American values

It’s that time of year: a Tuesday near the end of January. It’s just past another anniversary of the president’s inauguration, and time for the annual tradition, the State of the Union address.

In this case, it’s President Obama’s third anniversary, and tonight he’ll give his third SotU speech. According to the Washington Post, this year’s talk will stress a return to American values.

All right, here it is: I’m sick to death of hearing about values. Values has turned into a codeword for reactionary politics, repression, and censorship. I don’t want to hear a speech about those kinds of values, especially from a president who has done little to fix the overstepping excesses of his predecessor, and, to the contrary, seems to embrace many of them.

American values used to be about freedom and opportunity, not control and rigidity. America was a country that didn’t abuse and arrest people for assembling peacefully. It didn’t arrest people for documenting how the police were handling situations. It didn’t keep political prisoners, detaining people indefinitely with no chance of formal accusation, trial, and defense. It didn’t limit the rights of people because of who they are, it didn’t restrict their access to medicines and medical procedures, it didn’t try to teach children mythology in science class, and it did not march a conservative Christian agenda down the streets everywhere.

You want to return to American values? Demilitarize the police, and get them back to engaging with the communities they serve and protect. Don’t send people off to secret prisons, close Guantánamo, and give everyone there a proper, open trial. Stop using terrorist the way dictatorships have used denunciation, as a way to whisk troublesome people away. When people get angry and want to protest, encourage them and give them a venue, don’t beat them down and throw tear gas at them as they sit non-aggressively. Allow yourself to be held accountable for your actions, and don’t threaten people who want to record what you’re doing. Don’t get involved in people’s private lives and personal decisions. And keep religion out of the government and public education. You can start that by not saying God bless in your speeches. Try it tonight.

Remember that American values came from our flight from having to live under someone else’s values. We can’t just replace the king’s values with those of your family, your church, or any other relatively small subset of Americans. Our values were set up to protect our rights and our freedom — everyone’s — and that is what we need to return to.

Oh, and fix the economy, yeah? Don’t just talk about it.

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill that provides for continued operation of the U.S. military. But this year’s 680-page bill includes yet more civil rights violations sanctioned by our legislature. Here’s NPR’s Steve Inskeep introducing their report:

The senate last night passed a defense bill that includes controversial provisions for handling terrorism suspects. The bill would send most detainees into military custody, not into the hands of the FBI, and it would allow the U.S. government to hold some suspects indefinitely, without charge, without trial. Those ideas ran into strong opposition from national security experts across the Obama administration, setting the stage for a possible veto by the president.

About halfway through the NPR report is this:

Carrie Johnson (NPR): But some Democrats and civil liberties groups said that left up in the air whether U.S. citizens could be detained in this country indefinitely without charges. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, says there’s nothing wrong with taking a hard line against American terrorists.

Senator Graham: I’m just saying to any American citizen, if you wanna help Al Qaeda, you do so at your own peril. You can get killed in the process, you can get detained indefinitely, and when you’re being questioned and you say to the interrogator, I want my lawyer, the interrogator will say you don’t have a right to a lawyer, ’cause you’re a military threat.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: what Senator Graham and those who spout the same rhetoric are missing is that we’re dealing here not with adjudicated cases, but with accusations. The rights they’re threatening were put in place to protect Americans from improper accusations — unfair, unwarranted, trumped up, perhaps specifically intended to put away someone who’s turned out to be inconvenient.

Back in the old days of tyrannical rule, the king would accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation alone would be cause to lock the accused in a dungeon indefinitely, with no hope of help or justice. When we formed this country, we put together a system of rights and guarantees to prevent such abuse and to protect our people from that sort of thing.

And yet that’s exactly what Senator Graham and others want to put us back into: a situation wherein a government that wants to silence someone and make him disappear need only make an unsubstantiated accusation of working with terrorists, and that person can be whisked away by the military, held in secret forever, and denied access to anyone — no family, no lawyers, no advocates of any kind to help him refute what may well be false accusations. No charge of an actual crime and no evidence are necessary.

I agree with Senator Graham that we should take a hard line against people who wanna help Al Qaeda. I’m just not willing to take accusations as fact and throw away the protections we have against abuse, and neither should anyone who supports the tenets this country was founded on be willing to do so. By all means, arrest people suspected of working with terrorists. Then give them access to legal support, tell them what crimes they’re charged with, and have fair and public trials, just as we do with people accused of murder, rape, arson, and all other horrible crimes.

These provisions need to be removed from the bill, and President Obama must veto it until they are removed.

Separation of church and Texas?

In a wonderful display of why we need to get religious nuttiness away from the halls of gummint, Governor of Rick Perry of Texas ranted thus yesterday in an executive proclamation that’s just in time for Earth Day:

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

Texas has as a state ... been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer?

Indeed.

This proclamation seems as clear a violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment as I’ve seen in a while.

One might say that it does no harm. One might say that he makes it clear that it’s not just Rick Perry’s prayer, not just Christian prayer... that Governor Perry explicitly calls on all faiths and traditions.

The problem is that he still shoves some sort of faith in prayer into the faces of many, many people who consider prayer to be so much bullshit. This is totally inappropriate — just as inappropriate as if he’d said we should pray to Jesus, we should beseech Allah, or we should ask for the intercession of the spirit of Elvis.

It’s fine if Mr Perry thinks putting his hands together and muttering will do some good in relieving the drought. It’s fine if he wants to get his friends to join him in it. It’s even fine if he says so on statewide television when some talk-show host interviews him.

It’s not fine when it becomes an official proclamation. That’s crossing a line.

But here: I intend to draw an outline of Texas in the dirt in my garden today, and bury a ceremonial dried bluebonnet blossom in the approximate position of Austin therein. I will say Light-beam feelie! three times while holding my hand over the buried bluebonnet, and I am certain that within the month, it will have worked its magic and Texas will have had much-needed rain.

