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In Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits we discuss the Total Information Awareness program, which was cut short but replaced by several other programs aimed at identifying terrorists by sifting through massive quantities of everyday data. A National Research Council report released today comes to the conclusion that such data mining efforts don’t work very well and wouldn’t be a good idea even if they did. The panel is no bunch of hippie leftists; it includes a former Secretary of Defense, computer science experts, and a former president of MIT.

The CNet summary of the report is here. The bottom line:

The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn’t really work.

A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.

This reminds me of the NRC report on strong encryption (Chapter 5), which recommended against legislative efforts to prevent the export of encryption software. It didn’t immediately settle the political argument, but eventually reason won out. Will reason prevail here, and will we go back to a probable-cause basis for searches of our personal information? Or will we act on arguments like the one Senator Gregg used in favor of regulating encryption: “Nothing’s ever perfect. If you don’t try, you’re never going to accomplish it. If you do try, you’ve at least got some opportunity for accomplishing it”?

In Blown to Bits we talk about the Electronic Data Recorders in new cars, which document critical data about speed and braking. In case of an accident, the police and the insurance company will know far better what happened just before the accident than they used to, when they had to rely on witness testimony and accident reconstruction from skid marks and the like.

Here’s another innovation in digital automotive technology. Ford has introduced a digital key that sets the vehicle’s operating parameters. So if you don’t want Johnny driving the car over 80mph, you just make sure that Johnny’s key won’t let him. Your own key fits the same ignition lock, but lets you drive as fast as you want.

Other things the key controls are chimes that sound when the vehicle’s speed passes certain thresholds, — and the stereo volume, which can be maxed out at 44% of the system’s capabilities.

Though the key is programmed at home, it appears that the programmability is limited. You can’t set the top speed at 60, for example, only at 80. That is probably a good idea — there are occasions when you need a burst of speed for collision avoidance. But no reason why the codes couldn’t do something more complicated in the future — such as letting you drive over 60mph only for short periods.

Surprise, surprise: Parents like this feature and kids don’t.

I have an opinion piece in tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor on privacy of email. It’s up on the Web already.

It’s easier to document the erosion of privacy due to technology advances and fear of terrorism than to formulate legislative proposals to counter the trend. The Center for Democracy and Technology has a good summary here. The bottom line:

In short, the next President and Congress should —

• Update electronic communications laws to account for the way that Americans communicate today;

• Restore checks and balances on government surveillance, including vigorous judicial and congressional oversight of surveillance programs;

• Review information sharing policies and practices to ensure that the government can “connect the dots” while preserving privacy; and

• Revisit the REAL ID Act and ensure that governmental identification programs include proper privacy and security protections.

The first bullet refers to the reality that in a very few years, many Americans have moved to keep their email “in the cloud” — that is, Gmail or Yahoo! mail or a similar web-based service, leaving them dependent on the practices of those companies to deal with government demands for copies of their email.

5 pages, and a quick read.

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain’s top economic adviser held up a Blackberry and proclaimed,

“He did this. Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years — comes right through the Commerce Committee — so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create, and that’s what he did.”

The next day the campaign characterized this statement as a “boneheaded joke.” So be it. Everybody has to disown their surrogates’ statements from time to time.

But a related claim appears on the McCain campaign’s Web site, on the Technology Issues page.

He is the former chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The Committee plays a major role in the development of technology policy, specifically any legislation affecting communications services, the Internet, cable television and other technologies. Under John McCain’s guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park.

Now the success of Wi-Fi is an important example of what spectrum deregulation can make possible. And the explosive growth of of Wi-Fi as a consumer product did in fact happen during years when McCain was chair of the Senate Commerce Committee (for the record, from 1997-2001 and 2003-2005). But what happened to Wi-Fi policy during these years? Basically nothing.

As readers of Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits know, the important policy step happened two decades earlier, under the administration of Jimmy Carter, of all people. That is when forces within the FCC started to push for unlicensed use of a small spectrum band — they wound up using a 100MHz band starting at 2.4GHz, because it was mostly used for microwave ovens, not communication technologies, so fewer parties would complain about the risks of “interference.”

