Category: Policy

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An "I voted" sticker on the front of my hoodie

I’ve written before about my own take on verifying citizenship for voters (at registration time, not at voting time) and on how the right to vote should be treated like other rights (not abridged without due process).

Critics fear that states could use the system to purge large numbers of valid voters from their rolls ahead of the midterm elections.

Source: Supreme Court Allows Use of Trump Administration’s Expansive Database for Voter Screening – NYT

I was briefly worrying about this, but then I remembered that I have already voted. Phew.

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Walls of an old castle

I worked in computer security for most of my career. I worked on Unix security, then phone operating system security, then Bluetooth security. It was largely thankless work.

The issue was that no one wanted to work on a secure computer. Every security feature was a small obstacle to the user getting work done. Security features tended to get turned off or worked around. Certainly nobody was willing to pay more to buy a more secure operating system.

The secure Unix system I worked on was pretty secure. It had great security features that made it easy for users to do their work with considerable confidence that neither outsiders nor other users on their computer could hack their way in.

The federal government required that all computers purchased by anyone for any government office be evaluated to the level of security that our system offered. Over a period of years, our system was the only evaluated system available.

Guess how many we sold?

Zero.

Every government office that was buying computers asked for and got an exception to the requirement that they buy a system like ours.

That’s how much people hate security features in their computers. They slow you down. They make it harder for you to get your work done. They make your system different from other systems, so you have to learn new stuff.

It is from that perspective that I’m dismissive of AI hacking tools. Yes, they can hack computer systems, but that’s because people have preferred computer systems that are hackable. It will take a bit of time to go back and redesign and rebuild those systems with security in mind, but not long. How to do computer security is a solved problem. The knowledge is broadly distributed. It’s just a willingness to put up some minor inconveniences that’s been the obstacle to having broadly unhackable computer systems. Maybe with AI hacking tools quickly hacking into every insecure system out there (which is virtually all of them), people will finally be willing to accept the cost and inconvenience of secure systems.

At any rate, it’s no reason to regulate AI. Just a reason to enforce our regular laws.

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A slug crawling on a wet sidewalk

I am almost completely unconcerned about the “dangers” of AI that I’m hearing about.

In particular, I’m completely unconcerned about the danger that terrorists (or bored high school students) are going to use AI to make a bioweapon. I guess the concern is that AI will be able to try thousands of changes in the time a human could try three? That is different from what evolution has been doing for two billion years in no way whatsoever.

Similar only in that it is another AI danger that’s easily ameliorated, is AI-facilitated hacking, which the AI firms want us to come up with regulations for.

The fact is, we scarcely need any new regulations at all. Just an ordinary legal structure where, if someone using AI does something improper, the legal and criminal liability falls equally on the person prompting the AI and on the company that wrote the AI.

Of course, if the harm passes through someone else who’s supposed to be taking due care (such as your bank or broker) that person also has ordinary responsibility. (So if an AI helps someone steal your retirement account, the broker holding your retirement account has to make you whole, just as if they had handed your money over to someone who hadn’t used AI. About the only AI-related regulation needed is something making it clear that the broker can not only sue the criminal who stole it, but also the AI firm whose tool was used to effectuate the crime.)

My point is that all those supposed horrible dangers are perfectly ordinary, and there is no need to do anything special at all.

What’s really interesting is why are the AI firms and AI scientists trying to gin up all this worry? Could it be that they can see that without some buy-in from governments the companies are all going to collapse in short order?

That’s my best guess.

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EFF membership badge

Prompted by EFF, I sent the following message to my representative:

I strongly oppose government surveillance of U.S. citizens, so I’m asking you to please vote no on any bill that includes a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Real reform is possible and has more support than ever. Several bills would do much to rein in Section 702 surveillance and protect Americans’ privacy, and do so without hurting national security. 

We live in a globalized society in which Americans are constantly communicating with people overseas. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has proven many times over that they cannot be trusted with discretion to warrantlessly query communications collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Americans should not lose their constitutional rights to private communications because of a mass surveillance authority that provides federal law enforcement with backdoor access to them. 

Please, reform Section 702. 

