ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, december 12, 2010
INSIDE Haynesworth wins one for the Redskins!
Find out what. B2
BOOKWORLD,B5-6 Captive audience A reporter is abducted in Afghanistan, a spouse fights for his freedom. B6
The death of religious moderates Robert Putnam’s new study on faith in America. B5 A hero falls Crazy Horse, Gen. Crook and a gripping tale of betrayal. B5
5
One nation, under too many laws
How old rules clog up Washington and drive up our debt
BY PHILIP K. HOWARD
TenCommandments—except it’smore like one of 10million. We even have a hard time modifying laws that were
A
explicitly designed to be temporary. Just look at the current battle over the Bush-era tax cuts. Having that debate at all is unusual. Once enacted, most
laws are ignored for generations, allowed to take on a life of their own without meaningful review. Decade after decade, they pile up like sediment in a harbor, bogging the country down — in dense regulation, unaffordable health care, and higher taxes and public debt. A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This
requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjust- ment of laws. Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities.
laws continued on B4
Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, is the chair of the legal reform nonprofit Common Good and the author, most recently, of “Life Without Lawyers.”
merica is choking on laws of our ownmaking. Once a law is in place in the United States, it’s
almost impossible to dislodge. Our political class assumes that, after a lawis forged in the crucible of democracy, it should be honored as if it’s one of the
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myths about
North Korea. B2
THE WASHINGTON POST
KRISTIN LENZ
WikiLeaks and the Internet’s Long War
BY TIM HWANG S
ome historians like to talk about the “Long War” of the 20th century, a conflict span- ning both world wars and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
They stress that this Long War was a single struggle overwhat kind of politi- cal system would rule the world — democracy, communism or fascism — and that what a war is fought over is oftenmore important thanthe specifics of individual armies and nations. The Internet, too, is embroiled in a
LongWar. The latest fighters on one side are
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, and the media-dubbed “hacker army” that has risen in his defense in the past week, staging coordinated attacks on government and corporate institutions that have stood in his way. They come froma long tradition of Internet expan- sionists, who hold that theWeb should remake the rest of the world in its own image. They believe that decentralized, transparent and radically open net- works should be the organizing princi- ple for all things in society, big and small. On the other side are those who
believe fundamentally that the world should remake the Web in its own image. This side believes that the Inter- net at its heart is simply a tool, some- thing that shouldbe shapedto serve the demands of existing institutions. Each
side seeks to mold the technology and standards of theWeb to suit its particu- lar vision. In this current conflict, the loose
confederation of “hacktivists” who ral- lied in support of Assange inwhat they called Operation Payback, targeted MasterCard, PayPal, Visa and other companies with a denial-of-service at- tack, effectively preventing Web sites from operating. It’s a global effort of often surprising scope; Dutch police said they arrested a 16-year-old last week suspected to be involved. Their cause, fromwhichAssange has
publicly distanced himself, follows the simple logic of independence. One self- declared spokesperson for the “Anony- mous”groupdoingbattleforWikiLeaks explained its philosophy to the Guard- ian newspaper. “We’re against corpora- tions and government interfering on the Internet,” saidthe 22-year-old, iden- tified only as Coldblood. “We believe it should be open and free for everyone.” The battle between “Anonymous”
and the establishment isn’t the first in the Long War between media-dubbed “hackers” and institutions, and consid- ering the conflict’s progression is key to understandingwhere itwill lead. In the early 1980s,Richard Stallman,
then an employee atMIT’s artificial-in- telligence lab,wasdeniedpermissionto access and edit computer code for the lab’s laser
printer.Frustrated,he kicked off what he calls GNU, a massively
wikileaks continued on B2
Tim Hwang is the founder of ROFLCon, a conference about Web culture and Internet celebrity, and a former researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Lennon the rebel, Bono the wonk BY WILLIAM EASTERLY T
he recent release of the Beat- les’music on iTunes, coupled with the anniversary of John Lennon’s tragic death in New York City 30 years ago this
pastWednesday, has brought on awave of Beatles nostalgia. For somany ofmy generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Lennon was a hero, not just for his music but for his fearless activismagainst the VietnamWar. Is there a celebrity activist today
who matches Lennon’s impact and appeal? The closest counterpart to Lennon now is U2’s Bono, another transcendent musical talent champi-
oning another cause: the battle against global poverty. But there is a funda- mental difference between Lennon’s activismandBono’s, and it underscores the sad evolution of celebrity activism in recent years. Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not. Lennon’s protests against the war in
Vietnamso threatened theU.S. govern- ment that he was hounded by the FBI, police and immigration authorities.He was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, support- ing specific technical solutions to glob- al poverty.He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with
international political leaders — or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary — than he is to call them out in ameaningful way. There is something inherently noble
about the celebrity dissident, but there is something slightly ridiculous about the celebrity wonk. Lennon was no Johnny-come-lately
to the antiwar movement. As early as 1966, during the Beatles’ American tour, he answered a reporter’s question about Vietnam,much to the consterna- tion of the band’s business manager. “We just don’t like it.We don’t likewar,” Lennon said simply. And when he married Yoko Ono in 1969, they used
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William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is the author of “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.”
Best books
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