politics – Page 4 – GranneBlog

The NSA and threats to privacy

history, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / Scott Granneman / 27 November 2008

From James Bamford’s “Big Brother Is Listening” (The Atlantic: April 2006):

This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court—made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States—as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The court’s job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright.

Such facts worry Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who worked for the NSA as an intern while in law school in the 1980s. The FISA “courtroom,” hidden away on the top floor of the Justice Department building (because even its location is supposed to be secret), is actually a heavily protected, windowless, bug-proof installation known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.

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It is true that the court has been getting tougher. From 1979 through 2000, it modified only two out of 13,087 warrant requests. But from the start of the Bush administration, in 2001, the number of modifications increased to 179 out of 5,645 requests. Most of those—173—involved what the court terms “substantive modifications.”

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Contrary to popular perception, the NSA does not engage in “wiretapping”; it collects signals intelligence, or “sigint.” In contrast to the image we have from movies and television of an FBI agent placing a listening device on a target’s phone line, the NSA intercepts entire streams of electronic communications containing millions of telephone calls and e-mails. It runs the intercepts through very powerful computers that screen them for particular names, telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and trigger words or phrases. Any communications containing flagged information are forwarded by the computer for further analysis.

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Names and information on the watch lists are shared with the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign intelligence services. Once a person’s name is in the files, even if nothing incriminating ever turns up, it will likely remain there forever. There is no way to request removal, because there is no way to confirm that a name is on the list.

In December of 1997, in a small factory outside the southern French city of Toulouse, a salesman got caught in the NSA’s electronic web. Agents working for the NSA’s British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, learned of a letter of credit, valued at more than $1.1 million, issued by Iran’s defense ministry to the French company Microturbo. According to NSA documents, both the NSA and the GCHQ concluded that Iran was attempting to secretly buy from Microturbo an engine for the embargoed C-802 anti-ship missile. Faxes zapping back and forth between Toulouse and Tehran were intercepted by the GCHQ, which sent them on not just to the NSA but also to the Canadian and Australian sigint agencies, as well as to Britain’s MI6. The NSA then sent the reports on the salesman making the Iranian deal to a number of CIA stations around the world, including those in Paris and Bonn, and to the U.S. Commerce Department and the Customs Service. Probably several hundred people in at least four countries were reading the company’s communications.

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Such events are central to the current debate involving the potential harm caused by the NSA’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping operation. Even though the salesman did nothing wrong, his name made its way into the computers and onto the watch lists of intelligence, customs, and other secret and law-enforcement organizations around the world. Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe the next time he tries to enter the United States or Britain he will be denied, without explanation. Maybe he will be arrested. As the domestic eavesdropping program continues to grow, such uncertainties may plague innocent Americans whose names are being run through the supercomputers even though the NSA has not met the established legal standard for a search warrant. It is only when such citizens are turned down while applying for a job with the federal government—or refused when seeking a Small Business Administration loan, or turned back by British customs agents when flying to London on vacation, or even placed on a “no-fly” list—that they will realize that something is very wrong. But they will never learn why.

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General Michael Hayden, director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and now principal deputy director of national intelligence, noted in 2002 that during the 1990s, e-communications “surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of nearly 50 times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million—an increase of over 90 times. Half as many land lines were laid in the last six years of the 1990s as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990s, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion. This year, the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in international calls alone.”

Intercepting communications carried by satellite is fairly simple for the NSA. The key conduits are the thirty Intelsat satellites that ring the Earth, 22,300 miles above the equator. Many communications from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the eastern half of the United States, for example, are first uplinked to an Intelsat satellite and then downlinked to AT&T’s ground station in Etam, West Virginia. From there, phone calls, e-mails, and other communications travel on to various parts of the country. To listen in on that rich stream of information, the NSA built a listening post fifty miles away, near Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Consisting of a group of very large parabolic dishes, hidden in a heavily forested valley and surrounded by tall hills, the post can easily intercept the millions of calls and messages flowing every hour into the Etam station. On the West Coast, high on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Okanogan River, near Brewster, Washington, is the major commercial downlink for communications to and from Asia and the Pacific. Consisting of forty parabolic dishes, it is reportedly the largest satellite antenna farm in the Western Hemisphere. A hundred miles to the south, collecting every whisper, is the NSA’s western listening post, hidden away on a 324,000-acre Army base in Yakima, Washington. The NSA posts collect the international traffic beamed down from the Intelsat satellites over the Atlantic and Pacific. But each also has a number of dishes that appear to be directed at domestic telecommunications satellites.

Until recently, most international telecommunications flowing into and out of the United States traveled by satellite. But faster, more reliable undersea fiber-optic cables have taken the lead, and the NSA has adapted. The agency taps into the cables that don’t reach our shores by using specially designed submarines, such as the USS Jimmy Carter, to attach a complex “bug” to the cable itself. This is difficult, however, and undersea taps are short-lived because the batteries last only a limited time. The fiber-optic transmission cables that enter the United States from Europe and Asia can be tapped more easily at the landing stations where they come ashore. With the acquiescence of the telecommunications companies, it is possible for the NSA to attach monitoring equipment inside the landing station and then run a buried encrypted fiber-optic “backhaul” line to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the river of data can be analyzed by supercomputers in near real time.

Tapping into the fiber-optic network that carries the nation’s Internet communications is even easier, as much of the information transits through just a few “switches” (similar to the satellite downlinks). Among the busiest are MAE East (Metropolitan Area Ethernet), in Vienna, Virginia, and MAE West, in San Jose, California, both owned by Verizon. By accessing the switch, the NSA can see who’s e-mailing with whom over the Internet cables and can copy entire messages. Last September, the Federal Communications Commission further opened the door for the agency. The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required telephone companies to rewire their networks to provide the government with secret access. The FCC has now extended the act to cover “any type of broadband Internet access service” and the new Internet phone services—and ordered company officials never to discuss any aspect of the program.

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The National Security Agency was born in absolute secrecy. Unlike the CIA, which was created publicly by a congressional act, the NSA was brought to life by a top-secret memorandum signed by President Truman in 1952, consolidating the country’s various military sigint operations into a single agency. Even its name was secret, and only a few members of Congress were informed of its existence—and they received no information about some of its most important activities. Such secrecy has lent itself to abuse.

During the Vietnam War, for instance, the agency was heavily involved in spying on the domestic opposition to the government. Many of the Americans on the watch lists of that era were there solely for having protested against the war. … Even so much as writing about the NSA could land a person a place on a watch list.

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For instance, during World War I, the government read and censored thousands of telegrams—the e-mail of the day—sent hourly by telegraph companies. Though the end of the war brought with it a reversion to the Radio Act of 1912, which guaranteed the secrecy of communications, the State and War Departments nevertheless joined together in May of 1919 to create America’s first civilian eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, nicknamed the Black Chamber. By arrangement, messengers visited the telegraph companies each morning and took bundles of hard-copy telegrams to the agency’s offices across town. These copies were returned before the close of business that day.

