E.J. Dionne chastises Democrats for not supporting President Obama on Syria:

The wretched experience of Iraq is leading many Democrats to see Obama’s intervention in Syria as little different from what came before. Never mind that the evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people is far clearer than the evidence was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that Obama has been so reluctant to take military action up to now.

Wait a second. I realize that Dionne is only talking about Syria here, but in the past five years Obama has (a) escalated twice in Afghanistan, (b) massively ramped up the drone war in Pakistan and expanded it to Yemen, (c) joined NATO’s air strikes against Libya, and (d) is now asking Congress to approve a punitive military mission against Syria.

No, none of this matches Iraq in the annals of military folly. And who knows? Maybe history will judge that these were all good decisions. Still, I think it’s about time to acknowledge that Obama is hardly “reluctant” to take military action. Neither I nor anyone else will ever know how hard he struggles with these decisions in the innermost recesses of his soul, but in the end he actually seems pretty damn agreeable about taking military action, doesn’t he?

Dionne also warns that voting against Obama will damage the rest of his presidency:

It was only a matter of time before our polarized politics threatened to destroy a president’s authority and call into question our country’s ability to act in the world….The question now is whether Congress really wants to incapacitate the president for three long years….The seriousness of this crisis should also push Republicans away from reflexive anti-Obamaism, Rush Limbaugh-style talk-show madness, extreme anti-government rhetoric and threats to shut Washington down.

I agree with Dionne about the shamelessness of big chunks of the Republican opposition. When Obama wanted to stay out of Syria, they spent hours on Fox sputtering about his lack of leadership and insisting that we had to do more to bring down the Assad regime. But now that Obama is proposing to do exactly what they asked for, suddenly they’re spending hours on Fox explaining why it would be foolish to enmesh ourselves in a brutal and intractable civil war five thousand miles away. It’s pretty stomach turning.

Still, putting our stomachs aside, why would rejecting Obama’s request “incapacitate the president for three long years”? I’m not asking this in the usual rhetorical way, where I pretend not to know even though I really do. I’m really asking. Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?

As for America’s ability to act in the world, I really doubt that this vote will be taken as much of a precedent. But if it were, the precedent it sets would be simple: the United States won’t undertake military action unless it’s so plainly justified that both parties are willing to support it. That would frankly be no bad thing. Unfortunately, once they get in office American presidents of both parties seem to find no end of wars to fight overseas. Reining them in a bit would be commendable.

Ellen Nakashima has an oddly downplayed story in the Washington Post today. As we all know, the NSA collects massive amounts of both domestic and foreign communications, which it stores for years. It’s allowed to search this database, but under the Bush administration they could only search for names and email addresses of foreign targets. Two years ago, however, the Obama administration got permission to perform searches using the names and email addresses of American residents:

The court decision allowed the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its e-mail and phone call databases using the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant, according to Bates’s opinion. The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” And the results are subject to the NSA’s privacy rules.

The court in 2008 imposed a wholesale ban on such searches at the government’s request, said Alex Joel, civil liberties protection officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The government included this restriction “to remain consistent with NSA policies and procedures that NSA applied to other authorized collection activities,” he said.

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications, “we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have issued warnings about this, but secrecy rules kept their warnings vague. Now, however, it’s public knowledge:

“The [surveillance] Court documents declassified recently show that in late 2011 the court authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless searches of individual Americans’ communications using an authority intended to target only foreigners,” Wyden said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Our intelligence agencies need the authority to target the communications of foreigners, but for government agencies to deliberately read the e-mails or listen to the phone calls of individual Americans, the Constitution requires a warrant.”

Senior administration officials disagree. “If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.”

So there you have it. When the NSA sweeps up this data in the first place, it says no individualized warrant is necessary because it’s merely storing the information, not “collecting” it. Collection only happens when an analyst performs a search and looks at the stored content. But now they’re saying that even when analysts explicitly search for U.S. names and get some hits, this means they just “happen to” have collected the communications of Americans. And once that’s happened, why should they have to go back and get a warrant for records they just “happen to” have collected? As long as they think it’s “reasonably likely” to yield foreign intelligence information, they should be able to go right ahead. And now they can. Lovely.

UPDATE: One reason this might not have gotten a lot of play from the Post is that much of it has been previously reported. There’s some new stuff in the Post account, but the basics were reported last month by James Ball and Spencer Ackerman in the Guardian. Click here for the story.

