
Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor - CarolineW
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/
======
quanticle
These are also (largely) the same Congresspeople who voted to reduce funding
to NOAA, because, as it turns out, weather satellites are a good source of
evidence in favor of man-made climate change.

~~~
d33
Hopefully at some point they'd get too dumb to be able to enter the congress
and something a bit cooler will ensue from the imminent anarchy... In the
meantime, say "hi" to Trump.

~~~
pklausler
> too dumb to be able to enter the congress

You might have just lowered the bar right down beneath the grass there.

------
rayiner
An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers.
It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM,
etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified."
You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-
button issues like copyright, patents, etc?

~~~
toomuchtodo
This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although
that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress.

Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.

~~~
harryh
The USDS is a very new and fundamentally different organization from most of
what the US has ever done with tech.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Agree, and a model which Congress would be wise to adopt...if Congress had
competent guardians at its helm. But I digress.

------
amelius
> The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known
> liberal bias.

Speaking about bias ...

~~~
ianhawes
Thats a satirical line from Stephen Colbert.

~~~
pklausler
And Colbert said it right to George W. Bush's face in a speech at a White
House Correspondents' dinner.

------
pascalxus
Yes, but don't ignore the root cause. Politicians make decisions based on what
will get them re-elected, or whatever will get them the best post-career
lobbying position. Their self interest doesn't always overlap with what's best
for the country. Most of the advice they got from their 'advisors' probably
fell on deaf ears anyway.

~~~
nikdaheratik
Except that most of the issues they're looking for advice on, are things that
most voters don't care about. Basically, it used to be a battle of information
with lobbyists putting their (often biased) viewpoint, and then the advisors,
who are at least paid by the public and theoretically looking out for the rest
of us, putting in their view.

Now you just have different lobbyists weighing in on these issues and no one
out there thinking about it who isn't already bought by someone trying to make
a buck off the public. It should worry at least some of us.

------
a3n
It's much easier to ignore the facts when you remove them from the
environment.

------
awinter-py
I don't know, it only takes jason chaffetz 3 tries to say COBOL

[http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4541987/cobol](http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4541987/cobol)

------
OliverJones
Unfortunately, the US Congress is a failed institution: proudly ignorant,
uncooperative, and inwardly focused.

It pains me to say it, but that failure is one eventuality the second
amendment to the US Constitution contemplated.

~~~
pc86
The second amendment was crafted with the express purpose of allowing American
citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical, oppressive government,
using that force as a last resort to maintain their freedom.

I don't think "LOL the internet is a series of tubes" quite qualifies.

~~~
jonathankoren
No. That's a rather modern invention of the 1970s. It was to create a state
militia, that's why it talks specifically talks about a "Militia"
(capitalization original). It's prima facie absurd to think that the very
document that defines treason as "levying war against [the United States]" and
talks about using "Militia to [...] suppress Insurrections" would also codify
insurrection as a good thing.

~~~
EdHominem
A Militia is armed people. Because Militias were a good thing for the people,
a right to bear arms shall not be abolished.

But anyways, the reasoning is just reasoning. The right is pretty clearly
spelled out and stands on its own.

~~~
krapp
A Militia is not necessarily "any group of people with guns and a grudge
against the government."

~~~
EdHominem
No, but it is at least that. (People with guns.)

It certainly isn't conscripts, or people being loaned weapons to defend
someone else's holdings - it's free people defending themselves with their own
tools.

~~~
jonathankoren
Militias were instruments of the state, and they are never DIY volunteer
organizations. These were conscripted government funded, organized, and
partially armed organizations. Who had canons? The state. Who had funded the
militia? The state. Who headed the militia? The state governor. Who declared
that all able bodied men 16 and older served in the militia?[0][1] The state.
Who declared that all men needed to purchase a weapon?[1] The state.

The main point that differed a "militia" from an "army" was that it was a part
time affair, and not a standing army. The threat antifederalists cared about
was a standing federal army imposing its will on the state government. It was
never about random dudes getting upset at the government. Although there was
plenty of that too. (The Whiskey and Shay's rebellions come to mind.) It's
just that the founding fathers would send the militia in to arrest them. To
romanticize the colonial and early state militias as rugged individualists
ready to stand up to The Man is simply ahistorical.

[0]
[http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/8Mil...](http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/8Military/milita01.htm)
[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792)

~~~
hga
_Who had canons? The state._

Now that I know is not true, there were (wealthy) private individuals owned
canons. Heck, that the Congress has the power to "To ... grant Letters of
Marque and Reprisal" acknowledges that private entities had armed ships.

Partly armed is correct, and a screwup there helped ensure that Washington,
D.C. got burned in 1814 (too much bureaucracy in issuing flints etc.).

But it's also the case that, as you note, "all able bodied men 16 and older
served in the militia", and as is still the law, all who are 17-44 years of
age are members of it:
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311)
(and in modern legal interpretation, men is generally read as men and women).