A similar tale followed the end of World War II. In August of 1945, President Truman ordered an end to censorship. That left the Signal Security Agency (the military successor to the Black Chamber, which was shut down in 1929) without its raw intelligence—the telegrams provided by the telegraph companies. The director of the SSA sought access to cable traffic through a secret arrangement with the heads of the three major telegraph companies. The companies agreed to turn all telegrams over to the SSA, under a plan code-named Operation Shamrock. It ran until the government’s domestic spying programs were publicly revealed, in the mid-1970s.

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Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who led the first probe into the National Security Agency, warned in 1975 that the agency’s capabilities

“could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it is done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capacity of this technology.”

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Presidential campaigns, campaign bios, & history

history, politics / Scott Granneman / 24 November 2008

From Jill Lepore’s “Bound for Glory” (The New Yorker: 20 October 2008):

The biography was published in 1817 as “The Life of Andrew Jackson.” The next year, Eaton was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat in the United States Senate. In 1823, Jackson was elected as the other senator from Tennessee, and followed his biographer and friend to the nation’s capital. The two men took lodgings at the same Washington boarding house. The following year, Jackson was a candidate for the Presidency. Eaton headed his campaign. Jackson’s opponent John Quincy Adams refused to campaign at all. In keeping with the tradition of the first five American Presidents, Adams considered currying favor with voters to be beneath the dignity of the office, and believed that any man who craved the Presidency ought not to have it. Adams called this his Macbeth policy: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, / Without my stir.” Jackson’s supporters leaned more toward Lady Macbeth’s point of view. They had no choice but to stir: their candidate was, otherwise, unelectable. How they stirred has shaped American politics ever since. They told a story, the story of Andrew Jackson’s life. In 1824, Eaton published a revised “Life of Jackson,” founding a genre, the campaign biography. At its heart lies a single, telling anecdote. In 1781, when Jackson was fourteen and fighting in the American Revolution, he was captured. A British officer, whose boots had got muddy, ordered the boy to clean them: Jackson refused, and the officer beat him, badly, with a sword. All his life, he bore the scars. Andrew Jackson would not kneel before a tyrant.

Since 1824, no Presidential election year has passed without a campaign biography, printed about the time a candidate is nominated, chiefly for the purpose of getting him elected. (Although, since Reagan’s “A New Beginning,” in 1984, the campaign biography, as book, has been supplanted somewhat by the campaign film, screened at the nominating Convention.)

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The election of 1824 brought the first campaign buttons, the first public-opinion polls (undertaken by and published in pro-Jackson newspapers), and the first campaign biographies. Eaton’s “Life of Jackson” was the one that established the genre’s enduring conventions. When Eaton revised it in 1824, he turned what was a history, if a decidedly partial one, into political propaganda; his changes are carefully annotated by Frank Owsley, Jr., in a facsimile edition published by the University of Alabama Press. Eaton cut out or waved away everything compromising (the duels Jackson fought, a soldier he had executed), lingered longer over everything wondrous (battles, mainly), and converted into strengths what pundits had construed as weaknesses. Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t reckless; he was fearless. He had almost no political experience; he was, therefore, ideally suited to fight corruption. He lacked political pedigree; his father, a poor Scotch-Irish immigrant, died before he was born—but this only made Jackson more qualified for the White House, since he was, to use a phrase that was coined during his Presidency, a “self-made man.”

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In 1834, Davy Crockett wrote the first Presidential campaign autobiography. Vying for the Whig nomination, he then wrote an ornery biography of his rival, upbraiding him for having traded his coonskin cap for a swankier hat. “Mr. Van Buren’s parents were humble, plain, and not much troubled with book knowledge, and so were mine,” Crockett allowed. But Van Buren had since put on airs: “He couldn’t bear his rise; I never minded mine.”

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How Obama raised money in Silicon Valley & using the Net

business, history, law, politics / Scott Granneman / 24 November 2008

From Joshua Green’s “The Amazing Money Machine” (The Atlantic: June 2008):

That early fund-raiser [in February 2007] and others like it were important to Obama in several respects. As someone attempting to build a campaign on the fly, he needed money to operate. As someone who dared challenge Hillary Clinton, he needed a considerable amount of it. And as a newcomer to national politics, though he had grassroots appeal, he needed to establish credibility by making inroads to major donors—most of whom, in California as elsewhere, had been locked down by the Clinton campaign.

Silicon Valley was a notable exception. The Internet was still in its infancy when Bill Clinton last ran for president, in 1996, and most of the immense fortunes had not yet come into being; the emerging tech class had not yet taken shape. So, unlike the magnates in California real estate (Walter Shorenstein), apparel (Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell), and entertainment (name your Hollywood celeb), who all had long-established loyalty to the Clintons, the tech community was up for grabs in 2007. In a colossal error of judgment, the Clinton campaign never made a serious approach, assuming that Obama would fade and that lack of money and cutting-edge technology couldn’t possibly factor into what was expected to be an easy race. Some of her staff tried to arrange “prospect meetings” in Silicon Valley, but they were overruled. “There was massive frustration about not being able to go out there and recruit people,” a Clinton consultant told me last year. As a result, the wealthiest region of the wealthiest state in the nation was left to Barack Obama.

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley’s unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama’s major shortcomings—his youth, his inexperience—here counted as prime assets.

[John Roos, Obama’s Northern California finance chair and the CEO of the Palo Alto law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati]: “… we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.”

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The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” [Joe Rospars, a veteran of Dean’s campaign who had gone on to found an Internet fund-raising company and became Obama’s new-media director] says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.”

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“What’s amazing,” says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, “is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.”

Before leaving Silicon Valley, I stopped by the local Obama headquarters. It was a Friday morning in early March, and the circus had passed through town more than a month earlier, after Obama lost the California primary by nine points. Yet his headquarters was not only open but jammed with volunteers. Soon after I arrived, everyone gathered around a speakerphone, and Obama himself, between votes on the Senate floor, gave a brief hortatory speech telling volunteers to call wavering Edwards delegates in Iowa before the county conventions that Saturday (they took place two months after the presidential caucuses). Afterward, people headed off to rows of computers, put on telephone headsets, and began punching up phone numbers on the Web site, ringing a desk bell after every successful call. The next day, Obama gained nine delegates, including a Clinton delegate.

The most striking thing about all this was that the headquarters is entirely self-sufficient—not a dime has come from the Obama campaign. Instead, everything from the computers to the telephones to the doughnuts and coffee—even the building’s rent and utilities—is user-generated, arranged and paid for by local volunteers. It is one of several such examples across the country, and no other campaign has put together anything that can match this level of self-sufficiency.

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But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.

“If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.” Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign—to win their commitment right there on the spot.

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How the Greek cell phone network was compromised

business, politics, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 22 November 2008

From Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis’ “The Athens Affair” (IEEE Spectrum: July 2007):

On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy.

The victims were customers of Athens-based Vodafone-Panafon, generally known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cellular service provider; Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company.

