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This Court Sucks

July 1, 2013 – 11:15 am

Whatever you think of the results, the majority opinions in both the Voting Rights Act and the DOMA cases are unworthy of the highest court in the land.

Sometimes I imagine that a judge is brilliant just because he or she agrees with me, or that judges are idiots when they don’t do what I want. That’s what made this week’s Supreme Court decisions so interesting for me.

On Tuesday the Court announced a decision whose result I thought was terrible (Voting Rights Act) and on Wednesday one I thought was great (Defense of Marriage Act). Reading the two back-to-back qualifies me to make the following non-partisan judgment: This Court sucks. Whether you love or hate the consequences, both decisions are awful pieces of legal reasoning.

Justice Kennedy’s DOMA decision. Let me start with the decision whose conclusion I like: DOMA. I’ve read all the major same-sex marriage decisions since 2003, and they are all structured the same way because they all hang on the same two issues:

  • Do laws discriminating against gays and lesbians deserve heightened scrutiny? Laws that single out a class of citizens for better or worse treatment can’t be arbitrary; some rational thought process needs to connect the discrimination to some legitimate goal of government. How good that reasoning needs to be depends on how likely it is that the law is based on simple bigotry. If a history of bigotry against the singled-out group makes that explanation seem very likely (as in race or gender cases), then the law faces some form of heightened scrutiny. At the lowest level of scrutiny, the law just needs to have some rational connection to some legitimate goal. At the highest level (strict scrutiny) the government has to have a very important goal, and the discrimination in the law has to be the minimal amount necessary to achieve it.So in a same-sex marriage case the first thing a judge needs to do is announce a standard of scrutiny: Does a history of bigotry against gays and lesbians make a law restricting their rights inherently suspect? How much so?
  • Do the justifications of the law in question meet that standard? If you want to uphold a law discriminating against same-sex couples, you announce a low standard of scrutiny and argue that the law’s justifications meet that standard. Conversely, a decision overturning a discriminatory law will announce a high standard and say that the law’s justifications don’t meet it. Really sweeping decisions, like the original 2003 Goodridge decision establishing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, say that the law can’t even meet the lowest standard, because treating same-sex couples differently has no rational relationship at all to any legitimate government goal.

For ten years, lower courts have been practically begging the Supremes to settle the level-of-scrutiny issue with respect to gays and lesbians. With that in mind, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion on DOMA reads like mush. When the decision was released, the initial commentary said he had defined a new standard, careful consideration. But that turned out to give him too much credit. Kennedy used the phrase, but when analysts had time to read more closely they saw that he must have meant it in its everyday sense, because he never defined it as a legal term. He just meant that he was considering carefully.

Gay-rights advocates (among whose ranks I count myself) love quoting from Kennedy’s opinion, because it is full of polemic sound-bites about “second-tier marriage” like:

The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.

Now that sounds really bad, but legally it amounts to nothing, because governments demean and humiliate people all the time. (I feel demeaned and humiliated when I have to take off my belt and shoes at the airport, and then let them blast me with radiation to make an image of my naked body.) The question is why they do it and how their reasons stack up against our rights.

Kennedy never lays that out. He lists many ways that DOMA disadvantages same-sex married couples, and then concludes:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State [of New York], by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

That’s exactly the result I want, Justice Kennedy, but how did you get there? The purposes Congress imagined DOMA serving — whatever they were; you don’t list them or examine them — don’t “overcome”, but are they failing to overcome a high standard or a low standard? Or are you saying that Congress didn’t have a legitimate purpose at all, or even that none can be imagined after the fact? That would be really sweeping … if that’s what you’re saying. But who can tell?

As my high school algebra teacher used to say: “Show your work.” You’re an effing Supreme Court justice! You can’t just list a bunch of facts and then state a conclusion, as if the logic connecting them must be obvious to everybody.

Justice Roberts’ VRA decision. I was primed to find fault with Kennedy’s decision because just the day before Justice Roberts had published a similarly mushy decision tossing out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, and so making Section 5 meaningless. Roberts’ failures jumped out at me, because I disagree with his conclusion and think his decision will lead to major injustices.

Some quick background: After the Civil War, black men’s right to vote was established by the 14th and 15th amendments. (Black women got the right to vote at the same time white women did, with the 19th amendment in 1920.) During Reconstruction, blacks were a majority in several southern states, and many were elected to office. But after federal troops left the South in 1877, white paramilitary groups like the KKK intimidated black voters sufficiently for whites to regain control of state governments. That led to a series of laws and practices that effectively disenfranchised blacks.

The Supreme Court initially upheld such laws (to the shame of otherwise great justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.), but started over-ruling them in 1915. The legislative process works faster than the judicial process, though, so for half a century new disenfranchising laws were passed faster than courts could throw them out. Justice Roberts notes that at the time the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, only 6.4% of the black population of Mississippi was registered to vote.

The VRA [text] has two key provisions: Section 2 concisely restates the rights implied by the 15th amendment:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

And Section 5 says that areas with a history of disenfranchisement have to  pre-clear any changes in their voting laws with the Justice Department. Section 4 spells out how those areas are defined. Mostly that turns out to be southern states, but a few other places (including parts of my state of New Hampshire) have had to endure the Justice Department looking over their shoulders whenever they change voting laws.

But in essence, the VRA puts the South on probation. Initially that was for 5 years, but the term keeps getting renewed; most recently it was renewed for another 25 years in 2006.

That’s what Roberts has a problem with. Section 4 is based on evidence that was current in 1965, and the basic formula has barely changed since. In the same way that laws need to have a reason to discriminate between citizens, they have to have really good reasons to discriminate between states, which are assumed to have “equal sovereignty”.

Past Supreme Courts have weighed the VRA’s justifications and found them sufficient. Jim Crow was an exceptional problem that required an exceptional solution. (My personal opinion: If you’re going to make an exception, voting rights is a good place to make it, because once voting gets screwed up all the non-judicial ways our system corrects itself are screwed up too.) But Roberts notes that:

Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.

This is a point you’ll hear often in conservative circles. Nobody wants to explicitly defend Jim Crow any more, but that’s all ancient history. The Age of Obama is post-racial. Things have changed.

Roberts goes on at some length about how things have changed. Minority voter-registration rates are close to parity with white Anglos, and in some elections minority turnout is above average. Minority candidates now get elected to Congress in section-5 states like Texas or South Carolina.

In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were. … Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.

Of course, Robert’s characterization of the VRA is not exactly true, because it has a bail-out provision: States and counties can permanently escape section 5 by convincing a court that they’ve stopped trying to discriminate. Parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and New Hampshire have all successfully used that procedure. So a state’s failure to bail out is itself a “current condition”. The plaintiff, Shelby County, could not meet that condition, because it continues to try to disenfranchise blacks. (During oral arguments, Justice Kagan summed it up: “You’re objecting to the formula, but under any formula Congress could devise, it would capture Alabama.”)

But never mind all that, because even making that point draws us down the rabbit hole Roberts has dug. Here’s what’s important: “Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.

If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)

Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.

This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.

So after “careful consideration” of how “things have changed”, this is my judgment: Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, this Court sucks.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (39)

Are you a “news” addict?

July 1, 2013 – 8:52 am

Every week, the so-called “news” provided by 24/7 cable channels and their web sites includes a hefty helping of gossip: stuff you really don’t need to know that is designed to snag your attention. Worse, this kind of stuff is addictive; you can find yourself thinking about it when you’re supposed to be working or resting or listening to your spouse. Like any addict, your mind drifts into wondering when you’ll be able to turn on the TV or check the internet to get your next dose.

Believe me, I speak from experience. Back in the 90s, my attention got captured by addictive stories like the O. J. Simpson and the Microsoft antitrust trials. They seemed harmless at first, but before long my brain was not my own. They took mental cycles away from the important issues in my personal life, and from the issues that needed my attention as a citizen. Instead, my thoughts and emotions were focused on whatever CNN* decided to hype that week, stuff that usually had nothing to do with me.

One beautiful summer day I went to a peaceful park, imagining that I would work out the plot holes in a piece of fiction I’d been trying to write. Instead, I spent the time raging about Elian Gonzalez. That was when I knew I had a problem. I had to go cold turkey.

