Politics – Page 22 – Spinor Info

Guess someone doesn’t want to be invited back by CNN

Oct 052013

One of my favorite programs on CNN is Reliable Sources, the channel’s press/media backgrounder. It used to be hosted by Washington journalist Howard Kurtz, who recently moved to Fox News, however, to host a similar program (Mediabuzz) there.

Since then, CNN has been using invited guest hosts to host the program. One of those guest hosts, Brian Stelter, appeared for the second time this past Sunday.

Near the end of his program, he delivered a scathing (well-deserved, but scathing) criticism of CNN itself, about the way the channel bent disclosure rules to accommodate hosts and guests on the new program Crossfire.

I wonder if they will invite him back. (Or maybe he doesn’t want to be invited back?)

Cruz and McCarthy

Politics No Responses »

Sep 292013

Last week, U.S. Republican senator Ted Cruz was featured on television screens numerous times, on account of his rather pointless marathon 21-hour filibuster trying to derail Obamacare.

Whenever I saw his face on screen, I was taken aback by one thing: Just how eerily similar he looks to another senator from the inglorious past, senator Joseph McCarthy.

Apparently, the similarity is more than skin deep. I just happened upon a February article published in Forbes Magazine, which compares the actions of senator Cruz to the dirty politics of his infamous predecessor.

Religious neutrality

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Sep 102013

So Pauline Marois now tabled her proposal for religious neutrality. A new, secular charter for Quebec.

I am an atheist. I have no use for religion, especially dogmatic religion that prescribes even the clothes one wears. So I have some sympathy for those who support this proposed charter.

But I don’t, for several reasons.

First, it is trying to solve a problem where none exists. Yes, Canada is multicultural. Yes, this means that we encounter people wearing crosses, niqabs, hijabs, kippahs, and the Devil knows what other forms of ridiculous clothing. (On a side note: I respect other people’s right to their religion, and I am willing to fight for it. I have one condition: I claim the right to call every stupid superstition exactly what it is.) But since when is this a problem? I have met people ranging from medical professionals to supermarket checkout clerks wearing such things, and they were just as courteous, polite, and competent as those who wore no religious items.

Second, it is divisive. Far from solving problems, it creates one. It is designed not to embrace but to exclude people.

Third… we have to recognize this attempt for exactly what it is. A cynically divisive attempt by a mediocre politician to gather support for her failing party, and to turn her province against the rest of Canada. The language debate is long over. Canada is a fully bilingual country where folks like me, who do not speak fluent French, feel stupid and embarrassed. They can no longer drum up support by claiming to fight for the future of the French language in an English-speaking sea in North America. So they need something new.

I hope they miscalculated. I hope that Quebec voters will realize that they are being played. Support for this proposed secular charter may be high now, but I hope this will change as we learn more about the politics behind this backward, pitiful political game.

Simply put, I hope most of Quebec has firmly embraced the 21st century, even if some of the province’s leaders haven’t yet.

Was Bush smarter than Obama after all?

Politics No Responses »

Sep 082013

Yes, I am beginning to wonder if Bush (or Cheney or Rumsfeld) was indeed smarter than Obama after all.

But first… I actually believe that the Obama administration is telling the truth. I actually believe that the Sarin attack was the doing of the Syrian government. I spent some time this the weekend reading, in particular reading about the history and properties of [(CH₃)₂CHO]CH₃P(O)F (the chemical formula for Sarin). I came to realize that producing Sarin is not easy, storing Sarin (which is unstable) is not easy, and deploying Sarin is not easy. Yes, it can be done (as demonstrated by two separate Sarin attacks in Tokyo by an extremist sect in the 1990s) but it is very hard to do it effectively (as demonstrated during an attack on American troops in Iraq in 2004, in which a roadside bomb based on a Sarin artillery shell was used, but the components did not mix properly and very little Sarin was produced.) In light of what I read, and in light of the evidence offered in the meantime by the White House, I think there is very little doubt that the attack was the regime’s doing. (In other words, Putin is full of the proverbial “it”.)

