Smartphone proximity-tracking is coming, so it’s vital to think about the dangers and how to avoid them
In addition to Ross Anderson’s observations on the Light Blue Touchpaper blog, another really useful source is the briefing on the technology by Privacy International. It concludes that Bluetooth is probably the least-bad option, provides an excellent primer on the technology and comes to a rounded, careful verdict:
Bluetooth LE has the capability of being both the least intrusive of tracking technologies (based on proximity between people choosing to use the app), whilst at the same time being highly intrusive in movement and interaction tracking (because its proximity is so small, and works as broadcast), and deanonymisation will necessarily cascade as the infection continues to spread, and uptake of apps increase.
As with everything we’re seeing in the age of Covid-19, we must be highly aware of the limitations of the choices we are offered. It is also important that technical and legal safeguards around the processing and storage of data — especially when those data can be used for deanonymisation — are not bypassed or ignored in the rush to deploy technology, however well-meaning or indeed vital it may be. It’s also important to ensure that there exists a genuine need to use location tracking that is supported by the scientific evidence, given contact tracing is more effective at earlier stages of tackling pandemics.
Balancing the risks of location tracking also involves consideration of whether the apps will be effective given the down-sides. In the example of the United Kingdom, as identified by the Big Data Institute, this not only relates to adoption of the app – they estimate that over 60 per cent of the UK’s population would have to be using the app for digital contact tracing to reach enough people as they become infected. It is also essential, in their view, that people identified by the contact tracing app be promptly tested. This may require a significantly higher rate of testing that we’ve so far seen in the UK. As of March 24, UK government data shows 90,436 people have been tested in Britain (population 66.44 million) compared to more than 330,000 in South Korea (population 51.47m).
Alternatives to using Bluetooth include the use of apps collecting GPS and Wifi location data and storing everything on a central server, or government authorities going directly to telecommunications operators themselves. Despite the drawbacks of Bluetooth, some of which we’ve explored in this primer, with the use of changing UUIDs, apps only tracking other users, and opt-in of upload of localised data, it’s a far less intrusive tracking method than some alternatives.
Emphasis above is mine. The technology is not a magic bullet. But it would be useful provided that people identified by proximity-sensing are promptly tested. Evidence so far suggests that the British state is nowhere near being able to do that.
Remember that the pandemic is also providing terrific opportunities for Big Brother. Which is why any legalised use of it requires sunset clauses.
The point about sunset clauses (i.e. provisions in enabling legislation) is that they enable legislatures periodically to review the continuing need for the surveillance powers. That’s why framing the crisis as a ‘war’ on the virus is so dangerous: there isn’t any logical end-point for a ‘war’ against such a pervasive and elusive adversary. And so the powers will continue to be necessary ad infinitum. We should have learned that from the “war on terror”.
Zoom Is a Nightmare. So why is everyone still using it?
Here’s a fairly routine catalogue of Zoom’s multifarious flaws. But the author does ask an important question: should we collectively impose a sunset clause on our use of Zoom? That is, should we move to something better when this crisis eases or ends?
And what would that ‘something better’ be?
Missing the office? There’s an album for that
Now this is something you’d could not make up. You can buy an album of sounds from pre-1990s offices from the Smithsonian archive. They include a manual typewriter in action (and an electric one, though I’m not sure if it’s an IBM Golfball one) and even a Coffee-break, Complete with the sounds of coffee being poured from a jug!!Sacre Bleu!
What it brings back to me is the closing scene of the film All the President’s Men – which overdubs the distant commentary on TV coverage of Nixon’s Inauguration ceremony with the sounds of the Washington Post‘s newsroom, clacking typewriters and all.
Sigh. I had an Olivetti portable typewriter once. And an IBM Golfball too, for that matter. Remind me to tell you about the Boer War sometime.
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At least estimates from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggest that various countries pursuing lockdown strategies may be approaching the point where R(0), the reproduction rate, gets to lower than 1.
RIP John Horton Conway
The great mathematician has been taken by Covid-19. He was, said his biographer, Siobhan Roberts, “Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Richard Feynman, all rolled into one”. He was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time, with “a sly sense of humour, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it.”
Most lay people will probably know of him through his Game of Life which, among other things, provides a fascinating demonstration of how simple rules can produce very complex outcomes. There will be many obituaries, and in due course a Royal Society memoir of him. But for now Siobhan Roberts’s 2015 Guardianprofile conveys a vivid impression of what a remarkable person he was.
Thanks to Guy Haworth for alerting me to the sad news.
Covid-19 and contact-tracing smartphones
Now that it’s been confirmed that the UK government is considering using the technology to address the next phases of the pandemic, it needs to be subjected to some really searching scrutiny. Ross Anderson, who is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, has just published a masterful survey of the various issues raised by the technology. Its title, “Contact Tracing in the Real World” captures the fact that no technology — including this one — is a magic bullet. It may be that smartphones are good at detecting other nearby smartphones, for example, but they know nothing about context, or for that matter about human beings. “On Friday, when I was coming back from walking the dogs”, Ross writes,
“I stopped to chat for ten minutes to a neighbour. She stood halfway between her gate and her front door, so we were about 3 metres apart, and the wind was blowing from the side. The risk that either of us would infect the other was negligible. If we’d been carrying bluetooth apps, we’d have been flagged as mutual contacts. It would be quite intolerable for the government to prohibit such social interactions, or to deploy technology that would punish them via false alarms. And how will things work with an orderly supermarket queue, where law-abiding people stand patiently six feet apart?”
It’s a great blog post — worth reading in full.
