MIT Technology Review Will Spyware Work?

"For several decades, electronic systems have been quietly put in place to intercept satellite communications, tap phone calls, monitor e-mail and Web traffic and then turn this massive flow of information into intelligence reports for U.S. leaders and investigative aids for law enforcement. Yet despite the $30 billion invested in them, and all the secrecy afforded them, government information technologies still could not connect the proverbial dots of the World Trade Center plot. "Obviously, there were intelligence failures on a number of levels," says Barry Posen, a defense policy analyst with MIT's Center for International Studies.

Now that it is apparent that these supposedly all-seeing government systems are not all-knowing, how can we ascertain that they work at all?"

The Economist Terrorism and freedom

"There is no doubt that America now confronts an extraordinary threat and that, as America's closest ally, Britain also has cause to fear. The terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks were ruthless, implacable and shrewd. It must be assumed that more attacks are possible. Faced with this, extraordinary measures are justified. A loss of privacy and more intrusive security seem inevitable. Tougher banking rules, closer co-operation between intelligence and police forces, and more monitoring of communications may be unwelcome, but they are necessary to track terrorists.

Still, it is essential that any new police powers be as limited as possible, and that the rival claims of liberty be taken seriously—even in the face of shadowy enemies. Striking this balance is bound to be tricky. Unfortunately, both governments are already failing in obvious ways to get the balance right."

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

CMSWatch The Case for Personal Web Publishing

"Inside of corporations a weblog can be used in a knowledge management or market intelligence function. Every work group seems to have someone on the team who just sends links around via email to all the other people he or she works with. In an environment like that if you give them a weblog and all the sudden the resources start really working for you. Pretty soon everyone wants a weblog to share a resource they found and to annotate useful ways in which that resource can be used by the team."

"A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that. It's better to have people write publicly."

redux [11.05.01]
CW360 IBM executive urges knowledge management caution

"One of the major problems with expert communities, according to Snowden, is that they train behaviour and prevent innovation. Encouraging multiple informal communities throughout the company is a critical step toward innovation, he said.

"Identify people with like interests and pull them together. Allow people to cluster and form communities, then reinforce the ones you want." Snowden said. "Informal communities keep organisations together and make things work.""

redux [10.17.01]
Amy D. Wohl Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM?

"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."

"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"

redux [07.16.01]
Seattle Times Knowledge-sharing platform proves wise move for AskMe

"A recent study by market-research firm Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don't."

"Harry Bruce, associate dean of the University of Washington's Information School, said knowledge sharing is important because information has value in and of itself in our society."

""Clearly, we're increasingly becoming aware of the complexities of trying to share and transfer information and expertise within organizations and between organizations," he said."

Release 1.0 Postmodern Knowledge Management

"People constantly exchange information, the raw material of knowledge, with co-workers, business partners and customers... but they do it using personal, unstructured tools such as email. Wouldn't it be nice if companies could benefit from their own collective intelligence? Despite this appealing premise, years of knowledge management (KM) implementations have produced mixed results."

"The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the hubris of modernism: the belief we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. It's time for postmodern knowledge management."

"Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that worked at cross-purposes with human nature. Instead, it operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. In the end, postmodern knowledge management isn't about management at all, because management implies external control. The goal of postmodern KM is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people."

redux [06.12.01]
DigitalMASS First rule of knowledge management: Knowing who needs what

"Within IBM, there's an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.

In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."

Outsights Knowledge Management -- Emerging Perspectives

"Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not."

redux [05.28.01]
The New York Times I.B.M. Meets With 52,600, Virtually
[requires 'free' registration]

""Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper

""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

MIT Technology Review The 2001 Corporate R&D Scorecard

"Balancing an increased market focus—and closer ties to customers—with the pursuit of world-class science is now the trick for many corporate R&D groups. Gone forever are the days when large industrial labs churned out scientific papers and conducted long-term research far removed from business pressures. But while R&D groups have clearly gotten more business friendly over the last decade, they are also feeling pressures to come up with tomorrow's high-growth opportunities.

Indeed, industrial-R&D expert Richard Rosenbloom, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, is convinced that most high-tech firms—especially in the information technology sector—"still aren't doing enough to invest in the future technologies that will be the next big revolutionary business. They've been experimenting with new venture units, spinoffs, joint ventures and the like, but I don't know of a single big corporation that has a track record that is exceptional in any of those initiatives.""

redux [10.18.01]
Newsfactor Network Corporate Techies Pursue 'Disruptive Technologies'

"Corporate research labs have traditionally been called too narrowly focused, existing solely to turn a profit. Also, the argument goes, corporate labs don't have the broad mandate or intellectual freedom of university labs to delve into what might be considered "far-out" concepts, otherwise known as "disruptive technologies.""

