Goto Fail and the Raise that wasn't.

Hanlon's Razor and Legislative Oversight

Hanlon's Razor suggests that we should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. This principle seems particularly relevant when looking at legislative processes. After all, how many incompetent people do we know compared to truly malevolent ones?

Consider the recent case where Congress inadvertently gave itself a raise by omitting a clause from the Continuing Resolution (CR). There's no clear evidence of conspiracy; it might just have been a simple oversight, perhaps a legislative aide's copy-paste error. Noticing what isn't there in a document is notoriously difficult.Because how many stupid people do you know vs. how many evil people?

This is the clause that by omission, gave Congress a raise.

Consider the recent case where Congress inadvertently gave itself a raise by omitting a clause from the Continuing Resolution (CR). There's no clear evidence of conspiracy; it might just have been a simple oversight, perhaps a legislative aide's copy-paste error. Noticing what isn't there is very hard.

This blunder should annoy Republicans because it resulted in an unwarranted salary increase, and Democrats because the omission made objections to the CR3 draft impossible, forcing its passage. As citizens, we should be frustrated that our legislative process has become so complex that such oversights can occur.Which speaks to the need for better tooling. The word sin means to miss the bullseye, to make a mistake. We are all "mistakers". It's the human condition.

Goto Fail

This scenario underscores the urgent need for better legislative tooling. The word "sin" originally means to miss the mark, to err. We are all "mistakers"; it's part of the human condition. In technology, a similar situation occurred with Apple's infamous "Goto Fail" bug, where an extra goto fail; statement led to all HTTPS certificates being accepted as valid due to a coding oversight in C, where whitespace is irrelevant. Here's the problematic code:

The second goto fail; is misplaced, causing the function to skip all subsequent checks, always returning success if the hash computation was correct. As a software engineer, I've encountered similar errors countless times. This experience advocates for:

Automatic Code Formatting

Using Curly Braces {} for clarity

Rewriting Control Flow to reduce confusion

Automated Testing, especially for security-critical operations like SSL certificate validation

Turning to law, my view of lawyers is that they're akin to software engineers for the adversarial side of human interaction. While software engineers aim for truth, lawyers often craft rules to benefit their clients, leading to a system where legal battles resemble the antics of Road Runner and Coyote—formalities and conflicts until the day's whistle blows. My one experience with litigation felt exactly like this; it's a game for lawyers.

The film "My Cousin Vinny" humorously captures this dynamic, where Vinny learns he's part of the broader "lawyer team." Watching legislative debates can be equally frustrating, almost torturous.

Thus, we require better tools for both legislators and the public to track legislative processes. The conventional approach might involve awarding a costly contract to a firm like Deloitte, resulting in an inefficient product. Instead, I propose the "Legion of Pissed Off Nerds" (LPON), harnessing collective expertise for a better, free solution. Currently, bills are encoded in XML, and while internal tools exist, they're not publicly accessible. Bgov.com, for instance, is not free.

I've initiated a project on Bitbucket called Dogetools@bitbucket, where I'll soon upload my tools so far for bill analysis. Bitbucket, much like GitHub, offers rule-based features that will help as the project grows. I welcome other contributions, more later.

if (err = testTheHash())
   goto fail;
   goto fail; // this is NOT in the if.

///check to see if the certificate is signed correctly

fail:
   return err;

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