When Google+ launched, I tried to keep this blog going and link to posts here from G+. But I’ve found over the months that it’s just easier to write a full post there, and I get a much bigger discussion. So a question: is there anybody who follows this blog that does not also regularly see my Google+ stream?

If not, I might phase out cross-posting here.

It’s easy and common for people to say “corporate lobbyists write the legislation and control the government,” but in a recent argument, I found it much harder to actually back that up. Do companies just throw money at the government and legislators? Do companies influence the lawmaking process, or just political parties? Do companies actually write the wording in the law, or just influence issues? So I did a bit of research. I want to focus on the U.S. since they have a lot of influence on the rest of the world (particularly in my area of interest, IP law). Here is a good starter article.

There is lots of other stuff that goes on, such as campaign donations and so on, but this gives a pretty good summary of how a large company might get laws written. It suggests that it isn’t anywhere near as “obvious” as throwing money at Congress and telling them to write laws. Lobbyists are essentially full-time assistants to lawmakers, on the payroll of corporate interests. Basically, Congress staff have access to a wealth of assistants who have much more in-depth knowledge of the specific domain they are working in. Need to write a law about copyright enforcement? Don’t know the details? No worries: A friendly man from the MPAA knows a lot about copyright law, and he’s here to help.

The point of the article is that the lawmakers aren’t motivated by greed (“if I write this law, they will give me moneys”). They are motivated by laziness (“if I let them research and write this law, I won’t have to”).

But it doesn’t seem so bad to have people merely helping shape the laws. Why should we be worried if the MPAA sends a few guys to offer helpful suggestions to congress? Well a handy site, the OpenSecrets Lobbying Spending Database shows us the true magnitude of the problem, within the United States. In 2010, a total of $3.51 billion was spent on lobbying Congress and federal agencies (note that this does not include campaign contributions). That paid for 12,951 lobbyists that year. Imagine a country where nearly 13 thousand of the people whose sole job is to help write laws are on the payroll of non-government corporations! You begin to see what people mean when they say “corporations run the United States”.

The biggest spending comes from pharmaceutical companies. In technology, the two biggest spenders in 2010 were Microsoft ($6.9 million) and HP ($6.8 million), followed by Google. In 2011 so far, Google are the biggest tech lobbyist! Interestingly, we hear a lot about the lobbying by the RIAA and MPAA but they only spent $5.5 million and $1.6 million, respectively, in 2010. They must be getting a lot of value for their lobbying dollar!

I just re-found a humorous anecdote by John McCarthy on an early LISP demonstration, before anybody knew what a garbage collector was:

The first on-line demonstration of LISP was also the first of a precursor of time-sharing that we called “time-stealing”. The audience comprised the participants of one of M.I.T.’s Industrial Liaison Symposia on whom it was important to make a good impression. A Flexowriter had been connected to the IBM 704 and the operating system modified so that it collected characters from the Flexowriter in a buffer when their presence was signalled by an interrupt. Whenever a carriage return occurred, the line was given to LISP for processing. The demonstration depended on the fact that the memory of the computer had just been increased from 8192 words to 32768 words so that batches could be collected that presumed only a small memory.

The demonstration was also one of the first to use closed circuit TV in order to spare the spectators the museum feet consequent on crowding around a terminal waiting for something to happen. Thus they were on the fourth floor, and I was on the first floor computer room exercising LISP and speaking into a microphone. The problem chosen was to determine whether a first order differential equation of the form M dx + N dy was exact by testing whether δM/overδy = δM/overδy, which also involved some primitive algebraic simplification.

Everything was going well, if slowly, when suddenly the Flexowriter began to type (at ten characters per second)

“THE GARBAGE COLLECTOR HAS BEEN CALLED. SOME INTERESTING STATISTICS ARE AS FOLLOWS:”

and on and on and on. The garbage collector was quite new at the time, we were rather proud of it and curious about it, and our normal output was on a line printer, so it printed a full page every time it was called giving how many words were marked and how many were collected and the size of list space, etc. During a previous rehearsal, the garbage collector hadn’t been called, but we had not refreshed the LISP core image, so we ran out of free storage during the demonstration.

Nothing had ever been said about the garbage collector, and I could only imagine the reaction of the audience. We were already behind time on a tight schedule, it was clear that typing out the garbage collector message would take all the remaining time allocated to the demonstration, and both the lecturer and the audience were incapacitated with laughter. I think some of them thought we were victims of a practical joker.

Today, WikiLeaks has issued a statement accusing the Guardian, a UK newspaper, of publishing a book that negligently divulged the password to an encrypted file circulating the torrents which contains the full unredacted text of all 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. While WikiLeaks ruminates on whether to publicly release the cables, it doesn’t really matter — the full cables are now public for all intents and purposes, and nothing can stop that. There’s a lot of blame going around, so I’d like to comment on the cryptographic facts in a way that should be possible for a non-technical person to understand.

The Guardian has released a statement which fires back:

[The book] contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours.

Essentially, the Guardian is saying that they felt it was unnecessary to keep the password secret, since it was no longer of any use. I’m willing to accept ignorance here on behalf of the Guardian, but let’s be clear on the facts: there is no such thing as a temporary password on an encrypted file.

There are basically two things that a password can unlock: a login password unlocks a service; a decryption password unlocks data. For example, your Google password is a login password. If you change the password on your Google account, then you can safely tell the world what your old password was, and nobody will be able to get into your Gmail — Google won’t let you in without the new password. Now for another example, Microsoft Word has a setting that lets you put a password on a Word document. If you put a decryption password on a Word document, you can safely put it online and everybody will be able to download it, but nobody will be able to read it. Once you have given out the file, you cannot change the password, and it cannot expire. Now, you can give the password to a friend, and they will be able to read the document. But if your friend stupidly gives out the password, there is nothing you can do. You could delete the Word document off your computer, but it is likely that dozens of people have a separate copy of the document, which you cannot change or delete. They will all be able to read it using the now-public password, and if the story is juicy enough, it will certainly spread on the Internet.

So: Maybe Julian Assange shouldn’t have trusted David Leigh. Maybe he should have used a different password when he gave out other copies of the same file (just in case Leigh screwed up). But the fact remains that Leigh should never, ever, have disclosed that password, as it was a decryption password, not a login password. I am certain that Assange would never have promised that it was a temporary password, because that is a technical impossibility.