Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

For Statists The Only Response Is Attacking Individual Freedom

When a problem, perceived or real, arises there is only one response for statists: attacking individual freedom. As I noted last week, the knowledge that the Paris attackers used burner phones instead of encrypted communications would likely inspire useless legislation aimed at prohibiting burner phones. Jackie Speier seems hellbent on proving me right because she has introduced legislation to do exactly that:

Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a Democrat representing California’s 14th district, has introduced a the “Closing the Pre-Paid Mobile Device Security Gap Act of 2016,” or HR 4886, which will require people who purchase a prepaid device to provide proper identification.

“This bill would close one of the most significant gaps in our ability to track and prevent acts of terror, drug trafficking, and modern-day slavery,” Speier said in a blog post. “The ‘burner phone’ loophole is an egregious gap in our legal framework that allows actors like the 9/11 hijackers and the Times Square bomber to evade law enforcement while they plot to take innocent lives. The Paris attackers also used ‘burner phones.’ As we’ve seen so vividly over the past few days, we cannot afford to take these kinds of risks. It’s time to close this ‘burner phone’ loophole for good.”

Regardless of Speier’s claims, burner phones are not a significant gap in the State’s ability to prevent acts of terror, drug trafficking, or modern-day slavery. Setting aside the fact that most acts of terror, negative aspects of drug trafficking, and modern-day slavery are created by the State, we’re still left having to accept the fact that pervasive communication technology has rendered any ability to control communications practically impossible.

Burner phones are just one method of communicating in a way that’s difficult to surveil. The same effect can be achieved with cloned subscriber identity module (SIM) cards. Furthermore, registrations are easy to bypass. The firearm community is well aware of the term straw purchase. It’s a term that describes having somebody who isn’t prohibited from purchasing firearms to purchase one for somebody who is prohibited. By having somebody else purchase a phone for you you can avoid having that phone tied to your person. Getting somebody to purchase a cell phone for you would be even easier than a firearm since few people see a cell phone as a destructive device. There is also the fact that burner phones from overseas can be smuggled into the country and sold for cash.

Legislation aimed at prohibiting something only accomplish one thing: creating a black market. Not a single piece of legislation aimed at prohibiting something has been successful. This bill will be no different.

Checkpoints All The Way Down

The investigation into the Brussels attack hasn’t concluded yet but politicians are already calling for actions to be taken to prevent such an attack from happening here:

Security experts, politicians and travelers alike say the Brussels bombings exposed a weak spot in airport security, between the terminal entrance and the screening checkpoint.

“If you think about the way things were done in Brussels — and have been done in other places — literally people only have to only walk in, and they can attack at will,” said Daniel Wagner, CEO of security consulting firm Country Risk Solutions.

These idiots will be putting security checkpoints before the security checkpoints if we let them:

Wagner suggests U.S. airports establish pre-terminal screening before travelers enter the facility.

“That is a common approach in many countries around the world — you cannot even get in the terminal until your bags and your person have been pre-screened,” he said. “That is, through an X-ray machine both for the bags and for the individual.”

It’ll be checkpoints all the way down. What none of these stooges have stopped to consider is that the checkpoints themselves are attractive targets. Checkpoints are chokepoints. They forces large numbers of people to gather in a single place so they can slowly (very slowly in the case of Minneapolis’ airport) be filtered through by security. If a suicide bomber wants to kill a lot of people they need only step in the checkpoint line.

Adding an additional chokepoint or moving the current one doesn’t fix the problem. Reducing the amount of damage a terrorist can cause in an airport requires dispersing people, which means making major changes to current airport security practices. The long security lines have to go. This can be done by simplifying the screening process, making it consistent (anybody who travels frequently knows that the orders barked by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) goons can change drastically from day to day), and increasing the number of checkpoints. None of those measures will be taken though because the idiots who make the policies know nothing about security.

How The State Makes Us Less Secure Part MLVI

Statists often claim that the State is necessary for the common defense. If this were the case I would expect it to do what it can to make everybody safer. Instead it does the opposite. In its pursuit of power the State continues to take actions that make everybody under its rule less safe.

