Public policy and privacy
Public policy issues such as privacy, technology industry economic development, education to support technology workers, and so on. Privacy in particular, whether or not strictly tied to public policy.
Republicans are extremists, and should be labeled as such
Republican and other US conservative political messaging is relentlessly negative.
- Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have communicated negativity about almost any government activity except law enforcement and military defense.
- Republicans relentlessly attack “libtards”, “feminazis”, the “lamestream media” and, above all, out-of-touch radical socialist secular America-hating Democrats who insist you eat tofu.
And the Trump era has taken this to a new level of screeching. The “fake news” press are “enemies of the people”. Patriotic bureaucrats are a “deep state” “swamp”. Impeachment is a freedom-destroying “coup”. Anybody who opposes Trump should be locked up for treason. Above all, Democrats are nuts and want to take your freedoms away.
Democrats can use negative messaging too. But they face obstacles, including: Read more
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Republicans vs. democracy
For traditionally patriotic Americans, rule of law is sacrosanct. But leading Republicans don’t agree.
- They show this through authoritarian rhetoric, like “treason”, “enemies of the people”, “lock her up”, “human scum”, “fake judges” and “I have the right to do whatever I want”.
- They show it through dictatorial actions, such as defiance of Congress, open (and openly reciprocated) partisanship in judicial appointments, criminal-law harassment of the FBI officials who investigated them, and the whole mess with Ukraine.
And so the November, 2020 United States election will be desperately important. Republicans are sabotaging our democracy, and have done it much damage. So they must be temporarily removed from power, long enough for the system to be substantially repaired. This is essential at the national level, president and Congress alike. It is vital in individual states as well.
The importance of such repair is impossible to overstate; democratic government, once lost, can take a very long time to restore. Read more
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Everything is at stake on November 6. Here’s how you can still help.
Summary: The November 6 election is hugely important to the future of freedom in the United States. The main remaining way to help is to donate to Democrats in very close races. My most specific advice is:
- Sign up with ActBlue Express, a kind of PayPal-for-Democrats that makes every particular donation extremely easy.
- Donate to one of both of two organizations focused on winnable state-legislature races, Forward Majority (startup-y, data-driven) and/or the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (more establishment-oriented).
- Donate to specific House candidates in races that are very close and not already overloaded with money, such as:
- Leslie Cockburn, a highly accomplished investigative journalist running in the 5th District of Virginia.
- Dan McCready, a marine, Harvard MBA and solar energy entrepreneur in a super-close race in the 9th District of North Carolina.
- Kathleen Williams, who is running for the at-large seat in Montana, a state that also has a close Senate race.
Further ideas are below.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
The wars on democracy and truth
The “War on Truth” is a new and somewhat useful cliché. But like any short phrase, it isn’t perfectly accurate. In particular:
- “Truth”* is in danger from many different threats.
- Some of those threats are surely deliberate attacks …
- … but others are not.
*There also are a number of semantic and epistemological issues around the concept of “truth”, but let’s put those aside for now
For starters, let’s note: Read more
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 5 Comments |
Historical comparisons for Donald Trump
Donald Trump, to put it mildly, is unusual. No analogy or comparison or him is close to being perfectly accurate. Despite, or indeed because, of that, he’s wound up being compared to quite a few other figures, from history, fiction or current events. Perhaps a quick survey would be helpful as background to other discussions.
Three of the most popular Trump comparisons are:
- Andrew Jackson, who was President of the United States from 1829-1837. This is Trump and Bannon’s preferred analogy.
- Classical fascist leaders, such as Mussolini and Hitler.
- Modern populist/authoritarian leaders, such as Putin, Erdogan, Chavez, Duterte or even Milosevic.
I’ll discuss the first two below. The third will have to wait until future posts.
Further Trump analogies that I think are worth brief mentions include:
- Silvio Berlusconi, erstwhile prime minister of Italy.
- Berlusconi/Trump analogies start with Berlusconi being a corrupt media mogul, a real estate developer, a minor performing artist, and a major sexual sleazebag.
- Berlusconi flouted conflict-of-interest concerns, bragged fancifully about his cabinet, and accused the media of being his corrupt enemy.
- Berlusconi was friendly to authoritarian leaders (Putin, Gaddafi et al.), and to the Mafia.
- To my knowledge, however, Berlusconi didn’t go nearly as far as Trump in adopting alt-right/Bannon kinds of ideologies.
- Berlusconi actually led Italy for quite a while. But few people say he led it well.
- Orwell’s fictional tyrants.
- Doublethink and the other dishonesty from 1984 are obvious matches to Trump/Bannon.
- Governments’ tendencies to rapidly turn friends to foes and vice-versa have multiple echoes in Trumpworld.
