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(Copyright (c) 2010, Chris Travers)

The New York Times has reported today that the Obama Administration is seeking legislation to require backdoors into encryption software that could be used for wiretapping. I believe this is deeply problematic for both technical and social reasons, but the technical reasons are probably the worst. Because this area is not well covered in the existing articles, I figure it's worth giving a quick primer here.

  Types of Encryption

The simplest form of encryption is what's called symmetric encryption. It comes in various forms, some simpler than others, but the basic process is conceptually simple. Two parties share a secret. One party takes the message and encodes that message with the shared secret, and the other party decodes it using that same shared secret. This encryption is reversible and the key is the same on both sides.

A trivial example might include what we think of as ROT-13 (used for obfuscation) where every letter is rotated 13 places forward. So "this is a sample message" becomes "guvf vf n fnzcyr zrffntr." Of course such a cypher is easily broken, but there are very good quality symmetric cyphers available, such as AES.

The real problem with symmetric cyphers is that they require that both sides knows the same key before encrypted communication begins. If you are communicating with a lot of third parties, you would find you'd either have to publish the key (making sure everyone else could decrypt the same messages!) or find some way of getting the keys to the other parties in advance. This obviously renders this form of encryption useless for initiating secure communications with individuals one has never met.

To solve this problem, public key encryption was designed. Public key encryption uses two keys, called a public key and a private key. Knowledge of the public key is not sufficient to derive the private key through any sort of feasible process, and these keys are usually very long (AES may be 256 or even 512 bits long, but public/private key pairs are often 1024, 2048, or 4096 bits long per key), making brute force even harder (since the public key is expected to be publicly available).

The public key is then published and the private key is retained. A user can then look up a public key, encrypt a message with it, and only the holder of the private key can decrypt it. Similarly a private key holder can sign a cryptographic hash of a message and anyone with the public key can validate this "digital signature." (A cryptographic hash is another form of encryption with is one-way, and is used in document validation, tamper-proofing, and password checking.)

Public key encryption depends on the idea that ONLY the appropriate party has the private key. When you make a secure purchase on, say, Amazon.com, Amazon sends you their public key, and you and them use this to negotiate a symmetric cypher (probably using AES or RC4). In this way you know the key was properly exchanged and eavesdropping on this sale by criminals is not possible. When you enter your credit card data is not intercepted by criminals. Protection of the private key is very, very important to this process, but even knowing the private key does not enable you to eavesdrop on a conversation in process since that's done with a symmetric cypher.

SSL, PGP, IPSec Opportunistic Encryption, and related technologies all use asymmetric encryption, but the differences tend to be in how keys are published and who is vouching for them. SSL is designed so that you know who you are talking to because a third party (like Verisign) is vouching for the identity of the server.

Problems with Backdoors in Public Key Encryption

To effectively wiretap public-key-based communications, you have to have access to the private key, or you have to tap them post-decryption. Tapping post-decryption works fine in some contexts, such as what you are purchasing at Amazon.com. However, it does not properly work when trying to capture the content of encrypted emails, since these are usually encoded with the recipient's private key. Communications encrypted in this way are not generally vulnerable to interception in the middle. Moreover, communication itself could include encrypted files as attachments and such which could be handled entirely outside the flow of the program (I can encrypt a file and then attach it and my email program doesn't care if it is encrypted).

There isn't a real way to retrofit peer to peer communications programs to allow this sort of interception without compromising the core of how encryption works. A company may maintain their own certificate authority and use it to publish keys for internal company communications. A person taking a company laptop home may then use those certificates to encrypt emails. There is no way to intercept the content of these communications without requiring that the company keep copies of all private keys, thus compromising their own security. Similarly, if I email out an OpenPGP key or an OpenSSH key, these are not sufficient to wiretap the communications that would be encrypted using those keys. The only way out would be to require the makers of the software to include a facility sending the private key to some sort of escrow service which could then provide the key to law enforcement, but this compromises the basic integrity of the software, and any attempt on open source programs could be easily circumvented.

Consequently, this doesn't actually affect the sorts of technologies an organized crime ring is likely to use. Instead it makes each of us more vulnerable to government spying, and it makes key data, such as credit card data, far more accessible to criminals.

Such a law would thus benefit organized crime at the expense of the average consumer. It's an unbelievably bad idea no matter how you look at it.