That’s why the Weekly Sift is the way it is. I designed it to be the informational equivalent of a coffee-and-juice bar for former alcoholics. You can hang out here, stay informed about the things a citizen needs to know, and never hear about the Casey Anthony trial. We can even talk politics without agonizing over whether Hillary is going to run again or not**.

Most weeks, providing that hype-free space feels like enough. But these last two weeks have seen such an enormous concentration of addictive not-news or almost-news stories that simply ignoring them doesn’t seem sufficient. (I had to listen to President Obama’s climate speech on C-SPAN, because CNN, Fox, and MSNBC all had junk news to cover instead.) Many of my regular readers, I suspect, have been captured by these stories, because it’s hard not to be. So this week I’m doing an intervention. If you’re obsessing over any of the stories below (or something similar), think about whether that’s the best use of your time, your mind, and your emotional energy.

As I said, I’ve been there, so I know how you want to respond: “OK, maybe I am spending too much time on this, but I enjoy it. What’s wrong with that?”

Alcoholics will tell you the same thing. They enjoy drinking. They enjoy barfing in your car. They enjoy waking up with a headache and not knowing how they got here.

Take a step back from your “enjoyment” of addictive stories and look at their larger effects. Do you really enjoy staying up until 2 a.m. to put the 400th comment on some internet article (because otherwise the 399th guy wouldn’t understand what a jerk he is)? When you finally leave the TV, are you happier than when you sat down in front of it? More relaxed? Better able to deal with the rest of your life?

Or have the gossip pushers gotten their hooks into you? Has your mind stopped being your own?

The Zimmerman trial. Trials are classic soap opera, but the only people who should devote day-by-day attention to them are defendants, jurors, and the lawyers and judges who are paid for their time. Everybody else should just wait to see how they come out. A typical day at a trial produces maybe a paragraph’s worth of new information, but that paragraph can take hours to unfold and then pundits can speculate endlessly about what tomorrow’s paragraph will say. Minus the 15 seconds it takes to read a paragraph, all that time is wasted.

The Zimmerman trial is particularly insidious, because you can almost convince yourself it’s news. The Trayvon Martin case as a whole is worth knowing about, because of what it says about racism in America. (So was O. J.’s case, if you could keep the long view and not develop an opinion about Kato Kaelin’s character.) That’s why I covered it twice last year (Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See and Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism). When the trial is over, it may be worth looking back to see how those social issues played out in this context. But don’t waste hours pondering the daily drip-drip-drip of information.

You don’t know George Zimmerman, and whether he spends 20 years in prison or walks away free has no effect on your life. So if you find yourself reacting emotionally to obscure points in the rules of evidence, consider the possibility that you may have a problem.

The Snowden chase. Like the Zimmerman trial, this spins out of a legitimate news story, but isn’t news. As I explained in the previous Sift, Edward Snowden is Not the Issue. So far, Snowden has told us a bunch of stuff about NSA spying that the government should have told us a long time ago. Why he did it, how he did it, where he is now, and whether he’ll make it to a country willing to grant him asylum — it’ll be a great movie someday, but it doesn’t matter. The Fourth Amendment matters; the NSA spying on innocent American citizens matters.

Paula Deen. This story contains a tiny sliver of some important issues: How much should we care about what TV stars do when they’re off camera? And if you imagined that racism was ancient history in America, well, clearly not.

But those issues came and went in a brief flicker. Now it’s about whether she’s been sufficiently contrite, and whether white people are persecuted by “reverse racism” or “political correctness” or some other nonsense. (I’ve already said everything I have to say about that in The Distress of the Privileged.)

If you never watched Deen’s show on the Food Network, then the story has no effect on you whatsoever. If you loved her show, don’t worry, she’ll have another one before long. Don Imus came back; so will Paula Deen.

Aaron Hernandez. I’m a Patriot fan, I’ve enjoyed watching Hernandez run after making a catch, and I still refuse to pay attention to this case. O. J.’s runs were even more fun to watch, but his murder trial took up a chunk of my life that I’ll never get back.

I’m going to continue to worry about whether Tom Brady will have anybody to throw to next season. But the Patriots have released Hernandez and the rest of us should too. A jury will decide whether he’s a murderer. The rest of us don’t need to have an opinion.

What is news anyway? News is a recent or ongoing public event that affects you either in your personal life or in your role as a citizen. You could imagine doing something about news. If it’s large-scale news, it might change how you vote or cause you to contact your elected representatives. Maybe you’ll write a check or attend a demonstration or organize to help the victims. Or maybe you won’t end up doing any of those things, but you could, because the story affects your life.

Smaller-scale news concerns stuff you might do in your personal life: a new restaurant is opening, the highway is under construction, 4th of July fireworks will be somewhere different this year.

Sometimes news changes your perspective or opens your eyes to wonder. Apollo 17’s Big Blue Marble photo was news.

Addictive gossip raises the same do-something feelings as a war or a famine, but since it doesn’t really touch any part of your life, all you can “do” is invest more energy in the story itself. So you learn more details, form more opinions about the characters, speculate about what might happen next, and generally just get more and more wound up. Perversely, you end up more motivated to do something — but there’s nothing you can do — than you feel in response to personal and political situations that are crying out for your action.

Worst of all, the addictive story gives you a chance to keep repeating all those maxims that make you unhappy and prevent you from achieving your potential: The world is rigged against people like you, nasty people are everywhere, justice never really triumphs. Maybe your negative maxims are different, but you know what they are.

Take a step back and look around. Are you really enjoying this? If you never thought about it again, would it ever come back to bite you?

Let it go. There’s a world out there that needs your attention.

* The Fox/MSNBC shouting match hadn’t developed yet. It was a simpler time.

** It’ll be fine. Either way, there will be someone worth voting for, at least in the primaries. Trust me on this.

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Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue

June 17, 2013 – 10:31 am

Focusing Snowden distracts us from the NSA. The NSA loves that.

Whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor* makes for great talking-head debates. Why did he do it? Will he get away with it? What’s he going to do next?

Let me ask a better question: Why do you care? You’re not going to invite Snowden over for dinner or offer him a job, so why do you need to know whether he’s a good person or not? On the other hand, if you’re planning to keep living in the United States, or in any country under the influence of the United States, how the NSA might be spying on you is important. That’s where your attention should be.

I know, I know. Making Snowden the issue lets journalists interview Snowden’s attractive girlfriend (an ABC News article — with picture, naturally — describes her as “an acrobatic pole performer“), her father, and even some woman who lives next door to his mother. (He “seemed like a nice young man”.)

Pole dancer!

Great stuff for ratings, but completely beside the point — what the logicians call an ad hominem fallacy. It’s also standard operating procedure when anybody blows the whistle on wrong-doing in high places: First make the whistleblower the issue, and then assassinate his or her character.

Leaving pole dancers out of it for a few minutes, let’s review the important questions:

Are the programs Snowden described real? Yes. So far the government is not denying the authenticity of the documents Snowden has leaked. Much of it they have verified.

Are they as invasive as the Guardian article made them sound? Unclear. As the techies look at the leaked PRISM documents, many are concluding that one key slide was misinterpreted. It doesn’t really mean that the NSA has a pipe into the central servers at Google and Facebook, from which it can grab whatever it wants at will. There seems to be more process involved than that.

On the other hand, AP reports:

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

CNET reports the NSA admitting in a congressional briefing that their analysts can listen to phone calls on their own authority, just as Snowden said he could. But other sources are saying that also is based on a misunderstanding. Julian Sanchez does a good job of sorting out what we know and don’t know.

Legally speaking, the analysts don’t have carte blanche. In other words, this isn’t “warrantless wiretapping” so much as “general warrant wiretapping.” They can’t just tap any old call or read any old e-mail they strikes them as “suspicious.” They’ve got to be flagging content for interception because they believe it’s covered by a particular §702 authorization, and observe whatever “targeting procedures” the FISA Court has established for the relevant authorization.

On the third hand, it’s not clear who is enforcing those rules or whether the analysts ever break them.

Are they legal? It depends on what the meaning of is is.  If you mean: “Can the government point to laws and procedures that they are following?”, then the answer seems to be yes. But if the question is whether those laws and procedures fulfill the Fourth Amendment‘s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”, I would say no.

