Internet Scofflaw

With the recent FCC action on net neutrality, a lot of people are worked up, but almost no one seems to know what it actually means. Here is what it is all about:

The Internet is a protocol for delivering small packets of data over a wide-area network. An important property of the internet protocol (for present purposes it is the most important property) is that packet delivery is best-effort. That means that internet routers will attempt to deliver every packet, but there are no promises. If a router gets overloaded, some packets will be dropped (i.e., not delivered).

The key question is this: when packets have to be dropped, how do you pick which ones? Historically, internet routers have generally chosen the packets to drop arbitrarily.

But for many applications, this is not actually what you want. For example, in streaming video (nearly 80% of all internet traffic) some frames are more important than others. Some frames are keyframes (which give the entire picture), while most frames only describe the differences from the previous frame. If you miss a regular frame, there is some degradation in the picture, but if you miss a keyframe, you have no picture until the next keyframe arrives. Consequently, it would be best if internet routers preferred keyframes to other frames. More generally, there is an area of research called quality of service, which seeks to enable applications that require a certain amount of reliable bandwidth, and typically does so by identifying and reserving network resources.

So what is network neutrality? Network neutrality is the principle that says that routers must not distinguish between packets when deciding which ones to drop.

As a technical matter, network neutrality would tie the hands of networking innovators by prohibiting any routing strategy that intelligently chooses which packets to favor. One can improve the network by adding more hardware, but not by using the hardware one already has more efficiently. (Note: some dispute this. I will return to this point later.)

So why do some people want network neutrality? There is concern about a certain sort of network management practice that ISPs might adopt. To explain this, it’s helpful to know a few statistics.

Over three-quarters of the internet traffic in North America is from video streaming. Netflix alone accounts for over a third of internet traffic. YouTube (owned by Google) accounts for another sixth. (Figures from December 2015.) This creates a tension between ISPs and content providers. The latter’s business strategy requires that they consume a brobdingnagian amount of network bandwidth, while the former are concerned that the content providers will overwhelm their networks.

Thus, the content providers are concerned that the ISPs will throttle back their content, or that the ISPs will demand that they help pay for it. And, in fact, on a few occasions, ISPs actually did something like this.

Back in 2007, when the concern was peer-to-peer file-sharing (mostly music and video), rather than video streaming, Comcast throttled back certain file-sharing protocols. On the face of it, one could argue it was reasonable, but, being Comcast, they did it in a super-sleazy way. Rather than announce they were doing it, they just did it secretly. People noticed, made a fuss, and Comcast stopped doing it. (Ironically, Comcast is now trying to position themselves as big supporters of network neutrality, while they literally did exactly the thing that net neutrality advocates are trying to prevent.)

Nevertheless, the Comcast incident is instructive, because it was corrected by the free market without any government intervention at all. The customers noticed, the customers complained, and Comcast stopped. Years later, AT&T blocked its customers from using Facetime on iPhones, and they too stopped after public outcry.

That’s the technical background. At this point it gets political. Google (which owns YouTube) made a big push for net neutrality, and it became a cause celebre on the left.

In 2010 the FCC announced its rules governing internet routing and they were quite bad for innovation. (You can find the relevant rules on pages 17944-17956 here, but the summary in the draft rules is much more accessible.) They were full of lip service about freedom to innovate, but they never defined the key terms of “nondiscrimination” and “reasonable network management.” (The final rules improved the draft rules by giving a non-circular definition of “reasonable network management,” but they defined it (¶82) in terms of “legitimate network management purposes” which they did not define.) They specifically say (¶83) that “reasonable network management” will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Consequently, if you want to stay out of trouble, you have to go to the FCC for permission to do anything.

At this point, there is one more important element. The FCC actually had no legal authority to regulate the internet, and when they tried to do it anyway, they lost in court. But, never ones to allow something like that to stop them, the Obama administration reclassified the internet from an information service (which they have no power to regulate) to a telecommunications service (which they do).

A telecommunications service is a service that transmits information without change in its form or content. An information service is a service for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications. (Via Ars Technica.) The sticky thing is the internet is pretty clearly both of these. Some applications are more like an information service: the web, search engines, social media, video streaming, file sharing, cloud drives; while other applications are more like telecommunications: email, instant messaging, voice over IP, online gaming, remote login. Certainly the vast majority of traffic is in the first category, but a case can be made for either.

