Category Archives: Observer

NSA: Neat hacks vs democratic control

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This morning’s Observer column.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. And then there’s Edward Snowden, who was a spy and then became something else. Nobody’s neutral about him. The other day I heard a senior military officer describe him unambiguously as “a thief”. In Washington he seems to be universally regarded as a traitor. Many people in Europe regard him as, at worst, a principled whistleblower and, at best, a hero in the Daniel Ellsberg mould.

Whatever you think about him, though, one thing is clear: Snowden is a pretty astute geek. The evidence for this is in the way he approached his whistleblowing task. Having concluded (as several other distinguished National Security Agency employees before him had) that the NSA had misinterpreted or overstepped its brief, he then identified prominent instances of agency overreach and for each category downloaded evidence that supported his conjecture.

We’re now getting to the point where we can begin to assess the bigger picture. What do the Snowden revelations tell us about what’s wrong with the NSA – and its leading overseas franchise, our own dear GCHQ?

Read on.

Why the Obamacare website was doomed

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In the world of digital solutions, building a functional and user-friendly website can often be a complex endeavor, impacted by a multitude of factors beyond technology itself. Just as government agencies have struggled with IT service procurement, businesses, and organizations also face challenges in creating effective online platforms. When it comes to establishing a strong online presence, it’s not just about having a visually appealing website, but also about ensuring that the right strategies are in place to drive traffic and engage users. This is where the art of search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. Learning how to do SEO effectively can empower businesses to navigate the digital landscape with confidence, optimizing their websites to reach the right audience and achieve their goals. Just like government projects require strategic planning and execution, successful websites demand a thoughtful approach that includes robust SEO practices to ensure visibility, accessibility, and overall success.

This morning’s Observer column.

So why was the Obamacare site launch such a disaster? Writing in the New York Times, two politically experienced geeks argue that it’s mostly down to the way the government purchases IT services. “Much of the problem,” they write, “has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job.”

That strikes a chord over here. British civil servants have traditionally been technologically illiterate, so when ministers demand a new IT system to fix some failing that is annoying the Daily Mail, Sir Humphrey breaks into a cold sweat. He knows nothing about this stuff, except that it costs a bomb and that it usually bombs. The spectre of the National Audit Office looms over him. He does not want another IT disaster attached to his personnel file. So what does he do?

Simple: he calls up the big consultancy firms asking for tenders. These in turn call up their chums in brain-dead firms called “system integrators” who know only how to do one thing, namely to build massive integrated IT systems the way they were built in the 1960s. And thus begins another death march to oblivion; another project that is billions over budget and years behind schedule.

LATER: Seb Schmoller pointed me to this excellent Washington Post piece which explains, in detail, why the poisonous politics surrounding Obamacare made it impossible to mount a rationally-planned and executed website project.

In remembrance of odours past

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This morning’s Observer column.

Next month sees the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece – Remembrance of Things Past (or, if you prefer DJ Enright’s translation, In Search of Lost Time). So stand by for what one expert calls a Proustathon. “Untold universities have planned at least one reading or round table dedicated to Proust. Every self-respecting bookstore will hold its own Proustathon, with authors, actors and book lovers reading snippets from his epic novel. The Centre for Fiction in New York has scheduled a Proust evening, and the French embassy is organising its own Proust occasion. There are Proust T-shirts, Proust coffee mugs, Proust watches, Proust comic series, Proust tote bags, Proust fountain pens and Proust paraphernalia of all stripes.”

As it happens, I’m reading Swann’s Way on a Kindle – which is more appropriate than you might think.

Can Twitter still be special after floating on Wall Street?

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My take on the Twitter IPO — in the Observer‘s Tech Monthly.

Despite Facebook’s size and reach, and its much-vaunted role in the short-lived Arab spring, there are reasons for thinking that Twitter may be the more important service for the future of the public sphere – that is, the space in which democracies conduct public discussion. The fact that Twitter has fewer users and that they might not be demographically representative might, paradoxically, make them more influential in shaping opinion for the simple reason that they are more likely than the average Joe to express or articulate political views.

And there is some evidence to suggest that tweeted sentiment on some ideological issues actually tracks more rigorous methods of opinion polling.

In a less abstruse way, Twitter has already shown itself to be a useful conduit for circumventing legal or governmental censorship. In the UK, for example, it provided the means for circumventing the intricate web of legal injunctions and super-injunctions which had kept the Trafigura case out of the public domain.

When WikiLeaks was deprived of DNS services during the “Cablegate” controversy – which had the effect of making the site unfindable for a time – Twitter provided the channel by which information on the current URL was disseminated until normal service was restored.

To date, the owners of Twitter have been alert to the sensitive role that their system plays in our information ecosystem. They seem to have been slightly better, for example, than some other online providers at pushing back on government demands for personal information about their users.

The US fears back-door routes into the net because it’s building them too

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This morning’s Observer column.