Are the safeguards protecting the privacy of innocent people working? We don’t yet have an egregious example of them not working. But if it makes you feel safe that a secret court has to approve these programs, you should read what retired Judge Nancy Gertner says:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced.

The judges appointed to this court aren’t representative of the judiciary as a whole, and chosen precisely because they are sympathetic to government power.

it’s not boat rockers. … To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.

Congressional oversight also looks more impressive on paper than it seems to be in practice. WaPo reporter Bruce Gellman said on Face the Nation:

Aside from the members of the intelligence committees, there is something near zero members of Congress who have a member of their staff who is cleared to know anything about this.

He described a “locked room” where Congressmen can go to read unbelievably complicated documents for themselves, “and the number of members who do that is zero.”

What’s the effect on democracy if those safeguards fail? The country would effectively be ruled by the people who know everybody else’s secrets. How many congressmen could vote against them? What president could shut them down?

Do these programs really catch terrorists? I’m impressed that Al Franken says they do. But I’m not impressed that we have to take other people’s word for it. It’s like the torture debate: The government can say it works, but if we’re not cleared to look at the evidence, then why should we believe them?

And none of these claims assess how much domestic terrorist recruitment is aided by Americans’ sense that they are subjects of a government beyond their control or understanding.

Why do they have to be secret? Senator Tester denies that Snowden’s leaks harmed national security. And it’s hard to imagine a terrorist cell that wouldn’t already be thinking about people tapping its phones and reading its email.

Some details need to be secret — plans for the H-bomb, dates for the D-Day invasion, and so on. But the government’s interpretations of the laws should never be secret. The American people are owed a map of the rights they have lost, and at every wall that keeps them from knowing more, we are owed an explanation of why we can’t know more. We haven’t gotten that yet.

*Notice what a hero/traitor dichotomy assumes. If what the government is doing is evil, then Snowden could be both a hero and a traitor.

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Herd Immunity Against Online Spying

June 17, 2013 – 8:45 am

Can people like us make the NSA’s job harder?

Unlike Senator Lindsey Graham, I’m not “glad” the NSA is hoovering my data into a big database that they pledge (cross their hearts and hope to die) not to access without court authorization and Congressional oversight.

Last time I checked I wasn’t conspiring with terrorists, and off the top of my head I can’t think of any big secrets I’m hiding, but the whole thing just makes me uneasy, given what has happened in the past. The meaning of “terrorist” sometimes gets stretched from jihadist mass murderers to, say, environmentalists who sabotage bulldozers or maybe even Martin Luther King. And while I don’t know how seriously to take Steven Rambam’s claim that it’s “routine” for authorities to log all the cell phones at demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street, I can’t call it unbelievable either.

So, as I said last week, I’m inclined to monkey-wrench a little, and to encourage others to do the same.

The problem is, I’m not a hacker. I’m pretty good at finding things with Google, and I can usually follow step-by-step instructions as long as nothing (and I mean nothing) has changed since the author wrote them, but configuring software isn’t fun for me. I don’t think of it as an artistic outlet. Mostly, I just want stuff to work so I can get on with whatever I sat down to do.

In short, it’s very unlikely that anything I do as an individual is going to give the NSA much of a headache. But there are lots and lots of people at my middling level of sophistication. Are there simple things we could do collectively to make government surveillance more difficult?

That’s what I started playing with this week. Starting with some suggestions from Timothy Lee’s Five Ways to Stop the NSA From Spying On You, I tried out some simple anonymizing tools. I ignored the ones that depend convincing my friends to learn encryption, and focused on things I can do on my own.

I’d like to see more people use these and similar tools for a very simple reason: herd immunity. If only one person is trying to hide his information from the government, that by itself makes him look suspicious. But if lots and lots of people are doing it, then the people with nothing to hide provide cover for any Martin Luther Kings that the government tries to spy on.

Saying the same thing more technically: Data mining like the NSA is doing has a false-positive problem. It might identify a revolutionary (as this clever Paul Revere example illustrates), but it might also pick out a thousand other people who have nothing to do with whatever the government is investigating. So if we all start acting more suspiciously, maybe we can increase the false positives to the point that the whole program becomes useless.

TOR. TOR stands for The Onion Router. (No connection to the satire-news site The Onion. I think the image is supposed to represent something that has layers within layers and can’t be peeled.) Wikipedia says: “Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide volunteer network consisting of thousands of relays to conceal a user’s location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.”

The Tor browser is free, and easy to install and use. It works with the Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. You can download it here.

The first thing I noticed using Tor is that it’s a little sluggish. It’s not agonizingly slow, but if you’re used to web pages popping up instantly, you’ll notice a lag — just long enough to make you realize that your data is zipping and zapping all over the world. (Like Louis CK says about cell phones: “It’s going to space. Can you give it a second?”)

Second — and this is so obvious in retrospect that I feel stupid mentioning it — remaining anonymous is the exact opposite of identifying yourself. So Facebook keeps asking me security questions, because (even though I’m on my home desktop machine) I don’t appear to be anyplace I usually log in from. And I can never guess what country’s home page CNN is going to serve up.

So whether I’m hiding anything from the NSA or not, I’m pretty sure I’m keeping Google confused.

Finally, some stuff is inherently insecure, so Tor either recommends you not install it or just won’t work with it. For example, using Flash with Tor kind of defeats the purpose. So I’ve been using Tor in combination with another browser. When I want to log in to something or watch a video, I’ll jump over to FireFox.

If you start using Tor regularly — or you just like the idea of it — you might want to contribute to the Tor Project.

TorMail. If you worry about Google or Yahoo turning your mail over to the NSA — email that sits on a server gets none of the constitutional protection of snail mail or phone calls — then TorMail is your answer.

It’s web-based email, just like you’re used to. But the system is designed in an admirably paranoid way. Your traffic goes through the Tor network, so you can only access it with the Tor browser. (People claim you can use the Thunderbird email client as a front end, but I wasn’t able to make that work. And you still need to be connected to the Tor network.) Mail servers that send and receive from the Tor network are pure relays that don’t have any mail sitting on them. So there’s nothing to seize and nobody to serve a warrant to.

LPS. This is the coolest thing I played with, and I was surprised how easily it worked for me. Lightweight Portable Security is something the Air Force wrote to allow their people to do secure work on insecure machines. Here’s the idea: LPS is a very small operating system that you put on a CD or a thumbdrive. Insert that disk into anybody’s machine and tell it to reboot. (You don’t even need their password, because you’re not using their operating system or opening their files.)

LPS takes about 3-5 minutes to load, and then you have a minimal Linux-based desktop with a FireFox browser. After you connect to the local network (maybe you’ll need a password there), you’re free to roam the internet. I checked my mail, edited files on my Google drive, and posted to Facebook. And when I shut down and took my disk, no trace of me remained on the machine I’d been using, because I’d never touched its file system. Likewise, my files didn’t pick up any of the viruses or spyware that might have been on the host machine.

I think the Air Force wants its LPS users to immediately log on to some super-secure Department of Defense network. I can’t do that, so my next project is to add a Tor browser to LPS. That should make me both invisible to the machine I’m using and anonymous to the web sites I visit. (OK, maybe I am starting to enjoy this a little.)

If you’ve been trying out anything the rest of us should know about, mention it in the comments.

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PRISM and Privacy

June 10, 2013 – 1:03 pm

This week’s big story was the series of revelations about government spying on ordinary Americans. I don’t see the Weekly Sift as a breaking-news blog, but before we can get around to reflecting on how upset we should be and what we should do about it, let’s establish what happened.

Verizon metadata. It started Wednesday, with Glenn Greenwald’s scoop that Verizon turns its caller records over to the NSA every day. The report was based on a copy of an order from the secret FISA court that oversees the government’s secret snooping. The order, in turn, is based on an expansive interpretation of a provision of the Patriot Act.

Leaks during the Bush administration revealed that call records were being swept up into a massive government database, but

Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

Three related New Yorker articles are worth reading: a Seymour Hersh article about what the NSA was doing in 2006, Jane Mayer explaining just how much about the content of a phone call can be deduced from metadata, and (laughing to keep your sanity) Andy Borowitz’s satirical “Letter to Verizon Customers” in which the company explains that

While the harvesting and surveillance of your domestic phone calls were not a part of your original Verizon service contract, the National Security Agency is providing this service entirely free of charge.

