Month: December 2015

Stupid Hurts

I take a great deal of solace in knowing that a lot of people are too stupid to successfully pull off any kind of meaningful attack:

WHEATFIELD, NY – The U.S. Attorney’s Office revealed new information Wednesday, regarding the investigation of a Wheatfield man accused of making and possessing homemade bombs.

The new information, was geared to persuade a federal judge that Michael O’Neill, should be detained in federal facility and not allowed to seek bail or bond.

O’Neill is accused of making at least seven bombs at his home. Two weeks ago, one of the explosives inadvertently went off inside the garage. O’Neill was the only one injured and was taken to ECMC where his left leg was amputated. He’s been there ever since.

Prosecutors are claiming Nazi, Confederacy, and Ku Klux Klan paraphernalia were found in his home, which they’re probably using to insinuate he’s a dangerous man but to me show he’s probably just an idiot. On the upside, if he did have any malicious intent it doesn’t matter since the only person he managed to hurt with his homemade bombs was himself.

Of course his survival ensures he is disqualified from receiving a Darwin Award.

Why Centralization Fails

While the politicians discuss ways to further centralize security here let’s take a moment to review why centralization, specifically as it relates to security, fails. Imagine a society where private firearm ownership is illegal. In this society the only people who have access to firearms are the military, the police, and the attackers. It’s not hard to imagine since I’ve just described a good percentage of countries.

Under such circumstances society consists mostly of soft targets with a few hard targets scattered about. The hard targets consist of military bases, police stations, and any place where a soldier or police officer may be at a particular point in time. Everywhere else is a soft target. There are two major and very apparent weaknesses with this setup. First, the soft targets are all known. Second, the response time of somebody capable of thwarting your attack can be reasonably determined.

Attackers can cause a great deal of damage by finding a high value target far away from either a military base or a police station (and in societies, such as the United States, where the military is legally prohibited from operating in civilian spaces without approval you can focus primarily on police stations). For example, a school, museum, or sports stadium 10 to 15 minutes away from a police station will give attackers a lot of time in a target-rich environment, which will allow them to cause a great deal of damage.

Centralization fails precisely because the central points of failure can be identified and worked around. Decentralized systems tend to be more difficult to exploit because central points of failure either don’t exist or additional layers exist to support the centralized ones.

We can illustrate this by making a single alteration to our above model. In addition to soldiers and police we will allow licensed armed security agents to own firearms. Assuming any place can hire a security agent the difficulty of identifying soft targets becomes more difficult. Selecting a target now requires determining how far it is from a military base or police station and whether the it employs armed security agents. Another layer of security has been added and the complexity of pulling off an attack has increased.

Let’s take things a step further. In addition to soldiers, police officers, and licensed security agents we are now going to allow any adult who wants to own and carry a gun to do so. How do you identify the soft targets now? While a school, museum, or sports stadium may be 10 or 15 minutes away from a police station and doesn’t employ armed security agents anybody within the facility could be armed. While there is no guarantee that an armed individual will be at any specific target the possibility of one or more armed individuals being there always exists. Another layer of security has been added and the complexity of pulling off an attack has greatly increased.

What I’ve just described is a concept known as defense in depth. The idea is to have multiple layers of overlapping security so any single layer failing doesn’t result in total failure. As the politicians continue to argue that security must be further centralized under the State remember that the more centralized security becomes the more fragile it becomes.

Mi Finis La Esperantan Arbon En Duolingo

Nun la reala lernado komencas!

finished-the-esperanto-tree

It’s taken me nearly 100 days but I have finally completed the Esperanto tree on Duolingo. Between Duolingo’s course, Lernu’s dictionary, and Memrise’s various Esperanto courses I feel I’ve obtained a good enough understanding of the language to call myself a beginner. I say I only qualify as a beginner because I now have a fairly solid understanding of the grammar and a large enough vocabulary to write somewhat complex sentences. That doesn’t mean I can write sentences without making numerous grammatical mistakes and I don’t always select the correct word to accurately translate my thoughts. But I’m not at a point where I can start holding simple conversations and understand a lot of written material I come across.

What is truly remarkable about this is that I have gotten this far using only free online tools. The true value of the Internet, in my opinion, is the commodification of information. A free (to you) education on almost any subject is available to anybody with an Internet connection. While it’s true not everybody has an Internet connection the current availability of information is far greater than it was before the Internet. In time Internet connectivity will likely become commodified to such a point that almost everybody who wants to be connected will be connected. The future is looking to be pretty fucking awesome.

