I read an account yesterday of a woman who was arrested (let's just call it that right now, to simplify things) for reading the US Constitution while being scanned at an airport security checkpoint. I think the point of the article, given its source, was meant to elicit a reaction of outrage. But I can't help but think how outright foolish everyone involved is.

For example, what possible outcome could the woman expect from her actions? Did she expect that the crowd would suddenly decide not to be subject to scanning? Did she expect to casually walk through security unmolested after having made this stir? Did she truly expect that the only consequence would be that she'd have informed her fellow air travelers that their rights were (possibly) being violated?

But it's not all one-sided. As I said, you are all idiots. The TSA then decides to make a big deal about it, rather than letting it pass. To me, this is what belies a deeper story. Was the woman yelling? Because certainly it would be easier to simply let her pass through the detectors, mark her ticket as "no-fly", and let her be on her way, than to cause a scene, (questionably) detain her, and then let her fly anyway.

SOPA

Switching tacks for a moment, I think the current SOPA legislation being considered is questionable at best, and an outright breakage of the internet at worst. But look at the wording of the legislation (103.b.5.A.iii) before you jump on the bandwagon:

A statement under penalty of perjury that the owner or operator, or registrant, has a good faith belief that it does not meet the criteria of an Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property as set forth under this section.

If you read through the whole thing, you realize that there is a specific process that is involved to shut down a site or payment to a site that is supposedly infringing. The copyright owner sends an official notice (103.b.4.A) to the site or payment provider, which includes many useful things, like the name of the infringed material, how to contact the copyright holder, who holds the copyright, where the material is located, etc. This official notice is made under penalty of perjury -- if you accuse someone of hosting or providing payment to infringing material, you can be taken to court for these false accusations (which is not possible under current law, and a useful deterrent for rampant casual accusations).

The recipient of the notice then gets five days to respond, and has the option to say, in good faith, that they do not believe that the material is infringing, and continue about their business. Seriously. They can just say "no". But they do so under penalty of perjury, so there are more severe consequences if they protect an obvious infringement of copyright in bad faith.

I admit, the bill is very, very imperfect. There are technical aspects of it that don't make any sense. But the claims that it's going to irreparably damage the internet are questionable, and it does have some effect on ending obvious copyright infringement. I'm talking about foreign sites that obviously offer things for download that don't belong to them. Notice that the bill (if you actually read it) deals almost exclusively with foreign sites that host infringing material, and only targets US payment processors and advertising syndicates that cater to them.

Moreover, people that take preemptive measures to deal with copyright infringement are immune from prosecution for those infringements! It's right in the bill!

But the outright insanity that pervades the internet about SOPA is the rhetoric that agencies like the EFF use to scare you into opposing this legislation. I am of the personal belief that the government should just get out of the internet; regulation of this tool would cause more problems than the problems that the tool causes. Yet the EFF would have you believe that the world economy would crash and armageddon would commence due of the passing of this bill. I simply don't see that happening.

Do I believe SOPA should be opposed? Yes, but not for many of the reasons explained online. The online petitions, "signed" by thousands to oppose the legislation, are as ineffective a method for change as reading the constitution aloud while standing in an airport backscatter scanner.

Occupy

I admit to not knowing a lot about the Occupy Wall Street movement. I was in Australia when it all started, and not really connected to the news at the time. But looking over the material that is available online, I will say two things: 1) I agree that I think it's unfair that the richest 1% of the people are in control of everything, although I'm not surprised. 2) Standing around in "public" places protesting doesn't actually get you anything.

Whether the protests are effective, I don't know. What the people there stand for or hope to accomplish, I don't know. What I do know is that I see a ton of people standing around in places where nobody seems to want them. And I hear in my head the fictional voice of fathers everywhere, "Get a job, hippie!" Maybe the problem is that they can't get a job? I can't imagine that with so many people standing around, they couldn't come up with something together. The whole thing seems a little "off" to me.

I kind of understand what they're saying. Like I said, I think this is something I can agree with from a certain perspective, but just like oration from the backscatter scanner, and online petitions, this doesn't seem to be the best means of attack at... whatever the target of frustration happens to be.

Where Next?

I read " Dear Internet, It's no longer ok to not know how congress works", and I agree with many of the points there. This primarily deals with SOPA, but I think it extends to things like the TSA and OWS. The problem is the government. Generation We has a good point: Everything is screwed up, and the youth who will be saddled with it is finally able to make a decision about what they want to do about it.

