Caller ID is a relatively new technology. It only dates back to the '90s. Caller ID was not possible until telephone switching equipment became computerized. If you look at old black and white crime movies you will see what it used to take to "trace" a call. You literally had to have people standing by at telephone "central offices", buildings full of complex electromechanical equipment. When he got the signal the technician would literally look at the equipment to follow the path of the telephone call. According to dialog in these old movies it typically took a minimum of two minutes to trace a call. And tracing was only possible if it was a local call.
The advent of computerized telephone equipment changed all this. First the industry had to change over to computer control of the telephone equipment. Then standardized methodology for doing a trace had to be developed. Finally a method of passing the trace information to a customer's phone had to be developed. But all that eventually happened. And when caller ID first rolled out it was very cool. A little display on your phone would show you the name and phone number of the caller. Back not so long ago this little trick seemed totally awesome. Now in the era of smart phones and Skype it doesn't seem like a big deal.
And it turns out that caller ID depends on a technology that is rapidly disappearing, the phone book. It took me a while to figure out that this connection existed but it does. I have a phone book but I believe it is now about three years old. (The phone company has stopped dropping a new one off every year.) Phone books used to be a cash cow. You got a set of "white pages", which cost the phone company a bundle of money to produce. But in exchange you also got a set of "yellow pages". And not so long ago yellow pages were a very effective method of advertising. So businesses signed up and paid through the nose to be prominently featured. And they frequently had to buy multiple ads to cover all of what we now call "search terms". You would want your pizza joint listed under "Pizza" and "Restaurant", for instance.
But it is now easier and more effective to do a search, on your computer (if you are an old fart like me), or on your smart phone (if you are not). So the value of putting an ad in the yellow pages has plummeted. And most businesses have figured that out. You are far better off putting your money into Google "adwords" instead. And with the plunge in revenue from yellow pages has come a plunge in interest in complete and accurate white pages by the phone companies. And that, in turn has become a problem for caller ID.
I am new to caller ID. First I didn't have a phone that would display caller ID information. Then it didn't seem worth the trouble. Finally I got fed up with all the nuisance phone calls I was getting. So I bit and got caller ID. I am looking at it with fresh eyes compared to someone who has had it for some time. And my conclusion is that it doesn't work nearly as well as it should. And it looks to me like the situation is only going to continue to get worse. So what's the problem?
Well, technically caller ID works just fine. Every single time the phone rings a "caller ID" informational display pops up on my phone. But the actual information is not very informative a lot of the time. The obvious problem is with "blocked" calls. A provision was put into the regulations that allowed a caller to block caller ID. The justification was to protect the privacy of single women living alone. But as far as I can tell anyone can have caller ID blocked.
This is actually a far smaller problem than you would expect. Most women have found that blocking caller ID is more trouble than it is worth so they don't bother. So I only occasionally see a "blocked" message come up on my display. It turns out their are better methods for hiding your identity. And I have trained the one person I know who has caller ID blocked to enter an "unblock caller ID for this call" code before she calls me. So "blocked" calls are not much of a problem. And to the extent this is a problem the impact is going down because fewer and fewer callers have blocking turned on.
There is a technical term for a much bigger problem with caller ID. The term is "spoofing". Spoofing covers any situation where the number shown is not the actual number of the calling phone. You would think that spoofing would be limited to spies and crooks. But it is actually in widespread use by many companies large and small. An obvious example is an "800" number. Free to the caller long distance has been around for a long time now. I even know of a situation where an individual had children scattered across the country. In order to encourage them to call home he got a personal 800 number. It cost little and had the desired result of causing his children to call home more often.
He was happy with the result (this was several years ago) but cost of long distance has dropped so much it would hardly be worth the trouble now. So what's the point? The point is that no phone line is ever actually assigned an 800 number. The 800 number is an "overlay". Some computer somewhere in the phone network replaces the 800 number you dial with an actual phone number. The call is completed to this normal number, which you never see. But many calls I get from companies show an 800 number on the caller ID display. Any time I see an 800 number I know the call has been spoofed.
Now this is not necessarily a problem. In most cases if I call the 800 number I will get the company that called me. So this example of spoofing is harmless. The problem is that the "name" part of the caller ID display often does not show the name of the company. It often dumbly duplicates the same 800 number shown on the "number" line. So I don't know who's calling me without answering the phone. This even happened to me with a call from Bank of America. You'd think they would want me to know it was them calling.
So, to recapitulate, phone numbers are frequently spoofed by businesses. And I have even seen it done by very small businesses. And the number displayed is often an 800 number. That can be justified on the basis that it can make it more convenient for me, the customer, to get back to the company in question. But the point is that spoofing is common. So in many cases you can't trust the number caller ID displays. I know that I am being spoofed when I see an 800 number on the display. So I know a large number of caller ID displays are showing spoofed numbers. Do I know that the other numbers I see displayed are the number of the caller? No. It is possible (and likely in the case of the frequent "marketing" calls I get) that other numbers are being spoofed too. It's just that I can't immediately tell that this is happening.
So there is a big problem with spoofing the caller's number. There is an even bigger problem with the other piece of information caller ID is supposed to give you. There is frequently no name in the "name" field. I indicated above that my call from Bank of America just repeated the 800 number rather than saying "Bank of America". This is a particularly bad idea on their part. Over the years I have received many calls from "Rachel from cardholder services". I even wrote a blog post about it (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/02/rachel-from-cardholder-services.html). Rachel fronts for a scammer that wants me to switch to a different credit card. You would think that Bank of America would want to do everything they could to discourage this. But their legitimate call to me looked very much like a "scam" call.
So I see a lot of calls where the "name" field just repeats the information in the "number" field. This seems to happen most frequently with calls from businesses. But, since I no longer answer calls when I can't figure out who the caller is I don't really know. So repeating the number in the "name" field is a problem. But there is another problem with the information in the "name" field.
Frequently it contains just a "City ST" combination. I recently was called from "Rochester NY", for instance. I have received a number of calls from "Albuquerque NM" in the past few weeks. Apparently I have a fan base spread all across the country. Many of these calls are apparently from places where I know I don't know anyone. So it is easy to ignore those calls. But sometimes I bite and answer the phone. The "City ST" combination happens to match that of a distant friend or relative. So it might be a call from them. But when I do bite and answer it has often turned out to be a scam/marketing call. But not always.
Cell phones (or "mobile" phones, as most of the rest of the world calls them) routinely pop up with this same "City ST" type of display in the "name" field. In fact, I have never gotten a call from a cell phone where the person's name popped up. As far as I can tell cell providers never register a name for a cell phone number. I recently got my mother a prepaid phone. You can register them. When you do you provide the usual contact information. But in this case I could not change the name from "MOBILE USER" to that of my mother. Now the company involved (it was an AT&T "go phone") certainly knew my mother's address from the contact information I filled in on her behalf. They even would have had an email address except my mother doesn't have an email account. But they literally made it impossible to change the name on the account.
And this is where the death of white pages ties in. It is no longer important to have a phone book to look numbers up in. In fact, it is of decreasing importance to be able to look a person's number up online. So apparently cell phone companies have decided as a matter of policy to not publish name and address information for cell phones. And the world is increasingly going mobile. The number of people who only have a mobile is growing. Kids do it. But I know a number of budget challenged adults who have given up their land line to save money. They all feel that going "mobile only" is feasible but going "landline only" is not. My guess is that caller ID gets the name information from public directories (the online version of white pages). But more and more phone numbers are not listed in any public directories. So the percentage of the time that the "name" field in a caller ID entry has useful information is low and dropping and this makes caller ID less useful. The situation has gotten so bad that it is apparently cutting into the ability of the NSA to spy on us. A recent story (http://gizmodo.com/want-to-avoid-the-nsa-use-a-cell-phone-1518318611) reports that cell phones are giving the NSA fits.
My recent experience getting a prepaid phone for my mother allowed me to answer the burning question "are burner phones for real?" As anyone who has seen a cop show or a thriller recently knows, there is something called a "burner phone". It is a phone that can't be traced back to the user. And, since it is cheap and untraceable, it can be "burned" (thrown away) at any time. Lots of things that show up in entertainment pieces are fiction. It is way harder to crack encryption than the movies and TV lead you to believe. But it turns out that everything they say about burner phones is true. I bought my mother's phone at a drug store for cash. I put money into it using a credit card. So, with a little effort my mother's phone could be tracked back to me because I used my credit card. But I could have bought a prepaid card for cash and loaded money into the phone that way.
All the company wants is their money. If you buy the phone (for cash) and load money into the phone (say with a prepaid card bought with cash) then they get their money. So they don't care who you are or what you use the phone for. And that's a problem for the NSA. And its a problem for people like me who want to screen out nuisance calls using caller ID. The laws and regulations make all this legal. They could be changed. But the phone companies (and other businesses) are doing just fine with things as they are. So their lobbyists will make sure that the laws and regulations stay the way they are.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Ken Ham Creationism
On February 4, 2014 an uncommon thing happened. There was a debate between a creationist and an evolutionist. Any regular reader of this blog will know that I come down on the evolution side of the debate. But instead of trying to rehash the debate I want to spend some time on the version of creationism propounded by Mr. Ham. I know nothing about Mr. Ham's beliefs outside of what he had to say at this event so if he has contradicted himself in other forums I am not there to trip him up. I will, after I have laid out Mr. Ham's vision, make some observations. But these will not be from the Evolutionist perspective. Instead I want to give fellow Creationists some things to think about. But, wait for it, before I get to all that let me take a moment to make some remarks on the event.
The Event
The event took place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky. It was between Ken Ham representing the creationist perspective and Bill Nye representing the evolutionist perspective. The whole debate is available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI. The video runs about two hours and forty-five minutes. But this includes about 13 minutes of "countdown clock" on the front and about two minutes of filler on the back. So the actual event ran about two and a half hours. Each participant got a five minute opening statement and a short time later a thirty minute segment to make his argument at greater length. The rest of the event consisted of short (two minutes or less) back and forth segments in a number of formats.
There was no formal declaration of who won. Since both participants left some of the arguments of their opponents unchallenged technically it is possible to declare either the winner. The debate was moderated by Tom Foreman of CNN. Both debaters represented their respective sides well and comported themselves in a civil manner. So there was no shouting, interrupting, name calling, etc. They also each demonstrated a respect for the other person and their positions and beliefs. So who are they?
Ken Ham is the CEO of Answers in Genesis, which runs the identically named web site and the Creation Museum. Bill Nye is well known for his "Bill Nye the Science Guy" TV show and his many activities promoting science literacy.
Ken Ham Creationism
As I indicated above, rather than trying to pick apart Mr. Ham's position I am going to lay it out as clearly as I can. One thing I want to give Mr. Ham a lot of credit for is that he has a single reasonably well developed theory. One problem scientists have in dealing with creationists is that it is hard to pin them down as a group to just one version. I will go into this in more detail in the Analysis section. If you are looking for a Evolutionist perspective on Mr. Ham's thinking I suggest you listen to what Mr. Nye had to say in the debate and what he and others have had to say elsewhere.
I will try to stick as closely as I can to what Mr. Ham said or to slides he presented at the debate. I have not (with a single exception noted below) gone out looking for what Mr. Ham has had to say in other places or at other times. Besides quoting Mr. Ham or his slides I will try to provide a "time hack" to where they occur in the show. Frequently the time hack points to a few seconds before the quote or to where the slide is displayed. I am not that good at navigating my way around in the video so I am trying to look out for others who are similarly challenged.
An overview of Mr. Ham's argument can be found in a slide at 53:41. The history of the world can be broken into "The Seven C's of History". They are "Creation" (Genesis), "Corruption" (original sin), "Catastrophe" (Noah's flood), "Confusion" (the tower of Babel), "Christ" (his birth), "Cross" (his crucifixion), and "Consummation" (the second coming). He also pairs them up. Creation is paired with Consummation. Corruption is paired with Crucifixion. Catastrophe is paired with Christ. (Confusion remains unpaired.)
If this sounds straight out of the bible, that's because it is. At 43:15 he refers to "the creation model based on the bible". At 50:40 he says "At the Creation Museum we are only too willing to admit our beliefs based on the bible.". He makes the same point over and over. His starting point is the bible. He believes the bible to be the word of god and to be an unimpeachable source of truth when it comes to the historical record. At 36:10 he says "My starting point is that god is the ultimate authority" and that the bible is the word of god. (But see his position on what parts of the bible are literally true below).
At 51:25 he gives an extended description of his beliefs: "Let me further go on and define 'creation' as we use it. By 'creation' we mean here at Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, we mean the account based on the bible. Yes I take Genesis as the literal history as Jesus did. And here at the Creation Museum we walk people through that history. We walk them through creation, where god made Adam and Eve, land animal kind, sea creatures and so on, and then sin and death entered the world so there was no death before sin. That means how can you have billions of dead things before man sinned? And the catastrophe of Noah's flood. If there was a global flood you'd expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Had to say that because a lot of our supporters would want me to. And what do you find? Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Confusion, the tower of Babel. God gave different languages so you get different people groups. So this is the geological, astrological, anthropological, biological history as recorded in the bible. So this is concerning what happened in the past that explains the present. And then of course that god's son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ the god/man to die on the cross, be raised from the dead. And one day is going to be a new heaven and a new earth to come."
With a summary description of Mr. Ham's beliefs under out belts, let me get more specific. And to keep things understandable I am going to lay out a time line. And to keep things simple there is going to be some rounding. Mr. Ham believes that the earth was created in 4004 BC. That makes the earth a little over 6,000 years old. But we are going to stick with round numbers and call it 6,000 years. Further, Mr. Ham breaks this 6,000 years down into three 2,000 (again roughly) year periods. Period 1 runs from Genesis to Abraham. Period 2 runs from Abraham to Jesus, and period 3 runs from Jesus to the present.
Mr. Ham presents a handy "World History Timeline" diagram at 1:30:11. But it does not have a usable scale on it. At 1:30:00 he says "From Adam to Abraham you got 2,000 years. From Abraham to Christ - 2,000. From Christ to the present - 2,000 years". This presents a bit of a problem because the discussion of when things happened does not make reference to Abraham. Rather it makes reference to the Noah flood. When did this take place? The issue is not covered by Mr. Ham. Bill Nye says several times that from the flood to the present is 4,000 years. But that's Nye's characterization of Ham's position. The best I could do was to search the Answers in Genesis web site. At http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2012/03/09/feedback-timeline-for-the-flood I found a calculation. That calculation places the flood at 2,348 BC. This would put it 348 years before Abraham. I am going to call that close enough and stick with the 2,000 - 2,000 - 2,000 timeline to keep things simple. This puts everyone in sync with a common time line for a 6,000 year old earth. With that out of the way, let me get back to the time line.
days 1-6 - God does his "let there be light" thing. At 28:50 Mr. Ham says "God created the world in six twenty-four hour days, just as recorded in Genesis". He also says at 1:30:00 "Adam was made on day six." At the end of this we have the world (heaven and earth, plants and animals, Adam and Eve) all created. Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and there is no death because original sin has not yet happened. (See the "millions of years" discussion below for more on this subject.)
A short time later - All the "Garden of Eden" activity happens. The original sin has been committed so that death enters the world.
2,000 BC (roughly - see above) - The Noah flood happens. Millions of animals are wiped out thus populating the earth with lots of fossils of dead things. Some "kinds" (see the "kinds" discussion below to understand why the word is quoted) are wiped out, presumably including dinosaur species.
1 AD (or maybe 1 BC, I'm not sure exactly how this works ) - Jesus Christ is born.
32 AD - Jesus Christ dies on the cross.
2,000 AD (roughly) the present.
later - the second coming
So that, in summary is his timeline.
Discussion
Here I am going to go into some issues. I am going to start with issues Mr. Ham spent some time going into.
