> Article I of the United States Constitution lists issuing letters of marque and reprisal in Section 8 as one of the enumerated powers of Congress, alongside the power to tax and to declare war.
“It is a power enumerated in the Constitution of 1789” does not mean “It is a practice still relevant in the world of 2023”. The US hasn’t issued any Letters of Marque and Reprisal since 1815, and while it remains a Constitutional power of the US government that a couple Republican members of Congress keep trying to breathe active life into since 9/11, it seems well and truly dead in practice.
It does not need such letters anymore. The US got a better thing called "sanctions", which apparently allow US Navy to forcefully detain ships on the high seas and sell their stuff on the grounds of them being engaged in "illegal trade", despite the ship having nothing to do with the US.
True, its hard to imagine a situation where privateers would add any measurable capacity to the US Navy.
> The US got a better thing called “sanctions”, which apparently allow US Navy to forcefully detain ships on the high seas and sell their stuff on the grounds of them being engaged in “illegal trade”, despite the ship having nothing to do with the US.
That kind of sanctions, don’t replace letters of marque (letters of marque are a way of getting private ships to perform functions for which you would otherwise need to use a Navy, which can include commerce raiding or, I suppose, enforcing sanctions – though the era of privateering and the kind of sanctions at issue don’t really overlap), enforcing sanctions is something you do with ships you have. If anything, the “new thing” of sanctions would increase, not decrease, the appeal of letters of marque.
What decreases them is having a professional Navy that overmatches the rest of the world combined, making adding private combatant ships, for any purpose, not really attractive.
ok - unless you are talking about fishing past ecological boundaries, or gangs of boats trading "silent running" to enter internationally protected waters to do fishing. In that case, as a human being, yes, stop them.
Tax revenue on another countries brand of cigarettes, sure, hands-off.. agree
Actual piracy with weapons? how about losing a gun battle with US Navy and going to jail, yes.
> Where can you find congress agree to drone strike some dwelling in Afghanistan?
Congress generally doesn’t seek to separately and redundantly authorize specific attacks once it has generally authorized the President to use military force, whether it was the bill passed in 1941 stating “the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial Government of Japan”, or the bill passed in 2001 stating “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
I read up on this topic; there was a conference in Paris in 1856 after the Second Crimean War where almost everyone abolished the Letter of Marques, but not the US even though the last letter was written in 1815 (41 years prior).
You can't get one from Spain, France, the Netherlands, or Germany – all nations with a tradition of Privateering, but you could get one from the US — maybe in Trumps second term, all it needs is a pirate cryptocoin
> Reportedly the Russian government has issued letters of marque to hacking and cybercrime groups.
Those would only be metaphorical (and even then not a particular apt metaphor) letters of marque and reprisal; a literal letter of marque and reprisal is to a private vessel to attack and seize property from enemy vessels, converting acts which would otherwise be piracy under international law into lawful armed combat.
Cyberhacking groups aren’t vessels, and what they are doing isn’t something that would be piracy under international law without being under the umbrella of government war efforts.
> I can imagine the same has happened in the US.
Not under US law (even if it still wouldn’t make any sense under international law for the reasons described above), since Constitutionally that would require an active of Congress authorizing such letters, which has not occurred. You can imagine what you want, but its simply not a reality.
> Not under US law (even if it still wouldn’t make any sense under international law for the reasons described above), since Constitutionally that would require an active of Congress authorizing such letters, which has not occurred. You can imagine what you want, but its simply not a reality.
As we all know, the US defense apparatus, particularly its clandestine branch, has never done anything illegal.
> As we all know, the US defense apparatus, particularly its clandestine branch, has never done anything illegal.
A letter of marque is a specific legal instrument.
If the US (or Russian) government is recruiting and employing private sector hacking groups as cyberwarfare agents (as both probably are), whehter or not they are doing so legally under domestic and/or international law, they aren’t issuing letters of marque.
