to today's event, the 10th in a series of debates hosted by the Foundation for Economic Education and sponsored by the Arthur N. Rook Foundation. My name's Jason Riddle. I'm the college programs manager here at FI. And I'd like to welcome all the students here in the audience at Grand Rapids, as well as all of those watching this live streaming debate from around the world. Today's discussion is based on the topic of immigration. Unfortunately, Jim Carafano from the Heritage Foundation was unable to make it today due to some last-minute flight complications, but the show must go on. We're still gonna have a fun discussion with Dr. Ben Powell and moderated by Scott Bollier. Dr. Bollier, he is the director at Troy University's Center for Political Economy, so I'm gonna turn things over now to Dr. Bollier, who will introduce Dr. Powell and explain how we're going to proceed this morning. Thank you guys. Thank you, Jason, and thank you all for tuning in and thank you to the audience who's here too. It's a pleasure to be here and to trying to fill in for James a little bit. So the format is going to be, Dr. Powell presents his point of view on immigration. I will present a point of view that perhaps is in the general ballpark of James, this point of view, and then we'll just go back and forth with a bit of discussion between us and then hopefully a lot of audience questions as well. Before we get to that, just a quick explanation of what the specific resolution for this debate is. The question that we're trying to focus on is whether or not a free market and labor makes both the data of population richer and reduces poverty worldwide. So we're gonna really try to focus on the economics of this and a number of other things as well that come into the immigration issue. Before we get to actual content, it's a real great pleasure to introduce a friend and one of the real stars in the free enterprise movement, Benjamin Powell. Ben is the director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and a visiting professor in the Rawls College of Business. He's the North American editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, past president of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and a senior fellow with the Independent Institute. He earned his BS in economics and finance from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and his MA and PhD in economics from George Mason University. He and I were classmates, so it's great to be on the stage with him. Professor Powell is the author of Out of Poverty, Sweatshops in the Global Economy, Editor of Making Poor Nations Rich, which has a really great chapter on Botswana by someone, and the author of more than 50 scholarly articles and policy studies. His primary fields of research are economic development, Austrian economics and public choice. Dr. Powell's research findings have been reported in more than 100 popular press outlets including the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times. He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows including CNN, MSNBC Showtime, CNBC, and he was a regular guest commentator on Fox Business's Freedom Watch. His Sandra at Texas Tech is one that we all are really excited about and watching, and it's just really wonderful to have him here with us this morning, so welcome. All right, thank you, Scotty.  Unfortunately, that's not happening now, but I get to kind of debate my old grad school buddy, Scott, so it's a lot like what we did 14 years ago just with less whiskey. So let me begin by defining what I'm gonna defend here today of open borders for the United States and other wealthier countries. I'm doing it for today's purposes within the context of our existing nation states that we have, so by open borders I don't have to necessarily mean that you can jump willy-nilly across the Rio Grande whenever you want. We have border checkpoints right now. I think open borders in this context simply means that we're not going to put quantitative restrictions on a number of immigrants coming from any country at any skill level from around the world. You can still have your known terrorist watch list, a list of known violent international criminals that at the checkpoints you can do your best to exclude or for that matter, if someone has contagious diseases that you're worried about an epidemic or something. It just means no restrictions on immigration other than that, a free market in labor. As long as people can come here and support themselves or find somebody willing to support them, they should be free to do so. That is a radical position, at least in the context of contemporary America and for that matter, the rest of the wealthy nations in the world. Most of the people in America disagree with me on this, perhaps many of you in the audience do. So let me start with something that's much less radical, at least less radical among economists. And that's the case for free trade that's been well-established since Adam Smith and based on the theory of comparative advantage since the mid-19th century. And what that theory says is whoever can produce products at lowest cost should produce them while somebody else produces different products at lowest cost and then they swap. So everybody has a comparative advantage in something and we should all specialize in that that we do best and trade with everybody else. And as a result, the economic pie is gonna be bigger for everybody. There's more total wealth to go around and we're all better off over the long run on this. Put into concrete terms, you could grow bananas in Alaska but it would require a lot of energy and a lot of greenhouses and they grow much more easily in Honduras. You should let them grow down in Honduras and send them up to Alaska and you can grow, I suppose you could grow Alaskan stone crab in Honduras if you've created the right aquarium but that would be a tremendously costly way to do that. Instead, let the Alaskans fish those and send them down to Honduras in exchange for bananas and there'll be more crab and more bananas total to go around. Both parties are better off. Well, there's a problem with some goods and services. You can't ship them across borders like this. I can't outsource my lawn care to Mexico and Indian call center cannot be the nanny for my child. These services have to be provided onsite but the case for trading these services based on comparative advantages is the exact same as it is for the goods that we can ship across borders. So, restricting migrants from coming here who could do our lawn care, babysit our children, drive our cars makes no more sense than restrictions stopping bananas from going to Alaska. It forces us to produce these services for ourselves inefficently. We have inefficently too little low skill immigrant labor in the United States and as a result, we are producing things like childcare and other services at too higher cost and could be better off if we let more of it in. And don't for a minute think that this means that we're somehow unjustly exploiting these workers by letting them come here and paying them less than what we could do for services now. These people who are coming here a Mexican who leaves Mexico and comes to the United States nothing else changes about them, just this location. People are in 150% of what he could have earned in Mexico. A Nigerian, 1,000%. They see their incomes explode. In fact, this is the way to get rid of extreme poverty in the poorer parts of the world. The relative poverty that they might be in near us is vastly better than that extreme poverty of where they are, which is why they come here in the first place. So, how big would the gains to the world be if we adopted, if we and other wealthy countries adopted a more open borders policy? Massive is the answer. Labor is our most valuable resource and it's locked up in unproductive areas of the world where we can't make the best use of it. Economists have done many estimates of what freeing the market and labor would do for the world economy. Consensus is somewhere around doubling world income. $70 trillion. Every year would produce $70 trillion more in goods and services than we do now. The estimates vary, but from a low of about $50 trillion to a high of about a little over $100 trillion. These are just massive, massive numbers in terms of the increase in wealth. Even if they're widely off, the numbers are still going to be huge and it's because we have such pervasive restrictions on this labor and the labor is so valuable when it can be put to good use. So, what we'd be seeing really is what we see going on in India and China today, which is a massive rural to urban migration and this would be just writ large around the world with many of them relocating to the United States and other wealthy nations. It doesn't mean that it's bad news for those countries that it leaves behind. So, there's little evidence that when immigrants leave a country they impoverish the place that they're leaving and in fact remittances dominate in terms of flows to poorer countries compared to foreign aid flows and they're more effective would see a big increase in remittances to those people and I suspect although there's less good evidence on this that would also see more pressure on their governments to reform policy as they're losing their productive people to the richer countries around the world. So, I think a response that many of you have in your mind is well that's all well and good for them but what about us? Now remember, back to free trade and comparative advantage both parties benefit from this trade and that's exactly what economists find when they study immigration too. So, we can look at current levels of immigration and economists all agree that it brings net benefits net economic benefits to the United States. It's small as in relation to our overall economy but positive. Even a guy, George Borjas is probably the most prominent economist critical of greater immigration. He puts the number right around $40 billion per year that we get as the native born population as a benefit of the immigrants being here. Other estimates might get you into the hundreds of billions but they're still relatively modest as a percent of a $14 trillion economy but there's a reason they're relatively modest we massively restrict the number that can come in and we relegate many of them to illegal status where they can't make the best use of their labor. If we allowed more in the gains for the natives would be much larger. Some would fear that this destroys American jobs there's absolutely no evidence for this. What we have is a classic problem of the scene and the unseen that Bastiat talked about. When the immigrants come in and perform services and you see Americans who used to do that service no longer employed, you say the immigrants stolen their jobs but what we're not seeing is the many jobs that are created precisely because immigrants are here. Statistically they're created but you can't always identify one to one that's where it came from. But if it was true that if we added more people we took away jobs on that. Think of what the American labor force should look like right now. What should our unemployment rate be? We've more than doubled the size of the civilian labor force since the 1960s. Yet there's no long-term increase in structural unemployment. What we did is we created more jobs when we got more workers because we have virtually limitless desires for goods and services. So what about the wages? Well, the wages or the wealth overall of Americans is going to go up but there's some concern about whose wages will be affected when economists study this. If they're gonna find a negative effect they have to look at low-skill Americans namely high school dropouts and there the estimates vary from slightly positive effect even on their wages to at most negative 8%, that's a George Bauhrhaus estimate from current levels of immigration coming into the United States. So it's a relatively modest wage decline oh and it tends to be temporary. Over time wages recover even for those least skilled. But also keep in mind that those people some of them own houses, some of them have a retirement fund which means they're in part capitalist. Both of those things go up in value as you have greater immigration. But either way it's just a small segment of the US labor market overall. Also we have to keep in mind we're