I was reminded of a story I heard from the early days of the Wuhan outbreak. A journalist (I forget who) was travelling by train through part of China and was astonished to find that his phone recorded him having visited areas suspected of being hotspots of Covid 19 — even though he hadn’t left the train at any stage. It turned out that his phone was just logging mobile masts located in the cities he was passing at high speed.
As Lisa Geilelman and her fellow-authors point out in their new book, Raw Data is an Oxymoron.
The UK death rate from Covid-19 is twice that of Ireland, even though — proportionately — both countries started out with the same level of ICU provision. Why?
Answer (from a striking Twitter thread by Elaine Doyle, a medical historian) is that the Irish government started earlier and took the threat more seriously than Johnson & Co. For example, the UK allowed 250,000 people to go to the Cheltenham racing festival. The Irish cancelled the country’s National day (St Patrick’s Day, March 17).
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The capabilities of this technology would make totalitarian leaders drool. On the other hand, it appears to be very effective in helping countries to manage the crisis. And it is probably not a coincidence that the democratic societies that appear to have coped best – South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, for example – have evolved from, er, authoritarian pasts. In normal circumstances, liberal democracies would have to think very hard about intruding so comprehensively into their citizens’ privacy.
But these are not normal times, and it seems likely that western governments will move to deploy smartphone tracking as a way of monitoring and controlling the pandemic. When they do there will be an explosion of (understandable) outrage from civil liberties organisations, but governments will ride roughshod over these with reassuring bromides about how such “emergency” measures will be rolled back once the crisis has passed. Recent history (think 9/11) does not provide much comfort here. And we are going to have zoonotic-virus crises for the foreseeable future, so the “war against the virus” will become like the war on terror.
In that sense, we seem to be heading into a nightmarish future. But it doesn’t have to be that way…
MORE This is a fast-moving topic. Since I wrote the column lots of useful related stuff has appeared. For example:
An excellent White Paper by The ACLU which provides useful background on some of the privacy issues under five headings: 1. What’s the goal of the deployment?2.What data? Is it aggregate and anonymized data, or individually identifying information? How precisely can the information pinpoint individuals’ locations? 3. Who gets the data? Does the government get access to the raw data, is it shared only with public health entities such as qualified academics or hospitals, or does it remain in the hands of the private entity that originally collected it? 4. How is the data used? For centralized government action,such as issuing or enforcing quarantine orders,or for punitive measures? 5. What is the life cycle of the data? When will it be deleted?
Apple and Google are collaborating on cross-platform technology to do some of this stuff. The joint venture includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores. Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities.
Cory Doctorow wrote an accessible explanation of the proposed technology, and followed it up with a link to a paper by French cryptographer Serge Vaudenay arguing that there are some potentially severe risks in the proposals advanced so far — “sick and reported people may be deanonymized, private encounters may be revealed, and people may be coerced to reveal the private data they collect”.
The overall project, though, is a fascinating example of collective IQ in action.
“Death comes to all — but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder”.
Terrific New Yorker essay by Zadie Smith which manages to be both sardonic and impassioned.
Not that there is anything ridiculous about trying to lengthen the distance between the dates on our birth certificates and the ones on our tombstones: ethical life depends on the meaningfulness of that effort. But perhaps nowhere in the world has this effort—and its relative success—been linked so emphatically to money as it is in America. Maybe this is why plagues—being considered insufficiently hierarchical in nature, too inattentive to income disparity—were long ago relegated to history in the American imagination, or to other continents. In fact, as he made clear early on in his Presidency, entire “shithole” countries were to be considered culpable for their own high death rates—they were by definition in the wrong place (over there) at the wrong time (an earlier stage of development). Such places were plagued in the permanent sense, by not having the foresight to be America. Even global mass extinction—in the form of environmental collapse—was not going to reach America, or would reach it only ultimately, at the very last minute. Relatively secure, in its high-walled haven, America would feast on whatever was left of its resources, still great by comparison with the suffering out there, beyond its borders.
This is about the US but it reminds one of why the ubiquitous government trope that “we are all in this together” is so nauseating.
“There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.”
Graffito in Hong Kong
This is the most incompetent British government in living memory, and yet British journalism seems utterly incapable of holding it to account
I’m not the only one who is pissed off at the government’s Daily ‘Briefings’, in which Ministers provide little information of real value, and the journalists present seem unable to ask the important, hard questions or to follow up on unsatisfactory or evasive answers. There’s a strange kind of atmosphere at the events; it’s almost as though the hacks feel that this bunch of amateurs are doing their best, God bless them, and we shouldn’t crucify them. This journalistic failure is exasperating because it must be clear by now that the UK has a spectacularly incompetent government. This is not entirely surprising because — as I’ve said before — the prime criterion for membership of the Cabinet was to have been wrong on the single most important issue to have faced Britain since 1946. But still…
It turns out that Alastair Campbell, who was Tony Blair’s spin-doctor, has also been watching these info-charades with exasperation. Eventually one of the hacks who is in daily attendance asked him what questions he thinks they should be asking.
“Do you still think it was a good idea to have allowed 250,000 people to amass at the Cheltenham Festival after the WHO had officially declared coronavirus a pandemic?” Follow-up: “How many people have now been infected and/or died as a result?”
“There were three million people daily on the London Underground at the time other countries were in lockdown. Does that partly explain why London has been so badly hit?”
“Everyone will be pleased the Prime Minister is out of intensive care, and wish him well in his recovery. But was he wise to boast about shaking hands with coronavirus patients? Or be so lax at social distancing, not least at these briefings? And was this not all part of a pattern — he and you did not take this virus as seriously as you should have done, which is one of the reasons why more than seven thousand people have died?”
“Would you accept that he did not follow his own government’s advice at all times? And the signals that sent may have led to the loss of life?”
