Review: Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

I'm a Connelly fan, but this one (admittedly I have not read the first Ballard) I just had trouble getting a grip on. I know that authors probably have difficulty keeping a series with one character alive, but Connelly, was very successful with his Lincoln Lawyer series which integrated another character with Harry Bosch much better. I listened to this as an audio-book and Titus Welliver did his usual remarkable job narrating Bosch. Christine Lakin did a fine job with Ballard, it's just the story didn't gel for me.

Review: Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry

Thomas Perry can be relied upon to deliver solid mysteries. Although often billed as thrillers, to me they don't fit the description well as the outcome is usually reliably certain. This one was intriguing as it contains two sets, maybe even three, of protagonists. (I began to feel a certain sympathy for the thieves who, after all, were just trying to retire.) One set is the team of ex-cops now searching for the killer of a man who was more (or less, depending on your POV) than appearances. The other set is a pair of assassins who have been hired to kill the first team. It all comes together in a glorious denouement, although frankly the violence and over-specificity of brand-name weapons does nothing for me. Perry's originality and character development, on the other hand, do. Good read.

Review: The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age by Adam Segal

As I write this John Bolton and Trump seem to be planning a major war with Iran. They are not paying attention to the incredible damage that can be done by state-sponsored or even independent actors to infrastructure by cyber-attacks. Iran caused millions in damage to Saudi oilfield computers; Russia virtually shut down Estonia for more than a week to punish them for their support of Ukraine; the U.S. and Israel wrecked havoc on Iranian centrifuges with a cleverly designed malicious worm; Iran caused millions in damages to Sheldon Adelson's empire after he made injudicious remarks regarding nuclear war and Iran; the list goes on and on. 

The web is used to wage war and spy on, coerce, and damage other countries. Israel and the U.S. is want to derail the Iranian nuclear weapons program. India wants to prevent Pakistani terrorists from using smartphones to coordinate attacks. Brazil has plans to lay new fiber cables and develop satellite links so its Internet traffic no longer has to pass through Miami. China does not want to be dependent on the West for its technology needs. These new digital conflicts pose no physical threat—no one has ever died from a cyber-attack—but they serve to both threaten and defend the integrity of complex systems like power grids, financial institutions, and security networks.

What makes these attacks so problematic is that they can be designed to hide the source and can be initiated from virtually anywhere. The U.S. is so dependent on the Internet that even the slightest upheaval in some router farm could make bank deposits unavailable, the electrical grid unreliable, just to mention a few potential problems. State-backed hacking initiatives can shut down, sabotage trade strategies, steal intellectual property, sow economic chaos, and paralyze whole countries.

Segal insists that MAD (mutually assured destruction - the bedrock of nuclear war prevention) applies here as well, i.e., that countries would be afraid of massive retaliation were they to engage in widespread harm to another country. Insidious targeted attacks could be more useful and determining where they are coming from is often a laborious and time-consuming process.

Hacking tools themselves can come back to haunt their creators. "Cyber-security firm Symantec discovered that Chinese hacking group, APT 3 acquired National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools used against them in 2016 to target U.S. allies. APT 3 is responsible for various attacks on the United States and has been tracked by the NSA for over a decade. Symantec does not believe the group stole the U.S. code, but rather acquired it from an NSA attack on its computers. APT 3 then used the hacking tools in cyber-attacks involving five countries in Europe and Asia. This is not the first time U.S. agencies’ cyber weapons have fallen into the wrong hands." (from Adam Segal's blog, May 10, 2019) Those hacking tools remain viable almost indefinitely and are impossible to eradicate

The issues raised by Segal are mind-boggling. The cyber-attack by the North Koreans for example were supposedly in retaliation for SONY's production of a sophomoric comedy ridiculing the North Korean leader. 200 TB of emails and information were retrieved and then used as blackmail to force SONY to not release the movie. What role should states play in such an attack. For that matter what state did SONY belong too? They are a multi-national corporation. What nation should be responsible for its defense?

The attack on Estonia by the Russians in 2007 raises additional issues. Russia (or its non-state actors) complained about the removal of a statue in Tallinn. Estonia refused to back down and soon a huge denial of service attack began that virtually shut down the country for about three weeks. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world having decided following the fall of the Soviet Union that it would be the most effective and economical way to build infrastructure in the new country. They had a strong cadre of programmers and IT people. Access to the Internet is considered a basic human right there. Western and Estonian analysts were confident the attacks came from a Russian source but were they state coordinated or simply vandals. And since Estonia was a member of NATO, what was NATO's responsibility in helping t defend against an attack on Estonian infrastructure? Ultimately, several western countries helped in thwarting and reducing the effects of the attacks and the resulting permanent damage was minimal, but for a while the country was at a virtual standstill. The Estonian response has been to develop a large volunteer (larger than their army) group of IT specialists who help to defend their cyber infrastructure.

