Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

My parents had a great gift idea: an Uninterruptible Power Supply for laniels.org. This machine goes down fairly regularly when the power spikes in this neighborhood, so the UPS is perfect. My last one failed in a bad way: it kept cutting out, bringing my machine down at least once an hour for a few weeks. I unplugged that UPS and plugged my machine directly into the wall. Everything was going great until the neighborhood’s power cut out. Hence the new UPS. It should keep laniels.org up as close to 24/7 as possible.

All of this is probably moot, because I think some friends and I will be moving to a colocated server presently. When that happens, bandwidth and reliability will both go up. I’m excited.

Professor Dan Drezner says that a recent comment by Howard Dean is stupid:

Then there’s Howard Dean on Osama bin Laden in an interview with the Concord Monitor:

The Monitor asked: Where should Osama bin Laden be tried if he’s caught? Dean said he didn’t think it made any difference, and if he were president he would consult with his lawyers for advice on the subject.

But wouldn’t most Americans feel strongly that bin Laden should be tried in America — and put to death?

“I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said. “I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials. So I’m sure that is the correct sentiment of most Americans, but I do think if you’re running for president, or if you are president, it’s best to say that the full range of penalties should be available. But it’s not so great to prejudge the judicial system.”

Logical question for Governor Dean — how is your support for the decision to go to war in Afghanistan not tantamount to “pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found”? /p>

UPDATE: Dean released a clarifying statement on his official blog:

I share the outrage of all Americans. Osama bin Laden has admitted that he is responsible for killing 3,000 Americans as well as scores of men, women and children around the world. This is exactly the kind of case that the death penalty is meant for.

I don’t think Dean’s comments are stupid, and I said so in the comments to Drezner’s post. In fact, Dean’s views square with mine: as a democracy, we must resort to war only when the judicial process has failed or when it’s inapplicable. If it’s possible to capture each of a country’s leaders and try them with murder, then we should do that. My objection to invading Afghanistan was precisely that we had short-circuited the entire judicial process; we had even refused to turn over evidence of Osama bin Laden’s complicity in the September 11 attacks, resorting instead to a “you are with us or you are against us” stance. We made a mockery of democracy.

I’ve found few reasons not to support Dean.

A very good, very intelligent friend argued recently that Linux is not inherently more secure than Windows; it’s just that Windows has the much larger market share, he said. He claims that Windows isn’t any more vulnerable to viruses than Linux is. I disagree, but the proof is in the pudding. So I throw down the gauntlet here: if someone a) develops a Linux exploit that affects more than a few high-profile servers, or b) develops a Linux virus that spreads rapidly in the wild, then I will pay my friend $100. I can think of no other way to test the strength of his claim, or to convince either of us.

I restrict both a) and b) to servers to keep the playing field level. Linux has not yet achieved widespread adoption on the desktop, but it is deployed quite widely on servers. And I would suspect that servers are the most high-profile targets: hacking into Amazon’s or Google’s servers is worth a lot more than hacking into Joe Sixpack’s home machine — or even several thousand Joe Sixpacks’ machines.

It’s just not going to happen: Linux is a more secure OS by design, and it will resist attacks well into the future. Of this I’m quite certain.

A couple of links, and then it’s off to read a bunch more essays by Jeffrey Steingarten. First, Via The Volokh Conspiracy, a very interesting profile of the Ninth Circuit’s Judge Kozinski (my cache). Adam and I had a very well-timed conversation just a few days ago about Kozinski’s conservatism and famed irascibility, and the article more or less backed up those impressions — along with some doubts about the consistency of the man’s jurisprudence.

Next, the obscenely well-designed Ben Hammersley reports that the Clark campaign is using open-source software as a vital part of its campaign (or at least, doing its campaign cheaply):

In the continuing realisation that they can get people to work for free, the techification of the US presidential campaigns just gets geekier and geekier. Not content with Wesley Clark’s new Open Source initiative, Howard Dean’s lot have released the Dean Feeds: policy statements, press releases and the like, but also including events and FOAF feeds for all registered users.. Wow.

If you visit the Clark-campaign link above, you see that it says

The Clark TechCorps provides a framework for involving open source software developers in the Clark campaign. Through the collaborative development of open source code, developers design and implement critical Clark campaign infrastructure while extending the availability of open campaignware/electionware.

and

Democracy cannot function without openness and transparency. Internet Democracy is no different. The Clark TechCorps represents a significant commitment to both these guiding principles.

It’s a sign that perhaps the campaign really gets the connection between democracy and open-source software. It’s really a very fundamental connection, and an acid test of any campaigner in 2004 should be that he (I would say “he or she,” but Carol Moseley Braun will not be the nominee; I’m sorry if I’ve burst anyone’s bubbles) makes a commitment to open-source in government.