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We now know that the illegally implanted software, which was eventually found in a total of four of Vodafone’s Greek switches, created parallel streams of digitized voice for the tapped phone calls. One stream was the ordinary one, between the two calling parties. The other stream, an exact copy, was directed to other cellphones, allowing the tappers to listen in on the conversations on the cellphones, and probably also to record them. The software also routed location and other information about those phone calls to these shadow handsets via automated text messages.

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The day after Tsalikidis’s body was discovered, CEO Koronias met with the director of the Greek prime minister’s political office. Yiannis Angelou, and the minister of public order, Giorgos Voulgarakis. Koronias told them that rogue software used the lawful wiretapping mechanisms of Vodafone’s digital switches to tap about 100 phones and handed over a list of bugged numbers. Besides the prime minister and his wife, phones belonging to the ministers of national defense, foreign affairs, and justice, the mayor of Athens, and the Greek European Union commissioner were all compromised. Others belonged to members of civil rights organizations, peace activists, and antiglobalization groups; senior staff at the ministries of National Defense, Public Order, Merchant Marine, and Foreign Affairs; the New Democracy ruling party; the Hellenic Navy general staff; and a Greek-American employee at the United States Embassy in Athens.

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First, consider how a phone call, yours or a prime minister’s, gets completed. Long before you dial a number on your handset, your cellphone has been communicating with nearby cellular base stations. One of those stations, usually the nearest, has agreed to be the intermediary between your phone and the network as a whole. Your telephone handset converts your words into a stream of digital data that is sent to a transceiver at the base station.

The base station’s activities are governed by a base station controller, a special-purpose computer within the station that allocates radio channels and helps coordinate handovers between the transceivers under its control.

This controller in turn communicates with a mobile switching center that takes phone calls and connects them to call recipients within the same switching center, other switching centers within the company, or special exchanges that act as gateways to foreign networks, routing calls to other telephone networks (mobile or landline). The mobile switching centers are particularly important to the Athens affair because they hosted the rogue phone-tapping software, and it is there that the eavesdropping originated. They were the logical choice, because they are at the heart of the network; the intruders needed to take over only a few of them in order to carry out their attack.

Both the base station controllers and the switching centers are built around a large computer, known as a switch, capable of creating a dedicated communications path between a phone within its network and, in principle, any other phone in the world. Switches are holdovers from the 1970s, an era when powerful computers filled rooms and were built around proprietary hardware and software. Though these computers are smaller nowadays, the system’s basic architecture remains largely unchanged.

Like most phone companies, Vodafone Greece uses the same kind of computer for both its mobile switching centers and its base station controllers—Ericsson’s AXE line of switches. A central processor coordinates the switch’s operations and directs the switch to set up a speech or data path from one phone to another and then routes a call through it. Logs of network activity and billing records are stored on disk by a separate unit, called a management processor.

The key to understanding the hack at the heart of the Athens affair is knowing how the Ericsson AXE allows lawful intercepts—what are popularly called “wiretaps.” Though the details differ from country to country, in Greece, as in most places, the process starts when a law enforcement official goes to a court and obtains a warrant, which is then presented to the phone company whose customer is to be tapped.

Nowadays, all wiretaps are carried out at the central office. In AXE exchanges a remote-control equipment subsystem, or RES, carries out the phone tap by monitoring the speech and data streams of switched calls. It is a software subsystem typically used for setting up wiretaps, which only law officers are supposed to have access to. When the wiretapped phone makes a call, the RES copies the conversation into a second data stream and diverts that copy to a phone line used by law enforcement officials.

Ericsson optionally provides an interception management system (IMS), through which lawful call intercepts are set up and managed. When a court order is presented to the phone company, its operators initiate an intercept by filling out a dialog box in the IMS software. The optional IMS in the operator interface and the RES in the exchange each contain a list of wiretaps: wiretap requests in the case of the IMS, actual taps in the RES. Only IMS-initiated wiretaps should be active in the RES, so a wiretap in the RES without a request for a tap in the IMS is a pretty good indicator that an unauthorized tap has occurred. An audit procedure can be used to find any discrepancies between them.

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It took guile and some serious programming chops to manipulate the lawful call-intercept functions in Vodafone’s mobile switching centers. The intruders’ task was particularly complicated because they needed to install and operate the wiretapping software on the exchanges without being detected by Vodafone or Ericsson system administrators. From time to time the intruders needed access to the rogue software to update the lists of monitored numbers and shadow phones. These activities had to be kept off all logs, while the software itself had to be invisible to the system administrators conducting routine maintenance activities. The intruders achieved all these objectives.

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The challenge faced by the intruders was to use the RES’s capabilities to duplicate and divert the bits of a call stream without using the dialog-box interface to the IMS, which would create auditable logs of their activities. The intruders pulled this off by installing a series of patches to 29 separate blocks of code, according to Ericsson officials who testified before the Greek parliamentary committee that investigated the wiretaps. This rogue software modified the central processor’s software to directly initiate a wiretap, using the RES’s capabilities. Best of all, for them, the taps were not visible to the operators, because the IMS and its user interface weren’t used.

The full version of the software would have recorded the phone numbers being tapped in an official registry within the exchange. And, as we noted, an audit could then find a discrepancy between the numbers monitored by the exchange and the warrants active in the IMS. But the rogue software bypassed the IMS. Instead, it cleverly stored the bugged numbers in two data areas that were part of the rogue software’s own memory space, which was within the switch’s memory but isolated and not made known to the rest of the switch.

That by itself put the rogue software a long way toward escaping detection. But the perpetrators hid their own tracks in a number of other ways as well. There were a variety of circumstances by which Vodafone technicians could have discovered the alterations to the AXE’s software blocks. For example, they could have taken a listing of all the blocks, which would show all the active processes running within the AXE—similar to the task manager output in Microsoft Windows or the process status (ps) output in Unix. They then would have seen that some processes were active, though they shouldn’t have been. But the rogue software apparently modified the commands that list the active blocks in a way that omitted certain blocks—the ones that related to intercepts—from any such listing.

In addition, the rogue software might have been discovered during a software upgrade or even when Vodafone technicians installed a minor patch. It is standard practice in the telecommunications industry for technicians to verify the existing block contents before performing an upgrade or patch. We don’t know why the rogue software was not detected in this way, but we suspect that the software also modified the operation of the command used to print the checksums—codes that create a kind of signature against which the integrity of the existing blocks can be validated. One way or another, the blocks appeared unaltered to the operators.

Finally, the software included a back door to allow the perpetrators to control it in the future. This, too, was cleverly constructed to avoid detection. A report by the Hellenic Authority for the Information and Communication Security and Privacy (the Greek abbreviation is ADAE) indicates that the rogue software modified the exchange’s command parser—a routine that accepts commands from a person with system administrator status—so that innocuous commands followed by six spaces would deactivate the exchange’s transaction log and the alarm associated with its deactivation, and allow the execution of commands associated with the lawful interception subsystem. In effect, it was a signal to allow operations associated with the wiretaps but leave no trace of them. It also added a new user name and password to the system, which could be used to obtain access to the exchange.