“Can you provide the current figures on all aspects of testing please?” Follow up: (if there is no answer) “You have consistently said this is a top priority. Priority means more important than other things. If it is so important, why can you not give us the figures?” Follow-up: (if there is an answer) “How does that fit with the plan to get to 100,000 tests per day?”
“New Zealand has a population one thirteenth of the UK, yet has carried out a quarter of the number of tests we have, and been in lockdown longer than we have. Do you think these might be factors in their managing to keep the death toll to one? Not one thousand, Mr Raab. But one.”
“Can you tell us how many NHS and social care workers have now died as a result of Covid-19? And what investigations have been carried out into how many of them had adequate PPE?”
“Yesterday three nurses who were recently photographed wearing bin liners as protection were diagnosed as having coronavirus. Do you think there might be a link? Would you apologise to them for being sent to the frontline without proper protection?”
“On March 15, almost a full month ago, the Prime Minister told the Commons that all social care workers would have proper protective equipment “by the end of the week”. Which week did he mean? And by what date will that promise be met?”
“Mr Raab, almost one thousand British people died yesterday. So in one day, around a quarter of the total number of people killed in the entirety of the Troubles in Northern Ireland over thirty years. Do you really believe you are on top of this in the way you should be?”
“Are the figures you give us the real death toll? Do they include all deaths in people’s homes, and those in care homes, where the virus may have been an issue? If so, is there not a danger we are already ahead of Italy?”
“You keep saying you follow the science. Would you please publish the scientific advice on which you are relying?”
“You keep saying you follow the scientific advice. But can you confirm that on all issues such as whether to impose or lift lockdown, how much testing to do, how many ventilators and PPE sets to procure, these are decisions finally taken by ministers?”
“Successive Prime Ministers have written personal letters to the families of military personnel who lose their lives on the frontline. Will you be doing this for public servants who have lost their lives in the fight against the virus?”
“A number of bus drivers have lost their lives. Will there be a proper investigation into whether any or all of these deaths were linked to the lack of protective equipment?”
“We understand why the public transport system has kept running. But, especially in the early days of lockdown, it is clear many non-essential workers continued to use buses. Will you accept some responsibility for the deaths of public transport workers, as a result of the lack of clarity of advice?”
“You have been very critical of Premier League footballers. They have now set out how they intend to make a major contribution to those dealing with the crisis. Will you now call on bankers to donate part of their bonuses, hedge funds to donate some of the massive profits they are making even now, with the Prime Minister’s friend and backer Crispin Odey reportedly making £115 million in the period of the crisis, and indeed those members of the Cabinet who have considerable personal wealth? Or is it one law for working class young men, and another for rich, privileged, middle aged multi-millionaires?”
“Where is Priti Patel?” [The Home Secretary, i.e. Minister of the Interior] And, as a follow up, “Mr Raab, do you accept many of the people you thanked and praised as key workers yesterday — carers, cleaners, porters, supermarket staff and so on — are considered by your immigration plans to be unskilled, non-essential workers? In light of your new-found admiration for them, will Ms Patel, when she is found, be revising the policy?”
“If Parliament could meet weekly in 1940, as a world war was raging, why not now? Why is our democracy reduced to the lowest level of public accountability in modern history?”
“Mr Raab, as these briefings are pretty useless — partly your fault, partly ours — do you not think Parliament should return as a matter of urgency so that you can be properly questioned and held to account?”
Campbell’s main beef “is the tendency to let go of questions which are not properly answered, not simply within briefings, but from one briefing to the next. Testing, ventilators, personal protective equipment — these remain huge issues, but the journalists’ attention span is poor. They have utterly failed to hold the government’s feet to the fire on any of them. Promises come and go, and are not met, yet the media caravan moves to the next promise, leaving behind the failure to deliver on the last one.
“I said days ago”, he continues, that
the media should have created the pressure to provide data on tests, ventilators and PPE each day, along with cases, deaths, and public transport use. There is a reason why the government does not volunteer the information as readily as it does stats for the roads and the trains — because it is not good. Health Secretary Matt Hancock promised we would get to 100,000 tests per day, and no minister should be able to get past a microphone without being probed on where they are with that. It is a total failure of journalism that this is not happening.
All spot-on, IMHO
Zoomed out: two rules for staying sane with online meetings.
As last week for the first ‘real’ week of working at home for many people, I’m beginning to hear that many of them are finding online conferencing very tiring. And I can understand that. The most annoying thing is that many organisations which are dysfunctionally addicted to meetings think that they can do the same now that they have figured out to use Zoom of WebEx. They’re a bit like middle-aged men who’ve just bought their first motorbike. The current obsession with video-conferencing needs to be pared down. So here are two rules.
Cut down on meetings — break the dysfunctional cycle. And only use online for meetings that are really essential.
For most purposes, video is actually not essential: may be worth doing right at the beginning just to give everyone a picture of who’s at the meeting. But then switch off the camera. Zoom has a helpful feature when used in audio-only mode, in that the name of the current speaker is displayed when they are foregrounded.
Follow these rules, or wind up like a zombie at the end of the week.
Following on the item yesterday on what TLS writers and critics were reading during lockdown, A reader wrote to point out something that one of them — Muriel Zagha — wrote:
“Communicating on screens is like receiving news of astronauts in orbit. Atomized, we wave at each other. We have no idea how long the flight will take.”
Think of that every time you wave at a colleague encased in a postage-stamp-sized frame at the top of your screen!
“We have the power to destroy ourselves without the wisdom to ensure that we don’t” A talk by Toby Ord
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It might come to that yet. Some of the largest producers of wheat and rice, namely Kazakhstan and Vietnam, have suspended exports. This suggests that they may be anticipating severe disruption to their domestic supplies. The UK imports 50% of some of the foodstuffs we consume.
