Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain in conversation
April 4, 6:00pm ET
Langdell Hall South, 272 Kirkland and Ellis Classroom
From Bruce Schneier:
What I've Been Thinking About
I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:
1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.
Boston is a reminder that: Open source warfare doesn't ever go away.
It can be revived with a terrible suddenness, as we saw at the Boston Marathon.
The grievances and motivations for attacks never die. They can always find a corner of the Web to fester and grow, in groups too tiny to ever control.
The information needed to conduct attacks will always be available, and with each round of incidents, the information improves through testing.
Due to excessive industrial urbanization, the targets both in terms of people and infrastructure are thick on the ground.
Any single attack has the potential to ignite a series of additional attacks by other groups with similar, but different, motives.
Due to technological and behavioral factors, the quality of the attacks can better very quickly once a a conflict ignites. Weeks can yield significant progress instead of years.
I received an interesting bit of commission work earlier today – would I help someone plow up a bunch of astroturf. It sounded like an interesting test of my expanding social network analysis skills, so I agreed to take on the task.
I was given a list of six Twitter accounts. One had 2,000+ friends, two had 1,000+ friends, one had 500+ friends, and then there were two very small accounts that were suspected to be coordinators or handlers. Numbers like that are clearly beyond the query limits for Maltego, so the solution would have to be Gephi. I recently published my savetwit shell script, which exercises the python twitter package in order to collect as much information as possible on Twitter accounts. The process kicks out a couple of csv format files suitable for use as edge files in Gephi.
The accounts in question proved to have 4,300 friends and 5,200 links. This is labeled ‘anonymous’, it isn’t anything to do with Anonymous, it’s just a group that I don’t want to spook by mentioning their names.
. . . . . .
Click on Image to Enlarge
And here we have it – the tricolor battleground, with yellow/green on one side, and red on the other. The single red and two blue dots are what modularity shows us. I suspect that if these accounts were isolated, entered into Maltego, and manually colored for allegiance that this would be a three way tussle, and that the names in this portion of the graph are the ones that are lobbing verbal grenades at each other on a nightly basis.
How thorium can burn nuclear waste and generate energy
There’s a growing movement to make nuclear power safer, more efficient and less weapons-prone by replacing today’s uranium fuel with another element, thorium.
And within the thorium push, there are different technological ideas for how to deploy. One camp says that the best way to optimize thorium’s many advantages is to put it into liquid form in a molten salt reactor (MSR), which is a radically different design compared to today’s solid fueled reactors.
Some thorium pragmatists, however, advocate another step that would get thorium onto the power scene sooner: Put it into existing reactors.
That’s the message coming from the University of Cambridge in England, where PhD candidate Ben Lindley has discovered another potential advantage: Reactor operators could burn a thorium fuel that is mixed with plutonium and thus would provide a useful way to eliminate troubling nuclear waste.
Fabricators can already mix uranium with plutonium into a fuel called “MOX” (mixed oxide), which France uses in some of its nuclear reactors.
Yesterday after I posted Exploring e-International Relations I kept digging. I visited the LinkedIn profiles I had and found half a dozen additional people by using the “also viewed” column on the right. One of them responded to my request to connect, so I should be able to see the whole group fairly soon.
Having had such poor luck yesterday with an automatic method I went at it in manual mode – I looked through the followers of a few of the smaller accounts and I noticed a ‘team members’ list on the @e_IR role account. This put me in a position to see what they’re up to:
First, I loaded the e-IR-Twitter file into Maltego. This file contains both e-IR people and their close associates, so I selected just the staff by picking the entities tagged with a yellow star, one of five available ‘colors’ that can be used to tag groups of entities. Once I had the right group selected I pulled all of their tweets, and then all of the associated hashtags. The clusters around the edges are a Twitter account, it’s tweets, and then a more sparse sprinkle of hashtags.
Collaboration, Peer production, Peer networks, Crowdsourcing….the more I read about these topics the more I understand the enormous opportunities for social development and governance that are already out there. But at the same time, there are some new challenges to address.
For every new concept introduced in Government 3.0 I have the same reaction. First, I am all confused about it. Second, I start to understand it, but at the same time it always looks kind of utopian or not really applicable in the government field. And finally, I find some practical examples and ideas that allow me to think that these concepts are in fact both interesting and feasible.
