“Where was the outrage then?” ask the trolls

posted on 8 May, 2013 with tags ,

Working on drones, and increasingly in the conversation around Google Glass, I keep hearing a common refrain from people who don’t understand other people’s concerns. “There are surveillance cameras on every corner in major cities, helicopters with cameras overhead, and constant tracking in a million other ways,” the argument goes, “and where is the outrage about those things?”

I find this very strange. For one thing, it seems to imply that society’s got one shot to weigh in on a new branch of technology when its root is being formed. Like there’s a speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace moment where if the outrage isn’t sufficiently intense then we have to take our lumps and accept new developments forever. Of course, though, that’s crazy.

But for another thing, I can tell you where the outrage was. A lot of the concerns around drones and Glass that are being picked up and amplified now are the exact same concerns that people were voicing around ubiquitous CCTV cameras and warrantless wiretapping and the TSA and what-have-you.

I don’t think, generally, you should be able to silence an argument because somebody wasn’t making a similar argument earlier. But it seems especially ill-advised to me to try to catch the privacy community in such a loophole. The group of people that are actively outraged about privacy violations may be small, but it is fiercely principled.

So, in response to “Where was the outrage then?” First, it doesn’t matter. Here is the outrage now. But second, it was always there, simmering beneath the surface, and if you haven’t seen it then maybe you’re not the expert on these issues that you thought you were.

How to defeat terrorism

posted on 15 April, 2013 with tags , , , , , , , ,

Bruce Schneier’s essay on today’s bombings in Boston helped shake me out of the daze I found myself in since hearing the news this morning. I am far away from Boston, and knew nobody in the blast radius, but the ability to keep refreshing feeds to read more news, hear more rumors, see more pictures, made the tragedy feel immediate.

Acts of terror are extremely uncommon, but they manage to play on that immediacy to cause real, self-inflicted damage that ripples out to orders of magnitude more people. The cruel measure of “success” for an act of terror, then, isn’t how much harm is done in the explosion itself, but whether society’s reaction allows the terrible memories to fester and continue to disrupt our lives.

As Schneier notes, we can’t attain absolute security, and we can’t guarantee our safety from people who want to destroy it. But we can rein in the ratcheting of the security theater that follows, and demonstrate that terrorism is ineffective against people who refuse to be terrorized.

Expanding on that just a bit: one of the most pernicious effects of terrorism is to undermine the bonds of trust and good faith in society. So one way to fight that is to celebrate the first responders and other heroes to come out of today. Celebrating the stories of kindness from after the bombing, many of which are truly remarkable. As has been widely noted, in the footage of the explosion, you can see people running towards the smoke, looking to help whoever has been caught. Noting that selflessness helps avoid perpetuating a terrible and cynical impression of human nature. Cory Doctorow wrote recently about the dangers of that misguided belief:

This is the worst kind of lie: the lie that makes itself true. When enough people believe the libel against the human race, the vile calumny that ‘‘human nature’’ would have us all at each others’ throats were it not for coercive force, it becomes a truth.

Many people online shared a beautiful quote from Mr. Fred Rogers about dealing with scary news. It’s been clipped in a few places, but I think the whole thing is worth sharing.

“My mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”

Today as we look, even through tears, for the helpers, for the caring people in the world, we are not disappointed.

These are the things I think about, but just as important are the things I do. In the shockwave of today’s news, I made two decisions about concrete things I will do.

  1. Donate blood. I try to do so every 56 days, but it slips. When tragedy strikes, though, it’s a good reminder that you can do something that can literally save a life. Of course, my blood in San Francisco won’t do much for the people in Boston, but it’s a good thing to do for the world. (Incidentally, Red Cross doesn’t seem to have much of a presence in the city in terms of blood drives. I’m giving through Blood Centers of the Pacific.)
  2. Sign up for the San Francisco Marathon. It’s a show of solidarity, and a statement that fear of violence can’t stop us. I may end up doing the half marathon instead, but the important point is this: I will be lined up with the other runners come race day.

