Election Got You Down? GOOD.

My social media feeds are physically dripping with existential angst about the Presidential election. My conservative friends were losing their shit over either Hillary and her lies, or the fact that Trump is leading their party off a cliff. My liberal friends were salty about Bernie getting the shaft from the DNC. There was a lot of talk about the lesser of two evils.

I have been making my saving throw against angst-filled rants, until now. Everyone I know is in some sort of funk over the election, and I’m just sitting here like “Welcome to my world. You’re stuck here until January, but look on the bright side: AT LEAST YOU DON’T LIVE HERE.”

For me, there was never a good choice. The whole election was like a shit sandwich and the whole country spent like two years arguing over which end to bite into. It never occurred to anyone to question why the sandwich was full of shit. This “None Of The Above” view of American politics is pretty much where I live my life. I hate at least half of the liberal platform, and at least half of the conservative platform. This doesn’t make me a moderate, it makes me a political misfit.

I was pretty well braced for disillusion. I voted for Obama, and watched him pivot from promises of government transparency and closing Git-mo, to a growth of the surveillance state. I like gay marriage and healthcare, don’t get me wrong. Those were good things that I could get behind. I just *really* hated Bush’s illegal spying; Obama campaigned against it but then turned around and made it bigger. *Then* he equipped it with assassination drones. Maybe it wasn’t Obama who did it personally, but he was supposed to be steering the ship. It happened on his watch and even if he didn’t make it happen, he certainly failed to stop it. Maybe Bush did the same thing and he wasn’t such a bad guy after all?

I was *this* close to making a protest vote for either Stein or Johnson, but my principles gave way to my self-preservation instinct and I grudgingly voted for Clinton. I am mad that Trump won because I feel like I got robbed of my statement. I felt pretty dirty voting for her, and then she had the audacity to lose. The world-as-we-knew-it was wrong about her being the presumptive nominee and now I can’t smugly say “Don’t blame me, I voted for… Stein? I guess?”

My politics can be summed up in two basic talking points: I hate cops and I hate corporations. I am a firm believer in social progress and a limited federal government that actually does it’s fucking job. There are too many laws, too many jails, and too much of that enriches corporations at the expense of people’s civil liberties. Too much of that corporate enrichment happens at the expense of people of color. Also there are not enough independent media companies, banks, and telecoms to serve those that big corporations ignore. I don’t know if I dislike capitalism, or just the corporatism that we practice all over the world. Maybe well-executed capitalism is like well-executed socialism and only exists in the fantasies of economists and political scientists. I don’t really care, I’d rather focus on the sharing economy. I do know for certain that The Social Contract isn’t socialism. It’s the consideration of the governed for allowing governors.

A sick part of me wanted Trump to win. Not the actual me, just that little crazy part that envisions the car crashing when you have to slam on your brakes suddenly. You know, that crazy death-wish part, that kind of fantasizes about the zombie apocalypse that your rational mind is always telling to shut up.

Any way, I wanted very badly to say “Look, if I vote for her, can you all just promise to work to make things better?”

Well, now it’s time to work on making it better. The thing that I want to work on is not political parties and why they all suck. I am done with believing in elections for Democrats and Republicans. I’m still gonna vote, I just won’t invest in the idea of elections producing results that I want. I’d rather invest that energy into writing about something else.

That something else is basically doing away with our country’s reliance on central authority. I think we should have a government, I just think it shouldn’t be such a big factor in our lives and our culture. I think we should have a mass media, but it should be free from corporate influence and cartel ownership. I think we should see America for what it is: a great nation that was exceptional, but is capable of decadence and corruption, just like any other country.

The FBI asking Apple to Backdoor an iPhone is a Rubicon for Privacy

The US District Court of California has asked Apple to backdoor a locked iPhone for the FBI. This isn’t a request to unlock a single phone, this is a request for Apple to build a tool that lets the FBI circumvent the security on the iPhone… as in basically all iPhones, which will then set a precedent for all smart phones.

“Make no mistake: This is unprecedented, and the situation was deliberately engineered by the FBI and Department of Justice to force a showdown that could define limits our civil rights for generations to come. This is an issue with far-reaching implications well beyond a single phone, a single case, or even Apple itself.”

