[governance] What is RPKI and why should you care about it?

[Paul Lehto]

On 9/12/10, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> My concern with RPKI is not that "law" is behind "technology," it is that
> policy decisions with law-like implications could be made without our even
> noticing it, through certain kinds of technical choices being made now.
>
> There is a difference.

A big difference.  In these "certain kinds of technical choices" being
made that qualify for the concern above, [computer] Code is [legal]
Code.  Lines of computer code become de facto law, in other words.

The clearest example I know of is the example of trade secret vote
processing programs for elections.  Nowhere does the law spell out in
minutest detail what we all know is common sense: each vote is counted
once, only once, and given equal weight, that base 10 math (only) is
allowable, no division, subtraction, multiplication or "new math" much
less creative accounting is allowed, the vote count is just 1 + 1 + 1
for each vote cast in a given category.

There could not be a more important piece of legal code than to spell
out in any real detail what programmers (who are not experts in
democracy in any sense of the word) should do.  Yet one of the highest
laws in any democracy is how the suffrage is processed and counted,
and that is a corporate trade secret that not even "election
officials" are privy to, and yet the outcomes of the computer black
box processes ARE the Law - the results of the elections.

It's quite stunning to realize that the one and only authoritative
voice of the people is rendered by such an inscrutable process of
secrecy, and that on top of that, even if the secrecy was somehow
justified as absolutely necessary or desirable, that the incumbents
who have been elected by the secret processes haven't seen fit to
spell out standards for programmers that are air tight and fair.

Of course, 100% of incumbents were treated well by those voting
computers and perhaps they are not inclined to look a gift horse in
the mouth, and nobody will ever know if those detailed standards are
in fact observed so long as trade secrecy is observed and also so long
as classic papers in computer science like "Reflections on Trusting
Trust" remain true.

Paul Lehto, J.D.

-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-2334
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