Yesterday while browsing Crooks and Liars I read about a recent Al Qaeda video encouraging their followers to go down to the nearest gun show and buy an assault rifle since you’ll be confronted most likely “without a background check and most likely without having to show an identification card.” Since we’ve had several lively gun discussions here in the past I figured this would be a good opportunity to resume the conversation.

This video will likely bee seen as rather inflammatory as some, but it does pose an interesting question. Why, when the patriot act was designed, was access restrictions or waiting periods for assault weapons left out? I’m guessing the answer to that would be the NRA lobby (if only the ACLU had so strong a lobby…) but it does seem like a gaping hole. Is it more important for the government to know who just bought a large amount of ammo and assault weapons or to know who took out the communist manifesto at the local library?

Redistricting. By now, if you’ve seen a news paper or listened to VPR, you’ve heard that it’s that time of the century again when we reconsider our legislative boundaries. In the not too distant past, this sort of thing was prone to gerrymandering and other tricks done in smoke filled back rooms. One of the glorious things about the computer revolution is that increasingly the process is being brought to a more mathematical plane where redistricting decisions are made through the use of software tools to optimize legislative boundaries and ensure the creed of one person one vote. The more balanced we can make our congressional representative’s districts, the easier it is for us all to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard on an equal level.

In Vermont, we’ll begin hearing more about redistricting as the July deadline for new state senate districts draws near, but in the mean time, lets discuss the tools and methods our redistricting panel will be utilizing.

Vermont, like an increasingly large number of states, has opted to utilize a GIS solution for its redistricting process. GIS (Geographic Information System) is an umbrella term used to define any electronic system that can display geographic data. At its simplest, it’s a way of producing maps. In the hands of analysts, it’s a wonderful tool used to add context to numbers. It is one thing to present a spreadsheet of data indicating where the poorest Vermonters live and quite another to be able to analyze their distribution and see if the poor are clustered in certain areas, if those areas have adequate access to food banks and other services, and help to determine the best ways to focus future assistance.

In terms of redistricting, you can pull in all the data that is important to such decisions (roads, county and town boundaries, census population data, etc) and use that to determine what district boundaries should be. The software that Vermont appears to be using from the meeting minutes of the apportionment board is a product called Mapitude.

Mapitude is capable of working straight from the data provided by the US Census (via the Census TIGER spatial releases) and supports exporting the finished product to a google maps compatible format. All this means that if our state government chooses to do so, they can share the end result of the redistricting with us all so we can all inspect their choices. I have not yet seen any indication of what information will be shared when the final redistricting happens, but I sincerely hope they will share the mapitude plan files and other spatial data with us all, perhaps through VCGI. I’m hoping in the coming weeks to adequately annoy my representatives and senators with questions about the redistricting data. Hopefully you will as well.

Further Reading

Mapitude Sales Brochure

Virginia Districts – A sample of an online district viewing application from 2007

Use of GIS to Demonstrate Public Redistricting – A Cleveland State University study on the possibility of using GIS solutions to allow increased public participation in redistricting.

What is Autobound – An interesting slideshow presentation made by Oregon’s Redistricting Coordinator to Oregon’s State Senate Rules Committee on how a similar product, Autobound, is used in Oregon for redistricting.

2010 TIGER Data – The US Census TIGER gis datasets.

VCGI – Vermont Center for Geographic Information is our state’s clearinghouse for Vermont specific spatial data.

( – promoted by odum)

Preface: This is my first diary here, and my first real writing since I left college almost 10 years ago. I apologize if this is overly convoluted. If I write more, it’ll probably get better. I wrote this after reading JulieWater’s post as I thought a rough background on the group Anonymous might prove interesting. My goal is to start a conversation on the ethics of protesting. I am not sure I succeeded in the following. I will not take offense if one of the admins deletes this. That having been said, through the rabbit hole we go.

