David L. Lindsey's Blog, page 4

The Revolving door keeps spinning….

Reuters: NSA reviewing deal between official, ex-spy agency head

There are always special rules for those leaving our national intelligence programs and moving to the private sector where contractors for US intelligence programs can make billions of dollars provided by taxpayer funding. Here’s yet another example of their special rules, created by themselves, for themselves.

Don’t be suckered in by “the safest place on the Internet”

This article in today’s British newspaper the Guardian is just one more example of how we should think twice before believing all the promises app developers make us when they are trying to sell us their wares. More than ever, it’s buyer beware.

U.S. Government Tried to Stop James Risen’s New Book

James Risen’s story is a great primer on the constant struggle that faces the freedom of the press, even in democratic America. Sixty Minutes recently focused on his story, and this article is only the latest episode in that ongoing battle. It’s good for all of us to keep in mind that all of our freedoms are only as secure as our will to fight for them.

Former NSA Director Personally Invested Thousands in Tech Firms

This article in Ars Technica is yet more evidence of the revolving door between powerful figures leaving the NSA (and all the government’s intelligence services) and heading straight to the private sector intelligence industry. Not only do high level figures leave the government service to use their expertise gained there to triple (and far more than triple) their wealth in the private sector, but the corporations they form, or go to work for, are then hired by the government as contractors to do the same work at a far greater cost to the taxpayer. And they get rich doing it. Keith Alexander has even patented software programming that he developed while director of the NSA.

Who’s Buying Your Senator or Representative?

Opensecrets.org is an essential website if you want to keep up with the “inside story” in Congress. It bills itself as “your nonpartisan guide to money’s influence on U.S. elections and public policy.” It’s chock full of data, and you can spend a lot of time there, as many investigative journalist and interested voters do. But it’s dense, and sometimes you have to be pretty adept at research to get to the bottom of your questions.

Well, now comes an app that is immensely help in simplifying your research. And it provides a quick and easy way to get an answer to one question I often ask myself as I read and listen to the news: who’s laying down most of the contributions for our Senators and members of congress? Who’s footing the bill to keep these people in office? Welcome to Greenhouse. (You can install Greenhouse for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari by going to allaregreen.us). As described by David Kravets in an article on ArsTechnica, “Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received and a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors.”

It’s a brilliant idea, and one every voter can use–and should use– to understand just exactly where the men and women you elected to speak on your behalf are getting the money to keep their careers going. Are they going to listen to us–representing one vote each–or are they going to listen to the people giving them hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars for their influence in all those private committee meetings we don’t get to attend?

Just something to think about….

And while you’re at it, think about this, too: the person who invented this ingenuous, incredibly useful app, is a 16-year old high school student. Honest.

So let’s give a hand to the future of American youth…and to the parents who teach them that some things are more important than…well, you fill in the blank. If you’re the parent of a teenager you won’t have any problem doing that.

Read the ArsTechnica article about the Greenhouse app, and Nicholas Rubin, the 16 years old high school student who has just made it possible for each of us to shine a brighter light on the sausage making in the Congressional halls of Washington.

 

Privacy is an issue?? And personal data, too??

Well, yeah, they seem to be. Read Google Privacy Inquiries Get Little Cooperation in today’s New York Times. The issue was that Google’s specially equipped Street View camera cars that are busily photographing all the city streets in the world, were caught scooping up “…e-mails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, postings on Web sites and social networks—all sorts of private Internet communications…” from private homes of wireless users as they drove up and down city streets in Germany.

This was in late 2010. Google denied it at first. Then the German regulators forced the company to admit that they were indeed collecting the data. But it was a mistake, Google said. American authorities got involved. Like Germany, they asked to see the data Google had collected, but Google refused. A long and involved legal tussle has been engaged and continues. As of now,  “Google has yet to give a complete explanation of why the data was collected and who at the company knew about it. No regulator in the United States has ever seen the information that Google’s cars gathered from American citizens.”

Michael Copps, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, said that “The industry has gotten more powerful, the technology has gotten more pervasive and it’s getting to the point where we can’t do too much about it.”

That has a lot of people rattled.

In the past couple of decades billions of people worldwide have increasingly and heedlessly, dumped mind-bending amounts of personal and private information onto the Internet in exchange for access to the awesome data information highway. The people who control the various platforms of the Internet structure have helped themselves to that data. They store it, sort it, package it and sell it to…well, anybody with enough money to buy it. And I mean ANYBODY. (Think about that just a second.)

This is a big and involved story, this business of our privacy and our personal data, who owns it, and who controls it. I’ll be writing more about it. The Google story mentioned above is only a part of this complicated and immensely important story. (And if you don’t think people are worried about this, read the comments attached at the end of the article online.) But the bottom line here is that in the past twenty years, during the ascendency of the Internet, and the public’s addiction to it, the privacy of individual citizens has deteriorated enormously. At the same time, the Internet giants, who now “own” our personal data that we used to keep private, have themselves become more and more secretive about their own businesses, and what they do with OUR business, that is, our personal information.

More about this in many blogs to come.

No comment…

Wired magazine reports that on Friday, May11, the National Security Agency’s decision not to realease to the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it may or may not have with Google concerning cypersecurity and encryption was upheld by a federal appeals court. The Wired article says that former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that the collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”

David Kravets who wrote the article, concludes, with tongue firmly in cheek, “If we removed all the legalese, the appellate court upheld the government’s often-said contention that, “if we told you, we’d have to kill you.”

Use the link above to get more links from this short article.

Three articles, interrelated……..

This past week three articles strike me as memorable. I give links to them here if you’d like to look them up.

