It’s Finally Begun

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It’s Finally Begun

By Brian | January 21, 2009 | Share on Facebook

As of noon today, Barack H. Obama is the President of the United States. As he often reminds us, he begins his presidency in the midst of war, financial crisis, and a dearth of confidence from the American people – confidence in their government, confidence in their financial markets, and confidence in their country’s standing around the world. And yet, despite all of that, Barack Obama exudes a charisma that the nation has not seen since John F. Kennedy took office in 1961. He is, in our modern terms, a celebrity. People go out of their way to see him and to hear him speak. They want to like what it is he has to say. In times like these, Obama’s ability to lead through inspiration is perhaps his most valuable asset.

Over the last twenty years, we have had three presidents who have ran the gamut during their terms in office from highly popular to highly unpopular. They have led us through war, helped us cope with national tragedy, and presided over economic booms and busts of a size and speed that our nation has never experienced before. It has been said that change is the only constant, but the last two decades have proven that old adage to be false. Change is not constant; it is accelerating. And because it is accelerating, our ability to manage change must evolve as well. Our laws must keep up with our technology. Our approaches to problem solving must apply to new economic, political and financial models. And our President must be able to manage the largest and most complex government in our history to be the most nimble and flexible it has ever been.

Communication is key, and Barack Obama is a great communicator. He is also a skilled politician, having shown through the various stages of his presidential campaign an ability to take an extreme position when warranted, and then compromise back to a more moderate position as he approaches implementation. We’ve seen him do it with regard to the war, where he took a position that was very different than his predecessor, and now seems poised to execute a policy very similar to the one laid out before he took office. We’ve seen it with the economy, where his initial proposals around tax and spending cuts have migrated slowly into a “let it ride” tax policy and a deficit-inducing stimulus package.

Through it all, though, he has controlled the message. The national dialog has been about what he wanted to discuss. When challenged (as was the case with Reverend Wright, for instance), he was able to say the following, and refocus the message back to his agenda:

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together. This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

Barack Obama’s ability to give this speech and to focus the American people back on the issues of the campaign, rather than on Reverend Wright’s hateful sermons, is something that George W. Bush seemingly never possessed. That said, the lesson of sixteen years filled with “Lewinsky-gate” and “Bushitler” teaches us that it is an ability that can be wrestled away right under our noses. Today, an appointee who withdraws in scandal plus another who is accused of tax evasion plus a gaffe by Jill Biden about the Secretary of State position equal “hiccups in an otherwise smooth transition.” Four years down the road, a change in public zeitgeist could easily make a similar scenario a “scandal-plagued mishandling of events.”

Barack Obama talks a lot about citizenship and about participation. Let us resolve here and now to allow him to do his job. Let us resolve to listen to what he has to say, rather than obstinately seek to criticize, distract or embarass him. Let us hold him accountable for his statements and his actions, and then discuss them for what they are, not the embodiment of their worst possible outcomes. If we do those things, we can get to work on some of our very real problems. And when that starts to happen, we can all agree…

It’s finally begun.

Topics: Political Rantings | 7 Comments »

7 Responses to “It’s Finally Begun”

Jeff Porten says at January 22nd, 2009 at 1:38 am :

Clearly, change has come. I agree with most of this.

Have to admit, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised and psyched to see Obama’s actions today in the direction of transparency. Easily visible: the organization and quality of information appearing on whitehouse.gov. Proof that they really get this stuff: whitehouse.gov is now fully indexable, whereas Bush blocked large swathes of the site from search engines (http://codeulate.com/?p=24). Wonky but important: moving to make disclosure of presidential records the default under FOIA. Amazing attention to detail: the copyright notice on whitehouse.gov notes that government-employed authors have no copyright on site content, and makes all third-party content Creative Commons.

Third-party posts on whitehouse.gov? Huh. Wonder what that will be?

Regarding what you said about scandal, I think this gets back to the issue of the media needing to fill 24 hours a day. 21 of those hours are inanities unless they can invent a good scandal, at which point their week is done. (Meanwhile, real issues are lost in the invented noise.)

What I wish you had said is the obvious answer: if you think this is bad for the country, stop consuming those media, and tell your friends to do the same. They’ll continue to do this, and get worse by our standards, so long as it continues to make them money.

Likewise, it’s time we stopped tolerating certain useless aspects of political theater. I just listened to five minutes of John Kyl grandstanding about Geithner’s income taxes. Really? This will prevent you from confirming him? No? Then stop wasting time and trying to score political points.
Brian says at January 23rd, 2009 at 1:58 am :

Heh…I have stopped consuming it, and so have my friends. Newspaper circulation is down dramatically. So are cable news ratings. Things is, they’re still the “mainstream media,” so they still set the tone. Change comes slowly, even under President Obama. ;-)

As for not tolerating political theater – hallelujah and praise the lord, my friend. But where were you with that sentiment when Sarah Palin was a moron, John McCain was an old man, Barack Obama was an unpatriotic secret muslim, Hillary was a lesbian, and George W. Bush was creating a police state where millions of Americans were simultaneously tortured and spied upon?

