Common Infirmities

The right to bear codes

Back when I was a graduate student, in the late 1980s and early 90s, there was a lot of discussion, among those interested in cryptography and computing (which I was, only peripherally) of the status of cryptographic algorithms as “weapons”, subject to export controls. The idea seemed bizarre to those of us who thought of algorithms as things you prove theorems about, and computer code as something you write. It seemed as absurd as declaring a book to be a weapon. Sure, you might metaphorically call Das Kapital a weapon, or the Declaration of Independence, but it’s not really a weapon, and a country was much more likely to think about banning imports than banning exports. The author of PGP was then being threatened with prosecution, and had the code published as a book to mate the analogy more explicit.

So, I used to defend free access to cryptography because I thought it was ridiculous to consider codes to be weapons. I now think that was naïve. But if codes are weapons, does that provide a justification for a right of free access (in the US)? Maybe it’s not freedom of speech or the press — 1st amendment — but if cryptography is a weapon, is the use and manufacture of cryptographic algorithms and software protected in the US by the 2nd amendment? Certainly the main arguments made for a right to firearms — sport, self-defence, and bulwark against tyranny — are all applicable to cryptography as well. Are there current US laws or government practices that restrict the people’s free access to cryptography that would be called into question if cryptography were “arms” in the sense of the 2nd amendment?

This is connected to the question I have wondered about occasionally: Why didn’t strong cryptography happen? That is, back then I (and many others) assumed that essentially unbreakable cryptography would become easy and default, causing trouble for snoops and law enforcement. But in fact, most of our data and communications are pretty insecure still. Is this because of legal constraints, or general disinterest, or something else? The software is available, but it’s sufficiently inconvenient that most people don’t use it. And while it wouldn’t actually be difficult to encode all my email (say) with PGP, I’d feel awkward asking people to do it, since no one else is doing it.

It seems as though the philosophy of the Clipper chip has prevailed: Some people really need some sort of cryptography for legitimate purposes. If you make a barely adequate tool for the purpose conveniently available, you’ll prevent people from making the small extra effort to obtain really strong cryptography.

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How much do BART police earn?

I have great affection for BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, to the uninitiated), and I have no criticism to make of the BART police. That said, I was somewhat astonished a few months ago when I saw an advertisement for BART police recruits much like the one below, except that it quoted numbers well over $100,000 for the salary range. I think they deserve to be well paid. They have a difficult and dangerous job, and they spend so much of their lives down in gloomy subway tunnels that (to judge by the evidence of the photo below) they are left blinking in stunned amazement when they are summoned up into the light of day to be photographed, and all but one seem to have had their growth stunted.

Obviously I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. They have now put up exactly the same poster, but with numbers barely half as big, and now supplemented with the word base in bold-face type modifying “annual base, entry-level pay range”. Boldfaced type really stands out in this context. Particularly with the comma after it. That line looks like the typographic incarnation of embarrassment.

Benjamin Franklin’s advice on vaccination

I’ve never seen Franklin brought into the discussion of parents’ refusal to vaccinate their children. This passage from his autobiography made a deep impression on me:

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

More comments on Andrew Wakefield and the MMR-autism hoax here.

I once was at a parents’ meeting in Oxford where a homeopath had been invited to speak. I was genuinely nonplussed that she was raving against vaccines. Aren’t vaccines the one great success of the homeopathic world-view? Giving a tiny dose of the disease-causing agent to cure (or prevent) the disease. Her answer was incomprehensible to me, but seemed to suggest that the very fact that there was a measurable physiologic effect showed that they weren’t any good (from a homeopathic perspective). And the fact that pharmaceutical firms made the vaccines was all you needed to know about their chthonic nature.

I fled the meeting in revulsion when the homeopath started prating about homeopathic cures for tetanus.

Hospital advertisements

So, you’ve just been hit by a bus, and you’re lying bleeding in the gutter. Naturally, what you’re thinking about is, what would be the most convenient place to get a couple of pints of blood, and maybe have a ruptured spleen removed. Sure, the ambulance drivers might know the closest one, but I’m going to insist on being taken to the best, and what better recommendation could there be, when your life is at stake, than a placard on the side of a bus. (Anyway, the EMTs probably have a remunerative arrangement with some other hospital that will pad their incomes, regardless of whether you survive the trip.) And while I’m paying thousands of dollars a day just for being in the bed, I can think about how my money is being put to good use subsidising mass transit.

Seriously, isn’t this beyond bad taste? I’m used to a medical system that advertises to, you know, inform the public about medical matters. Not to drum up business for the ER.

