Later On

Is it just part of their generalized hatred of everything, or is there some reason? Michael Cooper reports in the NY Times:

Republicans running for governor in a handful of states could block, or significantly delay, one of President Obama’s signature initiatives: his plan to expand the passenger rail system and to develop the nation’s first bullet-train service.

In his State of the Union address this year, the president called for building high-speed rail, and backed up his words with $8 billion in stimulus money, distributed to various states, for rail projects.

But Republican candidates for governor in some of the states that won the biggest stimulus rail awards are reaching for the emergency brake.

In Wisconsin, which got more than $810 million in federal stimulus money to build a train line between Milwaukee and Madison, Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive and Republican candidate for governor, has made his opposition to the project central to his campaign.

Mr. Walker, who worries that the state could be required to spend $7 million to $10 million a year to operate the trains once the line is built, started a Web site, NoTrain.com, and has run a television advertisement in which he calls the rail project a boondoggle. “I’m Scott Walker,” he says in the advertisement, “and if I’m elected as your next governor, we’ll stop this train.”

Similar concerns are threatening to stall many of the nation’s biggest train projects. In Ohio, the Republican candidate for governor, John Kasich, is vowing to kill a $400 million federal stimulus project to link Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati by rail. In Florida, Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor, has questioned whether the state should invest in the planned rail line from Orlando to Tampa. The state got $1.25 billion in federal stimulus money for the project, but it will cost at least twice that much to complete.

And the nation’s most ambitious high-speed rail project, California’s $45 billion plan to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with trains that would go up to 220 miles per hour, could be delayed if Meg Whitman, a Republican, is elected governor. “In the face of the state’s current fiscal crisis, Meg doesn’t believe we can afford the costs associated with new high-speed rail at this time,” said Tucker Bounds, a campaign spokesman.

Ms. Whitman’s desire to delay the project, which has already received $2.25 billion in stimulus money, drew a rebuke from the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who champions high-speed rail. “To say ‘now is not the time’ shows a very narrow vision,” said Matt David, the governor’s communications director.

The state-level opposition is a reminder of the challenge of building a national transportation project in the United States: while the federal government can set priorities, the construction is up to the states…

Continue reading.

Ed Brayton:

For the true devotee of irony, the New York Times reported last week:

The Obama administration stepped up pressure against Iran’s government on Wednesday, slapping financial and travel sanctions on eight Iranian officials and accusing them of taking part in rampant human rights abuses.

Under an executive order signed this week by President Barack Obama, the State and Treasury departments jointly announced the sanctions that target Iranians who “share responsibility for the sustained and severe violation of human rights in Iran,” notably after last year’s disputed presidential elections.

Gee, whatever happened to that “looking forward, not back” thing? Oh yeah, that only applies when it’s our government engaging in torture, not when other governments do it. When other governments do it, it’s evil and must be stopped. I think the Iranians should double down on the irony and just invoke the State Secrets Privilege.

“On these officials’ watch or under their command, Iranian citizens have been arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed and killed,” Clinton said. “Yet the Iranian government has ignored repeated calls from the international community to end these abuses.”

Yep, just like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld arrested U.S. citizen Jose Padilla and had him beaten and tortured. And just like the U.S. government has ignored repeated calls from the international community to punish those who authorized that torture — you know, like we promised to do when we signed the U.N. Convention on Torture.

Glenn Greenwald responds with all due sarcasm:

Numerous detainees in American custody were also beaten, tortured and killed. The photos Obama caused to be suppressed — even after two federal courts ordered them disclosed — depicted multiple acts of detainee rape. Thousands were arbitrarily arrested and detained by the U.S. without due process, and continue to be. None of that resulted in a smidgen of accountability for the high-level government officials responsible for all of that, because the Obama administration formally took the position that they should be immunized. Somehow, though, the same Obama officials manage with a straight face to stand up in public and impose penalties on Iranians for the same conduct. Note, too, how freely the Associated Press uses the word “torture” to describe what the Iranians did, in contrast to the American media’s refusal to use that term for what Americans did.

Can you believe those crazy, paranoid Muslims and Arabs who claim that the U.S. maintains completely different standards for itself and the rest of the world? Such deranged, conspiratorial thoughts can mean only one thing: They Hate Us For Our Freedom.

I think I’m figuring out what all the wingnuts mean when they use the phrase “American exceptionalism” — we get exceptions from all the laws we demand be followed by others.

Customer-centered development is when the focus of developing the software/procedure/machine/whatever is the customer: every aspect of the new creation is examined through a customer lens: what is the customer wanting to achieve? how does the customer use the current system/device? what things would help the customer (that the customer might not even know about)? And so on.

There’s another approach that developers sometimes discover as they try to introduce improvements: “No one’s ever complained about the way it works.” This is the sign of complaint-centered development in which nothing is done proactively and any customer complaint is resolved in a way easiest for the developers (if it is addressed at all: quite a few businesses follow the model of not recording any complaints until they have a similar complaint already on record).

Complaint-centered development (aka “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”) is more common than you would think and is particularly appealing to uncreative and lazy developers—or, to be charitable, developers who work in a situation structured by a hyper-capitalistic approach that has trimmed costs so efficiently that the developers face a hopeless task: under-resourced and overloaded.

I realized during the trip that I lived through and experienced the Golden Age of air travel: a time when airlines were regulated so that all airlines charged the same fares, so that airlines had to compete based on services and amenities. Those were glorious days to travel: the late 60′s and early 70′s, and I actually looked forward to those flights. Prices were perhaps higher then than now, but my company paid for my travel.

Airports were uncrowded, no real security screening—initially, just making sure you had ticket or, initially, just the ticket envelope on with the person at the counter and given you, marked with flight and destination. (They dropped this practice when they found that some were picking up the discarded envelope and using it as a ticket.)

Seats fully reclined—not a problem in those days before laptops and with rows substantially farther apart than now. Food was excellent and often served on a tray with a little tablecloth, cloth napkins, china, and stainless flatware (coach) or silverplate (first class).

Now it seems that we live in an era of hyper-capitalism with enormous databases that collect information on everything that allows the airline companies to trim costs and trim them further and trim them more until they have trimmed away everything that made air travel pleasant and the customers now have a dreadful experience. (Full disclosure: yesterday I got up at 5:30 a.m. to make my flight in San Jose, then my flight out of Philly was delayed for 2-3 hours. We finally left after midnight, arriving at our destination around 2:00 a.m.)

Of course, the TSA contributes to the unpleasantness. San Jose has the new scanners that allow the TSA agents to look through your clothing, so now you have to remove not only your shoes, but also your belt (so that you can’t commit suicide when you are fully beat down by the experience) and take EVERYTHING out of your pockets. I was still thinking of the x-ray days and left my wallet and little pack of business cards in my back pockets and my plastic vial of evening meds in my front pocket. Mistake: the agent had to see them (and he looked through my wallet to see how much money I was carrying) and then had to feel my buttocks. He kindly told me that he would feel with the back of his hands, which of course made this totally okay.

I also had to pay $25 to check one bag. The result of this new charge is that passengers REALLY don’t want to check their bags, so everyone brings their carry-ons to the gate—and some of those “carry-ons” are quite large, but soft sided so that they can be crammed into the overhead compartment. Naturally, most people care little about the convenience of their fellow travelers, so they will put their carry-on in the first empty overhead bin they encounter and then go on to the back of the plane to their seat, so that those boarding later find all the overhead bins full until they get toward the back of the plane: these people then must wait for everyone else to deplane before they can go back and get their bags. And on flights that are 100% filled—not unusual with the constant trimming of costs—there is simply not room for their luggage. Not the airlines’ problem, of course.

And the seats are crammed close together, with the “recline” limited to about 2″. I dropped some foam earplugs—and anything you drop is lost unless you wait until the plane is empty and then crawl under the seats to find it. You certainly cannot retrieve anything from the floor in flight: seats are too close together.

