Going Fourth

This Fourth of July has probably got to be one of the most depressing in recent memory for me.  It's depressing because what has been for almost two and a half centuries a celebration of freedom feels so unspeakably hollow to me.  And it shouldn't.

Winter of Discontent

I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad,
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch …
                                                                    --”Richard III”, Act I, Scene iii

By now, everybody on the planet who has access to a radio, a TV, or an Internet connection has heard of the Newtown shootings.  It’s arguably one of the most heinous events this year, and likely will be in American history for many years to come.  If Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles sat down together and tried to create the ultimate tragedy storyline, they probably couldn’t have bettered Newtown if they had a hundred years to work on it.  And once again, in the face of incomprehensible horror, we’re hearing the same chorus of voices.

“It’s the guns!  Ban ALL the guns!”
“It’s the violent media!  It’s Hollywood movies and video games!  Burn them all!”
“It’s the press!  It’s all their fault! Make them stop reporting tragedies!”
“It’s the lunatics!  Lock them all up for our own good!” 

There is the understandable desire to Do Something, or failing that to be Seen As Doing Something.  There are going to be blue ribbon panels.  There are going to be Congressional hearings.  There will be more drama and agony in the next year or so then there was during the actual event that sparked the whole thing.  And it will not end well for anybody.

The Great Firewall of America

For the last year or so, I've been keeping an eye on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) with a slightly more than casual level in interest.  It is a far reaching and expansive "trade" treaty that seeks to impose harsh penalties on copyright infringers and those who deal in counterfeit goods.  A little over a year ago, the Obama Administration refused to divulge any information about ACTA in the first place, citing "national security concerns."  Over the last ten years, anybody citing "national security concerns" over anything that isn't remotely related to defense spending, intelligence activities, or military deployments automatically falls into the category of suspicious as hell in my mind.  Naturally, the text of the draft agreement leaked out on to the Internet.  At that time, the most heinous portions of the agreement were provisions that demanded DMCA-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that demanded material be removed from websites by ISPs if the ISP received word that the material was infringing on somebody's copyright, without any actual effort or mechanism to investigate the veracity of the complaint or appeal the decision.  Additionally, there were provisions that prohibited breaking DRM for any reason (again, shades of the DMCA), and rules requiring ISPs to actively police sites with user-contributed material for potential copyright violations, as well as cutting off Internet access to accused (not convicted) infringers.  The entire Blogger site, not just this blog, would doubtlessly shut down because of the literally prohibitive cost involved in trying to cover the costs of lawyers who did nothing all day but scour blogs looking for POSSIBLE copyright infringements.

A year later, things have not gotten any better.  Two months ago, the MPAA sent a representative to an information meeting about ACTA down in Mexico.  It's not terribly surprising in and of itself, since the MPAA has championed the cause of ACTA by crying foul over piracy and believing that ACTA (or the analogous American version of it, COICA) would allow it to finally crush movie piracy in much the same way that the Death Star was supposed to crush the Rebel Alliance.  What was surprising at this meeting was that the MPAA rep asked the seemingly innocuous question of whether or not ACTA could be used to block "dangerous" web sites such as WikiLeaks.  Keep in mind that this was coming shortly after WikiLeaks dumped almost a hundred thousand pages worth of documents that the Pentagon had classified which contained some of its dirty laundry.  The government was pissed off at WikiLeaks and such a question answered in the affirmative could very easily be used as justification to go after equally "dangerous" web sites, though the danger the MPAA is most afraid of is the danger to the bottom lines of the studios as opposed to any trifling concerns about the safety of troops in the field or American civilians potentially targeted by terrorists.

Recently, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) left the Senate Judiciary Committee.  As the EFF reported earlier today, the bill probably won't come up to the full Senate until the start of the next session, but it's troubling given bipartisan opposition to the bill and a host of engineers who basically helped assemble the Internet piece by piece, protocol by protocol.  The first most troubling element of the bill is the blacklist.  The Attorney General (or those underlings acting in the name of the Attorney General's Office) would suddenly have the power to kill a website if it allegedly had infringing material.  Much like the DMCA and ACTA, there's no mechanism in place to contest or appeal such an action, nor is there any provision for an investigation into verifying a claim of copyright infringement.  DMCA claims aren't 100% right, what's to say that the COICA would have a better average?  It's an unregulated, unchecked, and unspeakably dangerous power.  There is simply too little in the way to prevent a gross abuse of the power.  The Attorney General's Office and the Attorney General are not elected officials, but rather filled by executive appointment, which means there is absolutely no means of accountability that can effectively be exercised against them.  Unaccountable bureaucrats given unchecked power is completely anathema to every principle America claims to hold dear.

