Want to take back some privacy, but still enjoy the power of a high-end smartphone? Consider buying the smartphone with cash, at the full retail price. Then, consider paying for the service anonymously, with cash, on a pay-as-you-go plan. In the United States, we still have this freedom. In many other countries, people must register and show evidence of their name and address when they buy a mobile phone or a SIM card.

Be aware that these steps are only the beginning. Your carrier gets the smartphone’s identification number (IMEI) every time you use its network. It also gets your SIM card’s identification number (IMSI). If you bought both anonymously, it won’t know immediately whom it is eavesdropping on. Unfortunately, your call and text recipients, email accounts, and movements will soon give clues to your identity. Additional steps will appear in a future article.

The cellphone service providers do have a sound business reason for wanting to know the real name and address of a customer on a long-term contract. The carrier is extending credit to the customer. She may have made only a small down payment for the phone. She gets her bill after she has made calls and downloaded songs for a month. If she doesn’t pay her bill, or cancels the contract without paying the full price of the phone, the carrier has lost money.

Pre-Paid

Paying in advance, though, for service on a cellphone that was bought at the full retail price completely removes that business justification. The company is extending no credit. In the retail shops that I checked recently in the San Francisco Bay Area, some carriers saw it that way, but others didn’t. A T-Mobile salesman happily offered his most expensive smartphone, bought with cash at the full retail price, on a pre-paid plan with complete anonymity. “I had a customer who wanted his service under the name ‘Micky Mouse’! It was fine with me.” T-Mobile’s future is so uncertain, though, that he might have been happy to sell me the whole store anonymously.

The most obtuse carriers that I have spoken with are AT&T and Verizon. Sales clerks at both companies’ retail outlets wanted customers seeking a pre-paid plan for a top-of-the line smartphone–bought with cash at full retail–to pay a big deposit. AT&T wanted $500. Verizon wanted $400. Perhaps they are using their market power to squeeze money out of people eager for a top-of-the-line smartphone? They also wanted a government-issued identification card with a photo and a Social Security number. Clerks of both companies said that their Credit Department insisted on having this information.

What nonsense! The deal is all cash, no credit.

Now you might be wondering, “How do foreigners here get an AT&T contract? They have no Social Security number.” AT&T and Verizon answered: foreigners must show a passport.

A Fictitious Foreigner

Your empathy and honesty may persuade an obtuse company’s sales clerk to make an exception for you. He may also exercise more discretion if he is on duty alone in a quiet store. Lay on the counter four or five hundred dollar bills. You want a prepaid plan and want to pay the deposit. Confess your passion for privacy. You are eccentric, but because the company will be completely protected from risk, you think the arrangement is fair to the company.

The sales clerk needs to fax to his Credit Department something that looks like a foreign passport with a name, foreign place of residence, and a photo. Offer to him a sheet of paper that you printed, showing a passport that you scanned and doctored: fictitious name, address, numbers, and a photo of someone you don’t know from the Web. Remove any ambiguity: “I created this document. My name is really not Viktoria Kovacs. I am not from Hungary. I just love my privacy.”

Could a police officer construe your behavior as fraud? With difficulty, I argue. The telephone company suffers no harm and you have no criminal intent. If you are worried, ask a lawyer.

You might as well pick a fictitious local address near your real address. The carrier will know which cell towers you are using, even if you turn off the phone’s GPS radio.

A Pay Phone in Your Pocket

You can make your monthly payments for your service either with cash at the carrier’s retail store or, until we get good digital cash, on the carrier’s Web site with an acceptable gift card, which–ahem–you have bought with cash. The telephone companies accept gift cards from Visa, MasterCard, or American Express that have an expiration date. If you pay your bill on on a Web site, though, you may reveal your location (IP address) and your real name (cookies), unless you take additional measures. Additional measures will appear in a future article.

Here is a blank passport page (2 MB) to get you started. If you don’t have a good graphics program, see GIMP. It is free.

Device Classes 4 and 5

I am a privacy advocate, computer hobbyist, writer, and mother of three teenage daughters. On my smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers, I install software that keeps my identity and my location (IP address) private, encrypts my communications, and encrypts the data on my devices. I think that these measures are fundamental to defending my dignity and autonomy. I install the same software on my daughters’ devices. I teach my daughters that many profit-seeking people and a few unscrupulous people might otherwise use information about them in ways that could harm them or make them unhappy. The solution is not to throw up our hands and declare that “Privacy is dead!” Instead, we take responsibility to make the devices that we own protect us.

