I’m a Californian in the Bay Area and I work in tech. I also want a self-driving car. I really, really want a self driving car. I will probably not be able to safely drive in a few more years, and even today I avoid it as much as I can.

All of that said, this is absolutely ridiculous. In a democracy, the citizens need to know what their government is doing, otherwise how are they going to know who or what to vote for? If your government is keeping secrets from you, that’s removing that area from the democratic feedback that’s supposed to be more robust than an authoritarian system in that it not only reflects the will of the people, but provides a “market” for politics.

In some cases - intelligence work being one example - we have needed to develop a compromise position between transparency and being able to have a program at all. We tend to just accept it today, but historically it has lead to major debates. Even with our imperfect compromise, we end up with rogue programs in the intelligence services that are not only withheld from the American people, but from the very government that’s supposed to be overseeing it in the place of the people. I’m not going to get into that here, though.

I’ve also done military and intelligence work, both for the government and for private companies working for the government. Companies have pretty massive leeway in classifying things as trade secrets or deliberative documents, which can shield them from things like Freedom of Information Act requests. Actually classifying something as secret takes a bit more work, but the lowest levels of classification are generally left to the discretion of the authors.

The government, over the last couple of decades, has pushed more and more government function into private hands. As the corporations gained government levels of power by controlling the programs, they’ve pushed for more and more concessions. Whether it’s ideology, bribery, or just lack of budget, corporations have vendors who dictate the rules of their contracts with the government.

The point is that it should be the government making the call that the operations parameters of the new Raytheon missile system are top secret on the basis of national security. I’m fine with that, and I’m fine with arguing against it. I’m fine with not knowing the identities of our people in Moscow or our satellite capabilities.

I am not fine when governments use their questionably legitimate powers to control that kind of information in order to protect a private company’s profits, especially if it is allowing the private companies to make the call as to what constitutes a trade secret. This is exactly what’s going on with fracking, where they don’t have to tell the communities what’s being pumped into their ecosystems.

I recognize that not everything can be open source, as much as I might like it to be. I am from back in the days when we’d talk with RMS and ESR on usenet, and the cypherpunks we’re writing pgp in three lines of perl so we could add it as an email sig. I’m very much part of the “information wants to be free” generation, even if I later ended up with a more nuanced view on some items.

My position is this: the implementation details are fine as trade secrets. We want people to be able to develop the tech, and we need to let them make money off of it. That’s our system right now. But things like safety performance, certification criteria, and above all the real world behaviors and impacts of these systems needs to be made public. Trust me when I say I don’t have any particular trust in the average voter, but we still need the information to be out there, otherwise nothing is going to work.

This is just broken. I am sure San Francisco would benefit from an efficient fleet of automated cabs. I know I’d benefit from being able to commute without having to drive. I’m not going to get into the logistics of more public transportation (which I also support), but I do feel that, if and when it finally works, self-driving technology will be a boon. At the same time, we need to be able to decide what kind of impact (so to speak) we’re willing to take on our way there. It’s not California’s job to make Waymo profitable.

“this is not a paywall” fuck you all the same.