So why is the free world not lining up behind its brave leader, Barack H. Obama? Well… here is where Bush’s smarts come in. While those opposed to him (myself included) liked to ridicule his statements (which basically all boiled down to, “Saddam evil, bomb Iraq”) by the time he brought his case to Congress, well, he had a case. We may have laughed at his “coalition of the willing”, but at least he had a coalition! And, ridiculous as his so-called evidence for WMDs in Iraq was (all of which turned out to be a boldfaced lie), he managed to sell it to all those who mattered: the US Congress, the Senate, his allies. When he started his war, sure he had significant opposition but he also had broad support. Even as he said that if necessary, he would “go it alone”, he didn’t. He was backed by many.

Barack Obama: the smart, highly educated, peace-loving, consensus-builder Barack Obama has no support. Even his closest allies are abandoning him both in Congress and abroad. CNN boldly states that Obama has a “challenge” convincing Congress, but it looks more like a slam dunk to me: what was it, I think 24 in favor, well over 100 against, and the rest who are undecided are not exactly leaning towards authorizing war either.

For what it’s worth, I still like Obama. I still believe that he is a better president than his predecessor, all things considered. But I am really puzzled by this Syria thing. If I were a lawmaker in the US Congress, I would also vote against it, not to spite Obama, but because I just don’t see what a limited military strike is intended to accomplish and how. Nor do I see an honest attempt to account for all possible consequences of such a strike.

Meanwhile I also cannot help but scowl at the hypocrisy of anti-war protesters who chant for “peace”. Assad’s war is not “peace”. It is a very nasty civil war, in which Assad’s government is committing wholesale murder. The world should consider intervention. But such an intervention should be based on a decisive military commitment (i.e., boots must be on the ground) and a well-defined outcome (a civilian government free of jihadist elements firmly in control of Syria.) You can’t do this on the cheap by lobbing a few missiles into the country and hope for the best. That’s just irresponsible and stupid.

Why the NSA undermines our digital security

Computer Security, Internet, Politics No Responses »

Sep 062013

So the NSA and their counterparts elsewhere, including Canada and the UK, are spying on us. I wish I could say the news shocked me, but it didn’t.

The level of secrecy is a cause for concern of course. It is one thing for these agencies not to disclose specific sources and methods, it is another to keep the existence of entire programs secret, especially when these programs are designed to collect data wholesale.

But my biggest concern is that the programs themselves represent a huge security threat for all of us.

First, the NSA apparently relies on its ability to compromise the security of encryption products and technologies or on backdoors built into these products. An unspoken assumption is that only the NSA would be able to exploit these weaknesses. But how do we know that this is the case? How do we know that the same weaknesses and backdoors used by the NSA to decrypt our communications are not discovered and then exploited by foreign intelligence agencies, industrial spies, or criminal organizations?

As an illustrative example, imagine purchasing a very secure lock for your front door. Now imagine that the manufacturer does not tell you that the locks are designed such that there exists a master key that opens them all. Maybe the only officially sanctioned master key is deposited in a safe place, but what are the guarantees that it does not get stolen? Copied? Or that the lock is not reverse engineered?

My other worry is about how the NSA either directly collects, or compels service providers to collect, and store, large amounts of data (e.g., raw Internet traffic). Once again, the unspoken assumption is that only authorized personnel are able to access the data that was collected. But what are the guarantees for that? How do we know that these databases are not compromised and that our private data will not fall into hands not bound by laws and legislative oversight?

These are not groundless concerns. As Edward Snowden’s case demonstrates, the NSA was unable to control unauthorized access even by its own contract employees working in what was supposedly a highly structured, extremely secure work environment. (How on Earth was Snowden able to copy data from a top secret system to a portable device? That violates just about every security rule in the book.)

So even if the NSA and friends play entirely above board and never act in an unlawful manner, these serious concerns remain.

I do not believe we, as citizens, should grant the authority to any state security apparatus to collect data wholesale, or to compromise the cryptographic security of our digital infrastructure. Even if it makes it harder to catch bad guys.

So, our message to the NSA, the CSE, the GCHQ and their friends elsewhere in the free world should be simply this: back off, guys. Or else, risk undermining the very thing you purportedly protect, our basic security.

