Some might think that I have taken this position just to confuse people. Jeremy, rabid proponent of free speech, lover of the Supreme Court, obviously would be in favor of a bill requiring that all court cases be televised.

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/gothmog/status/168065058017001472]

I think I suprised people a bit. The bill, Senate bill 1945, proposes amending Chapter 45 of title 28, United States Code to say:

The Supreme Court shall permit television coverage of all open sessions of the Court unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that allowing such coverage in a particular case would constitute a violation of the due process rights of 1 or more of the parties before the Court. On the surface it may seem odd that I have taken a position opposed to allowing simple viewing access to an institution I have wanted to visit for years. However, my respect for the institution of the Supreme Court is largely due to the fact that it is slightly removed from the general operation of our government. More specifically, it is somewhat removed from the realm of politics. That is in no way to say that the Supreme Court is immune to politics, but the formal nature of the proceedings and the interaction between the lawyers and the Justices is a more intimate one than say, a Congressional hearing. And I believe this is a great strength.

I believe that by inserting the possibility of a live broadcast of hearings into the system, it will change the dynamics and motivations of the lawyers trying cases. They will no longer be speaking (primarily) to the Justices themselves, but will be also presenting their case to the broader audience. I also have the concern that the Justices will experience a chilling effect in that their questions will be scrutinized and challenged far more easily in a political light. Obviously, all of these things can happen in today’s system; transcripts and audio of cases are already released from the court, but there is a slightly higher bar to overcome that prevents most of the stupid, inane criticisms. I don’t believe that in the current system the lawyers and Justices are looking to drop the pithy sound bite that can be shown ad nauseam on Fox or CNN.

To play off the comments of supporter Arlen Specter; “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” I agree in general, however, too much sunlight gives you skin cancer.

You can share your opinion on Open Congress - S.1945.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”A break from work by J. Paxon Reyes, on Flickr”][/caption]

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size. The sentiment of this quote, attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury is probably familiar to most people and almost certainly taken for granted as being true. The rise of modern society and learning, whether it is technology, science, or cultural understanding is founded on this principle; that each scientist does not have to “reinvent the wheel” before they can discover something new.

But in a great conversation I had with Terry Brock a few weeks ago, I noticed a difference in how literally this sentiment can be applied to different disciplines. We both attended a colloquium talk given by William and Mary physics professor Marc Sher (who was my freshman adviser) on the topic of the Higgs Boson. By way of background, I have a BS in Physics and Terry is working on his PhD in Anthropology. While this would imply I was better prepared for this talk, Terry is the son of Chip Brock, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Michigan State University, so I think Terry gets extra physics points by osmosis. The talk was geared towards late physics undergraduate to physics graduate student audiences.

Needless to say, the talk was wonderful and both Terry and I came out of it feeling very stupid.

As the evening wore on, Terry and I spent some time discussing his research work on the process of emancipation for slaves and their transformation into a free people. Very cool work that fascinates me. (If you are interested, I would recommend the talk he gave and recorded entitled Space, Place, and Emancipation.)

What struck me as we talked was that the talk by Marc Sher we had seen and the conversation I was having with Terry both centered around cutting edge research in each of their disciplines. So why was it that I, even with a strong background in physics, was completely lost for the meat of the presentation on the Higgs Boson, yet was able to have what I hope was an interesting, engaging, and possibly even enlightening for Terry conversation on his work?

The simple, stock, bigoted scientist answer to that questions is “Well, physics is harder than anthropology.” That is too easy and full of crap. Knowing Terry and having dated an anthropology major through college, I know that the amount of effort they put into their work and the intellectual rigor of their research is just as challenging as that of any hard science discipline. Given his reading collection, it is clear that Terry’s work relies upon insights, facts, and information gathered by many experts in his field just as my undergraduate work in physics relied upon learning the works of Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein. However, I think it is very true to say that anthropology and other social sciences are much more accessible to the non-expert.

I think the difference comes down to how literally one takes interprets the analogy of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” In the “hard” sciences, I visualize a very tall and thin tower of ideas standing on top of each other. For a layman on the group, the top of the tower is obscured by the clouds; in order to reach the top of the tower (and by analogy understand them), one must climb the whole tower from the ground up. And it is very unlikely for an non-expert to have familiarity with the exact prerequisites of knowledge needed to get to the top.