Some things are inexplicable: all seating, in the airplane and in the airport, seems designed for discomfort. Is comfortable seating that costly? or do the airlines feel that they can’t be arsed with that? And though people get tired during a long day of travel while waiting from 7:45 p.m. to after midnight, but the benches are carefully designed to prevent anyone lying down—that would be awful, and if they really MUST lie down, they can lie on the floor.

In other words, nothing—nothing—is done except for the purpose of cutting costs, and the comfort and convenience of the traveler doesn’t show up in the bottom line—especially with ALL airlines taking the same steps to cut costs. And they keep outwitting us: I took an empty 1-liter bottle through security, filled it from a water fountain, and felt quite good until I got to LA and took the shuttle from the remote terminal to the main terminal, where we were left outside the secure area so had to go through security once more: there went the water. At least LA doesn’t have the scanners that allow the TSA to view your naked body, just the now-usual routine.

And, thanks to technological progress, the airport is now filled with people talking loudly to themselves—something one wants to avoid even after spotting the bluetooth device in their ear. (Note to crazy people: Get an old bluetooth earpiece and wear it; then people won’t be so distressed by your on-going conversation with demons.)

I realize that this diatribe makes me sound like an old curmudgeon. So be it.

No photo this time. I used my Muhle travel brush and the Prairie Creations shave stick and got a wonderful lather—very soft water where I’m staying, so the lather was exceptionally nice. Then three smooth passes of the Feather Premium razor with a new Feather blade: total smoothness. A splash of Royal Danish aftershave and I’m ready to go.

Dan Colman at Open Culture:

This past week, an Italian web site (Haltadefinizione) placed online six masterpieces from the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence, all in super high resolution. Each image is packed with close to 28 billion pixels, a resolution 3,000 times greater than your normal digital photo. And this gives art connoisseurs everywhere the ability to zoom in and explore these paintings in exquisitely fine detail – to see strokes and details not normally seen even by visitors to the Uffizi. The paintings featured here include Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus; Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation and The Last Supper;The Baptism of Christ by Verrocchio and da Vinci; Caravaggio’s Bacchus; and the Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo by Bronzino. These masterpieces will remain online for free until January 29. For more details on the project, look here. Thanks Claudia for the great heads up.

Chop Socky: Cinema Hong Kong. I’ve long been a fan of Hong Kong cinema, so I don’t know how much this documentary will appeal to those who aren’t fans. It’s just 55 minutes long, so it’s skimpy here and there, but an enjoyable brief overview.

I do wish some extremely well-funded and well-connection group of cineophiles would create a substantial in-depth history with substantial excerpts. And this time don’t omit Tsui Hark. I think a 10-DVD set would be about right,  ideally with hyperlinks to streaming media of the actual movies, so long as I’m dreaming.

More videos of inter-species friendships here.

Just a quick report: I got6  new Frank brush yesterday and used it this morning with no problem at all: three good passes of lather from soap. So I’m more mystified than ever.

Later.

Rewatching My Dinner With Andre turns out to have been an excellent idea. Just as absorbing as it was in every other viewing.

Packing almost complete. Normal blogging will resume on the 20th, but may break out at any time.

Interesting article by Gwendolyn Bounds in the Wall Street Journal. I use (and advocate) italic handwriting, also known as chancery cursive. You can read my post about it here. Bounds’s article begins:

Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old’s stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane’s mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.

She’s right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

It’s not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

Studies suggest there’s real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting’s demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice.

Most schools still include conventional handwriting instruction in their primary-grade curriculum, but today that amounts to just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation’s largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Even at institutions that make it a strong priority, such as the private Brearley School in New York City, “some parents say, ‘I can’t believe you are wasting a minute on this,’” says Linda Boldt, the school’s head of learning skills.

Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the brain in learning. During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a “spaceship,” actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called “functional” MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters.

“It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time,” says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

Adults may benefit similarly when . . .

Continue reading. There’s much more at the link, including a video. Check out also Handwriting Repair.

