The NSA, Bruce Schneier, and the Bottom Line

Because one can never say enough about Bruce Schneier.

The NSA secretly inserting back doors into standards-based encryption algorithms and enforcing compromising security practices on US businesses has undoubtedly already had, and will continue to have, a negative impact on the bottom line of those businesses. US privacy laws are behind other competitive nations and this makes it difficult for US companies to upgrade the privacy standards of their data security policies to meet the needs of global customers. Legally enforced crippling of these security policies and technologies only further widens that gap, putting US businesses further in the lurch.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that any backdoor in any cryptosystem is available to the creator of the backdoor and to anyone else who figures out the backdoor is there. So even if one believes the NSA has a duty to protect US citizens by disabling security systems around their data and spying on them, one still has to admit that this opens US citizens up to being spied upon by clever foreign intelligence agencies and increasingly clever organized criminals getting into the cyber insecurity game.

Most tech folks and many politically inclined citizens at least sort of know who Bruce Schneier is, but in case they don't he's a famous cryptographer who wrote the book on applied cryptography (conveniently titled Applied Cryptography) and became internet-famous after the terrorist attacks of 2001-09-11 for criticizing the "security theater" that constituted the bulk of the federal government's domestic response. Predictably enough he's been all over the Snowden leaks like white on rice, including assisting Glenn Greenwald the lead Guardian journalist working with Snowden in working through the best practices of handling Snowden data and explaining the technical implications of the leaks in the Guardian:

Schneier writing for the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/bruceschneier

Schneier's blog, a must read for anyone interested in technology, security, politics, or People Taking Things Seriously:

https://www.schneier.com/

Chronological Ethnocentrism

The ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. -James W. Loewen

A friend of mine often remarks that they are rarely captured by fiction writing, instead preferring nonfiction for its edifying properties. In these discussions I unfailingly counter with the argument that fiction offers a unique form of knowledge that comparatively dry books on math, science, or philosophy rarely do: information modeling in the form of illuminating metaphor and allegory. I'm known to recommend speculative fiction in particular for it's unique ability to smoothly integrate topics of interest like technology, politics, and metaphysics into these metaphorical models of potential outcomes. Stories that involve time travel, alternate dimensions, or a combination of the two are doubly (triply? infinitely?) suited to aid the learning process for their ability to observe a given model from as many different facets as there are wave functions to collapse into a narrative¹.

The final season (spoiler alert) of the J. J. Abrams produced television series "Fringe" (which incorporates alternate dimensions and time travel to an above average degree of success) posits a far future in which humanity picks up where evolution leaves off and follows a course of self-directed genetic "progress" to a level of apex-predation that spans universes and timelines. Some might say humanity started this process the moment we grabbed up the femur and started smashing tapir skulls with any kind of self awareness, but that's a discussion for another time. What's relevant in the "Fringe" plot-arc is that the primitive, present-day human protagonists of the series resist invasion, subjugation, and replacement at the hands of their time-traveling, dimension-hopping, lebensraum-seeking descendants in spite of the apparent progress their own species has made. They reject the argument that simply because future versions of themselves exist and are vastly superior in many obvious ways that they should therefor roll over and accept these descendants as their betters. They reject a chronological form of ethnocentrism.

In the series the protagonists are rewarded for their pugnacious spirit with the discovery of an even more superior future version of humanity without all the patricidal tendencies that, with a just a bit more time travel, can take the place of the bad guys in The Darkest Timeline² and save humanity from a nightmarish dystopia. What's interesting to imagine however, is if the villains had not expressed such obvious antagonisms (time-colonialism, failure to emote, head a'splodin') and were instead simply mild mannered future versions of all of us set on a collision course of no one's design. If looked at from another facet, this is in fact exactly what happens, but the collision course is the simple progress of time and the replacement of one second with the next, one life lived with another born, and the slow erosion of one era's morality with another's. How could any rag tag group of protagonists defend their ideals against the inevitable march of time?

The introductory quote suggests one answer: a reconsideration of the idea of progress. Explaining the implications of revisionist history in American textbooks, Mr. Loewen wrote in his work of popular anthropology "Lies My Teacher Told Me":

Besides fostering ignorance of past societies, belief in progress makes students oblivious to merit in present-day societies other than our own. ... Ethnocentric faith in progress in Western culture has had disastrous consequences. People who believed in their society as the vanguard of the future, the most progressive on earth, have been all too likely to indulge in such excessive cruelties as the Pequot massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, or the Great Leap Forward.