I want to take these measures legally. I am a writer, past contributor to The Economist magazine, and author of Kidding Ourselves (Basic Books, New York, 1995). I have benefitted from the copyright law’s protection of my writing. Of course, the de facto protections that copyright can offer to writers are shrinking. Nonetheless, I do not abuse my practical ability to copy other people’s writing, artwork, or music. I don’t copy those works unless I have the permission of the writer or artist. I teach my daughters to exercise the same respect. They don’t make infringing copies, either.

Hypocrisy is painful. I prefer to avoid it. I want very much to be able to install privacy, security, and communication software on my devices–and my daughters’ devices–without violating legally protected rights of the manufacturers and programmers of the devices. My interest in privacy and security and their interest in protecting their work really do not seem to be in conflict. To me, this customizing is like putting stronger bumpers on my car. I am the owner, making what I bought work better for me.

Examples of the software that I install:
Cydia, a store containing third-party software for Apple devices: http://cydia.saurik.com
Tor (the Onion Router): http://torproject.org
OpenSSH: http://thebigboss.org/guides-iphone-ipod-ipad/install-and-use-ssh
Orbot, Tor for Android phones: http://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/
full-device encryption, such as Luks: http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/
Firefox modified to use “Https Everywhere,” “No Script,” and “Disconnect”: http://donttrack.us/
CyanogenMod: a higher performance operating system for Android phones: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

The U.S. Copyright Office has already made an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the jailbreaking (“rooting”) of iPhones. I had to jailbreak my iPhone 3G in order to install Tor. I also had to jailbreak my iPhone 3G in order to install OpenSSH, available on Cydia. This program gives me a terminal window with a command line and an encrypted channel to other computers. It lets me use my iPhone to communicate with a computer in Tokyo that I administer as a relay on the Tor network. I now have a little computer in my pocket from which–wherever I am–I can do lots of administration work on remote computers, such as my account on a Stanford University server and my account on a Hurricane Electric server in Fremont, California, which hosts one of my Web sites. It also lets me see the entire file system of the iPhone itself and correct corrupted files.

I would like to run all these programs on our iPad and my Samsung Android smartphone. I am considering buying an Amazon Kindle or Barnes and Noble Nook Color. I will also want to run my privacy, security, and communication software on those devices. I will have to jailbreak them. Please create an exemption in the DMCA, so that I may do so legally.

Sincerely,
Rhona Mahony

Bill McGonigle, of Lebanon, New Hampshire, decided to become a Tor volunteer when he learned that people in Iran were protesting the results of their June Presidential election. They were using the Internet to organize their meetings. The Iranian government was trying to censor their messages to one another. “I have a soft-spot for people trying to gain liberty for themselves,” he wrote in an email, “especially against tyrannical regimes. It became known that they were using Tor to get around the censorship, so at that point I put up a relay….The people I’d like to help are those living under violence-based oppression, most commonly orchestrated by dangerous and corrupt individuals posing as legitimate governments. I’d like to see an end to oppression wherever it exists.”

Get Tor

To become a volunteer, download this software.
To use Tor to protect your own privacy, download this software

How It Works

How Tor works is complicated. It uses fancy cryptography, which is difficult mathematics. It uses technical features of the Internet, which is difficult network engineering. The good news is that neither Tor volunteers nor Tor users need to know any of the hard stuff. Curious readers may enjoy technical explanations by the Tor Project programmers and classroom slides, written by Dan Boneh, a computer science professor at Stanford University specializing in cryptography. The inventors of the original Onion Router have published many papers, as has the team now working on Tor.

To get started, a volunteer–for example, Bill McGonigle in New Hampshire–downloads a software program from the Tor Project, based in Massachusetts, that lets him share a small fraction of his broadband Internet connection with people who use Tor. He chooses how much bandwidth he will set aside for Tor users. It can be as little as 20 kilobytes per second, a small fraction of a 1.5 megabyte connection. The person who wants privacy, let’s say Abigail, downloads a small program that adds a Tor button to her Firefox Web browser. When Abigail clicks on her Tor button, Tor encrypts the message that Firefox sends out, passes that message along three or more randomly-chosen volunteers’ computers, which may include Bill’s, and then connects her to the Web site she wants. Tor then encrypts and bounces the messages along the same path from the destination Web site back to Abigail. Each computer on the path know only which computer preceded it and to which computer it must relay the message. After a short time, Abigail’s Tor chooses a new, random path among volunteers’ computers for her messages to follow. The result: Abigail is using the Web anonymously. Companies, government agencies, and spies have a very hard time figuring out where Abigail is, what site she is visiting, what she is writing or learning, and, if they are monitoring the destination Web site, who is visiting it. Right now, volunteers worldwide are offering Tor on 1755 computers.