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Impact à la canadienne

I’ve mocked the sometimes risible implications of the British obsession with tying academic research one-for-one with “impact” on industry or society. It’s not absurd to want to ask the question, I would argue, but expecting to be able to get answers about impact on the fine grain that is needed for steering funding decisions leads, I suggest, is a fool’s errand. There is also a (not very) hidden political agenda behind impact: Research that elucidates the origin of the Himalayas or the inner workings of modern religious movements, let us say, has no impact unless the BBC makes a documentary about it. Research that helps one bank increase its market share over another bank by better confusing its customers is rewarded for its impact, because definable (and potentially grateful) people have made money from it.

Nonetheless, the British establishment is not so crass as to suppose that helping to make money is the only possible utility of research. The UK research councils are at pains to point to the multiple “pathways to impact”, through changing public understanding, government policy, health benefits, education. For some purposes, even something as useless as influencing the progress of science can be counted as impact, though it fail to swell the bank account of even the smallest party donor.

To see the full unfolding of impact’s crassness potential, we need to look to Canada. John MacDougal, director of Canada’s National Research Council (NRC), announced his agency’s new focus on impact by saying,

Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.

No hedging there about social impact, contributing to public understanding, government policy, etc. Science minister Gary Goodyear said that

We want business-driven, industry-relevant research and development.

This is not quite as outrageous as astronomer Phil Plait makes it seem, when he contends that “the Canadian government and the NRC have literally sold out science”. And he goes on to say that NRC “will only perform research that has ‘social or economic gain’.” An article quotes Goodyear saying

the government isn’t abandoning basic science, just shifting its focus to commercializing discoveries. “The day is past when a researcher could hit a home run simply by publishing a paper on some new discovery,” he said. “The home run is when somebody utilizes the knowledge that was discovered for social or economic gain.”

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Exile in the modern world: Can a country deport its own citizens?

One of my favourite novels is B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff (“The Ship of the Dead”). Written in the mid-1920s, this novel tells the story of an American seaman who accidentally gets left behind with no papers when his ship sails from Rotterdam. Suddenly he is a stateless person. He tries to get help from the US consulate, but gets a Catch 22-like sermon, along the lines of, “I would of course help an American citizen who was stranded here without papers, but I am unable to assist you without proof that you are indeed an American citizen.” All the officials he encounters treat him as some sort of ghost, a man without identity papers being a contradiction in terms. (This reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s comments on the imposition of passport requirements for international travel after the First World War, a tyranny that until then had been thought characteristic of Russian despotism.) Since no one wants to deal with a ghost, they find ways to dump him across a border, taking him further and further west, until he lands in Barcelona and ends up being signed on, not entirely willingly, to the Yorick, a ramshackle ship, a floating hell of labour, crewed by other unpersons from all over the world, its hold stuffed with useless cargo that is just being carried around the Seven Seas in the hopes that it will eventually sink and yield an insurance payment.

Anyway, I thought of this surreal novel when I read the recent New Yorker article by William Finnegan, about a US citizen with a minor criminal record and mental disabilities who, for no reason that anyone can reconstruct, was targeted by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for deportation to Mexico. He was born in the US, had never been outside the US, was not Hispanic, but somehow when he was booked into a state prison for a short sentence his birthplace was listed as Mexico, and that was enough to get him deported to Mexico less than a year later. And the Mexican authorities, since he wasn’t Mexican, managed to ship him off to Guatemala. He eventually got returned to the US, though more by accident than design. When he flew into Atlanta, with a passport issued to him by a vice consul in Guatemala City, the immigration officials there noted that he had already been deported and had him arrested, intending to redeport him.

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Why don’t we throw people out of emergency rooms?

In discussions of market forces in health care, someone always points out that we don’t allow people to just die in the streets. Anyone who shows up in an emergency room must be treated (in the US this has been true since the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986, I believe). Among the many other reasons why medical care does not respond to free market incentives, then, is the fact that the providers are not able to turn away customers who are unwilling or unable to pay.

But here’s what I’m wondering: This is always presented as an issue of basic humanity, or altruism. We can’t let the poor die of treatable injuries or illnesses because that seems too brutal. But is that the whole story, or even most of the story? My suspicion — and I’d have to go back to the debates on EMTALA to develop any clarity on this — is that the real reason we have a no-exceptions requirement that hospitals provide urgent care to the poor is that there’s a significant danger that the non-poor might be confused with the poor, particularly in times of medical emergency. Someone who has been hit by a car or has suffered a stroke and is disoriented is likely incapable of quickly identifying herself as an upstanding creditworthy citizen with health insurance. So the hospital is required to try to keep them alive long enough to allow them (or their relatives) to demonstrate that they are worth saving.

Which leads to a question: Supposing biometric databases become universal, and the hospitals are able to immediately ID anyone who comes through the door. Will we then relax the rules, and allow them to turn away the indigent, perhaps sending them off to some primitive alternative hospital for the poor?

Who cares about future generations?

