Why Be Early?
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March 07, 2008
July 03, 2007
Terrorist Special Olympics?
If you read the news, you'd think we've had some pretty close calls recently with some would-be terrorists. But if you actually find out a few crucial facts, you see that what we have are some morons attempting to be terrorists - or succeeding, if you define it as spreading fear - and not getting very far. Both the would be bombers in London just a few days ago and the guy who thought he could level JFK a few weeks ago apparently have the science knowledge of a 12 year old who has watched too many movies.
But - the parts of explosives and the half-baked plans combined with government agencies that need funding and media outlets that just can't wait for a juicy story all add up to some big fears. It's a good thing we don't have to worry about those 43,000 people killed in automobile accidents last year in the US. That's nothing to get excited about. Or the loss of habeus corpus - who needs it?
June 27, 2007
Really Secret?
Great article (PDF) in the Washington Post about the increasing amount of secrecy in the government and the country - and why it is a disturbing trend. This democracy we live in was built on an open sharing of ideas - remember that the original settlers were escaping religious persecution - and too much secrecy in our government perverts its foundations. As the saying goes, the best disinfectant is sunlight. Hopefully our next administration will reverse the current trend.
But the notion that information is more credible because it's secret is increasingly unfounded. In fact, secret information is often more suspect because it hasn't been subjected to open debate. Those with their own agendas can game the system, over-classifying or stove-piping self-serving intelligence to shield it from scrutiny. Those who cherry-picked intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war could ignore anything that contradicted it. Even now, some members of Congress tell me that they avoid reading classified reports for fear that if they do, the edicts of secrecy will bar them from discussing vital public issues.
May 07, 2007
Buying Used CDs Requires a Fingerprint?!
The Recording Industry has gone way overboard in somehow getting Florida and Utah (and possibly Rhode Island and Wisconsin) to pass a laws that say:
- selling used CDs requires putting up a $10K bond with the state
- buying them requires a fingerprint (!) and a state-issued ID
These are probably much tougher requirements than buying a gun in these states. Does this seem absurd to anyone? What about used book sales? Are used CD sales really that much of a market killer? Why is the recording industry trying to shoot itself in the foot? What a bunch of morons - including the legislators who bought in to this ill-conceived joke.
April 28, 2007
The 'Puppy Dog Theory' of Terrorism
Richard Clarke puts is relatively simply and quite well in this op-ed - saying that "we are beating them over there to prevent them from coming over here" is nonsense. In fact, it's probably quite the opposite - the more we try to do "over there," the more harm will probably come to us "over here." As if we really needed more evidence that this mess we're in over in Iraq was not needed in the first place, and we should just get out of there...
March 25, 2007
E-voting in Holland
The trials and tribulations of electronic voting are not just an American problem. The Dutch Government apparently had their main supplier of e-voting systems essentially threaten them with blackmail if they didn't purchase his company after an independent watchdog group (great: The "We don't trust voting computers foundation") leader was poised to be put on a commission to investigate the voting computers.
This kind of problem isn't really specific to e-voting, but it does make a good argument for open-source e-voting systems. If the source is publicly owned and maintained by government programmers (doing releases and testing for elections) plus the open-source community, your blackmail and sole-source problems go away.
March 12, 2007
Internet Radio Petition
To my Congressional representatives (and to Congress as a whole) --
As a fan of Internet radio, I was alarmed to learn that music royalty rates were recently determined by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) which, if enacted, would certainly silence most or all of my favorite online listening services. (For most webcasters, this new royalty rate represents more than 100% of their total revenues!)
The closure of these Internet radio stations would be a loss for not only independent business owners, but also for musical artists, for copyright owners, and for listeners like me who enjoy the wide variety of choices available via Internet radio.
I respectfully request that Congress look into this matter and initiate action to prevent it. As the CRB rate decision is retroactive to January 1, 2006, please understand that time is of the essence -- as the immediate impact of this decision could silence many or most free Internet radio stations forever.