Sure, the lockdown saves lives that might otherwise be lost to Covid-19. But what about the avoidable deaths it might also be causing?
Fraser Nelson, the Editor of The Spectator has a startling article in today’s Daily Telegraph about the other side of social distancing and self-isolation. Here’s the core bit that struck me:
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, had been working with the Prime Minister on the next step: how to stop the end of lockdown being seen as a question of “lives vs money”. As a former economic adviser, Hancock is certainly mindful of the money: a £200 billion deficit could mean another decade of austerity. But other figures – infections, mortality rates and deaths – are rightly holding the national attention. Phasing out the lockdown needs to be spoken about in terms of lives vs lives. Or, crudely, whether lockdown might end up costing more lives than the virus.
Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, has worried about this from the offset. In meetings he often stresses that a pandemic kills people directly, and indirectly. A smaller economy means a poorer society and less money for the NHS – eventually. But right now, he says, there will be parents avoiding the NHS, not vaccinating their children – so old diseases return. People who feel a lump now may not get it checked out. Cancer treatment is curtailed. Therapy is abandoned.
Work is being done to add it all up and produce a figure for “avoidable deaths” that could, in the long-term, be caused by lockdown. I’m told the early attempts have produced a figure of 150,000, far greater than those expected to die of Covid.
Nelson is pretty well-connected, so there might be something in this. And, as he points out, all of these numbers come from modelling studies, so should be treated cautiously. But, he says, estimates of lockdown victims are being shared among those in government who worry about the social damage now underway: the domestic violence, the depression, even suicides accompanying the mass bankruptcies. But since these are deaths that may, or may not, show up in national figures in a year’s time, it’s hard to weigh them up against a virus whose victims are being counted every day.
What all of this says to me is that the only reasonable way forward is gradual easing accompanied by dramatic increases in the production of N95 masks.
“War” is the wrong framing for this crisis
I’m as remiss as everyone else in thinking about the current crisis as a ‘war’ against the virus. So one resolution I’ve made today is to avoid using the metaphor in future.
Of course some of the measures now in force in the UK and elsewhere are reminiscent of ‘real’ wartime (e.g. 1939-1946). The burgeoning political talk about an “exit strategy” is likewise misleading, because it implies that, one day, victory over the virus will be achieved. In that sense it’s a bit like the so-called ‘war on terror’, which is really a war on an idea — and therefore never-ending.
There is no end to this, because the virus is a product of nature, and nature will be around long after humans have disappeared from the earth.
Besides, if the virus is an adversary, then it seems to hold most of the cards. It has reduced us to huddling in our caves, for example, while it does its own thing regardless. The human delusion of ‘taming’ nature was always hubris. Now we’re coming to terms with the inevitable nemesis.
And of course this is a tea-party compared to climate change.
Quarantine reading: Emily Wilson
The TLS has a nice compendium of what its various writers and reviewers are reading under lockdown. I was struck by this passage from Emily Wilson’s notes:
In my minimal work time, I am engaged in my translation of the Iliad. I’m now in the throes of Book 5, in which Diomedes confronts the gods on the battlefield. The idea of theomachy – in which a mortal human being grapples with immortal, unkillable, superhuman forces – takes on a new resonance now that far-shooting Apollo, god of plague, has afflicted our world with Covid-19. I began working on this translation at a time when the theme of sudden premature violent death, afflicting vast numbers of the population and bringing down prosperous cities and cultures, seemed relatively distant from my lived reality. Now, I feel haunted in new ways by the poem’s awareness that people can die far from home, far from their loved ones; that wealthy, beautiful, successful cities can be totally destroyed; that the squabbles of a privileged few can cost numberless people their lives, as well as their culture’s prosperity. It isn’t escapism, but there is a kind of comfort in the sense of being in an imaginary poetic landscape that feels so heartbreaking, so human and so truthful.
People get good at something when they have repeated attempts and rapid feedback. People can get pretty good at putting a basketball through a hoop. But for other decisions we only get one shot. One reason South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have been much better at handling coronavirus is that within recent memory they had the SARS and H1N1 flu pandemics to build experience. The US and Europe were less hit by these earlier pandemics and responded less well. We don’t get many attempts to respond to once-in-a-lifetime events.
Even as coronavirus swept through China and Italy, many people dismissed the threat by thinking that we were somehow different. We weren’t. Even within the United States some people think that New York is different. It’s not. Most people learn, if they learn at all, from their own experiences, not from the experiences of others–even others like them. Learning from your own mistakes and experiences is a good skill. Many people make the same mistakes over and over again. But learning from other people’s mistakes or experiences is a great skill of immense power. It’s rare. Cultivate it.
The Zoombot arrives
It’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Already people working from home have discovered that they have too many Zoom meetings. The bad habits of organizations — especially their addiction to meetings — is being replicated online. I know people who have been online all week and have decided to have nothing to do with screens over this holiday weekend.
But help is at hand. Popular Mechanicsreports that Matt Reed, a technologist at redpepper, a marketing design firm in Nashville, has created an AI-powered “Zoombot” that can sit in on video calls for you.
It all began when he noticed someone on Twitter (jokingly) complaining they don’t have time to go outside anymore because they’re always on Zoom calls.
“I was thinking, ‘How can I get someone out of this? What if you need to take a bathroom break, or you want to take a walk during a one-hour conference call? I wanted to find a funny take. We try not to take ourselves too seriously [at redpepper] but we still like to show what’s possible.”
For now, the project is tongue-in-cheek; Reed’s doppelgänger is a little slow to respond, doesn’t really blink, and uses a robotic voice similar to voice assistants like Siri or Alexa. But the code’s up on Github, so it’ll get smarter quickly. Stay tuned.
It’s the kind of thing that restores one’s faith in humanity.
A colleague received this automated response from a Brazilian academic he had emailed about edits to a journal article.
Let’s slow down and stay home. We cannot continue to live in the way we have been living. We have been working extra-hours and not doing the essential work. It’s time to say farewell to the productivist nightmare.
Amen.
E pluribus unum — the New York Phil’s tribute to healthcare workers
I don’t view “optimal length of shutdown” arguments compelling, rather it is about how much pain the political process can stand. I expect partial reopenings by mid-May, sometimes driven by governors in the healthier states, even if that is sub-optimal for the nation as a whole. Besides you can’t have all the banks insolvent because of missed mortgage payments. But R0 won’t stay below 1 for long, even if it gets there at all. We will then have to shut down again within two months, but will then reopen again a bit after that. At each step along the way, we will self-deceive rather than confront the level of pain involved with our choices. We may lose a coherent national policy on the shutdown issue altogether, not that we have one now. The pandemic yo-yo will hold. At some point antivirals or antibodies will kick in (read Scott Gottlieb), or here: “There are perhaps 4-6 drugs that could be available by Fall and have robust enough treatment effect to impact risk of another epidemic or large outbreaks after current wave passes. We should be placing policy bets on these likeliest opportunities.” We will then continue the rinse and repeat of the yo-yo, but with the new drugs and treatments on-line with a death rate at maybe half current levels and typical hospital stays at three days rather than ten. It will seem more manageable, but how eager will consumers be to resume their old habits? Eventually a vaccine will be found, but getting it to everyone will be slower than expected. The lingering uncertainty and “value of waiting,” due to the risk of second and third waves, will badly damage economies along the way.
Written with the US mainly in mind, but sounds relevant for the UK too.
Given that there’s no conclusive end in sight, the challenge will be how to live with the virus longer-term at lower intensities until a vaccine appears.
Shockwave: Adam Tooze on the pandemic’s consequences for the world economy
Terrific analysis of the impact of COVID-19 by a distinguished contemporary historian. Long read, but well worth it. Not reassuring. Ends like this:
And once the crisis is over? What then? How do we imagine the restart? Before he was forced to retreat, Trump evoked the image of churches filling at Easter. Will the world economy rise from the dead? Are we going to rely once more on the genius of modern logistics and the techniques of dollar-finance to stitch the world economy back together again? It will be harder than before. Any fantasy of convergence that we might have entertained after the ‘fall of communism’ has surely by now been dispelled. We will somehow have to patch together China’s one-party authoritarianism, Europe’s national welfarism and whatever it is the United States will be in the wake of this disaster. But in any case, for those of us in Europe and America these questions are premature. The worst is just beginning.
Biden can assemble a panel of scientists and medical doctors to keep the public informed. An hour a day, press conference style. What the CDC would be doing if Trump weren’t president.
And he (Biden) would step back, an example for what Trump should do. Let the doctors and the military manage it. Stop campaigning while thousands of Americans are dying. Biden wouldn’t even have to say it. It would make Trump look immediately tone deaf which he most certainly is.
What makes this idea so appealing right now is that the governors are linking up and sharing resources. Someone should be providing the science for them. The government is failing. But there’s plenty of unused talent out there, it just needs to be managed.
This would be a smart idea, given that Bernie Sanders has quit the race, leaving Biden the Democratic candidate. Essentially, it would mean that Biden was showing the country what a real US President should be doing — leading by example. And it would drive Trump nuts. He’s always thought that Biden would be the guy he’d have to beat. That’s what drove all the skullduggery in the Ukraine.
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I found it in a nice piece in the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s second-favourite newspaper.
The economic consequences of the virus
The inhabitant of New York could order by computer, sipping his morning coffee in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate with passport or other formality and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing just a credit card upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved by the TSA but otherwise much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, exclusion and of pandemics which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily twitter feed, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.
This is Alex Tabbarok’s slight adaptation of a famous passage in John Maynard Keynes’s pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he evokes the world that was destroyed by the First World War. To see how clever this is, just compare it with the original.
New app collects the sounds of COVID-19
Amazing piece of research by Celicia Mascolo and her Cambridge colleagues. They’ve created an app which will be used to collect data to develop machine learning algorithms that may be able automatically to detect whether a person is suffering from COVID-19 based on the sound of their voice, their breathing and coughing.
“Having spoken to doctors”, Cecilia said,
“one of the most common things they have noticed about patients with the virus is the way they catch their breath when they’re speaking, as well as a dry cough, and the intervals of their breathing patterns. There are very few large datasets of respiratory sounds, so to make better algorithms that could be used for early detection, we need as many samples from as many participants as we can get. Even if we don’t get many positive cases of coronavirus, we could find links with other health conditions.”
Where those Florida beach celebrants went after partying
You know the story: lots and lots of people congregated on a beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida during the Spring break weekend. A couple of geo-tracking companies, one of which was Tectonix (Slogan: “Reshape Your Data Experience) posted an fascinating video showing where those celebrants went afterwards.
Donie O’Sullivan of CNN has a good report on this. Apparently there are at least two companies — Tectonix and X-mode — doing this.
The map generated from X-Mode’s data by Tectonix, a data visualization firm, is indeed powerful and underlines why the US government might be considering using location data from Americans’ cell phones to try to track and possibly curtail the spread of the coronavirus.
It also may point to a potential sea change in how some in the tech industry talk about the data they possess. Silicon Valley has endured years of high-profile data privacy scandals. But now smaller companies like X-Mode, unheard of unknown by the majority of Americans, are publicly touting demonstrations of their technology — suggesting businesses like theirs see the potential of helping track the spread of the coronavirus as an opportunity to show how their often maligned data can be used for good. Cuebiq, another location tracking company, has been similarly public about its abilities.
