The 2011 Mayoral contests represent a unique opportunity to make American cities work again. Cities have already begun an inexorable return to relevance as refuges from crushing commutes, and as havens of culture and innovation. Our economy is increasingly hitched to our ability to develop and capitalize on innovative ideas, and that innovation can’t happen when folks are trapped in their cars and isolated in the matrix of suburban sprawl. Cities are the American future.
But in the early 1970’s, they were left for dead: victims of race and class warfare, they became abandoned places – a place where people work or would go to the symphony, but not places to build a life or raise children. Formerly walkable, livable cities degraded into a-la-carte destinations you could get into and out of quickly as 1950’s visions of suburbia gained dominance.
With this shift, cities’ political influence waned, and city politics evolved into a top-down enterprise. Power brokers, political clubs, and church groups conferred power on those who would play the game and wait their turn. In Baltimore, city politics became either a launching pad for state office, or a refuge of scoundrels whose city fiefdoms became ends in and of themselves. Instead of working for Baltimore, all too often our politicians have tried to enrich themselves at its expense. With minimal popular interest and the atrophy of the press, there has been increasingly less oversight. So the machine has lumbered on – unencumbered by the tempering force of investigation, new blood, or real political imagination.
In other contexts, leaders are judged on their ability to lead and deliver tangible improvements. But in our cities, it has become enough for our politicians to just not screw things up even worse than they found them. Enough isverigeapotek.com. It’s time to move forward again.
In 2010 we saw some new trends: long-term incumbents who fit the old standard – of merely not being demonstrably corrupt or incompetent – were booted out. And not because of typical anti-incumbent anger, but because people saw something else: that maybe we could demand better.
In Baltimore, 27 year-old newcomer Bill Ferguson delivered a decisive blow to 27-year incumbent State Senator George Della. Gregg Bernstein defeated long-time incumbent Baltimore City States Attorney Patricia Jessamy. These races shared two things in common: no one thought they could upset the machine, and they used the Internet to organize financial and ideological support.
The simultaneous rise in the demand for urban living along with the use of the Internet for political and community organizing will usher in an era of unprecedented change in American cities. With the 2010 races, the old system was put on notice; in 2011 it will begin to be dismantled.
I support Otis Rolley in his candidacy for Mayor of Baltimore in 2011. At 36, Otis is part of the new guard. He’s qualified – he has a masters’ degree in City Planning from MIT. He has been in Baltimore since 1998. He served 10 years in the public sector and two in the private sector. As an executive, he led the Baltimore City Department of Planning and – shockingly – produced the city’s first actual master plan in 39 years.
In his time at Planning and as a Chief of Staff, Otis was struck with one question: can’t we do better than this?
Indeed we can. Leadership is about creating a culture based on shared values. We need a leader who is willing to stand up for his values and the values of people who care and work hard, and not allow entrenched career “slugs” to dilute those efforts. He proved he could do this at the Department of Planning, empowering those who had a vision for the city, pushing out those that did not.
But while Otis was able to turn around a non-performing department and produce a workable plan for the city, he ultimately realized that the only way to see its recommendations executed was as Mayor. We should give him this opportunity.
Otis can turn around our city the same way he turned around a department: by creating a new culture. Frankly, there are a lot of people in city government who should be looking for other kinds of work. We can start there.
Otis understands that we need to start allocating our resources differently. Economic development has for too long been about big projects, like the currently proposed $900 Million Baltimore Arena redevelopment. While this plan would assuredly enrich some developers and provide ample future backing for political operators looking to entrench themselves for a lifetime in Maryland politics, we should instead be thinking about new ways to capitalize on Baltimore’s biggest economic development assets: its people and its fortunate geography.
If instead we were to invest $900 Million in the infrastructure to support entrepreneurial enterprises and startups, we could potentially create tens of thousands of jobs across a wide range of income levels. A new startup-friendly Baltimore could outperform other regions in terms of standard and cost of living as well as access to a world-class workforce. A strategic focus on manufacturing, both large and small using the latest technologies, could restore what was once a thriving middle class. Arenas, convention centers, stadiums and hotel subsidies just deliver more jobs that don’t even pay a living wage. Otis knows we can do better.
In 2011, we have a choice: do we want to be a good city, or a great city? Otis has a vision that he will articulate over the coming months as part of what should be an open and healthy debate around the future of our city, and not about personal politics. As I have come to know Otis over the past 14 months, I am confident that he is the right leader for Baltimore’s future. If you give him an opportunity to serve, you will not be disappointed.
Baltimore is Otis’ first priority. He has no aspirations for higher office. He wants to work for Baltimore and for all of you. In 2011, we have the wind at our backs – cities are on the upswing, and the Internet is connecting us in unprecedented ways. It’s time to take back our cities and make them the vital, beautiful, functional, and inclusive places we all know they can be. Otis Rolley can help us do that. This is Baltimore’s moment; let’s seize it together.
Firesheep is a startling plugin that allows anyone to easily impersonate the login credentials of others for dozens of sites. It works on any unencrypted WiFi connection and is stupid-simple to setup. It can be done by anyone in a matter of minutes.
Just to illustrate how easy it is to setup, I was on Virgin America flight VX67 from Washington to San Francisco yesterday.
All I had to do to get going with Firesheep was download Firefox (onto my new MacBook Air) using the in-flight WiFi, and then download the Firesheep plugin for Firefox. Just drag the plugin into Firefox and it installs. Reload Firefox and you’re ready to go.
Click “Start Capturing” and you are instantly snooping on every interaction occurring on the WiFi network. In my case yesterday, that meant snooping on everybody who was using the WiFi on my flight.
What’s At Risk?
Within just a couple of minutes, I was able to impersonate 3 people on Facebook (updating their status, exploring friends, doing anything I wanted to – of course I didn’t). Twitter is also at risk. So is Gmail. And so is Amazon.
Access to Amazon is perhaps the most worrying. Once I realized I was in under someone else’s Amazon account, I quickly shut down Firesheep: this is some scary stuff. What if I had changed the shipping address for the account and done a one-click order on a $10,000 watch or a $2,000 plasma TV?
This was all at 37,000 feet in an airplane (and way more entertaining than SkyMall). Like taking candy from a baby.
Even More Shocking…
Later in the afternoon I was at one of the Internet Industry’s high-profile events: Web 2.0 Summit produced by O’Reilly. There on the hotel’s WiFi, which was setup to serve the summit, I ran Firesheep. Within seconds I had compromised about 25 accounts, including the Twitter accounts of O’Reilly Media and TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis. Change passwords, tweet-as-them, friend and de-friend people? No problem. Here’s what I saw. (Note that my accounts were vulnerable as well.)
How It Works
I have not studied this exploit carefully enough yet to explain it in full detail, but my understanding is that on an open WiFi network, it’s trivial to capture in cleartext all of the web interactions of the users around you on the same IP network. Once you can do that (something Firesheep achieves using the pcap library, capturing port 80) then you can sniff for credential information specific to particular websites. Firesheep supports a couple of dozen out of the box, including all major social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Gowalla, Foursquare) but also some more obscure sites relevant to coders (Github, Pivotal Tracker). Ouch. It even has an “import” function so others can write exploits for sites that Firesheep doesn’t know about yet.
The bottom line is that these sites all need to enforce the use of HTTPS (secure HTTP) rather than HTTP *before* the login handshake occurs. This will force some emergency changes by many sites over the next few days.
This is not a new exploit – it’s always been possible to do this; Firesheep just makes it stupid easy.
A Note On Passwords vs. Encryption
You’ve encountered WiFI networks that require WEP or WPA encryption passwords. These are secure from Firesheep’s reach. However, there are a lot of WiFi networks that require “passwords” (such as those at coffee shops, hotels, etc) that are in fact open networks. Many do not even require you to login to them to exploit them via Firesheep. To put it in perspective, every Starbucks location is vulnerable to attack.
The only for-sure ways to stay safe from Firesheep for now are to 1) use only encrypted WiFi networks (that use WPA or equivalent), 2) use wired networks that you trust. Any open WiFi network can and will be vulnerable to this attack until vulnerable sites switch to using HTTPS for all authentication. Be very careful out there, folks.
Update: After talking with a few folks and thinking through this exploit a little further, I can offer a bit more complete of an explanation of how it works and why blocking it is so difficult.
The exploit does not actually capture the *password* itself (which is actually transmitted using HTTPS) but rather captures the authentication credentials which are stored (and visible) in the session cookie *after* HTTPS authentication has completed.
So, even a one-time password will not address this. And the reason boils down to ads and other unsecure content that folks want to serve as part of the site experience. To fix this problem would require serving ads (and images) via HTTPS, which would require major computing resources and will have a major impact on the web.
According to one security researcher I spoke to this evening (who formerly ran Yahoo mail), there’s no obvious way around this other than to allow both HTTP and HTTPS content to be served from the same site during the same session, something which presently causes an alert to the user (which would have the result of freaking them out). Such an alert is a good thing; turning it off is not a net gain. It shouldn’t be up to the user to have to sort out which resources the site is requesting should be secure and which ones do not need to be.
So, it’s a real dilemma. No one seems to be sure how to really address it other than to eliminate or curb the use of open networks, which is probably where it’s going to end up. So open WiFi is now basically over. Expect places that had been using it to post publicly available WPA passwords, which solves the problem.
Last week another Maryland elected official, Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson, was arrested – along with his wife – on federal corruption charges. And once again, land development deals were the problem: a relatively inexperienced public official was lured by small profits gained by handing out development deals to a few cronies.
Shockingly, the press and the public feign surprise every time this happens. The Washington Post’s coverage of the Johnson arrest earnestly reports that the county seems to have developed a “pay to play” culture – and that you “don’t hear that about other jurisdictions.”
What about Baltimore city, where just nine short months ago former Mayor Sheila Dixon was convicted for accepting gifts and bribes from developers? Granted, Dixon was dealing in a few thousand dollars worth of gift cards and baubles while Johnson and his wife were flushing $100,000 checks and stuffing tens of thousands of dollars in their underwear. But one gets the impression that this may be a result of Dixon’s relative inexperience. Given more time, she would likely have learned to ask for more.
How did we get here? How is it that public-private development deals can be handed out to cronies and first-time “developers?”
First, too many people that seek public office expect to be financially enriched by it. There’s a reason it’s called public “service” – it is meant to be a sacrifice made in exchange for the opportunity to participate in private enterprise. When politicians go into office expecting that the power of public office should also include big money, they’ll be disappointed. Only crooked deals can fulfill those expectations.
Second, we have collectively lost sight of what “development” actually means. Today when people say “development,” they almost always mean turning an unsuspecting piece of land “into” something, whether it’s houses, a shopping mall, a hotel, or a stadium. And sometimes that fulfills a real need.
But too often, these are projects that we don’t truly need – but they do hold the potential to make a few people pretty wealthy. A small-time developer can double his wealth over a few years. But like a small-time addict, the beast must be fed: with new land, new projects, new deals. Because very often the gains are one-time hits. A housing project might make a five time return on investment. To keep the perpetual motion machine going, there must always be new deals.
This is where local elected officials come in. Mayors and county executives have just enough power to direct their agenda towards development projects that can enrich developers. Often, cronies of elected officials will become developers just to take advantage of their proximity to this fresh supply of new land deals. This seems to have been the case with Johnson. One of Johnson’s golf buddies had never developed anything, but was given a no-bid contract on a major project. This constitutes an illegal squandering of public funds.
Maybe it’s time to rethink what we mean when we use the word “development.” Do we really need to develop more strip malls, hotels, and suburban housing? In a place like central Maryland, we’re darn near out of land anyway. So this pyramid-scheme of land development has to stop. The corruption will only stop when local elected officials stop thinking that no-bid or restricted-bid contracts for major development deals actually move anything forward.
Instead, let’s start thinking about “development” in terms of “resource allocation.” How are we going to allocate scarce public resources to enrich our citizens through education, equal opportunity, and in repairing and maintaining the infrastructure and buildings we already have?
If the goal of “development” is to advance the economic opportunity and prosperity of the people of our state, maybe we should start by valuing our landscape. Instead of cluttering it up with mile after mile of pointless suburbia, let’s invest in places that mean something to the people that live there. Let’s make the places we have better. Let’s fix blight and make transportation systems that work. Let’s plant trees and make bike lanes.
Development should be about developing our people and making what we already have work more efficiently, not in building shoddy new projects that devalue existing assets and clutter our landscape.
And when contractors are required, let’s put the bidding online, require each bidder to go through the same qualification process, and let the lowest, most qualified bidders win.
When the public changes its perception of what development means, we will have fewer politicians who see elected office as a get-rich-quick scheme. Every time another politician is caught in these shenanigans, the public trust in government is undermined.
So a change in public perception about the nature of development can actually lead to a tangible restoration of public trust in government, and that can’t come too soon.
When I was about four years old, my parents asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My response? A cashier. Why? They were the ones who got handed all the money.
Today, when people cite crime and education as the two major problems facing America’s cities, the knee-jerk response is to “protect city education budgets” and “put more cops on the street.” This is the same kind of simplistic logic I used as a child, and it’s just as wrong.
If this was how things worked, the safest cities in the world would be populated entirely by police, and the highest levels of education would be attained by those countries who spent the most on teachers and schools. This also is not true. Excluding repressive regimes, the areas with the least crime and most educated populations tend to be places where all citizens have access to the same opportunities.
Access to Opportunity
The new film by Davis Guggenheim, “Waiting for Superman,” chronicles a year or so in the life of a handful of students of different backgrounds as they struggle to get access to the educational resources they need to thrive. The heart-wrenching conclusion shows these kids – all but one – get denied that opportunity by a system that is clearly broken and unfair. 720 applicants, 15 spots. You get the picture.
If America is going to have a public school system, this kind of unfairness should not be tolerated. What happens to the kids that don’t get into the schools that can help them thrive? Should people have equal opportunity? Most people would say “yes.”
How We Got Here
Economic vitality is a kind of spotlight: it shines a light on things that need fixing, and provides the funds and political power to do so. Since our cities were torn apart by race riots and the global consolidation of manufacturing, the resulting precipitous decline in economic health has meant that cities have operated substantially in the dark. Watchdogs have been absent, and grassroots efforts have been underpowered.
American cities have reached a kind of feudal equilibrium. Politicians in power have little incentive to promote the kind of broad-based economic growth that could ultimately result in their ouster, but they can’t let things deteriorate so badly that everyone leaves – also stripping them of their power. And so American cities walk the line: with crime, schools, drug use and taxes locked at levels that are tolerable to just enough people that they are still worth milking, all while politicians hand out favors to power-brokers and childhood friends. Enough.
Ending the Abuse, from the Bottom Up
I wrote in my previous post that cities are now prime locations for idea-based industries. Over time this will mean an influx of wealth into cities as well as an increase in poorer populations in the suburbs.
Economic vitality in our cities borne from idea-based industries will result in a demand for accountable leadership and provide new levels of participation. In short, the feudalism will end when creative people begin to use their economic power to demand real change. The 40 year free ride is over.
Too many people in cities have resigned themselves to the idea that politics is a top-down enterprise — that it’s primarily influenced by the machine, by power-brokers, by community leaders, or by churches. Or that there’s a “turn based system,” where everyone who serves is given an equal shot unless they do something wrong.
That’s just wrong. American city politics from now on will be a bottom-up grassroots affair dictated not by the economics of writing checks to campaigns, but by the interdependent economics of jobs and a shared vision for the future of places that people care about.
Restoring Trust
To be workable, all power relationships must be a compact founded on shared values. Kids trust teachers that have their best interests at heart. Citizens trust cops who behave consistently and fairly. People trust politicians who put the civic interest ahead of their own.
There is nothing that ails us that cannot be fixed by restoring these trust relationships.
In “Superman,” Guggenheim asserts that bad teachers are kept around out of a “desire to maintain harmony amongst adults.” It’s difficult to stand up and fight to end someone’s teaching career, but it’s what’s required. To fail to do so is immoral.
It’s easier to keep getting a paycheck than to make enemies. And certainly there are dozens of systemic problems that make firing teachers very difficult. But that’s all that’s wrong with our schools, our police and our politicians: a simple failure to defend our core values.
And if we cannot agree on those core values – if a desire for personal gain exceeds a willingness or ability to serve the public – then those people deserve to be called out.
The Game Is Up
To be an old-school politician in a major American city today is to be in the way of a major cultural shift. Idealistic, intelligent, educated millennials armed with 21st century political weapons are coming, and they are going to ask why?
Why is the city so screwed up? Why are these jokers in power? Why are these incompetent teachers shuttled between schools? Why is more money spent on development deals for cronies than on parks? And why the hell can’t we clean up the blight that makes any trust or pride impossible?
Should we spend more money on schools or police? More than likely, all we need to do is let smart young people start asking questions. Crime and education take care of themselves if those that have violated the public trust can be removed from power. And with a little attention and common sense, we can ensure that more kids have a shot at the same opportunities.
Because in the end, crime, education, and blight are really just one problem, and it can be cured at least as quickly as it developed.
I am CEO and co-founder at 410Labs, and creator of Mailstrom. I'm a serial entrepreneur, software developer, and community builder in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
