Category: Political

So I was thinking about the latest worrisome developments, like John “Iran-Contra” Poindexter running a Defense Department program to set up a vast data mining operation, which will sift through credit card records, medical records, travel records, and email, along with government and legal records, on a vast and random fishing expedition for signs of potential crime.
No prior cause, no warrants, no permission necessary.
William Safire’s tirade against the program, if you haven’t read it yet. Posted by David Weinberger in full, here.
The ACLU’s arguments against it.
And I thought that the one thing we were missing was a real, honest-to-goodness secret police.
Then I saw this. The President’s national security advisors are recommending the creation of a brand new domestic spy agency.

I’m politically pretty moderate, with some very strong opinions on specific issues that cross party lines.
The current administration is in favor of:

• spending a lot of money we don’t have
• reducing civil liberties in ways, like secret trials, that this country was started in order to avoid
• moving beyond legitimate self-defense to miltary adventurism
• protecting the oil industry instead of getting cost-effective energy technology that frees us from middle east dependence and smog
• pursuing a foreign policy that emphasises weapons of destruction at the expense of weapons of salvation

I’m pretty worried about the consequences of these policies. They could make this country and the world a lot worse for a long time.
(The Economist article might cost money to read; it’s Jeffrey Sachs on proven-effective ways of reducing poverty and suffering around the world. If you want the article, I’m pretty sure I can email it in a way you can read it for free, so ask.)

Mitch Ratcliffe picked up a Slate story by Daniel Gross, speculating that the stock market was up on Friday in response to Senator Wellstone’s death.
Here’s what I posted to the Slate discussion board in response:
It seems ludicrous to theorize about the market bouncing on Friday in response to Senator Wellstone’s death without also drawing a connection between the market’s terrible performance over the last year and business concerns about the prospect for war without end.
If anything, it seems just as logical to attribute the market’s rise over the last few weeks to the apparent easing of the threat of imminent war. Polls show most Americans worry about the potential for war with Iraq to spread elsewhere in the Middle East, and fear that the administration hasn’t thought through the requirements and consequences of a long-term occupation. Seems only reasonable that Wall Street would reflect these worries.

AP Wire story
from Andrew Sullivan
Senator Wellstone acted according to his convictions, and had the respect of friends, allies and adversaries.
Baruch Dayan Emet.

An open letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell explains why the government shouldn’t prop up the ailing telecom behemoths.
Telecom companies bought expensive network technology with long bonds. That technology has been made obsolete by gear getting faster and cheaper all the time by Moore’s law and Metcalfe’s law. The telecom companies are asking for the equivalent of a bailout for their investments in sailing ships after the advent of steam.
The way to speed the deployment of broadband to homes isn’t to prop up businesses based on old technology, but to let uncompetitive businesses “fail fast”, and let new competitors play.
Read it; and if you agree, contact your legislator and pass it on.

According to this CBS/New York Times poll:
“The public overwhelmingly wants to get the United Nations’ weapons inspectors back into Iraq and allied support before taking any military action. Americans also want a congressional vote before acting – and think members of Congress should be asking more questions about the implications of war with Iraq.”
“Americans are concerned about the wider implications of war with Iraq. They believe such a war will result in a long and costly military involvement; they believe it will lead to a wider war in the Middle East with other Arab nations and Israel; and that it could further undermine the U.S. economy.”
Given President Bush’s approval ratings, it’s nice to see that American’s haven’t become completely foolhardy and bloodthirsty; people want our government to think about the consequences of its actions.
Another good sign of this comes from some non-scientific polls from the Wall Street Journal.
The self-selected respondents in Journal audience are typically moderate-to-right-of-center, and are more than willing to have partisan opinions about things like whether the Democrats can replace Toricelli in New Jersey.
But they’re cautious about Iraq, too. As of a few weeks ago, respondents to the Journal poll didn’t think that the administration had made a good enough case about invading Iraq.

The editorial argues that the US should invest aggressively in new energy sources in order to free ourselves of dependency on Middle East oil. This is no radical environmentalist pamphlet or obscure foreign policy white paper. The idea has become mainstream. Perhaps it will happen in the forseeable future (though clearly not in the short term.)

Bush administration lawyers claim that there’s no need to consult Congress about attacking Iraq, since the 1991 Gulf War resolution is still in effect. Never mind that the resolution was passed in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, or that the Gulf War seemed at the time to have ended with the April 91 cease fire.
It’s true that the lines of responsibility for starting wars are mightily tangled; administrations and Congress have been fighting over the power to start wars for the whole of US history.
But this argument is completely absurd. It makes one suspect that the proponents consider democracy a bureaucratic inconvenience.

At Denver International Airport last week, an enthusiastic security
guard trainee decided that she needed to manually verify my assertion
that the metal-detector wand is triggered by brassiere underwires.
After confirming this fact, I was allowed to pass through security and
board the airplane, still wearing the suspicious bra. Airline security
staff are clearly not being sufficiently vigilant against the threat of
rows of zaftig passengers rising up to garrote the crew with their
underwear.
On the other hand, the airline had no trouble sending my suitcase to
Austin one flight ahead of me.

On Monday, Declan McCullough wrote a defeatist essay in CNET encouraging technologists not to bother opposing bad laws, and to stay home and write clever code.
In the ensuing Slashdot discussion, the audience roundly disagreed with Declan and argued that geeks need to be political to keep and take back freedoms lost to bad laws like the DMCA.
The tone of of the SlashDot discussion was very different from the libertarian dogma several years ago and the level of knowledge about the political process seemed a lot higher.
It took 10 years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 for Congress to ban DDT. Time will tell if enough people will speak up in our time.