Take a look at this review:

Grant Wood: A Life
by R. Tripp Evans

A review by Steven Biel

Grant Wood’s life story, as he told it to the press and as many of his biographers have repeated it, went like this: Born in rural Iowa in 1891, Wood showed artistic precocity from an early age, flirted with bohemianism, turned his back on his benighted region under the sway of H. L. Mencken, traveled to France, grew a hideous beard, produced derivative Impressionist paintings, returned home, shaved off the beard, discovered a “native” subject matter and style (most famously in his 1930 painting American Gothic), and became America’s “artist in overalls.” Well adjusted, hard working, and clean living, the mature Wood was everything the stereotypical artist wasn’t. Most of all, he was masculine — “a sturdy, foursquare son of the Middle West,” as an admiring critic put it. The art, like the artist, was solid, straightforward, and robustly American.

In Grant Wood: A Life, R. Tripp Evans, an art historian at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, reveals how this narrative of “normalcy” hid in plain sight the reality that Wood was a closeted homosexual. Newspapers and magazines routinely remarked on his apparently permanent bachelorhood. In 1940, some of Wood’s colleagues at the University of Iowa tried to have him fired for, among other transgressions, his alleged homosexual relationship with his secretary, the latest in a series of young male protégés and companions. Faced with constant threats of exposure, he sought protection in his regular-guy persona, to the point of ratifying the virulent homophobia of his friend and fellow Midwestern regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, whose 1937 autobiography he praised for its “healthful commentary” on “the parasites and hangers-on of art . . . with their ivory-tower hysterias and frequent homosexuality.”

Evans gives us a moving and persuasive psychoanalytic study that finds in both the life and the work powerful forces of “desire, memory, and dread.” The artist’s father, who died suddenly when Wood was 10, looms large throughout. Stern and intimidating, Maryville Wood compared Grant unfavorably to his two brothers, disapproved of his unmanly artistic inclinations, and left him with “a sense of shame” about “his artwork and its attendant sense of fantasy.” The doting and adored mother, Hattie, completed “the family romance that would shape so much of Wood’s life and work.” Wood lived for most of his adult life with his mother and his younger sister, Nan — his model for the woman in American Gothic — in a small carriage-house studio in Cedar Rapids. Taking care of Hattie served as his excuse for bachelorhood until the prospect of her death prodded him into a disastrous marriage, in 1935, to an older woman, Sara Sherman Maxon.

Pushing aside the public inspirations for and meanings of Wood’s work that have preoccupied critics since the 1930s, Evans explores “the personal factors that complicate everything we may think we know about his paintings,” including American Gothic, which displays “not the artist’s patriotism” or some conception of the national character “but a fractured return to his own past.” From ostensibly unimportant details — the female figure wears the Persephone brooch Wood gave to Hattie; the male figure wears Maryville Wood’s glasses rather than those of the model (the artist’s dentist) — Evans establishes the presence of the family romance in the painting. We immediately recognize that the woman’s gaze is directed away from us, but on closer examination so is the man’s. “In establishing this peculiar standoff between sitter and viewer,” Evans explains, “Wood deftly illustrates his own feelings of invisibility before his father” — feelings that Wood repeatedly articulated in his unfinished and unpublished autobiography, Return From Bohemia. In American Gothic‘s complex invocation of the Persephone myth, Evans finds an artist who was far from reconciled to this return.

Late in the book, after an equally dazzling reading of Parson Weems’ Fable (1939), Wood’s last major painting before his death in 1942, Evans offers a sweeping defense of his method. Having claimed that the small figures in the background suggest “an incestuous union” between mother and son (to complement the “patricidal hatchet job” in the foreground), he addresses readers who might react with “alarm and disbelief” to this interpretation and those that precede it. Such reactions, Evans argues, would indicate not only a lack of sympathy with his approach but a “conscious resistance to the psyche’s raw and anarchic operations.” By treating any objection that an interpretation “goes too far” as a symptom of resistance, Evans precludes even sympathetic readers from reasonably identifying instances of overreaching. Why not leave potential critics to their opinions rather than preemptively psychoanalyze them?

