The Guardian’s leader column reiterates some truths about surveillance that are worth repeating and repeating so they are not drowned out by the volume of the UK’s ubiquitous surveillance tendencies.

Speed cameras and lie-detection tests are not analogous. Speed cameras can reliably detect speed and their implementation has lowered the casualty rates for reckless driving. Lie detectors are not reliable and their proposed application is not to the general population, but to people who may be in the most vulnerable positions.

The view that everyone could be a liar, the paranoid mode of government, is one component of the equation, the other is the simplistic performance measure. The latter often insidiously leads to the former by the simple but brutal logic that, when you judge a ministry on its ability to cut costs then it will accept the collateral damage of discouraged, legitimate, claimants. The logic that every tactic successfully (measured in $$) catching the liars is legitimate is the same logic that accepts executing people who can’t afford good quality legal defense because at least we’ll get the real killlers too.

Does anyone really believe that appearing on a government lie detection database is not a discouragement to use the service? Perhaps the poor and vulnerable should not be the only people eligible for inclusion on government ‘honesty’ databases? We could include all the people convicted of fraud, deception, libel, adultery and plagiarism (who have probably gone through rather more rigorous investigtions with rights of appeal). That way we could all read their mendacity ratings just by swiping their indentity cards.

The most sage advice the next generations may receive will be to ’stay invisible’.

[From the Guardian via Blogzilla]

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2006 saw the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cutting back its funding of fundamental science in favour of product-based research of tactical and strategic significance for the US. University researchers have found themselves starved of funding for basic science and having to conform to war-footing security procedures for smaller scale projects. The focus on deliverables has led to funding being directed towards corporate and covert research programmes. The cumulative effect of IP legislation in the US has further eroded the openness of traditional academic methods.

According to David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, DARPA funding has decreased [for universities] while National Science Foundation funding has been rising, although NSF funding tends to focus on very much smaller scale projects than was conventional for DARPA. It should be noted that the funding numbers referred to by Patterson are ‘excluding classified projects or those where the university functioned as a subcontractor’ ( IEEE Spectrum Online ). The New York Times reported on April 2nd that:

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million. [New York Times]

The Computing Research Association, an association of computer science academics from US universities, produced a report for the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee subcomittee on cybersecurity R&D criticising government policy for the near-sightedness of DARPA’s venture-capital firm approach to easily measurable progress in research; for the increased use of classification to hide research from the academic community; and for the pernicious influence of IP law in preventing open discourse about research.

According to the CRA report, under the stewardship of its director, Anthony Tether, DARPA has been transformed into an organization resembling a ‘high-tech venture capital firm’ focused on projects whose development schedules can be mapped onto 12/18 monthly milestones. Since there can be no guarantees in the development schedules of fundamental science these constraints place the emphasis of funding squarely on those projects having only to overcome implementation problems.

The CRA report also criticises the increased use of classification to render the results of research beyond the scrutiny and peer-review of the academic community. Clearly, research with a focus on deliverables of tactical and strategic importance is going result in classified research. However, where there is a redistribution of resources in favour of such projects there will be a dwindling amount of academic material available to contribute to the broader research community. Starving the academic community of cutting edge developments is hardly a recipe for expanding the pool of researchers and theories out of which future projects will emerge.

The growing proportion of DARPA funding for tactically relevant research brings with it inevitable security concerns. One consequence of this is the increase in classification of research and the associated extension of the state security apparatus to include the assessment of membership qualification for research programmes. The New York Times article reports that academics have discovered DARPA funding can entail tough constraints on the membership of research programmes. One academic, Dr. Kleinrock (UCLA) ‘said that he decided that he was not interested in the project when he learned that the agency was insisting that he employ only graduate assistants with American citizenship’ (New York Times). Needless to say, severing US research from the pool of international talent wanting to study in the US deprives science (and US science) of a tremendously powerful resource.

The third of the CRA’s concerns was with the consequences of US intellectual property law for the dissemination of academic research:

[T]he “anti-circumvention provisions” of the DMCA interfere with many legal, non-infringing uses of digital computing and prevent scientists and technologists from circumventing access technologies to recognize shortcomings in security systems, to defend patents and copyrights, to discover and fix dangerous bugs in code, to analyze and stop malicious code (e.g., viruses), and to conduct forms of desired educational activities. In some instances, the threat of legal action under the DMCA has deterred scientists from publishing scholarly work or even publicly discussing their research, both fundamental tenets of scientific discourse.[CRA Report]

Whether your politics are left- or right-leaning, the issue at this point in history is whether anyone can afford to cut fundamental science in favour of covert military research when the operational constraints on covert research remove the mechanisms science has established to sustain the quality of its work. The place of the university at the heart of science is not metaphysically guaranteed role. Even if research increases the intensity of its migration into corporatate institutions the same principles of openness, peer-review and criticism are still its best guarentors of quality. The danger of the drift in emphasis towards deliverables and security in an age of almost permanent national emergency is that will see increasing political interference in matters of science and we will have removed the protections against a new breed of corporate Lysenkoism.