I’m not railing at you, specifically, of course – I know you tend to speak out against egregious political hackery. My point in this post (and the previous one) is that Bush endured the worst of that sort of thing for eight years, and the record he beat was Bill Clinton’s.

If Obama’s presidency means the end of acceptability for that kind of inane, disrepectful persecution of public officials, then I’m ready to declare it a success right now, based on that fact alone.
Jeff Porten says at January 24th, 2009 at 12:56 am :

Well, the thing is, it’s not hackery if it’s true. That is, I note that the Democratic examples you use are poppycock, and the Republican examples, well, at least have some merit. You picked a bad week to disparage the issue of spying on Americans.

But if you’re saying that, to use two Democratic examples, it shouldn’t be any of our business if the president is boffing Marilyn Monroe or his secretary, yeah, I can get behind that. Your theory that Bush was subject to undeserved slander, however, continues to make me think that whatever it is you’re smoking, it’s better than what I’ve got.
Brian says at January 24th, 2009 at 2:44 am :

Heh….every Democratic example is poppycock and every Republican example has merit? Like the one you joined in on about how Bush was definitely planning to invade Iran and/or Syria? Go back and read my previous post. The media circus has enough rings for everybody – there’s no partisan monopoly on distractions.

As for Keith Olbermann’s latest bit of investigative reporting, Mr. Tice can’t get halfway through the article without contradicting himself:

With regard to the surveillance of journalists, Tice wouldn’t disclose the names of the specific reporters or media outlets he targeted when he worked as an analyst for the NSA but said in the part of the program he covered, “everyone was collected.”

“They sucked in everybody and at some point they may have cherry-picked from what they had, but I wasn’t aware of who got cherry-picked out of the big pot,” he said.

Right – he wasn’t aware who got cherry-picked because that’s how data-mining works. Having access to the database doesn’t mean spying on individuals, it means the ability to spy on individuals. And so yes – laws need to be written to prevent abuse here. But, as I said in my post (which you cleverly glossed over with “disparage the issue of spying on Americans,”), “not a single American citizen has made a legitimate complaint about being spied upon, tracked, or otherwise constricted by any of our anti-terror programs.”

Reporters, or even senators, who “suspect” they may have been targeted are speculating. Heck – I may have been targeted as well. But by an algorithm, not a scary guy with a visor in a smokey room. And if my name has a “little flag” next to it, it doesn’t say “potential terrorist,” it says, “matched as part of algorithm #6593623.”

That doesn’t make a good on Countdown, though, does it?
Jeff Porten says at January 27th, 2009 at 9:55 pm :

Heh….every Democratic example is poppycock and every Republican example has merit?

That was in reference to your examples: in the list “Obama = Muslim”, “Hillary = lesbian”, “Palin = moron”, “McCain = old”, and “Bush = police state”, the two Democratic examples are provably false with no justifiable evidence, whereas the three Republican examples at least have *something* behind each, regardless of how much we want to debate their absolute accuracy. (Seeing as how we’re still arguing the intelligence of W, I’d really rather not go on about Palin unless it becomes necessary in 2011.)

Like the one you joined in on about how Bush was definitely planning to invade Iran and/or Syria?

Again, those are documented — cf. Sy Hersh’s coverage in the New Yorker regarding Iran, and news coverage of actual US activities over the Syrian border. That said, I am very happy that I was wrong about our going to full-scale war with either country, and I have yet to see a journalistic analysis of what derailed the documented plans that were in place in 2006. If and when I do, I’ll be glad to share.

Right – he wasn’t aware who got cherry-picked because that’s how data-mining works. Having access to the database doesn’t mean spying on individuals, it means the ability to spy on individuals.

Ugh. This is where arguing with you gives me a headache. Your argument, if I read you correctly, is that assembling the data is legally and ethically neutral; there must be something done with the data (through either human or computer analysis) before it rises to the level of homegrown espionage.

So let’s agree that when we’re talking about computer databases there is some disparity between the virtual invasion of privacy when that data is just sitting on a computer, and a real invasion of privacy when some human actually reads it. Let’s further agree to disagree on where that line is drawn, since I’m certain we’re not going to agree on those particulars.

That said, even the collection of that data is protected under the law, and historically requires warrants under the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Note that “search” is separate from “seizure”.

“not a single American citizen has made a legitimate complaint about being spied upon, tracked, or otherwise constricted by any of our anti-terror programs.”

