Bill Ryan's Other Blog

It’s well documented that we can’t cut taxes without cutting vital government services.  There’s no waste in the government and they are very careful with our tax dollars.  And we know that private corporations are run by greedy bastards whereas government agencies are run by altruists.  Somehow, the mere act of receiving a paycheck from the government instead of private sector makes one immune to greed, avarice and most other vices afflicting the private sector (I can’t believe I wrote that without barfing).

When a private company does something, directly or indirectly if you will, that hurts private citizens, there’s never a shortage of opportunist politicians wagging their fingers and promising that the bad guys get their due. When it’s a Senator/Congressman/Governor/President that does it, an Ethics Committee is convened and the person is almost always cleared of all wrongdoing (unless his crime is politically incorrect.  Stealing money and taking bribes is almost always OK).

What’s really offensive though is how things are handled when the government’s actions hurt people.  Every year hundreds of thousands of people die or suffer needlessly b/c the FDA won’t allow them access to experimental drugs that might kill them.  The US Government says Pot is bad but pretty much makes research to support or refute this claim illegal.   Virtually every major aspect of the housing meltdown can be attributed to government action.  Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose catalogs a ton of such instances and that book was written way before any of this housing nonsense.

So in the latest instance of government incompetence that would lead to arrests if a private sector company did it on their own…

The US government is huffing and puffing about the evils of governments that spy on their citizens.

Obama administration issued statements of support for Google, and members of Congress are pushing to revive a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. [editor’s note:  I have no doubt that if the other party was in power, their position would be no different]

I commend them on their support for the non-ruling members of the world and I share their outrage.  There’s a problem or two though::

The 1994 CALEA law required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the NSA has built substantial eavesdropping systems in the United States. The government has repeatedly proposed Internet data retention laws, allowing surveillance into past activities as well as present

CALEA, also known as Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act had a pretty noble purpose no doubt, but the implications seem pretty, uhhh, Orwellian? Totalitarian? What do you think Stalin, Mao, Chavez or Castro would think about such a law compared to say a Churchill or a Ghandi?

CALEA’s purpose is to enhance the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time

Then there was that pesky CARNIVORE (And to think that Taxpayer money was used to pay someone to come up with such a ‘brilliant’ name. It’s amazing that it didn’t receive a warmer welcome with such a friendly name, non?)

After the dust settled from the Carnivore PR disaster, the best and the brightest decided to soften the image of their totalitarian snooping initiatives and Total Information Awareness was born.  Just to be clear, these are a few of many such power grabs.  So pretty much every time you turn around, our government, just like the governments of most other countries, tries to come up with some new way to snoop on its citizens.

Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

They keep trying and wait for the right moment to claim such intrusions are necessary.  (For the record, President Bush SIGNED the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001. That means it was written, debated, voted on and confirmed in 6 weeks and 3 days.  It was introduced to the House of Representatives within a week of 9/11.  Check it out for yourself.  Do you really believe that it was all written After 9/11?  Or was it already sitting around as a solution waiting for a problem?) 

So we sit here today with Congress in high dudgeon about the Chinese Governments snooping and we’re ready to really stick it to any government that spies on it’s citizens, yet these same people demanded that companies like Google put backdoors into their software so the government could spy on its citizens.  And because of that mandated back door, Chinese Hackers were able to infiltrate Google’s Gmail service and retrieve who knows what.  This cost Google substantial embarrassment and G*d only knows how much in monetary damages.  Who does Google call to get their reputation or money back? (And for the record, I’m not a huge Google sympathizer – it’s just in this case, I think they got the shaft pretty bad).

While we’re taking a trip down memory lane.  Do you remember the early days of the internet?  Remember any time you installed most major software there was all sorts of text making you promise you wouldn’t export anything that contained encryption?  Remember International Traffic in Arms (ITAR) Regulations?  Do you remember Phil Zimmerman?  This is a prime example of what happens when people who DON’T UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY , TRY TO LEGISLATE IT INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WRITING INTEROGATORIES, OR LEGAL PROPOSALS, BY YOU.  In a nutshell, ITAR made it illegal to export strong cryptography.  Here’s the genius part of it:

You could write the source code that built the cryptography and send it out of the country, even directly to a known terrorist and not break the law.  You could put it in a text file and email it and not break the law.  You could send the source code, a compiler and instructions on how to compile the program and still not run afoul of ITAR.  But if you compiled the source and transmitted it to a specific list of actors, even if you did so accidentally, you were now a federal criminal.  To show how stupid this is, I downloaded the source for PgP along with an old Borland Compiler.  It took me a total of 6 mouse clicks (Open the program, File->Open->PgpSource-Select All-Compile) to build the application to make the program in question. If you include creating the email, downloading the instructions and attaching the compiler, the whole process takes less than 20 mouse clicks.  So we made something a FEDERAL CRIME and a damn serious one at that (try to get hired with “I Broke federal arms trafficking laws” on your record), where the threshold between completely legal and federal criminal was < 20 mouse clicks.  God knows no bad guys would ever know how to download source code or install a basic C, C++ compiler.  It’d be the hitting F5 that would throw them. 

So we have repeated examples of the government screwing up (and as Friedman pointed out, in many cases causing screw ups that lead to lives lost) over and over again. We know that many in the Prison Industrial Complex sit around waiting for an opportune time to get around the Constitution.  We know that Congress often doesn’t read the text of legislation they vote on.  We know many of them don’t have a clue about technology (and in some cases, ideas so utterly stupid most people couldn’t begin to understand them).  Tell me again why we are so willing to let them make laws related to technology?  (Or much else for that matter)

[tags]Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, PGP, Phillip Zimmerman, ITAR, International Traffic in Arms, Google – China, Chinese Hacking of Gmail, CALEA, Milton Friedman, Cryptography, Patriot Act  [/tags]