…Security experts have also discovered other rootkits for general-purpose operating systems, such as Linux, Windows, and Solaris, but to our knowledge this is the first time a rootkit has been observed on a special-purpose system, in this case an Ericsson telephone switch.

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So the investigators painstakingly reconstructed an approximation of the original PLEX source files that the intruders developed. It turned out to be the equivalent of about 6500 lines of code, a surprisingly substantial piece of software.

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The Chinese Internet threat

business, history, politics, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 22 November 2008

From Shane Harris’ “China’s Cyber-Militia” (National Journal: 31 May 2008):

Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.

One prominent expert told National Journal he believes that China’s People’s Liberation Army played a role in the power outages. Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.

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Bennett, whose former trade association includes some of the nation’s largest computer-security companies and who has testified before Congress on the vulnerability of information networks, also said that a blackout in February, which affected 3 million customers in South Florida, was precipitated by a cyber-hacker. That outage cut off electricity along Florida’s east coast, from Daytona Beach to Monroe County, and affected eight power-generating stations.

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A second information-security expert independently corroborated Bennett’s account of the Florida blackout. According to this individual, who cited sources with direct knowledge of the investigation, a Chinese PLA hacker attempting to map Florida Power & Light’s computer infrastructure apparently made a mistake.

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The industry source, who conducts security research for government and corporate clients, said that hackers in China have devoted considerable time and resources to mapping the technology infrastructure of other U.S. companies. That assertion has been backed up by the current vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last year that Chinese sources are probing U.S. government and commercial networks.

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“The Chinese operate both through government agencies, as we do, but they also operate through sponsoring other organizations that are engaging in this kind of international hacking, whether or not under specific direction. It’s a kind of cyber-militia.… It’s coming in volumes that are just staggering.”

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In addition to disruptive attacks on networks, officials are worried about the Chinese using long-established computer-hacking techniques to steal sensitive information from government agencies and U.S. corporations.

Brenner, the U.S. counterintelligence chief, said he knows of “a large American company” whose strategic information was obtained by its Chinese counterparts in advance of a business negotiation. As Brenner recounted the story, “The delegation gets to China and realizes, ‘These guys on the other side of the table know every bottom line on every significant negotiating point.’ They had to have got this by hacking into [the company’s] systems.”

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During a trip to Beijing in December 2007, spyware programs designed to clandestinely remove information from personal computers and other electronic equipment were discovered on devices used by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and possibly other members of a U.S. trade delegation, according to a computer-security expert with firsthand knowledge of the spyware used. Gutierrez was in China with the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade, a high-level delegation that includes the U.S. trade representative and that meets with Chinese officials to discuss such matters as intellectual-property rights, market access, and consumer product safety. According to the computer-security expert, the spyware programs were designed to open communications channels to an outside system, and to download the contents of the infected devices at regular intervals. The source said that the computer codes were identical to those found in the laptop computers and other devices of several senior executives of U.S. corporations who also had their electronics “slurped” while on business in China.

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The Chinese make little distinction between hackers who work for the government and those who undertake cyber-adventures on its behalf. “There’s a huge pool of Chinese individuals, students, academics, unemployed, whatever it may be, who are, at minimum, not discouraged from trying this out,” said Rodger Baker, a senior China analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. So-called patriotic-hacker groups have launched attacks from inside China, usually aimed at people they think have offended the country or pose a threat to its strategic interests. At a minimum the Chinese government has done little to shut down these groups, which are typically composed of technologically skilled and highly nationalistic young men.

…

The military is not waiting for China, or any other nation or hacker group, to strike a lethal cyber-blow. In March, Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, the chief of U.S. Strategic Command, said that the Pentagon has its own cyberwar plans. “Our challenge is to define, shape, develop, deliver, and sustain a cyber-force second to none,” Chilton told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He asked appropriators for an “increased emphasis” on the Defense Department’s cyber-capabilities to help train personnel to “conduct network warfare.”

The Air Force is in the process of setting up a Cyberspace Command, headed by a two-star general and comprising about 160 individuals assigned to a handful of bases. As Wired noted in a recent profile, Cyberspace Command “is dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum and that computers are military weapons.” The Air Force has launched a TV ad campaign to drum up support for the new command, and to call attention to cyberwar. “You used to need an army to wage a war,” a narrator in the TV spot declares. “Now all you need is an Internet connection.”

The Chinese Internet threat Read More »

The latest on electronic voting machines

history, law, politics, science, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 22 November 2008

From James Turner’s interview with Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery & recent appointee to the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, at “A 2008 e-Voting Wrapup with Dr. Barbara Simons” (O’Reilly Media: 7 November 2008):

[Note from Scott: headers added by me]

Optical Scan: Good & Bad

And most of the voting in Minnesota was done on precinct based optical scan machines, paper ballot which is then fed into the optical scanner at the precinct. And the good thing about that is it gives the voter immediate feedback if there is any problem, such as over-voting, voting twice for a candidate.

…

Well there’s several problems; one is–well first of all, as you say because these things have computers in them they can be mis-programmed, there can be software bugs. You could conceivably have malicious code. You could have the machines give you a different count from the right one. There was a situation back in the 2004 race where Gephardt in one of the Primaries–Gephardt received a large number of votes after he had withdrawn from the race. And this was done–using paper ballots, using optical scan paper ballots. I don’t know if it was this particular brand or not. And when they were recounted it was discovered that in fact that was the wrong result; that he had gotten fewer votes. Now I never saw an explanation for what happened but my guess is that whoever programmed these machines had mistakenly assigned the slot that was for Kerry to Gephardt and the slot that was for Gephardt to Kerry; that’s my guess. Now I don’t know if that’s true but if that did happen I think there’s very little reason to believe it was malicious because there was really nothing to be gained by doing that. So I think it was just an honest error but of course errors can occur.

…

DRE Studies

Ohio conducted a major study of electronic voting machines called the Everest Study which was commissioned by the current Secretary of State Bruner, Secretary of State Bruner and this study uncovered huge problems with these–with most of these voting systems, these touch screen voting systems. They were found to be insecure, unreliable, difficult to use; basically a similar study had been studied in California not too much earlier called the Top to Bottom Review and the Ohio study confirmed every–all of the problems that had been uncovered in California and found additional problems, so based on that there was a push to get rid of a lot of these machines.

…

States Using DREs

Maryland and Georgia are entirely touch screen States and so is New Jersey. In Maryland they’re supposed to replace them with optical scan paper ballots by 2010 but there’s some concern that there may not be the funding to do that. In fact Maryland and Georgia both use Diebold which is now called Premier, paperless touch screen voting machines; Georgia started using them in 2002 and in that race, that’s the race in which Max Cleveland, the Democratic Senator, paraplegic from–the Vietnam War Vet was defeated and I know that there are some people who questioned the outcome of that race because the area polls had showed him winning. And because that race–those machines are paperless there was no way to check the outcome. Another thing that was of a concern in Maryland in 2002 was that–I mean in Georgia in 2002 was that there were last minute software patches being added to the machines just before the Election and the software patches hadn’t really been inspected by any kind of independent agency.

