The EPA makes everything worse, vol CXVI

In this case, marine diesel engines which used to be famously long lived.  The Detroit Diesel engines of old were famous for running 20,000 or 30,000 hours before a four day rebuild at the dock set them up for another 20,000 or 30,000 hours.  You couldn't kill these engines.  Rather, you would leave them to your kids in your will.

That's over now, and it's because of the EPA.  Over a span of 15 or 20 years, they ratcheted up the emission requirements for these engines to the point that Detroit Diesel would be fined millions and millions of dollars for selling their old (famously reliable) design.

And so now you have to rebuild after 10,000 hours, and you have to replace three times as many parts.  Plan on a month, rather than four days.

This is a very interesting video on the subject.  While I'm not an expert on diesel engines, it certainly seems solid from an engineering perspective. 

Here are the main points.

1. Pressures have gone from 10,000 psi to 30,000 PSI for a bunch of EPA-imposed constraints.  This shortens the lifespan of parts used in the engines.

2. The higher pressure means that engines are much more vulnerable to bad diesel fuel: water particles or tiny flakes of rust now essentially sandblast the pistons, valves, and cylinders.  This didn't used to take place at the old lower pressure.  This sandblasting effect shortens part life even more, which makes engine rebuild and cost even higher.

3. Because parts will fail much more often now, manufacturers put all sorts of sensors in place.  The sensors themselves can fail - the high seas is a notoriously unforgiving environment and salt water will get into the engine room.  This causes corrosion, which triggers sensor faults.  The engine's computer (itself a new thing, with software of questionable quality) will detect the fault and sometimes put the engine into "Limp Home Mode" - not allowing it to go above, say, 1000 RPM.  A ship in a storm may find its engine dangerously under powered, putting at risk the lives on board and the safety of the ship itself.  If a ship sinks in a storm under these circumstances, the fuel oil in the tanks will pollute the environment.

4. Not pointed out in the video, ocean-going vessels do not have to worry about emissions.  From a pure regulatory perspective, that is.  However, finding a new engine with all the design "upgrades" discussed here is the challenge.  I don't know what EU regulations are, so maybe a MAN engine doesn't have to deal with this.  But I'm nasty and suspicious and think that EU regulations could be even worse than EPA's.

Thanks a whole lot of nothing, EPA.  You're supposed to protect the environment. Oh, and not get Americans killed.

The only thing I think is unfair about the video is the title.  Engine manufactures design their engines to fail after 10 years because the EPA forces them to. 

You could roll back all the environmental regulations since 1990 and shutter the EPA and this Republic would be a whole lot better off. 

Things I don't understand, vol. MCCXVI

So an Irish chap (Graham Lineham) who is a resident of Arizona posted some stuff to Twitter.  And so the British authorities arrested him at Heathrow airport essentially for exercising his First Amendment rights in America.

So how is it possible that the Administration has not summoned His Magesty's Ambassador and given them 24 hours to free him and drop all charges?  Or. Else.

I really don't understand the political optics here.  Sure, sure - "all politics is local" and all that.  I understand why His Magesty's Government would be happy to stick a thumb in Trump's eye, but what's up with Trump?

I mean there's no domestic downside to bringing the hammer down - nobody here cares about Europe, everyone here loves free speech, everyone here hates the woke censors, and Trump has been going after the DEI (woke censor) brigade here on these shores.

How on earth is it possible that they are letting this golden opportunity slide?  I mean, it's not like the UK has made themselves our greatest ally over the last decade.  And it's not like Kier Starmer wouldn't fold like a house of cards over this. 

UK.GOV to US Tech Companies: Put an encryption backdoor in your stuff

US.GOV to UK.GOV: Get lost, punk:

The Home Office's war on encryption – its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet – is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes.

First tabled by former prime minister David Cameron in 2015 following a terrorist shooting at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, vague wording alluded to a potential ban in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.

...

However, it seems Home Office staff are now coming to terms with the fact that the Trump administration will block any attempt to further strongarm Amercia's tech companies.


Insiders told the Financial Times, speaking on condition of anonymity, that the Trump administration's disapproval of the UK's plans, which the president has previously likened to Chinese-style policymaking, is the main obstacle in achieving its encryption-busting ambitions.

Being compared to Red China* has got to hurt.  But you know how not to get compared to Red China?  Don't act like Red China. 

