The NSA : "I have Nothing to Hide, why should I care?"

I have heard this often of late. And it seems a reasonable point. If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about. They are only interesting in finding and stopping terrorists and child pornographers. That is a good thing, right? What sensible person wouldn't sacrifice a little privacy for that? A few crazy extremists clinging to their guns, perhaps.

Personally, I don't really have a big problem with cameras everywhere, watching me. Given the number of cellphones with cameras, I have no doubt there is some embarrassing footage out there of me picking my nose, scratching my butt...

To me the problem is that I don't know exactly what they are gathering, how they are using it, or who else they have let see it.

But why does that matter? Again, I have nothing to hide, so nothing to worry about, right?

Let me introduce you to the idea of advanced media manipulation. Did you know that the marketing/advertising industry has poured millions into researching how different things like color influence you? Why? Mind Control, that's why. By applying the right colors, sounds, smells, social cues, they can manipulate you into buying a product you might otherwise pass by.

What does that have to do with spying? The more they know about you, individually, the more specifically they can tailor the message. At the most fundamental non-sinister level, they know what you are looking for, and can send you targeted advertising. But what if they branch into more sensitive areas of your life? Like Health issues?

And as technology advances, the amount and granularity of data they capture increases. You've seen the cool new Samsung Galaxy S4? The one that pauses your movie when you look away from the screen. Did you know that Market research firms are using that technology as well? To better understand what catches your attention?

But what does this have to do with the NSA? They aren't trying to sell deodorant, or toothpaste.

The government deals in Ideas. They are very interested in "Selling" certain ideas, and they are happy to use marketing manipulation techniques to do so. They have. And they are VERY interested in Control. The purpose of a government is to Govern. "Of by and for the people", is only necessary when the people will it.

So, why should I care about secretive organizations data gathering activities? I don't have anything to hide. Do they?

Info Age Fail 10: Big Sister

(This is part 10 in a series. Part 1 is here)

Ever heard the term "Big Brother"? No not the lame reality TV show. I am referring to the Original "Big Brother" from Orwell's "1984" ("Big Brother is watching you"). The great surveillance state. In which your every move, every emotion is caught be cameras, by spies, your every word reviewed for any sign that you are not precisely in lock-step with the party. Pretty terrifying stuff. Many a dark movie has contemplated the implications of a society in which humanity has become enslaved by the surveillance network which they originally welcomed as being necessary for the "greater good" (Enemy of the State and Minority Report are two good examples).

Well, try to set aside those images for a minute as I introduce you to Big Sister.

Big Sister is ... a surveillance system.... in the general sense. But she is very different from Big Brother. Big Sister doesn't attempt to scrutinize or discern your thoughts or intentions. Big sister isn't an attempt to achieve crime prediction and prevention. Most importantly, Big Sister doesn't belong to any one group or organization.

Big Sister is a distributed network of open sensors, cameras and other information gathering equipment, used to provide information needed to make educated decisions, reducing the influence of political agenda, and our own human bias. Big sister doesn't secretly gather information, she doesn't hide in a data center poking through emails, listening to phone calls.  She doesn't send swat teams to Euthanize baby deer.

Big sister provides the framework to allow an engaged public to act collectively, and cohesively to achieve better results. Big Sister can use existing sensor and 'surveillance systems, provided they are fully exposed to the public, and applied equally to everyone (Think less "NSA surveillance center", and more "everyone with a camera phone, and an open repository for all that footage to go to".

Big sister relies heavily on the previously described identification and trust systems. remember her purpose is to present information to the masses, as unencumbered by bias as possible she exists to tell the truth, absent the influence of human bias and perception. She doe not make decisions, she does not keep secrets, and she does not work in a vacuum.

It is probably easier to demonstrate Big Sister than to explain her. I will follow this post with a series of fictional scenarios demonstrating Big Sister in action. For starters, here is one small taste, a hint of a possibility...

I am a pretty terrible awesome cook

I am a good cook. okay, I am basing that entirely on my own personal opinion. It is entirely possible that my cooking is awful (I have had a few roommates in days past who sad good things, I had a couple proposals of marriage by complete strangers for my black forest cake. So, it probably isn't awful...), But I really like it and that's what really matters, right?