Probably there’s nothing special about Verizon; that’s just the court order we happen to have.

PRISM. Thursday, The Guardian and The Washington Post published a leaked slide presentation on the top-secret PRISM program, in which “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats” are collected directly from the servers of major U.S. service providers like Google, Facebook, and Apple. As the then-anonymous leaker claimed, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

Edward Snowden. This weekend, I was explaining to my wife that I didn’t understand why the leaker was staying anonymous, since the NSA was going to figure it out anyway. He might as well orchestrate the announcement himself, rather than be introduced to the world while doing a perp walk.

It turns out he was having similar thoughts. Saturday Edward Snowden was revealed as the whistleblower. Currently hiding out in Hong Kong, Snowden gave this interview to Glenn Greenwald.

Defending surveillance. A variety of sources jumped to the defense of the newly-exposed programs. President Obama emphasized that the programs “do not involve listening to people’s phone calls, do not involve reading the e-mails of US citizens and US residents.” And there is oversight to prevent abuse:

Your duly elected representatives have consistently been informed. … This program, by the way, is fully overseen not just by Congress, but by the FISA court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs. … We have established a process and a procedure that the American people should feel comfortable about.

Obama’s bottom-line justification of the spying programs is: “They help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican Saxby Chambliss — the ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee — released a joint statement:

The intelligence community has successfully used FISA authorities to identify terrorists and those with whom they communicate, and this intelligence has helped protect the nation. The threat from terrorism remains very real and these lawful intelligence activities must continue, with the careful oversight of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

Opposition in Congress comes from an unusual right/left alliance: liberals like Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, as well as conservatives like Rand Paul.

Four levels of privacy loss. Now we’re getting into the how-should-I-think-about-this part. When I think about “loss of privacy”, I might be talking about four different things:

  1. The modern world collects a lot of information about me. We don’t usually think about it, but just about everything we do leaves a record somewhere. When I walk past a security camera, make a phone call, buy something with a credit card, or go through the E-Z-Pass toll gate, something gets recorded. Most of that security video is never watched by anybody, but it could be, and that by itself might intimidate me out of doing something perfectly legal and harmless, like dancing to the Muzak when I’m by myself in an elevator.
  2. My information could be gathered together into a database, even if no one is targeting me. It’s one thing to imagine a rogue security guard in my building getting obsessed with me (or with my daughter, if I had one) and scanning security tapes. It’s another thing entirely to worry about somebody with access to security cameras everywhere, as well as cell-phone tracking data, credit-card data, TSA body scans, and so on. Again, I’m not important enough for anybody to bother, but the mere possibility is worrisome.
  3. I might be investigated by the government. Think about J. Edgar Hoover tapping Martin Luther King’s phone. Just exercising your constitutional rights in a totally legal way — organizing the next Occupy Wall Street, say — could put you under the government’s microscope. Suddenly, every illegal or embarrassing thing you’ve ever done (no matter how trivial) might come to light and be used to tear you down.
  4. Someday the government might routinely keep track of everyone. So far this is science fiction, because you’d need to hire half the country to watch the other half. But as artificial intelligence improves and processing power grows, the idea of a system that processes all that gathered information and draws conclusions about everybody becomes less and less far-fetched

Now we’re in a position to think about the things we learned this week about government surveillance. It’s tempting to be mad at the government for our level-1 loss of privacy, but that’s just life in the modern world. You need to put that aside.

The Level-2 issues. This week’s revelations indisputably showed level-2 loss of privacy. Information that already existed in separate places is being pulled together into big government databases.

Anybody who watches prime-time TV cop shows shouldn’t be terribly surprised that information can be pulled together about specific people for some good reason. Castle and Beckett are constantly studying suspects’ financial records, looking for specific cars on traffic cams, getting businesses to turn over security-cam videotapes, and so on. The Boston Marathon bombing investigation was like CSI: Real World. We expected investigators to have video of everything and records of everything. If we were disappointed, it was that the FBI couldn’t assemble and process that information to zero in on the bombers faster.

The public is mostly OK with this — supports it, even — as long as the information is handled properly: The government has a good reason to assemble the information; investigators use it to accomplish that legitimate purpose; and after the purpose is fulfilled, they dispose of the information they don’t need. We assume that Castle and Beckett stop tracking a suspect’s financials after his alibi checks out, and that after the case closes, they do their best to forget what they’ve learned. It would creep us out to see them compiling private information just to satisfy their curiosity.

So the idea that the government might be collecting everybody’s phone and/or internet records and storing them forever — that’s a problem.

Level 3 issues. The government’s defense amounts to: Level 2 doesn’t matter as long as we have good procedures in place to protect Level 3. In other words, compiling the database shouldn’t bother you; the real violation of privacy doesn’t happen until somebody accesses the database.

I’m not persuaded, mostly because the safeguards are as invisible to me as the programs were until Wednesday. Courts that have to publish their opinions sometimes make outrageous rulings, and we can respond by pressuring Congress to change the law or starting a movement to amend the Constitution. But if a secret court makes an outrageous ruling, none of that happens, because we don’t hear about it.

Likewise, police sometimes exceed their authority, as they often did during the Occupy protests. When the excess takes the form of pepper spray or a baton to the head, it might show up on YouTube or result in a lawsuit. But when the excess is the misuse of a database, you might never know. Even if you suffer tangible effects, you probably won’t be sure what happened.

One of the things Snowden emphasized in his Greenwald interview was that policy safeguards aren’t much to stand on, particularly if the details of the policy are secret. If you’re a loyal Democrat, you might imagine that President Obama is honestly doing his best to keep the databases from being abused; if you’re  a Republican, you might have similarly trusted President Bush. Good for them if they really did prevent abuse, but the long-term threat is still there.

We have had untrustworthy presidents in the past and we will undoubtedly have another one someday. Or we’ll have an emergency that makes everybody temporarily forget all those namby-pamby notions of privacy. Policies can change in a blink, or people can just stop enforcing them. And if they’re secret policies, no one will know.

Snowden calls this “turnkey tyranny”.

What can be done? This is the hardest kind of thing to fix through the democratic process. First, because a lot of Americans, maybe a majority, would buy the idea that the threat of terrorism justifies ditching some abstract ideals about privacy. (My hunch is that this is an issue where you can get wildly different poll results by re-phrasing the question.)

Even if a majority is solidly against this, it might survive — just as 70% support levels haven’t produced a universal background check law. On the one hand you have the threat of abuses that can probably be kept secret; on the other the threat of a terrorist attack that will dominate the news for weeks. Politicians may decide not to take the chance.

Even if we can elect people we believe oppose such programs … well, we thought Obama did too.

So I’m about to say something significantly more radical than you’re used to reading on this blog: I don’t see this changing without direct action, and probably not without monkey-wrenching. Somehow — and I’m open to suggestions about how — ordinary people have to make this kind of surveillance not work, and frustrate and embarrass the people who try to implement it.

Should it come to that? Yeah, I think it should. I know the spies think they’re keeping us safe from terrorism, and God knows I don’t support terrorism. But long-term, I believe the surveillance state itself is a bigger threat than what it claims to be protecting us from.

To get yourself thinking in the right direction, I recommend a 2008 young-adult novel by Boing-Boing editor Cory Doctorow: Little Brother (as compared to Big Brother). Turns out you can download it for free. I found it a compelling read, and it does for cyber-privacy what Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang did for the environment a generation ago.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (10)

Smart Kids

June 10, 2013 – 10:22 am

College Republicans are giving better advice than their elders will be able to follow.

Ever since Mitt Romney’s defeat — the second consecutive presidential election that the Republicans have lost by large margins (4.9 million votes in 2012 and 9.6 million in 2008), and fifth loss of the popular vote in six elections (Bush lost the popular vote by half a million in 2000, but won in the Electoral College) — diagnosing the Republicans’ problems and prescribing a cure has become something of a cottage industry.

The demographic outline of the problem is clear and ought to scare anybody who dreams of painting the map red in 2016 or 2020 or ever again.

  • Hispanics are the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country, and Republicans have been losing them badly: John McCain could muster only 31% of the Hispanic vote in 2008, and Romney couldn’t even hold that; he got 27%. If current trends hold, the Houston Chronicle says Texas will be a swing state by 2024. It’s hard to see how any Republican can win nationally without a base in Texas.
  • Young people have voted overwhelming for Obama: 60% in 2012 and 66% in 2008, both times with higher-than-normal turnout. That should trouble the GOP for two reasons: A voter’s first few elections can establish a lifelong political identity or party brand loyalty. Plus, every year more new voters turn 18 and more old voters die. In short, large margins in the youth vote could presage Democratic electoral domination for decades to come.

So far, Hispanic outreach isn’t going well: Last month the RNC’s Director of Hispanic Outreach for Florida announced he was becoming a Democrat, citing “the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today”. Ouch.

As if they were trying to prove his point, Thursday House Republicans (with no Democratic support) voted to defund President Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” program. Since that’s the moratorium on deporting undocumented students pending passage of the DREAM Act, the upshot is that Republicans — including Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and VP-nominee Paul Ryan — voted to resume deporting the undocumented Hispanics who have the most public sympathy. Since the Senate and the President will never go along with this, it’s hard to interpret it as anything other than gratuitously giving the finger to the Hispanic community.

But what about the youth vote?

Monday, the College Republican National Committee put out its report on the party’s youth problem. The CRNC did something unusual in conservative circles: It talked to the people it was reporting on, gathered facts, and wrote them up clearly. That’s what has been conspicuously missing from the Hispanic effort. Lots of Republicans have decided that the party needs more brown-faced candidates or an immigration bill, but few have asked real live Hispanics what they’re looking for and then thought about how Republicans can provide it.

Social media. The report has three main pieces: media, policy, and branding. The media section says stuff that ought to be obvious to anyone with an ear to the ground, but apparently has not been obvious to Republican campaigns:

  • Young people are more influenced by social media and less influenced by traditional media, particularly TV commercials. When your Facebook friends start sharing the 47% or legitimate rape videos and adding their own caustic comments, no amount of paid advertising is going to counter that.
  • Social media isn’t just another way to broadcast your message to passive viewers, like TV and radio. CRNC says: “Success on Facebook and Twitter comes from getting people to share, not just consume, your message.” So why would they share your message? “When people share content online, they are making a statement about themselves. They will therefore be more likely to share things that make them appear entertaining or intelligent to their friends.”

You know who doesn’t get that? Mitch McConnell. Lately Mitch’s tweets have been showing up on my Twitter feed, because he’s paying Twitter to broadcast them. It’s like he broke into my living room while I’m trying to talk to my friends, shouted something unrelated to our conversation, and left. Similarly, Mitch bought himself a “viral” video on YouTube — apparently by paying a service to run up the numbers. But there’s nothing entertaining or intelligent about McConnell’s tweets or videos that would cause one of your friends — even a conservative friend — to want to share one with you.

But hey, Mitch is “with it”. He has a social media strategy — just like Bob Dole had a web site in 1996.

Policy. The big message here is that Republicans need a message. Hating Obama and blocking everything he tries to do is not a message.

CRNC did focus groups with young Obama voters that they considered “persuadable” for some reason, like “aspiring entrepreneurs” or people “having economic troubles”. They discovered that even voters who were not thrilled with Obama’s first-term performance nonetheless gave him credit for trying. By contrast

Young voters simply felt the GOP had nothing to offer, and therefore said they trusted the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party on every issue tested.

On healthcare, for example, the CRNC survey found considerable skepticism about Obamacare. But even if the implementation goes badly

it will be important for Republicans to outline a vision for how they would build a better system that does contain costs and improve quality. For the moment, the advantage that Obama has on the issue is largely due to the fact that he attempted a reform plan at all.

Same-sex marriage played an interesting role: Few young voters identified it as the most important issue facing the country, but nonetheless it was a deal-breaker for many. Conversely, the report noted that young voters were trending slightly more conservative on abortion. However, the most extreme Santorumish anti-abortion positions are still unpopular.

The young voters largely didn’t respond to traditional Republican buzzwords like “big government”. They are more interested in whether government is solving problems than how big it is.

the focus must be on the outcomes rather than on treating “big government” itself as the enemy.

Neither party appreciates the full importance of the student debt issue for young people, and Republicans frequently wind up on the wrong side of it.

This is one of many issues where young people view Republicans as the party of people who are already rich. To win young voters, it will need to be seen as the party that will help them get rich.

a message and narrative that focuses on economic growth and opportunity cannot exist without substance behind it. … Economic growth and opportunity policies cannot just be about tax cuts and spending cuts.

To win young voters, this agenda must include a range of policies, and they must also be about removing barriers to getting a good education, removing barriers to entrepreneurship, and addressing the challenges of our nation’s health care and immigration systems.

The report mentioned the difficulty the Party has had getting young people to connect their positive feelings about “small business” with keeping taxes low on people who make over $250K a year — many of whom are small businesspeople of some sort.

The vastly different polling numbers for taxes on small businesses versus taxes on “the wealthy” underscores the fact that the connection between the two is rarely made

This is a place where even the College Republicans are drinking the ideological Kool-Aid: The rosy glow that surrounds the phrase “small businessman” goes away when you say “wealthy small businessman”. The small businessman we root for is the one struggling to make a new shop or restaurant turn a profit at all, not the one in the top tax bracket.

One point in the report struck me as particularly insightful: Republicans tend to be people who have established themselves. For example, married homeowners with kids trend strongly towards the GOP, while single apartment-dwellers and 20-somethings living in their parents’ basements don’t. That means the GOP has a vested interest in helping young people get established. If high student debt and a lack of good entry-level jobs keeps responsible young adults from getting married, buying houses, and choosing to have children, how are they going to become Republicans?

Branding. This part of the report drew the most coverage, because it has the most eye-popping quote:

the young “winnable” Obama voters were asked to say what words came to mind when they heard “Republican Party.” The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.

The most interesting information in this section, though, is what words young adults want to identify with — which presumably are the words they most want their party identity to evoke: intelligent was the #1 answer, closely followed by caring and hard-working.

Here’s the problem: Ideology is a lazy way to look at the world. The public dislikes ideologues because they don’t react intelligently to new information, and they care more about ideology than about people — which is why they keep making those insensitive remarks about rape victims. So if you want to be seen as intelligent, caring, and hard-working, you can’t be an ideologue.

That’s why I don’t think the CRNC report is going to have much influence on the over-40 leadership of the GOP. The Party’s current base values its ideology above all. The codeword for this is principles. Any discussion of reform inside the GOP quickly comes around to: “We can’t abandon our principles.”

Intelligent, caring, and hard-working means being willing to make the effort to investigate the details of an issue, to recognize how the strict application of your principles is hurting innocent people, and to come up with clever compromises that achieve most of what you want while doing as little damage as possible.

That’s not the kind of people the GOP’s aging base want to be.

Does it matter? As a Democrat, I have a hard time getting too upset about the possibility that the Republican Party might drive itself into the ground. But my better angels remind me that the country needs two good parties. The sheer craziness of the deport-the-Dreamers Republicans makes the Democratic Party less responsive.

Look at this week’s other main issue: the surveillance state. I have a Democratic senator who faces re-election in 2014 (Jean Shaheen). I can write to her about my concerns, but can I seriously threaten to vote for her opponent if she doesn’t do what I want? Not really. Voting Republican means voting for global warming and back-alley abortions and creationism in the public schools and gays in the closet and new wars and more tax cuts for the rich — and they won’t rein in the surveillance state either. It’s not an option.

