armchair pundit

As promised. The second article I alluded to in my last post is really a series of articles ars technica ran last month. It’s an absolutely riveting tale of how the CEO of a well-known Internet security firm stirred the wrath of a loose collective of hackers known as “Anonymous” and paid a heavy price.

Anonymous has been around for a while, but if you’re unfamiliar with them (it?), they’re not easy to define. The Wikipedia article on Anonymous refers to them as:

“…representing the concept of many on-line community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures”

This does not exactly roll off the tongue, but the article goes on to explain that this “representation of a concept” evolved into “a decentralized on-line community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self-agreed goal.” Initially, their goal seemed to be entertainment, or the lulz, but more recently the’ve channeled their efforts into various causes. They made a few headlines for example when they launched a DDoS attack against the websites of MasterCard, PayPal and others after those companies terminated their relationships with Wikileaks.

This is when Aaron Barr, CEO of a well-regarded Internet security firm called HBGary, enters the story. A self-described fan of Wikileaks, he nonetheless sensed a business opportunity in the attacks by Anonymous on MasterCard et al. He hypothesized that he could identify the culprits using data from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and he knew this would raise his – and his company’s – profile in the Internet security business.

To test his hypothesis, he went undercover in IRC chat rooms and other places where the denizens of Anonymous are known to travel. Eventually, he thought he identified several of the “top leaders” of Anonymous, and he revealed himself to them in an ill-advised moment of hubris.

This turns out to have been a bad idea. Hours later, his company’s website was wiped out and replaced by this (click to enlarge):

But that’s not all, to put it mildly. Members of Anonymous hacked Barr’s Twitter and Gmail accounts, pilfered the company’s email, purged terabytes of backed-up data and more.

I’m not doing the story justice though. It’s a great read, and a kind of primer of basic hackery. Enjoy…

How One Security Firm Tracked Anonymous and Paid a Heavy Price

Anonymous Speaks: The Inside Story of the HBGary Hack

Virtually Face to Face: When Aaron Barr met Anonymous

Anonymous vs. HBGary: The Aftermath

The latest highly-publicized, hotly-ridiculed move by my adopted city of San Francisco was to ban the Happy Meal. And so once again we have lobbed a softball to conservatives and libertarians across the nation, who relish any opportunity to point west and say, “See? See the nanny state? See those people who are too dumb, or too lazy, to [in this case] decide for themselves what their kids should and shouldn’t eat?”

My libertarian-leaning friends here (yes, even San Francisco has them) were against the Happy Meal ban on principle of course. To them, it represents paternalistic government overreach. I personally dislike the ban because it’s ridiculous and trivial. But regardless of one’s reasons for disliking the ban (I don’t know anyone who supports it), I’m not aware of anyone who cared enough about the issue to take any action opposing it.

The first anti-smoking laws in the U.S. were met with similarly principled but irresolute opposition. More of the same, more recently, with New York City’s ban on trans-fats.

What is it that makes New York and San Francisco so hospitable to these nanny laws? Are we, the citizens of these cities, simply big government liberals by nature? Are we too busy with our fast-paced urban lives to get involved in politics? Are we so affluent and comfortable and free from real suffering that we need to fish for new (non-)problems to solve? Do we not value our individual rights?

Perhaps.

But there are other reasons.

For one thing, there’s no hard line between issues of individual rights and issues of public policy. It’s fuzzy. This is especially true in cities, where day and night we confront the habits and behaviors of our fellow citizens. For example, how do we reconcile one person’s freedom to smoke in public with another person’s freedom to breathe clean air? There are three options: The factions can battle it out every day in the streets. Non-smokers can silently tolerate the dirty air. Or we can ask the state to settle the issue for us and end the war.

We’ve gone with the third option because it actually gives the greatest amount of freedom to the greatest number of people. The factions are freed from daily battles with each other, and non-smokers are free to breathe clean air. The only losers are the smokers. To put it more simply, anti-smoking laws succeed in cities because most people are non-smokers. A single smoldering cigarette stirs the ire of a hundred non-smokers in its vicinity. Even people who believe on principle that a man should be free to smoke anywhere he wants are annoyed when he lights up beside them, so the principle is not enough to motivate them to oppose the anti-smoking law. People gripe about the nanny state while they enjoy the cleaner air.

