Author Archives: Robert Graham

That “Commission on Enhancing Cybersecurity” is absurd

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An Obama commission has publish a report on how to “Enhance Cybersecurity”. It’s promoted as having been written by neutral, bipartisan, technical experts. Instead, it’s almost entirely dominated by special interests and the left-wing politics of the outgoing administration.

In this post, I’m going through a random list of some of the 53 “action items” proposed by the documents. I show how they are policy issues, not technical issues. Indeed, much of the time the technical details are warped to conform to special interests.

IoT passwords

The recommendations include such things as Action Item 2.1.4:

Initial best practices should include requirements to mandate that IoT devices be rendered unusable until users first change default usernames and passwords. 

This recommendation for changing default passwords is repeated many times. It comes from the way the Mirai worm exploits devices by using hardcoded/default passwords.

But this is a misunderstanding of how these devices work. Take, for example, the infamous Xiongmai camera. It has user accounts on the web server to control the camera. If the user forgets the password, the camera can be reset to factory defaults by pressing a button on the outside of the camera.

But here’s the deal with security cameras. They are placed at remote sites miles away, up on the second story where people can’t mess with them. In order to reset them, you need to put a ladder in your truck and drive 30 minutes out to the site, then climb the ladder (an inherently dangerous activity). Therefore, Xiongmai provides a RESET.EXE utility for remotely resetting them. That utility happens to connect via Telnet using a hardcoded password.

The above report misunderstands what’s going on here. It sees Telnet and a hardcoded password, and makes assumptions. Some people assume that this is the normal user account — it’s not, it’s unrelated to the user accounts on the web server portion of the device. Requiring the user to change the password on the web service would have no effect on the Telnet service. Other people assume the Telnet service is accidental, that good security hygiene would remove it. Instead, it’s an intended feature of the product, to remotely reset the device. Fixing the “password” issue as described in the above recommendations would simply mean the manufacturer would create a different, custom backdoor that hackers would eventually reverse engineer, creating MiraiV2 botnet. Instead of security guides banning backdoors, they need to come up with standard for remote reset.

That characterization of Mirai as an IoT botnet is wrong. Mirai is a botnet of security cameras. Security cameras are fundamentally different from IoT devices like toasters and fridges because they are often exposed to the public Internet. To stream video on your phone from your security camera, you need a port open on the Internet. Non-camera IoT devices, however, are overwhelmingly protected by a firewall, with no exposure to the public Internet. While you can create a botnet of Internet cameras, you cannot create a botnet of Internet toasters.

The point I’m trying to demonstrate here is that the above report was written by policy folks with little grasp of the technical details of what’s going on. They use Mirai to justify several of their “Action Items”, none of which actually apply to the technical details of Mirai. It has little to do with IoT, passwords, or hygiene.

Public-private partnerships

Action Item 1.2.1: The President should create, through executive order, the National Cybersecurity Private–Public Program (NCP 3 ) as a forum for addressing cybersecurity issues through a high-level, joint public–private collaboration.

We’ve had public-private partnerships to secure cyberspace for over 20 years, such as the FBI InfraGuard partnership. President Clinton’s had a plan in 1998 to create a public-private partnership to address cyber vulnerabilities. President Bush declared public-private partnerships the “cornerstone of his 2003 plan to secure cyberspace.

Here we are 20 years later, and this document is full of new naive proposals for public-private partnerships There’s no analysis of why they have failed in the past, or a discussion of which ones have succeeded.

The many calls for public-private programs reflects the left-wing nature of this supposed “bipartisan” document, that sees government as a paternalistic entity that can help. The right-wing doesn’t believe the government provides any value in these partnerships. In my 20 years of experience with government private-partnerships in cybersecurity, I’ve found them to be a time waster at best and at worst, a way to coerce “voluntary measures” out of companies that hurt the public’s interest.

Build a wall and make China pay for it

Action Item 1.3.1: The next Administration should require that all Internet-based federal government services provided directly to citizens require the use of appropriately strong authentication.

This would cost at least $100 per person, for 300 million people, or $30 billion. In other words, it’ll cost more than Trump’s wall with Mexico.

Hardware tokens are cheap. Blizzard (a popular gaming company) must deal with widespread account hacking from “gold sellers”, and provides second factor authentication to its gamers for $6 each. But that ignores the enormous support costs involved. How does a person prove their identity to the government in order to get such a token? To replace a lost token? When old tokens break? What happens if somebody’s token is stolen?

And that’s the best case scenario. Other options, like using cellphones as a second factor, are non-starters.

This is actually not a bad recommendation, as far as government services are involved, but it ignores the costs and difficulties involved.

But then the recommendations go on to suggest this for private sector as well:

Specifically, private-sector organizations, including top online retailers, large health insurers, social media companies, and major financial institutions, should use strong authentication solutions as the default for major online applications.

No, no, no. There is no reason for a “top online retailer” to know your identity. I lie about my identity. Amazon.com thinks my name is “Edward Williams”, for example.

They get worse with:

Action Item 1.3.3: The government should serve as a source to validate identity attributes to address online identity challenges.

In other words, they are advocating a cyber-dystopic police-state wet-dream where the government controls everyone’s identity. We already see how this fails with Facebook’s “real name” policy, where everyone from political activists in other countries to LGBTQ in this country get harassed for revealing their real names.

This is a radical policy question that has nothing to do with the technical aspects of cybersecurity. It’s a demonstration how this document was written by policy people with little or no input from technical people.

Cybersecurity Framework

Action Item 1.4.2: All federal agencies should be required to use the Cybersecurity Framework. 

The “Cybersecurity Framework” is a bunch of a nonsense that would require another long blogpost to debunk. It requires months of training and years of experience to understand. It contains things like “DE.CM-4: Malicious code is detected”, as if that’s a thing organizations are able to do.

All the while it ignores the most common cyber attacks (SQL/web injections, phishing, password reuse, DDoS). It’s a typical example where organizations spend enormous amounts of money following process while getting no closer to solving what the processes are attempting to solve. Federal agencies using the Cybersecurity Framework are no safer from my pentests than those who don’t use it.

It gets even crazier:

Action Item 1.5.1: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should expand its support of SMBs in using the Cybersecurity Framework and should assess its cost-effectiveness specifically for SMBs.