For people who don’t understand the tracking capabilities of smartphones this will probably be startling info. For those who follow the industry it is, sadly, old hat.
IT support staff are critical workers too
One overlooked group of critical workers is the folks who are doing IT support to enable thousands and thousands of people who have never worked out of an office to do it at home. I see it in my college and in the wider university. But a colleague who works for a large corporation tells me that their IT staff are stretched to breaking point — having to prep 300-500 new laptops a day with the security and other specialised software needed for secure home working. IT Support is one of the most stressful occupations there are (partly because their clients are often angry and/or frustrated when they call them in). And getting beginners onto Zoom, Teams, VPNs etc. isn’t often easy.
How the telephone failed to make the Spanish flu bearable
This isn’t the first time technology was supposed to make isolation easier.
This is from the St Louis Post-Despatch of November 17, 1910, years before the Spanish flu outbreak. Harry McCracken, the Tech Editor of Fast Company, has a lovely of the role the Bell system played in that crisis.
Cities and entire states imposed emergency measures similar to those in place today, aiming to flatten the flu’s curve by keeping people apart from each other. Places of business, education, and worship were temporarily closed, and masks were required in some areas.
For a time, it looked like the telephone might help people carry on their lives with minimal disruption. In Holton, Kansas, the local Red Cross distributed placards that local merchants could place in their windows, encouraging customers—especially those who might be ill—to call rather than enter the premises. (Even before the epidemic, telephone ordering was becoming a popular form of commerce—grocery stores, for instance, offered Instacart-like delivery services.)
But then…
Guess what? There was a category of ‘critical’ workers that nobody had thought of. Switchboard operators. Overwhelmingly female. And they were as vulnerable to the flu as our critical workers. SO you can guess the rest of the story — encapsulated in these ads:
It’s a lovely essay — worth reading in full.
YouTube and 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories.
You may not have noticed but seriously crackpot conspiracy theories about 5G mobile telephony causing COVID-19 have been circulating on social media, including YouTube. And nutters have apparently been so moved by them that they ahve started to set fire to mobile phone masts. This has led to demands to YouTube to shape up and stop this nonsense circulating.
According to a Guardianreport by Alex Hern, YouTube has
“reduced the amount of content spreading conspiracy theories about links between 5G technology and coronavirus that it recommends to users, it has said, as four more attacks were recorded on phone masts within 24 hours.
The online video company will actively remove videos that breach its policies, it said. But content that is simply conspiratorial about 5G mobile communications networks, without mentioning coronavirus, is still allowed on the site.”
This is standard-issue First Amendment cant. YouTube (like Facebook and Twitter) believes it has a responsibility to let nutters broadcast so long as they do not violate those sacred Terms and Conditions. But the First Amendment applies only to the government. YouTube is a private platform, owned and controlled by Google (well, Alphabet, Google’s parent company). It can do what it likes. It has no obligation to give a platform to anyone.
But 5G doesn’t give you cancer. It won’t make you sick. And…god, I am getting stupider just thinking about typing this, coronavirus is not a false-flag op to disguise the illnesses that 5G is secretly creating.
The reason I have to mention that is that the conspiracyverse is full of that specific theory, and it’s inspiring people to COMMIT ARSON and torch 5G towers.
No, seriously.
In the wake of multiple attacks on 5G towers, Youtube has announced changes to its moderation guidelines. It will allow 5G conspiracy theories, just not ones that (oh god my fingers are seizing up from the stupid) link 5G with coronavirus.
Corona conspiracy theories are new, but conspiracy theories have have been around for ever. “Even a cursory perusal of the arguments for these conspiracies”, says Cory, ” reveals that they have not gotten better, even as they’ve gained traction”. If the same arguments are attracting more adherents, he argues, then one of two things is going on. Either: YouTube is a mind-control ray that can turn rational people into believers in absurd ideas; or the number of people to whom these ideas seem plausible has grown and/or Youtube has made it more efficient to reach those people.
Cory thinks it’s the latter, and I agree. YouTube is not a powerful hypnotising machine so much as a machine for finding people who are susceptible to nonsense.
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Is it any wonder that the UK currently has such a mediocre government?
After all, the main criterion for appointment to the Cabinet was to have been wrong about the most important question that faced the UK since 1946. As a result we have a squad of econd-raters.
How long can we continue to live like this?
Abhijit Banerjee (AB) and Esther Duflo (ED), a married couple, shared this year’s Nobel Prize for economics with Michael Kremer. Here’s part of a transcript of a conversation in which the couple discussed one of the issues — how long can we live like this?
AB: So, what do you propose to do about it?
ED: At this moment, we can listen to what the doctor says or try to make sense of what the doctor says. We know it is bad and we know we do not have a cure, and anybody who says he has a cure is lying. People are working for a cure but it will take time. All we can do is to isolate ourselves. Another thing we can do is to practice good hygiene in particular washing of hands. So if we get in contact with affected people we can prevent a transmission.
AB: It is extremely hard for people to practise such an unnatural lifestyle in the foreseeable future. For how long? People are not working, they are not earning, they are not going out, they are not meeting their loved ones. Is this a realistic enterprise for six months? Do you think that causes some challenges?
ED: It would be unsustainable for two weeks. Almost sure it would be unsustainable for six months. On the top of the uncertainties caused by the virus itself, there are uncertainties caused by the uncertainties. I am now turning the question to you. If you were in charge, of US to begin with, when would you have started this curfew and so many restrictions… you can do this, you cannot do this?