On December 7th 2010, a group known as Anonymous burst into political consciousness with brazen attacks on Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Swiss internet bank PostFinance in retaliation for shutting down payments or other services to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Wikileaks had just days earlier released a plethora of US diplomatic cables and various governmental and non-governmental organizations were learning on corporations to cease providing support and services to wikileaks. While these attacks gained breathless coverage in the American media, this was not by far the first time Anonymous had made its presence known.

Over the past few years, Anonymous has been involved in anti-scientologist protest organization and information dissemination, fighting porn filters in Australia, and even bringing down Gene Simmons’ (of KISS fame) website over anti-file sharing comments he made. For most people these battles flew under the radar, but for those paying attention it showed the clear signs indicating the creation of a new form of activism.

Anonymous describes itself as a decentralized group of concerned citizens of the world. If their beliefs can be generalized, it would best be expressed as a form of digital libertarianism. They have in general expressed their interest in the freedom of information (for example, information on the inner workings and perceived deficiencies of Scientology) and their belief that the laws of countries should have no place on the internet (filesharing/”piracy”, restrictions on porn, etc). However, since anonymous (at least publicly) has no formal leadership structure or organization, actions undertaken in their name occasionally seem to deviate from these generalities. Statements on their purpose have stated that they do it “for the lulz.” Their activities have been called hactivism by some, the combination of the words activism and hacking.

Their only known physical protest by the group took place in 2008 during Anonymous’ attack on scientology. After several days of intermittent distributed denial of service attacks against scientology websites, Anonymous organized protests at scientology offices in 93 cities worldwide. Usually Anonymous has kept to the internet. Their modus operendi has been to use a combination of exploiting security flaws, social engineering, and brute force distributed denial of service attacks to convey their “message.” Typically, a press release style announcement will be released in advance of the action to give a general warning, ultimatum, or reason behind their pending actions. Since Anonymous is a collective rather than an organized group, some of these announcements are never actually acted upon. Projects are undertaken by volunteers. If not enough people (or not enough people with the required skills) are involved, the projects fizzle as they would in any community. In this way, Anonymous represents something akin to the organization in grassroots political or revolutionary groups.

The fundamental ideas behind the organization and activity of anonymous have been around for quite some time. Ever since computers became commonplace home appliances, disgruntled people have been exploring vulnerabilities in systems for various purposes, some claimed noble. For example, many people attempted (and occasionally succeeded) over the years of obtaining unauthorized access to corporate servers with the intent on “freeing” proprietary information to the masses. Where anonymous has revolutionized the concept has been in taking on various larger societal issues and applying a decentralized organizational structure to ensure that the organization cannot be taken down by removing any known key player.

This has not stopped people from trying. Notably, over the past month, a story has developed around one security researcher’s attempt to unveil the leadership behind anonymous. Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal attempted to discover the identity of several people involved in the organization of attacks on wikileaks who he identified by following conversations in an IRC (internet relay chat) channel. He leveraged several social media websites, mostly facebook and twitter, to correlate login times between, IRC and the social media sites as well as comment contents to determine real world names behind digital handles. Whether or not he succeeded is a question we may never know the answer to. For whatever reason, Mr. Barr decided to contact a member of Anonymous to tell them what he had done. This resulted in an immediate and harsh retaliatory action. Through social engineering, a member of Anonymous managed to get “root” access to a server related to HBGary Federal and through several fairly common techniques managed to escalate their access to the point where they were able to retrieve 40,000 emails, delete 1 terabyte of backup data, compromise the HBGary Federal website, and obtain control over Aaron Barr’s twitter account.

So what is Anonymous? That depends largely on your point of view. Some would likely qualify them as digital vigilantes. Others would call them bored technologists. Their actions have thus far primarily been targeted at corporations and large organizations and their techniques have mostly been attempting to send a message via blocking access to websites. This activity is illegal in several countries, including the United States, but is it a morally justifiable form of protest?  

Further Reading:

Anonymous’ Wikipedia Entry

Anon News Network

ArsTechnica covers the HBGary-Anonymous clash