So um...

I haven't been blogging much lately... because I don't seem to have an audience. So I've been posting lots of mini-commentaries to Facebook instead, where at least I have some Facebook Friends, but most of the time I can't get so much as a Like from my wife.

Oh, by the way... I got married late last year.

To find out how well I might fare as an active activist, I started my very first petition a little while ago, a click-bait test, and I asked all my friends to sign and share it, but none of them did. With repeated nagging, I managed to convince my wife to share it, but still nobody else would sign it. I'm taking this as a sign: nobody likes me (still). Either that or nobody cares about the topics I post about: the most important problems facing the world today, and the solutions to those problems. Between these two interpretations, it's really better if nobody likes me.

Or maybe there's some secret of social media I'm not getting.

I signed up on Medium recently - on the whole, it seems a lot better than BlogSpot, but I don't see how to make a link to my own stories, so ... I dunno. I'm not sure what to do with it.

Okay, non-readers, have a nice day!

Stop the Carnage of JJ Abrams!

I've started a petition to stop the destruction of multiple star systems at the hands of JJ Abrams. End the carnage - share this petition!

Oh, there's work.

IF YOU'RE UNEMPLOYED,
IT'S NOT BECAUSE
THERE ISN'T ANY WORK

Just look around: A housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs,

THERE IS WORK TO BE DONE.

So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs? It’s a world where work is not related to satisfying our needs, a world where work is only related to satisfying the profit needs of business.

This country was not built by the huge corporations or government bureaucracies. It was built by people who work. And, it is working people who should control the work to be done. Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else’s profits, the work won’t get done.

- An old poster from the New American Movement

DNC changes rules to block Lessig from debates

In case you still haven't learned about Lawrence Lessig and how U.S. political corruption works, I urge you to see Lessig's TED talk from two years ago - well before Lessig ever considered running for president.

Recently I offered to be part of the volunteer tech team that would help Larry Lessig in his campaign for president - his campaign to fix corruption in Washington, having earlier donated to his campaign, and before that to his MAYDAY SuperPAC. But Lessig has faced opposition from the democratic party itself, which included Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chafee in the first debate but excluded Lessig despite his strong fundraising base:

Webb raised $697,000, while Chafee raised a paltry $15,457 (including $4,121 from himself). Lessig’s numbers put him in the same league as fellow Democrat Martin O’Malley, who raised $1,283,000, though they’re both well behind Hillary Clinton at $30 million and Bernie Sanders at $26 million.

Of course, there's a limit to how much money you can raise when no one knows your name. Lessig knew that getting in the debates was the key to changing the game. To get in the debates, you have to make at least 1% in multiple national polls - which is a big problem when some pollsters wouldn't include Lessig on the list of candidates. Even so, he recently managed to get enough exposure to qualify for the next debate. Clearly, however, certain powerful individuals had a trick up their sleeve. I was saddened to receive this message from Larry today:

I am writing with sad news that has forced me to end my campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. The Democrats have now changed the rules for the debates, making it impossible for my campaign to continue.

As you know, the critical step in this improbable campaign has been to get into the debates. Though we raised more money than almost half of the field, and with you, built a vibrant campaign for reform, the party was slow to welcome us to this race. The polls have been slow to include me on the list of candidates.

But last week, we were making progress. A national poll by Monmouth found me at 1%. Three days ago, an NBC poll found the same. HuffPost Pollster now lists three polls at 1%. Since the Monmouth poll, no poll that included my name found me with less than 1%.

Under the rules for the debate announced by the DNC in August — and upon which we relied when we launched our campaign — the standard was 3 polls “in the six weeks prior to the debate.” Depending on which polls CBS counted, we either have qualified or could be just one poll away from qualifying for the debate.

But at the end of last week, I learned from my team that the DNC has now changed the rules. The standard is no longer the rule announced by the DNC Chair — 3 polls “in the six weeks prior to the debate.” The standard is now 3 polls “at least six weeks before the debate.” That means, for me to qualify, I had to have had 3 polls at 1% before October 10! You can read the @full and sad story as described by the leader of my campaign, Steve Jarding. The consequence of this change is that it is now impossible for me to get into the second debate.

