Discussion of the interrogation technique "waterboarding" is all over the internets these days, particularly surrounding the confirmation of former federal judge Michael B. Mukasey as head of the DOJ.

I am sort of amazed and aghast that the legality waterboarding is even an issue. The right answer is "It doesn't matter if waterboarding is legal or not. The simple fact that it is borderline, and debatable to so many, means we shouldn't use the technique, because it should be the goal of any moral democratic nation to strive to be ethically right. We should err on the side of doing the right thing, and avoid actions that rub up against the border."

One of my ongoing frustrations with the current political milieu is that there is almost no discussion of ethics or right and wrong. People play fast and loose with ethics - particularly the current GOP administration - and then everyone haggles over legal details. Why won't anybody simply stand up and say "I don't give a rat's ass if it's legal or not, it's wrong, so we shouldn't do it"?

Via Boing Boing today I read this story about the Boston Police Department blowing up a "suspicious device" found chained to a lamppost in the financial district downtown. Of course, the device turned out to be a traffic counter put there by the highway department.

So this goes beyond simple paranoia into seriously dangerous behavior. Yes, we know the Boston PD basically shut down half the city because of a bunch of lite-brite devices left outside as part of a marketing campaign. But if you watch the Faux News video about it, you can see that they blew this box up just by putting explosives under it. No particular blash shielding or anything.

Suppose this really were a terrorist device? If it were a bomb, a box that size could carry enough explosive to do serious damage for many yards in every direction. Detonating it would be criminally dangerous.

Suppose it were some kind of chemical or biological agent dispersal system. Detonating it out in the open would be even MORE stupid, because winds could carry the toxins or infectious agents very long distances, hurting people nowhere near the scene.

And if it's not one of those things, it should be investigated and perhaps taken back to a lab.

In fact, I can't think of any circumstance at all in which blowing the thing up would be the right thing to do. Either it's harmless, or blowing it up risks making things much much worse. The commentary by the Republicnewsdroids at Fox is particularly galling, prattling on about the cops "not taking any chances" when exploding an unknown box is a ridiculously unsafe thing to do, and clearly in implicit agreement that such "suspicious devices" are a severe threat to our security.

It's amazing how much interesting and funny stuff can go by on the 'net in the course of a few years, and amazing how much of it any one person is destined to miss.

Last night I surfed and read a few things about geek graffiti ... urban nerds making public statements with LED's and magnets, graffiti circuits painted directly on walls with conductive paint, giant projectors putting interactive animations on buildings, etc.

This one hack of postal envelopes is certainly illegal and a waste of public resources ... but funny and fascinating not least because of its subtlety. You have to look pretty close to even see that the perpetrator did anything.

Oh.

Holy.

Crap.

Being on a business retreat with my sister, I've seen more TV in the evenings this weekend than I've probably watched in the last year. Last night, I saw an episode of 24 for the first time. And now, I'm far more worried about our country than I've been in a while.

There's this myth in the public mindset of the "classic" torture scenario: we've captured a terrorist who knows where the bomb is, or knows how to find the cell, or whatever. And we're faced with the decision: 1) torture them or 2) Americans will die.

In reality, detained suspects are just that: a suspect. They're not "a terrorist" yet, and may not be one at all, as we found after 9/11 when 3000 suspected terrorist contacts were rounded up in the U.S. and four years later all had been released an not a single one had been convinced of a crime. We don't know what a detained suspect knows. If we did, we wouldn't be faced with this decision.

Moreover, the intelligence gained from torture is terrible. Under torture conditions, people will tell you whatever they think you want to hear, in order to get the pain to stop.

But in this TV show I watched last night, the mythical scenario came up no fewer than five times: someone had information our heroes needed, but wouldn't give it up. But Kiefer (or another government agent) absolutely knew they had the information, and under physical or psychological pressure, they gave it up. Success! Even worse, the most terribly tortured person not only gave up the information (apparently he wasn't in league with the terrorists and really had no reason to hold back the info in the first place), he then became a cooperative, friendly collaborator shortly thereafter.

According to my sister, this is pretty typical fare for this show. She pointed out another government agent who was tortured by her own boss as a suspected mole two episodes ago, but was back at work as a good guy only one hour later.

If this is the social programming our society is watching every week ... I'm pretty worried.

