Category: Quotations

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2013.3.2

In Jewel, the Obama administration has already twice invoked the “state secrets” privilege, a mechanism left behind from the McCarthy-era persecution of Communist sympathizers which effectively lets the government ‘turn off’ the Constitution and the justice system whenever they feel that a case might jeopardize national security. The administration has promised to limit its use of the privilege to situations which present the potential for “significant harm” to the country. But that promise obviously hasn’t stopped them from deflecting recent challenges to warrantless wiretapping and other government counterterrorism initiatives — like indefinite detention provisions, or the secret program for targeted killings carried out by drones — nor will it necessarily restrain future administrations from doing the same.

Jewel may be the last chance for meaningful judicial review of the wiretapping programs in the foreseeable future. Failing that, the only remaining response for journalists and others dealing in sensitive overseas communications may be exactly what digital activists have been advocating for decades: widespread personal encryption. But aside from being somewhat impractical, the necessity of encrypted communications would more broadly underscore just how thoroughly the legal system has failed to protect citizens from unnecessary intrusion.

Joshua Kopstein, “Denied in the Supreme Court, warrantless wiretap opponents are losing ground fast: Does secret surveillance violate the Constitution? Sorry, that’s a secret”
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Quotations

2013.3.1

I meet up with my friend Dan Pashman, who hosts the Sporkful podcast and whom you hear sometimes on Weekend Edition Sunday. He believes poutine would be better if it were served with the gravy on the side, so you could mete out perfect bites and avoid sogginess. I tell him you could also ask for a bunch of cans of paint instead of Starry Night, but I’ll trust van Gogh on it.

Ianan Chillag, “Dispatch From Poutine Fest, Chicago’s ‘Love Letter’ To Canada”
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Quotations

The report finds plenty of blame to go around. The ultimate cause of the fiasco, it says, was the fact the grant implementers did not conduct a capacity or use study before spending $24 million. They also used a “legally unauthorized purchasing process” to buy the routers, which resulted in only modest competition for the bid. Finally, Cisco is accused of knowingly selling the state larger routers than it needed and of showing a “wanton indifference to the interests of the public.”

Getting any of the money back seems unlikely at this point, but the legislative auditor does have one solid recommendation to make. The State Purchasing division should determine whether Cisco’s actions in this matter fall afoul of section 5A-3-33d of the West Virginia Code, and whether the company should be barred from bidding on future projects.

Cisco tells Ars “the criticism of the State is misplaced and fails to recognize the forward-looking nature of their vision. The positive impact of broadband infrastructure on education, job creation, and economic development is well established, and we are committed to working with the State to realize these benefits for the people of West Virginia now and into the future.”

As for that $5+ million the state could have saved—it would have paid for 104 additional miles of fiber.

Nate Anderson, “Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router: Cisco, West Virginia wasted $5M on enterprise-class routers”
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Quotations

2013.3.1

A few years ago, he [Ken Anderson, Intel ethnographer] conducted an ethnographic study of “temporality,” about the perception of the passage and scarcity of time—noting how Americans he studied had come to perceive busy-ness and lack of time as a marker of well-being. “We found that in social interaction, virtually everyone would claim to be ‘busy,’ and that everyone close to them would be ‘busy’ too,” he told me. But in fact, coordinated studies of how these people used technology suggested that when they used their computers, they tended to do work only in short bursts of a few minutes at a time, with the rest of the time devoted to something other than what we might identify as work. “We were designing computers, and the spec at the time was to use the computer to the max for two hours,” Anderson says. “We had to make chips that would perform at that level. You don’t want them to overheat. But when we came back, we figured that we needed to rethink this, because people’s time is not quite what we imagine.” For a company that makes microchip processors, this discovery has had important consequences for how to engineer products—not only for users who constantly need high-powered computing for long durations, but for people who just think they do.

Graeme Wood, Anthropology Inc.

Speaks volumes about why social sciences are so important to development and engineering processes.

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Quotations

2013.2.28

… test version of a data-mining tool in Delta’s offices, and he was surprised by the technology’s power to collect vast amounts of personal information using one start point. Jackson volunteered his Social Security number and watched the tool retrieve his address, the names of his neighbours, his wife’s name, and the date they were married, all from publicly available information. Some of the Delta employees had been test subjects already, and when his own personal information stated popping up for all to see, Jackson joked he’d seen enough. But the demo convinced him that the government had to have this capacity. Not because he wanted it. But because he was afraid he couldn’t do his job without it.

Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State
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Quotations

2013.2.26

I have posted before about the Tibetan attacks, because they offer good insights into this issue in general. But it’s not just the Tibetan activists and other outspoken critics of the Chinese regime that are targeted by this “GhostNet”. I work on Taiwan/China issues in Washington, D.C. Pretty much everyone in that community – be it academics, think tankers, NGO employees, and government officials – are consistently targeted by the kind of “social malware” attacks that are detailed in the two reports. These attacks are very sophisticated, making them really hard to spot, and they show intimate knowledge of what’s going on in the community. Let me give you two recent examples:

On March 26, the Pentagon released their annual report on the Chinese military. On March 27, I received an email ostensibly from one of the people responsible for Taiwan issues at the Pentagon. The email basically said “Hey, here is the expanded version of the report from yesterday, with some additional commentary on Taiwan. I thought you would find it useful”. Attached was a PDF named “China_Military_Power_Report_2009.pdf”, exactly like the official document released by the Pentagon. I work on Taiwan defense issues, so this would be very interesting to me were it real. However, I correspond with this person on a regular basis, and he usually signs his emails to me with his nickname. This email didn’t, which made me suspicious. A Virustotal scan confirmed that the attachment contained malicious software (only detected by 4/38 products, though) and a quick phone call confirmed that the person hadn’t sent an email like that.

In another recent attack, it was the name of the head of my organization that was used to try to trick recipients into opening malicious attachments. He had just returned from a visit to Taiwan, a trip that had been reported on in the Taiwan press. About a week after returning, he received an inquiry from a prominent researcher at a D.C. think tank, asking if he had sent the researcher an email with a trip report from his visit. He had not in fact sent such an email, although it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to do so. I spoke to the IT manager at the think tank, who confirmed that the researcher was indeed tricked into opening the attachment, and that it did contain malware.

And this was just in the last three weeks. I could go on for pages describing various things we have seen over the past two/three years (two more here), but you get the gist. For small NGOs like mine, protecting against infiltration, monitoring our systems for intrusions, and educating our staff to recognize potential hazards has become a huge drain on our already limited resources. The frustrating thing is that there is pretty much nothing we can do about it, except to remain diligent. But at least I’m glad that the issue is continuing to get coverage in the mainstream press.

Gemmy, from a 2009 comment on GhostNet
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Quotations

There’s A Yawning Need for Boring Professors

While such research is done in a number of countries, Canada seems to be a hotbed of boredom studies. James Danckert, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, recently conducted a study to compare the physiological effects of boredom and sadness.

To induce sadness in the lab, he used video clips from the 1979 tear-jerker, “The Champ,” a widely accepted practice among psychologists.

But finding a clip to induce boredom was a trickier task. Dr. Danckert first tried a YouTube video of a man mowing a lawn, but subjects found it funny, not boring. A clip of parliamentary proceedings was too risky. “There’s always the off chance you get someone who is interested in that,” he says.

Rachel Emma Silverman, “Interesting Fact: There’s a Yawning Need for Boring Professors”

I found the third paragraph particularly amusing as someone who often finds watching parliament interesting. I guess I’d be one of the ‘problem’ participants!

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Quotations

2013.2.25

… success will be found once expectations are suitably managed. The grads do make a difference, just a slightly smaller one than they anticipated. Value-adding really is as simple as putting a semi-colon in the right spot in a ministerial brief. Being thanked for inserting that semi-colon provides such joy that it’s almost enough motivation to proofread the next brief. Producing talking points that might theoretically be uttered by a represented official in response to an unlikely question suddenly feels like penning the opening of the Gettysburg Address.

…

Once broken and socialised, the culture really changes. The formerly idealistic young cohort rapidly joins Canberra’s favourite pastime: fighting for status. Grads are thrown, Hunger Games-style, into a battle for rotations, seeking career-building weapons such as high-profile taskforces or personal access to department heads and senior executives. The universal scoring system in this game is your opportunity for work travel (Paris being 250 points and Queanbeyan being 1).

The Cubicle Brothers, “Confessions of an ex-grad”
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Quotations

2013.2.24

How a policy is understood and discussed is its policy image. Policy images play a critical role in the expansion of issues to the previously apathetic. Because all people cannot be equally interested or knowledgeable about all issues facing society, specialists in any area have an advantage over all others. Since they know the issue better, they are sometimes able to portray most of their time communicating with each other, of course, but from time to time they must explain their policies to the larger public or to elites with only a passing interest in the area. This type of communications requires some simplified ways of explaining the issue and justifying public policy approaches to them. As a result, every public policy program is usually understood, even by the politically sophisticated, in simplified and symbolic terms.

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Second Edition)
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Quotations

2013.2.21

The 27 regulators, led by France’s CNIL, gave Google three to four months to make changes to its privacy policy — or face “more contentious” action. In a statement on its website today, the CNIL said that four months on from that report Google has failed “to come into compliance” so will now face additional action.

“On 18 February, the European authorities find that Google does not give a precise answer and operational recommendations. Under these circumstances, they are determined to act and pursue their investigations,” the CNIL said in its statement (translated from French with Google Translate).

According to the statement, the European regulators intend to set up a working group, led by CNIL, to “coordinate their enforcement action” against Google — with the working group due to be established before the summer. An action plan for tackling the issue was drawn up at a meeting of the regulators late last month, and will be “submitted for validation” later this month, they added.

Natasha Lomas, “Google’s Consolidated Privacy Policy Draws Fresh Fire In Europe”