So even though my tribal desire to win pulls the other way, I’ll be rooting for the young Republicans to restore some sanity. Go work hard at being smart and caring, young Republicans. Your country needs you.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (5)

Starve the Corporate Beast

June 3, 2013 – 12:30 pm

One of the background themes of The Weekly Sift is that profit-making corporations are dangerous, because they have no morals. I don’t mean that as an insult and I’m not trolling. I just mean that, as a point of fact, corporations have no morals. Their goal is to maximize profit. If they can profit by curing cancer, they will, but if they can profit by giving people cancer, they’ll do that too. It makes no difference to them.*

Especially since Citizens United, you need to understand that any dollar you give to a profit-making corporation is likely to be used against you. Sometimes the assault is obvious, like Chick-fil-A funding anti-gay organizations; if you’re gay and you eat at Chick-fil-A, you’re funding efforts to take away your rights. Other cases are more subtle, like UPS having a seat on the board of ALEC. I’m sure union members ship via UPS all the time without realizing that they’re conspiring in their own destruction.

But what can you do? I don’t care for Verizon’s lobbying on net neutrality, but they have the only cell network that covers all the places I go. If I want an iPad, I can’t get an equivalent product from some tinkerer’s booth at the farmers’ market. And I’m sure my gas purchases have funded plenty of climate-denial propaganda, but my town is set up for cars.

If you try to be a purist about these kinds of things, you’ll end up living in a Unabomber cabin someplace. So the better question is: What’s the low-hanging fruit? You probably can’t (or don’t want to) disentangle yourself from corporate octopus completely, but how much of your money can you route around it without joining a hippie commune or something?

The answers below are not exhaustive and follow a few simple themes: Join co-ops, which are owned by their customers. Deal with local businesses that are owned by individuals or families. If you have to deal with a corporation (and often you do), pick smaller ones over bigger ones — and look for the occasional corporation that is owned by its employees.

Financial services. The no-brainer here is bank at a credit union. You won’t just pull your money away from the bankers who crashed the economy, you’ll get a better deal. This week my credit union gave me an .85% interest rate on an 11-month CD. The best a local profit-making bank would give me was .4% if I stretched it out to 14 months. Whether you’re looking for checking, savings, car loans, or low-interest-rate credit cards, your best bet is probably a credit union.

Like all co-ops, a credit union is owned by its members, who elect its board. So your money is not going to pay outrageous CEO bonuses or get lost gambling on derivatives or building some temple-of-finance edifice. The stock-holders are the customers like you. So the credit union will pay more on your savings and charge less on your loans.

Years ago, you could only join a credit union if you worked at a place that had one, or had some other special connection. But the rules got loosened in 1998, and now there are local credit unions that accept anyone who lives in a particular area. For example, anybody who lives in New Hampshire can join Granite State Credit Union.

Mutual insurance companies are also member-owned, but you need to be careful: Some companies retain “mutual” in their names for historical reasons, but their structure is more complicated. If your policy doesn’t come with voting rights, you’re not really a member-owner.

For more complicated financial services, you might have several other member-owned options.

If you are (or were) in the military, or one of your parents is a USAA member, you can join USAA and get a full range of financial services: brokerage, insurance, whatever.

If you work for an educational institution or some other non-profit, probably not-for-profit TIAA-CREF is one of your retirement-plan options. (I’ve had a TIAA-CREF 401(k) for 29 years.) In addition to 401(k)s, they offer life insurance and individual investment products like mutual funds and brokerage accounts. Possibly anybody can go to their web site and open an individual account, but I haven’t found a FAQ that says that.

But even if you don’t have a military or non-profit connection, Vanguard has brokerage and mutual fund services available to the general public. Like USAA and TIAA-CREF, Vanguard isn’t exactly a co-op, but it is organized in a creative way that avoids Wall Street: It is owned by the mutual funds it manages, and those funds are owned by their investors.

Finally: You can cut the Visa/Mastercard oligopoly out of a transaction by paying cash. Usually you don’t see the difference, but the merchant pays something like 2-3% — which is how some cards can give you 1% cash back on your charges. This is a judgment call. I’ll pocket my 1% if the merchant is another big corporation like Exxon-Mobil. But I’ve started paying cash to local merchants. More of my money stays in the community.

Groceries. The easiest way to reduce the amount of your grocery budget that goes to profit-making corporations is to join a food co-op, if your area has one. More and more of them are springing up. (In my state, one has just opened in Keene, and I’ve pre-joined one that is trying to open in Manchester.)

A food co-op looks just like a grocery store and anybody can shop there, but it’s member-owned. So if you join you can vote and you’ll get a dividend if the store makes money. Because members vote, a food co-op can manifest values other than cost. For example, it can favor local farms or organic agriculture, or whatever the member think is important. Probably some things will be cheaper at Walmart, even after your dividend, but you won’t be mistreating your workers and none of your money will support a right-wing political agenda. This article includes links to help you find food co-ops near you.

Another option is a farmers’ market, where you can buy directly from the local producers. On summer weekends I can see one out my window, but if you don’t know where the nearest one is, check the Local Harvest website.

In community-sponsored agriculture, you buy a share of a local farmer’s output. It helps if you have some way to store the excess and are creative enough in the kitchen to adjust your menu to what’s in season. But if you fit that description, a CSA share isn’t just socially responsible, it will save you money.

Finally, one of the big supermarket chains in the rural Midwest is employee-owned: HyVee.

Retail. Depending on where you live, you might have all kinds of unexpected co-op options. For example, the Black Star brew pub in Austin is a co-op. It’s owned by 3,000 beer-drinkers and managed by its workers. I’ll bet it will never have a Friday’s-style drink-watering scandal.

Book co-ops show up here and there. When I was a graduate student in Chicago, I joined the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, which has expanded since I left. Back in the 80s, I paid $10 for a membership, and when I left town a few years later they bought my share back for $13.

This week I rejoined for $30. The share buy-back provision still applies. You can order books online or get e-books from their partner Kobo. Prices are generally below list, but I suspect not as low as Amazon — for now. Personally, I worry what Amazon will do after it drives Barnes&Noble out of business, as it probably will. In general, we seem to be headed for a retail world of Amazon vs. Walmart, with everyone else reduced to bit players. Maybe avoiding that future is worth paying slightly higher prices now.

Clothing co-op stores exist, but tend to be high end: REI is a co-op. Patagonia is a B-corporation, a relatively new type of company whose structure makes it less purely profit-driven.

Avoid chain restaurants. It should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people just don’t think about it. A local restaurant isn’t just less corporate, it keeps money in your community. It’s not just that the owner lives nearby, but the business also probably has a local accountant, a local lawyer, and so on.

Chains aren’t even necessary on car trips any more. Yelp will find you local restaurants wherever you happen to be. And my personal research says that if an interstate exit has a Denny’s, a McDonalds, and some local diner, the diner is pretty good. (The best fried chicken I’ve ever had came from just such a place: the Jubilee Cafe off I-74 in Kickapoo, IL.)

Use the post office. That speaks for itself, I guess.

Utilities. You’re more-or-less stuck with the utilities that serve your home, but the next time you move you might look for an area with municipally owned utilities.

Cable TV probably should have been a municipal utility, but most places took the short-cut of granting a monopoly to a private company. Now a handful of conglomerates dominate the business. But depending on what you watch, you may be able to fire your cable company.

Software/internet. Open-source software is free to use and has gotten pretty good. The Open Source Alternative website lets you specify the commercial software you want to replace, and tells you what your open source options are.

Lately I’ve been using Duck Duck Go as an alternative to Google or Bing. It’s also commercial, but claims not to collect data on users and profile them. I still revert to Google for a few things, but for the most part DDG does what I want with less annoyance.

Some of those suggestions will save you money, while some will raise your costs a little. But none require you to adopt a completely different lifestyle. I find that I feel less trapped when I route some of my money away from the corporate power structure. And if we can get a lot of people to do it, some larger changes become possible. I’ll cover that next week when I review Gar Alperovitz’s new book What Then Must We Do?.

In the meantime, use the comments to tell me what I left out.

* I’m sure it does make a difference to many of the people who work in corporations, and even to some CEOs. But if their moral values consistently reduce profit, they’ll be replaced.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (15)

Category Error – the problem with that “breadwinner mom” study

June 3, 2013 – 9:17 am

Tuesday I had never heard the term “breadwinner mom”, but by Wednesday afternoon everybody seemed to have an opinion about it — and a reaction to everybody else’s opinions. By Thursday, the reactions to the reactions were the story, and the conversation stopped having much to do with the underlying study.