Much ink was spilled in the last decade lamenting an increase in partisanship, often ascribed to the loss of impartial writing in modern media. Journalists wrote as if a halcyon era that began with Woodward and Bernstein were coming to a close with the end of the network and print news oligarchies at the hands of the comparatively anarchic Internet. Other media observers heeded Mr. Loewen, hearkened back to journalism's yellow past and the brutal politics of prior eras, and pronounced the cycles of partisan and impartial media as entirely normal given a modicum of (accurate) historical perspective. Today, participants in the debate about the merits and degree of modern partisanship seem to agree on at least one thing: moral relativism is a thing of the past³. Ideological proponents may disagree bitterly about their vision of progress, but they agree that theirs should be the one to win out in the end.

Beware the End Of History!

The worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. -Francis Fukuyama

If any ethos ever truly wins out, it blankets not just some large area or volume of human space, but some long epoch of human time as well. We may not experience the boredom Fukuyama hoped might rekindle a lively debate, we may simply change our core selves to better suit the winning ideology. From the lens of multiple backstories (pasts), universes (presents), and plotlines (futures), each party's morality is another protagonist armed with a fighting chance to resist a tyrannical outcome. Today your ideological foe may drive you to froth at the mouth and flail at your radio dial, but tomorrow they are a potential ally against a grinding monoculture intent on snuffing the both of you out of the history books. Or against time traveling telekinetics. Can't rule them out either.

1. Anathem, Neal Stephenson's incomparable novel on quantum mechanics and the clash of philosophies in and against the secular world, is perhaps the best example of this phenomena. It is the underlying source of this post as well, I simply did not feel qualified to write about it at length without at least a third read through.
2. A satirical examination of short run moral decision making via multiple timelines can be found in an episode of the television show "Community" entitled "Remedial Chaos Theory".
3. The final prompt in the writing of this post was the recent This American Life episode on gang violence in and around Harper High School in Chicago, where Officer Aaron Washington remarked: "There is no neutrons anymore. It used to be if you play sports, or you were academically better than the average kid, [gangs] didn't bother you. Now it's different. It doesn't matter. If you live here, you're part of them."

Endorsing the City

For anyone interested in seeing a reurbanization of the American landscape, Stanley Kurtz's recent OP/ED in Forbes Magazine "How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities" is a ringing endorsement of President Obama's reelection campaign:

Once voters realize that there has never been a president more ideologically opposed to the suburbs, or more reliant on redistribution as a policy, they should know what to do.

As with most ink spilled opposite the editorial page, the piece is tragically empty of facts supporting these pie-in-the-sky, would-be campaign promises like:

• "an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities"
• "policies designed to coerce people out of their cars"
• "take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor"
• "quit building sub-divisions and malls"

Too bad for Obama! Having your staunchest ideological enemies talking up your political prowess and mastery of urban planning is the kind of get Democrats rarely luck into under their own steam. When was the last time any Democrat promised a platform so boldly progressive, or any of their constituents believed those promises as passionately as Mr. Kurtz believes in Obama?

But enough about the professionally outraged class, the bizarre sense of entitlement they hold so dear, and their world-class ability to theorize conspiracies. What's so great about the cities? After all, as Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann point out in a recent article for The New Republic "The Cheapest Generation", cities seem to be responsible for an entire generation of Americans abandoning the endless business cycles of the disposable auto, hotel, and fashion industries:

The emergence of the “sharing economy”—services that use the Web to let companies and families share otherwise idle goods—is headlined by Zipcar, but it also involves companies such as Airbnb, a shared market­place for bedrooms and other accommodations for travelers; and thred­UP, a site where parents can buy and sell kids’ used clothing.

And don't even get them started about what these selfishly possessionless Millenials are doing to the real estate industry!

If the Millennials are not quite a post-­driving and post-owning generation, they’ll almost certainly be a less-­driving and less-­owning generation. That could mean some tough adjustments for the economy over the next several years. In recent decades, the housing industry has usually led us out of recession. When the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in the midst of the sharp recession of the early 1980s, for instance, a construction boom helped fuel the “Reagan Recovery.” With the housing market moribund, the Federal Reserve has lost a key means of influencing the economy with lower interest rates. The service-led recovery we’ve gotten instead is not nearly as robust.

Damn you kids, buy my lawn! After all, the construction boom that fueled the GOP's dreams of an "ownership society" and the financial sector's love affair with sub-prime real estate markets didn't cause our current Great Recession, it simply provided the majority of the air released from the bubble that preceded it. So if they aren't going to buy the cars or prop up the next housing bubble, er, market, how does this new generation plan to feed the financial sector's endless need for lightly taxed capital gains?

