BookBlog

Open government geekery

So, is it legal to use a web forum or internet chat for official public discussion in California?

The plot thickens. I asked informally, through city council folk in two Bay Area cities, and got conflicting responses from city attorneys. One says it's illegal. Another says it's permitted but recommends that officials use the tools cautiously. And neither has provided citations in case law or administrative ruling.

Point to point email is explicitly prohibited under California's Brown Act, which requires conversation among a quorum of public officials to occur only in public meetings. But web forums are different -- unlike an email, which is visible only to the sender and recipients, tools like blogs, forums and wikis are visible to the public.

Teleconferences are permitted under the Bagley Keene act. What about web conference and chat, which are like teleconferences without a phone number, and with or without voice?

In search of some more solid legal grounding, I sent a question to these California open government watchdogs. If I don't hear from them directly, I'll network in.

The new tools are great ways to broaden public discourse. If they're not legal, they should be. The first step is to find out where the law stands.

I discovered another opportunity for fixing, listening to Jon Udell's interview of Carl Malamud on IT Conversations. Malamud's activism was behind the publication of Edgar, and many other initiatives to make public data publicly available. In the interview, he mentioned that Congressional Committee meetings are webcast but not recorded and archived. Well, that's wrong. Sounds like a lovely opportunity for some blog activism, sometime after election season.

The YouTube debate as mass media

On KQED Forum on Friday, David Weinberger noted that the YouTube debate, drew more from the conventions of mass media than the web. The questions came from citizens, but the candidates answered in soundbite format, with minimal follow-up, and the answers were subjected to talking-head punditry. The YouTube debate was a fine news hook for discussion of web politics. Meanwhile, the interesting action, it seems to me, is in local/regional politics.

Firedoglake has a weekly series where progressive candidates talk to the community, and donations are solicited via ActBlue. Recent studies have shown that MoveOn's get out the vote efforts actually got out the vote; the next step is peer GOTV. Once the Netroots help candiates get elected, the next step is accountability. On Calitics, bloggers are calling out Jerry McNerney, who was elected with tremendous netroots support, for voting against medical marijuana. The legacy of the Dean campaign, it seems to me, is less about bloggers covering presidential campaigns and more about activists building the 50 state grass roots base.

Delamination and the antitrust

David Weinberg has a fine manifesto up on Delamination, the idea that in order to have a free and competitive internet, we need to split access from services. Which is good right and true, and darn hard to do with the government as wholly owned subsidiary of the oligopoly. A good number of the intractable problems in US society come from way too much market power. The problem with Net Neutrality is like the problem with the Farm Bill -- a handful of companies own the market and buy the law, and it's pain in the rear to buy back. Delamination on its own is like saving the whales, a good but atomized idea that's not big enough to sustain. We need to rebuild the trust-busting ideal of the good old Progressives.

Advertising your way out of a problem

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch criticizes the Google blogger's use of Sicko to pitch ads for the healthcare industry. Why is this a bad idea? In his post, Arrington says it's because the topic is controversial, "Millions of Americans have a serious problem with the way health care is handled in this country, and such a polarized topic is hardly one in which a company like Google wants to take a stand. And if they did take a stand, it would be with Moore." In a comment further down in the thread, he goes further, alleging that the move is unwise because it will "step on certain toes" in the Bay Area. Arrington's implication is that as a company gets bigger, its bloggers need to refrain from controversy and toe the line with respect to politically correct conventional wisdom.

Ross Mayfield is closer on with his critique of the blogger's statement that Google advertising is a "democratic" way of spreading the word about the good side of your industry. Advertising isn't democratic, first of all because it costs money, and second because advertising messages are one way and don't allow readers to talk back.

Building on Ross' point, what's worst about Lauren Turner's post -- from Google's perspective -- isn't that it expresses an opinion about a controversial topic (the health care industry really isn't that bad), or that it overestimates the democracy of online advertising. It's that advertising is presented as the way out of a PR dilemma that caused at least in part by real problems.

The classic lesson of contemporary PR -- from the Exxon Valdez to the Tylenol poisoning to John Mackey of Whole Foods taking on Michael Pollan's critique of "industrial organic" -- is that when there's bad press that has some merit, you should honestly take on the critics, and acknowledge the problems, and make changes. You can't just whitewash your way out of a scandal.

Given the number of uninsured people in the US, the statistics about infant mortality and lifespan and healthcare cost, there's clearly a problem. that is not going to be fixed by pictures of smiling grandmas and cute babies. You can agree with Michael Moore's solution, or like his filmmaking style, or neither. (Disclosure: I haven't seen the movie because Moore's style often bugs me, but I probably agree with his conclusion). Regardless, the US healthcare system has problems and it can't just advertise its way out.

As a provider of advertising services, Google is ill-advised to market their services as a way to escape a well-deserved bad reputation.

Have you been reading Josh Marshall?

He and his crew at Talking Points Memo / Muckraker Report have been doing some of the best investigative journalism about the US Attorney scandal. They have been relentlesslyconnecting the dots about the reasons for the firings, and the apparent perversion of the justice department into a tool to prosecute democrats, protect corrupt republicans, and suppress the democratic vote. Before this story, he was an early investigator of the Plame and Abramoff stories. No dead celebrities junkfood or he-said-she-said abdication of critical thinking. Good, straight-up journalistic oversight from the old tradition, and as far as I can tell, one of the best working journalists alive.

One of the benefits of the blog form for investigative journalism is its strength at serialization. The classic Pulitzer-winning formula is a long-form expose, developed in secrecy for months or years. The resulting stories are in-depth and rigorous, but sometimes hard to follow. The "story" punch belongs to the disaster or celebrity scandal. The stories of systematic corruption are wonky and "boring." The short, serial blog form lets you learn the characters and follow the plot, building an understanding of complex events over time without having to plow through contiguous acre-feet of newsprint. Blogs depend on linking and comments for fame, rather than "scoops," and benefits from shared research by readers. So blog-borne investigative journalism surfaces earlier, as the facts are being discovered. The reader is brought along for the ride with the journalist, who is following the threads, not sure where they will go.