AB: It is a tough call. The model says five months and the model is based on the numbers which people plucked out from the air. Five months for full shutdown strategy. It is frightening to contemplate. A realistic (option) is to pick a shorter window and work around the peak and to make sure the peak is not as bad. Keeping the window significantly short and more focussed. I do not know which way I would have gone if I was in the hot seat because that involves making a choice that I will let some people die. More people will die in the scenario we shut it down later unless we believe that the whole thing is not sustainable. Then of course… That must be the case in many countries, because five months shutting down means people will stop believing there is a centre of policy. There is a trade-off between saving real lives and possibly at an enormous enforcement cost and enormous cost to the economy… Possibly it is easier to save the economy… I do not know.
He doesn’t know. Neither do we.
Bruce Schneier and Ben Evans on Zoom and its weaknesses/problems
Everybody’s piling in on Zoom. Bruce Schneier, one of my favourite security gurus, is particularly fierce. He sees three kinds of problems with the service: (1) bad privacy practices, (2) bad security practices, and (3) bad user configurations.
Privacy first: Zoom spies on its users for personal profit. It seems to have cleaned this up somewhat since everyone started paying attention, but it still does it.
The company collects a laundry list of data about you, including user name, physical address, email address, phone number, job information, Facebook profile information, computer or phone specs, IP address, and any other information you create or upload. And it uses all of this surveillance data for profit, against your interests.
On security, Schneier says that “Zoom’s security is at best sloppy, and malicious at worst”. And its encryption is “awful. First, the company claims that it offers end-to-end encryption, but it doesn’t. It only provides link encryption, which means everything is unencrypted on the company’s servers.” (I wrote about this in my Observer column yesterday.)
And then there’s Zoom’s “bad user configuration. Zoom has a lot of options. The defaults aren’t great, and if you don’t configure your meetings right you’re leaving yourself open to all sort of mischief.”
Even without screen sharing, people are logging in to random Zoom meetings and disrupting them. Turns out that Zoom didn’t make the meeting ID long enough to prevent someone from randomly trying them, looking for meetings. This isn’t new; Checkpoint Research reported this last summer. Instead of making the meeting IDs longer or more complicated — which it should have done — it enabled meeting passwords by default. Of course most of us don’t use passwords, and there are now automatic tools for finding Zoom meetings.
In short: Schneier really doesn’t like Zoom.
Benedict Evans has an interesting and more sympathetic take on it in his (invaluable) weekly newsletter.
Zoom has gone from 10m to 200m daily users in the past few weeks (!), and that comes with pain. On one hand, since it was designed for the enterprise it wasn’t hardened against abuse, so ‘Zoom-bombing’ (eg crashing random open group calls and putting obscene things onto everyone’s screen) is now a thing. On the other hand, it’s now getting a lot more privacy and security scrutiny, and some… issues have come up. These are two sides of the same coin: you have to ask ‘what would malicious people do with our software?’ and the answer might be both human engineering and software engineering. A lot of the flaws people found look like simple product decisions to make installing and using easier – for example, it used the Facebook SDK so you could log-in with Facebook, but that sends some device data to Facebook. But it also claimed it was end-to-end encrypted and isn’t, and some of the traffic goes through Chinese servers, and so one has to assume that the Chinese state could listen in to anything if it wanted to. To its credit, Zoom has responded pretty well to most of these concerns, and some of this can be over-played (it seems pretty silly for a school system to ban it in case the Chinese intelligence agencies are listening to drama class), but I’m not sure the UK cabinet should carry on using this.
Agreed. But then Evans has this interesting thought.
Stepping back, it’s striking that Zoom has made such a big impact despite every tech giant having a big mature product in this space (or even several – how many of these apps does Google have? That would be a good interview question). It’s really not as hard to displace these companies as some would think, if you can find the right wedge. This also reminds me of the founding legend of Dropbox: everyone told Drew Houston ‘there are dozens of these’ and he said ‘yes, but do you use any of them?’ Links: Zoom goes to 200m users, Zoom response to issues
Superyachts: depreciating quarantine machines
This was the headline on a lovely FT piece about the problems of the mega rich in their floating gin-palaces.
Google searches for “I can’t smell” seem to be good predictors of where the virus is
As this pandemic rages, it becomes ever clearer that the UK government is flying blind. This is because we’re not testing enough people for the simple reason that we don’t have the capacity to do it. So we’re in a radically different position to Germany — another large country which seems to be doing much better. And because the UK started so late in the pandemic, it’s now run up against the global shortage of reagents which is reducing capacity to create huge numbers of test kits. Is there anything we could do at the moment to improve our knowledge of where the virus is striking hardest?
An intriguing OpEd in today’s New York Times suggests that there might be. The article is by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz, who some years published an insightful book with the intriguing title Everybody Lies: what the Internet can tell us about who we really are. The point of the book is that people’s Google searches are amazingly revealing, because they will confide anxieties to Google they would not dare express to even their nearest and dearest.
In his NYT article, Seth suggests that analysis of the location of Internet users searching Google for “I can’t smell” could provide valuable information about outbreaks of COVID-19.
To see the potential information lying in plain sight in Google data, consider searches for “I can’t smell.” There is now strong evidence that anosmia, or loss of smell, is a symptom of Covid-19, with some estimates suggesting that 30-60 percent of people with the disease experience this symptom. In the United States, in the week ending this past Saturday, searches for “I can’t smell” were highest in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Michigan — four of the states with the highest prevalence of Covid-19. In fact, searches related to loss of smell during this period almost perfectly matched state-level disease prevalence rates, as the accompanying chart shows.
Other researchers have found that a bevy of symptom-related searches — loss of smell as well as fever and shortness of breath — have tracked outbreaks around the world.
Because these searches correlate so strongly with disease prevalence rates in parts of the world with reasonably good testing, says Stephens-Davidowitz, we can use these searches to try to find places where many positive cases are likely to have been missed.