If they're issuing "non-prosecution agreements" or "immunity agreements" (which is likely what they're actually doing) isn't that fundamentally the same thing? The difference is essentially just semantics.
It's like how the US hasn't officially been to war since World War II.
> If they’re issuing “non-prosecution agreements” or “immunity agreements” (which is likely what they’re actually doing) isn’t that fundamentally the same thing?
No.
A letter of marque makes you not pirates but lawful combatants under international law, where there has long been a norm that pirates (but not lawful combatants) are the common enemy of all humanity (hostis humani generis) and subject to summary punishment by any nation, for piracy against the shipping of any nation, without limit. Whereas privateers are, to other nations, of the same legal status as military forces of the sponsoring power.
A nonprosecution agreement gives you immunity from punishment under the domestic law of the country issuing it.
Not the same thing at all.
> It’s like how the US hasn’t officially been to war since World War II.
So, a popular myth? US Courts have long rejected the notion that any particular magic words are necessary for Congress to exercise its power to declare war, and that a Congressional authorization of military force that does not use terms like “declaration of war” (the earliest of which was issued in 1798, this is not a new practice) nevertheless is an exercise of the power to declare war. There are some statutes to which magic words are relevant, but that’s a choice of Congress to structure other statutes that way, not something inherent it what makes a state of war under US law.
>and what they are doing isn’t something that would be piracy under international law without being under the umbrella of government war efforts.
But committing copyright violations is piracy, according to many legal experts apparently. How can there be much difference between cyberhacking groups and naval vessels, when there's really no difference at all between copying a floppy and attacking a merchant vessel on the high seas?
A better example might be North Korean hackers who are explicitly legal under their government and quite proficient at revenue generation on the cyber seas.
> Cyberhacking groups aren’t vessels, and what they are doing isn’t something that would be piracy under international law without being under the umbrella of government war efforts.
Well obviously the cyberspace and information superhighway metaphor needs to morph into the cybersea, and information ocean gyres, and...you get the idea.
If you doing it under the authority of a letter of marque, then I think it stops being pirate-y. We do it 'cause the crew got drunk and voted to do it, not because some hoity toity government type singed a page.
Eh, you don't need a certificate to engage in piracy. Also, do they have a Highwayman Certificate if you also make the equestrian team? Asking for a friend...
A US Congressman (from Texas, naturally) introduced a bill to grant letters of marque to be used against Russian oligarchs’ property early last year, just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alas, it did not pass. But letters of marque are still explicitly enumerated as a power granted in the US Constitution, and notably the United States was not one of the signatories to the 1856 treaty that mostly banned them.
And that treaty was the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, which came about at the end of a war for…Crimea.
Well, sure, it's a bummer. But one has to wonder why we glorify a practice of pillaging, raping and destruction. What's next for MIT? A Hitler Certificate? A KGB Certificate? A Slave Whipping Certificate?
Fun fact: registration for the classes required for the pirate certificate (sailing, archery, pistol/rifle, fencing) generally run out within a minute of opening.
However, this being at MIT, I was never sure whether this was because of humans or bots.
I don't know why universities think the best way to decide enrollment is smashing the register button.
My undergrad university had the sense to let everyone pick their first preferences within 24 hours of enrollment starting. Then for over-selected courses, people were enrolled randomly [1]. This was repeated once more, iirc, and then in the third round enrollment was instantaneous.
This, thankfully, prevented virtual stampedes and allowed for people to select their courses in a non-panic manner.
That also has the advantage of allowing the school to potentially open a new another timeslot for the course if they know there's enough serious interest in it.
My tiny local community college wouldn't even hold their displayed assembly language course, because "nobody is interested in assembly anymore". This was in 1998. I still wish I could have taken that course, even if it was for super specific chipset.
My college just sorted people by GPA and if there were enough of them for an additional group and staff to lead it, an additional timeslot would appear.
Or why not just hire more faculty and start up more sections? The students are paying huge tuition bills. Why can't they get the courses they want?