I know this to be the true answer, and far more effective than that prayer stuff. See if it isn’t!

Government oversight of the Internet

Now that the protests in Egypt have led to a change in leadership — an outcome that seemed inevitable for a while, though now-former-President Mubarak denied that it would happen — I want to go back and look at a key event during the last few weeks, when the Egyptian government disconnected the country from the Internet

It appears that removing an entire country from the internet is surprisingly easy, by making changes in a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP). This system is used by ISPs and other organisations to connect to each others’ networks, so the Egyptian government just had to order ISPs to alter the BGP routing tables to make external connections impossible.

Looking at BGP data we can confirm that according to our analysis 88 per cent of the ‘Egyptian internet’ has fallen off the internet, reports Andree Tonk of BGPmon, a site dedicated to monitoring changes in the BGP. A recent report for the OECD cited the BGP as a weak point in online infrastructure that needs to be secured — a prediction that seems to have now come true.

As the report makes clear, it’s not technically difficult, at least not for a relatively small country with a relatively centralized connection to the Internet. And we see countries such as China and Iran using similar techniques to do more selective blocking (the latter has, I understand, responded to the events in Tunisia and Egypt by joining the former in blocking access to blog sites such as this one). The issue isn’t technical, but one of policy: is the government allowed to cut off the Internet?

Of course, with countries where the government makes its own authority, the answer is always Yes. But what about in the U.S., where the government was limited, at least through the end of the 20th century, to abiding by its constitution, legislation, and a judicial system?

For one answer to that question, we can look to Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who, along with Senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Tom Carper (Delaware), introduced legislation to enhance the security and resiliency of the cyber and communications infrastructure of the United States.

The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, S.3480 (here’s a PDF of the latest version as of this writing) was introduced last June and was entirely replaced by Senator Lieberman in December (you have to go to the bottom of page 197 of the PDF to see the new version). The December version was reported to the Senate from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which Mr Lieberman chairs (and on which his cosponsors sit). It’s now on the Senate’s legislative calendar. (The corresponding House bill is H.R.5548.)

The bill, if it should become law, would create a new operational entity within [the Department of Homeland Security]: the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC).

The NCCC would be led by a Senate-confirmed Director, who would regularly advise the President regarding the exercise of authorities relating to the security of federal networks. The NCCC would include the United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT), and it would lead federal operational efforts to protect public and private sector networks. The NCCC would detect, prevent, analyze, and warn of cyber threats to these networks.

The bill creates, in addition to the NCCC, quite a number of offices, councils, task forces, and programs, some of which make sense and some of which probably don’t. It creates the Office of Cyberspace Policy, whose Director is appointed by and reports to the President. It creates the Federal Information Security Taskforce, comprising executives and representatives from more than a dozen government agencies. And so on.

The entire bill is quite extensive, running well over 200 pages. And what’s frightening about it is that it puts the U.S. government right in the middle of the operation and management of the Internet within the United States and its territories — and keep in mind how central U.S. operations and U.S.-based services are to the Internet as a whole. It’s difficult to understand the effect that all this new administration will have on the operation of the Internet within the U.S., and the effect that it could have if it’s mismanaged, if it tries to respond to perceived threats, if it’s affected by right-wing zealots or other dubious elements that inhabit the U.S. political community.

I have read the bill’s summary, along with parts of the bill itself, but haven’t had time to read the whole bill yet. It’s not clear how bad it could be, nor, indeed, whether it will be bad at all... but I’m very skeptical of the result of putting such a large set of deep layers of U.S. government bureaucracy in the middle of the operation and management of the Internet. And I’m deeply worried about giving authority to make operational decisions to people who have insufficient technical knowledge to understand the ramifications of those decisions, who may have political or ideological motivations that do not coincide with what’s best for the Internet, and who can implement their decisions without the checks-and-balances oversight that protects us in other parts of our lives.

I have lots more reading to do.

Breaking the wind

How did I miss this?

Joe Barton is the congressman from Texas who apologized last June to BP for how badly we were treating them in the wake of the oil spill. That was enough to bring him out as a bozo, but I expected nothing else from a Tea-Party congressman from Waco, who represents part of the Dallas-Ft Worth area.

Thing is, he chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2004 through 2006, and has just been given the committee's title of Chair Emeritus, what with the Republicans controlling the House again. And, so, we wonder just what he knows about energy.

That’s when we get to the question of how I missed this, his concern about using wind power, which he voiced early last year:

Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.

Wind power is a finite resource. Using wind power slows the wind down, which causes the temperature to go up. Presumably only in the areas where it’s hotter; in the areas where it’s cooler, it only makes sense that they’d stay cooler. I guess. So, in other words, we can interfere with God pretty easily, omnipotent being that he is, just by putting up some windmills. Yes, indeed, it’s just something to think about.

I want to leave this country and move someplace sane.

Свободного программного обеспечения

Interesting: Vladimir Putin has signed an order to move the Russian government to free software over the next four years.

The transition to open-source, or free, software will begin in the second quarter of 2011, with the Ministry of Communications examining what base software packages are needed for government agencies, according to the documents. During the same quarter, the ministry and other agencies will develop proposals for user support centers and for mechanisms to support software developers, the documents said.

Russian agencies will also begin an inventory of their IT assets during the second quarter of 2011, the documents said. Pilot agencies will begin using a basic package open-source software in the second quarter of 2012, according to the transition schedule.

Official adoption of Firefox has been going around here and there, but this goes way beyond that, with plans to deploy Linux in place of Windows, to replace Microsoft Office, and so on. The order talks of replacing proprietary software with free software, including operating systems, drivers for hardware and application software for servers and user workstations.