Democratic congress and tech policy: better and worse

The new D congress seems to have mixed prospects for tech policy. Internet policy looks to be getting better,with Ed Markey, a supporter of Net Neutrality, now chairman of the internet subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee. Copyright looks pretty scary, with Berman (D, Disney) in charge of the committee responsible for IP law. Privacy's looking better, with Waxman looking to investigate government violations. Energy is better than it was when the reps from XOM were in charge. Unfortunately, money seems to be headed from oil subsidies to ethanol subsidies. Given the farm lobby, I wonder if there's any way to stop that boondoggle.

Sunlight Foundation - Web2.0 meets government

What would it be like if public information: bills and supporters, government spending, campaign donations, were online and mashup-able like Amazon books and Google maps, and collaborative like wikipedia? I had a chance to go to an event put on by the Sunlight Foundation, which is investing in this vision, and admire some excellent tools, such as Maplight, a new, useful and elegant database of political contributions in California, and project VoteSmart,which tracks US and state politicians voting records.

Getting the tools crew together was fun; the next step is to mix it up with users. One of the participants in the "speed geeking" cohort I was in -- this is like speed dating but with tech demos -- was a journalist, and it was a thrill seeing him get excited about all of the lovely sources. As a sometime activist, I also saw the tools with the eyes of a potential user. There needs to be an event with the Sunlight toolset, and the crew of journalists, bloggers, public interest folk, and staffers who would actually use it, to get the word out, and get feedback.

It is excellent that Sunlight is funding this stuff -- it is the old-fashioned, geeky progressive vision that government is better with oversight and transparency. The value is combining the dispassionate data with the energy of folks trying to expose corruption and get good things done.

So, a new generation of tools is getting funded at the same time that the traditional users of the tools -- journalists -- are facing an economically dubious future. The unholy alliance of advertising and news is breaking apart -- the money is siphoning to Google and to Craigs List. There is more than enough great data to keep investigative journalists quite busy, but what is going to pay their rent?

Belated election happy

I'm proud of California for electing Debra Bowen, a top-notch advocate for transparent, secure, reliable and open voting systems. And for rejecting Prop 90, the legislative approach that makes environmental and land use regulation impractical, which is currently wreaking havoc on Oregon (the link has telling stories about mining in national parks and neighborhoods. I didn't vote for Arnold; in an era when R has come to mean no-bid contracts, torture, infinite detention, opposition to birth control, and any number of other extreme and unsavory things, I am not voting for any Rs, but I'm pretty pleased that he figured out that he needs to govern as a moderate democrat in order to keep his job.

Not to mention the US, for waking up and throwing the bums out. It will take a lot of work to recover, and build differently, hopefully we can.

Debra Bowen's voting system leadership

Wow. Debra Bowen is running for Secretary of State in California, after her term in the state senate. Einsteinia on DailyKos has compiled a long list of Bowen's legislative accomplishments. Having put in some leather-pump-miles in the Texas Capitol trying to educate legislators about electronic voting, it is just stunning and incredibly gratifying to see a political figure who is so savvy on these issues.

Her achivements include passing bills to use the voter verified paper trail in audits, making sure the audits include absentee and provisional votes, requiring the paper used for the audit trail to be readable for 22 months, requiring a statewide recount policy, enabling citizens to inspect voting systems.

In Texas, we got bipartisan support for a paper trail bill but got shot down because of leadership opposition. Explaining the details -- why you need an audit trail, why you actually need to do the audits, why the paper needs to be good, why you need citizen oversight -- these were all topics that took a lot of explaining. Meanwhile, Bowen has been leading.

Here's a selection, a longer list is at the DailyKos link above.

SB 11 - Prohibits a voting equipment manufacturer or vendor or their agents from making campaign contributions to candidates for state or local office. Also precludes the Secretary of State from supporting or opposing candidates or ballot measures. Passed Senate in 2005, killed in Assembly in 2006.

SB 370 - Requires elections officials, when doing the 1% manual count required by law, to use the AVVPAT produced by electronic machines. Signed into law in 2005.

SB 1235 - This is an expansion of last year's SB 370 (Bowen). The manual count law requires the votes in 1% of the precincts (with some exemptions) selected at random to be counted manually and matched against the results from the electronic tabulator. This bill: 1) Requires all "early voting" center, absentee votes, and provisional votes to be included into this tally; Requires the select the "random" precincts using a randomly generated number method and/or based on regulations drafted by the SOS; 3) Requires the audits to be public; and 4) Requires the results of the audits to be made public. Will be sent to Governor's desk by 8/31/06.

SB 1519- Requires the SOS to promulgate recount procedures. There is no state law or regulation on how exactly recounts are conducted. Instead, the procedures (they vary by voting system) are laid out in an informal "best practices" manual between the SOS and the counties. This requires the SOS to promulgate official regulations, so everyone (including the public) will know how it's done. Will be sent to Governor's desk by 8/31/06.

SB 1725 - Requires counties to "track" absentee ballots so a voter can call in and check to see if their ballot arrived. Will be sent to Governor's desk by 8/31/06.

SB 1747 - Voting machine inspection. Right now, the law restricts the ability of people to inspect voting machines, limiting it to county central committees who can send in "data processing specialists or engineers." This bill expands it to every qualified political party, removes the requirement that they be "data processing specialists or engineers," and permits up to 10 people from a "bonafide collection of citizens." Pending on Governor's desk. He must act by 9/30/06.

SB 1760 - Precludes the Secretary of State from certifying any voting system unless the paper ballots and the accessible voter-verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT) retain their integrity and readability for 22 months. That's how long, under current law, elections officials are required to retain these documents. Also referred to as the "Elephant Gestation Bill," since 22 months is the gestation period for a baby elephant. Pending on Governor's desk. He must act by 8/26/06.

