Category: Law

Posts about law-making, the courts, and legal concepts in general

Gambling with high stakes

As with other high-risk activities, I think gambling on climate change is irresponsible and reckless, even if the people making that bet turn out to be right.

If a person runs across a minefield in order to experience the thrill of danger, few people are likely to congratulate them for their bold choice in the face of uncertainty. Even if you get away with it, it is foolish to run careless risks, especially when the consequences of getting it wrong are severe. This is why Russian Roulette is commonly regarded as an absurdly irresponsible pastime.

Say there is some powerful negative feedback that climate scientists haven’t yet identified. And say it manages to reduce the severity of climate change substantially. Imagine it is 2100 and we are looking back at 2012. I think the people considering the problem from that vantage would be quite willing to recognize how scary climate change looked in 2012. I also think they would be willing to chastise us for our inactivity on the problem, even in a scenario where it worked out that our most extreme fears for what climate change might mean weren’t recognized. Rather than being concerned about climate change ‘alarmists’ who called for action, I suspect impartial citizens in 2100 would be critical of the people who wanted us to plow heedlessly on with fossil fuel development, despite the serious outstanding questions on what effect that would have on the future of human civilization.

From any rational perspective, it makes sense for the world as a whole to take serious action to reduce the seriousness of climate change and the probability of extremely bad outcomes. The problem is that this course of action is not in the short-term interests of many individuals, including powerful people whose wealth and influence is rooted in the status quo.

The real question, when it comes to climate change, is how to make individuals, companies, and countries behave more like they would if they were taking the rights and welfare of everybody seriously. Something like the Categorical Imperative (or even the Harm Principle) provides the moral backing for this view. The question is how to discourage selfish and destructive behaviour while encouraging the cooperation and sacrifice that are required to protect the planet and discharge our duties with respect to future generations.

Open thread: smartphone security

There are masses of important recent news stories on the topic of smartphone security. I have been filing them below posts like this one, this one, and this one, but they really deserve a spot of their own.

First news story: Micro Systemation makes software that allows people to bypass the 4-digit lock code on an iPhone in seconds. This could be important for people crossing borders, people who get arrested at political protests, etc.

2012

No matter what else we achieve, if the generations alive now fail to prevent catastrophic climate change we will be seen as failures by the generations that will suffer after us. We will be remembered as the people who had all the knowledge and technology required to preserve a habitable Earth, but who were too ignorant or distracted or greedy to actually do it. We will be the generation that breaks the chain of inheritance – which has links extending back through all of human history – and that passes on a degraded and dangerous world after having received a promising and prosperous one.

It’s remarkable to read Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, published in 1989 when I was six years old. In it, he describes everything that is happening now: the growing scientific certainty accompanying increasingly perceptible changes in the outside world, the body of scientific research and understanding being assembled over decades and centuries. And yet, despite how the message has been clear and compelling for decades, the world hasn’t even started moving in the right direction yet, much less started moving that way quickly enough to avoid disaster.

The stupidity of what we are doing is startling.

What to do about climate change

Recently, I suggested that perhaps there is a division between ethical questions that are hard to answer and those where the answers are merely deeply inconvenient.

Something a bit similar is probably true of climate change policies. There are a few things we should obviously do, but many large questions outstanding.

Something clear: carbon pricing

For example, I think it’s clear that we need an economy-wide price on carbon. Every activity that produces greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution causes harm that isn’t reflected in its price. When you buy a car, or gasoline, or a laptop, or airline tickets, the cost should include some reckoning of how much harm is being done by the GHG pollution you are causing. As I mentioned before, the purpose of this extra cost isn’t to pay compensation to the victims, but rather to discourage the harmful behaviour. As such, the price on carbon needs to be set high enough to drive people to change their behaviour.

There are those who object to the idea of pricing carbon at all – often because they distrust capitalism and market mechanisms. I can understand the sentiment, but I think the urgency of climate change obligates us to develop mechanisms that are capable of working within the general systems we have. Carbon pricing fits the bill. (More on my fantasy climate policy is here).

Something uncertain: nuclear power

One question with no clear answer is what ought to be done with nuclear power. In a weird reversal of their stereotypical roles, The Economist is now calling nuclear power “the dream that failed” while George Monbiot is emphatically encouraging the British government to stick with nuclear because of the importance of cutting GHG pollution.

