Administration and Iraqi government close to drawdown deal

How the Olympics and Georgia are completely pushing this off the radar is beyond me, but the question of opposition to the war and the exact timing of the pullout might be a moot question by 2009: link

American soldiers will withdraw from cities across Iraq next summer and all US combat troops will leave the country within three years, provided the violence remains low, under the terms of a draft agreement with the Iraqi Government. In one of the most detailed insights yet into the content of the deal, Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, has also told The Times that the US military would be barred from unilaterally mounting attacks inside Iraq from next year. In addition, the power of arrest for US soldiers would be curbed by the need to hand over any detainee to a new, US-Iraqi committee. Troops would require the green light from this joint command before conducting any operation. The Pentagon refused to comment last night on the proposals laid out in the draft agreement between Baghdad and Washington that covers the status of US forces beyond 2008. Britain will strike its own deal with Iraq but Gor-don Brown hopes to withdraw most British troops from Iraq by next summer, reducing the number of soldiers from 4,100 to “a few hundred” by then. Mr Zebari said in an interview: “Our negotiators and the Americans have almost brought it [the accord] to a close. It is not a closed deal but it is very close.”

This is good news, as we could really spare the resources to invest into Afghanistan - a country with a long history of appearing conquered and then exploding. In terms of the 2008 elections, it seems as though with this issue potentially out of the way and the economy recovering, we might actually have a debate about the issues I am most interested in: the limits of executive power, the future of civil rights in this country, and technological innovation (green technology and telecommunications). Oh sure, McCain could call Obama's opposition to the surge a bad decision that would have prevented the current progress from taking place (though some analysis has suggested it had more to do with the earlier Sunni Awakening). And Obama could say that the decision to go to war at all was a bad idea built on a series of frauds. But I think Americans are more interested about the future rather than the past in this election. I am fairly worried a pullout from Iraq will still leave a heavily balkanized country, rather ripe for a civil war from a historical perspective. Dividing neighborhoods by religion/ethnicity and putting up large concrete barriers between them might limit violence in the short term, but it doesn't make for a very cohesive nation. I mean look at this:

The i9/11 and the iPATRIOT Act

Excellent, excellent talk on the future of the internet with some very smart people. Jonathan Zittrain: Author of "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (available free here). Lawrence Lessig: Lawyer and author of dozens of books about free culture, recently having switched from talking about copyright specifically to a more broad range of IT and government corruption issues. Vin Cerf: He basically invented the internet with two other guys. No, really. Currently he is Google's chief internet evangelical (that is his real job title). The whole video is good, but the thing that stands out the most is a comment made by Lessig - the PATRIOT Act wasn't written really quickly in the wake of 9/11, it was sitting in a desk drawer waiting for the opportunity to be passed by a frantic legislature. He asked Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor to numerous presidents, if a version of the PATRIOT Act for the internet was waiting for some kind of major internet-based attack which could be compared to 9/11 in terms of disruption and financial loss. Clarke said that, without question, there was. The heart of the problem is our national infrastructure is based on a system that our representatives are largely entirely ignorant of. Here is Senator Ted Stevens demonstrating such ignorance. Here is John McCain admitted to not knowing how to use a computer, much less the internet. None of this would be a problem, except these are the kind of people that can (at least attempt) to legislate internet activity in the country. And when some major incident occurs, which is inevitable due to the open nature of the internet, they may kill the largest and most important communication/content/distribution instrument ever conceived by humankind.

