Rants – Page 17 – a sibilant intake of breath

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.

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.

The second rule of the internet

Back in 2010, I described what I called the ‘first rule of the internet‘:

Against a sophisticated attacker, nothing connected to the internet is secure.

To this, I feel like I should add a second item:

Everything is internet now.

While there were once large numbers of electronic systems entirely disconnected from the internet, nowadays virtually everything is either connected to the internet constantly or occasionally connected to a device that is online. Your cell phone is probably always accessible to a sophisticated attacker using the internet, and the same is probably true for landlines using VoIP. Many of your computers are probably constantly connected to wireless networks (themselves targets for attack) and exposed to the wider internet through your broadband connection at all times.

Web integration with computers has reached the point that Google’s Chrome browser now treats ‘search’ and ‘GMail’ as apps within the Chrome environment.

The implication of combining the first and second rules is pretty plain. If you manage to attract the attention of a sophisticated attacker, they can probably get into the contents of your cell phone and your GMail account, as well as the hard drive of your PC and laptop, the ubiquitous webcams now built into computers, and so on. There is also a good chance they can take over your email, websites, Twitter accounts, and the like and use them for their own purposes.

Repeated ad infinitum

XKCD is right, this is worth a look today:

List of common misconceptions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note:

Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burned.
The ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was spherical, and how large it was.
Napoleon was not short. He was slightly taller than the average Frenchman.
The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free slaves in the northern states.
The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space using the naked eye.
People did not evolve from chimpanzees.

Etc, etc, etc.

Advice to supervillains – killing your own scientists

One classic mistake made by cartoon supervillains concerns the complicated piece of machinery that is inevitably at the heart of their secret plan. It might be a time travel device of some sort, or a machine that strips the opposing superhero of their power, or a key part of a world domination scheme.

As a way of illustrating just how evil and ruthless they really are, supervillains will often kill the whole team of scientists who built the thing, perhaps by having them all drink poisoned champagne. This does make a certain measure of sense. Killing the scientists keeps them from going off and telling people about what they did, which could cause problems for you.

That being said, I strongly object to the timing that is frequently used for these killings. The supervillain will kill off the science team right before testing the device for the first time. As anyone who has worked on anything remotely technical and complex can tell you, this is the worst possible time to kill off all the people involved. Chances are, the machine will not work properly on the first try and that the only people who can figure out what went wrong are the people who designed and built the machine.

By all means, kill the science team once you are confident that you have a machine that will do what you want. Build it, test it, build an improved model, build a backup copy or two, and then hand out the glasses of killer champagne.

Much delayed and snowed upon

The combination of grossly insufficient sleep and mild snowfall has produced a morning of havoc. My normally-hour-and-a-half commute became two and a half hours, with people crammed cheek-by-jowl in a streetcar with totally fogged windows, lurching among confused drivers. Then, I forgot my (quite durable and expensive) umbrella somewhere on the subway or in a subway station.

With luck, it will turn up at the TTC lost and found within a few days.

Space tourism is pointless and damaging

Henry Shue has written convincingly about the moral importance of the rich giving up luxuries for the sake of fighting climate change, before the poor are asked to give up necessities. As he explains it, even in an emergency you sell the jewelry before you sell the blankets.

The ultimate example of luxury emissions is probably private spaceflight, as described in Nature recently. All that fuel gets burned so that a few really rich people can get to a high altitude and gawk for a while before returning to Earth.

Surely, our climate policies should curb such behaviours.

Unproductive investments that harm the world

Since the 2008 credit crunch, the governments of the world have been obsessed with economic conditions: trying to find ways to increase growth, improve the stability of the financial system, and cut unemployment. All other societal projects have taken a back seat. Given reasonable concerns about the economic future of the world, it seems like common sense to say that governments and societies should be investing their wealth and effort into things that will yield a beneficial return in the future. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the course Canada is following. We are making big investments in things that are bad for our own economic health, and even worse for the world at large.

Take the F-35 stealth fighter jets. They have no conceivable use. Canada is not going to war with any country that is capable of shooting down lesser jets, at least at any time in the foreseeable future. In the longer term, the jets still look useless, as it is increasingly clear that the age of manned combat aircraft is ending. Canada is spending tens of billions of dollars on weapons we do not need now, and which will probably be obsolete long before they go out of service. We should just skip this generation of killing machines, and perhaps invest later if some credible threat to Canadian security actually emerges.

The new crime bill is an even worse example of putting good money to counterproductive uses. There is no crime epidemic that requires a government response. There is no evidence that imprisoning more people will reduce crime below the already-low level where it is now. Indeed, the only things we can be sure about is that imprisoning people for longer will do more to wreck their chances of living a productive life, while harming their families and communities.

The oil sands may be the biggest example of Canada’s misplaced priorities. Look at the big picture. There are two possible futures for the world:

A world where we do nothing about climate change, and warming of well over 4˚C takes place
A world where we wake up and begin the process of aggressively phasing out fossil fuels

The first possibility is a suicide pact. We would probably be condemning the world to radically destabilizing climate change, with sea level rise of many metres, dramatic changes in precipitation patterns, and enormous human suffering as a consequence. In the second possibility, there is no place for an industry like the oil sands. Indeed, unconventional oil and gas production serves only to lengthen humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels. The smart investment is figuring out how to live on carbon-neutral sources of energy. Spending billions of dollars on an industry that will either be dismantled soon or will persist as a witness to a burning planet doesn’t make either economic or moral sense.

Even if Canada never wakes up and takes the obligation to address climate change seriously, it is quite possible that the rest of the world will do so. The people who say that oil sands extraction are inevitable are the same people who said that the Keystone XL pipeline was a sure thing. As people become aware of the dangers of climate change and the ethical imperatives that flow from them, they will be less and less inclined to invest in the suicidal fossil fuel industry, and less and less willing to buy its lethal products. The billions Canada is investing in fossil fuel infrastructure may end up rusting unused. Leaving the Kyoto Protocol is just one indication that Canada is out of step with the international community, and risks becoming an international pariah based on its selfish focus on fossil fuel profits.

There are so many things we could be spending money more usefully on. We could be investing in the skills and training of the Canadian workforce. That would be a sensible recognition of how global patterns of trade and production continue to change. We could be investing in sustainable infrastructure: buildings, transport links, power generation and storage facilities, and an agricultural system that can function without fossil fuels. We could be investing in assistance to those who are suffering from extreme poverty, both in Canada and around the world, as well as those who struggle with serious mental illnesses.

Canada can make smarter choices, not to mention choices that cause less needless harm. We just need to think a bit more about what sort of world we want for our children and examine whether our current priorities are aligned well with those goals.