China Plays Cat, Tor Plays Mouse, or Is It the Other Way Around?

Zhan Bin, who teaches at the Business School of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, has written forcefully in his blog in favor of more openness and freedom in China.

In a recent email, he said that he uses Tor every day to read Internet sites, because the Chinese government has blocked so many. If Tor became unavailable to him, he would immediately search for a substitute. At the moment, though, there is no substitute that is as secure or useful as Tor. Tor encrypts people’s messages, unlike most other proxy services. It then passes the messages through a far-flung network of computers not controlled by any single group. It also works with different kinds of Internet communication, such as instant messaging. Because the program is open source, any programmer can build it into his software.

On September 25, 2009, the Chinese government did its best to blockade Tor, possibly in preparation for China’s National Day on October 1. The Tor Project had, from its beginning in 2006, published a list of volunteers’ computers’ IP addresses on several Web sites. The government employees who run China’s Internet gateway simply looked up the Web site and added those publicly-listed Tor IP addresses to the long list of IP addresses whose messages could not enter China. Two days later, 80 percent of those relays were still blocked. The number of Tor relays inside China that could contact the outside world had fallen from over 60–before the blockade–to zero.

By January 5, 2010, though, Zhan Bin and many other Chinese were once again able to use Tor. The number of connections from China had recovered to roughly 40,000 per hour, about half the pre-blockade number. What happened? As Andrew Lewman, the Executive Director of the Tor Project, explained in a telephone call, he and his colleagues had long anticipated and prepared for China’s blockade. Many volunteers had set up secret relays, which were not listed on the public Web sites. Those secret relays are called bridges. On September 25, Lewman and his colleagues faced a challenge right out of a spy novel. How could they communicate the bridges’ secret IP addresses to people far away–and unknown to them–without the Chinese government intercepting the list? The solution: a widely distributed dribble. The Tor Project is releasing the list of bridges, a few at a time. They are using many methods: word of mouth, email, Twitter, other new social media, and Web sites. They reveal no more than one-eighth of the list by any one method. The Chinese government will intercept, and then block, some of the IP address, but not all.

This pouncing and parrying is a game of cat and mouse. Right now, though, Andrew Lewman, Karen Reilly, and the other staff members at Tor do not feel like mice. They say that they are confident that they can continue to move people’s words and photos in and out of China. What they need, they say, is more volunteers to run bridges.

Does the Chinese government feel like the mouse in this game? Half of the Tor Project’s $514,000 annual funding comes from the U.S. government, through the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent agency that runs radio transmissions for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. Ken Berman, the IBB’s head of engineering, sought out Tor, according to Lewman, because he wanted to support new Internet software that circumvented censorship.

Paul Syverson, co-inventor of the original Onion Router, worked and still works in the cryptographic laboratory of the U.S. Navy. In other words, he makes codes for the U.S. Defense Department. As in a delicious paradox common to logic puzzles, after inventing the Onion Router, Syverson told his Navy bosses that the Onion Router could keep the Navy’s secrets secret only if the Navy gave away the Onion Router. Why? Only when people sending messages through the Onion Router network are indistiguishable from average Internet users, can hostile observers not tell which messages to capture and inspect. The more numerous, varied, and ordinary Onion Router users become, the more they camouflage one another. In this way, sharks can hide among minnows.

Today, because Navy officials did–maybe to their dismay–understand the unforgiving logic of espionage–anyone can read the Onion Router source code and contribute to it. It is a civilian project–the Tor Project–and a non-profit organization.

Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, computer scientists trained at MIT,  do most of the research and programming to improve Tor. They are idealistic fellows. They say in their mission statement, “…for human rights workers, journalists, democracy activists and many others world-wide, anonymity online can be an issue of life and livelihood. The Tor Project believes that we should have the same expectation of privacy online as we have in the real world….”

Yet, how does Tor look to the Chinese government, or to the government of Iran, Syria, or even Russia? Or to zealous nationalists of those countries? They may look over the shoulders of Dingledine and Mathewson. They may see the propaganda arm and war machine of the West.

Ordinary People Help One Another

In so-called open societies, though, people see the issue differently. Most Westerners disdain censorship. The Tor button for Firefox has been downloaded three million times. Lots of those freeloading downloaders–the ones with a broadband Internet connection–could also be offering the Tor service. A remaining question: do home computer users have permission to run an Internet server program that gives services to people outside their house? The answer is: maybe.

The Acceptable Use Policy of many Internet Service Providers–such as Verizon and Earthlink–explicitly prohibits residential customers from running any Internet server program. AT&T and Comcast’s iBurst do not. To check any company’s policy, type its name and “AUP” into a search engine.