I recently started writing predictions for the future in my phone. Last week I wrote:

If serious reforms do not happen in the 2016-2020 time frame, some parts of the US government will collapse soon afterward, creating a large poverty crisis when some public services halt abruptly. Due to media manipulation by the wealthy, many U.S. citizens like my Mom and Dad will simply blame the Democrats again, but in reality the Democrats are merely ineffectual, pacified to inaction by wealthy donors, while the Republicans—funded by a fraction of the top 5% of the top 1%—will have been the true destructive force. Some states will remain largely functional, due to responsible management, but the long-term future is unpredictable. Edit: perhaps the disaster will occur earlier, but the current economic situation is unprecedented so I am not prepared to estimate exactly when things will fall apart.

I know that many, many people agree with me about this: corporations and billionaires may thrive in the coming depression, but the U.S. federal government and the U.S. economy is on the brink of disaster. And the DNC is killing one of the best chances to avert this disaster. So, what more can I say? Good night, and good luck.

I have been a Democrat my entire life. I have proudly helped elect many of the leaders of our party including Tom Daschle, Bob Kerrey, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, and Tim Johnson to high office and I have served nearly four years at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as Communications Director and Senior Advisor. But I am sad to say that I have never experienced this kind of game playing and deception from party leaders in nearly 38 years of political activism. - Steve Jarding (campaign consultant for Lessig)

Say... who are these gatekeepers anyway? Who are these people that essentially get a sort of "veto" power to block grassroots candidates from running for president?

Reversing inflated health care costs: a free market approach

The Atlantic has a good analysis and a solid proposal for affordable health care in the U.S., which pays twice as much for health care as the average for industrialized countries. Although it was written 6 years ago, the inflated costs it talks about have only become worse since then.

It's very long, but IMO well worth reading. The techniques by which his proposal will reduce costs should excite Democrats and its focus on free markets should excite Republicans, but I fear that Democrats won't support it because it's tantamount to admitting Obamacare sucks, and Republicans won't support it because reducing health care costs would eat into the profits of hospitals and insurance providers.

Thus, those who want intelligent reforms will have to reform Congress first. Fix democracy first: vote Lessig in the primaries, and don't vote for anyone that doesn't support campaign finance reform.

Hello again, Deepak Obhrai

VoteTogether.ca asked its supporters to express their top priorities to their new MP, but my new MP is the old conservative MP (who clung to his seat with 48% of the vote). I wrote him anyway.

To be honest, I'm not a conservative, but I do think there are merits to common conservative beliefs, such as low taxes with minimal public services, a hands-off approach to governance (I mean, Calgary zoning regulations really tick me off sometimes!), a reluctance to support abortions, and so forth. I'm even sympathetic to the Conservative reaction against the niqab - hey, it creeps me out, too.

However, the Harper conservatives adopted bad policies that are not core elements of conservatism, such as the "war on data" (killing the long form census, sending libraries to landfills even if they contain the only remaining copies of certain publications, muzzling scientists), or C-23, a bill to reduce minority voter turnout, among other things. Plus, the conservatives maintained the long tradition that all parties in power enjoy, of rejecting election reforms (Direct Representation and Proportional Representation) that would make the power of people in Parliament reflect voters' wishes accurately.

So I would just urge the conservatives not to get in the way of electoral reform, and to favor small-c conservative values over big-R Republican ones.

The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing

When I was in my last year of university, trying to get my degree in Computer Engineering, one of the courses I took required me to choose a goal and write a program to fulfill that goal. My goal was to add unit inference to a programming language. This would detect, for example, that in "dist + 2 km", dist must be a quantity of kilometres; and if dist seems to have a different unit elsewhere in the same program, the program must have a bug in it.

One requirement of the course was to find and read five academic papers related to my goal, and I was indeed able to locate 5 academic papers about unit checking and unit inference. I remember there were multiple papers about unit checking that I was able to follow, but they weren't really useful because I wanted to go beyond unit checking and do the more complex task of unit inference (I won't bore you by explaining the difference between unit checking and unit inference; the essential difference is that unit inference is easier for a programmer to use, but harder for the programming language to perform. In other words, it shifts effort from the programmer to the computer.)

As I recall, the academic paper that ultimately seemed most relevant to my work was also the most incomprehensible. I'm unable to locate the paper now, 9 years later, but I remember being stuck on its use of obscure terminology such as "abelian groups" and other jargon, its reliance on an obscure programming language like ML or Lambda Calculus, and/or its use of notation that looked something like this:

(For non-programmers reading this, just let me clarify that most programmers, and perhaps most computer scientists, have never seen anything like this.)

