Grow up, Libertarians!

I'm on the road so I can't give this the attention it deserves right now, but Michael Lind has a splendid followup to his earlier piece deconstructing libertarianism.

I was wrong. Hooray!

Over three years ago I made a cynical prediction that the Supreme Court would uphold human gene patents.  I'm happy to report that I was wrong.  The court's decision is shockingly sensible: naturally occurring genes are not patentable.  Synthetic genes with novel sequences that do not occur in nature are.  The Washington Post has a nice summary.

Joe Biden: vice hypocrite in chief

Watch Joe Biden criticize the Bush administration in 2006 for doing exactly what the Obama administration is doing now.

Here's a transcript.

Some choice excerpts:

I don't think it passes the [Constitutional] test, but it clearly doesn't pass the test of two existing statutes that say you can't do these kinds of things, forgetting the Fourth Amendment. 

It's a little bit like what would happen if the banks turned over all your checking records without your name but gave the checking account number and every single purchase you made and pattern of your behavior and then you were told, "Don't worry, that's not invasion of your privacy." 

I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to; I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.

I guess Republicans don't have a monopoly on hypocrisy.

Lies, damn lies, and red herrings

On June 7, president Obama said, referring to the then-breaking news about the NSA wiretapping program, that "every member of Congress has been briefed on this program [emphasis added]."  Turns out this was not true.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters in the Capitol Monday that as the top-ranking Republican on last year's Homeland Security Committee, she expected she would have been briefed on the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program, but was not. Even as a member of this session's intelligence committee, she said, she had not been briefed before the panoramic snooping program run by the NSA was revealed by The Guardian last week. 

Collins said the Obama administration's argument that she could have requested a briefing falls short, because she had no knowledge on which to base a request. "How can you ask when you don't know the program exists?" Collins wondered, chuckling at the absurdity. 

As Collins said she understands it, Senate leaders and the top intelligence committee members got briefings [but] "The rest of us did not..."

Now, Collins is a Republican.  Republicans will say anything to make the president look bad, so she may be lying.  But there's something else the president said that is also (almost certainly) untrue:

With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.

There is simply no way to tell in general who an email account belongs to, so there's no way to know whether a particular email account belongs to a U.S. citizen or not, or whether the owner of the account lives in the U.S.  If you think about it, the idea that the government does not spy on "people living in the U.S." is absurd on its face.  If a known terrorist is living in the U.S. do you really believe that the NSA would refuse to spy on that person just because they happen to be here instead of overseas?

To be fair, I don't think Obama consciously lied about this.  He was probably told that this is true by someone that he trusts, and he repeated that information.  But this is not an excuse.  The responsibility is still ultimately his to hire people who will provide him with accurate information, and to educate himself enough so that he can tell when someone is bald-facedly lying to him.  This is the perfect example of why everyone needs at least a basic understanding of how the internet works.  Otherwise we're sitting ducks for flim-flammery like this.

But all this is really beside the point.  The most important part of this debate seems to have gotten completely lost: this is not about spying.  This is about warrants.  The government should be allowed to spy on U.S. citizens and residents, but they should have to get a warrant first.  From a real judge, not a FISA sock puppet.

As long as I'm writing about kittens

I'll just leave this here.

Kitten torture part 3: a scientific theory of morality

(Third in a series)

In this third and final post I want to tackle head on this problem that Bertrand Russell described in 1960:

I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it.

Russell can surely be forgiven for not finding the answer to this problem because it relies on scientific advances that were not made until after his death in 1970.  Specifically, I believe that Richard Dawkins's theory of memes (1976) and Robert Axelrod's theory of the evolution of cooperation (1981) are both necessary and sufficient to produce a theory of morality that is both scientifically valid (which is to say, based on evidence) and consistent with most people's moral intuition.  In particular, it provides a principled argument against wanton cruelty, while still allowing the infliction of pain for a higher purpose.  It is similar to the theory Sam Harris describes in The Moral Landscape, but without some of the problems that his theory has.

Note that what I'm proposing here is different from what I wrote about back in 2008.  Back then I was just describing Axelrod's work on how moral intuition can evolve.  Here I am going further, proposing an affirmative theory of morality that is consistent with Axelrod (and Dawkins) but goes beyond merely observing that our moral intuition is generally reliable (because sometimes it isn't).

Let me start by being explicit about my premises.  If you don't accept these premises, you probably won't accept my hypothesis.

Premise 1: We (by which I mean humans) are alive, that is, we are the products of Darwinian evolution.  Our bodies are the direct phenotype of a collection of genes, but it is those genes, not our bodies, that are the reproductive unit on which natural selection acts.

Premise 2: In addition to our bodies, our genes also produce an extended phenotype, or indirect phenotype, comprising all of the effects that our bodies have on our environment: our clothing, our houses, our artwork.  All of these are products of our genes no less than our bodies.  The only difference is that there is additional steps in the process of producing the indirect phenotype than the direct one.

Premise 3: We humans are also hosts for a new (in evolutionary time scales) kind of replicator, called a meme.  Like genes, memes are self-replicating units of information that undergo a process of Darwinian evolution.  Unlike genes, memes are encoded in the synapses of the neurons of our brains, and more recently, in our extended phenotype: on stone tables, papyrus scrolls, paper, hard drives, and in the design of our artifacts.

Premise 4: Darwinian evolution is amoral (neither moral nor immoral).  It doesn't "care" about anything in the sense that we humans do.  It simply obeys the laws of physics to optimize a particular quality metric: the ability to reproduce.  But (and this is key) what Darwinian evolution optimizes is not the ability to reproduce bodies, but rather the ability to reproduce information.

Premise 5: It is fundamental to the nature of life that it draws boundaries around itself to separate itself from its environment.  One of the very first tricks that the earliest self-replicating molecules learned was how to make a cell wall.  Distinguishing between "us" and "them" is intrinsic to being alive.

Premise 6: Despite the fact that boundaries are fundamental to life, the nature of those boundaries is extremely flexible.  The direct phenotype of a single genome can include multiple discontinuous entities (as in an ant colony).  A single physical boundary can include multiple distinct genomes (as in the case of symbionts).

Premise 7: The information that reproduces and undergoes biological Darwinian evolution on earth is encoded in DNA, but that is merely an "implementation detail".  It doesn't matter to the evolutionary process how the information is encoded, only that it replicates, mutates, and undergoes a process of selection.

Those are all the premises.  Now a few key observations:

Observation 1: Humans are not autonomous from the perspective of the process of life.  A single human in isolation cannot reproduce, and even a mating pair would probably have trouble surviving in the absence of some kind of support structure.  At a minimum, to have a robust shot at long term survival requires a tribe or a village at a minimum.  In this regard, we have more in common with ants than is generally appreciated.

Observation 2: Even a single human body is not an autonomous whole.  We contain symbiotic microorganisms (mainly in our digestive tracts) without which we could not survive.

