On criticizing President Trump

I’ve have been debating with friends about how best to deal with the new president and his administration. Some say, “Give him a chance,” while others think he’s already gone too far. A former president made the point far better than I could have, and so I’m simply going to quote him:

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

Teddy Roosevelt, in a letter to the Kansas City Star, 18 May 1918

Should Uber require a permit for testing?

The Wall Street Journal and others are reporting on the ongoing battle between Uber and state and local governments. This time it’s their self-driving car. Uber announced last week that they would not bother to seek a permit to test their car, claiming that the law did not require one. The conflict took on a new dimension last week when one of Uber’s test vehicles ran a red light.

Is Uber right in not wanting to seek a permit? Both production and operation of vehicles in the nearly all markets are highly regulated. That’s because auto accidents are a leading cause of death in the United States and elsewhere. The good news is that number is falling. In part that’s due to regulation, and in part it’s due to civil liability laws. I’m confident that Uber doesn’t want to hurt people, and that their interest is undoubtedly to put out a safe service so that their reputation doesn’t suffer and their business thrives. But the rush to market is sometimes too alluring. With the pace of technology being what it is, Uber and others would be in a position to flood the streets with unsafe vehicles, possibly well beyond their ability to pay out damages. That’s when regulations are required.

There are a few hidden points in all of this:

As governments consider what to do about regulating the Internet of Things, they should recognize that much of the Internet of Things is already regulated. California did the right thing by incrementally extending the California Vehicle Code to cover self-driving vehicles, rather than come up with sweeping new regulations. Regulations already exist for many other industries, including trains, planes, automobiles, healthcare, electrical plants.
We do not yet have a full understanding of the risks involved with self-driving cars. There are probably many parts of the vehicle code that require revision. By taking the incremental approach, we’ve learned, for instance, that there are places where the vehicle code might need a freshening up. For instance, self-driving cars seem to be following the law, and yet causing problems for some bicyclists.
IoT regulation is today based on traditionally regulated markets. This doesn’t take into account the full nature of the Internet, and what externalities people are exposed to as new products rapidly hit the markets. This means, to me, that we will likely need some form of regulation over time. There is not yet a regulation that would have prevented the Mirai attack. Rather than fight all regulation as Uber does, it may be better to articulate the right principles to apply. One of those is that there has to be a best practice. In the case of automobiles, the usual test for the roads is this is whether the feature will make things more or less safe than the status quo. California’s approach is to let developers experiment under limited conditions in order to determine an answer.

None of this gets to my favorite part, which is whether Uber’s service can be hacked to cause chaos on the roads. Should that be tested in advance? And if so how? What are the best practices Uber should be following in this context? Some exist.

Comey and Adult Conversations About Encryption

What does an adult conversation over encryption look like? To start we need to understand what Mr. Comey is seeking. Then we can talk about the risks.

AP and others are reporting that FBI director James Comey has asked for “an adult conversation about encryption.” As I’ve previously opined, we need just such a dialog between policy makers, the technical community, and the law enforcement community, so that the technical community has a clear understanding of what it is that investigators really want, and policy makers and law enforcement have a clear understanding of the limits of technology. At the moment, however, it cannot be about give and take. Just as no one cannot legislate that π = 3, no one can legislate that lawful intercept can be done in a perfectly secure way. Mr. Comey’s comments do not quite seem to grasp that notion. At the same time, some in the technical community do not want to give policy makers to even evaluate the risks for themselves. We have recently seen stories of the government stockpiling malware kits. This should not be too surprising, given that at the moment there are few alternatives to accomplish their goals (whatever they are).

So where to start? It would be helpful to have from Mr. Comey and friends a concise statement as to what access they believe they need, and what problem they think they are solving with that access. Throughout All of This, such a statement has been conspicuous in its absence. In its place we have seen sweeping assertions about grand bargains involving the Fourth Amendment. We need to be specific about what the actual demand from the LI community is before we can have those sorts of debates. Does Mr. Comey want to be able to crack traffic on the wire? Does he want access to end user devices? Does he want access to data that has been encrypted in the cloud? It would be helpful for him to clarify.

Once we have such a statement, the technical community can provide a view as to what the risks of various mechanisms to accomplish policy goals are. We’ve assuredly been around the block on this a few times. The law enforcement community will never obtain a perfect solution. They may not need perfection. So what’s good enough for them and what is safe enough for the Internet? How can we implement such a mechanism in a global context? And how would the mechanism be abused by adversaries?

The devil is assuredly in the details.