Small businesses can’t even afford to even read the “Cybersecurity Framework”. Simply reading the doc, trying to understand it, would exceed their entire IT/computer budget for the year. It would take a high-priced consultant earning $500/hour to tell them that “DE.CM-4: Malicious code is detected” means “buy antivirus and keep it up to date”.

Software liability

Action Item 2.1.3: The Department of Justice should lead an interagency study with the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security and work with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and interested private sector parties to assess the current state of the law with regard to liability for harm caused by faulty IoT devices and provide recommendations within 180 days. 

For over a decade, leftists in the cybersecurity industry have been pushing the concept of “software liability”. Every time there is a major new development in hacking, such as the worms around 2003, they come out with documents explaining why there’s a “market failure” and that we need liability to punish companies to fix the problem. Then the problem is fixed, without software liability, and the leftists wait for some new development to push the theory yet again.

It’s especially absurd for the IoT marketspace. The harm, as they imagine, is DDoS. But the majority of devices in Mirai were sold by non-US companies to non-US customers. There’s no way US regulations can stop that.

What US regulations will stop is IoT innovation in the United States. Regulations are so burdensome, and liability lawsuits so punishing, that it will kill all innovation within the United States. If you want to get rich with a clever IoT Kickstarter project, forget about it: you entire development budget will go to cybersecurity. The only companies that will be able to afford to ship IoT products in the United States will be large industrial concerns like GE that can afford the overhead of regulation/liability.

Liability a left-wing policy issue, not one supported by technical analysis. Software liability has proven to be immaterial in any past problem and current proponents are distorting the IoT market to promote it now.

Cybersecurity workforce

Action Item 4.1.1: The next President should initiate a national cybersecurity workforce program to train 100,000 new cybersecurity practitioners by 2020. 

The problem in our industry isn’t the lack of “cybersecurity practitioners”, but the overabundance of “insecurity practitioners”.

Take “SQL injection” as an example. It’s been the most common way hackers break into websites for 15 years. It happens because programmers, those building web-apps, blinding paste input into SQL queries. They do that because they’ve been trained to do it that way. All the textbooks on how to build webapps teach them this. All the examples show them this.

So you have government programs on one hand pushing tech education, teaching kids to build web-apps with SQL injection. Then you propose to train a second group of people to fix the broken stuff the first group produced.

The solution to SQL/website injections is not more practitioners, but stopping programmers from creating the problems in the first place. The solution to phishing is to use the tools already built into Windows and networks that sysadmins use, not adding new products/practitioners. These are the two most common problems, and they happen not because of a lack of cybersecurity practitioners, but because the lack of cybersecurity as part of normal IT/computers.

I point this to demonstrate yet against that the document was written by policy people with little or no technical understanding of the problem.

Nutritional label

Action Item 3.1.1: To improve consumers’ purchasing decisions, an independent organization should develop the equivalent of a cybersecurity “nutritional label” for technology products and services—ideally linked to a rating system of understandable, impartial, third-party assessment that consumers will intuitively trust and understand. 

This can’t be done. Grab some IoT devices, like my thermostat, my car, or a Xiongmai security camera used in the Mirai botnet. These devices are so complex that no “nutritional label” can be made from them.

One of the things you’d like to know is all the software dependencies, so that if there’s a bug in OpenSSL, for example, then you know your device is vulnerable. Unfortunately, that requires a nutritional label with 10,000 items on it.

Or, one thing you’d want to know is that the device has no backdoor passwords. But that would miss the Xiongmai devices. The web service has no backdoor passwords. If you caught the Telnet backdoor password and removed it, then you’d miss the special secret backdoor that hackers would later reverse engineer.

This is a policy position chasing a non-existent technical issue push by Pieter Zatko, who has gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars from government grants to push the issue. It’s his way of getting rich and has nothing to do with sound policy.

Cyberczars and ambassadors

Various recommendations call for the appointment of various CISOs, Assistant to the President for Cybersecurity, and an Ambassador for Cybersecurity. But nowhere does it mention these should be technical posts. This is like appointing a Surgeon General who is not a doctor.

Government’s problems with cybersecurity stems from the way technical knowledge is so disrespected. The current cyberczar prides himself on his lack of technical knowledge, because that helps him see the bigger picture.

Ironically, many of the other Action Items are about training cybersecurity practitioners, employees, and managers. None of this can happen as long as leadership is clueless. Technical details matter, as I show above with the Mirai botnet. Subtlety and nuance in technical details can call for opposite policy responses.

Conclusion

This document is promoted as being written by technical experts. However, nothing in the document is neutral technical expertise. Instead, it’s almost entirely a policy document dominated by special interests and left-wing politics. In many places it makes recommendations to the incoming Republican president. His response should be to round-file it immediately.

I only chose a few items, as this blogpost is long enough as it is. I could pick almost any of of the 53 Action Items to demonstrate how they are policy, special-interest driven rather than reflecting technical expertise.

Continue reading That “Commission on Enhancing Cybersecurity” is absurd→

Posted in SBN

That "Commission on Enhancing Cybersecurity" is absurd

Posted on by

An Obama commission has publish a report on how to “Enhance Cybersecurity”. It’s promoted as having been written by neutral, bipartisan, technical experts. Instead, it’s almost entirely dominated by special interests and the Democrat politics of the outgoing administration.

In this post, I’m going through a random list of some of the 53 “action items” proposed by the documents. I show how they are policy issues, not technical issues. Indeed, much of the time the technical details are warped to conform to special interests.

IoT passwords

The recommendations include such things as Action Item 2.1.4:

Initial best practices should include requirements to mandate that IoT devices be rendered unusable until users first change default usernames and passwords. 

This recommendation for changing default passwords is repeated many times. It comes from the way the Mirai worm exploits devices by using hardcoded/default passwords.

But this is a misunderstanding of how these devices work. Take, for example, the infamous Xiongmai camera. It has user accounts on the web server to control the camera. If the user forgets the password, the camera can be reset to factory defaults by pressing a button on the outside of the camera.

But here’s the deal with security cameras. They are placed at remote sites miles away, up on the second story where people can’t mess with them. In order to reset them, you need to put a ladder in your truck and drive 30 minutes out to the site, then climb the ladder (an inherently dangerous activity). Therefore, Xiongmai provides a RESET.EXE utility for remotely resetting them. That utility happens to connect via Telnet using a hardcoded password.

