Author: Kyle Dickerson

I feel sick

December 14, 2011 8:59 pm

Unnerving many conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, the legislation also would deny suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation’s borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention. House Republican leaders had to tamp down a small revolt among some rank-and-file who sought to delay a vote on the bill. (NPR: House Passes $662B Defense Bill)

While President Bush already took the liberty of stripping U.S. citizens of their rights and denying them trials (e.g. José Padilla).  The government did eventually buckle to public pressure and give Padilla a civilian trial.

This new defense bill officially gives the government/military/president permission to simply disappear U.S. citizens.  When it passes the Senate and gets signed by the President (which everyone says it will), you will be able to be arrested by the military, hauled off to a secret prison, denied a writ of habeas corpus, denied a trial, and left to rot.

You won’t be considered a U.S. citizen, you won’t be a prisoner of war.  You won’t have the protection of the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.  You simply won’t exist.

This is disturbing on so many levels.  This is not what justice looks like.

I’m am stunned at how incredibly far our country has fallen in the last 11 years.  The idea that we stand for freedom and justice is now just a joke.

The bill is essentially repealing the Posse Comitatus Act and paving the way for us to see the U.S. Army being deployed against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.  It may sound like a far off extreme now, but there were reasons laws were put in place to explicitly forbid this type of stuff.

But most people don’t seem to care at all.  The complete misplacement of concerns is frustrating.  People will scream bloody murder about Netflix charging more, or Apple releasing a new product, or how loud commercials on TV are.  But come time for the government to strip you of all judicial protections and the only people complaining are watchdog groups.

It honestly makes me fear for our future as a democratic republic.

Heather At Home

November 1, 2011 9:26 pm

We left the hospital late Monday evening and got home around 11:45.  We put Heather in the Halloween sleeper we bought her for the ride home.  So she still got to wear it on Halloween.  We didn’t get any pictures then due to being exhausted, but we managed to get a lot of sleep last night (Jess got over 3 hours!).

We’ve been using the sleeper again today so we did get some pictures:

IMGP5865 IMGP5866 IMGP5871

And, no, I haven’t shaved since Friday or Saturday.

PaperTrust

October 5, 2011 7:10 pm

So, a while back I blogged an idea I had about cryptographically signing various documents.  I specifically talked about checks, but you can apply the principle anytime you have a fairly small amount of data which is supposed to be issued from a trusted source: cashier’s checks, money orders, driver’s licenses, event tickets, passports, boarding passes, etc.

Well, I spent some time playing around and put together a working example.  It’s not fancy, but it does the job.  It’s been a few months, but it really didn’t take that long.  Especially since I had to do some reading about QR codes and using them, along with public-key cryptography, from Python.  So I had a basic prototype done in about a week.  Then back in August I decided to flesh things out a bit more and produce a nice demo application.  I’m calling the system “PaperTrust” as it allows you to embed the trust element onto the paper item.

Here’s a video demonstration:

Text description of the demo:
So, in my demo, we generate data for a cashier’s check and then sign it using the demo private key.  We stick the signed data (which includes a signing-organization ID) and the signature into a QR code and stick that onto the check and print it.  Now the check is physical and can be carried around as usual.

Now say you’re going to use this check to pay for something from a stranger.  This stranger needs to know they can trust the check.  So they use their verifier application to scan the QR code from your check.  It reads the organization ID, looks up the correct public key for that organization, and verifies that the signature is valid.  It also displays the signed data so the person can compare it to what’s physically printed on the check.  This is a cryptographically secure guarantee that the check is valid (or at worst an exact copy of a real check, which should make tracking down counterfeiters a lot easier).  So you would use this in tandem with traditional anti-forgery measures like watermarks, micro-print, thermal ink, etc.

I’ve put the code up on GitHub: PaperTrust on GitHub.