I have written before about the tricky balance involved in the nuclear decision (PDF). I don’t think the answer is clear. Nuclear power stations have certainly played a role in making GHG pollution levels lower than they would have been in a world without nuclear power. At the same time, nuclear power stations are dangerous, both in terms of accidents and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In terms of cost, I still think the figures that are available are too contradictory and untrustworthy to be used as the basis for sound decision-making.

One shot

In the end, humanity only has one shot at this. We have one planet that we will warm to a greater or lesser degree and one global civilization that we will power to a greater or lesser degree in one way or another. We have options with varying levels of risk and types of risk (risks of doing nothing, risks of geoengineering, etc). Finally, we have governments that have largely failed to appreciate the seriousness of the issue, and a powerful assortment of industries dependent on fossil fuels that have been very effective at pressuring governments to do nothing major about the problem of climate change.

One way or another, the people who are young today will probably live to see which way the world will go. If we keep burning fossil fuels in the way we are now, the best science suggests that we are headed for a world more than 4°C warmer with sea levels several metres higher and other serious unpredictable effects. Alternatively, if we get serious about the multi-decadal project of decarbonizing the global energy supply, people who are young today may live to see the emergence of a global civilization that runs on renewable forms of energy within a stable climate.

P.S. I think the question of what individuals can most productively do in response to climate change is pretty clear: lobby your elected representatives. If you really want to focus on reducing your personal impact instead of changing the system, the best choice may be to travel less, eat less meat, and avoid having children.

Ubiquitous surveillance

We now live in a world where it is highly likely that various web companies, your government, and your internet service provider are tracking your web browsing. Where facial recognition software identifies you at borders, airports, and subway stations. Where your DNA may be sampled if you are arrested. Where new face tracking software gets used with old photo archives and video camera footage. Where data on what you buy and how you repay your debts is sold between companies. Where cameras track your automobile license plate to build up a database of your movements. Where drones may watch you from the sky. Where computers transcribe your speech and handwriting into searchable text. Where you can be identified at a distance by the cards in your wallet. Where your emails, phone calls, and text messages are scanned for keywords, archived forever, and used to build up webs of your known associates. Where governments and private organizations use data mining techniques against you. Where your cell phone can easily be turned into a bug that passes on what you say and type, as well as where you are. Where your Google searches may be used as evidence against you. Where anyone can listen to your cell phone calls. Where the metadata in the photos and videos you make identifies you. Where the DNA of your family members may be used to incriminate you. Where anyone on your wireless network can archive and access all your web traffic, as well as steal website sessions. Where no encryption software you can acquire does much good. Where insecure means of communication are marketed as secure. Where archives containing your sensitive personal data can be broken into (or bought) by those who wish to cause you trouble. And where anything ill-considered you did as a teenager may re-emerge to cause embarrassment or worse decades later.

The appropriate responses to this are not clear. You can simply accept that your life is an open book that anyone who cares to can pretty easily read from. You can opt out of some services (like Facebook) and employ some available countermeasures. You can move to the remote countryside and become a technology-shunning subsistence farmer (which is not to imply that all farmers shun technology, nor manage only to subsist). You can try to drive legislative, regulatory, and technological changes that address some of the issues above. What else can you do?

Kim Jong-un and North Korea’s criminality

Sheena Chestnut – a friend and former Oxford classmate – recently had an article published in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times: A North Korean Corleone.

She has written some very interesting things about the illicit dabbling of the North Korean regime, including in terms of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Ending drug prohibition

Earlier, I wrote about whether the phrase ‘greenhouse gas pollution’ is accurate, and whether it might be useful for building political will to do something about climate change. The phrase is accurate – CO2 is an unwanted by-product of various processes and it does harm to people all over the world – and it may be a useful way to remind people that ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ are a real problem that needs to be dealt with. It calls to mind phrases like “make the polluter pay [for the cost of cleaning up pollution]”.

I wonder whether a similar change in language might be helpful for opposing unreasonable drug laws. Mention ‘marijuana legalization’ and the eyes of the people around you will glaze over. They have heard the debate, they have their view, and they probably don’t care about it too strongly one way or the other.

Maybe we can do better by saying things like: “End marijauana prohibition” or “End the prohibition of drugs”.

