Politics

I know I'm a little late getting the word out, but if you own a website, you should be striking against SOPA today. It's pretty easy to set up, just add a JavaScript snippet to your homepage and it will do the right thing both today (striking) and tomorrow (when it's over)... see the link for details on what to do.

Wikipedia (which, by the way, is striking by making all pages except two unavailable today) has more about SOPA and what it is.

Most border crossings are uneventful, but if you have sensitive data on your electronic devices, you may be in for some surprises if you assume the data is private:

For now, a border agent has the legal authority to search your electronic devices at the border even if she has no reason to think that you’ve done anything wrong.

The EFF has a great guide for maintaining your privacy:

Different people will choose different kinds of precautions to protect their data at the border based on their experience, perception of risk, and other factors. There is no particular approach we can recommend for all travelers.

They go on to explain the options and make recommendations for many common scenarios.

Here's another commentary on the uselessness of most of the security programs in place in airports:

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

"Let's just tax the rich, that will pay for everything!"

Nope, it doesn't work like that:

I recently posted about Protect IP, a law that would make it possible for the government to force search engines and other internet utilities to block results related to companies believed to be in violation of copyright law. This is a bad idea on many levels, primarily because it won't actually stop the very thing it is intended to address.

The European Union recently rejected a smaller-scale but similar law, pointing out that large-scale filtering infringes on basic human rights with respect to "receiving or imparting information" (the EU's version of freedom of speech):

In its ruling, The Court of Justice upheld the right of copyright holders to file injunctions against intermediaries over illegal file sharing. But it struck down the provisions of the Belgian court ruling that required filtering, finding that the filtering provisions violated European Union e-commerce laws, and infringed on the rights of Scarlet and its customers. The broad monitoring required to filter file-sharing would "infringe the fundamental rights of [Scarlet's] customers, namely their right to protection of their personal data and their right to receive or impart information, which are rights safeguarded by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU," the court panel wrote.

Hopefully, our courts will come to a similar conclusion if Protect IP becomes law.

Think you have a good handle on the economy? If not, here's a breakdown to put things in perspective:

(click the image for the full-size version... and then get ready to do a lot of scrolling)

In a world where everybody speeds and nobody gets ticketed for minor infractions of the limit, the police have a unique power: they can choose who to pull over by any criteria they want (including biases such as racism) under the guise of enforcing the speed limit. This results in our effective laws (those that are enforced, rather than those on the books) being defined by the police themselves:

As drivers on our highways know well, American law often means something other than what it says. Roadside signs define the speed limit, or appear to do so: 65 or 70 miles per hour on well-built highways, 25 or 30 on local roads in residential areas, something in between for local highways and main roads in business districts. But drivers who take those signs seriously are in for a surprise: drive more slowly than the posted speed limit in light traffic and other drivers will race past, often with a few choice words or an upraised middle finger for a greeting. In the United States, posted limits don’t define the maximum speed of traffic; they define the minimum speed. So who or what determines the real speed limits, the velocity above which drivers risk traffic tickets or worse? The answer is: whatever police force patrols the relevant road. Law enforcers — state troopers and local cops — define the laws they enforce.

The net effect is a drastic increase in the power of each police officer and of enforcement agencies in general:

That power to define the law on the street allows the police to do two things they otherwise couldn’t. First, state troopers can be selectively severe, handing out fines for driving at speeds no higher than most cars on the road. Second, those same state troopers can use traffic stops to investigate other crimes (assuming one can call speeding a crime), stopping cars in order to ask permission to search for illegal drugs. That common practice gave birth to the phrase “racial profiling,” as troopers patrolling state highways stopped black drivers in large numbers, ostensibly for violating traffic rules but actually to look for evidence of drug offenses. Both enforcement patterns lead to the same bottom line. Because nearly all drivers violate traffic laws, those laws have ceased to function on the nation’s highways and local roads. Too much law amounts to no law at all: when legal doctrine makes everyone an offender, the relevant offenses have no meaning independent of law enforcers’ will. The formal rule of law yields the functional rule of official discretion.

... which leads to the collapse of equality in our legal system:

The criminal justice system has run off the rails. The system dispenses not justice according to law, but the “justice” of official discretion. Discretionary justice too often amounts to discriminatory justice. And no stable regulating mechanism governs the frequency or harshness of criminal punishment, which has swung wildly from excessive lenity to even more excessive severity.

The entire article is worth a read.

Protect IP is the latest move by media giants to slow or stop piracy of music and movies. It is effectively a large "censor" button that would be backed by government enforcement. This video contains the just of the argument against Protect IP:

It's that time of year again, time to fall back (at least if you are in the US... well, some parts of the US):

So here's on of my pet peeves: we want to think we're rational, then we go do stupid stuff like this (click image for full-size):

How rational is it to spend 25 times as much on something that is almost 2000 times less likely to occur? Answer: it isn't.

And if you are tempted to say something like "Yeah, but we got Bin Laden, the war is working!", well, then, I suggest you read The Starfish and the Spider. In any case, even if we did stop terrorism (which we didn't), we've got much bigger daily threats to our lives that we're ignoring. This graph hopefully puts one of them in perspective.