Blayne Sucks

I decided to read Franz Kafka’s The Trial after seeing it used by Dan Solove to describe the no-fly list. I knew very little about the book before reading it.  I knew that it was about a man named Joseph K. who was arrested and then, despite his best efforts, completely unable to understand or control the resulting course of events. I also knew that it was one of the books that has motivated the term “Kafkaesque.” What I didn’t know was that it does all of these things in a “meta” sense as well, which has made the the book extraordinarily rich and entertaining to read.

What do I meant by my use of the word “meta” to describe The Trial? Anyone who has read Gödel, Escher, and Bach would probably understand what I mean if I re-phrased it by saying that The Trial is a Strange Loop. However, for those who haven’t read GEB, I will try to explain in more detail, particularly since this is the most delicious part of the book. The Trial was originally written in German, with which I have some experience, but I am not capable of reading a book at this level in German. Thus, it had to be translated. Every time I read a translated book I feel it tug at me a little: Am I really reading this as it was intended? This tugging adds a level of disorientation, which is really the entire point of The Trial.

Of course, Kafka wasn’t intending that everyone read a translated version of the book. In fact, Kafka may have never intended anyone to read the book. It was published posthumously and perhaps against his wishes. Now, there is perhaps some debate over whether or not there was a moral obligation to publish, but that debate is still going today. Thus, it is, in some sense, a book over which not even the author could exercise complete control.

Since it was published posthumously, it was never finished. There is an obviously incomplete chapter that simply ends. There are unfinished chapter fragments and deleted sections published as appendices in the printed version of the book that I read. In fact, literary scholars aren’t entirely sure about the order the chapters should appear. All of this only adds to the confusion and disorder that is depicted throughout the book.

If you haven’t read any of Kafka’s books, but you’re interested in learning a little bit about why Kafka is such an important author, then I would recommend The Trial as a good starting point. I enjoyed the “meta” aspects of the book, but there are certainly a lot of other themes that are enjoyable, including the role of women in the book, which was the biggest surprise for me. I won’t talk about it here though. You’ll have to discover it for yourself.

Yesterday the FCC released their report on their decision against Comcast’s secret degredation of BitTorrent protocol traffic. The basic content of this ruling has been known since early August. It nominally states that Comcast violated federal rules for “reasonable network management.” Network neutrality proponents have been quick to applaud the FCC’s ruling. Certainly, this action violates a hands-off, network neutral approach. However, the extremely important and surprisingly overlooked subtext is that supporting the FCC’s ruling implicitly accepts that the FCC should regulate the operation of ISPs, and effectively, the Internet itself. The end result of regulating the Internet is to seriously muffle the creativity and innovation that has made the Internet great.

Some commentators are avoiding the discussion of the FCC’s jurisdiction in this matter, but it is absolutely the most important aspect of this ruling. The FCC’s five commissioners voted to take action 3 votes to 2. Both Commissioner McDowell and Commissioner Tate have released separate dissenting statements intimating that the FCC shouldn’t be involved in this type of decision. Commissioner McDowell wrote an editorial in the Washington Post several weeks ago defending the incredible growth of the Internet as the result of “the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.”

In fact, Comcast and BitTorrent had already agreed to work out an amicable solution to these engineering problems way back in March. Of course, the folks at Freedom to Tinker are right that this isn’t really a two party discussion between Comcast and BitTorrent, but the point is that Comcast was working towards fixing these problems well before the FCC took a regulatory action.

ISPs have always had the ability to solve network problems as they happen without fearing a fine. Government regulation would hamper these efforts. Politicians are concerned about this chilling effect. Kevin Martin, who is the Republican-appointed Chairman of the FCC and who voted in favor of taking action against Comcast, faced significant political pressure prior to the release of the opinion. House Minority Leader John Boehner wrote a letter to Martin to express “dismay” that he was “intend[ing] to interfere with the network management decisions of broadband providers, essentially regulating the Internet.”

Supporters of the FCC’s actions, such as Brett Frischmann, may find the FCC’s use of the phrase “reasonable network management” to provide sufficient wiggle room for analyzing actions on a case-by-case basis, but the phrase “reasonable network management” is not as innocuous as it may seem. Sure, there’s a lot of ambiguity in the word ‘reasonable,’ but adopting this phrase as a de facto standard would destroy creativity and innovation. Here’s what George Bernard Shaw had to say about reasonableness:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

This has certainly been true of the Internet, where virtually every major advance seems to have come as a complete shock to the vast majority of experts in the field. Paul Graham talks about this a lot. Most recently he mentioned it in the context of fundraising for startups:

A good startup idea has to be not just good but novel. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people, or someone would already be doing it and it wouldn’t be novel.

