Your Moral Earth's Magnetic Field

I've heard people talk about how important their moral compass is to them.  What this means can be something different to any different person, but one definition that I think matches most people's conception is, "a natural feeling that makes people know what is right and wrong and how they should behave."  Are the natural feelings we have really what should make us know what's right and wrong?

Doing what's natural may not be a terrible basis for morality, but it's not a good one either.  We have a number of pack animal and cooperative instincts that guide us toward some caring and concern for our fellow man (and remember man is gender neutral in this context).  These also create an aversion toward malice in many contexts, which is also good.  Our instincts don't stop with these, 'love your neighbor' drives though.

Being a pack animal leads to a set of instincts, and while some of those are positive like what's stated above others are decidedly negative.  It leads to a tribalism, probably due to competition with other packs.  We protect our own, but those who aren't are own are usually fair targets for whatever we can dish out.  This is why looking at history we only seem to have been fighting against racism, sexism, or similar discrimination for about a century or two, and to some even that's being quite generous.  There's also significant drives to personal status and individual gain.  We want the pack to be strong, but we also want to be the head of the pack (or at least be very secure about our position in it) and there's a good chance we're willing to trade the good of our group for a high position in it, too.  This is why children throw tantrums, politicians and important businessman are as willing to admit mistakes as they are to part with teeth, and people gossip about the shortcomings of acquaintances.

This leads me back to the idea of a moral compass.  Truthfully, I think it's a good analogy as long as we remember one thing: a compass doesn't operate in a vacuum.  A compass is a magnetized needle set on a spindle (or sometimes in other ways, such as suspended in a liquid).  It points to the north because it aligns itself with the Earth's magnetic field.  In morality, this leads to the question that might be much more important than how is your moral compass, but what is your moral Earth's magnetic field.

What things external to ourselves help us understand what is moral and what is not?  Is it divine scripture?  Public opinion and associated feelings of dignity or shame?  Articulate and interesting discussions on ethics?  All of these have flaws which must be examined and guarded against and all have certain merits as well.  Compasses can be disrupted by anything that produces strong magnetic fields, like high electrical current.  Precise navigation may also require an adjustment between magnetic north and 'true north' since the Earth's magnetic poles aren't perfectly aligned with her north and south poles.  Just like a compass will not point true in a lightning storm or around power lines we should learn where our moral compass may fail to point us true and why if we want to stay true to our moral north wherever we go.

Sadly, the porn must flow Part 3: Regulatory and Governmental Concerns

I've now addressed concerns with a mandatory pornography filtering system based on conceptual considerations on the nature of pornography and technical ones about how the system might work.  Now I will focus on a critique of the plan based on the governmental and regulatory considerations, as stated in the title.  A main point in my last part could be summed up as, "Don't trust your ISP to keep you safe, you're better off ensuring that on your own."  If we replace ISP with government that same idea will be found here.

America has a unique approach to government in that a fundamental value we hold is liberty, and are sensitive to the power of government to curtail this among individuals or groups.  The conflict between this and the need for law forms a basis to our society.  Whether pornographic filtering should be mandatory is another manifestation for this conflict, and I will be falling on the side of liberty as opposed to security.

The concept of safety curtailing our liberties is one hotly contested in the media with the government's efforts in the last ten years to crack down on and protect against terrorism.  This even has a more direct parallel in the field of communications with recent Snowden leaks on NSA data and metadata collection efforts that, in my own personal opinion and that of at least one court of law, violates American citizens' rights granted by the first (including and perhaps primarily the right of association) and fourth amendments.  With these already in peril, why would we want to introduce a new government mandate and increase their ability to curtail citizens' rights online?

Yes, yes, I know, "No one's rights are being curtailed, anyone can still opt in and get the content they want."  In the short view this may be true, though many of the points in my previous two essays on the subject should demonstrate ways it may also not be.  Though I'd rather not delve too deeply into the 'slippery slope' argument as it necessarily relies on speculation and unverifiable prediction, it would be prudent to mention that any law or regulation would set a precedent that our personal communication methods are something the government has every right to manage.

