Paul Haahr’s Blog

Spencer Ackerman argues that attempted suicide bombing of Flight 253 on Christmas Day didn’t necessarily represent an intelligence failure. I think the key part of his post is:

The intelligence community is drinking from a fire hose of data, a lot of it much more specific than what was acquired on Abdulmutallab. If policymakers decide that these thin reeds will be the standard for stopping someone from entering the United States, then they need to change the process to enshrine that in the no-fly system. But it will make it much harder for people who aren’t threatening to enter, a move that will ripple out to effect diplomacy, security relationships (good luck entering the U.S. for a military-to-military contact program if, say, you’re a member of the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, since you had contacts with known extremists), international business and trade, and so on.

As someone whose day job involves analyzing lots of data, I think I agree with most of this. Synthesizing all the related pieces of information – a warning from his father that Abdulmutallab might be dangerous and in Yemen, rumors that a Nigerian might be part of an Al Quaeda plan, generalized threats from Yemen – seems quite hard. If heading off terror attacks requires drawing the conclusion that a specific individual is likely to attempt an attack out of hundreds of thousands (or millions?) pieces of small information like that, it’s probably hopeless; what you’ll get is a lot of noise and very little signal. The complexity involved seems huge and predictive ability seems low.

On the other hand, I believe simple things can work. In the case of Abdulmutallab, a simple thing would have been to take action based on the warning from his father, ignoring all the other factors. And the action that was apparently taken was to put his name in a list of half a million people, but that wasn’t the smaller no-fly list (~4K people) nor the “selectee” list (~14K people).

Matt Yglesias writes that, because actual terrorists and terrorist incidents are so rare, there will be lots of false positives for any methods for identifying potential terrorists. That seems right. That the level of evidence against Abdulmutallab put him in the top half million of suspected terrorists, but not the top eighteen thousand, confirms for me both that the false positive rate is very high (it’s unlikely that there are half a million active terrorists our there) and that we can’t predict very well (Abdulmutallab clearly should have been in a higher scrutiny category).

One particularly worrisome class of false positive is, of course, false reporting. I’m sure for every legitimate case of a warning that so-and-so is a terrorist, there are hundreds or thousands of cases of self-interested accusations. (False reporting could be considered the spam problem in intelligence.)

Rather than inherently ruling out doing anything, though, I think that the large false positive rate means that the consequences of a false positive should be fairly minimal – an interrogation, a more intensive physical search, perhaps an investigator making a phone call or two to understand the reason for travel – instead of denying boarding or shipping a suspect off to Bagram. No question that extra screening at the airport would be inconvenient, unpleasant, and intimidating. And no question that it could be expensive to implement more screening.

I think the relevant policy question is “for our false positive rate, what is the appropriate action to take?” Right now, it appears that there’s very little middle ground between no-fly and “just another passenger,” which appears to keep the no-fly list small. (Yet, it’s famous for having lots of false positives.) Given poor predictive ability of any of these lists, I don’t think that makes sense. Instead, a much more widespread system of heightened scrutiny would seem more likely to prevent terrorist attacks, but still not affect more than a small fraction of travelers.

I just participated in a phone poll from some outfit (Western Wats) calling with caller ID saying 801-823-2023. Occasionally, I’ll do these things out of curiosity about what they’re asking, but this one really offended me by how blatantly the questions were directed to a particular result (and how clumsily done that was).

The “poll” was clearly commissioned by carriers opposed to net neutrality. It started with a set of questions to gauge how engaged I was in politics and technology: Do I read news sites online? Do I post comments on blogs? It then moved on to questions about broadband internet policy: Should the government “regulate the internet”? Does Congress have more important things to do than regulate the internet? Should internet service providers ensure “routine internet usage” isn’t disrupted by “large file transfers”? (Is YouTube routine? How about Netflix-via-TiVo? Amazon’s MP3 downloads? Just to name three routine things I’ve done in the past 24 hours…) The last set of questions were looking for agreement with fairly confusing premises, all of which were along the lines that net neutrality would undermine all these good things the internet can do. For example, do I agree that we shouldn’t regulate the internet if/because doing so would prevent empowering the poor to use the internet? (No, I don’t agree.) At the end, parsing the questions, I felt as if I was continually being asked “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

I have no problem with carriers opposed to net neutrality polling to figure out where their message resonates. But this “poll” crossed an ethical line, giving questions with no good answer for people who disagree with their point of view. Perhaps most polling is of this stripe, but I’ve responded to a fair number of phone polls and none of the previous ones was this crass in driving towards a specific result.

