Paul Rubin’s falsehoods:

Paul Rubin’s First Falsehood

1) Privacy is free. Many privacy advocates believe it is a free lunch—that is, consumers can obtain more privacy without giving up anything. Not so. There is a strong trade-off between privacy and information: The more privacy consumers have, the less information is available for use in the economy. Since information helps markets work better, the cost of privacy is less efficient markets.

Its not that “privacy is free” anymore than “freedom is free”. Privacy is the right to not be watched all the time. Clearly the groups working on privacy are expending time and energy. Does not sound free to me.

But lets take a closer look at the fallacies.

Fallacy #1.1 : “consumer privacy means the economy has less information” and “information helps the markets work better”.

Paul does not make a case that the consumers’ private information is the information needed to make the markets work. He just says consumers give less information and that information is needed for an efficient economy.

Fallacy #1.2: “helps”

How much value is derived from the consumers private information? Notice that Paul himself is fudging with that wussy word “helps”. Does the economy function 10% less efficient? 5%? 3%? What exactly is the realized benefit to the economy?

Fallacy #1.3: The consumer realizes some benefit

Does the consumer giving up the information realize any tangible value? Or is the economic value realized only to the recipient of the information. Most transactions involve an exchange of value. Does the consumer realize anything of value? How many sites ask for private information and then offer nothing useful. Or worse turn out to be scam sites.

Paul Rubin’s Second Falsehood

2) If there are costs of privacy, they are borne by companies. Many who do admit that privacy regulations restricting the use of information about consumers have costs believe they are born entirely by firms. Yet consumers get tremendous benefits from the use of information.

Think of all the free stuff on the Web: newspapers, search engines, stock prices, sports scores, maps and much more. Google alone lists more than 50 free services—all ultimately funded by targeted advertising based on the use of information. If revenues from advertising are reduced or if costs increase, then fewer such services will be provided.

Fallacy 2.1: Uncle Sam is counting on you! Give up your privacy or the world will end!!

This assertion is simply ludicrous. I know it is sooooo last century, but does anyone remember broadcast TV? maybe radio? Did everyone remember to “register” with your favorite FM station before listening to the free music?

Of course not! Did the advertisers refuse to advertise on radio for the last 70 years because they didn’t have targeted information about the listeners? How about newspapers? Of course not!

Clearly the economy managed to function quite well without demanding private information from consumers.

Fallacy 2.2: News flash: advertising revenue is already down. And it ain’t because of privacy groups.

The basic economics of online advertising is flawed. There is simply so many places to display ads that the value of each display ad even on a popular site like Facebook is in the range of about $0.00002 ( yes, Dorothy much less than a penny) And this is for a site like Facebook which has a lot of private information about its users.

Fallacy 2.3: News flash: Advertisers can use the information

Reality here is that most ad buyers still have very limited mechanisms to segment their target audience: sex, approximate age and that is about it.

All that detailed information the consumer is being asked to give up? for the most part unused.

Fallacy 2.4 The companies depend on the information they are gathering to make enough money to stay in business and without the information the companies will disappear.

Completely without substance. Companies that fold in Silicon Valley go out of business for many reasons. The most common reason is spending all the invested capital before figuring out how they will make money. Viable internet companies don’t go out of business. Once an internet business becomes cashflow positive, the company is successful. Consumer privacy issues have never changed a viable internet business into a failure. The more usual case is that in spite of gathering all this private information, the company couldn’t figure out how to make money with the information.

Paul Rubin’s Third Falsehood

3) If consumers have less control over information, then firms must gain and consumers must lose. When firms have better information, they can target advertising better to consumers—who thereby get better and more useful information more quickly. Likewise, when information is used for other purposes—for example, in credit rating—then the cost of credit for all consumers will decrease.

Fallacy 3.1: Fallacy of the win-lose by implication scenario: “consumers have less control over information, then firms must gain and consumers must lose.”

Paul is arguing the inverse here. He is implying a falsehood, if “consumers have more control over information, then firms must LOSE”. Apparently, Paul can not imagine a scenario where firms manage to function without the consumers’ private information. Paul really needs to revisit the economic history of this country. Maybe Adam Smith can help him out. Once again, the economy managed to function without privacy being invaded.