Kinds
This is an effort to address the "but there are millions of species - they wouldn't all fit on the ark" argument. Mr. Ham's response is that there is something called a "kind". It is a kind of super-species with respect to the scientific understanding of "species". He says at 36:40 "I would say that the 'kind' in Genesis I is really more at the 'family' [a scientific term having a specific meaning] level of classification. For instance, there is one dog 'kind'. There is one cat 'kind'. Even though you have different genera [again a scientific term with a specific meaning], different species [again a scientific term . . .]. That would mean by the way you don't need anywhere near the number of animals on the ark as people think. You don't need all the species of dogs, just two, not all the species of cats, just two." At 43:00 he says "you don't see one 'kind' changing to another".
This gets him out of trouble in a couple of different ways. First, it helps with the "how do you fit everyone on the ark" problem. After some more discussion he says at 1:41:35 "In fact . . . probably less than actually a thousand 'kind's were on Noah's ark".
Second, it gets him somewhat our of trouble with the "millions of species" problem. He allows changes within kinds. You can make lots of different dogs as long as you stay within the dog kind. Or specifically finches, and more specifically Darwin's finches. Ham agrees that Darwin found several different types of finches in the Galapagos Islands. But that's ok because they are all the same "kind" and differentiation within a "kind" is ok. At 38:40 he says "Actually, when it comes to finches, we actually would agree as creationists that different finch species came from a common ancestor."
At 40:07 he shows a divergence diagram that is similar in structure (on purpose) to standard scientific divergence diagrams. These are also often referred to as "tree diagrams". At the bottom you have a single line representing perhaps a single species. It splits as it moves up the diagram as other species (or whatever) come into existence. In some cases a line ends. This is where a species (or whatever) dies off. Ham's diagrams are two trees stacked on top of each other. The idea is that we have the usual splitting. Then Noah's flood happens killing lots of things off. Then a few branches representing animals saved by the ark continue on upward. There is more splitting and some additional die off as we reach the present at the top of the diagram. He even has one diagram at 40:36 where a kind of dinosaur is shown completely dying off.
The only hard and fast rule for all this is no breach of "kind" boundaries. Or, as Mr. Ham puts it at 40:30 "dogs will always be dogs, finches will always be finches". At 43:35 he says "Now we don't deny the change. You see that. You see different species of finches. You see different species of dogs."
millions of years
As I have indicated, Mr. Ham believes that the world is 6,000 (in round numbers) years old. But according to Mr. Ham others, and in particular other Christians, believe that the earth is at least "millions and millions" of years old. Mr. Ham devotes a significant period of time to this at 1:32:40. "Yah there are a lot of Christians out there that believe in millions and millions of years. But I'd say they have a problem. I'm not saying they're not Christian but, because salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ not the age of the earth, but there's an inconsistency. What the bible teaches, if you believe in millions and millions of years you've got death and bloodshed, suffering, disease, over millions of years leading to man 'cause that's what you see in the fossil record. The bible makes it very clear death is the result of man's sin. In fact the first death was in the garden when god killed an animal, clothed Adam and Eve, first blood sacrifice pointing toward what would happen with Jesus Christ. He would be the one who would die once and for all. Now, if you believe in millions of years as a Christian, in the fossil record there's evidence of animals eating each other . . . . We weren't told we could eat meat until after the flood."
This is a big deal argument. And I am skipping over what a scientist would make of it so I can focus on what a fellow religionist would think. Ham makes two very strong claims: (1) There was no death until after original sin, which happened in the Garden of Eden after the "six days" part of creation. (2) All men (and women) were vegetarians until after Noah's flood. This second item. Maybe he had a slip of the tongue. All I can say is that's what he said. Ham and Nye get into a discussion of whether Lions were vegetarians for a while before they were allowed to be carnivores. Remember, you can't have meat in your diet without requiring the death of animals. I didn't make a note of where this "Lion" argument is. If you care, you'll just have to find it yourself.
Bible Literalism
Mr. Ham was asked how literally he takes his biblical literalism. At 2:24:45 he starts taking about the word "naturally". Then he says "Yes I take the bible naturally. What do I mean by that? Well, if its history, as Genesis is, it's written in this typical historical narrative, you can take it as history. If its a poetry, as we find in the psalms, then you take it as poetry. It doesn't mean it doesn't teach truth. But its not a cosmological account in the sense that Genesis is. There's prophesy in the bible and there's literature in the bible, you know, concerning future events and so on. So, if you take it as written naturally according to the type of literature and you let it speak to you in that way, that's how I take the bible. It's god's revelation to man."
Mr. Ham goes into a little more detail beyond the quotation I have provided above but not much. It is not clear how large sections of the bible should be treated. Should they be taken literally? Apparently from remarks I have not quoted there is a lot of parts of the bible related to laws of the time that we are safe in ignoring now. And apparently we can just let the "poetry" parts of the bible "speak to us" and leave it at that. But I have no idea how Mr. Ham thinks many other parts of the bible should be treated. Apparently you apply the "naturally" rule. This segments out parts of the bible into "literal history - believe it", "laws - perhaps appropriate to the time (or later found to be wrong - see later parts of the bible) but safely ignored in the present", "literature - let it speak to you", "prophesy - I am unable to figure out how this is supposed to be handled", and maybe some other categories.
A Ham's eye view of Science
Mr. Ham is most definitely NOT a Science denier. In fact, he sees himself as a scientist. I don't have any "on point" quotes but over and over Mr. Ham characterizes himself as a proponent of science. He has no problem with cell phones, GPS, and many other modern wonders of the world. But he breaks science into two broad categories: "observational" science, and "historical" science. He puts modern technology into the "observational" category and unambiguously embraces it. It is "historical" science he has a problem with. And here his argument is interesting. He thinks scientists get this part of science wrong. In effect, the conflict between creationism and evolution is a result of scientists doing sloppy work. If they did the work correctly they would get the same results he does and the conflict would disappear.
The only example I can point directly to is a surprising one. At 2:12;50 he says (speaking about continental drift) "On the basis of the bible of course we believe there's one continent to start with". But see also the "kind" discussion above where he adopts the "scientific" evolutionary tree and accepts that there are now many species. He just argues that the "scientific" evolutionary trees are bad science whereas his evolutionary trees are science done correctly. It's not obvious from the quote itself but he was making the same point when at 43:15 he said (and also showing a slide with the same words on it) 'public school textbooks present the evolutionary "tree" as "science" but reject the creation "orchard" as religion.' His "orchard" is simply the better science version of the scientific "tree". It's not that there is no "tree" or "orchard". It's that his version is more correct than the evolutionary version.
He gets at the same point when he says at 50:40 "At the Creation Museum we are only too willing to admit our beliefs based upon the bible. But we also teach people the difference between beliefs and what one can actually observe and experiment with in the present." This sentiment is one that scientists would whole heartedly endorse. The disagreement is not as to what the proper method is. Ham and scientists agree that "actually observe and experiment" is the way to go. Scientists part ways with Mr. Ham because they believe he does not practice what he preaches in this quotation. They think he substitutes beliefs for observations and experiments.
Conclusion
I think other creationists and other co-religionists will be troubled by some or all of Mr. Ham's version of creationism. Do you agree with Mr. Ham's timeline? In other words, do you believe in six twenty-four hour days? Are you in the 6,000 years camp? How about the 10,000 years camp? Or the "millions of years" camp? Are you on board with his "kinds" analysis? If so, how about the limited speciation he allows? Are you a believer in his "naturally" approach to how much of the bible we should believe is literally true? Do you accept the approach but use a different method for categorizing the various parts of the bible? How about his view of how science should be treated? Do you accept that there is "observational" science that can be trusted? Or do you reject the entire enterprise of science. If you trust parts of science and distrust other parts, how do you draw the line? Do you agree with Mr. Ham's thesis that the problem with the parts of science that you disagree with are that the scientists doing the work just did it badly and everything would be fine if they just fixed the stuff they got wrong? Finally. Mr. Ham believes that the historical parts of the bible are truth and that there is no possibility of them being wrong? From this it follows that anything, a scientific result, for instance, that is in contradiction with this biblical truth must be wrong. That seems to be a principal that guides Mr. Ham. Does it guide you?
The Event
The event took place at the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky. It was between Ken Ham representing the creationist perspective and Bill Nye representing the evolutionist perspective. The whole debate is available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI. The video runs about two hours and forty-five minutes. But this includes about 13 minutes of "countdown clock" on the front and about two minutes of filler on the back. So the actual event ran about two and a half hours. Each participant got a five minute opening statement and a short time later a thirty minute segment to make his argument at greater length. The rest of the event consisted of short (two minutes or less) back and forth segments in a number of formats.
There was no formal declaration of who won. Since both participants left some of the arguments of their opponents unchallenged technically it is possible to declare either the winner. The debate was moderated by Tom Foreman of CNN. Both debaters represented their respective sides well and comported themselves in a civil manner. So there was no shouting, interrupting, name calling, etc. They also each demonstrated a respect for the other person and their positions and beliefs. So who are they?
Ken Ham is the CEO of Answers in Genesis, which runs the identically named web site and the Creation Museum. Bill Nye is well known for his "Bill Nye the Science Guy" TV show and his many activities promoting science literacy.
Ken Ham Creationism
As I indicated above, rather than trying to pick apart Mr. Ham's position I am going to lay it out as clearly as I can. One thing I want to give Mr. Ham a lot of credit for is that he has a single reasonably well developed theory. One problem scientists have in dealing with creationists is that it is hard to pin them down as a group to just one version. I will go into this in more detail in the Analysis section. If you are looking for a Evolutionist perspective on Mr. Ham's thinking I suggest you listen to what Mr. Nye had to say in the debate and what he and others have had to say elsewhere.
I will try to stick as closely as I can to what Mr. Ham said or to slides he presented at the debate. I have not (with a single exception noted below) gone out looking for what Mr. Ham has had to say in other places or at other times. Besides quoting Mr. Ham or his slides I will try to provide a "time hack" to where they occur in the show. Frequently the time hack points to a few seconds before the quote or to where the slide is displayed. I am not that good at navigating my way around in the video so I am trying to look out for others who are similarly challenged.
An overview of Mr. Ham's argument can be found in a slide at 53:41. The history of the world can be broken into "The Seven C's of History". They are "Creation" (Genesis), "Corruption" (original sin), "Catastrophe" (Noah's flood), "Confusion" (the tower of Babel), "Christ" (his birth), "Cross" (his crucifixion), and "Consummation" (the second coming). He also pairs them up. Creation is paired with Consummation. Corruption is paired with Crucifixion. Catastrophe is paired with Christ. (Confusion remains unpaired.)
If this sounds straight out of the bible, that's because it is. At 43:15 he refers to "the creation model based on the bible". At 50:40 he says "At the Creation Museum we are only too willing to admit our beliefs based on the bible.". He makes the same point over and over. His starting point is the bible. He believes the bible to be the word of god and to be an unimpeachable source of truth when it comes to the historical record. At 36:10 he says "My starting point is that god is the ultimate authority" and that the bible is the word of god. (But see his position on what parts of the bible are literally true below).
At 51:25 he gives an extended description of his beliefs: "Let me further go on and define 'creation' as we use it. By 'creation' we mean here at Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, we mean the account based on the bible. Yes I take Genesis as the literal history as Jesus did. And here at the Creation Museum we walk people through that history. We walk them through creation, where god made Adam and Eve, land animal kind, sea creatures and so on, and then sin and death entered the world so there was no death before sin. That means how can you have billions of dead things before man sinned? And the catastrophe of Noah's flood. If there was a global flood you'd expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Had to say that because a lot of our supporters would want me to. And what do you find? Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Confusion, the tower of Babel. God gave different languages so you get different people groups. So this is the geological, astrological, anthropological, biological history as recorded in the bible. So this is concerning what happened in the past that explains the present. And then of course that god's son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ the god/man to die on the cross, be raised from the dead. And one day is going to be a new heaven and a new earth to come."
With a summary description of Mr. Ham's beliefs under out belts, let me get more specific. And to keep things understandable I am going to lay out a time line. And to keep things simple there is going to be some rounding. Mr. Ham believes that the earth was created in 4004 BC. That makes the earth a little over 6,000 years old. But we are going to stick with round numbers and call it 6,000 years. Further, Mr. Ham breaks this 6,000 years down into three 2,000 (again roughly) year periods. Period 1 runs from Genesis to Abraham. Period 2 runs from Abraham to Jesus, and period 3 runs from Jesus to the present.
Mr. Ham presents a handy "World History Timeline" diagram at 1:30:11. But it does not have a usable scale on it. At 1:30:00 he says "From Adam to Abraham you got 2,000 years. From Abraham to Christ - 2,000. From Christ to the present - 2,000 years". This presents a bit of a problem because the discussion of when things happened does not make reference to Abraham. Rather it makes reference to the Noah flood. When did this take place? The issue is not covered by Mr. Ham. Bill Nye says several times that from the flood to the present is 4,000 years. But that's Nye's characterization of Ham's position. The best I could do was to search the Answers in Genesis web site. At http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2012/03/09/feedback-timeline-for-the-flood I found a calculation. That calculation places the flood at 2,348 BC. This would put it 348 years before Abraham. I am going to call that close enough and stick with the 2,000 - 2,000 - 2,000 timeline to keep things simple. This puts everyone in sync with a common time line for a 6,000 year old earth. With that out of the way, let me get back to the time line.
days 1-6 - God does his "let there be light" thing. At 28:50 Mr. Ham says "God created the world in six twenty-four hour days, just as recorded in Genesis". He also says at 1:30:00 "Adam was made on day six." At the end of this we have the world (heaven and earth, plants and animals, Adam and Eve) all created. Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and there is no death because original sin has not yet happened. (See the "millions of years" discussion below for more on this subject.)
A short time later - All the "Garden of Eden" activity happens. The original sin has been committed so that death enters the world.
2,000 BC (roughly - see above) - The Noah flood happens. Millions of animals are wiped out thus populating the earth with lots of fossils of dead things. Some "kinds" (see the "kinds" discussion below to understand why the word is quoted) are wiped out, presumably including dinosaur species.
1 AD (or maybe 1 BC, I'm not sure exactly how this works ) - Jesus Christ is born.
32 AD - Jesus Christ dies on the cross.
2,000 AD (roughly) the present.
later - the second coming
So that, in summary is his timeline.
Discussion
Here I am going to go into some issues. I am going to start with issues Mr. Ham spent some time going into.
Kinds
This is an effort to address the "but there are millions of species - they wouldn't all fit on the ark" argument. Mr. Ham's response is that there is something called a "kind". It is a kind of super-species with respect to the scientific understanding of "species". He says at 36:40 "I would say that the 'kind' in Genesis I is really more at the 'family' [a scientific term having a specific meaning] level of classification. For instance, there is one dog 'kind'. There is one cat 'kind'. Even though you have different genera [again a scientific term with a specific meaning], different species [again a scientific term . . .]. That would mean by the way you don't need anywhere near the number of animals on the ark as people think. You don't need all the species of dogs, just two, not all the species of cats, just two." At 43:00 he says "you don't see one 'kind' changing to another".
This gets him out of trouble in a couple of different ways. First, it helps with the "how do you fit everyone on the ark" problem. After some more discussion he says at 1:41:35 "In fact . . . probably less than actually a thousand 'kind's were on Noah's ark".
Second, it gets him somewhat our of trouble with the "millions of species" problem. He allows changes within kinds. You can make lots of different dogs as long as you stay within the dog kind. Or specifically finches, and more specifically Darwin's finches. Ham agrees that Darwin found several different types of finches in the Galapagos Islands. But that's ok because they are all the same "kind" and differentiation within a "kind" is ok. At 38:40 he says "Actually, when it comes to finches, we actually would agree as creationists that different finch species came from a common ancestor."