The above report misunderstands what’s going on here. It sees Telnet and a hardcoded password, and makes assumptions. Some people assume that this is the normal user account — it’s not, it’s unrelated to the user accounts on the web server portion of the device. Requiring the user to change the password on the web service would have no effect on the Telnet service. Other people assume the Telnet service is accidental, that good security hygiene would remove it. Instead, it’s an intended feature of the product, to remotely reset the device. Fixing the “password” issue as described in the above recommendations would simply mean the manufacturer would create a different, custom backdoor that hackers would eventually reverse engineer, creating MiraiV2 botnet. Instead of security guides banning backdoors, they need to come up with standard for remote reset.

That characterization of Mirai as an IoT botnet is wrong. Mirai is a botnet of security cameras. Security cameras are fundamentally different from IoT devices like toasters and fridges because they are often exposed to the public Internet. To stream video on your phone from your security camera, you need a port open on the Internet. Non-camera IoT devices, however, are overwhelmingly protected by a firewall, with no exposure to the public Internet. While you can create a botnet of Internet cameras, you cannot create a botnet of Internet toasters.

The point I’m trying to demonstrate here is that the above report was written by policy folks with little grasp of the technical details of what’s going on. They use Mirai to justify several of their “Action Items”, none of which actually apply to the technical details of Mirai. It has little to do with IoT, passwords, or hygiene.

Public-private partnerships

Action Item 1.2.1: The President should create, through executive order, the National Cybersecurity Private–Public Program (NCP 3 ) as a forum for addressing cybersecurity issues through a high-level, joint public–private collaboration.

We’ve had public-private partnerships to secure cyberspace for over 20 years, such as the FBI InfraGuard partnership. President Clinton’s had a plan in 1998 to create a public-private partnership to address cyber vulnerabilities. President Bush declared public-private partnerships the “cornerstone of his 2003 plan to secure cyberspace.

Here we are 20 years later, and this document is full of new naive proposals for public-private partnerships There’s no analysis of why they have failed in the past, or a discussion of which ones have succeeded.

The many calls for public-private programs reflects the left-wing nature of this supposed “bipartisan” document, that sees government as a paternalistic entity that can help. The right-wing doesn’t believe the government provides any value in these partnerships. In my 20 years of experience with government private-partnerships in cybersecurity, I’ve found them to be a time waster at best and at worst, a way to coerce “voluntary measures” out of companies that hurt the public’s interest.

Build a wall and make China pay for it

Action Item 1.3.1: The next Administration should require that all Internet-based federal government services provided directly to citizens require the use of appropriately strong authentication.

This would cost at least $100 per person, for 300 million people, or $30 billion. In other words, it’ll cost more than Trump’s wall with Mexico.

Hardware tokens are cheap. Blizzard (a popular gaming company) must deal with widespread account hacking from “gold sellers”, and provides second factor authentication to its gamers for $6 each. But that ignores the enormous support costs involved. How does a person prove their identity to the government in order to get such a token? To replace a lost token? When old tokens break? What happens if somebody’s token is stolen?

And that’s the best case scenario. Other options, like using cellphones as a second factor, are non-starters.

This is actually not a bad recommendation, as far as government services are involved, but it ignores the costs and difficulties involved.

But then the recommendations go on to suggest this for private sector as well:

Specifically, private-sector organizations, including top online retailers, large health insurers, social media companies, and major financial institutions, should use strong authentication solutions as the default for major online applications.

No, no, no. There is no reason for a “top online retailer” to know your identity. I lie about my identity. Amazon.com thinks my name is “Edward Williams”, for example.

They get worse with:

Action Item 1.3.3: The government should serve as a source to validate identity attributes to address online identity challenges.

In other words, they are advocating a cyber-dystopic police-state wet-dream where the government controls everyone’s identity. We already see how this fails with Facebook’s “real name” policy, where everyone from political activists in other countries to LGBTQ in this country get harassed for revealing their real names.

Anonymity and pseudonymity are precious rights on the Internet that we now enjoy — rights endangered by the radical policies in this document. This document frequently claims to promote security “while protecting privacy”. But the government doesn’t protect privacy — much of what we want from cybersecurity is to protect our privacy from government intrusion. This is nothing new, you’ve heard this privacy debate before. What I’m trying to show here is that the one-side view of privacy in this document demonstrates how it’s dominated by special interests.

Cybersecurity Framework

Action Item 1.4.2: All federal agencies should be required to use the Cybersecurity Framework. 

The “Cybersecurity Framework” is a bunch of a nonsense that would require another long blogpost to debunk. It requires months of training and years of experience to understand. It contains things like “DE.CM-4: Malicious code is detected”, as if that’s a thing organizations are able to do.

All the while it ignores the most common cyber attacks (SQL/web injections, phishing, password reuse, DDoS). It’s a typical example where organizations spend enormous amounts of money following process while getting no closer to solving what the processes are attempting to solve. Federal agencies using the Cybersecurity Framework are no safer from my pentests than those who don’t use it.

It gets even crazier:

Action Item 1.5.1: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should expand its support of SMBs in using the Cybersecurity Framework and should assess its cost-effectiveness specifically for SMBs.

Small businesses can’t even afford to even read the “Cybersecurity Framework”. Simply reading the doc, trying to understand it, would exceed their entire IT/computer budget for the year. It would take a high-priced consultant earning $500/hour to tell them that “DE.CM-4: Malicious code is detected” means “buy antivirus and keep it up to date”.

Software liability is a hoax invented by the Chinese to make our IoT less competitive

Action Item 2.1.3: The Department of Justice should lead an interagency study with the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security and work with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and interested private sector parties to assess the current state of the law with regard to liability for harm caused by faulty IoT devices and provide recommendations within 180 days. 

For over a decade, leftists in the cybersecurity industry have been pushing the concept of “software liability”. Every time there is a major new development in hacking, such as the worms around 2003, they come out with documents explaining why there’s a “market failure” and that we need liability to punish companies to fix the problem. Then the problem is fixed, without software liability, and the leftists wait for some new development to push the theory yet again.

It’s especially absurd for the IoT marketspace. The harm, as they imagine, is DDoS. But the majority of devices in Mirai were sold by non-US companies to non-US customers. There’s no way US regulations can stop that.

What US regulations will stop is IoT innovation in the United States. Regulations are so burdensome, and liability lawsuits so punishing, that it will kill all innovation within the United States. If you want to get rich with a clever IoT Kickstarter project, forget about it: you entire development budget will go to cybersecurity. The only companies that will be able to afford to ship IoT products in the United States will be large industrial concerns like GE that can afford the overhead of regulation/liability.