I have had a great laugh doing some research online (various sites) to try to figure out why this year's whooping cough epidemic is happening in California. It is amazing the amount of misinformation I have found. Pro-vaccine people are blaming it on anti-vaccine people (false, see below), and Anti-vaccine people are blaming it on the vaccine (also wrong). Some people are even blaming it on illegal immigration. As best as I can tell this is because the whooping cough vaccine is different from the vaccines of, say, Polio or Measles, and people try desperately hard to fit it into their agenda even when it doesn't fit. In my reading I have learned a lot about a type of vaccines I never really paid attention to. I figure it's time to set everyone straight.

The NPR article above is particularly laughable (really, NPR does enough good reporting they should know better) because they say whooping cough was once "wiped out." Not so, says the CDC.

Most vaccines against serious illnesses are called "live attenuated virus" vaccines. These include MMR and Polio, and and basically the idea is you give the body a weak version of the virus so it develops an immune response against a stronger version. Usually with appropriate doses, these provide permanent immunity, but there are rare cases where the virus can revert, so it is possible to get full-blown measles from the MMR vaccine, though once again this is rare. These are the vaccines which produce herd immunity.

It turns out that whooping cough vaccine is a different kind of vaccine altogether and in fact individuals are not actually vaccinated against the bacteria that cause the disease at all. Instead, the vaccine is against a toxin that is excreted by the bacteria, and that toxin, called an exotoxin, is what causes respiratory damage. The theory is that this way if you get the illness, your body will have a head start at damage control (by attacking and neutralizing the exotoxin) and so you won't get very sick. So the vaccine is a dose of denatured bacterial exotoxins, called toxoids, that your body can develop antibodies to. Other toxoid vaccines include tetanus and diphtheria. While it is possible to be allergic to an acellular toxoid vaccine like this one, it is entirely impossible to get the disease from it because there are no live (or even dead) microbes in the vaccine itself. Whooping cough, or pertussis, vaccine is usually given with diphtheria and tetanus toxoid vaccines together either as a DTaP or a Tdap depending on age of the individual, but adult vaccinations are rare.

One interesting feature about toxoid vaccines is that they don't actually provide direct immunity against the disease at all because the targets of antibody production aren't on the envelope of the microbe. Instead they work by reducing the severity (and length) of the illness. In short, they don't keep you from getting sick. They just keep you from getting extremely sick. Consequently most people reading this could still get diphtheria this winter, or whooping cough, and could even spread it, but you probably wouldn't know you were carrying a serious illness. In short these vaccines provide absolutely no herd immunity at all, though they may provide some epidemiological benefits in terms of reducing the number of individuals infected by a single person (the downside of course is that it makes diagnosis and monitoring much harder--- we simply don't have any idea, for example, how many minor cases of whooping cough or diphtheria actually occur every year. We just know they don't get sick enough to be diagnosed).

Yet the news media and many "experts" still talk about herd immunity from this vaccine. Indeed while the CDC recommends adults be vaccinated, they state clearly that herd immunity is not a direct factor and that it's not a simple choice.

And while it is not believed that whooping cough has an asymptomatic carrier state, diphtheria is shown to have one, particularly in vaccinated adults. (One possibility worth considering is that asymptomatic means just that, so even mild symptoms, such as those resembling the common cold could be a symptomatic carrier state.)

So the picture that emerges is that whooping cough vaccine prevents death and long, tiring illnesses in children, but doesn't stop the bug from circulating. So it's probably a good thing for kids to have. However, whooping cough is also very much out of control and not just this year, as the CDC admits.

Furthermore I have come to realize that a few times in the last decade I've gotten this cough which lasts a few weeks and then mostly goes away, except for periodic, very heavy coughing, and with no symptoms in between. In these cases, sometimes I have been diagnosed with asthma but the inhalers don't seem to help much (so I go back to using an herbal remedy which seems to work very well, but it is rather non-standard). This lasts a few more months, and then goes away. My current thinking is that my son probably picked up whooping cough at school and I picked it up from him. Since he was vaccinated, he only seemed to have the common cold, but I got something a bit worse.

This specific vaccine isn't about herd immunity, but rather reducing the severity of a serious childhood illness. It doesn't contain microbes, live or otherwise, and while it may reduce the spread of the illness there isn't sufficient data to know the extent of this. This particular vaccine is almost certainly worth giving to most kids. However, there is no benefit that non-vaccinated individuals get from those who are vaccinated in this case.

