Border walls have a history of doing their jobs

The answer to this is no. Walls do have a history of doing their job and, indeed, they are the tried-and-true go-to strategy almost everywhere that security or illegal migration is a concern … So, let’s consider the precedent of walls and systems designed to maintain security and keep illegal immigrants and terrorists out while allowing legal immigrants and visitors in:

Consider first buildings like the White House, where a decorative fence predated the wrought iron fence installed by President Ulysses Grant to control New Year’s crowds. President Franklin Roosevelt began restricting access to White House grounds to appointment-holders only during World War II as a further security measure.

But the White House is a building and different than a national border, even if the logic remains the same. Is there a precedent with border walls working along much longer distances?

Here, again, the answer is yes. Consider the following:

Israel-West Bank: The border wall — actually much more a security fence — was constructed in the wake of the 2001-02 terror campaign in Israel. Almost immediately, the number of successful terror attacks in the Jewish state dropped by 90 percent …

Morocco-Algeria: Morocco fought a bloody insurgency and terrorist campaign sponsored by Algeria’s and Cuba’s Cold War proxy, the Polisario Front. The Polisario became ineffective after Morocco built its famous 1,700-mile system of sand berms, fences, mine fields and ditches.

Cyprus: It was the United Nations that built a wall dividing Cyprus between the northern Turkish portion and the remaining Greek section after Turkey invaded and occupied parts of the island nation in 1974. To cite international law as opposed to walls is, therefore, nonsense since the United Nations created the precedent.

India-Pakistan: India and Pakistan fought wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999 that collectively killed millions of people. The two sides have had a more than three-decade-long standoff on the Siachen glacier and several skirmishes elsewhere along the disputed border.

Because Pakistani terror groups regularly try to infiltrate and wreak havoc in India, India constructed a border fence and wall system to keep Pakistanis out. That’s a good thing, because nowhere else in the world could a simple border incident so quickly escalate into nuclear war.

Stopping fake news before it starts

Michael Pasek for the Brookings Institution: In a 2011 study published in the journal Media Psychology, psychologists Melanie Green and John Donahue give a small window into the human psyche that explains why fake news is so powerful …

The researchers used random assignment to place people in one of four conditions. Everyone was asked to read a narrative. One group was informed from the beginning that the narrative was false. The second and third groups were told, only after reading the story, that the narrative was false and informed that the problem was an accidental error or intentional deception. The fourth group was not given any reason to doubt the veracity of the story.

The findings shed light on the impact of fake news. All readers who learned that they were provided with false information responded negatively to the information source. But, despite learning after the fact that this information was false and even being upset when they learned this, readers continued to be influenced by the contents of the narrative. The story changed participants’ attitudes and this attitude change persisted even after they learned that they had been deliberately misled.

This finding is important for all of us living in a seemingly post-truth society. It suggests that once a story is out in the open, it may be too late to retract it or blunt its influence. … How, then, can we neutralize the influence of fake news? …

We should resist the temptation to publish statements and tweets before we fact check. Rather than focusing on the facts of each statement after they are delivered to the public, journalists can preserve the integrity of the news by delaying the presentation of questionable statements until they have the ability to credit or discredit them.

Give a legal safe harbor to digital currencies

Peter Van Valkenburgh for Coin Center: Companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, WordPress and Dropbox, among others, are not providing the content that you find on their websites. They are building infrastructure that enable ordinary people to create and share whatever it is they are passionate about. They are building pipes, not making water …

We were at a critical juncture in the late 1990s, and we asked ourselves, do we treat these infrastructure providers as something new and save them from the crushing liability that could come if we do nothing? Or do we let them struggle under laws that were never calibrated with their business models (let alone the public good that they could create) in mind? We chose the right path back then, and now we have a chance to do it again.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash and all the other new tools we’re watching emerge are also, at a fundamental level, infrastructure. Just like the websites of the ’90s, some people will use that infrastructure to do something that can and should create legal liability. I can use the Bitcoin network to store and transmit other people’s bitcoin on their behalf. That, it stands to reason, is the sort of thing that should make me regulated just like PayPal or Bank of America are regulated.

But I can also contribute code or build a software tool that helps people put non-financial data into the Bitcoin blockchain, and those activities should never subject me to banking regulation or the liability that would follow my failure to register as a money transmitter.

Just like the web services providers who came before, there is a class of new inventors and entrepreneurs who don’t fit neatly in the baskets created by our legal system. If we want these new networks to flourish as the web did, we must ensure that mere infrastructure builders are insulated from crushing liability. To do that, we need a federal safe harbor for uses of these technologies.

Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.