However, in the social sciences, I visualize it as a much larger building, but broader. The ideas and theories at the cutting edge have required a much broader base of knowledge to get right, but are not so removed from the everyday experiences of others. While it would be necessary for a non-expert to learn just as much to fully understand the experts work, it is sufficient to know only a little to be able to understand the basic concepts.

I think this one of the strengths of the social sciences and challenges that the hard sciences have to overcome. It is much easier to convince someone of the importance of scientific work that they can understand and possibly see applications to in their everyday lives. Explaining why we should do research to back up the existence of the non-zero vacuum expectation spontaneously breaks electroweak gauge symmetry which then gives rise to the Higgs mechanism is a bit harder.

[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”Bombe detail by Garrettc, on Flickr”][/caption]

CNET and others have been running stories lately regarding a new feature of a product called Passware Kit Forensic 11.3 which has the ability to now recover the encryption keys from Apple’s FileVault 2 Full Hard Drive Encryption software. While the articles themselves have done a balanced job of describing the risks, it frustrates me that novices reading the headlines may misunderstand the risks.

• FileVault 2 easily decrypted, warns Passware
• Mac FileVault 2’s full disk encryption can be broken in less than 40 minutes
• Apple FileVault 2 Encryption Cracked By Forensic Software
• Passware: Filevault can be brute force cracked during the span of a lunchbreak No security product is magic. Each tool is designed to protect your data under certain circumstances and given certain constraints. Full Hard Drive Encryption is a great tool, but you have to understand its limitations. It only protects your data when your computer is powered down. When you are using your computer, your data is accessible, as it obviously must be, since you are using it.

Full Hard Drive Encryption, when used properly, is extremely effective at protecting your data. Research has shown that it is becoming a challenge for law enforcement (Research team finds disk encryption foils law enforcement efforts) and that the only avenue to recover data is by compelling the owner to divulge their encryption key. This is becoming an area of law in the United States with regards to 5th Amendment Protections. (Prosecutors Demand Laptop Password in Violation of Fifth Amendment, Take the 5th? Not With Encrypted Hard Drives, Says Fed Judge, and Does the Fifth Amendment Protect Your Encryption Key? provide some information on the topic.) This will be an interesting intersection of technology and law in the coming years. You can see the beginnings of this showing up in the recent Supreme Court case United States v. Jones I talked about recently.

Back to Full Hard Drive Encryption. Memory attacks like those used by the Passware software are nothing new. Firewire is designed to allow direct memory access. I doubt the authors imagined it being used in this way, but the “Law of unintended consequences” certainly applies here. More information on this topic can be found in this very informative article: Physical memory attacks via Firewire/DMA - Part 1: Overview and Mitigation.

The lesson to be learned here is that when using security software (or any security product) it is critical that you understand the security tool and what it can and most importantly can’t protect against.

Find lines of attack that could goad Mr. Gingrich into angry responses and rally mainstream Republicans. Swarm Gingrich campaign events to rattle him. Have Mr. Romney drop his above-the-fray persona and carry the fight directly to his opponent, especially in two critical debates scheduled for the week.[1. Facing Second Loss to Gingrich, Romney Went on Warpath] Sentiments like this, hardly unique to the Romney campaign or to the Repuublican party, are stark evidence that the primary contests are reinforcing characteristics in our elected officials which really are not the skills our leaders need when (or if) they get elected. Leadership at the national executive level requires many qualities, but I think it is safe to say that politeness, diplomacy, and tact are among them. Does going around calling each other liars really show the skills that are needed to run our country?

I don’t really know whom to blame for this trend? The obvious answer is the politicians themselves, but frankly they are just giving us what we want. When you look at the candidates who might qualify as reserved, thoughtful, balanced (Jon Hunstman for example), they don’t get much traction in the media. So maybe the media is to blame? They are certainly a favorite target, even by the candidates themselves[2. GOP candidate Newt Gingrich criticizes CNN during South Carolina debate]. But again, they are driven by revenues and ratings are driven by viewers, and viewers like conflict. And conflict is easier to sustain and show with pithy, blunt, angry soundbites.

People are motivated by how they are rewarded. And I think that we, as voters, are rewarding the wrong skills. Regardless of what your political views are, I think everyone can agree that we want our leaders to be able to execute those views in the best way if they win their elections.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. [3. Albert Einstein] Clearly, we are not happy with most of our politicians[4. NBC/WSJ poll: Majority would vote out every member of Congress]. So why are we still voting for them and people who act like them?

