iftttwall

President Obama is fast approaching lame duck
status as the public’s opinion of him sours. Only four in ten
Americans
now think he can effectively manage the federal
government,  and a majority (53 percent) don’t find him honest
or trustworthy. But there is one thing Americans can still trust
Obama to do,
raise lots of money for Democrats running in elections next
year. It may not matter what Obama says at these fundraisers (even
if they’re attended by the 47 percent that still trust him) as it’s
presumably his position as president that draws donors. He doesn’t
just show up and smile, though. Sometimes he’s good for a
laugh.

From Reuters:

President Barack Obama, on a fundraising swing in
Seattle on Sunday, described himself as “not a particularly
ideological person” despite ongoing political clashes with
Republicans over healthcare, the economy, and immigration
reform.

He’s
not a socialist, he just thinks he’s always right. And
everything that’s not is Republicans’ fault. That may not make him
seem particularly ideological, but it does make him seem
particularly partisan and petty.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don’t forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at @reason247.

At The American Conservative, W. James
Antle III has a
shrewd, pessimistic take on how GOP opposition to the Iran
nuclear deal threatens to isolate intervention-skeptic Sen. Rand
Paul (R-Kentucky):

The most hawkish conservatives follow a simple script: Obama is
an apologizing appeaser while Republicans are the muscular party of
Reagan and anyone to the right of Jimmy Carter. That narrative is
complicated by the fact that they often side with the Obama
administration—when they aren’t divided among themselves—against
the rest of the right on military interventions and civil liberties
questions.

Iran brings the foreign-policy debate back to the hawks’ comfort
zone. The Iranian ayatollahs have been villains since at least the
1979 hostage crisis, much longer than Saddam Hussein was so
perceived before the Iraq war. As a state sponsor of terrorism, it
is not an undeserved reputation. […]

Republican lawmakers, aided by Democrats like New Jersey Sen.
Robert Menendez, are insisting on zero enrichment as a condition
for relaxing any sanctions against Iran. Some would even like to
authorize the use of military force. There are no partisan or
opportunistic reasons for any Republican to resist such
legislation.

In the Senate, Rand Paul—who has supported some sanctions—may be
alone. If he decides to push back against Marco Rubio, John McCain,
and Lindsey Graham this time around, it’s hard to envision Ted Cruz
or even Mike Lee joining him.

Whole thing
here; Antle’s 2010 Reason profile of then-candidate
Paul here.

Interventionists recently seen stomping on
Paul’s Iran positioning include longtime critics Jennifer Rubin
at the Washington Post (“Rand
Paul: Worse than Obama on Iran“) and the
Washington Free Beacon.

After the jump read what Paul told me in late August when I
asked whether the U.S. has “moral standing” to stop nuclear
proliferation in Iran and elsewhere:

Q: What about developments pursuant of nuclear weapons?
Iran, North Korea….Do we actually have moral standing to stop
that, and what are the tools that you think are
appropriate?

A: You know, what we’ve been trying with Iran is sanctions, and
I think the sanctions have had some influence, and I think they’ve
at least superficially brought the Iranians to the point where
they’d like to negotiate. I think ultimately, though, that no
successful negotiation will happen unless Russia and China are
included in it.

I think we’ve made the mistake of having sort of superficial
show-votes in the Security Council. There’s always going to
be—particularly as we came out of the Cold War—there’s ah, I guess
the best way to describe it is Russia feels a diminished manhood.
And they want to assert their manhood, and assert their former
superpowerdom by voting against us in the Security Council, and I
think they will. But I think if you were to talk to them one-on-one
in a basis, same with China, and convince them that 1) trade with
us is important and that we want to expand trade with them, but in
order to do that we need to quit diverting so many resources to
Iran. If you just get Iran to behave we’d all trade better, we’d
all make more money, and it’d be much better for all of our
countries.

But I think you need their influence. Because if both Russia and
China were to not trade with Iran, and go and talk to Iran, and say
“Look, just cut this nonsense of building a nuclear bomb, and we’ll
see if we can get some of the sanctions relaxed; we’re talking with
the United States”—I don’t think we’re going to be able to talk
with Iran directly probably very well, although I’m not sure that
doesn’t happen. But I think through Russia and China.