consumers of these immigrant services. That's the major benefit that we get from them. There's no economic policy that we could adapt that would do more to increase overall world production or to reduce global poverty than opening our borders to poorer people who are trapped by accident of birth in countries where they can not make best use of their skills. The upshot is it'll make us wealthier although not wildly but a little bit better off by letting them come here too. This stuff that I've been talking about is fairly uncontroversial among most economists although widely misconceived in the general public. If Jim was here or James was here I expect what he would do is probably start giving he'd probably tell me there's a difference between a human being and a banana and that when you move a banana I can't do anything else but get eaten but when you move a human being it brings a lot of baggage with it that can cause other problems and start listing other problems for you. My answer would be well we'll talk about some of those other problems whether they're real problems in the first place but even if you believe they are we're talking about doubling world productivity. It has to be a pretty massive problem to swamp that. The question is could you use some of that 70 trillion dollars to fix whatever problems that he might mention. So with that I'll turn it over to my neocon friend Scott Bullier. Okay, I cannot wait. I've had 10 minutes to prepare for this. I'm not going to respond to anything Ben just said because I'll do that in the rebuttal. I'm just going to talk about the argument for open immigration broadly and say that it's too optimistic. Sounds a little too good to be true and also if you think about, I mean many of the economic arguments being made sound pretty good but there are a few things that we ought to think about particularly in the way that Ben framed the issue. We're talking about open immigration within the context of a nation state still. We're allowing people to move and we might monitor them for disease at the border and I want to talk as someone representing an alternative point of view about what is the role of the nation state in protecting our interests as citizens of a nation. Okay, one of them seems like there should be a premium to those of us who are here and also get into a couple of arguments that are very important and maybe secondary effects of this idea that yeah, sure, someone benefits if they can win the lottery and get into America. Yes, you're better off unambiguously. This does follow from David Ricardo's arguments about free trade and comparative advantage. It's a win-win principle that we talked about in my first lecture here, the notion that both parties gain if you can essentially engage in exchange but there are a whole bunch of things that maybe actually are really big and maybe big enough that it cuts into the doubling of world output. So here I go talking about why we shouldn't embrace open immigration. One of the big ones in my mind is that immigrants come here illegally. They generally don't contribute to the tax base. Often they're flying under the radar, okay? Even if we just allow them to come, there's a lot of evidence that their total contribution, okay, their total contribution to the public is less than the resources that they consume from the public. So immigrants tend to have more kids. Those kids go to our public schools. It makes it more costly to service them in public schools because they're usually speaking a different language. Okay, so sometimes you need conduits between English and Spanish or English and Chinese. And this is very costly for our schools to be supporting this. They use our roads, they use our healthcare. By the way, in the hospitals, there actually is a code that if someone shows up you treat them and ask questions later. I think this is a really good thing, okay? We want to save people. And immigrants can use that to their advantage to abuse the medical system as well. So the costs, while there's benefits to immigration in the sense that they gain, producers gain, consumers gain, there's these falling prices and all kinds of desirable effects from immigration, there's a huge public cost on us all. They're net takers from the system. So our taxes could very well end up going up by a lot. And I think one of the roles of the nation, okay, the United States government is to protect us against that possible outcome. So the economics of this aren't completely clear cut. There's this big spillover problem that I think needs to be addressed. A few other things that I worry about when thinking about open immigration. America's a great place, okay? It's, I still live here. I've been demonstrating with my feet that it's like the best place in the world to be. Its foundations rest on some core principles of economic freedom, the rule of law, okay? The right to private property. People from other countries who come here are coming from places where those ideas are less respected. Corruption is something that is common and they've learned how to operate in systems that are very corrupt. There's gray areas where you typically, if you got pulled over by a police officer, might say, okay, you got me. I was driving 90 in a 55. I deserve a ticket. They might get pulled over and say, can I pay you some money to just keep going? So culturally, they're gonna slowly, and police officers might begin taking bribes. Culturally, they're going to erode what makes America great. The fact that we are kind of law abiding citizens. The fact that we sometimes vote for policies that keep us one of the freest places in the world. So I'm a little worried about that, okay? And maybe America's so big that we can absorb a whole bunch of people, but if you expand the logic of this open immigration argument to some small countries, what's making a small country free right now could evaporate like that. Okay, so here's an example. I've gone to the Czech Republic several times. Czech Republic's a small country, wonderful country, has a lot of culture that is distinctly Czech. If the Czechs just said, anyone come, anyone invest, anyone do anything in our country, it could quickly become mini-Germany and you would lose Czech beer. You would lose Czech music. You would lose all kinds of things that are amazing, okay? So culturally, this could be really kind of scary for us. And I'm an economist who actually tries to bring a lot of this stuff all into, this is just economic. So this cultural issue, if there are costs to be considered on the cultural dimension, then it's just a cost that should be accounted for in the immigration argument. A couple others that I think are worth considering. The possible, yes, you can monitor people at the border, but are they really in any way effective in what they're doing and monitoring right now our security? So you're gonna have a lot more people coming, some of them with really bad intentions and we're just even engaging in worse, more, you're engaging in an embrace of, hey, we can't simply handle the caseload, there's gonna be more risk of terrorism. There's possibly gonna be risks of drug lords coming into our country and putting more drugs into our schools, crime could go up. In some places, imagine what open borders would mean and not open borders, like as Ben defined it, not open borders, just anyone anywhere. Imagine if Israel became very embracing of anyone can come. Think of what might happen in the Middle East if we just embraced that there, okay? So this is a trickier argument than it's not just about costs and money. And yes, you could improve human lives, but it may come at a cost to us Americans, like a really big cost. Wages in America, just to go back to economics for a second, wages in America have been stagnant since the 1970s. In fact, net worth has fallen by about $20,000 per household in the last five years. More competition, which is indeed what happens when you have more people come, isn't going to help us. Many of you are in your 20s. You've heard about just how weak the economy is for you. Ask yourselves, does immigration make you feel any more secure about your prospects? One final one. We have open immigration here in the United States. People are migrating out of California in droves. They're moving out of Illinois, which is a total basket case state in droves. And there's no evidence to me that those states are actually getting it together and doing any better. People are leaving and taxes are going up in Illinois, in California, they just keep on regulating and saying, this is actually closer to what the people remaining want.  So it's not clear to me that policies are going to improve. So I kind of worry about the people left behind. Who's gonna get out of Mexico? People with a little bit of mobility. Those who are left behind, it could be Illinois to like the 10th degree, like really scary in terms of what their lives might be like. So there's a lot of directions you can go in being against immigration. I've tried to spell out a few of them why we should at least act with much greater caution and conservatism, because that's what's made America great. All right, thank you, Scott. So I'll start with the wages part first. So just to be clear, they've done tons of work on this. You have to directly compete with the immigrant labor to have a negative effect on your wages. That's why it's limited to people without high school degrees in the United States who feel a negative wage effect and it's fairly small. For the rest of us, immigrants are compliments, not substitutes, so they don't push our wages down. They increase our purchasing power by giving us more goods and services at lower prices. The fiscal effect, there's tons of studies out there. If you're watching this online, Google tax impact of immigrants. You're gonna see tons of stuff, but there's tons of junk science out there. And most of the junk science on the fiscal impact of immigration counts up the fiscal cost now of a new immigrant or that immigrant's children when they come here. And that's all it does. In fact, Heritage published a study like this a couple years ago of the fiscal cost of amnesty. And what it didn't do was account for the dynamic effects in our economy of having immigration. The Heritage study essentially said these immigrants have certain tax servicing that they get, but there's no other effect of these immigrants in our economy. So if having the immigrant here increases production and makes a business more profitable, that business pays more in taxes. That has to be counted as part of the fiscal impact, like any decent scholarly study looks at your economy-wide effects of immigration. And it does another thing too. It looks at taxes not just at a moment in time but over an immigrant's life. If we just thought about this for a second and considered adding new people to our economy, birthing them, all our net tax drains when they're birthed. And probably for 18 to, in some cases, probably 26 years, maybe longer. That looks really bad if you just look at the upfront taxes instead you have to look at the taxes over their lifetime. And once you start doing that, the scholarly studies that basically look at the dynamic effect throughout your economy and account for the life cycle of being a net tax consumer at the beginning, a tax producer in the middle, a tax consumer at the end. What they find, it varies, some are slightly positive, some are slightly negative, but they're all small, they're all cluster around zero. Basically, fiscal reasons aren't a real thing, aren't a real reason to have a concern about immigration. You can find individual school districts or hospitals that are burdened, definitely true, but when we look at the macro all around, it's just not there. And even if it were, we control fiscal policy. If we're doing something that could double world income, could we change our fiscal policy to reallocate some of that to make it a win? In fact, the first point Scott brought up of America as a nation, shouldn't we get a premium for being here? Shouldn't America just be looking out to maximize for us? If your answer to that is yes, you should definitely support increased immigration because if it makes the overall pie bigger, you could use things, and I don't personally advocate this, but you could redistribute some of that pie to native-born Americans. If immigrants from Nigeria are gonna see their