Observation 3: Unlike most other creatures, we humans can make conscious choices about where we draw the line between "us" and "them."  We can even draw multiple lines for different purposes, around our immediate family, our tribe, our race, our country, our species, even around all living things.

Observation 4: Our memes are also symbiotic entities.  They can't live without our brains (because our brains form the ecosystem in which they exist) and in turn they provide our genes with significant reproductive advantages relative to species without brains, or whose brains are not hosts for memes.

Observation 5: Usually the reproductive interests of genes and memes coincide, but not always.  For example, the meme for birth control is potentially disastrous for our genes.  So it should not be too surprising that there exist human brains with an instinctive revulsion towards birth control.  Such an instinctive revulsion would be a defense mechanism evolved by genes to combat the deleterious effects (from the point of view of our genes) of the birth control meme.

This last observation is the key.  I believe that this occasional conflict between the interests of genes and memes is responsible for most if not all of the genuine disagreements over morality.  They all come down in the end to a conflict between the reproductive interests of memes and those of our genes.

So my theory of morality is simply this: where there is conflict, the interests of memes should trump the interests of genes.

This is a humanist (with a small "h") theory, at least for the moment, because at the moment only the (extended) human phenotype can be the host for memes (as far as we know).  But it has two significant advantages over the Humanist (big "H") theory of morality, at least as it is stated in the Humanist Manifesto.  First, it is humanist, but it is not axiomatically humanist.  It is not species-ist.  It is axiomatically meme-ist.  It just so happens that we humans are the only species that can be hosts for memes, but that is only true as far as we know at the moment.  It could change.  When and if it does, we won't have to struggle with whether or not some alien species or a conscious computer "is human" because "human" is not part of the definition, just an observation about the current state of our knowledge about the world, a circumstance which we should expect to change.

The second advantage that my theory has is that it offers an answer to Russell's problem: a principled account of why wanton cruelty is immoral: it's bad for memes.  The kind of mindset that allows one to take pleasure in torturing kittens is generally not the kind of mindset that is conducive to thinking deep thoughts.  Propagating memes is not easy.  It requires that one's basic physical needs be met.  It requires a certain level of physical security.  It is advanced by certain kinds of technology (like computers and the internet, not so much by nuclear weapons) and, in many cases, by the presence of companions who might be members of other species.

It's a positive, uplifting message.  It is, essentially, a pro-life position, but one which broadens the definition of life to include memes, and resolves gene-meme conflicts in their favor.  I think it's the Right Answer.  There's just one minor problem that still needs to be resolved, and that is that calling oneself a "meme-ist" sounds really weird.

Court finds NSA surveillance unconstitutional. Administration's response: keep the ruling secret and carry on

It turns out that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 found that the NSA's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional.  Why doesn't anyone know this? Because the decision was kept secret:

In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the surveillance at issue [then] was carried out under the same controversial legal authority that underlies the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program.

It gets worse:

The government’s argument is guaranteed to make heads spin. DOJ earlier argued that it lacks discretion to release the FISC opinion without the FISC's consent, but DOJ now argues that if the FISC were to agree with EFF, “the consequence would be that the Government could release the opinion or any portion of it in its discretion.” But FISC material is classified solely because the Executive Branch demands that it be, so release of the opinion has always been a matter of Executive discretion.

In other words, the FISC should rule against the EFF because to do otherwise would require the release of this secret ruling.  But the ruling is only secret because the administration insisted that it be kept secret!  I can hardly conceive of a more twisted and cynical manipulation of the law.

This is not what the American people signed up for.

The morality of kitten torture, part 2

(Second in a series)

Back when I used to debate Christians for sport one of my favorite plays was the cannibalism maneuver: Is cannibalism immoral?  Most Christians would say it is.  And yet there is no support for this in the Bible.  To the contrary, in Jeremiah 19:9 God Himself threatens to force the Jews to eat their own children as punishment for something or other.

And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

Logically, then, cannibalism cannot be a sin because if it were then either 1) God would force people to sin, which means that He is not Perfect, 2) God makes empty threats, which means that His Word is not trustworthy.

It is, of course, not fair to pick on Christians.  It isn't easy to come up with a codification of our moral intuition, and secularists fail as often as people of faith.  There is no shame in failure, only in not trying.  That is what drives me to take my best shot at this problem.

Let me start by defining the problem with a little more precision and a little less lulz.  It is, of course, not about kitten torture, it's about how do we decide what is moral.  It is indisputable that we have intuitions about morality. For proof we need look no further than the fact that Jeremiah 19:9 causes Christians serious cognitive dissonance.  If Christians were really serious about their theology there should be no problem: the whole point of the Bible is that our moral intuition is unreliable, so we need the Word of God to set us straight.  Disconnects between what we intuitively think is moral and what God says is moral is exactly what we should expect under such circumstances.  And yet, the Christian reaction to Jeremiah 19:9 is almost never to concede that cannibalism is moral but rather to invent all kinds of excuses why the meaning of this verse is something other than what it plainly says.

Relying on our moral intuition is actually not such a bad plan.  It has, after all, gotten us this far.  Flawed as we are, humanity has nonetheless racked up some impressive and laudable accomplishments, and so far we have managed to avoid incinerating the planet.  Somehow, despite the fact that we have not found a way to agree on a principle for deciding moral behavior, we nonetheless manage to behave morally more often than not.

No one can deny, however, that there is room for improvement.  But can we do better?  I believe that we can.  But it's not easy.  To illustrate the difficulty, let's look at a few ideas that don't work.

One proposal is that because moral intuition seems to be pragmatically effective as a guide to moral behavior that we adopt that as a principle: what is morally correct is what we intuitively feel to be morally correct.  The problem with this is that it leads to moral relativism, and no way to resolve disputes when our intuitions happen not to coincide.  For example, people who oppose gay marriage generally don't do it out of wanton cruelty, they do it out of a sincere, visceral, and deeply held belief that homosexual conduct is immoral and therefore should not be endorsed by society.  Moral relativism offers no possibility of reconciling such opposing views, and is therefore unsuitable as a principle.  At best, it is a concession of defeat.

A second possibility is utilitarianism or consequentialism: actions are judged by the desirability of their effects.  Utilitarian arguments are commonly raised in moral debates, e.g. gay marriage should be banned because it is bad for children to be brought up by gay parents.  The problem with consequentialism is that it begs the question.  Instead of deciding what is moral, we now have to decide what is desirable, and different people desire different things.

Notwithstanding, consequentialism does represent some progress.  We have mechanisms (like the free market) for resolving differences in desires in ways that everyone feels like they've come out ahead, and so adopting a consequentialist position at least has the potential for transforming the world in a way that everyone agrees is better even if we can't agree on what "better" actually means.  This is the white magic of trade.  It nevertheless grates on most people's moral intuitions to apply free market principles to questions of morality.  The answer to the question of whether it is morally wrong to torture kittens should be independent of how much one might be willing to pay for the privilege.  On the other hand, one can concoct consequentialist scenarios where kitten torture is arguably moral.  We (humanity) actually have tortured kittens in the name of scientific research, so this is not just an academic question.  (Here's a link.  WARNING:  This video contains some very disturbing images.  Do NOT watch it unless you are prepared for that.)