On the other hand, while Computerworld’s report mentions open-source software, I’m not sure about the idiom. The word the order uses, свободного (genitive of свободный), seems to mean free as in unrestricted, which is the same sense as it’s used by the Free Software Foundation — not free of charge, so much as free access. There are differences between free software and open-source software; they’re similar, but they’re not the same. Because I don’t know Russian, I can’t tell whether the Russian term (used here in the title, the words taken from the official plan) applies to the latter or not.

The FCC on network neutrality

Yesterday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved new rules related to network neutrality. The rules are no surprise, nor was the approval — we’ve known the basic contents for some time, and they’re right along the lines of the Google/Verizon proposal from August.

Key points of contention are these:

1. The rules allow for paid access to higher data speeds in a way that leaves things open for non-neutral deal between carriers and providers of services or content.
2. By stressing that carriers must not block legal web sites, the FCC leaves a gaping hole, the size of which depends upon one’s definition of legal.
3. Wireless broadband is treated differently from wired, and the rules allow much more non-neutral behaviour on the wireless side.

On point one, let’s look at three situations, and see how they’re different. Suppose my cable provider gives me Internet service at 5 megabits per second, but offers to make that 15 megabits per second if I pay another $10/month. Is that consistent with network neutrality? Most of us would say that it is.

Now suppose my cable provider gives me Internet service at 5 megabits per second, but if I stream data from Netflix that’s capped at 1 megabit per second. Is that consistent with network neutrality? Most of us would say that it is not. If I’m paying for 5 megabits per second with no limit on the number of megabits, they should not be artificially slowing down a service they want to discourage.

OK, but let’s go in the other direction, and suppose Netflix makes a deal with my cable provider. Suppose Netflix pays them some fee, and the result is that I get my 5 megabits per second normally, but when I stream from Netflix I get 15 megabits per second. Is that consistent with network neutrality?

The new rules seem to say that it is. Is it the same as the first scenario, or different? Does it matter whether I, the subscriber pay for better service, or Netflix, the content provider, pays for better service? That’s a matter for debate. Some say it’s bad on its surface, and is inconsistent with network neutrality. Others say that as long as any provider is allowed to pay for the improved service, it’s OK (there can’t be an exclusive deal). Still others think exclusive deals are OK, as long as it’s improving service, and not penalizing someone outside the deal. Maybe, but isn’t that a relative thing?

My own opinion is that there’s a fundamental difference that hinges on who pays, who benefits, and who gets left aside. If I pay, I benefit, and all services I use benefit equally. That seems neutral. If a service provider pays, only their services benefit. That’s not neutral. On the other hand, this is rather like a manufacturer paying for preferential display of their items in a store, and we do that all the time. This is not a black-and-white issue.

On the second point, the legal web site point, we have the Justice Department’s recent action of shutting down web sites that are purported to violate copyright rules. If the FCC’s highlighting of the legal point makes it easier for Internet carriers to police the Internet, I think it’s a very bad thing. Enforcement should stay in the hands of the enforcement agencies.

To look at the third point, we need to remind ourselves that wireless, in this context, refers not to WiFi, but to broadband over cellular service. I find it hard to accept that there’s a need for or a benefit to treating the two differently. With smart phones and iPad devices, and others like them, 3G service (and, soon, 4G) is becoming as important to accessing the Internet as wired broadband is. It seems detrimental, in general, to allow — even to encourage — different levels of service through the two paths. While it may be valid to limit data rates or volumes (in general, neutrally), I can’t see the need to restrict services and applications outright, and consider the inclusion of that in the regulations to be a real problem.

That’s not to say the new regulations are all bad — the transparency requirements are good, and there are other reasonable aspects to them. But I think there are fundamental flaws in the regulations, and they should not have been issued as they are. We’re very bad at regulating technology, and bad regulations can really bite us in the ass.

We still shouldn't ask, but it's OK to tell, now

Everyone’s heard, surely, but it’s worth saying here anyway: this weekend, the U.S. Senate got rid of the odious Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule, by a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republican senators joining the good guys.

It’s easy to forget that the rule was originally an improvement for gay rights in the U.S. military, compared with the situation before it went into effect. It’s easy to forget that, because it was such a small improvement as to escape notice for most. Now, our legislature has said that the military has to deal with homosexual Americans serving openly.

It won’t happen immediately, though. Despite that gay people have been part of our society forever, the military has to figure out how to integrate them. Apparently, just ordering people to accept it, and doling out discipline when they don’t, isn’t sufficient.

According to the Secretary of Defense, things will move apace:

Mr. Gates has acknowledged that the president will be watching closely to ensure that we don’t dawdle or try to slow-roll this and that Mr. Obama expects the military to prepare as quickly as we properly and comprehensively could.

The president will not be the only one watching.

Considering Wikileaks

Wikileaks, having recently released details of hundreds of thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, has been tossed into a maelstrom of troubles over the past week. Amazon, which had hosted the web site, terminated that arrangement, reportedly under pressure from the U.S. government. Its DNS registrar, EveryDNS.net, pulled the Wikileaks domain out of the domain name service, prompting them to move to a Swiss domain name. PayPal has blocked donations to Wikileaks by permanently restricting their account, saying that the illegal activity that Wikileaks engages in violates PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. And on top of all of that, founder Julian Assange is now an international fugitive, as Interpol has backed a Swedish warrant for his arrest (the Swedish charges are unrelated to Wikileaks activities, though Mr Assange says they are yet another attempt to shut Wikileaks down).

I have a mixed opinion of the matter of releasing the confidential documents, as well as about the other things Wikileaks has released in the past.