Look, there are literally millions of professional programmers in the world. So here was a paper about concepts that all engineers know about (unit checking) that is relevant to most programmers (we all make bugs involving units at some point), for a goal that could benefit all programmers (unit inference), yet no matter how hard I tried, I could not comprehend that paper or any other paper that had useful information about the subject. In the end, the papers were worthless; I ignored them and figured out how to perform unit inference by myself.

Since that time I have tried hard to write in ways that my audience would be able to understand, and to use other communication techniques not used by those damn worthless papers (such as using good examples). Today I'd like to thank The Atlantic for reminding me about the importance of comprehensible writing, and for reminding academics that they're still doing a crappy job.

See also:

• Why academic jargon thrives
• The Myth of Academic Difficulty

Yahoo News supports climate change denier

A few years ago I began receiving unsolicited Yahoo News emails from Yahoo. Since I didn't already have a source of news in my email, I accepted and often read the articles it suggested.

I was a little surprised recently when Yahoo sent me to a "news" article with the headline "Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate":

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says. “Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.

Dr Evans says his discovery “ought to change the world”.

“But the political obstacles are massive,” he said.

Since this article flatly contradicts my own knowledge, I had to dig deeper.

To put it simply, 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming, and I have the impression that there is a consensus not just on the cause but also on the magnitude of the problem. It's a fairly strong consensus, and overturning that consensus will take more than one guy publishing a blog series that one newspaper calls a "discovery". For that reason alone, I would caution you not to take David Evans at his word. Wait for him to publish a properly peer-reviewed paper in a scientific journal, then see how other scientists respond to it.

But of course, at least one scientific group has already published a rebuttal. This rebuttal isn't to the "news" story, but rather to an article that David Evans himself published in the Financial Times. Have a look:

The main error Evans makes here is to claim that climate sensitivity is simply a number churned out by climate models. In reality, climate scientists have used many different lines of evidence to create numerous independent estimates of the planet's climate sensitivity. These include not just climate models, but also empirical observational data (Figure 1 and Figure 2).

And here is another article (blog post) from someone who himself debated David Evans on the topic of climate change.

Vote Together, Canada!

It's federal election day in Canada. It's important to defeat Harper, but with our broken voting system, that won't happen by simply voting for your favorite candidate. That's why Vote Together was set up, to help you choose which candidate in your riding has the best chance of defeating the Harper Conservative.

The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

Citizen groups in North America and elsewhere are concerned about the TPP for a variety of reasons. Among geeks, the biggest concern tends to be the copyright provisions, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation describes as "all that we feared".

If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever.

Despite being finalized, the text of the TPP is being kept secret and the text reviewed here was leaked by Wikileaks. A note for voters: Stephen Harper is a strong supporter of the TPP. Visit https://www.votetogether.ca/ to learn about how to defeat the conservatives. If you are still unsure who to vote for, vote for the parties that support electoral reform: NDP or Green.

Esperanto quick reference

The Esperanto Quick Reference 1.0 is a list of essential words that all Esperanto speakers should learn, together with English translations, packed onto four pages. Please let me know if you feel that a common Esperanto word is missing from the quick reference.

Windows users: looking for a way to type the letters ĉĝĥĵŝŭ with the hats on them? Download my Esperanto/Spanish/English keyboard layout for Windows. It mostly acts the same as normal English keyboard, but you can hold down the right Alt key and press cghjsw to get the Esperanto letters ĉĝĥĵŝŭ (and you can hold down the right Alt key and press aeioun to get the Spanish letters áéíóúñ). Shift+Right Alt gives capital accented letters, kompreneble.

Larry Lessig Announces Presidential Bid

A study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern produced the most terrifying graph about American democracy ever produced.

The graph shows the extent to which the average citizens' support for a policy predicts that the government will implement that policy. It is a straight horizontal line, which means simply that the opinion of average citizens doesn't matter.

That's why Larry Lessig is running for president. He intends to pass one law, that changes the way elections are funded and the way elections work. That's it. One bill, one law, and then he will resign and allow the Vice President to take his place.

