Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Trivial Political Pursuits
Trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Forget substance. It’s all about the trivial. The more significant the issue, the more significant the trivial becomes. It all comes to mind when one considers the issues in which the trivial has been introduced in order to deflect attention from the substantive. Consider Chris Christie and Wendy Davis.
One of the great comic operas of today is in New Jersey. The libretto is taken straight from the Nixon years-what did Chris Christie know and when did he know it. It pertains, of course, to the closure of lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge. The lanes were reportedly closed in retaliation for the failure of Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, to support Mr. Christie’s bid for a second term as governor of New Jersey. The instructions to close the lanes were sent to David Wildstein at the Port Authority, by Mr. Christie’s former aid, Bridget Anne Kelly. Mr. Christie, denied knowledge of the instructions to close the lanes. In initial reports it was stated that the man who ordered the closures was one of Mr. Christie’s friends in high school but Mr. Christie promptly denied that. He acknowledged having been in high school at the same time as David but said: “David and I were not friends in high school. We were not even acquaintances in high school “ Lest anyone misunderstood that, the Governor also said: “You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time.” A little research helped him remember a bit more about David. In late January the governor’s office sent out a two-page memorandum that sought to discredit David. Among other things, it alleged that while in high school David brought suit over a school board election, and had also been “publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior. These remembrances of things past are are trivial but, the governor hopes, will serve to cast doubt on David’s credibility.
The governor’s attacks on David were partly in response to the peculiarly unlawyer like letter sent to the press by David’s lawyer. In the letter the lawyer said there was evidence the governor was complicit in the lane closures. He forgot to say what the evidence was.
Meanwhile, in Texas the trivial has overshadowed the race to see who will replace Governor Rick Perry. That race, it will be recalled, is between Greg Abbott, a Republican and Wendy Davis, a member of the Texas legislature and a Democrat. (Although each of them faces a primary each of them is certain to win.) Wendy became famous when she conducted an 11 hour filibuster to block the Texas legislature’s attempt to further restrict abortions in that state.Mr. Abbott has served for 5 years as the Texas Attorney General. During his tenure he has sued President Obama 27 times. In campaign speeches he often says his routine is that he goes into the office, “I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” He has sued the EPA 17 times in opposition to air quality standards and greenhouse gas emissions. He doesn’t think carbon dioxide is a pollutant since it is emitted by humans. (He has expressed no opinion on flatulence.) He has sued the Department of Health and Human Services four times and the Justice Department twice. Himself a paraplegic, he has argued in court against the requirement that cities be required to provide wheelchair access to buildings on the grounds that the Americans With Disabilities Act is unconstitutional. Those are just a few of the suits he has brought against the government.
Wendy Davis will probably not be elected as Texas’s next governor. Since she is running in Texas she probably wouldn’t be elected irrespective of what was disclosed last month. The disclosures, however, further dim her chances. They do not concern anything that pertains to the welfare of the citizens of that state. They do not pertain to what she might do as governor, questions that would seem important in electing a governor. They pertain to trivial misrepresentations made by her about events in her life that took place many years ago. They pertain to her description of her life as a young mother, descriptions that generated sympathy for the difficulties she encountered in getting to where she is now. Many of those events we have learned, were exaggerated or untrue. They are also irrelevant. She was not divorced when she was 19. She was separated at age 19 and divorced when she was 21. She said she lived in a mobile home following her divorce but it turns out that was only for a few months. She said she financed her own undergraduate education with grants, loans and scholarships and then went on to Harvard Law School. She didn’t disclose that her husband paid her tuition at Harvard. She will not be elected because Texans wouldn’t want to have a governor who lied about how long she lived in a trailer or how old she was when she got divorced even though non-Texans view those things as trivial. They’d rather have a governor who is wrong on all issues of substance but has not misrepresented his background. As New Jersey already has, Texas will end up getting exactly the kind of a governor it deserves.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Spying Can Be Fun
He that’s secure is not safe.
— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac
In the face of the most recent revelations about the relationship of the NSA to many of our smartphone apps that neither we nor the apps knew we had, it was nice to learn that there is a whimsical side to the NSA. It is known as CryptoKids® and is staffed, in part, by amusing cartoon characters with cute names such as CryptoCat®, and Decipher Dog®. It describes itself as being for “Future Codemakers & Codebreakers.” (Every name on the site seems to be a registered trademark since the NSA doesn’t want anyone stealing its good ideas.) Although CryptoKids®has been in existence for more than nine years, its existence was recently brought to our attention (thanks to a story in the New York Times,) at about the same time we learned that those using apps to play games on their smartphones are providing useful information to the NSA. According to news reports inspired by Edward Snowden, when someone with a smartphone plays games on the smartphone, the NSA joins in the fun. It uses the information gleaned from the phone to figure out where the player is, the player’s age and sex and other sorts of information that the game participant had no idea he or she was disclosing. The player thought by playing games on a smartphone, he or she was killing time-not disclosing facts. We now know that while the user of the smartphone is playing Angry Birds the NSA is playing Hid’n Go Seek.
CryptoKids® gives us the soft fuzzy side of the NSA. The site has different sections. The section called “Cryptomania®” encourages students to “Dig into Greek and Latin Roots” of words and expressions and explains the origin of many words and phrases that adults would find interesting as well. It contains features that can be used in classrooms by teachers who have no interest in teaching their students to become spies. If used, however, they will almost certainly develop in certain students a fondness for language. And that is probably why in the section of the site that deals with “Codes and Ciphers,” the site explains that codes “are used to make messages secret by changing the words into something else.” (Older readers can relate to the allure of code breaking for the young since in their youth many cereal boxes found in stores advised the purchaser that included in the box was a magic ring that could be used to break enemy code. Children, if not their mothers, found this irresistible and many boxes of cereals were sold for the rings rather than the cereal. )
In a section of the site entitled “What are Codes?” the reader is told that to understand coded messages a key must be shared by the users. It explains: “If your friends have the key, and your enemies do not, your messages become secret.” The very young may not be sure who their enemies are but by the time they get to junior high or high school they will have figured that out and the ability to code will be very helpful. It will be most helpful if a student wishes to pass a message to a friend in class and does not want the teacher-enemy to know what the message says.
