Who Should Have Whose Back? Memo to the Washington Post

No, WaPo: Tech needs to have our backs.

I do not blog as much as I used to, but I found something disturbing in a Washington Post article that was asking whether Kamala Harris will have policies friendly to Silicon Valley.

I have two problems with this article:

It would lead the reader to think the Biden administration has had no tech policy. That’s not true.
It seems to imply that the tech companies have done their part in helping society. They have not.

Let’s start with the first.

The administration has pushed hard in an area no other has: cybersecurity. President Biden issued executive orders to improve the posture of IoT devices and software, by requiring transparency of vulnerabilities for all products sold to the federal government. DHS, NIST, FCC, and other branches of the government have worked hard throughout the last three years to get our infrastructure on a better footing. 1990s gave us Section 230. The 2000s gave us an Internet governance model that the Obama administration fought to retain. The Biden administration is fighting for the safety of our infrastructure. And that is something that all sectors of society, especially the tech industry, need, as they can’t sell products that are viewed as unsafe.

This brings me to my second point. The question should not be whether Harris has the Valley’s back, but whether Tech has our backs. Social media companies have been all but mute about adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea taking advantage of offerings to harm our interests. They’ve profited over strife and discord in a way never seen, some of which has been sown by those same countries. At the same time, we all now heavily rely on the Internet infrastructure, as Crowdstrike painfully demonstrated. And yet the Valley is still playing the same hand they had in the 2000s: “We got this.”

The game has changed. The only real question is whether tech companies will accept that and work with the next administration and Congress to find new and innovative approaches that work for society.

The Israeli/Gaza War

Let there still be hope.

Everyone wants everyone to say something about what is happening in Israel and Gaza. Here in Switzerland the conversation since the attack has been All Israel All The Time. Everyone around the world has an opinion, of course. Here in Switzerland, the discussion is thoughtful. You would not hear anyone defend Hamas’ murderous actions.

It’s one thing to have opinions; it’s quite another to be grieving the loss of one’s friends and/or family, and worrying about one’s children who have been called up. My employer’s Israeli offices are somewhat emptier for that reason.

President Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and President Carter

I look up at my office wall these days and see a response from President Ford’s staff to a letter I wrote him in 1975 about Israel when I was a child. I remember writing him, suggesting that he throw both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership in a room and not let them out until they have a peace plan. Back then I knew I had the answers.

Prime Minister Itzak Rabin, Chairman Yasser Arafat and President Bill Clinton.

Over the years, there have been signs of hope. Seeing Sadat engage Israel, or the work that successive administrations undertook that led to the famous handshake you see here. Those days led to the hope that Israelis and Palestinians could live side by side.

Now I worry that this conflict will survive me and my generation, as it will have our parents. I hope and pray that it does not outlive our children, and that they will be more imaginative than us.

You may have seen my #MusicMonday list. Last week’s contribution was Hatikva. The Hope survived, even as many of the children in that video did not. The hope of peace and prosperity must survive for all. My only plea is for all parties, Israelis and Palestinians in particular, to work to preserve that hope.

Ode to Di Fi

Diane Feinstein was a force to be reckoned with, and she gave her all for San Franciscans, Californians, women, the LBGTQ community, and America.

I want to say a few words about our late Senator and my late neighbor, Diane Feinstein.

I remember when Di Fi ran for governor and lost to Pete Wilson in 1990, and how disappointed I was for her, and how excited we all were when she and Barbara Boxer were both elected to the Senate in 1992, along with Bill Clinton. We all departed some friends’ Election Night party, and piled onto Castro Street, and then the party really began; and she was there. She was always there for California and for Americans.

A common “social” event in those years in the Bay Area was a funeral for a person who died of AIDS, and Di Fi was right there for the LGBT community, as it was called back then. She was also there to defend a woman’s right to choose, and she was there to govern, as she had with San Francisco, having been the person who found Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk shot dead by Dan White. That’s where she learned that to govern, you have to find common ground with those who don’t always agree with you. It’s an important lesson that is lost on many in the House of Representatives these days.

The brutal death of her friends shaped her politics, to be sure. She was a hawk in the same vein as Sam Nunn, although they didn’t agree on social issues. She viewed encryption as a threat, and I was witness to one side of a conversation in which she lambasted one of my friends who was a policy maker at the time. She had no truck with those she thought were in the wrong. That is not to say I agreed with her on encryption- I did not. She could often be blunt, but she understood that we are all Americans, and that we had to work together for the good of the country, and that did mean crossing the aisle on occasion.

I do think she stayed at least one term too many. Some records should not be broken. If this is her biggest failing, as a long time constituent, I could easily forgive her this fault.

“Neighbor”, you ask? Yes. In 1992, Di Fi was my neighbor on the other side of Temple Emanuel. She lived on one of the wealthiest streets in San Francisco, Presidio Terrace, while I lived in a broken down flat on Arguello Blvd. We didn’t exchange calling cards back then, but I had visited her Senate office a few times.

Republicans, pick one: win at any cost or support Democracy and rule of law?

Our way of life and form of government require the sternest possible punishment for those who would attack either. Republicans need to support America, and not just winning.

The charges that have been leveled against Trump are political but not in the sense that Republicans claim. Our way of life requires that those who attain high office be severely punished when they attack our American system of democracy and justice, as Trump and his lackeys did.