At 40:07 he shows a divergence diagram that is similar in structure (on purpose) to standard scientific divergence diagrams. These are also often referred to as "tree diagrams". At the bottom you have a single line representing perhaps a single species. It splits as it moves up the diagram as other species (or whatever) come into existence. In some cases a line ends. This is where a species (or whatever) dies off. Ham's diagrams are two trees stacked on top of each other. The idea is that we have the usual splitting. Then Noah's flood happens killing lots of things off. Then a few branches representing animals saved by the ark continue on upward. There is more splitting and some additional die off as we reach the present at the top of the diagram. He even has one diagram at 40:36 where a kind of dinosaur is shown completely dying off.
The only hard and fast rule for all this is no breach of "kind" boundaries. Or, as Mr. Ham puts it at 40:30 "dogs will always be dogs, finches will always be finches". At 43:35 he says "Now we don't deny the change. You see that. You see different species of finches. You see different species of dogs."
millions of years
As I have indicated, Mr. Ham believes that the world is 6,000 (in round numbers) years old. But according to Mr. Ham others, and in particular other Christians, believe that the earth is at least "millions and millions" of years old. Mr. Ham devotes a significant period of time to this at 1:32:40. "Yah there are a lot of Christians out there that believe in millions and millions of years. But I'd say they have a problem. I'm not saying they're not Christian but, because salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ not the age of the earth, but there's an inconsistency. What the bible teaches, if you believe in millions and millions of years you've got death and bloodshed, suffering, disease, over millions of years leading to man 'cause that's what you see in the fossil record. The bible makes it very clear death is the result of man's sin. In fact the first death was in the garden when god killed an animal, clothed Adam and Eve, first blood sacrifice pointing toward what would happen with Jesus Christ. He would be the one who would die once and for all. Now, if you believe in millions of years as a Christian, in the fossil record there's evidence of animals eating each other . . . . We weren't told we could eat meat until after the flood."
This is a big deal argument. And I am skipping over what a scientist would make of it so I can focus on what a fellow religionist would think. Ham makes two very strong claims: (1) There was no death until after original sin, which happened in the Garden of Eden after the "six days" part of creation. (2) All men (and women) were vegetarians until after Noah's flood. This second item. Maybe he had a slip of the tongue. All I can say is that's what he said. Ham and Nye get into a discussion of whether Lions were vegetarians for a while before they were allowed to be carnivores. Remember, you can't have meat in your diet without requiring the death of animals. I didn't make a note of where this "Lion" argument is. If you care, you'll just have to find it yourself.
Bible Literalism
Mr. Ham was asked how literally he takes his biblical literalism. At 2:24:45 he starts taking about the word "naturally". Then he says "Yes I take the bible naturally. What do I mean by that? Well, if its history, as Genesis is, it's written in this typical historical narrative, you can take it as history. If its a poetry, as we find in the psalms, then you take it as poetry. It doesn't mean it doesn't teach truth. But its not a cosmological account in the sense that Genesis is. There's prophesy in the bible and there's literature in the bible, you know, concerning future events and so on. So, if you take it as written naturally according to the type of literature and you let it speak to you in that way, that's how I take the bible. It's god's revelation to man."
Mr. Ham goes into a little more detail beyond the quotation I have provided above but not much. It is not clear how large sections of the bible should be treated. Should they be taken literally? Apparently from remarks I have not quoted there is a lot of parts of the bible related to laws of the time that we are safe in ignoring now. And apparently we can just let the "poetry" parts of the bible "speak to us" and leave it at that. But I have no idea how Mr. Ham thinks many other parts of the bible should be treated. Apparently you apply the "naturally" rule. This segments out parts of the bible into "literal history - believe it", "laws - perhaps appropriate to the time (or later found to be wrong - see later parts of the bible) but safely ignored in the present", "literature - let it speak to you", "prophesy - I am unable to figure out how this is supposed to be handled", and maybe some other categories.
A Ham's eye view of Science
Mr. Ham is most definitely NOT a Science denier. In fact, he sees himself as a scientist. I don't have any "on point" quotes but over and over Mr. Ham characterizes himself as a proponent of science. He has no problem with cell phones, GPS, and many other modern wonders of the world. But he breaks science into two broad categories: "observational" science, and "historical" science. He puts modern technology into the "observational" category and unambiguously embraces it. It is "historical" science he has a problem with. And here his argument is interesting. He thinks scientists get this part of science wrong. In effect, the conflict between creationism and evolution is a result of scientists doing sloppy work. If they did the work correctly they would get the same results he does and the conflict would disappear.
The only example I can point directly to is a surprising one. At 2:12;50 he says (speaking about continental drift) "On the basis of the bible of course we believe there's one continent to start with". But see also the "kind" discussion above where he adopts the "scientific" evolutionary tree and accepts that there are now many species. He just argues that the "scientific" evolutionary trees are bad science whereas his evolutionary trees are science done correctly. It's not obvious from the quote itself but he was making the same point when at 43:15 he said (and also showing a slide with the same words on it) 'public school textbooks present the evolutionary "tree" as "science" but reject the creation "orchard" as religion.' His "orchard" is simply the better science version of the scientific "tree". It's not that there is no "tree" or "orchard". It's that his version is more correct than the evolutionary version.
He gets at the same point when he says at 50:40 "At the Creation Museum we are only too willing to admit our beliefs based upon the bible. But we also teach people the difference between beliefs and what one can actually observe and experiment with in the present." This sentiment is one that scientists would whole heartedly endorse. The disagreement is not as to what the proper method is. Ham and scientists agree that "actually observe and experiment" is the way to go. Scientists part ways with Mr. Ham because they believe he does not practice what he preaches in this quotation. They think he substitutes beliefs for observations and experiments.
Conclusion
I think other creationists and other co-religionists will be troubled by some or all of Mr. Ham's version of creationism. Do you agree with Mr. Ham's timeline? In other words, do you believe in six twenty-four hour days? Are you in the 6,000 years camp? How about the 10,000 years camp? Or the "millions of years" camp? Are you on board with his "kinds" analysis? If so, how about the limited speciation he allows? Are you a believer in his "naturally" approach to how much of the bible we should believe is literally true? Do you accept the approach but use a different method for categorizing the various parts of the bible? How about his view of how science should be treated? Do you accept that there is "observational" science that can be trusted? Or do you reject the entire enterprise of science. If you trust parts of science and distrust other parts, how do you draw the line? Do you agree with Mr. Ham's thesis that the problem with the parts of science that you disagree with are that the scientists doing the work just did it badly and everything would be fine if they just fixed the stuff they got wrong? Finally. Mr. Ham believes that the historical parts of the bible are truth and that there is no possibility of them being wrong? From this it follows that anything, a scientific result, for instance, that is in contradiction with this biblical truth must be wrong. That seems to be a principal that guides Mr. Ham. Does it guide you?
Friday, January 24, 2014
Windows 8.1 - try 1
A few days ago I took my first stab at Windows 8.1. I have a lot of experience doing installs and upgrades. In particular, I have done a lot of installs and upgrades of various Microsoft products. My Microsoft OS experience goes way back to the DOS era that preceded Windows. So I should know what I am doing. But it certainly didn't show.
I know better. When you are doing an install or upgrade, particularly for the first time, you should be organized and be careful. I was neither. Fortunately, I got out with my skin intact. But it was a close run thing. Windows 8.x has been quite controversial so I have no excuse. I should have known better. I will certainly behave differently next time. And there will be a next time. So what was I trying to do?
I was trying to upgrade my home PC. I am currently running Windows 7 "Pro". That's the version that is designed for work use. The big difference between this version and the "home" version is that it supports Microsoft "NT" networking. Most home users have a very loose network. They don't share files and other resources between the various computers they have around the house. They share networking infrastructure at the wiring (or Wi-Fi) level. But this is primarily used so that all computers can access the internet. In a work environment there are servers that house corporate hardware, data, and (sometimes) software. Home users generally keep it simple. But as a former system administrator I know how to set up and maintain an "NT" domain. I have a box running Windows Server and I do the same kind of sharing in a small way that companies do in a large way. Is there any good reason for me to do this? No! I do it because I can and because I want to.
So I was trying to upgrade my Windows 7 "Pro" desktop to Windows 8.1. I made sure I got the "Pro" version of Windows 8.1 so that all my "NT Domain" stuff would continue to work. And that part of the upgrade worked fine. All the "NT Domain" stuff was working just fine after the upgrade. And, as far as I know, this "Pro" and "NT Domain" stuff made absolutely no difference to the upgrade process.
I will outline how I should have proceeded below. But let me start with how I actually proceeded. Fortunately, I run the Microsoft provided "Backup" process daily and automatically. That's what bailed me out. I was able to "full restore" my computer back to its old Windows 7 self after I had given up on Windows 8.1. That's one of the few things I got right. So first step: Full Backup. And make sure you create a "Recovery disk". This is a CD you can boot from that lets you run the restore software and access your backup files. Remember you are restoring what amounts to a completely broken system so you need something that boots and runs independently of any software on your hard drive. If you are not familiar with burning CDs and booting from them practice and test. You don't have to actually run the restore. But make sure you can get everything to work up to the stage where the restore wants to start running. (If you don't think you can pull this off then you want to either hire the upgrade done or get a new computer and do a "computer to computer" transfer -- see below.)
My second step was to run the Microsoft "Upgrade Assistant". This is available at //windows.com/upgrade. This page has a lot of general requirements for upgrading and lots of links. The page has two main sections: Windows 8.1 and Windows 8. At the bottom of the Windows 8.1 section is a link marked "Upgrade Assistant". Click on that to run the assistant. It will check your computer and issue a report. This was my first disappointment. It will tell you if any of your hardware is problematic. That's good. The closest to a problem I got was that my hardware did not support a new feature called "Secure Boot". This just meant that this new feature would not be available to me. This information is not exactly a show stopper. So the report in summary said there were no show stopper issues. If you run the report and show stopper issues show up STOP. You must get these issues fixed before trying to go to 8.1.
So what was the disappointment? Well the assistant gave me a list of software but the list was not complete. I can't make hide nor hair out of what is in the list versus what is not listed. Microsoft Silverlight was listed (along with a lot of other Microsoft software and plenty of non-Microsoft software like my Adobe Reader) but my Office 365 was not listed. So the first lesson learned is: You need to make a complete inventory of all the software on your PC. Then divide it into software you care about (i.e. needs to work when you are done) and software you don't care about. If the software is not a Windows component it will have to be reinstalled later.
There should have been a bunch of additional steps (see below) but I just went from here to doing the install. You need to decide whether you want to do a "clean" install or an "upgrade" install. With a clean install you end up with a bare bones windows installation with none of your files and applications. From there you go on to install whatever applications you want and load whatever files you want. This gives you a "clean vanilla" box. This will fix many problems where things have gotten messed up on your old box. But you lose whatever you have of value from the old box. Most people want to do an upgrade. In this case all your files are carried over and eventually all (or at least the ones you care about) of your applications are carried over. It turns out that the 8.1 upgrade process gives you a third, middle option. You can have the upgrade carry over your personal files. Microsoft calls this a "data only" upgrade. My plan was to do an upgrade that would preserve both data and application settings but it didn't work out that way.
To do the upgrade I just inserted the proper CD. Microsoft provides "32 bit" and "64 bit" CDs. If your PC has more than 4 GB of RAM you will be forced to the 64 bit version. Older versions provided more backward compatibility in the 32 bit version but the days of the 32 bit version are definitely numbered. My PC has 8 GB of RAM so I was already running the 64 bit version of Windows 7 so I loaded the 64 bit 8.1 CD and let it "autorun". The upgrade process itself takes roughly an hour (at least on my PC) and ran without problem (except see below) the first time. It asks you some questions and then grinds away. Your PC will be rebooted several times (in my case 3 times). Another small annoyance was there was never a "you're done" screen. I just noticed that I had a screen that looked like it might be the Windows 8.1 screen and nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually I poked around and got a "Login" screen. (Many home users set their PCs up so that the login screen gets bypassed. This is bad security. But, in this case, it might have been more obvious that the process was complete.)
Before going on let me point out the major problem I had that I didn't even know I had until later. One of the install screens should have asked me to select one of three options: (1) "Keep Windows Settings, Personal Files, And Apps"; (2) "Keep Personal Files Only"; and (3) "Nothing". These options represent "upgrade", "keep your personal files" and "clean install". The option I wanted was the first one. But the screen only showed options 2 and 3. I selected option 2 and it worked just fine as far as it went. But it caused my Outlook Address book, for instance, to be lost. Since I had never worked with 8.1 and had certainly not tried an upgrade to 8.1 before I did not know that option 1 should have been listed. I just chugged along after selecting option 2 as the option closest to what I wanted. I plan to stop at this screen and ask Microsoft what's going if I hit this screen and option 1 is not shown. I did ask Microsoft about this after the fact but they were not helpful. I also have thought of a work around (see below) if I do not get a satisfactory answer.
Once I logged in I was totally confused. I was able to flounder around to some extent. For instance, I was able to establish that all the "NT Domain" stuff had connected up ok. I was also able to confirm that my personal files had been carried over successfully. (Note: Being an old timer I put my personal files in new separate directories. I do NOT put them in "My Files" or "My Pictures" or any of the other "My whatever" locations Microsoft recommends you use. I don't know if things would have carried over if I had used the "My whatever" location. I am pretty confident they would but can not speak from personal knowledge on this issue.) I was able to flounder about and find some things. I was able to get my printer installed, for instance. But I was not able to figure out how to print a web page. And there were lots of other things I was not able to figure out. When people say that Windows 8.x is a complete redesign, believe them.
After a certain amount of flailing around I gave up. I used the "Repair disk" CD I had built earlier to boot into software that enabled me to do a full restore. Since I have a backup scheduled to run daily the backup was very current. After the restore was complete I was able to boot in the normal way back to my Windows 7 configuration, which had all my stuff and worked perfectly. Based on my experience I strongly make the following recommendation:
I have learned through a long and varied and successful carrier as a computer techie that there is a secret to success. Software systems have a "mind set". There is a way of thinking behind their design and the way the designers intend them to be used. If you can figure out the "mind set" then you will be much better off. It will make it much easier for you to "intuit" how to do things and where to find things. This allows you to bootstrap some basic knowledge about how to do some things into a more complete ability to drive the product. It doesn't matter if a product can do something it you can't figure out how to make the product do it.
I have only sampled my "8.1" book. But even this quick look has given my a lot of insight into the mind set of 8.x. Windows 8.1 has a drastically different mind set in comparison to older versions of Windows. However much you have absorbed of this older mind set will actually make it harder for you to figure out Windows 8.x. The next time I dive into that particular deep end I expect to be able to swim much more effectively than I could the last time. This is because I have been given a look at the 8.x mind set as a result of reading this book. Before moving on let me give you a quick look at the new mind set.
I have been in this business for a long time. In the old days most systems had a "Command Line Interface" (CLI). You typed in obscure commands at the prompt. I am still most comfortable in this old CLI world. But the world has moved on. Windows up through Windows 7 is designed to use a "Graphical User Interface" (GUI). More specifically, it is designed for use with a keyboard and a mouse. And as time has gone by this has meant more mouse, less keyboard. We are now given "radio buttons" (little circles - click on one and it goes out on the other ones) or "check boxes" (click on the box to check or uncheck a particular option). These are both easily done with a mouse. Then there is the "drop down list". You click and you are shown a list. You can click on any line in the list to select a particular item. A drop down list is a substitute for typing. You select the item from the list instead of typing its name in. The more frequent use of drop down lists over time is an example of an effort to make it easier to drive the system using just the mouse. The need for keyboard entry is minimized. I have adapted to the replacement of the CLI with the GUI over time. 8.x is the next generation in this CLI to GUI evolution.
