towards an antisocial contract

Towards an Anti-Social Contract


I've read the David Kaye's report, which I very much like (clarity and precision, but also happen to agree). 


What is missing? A clear way to measure proportionality, and a social/legal framework to implement judgement of what is a (currently on hold) proposals to replace the European Human Rights proportional way to suspend crypto rights. So for example, the UK's where decisions are made, and replace them with politicians - with a UK Bill of Rights threatened to remove judges as the place Anderson's report makes it plain this is unacceptable (not just and proportional scheme to carryout lawful intercept, the advent of ethically, given conflict of interest, but constitutionally).

However, there's a very real threat that without a transparent, fair, intercept. Government agencies need to be persuaded to reduce their really good perfect forward secrecy mechanisms, and better key  management in general, will basically mean there will be no feasible (child porn , terrorism organisation, money laundering etc) would mission creep (similar to commercial agencies abuse of personal data) as that would mean legitimate policing of really bad uses of the net simply go completely unchecked. 

There's a secondary threat, which is that wholesale monitoring by too: If citizens feel confident that monitoring is only done for good reason, and without weakening out crypto-systems, they may not feel the need to adopt unbreakable systems. Many agencies will result in a massive breach of privacy when should never have had access to 2 Million documents - modern cloud (inevitably) one of those agencies accidentally leaks a collection of monitoring data. This is the other lesson from Snowden (the NSA's internal security procedures were incompetent, in that one person providers do not let their system administrators have such privilege.




This is the balancing act that needs to be created, in my view. and nor should a security agency, and what better way to enforce this, than only to collect necessary and sufficient data in the first place - the needle, not the whole haystack.

A sort of Anti-Social Contract c.f. always on

So maybe we need a new arbiter organisation - a distributed citizenship v. government tie-breaker - not the police, business or the press or current national judiciary  - a sort of 7th estate. It should, like the Internet itself, admit of no kings, just working codes of practice. It could manage rights to be forgotten too. It might need to employ some very smart social machines to cope with ddos, edit war, troll, bot farms etc etc

science and policy #101

Three recent pieces of work in Cambridge came to light

1. scientists have been working on the basis for randomized trials, and realized that, of course, we must have some non-randomized trials, to check if the very basis for randomization as part of scientific empirical method is sound.
In a bold inter-disciplinary move, the scientists collaborated with the department of history and analyzed a number of UK and other policies for economics and military action, to see if one could find random (e.g. the 100 years) and non-random (e.g. the 1st world) wars, as well as economics (e.g. monetarism, and austerity). The results will be published very soon, but are currently under embargo, in case they disturb a current experiment with Greece.

2. Engineers in Cambridge have long wanted to build a railway to replace the ageing bus and taxi system. Working from earlier chinese experiments with mono-rails, and the guided by the guided bus success, the proposal is not to take the modern electric line from Royston to King's Lynn, where customers are already used to the trains splitting at Cambridge, with one half going forward, for example, to Ely, and the other half, soon, to the Science Park. From next year, they hope to split the train laterally, with the left half going around the pieces (Christs, Parkers) and Commons (Midsummer etc), and the right half going in a long overhead loop, to Ely, allowing the Eels much easier migration along their breeding paths in the fens. If the duo-mono-rail is a success, the engineers propose to extend the routes to Paris and Brussels, where onward mono-mono routes could serve ski-resorts and some of the Belgian mountain regions where the finer beers are produced.

3. For some time now, a very ambitious project in CRASSH has been working on Consipiracy Theory. This work has involved linguists, computer scientists, taxi drivers and publicans, and has recently yielded a breakthrough. A new tool has been built that can detect consipiracy theories with a false positive rate of 2% and a false negative rate of 3%. The method is based on a mix of Bayes and various NLP clustering algorithms. Currently the tool is part of a possible startup and venture capitalists are clamouring to fund the work. The business case is unclear as yet, and there have been some suggestions that at least one major journalism organisation may have prior art, although scientists suggest that their conspiracy generator is based on different technology (followers of Chomsky will understand that recognition and generation are quite different linguistic machines). At least one government agency claims that they had build a system exactly like this in 1961, and that it correctly identified Cuba and Suez, but they could not reveal the technology for fear of showing potential national enemies how much more advanced the UK was than them. Security analysts have asked them to "put up or shut up" as this is not the first time that they have claimed to have approaches to their work that would save time and money, but have not deployed because they would have, err, saved time and money and lives and red faces.

Meanwhile, CRASSH were not available for comment.

intent with meaning - future network control

there's a lot of chat about intent-oriented networking e.g. Nemo, - latest fad - seems to be a little bit like predicate routing - or declarative networking - where you way, in a very high-level way (e.g. legalease, c.f. recent microsoft paper on compliance) what you want to happen. Hopefully, this is 11 layers higher than open flow, and employs P4 at a minimum, as most of the intents that aren't just 5-tuple flowspec based, must necessarily employ DPI and application based content patterns.

however, where are the semantics? this seems to me to be a massive missing mole of an elephant in the room

Who (subject/object) wants What (packet, router, link, user) to be Where (in a jurisdiction, or not) When (before T, after T etc), and Why (profit, loss, legal link, fun) - the WWWWW (High 5 ?) of networking - it shouldn't be too hard to do a bit of deontic logic and denotational sugar to get this right...a suitable job for computer science, and possibly, the NaaS project, but possibly not...