Blayne Sucks

Clarence Thomas was interviewed on 60 Minutes tonight. I was still rather young when Thomas was going through his confirmation process and I didn’t realize that he only had about one year of experience as a judge at the time. There were a lot of political machinations that were going on with his nomination. I didn’t really understand them all at the time, but I do remember thinking it was far more of a circus than I thought it should be.

Daniel Solove was commenting recently on the idea of ending life tenure for Supreme Court Justices. His argument was inspired by the New York Times article and contained some of the same kinds of things that I disliked about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Solove argues that life appointments make the process even more politicized, put pressure on Presidents to nominate inexperienced justices that will be able to serve longer and are dangerous because of the unpredictable nature of which political entity would be in power when a seat comes open.

Life appointments make sense today for the reasons they did when they were initially chosen. The position is too important to have justices worried about what they will do after their time on the bench. Anything that can be done to ensure their independence in decision making should be done. Arguing about life expectancy differences doesn’t make sense to me. Ben Franklin was the perfect example to those writing the Constitution that it was possible a justice could live far longer than average and have an impact on the bench for decades. Regardless of what term limit there is, the process is going to be politicized to no end simply because it’s the Supreme Freaking Court. In the US, this is the last say in all things judicial, so why wouldn’t it become politicized? As for President’s nominating young and inexperienced people to the court, that is a serious problem and it’s out of hand. Youth isn’t nearly as big of an issue as inexperience, but it’s not a Presidential nomination problem so much as it is a confirmation issue. There’s a reason that the Senate has to confirm nominations. If the nomination is young or inexperienced, then the Senate should not confirm the nomination.

I recently read an excellent article on John Paul Stevens by the New York Times. I definitely don’t agree with all his opinions, but it is hard to argue that his voice and experience with decades of serving on the Supreme Court are detrimental. I don’t know that Justices are constantly able to think broadly in terms of history, but I expect it would be easier if you had broad experience with it.

I would hope that we could avoid messy confirmation battles like the one that Clarence Thomas went through, but I would prefer having those battles over changing a system that has worked pretty darn well for so long. With the political battles that have been fought recently, it seems more important than ever to make sure that the Supreme Court Justices are as independent and removed from the political process as possible. Lastly, term limits would cut short the time that once in a generation minds could serve. What if Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was only allowed to serve 18 years? What about John Marshall? What about Louis Brandeis?

[Edit: I wanted to add that Clarence Thomas's recent autobiography and interview on 60 Minutes have caused Anita Hill to speak out. This seems like one of those stories for which we may never be able to fully know the truth. It also is exactly the worst kind of story in politics in that it has almost no significance on the national level but yet we still devote tons of time to trying to understand it.]

[Edit2: More commentary on cnn.com that argues Clarence Thomas has a right to be angry.]

There’s a BBC article that was posted this past Saturday entitled Big Brother is watching us all. I am leary of reading traditional media articles about privacy because many of them are inflammatory and most seem to provide and distorted view of what most reasonable privacy advocates are actually advocating. However, I was curious because it was the BBC and London is well-known to have extensive surveillance camera networks.

Despite my misgivings, the article does describe some technologies in a rational and accurate manner. I don’t know if the technologies described are right around the corner or if it will still take decades for them to be functional. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. However, I do know that we’re nowhere close to being able to understand as a society the implications that some of these things, when functional, will have for us.

Of course, there is a great example of the traditional tripe usually found in mainstream media articles. It comes at the end of the article:

Using radio waves, you point [the device at] a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side. [Ian Kitajima's] company, Oceanit, is due to test it with the Hawaiian National Guard in Iraq next year, and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates.

“First, you can tell whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield,” said Ian.

“But it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”

He glanced at me quizzically, noticing my apprehension.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It sounds very Star Trekkish, but that’s what’s ahead.”

This is exactly the reason I dislike mainstream media articles about technology. No, there will not be a magic radio wave device that can read your mind and determine what you’re actually thinking in the next ten years. This is hogwash. One of the many reasons why is simple. The first step in building a device that can determine what someone is actually thinking is creating an algorithm or process that can determine what someone is actually thinking. Anyone who has ever been married can tell you how successful humans are at that sort of thing.