Side Note: While I am using the Republicans to make my point here, I only do so because they are the only party having a meaningful primary this election cycle. I 100% believe that the same thing would happen with the Democrats. A pox on both our houses.

The Supreme Court just ruled in United States v. Jones that the placement of a GPS tracking device on an individuals automobile without a warrant is a violation of the 4th Amendment. The New York Times does a good job with an overview of the case here: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights.

I am quite pleased with the result, but I found the opinion itself to be particularly interesting. First is that while the Opinion of the Court was only joined by 5 of the 9 justices (Justices Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Sotomayor), the other 4 (Justices Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan) concurred in the judgement, but differed in reasoning. So the Judgement was decided unanimously, which I think is a positive sign for future privacy cases.

Specifically I think this section from Justice Sotomayor’s concussing opinion is worth reading (emphasis mine).

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. E.g., Smith, 442 U. S., at 742; United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435, 443 (1976). This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellu- lar providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medi- cations they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to acceptthis “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” post, at 10, and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protectedstatus only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection. See Smith, 442 U. S., at 749 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (“Privacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. Those who disclose certain facts to a bank or phone company for a limited business purpose need not assume that this information will be released to other persons for other purposes”); see also Katz, 389 U. S., at 351-352 (“[W]hat [a person] seeks to preserve as private,even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected”). This is quite a good thing in my opinion.

Obviously this is not the last time electronic information and privacy will be making its way to the Supreme Court, but I am hopeful based on the opinion of the Court that some of the Justices will look at the larger implications.

As a side note, I find it amusing that, as a self-declared originalist uses the Katz v. United States decision so prominently in the opinion as that case greatly expanded the reach of 4th Amendment protections, aruably beyond the original meaning.

My friend Terry posted a talk, Place, Space, and the Process of Emancipation on a 19th Century Plantation in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, he did for the Society for Historical Archaeology 45th annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology where he talked about the transition from slavery to freedom in St. Mary’s City in Maryland. I will not paraphrase his talk because Terry is smarter than I am and I would not do it justice; you should watch it.

One of the central themes he discussed was the distinction between space, which he defined as a “geographical area” and place, an “area with cultural or social meanings for certain groups.”

This spawned a short twitter conversation (twit-versation?)

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/gothmog/status/159720437520138242]

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/brockter/status/159721159124987904]

While people may metaphorically refer to modern day workplaces as “slavery” which it most certainly is not, I think that the modern workplace does offer a certain analogy to slaves and their quarters. Workers are in an environment which is owned by another entity who has a certain level of power over them. The employer to a large degree controls the environment, from building to furniture to temperature. The employer also can impose rules on the employees as to how they may make their work spaces “there own.”

I have long been a proponent in the technology field for small group offices (2-3 people). While there are clearly benefits in solitude and camaraderie in such a space, I never contemplated until now that offices also allow for the opportunity to most easily customize a workers area to make it much more of a space rather than just a place. Modern office theory for technology workers has shifted from the standard office through the awful stage of cubicals to the newest idea of having “open workspaces.” This seems to lower the opportunity for an individual space although it has been counterbalanced by the loosening of rules of what is appropriate when personalizing your workspace.

How this balances out is a personal matter; I know for me, I prefer the solitude of offices and would prefer that to the open culture where the only solitude you can get is between headphones. I have found that spending the time to make my office more personal through pictures, artwork, desk toys helps me be more relaxed than I would be in a more sterile environment.

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/gothmog/status/159722663324041216]

I think it is a logical conclusion to draw that the more an individual is able to identify their workspace as a personal space, the happier they will be. It also seems logical to conclude that a happier worker is a more productive worker. Obviously happy involves more than just ones workspace, but it is a factor.

I don’t have any empirical evidence of this theory, but if anyone wants to get a PhD on this topic, I will gladly accept a small footnote thanking me for the idea.

I think everyone who reads this knows that I am a bit of a security wonk, so I read with interest an article about the latest breaches to corporate security and loss of customer data: Even Big Companies Cannot Protect Their Data.

“It’s disturbing,” Ms. Scott said in an interview on Monday. “Companies have to do a better job protecting our privacy. You would think companies like eBay and Amazon have the financial backing and wherewithal to take the proper security measures.” But the article seems to take the question to be “why can’t the companies do better.” I think that is the wrong question. The question is “why_ won’t_ the companies do better.” And I will modestly put forward what I think is the simple answer.