I've donated hundreds to Lessig's work in the past, and I'm proud to give $100 more as his campaign begins. Ask yourself: how much is democracy in America worth to you? Put a dollar amount on it, and give it to Lawrence Lessig's campaign.

Today's politicians are bought. Tell your friends: it's time to buy them back.

Is AI a threat to humanity? No.

Three years ago I was telling y'all that there is no "singularity" that would suddenly make humanity obsolete. A couple of years after writing that article, I was alarmed to see science and engineering celebrities like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking claiming that superintelligent artificial intelligences might just murder us all if we aren't really, super careful.

I remain unphased. I find the singularity--of quickly-self-improving superintelligent AIs--as implausible today as I did three years ago. So it's nice to see this rebuttal from Edward Moore Geist ("MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).") And the guy has a lot more knowledge of AI history than me, so his arguments sound pretty good. FWIW.

White House responds: go to hell, Snowden

When Obama took office, the White House set up a web site for people to petition the office of the president. The White House pledged to respond to any petition with over 25,000 signatures; in his second term, the threshold was raised to 100,000. I followed the response to several petitions, and never once did I see the White House change their position on any subject in response to a petition. Still, usually they did, actually, respond.

In June of 2013, a petition was posted demanding that Edward Snowden receive a full pardon for his leaks about the NSA and U.S. surveillance practices. Not familiar with Edward Snowden? John Oliver explains:



The petition reads:

Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs.

It quickly passed 100,000 signatures, but the White House stayed silent on the matter for more than two years, before finally responding Tuesday morning, dumped simultaneously with responses to 19 other petitions in their "backlog". I found their response so vile and hypocritical, I don't even want to link to it (though I will). Vile, because they're using this petition's plea for mercy as an opportunity to intimidate would-be whistleblowers and convince Snowden's supporters to abandon him, and hypocritical, because they're suggesting Snowden should be punished for revealing the truth while claiming that the NSA should be allowed to engage in any number of secret, unconstitutional programs.

The flavor of the response is no surprise, though, since Obama has - for reasons that I cannot even guess - been running an unprecedented war on whistleblowers for years now. The response comes not from Obama, but from a "Lisa Monaco", counterterrorism advisor.

Slashdot readers had some insightful comments on the issue.

There is a high probably no Sunday talk show would have let him speak once they found out what he was going to say. They are all owned by giant media conglomerates you know. They wouldnt risk the wrath of the Federal government. Pretty sure Snowden went to Greenwald because he was one of the few journalists with the balls to do the story. The Guardian was hammered by the UK government for running it.

Remember when the CEO of Qwest defied the NSA plan to tap all data and phones lines after 9/11. The Federal government pulled all their contracts from Qwest, hammered their stock and then put him in prison for a phony securities rap. Qwest was a rare corporate hero among telecoms, long since swallowed up by CenturyLink who are just as bad as all the rest.

What Snowden did was technically illegal.

For the record, what every single one of the Founding Fathers of the United States did was "technically illegal", too.

Boston Tea Party? technically illegal
Rosa Parks technically illegal
Susan B Anthony? technically illegal
Martin Luther King, Jr? technically illegal

So, Ms Lisa Monaco, go jump in the motherfucking sea. You suggest that the "right way" for Mr Snowden to react to finding that his government was doing illegal shit would be to "speak out about it". Well, madame spokesperson, how the fuck do you "speak out" about something that it's illegal to disclose?

Under FISA he is not allowed to use wistleblowing as a defense...

Actually, it's worse than that. Two of the counts he's charged with are violations of the Espionage Act, which was intended to prevent US citizens from colluding with US enemies during World War I. Unfortunately, the law provides no room for affirmative defenses at all: if secrets were leaked, you're guilty, and the court isn't allowed to consider even the slightest sliver of the surrounding context. Did you uncover something illegal? Doesn't matter. Is this course of action the only one that would have turned up malfeasance by intelligence agencies? That can't be discussed.

The reason the Obama administration's insistence that Snowden come back to the US to "face a fair trial" is so flagrantly disingenuous is that the act that he's charged under, by virtue of its complete lack of defenses, is explicitly and intentionally designed to result in anything but a fair trial. They're inviting him home for a railroading, and it doesn't matter whether it's done in private or public: he's fucked.


From the petition:

If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and—importantly—accept the consequences of his actions.

He IS dealing with the consequences. That's why he left.

What Lisa Monaco is pushing for is martyrdom.