Sadly, their options are also crap. The options tend toward Republican or Democrat, and neither of those - at least in my mind - embody the choices that this youth vote would want to make. Even our votes as non-youth voters over the past years have amounted to one of:

1. "I dislike what the current guy is doing, so I'll vote for the guy from the other party."
2. "I dislike what the current guy is doing, but I vote Democrat/Republican, so I'll vote for him again anyway."
3. "I like what the current guy is doing, so I'll vote for him again."

Part of the problem is the republican process; that we elect people to represent our interests in government. It would be impossible to elect someone who could reflect our desires in voting, unless they truly voted using their own electorate's opinions. That would be impossible because while many people have opinions, they don't offer them. (I know, hard to believe, right? Well, you saw that only 54% of people voted in the 2008 presidential election, haven't you?)

At the risk of putting my own idiotic solution forward (at least it's not causing a scene at the airport), it seems to me like we need a strong third party that represents the people, rather than campaigning on their own issues. A candidate for this party would simply say "I will educate my electorate on the issues, poll them, publish the results, and vote as the electorate indicates I should."

Thinking about this, it seems still impossible that you could educate your electorate while maintaining an impartial stance. Surely, the information you provided for education would be biased based on who provided the information. At least the electorate could make an informed decision. Although, if we're already doing these insane things to get causes noticed, there's no guarantee that handing the keys to the idiots would gain us a better country.

So that's my monthly delve into politics. Leave a comment to illustrate how stupid I am, and keep me from getting involved for another month.

I've been reading a lot online about the TSA's new scanning machines and security pat-downs. Particularly vitriol from potential passengers reacting to people who don't like the screening procedures. I am left with many questions that I don't hear anyone asking.

How did we arrive at this situation? I guess we're talking about a repeat of 9/11, as if any post-9/11 passengers would let something like that happen again. It seems to have occurred to few people that the planes driven into New York and Washington were not carrying bombs or guns. In fact, the passengers of United Flight 93 were able to force the hand of the hijackers even after they had taken control. So why are we in need of something more than the metal detectors we had been using?

Moreover, it irritates me that people are getting bent out of shape about these new procedures for a number of reasons.

There were people at the onset of the post-9/11 world claiming that Americans are not guaranteed a right to privacy. And if you look at the exact wording of the Bill of Rights, we are not. It doesn't really mention it anywhere. I think the 9th amendment takes care of this pretty handily -- basically saying that just because the right isn't listed in the Constitution, that doesn't mean you don't have it. But there have been other interpretations through history that generally reduce the efficacy of the 9th amendment in this vein.

But here we are, just kind of given up on that privacy, and our reduced freedom (liberty, if you will) now also toys with the 4th Amendment's right against unreasonable search. The question being whether performing effectively a nude search or a hands-on invasive pat-down of a person is considered a reasonable search with probable cause to which every person boarding a plane should be subject.

What I don't have is due process. What I don't have is a warrant to perform a search based on probable cause.

What this is like are those stupid signs at the store that say "we reserve the right to search your bags". Well, first, no you don't. You can call the police and given probable cause, the police can warrant a search. But you can't just insist on searching everyone's bags that comes into the store without a reason. Even if you did search everyone's bag, people would have the right to refuse it and not enter the store to begin with.

What we're seeing is fines without due process. You can be searched or opt out, but if you opt out, you don't have the option of leaving without a fine? Someone needs to clarify that for me.

Also, this story that the scanners apply less radiation to you than the trip itself is not the whole story, and is bad science. The scanners apply a type of radiation that lets them penetrate your clothing and reflect off of your skin. So basically, the only part of you that is affected is your "exposed" skin, and all within a short amount of time. Even if you received half of the cosmic radiation (that's ambient radiation found at higher altitudes), you'd be receiving it over the course of a few seconds rather than over the hours of your flight.

Imagine you're sunbathing for two hours. The amount of radiation from the sun is spread out over those two hours. Sure, you might get a little burnt, but your body dissipates the radiation internally and externally so that you're not flash-toasted all at once. Now, take all of the energy applied to your body from the sun exposure for just half that time and flash it at you all within a couple of seconds. Your skin is going to roast.

I didn't just make this up. This is a legitimate concern of Nobel Laureates.