No doubt there will be readers, whatever their motives, who see Grant Wood: A Life as a slander against the self-described “simple Middle Western farmer-painter” and his wholesome paintings. But Evans has done Wood a great service in saving him and his work from the one-dimensionality to which they have largely been consigned. He has rendered the artist and the art in all their ambivalence, disquiet, mischief, deceptiveness, and anguish. This is a deeply respectful and compassionate biography.

– Steven Biel is executive director of the Humanities Center at Harvard and a senior lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. His most recent book is American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (2005).

Positive feedback is the worst: it quickly spins out of control which pretty much describes the situation we face in the way we’re fighting terrorists. Greenwald:

The U.S. war in (against) Pakistan continues to escalate, as Pakistanis attacked NATO tankers carrying fuel through their country to soldiers in Afghanistan last night, killing three people, an attack that was in retaliation for vastly increased U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan this month, which were ordered in alleged response to reports of increased Terrorist threats aimed at Europe, which, in turn, were in retaliation for the escalating wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as evidenced by the large numbers of individuals of Afghan descent involved in these plots).  Jim White — in a post this morning entitled "Stuck in Feedback Loop: Drone Strikes Provoke Terrorists Who Provoke More Drone Strikes" — documents exactly the process at play here:

The situation in Pakistan appears to have reached a point where a positive feedback loop prompts continued escalation on both sides. The US sees drone attacks as its primary weapon and has stepped up such attacks in the belief that they will create more security for military actions in Afghanistan and disrupt planning of terrorist attacks on the West.  Instead, the attacks appear to enrage the surviving targets, recruit more to their ranks and lead to more attacks.

What a surprise:  bombing Muslims more and more causes more and more Muslims to want to bomb the countries responsible.  That, of course, has long been the perverse "logic" driving the War on Terror.  The very idea that we’re going to reduce Terrorism by more intensively bombing more Muslim countries is one of the most patently absurd, self-contradicting premises that exists.  It’s exactly like announcing that the cure for lung cancer is to quadruple the number of cigarettes one smokes each day.  But that’s been the core premise (at least the stated one) of our foreign policy for the last decade:  we’re going to stop Terrorism by doing more and more of exactly the things that cause it (and see this very good Economist article on the ease with which drones allow a nation’s leaders to pretend to its citizenry that they are not really at war — as we’re doing with Pakistan).

Speaking of counter-productive U.S. actions in Pakistan, this Washington Post article from Friday discusses the possibility that a coup could be engineered in that country to overthrow the current Government and replace it with one that is friendlier to U.S. interests:

U.S. officials pointed to recent signs that Pakistan’s powerful army and opposition parties are positioning themselves to install a new civilian government to replace President Asif Ali Zardari and his prime minister in the coming months. . . . U.S. officials indicated that the administration has begun to contemplate the effects of a change, engineered through Zardari’s resignation as head of his political party, the dissolution of the current coalition government, or a call for new elections under the Pakistani constitution, rather than any overt action by the military. Some suggested that a new, constitutionally-approved government that was more competent and popular, and had strong military backing, might be better positioned to support U.S. policies.

The article does not say that the U.S. is actively involved in those efforts, but it’s very difficult to imagine American military and intelligence officials simply sitting passively by as a coup is underway in a country (like Pakistan) where we are so invested, just keeping their fingers crossed that it results in a new government "better positioned to support U.S. policies."  Whatever else is true, it’s very easy to imagine how such a coup — resulting in a more U.S.-friendly government — will be perceived in that country and around the Muslim world.  That perception is unlikely to help reduce the threat of Terrorism.

For more on the growing U.S. war in (on) Pakistan, watch this quite good Rachel Maddow monologue from Thursday night: . . ,

Continue reading.

I just received my first order from Prairie Creations and so of course want to test all the soaps—but tomorrow I leave at oh-dark-thirty, so this will probably be my last SOTD for a couple of weeks. I decided to try the shave stick, with the idea that if it works, that will be my travel shave soap. And work it did.