The latest chapter in this ongoing saga revolves around the iPhone of Syed Farook. After trying to get a court to force Apple to write a custom firmware for Farook’s iPhone that would allow the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to brute force the passcode, the agency postponed the hearing because it claimed to have found another method to get the data it wants. That method appears to be an exploit of some sort but the Justice Department has classified the matter so we may never know:

A new method to crack open locked iPhones is so promising that US government officials have classified it, the Guardian has learned.

The Justice Department made headlines on Monday when it postponed a federal court hearing in California. It had been due to confront Apple over an order that would have forced it to write software that would make it easier for investigators to guess the passcode for an iPhone used by San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook.

The government now says it may have figured out a way to get into the phone without Apple’s help. But it wants that discovery to remain secret, in an effort to prevent criminals, security researchers and even Apple itself from reengineering smartphones so that the tactic would no longer work.

By classifying this method the Justice Department is putting, at minimum, every iPhone 5C user running the same firmware as Farook’s phone at risk. But the exploit likely reaches further and may even put every user of every iOS device at risk.

Since Farook’s iPhone is in the State’s possession there is no risk of its firmware being upgraded. That being the case, there’s no reason for the Justice Department not to disclose the vulnerability its exploiting. Even if the exploit is disclosed the agency will still be able to use it to gain access to the data on Farook’s phone (assuming the exploit works as implied). But disclosing it would allow Apple to patch it so it couldn’t be used against the millions of innocent people using iOS devices.

There is a conflict of interest inherent in statism. The State is supposed to provide for the common defense of those within its territory. At the same time it’s charged with investigating crimes and dispensing justice. In order to fulfill the latter goal it must be able to gain access to whatever information it deems pertinent to an investigation. Ensuring that access is available conflicts with providing for a common defense since an effective defense against foreign aggressors, especially as it relates to protecting data, is also an effective defense against the State.

Cruzing The Ghetto

The attack in Brussels is only happened a few days. That means there hasn’t been enough time for a serious investigation. But that isn’t stopping people from playing the blame game. Wild speculations are being thrown about everywhere but I think Ted Cruz managed to become king of the asshole mountain:

After repeating his standard campaign-trail assertion that Barack Obama has failed to confront – or even properly identify – “radical Islamic terrorists”, he called for the US to stop admitting refugees from areas with a so-called Islamic State or al-Qaeda presence.

He then turned his attention to the home front.

“We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods before they become radicalised,” he said.

Cruz is always looking to make government smaller and more efficient. Whereas Franklin Roosevelt built expensive concentration camps to hold American citizens of Japanese decent, Cruz wants to use the cheaper option of simply turning Muslim neighborhoods into little Warsaw Ghettos.

Since Cruz stylizes himself as an individualist his proposal is ironic. Collective punishment, as the name denotes, is an entirely collectivist ideal. By saying Muslim neighborhoods must be patrolled Cruz is stating that he believes all Muslims shared responsibility for the action of the bombers in Brussels. That’s the exact opposite of individualism, which only holds the individuals directly responsible for crimes responsible (because they were the only ones responsible).

If turning Muslim neighborhoods into ghettos isn’t the proper response to these attacks, what is? As much as people hate to hear it the only proper response is to have patients. Nothing can be accomplished until a thorough investigation has been performed and the evidence has been analyzed. Until the investigation has concluded anything we hear will be speculative or preliminary in nature. Once the investigation has concluded we can consider methods of mitigating future attacks like this. Unfortunately it will be impossible to bring those responsible for these attacks to justice since they killed themselves. But we can use the information gathered by investigators to make future attacks like this harder to pull off (of course, since the government will claim a monopoly on implementing countermeasures, we’ll probably just get an expansion of the police state instead of effective methods of guarding against these kinds of attacks).

When Your Radical Goals Become Self-Defeating

From yesteryear’s anti-war movement to today’s social justice movement, college campuses have served as some of the biggest hot zones for social upheaval. Today’s upheaval, just like yesteryear’s, is being played out by conservatives who want things to remain as they are, radicals who want to change things, and everybody caught between them.

