As the collective methological knoweldge of the Open Source movement begins to permeate those who understand government and politics and things of that nature, I suspect we'll begin to see more and more stuff like this:

The real damage to our national security isn't in the too much disclosure of information. Al Qaeda doesn't have bureaucracies of analysts and spies probing for weaknesses in the American security system. The worst thing that could potentially happen is that the name of a captured jihadi is prematurely leaked before useful intelligence can be gained. Does anyone truly think that al Qaeda actually believed that e-mails and phone calls to the US weren't being monitored?

No, the HUGE problem, the elephant in the room, isn't leaks. Rather, it is in a complete lack of transparency. As we have seen again and again, secrecy prevents the full analysis of alternatives. It shuts down debate and prevents the qualification of sources. It is also the crutch of bad and/or nefarious management.

This is why Microsoft's products are routinely exploited by malicious software (viruses, spyware, etc) and high-quality open source products are not. Market-share is a factor, but the reality is there are simply way more holes in Windows than in Linux (or BSD, the open source core of MacOS X). There is no way for you to vet the Windows code, whereas every proposed patch and development to any active open source project will be reviewed and debated -- in public, I might add -- by experts in the field, with the opportunity for anyone at any time to suggest an improvement or fix.

The application of this simple revelation to Government is a little tricky, but the overrarching lesson is that Security Through Obscurity Is Not Dependable, and may in fact create vulnerability, not to mention being latently undemocratic.

The simple reality is that in the 21st-Century, Governments must go on-line in a real way which empoweres citizens to learn about, watchdog and interact with public servants and services. This will inevitably provide better governance, which is what citizens deserve and desire. The first political party to explain (perhaps demonstrate) and "own" this sort of initiative will make political hay.

Why do local credit unions routinely have better web services than the Social Security Administration?

Why isn't the Government providing secure, trusted, unified identity services?

Why isn't a unified federal budget available online with the ability to drill down from departmental appropriations to specific expendatures?

The truth is that people respond to real information as well as to propaganda and fearmongering. In the long run, one form of building political capital creates a strong civil society which can make collective desisions and support itself, and the other creates a latently facist Daddy State in which citizens are disempowered, afraid, and seek protection and patronage from their superiors in the statehouse.

Pick one.

I've been enjoying very much the blogging of Glenn Greenwald, who's got a very well-done post up looking at what's going on with the contemporary "Conservative" heads:

[P]eople like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

They love them that Daddy State, yes they do. The post is around 2800 words, and they're good ones.

Update: Greenwalkd responds to some responses. One of the most interesting bits is the quote he found from Bill Kristol (who's sort of the consiglere of neoconservatism) saying that "Bush was the movement and the cause."

Time Warner finally came through!

Expect more out of me.

A bit of a ramble about politics and a little drupalcon... Really just thinking out loud.

Are you in it for the country? I'm kind of wrestling with that right now. You see, I have a pretty solid sense that I'll be allright no matter what happens. I'm not really afraid for my life, and only moderately for my life chances. I'll be fine. Maybe dissapointed, but basically fine.

So that begs the question of why bother, why get into it? Why really give a shit about politics if you know your own life will be ok. The Ameican Dream is a pursuit best undertook in the private sector, son. Pollitics is just bullshit anyway, right?

Well, in a word, no. Because community is life, and community means organizing, and in a networked world organization means scaling and scaling means politics. I mean, the CEO track is similar, just takes seed money.

But are you in it for the country? Really? Do you have a vision for how it might all work? I sort of do, but I don't know how realistic it really is. It's a long game, you know? There was a time, right around the run-up to the Invasion of Iraq, and maybe through the election (or at least democratic primary), where things were really moving fast. The pace will pick up with politics again, but in real terms we're going to be dealing with these problems for a long time thanks to the fact that our country was lead through a terrible crisis by an incompatent bunch of shitheel Republican hacks.

That's something I'm unhappy about, because it could have been really different. They still could be.

I think it's interesting that Al Gore is positioning himself to capture that groundswell of internet support... starting a big media website, making those speeches, privately confessing that he'd only do it if he were drafted. He's setting up dominos, folks. I think that could be interesting to watch.

Draft Movements are a really under-explored tactic. You'd think someone would have realized that fundraising potential alone warrants further exploration. But they're also tricky things. If it's really a Draft, what if the Candidate turns out to be incompatible with the Draft Organization? The big one (Clark) didn't really work because the roots and the pros didn't really connect, and the campaign didn't really hit its stride.

It might work on a more local level, though. Could be a tactic for recruitment: local communities "drafting" their own members into service.

Oooh... what if you had a site which was Digg-like in that it allowed the community moderation system to rate itself up to the top, but rather than Tech News, it would be Political Debate. In order to vote you have to be logged in, and are yourself a potential candidate. You'd organize a good system for new content discovery, make a lot of use out of trackbacks, groups and ratings.

Sites like this are coming, but you have to be careful not to try and build the whole Semantic Web on your domain. Still, I find this idea kind of alluring. Might try it myself. You could use it to raise money for a PAC. Open Souce politics, baby. It's the only way to go.

Drupal is just starting to get organized, and it's pretty cool. It's funny, because we were in there in a session Zack had called for, named "How to make money and help Drupal at the same time," and we're all talking about how the emerging market is looking. Because we're all so politically minded we immediately start thinking about structuring it. Eric Gunderson, from Development Seed, a renegade international economist, sort of pulled us back in to reality: what we need is something simple and open, just a nice little phone book.

But we were all set to start premateurely regulating the market. It happened earlier too, in Greg Heller's talk about how drupal professionals should organize. At one point we got off on a tangent about whether to seek labor union affiliation. Even the person who brought it up originally made the note that it was quite premature, and that she simply recommended taking out the word "Guild" (which has a special meaning in labor lingo) and references to a "Bug" to distinguish Guild-Built websites.

Now, I admit that it's a pretty keen use of the drupal Droop, but I don't think Drupal Guild is quite the banner to push forward under. I don't have any alternate suggestiosn going forward, but I plan to write some stuff down soon and get the conversation going on the blogs.

Actually, that's a good tactic going forward in both cases, start getting some of the mailing list discussion public, draw some pictures.

So we're formin' a club, and lettin' everyone in, and we aint gonna cry no more.