Hope begins to return

A few quotes, one I read and one I heard today, have softened my anger about the passing of proposition 8. The first is one I read on John Scalzi's blog today, speaking of a long and difficult struggle:

"Re: Proposition 8 and the other anti-same-sex marriages initiatives on the ballots, which passed in their respective states: I am disappointed, of course. I had hoped voters, particularly in California, would have had better moral sense. But as I mentioned to someone else earlier today, the struggle against bigotry is long and difficult, and the fact of the matter is we’re in the middle of this particular struggle, and it will take years to see it through, as has every struggle against bigotry here in the US. I’m willing to invest the time."

This will indeed be a long struggle. It will take time, and judging from the demonstrations and actions I have read about and seen today that large groups of Californians are taking part in to protest proposition 8's passage, I have no doubt we as citizens will endure the struggle and eventually prevail.

The second is a quote I heard on tonight's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, said by an individual who was interviewed on the street about what the election of Barack Obama means to him. The imagery just struck me:

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run."

Hope.

I don't know if we can

I am sad and dismayed this morning to see that the majority of voters in California appear to have chosen to incorporate discrimination and bigotry into the state's constitution with the passage of proposition 8 (Wikipedia entry). At this moment the results are not official, but with 95% of precincts reporting, proposition 8 is passing with 52% approval.

If it ultimately passes, proposition 8 will cast a dark, ugly shadow across the positive change embodied in Barack Obama. How is it that a state which voted for such fundamental change with Barack Obama can also embrace fear and ignorance to regress to the days of 19th century anti-miscegenation laws?

Those who think they are "protecting marriage" by supporting proposition 8 have done quite the opposite. Discrimination and bigotry against a minority group in our society undermines that society and its institutions, of which marriage is one. If passed, proposition 8 will turn the institution of marriage into a tool of "straight supremacy," something proposition 8 supporters can point to and say "marriage is ours" and that gays and lesbians are not equal under the law.

This is a terrible message to send to children and young people.

The contradiction inherent in electing a black president while simultaneously choosing to enact law to discriminate against a minority group is mind-blowing.

Polling place update

I arrived at my polling place about ten minutes before seven, and waited in line behind maybe seven or eight people. Once the polling place opened I was able to finish voting by about 7:15.

By the time I finished the line was out the door and on the sidewalk, maybe 40 people. It's going to be a busy day, people, but get out there and vote!

Please vote

Please, everyone, remember to vote tomorrow.

Get up early, take time off of work, come home late, but whatever you do, please vote.

Gamers can be engaged politically

Last month, Microsoft announced a partnership with Rock the Vote, a group which works to engage young people with the political process. This partnership enables Xbox Live subscribers to have voter registration materials sent to them by making a request right from the Dashboard, and provides content from both political parties to allow gamers to become more informed about a candidate or issue. I watched Barack Obama's acceptance speech from the Democratic National Convention and have downloaded John McCain's acceptance speech from the Republican National Convention.

I spotted a story on Edge Online announcing that 100,000 Xbox Live users had participated in an unofficial presidential poll on Xbox Live where users could express their preference for a candidate by downloading the candidate's corresponding gamer picture.

From the above story:

"According to Microsoft, the sample of 100,000 voters was larger than the combined samples from individual Gallup, NBC and CNN polls."

and

"The company said that more than 55,000 voter registration forms were downloaded through Xbox Live and Xbox.com during the first two weeks of the program, and that videos from the recent Democratic and Republican conventions were downloaded nearly 25,000 times."

Those are impressive numbers.

Admittedly, not all Xbox Live subscribers are of legal age to vote, and not all who participated in this poll will go out and actually vote, but the majority of gamers are over 18 and if nothing else, this partnership will raise gamers' awareness and hopefully their level of knowledge about the political process.

If candidates and others want young people to vote and be interested in the process, becoming informed needs to be easy and can't be blocked by barriers to entry like poring through lengthy newspaper diatribes or suffering through the "talking heads" on every news network.

This is politics on demand, and gamers don't even have to let go of their controllers.