Economic research shows that doubling a community’s population density tends to increase productivity by anywhere between 6 percent and 28 percent. Economists have found that more than half of the variation in output per worker across U.S. states can be explained by density. Our wealth, after all, is determined not only by our own skills and talents, but by our ability to access the ideas of those around us; there’s a lot to be gained by increasing the odds that smart people might bump against each other. Ultimately, if the Millennial generation pushes our society toward more sharing and closer living, it may do more than simply change America’s consumption culture; it may put America on firmer economic footing for decades to come.

As Mr. Kurtz says, you "should know what to do."

SOPA / PIPA and the 2012-01-18 Blackout

Here's a form letter I created that you can feel free to adopt for you own usage:

Dear Senator / Congress Person _____ ['s legislative aid],  

I'm writing today about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), but now I'm annoyed that your office doesn't even have a "Topic" on your contact page for Technology. I imagine this is an outcropping of the same lack of technological awareness that has lead our Most Deliberative Body to unanimous past support for the horrendous Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). I can only assume it is this chronic misunderstanding of America's high tech economy that now prepares support for SOPA / PIPA, without regard for the underlying structure of the internet that everyone claims to value so highly as the source of our nation's future revenues. As a _____ professional at _____ that greatly benefits from unrestricted, uncensored internet access, I can only say that I am figuratively shocked and literally appalled that this kind of legislation has gotten so far, especially given the lip service paid by politicians to the "job creators" in the technology sector. If Congress truly values the creation of 21st century jobs, if the Democrats really want to "Win the Future" (seriously, whoever came up with that slogan watched way too much "X-Files"), then lobbyist fodder like SOPA / PIPA should never live to see the light of day outside of its authors' offices on K-Street. 

To quote the most useful source of general knowledge every created in the history of mankind, Wikipedia, on this the day of their historic (and heroic) blackout:

SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I hope your office does as well. These bills don't need to be 'adjusted', they need to be torn up. The content cartels in Hollywood and elsewhere don't need any further anti-competitive protections, or any more custom written laws from their lobbyists straight into the law books; they need new business models. New technology, not new laws, will save the wages of our artists and content producers. Bills like the DMCA, CTEA, SOPA, PIPA, et al, can do nothing but stifle our greatest innovators in a blind effort to save a stagnant oligopoly chronically uninterested in changing it's ways to meet producer or consumer demands. 

Thank you for your service to the great State of _____, and to the United States of America, 

_____

Occupation

Oddly enough, today I was mistaken for someone who doesn't support the Occupy Wall Street movement. While it is certainly true that I am pushing the boundary of heart versus head, I was still taken aback by this mischaracterization. I don't believe that OWS will be the start of any lasting reforms, I don't believe it will tip the scales in any relevant election cycles, and I don't believe that most of its constituents even really understand (much less agree upon) what it is they are protesting. In spite of those beliefs, I think a populist movement advocating economic solidarity between 99% of the American populace can be counted as a Good Thing™.

It is always easy to make fun of people who care, who warm to a topic or movement and expose themselves as uncool by definition. The rebel without a cause would never join any movement that would have him. To be sure, I was among the many who saw the Tea Party protests against Wall Street's partners in crime in Washington and took cheap shots, variations of which are now deservedly aimed at the hodgepodge of conflicting interest groups currently camped out in lower Manhattan. False equivalence aside however, the Tea Party was clearly the product of a sustained campaign by the wealthy influential class, in control of their media outlets for hire, steering, nay shoveling, their avaricious anti-regulatory agenda down the gullible gullets of the electorate via the ever convenient vehicle of class outrage. Occupy Wall Street on the other hand is the typically weak sodded but undeniably grass roots movement of disparate leftist interests succeeding in spite of themselves to steer equally anarchic social media into a virtuous circle of attention that has culminated in something worthy of being called, in the words of Wikipedia, "Part of the impact of the Arab Spring".

Did the true populists in Tea Party think their movement was the one that would be welcomed into the broader global movement for justice? How naive must anyone be to think they've invented the freedom by themselves. Taken together however, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of a coin that deserves our respect. For all the gullibility, racism, and anarchy of the Tea Party, and all the stupidity, paternalism and ... anarchy of the OWS, there is an endemic problem to be addressed by every society on record, that of power. The concentration of power, be it in the religion wielding, land owning, title bearing, gun toting, gold hording, political office taking, money grabbing, or stock selling class, is the problem every generation must confront. And every generation gets to decide for themselves how they will find their voice to do so. In the immortal words of David Bowie:

These children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds,
They are immune to your consultations,
They're quite aware of what they're going through.