Vital Systems Security

An article in today’s New York Time’s announces the release of Google Flu Trends, a tool developed by the philanthropy wing Google.org. Google Flu Trends tracks a specified set of search terms for “ebbs and flows”, broken down geographically by regions and states. Monitored search terms include “flu symptoms” and “muscle aches” (A complete list of monitored terms does not seem to be publicly available, perhaps because of the possibility of manipulation). Read the rest of this entry »

In her recent book Just One Child, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh traces the origins of China’s infamous ‘one child policy’ to a group of defense scientists who specialized in cybernetics and ‘control theory’. Her book is unabashedly both an analytic project and a criticism of the roots of the policy, that is to say, she begins from the claim that the ‘one child policy’ is an ethical bad and uses her analysis to discover what led to such unethical policy. Her claim that missile scientists were at the route of the policy, in other words, is a denunciation of a particular application of ‘natural science’ in government policy. First, I will tell a little bit of her story, which is incredibly interesting in its resonances with some of the topics we have been following in VSS. Then, I want to show how the perspective we have developed in the VSS research collaboration can productively engage as well as put in perspective her denunciation of cybernetic planning.
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The engineering society IEEE’s general magazine Spectrum has a featurette on “Open Source Warfare” in the November online version. It’s written by Robert Charette, who normally tracks software failures at his blog Risk Factor. The article is a good one, as these things go, spurred on by John Robb’s recent book Brave New War. Robb is a RAND researcher who has been writing about so-called open source warfare for a few years now. I thought I’d post this here because it’s obviously of concern to me that the term open source is being applied in this way. What it means to the RAND researchers and people who think the concept makes sense, is captured by my title here though: jihadists and insurgents are said to be more efficient at innovating their techniques because they are “free from the administrative burdens of maintaining their own infrastructure…” and can rely on Wal Mart and Fedex to supply and ship the things they need to make household bombs.

So, my analysis of open source is useful here, in that I think they are absolutely right about this, but that it is only one piece of what makes open source distinctive… but lacks many others. There is no mention of the intellectual property related aspects, or the specific mode of openness that characterizes software projects, much less the specifc IT tools people use. But it is correct about one thing, which is the reliance on existing standardized infrastructures and hardware, such as the widely shared PC architecture, file formats (for insurgents’ videos), the Internet, secure international credit transactions for online purchasing and so on.

The phrase “administrative burdens” is a peculiar one though. Much or the article focuses on the weapons acquisition process of the US Military, arguing that the process simply takes a long time. The implicit argument seems to be that this process and the time it takes to acquire weapons should be changed and shortened. I wonder though, whether this is just another way of arguing that the military should have less oversight, more secrecy, and less accountability… which would be pretty much the opposite of what open source can and has achieved in other areas.