Remember, Government mandated encryption backdoors are a bad idea.   Really.

* I only use the term to bother the Right Sort of people.

This. 1000x this.

When did the EU.gov get so, well, stupid?

The EU has issued its plans to keep the continent's denizens secure and among the pages of bureaucratese are a few worrying sections that indicate the political union wants to backdoor encryption by 2026, or even sooner.

While the superstate has made noises about backdooring encryption before the ProtectEU plan [PDF], launched on Monday at the European Parliament, says the European Commission wants to develop a roadmap to allow "lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement in 2025" and a technology roadmap to do so by the following year.

...

According to the document, the EC will set up a Security Research & Innovation Campus at its Joint Research Centre in 2026 to work out the technical details. Since it's impossible to backdoor encryption in a way that can't be exploited by others, it seems a very odd move to make if security's your goal.

China, Russia, and the US certainly would spend a huge amount of time and money to find the backdoor. Even American law enforcement has given up on the cause of backdooring, although the UK still seems to be wedded to the idea. [boldface by me - Borepatch]

Well, duh.

Now the cynical view of things is that the EU.gov is not being stupid at all, but just think that their adversary is not China and Russia and the USofA but rather their own populations.  

 

Tulsi Gabbard investigating UK.Gov's Apple crypto backdoor demand

Last week I posted about the Congressional request that DNI Gabbard look into the UK government's demand that Apple put an encryption backdoor into their products.   She has done so:

In a written response to members of Congress, Gabbard said this week that such a demand would violate Americans’ rights and raise concerns about a foreign government pressuring a U.S.-based technology company.

“This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties,” Gabbard told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., who had written to express their worries.

...

Gabbard has asked the heads of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to study the U.K. demand and said she will discuss it with her British counterparts. She noted that existing agreements between the two nations prohibit either country from demanding cloud data about citizens or residents of the other.

This seems unprecedented to me - the relationship between the US and UK intelligence communities has been very close for literally decades - I have personal experience of this in the 1990s and it predates that by a lot.

Europe seems really intent on making all sorts of relationships worse.

 

The importance of D.O.G.E.

Donald Trump has asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead what is basically an audit of the entire US Federal Government.  There is much consternation about this in the expected circles - no doubt due in part of the proclivity of Musk and Ramaswamy to stir the pot and troll their opponents.

I mean, the Department of Government Efficiency?  D.O.G.E.?  Srlsy?

 Fun and games aside, this is a really important project.  It's not just that Elon says you can reduce the Federal budget by $2T/year - nice though that would be.  Instead, it circles back to something that Trump has been talking about for years.  Remember him asking why we can't get a growth rate of 4%?

I wrote this a long time ago, and updated it 6 years ago for the age of Donald Trump.  I think that it's even more important today, with D.O.G.E. explicitly intended to address the issues I called out.

(last ported 2 January 2018)

Why Donald Trump will transform America

Donald Trump understands something that nobody else knows, and he is doing something about it.  If he accomplishes what he is setting out to do, it will completely change America.  To understand what this is, we need to look at what's changed in the past few decades, and before.

Something unprecedented happened during the eighteenth century, something that is a sharp dividing line between the modern world and what came before. The Industrial Revolution transformed first Britain, then Europe and the United States, and then the world.

It started with cloth making, where initially water power drove a set of rapidly evolving machine types that made cloth literally thousands of times easier to make. Prices plummeted, and consumption rose by a factor of 12 between 1770 and 1800. People's lives began to change, as now underwear was affordable to more than just the wealthy.

Then came steam and iron. James Watt invented the first really successful steam engine, but it was only unleashed when Henry Cort approached him with a "grand secret". Up until then, Iron was frightfully expensive, because manufacturing basically had to heat the molten ore until the slag floated off. Cort had figured out how to use Watt's engines to drive huge hammers to beat the slag out of the metal. He could make fifteen tons of wrought iron in twelve hours. Iron production soared by a factor of 150 between 1740 and 1852. The price of iron plummeted, to the point where it entirely changed architecture.

Something was in the air - creativity had been unleashed, and continued in the nineteenth century, infecting industry after industry: Bessemer and Steel, Tennant and industrial chemicals (chemicals manufactured in ton weights, like chlorine bleach), railroads, electricity, internal combustion, aviation, the communications revolution of telegraphy-radio-television-Internet.

