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George Orwell, here we come
By Declan McCullagh, Special to ZDNet
07 January 2003 11:50 AM
The biggest problem with criticism of John Poindexter's massive spy proposal is not contained in the argument over the system being so darn creepy.
Of course it's creepy. This new federal agency deliberately chose the motto "knowledge is power", crafted a logo certain to inspire conspiracy theories, and is itching to assemble a detailed computerized dossier on every American. And that a figure such as Poindexter--disgraced in the Iran-Contra scandal and with a database addiction dating back to at least 1987--is running the show is a detail worthy of a Jonathan Swift satire.
No, the biggest problem with the criticism of the Total Information Awareness system is that it's too shortsighted. It's focused on what the Poindexters of the world can do with current database and information-mining technology. That includes weaving together strands of data from various sources--such as travel, credit card, bank, electronic toll and driver's license databases--with the stated purpose of identifying terrorists before they strike.
But what could Poindexter and the Bush administration devise in five or 10 years, if they had the money, the power and the will?
That's the real question, and therein lies the true threat. Even if all of our current elected representatives, appointed officials and unappointed bureaucrats are entirely trustworthy--and that's a pretty big assumption--what could a corrupt FBI, Secret Service or Homeland Security police force do with advanced technology by the end of the decade? What if there was another terrorist attack that prompted Congress to delete whatever remaining privacy laws shield Americans from surveillance?
For a hint at what the future might bring, it's worth reviewing some of the projects already under way at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the parent agency for Poindexter's Information Awareness Office. Combine that information with the technology trends toward smaller sensors, cheaper hardware and ubiquitous wireless networks, and the possibilities are immensely disquieting. We could face the emergence of unblinking electronic eyes that record where we are and what we do, whenever we interact.
Imagine a world where every street corner is dotted with disposable microcameras, equipped with face-recognition software that identifies pedestrians and constantly updates their individual files with up-to-the-minute location information. (Wearing masks won't help: Many states already have antimask laws, and the rest would follow suit if masks became sufficiently popular.) The microcameras are linked through a network modelled on existing 802.11 wireless technology. The wireless mesh also includes cameras devoted to spotting and recording license plates and a third type that identifies people by the way they walk.
It's not that far from reality. Poindexter's office has an entire project area called Human ID at a Distance that's spending millions on researching biometric technologies, including face recognition and "gait performance" detection. Facecams already are in use in airports, city centres and casinos. And license plate recognition, by comparison, is a snap.
Or how about locations out of the range of this fixed surveillance mesh? In 1998, DARPA began funding a project to create spybots that can fly day and night and that use infrared and video sensors. These spybots, being designed by Lockheed Martin and code-named MicroStar, will have a six-inch wingspan, weigh only 86 grams and cost about $10,000--an affordable price point for keeping track of Americans from above.
And what of the spybots' larger cousins, capable of hovering higher and seeing more for a longer duration? Last week The Washington Post reported that the federal government may permit unmanned aircraft to fly above the United States. "I believe that the potential applications for this technology in the area of homeland defence are quite compelling," said Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, who added that the drones could be used by domestic police agencies.
Location tracking
GPS devices that record a vehicle's position and transmit it to police are an exciting growth area for the eavesdrop establishment. Jim Bell, an Internet essayist convicted of stalking federal agents, said before his arrest that he was sure the federal agencies were tailing him electronically. During Bell's trial, it emerged that he was right: The police arm of the IRS was tracking him on their laptops with a legally implanted GPS bug inside Bell's Nissan Maxima.
Last week, The Associated Press reported that an Oregon state task force wants a law requiring all cars to sport GPS receivers and recorders. The stated purpose: To measure how far you drive and calculate how much you owe in road taxes. The Nov. 15, 2002 report from the task force envisions some privacy protections--but those could be eliminated if homeland security worries become more acute, possibly leaving all Oregonians tracked whenever they're on the road.
Criminals already may be finding less desirable uses for GPS trackers. Last week, the Smoking Gun Web archive of documents owned by Court TV posted a criminal complaint against a 42-year-old Wisconsin man accused of stalking an ex-girlfriend using a GPS bug hidden in her car.
