Category: Politics

Gun violence is a complex problem. No single solution will prevent all gun violence, and while some of the more sensible solutions I’ve written about are a significant part of a larger solution, there are a lot of other things we can do too. In other words, no one thing is ever going to be a complete solution. The gun industry knows this, as do the lawmakers they fund, which is why the only thing many congressmen have been capable of offering are thoughts and prayers. It’s easy for politicians to attack any single idea if it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Just like other complex problems, a multi-faceted solution is needed here. Also like other complex problems, the success metric shouldn’t be reducing gun violence to zero, but rather how much we can move the needle down from the 33,000 lives lost to gun violence each year. The need for a creative and sophisticated solution is especially true in the United States, as there is an inherent fear among part of the country that we will become just like Australia – a country that has had zero mass murders in the past 20 years, and yet still remains a democracy. This sounds simply awful to some.

Rather than go on about the need to follow Australia’s model (which we should), or the desperate need this country has to fire most of our politicians and reform campaign finance law (which we should), I’ll attempt to outline my opinion of what I think would move the needle on gun violence significantly in this country, keeping what is realistic in sight.

Continue reading “Moving the Needle on Gun Violence”

I originally wrote this article in summer 2016, and have been revising and tweaking it every time there’s a mass shooting in the news. This has been a lot lately. It has become a very sad and depressing thing to constantly bump the date on this content, knowing that it will simply fall on deaf ears again and again. Some days it feels as though the value our country puts on human life is so very little. It gets harder and harder to convince myself that there is still good in our society, but in the midst of these horrifying tragedies, the good still manages to emerge.

I’ve been a long time responsible gun owner, by the old definition of what that used to mean. Like a vast majority of them, I’ve wanted more controls on semi-automatic rifles – particularly, assault rifles, for a long time. Indeed, there’s Kool-Aid on both sides about assault weapons, and both have some questionable notions about them. The extreme left seems to have developed an irrational fear and hatred of all guns and the extreme right believes the only solution to guns are more guns. Consider this alternative perspective from someone who’s spent over 15 years shooting and working on guns, obtained NRA certifications to supervise ranges and carry concealed weapons, and up until a few years ago – when I sold the rights to it – produced the #1 ballistics calculator in the App Store.

What much of the nation does not know is that there is already a system in place to perform strict checks of individuals looking to own firearms categorized as highly lethal. Introduced in the National Firearms Act, this system applies to machine guns, short barrel rifles, silencers, sawed off shotguns, and other types of firearms that individuals can still legally own today, but with more than the casual regulation of AR-15s and other such firearms.

There is a lot to chew on here, but if you follow this article to the very end, I think you’ll see how it all comes together to a solution that would address this very complex problem should Congress ever act. It’s important first to lay the groundwork necessary to build up to these working points.

Continue reading “Reclassifying Semi-Auto Rifles under the National Firearms Act”

To my friends in law enforcement, and many whom I don’t know serving our country:

First, thank you. You do an incredibly difficult job that often goes unseen, and you put your life at risk to make this great country safer. For that, I am deeply grateful.

Many of you have suddenly found yourselves on the wrong side of history. Our country has what, by many appearances, seems to be an illegitimate president who may be the product of the Russian intelligence community, and possibly even the head of the FBI, both of whom played a role in defrauding or manipulating our election system. Within one week of taking office, Trump has shown himself a madman who uses racism and personal prejudice to fill in the gaps that his incompetence affords. Seemingly overnight, our country has been transformed from what many had considered a free country struggling to overcome their indifferences, now into a place of fear for basic human rights. Racist extremist minority groups, deeply rooted in our country, have suddenly become empowered to hate, igniting hostility against anyone who is different from the majority in skin tone, religion, or sexual orientation.

With the stroke of a pen, livelihoods and families have been discarded by the government, as many who have lived legally in our country for years now have had to fight against illegal deportation orders, or have been banned from re-entering the country they call home. These men, women, and children are considered among enemies of the state not for committing a crime, but for merely existing. Meanwhile, science, technology, and even the arts are being harmed through this disgraceful practice, as many of these human beings are scientists, engineers, movie directors, and other productive human beings working for large technology innovators, defense contractors, or even in Hollywood. All of them went through several layers of vetting far beyond what the president has ever been subject to, just to be in this country and get the jobs they have. We’re in very troubling times – times that frighten everyone, except those in power.

Continue reading “Open Letter to the Law Enforcement Community”

FBI acknowledged today that there “appears” to be an alternative way into Farook’s iPhone 5c – something that experts have been shouting for weeks now; in fact, we’ve been saying there are several viable methods. Before I get into which method I think is being used here, here are some possibilities of other viable methods and why I don’t think they’re part of the solution being utilized:

1. A destructive method, such as de-capping or deconstruction of the microprocessor would preclude FBI from being able to come back in two weeks to continue proceedings against Apple. Once the phone is destroyed, there’s very little Apple can do with it. Apple cannot repair a destroyed processor without losing the UID key in the process. De-capping, acid and lasers, and other similar techniques are likely out.
2. We know the FBI hasn’t been reaching out to independent researchers, and so this likely isn’t some fly-by-night jailbreak exploit out of left field. If respected security researchers can’t talk to FBI, there’s no way a jailbreak crew is going to be allowed to either.
3. An NSA 0-day is likely also out, as the court briefs suggested the technique came from outside USG.
4. While it is possible that an outside firm has developed an exploit payload using a zero-day, or one of the dozens of code execution vulnerabilities published by Apple in patch releases, this likely wouldn’t take two weeks to verify, and the FBI wouldn’t stop a full court press (literally) against Apple unless the technique had been reported to have worked. A few test devices running the same firmware could easily determine such an attack would work, within perhaps hours. A software exploit would also be electronically transmittable, something that an outside firm could literally email to the FBI. Even if that two weeks accounted for travel, you still don’t need anywhere near this amount of time to demonstrate an exploit. It’s possible the two weeks could be for meetings, red tape, negotiating price, and so on, but the brief suggested that the two weeks was for verification, and not all of the other bureaucracy that comes after.
5. This likely has nothing to do with getting intel about the passcode or reviewing security camera footage to find Farook typing it in at a cafe; the FBI is uncertain about the method being used and needs to verify it. They wouldn’t go through this process if they believed they already had the passcode in their possession, unless it was for fasting and prayer to hope it worked.
6. Breaking the file system encryption on one of NSA/CIAs computing clusters is unlikely; that kind of brute forcing doesn’t give you a two week heads-up that it’s “almost there”. It can also take significantly longer – possibly years – to crack.
7. Experimental techniques such as frankensteining the crypto engine or other potentially niche edge techniques would take much longer than two weeks (or even two months) to develop and test, and would likely also be destructive.

Continue reading “My Take on FBI’s “Alternative” Method”