HorsesAss.Org

It’s a staple of the mudslinging in comment threads at various political blogs, in response to right-wing trolls, to wonder who’s paying them. Now, thanks to an article in today’s Guardian UK, we know at least one of the answers: We are.

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world….

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as “sock puppets” – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries”.

Three thoughts. First, this report is that the US military is seeking to develop software that would at least partially automate what can easily be done at most any Web site or Facebook or Twitter account by hand. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that the US military (along with how many other government agencies?) is already doing this, just not as efficiently as the new software would allow.

Secondly, the US government is prohibited by law from propagandizing US citizens (insert laugh track here), and since online communities have no international borders, even if they’re based overseas, that’s exactly what these efforts would do. This is not just a breach of online etiquette. It’s a crime.

Third: why, oh why, does it always seem to be a British or other foreign media outlet that first reports these stories? I’m just sayin’…

Updates on the various drug law reform items I’ve been following:

– Yesterday, former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington John McKay, along with former police officer Tim Burgess and Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, encouraged the state legislature to legalize marijuana and have it sold in state liquor stores. At the very least, I’d like to see a vote on this bill. There are a lot of legislators in this state who talk a good game on the budget, and it’d be interesting to see how many of them have the courage to put politics aside and walk the walk.

– The trial of medical marijuana provider Bryan Gabriel ended with a hung jury. Eight jurors found him not guilty, three found him guilty, and one was undecided. It’s not known yet whether King County Prosecutors will attempt to retry him, but I have trouble believing that they would. The case they had against Gabriel was laughable (and it’s worth pointing out that they filed these charges on the day Snoqualmie Police were forced to return 10 ounces of medical marijuana to him from a different sting operation – and 15 months after the alleged transaction took place). In trial, they had no audio or video evidence, no fingerprints, and the person to whom Gabriel allegedly sold the bag wouldn’t even testify under oath. Only Snoqualmie Police officers took the stand for the prosecution. If Satterberg’s office balked at bringing charges against Ian Birk because they wouldn’t be able to win a conviction, then what the hell was this?

– On Monday there were a number of raids across Montana shutting down marijuana production facilities. Just as in Washington, Montana has legalized the use of medical marijuana, but hasn’t established a network of distribution to supply their patients. But unlike here in Washington – where we’re on the verge of legalizing both dispensaries and licensed grows – their legislature tried to repeal their still-popular medical marijuana law. As the Montana State Senate deadlocked on the repeal bill, the Obama Administration’s DEA began shutting down the facilities across the state anyway. Because these facilities were operating outside state law, this wasn’t a violation of Obama’s stated position on medical marijuana, but this certainly appears to be a case where the Obama Administration is working closely with Montana’s Republicans to gut a law that both the people of the state and the state’s Democrats both support. There’s no excuse for that.

Last year I put up my favorite poem by William Butler Yeats. I think a yearly Yeats is appropriate.

Hound Voice

Because we love bare hills and stunted trees
And were the last to choose the settled ground,
Its boredom of the desk or of the spade, because
So many years companioned by a hound,
Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound,
Some few half wake and half renew their choice,
Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name — ‘hound voice.’

The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. ‘Hound voices’ were they all.
We picked each other from afar and knew
What hour of terror comes to test the soul,
And in that terror’s name obeyed the call,
And understood, what none have understood,
Those images that waken in the blood.

Some day we shall get up before the dawn
And find our ancient hounds before the door,
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,
Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;
Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,
And chants of victory amid the encircling hounds.

After reading The Stranger’s coverage of the police department recently, I can’t help but think that beat cops shouldn’t have guns under normal circumstances.

I don’t mean to suggest that all, or most, of the Seattle Police can’t handle a firearm. They’ve all had psychological screening and extensive training. Uniformly, I’ve only had good experiences with Seattle police. But all it took was one bad day for one officer to put a wood carver in the ground. The day would have been better for Williams and for Birk if Birk hadn’t been armed that day. We’re told that these sorts of incidents of police shooting people are inevitable, but if we disarm the sort of people who think “Ian Birk is a good young man” we’ll probably have fewer of those sorts of incidents.

And I know the region has had a spate of police officers murdered recently. There are people gunning for our officers, sadly literally. Still their weapons didn’t save them from those premeditated murders. And in the case of Clemmons, since he took an officer’s gun, he was more dangerous because the police were armed. Shootings of officers in Britain where the police on the street don’t carry weapons is fairly infrequent (obviously there are other reasons).

