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We have an op-ed in the Providence Journal about social adjustment to geolocation technologies.

There is also a transcript on-line of an interview that will be published in Architecture and Governance Magazine, which is oriented toward information technology managers.

In Blown to Bits, we stress that search is a new form of power. You have to hand it to Google; they recognize that sharing the power is good for everyone. Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) empower everyone to find out who is looking for what.

The site pitches itself as a set of business tools — figure out who your customers are, predict demand, etc. But you can use it for anything. For example, where are people most interested in “anthrax”? Iraq. (Locations are determined by IP addresses; there’s no way to know who’s actually doing the searching. The people in Iraq who are interested in “anthrax” could well be Americans.) How about “Nuclear bomb”? Pakistan, though the U.S. is right behind, and interest everywhere is waning. (The data go back to 2004, but you can choose a different time frame.) The next two lovely examples are courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman. “Email Extractor Lite 1.4” — a tool for extracting email addresses from large quantities of text — has most interest in the west African countries of Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. You don’t suppose people there want to use it to produce spam, do you? And “keygen” — a source of digital keys for unlocking pirated software — is of most interest in Cambodia, Russia, and Belarus.

Have fun. Your level of worldly experience — and perhaps the sickness of your mind — are the only limits to what you can learn about the interests of our fellow members of the human race.

The Washington Post reports (picked up by the Boston Globe) that many police forces are attaching GPS devices to cars to track suspects’ movements. When charged with a crime, suspects have challenged the evidence on the basis that it was obtained without a search warrant. Courts have accepted the explanation that no warrants were needed because this is just a technological version of what the police could have done by following the suspect in person.

Koan 5: “More of the Same Can Be a Whole New Thing.” It sure feels that way, doesn’t it? GPSs are expensive now, but getting cheaper quickly, like all digital technologies. Suppose they cost only a few bucks. Then if a crime is committed in a neighborhood, and the police want to see who from that neighborhood returns to the crime scene, they could just attach GPS’s to everyone’s cars, and close in on the one that goes to the crime scene. Without any worry that the rest of us could take umbrage at the police tracking us without probable cause to think we had committed any crime.

As widely reported in the British press (Guardian story, Telegraph story), a UN report considers British libel laws an infringement on basic human rights — the right of free expression. The problem is libel tourism, where a wealthy celebrity can sue for defamation in Britain on the basis of something published elsewhere. The laws in Britain place a much heavier burden on the defense in libel cases. This is a bits problem — any time someone in the UK views a web page, it’s considered “publication” in the UK, wherever the web server or actual content source may be. In Blown to Bits, we talk about this (and in particular the case of Australian businessman Joseph Gutnick, a resident of Australia, where the laws follow the British standard.

Unless checked, libel tourism is going to make U.S. publishers self-censor, trumping First Amendment guarantees. So far down the list of international issues for this political campaign it won’t even be noticed, but a potentially serious issue for the future.

HIPAA is the very strong privacy policy for medical records to which all doctors and hospitals must adhere. As we blogged recently, the Department of Homeland Security has issued guidelines stating that border agents may seize and examine any laptop — even, presumably, the laptop of a doctor who happens to have carried medical data with him out of and into the U.S. (Here are the actual DHS policies. They are extraordinarily sweeping and worth reading.) ¬†A blogging doctor’s explains the inconsistency.

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is the law that governs the privacy of your medical information. It is very, very detailed, and requires quite a bit from your doctor. You’ve signed a form at the office of every provider you’ve visited that notifies you of your privacy rights. I cannot discuss your care in a hospital elevator. I can’t send you an email regarding your health without making it very clear that any information in the email cannot be considered secure. I cannot disclose your health information to anyone else except under very specific and limited circumstances. HIPAA has radically changed the way we do things with health information (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).

Moving on to Homeland Security—DHS agents may, for any reason or none at all, seize my laptop and demand any security or encryption codes. My laptop not infrequently contains information covered by HIPAA (known as PHI, or Protected Health Information). Because of that, my laptop is secured via HIPAA-compliant security measures. Under the new DHS guidelines, I can be required to hand over my laptop and help officers access the information¬†without any suspicion of wrong-doing. We have a little problem here…

Unlimited government authority is always dangerous. I wonder if Chertoff plans to blow off this medical privacy fol-de-rol as a threat to national security.

We noted yesterday that McCain’s campaign has been promising a technology policy for a long time. It was finally put up on his web site today.

For the most part, it isn’t really a policy. It’s mostly vague, aspirational statements, many of which are in flat contradiction with each other. Example: (a) “John McCain will focus on policies that leave consumers free to access the content they choose”; (b) “He championed laws that ‚Ķ protected kids from harmful Internet content”; (c) “John McCain has fought special interests in Washington to force the Federal government to auction inefficiently-used wireless spectrum to companies that will instead use the spectrum to provide high-speed Internet service options to millions of Americans.” All fine things, if that’s all that is said. BUT the “policy” fails to note that the laws referred to in (b) have been overturned by federal courts because they unconstitutionally make (a) impossible. And the plan referred to in (c) is the one we blogged about several weeks ago, for a public Internet censored so ruthlessly that it couldn’t even carry an email that would be inappropriate for a 5-year-old.

