Why I ditched my servers for the Cloud (ZDNet)

Summary: Old habits die hard. But it no longer made sense for me to maintain my own systems anymore.
By Jason Perlow for Tech Broiler | August 26, 2014

My servers, may they rest in peace.

Over the last two years, due to career changes, I've made the transition from datacenter consolidation specialist to a cloud architect.

It could be argued that very little has actually changed in terms of the tools of the trade and the methodologies that I work with, as both make heavy use of virtualization and systems automation, but the reality is that I haven't done a lot of work in the datacenter itself since shifting the focus of what I do.

In my professional life, I help hosters, service providers and ISVs build new cloud offerings, whether they are deployed as IaaS, desktops as a service or hosted/subscriber applications via SaaS. If it's cloud in the public or in the private space, I'm all over it.

Until recently though, I haven't practiced what I preached. Vestiges of my earlier life still existed, in the form of my own private server lab, which I used for software testing and storing files and for multitudes of other things.

I'm a server guy. I've always been a server guy.

Over the last seven years I invested in 1U and 2U x86 servers, building them new from parts or buying them second hand. I needed systems that could run virtualized instances of Windows and Linux, running under various hypervisor platforms, because I had little room for on the job experimentation. 

Over time my testing demands increased and I needed more storage. So I bought more hard disks. I needed to speed up performance, so I upgraded CPUs and installed SSDs. I needed to test and run larger workloads. So I bought more memory.

When you are an enterprise, there are cycles for upgrades and replacement. Systems are assets that are depreciated and serve ongoing business functions, and there are IT budgets to justify their existence as necessary if they serve the needs of the business.

Look, messing around with hypervisors is fun at work, but let's face it, I really don't want to run my own infrastructure anymore.

But as an independent systems professional this was a tough pill to swallow. How much money should I spend per year on maintaining server equipment and my PCs? $2000? $5000? I made a very good living, but it was hard to justify the expense.

I continued to do it though, because I wanted to further my education on competing technologies, whether it was operating system, virtualization, networking or storage-related.

It wasn't just the cost of the equipment though that was a burden, however. I had an entire bakers rack in a spare bedroom dedicated to them and they made a lot of noise, generated a lot of heat, and consumed a lot of electricity.

I couldn't keep them running all the time because my electric bill would be outrageous, and they made such a racket that I had to turn them off at night or we couldn't get any sleep. 

It finally came to a head about three or four months ago. I was going to buy two new servers to replace the aging systems I own now. With my oldest boxes going on six years old, they are now at the point where running modern hypervisors on them, whether they are Hyper-V, VMware or KVM-based is a bit of a challenge.

They'll still run most stuff bare metal perfectly fine, but that's a huge waste of resources and makes it that much harder to test the things I want to test.

Read this

• Tablets, Ultrabooks: The future is unfixable
• Who's killing the PC? Blame the cloud
• Computing's low-cost, Cloud-centric future is not Science Fiction
• The approaching datacenter zombie apocalypse
• It's not about Windows: The repairable PC is dead
• Cloud haters: You too will be assimilated

I did the math, and it probably would have run me a good $5000-$7000 to get what I wanted in terms of CPU horsepower, memory, networking and storage. That kind of capital investment for what amounted to a testing/lab rig for someone who no longer owns their own consulting firm didn't make any sense anymore.

I looked at the pricing on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, as well as a number of private cloud offerings, and the numbers frankly astounded me. I'd be out of my mind to buy new equipment.

Let's start with storage. Enterprise-grade, locally-redundant cloud "blob" storage is ridiculously cheap now, to the tune of about two cents a gigabyte per month for the first terabyte, and it gets cheaper after about the first 10 terabytes. If you want georedundant you pay a little bit more. 

I could use that blob storage accessed by virtual machines I could run in IaaS, or I could use it as direct storage over the Internet, and build my own secure backup vault with it.

If I wasn't as concerned about RTO's or potential restore costs I might be enticed to use something like Amazon Glacier, which is priced at about 1 cent per gig and functions more akin to a tape drive than a random access device.

My multi-terabyte photo collection would have been a good candidate for that, but I chose to put it all on Azure blob, so I could access it directly from my PC as a hard drive and backup target using software like Cloudberry and GoodSync.

For personal data storage? OneDrive is awesome. I can access that from every device I own, from anywhere. Admittedly, I don't use many Google services anymore, but I have to give serious props to Google Drive for driving consumer storage prices way, way down. 

The VMs? Look, messing around with hypervisors is fun at work, but let's face it, I really don't want to run my own infrastructure anymore. I only want to run workloads and operating systems when they need to run, and I want to provision and deprovision them as necessary.

Azure gives me 10 different types of VM configurations for general purpose, compute intensive or memory intensive testing. Amazon and Google have similar offerings as do any number of independent cloud providers.

Cloud storage and VM compute is a commodity, period.

Provisioning a multi-tier application environment is as easy as clicking a few links in a web browser. It was never that effortless when I ran my own systems. And if I need something as simple as a website or a hosted database without firing up a whole VM? I can do that with my cloud provider as well.

Sure, I used to love firing up the servers and making hardware hum. But that's not me anymore. Now I just want to make the applications work, I don't want it to break the bank and I want it to run more reliably than I can possibly build it myself.

And when you get down to it, that's what the Cloud is ultimately all about

Silicon Valley's 'solutionism' issues appear to be scaling (TechRepublic)

By Alex Howard August 25, 2014,
In Evgeny Morozov's latest book, he explores technological 'solutionism,' which he believes is a dangerous ideology that is pervasive in Silicon Valley. Read Alex Howard's book review. 

The Washington Post reporter Brian Fung aptly described the trend of using a technology to fix or solve a real-world problem as "solutionism." The trouble, said Fung, referencing Uber's hire of David Plouffe to help navigate regulatory challenges, is that the way the real world works is "undermining Silicon Valley's apolitical fantasyland." This reality, embodied by the complex, dirty, and (sometimes) corrupt local, state, and national political systems of lobbyists, activists, regulators, campaigns, city councils, NGOs, unions, city halls, and legislatures around the world, is a frustratingly "dirty, petty business that reminds us more of the fading 20th century than the sleek, futuristic promise of the 21st," writes Fung.

To people who build fast and break things, the thinking goes, the built-in friction and resistance to change or efficiency that often pervade the political and the government institutions of society is anathema. Architects of democratic systems for governance might feel otherwise: the considerable friction within bicameral legislatures, or the checks and balances between executive, legislative, and legal branches of government, look much more like features than bugs, despite the lack of productivity in some chambers.

If your ears perked at this use of solutionism, it may be because the term has been applied there before, at great specificity, length, and volume over recent years by Evgeny Morozov. Morozov, the voluble and often contrarian critic of "internet intellectuals" and the worst aspects of the culture of today's technology world, has authored perhaps the most bruising series of book reviews and acid analyses of Silicon Valley's foibles of any writer working today. By almost any measure, Morozov is Silicon Valley's chief critic, a role he seems to relish with each successive polemic and darkly humorous tweet.

At times, his biting style and bilious prose can mask important points of criticism, just as the lengthy "personal take downs" in his lacerating book reviews may turn off people who don't relish pedantic pugilism. To get his work into mainstream discourse, Morozov has successfully pursued "meme hustling" himself over the years, from The Net Delusion, his prescient book on electronic surveillance and "internet freedom," to his critiques of so-called "slacktivism" (where people engage in lightweight online activism, as opposed to more "thick" civic engagement) and more recently "internet centrism," where the principles, standards, and logic that were used to build the network of networks and the World Wide Web atop it are applied towards social movements and societal problems. (Unsurprisingly, catchphrases, buzzwords, and online memes -- even if used ironically -- are a fine way to market criticism as well as software and startups.)

 Image courtesy of Amazon

To say his generally (if not always) well-reviewed book To Save Everything, Click Here or the vast number of columns, essays, articles, and tweets that he has written since to promote it and the ideas within are infused with anger and contempt for startup founders, venture capitalists, or technology pundits would be to fail to capture the depth of his visceral dislike for the people and the ideas that pervade today's industry, as he makes clear through his popular Twitter account.

Even if Morozov's critiques of technology and its discontents may be weakened by his use of straw man arguments at times, I think the substance of Morozov's work should be a must-read for many people in an industry that all-too-often engages in self-congratulation and rhetoric about "saving the world." (The necessary questions for those who would do the latter, as ever, are from what, for whom, and how?) As documented by Gawker's Valleywag and the broader technology media, the actions and words of many young or callow members of the tech industry leave them wide open for easy criticism, fromparties to luxury expeditions to the hot sands of Black Rock Desert to dehumanizing marketing stunts. When disruption and innovation are both overused and overhyped in academia, industry, and government, there's no shortage of targets.

In particular, Morozov's excellent essay on technology, democracy, and "the real privacy problem" in MIT's Technology Review is a must-read. In it, he explored many of the themes I've visited here at TechRepublic and plan to write about in the future:

"The invisible barbed wire of big data limits our lives to a space that might look quiet and enticing enough but is not of our own choosing and that we cannot rebuild or expand. The worst part is that we do not see it as such. Because we believe that we are free to go anywhere, the barbed wire remains invisible. Worse, there's no one to blame: certainly not Google, Dick Cheney, or the NSA. It's the result of many different logics and systems -- of modern capitalism, of bureaucratic governance, of risk management -- that get supercharged by the automation of information processing and by the depoliticization of politics.

The more information we reveal about ourselves, the denser but more invisible this barbed wire becomes. We gradually lose our capacity to reason and debate; we no longer understand why things happen to us.

But all is not lost. We could learn to perceive ourselves as trapped within this barbed wire and even cut through it. Privacy is the resource that allows us to do that and, should we be so lucky, even to plan our escape route."

Morozov encourages us to think of "privacy" as both a need for democracy and a condition for it, to politicize public debates around privacy and information sharing, to stop quantifying ourselves, and to create more "provocative digital services" that reveal the political dimensions of different technologies or choices in the use or creation. The long essay is well worth your time, largely free of the style he uses elsewhere, which is an absence I'd credit to good editing.

I can't say the same is entirely true of his most recent book, To Save Everything, Click Here, in which Morozov warns of the "perils of perfection" that technological solutionism would introduce and impose upon the world, exploring and critiquing the ideology that he argues pervades Silicon Valley. He caricatures the Valley and explains what he means by solutionism thusly:

"Last year the futurist Ayesha Khanna even described smart contact lenses that could make homeless people disappear from view, 'enhancing our basic sense' and, undoubtedly, making our lives so much more enjoyable. In a way, this does solve the problem of homelessness -- unless, of course, you happen to be a homeless person. In that case, Silicon Valley would hand you a pair of overpriced glasses that would make the streets feel like home. To quote an ad for Samsung's fancy TV sets, 'Reality. What a letdown.'

All these efforts to ease the torments of existence might sound like paradise to Silicon Valley. But for the rest of us, they will be hell. They are driven by a pervasive and dangerous ideology that I call 'solutionism': an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are 'solvable' with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal. Thus, forgetting and inconsistency become 'problems' simply because we have the tools to get rid of them -- and not because we've weighed all the philosophical pros and cons."

I was skeptical about how pervasive solutionism was in the tech industry when I first read Morozov's book, but the reality of its existence was clear enough over the past year that a Washington Post reporter independently landed upon both the problem and the term without reading it. Solutionism, which has its etymological roots in urban design and architecture, extends into other arenas as well, particularly healthcare. For instance, read John Wilbanks on sensorism and algorithms:

"Sensorism is rife in the sciences. Pick a data generation task that used to be human centric and odds are someone is trying to automate and parallelize it (often via solutionism, oddly -- there's an app to generate that data). What's missing is the epistemic transformation that makes the data emerging from sensors actually useful to make a scientific conclusion -- or a policy decision supposedly based on a scientific consensus."

"There's no way to grasp what's wrong with some of these initiatives without having some knowledge of debates in deliberative democracy," suggested Morozov to me last year, over email, "of which most people 'doing good' have little clue."

For instance, read Morozov's reply to Steven Johnson, after Johnson responded to a scathing review in The New Republic.

"The idea that progressive politics can be combined with market-oriented and decentralized solutions was already in circulation -- in the writings of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis but also of Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel -- by the end of the last century (and, more recently, in the work of scholars like Archon Fung). ...Josiah Ober, who has made a fascinating use of Hayek, game theory and political philosophyto argue that the democracy of classical Athens was so effective because it deployed highly innovative and decentralized schemes of aggregating the knowledge of its citizens."

Instead of approaches that seek to solve complex societal issues simply through the application of new technologies Morozov suggests, quite reasonably, that people seek first to understand the root causes of the issues.

"...a new strand of scholarship on the political implications of 'cognitive diversity' -- best exemplified by the work of Jon Elster and Helene Landemore -- which has advanced sophisticated, context-sensitive arguments about ways to bring more diverse voices into democratic policy-making," he writes, in The New Republic. "All these efforts start from where reform proposals ought to start: they acknowledge the complexity of the problem that they are trying to tackle and only then do they work their way to their preferred solution."

Honestly, this sounds eminently reasonable to me. I don't think Morozov hates open government or government reforms, as long as they are serious, grounded in social justice, and recognize the role of economic theory and political processes. He hates sloppy thinking, prose, and lack of citations from the relevant research literature and history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in that context, sharp prose, reasoning, and extensive footnoting are his primary strengths, along with dark humor.

To my read, it's not that Morozov is opposed to involving more citizens and leveraging networks in participatory processes but to imprecise thinking that isn't grounded in history, and, more fundamentally, the application of market solutions to democratic processes, or neoliberalism. Viewing open government solely through the lens of software developer participation and publishing open data risks (in his way of thinking) damaging both democratic institutions and the social contract between governments and the governed. It is for this reason and others that Morozov hates Silicon Valley and is deeply concerned about the impact of some of its most prominent technologists and platforms upon democracy, from the application of open source to open government to efforts to use technology to boost civic engagement. He has warned of "transparency without accountability," where digital disclosures do not accurately reflect the goals of those influencing democratic processes or their actions.

What does he support? A close read of his work is suggestive. As John Wonderlich pointed out on the Sunlight Foundation's blog, responding to a solutionist critique, Morozov is a proponent of open government, as it has been instantiated over previous decades, investigative journalism, and using technology to ensure government accountability with teeth. Wonderlich quoted Morozov's own words on a "good faith approach to open data," annotated with links to Sunlight Foundation projects:

How do we ensure accountability? Let's forget about databases for a moment andthink about power. How do we make the government feel the heat of public attention? Perhaps by forcing it to make targeted disclosures of particularly sensitive data sets. Perhaps by strengthening the FOIA laws, or at least making sure that governmentagencies comply with existing provisions. Or perhaps by funding intermediaries that can build narratives around data -- much of the released data is so complex that few amateurs have the processing power and expertise to read and make sense of it in their basements. This might be very useful for boosting accountability but useless for boosting innovation; likewise, you can think of many data releases that would be great for innovation and do nothing for accountability.

Morozov's book is both well-researched and often entertainingly written, though not in every case. Some chapters suffer the same fault that runs through too much of Morozov's oeuvre: he doesn't recount interviews with the people or representatives of the companies that he is pillorying, choosing instead to "know them" through their public writing, speaking, or news accounts of their lives or works. I find that this approach often robs his readers of a sense of who these people are and their own accounts of their motivations for why they do what they do, and even occasionally veers from paraphrasing into unethical territory, at least journalistically, where he eschews interviews when the subjects request them.