8.x is designed to work without there being any keyboard or mouse. Instead you have a "touch screen" that you can tap or touch. This is a kind of substitute for the mouse. But a mouse is more precise than your finger and it has buttons and a scroll wheel on it. 8.x is designed to be driven literally by hand (i.e. using the touch screen). You can tap or swipe or use two finger moves like opening or closing your fingers. That's the natural way 8.x is designed to be operated. So Microsoft has completely redesigned Windows to work well with this "by hand" way of operation. They do provide "backward compatible" ways of doing keyboard or mouse things instead of "by hand" things but these are substitutes for the real thing. To be comfortable with 8.x you need to think of "by hand" operations instead of keyboard or mouse things. If, as is the case with me, you are doing the mouse/keyboard thing you need to think in terms of the mouse/keyboard substitute for the "by hand" operation. I now understand that so I expect to be far less frustrated next time around. I also intend to read much more of the book so I will know (or know where to find in the book) how to do various things.
A final note before I go into summarization mode. Windows 8.x is not a good fit for a work environment. There are multiple reasons for this. Let me highlight a couple. (1) Work environments are much more likely to be "heads down - data entry" environments. 8.x is poorly designed for this. Remember that a keyboard is no longer a natural input device. (2) In 8.x you are supposed to get your software from the Microsoft App store. This is good in the sense that Microsoft will test Apps before putting them into the store. This means they are much more likely to play nice. But companies run lots of applications that are unlikely to be found in the MS App store. Microsoft was provide a work around. If you get the "Pro" (i.e. "for work") version, you can install the Apps in the traditional manner. But still this is NOT the way you are supposed to do business. (3) It turns out that companies use a lot of old, in some cases very old, applications.
At my last job we bought a piece of lab equipment in about 2010. The lab equipment company provided a PC to drive the equipment. We were explicitly told "don't hook the PC up to the network". Why? (Start "tech talk" section - skip it if you don't care and you trust me) The software that connected to the PC to the lab equipment was so old it did not use a buffered serial interface. The "freeze out" time required by network cards caused the serial interface to miss some data bytes. This made the instrument effectively unusable. No network meant that the network card was not used so nothing interfered with collecting the data from the instrument and everything worked like it was supposed to. Of course, we had to come up with a method to get the data from the PC to our other systems, which we did. (End "tech talk" section) Now at this time buffered serial interfaces were at least ten years old and software to use them was available for free on the internet. But the company had been too cheap to upgrade their software to use buffering.
I do regular business in my personal life with at least two different companies that to this day use old "3270 emulation" software. (It has a distinctive look that is easily recognizable once you've had it pointed out to you.) "3270 emulation" software emulates a device called an IBM 3270 terminal that was popular in the '70s. The company I worked for (not exactly on the cutting edge in many ways) retired the last system that needed 3270 emulation at the end of 1999 (remember Y2K - if you don't, that's ok, just focus on the "1999" part). Depending on software that goes back to the '90s, or even earlier, or has other weird characteristics is all too common in corporate environments. I'm sure that a lot of this can be overcome. But it will take a lot of work and that sounds like a lot of money to corporate bean counters. So I expect 8.x to have a tiny rate of penetration in the corporate world for at least the next several years.
So let me summarize my lessons learned so far:
So, if you are still with me, here's my revised upgrade plan:
I promise an update when I try this again.
I know better. When you are doing an install or upgrade, particularly for the first time, you should be organized and be careful. I was neither. Fortunately, I got out with my skin intact. But it was a close run thing. Windows 8.x has been quite controversial so I have no excuse. I should have known better. I will certainly behave differently next time. And there will be a next time. So what was I trying to do?
I was trying to upgrade my home PC. I am currently running Windows 7 "Pro". That's the version that is designed for work use. The big difference between this version and the "home" version is that it supports Microsoft "NT" networking. Most home users have a very loose network. They don't share files and other resources between the various computers they have around the house. They share networking infrastructure at the wiring (or Wi-Fi) level. But this is primarily used so that all computers can access the internet. In a work environment there are servers that house corporate hardware, data, and (sometimes) software. Home users generally keep it simple. But as a former system administrator I know how to set up and maintain an "NT" domain. I have a box running Windows Server and I do the same kind of sharing in a small way that companies do in a large way. Is there any good reason for me to do this? No! I do it because I can and because I want to.
So I was trying to upgrade my Windows 7 "Pro" desktop to Windows 8.1. I made sure I got the "Pro" version of Windows 8.1 so that all my "NT Domain" stuff would continue to work. And that part of the upgrade worked fine. All the "NT Domain" stuff was working just fine after the upgrade. And, as far as I know, this "Pro" and "NT Domain" stuff made absolutely no difference to the upgrade process.
I will outline how I should have proceeded below. But let me start with how I actually proceeded. Fortunately, I run the Microsoft provided "Backup" process daily and automatically. That's what bailed me out. I was able to "full restore" my computer back to its old Windows 7 self after I had given up on Windows 8.1. That's one of the few things I got right. So first step: Full Backup. And make sure you create a "Recovery disk". This is a CD you can boot from that lets you run the restore software and access your backup files. Remember you are restoring what amounts to a completely broken system so you need something that boots and runs independently of any software on your hard drive. If you are not familiar with burning CDs and booting from them practice and test. You don't have to actually run the restore. But make sure you can get everything to work up to the stage where the restore wants to start running. (If you don't think you can pull this off then you want to either hire the upgrade done or get a new computer and do a "computer to computer" transfer -- see below.)
My second step was to run the Microsoft "Upgrade Assistant". This is available at //windows.com/upgrade. This page has a lot of general requirements for upgrading and lots of links. The page has two main sections: Windows 8.1 and Windows 8. At the bottom of the Windows 8.1 section is a link marked "Upgrade Assistant". Click on that to run the assistant. It will check your computer and issue a report. This was my first disappointment. It will tell you if any of your hardware is problematic. That's good. The closest to a problem I got was that my hardware did not support a new feature called "Secure Boot". This just meant that this new feature would not be available to me. This information is not exactly a show stopper. So the report in summary said there were no show stopper issues. If you run the report and show stopper issues show up STOP. You must get these issues fixed before trying to go to 8.1.
So what was the disappointment? Well the assistant gave me a list of software but the list was not complete. I can't make hide nor hair out of what is in the list versus what is not listed. Microsoft Silverlight was listed (along with a lot of other Microsoft software and plenty of non-Microsoft software like my Adobe Reader) but my Office 365 was not listed. So the first lesson learned is: You need to make a complete inventory of all the software on your PC. Then divide it into software you care about (i.e. needs to work when you are done) and software you don't care about. If the software is not a Windows component it will have to be reinstalled later.
There should have been a bunch of additional steps (see below) but I just went from here to doing the install. You need to decide whether you want to do a "clean" install or an "upgrade" install. With a clean install you end up with a bare bones windows installation with none of your files and applications. From there you go on to install whatever applications you want and load whatever files you want. This gives you a "clean vanilla" box. This will fix many problems where things have gotten messed up on your old box. But you lose whatever you have of value from the old box. Most people want to do an upgrade. In this case all your files are carried over and eventually all (or at least the ones you care about) of your applications are carried over. It turns out that the 8.1 upgrade process gives you a third, middle option. You can have the upgrade carry over your personal files. Microsoft calls this a "data only" upgrade. My plan was to do an upgrade that would preserve both data and application settings but it didn't work out that way.
To do the upgrade I just inserted the proper CD. Microsoft provides "32 bit" and "64 bit" CDs. If your PC has more than 4 GB of RAM you will be forced to the 64 bit version. Older versions provided more backward compatibility in the 32 bit version but the days of the 32 bit version are definitely numbered. My PC has 8 GB of RAM so I was already running the 64 bit version of Windows 7 so I loaded the 64 bit 8.1 CD and let it "autorun". The upgrade process itself takes roughly an hour (at least on my PC) and ran without problem (except see below) the first time. It asks you some questions and then grinds away. Your PC will be rebooted several times (in my case 3 times). Another small annoyance was there was never a "you're done" screen. I just noticed that I had a screen that looked like it might be the Windows 8.1 screen and nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually I poked around and got a "Login" screen. (Many home users set their PCs up so that the login screen gets bypassed. This is bad security. But, in this case, it might have been more obvious that the process was complete.)
Before going on let me point out the major problem I had that I didn't even know I had until later. One of the install screens should have asked me to select one of three options: (1) "Keep Windows Settings, Personal Files, And Apps"; (2) "Keep Personal Files Only"; and (3) "Nothing". These options represent "upgrade", "keep your personal files" and "clean install". The option I wanted was the first one. But the screen only showed options 2 and 3. I selected option 2 and it worked just fine as far as it went. But it caused my Outlook Address book, for instance, to be lost. Since I had never worked with 8.1 and had certainly not tried an upgrade to 8.1 before I did not know that option 1 should have been listed. I just chugged along after selecting option 2 as the option closest to what I wanted. I plan to stop at this screen and ask Microsoft what's going if I hit this screen and option 1 is not shown. I did ask Microsoft about this after the fact but they were not helpful. I also have thought of a work around (see below) if I do not get a satisfactory answer.
Once I logged in I was totally confused. I was able to flounder around to some extent. For instance, I was able to establish that all the "NT Domain" stuff had connected up ok. I was also able to confirm that my personal files had been carried over successfully. (Note: Being an old timer I put my personal files in new separate directories. I do NOT put them in "My Files" or "My Pictures" or any of the other "My whatever" locations Microsoft recommends you use. I don't know if things would have carried over if I had used the "My whatever" location. I am pretty confident they would but can not speak from personal knowledge on this issue.) I was able to flounder about and find some things. I was able to get my printer installed, for instance. But I was not able to figure out how to print a web page. And there were lots of other things I was not able to figure out. When people say that Windows 8.x is a complete redesign, believe them.
After a certain amount of flailing around I gave up. I used the "Repair disk" CD I had built earlier to boot into software that enabled me to do a full restore. Since I have a backup scheduled to run daily the backup was very current. After the restore was complete I was able to boot in the normal way back to my Windows 7 configuration, which had all my stuff and worked perfectly. Based on my experience I strongly make the following recommendation:
Do not try to use Windows 8.x without getting and reading a book about how to use Windows 8.x. You will not be able to figure it out on your own.After putting my computer back together I went out and bought "Windows 8.1 Inside Out" by Tony Northrup. It was the right book for me. I have had good luck with Microsoft Press books in the past and I am happy with this one. I deliberately selected a "techie" oriented book because I am a techie. But it might not be right for you. There is a "for dummies" book (and many others). One of them might be a better fit for you. But I repeat: You will not be able to figure out Windows 8.x on your own. Instead you will become very frustrated and come to hate the product.
I have learned through a long and varied and successful carrier as a computer techie that there is a secret to success. Software systems have a "mind set". There is a way of thinking behind their design and the way the designers intend them to be used. If you can figure out the "mind set" then you will be much better off. It will make it much easier for you to "intuit" how to do things and where to find things. This allows you to bootstrap some basic knowledge about how to do some things into a more complete ability to drive the product. It doesn't matter if a product can do something it you can't figure out how to make the product do it.
I have only sampled my "8.1" book. But even this quick look has given my a lot of insight into the mind set of 8.x. Windows 8.1 has a drastically different mind set in comparison to older versions of Windows. However much you have absorbed of this older mind set will actually make it harder for you to figure out Windows 8.x. The next time I dive into that particular deep end I expect to be able to swim much more effectively than I could the last time. This is because I have been given a look at the 8.x mind set as a result of reading this book. Before moving on let me give you a quick look at the new mind set.
I have been in this business for a long time. In the old days most systems had a "Command Line Interface" (CLI). You typed in obscure commands at the prompt. I am still most comfortable in this old CLI world. But the world has moved on. Windows up through Windows 7 is designed to use a "Graphical User Interface" (GUI). More specifically, it is designed for use with a keyboard and a mouse. And as time has gone by this has meant more mouse, less keyboard. We are now given "radio buttons" (little circles - click on one and it goes out on the other ones) or "check boxes" (click on the box to check or uncheck a particular option). These are both easily done with a mouse. Then there is the "drop down list". You click and you are shown a list. You can click on any line in the list to select a particular item. A drop down list is a substitute for typing. You select the item from the list instead of typing its name in. The more frequent use of drop down lists over time is an example of an effort to make it easier to drive the system using just the mouse. The need for keyboard entry is minimized. I have adapted to the replacement of the CLI with the GUI over time. 8.x is the next generation in this CLI to GUI evolution.
8.x is designed to work without there being any keyboard or mouse. Instead you have a "touch screen" that you can tap or touch. This is a kind of substitute for the mouse. But a mouse is more precise than your finger and it has buttons and a scroll wheel on it. 8.x is designed to be driven literally by hand (i.e. using the touch screen). You can tap or swipe or use two finger moves like opening or closing your fingers. That's the natural way 8.x is designed to be operated. So Microsoft has completely redesigned Windows to work well with this "by hand" way of operation. They do provide "backward compatible" ways of doing keyboard or mouse things instead of "by hand" things but these are substitutes for the real thing. To be comfortable with 8.x you need to think of "by hand" operations instead of keyboard or mouse things. If, as is the case with me, you are doing the mouse/keyboard thing you need to think in terms of the mouse/keyboard substitute for the "by hand" operation. I now understand that so I expect to be far less frustrated next time around. I also intend to read much more of the book so I will know (or know where to find in the book) how to do various things.
A final note before I go into summarization mode. Windows 8.x is not a good fit for a work environment. There are multiple reasons for this. Let me highlight a couple. (1) Work environments are much more likely to be "heads down - data entry" environments. 8.x is poorly designed for this. Remember that a keyboard is no longer a natural input device. (2) In 8.x you are supposed to get your software from the Microsoft App store. This is good in the sense that Microsoft will test Apps before putting them into the store. This means they are much more likely to play nice. But companies run lots of applications that are unlikely to be found in the MS App store. Microsoft was provide a work around. If you get the "Pro" (i.e. "for work") version, you can install the Apps in the traditional manner. But still this is NOT the way you are supposed to do business. (3) It turns out that companies use a lot of old, in some cases very old, applications.
At my last job we bought a piece of lab equipment in about 2010. The lab equipment company provided a PC to drive the equipment. We were explicitly told "don't hook the PC up to the network". Why? (Start "tech talk" section - skip it if you don't care and you trust me) The software that connected to the PC to the lab equipment was so old it did not use a buffered serial interface. The "freeze out" time required by network cards caused the serial interface to miss some data bytes. This made the instrument effectively unusable. No network meant that the network card was not used so nothing interfered with collecting the data from the instrument and everything worked like it was supposed to. Of course, we had to come up with a method to get the data from the PC to our other systems, which we did. (End "tech talk" section) Now at this time buffered serial interfaces were at least ten years old and software to use them was available for free on the internet. But the company had been too cheap to upgrade their software to use buffering.
I do regular business in my personal life with at least two different companies that to this day use old "3270 emulation" software. (It has a distinctive look that is easily recognizable once you've had it pointed out to you.) "3270 emulation" software emulates a device called an IBM 3270 terminal that was popular in the '70s. The company I worked for (not exactly on the cutting edge in many ways) retired the last system that needed 3270 emulation at the end of 1999 (remember Y2K - if you don't, that's ok, just focus on the "1999" part). Depending on software that goes back to the '90s, or even earlier, or has other weird characteristics is all too common in corporate environments. I'm sure that a lot of this can be overcome. But it will take a lot of work and that sounds like a lot of money to corporate bean counters. So I expect 8.x to have a tiny rate of penetration in the corporate world for at least the next several years.
So let me summarize my lessons learned so far:
- Don't trust the software list that is generated by the "Upgrade Assistant" to be complete.
- Get a book and read it before you start. Otherwise, you will not be able to figure out how to drive 8.x
- Make sure you have a way to put everything back (full restore) in case things go badly wrong.
