Justifying Pre-Emptive War

The Becker-Posner Blog: Preventive War--Posner:  "Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation."

I find the kick-off discussion on the much-awaited Becker-Posner Blog to be rather chilling.  There's a calculated quality to the rationale that feels bloodless to me.  It is a welcome discussion, but I don't know who I would recommend it to.

It is also thought-provoking.  I'm granting that these are serious, thoughtful people.  And I'm still thinking it over.

There are two elements that I am having trouble with.  One has to do with the responsibility of revolutionaries that I recall reading about in Daedalus too many years ago to expect to find it now.  By that I am refering to the moral responsibility to not drag the citizenry onto seriously-disruptive terrain with irreversible and terrible moral consequences.  It is something I would have wished our leaders to have understood better in their zeal to reform the world.

Also, the democracies with which I am familiar do recognize self-defense as a civil justification, but vigilantyism is not held in such high regard.  What is an appropriate international conduct among nations that favors the same consideration for justice and the rule of law?

Secondly, I have serious concerns with the lopsided social utilitarianism that is expressed here.  What about the externalities?  Posner seems to suggest that the trade-off equation about pre-emption involves the cost-benefit to us, to our nation, without consideration for the externalities that are bourn by the inhabitants of the territory that we conduct our war on.  This also seems to completely undermine the present-value versus future-cost equation, having the present cost in lives lost be some else's while the only the speculative future cost is ours.

An easy way to express my concern is this: The next time I hear someone say better that non-combatant (and even insurgent) Iraqi citizens die there now than we be attacked here later, I will regret that the practice of washing someone's mouth out with soap is no longer acceptable corporal punishment.

And as a non-Christian, I have this puzzle for anyone to address: What would Jesus have to say about our behavior?

The IT Chaos Tipping Point?

ACM News Service: Sprawling Systems Teeter on IT Chaos.  2004-11-30: It was striking to me, early in my current M.Sc in IT work, to hear how much my IT-immersed classmates were apologists for inability to test software adequately and being helpless to deal with emergent behavior from unanticipated interactions.  This blurb is about how European IT networks are on the brink of massive failures, along with a British initiative to find remedies.  The idea is to mitigate against chaotic collapse, with "risk of this happening is increasing as all EU government departments, educational systems, and health care services are interconnected via the Internet."

The prophetic Duncan Graham-Rowe 2004-11-27 New Scientist article landed concurrent with what appears to have been an exquisite failure in the UK.  It appears that the 10 million Sterling investment in this future remedy is running way behind the loss rate of current and failed government IT projects.

Security-Challenged Arphids at a Survey Near You

An MBA classmate in my on-line degree program is conducting a survey about RFIDs and he'd like a broad response.  The only problem that I found with it is that the surveymonkey.com site raises more than enough privacy concerns for the RFID-wary and demonstrates the level of casualness about all of this that we exhibit in our actual behavior.  I didn't complete the survey exercise.  If you want to examine it yourself, follow the link in the title of this article.  Here's roughly what I had to say when I declined to follow through:

1. The survey site requires persistent cookies to be stored. Upon noticing that cookies are being blocked, the site suggests actions on the part of the visitor that can grant more privileges than this visit requires.  The advise also fails to recognize that the blocking might be accomplished with a firewall, not a browser.  SurveyMonkey wants to store a persistent cookie, not just a session cookie, perhaps to avoid duplicate submissions or to allow people to return and revise a previous or incomplete response.  I don't know.  They don't say why, they just say "trust us."  Maybe the linked privacy policy explains it, I didn't look.
2. The site also requires scripts to be enabled for any form to appear (I see no entries that I can fill in except at the bottom).  Script blocking isn't detected automatically.  At this point, I had the choice to enable scripts or not (I can see the form, but not use it).  I chose not to continue.
3. The survey enforces a common misconception in its introduction, biasing the reader.  The survey describes RFIDs as if the ones being deployed these days are of the active variety.  The current supply-chain RFIDs are almost all passive RFIDs and they are not active transmitters -- they passively respond to a scanner, using the energy of the scanning signal for power -- and work at a much shorter range than the 10 meters suggested in the survey introduction.  Active RFIDs, with "batteries on board" are too expensive but they have great applications in the transportation industry as in monitoring wear and dangerous overheating of truck tires.
4. The hypothetical case of being charged automatically as you leave the store, rather than stopped to pay for your purchase, assumes a legal power and a way to identify you that is beyond the technical capacity of a merchandise-attached RFID to accomplish -- the RFID has no way to report who the bearer of the merchandise is.  On the other hand, it would be interesting for a retailer to try this.  It should result in some fascinating new case law and in the US at least the Bank Card companies will probably not be happy with those merchants, since repudiations are almost all resolved in favor of the consumer.  This will turn into an undesirable cost for merchants who make disputable charges against bank cards.  (See the PayPal and eBay practices around this in the US, if you can access those policies from where you are.)
5. I find all of this pretty fascinating, and I think surveying for the public perception is fine, though one might want to look at problems of sample choice and whatnot.  Relying on a survey of self-selected respondents is about as good as newspaper call-in numbers for conducting automated surveys on the O.J. Simpson trial.  It might work for reality TV, but what does it tell us that one can calibrate as useful?
6. For a realizable scary case, consider suicide bombers/terrorists/assassins who have RFID scanners on their person and the explosive device is designed to go off automatically when it detects the RFID-coded passport or ID card of a citizen from a particular nation, or even a particular citizen from a particular nation.
7. More at http://orcmid.com/blog/2004/11/rfid-privacy-being-ignored.asp, et. seq. [;<).