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.

Corporate cant

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Waitrose1

Waitrose2

These nauseating posters greeted me this afternoon on arriving at Waitrose to do some shopping. What really grates is the saccharine misrepresentation, which is a bit like a visual version of those really annoying female Classic FM disc jockeys.

It’s not ‘my’ bloody Waitrose. It’s Waitrose’s bloody Waitrose. And inside the place has been transformed into a kind of aircraft hangar while the ceiling has been removed to facilitate the installation of the so-called ‘improvements’.

Which ‘improvements’ were not commissioned to make life easier for me, by the way, but to increase the store’s turnover per square foot.

Nailing the Google mindset

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I’m reading The Circle, Dave Eggers’s terrific new novel. The blurb describes it thus:

Set in an undefined future time, The Circle is the story of Mae Holland, a young woman hired to work for the world’s most powerful internet company. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle has subsumed all the tech companies we know of now, linking users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

Everything about the fictional company, as described by Eggers, screams “Google”. But in an interview on McSweeney’s he denies that it’s modelled on any particular company:

Q: Is this book about Google or Facebook or any particular company?

No, no. The book takes place after a company called the Circle has subsumed all the big tech companies around today. The Circle has streamlined search and social media into one system and that’s enabled it to grow very quickly in size and power.

Q: The campus described is so vivid. People will assume you’ve been to all the Silicon Valley tech campuses, especially Google.

There was a point where I thought I should tour some of the tech campuses, but because I wanted this book to be free of any real-life corollaries, I decided not to. I’ve never been to Google, or Facebook or Twitter or any other internet campus, actually. I didn’t interview any employees of any of these companies, either, and didn’t read any books about them. I didn’t want to be influenced by any one extant company or any actual people. But I’ve been living in the Bay Area for most of the last twenty years, so I’ve been very close to it all for a long time.

Well, if he hasn’t been to Google, then he’s clearly a fantastically intuitive writer because he seems to me to have nailed the creepy zeitgeist that pervades these tech companies. As in this passage:

Mae knew that she never wanted to work – never wanted to be – anywhere else. Her hometown, and the rest of California, the rest of America, seemed like some chaotic mess in the developing world. Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds, that made possible this, the best place to work. And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought. Who else but utopians could make utopia?

Spot on. This is IMHO a terrific, bitingly satirical, perceptive novel — though not everybody agrees with me about that.

NSA/GCHQ surveillance and human rights

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Frank Schirrmacher, publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commenting on the attacks on the Guardian‘s reporting of the Snowden revelations.

The Snowden affair, one day, will be understood as a historic milestone at which democratic societies began to realize that the political cost of new technologies still needed to be negotiated. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany’s last great intellectuals and certainly not a leftist, sees it as a transition to a post-democratic society. And had the Snowden files not opened our eyes to this transition already, the way how the current debate about these documents unfolds, certainly did.These revelations are not only about secret services, but just as much about all the new social touchpoints of every citizen who is equipped with a smartphone and online access: Who controls and analyses these touchpoints and why? Is it so difficult to understand that in a world in which – according to Eric Schmidt’s concise formulation – the digital self not only mirrors but substitutes our true selves, all these issues become questions of human rights?

More unintended consequences of NSA snooping

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This is a really intriguing statement by ICANN. It’s couched in diplomatic language, so I have added my interpretations in less diplomatic language.

Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation

7 October 2013
Montevideo, Uruguay – The leaders of organizations responsible for coordination of the Internet technical infrastructure globally have met in Montevideo, Uruguay, to consider current issues affecting the future of the Internet.

The Internet and World Wide Web have brought major benefits in social and economic development worldwide. Both have been built and governed in the public interest through unique mechanisms for global multistakeholder Internet cooperation, which have been intrinsic to their success. The leaders discussed the clear need to continually strengthen and evolve these mechanisms, in truly substantial ways, to be able to address emerging issues faced by stakeholders in the Internet.

In this sense:

They reinforced the importance of globally coherent Internet operations, and warned against Internet fragmentation at a national level. They expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance.

[Translation: We are concerned that one effect of the revelations about the NSA’s activities will be to hasten moves towards the ‘Balkanization’ of the Internet. We are also worried about the way trust and confidence in the Internet has been undermined by these revelations.]

They identified the need for ongoing effort to address Internet Governance challenges, and agreed to catalyze community-wide efforts towards the evolution of global multistakeholder Internet cooperation.

[Translation: the old system, by which the US exercised de-facto control over the central governance institutions of the Internet, has to be scrapped and replaced by something based on genuine global representation.]

They called for accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.

[Translation: the days when the US was primus inter pares are over.]

They also called for the transition to IPv6 to remain a top priority globally. In particular Internet content providers must serve content with both IPv4 and IPv6 services, in order to be fully reachable on the global Internet.

Telling it like it is: Andrew Wylie on publishing

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Laura Bennett has a lovely interview with the celebrated literary agent, Andrew Wylie, in the new Republic. It contains some memorable quotes.
For example:

“The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyses its strategies as though it were Procter & Gamble. It’s Hermes. It selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. Is a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.”

And I particularly liked this exchange:

Q: you grew up with a father who worked in publishing. Was there a disdain for mass-market fiction in your house?

A: Not really. I think what I wanted to know was: Is it possible to have a good business? The image I had was, if you represented writers were good, they and you were doomed to a life of poverty and madness and alcoholism and suicide. Dying spider plants and grimy windows on the Lower East Side. On the other side of my family, there were bankers. So I wanted to put the two together.

Q: how did you put the two together?
A: What I thought was: if I have to read James Mitchener, Danielle steel, Tom Clancy, I’m toast. Fuck it. This is about making money. I know where the money is. It’s on Wall Street. I’m not going to sit around reading this drivel in order to get paid less than a clerk at Barclays. That’s just stupid. So if I want to be interested in what I read, is there a business? Answer: yes, there is.

And the way to make it a business, I figured out, was: One, if you’re going to represent the best, you must represent a preponderance of the best. You’ve got to be very aggressive about representing the right people. Two, it has to be international and seamless.

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.

The Failing States

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Good blog post by Jonathan Freedland prompted by the paralysis in Washington. His conclusion:

Perhaps this doesn’t matter much to American voters. They might not realize how closely the rest of the world—their economies as well as their media and popular culture—follow, react to, and are affected by the ups and downs of US political life. But they do. And right now, they look at the stalemate in Washington the same way they look at the periodic gun massacres that afflict the United States: with a bafflement that America, mighty America, for so long the most innovative, creative, energetic society on the planet, cannot solve problems that smaller, poorer, feebler countries cracked long ago. Americans might not realize it, but this shutdown, like the gun epidemic, reduces US influence in the world. It makes nations, and individuals, who still want to regard America as a model see it instead as a basket case.