Tag: politics

Decisions are made by those who show up

June 16, 2015 10:30 am

The article “Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup” was published yesterday over at fastcompany.com.  It discusses the U.S. Digital Service as well as 18F and the effort to bring government tech into the 21st century.  When these stories post I oftentimes take a look at the comment threads on common tech watering holes like Slashdot and HackerNews.  Generally speaking, Slashdot comment threads are rather cynical while HackerNews tends to be more optimistic, but overall it provides some kind of view into how the greater tech world is responding.  So I was surprised at the amount of cynicism expressed in the comments on HackerNews on this article.

Now, I tend to be fairly cynical, the only negative remark on my annual performance appraisals has always been that I should try to be less cynical.  (Personally, I think my cynicism has helped make our team successful, but I digress…) While I may be somewhat cynical, I’m also on the inside of government work.  I know my team members and their skills.  I know the mission space my software is used in.  And I know my background and motivations.

I understand feeling that nothing in government could really be improved so this whole thing must be nothing more than a PR campaign.  It’s not.  This is possibly the first genuine attempt at meaningfully improving government tech services ever.  And there are more people pushing for it than just those in the U.S.D.S. or 18F.

I’m reminded of a quote from The West Wing: “Decisions are made by those who show up.”

The government isn’t just another corporation out to make a profit.  It is the thing which makes our country more than some lines on a map.  If it’s not working the way you want it to then you have two choices: whine and complain on the Internet about how broken it is or show up and do something about it.

torbakhopper via Flickr - Creative Commons Licensed
torbakhopper via Flickr – Creative Commons Licensed

The government is likely to continue to exist for some time to come*.  If we’re not trying to make it better then it’s not going to get better.  If you know me well you know I am not Mr. Patriotic, and in fact I find patriotism dangerous as it is often used to stifle dissent.  This isn’t about being patriotic or that somehow the U.S. is better than other countries.  This is about the U.S. government being our government.  And it was created upon the idea that the citizens should have some say in how their government operates.

For years technology in government has fallen behind due to thousands of qualified techies deciding they would rather chase piles of money by selling ads and shiny, metal gadgets than trying to make the government better.  And I get that it’s not just about the money. Fighting bureaucracy is hard and exhausting.

But if we don’t fight it then it’s only going to get worse.  And we can change it.  I have changed my small corner of it.

When I started in my job 6 years ago the source code for this group was stored in an ancient deployment of SVN, the applications were built on homegrown J2EE frameworks with no documentation, missing source code, years behind industry best practices, and with release cycles measured in months.  The code was like spaghetti, it barely functioned, and the intended users hated it.  They disliked it so much that they continued throwing their data into Excel to avoid using the custom software which was supposed to be more useful than Excel.  There was no reason for it but culture and lack of energy to fight for change.

When I joined, the existing software group had disbanded.  I still haven’t gotten a full story about what happened, but on my first day on the job the “team” consisted of myself, a database administrator, and a team manager.  Seeing the catastrophe of code that was in front of me I pushed on the manager to let me build a prototype using a modern framework (what did we have to lose, after all?).  It was a smash success and that prototype grew to become one of our core applications.

Now, with the help of willing managers and with our tiny team of software developers (just me, then 2, then 4, now ~7) we’ve made massive changes.  We use Git for our version control, we build our applications on popular open-source frameworks and libraries, we follow industry best practices as much as possible, our release cycles are measured in weeks and sometimes days.  Our users love the software and constantly ask for more advanced tools.  Our management estimates our technology environment to be at least a year ahead of any other organization in our mission space, we have saved the government millions of dollars, and we have saved lives.

Fighting the bureaucracy is hard.  Some days you think it would just be easier to give in.  It would be easier to give in.  But then nothing gets better.

We have enough work to keep a team twice our size busy but we can’t find qualified people to fill the positions.  If the qualified people choose money over service then government technology will continue to suffer.

Our government is what we make of it and the decisions are made by those who show up.

So show up.

“Discomfort” or Torture?

December 9, 2014 7:55 pm

Former Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin tells NPR, “We may have made a few terrorists uncomfortable for a short period of time in order to get information that we felt was essential to protecting the United States.”

By which he means:

In November 2002, a detainee died from hypothermia after he was held “partially nude and chained to a concrete floor.”

Some detainees were kept awake for up to 180 hours, “usually standing or in painful stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.”

Some naked detainees were “hooded and dragged up and down corridors while being slapped and punched.”

“At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal feeding’ or ‘rectal hydration’ without documented medical need.”

Detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.

The CIA may have waterboarded more than the three detainees it said it waterboarded.

…chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.

Multiple CIA detainees subjected to the techniques suffered from hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia and tried to mutilate themselves.

…became completely unresponsive after a period of intense waterboarding.

At least 26 were held “wrongfully,” partly because there was no information to justify their detention.

The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting.

Detainees were often held down, naked, on a tarp on the floor, with the tarp pulled up around them to form a makeshift tub, while cold or refrigerated water was poured on them.

Others were hosed down repeatedly while they were shackled naked, in the standing sleep deprivation position.

…the CIA instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take “precedence” over his medical care.

CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families—to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to “cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat.”

Quotes from NPR, CNN, and SF Chronicle articles; and from the document itself.

And it goes on and on and on and on….

Is this what you consider acceptable treatment of prisoners?  Would we ever accept this if done to U.S. military personnel?  Is this simply making them uncomfortable?  How could anyone read those descriptions and say all we did was, “made a few terrorists uncomfortable.”?

Torture – Not In My Name

4:06 pm

Having just finished my graduate course on terrorism the release of the summary of the report regarding the CIA’s interrogation activities is particularly interesting to me.  [NPR coverage here.]

A lot of words have been written about whether the treatment of prisoners was “technically torture.”  First, I think it should be seen as a clear sign that you’re doing something wrong when you have to spend that much energy arguing over whether something is technically torture or not.  If the best you can do to defend your actions is to say “it wasn’t ‘technically’ torture, so it was okay” then you’re doing something wrong.

Second, instead of spending pages and pages (as the Department of Justice did) analyzing the legal definition of torture and whether you’ve violated it; let’s use a much easier route.  Sample the population and describe the actions as having been committed against U.S. civilians captured by, let’s say, North Korea.  If we consider it torture for North Korea to do that to our citizens then it’s torture for us to do it to anybody else.

The argument then usually falls back to, “well, so what if it was torture, we needed the intel it resulted in.”  Despite this being a highly disputed claim (especially within the new report) it’s irrelevant.  Torture is wrong.  Efficacy does not matter.  Why?  Why is torture wrong?  The simplest argument is that it’s wrong for the same reason that capital punishment is wrong.  At some point you’re going to do it to someone who is completely innocent and there’s no taking it back.  But it’s wrong beyond that.  It’d be wrong even if you absolutely knew without any doubt whatsoever that the victim was guilty.  Despite the copious quantities of evidence that torture probably doesn’t work, results in backlash, alienates allies, and radicalizes enemies we need no data points here.  This is moral conviction.  Treating another conscious, living thing that way is wrong.

The only thing I find more disgusting than the fact that these actions were carried out in our names is that no one will be held accountable for it.  No one has been or ever will be charged with violating human rights or international conventions.  They did these disgusting things and told the world they did it for us.  Your name, my name, my daughter’s name, our flag, our country have been slapped on the use of torture claiming “We Approve!”

I do not approve.

It was wrong.

We as a country need to change.  We need to apologize to the victims and their families.  Yes, even though the prisoners most likely were awful people, what we did was unacceptable.  The idea that the victim was a bad person does not excuse mistreating them.  We need to do something to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  We need to show why the United States is better than a terrorist organization, not stoop to their level.  If we’re going to claim to stand for freedom and justice then we need to actually practice what we preach.

We need to be better.

2011 Reith Lectures – Securing Freedom

November 1, 2014 1:35 pm

p01h6bc5We were asked to listen to Eliza Manningham-Buller’s 3-part lecture series titled “Securing Freedom” as part of the terrorism course I’m taking right now.  She’s a former head of MI5 (the U.K.’s FBI, more or less).  Her talks were given as part of the 2011 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4.  It’s a fantastic set of talks.

You can listen to or read them on the BBC Radio 4 website:
Listen Online: Part 1 – Terror, Part 2 – Security, Part 3 – Freedom
Download (MP3s): Part 1 – Terror, Part2 – Security, Part 3 – Freedom
Read (PDFs): Part 1 – Terror, Part 2 – Security, Part 3 – Freedom

She joined MI5 in 1974 and was Director General from 2002 to 2007.  She knows the goings on of terrorism.  She lived and worked in that world for over 30 years.   Here positions and opinions have been thoughtfully cultivated during that career.  A career in an organization that has been trying to grapple with terrorism for decades and has learned a great deal that the U.S. has chosen to ignore.

She presents an incredibly well spoken, calm, rational discussion on terrorism.  There are some minor aspects of her talks that I disagree with, but even so I think she gives voice to a levelheadedness the world has been lacking.

I think the U.S. would be in a better place in terms of national security, civil rights, and human rights if we had some people like her over here running things.

I think her biggest point of departure from U.S. rhetoric is the acceptance that you can’t solve terrorism with the military alone.  You can’t shoot your way to peace unless you’re willing to shoot every man, woman, and child who might ever disagree with you.  And I’m not suggesting that we should do so.  You have to make some effort at resolving the underlying dispute that has given rise to the violence.  And I can already hear the disgusted remarks about how we don’t negotiate with terrorists.  Which is the point.  If you don’t you will never have peace.  Negotiation doesn’t necessarily mean sitting down at a table and signing a peace treaty.  But it should mean addressing root causes and trying to make potential terrorists feel like such actions are unnecessary.

I appreciate her adamant position that torture is unacceptable regardless of its efficacy simply because it is wrong to do that to another person.  And, yes, sadly this means sometimes innocent people may be injured or killed.  That’s the price a nation must pay in order to uphold the belief that all persons have a right to humane treatment.

I especially liked her discussion about how an intelligence organization can operate effectively in balance with civil rights.  There is a need for oversight and perhaps you shouldn’t give intelligence organizations arrest and detainment capabilities.  Holding people in prison indefinitely with no trial, as the U.S. has done to hundreds at Guantanamo Bay, is a massive breach of civil rights and the rule of law.  If the rule of law is broken then you erode faith that the system works.  If you don’t believe the system works then you become incentivized to operate outside the system.  The rule of law is what prevents civilized societies from devolving into violence and anarchy.

If you have some time, read the lectures.  I listened to them while driving to and form work for the last few days.

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.