Tunnels, Infrastructure, and Stupid Governors (like that of New Jersey)

Here in Switzerland people may have noticed the news last month about the new 57km (35 mile) Gotthard Tunnel having been broken through from both sides. The Swiss are to be congratulated on their achievement, which by the way, cost $13 billion, but will shift huge amounts of freight from trucks and roads to rail, reducing CO2 emissions and fuel costs.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie has cancelled a new rail tunnel project across the Hudson because, he claimed, it was over budget. Having lived in New Jersey for many years, of course it was it was going to be over budget, to say the least. But by most reports it wasn’t really that over budget, and the governor seemed to ignore many facts that were placed in front of him, forgoing $3 billion in federal aid.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg knows a deal when he sees one, being a business man. And so now he has proposed extending the Number 7 subway line across the Hudson to Secaucus, according to the this article in the Wall Street Journal. From a commuter perspective this would be second best, because it would mean yet another transfer to get to where one is going. Furthermore, the implications to PATH will have to be carefully studied. One wonders what it would take to combine PATH with the subway. A whole lot of downtime comes to mind, of course. I don’t even know if they use the same gauge track.

Anyway, it’s nice to see someone in America looking at infrastructure in a serious way.

Hurray Brazil!

It’s not a very big story on this side of the planet, and with an estimated population of 201 million people, that’s a bit sad on it’s own, but we should at least take note that in overseeing elections in Brazil, President Lula Da Silva is about to achieve what is the most important thing for a government in that part of the world: a peaceful transition of power. It’s not the first time for Brazil, either, as Lula himself succeeded Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 2003, who himself had succeeded Itamar Franco. Another sign of the health of Brazil is that neither Franco nor FHC are wanted men, and have not been shown to have been corrupt. This is not the way with many other countries. Good luck to the candidates vying to succeed Lula! They have both big shoes to fill and a great democracy to oversee.

Tyler Clementi: The real crime

I grew up in the township of Piscataway, New Jersey. It was a town of contradictions in the 1970s, where there was a large immigrant population, a large black population, a small Jewish population, and a well outspoken bigot and homophobe population. To be fair, this was not that uncommon in America for the 1970s- we were all learning how to get along with each other, still trying to learn the lessons that Dr. Martin Luther King gave his life teaching the world. Indeed a nearby Piscataway school was named after him, just like many were in the U.S. Piscataway, in fact, had a birds-eye view of what happens when people are oppressed just because they are somehow different: its neighboring town of Plainfield was the site of race riots in the 1960s.

Growing up, my family and our neighbors got to know a fellow neighbor by the name of David. David was a wonderful sensitive boy who couldn’t hurt a fly. He took part in school activities, and he enjoyed flash. While I didn’t understand it at the ripe old age of 7, when David expressed interest in Elton John and Bette Midler, it later became clear that he was gay. I do not know all the dynamics within our neighbor’s family, but they were Roman Catholics, and David had a very difficult time in the house. Outside the house, he had an even more difficult time in high school, as he tried to find ways to express his personality. The bigots would “kick his ass”. Between his homelife and his school life, David’s self esteem was battered, and he later chose self-destructive behaviors. He ended up as one of the many victims of AIDS, his behavior – not really his sexual orientation – being a contributing factor.

That was a long time ago. I miss my friend to this day, of course, but one thing I hope is that we will have learned from the tragedies of the past, in the same way they say that the regulations of submariners are written in blood.

The Washington Post story of a Rutgers Student in Piscataway killing himself last week because he was filmed having sex with another man reminds me that sometimes, when “boys will be boys” (in this case I think one of the offenders is a woman), the results are tragic. I’m sure the two people who committed this gross invasion of privacy could not have predicted the consequences. That’s in part because of their immaturity and in part because of their upbringing; because their parents didn’t impress on them the need to respect not only someone’s privacy, but to consider what it would be like if they were gay.

I hope we remember the name Tyler Clementi. What a sad loss, and for what? Why did he think what being gay and acting on those feelings was somehow wrong? Why? Why was it wrong? Who did it hurt?

The worst thing about this sad situation is that there are many people today who won’t see this as a loss because they are so blinded by ideology, prejudice, shame, and ignorance. That to me is the real crime.

Hello Insecurity, Goodbye Privacy. Thank you, President Obama

Some people say that Internet Security is an oxymoron, because we hear so much about the different ways in which hackers and criminals break into our data, steal our identities, and even use information to commit “real world” crimes like burglary, when it becomes clear that someone’s gone on vacation. Well now the Obama Administration along with the FBI and NSA are proposing to make things worse, according to an article in today’s New York Times.

According to the Times, the government is going to propose requiring that developers give up on one of the key principals of securing information– use of end to end encryption, the argument being that law enforcement does not have the visibility to information they once had, say, in the Nixon era, where the NSA acted as a vacuum cleaner and had access to anything.

As our friend Professor Steve Bellovin points out, weakening security of the Internet for law enforcement also weakens it for benefit of criminals. Not a month ago, for instance, David Barksdale was fired from Google for violating the privacy of teenagers. He could do that because communications between them were not encrypted end-to-end. (Yes, Google did the right thing by firing the slime).

This isn’t the first time that the government has wanted the keys to all the castles, since the invention of public key cryptography. Some of us remember the Clipper chip and a government-mandated key escrow system that the Clinton Administration wanted to mandate in the name of law enforcement. A wise friend of mine said, and this applies equally now, “No matter how many people stand between me and the escrow, there exists a value of money for me to buy them off.” The same would be true here, only it would be worse, because in this case, the government seems not to be proposing a uniform technical mechanism.

What’s worse– this mandate will impact only law abiding citizens and not criminals, as the criminals will encrypt data anyway on top of whatever service they use.

What you can do: call your congressman now, and find out where she or he stands. If they’re in favor of such intrusive policy, vote them out.

Healthcare: 51 million people in U.S. now without health insurance!

NPR’s Morning Edition reports today that the numbers are the worst since the Census Bureau started keeping statistics in 1987. Take the poll: how are you insured?

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