Category: Political

Wisconsin requires public review of voting software – update: not so much

As reported in <Badger Blues via Daily Kos, and Slashdot the law requires that:

“If a municipality uses an electronic voting systm for voting at any election, the municpal clerk shall provide any person, upon request, at the expense of the municipality, the coding for the software that the municipality uses to operate the system and tally the votes cast.

This is a great step toward making voting technology serve the public rather than voting system vendors.
Wisconsin law already required voting machines to produce paper ballots that can be used in a recount.
UPDATE: Unfortunately, the report was based on an old version of the bill. The

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More data mining skepticism

Matt Yglesias, John Cole, and Ezra Klein have picked up the question about data mining math. If you’re looking for a small enough needle in a large enough haystack, will the noise outweigh the signal?
Ezra Klein asks the question nicely:

I

Mass surveillance and bad math #2

This Ars Technica piece makes the argument about the ineffectiveness of mass surveillance at catching terrorists.

Just imagine, for a moment, that 0.1% of all the calls that go through this system score hits. Now let’s suppose the system processes 2 million calls a day. That’s still 2,000 calls a day that the feds will want to eavesdrop on

Data mining and bad math

There’s a lot of speculation that the warrantless spying authorized by the Bush administration is using some kind of TIA-like, Echelon-like massive data gathering and data mining operation.
That’s why the administration couldn’t get FISA warrants. If that’s what they’re doing, it’s arguably a bad idea even if it was legal (which right now it pretty clearly isn’t).
You can get warrants if you are spying on one, or five, or twenty people. You can’t get warrants if you are spying on 100,000 people, or 1 million people.
It’s also why they couldn’t use the “after the fact” exemption in FISA. Under FISA, the government can start spying immediately, and ask for the warrant up to 72 hours later. But if you’ve amassed petabytes of data on millions of people, the analysts haven’t analyzed it all in 72 hours. Maybe they go back and look for a pattern months after the fact.
Even if it was legal, though, it would arguably be a bad idea. Bruce Schneier makes the best argument that data mining is in many cases less effective than traditional, lead-based investigative work.
When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, data mining is bad math. It’s very different from the use of data mining to detect credit risk patterns. In the US, there are probably tens of millions of people who are iffy credit risks, and there are different probabilities of default. It’s reasonable to use math to assign a credit rating based on probability. And there’s a competitive market for credit. If an individual gets turned down by one provider, they might get credit from another. It’s not a binary thing.
But what about looking for terrorist sympathizers. Islamist terrorists in the US are rare. How many potential terrorists in the US are willing to kill innocent civilians — maybe 100, 200? Not that many. How big is their network of sympathizers and supports? Maybe a few thousand? By contrast, how many people are there who are news buffs, ordinary muslims, and ordinary, never-violent political activists? Many millions.
So a data mining operation that looked for keywords would find many many more innocent people than potential terrorists. The government would waste their time reading this blog post and menus for mosque community dinners.
When you are looking to assess a credit rating, being about right is OK. If someone pays a rate of 15% instead of 14%, not that much harm is done. But when you are looking for a terrorist, you want to be 100% right. It doesn’t help if you miss a killer and abduct uncle abdul the hardware store owner.
The government would be much better off doing the traditional job of finding leads, getting warrants, trailing those people, and finding their contacts. That sort of hard work actually has a higher probability of success than the data mining approach.

Cheney says 9/11 attacks could have been prevented by wiretaps

as reported in Forbes. Of course. Nobody is arguing against the needed surveillance of suspected criminals.
And if law enforcement wants to eavesdrop on a US citizen or a resident, they need to be authorized by a judicial warrant. The missing word in Cheney’s remarks is “warrant”.
The terms of FISA are quite liberal — the government can start eavesdropping immediately, and ask for judicial review up to three days later. If for some reason, the terms of FISA hampered legitimate investigation of terrorists, the administration should propose a change to the law.
Our constitution does not allow the president to disregard the law, or to make law by fiat. That’s called monarchy or dictatorship.

The joke’s less funny this year

Over the years, I’ve argued in favor of calling the office Christmas Party a Christmas Party, since that’s what it is. If generic christians really and truly wanted to be ecumenical, they’d also hold Purim parties and Diwali parties — they’d really celebrate when other ethicities party, instead of condescendingly including Hannuka with Christmas.
Last season, the war on Christmas seemed like a joke – a joke on the humorless, paranoid ultra-Christian scrooges who managed to sustain a persecution complex when they’re part of the majority culture.
This year, it’s not so funny anymore.
I’m not offended when someone untentionally wishes me a Merry Christmas. But I do appreciate it when people who know I’m Jewish say Happy Hannukah. The point isn’t about people in the minority being offended. It’s about people in the majority being considerate. So the “war on Christmas” folks are waging a war on politeness. But I’m getting the sneaking suspicion that it’s worse than that.
Wishing a “Merry Christmas” becomes a test of club membership. If a non-Christian doesn’t eagerly welcome the greeting, we’re “them”, not “us”. What the “war-on-Christmas” people are trying to do is to subtly and insidiously create the impression that people who aren’t Christian and aren’t faking it are somehow less American.
It’s good to see that ACLU Texas is prosecuting the war on Christmas with the vigor it deserves.

Will the American people buy the explanation of secret spying?

After Congress returned from recess to vote for the Terry Schiavo bill, I followed the news obsessively, looking for signs about whether the American people would embrace the creepy, intrusive conservative nanny state trend. Thankfully they didn’t; the Schiavo law was the beginning of the Bush administration’s loss of mainstream, independent American voters.
The NSA wiretapping story feels to me like a similar moment. Will the American people buy the John Yoo theory that anything the president does with a national security justification is by definition legal? Or will they agree with Russ Feingold that “The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king.”
Update:
* this reading of FISA indicates that the surveillance should have required FISA warrants.
* comments here raise questions about whether the surveillance should have been covered
* more facts are needed. This needs to be investigated immediately.
* the “Bush Doctrine” that the president can use national security justification to disregard the law was and is unamerican

Low morale at homeland security

According to a syndicated NYT story run in the Houston Chronicle, only 3 percent of employees at the Department of Homeland Security said they are confident that personnel decisions are “based on merit.” … “Only 12 percent of the more than 10,000 employees who returned a government questionnaire said they felt strongly that they are “encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things.”
“In each instance and many others, the responses of the Homeland Security employees were less favorable than those of all the other departments and agencies surveyed by the federal Office of Personnel Management, a new study by an outside research organization shows.”
The article didn’t cite the survey. The results look ominous for terrorism prevention and disaster readiness.

Symbol of freedom

My mom reports that she is now able to carry knitting needles on commercial airplanes for the first time since September 11.