Daily Archives: October 13, 2013

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.