Fact or fiction? Scene from the 1955 British movie of George Orwell's 1984 resonates today, though many sophisticated systems of government snooping are invisible to the ordinary citizen.
There’s an elephant in your room – and it never, never forgets.
It’s Big Data, and, says Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, co-author of a book by the same name, it is “A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think.”
From cradle to grave (and even before birth) we’re tracked, trailed, photographed, videoed, scrutinized, biometrized, analysed and….you can see where this is going.
Mayer-Shoenberger is a fan of Big D for its ability to put together information that connects patterns we could never understand from smaller bits and bytes. He also has some warnings about what can happen when staggering amounts of personal data are put together to map our lives in a virtual human cybergenome.
Q: Is Big Data just Big Brother writ larger -- an era of total surveillance?
A: There are two important elements. One is the obvious fact that we’re collecting more information than ever before and most of it is in a digital format. That creates a much more comprehensive capability of surveillance.
Q: And the other?
A: It takes the quality of ephemerality out of our communications. We used to depend on things we said or did being plausibly deniable. They would go away. We could say they never happened. Now that’s much more difficult.
Q: What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas?
A: If you look at Facebook and Twitter, the younger generation uses them as an ephemeral way of communicating. They don’t realize it doesn’t disappear like water cooler gossip. What I say will stay with me and may be used against me in the future.
Q: And the effect on behaviour?
A: What’s happening goes beyond surveillance per se. In the past, watching was done in the same time frame. Now it’s the panopticon. That was a prison in which inmates didn’t know if they were being watched, so they had to assume they were watched all the time. That created compliance without active watching.
Q: No escape?
A: There’s a “data shadow” following us that transcends time, which is new. And this may freak you out, but in the Big Data age there’s an even bigger problem, our vastly increasing reliance on probability.
It means calculating propensities based on probabilities. We’re using all that data to predict a 90 per cent likelihood that the person standing in front of us is going to commit a crime next week. So punish him now – like Minority Report. Or take him into an interview and persuade him not to do it.
Q: This isn’t science fiction. Ordinary people in Britain have been arrested because surveillance data predicted they might cause trouble during the royal wedding.
A: Right, and in the U.S. there’s “predictive policing” in a number of cities. They use Big Data analysis to determine where and what time crime spikes. But this is deeply troubling because profiling becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to Europe, South Asia and the U.S., winning national and international awards.
The website that distributed blueprints for a gun that could be made with a 3D printer has removed links to the download, complying with a U.S. government demand.
But in a letter to the Defense Distributed, the group that posted the blueprints, U.S. government officials warned founder Cody Wilson that he may have violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulation.
In a story on its website, The National Review reports that Wilson received this letter:
The Department of State, Bureau of Political Military
Affairs, Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance, Enforcement
Division (DTCC/END) is responsible for compliance with and civil
enforcement of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2778) (AECA) and
the AECA’s implementing regulations, the International Traffic in Arms
Regulations (22 C.F.R. Parts 120-130) (ITAR). The AECA and the ITAR
impose certain requirements and restrictions on the transfer of, and
access to, controlled defense articles and related technical data
designated by the United States Munitions List (USML) (22 C.F.R. Part
121).
The DTCC/END is conducting a review of technical data made
publicly available by Defense Distributed through its 3D printing
website, DEFCAD.org, the majority of which appear to be related to items
in Category I of the USML. Defense Distributed may have released
ITAR-controlled technical data without the required prior authorization
from the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), a violation of
the ITAR.
Technical data regulated under the ITAR refers to
information required for the design, development, production,
manufacture, assembly, operation, repair, testing, maintenance or
modification of defense articles, including information in the form of
blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, instructions or documentation.
For a complete definition of technical data, see 120.10 of the ITAR.
Pursuant to 127.1 of the ITAR, it is unlawful to export any defense
article or technical data for which a license or written approval is
required without first obtaining the required authorization from the
DDTC. Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure)
or tranferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United
States or abroad, is considered an export under 120.17 of the ITAR.