 

What was striking about this was that each industry would exhibit precisely the same growth characteristics. The "S" curve described a slowish initial takeoff, an exponentially rising growth period, and then a slow tailing off. All of these industries followed it in turn: cotton, iron, steel, railroads. What was key to the miracle that occurred between 1720 and 1990 was that as one reached the top of the curve and began to falter, a new industry emerged to drive things forward. Income per capita went from around $450 in what would become the United States (in 1700) to $18,300 in 1989.

In many ways, this seems to be spinning down. More and more industries seem to be in the top flat part of the curve. Fewer new industries are emerging with robust growth to pick up the slack. People look towards the future and do not see a doubling of real per capita national income.

We are told that the people are ignorant, and aren't smart enough to know what they're talking about. We're told this by an Educated Class with complex computer models of the financial system. We're asked, what do the hoi poloi know of the grand sweep of the world economic system?

I think that the feeling of dread is well justified, by a good view of the forest rather than the trees. And after all, the financial models didn't predict the 2008 collapse or the stagnation that followed, so a little more humility might be called for. But in general, the critique is correct - people don't know what's causing this, just that they're unhappy. They see a change, which makes them unhappy. They don't know the cause.

Immodestly, I would like to say that I think that I do. It's related to the size of government, but the usual arguments over which side of the Laffer Curve we're on, or what the optimal rate of marginal taxes are pretty much beside the point. Something is slowing the system down, and it's not the 35% that the Fed.Gov takes off the top (OK, a little, but that's a second order effect).

Let's think about fast and slow. The Empire State Building was built in a little over 15 months. The World Trade Center (Tower 1) took 52 months, and that was in 1970. Most recently, One World Trade Center took 7 years to complete.  We're slowing down; we're not as good at what we used to do.

The reason for this is regulation (and its bastard child, litigation). That's the problem. We have buildings full of people that make us stop what we're doing, fill out forms in triplicate, and then wait months or years before we are allowed to pick up where we stopped. Think for a minute what this does. It pushes some of the middle of the S-Curve into the flat part, reducing the overall value of the industry, as resources get sidelined instead of being engaged in production. More damagingly, it pushes the next S-Curve to the right, increasing the time that it takes to bring a new industry online. Most damagingly of all, it possibly completely eliminates some S-Curves from appearing at all, because the risk is too high to attract investors.

It's not the tax rate, it's the regulation rate that's making the economy run down. Sarbanes-Oxley, passed in great haste after Enron's collapse, has all but destroyed the high tech IPO market. Think of that as S-Curves that never came into existence.  The Silicon Graybeard posted about this 7 years ago:

Although the legislators and regulators never consider this, every regulation consumes some amount of time and money to comply with.  The new Finance Reform bill has been estimated to required the development of 250-300 new regulations.  Every regulation slows down, hinders and costs every honest business real money.  Despite the widespread talk of corrupt CEOs and general lack of corporate ethics, I've been working in the manufacturing industry since the mid 1970s, and every company has had an active, if not aggressive, ethics compliance program with requirements for training and seminars every year.  There are exceptions but most companies do their best to be honest and law-abiding.  Government seems to think it's mere coincidence that countries with lower tax rates and lower regulation attract business, and they demonize companies for moving to countries where the environment is better.  

As SiGraybeard points out, Big Business excels at managing the top end of the S-Curve, and they have big offices capable of dealing with the paperwork. Big Business doesn't mind regulation - in fact, if you believe (as I do) that Regulatory Capture is the equilibrium state of any government agency, Big Business uses regulation to hobble small but dangerous competitors. They get the Fed.Gov to do their dirty work, while they extract maximum value from the end phase of their old products. We pay for that in higher prices and lack of better alternatives.

Scale this up to cover the entire economy, as the government has tripled in the post war period, and it becomes obvious why we can't build skyscrapers any more. They don't seem to have trouble with this in Dubai - it's us that keeps us from doing it.

Regulation stifles innovation - quick, name the last revolutionary program that came out of the Department of Education. That effectively transfers wealth from future generations (our children and grandchildren, who will have lower standards of living). The recipients of that transfer are government employees - those folks that read and file your application (in triplicate) and the Big Business that captures the regulatory agency.