Snuggly, the Security Bear

Following up to my post on Barack's disappointing support of retroactive telecom immunity, I found these terrific animated pieces via the EFF web site. They are done by Mark Fiore, cartoonist for SF Gate, a daily paper in San Francisco. The two cartoons nail the issues with illegal wiretapping and constitutional compromise. Your narrator and tour guide for these issues is Snuggly, the Security Bear.

Don't you feel better now?

Obama disappoints with vote for retroactive immunity for telcos

It was more than disappointing to hear on the news today that Barack Obama had voted to support the Senate's passage of HR 6304, the bill that amends the Foreign Intelligence Sureveillance Act of 1978. The provision of the bill that held up the vote until after the July 4 weekend involved the granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies who complied with requests from the current administration to allow eavesdropping on domestic American citizens without a warrant.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation put it best by saying that the Senate Join[ed] the House in Caving to White House Immunity Demands. There were some senators who had the backbone to stand up to the White House, and no doubt lobbyists from telecommunications companies, and oppose this bill, most visibly Sendator Biden of Delaware (D), Senator Boxer of California (D), Senator Reid of Nevada (D), Senator Clinton of New York (D) and Senator Feingold of Wisconsin (D). I'm not sure what my other California Senator, Feinstein (no mention of this on her web site today, hmmm...), was thinking by voting "Yea." Senator McCain of Arizona (R) was not much better, as he was "Not Voting."

Granting retroactive immunity in this situation will only encourage future similar abuses by the executive branch, and the continued complicity of telecommunications and other companies in activity that has plainly violated the rights of United States citizens to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as granted under the fourth amendment.

Only one major telecommunications company, Qwest Communications, had the guts to stand up to the National Security Agency when it was approached with a request for access to its customers' private phone records. A statement put out by Herbert Stern, attorney to Quest CEO (in 2001) Joseph Nacchio puts it quite clearly:

Nacchio declined the NSA’s request because the agency did not have a warrant and that the authorities showed “a disinclination to use any legal process, including the special court which had been established to handle such matters."

What does it say about the other telecoms who agreed to comply with what was undoubtedly a similar request? Is the NSA, acting at the direction of the Bush White House such an intimidating force that companies and people are afraid to disagree? Or do those same companies and people simply not question such requests? Either way is unacceptable.

More information on the NSA's unlawful spying program is here at the EFF. Stay informed, people, and let your senators and representatives know how you feel.

Voting Accomplished

Remember to vote today, if you haven't already. Polls are open until 8p.

For those who want a quick reference for the Sacramento area:

Sacramento News & Review's recommendations; and

Sacramento Bee's endorsements.

When executive war power attacks

Bruce Schneier, a security expert mainly known for his expertise with encryption and computer security, has an eye-opening article on the implications of the Bush Administration's authorization in 2001 of the expansion of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping powers inward to include citizens of the United States.

Awareness of this authorization implicates many issues including the compromise of the 4th Amendment Constitutional principle of the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the separation of powers among the three branches of government, the limit of Presidential power during times of war, and even what "war" means. All of these things are being discussed, and Schneier's article has many links for further reading.

One issue I was not aware of is related to the resignation of federal District Court judge James Robertson who is also a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The FISC was created in 1978 when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was made law, in order to review warrant requests for wiretaps and other electronic surveillance made by U.S. intelligence and / or law enforcement agencies in connection with suspected spy and terrorist activity.

Schneier pulls the relevant passages out of a Washington Post article (finish reading the first page before going to the second or you'll have to register to go back) reporting the resignation:

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.

....Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.

"They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants -- to kind of cleanse the information," said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants. "What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court."

If any of you are like me you'd like to know what a Potemkin court is. It's not directly defined in Wikipedia (amazing!) but is referred to under Potemkin village as a change to the use of the name "Potemkin" to an adjective. According to Wikipedia, when the term modifies "court" the resulting phrase indicates that "the court's reason to exist is being called into question, not its standard of justice."

So not only has the current legal procedure for obtaining warrants to surveil United States citizens been bypassed, the court that was established specifically to review such warrant requests has potentially been compromised because it is unknown whether unwarranted NSA surveillance was used as the basis of apparently legal FISA warrants issued since 2001.