Liability is a left-wing policy issue, not one supported by technical analysis. Software liability has proven to be immaterial in any past problem and current proponents are distorting the IoT market to promote it now.

Cybersecurity workforce

Action Item 4.1.1: The next President should initiate a national cybersecurity workforce program to train 100,000 new cybersecurity practitioners by 2020. 

The problem in our industry isn’t the lack of “cybersecurity practitioners”, but the overabundance of “insecurity practitioners”.

Take “SQL injection” as an example. It’s been the most common way hackers break into websites for 15 years. It happens because programmers, those building web-apps, blinding paste input into SQL queries. They do that because they’ve been trained to do it that way. All the textbooks on how to build webapps teach them this. All the examples show them this.

So you have government programs on one hand pushing tech education, teaching kids to build web-apps with SQL injection. Then you propose to train a second group of people to fix the broken stuff the first group produced.

The solution to SQL/website injections is not more practitioners, but stopping programmers from creating the problems in the first place. The solution to phishing is to use the tools already built into Windows and networks that sysadmins use, not adding new products/practitioners. These are the two most common problems, and they happen not because of a lack of cybersecurity practitioners, but because the lack of cybersecurity as part of normal IT/computers.

I point this to demonstrate yet against that the document was written by policy people with little or no technical understanding of the problem.

Nutritional label

Action Item 3.1.1: To improve consumers’ purchasing decisions, an independent organization should develop the equivalent of a cybersecurity “nutritional label” for technology products and services—ideally linked to a rating system of understandable, impartial, third-party assessment that consumers will intuitively trust and understand. 

This can’t be done. Grab some IoT devices, like my thermostat, my car, or a Xiongmai security camera used in the Mirai botnet. These devices are so complex that no “nutritional label” can be made from them.

One of the things you’d like to know is all the software dependencies, so that if there’s a bug in OpenSSL, for example, then you know your device is vulnerable. Unfortunately, that requires a nutritional label with 10,000 items on it.

Or, one thing you’d want to know is that the device has no backdoor passwords. But that would miss the Xiongmai devices. The web service has no backdoor passwords. If you caught the Telnet backdoor password and removed it, then you’d miss the special secret backdoor that hackers would later reverse engineer.

This is a policy position chasing a non-existent technical issue push by Pieter Zatko, who has gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars from government grants to push the issue. It’s his way of getting rich and has nothing to do with sound policy.

Cyberczars and ambassadors

Various recommendations call for the appointment of various CISOs, Assistant to the President for Cybersecurity, and an Ambassador for Cybersecurity. But nowhere does it mention these should be technical posts. This is like appointing a Surgeon General who is not a doctor.

Government’s problems with cybersecurity stems from the way technical knowledge is so disrespected. The current cyberczar prides himself on his lack of technical knowledge, because that helps him see the bigger picture.

Ironically, many of the other Action Items are about training cybersecurity practitioners, employees, and managers. None of this can happen as long as leadership is clueless. Technical details matter, as I show above with the Mirai botnet. Subtlety and nuance in technical details can call for opposite policy responses.

Conclusion

This document is promoted as being written by technical experts. However, nothing in the document is neutral technical expertise. Instead, it’s almost entirely a policy document dominated by special interests and left-wing politics. In many places it makes recommendations to the incoming Republican president. His response should be to round-file it immediately.

I only chose a few items, as this blogpost is long enough as it is. I could pick almost any of of the 53 Action Items to demonstrate how they are policy, special-interest driven rather than reflecting technical expertise.

Continue reading That "Commission on Enhancing Cybersecurity" is absurd→

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No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot

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I keep seeing this Gizmodo piece entitled “Snowden is a fucking idiot”. I understand the appeal of the piece. The hero worship of Edward Snowden is getting old. But the piece itself is garbage.

The author, Matt Novak, is of the new wave of hard-core leftists intolerant of those who disagree with them. His position is that everyone is an idiot who doesn’t agree with his views: Libertarians, Republicans, moderate voters who chose Trump, and even fellow left-wingers that aren’t as hard-core.

If you carefully read his piece, you’ll see that Novak doesn’t actually prove Snowden is wrong. Novak doesn’t show how Snowden disagrees with facts, but only how Snowden disagrees with the left-wing view of the world, “libertarian garbage” as Novak puts it. It’s only through deduction that we come to the conclusion: those who aren’t left-wing are idiots, Snowden is not left-wing, therefore Snowden is an idiot.

The question under debate in the piece is:

technology is more important than policy as a way to protect our liberties

In other words, if you don’t want the government spying on you, then focus on using encryption (use Signal) rather than trying to change the laws so they can’t spy on you.

On a factual basis (rather than political), Snowden is right. If you live in Germany and don’t want the NSA spying on you there is little policy-wise that you can do about it, short of convincing Germany to go to war against the United States to get the US to stop spying.

Likewise, for all those dissenters in countries with repressive regimes, technology precedes policy. You can’t effect change until you first can protect yourselves from the state police who throws you in jail for dissenting. Use Signal.

In our own country, Snowden is right about “politics”. Snowden’s leak showed how the NSA was collecting everyone’s phone records to stop terrorism. Privacy organizations like the EFF supported the reform bill, the USA FREEDOM ACT. But rather than stopping the practice, the “reform” opened up the phone records to all law enforcement (FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, etc.) for normal law enforcement purposes.

Imagine the protestors out there opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. The FBI is shooting down their drones and blasting them with water cannons. Now, because of the efforts of the EFF and other privacy activists, using the USA FREEDOM ACT, the FBI is also grabbing everyone’s phone records in the area. Ask yourself who is the fucking idiot here: the guy telling you to use Signal, or the guy telling you to focus on “politics” to stop this surveillance.

Novak repeats the hard-left version of the creation of the Internet:

The internet has always been monitored by the state. It was created by the fucking US military and has been monitored from day one. Surveillance of the internet wasn’t invented after September 11, 2001, no matter how many people would like to believe that to be the case.

No, the Internet was not created by the US military. Sure, the military contributed to the Internet, but the majority of contributions came from corporations, universities, and researchers. The left-wing claim that the government/military created the Internet involves highlighting their contributions while ignoring everyone else’s.