The key clause you left out is “so far.” The charming thing about having standing in US courts is that you have to prove damages, which is difficult when the entire process is covered up by charges of national security. No one on the no fly list, or on the “we listened to all your phone calls” list, ever gets to find out why they were put on them — and in the latter case, may not know they were on them at all.

Which raises an interesting question as to what the damages are when the government has taped all of your calls and copied all your email for five years. I’m not sure how you’d tally that. (And for the record, I’m still watching to see how the hell they copied all the email.)

Heck – I may have been targeted as well. But by an algorithm, not a scary guy with a visor in a smokey room. And if my name has a “little flag” next to it, it doesn’t say “potential terrorist,” it says, “matched as part of algorithm #6593623.”

This goes back to where we agree to disagree, I think; I don’t think that this kind of analysis provides substantive reason to abrogate Constitutional rights. And again, I’ll mention that people who have similar profiles to mine have been targeted as potential terrorists, so I’ll ask you — do you think it’s right that I, or people like me, might have that potential terrorist flag lit up?
Brian says at January 28th, 2009 at 12:53 am :

That was in reference to your examples…

OK – fair point. My examples were somewhat left-leaning (and agreed to disagree on Sarah Palin – I think she was the Dan Quayle of 2008, which you’d probably agree with, but for totally different reasons).

Again, those are documented — cf. Sy Hersh’s coverage in the New Yorker regarding Iran…

OK, yeah – we’re retreading old ground here, but I can’t resist saying it again – “documented” doesn’t mean true. Heck – the “fact” that our government brought the towers down with secret missiles designed as commercial airliners is “documented” too. Sometimes even the “documented” things are *WRONG*.

Your argument, if I read you correctly, is that assembling the data is legally and ethically neutral; there must be something done with the data (through either human or computer analysis) before it rises to the level of homegrown espionage.

Yes, exactly. Especially when the data in question is already aggregated in other databases with the full knowledge of the person involved (i.e., everyone knows that your phone company knows about your phone calls, your credit card company knows about your purchases, and your e-mail provider has copies of your e-mails).

That said, even the collection of that data is protected under the law, and historically requires warrants under the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure. Note that “search” is separate from “seizure”.

OK, here I’ll call bullshit on you, unless you can prove it to me, because historically, no such databases existed. Or, if they were to exist, assembling them would involve much deeper invasion of privacy than anything we’re talking about here. This is what I mean by “our laws have to catch up to our technology.” If I’m wrong, I’m happy to read something that convinces me – it’s actually a topic that I’m weirdly interested in, although I can’t really say why…

The key clause you left out is “so far.” The charming thing about having standing in US courts is that you have to prove damages.

[...]

Which raises an interesting question as to what the damages are when the government has taped all of your calls and copied all your email for five years.

I guess this is the crux of it: I’d argue that if the collection were done & you didn’t even know about it, then you weren’t damaged at all, which means your rights weren’t violated. At the level of civil rights, what’s the difference between your name being in one of these databases and your image being on a hidden security camera in Washington, DC?

do you think it’s right that I, or people like me, might have that potential terrorist flag lit up?

Absolutely. To the extent that you share characteristics with someone who might actually seek to do harm, yes – I very much want you to appear as a false positive. And, and this is the key part again, I want you to be identified as a false positive and discarded without any disruption in your life. To me, that’s the most efficient scenario. I take it you disagree.

Relevant story: I was on a business trip to Boston and had planned on taking Amtrak back to New York that night, because my meeting was going to end too late to catch the last plane out. Turns out, my meeting ended early, so my colleague and I hopped in a cab to the airport, and from the cab, booked one-way tickets from Boston to New York for a flight leaving in about 90 minutes, with no luggage. You better believe that when we got to the airport, our boarding passes were tagged as “special security” and we went through the entire routine – air-puff check, patdowns, examination of our carry-ons & laptops, etc..

Does that mean I was considered a potential terrorist? Was I briefly (or maybe even still?) on the no-fly list? If so, that’s fine with me. My circumstances were such that I matched on several key criteria that you’d expect of someone who (rather inelegantly, I’ll grant you) wanted to blow up a plane from Boston to New York. I even commented to my colleague that I’d be a bit concerned if we weren’t pulled aside for extra security checks.
Jeff Porten says at February 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 am :

“documented” doesn’t mean true. Heck – the “fact” that our government brought the towers down with secret missiles designed as commercial airliners is “documented” too. Sometimes even the “documented” things are *WRONG*.

True enough, but then we get into using trusted sources, and verifying the people we listen to. I read Sy Hersh because he’s got one hell of an accuracy track record. And to reference the thread we’ve got going on over on my site, it consistently bugs me how often we cite different sets of facts about issues like the ICC. I realize the world is complex and that there are many different strata of facts that can be unearthed on any topic, but it seems to me that two educated people should sometimes be able to come to agreement on the nature of reality, even if they continue to draw different conclusions therefrom. You and I don’t have a good track record on this.