February 05, 2007
Social Science and the War on Terror
Very interesting article in The New Yorker on the (finally) increasing influence of non-traditional military methods in the non-traditional non-battlefield of the "war on terror." Looking at the social networks of people in the countries and places where terrorists are coming from is important to figuring out how to function there - militarily or otherwise - since we are often now not fighting these countries themselves but people hiding within them, so we have to work with and use the people there to get our goals accomplished.
December 08, 2006
Wither the reduction in consumption?
The Energy Information Administration released its far forward looking report on energy sources and consumption in the country. Alternative and biomass sources play a smaller part in our country's future then the current amount of news about them might lead one to believe, leaving our fossil fuel friend coal to do most of the heavy lifting. The report doesn't talk directly about any possible reduction in energy consumption, although I guess it might be implied in reduced rates of energy demand increase.
I guess we are a growing country, so we can't expect energy saving technologies and our better instincts to overcome our growing needs for power, right? I suppose to a large degree, much of the energy in this country is used by long lived assets such as buildings which cannot normally just be replaced when the latest technology comes out. It is highly unlikely that our transportation infrastructure will be scaled down, we can hope that the deficiency of the most common modes of our transportation increase, but again we run into the problem of long lived assets.
I guess we will all just have to be happy with chipping away at the margins of energy consumption, and maybe wait for the next big breakthrough in fusion power.
November 03, 2006
November 02, 2006
Can you say ironic?
If this story about Ted Haggard having some non-coed fun is true, I have to say it is pretty funny.
October 18, 2006
Schneier on the Death of the Casual Conversation
Everyday conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it... Privacy was the default assumption. This has changed. We now type our casual conversations. We chat in e-mail, with instant messages on our computer and SMS messages on our cellphones, and in comments on social networking Web sites like Friendster, LiveJournal and... MySpace. These conversations... are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting that we’re being recorded... If you find this disturbing, you should. Fewer conversations are ephemeral, and we’re losing control over the data. We trust our ISPs, employers and cellphone companies with our privacy, but again and again they’ve proven they can’t be trusted.
October 10, 2006
A Lasting Chill?
(I always forget to publish these scheduled articles...)
Although the article appears on the front page of the business section (An Obsession with Leaks and Plugs, PDF), it really ought to be a general op-ed. The current climate of secrecy, fear, and paranoia engendered by the administration already seem to be having ill effects on journalism, and as one could possibly even argued by the recent goings on at Hewlett-Packard, big business. The aptly titled "sunshine laws" that have been enacted in many places across the country passed because of the general feeling that democracy works best out in the open, in the brightly visible light of day. Exactly what about that is unclear to the current administration?
October 09, 2006
Bad Legacy
I am going to lean on the New York Times a bit here (completely out of character, I know). Thomas Friedman started off an op-ed last week with some funny (you might say morbidly funny) comments on how you could start to fill a bookshelf with the burgeoning section of "how the Bush administration has screwed up" titles. Things seem to be -- hopefully -- pointing in the way of Democratic victory in at least one of the branches of Congress, which if it happens, might start to rein in some of the Republican groupthink that has been going on in Washington for the past six years. Today David Sanger comments on how the decision to focus on Iraq has shown yet again to be a mistake, as North Korea claims to have tested a nuclear bomb and there isn't much of anything we can do about it. Three years ago we threw our lot in with the merely bad, and really haven't paid enough attention to the definitely worse.
I guess you could claim a lot of this is the 20/20 of hindsight, but I would definitely argue that there were some bad decisions based on some bad policies and the ideological (instead of realistic) visions of how certain things would play out.
October 05, 2006
Not what they said before, but we'll take it
Maybe I missed something over the past six years, but hasn't the administration done all it can to disprove or otherwise ignore global warming? Or is "climate change" not the same thing? Well, at least the Department of Energy seems to have come around.
DOE Releases Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan
DOE released on September 20th the Climate Change Technology Program (CCTP) Strategic Plan, which details measures to accelerate the development and reduce the cost of new and advanced technologies that avoid, reduce, or capture and store greenhouse gas emissions. CCTP is the technology component of a comprehensive U.S. strategy introduced by President Bush in 2002 to combat climate change. That strategy includes measures to advance climate change science; spur clean energy technology development and deployment; promote international collaboration; and slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions through voluntary, incentive-based, and mandatory partnerships.