Journalism at Radio Hungary

Hungary, Politics, Radio No Responses »

Sep 032013

szabad-radio I am reading a letter of resignation, written by a journalist who worked for the newsroom of Hungary’s public radio network until July this year. Unlike many of his colleagues who began their carriers in communist Hungary, Montreal-born Janos F. Antal was a Radio Free Europe correspondent. Here are some experts from this disturbing letter, in my rough translation:

“I was already working on the restoration of national sovereignty when many of you were still standing at stiff attention, listening to the Internationale […] At the time of ‘regime change’ I did not need to switch sides or become a turncoat, I just continued what I began much earlier, at Radio Free Europe…

“I am a spectator, not a participant; a chronicler, not an evangelist. A journalist – not a politician.

“All came to a head, however, when one day someone appeared behind my back and over my shoulder, staring at my monitor, began giving instructions to move this news item up, leave that one out, insert thit one, rewrite that – just like that, in such a tone.

“Moreover, this censorship brings about the growth of manipulative, propagandistic content. Once again the ‘repertoire’ includes production news of the type for which real demand existed only in the Kadar era.”

Yup, that’s Hungary’s national broadcaster in 2013.

Canned hunting

Cats, Politics, Society No Responses »

Aug 302013

I just watched a news item on CBC Ottawa about a Montreal woman who spent significant amounts of time and money to help raise a lion cub in what she thought was a lion sanctuary in South Africa, only to find out that her cub was being raised to be killed in a canned hunt.

Her lion may yet be saved thanks to her efforts and the donations she’s receiving, but countless other animals will not be as lucky, and not just in far-off third world lands like South Africa.

Apparently, many prominent supporters of the Second Amendment in the United States are also fans of this oh-so-macho practice. Never mind that the Second Amendment once codified a right of the people to deny the state a monopoly on forming an army, as a last resort guarantee of hard-earned freedoms in the American Revolution (against just the kind of decadent morons, I should add, who might be enjoying a canned hunt.) Apparently, the Second Amendment today is about the right to shoot a bird freshly released from a cage, perhaps learning for the first time in its life how to fly, just for the thrill of it, and then leaving the animal to die.

I find it hard to believe that even a I write this, there are people—not just any people, but all too often rich and wealthy people from enlightened first world societies, our “cream of the crop” if you wish—who get a hard-on from shooting a docile animal in an enclosed area. Now I don’t care if you happen to be a former president, vice president, head of the joint chiefs, or some other politician or celebrity. If you are a trophy hunter who shoots canned animals, you are a sick asshole.

Just to be clear, I am not a PETA freak. I may feel disturbed by how some farm animals are treated, but it has not yet made me stop eating meat. I still enjoy a fine filet mignon at a reputable steak house, or even the occasional cheeseburger. But let me repeat: if you are a trophy hunter who shoots canned animals, you are a sick asshole.

I know this is not a polite thing to say. I chose my words carefully and I thought about it long and hard before writing them down. I decided to do so when after I asked myself: would I say the same thing in person?

Yes, I would. People who shoot canned animals for fun are sick assholes and I do not want to have anything to do with them. I don’t want to socialize with them. I don’t want to do business with them and I don’t want their money, even if I happen to be badly in need of money. They may not be as bad as rapists or child molesters, but they come pretty darn close. Civilized society in 2013 should reject them regardless of their wealth or power. I know I do.

Thoughts on Syria

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Aug 292013

I keep wondering. Is military action in Syria desirable?

A friend of mine who knows the region well is convinced that Bashar al-Assad is indeed behind the chemical attack that took place a few days ago. Further, he believes that al-Assad is a murderer, that those who support him are increasingly isolated, and that most people in the Arab world would welcome a Western intervention, even Israeli involvement if need be, al-Assad is so bitterly hated.

My friend is credible, so his views dispelled some of the doubts I had about the people behind the attack (although I am still not fond of how certain politicians and some of the news media chose to replace information with fiery rhetoric. No, I will not be more pro-war just because you always attach the adjective “heinous” to the noun “attack”; I recognize words with zero information content.)

If my friend is right, military action is certainly justified on humanitarian grounds. And while support for military action in the United States remains low, it should not prevent the US government from doing the right thing.

But simply being just is not enough. The decision to involve the military should not be taken lightly. In particular, the military should be tasked with a goal that is clearly defined and achievable by military force. And while the military action is under way, political support should be complete and unconditional. You can’t win a half-hearted war; indeed, if your enemy knows that you are half-hearted about it, they can easily use this to their advantage and deny you the chance to succeed.

Is there a clearly defined goal in Syria?