One can attempt to rescue consequentialism by postulating some universal quality metric, like the minimization of pain or the maximization of pleasure.  The problem is that either of these in isolation leads to absurd conclusions.  If the moral quality metric is the minimization of pain, then the most moral thing one can do is to euthanize every sentient living creature.  If the moral quality metric is the maximization of pleasure, then you have to deal with the problem of the hedonic treadmill.  If you try to combine the two somehow then you have to deal with the fact that pain and pleasure are incommensurate quantities.  If causing a kitten a tiny bit of pain gives someone enormously greater pleasure, does that make it moral?

One can adopt the Golden Rule, but this has the same problem: different people want to be treated in different ways.  For example, I like it when people challenge my beliefs, but apparently most people don't (a hard life lesson that took me many years to learn).

One can postulate some other basis for morality, like the Humanist credo that "ethics are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience" (whatever that might mean).  But why should species-ism provide any sounder a basis for morality than (say) class-ism (in either the biological or the economic sense) or racism?

It's a very hard problem.  I think science actually does provide an answer.  I'll describe how in the next installment.

The government is almost certainly recording your phone calls

How do I know?  By listening to what the president says (and more importantly, what he isn't saying), and doing some simple math.

President Obama said today:

"When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about. ... What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content. ... If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."

If you parse this carefully you will see that he doesn't actually deny that calls are being recorded.  All he says is that no one is listening to the recordings without "go[ing] back to a federal judge" (but, of course, we have to take his word for that).

The more compelling evidence that something beyond mere "phone numbers, and durations of calls" is being recorded is this.

The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center,^[1] is adata storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data on the scale of yottabytes (1 yottabyte = 1 trillion terabytes, or 1 quadrillion gigabytes)

What is all that storage for?  It can't possibly be merely for "phone numbers, and durations of calls".  A year's worth of call data for the entire country would easily fit on a single modern hard drive.  The only possible reason to have yottabytes of storage is to record content, and specifically to record voice content.  Email just doesn't take up that much space.  Think about it: a yottabyte is 10^24 bytes.  That's 10^14=100 terabytes for every human on the planet.  What could they possibly be storing that would take up that much space if not content?

Kudos to Obama for taking on patent trolls

In the interest of balance and giving credit where it's due I have to give a shout-out to the Obama administration for tackling the problem of patent trolls.  The administration's report isn't perfect. It fails to address the root problem, which is the PTO issuing too many bogus patents. But it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.

I'm still pissed about the NSA surveillance thing though.

What part of "No warrants shall issue but upon probable cause" do you not understand?

President Obama defended the use of warrantless surveillance against American citizens at a news conference this morning.

The programs that have been discussed over the last couple days in the press are secret in the sense that they are classified but they are not secret in the sense that when it comes to phone calls every member of Congress has been briefed on this program. With respect to all these programs the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. So I think it's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed about exactly what we're doing.

OK, so my other elected representatives have been complicit with you in undermining our civil liberties.  Was that supposed to make me feel better?

With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.

How exactly do you distinguish the email accounts of U.S. citizens and residents from those of non-citizens and non-residents?

When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about. ... What the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content. ... If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.

So you're only snooping on part of my private life instead of all of my private life. Again, is that supposed to make me feel better?

One of the things we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy. Because there are some trade-offs involved. I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy.

Here's the problem, Mr. President: we already had this debate.  We had it in 2008 when you ran for president.  Back then you said that if we voted for you we would "leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and 'wiretaps without warrants'.

You can't have 100-percent security and also have 100-percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.

That's right.  And in 2008 and 2012 the American People made that choice based on the promises you made.  We chose freedom and the rule of law.

I don't welcome leaks. There's a reason why these programs are classified.

Indeed, because if it were known that you were doing this, the American People would rise up in righteous indignation.  You have betrayed us.  You have betrayed your campaign promises and your oath to uphold the Constitution.  Like George Bush before you, you have twisted the law and the political process to turn the United States of America into a surveillance state in the name of national security.  The Constitution is very clear:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There is no exception for national security.  The possibility that someone might plan a terrorist attack under the protection of the fourth amendment is the price we pay for freedom.  Anyone who isn't willing to pay that price should go live in North Korea.

It's not the leaks that are reprehensible

From the New York Times:

The top intelligence official in the United States condemned as “reprehensible” leaks revealing a secret program to collect information from leading Internet companies and said a separate disclosure about an effort to sweep up records of telephone calls threatens “irreversible harm” to the nation’s national security.

Funny how times change.  I can remember when the fashion was to consider it reprehensible for governments to spy on their own people.  That the Soviets did this and we didn't was one of the things that made Us better than Them back in the day.  That the North Korean government does this and ours doesn't is one of the things that... oh, wait.

You know what I consider reprehensible?  Hypocrisy.  Bald-faced lies.  A blatant disregard for the rule of law in the name of national security.  Forgetting that government is supposed to serve the people and not the other way around.

Way back in 2009 I wrote that Barack Obama is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from George Bush.  Today the transformation is complete.

The question libertarians just can’t answer

Michael Lind has the best takedown of libertarianism ever: If [libertarianism] is so great, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it? 

Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?

It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?

To be clear, I sympathize with the libertarian cause.  I want to maximize freedom, but not just for myself.  I want to maximize freedom also for my fellow man and, to the extent possible, my fellow non-homo-sapien creatures.  But the moment you decide to extend freedom beyond yourself you run headlong into the problem of externalities.  If I want the freedom to sleep and my neighbor wants the freedom to crank their stereo up to 11 (or keep a pit bull) then at least one of us will be forced to give up one some of our freedom not by the government, but by the laws of physics.

This is the fundamental problem of libertarians.  They are political alchemists, committed to a tacit definition of freedom that is tantamount to perpetual motion.  Freedom cannot possibly mean that everyone gets to do whatever the fuck they want.  Externalities and conflicts have to be resolved somehow.  Government and the rule of law are the best mechanisms mankind has yet been able to come up with to solve this problem.  This is not to say that the situation couldn't be improved -- of course it could.  But it won't be improved by libertarians sticking their fingers in their ears and hoping the problem will just go away if they ignore it hard enough.

On the morality of kitten torture, part 1

I was going to title this post "Why I am not a humanist" but I thought the kitten-torture angle had more panache.  I've also been looking at my traffic stats lately, and it seems that sensational titles are very effective.  This post has been getting a huge amount of traffic lately.  One of these days I'm going to write a series of completely bogus posts whose titles are all of the form "The shocking truth about X" and see what happens.