Pursue justice?

A propose of not much, I finally put my finger on why the "media justice" meme strikes me as going in the wrong direction. In political vocabulary, "justice" is a a buzzword and a code word. It implies a strategy of pursuiing redress of grievances, speaking truth to power, protest.

The lightbulb came on when I was reading an article in the Nation about the need for environmental and progressive groups to rebuild a grass roots base, that quoted Peggy Shepard of West Harlem Environmental Action. That group was born out of street protests to call attention to a sewage plant that had been making people sick for years. The group organized a demonstration that held up traffic at 7 a.m. on the West Side Highway in front of the North River plant on Martin Luther King Day, eventually filed a lawsuit, and catalyzed a $55 million repair operation by the city.

When pollution is making people sick, protest politics make sense. Polluters can get away with it as long as the harm is kept quiet and it's easier for the polluter to continue than to stop. Protest politics raise awareness and make it less convenient for the polluter.

The "justice" metaphor and strategy makes a lot less sense to me when applied to media. When there's a polluting sewage treatment plant or chemical plant in your neighborhood, you don't have a lot of power on your own. You can't shut it down or move it. You rely on recalcitrant business people and politicians to help you. In classic form, you need to organize and and petition those that have the power for redress of greivances.

With media, though, a community group or an individual can easily get a voice and become part of the media. By easy I don't mean trivial, it takes work and information-gathering and networking. But it is within the power of an individual or group of people, unlike, say, shutting down a polluting chemical plant. So, a large part of the focus to get "justice" in media coverage is DIY and entrepreneurial. Don't ask somebody to do it for you, just do it, and then reach out to get the story amplified. There are tremendous opportunities for business and civic entrepreneurship here. Don't ask, do.

There are some aspects of media where political activism is needed, where the rules are overly influenced by folks with concentrated power. In order to get open spectrum, organizers need to wrest it back from the claws of the incumbent oligopoly. In order to get net neutrality, organizers need to win the battle with the incumbent oligopoly - or, harder but better, break the oligopoly. Even then, the rhetoric of petition isn't nearly enough to win the war, since this speaks to a fraction of the supporters. Allies in that battle include the tech entrepreneurs who want to ensure space for a competitive market. They don't see themselves as the powerless asking from help from the powerful -- they want market forces to work, and concentrated oligopoly works against the competitive market.

So, environmental justice is a powerful strategy for a set of problems. "Media justice" plays a much narrower role, motivating a particular constituency on a particular subset of a set of issues where other strategies are a larger part of the solution.

Essembly and my ideal organizing app

Essembly is a fun toy for people who like to debate about politics and meet likeminded folks, but it doesn't yet do much useful to help you get informed or take action.

The starting point is kinda fun. The system poses some political question. You answer on a scale of one to four, and then the system lets you explain your answer. Some of the questions are put together by the editors of the site, and others by participants.

The explanations are what really make it work as a game. When I filled out their initial quiz, one of the questions was:

Preserving the environment is usually more important than protecting jobs and business.

Grrr!!! What a horrible question! This false dichotomy is toxic to real progress. How about, protecting the environment through clean energy can be a major creator of jobs and businesses. Moreover, reduction in fossil fuel carbon may be the only way to make sure that we have a viable economy that supports the current population.

Once I realized that I could comment, and people could debate each other in their answers, I was less mad and more entertained.

Debate is an important part of political learning, as Scott Henson teaches citing Christopher Lasch, who argues that journalism's goal of objectively informing people is a fallacy, since people really understand things through argument. The advocacy framing provided by blogs like Glenn Greenwald's actually makes news easier to understand, even if you don't agree with the blogger all the time (Greenwald is perilously right, but that's a digression).

The site gives people strong identity, with pictures and background information, which will hopefully help the site stay civil.

The problem is the site doesn't provide good ways to get beyond the opinions that readers bring to the table. I'm not going to go to Essembly as often as I'll go to a blog site that brings and contextualizes news in the context of the readers' opinions, with references to go deepen when I care to.

The site makes it easy to make groups and "friend" people in the social networking site manner. But it doesn't yet provide tools for people who want to do anything more.

What I really want from an activist site is a set of tools that helps not just to affiliate, but to organize. A tool to arrange a group visit to a legislator. A tool to build a mailing list,with distributed administration. A tool to build shared talking points, and to write letters to editors and decision-makers. A tool to donate for a shared purpose.

Essembly is a fun start, but in game terms, it leaves people at level 1.

Immigration: scapegoat politics is failing

Immigrants are the latest in a long series of minority scapegoats to bear the brunt of Republican party "divide and rule" electioneering. Thankfully, it's failing. A vast crowd in LA, and big crowds in Denver, Phoenix and Milwaukee gathered to protest a new bill that proposes making illegal immigration a felony and building a wall on the Mexican border.

In the last election, Republicans made headway in hispanic communities; that seems less likely this time around. Hopefully the bad bill won't go anywhere, and Republicans will be harmed by outraging Hispanic Americans more than they are helped by energizing the white bigot vote.

The scapegoat gambit is an old tactic for the Republican party. Willie Horton and welfare queens worked 20 years ago, but apparently demonization of black folk doesn't go over anymore. In the last cycle, the Republicans picked on gays, but tolerance is on the rise, so immigrants came up in the next draw of the scapegoat card.

Are changes to immigration policy needed? Its troubling to see workers with low wages and no protection. But making immigrants felons and building a wall isn't the solution. Running against the "brown hordes" is a transparent appeal to the bigot vote, and I'm glad to see it not working.

How to defang lobbyists

Chip links to a Slate article about how lobbying really works -- it's not so much outright dollars for votes, but dollars for access and influence. And making overworked staffers lives easier by writing bills for them.

The problem with the game isn't just access, it's the anti-access that the rest of us have. When doing some citizen lobbying at the Texas legislature, we needed to beg for copies of the bills that the lobby was negotiating and helping to write.