The same goes for North Korea. I think China holds the cards for
us with North Korea. I think they’re inept and poverty-stricken and
unable to really do anything; even the weapons they make usually
don’t work. So I don’t think we fear North Korea as a great ability
to attack the United States. But they have a nuclear weapon and
they need to be watched for that reason and contained. And I think
one of the ways you contain them, is that 1) you shouldn’t feed
them. When they run out of food, we shouldn’t give them any. But we
should encourage China that it’s to China’s benefit with us, and
our relations, to try to control North Korea.

As Richmond, VA considers a broad new
redevelopment plan that includes a baseball stadium, A. Barton
Hinkle recalls a quote. “We should be careful to get out of an
experience only the wisdom that is in it,” Mark Twain advised,
“lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She
will never sit down on a hot stove lid again … but also she will
never sit down on a cold one.” Hinkle says that Richmond should be
wise enough not to assume the stadium project will be another hot
stove lid that will leave everyone feeling burned. But the city
also should recognize that the project has some parallels.

View this article.

New York City elected Bill De Blasio as their new mayor earlier
this month, but Bloomberg still has some time in office. Before he
goes out, he wants to push a final, significant piece of
legislation into law:
banning plastic foam cups and plates. 

Bloomberg has supported the ban

since it was introduced by Brooklyn Councilman Lewis
Fidler this summer. Now, at Bloomberg’s request, the City
Council’s Sanitation Committee will hold a hearing Monday to
discuss the bill.

Bloomberg has said the ban is a no-brainer for environmental
reasons. According to the
New York Post, Bloomberg spokesman Jake Goldman said,
“When polystyrene foam is used for food service it becomes a
devastating pollutant that infects our parks and waterways while
never biodegrading and has been classified a carcinogenic health
hazard by the National Institute of Health.”

The Post also reports that plastic foam food
containers add 23,000 tons of trash a year to landfills.

Although Mr. Bloomberg is notorious
for his Nanny State tendencies, the plastic foam bill is not as
unprecedented as, say, the large soda ban. Many cities, including

Seattle and
Los Angeles, have banned the substance.

However, the bill’s opponents argue that the ban will be
extremely costly for small businesses. The American Chemistry
Council reports that replacing polystyrene cups and trays with the
cheapest alternative will cost New Yorkers $91.3 million
per year. MB Public Affairs found that for every $1 spent on
polystyrene foam goods, businesses 
will have to spend $1.94 on alternative replacements,
effectively doubling costs. Their report finds that “this 94% is in
effect an “environmental tax” far higher than any current sales tax
or import duty rates affecting the cost of consumer products.” And
given that most large chains in the city have
already stopped using polystyrene, small businesses will be hit
especially hard.  

Additionally, some trade groups and politicians have noted
alternative approaches to reducing environmental harm. In
California, 65 cities
with a total population of around 8
million (similar to New York City’s) have polystyrene recycling
centers. New York City’s recycling centers currently reject the
material, citing prohibitively high costs.

Forbes’ Jeff Stier
writes of Seattle’s problems with their polystyrene ban:

In coffee-loving Seattle, where styrofoam cups are already
banned, they’ve been having a hard time recycling their allegedly
green paper cups, according
to The Seattle Times.

They’ve found that mills don’t want recycled coffee cups because
the process takes longer, making cups more expensive to process
than items like recycled cardboard boxes. And facilities that do
accept the “mixed paper” that paper coffee cups and other food
service items contribute to, only use it in a 1:10 ratio
with higher-quality fibers. So there’s not much of a market for it,
at least in the U.S.

Even if Bloomberg doesn’t manage to get the ban passed, his
successor may try. On his campaign website, De Blasio pledges
to end government use of plastic foam. 

Twitter announced Friday that
it’s joining other tech companies in implementing “perfect forward
secrecy.” While many online services already encrypt user
comunications and other data, this form of encryption ensures that
snoops—we’re looking at you, National Security Agency—who break
through the encryption get access to only a snippet of data, rather
than everything belonging to a user. Even where a warrant is
involved, perfect forward secrecy has the potential to limit
intrusions, rather than acting as an open-ended skeleton key.