It’s possible that this correlation won’t be stable over a long time. (There was a surge of excitement a few years ago when it was discovered that Google searches provided earlier advance warning of ordinary flu outbreaks in the US than the CDC could produce; but that turned out to be a fluke.) This particular correlation, though, seems to hold across some parts of the world.
There is already some evidence that clues to this symptom were evident earlier in search data. Joshua Gans, a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, found that searches for “non sento odori” (“I can’t smell”) were elevated in Italy days before the symptom was reported in the news. Iran also saw an enormous rise in searches related to loss of smell weeks before media reports of the symptom became common.
Anyway, worth trying for the testing-challenged UK.
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Then there’s the issue of security, and of encryption in particular.
“We take security seriously and we are proud to exceed industry standards when it comes to your organisation’s communications,” says the Zoom website. Any host of a meeting can “secure a meeting with end-to-end encryption”. Well, that’s not quite right, at least if by “end to end” you mean encryption where the service provider has no way of decrypting the content (as, say, with WhatsApp or Signal). The encryption on Zoom communications at the moment is the kind that protects your communications with any website with ‘https’ in its URL. But the content is unencrypted while it is passing through Zoom’s cloud servers.
There may be good reasons for this, but at the very least the company’s website shouldn’t be making exaggerated claims about encryption. It should privilege facts over marketing puffery.
And the moral of all this? Zoom is providing a service of real value in these desperate times, but it needs to grow up. It’s playing in the big league now.
Rumours, facts, misunderstandings and hearsay about the supposed (in)security of Zoom conferencing has been rife for the last week. Lots of my friends and acquaintances have been asking me about it, in the (mistaken) belief that I know lots about it. I don’t. I only know what I read from trusted and knowledgeable sources.
The Citizen Lab report
Top of my list in this regard is the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of the University of Toronto. It was founded by Ron Deibert, who is a hero of mine, and has for years done sterling work on detecting and unearthing the tools that unscrupulous regimes and companies have developed for snooping on human rights activists, journalists and other good folks. They have now completed a pretty thorough investigation of the cryptographic protocols at the heart of Zoom’s service and published an illuminating report. It makes for fascinating reading if you’re a geek, but the gist is that their research shows that (contrary to the company’s public claims to the contrary) Zoom uses non-industry-standard cryptographic techniques with identifiable weaknesses and is thus not suitable for sensitive communications. But’s it seems ok for non-sensitive uses.
There are also potential security issues with where Zoom generates and stores cryptographic information. While based in Silicon Valley, Zoom owns three companies in China where its engineers develop the Zoom software. Its AES-128 keys, which we verified are sufficient to decrypt Zoom packets intercepted in Internet traffic, are transmitted by Zoom servers to all meeting participants. In some of our tests, our researchers observed these keys being distributed through Zoom servers in China, even when all meeting participants were outside of China. A company primarily catering to North American clients that distributes encryption keys through servers in China is very concerning, given that Zoom may be legally obligated to disclose these keys to authorities in China.
Given the sudden embrace of Zoom by a wide range of sectors across society, it is reasonable to assume that many government’s signals intelligence agencies, as well as criminals, will be subjecting Zoom to the type of analysis we did. Some of them may choose to privately exploit those weaknesses for nefarious purposes and with harmful consequences.
As a result of these troubling security issues, we discourage the use of Zoom at this time for use cases that require strong privacy and confidentiality, including:
Government communications Proprietary or confidential business activities Healthcare providers handling sensitive / confidential patient information Human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, and others working on sensitive topics
But the good news is that
For those using Zoom to keep in touch with friends, hold social events, or organize courses or lectures that they might otherwise hold in a public or semi-public venue, our findings should not necessarily be concerning.
This is a relief because it’s more or less what I’ve been saying to friends and family. It was based on a hunch that the vulnerabilities in the Zoom system would be mainly of interest to state-level actors.
On the other hand, I hadn’t known of the extent to which Zoom’s development work is being done in China, or that data packets and encryption keys seem to pass through servers that are based there. If I were running Zoom, I’d rethink that soonest.
Good advice from Mozilla
Many of the problems that have arisen with Zoom stem from the fact that it has had massive take-up of its free offer — which means that it is now being used by millions of non-technical users who probably know relatively little about online security. So it’s good to see that the Mozilla Foundation (which provides the Firefox browsers) has published some useful tips “to make your Zoom gatherings more private”.
They are:
1. Use your account with the latest version of Zoom. Sign-in and update to the latest version of the Zoom client or app. This will give you access to the meetings that are available to invited participants and ensure that your system has up-to-date security patches.
2. Use password protection. You can make your meetings password protected to prevent people from guessing your room ID and joining.
3. Keep your Personal Meeting ID private. Don’t use your Personal Meeting ID – especially for events you’re broadly publicizing. That will stop people from trying to enter your personal room at other times. Instead, generate a unique meeting ID by scheduling the meeting.
4. “Lock out” uninvited participants. Don’t share Zoom meeting invites or Meeting IDs with anyone you don’t want to join.
5. Utilize the “mute all” feature. Using the “manage participants” function, you can mute all participants. You should not unmute them again without telling them that’s what you’re doing.
6. Stop unwanted content from being shared. You can stop participants from sharing their screen, or if necessary, stop their video. This is helpful if you’re inviting lots of people you don’t necessarily know so that someone can’t maliciously share content – a practice now known as “zoombombing.”
7. Respect chat privacy. Decide ahead of time if you will save the chat or record the video of the meeting and make sure all participants have agreed and know how you plan to use that information. Recording and saving chats may have legal implications so make sure you’ve checked into that before enabling these options.
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