Niall Ferguson has gotten a lot of attention lately for having bashed the “effete” J M Keynes for his selfish worldview, which was due to his homosexuality-induced childlessness rendering him indifferent to the fate of future generations. (This was apparently NF’s interpretation of Keynes’s “In the long run we’re all dead” quip, which is such a bizarrely dishonest distortion that it can only be understood as a sort of carry-over of the toff’s empty PPE cleverness into his new life as intellectual masseur to the wealthy; he seems to have momentarily forgotten that his personal brand depends on him maintaining the veneer of an intelligent academic historian.)

Brad DeLong has pointed out that there is a long tradition of right-wing intellectuals slurring Keynes as a pervert, and his economic theories as sharing the taint of his perversion. Where you stand depends on where you sit, though Henry Blodget says it is unheard of for

a respectable academic to tie another economist’s beliefs to his or her personal situation rather than his or her research. Saying that Keynes’ economic philosophy was based on him being childless would be like saying that Ferguson’s own economic philosophy is based on him being rich and famous and therefore not caring about the plight of poor unemployed people.

Maybe that’s true, though plenty of non-economists state openly that the economics Weltanschauung derives from the pampered condition prevailing among its devotees.

But do you know who was really effete and childless and indifferent to the fate of our children and grandchildren and future generations? There was that guy who said this

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

and this

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal;

and this

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

I can’t wait to see Ferguson and his ideological compatriots go after that guy. I bet they’ll really nail him.

Paradoxes of belief: Holocaust denial edition

(or, Vonnegut’s Mother Night reversed)

I’ve long thought it amazing how many odd, nearly unbelievable, individual stories are hidden in the corners of the grand ghastly narrative of the Holocaust; and no matter how many stories I read — Peter Wyden’s account of Stella Goldschlag, for instance, his Jewish schoolmate in 1930s Berlin who specialised in sniffing out undercover Jews for the Gestapo — there’s always another even stranger, such as the jewish graphic designer Cioma Schönhaus who survived the war, and saved many other lives, by learning to forge identity papers.

Holocaust denial seems to have its own bizarre corners. To wit, this new revelation:

[David Stein] a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood’s political conservatives […] brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein’s cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.

[Under his original name David Cole he] was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998.

This reads like an April Fool’s prank, or a high-concept film plot from the fevered leftist imagination. The right-wing Jewish Holocaust documentary maker and fanatical Israel supporter is actually a secret neo-Nazi. Ha ha. Who would believe that? It’s not so easy to change your identity, particularly if you’ve just made yourself notorious on TV chat shows. And how would a man with no past be able to start a new career and become a political insider?

But what intrigues me most of all is when the Guardian article touches on the question of Stein/Cole’s true beliefs. One of the important lessons of modern cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind is that it is very difficult — perhaps impossible — to develop a coherent theory of beliefs, under which statements like “X believes Y” are statements of fact. (See, for example, the seminal book by Stephen Stich, that relegates beliefs — and other many other concepts — to the realm of “folk psychology”.)

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Freedom of religion in Britain and Germany

After the monarchy, state-sponsored religion is one of the strangest customs I’ve had to adapt to in the UK (and Germany, the other European country that I’ve lived in for a number of years). In the UK I’ve already written about the somewhat insidious role of state religion, such as the way it dictates which schools your children will be admitted to; that 26 bishops sit ex officio in the House of Lords (though it should be mentioned that the other state religion, Finance, has its own peculiar kind of special representation in the Commons); and that non-Anglican foreigners who wish to marry in the UK require permission of the Home Office, for which they must pay a substantial fee. (This Anglican exception may now have been rescinded; I know there was pressure from the European Court of Human Rights.) All UK state schools are required — following a Blair-era edict — to have daily Christian prayer (unless they are state-sponsored non-Christian religious schools, another Blair novum), though that law is not always followed, particularly in secondary schools — see par. 141 of this Ofsted report.

Germany is a federation in most respects, with wide variation in religion and religiosity, but a requirement for church-approved religious education (of two flavours, Catholic and Protestant) in the schools is anchored in the constitution. The federal government collects tax on behalf of the churches. And the churches, which control a significant portion of the hospitals, among other businesses and institutions — are allowed to discriminate against their employees in ways that would be forbidden, and indeed morally condemned, by any other employer. A recent court decision in Germany concerns a 60-year-old pediatric social worker, who worked for the Catholic organisation Caritas. Shocked and appalled by the extent of child-abuse perpetrated and covered up by the Church, he officially left the Church. (In other countries it’s not clear how you would officially stop being Catholic, other than by joining another church, but in Germany you just stop paying tax and you’re out. Reassignment of your soul’s eternal fate follows in 4 to 6 weeks.)

So the Church, which knows how to respond to a major breach of moral and ethical norms, clearly couldn’t stand for the scandal of a social worker in their employ taking a public stand against sexual abuse of children. And while being Catholic was apparently not a requirement of the job to begin, the courts agreed that being an ex-Catholic is forbidden, particularly one whose break with the Church was provoked by something so unseemly as individual conscience.