- Have a plan for each piece of software you are currently running. Your plan may be as simple as "dump it - don't need it any more".
- For those pieces of software you will be carrying forward make sure you know how to reinstall it and where to get the install software. Note: If you are using the "home" version of 8.x the only place you may be able to get it from is the Microsoft Store.
- If it's a corporate PC - don't bother unless you have to.
- Read and understand the "Upgrade plan" shown below.
So, if you are still with me, here's my revised upgrade plan:
- Document all the installed apps. For each app:
Come up with a plan (drop, upgrade, keep as is). - Back up your current configuration. Run a full backup. This will require a big chunk of space. A thumb drive will probably not be big enough. The simplest method is to use a USB connected external disk. If you search Amazon for "usb portable hard drive" you will find a number of devices listed that are plenty big (1 TB or more) for less than $100. The Best Buy web site also lists several models. Most of them are USB 3.0. Your older computer may only have USB 2.0. As far as I can tell USB 3.0 devices should still work. They will just be slower than if plugged into a USB 3.0 port. Warning: I have not personally run any tests to verify this.
- Install (if necessary) the Microsoft "Easy Transfer" utility on your current box. I believe it comes pre-installed on Windows 7. On "7" try "Start", "All Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools". If you see "Windows Easy Transfer", it's already installed. If not do a "Bing" search (a Google search gives confusing results). You should be able to locate a Microsoft page you can download it from.
- Run Easy Transfer. (The following information is from the "7" version.) Select:
"Next" on the "Welcome" screen.
"An external hard disk . . ." on the "What do you want to use . . ." screen
"This is my old computer" on the "Which Computer . . ." screen.
The "Choose what you want to transfer" screen will take a minute to fill in. You can then uncheck accounts you do NOT want to carry over. Do NOT uncheck "Shared". Note that it will tell you how much data is going to be transferred at the bottom of the screen. Click "Next" when you are done fiddling.
You will now be prompted for a password. I would suggest using one. Don't forget to make a note of what you choose.
Select the device that will house the MIG file by clicking on it. Click "Open".
Click "Save". The MIG file build process will now run.
You will be given an individual status on each component selected for saving.
The process takes a while. In my case about 20 GB gets saved. - Run the upgrade to 8.1. Be sure to select the "Keep Windows Settings" option if you can. If the setting is not there you might as well select "Nothing" as your files will be put back by easy transfer.
- If you were able to keep windows settings then you don't have to import your MIG file. If you need to process the MIG file just navigate around to it with Windows Explorer and double click on it. Windows will automatically run the easy transfer import process based on the fact that the file name ends with "MIG". This should result in all your settings now being present on your new system. Note: You will not be able to see a lot of them because the application that recognizes them hasn't been installed yet.
- Install your applications. Your settings should magically come back at this point.
- Have fun navigating around in your new environment.
I promise an update when I try this again.
Friday, December 20, 2013
Privacy
I have been about to write about about this subject for weeks. But then a new revelation comes out and gives me an excuse to delay. The latest (new Snowden revelations now seem like a continuous part of the background) is an opinion from a Federal Judge that activities of the NSA violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Here is the entire text of the Fourth Amendment:
It's short and unlike, for instance, the "commerce" clause, this language has been interpreted by the courts in a manner that pretty much aligns with how the average person would understand the meaning of the Amendment. We are all familiar with the "search warrant" from innumerable cop shows. A cop has to go before a judge and swear to the judge that he or she has "probable cause" to believe that if he or she searches a certain place (house, car, etc.) he or she will find a specific person (e.g. escaped prisoner) or thing (e.g. illegal drugs). If the cop doesn't have a search warrant or searches the wrong place (i.e. car instead of house) or the cop finds the wrong thing (i.e. escaped prisoner instead of drugs) the cop can't seize whatever he or she has found. And if he or she goes ahead anyhow the evidence obtained as a result of the impropriety is "tainted" and can't be used in a court of law.
Now there are some complexities, but let's ignore them for the moment and look at the broader picture. We all expect a reasonable degree of privacy. In U.S. law that flows from the Fourth Amendment. But an expectation of privacy is found everywhere and every when. So in the most broadest context what's our expectation when it comes to privacy?
For most of history and in most of the world people lived in villages. The village consisted of a grouping of huts. A hut has walls, a roof, and a door. In some cases it has one or more windows. In other cases there were no windows. You couldn't see or, in most cases hear, what was going on within the hut without entering it. Universally a set of manners grew up that said you couldn't enter the hut unless you lived there or you were invited. And it was a breach of manners to peer in through the door or windows. So if you were outside the hut you were in public. If you were inside the hut you were in private. But it came to extend beyond that.
Sex is usually considered a private act since time immemorial. Sex usually happens inside the hut. There were no interior walls or other barriers inside huts so generally speaking the other occupants of the hut were aware of sex, when it was happening. But taboos developed where this activity was not discussed outside the hut and frequently the other occupants of the hut would ignore the fact that sex was going on while it was going on. Other activities that happened inside the hut also became off limits to talk about. They were private.
Many cultures use a variation of an "I see you" as a greeting. The idea is that you are generally not there until you are acknowledged. That transitions your activities from effectively being private (people more or less ignore what you are saying or doing) to public (what you are saying or doing goes "on the record"). So the differentiation between "private" and "public" became more sophisticated. Various cultures developed different sets of rules but all cultures developed rules for separating activities into private and public activities. And in many situations the boundary between private and public could become very complex. The same act could be "private" to some observers while being "public" to others.
And technology marched on. Huts were replaced by houses and buildings. But the privacy rules evolved out of the "hut" model. And oral communication became supplemented by written communication. The adhesives that are required to construct an envelope are a modern development. In the past a letter was folded in an elaborate way and then "sealed". Wax was dripped in such a way as to glue the folded paper closed. A "seal" or "signet" or "chop" was impressed into the wax. This identified who had sealed the message and was supposed to make tampering evident. A universal convention quickly developed that what was on the outside, plainly visible without breaking the seal, was public. What couldn't be read without breaking the seal was private.
These conventions form the basis of the common understanding of privacy. What's inside the building is private. What's outside the building is public. What's on the inside of the letter is private. What's on the outside of the letter is public. Elaborations and exceptions were developed. As cultures get more complex the rules get more complex. But this is the basic, the "natural expectation" of people when it comes to privacy. And it comports closely with the plain language of the Fourth Amendment. The Amendment sets out the rules. And it specifies the proper procedure for governmental authority to use to override the rule.
Now let's be honest here. People have been breaking the rules as long as there have been rules. People listen at doorways or windows. People speak about what is supposed to remain unspoken with respect to goings on within the hut. "Black Chamber" departments of governments developed techniques hundreds of years ago for opening letters, copying the contents, and reclosing them in such a way that no (or very little) evidence of tampering remained. Codes and cyphers were developed so that diplomats could communicate securely in spite of the fact that their sealed correspondence was being read.
But there was a very practical reason why only special people like diplomats worried about their privacy. It was very expensive to violate privacy conventions. So Black Chamber departments snooped in the mail of diplomats but they did not have the resources to go after more than a few people. So the ordinary person was secure from invasions of privacy by the government. And any non-governmental person or group was breaking the law if they snooped.
At about the time that the Fourth Amendment was written Ben Franklin was investigating electricity. He was the first to figure out that it came in two kinds. He posited that it normally flowed from what he called "positive" to what he called "negative". He was right that it flows but he got the usual direction wrong. In round numbers, the telegraph was invented about fifty years later. In round numbers the telephone was invented another fifty years after that. In round numbers the computer was invented still another fifty years after that. And finally, in round numbers the Internet was invented still another fifty years later. Combined, these inventions ultimately revolutionized the privacy game.
The "letter" model was extended to cover the telegraph. Physically the telegram and the means used to transmit, receive, and process it are public. There is no practical method to seal the telegram up. It must be clearly visible to telegraph operators. The signal can be "tapped" from the telegraph wire. But the telegram was wrapped in a virtual envelope of privacy. Employees of telegraph companies were to treat the contents of all telegrams as confidential. It is illegal to tap a telegraph wire. In a practical sense, users adopted the "diplomatic letter" model. They used a variety of codes and ciphers to conceal the contents of their telegraph messages. A similar approach was adopted in the case of telephone calls. Telephone company employees were expected to treat all telephone calls as confidential. And the "get a search warrant" procedure was extended to cover telegrams and telephone calls. With a warrant the contents of a telegram could be disclosed to a government official. With a warrant a telephone line could be tapped.
For a long time, computers made no difference. They were not much used for communication. And, to the extent they were, they were treated like another piece of communications equipment. And in its early days the Internet made little difference either. The Internet is designed to be an open environment. It is the equivalent of people standing in a public square and talking to each other. It is bad manners to listen in on the conversation of others but it is certainly possible. If people want to keep their conversation private they should "get a room" (use something other than the Internet for their communication). But then a revolution gradually happened. Computers (and data storage) became unbelievably cheap. And the speed, ease of use, and ubiquity of the Internet made it the communications channel of choice. So now more and more communication is done over the Internet. The cheapness of computers (both the cost of computation and the cost of storing data) and the convenience of the Internet have created a revolution that has only recently been noticed.
As I indicated above, the practical reason that guaranteed our privacy was the difficulty (both in cost and in effort) of violating out privacy. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was famous for decades for tapping phones, opening mail, and doing "black bag jobs" (breaking into homes and businesses to violate the "houses, papers, and effects" of individuals and organizations). This was completely illegal. But Hoover's FBI concentrated their efforts on mobsters, spies, and politicians. (The latter was targeted to secure blackmail material that as used to maintain Hoover's position of power until he died.) The vast majority of us were safe because we did not fall into one of the above categories and Hoover did not have enough agents to broaden his list of targets.
But in the last few years there has been a profound change. It is no longer to difficult and expensive as a practical matter to violate people's privacy wholesale. Computers have evolved (down in cost, up in capability) enough to change the game. The new capability is usually referred to as "big data". Vast amounts of data can now be mined relatively inexpensively. There is a database concept called a "join". If you have a phone number it can be joined to a name. The name and phone number can be joined to an address. A name and address can be joined to a driver's license number or a credit card number or even a social security number. From there the joins can go on and on into nearly any direction you can think of.
And as recently as a few years ago data was spread all over the place. Your drivers license information was separate from your credit card information. And both of them were separated from your tax information (keyed to your social security number) and your medical information (again social security number but in a separate location). The glue that is now available is the Internet. Making data Internet accessible is almost a necessity in the modern era. So now joins can be used to link data from databases that heretofore could not be linked up. But they can now because they are all accessible via the Internet.
And there is now another class of player. I used to work for a bank. And I'd watch movies where the good guy or the bad guy (depending on the movie) would instantly access all this banking data. It was hard not to laugh. I knew that our bank did not have this data instantly available. It was hard to keep it available to the computers located in our data center, let alone anyone or anything located anywhere else. And I dealt with other banks enough to know that the same was true in their case. But that was before cash machines and ubiquitous cred card and debit card readers, all hooked up to the bank's databases so that transactions could be validated instantly and cleared instantly. Now various methods are being worked out so you can buy stuff with your smartphone. There are currently various incompatible schemes for doing this. But people all over the world will be able to buy pretty much anything with their smartphone within a decade. There's just too much money to be made once it's working for anything to get in the way.
Traditional players like banks are in the game and that's an obvious development. But we also have new players like social media in the guise of Facebook and search purveyors in the guise of Google who are gathering vast amounts of personal data. The old business model was "we invade your privacy but only to the extent necessary to do business with you". So banks held personal financial data about you. And doctors and hospitals held personal medical data about you. And until recently this personal data was not very useful for anything other than its original purpose. Doctors in particular have been slow to move from paper records to computerized records. And if it's not in the computer, it is prohibitively expensive to search.
Consciously or unconsciously we knew that these old line businesses could invade out privacy. But they had been around a while and standards and practices (and a certain amount of law) had grown up around them. But Google is less than fifteen years old and Facebook less than ten. And both companies and their new line brethren have been evolving rapidly. And these new line companies have substantial big data expertise. As a group, they invented big data. It is the old line businesses and government agencies that are playing catch up.
In summary, we have the old line players (government, old line businesses, snoopy neighbors or business competitors) with vast new "big data" capabilities. They are combined with new line players like search and social media players who have vast amounts of data and the capability to mine it. The practical barriers to vast and systematic privacy invasions are gone. They have been done in by cheap computers and Internet connectivity. And don't forget the fact that as a practical matter we all live on the Internet now. Illiterate rice farmers in rural villages in India are getting Internet connected via cheap low end phones whose capabilities are not to be found in sci-fi movies of 30 years ago. We can expect the number of people who are not on the 'net to drop below a billion people within a few years and to virtually zero within a few years after that. So what should we do?
Well, one thing not to do is to try to put the genie back in the bottle. The Internet, cheap computers, and big data are not going to go away. In fact, things are going to go the other way. More stuff will get connected to the Internet and the Internet will get faster and cheaper. Computers will also continue to get faster and cheaper. And big data is still in its infancy. Techniques for exploiting big data will continue to improve. This will result in more and better ways for your privacy to get invaded. The other thing not to try is to give up, to decide we live in an open world where more and more people have more and more capability to learn more and more about you and there's nothing that can or should be done about it.
Specifically with respect to the NSA, it looks like the worm is finally turning. 9/11 was used to scare all of us into turning the NSA loose to do whatever it could figure out how to do. (They were also given vast amounts of money so cost was not an impediment.) I don't know why but people were convinced that the NSA would only go after the bad guys. Pretty much everyone can quote the old saw "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" but people somehow believed that giving the NSA vast amounts of money and vast amounts of legal authority would not lead to incompetence, stupidity, and abuses. It is in the nature of bureaucracies to build empires. And when a bureaucracy can empire build in an environment where everything they do is secret and their mission is deemed critical then empires will be built.
My reading of the 9/11 commission report is that the government had all the information it needed to stop the attack. But the information was "siloed", each bureaucracy kept its information in a "silo". People in their organization got access to the information but people in other organizations did not. Between the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA all the information to connect the dots and foil the plot was there. But no one was able to put it all together because no one had access to all the information. (The FBI is an egregious example here. Two different supervisors shut down two different field office investigations that would have exposed the whole plot. And here there was no siloing. The FBI had everything it needed.) In spite of this, additional "authorities" were given to various government agencies, but especially to the NSA. They were authorized to vacuum up everything. And they did. There are supposed to be "checks and balances". But they are pathetically weak. And everyone who has been able to see what has really been going on has concluded that even these weak checks and balances were ignored routinely. Read for instance, the opinion of Judge Leon in the NSA case I referred to above ("Klayman et al. v. Obama et al. -- U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Civil Action No. 13-0851").
The biggest problem with the NSA is that they have collected vast amounts of data into a single NSA managed repository. The obvious fix here is to take the repository out of the control of the NSA. A White House study has apparently recommended this. (The study is classified but this item has leaked and the leak is presumed accurate.) I think this is a good idea. I think a quasi-governmental entity should be set up. This entity should own and maintain the repository. It should be responsible for making sure that access rules are in place and that those rules are followed. Telcos and others who currently contribute the data to the NSA don't want the job. Who knows where the data will come from in the future so I think a separate entity is the way to go. This means that the government has your data but at least the possibility would exist that it was secured and administered properly. I think the budget for this new entity should come from the current NSA budget.
I think we should also look at how much of and what kind of data is being collected. Various claims have been made as to how valuable the data has been so far. But the data to justify the claim is highly classified. I have been a student of intelligence matters for a long time. The intelligence community is fond of saying "we have had many successes but we can't talk about them". But the record shows that in fact they have had many failures and have used the classification system to hide or minimize them. There is usually a political advantage for information on the successes to leak out and it does. For instance, I know of no great cold war success that did not leak out within a few years, perhaps a decade. The cold war ended more than a quarter of a century ago. And in that time information on a number of failures and bungled jobs has dribbled out. See also the Leon opinion I cited above for how valuable this database has been. He says "the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government" (page 61 - emphasis in the original).