The proposal would grant new regulatory powers over our methods of communication.  It would be handed off to either ISPs or/and government committees and reduce choice for the individual.  While it's only a default setting that would change right now, the shame often involved in the complex issue of obscenity could easily cause this to be the societal norm, and forcing those who either held liberal views about sexuality or possibly a desire to protect their privacy and security online to be forced into an 'internet ghetto.'  Eventually these people might be lumped in with criminals and subject to greater invasion of their rights because they 'chose to use the internet in a manner recognized to reflect dangerous and deviant behavior.'

Let me explain by way of analogy.  How would you feel if car dealerships were now required to sell cars that would automatically avoid driving you anywhere where obscene or illegal activities were known to occur?  They would naturally have to standardize and define what obscene behavior was, and so a federal committee would now decide what parts of town you were allowed to drive to.  If you wanted to have full control over where you could go in the car you bought you would need to ask the dealer, and maybe they would have a special license plate for your car so that everyone else wouldn't accidentally follow you or wonder why they were having trouble getting to a place that you went to without problems.  Does that sound OK to you, or does it seem like a massive intrusion of government control in your life?

The internet is indeed a radically new method of communication.  Earlier methods often fell naturally into a pattern of self-regulation when it came to pornography.  Movies created a rating system, magazines went under the counter, TV shows had a set of standards to follow until after the watershed.  Phone lines were pretty much just as available to youngsters as much as anyone else but you needed to know what number to call and the commercials didn't go on until after the watershed, so their exposure wasn't really significant and in any event parents would get the bill later.  The internet, on the other hand, is hugely interconnected and once you're online you have access to most resources with nothing more than a name, or if you're not sure of that a search term will probably work just as well.  The industry doesn't lend itself well to self regulationas it is a personal service, the connection is to your home, connected to a vast public network.

It does lend itself easily to personal regulation, though.  In my last post I mentioned a few good and fairly easy solutions to filter pornography.  I explained my feelings that those who were unwilling to gain the technical skills to implement these shouldn't be foisting their responsibility to protect themselves on the country at large as well, but there's another aspect to this naivete I'd like to address: that pornography is a problem that technology or regulation can only slow, not stop.  It plays to the most basic human drives and desires.  This is what makes it so tempting, and destructive.

The way to fight pornography is to teach the right values, habits, and behaviors.  I admit the prevalence of pornography can make this difficult, but teaching our children and selves the truth of what pornography is is the most effective way to fight it.  We shouldn't pretend that we can shut off any exposure to it, and instead prepare ourselves and develop the mental and spiritual discipline to be strong against it when we do.  This may include a personal decision to install some sort of filter on our own networks.  Others might not even see a need for this.

Maturity comes with responsibility, taking on accountability for the way we live and the decisions we make.  I see this petition as immature, trying to abdicate the responsibility for avoiding pornography by passing it along to organizations believed to be more capable of doing so.  We must take this responsibility upon ourselves though, immense as it may seem, because immaturity and liberty cannot coexist.  The more we decide that something is too hard for us and should be handled by the government, the greater the state will become as the citizen becomes smaller and smaller.

Sadly, the porn must flow 2 : Technical Considerations

So I've gone over the conceptual problems with a government mandated ISP based pornography filtering system and given an overview of how these systems might work.  One of the problems with this kind of legislation, however, is that there are numerous technical considerations.  Much like the recent SOPA bill, a pornography filtering requirement could possibly work out to be a government mandate to restructure how the internet works in the service of a specific special interest.

On the surface this seems like an overreaction, porn filters already exist so how difficult would it be for these to be implemented broadly by ISPs rather than requiring users to implement them personally.  It's not, though, as scalability isn't simple.  There's a reason why programs have run locally on personal machines for years but only now can be served out from a remote location to hundreds of thousands of users.  There's a reason enterprise servers are different from personal computers.

Still, though, it's certainly doable.  It would take a lot of work, though, and skilled programmers, network engineers, and system administrators don't work for free.  That means forcing this to happen at the ISP level will be expensive.  A government mandate means everyone's prices will go up.  Think about if a similar resolution were to be passed for gasoline, electricity, or food.  People would rightfully be incensed that either they're being forced to pay more for a service they don't want or are already using from a provider they trust and have established a good relationship.