Get Rich U. : There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley.  This article in the New Yorker is full of fascinating information, but the thing that interested me immediately was toward the end when author Ken Auletta begins addressing the issue of “distance education”, the emergence of online learning. It seems that online learning is being perceived by some in the administration at Stanford University as a looming threat to the University’s on campus traditions. A recent experiment in online courses was a surprising success, but the credit went mostly to the professor who created the courses, not the University. Now that professor has left Stanford to embark on an education regimen all his own as a private educator. Many other faculty are seeing the possibilities in this, and there is a rising interest in professors as “private contractors”.

Up until now, the idea of forward-thinking technology has worked in Stanford’s favor. They are, after all, the birthplace of much of Silicon Valley’s imaginative financial success, and are still closely tied to many of them. The philosophical dictum, “digital disruption is normal, and even desirable,” was fully embraced by the University. “It was commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly,” according to Auletta. “But online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford,” he adds. Suddenly, the disruption of the “old order” seems less attractive.

The article ends with a quote from John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford who, until now, fully embraced the idea of “digital disruption.” Suddenly he sees Stanford as being vulnerable to, and even threatened by, digital innovation just as newspapers, the music companies, publishing, and much of traditional media has been during the last fifteen years. It doesn’t feel so good when the digital disruption is focused on your own back yard. “There’s a tsunami coming,” Hennessy is quoted as saying. And indeed there is.

The second article of interest is “Entrepreneurs’ New Nightmare: The Invasion of the Startup Snatchers.” It seems that Silicon Valley startups are being cloned and copied and outmaneuvered by unscrupulous “knock-off” artists, just as if their digital creations were a Prada purse knock-off sold on the streets of the major cities of the world. Copycat startups are holding the companies they are cloning hostage to their own identities. Again, suddenly (again), Silicon Valley is being set on its ear by the same kind of “innovation” that they have so long held as their birthright to upend traditional media. Problems ahead. Now copyrights and “rules” seem like a good idea.

The third article of interest: “These Islands Aren’t Just a Shelter from Taxes” appeared in today’s New York Times op ed pages. It was written by Robert M. Morgenthau the Manhattan district attorney from thirty-four years. It’s a short article with some block buster quotable quotes: “The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2008 [note the date] estimated that at least $5 trillion to 7 trillion was sheltered in offshore juristictions like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Bermuda and the Bahamas”.  And, “Consider the British Virgin Islands, home to about 30,000 people and 475,000 companies.” And, “Where there is no transparency, there can be no oversight.” And, “When companies use secrecy juristictions to commit fraud or to evade sanctions, legal remedies may come as cold comfort.”

Read this short op ed piece if you want to see how these three articles are tied together even further. None of these things happen in isolation.

The Battle for the Internet: a series and two articles

The UK newspaper The Guardian has just finished a weeklong series titled The New Cold War: The Battle for the Internet. This is a link to the archived series. The Internet is now ubiquitous and essential for all of us. But the American public’s education about important issues surrounding this indispensible tool have lagged behind our acceptance of it. We quickly and willingly brought it into our lives before we understood it. Now we’re learning more, and there’s growing concern that maybe we moved a little too fast with too little caution.

In the UK and the EU privacy issues vis-à-vis the Internet were a concern early on. Internet users in the U.S. have come to the battle far later than the rest of the world, but now that is changing. Americans consistently list privacy, specifically Internet privacy, as one of their main issues of concern in many recent polls, and now there is far more national discussion about it. But, in terms of the speed with which things happen in the digital world, Americans have come to the issue late in the game.

I’ll write more about this in the months to come, because it is a major theme element in my upcoming novels. (And more about those soon, too.)

Here are links to the last two articles in The Battle for the Internet series. “Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know?”, and “How to Download Your Data from Google and Facebook”. Read the article and then follow through with downloading your data. It may rattle you. And it should.

Good luck.

Human nature

Recently I read two articles that address the ever changing/never changing kaleidoscope of human nature. I think both articles are worth sharing.

The first article deals with the quirky confusions of the puzzle that is the adolescent mind.  What’s Wrong with the Teenage Mind? , written by Allison Gopnik, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, appeared in the Wall Street Journal in January of this year. As we all know, adolescence has always been trouble, and now, for reasons that are not altogether understood, puberty is kicking in at an earlier and earlier age, causing even more confusion for every one. Dr. Gopnik discusses how this new phenomenon is changing the way we think of the developing human mind. It’s a thoughtful article, and if your life touches the life of an adolescent in any way, you’ll want to read this.

The second article was the cover story in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. How Companies Learn Your Secrets by Charles Duhigg, discusses what has now become a common practice of almost all major consumer related businesses from grocers to investment bankers (and, though he didn’t say it, intelligence services as well). That is, the practice of employing the science of “predictive analytics” to cunsumer psychology.  This is the “golden age” of behavioral research. Never before in history have so many known so much about so many. We can thank the new digital age for that last odd sentence. There are few secrets anymore, and anyone who believes their lives are “private” in the sense that we understood it twenty years ago, are badly misinformed. But Duhigg’s article discusses one particular aspect of our human nature that is becoming increasingly understood–and exploited–by all of those in this consumer obsessed society who want to sell us something: habit. You’ll probably be astonished to learn that “habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day.” And that statistical fact contains a treasure trove of information for everyone who wants something from you and me…for whatever reason…for good or ill. As always, it’s a blade that cuts both way.

Both articles discuss how behavior actually shapes our brains. To say that we are “hard-wired” to be a certain way is a vast overstatement. It’s true that habit is a predominate driver of the way we live our lives, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be. In fact the human brain is enormously sensitive and responsive. Our social and cultural life shapes our biology. If we learn that certain habits are detrimental to us, then we can change the way we live, and thereby change our habits, and thereby change our lives. Self awareness is the first step in becoming the captain of our own destiny.