…

More on Optical Scans

Well I think scanned ballots–well certainly scanned ballots give you a paper trail and they give you a good paper trail. The kind of paper trail you want and it’s not really a paper trail; it’s paper ballots because they are the ballots. What you want is you want it to be easy to audit and recount an election. And I think that’s something that really people hadn’t taken into consideration early on when a lot of these machines were first designed and purchased.

…

Disabilities

One of the things that was investigated in California when they did the Top to Bottom Review was just how easy is it for people with disabilities to use these touch screen machines? Nobody had ever done that before and these test results came back very negatively. If you look at the California results they’re very negative on these touch screen machines. In many cases people in wheelchairs had a very difficult time being able to operate them correctly, people who were blind sometimes had troubles understanding what was being said or things were said too loudly or too softly or they would get confused about the instructions or some of the ways that they had for manual inputting; their votes were confusing.

…

There is a–there are these things called Ballot Generating Devices which are not what we generally refer to as touch screen machines although they can be touch screen. The most widely used one is called the Auto Mark. And the way the Auto Mark works is you take a paper ballots, one of these optical scan ballots and you insert it into the Auto Mark and then it operates much the same way that these other paperless–potentially paperless touch screen machines work. It has a headphone–headset so that a blind voter can use it; it has–it’s possible for somebody in a wheelchair to vote, although in fact you don’t have to use this if you’re in a wheelchair; you can vote optical scan clearly. Somebody who has severe mobility impairments can vote on these machines using a sip, puff device where if you sip it’s a zero or one and if you puff it’s the opposite or a yes or a no. And these–the Auto Mark was designed with disability people in mind from early on. And it faired much better in the California tests. What it does is at the end when the voter with disabilities is finished he or she will say okay cast my ballot. At that point the Auto Mark simply marks the optical scan ballot; it just marks it. And then you have an optical scan ballot that can be read by an optical scanner. There should be no problems with it because it’s been generated by a machine. And you have a paper ballot that can be recounted.

…

Problems with DREs vs Optical Scans

One of the things to keep in–there’s a couple things to keep in mind when thinking about replacing these systems. The first is that these direct recording electronic systems or touch screen systems as they’re called they have to have–the States and localities that buy these systems have to have maintenance contracts with the vendors because they’re very complicated systems to maintain and of course the software is a secret. So some of these contracts are quite costly and these are ongoing expenses with these machines. In addition, because they have software in them they have to be securely stored and they have to be securely delivered and those create enormous problems especially when you have to worry about delivering large numbers of machines to places prior to the election. Frequently these machines end up staying in people’s garages or in churches for periods of time when they’re relatively insecure.

…

And you need far fewer scanners; the security issues with scanners are not as great because you can do an audit and a recount, so altogether it just seems to me that moving to paper based optical scan systems with precinct scanners so that the voter gets feedback on the ballot if the voter votes twice for President; the ballot is kicked out and the voter can vote a new ballot.

…

And as I say there is the Auto Mark for voters with disabilities to use; there’s also another system called Populex but that’s not as widely used as Auto Mark. There could be new systems coming forward.

…

1/2 of DREs Broken in Pennsylvania on Election Day

Editor’s Note: Dr. Simons wrote me later to say: “Many Pennsylvania polling places opened on election day with half or more of their voting machines broken — so they used emergency paper ballots until they could fix their machines.”

The latest on electronic voting machines Read More »

Tracking children who might commit a crime later

education, law, politics, science, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 22 November 2008

From Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana’s “Put young children on DNA list, urge police” (The Guardian: 16 March 2008):

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

Tracking children who might commit a crime later Read More »

How the settlers changed America’s ecology, radically

history, politics / Scott Granneman / 21 November 2008

From Charles C. Mann’s “America, Found & Lost” (National Geographic: May 2007):

It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in North America. Most people know him today, if they know him at all, as the man who married Pocahontas. A few history buffs understand that Rolfe was one of the primary forces behind Jamestown’s eventual success. The worms hint at a third, still more important role: Rolfe inadvertently helped unleash a convulsive and permanent change in the American landscape.

Like many young English blades, Rolfe smoked – or, as the phrase went in those days, “drank” – tobacco, a fad since the Spanish had first carried back samples of Nicotiana tabacum from the Caribbean. Indians in Virginia also drank tobacco, but it was a different species, Nicotiana rustica. Virginia leaf was awful stuff, wrote colonist William Strachey: “poor and weak and of a biting taste.” After arriving in Jamestown in 1610, Rolfe talked a shipmaster into bringing him N. tabacum seeds from Trinidad and Venezuela. Six years later Rolfe returned to England with his wife, Pocahontas, and the first major shipment of his tobacco. “Pleasant, sweet, and strong,” as Rolfe’s friend Ralph Hamor described it, Jamestown’s tobacco was a hit. By 1620 the colony exported up to 50,000 pounds (23,000 kilograms) of it – and at least six times more a decade later. Ships bellied up to Jamestown and loaded up with barrels of tobacco leaves. To balance the weight, sailors dumped out ballast, mostly stones and soil. That dirt almost certainly contained English earthworms.

…

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geologic forces broke this vast expanse into pieces, sundering Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two halves of the world developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Columbus’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred Crosby, to reknit the torn seams of Pangaea. After 1492, the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian exchange, as Crosby called it, is why there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and hot peppers in Thailand. It is arguably the most important event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs.

…

But the largest ecological impact may have been wreaked by a much smaller, seemingly benign domestic animal: the European honeybee. In early 1622, a ship arrived in Jamestown that was a living exhibit of the Columbian exchange. It was loaded with exotic entities for the colonists to experiment with: grapevine cuttings, silkworm eggs, and beehives. Most bees pollinate only a few species; they tend to be fussy about where they live. European honeybees, promiscuous beasts, reside almost anywhere and pollinate almost anything in sight. Quickly, they swarmed from their hives and set up shop throughout the Americas.

How the settlers changed America’s ecology, radically Read More »

Lots of good info about the FBI’s far-reaching wiretapping of US phone systems

law, politics, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 21 November 2008

From Ryan Singel’s “Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates” (Wired News: 29 August 2007):

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It’s a “comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems,” says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

…

The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information — primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone — but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.)

DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders.

A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists.

What DCSNet Can Do

Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.

FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government’s behalf.

The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone’s location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.

The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau’s Telephone Application Database, where they’re subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.

…

The numerical scope of DCSNet surveillance is still guarded. But we do know that as telecoms have become more wiretap-friendly, the number of criminal wiretaps alone has climbed from 1,150 in 1996 to 1,839 in 2006. That’s a 60 percent jump. And in 2005, 92 percent of those criminal wiretaps targeted cell phones, according to a report published last year.

