Thanks to Spyblog for promoting this. Several Parliamentary committees have finally decided to take a serious look at the implications of surveillance and data collection on British Society. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution are going to investigate

the constitutional implications of the collection and use of surveillance and other personal data by the State and (insofar as they can be used by the State) private companies, particularly with regard to the impact on the relationship between citizen and state. [Parliamentary Call for Evidence via Spyblog]

The specific remit of the committee focuses on the technological and policy changes underpinning the collection of data, and is particularly interested in the impact of these changes on the relation between the citizen and the state. The committee will also consider the impact of current data protection legislation. This is the detail from the call for evidence:

• How has the range and quantity of surveillance and data collection by public and private organisations changed the balance between citizen and state in recent years, whether due to policy developments or technological developments? Which specific forms of surveillance and data collection have the greatest potential impact on this balance?
• What forms of surveillance and data collection might be considered constitutionally proper or improper? Can the claimed administrative, security or service benefits of such activities outweigh concerns about constitutional propriety? If so, under what circumstances? Is there a line that should not be crossed? If so, how might that line be identified?
• What effect do public or private sector surveillance and data collection have on a citizen’s liberty and privacy? Are there any constitutional rights or principles affected?
• What impact do surveillance and data collection have on the character of citizenship in the 21st century, in terms of relations with the State?
• To what extent are the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 sufficient in safeguarding constitutional rights in relation to the collection and use of surveillance or personal data?
• Is there a need for any additional constitutional protection of citizens in relation to the collection and use of surveillance material and personal data? If so, what form might such protection take?

The call for evidence can be downloaded from here. Submissions should be received by June 8th. Submissions should be emailed to constitution@parliament.uk. A single hard copy (single-sided, unbound) should also be sent to The Clerk to the Constitution Committee, House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW. Concise submissions of 1500 words or fewer are preferred.

If anyone would prefer to remain anonymous to the committee then you can send your submission to SpyBlog for inclusion in theirs.

[Thanks to SpyBlog]

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We are never surprised to discover that the arms trade uses the tactics of the military intelligence communities. Their interests are often linked and there is large scale traffic of employees from one to the other. Anger (or admiration depending on your political persuasion) might be a typical response to the discovery that BAE was spying on anti-arms trade groups [the Guardian] but not surprise. However, something seems utterly wrong with retail multi-nationals creating military intelligence units - despite their balance sheets operating on the scales of nation states. Wal-Mart seem to be creating a military intelligence unit, recruiting staff from the intelligence services with the intention of using their military contacts as part of their work.

[Business Week via Global Guerillas]

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Of course any military has to plan for contigencies. The Taiwanese military have been conducting war games simulating an attack on a Chinese aircraft carrier in 2012 which follows a Chinese attack on Taiwan:

Taiwan is performing a computerised military exercise which for the first time focuses on attacking a Chinese aircraft carrier, it was reported Monday. The scenario of a five-day drill — part of military manoeuvres codenamed “Han Kuang 23″ — is that in 2012 the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launch a blitz on the island after they acquire their first aircraft carrier, the Taipei-based China Times reported.

[via Sino Daily]

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Thanks to Omni Brain for discovering this laughable counterpoint to the invesigative geniuses populating forensic science fiction:

One method for discovering potentially violent students involves having students write about their lives as a window into their thoughts. This would have helped in some of the school shootings if the teachers had had the essays and then been able to interpret their content and style. For example, one of the shooters’work was influenced heavily by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is best known for having proclaimed the death of God and for calling himself an “immoralist”, one who opposes all morality. Another suspect’s writing was inspired by the musician Marilyn Manson who reportedly based his song “Antichrist Superstar” on Nietzsche’s book The Antichrist, a critique of Pauline Christianity. While these influences and writing styles may not uncover a potential school shooter, they do represent signs that educators and parents should take seriously and explore further.[Band & Harpold 1999:13}

[via Omni Brain]

1. Band, S.R., Harpold, J.A. (1999) “School Violence: Lessons Learned”. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 68(9) pp9-16 [Online] Internet: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1999/sept99leb.pdf (Accessed 28 April 2007)

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According to the BBC, IBM ’scientists ran a “cortical simulator” that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer’.

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The former Indian diplomat, M K Bhadrakumar, has written an interesting article for The Asia Times on the recent escalating tensions between the US/Europe and the Russian Federation entitled, “In the trenches of the new cold war”¹. In it he attempts to disentagle the strategies emerging in post cold war europe, paricularly in the light of the US announcement of new anti-ballistic missile systems close to russian borders.