I’m not arguing there is no place for any police officer in any circumstance to have a weapon. But it should be the exceptional case, not the norm.

I’m currently on the seventh floor of the King County Courthouse building in downtown Seattle. The jury is deliberating in the trial of Bryan Gabriel, the medical marijuana provider at the center of the tragic circumstances from last June that I wrote about here, in which a medical marijuana patient named Jeff Roetter died during an epileptic seizure as Snoqualmie police were pressuring him to testify against Gabriel. The charges that Gabriel currently faces are unrelated to Roetter, but were curiously filed the exact same day that Snoqualmie police were forced by a judge to return 10 ounces of marijuana to Gabriel.

The reason I’m even able to be here today, though, is that yesterday was my last day of work at the job I’ve been at since late 2008. I don’t write much about my actual day job since I let work and blogging co-mingle a bit too much at Microsoft. I work much harder to keep the two things separate (which I make easy for myself by being a shitty blogger with a relatively small audience). This past job was even easier for me to do that, since a lot of the people I worked with weren’t local, and I became a father in 2009 – giving me even less time to write shitty posts.

My career is in software quality assurance (QA). I’ve worked on airplanes, office productivity products, online music systems, statistical modeling applications, and large-scale data warehouses. My career has presented me with numerous challenges and I genuinely like the process of having to solve difficult problems. In this most recent job, I succeeded in climbing up into management and got a different perspective on how QA is done and a better perspective on how large projects are managed and – more commonly – mismanaged.

But this experience has also made me ponder the parallels between how QA functions within a company building a commercial product and how government functions within a society. Working on flight control software at Boeing early on in my career, I saw the overlap between them, as the FAA worked directly with us in our certification efforts. While it’s true that Boeing cares a lot about safety, I’ve worked at enough places since then to know that corporate bottom lines are often the most immovable objects, and that FAA presence within the group was both welcome and necessary. It made it easier for those of us in QA to demand enough time to complete our job.

At many other places, that isn’t always the case. QA efforts are often undermanned and underfunded, and yet still end up taking the blame when things go wrong. Developers and sometimes even program management fail to see the value that QA provides until a horrendous bug is found in a production system that probably would’ve been found by that QA engineer that you laid off last year. It’s one of the basic tenets of software development that the longer it takes for you to find a bug, the more it costs you. You know QA has done their job well when you aren’t constantly reminded of how important they are.

This isn’t an argument to have government regulation for all types of software development. Most commercial software development doesn’t impact public safety the way that airplanes do, and companies survive or fail based upon the quality of the products they produce (and they often don’t, but that’s a whole other post) without us needing to interfere with that process. But the parallels to government and how it’s seen in our society is what this post is about.

At the town hall I attended last weekend, Republican State Rep Jay Rodne complained that the state Department of Transportation had 5000 engineers on its staff. He seemed utterly incredulous at this statistic, as if he’d discovered some secret cabal that’s bleeding the taxpayers of Washington state dry. He didn’t provide any examples of waste. In his mind, the mere presence of the workers is an indication of wastefulness. This is religion dressed up as politics, a belief that a public sector employee or any public project is inherently a drain on society.

One can easily look on the WSDOT page to see what those engineers work on. Currently featured is the work being done on the Alaskan Way Viaduct for earthquake preparedness. These are things that you tend to notice only when they’re not done right – or not done at all. And when you decide to skimp on those things, just like in the software world, you can end up costing yourself far more in the long run.

My latest work experience was a frustrating one. Without going into too much detail, it involved significant budget cutting to our QA groups, including an offshoring push. The efforts to rein in costs made it very difficult to do proper QA on a number of their systems, potentially costing them far more in the long run. They closed down our office before I got to see how it all unfolded, but with some free time inbetween jobs, I’ll have some extra time to watch what happens in our greater society as we continue to take the same approach with government programs – eliminating workers whose value is often underappreciated, and taking away projects whose presence keeps overall costs down.

No…this isn’t about Japan. It’s about SeaTac and American travelers:

The Transportation Security Administration is re-analyzing the radiation levels of X-ray body scanners installed in airports nationwide, after testing produced dramatically higher-than-expected results.

The TSA, which has deployed at least 500 body scanners to at least 78 airports, said Tuesday the machines meet all safety standards and would remain in operation despite a “calculation error” in safety studies. The flawed results showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

You know who is going to be gloating over this, don’t you?

