Emergent Chaos

This is unfair, but I can’t resist. Nine days before we found out again that PETN is hard to detonate, the FBI was keeping us safe:

FBI FINALLY MAKES AN ARREST OVER ‘WOLVERINE’ LEAK

The FBI has announced the capture of an individual connected with the leak of 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”

…

“Wolverine” has raked in nearly $375 million in worldwide gross since its release. How much money the leak cost Fox will never be settled for certain.

I’m glad we’re spending money on things to keep us safe.

Is over on the New School blog. “An open Letter to the New Cyber-Security Czar.”

According to the Wall St Journal, “Iranian Crackdown Goes Global ,” Iran is monitoring Facebook, and in a move reminiscent of the Soviets, arresting people whose relatives criticize the regime online.

That trend is part of a disturbing tendency to criminalize thoughts, intents, and violations of social norms, those things which are bad because they are prohibited, not bad in themselves. It’s important if we want to export freedom of speech and freedom from self-incrimination, to push for an international norm of limiting the powers of governments, not of people. Of course, since the main way that the international reach of governments is limited is through treaties negotiated by, umm, governments, I don’t expect a lot of that soon.

Not to mention the creation of fake Facebook accounts by Iranian intelligence.

But most interesting is this:

Five interviewees who traveled to Iran in recent months said they were forced by police at Tehran’s airport to log in to their Facebook accounts. Several reported having their passports confiscated because of harsh criticism they had posted online about the way the Iranian government had handled its controversial elections earlier this year.

and

One 28-year-old physician who lives in Dubai said that in July he was asked to log on to his Facebook account by a security guard upon arrival in Tehran’s airport. At first, he says, he lied and said he didn’t have one. So the guard took him to a small room with a laptop and did a Google search for his name. His Facebook account turned up, he says, and his passport was confiscated.

Apparently, in a sovereign-in-cheeck move, the the Florida Keys have withdrawn from the United States, and declared themselves to be “The Conch Republic.” Their motto is “We seceded where others failed.” Perhaps you haven’t heard of them because they make all the good jokes, making writing about them hard.

I heard about them because of an incident that was mentioned in this podcast. The United States will allow Cuban refugees to enter if they reach dry land. The Border Patrol declared that 15 Cuban refugees that had reached the bridge were not in the United States, and thus could be returned to Cuba. Based on this disavowal, the Conch Republic seized the bridge and declared it their territory, in what is now known as “The great invasion of 1995.”

Next time I need a good vacation in the sun, I know where I’m going.

Shown: “Close up Bloody Battle.”

So the 2016 Olympics will be in Rio de Janeiro. Some people think this was a loss for Obama, but Obama was in a no-win situation. His ability to devote time to trying to influence the Olympics is strongly curtailed by other, more appropriate priorities. If he hadn’t gone to Copenhagen, he would have been blamed for not caring. If he went, he’s blamed anyway. In reality, he does have some control over what happened. He could have fixed the “harrowing experience” we show the world under the ironic words “Welcome to the United States:”

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience.” (New York Times, “Rio Wins“)

Ironically, the President has experienced harrowing nonsense at borders, see “US Senators Detained In Russia.” He should put someone on fixing the Customs and Immigration service before it costs us even more.

However, it’s really unclear if the “loss” is a loss. “No Games Chicago” was a citizens group advocating against destroying Chicago’s parks and budget for the Olympics, and according to CNN, 45% of the city’s residents didn’t want the games. And as the AP documents in “Olympics Aren’t Necessarily an Economic Bonanza,” the outlandish “economic benefit” numbers that Olympic advocates usually throw around are based on a “multiplier effect” of around 3. Me, I know what an Olympics event costs–Montreal taxpayers paid off the ‘76 Olympics in 2006.

So congratulations, Rio. I hope you don’t bulldoze the less waelthy neighborhoods, and I hope you’re all paid off by 2030 or so.

The Get FISA Right group is publicizing our need to re-think the laws. They have discussion going on on their site, as well as on The Daily Kos. I recommend catching up there, or reading Adam’s recent post here.

I have to ask what was wrong with the old FISA? It wasn’t a bad system, had a lot tradeoffs as well as emergency provisions. The government could, for example, get a warrant after the fact in an emergency.

But the old FISA was very Cold War. It was also very much adapted to the previous century’s technology in which wired technologies were static and protected and wireless or mobile technologies were highly regulated.

So let’s look at some of the things that are indeed worth changing.