"To the chagrin of pure-research advocates, corporate labs are now more willing to look at 'far-out' science - if it has possible practical applications.

redux [08.16.01]
Business 2.0r How Big Blue Plays D

"Bell Labs invented the transistor, the laser, and Unix, but it never invented a way for its parent, Ma Bell, to cash in. Xerox (XRX ) PARC presented the world with laser printers, Ethernet computer networking, and the point-and-click interface; the world capitalized on the technology.

Lucent (LU), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Eastman Kodak (EK ) also employ brilliant scientists who win patents for big discoveries. But like the other storied R&D operations in corporate America, they have succeeded far better at R than at D. "We invented everything and developed nothing," laments Xerox PARC's founder, Jack Goldman.

Then there's IBM Research."

redux [05.30.01]
The New York Times Bell Labs: A Bit Abstract and Always Curious
[requires 'free' registration]

"Bell Labs and its parent company, Lucent Technologies, are still giants of innovation despite recent management fumbles and business failures, many industry experts say.

"Their technology strength is four or five times" that of Alcatel , the French electronics giant that was trying to acquire Lucent, said Francis Narin, president of CHI Research of Haddon Heights, N.J., which tracks companies' inventiveness by analyzing their United States patent portfolios and by tallying how often other companies rely on them."

"But for decades, critics have called Lucent and its predecessors slow in turning the bright ideas into market-leading products that produce a steady flow of revenue."

redux [03.28.00]
Business 2.0 Paradise Lost?

"Transmitting a pulse of light faster than the speed of light is the kind of mind-bending, prestige-building discovery that the NEC Research Institute (NECI) was built to produce. So when Lijun Wang actually performed that astonishing feat last year, no one seemed to care that commercial application of his research is probably many years in the future. The kudos from the scientific community and terrific publicity were justification enough. But with parent company NEC struggling to boost profits, that kind of payoff may no longer be sufficient."

redux [03.21.00]
BusinessWeek Research Labs Get Real. It's About Time

"Xerox' woes might seem to provide evidence that there's something wrong with the U.S. system of corporate R&D. That's not the case. Innovation is rife in the U.S., from industrial labs to contract research outfits and Silicon Valley startups. Says Martin N. Baily, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: "We've been able to generate a fertile breeding ground because we have a range of funding mechanisms."

Start with the corporate labs, which once resembled ivory towers. Today, their PhDs are getting their hands dirty on real-world customer problems. But ''Xerox has been relatively slow'' to latch on to that trend, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Rebecca M. Henderson, an expert on corporate R&D.

Companies that get more pragmatic about research aren't dropping the "R" to do more "D.""

BusinessWeek Researchers Probe Dark and Murky Net

"Broadband customers and U.S. military systems are the most common victims of an online phenomenon researchers have dubbed "dark address space," which leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the Internet.

For a variety of reasons ranging from contract disputes among network operators to simple router misconfiguration, over five percent of the Internet's routable address space lacks global connectivity, according to the results of a three-year study by researchers at Massachusetts-based Arbor Networks, to be released Tuesday.

"Popular belief holds that the Internet represents a completely connected graph," says Craig Labovitz, Arbor Networks' director of network architecture. "It turns out that's just not true.""

redux [06.06.01]
News.Com Net blackout marks Web's Achilles heel

"The blockage that stopped traffic flowing between two of the top 10 networks in the United States for more than four days stemmed from a relationship called "peering," in which two networks agree to swap traffic back and forth without charge. In this case, Cable & Wireless has stopped peering with PSINet, saying the struggling company no longer had enough traffic to make the relationship worthwhile."

"Because of the complicated set of histories and relationships that make up the Internet, this had far-reaching ramifications. Cutting off this link prevented either network from seeing the other, though both could use different routes to get anywhere else on the Net."

redux [05.12.00]
IBM Almaden Research Center Graph structure in the web

"The study of the web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into web algorithms for crawling, searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and global properties of the web graph using two Altavista crawls each with over 200M pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the macroscopic structure of the web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale."

"In a sense the web is much like a complicated organism, in which the local structure in a microscopic scale looks very regular like a biological cell, but the global structure exhibits interesting morphological structure (body and limbs) that are not obviously evident in the local structure. Therefore, while it might be tempting to draw conclusions about the structure of the web graph from a local picture of it, such conclusions may be misleading."

NetFuture THE DECEIVING VIRTUES OF TECHNOLOGY

"In Odysseus' day, techne was a conscious resourcefulness that had scarcely begun to project itself into the material apparatus of life. What apparatus existed was an enticement for further creative expression of the nascent human self. While the technology of the Greeks may seem hopelessly primitive to us, it is worth remembering that the balanced awakening heralded by Homer culminated in a flowering of thought and art that many believe has never been surpassed for profundity or beauty anywhere on earth.