I urge you to urge your representative to work to reform section 702. Here’s a place to start:

https://act.eff.org/action/congress-has-until-april-20-to-take-action-on-702-tell-them-not-to-drop-the-ball

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Graph of the spot price for West Texas Intermediate crude oil, showing the recent spike

For no reason I can understand, markets seem to think that (with the cease fire with Iran) things are going to return more or less to normal, more or less immediately. This is false. It is not just false, it is so far from the truth that I don’t understand why way more people aren’t panicking.

There are so many problems with oil supply delivery right now—so many more than just the Strait of Hormuz. A lot of oil and gas production infrastructure is gone. A lot of oil and gas distribution infrastructure is gone. Even where the production infrastructure is still there, since there’s no way to ship out what is produced, production is being shut in. Production that has been shut in will take weeks to get started again. And it won’t be started again until it can be delivered.

At the same time, shipments of oil and gas that came out through the Strait just before it was closed, are probably only now reaching their destinations—meaning that it is only now that refineries are finding themselves without their next input for refining. The refining facilities are going to have to shut down. And just like the production facilities, it will take weeks to get them started again. And they won’t be started again until the people who run them foresee reliable, steady deliveries of crude.

These effects are already obvious in the observed spread between spot prices (the cost of a barrel of crude to be delivered right now), which are high (although not as high as I think would make sense), and futures prices (the cost of a barrel of crude to be delivered in a month), which are also high (but not nearly as high as I think would make sense).

The same is true (with various differences in details) with helium, nitrogen for fertilizer, aluminum, and who knows how many other commodities that used to come though the Strait.

This all matters because the knock-on effects are going to be huge. Higher fuel prices—much higher, and for much longer than the markets are currently anticipating. Higher food prices, due to the shortage of fertilizer reducing food production, especially of corn—which is a major input to both meat production and to ethanol production, meaning another way it feeds-through the higher energy prices. Higher helium prices feed through to shortages of computer chips—which were already under strain due to AI-related data-center demand.

In the background of all these are Trump’s tariffs from a year ago, the impact of which was eased in many different ways (the pause, various rate cuts, firms stocking-up ahead of the imposition of the taxes, the supreme court decision ruling that the worst of them were illegal), all of which delayed the main impacts for months. For some reason, the markets seem to think that those impacts would quit showing up in comparison to the year-ago numbers (since the tariffs were announced one year ago), but in fact are probably only now fully showing up in reported numbers.

My take on all this is that every aspect of the economy is going start getting bad, and then going on getting worse. The getting-worse phase will go on at least for months and months, and very possibly for a year or two or three.

Inflation spiked up to 3.3% last month, but that is only the start. That’s just the energy-price spike. As soon as those effects feed through to other prices, they’ll all go up. And as soon as those high prices start forcing people to cut back on other spending, we’ll see at least a recession, and very possibly worse than that. And that’s all before actual shortages of fuel and food start impacting every aspect of people’s lives.

Oh, and as I’ve said before: Don’t imagine that having some idea about what things are going to be higher-priced or in short-supply gives you the sort of insight that will let you invest to make money off these circumstances. The real-world impact of these things are going to be chaotic enough that any particular investment could go very badly wrong, even if your understanding of the general direction of events is correct. And, of course, the government is going to trying to protect their supporters (oil companies and tech billionaires, mostly) so they may well be bailed out. Any investments that suppose that things will go badly for them in particular may well go spectacularly awry.

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Stephen Miller would have ICE agents (and the rest of us) believe that they have “immunity” to perform their “duties.”

This is, of course, false. Depriving any person (not just citizens) of their rights “under color of law” is its own crime. But it is in that light that we should view their position on face masks as admitting that they know they have it wrong:

The administration’s perceived need for face coverings evocative of Iranian secret police and Russian security agents helps us recognize that assertions of state supremacy and citizen insignificance are claptrap…

Source: All the king’s masked and anonymous henchmen

If they were immune, they’d not hesitate to show their faces. The fact that they feel the need to keep them hidden makes it very clear that they know they’re totally exposed in a legal sense.

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Okay, I’m going to tag this “allegedly funny,” because that’s the tag I’ve got for this sorta stuff. But this is legit funny:

Instead, FEMA staff have been encouraged to use terms like “freezing rain” in their public messaging, the sources said.

Source: Don’t say ‘Watch out for ice’: FEMA warned storm announcements could invite memes | CNN Politics