• I think it is important to note upfront that getting a warrant trumps all this discussion. We are talking about Fourth Amendment considerations, and that means what can be done without a warrant. But it also concerns a certain amount of how the government can operate when it has one, when they’re operating completely above board.
• In the past, FISA was overly concerned with devices rather than persons. Changing it so that it affects persons is a good idea. If there is permission to spy on a person, then it should be to spy on the person. Making it the person and device is awfully restrictive, especially when it’s hard to know what counts. Rather than debate about what happens when DHCP gives you a new address, it’s better to just make things apply to persons. That probably makes the law adapt better to changing technology.

  I would not want end up having interesting new technologies like femtocells end up in some odd legal limbo because of some peculiarity of the technology. It’s better for us all to just agree that when it is okay to spy on a person, it’s that person.

• In the past, FISA worried a lot about about where the pipes were. It also seems reasonable to have that abstracted away. This goes along with focusing on the persons. A phone call between non-US persons does not suddenly become a US thing just because some glass runs across the US.

  Now, this has consequences. I wouldn’t blame non-US telecom companies to proudly avoid the US as a result of that. It’s from the viewpoint of a civil libertarian who is trying to make sense out of the rules of spying that I think that.

  It is also the converse of thinking that when I am in another country, they’ll spy on me or not according to their rules, not mine.

• The flip side of this is that US persons are protected everywhere. It seems fair that if we’re going to tune the law to make it easier to spy on non-US persons no matter where they are, the US persons should get full protection. This strikes me as being the way that things ought to be. My government shouldn’t spy on me (without a warrant) just because I’m traveling outside the country. This may be as things ought to be, but it used to be at least de facto that if you were outside the country, your calls would be monitored.
• It is a point of our common law that non-US persons are subject to US law when they are in the US. If a foreigner is arrested in the US, they get a jury trial, for example. In this particular case, however, non-US persons in the US should have some extra measure of protection, the question is what.

I can go on, particularly about the new features of the new FISA. However, that strays away from this discussion. What didn’t work well in the old one.

Jim Burrows is working to kick off a conversation about what good reform of US telecom law would be. He kicks it off with “What does it mean to “get FISA right”?” and also here.

To “get it right”, let me suggest that we need:

1. One law that covers all spying
2. Require warrants when the US spies on
   1. Anyone in the US
   2. US persons (citizens and resident aliens) anywhere
3. Allow the intelligence agencies to spy freely on foreigners oversees, even if the taps are in the US
4. Require Executive, Judicial and Congressional oversight when protected and unprotected communications are entangled.
5. Criminalize violation of the Constitution.

I think we need a law which works cross medium, and addresses both content and routing information. It should lay out broad principles of privacy protection for Americans and people in America, and the times when spying is acceptable in ways that enable debate and discussion. We also need to address the very real abuses of past wiretapping statues, perhaps with increasing oversight as time goes by.

This is a hard area, and I encourage you to join in the discussion here, on Jim’s blogs, or on your own.

I hit post to soon, I’d meant to explain the image. I picked the image because I believe that listening to phone calls is sometimes something we should allow a government to do. If we do it right, it’s a valuable tool. If we do it wrong, it becomes an intrusion and a betrayal of our values. To date, we are doing it wrong, with secret courts rubber stamping requests under complex laws that few can understand. The result is that legitimate wiretapping is harder than it needs to be. Getting FISA right includes restoring public trust.

Image: Dr. Bulldog & Ronin.

The BBC reports:

A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Dame Stella Rimington, 73, stood down as the director general of the security service in 1996…”Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect – there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification.”

What’s new? It’s gone far enough that even former spy chiefs are speaking out.

Let’s stop the madness, and embrace liberty and the risk that the chaos won’t be all for the good.

Thanks to Nicko for the pointer.

This photograph was taken at 11:19 AM on January 20th. It’s very cool that we can get 1 meter resolution photographs from space. What really struck me about this photo was.. well, take a look as you scroll down…

What really struck me about this is the open space. What’s up with that? Reports were that people were being turned away. Why all the visible ground? Were those areas still filling in? Did security procedures keep away that many?

You can click through for a much larger version at the Boston Globe. [update: even larger version at GeoEye, purveyors of fine space imagery.]

There’s an interesting (and long!) “Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States.” Michael Froomkin summarizes the summary.” Adam Thierer was a member of the task force, and has extensive commentary on the primary online safety issue today is peer-on-peer cyber-harassment, not adult [sexual] predation, along with a great link roundup. Kim Zetter at Wired gives unfortunate credence to hyperbolic claims by some attorneys general that “harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.” Uh huh. I’m glad Richard Blumenthal knows the truthy, and isn’t going to let facts stand in his way. I’m less glad that Wired chose to portray that as a ‘controversy.’ I’d call it an embarrassment to the state of Connecticut.