Filed under: BoingBoing, Constitution, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Government, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Press, Society, Terrorism
Over the weekend, news came out of yet another “Trust us, we’re the government” debacle, this time in the form of the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying that Americans have to give up on the idea that they have any expectation of privacy. Rather, he said, we should simply trust the government to properly safeguard the communications and financial information that they gather about us. No, I am not making this up. From the NYT:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.
* * *
“Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity,” he said, according to a transcript [pdf]. “But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.”
The future, Mr. Kerr says, is seen in MySpace and other online troves of volunteered information, and also in the the millions of commercial transactions made on the web or on the phone every day. If online merchants can be trusted, he asks, then why not federal employees, who face five years in jail and a $100,000 fine for misusing data from surveillance?
Or, from the Washington Post:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Kerr said. “I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.”
This mindset, that allowing the government to just vacuum up all of our personal information, to monitor our email and phone communications, or whatever else they are doing but don’t want to tell is, is somehow equivalent to my posting information on this blog or giving some company my credit card number when I want to buy something, is fucking absurd. First off, there is a fundamental difference between what I willingly reveal to someone in either a personal or commercial exchange, and having my information taken without my knowledge or agreement. To say otherwise is to say that just because my phone number is listed in the phone directory, everyone who has the ability to do so is free to listen in on my phone conversations.
Even worse, it shows how we are viewed by this individual, and our government: as their subjects, without rights or expectations of being in control of our lives.
And the notion that we can just trust governmental employees with our private information is patently ridiculous. First off, saying that we should because we already trust commercial businesses with our private information is completely specious – how many times in the last year have you heard of this or that company’s database having been hacked and credit card, personal, and financial information having been stolen? This alone is a good reason to not allow further concentration of our private data to be gathered in one place. Secondly, think of the many instances when hard drives with delicate information have been lost by government employees in the State Department, at the Department of Veterans Affairs, or even at Los Alamos National Laboratory – and those are just the things which have actually made it into the news. Third, and last (for now), anyone who has had any experience with any government agency can attest to just how screwed up such a large bureaucracy can be, in dealing with even the simplest information.
I recently went round and round with the IRS over some forms which they thought I had to file. I didn’t, and established that to the satisfaction of the office which contacted me. Yet for six months I was still being contacted by another office in charge with collecting the necessary fees and fines – three times I had to send a copy of the letter from the initial office which cleared me of the matter, before they finally, and almost grudgingly, admitted that I owed them no money (for not filing the documents I didn’t need to file). These are not the same people I want to trust to handle even *more* information about me.
Allowing the government to take this position – that the default should be that they can just take whatever information about us they want, so long as they promise not to misuse it – is to abandon any illusions that we are in any way, shape, or form a free people. It would turn the entire equation of the Constitution on its head, saying that the government is sovereign and we its subjects. That such a thing is even proposed by a government employee is extremely revealing, and should cause no little amount of concern.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Government, NPR, NYT, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
. . . the one I have in Communion of Dreams about a military EM jamming device which shuts down all communications in a given area is actually pretty lame. This sort of thing has been a staple of Science Fiction just about forever, and in fact real radio jamming equipment has been used since the early days of radio. I remember back in the ’70s reading about something called an ‘Odien Coil’ which could be used to blanket all radio and television broadcasts for up to about a half-mile. For Communion, I just set a few different parameters for the device, and gave it the ability to disrupt all the electro-magnetic spectrum used to carry the data of a ubiquitous computing/augmented reality society, then allowed it to play an important role in the plot.
So, while my prediction in this regard is, as I said, pretty lame, I still got a bit of amusement out of the recent NYT coverage of cell phone jamming devices. It was mentioned again this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, and that reminded me that I wanted to say something about it here, because while the tech is actually fairly old, how it is applied in a society becoming increasingly dependent on instantaneous cell phone communication is nonetheless newsworthy and insightful. From Matt Richtell’s NYT article:
The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.
The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.