And that’s too bad, because an important point needs to be made: breadwinner mom is an act of statistical malpractice. The term is badly defined and should never have been attached to a hard statistic like “40% of American homes with children under 18”.

The study that defined it generated so much bad discussion because it couldn’t possibly have generated good discussion; virtually none of the statements you might make about the entire 40% are both true and interesting. You can turn breadwinner mom into a stereotype or you can leave it alone, but you can’t talk about it intelligently.

To see why, let’s start at the beginning. Wednesday, Pew Research released a study. It begins with a statement that (as I’ll explain below) is not entirely true:

A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family.

A few paragraphs later we get the definition:

These “breadwinner moms” are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37%) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63%) are single mothers.

You have to be careful when you create a category “made up of very different groups”. Because once you’ve done that, it’s easy to forget how diverse the category is and talk about it as if it were a unified phenomenon.

For example, we might define a category called “minorities” that combines blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and homosexuals. That would get us a big number — probably almost as big as the 40% Pew claims for breadwinner moms — but at the cost of making the category too cumbersome to say much about. All “minorities” have some reason to feel out of the mainstream and can point to various kinds of discrimination, but it’s hard to find any single issue that cuts across the entire collection. If we started throwing the term around, probably the big number would stick in people’s heads, but the definition would get replaced by a stereotype — poor, dark-skinned people who live in urban ghettos — which would apply to many of the blacks and Hispanics, but would misrepresent most of the Asians, Jews, and homosexuals.

Now imagine being a professional-class suburban Jew who finds himself called to account for the problems “minorities” cause in the urban ghetto.

You might think two groups wouldn’t be hard to keep straight, but under examination, both “single mothers” and “married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands” dissolve into a variety of dissimilar groups.

In a footnote, Pew says:

Single mothers include mothers who are never married, divorced, widowed, separated, or married but the spouse is not in the household.

So some of our “single mothers” are married, and some are not breadwinners. Another footnote says that Pew won’t count single mothers who live with their parents, but think about the range of women still included:

  • A high-school dropout juggles a fast-food job and a baby, and gets food stamps and some money from her parents, but no help from the baby’s father.
  • A professional-class mother (whose youngest child is 17) recently divorced. She plans to restart her career soon, but for now lives on a combination of alimony, child support, and the cash settlement from the divorce.
  • A widow with children has a part-time job, but couldn’t get by without the pension and/or life insurance settlement from her deceased husband.
  • A Murphy Brown type gave up on finding Mr. Right, but has enough money and enough support from friends and family to raise her child well.
  • A lesbian can’t marry in her state, but shares child-raising with a long-term partner.

Couples where the wife out-earns the husband are also diverse:

  • The husband is a good-for-nothing who neither works nor helps around the house.
  • The husband doesn’t have a paying job, but takes care of the house and kids.
  • The wife temporarily supports her husband while he finishes a degree or starts a business.
  • The husband is disabled.
  • The household lives off the income from the wife’s inherited wealth.
  • Two professionals both make good salaries, but the wife’s is slightly higher.
  • Both spouses have successful careers, but the husband’s is in a less lucrative field.
  • The husband is older and has retired before the kids are out of the house.
  • Two unskilled workers struggle to find minimum-wage jobs; this year the wife got more hours.

Now lump all those households together, give the new category a catchy name, and then post this graph about how it’s growing.

What have you accomplished, really? Well, mainly you’ve created a monster, a Rorschach Test onto which people can project all their fears about social change. What you haven’t done is raise a worthwhile topic for discussion, because what true statement can anyone make about all those households?

Deep in those numbers somewhere is a phenomenon that’s actually disturbing: children born to never-married women who are too young and too poor and too uneducated to give them a decent shot at success, especially without help from a spouse. That’s nowhere near 40% of households, but it easily becomes the stereotype for the whole group.

That stereotype is what Fox Business Channel’s Juan Williams was reacting to when he said that this trend “is tearing apart minority communities even more than white communities”. Are minority communities being torn apart by women who get high-paying jobs? Of course not. But they might get torn apart by households that don’t have either the personal or monetary resources necessary to give their children a shot at success. A study of that trend would be useful — is that number growing? I’d really like to know — but it wouldn’t have a big headline statistic like 40% of American households.

It’s no wonder a high-achieving mom like Fox News’ Megyn Kelly lashed back at the male Fox pundits who stereotyped her.

But you know who also should be offended? Dads. By lumping single moms together with primary-provider moms, Pew is saying that the two situations are similar. In other words, a man who can’t out-earn his wife might as well not be there at all.

Think about it. John McCain and John Kerry are out-earned by their wives. Michelle Obama has a book out. What if it became such a wild best-seller that her income went higher than Barack’s? Would it then make sense to lump the President in with men who got a girl pregnant and vanished?

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“This War Must End”

May 27, 2013 – 12:33 pm

The issues on which President Obama has most disappointed liberals (and strayed farthest from his 2008 campaign rhetoric) have centered on the War on Terror. Yes, he got our combat troops out of Iraq (slowly) and is winding down the Afghan War (finally). He did renounce torture as an interrogation technique. But rather than reverse Bush administration’s expansion of presidential power and paint it as a one-time over-reaction to an emergency (like the Japanese internment camps of World War II), Obama has largely ratified Bush’s power-grab, and in some cases even grabbed more. As many of us feared at the time, it is hard for a president to cut back his own power, even if that’s what his principles say he should do.

Thursday, in a major speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, President Obama sounded a lot more like Candidate Obama in two ways: He took civil liberties issues more seriously than he has in some while, and he talked to us as if we were adults who can think about complex issues. In that second sense, it was his best speech since his campaign speech about race.

To put a few of my own words in Obama’s mouth: War is bad for democracy. A government at war needs to keep secrets, and it needs to favor security over freedom. The bigger the war, the worse for democracy.

Modeling the threat as a “Global War on Terror” amalgamates every little extremist group and home-grown terrorist into one giant enemy that justifies fighting one giant war. Maybe there was some justification for that framing immediately after 9-11, when Al Qaeda had a unified leadership that seemed to be able to direct multiple efforts all over the world. But:

Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat.  Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.  They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston.  They’ve not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11.

Instead, what we’ve seen is the emergence of various al Qaeda affiliates.  From Yemen to Iraq, from Somalia to North Africa, the threat today is more diffuse … Unrest in the Arab world has also allowed extremists to gain a foothold in countries like Libya and Syria.  But here, too, there are differences from 9/11.  In some cases, we continue to confront state-sponsored networks like Hezbollah that engage in acts of terror to achieve political goals.  Other of these groups are simply collections of local militias or extremists interested in seizing territory.  And while we are vigilant for signs that these groups may pose a transnational threat, most are focused on operating in the countries and regions where they are based.  And that means we’ll face more localized threats like what we saw in Benghazi, or the BP oil facility in Algeria

What we face now, in other words, are a lot of little threats, not one big threat like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda of 2001.

the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. [my italics] … if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11. … Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.

And he recognizes that he can’t promise a perfect defense against those threats.

Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror.  We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.  But what we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.

I read this as a rebuke of President Bush’s sweeping statement three days after 9-11: “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

If that’s our goal, then we are never done and we have never gone far enough. But if we have a more manageable goal (say, to reduce the risk of terrorism to below the level of many other risks we live with), then democracy might have a chance to survive.

The rest of the speech is more specific and tactical.

Drones. Obama defends drone strikes as “effective” (“measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations”) and “legal” (i.e., in accordance with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after 9-11), but admits the discussion can’t end there.

America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion.  To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power — or risk abusing it.

Obama claims that “clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday” embodies that needed discipline.  (I haven’t studied those guidelines — which he partially outlines — but I doubt I’m going to buy their sufficiency, given how easily Obama or some future president could change them or just ignore them. He later mentions options for moving some oversight outside the executive branch, but doesn’t commit himself.)

He specifically defends the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen:

when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.

“Force alone cannot make us safe.” Obama says we need to increase foreign aid, and that we should support transitions to democracy in places like Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya “because the peaceful realization of individual aspirations will serve as a rebuke to violent extremists.”