In case this is your first time reading about why government mandated back doors are a universally bad idea, here is the quick list:

1. A digital backdoor, much like a real back door, can be used by anyone, not just those authorized to access it. Back doors make excellent targets for criminals, spies, and other bad actors. These things get discovered, and then they get misused. If you are a criminal, and you are looking to steal data, knowing that there is a backdoor in a system lets you focus your cracking efforts.
2. Encryption is only good when it’s secure. Insecure crypto is worse than useless because it creates a false sense of safety and control. This is why Digital Rights Management technologies never work. No matter how you slice it, a purpose built entry point is a vulnerability. Once you introduce a back door, or a “Golden Key” it invalidates the security (and value) of the entire system (see point 1). An insecure phone just isn’t worth as much as a secure one.
3. The bad guys you are trying to catch are bad guys. They don’t give a single runny shit about government regulations. This means that the bad guys who use crypto will simply switch to new illegal tools that don’t have back doors. When the SOPA bill threatened to block DNS for sites accused of piracy, tools immediately began to surface that would defeat the blocks, before the bill was even voted on.
4. In the case of criminals, government mandated back doors would create a market for secure tools. These tools wouldn’t be Made In America like the *iPhone. Back doors would devalue the iPhone (see point 3) and add value to technologies that aren’t made in the US. Meanwhile, Federal Law Enforcement still couldn’t access phones that belong to terrorists. All the damage done by this would be collateral because the only people affected by this mandate would be innocent bystanders.

There are *tons* of other reasons why back doors are bad, but those are the top 4. Cory Doctorow sums the argument against back doors fairly succinctly in an article in The Guardian:

That’s really the argument in a nutshell. Oh, we can talk about whether the danger is as grave as the law enforcement people say it is, point out that only a tiny number of criminal investigations run up against cryptography, and when they do, these investigations always find another way to proceed. We can talk about the fact that a ban in the US or UK wouldn’t stop the “bad guys” from getting perfect crypto from one of the nations that would be able to profit (while US and UK business suffered) by selling these useful tools to all comers. But that’s missing the point: even if every crook was using crypto with perfect operational security, the proposal to back-door everything would still be madness.

The Law Enforcement community declares war on crypto in one form or another once or twice a decade. Every time they do, we as digital citizens need to stand up and say “NO!” They will keep trying, and we have to keep fighting, every time. It really is that important.

*The iPhone isn’t made in America either, but Apple does employ Americans around the country. Russian mobsters or Romanian cyber-criminals presumably don’t employ many Americans.

The Growing Problem of Police Overreaction Against Minorities

This video is must be the millionth video in a growing collection of a Caucasian police officer using what appears to be excessive force against an unarmed (and in this case, under-aged) African-American. This is such a common occurrence that it barely registers anymore.

Anyone who has participated in a military operation in a foreign country will tell you that sooner or later, some members of the occupying force will grow to treat the local with indifference, then hostility, and eventually hatred. The cultural differences become annoying, and those differences can galvanize into a kind of Us-Against-Them mentality. It happened to me on a humanitarian aid mission in Nicaragua, and to a certain extent when I was stationed in Germany. It happens when you are surrounded by people who are vastly different from you, and yet you are sort of discouraged from integrating into the local culture.

I think that this is what is happening to many police officers. When you take away the racial, political, and cultural differences, what remains is an attitude among many cops that they are essentially an invading force. Many of them believe that they are there to force order onto a population that has no concept of law and order. This is different from the problem of the militarization of police forces, because this isn’t just militarizing the equipment and tactics of a police force, it’s militarizing the attitudes, and in some cases the doctrine of a police force.

That attitude is fine for soldiers and marines going down-range on foreign soil, but never for a police officer. A police officer should be part of the community that he or she is policing, not an invader. A police officer should work with the community he or she is policing, and not treating the community as the enemy.

It’s this sort of routine overreaction that makes people, myself included, no longer trust the police. From a tactical standpoint, that’s a terrible place to be in, seeing as how citizens outnumber the police by a significant margin.