 Friday, November 14, 2003
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A very disturbing article in the Asia Times by David Scofield, a lecturer at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, describing the actions of an increasingly appeasement-oriented government in South Korea, and how the North continually takes advantage:
The crucial notion of reciprocity in dealings with Pyongyang has become a farce as the North continues to receive largesse from the South - at least $500 million and up to $1 billion for the 2000 summit alone - while offering little discernable in return.
In fact, the North has grown increasingly cantankerous in its dealings with the South, demanding compensation for even the slightest overture. After the Peace Festival on Cheju Island last month, the North Korean delegates refused to leave until they were paid an additional $1.2 million by the South, on top of the "gifts" and monies that had already been loaded on to their plane. In August, during the "celebration of peace" that was to have been the Asian Games, North Korean reporters physically assaulted a group of human rights activists, eliciting silence from the South Korean government and apathy from most citizens. The North Koreans were neither detained nor charged for the violent assault, in sharp contrast to the "anti-North" protesters who were detained for publicly burning North Korean flags. (Emphasis added.)
As Scofield points out, time and again Pyongyang has abused and terrorized the South. Twenty years ago North Korean terrorists killed 21 in an attempt to assassinate ROK President Chun Doo-hwan. Sixteen years ago North Korean terrorists blew up a Korean Airlines airliner killing 116. Tunnels have been dug underneath the DMZ to allow the People's Army to infiltrate the south. North Korea has kidnapped any number of not only South Korean citizens, including its leading film director, but also Japanese citizens as well -- and has the gall to not only admit it, but to demand they return to North Korea!
And how does the South regard these atrocities?
KBS [South Korean public TV], managed by a former editor of the Seoul-based, North-sympathetic Hankyoreh newspaper, has been so glowing in its portrayal of the Northern leadership that fleeing North Korean refugees huddled in China's Jilin province prefer not to listen. Refugees complain that they only hear positive portrayals of the North and its leadership on KBS, a fact that disgusts those who have witnessed the depraved regime first hand.
It's like South Korea is a spouse abused continually by its partner. Embarrassed, ashamed, it just takes the abuse, denies it ever happened, hushes it up, muzzles the victims in a vain attempt to change history. One can almost imagine some leftist politician standing up and saying, well, we in South Korea deserved it.
And to what purpose these excuses? Does it save face -- hardly: to those unafraid to confront the face of evil, the panderers to the North appear cowardly, insignificant, trivial blots on the scrolls of history.
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An informal meeting of US and North Korean scholars just concluded at the University of Georgia:
U.S. and North Korean representatives said they came away from the three-day University-hosted forum on nuclear weapons with hopeful goals of peace.
Interestingly, this was sponsored by (among others) Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa), who was in the news recently - his official trip to North Korea with a dozen or so other Congressional legislators was abruptly canceled by the Bush administration; also, he was one of the prime movers for getting the North Korean women's soccer team to compete in the World Cup, held in the US a few months ago. Weldon is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Kudos to Weldon: these are small things but perhaps they'll have big results.
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Clive via Slashdot notes that Boone County (Indiana, I think) had a problem with their last election:
"I'm assuming the glitch was in the software."
A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the problem. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.
"It was like 144,000 votes cast," said [County Clerk Lisa] Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.
"Believe me, there was nobody more shook up than I was."
Clive uses this to argue in favor of open-source voting machines:
That means it's impossible to really trust them [sic] that the software is secure. They [vendors] might well lie, or simply be unaware of how bad their code is. And wouldn't it suck if a bunch of computer bugs -- or hackers -- messed up an election?
But I think that's precisely the wrong conclusion to draw. First, we don't even know whether the problem was truly caused by software. Were the machines set up and configured correctly? Were they correctly interfaced to the network, to the other computers that rolled up the votes? I.e., was it really a "bug" or an error by Boone County's IT department?
Second -- and this is the really crucial point. When something went wrong, the Boone County people had a number to call. I'm sure the vendor had people onsite within moments of the problem being reported. Why? Because they stand to lose a lot of money!
Say you have a problem with your Apache web server. Who do you call? Guess what, you won't even find a phone number on the Apache site!
Now, I wholeheartedly agree that voting machine software should be reviewed by independent experts: possibly by NIST, or independent nongovernmental groups, perhaps even by the public at large. The integrity of the republic rests on these machines functioning properly. However, the last thing I want is to use code whose provenance is unknown or questionable.
Again, the issue is accountability.
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Oct Dec
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