income go up by 1,000% by coming here, you could tax them on 999% of that increase and it would still be a good deal for them to come here and then reallocate that to native-born Americans, perhaps the low-skill workers who directly compete with them and would still have more left over for both parties. I don't particularly favor that, but if that's your concern, fiscal policies within your hands, and if it's just them draining on the welfare state or something, as my friend and colleague Alex Narastas said one time, build a wall around the welfare state, not a wall around the country. I think the freedom and corruption one is the best objection and this is the one I've spent the most time thinking about for more open immigration because the gains from trade are stacked. It's a one-time jump out in your standard of living. It's not about your annual growth rate and our underlying institutions, private property, economic freedom, rule of law, that's what gives us, that's the kind of underlying fundamental cause of long-term development. If immigrants came in and distorted that rule of law, economic freedom, property rights respect and it took down our long-term growth rate that could easily make up for the giant gains that you'd get in a one-shot move. But I don't think there's very good evidence for it. Most immigrants who come here are fleeing bad places coming to America because they want to be in a place where they can be more productive. They don't run away from Cuba and say, I want Cuba's institutions in the United States, that's a bit weird. So actually I've done some real recent work, people want to find, actually I think it's on Cato's website as a working paper with Alex Narasta and a few other colleagues. What we did is we looked at immigrant stocks and flows, not just in the United States, but in countries, actually all countries for which we could get data from 1990 to present. And we looked at the economic freedom of the world and that's which is our best empirical measure of respect for property rights and economic freedoms that we have. And we said does the high immigrant stock or high immigrant flow over this time period impact the economic freedom? What we found was yes, but only slightly and it's slightly in the positive direction. Countries that had a higher stock of immigrants 20 years later had a little bit higher economic freedom and some countries that had a bigger flow over that 20 year period had a little bit higher economic freedom. And I think one reason is, and there's been other work done on this, is the reaction to immigrants by native born. People don't like subsidizing people who don't look like themselves, so they end up voting to contract the welfare state when there's more of the immigrants coming in. I think border security, they do a bad job of it now, they do a bad job under that, but if people wanna get in, the government's not gonna have any harder time under that new regime than what they do now. But I think that was some of the main ones that you asked. I think the freedom one's the most important fundamental one of it. Now I'm seeing movement, I'm not sure if we're going to questions now or if you want further rebuttal from me. Okay, questions now for anyone interested in continuing. As you all get ready with your questions, one thing I think that's also worth bringing up in Ben's rebuttal just a moment ago, is this argument that these are complementary goods. Immigrants are compliments to what you currently see. Technology is a compliment to labor as well. And if you look at Tyler Cowan's work, isn't it the case that technology interacting with labor is actually leading to this massive divergence where you have about 15% of people doing really well, 85% basically living kind of on a flat line level of income. Their well-being will get better because of technological advance, but inequality's gonna explode under your... But their absolute standard still went out. The wage stagnation stuff is just BS because we know that wages are a horrible way to measure the standard of living because their benefits have gone up during this time. But when I look around and people in, quote, poverty in the United States have a smartphone, technology's been making their standard of living higher even if we don't measure it in their wages. Questions? Yes? I guess my question is the question posed was if every developed country opens their borders, what would happen if one or just some open their borders would they be at a disadvantage advantage or so on? I think it wouldn't be as economically advantageous the whole world opening up, but it would still bring net gains both to the immigrants who come in the country who receives them. I think some of your cultural problems would get worse and as Scott points out for some small countries, that's going to be a greater challenge, especially if they're the only one in the world that have that. Country as large as the United States, I'm not particularly worried about it. There's been various estimates of this too of how many people would actually come. There's actually a global survey of how many people want to live outside of their country of birth. I think the United States, I think it's about 600 million total who want to move right now and the United States population would roughly double in a fairly short time frame. But it doesn't happen by the way overnight because the way the disporers work is like a few people come then spread word back and a few more come and builds over time. Initially our flow would predominantly be from Latin America. Although by the way the net migration from Mexico has basically stopped right now and that's largely for economic and demographic reasons not border enforcement reasons. Since the recession Mexico's economic growth compared to the United States has improved. That's taken away some of the pressure but basically their fertility rates now are back down towards what US levels are. So that gets around the big reason that so many people were coming. All countries but all of our times during the 19th century where we had open immigration and we got a big surge, it was from countries going through this fertility change. Basically we're sanitation and healthcare improved enough that more of your children live but yet people still have children at the rate that they used to when lots of children died. You get a population bomb, a lot of them migrate but then as people get used to the fact that children aren't dying fertility rates fall. That was the natural cycle of our 19th century immigration waves that we had. Mexico's just hit that one. Okay so Scott said that the greatest thing about America is that it's full of law abiding citizens. I think really that the greatest thing about America is the diversity. Nobody in this room would be here if immigrants hadn't come to this country. And it happened for hundreds and hundreds of years completely uncontrolled. So I suppose my question is why was it okay for hundreds of years but not now? Oh, this is where it gets hard to be over in this chair. I'm sympathetic to your argument. I think that one thing that, one tension throughout the history of American immigration has been that indeed it's a benefit but there's just a tremendous amount of change and complexity that comes with it. If you look at the great wave of immigration in the late 1880s until about World War I, it's what I would call as an economist a really good thing, a huge engine for productivity in the United States but it has these deeply unsettling aspects to it that create a lot of anxiety and maybe it should have been pursued more cautiously, disease ramped up during that period, you had people living in Manhattan slums. It's just not as, yes, we are all here because of immigration but just allowing a massive wave in may not be the best way to do it. Maybe we need to manage it more carefully, have some just high skilled immigrants come. To follow up on that, I think actually part of the answer too would be the argument would be a two-fold part. We didn't have a welfare state then. We assimilated them better then and technology's changed now, so travel's cheaper and word spreads faster so it would be a bigger wave than what we had before, I guess would be the kind of three that I'd think about. I'd say the evidence on assimilation though is, and Jake Bigdor's done really good work at that, he's an economist from Duke, in terms of English language, intermarrying, things like that, the late 19th century immigrants and immigrants over the last 20 years look a lot alike and more recent immigrants actually are assimilating faster in terms of language ability which also makes sense for in a more globalized world now, they know more about America before they ever leave to come here. So I think the case is as strong as ever and I think the relationship between welfare state and immigration is no accident that the US got most of its big welfare state in the period where we had the most restriction on immigration. Dr. Powell, in your rebuttal, you didn't have time to address this idea of losing cultural heritage and I was wondering if nations, so with the example of the Czech Republic, nations that depend on tourism as part of their economy would, cultural degradation, would that cause an economic loss in the long run? I don't, what you can't get is a net economic loss out of this. That could, so there are cost and benefits, so when you trade with foreign goods across borders, industries contract in one country to country grow in another and you switch what you're doing, the tourist industry may contract because people, but think about what this means too though.  Or should we allow people the freedom to move around here to mix and improve their lives? And if they all choose things because there's something in human nature that makes us all look more alike, I'd say that's cultural flourishing with freedom and just getting rent of little pockets that those people didn't deem best to hold on to. And I'd say just real briefly that we need to be careful. You could make mistakes that are irreversible in embracing waves of tourism and all of a sudden you lose elephants and you lose this nice old way of doing things. I'm not talking about free migration for elephants. You never know what could happen to something that was historically really special if you just have hotel after hotel just outside of the touristy area. You can vote with your dollars on these things. But you can't go back to the way it was before. I've seen plenty of buildings restored. All right, this is a question for both of you. Regarding the debate of open immigration or having restrictions, the argument that moving to an open border system would create a, you could touch on culture if you want a primarily economic shock, positive or negative, what is your opinion and do you think that that's a strong enough argument to institute a gradual transition from one policy to the other or just to flip a switch and have it happen overnight? I think even flipping a switch, you're gonna have bottleneck, so it's not gonna be instantiation. You have the spore dynamics, which is why we draw from Latin America more first and Asia more first, probably not very much from Africa, at least for the United States to begin with. But if you're concerned, so when I think about the shop costs, you've got a bunch of Americans who are used to a particular mode of production, so particularly low-skill Americans who provide services that would compete with immigrants. If that's really your concern, there's a better solution than restricting immigration or only phasing it in slowly. Charge every immigrant an extra 10% on their income taxes. They're still way ahead compared to if they were trapped in the poverty in their home country. Use that money and give it to the newly unemployed low-skill Americans to complete their education to do whatever. If you don't like 10%, make it 20%. There's lots of room to grow here when we're talking about doubling world income. Yeah, as the token critic on this, I have no answer.  