We have made so many layers of cruft - allowed so many barnacles to grow on the bottom of the ship - that we're noticeably slowing down. People feel it. People are nervous, because they think it's going to get worse. And while the recent Congresses and the Obama Administration poured gasoline on that flame with Health Care "Reform" (written by Big Pharma, the Insurance Companies, and the AMA), I'd like to point out that the Republicans ran Congress and the White House when Sarbanes-Oxley passed.

One way to look at things is that it's been a good long 300 year run. Too bad it's over, nothing lasts forever. Get used to stasis, with fewer and smaller S-Curves, and get used to declining living standards as Big Business and a bloated government take ever more from National Income, immizerating the masses.

A different way to look at things is government regulation didn't give people affordable underwear, or bleach to keep them clean. Get out of our way, and we'll do it again. The tax rates are annoying, but the buildings full of fussy balls-and-chains telling us that we'll hear back from them in 3 to 6 months are infuriating.

This is what Donald Trump knows.  He knows that there are winners in this game - the Ivy League, the Non-Governmental Organizations, "Big Green" (The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace).  Trump knows that they all hate him, and are engaged in a scorched earth campaign to destroy him. He also knows that the losers in this game are the working classes, who vote for him.  

So what do you think is his motivation?  Is it to change governance to unleash economic growth, rewarding his supporters and humiliating his opponents?  Or is it to fade quietly into the background, sitting in the corner and thinking about his many failings?  To ask the question is to answer it.

This is the big thing that Trump knows that nobody else does.  It's a big idea, which seems to be how he likes to think.  It's transformative.  So far, he has quashed nearly 2000 regulations in his first year, and seems only to be getting started.  And all the geniuses who hate him are so focused on his tweets that they have no idea what's hitting them.

Note: This post is based on one I did 7 years ago.  It's taken this long for a politician to come on the scene who looks like he wants to do something about it.

UPDATE 2 January 2018 22:17: Even the New York Times recognizes this in an (inadvertently) hilarious story.  It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at their attempts to spin soaring business confidence due to reduced regulation under Trump.  Almost every person quoted is a former Democratic administration aparachick, and there are precisely no quotes from business leaders who think that reduced regulation helps business expansion, hiring, and wage increases.  And there's this, of course:

There is little historical evidence tying regulation levels to growth. Regulatory proponents say, in fact, that those rules can have positive economic effects in the long run, saving companies from violations that could cost them both financially and reputationally. Cost-benefit analyses generally do not look just at the impact of a regulation on a particular business’s bottom line in the coming months, but at the broader impact on consumers, the environment, public health and other factors that can show up over years or decades.

Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.  [rolls eyes]

Is there an Extinction Level Event coming for the Deep State?

An Extinction Level Event is when something - we typically don't really understand what - causes a mass die-off, with 60% or more of species disappearing. The most famous of these was the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs (if you believe that; I'm skeptical that the answer to their demise is so neat and tidy).

Well Donald Trump said he's going to appoint Elon Musk to lead a "Government Efficiency Commission":

Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”

There's no need to look at Tesla's 50% Electric Vehicle market share, or compare SpaceX's launch rate to, well, the rest of the world combined.  Most relevant to this discussion is how Elon cut 80% of Twitter's headcount, turning the company around.

Even though reports have Government employees cutting back expenditures in anticipation of potential cuts, lots of folks are skeptical that this can be done at all.

I'm not one of the skeptics, because I've seen this my very own self, in my career at Three Letter Intelligence Agency.  It was the mid-1980s and I was a wet-behind-the-ears Electronics Engineer in the COMSEC R&D organization.  Their recent triumph was the introduction of the STU-III secure telephone.

The STU-III was a technological marvel, providing high level (Type 1) encryption in a telephony device that, well, worked like a telephone.  And it was delivered 2 years early because of a manager who might be described as the 1980s COMSEC version of Elon Musk.

Walt Deeley was a very senior Intelligence Manager.  He is listed on the NSA's web site:

As Deputy Director of Communications Security in the early 1980s, Mr. Deeley pushed the development and deployment of the STU-III secure telephone, which has been called the most significant improvement to the security of government voice communications in fifty years. He perceived the need for a new approach, and deployed an affordable and effective telephone security system within two years.

...


Walter Deeley was known as a strong-willed manager who pushed his subordinates hard to get results. While a tough taskmaster, the technical advances and mission achievements he led made the United States more secure.

Bold added by me.  Let me give some additional color around that.  He was a legend in the COMSEC R&D organization.  His reputation was equal parts admiration and fear - it was almost like he who must not be named.  People remembered the careers he derailed in his quest for an encrypting telephone.

One story told to me by an old hand was how Deeley had come into the office one Saturday to see how the program was working.  He called down to the program office, and the phone rang and rang and rang.  Finally one guy who happened to be in the office on the weekend answered.  Deeley asked for the Program Manager.  When told that the PM wasn't in because it was a Saturday, Deeley told the guy who was there that he was the new PM and to see him first thing on Monday.  It was very Elon-Must-at-Twitter.

True story - at least I believed it was.  And I for sure wasn't the only one there who did.

So to those who say you can't change how the Government works, color me skeptical.  I'm skeptical because I've actually seen it change (well, heard from people who did).

The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies.  I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount.  That's how the game is played.  So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins.  I expect that this would pay big dividends.

It's sort of like setting one type of dinosaur against another, in a battle to the death.

UPDATE 28 OCTOBER 2024 14:51: Elon says they can reduce the Federal budget by $2 Trillion.

Police increasingly use facial recognition technology

It seems that they often withhold that information from Courts and defense attorneys:

Police around the United States are routinely using facial recognition technology to help identify suspects, but those departments rarely disclose they've done so - even to suspects and their lawyers.

Documents concerning the use and disclosure, of facial recognition technology were provided to the Washington Post as part of its ongoing investigation into use of the technology in the US, but only from around 40 departments in 15 states out of the "more than 100" departments who were asked. Most, WaPo noted, declined to answer anything.

Police records reportedly indicate that, aside from not disclosing that facial recognition technology, police also frequently obscured use of the technology by saying they identified suspects "through investigative means," while others have outright policy documents that tell officers to "not document this investigative lead."

In multiple cases documented in police reports and court filings, WaPo found those charged with crimes based on facial recognition often weren't aware that it had been used to identify them until after they were already in jail – several times incorrectly.

Emphasis added by me.

It seems that the Police sometimes don't even tell the DA's office about this.  While I Am Not A Lawyer, this seems like a great argument to abolish Qualified Immunity.  The secrecy itself is the best evidence that the process is being abused.  I mean, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, right?

And the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award goes to ...

So UK Prime Minister Keir "Two Tier" Starmer has decreed that people saying hateful things will be jailed because their speech is actually violence, and he's making room for them in His Magesty's prisons be releasing violent criminals because their violence is actually speech, you guys.

Some big shot police constable has even said he was going to go all 1775-Bunker Hill on Americans for their speech, which is totally violence.  Ooooh kaaay,

All this totalitarianism reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union, back in the day.  It was said about Leonid Brezhnev (and likely others).  I've somewhat rewritten it for modern times.  See if you can tell the difference.

So this guy goes to Red Square Hyde Park Speaker's Corner and yells "Leonid Brezhnev Keir Starmer is a senile fascist old fool!"  Of course, the police swarm him and drag him off to Ye Olde Gaol.  He is sentenced to ten years and ten days in durance vile - ten days for slander and ten years for revealing State Secrets.

Maybe I gave away my edits right there ...

And so the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award for Totalitarianism goes to Brit PM Keir Starmer, for fascism above and beyond the call of duty.  Well done you dirty commie bastard.

"Climate Change" is a manufactured crisis

I've said repeatedly that the temperature data is a mess.  Long time readers will remember how the Surface Stations project documented poorly sited weather stations (like ones in the middle of baking parking lot asphalt), where 89% of the weather stations did not meet the Government's acceptable siting requirements.  They all read too hot, sometimes by as much as 2 degrees.

Long term readers may remember how NOAA (the US Government's weather bureau) established a "Climate Reference Network" of only well-sited weather stations.  The Reference Network shows that the poorly-sited stations overstate warming by at least half a degree.  Remember, we are told that temperature increased by 0.6 degrees over the course of the entire 20th Century.  Take away that half a degree and you have no warming at all over 100 years.

Yeah, that's quite a crisis.

But never let a crisis go to waste, even if you have to manufacture one.  What have governments been doing to get more warming?  Well, the UK.Gov is installing brand new weather stations, 80% of which not only are not acceptably sited, but are in Class 4 or 5 - the worst of the worst: 

Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.