Today was a hard day, and of course it was infinitely harder for the hundreds and thousands of people whose lives were directly affected. Even on the hardest days, though, there is hope if you can find it. I was very touched to find that sentiment expressed beautifully in this letter from E. B. White:

It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

The amazing library in Psy’s “Gentleman” video

posted on 14 April, 2013 with tags , , , , ,

Psy — he, of course, of “Gangnam Style” fame — is back with a second video called “Gentleman.” A day into its existence, it’s pushing 30 million views. Anyway, there are a few shots of a pretty incredible location that caught my eye. Psy and his crew are dancing on a set of steps, surrounded by shelves full of books.

Psy dancing in the Seoul Metropolitan Library in "Gentleman"

At first I thought this was a bookstore, but a little digging revealed that they’re dancing in the new Seoul Metropolitan Library, which is housed in the former City Hall building. That building was build under Japanese Colonial Rule in 1926, and later served as the headquarters for the municipal government until 2008. There were plans for the building to be demolished, but those plans proved unpopular.

In October 2012, Psy performed his free “thank you” concert in front of this building, drawing 80,000 fans and shutting down major parts of the city.

Later that month, it was re-opened as a library, and now houses 200,000 books on seven floors. It looks like a pretty incredible space.

As somebody on Twitter notes, though, the library’s about a 40-50 minute subway ride from Gangnam.

A visit from San Francisco’s wild parrots

posted on 7 April, 2013 with tags , , ,

three-birdsEarlier this week I was treated to a visit from some two dozen of San Francisco’s wild parrots, the cherry-headed conures that live on and around Telegraph Hill. It was pretty spectacular — I was sitting at the kitchen table by the window, and first one, then two, then maybe a half dozen landed right outside on my balcony, occasionally conferring with a larger group that had set down on the roof.

two-birdsI had heard of these birds, but had never seen them for more than a few seconds as a flash of green coming out of a tree. I took all these pictures from the table with my phone, not wanting to get up and startle them, but they stuck around for some 20 minutes.

I hadn’t seen the documentary about them, though I had long been meaning to. I made a point to watch it last night, and enjoyed it, and it is definitely weird.

April Fools’ Day EFFector, 2013

posted on 1 April, 2013 with tags ,

As with last year, I played a central role in putting together this year’s April Fools’ edition of the EFF newsletter. It’s hard writing things that are supposed to be funny.

I also feel, and I can’t tell if this is just confirmation bias, like maybe people are pretty much over April Fools’ Day jokes online. I had fun putting together this newsletter, but it seems like each year there are fewer jokes on other sites that I actually enjoy.

(ThinkGeek is usually an exception. Let’s see what they’ve got this year.)

Supreme Court gets it right in Wiley v Kirtsaeng

posted on 19 March, 2013 with tags , , ,

It’s really great to read today’s Supreme Court decision in Kirtsaeng, in which a bad opinion could have had very profound and negative consequences way beyond the normal contours of copyright. I attended the oral arguments in October (during Hurricane Sandy!) and wrote it up for EFF. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the decision since then, and I’m not disappointed. Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from the decision:

Finally, the fact that harm has proved limited so far may simply reflect the reluctance of copyright holders so far to assert geographically based resale rights. They may decide differently if the law is clarified in their favor. Regardless, a copyright law that can work in practice only if unenforced is not a sound copyright law. It is a law that would create uncertainty, would bring about selective enforcement, and, if widely unenforced, would breed disrespect for copyright law itself.

Good news. Somebody in the office here called it “the first good Supreme Court decision on copyright in two decades.” I’ll take it.

Arranging the keys

posted on 3 March, 2013 with tags , , , , ,

Like many around the web, I was struck last month by the obituary of Bell Labs engineer John E. Karlin, whose greatest legacy may be the keypad design on traditional touch-tone phones. (That is, the arrangement in a 3×3 grid with the 1-2-3 across the top instead of the bottom.) I had long heard the urban legend explanation that the arrangement was deliberately designed to slow down a population trained to quickly enter strings of numbers on calculators and cash registers and prevent them from overwhelming the phone system. It’s nice to hear that not only was there deliberate thought behind it, but real behavioral research.