“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”
Bingo. We’re still in the early phase of this kind of communications tech. As I stipulate in Communion, one way such technology could evolve is to become even more personal, literally implanted into our bodies, making it completely unnecessary to speak above a whisper in order to conduct a call clearly. If this were to happen, it would solve the problem of idiots needing to chatter away loudly on their phones, and perhaps societal pressures would counteract the current situation. And if it wasn’t just a matter of politeness bringing about such a change, perhaps the application of jamming technology will push us in that direction.
One can hope, anyway.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Constitution, Gene Roddenberry, Government, NPR, Politics, Press, Society, tech, Wired, YouTube
If you haven’t really been following the latest on the Telecom Immunity/Domestic Spying efforts by the Bush Administration, or even if you just were busy yesterday, you might want to check out what former AT&T technician and wiretapping whistle-blower Mark Klein has had to say on the matter. In particular, Senator Dodd has posted a 2 minute YouTube summary from Klein that’ll give some idea of the scope of the surveillance. And in a discussion on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday, Klein goes into some detail about why he claims that AT&T was basically spying on each and every one of us who uses the internet to surf, post, or send email…before 9/11. It was, as he says in the YouTube summation, “Massively Unconstitutional”.
Yes, your government has been spying on you. Not just “looking for patterns in the data” or “monitoring overseas communication.” Spying. On. You.
Personally, this comes as no surprise to me. Not really. I sort of assumed that Bush and his cronies would be up to this sort of thing, given how much they have sought to emulate the Unitary Executive theories promulgated by the Nixon Administration. But it is damned depressing to see the Congress working so hard to cover it all up.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Flu, General Musings, Global Warming, Habanero, Migraine, movies, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Umberto Eco, when asked why he wrote The Name of the Rose, famously replied: “I wanted to poison a monk.”
I can sympathize.
There are times when I’m a little grumpy, or have just had a little too much exposure to my fellow monkeys, when I’d like to kill a few people myself. In fact, catch me when I’m feeling more than a bit honest, and I’ll admit that part of the backstory of Communion of Dreams is because I think that the world really would be better off with about 2/3 of the population gone, as traumatic and painful as that might be. No, I am not advocating it – I can just see the benefit of some pandemic flu or plague, in terms of the carrying capacity of the planet.
And of course I see plenty of ways in which we’re well on the road to having this happen, as I write about here upon occasion. Take your pick: war, terrorism, global warming, disease, or even just eating ourselves to death. I just came from the store, where I needed to get some frozen raspberries for a habanero jelly recipe I want to make. There in my neighborhood supermarket were 120 feet of freezers carrying various ice creams and other dessert treats. One aisle over was 60 feet of frozen pizzas. I looked and looked for frozen fruits, and found one narrow little rack, about half the width of one 10′ wide freezer unit, containing a small selection of fruits. Think there’s something wrong there?
*Gah.*
OK, I am a little grumpy. I’m in a cycle of migraines, it seems, having had two in the last week. Still living with the echoes of the one yesterday. But still, sometimes I feel very pessimistic about our future . . . and take a certain perverse pleasure in it.
Well, this is the 200th post. Woo-hoo. I’ll be a little more upbeat later.
Jim Downey
Made a routine trip to the big-box store this morning, to stock up on catfood. I got one of those large boxes of 48 cans of different flavors my cats like. And when I went to put it away, the “easy open” tab didn’t. Instead, I wound up just destroying the whole box, ripping and tearing, so I had access to all the cans included.
It felt wonderful to be so destructive.
There are days like that for all of us. After a trip to the store, dealing with idiots who don’t know how to negotiate a check-out line. Or sitting behind the twit at the stoplight who somehow misses that the light changed and the cars in the other lane are passing him, getting his shit together just in time to slip through a yellow light and leave you sitting there for another cycle. Whatever it is, you just want to take out your frustrations in a safe and relatively sane way.
I have these days a lot. Part of it is just the toll of being a long-term care provider for someone who has a tenuous grip on reality but can be amazingly stubborn and focused in her determination to do something unsafe (or just highly annoying). But part of it is simply the effect of long term sleep disruption/deprivation that goes with providing care around the clock. I’ve known this for ages, and written about it several times. Anyone who has had insomnia, lived with an infant, or just had a bad string of luck sleeping for a few days will understand completely how grumpy and intolerant it can make you.
