Benlog

We are “at war,” whether we think we should be or not. A number of Americans are making decisions on that basis: that we are at war. And it is in times of war that we must be most – not least – careful about protecting civil liberties and due process, because it is in times of war that we are most vulnerable to abuses in the name of supposedly unique circumstances.

So it’s important to remember that due process – the guarantees that the accused will have the right to a fair hearing, to a speedy trial, to face their accusers, etc… – is meant to protect the innocent. For the past 3 years, we have held hundreds of individuals prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. None ever had a fair hearing, none was given any right to even try to prove their innocence.

Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that this situation was unacceptable. As a result, we’re finding out that some people really were held for years without cause. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, no one’s perfect, including our military and law enforcement. We all make mistakes.

But that’s what due process is about: making room for mistakes and making sure innocent people don’t pay for these mistakes. Due process protects the innocent. If we don’t take basic measures to protect innocent people, then what, exactly, are we doing?

I said I wouldn’t be too political, and I’m trying to keep it that way. But sometimes, you have to say a few things about facts, science, and this all-too-elusive thing we call Truth.

The current administration has long had a difficult relationship with the truth. Not everything can be interpreted as fact, of course, and many things are open to interpretation, so one should be careful with that word – Truth. But some things are facts. Some things are undeniable. Some things are simply true and some other things are simply untrue. And just because you win an election doesn’t mean you are a source of truths.

Take the recent study of abstinence programs in the US (CNN article, PDF report). These programs are making a number of amazing claims:

• CLAIM 1: condoms are 31% ineffective against HIV transmission. In fact, they are less than perfectly effective less than 2% of the time, and that statistic was obtained under worse-case scenario testing.
• CLAIM 2: 5-10% of women who have abortions become sterile. Others have risk of having children with mental retardation. This is completely bogus. In fact, there is no increased risk at all.
• CLAIM 3: HIV can be transmitted through sweat or tears. This is completely untrue according to the CDC (even Bush’s CDC).
• CLAIM 4: mutual masturbation can lead to pregnancy. Yes, it’s okay to laugh.

And the scary thing is, when Dr. Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader and licensed medical doctor, is asked about the HIV sweat-and-tears claim, he dodges the question, saying only it would be “really difficult” for transmission to occur this way. That is criminal behavior. Misinformation of this kind, when it has been known for 15 years that such transmission is impossible, should result in the AMA revoking Mr. Frist’s license.

But it’s not going to stop here. Today, Zell Miller congratulated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for taking “a lot of undeserved criticism for daring to speak the truth.” Someone should ask when it was proven that the Swift Boat Veterans told the truth? The Navy report into the issue discredited their claims. No new report has been issued since. So why the celebration?

Well, according to Swift Boat Vets, they “accomplished their mission,” which was to “ensure that John Kerry didn’t become commander in chief.” So it seems the truth was never really their concern. The Navy report dismissed their claims, but at least John Kerry didn’t get elected. Truth plays no part in their goals, even though the word “Truth” features prominently in their association’s name.

As for why Zell Miller is congratulating them, I suppose it’s because he and other Republicans think Bush’s election means they were right. That’s the sad state of affairs today. We have an administration who believes that, because they were elected, their opinions are inherently truths.

This Friday, at the Berkman Center‘s Internet and Society 2004 Conference, I’ll be on a panel on electronic voting from 6:30-8:00pm.

So, if you’re willing to give up your Friday Evening and you’re in Cambridge, you should check it out. Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard Law will be moderating, and that alone is worth the trip.

Here I am at the W3C meeting representing Creative Commons. Creative Commons is clearly catching on: whereas I had to explain CC to just about every W3C member at the last meeting 6 months ago, people now come up to me to tell me how much they like CC. I suspect the Firefox search engine hook has a lot to do with it.

And where copyright is concerned, techies quickly shift the conversation to patents, a fairly important topic to the W3C and the web community at large. It’s during one of these discussions that it occurred to me that software patents behave very much like weapons of mass destruction.

Software patents are used mostly for defensive purposes, as a kind of threat of potential action: software companies stockpile patents as quickly as they can but rarely make use of them. If a party chooses to make use of a patent against another party, the effect is usually devastating, especially if the other party chooses to countersue using its patent portfolio. The fines resulting from a patent infringement lawsuit are enormous (Eolas patent: $521 Million).

What ends up happening is that large software companies have an understood agreement that they will not sue each other for patent infringement, because the effect of suing and countersuing would be too much for either party to deal with. A sort of Mutually Assured Destruction by Patent Litigation, if you will. Of course, the small companies which have a much smaller patent arsenal cannot compete and are forced to negotiate to stay alive.

The situation is changing rapidly for the worse: Patent Litigation Mutually Assured Destruction assumes that if someone attacks you with a patent, you have the ability to strike back. That’s the “Mutual” in Mutually Assured. But what if the party suing you for patent litigation isn’t involved in software development of any kind? What if you can’t strike back? It’s what happened with Eolas. It’s what’s going to be happening more and more with Patent Firms like Intellectual Ventures. These companies have no software development activity, so they cannot be sued. Yet they have significant patent litigation activity.

In the world of WMDs, the equivalent is a terrorist group. While the Soviets would have been mad to use a nuclear weapon against the US, what does the terrorist group have to fear? They have no country against which the US could strike back. They hold the weapons, but no real targets to equivocate the Mutually Assured Destruction concept.

