Bad Laws And The Best Of Intentions: Law Designed To 'Protect' Gig Workers May Destroy Journalism Freelancers

from the bad-ideas-done-badly dept

For years there have been arguments about the whole "gig work" economy, and how the various "gig workers" should be classified. Specifically, it historically came down to a question of whether or not they should be seen as contractors/freelancers or employees. Of course, the real answer should probably be "neither" and there should be a different classification altogether (if we must classify them). However, following a California Supreme Court ruling that found that the so-called "ABC Test" should be used for determining employment, California pushed for a law codifying that rule, which would, in theory, force tons of companies to reclassify contract/gig workers as "employees." Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law last month with a signing statement that claimed it was to combat the "hollowing out of our middle-class..." and suggesting this will somehow help workers.

Of course, there's what politicians say, and what their bills will actually do. And, so far, this bill, AB5, is looking like it will be a complete and utter disaster. First of all, on the side of gig workers for companies like Uber/Lyft/etc., those companies have already made it clear that they don't think the law applies to them, even though they were the kinds of companies most often cited when discussing the law. On top of that, they're pushing for a ballot measure that would effectively exempt them from the law even if it does apply to them (we've already discussed in the past just how ridiculous California's ballot measure procedure is...).

So, there's a damn good chance that this law won't come close to impacting the types of workers everyone was told it was designed to benefit. Instead... who it might hurt most are... journalists. A huge part of the journalism world works with freelance journalists, and they're now all realizing that the law may make journalism freelancing close to impossible. The author of AB5 had an apparently arbitrary and nonsensical standard applied to the bill concerning who would no longer qualify as a freelance journalist: anyone who writes more than 35 articles per year for a publication.

As for how lawmakers settled on the 35-submission figure, Gonzalez says that she and her team decided that a weekly columnist sounded like a part-time worker and so halved that worker's yearly submissions. After protest from some freelancers, the number was bumped up to 35. "Was it a little arbitrary? Yeah. Writing bills with numbers like that are a little bit arbitrary," she says.

That... is not good. When the lawmaker herself is admitting the process was effectively picking a number out of thin air and then making arbitrary adjustments. That's bad. And journalists are quite reasonably freaking out:

The author of the bill, Lorena Gonzales, has been responding on Twitter aggressively defending the plan. She eventually felt enough pressure to admit that she's open to change... but that they can't be put in place until after the law goes into effect in January.

Of course, that doesn't ease any of the concerns of tons of journalism freelancers, especially in California, who are completely screwed by this "arbitrary" standard that completely messes up their ability to be journalism freelancers. Also this comes after she retweeted someone calling one of the freelance journalists calling out the problems of this bill "a selfish piece of shit."

There are, clearly, good intentions behind this law. The concern about exploitation of workers by companies -- especially giant multi-billion dollar operations -- is a legitimate concern. But, as with so much that happens when you get politicians trying to write legislation without truly understanding what's happening, you get an end result that that doesn't solve the actual problem of exploitation, and only serves to make life worse for people who have the least power in the situation in the first place.

Filed Under: ab5, abc test, california, classifications, freelance, freelancers, gig economy, gig work, jobs, journalism, lorena gonazalez

The NSA Turns Everyone Into A 'Threat To National Security' By Instantly Classifying All Data It Scoops Up

from the and-the-people-you-talk-to?-also-threats dept

Now that it's common knowledge the NSA is collecting metadata on pretty much any American with a working phone and/or internet connection, some Americans are trying to find out what's been collected. Multiple FOIA requests have been sent to the NSA, but each one is receiving the same form letter -- one that states that any information, including affirmation or denial, would result in "exceptionally grave damage" to national security.

The DailyKOS has a writeup on another citizen's attempt to get some info on their info, only to be stonewalled by the NSA's rejection form letter. David Gershon Harris, the author of the DailyKOS piece, says that "dozens of others" have received similar letters.

It's not as if there aren't protections in place that allow redactions of certain information. The problem with the letter this person (IT specialist Clayton Seymour) received is that it points to a specific executive order.