It is harder to make a case to reclassify the internet as telecommunications service when it is already classified as an information service, particularly since most internet usage is moving in the opposite direction. But, when the matter went to the Court of Appeals, only one of the three judges was bothered by that. The other two applied the Chevron principle which requires that judges defer to administrative agencies unless their decisions are clearly wrong. (It’s a terrible principle, but that’s another topic entirely.) As it happens, the 2-1 decision was Democratic appointees versus a Republican appointee, which emphasizes how political the matter has become.

Anyway, the reclassification allowed the FCC to regulate the internet (or, more precisely, home access to the internet). Another effect was to erase all of the FTC’s internet privacy rules. Instead, FCC crafted its own rules, but the FCC is not an agency with experience with consumer privacy protection, so the result was, as the FTC put it, “not optimal.” Moreover, there were other pernicious effects that had not fully played out yet.

At this point, net neutrality has become a proxy battle between progressives and conservatives. Conservatives oppose net neutrality because they generally oppose regulation, but especially because they don’t want to set the precedent that the government can regulate the internet. Net neutrality may be well-intentioned (if ill-conceived), but they worry that net neutrality will be just the beginning. Hillary Clinton’s statement that net neutrality is “a foot in the door” plays into that concern.

Now the FCC has re-reclassified the internet as an information service again, as it was until 2015. This makes the FCC’s net neutrality regulation null and void. So what happens now? In the near term, nothing at all. The internet survived without net neutrality until 2015, with very few abuses and nearly all of those quickly corrected by the free market. If an ISP ever tried to block an internet content provider that didn’t pay the ISP (a standard scenario in net neutrality’s parade of potential horribles), they would immediately face the wrath of their consumers, and have to reverse themselves. They know it, so they won’t even try.

In the longer term, it’s hard to say. The business model of Netflix and others, who soak up most of the internet’s bandwidth without paying anything for the infrastructure that makes it possible, may turn out to be unsustainable. If so, something will have to change. The same would have been true with net neutrality. But this is a technical problem, and the repeal of net neutrality means that networking researchers can develop a technical solution. Were net neutrality in play, technical solutions would be banned, so the solution would have to be political. That would mean that rent-seeking, not innovation, would be the future of the internet, and we would all be the worse for it.

UPDATE: Added the AT&T-Facetime affair to the preceding discussion.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The discussion above focuses on policies for choosing packets to drop, but there’s another aspect of network neutrality that I left out: concern that ISPs might block certain services entirely. This too happened once: a small phone company blocked voice over IP in an effort to force customers to pay for phone service. This case runs against my general thesis, because it was the (Bush-era) FCC, not the market, that put a stop to it. (Oddly, the FCC was able to do it at a time when it had no regulatory authority over ISPs at all, which says something about the intimidation powers of federal regulators.) Nevertheless, this is a baldly anti-competitive practice and I think the FTC has the power to address it under existing antitrust rules.

(Previous post.)

If Obama won’t follow his own health care law, he certainly won’t follow his own website privacy policy. I do find it amusing that he uses the same tracking company as YouPorn.com though.

It’s a good thing that Healthcare.gov doesn’t work, because the system is also insecure:

As HealthCare.gov was being developed, crucial tests to ensure the security and privacy of customer information fell behind schedule.

CBS News analysis found that the deadline for final security plans slipped three times from May 6 to July 16. Security assessments to be finished June 7 slid to August 16 and then August 23. The final, required top-to-bottom security tests never got done.

The House Oversight Committee released an Obama administration memo that shows four days before the launch, the government took an unusual step. It granted itself a waiver to launch the website with “a level of uncertainty … deemed as a high (security) risk.”

Agency head Marilyn Tavenner accepted the risk and “mitigation” measures like frequent testing and a dedicated security team. But three other officials signed a statement saying that “does not reduce the risk” of launching October 1.

(Via Hot Air.) In fact, the waiver (as CBS describes it) isn’t even allowed under government rules:

Ultimately, the letter recommended that Tavenner issue an Authority to Operate for six months while security testing continued on the site, which she approved. “This is a temporary Authority to Operate,” Sebelius said as she examined the document during the hearing. . .