Remember, these aren't 80 year old stations that used to be in a pasture and are now in a parking lot.  These are brand spanking new ones.  Sitting in parking lots.

Tagged Climate Bullshit because, well, you know.

WATCH. THIS. NOW!

Yeah, I'm shouting.  This is a fabulous film about the whole Global Warming scam.  It's all there - all the stuff I've been blathering on about for 15 years is in it.  Without all the Borepatchian prose overload, of course.

Well, my ClimateGate Clippy isn't there:

Go watch it.  This is great stuff.

Judge issues restraining order keeping DOE from tracking bitcoin miners

Interesting:

Earlier this month, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced its intention to gather basic information about the energy consumed by bitcoin mining. In making the decision, the DOE noted that the share of bitcoin mining happening in the US has shot up by a factor of over 10 just within the last three years, leaving the activity consuming as much electricity as a fairly populous state....

Albright's decision to issue the injunction is based largely on the fact that the DOE's decision to delay going forward with the survey was voluntary and could be rescinded at any time.

But he went beyond that by saying that the mining companies were likely to succeed on the merits of their case. In general terms, he noted that the DOE relied on its ability to enact emergency measures, and those are only applicable if there's a risk of public harm. The DOE will likely try to make the case that elevated carbon emissions and electricity costs both count as public harms, so Albright is suggesting that he's unlikely to find those compelling.

Ah, Climate Change.  Is there anything it can't do?  Except in west Texas, where the Judge doesn't buy the whole "Climate Emergency means more Government" thing.

 

Big Pharmacy chains turn over medical into to police without warants

Hey, you can trust the Government, right?

All of the big pharmacy chains in the US hand over sensitive medical records to law enforcement without a warrant—and some will do so without even running the requests by a legal professional, according to a congressional investigation.

...

They include the seven largest pharmacy chains in the country: CVS Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart Stores, Inc., The Kroger Company, and Rite Aid Corporation. The lawmakers also spoke with Amazon Pharmacy.

All eight of the pharmacies said they do not require law enforcement to have a warrant prior to sharing private and sensitive medical records, which can include the prescription drugs a person used or uses and their medical conditions. Instead, all the pharmacies hand over such information with nothing more than a subpoena, which can be issued by government agencies and does not require review or approval by a judge.

This sure seems like a violation of HIPAA, not to mention that pesky Fourth Amendment.

(via)

Signal to leave UK rather than backdoor their crypto

Well done:

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors” into its end-to-end encryption.

“We would leave the U.K. or any jurisdiction if it came down to the choice between backdooring our encryption and betraying the people who count on us for privacy, or leaving,” Whittaker said. “And that’s never not true.”

The Online Safety Bill, which was passed into law in September, includes a clause — clause 122 — that, depending on how it’s interpreted, could allow the U.K.’s communications regulator, Ofcom, to break the encryption of apps and services under the guise of making sure illegal material such as child sexual exploitation and abuse content is removed.

"Child sexual exploitation".  Oooooh kaaaaay.  No doubt the UK.Gov is very concerned indeed at getting access to Prince Andrew's communications with Jeffery Epstein.  Or something.

(via)

 

10 years after Snowden

Edward Snowden released his bombshell revelations ten years ago.  These showed that there was mass government spying on US citizens by US intelligence agencies; it also showed without a doubt that General Clapper perjured himself before the US Senate when he denied that this was the case.

Ten years later, Snowden is a refugee from the US Government, and Gen. Clapper is free as a bird (and guilty as sin).  This tells you much about how much trust to put in the US Government.

There are two excellent retrospective articles about this: The Register walks us through much of the narrative about the who, what, and when of the last ten years.  Highly recommended.  Here's the TL;DR:

"Ten years have gone by," since the first Snowden disclosures, "and we don't know what other kinds of rights-violating activities have been taking place in secret, and I don't trust our traditional oversight systems, courts and the Congress, to ferret those out," Wizner said. "When you're dealing with secret programs in a democracy, it almost always requires insiders who are willing to risk their livelihoods and their freedom to bring the information to the public."