The Unpayable Debt To Society

The United States has reached the logical conclusion of the tough on crime mentality. This country has become so tough on crime that even a wrongful conviction and ruin somebody’s life:

Simmons, at the time a contract systems analyst making $90 an hour, was arrested in Seattle’s University District in 2006 and charged with selling crack as well as resisting arrest. He was convicted of the drug-dealing charge and sentenced to a year in prison.

Three months after his conviction, though, the King County deputy whose testimony led to Simmons’ conviction, James Schrimpsher, was fired for dishonesty in a different drug case. That the deputy was being investigated for lying at the same time as Simmons’ trial had not been disclosed to Simmons’ attorneys.

Simmons insists he didn’t sell drugs and believes he was profiled. Save for a marijuana possession charge from the 1990s in Tennessee, he has no criminal convictions before or since. Regardless, he served the full prison term at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, plus a year of probation when he got out.

[…]

What’s alarming about Simmons’ story is that his drug-dealing conviction was eventually stricken from the record. He was retroactively exonerated in 2010 because the testimony that convicted him was no longer considered credible. Yet he struggles to get a job because the story stalks him on the Internet.

Based on the job offers Simmons has received he’s a very capable individual. What he was original charged with, selling crack, wasn’t even a crime (because crimes require victims). But now, even after he has been exonerated, he cannot get a job.

Sadly this is exactly what the tough on crime crowd wanted. In their pursuit of an impossible goal, a society free of crime, they demanded harsh punishments be issued. The politicians, always happy to take up the cause of fear mongering, acted on these pleas and passed harsher laws. When the new harsher punishments failed to bring about Nirvana the the cycle continued. Now we’re at a point when anybody who has been incarcerated, regardless of the offense, is nearly unemployable.

Fascism Returns To Europe

I know what you’re thinking, fascism never left Europe. It’s true but it has been hidden under euphemisms like emergency powers, social democracies, and parliamentary procedures. But France is finally throwing off the visage of liberty, equality, and fraternity. With the Paris attacks as the excuse the French government is moving to silence those who would question it:

According to leaked documents from the Ministry of Interior the French government is considering two new pieces of legislation: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France.

The documents were seen by the French newspaper Le Monde. According to the paper, the new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. The new laws are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered.

The first proposal, according to Le Monde, would forbid free and shared Wi-Fi during a state of emergency. The new measure is justified by way of a police opinion, saying that it’s tough to track people who use public hotspots.

The second proposal is a little more gnarly: the Ministry of Interior is looking at blocking and/or forbidding the use of Tor completely. Blocking people from using Tor within France is technologically quite complex, but the French government could definitely make it difficult for the average user to find and connect to the Tor network. If the French government needs some help in getting their blockade set up, they could always talk to the only other country in the world known to successfully block Tor: China, with its Great Firewall.

This is just another feather in the hat of fascism that already includes detaining activists in their homes so they can’t exercise their supposed right to free speech and targeting members of a minority religion. But the target of these measures is very clear: removing the anonymity of the people the French government wishes to target.

Fortunately the French government is setting itself up for failure. Tor has proven to be a difficult target for tyrannical governments to suppress. Every time an effective means of censoring Tor traffic is implemented a workaround is also implemented. Open Wi-Fi access points are easy to shutdown until the network is decentralized. Finding and shutting down every node in a large mesh network would be extremely expensive. In addition to taking a great deal of time and money it would also divert a sizable amount of labor from other suppression activities. And there’s no guarantee the French government would be able to find and tear down new nodes faster than activists could replace them. If the people of France are smart they’ll start working on their own version of Guifi.net.

Punishing The People Because Of Terrorism

The San Bernardino attack is just another tragedy on a long list of tragedies exploited by the State. Again we’re seeing the tired claim by the political body that the people must be severely punished:

Obama said he will “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice,” without going into details, and order a review of the visa waiver program that allowed one of the San Bernardino terrorists into the US. Obama also called on Congress to ban people on no-fly lists from buying guns. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon?” he asked. “This is a matter of national security.”

Mr. Obama may not have gone into specifics but we know what he’s hinting at. “Making it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice,” is a euphemism for prohibiting the use of effective cryptography. In other words the basic security tools every one of us relies on every day must be broken so the State can further expand it’s already too expansive surveillance apparatus.