But back to kitten torture.  My recent encounter with Richard Dawkins has led to a lot of discussions with members of the secular community about religion, community, morals, and nomenclature.  I believe that I am entitled to be fully franchised as a human being despite the fact that I don't believe in the existence (in the narrow sense) of the supernatural.  One of the things I believe I'm entitled to is a noun.  And not just any old noun, but one that adequately captures my core beliefs.  Religious people have these: "Christian", "Muslim", "Episcopalian." Why shouldn't I?

The obvious noun for me to adopt would be "atheist".  But I don't like to self-identify as an atheist despite the fact that I am one.  It's partly because of the baggage that this term has been saddled with by both believers and unbelievers, but more because I would prefer to self-identify with what I *do* believe rather than what I don't.  I am, in point of fact, an a-unicornian in addition to being an atheist, but I don't want to self-identify as one of those either.

A possibility that has been suggested to me is to self-identify as a Humanist.  The problem with that is that I'm actually not a humanist.  Humanist doctrine (to the extent that a secular movement can be said to have a doctrine) is set out in a document called the Humanist Manifesto, of which there are three versions.  There is a lot to like in all three versions, but, in my opinion, a fatal flaw in the most recent revision:

Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.

Or, to put it more bluntly, man is the measure of all things.

The problem with this view of morality is that it fails in my view to adequately answer the following question: if I have an intellectual curiosity about what happens when I torture a kitten, is it morally acceptable for me to conduct this experiment?  [UPDATE: I am specifically stipulating that no greater good will be served.  This is not scientific research, it is satisfying a personal whim.]

On a straightforward reading of the morals clause of the Manifesto the answer is an unambiguous "yes" because my interests as a human axiomatically trump the kitten's interests as a non-human.  And yet this grates heavily on my moral intuition, and, I suspect, on the moral intuition of most of my fellow humans, and even most of those who self-identify as humanists.

The mere fact that most humanists choose not to torture kittens does not give them license to sweep this issue under the rug.  Most Muslims choose not to engage in violent Jihad, but that does not stop the secular community from pointing out (rightly IMHO) that what they assert to be the Word of God does in fact endorse violent jihad.  It is no less justified to point out that what humanists hold up as their defining document doe not provide any principled way to reject kitten torture as immoral.  A humanist might reject kitten torture as personally distasteful, but there are no grounds on humanist doctrine for me to condemn your personal choice to torture kittens.

And yet, I do condemn it.  Torturing kittens is absolutely, unequivocally immoral.  And I believe that my moral condemnation of kitten torture can be justified on scientific grounds.  (Exactly how that is done will have to wait for another post.  It's not obvious.)  But I don't see any way to condemn kitten torture on the basis of Humanist Manifesto III, or even on the more general notion that man is the measure of all things.  That is why not only can I not self-identify as a humanist, I actively reject the label (unlike my attitude towards the term "atheist" which I reluctantly adopt as an accurate though incomplete description of my core beliefs).

Figuring out a principled way to make the argument that torturing kitten is immoral makes a challenging intellectual exercise.  If you, like me, believe that kitten torture is wrong, you might want to give it a shot. You should keep in mind that one doesn't have to go very far back in human history to find societies where the idea that it is immoral to torture animals for sport was the minority opinion, and that "it's wrong because believe it" doesn't count as a principled argument.

Shame on you, Michelle Rhee

Michelle Rhee's apparently inaptly named organization "Students First" has refused to rescind an award to homophobic Tennessee state representative John Ragan as "reformer of the year" in 2012 despite Ragan's ongoing sponsorship of anti-gay legislation that would effectively enshrine in law people's ability to bully and harass gay students.  MoveOn has a petition demanding Rhee's group (I can't bring myself to write the name again because of the manifest hypocrisy) reconsider their decision.  I urge you to take a moment to look at it and consider signing it.

[UPDATE:] We won!

It's time to end the war on marijuana

The ACLU is calling for an end to the war on marijuana.  This has seemed like such a no-brainer to me for such a long time that I can hardly think what to say about it.  It's like trying to convince someone that the sky is blue.  It is just so obvious that marijuana is a benign drug (at least by comparison to tobacco and alcohol), that prohibition doesn't work and never has, and that the war on drugs is a thinly veiled excuse for oppressing racial minorities and protecting moneyed interests (specifically the prison-industrial complex).

Oh, and in case there was any doubt, the sky is blue.

Obviously it's different because this time it's OUR state

I don't like to spend too much time pointing out examples of Republican hypocrisy because it's so common that there just isn't very much sport in it, but this takes bald-faced duplicity to a whole new level.  Senator James Inhofe and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma both voted against federal relief funds for victims of hurricane Sandy.  But of course they're all for federal money for victims of the Oklahoma tornado.  Because, well, it's Oklahoma, and Oklahoma is totally more deserving of federal relief money than New Jersey is.

Oh, Coburn is insisting that the money for Oklahoma disaster relief be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.  So... because he's going to take the money for his state away from someone else, that makes it OK?  Do these people ever stop to think about what they're saying?

Oh, and Inhofe is the Senate's foremost climate change denier.

Let's take stock, shall we?  Senator James Inhofe wants to 1) not do anything about climate change (because he thinks anthropological climate change is a hoax) 2) deny federal disaster relief to victims of extreme weather events unless 3) those victims happen to be in his home state.  And senator Coburn pretty much feels the same way except that in addition he wants to make sure that the money comes out of someone else's pocket.

It is taking all the self control I can muster not to render into words my feelings about these two senators and all of the citizens of the great state of Oklahoma who voted for them.  But were I to succumb to the temptation, at least one of those words would begin with the letters F and U.

We now return to our regularly scheduled Republican hypocrisy

Well, that didn't last long.  Republican lawmakers are back to their traditional (which is to say idiotic and hypocritical) ways in North Carolina, where the state senate commerce committee has just unanimously approved a bill that would prohibit car makers from selling their products in the state except through third-party dealerships.

Two passages from the article really stand out:

[The bill's] sponsor, state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican from Henderson ... said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between manufacturers and dealers. What makes it “unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old “competition”—something Republicans are typically inclined to favor—is not entirely clear.

But it becomes a lot clearer when you read this:

Robert Glaser, president of the dealers association, told the News & Observer that the law prohibiting Tesla sales isn’t just about his industry’s self-interest. Pointing to the Tesla representatives at a recent hearing, he said, “You tell me they’re gonna support the little leagues and the YMCA?”

If ever there was proof that Republican really don't hear themselves talking, this is it.  Their best argument for passing a law prohibiting competition is that the competition may not spend the money it makes in the way that they like.  Isn't that supposed to be the whole point of the free market, that people (of which corporations are now a proper subset) get to spend their money in the ways that they like and not in the ways that you like?

Stop the presses! A republican has done something sensible!

John McCain has introduced a bill that would encourage (not require) cable companies to offer unbundled services.  It's all carrot, no stick: cable companies currently enjoy compulsory copyright licensing of broadcast channels.  McCain's bill makes that license contingent on offering a-la-carte channel selection.