The CCTP Strategic Plan organizes roughly $3 billion in federal spending for climate technology research, development, demonstration, and deployment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase economic growth. The plan sets six complementary goals: (1) reducing emissions from energy use and infrastructure; (2) reducing emissions from energy supply; (3) capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide; (4) reducing emissions of other greenhouse gases; (5) measuring and monitoring emissions; and (6) bolstering the contributions of basic science to climate change. It examines energy efficiency, hydrogen, renewable energy, and renewable fuels among an array of other low-emissions energy technologies.
The strategic plan also notes the difficulty of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions; examining a range of scenarios, the report notes that cumulative global emissions over the next century would have to be reduced by the equivalent of 300 billion to a trillion metric tons of carbon. Deploying a million megawatts of wind power would cut emissions by only about 1 billion metric tons of carbon per year. On the other hand, advanced energy efficiency technologies could cut global carbon emissions by 270 billion tons over the next century. See the DOE press release and the CCTP Strategic Plan.
September 25, 2006
The widening gap
The widening gap between what the administration is saying about the war in Iraq and the war on terror is somewhat disturbing. You know something has got to be wrong when the agencies are quietly reporting things are much worse than the press releases say - they want to be sure when the shit actually hits the fan that they had covered their own ass...
The Guardian reports that the [National Intelligence Estimate] document "contradicts" recent optimistic assessments from the Bush administration. It also "furthers the divisions between the military and politicians in their assessment of the impact of US policy in Iraq."
September 15, 2006
Electronic De-voting
If it wasn't already obvious that the Diebold electronic voting machines had more security problems then Internet Explorer, Edward Felten and some researchers at Princeton University have done an analysis on a machine they obtained and proven the poor design of it. They even produced a nice summary and FAQ.
September 13, 2006
Hail to the Chief 2
More interesting stuff from the book I mentioned in a previous post. Different ways of dealing with war, foreign policy, and the difficulties of consensus building make for very interesting contrasts among the different presidents. It is especially interesting now that we are approaching the end of the Bush Jr. administration, and we can begin to contemplate what his legacy will be like. I am not a particular fan of his, but he was reelected, so I am curious how positively or negatively he will be viewed through the fuzzy lens of history. More of the passages I run into in this book make me think that he will not be viewed very positively.
Our most successful wartime presidents have been those who systematically built a consensus in the Congress, the press, and the country before taking up arms, just as the most ineffective leaders have been those who tried to impose a military policy on the nation in which it didn't believe. The freedom allowed America's chiefs in the making of war and crafting of peace has also burdened them with considerable risks, and it is in this arena at the reputations of some of the country's most and least successful presidents have been made. (p. 109)
The defeat of Wilson's peace plans in 1919 made an indelible impression on [FDR], for he learned that no leader could ignore the vital connection between domestic opinion and conduct of international relations. As president, he lived by the proposition that an effective policy abroad required a supporting consensus at home. (p. 114)
Apart from the Spanish American war in 1898, the Persian Gulf struggle, in large part because it lasted nearly 6 weeks and cost only 350 American lives... [George Bush Sr.] wisdom in establishing national and international support for an American military action of this magnitude provided an instructive contrast to the many instances of 20th-century gunboat and secret diplomacy, which did more to erode confidence in the countries democratic institutions than to advance the national interest. (p. 119)
September 04, 2006
Hail to the Chief
I have been reading a really interesting book, Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents, by Robert Dallek. The book examines what qualities have made our great presidents great and conversely, our bad presidents bad. With the upcoming elections looking to be something of a referendum on the complete Republican control on Washington and the relative unpopularity of the president and many of his policies, this book makes pretty interesting reading -- what are the things that have made our popular past presidents better than their more forgettable brethren? How much does having a strong vision for the country matter? Do you have to be able to get along with opposing politicians?
Here are a couple good excerpts. I will probably end up posting some more:
Democratic Openness:
Few developments in American political life have been more destructive to presidential authority than the rise of a secret government. While doctrinaire adherence to an ideology, or a stiffbacked presidential personality... have been detriments to sensible, innovative leadership, so, too, has been the conviction of some chief executives at secret, unilateral actions could take the place of public debate. Without it, presidents have denied themselves the chance to consider alternative means of dealing with difficult problems. Moreover, when their machinations came to light, as they invariably did, they proved highly damaging to the president's credibility and his ability to govern. (p. 77)
Electoral Mandates:
In the 52 presidential elections since the birth of the Republic in 1787, 16 presidents have gained the White House with less than 50% of the popular vote.... Even most presidents who were elected with a popular majority of one less than 56% of the ballot. Only 17 elections have produced decisive margins of more than 55%. (p. 84)
August 04, 2006
New York City Police against the bicycle
The New York City Police Department really does not seem to like bicyclists. The monthly Critical Mass rides annoy them to no end, and they were not very nice to bicyclists during the 2004 Republican National Convention protests by either.
Now they have decided that the best way to get back at the bicycle community is by changing the parade permit rules and regulations to be so restrictive that pretty much anyone but a single person on a bicycle riding down the street could be in violation of the parade rules (that is not an exaggeration, 2 or more people on bicycles could be considered a parade or gathering that needs a permit).
The police department has lost all its recent court cases against bicyclists who have been arrested, and the judges in the cases have been quite harsh with the conduct of the Police. So the police have decided to change the rules heavily in their favor.
The police department has come up with an overkill and heavy-handed solution for a problem that almost does not even exist. As one New York Times columnist said, "What happened here is that a molehill became a mountain."
I urge every one to get in contact with their city council member and the mayor to voice their concern and displeasure with this ridiculous proposal by the police department.
NY Times 19 July 2006: "The Police Department wants to require parade permits for bicyclists traveling in groups of 20 or more, and any bicyclists or walkers who take to the streets in groups of two or more and disobey traffic laws for things like parades, races or protests, according to a public notice filed with the city...."
July 26, 2006
It Takes Money, Unfortunately
you may be right, but if a very large, well-funded entity brings a lawsuit against you -- being right and being able to win in a court of law usually takes a lot of money. Well it looks like the MPAA finally picked on someone who has the money to defend himself. Hopefully Mr. Hogan is able to decisively showed them the error of their ham-fisted legalistic ways.
July 03, 2006
Data Brokers Take the 5th
Occasionally your Congressperson does learn something. What they do with that new knowledge is another question.
Almost every piece of personal information that Americans try to keep secret -- including bank account statements, e-mail messages and telephone records -- is semi-public and available for sale.
That was the lesson Congress learned over the last week during a series of hearings aimed at exposing peddlers of personal data, from whom banks, car dealers, jealous lovers and even some law enforcement officers have covertly purchased information to use as they wish.
"We had the impression that there were no secrets any more. Now we know that for sure," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican and chairman of the panel's oversight subcommittee.
April 29, 2006
Spying by the Rules
We know that the Bush administration authorized the NSA to spy domestically against federal law. It's an open question how useful this really was (and is). Seems like they were using some of the technology from the "it didn't actually die" Total Information Awareness data mining/spying program that Congress had supposedly killed funding for in 2003. The more interesting question is why if the administration felt the need to go around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to get permission to wiretap people, why did it not just attempt to change the rules of the court in light of what could most likely be viewed as new and different technology?
April 22, 2006
Legislation Information
Govtrack.us is a relatively well organized site where you can find out about all the latest legislation in Washington. It claims to be a non-partisan just-the-facts site and it pretty much seems to be that way.
April 17, 2006
Where is the NYC DOT going?
Part of the mission of the NYC DOT is to "enhance mobility," but does it always have to be via the motor vehicle? 8 million people in New York City, a constrained amount of land, and the densest built environment in the country -- and still a transit and pedestrian focus seems alien to the DOT.
Seems a few people have been noticing lately. The New York City Streets Renaissance group is trying to push a pretty good agenda. Gotham Gazette ran a good article by a former professor of mine at Hunter College on Livable Streets. The Tristate Transportation Campaign has been following the controversy over the new Yankee Stadium planning proposal and the extra parking that the city cannot prove that it needs. Recent patently false or completely misguided statements by officials at the DOT make one wonder what hidden agenda they are following or what drug is in the drinking water at the agency.
New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer has introduced a bill to have the DOT's performance measured against real-world performance goals:
the bill would supplement these statistics with a set of measures whose aim will be to assess and reduce “the amount of traffic citywide and within each borough.” Specific aims of the new data would be to “reduce commute time citywide,” reduce household exposure to street emissions and reduce driving’s share of travel to central business districts while increasing those of mass transit, cycling and walking.
Sounds like a good piece of legislation, however unfortunate since the agency can't seem to get itself going and actually helping out all the people of the city.
April 12, 2006
The IRS and Your Personal Information
A recent report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center has some troubling information about personal data collection methods and oversight at the Department Of Treasury/Internal Revenue Service. The most troubling was the recent news that the IRS (and from this report it seems they control the ability of independent tax preparers also) would start selling taxpayer data to other companies. Maybe generalized reports might not be a bad thing, but you just know that they would end up selling detailed individual reports with Social Security numbers because no one would notice or care to take them off.
April 11, 2006
The Prominence of Intolerance
American society has become more tolerant of many things over the years. We have even inscribed that tolerance into law. In many places that tolerance has recently included the sexual preference of people - you cannot be discriminated against if you are gay or straight or whatever. Now we see people whose religion dictates against alternative sexual preferences interpreting a passive tolerance as an active assault on their values, and they are fighting to overturn that rule of tolerance. Where does this logically end? Next in line, maybe, will be the people who believe that miscegenation was always evil?
April 08, 2006
What is the definition of lying?
So apparently president Bush knew about and directed the Valerie Plame leak. Didn't he previously say he wasn't involved? ("If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.") Or maybe he was just interested in finding out what was going on, knowing that might not happen - hoping that might not happen? Former President Clinton had to get into semantics to attempt to not admit directly fooling around* and the Republicans picked on him mightily for it. I would say that President Bush would be defending himself in the same manner now, but for one big difference - he and his administration don't even bother to defend themselves. They just pretend as if they have done nothing wrong. My guess is that history will not treat them as kindly.
(* Compared to authorizing spying on Americans and now this business with lying about knowledge of the leaking of classified CIA information, what exactly did former President Clinton do wrong?)
March 13, 2006
Go Russ!
Russ Finegold, Democratic senator from Wisconsin, is proposing a measure to censure president Bush for his domestic spying program. Finally, someone in Congress with some balls.
March 07, 2006
What is the Future of Privacy?
I was working for Sun Microsystems in 1999 when Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." I did not really want to believe him then, but I knew if we did not do something about it we would end up exactly in that spot.
On his blog, Bruce Schneier has posted one of his best all encompassing privacy essays to date, The Future Of Privacy. One of the good and bad things about wholesale surveillance is that it is so un-specific. We may no longer be anonymous with all this data about us stored in who knows how many databases, but just because it passes through a filter does not mean we are being watched in the same way it did thirty years ago. The problem lies in the filtering then, when a combination of things that we do raises a flag in some computer somewhere - and we become yet another example of an unduly harassed false positive. The numbers are so great at this point - the amount of data so large - that it does not seem to work out in our favor (the innocents) or that of law enforcement. And the amount of data seems like it will just keep pace with computing power and algorithm development.
February 25, 2006
NYPD's Strange Dislike for Bicycles
The New York City Police Department is definitely going overboard In in their crackdown on the Critical Mass rides, I wonder if more news coverage like this New York Times article will get them to back off, or if it will take legal action - more than just losing their case to stop the rides.
February 13, 2006
Insecure Flight
The Transportation Security Administration Secure Flight program has been suspended, supposedly because they have found a number of security vulnerabilities in it. Maybe they are suspending it (for now) because it does not seem to be working - $150 million spent and only lots of unhappy false positive matches (ordinary people who can't fly because they are matched for the wrong reasons). Not a very good benefit-to-cost ratio.
Bruce Schneier has said many things better than I could about how little this program would do to enhance our security.
January 23, 2006
The Old French Guy
Isn't it interesting how we keep coming back to Alexis de Tocqueville for an insightful look at the essence of our country - and some of the best suggestions for how out to run it.
January 17, 2006
Privacy Top Ten of 2005 and 2006
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has a list of the top ten privacy issues of 2005 and upcoming issues for 2006.
January 16, 2006
UNREAL ID
Does the United States need a national ID? Not really. Is Congress trying to impose one on us? Yes. Will they (we) be able to pay for it? That's a good question...
January 14, 2006
Regulation in Broadband Access
The data lines that carry our internet traffic makeup part of the infrastructure of this country just like the concrete of the sewers and highways, and infrastructure is an area - an inefficient market - that requires government regulation and funding to be both competitive for its (usually) small number of companies and fair for the public that needs access to it.
Larry Lessig has a good post about how the United States is falling behind the rest of the developed world in internet infrastructure development because of a lack of intelligent regulation in the broadband access market.
November 02, 2005
Explanations
Even when it has pretty much obviously done things wrong - probably even illegal - the current administration refuses to apologize or own up to its mistakes. Okay, the president did say that the government screwed up as far as hurricane Katrina is concerned, but now they have got another large mess on their hands, the indictment of Lewis Libby, and we have more evasion instead of explanation. Nicholas Kristof put it very well in his op-ed in this past Sunday's New York Times (PDF).
October 11, 2005
Crumbling Infrastructure
This is not exactly new news, which is why I guess it is in the Arts & Leisure section, but Nicolai Ouroussoff has written a great article on the pumps that were supposed to keep the water out of New Orleans and the general deterioration of urban infrastructure in this country over the past several decades.
October 06, 2005
His Noodly Appendage
Creationism? Intelligent design? Evolution? There is only one supreme being, and it is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
October 02, 2005
Non-Freedom Center?
Should the Freedom Center building that they are planning for Ground Zero now be called the non-Freedom Center? The International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center are both gone from the building because they apparently are not "patriotic enough for some political officials or some of the ridiculously shrill 9/11 families. So now we have a great Norwegian architecture firm designing a building that will be filled with some bland Disney-like patriotic display? Even more shopping? How about more life-affirming empty space?
Whether or not you subscribe to the theory that Islamic terrorists dislike us in part because of the freedoms that our society allows, these freedoms - one of the most important being the ability to speak ones mind about politics and criticize the government - are what make us the great country we are. It is sad to see the heavy censorship of the proposed cultural programming at Ground Zero. One would like to think that this country honors itself through great free thinking art and architecture - not through propaganda like one sees in communist and fascist countries.
Update: this article from The Guardian newspaper in London gives a great view on the purpose and usefulness of art in trying times:
Three points. One, why caution? Why not brave iconoclasm? In the wake of 7/7, London does not need art to tiptoe around the imagined sensibilities of those possibly affronted by [the art]. We need to swagger, not crawl. Otherwise art becomes decadently decorative, the 21st-century equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
September 06, 2005
On Not Helping the Poor
Keeping his eye on the bigger picture, Nicholas Kristof writes a great op-ed piece in the New York Times today. What happened in Louisiana and Alabama because of hurricane Katrina definitely had the worst effect on the poor, and the US is not doing a very good job of helping the poor in normal weather, either:
Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.
So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. Nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. On immunizations, the U.S. ranks 84th for measles and 89th for polio.
August 17, 2005
Mayor Mike and the Future of the Streets
Mayor Bloomberg comments on the future plans for the streets, walkways, and bikeways of New York City in the Queens Express. It is some what unfortunate that even though the accomplishments highlighted talk largely about the reduced number of deaths - still too many - the first thing talked about for improvements is congestion relief and not safety.
August 05, 2005
Novak 0, Stewart 1
Robert Novak lost it yesterday on a CNN talk show. The loser finally gets some punishment. And because of all that, last night's