One of the interesting things about moving to a city, is that you often hear about yourselves in the national news. Before, in SCE, we had a local paper and several local television and radio stations all producing local news. But the National News, whether from NPR, ABC or the BBC always was from an unrelated place and never intersected with our local stories. Here in PHX, often we are the National News. Perhaps not as often as a place like New York City, or Washington DC, but often enough to no longer feel isolated with "real" life never intersecting yours.

Here is a story I ran across today about the initial war on drugs:

http://www.november.org/VBrown.html

[...] In his first term, President Richard Nixon declared war on illicit drugs, particularly heroin, and sharply increased drug law enforcement. He directed Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst to create a new entity, patterned on the Organized Crime Strike Forces, named Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement. The president designated Myles Ambrose, the heavy-hitter then in charge of the Bureau of Customs, as ODALE director, with the twin titles of special assistant attorney general and special assistant to the president. Ambrose thus became the nation's first "drug czar." ODALE greatly supplemented the efforts of existing federal, state, and local drug law enforcement agencies so that illicit drug sales could be ended once and for all.

Because of my earlier experience as a federal prosecutor, I was recruited out of private law practice is ODALE regional director for California, Arizona, and Nevada. I established offices at San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix (each headed by a tough drug prosecutor), with a combined staff of some 150 attorneys, drug agents, and support personnel. We decided to test the effectiveness of simultaneously arresting every drug seller on the streets of an isolated city, and picked Phoenix for the exercise.

Using more "buy money" than Arizona had ever seen before, we bought into each street dealer we could find, two or three times each. It turned out that Phoenix had 76 drug pushers. In the middle of a week night, with the help of state and local police, we arrested all 76 at the same time.

For a week it was impossible to buy drugs on the streets of Phoenix. The single local drug treatment program was swamped. Addicts who could not get treatment left town to score elsewhere. But on the eighth day, new street pushers began to appear in the city, and before a month had elapsed, it was business-as-usual. We had spent tens of thousands of federal tax dollars, and sent scores of pushers to prison, but there was no lasting effect on the availability or price of illicit drugs.

[...]

I have learned from experience that there is no practical level of law enforcement that will prevent people from using the narcotics and dangerous drugs they wish to use.

Well, we left early Saturday morning for Flagstaff. A stampede of traffic was leaving the city, SUVs towing their boats, ATVs, dirtbikes etc. Driving from Phoenix to Flagstaff is equivalent to climbing a 160 mile ling hill. The journey starts around 1000 feet above sea level here in Phoenix and reaches 8000 feet in Flagstaff. The terrain changes radically as well. It goes from desert to grassland to Pine forest. During our trip, the tempreture dropped 30 degrees by the time we reached our destination. Humphrey's peak resides just north of Flagstaff and was the location of the trail we were heading to. It is the highest mountain in AZ at about 12,000 feet. We took the highway that goes to the Grand Canyon, but got off onto some forest roads 20 miles north of Flagstaff. We then drove back into the wilderness about 6 miles -- finally reaching the Abineau Canyon trail head. We gave the Accord's suspension quite a test.

The trail started at about 8500 feet and gained another 2500 feet in elevation before reaching its end. We were planning on camping at the top of the trail, about three miles up the mountain side, however, after about 2.5 miles, we started running into snow! And soon, the snow was knee deep! Who would of thought we could go from 100 degree desert to knee-deep snow in a matter of hours. The elevation was also killing me -- I was having a lot of difficulty breathing at 11,000 feet.

Because of the snow and elevation we decided to turn back and arrived home Saturday night. We will be going back later this summer to give it another try.

I have posted the website for "The Malcontent's List" or SecureList. I am working on getting a development mailing list started, as there are a few people who are interested in the idea. You can check out the beginnings of the design here.

Lately, the heat has been breaking records in Phoenix. It was 109 today. That's too hot for May. We'll be heading to Flagstaff this holiday weekend to escape it and to get some time out of the city. Should be fun.