I doubt it. Reports say that suspected chemical sites are off limits, as an attack on chemical stockpiles could cause grave damage, dispersing the chemical agents. So what would a limited strike accomplish? Remove al-Assad? Unlikely. A no-fly zone might help the opposition, but a no-fly zone is not being considered. So what, then? Degrade al-Assad’s military? That is not a clearly defined goal. And if al-Assad survives it all, he will come out stronger, being able to claim that he prevailed and thus “won” the war against America.

Is there a firm political commitment?

The US already has two, maybe three unfinished wars to deal with from the past decade. Iraq has become for all practical intents and purposes a vassal state of Iran and scores of people still die there every day in sectarian attacks. In Afghanistan the fight is still on, and there is a good chance that the planned US withdrawal will hand the country to the Taliban on a platter. And then there is Libya; sure, Gaddafi is dead, but what came after is not pretty.

I understand the desire to “do something”. I appreciate the frustration of people of Syrian descent, some of whom I know personally, who’d like the West to be involved. But without a clear military goal and an unambiguous political commitment… I am concerned that any such attack would be pointless and perhaps even counterproductive.

On this note though… I think Stephen Harper should have been a little more unambiguous. This “we support our allies but we have no military plans” is a weasel’s way out, which is very unbecoming of Canada. You are either for it or against it. You cannot have it both ways.

Don’t be INSPIREd without due precautions

Legal, Politics No Responses »

Aug 242013

I advise my good friends in the United Kingdom and perhaps in Australia to pause and think before clicking on the following link:

http://publicintelligence.net/aqap-inspire-issue-11/

The link is to a blog site that is dedicated to discussions about the public’s right to access information. Specifically, to a blog entry that discusses the latest issue of Al Qaeda’s “open source terrorism” magazine, INSPIRE. They also provide an archive of present and past issues of INSPIRE.

And herein lies the problem. Apparently in the UK, and perhaps also in Australia, mere possession of INSPIRE is a crime, regardless of the reason.

Having grown up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, I find this deeply troubling.

Chelsea Manning and Russia Today

Politics, Society No Responses »

Aug 222013

In recent days, the Kremlin-funded 24-hour news network, Russia Today, spent a fair amount of their airtime discussing the case of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked large chunks of information to Wikileaks a few years ago and was recently sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The breaking news this morning is that Bradley Manning expressed his desire to begin hormone therapy, eventually undergo a gender reassignment operation, and live his, or rather, her life as a woman named Chelsea Manning.

I wonder how Russia Today will deal with this in the wake of Russia’s recently enacted, Draconian anti-gay legislation.

[Correction: In the first version of this blog entry, I referred to the network as “Russia Times”. Its name is actually Russia Today, or more precisely, just RT.]

Living in the nuclear age

Environment, History, Politics No Responses »

Aug 092013

Today was the 68th anniversary of the last (for now) use of a nuclear weapon in anger, three days following the first such use. The city of Nagasaki was destroyed by the explosion of Fat Man, the world’s second plutonium bomb; the first one was used less than a month earlier at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

Since then, more than two thousand nuclear explosions took place on or beneath the surface of the Earth as declared nuclear powers tested their designs.

Rogue superpower

Politics No Responses »

Jul 172013

I am reading an interesting analysis of the conundrum NSA leaker Edward Snowden finds himself in: namely that he is facing the prospect of an asylum-less world.

It’s not that there are no countries who would grant him asylum. It’s that there are very few countries that are actually capable of delivering on that promise.

Should Snowden move to, say, Ecuador, I wonder how long before he’d be “rendered” by American agents?

Even getting there may prove to be a difficult task. The mere suspicion that Snowden may be on board the presidential aircraft of Bolivian President Evo Morales was sufficient to force the plane to land in Vienna and be searched, in an almost unthinkable breach of diplomatic protocol. (Actually, we don’t exactly know what happened, as there are too many conflicting stories. The airplane may simply have landed for fuel. Why it needed to be searched, though, is a darn good question.)

Behind Snowden’s difficulties is the fact that we live in the era of a lone superpower. There are no checks and balances that would limit the United States’ use (or abuse) of its nearly limitless powers.