This is why I often tell everyone, not just high school students, to consider other marketplaces for information like uDemy or Coursera or any of the dozens of upstarts. They're sooo much better than old school universities because they're not designed to enforce artificial scarcity. There's no bogus song and dance for the admissions department and after that there's no limit on how many people can take the course. This is what the digital world has to offer and we should celebrate the unlimited access to knowledge.
Because there are limited rooms and times of the day. I have seen the data at the Registrar's office at a couple of universities. Often, room utilization is above 90% with barely any time and space left over for talks and special events. And a university in the middle of a city (where universities should be) often don't have any land to make new buildings.
Not to mention, the highest demand courses are always the easiest ones. As someone who has worked as a professor, I refuse to accept that the universities have some administrative imperative to increase the number of sections of easy courses, so students can learn less.
Students should take online courses, but that is besides the point.
Have you looked at a map of Boston/Cambridge? The Charles is practically a large dredged up lake on MIT campus, it just happens that MIT only occupies one side of the 'lake' lol
Again, the number of classrooms leads me to ask, "Where is the tuition going?" It's not a good excuse. The students are paying plenty of tuition. Why shouldn't they get the courses they want?
Oh, I absolutely agree that tuition is much higher than it needs to be in universities across the world. The reason is also quite clear. Administrative staff has increased way too much, and universities also provide services that should in principle be provided by the government or larger society.
The correct answer is to this is to cut that administrative staff and reduce tuition. Not to redirect money towards easy classes.
But there is a larger issue here.
> The students are paying plenty of tuition. Why shouldn't they get the courses they want?
Universities are institutions for providing credentials [1]. Students cannot be the party who should decide what courses are offered, because there is a clear conflict of interest. If you work at a universities, you will see that students naturally and constantly advocate for easier passing requirements and courses. The same way you don't want your trainee electrician at the vocational school to have a say in whether they get to take the safety courses or not,
* you don't want your trainee software engineers at the university to have a say in which math courses they will need, and
* you don't want your English majors at the university to decide they would rather take the course on Twilight rather than the one on Shakespeare.
What courses should be offered should be decided by professors in collaboration with industry professionals. Not students who often don't know what is good for them long term. What should be provided to students before enrolling at the university is complete information about what courses are part of the program and why, and the students can decide up front whether the program is for them.
The above is not a blanket defense of universities in any way. I left academia because I think it is broken, but not for the reasons your comments postulate.
[1] Besides the necessary education of society. I also strongly believe there is space in society for educational institutions that don't provide test based credentials, but those cannot replace universities.
This assumes the purpose of a university is to prepare students for a job.
But wasn't a university meant to teach and carry out science?
Is it really a credentials provider mostly? Especially in the tech industry it seems the notion of having knowledge has gotten more important than just having credentials (though this could also just be a direct consequence of employers not trusting university credentials anymore)
I mean, in this case it is probably considered a net win, MIT is known for its culture of "hacks", and having to game your way into the required courses adds to the challenge!
Eh, just in the last decade MIT has seen a huge shift towards a culture of risk adversion. The administration have actively suppressed and dismantled cultural elements they do not find desireable. See what happened to Bexley house and senior house, and I'm not sure what's happening with east campus these days but some kind of construction is going on.
Still a fine university, but the days of 'hacker' culture are definitely dwindling. There are still pockets here and there, but like with old forms of communication (IRC, etc ) it becomes harder and harder to foster that culture when there are less and less spaces for it while simultaneously creating curated spaces that are so much easier to use.
Ticket and limited edition goods sales websites here are often first come first serve, with things selling out within a minute. A lottery approach is so easy I cannot begin to imagine why they don't do it. All this does is add stress and negative feelings to the process.
My son’s university simply opts to have the registration system crash randomly multiple times a minute if necessary until courses are somehow filled. Then you can sign up for text alerts over the coming weeks if an opening becomes available. You have approximately 8 seconds to login and grab the space.
For a few semesters at least, the phys ed requirement was a pool system. You wod choose your top 3 or 6 options. There were lotteries if classes were oversubscribed and those who didn't get their first choice, got lotteries for their second choice, and so on.
