Over the past four years bills on cybersecurity, Electromagnetic Pulse threats, and other forms of “purposeful interference” with U.S. cyberspace have been introduced only to go nowhere.
By now it has been well established that EMP, whether in the form of a Carrington Event of solar origin or the explosion of a high-radiation-yield nuclear device in the atmosphere above the United States could knock out the country’s electrical grid and therewith threaten the lives of 9 of 10 Americans, making a conventional nuclear attack seem like child’s play.
Although a super solar fare on September 1, 1859, was observed and documented by the English astronomer Richard Carrington, and it is known that U.S. adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea either have or can construct and explode a nuclear device in the atmosphere above large parts of the country, these threats are not taken seriously.
On December 23, 2013, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency issued a solicitation “to … conduct satellite system performance modeling, satellite system response-to-environments modeling, high altitude weapons electromagnetic pulse effects modeling, and disturbed atmosphere effects modeling…”
A portion of Back To The Future II where Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly invades the far-flung future of 2015. Among flying cars, self-drying clothes, and hover boards a few of the citizens where these weird glasses that they use to watch TV and do other activities. The people wearing these devices look weird and are committing a horrendous fashion faux pas. This is how many people view Google Glass, but fashion statement aside they also don’t trust the digital accessory because of privacy concerns. TechEye.net explains in “Americans Distrust Google Glass” that a recent market survey from Toluna explained that more than 72 percent of Americans do not want to spend the money on the device, because they’re worried their private data could become public and being recorded without consent.
The ongoing disinformation campaign financed by carbon interests such as the Koch brothers, combined with the corruption of every branch of our government, has left us in this condition.
In the age of the Iraq war and Obamacare, the government is hardly a trustworthy body.
The 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the US government this week has been described as ‘sobering”, but Americans do not appear sobered. The report goes into astonishing detail about what severe climate change would mean – and what it means already to specific villages, mountains and beaches.
The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become
John Naughton
The Observer, 10 May 2014
When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – “Orwellian” is the word that people generally reach for.
But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What's Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”
A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.
Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.
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In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.
The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.
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Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.
But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.
Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading. Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”
The usefulness of computer aids to intelligence analysis (“tools”) depends a good deal on what sort of ‘intelligence’ you are talking about. Intelligence is information that has been subjected to a process of research and analysis to determine its relative accuracy and relevance. When trying to determine if “analytic software” can help this process it is necessary to look at the kind of information that is being processed.
In the field of technical intelligence, i.e. SIGINT, there are a number of “tools” that are very useful. Most of these so-called tools are retrieval programs of various sorts that allow the analyst to manipulate the data in various useful ways and some of these capabilities go back over ten years ago (clustering and linking related bits if information and geographic displays using GIS). The most important unclassified technical advance impacting on analysis today is the availability of authentic data mining programs for the analyst. Data mining is NOT simple data retrieval, as many birdbrains claiming to speak for the IC appear to believe. Data mining proper uses a suite of sophisticated algorithms capably of detecting hidden patterns and trends, finding anomalies that may not be apparent, and even changing the original query structure to reflect retrieved information. Oracle has such a program based on the Oracle relational database that has been around in one form or another for at least 15 years. Data mining obviously would be effective against “big data.” The problem with all this is that these tools are designed to make research and analysis easier especially when dealing with large amounts of unevaluated information. As “anonymous” observed they cannot replace an engaged and target smart analyst.
As the information age and big data colonize everything in life – expanding now into reality itself – we face an erosion not only of privacy but of choice. Even as we think we have greater choice and power, really important choices and power are being subtly stolen from us by folks who don't want us to know or do anything about it. We need to take back our lives while we still can.
“Dark Google”, privacy and power
Dear friends,
Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes told us that “Knowledge is power.” We need to integrate their insight with Sir John Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In this runaway Information Age we need to realize that one-way concentrations of knowledge power are dangerous when they are not answerable, not responsive to oversight and feedback. The article below, “Dark Google”, makes this point powerfully regarding Google and the NSA. The author, Harvard's Shoshana Zuboff, is eminently qualified to issue this warning.