I normally use the Rooney Style 2 Finest as my test brush for new soaps and shaving creams: it works extremely well and quite reliably. OTOH, it’s not a brush that many use, so I decided that the Omega 643167 will be my new test brush: it really does work as well, so far as I can tell, and it’s much more affordable.

So, taking the Omega 643167 in hand, I worked up a really fine lather: dense, thick, and ample. The Feather Premium did three flawless passes, and at the end I had enough lather for three more passes. The Barbershop fragrance is very nice.

A splash of Floïd, and I’m into packing.

Read about it here. Napkin advised to catch drool.

I am doing some blogging, but lining up posts to pop up while I’m away in case I get to do no blogging then.

Once government requires the trap doors, criminals will find them—and there goes your bank account, along with your privacy. Bruce Schneier:

On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren’t as easy to monitor as traditional telephones.

The government wants to force companies to redesign their communications systems and information networks to facilitate surveillance, and to provide law enforcement with back doors that enable them to bypass any security measures.

The proposal may seem extreme, but — unfortunately — it’s not unique. Just a few months ago, the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India threatened to ban BlackBerry devices unless the company made eavesdropping easier. China has already built a massive internet surveillance system to better control its citizens.

Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.

Obama isn’t the first U.S. president to seek expanded digital eavesdropping. The 1994 CALEA law required phone companies to build ways to better facilitate FBI eavesdropping into their digital phone switches. Since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems within the United States.

These laws are dangerous, both for citizens of countries like China and citizens of Western democracies. Forcing companies to redesign their communications products and services to facilitate government eavesdropping reduces privacy and liberty; that’s obvious. But the laws also make us less safe. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

Any surveillance system invites both criminal appropriation and government abuse. Function creep is the most obvious abuse: New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of conventional nonterrorist crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses are far more worrisome. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and the people you don’t. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured, and we’re not very good at that. Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement will mine collected internet data or eavesdrop on Skype and IM conversations?

These risks are not theoretical. After 9/11, the National Security Agency built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the United States. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t always match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and famous people like former President Bill Clinton.

The most serious known misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure took place in Greece. Between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government — the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice — and other prominent people. Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, but enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but some still unknown party — a rival political group? organized crime? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

Surveillance infrastructure is easy to export. Once surveillance capabilities are built into Skype or Gmail or your BlackBerry, it’s easy for more totalitarian countries to demand the same access; after all, the technical work has already been done.

Western companies such as Siemens, Nokia and Secure Computing built Iran’s surveillance infrastructure, and U.S. companies like L-1 Identity Solutions helped build China’s electronic police state. The next generation of worldwide citizen control will be paid for by countries like the United States.

We should be embarrassed to export eavesdropping capabilities. Secure, surveillance-free systems protect the lives of people in totalitarian countries around the world. They allow people to exchange ideas even when the government wants to limit free exchange. They power citizen journalism, political movements and social change. For example, Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents — anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

Yes, communications technologies are used by both the good guys and the bad guys. But the good guys far outnumber the bad guys, and it’s far more valuable to make sure they’re secure than it is to cripple them on the off chance it might help catch a bad guy. It’s like the FBI demanding that no automobiles drive above 50 mph, so they can more easily pursue getaway cars. It might or might not work — but, regardless, the cost to society of the resulting slowdown would be enormous.

It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers say, these systems cost too much and put us all at greater risk.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com, and was a rewrite of a 2009 op ed on MPR News Q — which itself was based in part on a 2007 Washington Post op ed by Susan Landau.

Three more articles.

Today I decided to take a break from the Frank brush after reading this post on horsehair shaving brushes. I got a very good lather, ample for 3 passes and even for 4 or more. It’s a very nice brush, and of course Creed’s Green Irish Tweed is a very nice soap. Three passes of the Gillette English Aristocrat with a still-sharp Swedish Gillette blade, and my face is flawlessly smooth. A splash of Floïd and I’m ready for the day.