Whooping cough cycles come and go every few years. This is no different. While hospitalizations may be preventable with the vaccine, it's spread is probably not.

Researchers have discovered a new microbe that is eating the gulf oil spill fairly readily, with the added bonus of not depleting the dissolved oxygen supply too much. (abstract only, article is paywalled)

Certainly a piece of good news out of that mess.

Here's an odd thought I had some years ago..what would happen if these sorts of bacteria got established deep down in the big pools of oil? As in, one day we find out we are a few months away from no oil because it is being eaten up....wouldn't that be interesting.

Due to excessive greed and stupidity in the higher levels of repackaged mortgages, you might have the opportunity to own your property a bit earlier than you might have thought. Worth a look Mortgage jubilee

If by any odd chance people don't get the jubille reference, it is an old "all debts are cancelled" deal, plus pardons and whatnot. Basically, wiping the slates clean, start over.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_Biblical

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_Christian

A nice article that hits a lot of the high points that I have been outlining in a lot of my previous economic journal entries. Economic blowout, accident or on purpose?

Many more people are choosing to go "off the grid", untethering from traditional utility connections like electricity, natural gas, even municipal water and sewer, in whole or in part. Reducing demand while increasing your personal production of power can lead to energy independence, plus more security, and in a lot of cases, just plain more comfort.

Most off the grid people approach this situation from both ends, going to eliminate demand by wise construction techniques, using a lot more insulation, better windows, planned air in and out,etc. This drops the normal high level demand that most homes have and is the number 1 utility bill, for heating and cooling. Following similar steps, it is quite possible to enjoy all the niceties of modern life, without being part of the problem of massive fossil fuel use, along with eventually eliminating that monthly bill you can never pay off the traditional way of staying tethered. Another advantage is that these systems work-when the main centralized system doesn't.

They also mention in the article the concept of buyers clubs, getting together with other folks and negotiating bulk buy discounts for such things as solar PV panels, etc. The food co-op model taken to energy, which I have advocated in the past as one good way to reduce upfront costs. Another way to go there is the step by step method, just replace one circuit at a time, starting with your most critical "needs to work all the time" circuit.

note: cross posted at my site as well:

Long time readers will know my big four survivalist needs, what to get independent on, are, in order of importance:

water, food, shelter, security

Now look at this BBC article about floods in Pakistan and what they determined to be the basic needs for all these displaced people

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-10901896

Pretty dang close!

And that is why I picked those out years and years ago, because I have "been there, done that" in emergency and "you are completely on your own" type situations. This is *my* tech expertise, threat analysis and mitigation.

People who "invest" in $1,000 TVs or the rigged crooked "stock" market, etc and such like and don't even have a good gravity water filter..eventually, this chronic dumbness is gonna bite them hard. EVERYONE will go through at least one-if not several- serious emergency situations in their lives, and it might last for a long time, weeks or months, who knows. If you ain't prepared..you are gonna lose it, bad. And you can NOT rely on government or "why don't *they* do something"?, you know this "they" guy over there someplace people always refer to when they mean anyone other then themselves. And this can be beyond some natural disaster, look at the economic situation, you could lose your job tomorrow, or the dingbats could decide we need a much larger war in the middle east and the price of crude could jump to 300 bucks a barrel..whatever, black swan events outside your control.

    Sorry, reality doesn't work that way with this "they" guy "saving you" or "doing something"!!

  Any medium to large scale emergency, there ain't a government out there, including all the rich nations, that has enough resources to do this. We don't have entire backup cities and regions just sitting around with all the infrastructure intact in warehouses or whatever, which is what it would take to come up with a huge numbers of refugees in need of aid situation, a large scale one. It is not possible, it doesn't exist, it isn't going to happen, so you will be on your own, so you need to get it in gear BEFORE any bad stuff happens, well before, that is acquire gear/supplies plus the needed skills to use that gear and supplies.

Just like with computer data, if you have no backups, and if something weird happens, you got nothing and will be in a world of hurt.

Another example of how china is taking the west's surplus cash it ships there, and turns around and invests heavily in places to get access to their natural resources, then they turn around and sell to them, developing new markets.

The developed world is going to be the late not so great de-developing world pretty soon now. China invests in Brazil

All these western economists go on and on how we don't need "protectionism"..well, why is it then with china being so protectionist, they are advancing at a record pace? Could it be that some protectionism is necessary to keep from going bankrupt?

