silicon Valley to spearhead research into ways of tracking individuals and groups online. That research, as documented by Jeff Nesbit, the former director of legislative and public affairs at the National Science Foundation, culminated in the creation of a massive public-private surveillance state that hinged on a partnership between the NSA, the CIA and Google.

“The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called ‘birds of a feather,’” writes Nesbit. He continues:

Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web… By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.

The problem, of course, is that the government always sets its sights higher.

It wasn’t long before the government’s search for criminal “birds of a feather”—made much easier with the passage of the USA Patriot Act—lumped everyone together and treated all of the birds (i.e., the public) as criminals to be identified, tracked, monitored and subjected to warrantless, suspicionless surveillance.

Fast forward to the present moment when, on any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking you. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. These corporate trackers monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere and share the data with the government.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to collect data and spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power.

These government snoops are constantly combing through and harvesting vast quantities of our communications, then storing it in massive databases for years. Once this information—collected illegally and without any probable cause—is ingested into NSA servers, other government agencies can often search through the databases to make criminal cases against Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism or anything national security-related. One Justice Department lawyer called the database the “FBI’s ‘Google.’”

In other words, the NSA, an unaccountable institution filled with unelected bureaucrats, operates a massive database that contains the intimate and personal communications of countless Americans and makes it available to other unelected bureaucrats.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Ask the government why it’s carrying out this warrantless surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting out since 9/11 to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

Yet warrantless mass surveillance by the government and its corporate cohorts hasn’t made America any safer. And it certainly isn’t helping to preserve our freedoms. Frankly, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.

Don’t believe it.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale. They are conducting this mass surveillance without a warrant, thus violating the core principles of the Fourth Amendment which protects the privacy of all Americans.

Warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens is wrong, un-American, and unconstitutional.

Clearly, the outlook for reforming the government’s unconstitutional surveillance programs does not look good.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whenever the rights of the American people are pitted against the interests of the military/corporate/security complex, “we the people” lose. Unless Congress develops a conscience—or suddenly remembers that they owe their allegiance to the citizenry and not the corporate state—we’re about to lose big.

It’s time to let Section 702 expire or reform the law to ensure that millions and millions of Americans are not being victimized by a government that no longer respects its constitutional limits.

Mark my words: if Congress votes to make the NSA’s vast spying powers permanent, it will be yet another brick in the wall imprisoning us within an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape.

WC: 2229

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Reprinted by permission of The Rutherford Institute.

From the Archives: 'The state should punish violence - and nothing else' (1991)

To my surprise, a sentence in this letter to the editor was quoted in a book by Peter McWilliams, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society. It took me quite some time to identify and locate the source of the quotation ("There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols."), which appeared on the editorial page of The Washington Times on August 22, 1991. This may be the only time I have discussed masturbation (onanism, self-pleasure) and adult cinemas (a 20th century institution, now largely forgotten) in a mainstream publication.

The state should punish violence - and nothing else
22 August 1991 - The Washington Times

In your sympathetic Aug. 13 editorial about Paul Reubens, "The secret sin of Pee-wee Herman," you assert that so-called "victimless" crimes such as prostitution, pornography and drug use depend for their "victimless" status upon a narrow view of what it means to "hurt."

Your argument that the law exists to preserve and protect public order may be largely correct, but it begs the question as to whether public order is protected by laying traps for adults who expose their sexual organs in a darkened movie theater.

In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion - violence against persons or property - occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols. Otherwise, if a majority or vociferous minority found crucifixes offensive, the state would be closing down Catholic churches as a threat to public morality.

Similarly, if a majority felt the Korean ownership of convenience stores violated neighborhood standards of ethnic purity, the government could be enlisted to deny business licenses to recent immigrants. The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect individuals from coercive violence, not to initiate such coercion itself.

Pee-wee Herman's alleged "crime" took place on private property (the South Trail Cinema) after paying an entry fee for the express purpose of obtaining some measure of sexual gratification by watching erotic films. Under those circumstances, any person on the premises fully understands the nature of the business and what might be encountered there.

Neither the owners of the theater nor its patrons are likely to be offended by masturbation in a darkened auditorium. Patrons of an erotic cinema could hardly be offended by the sight of life-size genitalia when larger-than-life examples loomed before them on the screen.

There was no public disorder, no incitement to riot, no complaint from passers-by. Pee-wee Herman was arrested for doing in a private cinema what he certainly would be free to do without fear of reprisal in his (or the theater owner's) private home.

Unless, of course, masturbation is itself illegal in Florida. Come to think of it, that is not so hard to imagine at all. In any case, all such laws are clear violations of personal autonomy, their enforcement is an affront to human dignity and they should be repealed without delay.

RICHARD E. SINCERE JR.
Chairman
Libertarian Party of Virginia
Arlington

From the Archives: Crimes Against Nature Law Allows Virginia Police To Target Gays (2001)

This article, based upon survey research I did with Rasmussen Research for Virginians for Justice (later Equality Virginia), was originally published in the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia, on February 9, 2001.  It preceded the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated the remaining anti-sodomy laws in the United States, including Virginia's "Crimes Against Nature" statute (Section 18.2-361 of the Virginia Code).