The
Department believes Defense Distributed may not have established the
proper jurisdiction of the subject technical data. To resolve this
matter officially, we request that Defense Distributed submit Commodity
Jurisdiction (CJ) determination requests for the following selection of
data files available on DEFCAD.org, and any other technical data for
which Defense Distributed is unable to determine proper jurisdiction:
Defense Distributed Liberator pistol
.22 electric
125mm BK-14M high-explosive anti-tank warhead
5.56/.223 muzzle brake
Springfield XD-40 tactical slide assembly
Sound Moderator – slip on
“The Dirty Diane” 1/2-28 to 3/4-16 STP S3600 oil filter silencer adapter
12 gauge to .22 CB sub-caliber insert
Voltlock electronic black powder system
VZ-58 sight
DTCC/END requests that Defense Distributed
submits its CJ requests within three weeks of the receipt of this letter
and notify this office of the final CJ determinations. All CJ requests
must be submitted electronically through an online application using the
DS-4076 Commodity Jurisdiction Request Form. The form, guidance for
submitting CJ requests, and other relevant information such as a copy of
the ITAR can be found on DDTC’s website at http://www.pmddtc.state.gov.
Until
the Department provides Defense Distributed with the final CJ
determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical
data as ITAR-controlled. This means that all such data shoudl be removed
form public access immediately. Defense Distributed should also review
the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine
whether any additional data may be similarly controlled and proceed
according to ITAR requirements.
Additionally, DTCC/END requests
information about the procedures Defense Distributed follows to
determine the classification of its technical data, to include
aforementioned technical data files. We ask that you provide your
procedures for determining proper jurisdiction of technical data within
30 days of the date of this letter to Ms. Bridget Van Buren, Compliance
Specialist, Enforcement Division, at the address below.
Despite its removal, the file is still widely available on various Internet sites.
Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead
Here's an incredible time-lapse video of an icebreaker navigating through Antarctic ice.
The video is narrated by Cassandra Brooks, a doctoral student at Stanford University studying
Antarctic Ocean policy.
Brooks condensed two months of footage of the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker travelling through
the Ross Sea in Antarctica into about five minutes for this stunning video.
"Each day was a new stunning scene. The ice changing colour with the phases of the sun and
seemingly growing thicker every day as the temperatures dropped and daylight
decreased," Brooks told the Star.
Brooks and fellow research scientists were on the boat studying the Ross Sea ecosystem. The Ross Sea is "one of the last
remaining stretches of ocean on Earth that has not been harmed by human
activity," according to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.
She blogged about her experiences on the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a National Science Foundation research cruise for the National Geographic's Ocean Views blog. You can read her blog posts here.
"I would run up the bridge
almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day and attach my GoPro to the
railing outside in front of the bridge with a Joby Gorillapod. I have to thank
my husband, photographer and filmmaker John Weller for sending me to the
ice with the right gear and encouraging me to capture the scenes," Brooks said.
(A quick thanks to @Jeffdelviscio for tweeting this video.)
In 20 simple years. On Monday, CERN announced it was launching a project to restore the world's first URL.
Twenty years and three days ago, a researcher at CERN -- the European physics institute -- posted a web page that would be considered horrifyingly boring by today's standards.
On white background in black times new roman text, the page lists links like "Help," "Software products" and "Technical."
Most viewers would have needed help, in fact, because that page, posted on April 30, 1993, was the very first site on the World Wide Web.
Now CERN is launching a project to restore that first URL and to retain and protect the early files and web servers that went into creating the World Wide Web.
After announcing the project and the re-appearance of the first-ever website on Monday, the project's blog said the team was blown away by the level of interest from the public.
"We have a great number of leads that came up following yesterday's publicity. People who have old machines lying around; copies of files that may be of use; expertise; ideas; stories. This is fantastic. Thank you."
In 1993, there were other systems for retrieving information on the Internet. But the WWW prevailed because it was free and simple to use.
Its inventor, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, created the WWW system in 1989 to satisfy demand among international researchers for file-sharing capabilities.
News of the Boston Marathon bombings broke a few minutes
after the first explosion last Monday, and almost immediately the Star’s foreign
editor Lynn McAuley asked me to grab my passport and make my way to Boston.
We didn’t know how many fatalities there were, or if I’d
be able to make it to Boston.
After rumours of a possible bombing at a Boston
library, the airspace over the city was closed.
In the Toronto
Island airport lounge,
the gravity hit home as Boston-area residents frantically juggled cellphones
and laptops, trying to account for their family and friends.
After arriving in Boston, I headed
for a planned candlelight vigil at Boston
University. When tragedy
strikes, most arriving reporters head either for impromptu memorials, typically
advertised on Twitter or Facebook, or to area hospitals and blood donor centres.
I wore a windbreaker that had a small maple leaf on it, and
although the vigil was cancelled, a man approached me and asked if I was
Canadian.