Certainly, it is too extreme to say that patent firms are the equivalent of Patent Terrorists. But it’s important to note how the precarious balance of defensive patent portfolios is about to be shattered by Patent-Only firms, in very much the same way that the precarious balance of MAD during the Cold War was shattered on 9/11.

There are legitimate uses to patents, but we’re about to enter an era where they will do far more harm than good. And even the large companies will realize that we’re in need of serious patent reform.

UPDATE: An astute reader notes that “Intellectual Property Terrorist” muddles the issue. I’ve edited the text to read “Patent Terrorist.”

Starting with some discussions at Crypto 2004, a few of us cryptographers discussed setting up new standards for evaluating voting systems.

We were specifically worried about the design-oriented, pass/fail nature of current standards. Instead, we want performance-oriented, multi-dimensional tests. Basically, instead of saying “machine X is good for voting because it uses DES encryption,” a fairly useless statement, we want a testing authority to say “machine X receives a 7.6 score on confidentiality and a 3.5 score on usability because 95% of users maintained voter secrecy and 40% of users were able to express their vote correctly.”

So we got together and wrote up a paper in this month’s Communications of the ACM. If you want to learn more, visit the web site and sign up to the newsletter.

This past Tuesday, just before election results, I gave a talk at Harvard Law School’s Digital Democracy class on “Secure and Fair Elections.” In my new attempt to teach as much as I can to as many people as I can, I’m posting all of my slides online in various usable formats.

Check out the slides.

Boston Magazine‘s Jake Halpern wrote an article about my work in this month’s Boston Magazine.

Overall, as a high-level overview, it’s a decent article. Of course, there are a number of exaggerations I’d like to correct:

• I’m not a star PhD student. I’m just a normal PhD student.
• I’m not sure about the supposed “nodding somberly”, “heavy sigh”, and “mischievious smile”… as if somehow I have this enormous burden on my shoulders. I’m just one researcher looking at voting machines.
• the scenario about rigged voting machines that use a specific time slot as a covert channel is not new. Nor is it incredibly likely. It’s just a quick scenario used to explain why simple arguments like “but the voting machine doesn’t know the candidates ahead of time, how can it be rigged?” are not sufficient to make me feel safe about DRE voting machines.

The difficulty in talking about this voting stuff (certainly the same issue that many other scientists deal with) is that people expect a black-and-white outcome. Machines are totally safe. Or, the world is going to crumble because these machines are the work of Satan. The truth is somewhere in the middle, of course. And the only way we can ensure safety is by having some people (like me) remain paranoid.

Lessig is right: John Kerry lost the election and we need to admit it [ah, it looks like Kerry is admitting it right now]. My friend Jon was right: I am woefully out of touch with how Americans think.

There will be many theories about this election. The Republicans brought out the vote by inspiring fear (of terrorism) and disgust (of gay marriage), especially by pushing anti-gay-mariage amendments in key states (like Ohio). Young people didn’t vote as much as we’d hoped. Edwards didn’t pull out all the stops in the South. Kerry didn’t inspire enough. Etc.. etc… There’s some truth to all of these theories, but the only result that matters is that Bush won. Both the Electoral Vote and the Popular Vote.

I worry about the future of our country. I worry that the rest of the world will truly lose respect for the US given Bush’s stupid foreign policy. I worry that, as we lose allies, our security will falter. I worry about a number of ecological disasters under Bush. And, most importantly, I worry that this country is moving towards religious extremism, where facts are quickly dismissed in favor of ideology.

So, where do we go from here? For me, this is a realization that I need to step back and stop spending so much time thinking about politics, and more time doing what I know how to do. I’m not a politician. I’m a scientist, a technologist, and a teacher. If more reasonable, fact-based policy is ever to return to American Politics, then it can only happen through education. And so I will work to do my tiny part in that. I will seek every opportunity to educate as many people as I can about science and technology. I will work to build technologies that help people share knowledge and educate themselves. I will do this because I believe that more information, more knowledge is always a good thing. I believe that, the more people know, the more humble and reasonable they become.

It’s a small piece, but it’s a piece on which I can act. For me, it’s time to stop thinking abstractly, and time to start acting. This is my last blog post on politics. From now on, this blog will be dedicated to science and technology: what’s new, what’s interesting, what’s worth thinking about.

I’ll leave politics to the politicians, and hope the damage over the next 4 years isn’t as bad as I fear.

Bloggers – Atrios and Kos – are upset about an optical scan failure in Daytona Beach, Florida.

In fact, you have to give credit to the election officials who did exactly the right thing. With tens of thousands of voting machines out there, some are bound to fail. Apparently, as soon as the election officials detected this failure, they did exactly the right thing: they contacted party representatives and proceeded to secure the ballots. They then recounted the ballots with party representatives present.

What more could you ask for? This is exactly what you want election officials to do in case of failure. And certainly, as Atrios at least points out, it would be much worse with a non-paper electronic voting machine.

Now, the questions to really ask are: what allowed the officials to detect this failure? Are election officials at all polling locations given information on what red flags to look out for? In other words, were we just lucky to detect this failure, or is there a good process in place to detect these failures with high probability? That’s really what the press should be looking into.

Alright, putting aside my hopes and trying to think objectively, I’m making a prediction. I believe John Kerry will win the election with 295 electoral votes, and 53% of the popular vote. I have at least one friend who believes I’m woefully out of touch with the American people; he expects a solid Bush win. That may be. I guess we’ll know next week!