Losing the Argument: Why the Democratic party is probably doomed

Elections are not simply about the raw numbers or even the shifting of legislatures. They often represent the public's perception of right and wrong - a national discourse on where the country is headed and whether it should stay on that path. The elections of 2006 was a victory more about the excesses of the former Congress rather than the arguments for the current one. A good portion of the public felt betrayed by the selling of the war-turned-occupation in Iraq, by rampant mismanagement of federal institutions (FEMA being the poster child), and of the corruption and fraudulence of the individual legislators. I would submit there was not a kind of national argument made by the Democrats that framed the election beyond. It was basically: we don't like these guys and we want someone else to do something different. This is the opposite of the other blow-out election of recent history, the Republican takeover of the legislature in the mid 90s. Here, there was a concerted argument made for a reorientation of the path the nation was taking. It didn't make this argument by itself, but was the result of deep resentment by both social and fiscal conservatives for more than a decade driven by not just one or two wedge issues but a complete ideology. And the Republicans didn't simply take these issues individuals, but as a total and (relatively) coherent vision. The evidence this represented a general shift to the right is not difficult to find. The same has not happened in 2006. There was no Contract With America, no grand vision. Or if there was, it has been utterly decimated by triangulated, tactical voting with no thought to a long term strategy. By voting record, there is very little to distinguish the Congress of 2006 from their predecessor on the topics that were at the forefront of the election: the war in Iraq, civil liberties, agency competence, and accountability of the Bush Administration. Nothing at all truly significant was done on these fronts. And the Democrats in 1994 were in a much more powerful position with a popular president (who regardless largely conformed to the ideology of the opposition). Large scale ideological movements are an extremely powerful force in history: the liberal revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries which created this country and profoundly changed others, the rise of Facism and Communism in the early 20th century, and at a national level, the rise of the modern American conservative movement. These powerful forces are founded on intellectual arguments that were extremely compelling in their own time and place - some continue to be so and others have been refuted with horrible loss of life and human dignity, but it would unwise to doubt their power. Democrats have not made an intellectual argument on this vein and their majority will be ephemeral if they do not. Their activities on basic issues that were provided as the reasoning to vote for them - checking executive power, the war, securing civil liberties, were not really pursued, much less some larger ideological goal. It has become simply the party of everyone who isn't a Republican for whatever reason. When the excesses and unpopularity of the current batch of Republicans is forgotten, they will still have an argument. Even a poor ideology trumps none at all. They could fix this by coming together and deciding why they are against the things the Republicans are for and visa-versa. Right now it is a mishmash which suggests they could change their tune at the drop of a hat (and judging by their voting records, they will). Republicans can rightly attack them as having no core principles or values because as a party they don't seem to. Don't believe me? Try a Google search of "democratic party mission statement". The whole first page is either local party offices with statements that mean nothing (the Maricopa County party's mission is just to get elected; okay guys, what then?). The actual party website is not much better, nothing in their "What we stand for" page is an argument - never is it explained why they believe what they do and what that means for policy. The RNC website is no better, but their ideological argument was really made here. The original contract is actually kind of interesting to read because the parts about government transparency are so completely counter to the current party's actions when it last had the majority it is quite stunning.

Political spam emails and computer safety.

"Fwd: FWD: Fwd: fwd: OBAMA TO DISARN THE MILITARY!" reads one of those mass spam political emails. Surely everyone has somehow received one of these at some point. No doubt they are extremely popular because they confirm already established assumptions about a candidate. The internet has a wonderful way of justifying any opinion or claim because all human beings are characterized by some measure of credulity. The body of the email contained a link to a video in which Obama was said to have laid out this particular stance. Long have the creators of malicious code used gripping headlines to pull unsuspecting individuals on to suspicious websites. The Storm Worm is a classic example that persists to this day, creating an army of zombie computers ready to attack anyone or anything for hire. The email that is the subject of this post linked back to a throwaway Wordpress site and was originally sent by an email address consisting of what appeared to be part of an MD5 hash. Besides involving Nigerian banks, there isn't much more an email can do to find itself on the radar of a moderately aware user. Before trashing it, I alerted everyone it was sent to it might be dangerous. The final humor of this scenario is the the person who sent this to me is still miffed I suggested it was a possible attack site. I had assumed they were already compromised and it was automatically being sent to everyone in their contacts list. It hadn't occurred to me it might just be stupid rather than a security concern. Better safe than sorry though - I recommend the new and extremely popular Firefox 3 web browser with Adblock Plus and the NoScript addons. (As an aside: the funny part is I would be really happy if this particular email was true. The United States spends more on its military than the entire rest of the world combined. I'm reminded of the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, possibly the last competent person with some measure of integrity to hold the office of President:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

This was no pacifist. He was Supreme Allied commander in the European theater and served with distinction before then. He'd never be elected today with these views, and anyone trying to claim we face a greater threat today than the Soviet empire at the end of the 50s is either fooling themselves or needs to pick up a history book.)

