It’s great to be an American.  It can never be denied that our government provides well for us.  Each election we debate which areas need improvement, which areas should be left alone, and hopefully elect candidates who will achieve those agendas.  And if not, well, we’ll get ‘em next election.  There’ll always be critics and cynics, but even they would have to admit to more good things about our government than I could ever hope to list here, from the mundane (garbage, sewage, waste treatment) to the critical (food growth, clean water, health, safety, financial assistance) to the spectacular (snow removal, public television, air traffic control).

I’ve always loved how towns and cities build and maintain parks for no gain other than to give their citizens some place to relax or play a game.  I’ll always support the construction of skate parks.  I would never argue against the creation of more parks even if the last time I set foot on a skateboard, it was narrow and made of hard plastic with rubber wheels that would catch on every pebble or patch of sand.  You shouldn’t have to be boarder to get behind the idea of a park for kids to entertain themselves with physical activity.  I also love that if you don’t like the particular parks in your town, you can just go over to a neighboring city and hang out in one of their parks instead.

In most areas of the country there’s even plenty of subsidized transportation to get you there.  I just read somewhere that Boston was ranked #2 in the top list of cities that are accessible by foot.  The transit system, the T, is a great example of government in action.  There are 5 different subway and streetcar lines (red, orange, green, blue, and silver), plus the commuter rail, buses (diesel, electric, or LNG), wheelchair vans, cars for the handicapped or elderly, and even boats.

Or if you prefer, there’s a massive, regulated hansom industry in Boston.  That’s one thing I miss about living out here in the sticks: taxi availability.  We can get on the commuter rail and be in Boston in about 30 minutes, but we can’t get a taxi cab to take us down the road to a St. Patrick’s Day party.  But, I digress.

The government has been providing for us in many areas for a very long time.  Unfortunately, it feels like all the big ideas, all the revolutionary government projects, all the greatest things about this country, were undertaken far too long ago.  In simpler terms, what have you done for me lately?

I don’t mean to be glib, because it’s not something I take lightly, but where’s our space race?  Where’s our Hoover Dam, Statue of Liberty, or Mount Rushmore?  Where’s our Chicago’s World Fair?  Where are the bold projects that lead the way?  Particularly lacking is the government’s involvement in technology.

In the past thirty years, computers have gone from obscure thinking machines for mathematical functions to penetrating most aspect of our daily lives.  A computer was probably involved somewhere along the way in the construction or delivery of everything we buy, wear, eat, use, or consume.  My alarm clock has a computer in it.

With all this heavy reliance on computers for banking, commerce, communication, management, construction, or entertainment, I find it a little disturbing at how hands off the government has been in leading the way.  Instead of action and leadership, we get regulations and bureaucracy.  Of course, the greatest project thus far in computing is the design and implementation of the internet which was performed by a government through DARPA, but since that was over thirty years ago, it can’t be considered a recent input.  Where are the great new projects that show that the government recognizes it’s a digital world and some things need fixing?

A clear example of this lack of leadership is the continued presence of spam.  Why isn’t anything being done about spam?  The government has tried to deal with spam by passing nearly meaningless laws. Even when ledislators “get tough” on spam enforcement, it means that they’ve enacted measures to allow their constituents to do all the heavy lifting and sue some spammers for deceptive advertising or for not providing an opt-out.  These laws are based on the ability of the citizens to track down the spammers, serve them with papers, get them to appear in civil court, and prove the case.  Have these laws had any effect?  Has your inbox noticed the difference?  Mine sure hasn’t.  I still get spam at work and home and that’s after the emails have passed through about 4 different spam and anti-virus filters.

Spam is nearly impossible to fight from the receiving end.  And even if you do stop it from eventually getting to your inbox, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sent.  There could have been hundreds or thousands of routers, switches, and computers which had to carry the message all the way there only to be refused and then bounce the message back, most likely involving a different path than the way it came, involving even more equipment.  Rejecting spam can take up twice as much bandwidth as having received it.

The worst part about spam is it never, ever stops.  When I first setup the email server at work in about 1995, I got in the habit of reading the email logs.  I remember right from the get-go, we regularly got email addressed to two usernames that didn’t exist at our company.  Our company name is similar to those of many other companies that operate around the country, and clearly two people from one of these other companies with a different, but similar, URL got onto some kind of mailing list.  For years, these same two names appeared every single day as the target of email, even though a message had never gotten through to a recipient - every single one was bounced.  A few years ago we outsourced our email server and I don’t bother reading the logs, but I’m sure that if I did, I’d see the same two email addresses today.

Spammers don’t care if they ever hit their target.  They’re just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks.  They’re just playing the percentages and since it doesn’t cost them anything to send the emails, those percentages can be pretty low and still equate to a fortune.  Why isn’t the government making any real effort to stop it other than enacting regulatory laws that put the burden on the citizen?  Can you imagine the outcry if every night there was a knock at every American’s front door with someone pitching a bottle of snake oil or a peek at some dirty pictures?  Yet that’s exactly what happens to us regularly through email and its left up to every individual, company, or ISP to police the situation ourselves.

The U. S. Postal Service seems to me to be a prime governmental body to be involved in advancing the cause of email.  With the competition that has sprung up in the way of package handling and the reduced volume due to online invoicing and bill paying, an excellent stream of revenue for the U. S. Postal Service would be to charge money to deliver an email in the same way that it charges to deliver a letter.  In exchange for this fee, they could provide services like confidentiality, security, authentication, a confirmed receipt, and tracking information.

Not every email should have to pass through the USPS.  In the same way that you can hand-deliver a card or box of cookies to your neighbor’s house, you should be able to transmit emails peer-to-peer the way it’s done now if you choose.  But, I think a government-protected email address should be afforded every American if they should choose to use it.  I might not use it if I just wanted to ask a friend if he wanted to get together after work some night, but I would if I wanted to send out something important or receive something private.

Another advantage with using the USPS is that tampering with the mail is a federal crime.  So is using the mail for the commission of a crime.  The same could be made true of USPS email.  If some shyster spammer passed an email through the USPS, the weight of the federal government should come down on him.  In the movie, Tom Cruise was only able to take down The Firm after he had gathered evidence of billing fraud and brought down the mighty hammer of the government due to the realization that the fraudulent invoices were sent through the US mail.

Chances are most spam would drop anyway even without the threat of felony prosecution.  If a spammer had to pay money for every email sent, it could change the percentage game enough that spamming wouldn’t be such a lucrative business after all.  At the very minimum, it would get spammers to care more about whether their emails were reaching an audience at all, let alone an interested one, and thus stop knocking at doors that weren’t being opened.

The USPS would also resolve another problem with email: the difficulty in changing email addresses or managing multiple addresses.  You can now keep the same phone number when you change cell phone carriers, but if you change ISP’s, you’re SOL.  I wouldn’t know where to begin if I ever left my job or cancelled my Verizon DSL.  I’d have to plan for at least a month to hope to get half of my subscriptions, correspondence, newsletters, and registrations switched over to a new address, if it’s even possible at all.

There could be other advantages of having a central clearing house for email.  Virus disinfection could be handled on a higher level than it is currently being handled through the “go-out-and-buy-whatever-package-you-think-will-work-update-it-regularly-never-open-any-attachments-and-pray-for-the-best” approach that stands now.  It would also help if the virus could be traced back to the first registered citizen that released it to the internet so it could be stopped at the source.

Email is only one of the problems that I see as affecting us on the technological front.  There are also serious problems with the patent office, the copyright system, open document standards, internet commerce, and allowing some very powerful corporations to have the power to dictate terms for the regular use of the systems on which our country’s computers are based.  These are only the things I can pick off the top of my head, but each is ripe with problems, misguided intentions, and example of a laissez-faire attitude toward technological innovation. I don’t expect these or any of the other problems facing the industry to be corrected with the wave of a wand, but shouldn’t we expect that at least something be seriously attempted?  Let’s build today’s equivalent of the NASA space program and stop pushing the burden onto the citizen.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw