Vastly Important Notes

My first earthquake!

Wheeeeee! It was actually kindda fun. The strange thing is that I'll never really think of the ground as "solid" again. I was at the world's greatest sushi bar. My dinner companion ran outside and I ate his Kampachi. No damage at home although one of my more precarious stacks of books, routers and amazon boxen might have toppled over at the home office. It's hard to be certain.

I mumble about Real ID

Jon Udell has posted a podcast interview with me about Real ID.  We've both written briefly about it recently.  I just listened to the podcast again and must say that Jon is really good at asking the right questions.  His questions in the interview are a lot better than my answers.

Plus I don't really sound like that in real life.  How do radio people ever get used to hearing their own voice?

Thinking about Real ID

DHS has published the proposed details of the Real ID act and criticism is staring to pour on in from all sides.  The Real ID act is supposed to standardize the driver's licenses issued by the states.  Supporters say that this is necessary to improve security.  Critics usually focus on the weakening of privacy protections.  The arguments and counter-arguments usually don't bother to address each other and, lofted on volume not substance, quickly grow heated and dim.

There's a way to have a meaningful debate on this.  Any new security proposal must be compared to the status quo on four dimensions: Security, Privacy, Convenience and Cost.  If the new proposal is clearly better at all four, then it's a no brainer.  If the new program is worse on all four, then, well, it has no brains.  What if the new program is better on some dimensions but not on others?  Should we weigh the relative merits and compromise?  Yes, eventually, but not right away!  Since the new proposal enjoys the airy freedom of not actually existing yet, we should go back and rework the proposal until it is overwhelmingly better than the status quo. 

What is the status quo that Real ID is aiming to replace?  Basically, each state has their own standards for driver's licenses which differ on many of the important details.  The status quo sucks in terms of security and privacy and is lackluster in convenience and cost. Is Real ID overwhelmingly better?  Not yet, but it can be made so.

Let's.

Best. Organization. Ever.

I've said it before, and I'll say it for the next 10,000 years: The Long Now Foundation is the most awesomely cool thing ever conceived. 

When I grow up, I want to work there.

What I don't know about privacy

A post on Steve Hunt's blog has me thinking about privacy again. 

A couple of years ago, I was speaking on an international identity and security panel in Rome.  At the end of my remarks, a French journalist asked me a long question that seemed to have something to do with privacy but a lot more to do with trying to bait me to agree or disagree with his stated distaste for some aspect of Bush's foreign policy.  I say "seemed to" because neither my French nor his English were up to the task at hand.  Unfortunately, this kind of game has become routine for traveling Americans and I almost always choose not to play.  So instead of answering directly or, the horror, asking him to clarify his question, I decided to use up my time with an impromptu digression on the nature of privacy.  I wasn't sure what I was going to say and, when it was said, I wasn't sure if I actually agreed with it. I'm still not sure.  It sounded good at the time though and sent the audience a-nodding.  Here's more or less what I said, [with my simultaneous inner monologue in brackets].

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When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence [good, always start with the Founding Fathers when talking to a French reporter], they put in a curious sentence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," [Uh oh, is that in the Declaration or the Preamble to the Constitution?  Crap!  Ok, just act confident and the audience won't know.] "...that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Now there's an interesting thing here: the three rights specified are mentioned in order of decreasing specificity and ease of measurement.  The first one, Life, is pretty easy to measure; most people will agree on whether someone is alive or dead.  Well, not right now in Washington, but most of the time. [Polite laughter, good, they've heard about the Schiavo thing over here.] The second one, Liberty, is a bit harder to define but still pretty good.  You can usually get a pretty good consensus on whether someone is free or a slave. 

Now the third one is tough.  Happiness?  How can you really define it?  Or measure it?  It seems like a really personal quality that's really hard to pin down.  Some people don't even seem to want to be happy.  I mean I've seen French movies. [Better laugh line, but have I actually ever seen a French movie?  I must have.] Aren't standards of happiness based heavily on the ideas of the time? Plus what if my happiness makes you unhappy? Or vice versa?  Don't the Germans even have a word for this? Schadenschnitzel or something? [Big laugh, Europeans love the 'dumb American tries to say something important but gets comically confused with a food item' bit.  JFK knew this as well.]

That's why the Declaration doesn't give you a right to happiness, only to the pursuit of happiness.  We can't guarantee you happiness, but we can make sure that you can do whatever you think may make you happy - as long as you don't get in the way of the other two rights for others.  And this is the real genius of the document: you have a right to pursue.  You may never get there, or I may beat you to it, but you can pursue happiness if you want and we won't stand in your way.

[Now here's the part that I'm really not sure about, but it's such a smooth transition.]