In Congress, bills often aren't available until minutes before a vote. The congresscritters and their staffs don't even have access to the bills, let alone the public. Large bills are available on paper only, locking out anyone who isn't physically in DC.

So, it would be a significant reform to mandate that bills be posted, in full text, on the internet, with a reasonably long lead time, like a week or more, between bill posting and vote.

That would give citizens more opportunity to contact their legislator before a vote. It takes a lot of citizen contacts to outweight a few lobbyists in fancy suits, but lots of citizens can have some influence.

The big finance reform would be public finance and free media. That's a huge step for our well-bought system. Instead, we get incremental proposals that cause money to slosh back and forth among different contribution structures, but have less affect on the economy of access.

Openness can do at least as much as more campaign finance regulation can to improve the access equation.

Wisconsin requires public review of voting software - update: not so much

As reported in <Badger Blues via Daily Kos, and Slashdot the law requires that:

"If a municipality uses an electronic voting systm for voting at any election, the municpal clerk shall provide any person, upon request, at the expense of the municipality, the coding for the software that the municipality uses to operate the system and tally the votes cast.

This is a great step toward making voting technology serve the public rather than voting system vendors.

Wisconsin law already required voting machines to produce paper ballots that can be used in a recount.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the report was based on an old version of the bill. The version of the bill that passed requires an non-disclosure agreement be signed for code review. So much for transparency and public scrutiny.

Also, the "paper trail" language doesn't require that the paper ballot be viewed by the voter before it is cast, so it's toothless also.

More data mining skepticism

Matt Yglesias, John Cole, and Ezra Klein have picked up the question about data mining math. If you're looking for a small enough needle in a large enough haystack, will the noise outweigh the signal?

Ezra Klein asks the question nicely:

I’m not necessarily against a program of this sort if properly executed, but why is it such high priority? Bush keeps mentioning how we needed to “connect the dots.” Only problem is, he doesn’t seem to understand the phrase. Pre 9/11, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, and a variety of other groups had collected isolated bits of information and surveillance that, if laid out on the same desk, would’ve laid out the 9/11 plot in considerable detail. We had FBI officials noticing the Al-Qaeda members in flight school, NSA intercepts calling 9/11 “zero day,” agents theorizing that hijacked planes would be turned to missiles, and so forth. But none of that mattered. Because while we had the dots, we lacked the ability to connect them.

At best, this NSA program collects tons more dots, but are we connecting them? Do we have the ability to process this much information? Or are we dangerously decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio? In short, why is this program necessary? We had the intelligence under the old protocols, we just didn’t process it. Why is the answer more data and why should we be confident that the government has the resources to sift through it?

Mass surveillance and bad math #2

This Ars Technica piece makes the argument about the ineffectiveness of mass surveillance at catching terrorists.

Just imagine, for a moment, that 0.1% of all the calls that go through this system score hits. Now let's suppose the system processes 2 million calls a day. That's still 2,000 calls a day that the feds will want to eavesdrop on—a very high number, and still much higher than any courts could possibly oversee. Furthermore, only a miniscule fraction of the overall total of 2 million calls per day on only a few days of each month will contain any information of genuine interest to the feds, and the odds that some of those calls will be among those that catch the governments interest are passing slim.

Targeted human intelligence has always been and will always be the best way to sort the sharks from the guppies (to change fish metaphors). Government money invested in much less intrusive and much less defense contractor-friendly programs like training more Arabists and developing more "human assets" in the field will be orders of magnitude more effective than mass surveillance could ever be. Blunt instruments like airport facial recognition software and random subway bag searches produce much more noise than they do signal, and any engineer or computer scientist worth his or her salt will tell you that an intelligent, targeted, low-tech approach beats a brute-force high-tech approach every time."

When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, the number of false positives is going to be enormous. Sifting through these low-quality false positives can overwhelm legitimate law enforcement resources to pursue high quality leads.

Get a warrant

Investigate by all means, but before investigating the homes of US citizens, get a warrant.

Data mining and bad math

There's a lot of speculation that the warrantless spying authorized by the Bush administration is using some kind of TIA-like, Echelon-like massive data gathering and data mining operation.

That's why the administration couldn't get FISA warrants. If that's what they're doing, it's arguably a bad idea even if it was legal (which right now it pretty clearly isn't).

You can get warrants if you are spying on one, or five, or twenty people. You can't get warrants if you are spying on 100,000 people, or 1 million people.

It's also why they couldn't use the "after the fact" exemption in FISA. Under FISA, the government can start spying immediately, and ask for the warrant up to 72 hours later. But if you've amassed petabytes of data on millions of people, the analysts haven't analyzed it all in 72 hours. Maybe they go back and look for a pattern months after the fact.

Even if it was legal, though, it would arguably be a bad idea. Bruce Schneier makes the best argument that data mining is in many cases less effective than traditional, lead-based investigative work.

When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, data mining is bad math. It's very different from the use of data mining to detect credit risk patterns. In the US, there are probably tens of millions of people who are iffy credit risks, and there are different probabilities of default. It's reasonable to use math to assign a credit rating based on probability. And there's a competitive market for credit. If an individual gets turned down by one provider, they might get credit from another. It's not a binary thing.

But what about looking for terrorist sympathizers. Islamist terrorists in the US are rare. How many potential terrorists in the US are willing to kill innocent civilians -- maybe 100, 200? Not that many. How big is their network of sympathizers and supports? Maybe a few thousand? By contrast, how many people are there who are news buffs, ordinary muslims, and ordinary, never-violent political activists? Many millions.

So a data mining operation that looked for keywords would find many many more innocent people than potential terrorists. The government would waste their time reading this blog post and menus for mosque community dinners.

When you are looking to assess a credit rating, being about right is OK. If someone pays a rate of 15% instead of 14%, not that much harm is done. But when you are looking for a terrorist, you want to be 100% right. It doesn't help if you miss a killer and abduct uncle abdul the hardware store owner.