Some issues are not so tangible. How, for example, do we reconcile a person’s right to drive without wearing a seatbelt with everyone else’s right not to pay that person’s emergency bill? Hardcore libertarians might wonder why we can’t have both. But how would this play out? At the crash scene, should the person calling 911 check to see who was wearing a seatbelt and who wasn’t, then look into each victims’ ability to pay, so that the ambulance knows whether to respond, whom to treat? The American obesity epidemic, and all the accompanying cases of diabetes, heart disease, etc. raises similar questions.

If we want to minimize our contribution to other people’s hospital bills – for trauma or diabetes – then one option is to make it costlier for people to drive without seatbelts and eat unhealthy fast food.

But the people still ask themselves, “What will they ban next?” They think, “this is facism!” while also thinking, “well, I try to avoid trans fats anyway, and at least now I don’t have to wonder about my restaurant order” and “I can’t remember the last time I bought a Happy Meal.” Again, the principle alone is not enough to start the revolution, because it turns out people don’t like trans-fats, and they don’t care about Happy Meals. But they continue to fret about the “next” crazy law, letting their imaginations run to logical extremes. “Where will they draw the line?” the people ask.

Eventually, there it is. The line. Someone proposes a law that actually goes too far, and the people rise up in sufficient numbers to strike it down. This is the difference between how much government the people say they want and how much they actually want.

This doesn’t mean the Happy Meal law is a good idea, but is it fascism if no one cares?

Things are ugly right now.

After the healthcare bill passed, we all heard how a few so-called tea baggers hurled racial slurs and other insults at Democratic lawmakers, broke windows of party offices and engaged in other such foolery.

Yesterday, I saw Mitt Romney’s new book on display in Borders. It’s called “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” – an obvious swipe at Obama liberals for acting as if the United States is something short of infallible.

Glenn Beck absurdly compares progressives to Hitler and Stalin, and warns us that universal healthcare will take us down a slippery slope to tyranny.

On the other side, countless voices on the left dismiss the tea baggers entirely as the wingnut fringe and draw as much attention as they can to the most outrageous, classless antics of its most extreme members.

When Bush was president, the left portrayed him as an idiot, a manchild, a cowboy. Cheney was Darth Vader. They and their cohorts were bent on destroying everything America stands for. The Bush Administration and their supporters in turn portrayed the left as unpatriotic, soft, weak, elitist.

I admit I’m pretty squarely on one side of this ideological divide, but I’m tired of all of it.

For a decade now, we’ve all been fooled and misled into hating each other. Kids in their teens and twenties must think America has always been this divided, this polarized, and that’s sad.

The saddest thing is how it distracts us from all the things we have in common.

The tea-baggers are mad at the government, whom they perceive has been bought by Wall Street. The anger over the healthcare bill is about money (unemployment, the deficit), and it can be seen as a proxy for their anger at Wall Street – whose robber barons broke the economy, stole from the American people and then walked away richer than before. But guess what? Progressives are mad at Wall Street too. So why are we attacking each other? Wall Street must love watching us fight amongst ourselves. They could not have engineered a situation that better enables them to keep on doing what they’re doing to us – or maybe that’s exactly what’s going on. Either way, I really don’t want to let them win.

As much as it pains me not to argue with climate change deniers, Sarah Palin lovers and Fox News watchers, I hereby call for a truce. We will continue to disagree about global warming, same-sex marriage, Sarah Palin, President Obama and a host of other things. One side will make a little headway, then the other. What little progress is made by either side will be so full of compromises that it won’t satisfy anyone.

Conservatives don’t think we should all pay hundreds of billions of dollars for universal healthcare. Liberals don’t want to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to wage war in Iraq. How about we call it even now and agree that we’ve all been screwed.

Let’s not let our disagreements stop us from making real progress in the areas where we agree. Like Wall Street. Congress is finally getting ready to debate legislation to regulate the financial industry. Let’s pay attention to this, and let’s refuse to allow the political parties, the media pundits and the lobbyists pit us against each other. Let’s not blindly listen to supposed experts whose impassioned arguments invent an enemy – a “them” – that isn’t Wall Street itself. Let’s think critically for ourselves, and give each other credit for doing the same, instead of shoving each other into knee-jerk categories like “tea-baggers” and “progressives”. Let’s assume good intentions in our fellow Americans.

And after we’re done with Wall Street, there are a lot of other things we agree on. Chew on these statistics:

A recent poll found that 60% of Americans feel that improving treatment of women in other countries is “very important” and that 30% feel it’s “somewhat important.” Despite all our other differences, that’s 90% of Americans who agree on something. That’s huge. And it’s something we actually have the power to change.