Anywho, there is one big problem with my cooking though. I have a bad habit of hacking when I cook (I mean the old definiton, before it got stolen by the media to mean computer criminal. I mean fiddling with things, making little tweaks here and there, to see what will happen, to see if an improvement can be made). But I don't keep notes.

Example: Last fall, as I was snapping green beans from the garden, I had a nostalgic memory of pickled beans. So I decided, "Hey, I'm gonna make some." I had no idea how to make them, so I went googling for recipes. I found quite a few, but as I read through them, none of them really sounded quite right. So I picked a couple that sounded sorta interesting and merged them. Sort of. I also fiddled a bit with ratio's on a few of the ingredients.

The end result.... was.... a....MAZING! Six pints of pickle-beany-bliss! And then they were gone! And I had NO IDEA WHAT I DID! YAARGH!


This was not an isolated incident. A few months later I pulled a similar number making spaghetti sauce. I started with a recipe I found that sounded good. but then changed a bunch of things that didn't sound that good, and added a bunch of other things. Divine! Gone! Unrepeatable.

Before that it was Salsa. That one I just completely made up. I know there were poblano's. They were the reason I decied to  make salsa. We got a bunch from Bountiful Baskets. Tomatoes obviously. Garlic, salt, lime, a little cilantro. a couple jalapenos. The end result wasn't exactly awesome. It was too mild. But the flavor profile was very promising. Just a little more heat and maybe... But, I don't remember the ratios, or what else was in there. So...


Last week I did it again with pickled beets.

You think I'd learn after a while.

*Sigh*

Parable of the Mountain Village

There once was a small, mountain village. It was a happy, peaceful place, at the end of 10 miles of winding road.

Then one evening, a bus full of children was making its way back down from a visit to the village, when a young man in a sporty little car was zooming up the road. The driver of the car had been enjoying himself in the city at the foot of the mountains. He was rather inebriated. In his fuddled state, he crossed the dividing line and struck the bus. Car and bus both careened over the edge and tumbled down the precipice.

The next morning, the news of the disaster spread like wildfire.  The whole community was rocked by the horror of it. Many were silent, consumed with grief. Some clamored for justice, vengeance. Someone had to be held accountable. For many others, the event was a call for action. Something must be done to ensure this never happened again.

Many ideas were suggested – Guard rails, for instance. Another suggestion was to place checkpoints at the top and bottom of the Mountain, and to check every driver’s sobriety before allowing them to pass. Others suggested anyone caught driving intoxicated be removed from their vehicle and bodily thrown over the edge. Surely the threat of death would be sufficient discouragement to prevent anyone else from daring to drive that road intoxicated. Still others suggested banning alcohol altogether. This they reasoned would get to the root cause. If nobody could get drunk, there would be no need to make death threats, or carry out executions, which many felt was a barbaric thing to do. There was, of course a strong opposition to these latter suggestions, by those who said such actions would discriminate against drunks.

Finally, after careful consideration, the village and city governments agreed upon a means to solve the problem. They blocked the road at both ends. Preventing any vehicle traffic up or down the road. Anyone wishing to travel to or from the village would have to do so on foot.

As a result, there was never another incident involving a horrible vehicle accident. An occasional person would go missing, and one or two weaker individuals succumbed to exhaustion while traveling. Many people never traveled again due to the inconvenience, or cost. Those who could afford to owned one car in the village, and another car in the city. And by and large, nobody lived happily ever after. The End.

Info Age Fail 9: The Trustinator

(This is part 9 of a series. Part 1 is here.)

The next crucial component is a means of establishing, maintaining and reporting trust in an identity. This system is closely tied to the previously described identity system, but it is a separate system.

The purpose of this system will be to help establish a level of confidence in an individual, based on the reports of knowledgeable peers, past evidence, and so forth.

With this system in place, a user reading an article on the web, or in a newspaper or magazine (or book, or...) can use an inline link (or for physical material, a barcode), to receive a numerical value representing the level of trust the author has acquired, thus giving some sense as to the 'trustability' of the material. This system could also be used when evaluating individuals in the physical world, for hire, or contract work, or political candidacy, or...

Given the potential power this system has in influencing decision making, it needs to be a very robust, secure system. It will take the collective power of the world's brightest math geniuses to develop the algorithm which defines trust. It will have to account for a number of factors:

• It will have to account for the level of trust of the individuals rating another person.