What are the prohibitive ISPs worried about? That a customer will run an enterprise using most of the contracted bandwidth round-the-clock. That traffic could strain the ISP’s gear, hurt service to other customers, and get the ISP sued. By prohibiting all server programs, the company saves its employees the work of researching each customer’s case.

A little arithmetic shows how harmless and costless to her ISP Abigail actually will be if she offers Tor to the world, instead of merely using it herself. Let’s say that she has a 1 MB broadband connection. She considers setting aside a maximum at any given time of 20 kilobytes per second for a Tor bridge, since bridges are now needed most urgently. A kilobyte is one-thousandth of a megabyte. Abigail, at maximum burst, will have 1/50th of her broadband connection busy with Tor users. She is paying $50 per month. She will have to decide for herself what her conscience permits. Then she can help her grandchildren set up Tor on their computers.

A person who sets up a Tor relay gets to give it a name. Bill McGonigle, the man in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who was moved by the Iranian election protesters, also admires John Lennon’s music. He calls his relay, “imagineallthepeople.”

Legal guidance for people running Tor relays in the United States
Video of a talk by Roger Dingledine

It was my suitcase that caught the attention of the TSA fellow watching the baggage X-ray monitor. He frowned. Then he waved over a stocky TSA co-worker. The co-worker picked up my suitcase and carried it down to me at the end of the conveyor belt. “Anything sharp or fragile in here?,” he asked. “Not that I can think of,” I said. What had the first fellow seen? Oh ho, the co-worker opened my suitcase and found my bamboo flutes. I had packed the flutes because I had planned to say, at the beginning of a conversation, that my unusual pastes were primitive pigments. I was going to paint the flutes with them. I hadn’t realized that on the X-ray monitor, flutes might look like clubs. The TSA forbids clubs in carry-on bags. The TSA fellow solemnly looked through each end of each flute. While he squinted, I packed my 3-1-1 bag back into my messenger bag. Oops, a snag. He couldn’t see through the third flute. It was still a stalk of raw bamboo. I hadn’t yet broken open the nodes. He picked up my whole suitcase and walked away. I didn’t see the consultation. When he came back, he wiped down the inside of my suitcase compartment with a round, white pad. He fed the pad through a machine. I suppose the machine’s purpose was to detect…explosives? Wow, I hadn’t anticipated this thoroughness. The machine sniffed, assayed, calculated…and was happy with the pad. I was free to go to Gate 82.

Janet Napolitano, Are You There?

Do TSA agents learn in their training that charcoal plus sulphur plus saltpetre make gunpowder? Don’t they watch the classic Star Trek episode (“Arena”) in which Captain Kirk improvises a cannon by finding just the right minerals–guess which ones–to mix up an explosive propellant on that distant rocky planet? Sure, my constituents were packed separately. Constituents, though, can be mixed. Sure, my constituents were wet. The TSA, though, didn’t know what they were wet with. It could have been alcohol.

It wasn’t, because I care about safety. Nothing in my past suggests otherwise. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to search me thoroughly, or superficially. And that’s why the TSA agents usually rotely follow the rules of their pantomime, rather than using educated judgment. Educated judgment is too tiring, too expensive, and needed elsewhere.

May I suggest that our new Secretary of Homeland Security reconsider the billions allocated in the 2009 budget to the Transportation Security Agency and its 48,000 employees? Many thoughtful travelers know that the rigamarole we go through on the way to our airline gates is a show to comfort the ignorant, to keep them buying airline tickets. Tell the truth, save our time, save our money. Let us resume our old carefree stroll to the gate. Spend some of the $3 billion on real police work to catch the bad guys. That would make us safer. Maybe those 48,000 TSA patriots could be put to work dismantling the wall on the border with Mexico?

Required to be Better

The Better Place car looks sensible on an island, where drivers will feel constrained by geography, not their batteries. The island must have high taxes on internal-combustion cars, a supplier of electricity willing to communicate often with the electron filling machines or their masters, and drivers who will accept a bossy electronic nanny in their car. More such islands exist in the world than one might first guess.

“The ability to drive a car is not limited by the battery or the range of the car, it’s limited by the range of deployment of the infrastructure.” Shai Agassi, Melbourne, Australia, October 23, 2008.

No Man is an Island, But Israel Is

It is time to relearn geography. Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt are closed. To the west lies the Mediterranean. Politics and the sea isolate the country.

Israel imports all its cars. The tax on internal combution ones is 160 percent; on electric cars it is ten percent. A hybrid, like the Toyota Prius, counts as an internal combustion car. Agassi encouraged this difference in taxation by charming the right Israelis (including President Shimon Peres), many of whom dislike buying oil from unfriendly Arab countries.

Because Israel is such a small island, BP can meet demand for electrons with only 1000 electron stations. The country now has only 200 gasoline stations. This week, gasoline costs about U.S. $5 per gallon.

All electricity in Israel distributed on the national grid comes from the government-owned Israel Electric Corporation. The government backs Agassi’s plan; he hopes the managers of the utility will cooperate with him. If the Israel Electric grid watchers tell BP that one area or another is straining to supply demand, BP can reduce the rate of its battery recharging in that area. Agassi’s dream is that all the additional electricity demand that his cars create will come from renewable sources. Israel is a good place to experiment with solar generation of electricity. Batteries are a good place to store electricity whose time of production doesn’t match its time of consumption.

Last, according to Quin Garcia, the Better Placer running the demonstration car program, few Israelis mind being tracked by a GPS device. After all, they happily carry everywhere their homing-beacon cell phones. The computer in each BP car, running the company’s proprietary software, will tell the driver when the battery’s charge is low, where the nearest recharge or swap station is, and, perhaps, to accelerate and brake more smoothly. Who keeps, and for how long, all that data about each car’s movements? Don’t worry about it, says Mr. Garcia. Apparently, BP will leave those concerns to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s counterpart to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Denmark is also an Island

Recheck your map. Denmark shares only about 50 miles of border with Germany; the rest is seashore. Like Israel, it is easy to saturate with electron stations. The government has imposed a 180 percent registration tax on internal combustion cars to encourage electric ones. Gasoline costs about U.S.$6 per gallon. Denmark is also congenial to BP because it is marvelously rich in wind. The wind blows mainly at night, when Danes are sleeping The big utility, DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas), has actually been giving away its wind-generated electricity to neighboring countries. It has now signed a deal to sell that nocturnal electricity to BP, which hopes to pipe it into the resting automobiles of sleeping Danes. This year, only 20 percent of DONG power comes from wind. The rest, unfortunately, comes from coal. Maybe DONG will build more windmills?

Australia, Demoted

Better Place announced on October 22 that Australia is not a continent, but an island, after all. At least, the eastern coastal stretch from Melbourne through Sydney to Brisbane is a population island. To the east lies the South Pacific, to the west, the sparsely populated desert. AGL Energy says it will supply green electricity for BP cars, but its nearest source is Hydro NSW, a large hydroelectric project. Australians count hydro as green, though American environmentalists do not, because it produces no carbon. Australians now crank out greenhouse gases at the highest per capita rate in the world, because of their coal consumption. It is past time to cut back. The federal government imposes a tax of 33 percent on luxury cars, defined as those costing more than AU $57,000 (US $36,700). So far it imposes no tax on inexpensive internal-combustion cars. Gasoline costs about US$3 per gallon. Agassi hopes that once his firm has set up in the population center of the country, it can expand north and southwest around the coastal rim.

When a Car is a Razor

Or a cellphone. The Better Place customer will buy the car for $20,000 or less and buy a contract. The contract entitles the customer to a specified amount of electricity per time period. BP will retain ownership of the battery, which when manufactured in volume might cost only $10,000. BP plans to get its batteries from AESC, a joint venture by Renault and NEC, that is developing and testing a rechargeable lithium-ion battery for use in automobiles. If the customer doesn’t have to buy the battery, the package is cheap. Republicans, lumberjacks, and eaters of red meat may buy it.

So far, BP has two advantages that most of its competitors lack. It understands that electric cars must be cheap to replace internal combustion cars. It also understands the importance of electron refilling stations. It has chosen to swap out the customer’s old battery quickly, then recharge it slowly in off-peak hours, to avoid straining the electric grid. Chevrolet’s Volt is merely a hybrid, with a gasoline engine to carry drivers past the 40-mile mark. It will also cost $40,000. What disappointing lack of imagination.

A competitor to watch is Daimler-Benz. In a small test-run collaboration with the German electricity supplier, RWE AG, Daimler plans to build 500 charging points in Berlin to power 100 all-electric cars: minute ones from smart and non-minute ones from Mercedes-Benz. It seems to be betting on fast charging, as opposed to Better Place’s fast swapping. What remains to be seen: is Berlin an island?

Thanks to Quin Garcia, head of Supplier Relations and Technical Alliances at Better Place, for his talk to the Silicon Valley chapter of the Electric Auto Association on September 20, 2008.

In the disease “cold spots” that she visited, she found people eating the foods that their great-grandparents had eaten, prepared in the old ways. The animals they eat also live as they did 200 years ago, either wild or domesticated but unconfined.