As a rule of thumb I recommend this: Of everything that is classified about one percent really needs to be secret for more than a short period of time, say a year (and often much less). About ten percent is classified to avoid oversight leading to possible embarrassment and about 90% is classified as the result of sheer bureaucratic inertia. Bottom line: The NSA is collecting far more data than it needs or can even make use of. (Although "big data" techniques continue to make it easier to make use of large amounts of data.)
But that's the NSA. And, of course, similar restrictions could be put on other government agencies. But, as I indicated above, there are now other non-governmental players: the new line players and the old line players that are catching up. Laws, rules, etc. can be used to reign in the government (at least in theory -- let's see what congress actually does). But these non-governmental players are a whole different kettle of fish. What should be done?
I have heard a number of proposals made over the years by pro-privacy groups. I consider most of them misguided. A couple of lifetimes ago (here I am using Internet years) Intel was going to put an easily accessible serial number in their "486" chip. The pro-privacy people raised such a ruckus ("they'll be able to know who I am") that Intel gave up on the idea. So what happened? Software designers used another of the hundreds of unique numbers found on all computers. So developers had to write a couple of hundred extra lines of code to find something that would behave like a serial number and went ahead with their plans. So most of the pro-privacy suggestions are pretty useless. Okay . . .
I think that a fundamental legal principle needs to be adopted: If the data is about you then the owner of the data is you. Right now whatever data Google collects about your searches is owned by Google. They can promise you anything they want about what they will or won't do with that data but at the end of the day it's their data and they can do whatever they want with it. So they do. Facebook has gotten into trouble multiple times because they keep tweaking the privacy settings so that it becomes harder and harder for you to keep anything private. Why? Because they want to sell as much data about you to as many companies as they can for as much money as possible. The more data and the higher quality the data the more valuable it is to Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account but it seems to me that Facebook recently got in trouble for selling pictures from your "wall" to whoever wanted to buy them.
If all this data about you (i.e. the pictures on your wall) was owned by you then the legal situation would be quite different. Now the collector of the data (Facebook, your bank, your doctor, etc.) would be given a "use" right to your data. They would be permitted to use it in whatever means were necessary to provide the service you signed up for. But that would be it. They would no longer have the right to sell the data (or trade it or lend it out) simply in order to make a buck.
This may seem off point but let's talk about world trade for a minute. Why are Nike shoes made in China? There are many components to the answer but I am going to single out only one. It's because it is cheap to ship raw materials from all over the world to China and it is cheap to ship the finished shoe from China to the U.S. Shipping is cheap. And there are two components to this cheapness. There is the actual cost of shipping the goods. Then there are the tariff and non-tariff barriers or lack thereof. As a response to the Great Depression the U.S. passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It succeeded in its design to increase the cost of imported goods. Another trick is to introduce "non-tariff barriers" to trade. Japan was particularly good at this. They both have the same effect. They increase the cost of imported goods or, in some cases make importing goods completely impossible. It should come as no surprise to learn that many countries follow the lead of the U.S. and later Japan, raising tariff (and later non-tariff) barriers that protected their domestic markets from foreign competition. And these barriers were very successful. Trade in the '30s when the tariff wars were at their most fierce fell to very low levels. As barriers have slowly been removed, especially in the last few decades, world trade has grown by leaps and bounds.
I hope it is now clear why I chose to talk about trade. Trade barriers worked as a method to reduce trade. Data interchange used to be effectively impossible. Think cave men on rafts. Then it was very difficult. Think trade around the Mediterranean a thousand years ago. Then it was only difficult. Think trade during the '30s. Now it is quick and easy. Think the current era of trade. I suggest that the same techniques that depressed trade would depress wholesale data interchange. Tariff and non-tariff barriers could be put into place to inhibit the current "wild west" trading of data between companies. This would ease the pressure to invade people's privacy.
Ultimately norms of privacy protection need to be established and, where there is something to build on, enhanced. Laws and regulations need to be put in place to protect data. Companies need to be fined and executives need to be jailed for privacy failures. It was recently reported that 40 million Target customers had their credit card information stolen. Given that this kind of security failure is now common, Target will suffer some embarrassment, but very little. I don't think they will be fined, not even by the card issuers that will actually suffer most of the loss. And certainly no one at Target will go to jail unless it turns out to be an inside job. The people that perpetrated this fraud are likely to get away with it. Even if they don't, they are balancing vast potential gains against a small likelihood of getting caught and, in the worse case, a few years of jail time. That looks like a pretty sweet proposition to me.
So things need to change. It seems likely that things at the NSA will change. But even that is not a certainty. Change elsewhere is much needed but seems less likely. Theoretically, libertarians and "defenders of the Constitution" (e.g. groups like the Tea Party) should be leading the charge. But there is very little activity going on there. There is some pro-privacy fire on the left. But it is only some and powerful interests think they can be safely ignored. Ultimately, the public needs to believe that the issue is important and that something can be done about it. I think most of the public thinks that it is at least moderately important. But I think most people are convinced that nothing can be done.
Unless, of course, you are talking about any kind of information relating to guns. Then everything can. should, and probably will be done to make sure that no one (except the NRA and gun manufacturers) has access to any kind of data about gun ownership. If it's gun related then anyone, including foreigners and terrorists should be able to purchase any kind of gun they want. And they should be able to purchase as many guns and as much ammunition as they want too. Being on the terrorist watch list is not sufficient to deny you the rights and privileges of gun ownership.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It's short and unlike, for instance, the "commerce" clause, this language has been interpreted by the courts in a manner that pretty much aligns with how the average person would understand the meaning of the Amendment. We are all familiar with the "search warrant" from innumerable cop shows. A cop has to go before a judge and swear to the judge that he or she has "probable cause" to believe that if he or she searches a certain place (house, car, etc.) he or she will find a specific person (e.g. escaped prisoner) or thing (e.g. illegal drugs). If the cop doesn't have a search warrant or searches the wrong place (i.e. car instead of house) or the cop finds the wrong thing (i.e. escaped prisoner instead of drugs) the cop can't seize whatever he or she has found. And if he or she goes ahead anyhow the evidence obtained as a result of the impropriety is "tainted" and can't be used in a court of law.
Now there are some complexities, but let's ignore them for the moment and look at the broader picture. We all expect a reasonable degree of privacy. In U.S. law that flows from the Fourth Amendment. But an expectation of privacy is found everywhere and every when. So in the most broadest context what's our expectation when it comes to privacy?
For most of history and in most of the world people lived in villages. The village consisted of a grouping of huts. A hut has walls, a roof, and a door. In some cases it has one or more windows. In other cases there were no windows. You couldn't see or, in most cases hear, what was going on within the hut without entering it. Universally a set of manners grew up that said you couldn't enter the hut unless you lived there or you were invited. And it was a breach of manners to peer in through the door or windows. So if you were outside the hut you were in public. If you were inside the hut you were in private. But it came to extend beyond that.
Sex is usually considered a private act since time immemorial. Sex usually happens inside the hut. There were no interior walls or other barriers inside huts so generally speaking the other occupants of the hut were aware of sex, when it was happening. But taboos developed where this activity was not discussed outside the hut and frequently the other occupants of the hut would ignore the fact that sex was going on while it was going on. Other activities that happened inside the hut also became off limits to talk about. They were private.
Many cultures use a variation of an "I see you" as a greeting. The idea is that you are generally not there until you are acknowledged. That transitions your activities from effectively being private (people more or less ignore what you are saying or doing) to public (what you are saying or doing goes "on the record"). So the differentiation between "private" and "public" became more sophisticated. Various cultures developed different sets of rules but all cultures developed rules for separating activities into private and public activities. And in many situations the boundary between private and public could become very complex. The same act could be "private" to some observers while being "public" to others.
And technology marched on. Huts were replaced by houses and buildings. But the privacy rules evolved out of the "hut" model. And oral communication became supplemented by written communication. The adhesives that are required to construct an envelope are a modern development. In the past a letter was folded in an elaborate way and then "sealed". Wax was dripped in such a way as to glue the folded paper closed. A "seal" or "signet" or "chop" was impressed into the wax. This identified who had sealed the message and was supposed to make tampering evident. A universal convention quickly developed that what was on the outside, plainly visible without breaking the seal, was public. What couldn't be read without breaking the seal was private.
These conventions form the basis of the common understanding of privacy. What's inside the building is private. What's outside the building is public. What's on the inside of the letter is private. What's on the outside of the letter is public. Elaborations and exceptions were developed. As cultures get more complex the rules get more complex. But this is the basic, the "natural expectation" of people when it comes to privacy. And it comports closely with the plain language of the Fourth Amendment. The Amendment sets out the rules. And it specifies the proper procedure for governmental authority to use to override the rule.
Now let's be honest here. People have been breaking the rules as long as there have been rules. People listen at doorways or windows. People speak about what is supposed to remain unspoken with respect to goings on within the hut. "Black Chamber" departments of governments developed techniques hundreds of years ago for opening letters, copying the contents, and reclosing them in such a way that no (or very little) evidence of tampering remained. Codes and cyphers were developed so that diplomats could communicate securely in spite of the fact that their sealed correspondence was being read.
But there was a very practical reason why only special people like diplomats worried about their privacy. It was very expensive to violate privacy conventions. So Black Chamber departments snooped in the mail of diplomats but they did not have the resources to go after more than a few people. So the ordinary person was secure from invasions of privacy by the government. And any non-governmental person or group was breaking the law if they snooped.
At about the time that the Fourth Amendment was written Ben Franklin was investigating electricity. He was the first to figure out that it came in two kinds. He posited that it normally flowed from what he called "positive" to what he called "negative". He was right that it flows but he got the usual direction wrong. In round numbers, the telegraph was invented about fifty years later. In round numbers the telephone was invented another fifty years after that. In round numbers the computer was invented still another fifty years after that. And finally, in round numbers the Internet was invented still another fifty years later. Combined, these inventions ultimately revolutionized the privacy game.
The "letter" model was extended to cover the telegraph. Physically the telegram and the means used to transmit, receive, and process it are public. There is no practical method to seal the telegram up. It must be clearly visible to telegraph operators. The signal can be "tapped" from the telegraph wire. But the telegram was wrapped in a virtual envelope of privacy. Employees of telegraph companies were to treat the contents of all telegrams as confidential. It is illegal to tap a telegraph wire. In a practical sense, users adopted the "diplomatic letter" model. They used a variety of codes and ciphers to conceal the contents of their telegraph messages. A similar approach was adopted in the case of telephone calls. Telephone company employees were expected to treat all telephone calls as confidential. And the "get a search warrant" procedure was extended to cover telegrams and telephone calls. With a warrant the contents of a telegram could be disclosed to a government official. With a warrant a telephone line could be tapped.
For a long time, computers made no difference. They were not much used for communication. And, to the extent they were, they were treated like another piece of communications equipment. And in its early days the Internet made little difference either. The Internet is designed to be an open environment. It is the equivalent of people standing in a public square and talking to each other. It is bad manners to listen in on the conversation of others but it is certainly possible. If people want to keep their conversation private they should "get a room" (use something other than the Internet for their communication). But then a revolution gradually happened. Computers (and data storage) became unbelievably cheap. And the speed, ease of use, and ubiquity of the Internet made it the communications channel of choice. So now more and more communication is done over the Internet. The cheapness of computers (both the cost of computation and the cost of storing data) and the convenience of the Internet have created a revolution that has only recently been noticed.
As I indicated above, the practical reason that guaranteed our privacy was the difficulty (both in cost and in effort) of violating out privacy. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was famous for decades for tapping phones, opening mail, and doing "black bag jobs" (breaking into homes and businesses to violate the "houses, papers, and effects" of individuals and organizations). This was completely illegal. But Hoover's FBI concentrated their efforts on mobsters, spies, and politicians. (The latter was targeted to secure blackmail material that as used to maintain Hoover's position of power until he died.) The vast majority of us were safe because we did not fall into one of the above categories and Hoover did not have enough agents to broaden his list of targets.
But in the last few years there has been a profound change. It is no longer to difficult and expensive as a practical matter to violate people's privacy wholesale. Computers have evolved (down in cost, up in capability) enough to change the game. The new capability is usually referred to as "big data". Vast amounts of data can now be mined relatively inexpensively. There is a database concept called a "join". If you have a phone number it can be joined to a name. The name and phone number can be joined to an address. A name and address can be joined to a driver's license number or a credit card number or even a social security number. From there the joins can go on and on into nearly any direction you can think of.
And as recently as a few years ago data was spread all over the place. Your drivers license information was separate from your credit card information. And both of them were separated from your tax information (keyed to your social security number) and your medical information (again social security number but in a separate location). The glue that is now available is the Internet. Making data Internet accessible is almost a necessity in the modern era. So now joins can be used to link data from databases that heretofore could not be linked up. But they can now because they are all accessible via the Internet.
And there is now another class of player. I used to work for a bank. And I'd watch movies where the good guy or the bad guy (depending on the movie) would instantly access all this banking data. It was hard not to laugh. I knew that our bank did not have this data instantly available. It was hard to keep it available to the computers located in our data center, let alone anyone or anything located anywhere else. And I dealt with other banks enough to know that the same was true in their case. But that was before cash machines and ubiquitous cred card and debit card readers, all hooked up to the bank's databases so that transactions could be validated instantly and cleared instantly. Now various methods are being worked out so you can buy stuff with your smartphone. There are currently various incompatible schemes for doing this. But people all over the world will be able to buy pretty much anything with their smartphone within a decade. There's just too much money to be made once it's working for anything to get in the way.
Traditional players like banks are in the game and that's an obvious development. But we also have new players like social media in the guise of Facebook and search purveyors in the guise of Google who are gathering vast amounts of personal data. The old business model was "we invade your privacy but only to the extent necessary to do business with you". So banks held personal financial data about you. And doctors and hospitals held personal medical data about you. And until recently this personal data was not very useful for anything other than its original purpose. Doctors in particular have been slow to move from paper records to computerized records. And if it's not in the computer, it is prohibitively expensive to search.
Consciously or unconsciously we knew that these old line businesses could invade out privacy. But they had been around a while and standards and practices (and a certain amount of law) had grown up around them. But Google is less than fifteen years old and Facebook less than ten. And both companies and their new line brethren have been evolving rapidly. And these new line companies have substantial big data expertise. As a group, they invented big data. It is the old line businesses and government agencies that are playing catch up.
In summary, we have the old line players (government, old line businesses, snoopy neighbors or business competitors) with vast new "big data" capabilities. They are combined with new line players like search and social media players who have vast amounts of data and the capability to mine it. The practical barriers to vast and systematic privacy invasions are gone. They have been done in by cheap computers and Internet connectivity. And don't forget the fact that as a practical matter we all live on the Internet now. Illiterate rice farmers in rural villages in India are getting Internet connected via cheap low end phones whose capabilities are not to be found in sci-fi movies of 30 years ago. We can expect the number of people who are not on the 'net to drop below a billion people within a few years and to virtually zero within a few years after that. So what should we do?
Well, one thing not to do is to try to put the genie back in the bottle. The Internet, cheap computers, and big data are not going to go away. In fact, things are going to go the other way. More stuff will get connected to the Internet and the Internet will get faster and cheaper. Computers will also continue to get faster and cheaper. And big data is still in its infancy. Techniques for exploiting big data will continue to improve. This will result in more and better ways for your privacy to get invaded. The other thing not to try is to give up, to decide we live in an open world where more and more people have more and more capability to learn more and more about you and there's nothing that can or should be done about it.