We are supposed to be a country of laws. We should not have officials demanding martyrdom of those who oppose their policies.

More importantly, the message here is that being right doesn't matter; being good and obedient preserves you, while being right only makes you a martyr. If you expose the corruption of those in power, that's well and good, and a great civil duty; however, you must understand that you will be punished.

The implication is that, civil duty or not, you should think long and hard about pitching your own skin into the cause, because we sure as hell aren't going to reward you just for doing a great service to humanity. Read carefully and you'll notice the government said he'd even have to accept the consequences of speaking out and engaging in constructive protest: they decree you can dissent against their rule, and that's well and good, as long as they can punish you for your dissent--which is precisely the situation in North Korea, where you may speak out against Kim Jong-Un, and, importantly, accept the consequences of speaking out against him.

Correcting false ideas:

he made no effort to be a whistleblower

False. There are e-mails that have been more or less corroborate that indicate he DID raise the issue up the chain of command. He was basically told not to worry his pretty little head about it and get back to work.

Selling IC secrets to the highest bidder is hardly whistleblowing

Are you aware of any evidence he every sold any secrets? I am not.

Why do people think he's not going to get an open trial? OR a fair one?

It doesn't matter whether he gets an open trial or not. The trial quite simply will not be fair. That is more or less a foregone conclusion. The laws he is charged under basically allow for no context to be considered even if what he did was morally correct and justified. He quite simply cannot get a fair trial.

The outcome may be obvious, but that doesn't make the trial unfair....

A ludicrous argument because it presumes the laws are just. Laws frequently are wildly unfair and you cannot have a fair trial when you are being judged under unfair laws.

Jury Nullification is Snowden's only hope if he returns to face the music.

In most of the US, its borderline illegal to even MENTION JN in court. judges will kick you out, lock you up, threaten you, try to scare you. voire dire does all it can to try to reject jurors that even KNOW what JN is. and if you tell them during VD that you don't know what JN is and then later, they find out you do, you are in contempt.

its all neatly stacked up so that your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS are not vocalized or listed or communicated to you.

"nice liberty you got there; would be a shame if something were to happen to it"

Mr. Snowden's dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country...

Here it is, put up or shut up: name one single way that I personally am less "secure" due to Snowden's actions.

That's it. One single example.

Either that, or quit pushing this bullshit.

Right now, he's running away from the consequences of his actions.

Unlike James Clapper who enjoys no consequences for his actions - lying under oath to Congress.

Obama's administration is going to go down in history as the one that best highlights how politically well connected players are "too big to jail"...

And here's a random comment that vocalizes what I thought the first time I heard the term "Department of Homeland Security":

What do you expect from a country that has a Department of Homeland Security? It sounds like something from Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. (Fatherland, motherland, homeland ...)

Finally, a reminder from Edward Snowden himself:

I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing.

P.S. Hi, Sweet Sher!

Big Money Breaks Democracy

The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less, a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance filings found.

If you're an American, statistically, it's a safe bet that you don't personally donate anything to any political candidate. Only 2% of Americans do. But if you did donate, you'd be overshadowed by the big donors. Only one single candidate in the U.S. congress gets the majority of his funding from small donors giving $200 or less (that's Alan Grayson, (D) Florida).

That's why I just gave $100 to MayDay.US, the SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. They have a plan to change who buys congress. Instead of the ultra-rich, ordinary Americans will choose who gets campaign funds. Proposals include (R) letting taxpayers earmark the first $200 of their tax dollars to political candidates, to (D) the government matching donations up to 9:1 to candidates who only accept small-dollar donations. Any of the five proposals supported by Mayday.US and Rootstrikers will fundamentally change American politics, and restore Congress to the functioning entity it used to be.

Oxfam: by 2016, 1% of the people will have 50% of all the wealth in the world

In other words, unless something changes very quickly, the top 1% will soon have more stuff than the bottom 99%, more than everyone else combined.

"It is time our leaders took on the powerful vested interests that stand in the way of a fairer and more prosperous world.

"Business as usual for the elite isn’t a cost-free option – failure to tackle inequality will set the fight against poverty back decades. The poor are hurt twice by rising inequality – they get a smaller share of the economic pie and because extreme inequality hurts growth, there is less pie to be shared around." - Oxfam executive director Winnie Byanyima

An equally striking figure is that 85 individual billionaires have the same wealth as the bottom 50% of the world’s population. The wealth of 85 people equals the wealth of roughly 3,688,005,000 others living here.