A quickly beating heart is indicative of many disparate things. Most of these are not “I am preparing to kill whomever is staring at me through my wall.” However, if you are a member of a SWAT team holding a device such as this in one hand and a machine gun in the other… Well, let’s just say that a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

A similar situation is described in Blink by Malcom Gladwell where a police officer had to make a split second decision based on bad instincts. The good news is that training can improve split second decisions in police officers. Thus, it is possible that proper training in the use of technology can prevent abuses and wasteful spending which might result from misunderstanding technology. The bad news is that we may not be able to train those in decision making positions rapidly enough to keep up with technology marketers (and clueless mainstream media journalists) who are trying to sell the next miracle device that will solve all your security problems.

One of the reasons why I like sports, and football in particular, is that they are readily analogous to life. Over the football season, you can see life lessons in action and have an opportunity to learn from them. More importantly, it is easier to talk about football problems than real life problems from time to time. In real life, some topics become so sensitive that we can’t talk about them without bending over backwards to achieve a level of political correctness which ends up distracting us from resolving the deeper issues. This happens less often in sports or fiction.

The most amazing story in football this week has to be Kevin Everett’s seemingly astounding progress in recovering from a devastating neck injury. Life can throw difficulties like this your way from time to time. Car accidents with serious injuries and deaths happen every day. Seeing that people can handle these problems is both encouraging and inspiring.

Of course, there are also other injuries that happen as a result of football. I can’t say that I’ve ever been so passionate about football that I would get into a physical altercation about it. However, the analogy holds even in this extremely weird case. These folks had far more in common than they had differences. They both liked football. They both apparently liked the same bar. How many times does the human race fight over the tiny ways in which we differ?

The 2007 Football Season is upon us. Both the Colts and Boilermakers have gotten out of the gate with solid wins under their belts. Purdue beat Toledo last Saturday and will be playing Eastern Illinois tomorrow. I watched most of this game with a few friends, but we left before Dorien Bryant’s 91 yard kickoff return for a touchdown. He’s a burner that gives Purdue a legitimate threat to score any time he gets the ball. With an experienced quarterback and a solid offensive line, I’m looking forward to the season.

The Colts stole the show last night with a season opener against the New Orleans Saints. It was really cool to see the pre-game celebration in Indianapolis for the Colts Super Bowl victory, but seeing that all the changes on defense didn’t seem to affect them too badly was even more cool. I really didn’t expect them to hold New Orleans to 10 points. We’ll have to see how much of that was Indy’s defense and how much of that was first game miscues from New Orleans’ offense.

It’s such a wonderful feeling to get back to football.

There’s a principle in computer security that is the basis of access control as we know it. This principle is called The Principle of Least Privilege. The idea is that you should only provide the minimum amount of rights needed for someone to do the things they need to do. For example, an account for a computer user who merely needs to browse the web and send emails shouldn’t also include rights to do things like install or remove programs.

Key to this principle is the concept of a “root” owner of rights who is able to determine who deserves to have what rights. With a computer, that “root” owner is the administrator account, but there is a political mirror to this principle. In a police state or dictatorship, the “root” owner of all rights is the State which can pretty much distribute rights however they wish. In a democracy, the root owner of all rights is the citizenry who elects politicians to create, enforce and maintain a legal system that dispenses these rights.

The citizens of a democracy must continually verify that the distribution of rights is proper. Recently, a story was posted on Slashdot about someone doing just that. I encourage you to read the details about this because it demonstrates exactly the kind of thought process that has been abandoned by many citizens for the sake of convenience.

I don’t want to get into anything overly political, so I won’t comment further. However, I do hope that you’ll at least consider this man’s situation. Ask yourself a few questions about the division of rights in this scenario. Do you feel that the Principle of Least Privilege has been violated? Consider similar situations, such as producing a driver’s license or other ID to board an airplane. For example, should you have to display an ID to fly?

[Edited to add: A friend of mine pointed out a similar story about a trip to Best Buy.]