So what about Privacy?  Is it like Life?  Is it like Liberty? [Yes, come to think of it, it probably is like liberty, should have thought this through better before starting.] Or is it more like Happiness?  I think privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be very private, other people post pictures of their vasectomy on their blog.  Don't google for this! [Really, don't.] Some people want to hide every step they make on the web, others don't care at all.  And is there a corresponding right to know?  If I really want to know how much my customers earn, is it really wrong for me to try to find out?  What if I want to find out who's giving money to a politician?  Does your right to privacy trump my right to happiness?

I think maybe privacy is like happiness, and the "right to privacy" should really be "the right to the pursuit of privacy".  If you want to keep certain information private, you should have access to all the tools you need to make that happen.  If you choose not to use those tools, either because you don't care or because you agree to some kind of business or social proposition in return, then I have the right to get whatever information about you that I want.  And the default setting on your web browser shouldn't be "private" any more than the default setting on your life should be "happy".  If you want privacy or happiness, you have the absolute right to work at it, but it's not our responsibility as representatives of government or industry to hand you either one. [Big applause line from the audience, but it's a very business- and government- centric crowd.] Companies should be free to track their customers' actions and people should be free to hide whichever of those actions they want.  Each person gets to choose where they want to stand in that marketplace.

---

This got a good very good reaction at the conference, but the "privacy" guys were pretty severely outnumbered so it wasn't a balanced field.  I'm still not sure how I feel about this analogy.  The biggest danger seems to be the potential arms-race between privacy seeking individuals and information seeking businesses or governments.  For instance, is it OK for Google's default search behavior to be set to log your search history? (Nelson Minar and my brother had an interesting discussion about this a couple of weeks ago).  If so, would it be OK for Google to change the opt-out settings randomly every few months to force people to "really" care about their privacy? Would it be OK for Google to just lie to you and keep records even you've opted out, claiming that you should be using some third-party anonymizer if you really cared? (I think the answers are "yes", "no" and "no", but where do you draw the line?)  Also, are the implications significantly different for government/citizen interactions?

I'm not sure about any of this.  I told myself that I'd sort it out before posting, but my little talk was almost two years ago and I still haven't decided.  Is "privacy" like "happiness"?  Maybe it's not a very useful question.  What do you think?

Oh, the picture at the top of this post is a still from "Fireworks", the School House Rock episode on the Declaration of Independence.  It's how they chose to illustrate "pursuit of happiness".  Note that this kind of pursuit, deemed appropriate educational programming for children in the 1970s, would now land you in jail.

I'm not good with slogans

Now that my former governor, Mitt Romney, has officially entered the 2008 presidential race, I'd like to propose the following campaign slogan:

You may groan at will.  I'm not yet sure whether this is a pro- or anti- Romney slogan as I don't plan on paying any attention to the race for another sixteen months or so.

A Realistic Plan For Saving Air Travel

There's recently been a lot of hand-wringing that the air travel experience is on an irreversible spiral to unbearable levels of craptitude. Fear not! By thinking outside the box I have come up with a way to change the paradigm and simultaneously exploit win-win synergies between security and economic stakeholders. Here's how the brave new world of air travel is going to work:

1. RFID chips will be in everything - all your clothes, toiletries, electronics, underwear, etc.

2. When you show up at the airport, you'll walk through a scanner which will instantly compile a full catalog of everything you're wearing and carrying using the above mentioned RFID chips. This information will be stored in XML!

3. You'll take off your clothes and put on a stylish paper gown. All of your clothes and other possessions will be placed into a box and incinerated.

4. You'll board the plane in your gown. Since everyone on board will be similarly attired, you'll enjoy a relaxed, spa-like atmosphere. Business class seats will offer a complimentary electro-pneumatic massage ($12 in coach).

5. As you fly, the information about your possessions will be electronically sent (via XML!) to a new joint venture between Air Mall and Amazon.com. Assuming all your brand licenses are up to date, an exact duplicate of all your clothes and possessions will be just-in-timed to your final destination.

6. Once you arrive and clear security a second time, you'll be given new copies of all your stuff. An efficient waiting area will be provided for people whose new clothes haven't arrived yet.

Think about it: total security and a big boost to our RFID, XML, PPRM (Physical Possessions Rights Management) and logistics industries! Low cost off-shore manufacturing gets a hand as well and who cares about quality when that Hugo Boss suit only has to survive until your next flight?

As an alternative to incineration, I suppose that your items could be cataloged, sanitized and given out to people traveling in the opposite direction, but that sounds like defeatist tree-huggery to me. The other alternative, low cost air-taxi service using a new generation of affordable light planes that are convenient, efficient and too small to be interesting terrorist targets, is just rampant crazytalk.