Reviewing the visa program is a euphemism for finding more ways to restrict people from crossing the imaginary lines often referred to as borders. Anybody who has been paying attention to recent political maneuvering is aware that the State is becoming more interested in tightening the borders. Just remember that a secure border prevents tax cattle from leaving.

Finally the question, “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semi-automatic weapon,” is a euphemism for removing due process from decided who can and cannot own a firearm. Apparently having to go through the process of finding somebody guilty of a crime before they can be prohibited from owning a firearm is just too damn inconvenient.

Notice how each of these proposals requires punishing the entire population of almost 319 million for the actions of two individuals. Also notice how none of these proposals will do anything to curtail terrorism. Just because domestic companies can’t release tools that use effective cryptography doesn’t mean foreign entities can’t. According to the United States government the border is 102,514 miles long. Any thoughts of effective controlling over 100,000 miles of territory is nothing but a fantasy. Prohibiting more people from owning firearms only ensures attackers will be met with lighter resistance.

There are many ways of making a society more resilient to attacks. Punishing everybody in society whenever attack occurs is not one of them.

Guns, Weed, and Crypto

Because I advocate apolitical action to achieve change in the world I periodically get political types snidely asking, “Well what have you done for liberty?” It’s a fair question. My recent efforts have been primarily focused on teaching people how to defend themselves online. Fortunately I’m not alone. I’ve been working with some phenomenal people to run CryptoPartyMN, and organization created specifically to teach people how to use security means of communications.

Our work hasn’t gone unnoticed either. A few weeks ago James Shiffer from the Star Tribune contacted us. He was working on an article covering Crypto War II and wanted to interview members of CryptoPartyMN to understand the counterarguments to the State’s claims that effective cryptography puts everybody at risk. In addition to interviewing several of us he also attended the last CryptoParty. The result was this article. As you can tell from the article we’ve got everything you could possibly want:

The three CryptoParty presenters were Burg, 32, a Twin Cities software developer and Second Amendment supporter whose blog is called “A Geek With Guns.” The two others are cannabis activists Cassie Traun, 26, an IT professional who “never really trusted the government,” and Kurtis Hanna, 30, an unsuccessful candidate for Minneapolis mayor and state Legislature who said he became interested in the issue after the revelations of NSA spying.

Guns, weed, and crypto. Between the three of us we’ve got pretty much every important freedom issue covered!

So, yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve been up to.

Immanentizing The Eschaton

If ever there was reason to give up hope on the entire political process this year’s presidential candidates are it. Each an ever one of them is an honest to goodness terrible human being. The Democrats are deciding whether they want Bernie “Promise You Free Shit Nobody Can Pay For” Sander or Killary Clinton. On the other side of the isle there is a contest to see which candidate can say the most horrible thing. Donald Trump has openly stated a desire to take out the family of ISIS members like some kind of mafioso. Ted Cruz, who has been relegated to near obscurity, has decided to trump Trump by flat out saying he wants to nuke the Middle East:

Texas Senator Ted Cruz intensified his rhetoric this weekend in Iowa as he sought to compete with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump on tough talk about killing Islamic State terrorists.

“We will carpet bomb them into oblivion,” Cruz said at a multi-candidate event in Cedar Rapids sponsored by the Tea Party-aligned FreedomWorks group. “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”

Cruz received loud applause throughout his speech from the more than 1,500 people in attendance and got a standing ovation as he left the stage.

I’m not sure whether Cruz openly supporting the use of nuclear weapons or receiving applause from his audience are scarier. All I know is that this country is fucked.

For those of you who still believe we can vote our way out of this nosedive, assuming there are any of you left, how exactly does the voting process work when every single candidate is a war monger, economically illiterate, and openly hostile towards freedom? The option of damage control doesn’t even exist this election cycle because all of the candidates want same thing: a continuation of the seemingly endless war that is guaranteed to bankrupt the nation (mind you, I’m not against the State bankrupting itself, I just wish it would find a way to do it that didn’t require so many dead bodies).

Furthermore, each of these candidates has supporters. Even if a decent candidate existed and you supported them you would almost certainly be a very small minority voting against an army of psychotic voters who want the very war their candidates are selling.

My Position On Self-Defense

I try really hard to not use shootings as platforms to argue philosophical points but since everybody has been, shall we say, interested in my thoughts I’ll state them.

Until somebody can make a convincing argument of why people caught up in shootings are better off being unarmed I will continue to actively support people’s right to defend themselves with the most effective tools available.

Carry on.