The government would be much better off doing the traditional job of finding leads, getting warrants, trailing those people, and finding their contacts. That sort of hard work actually has a higher probability of success than the data mining approach.

Cheney says 9/11 attacks could have been prevented by wiretaps

as reported in Forbes. Of course. Nobody is arguing against the needed surveillance of suspected criminals.

And if law enforcement wants to eavesdrop on a US citizen or a resident, they need to be authorized by a judicial warrant. The missing word in Cheney's remarks is "warrant".

The terms of FISA are quite liberal -- the government can start eavesdropping immediately, and ask for judicial review up to three days later. If for some reason, the terms of FISA hampered legitimate investigation of terrorists, the administration should propose a change to the law.

Our constitution does not allow the president to disregard the law, or to make law by fiat. That's called monarchy or dictatorship.

The joke's less funny this year

Over the years, I've argued in favor of calling the office Christmas Party a Christmas Party, since that's what it is. If generic christians really and truly wanted to be ecumenical, they'd also hold Purim parties and Diwali parties -- they'd really celebrate when other ethicities party, instead of condescendingly including Hannuka with Christmas.

Last season, the war on Christmas seemed like a joke - a joke on the humorless, paranoid ultra-Christian scrooges who managed to sustain a persecution complex when they're part of the majority culture.

This year, it's not so funny anymore.

I'm not offended when someone untentionally wishes me a Merry Christmas. But I do appreciate it when people who know I'm Jewish say Happy Hannukah. The point isn't about people in the minority being offended. It's about people in the majority being considerate. So the "war on Christmas" folks are waging a war on politeness. But I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that it's worse than that.

Wishing a "Merry Christmas" becomes a test of club membership. If a non-Christian doesn't eagerly welcome the greeting, we're "them", not "us". What the "war-on-Christmas" people are trying to do is to subtly and insidiously create the impression that people who aren't Christian and aren't faking it are somehow less American.

It's good to see that ACLU Texas is prosecuting the war on Christmas with the vigor it deserves.

Will the American people buy the explanation of secret spying?

After Congress returned from recess to vote for the Terry Schiavo bill, I followed the news obsessively, looking for signs about whether the American people would embrace the creepy, intrusive conservative nanny state trend. Thankfully they didn't; the Schiavo law was the beginning of the Bush administration's loss of mainstream, independent American voters.

The NSA wiretapping story feels to me like a similar moment. Will the American people buy the John Yoo theory that anything the president does with a national security justification is by definition legal? Or will they agree with Russ Feingold that "The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king."

Update:
* this reading of FISA indicates that the surveillance should have required FISA warrants.
* comments here raise questions about whether the surveillance should have been covered
* more facts are needed. This needs to be investigated immediately.
* the "Bush Doctrine" that the president can use national security justification to disregard the law was and is unamerican

Low morale at homeland security

According to a syndicated NYT story run in the Houston Chronicle, only 3 percent of employees at the Department of Homeland Security said they are confident that personnel decisions are "based on merit." ... "Only 12 percent of the more than 10,000 employees who returned a government questionnaire said they felt strongly that they are "encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things."

"In each instance and many others, the responses of the Homeland Security employees were less favorable than those of all the other departments and agencies surveyed by the federal Office of Personnel Management, a new study by an outside research organization shows."

The article didn't cite the survey. The results look ominous for terrorism prevention and disaster readiness.

Symbol of freedom

My mom reports that she is now able to carry knitting needles on commercial airplanes for the first time since September 11.

How to play the press like a fiddle

This is from an interview in Grist with Chris Mooney, author of the Republican War on Science. The interview has a great quote about the way that "he said/she said" journalism leaves the press open to puppetry by interested parties. The quote applies to any topic, not just the abuse of science. (I haven't read Mooney's book, so I don't have an opinion on it).

Here's my real fear when it comes to the press. Suppose there's some mainstream scientific view that you want to set up a think tank to challenge -- to undermine, to controversialize. Suppose further that you have a lot of money, as well as an interested and politically influential constituency on board with your agenda. In this situation, it seems to me that as long as you are clever enough, you should be able to set your political machine in motion and then sit back and watch the national media do the rest of your work for you. The press will help you create precisely the controversy that lies at the heart of your political and public relations strategy -- and not only that. It will do a far better job than the best PR firm, and its services will be entirely free of charge.

Katrina reconstruction corruption watch

The New York Times has the scoop on piles of suspicious findings in the $1.5 billion in Hurricane Katrina reconstruction contracts.

More than 80 percent of FEMA contracts were awarded without bidding or with limited competition. The largest deal was $568 million in contracts for debris removal landed by a Florida company that was a former lobbying client of Mississippi governer Haley Barbour. What better deal than to promote your lobbyist to have purchase signoff authority?

The second best deal is to have the buyer's ex-boss be the lobbyist. Two contractors, the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton are represented by Joe M. Allbaugh, the retired head of FEMA who recommended his college buddy Brown to take over when he left to lobby for reconstruction contracts.

The contracting practices are starting to smell like fish in a freezer with the power out.

Meanwhile, Time hunts for more Mike Browns.

Katrina contracting corruption watch

The Project on Government Oversight has been tracking the story.

The latest juicy tidbit: the administration's top procurement official, David Safavian, had been working on developing contracting policies for the Katrina relief effort. He was arrested for obstructing an investigation by the GSA's Office of Inspector General. Safavian allegedly helped lobbyist Jack Abramoff aquire GSA-controlled property the Washington, D.C., then lied about it to the investigators.

Laura Rozen is collecting reports on the Safavian investigation.

Corruption early warning alert

The Louisiana reconstruction has the potential to be a vast cesspool of corruption. Hopefully some investigative journalists smell one-in-a-lifetime muckracking opportunities and will be following the money.

Here's one bad smell: "A bill introduced in the House [last week] by Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Tex.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) would waive rules for congressional notification of certain no-bid purchases".

And another: The LA times reports that "Senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck. And federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted for funds that were funneled to the state from the Federal Emergency Management Agency dating back to 1998."

One of the few good things about the D/R fingerpointing is that the Democrats will be keeping an eye on the Feds and the Republicans will be keeping an eye on the locals.

Civil liberties schwag

Yesterday, the House decided not consider an amendment to the Patriot Act which removed the secret searches of libraries. The measure that passed by bypartisan majority earlier today. The House bill extends the notorious Section 215 for 10 years, allowing the FBI to search business records, library records, bookstore records, medical records, commercial purchase records without probable cause.

However, you can compensate with civil liberties schwag:

Handy fourth amendment totebag, protected in theory from searches and seizures. Now sold out, but you can ask the seller to make more.

Disappearing civil liberties coffee mug:

FBI spies on ACLU

According to this AP story, the FBI has amassed thousands of pages of records about the ACLU, Greenpeace, and other civil rights and advocacy groups.

If nothing else, the FBI is proving the case of critics concerned about expansion of domestic police powers to investigate terrorism. Of course, it's probably easer to investigate the ACLU, which has offices in the phone book and leadership that makes regular media appearances, than to investigate Al Qaeda sleeper cells.

Blogging on health care

Belated kudos to the superb series by Ezra Klein comparing the health care systems in various other countries, including Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

Klein's serices brings clarity to a subject that is usually treated with a mix of ideology, and mind-numbing, detail-encrusted jargon.

The analysis shows that the US is getting a bad deal with our current health care system. The US spends more than $5,000 per person on health care, despite not covering 43 million citizens. Japan covers all of its citizens for $2,000 per person. Germany covers 90% of citizens through its public program for $2,817 per person. Canada covers all of its citizens for administrative costs that are 1/3 of the US costs per capita. The higher costs in the US don't buy better health. The US comes out worse in measures of preventable premature death.

The systems are structured differently: France has three programs for different occupational groups. Japan has three programs for big business, small businesses, and the retired or self-employed. The programs in Britain and Canada are separate from employment. They also treat private insurance differently. Britain, France, and Germany allow supplementary private insurance, while Canada prohibits it.

They differ in the level of choice: Britain and Canada use a gatekeeper system, where a patient needs to first go to a general practitioner and get a recommendation to a specialist. Japan does not limit hospital or physician choice, and in most cases does require a gatekeeper. Neither does France, although they are moving to a primary doctor system.

The ill-fated Clinton plan was based on the German system. German health care is funded through employer contributions, with half the money coming from the employeer and half from the employee. Germany has different "sickness funds", specializing by region and occupation, which compete for members. Germany spends $2,817 on health care for its citizens compared to $5,267 for the US.

When the Clinton plan was up for debate, I looked unsucessfully for a clear explanation of how health care systems worked. Ezra Klein has done an amazing job showing the structure of health care systems. And he links to his primary sources, so the diligent can check the facts.

If you want to grok health care in a few short posts, check out Health of Nations.

Microsoft reverses on anti-discrimination bill

As reported by Scoble, Microsoft is again in favor of the bill that bans discrimination against gay people in housing employment. (though it's too late for the Washington legislative session this year).

The reversal was prompted by widespread complaints by Microsoft employees and media coverage, after the story was broken by The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle, and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog. So much for the lobbyists's boast that nobody would notice.

In a memo posted on Channel 9, Microsoft's online forum, CEO Steve Ballmer explained why Microsoft is taking a position on a public policy question:

I’m proud of Microsoft’s commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies can’t cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.

I am very happy to see the Microsoft executive team do the right thing, and glad that enough people spoke up to help the execs change their minds.

US Gov't bans reading on airplanes

An airport security guard doing the pull-aside on Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield says that we're now restricted to two books to carry on airplanes.

So now you can tell terrorists because they're reading too many books? Or the government thinks that people who don't read will be more susceptible to idiotic pseudo-security.

This needs a little bit of investigation and if true, a lot of mockery.

UPDATE: Apparently, a poorly trained security guard was confused between books of matches and books for reading.

The persistence of the pyramid

The last post was about tools and techniques to give more power to "bottom-up" organizations, and enable top-down organizations to get more done by empowering members. I see the pyramid getting flatter (or more arrows feeding into the network nodes), but I don't see hierarchy disappearing for two reasons: attention and television.

The first reason is attention. In a complex society with a thriving democracy, most people can only commit a fraction of their time to civic activity. Organizational structures need to reflect hierarchy of commitment in attention and time -- from people who's willing to learn a bit and vote, to people who are committed volunteers, to people who have full-time public sector jobs.

Representative democracy takes the attention limit into account -- there's a relatively small number of people who are delegated to do the public's business full time. These representatives are chartered with soliciting public input and making decisions.

There are alternate models of representation that are more democratic, but the representative structure demains. In the model of deliberative democracy promoted by Tom Attlee and others, deliberation is conducted more along the lines of extended jury duty. A group of ordinary citizens is chosen. They focus a significant amount of time studying and deliberating an issue, and then make a decision. This model used in the British Columbia project to choose a voting method.

The process of educating government decision-makers -- lobbying, that is -- can certainly be more democratic than it is -- well-trained volunteers can get a lot done, at least on the state and local level. But there's a practical limit to the number of people who can pursue face-to-face lobbying as a vocation or avocation.

The other source of hierarchy is television. Television is in persistent decline, but remains the single most effective means of political persuasion. It is conventional wisdom that in an election, television generates 48% of the voting decisions, and field get-out-the-vote activities get the last 3%. TV ads are extremely expensive, and the arts of ad polling and message-testing are in the hands of a small handful of wizards.

Young people (ages 18-34) use local tv news and the internet more than national news and newspapers for information according to a Carnegie study. The study reports that "the Internet, is number one among men, high-income groups, and broadband users." According to the survey, young people say that the Internet, by a 41-to-15 percent margin over second ranked local TV, is “the most useful way to learn.” As net technology diffuses, we can expect the use of the net to increase.