Yet Sebelius’s matter-of-fact description of the temporary authorization is a lot different from the 2012 memo from Zients on federal cyber-security.

Page 11 of the Zients memo includes the following section:

Does OMB recognize interim authority to operate for security authorizations?

No. The security authorization process has been required for many years, and it is important to measure the implementation of this process to improve consistency and quality government-wide. Introducing additional inconsistency to the government’s security program would be counter to FISMA’s goals.

(Via Instapundit.) Counter to FISMA’s (the Federal Information Security Management Act) goals perhaps, but essential to the Obama administration’s political goals, and you know which takes priority.

The system’s insecurity isn’t just theoretical either. They’re already finding exploitable security holes.

(Previous post.)

You can finally use electronic devices during all phases of flight.

As a general rule, just don’t believe anything the Obama administration says:

An executive of the largest contractor working on the federal health insurance exchange website told Congress Thursday that problems with erroneous enrollment information being transferred to insurance companies were “isolated” – a claim later echoed by an Obama administration official.

But insurance industry officials have told the Washington Examiner that this is simply not true. The problems – such as duplicate enrollments being sent from the federal system to insurers, incorrect cancellations, and spouses being mixed up as children – were in fact being widely encountered across the insurance industry.

(More on this here.) To be clear, these problems are distinct from the web site being unable to handle more than a handful of applicants at a time. In fact, as we’ve noted, the fact that the web site doesn’t work actually masks this problem; if people can’t sign up, the system doesn’t get much chance to fail. With only a handful able to use the system, they’ve been able to correct the bad data by hand. If they ever get the site to take applications, the problems from its delivering incorrect data to insurers will be huge.

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Healthcare.gov is 500 million lines of code. 500 million! By comparison:

Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be able to fix it really quickly. . .

POSTSCRIPT: The caption is a little inapt, since Healthcare.gov is not actually popular.

(Previous post.) (Via Ed Driscoll.)

A superbly prophetic of prediction of disaster in the Obamacare exchanges.

UPDATE: This quote from Nancy Pelosi:

At a Thursday afternoon press conference, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi was asked by THE WEEKLY STANDARD if Obamacare should be delayed in whole or in part if healthcare.gov still isn’t working in November or December.

“No, no,” Pelosi replied. “It has nothing to do with the programmatic part. It’s about technology.”

is a perfect illustration of Webster’s naive supervisor that sees software development as “a simple matter of programming.”

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I noted on Monday that two major contributing factors to Healthcare.gov’s failure came not from typical government incompetence, but from the Obama administration’s own political malfeasance: (1) They kept systems integration in-house so Republicans couldn’t find out how things were going, and (2) they didn’t want users to find out the actual price of health insurance. In light of that, these stories seem interesting:

The Obama administration has decided to brief Congress on Obamacare’s implementation woes, but only Democrats are invited:

On Wednesday, the administration also sent Mike Hash, who runs the health reform office at Health and Human Services, to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on the law’s implementation.

Only Democrats were invited to that session, prompting protest from House Speaker John Boehner, whose spokesman called it a “snub” and said the administration should brief House Republicans, too.

Then there’s this:

The problems haven’t yet been resolved, but people familiar with the situation said officials are debating whether to replace parts of the registration system this weekend. By Thursday morning, a new tool that allows users to preview plans without registering appeared on the site with little fanfare.

This would allow people to see health insurance prices without giving personal information (thereby loading the system), and consequently would allow people to see the actual prices without a subsidy applied. This would seem to go against the administration’s goals for the system. But in fact:

CBS News has uncovered a serious pricing problem with HealthCare.gov. It stems from the Obama administration’s efforts to improve its health care website. A new online feature can dramatically underestimate the cost of insurance.

The administration announced it would provide a new “shop and browse” feature Sunday, but it’s not giving consumers the real picture. In some cases, people could end up paying double of what they see on the website. . .

Every single page of the new feature warns people that they might be able to get a subsidy, with a big blue box that is often larger than everything else on the page. But even with that, it seems they still don’t want people to know the actual cost.

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The primary contractor for the failed Healthcare.gov web site — the Canadian firm CGI — was hired with a no-bid contract.

Cronyism generally doesn’t surprise me, especially from these guys, but in this case I thought they really did want the system to work!