People remember the prohibition of alcohol, the way it failed, and the problems it caused. It enriched organized crime and pushed alcohol use underground. It led to inferior and dangerous kinds of alcohol being sold. It cost tax revenues, crowded the prisons, and so on. All this is true of drug criminalization today. Most of the problems associated with drugs only exist because they are illegal, or are made much worse because they are illegal. Drug prohibition turns the drug trade into a violent, dangerous business and it turns ordinary people who use substances that are often more benign than alcohol or tobacco into criminals.

Al Capone was the natural consequence of alcohol prohibition. His successors created by the drug war may be less famous – and they may kill more people in Mexico than in Chicago – but their business has arisen for exactly the same reason, and operates according to the same logic. Stratfor describes what has been happening recently in Mexico as “a stalemate” “between the Sinaloa Federation, Los Zetas and the government” and argue that it has produced 50,000 deaths. That is more than 16 times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. It’s about 6% of the number of deaths associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Ending drug prohibition just makes sense. It is both unethical and ineffective for governments to try to control what consenting adults do with their bodies. Their efforts to assert that control are doing demonstrable harm. Perhaps by speaking about the situation in terms of ‘ending prohibition’ rather than ‘legalizing’ this or that, the political debate can be moved forward just a little.

The government that hammers tent pegs up our noses

A pattern seems to have developed in the legislative politics of a certain northern country.

The people in power boast that they are going to do something dramatic but somewhat foolhardy: “Watch! I am going to hammer this tent peg up your nose!” or “Let’s make the census optional!” or “Let’s throw people in jail for harmless marijuana offenses!” or “Let’s allow the police and spies to watch everybody’s internet use!”.

After this declaration is made, both the political opposition and experts in the field bring up some of the very reasonable objections to the proposal: “What about my brain?” or “The whole point of a census is that everyone completes it” or “That’s pointless vindictiveness for a non-offence to society” or “That’s an insanely over-reaching way to catch only the stupidest criminal web users”.

But the issue has already become a matter of pride and honour for the government of the day, so they cannot back down or change plans. Occasionally, public and political opposition to the proposal are strong enough to stop it, at which point the government becomes bitter and petulant, stressing how everyone will need to live with the terrible consequences of not following the government’s plan. Often, however, they are able to circle up successfully around their bad idea and turn it into law.

This pattern of behaviour is likely to persist for as long as the opposition is leaderless and split.

Even those who favour the party in power probably realize that the political system only works properly when there is a credible opposition. If there is nobody else who looks capable of forming a government, there are few real checks on the power of the people in charge. That leads to them expressing their own psychological excesses and frustrations in ill-conceived legislation, which is bad for everybody.

Internet surveillance in Canada

The Conservative government is proposing a new law that would require internet service providers to monitor and record what Canadians do online, and to provide that information to the authorities without a warrant.

As well as being an obvious violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (§8 “Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.”), I think this is an example of thinking badly about security. Obviously, having the government monitor everything that happens online could prevent some bad things from happening. At the same time, it is virtually certain that the capability would be abused or that security breaches will allow it to be hijacked by those with nefarious purposes. The abuse could happen at the governmental level – say, with discreet inquiries being made into the private correspondence of members of competing political parties. It could be done within the police and intelligence services – say, a jilted ex tracking the emails of their former partner. It could be done within internet service providers – say, some low-paid tech at Bell or Telus deciding to earn a bit of extra cash by blackmailing customers.

The archives of internet use would be an irresistible target for malefactors of every type, from nosy bosses and spouses to spammers and rogue political operatives. Maintaining and trying to secure these archives would also be a major burden for internet service providers. Instead of being in the business of helping their clients communicate, they will be forced into the business of keeping tabs on their clients on behalf of the government.

The security risks created by internet surveillance are greater than the risks that it might help reduce. Furthermore, allowing the creation of internet surveillance systems violates the Charter-protected rights of Canadians. What Canadians do online is their private business. It is not something that governments have the right to monitor, just because doing so will occasionally allow them to catch people committing crimes. Hopefully, this proposal will never become law.

When to shiver and when to work

From Daniel Yergin’s The Quest:

To demonstrate environmental sensitivity [at the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol], the Japanese organizers turned down the heating in the conference center. But this created a new problem as Kyoto in December was cold. To compensate, the Japanese decided to distribute blankets to the delegates. But they did not have enough blankets, and so a whole separate negotiation erupted over how many blankets would be allocated to each delegation. (p. 483 harcover)

Worst choice of abstinence over resistance ever.