Some people might say, “Well, these are just Democratic prosecutors going after a Republican they don’t like.” Let’s look at the accusations:

In New York, Trump stands accused of felony bank fraud for having falsified records in his attempt to cover up his affair with a porn star. He is accused of doing this to win not just any election, but a presidential election.
In Washington, Trump and others stand accused attempting to fraudulantly thwart the peaceful and legal transfer of power, and the prosecutors have produced overwhelming evidence, including Trump’s own words.
In Atlanta, Trump and others stand accused of fraudulently attempting to “find” over 11,000 votes, once again in an attempt to overturn an election.

In short, Trump attempted to steal an election. It is undeniable.

Trump’s own tactics have been to accuse others of exactly the crimes he has knowingly committed. Thus we hear the rhetoric of “Stop the Steal”, when he himself attempted to do the stealing, as the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates. The idea that Trump started his own social network called “Truth” demonstrates the depths of his depravity. He and truth rarely have met, and only ever to his disadvantage, as these indictments and the facts behind them demonstrate.

Trump had many co-conspirators, many of whom remain unindicted, such as the so-called “news” organizations like Fox News, who had to settle with Dominion voting for the lies they perpetuated; NewsMax, whose day is coming; and Republican office holders who disgraced themselves by violating their oaths to protect the Constitution. Many of those people have yet to be held accountable by their constituents. That in itself reflects the depths of trouble in which American democracy finds itself.

I note that not all Republicans are in disgrace. Former Governor Chris Christie stands out as the most vocal and consistent of Trump’s critics. But judging by the polls, Christie is in a small minority.

So, Republican citizens: the day of reckoning is here. Is the object simply to have your guy remain in power, no matter the lies and cheating? Will you put country before winning and before worship of this grifter and once again make America a beacon of democracy? That is what will make America great again.

It’s that simple.

Cyber-policing again: where is the social compact?

Private companies are making public policy, with no societal agreement on what powers governments should and should not have to address cybercrime.

A few of us have been having a rather public discussion about who should be policing the Internet and how. This began with someone saying that he had a good conversation with a mature law enforcement official who was not himself troubled by data encryption in the context of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on the Internet.

I have no doubt about the professionalism of the officer or his colleagues. It is dogma in our community that child online protection is a crutch upon which policy makers and senior members of the law enforcement agencies rest, and we certainly have seen grandstanding by those who say, “protect the children”. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.

Perhaps in that same time frame you may have seen this report by Michael Keller and Gabriel Dance in the New York Times. That would be 45 million images, 12 million reports of which were at the time passing through FB messenger. Those were the numbers in 2019, and they were exploding then. In some cases these images were hiding in plain sight. Is 45 million a large number? Who gets to say?

Law enforcement will use the tools they have.

We have also seen people object to June’s massive sting operation that led to the bust of hundreds of people, disrupting a drug gang network. At the same time, leading legal scholars have highlighted that the sixth amendment of the US Constitution (amongst others) has been gutted with regard to electronic evidence, because the courts in America have said that private entities cannot be compelled to produce their source or methods, even when those entities are used by law enforcement. In one case, a conviction stood, even though the police contracted the software and then couldn’t produce it.

By my score, then, many don’t like the tools law enforcement doesn’t have, and many don’t like the tools law enforcement does have. Seems like the basis for a healthy dialog.

Friend and colleague John Levine pointed out that people aren’t having dialog but are talking past each other, and concluding the other side is being unreasonable because of “some fundamental incompatible assumptions”. You can read his entire commentary here.

I agree, and it may well be due to some fundamental incompatible assumptions, as John described. I have said in the past that engineers make lousy politicians and politicians make lousy engineers. Put in a less pejorative form, the generalization of that statement is that people are expert in their own disciplines, and inexpert elsewhere. We have seen politicians playing the role of doctors too, and they don’t do a good job there either; but the US is in a mess because most doctors aren’t political animals. And don’t get me started on engineers, given the recent string of legislation around encryption in places like Australia and the UK.

John added:

It’s not like we haven’t tried to explain this, but the people who believe in the wiretap model believe in it very strongly, leading them to tell us to nerd harder until we make it work their way, which of course we cannot.

This relates to a concern that I have heard, that some politicians want the issue and not the solution. That may well be true. But in the meantime, FaceBook and Google have indeed found ways to reduce CSAM on their platforms; and it seems to me that Apple has come up with an innovative approach to do the same, while still encrypting communications and data at rest. They have all “nerded harder”, trying to strike a balance between the individual’s privacy and other hazards such as CSAM (amongst other problems). Good for them!

Is there a risk with the Apple approach? Potentially, but it is not as John described, that we are one disaffected clerk away from catastrophe. What I think we heard from at least some corners wasn’t that, but rather a slippery slope argument in which Apple’s willingness to prevent CSAM might be exploited to limit political speech; and (2) that the approach will be gotten around through double encryption.

I have some sympathy for both arguments, but even if we add the catastrophe theory back into the mix, the fundamental question I asked some time ago remains: who gets to judge all of these risks and decide? The tech companies? A government? Multiple governments? Citizens? Consumers?

The other question is whether some standard (a’la the 6th Amendment) should be in play prior to anyone giving up any information. To that I would only say that government exists as a compact, and that foundational documents such as the Constitution must serve the practical needs of society, and that includes both law enforcement and preventing governmental abuse. If the compact of the 18th century can’t be held, what does a compact of the 21st century look like?

Yet more research and yet more dialogue is required.