Especially when the data in question is already aggregated in other databases with the full knowledge of the person involved (i.e., everyone knows that your phone company knows about your phone calls, your credit card company knows about your purchases, and your e-mail provider has copies of your e-mails).

Well, this is one reason why I run my own mail server at jeffporten.com, and if my ISP is keeping copies of what’s moving in and out of it despite my use of SSL connections, it comes as news to me. Trust me, if I could run my own phone server and commerce server, I’d do that as well.

That said, I strongly doubt that “everyone” knows that this is being done, and even fewer have any idea of what information can be gleaned from analyzing logs of communications activity. It’s one thing for Visa to know I bought a pack of cigarettes last week; it’s another to add up all my purchases and track my overall nicotine exposure over a five-year period.

here I’ll call bullshit on you, unless you can prove it to me, because historically, no such databases existed…. This is what I mean by “our laws have to catch up to our technology.”

Agreed that the Founding Fathers didn’t think about SQL queries when they wrote the Fourth, and equally agreed that this is something that really should have been legally addressed in the 1970s when companies started the process that has culminated today in the Total Information Awareness-equivalent databases we’re debating.

Also agreed that it’s my interpretation that “copying everyone’s email” equates to violation of the search and seizure clause, but I think that it’s a justifiable claim. We’ve had electronic communications for over 125 years at this point, and we’ve had laws on the books regarding telegrams and phone calls for a good long time; do a little research and you’ll see that many of these laws were put in place after the federal government tried the same global wiretap trick in the 1940s and 1950s.

If I’m wrong, I’m happy to read something that convinces me – it’s actually a topic that I’m weirdly interested in, although I can’t really say why….

Heh. Well, if you have a free year or two…. You’ve got five tracks of thought on this, which I’ll summarize:

1) The EFF, EPIC, and Privacy International approach. These groups (DC and London) generally work to put legal frameworks in place to protect privacy and prevent abuses. Cf. eff.org and privacy.org as starter resources.

2) The peer-to-peer, or open source approach. A techno-utopian version which rejects legal approaches as slow and/or corrupt, and “bakes in” the privacy end-to-end. I can’t think of a good central source (which you’d expect from a highly distributed and disparate group), but think of these people as the real-life version of the Cryptonomicon protagonists.

3) The Bruce Schneier approach falls somewhere in between the first two — but he gets a separate shout-out here because he’s very good at debunking security systems which are useless or even detrimental.

4) David Brin, on the other hand, believes that privacy is dead and we need to get over it — he advocates distributed control of the means of surveillance so individuals and groups have the ability to watch their government and each other, just as the government can watch us. Very interesting essays on this topic on his website.

5) Finally, you’ve got the groups who toe the Bush line of wiretapping everyone and datamining everything. Personally, I think Schneier has conceptually disproved this point, but I’m guessing there are folks out there who argue in favor of it.

I’d argue that if the collection were done & you didn’t even know about it, then you weren’t damaged at all, which means your rights weren’t violated. At the level of civil rights, what’s the difference between your name being in one of these databases and your image being on a hidden security camera in Washington, DC?

Well, you’ve got several conceptual questions here, don’t you? First, we’ve got at least two different kinds of data — the information I generate, and information about that information. (A cell phone has location information; a cigarette sale indicates nicotine use. Is there a difference between knowing someone buys beer, and inferring someone is alcoholic?)

Second, you’ve got a chain of events concerning that data: collection in a computer, analysis by a computer, presentation to a human being, analysis by a human being, possible action or lack thereof that affects an individual or class of individuals.

Here we can split infinite hairs. Is it a violation of privacy if no human ever sees your data? Or if someone knows your data, but never acts on it? Does it matter if this person is someone who knows you personally? Does it matter if this person is in a position of authority over you, such as having the power of the state behind him?

Personally — and to make a much larger point — I think all of this is part of a massive dehumanization that comes with reducing everyone to numbers and data avatars, and giving people rights to their data is a step back in the direction of dignity. That’s why I think it’s an invasion for my Visa record to be used for anything other than paying 7-11 and billing me. And yes, that includes the operation of “select all Visa purchases in Washington DC on January 20, 2009″.

To the extent that you share characteristics with someone who might actually seek to do harm, yes – I very much want you to appear as a false positive.

Cf. my reference above to Schneier, who makes a far better argument than I can about why all of the procedures they put you through at the airport were completely useless. The purpose of the air puff and the shoe check is to make you feel better about your government and the airline. Think about it: are people without luggage more or less likely to be smuggling a bomb? Me, I’m thinking that bombs are pretty frickin’ heavy.