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Among the issues
that President Obama did not address in his
lukewarm call for “reform” of NSA spying practices are
allegations that U.S. government officials have used their clout to

compromise encryption technology and strongarm companies into
inserting backdoors into their technology. That’s not a small
issue, because it gives the NSA and other agencies access to vast
quantities of information at least as sensitive as what they gather
from sucking up phone meta data. Last week, even before the
president’s speech, Brendan
Eich, the Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla, the organization
behind the Firefox Web browser, called on the public to help resist
such threats.

Wrote Eich in a blog
post:

As a result of laws in the US and elsewhere, prudent users must
interact with Internet services knowing that despite how much any
cloud-service company wants to protect privacy, at the end of the
day most big companies must comply with the law. The government can
legally access user data in ways that might violate the privacy
expectations of law-abiding users. Worse, the government may force
service operators to enable surveillance (something that seems to
have happened in the
Lavabit case).

Worst of all, the government can do all of this without users
ever finding out about it, due to gag orders.

This creates a significant predicament for privacy and security
on the Open Web. Every major browser today is distributed
by an organization within reach of surveillance laws. As
the Lavabit case suggests, the government may request that browser
vendors secretly inject surveillance code into the browsers they
distribute to users. We have no information that any browser vendor
has ever received such a directive. However, if that were to
happen, the public would likely not find out due to gag orders.

The unfortunate consequence is that software vendors —
including browser vendors — must not be blindly trusted.
Not because such vendors don’t want to protect user privacy.
Rather, because a law might force vendors to secretly violate their
own principles and do things they don’t want to do.

His proposed solution? Since Mozilla and its products are all
open source, he wants tech savvy users around the world to:

• regularly audit Mozilla source and verified builds by all
  effective means;
• establish automated systems to verify official Mozilla builds
  from source; and
• raise an alert if the verified bits differ from official
  bits.

That way, no matter what Mozilla is ordered to do by a a
government body, and forbidden to reveal, any compromises stand a
good chance of being discovered—and even attempting them might
deterred.

Talk about watching the watchers.

Eich is right—open source does have an inherent advantage over
proprietary technology because it’s open to public scrutiny, and it
stands to grow in importance for just that reason.

The anti-pot
group Project SAM was not pleased by President Obama’s
recent observation that marijuana is less dangerous than
alcohol. “We take issue with the President’s comparisons between
marijuana and alcohol,” says Project SAM Chairman Patrick J,
Kennedy in a press
release. He does not argue that Obama’s statement was
inaccurate—just that it was unhelpful to the prohibitionist cause.
Kennedy explains that “two wrongs don’t make a right: just because
our already legal drugs may have very dangerous impacts on society
it does not mean that other drugs should follow the same path.”
Note that the first “wrong,” according to Kennedy, was making
alcohol legal.  

Despite that decision, which Kennedy evidently considers a
mistake, the U.S. government has managed to keep marijuana illegal
for 77 years. Yet Kennedy worries that “the legalization of
marijuana leads quickly to a slippery slope that could open the
gates to legalization—and commercialization—of other addictive
substances for recreational use.” After all, “several of today’s
largest pro-marijuana-legalization groups have been advocating for
the full-scale legalization of all recreational drugs, including
psychedelics and cocaine.” I’m not sure which groups Kennedy has in
mind. The most prominent ones, such as the Marijuana Policy Project
and the Drug Policy Alliance, either do not address other drugs or
take a position that falls well short of “full-scale
legalization.”

In any case, I wish American politicians and voters were as
philosophically consistent as Kennedy suggests. But surveys find a
huge gap between support for legalizing marijuana—a step backed by

most Americans, according to several recent polls—and support
for legalizing other drugs. A
YouGov poll conducted in November, for instance, put support
for legalizing heroin at 9 percent and support for legalizing
cocaine at 11 percent. A 2012 Rasmussen poll got
similar results.

Kennedy seems to think those gaps will be bridged soon:

Our country hasn’t asked important questions about how far is
too far with drug legalization. As parts of the United States
plunge headlong into ill-informed drug policies rooted in opinions,
political agendas and corporate greed, the President astutely notes
that it is a matter of time before we’re also asked to consider the
legalization of a “negotiated dose of cocaine” or “a finely
calibrated dose of meth.” That is the nature of addiction and
substance abuse. It leads to the next problem, and the next problem
and the next—and many times, the damage is irreversible and
irreparable.

According to Kennedy, the buzz from legalizing marijuana will
soon fade, causing Americans to crave legalization of other
psychoactive substances. History suggests that is the pattern
followed by prohibition: A little is never enough. If legalization
also works that way, I will be pleasantly surprised. 

During a lawsuit between
pharmaceutical companies about the price of HIV medications, one
side struck a juror from the pool because he was gay. Stereotype
much? Today a federal appeals court ruled the behavior
inappropriate. Via BuzzFeed:

A federal appeals court Tuesday held that lawyers cannot exclude
potential jurors from a jury based on their sexual orientation — a
ruling whose underlying rationale could have broad implications
outside of the case.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous decision, held
that discrimination based on sexual orientation is subject to
heightened scrutiny — a decision the court concluded has been made
in action, though not in word, by the Supreme Court itself.

In describing the reason for applying the new standard, Judge
Stephen Reinhardt examined the Supreme Court’s June decision in
Edith Windsor’s case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act.
Although equal protection claims brought based on sexual
orientation have previously been judged under the lowest level of
review, called rational basis, the 9th Circuit held that a higher
standard now applies.

Read more at BuzzFeed
here about how the DOMA ruling contributed to the decision.
Apparently I’m supposed to treat this as a victory, but it will be
short-lived once lawyers hear my position on jury
nullification.

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