"We continue to see problems with stalkers (using databases)," says Peter Wayner, author of Translucent Databases. "I think there are many more sleazeballs who will use this stuff than there are cops who will use it to catch people. It's a lot easier to abuse this technology than to use it successfully."
Then there's Applied Digital Systems (ADS) of Palm Beach, Florida, which received FDA approval last fall for a microchip to be implanted in humans for tracking and identification purposes. (Company spokesman Matthew Cossolotto told me in June 2001 that ADS had no such plans. "We are not now developing, nor do we have any plans to develop, anything other than an external, wearable device," he said in an email message.)
It's difficult to imagine a more ruthlessly effective way to track every American. I doubt it's likely, but it's possible to imagine a future where "getting chipped" starts as a way to speed your way through lines at ATMs and airports--and ends up being mandatory.
There's some precedent. In October, police in one Colourado county started pressuring businesses to require fingerprints when customers make purchases with checks or credit cards. Police in Arlington, Texas, are asking businesses to participate in a similar program.
Things get stranger still. The Electronic Privacy Information Centre used the Freedom of Information Act in August 2002 to obtain government documents that talked about reading air travellers' minds and identifying suspicious thoughts. The NASA briefing materials referred to "non-invasive neuro-electric sensors" to be used in aviation security.
In a bizarre press release, NASA claimed it has not approved any research in the area of "mind reading" and that "because of the sensitivity of such research," the agency will seek independent review of future projects. Yikes.
There are some bright areas in this generally dismal outlook. Avi Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, predicts growing interest in antisurveillance measures. "I expect there will be a whole industry popping up in counter-surveillance--at least, I hope," Rubin said. "Nowadays, it's not like someone drops a camera and comes back and retrieves the data. You attack the transmission." Short of fleeing to the wilderness or living our lives entirely online, our only option is to fight the Poindexterization of modern life before it becomes too late. Congress returns this week. Some of your congressional representatives may soon be asked why there has never been even one hearing investigating DARPA, Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness plans.
Feds Want to Strengthen Web Log-ons
Published - Oct 17 2005 11:39AM PDT || AP
BOSTON(AP) Federal regulators will require banks to strengthen security for Internet customers through authentication that goes beyond mere user names and passwords, which have become too easy for criminals to exploit.
Bank Web sites are expected to adopt some form of "two-factor" authentication by the end of 2006, regulators with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said in a letter to banks last week.
In two-factor authentication, customers must confirm their identities not only through something they know, like a PIN or password, but also with something they physically have, like a hardware token with numeric access codes that change every minute.
Other types of two-factor authentication include costlier hardware involving biometrics or "smart" cards that would be inserted into designated readers on a user's computer.
Banks might also issue one-time passwords on scratch-off cards or require "secret questions" about a customer's account, such as the amount of the last deposit or mortgage payment.
The council also suggested that banks explore technology that can estimate a Web user's physical location and compare it to the address on file.
The most common way of stealing consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials online, known as phishing, typically involves sending e-mails that direct unwitting users to phony Web sites. Data harvested at such sites is then used fraudulently.
The Anti-Phishing Working group, an industry association, reported 13,776 unique types of phishing attacks in August.
While some financial institutions have given their customers electronic password tokens, those have tended to be optional. Other banks have instituted password entry through mouse clicks instead of typing, a protection against keystroke-snooping programs.
But in general, the industry can do more to stop account fraud and identity theft, according to the financial institutions council _ which includes the Federal Reserve; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.; the U.S. Comptroller; the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration.
[font=VERDANA,ARIAL]The Future of Computing: As Small as a Grain of Sand[/font]
[font=VERDANA,ARIAL]Published: 9 November 2004 [/font][font=VERDANA,ARIAL]
A consortium of Scottish researchers is working to apply speckled computingnetworks of tiny semiconductors that can sense their environment and communicate wirelesslyto all aspects of life. [/font][font=VERDANA,ARIAL]In the future D.K. Arvind envisions, computers will be everywhere, in everything, in the form of thousands of tiny semiconductors sprinkled on or otherwise applied to whatever surface theyre monitoring. Each "speck" will be the size of a grain of sand, power itself, and communicate wirelessly with other specks, forming a "speckled network" that can send information to and from other computer networks.