In this country, we should “work with the Muslim-American community” to “prevent violent extremism inspired by violent jihadists”. Speaking in my own words: The guy who is a committed member of a American Muslim community mosque is not going to blow himself up, any more than a Baptist deacon is going to blow up an abortion clinic. In any religion, the people to worry about are the alienated loners who want to go from loser to hero in one big step.

Civil liberties. Even after the Boston bombings, Obama says, “we do not deport someone or throw somebody in prison in the absence of evidence.” He also says we need “careful constraints on the tools the government uses to protect sensitive information, such as the state secrets doctrine.”

His defense of press freedom, calling for a shield law for journalists and saying “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs” in some ways misses the point. The targets of the AP investigations are leakers, not journalists. But a journalist’s ability to investigate the government is compromised if sources suspect their communications are going to be intercepted.

Repeal the AUMF. The  AUMF was a very sweeping grant of power that Congress gave President Bush after 9-11. It didn’t have a time limit, but maybe its mission has been accomplished.

I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.  And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.  Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue.  But this war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands.

Close Guantanamo. Finally, he discusses closing Guantanamo, which was one of the first things he pledged to do after taking office. In asking Congress to cooperate with him this time, he invokes the judgment of history.

Imagine a future — 10 years from now or 20 years from now — when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country.  Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike.  … Is this who we are?  Is that something our Founders foresaw?  Is that the America we want to leave our children?  Our sense of justice is stronger than that.

And that  may be the best reason to hope that President Obama is serious this time, and that he might really start to disassemble the wartime presidency that Bush built. As he gets closer to leaving office, the temptation to shore up presidential power should wane, and the judgment of history may start to weigh on his mind.

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What Happens to a Scandal With Boring Details?

May 27, 2013 – 9:47 am

The IRS scandal is starting to look like one of those movies with a cool title and a heart-pounding trailer that ends up delivering two hours of excruciating boredom.

The initial headline “IRS Targeted Tea Party Groups” promised conspiracy, duplicity, and suspense. Surely we’d find a bloody trail leading towards the White House. Investigating that trail would lead to a series of exciting confrontations, where ever-higher-level members of the administration would face the choice of flipping on their bosses or falling on their swords. Eventually, the story might culminate in a presidential resignation (like Nixon) or impeachment (like Clinton).

Excitement! Headlines! Ratings!

Instead, the unfolding details sound more like scenes from David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (also set at the IRS) which explores the spiritual dimensions of boredom.

Nobody has found any trail pointing towards the White House. More and more it looks like bureaucrats broke the rules for the same reason bureaucrats usually break rules — to make their tedious jobs easier. Like cops profiling black teens, IRS agents profiled conservative groups because (i) from their (possibly biased) point of view, that’s who they expected to be cheating, and (ii) it was simpler than thinking up legal ways to generate suspects.

If you want to take viewers deeper than that, you’ll need describe how the regulations define and treat 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations differently from 527 organizations. You’ll have to send cameras to the offices of victimized Tea Party groups and re-enact them filling out unnecessary forms. I’m sure people will be glued to their TVs.

Thursday on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word, Chris Hayes explained how he looks at this as a TV host:

My feeling is that as it comes out — as the media is forced to cover what is essentially a somewhat boring story of bureaucratic malfeasance or overwhelmedness or bureaucratic incompetencies or just bureaucratic bureaucraticness — it becomes less interesting. I’m genuinely curious the degree to which this can have legs.  … I have hopes that just from a sheer I-have-to-produce-a-television-show-every-day level, is this interesting? Like, it’s not. … I think the actual details of it end up not sustaining the drama. … What was in the headline was dramatic. … The third through 15th paragraphs are not dramatic.

But Nate Silver makes a different prediction. His model recognizes that a scandal “having legs” involves more than just whether the charges are important or true. He judges a scandal’s potential by (i) whether the accusation is easier to describe than the defense; (ii) how well the story fits or contradicts some pre-existing narrative; (iii) whether the opposition can push the scandal without getting tarred by it; and (iv) whether the media has anything shinier to pay attention to.

By that measure, the IRS scandal looks to have a future: Again, it’s got that great initial headline. It fits two standard conservative narratives: that conservatives are persecuted, and that government is out of control. It figures in the duel between liberal and conservative narratives about Obama: Is Obama basically a good guy doing his best in a difficult job, or is he a ruthless Chicago politician? Since Republicans don’t have their own IRS, this can’t backfire on them the way the Clinton adultery scandal did. And finally, 2012 is over and 2016 is a long way off, so political reporters are looking for excitement like bored 8-year-olds at the end of summer vacation.

How can we reconcile these two conflicting predictions? I think they describe two different universes: For the general public, the IRS scandal will strangle on its own tedium, as Hayes predicts. But it will reach its full scandalous potential inside the conservative media bubble, where the exciting details necessary to keep it going will be invented from whole cloth.

The best insight into the conservative media comes from a series of posts by Tod Kelly on the League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog. His theme has been: “America’s conservative media machine is slowly but surely killing America’s conservative party.”

In the late 90s through the early and mid 00s, the GOP found that it could increase both number of voters and voter passion by aligning itself with a media machine that was initially created to build ratings from shock value. … An inherent flaw with this type of model is that while it leads to quick ratings and advertising profits, it can be difficult to sustain. If you spend one week calling the President a liar and an idiot, it’s not going to be long before calling him a lying idiot isn’t really all that shocking. You have to continually push just a little bit more as you go, or risk being irrelevant in the shock-media world.

… Somewhere along the line, however, this model has to break down – partly because you eventually reach a ceiling where the base that believes the ever-increasingly shocking claims is small enough to make the party you’re backing politically irrelevant, and partly because to those that aren’t part of the machine or the base you begin to look increasingly out of touch. Birtherism is a fairly good example of this ceiling being reached, as are the Death Panels and Obama/Hitler youth programs. Unfortunately for the Right, however, once you tie yourself and your success so inexorably to the machine it becomes almost impossible to untangle yourself from it.

Republican politicians initially thought they would define a narrative that their media machine would trumpet to the world. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the rest would serve their governing agenda and help them win elections.

Instead, the conservative media defines a narrative that is shaped to build ratings, and Republican politicians have had to get in step, even if it ultimately means marching off a cliff. The result is a party that can’t put together a governing agenda and can’t win national elections.

But the ratings are good — because media companies don’t need a majority, they just need a small core of dedicated viewers and listeners. (Glenn Beck’s subscribers pay $100 per year; a tiny fraction of the voting public can make him very rich.)

Kelly outlined how the primacy of ratings shaped four bogus stories leading up to the 2012 election.

the story that the President order[ed] his own people be abandoned in Benghazi, the story that the president started Operation Fast & Furious to overturn the second amendment, the story that UN forces will soon be entering the United States to collect the guns of private citizens, and the story that once reelected, the President is set to enact some kind of national Sharia law.

Each of these started as real stories about actions taken by the current administration.  As we will see, however, in each case a pattern begins to emerge:

1. The original story, while absolutely showing a potential miscalculation by the White House, isn’t really damning as initially reported (usually by FOX).

2. The story is then taken by bloggers, talk radio show hosts, and FOX “expert” commentators and reworked to better fit the narrative of Obama as evil usurper.  The facts are changed entirely, but no real journalism is used to gather new information; instead, the media machine relies on self-referencing its own continually shifting commentaries on the original story until a very different and far more nefarious sounding story emerges.

3. The huge whirlwind of the media machine is assumed to itself be indicative of “unreported” news, and thus the original reporting source (again, usually FOX) re-reports the story with the new “facts.”  (Reminding one of that moment in the children’s game Telephone when the original child announces what their starting phrase has morphed into).

4. The media machine and its audience point to the mainstream media’s ignoring of the new, factually dubious story as “proof” that the new story is true.

It’s not hard to apply that model to the IRS story. Tedium will not be a problem for Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity any more than it is for Stephen King. Boredom is never a problem if you let the story generate its own facts.

Republican politicians — even if they know better — will feel that they have no choice other than to pander to the invented story, even if it sounds crazy to most voters. They may even find themselves believing it, until confronted with reality, as Mitt Romney was in the presidential debates.

So even if the trail the White House remains totally bloodless and cold, we may well see impeachment hearings. Beating the drum for impeachment is great for ratings, and what Republican politician is in a position to say no?

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