(There are similar legends, too, about the QWERTY keyboard being developed to intentionally slow down typists to avoid jamming the keys. This is at least controversial and probably wrong.)

Arrow_keysHis story also reminded me of the creation of another well-known keypad arrangement: the arrow keys on computer keyboards. To me the familiar inverted-T seems like the only plausible arrangement, but there were actually a handful of different options in production for a while. Jim “Brons” Burrows was an engineer at DEC which developed the inverted-T keypad that later became the industry standard, and his first-person account of that development process is a really interesting read.

An update on the Christopher Dorner drone situation

posted on 17 February, 2013 with tags , ,

Last week I dug into some claims that struck me as bogus, claiming that the LAPD was flying drones to track Christopher Dorner through Southern California. It looks like my suspicions were correct. Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai at Mashable posted a write-up just a few hours after mine, but since he’s a real journalist he called the CBP and checked with them: they stated that “CPB UAS are not flying in support of the search.”

Of course, the CBP drones weren’t the only option. The day after Lorenzo’s story, Ryan Gallagher at Slate got in touch with the FAA, who said that “no agency has asked us to issue a certificate of authorization for operating UAS as part of this search.” That pretty much rules out the option that the LAPD was flying drones, even if they were officially refusing to confirm or deny the story.

On Wednesday, the morning after Dorner was discovered and killed, the LAPD confirmed that it was not flying a drone, but that it wished it could have. A police spokesman said, “The search would have been much wider and quicker because you’d have an unmanned aircraft looking. You can cover more ground.”

Given that Dorner was discovered in close proximity to a police outpost, it seems unlikely that a drone covering more territory would have been much help. But now we know, more or less, that it wasn’t used in this case.

Did the Internet just fall for a massive drone hoax?

posted on 11 February, 2013 with tags , , ,

If you’ve been on Twitter today, you’ve probably seen it promoted as fact that surveillance drones have been sent into operation over Los Angeles as part of the multi-state manhunt for former cop Christopher Dorner alleged to be on a killing spree. The worst articles imply that the drones are armed and the government has authorized Dorner’s death, using language that’s ambiguous to the point of being deceptive, which is almost certainly untrue. But a closer look at the articles raises another concern: all of the reports are citing a single article which is flawed at best, and at worst may even be fabricated. Are the police using a drone at all?

Sunday Morning, the UK publication “Express” published an article about the manhunt, and provided its drone claims, with its main claim coming from an anonymous source within the Los Angeles police department. The relevant facts presented in the article are:

  • “Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil.”
  • “A senior police source said: ‘The thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him. On the ground, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.’”
  • Riverside PD Chief Sergio Diaz was asked directly about drones, and responded “We are using all the tools at our disposal.”
  • Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio confirmed the drone use, and provided the quote: “This agency has been at the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement. That’s all I can say at the moment.”

These claims have been cited in dozens or hundreds of subsequent articles, beginning with Gizmodo. But each of these claims is suspect, and taken collectively I believe they are false. Taking a look at each:

“The first human target”

That Dorner would be the first human target for drone surveillance on US soil is true only if you take a very particular, and unusual, read on some of the words. If there are drones tracking him, he is at least the second case on US soil, after a 2011 arrest based on drone evidence in North Dakota. In that case, as is alleged in this case, the drones were Customs and Border Protection MQ-9 “Reaper” drones (a model previously known as “Predator B”). In that case, the suspects’ general location was known, and the drone was used to determine their specific location on a single property, and whether they were armed or not. If that makes them ineligible to be the “first human target[s] for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil”, it’s not clear how.

Senior police source on thermal imaging

It’s not clear why this source would be attributed anonymously, or where this quote comes from. Without a name or the circumstances of its delivery, it’s difficult or impossible to verify the quote. And how did a tiny paper in the United Kingdom get such a juicy source more than 10,000 miles away in the Los Angeles police department?