"Chinese firms have bought stakes in Brazil's electrical grid; they are building steel mills, car plants and a telecommunications infrastructure in that country. Chinese grain companies are negotiating to buy huge tracts -- some larger than 600,000 acres -- of Brazilian outback to plant soybeans. Chinese firms have the inside track on landing a huge high-speed-rail contract. They want to help realize Brazil's gargantuan plans -- estimated at more than $250 billion -- to tap its offshore oil reserves. "

And they have all this investment money because our glorious leaders said we didn't need old fashioned manufacturing, oh noes, that is passe', that we would be some sort of combo financial services (90% high stakes casino games), IP (ideas=dime a dozen), service (we'll mow each other's yards and get rich!) and governmental workers (in a shrinking economy, by all means, quadruple the size of government as the first step, raise taxes on those still barely producing any real wealth, plus add a few trillion in debt!) economy.

  Well, that mastermind theory sure has worked out just swell....and we still keep electing these people who let those pirates keep selling off what is left of the national seed corn for a fast buck. Corporate raiders, nation sized. Our political and economic "leaders"... When does this get to shift from just "sucky" to "treasonous" anyway? Oh, I guess that is passe' now as well, to be loyal to one's nation first.

And I can't blame China, they would have been stone idjits to not take the golden egg laying goose when it was offered. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing as a nation, looking out for themselves FIRST. After that, sure, get generous, but if you can't take care of affairs at home first, you won't have any "extra" to be generous with. You have to make wealth before you spend it, that's the real economic bottom line, and manufacturing is the top way to make wealth today, closely followed by agriculture and mining/natural resource extraction.

    The big kahuna though, is the factory. Destroy your factories, you lose, end of story. You aren't replacing them with *anything*, that's the fairy tale they get people to believe in. Destroy your ag, you lose + starve, end of story. Sell off your natural resources cheap, fat city for some years..then you lose. You gain a few warlords who own a lot of yachts and limos and tanks and jet fighters eventually, that's about it for selling off natural resources cheap, that's the end game there.

A pretty good read about the republishing of a book detailing what happened socially when the banksters and their political puppets lose control of their printing presses, back in the Weimar Republic. What follows, in the historical record, would be classed in the US as a red versus blue civil war (note, red state and blue state are overly simplified, look closer at the records and this red blue schism is urban versus "other than urban", in just about any state you want to look at. Then it turned into a general large war as we all know when they weren't able to repair all the damage, and those "elites" created internal and external patsies to blame all their troubles on.

It can happen again, too...

    The collapse of fiat currency systems lead to the collapse of the blue urban areas *really quickly*..as they have no actual human needed product, none of the necessities I mean. The currency system must be sound, not overly inflated or manipulated excessively for it to keep working. If they screw it up, "bad stuff" happens and the system breaks down.

    In the record, they flee the cities and go on looting rampages, that's the real bottom line, the cities become untenable for the most part. The "blue" areas are completely dependent on imports and exploitation of the red areas, despite claims they "support" the red areas. This "support" is a false notion, it is merely modern day imperialism backed up by the controllers "trickle down" economic theory of credit and currency creation at the top, in the mega blue urban areas, then lending it into existence-complete with charging interest on this newly poof created currency- at lower levels, until eventually a pittance makes it to the red areas, even though they really produce all the needed "stuff".

Of course there are variables, government checks now go to a lot of places, but once you subtract that, and a bout of fiat currency panic, such as loss of the FRN and the world's reserve currency would bring, would certainly subtract that as those checks go worthless for getting much real goods, because look at real wealth production..the red areas start the whole thing rolling, because that's where the food/water/energy/materials come from. All the stuff necessary for modern life. And the manufactured goods today..the stuff that keeps all the retailers busy..increasingly comes from places that might just cease taking fiat currency A as they deem it worth-less and less.

Anyway, a decent little read from Ambrose: Paper money

That I am old enough to remember where my current .sig came from, or that nobody else is.....! For those who are suffering from a memory lapse, here is the sig: "The world is in darkness. To erase data is to suppress truth; to halt computing is to shackle the mind."

Ok, ok, you're too lazy to google it, so here's the link: Son of Hexadecimal Kid

This is something that is really disturbing to me and I hope to more people, food security and prices. We have a food commodities market now that is skewed way out of proportion, it results in higher than necessary prices for consumers, really doesn't address farmers security, forces people to pay tribute to-once again-that nest of global thieves in Manhattan.