So then, perhaps Snowden did the smart thing, flying to Hong Kong first and then to Moscow, China and Russia being among the few countries that are beyond the reach of the CIA, where Snowden could still expect reasonably civilized treatment. (North Korea may also be beyond the reach of the CIA, but Snowden knew better than to go there.) Of course, there is something deeply hypocritical about a person who leaks documents in defense of free speech and individual rights, seeking asylum in the country that recently jailed members of a punk band. I hope once Snowden is granted asylum in Russia, he’ll take the time to visit the still jailed members of Pussy Riot in prison.

As to the rogue superpower… I keep asking myself if that is really such a bad thing. Two millennia ago, Roman hegemony resulted in a world that remained peaceful and prosperous for centuries. Pax Americana may not be perfect, but it may mean a decent and peaceful life for generations to come. Is this an acceptable moral compromise?

Radioactive sheep

History, Legal, Politics No Responses »

Jul 172013

Browsing the Web this morning, I ran across a reference to a Judge A. Sherman Christensen, also known as the “sheep case” judge, who tried a case in 1955 when Utah ranchers sued the federal government for the death of much of their livestock due to radioacive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in Nevada.

Christensen, relying on evidence offered by government expert witnesses, ruled against the ranchers.

Astonishingly, 23 years later Christensen set aside his own judgment, having become convinced that fraud was committed in his courtroom by the Federal government.

Even more astonishingly, an appeals court rejected Christensen’s findings. The ranchers never had a chance. Neither did their sheep.

Large scale surveillance

Computer Security, Politics No Responses »

Jul 152013

The NSA engaged in domestic surveillance on a massive scale. It collected information on both foreign nationals and US citizens. It collected large amounts of data indiscriminately. It did so in secret, with little oversight. It did so with the collaboration of major telecommunication companies.

Sounds familiar? Perhaps. But what I am describing is project SHAMROCK, an NSA program terminated in 1975 that collected telegrams sent to or from the United States.

Arguably, the situation is somewhat better today, as the NSA is now under Congressional oversight and it has (supposedly) internal procedures in place to prevent the unlawful use of data that they collect. That is, if you believe their statements. But then, they made similar reassuring statements back in 1975, too, before details about SHAMROCK came to light.

The bottom line, it seems to me, is that governments have the technological means, the capacity, and the willingness to engage in large-scale surveillance of their own citizens. No guarantees against an Orwellian nightmare can come from futile attempts to limit these capabilities. The genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Only the openness and transparency of our political institutions can guarantee that the capabilities will not be abused.

Fundamental rights in Hungary

Hungary, Politics No Responses »

Jul 032013

Fundamental rights in Hungary

Yesterday, the European Parliament discussed a report by the EU’s Civil Liberties Committee on fundamental rights in Hungary.

The report was accepted today with 370 votes for, 249 against.

The result was dismissed in advance by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who basically claimed that this was a vote by “socialists, liberals and greens”, “against Hungary”.

It wasn’t. It was a vote of concern regarding the policies of Orban’s government and party. Mr. Orban should know better and remember how it was a habit of the communist leaders that he so despises to dismiss criticisms of their regimes as the work of enemies of their nation.

More yottabyte insanity

Computers, Economy, Politics No Responses »

Jun 172013

The presumed yottabyte capacity of the new Utah Center of the NSA, about which I commented a few days ago, is still making the rounds on news channels and news cites. Someone calculated that a yottabyte is equivalent to 500 quintillion printed pages. CNN helpfully added that a stack of paper with this many pages could reach all the way to the Moon and back 66 million times.

What they ought to have calculated is the size and volume of 250 billion 4 TB hard drives.

A lighter hard drive weighs about 0.4 kg. 250 billion of them? That would be 100 billion kilograms. Or 100 million metric tons. Or roughly 1000 of the largest cargo ships, each the size of a small city, filled to capacity with hard drives.

A hard drive is about 15/16″ tall. That’s 2.38 centimeters. 250 billion of them? Why, it’s a stack tall enough to reach all the way to the Moon and back 8 times.

The volume of a standard hard drive is about 342 cubic centimeters. 250 billion? That would be just a tad under 0.1 cubic kilometers (8.56 × 10⁷ cubic meters, to be a bit more precise). That would be a field that is a kilometer square, filled with hard drives to the height of a small-ish skyscraper, about 25-30 stories high. Large as the Utah facility is, it’s by no means large enough.

