Samizdata

When I read about people like the hilarious American Center for Law and Justice and Family Research Council calling for on-line censorship, I am not sure if I should laugh or snarl… perhaps both. In an article in Charisma News Service, they say things like:

This is an important opportunity for the Supreme Court to protect children in the ongoing battle against online porn,” said Jay Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). “This measure…represents a proper and constitutional protection to ensure that pornographers don’t commercially profit from making pornography available to children,” Sekulow said. “The First Amendment protects free speech — but was never intended to permit the sale or distribution of porn to children on the Internet or anywhere else.

Hmmm. Although as a libertarian I do not usually argue matters on constitutional grounds but rather moral ones (a constitution is just a statement of rights, not the source of them), let us look at the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Now perhaps my copy of the US Constitution is an abridged version but no matter how many times I read it, I cannot see the bit that says:

However freedom of speech, and of the press, can have the crap abridged out of it if computers and the Internet are involved.

Will some legal scholar who reads the Samizdata please take pity and e-mail me and point out in which section of the US Constitution’s apocrypha is that passage to be found?

Now even if these authoritarian statist clowns got their way (unlikely), exactly how do they think a US law is going to prevent 15 year old Hank from Peoria taking a peek at a nice pair of titties on a web server in Amsterdam? These people are not just control freaks, they are pretty damn stupid

Have you ever noticed that groups calling themselves Pro-Family are often the ones who actually want the state to pass laws which remove responsibility from the family and make it a matter of criminal law? If little Hank from Peoria wants to look at porn on-line, why is that not a matter for the family to sort out? I suspect if these people think a US law will have the slightest effect on the global proliferation of on-line porn, then perhaps they are also sufficiently obtuse not to realise that the computer they purchased for little Hank also has an off switch. Doh!

An article in the Washington Post reports moves against a couple of the larger ‘Hawala’ networks. Also: “Under the new anti-terrorism legislation passed by Congress last month, hawalas will be required by year-end to register with the Treasury Department and, like banks, to report suspicious activities, such as unusually large cash transfers.”

The idiots seem to completely miss the point about why people use hawala (or Chinese ‘Fei Qian’) to move money internationally. It is so that the state cannot see what they are doing. To demand hawalas register with the state and report ‘suspicious activities’ is rather like passing a law requiring bank robbers to register and file a report prior to conducting a robbery. Do terrorists use hawala? Probably. So do millions of other people. Will they manage to shut the system down (which has been around since the 11th Century in India, China and other parts of Asia)? My guess is they will be even less successful than that other triumph of the state’s excursion into international paramilitary policing, namely the ‘Drug War’. These hawalas occur within ethnically homogenous tight knit communities. It is going to be impossible to shut down more than a few of these dispersed, multiply redundant networks as they are semi-underground as it is and extremely easy to set up again by others if any given hawala is disrupted.

What is a hawala?

A hawala (or fei qian) is a simple network set up to transfur funds internationally, usually using a member of an extended family or personal friend on both sides of the network (though a few larger hawalas are almost like banks). Vijay (or Abdul or Deng) goes to a hawala (typically a small back street office) in London (or Los Angeles or Paris or Toronto) and gives them a quantity of cash plus a small brokerage fee. He tells the hawala who he wants to collect the money in Calcutta (or Karachi or Cairo or Shanghai) and then leaves. The business is conducted with a handshake and trust. The hawala in London calls his contact in Calcutta (often a cousin or other family member) and tells him how much to disburse and to whom. This is often done on the phone but increasingly it is done by PGP encrypted e-mail. Next day, a relative of Vijay (or Abdul or Deng) goes to the hawala in Calcutta, identifies himself to the associated hawala there and collects his cash. The hawala run accounts with each other and periodically settle up the old fashioned way: a guy with a suitcase packed full of used 50 pound notes (or 100 dollar bills) gets on a plane in London, flies to Calcutta and settles the tab in cash. It is that simple!

In fact they are an excellent example of highly successful, completely unregulated, handshake based international capitalism. Hence is it hardly surprising so many people in government do not like these networks as it gives lie to all the smug claims about the supposed superiority of the West’s regulated international financial systems.