•  It will have to account for the number of individuals rating the person.

• It might make sense to have multiple levels of trust associated with an individual, for different skill-sets, as an example. An individual might be incredibly knowledgeable in a specific field, but woefully ignorant in another (and ignorant of their ignorance). Thus, when speaking on the first subject, you could have a high level of confidence in the veracity of their claims, while the latter subject... not so much.

• It will need to keep a history of trust ratings, in order to detect and remediate attempts to 'game the system'. For instance if a group were to target an individual, in an effort to either inflate or deflate the individuals trust rating. This system would need to have a record of the individuals who made those fraudulent trust entries, so that their trust could be lowered accordingly.

• It needs to be tighly integrated to, but separate from the identity system, to allow the possibility of 'anonymous' identities.

When applying real-world results in the trust equation, it needs to  (at least to some degree) be able to distinguish between an honest mistake, and an intentional lie (The effect on an individual's trust for being caught running a ponzi scheme, would be different than the effect of making a bad stock pick, for example).

This system will be an incredible undertaking. It is not expected to be perfect, it should not be trusted blindly, but it would at least provide a point of reference in decision making efforts in Science, Politics, Money...

<to Part 10>

Random thoughts on Immigration

I don't want to pay for a 3000 mile Fence. I don't want to pay for the upkeep on a 3000 mile fence. It doesn't matter if it is a literal fence. Dogs and Guards, Drones, Or motion sensor-ed machine guns. It is going to be expensive to build and expensive to maintain. That is wasted resources. resources that could be doing better things.


I want every hard-working individual in the world to come to the U.S. I want them to want to come. I want them to want to stay.  I want to have so many hard-working Mexicans come to the U.S. that Mexico just decides to become a state, so they can get some population back.Then there would be a tiny border to build a fence on, but we wouldn't because it wouldn't be needed.

I want this country to be the place the world wants to come to, because it is the place where innovation occurs, the place where where they can be assured that hard work will lead to quality living. I want them improving infrastructure, I want them producing more, better quality food. I want them curing modern diseases. I want them helping us get to space. I want them helping us to explore space, colonize planets, extend our reach to the stars.

I want it to be easy for people to come here, to become conditional citizens, to obtain or create work, and then to become permanent citizens. I want it to be just as easy to eject those who commit serious crimes, or who expect to get a free ride.

Info Age Fail 8: Fixing Identity

(This is part 8, Find Part 1 here.)

The first step to fixing the great information age fail is to fix identity. There needs to be a reliable way to prove you are you. (Note the way that is said: You prove who you are, not they determine who you are...).

Don't expect to leave this post with all the answers. It won't offer any answers. It is the framework on which the solution(s) will be built.

There are some key characteristics of this identity system:

It needs to have both a digital, and a physical form. It needs to be able to prove I am me to people in the real world, and to people and computers in the online/digital world. Perhaps a small card with USB and/or RFID and/or magnetic strip interfaces.

It must be a universal system. The same ID that works in New York must also work in California, Singapore, Taiwan, Paris, Rome, Moscow ...

The ID system must NOT be owned or maintained by any government or corporation. Ownership and maintenance must be distributed, the standards behind it must be open, unencumbered by patents or copyrights or other intellectual property rights. It must not in any way rely on any one individual, group, or ideal for operation.

The ID system must ONLY be an ID system. The ID database has the sole purpose of validating who you are. The open API of the system will allow (with the ID owner's permission) the ability to use it as a Single-Sign-On device (for example you can authorize the company you work for to allow your ID card to be used within their security door database, and computer login database.

The ID system must allow the user to Control its use. This might be accomplished by a PIN, a biometric interface,... The ID system might require a registered database of authenticator clients, and the ID holder would need to authorize each authenticator.

It must be illegal to require use of the ID system. Control of the ID and it's use is solely at the discretion of the user. Discrimination against non-ID users must be strictly forbidden and strongly penalized (Though there will be some systems which utilize the ID system, and which will provide a certain level of privilege to users, more on that later.




Remember, this is NOT the solution, this is the framework. There are other bits that are essential both to fix the information problem, and to protect the ID system. More to come.


<to Part 9>