Chaos Program

For some people, one of the things that makes science fiction interesting is the way it deals with ideas. I’m one of the old school that prefers the scientific and technological ideas over philosophical ones, as I find most philosophy (particularly when it’s in the context of science fiction) to be pretentious and illogical. Technology is a tool for building things and making people’s lives longer and more comfortable. It can’t change who we are (which could be a reference to the exceptional TV show Dollhouse or it could just be a segue into the discussion that follows. Don’t ask me which. I just write this stuff, I don’t analyze it).

Lately, due to the release of the new Terminator movie (Terminator: Salvation – a title apparently chosen more for dramatic impact than for anything that happens in the movie), there has been a slew of articles about how technology – especially robots – will shape the future of the human race. Usually the headline is something like, “Real life Terminators: How much time do we have?”

I’m not going to link to any of those articles because they are, almost without exception, not worth the paper that no one is bothering to print them out on (Sorry. This isn’t supposed to be a “what’s wrong with newspapers” post). For the moment it should be enough to say that the technology to build terminators doesn’t yet exist. Not the hardware and not the software. The robot apocalypse proposed by the Terminator movies is not just around the corner. Those movies came out of a different time and a different generation that grew up with the idea that some kind of apocalypse (probably a nuclear one) was always around the corner.
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A doctoral candidate in Virginia developed a highly accurate (as far as we can tell) and probably one of a kind map of North Korea (Wall Street Journal article here). This may become important in light of other developments, including North Korea’s announcement of having done a second, successful underground test of an atomic bomb (see AP story here).

Earlier this year, researchers for the Open Security Foundation used seemingly unrelated newspaper articles to learn details of the Heartland Systems data breach, one of the biggest data hacking incidents yet known (Wired story here), before the breach was made public.

Both of these items reminded me of an old story about one of the first people to study serial murder. This was a detective (whose name I should be able to remember but can’t just now. Sorry!) who began studying newspapers from all over California in order to find similar murders that were not thought to be linked, as likely as not because they were in different jurisdictions so that the investigators involved did not even know about them. He discovered quite a few links no one else had noticed this way.

This sort of research to link up scattered, seemingly unrelated information is called open source intelligence gathering and we may not be far from the time when you can get a degree in it and (hopefully) lots of high-paying jobs. The term should not be confused with open source software or artificial intelligence. This intelligence is the kind that concerns intelligence agencies like the CIA. And the open just means not hidden. read more »

How can you not love a domain named “cryptohippie.com?”

Okay, so it’s a business that sells unusual and interesting services that broadly fall under the heading of “security.” I say broadly because this is not the usual anti-virus or hacker proofing kind of stuff. Check out the website if you like. For now let’s just say that CryptoHippie lives up to its name.

What I really want to discuss is CryptoHippie’s report on the Electronic Police State, 2008. (Available here). The title caught my eye immediately, partly because I recently finished a class that included in the reading list a couple books that were chock full of scare stories about that same topic, more or less [See No Place to Hide by Robert O'Harrow, Jr. and Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation by J.D. Lasica]. The class wasn’t quite about that, though. It was about the law as it relates to computer and internet security and privacy (It was also brutal but it looks like I got the A).

Of course, some of what we covered included the hoops the government has to jump through to gather and the way that was changed by the USA PATRIOT Act. Privacy policies and the laws that govern or even require them were also a large part of the class. And other interesting things. Never did the phrase “Electronic Police State” come up. That would be worth another class by itself and I hope to take it one of these days.

The first topic should be What does “Electronic police state” mean?

First, what is a “regular” police state? According to Wikipedia, the term “describes a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population” (Police state). This is a nice start but doesn’t tell the half of it. A police state is one where citizens have few, if any, rights. It’s a place where they can be arrested at any time with, or without a reason. In the old Soviet Union the crime of committing “anti-soviet activities” (or was it un-Soviet?) was a catchall that could be used to collect dissidents or prostitutes with equal ease (the story goes that it was used against prostitutes because there were no laws against prostitution, since that was said to exist only in decadent western countries like the U.S.A. But that law could be used to nab almost anybody for almost anything, so it worked just fine).
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A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.

Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.

Or does there?

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