Well, it’s worse than you thought. At least, it’s worse than the people who study neuroscience thought:
Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.
“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, “and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes,” Walker speculated. “Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It’s a real oddity in nature.”
In modern life, people often deprive themselves of sleep “almost on a daily basis,” Walker said. “Alarm bells should be ringing about that behavior—no pun intended.”
Gee, ya think?
Sheesh. I need to go find another box to destroy or something.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, DARPA, Expert systems, Failure, Government, Guns, movies, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired
You think you get frustrated when your computer acts up? How do you think the guys who were on the receiving end of 500 rounds of 35mm explosive anti-aircraft fire feel? From Wired’s Danger Room blog:
We’re not used to thinking of them this way. But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force “is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.”
Wasn’t something like this part of the paleo-future Skynet from the Terminator? You think maybe we should pass along to the boys at DARPA the suggestion that they should watch that movie as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Bad Astronomy, Ballistics, Firefly, Government, Guns, Joss Whedon, movies, Phil Plait, RKBA, Science, Science Fiction, Serenity, Society, Space
So, a few weeks back, I mentioned that I was going to order in the whole series of Firefly, the brilliant but (therefore?) short-lived Science Fiction series created by Joss Whedon. Well, I did, and off and on since I’ve been thinking about writing something about the series, never getting around to it. Hey, a lot of other stuff has been on my mind, and besides, it’s not like there isn’t a ton of blogging and fandom out there about the series.
Suffice it to say that I watched it all the way through three or four times, then turned it over to a shooting buddy who has good taste in SF (well, obviously, since he really liked Communion). I knew that with his appreciation of good guns and fine Science Fiction, it would be a perfect match. The fact that the series actually ‘gets’ guns, does a good job with ballistics and physics, wouldn’t hurt matters.
Anyway, this morning an item over at Bad Astronomy caught my eye:
Another Firefly movie??
ZOMG.
There may may may be another Firefly movie.
ZOMG.
Ain’t It Cool is throwing some harshness on this. Still. Still.
BTW: Alan Tudyk: on my ManCrush list.
Phil Plait is just so cute sometimes. Not that I disagree with him about the prospect of another movie. Not at all.
Shiny!
Jim Downey
As I mentioned Saturday, we now have someone coming in to stay overnight three nights a week. Seems like a nice woman, but it will still be a little weird to have a stranger here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – and there’s a chance that it won’t work out with my MIL, if she freaks out over having this strange person help her in the middle of the night.
That was one of the main reasons we’d held off on taking this step earlier: we weren’t sure whether the trade-off of getting a night’s undisturbed sleep would be worth whatever disruption it caused my MIL that we’d have to deal with the rest of the time. But when we met with the Social Worker from Hospice, a nice woman by the name of Lori, she was fairly assertive that we needed to take this step, just for our own health and sanity. Getting an outside professional’s perspective helped, and affirmed what friends and family had been suggesting for some time.
The other main reason we’d held off in doing this was insurance. Now, let me get my biases right out in front: I think that most insurance is a scam, designed to scare people and sell them policies which provide little coverage and plenty of loopholes for the company to escape payment. I know that this isn’t always the case, and yes I have always had plenty of insurance – I just accept it as a necessary and unpleasant part of life. Our experience in this case proved not to be an exception.
See, my MIL has a long-term care policy which carried an option for an ‘alternative care plan’, meaning something other than a nursing home, which could be set up with the agreement of the company (and would save the company money, since it was a lot less than what a nursing home would cost). She’s had this policy for decades. Under the provisions of the plan, the company would pay up to $xx.xx dollars per day for in-home care assistance. We wanted to have them help pay for having a home-health aide in overnight a couple of times a week. Except that the cost of doing so was a little less than twice what the per diem specified in the policy. But hey, no problem – since it is overnight, the billing could be broken into two days, and fall under the specified coverage. Logical, right?
Um, no. Not as far as the insurance company was concerned. At least that was the position they took when they denied our request. My wife argued with them. For a while. Because honestly, we didn’t have the energy to fight with them over the long haul, given that we’re exhausted from being care-providers. It was easier to just curse the bastards and drop the matter – what the insurance company counts on, no doubt.