Disabled I can readily see and I would be surprised if exemptions weren't granted in some form. "Unusual" I'm far less sympathetic towards if it involves simply not getting into the water as a matter of principle or preference.
As I see it, this is a qualification entirely unrelated to the type of academic education being pursued. Even if this case is, subjectively, relatively minor, such arbitrary requirements serve only to exclude otherwise capable students.
Furthermore, where is the line between disability, principle and preference? Do religious reasons count? What about cultural ones? A friend of mine who was a Navy officer told me that the Nepalese he trained were absolutely terrified of water - the rivers were so cold in Nepal that they had a deep-rooted cultural association of water with danger. They needed to persevere because they had enlisted as frogmen, but why should a student of astrophysics do so?
The opportunity to justify one's reasons doesn't absolve the issue entirely either, as that effectively makes skills of persuasion, rather than swimming, the requirement. Finally, if you allow arbitrary requirements, which ones are reasonable? Swimming might be as unreasonable to someone brought up in a desert as mountain hiking might be to someone born and bred in Massachusetts.
They don't want to do it. But it's a life skill for safety and other reasons. So it seems reasonable for a university to at least push them in that direction. No one's forcing them to become an expert swimmer but I have zero problem with making at least a token push in that direction. (And mountain hikes are fine too--Dartmouth has freshman trips for example.)
I have zero issue with forcing prospective astrophysics students outside of their comfort zone.
ADDED: There are also phys ed requirements and humanities distribution requirements. If these are such issues, I have no doubt there are plenty of other schools that don't impose them.
Yep.I don't actually know how hard-core they are at enforcing the requirements for someone who adamantly refuses but reasonable exemptions or at least taking the swim class seem to be the norm. (And if you have some cert which includes a swim requirement that qualifies as well.)
Probably get a medical exemption, like many able-bodied people also do. When I looked into swim-tests initially, there were quotes from other collage's physicians who would sign a waiver for anyone without question.
I never took it but I shot on the range at one point. As I recall, the pistol team at the time was one of the best teams after the service academies and some of the better shots were some fellow photographers on the newspaper.
MIT also famously does not award honorary degrees [1] which restricts its commencement speaker pool. However, commencement speakers can get honorary Pirate Certificates which is way cooler: https://alum.mit.edu/slice/arrrr-mit-pirates-and-matt-damon-...
Do famous people really choose not to speak at MIT Commencement because they won't get an honorary degree for it? You'd think "spoke at MIT Commencement" would be an equal line item for a CV given the context.
I would think if someone was important enough to speak at commencement, the act of speaking at commencement would be a relatively unimportant and not worth putting on a CV (if someone in those positions actually needs to use CVs).
From what I've heard, yes. The choice is not between speaking at MIT+no honorary degree and not speaking at all; speak at MIT+no honorary degree/speak at Harvard+honorary degree -> well, could be swayed to speak at Harvard then!
Not actually related to article, but the title made me think this...
I feel like the piracy / p2p / scenegroup communities have been aging and being whittled down by brutal relentless lawsuits and lobbying from corps. I get the impression not many younger people are interested and are generally more content to accept the corporate slop they are given.
This is a bad thing. However u feel about piracy, keeping the skills alive to circumvent unfair systems imposed on you is really important for society and egality imo.
If it weren't for software pirates, countless old pieces of software (esp. DOS-era games) would be forever lost now. Society owes software pirates a huge debt of gratitude for keeping historical digital data archived.
However, I feel your perception of the piracy/p2p communities might be dated. I think they took a bit of a nosedive a while back when Netflix reigned supreme, at least for movies, but due to the fragmentation of streaming services and the constant removal of content and increase in prices and now the crackdown on account-sharing, movie/TV piracy seems to be alive and healthy. I'm not so sure about music piracy though; the streaming services there haven't made the huge mistakes the movie/TV services have, so having a single streaming service for music seems to be quite popular these days because it's so convenient. Software piracy appears to be largely dead, thanks to the move to SaaS and online gaming. But my perception could be quite biased too.