Fallacy 3.2 Red Herring: Credit scores are not an online privacy issue.

Credit gathering for the purpose of issuing loans are a specific transactions already covered by consumer law. Online privacy is all about information gathering that is not needed for a specific immediate transaction.

Paul Rubin’s Fourth Falsehood

4) Information use is “all or nothing.” Many say that firms such as Google will continue to provide services even if their use of information is curtailed. This is sometimes true, but the services will be lower-quality and less valuable to consumers as information use is more restricted.

For example, search engines can better target searches if they know what searchers are looking for. (Google’s “Did you mean . . .” to correct typos is a familiar example.) Keeping a past history of searches provides exactly this information. Shorter retained search histories mean less effective targeting.

Fallacy 4.1: Google does not need past history to correct a search.

I have search history turned off. And I have had no problems. If this is indeed such a problem for google, then every library patron who searches the internet from a public computer must have this “problem”. After all my search for “butterflies” is going to be blended with the search history of every other library patron.

Fallacy 4.2: The “lower” quality is some how meaningful

At a certain point, additional precision is meaningless. For example, if you ask your kids where they are, is it really more useful if they reply “I am 3.4 meters from the front door facing to 3degrees to the north, sitting down.” or if they say “I am at home”.

Paul Rubin’s Fifth Falsehood

5) If consumers have less privacy, then someone will know things about them that they may want to keep secret. Most information is used anonymously. To the extent that things are “known” about consumers, they are known by computers. This notion is counterintuitive; we are not used to the concept that something can be known and at the same time no person knows it. But this is true of much online information.

Fallacy 5.1 “Anonymous data”

It is relatively easy to deanonymize data. Netflix was forced to cancel their second planned contest because it was demonstratively easy to deanonymize the Netflix data. This was in spite of Netflix doing their best to prevent exactly that. So a motivated company trying to anonymize can’t do so. A less motivated company is going to do better?

Fallacy 5.2 Deanonymizing takes a lot of effort.

In fact, zip code, age, gender deanonymizes 87% of all data. Anyone asking “Happy birthday! How old are you?” at your birthday party has enough information. Netflix is now facing a lawsuit about this.

The suit is also asking the court to stop Netflix from launching its promised second contest to improve the recommendations — this time giving out user data that includes ZIP codes, ages and gender, along with movie ratings and ID numbers substituted for user names.

That’s a foolish idea on Netflix’s part, according to University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm, who in a blog post in September called the idea “a privacy blunder that could cost millions of dollars in fines and civil damages.” Ohm, a former Justice Department lawyer, recently authored a legal paper calling into question the practice of anonymizing data, essentially finding that if data is useful to researchers, it could also, by definition, be re-identified.

Read More

I think Netflix would disagree with Paul Rubin.

Paul Rubin’s Sixth Falsehood

6) Information can be used for price discrimination (differential pricing), which will harm consumers. For example, it might be possible to use a history of past purchases to tell which consumers might place a higher value on a particular good. The welfare implications of discriminatory pricing in general are ambiguous. But if price discrimination makes it possible for firms to provide goods and services that would otherwise not be available (which is common for virtual goods and services such as software, including cell phone apps) then consumers unambiguously benefit.

Fallacy 6.1 Price discrimination is o.k. no matter what it is based on.

Paul Rubin is willfully ignoring Redlining:

Redlining is the practice of denying, or increasing the cost of, services such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas.

The term “redlining” describes the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest; later the term was applied to discrimination against a particular group of people (usually by race or sex) no matter the geography. During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. Through at least the 1990s this practice meant that banks would often lend to lower income whites but not to middle or upper income blacks.

Reverse redlining occurs when a lender or insurer particularly targets minority consumers, not to deny them loans or insurance, but rather to charge them more than would be charged to a similarly situated majority consumer.

Paul Rubin, as a economics professor you should know about Redlining.

Paul Rubin’s Seventh Falsehood

7) If consumers knew how information about them was being used, they would be irate. When something (such as tainted food) actually harms consumers, they learn about the sources of the harm. But in spite of warnings by privacy advocates, consumers don’t bother to learn about information use on the Web precisely because there is no harm from the way it is used.

Fallacy 7.1 Consumers understand and are willing participants in giving up their privacy.

The Facebook privacy policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution:

If you guessed the latter, you’re right. Facebook’s Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long; the United States Constitution, without any of its amendments, is a concise 4,543 words.

Considering how vague the Facebook policy is, most consumers have no idea what the meaning of the policy is.

Fallacy 7.2 : Ignorance means permission.

Presuming that consumer ignorance is because there is no harm is a huge leap. The consumer has no ability to ask Google, Netflix, or Yahoo for an exact list of who got their information. No phone number to call, no email address that will be responded to. Even a motivated consumer is in the dark.

Paul Rubin’s Eighth Falsehood

8 ) Increasing privacy leads to greater safety and less risk. The opposite is true. Firms can use information to verify identity and reduce Internet crime and identity theft. Think of being called by a credit-card provider and asked a series of questions when using your card in an unfamiliar location, such as on a vacation. If this information is not available, then less verification can occur and risk may actually increase.

Fallacy 8.1 Gathering information reduces fraud.

The opposite is true. By having more private information stored on more computers at more companies there are more opportunities for hackers to gain access to the information. The hackers only need to penetrate the company with the weakest security.

Paul Rubin’s Ninth Falsehood

9) Restricting the use of information (such as by mandating consumer “opt-in”) will benefit consumers. In fact, since the use of information is generally benign and valuable, policies that lead to less information being used are generally harmful.

Fallacy 9.1 : “The information is valuable but not really.”

If the information is so valuable, why shouldn’t consumers be allowed to protect it?

Paul Rubin’s Tenth Falsehood

10) Targeted advertising leads people to buy stuff they don’t want or need. This belief is inconsistent with the basis of a market economy. A market economy exists because buyers and sellers both benefit from voluntary transactions. If this were not true, then a planned economy would be more efficient—and we have all seen how that works.

Fallacy 10.1 Advertising doesn’t work!

Do I really need to say more? Advertising has no ability to induce demand. Women with 300 pairs of shoes really need and want 300 pairs of shoes.

Paul Rubin’s Upcoming Falsehood!

Coming next week, Paul Rubin will write an article about the evils of cash purchases. Paul will explain how cash purchases deprive desperately poor banks of needed purchase information.

I might add more later but enough with the pustulance!

Update ( 30 aug 2010 ) : Apparently the NYTimes has noticed that consumers really do care about online privacy:

“Retargeting has helped turn on a light bulb for consumers,” said Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. “It illustrates that there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too.”

“The emissions were a significant factor” in the decision to cancel the runway-building plans, Teresa Villiers, Britain’s minister of state for transport, said in an interview. “The 220,000 or so flights that might well come with a third runway would make it difficult to meet the targets we’d set for ourselves.” She said that local environmental concerns like noise and pollution around Heathrow also weighed into the decision.

Robert Cruickshank over at the California HSR Blog whines about Palo Alto’s “undemocratic” democratic process:

In short, it is becoming increasingly clear that Palo Alto’s planning and citizen engagement process is a failure, distorting true public opinion by favoring a small, vocal elite at the expense of a silent majority whose opinions are much more supportive of new density and new transportation solutions – but whose voices are rarely ever included in the city’s planning process.

Of course, our democratic process requires energy and participation. There are lots of people who chose not to vote because their vote “will not be effective”.

Most people are uninformed about this issue, do not ride transit, or have no idea how to build transit effectively. Their opinion should not count as much as the people who are taking the time to inform themselves and to be involved.

If someone is not involved, their opinion is probably uninformed and negative.

Meetings to planning a company project can be just as bad.

Uninformed people should not be part of the process(^{see below}). In
an old Inc. article, Joel:

When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn’t want anyone to feel left out?

When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, “Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!” even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she’s your co-founder)?

When was the last time you got into a long discussion over the color palette for the new brochure with a programmer, who has nothing to do with the brochure but sure knows that he doesn’t like orange?

These are symptoms of a common illness: too much communication.

(“below”)
However, I disagree with Joel’s assertion that only people whose vote counts should be allowed to attend meetings. Decisions with no visible process result in no buy-in. While a company is not a democracy, and a city is not a company both should learn from each other.

What a company can learn from a city:

1. Process does matter. Process means consistency and reliability in how decisions are being made. People know how to voice their opinion. They know that there is a means and method for voicing their opinion. Instead of voicing opinion in an adhoc, disruptive manner – they can wait until the allocated time.
2. Only some people get a vote. Many people can show up to a city council to express their opinion, but only city council members get a vote. In company meeting, discussion can include everyone – but predecided ( and preannounce! ) who’s vote will be counted. For example, if a developer is trying to decide who to best implement a feature. Only his/her, the CTO’s, QA’s and customer service rep’s votes are counted. Others who are not involved, do not get to vote. They can express their opinion but they are not a decision maker (for this issue). Only people expending effort or where the decision has a material impact on their job should be counted.
3. Representatives get “elected”. Allow some self-selection in the process. Try to allow the lead representative to be selected by people other than managers. If a developer selected to be the lead in a project makes a decision, this makes it easier for the decision to be respected.
4. Make the discussion observable and inclusive While only some people get a vote, allowing others to learn from the process of making a decision prepares those observers to step into their own decision-making role. It also allows them to take knowledge from one decision-making group to another.

What a city can learn from a company:

1. Require an energy expenditure to participate. A meeting should only be open to people who have attended the last 5 meetings.
2. Allow adhoc representation. Allow people to represent adhoc groups. For example, allow a person to collect 10+ signatures of his neighbors giving him/her proxy authority to voice their collective opinion. Require that this adhoc representative keep the people she is representing informed of the progress and results. (With power should come responsibility).
3. Allow weighted voting. In a company, the CTO’s vote counts more than a lowly developer. When voting for a company’s board of directors’, shareholders have a vote based on number of shares not a one vote per shareholder. In a city planning process, the “vocal” minority may represent no one other than themselves. Let the “vocal minority” collect proxy signatures to indicate how strongly their “silent” neighbors (who can’t participate) trust the “vocal” people to represent the “silent” majorities best interest. The more signatures, the more strongly a “vocal” representative’s vote/opinion should count. Allow certain signatures to be more valuable than others based on the issue. For example, distance to a housing project, transit user’s opinion on a transit project, etc.

Update:

Lastly, learn when you should not vote or participate.

1. If you personally do not have any direct, meaningful, unique knowledge: don’t participate. Observing is o.k. – voicing a “I agree” content-free vocalization is not o.k.
2. If you don’t have the time to stay involved: don’t sign up and then drop out.
3. If an issue has no one who cares: then the decision can be made by a single person. Others should insist that that single person make the decision. The sole decision-maker should not need the CYA of a “group vote”.
4. If you cannot expend effort on the solution, then don’t vote. Note that “effort” does not mean “coding” or “making”
5. If the decision will not effect how hard your job is, then don’t vote. If the decision does meaningfully effect your job then you must participate and must vote.

There is this temptation to dismiss the concerns of Customer Service or QA people as being less important than that of the development team. This is ass-backwards.

A Customer Service rep will have to deal daily with a bad development decision. Their job satisfaction, their ability to deliver happy customers is daily determined by developers decisions. They must be allowed to participate and must be given a strong voice.

The internet provider I use should ONLY provide the infrastructure to connect me with the Internet.

As a business owner, I depend on skype / chat to conduct all my business dealings. My internet provider should not be permitted to interfere with my business transactions.

For any internet provider to insert themselves into the conversation I am having with the world, is the same as if the phone company inserted themselves into my voice communication.

I do not want a operator breaking in on my voice conversation to add their two cents to my private voice conversations with my employees.

Nor do I want the internet provider to break into my private written conversations with my employees just because I happen to be using VoIP (skype) to talk with them.

Nor do I want the internet provider eavesdropping in on my chat messages with my employees!

To allow this eavesdropping in any manner is to allow wiretapping!

Bluntly, clearly – “deep packet inspection”, “traffic shaping”, whatever the buzz words used is SPYING.

