A little internet privacy is like being a yellow belt in karate

One of the things that Sam Peltzman most famously taught us (or perhaps reminded us) is that one should always pay attention to income effects, because they can show up in odd places.

Income effects are simple at a first pass - if I have more income I can buy more of a product. Most goods are normal goods, meaning that demand rises as income rises. Some goods are inferior goods, meaning that as incomes go up, people buy less of them (e.g. Walmart clothes), because they substitute to better alternatives. So far, so easy.

As microeconomists have known for a long time though, income effects can be induced by changes in the price of goods, rather than directly through income changes. If the price of rice increases, the first order effect is likely to be a substitution effect - rice is now expensive relative to wheat, so I buy more bread and less rice. But there is also an income effect: the real bundle of goods I can now purchase has shrunk, which is effectively a decrease in income.

As a result, the fact that income has decreased can induce other changes in demand which can partially or totally offset the original effect. In other words, the first pass effect is that rice consumption goes down (the substitution effect), but because I'm now poorer overall I have to cut my purchases of luxuries and buy more rice than I otherwise would. If the income effect is large enough to offset the substitution effect completely, the good is called a Giffen good - when the price of the good goes up, demand can actually increase. Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller carried out an experiment in China where they showed that for some really poor Chinese people, rice really is a Giffen good. When its price increases, they buy more of it, because they're now so poor it's the only way to get enough calories.

Which brings us to Mr Peltzman. He famously argued that income-like effects can lead to puzzling results in a wide variety of settings, most notably risk-compensation (which became known as the Peltzman Effect). If you spend government money to make roads safer or mandate seatbelt use, people will have a lower chance of dying from a given type of driving (similar to the substitution effect). But there's an income effect too - the budget set of allowable risky driving behavior has increased. Peltzman argued that this can in some cases totally offset the gains, as people drive in a more risky manner on the safer roads to maintain the same overall level of risk.

The classic case of Peltzman-like effects that people do seem to instinctively grasp is self-defence knowledge. In theory, knowing a little karate has only improved one's ability to fight relative to knowing zero karate. But the problem is the income effect. The ability to defend oneself can either be consumed entirely as an increase in safety, or it can be spent by substituting towards talking $#!& to bullies. Thus the overall level of safety can go up or down as a result of being able to fight back. The popular conception is that people overestimate their fighting ability and 'spend' more than they actually had, leading to Giffen-like behavior at low levels of self-defence knowledge.

And now it turns out that there's inadvertent Peltzman effects going on with internet privacy.

Several researchers with Tor have described how using the internet privacy software Tor results in your IP address receiving permanently much greater scrutiny from the NSA. Even searching for Tor online is enough to get you logged.

At high levels of security, this is still probably worth it if you value privacy. Tor is an incredibly powerful tool to avoid being tracked. Unfortunately there's still lots of other exploits they can use to target your computer, but Tor itself is pretty reliable.

Since the NSA doesn't like this, they are determined to raise the income effect stakes a lot. If you get slack and only use Tor sometimes, you have almost certainly increased the chances of your behavior being tracked and monitored. Before you had the blessing of anonymity. When you embark down the road of privacy, the NSA makes sure that goes away for good. Tor is a Basilisk - a single search for it is enough to get you permanently flagged. So if you're going to start down that road, it's got to be the full retard or nothing at all.

The reality is that maintaining anonymity is hard. Really hard. It is a form of tradecraft, as the spies put it. It needs an obsessive attention to detail, and a willingness to forgo a number of aspects of the internet (flash video, for instance, as well as dealing with slow loading times). And unfortunately, the predicament is quite similar to the position of the IRA viz Mrs Thatcher - the NSA only needs to get lucky once, whereas you need to get lucky every day.

The unfortunate reality is that for most people, no protection is probably safer than a little protection. And even then, the only reason that 'no protection' offers any protection is because the internet is simply too large for the NSA to be able to store everything that goes on there. On the other hand, they are able to store everything done by Tor users.

The one saving grace is that the NSA is not actually the NKVD. For the most part, the NSA is only interested in tracking terrorists, and passing the occasional Silk Road drug dealer onto the DEA. Not only that, they are reluctant to blow the details of the data collection process (any more than they already have) by having the details of it disclosed in court cases unimportant to the NSA's mission. So they're probably not going after you for buying that Adderall online, even though they could.

On the other hand, the Snowden disclosures have massively reduced the cost of the NSA using information at trials, since a lot of the details are now already known, so maybe that protection has decreased too.

Income effects are rarely counterintuitive once they're pointed out, but they have a tendency to be lurking in places that you weren't thinking hard about.

Unfortunately, none of them are good in this story.

Against Tasers

Via Drudge comes a story of our time, of Scott O’Neil, a cop in Mount Sterling, Ohio dealing with an arrest of a 9 year old boy for skipping school. That premise alone may sound ridiculous, but bear with me.

[O'Neil] went to the boy’s S. Market Street home about 8:30 a.m. to serve a complaint filed against Jared for truancy.

Jared — listed on the report as between 5-foot-5 and 5-foot-8 inches tall and between 200 and 250 pounds — refused to cooperate. He begged his mother to let him go to school rather than with the officer, but Perry told her son it was too late.

O’Neil wrote that after repeated warnings, he pulled Jared from the couch, but he “dropped to the floor and became dead weight ... flailing around,” and the boy lay on his hands to prevent being handcuffed.

So what do we have so far? We're using a police officer to deal with the problem of a kid skipping school. The kid seems pretty hefty, and isn't going along with the officer. It seems like the officer might have to actually grapple with the kid to get his arms free and handcuffed. 

That's what you'd think would happen, right?

O’Neil demonstrated the electrical current from the Taser into the air “as a show of force.” Then, he wrote, Perry told her son to do as O’Neil said or he would be shocked. 

So you threatened to taser a non-violent 9 year old child. Strong words, but perhaps the threat might have been useful. But surely you weren't actually planning on tasering a kid who may or may not be of sufficient age for criminal responsibility ?

The report indicates that after being shocked once, Jared still didn’t cooperate and was shocked a second time. An ambulance was called, but Jared had no sign of injury; Perry signed a waiver for medical treatment. Jared was taken to the sheriff’s office, and a delinquency count of resisting arrest was added to his truancy charge.

Let's all give a round of applause to Officer Scott O'Neil for the 'pathetic cowardice in the line of duty' award! You sure showed that child what for! Without the thin blue line standing with tasers at the ready, why we might have all sorts of children not turning up to school.

This is the problem with tasers. They were brought in, as far as I understand, to give cops a means to apply force that is unlikely (but not impossible) to be fatal.

So without the taser, the cop has the following options:

Pistol: 

Cost to perp: Fatal

Cost to cop: High - psychological trauma of killing someone, mandatory review of their actions, possible career implications. Has the benefit of guaranteeing the cop's safety in a violent confrontation.

Physical Altercation:

Cost to perp: Low. You'll get resisting arrest and might get a violent handcuffing, but you'll live.

Cost to cop: Medium - physically taxing, might get hit, and runs the risk that confrontation could turn nasty if the perp tries to grab your gun, or pull a knife etc.

But now, we introduce into the mix the taser:

Taser:

Cost to perp: Low to medium - guarantees a 'resisting arrest' charge, painful but medical complications are rare

Cost to cop: Zero. Nobody gets hassled for tasing someone. Guarantees the cop's safety about as well as a pistol.

The idea was that the taser was meant to be a substitute for the use of lethal force as a way of ending violent confrontations - instead of reaching for your pistol to kill a subject, you can tase him instead. Since nobody wants more perps to be shot than strictly necessary, this is a benefit. It also stops cops having to go straight to the threat of using a pistol as an escalation of physical confrontation. And this is an improvement too - you don't want to have loaded pistols pointed at yelling and violent suspects any more often than necessary, because they have a tendency to go off in the heat of the moment.

And to this end, the taser is useful. Although frankly, I'm not sure how often this really happens - if the cop truly fears for their life, I imagine they're still going to reach for their pistol, as their main priority is stopping you killing them at all costs.

But what the policy guys didn't seem to take into account is the other substitution - that tasers would be used as a substitute for any kind of physical altercation. 

And this has happened way, way more than the substitution of tasers for pistols, in part because situations that might call for a physical altercation are far more common than situations that might require somebody being shot. 

Cops tend to view tasers as magic button they can press to enforce compliance from people. It's actually a lower cost to the cop than risking a punch in the face, and as long as you come up with some story about the person being threatening, your superiors will go along with it. Good news for the cop.

But it's bad news for everybody else, because the end result is exactly the kind of story above. You threaten the subject with a taser for anything less than full compliance. Subject doesn't comply. You tase them.

Face it - the only thing that makes the story above newsworthy is that the kid was 9 years old. If the kid had been 17, this would be a complete 'dog bites man' story.

But is that what we want? Someone lying on the ground gets tased instead of having their hands grabbed and cuffed?

I want the use of physical force against civilians to be personally costly for the police. That forces the cop to work harder to avoid inflicting harm on the person they're arresting. 

With a taser, there is no incentive at all to wrestle with a suspect - just zap them for anything short of complete compliance.

If you're pissed off at the current story, you should recognise that it's just the logical end point of the current policy. We may end up with fewer fatal shootings, but we end up with a lot more cop-on-civilian violence overall.

We have the law enforcement equivalent of the battlefield nuclear weapon - the good news is that when you nuke the enemy, fewer people will be killed. Hurrah!

But battlefield nukes are actually very dangerous in a different sense, because they increase the risk that nuclear weapons will actually be used. The incredibly negative consequences of nukes are a feature, not a bug - they force countries to think very seriously about whether to fire them.

We've given all our battlefield commanders the availability of small, no-questions-asked nukes, and then we act surprised when the commanders start using nukes to deal with minor border skirmishes.

In foreign policy, nobody would be stupid enough to implement a policy like that. 

But that's exactly what we've done with law enforcement.