Ostensibly, the new “missile shield” is there to provide defense against ICBMs originating in rogue states. Iran and North Korea are often mentioned in this regard, and, clearly, China is pursuing massive military development. The U.S. published a “Fact-sheet” about the systems in order, partly to calm Russian fears. Seven “facts” are highlighted:

(a) the European missile shield is meant to counter possible attacks from Iran or North Korea; (b) the US is puzzled by Russia’s anxiety, since the rockets to be deployed in Central Europe are no match for Russia’s arsenal; (c) Russia itself should be worried about the missile threat from “rogue states”; (d) the US is prepared to cooperate with Russia on missile defense; (e) the US is open to the idea of merging the missile shield with the Russian system; (f) Washington would like Moscow to take part in research and development, though it is unlikely the Russians will consider such cooperation; and (g) the US has endeavored to be “transparent” and is prepared to hold consultations with Russia to explain its case for the deployments in Central Europe. [Asia Times]

However, as Bhadrakumar points out, the Russians are deeply suspicious about the strategic capabilities of the new deployments. After all, the oft-mentioned rogue states are very far from strategically deployable ICBMs (even if the west is very far from an effective missile shield technology). General Yury Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian General Staff was quoted as saying:

The real goal [of the US deployment] is to protect [the US] from Russian and Chinese nuclear-missile potential and to create exclusive conditions for the invulnerability of the United States. [Asia Times]

There has been mounting concern in Europe as the Russian government have demonstrated an increasing willingness to use energy supplies as strategic weapons. Many European countries are now very nervously dependent on Russian natural gas. In the UK concerns are mounting about Gazprom’s desire to move into the energy supply markets. The UK currently has one of the smallest proportions of domestic gas supplies coming from Russian fields. Indeed, one flashpoint of the new cold war seems to be Kazakhstan’s role in the

US$6 billion gas-pipeline project that is an extension of the South Caucasus pipeline, linking Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, and which is expected to run from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The 3,400-kilometer pipeline across the Caspian bypassing Russia, which is to be built from early next year so as to go on stream in 2011, will have a capacity of 30 billion cubic meters and promises to be a rival to Russian Gazprom’s Blue Stream-2 (scheduled to be commissioned in 2012). [Asia Times]

One part of the european strategy for evading what seems like increasingly belligerent Russian energy strategy is to deepen economic cooperation with the US. Der Speigel has reported that a “confidential draft” of a new EU-US economic treaty has already been produced. Signatures are expected on the treaty next week. However, it would be wise to see this treaty as largely focused on the increasing economic significance of Asian states - Russia is increasingly looking like a potentially destrucive distraction in a bigger game.

The Americans seem to have decided that they need to put the mutually-assured destruction arrangement with Russia behind them in order to focus on a more important game. The only way to achieve this is to put the reciprocal stability of the cold war behind them and move to a position of strategic dominance. Bhadrakumar points out that this, at least, is how the Russians perceive the US strategy. Sergei Rogov of the USA and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has proposed cost-effective ways the Russian military can counter the ongoing extensions to the US-European military capacity without getting involved in an economically damaging arms race.

Commentators on post-Soviet affairs are pointing to events in the Ukraine and Georgia as the hot spots of the new cold war. With Europe and the US attempting to undermine Russian influence in these strategically important states, Russia has no choice but to try to maintain its influence there by whatever means it can.

Tensions are increasing in the Baltic states where ethnic Russians are often sizeable minorities and are increasingly seen as vehicles for the continuation of Russia influence after the withdrawal of the Soviet state. Estonia is currently experiencing large scale rioting in the aftermath of the removal of a statue commemorating a soviet soldier’s involvement in the defeat of Nazism (BBC news item here). Estonians often regard such monuments as symbols of their occupation by the Soviets. Many commentators are claiming that the Russian state is participating in the escalation of Russian nationalist sentiment in this situation.

1. Bhadrakumar, M.K. (2007) “In the Trenches of the New Cold War”. Asia Times 28 April 2007 [Online] Internet: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/ID28Ag01.html (Accessed 28 April 2007)

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At Brains: A dialogue on Philosophy of Mind and Related Matters Richard Brown asks the question:

What is striking (to me) about these stories, besides the overal ‘cool factor’ of space stuff, is that these scientists clearly do not think that life is multiply realized. They are looking for planets of about this size (Earth) with water and land masses (Jupitar is ruled out, Mars is in) and they seem to implicitly assume that life on other planets (if we find it at all) will be simple stuff like bacteria. Does this represent a serious flaw in their strategy? I don’t think so. We don’t really have any reason, except our imagination and intuitions, to expect life elsewhere in the universe to be other than carbon-based and water dependent. This makes me wonder why philosophers have such strong intuitions about multiple realizability… [Richard Brown at Brains]

Well…science is nothing if not pragmatic. Millions of years of evolution have equipped us with pattern determination capabilities with biases. Thousands of years of science have augmented these capacities with even more selective sensitivity (or focus - this is not a pejorative remark). Meanwhile, multiple realizability is a concept that has emerged from a history of attempts to devise context-independent logics. These two histories are divergent. Pragmatically, scientists would be crazy to look for things about which they have no intuitions - this is expensive science after all. Any demonstration that the formal representation of a living process had (logically) “near” neighbours is hardly likely to impress someone who has to do the hard work of looking for actual realisations.