Dr. Powell, so if you think this is a net gain for society and the world, how do you propose creating political change so politicians would wanna favor this and create this legislation to allow this? No, it's not happening. Well, how can you change it? That's what, how can you create the political change? I think politicians are just trying to guess what public sentiment is. I think public sentiment doesn't understand the economics of immigration and has a general skepticism of foreigners, whether trading goods and services or in migration. Perhaps that it's an evolved skepticism from when we didn't have gains from trade over large areas and people who didn't look like you were dangerous. Given that, I think it's a huge obstacle to overcome. I think what we need to do is make people better understand how it works and politics would follow from there, but I don't think there's a political solution. Dr. Bolier, you mentioned the risk of, the greater risk of terrorism. And my question is if the US government were to take resources that it's using to try to regulate the labor market would they be able to better protect the national security? Sure, I mean, if the United States could focus on what it really should be doing, which is basically protecting, if there is an important role for the United States protecting each other, protecting individuals from each other and from other outside entities as well, you could, I mean, if you could deregulate and cut spending elsewhere, you would be able to assure security more. I think that the immigration position that if we could have greater integration that suddenly a lot of these things are just gonna magically take care of themselves is one that's a little naive. Leading into World War I, we were as integrated as we ever have been, at least in Europe, until maybe the recent moment with the EU integration and it was no defense against complete annihilation and two world wars essentially. Yes, my question is with a country with failing states like ours, do we have the infrastructure to hold all these immigrants and just maintain the order? I'm sorry, with failing states like ours? Yeah, with like California where there's these mass exodus? Oh, productivity increases, some because we inefficently provide some goods to the government today, some of those might be stressed and put pressure on for more reform. Immigration's not gonna solve all of our problems. I don't think poor infrastructure in California though undermines the gains that immigrants can bring. I mean, in terms of thinking about their impact on a public good provision in the United States, if it's truly a public good, it's non-rival which means when you add more taxpayers to the basic, it's cheaper per taxpayer. The problem is government provides tons of things that don't fit that definition. We are gonna move to closing remarks. Mine's gonna be very short and then we're gonna give Ben the last word. So I think that the message from those who are concerned about just embracing more open immigration is that the process should be somewhat cautious, it should be controlled. We might wanna keep an eye on the quality of immigrant we're bringing in and just go slowly and see what kinds of unintended consequences pop up, each step that we take down the immigration path. I think that the notion that all of this is going to be clean and work just really well and the bottom line is is that the gains are going to offset all of these things while it may be true. Those who stand to lose or be hurt in some way from immigration, it's really going to hurt and there's no true biote that occurs when someone is disserviced by immigration so it could breed a lot of hostility and be somewhat counterproductive to the broader open immigration cause. So I think the message is there are a lot of reasons to just be skeptical and to go slow at most. There's no claim that this would be smooth and have no complications and no adjustment costs and people wouldn't have adjust. Any economic shift of magnitude that doubles world GDP is obviously gonna have dislocation effects and transition costs but we're still doubling it. That's a massive increase in wealth. So economics is a science of means and ends and what it says is the case for free trade and labor is no different than the case for free trade and goods and services would lead to a massive increase in wealth. We should be concerned in making sure that they don't undermine our political institutions that give us economic freedom and the ability to have good long run growth but there's not good evidence for that yet. If I don't see good evidence for that, that tells me this is a massive increase in wealth that can deal with these other problems. So economics is a science of means and ends. It tells you it's gonna massively increase productivity. That doesn't tell you whether it's good or bad. We need moral theories to do that. So let's consult some of the major ones here and see how this fits in. Utilitarian case for open borders. Clean cut, massive increase in utility for people in the poorer parts of the world moving here that's gonna compare it to the extreme poverty that they're in. That's going to dominate any utility losses to the native born who just don't like, who feel uncomfortable because now the poverty is not anonymous abroad but they see relative poverty nearer them. Efficiency, well the whole point of immigration restrictions is to stop things that would be efficient from moving across borders. The massive dollar gains tell you that it's a win there. Egalitarian, clearly if you care about the poor, this is something that you can do to help them, probably the best thing that you can do to help the world's real poor. And within that framework fits the Rawlsian framework of maximizing the welfare of the least well off as well because all of the people who are losers in the native born country are all much better off than these least well off people moving. The libertarian rights one. Right now immigration restrictions prevent capitalist acts between consenting adults. You can't sell your home for someone to be a permanent resident in if they don't happen to be one of the 300 million people who are RNA in the United States. You can't choose to employ a foreigner. These are capitalist acts among consenting adults that should not be prohibited if we're just in rights theory. Even if you're native centric, meaning all I care about is the welfare of the US, if these foreigners could gain so much by coming here, redistribute it to the people and some of it into the people in America and the native is positioned on this also has to be pro-immigration. This is a case where I think we have most of your major contending moral theories all point in the same direction if you believe the cause and effect that economics is telling you on this. And the theory that that's based off is core comparative advantage, non-controversial part of economics. The resource at stake is the most productive that we have in the world, human labor and its creativity. And there are major barriers to that right now. And that's why we find these massive games. So I think open immigration is a radical policy but it's only radical because the status quo is radically unjust and inefficient. And we should go about changing that. Thank you all for watching. Thank you all in the audience for tuning in as well. And that's it. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Scott.


All right, all right, all right. Here we are guys Fred Warner number 47 on the list of the top 100 NFL players of 2022 Sorry in 2022. He's a linebacker for 49ers and You know, he's he's he's memorable. He's got he's got a real decent set of hair I'm not gonna say that I know too much more about him I I've most probably seen him in the list last year. Look forgive me. Anyways guys. Let's get into it Warner for their toss of the coin. What do you think they're gonna call? Yeah, oh captain of the defense. Here we go So imagine wearing Jordans to play football. I know he's got spikes on the bottom, but still What what? Hang on has he got his boots on are they cleats They don't look like it to me. I know they are right assume. They are I've been seeing a lot of it. No, they are but still All right, so he's a master coin tosser and he was 21 on the list last year. Well, that's why I know Well, what we lose way now what we lose way now, who's the best linebacker not named Darius Leonard? Oh man Well, I'll tell you what this is the first time we've seen Darius Leonard and it's always a pleasure Fred Warner. He's doing a great job of helping out 49ers get to the championship game as they did Fred Warner racks up tackles and And coin toss victories just not other sexy stats like sex or pics The players who vote acknowledge intangibles and measurables the will to win Tell you what some of my favorite moments Sorry, I'll let you open your eyes there, mate. Think about I was doing your dirty there some of my favorite moments from these videos are seeing the camaraderie between The opposite teams, you know between the certain players That respect players in their position on the other team. I really love it. I really do And we've just seen a lot of it there I'm a player that you have the most respect for it's Fred Warner I got a lot of respect for the way he plays the game the way he goes about his business I got the most respect for him because how he understands the game how he sees the game He's a quarterback. That's how he plays the defense Playing Fred Warner.  I'll keep causing having all right corners No deep balls. That's a cheap right here. All right smart fast physical backer covers ground Fred Warner reminds me a little keeky lookie. He lives all over the field. No matter where the ball's a strong zone He's um covering tight ends punching the ball out. We gotta go punch the ball out man. A lot of guys won't wrap up They'll just punch Warner punched it out Tell you what if I was a running back.  He grabs with one and punches with the other Oh, let me tell you what if you if you're a hybrid of the two you're wrapped with one arm and you punch with the other Oh, mate Well, I can't really say much. Can I you're never gonna catch him out of position or like on a Simon bus?  I love his engine. He's definitely one of those top linebackers in the game right now Here's Warner relishing another job with no statistic Blocking the guard That's what happens when a linebacker comes up against a guard.  Oh my god. Oh Respect I try blogging for you and I got laid out. I try I try to pull my head in there.  I Rekind that's probably one of my favorite plays this series Oh, that was so cool. That was so cool. All right guys I didn't even think I've looked up Fred Warner stats, but I don't need to I don't need to the man is a He's a stalwart of the top 50 and for that. I say thanks for the memories Thanks for the entertainment and I'll see you next year. Cheers guys peace out in the next one We're looking to running back Austin Echler. Don't know much about him I don't think he's been on the list before if he has my bad But as I say, I don't mind my running backs cheers guys and I'll see you in the next one peace