The farm animals forage for wild plants, moss, and fungi on the hillsides: goats on Crete, sheep and cows in Iceland, chickens that strut about the village in Cameroon, pigs in Okinawa, and pigs, goats, and cows in Copper Canyon in Mexico. The chemical composition of the animals that Miller had tested was striking. They contained less saturated fat and a higher ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats than animals raised in the U.S. using the methods that have become conventional here. The milk of the Icelandic cows is also unusual. It is low in saturated fat and has a high ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats. Physicians think that the high level of omega-3 in Icelanders’ bloodstream helps them ward off depression, in spite of their country’s paucity of sunshine and, now, abundance of bank failures. High omega-3 levels may also help Okinawans hold down their rates of breast and prostate cancers.

The traditional folk that Miller interviewed also eat lots of wild sea creatures. In Crete, they eat sardines, anchovies, dorado, and octopus. Icelanders set the world record for fish consumption: 225 pounds (kilos) per person per year of char, salmon, and cod. Okinawans eat lots of fish, crabs, and shrimp. Fish are rich in omega-3 fats and in Vitamin D, which seems to help prevent breast and prostate cancer.

Wild creatures of the air and land are also an important part of the diet in several of these places. Icelanders roast wild sea birds, such as puffins and guillemots, that live on wild fish that they catch and are full of omega-3′s. Cameroonians must serve wild porcupine at any festive meal. They also make stews of boar, antelope, and boa constrictor.

On November 4, 2008, Californians voted in favor of Proposition 2, the Standards for Confining Farm Animals. The new standards prohibit “the confinement on a farm of pregnant pigs, calves raised for veal, and egg-laying hens in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.” Supporters of Prop 2 argued that the changes would be kinder to the animals. Opponents pointed out that raising costs in California might result in more imported veal, pork, and eggs from unkind states and Mexico. No one argued that animals that can walk about, frisk, and eat the wild food that instinctually appeals to them might be more nutritious. Perhaps they should have.

We have experienced a similar drop in reports of other violent crimes.

These data come from several sources. The Justice Department interviews samples of families. Their employees visit about 50,000 apartments and houses and ask people, in private, what violent treatment they have experienced in the last six months. Those numbers make up the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The Federal Bureau of Investigation collects numbers from police departments all over the country, and puts them into its Uniform Crime Reports. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also gathers numbers from cities and hospital emergency rooms. Each of these survey methods has its sources of inaccuracies. Since the early 1990′s, however, they have all pointed in the same direction: down.

Why Less Battering?

Two-thirds or more of the victims of battering are women. Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, economists at the University of Arkansas and Wake Forest University, have run multivariate regressions on data from the NCVS and from counties. They find that with everything else held equal, women were less likely to be battered if: they lived in a county with legal services for low-income people; or they or their female neighbors stayed longer in school; or they lived in higher-income households or had higher incomes themselves; or they were elderly. Anna Aizer, an economist at Brown University, has found that, with everything else held equal, domestic violence falls when women narrow the gap between their earnings and mens’ earnings.

During the 1990′s and 2000′s, those patterns helped thousands of American women. More towns and counties set up legal services offices for battered women, funded in part by the federal Violence Against Women Act of 2000. More women continued past high school to community college or a four-year college. The economic boom of the 90′s raised many households’ incomes and many women’s personal incomes. Women also dramatically raised their earnings relative to men’s. Last, the whole U.S. population aged.

These studies, and many others, suggest that women with good options outside their relationship can either leave a husband or lover who mistreats them or insist on better treatment.
The numbers support what feminists have argued for centuries, before and since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor.

What now?

Nobody knows. No one knows how severe this recession will be. Nor does anyone know what effect a recession of any given severity would have on U.S. domestic violence rates. Researchers found that when more men lost their jobs in Minneapolis in the 1980′s, battering rates rose (Tauchen and Witte, 1995). On the other hand, economists haven’t studied links between a national economic downturn and rates of domestic violence.

What can we expect?

Hard times. We can be grateful that the rate of domestic violence has fallen by more than half since 1993. The scale, though, of the battering that Americans are now living through, or not, is hard to grasp. A team of Harvard researchers monitored over 2000 federally-funded domestic-violence service centers for one 24-hour day: November 2 to November 3, 2006 (Iyengar, et al., 2008). During that single day, 48,350 people used the service centers. That amounted to 16 out of every 100,000 Americans. That is a much higher number of victims than the Justice Department and FBI reports reveal to us (though possibly on the same trend-line).

Do you know where your shelter is?