Ezra Klein has a good post up today on the problems of giving employers, but not individuals, a tax exemption on health insurance. This is clearly central to the problems of healthcare financing in the US, but, given how things are, it’s not the sort of policy that can be changed by itself – doing so without another mechanism to pay for insurance would end up making many more people uninsured.

What has always seemed to me to be bad policy, but not so intimately tied to the rest of our economy, is the existence of Flexible Spending Accounts. The gist of an FSA is that an employee of a firm which offers such a plan can set aside a fixed amount of their salary to pay for health care or dependent care; that portion of their salary is tax exempt, but must be used in the space of a little bit more than a year or it is forfeited.

I can’t see any public policy purpose here. Why is the tax exempt status of my medical or child care spending dependent on my employer offering such a plan? Why do I need to play “Let’s Make a Deal” to guess the closest dollar amount without going under to the amount I will spend on health or child care in order to exempt it from taxes? How does setting aside “use it or lose it” money help in any way to reign in health care costs?

I do participate in these plans. For child care, it’s easy to figure out in advance how much we’ll spend in a year on preschool. For health care, we overestimate how much we’ll spend and, towards the end of the year, use the leftover money to pick up a few pairs of glasses, since optometry is covered as medical. (Call me cynical; I’ll take advantage of a tax break even if I think it’s bad policy.)

But who benefits from FSAs versus a policy which says “The first N dollars of health or child care spending per year is tax exempt”? I can see how the companies which offer these plans to employers benefit. I can see how such things benefit optometrists or other providers where people can spend their money before losing it. I can even see how employers benefit, since they receive the money their employees forfeit due to the “use it or lose it” issue, though I don’t think many employers are actively seeking that revenue.

But the benefit to the public? To individual employees of companies offering the plans? To people who don’t have access to such plans? There are much more straightforward, efficient, and fair ways to provide a tax exemption for medical expenses.

Lawrence Lessig spoke at Google this week on his and Joe Trippi’s Change Congress organization. In particular, he made a convincing pitch for the Strike 4 Change initiative, which asks people to make a pledge:

“I’m pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.”

Many of my politically smartest friends believe that campaign finance changes are essential to making government work. I’ve never been in that camp – I’m very skeptical that anything can remove the influence of money on government, at any level – but I’m coming around to the belief that we need to try to plug holes in the system and hope to make progress while the “moneyed interests” are figuring out how to route around the new rules. A few observations seem to have tipped the scales for me:

• Regulatory and legislative capture by established, often declining, industries appear to me to often be the biggest roadblocks to progress, even within those industries. (Think: cars, music, finance, or health care for starters.)
• The common and brazen movement between government officials and lobbying firms is a form of institutionalized corruption.
• The amount of time elected officials need to spend raising money for their next races is shocking and necessarily distorts everything else they do.

Lessig makes these points, and more, very effectively.

For the last several years, I’ve been giving money to a lot of campaigns, almost always Democrats challenging Republicans or contesting open seats. I feel good about this (even though an economist would probably find the utility of these contributions as low as the utility of voting). At first I was negative on the idea of the donor strike, because I feel it’s one side giving up a possible powerful edge unilaterally. What I came to realize, while listening to Lessig, is that this acts as a useful filter – I don’t want to give money to someone who’s wants the status quo in politics to continue; there are certainly plenty of possible candidates to give money to and this gives me a way to nudge on this important issue.

Let’s hope Lessig’s optimism about being able to pass the Durbin-Specter bill is justified; my cynical fear is a filibuster that “supporters” of the bill don’t try too hard to override.

I suspect the Google talk will be available online soon, but it doesn’t appear to be yet. This talk appears to be similar:

We attended a Barack Obama fundraiser in San Francisco this evening. It was my first time at a full-on, campaign-run political fundraiser. I can’t say I like the overall experience; my preference is usually to just give money quietly online. But I thought that hearing Obama live would be worth it and it was.