In the DDOS attacks on Georgia, the Russians claimed these were independent folks just wanting to express their opinions. So the freedom to launch cyber-attacks has now morphed into freedom of expression.The situation there was different, everyone having learned from Estonia and Georgian traffic was routed through the U.S. with help from Poland and Estonia. Whether that made the U.S. complicit in the conflict or not was problematic.

Hacking of social media has become extremely sophisticated and the U.S. is woefully behind except as used by a certain U.S politician who dominates the Twitter world. The technique is to drown out the opposition. China used massive troll tweets and bots to overwhelm any discussion of opposition to their regime in Tibet. The Russians spread disinformation, anything to provoke and incite assorted groups. The idea is to confuse and promote their POV to the exclusion of others while preventing any kind of rational or reasonable debate on any issue. Doctored photos are spread about the opposition and soon it becomes impossible to separate reality from the simulated.

Ultimately Segal is optimistic, forecasting that if not pacific, the world will at least have come to terms with cyberspace and information will flow freer and be less dangerous. I remain more skeptical. 

Review: Alger Hiss and the Battle for History by Susan Jacoby

Does anyone under the age of seventy really care any more about Alger Hiss? Even Susan Jacoby's mother asked, "Who the hell cares about that anymore?" Jacoby's goal was to show how the arguments and debates over Hiss's guilt continue to play out in our politics in different forms. What we see today is simply a continuation of the besmirchment of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt by the Right and an attempt to defend them by the Left. That was precisely the symbolism behind the Alger Hiss case. The Left was attempting to defend the New Deal and obfuscate its flirtation with Communism in the thirties, while the Right was attacking the New Deal and hiding its own flirtation with Naziism and isolationism of the twenties and thirties by labeling FDR's attempt to save capitalism as communistic.

She decided to write the book after watching a pathetic spectacle. At a conference on Hiss in 2007, she watched his stepson, who was in his nineties, valiantly trying to deny that his step-father had ever met Chambers because he, a little boy at the time, never saw him in the house. The idea that an eight-year-old could remember who was in the house at a particular time was emblematic of the irrationality of the Left; but the Right had its own irrationality.

Jacoby, herself is absolutely convinced Hiss lied -- she cites Weinstein's Perjury as providing conclusive proof, but she's only 98% convinced Hiss was a spy. If he was for certain, his spy skills were childish. And there were really competent spies like George Koval who had been trained by the GRU and even worked on the Manhattan Project. But Hiss and his eastern establishment elitism had become symbolic of the New Deal which was under attack by the Right. Richard Nixon had hated Hiss and his background from the first day they met. Hiss had remarked how he had gone to Harvard and Nixon had gone to what was it? Whittier College? So even though Chambers was clearly a disreputable liar and Hiss a charming aristocrat, -- or perhaps because of that -- Nixon and HUAC had it in for him.

But her book is not really about the case but about the media and how it wrote about the case over the years.

In another of those wonderful ironies, after Hiss got out of prison, he got a job selling stationery. Salesmanship is sort of the iconic American profession where those who are the most successful are those who are best at telling people what they want to hear.

I listened also to an interview Jacoby had with Brian Lamb. He asked her about her time in Moscow where she had been a correspondent for the Washington Post while protests were going on in the United States about the Vietnam War. 

But where I really became opposed to the Vietnam War was in Moscow. l lived in Moscow from 1969 to the end of 1971. I wrote my first two books on Russia when I came home from the material I gathered there. And I was there on the day that the shootings at Kent State University, which you know the famous iconic picture of the young girl over the fallen student there shot by the National Guard. It was of course on the front page of Izvestia ire Pravda that day. 

And l had many Russian dissident friends who had an almost highly idealized view of the United States because the Soviet Union was so bad; the United States must be good. And the time l had, the question they asked was how you know when the thing we looked to for your country is that you allowed dissent. You don't kill dissenters. You don't put them in concentration camps. How do you reconcile that, my Russian dissident friends said, with this picture from Kent State? 

First of all, they said - because they're so used to, they were so used to doctored pictures - is this real? And I said, yes, It real you know I've seen it on the wire. But at this point I began to think what kind of a damage to our reputation, our best ideals, the best things that people around the world think America stands for, this is yet another thing. And I think that's when I decisively turned against the Vietnam War, when I found it impossible to explain to Russians who had idealized America, how can we be shooting people for demonstrating against the Vietnam War? 

How sad.