UPDATE: The senior vice-president at CGI is a college classmate of Michelle Obama.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

The failure of Healthcare.gov comes as no surprise to its hapless developers:

As questions mount over the website’s failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private developers with more expertise.

Project developers who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity — because they feared they would otherwise be fired — said they raised doubts among themselves whether the website could be ready in time. They complained openly to each other about what they considered tight and unrealistic deadlines. One was nearly brought to tears over the stress of finishing on time, one developer said. Website builders saw red flags for months.

Also, they first tested the system just five days before the system launched!

BONUS: It also seems as though some of the somewhat that did work was stolen.

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Obamacare’s apologists have tried to blame Healthcare.gov’s failure on heavy load. We’ve known nearly since the beginning that this wasn’t true. But some new reporting reveals it isn’t even remotely close to true:

Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.

Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead.

When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.

The system can’t even handle a few hundred simultaneous users. A few hundred!

Moreover, although the load was somewhat high (but not all that high) during the first couple of days when people were trying the system out of curiosity (indeed, I tried it myself), it’s much lower now:

The number of visitors to the federal government’s HealthCare.gov Web site plummeted 88 percent between Oct. 1 and Oct. 13, according to a new analysis of America’s online use, while less than half of 1 percent of the site’s visitors successfully enrolled for health insurance the first week.

(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)

Yuval Levin’s heavily reported piece on the state of the Obamacare exchanges must be read in its entirety. They are, he reports, an utter disaster. Government officials are in “a kind of restrained panic”, while among insurance industry people “there was much less restraint”. No one believes that the system can be fixed in time, and the need for some sort of delay is taken as granted.

One serious problem that has not been widely circulated is the fact that it is not impossible to use the system, just extremely difficult. This makes for a severe problem with adverse selection. It means that those who do use the system will be those who are most motivated; that is, the most expensive people. On the contrary, the purpose of the exchanges was to get a lot of cheap people into the system, so that they would subsidize the sick and infirm. If only the sick and infirm are getting it, it could bring health insurers down.

Another problem is that the back-end of the system — which reports data to health insurers — doesn’t work either. (More on that here.) This has been largely masked by the fact that hardly anyone has been able to use the system anyway, but if they manage to fix the front-end, this will be a severe problem. Levin reports that it doesn’t seem easy to fix:

CMS officials and the large insurers thought at first that the garbled data being automatically sent to insurers must be a function of some very simple problems of format incompatibility between the government and insurer systems, but that now seems not to be the case, and the problem appears to be deeper and harder to resolve. It is a very high priority problem, because the system will not be able to function if the insurers cannot have some confidence about the data they receive. At this point, insurers are trying to work through the data manually, because the volume of enrollments is very, very low.

Levin also reports that while some of the state exchanges work on the front-end, they all have problems on the back-end.

POSTSCRIPT: Megan McArdle adds a few more ways in which Healthcare.gov is worse than you think. One of them is this: The White House says you can always register by phone if the web site isn’t working, and there’s a prominent “apply by phone” button on the web page now, but you can’t really. The people at the call center use the same computer system as the web site. And that’s if you actually get to talk to a human; most people get referred back to the web site.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: The actual Obamacare phone number is 1-800-F1UCK-YO. Well, at least they made it easy to remember.

(Previous post.)

I have been enjoying the catastrophe that is the Obamacare rollout, of course. But beyond pure schadenfreude, it’s really interesting how the catastrophe came to be. The Obamacare web site goes beyond garden-variety government incompetence. It was the Obama administration’s own political malfeasance that brought about the disaster:

First, out of purely political considerations, the administration delayed issuing key rules:

To avoid giving ammunition to Republicans opposed to the project, the administration put off issuing several major rules until after last November’s elections. . .

The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process.

Second, the Obama administration’s deliberate lack of transparency was a key factor in the site not working. Consider this astonishing report:

As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.

They were still changing the fundamental design just a couple of weeks before the site launched! As it turns out the design point they were changing is key to why the system failed. The site won’t tell you anything at all without you providing personal information, which means that it cannot passively serve any pages other than the front page itself. In order to use the site at all, you need to put a heavy load on the system.