Chief Sergio Diaz “using all the tools” at his disposal

If Chief Sergio Diaz said that the task force is using all the tools at its disposal to hunt down Dorning, it’s likely he said it at a press conference on Thursday morning, February 7, 2013. If so, it’s not clear why the line didn’t get more attention. An online student-run newspaper from the University of Southern California — “Neon Tommy” — attributes the quote to him in an article published on the 7th. However, that article is explicitly about LAPD’s declining to state whether drones are being used — not presented as evidence that they’re in use.

What’s more, this video from the press conference does not appear to include that question or response, and despite the obvious newsworthiness of such a quote, it doesn’t show up in other publications.

CBP confirmation and spokesman quote

If CBP spokesman Ralph DeSio did confirm drone usage, it’s not clear how or where he did so. The same Neon Tommy article mentioned above cites Ralph DeSio as the source for information about where CPB drones are deployed. Curiously, the very next quote in that article is identical to what Express alleged DeSio to have said: “The agency has been on the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement.” However, that quote is attributed — and linked — to an article by the investigative reporting group California Watch. Did a hasty read of the Neon Tommy article lead to a bad attribution in the Express? Unfortunately, the addition of the next sentence, “That’s all I can say at the moment” gives the impression of unclean hands.

Yes, it’s possible that Express contacted Ralph DeSio over the weekend, got the confirmation, and then a quote from him that is out-of-character for the organization and plagiarized from a California Watch piece. But that seems unlikely.

Sorting out loose ends

In a rush to clarify that CPB drones aren’t in fact armed, and teasing out information on whether the drones in question were, say, launched from the a nearby Air Force Base that has recently tested search-and-rescue flights, there are some deeper unanswered questions.

The story is plausible. The Department of Homeland Security (CPB’s parent agency) does loan out drones to police agencies, and they’ve kept the terms of such deals almost completely secret. EFF is currently suing DHS to find more information about that program. But in this case, the factual support isn’t there.

Whether or not these drones are being used in this manhunt, and whether or not they’re armed (they’re not), there is real cause for concern. A secret aerial surveillance program wherein federal agencies loan military technology to local police forces raises serious questions and we should demand to know more. The expansion of warrantless surveillance to unarmed vehicles with capabilities that exceed any helicopter or light plane currently in operation is also a problem. The general militarization of police is well-documented and alarming, as is the shift in rhetoric and actions in the Dorner case from capture-and-try to capture-and-kill.

But we do a disservice to our efforts at resolving these important issues when we resort to untruths or conspiracy theories.

Two great pieces on women in tech

posted on 9 February, 2013 with tags , , , ,

There’s recently been a lot of great writing on women and the problem of gender inequality in the tech field. I recommend these three pieces in particular:

  • “Not a Beard” by Mari Huertas, who was a member of Obama’s re-election tech team. In an effort to indicate that the team was more San Francisco than Washington, many articles joke about the beards on the team. Needless to say, Mari does not have a beard. From the piece:

    I want other females, young and old, to feel encouraged by the women who worked on this re-election campaign and in technology, civics, and government as a whole. I want girls and young professionals to find their way by the determined wakes we leave. We’re doing important, satisfying, fun work – we should broaden and extend our purview so more can wade into the fray.

  • “How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year” by Brett Berson, a member of an investment group that hosted Etsy’s CTO for a talk on the subject. It’s important to note that it wasn’t a cheap or easy fix: it involved spending money intelligently on “Hacker Grants” and consistently and proactively reaching out. But it’s also been worth it, increasing diversity on the team and increasing the quality of applicants, male and female.

    Even science recognizes that diversity is important: research from both the Kellogg and Sloan Schools suggest that cognitively diverse teams perform better on hard problems.

    Beyond that, though, hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities.

I’m consistently frustrated by the homogeny of the tech scene in San Francisco and generally, and it’s encouraging to see that people are addressing the problem. It’s a long road ahead, and it extends even beyond gender issues. Another great piece called “And Read All Over” by Jamelle Bouie has done an excellent job, for example, of demonstrating the (mostly) unbearable whiteness of the tech journalism community.

Anyway, I think the importance of these issues is even greater than their obvious effect on the discussion around equality in the tech community. As technical developments increasingly have profound effects on our privacy, speech, and civil liberties, I feel much more comfortable with diverse teams making those decisions.