I farm because I want a peaceful life, do an honest job, and just make a living, not a killing, and provide food for people..because all of that is a combined good idea. But see, we all are subject to the parasite tax now, we've become defacto put into economic bondage to these gents, and they try to hide it like saying biofuels drive up the prices of food, etc, which is hogwash, and will also kill off the only viable option we have to use instead of pumped crude for all the millions of existing vehicles out there. This is the same sort of thing they do in the metals markets, and the same guys doing it, game the system because they now pwn the system..and they shouldn't..no one elected these thieves, but they sure have seized control.

Here is a nice interview with an additional link to the original story on manipulations in the global food markets.

Oh, food security? We swapped actual stockpiled mass quantities of food, which is a good idea, for server entries in these investor banks and letting them skim off zillions. That's not security, it's stupidity.

"Ya, Mom, what's for dinner"?

"Here ya go Junior and Sis, nice heaping plate of news reports about some huge banks with their leveraged and hedged futures contracts..dee lish"!

"Wahhh..we wanted real food"!

"Sorry, our betters decided this was..better..it makes them more money, which we all know now is the most important thing in the world..we are lucky we all get to work for them"

"Oh..."

This is an indication of the moves I have been saying that china will do as the economy changes around the world. Now that they have extracted the bulk of the necessary manufacturing knowledge they need from the west, they no longer absolutely "need" the western markets. It's not that they will abandon them, but they now have the wherewithal to not be fixated on them, a significant change. They had to export cheap and work really hard for a long time, just so they could get access to western currencies so they could turn around and get the high tech goodies from those nations. This is done, accomplished for the most part. They can build most anything, in mass quantities, at globally competitive prices, and will now just get better at it.

  Now stage two, the big shift, where they emphasize their internal markets more, the thing I said was 'coming soon". It got here. Here is the reference, China and internal markets They move this way and institute polices to rapidly expand their middle classes, this makes them really much wealthier, and eliminates the potential for mass social unrest (while the western nations are killing off their middle classes and increasing the odds of mass social unrest...)

  Stage three is then another expansionist move they will make into areas of the world where they source raw materials from. This will be an almost unprecedented diaspora type event, millions of people going to set up businesses in cooperation with the locals, on a much larger scale than they are doing now, which is impressive enough. they have to, they have to get millions to move someplace else, they have run out of water and arable land at home. They will develop way more of an interest exporting and trading with these raw resource areas than they have with just the fiat currency "consuming" nations (they want real stuff for their manufactured goods now, they have about had it exchanging IOUs for just relabeled other sorts of IOUs for all their expotts. This has gotten old for them. It's also why they started unpegging from the dollar). This big change will also include exporting just a ton of their population as a necessity move. They *have* to, they have no choice at all, all you had to do to see this was look at some simple data from years ago, demographics and so on, and extrapolate it. They have to lose tens of millions of their people out, or run dry, plus they have this hugemongous young male surplus, plus people with good college degrees and no domestic jobs for them. that means..they have to go expansionist.. They simply do not have the water and the space any more, and need to keep expanding, or their fatcats lose their cushy jobs and heads..so the orders will come down to go this way, because that is the only other option they have, internal collapse, or expand..

  This will be part of the deals they arrange with a lot of foreign nations, offer them all kinds of manufacturing help and natural resource extraction help, and a ton of "engineers" and so on moving there will be part of the deal. That stage three move, when it begins in earnest, will be (IMO) the tipping point for the US to lose world's reserve currency status, right then, and to hit a really fast decline (barring some other real hard to predict wildcard). There will be "enough" indicators for that point to narrow the timing down better once it gets closer, that's when the major dollar rout will occur.

Much fun and games in the USA then.

(just a note: the past full month now my net connection has been more down than up, and even when up really flaky. I was more relying on my slow cell connection and "bent" the TOS a little-tethering- just to have any connection at all, so I didn't want to push it and lose that as well. I use a WISP and they got hammered with a huge batch of the radios we customers use that are all crapping out just a scosh past warranty, and they are proprietary and expensive. They've replaced mine twice now, but only a matter of time before it craps out again, and the speeds are really slow now. So it goes. Allegedly they might switch to a more "4g" technology and apparently I might be on the shortlist for the initial trials. Anyway, that's the reason I was mostly absent for several weeks, I could only skim the major stories and add the odd comment before losing connection, didn't have the luxury of my normal JE back and forths until just a coupla days ago.)