Obama is a great speaker and not just in comparison to Nancy Pelosi, Steve Westley, and John Roos who preceded him tonight. And not just in comparison to John McCain or George Bush. What’s appealing to me is how much intelligence he was able to convey. Tonight, he spoke without any obvious notes or teleprompter and appeared to be speaking off the cuff. He would pause at times, even stop in the middle of sentences, listen for audience reactions, and think about where to go next. He clearly had a bunch of packaged riffs that, once he decided what topic he wanted to talk about, he could rely on for phrasing — he does those set pieces extremely well. But the interludes, the improvisation, the weaving it all together was at least as compelling.

The emphasis of the speech will, I suspect, show up in his convention speech: if people believe that he will make what he promises happen, people will vote for him. A strong message about creating confidence in a government that can execute competently and effectively. Clear and measurable platform-style positions for health care (insure all children, cost effectiveness) and education (college in exchange for national service). Less on foreign policy than I had expected, but forthright statements about a war that shouldn’t have been fought and restoring alliances. The biggest applause line may have been about shutting down Guantanamo and restoring Habeus Corpus; perhaps that’s a function of the audience, but it’s a significant sign of how disappointed everyone is with what the Bush presidency has done.

This was not a big speech for Obama. He was speaking to a very friendly audience, whose main goal, I think, was looking for reassurance that this election was not going to be 2004 (or 1988) all over again; I came in cautiously optimistic and left the same way. But I also left feeling that he’d be someone you could have an intelligent conversation with on almost any topic. And, more importantly, someone I can trust to lead this country thoughtfully and with the right goals in mind.

There’s been some fascinating coverage of the Obama campaign’s strategy for winning the Democratic nomination, including Justin Sizemore’s accounting of how the race played out in delegates and, earlier, Ben Smith and Avi Zenilman’s profile of Jeffrey Berman, Obama’s delegate counter. Reading these pieces together, I’m struck by the resemblance to Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

It seems obvious in retrospect, but by focusing on delegates and the places where the largest marginal amount of delegates could be picked up — caucus states, congressional districts with odd numbers of delegates — the Obama campaign was paying attention to the right statistics. By contrast, thinking about about states won and lost or even the popular vote could be considered a distraction; it appears, from this distance, that that was what Clinton’s campaign was doing — early in the race, they focused on states won and, later, perhaps in a too self-serving way, on the popular vote.

Hendrick Hertzberg makes the good point that “the popular vote is a relevant moral category” even though it is a “juridical irrelevancy” for both the nominating process and the general election. This is clearly a place where American politics feel broken and out of step with modern-day democratic beliefs. However, in the real world, the metric on which a race is decided — delegate count or electoral college vote — is clearly the right one to focus on. At the end of the day, the Obama campaign, as winners generally do, looks very smart.

During my commute yesterday, I listened to Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia on race and religion. It was amazing and inspiring, but not in the usual way one expects to use the words. The oratory was rarely soaring and it didn’t build to huge crescendos.

Instead, what made the speech so good was the combination of Obama’s honesty and the sense he was not talking down to his audience. I heard a smart, black constitutional lawyer speaking about American history, politics, race, religion, and his personal story in simple, straightforward language. This shouldn’t be shocking, but it is. There was no political correctness, no “red meat” for the diehards, no sound-bite pablum, and no simple answers. I felt like I was being treated as a thinking adult, not a demographic, not just a vote up for grabs.

If you’ve only seen or read clips of the speech, I recommend reading or listening to the whole thing. It’s one of those moments we should aspire to.

(Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.)

“Tell me what you know, then tell me what you don’t know, and only then can you tell me what you think. Always keep those three separated.”

– Colin Powell to Mike McConnell, summer 1990, as reported in Lawrence Wright, A Reporter at Large: The Spymaster, The New Yorker, January 21, 2008

The article’s well worth reading and quite scary, I thought, both for the incompetence of the “intelligence community” and the frightening steps McConnell wants to take to make it effective, but I loved directness and efficiency of Powell’s advice.

