Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Twitter grabbing address books from phones

Here’s an example of what I mean about the internet creating all sorts of new security vulnerabilities. Twitter has recently confessed to grabbing entire address books from the smartphones of people using the service.

As well as being a violation of privacy, this is a practice that could seriously endanger people. Consider all those brave protestors in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, using Twitter to help organize a pro-democracy movement. If Twitter is grabbing their address books, it is assembling a perfect tool for the intelligence services of governments to round up everyone involved in protests. The same is true for people pressing for democracy in China, or doing anything else that is laudable but unpopular with the people in charge.

Technology companies need to recognize that there will be people who want to use their records and capabilities for nefarious purposes, and they need to design their technology and procedures to protect against such attacks and reduce how serious they are when they take place.

The companies that make operating systems for smartphones should also assume that applications can be ineptly designed or malicious, and should work to protect the data on the phone from potential eavesdroppers.

Ending drug prohibition

Earlier, I wrote about whether the phrase ‘greenhouse gas pollution’ is accurate, and whether it might be useful for building political will to do something about climate change. The phrase is accurate – CO2 is an unwanted by-product of various processes and it does harm to people all over the world – and it may be a useful way to remind people that ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ are a real problem that needs to be dealt with. It calls to mind phrases like “make the polluter pay [for the cost of cleaning up pollution]”.

I wonder whether a similar change in language might be helpful for opposing unreasonable drug laws. Mention ‘marijuana legalization’ and the eyes of the people around you will glaze over. They have heard the debate, they have their view, and they probably don’t care about it too strongly one way or the other.

Maybe we can do better by saying things like: “End marijauana prohibition” or “End the prohibition of drugs”.

People remember the prohibition of alcohol, the way it failed, and the problems it caused. It enriched organized crime and pushed alcohol use underground. It led to inferior and dangerous kinds of alcohol being sold. It cost tax revenues, crowded the prisons, and so on. All this is true of drug criminalization today. Most of the problems associated with drugs only exist because they are illegal, or are made much worse because they are illegal. Drug prohibition turns the drug trade into a violent, dangerous business and it turns ordinary people who use substances that are often more benign than alcohol or tobacco into criminals.

Al Capone was the natural consequence of alcohol prohibition. His successors created by the drug war may be less famous – and they may kill more people in Mexico than in Chicago – but their business has arisen for exactly the same reason, and operates according to the same logic. Stratfor describes what has been happening recently in Mexico as “a stalemate” “between the Sinaloa Federation, Los Zetas and the government” and argue that it has produced 50,000 deaths. That is more than 16 times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. It’s about 6% of the number of deaths associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Ending drug prohibition just makes sense. It is both unethical and ineffective for governments to try to control what consenting adults do with their bodies. Their efforts to assert that control are doing demonstrable harm. Perhaps by speaking about the situation in terms of ‘ending prohibition’ rather than ‘legalizing’ this or that, the political debate can be moved forward just a little.

The government that hammers tent pegs up our noses

A pattern seems to have developed in the legislative politics of a certain northern country.

The people in power boast that they are going to do something dramatic but somewhat foolhardy: “Watch! I am going to hammer this tent peg up your nose!” or “Let’s make the census optional!” or “Let’s throw people in jail for harmless marijuana offenses!” or “Let’s allow the police and spies to watch everybody’s internet use!”.

After this declaration is made, both the political opposition and experts in the field bring up some of the very reasonable objections to the proposal: “What about my brain?” or “The whole point of a census is that everyone completes it” or “That’s pointless vindictiveness for a non-offence to society” or “That’s an insanely over-reaching way to catch only the stupidest criminal web users”.

But the issue has already become a matter of pride and honour for the government of the day, so they cannot back down or change plans. Occasionally, public and political opposition to the proposal are strong enough to stop it, at which point the government becomes bitter and petulant, stressing how everyone will need to live with the terrible consequences of not following the government’s plan. Often, however, they are able to circle up successfully around their bad idea and turn it into law.