The viable solution to internet piracy

The sad fact of the matter is piracy as it is currently defined cannot be stopped without enormous breaches of privacy. Absent the restriction of tools to even create programs that can effortlessly defeat protection methods, you can't stop people from copying digital information. Mostly because the mere act of being on the internet means you are required to copy things just to view/listen to them. This is a sample of some of the points of a paper I recently read at Cato called The Future of Copyright. My personal favorite part:

When American troops liberated the city of Luxembourg in 1944, they made a strange capture: a machine capable of recording sound on magnetic tapes. Shortly after the war, this German military invention made its appearance in private homes. Tape recorders integrated listening and reproduction in one device, but as separate functions. That’s no longer the case with digital technology. Today, to use digital information is to copy it.

Computers operate by copying. They couldn’t care less whether the physical distance between original and copy is measured in micrometers or in miles; both work equally well for them. Copyright law, on the other hand, must somehow draw a line between use and distribution. That means putting an imaginary grid over the chaotic myriad of network nodes, delineating clusters of devices that can be attributed to individuals or households.

Every person reading this article is actually copying it illegally. You can't help but do it. As you surf the internet your computer is constantly caching (saving locally) data that you are viewing. Anyone who has ever used the internet for anything is almost certainly a pirate. I'll let you all off with a warning this time. Humor aside, the problem is one that the music industry found itself in a long while ago with the invention and mass adoption of radio. John Philip Sousa was convinced anything but live shows would completely destroy music. The solution, after much complaining, was to just license the distributor. Now of course the distributor and consumer and creator is anyone and everyone on the internet. The compromise is an idea that is not new and is even talked about by both sides of the issue with increasing interest: mass public electronic media licensing. If everyone on the internet is a pirate, license everyone. Everyone who wants to buy in at least. You've solved 99% of your piracy problems by facing the reality of a system, the internet, that requires copying. You also don't even have to host the files themselves, users are more than willing to do so. The idea has merit but the problem is the pie to be divided. We need an organization as trusted as the Nielsen statistics are for downloaded media content to correctly award creators and their labels/studios/whatever. The only alternatives are to entire restrict piracy with the kind of locking down that would destroy the internet and privacy in general (people could still just rip stuff from friends/renters) OR to see an attempt to destroy internet and privacy while the major content holders die a slow and painful (for everyone involved) death at the hands of unrelenting technological innovation. Edit: Hahaha. Bonus quote from a Guardian article linked from the Cato piece:

"For somebody who has spent 30 years in the music industry, you instinctively know this stuff is going on. But when you actually sit looking at your computer and see a number that says 95% of people are copying music at home, you suddenly go, 'Bloody hell'," he said.

Turns out you could nuke the internet from orbit and the current copyright model is doomed. Note: Copying this work is no longer actually illegal in any sense, since I have licensed everything with Creative Commons.

Geography, law, and leaving things up to the states to decide

The problem here is not that some states are unusually incompetent or corrupt (I'm looking at you Texas), but because people move more frequently and federal law has ballooned into places where the original signers of the Constitution never envisioned. Take the current rather bigoted opposition to gay marriage and throw transsexuals into the mix: the equation becomes hilariously/tragically more complicated. Money quote from the NYT article on the subject (registration is free but I don't like to encourage sites to put up that trash, so I recommend BugMeNot, an addon for Firefox that you should try to only use legally):

Urging the United States Supreme Court to tackle the issue in 2000, lawyers for Christie Lee Littleton, a Texas male-to-female transsexual suing her husband’s doctors for wrongful death, noted the confused landscape: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.” The Supreme Court declined to take the case.

THE POLLS!

This image is still less insulting than the comment I recently read on SA suggesting the only reason Clinton hasn't conceded (due to a nearly insurmountable Obama delegate lead) is that women are bad at math.

Edit: To qualify that "insurmountable lead" bit, lets take tonight's nearly double digit victory for Clinton into the larger perspective:

Obama now has 1723 delegates, Clinton has 1593.

There are 303 uncommitted supers and 408 unassigned pledged delegates, a total of 711. These means Clinton must now win 59.1% of the 711 remaining delegates to break even with Obama.

Before PA, he had 1650 to her 1508, and there were 869 delegates outstanding. At this point, she needed to win 58.2% of remaining delegates to break even.

So, after all is said and done in PA, Clinton must now take a 1% larger share of the remaining delegates to break even with Obama.