The second most troubling element of COICA is the subversion (or perversion, if you prefer) of the DNS infrastructure currently under U.S. control.  For the last sixteen years, ever since the Internet became open to public and commercial use, the U.S. has rightly maintained a very hands-off policy towards Domain Name System servers.  You type in "Google" in the address bar of your browser, your command brings up Google by directing the request to one of the many servers which hold an IP address owned by Google.  This simple mechanism allows used to access sites both puritanical and prurient, commercial and crass, polished and amateurish.  Nations like China, Iran, Burma, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia have various filters and cutouts in place to divert requests for "undesirable" sites to sites that are "approved" by the existing regimes, or outright block the requests from ever reaching the undesirable sites, essentially cutting them off from being seen on the "official" Internet by their inhabitants.  Such filtering and blocking, exemplified by "The Great Firewall of China," is in place to crush dissent, inhibit communication, and ultimately control the population to keep the existing regimes in power by attempting to mask the inherent flaws and weaknesses in the system.  Yet this bill proposes that we emulate those countries, countries that the State Department, the United Nations, and various private organizations have been hectoring for years about their repressive Internet policies.  Worse, the bill proposes we do so not to prop up the existing government, but to prop up media conglomerates, businesses that have grown bloated over the years and are deathly afraid of technologies that have the potential to render them extinct.  The fact that the U.S. government would have the means to do precisely the same thing as the aforementioned nations is merely poisonous gravy.

The COICA, much like the PATRIOT Act, has been rushed through with absolutely indecent haste, previous efforts to table the bill notwithstanding.  Like the PATRIOT Act, the stated benefits cannot possibly outweigh the potential liabilities.  Unlike the PATRIOT Act, the single purpose motivating this unholy abortion of a bill is pure unadulterated greed, whatever high minded language might be employed to claim otherwise.

Normally, I don't ask much of my readers.  I take it as a given that my work will eventually percolate through the Internet and people will read it.  This once, I'd take it as a personal kindness if people who read this would pass a link along to friends and family members.  I want people to get mad about this, because it's something they rightly should be mad about.  I know that it doesn't seem as important as the unemployment situation, or the financial markets, or the fact that gas and food prices are going up.  It's not one of those issues that seemingly has any survival value.  Rather, it's an issue that affects the value of survival, and it's important for that reason.  What does it gain you to have food in your gut and gas in your tank, but live under threat of being silenced and cut off from the larger world just because some rich bastards in Hollywood are crying foul?  Nothing, which is precisely what you have to lose by spreading the word.  Thanks.

Honor At Stake

I've tried not to rant about this.

I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything.  To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA.  Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.

And how I hate to have been disappointed.

The fracas started a couple months back.  A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches.  There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport.  From there, it just got worse.  Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news.  Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision.  Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."

Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor.  The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty.  I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision.  Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany.  But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy.  Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game.  Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation.  If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich.  And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round.  None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history.  By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban.  It's not paying them a compliment.  It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.

An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck.  For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising.  I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality.  He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try.  He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan.  Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force."  Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned.  It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force.  It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto.  If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy."  As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure.  Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in.  They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat.  They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game.  If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.

I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game."  Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have?  You have "cowboys and Indians."  You have "cops and robbers."  You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents.  Folks, that right there is a game.  Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region?  I would say not.  If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same.  Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering?  If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one.  I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree.  For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person.  As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.

The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking.  Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.

Border Brouhaha

Sometimes, the writers of The Armchair Empire get bored.  There's only so much one can talk about in the games industry before you need to take a break from it.  Politics is one of those areas that doesn't get a lot of talk in the site's forums, but when one of the writers asked me for my thoughts on the recently passed SB1070 bill here in Arizona, I obliged him the only way I really knew how.  Below is the text of my main response.  The link to the full forum thread can be found here.


*     *     *

The whole business with SB1070 and the issues it is supposed to be alleviating depends a lot upon how one parses language and how one reacts to words.

The bare bones of the case: Mexico is still an unstable broke-as-hell country. There's very few opportunities south of the border that don't involve smuggling drugs, guns, or people, so everybody and his brother seems to be trying to go north of the border. The last several years, it's gotten a lot more unstable, particularly since Felipe Calderon took office and deployed Army troops to fight the drug cartels. At the same time, almost 9 years after 9/11, the federal government STILL hasn't managed to get their shit together and make serious and substantive efforts at securing the US/Mexican border.