And now, a few words from some random billionaire that I happen to agree with. Speaking at the "Business of Luxury" Summit in Monaco, billionaire Johann Rupert reportedly said that tension between the rich and poor will increase as robots and artificial intelligence fuel mass unemployment:

We cannot have 0.1 percent of 0.1% taking all the spoils. It’s unfair and it is not sustainable.

How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare? We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.

We're in for a huge change in society. Get used to it. And be prepared.

PSA: The Citizens United era of money in politics

The amount of money it takes to get elected to get elected to congress has skyrocketed, with over 3.6 billion dollars spent in the last election cycle on congressional races alone.

Think about it: how much money is spent, on average, for each member of the 468 members elected to Congress? Answer: 7.8 million dollars—and that's just an average. "Safe seats" where the winner is almost assured will probably cost less, while tight races and senate races will cost extra. Since the U.S. is a two-party system, that means about half of the money is spent on Republicans and half on Democrats. You might think that a Congressman making $174,000 per year, plus benefits, has a cushy job, but the need to raise more than ten times your own salary in "donations" from the rich, just to keep your job, must be kind of stressful. But it's not that bad; they don't have to raise all that money themselves—in fact, after Citizens United they may not be legally allowed to "coordinate" with some of their their top funders at all! And I'm dead serious about "donations from the rich": out of 435 members of congress, only one (Alan Grayson) got the majority of his campaign funding from "small donations" ($200 or less). So don't feel too sorry for these guys; congressmen that leave to become lobbyists receive a 1452% raise (on average).

To learn more on the new "Citizens United Era" of money in politics, here's a handy interactive infographic.

The Citizens United era of money in politics, explained

Support Corruption Reform (a.k.a. Campain Finance Reform)!

Cybersecurity and the Tylenol Murders

When a criminal started lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly sprang into action to ensure consumer safety. It increased its internal production controls, recalled the capsules, offered an exchange for tablets, and within two months started using triple-seal tamper-resistant packaging. The company focused on fixing weak points in their supply chain so that users could be sure that no one had interfered with the product before they purchased it.

This story is taught in business schools as an example of how a company chose to be proactive to protect its users. The FDA also passed regulations requiring increased security and Congress ultimately passed an anti-tampering law. But the focus of the response from both the private and the public sector was on ensuring that consumers remained safe and secure, rather than on catching the perpetrator. Indeed, the person who did the tampering was never caught.

This story springs to mind today as Congress considers the latest cybersecurity and data breach bills. To folks who understand computer security and networks, it's plain that the key problem are our vulnerable infrastructure and weak computer security, much like the vulnerabilities in Johnson & Johnson’s supply chain in the 1980s. As then, the failure to secure our networks, the services we rely upon, and our individual computers makes it easy for bad actors to step in and “poison” our information.

The way forward is clear: We need better incentives for companies who store our data to keep it secure.

Yet none of the proposals now in Congress are aimed at actually increasing the safety of our data. Instead, the focus is on “information sharing,” a euphemism for more surveillance of users and networks. These bills are not only wrongheaded, they seem to be a cynical ploy to use the very real problems of cybersecurity to advance a surveillance agenda, rather than to actually take steps to make people safer. EFF has long opposed these bills and we will continue to do so.

Congress could step in on any one of these topic to encourage real security for users—by creating incentives for greater security, a greater downside for companies that fail to do so and by rewarding those companies who make the effort to develop stronger security. It can also shine a light on security failures by requiring public reporting for big companies.

Yet none of these options are even part of the legislative debate; they often aren't even mentioned. Instead the proposed laws go the other way—giving companies immunity if they create more risk with your data by “sharing” it with the government, where it could still be hacked. "Information sharing" is focused on forensics—finding who did it and how after the fact—rather than on protecting computer users in the first place.

It's as if the answer for Americans after the Tylenol incident was not to put on tamper-evident seals, or increase the security of the supply chain, but only to require Tylenol to "share" its customer lists with the government and with the folks over at Bayer aspirin. We wouldn't have stood for such a wrongheaded response in 1982, and we shouldn't do so now."