In a decade or two, anything less will be like being illiterate

I casually linked a 12 year old who is doing a lot of development on a major Javascript framework in the previous post. Here he is giving a talk at Google on jQuery. The tools will only get easier and the next generation will have no problem picking it all up with their sponge-like brains. There are four consequences of this that I can immediately think of:

• More open source development. It looks great on a resume, there is a possibility of making a big name for yourself (publish something in academic journals, giving talks at Google, etc.) the satisfaction derived from contributing, and naturally you, like everyone else, get the benefits of the improvements.
• Possibly a citizenry that can more easily identify logical fallacies. Perhaps nothing is more important for a democracy besides free speech. As with the open source stuff, people should demand more transparency from their elected officials, and even if they don't get it though official channels, they will always find ways to fulfill this need.
• A greater appreciation for mathematics. Hopefully higher level math taught earlier, when the kids can absorb basically any information.
• More rational discussion of basic scientific facts about the world around us. Less of this tragic, mortifying stupidity.

Links for Today

Happy generic Hallmark created holiday everyone. Here is a list of interesting things.

• The brilliant anti-corruption lawyer and author Lawrence Lessig on Obama. I apologize if at any time my rather strong support for Barack Obama has offended anyone who reads this. If you at all on the fence about this guy or just don't really know a lot about him, this is a good thing to see.
• The Reuters news agency releases its semantic web tool. Put in a document of anything and it will spit out metadata, tags, and other information. Very handy for searches. If you could have this accept spatial data you could whip up a generic search tool like what appears on Google Earth.
• Firefox 3 beta 3 is out. Faster and more stable than Firefox 2, which means several orders of magnitude better than IE7.
• Miro. I don't care if I mentioned this in a previous links post, it is still awesome. Free shows and music videos (TED talks, PBS Frontline, The Onion).
• The Escapist; funny game reviews. Funny even if you never played them or only have a passing interest in video games.
• This comic is almost as misogynistic as the comment I left on my mother's blog.

Telcom immunity passes Senate, Clinton doesn't bother showing up to vote.

The Senate bill includes every single thing Bush wanted. One senator was mentioning with glee that not one of the amendments that could have caused a veto made it through. McCain show up to vote for immunity, Obama voted to oppose it. Not even the amendment that stipulated that this was the only legal eavesdropping program the president can create passed (this was Dianne Feinstein's, to give her credit for not being a complete shill). The lack of that amendment means a president can just make up a new spy program if for some reason (s)he find this law to be too constricting. Knowing this congress, they would just make it legal afterward anyway. The only way you can justify the striking down of these amendments is if you honestly believe the president has the right to spy on any person for any reason. I will be highly amused if Clinton - who's campaign is already Nixonesque - gets the nod and the right-wing echo chamber suddenly reverses its position with the kind of amnesia normally reserved for budget, midday soap opera programming. Here is a petition to the House not to back down. Their bill isn't perfect, but it doesn't include immunity. I also recommend calling your representatives.

Polls are projecting Barack Obama as the Winner of my Heart

He was against the war while Clinton was making a passionate speech for why it was necessary to give that decision to Bush, abdicating a key constitutional responsibility given to Congress (Section 8). He has the best policy on network neutrality and privacy rights - IE, keeping the internet from being a worthless telcom-dominated commercial enterprise. He has as much real political experience as Clinton (both relatively new Senators) and has actually gotten good government transparency legislation passed - a searchable database of where government money actually goes.

RE: Arizona's new Immigration Law

The Phoenix area at least gets a lot of its powerhouse economy from ruthlessly exploiting probably innocent prisoners in chain gangs and illegal immigrants. So the natural response to the housing crisis, which is probably going to bankrupt the state government by itself, is to toss one of these groups under a bus with an employee sanctioning law. I suppose if you were attempting to change one group into the other, this would be your plan. At the moment you can frequently find a free six month apartment lease as a prize in your cereal box...which you would get for free as part of the current sweetheart lease you signed rewarding you free food for a year and full use of the renter's daughter for your meth-fueled pornography business. Okay, admittedly such places are utter ratholes. But they drive the prices down for all other apartments nicely. They will all probably go away and the sudden absence of their residents will drive any number of other businesses to ruin. And all that is ignoring the substantial amount of taxes that immigrants paid (sales and even parole taxes with faked Social Security numbers). Now they will move home/to other states - with the businesses likely following them - and the ones that can't move will be forced to crime for survival. Addendum: This law wouldn't be nearly so stupid and shortsighted if there was an extremely easy mechanism to turn currently "illegal" workers into a guest worker/working-on-citizenship status and letting them stick around but with all of the advantages of them being on the books while still maintaining the necessary labor force. Of course the whole immigration system with its astoundingly racist quota system should be overhauled, but if you are going to pass a law to ruin a bunch of people's lives, you should attempt to provide a way in people guilty of what amounts to a rather minor crime (if 50+ million of the people in your country are guilty of something - alcohol consumption during prohibition, nonviolent drug use, minor [even accidental] personal copyright infringement - you really can't consider it a major crime).