Today, that balance seems a thing of the past. The powers of our minds crystallize almost immediately, and before we are aware of them, into gadgetry, without any mediating, self-possessed reflection, so that we live within a kind of crystal palace that is sometimes hard to distinguish from a prison. The question is no longer whether we can use the enticement of clever devices as a means to summon the energies of dawning selfhood; rather, it is whether we can preserve what live energies we once had, in the face of the deadening effect of the now inert cleverness bound into the ubiquitous external machinery of our existence."

redux [04.20.01]
The New York Times Magazine Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age
[requires 'free' registration]

"Information everywhere, at light speed, immersing us -- is this what we want? We seem unsure. We are the species that defines itself in terms of information: homo sapiens sapiens. We are knowledge connoisseurs. We are being promised some approximation of All Previous Text (and music and pictures) in our pockets. Then again, we didn't evolve in a world with so much data and buzz. Our sense organs tuned into one slow channel at a time. Now we tune in and out. The dream of perfect ceaseless information flow can slip so easily into a nightmare of perfect perpetual distraction.

Our technologies don't just empower us: they also harass us, and they change us -- for better and for worse."

The Christian Science Monitor Online all the time

"Questions such as: What does it mean to be online all the time? How will that change the way we live? What are the benefits and the drawbacks to being constantly connected?"

""It's easy to say we would just have more of the same: more speed, more multitasking, more frequent messages," Mr. Powell says. "But maybe we will see something more qualitative than quantitative - watch kids doing homework with four or five instant-chat windows open. Is this just more, or is it something very different from, say, sitting quietly with a book? Whatever that difference is, that's what is coming.""

redux [08.10.00]
Dr. Kim H. Veltman New Media and Transformations in Knowledge

"This paper began from the premise that every new medium changes our definitions of, approaches to and views of knowledge. It claimed that networked computers (as enabled by the Internet), cannot be understood as simply yet another medium in a long evolution that began with speech and evolved via cuneiform, parchment, manuscripts to printed books and more recently to radio, film, and video. Computers offer a new method of translating information from one medium to another, wherein lies the deeper meaning of the overworked term multimedia. Hence computers will never create paperless offices, they will eventually create offices where any form of communication can be transformed into any other form."

"A half century ago pioneers such as Havelock, Innis and McLuhan recognized that new media inevitably affect our concepts of what constitutes knowledge. The mass media epitomized this with McLuhan’s pithy phrase: "The medium is the message." Reduced and taken in isolation, it is easy to see, in retrospect, that this obscured almost as much as it revealed. The new media are changing the way we know. They are doing so in fundamental ways and they are inspiring, creating, producing, distorting and even obscuring many messages. New machines make many new things possible. Only humans can ensure that what began as data streams and quests for information highways become paths towards knowledge and wisdom."

NetFuture Media Ecology:Taking Account of the Knower

"Our dialog with technology is a dialog with ourselves. Technology can indeed have a powerful effect upon the subsequent development of culture, but it is the kind of effect that powerful meanings have. This must be distinguished from any mechanical sort of cause and effect.

I draw on the work of Owen Barfield to indicate how the development of both printing press and perspective art, as companion movements toward abstraction, fit into the broad evolution of western consciousness. My conclusion is that, once we take this evolution into account -- and reckon especially with our own place in it -- we cannot say, in quite the way it is often said, that technology "causes" a radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life."

Rhetoric Notes Review of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy

"Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of cons ciousness to one dominated by writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in that he discusses the change in the West from being oral-based to chirographic which began with the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current emergence in Western society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some time."

MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

The Boston Globe Downturn dictionary

"The weather in the tech sector is changing, and so are the words we choose to describe it."

"''People were using the language of revolution over the past few years: `We're going to change the way you do business.' Now, a lot of the most visionary talk about technology has disappeared, in part because a lot of the magazines that carried it don't exist anymore. There's a sense that hype itself engenders a kind of suspicion, and people are a little bit more skeptical.''

So how is tech talk different today?"

redux [07.13.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy

"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System

"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

Newsweek The End of the Net

"September 11 is going to push a lot of support for technologies that supposedly increase security. Everybody’s for a more secure network, increased ability for the government to monitor when they need to be monitoring. The standard move [among privacy advocates] is to resist those new technologies, to pretend they don’t exist. I think that’s a silly move. They’re going to come. All of our energy should be on what’s the implementation going to look like. But again, here’s another reason to be pessimistic. If we could take the next 20 years to work the next infrastructure out, we’d be OK. But if we’re going to have to do it in the next two years, given our attention span, we’re going to mess it up. We’ll build a surveillance society beyond Orwell’s imagination. Not because we intend to but we’re too ill informed to do anything different."

The New York Times Online Privacy Expert Shifts Focus to Security
[requires 'free' registration]

"As perhaps the nation's most vocal authority on data privacy, Richard M. Smith spent the last two years trying to keep Americans' personal information private from corporate intrusions. But seeing bigger threats, he is now turning his attention to studying whether the public is sufficiently secure.

Mr. Smith resigned earlier this month as the chief technology officer for the nonprofit Privacy Foundation in Denver. In light of the terrorist attacks on the United States, Mr. Smith said he was compelled to focus on technology related to "homeland security" issues, like facial scanning and electronic ID cards."

Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [10.04.01]
First Monday Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""