Tag: US politics

Exile, ctd.

I wrote before about US citizens being sent into exile. In looking for information about how the No Fly List works, I found this story reported by Glenn Greenwald:

In April of this year, Saadiq Long, a 43-year-old African-American Muslim who now lives in Qatar, purchased a ticket on KLM Airlines to travel to Oklahoma, the state where he grew up. Long, a 10-year veteran of the US Air Force, had learned that the congestive heart failure from which his mother suffers had worsened, and she was eager to see her son…

The day before he was to travel, a KLM representative called Long and informed him that the airlines could not allow him to board the flight. That, she explained, was because the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had placed Long on its “no-fly list”, which bars him from flying into his own country.

Long has now spent the last six months trying to find out why he was placed on this list and what he can do to get off of it. He has had no success, unable to obtain even the most basic information about what caused his own government to deprive him of this right to travel.

Given that there is really no other way to get from Qatar to the US than by flying, this is equivalent to exile. Without even a trial, or even any official notification. And no procedure for redress. (Supposedly there is a procedure, but it seems to consist only of his being assigned a “redress control number”. No other response was forthcoming from the government in 6 months, and the US embassy has offered no assistance.) Greenwald cites several other comparable cases, and says there are 21,000 names on the list, including 500 Americans. And things aren’t getting better:

The Obama administration “lowered the bar for being added to the list”. As a result, reported AP, “now a person doesn’t have to be considered only a threat to aviation to be placed on the no-fly list” but can be included if they “are considered a broader threat to domestic or international security”, a vague status determined in the sole and unchecked discretion of unseen DHS bureaucrats.

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.

Continue reading “The right to bear codes”

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.

Continue reading “Exile in the modern world: Can a country deport its own citizens?”

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”.)

Continue reading “Paradoxes of belief: Holocaust denial edition”

Conspiratorial resurrection

By way of Andrew Sullivan, there’s this report from Scientific American about the psychology of conspiracy theorists. Key lines:

while it has been known for some time that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, we would expect contradictory conspiracy theories to be negatively correlated. Yet, this is not what psychologists Micheal Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Suton found in a recent study. Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time

Contradiction is in the mind of the beholder. They are ignoring the possibility that President Obama, dissatisfied with the poor progress of the minions he had been able to hire to destroy America (he’s a stickler for benchmarks) sent a Kenyan voodoo strike team into Pakistan to resurrect Osama bin Laden, who had already been garroted personally by George W. Bush (in one of the many top secret missions he carried out while his body double cleared brush on the ranch).

The next president will not only have a $20 trillion debt to cope with, he’ll also have to take out an undead al Qaeda leader. Continue reading “Conspiratorial resurrection”

The Life of Julia: Another longitudinal fable

Picking up from my earlier discussion of the way cross-sectional data  get turned into (sometimes misleading) longitudinal stories, it’s been about a year since the Obama campaign unveiled The Life of Julia, a slide show that contrasted Obama’s and Romney’s policies with regard to their effects on women at different ages. Stated that way it would be pretty standard and uncontroversial, but in fact it turned into a flashpoint for the early part of the campaign. Why? Precisely because it was not a list of cross-sectional promises — What President Obama will do for children; What President Obama will do for seniors; etc. would be standard campaign web site headings — but was turned into a longitudinal story. These were not 12 different women, of different ages, who would putatively be helped by the president’s policies, but a single woman “Julia” who seems to be spending her whole life looking for government programs to scrounge from. Of course, it only seems this way because of the way this infographic interacts with our expectations of a biographical narrative, where we expect to be seeing the high points of her life, and every one of them involves government services. Creepy! It’s no wonder some critics were reminded of cradle-to-grave socialism.

Of course, the real story is cross-sectional. If Julia is 3 years old now, Obama is not really promising to provide a small business loan to her in the year 2040. And by the time she reaches retirement, she’ll probably be living on a Mars colony or hiding out from roving mutant bandits in subterranean bunkers after the nuclear climate catastrophe.

obama-julia-infographic julia full

Bad apples

I remember being mystified back when President Bush defended his administrations stewardship of the Iraqi penal system by saying that the torture enhanced interrogation torture (I guess it was officially, since people got prosecuted for it) at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few bad apples”. I guess that phrase had been going around for a while, and now it’s certainly common. (For example, here is the assertion that “a few bad apples” are responsible for most complaints about doctors.)

But back in 2003 I was confused by this expression. Bush seemed to be using it to mean that the US occupation of Iraq, and the US military and antiterror policies more generally, were sound, and that the crimes were the isolated work of individuals with no broader implications. But why apples? Why not “a few bad people”? The reference is clearly to the phrase “one rotten apple spoils the barrel”. But that expression has exactly the opposite implication: Rottenness is not isolated. If you’ve found “a few bad apples”, you must expect that the rot is widespread. Now, there’s nothing compulsory about that metaphor — you may not think that one bad individual casts suspicion on the rest — but why are apples being gratuitously referred to when the desired implication is exactly the opposite? How did this adage get turned into its converse? Or is the referent actually something else?

World’s greatest healthcare (TM)

What does it mean when a US politician like Chris Christie tells the Republican National Convention the US has “the world’s greatest healthcare system”? Is it like when kids buy a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug for Father’s Day: An expression of affection for an ill-favoured thing, but mine own?

One of my formative political experiences was the summer during graduate school, when I listened on the radio to broadcasts of the US Senate debating the Clinton healthcare proposals. What struck me above all was how the senators universally (it seemed) invoked the unmatched excellence of American health care. “The envy of the world”, “best health care in the world”. The only difference of opinion was, of course, that opponents of the reform said that tinkering with this paragon of perfection would inevitably be disastrous, while supporters argued for making this blessing available to more people.*

So, the politicians certainly appear to believe it, and to believe that it should have policy implications; or to believe that a significant portion of the public believes it; or to believe that a significant portion of the public will respond favourably to the assertion, even if they suspect it is untrue. Is it cognitive dissonance? We’re America dammit, and being the sort of people we are, we certainly wouldn’t put up with a ramshackle healthcare system.

Continue reading “World’s greatest healthcare (TM)”

More reflections on 9/11 and the Iraq war

I left out a few points that I wanted to make in my post on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War:

  1. About a week after, I wrote in my diary that I had the disturbing impression, reading the comments of journalists, politicians, and intellectuals, that a significant subset of them were in a certain way pleased: not that the country was attacked, certainly not at the tremendous loss of life, but that life had turned serious. The country had been wallowing in nostalgia for the “Greatest Generation” — Tom Brokaw’s book had been published just a few years earlier — while the current youth (a group which I was just growing out of, being then aged 33) had its culture defined by ironic detachment. So we had articles on “The Age of Irony Comes to an End“. It was mainly just another way to bash young people, which is always popular, but it also appealed to a deep-seated desire to be the protagonists of history, solving problems of historic dimensions. And there are no victory parades for conserving energy and stopping runaway global warming. This was confirmed for me when people started quoting incessantly W H Auden’s 1939 disdain for the “clever hopes” expiring “of a low dishonest decade”. Continue reading “More reflections on 9/11 and the Iraq war”

Evidence, WMD, and the Iraq War: Reflections on Tony Blair and Colin Powell

With the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, it’s an appropriate time to comment on two elements of the public discussion of the war, in the US and the UK, that puzzle me.

  1. The insistence, particularly among lefties who supported the war then and have reconsidered the matter since then, that everyone thought Saddam Hussein had active nuclear and chemical programs. At the time, I strongly opposed the war — because I thought it was an inappropriate distraction from Afghanistan, I didn’t like the way it was being ginned up, the WMD argument didn’t seem to me sufficiently important relative to the trouble it was likely to stir up –but I had every anticipation that the US military would march in and would find the missing nuclear program, and that this would be waved in the face of everyone who was still legitimately skeptical. I assumed there was a lot of secret information that more or less proved to anyone entitled to see it that this work was going on. It seemed more likely than not, until… Until Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. I found that speech astonishing. My thought was, surely they are pulling out all of the most convincing bits from their secret dossier, and that’s it? Continue reading “Evidence, WMD, and the Iraq War: Reflections on Tony Blair and Colin Powell”