Don’t lose sight of this bigger picture like the FCC has: Regulating network neutrality doesn’t work out well for anyone in the long run because creativity and innovation depend on the ability to be “unreasonable” at times.

In an election year, it is easy to become caught up in the political discussion about which candidate has the best policy on education, which candidate will fix healthcare, or which candidate will lower our gas prices. It is easy to focus on the problems because politicians don’t get elected for the things that have gone right. These are the things we take for granted, but there are certainly places in the world where the things we take for granted are serious concerns.

Zimbabwe is one of those places. Yesterday, it was determined that the Zimbabwe dollar has suffered from 11,200,000% inflation for the 12 previous months. That’s 11.2 million percent inflation. As Tom Palmer has aptly said, this is how you destroy a country. As you may have surmised, this is a classic example of hyperinflation.

The leaders of Zimbabwe are at best clueless and at worst ruthlessly careless as to the effects of their policies. Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono have devalued the currency rather than attempt to address the root causes of the problem. They blame sanctions from western countries for their economic woes, when in reality they have created their own crisis.

Zimbabwe has the natural resources to be one of the wealthiest African countries. Zimbabwe is home to Victoria Falls, a worldwide tourist attraction. They also has rich mineral deposits that could support some of the best mines in the world. Zimbabwe’s sub-tropical climate could support significant agriculture as well. These resources simply need to be managed properly.

Meanwhile, the people of Zimbabwe are suffering. The unemployment rate is over 80%. The brain drain has been staggering. Only those people who can’t afford to leave or who care too much about their homeland to leave remain in the country. Parts of the country have been without running water for months. The electric grid is unstable. Basic elements of the country’s infrastructure are failing.

Zimbabwe’s economic problems dwarf those problems in the United States. The US has had a 17 year high percentage of inflation: 5.6% This is certainly a problem, and one that has caused the economy to be a serious topic of the current presidential election. The economic concept of sound money (a monetary unit that is relatively stable and inflation-free) is crucial to any economy. However, it is important to remember that things could be much worse and we still have a pretty stable economy. If you find yourself tired of paying too much for gas or fed up with the election year political chatter, remember that there are probably quite a few things we may be taking for granted.

Yesterday Barack Obama was at Purdue University to talk about national security. You can read the text of his remarks here.

Purdue University may seem like a strange place to talk about National Security for many people, but this location was well-chosen for several reasons. First, Clinton won Indiana in the primaries and although the state tends to vote republican in November, Obama needs to continue to bring the democratic party together. Second, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) supported Clinton in the primaries. He’s a very popular former governor of the state who’s father was also in the Senate. Being able to receive his support is important for Obama. Third, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) is a foreign policy and national security expert. Although Sen. Lugar was not at the event, he was spoken of with high praise. Fourth, Purdue University is home of CERIAS, one of the best cyber security research institutions in the world. It makes sense to talk about national security in a state that has such an influential voice in that area.

As to the actual event itself, I strongly encourage you to read Professor Gene Spafford‘s write up of his experiences at the event. He gives an overview of Obama’s speech and each of the three panels that followed. It is an excellent read if you are interested in national security, politics or computer security. Although there are many quotable sections of the post, I will refrain from quoting it in the hopes that my strong endorsement of it will encourage you to read the whole thing.

CNN is running an article about a 22 year old woman who is facing a probable sentence of six years for identity fraud. There are a couple of things to note in this story.

First, their victims were friends and family. This is a common form of identity fraud. More than a third of all victims of identity fraud know the person who victimized them. Why? The answer is access. Friends and family are more trusting and their identity information is simply more easily available. It may even be easier for criminals to use since many vendors may be willing to look the other way for a daughter using her mother’s credit.

Second, the article quotes a federal prosecutor using the phrase “identity fraud” rather than identity theft. This is extremely important because it more accurately describes the crime. We already have laws on the books for fraud. Fraud has been illegal for quite some time. Yes, there are technological issues in catching the criminals, but the situation is far better than it was a few yeas ago.

Jim Harper describes the difference in detail in his book Identity Crisis:

Silence of the Lambs was a 1991 movie starring Jodie Foster as FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as the notorious and devious supercriminal Hannibal Lecter. At the end of the movie, Lecter overpowers ad kills two guards in order to escape from a special prison that has been built for him on the upper floors of a building. He changes into the uniform of one of the guards, hides the guard’s body and poses as that guard, badly injured but clinging o life. To complete the deception, Lecter tears the guard’s face off and places it over his own. The police wheel Lecter out of his prison on a gurey, underneath that gruesome mask. This is identity theft. Lecter has taken a key identifier from the dead and mutilated guard, who will never get it back.

Obviously, simply using an identifier is far different than stealing one. It is nice to see that the federal prosecutors are using the correct terminology and that it is making its way into the mainstream press.

I have trouble describing how disappointed I am that this bill has passed. The roll call vote is available here. I have written about FISA previously here and here.

Although there are many aspects of this bill that disappoint me, I would like to take a moment to talk about the one closest to my research: legal compliance in technology systems. This bill sets an incredibly bad precedent for anyone advocating legal compliance. Essentially, what the telecommunications companies did was blatantly against the law. However, this bill retroactively provides them immunity for their actions [1]. When the consequences for violating the law are removed retroactively, companies have an incentive to violate the law in the future.

The ethics in situations like this are already difficult for engineers to recognize. For a technologist like Mark Klein, setting up a room with a whole bunch of cables going into it is a normal daily aspect of their job. Most will not see the ethical implications. Most engineers at that level are not aware of the bigger picture. They may not be able to say for sure whether their action is a violation of the law. To speak out about such a thing already takes great personal courage.

The last thing engineers need to see is a case like this. They will recognize that even if they do risk their job to speak out about a possible legal problem, and even if that possible problem is recognized as such, it is now, with the passage of this bill, clearly possible that Congress will bend over backwards to let their employer off the hook.

To understand how difficult it was before this amendment was passed for someone like Mark Klein to do what he did, I urge you to read the introduction Cindy Cohn gave him at the EFF Pioneer Awards. Congress has just made it harder on the heroes. This is a disappointing day.

[1] Yes, I realize that this bill doesn’t directly provide for retroactive immunity. However, the bill sets up a sham court proceeding to determine whether or not the companies involved were told it was ok to do what they did by the President, which is already widely known to be true.

[Update: There's an extremely well-written article on the FISA Ammedment Act on ThreatLevel.]

Tomorrow, on July 8th, the Senate will vote on a pending FISA amendment that includes provisions to give telecommunications companies legal protection for their role in the warrantless wiretapping, about which I have previously blogged here.

FISA stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and it was passed in 1978 to address abuses of several Presidents. The goal was to limit the ability of the executive to perform surveillance on anyone they wanted.

The initial reaction to the amendment from technologists and civil liberties advocates has been strong and consistent. Techdirt believes that our congress has failed us. The Technology Liberation Front believes this is bad policy and bad politics. The Center for Democracy and Technology believes that the bill is unclear and should at least be clarified for both national security and civil liberty. Finally, the whistleblower who got the ball rolling on all of this in the first place believes that this bill would create the “infrastructure for a police state.” It is also interesting to look at the politicians who received donations from telecommunications companies and also changed their votes.

There are other reasons to dislike this amendment. Representative Rush Holt’s thoughts are worth reading. Senator Chris Dodd gave an impassioned speech about FISA, which includes this gem, pointed out to me by Tim Lee:

This bill does not say, “Trust the American people; Trust the courts and judges and juries to come to just decisions.” Retroactive immunity sends a message that is crystal clear:

“Trust me.”

And that message comes straight from the mouth of this President. “Trust me.”

The amendment even redefines Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Let’s look back at the original goal of the FISA: to limit the power of the executive to watch anyone they wanted. Now, consider the current bill. It takes the power to determine the need for surveillance out of the hands of an impartial judge and puts that power into the hands of the President. It also provides blanket immunity to those companies that broke the law to allow the President to have this surveillance power over the last several years. Make no mistake about it; it is not a compromise.

One might assume that we can all agree that natural disasters are bad, but apparently we can’t. The Boston Globe has an article about how natural disasters are helpful. Yes, you read that right. The article is about how natural disasters are helpful.

