23 years after: The Harm of Fear

America’s War On Terror was a war on American ideals driven by fear. Let’s hope for better.

Photo of two beams of light where the Towers stood from Liberty State Park, N.J., on Sept. 11, 2006, the five year anniversary of 9/11. (U.S. Air Force photo/Denise Gould) — U.S. Air Force photo/Denise Gould

It’s September 11th, 2024. Yet another anniversary of that horrible day in 2001. I always dread this day. For years it has served as a reminder of how far we have to go to heal ourselves not only from the events of that day, but from the self-inflicted wounds that followed. Given that we are 23 years on, now seems like a good time to take stock of the cost of our fears, and maybe hope for better.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the passage of the Patriot Act that dramatically expanded government surveillance powers was no doubt well-intentioned, but an assault on libraries and privacy as a whole. We began to severely restrict who could visit the United States, and our government tortured people. We tarnished American ideals not unlike the injustice committed against Japanese Americans in the 1940s, as our society scrutinized an entire classes of immigrants and Americans for the actions of a few who cruelly took advantage of our openness and generosity. We did that to ourselves. These acts were our choice.

We engaged in a war in Afghanistan that served only to lead to Osama bin Laden’s death, but cost the lives 2,342 American military personnel, 3,917 contractors, over 116,000 Afghans, and over 60,000 Pakistani people (people always seem to forget the Pakastanis). We engaged in a second war in Iraq that served only to see off Saddam Hussein, but at the cost of 292 ally soldiers and as many as 50,000 Iraqis, while at the same time destabilizing the region. We did this to ourselves and others. It was our choice.

President Bush in front of Mount Rushmore.

President Bush’s War On Terror turned into a terror of its own. Many of us became fearful, insular, and and xenophobic. In the 2000s we saw everything through the lens of 9/11, and we could not unsee those towers falling, and our friends and family dying, and we withdrew from the world, and we became scared. Our federal buildings and monuments were blocked from the People by “visitor centers”. We used our might solely as a means of revenge, and not for good. It was reflected in many aspects of our culture, most notably television shows and movies in which there was a bad guy who spoke with an Arab accent. We did that to ourselves. It was our choice.

9/11 put an end to the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, which was, to be fair, already in trouble. Never again were the two sides seriously willing to sit down for talks, although occasionally one side or the other paid lip service as America stepped away from the table. We did that to ourselves, not bin Laden. That was our choice.

And then we elected Donald Trump in 2016 in xenophobic craze, and he targeted a new bogeyman, China. The Chinese government plays a bad guy right out of central casting: they persecute minorities, put profit before principle, and fully believe that might makes right, but are otherwise incompetent in a crisis. Sounds familiar? Meanwhile we ignored the threat of Putin for over two decades. Meanwhile, over 1.2 million Americans died of COVID, and a gun violence epidemic ravages and terrorizes our youth. We did that to ourselves. It was our choice.

We could keep making the same mistakes based on fear.

American youth watch U.S.-Sweden soccer match at the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup in Wolfsburg, Germany, on July 6, 2011

But on this 9/11 I see a bit more hope. We have, I think, healed at least a bit. For the most part, we no longer look through the lens of that day. We are beginning to show some resilience. And this has been coming for a while. Each year I see more glimmers of President Reagan’s “shining the city on the hill”. Of course there are always new challenges, my favorite being climate change. Here’s one for you: China plans to activate thorium nuclear reactors next year to reduce its carbon footprint. Yeah, that big bugaboo, China. Maybe just maybe, there are now more of us who have gotten beyond fear, who are seeking to grab onto the possibilities before us, who don’t define themselves by who or what they hate, and can lead the way to that city on the hill out of a sense of hope.

May the memory of those who died on that day and because of that day always be a blessing to all who knew them, may we all live in peace; and may we learn from our mistakes, and may we not live in fear of the future.

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.

Poll: Sanders or Clinton?

