Cyber Security Initiative, a Trojan horse?

Suspicion is growing around Bush's National Cyber Security Initiative. The Senate Armed Services Committee has raised some questions about the secrecy surrounding not just the details, but the fundamental purposes of the initiative.

A chief concern is that virtually everything about the initiative is highly classified, and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as `For Official Use Only.' These restrictions preclude public education, awareness, and debate about the policy and legal issues, real or imagined, that the initiative poses in the areas of privacy and civil liberties. Without such debate and awareness in such important and sensitive areas, it is likely that the initiative will make slow or modest progress. The committee strongly urges the administration to reconsider the necessity and wisdom of the blanket, indiscriminate classification levels established for the initiative.
 
The administration itself is starting a serious effort as part of the initiative to develop an information warfare deterrence strategy and declaratory doctrine, much as the superpowers did during the Cold War for nuclear conflict. It is difficult to conceive how the United States could promulgate a meaningful deterrence doctrine if every aspect of our capabilities and operational concepts is classified. In the era of superpower nuclear competition, while neither side disclosed weapons designs, everyone understood the effects of nuclear weapons, how they would be delivered, and the circumstances under which they would be used. Indeed, deterrence was not possible without letting friends and adversaries alike know what capabilities we possessed and the price that adversaries would pay in a real conflict. Some analogous level of disclosure is necessary in the cyber domain.

There is commentary at Security Fix, on the Wired Threat Level blog, and Secrecy News.

Rotenberg Records seized?

Justice has been moving slowly against the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, but apparently it is moving. The Boston Globe's website reports that according to unofficial, unnamed sources, the state police have seized documents relating to a case of torture committed by Rotenberg employees on two students last year.

On August 26, 2007, an unknown person called the Rotenberg Center, a school for difficult students that regularly uses shock treatment as therapy. He claimed to be a supervisor, and ordered large numbers of shocks for two of the students. (The Globe dismissively calls this a "prank.") Employees carried out the orders without question, delivering 77 shocks to one student and 29 to another. One of the boys received first-degee burns as a result.

Video recordings were routinely made of the proceedings. The Globe reports that the Center has since destroyed the recordings, in violation of investigators' instructions.

I hope it's true that an investigation is gathering momentum, and that this monstrous excuse for a school will be shut down.

States continue to reject Real ID

States are throwing Real ID back in the feds' faces at an accelerating pace, now that Homeland Security's threat to ban the citizens of rebellious states from airplanes has proven an empty bluff. Minnesota's House and Senate have voted to prohibit implementation of Real ID, overriding the governor's veto.

Governor Doyle of Wisconsin has removed $20 million dollars from Real ID funding and put it into the state's general fund. This drove Rep. James Sensenbrenner, who was originally responsible for Real ID, into into an incoherent rage. His gibbering is so bizarre it's almost funny.

"Now," Sensenbrenner yammers, "Governor Doyle is playing fiscal games and stealing from Wisconsinites $6 at a time to get himself out of this budget mess." That is, keeping money in the state instead of sending it to Washington is "stealing" from Wisconsinites.

"Governor Doyle is like a fast talking salesman trying to orchestrate a deal. The problem is it's the citizens of Wisconsin who are the unwilling pawns in this irresponsible deal and will ultimately pay and pay and pay." The man who pushed Real ID through by sneaking it into an unrelated bill has little business comparing anyone else to a fast-talking salesman. The national ID scheme requires the states to spend huge amounts of money on an unfunded mandate; not making them do this, according to Sensenbrenner, is making them "pay and pay and pay."

"As we saw in 2001, in the hands of a terrorist, a valid ID accepted for travel in the US can be just as dangerous as a missile or bomb." Sensenbrenner needs a nice long rest somewhere that he can't do himself or others any harm.

A murder and a mural

A recent death in Nashua generated a lot of news outside the local area, but as far as I can tell, no one reported on a remarkable irony about it.

Ivonne Hernandez of Nashua is a Yankees fan in Red Sox country, and got into an argument in a bar over baseball. She got angry enough about it -- particularly over some chanting of "Yankees suck" -- that she allegedly got into her car in the Maynard and Lesieur parking lot and ran down two people, killing Matthew Beaudoin. In looking at news stories about the event, I've seen numerous comments saying the equivalent of "What do you expect of a Yankees fan?" Both the killing and these comments show the same idiotic mentality, the belief that the worth of people depends on the baseball team they root for.

On the Drudge Report site, two commenters reacted to the killing by saying "Yankees suck." Another site with the story responded that "yankees fans are genetically predisposed towards a painful and unfortunate condition known as 'aesthetically challenged'." On the same site someone else wrote, "As an AL West fan, I consider this a victimless crime." On yet another site we find: "as if we needed more proof that the yankees represent evil incarnate." These are just the comments that weren't deleted for bad taste. I'm not going to link to those sites.