Hilary Clinton: A little improvement over making America break again

HIllary Clinton Many of us have experienced loss in our lives, and we get hit with the cruel irony that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. We Americans like complaining. To be sure there is plenty to complain about. You have your own list; I won’t write one for you. But things can get a lot worse for Americans than they are.

Donald Trump looks up to President Putin and envies China, because he sees an uncontested leader and hunger to win, regardless of rules, respectively. But that doesn’t mean we want to live in those countries, where people are subject to arrest without cause, where one cannot say what wants to say. These are countries that operate by the rule of man (and I do mean “man”) and not the rule of law, where might makes right, and where the ends justify the means. Putin took the Crimea because he could. He imprisoned and poisoned his opposition because he could. He has interfered with an American election because he could. China violates intellectual property rules and builds islands in the Pacific because they can. These are the ones Trump looks up to.

The American ideal is different. We don’t believe in kings, and we surely do not believe in thugs. We like our freedom, where government acts on the will of the People and not the will of an individual, and where it is constrained not only by the People, but by those who we elect through their oaths to uphold the Constitution, a document that guarantees freedom and fairness, that a person won’t be treated different because of sex, race, or religion. Our ideal extends the Constitution to cover other innate characteristics, such as sexual orientation. Fairness is something we hold dear.

I do not believe that Donald Trump understands any of this. He has spent his life cheating people out of money. To him, the ends will always justify the means. To him, the art of the deal is a matter of deceit, and knowing when to violate its terms. And he does so as long as he can get away with it. An agreement to him only binds him until he finds it inconvenient. Donald Trump will never deliver on his promises, and we know this because of all the broken promises of his past. He is vindictive, and spews hatred towards others. He does not know how to delegate responsibility, and he does not know how to accept responsibility for his mistakes. According to Trump, he’s never made a mistake.

Hillary Clinton lacks the charisma of her husband. She is not a visionary like Bernie Sanders. She is an incrementalist. She is a policy wonk, and she’s a bit nerdish. She will be challenged by a vociferous and resentful opposition. Under a President Hillary Clinton we will not see a Democratic House of Representatives. That will never be her mission. What we will see is steady leadership. Mostly status quo. Status quo means that we get mostly what we have.

And we have quite a lot. We have freedom. We have a functioning, if imperfect, support infrastructure. We have an innovative society. We have democracy. We have checks and balances. We have the right to practice whatever religion we want, so long as we don’t hurt others. Under a President Clinton we would have humility in leadership, and someone who is serious about trying to take a great America and make it better; not by a lot, but at least in the right direction. She is the type that will work to fix the potholes and leaks in the roofs. And she won’t promise more.

She will also deal honestly and ably with what crises hit her. No president is defined by his or her campaign platform, but rather how they react to the problems that are thrown at them. Hillary Clinton will do that will a cool head. We cannot say the same about Trump.

Image Courtesy: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, USA – Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0

Guns and Gun Control: The Numbers Are Beginning To Add Up

Drawing_from_holster Many people have made the claim that they need to own guns to protect themselves, that they can’t leave it to police to protect them, the enormous assumption being that a gun actually does offer some protection. There are a number of scholarly works to test that assertion.

A longitudinal study by Johns Hopkins and Berkeley published in 2015 the American Journal of Public Health shows that Connecticut’s Permit to Purchase law reduced firearm homicide by 40%.
A separate Johns Hopkins study showed that firearm suicide rates in Connecticut dropped 15.4% after that law was passed, while Missouri’s firearm suicide rate increased by 16.1% after they repealed gun control legislation. There was also a lower than expected overall suicide rate in Connecticut.
Missouri also saw a 25% increase in homicides after their background check law was repealed.
An earlier CDC study published in 2004 in the Journal of American Epidemiology showed that simply having a gun in the home, regardless of how it is stored, increases the odds of death by firearm by a factor of 1.9.
A more recent meta-study by Harvard researchers in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed an increase risk of both suicide and homicide in homes where guns are present. In particular, that study found that homicide victimization rates were slightly higher for those who had guns in their homes than those who did not.
A 2011 CMU study did show that having a gun in the home seems to deter certain planned crimes such as burglary, but has no effect for unplanned crimes. Furthermore, it showed that only having a gun in the home does not provide the deterrence, but that this fact needs to be somehow brought to the attention of the burglar.

Summing up: studies thus far demonstrate that having a gun in the house increases the chances of someone in that house dying by firearm, it increases the risk of suicide, and it does not prevent a crime of passion, although it may deter a burglary. More analysis is needed. It is likely, for instance, that the type of gun matters. A lot of studies are needed about open carry laws. Still, if you think a gun offers you any sort of protection against others, consider the risks.

Image courtesy of aliengearholsters.com.