The Internet was not “monitored from day one”, because until the 1990s, it wasn’t even an important enough network to monitor. As late as 1993, the Internet was dwarfed in size and importance by numerous other computer networks – until the web took off that year, the Internet was considered a temporary research project. Those like Novak writing the history of the Internet are astonishingly ignorant of the competing networks of those years. They miss XNS, AppleTalk, GOSIP, SNA, Novel, DECnet, Bitnet, Uunet, Fidonet, X.25, Telenet, and all the other things that were really important during those years.

And, mass Internet surveillance did indeed come only after 9/11. The NSA’s focus before that was on signals and telephone lines, because that’s where all the information was.  When 9/11 happened, they were still trying to catch up to the recent growth of the Internet. Virtually everything Snowden documents came after 9/11. Sure, they had programs like FAIRVIEW that were originally created to get telephone information in the 1970s, but these programs only started delivering mass Internet information after 9/11. Sure, the NSA occasionally got emails before 9/11, but nothing like the enormous increase in collection afterwards.

What I’ve shown here is that Matt Novak is a fucking idiot. He gets basic facts wrong about how the Internet works. He doesn’t prove Snowden’s actually wrong by citing evidence, only that Snowden is wrong because he disagrees with what leftists like Novak believe to be right. All the actual evidence supports Snowden in this case.

It doesn’t mean we should avoid politics. Technology and politics are different things, it’s not either-or. Whether we do one has no impact on deciding to do the other. But if you are a DAP protester, use Signal instead of unencrypted messaging or phone, instead of waiting for activists to pass legislation.

Continue reading No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot→

Posted in Uncategorized

No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot

Posted on by

I keep seeing this Gizmodo piece entitled “Snowden is a fucking idiot”. I understand the appeal of the piece. The hero worship of Edward Snowden is getting old. But the piece itself is garbage.

The author, Matt Novak, is of the new wave of hard-core leftists intolerant of those who disagree with them. His position is that everyone is an idiot who doesn’t agree with his views: Libertarians, Republicans, moderate voters who chose Trump, and even fellow left-wingers that aren’t as hard-core.

If you carefully read his piece, you’ll see that Novak doesn’t actually prove Snowden is wrong. Novak doesn’t show how Snowden disagrees with facts, but only how Snowden disagrees with the left-wing view of the world, “libertarian garbage” as Novak puts it. It’s only through deduction that we come to the conclusion: those who aren’t left-wing are idiots, Snowden is not left-wing, therefore Snowden is an idiot.

The question under debate in the piece is:

technology is more important than policy as a way to protect our liberties

In other words, if you don’t want the government spying on you, then focus on using encryption (use Signal) rather than trying to change the laws so they can’t spy on you.

On a factual basis (rather than political), Snowden is right. If you live in Germany and don’t want the NSA spying on you there is little policy-wise that you can do about it, short of convincing Germany to go to war against the United States to get the US to stop spying.

Likewise, for all those dissenters in countries with repressive regimes, technology precedes policy. You can’t effect change until you first can protect yourselves from the state police who throws you in jail for dissenting. Use Signal.

In our own country, Snowden is right about “politics”. Snowden’s leak showed how the NSA was collecting everyone’s phone records to stop terrorism. Privacy organizations like the EFF supported the reform bill, the USA FREEDOM ACT. But rather than stopping the practice, the “reform” opened up the phone records to all law enforcement (FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, etc.) for normal law enforcement purposes.

Imagine the protestors out there opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. The FBI is shooting down their drones and blasting them with water cannons. Now, because of the efforts of the EFF and other privacy activists, using the USA FREEDOM ACT, the FBI is also grabbing everyone’s phone records in the area. Ask yourself who is the fucking idiot here: the guy telling you to use Signal, or the guy telling you to focus on “politics” to stop this surveillance.

Novak repeats the hard-left version of the creation of the Internet:

The internet has always been monitored by the state. It was created by the fucking US military and has been monitored from day one. Surveillance of the internet wasn’t invented after September 11, 2001, no matter how many people would like to believe that to be the case.

No, the Internet was not created by the US military. Sure, the military contributed to the Internet, but the majority of contributions came from corporations, universities, and researchers. The left-wing claim that the government/military created the Internet involves highlighting their contributions while ignoring everyone else’s.

The Internet was not “monitored from day one”, because until the 1990s, it wasn’t even an important enough network to monitor. As late as 1993, the Internet was dwarfed in size and importance by numerous other computer networks – until the web took off that year, the Internet was considered a temporary research project. Those like Novak writing the history of the Internet are astonishingly ignorant of the competing networks of those years. They miss XNS, AppleTalk, GOSIP, SNA, Novel, DECnet, Bitnet, Uunet, Fidonet, X.25, Telenet, and all the other things that were really important during those years.

And, mass Internet surveillance did indeed come only after 9/11. The NSA’s focus before that was on signals and telephone lines, because that’s where all the information was.  When 9/11 happened, they were still trying to catch up to the recent growth of the Internet. Virtually everything Snowden documents came after 9/11. Sure, they had programs like FAIRVIEW that were originally created to get telephone information in the 1970s, but these programs only started delivering mass Internet information after 9/11. Sure, the NSA occasionally got emails before 9/11, but nothing like the enormous increase in collection afterwards.

What I’ve shown here is that Matt Novak is a fucking idiot. He gets basic facts wrong about how the Internet works. He doesn’t prove Snowden’s actually wrong by citing evidence, only that Snowden is wrong because he disagrees with what leftists like Novak believe to be right. All the actual evidence supports Snowden in this case.

It doesn’t mean we should avoid politics. Technology and politics are different things, it’s not either-or. Whether we do one has no impact on deciding to do the other. But if you are a DAP protester, use Signal instead of unencrypted messaging or phone, instead of waiting for activists to pass legislation.

Continue reading No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot→

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No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot

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I keep seeing this Gizmodo piece entitled “Snowden is a fucking idiot”. I understand the appeal of the piece. The hero worship of Edward Snowden is getting old. But the piece itself is garbage.

The author, Matt Novak, is of the new wave of hard-core leftists intolerant of those who disagree with them. His position is that everyone is an idiot who doesn’t agree with his views: Libertarians, Republicans, moderate voters who chose Trump, and even fellow left-wingers that aren’t as hard-core.

If you carefully read his piece, you’ll see that Novak doesn’t actually prove Snowden is wrong. Novak doesn’t show how Snowden disagrees with facts, but only how Snowden disagrees with the left-wing view of the world. It’s only through deduction that we come to the conclusion: those who aren’t left-wing are idiots, Snowden is not left-wing, therefore Snowden is an idiot.

