OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
Crab season isn’t
ill fated, but it
needs attention
S
ome may wonder if the 2017 Dungeness crab season is
ill-fated: First delayed by weeks to make certain crab were
free of domoic acid toxin, delayed again after processors
proposed lowering the price paid to crabbers, and then it started
with a capsizing that could have cost five lives except for quick
intervention by the Ballad.
Today’s crabbers and fishermen have to be smart and rational to
survive — literally and economically.
Crab around the mouth of the Columbia this season never
exceeded safe levels of marine toxin, but the industry is united in
striving to preserve the reputation of Dungeness crab as a pure,
premium product. For this reason alone, it’s sensible to take every
precaution.
Delays in the season also often have strategic components
involving jockeying over price, and competition over crabbing
grounds. Sometimes crabbers wait to allow an early-season storm
to pass. In this instance, the closure went longer than most anyone
wanted.
Missing the holiday celebrations when crab are a popular menu
option led to downward pressure on the ex-vessel price. Beyond
this, some West Coast processors and fishermen have been playing
hard ball for generations, with the situation becoming more pro-
nounced with monopolization on the processor side. As a society,
we should always advocate for fair compensation for all economic
players.
Danger in the Dungeness fishery is infamous. The risks all
argue for decent paydays and for continuing scrutiny of safety
measures.
It must be said that many crabbers resent and distrust outside
efforts to intervene in how the fishery is conducted. Deference is
warranted in such a specialized field. However, it must be won-
dered whether there are ways to improve crabbing’s cost/bene-
fit ratio. It is inherently hazardous to make a mad dash out into
the wild Pacific over one of the world’s most notorious river bars
in the middle of storm season. Regulators and the industry must
continue trying to minimize risks and maximize local economic
benefits.
There is a popular saying making the rounds of local social
media: “Fishermen’s live matter.” They do indeed. We owe it to
them to be supportive.
Public records reforms need
continuing attention, action
I
f Oregonians have a shared self-image, it’s that we may see
inside our state and local governments. These days that expec-
tation is often thwarted, if not challenged.
We on the Lower Columbia River got an education in how a
misguided governor could assume a proprietary attitude toward
his office. At the close of Gov. John Kitzhaber’s third term, he uni-
laterally moved to ban gillnet fishing on the Columbia. It was an
opaque process that defied logical, scientific explanation.
Following Kitzhaber’s resignation, there was a welter of
requests for communications that occurred behind the wall of the
governor’s suite. Our newspaper group made requests regarding
the gestation of the gillnet decision.
The essence of why access to public records matter is this:
Citizens pay for this government and it’s not the property of those
who come and go in its leadership.
Kitzhaber’s successor, Gov. Kate Brown, routinely invokes
transparency and ethics as an applause line.
Meanwhile, the substantive work on public records reform is
happening within a task force convened by Attorney General Ellen
Rosenblum. The reality which the task force confronts includes
the some 550 exemptions to the public records statute. Another
reality is fee-creep. Many agencies charge onerous fees for pro-
ducing records.
Among the significant preliminary recommendations the AG’s
task force has issued is to set a time limit for agencies’ response to
records requests.
Task force members must grasp the complexity of what they
confront, but they must not use that complexity as an excuse for
inertia. In a recent article, task force member Jeb Bladine noted
that the 550 exemptions to the public records statute cropped up
one at a time, over 50 years. It would be unrealistic, he said, to
expect they could be swept away all at once.
Attorney General Rosenblum in a Monday interview noted that
the proliferation of electronic records is a new, complicating fac-
tor. “Now we’re buckling under the strain of technology and a law
that’s creaking along,” she said.
The task force’s first steps are encouraging. The key to making
real change is tenacity. Rosenblum and her task force must have
staying power, and their recommendations need serious legislative
action.
Tipping point: online and scared
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times News Service
A
nd so it came to pass that in
the winter of 2016 the world
hit a tipping point that was
revealed by the most unlikely col-
lection of actors:
Vladimir Putin,
Jeff Bezos, Don-
ald Trump, Mark
Zuckerberg and the
Macy’s department
store. Who’d have
thunk it?
And what was this tipping point?
It was the moment when we real-
ized that a critical mass of our lives
and work had shifted away from the
terrestrial world to a realm known
as “cyberspace.” That is to say, a
critical mass of our interactions had
moved to a realm where we’re all
connected but no one’s in charge.
After all, there are no stop-
lights in cyberspace, no police offi-
cers walking the beat, no courts,
no judges, no God who smites evil
and rewards good, and certainly no
“1-800-Call-If-Putin-Hacks-Your-
Election.” If someone slimes you on
Twitter or Facebook, well, unless it
is a death threat, good luck getting
it removed, especially if it is done
anonymously, which in cyberspace
is quite common.
Hours of our day
And yet this realm is where we
now spend increasing hours of our
day. Cyberspace is now where we
do more of our shopping, more
of our dating, more of our friend-
ship-making and sustaining, more
of our learning, more of our com-
merce, more of our teaching, more
of our communicating, more of our
news-broadcasting and news-seek-
ing, and more of our selling of
goods, services and ideas.
It’s where both our presi-
dent-elect and the leader of ISIS can
communicate with equal ease with
tens of millions of their respective
followers through Twitter — with-
out editors, fact-checkers, libel law-
yers or other filters.
And, I would argue, 2016 will
be remembered as the year when
we fully grasped just how scary
that can be — how easy it was for a
presidential candidate to tweet out
untruths and half-truths faster than
anyone could correct them, how
cheap it was for Russia to intervene
on Trump’s behalf with hacks of
Democratic operatives’ computers
and how unnerving it was to hear
Yahoo’s chief information secu-
rity officer, Bob Lord, say that his
company still had “not been able
to identify” how 1 billion Yahoo
accounts and their sensitive user
information were hacked in 2013.
Even President Barack Obama
was taken aback by the speed at
which this tipping point tipped.
“I think that I underestimated the
degree to which, in this new infor-
mation age, it is possible for misin-
formation, for cyberhacking and so
forth, to have an impact on our open
societies,” he told ABC News’ “This
Week.”
At Christmas, Amazon.com
taught yet more traditional retail-
ers how hard the cybertipping point
has hit retailing. Last week, Macy’s
said it was slashing 10,000 jobs and
closing dozens of stores because,
according to The Wall Street Jour-
nal, “Macy’s hasn’t been able to
solve consumers’ shift to online
shopping.”
At first Zuckerberg, the Face-
book founder, insisted that fake
news stories carried by Facebook
“surely had no impact” on the elec-
tion and that saying so was “a pretty
crazy idea.” But in a very close elec-
tion it was not crazy at all.
Facebook — which wants all the
readers and advertisers of the main-
stream media but not to be sad-
dled with its human editors and
fact-checkers — is now taking more
seriously its responsibilities as a
news purveyor in cyberspace.
Critical mass
Alan S. Cohen, chief commer-
cial officer of the cybersecurity firm
Illumio (I am a small shareholder),
noted in an interview on siliconAn-
gle.com that the reason this tipping
point tipped now was because so
many companies, governments, uni-
versities, political parties and indi-
viduals have concentrated a criti-
cal mass of their data in enterprise
data centers and cloud computing
environments.
Ten years ago, Cohen said, bad
guys did not have the capabilities
to get at all this data and extract it,
but “now they do,” and as more cre-
ative tools like big data and artifi-
cial intelligence get “weaponized,”
this will become an even bigger
problem. It’s a huge legal, moral
and strategic problem, and it will
require, Cohen said, “a new social
compact” to defuse.
Work on that compact has to start
with every school teaching chil-
dren digital civics. And that begins
with teaching them that the inter-
net is an open sewer of untreated,
unfiltered information, where they
need to bring skepticism and critical
thinking to everything they read and
basic civic decency to everything
they write.
A Stanford Graduate School
of Education study published in
November found “a dismaying
inability by students to reason about
information they see on the inter-
net. Students, for example, had a
hard time distinguishing advertise-
ments from news articles or identi-
fying where information came from.
... One assessment required middle
schoolers to explain why they might
not trust an article on financial plan-
ning that was written by a bank
executive and sponsored by a bank.
The researchers found that many
students did not cite authorship or
article sponsorship as key reasons
for not believing the article.”
Prof. Sam Wineburg, the lead
author of the report, said: “Many
people assume that because young
people are fluent in social media
they are equally perceptive about
what they find there. Our work
shows the opposite to be true.”
In an era when more and more of
our lives have moved to this digital
realm, that is downright scary.
Cold War relic, present-day threat
By CHARLES
KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post Writers Group
W
ASHINGTON — You
can kick the can down the
road, but when Kim Jong
Un announces, as he did last Sun-
day, that “we have
reached the final
stage in prepara-
tions to test-launch
an intercontinen-
tal ballistic rocket,”
you are reaching
the end of that road.
Since the early 1990s, we have
offered every kind of inducement
to get North Korea to give up its
nuclear program. All failed misera-
bly. Pyongyang managed to extort
money, food, oil and commercial
nuclear reactors in exchange. But
it was all a swindle. North Korea
was never going to give up its nukes
because it sees them as the ultimate
guarantee of regime survival.
The North Koreans believe that
nukes confer inviolability. Saddam
Hussein was invaded and deposed
before he could acquire them. Kim
won’t let that happen to him. That’s
why Thae Yong Ho, a recent high-
level defector, insisted that “As long
as Kim Jong Un is in power, North
Korea will never give up its nuclear
weapons, even if it’s offered $1 tril-
lion or $10 trillion in rewards.”
Meanwhile, they have advanced.
They’ve already exploded a handful
of nuclear bombs. And they’ve twice
successfully launched satellites,
which means they have the ICBM
essentials. If they can miniatur-
ize their weapons to fit on top of the
rocket and control re-entry, they’ll be
able to push a button in Pyongyang
and wipe out an American city.
The options
The options are stark:
(1) Pre-emptive attack on its mis-
sile launching facilities. Doable
but reckless. It is the option most
likely to trigger an actual war. The
North Koreans enjoy both conven-
tional superiority and proximity: a
vast army poised at the Demilita-
rized Zone only 30 miles from Seoul.
Americans are not going to fight
another land war in Asia.
(2) Shoot down the test ICBM, as
advocated by The Wall Street Jour-
nal. Assuming we can. Democrats
have done their best to abort or slow
down anti-missile defenses since
Ronald Reagan proposed them in
the early 1980s. Even so, we should
be able to intercept a single, rela-
tively primitive ICBM of the sort
North Korea might be capable of.
Such a red line could be a powerful
deterrent.
(3) Return tactical U.S. nuclear
weapons to South Korea. They were
withdrawn in 1991 by George H.W.
Bush in the waning days of the Cold
War. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union
responded in kind. A good idea in
general, but not on the Korean Pen-
insula. Pyongyang had railed con-
stantly against their presence, but
they did act as a deterrent to any con-
templated North Korean aggression.
Which might make them a useful
bargaining chip
(4) Economic leverage on China,
upon which Pyongyang depends for
its survival. Donald Trump seems to
suggest using trade to pressure China
to get North Korea to desist. The
problem is that China has shown no
evidence of being willing to yield a
priceless strategic asset — a wholly
dependent client state that acts as a
permanent thorn and distraction to
U.S. power in the Pacific Rim —
because of mere economic pressure.
The principal strategic challenge
facing the United States is the rise of
revisionist powers — Russia, China
and Iran — striving to expel Amer-
ican influence from their regions. In
comparison, the Korean problem is
minor, an idiosyncratic relic of the
Cold War. North Korea should be a
strategic afterthought, like Cuba. And
it would be if not for its nukes.
That’s a big if. A wholly unpre-
dictable, highly erratic and often irra-
tional regime is acquiring the capac-
ity to destroy an American city by
missile. That’s an urgent problem.
North Korea may be just an unex-
ploded ordnance of a long-concluded
Cold War. But we cannot keep
assuming it will never go off.