Also, people don't often think about what their ISP is doing with their internet traffic.  Usually that's because it's assumed that they shouldn't be doing anything with it apart from passing it on to the intended recipient.  That's not the case, though.  Your ISP is watching you, much like Google, Facebook, or other online advertising companies are and like these they plan to sell information about your habits to interested parties for some extra cash.  They're also watching you as a favor to their friends in the entertainment industries to make sure that you don't "copy or share a movie, television show, or song improperly."  The more I find out about the ISP industry, the less I trust them.

Knowing this we're likely to see two things happen should any sort of legislation pass from this petition: First, pornography filtering will be put in place, but thanks to a grant from the pornography industry to ISPs will make this laughably easy to circumvent.  There could possibly be a sort of 'protection money' situation where ISPs block the pornography sites that don't pay up to be on their list of sites that aren't too 'extreme or hardcore.'  Second, the system will be implemented with little thought to protecting those that want to avoid pornography, but as a great excuse to further other goals for the ISP.

I mentioned encrypted traffic in my last post and how this can create a problem for porn filtering systems.  My feelings about ISPs give me every reason to believe that they would be happy to use porn filtering mandates to try to subvert users' efforts that are trying to remain anonymous and gain a modicum of privacy while online (such as when using a VPN service like ProXPN to hide traffic from the ISP, or connecting to a Tor node to remain anonymous).  This way they could continue collecting information about you and your habits to sell to advertisers or make sure you fall in line with the entertainment industry's demands.  They'd also have the power to brand anyone trying to get around these restrictions on the service they're paying for with a 'scarlet P' by saying that they had opted in to the internet with pornographic access plan.

Going back to the phrase from the petition, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn," I'm not really certain what these 'great lengths' are.  Installing a free program like K9 web protection on your computer, or an app on your cell phone like this web filter?  Admittedly my preferred solution, OpenDNS, is a little technical but even then you don't even need to sign up and they'll still provide straight forward instructions like these on their website.  Why do we feel it necessary to have the government partner with our ISPs to do this for us?  If staying safe from pornography is important to us shouldn't we be willing to put an iota of effort into doing it in a way we understand and are in control of?

This leads me back to one of my original points: naivete.  I recently watched a documentary on prohibition and one thing that was pointed out was that once the prohibition amendment had passed the prohibitionists had thought they'd won the war on alcohol.  Anyone with a smattering of US history knows that wasn't the case, and a tacit law saying porn is to be avoided won't make it any less desired or sought after.  We'll be handing over a good degree of power over our lives, remember the internet is only becoming more and more important to who we are, in exchange for avoiding something like an hour a week, at most, to install, configure, and maintain a filtering solution that fits our personal needs.

I'm writing a novel this month for National Novel Writing Month in the tradition of cyberpunk.  One characteristic of the cyberpunk genre is that it features technology not as an enabling  force that brings about Utopian lives for mankind, but instead becomes a force for control and oppression.  There's hints of this in my novel, but one of the themes is also supposed to be that this happens because people give up their rights, their strength, and their power to others because they think it's too hard to develop the technical skills necessary to understand the systems they use.  Society has fallen back into being controlled by a few select elite, but this time we chose it because math, programming, physics, engineering, and computing are hard and we'd rather enjoy ourselves while someone else did those complicated things.  This petition is a sad reminder that the bleak future I'm writing should be fiction, but might not be someday.

Sadly, The Porn Must Flow

There's been a white house petition going around lately that I've been saddened to see many friends of mine supporting.  The petition is promoting a measure similar to one that was proposed a while back in the UK, that internet service providers be required to block pornography by default.  I remember hearing this news back then and thinking of it as an oddity of British politics, and feeling thankful that we weren't foolish enough and that the American spirit had principles of liberty well enough ingrained that we wouldn't support something similar here in the US.  Sadly, it seems I'm being proven wrong.

I'm no lover of pornography.  Well, I mean, I'm a normal red-blooded heterosexual male so there's the obvious vulgar desire to check it out, but I do avoid it and would counsel anyone to do the same.  I actually block pornography on my home network using OpenDNS, which has proved to be a fantastic solution.  Make no mistake, my objection is not pro-porn, I object on the grounds that what we'll lose if we try this will be greater than any gains.