Then again, as Hammersley says: maybe it’s just a way for the Clark campaign to get some free labor. The last temptation may still be the greatest treason.

Every now and again it occurs to me that I should get a job involving books in some way — lexicographer, research librarian, editor, publisher, agent, reviewer, or something. But then I realize that one of the things I love most about reading books is that I’m under no pressure to do it. In high school, I just couldn’t bring myself to read any of the books I was assigned; reading a book had to be my idea. Of course, now I regret that, because I missed out on really absorbing a lot of books that I now acknowledge to be brilliant. At the same time, I probably just wasn’t ready to read them, and probably most people at that age aren’t.

If I got a job that required me to, say, read 100 incoming books by new authors and give my impressions of each, I don’t know whether my private reading life would suffer. I’d either be so tired of reading all day that I’d cultivate a solid drug habit, or I’d be so happy to choose the books I read that I’d read my own stuff at night. I’m not really sure. So I wonder whether I ought to stay away from book-reading as a career and keep that as part of my private life.

I’ve yet to find a job that takes a private joy of mine — say, technology or tech policy — and turns it into a source of income while still keeping me excited. My dream right now is that at some point in the future, I’ll combine law, technology, literature, journalism, and politics into some heady brew that’s enormous fun to do and changes the world in whatever way ends up seeming the best. (I’ve got some ideas, but nothing that I could turn into policy just yet.) I wonder whether I’m the sort of person who loses a lot of the fun of a task when he does it either formally (I couldn’t deal with ultimate frisbee beyond pickup games) or for money.

Unrelatedly, I’d like to point everyone to Jessamyn West, and in particular her weblog  . . .  er  . . .  journal. I’ve not yet met Jessamyn, but we’ve emailed quite a lot (thank you, Friendster) and spoken on the phone, and my friend James tells me that she’s the reason there are six degrees of separation between humans rather than eight. She also published a list of technically legal ways for libraries to get around the Patriot Act. She seems way cool. I can’t wait to meet her; scheduling and illness have thwarted our attempts thus far, but I have faith that we’ll meet soon.

Having finished Order Without Law yesterday morning, I’m on to a much lighter book: Vogue food columnist Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay collection It Must’ve Been Something I Ate. It’s good fun. It’s a little too precious at times, in the “in case you had forgotten, I go really far to eat good food!” vein. But it’s a fun read, especially if you like good food and enjoy drooling over people writing about it. Plus Steingarten is just a very solid writer. If you happen to have a really amazing bookstore in your neighborhood, and they’re offering the book at 20% off for Christmas, why not pick it up? (Speaking of which, a little sidenote to the Harvard Book Store: guys, I emailed you a while ago asking why you don’t have anything like the Amazon.com Associates program, where people put links to Amazon on their sites and collect a little cash when visitors click through and buy Amazon books. Get on the ball, Harvard Book Store! You should have something like this.)

While reading one of Steingarten’s essays, about the sorrows of being laid up with a broken leg for weeks, I happened upon a line that I find kind of funny: “And then, at last, my wife returns from China, bent low with culinary gifts: three bags of very fine tea; a liter of Suntory Pure Malt Whiskey  . . . ” Suntory was the whiskey Bill Murray advertised in Lost In Translation, wasn’t it? I thought it was a fake product. Murray’s signature line was something like, “For good times  . . .  make it Suntory Time.”

All right, so maybe just I found that funny.

Finally, note that Steingarten has a detailed Q-and-A on egullet.com (via Jason Kottke’s remaindered links). This Q-and-A is especially valuable for those who’ve read Amanda Hesser’s praise of Steingarten. If you believe that Amanda Hesser (left) will eventually ditch her New Yorker-writing husband and come over to the curly-haired beast who is her destiny, then the Q-and-A is for you.

I just finished reading Robert Ellickson’s book Order Without Law, about the informal norms that control behavior even in the presence of laws to the contrary. It’s a very solid book, very tightly argued. If I were its editor, the only change I would make is to ask Ellickson to repeat himself less.

The basic premise behind the book is that, because of certain very obvious principles of social interaction, neighbors don’t need laws to tell them how to act. One such principle is that if you expect to do business with someone over and over again, you have incentives to resolve your problems amongst yourselves rather than turning to the legal system. If you mistreat that person, you can expect that he’ll pay you back later. Similarly, neighbors often keep a mental ledger: if someone has treated me well over the years, I will typically feel inclined to help him in return.

Principles like this are obvious, but Ellickson runs quite far with them. He also supplements them with empirical evidence from cattle ranchers in Shasta County, California. He found that ranchers turned to the legal system only after exhausting every other option when dealing with one another, and that they misunderstood the liabilities that the law imposed on them when they fenced off their ranges. Not only did their norms differ from the law, but they hardly took the law into consideration when deciding how to act.

Ellickson takes some nice turns into game theory, anthropology and sociology throughout his book, which makes it a refreshingly worldly view of the law. I’ve recently been reading Richard Posner’s law-and-economics works which — while fascinating — seems to be missing some humanity. Ellickson spent his career before Order Without Law working as a law-and-economics scholar, and he admits that this is one of the field’s failings; it’s so committed to a rational-choice model of the world that it sacrifices necessary complexity: the world really is a complicated place, and to think that you can describe it using that parsimonious a model is rather ludicrous. Ellickson shows that in practice, real people seem not to behave the way that Coase, Posner and others believe that they would. Empiricism is a wonderful breath of fresh air; Ellickson’s book is enjoyable to read, whereas I find myself throughout Posner thinking, “But no, that’s insane!” Granted, Posner’s a genius with a broad view, and one cannot dismiss his ideas out of hand. But reading Ellickson leaves you with a different feel than Posner — the feeling, honestly, that you’ve just read someone with more humanity.

Finally, one of the big virtues of Order Without Law is the generosity of its style. Ellickson never tears into other scholars with the abandon that a Posner does. Again, I don’t mean to demean Posner all that much — I love reading his books — but he does delight in triumphing over his intellectual sparring partners. Ellickson takes no such joy, even when he is in fact undercutting an opponent’s arguments. He’s laying out a dispassionate story in Shasta County, then building up a dispassionate theory. Again, the style is a breath of fresh air.

Anarchists will get something out of this book: they may go into it thinking that it’s an argument in favor of destroying government broadly, when it’s really no such thing; Ellickson’s model, if anything, only argues that we could do without government (or that people act as though the government weren’t there) when people with a long-term relationship interact. It never tries to argue — indeed, questions the argument — that strangers (such as victims in a car crash) could negotiate to an optimal solution without the aide of centralized authority. It may be possible to make that argument, but Ellickson is not the one to make it.

Above all, I’d recommend this book to readers in law-and-economics who are looking to soothe their stomachs after reading Posner.

I’ve not yet read the full decision in the Padilla case — refusing to allow the government to hold José Padilla without charging him with a crime or giving him access to an attorney — but it seems generally right to me. Doesn’t it just seem morally wrong to you to allow the government to hold someone for years without counsel and almost no possibility of ever being released? Shouldn’t a man’s freedom rest on more than the whim of the attorney general?

So I have very little patience for unprincipled arguments of the sort that Ruth Wedgwood is advancing (my cache). It’s fundamentally legalistic. I’ll set aside the legal question for right now, because I don’t really know whether the court acted within its rights. But from the level of principle: I’d like Professor Wedgwood to explain where she draws the line between a fascist — and I mean that strictly — mode of operating a government, and a democratic one. If we’re allowed to hold people hostage for two years with no legal protection, what’s left of the judicial system? Why should terrorism justify this sort of disgrace, and not murder? Or better yet, why foreign terrorism and not Tim McVeigh-style terrorism?

Again bearing in mind that I’ve not read the Padilla decision, Wedgwood appears to have engaged in overstatement and straw-manning:

Of course, it would be preferable to know everything that is important in life by standards of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But imagine if the intelligence dots had been replete and connected on Sept. 10, 2001. What if we knew, from out-of-court sources, the names of Qaeda operatives who were planning to hijack the jet-fueled airplanes for attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Even then, we would likely have lacked admissible criminal proof. By the logic of last week’s decision, the president could not have held the hijackers as combatants — even after they had entered the United States, even with habeas corpus review of the president’s decision, until the moment they appeared at Logan Airport with box cutters.

Has anyone insisted that we had to have evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” against Padilla before jailing him? Isn’t that a standard applied only to juries once the accused has entered a criminal trial? Padilla hasn’t even been tried yet. He hasn’t even been tried by a military tribunal. He’s just rotting in jail. The judicial system has done a reasonable job keeping this country safe from violent criminals for hundreds of years, all along without knowing the guilt of the accused before scooping them up. Why does Wedgwood assume that we would need it to grab Padilla?

All that civil libertarians ask is that the ordinary judicial protections afforded to ordinary American citizens be extended into as many corners of this “war on terror” as possible. It seems the only just thing to do while our leaders claim to be defending democracy in the rest of the world. Instead, people like Wedgwood and the Bush Administration would have us believe that these protections are passé after 9/11. I hope that their ideas fade away quickly, or I honestly don’t hold out much hope for our democracy.