Went to a bar called "Boston's" last night. Pretty cool place. We went to see a Grateful Dead cover band that was supposed to be the "best" cover band around. The bar is near the Salt river in this pretty industrial area. Its the second bar we went to in this shady part of the city -- the other one was called Nita's Hideaway.

These places are pretty unique. I think that being so far from the center of Tempe, they have a lot more freedom to be a good bar. You would expect with tempretures in the 80s and 90s after dark that most places would be cranking the AC. But not at Boston's. They simply roll up the back wall to the bar and jack up the fans. Works well and feels better than the refrigerator AC feeling. The music was pretty good too, except for the warm up where the sound man was apparently having problems determining which way to pot the levels.

For about 10 minutes, every time the singer would say "check" into the mic, a screeching sound would come out of the amps. This sound was so loud that that I felt weightless as the fluid in my inner ear was temporarily vaporized. But, I think we will return as the bar had a good vibe, $2 Sam Adams, and the music was pretty good. Sure as hell beats the bass-pumping, machine-driven crap heard in the more "popular" parts of town. I think I will stick to shady bars, at least they have soul (even if its got tatoos).

Well, it was an interesting weekend. Sam and I celebrated "Cinco De Mayo" for the first time. I think that this is really the first cultural difference between PHX and SCE I have experienced, as no one back east has really heard of the holiday. It is an important day for Mexicans, because it marks the day when they defeated an invading French Army. It is also significant for the United States, because the defeat of the French prevented them from continuing to supply the American Confederates allowing the Union to win the decisive battle at Gettysburg. It is interesting that in all my years of learning about the US Civil War, I never new of the importance of Mexico in determining the outcome of that war. It is ironic then, that no one in SCE (only a few hours from Gettysburg) has ever heard of Cinco De Mayo.

I think that more software needs to be developed to support the independantorganizing of people on the net. While the Internet has allowed a newgeneration of activists to organize more efficiently than ever before, the disposition of those activists has made them more vulnerable then before as well. Marked by the success in Seattle and continuing in D.C. and Quebec City, Law Enforcement officials have increased their surveillance of any group on the Internet who holds an opinion on Fair Trade or Globalization. Combine this with the fact that many activists use low-budget, advertising driven systems to connect their members, allows for an unprecedented amount of surveillance, in the spirit of COINTELPRO.

To combat this I think that more software needs to be developed that protects activists (and any other individual for that matter) from surveilance and other violations of the 4th amendment. It must also do this on a low budget and in a simple enough way that can be quickly and easily deployed.

A first step is to supply a free set of mailing lists to these organizations. The need for enthusiastic members, and an open door on activist mailing lists has led to a situation where members of law enforcement legally survey the actions of the group simply by signing up on the mailing list.

So, a system is needed that maintains free, open email system, while still preventing people opposed to the ideals of the group from disrupting it.

Such mailing lists can be manufactured in the following way:

• First, a website will be constructed that houses each mailing list and the archives for that list. While the descriptions of the lists (for subscription) would be open to the public, the rest of the site will be password protected and use SSL for transactions. The goal is that only members of the list could access the archives of that list. Precautions would be taken to eliminate a tie between geographic location and any particular user. So, connection logs would be deleted daily.
• Each person on the list would be required to submit to the list a public key generated with PGP or GPG software.
• When a person wants to subscribe to a list, they submit their request along with their public key. In addition, they must digitally sign the irrequest to verify that they are not masquerading as someone else.
• The potential subscriber would be listed on the list's website and each member of the list would have the opportunity to vote the prospective subscriber as either TRUSTWORTHY or UNTRUSTWORTHY. When the user receives more than a specified number of votes, they are placed on the list. If a certain amount of time passes and they have not received votes, their request will be dropped. In order to vote someone as trustworthy, and member of the list must be able to physically identify the prospective member.
• This process would be automated with CGI scripts so that no human intervention is necessary to perform these tasks.
• Implement this system with GPLed, free code available to anyone who wants it.
• It is hoped that the combination of a digital signiture to prove identity as well as this "trust net" will ensure that only people who should be on the list are.

Send me feedback if you have it, otherwise, I think after some more study, implementation will begin.