Of course, a better (and less hypocritical) approach would be to remove the regulatory barriers to entry that prevent competitors from entering the market.  (Hey, a bot can dream.)  But short of that, this is better than nothing.

I thought this was noteworthy because it is so rare that a Republican does something that isn't completely moronic.  I'm sure it's not unprecedented, but I can't remember the last time it happened.

The only thing that surprises me is that this hasn't happened sooner

Or maybe it has and we just haven't heard about it.  A gang of thieves stole $45 million in a coordinated attack on ATM machines worldwide.  This surprises me not at all.  The world's financial systems are for the most part hopelessly insecure because they are (again for the most part) based on protocols that were invented in the 1950s.  I became personally and painfully aware of how deeply broken the system is when a bank lost a very substantial sum of my money in 2008.  Since then I have become even more painfully aware of how deeply entrenched the brokenness is when my own efforts to fix this problem crashed and burned on the shoals of protectionist regulations and other very effective barriers to entry erected by the banking industry to keep meddling newcomers like me off of their turf.

The situation is bad.  It's really, really bad.  And it's going to keep getting worse because the banks have no incentive to fix the problem.  They aren't going to face any competition.  Their barriers to entry are too effective.  And they aren't really taking on any risk either because as long as their losses are big enough they just get the government to bail them out.  Because, well, they basically own the government.

I really wonder what the end game is going to be here, because I don't see how the status quo can possibly be sustainable.  Banking is supposed to be about capital formation and risk management, but it has now become an industry of arbitrage and legalized fraud.  Banks have become parasites, sucking the life blood from the economy and contributing nothing.

The thing about parasites is that they can only grow so much before they kill the host.

I'm not a bigot! I'm not I'm not I'm NOT!

States are legalizing gay marriage so fast I can hardly keep up any more.  Delaware joined the club on Tuesday, and the Minnesota House approved it today.

Still, some legislators seem not to have gotten the memo.

Opponents argued the bill would alter a centuries-old conception of marriage and leave those people opposed for religious reasons tarred as bigots. 

"We're not. We're not," said Rep. Kelby Woodard, R-Belle Plaine. "These are people with deeply held beliefs, including myself."

I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you Mr. Woodward, but just because your beliefs are deeply held doesn't mean they aren't bigoted.  This is the funny thing about bigots: they never think of themselves as bigoted.  How can you possibly be a bigot when God (or logic) is on your side?

Having not a single substantive argument remaining, conservatives are now arguing for gays to be denied their fundamental human right to marry whom they choose on the grounds that the people denying them that right might be tarred as bigots.  The irony is almost too much to bear.  That is the very definition of bigotry!

Libertarianism ends with a bang

If any good can come of a tragedy like the explosion in the town ofd West, Texas it is that it might help drive the zombie notion that all government regulation is bad back to the intellectual graveyard from whence it came.  This is the fundamental problem with libertarianism: it's the externalities, stupid.  In the absence of government regulation, nothing prevents people from imposing risks on other people without their consent.  I love freedom as much as anyone, but how any reasonable person can fail to understand this is beyond me.

How's that "profiling people who could conceivably be Muslim" thing working out for ya?

Rhetorical question for the day: how many of these terrorists might have been caught if we'd followed Sam Harris's recommendation of "profil[ing] Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim"? (Hint: at least two of them actually are Muslims. Can you tell which by looking at them?)

 

This is what implementing Sam Harris's plan looks like

Sam Harris's recommendation to improve security by "profil[ing] Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim" has been implemented in France:

Black and North African railway workers were banned from working at Paris's Gare du Nord when the President of Israel visited France over fears they might be Muslim...

Unless and until Harris actually explains what he means by "anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim" we have to assume that he means what is commonly meant: dark-skinned people, or people who wear non-western attire.  I'm sorry, but that is the very definition of racist.

Once again: I am completely on board with singling out Muslims, if by "Muslim" one means people who adhere to a certain set of virulent beliefs (and not "people who self-identify as Muslim").  The problem is that there is no way to tell who these people are by looking at them.  This is a complete no-brainer.  And Sam Harris is a neuroscientist.  He of all people should know this.

For the record, re: Sam Harris

Sam Harris has published a response to some of the recent criticism leveled at him as a result of his public spat with Glen Greenwald.  He writes:

Because I consider Islam to be especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse, my views are often described as “racist” by my critics.

For the record, and on the off chance that Sam ever reads my blog, this is not the reason I labelled him a racist. The reason I labelled him a racist is because he implied that one could tell who is and who is not a Muslim by their physical appearance.  I mostly agree with the rest of what he says. In particular, I agree that "Islam [is] especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse."

But there is another subtlety that Harris misses, apart from the bigoted claim that a person's beliefs can be inferred from how they look: just because Islam is especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse, it does not necessarily follow that Muslims are especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse.  It depends on how you define "Muslim."  Of course, if you define a Muslim as someone who follows all of the tenets of Islam, including the belligerent and inimical ones, then it does follow.  But this is not the only possible definition of the word "Muslim."  Another perfectly reasonable definition of the word is someone who self-identifies as a Muslim.  And not all people who self-identify as Muslims adhere to all of the tenets of Islam (even if they think that they do).

I am personally acquainted with several self-identified Muslims who are no more belligerent or inimical to the norms of civil discourse than the next person.  I have travelled in Muslim countries and have come away with the impression that the vast majority of the people who live there are perfectly decent human beings.

Yes, it is true that the Quran says all manner of horrible things.  But so does the Bible, and somehow the vast majority of people who self-identify as Christians manage to get along without, say, stoning their disobedient children to death despite the fact that the Bible says unambiguously that they should.  People have an amazing capacity for letting crazy ideas run around in their heads without actually going crazy.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of Muslims whose adherence to Islam makes them worthy of the distrust that Harris advocates.  But it has to be a minority.  There are a billion self-identified Muslims in the world.  If even half of them were as crazy as Harris fears we world would be engulfed in a conflagration the likes of which the world has never seen.  That's not happening.

Harris is not wrong about Islam.  His mistake is failing to distinguish between Islam, (self-identified) Muslims, and crazy Muslims.  And thinking that you can tell who is who by their appearance.

Who says there is no justice in Sharia law?

A man in Saudi Arabia convicted of repeatedly raping his teenage daughter has been sentenced to receive 2,080 lashes during his 13 year prison term.

(For the record: In case it's not obvious, the title of this post is intended to be ironic.  I am as horrified by the punishment as I am by the crime.  Sadly, this sort of thing seems to be sickeningly common in the Muslim world.)

Bitcoin: passing fad or the end of the world as we know it?

Bitcoin is suddenly getting a lot of attention.  As I write this, BTC is trading at $118USD, up from $30 in the last two months.  That's a nice rate of return.  But is it a bubble, or the start of a revolution?