From Twitter’s
Jacob Hoffman-Andrews:

As part of our continuing effort to keep our users’ information
as secure as possible, we’re happy to announce that we recently
enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com,
api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com. On top of the usual
confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, forward secrecy
adds a new property. If an adversary is currently recording all
Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal
Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys
to decrypt the recorded traffic.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Parker Higgins
describes how perfect forward secrecy works:

How can perfect forward secrecy help protect user privacy
against that kind of threat? In order to understand that, it’s
helpful to have a basic idea of how HTTPS works in general. Every
Web server that uses HTTPS has its own secret key that it uses to
encrypt data that it sends to users. Specifically, it uses that
secret key to generate a new “session key” that only the server and
the browser know. Without that secret key, the traffic traveling
back and forth between the user and the server is incomprehensible,
to the NSA and to any other eavesdroppers.

But imagine that some of that incomprehensible data is being
recorded anyway—as leaked NSA documents confirm the agency is
doing. An eavesdropper who gets the secret key at any time in the
future—even years later—can use it to decrypt all of the stored
data! That means that the encrypted data, once stored, is only as
secure as the secret key, which may be vulnerable to compromised
server security or disclosure by the service provider.

That’s where perfect forward secrecy comes in. When an encrypted
connection uses perfect forward secrecy, that means that the
session keys the server generates are truly ephemeral, and even
somebody with access to the secret key can’t later derive the
relevant session key that would allow her to decrypt any particular
HTTPS session. So intercepted encrypted data is protected from
prying eyes long into the future, even if the website’s secret key
is later compromised.

Facebook
also plans to implement perfect forward secrecy, and
Google has had it in place since 2011. Google points out that
“not even the server operator will be able to retroactively decrypt
HTTPS sessions,” meaning that companies that implement the security
can’t turn users’ lives into open books, no matter the
pressure they face.

As fuck-yous to the surveillance state go, this is both welcome,
and effective.

Norman Gurley, whom I noted
last week
was arrested in northern Ohio for violating the state’s new
statute prohibiting secret compartments in cars (if authorities
determine they’re being used for transporting drugs) faces a
preliminary hearing tomorrow at Oberlin Municipal Court. According
to court
documents, Ohio Highway Patrol officers weren’t kidding when
they said they’d have nothing on Gurley if they hadn’t found the
compartment. The one count of violating Ohio’s hidden compartment
law is the only charge levied against Gurley.

Even though Gurley’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for
tomorrow, Oberlin’s site does not list an attorney for the man to
try to contact. Several commenters (and e-mailers) are curious as
to how the troopers justified the search. You can probably guess,
but if not, The Morning Journal of … somewhere
nearby (dear small media outlets: Please indicate where the
hell you are on your websites and not assume that visitors already
know)
got some comments from Ohio Highway Patrol Lt. Michael
Combs:

“The troopers noticed a smell of raw marijuana, which led them
to perform a search of the car,” Combs said. “While searching, they
saw some indicators that led them to believe a secret compartment
may have been added to the car.”

So the officers were able to smell raw marijuana while standing
outside the vehicle, but they weren’t able to find any during their
search. Those are some strong noses. I bet they don’t even need
police dogs up there in Ohio. Combs added that they found evidence
that the car was being used to transport drugs, but the evidence is
not detailed.

Violating Ohio’s hidden compartment law is a fourth degree felony,
meaning a judge could sentence Gurley to up to 18 months in prison
if convicted. If the defendant had been previously convicted
(apparently not the case with Gurley) the crime becomes a
third-degree felony, leading to a sentence of up to three years. If
it turns out there are drugs in the hidden compartment, the crime
becomes a second degree felony with a potential sentence of up to
five years in prison.

Once Reason passed along the story on Thursday it spread fast
and quickly on the Internet through social media. I’ll do my best
to try to keep an eye on the case (from all the way out here in
California), and when Gurley gets an attorney, I’ll see if he or
she is willing to comment.