Feds investigating peace activists

Thank you, John Ashcroft, for defending us from those shady radical terror-sympathizers at the Catholic Peace Ministry. Does anyone still believe that the Feds aren't going to abuse PATRIOT Act powers to intimidate political opponents?

If you actually remember September 11, 2001...

...then you'll find that this Slate article about a Bush/Cheney campaign rally makes your blood boil.

Both Bush rallies that I've attended emphasize the idea that the president merits re-election as a reward for past performance, as much as—or even more than—any promise of future results. "On Sept. 11, when this nation faced in many respects the greatest threat to our security, President Bush stood forward, led this nation with clarity and with strength, which has earned him the admiration and appreciation of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and I believe has earned him another term as president of the United States of America," McCain said in Nashua.

Right. As I remember it, Bush and Cheney were practically nowhere to be found on that day. Let us remember that Bush spent twenty minutes reading stories to schoolchildren in Florida after he was informed of the attack (way to grasp the importance of the situation, genius). Then Bush promptly sank from sight, surfacing only to read canned "tough"-sounding speeches which were clearly scripted by his handlers. For real leadership, we had to turn to Mayor Giuliani, who was working his ass off in plain sight rallying the rescue teams in New York, and yet made time for regular press conferences to reassure the public. His remarks at these conferences were clearly unscripted and (in contrast to the preceding years of Giuliani's mayorship) managed a balance of gravity, dignity, concern, and confidence rarely equalled in recent political history.

Bush, by contrast, sounded like his usual drawstring-puppet self. I recall watching his appearances on television on that day, and the days that followed, with my roommates in Manhattan, and feeling a mixture of alarm and contempt. This man, who was clearly having trouble even remembering his scripted lines, was in charge of our nation in this time of crisis?

And Bush's administration has scarcely improved in its subsequent actions w.r.t. the events of 9/11. They oust the Taliban --- and then forget to invest the resources required to build a stable democracy in Afghanistan. They invade Iraq in a fashion calculated to annoy our allies and draw resources away from the war on terror. They undermine our international credibility with distorted intelligence. They appoint a bipartisan commission to investigate 9/11, but obstruct and underfund that investigation at every turn.

Anyone who actually remembers September 11, as opposed to the September 11^TM All-Purpose Political Juice Machine which the Bushites have been using to squeeze Americans' emotional reactions ever since that day, can only regard Bush's handling of the entire affair and its aftermath as shameful, not admirable.

(The contrast between Bush and Giuliani is hardly surprising if you compare Giuliani's biography with the miserable failure that is Bush's life. For all his flaws, Giuliani is a man who possesses intelligence and at least a minimally adult level of emotional maturity. He graduated magna cum laude from NYU law school and worked his way up through the legal system as an ace attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice --- a job where you can't be a slouch, and Daddy's connections can't get you ahead and can't bail you out if you blow it. Bush's slacker-rich-kid extended adolescence and various failed businesses are, of course, well-documented.)

True costs of America's car culture

Great post by John Quiggin at CT. I've always been a proponent of dense cities, which not only reduce commute distances but make mass transit economicaly viable, create truly public spaces, and leave the countryside relatively pristine for leisure activities (viz., hiking and snow sports).

Close your eyes and hum pretty songs and maybe the code will fix itself

San Jose Mercury news reports on the following, which does wonderful things for my confidence in electronic voting machines:

Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.

Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.

Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California.

I can totally imagine how this would happen. I bet they keep the list of candidates in a sorted list by last name. Somehow an index got incremented or decremented incorrectly, and they indexed into a location one prior to the one that was supposed to be referenced.

(This raises the question of how that index got incorrectly set on this machine, but not on most of the others. If it's a software error, then it has to be a bug on a rarely executed program path. It could also be RAM error. Are they using error-checking (ECC) RAM? Somehow I doubt it --- it's a baseline requirement for reliable hardware, but it's more expensive, and everything I've heard of these voting machine manufacturers leads me to believe they're a bunch of incompetent crooks.)

The thing is, this is a perfect example of how a tiny little mistake (incrementing a number wrong) can lead to a huge difference in election outcome. At least when a person misinterprets a hanging chad, it only messes up one vote at a time. A mistake like this can instantly misrecord a thousand votes or ten thousand.

As I've written before, every respectable computer scientist (and some non-respectable ones) believes that electronic voting is fraught with opportunities for abuse and error. It's outrageous for these companies to refuse to open their source code and assembly diagrams to public inspection based on trade secret law. They're the ones begging for our tax dollars, and asking us to trust them with the foundation of our democratic institutions. The burden of proof is on them to prove to us that they are worthy of this trust.

My proposal:

• All voting machines' hardware components must be commodity off-the-shelf parts.
• All voting machines' hardware designs should be open to public inspection (i.e., posted on a public web site).
• All voting machines' software should be open source and available for public review (i.e., posted on a public web site for download).
• All voting machines' software must be written in a type-safe language (where possible), and must be written using the best formal methods and automated software verification tools currently available. For example, software should be written in Cyclone rather than C wherever possible. If it absolutely must be written in C, it must pass the Splint checker at its most rigorous setting.
• All voting machine company employees must have strict background checks.
• All voting machines must be assembled, and their software installed, in a plant subject to public audit at any time.

If you can't live with these restrictions, you should get the fuck out of the voting machine business. And if your government can't bear to impose these restrictions of your voting machine company, your government should get the fuck out of the voting machine market.

UPDATE: Reading further down the article, I get even more disturbed:

``At no time were incorrect vote totals released,'' Diebold spokesman David Bear wrote in an e-mail. ``The system is safe, secure and accurate.'' He attributed the malfunction to a computer-server error and the large number of candidates on the recall ballot.

Server error? Large number of candidates on the recall ballot? Holy shit, were they using something ridiculous like a 6-bit integer to represent the candidate ID somewhere in their client/server protocol? That's even more frightening than my previous hypotheses.

BTW, don't buy this spokesperson's crap about the system being safe, secure, and accurate. Software is not like a car engine; it doesn't stall occasionally due to normal wear and tear, or anything of the sort. There are no truly random errors in software. Software is like a math formula: if there's a bug, there's a bug. Period. That bug definitely exists, and will stay there until someone fixes it.

If I had a junk mail filter for my postal inbox...

...it would look something like this:

• .*Wilmington, DE.* => /dev/null
• .*Comcast.* => /dev/null
• .*Advo, Inc.* => /dev/null
• .*Maryland.* => /dev/null

It's actually kind of amazing how much my junk mail would be reduced just by implementing the first one of these rules. I think the preponderance of Wilmington junk mailers (usually for financial services of one sort or another) has something to do with Delaware's tax code.

It occurs to me that if the USPS allowed you to register a blacklist for your postal address, then it would punish states like Delaware for being hospitable to pro-junk mail businesses. Delaware would get the equivalent of an Internet Death Penalty. This, in turn, would discourage states from rigging their tax code to attract these pests, which would have the beneficial effect of raising the cost of sending junk mail, which would reduce the volume of junk mail.

Now, given that junk postal mail (unlike spam) actually subsidizes non-junk mail (it is pre-sorted, which makes it cheaper to mail, and hence the USPS makes a larger margin), this would drive up the cost of mail for the rest of us. But IMO that would be a fine price to pay in exchange for less crap inside my inbox.