Furthermore, my small business is internet-based. My small business cannot afford to pay for special treatment. If my customers have their traffic “shaped” so that my site appears to be unresponsive or slow, then my business will lose customers to the larger competitors that can pay off the Comcasts of the world.

Take Action

• In effect, a fan page becomes more like a bumper sticker popularity contest than a real business presence or one of deeper engagement
• In a “twitter-esque” move, Facebook is trading volume of interaction with depth of interaction.
• Facebook will be able to sell engagement more broadly

The battle to pick the one “word” is meaningless and impossible.

Thinking points:

• My kids like their classmates
• My kids like chocolate.
• My kids like Rush’s music.

When my kids click “like” on their classmates FB page – are my kids “fans” of their classmates?

When my kids click “like” on the Hershey FB page – are my kids “fans” of any Hersheys’ Chocolate, just the milk chocolate? or are they fans of the Hershey company?

When my kids click “like” on the Rush FB page – are my kids fans of Rush? Like some of Rush’s songs but would never go to a concert?

Mimic the real world

Any social network website should look first to the physical world social network interactions and try to mimic those. Attaching words to a relationship between people is hard. Facebook is not alone in this problem. All social network sites fail in these ways:

1. No measure of relationship strength – casual, sexual, deep love, or acquaintance.
2. No measure of relative and fuzzy relationship strength ( “I like Peter about the same as Paul, and I like Daniel more than Paul”)
3. No time component – relationships if not maintained diminish
4. No context – workplace only? professional? activity-centric ( i.e. a bicycling club )?
5. Age/Culture
   • Example: Middle East v. Germany – very different. In one women are forced to cover up, in the other prostitution is legal. So in Saudi Arabia, “liking” an unmarried woman may invite a visit from her brothers. In Germany, someone may be “liking” their favorite hooker! (Similar cultural differences exist within the U.S.)
   • Age/Generational: someone who grew up in the 1990′s has different meanings attached to words than someone who grew up in the 1970′s
6. No consideration of the type of the primary parties in the relationship. Is this relationship between 2 people, a person and a product, a person and a company, or two companies?
7. No consideration of the power structure in relationship: Does an employee “like” their manager so they get the next raise?
8. No secondary relationships – ( “I like Rush because my hot, hot girlfriend loves Rush. Oh, I just got dumped by that hot, hot now-ex-gf. I don’t listen to Rush any more.” )
9. No asymmetrical relationships allowed. Both parties have to agree to a relationship for the FB connection to be made. LinkedIn has the same problem.

So Facebook is just spinning their wheels looking for that magical word – and yes they are heading to the lowest common denominator as a result.

what Facebook is really getting wrong

But Facebook’s biggest problem is not “Like” v. “Fan”. Their biggest problem is their casual disregard for the social contract Facebook used to have with their users – not the legal TOS. But the unwritten social contract that was expressed in the marketing message and the way people use FB.

FB is stomping all over that social contract with their continuous “privacy” tweaks. Anything entered into FB is bound to be revealed by “default” to be public at some point. Go away on vacation for a month and come back and discovered that half your love life has been defaulted to be announced to your manager.

If Mark Z. and the rest of Facebook’s management can’t understand their own relationship with their own users, then it is impossible for Mark, et.al. to realize that relationships are too complex to be devolved to a single universal word.

Someone, somewhere ends up putting out money for everything you do online, every piece of news you read, every Web app you use. It takes professionals and hardware across a gigantic industry to make these things work. In terms of overhead alone, content costs a lot. So why do some users always kick and scream at the first suggestion of paid content? Do you think content is worth paying for, and if so, what are you personally willing to pay?

I’m curious: What kinds of online content, if any, are you willing to pay for? And how much will you pay for them?

As usual for the stenographers they completely missed the point. They are no longer king of the data hill since the “journalists” do not provide information ( actionable data ) but merely (and usually inaccurate) data with no competent interpretation.

Some of the problems with the “content” MSM media produces:

1. Inaccurate: It is extraordinarily rare to find a Main-stream Media outlet that can get the facts correct. I have seen articles confuse the term “Light-Rail” with “High-Speed Rail” ( equivalent to confusing “speed of sound” with “speed of light” ).
2. Anonymous (gossip) sources: Reading anything about politics is equally painful “anonymous sources” are quoted, given reader no way to judge the quality of the information – so the article becomes disguised hearsay.
3. Stenographers: Usually, a “journalist” lazily parrots a political party’s (usually Republican ) talking points or regurgitates a corporate press release. Witness the rah-rah-rahing of the Iraq War.
4. Contrived controversies: There is the endless contrived controversies around settled issues ( global warming ) that confuse the lay man.
5. False Balance: there is false “journalistic” balance where a scientist with a vast amount of data is “balanced” against the latest creationist whack-job.
6. DWHC: Lastly come the endless pieces about the latest DWHC ( Dead white hot chick ) or rumors about Micheal Jackson’s death. Yes, people are interested in hearing about celebrity gossip, put it is mental cotton candy – low food value.
7. Not unique: the article on the AP wire as little value. The same article can be gotten from a vast array of sources. Therefore its scarcity and value are non-existent to a given media outlet.
8. Process-orientated: Case in point: Horse race mentality around what polls are saying about who is “in the lead”.

So why would I pay for “content” stenographic, celebrity gossip articles.

If journalists stopped being lazy and did more research than half-understood wikipedia articles and google-reading, it would be worth it to buy their content. But buy stenographic contact in advance, not a chance.

However, I would very much like to see a tip mechanism whereby I can tip a reporter after reading the article. But I ain’t paying for the crap fluff pieces. Hell you should pay ME that you wasted my time.

Before identity theft became a huge problem, “no one” cared that every tom-dick-and-harry business was using social security numbers as account numbers.

Before 9/11, “no one” cared about terrorism at the deeply personal level.

The fundamental danger is that Mark Z. is completely unprepared for the reality that societies acceptance of what is o.k. can and does shift. Sometimes slowly, some times in one day.

Arrogance and indifference is blinding.

I won’t predicate the demise of Facebook. But if I was a facebook investor, this would be a little worrying. I sense a bit of an echo machine within Facebook.

If government law changes to demand privacy will facebook be able to respond?

While the Missouri Department of transportation talks about how this is great for vehicles, it is also great for pedestrians:

1. all crossings can be signalled for long crossing times because pedestrians are walking with the main flow of traffic — so lots of time for moms with kids to get across.
2. the center island can be double the normal width — the 2 sidewalks on the edge of the bridge are combined to one double width sidewalk.
3. planter boxes or fencing on the perimeter of the center island can help reassure moms (and dads) that the 3-year old is not going to escape into traffic.
4. NO worries about people turning into pedestrians – all traffic is going the same direction as pedestrians — except for the initial right turn on to the freeway.
5. the right turn on to the freeway can easily be signaled and no right-turn on red allowed.
6. the gray areas at the end of the bridge also provide nice big areas.
7. Really, really easy to get across Missouri 13. It is now trivial to get do a diagonal crossing so that 44 and 13 are both crossed.

h/t to AdamHertz for pointing the NPR article out.

This is mine:

I am an entrepreneur starting my own company in Silicon Valley. I am reliant on expensive COBRA coverage for my own health care needs. COBRA runs out in a few months.

Without health insurance I will be forced to shutdown my company and my dream, and find another job building someone else’s dream.

I can’t afford to pay any health care for employees. So ironically I have to hire contractors from countries that do have universal health care. (or at least cheaper health care). Hiring anyone in the U.S. is too costly. Even if someone can work for minimum wage and equity, most software engineers will not do without health care insurance.

The best economic stimulus that Washington could enact is to take the economic burden of health care costs off the backs of small business and their employees. Enable people to realize their dreams without taking a chance on their health!

Not having to pay $13,000 – $15,000 / employee / year is a huge, huge, huge economic aid! For my own company this would have saved $40,000. This $40,000 could have been spent hiring people.

Jerry’s original email message:

Dear Patrick,

We’re in the midst of an historic debate on health care and closer than ever to enacting major reform.

Many of you participated in the health care survey I began circulating in April or in the telephone town hall on health care I held recently with almost 5,000 participants. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated and offer great insight.

Unfortunately, as you’ve probably heard, there are those in our country who want to block an open debate on health care. We shouldn’t lose the opportunity to have a productive and respectful conversation about the future of health care in this country.

I am not deterred by the current challenges or by those who seek to scare people into believing myths about the great changes we can make to the health care system.

I need your help to continue. We must stand together to create great change – our voices must rise above the din of misinformation.

Will you please sign my petition to show your support for health care reform?

I will continue to reach out to hear from you. Over the past month, I’ve traveled throughout the district to meet with small business owners, seniors, doctors and nurses. I’ve toured healthClick to watch video care facilities, including hospitals, clinics and local practices so that I can see our health care resources firsthand.

During my health care listening tour, I’ve heard again and again from people who are ready for change to our health care system. During these tough times no one should have the additional burden of worrying if they’ll have health care when their family needs it most.

I’m working hard to find a uniquely American solution to the problems of our current health care system. Every family should have access to high quality and affordable health care. We should crack down on insurance abuses such as preventing people with pre-existing conditions from accessing coverage. Every citizen should be able to choose the doctor they want to see and be free to make their own decisions on care for themselves and their families.

The fight isn’t an easy one. I am being attacked for my support of health care reform. I need your support during this crucial time.

Please take a moment to sign my petition, and if you’re able, consider a donation to the campaign so I have the resources to continue the fight.

The other side will use any means possible to continue their fear campaign against reform, including distortions, lies, and intimidation to stop us. We cannot allow this to happen.

We’re in this together.

Thank you for all that you do,
Congressman Jerry McNerney

On Tuesday at 8 a.m., I will stand trial for speaking three truthful words: “I am gay.”

On Tuesday, I will face a panel of colonels who will decide whether or not to fire me — to discharge me for “moral and professional dereliction” under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

On Tuesday, I will try to prove that it’s not immoral to tell the truth.

As an infantry officer, an Iraq combat veteran and a West Point graduate with a degree in Arabic, I refuse to lie to my commanders. I refuse to lie to my peers. I refuse to lie to my subordinates.

My case requires that I provide personal testimony from people who can attest to my character. That’s why several members of my military unit have written letters of support and offered to testify on my behalf.

Now I need your help. ANYONE who believes the Army should not fire me can take a stand right now. I am bringing a statement of support to Tuesday’s trial and I need you to add your signature to it. Will you support me by signing this statement before Tuesday?

I want to thank the 141,262 people who have signed the “Don’t Fire Dan” letter launched a few weeks ago by the Courage Campaign and CREDO Mobile to President Obama, asking him to take leadership to bring this tragic policy to an end.

The momentum is building. This week, 77 members of Congress signed a letter to the President citing my service as an example of why DADT should be repealed. And a Gallup poll was recently released showing that 69 percent of Americans — including 58 percent of Republicans – favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve their country .

As I learned at West Point, deception and lies poison a unit and cripple a fighting force. That’s why more than 70 of my fellow West Point graduates have also come out of the closet to join Knights Out, the organization I co-founded to build support for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

The only way we will eventually overturn “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is by speaking up together. You can help me fight back right now by adding your name to my statement of support. On Tuesday morning, I will bring your signature — and thousands of others — to my trial as a demonstration of your collective support:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/SupportDan

National security means many things, but the thing that makes us secure in our nation and homes is love. What makes me a better soldier, leader, Christian and human being is love. And I’m not going to hide my love.

Love is worth it.

Thank you for your support.

Daniel W. Choi
1LT, IN
New York Army National Guard

And my response:

We should treat honorably servicing members of the military with honor.

Court martialing Lt. Choi is dishonoring his service. Court martialing Lt. Choi will stain the Army not Lt. Choi.

Court martialing Lt. Choi clearly indicates that for the U.S military, the words “honor” and “dignity” should be prefaced with “mostly” and “while convenient”.

Being willing to face a court martial in order to do the honorable action is the highest indicator of honor that any service member could demonstrate. This willingness to sacrifice oneself is what the military demands. Self-sacrifice doesn’t always come in the form of a bullet.

The hardest form of self-sacrifice is willingness to be subject to societal rejection.

Lt. Choi should be promoted not court martialed.