I'm not sure I can make a final conclusion with this one. I understand there can be an urgent need when national security is at stake, but how far do we want the government to go? It is very likely that as time progresses from the horror of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the power of the executive branch will recede and self-correct as Congress asserts itself again. The problem is, now that the U.S. has characterized our struggle as a "war on terror," when does the "war" end?

Obviously there will be hearings, and the FISA law may ultimately need to be amended or rewritten to take modern realities into consideration. It's times like these that the importance of the First Amendment protection of a free press is paramount to the existence of a representative democracy.

Rumsfeld recalls ghost of McNamara's lessons of Vietnam

I've had this post idea since I saw Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld interviewed on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on December 8. It's been stewing awhile, and I rented Fog of War so I could recall an exact quote.

A disturbing parallel occurred to me after seeing Rumsfeld's NewsHour interview. Tell me if you don't see the lesson we haven't seemed to have learned from Vietnam.

Robert S. McNamara

Mr. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, first under Kennedy and then under Johnson after Kennedy's assassination. By most counts, the war in Vietnam was a failure for the United States as 3.5 million Vietnamese were killed, over 58,000 U.S. soldiers were killed, and South Vietnam still fell to North Vietnam. At the time the U.S. administration subscribed to the "domino theory" that South Vietnam had to be propped up against the North lest the South's fall lead to the fall of a series of countries throughout Asia, spreading communism to Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

McNamara has written a number of books about his time as Secretary and what he, in retrospect, has learned about the decisions made about the U.S. engagement in Vietnam. One of the major causes of the U.S.'s disastrous experience in Vietnam, according to McNamara in his book, In Retrospect, is that we [the U.S. Government] misjudged the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions. In its most basic form, we did not know our enemy. According to McNamara in Fog of War, we viewed Vietnam as an element of the Cold War and not what they saw it as, a civil war.

A quote from McNamara in an interview at Berkeley in 1996:

Now to illustrate the degree to which we didn't understand the situation in Vietnam at the time, today I believe that Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist, more of a Tito, than a servant or a follower of Khruschev. But at that time, we looked upon him as a vassal of the Soviets.

The beginning of the Berkeley interview is here.

[UPDATE, 2/16/2007] -- Upon revisiting this post, the quote below about history wouldn't have made sense coming from Tran Van Lam as he was Minister of Foreign Affairs for The Republic of Vietnam, which the U.S. supported during The Vietnam War. Even though I can't confirm the author of that quote definitively, it most likely was Vo Nguyen Giap, who according to his Wikipedia entry was, in addition to a General in the Vietnam People's Army, the Minister of National Defense of what we in the U.S. called North Vietnam. During discussion of the history quote, Fog of War shows a terrific photo of these two in the heat of discussion, presumably during the below-mentioned 1995 visit, that I have been unable to locate online. [/UPDATE]

The striking quote from Fog of War that I wrote down comes from McNamara's 1995 visit to Vietnam and his meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart during the war, former foreign minister (as he referred to him) of Vietnam Tran Van Lam. I have been unable to confirm this man's name as it was unclear in the film's audio and I believe McNamara's wikipedia entry identifies the wrong person, a former Vietnamese general named Vo Nguyen Giap. McNamara clearly says in Fog of War that it was the former foreign minister who told him the following after McNamara asserted that he thought we could have avoided U.S. escalation while also preventing the spread of communism:

You are totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us ... Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. Mr. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years? We were fighting for our independence and we would fight to the last man and we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.

Donald Rumsfeld

When I heard the following quote from Secretary Rumsfeld I had to wonder whether the U.S. is willing to face what it learned at so great a cost during the Vietnam War:

... you think about what they are losing. The terrorists, the opponents, this is an enormous thing for them. If they fail to stop a democratic government, Iraqis with their own constitution, their own election, their own officials, a sovereign nation, if they don't stop that, they've lost something enormous ... they have a lot at stake. And I expect them to be putting a lot of cards on the table.

Now admittedly, the insurgents, terrorists and other opposition forces in Iraq are not nearly as organized as the North Vietnamese were, but what strikes me is the similar "all or nothing" incentive those groups have to what the North Vietnamese had. If those forces are going to lose "something enormous," shouldn't we approach the situation differently? Shouldn't we not underestimate the level of resistance to the U.S. face of democracy in Iraq? What else do we know or not know about the motivations of the opposition forces there and in surrounding countries? What is amazing is that Rumsfeld recognizes the potential loss the opposition forces face and he doesn't seem overly concerned. We're just going to continue on with our plans no matter what.