I’ve worked with classified, proprietary, personal, and otherwise confidential material often during my career, and I well understand that some information should be kept confidential. Even in cases where openness and public scrutiny are important, there’s value in being circumspect about some things. Personnel matters, obviously, fall into this category. Plans often need be kept quiet until they’re carried out. Trade secrets and other confidential company information should be distributed only as there be need to know — and government agencies can have confidential company information as well. We often don’t reveal sources, to avoid discouraging those and future sources from coming forward. The fact that even Wikileaks doesn’t disclose the identities of the leakers is testament enough to that.

We have to balance the benefit that comes from the disclosure of information against the damage caused by that disclosure. Sometimes, it’s easy to see where the balance lies. If we disclose payoffs to a government official that have been feeding a program that serves only to line the pockets of a few, the benefit is clear, and the damage is only to those involved in the corruption. On the other side, if we expose a covert agent, citing a public right to know, there might be no tangible benefit and we may risk the life of the agent and many of his associates.

Sometimes, the determination isn’t as straightforward. With the diplomatic cables, it’s likely that they fell wildly on each side of the balancing point, with many landing too close to it to judge easily.

Whistle blowing is an important part of the checks against corruption and other forms of abuse, and it’s important for us to have a way for people to publicize the sorts of things that need to have light shone on them. At the same time, though, not everything should be so illuminated. The set of diplomatic cables is one case where discretion would have been better. The problem with an arrangement such as Wikileaks is that there’s no one sifting through the items in the set and making intelligent choices about which ones to release and which ones to hold back, at least for now.

On the other hand, while I understand the desire to shut Wikileaks down as a result of this, that heavy-handed approach isn’t going to be effective, and probably isn’t the right way to go about it. It would be better to try to establish some sort of liaison that looks for voluntary discretion. Here, too, we have to find that same balance: the benefit of shutting down a system that exposes confidential information indiscriminately, against the damage done by removing a mechanism for safely exposing waste and corruption.

Domain name seizure

The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the U.S. government has launched a crackdown on web sites that are accused of violating copyrights. The government has done this by seizing the domain names, having the names removed from DNS resolution — the process that converts the name you give to your web browser into an actual Internet address.

Over the past few days, the U.S. Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and nine U.S. Attorneys’ Offices seized 82 domain names of websites they claim were engaged in the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and illegal copyrighted works.

One major problem, as EFF reports it, is that at least some of the web sites included in the sweep are not in the business of illegal distribution, and are actually trying to do the right thing, taking down bad material when they find out about it.

What’s as disturbing, though, is the U.S. government’s attempt to censor the Internet this way. As the EFF points out, sites that are able to will only find other options, using non-U.S. DNS servers (as they are already doing). Meddling with the low-layer workings of the Internet this way is not a good thing. Shutting down web sites without due process is also not a good thing. As the Federal Trade Commission struggles with trying to address real cyber crime such as phishing and other forms of fraud, the entertainment industry has found a way to bypass the difficulties and get the Department of Justice to do preemptive copyright enforcement for them.

We criticize the government of China for blocking web sites they don’t like. It seems to me that we’re now doing the same thing. That our reasons are different matters little: this isn’t the way to deal with these issues.

This also does not make me comfortable when I think about how they might handle network-neutrality legislation.

Touring Beijing, appendix 3: Final Notes

Before we leave China, I have a final note, on the people and the country and the daily life.

Yes, it’s communist; yes, it’s authoritarian; yes, there’s the network censorship, and all that. There’s no political dissent. The press is controlled. There’s a lot of risk to speaking out.

But, day to day, there is no sense of oppression in these people. They are free to do as they like from day to day. They are happy. There’s little police presence (less than what I see in New York City, for example) and no sense that people are being watched. Apart from knowing that they can’t openly speak their minds, I feel that could be in New York, Los Angeles, London, or Frankfurt, as far as the daily life goes.

The missing stuff is important of course, and I won’t ignore that. It’s just that this is very much not Mao’s China, not the China of fifty years ago. It’s clear that one day, it won’t be the China of today, either. Things continue to change.

They’ve embraced capitalism in a big way, and the Chinese companies are competing with the rest of the world in a way that was not imaginable when I was a child. For that matter, even the idea that I might one day visit China, much less happily work for a Chinese company, was complete fantasy. I remember that when President Nixon went to China in 1972, it was a really big deal.

The world has changed, and continues to.

“Albany Governor Debate Verges on Farce”

So says the New York Times headline. The campaign to be governor of New York is an amusing one, looking a bit like a smaller (much, much smaller) version of the California craziness in 2003, when the Governator beat a cast of hundreds that included a porn star or two, and a bit like a British MP election, with a batch of silly, sometimes meaningless parties.

We had a televised debate last night, where the two serious candidates — current Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the Democrat, and right-wing idiot Carl Paladino, the Republican — were joined by a handful of Fruit Loops that included Kristin Davis (not the actress from Sex and the City, but the former prostitute/madam who participated in the downfall of our former governor, Eliot Spitzer; she’s running in her own Anti-Prohibition Party, and says she will legalize marijuana) and Jimmy McMillan, who has tried to become New York City’s mayor twice before through his self-styled The Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

To round it out were Charles Barron (self-created Democratic Freedom Party; former Black Panther and Brooklyn representative on the New York City Council — he also tried to be mayor in 2005, along with Mr McMillan), Howie Hawkins (Green Party; lost to Hillary Clinton for U.S. Senate in 2006), and Warren Redlich (Libertarian Party; he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Representative for his district, near Albany).

From all reports, it was not so much a debate as a comedic talk-show panel, where the panelists shouted over the questions and essentially ignored them, and turned it into something of a free-for-all. From the New York Times:

The moderators’ questions were frequently ignored. The candidates barely looked at one another. One wore black gloves and spoke of himself repeatedly in the third person. And Andrew M. Cuomo, the Democratic candidate and the race’s front-runner, at times struggled to suppress laughter.