I am an independent and looking for a president with integrity. Should I vote for John McCain or Barack Obama?

Didn’t we all swear to stop picking the candidate who would be most fun to go on a picnic with? You’re torn between the guy who’s been against the war from the beginning and the guy who’s willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years? Between the guy who wants to pay for a $50 billion-a-year health care program by eliminating tax cuts for the wealthy, and the guy who wants to keep the tax cuts and pay for them by cutting the budget? Get a grip.

– Gail Collins, A Voter’s Guide, The New York Times, February 2, 2007

Collins’s comment is absolutely true: on almost all policy issues where there is a difference between candidates, Obama and McCain disagree. So there should be no difficulty for anyone with political opinions in picking between them. But, a campaign between them would, like any other presidential contest, largely be decided by who attracts the most “independent” voters. I guess I just don’t understand voters without a strong bias towards one or the other party.

And yet, even though I consider Collins’s hypothetical question silly, I’m a lifelong Democrat and liberal who finds McCain appealing. (I even cast the sole vote in my life for a Republican for him. It was in the California primary in 2000, when Gore had sewn up the Democratic nomination and I was hoping against hope that Bush, who, it was clear would make a terrible President, would not get the Republican nomination. Even though McCain, with his independent appeal, was clearly more electable.) I won’t vote for McCain in the general election and am ecstatic to be voting for Obama, especially in a primary where my vote actually matters. But I also can relate to the politics of personality, where both candidates, based on their integrity and clarity of vision, pull the attention of voters from across the spectrum.

Barack Obama appears to be a once in a generation candidate: he’s smart, he’s appealing, he speaks well, and he seems to be viewed more positively across the political spectrum than negatively. In addition, his policy positions are closer to mine than I could reasonably hope from a leading candidate. I’ve been supporting his campaign for a while, but haven’t been too vocal about it until now.

I should start off by saying that I think it’s clear that any of the leading Democratic contenders would do a much better job as President than any of the Republicans. In policy, in temperament, in intelligence, all three of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Obama all have the makings of a very good President.

If Hillary Clinton weren’t the former first lady (can we lose that title?), she’d be easier to support; but after a sequence of Bush/Clinton/Bush, the last thing I think this country could use is another Clinton — handing power between two dynasties feels distinctly unamerican. Her early vote for the Iraq war was either too naive, too hawkish, or too cynically political; in any case, she was wrong and it reflects bad judgment. The 1994 health care plan showed her doing a bad job on policy and politics at the same time as holding Cheneyesque views on secrecy. And I think the intense dislike that much of the country feels for her is a problem, both in a general election and, assuming she’s elected, in governing; it could just be too easy for Republican legislators to demonize her and obstruct any of her proposals, with no political consequences.

I keep wanting to like John Edwards, but I find it hard not to fault him in part for the incompetence of the 2004 campaign. As a pro-business liberal, I think his policies on trade and globalization are wrong-headed and short-sighted. And, Edwards, too, has an Iraq war vote that shows poor judgment, even if he’s now willing to call it a “mistake.”

Obama, first and foremost, was right on the Iraq war in his pre-Senate days. At the same time, he isn’t isolationist or always opposed to intervention, as his statements about Pakistan made clear. I find his ability to make his policy a function of the facts appealing. As to details of his policy proposals, I prefer some to those of his opponents, some of his opponents’ to his (Edwards on health care, almost anyone else on ethanol), but, overall, there is not much difference among the Democratic candidates and a lot of difference between the two parties.

What also seems different about Obama, though, is his appeal and lack of negatives across the political spectrum, which makes him feel more like a Kennedy or Reagan than any other active politician. (That sense of Kennedy may only be true in hindsight and not reflect any actual mandate while he was alive; I was born three years after his assassination and have no memories of the time.) Obama’s success in his state senate career in uniting people behind progressive measures is impressive; getting things done counts.

Currently, it looks as though it’s Clinton’s race to lose. It would be a shame if she walks to the nomination without competition — it’s still early (even with this year’s ludicrously accelerated campaign schedule) and it doesn’t seem like much of the country is paying attention yet. Still, the good news is, any one of these three (or several of their competitors) would be as good a President as we’ve had in a long time.