Twitter account C3Lingo. I'm happy as always to announce the next guest. He does not shy away from entering into conflict with the German Foreign Intelligence Agency. Who of you knows de-kicks the commercial internet exchange? Now, who knows the history that they have, the huge internet exchange with the foreign intelligence service. You can do the first part. Yes, they still need that info. To keep a long story short, de-kicks versus the state or the G10 or BND law and the protection from basic laws. G10 being the law to restrict communication secrecy in Germany. Now, the thing about protecting from basic rights was complicated. Of course, my first opinion was that it's these basic laws themselves that need protection, but these are protections from those basic laws, as we will see. I'll now skip through a few things at the beginning, just to motivate you to what this is about. It's the protection from surveillance and the thing to be protected is the secrecy of communications. We've heard of that and the German Constitutional Court has put it as the perception of freedom that cannot be totally registered and recorded. That is part of the constitutional identity of Germany, which Germany has to strive for on the international stage. The difficult thing here is that the services that are to protect these basic laws now yield questions where we have to ask whether these services actually violate these basic laws. Are they being protected or not? To say that in advance, is this just about content data or any metadata? In Germany, it's a very simple rule. It's in the criminal code that the secrecy of communications not only applies to content, but also the circumstances who is talking to whom, even attempted connections if these connections fail. All that is under the protection of this Article 10 of the German Constitution Secrets of Communications. The European Court of Justice has seen it quite similarly. They said that metadata actually yields complete profiles of the network who is doing things with whom. How do they conduct their lives, who are their friends and all that? Even the metadata is enough to recognize that it's not just about content. That's always a topic if services like the German Foreign Service argue that communications data can be stored. Thankfully, we have a judgment that was gained by reporters without borders in this case. Now, these mass recording is a global trend, unfortunately. All services try to have systematic access to data, bulk access. That's the term they use. So they want metadata, communications data, but also private collections such as Facebook or Google, which records interest through search queries. And they try to access those data directly without filter and only filter within the service as they have the data. And the more extreme things are things like the GCHQ in Britain, where they recorded the data going through C-cables and were able to do a rollback across a few days at least. So they noticed, oh, there's something interesting here. Who did these people communicate with a few days beforehand? They tried to even find out that. And because of the amount, that can be difficult. And that also applies to the espionage software products that services sometimes use. And we've seen that some of the best-known software came from the labs of NSA and Co. And that is an increasing problem. This is all about acquisition of data. And to understand what the German Foreign Service is doing, what is the actual task and profile, it's to supply the government and ministries and police with information as required about political, economical and technological developments who has new technologies, perhaps military issues, where are there troop movements who's planning something in the background, but this great term abstract or concrete threats for the security of Germany and its citizens. Now, that is something that you can pin everything to. And the things we're going to talk about is actually pinned to these abstract and concrete threats. We don't know who is actually planning something, it's just without any particular target. The task profile, their priority topics are proliferation, that's weapons trade, international terrorism, failing states, such as Syria perhaps, where states just fall apart, all conflicts about resources, the gas politics and things like that. Are we still getting oil somewhere or things like that? Officially, the targets are the near and middle east, North Africa, west and central Asia, but in case of doubts, this can always be spun a bit wider. And what's the legal framework here? There are targeted measures where you know who you want to target, who you want to investigate. That's what police forces normally do, but sometimes secret services too. And then providers are compelled through telecommunications surveillance, cell queries, all targeted attacks on mobile phones or computers of individual people. And in theory, the so-called restriction on secretive communications in the domestic sphere. So whenever the computer is involved as a tool, so this could apply in the interior, in domestically. And then you have the topics that we are going to talk about really. The untargeted strategic surveillance measures, which again affects the article on restriction communication secrecy. So this is the restriction of the basic law in the German constitution. And this law explains under which conditions someone can listen into communications, someone from the secret services, we should say. And relatively new, since 2016, the law on the Federal Criminal Police Office, no, sorry, the law on the Foreign Secret Service regulating where they can investigate abroad, but no law on domestic investigations. There's always has to be some kind of reference to the international level. But then also cyber threats in the domestic sphere in another law are part of it too. Now, untargeted surveillance in Germany only happened according to that G10 law until 2016, which was passed in 1999 and of course was challenged legally by NGOs and the opposition. And the German Constitutional Court then ruled that yes, this is allowed because there are these great protections in the G10 law. The protection of citizens is achieved by only having international telecommunications affected by this restriction to secrecy. Now, this was limited to 20% of the capacity of telephone lines, international lines. And the regions that were targeted were defined and what you look for, this all had to be part of the application to restrict someone's secrecy of communications. And those applications will have to be checked every three months. And those were regarded by the Constitutional Courts as vital protections, no targeted search queries and no subject from the core area of private conduct of life, which is specifically protected by the German constitutions. They must not be targeted by this. Then in October 2016, the law on domestic communications investigations happened. Now, this law claims that the constitutional questions in the G10 law are not affected because it separates into communications of Germans and citizens of other countries. So if you, as a German in Moscow, have a phone call with someone in Paris, you are not allowed to be surveilled. But other foreigners can be targeted wherever they are. Sharing of data with partner services defined by certain treaties is allowed according to this new law. And there is a new controlling institution, a new commission that is supposed to allow this in a more open way, but they don't really check anything they just nod things through in practice. This is actually a legalization of the practices that the NSA, the NSA Investigating Committee of the German Parliament found. They actually found that this is all not possible, and then this new law was passed that made it all possible. Now, the State Secretary in the German Treasury, who is still responsible for the secret services, said in response to a question whether this law was made for the employees of the Secret Service or protecting citizens. The answer was he was only interested in the legal certainty for the employees of the Secret Service. Now, you could understand someone responsible for the Secret Service is saying this, but as an answer from the whole Treasury, that is not a good answer. Now, what was regulated in this new law? Now investigations are possible in the domestic sphere in the inland. There are no limits on capacity that can take as much as they want. It doesn't have to be limited to certain lines. Only every nine months does a permission have to be extended and the data can be fished in the country. And there is no real control anymore. The reasoning says that the budget of the services would be sufficient as a restriction. The fact that these budgets could always be increased was not really addressed. Now, the saying was that no laws were restricted, no Germans could by accident be surveilled. Other EU citizens were not that well protected according to that. It was significantly targeted because of the restrictions, but even the German Parliament's scientific service said that this is not possible in this way. But the coalition thought this was a very good law and it's an international example actually. So, there are complaints. Many parties and the Constitutional Court is looking at it. The opposition and certain NGOs have filed complaints. We are not involved. Now, let's go to the DE kicks surveillance to keep to the time limit. This started in 2008 when we were approached and told that we were an international node. Traffic from several countries comes together. All these lines go to lead to the abroad, which is not really true. So, that was why we were supposed to be allowed to be surveilled. That was in 2008 and the new law was only passed in 2016. And we have these orders according to the G10 law on restrictions of the secrecy of communications that were used as a foundation. And when the filters did not apply, when Germans communicated with citizens from abroad, that's when the filter did not apply, the G10 filter, but that was solved by the new law. Data is freely usable by the services as long as it's not two Germans that communicate between each other. And the use of the data in that opinion is permissible even according to paragraph 3, which is specific orders when a secret service knows that it wants a certain phone number, a certain person, then it can order this according to paragraph 3 and that since 2015 is possible. And the insights glean can actually pass on to other authorities, too, since 2015. For example, the Inland Domestic Service, the Agency for Internet Security, Information Technology Security, and requests can also be given to this partner organizations to then delete the data, which is, of course, very likely to happen. We in 2009 had our doubts, we said it won't work this way, it cannot, this is line-based in the law, but these are packet-based communications. What is 20% is that line capacity or do I have to look at each type of communication separately? What does that actually mean? How do I translate something that was passed as a law for telephony into this new technology? And also the abroad, we're not really a virtual abroad. We are transporting data from one route in Frankfurt to another route in Frankfurt. So these international lines are arriving at a route in Frankfurt, that is connected to another route in Frankfurt, and from there it goes somewhere. Germany, internationally, we don't know, actually. So we don't know how these other carriers that we link to have shaped the networks. And that's why the separation of international and international carriers, most, if you have customers in Germany and abroad, are these international or international carriers. Sometimes the national subsidiaries are our customers, but still the network might be an international one. How are you supposed to separate this? And everything has to be stored temporarily anyway. Because you have to put things together afterwards. If you don't store it temporarily, you can't analyze anything. How are you going to filter it afterwards? No idea. And then the chancellor said, no, no, it's all permissible. It's all the legal framework is there. And then we actually let them soothe us. This was the first terrorism debate at the time. We had cases where children were groomed by organizations in Cologne or something. So we said, okay, we'll go along. We probably are able to trust the German chancellery. Now 2009, right? And then came Snowden and the NSA investigation commission in the German parliament. And we realized it doesn't work this way. The top legal experts say basic rights apply to foreigners as well. This virtual abroad and free sky, it's just not, doesn't hold. And the systems don't work. The legal protections, which were all rudimentary anyway, but the results were much worse. And the technical and one violation actually would be too much. We found completely impossible. I'll come back later to what the figures actually mean. And the fact that the data that is not marked as G10 could be exchanged now. We also thought that that saw that this won't work. We can't just swap, exchange those data. So even the former head of the commission overseeing G10 measures said this completely, it doesn't hold water. If you look at this according to G10 and then exchange data, it doesn't work. You are abusing our commission to get a rubber stamp. And the data was also stored much longer than it was permissible. So we realized we have to get active. We can't just continue as we did. And we then asked Mr. Papier, a former judge at the Constitutional Court, to write an expertise. He was the head of the German Constitutional Court formally. And he wrote, he oversaw the judgment on earlier cases. And he clearly told us that human rights are not German rights. It doesn't matter who is communicating. If it's in Germany, within Germany then anyway. But if a German service is doing the investigations then probably too. The constitution