Why would they use such a manifestly foolish design? Political considerations:

“Healthcare.gov was initially going to include an option to browse before registering,” report Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in the Wall Street Journal. “But that tool was delayed, people familiar with the situation said.” Why was it delayed? “An HHS spokeswoman said the agency wanted to ensure that users were aware of their eligibility for subsidies that could help pay for coverage, before they started seeing the prices of policies.”

The Obama administration does not want people to see the true cost of health insurance on the exchanges, they only want them to see the prices after subsidy. And as a direct consequence of their concealment of Obamacare’s true cost, the system doesn’t work. It’s poetic justice. (Except that the public are the ones who are ultimately punished.)

(UPDATE: More on this issue here.)

But wait, there’s more!

Third, the contractors who were hired to implement the system were selected not on the basis of IT experience, but out of political considerations. Most of the contractors were Beltway bandits, notable mainly for their lobbying prowess. The firm that did the site’s visual design was founded by the design manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. But of greatest significance is the system integrator. They didn’t have one:

One highly unusual decision, reached early in the project, proved critical: the Medicare and Medicaid agency assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor.

Some people intimately involved in the project seriously doubted that the agency had the in-house capability to handle such a mammoth technical task of software engineering while simultaneously supervising 55 contractors. An internal government progress report in September 2011 identified a lack of employees “to manage the multiple activities and contractors happening concurrently” as a “major risk” to the whole project.

While some branches of the military have large software engineering departments capable of acting as the so-called system integrator, often on medium-size weapons projects, the rest of the federal government typically does not . . .

Why did they make such an unusual and ultimately disastrous decision? They were concerned that if they hired an outside contractor, Republicans might be able to subpoena information on the process:

Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Note that voluntarily sharing information with Congress was out of the question; they were concerned with fighting subpoenas. And that lack of transparency directly contributed to the project’s failure.

Fourth, the administration wants to blame a lack of funds for the disaster:

Dr. Donald M. Berwick, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2010 and 2011, said the time and budgetary pressures were a constant worry. “The staff was heroic and dedicated, but we did not have enough money, and we all knew that,” he said in an interview on Friday.

That’s pretty silly, since the cost overruns were astronomical; they ended up spending over half a billion dollars building the system. But let’s suppose we take it seriously. This is intended as an indictment of Republicans, who obviously weren’t going to appropriate any additional funds for Obamacare. On the contrary, to the extent to which it’s true at all, it’s an indictment of the administration.

They want you to forget that when Democrats rammed this turkey down our throats, they included a billion-dollar slush fund for Obamacare’s implementation. They had plenty of money, but they blew it on who-knows-what? (Literally. $67 million of it is simply missing.) After spending half a billion on the site, and blowing the billion-dollar slush fund, they now have the chutzpah to claim they didn’t have enough money.

In summary, Obamacare is failing not just because of government incompetence. It is failing because the Obama administration, for all of its determination to keep Obamacare in place, has priorities other than actually making it work.

(Previous post.)

CNN has been trying to use the Obamacare web site for two weeks now, to no avail. Never mind signing up for health care, their reporter can’t even set up an account:

Of particular note, their reporter tried at all times of day, including during the middle of the night.

(Previous post.)

The Obamacare web site, which still doesn’t work, cost a reported $634 million to build. (Another report put the cost at a mere $515 million.) CGI Federal, the Canadian contractor that built the site, originally won the contract with a $94 million bid.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

The Obama administration admits that the exchange system is broken, and not just suffering under unexpectedly heavy load.

Democrats will surely claim (if they ever even get asked) that the failure is somehow the GOP’s fault. Megan McArdle prebuts that narrative. The real problem is that the Democrats who crafted the law thought that they could bring a working exchange system into being, on an extraordinarily aggressive timetable, simply by decreeing it would happen. In the real world, “you can’t just order, ‘Make it so!’”

(Previous post.)

More explanation of why the Obamacare exchanges melted down. As I speculated, it doesn’t appear to be excessive load:

One possible cause of the problems is that hitting “apply” on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user’s computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. . .

“They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time,” Hancock said.

He said because so much traffic was going back and forth between the users’ computers and the server hosting the government website, it was as if the system was attacking itself.

Hancock described the situation as similar to what happens when hackers conduct a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack on a website: they get large numbers of computers to simultaneously request information from the server that runs a website, overwhelming it and causing it to crash or otherwise stumble. “The site basically DDOS’d itself,” he said.

If this is true, the problem isn’t going to go away quickly as load lessens. It’s going to need a reimplementation, which will take time.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: Down for repairs. Take your time, guys.

It’s not load that’s causing the Obamcare exchanges not to work, it’s bad design:

Load problems could explain servers hanging in California and New York … but the drop-downs? The standard explanation for this is “high load,” but high server loads don’t cause your security dropboxes to empty out.

“The drop-down thing is mystifying,” he told me. If federal exchanges decided to populate the security question fields by calling up a list of possible questions from another server — one that didn’t have a lot of capacity — then that might be causing the sign-up process to stall at that step. For an application that expects a lot of traffic, this is a very bad idea. . .

Why would they use such a seemingly obvious poor design?

“It can be easier to make a call to another server to get something when you need it than to implement a cache that you prepopulate either from static files or from the database on startup. Making a call to another server is also something you’d naturally think to do if you hadn’t had to focus on scalability before. The security question page is probably not the thing you’re most concerned about, so you give it to the new hire to do as their starter project. They don’t know what they’re doing, so they implement it the straightforward way … and since you’re under unbelievable deadline pressure to get something working now nobody reviews it in detail.”

(Emphasis mine.)

The load they are getting isn’t all that much. Just one order of magnitude more than a prominent blog.

(Previous post.)

The Obamacare spin this morning was about how the new exchanges melted down because of intense consumer interest. But when the statistics become known (if they ever do), I think we will learn that the traffic was well within the range that a competently constructed system can handle.

The exchanges don’t work because their designers entirely neglected the problem of their implementation. They thought it was sufficient simply to decree that the exchanges would exist.

UPDATE: More here.

Another new technology for nuclear reactors is reaching maturity: the molten-salt reactor. One important aspect of the design is it’s “walk-away safe”. That means it doesn’t require any power to remain safe; you can walk away from it and it will safely coast to a halt.

A company says it’s ready to commercialize the design. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, government is in the way:

Bringing the new reactor to market will be challenging. Although the basic idea of a molten-salt reactor has been demonstrated, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s certification process is set up around light-water reactors. The company will need the NRC to establish new regulations, especially since the commission must sign off on the idea of using less steel and concrete if the design’s safety features are to lead to real savings.

Why does the left oppose nutrition for children?

Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. . .

Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”

Glenn Reynolds adds:

For all the claims of “murder” thrown at the NRA over its policy arguments, the usual suspects are much quieter on this subject, where the connection between policy-advocacy and dead children is much clearer.

Indeed, for some perspective, consider this: 8 million children over 12 years works out to four Sandy Hook massacres every hour of every day for over a decade. Why isn’t the president surrounding himself with children and demanding golden rice?

Remember when officials use to cover up reports in order to hide dangers? That’s old school. Today, they cover-up reports showing that industries are safe:

Thanks to a leak from an anonymous insider, we learned Thursday that a report commissioned by the State of New York has given fracking a clean bill of health. The insider “did not think it should be kept secret” and released the document, which is now nearly one year old, to the New York Times, which reported:

The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York.

The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others…[that] delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.”…[It] concludes that fracking can be done safely.

The analysis and other health assessments have been closely guarded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration as the governor weighs whether to approve fracking.

(Via Instapundit.)

Of course, covering up the report is a last resort. It’s preferable to falsify the tests, like the EPA is doing.

Why are they doing this? Possibly they believe that fracking is dangerous, despite the scientific consensus. (I believe that’s called being “anti-science”.) More likely, they’re just on the take, like Matt Damon and Al Gore.

Facebook has apologized for censoring a anti-Obama Facebook post. It’s good that they apologized, as far as it goes, but that’s not far. Without explaining how it happened, their apology rings hollow. In particular, I’d like to hear what role the Obama campaign had in the censorship; they have a history of calling for their opponents to be censored.

More generally, however, this incident (and others like it) show the weakness of proprietary social networks for free speech. When you own the medium (say, on your own blog) you can say what you want. When someone else owns it, they can shut you down. Even if they have a policy of allowing free speech, they can renege on that policy at the very moment you’re most interested in speaking, such as just before an election.

