CFP closed today with “Quick Takes”, a series of five-minute presentations. Bruce Schneier, the moderator, made a public call for spur-of-the-moment additions, so I took the stage to talk about something that’s been bugging me about privacy activism. I’ve already had a few people ask me to put it online, so it’s posted after the break.

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I’m covering CFP 2009 for TidBITS this week. My first article went live yesterday morning; part one of my coverage should be up shortly.

If you want to follow the conference yourself, follow the links from the CFP site to the live (and archived) video coverage. It’s well worth checking out the Twitter stream; not only does it contain plenty of live comments from the conference, but the live stream is being displayed on stage and is becoming part of the conversation here. I’ll have more to say about that later — it’s an extremely interesting dynamic.

It is damned hard to attend the sessions, network in the hallways, and still find the time to write articles (and participate in that live Twitstream). There’s at least four hours of conference video, filmed in another room, that I want to watch later. It’s the proverbial drink from the proverbial firehose here.

Dear Frank,

Yes, people are mean in politics. Reality does suck.

Granted, politics have been mean, and reality has sucked, for a long time. But you’re one of the people to blame for the modern way in which it sucks, the one in which we can rebrand “torture” — and by “rebrand”, of course, I mean marketing, and not the actual red hot irons. Which you would probably call “interrogative probes.”

Not that any of us who were your students at Penn are particularly surprised. You were a great prof, but part of that was the amazing way in which you equated oleaginous stances to academic merit. “I can argue any political point so convincingly,” you said, “that none of you will be able to tell what I really believe.”

And you can. You’ve made a career of it. If you could have done so while double-dipping from the left and the right, I’m sure you would have. Some of us remember that Perot predated Gingrich on your resumé.

So have fun in Hollywood. I’m sure you’ll get along fine with the “arch-liberals” there. They’ll invite you to parties to play the foil, and you’ll go so you can pretend to be their intellectual superior. It’ll work out great for all of you.

Just do me a favor, Frank. Once you’re there, and you’re getting rich from fiction that is supposed to be fiction? Please stay. I think you’ve done the political infrastructure enough damage already.

Best,
Jeff Porten
UPenn, COL ’90

Remember the days after 9/11, when most of us spent days furiously getting in touch with friends and family, consoling each other, and making sure everyone was alright? If you’re like most people, you look back and think, “Christ, that was tedious. I sure hope I don’t have to go through that much effort next time.”

At least, if you’re like most people, according to the developers of the Microsoft Vine social network:

Vine is a hyperlocal messaging and alert system intended to be used to share information during a crisis. Properly configured, it will gather local news and public safety announcements along with location information, reports and messages from friends–eventually even those posted to other services, like Facebook and Twitter–into a handy little dashboard. This being Microsoft (MSFT), that dashboard will be proprietary and require PCs running XP SP2 or Vista and 600 MB of hard disk space.

I’m entirely in favor of disseminating good information during a disaster. When it gets bad, common sense will let you down, and ignorance can be swiftly fatal. For example, in the event of a radiological attack, your best bet — depending on your distance from the epicenter — is to find a deep hole in the ground and stay there for a few days. But if you’re far enough away, and downwind from the attack, you should be running like hell instead.

Then, of course, you should factor in the likelihood that you’ll be running like hell down the same roads that a million other panicked citizens are using, all of you fearing death from invisible, intangible radiation poisoning. Depending on how many of your fellow citizens have guns, well, I’m thinking that should tip some folks into staying in their basements instead.

A good source of information would be crucial during this kind of emergency. And there’s your essential problem with alert networks like Vine. During normal times, no one pays attention to them. So your response is likely to have the bejesus scared out of you when they chirp up — at least until you’re desensitized to false alarms. (Which is exactly what happens with the Alert DC SMS network, and the memories many of us have from the old tests of the Emergency Broadcast System.) But no one likes to build a network and then never use it, so expect to see Vine regularly telling you about decidedly non-emergency issues, leading you to think of Vine as a broadcaster of trivia.

Meanwhile, what happens during an actual emergency? Well, if you’re using Vine, here are the necessary preconditions:

1. You’ll stay relatively stationary with your Windows laptop, or entirely stationary in front of your Windows desktop.
2. Of course, you’ll have reliable access to both the Internet and electricty.
3. All federal, state, and local emergency planners will be diligent in updating their news broadcasts using the computer-readable metadata that Vine will rely on to aggregate your hyperlocal news.
4. Did I mention that you’d be stationary and require Internet access and electricity? Because really, I could have stopped there.