Despite the euphemistic phrase "undocumented workers" being bandied about, the plain fact is that crossing the border without going through the admittedly byzantine process of getting work visas or green cards does, in fact, make one an illegal alien under federal law. While Mexicans who have work in and around the Nogales area right on the border might be able to bounce back and forth (legal or not), once you get north of there, it becomes a practical impossibility to work in the state and not live here. It's not like there's giant caravans of Mexicans running around the state, moving from job to job like an echo of the Okies back during the Great Depression. Mexicans are coming up, grabbing shit jobs, crashing at slum apartments, and generally not making any effort to actually become citizens, get resident alien status, or even just try to get a work visa. And that's the best case scenario.

What's been happening more and more frequently is Mexicans getting stuffed into trucks and vans by smugglers ("coyotes" in the local vernacular), then carted off to drop houses in residential neighborhoods where they either become hostages (so the coyotes can extort more money from the families back in Mexico) or virtual slaves. For those who don't get a ride up Interstate 10 to Phoenix, they march straight through both public and private lands, usually littering and destroying the environment in the process. With the increasing violence from the drug cartels, there are folks north of the border that are ending up getting injured and or killed, usually by smugglers or their immediate associates. It's not a situation designed to help people sleep soundly at night.

Looking at the text of the bill, there are two sub-sections which I can imagine create a great deal of consternation. Subsection B reads "FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c)." Subsection E reads "A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES." You can read the full text of the bill here.

The reasons why the consternation might be coming about are manifold. First, there's a pretty large Hispanic population in Arizona, as you might well imagine. "Reasonable suspicion" is a lower standard of proof than "probable cause," which means that as a practical matter, there's a whole lot of people that could potentially get stopped just to make sure they're not illegals. Secondly, the fact that being an illegal alien is a "public offense" creates conditions where if you get stopped by a cop under Subsection B, you can get busted under Subsection E. The text of the bill does lay out provisions for people to contest their arrest if they believe they've been wrongfully arrested, and it does lay out provisions that indicate cops who just go around busting people because they've got brown skin and a Spanish surname won't have any sort of support or protection from the state or municipality if they get hauled into court. A couple days ago, an amendment to the bill specifically prohibiting racial profiling was passed and signed. The problem with all of this, however, is that the issues aren't nearly so cut and dried.

The common assumption and attitude among those who are in an uproar over the bill is that America is being anti-immigrant. And to be sure, the process for becoming a resident alien or a full US citizen has never been a cakewalk. But once you've got it, you're golden. And if you think the process for America is bad, try looking at the process for Japan sometime and then come back to me to bitch about how "unfair" America's naturalization process is to people. I know folks who immigrated legally to the US, went through the process, took all the stupid classes, took their tests, and took their oath. The ones who went through all that trouble are generally pretty pissed, and rightly so, at the illegals coming up from Mexico precisely because the Mexicans aren't bothering to make the effort. It becomes a giant merry-go-round where Mexicans cross the border, get work, get caught, get shipped back to Mexico, and then cross the border to start it all over again. Compounding the problem is the perception by some illegals that they're performing a "reconquista," that they're not entering the US but rather Mexican territory illegally occupied by the US. After the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, which Mexico lost badly, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded Texas and California, as well as what would later become Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, along with chunks of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Subsequently, the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 bought the remaining southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico from the Mexican government. To some Mexicans, the entire affair is a national insult, and you sometimes hear Mexicans blathering on about how they're taking back what was stolen from them.

Further complicating the problem is the abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. What was intended to ensure that former black slaves and their children would be legally treated as American citizens has boomeranged into a situation whereby foreign citizens, legal and otherwise, are entering the US to give birth because the current reading of the law grants their newborn children automatic American citizenship. When these children grow up, they can legally enter the country without any problem and be able to bring their parents and siblings over because they're family members. It's a loophole that needs to be rectified.

As if all this wasn't enough, there's the financial angle to look at. It's not just the illegals that are making money on the situation, it's businesses that hire illegals that are making money off it, if only indirectly. The simplest measure for paying illegals would be through cash. Since it's cash, there's a lot less of a paper trail to follow, which means the business saves money because they're not paying into Social Security or Medicare. By using fake Social Security numbers or fake taxpayer ID numbers, businesses can potentially get more money back from the government when the tax refunds are disbursed, though there's also the potential for the feds to come by and do some digging through the records. Should that occur, the employer can disavow any discrepancies as the action of the illegal alien. It should be mentioned that there are notionally checks in place to discourage using fake or stolen information, and there are legitimate businesses that do everything right but still end up unwittingly hiring an illegal alien because they happened to have a good set of faked credentials.