Crimes Against Nature Law Allows Virginia Police To Target Gays

Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

CHARLOTTESVILLE - When Republicans discuss the proper role of government, most agree that it should be low-cost, limited in scope, and nonintrusive in the lives of citizens.

Rank-and-file Republican voters, for the most part, stand by the words of the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater:

"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.

"I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."

Do Virginia’s Republicans live up to this Goldwaterite ideal? Not always, but the impulse remains. Evidence for this is found in a recent poll from an unlikely source on an unlikely topic.

On Jan. 16 and 18, Rasmussen Research, an independent polling organization, conducted a statewide survey to determine knowledge and attitudes about Virginia’s Crimes Against Nature statute. This statute forbids certain intimate sexual activity, even in private and even for married couples. To be blunt, the law prohibits oral sex for any Virginian, whether they are gay or straight, married or single.

The law is enforced selectively. It is used to target gay men in public places who discuss having sex. It is used as a fallback when prosecutors cannot prove that a sexual assault has taken place, so the alleged perpetrator is accused and convicted of consensual sodomy instead.

And it is used as a pretext to deny child custody to gay or lesbian parents - for example, in the case of Richmonder Sharon Bottoms, which achieved nationwide infamy when the government forcibly took her son, Tyler, from her because she is a lesbian.

The Rasmussen Research poll found that, across the board, Virginians want the CAN law repealed. Large majorities in almost every conceivable category say they want to see the law eliminated, that they want their legislators to vote for repeal, and that legislators who support repeal will not be adversely affected at the ballot box.

This is true for Democrats, Republicans, and independents; it is true for men and women; it is true for whites and African-Americans.

In this random survey, Republicans showed clear consistency in their view that government should stay out of the private lives of citizens.

Virginia State Capitol in Richmond

Asked "Should it be against the law for an unmarried man and an unmarried woman to have sex in the state of Virginia?" 67.4 percent of Republicans answered "no," compared to 71.1 percent overall.

Asked "Should it be against the law for a married couple to have oral sex in the privacy of their own home?" 78.9 percent of Republicans answered "no" (81.7 percent overall).

Asked "Currently, according to Virginia law, it is illegal for consenting adults to have oral sex in the state of Virginia; a proposal has been made to eliminate the Virginia law; should the Virginia law be eliminated?" 61.4 percent of Republicans answered "yes" (65.2 percent overall).

Now, some members of the General Assembly say privately that they would support the repeal of the CAN law, but that they would have hell to pay on Election Day if they did. This is simply not true.

Survey participants were asked:

"Suppose your representative in the House of Delegates or the State Senate voted to eliminate the Virginia law. Would that make you more likely to vote for that person, less likely to vote for them, or would it have no impact on your vote?" Overall, 82.9 percent of Virginians said that they would either be more likely to vote for that representative, or it would have no impact on their vote; 83.5 percent of Republicans answered the same way, as did 77.5 percent of Democrats.

In other words, state legislators who vote to repeal the Crimes Against Nature law will have little or nothing to worry about in their re-election bids. The fear they cite is a red herring.

Republicans are part of a broad "leave us alone" coalition that wants the government to stop breathing down our necks. As speaker of the House of Delegates Vance Wilkins told The Washington Post, "It’s simply a matter of individual liberty versus not having the government be a nanny." We don’t trust the government to run our businesses, and we certainly don’t trust it to run our sex lives.

The spirit of Barry Goldwater lives on in Virginia.

RICHARD SINCERE serves on the national committee of the Republican Liberty Caucus.

Guest Post: Easter Symbolizes a New Hope for Life and Liberty

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Easter morning is filled with delight: bright colors, delicious foods, happy scenes of bunnies, and egg hunts. Above all, for those who are Christian, we are called to celebrate the joy of the resurrection of Christ from death to new life. The contrast between Good Friday and Easter could not be starker: with the quick turn of the calendar, we move from desperate sadness to unmitigated celebration.

It was not this way in the ancient Christian liturgy. Easter was the beginning of a process of discerning a new reality in the world. It was an entire season lasting five weeks, during which time the dramatic realization of what happened and what it implies for the world unfolds in stages, like spring itself. You can see it in the texts of liturgy and hear it in the chanted music from the first millennium. 

Spring Dawns Slowly
Initially, on Easter morning, there is not unmitigated joy, but rather an awe that approaches a kind of fear: the man who was dead is said to be alive again, which seems to lend credibility to those who said he was not a false prophet but rather the son of God. 

Listen to the melody of the Easter morning entrance song from the old liturgy, which isn’t celebratory but awe-struck and slightly frightened. 

What does this imply about the crucifixion itself, and what does this ask of those who stood aside as Jesus was put to death at the bloody hands of the civic authorities? 

In the second week after Easter, the ancient liturgy observes people’s dawning realization of the truth they have witnessed, and are thereby drawn by a sense of awe to a new faith, brought into the community of believers one person at a time. In the third week, you experience the first cries of joy, and in the fourth, the celebrations consist of new songs, songs that depart from tradition and introduce a new age. By the fifth, the experience of elation is completely unleashed and proclaimed to all the world. 

