I apologize for the outage, and thank you for your patience.
The modification times on the entries for March have been fudged somewhat, but I don't know whether you can even see those as a reader, so I won't worry about it. All of my old links should now work, so if you encounter one that doesn't, please let me know!
I've also lost one name that I had added to my blogroll; if you remember who that was, please let me know about that, too.
My mother found some dead lettuce in her refrigerator. "This lettuce is dead", she said. "You had better send it to the Dead Lettuce Office", I said.
In an earlier post, I talked about Zooko's views on pseudonymity and privacy, including the general idea that pseudonymity is quite a lot harder to maintain that cypherpunk privacy enthusiasts originally hoped.
David Weekly sent me a very thoughtful comment on this, with a similar skepticism. David recalls that a friend happened to comment that she kept a journal on-line.
"LiveJournal?" I guessed.
"Yeah," she said, "that's right. But I don't use my name, so people can't find it."
"I can find it in 15 minutes."
[... S]ure enough, I found her pseudonym on LiveJournal in about fifteen minutes. Basically, it's a compression issue. Unless you can assume a very large shared secret codebook (certain "replacement names" for people, a la "C" = Chris the ex, "E" = Elizabeth the roommate, etc.), a certain amount of the keying and introduction has to actually be on the site. For instance, if you went to visit a specific place or had specific new interests, you probably would have to write out those things fully for the blog to be at all useful to your friends.
I would therefore posit that any public blog whose point it is even in part to reveal the life of the underlying person and their experiences is findable in a trivial amount of time, given even only a small amount of knowledge about the person. Public pseudonyms used in anything but the most academic of discussions are quickly discoverable by mentions of facts alone.
Beyond that, of course, there is the issue of "fist". As I'm sure you know, there were code listeners in the UK who would listen to transmissions from German field operators. Without even being able to decode the texts, the listeners were able to uniquely identify specific operators by the patterns of their transmissions. If this applies to banging out dits and dashes, how much more would this apply to style used in writing? Indeed, this is how the Unabomber was found out...the style was Ted Kaczyinski's and Ted's alone. So as long as one writes consistently, or even making use of a consistent set of aphorisms and analogies, one can be uniquely identified.
It's possible that automated tools will be able to scan the Net, matching well-defined personal sites and emails with public pseudonyms. The only real way around this is to either never make one's public persona public or never make the pseudonym public. The former is arguably difficult, save living as a hermit (with an Internet drop) and the latter defeats much of the point of having a pseudonym.
The "fist" idea reminds me of some of David Molnar's research on RFID privacy, where RFIDs that supposedly are privacy-protective may actually divulge persistent tracking information as a result of lower-level protocols (collision-avoidance schemes) that had not been specially designed for privacy protection.
There really is a layer-crossover problem. People rarely go to great lengths to make themselves statistically indistinguishable from other people. A pseudonym that writes only about a single topic (without making reference to life events), as Unlimited Freedom does, is better off, especially if that pseudonym writes only infrequently and at seemingly random times. But that doesn't coincide with the communications habits or preferences of very many people who might want (or think they might want) anonymity or pseudonymity.
There certainly are possibilities for mechanically rewriting texts. A machine can perform certain transformations to ensure consistency (or consistent randomness!) in certain stylistic distinctions, for example "it's" vs. "it is", "don't" vs. "do not", certain cases of passive voice vs. active voice, and so on. Pseudonymous writers should definitely use a spell check if they're not confident about their spelling or typographic abilities. (I think a persistent typo was one of the stylometric tricks that linked up pseudonymous posts in the stylometry paper that the Tor bibliography includes.) But David's observation functions mostly at higher levels, which can't be mechanically rewritten. And I think his observations are dead on with regard to people blogging about their own lives, unless they already belong to a simply vast anonymity set or make very cautious military-censor-like decisions about what they're going to include. Loose lips sink pseudonyms, but most bloggers who discuss their personal lives have nothing if not loose lips...
I visited my elementary school during my vacation last week and was pleased to run into about five of my elementary school teachers. Apparently, it's routine for teachers to teach at the Campus School for over twenty years. I was very excited to see them again and was once again persuaded that the Campus School is a wonderful place.
Various civil liberties attorneys, international visitors, and I made the brief trip two weeks ago over to the main courthouse of the Ninth Circuit in the South of Market Area in San Francisco. It's a beautiful building, and, though I've seen one other argument in the Ninth Circuit at another venue, I had never been inside this courthouse before.
We were there to see the rehearing en banc in Yahoo v. LICRA (more fully, Yahoo, Inc., v. La Ligue Contra Le Racisme et L'Antisemitisme). This is better known as the "Nazi memorabilia auctions" case. Previously, a French court had ruled in favor of student antiracist groups that sued Yahoo in France for permitting Nazi materials on its web sites, including Yahoo Auctions. Yahoo then filed suit in the U.S. to try to block enforcement of that judgment against it here on the grounds that enforcing that decision would violate Yahoo's first amendment rights. Yahoo won that case in the District Court and then lost on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. (The three-judge panel ruled that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over the French groups at this stage because they had not actually tried to enforce the French decision in the U.S.) Yahoo then sought rehearing en banc (before a larger panel of judges of the Ninth Circuit); EFF was amicus in support of Yahoo's rehearing request.
The en banc panel consisted of 11 randomly-selected judges of the Ninth Circuit, who had the power to reverse the earlier decision of three judges of that court. (Interestingly, they also have the power to reverse other earlier published decisions by the Ninth Circuit, something they alluded to during the argument; a Circuit Court sitting en banc is technically bound only by Supreme Court decisions, making it uniquely unconstrained by precedent if it so chooses.)
In theory, a lot of the U.S. case relates to the question of whether suing a U.S. entity abroad, in an effort to intimidate it or change its behavior in the U.S., is enough to give the U.S. entity a right to sue here for a judicial determination of whether its behavior is protected by U.S. law. This is a particular species of the question of when a court will exercise jurisdiction to grant a declaratory judgment, in order to avoid the "sword of Damocles" problem where someone is intimidated by an ongoing threat of a lawsuit.
Oddly, the judges did not seem particularly familiar with the factual history of the case. The lawyers came prepared to argue about jurisdiction, but a huge proportion of the questioning from the court was about specific facts, which ought to have been in the record. I don't think either side was prepared for such extensive factual questioning; I think both sides assumed that the judges would already have read the record of the case.
One of the judges got very upset at Yahoo for having brought the case in the first place, suggesting that Yahoo should not be seeking the right to sell and profit from Nazi memorabilia. He suggested that Yahoo should simply accept that it was wrong to help people trade Nazi objects or ideas, comply with the French judgment, and go home. The other judges mostly seemed to accept the idea that Yahoo did have a first amendment interest at stake, but weren't sure about whether declaratory judgment was appropriate in a situation like this.
One of the oddities of declaratory judgment is that the plaintiff often tries to show that it does have legal risk or exposure (that it is arguably doing something improper and hence is at risk of being sued), whereas the defendant tries to make the case go away by suggesting that it actually has no objection to the plaintiff's behavior. You can ridicule this dynamic as the "I'm a bad guy and you hate me"/"No you're not, and I don't" exchange.
Indeed, Yahoo spent a long time arguing that it was, in fact, flagrantly violating the French court's order, that it had never been in compliance with the French court's order, and that it was incapable of complying with it. It suggested that it was likely to get in plenty of trouble for continually flouting the court order and could be liable for an enormous fine. (Normally you don't hear corporate lawyers go to such great lengths to argue that the corporations are continuing to disobey court orders.) On the other side, LICRA (trying to make the case go away by suggesting that there was no real disagreement) kept arguing that Yahoo actually was complying with the court's order, that Yahoo was at no risk, that Yahoo was already doing the right thing, etc. This was quite a spectacle.
I'm amazed by the non-universalism that everyone in the courtroom (with the possible exception of the judge who criticized Yahoo) displayed. Everyone accepted the idea that France was right to forbid racist advocacy while the U.S. was simultaneously right to permit it, and that neither country ought to be able to do anything to undermine the other's policy. I heard nothing from other side that would have brought this idea into doubt. There was certainly no argument by the lawyers themselves that Nazi auctions were actually good or bad or that censorship of racist advocacy was actually a good or a bad thing. The theory seemed to be "they censor it, we don't, the question here is whether that discrepancy given a particular set of facts will create jurisdiction for a declaratory judgment action". I guess this could be seen as another instance of lawyers' and judges' famous ability to compartmentalize issues.
Several companies were unanimous in their assessment: if you have DSL service in California and want to change the name in which your underlying telephone service is billed, you will have a three-week DSL service outage. This is because of inadequacies in the way the line-sharing between DSL providers and local exchange carriers is set up.
You can't switch phone billing information while line-sharing with a DSL ISP is set up. (Why not?)
So you have to cancel the DSL service. This can be done almost immediately. Then it takes a week for the LEC to be informed that the DSL service has been shut off. (Why?)
Then you have to call the LEC to ask them to change the billing. The LEC will note your request immediately, but it takes a week for the LEC to make the change in its records. (Why?)
Then you have to call the DSL ISP and place a new order for DSL service. You supposedly can't do this inside the week when the LEC is changing its records, because the DSL order might be cancelled automatically if it were still pending when the LEC's internal change took effect. It then takes a week for the DSL ISP to activate your service. (Why?)
Note that the only benefit you get as a result of all these changes is that a single database entry in the phone company's computers has been corrected. But everyone agrees that there is no way that entry can be corrected without a three-week outage. (I don't know if this is true for California ILECs other than SBC.)
Imagine if another utility, like the electric company, had to shut off your service for weeks in order to correct your billing records.
Students can put on great conferences, with cool speakers, and seem especially sensitive to the idea that keeping a conference inexpensive matters. The Bay Area Law School Technology Conference this past weekend was one such; the general admission was only $25, yet the conference was well-organized, interesting, and even eligible for CLE credit. (I wonder how many CLE credits I've accumulated over the years. I was joking at the conference that one could do well financially if a CLE credit trading system were introduced along the lines of pollution credit trading.)
I enjoyed hearing Fred von Lohmann debate opposing counsel from Grokster first thing in the morning. (He had practice with this beforehand when C-SPAN put him up against former Solicitor General Ted Olson a couple of weeks ago.) I also enjoyed Aaron's performance when he was put on a panel between two conservatives (not, fortunately, between two thieves). The moderator of the panel was a ventriloquist, which suggests that, should Aaron ever have occasion to write a political autobiography, he would at least have the title Two Conservatives and a Ventriloquist available for his consideration. You can read the written version of his speech on his web site.
Maybe the most unusual thing at the conference was the opportunity to meet Bill Jolitz, co-author of 386BSD. He suggests that he's writing a book about the experience, which should be very interesting.
There was a fun discussion of EULAs in which Mark Lemley brought up the leather-winged demons of the night and the EULAs that not only prohibit criticism of a product but also claim the end-user's soul. He suggested that EULA practices are undermining important traditions of the law of contract formation and are likely to spoil contract law from within.
The integration of satellite imagery into Google Maps is lots of fun, and lets you do things like follow a familiar drive, walk, or bike ride from above, recognizing landmarks as you go. For example, here's the spot my sister and I wound up on our bike ride together last week.
Later on, I'll post about censorship, transparency, and aerial imagery.
I used to complain about arm injuries a lot. Now I have a new problem; I'm taking some time off of playing Dance Dance Revolution because it's been making my knee hurt. It's wonderful, wonderful exercise, but very high-impact.
If you exercise, or are thinking of taking up something like DDR, please make sure to stretch enough.
The Ninth Circuit doesn't make transcripts of oral arguments available, but it does make audio recordings available. Unfortunately, they're only published in Windows Media format. The recording of the recent en banc argument in Yahoo v. LICRA is available in that format.