So what do we have to lose, except our pornography?  The fact that this question needs to be asked is part of what saddens me.  It bespeaks a naivete in our society that borders on, if not diving all the way into, a dangerous area.  Pornography is very hard to define.  Any reasonable person will admit that not all nudity is pornographic.  Once this is acknowledged the waters immediately muddle quite a bit.  Some might try to avoid this difficulty by saying that our efforts only need to filter out 'the worst kinds of porn' or 'extreme and hardcore pornography' but that only pushes that very hazy line back in hopes that it will reach an area where enough people feel shameful about being on the wrong side of it that they avoid being anywhere near it.

That approach doesn't help when we're talking about electronic content filtering.  Our computers, networking routers, or servers aren't like our parents that can look at us and tell when we think something might not be right and ask us in a stern voice if we're really making the correct decision right now.  The petition states as one of its concerns that, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn."  I'll get to the first part (oh believe you me I'll get to it), but let's look at the worry that they "don't weed out all porn."  Short answer, that's because they can't.  Let's get into the two ways to filter pornography (or really anything, the same methods can and are used for your computer's anti-virus): blacklisting, whitelisting and heuristics.

Blacklists are a list that's been built of sites known to be pornographic that are blocked.  The obvious flaw with this is that new pornographic sites arise everyday, and there's a delay before these would be added to the blacklist.  The less obvious flaw is that it will inevitably be based on the opinions of people making decisions about whether a site is pornographic or not, and your opinion may not agree with the blacklist makers.  I'll go into this more after explaining the counterpart to the blacklist, the whitelist.

 Whitelists are the inverse of blacklists, building a list of known safe and OK sites that don't contain objectionable material and only allowing a user to visit those sites.  It should be fairly apparent that this essentially reduces the internet to barely useful, but then again in certain contexts may be a good solution.  Parents installing a whitelisting program on their home computer or network for their children, requiring them to get parental approval before visiting a site, or non-technical users that only use a relatively small amount of web applications (i.e. only visiting facebook, youtube, amazon, and one or two other web applications related to their job).  That's not what this petition is about though, and whitelisting would be far too restrictive for an ISP to ever implement for a solution to their customers.

So neither are a good solution for a government mandated ISP pornography filter as they either 'don't weed out all porn' or throw the baby out with the bathwater and cause huge gaps in service in an effort to do so.  Again, though, the issue of what porn is comes up.  One pornography filter I installed, K9 web protection, was absurdly restrictive for me and blocked sites like facebook and youtube (though admittedly I think this might have been for reasons other than porn).  I had to disable these filters while leaving the rest in place.  There is some pretty saucy content on these sites, though, and some parents might not want their kids exposed to that.  Would you want your ISP to block youtube, since after all you can see videos of girls in bikinis and lingerie or lesbians kissing (albeit that media is often behind youtube's own adult content protections) and then if you wanted to watch a youtube video be forced to tell you ISP to 'turn off their porn blocking' for you?  Are you OK with never using facebook since, after all, if an attractive woman who is 'friends' with you posts a picture of her in a bikini or otherwise scantily clad it might as well be porn?

Maybe our final method, heuristics, can help us out.  Heuristics will inspect data and websites for specific behaviors, content, or properties and then block it if they meet certain qualifications.  Heuristics can easily get false positives, a popular example being filters that scan images for exposed skin or genitals blocking medical journals for having instructional images when examining a disorder.  This leads to similar problems as before, either too much is blocked because it might be porn, or not all porn is weeded out.  Heuristics also have the problem of requiring much more processing power and access to your information.