That's quite a lot I've poured out of my brain, so if you've stuck with me I applaud you. If you're so inclined please leave me a comment and let me know if I'm out of my mind or if I've put together a coherent statement and observation.

Further reading:
McNamara's June 1996 interview with CNN.
Wikipedia's list of people related to the Vietnam War.

Star wars and politics collide: still funny

I found this site while looking for Emperor Palpatine's quote about a fully operational battle station to modify for my own use as comment moderator. More funny than the actual quotes is the fact that someone thought to compare Palpatine and Bush and make a web page about it. I laughed out loud when I saw the summary in google's results.

Federal disaster response readiness?

The fallout from hurricane Katrina has made me wonder whether federal agencies of the United States have focused too tightly on a military response to a terrorist attack at the expense of preparedness for more immediate and predictable concerns like natural disasters.

It appears clear to me that "Brownie," the former head of FEMA, coordinated that agency's response to Katrina poorly, to put it mildly, but beyond that there has to be more than one man to blame for the lack of a coordinated response to that tragedy.

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina quite a bit of discussion went around about the Posse Comitatus Act which, briefly, is a federal law that prohibits the US military from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States "except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress..." However, there are exceptions to this law that allow military participation in certain circumstances. According to an article written by William Banks, Director of the Institute for National Security and Counter Terrorism:

The law itself simply states a presumption against military involvement in law enforcement, not a rule. The actual rules provide sufficient authority for any catastrophic contingency, from hurricanes to terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction. That is not to say that the availability of troops will abate such a crisis. Moreover, the PCA [Posse Comitatus Act] presumption applies to enforcing the laws, not to providing relief personnel and supplies, equipment, or even medical triage.

So what was the problem? Why wasn't the authority to use military troops for just this type of situation exercised? A lot had to do with a lack of foresight and poor communication between local government and federal government, but bringing FEMA under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the resulting confusion also played a large role.

After September 11, 2001 we became so focused on being able to handle a terrorist attack that almost everything else was put on the back burner. The DHS was created to presumably help relieve the failure of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to communicate and share information with each other regarding potential terrorist activity.

A clearer case of irony couldn't flow from the pen of Shakespeare himself.

I don't think communication and sharing, at least in a useful sense, are a result of layering bureaucracies on top of one another. The resulting red tape between FEMA and DHS must be mind-boggling.

I wonder if confusion related to military assistance was exacerbated by the Posse Comitatus Act and the fact that a civilian disaster response agency was under the control of DHS, which seemed primarily concerned with terrorist activity.

Lack of funding was a problem. With FEMA under the DHS and all focus on preventing the next terrorist attack, funding for FEMA was cut to provide more money for "homeland security," which apparently came to be defined solely as an overt attack by foreign aggressors. Not to mention funding cuts for the Army Corps of Engineers, which has a division that, along with five other districts, is responsible for water management in and around New Orleans.

A summary of these funding blunders is here.

FEMA needs more autonomy and cannot depend on funding leftovers from DHS. Lines of communication must be clearly defined so a federal response can be timely. And those with the power to make these decisions must be aware of the extent of their powers and the competency to know how to exercise them.

Observations related to Katrina

I ran across this blog entry and found it piercingly insightful. It deals with the idea reported by some in the media that those who were trapped, injured or killed as a result of hurricane Katrina have no one but themselves to blame. The author highlights an interesting focal point for much of mainstream society when it thinks about the poor: children and the elderly. He suggests it's easy to focus on these age groups because it's easy to feel compassion for them. For those poor who happen to be 18 and older and are "able-bodied," however, being poor is obviously your fault and if you'd just work harder...

A quote from the post that sums up these ideas for me is:

For poor children, we have bleeding hearts; for poor adults, we have three-strikes legislation and prim, pursed lips.

The author includes a link to John Scalzi's post "Being Poor," which is superb, and provided the germ for the author's post.

Hurricane Katrina info

Wikipedia has a fascinating and detailed account of this hurricane.