Some might want to point out that if the NSA used flash memory instead, the volume (and also the power consumption) would go way down. True. But the price would go up. Flash memory is still roughly an order of magnitude more expensive than hard drives. So if the NSA wanted to build a yottabyte facility using flash memory, instead of spending 1.5 times the GDP of the entire United States, they’d be spending 15 times that amount. Or roughly three times the “gross world product”, estimated at 83 trillion US dollars.

Perhaps CNN and friends should do a little more math, not just to impress their readers but also to fact check the stuff that they report. Would be nice.

For illustration, I chose a Hungarian bank note from 1946, reportedly the highest denomination ever printed anywhere: it is a 100 quintillion pengő note. It is still far short of a yottapengő: you would need 10,000 of these banknotes. Then again, by the time hyperinflation ended and a new currency (the Hungarian forint, still in circulation) was introduced, the exchange rate was 400 octillion pengős to the forint; that would be 400,000 yottapengős.

Yottabyte

Computers, Politics No Responses »

Jun 112013

In reaction to the news about large scale NSA surveillance, the new NSA data storage facility currently under construction in Utah has been mentioned frequently. Along with the factoid that this facility will supposedly be able to store a yottabyte of data.

Yottabyte? That is a lot of data. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT. An incredibly large amount of data. And in this case, I mean “incredible” in the literal sense of the word, as in not credible. Despite the fact that this tidbit even appears on Wikipedia.

A yottabyte is a trillion trillion bytes. A trillion terabytes, in other words.

The largest commercially available hard drives currently hold about 4 terabytes of data. To store a yottabyte, you would need a quarter trillion, or 250 billion 4TB hard drives. That would amount to about 35 hard drives for each living person on the planet.

A 4 TB hard drive consumes about 3-6 W of power. Say, 4 W on average. 250 billion drives would therefore consume a trillion watts of power. Which is roughly the peak electrical power generation capacity of the entire United States. We know that the Utah facility will consume a lot of power, but the figure I’ve seen mentioned in one article was a much more modest 75 megawatts. Which is about one ten thousandths the amount of power I just calculated.

Then there is the price. The retail price of a 4TB drive is a tad under $200 these days. Presumably, they would cost a lot less if purchased in bulk; say, $100 per drive, including power supplies, interface circuits, whatever. So 250 billion 4TB hard drives would only cost 25 trillion US dollars.

That is, more than one and a half times the United States GDP.

However important it is for the United Stasi of America to keep a watchful eye over every citizen of the world, I don’t think a price tag like this is feasible. Indeed, the cost of the facility is a lot less, reportedly around 1.5 to 2 billion dollars. Let me round it up to 2.5 billion; after all, government projects are rarely completed within budget. And let me assume that all that money is spent on data storage. Well… that’s still not a yottabyte. It’s one ten thousandths of a yottabyte. Or 0.1 zettabytes. Or 100 exabytes.

Still a staggering amount, but much more modest. After all, large service providers like Google are already storing hundreds of petabytes, even exabytes of data. And the entire world may already have collected a few zettabytes.

But not yottabytes. Never mind the NSA; the world as a whole is still a long way away from a yottabyte. Probably a couple of decades, even assuming continuing exponential growth in global data storage capacity.

In any case, a yottabyte is an insane amount of data, even for an institution like the NSA. It is sufficient to store about eight years worth of broadcast quality video for each individual living on the planet. Or, if you are content with lower video quality, a complete visual record of the entire life of every living person on the planet could easily fit in a yottabyte.

Besides… is it really believable that the NSA sits on top of a technology that increases the efficiency of data storage by 4-5 orders of magnitude, a factor of 10,000 or more? There are some really smart people working for the NSA, to be sure, but they are not space aliens. Exotic storage technologies may be in the works in storage technology labs, but I suspect that when they become practical and usable, we will first see them in our next generation gadgets, not secret US government data centers.

So no, the NSA is not going to store a yottabyte of data, breathless news reports and the hype notwithstanding. Not even a zettabyte. A few exabytes, maybe.

Which is still a lot. Far too much, in fact, for my comfort.

The Huffington Post’s concern about the cancer of Europe

Hungary, Politics No Responses »

Jun 092013

John Feffer, writing for the Huffington Post, expresses his grave concern over political developments in Hungary in recent years. He suggests that Hungary may be symptomatic of a cancer that is spreading across Europe: a rejection of liberal values, a rise of nationalism and xenophobia, combined with a growing distrust in European institutions.