XML!

Sweetness Follows

Lamentably, Katyusha rockets are in the news again. Want to know what the name means? It's Russian.

In Russian, most nouns, and all proper nouns, have multiple diminutive forms. For example, if stol is the word for table, stolik means "cute, little table". Sometimes the diminutive form is the only surviving form of a word. For example, the word for a portable folding bed, raskladushka, literally means, "cute little thing that unfolds".

Names receive this treatment very commonly as well. In English, the diminutive form of "Catherine" is "Cathy". The same name in Russian is "Yekaterina" or, more familiarly "Katya". If your Katya is a particularly sweet little girl, you might call her "Katyusha". That's the literal name of the WW2-era rocket at the center of the current unpleasantness.

It's unlikely that the current weapons were actually made in Russia. "Katyusha" has come to mean any low-tech, unguided rocket fired out of a tube mounted on some kind of portable cart or vehicle. It's sort of like a Scud, except smaller.

There is another level of diminution possible with Russian names. If your Katyusha is really, really adorable - perhaps she's a small puppy - you might call her "Katyushenka". As far as I know, there is not yet a weapon with that name.

When I was a kid growing up in the Soviet Union, we were taught a famous song about the Katyusha rocket. Today, I can't get it out of my head.

Big Dig Accident

Last night, a big slab of ceiling fell inside the Boston "Big Dig" tunnel and killed a woman driving through. This follows a string of fraud charges and controversy about the $14.6 Billion dollar project.

Matthew J. Amorello, the chairman of the controlling authority is quoted in today's Boston Globe:

“We are going to do everything we can to assure these are safe tunnels,” said Amorello, flanked by police and state and local transportation officials. “These are safe tunnels. This was a horrible, horrible event. It is an anomaly, and we will get to the bottom of what happened.”

This statement has two possible meanings, depending on the definition of the word "assure".

1) "We are going to do everything possible to make these tunnels safe. These tunnels are safe."

or

2) "We are going to do everything possible to convince people that these tunnels are safe. Let's start: these tunnels are safe."

Note that the first meaning doesn't really hold water. Kind of like the Big Dig.

Vienna

I had a hankering to start up the blog again. Who knows how long it'll last but here goes.

I'm in Vienna for a couple of days. They're really into some guy (? - hard to tell for sure from the portraits) named Mozart here. You literally can't walk a block without running into something Mozart related. It's like with Starbucks in the US, except they have just as many Starbucks (Starboxen?) here as we do at home, so there's really not much room for anything else. The "anything else" is quite beautiful though. Walking around old European capitals always reminds me that the most historically-significant building in my neighborhood is the art deco Sears-Roebuck store from the 1930s. Apparently it's the 250th anniversary of Mozart founding the city or something, so they're really going all out. Mozart must be some sort of mythical city-creating hero in Vienna, like Paul Bunyan in Brainerd or Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

I'm here to moderate a panel at the Global Security Forum. It's been a worthwhile experience. One of my panelists, Aldo Agostini from Venice, made a fascinating point about the different meanings of "privacy" between the U.S. and Europe. According to Mr. Agostini, the American concept of privacy is rooted in the goal of "freedom", while the European definition centers around "dignity". I'm not entirely sure what "dignity" is, but the Europeans seem quite attached to it. It might somehow be related to the Japanese word, "shame", but that's a concept as strange to Americans as anthropomorphic panda bears riding in giant-panda-shaped fighting robots. Except less cool, like Brainerd.

Anyway, I'll take freedom over dignity any day. I'd take happiness over dignity. I've even been known to take a nice big steak over dignity.

Speaking of which, I've yet to eat any of the famous Viennese meat products so when the conference was over I headed back to the Radisson with the plan of changing clothes and then hitting a restaurant. Once in my room I flipped open the hotel-provided Vienna guide book and read the very first sentence in the "sightseeing" section:

"Even though we are facing an economic slump, terror threats and cost reduction measures: Vienna is still one of the most popular places for outings and holidays."

Way to go for the hard sell! Now I see why our idea of marketing isn't centered around "dignity", either.

Under the guidebook was a brochure for the fancy hotel restaurant. The pictures looked appetizing until I saw this one in the corner:

Ok, seriously, I'm thinking of calling the cops.

Back to the guidebook, randomly flipped open to page 41:

"Would you like to discover Vienna in a special way? Would you like to discover Vienna in a very-special way?"

No. I'm going to bed hungry.

[Update: Two people have already accused me of "name dropping" Brainerd. Yes, I've been there. Any place that has Jello in the all-you-can-eat salad bar is OK in my book.]