Except then we talked with Lori, and she made her point about us needing more rest. Further, she asked about any insurance policies that might allow for some in-home care. We explained the situation we’d gone through with the insurance company earlier this year. She nodded, asked to see the policy. Looked it over. Looked at us, said, “Let me handle it. The sad fact is, I have a lot more success than our hospice clients do with these things – the insurance companies know that they can’t just wait me out.”
Three weeks later, we had a tentative agreement in place. A week after that, the paperwork was all signed. The company will indeed pay for someone being here three nights a week, billed under the per diem for six days. Starting tonight.
Thanks, Lori.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Architecture, Flu, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
Couple of items of interest from the news.
First, researchers have figured out a way to produce what I called “plasteel” in Communion of Dreams, and used as the basis for a lot of the architecture of the future. From PhysOrg.com:
New plastic strong as steel, transparent.
By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that’s as strong as steel but lighter and transparent.
It’s made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue.
Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it “plastic steel,” but the new material isn’t quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft.
Ah, I love to see my predictions actually coming true. (Not that I knew exactly how this would be achieved, but it was clear that materials science will reap a huge benefit from nanotech advancements.)
Now for the bad news:
Bird flu virus mutating into human-unfriendly form.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said on Thursday.
The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study. “The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus,” Kawaoka said.
This is unbelievably bad news. The thing which has kept H5N1 from becoming a real threat is that it is difficult for it to move from one human to another – almost all the deaths attributable to the virus so far have come in animal to human transfers. Part of this is due to the fact that the virus just doesn’t find us all that good a place to set up shop. But once it does, it will only be a matter of time before you start to see human-to-human transfers. And then it’ll be “hello, pandemic!” And depending on how virulent that strain is, it may or may not precipitate the sort of global catastrophe I envision as the basis for Communion.
That’s one prediction I’d really love to have completely wrong.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Failure, Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Politics, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Terrorism
[This post contains spoiler information about Communion of Dreams.]
Twin news items to make you nervous:
Well, it makes me nervous, anyway. First we have a report on how with the increased accreditation of so-called high security labs has seen an increased incident rate for those labs. In the last 4 years, more than 100 incidents involving very dangerous biologic materials have occurred. From the first news article:
The mishaps include workers bitten or scratched by infected animals, skin cuts, needle sticks and more, according to a review by The Associated Press of confidential reports submitted to federal regulators. They describe accidents involving anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria at 44 labs in 24 states. More than two-dozen incidents were still under investigation.
The number of accidents has risen steadily. Through August, the most recent period covered in the reports obtained by the AP, labs reported 36 accidents and lost shipments during 2007 — nearly double the number reported during all of 2004.
And the second one involves cattle ranchers who are concerned about the DHS plans for a new animal disease research lab, and how the proximity of such a lab near livestock operations poses a threat. (Disclosure note: my hometown of Columbia was recently removed from a list of potential sites, in part thanks to efforts of friends of mine who opposed such a facility being placed here.) The threat is not theoretical – it is little known in this country, but recent outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain have been tied to a similar research lab in that country. Yet this is what we hear from the government:
“No matter where we put it it’s going to be safe and secure,” said James Johnson, Homeland Security‘s director of national labs and the program manager for the planned lab.
I’m sure it will be, Jim. Just like all those other high-security labs around the country.
See, the problem is that people being people, mistakes happen. Under the best of conditions. And when you’re messing around with really dangerous shit, the potential harm of an error goes way up. And that is only being concerned with mistakes.
[Spoiler alert.]
Because what happens when some one or group decides to exploit the system in place to redirect something really nasty for their own purposes? This is what I use as the source of the original ‘Fire Flu’ for Communion, though that isn’t revealed until late in the book. Impossible? Oh? Remember the 2001 Anthrax attacks which killed five people and shut down the Senate’s postal facility? That whole episode is still unsolved.
I don’t know about you, but when the same people who let New Orleans die tell me that I should trust them to secure biologic agents which have the potential to wipe out our (overly concentrated) livestock, cause widespread crop failure, or even start a pandemic plague of some variety, I shudder.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 