And from the Wall Street Journal:

New Yorkers watching the seven candidates for governor debate on Monday night heard a former madam articulate a nuanced position on the merits of hydraulic fracturing. They listened to a former Black Panther and a Green Party activist call for massive tax hikes on the rich. And they learned that one candidate is so supportive of marriage equality, he’d let a person marry a shoe.

But for those searching for insights into the platforms of the two major candidates vying to lead a troubled state, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino, the first and perhaps last debate before the Nov. 2 election was lacking.

For most of the 90 minutes, the televised debate at Hofstra University on Long Island provoked more laughs and puzzlement than meaningful drama. And while it introduced voters to an obscure cast of characters from the periphery of local politics, it shed little new light on either of the two men who have more than a minuscule chance of winning the race.

I really don’t understand why the organizers of these things, which generally stopped resembling debates years ago, though they’re still called that, don’t exert some control over them. Maybe people have just gotten used to having everyone ignore questions and yell at each other on television now, and maybe that’s what some people want. Is it really what the majority of us want? Wouldn’t we rather see them forced to answer the questions that were asked or have their microphones turned off?

Well, amusing, sad, or silly though it may be, it matters little to me: I’ve already voted on an absentee ballot, because I’ll be travelling on election day. Figuring out whom I voted for is left as an exercise for the reader.

Internet wiretapping

A story about impending U.S. legislation has hit the news in the last few days: Senator Patrick Leahy, along with ten co-sponsors that include Dianne Feinstein and my own senator, Chuck Schumer), has introduced S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (link to PDF).

There’s a log of blog outcry about it, of course, and rightly so. I’m less worried about it than many, but I do think it’s a bad idea. Here’s why:

First, we’re meant to be a democracy, different from the totalitarian states we group together with terms such as Axis of Evil and whatnot. That means that, in general, we fit our surveillance and law enforcement into the technology, rather than limiting the technology and building it specifically to enable surveillance and law enforcement. Those who say that this is only paralleling what’s in the telephone system already are missing that the telephone system grew up from a much lower-tech starting point. Wiretaps used to be literally that: wires clipped into wired systems. And it didn’t used to be easy at all.

There’s a lot about surveillance and intelligence gathering that’s hard, and it stands to reason that those tasked with doing it should want to make it easier. Keeping it hard is actually a useful check on nascent authoritarian tendencies, and the temptation for abuse. We’ve recently had court decisions, for example, declaring it a fourth-amendment violation to use GPS tracking without a warrant. These sorts of checks are important.

There’s no saying that the sort of surveillance that S. 3804 proposes will be warrantless — and the bill does specify that a court has to approve it — but we have to remember the warrantless electronic surveillance of the Bush administration, where they bypassed no only the regular courts but also the FISA court, specifically set up to deal with monitoring terrorist action. Official abuse is a real danger.

Further, this bill doesn’t even address terrorism, nor even racketeering or other such crimes. It’s aimed at copyright infringement. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a ridiculous focus for such a broad and risky remedy. There are better ways to address the problem of illegal distribution of copyrighted material, and this is an attempt to shortcut things with a blunt instrument. At least, though, it’s not as bad as the insane French HADOPI law.

Apart from official abuse, though, there’s the issue of abuse by the Bad Guys themselves, who can fool with such a system in two ways:

1. They can take advantage of the holes themselves. Any system that allows authorized intrusion implicitly allows unauthorized intrusion as well, and we should not be so naïve as to think that won’t happen. People are corruptible, security systems are compromised all the time, and if we set it up so that any Internet communication is tappable, malefactors will make their way in and tap it.
2. They can skirt it entirely. It will only be the normal communication channels that will have their encryption compromised, allowing officials to get the unencrypted version. If what gets put on those wires is itself encrypted beforehand — if the unencrypted version is separately encrypted — we’ve gained nothing. Once requiring specialized, high-tech, expensive machines, encryption is now easy, and any ten-year-old with a copy of PGP can do it. And anyone can create a self-signed TLS certificate to secure communication with their web site. There’s nothing the service providers can do to tap into any of that.

The result will be, as often happens with these sorts of things, that private citizens and companies that are trying to abide by the law will have their privacy and liberty compromised, while the real criminals will be able to hide as easily as they do today. If passed, this law will have some effect in the area it’s intended to... but that effect will be limited, and probably short-term.

Finally, there’s the law itself: it actually seems pretty good in its inclusion of safeguards and court involvement. There are two issues I have with it:

1. Sec. 2324(a)(2)(B) is too vague:

   [For purposes of this section, an Internet site is dedicated to infringing activities if such site is] engaged in the activities described in subparagraph (A), and when taken together, such activities are central to the activity of the Internet site or sites accessed through a specific domain name.

   Subparagraph (A) specifies that the site must be specifically designed for these activities, be marketed for these activities, or have no significant purpose other than these activities. That provides a reasonable limitation on the Internet sites that may be targeted here. But then subparagraph (B) opens it back up in a vague way, by saying that any other site might qualify if when taken together such activities are central to the site. Subparagraph (A) clearly does not include such sites as YouTube and Facebook, but subparagraph (B) arguably could. The threat of bringing such an argument to court could exert a severely chilling effect on web sites devoted to social activities and legitimate media sharing.
2. Sec. 2324(j) provides for a public list of sites that are alleged, without any real evidence or court involvement.

   (1) IN GENERAL- The Attorney General shall maintain a public listing of domain names that, upon information and reasonable belief, the Department of Justice determines are dedicated to infringing activities but for which the Attorney General has not filed an action under this section.

   There are mechanisms to ask to be removed from the list, and for judicial review of the case only after the Justice Department refuses the petition for removal. This amounts to an unregulated blacklist of Internet sites, and strikes me as ill advised, and possibly dangerous. There will clearly be such a list held at the Justice Department; the list should not be public. Any public list must be vetted by a court, as a necessary check on law enforcement.