But these quibbles aside, your general thrust is correct. So much so, per
Galvin's _The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American
Revolution_ [http://www.amazon.com/The-Minute-Men-Realities-
Revolution/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Minute-Men-Realities-
Revolution/dp/1597970700) the British in Massachusetts were completely
outclassed in war fighting experience, they'd put garrison troops there, and
many of our men had gained experience in what we call the French and Indian
War.

~~~
EdHominem
If the Militia is strictly governmental - the reserves essentially - why would
it warrant a constitutional amendment allowing the soldiers to keep guns at
home?

How would a governmental Militia (ie British) have proven useful to the
Americans and warranted this specific clarification?

I'm not an American, but it seems pretty clear that the people on the ground
at the time meant "because we won our freedom from tyranny by being able to
call up an army of the people, and may need to do so again, everyone shall be
able to keep arms handy".

~~~
hga
Indeed, except for the first bit being a dependent clause.

And behind that is some politics: our Founders were supremely suspicious of
standing armies (we didn't really have much of one until the Cold War) and
"select militias", which were groups of armed men selected by some criteria
(like being a loyal Tory) instead of "everyone" answering the call up.

Some of the Founders wanted us to depend entirely on a militia system, but
others, including the supremely important George Washington, commander in
chief during the Revolutionary War, said no way, Regulars are required for
serious wars. And his and the other experienced commanders opinions could not
be denied, so the dependent clause, very unusual in the Constitution or the
Bill of Rights, was a sop thrown to the pro-militia only group.

~~~
EdHominem
> Indeed, except for the first bit being a dependent clause.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. This line implies you think it is not
a dependent clause but later you say it is...? Also, what is the impact you're
implying?

But anyways, the only actionable piece of the 2nd is "the right shall not be
infringed".

> And behind that is some politics: our Founders were supremely suspicious of
> standing armies [...]

Rightly so. But the original reasoning behind the laws aren't the laws. For
better or worse.

It's been acknowledged that people have this right (to keep and bear arms) and
you cannot take rights away.

For instance, we can't reinstate slavery, even with another amendment. It's
not like the 13th amendment made it illegal; the amendment forced the
government to acknowledge that it does not have that power and cannot enact
slavery - those orders would be illegal.

A vote to repeal the 13th would be unconstitutional in its very nature because
it recognizes a right. Unlike repealing the 18th establishing prohibition, for
example.

------
authorkate
Really interesting read, thanks for sharing!

------
steverb
The original article is at: [http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-
assessment-co...](http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-
congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/)

~~~
dang
Yes. Url changed from [https://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-is-congress-so-
clueles...](https://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-is-congress-so-clueless-
ab.html), which points to this.

------
aggieben
"The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known
liberal bias."

That's cute.

No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the
absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile
interceptors.

~~~
matthewmcg
You (and Boing Boing) are mischaracterizing what OTA said about the Star Wars
program.

They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any
of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it
was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet
first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.

History has proven them correct.

You can read the actual reports here:

[http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/](http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/)

There's a reflexive tendency on HN to dismiss government-directed technology
efforts. But a quick look at the advisory panel on the September 1985 OTA ABM
report should convince anyone the report authors really did consult with
experts in the field:

Guyford Steve, Chairman President, Universities Research Associates

Solomon Buchsbaum Executive Vice President AT&T Bell Labs

Ashton Carter Kennedy School of Government Harvard University

Robert Clem Director of Systems Sciences Sandia National Laboratories

Sidney D. Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Daniel J. Fink President D. J. Fink Associates, Inc.

Richard Garwin IBM Fellow Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Noel Gayler, Admiral, USN (Ret.) American Committee on East-West Accord

Colin Gray President National Institute for Public Policy

George Jeffs President North American Space Operations, Rockwell International

General David Jones, USAF (Ret.) Former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff

Robert S. McNamara Former President of the World Bank

Michael M. May Associate Director-at-Large Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory

H. Alan Pike Program Manager, Space Stations Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.

Frederick Seitz President Emeritus The Rockefeller University

Robert Selden Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics Los
Alamos National Laboratory

Marshall D. Shulman Director Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the
Soviet Union

Columbia University Ambassador Gerard C. Smith President Consultants
International Group, Inc.

Sayre Stevens Vice President System Planning Corp. Maj. General John Toomay,
USAF (Ret.) Consultant

Seymour Zeiberg Vice President Research and Engineering Operations Martin
Marietta Aerospace

~~~
hga
_You can read the actual reports here:

[http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/](http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/) _

Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead.

So I don't know how they scored success. I score it:

Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did.

Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their
warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made
a successful first strike, that is, one with minimum retaliation,
extraordinarily difficult in the first place.

Preventing maximal damage to cities and infrastructure while civilians huddle
in their shelters (which we could have built, and stocked with a years worth
of food, for 1/3 of the annual DoD budget of the period).

Failing our building shelters, preventing _all_ civilians in their cities and
such from getting nuked. That one is iffy, especially since:

At the other end, you could define it as none of the 40,000 warheads in their
inventory hitting us, but I know that's not what the proponents of SDI claimed
it was capable of.

Note, I was something of a player in this arena during the period in question,
including editing the Arpanet ARMS-D mailing list in the 1982-3 period,
debating it with the best anti-s MIT had, you're not going to convince me by a
raw appeal to authority, especially as filtered through such a notorious
organization as the OTA.

~~~
k3oni
Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.