To top it off, there is an element of political armtwisting involved with the passage of the bill. As weird as it may sound, Arizona wants the federal government to step in and do something about the border situation. However, the usual legislative process has consistently put immigration and border security issues to the back burner in favor of financial issues (which were pretty critical at the time), health care (which nobody seems to be super happy about outside of D.C.), and other issues which never seem quite as important. Since Congress can't or won't take action on the issue, Arizona is attempting to force them to do something about it. By passing the bill, they're applying pressure to the feds to get serious about border issues. In the long run, Arizona knows that it can't choke off the flow of illegal aliens completely, but in the short term, the bill potentially will shift the avenues of illegal border crossing into New Mexico, Texas, and California. Theoretically, if New Mexico and Texas pass similar bills, California will be the only state which will be considered "safe" to cross into, which will doubtlessly put a strain on the resources in a state which is already uncomfortably close to insolvency. By making California cry "uncle!", the federal government really will have to get serious about the border. The best case scenario is that the feds realize exactly what Arizona is doing and start making substantive changes to border and immigration policy before it ever reaches the point where Texas and New Mexico follow suit. However, I don't imagine that anybody in the current administration has that level of foresight.

It is a great stinking mess and it remains to be seen if anybody has the requisite intestinal fortitude to shove a hand into this sack full of snakes and pull out a good workable solution.

What Goes Around

Tuesday wasn't exactly a banner day for the FCC as a federal appeals court unanimously decided that the agency had overreached itself when ordering broadband provider Comcast not to block its customers from using BitTorrent.  Comcast's spokesman was clearly pleased with the ruling when relaying the company's official statement: "our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation."  And yes, I just threw up a little in my mouth typing that.

This particular case has me feeling highly ambivalent.  On the one hand, I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the expansion of government power, and the FCC has demonstrated that when they use their power, they're about as subtle as a sequoia falling down, and not nearly as intelligent.  One slipped nipple and the Super Bowl halftime shows have largely suffered for it for the last several years (though I did like it when Tom Petty went on).  On the other hand, I'm not exactly a firm believer in the inherent goodness of the average American corporation either, particularly not one who's in the position to dictate how a measurable percentage of Americans access the Internet.  The old saw about being between the Devil and the deep blue sea certainly comes to mind.

So, what exactly happened on Tuesday and how is this going to affect the country?  To begin with, while I am not at all happy about the ruling, I do have to tip my hat to the judges for at least recognizing that the stated goal of the FCC in attempting to keep the Internet "free and open" wasn't at issue, merely their efforts to go about making it happen.  In a nutshell, the court ruled that the FCC's policies did not have the force of law.  By and large, this is a quite reasonable position to take, since the ruling doesn't just prohibit sound policies from being applied as law, but it also prohibits stupid policies from being applied as law.  If the FCC wants to enforce net neutrality, they have a few options available to them.  The first option would be to go to Congress and tell them to give the FCC the necessary power to make Comcast stop blocking subscribers.  This is probably the least likely to happen, mainly because it could possibly be years before such a bill got out of committee and up for a vote.  Moreover, Congress isn't exactly beloved of the people right at the moment, and all it would take to kill any bill would be a few whispers placed in the right ears of the right talking heads.  "Look!" the heads would say with gravity and outrage, "Look how Congress is trying to ram more government down our throats!"  The second option would be to appeal up to the Supreme Court.  This one might actually take longer than having to deal with Congress.  With Congress, you can always reintroduce a bill.  If the Supremes decide to take a case, or decline to take it, that's it.  Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Probably as we speak, Comcast technicians are putting the port blocking in place for BitTorrent and other file sharing programs, and probably other programs that it feels "unfairly competes" (read: free) with their subscription services, all while the suits are chortling and thinking that they showed the FCC who's boss.  That would be a fatally foolish attitude to be adopting, because there is a third option, one that is not only the most expeditious but also potentially the most troublesome.  The FCC could decide that that broadband services are to fall under the same rules as phone lines, with all of the attending "common carrier" regulations.  It's less of a "nuclear option" and more of a "neutron bomb option," meaning that all the infrastructure will still be there, but nobody will be around to use it.  Why will nobody be around to use it?  Because once those regulations are in place, the broadband ISPs like Comcast and Cox will not be lowering prices, they will be raising them. Purely for "administrative costs" to defray "traffic generated by other networks."  The increase in prices, particularly in a recessionary climate, will cause people to cut back or even abandon their broadband connections, as much as it will pain them to do so.  This will cause the ISPs to raise prices further, to cover the costs of "maintaining our award winning broadband services."  In turn, more people abandon their broadband.  When it's all said and done, ISPs won't be offering broadband anymore because they'll claim that "there's no interest in the product."  Nevermind the fact that people once had broadband and were quite happy with it as a general rule.  The difference between a ripple effect and a blast wave is a matter of perspective.