What happened in the late 1990s was not new spectrum policy, but the inexorable advance of Moore’s Law to the point where wireless processing could occur in home computers and hundred-dollar wireless routers. So unless McCain’s guiding hand helped pass Moore’s Law, this claim seems utterly groundless. (Perhaps someone could ask him to explain it.)

Thanks to Michael Marcus for pointing this out.

In a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the lessons to be drawn from the aftermath of a six-year-old bankruptcy story about United Airlines carelessly posted on a Bloomberg site, comparing it to wacky Internet rumors about the presidential candidates:

With human judgment so eclipsed by responses to atomized, instant data, can there be much doubt that intentional manipulations—of the markets, and of the electorate—should be expected?

Yesterday an anonymous citizen journalist posted to a CNN site that Steve Jobs had been rushed to a hospital after a heart attack, and Apple’s stock dropped 5.4%. The SEC is investigating.

Of course there are morals here. That citizen journalism, the exploitation of millions of eyes and ears through the wonder of Internet connectivity, is a wonderful evolution of journalism, except when it isn’t because any damn fool can say anything and there’s no validation or fact-checking. That instantaneity, much as we love it, sometimes has a big pricetag. And maybe that it’s worth asking whether the law protecting CNN in this case (it bears no responsibility for the anonymous poster’s falsehood) may be a little too generous.

But mostly what I’m thinking is that it didn’t take long for one of my predictions to come true. The other one, about the opportunity to manipulate the election by spreading a last-minute rumor, wouldn’t be timely quite yet. But I’ll bet there are people thinking about how to pull it off.

A report out of the University of Toronto, sponsored by the OpenNet Initiative, reveals that text messages sent via the Chinese variant of the popular Skype software, known as TOM-Skype, are not only filtered and censored, but stored, apparently for later analysis. The report is only 12 well structured pages and easy to read. There is also a New York Times story about these discoveries.

In 2005, Skype, which is owned by eBay, formed a business relationship with TOM Online, a Chinese provider of wireless services, to launch the Chinese version of Skype called TOM-Skype. The service advertises end-to-end encryption, making it a favorite of dissidents and democracy advocates. The Epoch Times reported, for example,

Skype has become a popular communication tool among democracy activists in mainland China in recent years. Due to its excellent vocal clarity, fewer imposed restrictions, and an end-to-end encryption feature making it difficult to monitor, many Chinese democracy activists have favored Skype over traditional telephones and other similar communication tools.

It’s been known for some time that not all text messages were getting through, and that mentioning Falun Gong and such prohibited institutions would cause messages to go undelivered. When called on it, Skype claimed that the messages were simply discarded. Not true.

Not only not true, but drastically not true. The full text of the messages is retained on servers in China along with the identifying information about their source and destination — and so are some messages without any significant keywords, apparently logged based simply on their sender and recipient information.

Due to weak security on the TOM-Skype servers, the researcher was able to download more than one hundred thousand messages and analyze them. Many mentioned the Communist Party or quitting the party or Falun, but others mentioned democracy, the Olympic Games, Taiwan, or milk powder.

The technology is there to do the surveillance — and much of it is in private hands, cooperating with governments in highly profitable ventures that are not what they seem to be.

Skype unequivocally states that there is no surveillance of voice conversations. But why should anyone believe them?

Blown to Bits will be re-launched next Tuesday, October 7, in a conversation hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where I am privileged to be a Fellow. The event will take place in Maxwell Dworkin G125 at 6PM, and will be followed by a reception in the lobby. We’ll finish in plenty of time for people to go off and watch the presidential debate. Further details here. Hal, Ken, and Harry will all be there. Come and join us!

Readers of B2B Chapter 8 (Bits in the Air) know about the dynamic of spectrum utilization. Incumbents who got use of the spectrum when technologies were less advanced and could use the resource less efficiently fight to maintain their control and to keep out any competition. They simply have no business reason to look to the public interest of letting others use what they regard to be their land — even though they don’t need as much of it as they used to — or for that matter to use any newly available land, if that would create competition for their business. This dynamic is a huge innovation-stifling force.

The issue of the day is what to do with the parts of the spectrum that will be freed up with TV broadcasting goes all-digital, which will happen in this coming February. The stakes are extremely high, and the level of distortion and rhetoric matches.

