The tech world rejoices: A Congressman who can code
In what appears to be a first, the US House of Representatives now has a Congressman who can code...in assembly. That's right, a Congressman with geek skills.
Democratic Representative Bill Foster won a special election this past Saturday in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois. This was the district that former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert held from 1986-2007. Hastert stepped down in November of 2007.
Congressman Bill Foster
Foster, a physicist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, surprised many when he won the district. After all, it had been a Republican stronghold for more than twenty years. After being sworn in on Tuesday, Foster has already made his mark, by providing the single vote needed to pass a significant ethics reform bill.
More surprising than the fact that Foster won in a heavily Republican district, more than his public position against telecom immunity, is the fact that Bill Foster is a computer geek.
According to a February article in the Chicago Tribune, Bill Foster has got coding skills:
The Democrat, Bill Foster of Geneva, is a get-out-the-vote geek. He's a knock-on-doors nerd who wrote the software program credited with propelling Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy to a narrow victory in 2006 ... "It was pretty remarkable," said Nat Binns, a spokesman for Murphy's campaign. "He dropped in from nowhere and approached the get-out-the-vote effort as a scientific puzzle.
"He helped us crack the code and figure out where we needed to go and how to do it really efficiently," Binns said. "It was brilliant. We were able to knock on 140,000 doors on Election Day, which was a big part of why we won (by just 1,518 votes)."
Foster's unofficial title was "campaign physicist."
Foster worked as a researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) for 22 years. One of his main projects involved the design of equipment and data analysis software for the lab's high energy particle collision detector.
Given Foster's background, his experience in software development, and the research environment in which he worked, it's almost certain that he worked on Unix systems at some point, too.
I spoke with Tom Bowen, Congressman Foster's campaign manager, who confirmed that the Representative does indeed have programming skills. He told me that Congressman Foster has written code in assembly, Fortran, and Visual Basic. Mr. Bowen also added that during one project, Foster designed integrated circuits that were later used in Fermilab's particle accelerator.
As for the Congressman's laptop? He owns a Dell that runs Windows. Oh, well. He can't be perfect.
What this actually means to tech policy remains unclear. Computer programming skills do not automatically lead to sound logic or wise positions on important issues. A quick read through Slashdot user comments easily demonstrates this. However, it's likely that someone who has actually used a computer for scientific research will better understand the complex issues at play. At the very least, we're not likely to see a Ted Stevens style "Series of Tubes" moment from Congressman Foster.
With any luck, Foster will be assigned to tech and science relevant committees. Top picks would include the the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, as well as the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet which is chaired by Net Neutrality cheerleader Edward Markey.
We at Surveillance State predict Foster can expect massive love from the Digg/Slashdot crowd. Furthermore, while many politicians get invited to talk at Google, it's likely that Foster could actually correctly answer a few of the company's notoriously difficult interview questions.
Hat tip: Adam B at DailyKos for first pointing out Foster's tech credentials.
Christopher Soghoian delves into the areas of security, privacy, technology policy and cyber-law. He is a student fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society , and is a PhD candidate at Indiana University's School of Informatics. His academic work and contact information can be found by visiting www.dubfire.net/chris/. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
And honestly, I don't get all the Ted Stevens bashing. Networks are routinely explained to non techies with a "plumbing" metaphor. What did I miss?
What is wrong with a Dell PC that runs Windows? That means that the new Congressman is in the mainstream and use a computer that is compatible with most of us US citizens who use computers.
What do you want, some bearded, Birkenstock wearing, latte sipping fruity-loop who uses an Apple? Do we really need a Congressman who spends 99% of their time bragging how great their Mac is when compared to the "dreaded PC", or do we need a Congressman with real world experience who actually does some real work?
PC's are make for people who do real work, while Macs are for people who wish they knew how to do any work.
Mac is just as bad as Windows. And computability wise it probably doesn't matter what OS you use these days. I send files between Windows, Mac, and Linux every day with no problem at all.
PC's are made (not "make") for people who do real work (in rebooting after virtually every system update and updating the antivirus and struggling with registry issues, all the while "dancing" around the crippling DRM garbage that's interleaved into the system and deluding themselves into thinking that Gates doesn't really own their machine), while Macs are for people who wish they knew how to do any work (because the Mac platform makes their work so effortless and easy they're constantly wondering why they're looking for another project while their winblows-slave counterparts are fighting dll issues and file corruptions while being attacked by the next virus and worm simultaneously, only to find winblows genuine disadvantage once again locked them out of the system because it mistakenly thinks it's a pirate version of winblows simply because of a firewall setting).
I've worked in winblows, linux and OSX. Linux and OSX allow you to do what you want to do with your system. Winblows attempts to own your system for you, telling you what you can and can't do with it. Winblows is only good for one thing - turning an otherwise powerful computer into a better-than-most game console.
Neither does it lead to sound or wise blog entries on important issues.
"As for the Congressman's laptop? He owns a Dell that runs Windows. Oh, well. He can't be perfect."
When you make these types of remarks - it becomes next to impossible to take you seriously.
Assuming you mean PCs running Windows, I have to correct you. Perhaps business people who are scared to run anything else do their work on PCs. If you hit the developer conferences, many of the speakers and the companies they own are running Mac or Linux as development environments. As a developer who's been writing code for quite a while, my preferred development environment is Linux. Not only am I able to interface with all the printers, the networks, and the servers... I can get things done much faster than in Windows where I don't have near the options. So if you ask me, PCs running Windows are for gamers, PCs running Linux are for people who actually want to get some work done. As for Macs, you can get plenty of work done on a mac... after all, it's BSD at the core. You can do most of the functional stuff on a mac as you can in Linux... the difference, of course, is package management. If I need Java or Mono or I need to write something in assembler, I'm an apt-get, emerge, yum, etc. away from having it.
And regarding Stevens, I agree. I believe he misquoted some technical guy who was trying to explain bandwidth and he got it confused with the internet itself. I have explained bandwidth with the pipe analogy in the past and I can't even count the number of times a sales or business person has misquoted something I told them in front of a client.
- by March 13, 2008 3:21 PM PDT
- The significant thing about having a Congressperson with scientific and technology background is that people in this field are trained to think in terms of hypothesis, data, what could prove a hypothesis false, edge case and exceptions, and what ifs -- secondary, and tertiery implications of a certain architectural decision or strategy or design. This is something that has been in relatively short supply. I commend the voters in Illinois for giving Bill Foster a chance to represent them and to serve this country in Congress.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(9 Comments)