As to the lessons from Alger Hiss and Vietnam:

But l think that what happened in the .60s, even more than the Vietnam War obviously. Obviously you know two things happened in oOs of surpassing importance, the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protest, followed quite swiftly by the Women's Movement. All of these things had to do with saying, well just because you're the government or just because you're the authorities, you don't know best.

And I think that -1 think unfortunately the Vietnam War has not had nearly as much of an impact as l would have thought it would have had because of the kind of historical amnesia that has characterized our country over the last four decades. And that begins a little bit in the 60's where the culture of celebrity begins to come in and people are getting all of their news from visual images which in one way is what turned people against the war. But I think of the late 60s as a time when begin the process of losing our attention span.

So I think in one way, I don't think if the lessons of the Vietnam War were learned, 1 don't think that Bush would have had so much overwhelming support early on for the Iraq War. So I'm not sure what a long-term effect the Vietnam War had on this country. 

SCOTUS, Citizenship and the Census

An interesting question has arisen as to whether the SCOTUS has jurisdiction to rule on the census form issue. Congress is given the responsibility for the Census in the Constitution. In 1902 it created the Census Bureau that was placed under the Commerce Department in 1903. Since the Commerce Department resides in the Executive Branch, it has been argued that as a function of the Executive Branch, it is solely within the purview of the President to decide what information is to be collected. Others would argue that since the responsibility of Congress which then delegated that power, any conflict between the two would have to be decided by the third branch, SCOTUS. Ironically, in that 5-4 decision the court ruled that the Executive had the power to decide the content but it had to have valid reasons for doing so. Decisions needed “genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Roberts wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.” A larger issue is whether the courts can force the president to adhere to the procedures outlined in the Administrative Procedures Act. Then again, the Constitution gives Congress the power to decide on the jurisdiction of SCOTUS. (See Article III. Just how that power is applied or defined has been argued many times.)

Roberts had made it clear in the first part of his decision that the Commerce Secretary had the power to determine the content of the questionnaire, where the four justices in the minority disagreed was in his questioning of the motives of the decision. “For the first time ever, the Court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale,” Thomas wrote. “Echoing the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, the court declares the secretary’s memorandum ‘pretextual.’ ”

Alito argued the jurisdiction point of view, “To put the point bluntly, the Federal Judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question [of] whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons,” he wrote, arguing for Chevron Deference (although I doubt he would see it that way) (“Chevron deference, or Chevron doctrine, is an administrative law principle that compels federal courts to defer to a federal agency's interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute that Congress delegated to the agency to administer.”) The liberals on the Court argued adding the question would result in less accuracy. So Roberts’ reasoning was unique.

The question itself would seem to be uncontroversial. It was on most census forms (sometimes only on the long one, other times on the short form) until 2010 when Obama removed the long form thus eliminating the question.

I guess I'm puzzled by all the fuss which I believe to be based on false assumptions. The citizenship question used to be on the census questionnaire. Wouldn't it be useful to know how many non-citizens there are? They deserve representation but non-citizens, be they immigrants or otherwise, can't vote anyway, so how would non-citizens affect the outcome of any federal election? I doubt if there is any evidence showing that adding it to the questionnaire as a way of increasing Republicans is correct, although the under-countof perhaps 8 million -- if the Census Bureau is correct -- *might* (I emphasize, might) result in less population for traditionally Democratic areas. If everyone is counted in a district it would possibly change district boundaries, but how does that necessarily translate into benefiting either party? Conversely, I doubt the charge that "immigrants" (the issue should be citizen v non-citizen, not immigrant) would be reluctant to indicate whether they are, or are not citizens, would affect their completion of the form which is required under federal law. Legal immigrants who are non-citizens would have no reason to not complete the form.

Fact is there are millions of immigrants who are legal residents, and have every right to be here, but who, for whatever reason, have not chosen to become citizens. The purpose of the census is to count the number of people in the U.S. for the purposes of apportionment. (“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”) Personally, I think it would be very useful to know how many are citizens, how many are legal residents, and how many are undocumented aliens (who may have children who are citizens.) Both parties are taking ideological positions that may be based on false assumptions, i.e. that the presence or absence of the citizenship question will benefit or hinder them. I don’t think the answer is that clear. To fall back on what the Constitution says, however, it’s critical that *everyone* be counted no matter their status. That’s what it says. That said, it seems to me the Constitution says plainly that apportionment is to be based on a count of ALL people (except non-taxed Indians, of course). The Census Bureau should be doing everything in its power to make an accurate count. I note that the concept of citizenship didn’t even appear in the Constitution until the 14th Amendment when it was added to make sure that freed slaves were to be accorded the full rights of citizenship, those “Privileges or Immunities.”. (Not women, though.)