Life Moves Fast
But in modern times, the entire experience is put on fast-forward. Traditionalists regret this, but it is a defensible change that keeps track of the dramatic cultural shifts between the first millennium and the second. In the first, very few people experienced anything like what we call material progress today. The population barely grew and life was characterized by an unchanging tedium of survival. 

In the second millennium, over the course of hundreds of years, humanity experienced the first signs of the possibility of life improvement, longer and better lives even within a single generation, and modernity dawned with the gradual unfolding of freedom and the accumulation of material capital. Sickness and death gave way to health and life as a reasonable expectation. 

So, in this sense, it makes sense that stories about ourselves and even the past would speed up as well. Whatever it is today, we want it now and in the most time-efficient form of delivery possible. A website that sticks is abandoned. A book that is too long is not read. Even a sermon in church that drags on tempts people to leave their pews and find a better way to spend the hour. 

We have come to believe that life is about more than preparing our souls for eternity; it is about finding great experiences within the structure of time itself. Hardly anyone even questions this notion today. We carry it with us constantly. Our impatience with tedium is palpable.

This is a cultural change in us wrought by capitalism, and it is nothing to regret. The existence of “time preferences” – that we want to have what we desire sooner than later – is what might be called a Kantian category of action. It is baked into our choices as human beings. The material world either accommodates us or it does not. With the advent of capitalism, humanity experienced a realization of dreams that had been materially inaccessible throughout most of history. We are today surrounded by its blessings in ways we don’t fully appreciate.

It Needs to Happen Now
Let me just relay a story from this morning, which you might find trivial but is actually glorious.
I woke this morning determined to get my oil changed. Now, when my father was my age, he had to do it himself. There were no places where you can go and be in and out in 10 minutes. I, on the other hand, know that this is possible now, without fuss and without an appointment.

So I started driving, letting my mobile app guide me to the closest place and with full confidence that I could achieve my goal. I got my oil changed for $39 and they added fluid for my power steering, which fixed a whirling sound I’d been hearing. Then I got my car washed and the guy fixed my glove compartment that kept falling open. Somehow he just knew what to do, and he did it just to be nice.
Then I went to a car parts store and got some wipes that made my car smell great, and also some touch-up paint – yes, they happened to have the right color – that took away some scrapes on the paint. I did all this just by driving around and meeting nice people and engaging in beautiful commerce all designed to make my life better. I met fascinating, talented people and saw my life improve in real ways through human labor, courtesy, and commercial activity.

This is the way mornings should be. But of all the mornings in world history, it has only become possible to live this way in 0.00000009% percent of them (not scientific, but you get the point). But instead of celebrating how easy our lives are, what do most people do? They grumble about the traffic. They complain that they had to do this at all. They get upset that they are not otherwise at the office or languishing at home or huffing and puffing at the gym.

No matter how much we get, and however soon we get it, there is still something in us that aches for more. This too is a defensible impulse because it is that longing in us that causes us to act to make the world a better place through entrepreneurship, risk-taking, working hard, saving, and generally having the option as consumers to buy what it is that capitalists are selling us. So long as we are free in action and choice, our disgruntlement becomes a motivating force for improving the world. 

Politics Is a Different Matter
And yet, there is one space in life where wanting more sooner does not redound to our benefit. It is within the political sphere. We listen to candidates sell their nostrums and go to the voting booth to buy what they are selling. Then we are shocked when it turns out that they cannot and will not deliver on what they say. Then we do the same thing two years and four years later, never learning the lesson that the political marketplace doesn’t really exist to serve us but rather to serve an institution that, in so many ways, exists outside the sphere of social action. The state is different, radically different, from the marketplace. 

Because of this tendency to want more as soon as possible and to speed up life to accommodate our wishes, people tend to fall for charlatans in political life. Some dude comes along promising to make us great and we go for it, even if what he says makes no sense. Another person says he will deliver justice, equality, fairness, and goodness through taxing, regulating, spending, and war, and people figure that they will “spend” their vote and take the chance that it is true. 

Growing in Liberty
True maturity in political action requires two mental steps. First, we have to decide what it is we want. The burden of the liberal tradition has long been to convince people that the best possible world for us comes through voluntary action within a social setting we create for ourselves, and not from the imposition of someone else’s plan from the top down. Second, we have to cultivate patience that working for the long-term goal of humanity requires commitment, slow growth of intellectual communities, the persuasion of public intellectuals, and deep investment in an idea.

This is the only way it can work. Liberty is not something you can buy. It is something you must build through intellectual courage and hard work. It cannot be granted to you by a politician. It doesn’t even come from politics alone. The work of liberty is a cultural act, extended from the sphere you can control and working outwards to change the intellectual fabric of society. 

The work of liberty unfolds over time like the dawn of spring itself, or the unfolding of Easter in the ancient Christian liturgy. What is possible in this world is a slow realization, born first of awe, then turning to a new consciousness, unfolding in gradual celebration, and culminating in a message to the entire world. Liberty is what allows us all to cast off the old world of authority and imposition and sing a new song of freedom the world over.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.