Dana Blankenhorn

Martin Hellman Has Concerns

What do you do if you win one of the big prizes in math or computing and are invited to become a Heidelberg Laureate? 

Some go back to their work, like Yoshua Bengio and mentor the next generation. Others become great men who wear their celebrity like a warm coat, like Vint Cerf, who is also in Heidelberg this week.

Then there is Martin Hellman. He won the Turing Award in 2015, along with Whitfield Diffie (who is also in Heidelberg), for public key cryptography, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. 

Public key cryptography became controversial as soon as it  s was announced. The National Security Agency tried to suppress the technology under Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who later saw the problem with weak solutions, said Hellman. Another cryptography war erupted in the 1990s with the “Clipper Chip,” an attempt to give crypto a “backdoor” for cops. Hellman called it  a front door. 

The third cryptography war began only recently, with the FBI putting pressure on Apple and others to get “exceptional access”  to iPhones, and the Trump Administration now trying to ban strong encryption. “It’s in a lull,” Hellman said of the current conflict. “Hopefully it dies.” But attacks are global, with even Australia trying to limit it. “They want to defy gravity to put things in space more cheaply,” he said. Hellman has been arguing this case for decades. 

In the process Hellman has created a second life, as an activist.

Martin Hellman has concerns. He likes freedom, and hates war. He rejects attempts to ban encryption because cops already have plenty of  information on us, like security cameras and license plates that can be automatically read as you drive. “I recognize there are trade offs. The FBI is trying to protect safety. We just  have to point out when they’re wrong.”

The Fight in My Front Yard

I’m leaving next week for Europe.

Perhaps the most important day on my trip will be September 28, when I’m due to see my daughter in Vienna.

It’s not just important because I love her. It’s important that I check in with her regarding the most important issue facing mankind, climate change.

My daughter has been studying most of her life to be on the front lines of the battle. But what I’m finding is that the key to this battle may be right back here, in what was her front yard. If you want to know whether the climate crisis can be overcome or not, that’s where to start.

My daughter’s focus has been on urban animal policy. It sounds arcane, but it’s not. Whether or not we admit it, our cities and suburbs are part of nature, just as our forests and beaches are. They are ecosystems, where plants and animals live or die depending on our actions.

In Atlanta, that battle is being lost.

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

Loneliness

“They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness. But it’s better than drinking alone.”

-- Billy Joel, Piano Man

My late father-in-law lived long enough, and wound up prosperous enough, to write and publish his own autobiography. He asked me to ghostwrite it. I said he’d do a much better job.

He did.

He called it Never Alone.

My father in law felt blessed to have grown up in a large family, finding a great wife soon after leaving home, to spend a working life in service to the public, then aging gently amidst grown children, grandchildren, and even some great-grands. He was a member in good standing of the “Greatest Generation.”

While that generation’s reticence in talking about themselves, and their trust in governments that didn’t deserve trust (as in Vietnam), caused a rift between their generation and mine, our own values of independence and individuality haven’t worked out as well for us, and our children, as theirs did for them.

The Demand of 2020: Law and Order

Regulations are the guardrails of corporate law.

They kick in before people are hurt. They’re usually aimed at corporations, not individuals. Everyone is punished by the paperwork. The penalties come in the form of fines.

Regulation is the best protection business can have.

When regulation isn’t imposed by government, it comes in other forms. It comes in insurance requirements. It comes from the plaintiff’s bar. Fines come in the form of differing rates to protect truck fleets, different prices for handling transactions, and in jury awards.

Common Carriers

A key to understanding 2019 will be the issue of common carriers.

In just one decade the “Cloud Czars” – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook – have replaced the telecommunications and broadcast industries with a new system, using their infrastructure.

We don’t make overseas calls anymore. We Skype. We don’t watch TV. We stream.

The cloud was built without government subsidy or interference, in a competitive free for all in which the winners invested while the losers did not. The industries replaced by this infrastructure were built as monopolies, under systems of regulation controlled by the Federal Communications Commission and, when necessary, courts.

This made sense, in terms of both capital preservation and technology, at the time.

2019: Crime in the Suites

My adult millennial children are both conservative, but in the nicest possible way.

They have ethics. They expect correct behavior from authority. When they don’t see it, they want it punished, not with a wrist slap, but with jail time.

I agree, and 2019 will mark the start of a process toward getting it. Justice is slow, but it is certain.

If 2018 was the year when crime was stripped naked, with the MeToo movement, the Trump treason, and corporate theft, 2019 will be the first year of retribution.

This becomes certain when you look at the economy. The next year may be the most readily predicted, indeed eagerly anticipated, recession of my lifetime.

A Santa Story

Recently I woke from troubled dreams to find myself with white hair, a long beard, and a troubling impact on small children.

Little kids would look up at me, wide-eyed.

Their faces held a mixture of awe and fear.

I knew what they were thinking.

I gathered some of them together and told them a story.

Monument to the Present

The media calls it the Lynching Memorial.

Its proper name is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  The Equal Justice Initiative built it, and an accompanying museum, on a six acre site at Centennial Hill in Montgomery, Alabama , near where I-85 meets I-65. It is just a few blocks from the first White House of the Confederacy, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Hank Williams museum.

Call it the duality of the southern thing.

There are 313 names inscribed there, on tombstones that also bear the names of counties across the South where men were murdered during the days of Jim Crow. There are two sets of tombstones, and the museum hopes this second set will eventually be picked up by those counties, creating memorials to the dead there.

It is, without question, the most moving monument built in America since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened in 1982.

Trump, Too, Shall Pass

Recently my dear heart dragged me to a wedding.

It was for the son of one of her co-workers. The groom was born here, the parents arriving from India a few years before his birth. The bride was born in China but moved here as a toddler and is a U.S. citizen.

The bride and groom grew up together. They met in high school about 15 years ago. They moved among their guests with the grace and comfort of a long-married couple, secure in themselves. Their relationship may have once been controversial, but their joy in each other buried that long-ago. They live in Boston. He is a doctor. She’s a business consultant. They came down to be with his family. Some of her relatives traveled from China to Georgia to be at the celebration, in the shadow of Stone Mountain’s Confederate carving. Some of his traveled all the way from India.