Goldy:

I, for one, will refuse to allow my daughter through one of those scanners, and will refuse to walk through one myself. […] I mean, honestly… would you trust TSA to bombard you or a loved one with ionizing radiation?

You know who is laughing over this, don’t you?

The “terrorists”. You know…the ones who “hate our freedoms.”

“They” have scared the living shit out of politicians, driving them to a state of frenzied security overreaction. It isn’t just the trillion dollar wars, the costly military build-up, the absurdly bloated domestic security infrastructure…those things that have drained our coffers with little substantive return on investment. It isn’t just the disgrace of our government getting caught committing torture in our names and starting wars under false pretenses that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

For our dignity, it’s also a “death” by 1,000 cuts. We’ve succumbed to ludicrous restrictions and procedures for air travel and we’ve accepted those increasingly invasive inspections.

We’ve taken it to the extreme of “mainstreaming” the use of full body scanning using ionizing radiation administered by non-radiologists on equipment that, it turns out, was being inspected erroneously.

Ultimately we, the American electorate, by putting up with this shit, are self-terrorists.

I always opt out…and go for the free TSA massage.

Update:

Commenter Oxbrain takes me to task for fear-mongering. I’ll respond here, because I believe it will add some clarity to a post that was minimally about radiation and more about overreaction to terrorism.

“Your title is “Radiation “emissions are 10 times higher”” Taking the quote out of context as it is, this is a blatantly false statement that is obviously intended to strike at a fear of radiation.”

The title is not a statement. But I understand the point. The title is alarmist…I mean, given the context of concerns over the situation in Japan. But the purpose of the over-the-top title was to draw eyeballs. Incendiary titles are a tradition in blogging. I just wish they could all be as good as “Asshole inflamed over anuses”.

“I can’t imagine the mental disconnect required to try using an irrational fear of radiation as an argument against our irrational fear of terrorism.”

I appreciate your point, I really do. But what is rational about fear of radiation is that mistakes can, and will, happen. (Yes…even by a government agency.) That the particular mistake (one of several) highlighted in the article was not a radiation health threat, as the article made explicit, isn’t much comfort. It was still a mistake. The tests yielded numbers 10 times too high.

Apparently, someone at the TSA charged with reviewing the test results from the contractor, wasn’t surprised, or even curious about readings that were, apparently, ten-times too high. That’s not good.

And that wasn’t the only mistake. The TSA report cited other problems with the inspections:

• Lack of notation for the latest calibration date for the machine being tested or the most recent calibration date noted had expired on survey meters
• Information missing regarding warning labels and required labels
• Calculation errors not impacting safety
• Missing survey point readings
• Inconsistent responses to survey questions
• No reading of background radiation noted
• Missing other non-measurement related information

(For context, I’ll just note that a missing placard on an aircraft renders it legally unairworthy.)

These errors add poignancy to Goldy’s question: do you trust the TSA to expose you to ionizing radiation?

So…yeah, I think it works using the irrational fear of radiation as an argument against the irrational fear of terrorism. Clearly people’s irrational fear of terrorism is so…well, irrational, that people succumb to it over their irrational fear of radiation and their rational fear that mistakes can happen.

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00 pm, but feel free to show up earlier for dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 215 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

In case this passed under your radar, there is an election today:

Online voter applicants who have received an emailed confirmation of voter eligibility may vote online until 9 p.m. Tuesday. The King Conservation District is also providing an “in-person” voting option from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.Tuesday at the district’s offices located at 1107 SW Grady Way in Renton.

That’s right…a King County election with email voting and a single polling place. Goldy rants about it here.

You may say, so what? I’ll either be somewhat inconvenienced or I’ll find another route. Yes, you would, but Stefan Sharkansky decided that a mode of transportation he doesn’t like not working perfectly occasionally means that it’s time to pack in this whole public transit experiment.

Because trains are more dependable than cars

Usually, yes.

“Sounder train between Everett and Seattle canceled for Monday”

If only there was a commuter bus you could take you from Everett to Seattle, this whole post would be a fucking waste of everybody’s time.

There seems to be a lot of that.

My God, occasionally trains get delayed or canceled. Traffic jams literally don’t exist, because otherwise this post is so stupid that you’ll lose fewer brain cells banging your head against a wall while drinking grain alcohol than you would reading it.