Who would you rather have as the next president?

Like many other Democrats I am looking at the two main candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders and Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and I am very close to making a decision on who to support. I am very interested in hearing what friends have to say about who they think wold make the better president.

Who would make the better president?

Senator Sanders (76%, 13 Votes)
Hilary Clinton (24%, 4 Votes)

Total Voters: 17

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The poll is closed, but feel free to leave a comment.

Should the ITU Handle Cybersecurity or Cybercrime?

Cybercrime and cybersecurity are two very important topics that are largely being lost in the noise around the American elections, the Arab Spring, or the European banking crisis. Nevertheless, there is an attempt by the ITU and some governments to take a more active role in this space.

Roughly defined, cybercrime is a crime that occurs or is facilitated by computers. Cybersecurity is the actions taken to protect against cybercrime. This includes protection of devices so that they don’t get broken into, and remediation.

Cybercrime itself is a complex issue. It relates to many things, including fraud, data theft, privacy theft, and just about any criminal endeavor that happened before the term “cyber” ever came to be. There’s a great paper by a laundry list of Who’s Who in the economics of cybersecurity that proposes methods of estimating actual losses, breaking down crime into various categories. Statistics in this space are remarkably fluid- that is, there are poor standards for data collection.

As it turns out, there is a treaty on cybercrime, conveniently called The Convention on Cybercrime, developed in the Council of Europe. Nearly all of Europe, as well as the U.S. and a number of other countries have ratified this treaty, and there other signatories. Research from the University of Singapore has already shown that either accession to the treaty or even becoming congruent with it will reduce a country’s cybercrime rate. While the causalities are not clearly explained in that paper, one part is obvious: the first part of the treaty is what amounts to a best practices document for governments, on how they should develop legislation.

The treaty itself is fairly involved and took many years to get as many signatures as it did. It has to deal with diverse societies who have differing constitutional views on freedom of speech and expression, as well as on due process.

The Secretary General of the ITU and his staff, as well as a few governments, have been under the impression that the ITU could do a better job than what was done by the Council of Europe. There is little chance of this happening, and in all likelihood, they would make matters worse, if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) that anyone who already signed the Convention would have to reconcile differences between that and whatever would be created by the ITU.

There are other reasons the ITU cannot do better, not least of which is that they lack the technical expertise to actively engage in cybersecurity. Part of the problem is that most Internet standards are not ITU standards, but come from elsewhere. While the ITU has any number of standards involving fiber optics management, and good codec support, the computer you’re reading this blog on uses mostly the work of others. Another reason is that the state of the art in both cybercrime and cybersecurity is rapidly moving, beyond the ITU’s capability to adapt. Here’s just one example: contrary to what people had thought, the battle ground for cybercrime has not really moved to mobile devices. As we’ve previously discussed, this has a lot to do with the update mechanisms and business models in play, but the most notable one being that applications on the iPhone in particular are both reviewed by Apple and signed. The only iPhone you hear about being vulnerable is the one that has been cracked by the owner, and that doesn’t account for a whole lot.

One WCIT proposal that refers to spam as a threat demonstrates how far off some governments are on the subject. Spam itself has never really been much of a threat, but more of an annoyance. 80-90% of it is never delivered to the end user, and most Evil Doers have moved on to more sophisticated approaches, such as spear phishing. Worse, the ITU-T’s study group 17 had to take years simply to come up with a definition of spam, when it really was a problem.

This is not to say that the ITU shouldn’t have a role to play with cybersecurity. The ITU has extraordinarily access to governments of developing countries, and can work with them to improve their cybersecurity posture, through training and outreach. In fact they do some of this in their Development or ITU-D Sector. One thing that the D sector has done recently has been to put developing governments in touch with FIRST, the organization that coordinates discussion among Computer Incident Response Teams or CIRTs. But the ITU should give up any idea that it can play more of a role than outreach and capacity building, all of which should be done in consultation with actual experts.

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.