~~~
hga
Thanks.

From
[http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF](http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF),
the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all
of which I read):

At the end of 1: _While it is certainly possible that defensive technological
development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and
countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely._

Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, especially with our successful
campaign of economic warfare focused on energy, could not afford to build a
new BM fleet (we can quibble about mid- and terminal ranges, but boost phase
intercept (by far the highest payoff) counter measures tended to require new
boosters).

2 is not in conflict with the Reagan Administration (you indeed need Civil
Defense, and we still need it).

3 is very speculative, but, in the end, that's actually what happened. Before
the decisions about deployment that SDI proposed to be able to answer in the
'90s could be made, the USSR was no more, as was much of its BM fleet (besides
the draw-downs, it was a shame about how a solid third of the most dangerous
RS-36/SS-18 Satan missiles were exiled outside of the Russian Federation).

4 likewise negated, USSR collapsed, we didn't deploy.

5-6 and 8 are not particularly controversial.

Pretty much the same for 7, which doesn't say much to begin with.

Nowhere do I see the combination of " _OTA found it was unlikely a program
that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be
deployed within the desired timeline._

And _History has proven them correct._ , and it couldn't be, since the
proposed decisions in the '90s were mooted by the USSR's end in 1991, which we
could see coming in 1988-9 (e.g. Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall, and note how
widely derided G. H. W. Bush's 1991 Chicken Kiev speech
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech)
was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).

~~~
selimthegrim
The Union of Concerned Scientists report was probably the most effective one
in my mind; Panofsky and Bethe among others showed that SDI was not cost
effective at the margins, meaning that the marginal Soviet costs of more
missiles was lesser than our marginal cost to scale SDI up to deal with them.

~~~
hga
I'm pretty sure _a_ UCS report was the single most bogus "scientific" study
I've ever heard of, based on my memory and what I was just able to look up
with Google:

It postulated that the entire battle would have to be fought by a single space
battle station (ignoring for example that the Earth revolves), and therefore a
huge number of huge stations would have to be built, and that we could only
loft them into space at current Space Shuttle costs (as opposed to spending a
fraction of the cost on building some cost effective rockets), all of this
costing "hundreds of billions of dollars" (that's the key phrase to look for,
and note the dollar has lost about half its value since then).

Bottom line would be that no one denied that the UCS could design an entirely
impossible strategic defense system, but the construction and destruction of
such strawmen are entirely uninteresting to those who care about the truth.

Marginal cost analysis are _entirely_ irrelevant to a discussion of the real
Cold War as I noted above, the Soviets simply didn't have the money to do it,
even if it would have been cheaper for them.

They'd spent several fortunes in equipping North Vietnam with three complete
mechanized armies (1st used up piecemeal, 2nd crushed in their first invasion,
when only 40,000 of the 150,000 men committed even made it back to the north,
and of course the 3rd succeeded after the Congress stopped supplying ammo to
South Vietnam), building their Strategic Rocket Forces, all their other
military expenses, vast armies and air forces to invade Western Europe
(including maintaining up to date lists of "future war criminals", about
10,000 for France), their vast borders guarded to keep their people in and us
out, in such a way that even the rather distant and not precisely strategic
territory KAL 007 overflew generated a massacre, the money they had to spend
to buy grain every year they had "a bad harvest", etc. etc. etc. etc.

Combine that with things like our support of the _mujahideen_ , our economic
warfare, our moral warfare including capturing Grenada (our denial of the
Brezhnev Doctrine was a shock to the system), and it was game over. Funny how
after the US President to decide to actually end the Soviet Union started the
effort, it went poof in one decade....

~~~
selimthegrim
I see. I suppose you think Vietnam was winnable then? Methinks you need to
read some John Paul Vann.

Grenada was moral warfare? I am at a loss to understand you here.

~~~
hga
Not winnable, _it was won_ , "Peace With Honor" and all that jazz, the North
had given it their best shot after we'd withdrawn our troops and got skunked.
Then the Congress threw away the victory. And the end game happened while I
was politically aware, so I don't exactly have to read historical accounts,
although I've read plenty. Note also that Vann died a little too early in
mid-72 to have any final words on the subject.

Grenada as moral warfare: it was the first time the West had ever taken back
any Communist territory since the Korean War (which was ultimately
unsuccessful), and by force of arms at that. Many then living in the Soviet
Union attested to it being a shocking action.

In general, you could say that Reagan himself was "moral warfare". There's a
_huge_ difference between an opponent who's merely trying to delay your
victory, and one who's determined to end you. One of the things that made
George Washington such an effective and feared leader in our Revolutionary
War.

------
original_idea
No one should trust a government agency to be an 'expert' on tech. Moving on.

~~~
gnaritas
That's patently silly since the government is "the" expert on much tech that
only it has. Who do you think has and maintains our nuclear arsenal? You think
the CIA is clueless on tech? Who again was spying on Google's internal
network... idiots that don't know anything about tech? Who is performing mass
surveillance, idiots that don't know anything about tech?

~~~
original_idea
"agency" is the key word there. Individuals aside. bureaucrats tend to kill
anything/everything.