At a remarkable conference held at the Aspen Institute in 2011, General Michael Hayden, a former head of both the NSA and the CIA, said something very interesting. In a discussion of how to secure the “critical infrastructure” of the United States he described the phenomenon of compromised computer hardware – namely, chips that have hidden “back doors” inserted into them at the design or manufacturing stage – as “the problem from hell”. And, he went on, “frankly, it’s not a problem that can be solved”.

Now General Hayden is an engaging, voluble, likable fellow. He’s popular with the hacking crowd because he doesn’t talk like a government suit. But sometimes one wonders if his agreeable persona is actually a front for something a bit more disingenuous. Earlier in the Aspen discussion, for example, he talked about the Stuxnet worm – which was used to destroy centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear programme – as something that was obviously created by a nation-state, but affected not to know that the US was one of the nation-states involved.

Given Hayden’s background and level of security clearance, it seems inconceivable that he didn’t know who built Stuxnet. So already one had begun to take his contributions with a modicum of salt. Nevertheless, his observation about the intractability of the problem of compromised hardware seemed incontrovertible…

Read on.

LATER: I come on this amazing piece of detective work which uncovers a backdoor installed in some D-Link routers.

Why big data has made your privacy a thing of the past

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This morning’s Observer column.

Watching the legal system deal with the internet is like watching somebody trying to drive a car by looking only in the rear-view mirror. The results are amusing and predictable but not really interesting. On the other hand, watching the efforts of regulators – whether national ones such as Ofcom, or multinational, such as the European Commission – is more instructive.

At the moment, the commission is wrestling with the problem of how to protect the data of European citizens in a world dominated by Google, Facebook and co. The windscreen of the metaphorical car that the commission is trying to drive has been cracked so extensively that it’s difficult to see anything clearly through it.

So in her desperation, the driver (Viviane Reding, the commission’s vice-president) oscillates between consulting the rear-view mirror and asking passers-by (who may or may not be impartial) for tips about what lies ahead. And just to make matters worse, she also has to deal with outbreaks of fighting between the other occupants of the car, who just happen to be sovereign states and are a quarrelsome bunch at the best of times…

More.

Breaking through the Reality Distortion Field

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This morning’s Observer column.

When Steve Jobs was still with us, many commentators – yours truly included – used to complain about the “reality distortion field” that surrounded Apple’s charismatic leader. Those in attendance when Jobs launched the devices and services (iPod, iTunes, OS X, iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPad) that blew such huge holes in the business models of established industries told of events that were more like religious revival meetings than corporate press conferences. As Apple’s dominance grew, the man who led it came to be seen as a unique combination of visionary, guru, saint and mogul.

But then mortality intervened and His Steveness passed away. The reality distortion field persisted, however, though now in reverse. It led people to conclude that the death of the magician would inevitably lead to the end of the magic that made Apple the most valuable company in the world. In comparison to Jobs his successor, Tim Cook, was seen as charismatically challenged. And while we could expect Apple to thrive for a little longer, it was only because Cook would be unveiling innovations that were in the works when Jobs was alive. After that, the well would surely run dry.

It was against this background that the hapless Cook unveiled the new iPhones on 10 September…

Eagle fouls its own nest

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This morning’s Observer column

‘It’s an ill bird,” runs the adage, “that fouls its own nest.” Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us.

Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for digital affairs, put it in a speech on 4 July: “If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn’t matter – any smart person doesn’t want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.”

Which providers? Why, the big US internet companies that have hitherto dominated the market for cloud services – a market set to double in size to $200bn (£126bn) over the next three years. So the first own goal scored by the NSA was to undermine an industry that many people had regarded as the next big thing in corporate computing.

Coase and the Penguin

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This morning’s Observer column remembering Ronald Coase.

When the news broke last week that Ronald Coase, the economist and Nobel laureate, had died at the age of 102, what came immediately to mind was Keynes’s observation that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. Most of the people running the great internet companies of today have probably never heard of Coase, but, in a way, they are all his slaves, because way back in 1932 he cracked the problem of explaining how firms are structured, and how and why they change as circumstances change. Coase might have been ancient, but he was certainly not defunct…

If Big Data is “the new oil” then we’re the wells

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This morning’s Observer column.

Should you be looking for an example of hucksterish cynicism, then the mantra that “data is the new oil” is as good as they come. Although its first recorded utterance goes as far back as 2006, in recent times it has achieved the status of an approved corporate cliche, though nowadays “data” is generally qualified by the adjective “big”. And if you want a measure of how deeply the cliche has penetrated the collective unconscious, ponder this: a Google search for “big data” turns up more than 1.5bn results. And a search for “data mining” turns up 167m results.

The idea of big data as a metaphor for oil is seductive. It’s also revealing in interesting ways. Given that the oil business is one of the biggest industries in the history of the world, for example, the metaphor hints at untold future riches. But it conveniently skates over the fact that oil wealth overwhelmingly benefits either ruling elites in corrupt and/or authoritarian countries, or huge corporations in democratic states.

But at least oil is a physical, non-renewable resource that is extracted from the earth. Big data, on the other hand, is extracted from the activities of people and machines…