Snowden disclosures reveal NSA abuse

I had no knowledge of the NSA’s programs, but I’m not surprised by most of it. James Bamford articulated in The Puzzle Palace in 1980 what the NSA was capable of, and it has always been clear to me that they would establish whatever intelligence capabilities they could in order to carry out their mission. There are several areas that raise substantial concerns:

1. NSA’s own documents indicate that they intended to interfere with and degrade crypto standards. That on its own has caused the agency substantial harm to its reputation that will take decades to recover from. But they haven’t just sullied their own reputation but that of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) who are a true braintrust. Furthermore, they’ve caused the discounting in the discourse of anyone who is technology knowledgeable who have either recently held or currently hold government posts. I will come back to this issue below.

2. It is clear that the FISA mechanism just broke down, and that its oversight entirely failed. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court took its role seriously. They all gave so much deference to the executive because of that bugaboo word “terrorism” that they failed to safeguard our way of life. That to me is unforgivable and I blame both parties for it. In fact I wrote about this risk on September 12, 2001. I wrote then:

I am equally concerned about Congress or the President taking liberties with our liberties beyond what is called for. Already, millions of people are stranded away from their loved ones, and commerce has come to a halt. Let’s not do what the terrorists could not, by shrinking in fear in the face of aggression, nor should we surrender our freedom.

Sadly, here we are.

3. There are reports about law enforcement taking intelligence information and scrubbing the origin. Where I come from we call that tampering with evidence in an egregious attempt to get around those pesky 4th and 5th amendments.

4. The NSA’s activities have caused great harm to U.S. services industry because other nations and their citizens have no notion as to when their information will be shared. This is keenly true for companies such as Google and Microsoft who, it is reported, were ordered to reveal information. The great Tip O’Neill said that all politics is local. That may be true, but in a global market place, all sales are local.

It would be wrong to simply lay blame on the NSA. They were following their mission. Their oversight simply failed. Congress needs oversight. That is our responsibility.

Restore Morsi Now!

I am no fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, as many of their political positions are diametrically oppose to my own.

However.

I am a big fan of democracy. However imperfect his election and that of the parliament, President Mohammed Morsi deserves the world’s support. We in America often forget just how imperfect our democracy is. Putting aside hanging chads, they used to have a saying in Chicago: vote early, vote often.

Democracy takes time to get right. It takes commitment, and it takes patience. Could you imagine the United States Army going in and taking over CNN in Atlanta, and arresting the president, simply because of a large protest on the Mall? Those protests are meant to sway legislators and those who vote for them peacefully.

And it hasn’t always been so peaceful, even in America. Some people may remember Sheriff Bull Connor who set dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protestors. And we don’t even have to go back that far. But we got better at it.

So would Egypt, if they give it time and patience.

What was the strategy of the Allied Forces in WWII?

I’ve recently read two books relating to World War II. The first was Ike: An American Hero, a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower by Michael Korda, which is a near idolizing tale of Ike, in which the man can seemingly do no wrong. The other is saga of Winston Churchill’s life, starting from the day he becomes Prime Minister in 1940. This is the third of The Last Lion trilogy by William Manchester. These are two very different perspectives on how WWII was won.

In the case of Churchill, Manchester describes his Mediterranean strategy as somewhere between nibbling around the edges, a war of opportunity, or an attempt to coax Turkey into the melée, while at the same time placing blame on Americans for delaying the end of the war, first by not entering it earlier, and second by not being more aggressive in the taking of Italy.

On the other side, Korda points out that Eisenhower took his strategy directly from Grant, which was to destroy the enemy’s ability to make war. That necessitated the destruction of all German armies the hard way, under the belief that so long as they had armies that could fight, they would fight.

What is stunning about the difference in points of view is that neither seems to acknowledge the others at all. As an American I found Manchester’s book helpful to understand the British perceptions of history, while at the same time having some understanding of the history of the Americans involved.

Who owns your identity?

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Right? Not if you are known at all. Those days are gone. As if to prove the point, one of my favorite web sites is on the wrong side of this issue. An actress unsuccessfully sued imdb.com for lost wages for having included her age on their site. There is a well known axiom in Hollywood that starlets have a half-life, and age is something that is best kept secret. IMDB countered that what matters is not an actress’ age but her ability to play a certain age.

My point is this: she sued and was unable to have information about her removed. Is age something that you believe should be private? I do. I especially do for people born after 1989 where a birthday and a home city can lead to someone guessing your Social Security Number.

But what about other physical attributes one might consider private? “He has a mole that you can only see if he’s naked.” How about illness? “This actor cannot lift his arm due to a stroke.” Once the information is out there, there’s no way to get rid of it. And this in the UK, which is subject to the European Data Privacy Directive. The situation is considerably bleaker for your personal information in the United States.

Related to this is The Right To Be Forgotten. In Europe they are considering new rules that say that you have a right to have information about you removed. This has some American firms in an uproar, arguing that a lack of transparency only increases risk and inefficiency. But what are the limits? What about this actress who doesn’t want her age known? How did her age provide for market efficiency?

Mark Crispin: 1956 – 2012

Mark Crispin passed away on the 28th of December. While I didn’t know him well, Mark was a very important visionary in the area of Internet applications, and Email and character sets in particular.

I first enjoyed his work as a user of the MM program on TOPS-20, upon which he based the design of IMAP. MM featured strong searching and marking capabilities, as well as all the customization a person could want. It was through MM that people individualized their messages with funny headers or a cute name. And it was all so easy to use. Mark was constantly reminding us about that, and how UNIX’s interface could always stand improvement. Mark was an unabashed TOPS-20 fan.

Before the world had fully converged on vt100 semantics, Mark worked to standardize SUPDUP and the SUPDUP option. He was also early to recognize the limitations of a single host table. Mark’s sense of humor brought us RFC-748, the Telnet randomly-lose option, which was the first April 1 RFC. He also wrote another such RFC for UTF-9 and UTF-10.

Most of us benefit from Mark’s work today through our use of IMAP, which followed Einstein’s advice by having a protocol that was as simple as possible to tackle the necessary problems, but no simpler. We know this because our first attempt was POP, which was too simple. Mark knew he had hit the balance right because he made benefited from his experience with lots of running code and direct work with many end users.

I will miss his quirkiness, his cowboy boots, and his recommendations for the best Japanese food in a town where the IETF would visit, and I will miss the contributions he should have had more time to make.