The first concern means a huge investment in equipment for ISPs, which will effectively pass on the cost of porn filtering to customers that may not want it.  Is it really fair to force people to pay for a service they don't want?  The second means it's tricky to impossible for connections that are properly secured to be filtered. It's entirely accurate to say that for an ISP to comply with any law created from this petition they might be within their rights to say, "This traffic is encrypted and has been blocked as possible pornography," when you're accessing your bank or other financial institution's website.  Lest you consider this an extreme example of hyperbole to make my point there is precedent for this; the NSA in its data collection efforts collect all encrypted communications they come across despite the fact that they're prohibited from collecting communications from American citizens saying that encrypted communications are essentially by definition unable to be verifiable as between Americans.  If you allow the ISP to allow encrypted connections you've approved to connect normally you've short circuited the system, and disabling heuristic filtering for certain approved sites with secure, encrypted connections increases the overhead requiring even more costly processing power.

What can the government and ISPs do to block pornography, then?  Well, here's the thing, we still haven't defined what pornography is.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints actually provides what I believe is a very accurate definition in their manual True to the Faith, "Pornography is any material depicting or describing the human body or sexual conduct in a way that arouses sexual feelings."  The question here is, how do we know what arouses sexual feelings?  To some a painting such as the Venus de Milo might seem sexual, while to others it might not.  Pornography, like so much involved with sexuality, is a deeply personal thing, and as such is hard to define, let alone regulate, effectively.  Regarding pornography Justice Potter Stewart famously couldn't give a definition other than "I know it when I see it." (and, interestingly, the film referred to in the case where he said that was not, according to him, obscene).  We may know indecent content when we see it, but computers don't so any hope of creating a computer system that will block all that out for us is doomed to fail.

Imagination and Knowledge

After my last post I decided I want to write another one this month, since I like to cool off and give any readers I might have a break when I go on tears about technology, law, and society.  I didn't have a good topic that I wanted to talk about, though, so I asked my wife what she thought I should write on.  She provided a one word prompt: imagination.  I decided to go with this, but having something so broad I needed to keep looking.  A few internet searches later I happened upon some Einstein quotes around, Imagination is more important than knowledge."  In that way I have I said to myself, "¿Is it?" and then I realized I had a topic for a post.

I think considering imagination and knowledge more important than one another is actually a little misguided.  They're different entities that have different purposes and bring differing benefits to a person or society.  It's like saying hammers are more important than saws or potatoes are more important than chairs.  And we can often get by with only one.  But, these are two forces that gain the greatest power when working together.

Knowledge is a foundation.   Knowledge tells us how the world and things in it work, how to do things, and how things are connected.  Imagination gives us the capability to see how these facts could be different, improved, or superseded.  But using imagination rarely can make a strong impact if we're without the knowledge to back this up.  Knowledge lets us reasonably examine the ways in which the things we imagine might play out, so that when we try to put those things we imagine into reality the chance that we're successful is higher.

My love for Star Trek was recently re-kindled by a collection of online reviews of works in the franchise and one thing that's been striking is that one of the most impressive things about the franchise was its ability to imagine the future in a very different yet very reasonable way.  Social issues such as race, ethnicity, and sex becoming less important to a team that works together.   Also, amazingly, the science of instantaneous point to point transportation, faster than light travel, and futuristic weaponry (though it was changed later, the original meaning of the term "phaser" was "photonic maser" which, while actually redundant since the microwaves a maser produces are made up of photons, points toward the laser which does indeed exist and could be weaponized).  Many of the high points of the series' are when this works to add believably and a feeling of reality to the impossible,and failures of the series often occur thanks to imagination being backed up by too little knowledge.

Choosing Style & Convenience Over Principles

Consider which of the following philosophies you agree with more:

A central authority will control every aspect possible.

or

As much as possible will be made available in its entirety for public inspection and involvement.

With that in mind consider this: are you more willing to use Apple or Linux computers?  I know, I know "It just works."  "I'm not a 'techie,' and don't want to have to deal with all that complicated stuff"  "The way the little book opens is just so cute."  I've heard it all before.  I recognize that Apple has abstracted more of the functions for the user and produced very powerful, stable, efficient (though you wouldn't know if from their pricing) technology solutions, but you're missing the point.  I don't want to talk about Apple per se.  I want to talk about the choices we make, especially in technology.