Here’s another example… I was working in Southeast Asia in 2004 when the tsunami devastated the region. Despite our differences, Americans stepped up and donated 1.2 billion dollars to tsunami relief. 30% of American households contributed to the cause – across all the ideological lines that seem important enough to divide us so much of the time.

These are just a couple of random examples, but the point is let’s ignore rhetoric that would turn us against each other. Let’s be careful about how we listen to the Karl Roves and Glenn Becks on the right, and the Bill Mahers, Olbermans and Moveon.orgs on the left. Better yet, let’s take a break altogether from listening to people who would persuade “us” to oppose “them.”

Let’s not get so sidetracked by the things that divide us that we become unable to make progress in the areas where we share common ground.

I have a somewhat irrational affection for Costco. The selection is good, the prices are low. They have a generous return policy (my friend just returned a printer he bought there four years ago and exchanged it for a new one). The folks who work at the one in San Francisco always seem to be enjoying themselves.

But many of my green-minded friends see Costco as a perfect embodiment of modern-day consumer culture and all that is wrong with America.

When you think about it though, one giant jug of laundry detergent requires significantly less plastic than the same amount of detergent sold in six smaller bottles. And buying a mega-bundle of toilet paper means fewer trips to the store than buying six rolls at a time. Plus, they sell recycled paper products and phosphate-free detergent.

I’m just sayin’

I just finished watching the second season of Mad Men, and I’m left with a familiar bittersweet feeling. The same one you get when you finish a great book. I don’t often get this feeling from a TV show, so I’ve begun to reflect a little on what it is that makes the show so good. One thing, of course, is the place and time.

1960 in America

Setting a show in 1960 was a stroke of pure genius. America, having recovered from World War II hit it’s stride in the 1950s. The country was enjoying an unprecedented era of era of prosperity. The big companies that created the machinery of modern warfare reinvented themselves as purveyors of household magic. Plastic revolutionized packaging and changed the whole concept of disposable goods. Chemicals emerged to ensure everything from green lawns to wrinkle-free clothing. A proliferation of new gadgets promised to erase every inconvenience from our lives. This is when Modern America was born. We were seduced by technology, and we never looked back.

At the same time, there was so much about America in 1960 that seems so quaint and primitive now. Often comically so. There’s a voyeuristic joy in watching kids play spacemen in front of their parents by putting plastic bags over their heads. Seatbelts didn’t even exist yet. Pregnant women smoked and drank. Everyone, for that matter, smoked and drank constantly – even at work. Every executive had “a girl” to take care of all the minutiae of meetings and phone calls (plus coffee, dry-cleaning and sometimes other “perks”). “Homos” were perverts, and “negroes” were only fit for household help and operating elevators.

Looking back on this era is to witness the fascinating disconnect between what Americans in 1960 believed about themselves – and their culture and their country – and what we now understand to be the reality. This makes for many gasp-producing, head-shaking moments. But I believe there’s also something much more personal going on. I suspect that in 2009 there is a similar disconnect at play in America.

1960 as a mirror

The Internet has resurrected our reverence for technology and our faith in technology’s ability to solve our problems (if it ever went away). We constantly crave the next new thing – then we adopt it, adapt to it, become disillusioned by it and discard it. This whole cycle can happen over a few months or even weeks.

Today, for example, everyone seems to be excited about Twitter’s third anniversary. At the same time they’re wondering if Facebook’s home page redesign is a harbinger of impending decline.

Women and minorities have come a long way of course. There are whole categories of things we consider unjust today that were acceptable in 1960, but there is still plenty of injustice in the world. And for the most part we still coast through our lives, blissfully untouched by it.

So partly, we love Mad Men for the same reason we love most great stories – because we recognize ourselves in the characters, and we see our world in the one they inhabit.

Remember when you were a kid and you’d overhear grownups talking about insurance and taxes, IRAs, mortgages and interest rates? Remember thinking to yourself, do they really understand that stuff? Remember how boring it all sounded and how frightening it was to imagine that someday you might have to know about it too, that someday you might actually find yourself talking about it…voluntarily?

Anyway, since I left my last job, I’ve been forced to think about where to invest the money that was in my 401k. I don’t want to unwittingly pad the pockets of Haliburton or Tyco, so I’ve been looking at socially responsible mutual funds and the 100 Best Corporate Citizens according to Business Ethics magazine. I’m so PC, don’t you think?