Both extremes have an unfortunate habit of becoming extremely authoritarian. For the radicals this authoritarianism can quickly become self-defeating though:

At Western Washington University, a public institution with roughly 15,000 students, a group of leftist activists calling itself the Student Assembly for Power and Liberation has issued a sweeping list of demands that would radically reshape its school.

[…]

The petition goes on to call for $45,000 annually to compensate “students and faculty doing de-colonial work on campus” and the creation of a 15-member student panel, dubbed the Office for Social Transformation, “to monitor, document, and archive all racist, anti-black, transphobic, cissexist, misogynistic, ablest, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-semitic, and otherwise oppressive behavior.” This panel would have the power to investigate and discipline students and faculty members and to fire even tenured faculty members.

Surveillance always favors those already in power. Conservatives, as proponents of the current system, favor the current individuals in power. That means any surveillance system will necessarily favor conservatives.

Herein lies the moment when radicalism can become self-defeating. Surveillance sounds like a very attractive tool to both sides because it allows them to identify and take out their opposition. Given an excuse the established power will gladly implement a surveillance system. By demanding such a surveillance system the radicals are giving the conservatives a convenient excuse to implement a surveillance system while justifying it as a compromise. Once implemented though the surveillance system remains in their control and they can use it to identify and take out radicals.

The current social justice movement isn’t unique in this. Many radical movements throughout history have provided the rope needed to hang them with to their conservative opposition. If you’re a radical any authoritarian system will be used against you so don’t volunteer your support for its implementation.

Libertarians Need To Embrace Their Radical Goal

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, libertarians are bad at politics. It’s not our fault. Politics is the art of aggression and libertarianism is a philosophy built on non-aggression. But many libertarians refuse to accept this fact so they end up doing stupid shit like starting Libertarians for Trump.

If you read through the post a lot of time is spent by the author, Walter Block, trying to argue what Donald Trump is the most libertarian mainstream candidate currently running. His arguments ring hollow though since his logic would just as easily lead one to compare who is more libertarian amongst Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot. While one can technically compared the three for the purposes of determining which is the most libertarian, in the end you’re still comparing three individuals who are fundamentally anti-libertarian.

But his article falls to pieces before he even gets to his justifications for supporting Trump. He immediately falls into the same trap many libertarians fall into by assuming only two options exist:

Let me just say that there is nothing, nothing at all, incompatible between libertarianism and voting, or supporting political candidates. Both Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard can be considered political junkies, and you won’t find too many better libertarians than those two.

Suppose we were all slaves, and the master said we could have a democratic election; we could vote for overseer Baddie, who would whip us unmercifully once per day, or overseer Goodie, who would do exactly the same thing, but only once per month. We all voted for the latter. Is this incompatible with libertarianism? Would this make us worse libertarians? Anyone who thinks so does not really understand this philosophy. For a remedial course, read this book: Rothbard, Murray N. 1998 [1982]. The Ethics of Liberty, New York: New York University Press.

Between the two options presented he makes a valid argument. However, there are options outside of voting for either the really evil slave owner or the slightly less evil slave owner. You can instead attempt to escape or overthrow the slave owner. In fact this is exactly what Lysander Spooner proposed when most people were arguing over electing politicians who supported the Southern views of slavery or the less harsh Northern views of slavery.

People like to divide libertarians into right and left. If we’re going to collectivize, err, categorize individual libertarians into two groups though I’d much rather divide them up into neophobes and neophiles. Both groups recognize the system of slavery they suffer under and express a desire to create radical change. But the neophobes act inconsistently with their stated goal whereas the neophiles embrace their radical goal.

Walter Block belongs to the Rothbard tradition of libertarianism. I would classify them as neophobes. While they do want to bring about change by moving society towards libertarianism they want to do it without radical changes. They want to utilize the already existing political system to elect the already existing politicians to the already existing political offices. By doing that they hope to legislate libertarianism into existence. Well, at least some libertarianism. Many of them also want to ensure certain already existing political creations, such as government borders continue to exist. But that’s beside the point. Neophobe libertarians fail to embrace the radical nature of their stated goal and that leads them to take ineffective political action.