>the streaming services there haven't made the huge mistakes the movie/TV services have
I'm not sure it's so much mistakes of the streaming services as the fact that music has a near enough to universal for most people licensing scheme from a handful of major labels that the major services can offer a near-universal essentially interchangeable (other than UX and integration with other services) service to consumers.
Whereas the fragmented (and frequently changing) rights owners in the film/TV business have no equivalent. I'm honestly not sure of the impact on piracy though. A lot of us shrug our shoulders, see all the content that is at there with a few subscriptions, and just ignore all the stuff we can't trivially watch.
>I'm not sure it's so much mistakes of the streaming services as the fact that music has a near enough to universal for most people licensing scheme
It is the mistakes they've made: you're specifying the exact mistake I'm referring to.
>Whereas the fragmented (and frequently changing) rights owners in the film/TV business have no equivalent. I'm honestly not sure of the impact on piracy though.
Well, to listen to all the music you want, you just need one subscription for $10/month or whatever it is. To watch the films and TV you want, you need 10 different subscriptions, and it adds up to a lot of money. Why would this not have an impact on piracy?
>and just ignore all the stuff we can't trivially watch.
Maybe you do, but I imagine a lot of people turn to the high seas when they really want to watch one thing, and it's only available on some service they're not subscribed to, when they're already subscribed to several other services.
Certainly not dead, but the multi decade long DRM arms race and the more insular nature of the scene recently means there isnt many new people joining. On the other hand, I'd say the groups that are already established are doing better in the last few years than they did before. Just to name a few recent breakthroughs:
- WIBU dongles getting fully emulated in software by R2R. Used in higher end software like Propellerhead Reason.
- The first scene proper of Office 365 by BTCR
- Denuvo is still getting cracked after all these years.
This was an informal thing for a long time, but I didn't know that there's now an actual certificate. I may have to go back and request mine retroactively.
Why? Shooting is an Olympic sport, it is also very pirate-y.
Archery is the odd one here. It is not part of the popular image of a pirate, and historically, I don't think they saw much use in the 1600s and after (so, not during the "golden age").
Same way the bipartisan safer communities act defunded archery and hunting programs in public high schools, it’s part of the plan to delegitimize all guns.
Yes [1]. They also provide tuition scholarships for children of staff and graduate students [2] who could not otherwise afford childcare in the Boston area (which runs on average $20K/yr against a post-tax stipend as low as $31K/yr, ie, completely impossible to afford unless you have a trust fund or a scholarship).
Not sure what that has to do with a bit of workplace levity at an otherwise famously intense undergraduate institution. Having a bit of fun is a time-honored MIT tradition; e.g., "All Tech Men carry batteries!" [3] and The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery, and Pranks at MIT more generally [4].
It was more of Federal prosecutor's, Carmen Ortiz, "zero tolerance, tough on crime" desperation for stats any cost.
Harvey Silverglate wrote a book on the phenomenon, "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent". Federal DAs have the biggest hammers, and so they see nails everywhere. This is also partly why the "nothing to hide" people are foolish, because information can be selectively weaponized by authorities to construct technical crimes. There are nearly infinite and poorly-worded regulations on certain professions with civil and criminal penalties that are all but impossible to commit without intention. That's not the point; the point is that very few prosecutors are uniformly setting out to arrest and convict only the worst of the worst causing legitimate, specific harm.
Unsurprisingly, Oracle killed Zoe Lofgren's CFAA exception bill in committee because the rich and the religious run America.
It clearly demonstrates a time when MIT completely hung one of their own out to dry, in contrast to the “all tech men carry batteries” defense. It is representative of the modern administration’s inability to empathize with the students and faculty they represent.
And yes, I would characterize fighting peacefully for open access as trying to have fun in a way that MIT should be trying to protect.
Jeez, what buzzkills.