Toronto resident Farhan
Mumtaz, 18, a first-year pre-med student at Boston University,
told me he’d been fielding calls all day from people afraid he might have been
injured. The Pakistan
native said he was praying that the bombers weren’t Muslim because life for
many Muslims was hard enough in the wake of 9/11.
My editors and I debated how much of his quotes we’d use for
our story, and decided that since no one had claimed responsibility for the
bombings, and there were no suspects, it was too early to raise the issue of
religion in our coverage.
The workday wasn't over. It was after midnight but there was still an hour or so to go to file updates for the Star's final edition. I walked as close as I could to the marathon finish line, and interviewed a few runners there who were picking up bags of clothing they had would have retrieved earlier if they could have completed the race.
In many foreign assignments logistics is a key challenge, and
Boston was no
different.
Each day, editors would ask whether I could chase down a
string of purported developments in the case. On Tuesday, The New York Post
reported a pair of Saudi nationals were guarded and being questioned in the
hospital.
Later, CNN erroneously reported an arrest had been made in
the case, a report that left me sprinting across Boston to a courthouse where I thought a
suspect would be arraigned. (Much of downtown Boston remained closed to taxis and other
vehicles throughout the week.) As CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer said on air, "That's what happens in these cases.. you go with what you have."
Downtown Boston was mostly shut off to traffic during the manhunt. (Rick Westhead/Toronto Star)
After a prank call led to the evacuation of the courthouse,
taxi driver Steve Sullivan spoke for so many when he told me locals were
frustrated over the incorrect media reports.
“You reporters wonder why no one trusts you these days?
Because of garbage like this,” Sullivan said.
It's a fair point, and I went out of my way not to upset the hundreds of people who earlier had gathered in Dorchester, Mass., to remember 8-year-old Martin Richard, one of three people killed by the blasts. An editor once told me that the best way to approach people for quotes at times like this was to explain we want to write "tributes" about the victims.
It was good advice that helped me connect with many locals in Dorchester who eyed the TV cameras warily. I wound up with a better understanding of the blue-collar community.
As a Star colleague remarked, covering such a big
story can make you feel small. In the same way that the Star would have all
reporters and editors dedicated to a story of this magnitude unfolding in Toronto,
The Boston Globe and U.S. national TV networks committed huge resources to
coverage.
Even if we couldn’t connect with families in local hospitals
(police understandably locked them down) we decided to try to use
law-enforcement experts to explain how police and FBI would be pursuing their
investigation.
That led me Wednesday to a string of explosions experts such
as former FBI special agent Kevin Miles who explained how crime scenes are
processed and how even details like the colour of the smoke from an explosion
is telling.
On Thursday, the FBI released photos and video of the
suspects but seemed no closer to making an arrest as the evening unfolded. I
filed the last update to a story on the video footage at about midnight and
planned to return to Toronto
the following morning.
A few hours later, that plan changed.
At about 4 a.m. on Friday, a friend who worked for a large U.S. media
company sent me a string of text messages. (He figured I might have ignored one
message alone.) He said police scanners were full of chatter about a manhunt in
nearby Watertown.
After a quick shower, I grabbed my bag and jumped in a taxi.
The cabbie needed convincing to go to Watertown,
but a fare that was about double his regular price settled the matter.
The first sign of trouble in Watertown was police tape that closed off a
road near a local Dunkin’ Donuts. A state trooper stood on the other side of
the tape, and said repeatedly he didn’t know anything about what was happening.
A reporter from Miami said he’d
heard that the shopping mall across town was closer to the manhunt and we raced
across Watertown,
talking our way past several police checkpoints on the way.
For most of Friday, we were huddled in a plaza parking lot,
watching convoy after convoy of police, ATF and military vehicles race past.
The Boston
police have media relations figured out.
At one point, they brought the few dozen reporters there
bagged lunches: ham, turkey and corned beer sandwiches, apples and oranges and
potato chips. They also generously offered free diesel to the TV trucks. But tensions were incredibly high. At one point, police jumped into a group of reporters and grabbed one journalist away, searching his bag.
Every hour seemed to bring a dramatic development. At one point, a local sheriff told me that an MIT police
officer had been shot. “He didn’t even have time to draw his
weapon,” the sheriff said, revealing some news that hadn’t yet been reported in
the press.
Finally, at 6 p.m. Massachusetts
governor Deval Patrick showed up at the parking lot surrounded by guards and
reported the manhunt had failed.
I met up with Muna Shikaki, a U.S.-based correspondent for
Al Arabiya, and headed back to Boston.
