This looks like a very worthwhile coalition, advocating for open access to aggregate social media data for research purposes (not necessarily only for academics and journalists), while emphasizing a duty of independence in research and upholding standards and oversight. The coalition is US-focused, but its efforts dovetail with draft legislation currently making its way through the European institutions that seeks to guarantee similar rights of access. Inasmuch as large platforms lay a claim to embodying the contemporary public sphere, such calls for openness will only persist and intensify.
Tag Archives: Critical infrastructure
Jailbreaking North of the 38th Parallel
A recent article in Wired (via /.) describes North Korean experiences with jailbreaking smartphones for access to forbidden foreign content. It would appear that the North Korean government’s system for surveilling online activity is much more invasive than its Chinese counterpart, but less technically sophisticated.
Limits of trustbuilding as policy objective
Yesterday, I attended a virtual event hosted by CIGI and ISPI entitled “Digital Technologies: Building Global Trust”. Some interesting points raised by the panel: the focus on datafication as the central aspect of the digital transformation, and the consequent need to concentrate on the norms, institutions, and emerging professions surrounding the practice of data (re-)use [Stefaan Verhulst, GovLab]; the importance of underlying human connections and behaviors as necessary trust markers [Andrew Wyckoff, OECD]; the distinction between content, data, competition, and physical infrastructure as flashpoints for trust in the technology sphere [Heidi Tworek, UBC]. Also, I learned about the OECD AI Principles (2019), which I had not run across before.
While the breadth of different sectoral interests and use-cases considered by the panel was significant, the framework for analysis (actionable policy solutions to boost trust) ended up being rather limiting. For instance, communal distrust of dominant narratives was considered only from the perspective of deficits of inclusivity (on the part of the authorities) or of digital literacy (on the part of the distrusters). Technical, policy fixes can be a reductive lens through which to see the problem of lack of trust: such an approach misses both the fundamental compulsion to trust that typically underlies the debate, and also the performative effects sought by public manifestations of distrust.
Lye machines
Josephine Wolff (Slate) reports on the recent hack of the water processing plant in Oldsmar, FL. Unknown intruders remotely accessed the plant’s controls and attempted to increase the lye content of the town’s water supply to potentially lethal levels. The case is notable in that the human fail-safe (the plant operator on duty) successfully counterbalanced the machine vulnerability, catching the hack as it was taking place and overriding the automatic controls, so no real-world adverse effects ultimately occurred.
What moral can be drawn? It is reasonable to argue, as Wolff does, against full automation: human supervision still has a critical role to play in the resiliency of critical control systems through human-machine redundancy. However, what Wolff does not mention is that this modus operandi may itself be interpreted as a signature of sorts (although no attribution has appeared in the press so far): it speaks of amateurism or of a proof-of-concept stunt; in any case, of an actor not planning to do any serious damage. Otherwise, it is highly improbable that there would have been no parallel attempt at social engineering of (or other types of attacks against) on-site technicians. After all, as the old security engineering nostrum states, rookies target technology, pros target people.