For those of you who have been living in a cave, Bitcoin is a fully decentralized anonymous digital currency.  It is based, like so many cool things are, on an algorithm rather than government fiat.  Its anonymity makes it attractive to criminals, and its algorithmic basis makes it attractive to libertarians and people who have been screwed by central banks.

Some people think the recent price run up is a bubble, and that the whole bitcoin thing is a passing fad.  Others think it's the beginning of a revolution and lifting the Rothschilds boot from the neck of the People once and for all.

I think it could go either way.

On the one hand, Bitcoin really is new and revolutionary.  There has never been anything like it in the history of the world.  It is a tradable commodity whose supply is limited by mathematics, and is therefore guaranteed to remain scarce.  On the other hand, its intrinsic value is zero, so its actual value depends entirely on whether or not people choose to use it.

Right now, they're choosing to use it.  And the problem with that is that it poses an existential threat to the current social order, but very few people have realized it yet.  I think even Bitcoin's advocates don't fully appreciate the genie that they have unleashed.

Here's the problem: life is a prisoner's dilemma, a game in which mutual cooperation is an evolutionarily stable strategy, but only under the condition that the game is iterated.  Only if you play multiple rounds with the same players is it rational to cooperate.  Otherwise, the rational strategy is to defect, and civilization collapses.

Bitcoin, by providing anonymity, undermines the iterative aspect of most social interactions.  The social fabric is held together by the possibility that if you try to screw someone, they (or people acting on their behalf) can screw you back.  But that only works if they know who you are.

Bitcoin replaces the social impediments to defection with technological ones.  There is, essentially, no possible punishment for stealing bitcoins, since all bitcoin transactions are anonymous.  Instead, stealing coins is simply hard to do.  That difficulty is enforced by cryptographic algorithms.  These algorithms work very well, but -- and this is a big, big BUT -- only if they are used properly.  And using cryptographic algorithms properly is really, really hard, particularly in the face of active attack.  The more Bitcoin is adopted, the more lucrative, and hence the more likely, such attacks become.

Case in point: I just downloaded the latest bitcoin client from sourceforge.  Those files are served over an HTTP link.  So how can I know that the file I got is really an honest bitcoin client and not some backdoored version served to me by a Bulgarian hacker?  The answer is: I can't know.

I'm sure the Bitcoin community will eventually batten down the hatches and close such obvious security holes as the non-secure client downloads, but the point is that unless you write your own client from scratch (and your own compiler and your own operating system, and maybe even your own BIOS and CPU) you can't be sure if the client you're using is trustworthy.  And if you're not sure, you could wake up one day and find that all your bitcoins are gone.

When that day comes, you will have no recourse.  Zero.  None.

Worse, you don't even have to be the victim of malice, or even technical incompetence to irretrievably lose bitcoins.  Simple carelessness will suffice.  Today I lost some bitcoins because I accidentally entered the wrong account number into a transaction.  I was trying to transfer some bitcoins that someone had given me on Reddit into my main account (which in bitcoin parlance is called a "wallet").  Instead of cutting-and-pasting my own wallet identifier, I accidentally pasted in someone else's.  I have no idea how that happened (or even if -- it's possible that Reddit screwed this up, though I think that's unlikely).  But my bitcoins are gone.  I don't even have any idea who I sent them to.  Whoever you are, use them in good health.

I think that what will ultimately doom bitcoin is that people will come to realize that civilization does actually offer some benefits that they are loath to give up once they realize what the price of freedom really is.  The amount I lost today was trivial, but bitcoin doesn't care about that.  It will just as happily dispense with a large amount as a small one.  The lack of recourse will be the same either way.  I think people will ultimately decide that the risk of losing your life savings to a typographical error is too big a price to pay for anonymity.

Or maybe they won't.  Maybe a generation will grow up on bitcoin, fully aware of its risks and potential benefits, and will have devised ways to mitigate the risks to the point where they are willing to accept them.  But (and this is really my point) if this happens, it will be a big, big change.  It will be a fundamental change to the way humans have organized themselves since the dawn of civilization.  Bitcoin could very easily be the end of the world as we know it.  But (and here's another important caveat) that might not be a bad thing if it's a choice that humanity makes with its eyes open.

It's not a slam-dunk either way.

In the meantime, I have never tried to monetize Rondam Ramblings in any way, but I've decided to start accepting bitcoin tips just so I can have a few more to play around with now that the ones I had are gone.  My wallet ID (and let's hope I get it right this time) is 13Yz6GvDGKVfYp21xK6p9xcGFBKQc5VJU9.

@samharris: how does someone "look Muslim"?

Glen Greenwald and Sam Haris are having a a spat over an Al Jazeera article that Glen tweeted about.  The article calls Sam out for being racist and Islamophobic.  Sam, of course, is aghast.  How can it possibly be "racist" to state the simple truth that Muslims engage in terrorism and other unsavory behaviors more than non-Muslims?

Here's how:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim...

How exactly do you propose we do that, Sam? What exactly does it mean to "look like" someone who "could conceivably be Muslim?" More to the point, what does it mean for someone to not look like they could "conceivably be Muslim"?  Isn't Islam a belief system?  Exactly what outwardly visible physical traits make it inconceivable that a person might harbor that belief system?

Every moment spent frisking the Mormon Tabernacle Choir subtracts from the scrutiny paid to more likely threats. Who could fail to understand this?

That is not at all the same thing.  Being a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and looking like you are a member are two completely different things.  If you judge someone to be a member of the Choir because they present you with, say, a document that shows they are a member, that is one thing.  But judging them to be a member of the choir because of how they look, (and let's not kid ourselves, because they are white), that is racist, even if being white actually does make a good predictor of Mormonism!  Who could fail to understand this?

The only thing that frustrates me more than conservative bigots is liberal bigots because they really ought to know better.  Alas, even liberals have blind spots.

Conservatives are wrong about everything

The dominoes continue to fall: a second Republican senator has come out in favor of gay marriage.

It occurred to me that conservatives have a virtually unblemished record going back hundreds of years of being wrong about social issues: slavery, segregation, reproductive rights, interracial marriage, the right to privacy, prohibition, pornography... the list goes on and on and on.  The liberal position on social issues has been vindicated again and again and again and again.  In fact, I can't think of a single social issue on which conservatives have been on the right side of history.  Can you?

You'd think that people would start to catch on after 300 years without a win.

(Conservatives are wrong about most economic issues too, but that's a harder case to make because there's not a consensus on the quality metric.  Conservatives think that oligopolies are fine and dandy, but dare I say that reasonable people might disagree.)

Enough with the "it's not natural" nonsense already

The more I think about this, the more it steams my clams.  Georgia GOP Chairwoman Sue Everhart was quoted by the Marietta Daily Journal giving voice to a common sentiment among opponents of same-sex marriage:

[I]t is not natural for two women or two men to be married,” Everhart said. “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship."

I have news for you, Ms. Everhart: gays can (and do) have sexual relationships.  (I always thought that was the problem people had with gays to begin with, that they had sex.  Meh, what do I know?)