The question under debate in the piece is:

technology is more important than policy as a way to protect our liberties

In other words, if you don’t want the government spying on you, then focus on using encryption (use Signal) rather than trying to change the laws so they can’t spy on you.

On a factual basis (rather than political), Snowden is right. If you live in Germany and don’t want the NSA spying on you there is little policy-wise that you can do about it, short of convincing Germany to go to war against the United States to get the US to stop spying.

Likewise, for all those dissenters in countries with repressive regimes, technology precedes policy. You can’t effect change until you first can protect yourselves from the state police who throws you in jail for dissenting. Use Signal.

In our own country, Snowden is right about “politics”. Snowden’s leak showed how the NSA was collecting everyone’s phone records to stop terrorism. Privacy organizations like the EFF supported the reform bill, the USA FREEDOM ACT. But rather than stopping the practice, the “reform” opened up the phone records to all law enforcement (FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, etc.) for normal law enforcement purposes.

Imagine the protestors out there opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. The FBI is shooting down their drones and blasting them with water cannons. Now, because of the efforts of the EFF and other privacy activists, using the USA FREEDOM ACT, the FBI is also grabbing everyone’s phone records in the area. Ask yourself who is the fucking idiot here: the guy telling you to use Signal, or the guy telling you to focus on “politics” to stop this surveillance.

Novak repeats the hard-left version of the creation of the Internet:

The internet has always been monitored by the state. It was created by the fucking US military and has been monitored from day one. Surveillance of the internet wasn’t invented after September 11, 2001, no matter how many people would like to believe that to be the case.

No, the Internet was not created by the US military. Sure, the military contributed to the Internet, but the majority of contributions came from corporations, universities, and researchers. The left-wing claim that the government/military created the Internet involves highlighting their contributions while ignoring everyone else’s.

The Internet was not “monitored from day one”, because until the 1990s, it wasn’t even an important enough network to monitor. As late as 1993, the Internet was dwarfed in size and importance by numerous other computer networks – until the web took off that year, the Internet was considered a temporary research project. Those like Novak writing the history of the Internet are astonishingly ignorant of the competing networks of those years. They miss XNS, AppleTalk, GOSIP, SNA, Novel, DECnet, Bitnet, Uunet, Fidonet, X.25, Telenet, and all the other things that were really important during those years.

And, mass Internet surveillance did indeed come only after 9/11. The NSA’s focus before that was on signals and telephone lines, because that’s where all the information was.  When 9/11 happened, they were still trying to catch up to the recent growth of the Internet. Virtually everything Snowden documents came after 9/11. Sure, they had programs like FAIRVIEW that were originally created to get telephone information in the 1970s, but these programs only started delivering mass Internet information after 9/11. Sure, the NSA occasionally got emails before 9/11, but nothing like the enormous increase in collection afterwards.

What I’ve shown here is that Matt Novak is a fucking idiot. He gets basic facts wrong about how the Internet works. He doesn’t prove Snowden’s actually wrong by citing evidence, only that Snowden is wrong because he disagrees with what leftists like Novak believe to be right. All the actual evidence supports Snowden in this case. It doesn’t mean we should avoid all politics, only that if you are a DAP protester, use Signal instead of unencrypted messaging or phone.

Continue reading No, it’s Matt Novak who is a fucking idiot→

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The false-false-balance problem

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Until recently, journalism in America prided itself on objectivity — to report the truth, without taking sides. That’s because big debates are always complexed and nuanced, and that both sides are equally reasonable. Therefore, when writing an article, reporters attempt to achieve balance by quoting people/experts/proponents on both sides of an issue.