Whether or not the recession increases battering, more Americans will suffer more from battering because the resources to help them will shrink. Their savings have already shrunk. Their personal incomes will shrink. The incomes of their friends, cousins, and church members will shrink. The local, county, state, and federally-funded services offered to them will shrink.

Our local domestic-violence service centers will need our help. So may members of our own families. Will we be able to give effective help with less money? Maybe, if we can figure out the best ways to help victims and prevent battering. In future articles, we’ll explore what district attorneys, physicians, activists, and victims think are the best services and deterrents. Maybe we can do better than “maybe.”

Charts from:

Intimate violence: Bureau of Justice Statistics report on intimate violence

Overall violent crime: Bureau of Justice Statistics report on violent crime

Female-to-male earnings: U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage: 2007″ Carmen DeNavas-Wait, et al., Current Population Reports, August 2008.

Further Reading

Anna Aizer, “Wages, Violence, and Health in the Household,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 13494, October 2007.

“Crime and Victims Statistics,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, last revised on August 29, 2008.

Shannon Catalano, “Intimate Partner Violence in the United States,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, last revised on December 17, 2007.

Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, “An Economic Analysis of Domestic Violence,” Review of Social Economy, 1997, vol. 55, issue 3, pages 337-58.

Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, “Explaining the Recent Decline in Domestic Violence,” Contemporary Economic Policy, January 2003.

Radha Iyengar, et al., “50,000 People a Day,” NBER Working Paper No. 13785, February 2008.

Anne Dryden Witte and Helen V. Tauchen, “The Dynamics of Domestic Violence: Does Arrest Matter?,” NBER Working Paper No. 4939, November 1994.

Small and Smaller

Two inventions made the new, tiny laptop and desktop computers possible: the mini-ITX motherboard and low-power CPU’s. VIA Technologies of Taiwan introduced the mini-ITX motherboard in 2001 for industrial applications, such as running television set-top boxes and electronic kiosks. It was much smaller, at 170 mm by 170 mm (6.7 inches), than the most common personal-computer board, the ATX, which was and still is 305 by 244 mm (12 by 9.6 inches).
By design, the mini-ITX’s built-in chips used little electricity. Hobbyists loved mini-ITX’s and insisted on turning them into general-purpose personal computers, often stuffing them into unlikely cases, such as teddy bears and toasters. Retailers noticed. Now the mini-ITX board is an open industry standard and manufactured by many companies, such as Intel and Jetway.

PC builders typically install on a mini-ITX board a CPU by Intel, Advanced Micro Design (AMD), or VIA . Those CPU’s range widely in electricity consumption, performance, and price, depending on the target application and customer. The thriftiest new CPU’s use very much less than the 45 to 65 watts of traditional ones. The innovation here has been astounding. According to their manufacturers’ claims, Intel’s new 1.6 GHz Atom, for example, draws only 4 watts; AMD Geode LX 900 draws only 1.5 watts; and VIA’s new C7 draws “on average” less than 1 watt. The remarkable thing is not how little electricity these CPU’s sip, but how much fast, sophisticated computing they do with so little electricity.

Cool

A side benefit of the Atom and the other low-wattage CPU’s is that they do not radiate as much heat as traditional ones. Manufacturers can carefully design a heat sink, a lump of heat-conducting material that sits on top of the CPU and carries the unwanted, circuit-cooking heat away from it to the computer’s case, and thence to the surrounding air. Some mini-ITX desktop manufacturers even craft heat-radiating ridges or fins on the outside of their case to speed that conduction. Clever passive heat radiation can make it unnecessary to install a fan inside the case. Leaving out a fan reduces the overall electricity usage of the computer even further.

Quiet

Leaving out a fan has another advantage; the machine runs more quietly. For completely silent operation, companies leave out a spinning hard drive. Asus and the other “netbook” sellers offer versions of their laptops with a solid-state drive (SSD), a giant chunk of motionless “flash” memory, instead of a hard drive. So do the mini-ITX desktop makers. Solid-state drives, though, cost more than hard drives of the same capacity. For $100, it is easy now to buy a 500 GB hard disk drive. That $100 will get you only about 8GB of solid state storage. A noise-sensitive person who knows he needs only 8 GB, though, may be happy to trade away the whirring and chugging.

Show Me the Watts

A very low-consumption mini-ITX desktop with good general performance draws 8 watts when actively calculating (the Aleutia E2). A conventional desktop uses between 100 and 200 watts. For comparison, a typical American refrigerator uses about 500 watts when the electric motor is humming. A 100-watt, incandescent light bulb uses, yes, 100 watts.