[T]he central problem is this: Seymour's letter from the NSA points to Executive Order 13526, signed by President Obama in 2009, as justification for the NSA's FOIA exemption.

This order signed by Obama established a uniform system for classifying national security information, and stipulates that "information shall not be considered for classification unless its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security."

This qualification appears in section 1.4 of the executive order, after which follow many categories of information which may be marked as classified. The category the NSA points to in justifying the classification of all its data is this:

"(c) intelligence activities (including covert action), intelligence sources or methods, or cryptology"

By securing the metadata on millions of Americans through covert action, the NSA has given itself an "out." It will never have to reveal this information via a response to a FOIA request because all data collected is, by this definition, instantly classified. The use (or abuse) of this executive order implies something very unseemly about the NSA's thought processes.

The NSA, it seems, has classified every single piece of data on American citizens that it has seized and saved, even benign data culled from people like Seymour, who are no threat to U.S. national security.

What does this mean? In the eyes of the NSA, every person in the US who has had data collected covertly (in order to skirt Fourth Amendment protections), is a "threat to national security." The gathered data, even if incidentally gathered in the pursuit of terrorists, is instantly classified and stashed away securely. FOIA requests won't pry it loose.

There's no way the NSA truly believes every American is a threat, but that hasn't stopped it from gathering up everything it can and locking it up. The data that is supposed to be flushed from the system or otherwise protected from abuse by its holders? You can't have access to that either. Even the data it doesn't need has been given the same protection as that which could cause "identifiable or describable damage to national security."

This is the NSA's America. Everyone's a security threat. It just a matter of connecting the dots.

Filed Under: classifications, foia, national security, nsa, nsa surveillance

ACLU Drags The State Department To Court For Its Failure To Declassify Publicly Available Documents

from the joseph-heller's-coffin-clocked-at-over-7,200-rpm dept

Of all the spectacle surrounding the Wikileaks/Cablegate situation, nothing has proven to be more bizarre than the U.S. government's actions and policies concerning the continued classification of the leaked cables. One of its first efforts was its patented "escalating response", in which it first blocked off the Wikileaks site, followed by any site with the word Wikileaks in the title and, when this didn't seem to be burying its employees' heads in the sand quickly enough, it reached out to various security firms to see if they could build some sort of Wikileaks filtering system for its computers.

Things turned even more surreal when lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were not allowed to view leaked documents that had been published online by various news services. When is public information not truly "public?" Well, when it's "classified," of course. Had the principles not been currently fighting a legal battle in a U.S. court, they could have joined the rest of the U.S. (and the world) in reading and using these leaked documents.

In the business world, if a document is considered secret, it's commonly accepted that if it becomes public by other means, those with a contractual obligation not to discuss are now free from their obligations. This makes sense. Pretending that documents that are publicly available for all and which have been widely discussed in the press are not "public" doesn't make sense.

With a recently filed lawsuit against the State Department, the ACLU hopes to bring this legal catch-22 to its illogical conclusion and make publicly published documents officially public. Andy Greenberg (Forbes) explains the ACLU's rationale:

Given that all those memos have already been covered by the news media, why bother to declassify them anyway? "The point is to expose the legal fiction that the secrecy system rests on," says Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU. "The government uses this formality of secrecy to avoid having to answer for real violations of the law."

Wizner says that keeping the documents classified makes them much more difficult to use in courts, for instance, and allows the government to avoid confirming their authenticity.

The files that WikiLeaks released on Guantanamo detainees in April, for example, can’t be used by the defense lawyers for those prisoners unless they’re viewed in a secure government facility. “Government employees can’t read the New York Times. When I go to court in a real lawsuit seeking to get compensation for a victim’s ordeal and hold people liable, I can’t use this information,” Wizner says.

This should prove to be an alternately infuriating and entertaining case. There's going to be a whole lot of circular reasoning in play, all of it under the pretense of protecting state secrets that everyone already knows. The sad part is that taxpayers will be footing the bill for the government's last-ditch attempt to close several barn doors, while warily keeping an eye on all the free-roaming horses.

Filed Under: cables, classifications, state department, wikileaks
Companies: aclu, wikileaks