Author Archives: eehines

A Solution

Posted on by
Reply

Last year, a People’s Republic of China-owned and -operated mine in Zambia had a catastrophic failure of a mine tailings wall, creating an environmental disaster for Zambian citizens.

[A] tailings dam owned by Sino-Metals collapsed and unleashed toxic sludge into the Kafue River, farmlands along the river valley are scorched, hundreds of people lack a source of clean drinking water and residents continue to live on land contaminated with heavy metals.

The Zambian government meekly aided the PRC and its mine operators in covering up this disaster, trying to hide it from the public. To hell with its own citizens who still are paying with their health and their lives for the failure, now of their own government in addition to that of the PRC and its mine operators.

According to a US House Select Committee on China,

The Zambian government, which owes $6.6 billion to the Chinese government and Chinese lenders, has held back from pressing Sino-Metals over the disaster, fearing retaliation from China….

Retaliation. Here’s an alternate solution: cancel the contract with Sino-Metals and all other PRC “investments” and “loans” in Zambia, declare the $6.6 billion debt reclassified as the PRC’s and Sino-Metals’ debt to Zambia for the cleanup, and dare the PRC to retaliate in any material way.

No actual dollars would flow from this, but two salutary things would result: Zambia would be freed from a debt it never should have taken on in the first place—PRC terms are notoriously usurious and are designed for to force default and confiscation of the collateral (here, the mine itself) put up for the loan. Zambia also would be out from under the PRC’s thumb and free(r) to trade its wealth of natural resources to more honorable nations under more equitable terms.

Whose Fault is That?

Posted on by
Reply

The woman’s plaint opens with a catalog of online and personal device reminders of her daughter’s death in February 2024:

MY CAR’S BLUETOOTH asks if I’d like to connect to “Miranda’s iPhone.”
Facebook pings me with “memories”: photo carousels of my adult daughter and me on a beach or posing for goofy selfies.
Miranda’s name appears on my list of “favorite” numbers on my phone. A shared streaming account offers recommendations that cater to Miranda’s high-low tastes: a historical drama, and the new season of “Real Housewives.”
Then there’s my Amazon account, which lists Miranda’s shipping address in Brooklyn.

Then she wrote

Every time her ghost pops up on a device, my heart is ripped anew.

And

OUR ONLINE PROFILES outlive our physical bodies. We can pack or give away possessions, but the tech gods preserve the digital lives forever of those we’ve lost.

However.

My sympathies for the woman’s loss of her daughter, but really, whose fault is it that all of that personal information was put into the Internet cloud in the first place? Whose fault is it that these data were not deleted from the cloud—or from the contact list she still has loaded into her car—some time after she laid her daughter to rest, but instead were left scattered about among the cloud and her devices these 14 months after her daughter’s death?

And: the despicable behavior of AT&T in the face of a court order and of Apple’s and Alphabet’s differing decisions to censor what information each would release in the face of a court order, notwithstanding, the decision to give up the court fight was this woman’s alone, even though she was making progress on the matter.

Again, my sympathies for the woman, but she doesn’t get to hide behind her grief to duck responsibility for her own decisions and actions.

Primary Elections and Redistricting

Posted on by
Reply

With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Louisiana v Callais et al. many more States are looking hard at redoing their district maps, ostensibly to eliminate Voting Rights Act-centered racial gerrymandering, and to enhance (Republican) partisan gerrymandering.

For good or ill (ill, I say), the current potential move very strongly emphasizes partisan gerrymandering. In the way, though, is the fact that many of the States looking here have already begun mail-in balloting for their primaries, or have completed their primary elections.

That’s an impediment, but I don’t see it as an impassable barrier. Primary elections are not final elections; those don’t occur until well after the political parties have made their nominations. Following those party decisions, the nominees will have months during which to campaign before the actual elections occur.

The dispositive factor, it seems to me, is that primary elections are strictly party-run elections; they are not bound by the laws for district/State/nation-wide elections. These party-run elections are conducted under party rules, albeit within overarching, generalized State criteria. Indeed, most jurisdictions limit primary election voting to members of the particular party fielding its own prospective candidate list. The general voting public isn’t involved in most of these jurisdictions.

That suggests to me that it’s a straightforward matter to cancel primaries in progress (as Louisiana is doing with its upcoming primary season), declare null completed primaries, and (re)hold them after a State’s redistricting effort is complete or has legislatively failed.

The Only Even Remotely Legitimate Move Re TPS

Posted on by
Reply

The Supreme Court heard last Wednesday in an expedited manner (“certiorari before judgment” for the judicial nerds among us) oral argument in a case centered on whether a President’s Executive Branch agency can withdraw, on its own recognizance, Temporary Protected Status from immigration populations who remain here under that status. Several District and Appellate courts have said no, not without (judge-determined) sufficient interagency review of the matter.

The governing statute is quite clear: granting, withdrawing, extending, or not extending temporary protected status for folks from particular nations is not a justiciable matter; courts have no standing to adjudicate these decisions.

The only legitimate recourse those demanding TPS be extended/maintained for Haitians (for instance) is to argue that that governing statute limit is unconstitutional and should be struck. Even this, though, is itself doomed to failure. Here’s Art III, Sect 2, Clause 1 on judicial jurisdictions:

The [Supreme Court] judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity…to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party….

DHS, which is the agency with TPS responsibility within the United States, most assuredly is “the United States” in this context.

Here’s Art III, Sect 2, Clause 2 on judicial jurisdictions:

…the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Under the Immigration Act of 1990 as amended, which created the Temporary Protected Status facility, there “is no judicial review of any determination” of the DHS secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.”  That’s a pretty clear act of setting such Regulations—limiting the courts’ jurisdiction—here withdrawing TPS actions from judicial scrutiny.

And Art III, Sect 1:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Federal District and Appellate courts, being inferior to the Supreme Court are bound by those same jurisdictional limits.

For good or ill, US courts have nothing to say regarding any aspect of Temporary Protected Status settings.

The Act, as amended, can be read here. The Act withdrew references to court jurisdiction and placed that jurisdiction within the State or INS district, or in the main, within the DHS.

A Powerful Security Tool

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what Anthropic’s Mythos package is. Anthropic already has released it to 50 companies and organizations, and now it wants to release Mythos to an additional 70. This would be a terrible mistake of highly destructive proportions for our national security. The White House is entirely correct to object and to move to get Anthropic to not release it further.

In my not very humble opinion, the 50 releasees already are ‘way too many. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer noted, Mythos is fully capable of find[ing] and exploit[ing] software vulnerabilities.

As such, Mythos is the beginnings of both a powerful offensive weapon and a critically proactive defensive tool. Release it too widely, and it becomes a powerful offensive weapon and critically proactive defensive tool in the hands of our enemies. Leaks happen. As the adage so correctly has it, telling a secret to three people makes it no longer secret. Fifty is dangerously larger than three, and those additional seventy guarantee widespread access to Mythos by our enemies.

The better solution would be to leave Mythos in its currently restricted release state, and let Anthropic, or DHS/DoD apply it on request to any company wanting its software inspected for vulnerabilities. Let DHS/DoD encourage companies above a size (TBD) to ask for the inspection, with that inspection coming at a nominal fee. Companies above that size that do not apply for a Mythos inspection that are then successfully cyber attacked should be fined heavily for their negligence. With the availability of a tool like Mythos, the existence of a successful cyber attack would be prima facie evidence of the victim’s negligence.