Posts tagged "politics"

You have something to hide

2013-06-23T15:45:00Z

You have something to hide

2013-06-23 :: politics

You’ve committed felonies.

Perhaps as many as three per day.

If someone tracked you for a year are you confident that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law.

Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.

This relates to a couple things in the news. One of course is NSA surveillance, which dramatically lowers the cost of evidence against you. Also relevant is a very recent SCOTUS decision, Salinas v. Texas, that you no longer have the right to remain silent.

You may have been taught as a child to follow the rules and everything would be OK. If you had a relatively privileged upbringing and reasonable parents and teachers, maybe that was mostly the case.

But clearly you can’t do that. It’s impossible to know all the rules. If you did, you’d know it’s impossible to follow all the rules.

That’s why matters of surveillance and evidence aren’t just important for the people think of as “criminals”. You, unfortunately, are one of the criminals. You just haven’t been caught yet.

Some have observed that the NSA is collecting roughly what Facebook or Google do. And they ask, what’s the difference?

One principled answer is that people consent to information collection by a company. In theory, they exchange this data for the consideration of using the service for free. The consent may not be deeply-informed, but it exists. With a company, there’s a choice. With the government, there isn’t.¹

A practical answer is that Facebook and Google cannot legally use the information to confiscate and/or confine. If they did, it would be a form of blackmail and/or kidnapping. Whereas in the case of government it’s not “blackmail”, it’s “prosecutorial discretion”.

And that’s if you’re relatively lucky enough to have a prosecutor — to have specific charges filed in public. Even if the charges are inflated and multiplied (the reason why it’s convenient for everyone to be guilty of multiple felonies), at least you get an opportunity to negotiate a deal or have your day in court. That is still a pretty horrible situation to be in, but like life in general, it’s better than the alternative.

Postscript

I am not a lawyer.
I have not been charged with a felony. This blog post is the result of reading and reflecting.
I want to thank everyone who reviewed pre-publication drafts of this post, including the fine, hard-working, dedicated members of intelligence services everywhere.

In the long run you may have some choice via voting. But until recently there has been no information and therefore no choice. Secrecy about near-term operational details is understandable, and with active oversight, fine. Secrecy about even the existence of operations, is a problem. ↩

Walking in the steps of soft interrogation

2013-02-19T12:00:00Z

Walking in the steps of soft interrogation

2013-02-19 :: life, politics

For many years I visited Frankfurt Musikmesse. Roughly speaking, Musikmesse is Europe’s equivalent of the NAMM show in the US.

Folks from my company would stay north of Frankfurt at the Mövenpick Hotel in Oberursel. It was more affordable and very comfortable. The front desk staff remained the same for many years. They got to know us—the obviously American, odd musician types—and were very friendly.

A couple years ago, I’d scheduled to fly home on Sunday, in case I needed to have more meetings on Saturday. The meetings never materialized, and I took it as a free day. The April weather was unseasonably warm. I walked into Oberursel’s small “downtown” and explored it like I never had before. At some point I ended up wandering into paths that led through parks and open fields. It was very beautiful.

Today I read the BBC article about Obergefreiter Hanns Scharff, the WWII interrogator who used kindness over violence. In short, he got amazing results via his “firm conviction that interrogation could succeed without treating prisoners in an inhumane manner.” As the BBC says, this is a timely topic:

Scharff died in California 20 years ago but his legacy remains. At first his name did not figure in the sharp and bitter public exchanges about the morality of waterboarding and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were sanctioned by President George Bush and inflicted on alleged terrorists detained in Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA detention centre.

What did he do instead?

He pretended to be a prisoner’s best pal. Masquerading as a nice guy, Scharff arranged for special treats outside the confines of Dulag Luft. He arranged for one prisoner to enjoy a brief flight in a German fighter plane, prisoners were treated to slap-up feeds with German fliers, granted medical treatment and even permitted to go on an outing to the local zoo.

Typically, after extracting a precautionary undertaking that he would not use the opportunity to make a bid to escape, a prisoner could enjoy a visit to Oberursel forest, with Scharff acting as chaperone and guide.

Rambling along woodland paths the two men chatted about the flora and fauna and engaged in small talk, including for example, musing about British and US social activities or customs.

Wait, what? Oberursel?

It turns out I may have unknowingly been walking on the same paths as did Scharff and his prisoners over 50 years ago.

Others should walk that path. Well, the metaphorical path: Not only is torture unethical, it’s less effective than smarter interrogation approaches.

We need a prior art database

2013-02-07T12:00:00Z

We need a prior art database

2013-02-07 :: patents, politics, software, technology

Last week I visited Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. Mark Cuban and Minecraft creator Markus Persson had recently funded an additional staff attorney position, the “Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents”.

Considering this after I got home, I had an idea about an additional angle from which to attack this problem.

What if there were a sort of “prior art database”? Where people could submit and find information about first-use or discovery of techniques—whether patented or not?

Benefits:

Engineers/inventors have an alternative to the patent process. This alternative allows them to receive recognition, which for many people is the primary motivation. And although they would forgo licensing (or trolling) revenue, there are other financial rewards that can result from a demonstration of expertise.

Companies have a time- and cost-effective alternative to “defensive” patents.

It’s a helpful resource for contesting stupid patents.

Implementation:

Instead of a database per se, probably this would work better as something like a wiki or StackOverflow.com.

Perhaps Google could sponsor/spearhead, as they’re presumably both willing and able.

Perhaps the USPTO could sponsor/host. If sufficient people chose this alternative, it could appreciably decrease the application backlog and work overload.

Is the concept of “approval” needed? Maybe not. People could file an electronic affidavit, or even just make a mere to-their-knowledge statement.

If some form of approbation were needed, it could be crowd-sourced. Think of the voting and reputation system of StackOverflow.com.

In fact, this seems like a natural evolution for Stack Exchange.

As I said above, this is not “the” answer. The patent system is horribly dysfunctional, especially for software patents. The problem needs attacking from multiple angles. Reforms like five year expirations for software patents are needed and should be implemented. In addition, I think some sort of go-to resource for prior art could help.