The Senate wants every car to contain a “black box” that records its driving “event data”. Even if you don’t see this as sinister, it certainly seems unwise, as the law would essentially require the black box to be accessible to hackers.

You knew this day was coming:

Hacked DC School Board E-Voting Elects Bender President . . .

Within hours of examining the Ruby on Rails software build that constituted the voting system, Halderman’s team discovered a shell injection vulnerability, allowing them to alter an images directory on the compromised server as well as change outputs, and had guessed the admin login for the terminal server (hint: both the name and password were ADMIN).

From there, the team found vulnerabilities in the system controlling the server farm’s security camera’s, which allowed them to time attacks when nobody was around to notice the extra activity. Best of all, the team found a PDF containing authentication codes for every DC voter—you know, the ones voters use to prevent electoral fraud and prove their identities.

With this data, the team was able to change every ballot to a vote, not for any of the actual candidates, but a write-in for a fictional IT entity with Bender edging out Skynet in his political debut. Their control was so complete that even if new ballots were generated, they too would vote Bender.

Electronic voting is simply a bad idea.

Forbes reports:

A special board formed to advise the federal government on the clash between Global Positioning System receivers and LightSquared’s proposed cellular/satellite communications network has concluded there are “no practical solutions or mitigations” that would allow the two to coexist on adjacent segments of the radio spectrum.

The National Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Committee, in a letter released this afternoon, said it had reached the “unanimous conclusion” that the LightSquared network would “cause harmful interference to many GPS receivers” as well as a GPS-powered ground-alert system overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Based upon this testing an analysis, there appear to be no practical solutions or mitigations that would permit the LightSquared broadband service, as proposed, to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS. As a result, no additional testing is warranted at this time.”

Recall that LightSquared’s business strategy is based not on new technology, but on using its political connections to obtain a competitive advantage. That’s why they aren’t giving up despite all the technical findings against them: they think their politicians still might prevail.

(Previous post.)

Content creators have a legitimate interest in protecting their property. With the break-the-internet bills hopefully going to defeat, is there another, better way to do it?

ASIDE: Some have said that Hollywood and its ilk are liberal institutions and we should let them swing in the wind. I despise that bunch as much as anyone, and yes, I know that that is exactly how the Democratic party operates, but I don’t think we should stoop to that kind of Chicago-style politics. The right thing to do is the right thing to do, even if it benefits Hollywood.

Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) OPEN bill might be right way to do it. I can’t speak to all the details, but the basic concept seems workable: Rather than censor the Internet, OPEN would go after the finances that make piracy profitable.

What makes this attractive to me is that is puts the solution in the same space as the problem. The Internet is not broken; it is a tool for transmitting data and it works well. Content piracy is a financial problem and the solution should be situated in that space.

And if Hollywood isn’t satisfied with that, they can swing in the wind.

OWS Exposed is a new web site that exposes the nature and misconduct of the Occupy Wall Street protests. It was immediately subjected to a denial of service attack. When it got back up, its servers were hacked, redirecting readers to 127.0.0.1. (I saw this myself.) It’s finally up and running now.

All of which tells us something about the supporters of Occupy Wall Street, without even going to the site.

In a change of policy, Google will no longer give the same discounts to churches that it gives to other non-profits.

The Protect IP bill is a terrible idea and it needs to go away. It would allow the government to shut down web sites without any due process, and it would break the Internet for good measure. In short, this thing is a dream for tyrants. Kill it.

The Boston Herald reports:

President Obama could soon have the ability to personally text message every single cell-phone-toting American -— whether they like it or not — with “critical emergency alerts” under a new federal program that civil libertarians and political opponents say is a Big Brother-like intrusion posing a high risk of political abuse.

Federal officials in New York yesterday unveiled the three-tiered emergency alert system that would blast messages about Amber Alerts, impending weather disasters and terror threats to mobile devices.

Cell-phone users could opt out of most alerts if they want to, but not the texter-in-chief’s presidential pages.

“It’s like the state rep sending out mailings about how wonderful they are,” said Tad Kasperowicz of the Quincy Tea Party. “President Obama says,’Here come the high winds and the thunderstorms’ and it’s not really an emergency, but, hey, he gets his name out to every cell phone in the area. I can see that. Absolutely. There’s potential for abuse there.”

Potential? I’d say near-certainty. Politicians already exploit every avenue they can find to get their names in front of you, from Congress’s franking privileges to governors stamping their name on billboards at every entrance to the state. Of course they will abuse this, but they’ve never had such an invasive tool before.

(Via Instapundit.)

The European Union wants to improve your privacy, but there’s a little problem:

The commission said consumers should be informed “in a clear and transparent way” about how their data will be used. They should also have the right to fully delete digital information, like social networking profiles, and should be informed when their data has been used in unlawful ways, the commission added.

What is this “full delete” of which they speak?

I guess I hadn’t been paying attention. I’ve been hearing people talk about a proposed Internet kill switch, but I assumed that it was either hyperbole or a fringe proposal. Nope. This is an actual bill proposed by Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Susan Collins (RINO-ME).

Its supporters defend it thus:

Proponents of the bill say it is narrowly crafted and does not intend to limit speech but to eliminate the vulnerability of critical systems such as banks, the power grid and telecommunications from attacks by terrorists or agents of hostile countries.

Indeed, the bill specifically does not grant the president power to act unless a cyberattack threatens to cause more than $25 billion in damages in a year, kill more than 2,500 people or force mass evacuations. The president would have the ability to pinpoint what to clamp down on without causing economic damage to U.S. interests, for anywhere from 30 to 120 days with the approval of Congress, according to the bill.

“This is not Big Brother,” says Tom Kellermann, vice president of security awareness at Core Security Technologies, and a former security expert for the World Bank. “It’s not about shutting off the Internet, but taking a scalpel to command control to key services to protect them.”

Call me unreassured. Who issues the finding that one of this parade of horribles is going to happen, thereby allowing the president to shut down the Internet? The president, of course. The bill specifically prohibits judicial review, and the Congress merely has to be notified. So the limitations are meaningless.

Remember that the Democrats have made it clear that they believe that Sarah Palin can singlehandedly instigate a mass shooting merely by posting a web page calling for the defeat of some Democrats. Against that backdrop, it’s very easy to imagine a Democratic president deciding that Republicans communicating on the Internet are going to cause mass casualties.

Worse still, the proposal is not really for a nationwide kill switch. Such an extreme power could be used only in a legitimate emergency. Instead, the proposal would give the president a “scalpel”, with the power “to pinpoint what to clamp down on.” The president can easily choose precisely who to silence without inconveniencing the general public.

But the president would never do such a thing, right? Wrong. The administration is already shutting down tens of thousands of domains, without any due process at all, for literally no reason other than its confusion about how the Internet works.

Neither is the limitation of the power to dealing with “cyberattack” likely to be any protection. We have seen many times before how racketeering and money-laundering laws have been creatively interpreted to prosecute political activity, and that was with the approval of the courts. Here, the power of creative interpretation would lie with the same person who would exercise the power (remember, no judicial review). That’s no protection at all.

This proposal needs to be soundly defeated.

A number of network neutrality advocates are coming out against the FCC chairman’s plan to impose network neutrality despite a court ruling forbidding it.

I don’t understand it (the article doesn’t provide much detail), but I’m glad to see it.

(Previous post.)

Fox News reports:

The Obama administration is developing plans that would require all Internet-based communication services — such as encrypted BlackBerry e-mail, Facebook, and Skype — to be capable of complying with federal wiretap orders, according to a report published Monday.

This may or may not be a good idea (I think not), but of one thing you may be sure: If this were President Bush’s proposal, the left (in which I include the mainstream media) would be going beserk. There would not be enough trees for all the editorials the New York Times would write.

Listen: crickets!

Popular Mechanics: Compact fluorescent bulbs just aren’t very good, and LED bulbs are $30-$50 each. Soon they will be mandatory, though. So when is the right time to start hoarding incandescent bulbs?

The Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. . .

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

Of course, the government can already demand to know who you are talking to on the phone. That’s troubling, to be sure, but at least there is a limit to what they can learn from that, because there is a sharp distinction between the phone number and the content of the call. For electronic communications, such a distinction is very hard to maintain. For many communications (e.g., web browsing, or friend requests), the recipient of the message is the entire substance of the message.

Will those on the left who condemned the Bush administration’s policy on phone records step up to condemn this far-worse overreach? We will see who was honest, and who was just scoring political points.

(Via Hot Air.)