These figures include both state and federal wiretaps, and do not include antiterrorism wiretaps, which dramatically expanded after 9/11. They also don’t count the DCS-3000’s collection of incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed. Far more common than full-blown wiretaps, this level of surveillance requires only that investigators certify that the phone numbers are relevant to an investigation.

…

In the 1990s, the Justice Department began complaining to Congress that digital technology, cellular phones and features like call forwarding would make it difficult for investigators to continue to conduct wiretaps. Congress responded by passing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, in 1994, mandating backdoors in U.S. telephone switches.

CALEA requires telecommunications companies to install only telephone-switching equipment that meets detailed wiretapping standards. Prior to CALEA, the FBI would get a court order for a wiretap and present it to a phone company, which would then create a physical tap of the phone system.

With new CALEA-compliant digital switches, the FBI now logs directly into the telecom’s network. Once a court order has been sent to a carrier and the carrier turns on the wiretap, the communications data on a surveillance target streams into the FBI’s computers in real time.

…

The released documents suggest that the FBI’s wiretapping engineers are struggling with peer-to-peer telephony provider Skype, which offers no central location to wiretap, and with innovations like caller-ID spoofing and phone-number portability.

…

Despite its ease of use, the new technology is proving more expensive than a traditional wiretap. Telecoms charge the government an average of $2,200 for a 30-day CALEA wiretap, while a traditional intercept costs only $250, according to the Justice Department inspector general. A federal wiretap order in 2006 cost taxpayers $67,000 on average, according to the most recent U.S. Court wiretap report.

What’s more, under CALEA, the government had to pay to make pre-1995 phone switches wiretap-friendly. The FBI has spent almost $500 million on that effort, but many traditional wire-line switches still aren’t compliant.

Processing all the phone calls sucked in by DCSNet is also costly. At the backend of the data collection, the conversations and phone numbers are transferred to the FBI’s Electronic Surveillance Data Management System, an Oracle SQL database that’s seen a 62 percent growth in wiretap volume over the last three years — and more than 3,000 percent growth in digital files like e-mail. Through 2007, the FBI has spent $39 million on the system, which indexes and analyzes data for agents, translators and intelligence analysts.

Lots of good info about the FBI’s far-reaching wiretapping of US phone systems Read More »

Matching voters with their votes, thanks to voting machines

politics, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 21 November 2008

From Declan McCullagh’s “E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots” (CNET News: 20 August 2007):

Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election’s results — including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.

…

Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. “We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way,” said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Click for gallery

Once the two documents are merged, it’s easy enough to say that the first voter who signed in is very likely going to be responsible for the first vote cast, and so on.

…

Other suppliers of electronic voting machines say they do not include time stamps in their products that provide voter-verified paper audit trails. Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart Intercivic both said they don’t. A spokesman for Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions), said they don’t for security and privacy reasons…

…

David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said electronic storage of votes in the order that voters cast them is a recurring problem with e-voting machines.

“This summer I learned that Diebold’s AV-TSX touchscreen voting machine stores a time stamp showing the time which each vote was cast–down to the millisecond–along with the electronic record of that vote,” Wagner said in an e-mail message. “In particular, we discovered this as part of the California top-to-bottom review and reported it in our public report on the Diebold voting system. However, I had no idea that this kind of information was available to the public as a public record.”

Matching voters with their votes, thanks to voting machines Read More »

San Francisco surveillance cameras prove useless

politics, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 21 November 2008

From Heather Knight’s “S.F. public housing cameras no help in homicide arrests” (San Francisco Chronicle: 14 August 2007):

The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city’s homicides occur on or near public housing property, city officials say.

Nobody monitors the cameras, and the videos are seen only if police specifically request it from San Francisco Housing Authority officials. The cameras have occasionally managed to miss crimes happening in front of them because they were trained in another direction, and footage is particularly grainy at night when most crime occurs, according to police and city officials.

Similar concerns have been raised about the 70 city-owned cameras located at high-crime locations around San Francisco.

…

So far this year, 66 homicides have occurred in San Francisco, compared with 85 in all of 2006. On average, about a quarter of the city’s homicides happen on or near public housing property every year, according to statistics from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

…

The authority has spent $203,603 to purchase and maintain its cameras since installing the first batch in the summer of 2005. It has plans to install another 81 cameras, but no date has been set.

San Francisco surveillance cameras prove useless Read More »

A collective action problem: why the cops can’t talk to firemen

politics, security, tech in changing society / Scott Granneman / 21 November 2008

From Bruce Schneier’s “First Responders” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):

In 2004, the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued a report on communications interoperability. In 25% of the 192 cities surveyed, the police couldn’t communicate with the fire department. In 80% of cities, municipal authorities couldn’t communicate with the FBI, FEMA, and other federal agencies.

The source of the problem is a basic economic one, called the “collective action problem.” A collective action is one that needs the coordinated effort of several entities in order to succeed. The problem arises when each individual entity’s needs diverge from the collective needs, and there is no mechanism to ensure that those individual needs are sacrificed in favor of the collective need.

A collective action problem: why the cops can’t talk to firemen Read More »

China’s increasing control over American dollars

business, history, politics, security / Scott Granneman / 20 November 2008

From James Fallows’ “The $1.4 Trillion Question” (The Atlantic: January/February 2008):

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.

…

When the dollar is strong, the following (good) things happen: the price of food, fuel, imports, manufactured goods, and just about everything else (vacations in Europe!) goes down. The value of the stock market, real estate, and just about all other American assets goes up. Interest rates go down—for mortgage loans, credit-card debt, and commercial borrowing. Tax rates can be lower, since foreign lenders hold down the cost of financing the national debt. The only problem is that American-made goods become more expensive for foreigners, so the country’s exports are hurt.

When the dollar is weak, the following (bad) things happen: the price of food, fuel, imports, and so on (no more vacations in Europe) goes up. The value of the stock market, real estate, and just about all other American assets goes down. Interest rates are higher. Tax rates can be higher, to cover the increased cost of financing the national debt. The only benefit is that American-made goods become cheaper for foreigners, which helps create new jobs and can raise the value of export-oriented American firms (winemakers in California, producers of medical devices in New England).

…

Americans sometimes debate (though not often) whether in principle it is good to rely so heavily on money controlled by a foreign government. The debate has never been more relevant, because America has never before been so deeply in debt to one country. Meanwhile, the Chinese are having a debate of their own—about whether the deal makes sense for them. Certainly China’s officials are aware that their stock purchases prop up 401(k) values, their money-market holdings keep down American interest rates, and their bond purchases do the same thing—plus allow our government to spend money without raising taxes.

China’s increasing control over American dollars Read More »

Bush’s Manicheanism destroyed him

1 Comment / history, law, politics / Scott Granneman / 11 October 2008

From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007):

One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a crusade against Evil — is that the moral imperative driving the mission will justify any and all means used to achieve it. Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations — moral, pragmatic, or otherwise — on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.

Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.