It's not going to be just the average American consumer who's going to get hit by this.  The earliest victims will be bandwidth-intensive but incredibly popular sites and services.  YouTube?  Reduced to a shell of its former self.  Skype?  Gone.  Hulu?  The biggest disappointment for NBC Universal since they screwed Conan O'Brien.  From there, the carnage spreads out into other areas, predominantly into the game sector.  The twelve million plus players on World of WarCraft will suddenly find themselves brought down by a foe more terrible than Onyxia or The Lich King.  Microsoft's XBox Live and Sony's Playstation Network will become shadows of their former glory, reduced to branded patch servers.  Steam and Impulse will collapse as gamers are cut off from the virtual marketplaces.  All those stupid bastards who went and bought the PC version of Assassin's Creed II will howl at the money wasted because Ubisoft wasn't smart enough to foresee the possible amputation of broadband, and the guys at Blizzard will probably be living out of their cubicles to try and change Diablo III to avoid that same mistake.  Would there be any survivors of this apocalypse?  Twitter might well survive, despite some people's desire to the contrary, since anybody with a cell phone could update on that.  Facebook and MySpace will probably take a hit, but continue on as before.

I can hear somebody out in the Peanut Gallery saying, "The world will not end because you stupid Americans don't have broadband!"  Whoever that is, you're right.  The world will not end.  But it will change.  If the last fifteen years or so have been any indicator, what happens on the Internet and to the Internet in one geographic area can have almost incalculable changes to the rest of the world.  And there is no guarantee that those changes will be good for any other part of the world.  It would be a sorry state of affairs that America entered the Information Age equivalent of a Dark Age simply because one ISP went and sued the FCC because of a spat over the use of bandwidth for a program that competed with the ISP's non-Internet products.  Some will doubtlessly argue that such a nightmare scenario could never possibly happen.  Perhaps not to the degree that I've outlined here, but don't think for one instant that the blowback from this case won't touch anybody beyond Comcast and the FCC.

Even today, karma is a vital and active force within the Internet.  What goes around does come around.  And I don't like to think what will happen when it finally comes around.

First Caracas, Then Zurich

Up until a few weeks ago, if you'd asked me offhand what Venezuela and Switzerland had in common, I'd have been hard pressed to come up with an answer beyond the fact that they both existed on Planet Earth.  It now seems that, barring the restoration of sanity to the legislative process, Switzerland will be the second country inside of a month to issue a total ban on "violent" video games.

Switzerland's National Council (the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, I believe) approved a bill that would ultimately lead to the total ban of any computer or console game that it deems unacceptably violent.  The original draft of the legislation called for banning the production, sale, or distribution of any game which "requires cruel acts of violence against humans and humanlike creatures for in-game success" within Swiss borders.  There is some question as to whether the upper chamber of the Swiss parliament will go along with this or if they'll exhibit some common sense and stop this bill dead.  Even if the bill passes the upper house, it's apparently a lot easier for Swiss citizens to get a stupid law repealed than it is here in the States.  One would hope that Swiss gamers would rally to get this idiocy overturned.

However little I might like the idea of a Swiss game ban, or any country enacting a game ban for that matter, I must extend a grudging degree of respect to the Swiss parliament for entertaining reasoned debate on the matter, however flawed the reasoning might be. In sharp contrast is the measure passed in Venezuela last summer which finally went into effect just under two weeks ago.  For the crime of making, selling, renting, importing, or distributing "video games or programs that can be used on personal computers, arcade systems, consoles, portable devices or mobile telephones, or any other electronic or telephonic device, that contain information or images that promote or incite violence and the use of weapons," you're looking at a sentence of three to five years in a Venezuelan prison.  If you're guilty of merely buying or promoting such a game, you just get hit with a fine.  Somehow, I don't think you'd get a lot of sympathy by claiming you're a political prisoner because you sold a copy of Final Fantasy XIII on the streets of Caracas.  President Hugo Chavez went on record earlier this year and denounced PlayStation games specifically (and presumably games on other platforms in general) as "poison" and a capitalist plot "to sow violence so they can later sell weapons."