This pattern of behaviour is likely to persist for as long as the opposition is leaderless and split.

Even those who favour the party in power probably realize that the political system only works properly when there is a credible opposition. If there is nobody else who looks capable of forming a government, there are few real checks on the power of the people in charge. That leads to them expressing their own psychological excesses and frustrations in ill-conceived legislation, which is bad for everybody.

Internet surveillance in Canada

The Conservative government is proposing a new law that would require internet service providers to monitor and record what Canadians do online, and to provide that information to the authorities without a warrant.

As well as being an obvious violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (§8 “Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.”), I think this is an example of thinking badly about security. Obviously, having the government monitor everything that happens online could prevent some bad things from happening. At the same time, it is virtually certain that the capability would be abused or that security breaches will allow it to be hijacked by those with nefarious purposes. The abuse could happen at the governmental level – say, with discreet inquiries being made into the private correspondence of members of competing political parties. It could be done within the police and intelligence services – say, a jilted ex tracking the emails of their former partner. It could be done within internet service providers – say, some low-paid tech at Bell or Telus deciding to earn a bit of extra cash by blackmailing customers.

The archives of internet use would be an irresistible target for malefactors of every type, from nosy bosses and spouses to spammers and rogue political operatives. Maintaining and trying to secure these archives would also be a major burden for internet service providers. Instead of being in the business of helping their clients communicate, they will be forced into the business of keeping tabs on their clients on behalf of the government.

The security risks created by internet surveillance are greater than the risks that it might help reduce. Furthermore, allowing the creation of internet surveillance systems violates the Charter-protected rights of Canadians. What Canadians do online is their private business. It is not something that governments have the right to monitor, just because doing so will occasionally allow them to catch people committing crimes. Hopefully, this proposal will never become law.

The TOR browser bundle

The TOR browser bundle seems like a reasonably effective and very easy-to-use means of circumventing web censorship and surveillance.

The speed of web browsing falls significantly when data is routed through the TOR network, but tools like this are increasingly essential as governments undertake more and more inappropriate meddling with the free flow of ideas online.

There are versions for various operating systems. I have tried both the Windows and Mac OS installs and they are both easy to use and at least a bit effective in avoiding tracking and censorship. Remember, however, that TOR is useless if someone is tracking all your web traffic at your point of connection to the internet, for instance by reading all the traffic through your broadband connection or cell phone. If you are worried about that, use public networks along with TOR, or set up an encrypted connection to a proxy or virtual private network and then run TOR from there.

Remember, all security bets are of if an attacker gets malware on your machine or gains physical access to it.

When to shiver and when to work

From Daniel Yergin’s The Quest:

To demonstrate environmental sensitivity [at the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol], the Japanese organizers turned down the heating in the conference center. But this created a new problem as Kyoto in December was cold. To compensate, the Japanese decided to distribute blankets to the delegates. But they did not have enough blankets, and so a whole separate negotiation erupted over how many blankets would be allocated to each delegation. (p. 483 harcover)

Worst choice of abstinence over resistance ever.

Rickover on duty

U.S. Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, wrote a good plain-language description of what is basically Immanuel Kan’t categorical imperative:

I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. Admittedly, one man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference… We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success.

It’s an interesting perspective in the context of his own life. He dedicated much of it to building a nuclear-powered navy for the United States, despite his apparent view that such a navy was, at best, a necessary evil.

As a side note, many of today’s commercial nuclear power stations use reactor designs that have evolved from the shipborne reactors designed by Rickover and his staff.

350.org oil sands petition

As usual, Bill McKibben is saying sensible things and calling for appropriate actions. He is a non-Canadian who is concerned about the ethics of digging up and burning the oil sands, in a world where the climate is changing at a frightening pace.

He is asking Canadians to sign a petition:

“As a Canadian, I stand with people all over the world who are opposed to burning the oil sands, and demand that our leaders stop their campaign to discredit the movement to stop the pipeline.”

Please consider signing. He is hoping to get 10,000 signatures before he visits Vancouver in March.