Security is a good thing

Sony have done much to attract the ire of their customers over the years, myself among them. It brings a smile to my face to see a company that tried to install a root kit on my PC getting hacked. But I have still been avoiding the stories that result, as much as I can, because even corporations deserve their privacy.
I would make an exception for stories that reveal corporate malfeasance of one kind or another, but revelations about which executive doesn't like which famous actor are purely invasive.

But the lesson I hope the corporate world takes away from this incident is that you can't afford weak security. The NSA and various government officials have been loudly saying that it is terrible that iPhone encryption isn't even breakable by them; what the Sony hack shows is that this what you want.
If there's a back door in your security, for no matter what good purpose, it will be found and abused by hackers. And those hackers can be anywhere in the world - Russia, North Korea, some random US town. The NSA and the FBI can't keep hackers out of the internet the way the US military can keep attackers out of the country, and it isn't even trying (nor should it).

The NSA used to have a reputation for being several steps ahead of the public when it came to security, and for guiding everyone else away from mistakes. It's thoroughly trashed that reputation, but it's where they need to get back to. It can ensure that US businesses and people have security that's at least as good as anyone else's - this will have commercial and social benefits.

As for the "can't catch criminals" argument - criminals are hugely outnumbered by ordinary people, and every tool that we have helps ordinary people far more than criminals. The only societies that won't find this to be true are the broken ones - repressive dictatorships, kleptocracies and the like. And why would we not want to make life hard for them? In making privacy a universal right, we are exporting democracy.

Land of the free and the home of the brave. Let's act like it.

Torture Still Bad.

Thanks to the report on torture, we now officially know that the CIA:

• Tortured people, by any definition of torture
• Tortured innocent people
• Tortured people to death
• Kept on torturing people even after the interrogators reported that they had no more information to provide
• Didn't get any important information that had not already been obtained elsewhere
• Didn't get more reliable information; rather, less.

So much for the "ticking time bomb" theory of torture.

Because the US is a signatory to the UN convention on torture (signed by St Ronald of Reagan, no less), we are now legally obliged to prosecute the torturers. And if we do not, how are we to prosecute torturers from other nations? After WWII we prosecuted torturers as war criminals - and rightly so. What will we do next time? How will we respond when our enemies capture our soldiers (or our civilians for that matter) and torture them?

Sadly this has now become a partisan thing. Especially (no) thanks to Dick Cheney, the Republicans will try to block any such prosecution. And so America's reputation is further trashed.

For those who say the report should not have been released - do not imagine that other people didn't already know about this. Foreign intelligence services will have already known. Al Qaeda will have already known. The whole planet already knew. What this report does is tell the American people, officially. And now the American people have a choice, officially: to prosecute or not to prosecute. We can't say we didn't know, we were not told; we have to make a decision and stick with it. Do we want a world where torture is used by governments and justified by our own actions? Or do we want a world of UN Convention on Torture, where prosecutions await such actions in every civilised country?

I want a world that stamps out barbarism. I am disgusted by all those in the Bush administration who instigated and defended the practice; and I am deeply disappointed by those since who were in a position to pursue them and not.

And incidentally, anyone who complains that "Muslim leaders don't condemn terrorism", and who does not themselves publicly condemn torture, has no credibility.

Investigate. Uncover. Prosecute. Never repeat.

Politics as a scientific endeavour

Go read this piece on shrimp treadmills, but you have my encouragement not to read any of the comments.

I would like to think that this kind of thing is all the fault of anti-science Republicans, but the truth is that accuracy in argument is a rare and precious gem all across the political spectrum.

One of my real yell-at-the-TV triggers is seeing a politician citing something in support of his or her arguments that I already know is rubbish because they said they same thing yesterday and I looked it up. This kind of thing will cost you dearly in scientific circles; in politics, it's par for the course. Fact checking setups have been proliferating in recent years, and they are great; but they are also (empirically speaking) easy for politicians to dismiss as biased in favor of "them", or to simply ignore and bull on through. The audience in political arguments is not nearly as inclined to check things as a scientific audience. And criticism from the other side is even easier to ignore than a fact checker.

What we need is more science in politics. By that I mean a commitment to being right instead of looking right, even at the cost of changing your mind. The sort of person who really needs to hear that is a politician, who will already be chuckling good naturedly and starting in on an explanation of why the World Just Doesn't Work Like That. We need to make the world Work Like That; politicians respond to votes.

So I issue a call. The other side won't listen to you, no matter how cogent and well researched your arguments. But your side will. I've previously said that everyone who cares about getting politics right should look for things that the other side is correct about. We must also do the reverse; look for things our side is wrong about and make them right. If that knocks a hole in our position, so much the worse for our position. Identify people on your side who make bogus arguments, and call them out; do it before the other side does. Join a political party and help get rid of bad candidates. Vote for people who are trying to get it right and are prepared to concede good arguments.

Politics won't treat science well of its own accord; science has to muscle in and force it. That doesn't mean forcing politicians to defer to scientists; it means forcing them to be more scientific themselves.