But on the drive, NPR reported a gun fight in Watertown. It was like something out of a
movie. We darted off the highway, and returned to the suburb.
Hours later, police relaxed the roadblocks and we made our
way to the street where Dzhokar Tsarnaev was found.
Sean Finn sat on his front porch, sipping a Bud Light while
his son flipped through a book of hockey cards.
Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was
based in India as the Star’s
South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011
and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead
The iPhone has been a godsend for many blind consumers.
Austin Seraphin, an American blind since birth, wrote in a blog post in 2010 that he could use the phone's voice activation function to tap an item to hear it.
He wrote that his mother "pulled out her phone, and sent me a text message. Within seconds, my phone alerted me, and said her name. I simply swiped my finger and it read her message: Hi Austin."
But what about the millions of blind consumers who can't afford Apple's high-end phones?
An Indian inventor has come up with a lower-cost alternative.
Sumit Dagar, who works out of the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, says he has created the world’s first Braille smartphone, according to a report in the India Times.
Messages and texts are sent like other smartphones. But instead of a smooth glass panel, the phone comes with a series of pins under the screen which elevate or depress to form letters and words in Braille. The pins can be felt on the screen.
A prototype is being tested at an eye institute in Hyderabad.
Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead
Former New York congressman Anthony Weiner has returned to the forum
that led to his political downfall in 2011, launching a new Twitter account.
The married Democrat resigned from Congress after tweeting a lewd
picture of himself and lying about his account being hacked. He later admitted
trading inappropriate messages with several women.
Weiner's first post Monday was decidedly not racy: a link to a
20-page policy statement outlining "64 Ideas to keep New York City the Capital
of the Middle Class."
By mid-afternoon, there were about 2,600 people following @anthonyweiner.
Weiner's name has emerged this month in a large field of
potential candidates for New York City mayor.
On Thursday, we brought you a story about how both the New York Post newspaper and subsets of online communities like Reddit and 4chan had publicized or circulated photos of supposed possible "suspects" in the Boston Marathon bombings, none of whom turned out to be the actual suspects.
On Friday, we followed up with a blog post about how those same online communities persisted in trying to identify the Boston bombers after the FBI's images of the real suspects were released, fingering another innocent person in the process.
So it's only fair that today we complete the saga with a look at how how cable news contributed to the misinformation machine last week. And Ali Velshi, the Toronto-raised former CNN anchor, has delivered just such an examination today on Quartz, a business-news website.
Velshi recently left CNN to join Al Jazeera America, which doesn't launch until later this year. So as his post points out, he followed the Boston bombings as a news consumer rather than a news producer.
In fact it was CNN who committed perhaps the most criticized on-air error, after falsely reporting on Wednesday afternoon that a suspect had been arrested. The Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and Fox News all followed. The lone surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was actually arrested more than 48 hours later, on Friday night.
In fast-breaking stories, "Mistakes happen regularly on cable news because of the inexact and unreliable nature of rolling coverage." TV anchors have to keep talking to fill air time. And they need facts -- news -- to fill that air time. Problems start, Velshi writes, when officials won't disclose any new facts, but information starts trickling out anyway.
"A cop tells an old reporter friend something on the side. Or a cop tells a retired cop who has a friend. Or someone sees a squad car racing to a station with lights and sirens. ...Badly-sourced news never starts out as totally wrong information."
And when a piece of information gets into a reporter's hands and it's an important development, like the arrest of a suspect, reporters turn to sources that can confirm it. But gauging the trustworthiness of sources in the pressure-filled haze of a breaking news situation can be tough: judgments are clouded, time is clipped, and demand is relentless.
"The “Crowd,” in front of their televisions and on their smartphones, is making us move faster, demanding updates and developments," says Velshi.
When that information turns out to be wrong, the same crowd that drove the demand in the first place is crushingly harsh.
"It’s hard in this hyper-competitive market to even be second. Regularly being first wins you awards and accolades and audiences. But being wrong is, at best, a hard kick in the gut. At its worst, it can cost a journalist his or her career and an organization its credibility. Whether or not you tweet at us about it, we journalists actually do understand that being right is all that should matter. That’s never clearer than right after we’ve made a big mistake," Velshi concludes.
Velshi's piece shows what should be obvious by now: that when newspapers, cable news networks, or online communities propagate errors, they are never operating in a bubble. News networks trying to keep pace with viewers' appetite for new information, appetites driven in part by the pace of Twitter, where news is often being broken anyway. Newspapers do the same. Sometimes the source of news networks' information is online. Online communities monitor mainstream media constantly.