But what about those times when one side is clearly unreasonable? You’d never try to achieve balance by citing those who believe in aliens and big-foot, for example.Thus, journalists have come up with the theory of false-balance to justify being partisan and one-sided on certain issues.
Typical examples where journalists cite false-balance is reporting on anti-vaxxers, climate-change denialists, and Creationists. More recently, false-balance has become an issue in the 2016 Trump election.
But this concept of false-balance is wrong. It’s not that anti-vaxxers, denialists, Creationists, and white supremacists are reasonable. Instead, the issue is that the left-wing has reframed the debate. They’ve simplified it into something black-and-white, removing nuance, in a way that shows their opponents as being unreasonable. The media then adopts the reframed debate.
Let’s talk anti-vaxxers. One of the policy debates is whether the government has the power to force vaccinations on people (or on people’s children). Reasonable people say the government doesn’t have this power. Many (if not most) people hold this opinion while agreeing that vaccines are both safe and effective (that they don’t cause autism).
Consider this February 2015 interview with Chris Christy. He’s one of the few politicians who have taken the position that government can override personal choice, such as in the case of an outbreak. Yet, when he said “parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide“, he was broadly reviled as an anti-vaxxer throughout the media. The press reviled other Republican candidates the same way, even while ignoring almost identical statements made at the same time by the Obama administration. They also ignored clearly anti-vax comments from both Hillary and Obama during the 2008 election.
Yes, we can all agree that anti-vaxxers are a bunch of crazy nutjobs. In calling for objectivity, we aren’t saying that you should take them seriously. Instead, we are pointing out the obvious bias in the way the media attacked Republican candidates as being anti-vaxxers, and then hiding behind “false-balance”.
Now let’s talk evolution. The issue is this: Darwinism has been set up as some sort of competing religion against belief in God(s). High-schools teach children to believe in Darwinism, but not to understand Darwinism. Few kids graduate understanding Darwinism, which is why it’s invariably misrepresented in mass-media (X-Men, Planet of the Apes, Waterworld, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, etc.). The only movie I can recall getting evolution correct is Idiocracy.
Also, evolution has holes in it. This isn’t a bad thing in science, every scientific theory has holes. Science isn’t a religion. We don’t care about the holes. That some things remain unexplained by a theory doesn’t bother us. Science has no problem with gaps in knowledge, where we admit “I don’t know”. It’s religion that has “God of the gaps”, where ignorance isn’t tolerated, and everything unexplained is explained by a deity.
The hole in evolution is how the cell evolved. The fossil record teaches us a lot about multi-cellular organisms over the last 400-million years, but not much about how the cell evolved in the 4-billion years on planet Earth before that. I can point to radio isotope dating and fossil finds to prove dinosaurs existed 250,000 million to 60 million years ago, thus disproving your crazy theory of a 10,000 year-old Earth. But I can’t point to anything that disagrees with your view that a deity created the original cellular organisms. I don’t agree with that theory, but I can’t disprove it, either.
The point is that Christians have a good point that Darwinism is taught as a competing religion. You see this in the way books that deny holes in knowledge, insisting that Darwinism explains even how cells evolved, and that doubting Darwin is blasphemy. 
The Creationist solution is wrong, we can’t teach religion in schools. But they have a reasonable concern about religious Darwinism. The solution there is to do a better job teaching it as a science. If kids want to believe that one of the deities created the first cells, then that’s okay, as long as they understand the fossil record and radioisotope dating.
Now let’s talk Climate Change. This is a tough one, because you people have lost your collective minds. The debate is over how much change? how much danger? how much costs?. The debate is not over Is it true?. We all agree it’s true, even most Republicans. By keeping the debate between the black-and-white “Is global warming true?”, the left-wing can avoid the debate “How much warming?”.
Consider this exchange from one of the primary debates:
Moderator: …about climate change…
RUBIO: Because we’re not going to destroy our economy …
Moderator: Governor Christie, … what do you make of skeptics of climate change such as Senator Rubio?
CHRISTIE: I don’t think Senator Rubio is a skeptic of climate change.
RUBIO: I’m not a denier/skeptic of climate change.
The media (in this case CNN) is so convinced that Republican deny climate change that they can’t hear any other statement. Rubio clearly didn’t deny Climate Change, but the moderator was convinced that he did. Every statement is seen as outright denial, or code words for denial. Thus, convinced of the falseness of false-balance, the media never sees the fact that most Republicans are reasonable.
Similar proof of Republican non-denial is this page full of denialism quotes. If you actually look at the quotes, you’ll see that when taken in context, virtually none of the statements deny climate change. For example, when Senator Dan Sulliven says “no concrete scientific consensus on the extent to which humans contribute to climate change“, he is absolutely right. There is 97% consensus that mankind contributes to climate change, but there is widespread disagreement on how much.
That “97% consensus” is incredibly misleading. Whenever it’s quoted, the speaker immediately moves the bar, claiming that scientists also agree with whatever crazy thing the speaker wants, like hurricanes getting worse (they haven’t — at least, not yet).
There’s no inherent reason why Republicans would disagree with addressing Climate Change. For example, Washington State recently voted on a bill to impose a revenue neutral carbon tax. The important part is “revenue neutral”: Republicans hate expanding government, but they don’t oppose policies that keep government the same side. Democrats opposed this bill, precisely because it didn’t expand the size of government. That proves that Democrats are less concerned with a bipartisan approach to addressing climate change, but instead simply use it as a wedge issue to promote their agenda of increased regulation and increased spending. 
If you are serious about address Climate Change, then agree that Republicans aren’t deniers, and then look for bipartisan solutions.
Conclusion

The point here is not to try to convince you of any political opinion. The point here is to describe how the press has lost objectivity by adopting the left-wing’s reframing of the debate. Instead of seeing balanced debate between two reasonable sides, they see a warped debate between a reasonable (left-wing) side and an unreasonable (right-wing) side. That the opposing side is unreasonable is so incredible seductive they can never give it up.
That Christie had to correct the moderator in the debate should teach you that something is rotten in journalism. Christie understood Rubio’s remarks, but the debate moderator could not. Journalists cannot even see the climate debate because they are wedded to the left-wing’s corrupt view of the debate.
The issue of false-balance is wrong. In debates that evenly divide the population, the issues are complex and nuanced, both sides are reasonable. That’s the law. It doesn’t matter what the debate is. If you see the debate simplified to the point where one side is obviously unreasonable, then it’s you who has a problem.
Dinner with Rajneeshees

One evening I answered the doorbell to find a burgundy clad couple on the doorstep. They were followers of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose cult had recently purchased a large ranch in the eastern part of the state. No, they weren’t there to convert us. They had come for dinner. My father had invited them.
My father was a journalist, who had been covering the controversies with the cult’s neighbors. Yes, they were a crazy cult which later would breakup after committing acts of domestic terrorism.  But this couple was a pair of young professionals (lawyers) who, except for their clothing, looked and behaved like normal people. They would go on to live normal lives after the cult.
Growing up, I lived in two worlds. One was the normal world, which encourages you to demonize those who disagree with you. On the political issues that concern you most, you divide the world into the righteous and the villains. It’s not enough to believe the other side wrong, you most also believe them to be evil.
The other world was that of my father, teaching me to see the other side of the argument. I guess I grew up with my own Atticus Finch (from To Kill a Mockingbird), who set an ideal. In much the same way that Atticus told his children that they couldn’t hate even Hitler, I was told I couldn’t hate even the crazy Rajneeshees.

Continue reading The false-false-balance problem→

Posted in Uncategorized

The false-false-balance problem

Posted on by

Until recently, journalism in America prided itself on objectivity — to report the truth, without taking sides. That’s because big debates are always complexed and nuanced, and that both sides are equally reasonable. Therefore, when writing an article, reporters attempt to achieve balance by quoting people/experts/proponents on both sides of an issue.