But Ms. Everahart is right about one thing: it is in fact not natural for to women or two men to be married.  But it is also not natural for one man and one woman to be married.  The natural (and Biblical, by the way) state of affairs is polygamy.  This is because females maximize their reproductive fitness by mating with the highest status male, while males maximize their reproductive fitness by mating with as many females as possible.  Yes, beer googles can be explained in Darwinian terms.

So what exactly is it that makes being "unnatural" so bad?  Lots of things are unnatural.  Cities, for example.  Sanitation.  Cars.  Movies.  Laws.  Democracy.  Capitalism.  Scotch.  Cell phones.  The internet.  Deep-fried Twinkies.

Religion.  Churches.  Science.

Wearing clothes.

All of these things are unnatural.

Unnatural is a good thing, or at least it can be.  Unnatural is what sets humanity apart from the animals.  The ability to transcend and rise above nature is what makes it possible for us to be noble, artistic, technological, the masters of our fates.

Fair warning: the next person who says in my presence that gays should not be allowed to marry because it's unnatural will get dope-smacked.

You can't make this shit up

Well, at least I can't.  The Marietta Daily Journal writes the following, which I will simply reproduce here without comment because, well, it just leaves me at a loss for words.  (BTW, if you decide to follow the link to the original article, the Journal has a really annoying paywall, which you can circumvent by disabling Javascript in your browser.)

One woman who has not [decided to support same-sex marriage] is Georgia GOP Chairwoman Sue Everhart of east Cobb, although she’s aware of the movement. 

“Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this, but it is not natural for two women or two men to be married,” Everhart said. “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship.”

Everhart said while she respects all people, if same sex marriage is legalized across the country, there will be fraud.

“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” Everhart said. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

Everhart said if she had a young child, she wouldn’t want them to have gay parents who would influence that child’s sexual orientation.

“You’re creating with this child that it’s a lifestyle, don’t go out and marry someone else of a different sex because this is natural,” Everhart said. “But if I had a next door neighbor who was in a gay relationship, I could be just as friendly to them as I could be to you and your wife or anybody else. I’m not saying that we ostracize them or anything like that. I’m just saying I’m against marriage because once you get the gay marriage you get everything else.”

OK, I'm game

The Guardian reports that a creationist has put up $10,000 for anyone who can prove in a mock-trial that evolution is true.  OK, I can use an extra ten grand, so I went to see how I could sign up.  The Guardian didn't have a link, but through the comments on Reddit I found the guy's web site.  What I could not find were instructions on how to accept the $10,000 challenge.  I looked at all of the obvious places, including the FAQ, and I couldn't find anything.  Compare that to the very straightforward instructions on how to apply for the James Randi prize for demonstrating paranormal phenomena.

I did find Joseph Mastropaolo's email address.  Maybe I'll just drop him a line.

[UPDATE] What the heck, I had a little down time this morning, so I sent Joe this note:

Hello,

My name is Ron Garret.  I want to accept your $10,000 evolution mini-trial challenge: 

http://www.lifescienceprize.org/

But I can't find any indication of how one goes about doing it.  For example, the James Randi foundation has very straightforward instructions for anyone who wants to accept their challenge: 

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html 

but I can't find anything analogous on your site.  What am I missing? 

Thank you, 

Ron Garret, Ph.D.

Anyone want to lay odds on whether he responds?

[UPDATE2] Heh, that didn't take long. "Undeliverable mail -- invalid mailbox."

What a surprise.

OK, Joseph Mastropaolo, I'm calling you out: I want to accept your Life Science Prize min-trial challenge.  How do I do it?

Disgusting concessions from the proponents of gay marriage

I'm on the road so I don't have time to give this the thorough treatment it deserves, but I had a little down time that I used to read the transcript of today's oral arguments in Proposition 8 Supreme Court case.  I was completely disgusted by the arguments on both sides, but mostly by the concessions made by the proponents of gay marriage.

Justice Alito:  Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is 25 very new. I think it was first adopted in The Netherlands in 2000. So there isn't a lot of data about 2 its effect. And it may turn out to be a -- a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing,...But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet?

The proper response to this is: No, gay marriage cannot possibly turn out to be a bad thing even if we concede the erroneous assumption we have only thirteen years of actual data to go by.  How do we know this?  Well, first, because we have thirteen years of actual data to go by, and if there were even the slightest hint that gay marriage had deleterious effects the opponents would long ago have seized on those and trumpeted them as a prominent part of their case.  But they haven't, because there aren't any.  But more than that, opponents of gay marriage have not even been able to put forth any credible hypothetical scenario whereby gay marriage might have any harmful effects on society.  The only argument against gay marriage is tradition, and some possible harmful effects that no one has actually been able to imagine, let alone demonstrate.

That argument didn't get made.  Not only that, but one of the advocates for gay marriage actually conceded that states could legitimately ban gay marriage, but only if they had not already granted gays other rights like civil unions.  I won't even try to extract the twisted reasoning behind this.  Go read the transcript if you really want to know.

The case of Loving v. Virginia, the case the legalized interracial marriage, was brought up, but no one has drawn the correct analogy: it is actually possible to raise a much more legitimate argument against interracial marriage than against gay marriage.  That people of color are discriminated against in the United States is a demonstrable fact.  That marriages that involve people of color tend to produce children of color is also a demonstrable fact.  Therefore the state has a legitimate interest in preventing people of color from marrying white people in the interests of preventing the production of children who will be the subject of societal discrimination.

Are you disgusted by that argument?  You should be.  It is a disgusting argument.  No one but the most hardened racist bigot would raise that argument in today's world.  And yet, that is exactly the argument that is being danced around in the Supreme Court today.

Here's a question I wish one of the justices would pose to the opponents of gay marriage:  "Please rank the following parental situation in order of their desirability for the children:

1.  One father, one mother, married
2.  One father, one mother, unmarried, but in a committed relationship
3.  A single parent
4.  A gay couple, married
5.  A gay couple, unmarried but in a committed relationship
6.  Foster care by a straight couple

Can you seriously imagine anyone going on the record rating foster care or single parenthood over a gay couple in today's world?  Honestly, what else is there to say?

That Christian Nation Nonsense

Dr. Richard Carrier utterly destroys the notion that the United States is a Christian nation.  Not that this should have been news to anyone, but the thoroughness of his takedown is truly awesome.  Long, but well worth reading, even if you already believe the conclusion.

Join CRMTL to repeal the California MTA

Following up on my earlier call to action to repeal the California Money Transmission Act (MTA), I have helped form a group called the Coalition for the Reform of Money Transfer Law (CRMTL, pronounced Core-Metal).  We have written a letter that we are submitting as formal testimony for the hearings on March 11.  We would welcome additional signatories to this letter.  If you want to add your voice to ours please send an email to Mark Farouk: Mark.Farouk@asm.ca.gov.  Here is some suggested language:

Re: Assembly Bill 786 

To Whom It May Concern:

[Company/Individual Name] submits the following comments for consideration at the Committee's March 11, 2013 hearing regarding the the California Money Transmission Act of 2010.