The Siege

It took me weeks to hunt down the movie The Siege. I watch it now for the ridiculously prescient dialog (see below). It should have a warning label now: "Although this film involves muslim terrorism suspects being mercilessly tortured by the US Military, it isn't in fact a documentary." That is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole section about a protest march - against the occupying military presence in New York - invoking the chant "no fear". While there is no military presence in New York (though the police are getting pretty close to a military presence), such a protest would warm my heart. Our fear of terrorism is going to end up far more dangerous to this country than actual terrorism. We always say we are willing to bleed and die for our freedoms, this is basically the test. If the Military Commissions Act and Patriot Act are any indication, we fail that test handedly.

Open Government Act Revitalizes FOIA

Good news for fans of a more transparent government (AP). For once the legislative branch of the United States does something right. Highlights: 1. "Presumption of disclosure" restored. Agencies should release information by default unless there is a reason not to. 2. It passed unanimously and with a large number of sponsors from both sides of the aisle (more likely to be veto-proof). 3. Twenty day deadline or the agency has to pay for the search and duplication fees - likely to lead to much faster turnaround time. 4. As mentioned in the AP story, this also works for government records held by third party contractors. I am proud but moderately surprised to see John Kyl (AZ) as one of the sponsors. I was pretty sure there would never be anything I would agree with him on. For once I can send him a note of actual support:

I'd like to express how happy I am with the Senator's support of the new Freedom of Information Act legislation he is sponsoring. A great republic such as ours requires accountability in its people and its government, and it sounds as if this will make it easier to assure such for the latter. Thank you.

What needs to happen now is the enforcement of current laws limiting the power of the executive specifically, rather than passing laws that justify the lawbreaking done by that branch. This is a good, though small, step away from the direction the country has been headed for six years.

Spending Iraq conditioned on withdrawl by Dec 08

It seems the more centralist DLC Democrats have finally bowed to pressure from the rest of their party regarding Iraq. Having capitulated on or ignored every other issue - torture, wiretapping, habeas corpus, executive authoritarianism - the more pragmatic needs of being reelected in 2008 have edged out previous reservations on Iraq. I was always amazingly unconvinced regarding the excuses of this group of Democrats in failing to preform as they suggested they would in 2006. They must realize how unpopular their opposition is, and how they could stop the war instantly with the "power of the purse" invested in them by the Constitution. Even if you do not believe this is the right course, you must concede that the Democrat's in Congress deception on this issue lacks the transparency and honesty they had promised. For as defeated as the Republicans seem to be, their libertarian-authoritarian breaking points do not seem as wide as the gap between the DLC and the masses that elected them a year ago. As a side note, I would just like to add Harry Reid is a vapid, corrupt legislator. His continued support of the Pirate Act - demanding stiffer and criminal penalties regarding copyright infringement - demonstrates his surrender to special interests whose motives are entirely counter to the public good. Similar to how taxes work (at a very high tax rate, you can lower it and actually increase revenue by reducing the incentive to cheat and because there is more consumption and growth in general), extremely protected copyright rules are unenforceable and actually reduce the innovation they are meant to encourage. Wow that was a long side note. UPDATE on copyright sidenote: In his talks, Cory Doctorow has repeated one of his many complaints of the current copyright legalism - everyone is guilty of copyright infringement, intentional or otherwise, and (to quote him) "Once everyone is a criminal, no one is free." If you criminalize normal behavior there is no need to trump up charges to quash dissent. I'll admit at first I was skeptical of such rhetoric. The first part is undoubtedly true. In a very technical sense humming a few bars for a friend or the mere act of your computer passively caching pictures on websites as you surf could be considered copyright infringement. The second part - that it would be used to suppress free speech - I felt needed an example. The Russian Federation has generously provided one. Unquestionably this is simply the start, and you should take care not to fool yourself. This will happen in the United States. It wouldn't need to be by government, the private sector would have no problem causing a similar chilling effect on free speech.