- Cindy Cohn at EFF (lightly abbreviated)

Professional Russian Trolls

There's a new reason not to believe everything you read on the internet—especially if it has something to do with Russia or the Ukraine.

Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities. Russian domestic affairs were also a major topic. Last year, after a financial crisis hit Russia and the ruble collapsed, the professional trolls left optimistic posts about the pace of recovery. Savchuk also says that in March, after the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, she and her entire team were moved to the department that left comments on the websites of Russian news outlets and ordered to suggest that the opposition itself had set up the murder.

- The Agency, NyTimes.com And then there's this key ingredient that is completely missing from my own blog:

[...] the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines.

And why would people work as trolls? High rates of pay. Apparently 41,000 rubles/mo ($777 USD) is a big deal in Russia.

And what's in it for the powerful officials and businessmen who are paying the trolls, when so many of the trolls' messages are of poor quality?

“The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” Volkov said, when we met in the office of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it’s very important what is their first impression.” The Internet still remains the one medium where the opposition can reliably get its message out. But their message is now surrounded by so much garbage from trolls that readers can become resistant before the message even gets to them. [...] Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.

Which is worse? An internet where truth is actively censored, as in China, or one where the truth is censored by glut—simply by being drowned out by louder liars, as in Russia? (note: Russia also uses various techniques to keep independent traditional media quiet, and ranked 148th out of 179 countries in the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders. The U.S. ranks 46th, and Canada ranks 18th.)

As the NYT article demonstrates, too, Russia is quite interested in spreading Russian propaganda in English-speaking countries. Know your trolls, people.

My hopes for Alberta

leadnow.ca asked its members to send letters to Rachel Notley, the new premier of Alberta. Here's mine.

Hi, my name is David. I have two things I want to say to the new NDP leadership.

First, please consider adding electoral reform to the agenda. It's always been difficult being a small party in a first-past-the-post electoral system. It's an unstable system that gave Wildrose more than double the amount of seats as PC (21-10) with fewer votes (24%-28%). It's a system that unjustly rewards largeness and unjustly penalizes smallness. And it's a system that makes many people (especially me!) feel as if their vote doesn't really matter. Now that you're suddenly the big party, you have a chance to set this right.

The federal NDP has come out in favor of a mixed-member proportional electoral system. While this is not my favorite system, it's a lot better than FPTP and I would support it gladly and eagerly. Now, I don't know if anyone cares what I think, but this blog post describes the voting system I would propose. It's simple, it makes sure every vote counts, and it gives voters a range of real, meaningful choices:

http://qism.blogspot.ca/2015/04/enjoy-true-democracy-with-sdr.html

At the very least, you should simply remove one sentence from the ballot instructions. That's the sentence that says something like "Mark one box only, or your ballot will be spoiled." Remove this sentence, and we will have a (somewhat) superior electoral system called Approval Voting.

My second hope is that the NDP will move forward to combat climate change by supporting alternative forms of energy: wind and, more controversially, but still very important, molten salt nuclear reactors. Old-fashioned boiling water reactors are expensive and although they are statistically safer than oil and coal, they have a bad reputation.

I like to use an analogy with airplanes. Like nuclear energy, people have a fear of flying that is wildly out of proportion with the actual danger (or lack thereof). Yet somehow, people still decide to fly. And more importantly, from the perspective of cost, people don't go out to protest building airports near cities based on "safety concerns". When a plane crashes, people don't say "we need to stop building new and improved planes immediately! Let's just keep using the oldest, least safe ones! Maybe someday we'll stop using airplanes completely!" Yet somehow this is exactly what happens in the nuclear sector.

There are some fantastic nuclear reactor concepts out there, such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). Designs like this are potentially both much cheaper, and much safer, than traditional reactors. And if Alberta is going to stop being a leading cause of climate change, it's going to need to replace the tar sands with something clean. The science is clear: much of the oil (to say nothing of the coal) must be left in the ground. By taking the lead in pursuing LFTR and other new reactor designs, perhaps Alberta can do that without destroying its own economy.

I know this is a hard problem for politicians to tackle. It'll be hard to blame you if you take the easy route and do nothing, or implement a half-hearted policy that steadfastly avoids using the "N" word. But please, this matter has been urgent for years, and only gets worse the longer we wait. I urge you to look for opportunities to lead a shift to cleaner energy.

LFTR in 5 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY