Telematique, water and fire.

Minority Report ... and hold the psychics.

After seeing a summary of this post from Science Daily, I could not resist picking up a summary of Minority Report from the IMDB database:

In the year 2054, a so-called "pre-crime division" is working around Washington, DC. Its purpose is to use the precog(nitive) potential of three genetically altered humans to prevent murders. When the three precogs, who only work together, floating connected in a tank of fluid, have a vision, the names of the victim and the perpetrator as well as video imagery of the crime and the exact time it will happen, are given out to the special cops who then try to prevent the crime from happening. But there is a political dilemma: If someone is arrested before he commits a murder, can the person be accused of the murder, which - because of the arrest - never took place? ...

OK.  If this scan for intention gets much better, we can dispense with the psychics.

ScienceDaily: Revealing Secret Intentions In The Brain

... Our secret intentions remain concealed until we put them into action -so we believe. Now researchers have been able to decode these secret intentions from patterns of their brain activity. They let subjects freely and covertly choose between two possible tasks - to either add or subtract two numbers. They were then asked to hold in mind their intention for a while until the relevant numbers were presented on a screen. The researchers were able to recognize the subjects intentions with 70% accuracy based alone on their brain activity - even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation.
...
In future it will be possible to read even abstract thoughts and intentions out of patients' brains. One day even the intention to "open the blue folder" or "reply to the email" could be picked up by brain scanners and turned into the appropriate action.

AOL members sue over search data release

Now it begins. And, unfortunately, the action being called for constitutes throwing the baby out with the bath water.

AOL members sue over search data release

"Three AOL LLC members have sued the company over its controversial release of member search-engine records, in what their lawyers are billing as the first such lawsuit seeking national class-action status.

The three members are charging the Time Warner Inc. subsidiary with, among other things, privacy violation, false advertising and unjust enrichment.
...
The lawsuit seeks monetary relief for all affected AOL members in the U.S. whose search data was disclosed without consent from Jan. 1, 2004, to the present.

The plaintiffs also ask the court to instruct AOL not to store or maintain users' Web search records and to destroy the Web search records it currently has.
...

I'm sorry to see that the suits seek to prohibit AOL (and, using precedent, the rest of web-resident organizations) from retaining search records. A more reasonable, and less draconian measure, would be to seek a "standard of care" for customer data like this, which provides privacy for the user, while offering truly valuable data subject to analysis of all kinds.

Technorati Tags: Data Protection, Personal Identifying Information, Security Incentives

EFF's Six Tips for Consumers... what's the subtext?

TechWeb's Intelligent Enterprise site posted an announcement of EFF's publication of "six tips for consumers who would prefer to remain as anonymous as possible when using search engines." These include "tips" which made my head spin. They are

• Don't search for your own name, address, or other personally identifying information;
• Don't use your ISP's search engine, since the company can link a person's identity to his searches;
• Avoid logging in to a search engine or its related tools;
• Block cookies from search engines;
• Broadband users should turn off their modems at least once a day to change the IP addresses their ISPs automatically assign to computers each time subscribers log on;
• Use anonymizing software

I can't imagine using the web without logging into a search engine and using the added value tools. I've long ago decided that the cost of monitoring the installation of each cookie is not worth it. Turning them off is simply not reasonable. And... turning off my broadband modem in order to force a new IP assignment ? Not a chance.

About this time, I decided to check out the EFF's article, and (no big surprise) saw that they were making use of the AOL foul-up in August as the basis for this article and the specific recommendations. What this article also offers is an opportunity for EFF to lobby search companies to limit data retention as well as to call for Congressional action. All good in the abstract, though I'd have to take issue with the use of data retention (or, rather, data destruction) policies as the answer.

The EFF's advice comes with a rather open editorial point of view regarding "the government" and individual rights. It shows up in the third paragraph: "Unfortunately, it may be all too easy for the government or individual litigants to subpoena your search provider and get access to your search history." So, as far as the EFF's concerned, the right approach is to have the search firms throw the data away, prevent them from obtaining it in the first place, or... what? This is over the top.

EFF: Six Tips to Protect Your Online Search Privacy

... Disclosures like AOL's are not the only threats to your privacy. Unfortunately, it may be all too easy for the government or individual litigants to subpoena your search provider and get access to your search history. For example, in January 2006, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft reportedly cooperated with a broad Justice Department request for millions of search records. Although Google successfully challenged this request,3 the lack of clarity in current law leaves your online privacy at risk.

Search companies should limit data retention and make their logging practices more transparent to the public,5 while Congress ought to clarify and strengthen privacy protections for search data. But you should also take matters into your own hands and adopt habits that will help protect your privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed the following search privacy tips. They range from straightforward steps that offer a little protection to more complicated measures that offer near-complete safety. While we strongly urge users to follow all six tips, a lesser level of protection might be sufficient depending on your particular situation and willingness to accept risks to your privacy.
...

Technorati Tags: Data Protection, Personal Identifying Information, Security

New Cybersecurity Chief at DHS

Gregory Garcia was named to becom the assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications with the Department of Homeland Security. While InformationWeek characterized him as an "IT lobbyist", I don't believe that does justice to Garcia or to the ITAA. I've had encounters with the ITAA over the years, and to lump them into the category of "lobbyist" with many of the K Street crowd just does NOT feel right. They definitely take views, and they do have an agenda which they pursue in Washington on the part of their constituency. But some of the best policy research, and fair-minded analysis that I've seen has come out of ITAA.

Now, as for the perceived importance of the new job...that's something about which I have no clear sense. The title and position would seem to indicate a perceived level of importance for cybersecurity that is overshadowed by physical security. I suppose it's understandable. Yet, without diligent attention to cybersecurity, we put the country in just as much jeopardy.

IT Lobbyist Named As Federal Cybersecurity Chief

... At Congressional hearings last week, (George) Foresman (Under Secretary for Preparedness at DHS) said that department was having difficulty finding someone to fill the post, either because people turned down offers or candidates were eventually deemed unsuited for the job.

The failure to name someone to the post quickly suggested to some cybersecurity experts in and out of government that the Bush administration places greater emphasis on physical security than on cybersecurity. Having the top cybersecurity official as an assistant secretary within Homeland Security rather as a White House advisor also signals a diminishment of the importance of cybersecurity, some experts say.

Technorati Tags: Data Protection, Security

What Really Scares Us - William Gibson

What Really Scares Us

By WILLIAM GIBSON
Published: September 10, 2006

ANOTHER attempt on the scale of the 2001 attacks hasn’t been necessary. The last one is still doing the trick, and the terrorists’ resources are limited. The fear induced by terrorism mirrors the irrational psychology that makes state lotteries an utterly reliable form of stupidity tax. A huge statistical asymmetry serves as fulcrum for a spectral yet powerful lever: apprehension of the next jackpot. We’re terrorized not by the actual explosion, which statistically we’re almost never present for, but by our apprehension of the next one.

The terrorist tactic that matters most is the next one used, one we haven’t seen yet. In order to know it, we must know the terrorists. Without a national security policy that concentrates on the vigorous and politically agnostic maximization of intelligence rather than, in the phrase of the security expert Bruce Schneier, “security theater,” that may well prove impossible.

Laundering Internet usage data to protect privacy

Google's apparent willingness to comply with the Brazilian court order that seeks to have Google provide to authorities identifiable information from the Orkut service users, has prompted Tom Foremski to posit the notion of offshore data repositories, tasked with obscuring or stripping the personal data.

Laundering Internet usage data to protect privacy | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com

I've been thinking about Google handing over identifiable information about users of its Orkut service to Brazilian authorities, and disclosures by Yahoo in China–couldn't such things be avoided fairly easily?

Enron set up huge numbers of off-shore companies to hide its debt and obscure its financial data. Why couldn't such a method be used by Google, for example, to hide and obscure its data collections?

Offshore companies could be created and made responsible for administration of parts of its services. They could pass back data to GOOG but that data would be only data that was needed for specific tasks, and could be stripped of indentifiable information.

I have two reactions. First, I keep thinking of cyberpunk novels from Gibson and Sterling about offshore data "nations" created solely to bypass national laws regarding copyright and other IP issues. Second, in suggesting that Google take this approach, I can't say that I'd find it workable, nor would I consider it responsible on the part of Google. (Just the fact that Foremski's reference is to the rather odious efforts of Enron to hide and obscure financial data makes me want to say..."No, that's not a good idea.")

Despite AOL's faux pas, I would not want the wholesale and "permanent" de-identification of personal identifiable information. There are (and should be) legitimate uses, policies and legal procedures under which such information is provided to legitimate authorities.

What's more to the point is the question of just how much of this data needs to be gathered (a business decision by services like Google), and, when gathered, how best to prevent it from inadvertent or intentional exposure.

Technorati Tags: Data Protection

Treating the Aspiring Amnesiac

I first read the Tin Drum in December 1969, ten years after it was published. I was living in Vienna (Austria, not Virginia) at the time, about to dive into a central european winter, and I was taken with just how much of the earliest half of the twentieth century was still present in the daily life of the Viennese. I can recall that, after reading the book in three sittings, I was giddy, dizzy, horrified, terrified, haunted and thankful. I devoured the rest of the Dantzig Trilogy, but always have had the same reaction to Oskar and the Tin Drum.

Over the years, I found myself put off by Grass -- by the holier-than-thou, sackcloth and ashes, finger-pointing. I stopped reading Grass' essays. I spent a lot of time in Germany during the late 70s and the 80s. I stopped reading Grass' novels. In fact, I haven't picked up the Trilogy for 20 years. And now, the revelation.

I've spent idle moments over the past two weeks trying to figure out how I feel about it. And then, last night, I came across this article from Time, and realized that its last paragraph is about as close as I'm going to get. Trying to delve much deeper would take me places I don't want to go.

From TIME.com: Günter Grass's Silence

...
If Grass had not been living with this wretched little skeleton in his closet, he might never have written a word. Like 99% of his compatriots, he might have just dusted himself off at war's end, said his 20 Hail Marys, and gone about joining the blithely ahistorical postwar boom. Instead, a haunted Grass cranked out a series of brutal novels about the war and childhood in occupied Poland, beginning with his powerful 1959 novel The Tin Drum. Those unforgettable narratives, along with a good measure of his public hectoring and politicking, helped his entire country stave off collective amnesia for decades. So while his opponents, and even a share of his friends, are piling on him about the lies he told about his past, it's worth considering that those personal lies helped keep alive important national truths.

Technorati Tags: memoir

Welcome, Dean.

I've had a bit of time this week to catch up on my reading, and found this post from Steven Johnson. Congratulations to the Johnson clan, and a special welcome to Dean Berlin Johnson. (Nine pounds, eleven ounces ?!?! Whoa!)

Supply Chain Management and the Pandemic

In an interesting 'blog entry at InfoWorld's Tech Watch, Paul Roberts describes a session at MIT. When/If H5N1 "jumps the fence" and becomes communicable directly between humans, one of the less considered and potentially most disruptive results of the pandemic is the disruption in commerce and particularly the traffic in staple goods.

We're so dependent on lean supply chains, and playing in the international/global markets, that minor disruptions take on the trappings of a commercial disaster. I'm concerned that when human travel or the transport of goods is curtailed, the "work-arounds" have not been considered and certainly the contingency planning is very scanty. It's important that the CTL exercise gets publicity, if for no other reason than to raise visibility and get some of the right folks focused on addressing these contingencies.

Supply Chain Management and the end of the world

For most of the last decade, "virus" has meant one thing to those of us who cover the IT sector: computer viruses -- malicious programs that propagate between machines connected on a LAN or, more recently, on the Internet. You know what I'm talking about -- all the dudes with the funky names: W32.Blaster, W32.Slammer, W32.Sobig. But the folks over at MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics have some new letters to wrap your brain around: H5N1. H5N1, as you know, is the specific strain of the influence virus that responsible for the recent Avian Influenza outbreaks that have killed untold numbers of our feathered friends in Asia, Africa and Europe, as well as some humans -- mostly among farmers and those who work with poultry in countries like Vietnam, China, and Turkey.

Why are a bunch of academics who study logistics interested in influenza, you ask? Well, if you think H5N1 is tough on chickens, you should see what it will do to your supply chain! At least, that was the message from the CTL's event today in Cambridge, MA, entitled "At the Crossroads of Supply Chain and Strategy: Simulating Disruption to Business Recovery.

In a fascinating session moderated by Mary Pimm, who runs Intel Corp.'s Corporate Emergency Operations Center, executives from Intel, EMC and Arnold Communications war gamed a simulated H5N1 and its impact on an imaginary mobile phone company, Vaxxon Corp., which gets sucked into an media-epidemiological (explitive) storm after workers at a Vaxxon supplier in mainland China begin dying from H5N1.

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Technorati Tags: Technology startup

Human Development Trends 2005

Thanks to Steven Johnson for drawing my attention to the exceptionally well done animated presentations of world development trends.

Link: G A P M I N D E R: HOME.