Sumana found, and was impressed by, an argument against arguments for gay marriage whose author claims that it isn't quite an argument against gay marriage. Some people, including Sumana, are making much of the fact that this argument was posted by a libertarian blogger. (Their reasons for making much of this are quite varied.) I wanted to point out that, although this argument may have been written by a libertarian blogger, it is a conservative argument, not a libertarian argument. (I know that it's been argued that libertarian arguments are conservative arguments.)
This is recognized enthusiastically by some of the conservative commenters on the post in question, who commend Jane Galt on, well, making a conservative argument. See this example or this example and (sort of) this example from a "moderate" skeptic of libertarianism.
Indeed, Jane Galt herself starts out by saying that this is a conservative argument against liberal and libertarian arguments.
And later on she quotes Chesterton:
But as G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don't see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
Now, of course, this can turn into a sort of precautionary principle that prevents reform from ever happening. That would be bad; all sorts of things need changing all the time, because society and our environment change. But as a matter of principle, it is probably a bad idea to let someone go mucking around with social arrangements, such as the way we treat unwed parenthood, if their idea about that institution is that "it just growed". You don't have to be a rock-ribbed conservative to recognise that there is something of an evolutionary process in society: institutional features are not necessarily the best possible arrangement, but they have been selected for a certain amount of fitness.
This argument is interesting, but it is not a libertarian argument. It is a conservative argument. Libertarian and conservative commenters on this thread are right to agree that it cuts directly against a wide variety of libertarian arguments on a wide variety of issues. If you like this argument, or this style of argument, you like a conservative argument.
There is a disagreement in libertarianism (among the many) between what I might call consequentialist and nonconsequentialist libertarianism. (I was once part of a discussion with Robin Hanson about what to call the ideas on either side of a similar disagreement.) We could also call the nonconsequentialists "radical individualist", "moralist", etc. The nonconsequentialists believe that freedom, as they understand it, is an end in itself, and, if they are honest, should not assume that freedom will necessarily lead to other good things, such as health, happiness, harmony, progress, or whatever. The consequentialists believe or argue that freedom, as they understand it, gets you somewhere, that it works, that it is a way of accomplishing goals for society.
Consequentialist libertarians might start to sympathize with social conservatives, and indeed there is a great deal of consequentialist discussion of family in Jane Galt's post. I have said for years (from since when I was a radical libertarian) that families and the status of children are one of the deepest sources of paradox and internal conflict in libertarianism, and in other kinds of political thought that aspire to radicalism.
Partly, I think this is because most people have experience being somebody's child and being in some kind of family, and they have ideas and attitudes about family that they learned from that experience, and sometimes in opposition to that experience, prior to and apart from any kind of political ideal. So you can see oddities like people who are otherwise radical advocates of free expression -- "for adults" -- simply assuming that children have no independent rights to free speech or access to information.
This is one reason that I was fascinated by George Lakoff's account of political ideas as being informed most by analogies to family life. Unfortunately, Lakoff describes only two ways of thinking about families, and his discussion of why those two ways are the only important ways seems cursory to me. (I think that, in practice, it's because those ways are the most culturally powerful, and because Lakoff, at least, believes that each of those ways is closely associated with one of the two powerful U.S. political parties. If he's right, they are the most important to understand for someone who wants to understand or influence mainstream U.S. politics. But that doesn't mean that they are the only existing or possible ideas.)
Of course, real people (though they may well subscribe to either of Lakoff's "strict father" or "nurturant parent" models) have ideas about families that are more detailed and elaborate than the two approaches Lakoff describes. And political radicals from many points of view do want to change or create alternatives to the family as we think we have known it.
I think consequentialist libertarians may come to think of families in social conservative terms (even if there are arguments that might have lead them in another direction) and may indeed be led to become social conservatives. Families -- inside and outside Lakoff's models -- do seem to be the paramount battleground and the source of paradox, conflict, and anomaly in political ideology.
I'm still having some problems with vitanuova, and they prevented me from posting recently. I apologize for the inconvenience.
I've also been out of town quite a lot, and had less Internet access than normal. I have some notes from which I hope I can describe what I've been up to recently.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