Bruce Schneier has a fascinating piece from the perspective of someone who was involved with the disclosures.  Also highly, highly recommended.  Schneier is a security big wig, and so there's a fair amount of security industry inside baseball.  For example:

I ended up being something of a public ambassador for the documents. When I got back from Rio, I gave talks …at the IETF meeting in Vancouver in November 2013. (I remember little of this; I am reconstructing it all from my calendar.)

What struck me at the IETF was the indignation in the room, and the calls to action. And there was action, across many fronts. We technologists did a lot to help secure the Internet, for example.

And this prediction from your humble host has stood the test of a decade:

The two highlighted items really get to the heart of why the security industry is so angry about what the NSA has been doing.  They spent years establishing a relationship of trust with the industry and researchers.  Then they exploited that trust for personal gain at the expense of everyone else.

While I don't at all want to minimize the horrific crime of child abuse, that will give you a bit of the flavor of how the security industry looks at Ft. Meade now.  It was a rape, a rape of those who had trusted them as teacher and protector.

This is going to cause enormous problems for NSA.  I simply don't see how anyone will ever want to cooperate with them outside a public forum.  Nobody who values their reputation will be willing to be accused of slipping an NSA mickey into a crypto library.

And nobody on a standards body will ever again listen to NSA recommendations for changes to algorithms.  As a matter of fact, those recommendations will make the hair on the back of people's necks stand up, and lots of people will start to reverse engineer the NSA's math to see what games they're playing.

The last ten years have sure been a wild ride.

Be careful with Ring doorbell video cameras

Police warrant orders man to surrender video from camera inside his home:

Last year, around the Thanksgiving holiday, Ohio businessman Michael Larkin received a request for video from his Amazon Ring security system from Hamilton city police.

He complied, providing video from his doorbell camera that was stored on Ring's servers. After balking at further demands, he subsequently learned that authorities had bypassed the need to get his consent by presenting Ring with a search warrant for video from several of his Ring cameras, including one that covered an indoor area of his home.

According to Politico, Larkin received a notice from Ring that the tech biz had received a warrant and was required to turn over video from numerous cameras, without giving the owner with any say in the matter.

I expect that this won't just happen with Ring video devices.  If you have these sorts of cameras, you might want to make sure they're only recording video of outdoors. 

Has WWIII already started?

Very in-depth and thoughtful post at E.M. Smith's place.  The comments are thoughtful, too.

For the life of me, I can't see what compelling interest the USA has in war with Russia.  I can see what the US Military Industrial Complex has with a war like that.  And as they say, "War is the health of the State". 

But I don't see what's in it for us.

UPDATE 31 January 2023 11:18: Chuck Pergiel has a related and very interesting post about who the chief clowns running US foreign policy are.

Update 31 January 2023 15:35 : Link corrected

More Tab Clearing, of the Donald Trump variety

Isegoria has a nifty definition of class structure in America.  Donald Trump is about the only one who has the first class in mind:

Rob Henderson explains social class through the example of where your name goes:

Working class: Your name on your uniform
Middle class: Your name on your desk
Upper middle class: Your name on your office door
Upper class: Your name on the building

You will notice that the folks who own the Media are all in the last class.  Gosh, I wonder why they hate Trump's guts? /sarc

Mike at Cold Fury thinks that Ron DeSantis is wimping out:

DeSantis, Abbott, and any other non-Vichy GOPe governors with stones enough to do so could render all Real Americans a great service, as well as etch their names with honor and glory in the annals of American liberty forevermore, by announcing their firm intention to end all cooperation and/or contact with FBI goon squads currently skulking about in their sovereign States—effective oh, say, five minutes ago or thereabouts.

Srlsy, Mike really thinks he's wimping out:

The Leftard camel has been allowed to poke its big, ugly snout way too far into the tent already for my liking, and I can’t even begin to imagine that DeSantis is in agreement with those assholes on this particular topic. Any and every time they can be dealt a defeat, regardless of its perceived import, they not only should be, they must be, just as a matter of principle.

I don't know that I agree.  DeSantis has been an astonishingly effective Governor and gets the daily dose of hate in the Florida newspapers as his reward.  He is particularly effective in dishing out punishment, not a bunch of hot air posturing.  This is what has made the Florida newspapers to melt down on a daily basis.  DeSantis is establishing a reputation as a doer, not a talker - at least with me.