I plan to write to Senator Schumer with a brief version of this post, and a pointer to the full one.

Fiscal responsibility? Or Fiscal lying?

I saw a local political advertisement last night, in which two women are in a diner, talking. One has had a fight with her husband, because she broke the family budget by spending too much on the kids’ school supplies. It seems that she had been hoping the STAR rebate check would come in to cover it.

STAR — the New York State School TAx Relief program — is a program that reduces school taxes for homeowners. The first $30,000 of the assessed value of your primary residence, if you own it, is not subject to school tax (and there are further rules for older people).

In the ad, after the two women set up the situation, the waitress comes over:

Waitress: So, what can I get you girls?

Woman: How about my STAR rebate check? [Smirks.]

Waitress: Can’t help you there. Last year, Senator Suzi Oppenheimer did away with them. [She enunciates the senator’s name especially clearly.]

Woman: So, while I’m trying to make ends meet, Senator Oppenheimer is making it even harder?

Waitress: Can you believe it?

Voice over: Paid for by New Yorkers for Fiscal Responsibility.

Can you believe it, indeed? You shouldn’t.

First, of course, Senator Oppenheimer did nothing all by herself. The New York State Senate has 62 members, and any repeal has to pass with a majority vote.

But what is it that they did away with, according to the advert? The STAR program?

No, look at it carefully. They did away with the STAR rebate checks. The program is still there, reducing our school tax just as it had been.

[Update, 16:00: I’ve made an important error below, and part of the tax reduction has been repealed. Please see the comments.]

See, what used to happen is that we had to pay the full tax, and we had to apply for the rebate. And then, later, the state would send us rebate checks. But that meant that we paid the money up front and got it back later. It also meant that the state had to spend a lot of money processing applications and issuing checks.

What has changed is that we keep the money all along. The STAR rebate has now become a STAR exemption, and it’s calculated into our school taxes from the beginning. There’s no rebate check because we never had to pay the money in the first place. That’s better than a rebate check, and it saves the state a significant expense.

That sounds like fiscal responsibility to me. And this group with the misleading ad is just full of crap.

New York primary election

It was very strange, after more than twenty years of voting on big, clunky machines with levers, to vote for the first time on a paper ballot this Tuesday.

Well, not the first time for me, but the first time at a regular polling place in New York. I once voted by absentee ballot because I was off at an IETF meeting on voting day. And when I lived in Maryland, we voted with a punch-card system (yes, with issues of pregnant and hanging chads, which we never thought of at the time).

But starting with Tuesday’s primary election, New York has switched from the old voting machines to paper ballots, large sheets with small circles that one fills in with a black marker. I have to trust that they work well, but who knows for sure? I suppose we trusted the old machines, and maybe that trust was ill-founded. But they were stately and venerable, and the levers made satisfying and reassuring sounds.

Now I have to wonder whether I really marked the right circle, and whether the machine counted it correctly. I have to make sure I didn’t brush the marker against the paper and make a stray mark, check that I didn’t crease the page in a funny way. Why does it feel odd? Maryland’s punch-cards didn’t give me the same feelings, yet they surely suffered from similar effects, and worse. Perhaps I’m just getting old and inflexible.

Anyway, I voted, of course; that should surprise none of my readers. The New York primary ballot was easy for the Democrats, with just two races: a choice among five for the Attorney General nominee, and one between two for Kirsten Gillebrand’s U.S. Senate seat — Ms Gillebrand was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s seat in 2009, and has to stand in a special election in November to get the final two years of that seat’s term. (Meanwhile, our other U.S. Senator, Charles Schumer, is up for re-election normally, so we’ll have the unusual situation of voting for both of our senate seats at the same time this November.)

Ms Gillebrand easily won her nomination, as everyone expected. The Attorney General contest was more hotly contested, and State Senator Eric Schneiderman — who had the endorsement of the New York Times — fairly closely edged out Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice, my own choice on the ballot. To be sure, all five candidates were reasonable, and I’m perfectly happy with Mr Schneiderman.

On the Republican side, Tea Party idiot Carl Paladino beat perennial loser Rick Lazio by quite a lot to become the Republican nominee for Governor. This is probably good news for our current AG, Andrew Cuomo, who has the Democratic nomination in hand, with no opposition.

Tea Party candidates kicked out traditional Republican incumbents in a few places — the most newsworthy one was in Delaware. Either that will mean good things for the Democrats, who will sail to victory over right-wing nutjobs, or it will say some very bad things, indeed, about the state of the country, should those nuts win in November. We’ll have to see.

What’s always disturbing is the low turnout in these elections. Primary elections get low voter turnout in general, and midterm elections do as well... so the primaries in the midterms involve just a handful of voters deciding things for the entire state.

With 98% of the votes counted, as I write this, we had about 440,000 votes cast in the Republican primary and about 590,000 in the Democratic primary. Put in perspective, there are about 20,000,000 people in the state (of course, they’re not all eligible to vote, and I don’t know how many voters there are). That means that each voter made the choice for about twenty people — only five percent of the population of New York took part in deciding who might be our governor, our attorney general, and our two senators for the next four to six years.

I find that sad.

Travel visas

I just got a visa for travelling to China, for Huawei and for the upcoming IETF meeting in Beijing. With all the travel I’ve done, this is the first time I’ve needed a visa — I’ve always been to countries with which the U.S. has visa waivers — and it was strange to send my passport off to someone, trusting that it’d come back in short order.

It did.

On the web site of the Chinese embassy are instructions for applying for visas, whether an L visa (for tourists), an F visa (business, which I got), or some other. The instructions include an Additional Information section, which has this item:

4. Any person suffering from a mental disorder, leprosy, AIDS, venereal diseases, contagious tuberculosis or other such infectious diseases shall not be permitted to enter China.