- So does the fake populism of Animal Farm.
- But Orwell’s Stalinist purges were a lot deadlier than anything Trump has so far pursued.
- Machiavelli’s hypothetical princes. I think this one fits well.
- Trump has a lot of Medici-like traits. (They were businesspeople who went into politics, and who liked to build gaudy things.)
- Renaissance princes governed city-states, in a simpler era, when people had much less knowledge or education. I can actually envision Trump as being intellectually capable of handling their jobs.
Donald Trump compared to Andrew Jackson
Let’s return to Trump’s own favorite analogy. President Andrew Jackson is probably most famous for: Read more
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 4 Comments |
My view of intellectual property
The purpose of legal intellectual property protections, simply put, is to help make it a good decision to create something. The specific phrasing in the United States Constitution is
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
but that’s just a longer way of saying the same thing.
Why does “securing … exclusive Right[s]” to the creators of things that are patented, copyrighted, or trademarked help make it a good decision for them to create stuff? Because it averts competition from copiers, thus making the creator a monopolist in what s/he has created, allowing her to at least somewhat value-price her creation.
I.e., the core point of intellectual property rights is to prevent copying-based competition. By way of contrast, any other kind of intellectual property “right” should be viewed with great suspicion.
Examples of my views include:
- In a recent comment I pooh-poohed an expansive interpretation of the GPL, even as I supported the GPL in core cases.
- I believe that most kinds of software patents are or should be invalid, but I’m willing to make an exception for innovative user experiences.
- I believe in copyright, even though I agree with consensus that in many cases copyright-holders’ business models will evolve away from the licensing of intellectual property. For example, I’m mightily annoyed when somebody claims my words as their own. But I give mine away for free. I just want to get the reputational benefit of what I write, and also to aggregate comments on my original blog posts rather than having them go to some other site.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 6 Comments |
People are very confused about privacy
According to CNet, Anthony Stancl ran an interesting scheme:
Stancle had been accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.
Stancl then reportedly threatened to post the photos or videos on the Internet if they didn’t engage in some sort of sexual activity with him. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl documented with a cell phone camera.
Stancl’s victims were teenage boys focused on sex — not exactly the world’s clearest thinkers. Even so, I find it remarkable that multiple people would:
- Send nude photographs of themselves to a stranger.
- Be so concerned about those photographs getting published online that they would submit to sexual blackmail.
- Allow the results of their sexual blackmail to be photographed.
Literally — WTF??
| Categories: Privacy, censorship, and freedom | 2 Comments |
I’m holding forth on public policy again
I was interviewed by Federal News Radio again, and will edit in a link to an audio file if/when they give me one. (Here it is.) The subject was the completion of the Aneesh Chopra/Vivek Kundra team for United States CTO and CIO, something I find alarming due to their lack of focus on the tough project management/data integration and privacy issues at the heart of government IT.
Overall, the interview went a lot better than my last one with the same station.
When law meets technology, and you can help
I’ve been arguing passionately for years that technologists and policy-makers need to work together on ensuring information systems meet life-and-death needs without compromising essential liberties.* This is obviously a tall order, and last night something struck me — the case of electronic health records should be handled first, basically because it is free of the national-security rigmarole infesting other kinds of privacy issues.
Please take a look. (And please overlook the UI at those links. It’s been embarrasingly bad, especially in the matter of bullet points, ever since I started blogging there, and this month it got a lot worse. I’m sorry.)
Then please help, by advancing your take on these ideas by any means at your disposal. It’s going to take years to get all this right. Freedom hangs in the balance. We need to start NOW.
Discussion is also underway on Slashdot.
You can help with one of the most important public policy issues of our times
I’m pretty passionate about electronic freedom these days.
Issues of privacy and liberty take at least five forms:
- Censorship
- Admissible evidence in court
- Admissible evidence in investigations (not exactly the same thing)
- The consequences of damaging information leaks from the government to the private sector
- Potential chill on useful technologies (e.g., electronic health records) caused by any of the other four kinds of issue
Taken together, that amounts to much of the Bill of Rights – or other countries’ equivalents — plus a whole lot of life-saving technology on the side. I.e., it’s more than huge.
That’s from a detailed recent post that ends with a call to action:
Please join me in raising awareness. Blog yourself. Send email to those who might have influence. Or – and this one’s really easy – just go to the suggestion page at www.change.gov and help draw the incoming Administration’s attention toward these crucial issues.
Please, please do at least one of those things. There’s still enough time for freedom to be preserved, since the worst practical threats are still some years off. But if it doesn’t happen during an Obama Administration, when will it happen, in the United States or the rest of the world? The time to make a difference is now.