Reasoned or insanely unreasoned, complete bans on video games will accomplish precisely nothing.  They will not make street crime magically disappear.  They will not cause teenage disaffection and alienation to become a thing of the past.  They will not guarantee moral or ideological purity of the masses.  They will not make people happier, more productive, or more content.  The only thing they will do is turn an otherwise productive segment of a nation's population into criminals, whether it is on the supply side or the demand side of the market, while completely overtaxing law enforcement resources which could be better utilized for more serious crimes.  And still, in every country that has even the rudiments of a parliamentary system, there's some nutjob who thinks that banning violent video games will cure all the ills that face their nation.

So far, at the state level in America, violent video game bans have been passed and overturned as unconstitutional.  I suspect that a similar fate awaits the Swiss ban, though it's also possible a gamer sponsored referendum will remind Swiss parliamentarians that they work for the people.  As for Venezuela, well, that one might have to wait until Hugo Chavez and his glorious socialist paradise die together.  And what of other nations that have or are considering bans on violent video games?  My advice: don't.  Scrap the ones you've got.  Forget about trying to pass them if they don't exist.  Too many people have chased the chimera of "better living through banning video games" and have nothing to show for their efforts but disgruntled citizens and irritated cops.  It is a fool's errand pursued to create a fool's paradise.

Wake up and smell the ashes.

Now we just need the Trilateral Commission . . .

Amid all the brouhaha over the health care bill, there's another bill currently in committee in the Senate which probably will make it out of committee without much in the way of serious debate. As reported by Declan McCullagh on this CNET news piece, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has reintroduced a bill that went nowhere fast last year.  While a large chunk of the text of the bill appears to be proposed rules for certification of cybersecurity professionals, there are some elements of the bill that are particularly disturbing despite language which states that civil liberties will be protected.

Towards the start of the so-called Cybersecurity Act of 2010 (S.773), one of the stated goals of the bill is to grant the President the power to designate a specific system as a "United States critical infrastructure information system" which meets sufficient criteria (to be determined later) such that if said system was compromised, it would constitute a threat to "strategic national interests."  While there is a phrase buried halfway into the text that states the act is not to be construed as an expansion of existing Presidential authorities, it seems exceedingly difficult not to quantify what is essentially nationalization of currently held private sector Internet assets by Presidential fiat under the guise of a "cybersecurity emergency" as anything less than such an expansion.  Language further down in the text may delimit how long such an emergency may be used as justification, but the language doesn't feel like it is sufficiently robust to guarantee a showdown between Congress and the President will end well for Congress, or by extension American users of the Internet.

I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to cybersecurity, America could probably learn to do a lot better keeping the doors locked.  And while there's a part of me that wouldn't mind seeing cybersecurity get some genuine attention from the government, I think this is the wrong way to go about it.  I think federally mandated and designed certification schemes do not carry any inherently greater likelihood of effectiveness than MCSE, A+, Net+, CCNA, or any one of the other dozens of alphabet soup certifications that overpromise and underdeliver.  If I've learned anything in my hunt for employment, it's that hiring managers are desperate to see those certifications on resumes while recruiters are perfectly aware that the certs aren't worth a damn.  They look pretty but they're proof only that somebody paid to take a test and didn't flunk it.  While the bill calls for people who have plans for a career in cybersecurity to be the primary beneficiary of the training programs, I can't help but suspect that it will soon become the latest "trendy" certification.  The shiny new degree that everybody will be scrambling to get and nobody will actually be able to practice.

Cybersecurity should not be quantified by committees and academics.  It should not be raised to the level of a specialized discipline divorced from the larger fields of computer science and information technology.  It should be a brutal Darwinian process that recognizes only the quick and the dead, or the l33t and the pwned if you prefer.  It should be an endless battle of wits between the most vicious, most brilliant, most fearless and inventive minds who ever got root access on a box.  Let the private sector take care of the private sector and the feds take care of the feds.  If a company or government agency wants to go hunting for talent, let them pony up for contests where "capture the flag" becomes "own the box" and pick out the people who've proven they're the best at what they do instead of smiling at the shiny little acronym on their resume.

However great it sounds on the surface, this bill is not going to help America figure out how to protect itself on the Internet.  It's an unworthy effort for unsavory ends by means of ineffective policies.