This is standard, of course; we have similar rules (see the section Health-related grounds). Ours says that you mustn’t have a communicable disease of public health significance, you must have been vaccinated against certain diseases, you mustn’t have a mental disorder, and you mustn’t be a drug abuser or addict.

The U.S. version of mental disorder, though, is more specific. It addresses people with behaviour that may pose, or has posed, a threat to the property, safety, or welfare of the alien or others. I suspect that the Chinese rules are similar, but the web site is eliding the details. If the issue actually needed to come up, the full rule would be applied, and the filtering would be appropriate.

But I mused about this when I read it. Just taken on its surface, it would bar anyone taking anti-depressants, anyone on methylphenidate (Ritalin)... perhaps even anyone in treatment by a psychiatrist or psychotherapist.

I wonder what portion of the population that covers. I wonder what portion of the IETF participants.

He-he-he....

None shall pass!

Because Faisal Shahzad nearly got airborne en route to Dubai, and we only narrowly managed to stop the takeoff and snag him, everyone wants to know why the no-fly list didn’t work. One issue is that Mr Shahzad was only added to the list that same day, so we’re responding by tightening the rules for using the no-fly list:

Airlines have been required to check the no-fly list for updates only every 24 hours. But the new rule, sent to airlines on Wednesday to take effect immediately, requires that they check within two hours of receiving notification that a high-priority name has been added to the list.

Hm. That sort of goes without saying, doesn’t it? I mean, if the list can be updated any time, then it makes sense to refresh it more than once a day, and it especially makes sense to respond to high-priority requests to refresh it. It boggles the mind that this isn’t already being done. Moreover, this should all be computerized, and the lists that are being used should be updated in close to real time. Are they actually printing paper lists?

But that’s assuming that the list has much value, in general, and it seems clear that it doesn’t. How many people have we really stopped from flying, who we actually wanted to stop from flying? We don’t have numbers on that — it’s a secret, of course — but wouldn’t the TSA be crowing about its success if it were significant? Yet we know that we’ve used it to turn Yusuf Islam (the former popular singer Cat Stevens) away at the border. We know we’ve used it to hassle and delay numerous honest, respectable, non-threatening people with unfortunate names, from five-year-old boys to aged grandparents.

A list of names simply doesn’t scale to the level we need it to for this task. And, yet, a list of names is what we have — a list of names that isn’t refreshed often enough to catch a suspect on the lam. We’re told the list makes us safer. I don’t believe it does. Show me the numbers to prove it.

Oh, and we have a no-fly list, but we don’t have a no-weapon list. Faisal Shahzad bought himself a powerful gun last month. He wasn’t on the no-fly list then... but if he had been, it wouldn’t have stopped him from snagging the weapon, legally, a weapon he could have easily taken on a killing spree through Times Square, just in case the bomb didn’t work.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks that should be fixed:

When gun dealers run background checks, should F.B.I. agents have the authority to block sales of guns and explosives to those on the terror watch lists — and deemed too dangerous to fly? I believe strongly that they should.

I agree, and I find it mystifying that we haven’t already done that.

I also think the NRA will bust a blood vessel on this, which would seem somewhat ironic.

---

Update, 11:00 — And in the New York Times, Gail Collins has an op-ed piece about the gun issue.

Here's an excerpt from what Ms Collins says:

Terror threats make politicians behave somewhat irrationally. But the subject of guns makes them act like a paranoid mother ferret protecting her litter. The National Rifle Association, the fiercest lobby in Washington, grades every member of Congress on how well they toe the N.R.A. line. Lawmakers with heavily rural districts would rather vote to legalize carrying concealed weapons in kindergarten than risk getting less than 100 percent.

Why can’t the voices favouring sensible control of dangerous weapons establish equal sway?

Update, 17:00 — And a New York Times editorial about the gun issue.

Regulating the Internet?

The New York Times recently published an editorial opining that the Federal Communications Commission should reclassify broadband Internet service, from a U.S. regulatory point of view, as a communications service (rather than an information service, as it’s classified now). That will give the FCC more authority to regulate broadband providers.

The Times acknowledges that such a redefinition “would surely unleash a torrent of lawsuits by broadband providers,” and presaging that is a letter to the editor from Verizon’s Chief Communications Officer, Peter Thonis. Mr Thonis says that “the Internet and consumers have thrived” and that “interconnectivity occurred seamlessly”. He concludes:

To predict that “the odds of a rational debate” on Internet policies are “slim” ignores history. There have been scores of smart conferences. And in February, hundreds of detailed public comments were submitted to the F.C.C., including a filing by Verizon and Google.

Another letter writer, Brent Wilkes, claims that net neutrality regulation “could shield the companies that make billions in profits from the Internet” from investing in broadband infrastructure, shifting the costs “exclusively — 100 percent — onto consumers”. Mr Wilkes doesn’t give his justification for that claim, but goes on to say this:

Net neutrality could also bar broadband providers from managing, in a nondiscriminatory manner, the few bandwidth-hogging applications and services that can consume nearly all of a neighborhood’s bandwidth.

Taking Mr Thonis’s comment first: the Times does not “ignore history”. Yes, the Internet has grown up as an independent thing, and the standards that drive the smooth operation of the Internet continue to be developed openly. Ideas, services, and applications are readily available, and people share them online and at conferences. But that’s not what’s at issue here.

This discussion concerns operational policies of the carriers, and in that regard there’s increasing friction, and strong evidence that debate leading to fair policies that best serve the users of the Internet are not likely in the absence of regulation.