applies. But in any case, protections have to be there. And according to his evaluation, which he actually wrote down in his expertise, the whole orders were impermissible. And it's very rare to get such a clear statement that it's impermissible. So all our doubts in 2009 were confirmed. And we clearly had to find out whether this was permissible because we did not want to be part of violations of basic rights. That was unthinkable for us. So we said we have to do something. And the responsible institution is always the Federal Administrative Court here in Leipzig, the first and last instance. And what was scared is that all the protections from the G10 law, so we went to the court, we filed our complaint and some lessons were learned as the papers were exchanged because some things were admitted in the replies that we didn't know about. Some things we didn't even ask for, but they wrote it anyway. For example, that all protections from the 2001 judgment had been bypassed. So the limits for 20% of capacity was administratively bypassed. So you sometimes look at 100% of capacity. Now target areas and search terms. You simply put all the orders and all the applications together. And have a large target area, but that was not the intention. And the filtering is taking place at the service, not the provider. We actually had overlooked that. The Constitutional Court had said that one of the protections is that the reduction, these percentages to a certain region and search term have to happen at the provider so that the rest of the data isn't even seen by the service. That was an elementary protection, but that is not happening. They are getting everything as it is. And the other thing that was admitted completely surprising to us was that some of these protections from the paragraph 10 of the GTN law, there are certain questions when the searches were targeted to individual people that certain purposes have to be adhered to. It has to be limited to certain purposes, and that was bypassed as well. And we thought, you cannot do this, but it has been done. And the information of the people affected, according to the other side, was only necessary if storage and identification is actually taking place. And storage means that someone has seen the data, analyzed the data and said, oh, I'm not really interested in that and then deletes it. That they do not call storage. So that's an interesting thing to discuss, but in our opinion, that is only possible in automated systems not if a human person first has to look at it before it's being deleted and analyzed it before it's being deleted. Then it's still storage. Now, surprisingly to us, the way the process worked, our complaint was simply rejected and only checked by formal criteria. And the reasoning was that only a formal check is necessary. The actual content is not interesting to us. All the doubts were not checked. Now, this was about two-thirds of all the papers that had been written concerning the actual content. The admissibility of the orders was not checked. The freedom of profession was not affected, they said. And then they thought they didn't have to do anything. It was all right. And they did not deal at all with the question what happens with this inland communication that is actually not allowed to be passed on. So the court didn't care about that at all. The reasoning was primarily that we are not affected, so we cannot act on that, because only the G10 commission is actually capable to do that because that's what I meant for it, we cannot do that. And we even told them that we are users and we are afflicted by that as well, but they just said no. They said that's just a means to circumvent applicable law. So that was tough from them. It was also quite surprising that the intelligence service has their own way of ordering themselves. We did not even ask for that, so that was really surprising. And we were asking to the Supreme Court, because that was the only way we had. And we were asking if that was really okay, what they did. And we said that this does not work at all. This does not apply to all the paper that has been submitted. And we wrote completely different, we made completely different applications, and none of that was recognized, none of that was even read. And we said this is not how the law works. And then we said it doesn't work like that. To get orders that work within the law, we can't just get orders that are against the law. So the court order must explain how it's not relevant for us. So we couldn't even tell if this court order was administrational that we could fight against it or what it was. So it was really incomplete. So it was just, we were just told no. So this is a really long text, and I really made it this long, so you can find all the relevant information in there. So the court said no, we do not have to explain that. And we said you cannot apply to this court. That's why we do not have to explain why we do not accept your application. And yeah, they just didn't want to do that. They said if it really was against the law, they had to reject everything and just no. And they also said that the intelligence service was allowed to do their own administrative actions, but they never said if they did that. So we know nothing more than we knew before, and we have all the same questions as before. So we do not know if, according to the content, it's lawful. We do not know if the amount of surveillance is lawful. So there are even more doubts than before now. There was no decision. If we have to follow these orders, nothing was decided. So they are allowed to order, but it was not decided if it was in order what they sent us. And since they do not want to check what the orders contain, they won't check it at all. So we went to the Supreme Court in Germany. To the constitutional court, sorry. And this is what happened then. This is what happens now. And what we want is that the whole deal will be checked, whether it's lawful. And there's this principle where you only have to follow orders from the state that are lawful. And if an order from the state is not lawful, then that includes that you just cannot say, the court cannot say, well, we are not checking whether it's lawful, it just doesn't work this way. So this really calls into question the whole G10 law, because everything that in 2010 told us that we can agree to this G10 law, nothing of those provisions were really held. And nothing of that works. So the G10 law, how it's really used or lived these days, that does not, that's just not the same that we agree to back then. And it's just not okay that a federal administration does all that. It's simply not working. At the same time, we still don't have any way for protection of civilians. So according to the G10 law, civilians cannot apply to a court as long as they are not informed. And the companies, even if they know that something unlawful happened, are not allowed to apply to court as well. So the only one who is left is the G10 commission, and even they are not allowed to apply to court. So there is actually no protection at all as nobody is allowed to apply to the courts. The G10 commission is not allowed since they are not a juristical person. And so we also said that this is not how the law is supposed to work, because nobody is allowed to apply to a court, and there must always be a way to protect yourself against unlawful proceedings. In our personal opinion, the administrative court is just whistling out, they are making it too simple for themselves, because they are just refusing. And as the last instance, they really have to do that, but they just don't want to. We also went to court against the new law, the BND, so the Foreign Intelligence Law Act. And we received orders in the end of 2017, and immediately went to court. And in November of this year, they already told us that we should take it back until the law is tested against the constitution. So we would agree with that if the orders were also taken back until the constitutional aspect is checked. So we are not taking back our complaints, but this is still work in progress. It not much has happened so far. We are also of the opinion that the same opinion as MST International that this law and this act is not in compliance with the basic law of the constitution of Germany, and so we expect it to be taken back, but we can't be sure that the constitutional court will really do that. I also want to stress how important the data procession is. So we don't want to be the ones who protect civilians, but the problem is that only the filter system of the intelligence service can protect the civilians, protect the people. And now the question is how good is this filter? And well, all this is supposed to be tested and checked, but it's just not tested by anyone. And it can also just be turned off for half a year for internal tests. The intelligence service can just order themselves to turn off the filters. And what that means is that basically everything, from not only foreignness but also inland civilians, will be collected and processed, which is really not allowed. And they say, yeah, they are not allowed to really use it, but then still they can weasel out, except if it's according to the profile of the agency. So the quality of the filter system, it has several layers. They described it quite in detail. There is an IP filter, a type filter, a metadata filter, and also the information within the communication, not only the metadata. There are reports that guess the filter system to be 98.5% to 99% accurate. And commercial filters are reached 99.5%, but they do nothing else. So at least if you reach layer three and four, you should already tell people in our opinion. But now let's add a real number. So in peak we have 6.5 terabytes. That's 12 million flows per second. And in average we have 3.4 terabytes. That is 7.5 million flows per second in average. So we have 650 billion connections per day. And a very good filter of 99.9% would still lose 0.65 billion connections per day. And with a filter quality of 99% that's 6 billion connections per day. So if you check the Parliamentary Control Commission in 2015, there were 58 checks. And six were final. No, one was final. Six were not final. 51 were just not known. 2016 it was already 178 processings. Nine of them, none final, four final and 166 not known. And I just don't know how you get from 1.5 billion connections per day to 178 per year. So how this happens is just a secret of the agency. And whoever does that, nobody knows. The information of afflicted people just cannot happen. And the work the Commission has to do just cannot be done. And there are also some proceedings that were stopped. But the question is if this really works, and there probably are way better ways to get the information they really need. And we still do not know how much of this is communications within Germany. So of course if you grab all this data, there will be inner German communications. There are providers that have 85% only German customers. And all that will land at the agency that is not allowed to use this data at all. So this data should have to be deleted immediately, but the control agreement is not supposed to check on that because the service is not allowed to have this data at all. So it's not their job to check on that. And nobody is checking on that. So one problem is that the Foreign Intelligence Service already proved that they are not to be trusted. 