No-one (to my knowledge) has ever made sense of the concept, “nearby”, in possible-world semantics. However, fitness landscapes are another matter. On a fitness landscape the concept of “nearby” actually means something. Things can be nearby but unreachable. Perhaps we should distinguish strong from nuanced intuitions about multiple realisability (MR). That way we can support MR but take our cues about reachable space from emprical research. Most philosophical debates about multiple realisability pay no attention to the constraints involved in the material genesis of systems so it’s hardly likely that they will converge with contextually embedded scientific research programmes (where the context includes the methodologies, technologies, pedagogies and institutions as well as the object of the science).

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Prof Hiroshi Ishigro of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at the Osaka University Department of Adaptive Machine Systems has been getting a lot of publicity for his android doppelganger. The BBC have a video report here. Pink Tentacle has a host of links to video footage of Ishigro’s RL avatar.

Ishigro wants his (very expensive) androids to offer virtual presence for executives - the 21C corporate jet. While Fortune 500 company CEOs chase IBM’s Sam Palmisano into virtual boardrooms Russian oligarchs and Chinese ministers will flaunt their new status by staging their virtual conferences in real boardrooms. Don’t think geminoids won’t have real bodyguards.

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I would hate anybody to have missed this. The BBC and Astrobiology have reported on the discovery of a 1.5x earth radius extrasolar planet with an average temperature of between 0 and 40 degrees centigrade. The discovery was originally reported in an ESO (European Southern Observatory) press release. The results are published in a Letter to the Editor of Astronomy and Astrophysics¹ that can be downloaded here.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explains Stéphane Udry, from the Geneva Observatory (Switzerland) and lead-author of the paper reporting the result. “Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky - like our Earth - or fully covered with oceans,” he adds.

“Liquid water is critical to life as we know it,” avows Xavier Delfosse, a member of the team from Grenoble University (France). “Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X.“[ESO Outreach]

In 2005 a Neptune sized planet (17 times earth mass) was discovered orbiting Gliese 581. The results were published in a Letter to the Editor of Astronomy and Astrophysics (which can be downloaded here)². [Via ESO Outreach]

In 2003 the same team had discovered a Jupiter sized planet around the same star. [via ESA]

[via The BBC and Astrobiology]

[UPDATE: Space.com reported this yesterday and does a great job of capturing the impact of the discovery]

1. 1. Udry, S., Bonfils, X., Delfosse, X., Forveille, T., Mayor, M., Perrier, C., Bouchy, F., Lovis, C., Pepe, F., Queloz, D., Bertaux, J.-L. (2007) “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets: XI. An habitable super-Earth in a 3-planet system”, Astronomy and Astrophysics. [Online] Internet: http://obswww.unige.ch/~udry/udry_preprint.pdf (Accessed 25 April 2007)
2. 2. Bonfils, X., Forveille, T., Delfosse, X., Udry, S., Mayor, M., Perrier, C., Bouchy, F., Pepe, F., Queloz, D., Bertaux, J.-L. (2005) “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets: VI. A Neptune-mass planet around the nearby M dwarf Gl 581″, Astronomy and Astrophysics 443, L15–L18, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:200500193

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The Scotsman have reported on the development of miniaturised, ’speckled computing’ techniques being developed by team based in Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Strathclyde universities¹. Dr Damal Arvind, director of the team, will deliver a talk about these new computational systems at Edinburgh International Science Festival on Friday 13th April.

Arvind said: “This is the new class of computing: devices which can sense and process the data they receive. They also have a radio so they can network and there’s a battery in there as well, so they are entirely self-powered.

“You can do lots of interesting things with this technology. We are seeing this kind of technology in the Nintendo Wii and this is a very, very primitive form of what we will be demonstrating on Friday.” [The Scotsman]

On a related note, I am reminded of the 5 micron RFID chips produced by Hitachi² which are many times smaller than the 0.4mm x 0.4mm mu-chips that can already be found embedded in tickets etc.

¹[From The Scotsman via Medgadget and Engadget]

²[Fuji Sankei (in Japanese) Via Pink Tentacle]

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