Now, if you, like me, don’t believe that an earthquake which killed almost 70,000 people is helpful, then you may find yourself similarly disappointed that such an article could be published at a reputable paper. The concept is tortured logic at best. It goes something like this:

1. A disaster occurs wiping out all sorts of things that are valuable like buildings, factories, vehicles, and infrastructure.
2. At great financial cost, society re-builds all the things that were destroyed using the latest techniques.
3. Measurements are taken of both before and after the disaster and someone concludes that those affected are better off because they have all new buildings, factories, vehicles and infrastructure.

Let’s think about some logical conclusions one might draw about this. If natural disaster is good because it forces us to rebuild, then wouldn’t man-made disaster be even better? I mean, we could pick the places where the disaster would occur and we would create jobs for the teams of people who could go around destroying things. Actually, that sounds a lot like war now. Heck, why don’t we just start wars all the time since the resulting disaster is so obviously good?

Doesn’t really make much sense, does it?

There are really only two salient points to be found in this article. First, the voice of reason:

To critics of this line of thinking, the problem is that it is, at best, a partial picture. It ignores, they argue, the fact that the money and labor that go into post-disaster rebuilding are simply being redirected from other productive uses.

“If you’re a carpenter, a trash remover, a physician, you may be made better off, but the things that those producers would have otherwise produced are not going to be produced,” says Donald Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University. “Over any reasonably relevant period of time, society is not made wealthier by destroying resources,” he adds. If it were, “Beirut should be one of the wealthiest places in the world.”

Huh, who would have thought that disasters were actually bad? Of course, we have known this for a long time.

Second, the conclusion, which is surprisingly good given how horrible the rest of it was:

It may be, then, that disaster economics works best as a guide in those times when we don’t have disasters to contend with. Investing in human capital, replacing outdated plants and infrastructure – the things that Kunreuther and Skidmore argue disasters drive us to do – are also, it turns out, good ideas even in the absence of a crippling catastrophe. If the disaster economists are right, calamities are simply pushing societies to make the sort of sound economic decisions that inertia or fear or bureaucratic sclerosis prevents them from otherwise making. Governments and businesses might do well to adopt some of the urgency and innovation of a post-disaster mind-set even in more clement times.

Imagine that. If you invest in your business rather than limp along with outdated facilities and inefficient equipment, then your business will operate more efficiently.

War is bad. Disasters are bad. The end.

I recently met Brooke Oberwetter, who has become known as the Jefferson 1. She seems like a nice, unassuming person and we had a pleasant conversation, which is why I was surprised to learn that she was facing criminal charges. I have come to believe that her arrest is an excellent example of the war on the unexpected.

She and around 20 of her friends went to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by silently dancing and listening to music with earphones of some kind. Surely this is not a usual occurrence and the park police were not expecting 20 people to show up and silently dance around in the middle of the night. However, she was not breaking any laws and she certainly wasn’t terrorizing anything.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it because there’s three videos on YouTube that show the event in detail. This incident happens to be getting a lot of publicity because of the circumstances: a young blond woman, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, the video footage of the event, the fact that all the participants were active in libertarian politics.

If this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to you, I am not surprised. Violations of civil liberties rarely seem like that big of a deal to the unaffected. The unaffected are, by definition, not directly affected by events like this. Mistakes are made. Police officers are human just like everyone else, but we all lose something when citizens in our country are wrongfully arrested or detained. This event may be useful in illuminating the broader point: the war on the unexpected is a massive waste of time and money — how can we fix this?

That’s certainly something to think about.

Threat Level is reporting that John McCain would continue the Bush administration’s policies of warrantless wiretapping. For the uninitiated: The NSA has conducted warrantless surveillance of Americans with the help of some telephone companies such as AT&T. I have previously blogged about whether AT&T should be retroactively granted immunity for the actions. McCain apparently now supports this type of action. McCain’s position on this topic hasn’t always been very clear. Cory Doctorow believes that this is pretty much exactly the kind of intrusion the founding fathers were hoping to avoid with that whole Constitution thing.

Personally, I think the politics are not as important as the technological concerns. Wiretapping isn’t as simple as it may seem and there are real technical challenges and security risks introduced by these systems. For example, every surveillance technique we use is a potential technique that our enemies could use against us. (The founding fathers might say that the government itself might use it against us.) For a detailed list of risks, I highly recommend reading the paper described by Matt Blaze in this post on wiretap risks.