I wish I could argue that Feffer is wrong. But he isn’t. Not only is some of the political rhetoric coming from Hungary frightening, but so is the attitude of ordinary people towards the country’s Roma minority, towards Europe, towards Western values.

Yet as Feffer notes, Hungary is not alone: similar sentiments are also on the rise elsewhere in Europe. And unless the EU manages to get its economy under control, things will get worse. Indeed, I have a feeling that the worst is yet to come, and that things will get a lot worse before they’ll get any better.

Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength!

Computer Security, Internet, Politics 2 Responses »

Jun 082013

Yes, it’s Orwellian, and this time around, it’s no hyperbole.

The US government apparently not only collects information (“metadata”) on all telephone calls, they also have the means collect e-mails, online chats, voice-over-IP (e.g., Skype) telephone calls, file transfers, photographs and other stored data, and who knows what else… basically, all data handled by some of the largest Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Skype and others.

Last summer, I decided to revamp my e-mail system. The main goal was to make it compatible with mobile devices; instead of using a conventional mail client that downloads and stores messages, I set up an IMAP server.

But before I did so, I seriously considered off-loading all this stuff to Google’s Gmail or perhaps, Microsoft’s outlook.com. After all, why should I bother maintaining my own server, when these fine companies offer all the services I need for free (or for a nominal fee)?

After evaluating all options, I decided against “outsourcing” my mail system. The fact that I did not want to have my mail stored on servers that fall under the jurisdiction of the US government played a significant role in my decision. Not because I have anything to hide; it’s because I value my privacy.

Little did I know back then just how extensively the US government was already keeping services such as Google under surveillance:

From the leaked slides (marked top secret, sensitive information, originator controlled, no foreign nationals; just how much more secret can stuff get?) and the accompanying newspaper articles it is not clear if this is blanket surveillance (as in the case of telephone company metadata) or targeted surveillance. Even so, the very fact that the US government has set up this capability and recruited America’s leading Internet companies (apparently not concerned about their reputation; after all, a presentation, internal as it may be, looks so much nicer if you can splatter the logos of said companies all over your slides) is disconcerting, to say the least.

True, they are doing this supposedly to keep us safe. And I am willing to believe that. But if I preferred security over liberty, I’d have joined Hungary’s communist party in 1986 instead of emigrating and starting a new life in a foreign country. Communist countries were very safe, after all. (And incidentally, they were not nearly this intrusive. Though who knows how intrusive they’d have become if they had the technical means available.)

One thing I especially liked: the assurances that the NSA does not spy on US residents or citizens. Of course… they don’t have to. This will be done for them by their British (or Canadian?) counterparts. No agency is breaking any of the laws of its own country, yet everybody is kept under surveillance. And this is not even new: I remember reading an article in the Globe and Mail some 20 years ago, detailing this “mutually beneficial” practice. I may even have kept a copy, but if so, it is probably buried somewhere in my basement.

Meanwhile, I realize that the good people at the NSA or at Canada’s Communications Security Establishment must really hate folks like me, though, running our own secure mail servers. I wonder when I will get on some suspect list for simply refusing to use free services like Gmail that can be easily monitored by our masters and overlords.

Trouble in Turkey

Politics No Responses »

Jun 012013

The good citizens of Istanbul decided that they’ve had enough: they need to defend Turkish democracy against a semi-autocratic government.

I am enough of a conservative to think that street riots and settings things on fire rarely (if ever) solve problems, but I certainly understand the protesters’ concern and frustration.

From: CNN Breaking News [mailto:BreakingNews@mail.cnn.com]

Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2013 4:31 PM

To: textbreakingnews@EMA3LSV06.TURNER.COM

Subject: CNN Breaking News
Turkish authorities have detained 939 people in connection with anti-government protests across 30 provinces, Interior Minister Muammer Guler told Turkey’s semi-official Anadolu news agency on Saturday.The demonstrations began this week in protest of government plans to level a park in Istanbul. But many demonstrators say they now are protesting against authoritarian policies of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
As demonstrators clashed with police Friday in Istanbul, protests spread to several other cities, including Ankara, the capital, and the port city of Izmir.

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