Scott McKay at The American Spectator thinks it's not Trump or DeSantis, it's Trump and DeSantis:

The issue isn’t whether Trump or DeSantis is the GOP nominee in 2024. Both would be fine. Seriously. Trump is starting to get to the outer edge of what you’d look for age-wise in a president, but he’s also been through the wars and he’d be able to leverage that experience to hit the ground running and efficiently do the things that are controversial until they aren’t early in his second term.

And DeSantis is younger and smoother than Trump, having had a good deal more experience with politics and government.

But — and I’m going to harp on this, because it’s a point I make in my book The Revivalist Manifesto, which you should buy and read thoroughly — political eras are formed in America not on the basis of one election but rather five or six in a row. The Democrats kicked off the first era of our political history with Thomas Jefferson’s rout of John Adams in 1800, and they didn’t lose a presidential race until 1824, by which time Democratic politics was American politics. Ditto for the second era, which began with Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 victory; the GOP didn’t lose a presidential election until 1884. And the third era, which is coming to a miserable end, began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rout of Herbert Hoover in 1932; it was 1952 before a Republican again won a presidential race, and Dwight Eisenhower was necessarily so timid when it came to domestic policy that by the end of his tenure the John Birch Society was convinced he was a communist mole.

The point being, it takes a generation for the concrete of a new political era to cure. And that means it’s less important whether Trump or DeSantis wins in 2024 than that one of them does. And furthermore, what’s more important than that is the standard both of them set for Republican politicians up and down the governmental food chain.

Trump is a wrecking ball, and knows where and how to start disassembling the Imperial Bureaucracy.  DeSantis is the guy who can put it back together in a way to cause even more pain to The Right Sort Of Folks.  Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.

We know what Red Flag enforcement looks like

I've seen how this movie ends:

I've linked several times to posts over at the blog Dispatches from TJICistan.  TJIC is an outspoken (some might say extremely so) advocate of smaller government.  He's also a firearms owner in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.  While he owns guns, it appears that he's no longer allowed to possess any:

ARLINGTON (CBS) – A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man. 

It was the headline “1 down and 534 to go” that caught the attention. “One” refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.

Police are investigating the “suitability” of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license

Let's ignore for the moment how many people were investigated for making similar comments about George W. Bush.  Let's look at the "logic" being exercised by the Arlington Po-Po, shall we?

They claim that Corcoran is so dangerous that, while he has done nothing more than put up a blog post, he must be restrained from possessing firearms.  However, it appears that it's not worth it for the police to follow him, or stake out his place, or arrest him.

Huh?

Look, guys, if you think that his speech rises to the level of an actual threat of specific harm to specific persons, he should be in jail.  If you're not sure, then do the leg work to establish whether it is or not.

Ah, I was so young and optimistic, 11 years ago.  After all, we had ferocious conservative Republicans ferociously conserving things.  But even then it was clear where this would go:

It would be one thing if the law were applied equally to all.  It's not, and it will be applied disproportionately to us, because we hold views considered by some in power to be Double Plus Ungood.

Divemedic says the same, in fewer words.  He also has some suggestions on a strategy you can use.

Thanks to the GOP, we're all TJIC now.

There's a reason that they're called the "Stupid Party".  And there's a reason that the Democrats are called the "Evil Party".

The Peasant's Rebellion

In 1381 an English construction worker named Wat Tyler had had enough of an oppressive and out of touch government.  He led a growing movement that became known as The Peasant's Revolt which descended on London and created panic and confusion in the government of King Richard II.

Richard wasn't a strong monarch, being only a boy at the time, and all of the peasants assembled before the city walls was an impressive sight.  The King negotiated with them to try to defuse the situation.  After all, the English Army was beating the French in the Hundred Year's War because of the yeoman Longbowmen who made up much of the peasant's armed host.

But it was all a ruse.  The King met with Tyler, something went wrong, and Tyler was cut down by the royal bodyguard.  The King rode out to address the peasant force who, leaderless, dispersed.  This is pretty typical of Peasant Revolts in general - very few of them have been successful.

US Truckers have descended on Washington, D.C., having had enough of an oppressive and out of touch government.  But they seem unfocused, with confused goals - the original "End the Covid mandates" having more or less been done before they reached DC.  I have no idea what they hope to accomplish.

Good luck to them, but history suggests that they are unlikely to be very successful at whatever they are trying to accomplish.