18 severe violations and 12 official complaints were noted. And the Commission noted that they cannot force the Foreign Intelligence Service to do anything. And without legal basis they still recorded personal data and systematically used it. And even the Data Privacy Commissioner of the Foreign Secure Service complained about a lack of understanding for the basic rights and the function of protections of basic rights. Now whether that has been able to be improved, I doubt if I see what the requests we still receive and how we still are supposed to continue, I have to say it's going to be difficult. So what's the approach? If basic rights are violated, people are supposed to be informed. Interestingly there's no budget for that. No one has one. Neither the G10 Commission nor the Services. Maybe these amounts are a bit complicated. The interesting thing is that that's one of the interesting problems that we are talking about very different amounts. It's not clear what is the right amount, who is supposed to do it and who has to report to whom about what they actually received. Clearly the G10 Commission is supposed to check every three months whether the information of the people affected is still suspended. Only after five years a final lack of information is possible. They have a meeting a month every month of about two hours length. I can't really imagine that they check individual cases whether someone is informed or not. The problem is if you just use simple mathematics, the whole parliamentary control mechanism cannot function if what you are supposed to do constitutionally, which is individual cases, if you can't look at that, it doesn't work. And these five years are an interesting circumvention as well. If you have to put someone back in the queue, then the data is not supposed to be deleted. Normally it should only be kept for six months. Thanks for your attention. Yes, come to center please. That means you were very quick. Yes, I did my best. Now we have 20 minutes for questions and answers. Do you think we can do that? Oh, if there are enough questions. Where's the signal engine? Are there any questions? Yes. Let's give it a go. Can the D6 take it out of the intelligence agency and just... Can't you just pull the plug and leave it to the services to go to the courts and pass and get a judgement? Yes, we could do that, but the question is in the moment you go to court, you are not forced to put it into practice. Just in case it happens that in the German state... The judgement has to be executed immediately. If a measure is elementary for the existence of the German state, which is what these things say, then you are compelled to implement. If you don't, then you are in violation of the law. If I have a complaint and therefore tell others that they are violating the law and then violate the law yourself, that's not a good way to go about it. So as we are compelled, we do continue to implement. It's a bit difficult, but as I said, it's difficult to argue in front of judges why you are breaking the law yourself because you're actually telling the other people the other side that they are violating the law. Okay, second microphone. I have the following question. When the provider of Lava Bits uses a servant according to his address known that he cannot protect his customer's data before listening to his service. This act of behalf of D6, not about due date. Wouldn't it be time for the D6 to close down?  No, I mean we should. It's a bit more complicated. It's not our customers. It's not the carriers. Our customers are the carriers. So the actual end customers are indirect. So we suggest we send data using encryption we wanted to but there is no standard that we can agree on. So the exchange has to happen somewhere and the carriers have to exchange data. If we were to shut down our services, the data would use other lines that would analyze the same problem. So it's a difficult subject and we haven't quite arrived at that conclusion yet. I need an explanation for the relation of the numbers. The smallest number in 2016 and millions of daters in 178. This is the official number of the parliamentary control agreement in the Strategic Surveillance Update Communication Service. That's 178 per year. We think it's a weird number as well, how to get from A to B but this is the filtering application. Thank you. Good question. Someone from the Internet? If Great Britain is not part of the European Union anymore, are those partisans of the Sixth thrown out? That's not necessary as I explained that they're inside. That's the German Intelligence Service, Federal Service. According to our knowledge, they're not listening so I don't have any clue that they're listening. But we are happy. German colleagues are always happy to swap. The German services like to exchange data with the British colleagues anyway, whether they're in the EU or not. But if we win our case then maybe we can put a stop to that and stop this kind of surveillance from happening. Although it doesn't quite answer the question but I would like to clarify that we are accusing the German state and German laws if it's stuck to the law and the law would then allow this, then we would probably not take action. I have to make that clear. If society arrives at the opinion that this is permissible then this discussion has to be placed within society what is allowed, what secret services can do. We are only acting against secret services doing something that they are not allowed to do is far beyond. This is German citizen's data being leaked within the country and there is no legal foundation for that. That's not possible and volumes. If there is a 20% limit somewhere in the law then I can't just look at the 100% and just accumulate all these administrative orders to look at all the data. That's not how it works. That is not done. So if the service would stick to the law maybe the law has to be changed that would be someone else's task to influence. The NGOs do that. We do get in touch with parliament to improve the law so that things can actually be looked up. In Norway you have this thing where the commission there can look at all the measures that their service is actually executing at the time and we cannot do that. We have to wait for the report from the service and so these are things that you can tackle. I would like to go back to the Lava bit case. The solution was that the keys that were demanded were printed out. Isn't that a measure that you could apply in this case to print out the traffic? And forward it to the responsible person like mail on a database, hard drive. You can do anything with latency but that not. Microphone 7? I have two questions. How is the resonance of politics? One is the response of politicians. They don't like mathematics, neither do they. How is the response of politicians? Surprisingly it's very diverse. The opposition think it's very graced. They are doing well. But also the coalition, they are against it and there has to be change. It's a difficult subject. Everybody is working for security, deceiving. They always get what they want. It's a very difficult task on a political field and we are very hopeful that there will be there is change going on. The constitution of courts hasn't responded in a long time. It has been quiet for a long time. They have a lot of cases pending. And the fact that they hope that something will happen next year the chamber might change and we hope that something will be decided before that. The second question is, if the complaint goes through and you win, who is now going to be held liable? Is it the chair of authority? The individual employee of the chicken service will they be held liable? That's an interesting question. That's quite difficult. So the employee did break the law if they did that knowingly. So I have to say that their boss really does his job protecting his employees but unfortunately in such cases usually nobody is punished. Nobody has to fear to be punished in any way. Maybe they lose their job but since they are state employees they will not lose their job. They will just get a pension. So you can't really expect a lot. We just want to put an end to this. Microphone number four. If we remember, we think back to the fact that Safe Harbor was abolished because this was targeted mass surveillance in the US because that existed in the US. Isn't this kind of thing also against European basic rights that the European Court of Justice gets involved or if you use the D6 node are you then actually guilty of violating privacy because mass surveillance is taking place there? But then there's always the metadata too. I understand the idea but unfortunately national security is not part of data protection. So European law does not really cover this. So maybe you will be right in court but usually nothing follows. Normally there's just a new law and they'll just keep on doing the same thing because it's just one law they were violating and that gets corrected. So usually these laws just don't apply to national security. GDPR for example excluding national security. My question goes to similar, to similar action. Now, how difficult is it to have all this work within German borders and not look abroad? You have to look at what is happening where and if countries like Italy or France nobody will usually think to take the country or the government to court because they want the data. We are really advanced in this because we have quite a good understanding of the law and what the law should be like for civilians. And if you look at the states within Germany you can see how different this is handled and it's very difficult to keep an overview of everything. So carriers are sometimes asking us what do I have to give to whom if they are asking so people are asking for different stuff and the law situation is very different in different states. So the law of one federal state allows something or obliges us for something. It's not quite clear. The microphone too. The question is what practically the content of such an administrative order is. Can you talk about this? Are you compelled to hand out immediate execution? So normally you are not allowed to even talk about this so I could not tell you what is in this orders. Usually sometimes it's quite detailed on why it's necessary including some terroristic group names. Sometimes it's quite strange. Human trafficking might be involved. Sometimes it's not really reasonable why this is now related to human trafficking but yeah. Question from the news. How about the surveillance of those 20% of traffic? How are these 20% calculated and is this legally, does it hold water? That's the question that we always have. We always were questioning that this is reasonable and the federal office suggested that you just sequest all the data into piles and then you can take 20% of the piles which sounded quite reasonable in my opinion. But now it sounds quite different that they just write so many orders and applications that they just take 20% of everything they wanted and just look at 100% of that. So the question of 20% does not really apply because you just write the correct orders. Almost about to laugh, sorry. And yes, it's a laughable judgment. Microphone 8 please. First of all, huge thanks for trying to protect our rights. Please continue, don't give up. Although it seems to be a fight against the windmills. Now my question, you said that as a citizen you can't immediately apply to the G10 permission. Now according to Article 13 in the Copyright Regulation, there was the question of eased access by citizens to the providers. Would it be an approach here to create a sign of kind of portal? You mean the Portals Without Borders portal, yeah. That only the G10 Commission is responsible for that that wrote the Administration Court and there is supposed to be a right to complain but it's a good question if you can complain if you are not informed. And I myself, I'm trying to reason that I cannot go back from my knowledge and therefore know that I'm under surveillance but I doubt that they will understand that correctly. Microphone 1. I'm interested to know how direct it is that the traffic experiments are using a VPN client and their trick might be in the Netherlands. I never said I know it but this service provider says we know how to do it. The very interesting thing is that Germans, for Germans it has to be a code 100% that the data that is re-analyzed already in the law it states that if two Germans communicate abroad we can't secure it, if two French communicate abroad we never know. That's how it's stated in the law. I don't see the point why that's so. Nobody can explain it, they just took it over. Do they look at the connections or at the information? They can look in the data but how deep the depth of the analysis cannot be estimated. It's hard to estimate. It's very complicated as it doesn't only differentiate between home and abroad. It would work if communication is only in a home and abroad. According to the PDLA we could take a look at it. However, looking at the nationality the communication of two Germans abroad cannot be... So the only way to do it is to look at the data. I have no idea how they want to do it. This is how it's in the reason of law. You know what this man deserves now?  Thank you, thank you everyone. Thank you very much for your work. Thank you for listening.