Equally operative in the Manichean worldview is the principle that those who are warriors for a universal Good cannot recognize that the particular means they employ in service of their mission may be immoral or even misguided. The very fact that the instruments they embrace are employed in service of their Manichean mission renders any such objections incoherent. How can an act undertaken in order to strengthen the side of Good, and to weaken the forces of Evil, ever be anything other than Good in itself? Thus, any act undertaken by a warrior of Good in service of the war against Evil is inherently moral for that reason alone.

It is from these premises that the most amoral or even most reprehensible outcomes can be — and often are — produced by political movements and political leaders grounded in universal moral certainties. Intoxicated by his own righteousness and therefore immune from doubt, the Manichean warrior becomes capable of acts of moral monstrousness that would be unthinkable in the absence of such unquestionable moral conviction. One who believes himself to be leading a supreme war against Evil on behalf of Good will be incapable of understanding any claims that he himself is acting immorally.

…

That is the essence of virtually every argument Bush supporters make regarding terrorism. No matter what objection is raised to the never-ending expansions of executive power, no matter what competing values are touted (due process, the rule of law, the principles our country embodies, how we are perceived around the world), the response will always be that The Terrorists are waging war against us and our overarching priority — one that overrides all others — is to protect ourselves, to triumph over Evil. By definition, then, there can never be any good reason to oppose vesting powers in the government to protect us from The Terrorists because that goal outweighs all others.

But our entire system of government, from its inception, has been based upon a very different calculus — that is, that many things matter besides merely protecting ourselves against threats, and consequently, we are willing to accept risks, even potentially fatal ones, in order to secure those other values. From its founding, America has rejected the worldview of prioritizing physical safety above all else, as such a mentality leads to an impoverished and empty civic life. The premise of America is and always has been that imposing limitations on government power is necessary to secure liberty and avoid tyranny even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result. That is the foundational American value.

It is this courageous demand for core liberties even if such liberties provide less than maximum protection from physical risks that has made America bold, brave, and free. Societies driven exclusively or primarily by a fear of avoiding Evil, minimizing risks, and seeking above all else that our government “protects” us are not free. That is a path that inevitably leads to authoritarianism — an increasingly strong and empowered leader in whom the citizens vest ever-increasing faith and power in exchange for promises of safety. That is most assuredly not the historical ethos of the United States.

The Bill of Rights contains numerous limitations on government power, and many of them render us more vulnerable to threats. If there is a serial killer on the loose in a community, the police would be able to find and apprehend him much more easily if they could simply invade and search everyone’s homes at will and without warning. Nonetheless, the Fourth Amendment expressly prohibits the police from undertaking such searches. It requires both probable cause and a judicial warrant before police may do so, even though such limitations on state power will enable dangerous killers to elude capture.

…

The scare tactic of telling Americans that every desired expansion of government power is justified by the Evil Terrorist Threat — and that there is no need to worry because the president is Good and will use these powers only to protect us — is effective because it has immediate rhetorical appeal. Most people, especially when placed in fear of potentially fatal threats, are receptive to the argument that maximizing protection is the only thing that matters, and that no abstract concept (such as liberty, or freedom, or due process, or adhering to civilized norms) is worth risking one’s life by accepting heightened levels of vulnerability.

But nothing in life is perfectly safe. Perfect safety is an illusion. When pursued by an individual to the exclusion of all else, it creates a tragically worthless, paralyzed way of life. On the political level, safety as the paramount goal produces tyranny, causing people to vest as much power as possible in the government, without limits, in exchange for the promise of maximum protection.

Bush’s Manicheanism destroyed him Read More »

How technologies have changed politics, & how Obama uses tech

history, politics, technology / Scott Granneman / 6 October 2008

From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008):

Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own as he reached for the presidency, was perhaps even more important to his election and public image. Jackson’s exploits in the War of 1812 became well known thanks in large measure to the distribution network that the postal service had created, and his 1828 campaign—among the first to distribute biographical pamphlets by mail—reinforced his heroic image. As president, he turned the office of postmaster into a patronage position, expanded the postal network further—the historian Richard John has pointed out that by the middle of Jackson’s first term, there were 2,000 more postal workers in America than soldiers in the Army—and used it to keep his populist base rallied behind him.

Abraham Lincoln became a national celebrity, according to the historian Allen Guelzo’s new book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, when transcripts of those debates were reprinted nationwide in newspapers, which were just then reaching critical mass in distribution beyond the few Eastern cities where they had previously flourished. Newspapers enabled Lincoln, an odd-looking man with a reed-thin voice, to become a viable national candidate …

Franklin Delano Roosevelt used radio to make his case for a dramatic redefinition of government itself, quickly mastering the informal tone best suited to the medium. In his fireside chats, Roosevelt reached directly into American living rooms at pivotal moments of his presidency. His talks—which by turns soothed, educated, and pressed for change—held the New Deal together.

And of course John F. Kennedy famously rode into the White House thanks in part to the first televised presidential debate in U.S. history, in which his keen sense of the medium’s visual impact, plus a little makeup, enabled him to fashion the look of a winner (especially when compared with a pale and haggard Richard Nixon). Kennedy used TV primarily to create and maintain his public image, not as a governing tool, but he understood its strengths and limitations before his peers did …

[Obama’s] speeches play well on YouTube, which allows for more than the five-second sound bites that have characterized the television era. And he recognizes the importance of transparency and consistency at a time when access to everything a politician has ever said is at the fingertips of every voter. But as Joshua Green notes in the preceding pages, Obama has truly set himself apart by his campaign’s use of the Internet to organize support. No other candidate in this or any other election has ever built a support network like Obama’s. The campaign’s 8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 750,000 active volunteers, and 1,276,000 donors have provided him with an enormous financial and organizational advantage in the Democratic primary.

…

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

There is some precedent for Obama’s vision. The British government has already used the Web to try to increase interaction with its citizenry, to limited effect. In November 2006, it established a Web site for citizens seeking redress from their government, http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/. More than 29,000 petitions have since been submitted, and about 9.5 percent of Britons have signed at least one of them. The petitions range from the class-conscious (“Order a independent report to identify reasons that the living conditions of working class people are poor in relation to higher classes”) to the parochial (“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to re-open sunderland ice rink”).

How technologies have changed politics, & how Obama uses tech Read More »

Correcting wrong info reinforces false beliefs

education, history, politics, science / Scott Granneman / 6 October 2008

From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):

We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that’s actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.

This sort of misinformation isn’t hypothetical; in 2003 a study found that viewers of Fox News were significantly more misinformed about the Iraq war, with far greater percentages of viewers erroneously believing that Iraq possessed WMDs or that there was a credible link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein than those who got their news from other outlets like NPR and PBS. This has led to the rise of websites like FactCheck and SourceWatch.

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false belief is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction. In the studies, volunteers were shown news items or political adverts that contained misinformation, followed by a correction. For example, a study by John Bullock of Yale showed volunteers a political ad created by NARAL that linked Justice John Roberts to a violent anti-abortion group, followed by news that the ad had been withdrawn. Interestingly, Democratic participants had a worse opinion of Roberts after being shown the ad, even after they were told it was false.