We are aware that the Coalition for the Reform of Money Transmission Laws submitted comments supporting the Committee’s efforts to reconsider the Act.  [We/I] support the Coalition's comments and encourage the Assembly to strongly consider the Coalition’s suggested modifications to the law. Once these needed modifications have been made to the Committee's draft legislation, we urge the Assembly to act quickly to provide the relief that is necessary to ensuring that consumers derive the full benefits of a competitive payments marketplace.

[In addition, [ADD ANY ADDITIONAL COMMENTS THAT YOU WISH TO MAKE ON BEHALF OF YOUR COMPANY, IF DESIRED. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO MAKE ADDITIONAL COMMENTS, PLEASE DELETE THIS SECTION.]]

Thank you for the opportunity to provide these comments and we strongly encourage the Committee to proceed to adopt the Coalition's proposed alternatives as soon as possible. 

Respectfully submitted,

[Name, Title and Company Name]

Thank you for your support.  Please note that input for the hearings is due by COB tomorrow, March 6.  Sorry for the late notice, but we only today finalized the text of the letter.

A simple solution to credit card fraud, part 6: It's the protocol, stupid

This is part 6 of a long series.  This post is another technical post.  Some people have been (justifiably) pressing me for more details on the "simple solution" I've been promising in the title.  That's what this post is about.

Let us start by observing that credit cards don't actually require either credit or cards.  What matters is not the card, but the information on the card.  This is particularly evident in e-commerce transactions.  If you possess the right information, you can type that information in to a web browser and a few days later stuff will magically appear on your doorstep.  The fundamental problem is that the information you have to type in is not bound to a particular transaction.  It is reusable.  So you have to trust everyone you do business with.  Sooner or later that trust will fail.  Some random e-commerce web site that you place an order from will turn out to be a well crafted phishing site, or their database will get hacked, or a waiter in a restaurant or cashier at the shop will skim your card or just write down the number on a Post-It note.  Something.  If you use credit cards, it is a question of when, not if, you will get hacked.

Despite consumer protections, getting a card hacked can be a major hassle, especially if, like me, you have a lot of your regular bills set up to auto-pay.  I get hacked every few years, and as you might imagine I am extremely careful.  The last time it happened I was just on my way out of the country for six weeks, so they couldn't even send me a replacement card.  I didn't lose any money, but it was a colossal pain in the ass.

Debit cards, of course, have all the same problems as credit cards, except that they lack a layer of protection.  When you authorize a transaction with a debit card, you authorize the merchant to reach directly into your checking or savings account and extract money.  There are two reasons you don't hear as much about debit card fraud as credit card fraud.  First, people use credit cards a lot more than they use debit cards.  And second, debit cards typically have an extra layer of protection: the PIN.  Consumers have been effectively trained to guard their PINs closely, but the fact that a compromised debit card gives the fraudster direct access to cash makes debit card fraud lucrative enough that fraudsters go to considerable effort and expense to steal them.

Regular paper checks, by the way, are even worse.  Unlike debit cards, they actually expose your account number, and they don't have a PIN.  Anyone to whom you have ever given a check could, if they chose to, take all the money from your account.  Electronic checks, of course, are the worst of all.  They are completely insecure.  An electronic check has no security at all.  Writing an electronic check is effectively the same as opening up your bank account and saying, "Here, help yourself to whatever you like any time you like."  This is the reason you don't see electronic checks as a payment option very often.  They are so insecure that you have to be carefully vetted before you can gain official access to the electronic check system.

All of these problems could be solved at a stroke using secure digital signatures.  Instead of making a payment by handing over your account details, you would instead write and sign a digital check (not to be confused with an electronic check).  A digital check would be just some text in some standard format, e.g.:

Transaction ID: 1234

Pay to the order of: Joe Merchant

Account ID: 4321

Amount: $123.45

Expires: 4 March 2013

The digital check itself could be generated either by you or the merchant.  To authorize the transaction you would simply generate a digital signature for that text and give that to the merchant.  The merchant would then "cash" the check by presenting the check and your digital signature to the bank.

That's it.  That's the simple solution to not only credit card fraud but check fraud and debit card fraud and just about any other kind of financial fraud that involves stealing credentials.  It works because digital signatures are unforgeable and non-reusable.  The merchant can't change any of the information on the check because that would make the signature invalid.  The merchant can't cash the check twice because it contains a transaction identifier.

Now, there are some real-world complications.  The most serious is that users have to be trained to manage their secret keys.  Keeping a secret key secret is not a trivial matter, but at least it is possible.  Keeping your credit card number secret is not possible because the protocol requires you to disclose it for every transaction.

So what would the user experience be like?  (Are you paying attention, pbreit?)  There are myriad possibilities.  The most straightforward is what is already out there.  Chip-and-pin systems in use in Asia and Europe already implement a similar protocol.  But it doesn't have to be a chip-and-pin card.  It can be a dongle, or a smartphone app, or a browser plug-in.

To give you some concrete examples, here is an actual digital signature for the digital check shown above:

---MSGID---
149302O5AAVHKAEC7N5IPIGDPJAC8MBOJ2T0E6M8LQ3M40BABREI
---PUBLIC KEY---
1RBNESSNAFFOD4G05MJPTK9TLGS95QHOEBK3CD6O1KIOV5GHKAQT
---SIGNATURE---
1EQEB9T51UDVGHFVGMTANQS3JQVLV17H5HAOECHSRDJ67H4MNT1M
29SDNR6V8VCH1C3TICVDDDIA67GTG0V46H4ST2Q7IP4LF8GM548

For you hard-core geeks, this signature was generated using the Ed25519 elliptic curve digital signature algorithm.  The message ID is the SHA512 hash of the ascii text of the check, truncated to 256 bits.  All values are rendered as base 32 big-endian numbers.  You can verify that this signature is valid here.  And you can generate your own Ed25519 signatures here.  As a proof-of-concept for a standalone security dongle, I have implemented Ed25519 on a Teensy3, which costs $19 in single quantities.  So no, pbreit, distributing new hardware is not hard, and it is not expensive.  Not any more.

The physical manifestations of this protocol are endless.  Here, for example, is the above signature rendered as a QR code:

You can scan this image with any QR code reader to verify that the signature is valid.  Or, if you don't trust my verification web site, you can use a standalone verification app written by someone else.  There is nothing at all proprietary about this protocol.  It is entirely open.  The only secret is your secret key.

Again I have to stress that what matters here is the protocol, not any of the implementation details.  I happen to like Ed25519 because it generates highly secure signatures that are short enough to render as reasonable-looking QR codes, but that is a detail.  The point is that by changing the protocol you can solve the fraud problem.

And you can solve lots of other problems too.  More on that in a future post.