As the Sound Transit enthusiasts have been telling us for years, the Sounder is “a dependable, stress-free commute” and a “reliable service”

Compared to driving, it sure is. Seriously, how many traffic jams have there been on I-5 between Seattle and Everett since Sounder opened? Do scientists even know have numbers that reach that high?

The taxes we pay for it are a reliable and dependable outflow.

Roads are literally free.

The trial is finally underway this week. The background of the case is here. Updates from the courtroom using the Twitter tag #kcvbg. Most interesting update so far is this one.

Prompted by the need to manually adjust HA’s GMT offset to accommodate for Daylight Savings Time (what’s up with that, WordPress?), I once again opened a support ticket with the hosting company asking them to adjust the server’s clock, which has been off by about 40 minutes for I dunno, months. And possibly prompted by other support tickets related to DST, this time they did.

Yay.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was in Edinburgh, Scotland.

This week’s is related to a TV show or a movie, and before you grab the pitchforks and hunt me down, this image is probably 2-3 years old, so that’s a clue. Good luck!

I was so busy following the disaster in Japan that I couldn’t even crack open my bible. So let’s just ask the believers to explain how a compassionate God could do something like this.

Discuss.

Yesterday, legislators around the state held town hall meetings. I’ve lived in the 5th Legislative District for a year now – and expect to live here for many more – and thought it was a good time to actually hear what my state representatives are up to. I showed up at 10am at the Maple Valley Community Center. Glenn Anderson and Jay Rodne (my two Republican state reps) were just starting to speak to a crowd of about a dozen people.

The meeting started off with Anderson talking about the budget difficulties. As you’d expect, Anderson and Rodne believe that our budget problems are related to Democratic overspending (something that Goldy has repeatedly pointed out is not true). One particularly interesting accusation that they made was that the cuts to the budget this year were specifically put in areas that would be most painful (health care and education) in order to scare people into raising taxes in a November referendum. Rodne seemed to believe that we could’ve balanced the budget merely by cutting L&I and the Department of Ecology. That sounded like the equivalent of folks saying that we can eliminate the federal budget deficit by cutting NPR and arts funding, but I’ll let my wonkier friends evaluate that claim.

Anyway, Rodne then asked for a show of hands on who in the room wanted to solve the budget problems by raising taxes. My hand went up and about half the room uneasily raised their hands half-way up with some uncertainty. Rodne then asked me if I was a firefighter (what?). I said no. He asked if I was a public union worker. I said no again, somewhat perplexed by his questions.

The meeting continued on. The political affiliation of the attendees wasn’t overly obvious, except for one gentleman wearing a Republican pin on his jacket. I was expecting it to be largely a conservative crowd, however it was probably closer to 50-50. Either way, it was a small crowd. At one point, the older couple in front on me, who had both worked in the public sector, spoke up to challenge some of the prevailing anti-union rhetoric coming from the front of the room.

The husband (who actually was a firefighter) got somewhat agitated with Rodne in what was the only really tense part of the entire meeting. I spoke up to defend him – primarily because Rodne was attempting to claim that the budget problems we have aren’t related to nationwide problems in the economy, which is absurd. Rodne once again asked if I was a firefighter. This time I more fully elaborated on the fact that I’m a private-sector employee. In response to me, Anderson actually put together a somewhat rational response.

Rodne then asked the room if they agreed with what was happening in Wisconsin. I saw only 2 hands go up, although a gentleman in the back spoke up saying he didn’t understand what Rodne was asking. It’s possible that some in the room thought Rodne was referring to what the protesters were doing, but Rodne seemed genuinely surprised not to see a roomful of hands go up.

Well, my son is waking up now, so I’ll try to wrap this up. At the end of the meeting, I went up to speak to Anderson about my pet pieces of legislation, the drug law reform measures currently making their way through the legislature. I asked him if he was going to support the legalization bill, which would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the state budget, lower crime, and protect families. He first copped to having been a ‘head’ back in the day and said he could potentially support the medical marijuana bill, but couldn’t support HB 1550. I asked him why and his response was that there were soccer moms, and “that gateway thing”, and because meth was really, really bad. So after an hour long town hall of two Republican legislators accusing Democrats of playing politics instead of dealing responsibly with the state budget, it took me roughly 15 seconds to get Anderson to do the same.

Time change for Tea Baggers: set clocks back 400 years. So 2 AM tomorrow becomes 1611, and don’t be late for witch drownings/church.

— Jon DeVore via Twitter.

(Man…I sure wish Jon would post his stuff—even really short stuff—on HA again!)