The worst part of all of this for me is that there's nothing being done. Sure, there's a lot of complaining. But nobody is doing anything. At least, with all the turmoil, you'd think that someone would actually file a suit of some kind and you'd hear about it. The closest I've come to learning of such a thing is via known celebrity and troublemaker Penn Jilette.

I suspect that this is another one of those ridiculous moments in history were people get upset about something that they should legitimately be upset about, and then, through complacency, do nothing about it. See also: Every sensational news story on the evening TV news.

Sure, this is probably more important than HDCP, but at least this has enough social momentum at the moment to have something done about it. HDCP never had a chance, since nobody really knew anything about it being applied. And now we're screwed. Oh well.

As with most things involving politics, that's kind of what I come to expect anymore.

I didn't want to vote yesterday. I watched CNN last night, not raptly, but with a sense of knowing what was coming. As a sort of passive observer of the political process this year, it has been interesting to see all of the work finally play out, but I can't help but notice that while, as usual, the election is not really about the issues, it's also no longer about whatever nonsense it happened to be about before.

At a session I attended BlogOrlando this year, a presenter discussed his role in helping change the image of Fiskars, the scissor people, by bringing social interaction to the table to sit beside marketing and branding. In a very compelling part of his talk, he said that the challenge and success was in creating a movement. And yes, apparently, even if delicacy is required, movements can be engineered.

So I'm amused by what I see on TV and in the paper today. I don't necessarily disagree with Obama's policies or ideas for change, but what I do see is a movement for change where perhaps the prescribed change itself isn't the instrument of its creation. I see an engineering of politics that the world has yet to endure - one where social media, an engineered movement, has led people to make decisions that are very large.

It's been obvious to me that McCain's campaign has been a typically haphazard misapplication of social media. For whatever reason (and I have my conspiracy theories), his campaign just did not get it. His people have obviously never touched the web in curiosity, or looked to its huge yet experimentally small pool of users for insight into how social engineering could have been applied to this election. In that, and in many other areas that would be key to becoming elected that have nothing to do with whether he was fit for office, his campaign completely and utterly failed.

There are also tales every year about how the electoral system is no longer efficient for selecting a president; how the electoral vote could easily not reflect the popular vote. I think if you look carefully at the campaigns this year, you'll see some of the most efficient application of this "electoral math" that we've ever seen.

The actual popular vote race was pretty close. But the electoral votes are very skewed in Obama's favor. Even if the movement did not do so well as they had hoped, they still targeted the populous centers of states with high electoral votes so well that they would have won those states regardless.

I'm no so persuaded by the rhetoric. Every year we are promised things by newly elected politicians, and every year things fail to deliver. Sure, some promises are fulfilled, but I think that such a large agenda as Obama's, while certainly ambitious and perhaps even worthy of making happen in full, is not something we'll see come to fruition. I have imagined a scene of Obama's first day in office as one where he realizes that the weight of the country - economically, militarily, socially - is all on him, and that his proposed change is something that requires not just a (in relative terms) simple change in what's being done, but a more significant change in the process of doing things.

Well, at least we see and have evidence that the stumping process has changed as a result of his ideas. Woe be Obama in 2012 if his change isn't in the upswing, because by then the Republicans will have figured out social media, and a different kind of change will be in store for the White House.

This graph shows the time distribution of how I spend my day. In case you wondered.

I had no idea that politics in Downingtown was such a mud-slinging exercise.

I've been getting junk in my door at home, and also in my mailbox (this is illegal, by the way, if you're putting non -USPS mail in my USPS mailbox) touting the virtues of a couple of borough candidates for Mayor.

Personally, I would like to see none of them win. Maybe it's about time the incestuous infighting came to a conclusion. I don't think either of these people have the best interests of our town in mind, they just want to beat the other guy.

The incumbent mayor apparently isn't even on the ballot. His opponent won both the Democratic and Republican primaries due to write-ins!

If I can get people in my local government to start caring about those issues that affect me, I'll be happy. Mostly, I'm concerned about the road work around town. But I understand that attracting businesses to our town is important for getting them to pay more of our taxes.

Of course, I'm simplifying all of this. But it doesn't make me any less frustrated that it's impossible to figure out what they're thinking about doing until after they've done it. Often times, I think if the poeple in town knew what these politicians were up to, they would be more involved in their local politics than they are.