The Boston bombings were by no means the first major news story of this year in which both print news, cable news networks, and online communities contributed to a cascade of inaccurate information -- after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., all three were responsible for disseminating errors, including the identity of the shooter. After Newtown, there was at least as much criticism as there is today.
Yesterday, we brought you a story about how wannabe cyber-sleuths on Reddit, 4chan, and elsewhere online had managed to circulate a whole lot of photos of "suspicious-seeming" possible suspects this week, none of whom turned out to be the real suspects.
When we went to bed last night, at least some Redditors were chastened, if not the New York Post -- who had also published a front-page photo of two innocent bystanders alongside a technically accurate but incriminating story.
Incredibly, overnight, the sleuthy-Internet-machine-thing revved back up and by morning had already fingered another innocent person.
By 10:00 AM the next Morning, the New York Times and other outlets had identified the suspects as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is still at large, and his brother Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout.
But all night, Reddit, Twitter and environs raged with speculation that Tripathi was a suspect in a bombing that killed three people, including an 8-year-old boy.
Once the real suspects' names came out, Redditors and others keep insisting that Tripathi's name came from investigators: listeners heard his and someone named Mike Mulugeta's names mentioned as suspects over the Boston police scanners.
The Atlantic, after some digital digging of their own, has an excellent piece on the source of the inaccurate information, and discovered the police scanners broadcasted no such thing. Listening back to the audio of the scanner, the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal points out that the police said only this:
"Last name: Mulugeta, M-U-L-U-G-E-T-A, M as in Mike, Mulugeta."
There is no Mike, and who the person with the last name Mulugeta is is unknown.
According to the Atlantic's digging, Tripathi's name seems to have entered the Internet feedback machine via a single tweet from an information studies masters student and blogger with fewer than 600 followers.
Gawker is making a big deal about how the Tripathi affair embodies how badly "the media" have screwed up this week, reporting inaccuracies and broadcasting badly-sourced information. On Friday, the New York Post continued to be blasted from all sides for its irresponsible reporting.
Gawker's story on how Tripathi and "Mike Mulugeta" were incorrectly named says that by morning, "The media, content to pile new data on top of old, was simply pretending that it had never fingered the wrong two guys."
But no major media outlets reported Tripathi's name. One Buzzfeed reporter did, and according to the Atlantic so did one cameraman for a local CBS affiliate. A Twitter feed for the hacktivist group Anonymous also helped spread the two names, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would agree they are a member of the mainstream media.
None of this absolves the news establishment for previous inaccuracies in their coverage of the Boston bombings, or precludes the online hordes from ever cracking an important case in the future. But last night's debacle appears to belong to the Internet alone.
Still, Gawker makes a really interesting point: that it's possible the police are monitoring social media as closely as everyone else, and could have picked up the information online, broadcast it through the scanner, which fed it back into the cyber-hounds online, initiating a wild feedback loop of faulty information.
But that theory doesn't seem to hold if the Atlantic is right and the police scanners never mentioned Tripathi's name in the first place.
On Friday, Redditors once again seem chastened.
A moderator on the "findbostonbombers" sub page (with the unfortunate handle "Rather_Confused") posted this:
You meet someone, there's chemistry, and
then come the introductory questions: What's your name? Come here often? Are you
my cousin?
In Iceland, a country with a population of 320,000 where most
everyone is distantly related, inadvertently kissing cousins is a real risk.
A new smartphone app is on hand to help Icelanders avoid
accidental incest. The app lets users "bump" phones, and emits a warning alarm
if they are closely related. "Bump the app before you bump in bed," says the
catchy slogan.
Some are hailing it as a welcome solution to a very Icelandic
form of social embarrassment.
"Everyone has heard the story of going to a family event and
running into a girl you hooked up with some time ago," said Einar Magnusson, a
graphic designer in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik.
"It's not a good feeling when you realize that girl is a second
cousin. People may think it's funny, but (the app) is a necessity."
The Islendiga-App — "App of Icelanders" — is an idea that may
only be possible in Iceland, where most of the population shares descent from a
group of 9th-century Viking settlers, and where an online database holds
genealogical details of almost the entire population.
The app was created by three University of Iceland software
engineering students for a contest calling for "new creative uses" of the
Islendingabok, or Book of Icelanders, an online database of residents and their
family trees stretching back 1,200 years.
Currently available for Android phones, it has been downloaded
almost 4,000 times since it was launched earlier this month. The creators also
hope to develop an iPhone version.
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