Our choice in technology tends to be surprisingly shallow when we consider the depth of the effect technology has on us.  We decide based on what looks nice, has the coolest features, or sometimes (usually if we're a little more informed) runs well and has the most processing power.  For something that is so rapidly changing the way we interact, work, and quite arguably think this seems like pretty arbitrary criteria.  Will it cause me to seek large amounts of less intimate relationships more efficiently?  Will I ponder issues less in favor of looking up a quick and easy answer from a third party source in the most sleek and stylish way?  These are the kind of questions we're asking, when we could be asking ourselves questions like, "Will I be engaging in and contributing to a infrastructure that promotes openness and individual freedom?"

If I may be candid for a moment let me admit my smug tech nerd ways.  I used to be a little annoyed, mostly due to the immaturity one has early in life that others know different things than you do, when people didn't know how a computer's file system worked, the difference between a program and a text file, or why they couldn't get on the internet.  I'm quickly becoming less annoyed by these people, but that annoyance is being replaced by fear.

I'm afraid because I know that market forces drive technology, and it's terrifying to see the market choose flashy, easy, and restrictive items over empowering items that might make them work a little harder.  I'm afraid because working in tech support I've seen just how helpless people are when their technology breaks, how helpless many people are when it comes to fixing their technological problems, and how earnestly industry is working to make sure that problems may come up less at the expense of being fixable without being invited into a company's inner circle to error codes and access controls.  I worry about living in a world where a relatively small conglomerate of programmers, advertisers, and businessmen are making sweeping decisions on how people live their lives, and the people are relatively powerless to and even uninterested in changing that.

Many are afraid of the effect technology is having on the human psyche and sociological structures.  It's easy to blame the technology for this, but I feel that's misguided.  If our minds or societies are becoming corrupted it's not thanks to the internet, smartphones, or video games.  It's because we're using these poorly.  And why wouldn't we if most of us don't know how they work at all, and only know what they do as the company making it presents that to us?

Studying mathematics and physics where most modern research is done with the aid of computers I'm perhaps blessed to have been taught in a tradition that specifically points out where computers are helpful and where our own intellect should be applied.  Questions of what's computable and what isn't are addressed directly, as well as questions of the best way to compute that which we would indeed like to compute.

I worry a lot about my tone here.  As I recently found out when reading a book on obesity, it's sadly easy to dismiss those presenting information and ideas about something as, "Oh, they're one of those type of people.  That explains why they would say that."  It would be so easy to end up being that "smugly superior" guy who'll criticize folk for having different views on technology or not knowing as much as he does about computers.  As the comic below illustrates thouygh, sooner or later we'll be uncomfortable with how the technology we use works, and if unless we develop the appropriate infrastructure we'll be unable to change it.

Sacred Sexuality

"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine." taught Jesus in the sermon on the mount. Casting pearls before swine is one of those phrases that floats around today but is seldom given the consideration it deserves. On my mission I felt like I was walking a precarious line between sharing the gospel and casting pearls before swine.  But anyway I'm not writing now to talk about sharing the gospel. I've wanted to write for some time on sex, and this scripture came to mind when thinking what to write.

Sacred sexuality is one of those new-age sounding things that usually gets thrown around by those that want to talk about how great sex is.  That somewhat more snide than I intended remark aside, I think sacred sexuality is entirely real.  Sex is something sacred, and that's why in my life it's reserved for marriage (which is also holy).  Often in Christian circles the holiness of sex is directly related to the ability to bear children, and while I think we should hold the same gravitas for the acts of creating life as we do to destroying it I don't feel that this is what makes sex something holy.

So what is it that makes sex sacred, then?  The words sacred and holy both derive from the idea of setting something apart, reserving something for a higher purpose, or dedicating something to a greater cause.  Sex for me is something reserved for marriage.  That imbues it with the high purpose of strengthening marital bonds and by extension the family.  That makes sex a way to study selflessness and caring for another (without abnegating one's own needs or desires in the process).

I own a book of erotic myths and legends and read one together with my wife the other night.  The one we read was (perhaps a little bit surprisingly) rather tame with almost no mention of sex but rather an extended poetic meditation on love, longing, desire, loss, and union.  Although when reading we might have been looking to partake together in something a little more saucy, I'll also say I actually really liked this little legend of a lover comforting himself that his "beloved other" was not truly lost because they had become one soul.  Sex is a part of that, and that makes it sacred.