One major reason for that is lack of competition — lack of choice for the consumer. That’s the history. As the Times points out:

Rather than seeing an explosion of new competition, the broadband access business has consolidated to the point that many areas of the country have only one provider. Broadband Internet has unbundled into a business with many unrelated information service providers vying for space on the pipelines of a few providers.

Without real choice of providers, the market forces that would prevent restrictive policies that drive prices up and services down do not work. If Verizon and Cablevision should both decide to block Bittorrent, for example, I would have no alternative. And I’m in a good position, having a choice between those two; many residents have only one broadband provider available to them. Suppose Verizon decided that users of sites such as Hulu should pay a surcharge if they aren’t already paying for TV service from Verizon. Absent regulation, nothing’s stopping them from doing that.

It’s reasonable for carriers to establish terms of service that allow them to manage their networks, and, as I’ve said before, if that’s done fairly, it doesn’t violate network neutrality. Limiting lower-tier users to specified maximum data rates and volumes is fine, if the rates and volumes are reasonable. One difficulty is that what’s reasonable changes over time. Ten years ago, we thought a few hundred megabytes per month was a generous limit; now, that would just be the most basic service. New innovations may push the bandwidth and data volume needs up unexpectedly, and the carriers will have to respond to that quickly, lest they block the new applications and services. Regulation can ensure that they respond.

Of course, the regulation must be sensible, and it’s fair for both providers and consumers to worry about over-regulation, regulation run amok. The FCC is generally reasonable, but they’ve certainly been known to overstep, and it’s easy to foresee demands for regulations that block “offensive sites”, and such. We must be careful not to wade into those waters, using regulation to ensure openness, and keeping the various special interests out of it.

As to Mr Wilkes’s comments, I just don’t see how he reached his conclusions. Regulation can ensure just the opposite of what he claims. Regulation can make sure that carriers do provide broadband access to less profitable areas, as a requirement for expansion into high-profit ones. It can make sure that their management of high-bandwidth users and uses is done in a non-discriminatory manner. And regulation can see to it that providers’ fees are reasonable and non-discriminatory as well. It’s exactly the lack of regulation that’s likely to result in the Internet dystopia that Mr Wilkes fears.

Leaving the last word to the Times:

And most persuasively: broadband access is probably the most important communication service of our time. One that needs a robust regulator.

State microbe?

Long-time readers may remember when these pages were just a few months old, and I wrote about the U.S. House of Representatives attaching to an anti-computer-piracy bill a section that designated the oak as the national tree. Silly though it be, there are lots of these sorts of national and state symbols: officially designated state flowers, trees, birds, mammals, folk dances, sports, hobbies....

Well, the Wisconsin state legislature has gone all that one better: on Thursday, they passed a bill designating an offical state microbe.

Yes, indeed. If the Wisconsin state senate goes along as well, the Lactococcus lactis will soon become the Wisconsin state bacterium. Better than having it be some Streptococcus species, I suppose.

Now, there's no denying that the Lactococcus lactis is important to the economy and life of Wisconsin: it's necessary for the production of cheese. But, really, what's the point of all these official “state &thing” designations? For the most part, they serve no useful purpose, and let's be clear about this: these designations aren't free.

It's not like someone just writes it up like I write this blog entry, and sends it to the governor, who says, “Ýeah, OK, why not?”, and signs it. A lot of legislative time is spent on this stuff, not to mention the lobbying that gets it started, and the record keeping afterward. And then someone decides that the new state animal-dropping needs to be depicted on a plaque in the capitol building, and so on.

Why on Earth do we, as a species, seem to feel the need to waste our time on this stuff?

But, hey, as long as we do that sort of thing, maybe I'll try to get a bill introduced to designate David Paterson as the New York State Dufus. Could be fun.

Update, 19 Apr: New Scientist joins the silliness, with suggestions for State Microbes for other states:

Based on its popularity there, California should surely elevate the botox bacterium Clostridium botulinum to the level of state microbe.

And the retired communities of Florida would appreciate the 250-million-year-old Lazarus bacterium, Bacillus permians, as their pet bug.

Click through for the rest.

Is this what democracy looks like?

With the passage of the health-insurance reform bill, congressional representatives have a lot of unhappy constituents — some, as I, unhappy because it doesn’t go far enough, and some unhappy because it goes too far. There are many who wanted no change at all.

But that’s the way things work in a representative democracy. Many of us try to influence our legislators by writing to them, by publicly writing about our ideas, by campaigning and protesting. Whether or not we agree with those writing letters and marching in the streets, we support the exercise of our first-amendment rights to petition our government.

We do not, though, petition our government with bricks and with threats.

From the New York Times article:

Democratic lawmakers have received death threats and been the victims of vandalism because of their votes in favor of the health care bill, lawmakers and law enforcement officials said Wednesday, as the Congressional debate over the issue headed toward a bitter and divisive conclusion.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said at least 10 House members had raised concerns about their personal security since Sunday’s climactic vote, and Mr. Hoyer characterized the cases as serious.

And from the Washington Post:

“To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW.”

These were the words of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who took to his blog urging people who opposed the historic health-care reform legislation — he calls it “Nancy Pelosi’s Intolerable Act” — to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.

And bricks have, indeed, been thrown. Offices — and houses — have been vandalized. At least so far, no one’s been hurt.

Nancy Pelosi reminds us that “these threats have no place in our country,” and that’s absolutely true. The vote doesn’t always go your way, and many of us had eight years to get used to that in the Bush regime. We debated, we wrote, we protested. We took our arguments to our legislators, to the Internet, and to the streets. We urged the impeachment of the president and we campaigned against those who passed laws we didn’t like.

Even in the worst of times, we overthrow our government in the election booth, and we throw our stones by flipping levers and punching holes, and making sure our chad is not hanging nor pregnant.

And we bring change about with words and the sharing of ideas. Not with bricks, or worse.