Agorists such as myself belong to the Konkin tradition of libertarianism. The Konkin tradition falls into the neophile category. We want to bring about radical change and see the already existing political system as a hinderance. After all, how can a fundamentally anti-libertarian system be used in a fundamentally anti-libertarian society to bring about libertarianism? Incrementally over decades? To that I will point out that Rothbard and his followers were working on that decades ago and the only result has been a continuation of the slide towards totalitarianism. We recognize that libertarianism cannot be legislated. Furthermore, we want radical change. The currently existing political creations? Destroy them and salt the Earth they once occupied.

By failing to embrace their radical goal neophobes artificially limit themselves to a course of action libertarians have never been good at (because, after all, it is a course of action created by the opponents of libertarianism). This leads them to do incredibly anti-libertarian things such as support Donald Trump. Neophiles, by embracing our radical goal, are able to act in a way that is consistent with our stated goals. This allows us to avoid anti-libertarian actions such as supporting politicians who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

You are free to join Block’s little club and help continue the system of oppression that exists today. But realize that doing so will require you to participate in a system that libertarians have never been any good at. Furthermore, it will require you to support somebody who is fundamentally anti-libertarain. Or you could not join his little club and enjoy the clear conscious acting consistently with your stated goal brings. As always, the choice is yours but you will be graded based on your decision.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Were I asked I would summarize the Internet of Things as taking one step forward and two steps back. While integrating computers into everyday objects offers some potential the way manufacturers are going about it is all wrong.

Consider the standard light switch. A light switch usually has two states. One state, which closes the circuit, turns the lights on while the other state, which opens the circuit, turns the lights off. It’s simple enough but has some notable limitations. First, it cannot be controlled remotely. Having a remotely controlled light switch would be useful, especially if you’re away from home and want to make it appear as though somebody is there to discourage burglars. It would also be nice to verify if you turned all your lights off when you left to reduce the electric bill. Of course remotely operated switches also introduce the potential for remotely accessible vulnerabilities.

What happens when you take the worst aspects of connected light switches, namely vulnerabilities, and don’t even offer the positives? This:

Garrett, who’s also a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors, was in London last week attending a conference, and found that his hotel room has Android tablets instead of light switches.

“One was embedded in the wall, but the two next to the bed had convenient looking ethernet cables plugged into the wall,” he noted. So, he got ahold of a couple of ethernet adapters, set up a transparent bridge, and put his laptop between the tablet and the wall.

He discovered that the traffic to and from the tablet is going through the Modbus serial communications protocol over TCP.

“Modbus is a pretty trivial protocol, and notably has no authentication whatsoever,” he noted. “Tcpdump showed that traffic was being sent to 172.16.207.14, and pymodbus let me start controlling my lights, turning the TV on and off and even making my curtains open and close.”

He then noticed that the last three digits of the IP address he was communicating with were those of his room, and successfully tested his theory:

“It’s basically as bad as it could be – once I’d figured out the gateway, I could access the control systems on every floor and query other rooms to figure out whether the lights were on or not, which strongly implies that I could control them as well.”

As far as I can tell the only reason the hotel swapped out mechanical light switches with Android tablets was to attempt to look impressive. What they ended up with was a setup that may look impressive to the layman but is every trolls dream come true.

I can’t wait to read a story about a 14 year-old turning off the lights to every room in a hotel.

The Most Transparent Government In History

Nearly a decade ago Obama was campaigning on a platform of, amongst other things, transparency. After 9/11 the Bush administration went full Orwell (you never go full Orwell) and people were demanding change. Obama promised to deliver that change. But history repeated itself as it so often does. Like every other politician before him, Obama failed to deliver on most of the promises he made. He not only failed to deliver on his promises but he actually expanding what Bush was doing.

Decades will likely pass before we learn the full extent of the current administration’s expansions to the surveillance state. However, bits and pieces are already leaking out. A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request produced a wealth of information on how the current administration has been working to undermine FOIA requests:

The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.

The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.

The documents confirm longstanding suspicions about the administration’s meddling, and lay bare for the first time how it worked to undermine FOIA reform bills that received overwhelming bipartisan support and were unanimously passed by both the House and Senate in 2014 — yet were never put up for a final vote.

It’s a lengthy article detailing several different ploys made by Obama’s administration in its quest to establish the most opaque government in history.

While the FOIA has revealed a great deal of the State’s dirty laundry it has always been a limited tool. When it was written a number of exemptions were included. Basically, at the judgement of the State, FOIA requests can be denied under several justifications. A FOIA request only reveals what the State is willing to reveal. However, the higher ups in the State have recognized that even with the number of exemptions put in place a lot of embarrassing information is still becoming public. That being the case, it’s not surprising to see the current administration working to add further restrictions on top of a bill that already includes numerous restrictions.

There is a lesson to be learned here. No matter what promises a politician makes up front they will almost invariably go unfulfilled if they win an election. Power seems terrible until you have it. Before becoming president I’m better Obama was being sincere in many of his promises. But when he gained the power he likely realized how good it felt. This is also why reforming the system through the voting process is doomed to fail. Even the most honest individuals can be corrupted with enough power.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Lower Your Expectations

Rant time. The education system in this country is fucking terrible. A lot of people blame the teachers but it’s not their fault. They are, after all, victims of the education system themselves who were taught by previous victims of the education system. The blame goes to the policy makers who believe the solution to every embarrassing statistic is to dumb down the curriculum:

In his new book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, political scientist Andrew Hacker proposes replacing algebra II and calculus in the high school and college curriculum with a practical course in statistics for citizenship (more on that later). Only mathematicians and some engineers actually use advanced math in their day-to-day work, Hacker argues—even the doctors, accountants, and coders of the future shouldn’t have to master abstract math that they’ll never need.

You see? Math is hard so we should dumb it down. In a rather ironic twist, Hacker proposes replacing algebra II and calculus with statistics and statistics is part of what’s fueling the deterioration of the education system. Statistics itself isn’t bad but when it’s placed in the hands of policy makers it because a weapon of mass destruction. Hacker, probably unknowingly, makes this point perfectly:

Unlike most professors who publicly opine about the education system, Hacker, though an eminent scholar, teaches at a low-prestige institution, Queens College, part of the City University of New York system. Most CUNY students come from low-income families, and a 2009 faculty report found that 57 percent fail the system’s required algebra course. A subsequent study showed that when students were allowed to take a statistics class instead, only 44 percent failed.

His argument is based on statistics surrounding student failure rates. An intelligent person would look at such statistics and try to investigate the causes (there are likely numerous interacting causes involved here). But Hacker, like most policy makers, isn’t an intelligent person. He looks at the statistic and decides the only option is to make the hard classes easier. The problem with his attitude is that it can only lead to one outcome in the end: Idiocracy.

I’m not going to lie, math kicked my ass in school and college. Young me would have loved to hear that algebra II was being replaced by something far easier. But old me understands the value of higher level math. While I don’t use it in my daily life it taught me logic (as in reasoning, not as in a word to throw around when I’m losing an Internet argument and have nothing to resort to other than telling the other person they’re not logical), which I do use every day. And that’s the point. Many subjects themselves aren’t obviously useful in our day to day lives. But they do teach us how to learn, which is tremendously useful. Without understanding how to learn we’re relegated to memorizing information so we can regurgitate it later. In fact that’s the state of education in this country in a nutshell: memorize information so you can regurgitate it on a standardized test.

Amazon Disabled Device Encryption In Fire OS 5

While Apple and, to a lesser extent, Google are working to improve the security on their devices Amazon has decided on a different strategy:

While Apple continues to resist a court order requiring it to help the FBI access a terrorist’s phone, another major tech company just took a strange and unexpected step away from encryption.

Amazon has removed device encryption from the operating system that powers its Kindle e-reader, Fire Phone, Fire Tablet, and Fire TV devices.

The change, which took effect in Fire OS 5, affects millions of users.

Traditionally firmware updates deliver (or at least attempt to) security enhancements. I’m not sure why Amazon chose to move away from that tradition but it should cause users of Fire OS devices concern. By delivering a firmware update that removes a major security feature Amazon has violated the trust of its users.

Unless Amazon fixes this I would recommend avoiding Fire OS based devices. Fortunately other phone and table manufacturers exist and are willing to provide you devices that offer good security features.