This is Wayne LeCiao and welcome to Necrogenous Torts and Professional Liability, Module 4B, Part B. In this part, we'll look at the rules to determine the existence of a duty of care, specifically reasonable foreseeability, proximity, and policy. We'll focus on the question, am I obligated to you to act carefully? To answer that question, we need to look at three different things. The first is reasonable foreseeability, the second is proximity, and the third is policy. If you remember way back in Module 1.2, one of the sources of law in Canada is case law created by the courts. The negligence tort was essentially created by a court case which involved a Mrs. Donahue, a bottle, and a snail. Mrs. Donahue, here's a picture of an actress that portrayed Mrs. Donahue or her full name was Mae Donahue in a very insignificant movie on this case. Mae Donahue was a young woman who was married and this was in the late 1920s in Scotland, and she had arranged to meet with a friend. The historical records are not clear as to who this friend is, but some people speculate it was a man that she was having an affair with. But anyhow, she did meet this friend at a cafe in Glasgow, Scotland called the Well Meadow Cafe. At this cafe, the friend ordered food and drink for the both of them. So the significant fact there is that the contract for the purchase of the food and drink was between the friend and the Well Meadow Cafe. Some of that drink was a bottle of ginger beer which was consumed by Mae Donahue. And after she had finished drinking the whole bottle of ginger beer, a snail poured out of the bottle. So this was a dead disgusting decomposed snail that had been in the drink that she had just consumed. So she immediately or at least soon after felt very ill and eventually she was admitted into a hospital at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And then sometime after she left hospital she did get better. She sued the manufacturer of the ginger beer which was a David Stevenson. The name of this case was Donahue and Stevenson. And the legal obstacle that Mae Donahue encountered when she started this case was that usually you needed a contractual or some other kind of special relationship with someone in order to be able to sue them. Now remember the person who contracted to buy the drink was her friend. It was not Mae Donahue. Mae Donahue does not have a contractual relationship with the manufacturer Mr. Stevenson. So this case eventually made its way up to the highest court in the UK which is called the House of Lords. And at the House of Lords Mae Donahue was successful. The judge created this principle called the neighbor principle which essentially allowed her to sue and to claim liability for the injuries that she suffered from drinking the ginger beer. The judge that wrote the judgment was called Lord Atkin. And what he said was very important so I will read it word for word here. He said, you must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. Who then in law is my neighbor? The answer seems to be persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions that are called in question. So essentially he was saying even if you don't have a special relationship or contract with someone if you can reasonably foresee that what you do or don't do would likely injure another person who we would call your neighbor then you owe a duty of care to them. From the Donahue and Stevenson case we get the principle of reasonable foreseeability. The question to be applied here is was it reasonably foreseeable that the plaintiff could be harmed by the defendant's carelessness. So the thing to keep in mind about this legal test is that it is what we call an objective test. In other words the question or a more specific question we ask is what a reasonable person have known that its activities might harm the plaintiff. So this comes from the neighbor principle from Donahue and Stevenson. So this is an objective test meaning that we are imagining what a reasonable person would have known. It's not a subjective test in that we are not asking whether or not the defendant, the person involved, the person being sued whether or not the defendant actually knew that their activities might harm the plaintiff. Let's have a look at this quick quiz question. Please pause this video at this time so that you may consider the question and also feel free to look at the previous slide. Callum may owe a duty of care to Emma if, and the answer is B, it was reasonably foreseeable that Callum's acts or omissions could harm Emma. So the key words in that answer were reasonably foreseeable. The other choices were wrong. A said Callum knew that his acts or omissions would harm Emma. What Callum actually knew is not relevant. C, Callum intended to harm Emma. Intention to harm is also not relevant and also D, Emma was not being careless. So that's not relevant in determining duty of care. That could be relevant in determining whether or not Emma is contributorily negligent, which we will talk about later on when we talk about defenses to negligence torts. The second requirement that is needed for a duty of care is proximity. Proximity is some kind of close and direct connection between the plaintiff and the defendant. That connection can arise in a number of different ways. It can be a physical connection, it can be social, commercial, a direct causal connection or reliance. The third thing that a court looks at in determining whether or not there is a duty of care is the topic or issue of policy. So even if the reasonable foreseeability test is passed and also the proximity test is passed, a court can still deny a duty of care on policy grounds. Now what do we mean by policy? So the question that we ask here is if a duty of care is imposed, what would be the effect on the legal system and society in general? So in essence what we're looking at are the larger effects of this case. So what are the effects beyond this case of finding a duty of care? Some examples of policy considerations that a court would look at. First is what we call opening the floodgates. So when a court says we don't want to find duty of care here because we fear that it would open the floodgates to litigation. What they're referring to is that if we find a duty of care in this one case, there are a large number of people in a similar situation who would use that case as the legal basis to launch their own lawsuits and thus swapping the courts with a whole flood of lawsuits. A second policy consideration that a court may look at is whether or not imposing a duty of care will interfere with a political decision. The third is will finding a duty of care hurt a certain kind of valuable type of relationship, a relationship that we value in society. And a last example of a policy consideration is if we do find a duty of care, will that provide an incentive for others in similar situations to act carefully so as to avoid liability? To understand how a court applies policy considerations in determining duty of care, let's look at the case of Cooper and Hobart of the Supreme Court of Canada. The facts of that case involve an investor named Mary Cooper. So she had invested in a mortgage corporation called Aaron Mortgage Corp.  And Mary Cooper's investment was essentially worthless. So Mary Cooper sued the registrar of mortgages. The registrar of mortgages is a part of the Ontario government and is responsible for regulating mortgage companies. And so Mary sued the registrar for negligence in allowing Aaron to carry on business even after it knew that Aaron was in violation of the Mortgage Brokers Act. The legal issue in this case was did the registrar owe a duty of care to Mary Cooper? The applicable law was the standard three-part test that we need to apply to have a duty of care. The first part is, is it reasonably foreseeable that the defendant's negligence would harm the plaintiff? The second is, is there sufficient proximity between the plaintiff and the defendant? And the third is looking at the policy considerations and whether or not there are policy considerations that are sufficient enough to deny a duty of care. The court applied the law to the facts and found that there was no duty of care owed by the registrar to Mary Cooper. The court's analysis involved applying the three steps or the three elements of the duty of care to the facts of this case. The first element of reasonable foreseeability was applied and the court found that it was reasonably foreseeable that the registrar's negligence in regulating Aaron would cause investors such as Mary Cooper to lose their money. The second element of the duty of care test which is proximity, the court said that since the registrar's job was to serve the general public, not individual investors like Mary Cooper, there was no close and direct connection between the registrar and Mary Cooper and therefore there was insufficient proximity. So since there was no proximity, that was enough to say that there was no duty of care owed by the registrar to Mary Cooper. The court however did not stop there. They still went ahead and looked at the policy considerations. The court concluded that based on policy considerations they needed to find that there was no duty of care owed in this case. The specific policy considerations that the court emphasized were that number one, they didn't want to interfere with the registrar's role which they viewed as being largely political and judicial. The second policy consideration that the court cited was that by finding a duty of care or if they did find a duty of care it would open floodgates for thousands of other affected investors to sue the registrar so the Supreme Court thought that that wasn't a good thing. And the third policy consideration was that the court cited was that if there was any payment made to Cooper by the registrar that money would be coming from tax dollars since the registrar was a part of the Ontario government. So that's what the court said. Now let's think about the policy considerations that could be used to find a duty of care. Now what are some of the positive larger effects of finding a duty of care in this case? I would say that a large positive effect of finding a duty of care which is the opposite of what the court said here is that if we do make the registrar liable here, we impose a duty of care, that would cause the registrar and other government regulators to be more careful in doing its job of regulating mortgage companies or whatever the responsibilities of the regulator are and in so doing that is a good thing. That is a good thing that is good for investors and good for the general public.