Deltoid

At the The High Road there was some discussion of the cherry picked Lott article I discussed here. One poster, “agricola”, criticized Lott, linking to my blog. Another poster, “fallingblock”, responded:

I contacted John Lott a while back and asked him for the details of his discussions with Tim Lambert.

According to Lott, he has offered several times to provide data for Tim and Lambert does not reply.

Lott tried to make it look like I refused to look at the data and attacked him regardless. In fact, I have not received any email from Lott since 1999. All of my email to him since my first email about the mysterious survey have gone unanswered. Lott’s claim had the desired effect—fallingblock concluded (erroneously):

My opinion is that Tim Lambert is yet another anti-gun Australian of the academic elite - the sort who seem to drive so much of the riduculous firearms legislation here in Australia.

I contacted fallingblock to point out that Lott had not contacted me. He emailed Lott to seek an explanation, and sure enough, Lott’s story changed. Fallingblock posted:

I’ve had a few emails from John Lott and he quite correctly states that the data is all available at his website for anyone to view.

Dr. Lott remains quite open to any specific questions concerning his research and generously offered to answer any of my own.

He also maintains that Tim Lambert was among the first to receive the data when it became available.

Yes, I was among the first to get the data from his 2002 survey. But in his email to fallingblock, Lott had implied that I had ignored his offers to supply me with that data. And note that Lott did not made this charge publically, where I could rebut it, but in a private email where he thought I would never find out about it. I wonder what other things he is saying behind my back?

John Quiggin has a heuristic to help detect outfits like The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute.

ADTI claimed that Ken Brown’s attack on Linux was based on “extensive interviews” with “Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew Tanenbaum”. We already saw Tanenbaum’s repudiation of Brown. Now Groklaw has Stallman’s and Ritchie’s. The one from Ritchie is particularly interesting because it lets us see the leading questions Brown was asking:

In my opinion, Linus Torvalds did NOT write Linux from scratch. What is you opinion? How much did he write? I talked to a Finnish programmer that insists that Linus had the Unix code (the Lyon’s Book) and Minix code. Without those two, who could not have even come close to writing Linux.

By “the Lyon’s Book” Brown is referring to my late colleague John Lions‘ commentary on the 6th edition of Unix that he used for teaching operating systems here at UNSW. (His office used to be three doors down from mine.) The notion that Torvalds copied Linux from John’s commentary is pretty silly. By the time Torvalds was writing Linux, the version of Unix in John’s book was fifteen years out of date and was written for a different architecture in any case.

Meanwhile, Brown’s book has gathered a few negative on-line reviews. I know someone who could help him with that.

Ken Brown has a reply to the heavy criticism of his paper claiming that Linus Torvalds did not write Linux. ADTI introduce his reply like this:

Experts from Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds agree: a. they are much smarter than AdTI’s Kenneth Brown, b. IBM is good, Microsoft is evil, and c. Brown’s theory of how Linux was probably written is dead wrong. (Dog bites man.) Brown says their accounts are hopelessly shifting and contradictory — not only against the historical record, but in recent weeks. (Man bites back.)

Unfortunately, Brown’s reply fails to live up to the promise they make. Brown does not find any contradictions in their accounts at all. Tanenbaum comprehensively demolishes Brown in his response. An excerpt:

First, Linux 0.01 does not contain any MINIX code, as Alexey Toptygin’s code comparison shows. Second, even if it had, there was no prohibition in using MINIX code for noncommercial purposes, even in the beginning. I find it dishonest in the extreme for Brown to have hired Topygin to compare the Linux and MINIX code, get a report saying they were completely different, and then merrily continue claiming Linux was based on MINIX. I don’t know if Brown used MS-Word to write his book, but saying Linux is based on MINIX is like saying Brown’s book is based on MS-Word.

I can’t resist a comment of my own. Brown claims:

Another reason this is interesting is because the Ritchie, Thompson kernel was 11,000 lines of code over a number of years, and the Torvalds kernel was 32,000 in under a year.

But Linux did not reach 32,000 lines until version 0.96b, 14 months after Torvalds started the project. More importantly, once version 0.01 was released, many other people contributed to Linux. Moon and Sproull’s paper on Linux development (First Monday 5:11 2000) states:

Within two months of Torvalds’ October 1991 announcement, about thirty people had contributed close to 200 reports of errors and problems in running Linux, contributions of utilities to run under Linux, and drivers and features to add to Linux. When Torvalds released version 0.11 in December 1991, he credited contributions by three people in addition to himself (Torvalds, 1991, December 3). In version 0.13, released in February 1992, the majority of patches were written by people other than Torvalds. By July 1995, more than 15,000 people from 90 countries on five continents had contributed comments, bug reports, patches, and features.

People familiar with writing programs don’t find it unlikely that Torvalds could have written 10,000 lines of code in six months. The only person who can’t believe it is Brown, who does not appear to have any background in programming.

I’m a computer scientist. I’ve written on critics of Global Warming (here, for example) not because I’m an expert on climate science, but because I’m not. The critics I’ve written about aren’t experts either and make errors that even I can detect easily. I’ve wondered how professional climate scientists must feel about amateurs like Ross McKitrick who write papers based on ignorance of the field insisting that all the experts have got it wrong. Now, thanks to Ken Brown, I know how they feel.

Oh, and the McKitrick briefing I critiqued was sponsored by the Cooler Heads Coalition. And what is the Cooler Heads Coalition? Why, it’s group formed to “dispel the myths of global warming”. Look at some of its members:

• Competitive Enterprise Institute—home of Iain Murray
• Pacific Research Institute—home of Sonia Arrison
• The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (now replaced by junkscience.com)
• and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

Yes, ADTI are anti-Linux, pro-tobacco and anti-global warming shills.

Lott has a new post on blog where he writes:

6/15/04
Two-thirds of Police Chiefs think Right-to-carry Laws Reduce Crime

A new survey by the National Association of Chiefs of Police asks members: “Do you agree that a national concealed handgun permit would reduce rates of violent crime as recent studies in some states have already reflected?” 65.7 percent of members say “Yes”. There are other interesting questions in the survey. Two-thirds oppose one-gun-a-month rules. Over half think that the rules allowing pilots to carry concealed handguns are too restrictive.

It may be that two-thirds of Police Chiefs think right-to-carry laws reduce crime, but this poll does not tell us that. First, the survey was conducted by mailing 22,587 Chiefs of Police and Sheriffs. Mail-out surveys get low response rates (just 10.4% in this case) so the results are not representative of the opinions of police chiefs. A phone survey of size 1,000 would have had a similar cost to their mail-out survey and would have actually provided some meaningful results.

Second, the question seems to come from a push poll. Instead of finding out what the police chiefs think about concealed carry the question seems designed to convince them that “recent studies” show that concealed carry laws reduce violent crime. In fact, recent studies show that, if anything, concealed carry laws increase crime. If the question had been “Do you agree that a national concealed handgun permit would INCREASE rates of violent crime as recent studies in some states have already reflected?” I suspect you would have got a majority to agree with that instead.

So why would NACOP run a push poll question on concealed carry? This story on an earlier version of the poll gives us a clue:

The survey asked 23,113 chiefs and sheriffs around the country, “Do you agree that a national concealed handgun permit would reduce rates of violent crime as recent studies in some states already reflected?” According to the National Association of Chiefs of Police (NACOP), 62 percent of those surveyed said “yes.”

John Michael Snyder, NACOP vice president and director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said the response was striking, especially since this is the first time in the survey’s 14-year history that this particular question was asked.

Yes, Snyder is a political activist trying to get concealed carry laws passed. And note that while for an opinion poll it makes no sense to conduct a mail-out poll of size 20,000 instead of a phone poll of size 1,000, for a push poll it makes more sense since you get your message to more people.

Oddly enough, the year before the question was first asked, both Snyder and Lott were speakers at the morning sessions of the 2000 Gun Rights Policy Conference. Snyder said:

“If Gore wins, America loses. If Gore wins, the horrendous gun-grabbing legislative attacks spearheaded by the Clinton/Gore Administration will continue and increase.”

While Lott told the audience:

“About 98% of the time simply brandishing a gun is sufficient cause for the criminal to break off his attack. Less than 2% of the time the weapon is fired, and most of those are just warning shots.”

Jason Soon has a series of posts on gun control in Australia here, here and here.

I felt that the laws here before 1996 were about right and I do not think that the 1996 laws were a good idea. The 1996 gun buyback involved replacing semi-automatic long guns with ones that weren’t semi-autos. For almost all misuses of guns this makes no difference—you only need one shot to kill or wound someone. It does make a difference in the sort of incident that prompted the buyback—a mass public shooting, but these are really rare. You could save more lives if you spent the $500 million on something else.

You can see a table containing crime figures before and after the laws here. (I also have them in a spreadsheet.) There has been a modest reduction in homicides and with-gun homicides, but it is not statistically significant, so might have been caused by chance.

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s attack on Linux gets taken apart in Lee Gomes’ Wall Street Journal article:

An institute study issued last month ups the ante in Linux criticism. It tries to prove that Linux’s Linus Torvalds has always been contemptuous of intellectual-property laws, starting with the very birth of Linux. The implication: Since Linux is tainted, potential users may one day find themselves in court. …

If Mr. Torvalds had the larcenous heart of a software pirate, it would be very simple to prove. Linux, you’ll recall, is totally open. All that purloined code would be sitting there, buck naked, for both terrorists and Linux bashers to see.

Mr. Brown, though, hasn’t a single example. With the absence of such evidence, reasonable people will be forgiven for assuming that Linux folks are as scrupulous about intellectual-property issues as they have always said they were. For those like Mr. Brown who insist otherwise, the phrase “put up or shut up” comes to mind.

I asked Mr. Brown why we should believe him rather than Prof. Tannenbaum — who, incidentally, is no fan of Linux. “There are just too many conflicting interviews and facts,” Mr. Brown replied. “When those guys get their story straight, maybe we can make some progress.”

Mr. Brown says he never maintained it was impossible for Mr. Torvalds to have written Linux, just “highly unlikely.” And he calls Mr. Toptygin “a great kid,” albeit “a little caught up in the fanaticism of the Linux movement, which is cool with me.”

With growing numbers of businesses turning to Linux, its pros and cons are fair game for debate. But cynically manufacturing confusion isn’t debating. Even Microsoft didn’t like the way this report turned out, though it indirectly helped subsidize it. A company spokesman called the study, “an unhelpful distraction from what matters most — providing the best technology for our customers.”

Groklaw has even more rebuttals of ADTI: Ilkka Tuomi and Andrew Tanenbaum and Swartz and Perens. My earlier posts on ADTI are here, here and here

Lott has teamed up with Eli Lehrer for another cherry picking exercise. In an op-ed published in National Post they get straight to it with an outrageous cherry pick in just the second sentence:

Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased.

On the left you can see a graph of Canadian homicide rates for the last ten years (data from Statistics Canada). Since 1998 the homicide rate has pretty obviously gone down. So how were Lott and Lehrer able to come up with an increase? Simple. In 1998 the rate was 1.84, while in 2002 the rate was 1.85 (details). They picked the year after the law with the highest homicide rate (2002). Then they picked the year before the law with the lowest homicide rate (1998). Even then they got numbers with the smallest possible difference in rates. But they didn’t tell you that, trying to make it seem that the increase was significant.

Lott then goes on to cut and paste his previous cherry picked statistics purporting to show that crime in England and Australia has increased. I dealt with these in a previous post.

Lott and Lehrer continue with:

violent crime has fallen even faster in right-to-carry states than for the nation as a whole.

This is not true. The most comprehensive study on this (Ayers and Donohue’s Stanford Law Review paper) finds that crime has tended to fall faster in the states without carry laws.

The states with the fastest growth in gun ownership have also experienced the biggest drops in violent crime rates.

This is from an analysis (page 114 of More Guns, Less Crime) based on two surveys of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purported to show that a 1% increase in a state’s gun ownership causes a 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.

Lott’s two polls indicate that gun ownership increased by 50% in just eight years, from 26% to 39%. This is contradicted by everything else we know about gun ownership:

Since 1959, there have been at least 86 different surveys on gun ownership *. There doesn’t seem to have been in any increase over that period, let alone over 1988-1996. The percentage of the population that declared they were gun owners varied between 25% and 35%, but there was no clear trend. It seems that the changes in the numbers are caused by sampling error, differently worded questions, and changes in the willingness of people to admit to gun ownership. Lott’s apparent increase is an artifact of his having looked at just two polls instead of many.

My thanks to Carl Jarret for first pointing out Lott’s cherry picking of the Canadian statistics.

The National Post has printed a letter from Gary Mauser commenting on the Lott/Lehrer oped I discussed earlier. Here is the whole thing:

It should not surprise many people that Canada’s gun laws have not worked (More Gun Control Isn’t The Answer, John R. Lott Jr., June 15). Anyone living in a big Canadian city has witnessed the horrifying increase in violent crime over the past decade.

Canada’s violent crime rate is now higher than in the United States. Our burglary and assault rates are particularly frightening, and illegal handguns are increasingly misused in our largest cities.

This is the result of the Liberal government’s failure to punish violent criminals and instead to criminalize hunters and target shooters if they fail to get a licence and to register their shotguns and rifles.

Nor do gun laws work any better in Great Britain or Australia. In a recent study for the Fraser Institute, I showed that gun laws in those countries have failed to stop increases in violent crime and homicides.

In contrast, violent crime and homicide rates are plummeting in the United States. Violent crime is dropping even faster in those states that allow citizens to carry concealed handguns.

When is Ottawa going to get serious about stoping violent criminals?

There are several problems with Mauser’s letter.

On the left is a graph of the “horrifying increase in violent crime over the past decade” in Canada. If you compare the violent crime rate now with that of ten years ago, you’ll see that it has actually gone down. There has been no increase, let alone a “horrifying” one. And guess where this graph comes from? His own Fraser Institute Study.. He even refers to it in his letter.

And look at the graph in Mauser’s paper immediately before the one showing violent crime rates. In his letter Mauser writes “in contrast violent crime and homicide rates are plummeting in the United States”. But his own graph shows that homicide rates are dropping in Canada in parallel with those in the US.

Mauser also claims that “Canada’s violent crime rate is now higher than in the United States”. What he fails to mention that the “violent crime rate” in the Canadian statistics includes simple assaults but in the US statistics it only includes aggravated assaults. The graph on the left (from here) shows that the robbery and aggravated assault rates are actually lower in Canada. Moreover, Mauser is well aware of this since in his study he refers to this very graph (it’s from Gannon (2001)) when he writes:

“The comparison here shows the official statistics from both countries. Gannon (2001) constructs indices of violent crime that are more directly comparable. In her analysis, the trends in violent crime in the two countries resemble each other more closely, but her data also show that violent crime in Canada is increasing while it is decreasing in the United States.”

The graph clearly shows that robberies are decreasing in Canada. Mauser seems to consistently call decreases increases when it suits his argument.

His references to violent crime and homicide increases in Great Britain and Australia are also incorrect. Violent crime in England has decreased significantly since their gun ban. The number of violent crimes recorded by police has increased because of increased reporting and changes in recording practices. Mauser reports the police figures to try to make it look as if violent crime has increased even though the more accurate British Crime Survey figures show that it decreased. And he his well aware of what the BCS shows a decrease since he mentions it but buries it in an endnote and does not admit its significance. As for Australia, his own graph shows that homicide has decreased, but as usual he calls it an increase.

In his study he also claims:

Professor [sic] John Lott has shown how violent crime has fallen faster in those states that have introduced concealed carry laws than in the rest of the United States.

Of course, my readers will be well aware that Ayres and Donohue’s more comprehensive study has shown that crime has actually tended to fall faster in the states without carry laws, and that Lott’s results go away when his coding errors are corrected. Mauser is well aware of Ayres and Donohue’s work—we discussed it at great length in 2002 and 2003 on the firearmsregprof list, a mail list that Mauser is on, and yet he does not mention their work at all. In fact he doesn’t cite any critics of Lott at all.

Oh, and guess who is a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute, the think tank that published Mauser’s study: Our old friend Ross McKitrick.

Think tanks vs Open Source

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks:

Date	Think Tank	Author/Title	Extracts
Sep 19, 2002	Competitive Enterprise Institute	James DeLong Software Wars: Open Source And The New York Times	Writing aps without incorporating some operating system code is difficult, and those who want to engraft proprietary aps onto Linux are taking a legal risk.
Jan 31, 2003	Washington Legal Foundation	David S. Evans Open-Source Software Poses Challenges for Legal and Public Policy	the terms of licenses under which most open-source software is being distributed create a legal wall between for-profit and non-profit software, threatening to reduce innovation on both sides.
Feb 5, 2003	Small Business Survival Committee	Raymond Keating Is Open Source Software Equivalent to the Borg?	In the software universe, something similar to the Borg from “Star Trek” seems to be at work. It’s called open source software distributed under an agreement known as General Public License (GPL). If you recall, the Borg are “Star Trek” bad guys. They’re basically evil bureaucrats with skin problems, who assimilate every species they come in contact with throughout the universe. Societies are wiped out. Individual thought and creativity are extinguished as individuals are absorbed into a collective. Something similar could be said of GPL-based open source software.
April 8, 2003	Defenders of Property Rights	Is Open Source Software a Threat to the Future of Intellectual Property Rights?	As unlikely as this might seem to the skeptic, the National Security Agency (NSA), that coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence information, made the folly of developing GPL-licensed code to improve the Linux operating system. After reading the terms of the Linux GPL, the NSA realized they needed to post this enhancement to the Internet in source code form for the world to see. Unbelievably, any person with a PC and an Internet connection can now logon to the NSA’s website and print out the blueprint for NSA s Security Enhanced Linux software.
May 20, 2003	Pacific Research Institute	Sonia Arrison Is the Penguin Contaminated?	After all, in scanning the online petition, one can’t help but be struck by the many comments such as “get your hands of my linux you damn, dirty, corpo-apes!!” and worse. These words suggest we can expect defiance, not cooperation, on serious issues like intellectual property from the open-source community, at least in the near future.
June 24, 2003	Association For Competitive Technology	Richard Wilder Open source’s moment of truth	Regardless of the case’s outcome, however, the specter of liability has already been raised among the notoriously risk-averse ranks of corporate information officers. Already, industry analysts from Gartner have advised corporations to reconsider implementing Linux, especially on “mission critical” systems.
Aug 27, 2003	Citizens for a sound economy	Wayne T. Brough New Protectionism: Mandates for Open Source Software	there may be more incompatibility problems among open source programs than proprietary programs
Sep 24, 2003	Americans for Technology Leadership	Jim Prendergast CCIA Engages in Shameless Exploitation of Cyber-Security Fears	In a recent CNET article, Dan Ingevaldson, engineering manager for Internet Security Systems in Atlanta said ‘In any given year there have been just as many vulnerabilities in the open-source community as there have been with Microsoft.’
Oct 29, 2003	Citizens Against Government Waste	Tom Finnigan Massachusetts Not So Open For Business	Yet while the software itself is free, the cost to maintain and upgrade it can become very expensive. Acquisition costs commonly represent only a small percentage of the total cost of ownership. Maintenance, training and support are often more expensive with open source than proprietary software. Imagine the state DMV being responsible for programming the software that runs its computers. Every little problem would require an outside consultant, racking up fees and slowing down services.
Mar 2004	Progress and Freedom Foundation	James DeLong The Enigma of Open Source Software	In my opinion, open source looks like an idiosyncratic quirk that piggybacks on the billions of dollars that were spent on Unix rather than as a product of a real economic model. My view is that the open source advocates are pushing hard for preferences precisely because they doubt the sustainability of their model, and think that legal favoritism is necessary to keep it alive.
Mar 4, 2004	Institute for Policy Innovation	Tony Healy Has Open Source Reached Its Limits?	The reality is that open source can trap a customer into an outsourcer relationship more readily than commercial software. This is because commercial platforms expose standard API’s for third party applications and any consultant can develop for them. … open source will go the way of other IT industry fads that were once trumpeted as the way of the future, like Macintosh computers, business AI, 4GL programming languages and Y2K.
Mar 11, 2004	Small Business Survival Committee	Raymond Keating Intellectual Property: The Open Source Challenge	Risk of Lost Property. … If GPL-covered code were to find its way into a proprietary system or application, it would become public and free to use by anyone. … Security Issues. … relying on nameless volunteers in cyberspace for security purposes would seem to be a dicey proposition, at best. … Innovation. Much of the questions about open source software and applications come back to basic economic incentives. What incentives exist among volunteers to do their best, most innovative work? There is little.
Mar 17, 2004	Small Business Survival Committee	Raymond Keating Open Source, Open Questions	Indeed, open source has now moved into the courts over the issue of intellectual property. The burning question comes down to: How do those providing and using open source applications know that someone’s intellectual property wasn’t stolen and inserted? Consider that SCO Group, which owns the license for Unix software, accused IBM in a lawsuit filed in March 2003 of allegedly shifting Unix intellectual property into Linux. Additional lawsuits swirl around SCO, Unix and Linux. After long threatening to sue some high-profile Linux users, earlier this month, SCO brought a lawsuit against DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone.
Apr 29, 2004	International Policy Network	Bibek Debroy and Julian Morris Open to development: Open source software and economic development	The pure open-source model is not capable of supporting for-profit firms. While the service-support model can provide sustainable profits, as the U.S. experience has demonstrated this model can only support a handful of firms at best.
June 4, 2004	Alexis de Tocqueville Institute	Ken Brown Samizdat’s critics… Brown replies	Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector.

Many of these pieces were disseminated by townhall.com which is a project of the Heritage Foundation . Many more attacks on Open Source have been published by Tech Central Station .

It would take far too much space to rebut all their arguments. For example, here are extensive critiques of just the first one. I did mark with an asterisk all the think tanks that use Open Source software to power their web sites.

What the think tanks have in common

Why are all these think tanks so down on Open Source? Well, the Small Business Survival Committee is concerned that using open source will expose small business to the risk of lawsuits. Citizens Against Government Waste is concerned that the Government might waste money on Open Source. Defenders of Property Rights is concerned that Open Source might be a threat to intellectual property rights. However, I was able to detect a common theme to all their criticism. They all seem to be funded by Microsoft.

Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian, 20 July 2000:

They have a word in Washington for the corporate-sponsored outcry, the grassroots movement that isn’t: AstroTurf. By far the most comical example of this is to be found at the Freedom to Innovate Network (Fin), a “non-partisan, grassroots network of citizens and businesses who have a stake in the success of Microsoft and the high-tech industry”. Fin doesn’t try particularly hard to appear independent—its website, after all, is housed on Microsoft’s own—but it has as its online centrepiece a lengthy collection of testimonials from activist groups with vaguely alarming names: the Centre for the Moral Defence of Capitalism, Frontiers of Freedom, Defenders of Property Rights. Their comments appear unsolicited and independent: it certainly looks like there is a groundswell of support for the beleaguered computer giant. Though it isn’t mentioned on the site, the vast majority get funding from Microsoft, a company source confirms. There are swathes of them—the National Taxpayers Union, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Small Business Survival Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, and many more.

And the Albion Monitor writes:

[Citizens for a Sound Economy] is just one of several tax-exempt orgs that have divided over $750,000 from Microsoft and waxed in outrage over the proposed breakup of the software giant. Other beneficiaries include the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, and about a dozen more obscure names such as Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Small Business Survival Committee, the Independent Institute, Americans for Technology Leadership, and the Association for Competitive Technology.

Together the groups wage a disinformation campaign almost identical to the attempt to debunk global warming waged by Big Oil that we described in a 404 report two years ago. The strategy requires discrediting Microsoft critics while building a sham “grassroots” movement in support of the corporation.

The Pacific Research Institute’s annual report shows that it received more than $10,000 from Microsoft in 2003. The Progress and Freedom Foundation is supported by Microsoft. Declan McCullagh states: “CEI received a small-to-moderate amount of money from Microsoft during the antitrust trial days”. Tech Central Station is published by the DCI Group, a PR firm with Microsoft as a client. And, of course, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is funded by Microsoft.

Let’s see, that leaves the Washingtonian Legal Foundation, the International Policy Network and the Institute for Policy Innovation. I asked each of them if they were funded by Microsoft, but not one of them replied. The article published by the Washingtonian Legal Foundation is similar to this one published by Microsoft. That’s not surprising since they were both written by the same person, who is, in fact, a consultant to Microsoft. The International Policy Network shares staff and its US address with the Microsoft-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute. As for the IPI, it seems that Microsoft hired one of the directors of the IPI as its chief lobbyist. And when Leon Brooks accused the IPI of shilling for Microsoft, the IPI responded:

Mr Brooks attacked a 17-year-old, well-respected public policy research organisation in the US about which he knows absolutely nothing, and to which he made not a single inquiry before dashing off his screed. He impugned our motives and questioned our integrity without a shred of information and without enough interest to bother to ask us.

This is your basic non-denial denial. IPI is upset that their integrity was questioned, but they did not actually deny the charge. I pointed this out in my email to them, but they did not reply.

Several leaked Microsoft memos (known as the Halloween documents) provide some insight into Microsoft’s plans to combat Open Source. Comparing their research, into the best messages to use against Open Source with the arguments used by the think tanks is rather interesting.

Lack of disclosure

Not one of these think tanks mentioned that they were funded by Microsoft when they attacked Open Source. Chris Mooney explains what is wrong with this:

My argument is not that the work of any of these authors was bought and paid for by a particular company. That is both impossible to prove and probably untrue anyway. Still, had the relevant corporate connections been disclosed to readers in each of these cases, the op-eds would undoubtedly have seemed suspect. That’s the whole point of disclosure: It lets readers judge for themselves whether a particular connection may bias an argument or analysis. It shines sunlight on debates in which advocates may attempt to hide their ulterior motives to advance self-interested propagandistic arguments.

Funded by Philip Morris and pro-tobacco

This is not the only time that these think tanks have been pushing the agenda of their funders without disclosing their connection. In 1995, several of them mounted vitrolic attacks on the FDA using expensive radio, television and print ads. In an article in the Los Angeles Times Myron Levin wrote:

Although the attacks do not mention tobacco, the industry is a major beneficiary. By arguing that the FDA has neglected its basic mission, the critics have made a case against the agency embarking on new initiatives, such as tobacco control…

Some of the FDA attackers—including the Washington Legal Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy and the Competitive Enterprise Institute—have received financial support from tobacco interests. And that has prompted industry foes to question if the companies are just lucky bystanders or have played a behind-the-scenes role…

Officials of Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, the two biggest tobacco companies, declined to discuss corporate donations to such groups…

Tobacco companies “have increased their support of CEI,” but not to fund any specific campaign, said spokesman Jason Taylor. “We make it quite clear that support of CEI is support of the whole organization and … . our principles.”

However, now that the tobacco companies’ documents are publicly available we can find out what was really going on.

Levin’s inquiries while he was working on his story generated quite a few concerned emails within Philip Morris. Executives were worried about what Levin might find out and wanted to make sure that no-one told him anything. For example:

Of course Marsha should not respond to Levin. We never had any leaks with Decision Quest. … This is disturbing and may mean that we are using too many outside consultants.

What was Philip Morris trying to hide? Well, in December 1994, a Philip Morris executive came up with a plan to deal with the FDA:

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about how the tobacco industry should deal with the threat of FDA regulation of nicotine. Even with the favorable outcome of the November elections, I doubt if it will be politically feasible to get Congress to direct the FDA not to regulate tobacco.

A better strategy is to launch a broad-based attack on the FDA. …

A public relations and advertising campaign should be mounted to publicize FDA’s failings, and to generate public and congressional sentiment for reform. …

From the moment the plan is launched, FDA will have its hands full defending its record and its existing turf. FDA’s efforts to claim new jurisdiction, including jurisdiction over tobacco would be curtailed. The tobacco industry could take a low—even invisible—profile if it so desires…

Citizens for a Sound Economy was Philip Morris’ major partner in the campaign. They presented a proposal to Philip Morris that included TV and radio ads, production of an “academic” study on the FDA’s regulatory burden, and even astroturf letters:

CSE would encourage our 250,000 grassroots members to … sign and mail a pre-printed letter to the editor that has been personalized with their local newspapers’ names and addresses.

The proposed budget was over a million dollars for phases I and II and an additional $2,827,925 for phase III. Philip Morris paid CSE a mere one million dollars, so it looks like only phases I and II were implemented.

Philip Morris records show the following payments in 1995, as well as examples of pro-tobbaco lobbying:

Think tank	1995 Payments	Pro-tobacco lobbying
Competitive Enterprise Institute	$200,000	Example
Heritage Foundation	$50,000	Example
Defenders of Property Rights	$30,000	Example
Small Business Survival Committee	$40,000	Example
Citizens for a Sound Economy	$985,000	Example
Alexis de Tocqueville Institute	$75,000	Example
Citizens Against Government Waste	$50,000	Example
Washington Legal Foundation	$250,000	Example

All of these think tanks lobbied on behalf of Philip Morris without mentioning their connection, just as they attacked Open Source without mentioning that they were funded by Microsoft. More details on the behind-the-scenes efforts of the tobacco companies are in this Mother Jones article.

Funded by Exxon and anti-global warming

Some of these same think tanks have also received funding from Exxon, and by the strangest coincidence have been hard at work denying the existence of global warming and claiming that Kyoto will cause massive damage to the economy. Examples: Paul Georgia of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Alexis De Tocqueville Institute. Greenpeace has created an interactive web site on these groups. I used it to create a graph showing all the anti-Open Source think tanks that are also anti-global warming (Flash required).

Disclosure

I have not been paid by anybody to write this piece. I did use Open Source software including Xemacs, GNU/Linux, and Blosxom while writing it. My thanks to Lion Kuntz who prompted my investigation by leaving a comment listing some of the think tank attacks.

Update 25 Jun

There is discussion of this article at Slashdot and Linux World. I added the Progress and Freedom Foundation to the list. Eric Raymond has posted a new Halloween document.

Update 2 Jul

IPI replies here.

Site Meter says that I have now had 200,000 visits to this blog. The post that attracted the most visits was the one I made a few days ago on think tanks and Open Source, with about 35,000 visits, mainly because of a link from Slashdot. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.

On his blog, John Lott writes

The Public’s Response to Michael Moore’s Sources

David Letterman: How do we know what’s in your film [Fahrenheit 9/11] is true?
Michael Moore: Because I got most of my information from The New York Times.
Audience: Wild laughter.
Letterman: [Strains to repress laughing]
Moore: What’s so funny?

Late Show with David Letterman
June 18, 2004

However, this transcript seems to be a fabrication. Nathan at BlueB has the correct version:

Letterman: And, and we can absolutely believe the sources you’ve used in assembling your documentary?

Moore: Oh yeah, it’s New York Times, it’s the Wall Street Journal, it’s, it’s, uh –

Letterman: Well, the Times [starts laughing, audience laughs, Michael Moore laughs] - depending on what day it is….

Letterman: Hang on a second, we’ll be right back here with Michael Moore.

You can check this for yourself by looking at the video over at One Good Move.

Nathan also has the details on how the bogus transcript has been spread by bloggers. The primary vector for spreading it seems to have been a post by Eugene Volokh. Unlike Lott, Volokh at least cautions his readers that the transcript may not be accurate, but he has not yet corrected his post, even though I emailed him about it a few days ago.

The bogus transcript is sufficiently different from the correct version that I don’t think it likely to be the result of an error, but if you can think of a plausible explanation, please leave a comment.

Update:Volokh has posted a correction, writing “Another beautiful story ruined by ugly fact”. Pejman Yousefzadeh, however, isn’t one to be swayed by a mere fact.

Update 2:Yousefzadeh still doesn’t get it. (You can watch the video if you want to see what I mean).

Mike Adams has an article on John Lott and Michael Moore where he writes:

The thesis of “Bowling for Columbine” is sometimes difficult to ascertain because Moore frequently contradicts himself in the movie. Nonetheless, I think that he is trying, above all else, to assert the following:

The United States has more crime than other countries (like Canada). The United States has more guns than other countries (like Canada). Therefore, guns cause crime and, of course, more gun control is necessary.

What Moore actually says is that Canada has as many guns as the US and does not make the assertion that Adams claims.

Moore could certainly be criticized on this point since comparable survey data from the ICVS indicate that only 30% of Canadian households have guns, as compared to 50% of US households. (See this paper by Martin Killias for details.)

Adams also writes about John Lott:

Some of my colleagues disagree with his recommendations for public policy but are completely unable to specify any flaws in his research or in his logic.

Adams seems to be unfamiliar with the papers by Ayres and Donohue, Rubin and Dezhbakhsh, Ludwig, Duggan, Black and Nagin, Duggan, Maltz and Targonski, Zimring and Hawkins, Hood and Neeley, Goertzel and Helland and Tabarrok. This is a little disappointing since Adams is actually a professor in Criminal Justice.

Update: World O’Crap weighs in, suggesting that Adams may have made up the stories about his colleagues.

In reponse to criticism that Lott used cherry picked numbers to claim that homicides had increased following gun registration in Canada, “Maxim” posted on Usenet:

The law started in December 1998. Guns did not have to be registered until 2001. Violent crime was falling until very shortly after the law started doing anything, and the crime rates start rising consistently after that, with the biggest increase in 2002. It is falling before the law and for one year after and then rising consistently afterward.

Hmm, it was posted under the name of Lott’s son, but the writing style belongs to John Lott. Note that Lott has posted a five-star review of More Guns, Less Crime under Maxim’s name. I suppose it’s possible that John helped Maxim with the post.

John Lott posted on his blog:

Canadian long gun and shot gun registration was started in December 1998 and the guns were supposed to be registered by January 2001, though there was an extension until July 2001. Crime rates continued falling during the first full year of the program but rose consistent [sic] every year thereafter and in the lastest [sic] numbers for 2002 ended up higher than the last year prior to the law (1998).

Maxim, at least, seems to be better at proof reading his posts.

Anyway, on to the substance of their defence. The “consistent” increase is barely noticeable on the graph since it is an increase from 1.76 to 1.77 to 1.78. Given the normal random variation in crime rates, no person knowledgable in statistics would read anything into such an increase.

Furthermore, when you look at the official Canadian statistics you’ll see that there is a footnote on the 2002 homicide rates:

Part of the increase in 2002 is a result of 15 homicides that occurred in Port Coquitlam in previous years and that were reported by police in 2002. Homicide counts reflect the year in which police file the report.

If you adjust the the statistics to count those murders when they happened, the rates for 2001 and 2002 end up exactly the same at 1.80 each, and even Lott’s cherrypicked increase goes away.