Some day in the foreseeable future, TV will no longer be the dominant medium for political communication. Until then, the wizards will rule.

Even when TV is a less powerful presense, the dynamics of attention will recreate hiearchical structures. This is always true in democratic societies - leaders gain support from shifting groups and trends among constituencies. The means of gaining support, and means of assembling constituences are changing. The network map is changing as we watch.

Geogreen in Texas

Several of the rural legislators in both parties who support municipal wireless for their districts and for the bandwidth-starved towns of rural Texas are among the group of sponsors of a clutch of bills proposing to increase the state's renewable energy standard.

The website of Texas Impact (I love Google) explains the story behind the Texas renewable energy bills.

In 1999, then-Governor George W. Bush signed historic Texas legislation establishing the nation's first "renewable power standard" or RPS. The law set goals for how much of Texans' electricity would come from renewable sources like wind and solar power. Texas has the best potential for renewable energy of any state. The 1999 law set a modest goal of three percent by 2009, meaning that by 2009, three percent of Texas electricity would come from renewables.

Texas is likely to reach the 2009 standard this year. And rural Texas stands to gain from the jobs provided by increasing renewables, mostly wind power. So several legislators are proposing increasing the renewable targets:

• SB 533 by Sen. Fraser and HB1671 by Rep. Hunter: 5,880 MW by 2015 ( 4.2% of state total)

• SB 836 by Sen. Duncan and HB1798 by Rep. Swinford: 10,880 MW by 2015 ( 7.9% of state total)

• SB1075 by Sen. Zaffirini and HB 2692 by Rep. Gallego: 20% of state total by 2020
  

The Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association is seeking 10% by 2015 because of concerns about building transmission for the amount of power in the next decade.

Anybody with domain expertise is most welcome to comment on the merits of the different goals. Is it the case that more is better? Is there a practical limit with how fast we can move?

Increasing renewables isn't just a tree-lover's dream. It's also one of the best things the US can to increase national security -- what Friedman calls the geogreen strategy. The Wahhabi think tanks that fuel Islamic fanaticism are funded by the Saudi government, which we subsidize with our oil dollars. Just a little less profit margin to the Saudis, and they reduce their exports of terrorism.

It seems like basic supply and demand economics. Starting more mideast wars increases oil prices and increases the supply of anti-American zealots. Increasing consumption of renewable energy and using less oil reduces the supply of anti-American zealots. Plan B sounds better to me.

p.s.

According to a market research report released earler this month by Clean Edge, Inc. solar, wind, and fuel cells are poised to grow from a $12.9 billion industry today to $92 billion by 2013.

The total US energy market was $350 billion in 2002, so clean energy has a total market share of under 4% (not counting increases in oil prices). A better way to measure market share would be in units of energy consumption, not dollars, but CleanEdge doesn't publish units.

According to the US Dep't of Energy cited on this vendor's page overall US energy consumption is growing at 2.2% a year. Taking out my trusty napkin, if you run CleanEdge's 30% growth rate on units, the US gets to 35% market share by 2013, which is over the tipping point for the mainstreaming of new technology. But is it fast enough to save civilization from global warming?

Austin Lounge Lizards star in funny activist animation

Prescription for Change is a very funny take on a serious topic -- drug companies are regulated before they release a drug, but they aren't obligated to disclose nasty side effects after the drug is on the market.

The video features the Austin Lounge Lizards and Animation Farm of Austin. It was produced by my friend Kathy Mitchell of Consumer's Union, the parent organization of Consumer Reports magazine.

Horse race coverage

This LA times article describes a three-way tie for LA mayor. The article describes the polls, the levels of ethnic support, the ads, the ad strategies (should they go negative?), and some scandal in the incumbent's office.

Yet, the article says, "more than four in 10 likely voters say they do not know enough about Hertzberg [one of the challengers] to have a positive or negative impression of him." The article doesn't help in the slightest. It says little about the candidates' backgrounds, positions, and beliefs. It says little about the incumbent's achievements or lack thereof.

So, this article is about a poll, maybe that explains it. But a search on the name of one of the candidates reveals a similar lack of substance in other campaign stories. In one story, the candidates compete with rain. In another, they compete in the news with mudslides. The paper goes out of its way say that the candidates are less interesting than the weather.

Maybe elections in LA are purely tribal, maybe people are bored with the election, but the newspaper is part of the problem.

Department of Creepy

In which David Frum objects to gay marriage because it somehow abolishes

the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband's duties to his wife - while equally binding and equally supreme - are not the same as a wife's duties to her husband."

Frum's statement is illogical because the "duties" that he is talking about -- whatever they are -- aren't anywhere near the law. I am curious, and at the same me, very leery to know what he means by these things that he doesn't mention out loud. Is it:

* a husband's obligation under Jewish law to satisfy a wife sexually (true)
* a wife's duty to have dinner ready and the table set by 7pm?
* a wife's duty to submit humbly to corporal punishment?

I am not looking to the day when these duties are spelled out and somebody tries to put them into civil law.

Which political blogs?

Grits for Breakfast just won a Koufax award for best single-issue lefty blog, for its coverage of criminal justice reform in Texas. Scott Henson's blog includes original research and insightful coverage of an important issue that is badly undercovered by the mainstream media.

The Koufax awards inspired others to share links of favorite niche blogs.

Meanwhile, Salon picked up the Daou Report, a compilation of thumbnail clips from political blogs, right and left. Skimming the Daou Report, I get a headache from the snippets of insults -- "The Petulant Left", "wingnuts plan to keep women scared", back and forth like 4th grade recess.

Complaints about the dreck in the blogosphere are missing the point. There's infinite space -- anyone can choose to read good sources like Scott, easily find other good sources, and ignore the spitball fights.