These issues are not simple. Blown to Bits is largely about how hard it is to reconcile conflicting values. They can’t be reconciled by apple-pie rhetoric that leaves doubt the candidate even recognizes the tensions exist. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to complain about this sound bite from the prologue: “In the last decade, there has been an explosion in the ways Americans communicate with family, friends, and business partners; shop and connect with global markets; educate themselves; become more engaged politically; and consume and even create entertainment.” Nice metaphor, there.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing to me is the “policy’s” posture toward intellectual property: that it is something to protect. Does he realize how the explosion happened? McCain seems to be in the grip of the entertainment industry and the law firms. The Internet is the greatest thing ever invented for inventiveness by small businesses, and this is a big-business policy platform. Invention is being choked by our intellectual policy apparatus, and this platform would strengthen it, not relax it. I am not surprised by the absence of actual proposals about democratic empowerment, collaboration, and civic engagement that the Internet might support. But does McCain even realize that digital technology is going to be the wellspring of economic growth in the U.S. — and that won’t come just from making Disney and Comcast yet more powerful?

For an even more intemperate response to this long-awaited policy, read David Weinberger’s blog.

We talk a lot about how digital technologies are improving, and in particular making it possible to do automated language-processing tasks that used to require human intervention. A couple of nice examples that the technologies are not perfect yet. First, a reminder that automated language translation still requires human checking, especially if the output is going to be publicly deployed:

Or this attempt at automated cake decoration, which triggered an error message in the decorating software:

Thanks to Adweek for the restaurant sign and to Livejournal for the cake.

Peter Gordon of the Hong Kong Standard has a nice article about the book, and its relevance to a variety of issues facing Hong Kong.

The New York Times features “bits” stories today that are two sides of the same coin. On the front page, tech writer John Markoff reports that the shooting war between Russia and Georgia was preceded by a cyberwar — specifically, a “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attack, aimed at critical computers in Georgia. A DDOS is simply a bombardment of Internet-connected computers with messages in such enormous quantities that even figuring out that the messages should be ignored overwhelms the computers’ network bandwidth and processing power. What makes it “distributed” is that the messages are coming not from a single source but from hundreds or thousands of machines, perhaps distributed around the world. And that’s what makes it hard to draw the natural conclusion, that the attack was coming from Russia, or even that Russian hands were on the trigger. Tracing the origins of an attack like this is very difficult, since the machines sending the messages may themselves have been taken over for this purpose by a remote attack, without the owner’s knowledge.

On the Opinion page, Garrett Graff — with whom I had friendly relations when he wrote for the Crimson — has an interesting analysis of the story behind Obama’s promise to text-message his VP choice. That database of contact info is hugely valuable in a political campaign, especially now that many young voters don’t have landlines. Badger them with text messages and they are more likely to vote. It’s how organizing now happens, and campaigns are about organization. McCain doesn’t seem to have figured that out yet. As far as I can see (the search window on his web site is broken), McCain sees information technology as mostly something to be feared. The only reference to the Internet is on the “Sanctity of Life” page. Reports keep coming (e.g. from Kevin Werbach here) that McCain’s technology policy will be announced any day now. But even when and if it comes, comparisons like the one Graff makes leave doubt that McCain really gets it in a way that will usefully guide government actions.

The three MIT students are talking a bit more about what they did and did not intend to say at the talk in Las Vegas last Sunday, before it was blocked by a judge’s temporary restraining order. The Globe and the Tech both have informative stories. The slides of the talk itself were distributed to registrants at the conference before the students and MIT had been sued. They are worth perusing (pdf here). You don’t need to parse the cryptography slides to be interested in the photographs of physical insecurities: unlocked doors, unattended equipment, etc.

Yesterday’s Herald story is also well-informed. And the comments seem to be running about 4:1 against the MBTA. Of course, the MBTA is a favorite whipping boy in the Boston area. This is the same organization that earlier in the summer went after Legal Seafoods, the great seafood restaurant chain, for some ads that teasingly compared MBTA conductors to halibut.

Media Nation has the right take on this. “Charles Evans Hughes forgot something when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark¬†Near v. Minnesota decision in 1931.¬†The chief justice listed national security, obscenity and the imminent threat of violence as essentially the only three reasons that the courts could ever step in and order someone not to exercise his right to free speech. What he left out: information that could result in the MBTA’s losing some fare money. What a bonehead, eh?” The Media Nation post goes on to note that the judge who issued the TRO has a history of offenses to the First Amendment.

Discussions of security problems at places like DEFCON enhance security. Let’s suppose the T had answered their phone when the students first tried to contact them and the whole thing had gone no farther than that. Then the T would have had the benefit of what those three undergraduates had learned. With a discussion at the conference, they would have had the ideas debugged by many far more experienced security experts too. Openness is the way to the truth; stifling free speech makes matters worse, not better.

Last month, Governor Patrick was being discussed as a possible Supreme Court nominee under an Obama administration. He knows about this case; supposedly he weighed in on it. The MBTA reports to him. He supposedly cares about education, and constitutional liberties. Get going, Mr. Governor. Tell Daniel Grabauskas, the T head, to drop the suit. And to stop complaining about fish jokes, too, and get his organization focused on locking its doors, at least!