Specifically with respect to the NSA, it looks like the worm is finally turning. 9/11 was used to scare all of us into turning the NSA loose to do whatever it could figure out how to do. (They were also given vast amounts of money so cost was not an impediment.) I don't know why but people were convinced that the NSA would only go after the bad guys. Pretty much everyone can quote the old saw "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" but people somehow believed that giving the NSA vast amounts of money and vast amounts of legal authority would not lead to incompetence, stupidity, and abuses. It is in the nature of bureaucracies to build empires. And when a bureaucracy can empire build in an environment where everything they do is secret and their mission is deemed critical then empires will be built.
My reading of the 9/11 commission report is that the government had all the information it needed to stop the attack. But the information was "siloed", each bureaucracy kept its information in a "silo". People in their organization got access to the information but people in other organizations did not. Between the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA all the information to connect the dots and foil the plot was there. But no one was able to put it all together because no one had access to all the information. (The FBI is an egregious example here. Two different supervisors shut down two different field office investigations that would have exposed the whole plot. And here there was no siloing. The FBI had everything it needed.) In spite of this, additional "authorities" were given to various government agencies, but especially to the NSA. They were authorized to vacuum up everything. And they did. There are supposed to be "checks and balances". But they are pathetically weak. And everyone who has been able to see what has really been going on has concluded that even these weak checks and balances were ignored routinely. Read for instance, the opinion of Judge Leon in the NSA case I referred to above ("Klayman et al. v. Obama et al. -- U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Civil Action No. 13-0851").
The biggest problem with the NSA is that they have collected vast amounts of data into a single NSA managed repository. The obvious fix here is to take the repository out of the control of the NSA. A White House study has apparently recommended this. (The study is classified but this item has leaked and the leak is presumed accurate.) I think this is a good idea. I think a quasi-governmental entity should be set up. This entity should own and maintain the repository. It should be responsible for making sure that access rules are in place and that those rules are followed. Telcos and others who currently contribute the data to the NSA don't want the job. Who knows where the data will come from in the future so I think a separate entity is the way to go. This means that the government has your data but at least the possibility would exist that it was secured and administered properly. I think the budget for this new entity should come from the current NSA budget.
I think we should also look at how much of and what kind of data is being collected. Various claims have been made as to how valuable the data has been so far. But the data to justify the claim is highly classified. I have been a student of intelligence matters for a long time. The intelligence community is fond of saying "we have had many successes but we can't talk about them". But the record shows that in fact they have had many failures and have used the classification system to hide or minimize them. There is usually a political advantage for information on the successes to leak out and it does. For instance, I know of no great cold war success that did not leak out within a few years, perhaps a decade. The cold war ended more than a quarter of a century ago. And in that time information on a number of failures and bungled jobs has dribbled out. See also the Leon opinion I cited above for how valuable this database has been. He says "the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government" (page 61 - emphasis in the original).
As a rule of thumb I recommend this: Of everything that is classified about one percent really needs to be secret for more than a short period of time, say a year (and often much less). About ten percent is classified to avoid oversight leading to possible embarrassment and about 90% is classified as the result of sheer bureaucratic inertia. Bottom line: The NSA is collecting far more data than it needs or can even make use of. (Although "big data" techniques continue to make it easier to make use of large amounts of data.)
But that's the NSA. And, of course, similar restrictions could be put on other government agencies. But, as I indicated above, there are now other non-governmental players: the new line players and the old line players that are catching up. Laws, rules, etc. can be used to reign in the government (at least in theory -- let's see what congress actually does). But these non-governmental players are a whole different kettle of fish. What should be done?
I have heard a number of proposals made over the years by pro-privacy groups. I consider most of them misguided. A couple of lifetimes ago (here I am using Internet years) Intel was going to put an easily accessible serial number in their "486" chip. The pro-privacy people raised such a ruckus ("they'll be able to know who I am") that Intel gave up on the idea. So what happened? Software designers used another of the hundreds of unique numbers found on all computers. So developers had to write a couple of hundred extra lines of code to find something that would behave like a serial number and went ahead with their plans. So most of the pro-privacy suggestions are pretty useless. Okay . . .
I think that a fundamental legal principle needs to be adopted: If the data is about you then the owner of the data is you. Right now whatever data Google collects about your searches is owned by Google. They can promise you anything they want about what they will or won't do with that data but at the end of the day it's their data and they can do whatever they want with it. So they do. Facebook has gotten into trouble multiple times because they keep tweaking the privacy settings so that it becomes harder and harder for you to keep anything private. Why? Because they want to sell as much data about you to as many companies as they can for as much money as possible. The more data and the higher quality the data the more valuable it is to Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account but it seems to me that Facebook recently got in trouble for selling pictures from your "wall" to whoever wanted to buy them.
If all this data about you (i.e. the pictures on your wall) was owned by you then the legal situation would be quite different. Now the collector of the data (Facebook, your bank, your doctor, etc.) would be given a "use" right to your data. They would be permitted to use it in whatever means were necessary to provide the service you signed up for. But that would be it. They would no longer have the right to sell the data (or trade it or lend it out) simply in order to make a buck.
This may seem off point but let's talk about world trade for a minute. Why are Nike shoes made in China? There are many components to the answer but I am going to single out only one. It's because it is cheap to ship raw materials from all over the world to China and it is cheap to ship the finished shoe from China to the U.S. Shipping is cheap. And there are two components to this cheapness. There is the actual cost of shipping the goods. Then there are the tariff and non-tariff barriers or lack thereof. As a response to the Great Depression the U.S. passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It succeeded in its design to increase the cost of imported goods. Another trick is to introduce "non-tariff barriers" to trade. Japan was particularly good at this. They both have the same effect. They increase the cost of imported goods or, in some cases make importing goods completely impossible. It should come as no surprise to learn that many countries follow the lead of the U.S. and later Japan, raising tariff (and later non-tariff) barriers that protected their domestic markets from foreign competition. And these barriers were very successful. Trade in the '30s when the tariff wars were at their most fierce fell to very low levels. As barriers have slowly been removed, especially in the last few decades, world trade has grown by leaps and bounds.
I hope it is now clear why I chose to talk about trade. Trade barriers worked as a method to reduce trade. Data interchange used to be effectively impossible. Think cave men on rafts. Then it was very difficult. Think trade around the Mediterranean a thousand years ago. Then it was only difficult. Think trade during the '30s. Now it is quick and easy. Think the current era of trade. I suggest that the same techniques that depressed trade would depress wholesale data interchange. Tariff and non-tariff barriers could be put into place to inhibit the current "wild west" trading of data between companies. This would ease the pressure to invade people's privacy.
Ultimately norms of privacy protection need to be established and, where there is something to build on, enhanced. Laws and regulations need to be put in place to protect data. Companies need to be fined and executives need to be jailed for privacy failures. It was recently reported that 40 million Target customers had their credit card information stolen. Given that this kind of security failure is now common, Target will suffer some embarrassment, but very little. I don't think they will be fined, not even by the card issuers that will actually suffer most of the loss. And certainly no one at Target will go to jail unless it turns out to be an inside job. The people that perpetrated this fraud are likely to get away with it. Even if they don't, they are balancing vast potential gains against a small likelihood of getting caught and, in the worse case, a few years of jail time. That looks like a pretty sweet proposition to me.
So things need to change. It seems likely that things at the NSA will change. But even that is not a certainty. Change elsewhere is much needed but seems less likely. Theoretically, libertarians and "defenders of the Constitution" (e.g. groups like the Tea Party) should be leading the charge. But there is very little activity going on there. There is some pro-privacy fire on the left. But it is only some and powerful interests think they can be safely ignored. Ultimately, the public needs to believe that the issue is important and that something can be done about it. I think most of the public thinks that it is at least moderately important. But I think most people are convinced that nothing can be done.
Unless, of course, you are talking about any kind of information relating to guns. Then everything can. should, and probably will be done to make sure that no one (except the NRA and gun manufacturers) has access to any kind of data about gun ownership. If it's gun related then anyone, including foreigners and terrorists should be able to purchase any kind of gun they want. And they should be able to purchase as many guns and as much ammunition as they want too. Being on the terrorist watch list is not sufficient to deny you the rights and privileges of gun ownership.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Spies - Part 2
This is a continuation of an earlier post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/05/spies.html). It is a result of the now long series of revelations credited to Edward Snowden. There are more revelations today and it looks like they will continue for some time. I am not interested in getting stuck in "revelation of the day" mode like the media. Instead, since the revelations have been going on for some time, I think there are some "big picture" observations to make.
Recently Snowden has been revealing that the NSA has been spying on pretty much everybody, friends and enemies alike. This is "shocking news" to the media and our allies. There are two things going on here. In the case of the news its the result of a lack of journalistic competence and the usual "fixate on the shiny object" mentality that governs news decisions. In the case of our allies its a matter of gaining a tactical advantage in the "power" game. I'll be back with more on both these subjects but first let me step back.
We have had two giant leakers in the last few years, Edward Snowden and, before him, Bradley Manning. At the personal level they are completely different. But at a higher level they are both the same. Ben Franklin in the 1700's famously opined "three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead". It's a cute way at getting to the fact that a secret shared among a lot of people is bound to leak out. Franklin's idea of "a lot" was three. So how many people have access to classified data? The Atlantic Magazine, among many other sources, reports that the answer is staggeringly high. This post (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/contract-security-clearance-charts/66059/) is chock full of numbers. But let's just focus on "Top Secret" (supposedly the "all access" highest level but actually not). The Atlantic reports that nearly half a million people (including at one time both Manning and Snowden) have this level of access.
If half a million people have access to information what's the chance it will stay secret? The answer is known to extremely high precision. There is exactly zero chance that the information will stay secret for any length of time. We know about Manning and Snowden. But how about the people we don't know about because they haven't gone public with a big splash and gotten a lot of media coverage? Madden and Snowden were both Americans that chose to take what they learned to the press. What about the possibility of people taking this kind of information to Al Qaeda or the Taliban?
Actually, I think this is unlikely. Both of these organizations smell bad and the intelligence agencies track them closely. So, if they managed to get an inside connection it is likely the intelligence community would get a whiff. But it is not impossible. In the '30s the Russians managed to infiltrate a number of people into British Intelligence. They ultimately rose to occupy positions at the highest levels of MI6. They were not exposed until decades later. If you want details, check out the Wikipedia page on "Cambridge 5". I will have more to say on who is more likely to have gotten their hands on this kind of material later but first . . .
Manning and Snowden share another attribute. Both were very low level employees with some technical expertise. Manning's technical skill was sufficient to land him a job as a "developer" at a software company before he enlisted in the military. Snowden did "IT Security" work and was a Systems Administrator working on classified facilities during his tenure within various components of the intelligence community. Neither of them made any kind of mark as some kind of super computer guy. As far as I can tell they were both journeyman IT types. I am very familiar with this type because it's the kind of work I spent my professional life at. We are smarter than average but there are lots of us.
Manning and Snowden are also similar in that there are red flags associated with both of them. Manning had a long history of personal problems. He now claims to have "gender identity disorder". He had no business having access to classified data and a competent background check would have shown this. But he got his "Top Secret" ticket punched anyhow, apparently without difficulty. (This is another thread that has received little coverage.) As far as I know there is nothing in Snowden's background or makeup that would have alerted anyone. But there is a fundamental question, mostly unasked, as to why either of them had access to the information they had access to.
Manning was in the Army and was doing intelligence work related to the Iraq war. He was a Private and his duties had nothing to do with anything diplomatic? So why did he have access to hundreds of thousands of supposedly classified diplomatic documents? Neither his rank (as low as it goes) nor his duties (supporting the Army mission in Iraq) justify access to these documents? They didn't but he obviously obtained access anyhow. As far as I can tell the security on the server that held these documents was so lax that someone with a modest amount of computer expertise and an interest in finding them was able to bypass security. And as far as I can tell, Manning's access did not set off any alarms. After the story broke and people traced his activities (probably with Manning's help), only then did anyone know what had gone wrong. If an Army Private in Iraq could gain access to these documents, then who else could? The answer is hundreds of thousands of people.
The Snowden case is similar. I think Snowden's IT expertise was greater. And, since Snowden came later, he was in a position to learn from Manning's experience. But Snowden was not interested in keeping his identity secret for any length of time as Manning had been. Snowden was also more intelligent (in my opinion) and did not have the many personal problems Manning had. He had, as far as I can tell a very nice and very pretty (the pictures prove this) girlfriend. And before everything blew up they seemed to be having a good relationship. But at bottom the Snowden case is like the Manning case in the sense that it is important to ask the question "why did he have access to those documents?"
By the nature of the job, System Administrators have a lot of access. Among their duties is that of setting and maintaining security levels for all the parts of whatever systems they administer. They know the security controls better than anyone else. It's their job. And its a very unsexy job. So it's the type of job that attracts "slow track" management types to the supervisory positions above them. These management types also frequently get yelled at for doing their job too well. It is common for one of them to get called on the carpet because some well connected hotdog can't get access to something he wants to get access to but is not supposed to get access to. These management types tend to be happy when no one is yelling at them rather than being happy when their subordinates are doing their jobs well. So the quality of work frequently depends more than it should on the personal skill and moral fortitude of low level people like Snowden.
That's inside baseball. Its something I know because I've been there. But there is a huge red flag that Snowden raised and the media has completely ignored. Snowden said he got his last job at Booz Allen specifically because it would permit him broader access to the kind of material he was interested in. There has been no follow up by the media on this. Booz Allen has been around a long time. They have been successful at getting and keeping defense and intelligence contracts for a long time.
This depends on getting and keeping profitable contracts. It is more important to keep the government people who award contracts happy than it is to do good work. In short, they have mastered the office politics of keeping in the good graces of the military and intelligence community brass. What they look for from someone like Snowden is an ability to do adequate quality work quickly and an ability to not embarrass the brass. A good way to do this is to take shortcuts on the assumption you will not get caught. Shortcuts result in security loopholes that can be easily exploited by someone with the right mix of skill and knowledge.
Snowden was working in an obscure corner of the intelligence establishment in Hawaii. Like Manning in Iraq, it is hard to imagine a place further from the District of Columbia, home of the State Department and the NSA. But in this modern era networking makes distance unimportant. Connectivity is what is important. It is now obvious that connectivity permitted Manning to access political documents presumably housed on State Department servers. It is now also obvious that connectivity permitted Snowden to access political/management documents presumably housed on NSA servers. The NSA prides itself on being the best damn security shop in the world by a mile. What we now know Snowden successfully accessed (and again as far as we know without raising alarms) should be profoundly embarrassing to the NSA. I note that so far I haven't heard of any NSA brass or contracting companies getting fired.
Now let me circle back to the "who else could get access" question. Any "secret" held by hundreds of thousands of people is not a secret. What is surprising about the revelations credited to Manning and Snowden is not what they revealed. It's that these secrets and others like them haven't been revealed tens, hundreds, even thousands of other times. And this begs the question of whether they in fact haven't.
And this brings us to the dumb show and corresponding media coverage of the "shocking revelations" that the NSA has been spying on "friendly" foreign diplomats. The best single reference on intelligence matters up to and through World War II is "The Code Breakers" by David Kahn. People have between concealing messages going back at least to the Egyptians and the Romans. And during this entire period other people have been trying to "crack" these concealed messages, and they have often been remarkably successful.
The modern era of this sort of thing goes back hundreds of years in Europe. And it's not just Europe. The ancient Chinese were also noted for this sort of thing. Anyhow, in the European era it was common for governments to create "black chambers". Mail would be intercepted, opened, copied, and put back into circulation in such a manner that the tampering was nearly impossible to detect. The copied messages were decoded and the contents used to political and military advantage. And the old dictate "keep your enemies close and your friends closer" was the order of the day.