This is in a class with believing that their worth depends on -- oh, say, their skin color. The irony is that just a few feet from where the death occurred, on the same property as the parking lot (visible at the right of the photo -- larger version here), there is a mural honoring the idea that people's worth doesn't depend on their skin color. It portrays Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella, who joined the previously all-white Nashua Dodgers in 1946. They were, according to the Nashua Telegraph, "the first two black ballplayers to play for a major-league-affiliated team in the United States in the modern era."

That was one step toward people's learning not to despise others for the racial group they belonged to. (Not all have learned that; there was a recent report of racist graffiti on the mural.) But we still have the kind of person who despises others for the baseball team they support. Whichever one is dumber, both come from the same place, the desire to divide people into a group which is "us" and therefore good, and another group which is "not-us" and therefore an enemy. White vs. black. Yankees vs. Red Sox. Shiite vs. Sunni. Any excuse will do. I hope that the death reminded some people of the stupidity of taking baseball rivalry to the level of personal hatred, but a number of people failed to learn any such lesson.

The net neutrality fetish

For some people, the special feature of the Internet, the one most worth preserving, isn't that it's a medium which is particularly free of government control, on which people can say what they want. It's the concrete detail that it uses a certain delivery model, known as "net neutrality." So far it's the norm almost everywhere, aside from censorship attempts, nannyware, spam filtering, and such. With net neutrality, a packet is a packet, and all get the same level of service regardless of protocol or source.

There are obvious benefits to net neutrality. It encourages innovation in protocols, and it avoids snafus when management based on protocol or content tries to get too clever. It helps to make sure that everyone on the Internet has a voice. But many people consider it so important and so fragile that they are inviting the federal government to stick its regulatory camel's nose under the tent flap.

There are plausible reasons to deviate from net neutrality. Some types of traffic, such as streaming video, consume much more bandwidth than others, such as text. It could make sense to make the high-bandwidth protocols a premium service or to give them lower priority. Competition allows for multiple possibilities. But the advocates of mandated neutrality insist on regulation to prohibit this. Down this road, though, once the government has a precedent, comes the long chain of power grabbing through statements of the form, "We already regulate X, so it's inconsistent not to regulate Y." If packet neutrality should be mandated, then why not a fairness doctrine, for instance?

Once the process starts, we can be sure of one thing: regulation will be skewed, as it always is, to favor those who have the most influence with the regulators. This means those who have the strongest economic interest in favorable rules, together with the greatest influence. This means companies whose size exceeds their ethics. It always works this way, and the advocates of regulation in "the public interest" always complain bitterly when they get what they ask for.

On The Technology Liberation Front, Ryan Radia discusses the distorting effects which demand for net-neutrality regulation may be creating. Comcast may, according to rumor, institute a maximum data throughput per month for users, with overage fees. (He mistakenly refers to these as "bandwidth" limits; limiting bandwidth, as opposed to aggregate data transfer, is easy to do, but providers keep increasing it because it attracts customers.)

The “Save the Internet” brigade’s insistence on neutrality and transparency has left Comcast with little choice but to resort to a metered solution to network congestion. Of course, I’m pleased that Sandvine and the “invisi-caps” will soon be history, and I look forward to consuming 249.99 GB each month on my Comcast connection.
 
But what about non-neutral solutions to last-mile congestion? To be sure, Sandvine was far from perfect, but who knows what innovative network management technologies will go undeveloped because of the stigma, and threat of regulation, against traffic discrimination?

Widespread attitudes would attach stigma to non-neutral approaches, regardless of the regulatory climate, but it convincing demonstrations of economic benefit, including a speedy connection for ordinary purposes, could outweigh it. Sneakiness, such as Comcast's recent attempt to limit some types of packets by improper use of protocols, would carry more stigma and thus be unattractive. When regulation is threatened, companies may (and Comcast actually did) find sneakiness preferable to attracting the wrath of lobbyists and legislators. Or more precisely, since a corporation is a person only in the legal sense, someone in Comcast decided there was less risk to his job by taking a sneaky action that only geeks would get upset about than by making a policy decision that a Congressthing might make hay from.

Let the net neutrality advocates argue that their way is the best, and let them tell users they're best off avoiding any ISP's that implement non-neutral limits. By doing this, they'll stimulate the debate and discourage foolish approaches to limitation. But they should put down the club of threatened regulation and make their point by non-coercive means.

Unreal ID

The deadline for Real ID compliance has gone by, and not a single state is fully compliant. A number have said flatly that they won't implement it, but DHS gave them "extensions" anyway. It's starting to look as if passive resistance has beaten one draconian piece of federal legislation. I'm still surprised that Bush isn't denouncing the state legislatures for allegedly helping terrorists.

Oregon's secret laws

The state of Oregon is going after websites that post its laws, claiming copyright violation. Justia.com is one of the targets of this legal harassment. The Oregon government apparently likes to squeeze money out of the population by charging them to find out what is legal and illegal.

David Post writes:

What burns me up is that the State of Oregon would choose to assert its rather fanciful copyright claim for the purpose of making public access to the authoritative version of its laws more, rather than less, difficult.