The CryptoKids® page entitled “About NSA/CSS” contains useful information about the agencies. The page tells the reader that NSA and CSS “provide the technology . . . and the information. . . our Nation’s leaders and warfighters need to get their jobs done. Without NSA/CSS, they wouldn’t be able to talk to one another without the bad guys listening and they wouldn’t be able to figure out what the bad guys were planning. . . . .”
There is a great deal more to the site than a short piece such as this can hope to describe. Some will think it too bad that we had to learn of this from the New York Times instead of from Edward Snowden and will attribute his failure to disclose the existence of CryptoKids® to an unwillingness to show that the NSA does some good things. That is unfair to Mr. Snowden. He did not think knowledge of the existence of this site would cause those who became critics of the NSA because of his disclosures to change their opinions of the agency because of CryptoKids®.
In concluding its description of the activities of the NSA/CSS the site says: “Cryptology gives the United States an advantage over its enemies,” suggesting that the United States is the only country in the world that uses cryptology. That would probably surprise President Putin. He would probably be even more surprised to learn of the existence of CryptoKids®. My guess is Russia’s intelligence apparatus does not have a kid-friendly site. Mr. Putin may now create one, if only to demonstrate that appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, he’s every bit as warm and fuzzy as the NSA. He may be right.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Promises, Drugs and Executions
To the last moment of his breath
On hope the wretch relies;
And e’en the pang preceding death
Bids expectations rise.
—Oliver Goldsmith, The Captivity
State sponsored executions are back in the news again. By the time this column sees the black of print, two men will have been executed in the space of less than one week-one in Ohio and one in Texas. Neither would be remarkable (except in the eyes of the decedent and his family) but for what the executions say about their executioners. In Ohio it is the enthusiasm of the state for getting the job done and in Texas the duplicity of its governor and attorney general who permitted the execution to go forward.
On January 16, 2014, the state of Ohio showed the world that the lack of a proven potion to accomplish the task would not halt the execution of Dennis McGuire. A lesser state might have postponed the execution because of the unavailability of drugs that had most recently been used by Ohio when conducting its executions. The unavailability of death dealing drugs was not because they were no longer being manufactured. They were unavailable because their manufacturers refused to sell them to states that used them in executions.
When Missouri was confronted with the unavailability of propofol, its favored drug for executions, Missouri postponed a scheduled October 2013 execution until it could come up with an acceptable substitute. When Texas encountered a problem in obtaining pentobarbital, the drug it used in execution, state correction officials forged prescriptions in order to obtain the drug from a pharmacy. (When the forgery was discovered the pharmacy refused to fill the prescription.) Unlike Texas and Missouri, Ohio dealt with the problem by being creative.
For many years before Dennis’s execution, Ohio had used a three-drug combination that performed its assigned task in less than 15 minutes. When questions were raised as to whether or not it caused the person receiving the drugs an unconstitutional level of discomfort its use was discontinued and other drugs were substituted. None of those drugs being currently available, on January 16, 2014, Ohio killed Dennis by administering a sedative and a painkiller, a procedure that had never before been used in the United States. To outward appearances it was not a great success although Dennis did die. However, during the execution he appeared to be desperately gasping for air and the procedure took more than twice as long as it had taken when those being executed received the established death dealing cocktails.
Commenting on the new Ohio procedure, Doug Berman, a law professor and death penalty expert said: [W]hat we now have discovered is Ohio is using a method that gets the job done, but looks ugly. We don’t know if it actually was ugly. We just know that it looked ugly.” (If Ohio wants to find out if the procedure “actually was ugly” it might consider giving the person being executed a button to press to let those watching the execution know if he finds the procedure unpleasant. That could inform future executions, permitting the state to modify procedures if appropriate. The person being executed might take pleasure in knowing that while dying he was helping to improve the execution process. )
On January 22, 2014, Texas executed Edgar Tamayo, a Mexican citizen. After Edgar was arrested and charged, Texas ignored its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Under the Convention, foreign nationals who are arrested and charged with criminal conduct are entitled to have their Consulates notified of their detention. In 2004 the World Court ruled that Edgar’s rights and the rights of four dozen other Mexican nationals awaiting the death penalty were violated since they had not been properly advised of their consular rights. In response, President Bush ordered Texas to conduct those hearings. In 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president lacked the authority to order Texas to conduct those hearings. Following the Supreme Court decision, however, Governor Rick Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott, both honorable men, wrote the Supreme Court, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General of the United States and said Texas would ask the Texas courts to review the issues raised by the World Court, even though they were not are required to do so. Sadly, from Edgar’s point of view, Governor Perry forgot to ask Texas courts to consider that question. So did Greg Abbott who hopes to be Texas’s next governor. Commenting on the execution, Governor Perry’s spokesperson said: “If you commit a despicable crime like this in Texas you are subject to our state laws, including a fair trial by jury and the ultimate penalty.” Nothing was said about broken promises. January 22, 2014, Edgar was “executed”: without a review of his Vienna Convention claim. As the governor’s spokesperson said, Edgar had a jury trial and got the ultimate penalty. Who cares that Edgar’s rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations were not honored or that the governor and the attorney general of Texas showed themselves to be men without honor in permitting Edgar’s execution to go forward? Not Texas.