Tiny is Cute and Sometimes Useful

The Aleutia E2 computer is 115 mm by 115 mm by 35 mm (in inches: 4.5 by 4.5 by 1.4). Logic Supply’s SolidLogic Little Falls GS-L05 computer is 190 mm by 76 mm by 184 mm (in inches: 7.4 by 3 by 7.2). They are small enough to screw onto the back of a display, and come with mounting brackets to do so. People short on space will find that they take up very little.

Prices

The mini-ITX desktop computers from the companies listed below range in price from $285 to over $1000, depending on the performance of their CPU, RAM, graphics chips, etc.

What Operating System?

The vendors of these computers offer Windows XP and Vista, but those operating systems require a large hard disk, more RAM, a fan, and thus more electricity than the thriftiest mini-ITX configurations. Microsoft also levies a roughly $100 license fee per computer for the Windows OS. A free, highly efficient operating system–such as Linux–takes full advantage of the smallest, cheapest, thriftiest, and silent mini-ITX machines (say, 256 MB of RAM and a 4GB solid-state disk). Linux has matured in ease of use, interoperability with Windows and Apple programs, power, and attractiveness. That’s why Asus, Acer, and HP are shipping so many laptop “netbooks” with Linux installed. Mark Shuttleworth‘s Ubuntu team has made a point of designing a version of Linux that is especially pretty and easy to use.

For Whom?

Trading in a big, hot desktop for a tiny, cool one will not cut the average person’s electric bill significantly. People who are short on space, or are delighted by clever, tiny gadgets, or who cherish silence, or are greening every appliance out of principle, or want a low-cost alternative, or can’t wait to connect a keyboard to their toaster should think mini-ITX.

Where to Buy

• Aleutia
• Cappuccino PC
• Itx Depot
• Logic Supply
• Logisys
• Polywell Computers
• Stealth Computer

In Concord, soon afterward, a similar scene unfolded. A 50 year-old Army veteran, Job Shattuck, and hundreds of other men drove their vehicles onto the central town green and sent a message to the judges they should stay out of the courthouses until some solution to the mass foreclosure and eviction crisis could be worked out. The Concord judges, also prudent, went home, too.

Some people have begun calling this loose-knit group the Regulators. As their symbol, they have chosen a sprig of hemlock. One spokesman, Plough Jogger, said, “The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers….”

These events took place in 1786. People kept shutting down courthouses until February of 1787. The practice spread to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maryland, and South Carolina.

What Precipitated these Actions?

What happened was: a war, then a recession, then a call-in of debts. After Independence from Britain, British creditors asked Boston merchants to repay their debts. The sudden and severe post-war recession, though, left the Boston merchants short of cash. They leaned on their debtors. Those people, mostly low-income and rural, had very little cash at all. Some farmers offered to repay their loans in kind, with grain or cows. The merchants rejected those proposals and began legal action. Many men in the bottom tier of debtors had made sacrifices during the War of Independence, had fought in the Continental Army, had felt the heady thrill of standing up for themselves, and still had their guns. They weren’t ready to get thrown out of their homes and livelihoods quite so soon. As they had learned to do during the 1770′s, they organized and resisted.

You say “Viva Che”; I say “Viva Shays”

Americans may remember studying this drama in high school as “Shays’s Rebellion.” Daniel Shays didn’t join in, though, until September 19, when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts indicted three of his friends. Rumors flew that in a week the Court was going to meet again, in Springfield, to indict Luke Day. Shays pulled together seven hundred men and went to Springfield. He got permission to hold a “parade” through the center of town. Lots of on-duty soldiers joined the parade. With drums banging, fifes shrieking, and feet stomping, the marchers’ sentiments were audible. The judges postponed their hearing, then gave up and adjourned.

After this demonstration, sadly, protestors and soldiers met in armed conflict. As best I can tell, as many as ten men were killed in battle or surreptitious attacks. Leaders were arrested, including Shays, convicted and sentenced to death, then pardoned. Shays died many years later in New York, poor and obscure, like nearly everyone else in the rural Northeast.

The Effect on the Elections

The demonstrations, the petitions, and the fighting had political repercussions. In the next Massachusetts elections, candidates who supported relief for debtors won a majority of seats in the Legislature and passed their legislation. The same thing happened in Rhode Island.

Today

As far as I know, the Regulators never flew a flag. If they had, it might have looked like this one:

Parts of this story will repeat themselves, but which ones, where, and with whom? In your area, are people threatened with foreclosure or eviction organizing? Are judges delaying proceedings so that other measures can be experimented with? What are your state legislative and congressional representatives and candidates saying?

Further reading

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, 2001