The post-election future

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Nice post by Paul Mason:

The polls have not moved, so we’re about to get the second hung parliament in succession, in a system that never used to produce them. Only this time we don’t just get a coalition government. We get an existential crisis of the constitution, and of the UK as a political entity, that no political party is currently geared up to deal with.

To understand why, you have to recognise the demographic tribalism that an economic system in crisis has produced. I’ve written about this before: the division of England into an asset-rich south, a post-industrial north and the emergence of a positive national consciousness in Scotland linked to the rejection of neo-liberal economics.

Worth reading in full.

Magical thinking in surveillance circles

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This morning’s Observer column:

The power of magical thinking – the notion that you can make something happen merely by thinking about it – has been much in evidence in the current election campaign. And that’s not entirely surprising, because as politicians get desperate, rationality goes out of the window. What is surprising, however, is when high government officials – for example, heads of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies – begin to show clear signs of the syndrome.

Exhibit A in this respect is James Comey, the current director of the FBI. Mr Comey has become so exercised by the decisions of Apple and Google to implement strong encryption in their devices and services that he appears to have lost his marbles. “I am a huge believer in the rule of law,” he told reporters last September, “but I am also a believer that no one in this country is above the law. What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.”

It’s good to know that the FBI director believes that nobody should be above the law. Except, of course, for his colleague, the former NSA director, James Clapper, who lied under oath to the US Congress about the existence of bulk data collection programs and yet remains at large. But we will let that pass: after all, as Oscar Wilde observed, consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, and Mr Comey is nothing if not imaginative….

Read on

The apple tree at night

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Apple_tree_at_night

Every year our crab-apple tree surprises us by exploding into blossom. It’s vivid in the morning. But until this evening I hadn’t noticed that it’s striking even at night.

Photographed with an iPhone 6.

Summing up

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martin_wolf

Martin Wolf is one of my favourite columnists. This is his verdict on the two contenders for power in the forthcoming election.

So is the US really going to rein in the spooks?

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Hmmm… Only in so far as they surveill Americans at home. Today’s New York Times reports that

On Thursday, a bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the so-called metadata surveillance exposed by Edward J. Snowden was overwhelmingly passed by the House Judiciary Committee and was heading to almost certain passage in that chamber this month.

An identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader.

Under the bills, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection, and sweeps that had operated under the guise of so-called National Security Letters issued by the F.B.I. would end. The data would instead be stored by the phone companies themselves, and could be accessed by intelligence agencies only after approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

The legislation would also create a panel of experts to advise the FISA court on privacy, civil liberties, and technology matters, while requiring the declassification of all significant FISA court opinions.

Neither bill will, however, do anything to end the unrestricted surveillance of non-Americans, i.e the rest of the world, whose privacy, and therefore their civil liberties, will continue to be infringed by the US, without let or hindrance.

Networked echo chambers

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Lots of people, including Cass Sunstein, have written about the gap between the Internet’s potential to become the greatest marketplace of ideas the world has ever seen, and the actuality, which is that most of us seem to prefer to operate inside digital echo chambers.

Nick Corasaniti thinks that use of the ‘Unfollow’ button on social media may be the way in which people now construct their own echo chambers.

With the presidential race heating up, a torrent of politically charged commentary has flooded Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, with some users deploying their “unfollow” buttons like a television remote to silence distasteful political views. Coupled with the algorithm now powering Facebook’s news feed, the unfollowing is creating a more homogenized political experience of like-minded users, resulting in the kind of polarization more often associated with MSNBC or Fox News. And it may ultimately deflate a central promise of the Internet: Instead of offering people a diverse marketplace of challenging ideas, the web is becoming just another self-perpetuating echo chamber.

The sociology of online cruelty

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Interesting NYT piece by Nick Bilton, which starts by outlining the way in which the Net has become a machine for amplifying cruelty but finishes on a more nuanced note, suggesting that maybe we should be researching the social dynamics of this kind of mob behaviour.

In the early days of Twitter, I jumped into the fray a few times myself. But since then, having been on the receiving end of several Internet mobs, I think twice before piling on.

Some people I know who were once attacked by a mob now reach out to whomever is the Internet’s piñata of the week, telling them to hang tough, to look the other way and that this, too, shall pass.

And I’ve come to the realization that most people do not join these online mobs with the intention of being mean.

Whether it’s an online army of one or millions, people often believe they are doing the right thing by joining the mob.

“You show your proof of membership in a community by criticizing the most erratically,” said Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogger who has been on the receiving end of racially charged Twitter mobs. “There’s a social dynamic that says ‘Let me show that I belong.’ And there is a reward structure for being even more inflammatory.”

Mr. Dash noted that online mobs can sometimes serve a public good, as in cases when the powerless are given a voice to hold the ruling class accountable.

But the next time we want to provide justice from behind a keyboard, we should remember that there is a nuanced human being on the other side of that screen.

And while we’re not intending to be mean online, there’s a chance that in our quest for justice, we are performing an even worse injustice.

He ends by quoting Nietzsche: “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.”

Sheer genius

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Find_X

This is lovely. From a compendium of ingenious answers to exam questions. Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story about Michael Frayn when he was a philosophy student at Cambridge. The story goes that one of the questions in a Part II paper read “Q2. Is this a question. Discuss.” To which he supposedly answered: “If it is, then this is an answer.”

The clueless in pursuit of the impossible

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Oscar Wilde famously defined fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the unbeatable”. Something like that always comes to mind at the moment when US and other law-enforcement bosses attack tech companies like Apple and Google for building serious encryption into their mobile products. As The Register puts it‘ “WHY can’t Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption? cry US politicians”.

Where do you begin when faced with such cluelessness? The Reg asked a few cryptographic experts:

There’s just one problem with the government’s idea as it stands: it’s impossible from a technology, business, and international standpoint. Not a single one of the cryptography and security experts El Reg spoke to at the show could see any way such a system would work.

“It’s impossible,” Bruce Schneier – the man who literally wrote the book(s) on modern encryption techniques – told The Reg. “I can’t create mathematics that works differently in the presence of a particular legal piece of paper. Math just doesn’t work that way.” As Schneier has explained many times, strong crypto requires a sound encryption algorithm, correct digital signature handling, a random number generator that can’t be fooled, and a working methodology to house all of these and that doesn’t allow mistakes. Get one thing wrong and the whole system breaks down.

Quite. What was it TH Huxley said about “the slaughter of a beautiful idea by an ugly fact”?