Senator Feinstein Responds regarding H.R. 1585
2007/11/15/1109Thank you for your letter regarding the amendment offered by Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 1585), expressing the sense of the Senate regarding Iran. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.
I understand your concerns about this issue. I believe that the United States should resolve its differences with Iran diplomatically, through direct negotiations and dialogue with Iranian officials. We must also work closely with our friends and allies in the international community to pressure Iran to abandon its uranium enriched program, cease its active support for terrorist groups, and become a positive force for change in the Middle East.
I am also deeply concerned about allegations that Iran has provided arms, training, and financial support to Iraqi insurgents carrying out attacks against U.S. and Coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. In recent years, Iran has played a destabilizing role in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, and has pursued a nuclear enrichment program in violation of its international legal obligations and United Nations Security Council resolutions.
On September 26, 2007, I joined 75 of my colleagues in approving the sense of the senate amendment regarding Iran introduced by Senators Kyl and Lieberman. I decided to support this amendment after two very controversial provisions were removed. Those provisions would have stated that it is the policy of the United States to stop violent Iranian activities inside Iraq and to use all tools at our disposal, including the military, to do so. I felt this could be interpreted as an authorization of military force against Iran and was pleased that Senator Kyl and Senator Lieberman agreed to remove these provisions from the amendment.
Again, thank you for writing. I hope that you will continue to write on matters of importance to you. Best regards.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States SenatorFurther information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/.
I didn’t expect to receive such a relevant response to my original petition, so I was pleased to find this letter in my inbox, this morning. In fact, I am immensely pleased.
I can’t help but comment on the latency, though. It’s approximately 60 days after the fact… I know that the ping times to Dianne Feinstein’s CGI mailer are on the order of 200ms, so the bottleneck is obviously not with how quickly “they” receive the message.
To briefly digress, the essence of a Denail of Service attack is to overwhelm an event responder with more events than it can respond to. In practice, an attack against an Apache web server takes the form of lots of bogus requests flooding the server, which is generally unable to separate the legitimate requests from the bogus. The legitimate requests are therefore not responded to. Put another way, legitimate access to the web service is denied: Denial of Service. There are technical solutions to the DoS problem (or at least band-aid-type responses), but it’s still a relatively open issue.
Getting back to the latency with the federal government, I think this is essentially evidence of a DoS. It’s not an attack, per se, but the “representation service” provided by federal representatives is effectively denied until the time after which it is no longer relevant.
I understand why this is necessarily the case: one person’s attention can only be split so many different ways, and a person is also quite different from a timesharing computer server. As the controversial Linux Completely Fair Scheduler can attest, there’s a lot to be said about how you prioritize the focus of your attention across multiple, simultaneous tasks. It makes sense for a senator’s organization to take longer to respond to a single message from an individual, such as myself.
There are several solutions to the problem. Clearly, other federal representatives, who are in “less demand,” need to be brought into the loop. This means the next step is to contact the appropriate federal house representatives. It should be the case that their attention is focused on a smaller number of constituents.
In the end of the day, this is the question: is it possible to participate in current political events, in the United States? Of course, I’m optimistic that the answer is “yes.” However, it may be the case that this “yes” answer only applies at a fairly local level, and that federal policy is more difficult to influence.