Aren't we suppossed to be fighting dictators and authoritarians? You know, the kind who torture people? Why are we being programmed to believe those very tactics are necessary and effective?

My sister made an insightful comment yesterday I thought worth sharing. It runs like this: After the presidential debates, all the networks are running "fact check" segments to see which statements by the candidates are true or false.

The question is, what the hell does it mean that we have to debate which of our presidential candidates lies less?

Why can't we actually expect truthfulness from our public figures? I mean really, is that so much to ask? Why isn't the independent media eating these people for breakfast?

In the ever-increasing race to augment our memory and document our lives, something like this had to happen soon.

It's a camera you wear around your neck. Anytime there's a significant shift in light, or significant motion, it snaps a picture. Over a thousand per day.

Can't remember the name of that lovely wine you had on Tuesday? The address of that cool store you found while window shopping? The license plate # of the guy you saw hit and run that parked car? Just look it up in your image files for the relevant day.

It feels kind of creepy ... but it sure would come in handy. One day, we will all be cyborgs. I'm already willing to have my digital watch implanted on my left wrist so I don't have to keep searching for the *&@$ thing.

Actually in a sense we already are. We carry PDAs to augment our memory, phones to augment our voices and hearing so that they work over hundreds of miles, watches to augment our sense of time. Even simple tools like a hammer are essentially augmentations of our natural abilities.

Electronic cyborg devices are just tools - but tools that are easier to use and harder to lose. This continually recording camera was inevitable. I didn't predict a snapshot camera, though, I suspected many people would have continuous videorecording running by about 2020. I still think that will be the case, I just didn't see this intermediate development.

Yet again, the US won't sign the landmine treaty. Capital punishment, even for the mentally ill and the young, use of landmines, jailing citizens without charge, bail or access to a lawyer.

We're starting to sound pretty barbaric in a world where many nations are maturing around us. Take a bit of reform in Iran here, some human rights movements in China there, and in 40-50 years we may find ourselves looking a whole lot like the "enemy".

Well, this is just pretty retarded.

It drives me nuts when people get worked up over a word rather than a concept, since the only function of a word is to accurately deliver a concept. If people understand what you mean, the particular word you use doesn't matter much. There's an argument to be made against the use of a word if the meaning is ambiguous. There's an argument to be made if the concept you're using is under debate. Other than than that ... relax a bit about words, folks.

Okay, I think the certifiability of electronic voting has to become my number one issue now. Until this issue is fixed, nothing else matters very much. If we can't verify that our voting systems are accurate, we don't have a democracy. We may be being governed at someone's whim ... without knowing who that person is.

To summarize, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, or who have missed the issue:

1. America is rapidly switching to electronic voting systems.
2. These voting systems, mostly made by Diebold, are totally black-box. i.e. we vote, and the Diebold machines report the total.
3. There is absolutely no way to verify the count with these machines. No paper trail, no records of any kind. We are simply asked to trust the number the machine spits out.
4. All the internals of the Diebold machines are closed-source, proprietary, business secret. Nobody else has ever or will ever see their code.
5. Sometimes the machines are certified by independent testers, but last-minute patches and sloppy software releases have resulted in uncertified software versions being used in dozens of elections.

The upshot of this is that if Diebold had a backdoor that allowed their employees to edit the votes, or if the machines simply added 5% to the totals for one particular party, there would be no way for anyone to know. Ever. And even if the manufacturer is honest, there could be security holes that could allow unscrupulous crackers to diddle the elections. In fact, what little independent analysis there has been, based on leaked Diebold source code, has found gaping security holes in the system.

This should not be a partisan issue. Votes should be counted fairly and this fact MUST be transparently confirmable. The systems must be accountable.

For more information see these resources:

• Write to your congresscritter in support of HR 2239, which requires voting machines to leave a verifiable paper trail and to have their systems be accountable.
• Slashdot threads Oct 18 2003, Oct 17, Sept 26.
• BlackBoxVoting.com
• The EFF's e-voting page
• Copies of Diebold internal support memoranda giving examples of their sloppy release system and use of uncertified systems in elections.

What else can you do? In the meantime, you can vote absentee, and have your vote securely recorded on a good old-fashioned paper ballot.

Click "read more" for an excerpt of the security analysis of leaked Diebold source code and assorted other comments by me.