Kieran Healy:

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”. I will show how we can use this “metadata” to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner.

The analysis in this report is based on information gathered by our field agent Mr David Hackett Fischer and published in an Appendix to his lengthy report to the government. As you may be aware, Mr Fischer is an expert and respected field Agent with a broad and deep knowledge of the colonies. I, on the other hand, have made my way from Ireland with just a little quantitative training—I placed several hundred rungs below the Senior Wrangler during my time at Cambridge—and I am presently employed as a junior analytical scribe at ye olde National Security Administration. Sorry, I mean the Royal Security Administration. And I should emphasize again that I know nothing of current affairs in the colonies. However, our current Eighteenth Century beta of PRISM has been used to collect and analyze information on more than two hundred and sixty persons (of varying degrees of suspicion) belonging variously to seven different organizations in the Boston area.

What might one do when a Citroen 2CV appears in the rear view mirror, particularly on a rather steep incline? A beautiful example: white and purple.

Related: The End of French Cars by Stephen Bayley.

I accelerated.

Ritchie King and David Yanofsky:

The revelation that major US technology companies are participating in a National Security Administration surveillance program was shocking enough. And that was before we saw the top-secret slides used by the government to describe the spying operation. They are, to put it mildly, heinously ugly…

A. Does the information that I place in iCloud servers ever leave Apple’s infrastructure?

B. Under what circumstances can my iCloud information be accessed by Apple and/or non Apple humans or systems?

C. Does Apple share iOS, OS X & Cloud/Software user data in any way? With whom and under what circumstances?

D. How do Apple’s current user data and privacy practices differ from those when Steve Jobs was CEO?

E. Is there a relationship between government iOS, OSX and cloud software system purchases and Apple’s user data access practices?

F. Do Apple’s policies still support it’s long ago “computer for the rest of us” vision?

G. Will Apple create and promote user experiences and services related to true data privacy control? Apple is in a great position to do this, but it will mean “saying no” [2] to a number of special interests such as governments, telco, insurance and financial firms.

I write as a citizen, long time Apple shareholder and customer.

[1] With apologies to Horace Dediu: http://www.asymco.com/2013/05/24/my-questions-for-tim-cook/

[2] http://zurb.com/article/744/steve-jobs-innovation-is-saying-no-to-1-0

A great point on the global implications for Silicon Valley.

The US Government concerns about Huawei will likely be repeated by others with respect to US tech firms.

Jack Shafer:

Bank records, credit history, travel records, credit card records, EZPass data, GPS phone data, license-plate reader databases, Social Security and Internal Revenue Service records, facial-recognition databases at the Department of Motor Vehicles and elsewhere, even 7-Eleven surveillance videos comprise information lodes that are of equal or greater value to the national security establishment than phone and Web files. It doesn’t sound paranoid to conclude that the government has reused, or will reuse, the interpretation of the Patriot Act it presented to the secret FISA court in its phone record and Prism data requests to grab these other data troves.

Lest I sound like a Fourth Amendment hysteric, I understand there’s nothing automatically sacrosanct about any of the digital trails we leave behind. Lawful subpoenas can liberate all sorts records about you, electronic or otherwise.

What’s breathtaking about these two government surveillance programs that the Guardian and the Washington Post have revealed is that they’re vast collections of data about hundreds of millions of people suspected of no wrongdoing and not part of any civil action. Defending the phone-record cull, National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper explained this week that smaller sets of information aren’t very useful in screening for and identifying “terrorism-related communications,” hence all must collected.

Besides, as the government and its supporters insist, phone-record metadata does not include the names of individuals or organizations connected to the phone numbers (and government eavesdropping isn’t part of the operation).

Pew Internet:

For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project began systematically tracking smartphone adoption, a majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind. Our definition of a smartphone owner includes anyone who says “yes” to one—or both—of the following questions:

55% of cell phone owners say that their phone is a smartphone.
58% of cell phone owners say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform common to the U.S. market.1

Taken together, 61% of cell owners said yes to at least one of these questions and are classified as smartphone owners. Because 91% of the adult population now owns some kind of cell phone, that means that 56% of all American adults are now smartphone adopters. One third (35%) have some other kind of cell phone that is not a smartphone, and the remaining 9% of Americans do not own a cell phone at all.

Tim Bradshaw:

Tom Coates lives in a house that tweets. “Hey @tomcoates, I just noticed some movement in the sitting room. Is that you?” it posts to @houseofcoates when a motion sensor is activated in the British designer’s San Francisco home.

It’s not the sort of giant leap forward in technology that would have got Steve Jobs donning his polo neck for a big announcement. But, sometimes, it’s the quiet developments that creep up on us that end up changing our lives.

Coates, co-founder of a yet-to-launch start-up called Product Club, spent a few hundred dollars on Amazon to create a simple system that allows his house to tweet to him when certain “smart” devices are used. He likens its quotidian updates – about the temperature, lights switching on or whether his plant needs watering – to posts from a friend abroad. “You don’t care about everything they’re doing but it’s nice to have a sense that they are there,” he says, noting that it also functions as a cheap burglar alarm.

By Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone on November 22, 2011:

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’ ”

John Kirk:

In a phone network, the value is in the phone owner.

– In a mobile computing network, the value is in the app, not the mobile phone owner.

– In a phone network, the more phone owners there are – the more people you could call and be called by – the more powerful the network effect and the more valuable the phone network becomes.

– In a mobile computing network, the more developers there are – the more apps available for consumption – the more powerful the network effect and the more valuable the computing network becomes.

– In a phone network, there is no difference between a phone owner and a phone user – they are one and the same.

– In a mobile computing network, there is a HUGE difference between the mobile phone owner and the mobile user.

Learn more about Virtual Properties 5th generation native iPhone, iPad and Android apps, here.

Henry Binswanger:

Government suppression of private money is inevitable in the entitlement-state era. What is the alternative? Are governments going to stand idly by while more and more people avoid taxes and sidestep inflation? Government largess depends on taxation and monetary debasement. If there were private money, the welfare state could not exist. So, can there be any doubt that the government will throttle virtual currencies?

Consider the attraction of bitcoin and the like. People are desperate to have a stable, non-debaseable medium of exchange–so desperate that they are willing to try a virtual currency backed by nothing, so long as they believe that its supply will remain relatively stable. But what makes for this desperation? Why isn’t the government-controlled dollar stable in value? Why does government inflate and debase its own money? The answer is: to finance the entitlement state.

Consider. It is politically impossible to tax people enough to pay for the cancerous federal spending. Just perform this simple calculation. Divide the $4 trillion of government spending by the number of taxpayers in the country. There are considerably fewer than 100 million Americans who pay any significant amount in income tax, but take that figure. The division works out to $40,000 per taxpayer per year. And of course spending is always growing.