Over half (56 percent) of Democratic subjects disapproved of Roberts before the misinformation. That rose to 80 percent afterward, but even after correcting the misinformation, 72 percent of Democratic subjects still had a negative opinion. Republican volunteers, on the other hand, only showed a small increase in disapproval after watching the misinformation (11 percent vs 14 percent).

Correcting wrong info reinforces false beliefs Read More »

The 6 stages of political scandal

history, politics / Scott Granneman / 6 September 2008

According to Mickey Kaus’ Why write about the Edwards scandal? (Slate: 4 August 2008), these are the 6 stages of any political scandal:

… the natural progression in cases like this: 1) Too horrible and shocking; it can’t possibly be true; 2) It’s not true; 3) You can’t prove it’s true; 4) Why are you trying to prove it’s true? 5) It’s disgusting that you’ve proved it’s true; 6) What’s the big deal anyway?

The 6 stages of political scandal Read More »

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org

politics, technology / Scott Granneman / 30 May 2008

I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:

Thought y’all would find this interesting – from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:

“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.

Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

Obama’s January fundraising report, detailing the $23 million he raised and $41 million he spent in the last three months of 2007, far exceeded 65,536 rows listing contributions, refunds, expenditures, debts, reimbursements and other details. It was the first report to confound basic database programs since 2001, when the Federal Election Commission began directly posting candidates’ fundraising reports online in an effort to make political money more accessible and transparent to voters.

By March, the reports filed by Clinton, a New York senator who attributes Obama’s victories in several states to her own lack of money, also could no longer be downloaded into spreadsheets using basic applications.

If you want to comb through Obama or Clinton’s cash, you either need to divide and import their reports section-by-section (a time-consuming and mind-numbing process) or purchase a more powerful database application, such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel 2007, both of which retail for $229.”

Interestingly, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has the same limitation. OpenOffice.org 3 will expand the number of columns to 1024, according to http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html. No idea about how many rows. Anyone know?

OK … looked it up … it appears that the row limit is STILL in place, so you can’t use OOo to open Obama’s or Hillary’s spreadsheets. Of course, you could use MySQL …

Oh yeah … and here’s one more note, from the same Salon article quoted above:

“In a revealing insight into the significant fundraising disparity between the two Democrats and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, it is still possible to download his reports with plain-old Excel.”

Ouch!

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org Read More »

Micro-nations

art, history, law, politics, weird / Scott Granneman / 13 April 2008

From George Pendle’s “New Foundlands” (Cabinet: Summer 2005):

Call them micro-nations, model countries, ephemeral states, or new country projects, the world is surprisingly full of entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect. The Republic of Counani, Furstentum Castellania, Palmyra, the Hutt River Province, and the Empire of Randania may sound fantastical, but they are a far cry from authorial inventions, like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia or Swift’s Laputa. …

Such idiosyncratic nation-building can trace its roots back to the early nineteenth century, when even the mightiest empire had yet to consolidate its grip on the more far-flung regions of the world. The swampland of the Mosquito Coast was just such an untouched area, and it was here that the Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor decided to found his new kingdom – the Territory of Poyais.

…

The Territory of Poyais displayed many of the themes that would appear in micro-nations for the next century-and-a-half: Firstly, that the love of money is usually a significant incentive in a micro-nation’s foundation. Secondly, that a micro-nation’s founders will always bestow upon themselves thoroughly dramatic titles. Thirdly, that since all the world’s good spots have been taken, micro-nations are usually gifted with dire and hazardous geography. And finally, should any other country enquire into the status of a micro-nation, it is liable to collapse.

For example, take the Republic of Indian Stream, a self-declared republic in North America that existed from 1832 to 1835. An ambiguous border treaty between Britain and the U.S. had created a 500-square mile legal loophole between Canada and the state of New Hampshire. Three hundred enterprising American citizens, all hoping to avoid federal taxes, quickly established a government and constitution and declared Indian Stream a sovereign state. The Republic went unchallenged, but when one of its members was arrested for unpaid debts and taken to serve time in a debtors’ prison in Canada, the Republic of Indian Stream swiftly planned a counterstrike. Crossing the border into Canada, they shot up a local judge’s house, broke their fellow “Streamer” out of prison, and returned triumphantly home. This bravado did not last for long. By the next morning, doubts about the attack were mustering, British retaliation was feared, and before long the Republic voted to be annexed by the New Hampshire militia. Indian Stream was soon incorporated into the state where its libertarian longing would continue to be nurtured for years to come.

…

One of the major problems in founding a new country, second only to being ignored, is the threat of invasion by a more legitimate nation. As a result, when a group of Ayn Rand disciples tried, in 1969, to set up a new country named Oceana, defense of the realm was paramount. Even though the exact location for Oceana had not been definitely fixed, boot camps were organized for all those who wanted to live there. Most ominously of all, plans were made to steal a nuclear missile, the ultimate deterrent should another country come knocking on their door. Fortunately the group was disorganized and lacking in funds, and when the ringleaders decided to rob a bar to fund their project, the hapless group was promptly arrested and their startling story discovered.

…

The United States Office of the Geographer stresses that five factors are needed to become a country: space, population, economic activity, government structure, and recognition from other countries. Of these, it is the last factor that has always been the hardest to attain. However, one micro-nation has perhaps come closer to fulfilling these requirements than any other. Founded by a former “pirate” radio operator, Paddy Roy Bates, Sealand is situated on an abandoned World War II anti-aircraft tower, seven miles off the British coast. Consisting of 550 square meters of solid steel, it was declared independent by “Prince” Roy in 1967. (The country’s initial economic activity consisted largely of selling passports and minted coins – both common practices amongst modern micro-nations out to make a quick buck).

…

Just as Sealand now plays host to the Internet, it is the Internet that has revealed itself as the host for a whole new generation of fictional state projects. As the libertarian fetish for micro-nations weakens, the virtual geography of the Internet grants a modicum of affordable tangibility to new micro-nations, without any of the traditional perils associated with abandoned anti-aircraft platforms or disputed South Pacific atolls.

…

In comparison, the Royal Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) has no pull on believability. Although it claims physical territory, it insanely suggests that this consists of all the border frontier areas between all countries on earth. In doing so, the joint kings of KREV (for even these post-modern micro-nations can rarely resist the traditional attraction of a royal title) seem to be taking the artist Gordon Matta-ClarkÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s “Fake Estates” project – in which Matta-Clark bought small, inaccessible, and unusable lots of land, situated between buildings – to its furthest logical extension. KREV is a country made up of the intersections between real countries, a nation of negative space – a micro-nation that is best to debate rather than to visit.

Micro-nations listed in the article:

Ã‚Â the Republic of Counani Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â Furstentum Castellania Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â Palmyra Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Hutt River Province Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Empire of Randania Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Territory of Poyais Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Territory of Poyais Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Republic of Indian Stream Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Principality of Outer Baldonia Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â Oceana Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â Sealand Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Republic of Howland, Baker and Jarvis Ã‚Â
Ã‚Â the Royal Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) Ã‚Â

Micro-nations Read More »