EPIC and the doom of news

At the urging of Aldon Hynes, I just got around to watching EPIC 2014 -- the flash-animated dystopia about the death of the news. I'm less worried about this dystopia than other scenarios of doom.

Epic tells a history of a future in which by 2014, the New York Times is displaced by GoogleZon, an algorithmically-generated stew of peer-created content, narrowly personalized to the preferences of the individual user.

But the big threat to the New York Times isn't Google News, which links to traditional news sources. People who get their news from Google wind up reading more traditional sources than people who just read their local paper.

EPIC envisions an AI that constructs news stories themselves, not just a portal to existing stories. But the AI to write an interesting story is a lot harder than the AI to assemble a page of stories based on a popularity algorithm.

The passive faith in AI is belied by the real process of using Amazon recommendations and Technorati today. Amazon algorithmically assembes a set of recommended books, each with a set of human-written recommendations. The reader critically sifts through the recommendations, separating the cogent from the illiterate. If Amazon were building its recommendation service, the recommendations would be linked to deeper blog and profile information about the reviewer, providing further material to check trustworthiness.

Meanwhile, the formulaic crime-and-accident coverage of today's local news might as well be written by a bot. In-depth coverage by special-interest bloggers not infrequently beats the shallow, formulaic coverage of the mainstream media.

Also, I don't think personalization is as big a problem as EPIC makes it out to be, although folks have been worried about it since Nicholas Negroponte popularized "The Daily Me" in the mid-90s. Social networks with external links can broaden cultural reference at least as much as they shrink them, and surely more than the narrow mass media. I can get more diverse music references in a couple of hours with iTunes, LastFM, Webjay, Amazon and Google than in a lifetime with ClearChannel.

Not to mention the fact that newspaper circulation has been falling since the 60s, under competitive pressure from radio and TV. EPIC deplores and bemoans a world where the news is shallow and sensationalistic -- but that world was created by TV "disaster-of-the-day" coverage.

The big threat is from Craigslist, which cannibalizes the classified ad revenue that accounts for the newspapers' profit margin. Good investigative journalism takes money and time. Journalist need money to eat. It's an open question whether alternate business models -- different from the classified and space ads in traditional newspapers -- will generate enough money to keep investigative journalism afloat.

Underestimating Dean

In a way, I'm glad that the mainstream media and the R's are underestimating Howard Dean, making jokes about "the scream", hordes of latte-swilling leftists with bad hair, and wacky radical ideas.

Meanwhile, Dean's platform calls for rebuilding the party from the ground up, supporting candidates in local elections, building a message bottom up.

Jared Diamond and the death of environmentalism

The most compelling bit about Adam Werbach's jeremiad about the death of environmentalism was the vision for a New Apollo Project that would invest in clean energy infrastructure, end dependence on foreign oil, reduce contribution to global warming, and create new business opportunities and jobs.

When Werbach and his team took the story on the road to a town struggling with the lost of manufacturing plants, they were astonished at the hope and enthousiasm that the vision inspired.

Ironically, the rest of the speech is a classic jeremiad exhorting environmentalists to renounce their faith in jeremiads. An environmentalist myth tells a story about a pristine beginning, followed by decline and gruesome collapse and decay. So Werbach tells the elegaic tale: the idealistic beginnings of the environmental movement in the vision of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, through its decline into policy wonkdom and voter-alienating pessimism, and defeat at the hands of cheerful Republican exploiters.

The screed about the death of environmentalism is aimed at persuading old true believers to give up hope in winning environmental issues on their own, and to join the broader progressive movement. If you're not an old-time true believer, the speech isn't meant for you. If you're an old-time disbeliever, the speech will confirm your stereotypes.

Here's the lesson for rest of us, who are looking to assess today's situation, and what to do now. Diamond's Collapse wants to be our generation's Silent Spring. In "Collapse", Diamond argues persuasively that societies need to make foresighted decisions to avert the collapse of their civilization brought on by environmental destruction.

The way to inspire people and leaders to make those good decisions isn't just fear. Fear alone will lead people to put their heads in the sand. The way to inspire people is to provide an hopeful vision that reframes the threat of scarcity into an alternatve vision of abundance.

I'd love to hear a political candidate wrap a story of energy independence, technology progress, business opportunity, and national security. It uses the same story, framed as hope, not fear.

Falsehood

What do do about this?

From a comment on Adam Rice's blog

"Two weeks ago, my husband’s relatives in Louisiana were still defending the invasion of Iraq based on the “connection” between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."

It's obviously conterproductive to call that point of view ignorant and stupid -- you don't persuade people by calling them dumb.

But how do you change people's minds when they believe something that just isn't true?

Deliberation and action

There are two different phases in politics.

In the heat of an election or issue campaign, it's time to act. The story has been framed long ago. Partisans know what they want, engage fellow partisans to take action, persuade fence-sitters to engage by interest and identity. When time to act is short, it's counterproductive to return to first principles and question assumptions.

When a decision isn't at stake, it's time to talk and think. It's time to talk to others with different views and ask questions - why do they hold their beliefs, What are the underlying values and motives? Who do they listen to, and why?
It's time to think about how to reframe the discussion; what's important, what will work, how to talk in a way that will be heard.

The so-called "liberal elite"

A stalwart lefty colleague who lived in a red state for many years pointed to this New York Times article -- an unselfconcious exporation of the offensive stereotypes New Yorkers hold for benighted out-of-towners.

This type of smug response won't help build a majority to win elections.

On the other hand, the right-wing stereotype of a "liberal elite" -- referring to people with college degrees -- is toxic and chilling. The demonization of an educated population has a very long and dangerous history around the world -- China and Cambodia made particularly practical use of this stereotype.

It's the candidate

The Coyne post brought a damning statistic from another exit poll: 80% of Bush voters said they voted for their candidate, rather than against the other one. Barely a third of Kerry voters said the same.

A big problem with the election is that voters didn't find Kerry to be a compelling candidate.

Critique of the "morality" poll

Andrew Coyne writ