The LA Times has an interesting story today about supermarket automation that’s worth a read if you’re interested in such things. Among other things, I learned what those Powerballish-looking TV screens in my local Albertsons are all about.¹But there was also this:

Grocery stores especially want to appeal to younger shoppers, many of whom tend to avoid traditional supermarkets because they consider them the place their parents shop. One way to woo smartphone-toting millennials is to make grocery shopping more tech-friendly, analysts said.

Since I have long since reached the “get off my lawn” stage of life, this prompted two questions that perhaps my younger readers can answer. First, is it really true that you avoid traditional supermarkets because your parents shopped there? And second, where do you shop instead that doesn’t seem like a place your parents would frequent?

¹It’s QueVision! More here.

Reuters reports:

President Barack Obama will give interviews on Monday to the three network news anchors, as well as to anchors from PBS, CNN, and Fox, more evidence of a “full court press” strategy ahead of pivotal congressional votes on military strikes in Syria.

Has Obama ever engaged in such an intense public effort to win support for an embattled proposal before? He did for healthcare reform, but I think that’s about it. I sure wish he could have dredged up the same level of enthusiasm for immigration reform or tougher financial rules or cap-and-trade that he’s finally discovered for tossing bombs at Syria. This time it really seems personal for him. Why wasn’t it for all those other things?

The Washington Post reports today on the first of what I assume will be many announcements from tech companies worldwide:

Google is racing to encrypt the torrents of information that flow among its data centers around the world in a bid to thwart snooping by the NSA and the intelligence agencies of foreign governments, company officials said Friday. The move by Google is among the most concrete signs yet that recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance efforts have provoked significant backlash within an American technology industry that U.S. government officials long courted as a potential partner in spying programs.

….Security experts say the time and energy required to defeat encryption forces surveillance efforts to be targeted more narrowly on the highest-priority targets — such as terrorism suspects — and limits the ability of governments to simply cast a net into the huge rivers of data flowing across the Internet. “If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in . . . . Most of the people in my community are realistic about that,” said Christopher Soghoian, a computer security expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is all about making dragnet surveillance impossible.”

….Google officials declined to provide details on the cost of its new encryption efforts, the numbers of data centers involved, or the exact technology used. Officials did say that it will be what experts call “end-to-end,” meaning that both the servers in the data centers and the information on the fiber-optic lines connecting them will be encrypted using “very strong” technology. The project is expected to be completed soon, months ahead of the original schedule.

[Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google] echoed comments from other Google officials, saying that the company resists government surveillance and has never weakened its encryption systems to make snooping easier — as some companies reportedly have, according to the Snowden documents detailed by the Times and the Guardian on Thursday.

“This is a just a point of personal honor,” Grosse said. “It will not happen here.”

The question here is, Who do you trust? Google says they’re going to use strong encryption and will never install back doors or hand over encryption keys to the NSA. At least, that’s what they seem to be saying.

On the other hand, if the NSA gets a court order that forces Google to turn over encryption keys and prohibits them from talking about it, who would ever find out?

So which do you trust more? Google’s desire to give its customers what they want, or the NSA’s ability to get what they want? Good question. The vast majority of people won’t care about this at all, but I suspect that more than a few will decide that NSA has more power than Google and will simply decline to do business in the future with American companies if it involves storage of information on the cloud. Whether that eventually has a noticeable impact on American tech companies is hard to predict.

Earlier today, in a post about the latest Edward Snowden leak, I wrote that “I’m a lot less certain that this one should have seen the light of day.” After some further thought and conversation, I’m now a lot less certain I should have said that.

Here’s the problem. The Guardian and New York Times stories basically revealed two things:

• The NSA has been working to deliberately weaken commercial crypto standards and insert back doors that only they have privileged access to. This is horrific public policy for at least a couple of reasons. First, the NSA tried to do this publicly in the mid-90s with the Clipper chip and export restrictions on crypto technology, and they lost. Now they’re covertly doing what Congress refused to let them do overtly. Second, deliberately weakening commercial crypto exposes everyone who uses it to possible interception from bad actors who manage to discover the NSA’s handiwork. There’s no way the NSA can guarantee that other groups won’t learn the weaknesses it’s introduced (indeed, it’s already happened in some cases) or somehow get access to its back doors. I have no problem at all with the Times and the Guardian disclosing this, and I’d very much like Congress to put a stop to it. 
• In addition, the NSA has been working to to improve its decryption capabilities in ways that don’t degrade commercial crypto for anyone else. The details are unclear. It might involve new mathematical techniques. It might involve new computational techniques or improved computational power. It might involve old school hacking. It might involve stealing encryption keys or getting companies to give them up. It might involve the discovery of weaknesses that already exist. This is all stuff that NSA is chartered to do, and it does nothing to harm general use of commercial cryptography. However, revealing the extent of NSA’s success in this area might indeed warn terrorists and others away from commercial crypto that they thought was safe, and thus degrade NSA’s ability to track them. I have a hard time believing that the public interest in this outweighs the damage done to U.S. intelligence efforts.

Needless to say, not everyone agrees with my second bullet. Judging from my Twitter stream, there are people who seem to think that it’s illegal for the NSA to engage in decryption. Others apparently believe that foreign surveillance serves no actual purpose and is really just a sham to keep the power elite in power. Still others seem to think that governments should never keep anything secret. There’s not much to say to these people except to disagree with them.

But for the rest of us, this is a tough issue. If NSA is actively weakening internet security in ways that could blow back on us all, it absolutely ought to be reported. But to the extent that NSA is simply figuring out new decryption techniques that don’t weaken security, they’re just doing the job we’ve asked them to do. I don’t see much sense in alerting anyone to the details or scope of how successful they’ve been.

The problem is that a close reading of the Times and Guardian stories makes it really hard to figure out how much of these two things the NSA is doing. The Guardian says categorically that inserting back doors and vulnerabilities into commercial crypto systems is the “key component” of the NSA’s efforts. The Times is more circumspect, and the documents available to the Guardian and the Times are apparently fairly vague on this point. In 2010, for example, NSA says it developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against web encryption. Is this the product of a decade-long effort to insert vulnerabilities into commercial systems? Or something else?

We don’t know, though there are several hints that NSA is spending an awful lot of time and money on decryption capabilities that have no connection to back doors or inserted weaknesses. And the companies that have responded so far to this story have mostly denied having allowed anything like this.

For now, then, I’ll just say that I’m more uncertain about this than I was yesterday when I first read these stories. Some of the stuff they revealed I have no problem with. Some of it I think I do. I realize I’m breaking the pundit code that says we should all have absolute and unchangeable views on every subject, but I just don’t this time. I need to learn more, and unfortunately I’m not likely to.

I don’t want to keep you all on the edge of your seats, so here’s the news: Domino has a hyperactive thyroid. This is what’s causing her lack of appetite and weight loss. We’re going to put her on a low-iodine diet and hopefully this will clear everything up. She also got a flea bath today, and tomorrow I’ll de-flea the house. That should take care of her flea-related itchiness.

With any luck, this will fix all our problems. All our cat problems, anyway.

Yesterday featured a trip to the vet, which Domino considered little better than gratuitous torture. She was not a happy cat, especially since this visit included drawing a blood sample, which she’s never had to endure before.

Hopefully her problems aren’t major. She’s lost a couple patches of fur lately and is sporting some small sores. I gave her an extra dose of flea medicine, but that didn’t do anything. The vet, however, confirmed that it was indeed a flea allergy, and recommended that I thoroughly de-flea the house using carpet powder or spray. If anyone has any recommendations in this area, please leave them in comments.

As some of you have noted in comments, she also looks thin these days, and she’s been eating a little less than usual. I don’t have a scale accurate enough to check this for sure, but the vet does and Domino has indeed lost weight. Thus the blood tests. We’ll find out what’s up later today.

A few days ago, NBC News quoted a former intelligence official about the fallout from Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. “The damage, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 12,” he said.

At the time, I thought it was an odd thing to say. Obviously Snowden’s leaks have been damaging to the NSA, and just as obviously they’ve caused the NSA enormous PR problems. Still, we’ve known for years that they were collecting telephone metadata. We’ve known they were subpoenaing email and online documents from tech providers like Google and Microsoft. We’ve known they were monitoring switching equipment and fiber optic cables. We certainly know a lot more details about this stuff than we used to, but the basic outline of NSA’s capabilities hasn’t really come as much of a surprise.

So what was this former intelligence official talking about? I suspect it was this:

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

….Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks, or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones.

….By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by exploiting security flaws, according to the documents. The agency also expected to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications of three foreign governments.

….[In 2010, a] briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

But the agency was concerned that it could lose the advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption became widely known. “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document warned.

That’s a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10. The Snowden documents don’t make clear precisely what NSA’s capabilities are, or exactly what kind of encryption it can break. Nor is it clear how many of its new capabilities are truly due to mathematical breakthroughs of some kind, and how many are more prosaic hacking exploits that have given them more encryption keys than in the past.

Nonetheless, this is truly information that plenty of bad guys probably didn’t know, and probably didn’t have much of an inkling about. It’s likely that many or most of them figured that ordinary commercial crypto provided sufficient protection, which in turn meant that it wasn’t worth the trouble to implement strong crypto, which is a bit of a pain in the ass. (Recall, for example, Glenn Greenwald’s admission that he “almost lost one of the biggest leaks in national-security history” because Snowden initially insisted on communicating with strong crypto and Greenwald didn’t want to be bothered to install it.)

But now that’s all changed. Now every bad guy in the world knows for a fact that commercial crypto won’t help them, and the ones with even modest smarts will switch to strong crypto techniques that remain unbreakable. It’s still a pain in the ass, but it’s not that big a pain in the ass.

For what it’s worth, this is about the point where I get off the Snowden train. It’s true that some of these disclosures are of clear public interest. In particular, I’m thinking about the details of NSA efforts to infiltrate and corrupt the standards setting groups that produce commercial crypto schemes.

But the rest of it is a lot more dubious. It’s not clear to me how disclosing NSA’s decryption breakthroughs benefits the public debate much, unlike previous disclosures that have raised serious questions about the scope and legality of NSA’s surveillance of U.S. persons. Conversely, it’s really easy to see how disclosing them harms U.S. efforts to keep up our surveillance on genuine bad guys. Unlike previous rounds of disclosures, I’m a lot less certain that this one should have seen the light of day.

The Economist writes about robots:

No matter how flexible, easy to program and safe they are, collaborative workers may not be welcomed by human workers to begin with. The experience of Alumotion, an Italian distributor of UR’s robots, is illustrative. Workers fear being replaced by robots, says co-owner Fabio Facchinetti, so his salespeople carry demonstration units in unmarked cases and initially only meet a potential client’s senior management behind closed doors.

Roger that. So how do we make humans more accepting of robots? Part of the answer, as near as I can tell, is the usual: other, higher ranking humans will tell lies about how the robots will never, ever take away your job. They’ll just help you do your job better! But there’s also this:

Workers generally warm to collaborative robots quickly….And because workers themselves do the programming, they tend to regard the robots as subordinate assistants. This is good for morale….To keep human workers at ease, collaborative robots should also have an appropriate size and appearance. Takayuki Kanda of the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto says that collaborative, humanoid robots should generally be no larger than a six-year-old, a size most adults reckon they could overpower if necessary.

….It turns out, for example, that people are more trusting of robots that use metaphors rather than abstract language, says Bilge Mutlu….He has found that robots are more persuasive when they refer to the opinions of humans and limit pauses to about a third of a second to avoid appearing confused. Robots’ gazes must also be carefully programmed lest a stare make someone uncomfortable.

….When a person enters a room, robots inside should pause for a moment and acknowledge the newcomer, a sign of deference that puts people at ease….It is vital that a robot of this sort is not perceived as hostile, but as having its owner’s best interests at heart….One way to do this is to give robots a defining human trait—the ability to make mistakes. Maha Salem, a researcher under Dr Dautenhahn, programmed a humanoid Asimo robot, made by Honda, to make occasional harmless mistakes such as pointing to one drawer while talking about another. When it comes to household robots, test subjects prefer those that err over infallible ones, Dr Salem says.

So this is how robots will eventually become our overlords. They will keep themselves small and supposedly easy to overpower. They will traffic in charming metaphors. They will pretend to care about our opinions. They will avoid eye contact. They will feign deference. They will simulate charming clumsiness. And, of course, they will mount a massive PR campaign aimed at getting Hollywood to portray robots not as the relentless killing machines they are, but as harmless, friendly little eco-bots. They will do all this while Skynet takes over behind the scenes. You have been warned.