Ref:

Computing Research Association (2006) Testimony Of The Computing Research Association For The Pitac Cyber Security Subcommittee Town Hall Meeting On Cyber Security Research And Development. (Report) [Online] Internet: http://www.cra.org/ (Accessed 26 Dec 2006)

Kumagai, Jean (2006) “U.S. Defense Dollars for Computer Science Plunge”. IEEE Spectrum. 43 (2) [Online] Internet: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb06/2814 (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

Markoff, John (2006) “Pentagon Redirects its Research Dollars”. The New York Times. 2 April 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/ (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

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Prompted by Slater et al’s paper, A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments, BBC radio4’s The Today Programme’s John Humphrys interviewed Mel Slater and Alex Haslam about the opportunities created by virtual worlds for psychologists to revisit ethically controversial , but hugely important, experiments. Slater et al found that, given sufficiently immersive environments, subjects would react normally to their scenarios (despite reminders of artificiality). The Neurophilosopher’s Weblog has a good summary of the Milgram experiments in the context of Slater at al’s work.

The Today Programme discussion focused on the potential for virtual worlds to reproduce the classic conformity and coercion experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. Ethical objections to these experiments (as a consequence of the damage that can be done to the subjects) have prevented social psychologists from building on this work for the last quarter of a century. Many social psychologists regard the discipline to have effectively stalled in the areas probed by these experiments, so much is at stake in these new methods.

There may only be a small window of opportunity for research of this type. The Guardian recently reported that lawmakers in the Bavaria and Lower Saxony are proposing stiff penalties for ‘cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters’. A Korean Times article reports that where virtual worlds are a central component of popular culture, the word, ‘hyon-P’ has been adopted to describe violence passing from virtual to actual space. The article remarks,

“It is not surprising that these situations occur in Korea,'’ said Choi Saet-byul, a professor of sociology at Ewha Womans University. She said that Koreans tend to relate online life with the real world. She said online community members’ gathering offline is an example of the two worlds merging. [source: Korean Times]

The cynical amongst us might think that as soon as virtual $ equates to $ then all other equivalences follow. An earlier article here describes the business enterprises of Ansche Chung in Second Life generating the first millionaire of virtual capitalism. Currencies of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Eve-Online have regularly exchanged for real $ on ebay. Clickable culture have recently reported that a corporation in Eve-Online has ‘gone public’ and is selling shares outside the game’s supported mechanics. Some recent comment has made clear that it is possible to ‘launder’ virtual currency via game time top-up cards in Eve-Online. Perhaps you have to be a new member of global capitalism to see through the peculiarly moral prejudices against the virtual: the Chinese courts have declared crimes against virtual property to be analagous in law to to those against physical property (China Daily).

The conclusion of all of this is that the ‘ethically questionable’ experiments that form the core of late twentieth century social psychology could well be reproduced and developed in virtual worlds. However, virtual contexts allow productive social psychological research precisely because they are real social spaces. Capitalism has already colonised these real social spaces and will rapidly be followed by corresponding property law. Property law will be followed by definitions of ‘crimes against the person’. Social psychology does not have very long to act before virtual domains are included in the same legal protections against abuse that apply elsewhere.

Ref:

Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, Swapp D, Guger C, et al. (2006) A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments. PLoS ONE 1(1): e39. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039 [Online] http://www.plosone.org/ Accessed: 24 Dec 2006

The Today Programme (2006) BBC, Radio 4. 21 Dec 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ Accessed: 24 Dec 2006: 11.00

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In its headline story on 12/12/06 the Guardian announced that Shell had been forced to hand the controlling interest in the $20 billion Sakhalin liquid gas plant to Gazprom, the Russian government’s favourite state-owned energy supplier. The story was quickly demoted to the business pages - the BBC also runs the story in it’s business pages, as does the FT. The Guardian story had focused on the security of UK energy supply given that Gazprom had turned off the taps to Ukraine during a period of antagonism with Moscow. (More ….)

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According to the BBC Norman Foster has designed an enclosure for the new capital of Kazakhstan. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has moved the capital city to the Steppe from its original location in Almaty. The move was funded by $15 billion of oil revenue. Foster’s enclosure is designed to concentrate sunlight and make this shelter from the winter of the steppe more temperate.

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Discussions in the astronomy and astrophysics forums debates are raging about the costs to science research of NASA’s adoption of the plan for a permanently manned moon-base. It is not unusual to find the view that NASA’s new plans are the result of US planners being duped by the Chinese government’s publishing of grand plans for space. (More ….)

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Two stories collided in my aggregator today. Who ever thought that the future would pay so badly that you couldn’t get a mortgage on a job straight out of 20th century Sci-Fi? (More ….)

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Former World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, has warned that western countries are not prepared for the change in the balance of world power as the Chinese and Indian economies develop [Source:Yahoo News].

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It was reported last weekend that Second Life avatar entrepreneur, Anshe Chung’s virtual property business is now worth $1 million. (More ….)

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Gazprom are commissioning architecture for their capital, Gazprom City, in St. Petersburg. Needless to say, if any of these designs are built in St. Petersburg it will tell us all rather a lot about power in modern Russia.

[Source: Spiegel Online via BLDG BLOG and William Gibson]

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