There are two basic possibilities; To auction the spectrum to private parties who would be licensed to use it, keeping out anyone else, in exactly the way television, radio, and cellular telephone incumbents now hold licenses to use certain spectrum bands; or to allow the spectrum to be used in an unlicensed fashion, in the way the use of little radio broadcasters and receivers, in the form of the wireless routers used for Internet access in homes and in coffee shops, emerged when a small sliver of spectrum was made available for unlicensed use some years ago.

As the federal government looks for ways to raise cash these days, the advocates for licensed use are claiming that an auction for licensed uses might raise as much as $24B, and that unlicensed use would cause all manner of interference with everything from television to the wireless microphones used in churches.

Advocates for unlicensed use counter that the amount that could be raised from an auction is grossly exaggerated and the interference claims are bogus. And that the economic benefits of allowing the development of unlicensed technologies are enormous. (“Unlicensed” does not mean “unregulated.” Those wireless routers have to stay in their spectrum band and under their power ceiling.)

A clear and sober rebuttal of the incumbents’ claims is in a report called “There is No Windfall in the White Space” by the New America Foundation. From the Summary:

As Alexander Pope opined, hope springs eternal: And exploiting this natural optimism are interest groups holding out the hope of a budgetary windfall for a cash-strapped Congress if only more spectrum can be auctioned at ever-higher prices. Now it is the turn of the digital television (DTV) “white space” to spur this forlorn hope. And this hope is as precisely forlorn as the economic analysis presented below concludes. A one-time auction of the guard band and other vacant channels in each local television market ‚Äì so-called “spectrum white space” ‚Äì would provide minimal revenue to the Treasury, while simultaneously ensuring that most of this unused “beachfront” spectrum will remain fallow, stifling the broadband services and innovation that could generate far more long-term economic activity.

Or you can read this brief report about Google co-founder Larry Page’s opinion, as he expressed it to Congress this week:

Calling claims of potential interference with existing broadcast stations “garbage” and “despicable,” Page charged that FCC field tests this summer had been “rigged” against spectrum-sensing technology that’s designed to enable exploitation of white space.

Google, as we blogged earlier, wants to promote a technology that would allow the same phone to use whatever cellular service is available. More than that, it would actually take bids, on the fly, from the services whose signal power in the area was strong enough, and place the call on whatever network made the best offer.

The level of rhetoric is quite high here. But it’s a once-for-all-time decision between having the government sell an asset to the highest bidder to cover a small part of its debt, or making it available for the public good through innovation by a much broader variety of private enterprises. The incumbents’ experts simply can’t be trusted, and the NAF report explains why.

Just when you thought it might be safe to go back into the water …. the DMCA anticircumvention sharks have started circling again.

Last week I blogged about how it is becoming more and more apparent, to the content industry as well as to consumers, that Digital Rights Management (DRM), enshrined in law through the DMCA’s anticircumvention provision, is a dead-end business model as well as a drag on innovation. See Signs of a Move Towards Balance? (Part 2 of 2).

But not everyone has gotten the message, in particular not the Motion Picture Association of America, which today filed a lawsuit against Real Networks, charging it with violating the DMCA by distributing RealDVD.¬† The RealDVD software lets consumers copy DVDs to their personal computers.¬† It doesn’t permit unlimited copying, but rather uses its own form of DRM to lock the copy to be playable on only a single PC; additional PCs require additional licenses.

What we’re seeing here is another example of the dynamic described in B2B, where the industry uses the Copy Control Association (CCA) licensing scheme to squelch innovations that they don’t like: innovations like RealDVD that (horrors!) make DVDs more friendly¬† for consumers.

Real Networks, for its part, has filed its own suit, asking court to rule that RealDVD is in compliance with the CCA license.¬†¬† That’s not unreasonable: at first blush, RealDVD seems a lot like the Kaleidescape case described in chapter 6 of B2B, where the content industry huffed and puffed, but where the court found there was no license violation.¬† Yet, that was a different court.

Regardless of who wins in court, the fact is that this continues the DMCA’s track record as a dead weight hanging over the head of innovation.¬† Decisions that should be made on the basis of technology and consumer choice are instead being made by courts struggling to interpret a law that was a bad idea when it appeared in 1998 and has revealed itself to be a worse and worse idea every year.