Certainly all kinds of means were used in time of war. But efforts continued during peacetime. The Russians famously spied on everyone including their erstwhile friends the British, French, and Americans during the thirties. And it's not just the "bad old Ruskies" or, before you ask, the "bad old Nazis". Angela Merkel, the current German Chancellor was born and raised in what was then East Germany. The East Germans ran a large, extensive, and very effective spying operation into what was then West Germany. Some of it was for their Russian masters but a lot of it was for domestic consumption.
And then there's the French. They have been running a large industrial/political espionage operation for decades. A friend of mine worked for Boeing for a while. Boeing gave employees traveling in France explicit instructions for taking extraordinary security measures while traveling in France. Why? France was interested in both of Boeing's lines of business. They are competitors in civil aviation against Boeing commercial jets and in the military sphere, selling fighter jets and other kinds of equipment that Boeing Defense and Space also sells.
But you say "it was the cold war" in response to East Germany or "we've never been that close" in response to France. Well, how about an ally that is closer to us than anyone but the U.K., Israel. There have been not one but several scandals involving Israel spying on us. And that ignores the time the Israelis sank a U.S. spy ship during the "Six Day War" in the '60s. The official story is that it was "accidental" but that's an obvious cover story, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Why was the ship sunk? Because the Israeli military had some tricks up its sleeve that they didn't want the U.S. to know about.
Both Manning and Snowden have exposed secrets. The official line is that these are very damaging to U.S. interests. And they are. But they are not damaging because foreigners, especially the Europeans, didn't know these things. It's because they no longer have "plausible deniability". They could no longer pretend they didn't know these things. And that's embarrassing to them. It makes them look incompetent to the people that elect them. If you are embarrassed by some one, in this case the U.S., then you want to hit back. So we are being hounded from all sides.
It's also useful to get and apply whatever leverage comes your way when dealing with a powerful country like the U.S. There may be some countries like Brazil where these revelations may actually be a surprise. But here too, the U.S. has been treating Central and South American countries as second class citizens for at least a hundred years. And we have repeatedly meddled in their internal affairs. Quick: How many coup attempts has the U.S. sponsored in South America? How about Central America? So if you are a Central or South American country and you get a chance to get a little back from the U.S., it's an opportunity not to be wasted.
All of the above is publically known to people who take the time to become informed. It would be nice if the media took the time to become informed or assumed the public had the sophistication of a tree squirrel. But they don't. And the public time after time vindicates the media's low opinion of their viewers and (small number of remaining) readers. It's very depressing.
And it's worth while taking a look at how we got here. A standard bureaucratic tactic is to engage in empire building, gathering more power at the expense of your bureaucratic colleagues. One of the manifestations of empire building is what are often referred to as "silos". These are tube-like structures within which information flows up and down the organization. They are nicknamed silos because information does not flow across to other parallel organizations. We saw this in the run up to 9/11. The CIA didn't share with the FBI and the NSA didn't share with anybody. As a result the pattern wasn't clear because people inside one silo couldn't see the information in the other silos. After 9/11 sharing was the new thing. So databases were opened up and linked together. This was done quickly and sloppily.
And at the same time vast new databases (i.e. all the telephone records the NSA now routinely collects) were put online and connected up so that everyone (as in hundreds of thousands of people) could see everything. The government went from not enough sharing to too much sharing. Everyone with a Top Secret clearance can see everything. No one wants to be the person who stopped some other person from seeing some piece of data that would have stopped a terrorist attack. And no one wants to be the person who stops some massive collection project that could have collected the piece of information that could have stopped a terrorist attack. We are seeing this latter effect play itself out in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. "Gee, if we had just collected some more data we could have stopped those guys." The problem the intelligence community now has is that they are literally drowning in data. So much stuff is coming in that no one can deal with any of it.
This is one of these "judgment" things. It requires judgment to decide how much is the right amount. But if judgment is applied then some of the time someone will get it wrong. And then someone will take a pot shot. Then everyone will hunker down and things will get even worse. And the media is the last to champion judgment and the application of common sense. It is much more fun and better for ratings to showcase some showboating politician jumping down the throat of someone who applied judgment and was unlucky. And it is an even better show to feature some loud mouth going after entirely the wrong target. I frequently despair of the media and the vast part of the audience who will not put the effort in to sorting the wheat from the chaff. But probably, "'twas ever thus".
Recently Snowden has been revealing that the NSA has been spying on pretty much everybody, friends and enemies alike. This is "shocking news" to the media and our allies. There are two things going on here. In the case of the news its the result of a lack of journalistic competence and the usual "fixate on the shiny object" mentality that governs news decisions. In the case of our allies its a matter of gaining a tactical advantage in the "power" game. I'll be back with more on both these subjects but first let me step back.
We have had two giant leakers in the last few years, Edward Snowden and, before him, Bradley Manning. At the personal level they are completely different. But at a higher level they are both the same. Ben Franklin in the 1700's famously opined "three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead". It's a cute way at getting to the fact that a secret shared among a lot of people is bound to leak out. Franklin's idea of "a lot" was three. So how many people have access to classified data? The Atlantic Magazine, among many other sources, reports that the answer is staggeringly high. This post (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/contract-security-clearance-charts/66059/) is chock full of numbers. But let's just focus on "Top Secret" (supposedly the "all access" highest level but actually not). The Atlantic reports that nearly half a million people (including at one time both Manning and Snowden) have this level of access.
If half a million people have access to information what's the chance it will stay secret? The answer is known to extremely high precision. There is exactly zero chance that the information will stay secret for any length of time. We know about Manning and Snowden. But how about the people we don't know about because they haven't gone public with a big splash and gotten a lot of media coverage? Madden and Snowden were both Americans that chose to take what they learned to the press. What about the possibility of people taking this kind of information to Al Qaeda or the Taliban?
Actually, I think this is unlikely. Both of these organizations smell bad and the intelligence agencies track them closely. So, if they managed to get an inside connection it is likely the intelligence community would get a whiff. But it is not impossible. In the '30s the Russians managed to infiltrate a number of people into British Intelligence. They ultimately rose to occupy positions at the highest levels of MI6. They were not exposed until decades later. If you want details, check out the Wikipedia page on "Cambridge 5". I will have more to say on who is more likely to have gotten their hands on this kind of material later but first . . .
Manning and Snowden share another attribute. Both were very low level employees with some technical expertise. Manning's technical skill was sufficient to land him a job as a "developer" at a software company before he enlisted in the military. Snowden did "IT Security" work and was a Systems Administrator working on classified facilities during his tenure within various components of the intelligence community. Neither of them made any kind of mark as some kind of super computer guy. As far as I can tell they were both journeyman IT types. I am very familiar with this type because it's the kind of work I spent my professional life at. We are smarter than average but there are lots of us.
Manning and Snowden are also similar in that there are red flags associated with both of them. Manning had a long history of personal problems. He now claims to have "gender identity disorder". He had no business having access to classified data and a competent background check would have shown this. But he got his "Top Secret" ticket punched anyhow, apparently without difficulty. (This is another thread that has received little coverage.) As far as I know there is nothing in Snowden's background or makeup that would have alerted anyone. But there is a fundamental question, mostly unasked, as to why either of them had access to the information they had access to.
Manning was in the Army and was doing intelligence work related to the Iraq war. He was a Private and his duties had nothing to do with anything diplomatic? So why did he have access to hundreds of thousands of supposedly classified diplomatic documents? Neither his rank (as low as it goes) nor his duties (supporting the Army mission in Iraq) justify access to these documents? They didn't but he obviously obtained access anyhow. As far as I can tell the security on the server that held these documents was so lax that someone with a modest amount of computer expertise and an interest in finding them was able to bypass security. And as far as I can tell, Manning's access did not set off any alarms. After the story broke and people traced his activities (probably with Manning's help), only then did anyone know what had gone wrong. If an Army Private in Iraq could gain access to these documents, then who else could? The answer is hundreds of thousands of people.
The Snowden case is similar. I think Snowden's IT expertise was greater. And, since Snowden came later, he was in a position to learn from Manning's experience. But Snowden was not interested in keeping his identity secret for any length of time as Manning had been. Snowden was also more intelligent (in my opinion) and did not have the many personal problems Manning had. He had, as far as I can tell a very nice and very pretty (the pictures prove this) girlfriend. And before everything blew up they seemed to be having a good relationship. But at bottom the Snowden case is like the Manning case in the sense that it is important to ask the question "why did he have access to those documents?"
By the nature of the job, System Administrators have a lot of access. Among their duties is that of setting and maintaining security levels for all the parts of whatever systems they administer. They know the security controls better than anyone else. It's their job. And its a very unsexy job. So it's the type of job that attracts "slow track" management types to the supervisory positions above them. These management types also frequently get yelled at for doing their job too well. It is common for one of them to get called on the carpet because some well connected hotdog can't get access to something he wants to get access to but is not supposed to get access to. These management types tend to be happy when no one is yelling at them rather than being happy when their subordinates are doing their jobs well. So the quality of work frequently depends more than it should on the personal skill and moral fortitude of low level people like Snowden.
That's inside baseball. Its something I know because I've been there. But there is a huge red flag that Snowden raised and the media has completely ignored. Snowden said he got his last job at Booz Allen specifically because it would permit him broader access to the kind of material he was interested in. There has been no follow up by the media on this. Booz Allen has been around a long time. They have been successful at getting and keeping defense and intelligence contracts for a long time.
This depends on getting and keeping profitable contracts. It is more important to keep the government people who award contracts happy than it is to do good work. In short, they have mastered the office politics of keeping in the good graces of the military and intelligence community brass. What they look for from someone like Snowden is an ability to do adequate quality work quickly and an ability to not embarrass the brass. A good way to do this is to take shortcuts on the assumption you will not get caught. Shortcuts result in security loopholes that can be easily exploited by someone with the right mix of skill and knowledge.
Snowden was working in an obscure corner of the intelligence establishment in Hawaii. Like Manning in Iraq, it is hard to imagine a place further from the District of Columbia, home of the State Department and the NSA. But in this modern era networking makes distance unimportant. Connectivity is what is important. It is now obvious that connectivity permitted Manning to access political documents presumably housed on State Department servers. It is now also obvious that connectivity permitted Snowden to access political/management documents presumably housed on NSA servers. The NSA prides itself on being the best damn security shop in the world by a mile. What we now know Snowden successfully accessed (and again as far as we know without raising alarms) should be profoundly embarrassing to the NSA. I note that so far I haven't heard of any NSA brass or contracting companies getting fired.
Now let me circle back to the "who else could get access" question. Any "secret" held by hundreds of thousands of people is not a secret. What is surprising about the revelations credited to Manning and Snowden is not what they revealed. It's that these secrets and others like them haven't been revealed tens, hundreds, even thousands of other times. And this begs the question of whether they in fact haven't.
And this brings us to the dumb show and corresponding media coverage of the "shocking revelations" that the NSA has been spying on "friendly" foreign diplomats. The best single reference on intelligence matters up to and through World War II is "The Code Breakers" by David Kahn. People have between concealing messages going back at least to the Egyptians and the Romans. And during this entire period other people have been trying to "crack" these concealed messages, and they have often been remarkably successful.
The modern era of this sort of thing goes back hundreds of years in Europe. And it's not just Europe. The ancient Chinese were also noted for this sort of thing. Anyhow, in the European era it was common for governments to create "black chambers". Mail would be intercepted, opened, copied, and put back into circulation in such a manner that the tampering was nearly impossible to detect. The copied messages were decoded and the contents used to political and military advantage. And the old dictate "keep your enemies close and your friends closer" was the order of the day.
Certainly all kinds of means were used in time of war. But efforts continued during peacetime. The Russians famously spied on everyone including their erstwhile friends the British, French, and Americans during the thirties. And it's not just the "bad old Ruskies" or, before you ask, the "bad old Nazis". Angela Merkel, the current German Chancellor was born and raised in what was then East Germany. The East Germans ran a large, extensive, and very effective spying operation into what was then West Germany. Some of it was for their Russian masters but a lot of it was for domestic consumption.
And then there's the French. They have been running a large industrial/political espionage operation for decades. A friend of mine worked for Boeing for a while. Boeing gave employees traveling in France explicit instructions for taking extraordinary security measures while traveling in France. Why? France was interested in both of Boeing's lines of business. They are competitors in civil aviation against Boeing commercial jets and in the military sphere, selling fighter jets and other kinds of equipment that Boeing Defense and Space also sells.
But you say "it was the cold war" in response to East Germany or "we've never been that close" in response to France. Well, how about an ally that is closer to us than anyone but the U.K., Israel. There have been not one but several scandals involving Israel spying on us. And that ignores the time the Israelis sank a U.S. spy ship during the "Six Day War" in the '60s. The official story is that it was "accidental" but that's an obvious cover story, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Why was the ship sunk? Because the Israeli military had some tricks up its sleeve that they didn't want the U.S. to know about.
Both Manning and Snowden have exposed secrets. The official line is that these are very damaging to U.S. interests. And they are. But they are not damaging because foreigners, especially the Europeans, didn't know these things. It's because they no longer have "plausible deniability". They could no longer pretend they didn't know these things. And that's embarrassing to them. It makes them look incompetent to the people that elect them. If you are embarrassed by some one, in this case the U.S., then you want to hit back. So we are being hounded from all sides.
It's also useful to get and apply whatever leverage comes your way when dealing with a powerful country like the U.S. There may be some countries like Brazil where these revelations may actually be a surprise. But here too, the U.S. has been treating Central and South American countries as second class citizens for at least a hundred years. And we have repeatedly meddled in their internal affairs. Quick: How many coup attempts has the U.S. sponsored in South America? How about Central America? So if you are a Central or South American country and you get a chance to get a little back from the U.S., it's an opportunity not to be wasted.
All of the above is publically known to people who take the time to become informed. It would be nice if the media took the time to become informed or assumed the public had the sophistication of a tree squirrel. But they don't. And the public time after time vindicates the media's low opinion of their viewers and (small number of remaining) readers. It's very depressing.
And it's worth while taking a look at how we got here. A standard bureaucratic tactic is to engage in empire building, gathering more power at the expense of your bureaucratic colleagues. One of the manifestations of empire building is what are often referred to as "silos". These are tube-like structures within which information flows up and down the organization. They are nicknamed silos because information does not flow across to other parallel organizations. We saw this in the run up to 9/11. The CIA didn't share with the FBI and the NSA didn't share with anybody. As a result the pattern wasn't clear because people inside one silo couldn't see the information in the other silos. After 9/11 sharing was the new thing. So databases were opened up and linked together. This was done quickly and sloppily.
And at the same time vast new databases (i.e. all the telephone records the NSA now routinely collects) were put online and connected up so that everyone (as in hundreds of thousands of people) could see everything. The government went from not enough sharing to too much sharing. Everyone with a Top Secret clearance can see everything. No one wants to be the person who stopped some other person from seeing some piece of data that would have stopped a terrorist attack. And no one wants to be the person who stops some massive collection project that could have collected the piece of information that could have stopped a terrorist attack. We are seeing this latter effect play itself out in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. "Gee, if we had just collected some more data we could have stopped those guys." The problem the intelligence community now has is that they are literally drowning in data. So much stuff is coming in that no one can deal with any of it.
This is one of these "judgment" things. It requires judgment to decide how much is the right amount. But if judgment is applied then some of the time someone will get it wrong. And then someone will take a pot shot. Then everyone will hunker down and things will get even worse. And the media is the last to champion judgment and the application of common sense. It is much more fun and better for ratings to showcase some showboating politician jumping down the throat of someone who applied judgment and was unlucky. And it is an even better show to feature some loud mouth going after entirely the wrong target. I frequently despair of the media and the vast part of the audience who will not put the effort in to sorting the wheat from the chaff. But probably, "'twas ever thus".
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