According to the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, there are serious security flaws in the existing technology. Not necessarily a big deal, for now, as they observe that the risks are low at the current time. Emphasis on "current". They also state that no crackers have been observed to use the required level of sophistication. Again, emphasis needs to be on "observed". Yes, it may well be a while before automotive networks reach the point where this is exploited in the wild (at least to any scale), but I would remind you that it took Microsoft from Windows 3.0 through to Windows XP Service Pack 2 to take security even remotely seriously. That's a long, long time. And Microsoft had nothing like the install-base of the car industry. Further, the qualifications required by most companies to be a system administrator were a good deal steeper than the requirements for a car mechanic, so systems administrators were likely far more familiar with the issues involved. Also, said systems administrators are far more accountable for security issues, since there are plenty of third-party tools that novice users can use to spot malicious software.

The first question is why this even matters. It doesn't affect anyone today. No, but it's guaranteed to affect at least some current Slashdot readers in their lifetime and, depending on how rapidly car networks develop, may affect a significant fraction surprisingly fast. Technology doesn't move at Stone Age speeds any more. Technology advances rapidly and you can't use obsolete notions of progress to determine what will happen next year or over the next decade.

The second question is what anyone could seriously do, even if it was an issue. Not too many Slashdotters own automotive companies. In fact, I doubt if ANY Slashdotters own automotive companies. Well, the validation tools are Open Source. MISRA has a fair few links to members and software packages. In fact, even if developers just developed an understanding of MISRA's C and C++ specifications it might be quite valuable as it would allow people to understand what is being done (if anything) to improve reliability and to understand how (if at all) this impacts security. You don't get reliability for free, there will be some compromises made elsewhere.

When people extol the values of a political philosophy, I like to look to history for empirical data. Obviously republican forms of government with general police powers to enforce the common will are much more common than successful libertarian states. We can look to Athens, the Roman Republic before Sulla or Caesar.

There is one prominent exception: Iceland between the period of Norse settlement (probably 8-9th Century) and Norwegian domination (12th century). Iceland was a remarkable place during these years but due to a number of problems eventually was subsumed into Norway. The country sported a national legislature and a national court system supported through a combination of private enterprise and taxes, but it had absolutely no executive power. People suggest it was the first democracy to rule a country. Well, it wasn't (it's hard not to consider Athens a country), but it was quite remarkable nonetheless.

Icelandic society had basically three social classes based on offices, obligations, and conditions of servitude. The top class was occupied by the "godhar" who possessed property rights to a "godhord" which was a public office which contained legislative, attorney, and priestly roles. The godhord could be sold, loaned out, inherited, etc. In other words it was treated just like real property. The godhar collected taxes on the maintenance of temples, received income from arbitration and attorney services, and had certain rights regarding international commerce, such as first pick of goods from an overseas merchant. While "godhi" is usually translated as "chieftain," they didn't "rule" areas, and only were responsible for people who entered into contracts with them.

The second class were the bondar or thingmen, who were freeman farmers who entered into a relationship with a godhi. The bondi was responsible to represent the godhi's interests when serving on a jury at the thing ("thing" being legal assembly), were expected to serve as guards or soldiers for the godhi if necessary, and so forth. Bondir were allowed under Icelandic law to change allegiances more or less at will, so this relationship had to be mutually beneficial if it was to last.

The third class were thralls, or slaves, who were usually either people captured in raids or prisoners of war. If a thrall was freed, the freed man or woman would have certain legal obligations to the former owner, and the former owner would have paternal duties to the freed individual, but the children of freed thralls would be fully free citizens with no such obligations. Thralldom provided a sort of POW status for those captured during warfare or raiding operations, and provided a limited set of legal rights to those so held. Thralls weren't "slaves" in the way we think of them from American history in terms of simple human chattel, but rather individuals who were captured at war and afforded some legal protections provided that they'd work. Thralls could own property and were afforded the right to purchase their own freedom if such wasn't given by their "owner."

Now, for the Icelanders, life was surprisingly good compared to Continental Europe. While life expectancy from birth in France was about 20 years during the 10th century, assuming the child wasn't exposed to death in Iceland (infanticide was legal), the child could expect to live 45 years. Moreover the rate of dental caries in France over that shorter lifespan was 10% (meaning 10% of teeth were lost on average, or were decayed). Despite the longer lifespan, the rate in Iceland was 2%. The typical theory is that this would indicate a general lack of carbohydrates in the Icelanders' diet (they ate mostly dairy products, meat, and dried fish smeared with butter).

The longer lifespan is all the more incredible due to the way the Icelandic justice system worked: if the sagas are any indication blood feuds were quite common and may have actually had a stabilizing impact on Icelandic society due to how they were structured. These were generally resolved in court via lawsuits where the side which lost most would be compensated by the side which lost less. Often these were arbitrated with the support of extended families, but sometimes they were actually full law suits.

This system worked remarkably well for a remarkably long time (about three to four centuries). However, eventually Iceland was essentially annexed into Norway. The major causes for the Icelandic decline were:

1) Environmental degradation and erosion (a surprisingly common problem in the pre-modern world, but one which was particularly problematic to people on an island with limited land)
2) Climate change (the little ice age) which cut off Iceland from the Greenland colonies and made the island politically and economically dependant on Norway, and
3) The conversion to Christianity and the political struggles over the church in Iceland eventually allowed Norway to annex the island without a fight (though more than 100 years after the conversion)

After losing independence, Iceland would not regain it until WWII. However the system worked surprisingly well for a surprisingly long time period, and was (relative to the time) not a very bad place to live by any measure.

However, of course, this worked fine for an insular area like Iceland. It would not have worked in a place more easily subject to invasion.

Further reading:
"Medieval Iceland" by Jesse Byock
"Viking-Age Iceland" by Jesse Byock
"The Vikings" by Else Roesdahl
"Everyday Life in the Viking Age" by Jacqueline Simpson

My single largest concern with the health care reform bill here is that the law, if upheld, would severely damage some of our most important Constitutional rights as American citizens. These rights are codified in the 5th Amendment and protect us all from unfair prosecution by the government in two ways: by requiring that due process not be denied, and by prohibiting the government from requiring self-incrimination.

It's important to realize how this mandate works as opposed to, say, the mandate to be insured when you drive in this regard. The state cannot force you or anyone else to admit to a traffic infraction or misdemeanor, so the only way this can be enforced is to require proof of insurance to drive, and to write tickets when this is not present during a traffic stop. Nonetheless, at least in my state, this can be challenged in court if you have insurance but the proof of it was not in the car during the traffic stop.

Obviously this sort of enforcement measure doesn't work when requiring people to purchase health insurance. I suppose Congress could make visiting an emergency room without insurance to be a misdemeanor or even a felony but that would just discourage the uninsured from seeking medical help when it was necessary. Consequently, Congress attempted to do something that's unprecedented: require disclosure of non-violation as part of the tax code and penalize people appropriately. This is where things become problematic.

To be sure there's no problem with Congress deciding to raise everyone's taxes by 2.5% and then giving everyone a tax credit equivalent to the current penalty, but that's not equivalent to the current system. Instead, if you make over about 28000 USD/year, you pay 2.5% as a penalty but if you make less, you pay $695 as a flat penalty. This penalty is equivalent to that which is assessed when one is convicted of various misdemeanors. While I think it might be argued that the objection of folks making more than 28k per year might be shadows instead of substance, for those making less, I don't think the law is Constitutional because it imposes a fixed penalty, requiring self-incrimination and denying due process. This is hence a "fine of not less than" structure pretending to be a tax, requiring self-incrimination, and adjudicated to a standard that would be impermissible if assessing a federal misdemeanor. I believe that such would be adjudicated to a preponderance of evidence, which is the standard for civil cases, not criminal cases. There are ways this could bleed over into criminal cases as well.

If this is upheld as Constitutional, then it is not an understatement to say that this is as much a threat to American liberty as any part of the so-called war on terror. The threat here is substantial and one that I don't think most Americans on either side of the isle appreciate: by eroding due process in the name of a social interest, we make it possible to use the tax code to make an end-run around the 5th Amendment, rendering our valued Constitutional protections of limited value. It seems to me that both parties seem intent on destroying due process guarantees in one way or another when it suits them, and I am very concerned about the future of my country. Our last hope at present is with the courts.

If this is upheld as Constitutional, there's no reason why a state couldn't list a bunch of crimes and require self incrimination on tax forms. At that point we move ever closer to a society characterized by "show me the man and I'll find you the crime." This is not what I want for my country. And while I have policy concerns over a single payer system in this country, they do not rise to this level. Let's hope that the courts protect our rights not to self-incriminate, and to ensure we have due process when accused of not having health insurance that the government deems acceptable.