Next time I’m caught in this kind of situation, I already know what alert service I’ll use: Twitter, the alert service I use daily. Why?

1. It aggregates both official news sources, and crowdsourced information from people I collectively trust.
2. It’ll work on pretty much any mobile device I happen to have on me; if there’s any cell service, I’ll be connected.
3. It provides me with a simple way to broadcast information and become a member of the crowd — while, at the same time, running like hell as needs be.

Twitter’s not perfect — in the event of a national emergency, there’s no way it would scale. And it would sure be useful for it to mash up with Google Maps, GPS, and other technologies which could be lifesavers in an emergency. But in the meantime, it’ll do — and in fact, it clearly will be where people instinctively turn next time. Microsoft’s attempt to “compete” will serve only to create a cul-de-sac of people separated from the crowd, which would concern me if I weren’t convinced that Vine will be an utter failure.

Reading the transcript of a March 4, 2003 CNN debate about torture which is absolutely fascinating in retrospect. It opens with the question: “Following the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the question has become whether the senior al Qaeda leader will reveal key information about the terrorist network. If he doesn’t, should he be tortured to make him tell what he knows?”

Of course, we know now that as of this interview, three days after KSM’s capture, he was probably already being tortured, based purely on the math of fitting 183 waterboardings into the remainder of March.

In favor of torture, under limited circumstances: Alan Dershowitz. Unequivocally opposed, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch. “Moderating”: Wolf Blitzer.

Why is “moderating” in quotes? Because every one of his questions was actually more immoderate than the mostly-reasoned discussion of the interviewees:

BLITZER: Alan Dershowitz, a lot of our viewers will be surprised to hear that you think there are right times for torture. Is this one of those moments?

BLITZER: Alan, how do you know he doesn’t have that kind of ticking-bomb information right now?

BLITZER: Ken, under those kinds of rare, extreme circumstances, does Professor Dershowitz make a good point?

BLITZER: Well, let me interrupt, Ken. Let me ask you about a hypothetical case. There’s a terrorist attack. A lot of people have just been killed in New York. They capture one of the terrorists, who says, “Guess what, there’s another bomb out there, it is going to kill a lot more, but I’m not telling you where it is.”

BLITZER: Ken, let me just get back to that ticking time bomb scenario.

Go read the interview, and tell me that the man in that room most in favor of torture isn’t Wolf Blitzer.

Something came to my notice over the weekend, in the category of “the dog isn’t barking.” Despite hearing a great deal of discussion on both sides of the so-called “debate” over American use of torture, I haven’t heard anyone raise this point:

We waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March, 2003, according to the released memos.

No one seems to have correlated that with the date we captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed — which was March 1, 2003, in Pakistan.

In other words, we started torturing that unholy bastard pretty much the minute we laid hands on him. There were no “regular interrogation methods” for him. We went straight to the Torquemada techniques.

I don’t know about you, but there seems to be an unstated presumption that when the United States does engage in torture, it’s because we need information that we can’t get any other way. KSM shows that this is clearly false; with him, we didn’t try any other way.

At 11:07 AM today, CNET reported that Apple had approved the iPhone Baby Shaker application. Two hours and 18 minutes later, an update reported that the iPhone could no longer be used to simulate baby torture.

Specifically, the “game” was this:

The object of Baby Shaker is to stop the incessant crying of an infant pictured on screen by violently shaking the iPhone, at which point two red “x” marks appear over the baby’s eyes. “See how long you can endure his or her adorable cries before you just have to find a way to quiet the baby down!” reads the sales pitch for Baby Shaker.

Personally, I consider this behavior to be horrifying… on the part of Apple, that is. Because I believe that people should damn well be allowed to buy and sell this application.

Here’s the obvious argument against:

Jennipher Dickens, who founded a nonprofit organization in 2007 after her son Christopher was injured from being shaken by his father, brought the new application to our attention…. “As a mother of a child who was violently shaken at 7 weeks old, causing a severe brain injury, and the founder of a national organization for Shaken Baby Syndrome prevention, I don’t have to tell you how much this horrifies me!!!” she wrote in an e-mail.

The argument for:

If Ms. Dickens is trying to prevent shaken baby syndrome, then why is she preventing the distribution of an application that clearly demonstrates that shaking a baby can kill it?

I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the kind of people who find this kind of thing amusing, and who share it with their amused friends, are exactly the same kind of chowderheads who, two weeks after becoming an unplanned parent, might inflict devastating injuries on their child through sheer ignorance.

Much better to ban a tasteless joke, and shut down any possibility of viral information-sharing. Just so long as no one is offended, which is the important thing.