This concept, called speckled computing, has given rise in the United Kingdom to the Speckled Computing Consortium, which involves five Scottish universities and 25 researchers. Launched in October 2003, the endeavor is funded by a $3 million (£1.4 million) grant from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. The consortium has also submitted a funding proposal to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which will put it through peer review and decide in the next several months whether to offer a research grant.
"We see it as the integration of sensing, processing, and wireless networking," says Arvind, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and director of the consortium. "The comparison is the microprocessor which you find in PCs being the foundation of modern computing. We want the speck and specknets to be the foundation for ubiquitous computing."
[font=VERDANA,ARIAL]"As the SpeckNet technology is put into place, we expect to see applications appearing in healthcare, environment sensing, security, consumer technologies, defensein fact, just about anywhere and everywhere."
Professor Bob Stewart, University of Strathclyde Electrical Engineering Department[/font]
Computing, Engineering, and Physics Come Together
The Speckled Computing Consortium has brought together world-class expertise in computer science, electrical engineering, and physics to develop speckled computing applications. Researchers at Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Strathclyde, and Napier University are working toward their eventual goal of developing 1-cubic-millimeter semiconductor specks that together form a programmable network, the SpeckNet.
The project aims "to pioneer the development of speckled computing, offer radically new concepts in information technology, revolutionize the way people communicate and exchange information, and evolve this disruptive technology over the next five to 10 years."
U.S. scientists have been working on similar technology for the past decade. Computer engineer Kristofer Pister coined the term "smart dust" in 1997 while researching micronetworks at the University of California, Berkeley. His work got a jump start when he received funding from the U.S. Defense Departments Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1998 to develop tiny, intelligent sensing devices. Pister has since started his own company, Dust Networks, which produces a line of sensors for the security industry, environmental sciences, and industrial machinery.
Research in the so-called "wireless sensor network" area has grown rapidly in both academia and industry, with commercial applications appearing on the market in the past two years. Intel has also helped fund research at UC Berkeley and is involved in several commercial applications of sensing networks, including monitoring oil rigs for British Petroleum. Other companies developing sensor products include Motorola, Rockwell, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Norways Chipcon.
One difference between Pisters work and that of the Speckled Computing Consortium is that smart dust works with what computer scientists call "motes," while speckled computing uses specks.
"The best way of differentiating our work from the Berkeley work is that motes and smart dust are examples of sensor networks, while speckled computing, in a sense, looks well beyond sensor networks," Arvind says. "Motes are used in sparse static networks, whereas specks are intended to be used as dense, decentralized networks in which the specks can move around if required. They are nonstatic."
Although smart dust is being used in commercial applications, speckled networks have yet to be produced outside the lab. The SpeckNet team, however, plans to create specks that are highly programmable, creating a platform for ubiquitous and pervasive computing. The Speckled Computing Consortiums unique collaboration of experts from different fields also gives new dimension to the applications of sensor networks.
Tiny Specks, Huge Potential
Arvind sees SpeckNet as a fitting progression of his own research. "Ive been working with networks on silicon, called micronets, and wireless networks," he says. "I was interested in the idea of computing using thousands of simple programmable devices, each feeble in itself but powerful collectively. With that idea, I joined with other academics who have particular expertise in the various aspects of wireless communication to provide the technical leadership to move these ideas forward."
Bob Stewart, a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Strathclyde and a lead researcher on SpeckNet, compares this stage of the speckled computing concept to the early days of the Internet.
"Think back 10 years before the widespread use of the Internet," Stewart says. "It was very difficult, if not impossible, to see all of the varied applications that would transpire. As the SpeckNet technology is put into place, we expect to see applications appearing in healthcare, environment sensing, security, consumer technologies, defensein fact, just about anywhere and everywhere."
The specks Arvind, Stewart, and their fellow researchers are developing could one day be sprinkled like pixie dust on an object or person, or applied in a removable sheet, like a sticky note. Each speck would function independently, powered by its own renewable energy source from solar cells, a rechargeable battery, or another as-yet-undeveloped power source. Once applied, hundreds or thousands of specks would together form a programmable network.
For example, cardiac patients could apply specks in the form of removable patches to monitor their heartbeats. Should a patient experience irregularities, the patch could send an alert to his doctors office, which would, in turn, call the patient in for an exam.