Put another way, it doesn't always ring true if a reader knows the people and the culture Morozov is describing. That means essays or chapters can sometimes read like anthropological research conducted without firsthand experience but festooned with footnotes from the work of others, made entertaining by the rhetorical skills of the author and apparently grounded in academic references and theory but sometimes unrecognizable to the subjects in the domains Morozov describes. The best example of this phenomenon is in his criticism of my former publisher Tim O'Reilly, who has been depicted in both familiar and unrecognizable forms over the past year. As my sometime-editor Micah Sifry observed at TechPresident this summer, "Morozov's ongoing war against civic tech is truly nutty in how he assumes only the most nefarious of impulses and never once wades into understanding how civic hackers actually work."

From his take on the maker movement to warnings that technology and algorithmic regulation will mean the death of the welfare state, or even politics itself, Morozov deftly weaves together research or quotes that support nefarious or foolish depictions of his subjects and can leave out those that don't, as in his implication that federated online identity systemsdon't include public sector options. He may also simply be wrong (or, more charitably, misleading) as he was in a recent op-ed about Facebook and privacy. As law professor Ryan Calo noted at Stanford, "everyone knows privacy is about power," with many books and essays to that effect. I certainly hope that my own writing on privacy conveys that truth.

All of this isn't to say that Morozov's books or essays aren't worth reading, nor that many of the subjects of his critiques don't merit the attention: just the opposite, in fact. His focus upon the nexus of "predictive shopping," data-driven regulation, behavioral economics, andalgorithmic transparency, for instance, is both timely and relevant to any debate about theethics that surround the impact of disruptive technology on society.

That said, if people distrust government (and in the US, they appear to, at historic levels) or see it as incompetent, they will try to fix problems on their own. That's what civil society does, or at least can do in countries where it is strong. This is exactly what anecdotal examples of DIY (Do It Yourself) or DIO (Do It Ourselves) government show have happened, from Hawaii to Russia to the Far Rockaways, where Recovers.org and Occupy supplemented the work of the Red Cross. For that matter, this is also relevant anywhere that people step up to help one another in disasters or communities where institutions have failed. I'm thinking, too, of the role churches play in many parts of the US, far from "peer progressivism" in the heart of evangelical counties.

I don't think there's ever been a time when we've been more continually connected to one another, aware of what our officials are doing or able to organize and collectively make governments more transparent and accountable. Yes, the open data deluge can obfuscate and deflect those efforts, and those interested in services and economic outcomes can confuse the issue, but there are also unprecedented opportunities to apply technology towards the extension and maintenance of democracy. It's also true that the same tools can be used by autocracies or in the service of a modern police state -- and that existing differences in power can be exacerbated and extended by differential access to smartphones and broadband internet.

That's why privacy protections under strong regulators matter. That's why the plummeting costs of tablets and smartphones matters. That's why extending lower-cost broadband to the poor matters. And that's why we can't neglect all of the analog aspects of opening government, like the laws and rules that must undergird permanent change.

I think the Open Government Partnership is having a positive effect upon these conversations, even if many countries are choosing to put in e-government reforms or adopt open data for services -- often flubbing it -- as opposed to passing or complying with uncomfortable freedom of information laws or investing in libraries or civic literacy. "Open government" is now a big tent, with related benefits to that expansion, despite the ambiguitysurrounding the use of the term.

What's happening at the local level today, in cities and towns, is fascinating, particularly in the absence of big budgets. People are using free, web-based tools and inexpensive open source tech to self-organize and help one another in times of need. It's messy and uncomfortable, especially when natural disasters hit or awful events like the Boston Marathon bombing occur, but when you see a Google Spreadsheet of people offering runners places to stay and the police department communicating with communities in real time, it's obvious that something about the context we live in has changed.

Alex Howard writes about how shifts in technology are changing government and society. A former fellow at Harvard and Columbia, he is the founder of "E Pluribus Unum," a blog focused on open government and technology.

Researchers Hack Traffic Lights (PCMag)

University of Michigan researchers uncovered three major weaknesses in the traffic light infrastructure.

• BY STEPHANIE MLOT
• AUGUST 22, 2014

Image: University of Michigan

Green means go...unless your traffic light has been hacked, that is.

A new report from University of Michigan researchers finds that traffic light hacking can be a real-life threat. Five members of the school's electrical engineering and computer science department recently published their findings in a paper, appropriately titled "Green Lights Forever."

"[The] critical nature of traffic infrastructure requires that it be secure against computer-based attacks, but this is not always the case," the report said.

In order to test that theory, researchers partnered with a local Michigan road agency to hack into almost 100 wirelessly networked traffic lights, and uncovered three major weaknesses in the traffic infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, all three fit snugly under the heading "inadequate security": lack of encryption and secure authentication, plus a vulnerability to known exploits. Any three could lead to a denial of service attack, traffic congestion, and light control, among other possibilities.

"With the appropriate hardware and a little effort, an adversary can reconfigure a traffic controller to suit [their] needs," the paper said.

However, the vulnerabilities discovered in the infrastructure are not the fault of any one device or design choice, according to the team, which instead pointed to "a systemic lack of security consciousness."

While there have been no reported cases of serious computer security threats from the Michigan road agency, the MIT Technology Review points out that more than 40 states currently use similar wireless systems.

In hopes of curbing any future issues, the university researchers worked with local officials to provide recommendations, including wireless security, firewalls, firmware updates, and changing default credentials.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. 

• 
  

Las fiestas de la siembra y la cosecha (Por: Ricardo Tribín Acosta)

E   N      M   I      O   P   I   N   I   O   N

En Pereira, Colombia, mi ciudad natal, se realizan a finales del mes de agosto, en homenaje a su creación, unas magníficas celebraciones conocidas como “Las fiestas de la cosecha”. En mis épocas de muchacho para mí era esto todo un espectáculo maravilloso, pues había fanfarrias populares, reinados, desfiles, rusticas casetas de baile, así como elegantes jolgorios en los clubes más conocidos de la ciudad, todo rodeado de un sano y seguro ambiente.

Pereira, por ser una población de herencia cafetera hace al tiempo homenaje especial a la siembra y luego recolección del café, bebida deliciosa del tipo suave, derivada de este producto de nuestra tierra y de otras vecinas, lo cual ha gestado un nombre para tan bella región conocido como el del “Eje cafetero”, el cual abarca en su extensión a los tres departamentos de Caldas, Quindío, y Risaralda.

Hoy en día el lugar ha dado paso a que las antiguas casonas del campo se conviertan en lugares hoteleros de pocas habitaciones los que le dan al visitante una impresión ecológica muy agradable. El estar allí, degustando las comidas nuestras del tipo “abuelas”, hacen resaltar en los paladares unos gustos bien buenos de sentir y recordar.

Comparando este bello paisaje con la vida misma, diría que lo que se siembra es lo que se recoge temprano o  tarde, y se devuelve incrementado, aplicándose ello con excelencia, tanto a productos agrícolas como el café, como a nuestras acciones en los procederes. Somos lo que hacemos y recogemos lo que sembramos y de allí ello será el resultante de cuan bien o no tan bien, hallamos actuado durante las diferentes etapas de nuestra existencia.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com

Miami, Agosto 23 de 2014

Invito a bajar mi cuarto libro y leerlo entrando a Caperucita morada y el ego feroz

Why the First Amendment remains a key check and balance to police militarization (TechRepublic)

By Alex Howard August 15, 2014,

The disproportionate impact of police militarization upon poor and minority communities highlights the need to uphold the right to record police activity in a democratic society. 

Image: Evan Vucci via CNET/CBS Interactive

Over the past week, the furor, tension, anger, violence and, by week's end, stirrings of hope in Ferguson, Missouri, have captured the world's attention. We've seen what the militarization of American policing looks like in practice, through photos and videos shared and reshared online and on broadcast news. Iconic images of military-grade armored vehicles, officers dressed in riot gear and camouflage ill-suited for urban environments, and a sniper training a long gun on a peaceful protest are likely to linger in the national consciousness for decades to come, along with the uneasy truths they reveal.

As I've watched from afar, I've been struck again by how much technology has changed society and how it has not. Social media and livestreams have not only enabled people to share what they're seeing and experiencing, as sources going direct, but have allowed the rest of the world to observe what is happening. People could see how images and videos differed from the official accounts from local law enforcement or the narratives spun by ideologically diverse cable news stations and publications.

The same platforms that carried images of sadness, anger, violence, and police use of force also enabled people to protest how their community was being depicted: The fatal shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown by a police officer spurred an outpouring of activism on Twitter deploring media stereotypes of young black men.

While I can't claim direct knowledge through reporting on the ground, today's 21st century new media environment seems to have caught both the Ferguson and St. Louis Police Departments by surprise. The arrogance displayed when officers arrested reporters from the Huffington Post and The Washington Post strongly suggested a lack of respect for traditional journalism, much less the constitutional rights of the public that law enforcement officers are sworn to protect and defend.

"There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting,"President Barack Obama said. "There's also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground."

Over the coming weeks, as the FBI and Justice Department work with Missouri state and local government to investigate the death of Michael Brown, there will be an opportunity to learn what went wrong in this instance and to recognize the systemic issues in Ferguson and around the United States. Concerns about themilitarization of policing raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and civil libertarians like author Radley Balko and Conor Friedersdorf will be given fresh air, from reported attempts to thwart open records laws to the impact upon innocent people tomission creep from traditional SWAT missions.

The gentleman on the left has more personal body armor and weaponry than I did while invading Iraq.pic.twitter.com/5u6TxyIbkk

- Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) August 14, 2014

The disproportionate impact and direction of police militarization toward minorities and poor communities also merit more attention from governors, as well as the Justice Department, although it will need to get its own house in order.

"At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community," United States Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, "I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message."

If Congress and the Justice Department are concerned about law enforcement militarization, perhaps they should take meaningful steps to slow or halt federal grants for the purchase of military-grade hardware, particularly as vehicles and gear flow to police departments from the Pentagon after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. One step might be the serious consideration of Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson's bill, backed by conservative and liberal groups, which would direct the Secretary of Defense to make limitations on the transfer of property to state agencies.

As ever, the use of disruptive technology poses ethical questions for society. While SWAT teams can and should be equipped with the surveillance technology and gear they need to fight heavily armed gangs, drug traffickers, and domestic terrorism, making all police officers look like soldiers increases the likelihood of their acting like military, except without the training or discipline. After Ferguson, police departments should consider pursuing community policing and full disclosure in the face of similar unrest, not occupation, unofficial martial law, and suspension of the Bill of Rights.

"After #Ferguson, how should police respond to protests?"-@RadleyBalko http://t.co/URrqPpAIBkCommunity policing. pic.twitter.com/JvAa1q0NG0

- Alex Howard (@digiphile) August 15, 2014

On that count, it's worth noting that we have the right to record the police conducting their public duties, if not what other citizens do in private. While this First Amendment right is not absolute (you cannot interfere with the police's business, like, blocking their means of entry or egress), you can film the police, even if they tell you not to do so. This right was recently backed up by the Department of Justice. Moreover, the police do not have the right to confiscate mobile devices used to do so, nor search them without a warrant, after this year's landmark Supreme Court decision that applied the Fourth Amendment to the digital domain.

Everyone has the right to record what police officers are doing in public in their communities. In the wake of Ferguson and in the context of police shootings nationwide, citizens knowing their rights to peacefully assemble and observe may provide much-needed accountability for brutality and abuse.

Alex Howard writes about how shifts in technology are changing government and society.