There is no monetary incentive to do so. (yet)

The parenthetical is my optimism that at some point it will be worth it to do it. I am not saying that there are not egregious technical lapses in many pieces of software, but solving the technical problems behind securing data is possible. How expensive it will be is unknown at this point, but I think it is absolutely true that at this moment it is cheaper for the companies to not fix it right now.

Security is a balancing act between risk and reward. In today’s market, the risks (and associated PR flak and monetary costs) are not large enough that the merchants are interested in investing more money to fix the problems. This is partly a result of the current system that the costs associated with most fraud is absorbed by the credit card companies or possibly the insurance companies if they are large enough.

Until those organizations say “enough is enough” and force merchants to invest (which will then filter down to the software companies), the merchants don’t have an incentive to do better.

I am envious of people who, on any topic, seem to have a neverending fount of things to write about. The topic doesn’t really matter, it could be the well known industry experts like John Gruber and Horace Deidu or topic experts like my friend Terry or my friends KT and Liz who write blog entries all the time and write whole books. Writing has always been a chore for me and my lack of writing was even something I used to be proud of, gladly confirming I made it through college without taking a course in the English department (a hard thing to do at a traditional liberal arts university).

But now I wish I had worked harder at it. I doubt that the people I mentioned find it “easy,” but they are clearly better at it than me. I remember a book I read many years ago by Salman Rusdie (yes, that Salman Rusdie) - Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It was a fantastical tale following a child whose father lost the ability to write because the invisible, magical faucet that was in their bathroom that provided inspiration for stories had dried up. This faucet was installed based on some criteria when you became a writer and helped provide you with inspiration. My faucet is still on backorder, I think.

I have long been a consumer of information on all topics. My RSS reader currently has over 100 feeds I look at every day on topics ranging from technical to food to politics. I have been working on reading more of the news, recently renewing my subscription (online and print) to the New York Times.

Recently, I have been making a concerted effort to share more of the items that I find interesting via Twitter and Facebook. I think it is an honorable role to play as a filter. To curate the hundreds of articles that pass by me every day to the select few that others in my social group may find interesting.

Having been doing this sharing role for a month or so, I am finding that it is a logical progression towards creator. On a number of occasions, discussion has been started on one of the social media outlets which has spawned a blog entry.

I think that this shows that, at least for me, writing is just one part of a larger conversation about something I know something about or are interested in. The challenge I think all (many) of us face is that for topics that we know or are experienced about, well, we are experienced about them and they seem “easy” and therefore not worth writing about. The mindset shift that needs to occur is that they are probably not easy for everyone and therefore worth sharing. Therein lies the challenge.

My friend Ben has started a new blog, BK, you should read it.

His post on diversity is very well done and I largely agree with him, but I have a small point on which I would refine. (And since I have been searching for something to write about today, I will stretch it into an entry.)

Ben starts out by saying: “Everybody loves diversity, except when it comes to ideology.”

I would refine this to say that people quietly crave a very specific kind of diversity when it comes to ideology, the duality. The us vs. them mentality is somehow part of the human psyche at a very low level. I don’t think that we are inherently looking for conflict, just that conflict is a required component of feeling a belonging to your own group.

Humans therefore create this duality even when there is in fact a continuum of opinions. Politics is the perfect example. There are not in reality two camps, left and right. There is a very smooth spectrum from Crazy pinko liberals to wack job conservatives. Or you could divide it into libertarians and authoritarians. No matter what metric you use, it will be a roughly even distribution. But acknowledging that makes for poor arguments and bad TV.

While the result is vitriol and animosity, I think the true cause is an attempt to identify self.

An article came out this morning in our local web news site about two restaurants that have closed in Williamsburg,

Two Restaurants Closed, Owe JCC Meals, Business Taxes

I don’t know of the specifics in these cases, but it is the tone of the comments that seems to miss the point. I can think of numerous occasions where people I know have commented “Its too bad restaurant XYZ closed.” And I agree that it is sad to see local restaurants close. But I find that I have to restrain myself from asking what, to me, is the obvious question “Did you frequent them?” Because I am sure that in almost all the instances, the answer is “No.” And if so, why the hell are you surprised they went out of business?

If you value local restaurants and local businesses and you want them to succeed, you need to shop there. That is how you support local businesses; you give them money. Don’t buy your wine at Target or Walmart or even the chain grocery stores, find a local seller. Will it be a bit more expensive? Possibly, but frankly, if you say you support local business and aren’t willing to put your money down to do so, please shut up.

Thank you.