In transportation, specks could increase the safety and effectiveness of air bags. "When you use an air bag it explodes, but it disregards whether the passenger is a child or football player. Theyre pretty dumb that way," Arvind says. "We envision smart air bags that measure the pressure locally, by all the specks communicating with each other. That information can be used to guide the trajectory and force, giving the air bag its maximal effect."
Sprinkling the gears of a manual-shift automobile with specks could allow the cars onboard computer to know when the driver is shifting or backing up. The specks in turn would communicate wirelessly to the drivers cell phone to block incoming calls while she is trying to parallel park or backing out of her driveway.
Privacy in a Speckled World
But what about the heart patient who doesnt want his medical information sent to his doctors computer system, where it may not be stored securely? Or the driver who would rather not have a record that shes driving with another adult in the passenger seat, rather than her child?
Like any new technology, Arvind says, speck networks must be governed by a code of ethics. "The question is, who does this information belong to?" Arvind says. "Whose responsibility is it to keep it private?"
Like closed-circuit cameras that film people in public places, often without their knowledge, speck networks entail a trade-off. Banks, for example, are better able to catch robbers by recording everyone who steps up to a teller window or ATM. And as anyone who has traveled via commercial airline knows, its impossible to do so without forfeiting not only personal information, but also a bit of dignity.
Experts say that once people benefit directly from a new technology, they stop worrying so much about privacy implications, as long as the technology is regulated appropriately.
"When people saw, 10 to 15 years back, that [closed-circuit cameras] can be used to make streets safer, they were more willing to accept them," Arvind says. "People who use this information are regulated."
Privacy concerns aside, speckled computing promises to revolutionize computing as we know it.
Healthcare and transportation are just two fields in which researchers are experimenting with speckled computing. Arvind believes speckled computing "is the culmination of a greater trend. As the once-separate worlds of computing and wireless communications collide, a new class of information appliances will emerge." Related Links SpeckNet.org
A consortium of Scottish researchers aims to create speckled networks with thousands of tiny semiconductors called specks, which, when applied to people or objects, can sense the environment and communicate wirelessly with each other and other computer networks.
[/font]
MICROCOMPUTERLocation: Edinburgh, Scotland
Reporter: Hayden Turner
Synopsis:
Speckled Computing while just sounding like a quirky name is actually the latest application for computer technology. The idea is that computers will become so small that they become a part of everyday objects. The term speck describes a single autonomous computer, which can be as small as a coin, while containing its own renewable power source, sensors, memory and wireless capabilities. A number of specks scattered on surfaces, floors, walls and even clothing can interact with each other; tracking information and transmitting it back to a central computer. One use could even be equipping a coffee cup at your local coffee shop with a speck, the speck telling the waiter when your coffee needs a top up. It takes the term electronic spies to a whole new meaning.
Contact:
http://www.specknet.org/
About Speckled Computing
What is Speckled Computing?
Speckled Computing offers a radically new concept in information technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate and exchange information.
Specks will be minute (around 1 mm3) semiconductor grains that can sense and compute locally and communicate wirelessly. Each speck will be autonomous, with its own captive, renewable energy source. Thousands of specks, scattered or sprayed on the person or surfaces, will collaborate as programmable computational networks called Specknets.
Computing with Specknets will enable linkages between the material and digital worlds with a finer degree of spatial and temporal resolution than hitherto possible; this will be both fundamental and enabling to the goal of truly ubiquitous computing.
Speckled Computing is the culmination of a greater trend. As the once-separate worlds of computing and wireless communications collide, a new class of information appliances will emerge. Where once they stood proud the PDA bulging in the pocket, or the mobile phone nestling in ones palm, the post-modern equivalent might not be explicit after all. Rather, data sensing and information processing capabilities will fragment and disappear into everyday objects and the living environment. At present there are sharp dislocations in information processing capability the computer on a desk, the PDA/laptop, mobile phone, smart cards and smart appliances. In our vision of Speckled Computing, the sensing and processing of information will be highly diffused the person, the artefacts and the surrounding space, become, at the same time, computational resources and interfaces to those resources. Surfaces, walls, floors, ceilings, articles, and clothes, when sprayed with specks (or speckled), will be invested with a computational aura and sensitised post hoc as props for rich interactions with the computational resources.
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