But what about those times when one side is clearly unreasonable? You’d never try to achieve balance by citing those who believe in aliens and big-foot, for example.Thus, journalists have come up with the theory of false-balance to justify being partisan and one-sided on certain issues.
Typical examples where journalists cite false-balance is reporting on anti-vaxxers, climate-change denialists, and Creationists. More recently, false-balance has become an issue in the 2016 Trump election.
But this concept of false-balance is wrong. It’s not that anti-vaxxers, denialists, Creationists, and white supremacists are reasonable. Instead, the issue is that the left-wing has reframed the debate. They’ve simplified it into something black-and-white, removing nuance, in a way that shows their opponents as being unreasonable. The media then adopts the reframed debate.
Let’s talk anti-vaxxers. One of the policy debates is whether the government has the power to force vaccinations on people (or on people’s children). Reasonable people say the government doesn’t have this power. Many (if not most) people hold this opinion while agreeing that vaccines are both safe and effective (that they don’t cause autism).
Consider this February 2015 interview with Chris Christy. He’s one of the few politicians who have taken the position that government can override personal choice, such as in the case of an outbreak. Yet, when he said “parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide“, he was broadly reviled as an anti-vaxxer throughout the media. The press reviled other Republican candidates the same way, even while ignoring almost identical statements made at the same time by the Obama administration. They also ignored clearly anti-vax comments from both Hillary and Obama during the 2008 election.
Yes, we can all agree that anti-vaxxers are a bunch of crazy nutjobs. In calling for objectivity, we aren’t saying that you should take them seriously. Instead, we are pointing out the obvious bias in the way the media attacked Republican candidates as being anti-vaxxers, and then hiding behind “false-balance”.
Now let’s talk evolution. The issue is this: Darwinism has been set up as some sort of competing religion against belief in God(s). High-schools teach children to believe in Darwinism, but not to understand Darwinism. Few kids graduate understanding Darwinism, which is why it’s invariably misrepresented in mass-media (X-Men, Planet of the Apes, Waterworld, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, etc.). The only movie I can recall getting evolution correct is Idiocracy.
Also, evolution has holes in it. This isn’t a bad thing in science, every scientific theory has holes. Science isn’t a religion. We don’t care about the holes. That some things remain unexplained by a theory doesn’t bother us. Science has no problem with gaps in knowledge, where we admit “I don’t know”. It’s religion that has “God of the gaps”, where ignorance isn’t tolerated, and everything unexplained is explained by a deity.
The hole in evolution is how the cell evolved. The fossil record teaches us a lot about multi-cellular organisms over the last 400-million years, but not much about how the cell evolved in the 4-billion years on planet Earth before that. I can point to radio isotope dating and fossil finds to prove dinosaurs existed 250,000 million to 60 million years ago, thus disproving your crazy theory of a 10,000 year-old Earth. But I can’t point to anything that disagrees with your view that a deity created the original cellular organisms. I don’t agree with that theory, but I can’t disprove it, either.
The point is that Christians have a good point that Darwinism is taught as a competing religion. You see this in the way books that deny holes in knowledge, insisting that Darwinism explains even how cells evolved, and that doubting Darwin is blasphemy. 
The Creationist solution is wrong, we can’t teach religion in schools. But they have a reasonable concern about religious Darwinism. The solution there is to do a better job teaching it as a science. If kids want to believe that one of the deities created the first cells, then that’s okay, as long as they understand the fossil record and radioisotope dating.
Now let’s talk Climate Change. This is a tough one, because you people have lost your collective minds. The debate is over how much change? how much danger? how much costs?. The debate is not over Is it true?. We all agree it’s true, even most Republicans. By keeping the debate between the black-and-white “Is global warming true?”, the left-wing can avoid the debate “How much warming?”.
Consider this exchange from one of the primary debates:
Moderator: …about climate change…
RUBIO: Because we’re not going to destroy our economy …
Moderator: Governor Christie, … what do you make of skeptics of climate change such as Senator Rubio?
CHRISTIE: I don’t think Senator Rubio is a skeptic of climate change.
RUBIO: I’m not a denier/skeptic of climate change.
The media (in this case CNN) is so convinced that Republican deny climate change that they can’t hear any other statement. Rubio clearly didn’t deny Climate Change, but the moderator was convinced that he did. Every statement is seen as outright denial, or code words for denial. Thus, convinced of the falseness of false-balance, the media never sees the fact that most Republicans are reasonable.
Similar proof of Republican non-denial is this page full of denialism quotes. If you actually look at the quotes, you’ll see that when taken in context, virtually none of the statements deny climate change. For example, when Senator Dan Sulliven says “no concrete scientific consensus on the extent to which humans contribute to climate change“, he is absolutely right. There is 97% consensus that mankind contributes to climate change, but there is widespread disagreement on how much.
That “97% consensus” is incredibly misleading. Whenever it’s quoted, the speaker immediately moves the bar, claiming that scientists also agree with whatever crazy thing the speaker wants, like hurricanes getting worse (they haven’t — at least, not yet).
There’s no inherent reason why Republicans would disagree with addressing Climate Change. For example, Washington State recently voted on a bill to impose a revenue neutral carbon tax. The important part is “revenue neutral”: Republicans hate expanding government, but they don’t oppose policies that keep government the same side. Democrats opposed this bill, precisely because it didn’t expand the size of government. That proves that Democrats are less concerned with a bipartisan approach to addressing climate change, but instead simply use it as a wedge issue to promote their agenda of increased regulation and increased spending. 
If you are serious about address Climate Change, then agree that Republicans aren’t deniers, and then look for bipartisan solutions.
Conclusion

The point here is not to try to convince you of any political opinion. The point here is to describe how the press has lost objectivity by adopting the left-wing’s reframing of the debate. Instead of seeing balanced debate between two reasonable sides, they see a warped debate between a reasonable (left-wing) side and an unreasonable (right-wing) side. That the opposing side is unreasonable is so incredible seductive they can never give it up.
That Christie had to correct the moderator in the debate should teach you that something is rotten in journalism. Christie understood Rubio’s remarks, but the debate moderator could not. Journalists cannot even see the climate debate because they are wedded to the left-wing’s corrupt view of the debate.
The issue of false-balance is wrong. In debates that evenly divide the population, the issues are complex and nuanced, both sides are reasonable. That’s the law. It doesn’t matter what the debate is. If you see the debate simplified to the point where one side is obviously unreasonable, then it’s you who has a problem.
Dinner with Rajneeshees

One evening I answered the doorbell to find a burgundy clad couple on the doorstep. They were followers of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose cult had recently purchased a large ranch in the eastern part of the state. No, they weren’t there to convert us. They had come for dinner. My father had invited them.
My father was a journalist, who had been covering the controversies with the cult’s neighbors. Yes, they were a crazy cult which later would breakup after committing acts of domestic terrorism.  But this couple was a pair of young professionals (lawyers) who, except for their clothing, looked and behaved like normal people. They would go on to live normal lives after the cult.
Growing up, I lived in two worlds. One was the normal world, which encourages you to demonize those who disagree with you. On the political issues that concern you most, you divide the world into the righteous and the villains. It’s not enough to believe the other side wrong, you most also believe them to be evil.
The other world was that of my father, teaching me to see the other side of the argument. I guess I grew up with my own Atticus Finch (from To Kill a Mockingbird), who set an ideal. In much the same way that Atticus told his children that they couldn’t hate even Hitler, I was told I couldn’t hate even the crazy Rajneeshees.

Continue reading The false-false-balance problem→

Posted in SBN