Slashdot Mirror
Former Head of CIA Think Tank Talks Privacy, Technology
blackbearnh writes "Carmen Medina, until recently, helped run the analysis side of the house at the CIA. She also ran the agency's think tank, the Center for the Study of Intelligence. A self-proclaimed heretic, she has a number of controversial views about how we gather intelligence and how technology is changing the game. She talked to O'Reilly Radar about this and other topics, including the possible ways that intelligence analysis could be crowdsourced, why government technology procurement is so broken, and how the public may need to readjust its views on what things such as privacy mean. Medina said, 'Government is viewed as inefficient and wasteful by American citizens. I would argue that one of the reasons why that view has grown is that they're comparing the inefficiency of government to how they relate to their bank or to their airline. Interestingly enough, for private industry to provide that level of service, there are a lot of legacy privacy barriers that are being broken. Private industry is doing all sorts of analysis of you as a consumer to provide you better service and to let them make more profit. But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that. And yet, if government, because of this dynamic, continues not to be able to adopt modern transactional practices, then it's going to fall further behind the satisfaction curve.'"
>>> Private industry is doing all sorts of analysis of you as a consumer to provide you better service and to let them make more profit. But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that.
-----
The reason is, Airlines and such don't have the same authority over you as the government. Its OK for them to know about it because at the end of the day we still have a choice to use a different airline. I'll be OK with it when we have real control over how the government/police can choose to treat us.
FTFA:
Some concepts of privacy, that we thought were rights, are going to have to give way as we find out that social networks are just a lot more efficient, and monitoring and digital ubiquity are all more efficient ways to enforce laws, for example. That's a big thing in Britain. I mean God only knows how many cameras they have on their streets. And they're using it in ways to fight crime that, frankly, I don't think is yet possible in the U.S. because of our privacy concerns.
Next time Carmen provides an example, she may want to pick one that actually has a track record which supports her views.
The reason Governments are inefficient is because they are spending someone else's money.
If there is ZERO responsibility then there is no incentive to curb waste, fraud and abuse.
Every level of government suffers from this.
Correct me if I'm completely off base, but I'm reading this as the former head of the CIA whining about how "if business can do it, the government should be able to too". She correctly points out that the public doesn't seem to care when businesses invade their privacy, but she is using that to claim they shouldn't care when the government does it either, not to claim that the public should be concerned about both.
And come to think about it, what the hell does a former head of the CIA care about what the American public thinks about privacy anyway? Isn't the CIA only supposed to operate outside of the US or something like that?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The reason is, if you don't like what a private company is doing, you can decide not to do business with them. Hence, private companies evolve strategies to avoid annoying their customers.
If you don't like what the government is doing, well, I suppose the right-wingers have the slogan "love it or leave it." But most of us aren't willing to go that far.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's not "knee-jerk" because the government has a monopoly on force. The government can take your property without compensation and throw you in jail, courses of action denied to insurance companies and banks.
This person is a "heretic"? Only among people who value their privacy. She sounds more to me like a typical apologist for Big Brother.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Let me know when private industry gets its funding via taxation, and uses the information it gathers for more than simply increasing profit. It sounds like she just made a knee-jerk reaction that the government's end use of information it collects is good. Hint: dissatisfaction with government isn't due to it not employing the latest technology in order to efficiently tap all its citizens' phones!
Is this basically a call to let down our guard and let the government walk all over our privacy and constitutional rights?
What she's saying is wrong anyway, government is broken not because they can't track everything we do - it's broken because they try to track everything we do. There is a whole slew of agencies that don't even need to exist (or can be slimmed down significantly) just by reducing the reach of the government.
DHS is one of those departments (although I know it houses several departments), it's a layer of bureaucracy designed to give people a false sense of security while bogging down the whole process of immigration and border control while throughout it's existence all it has done is created large databases to track US citizens and non-citizens traveling around the globe. But when you need something from them, it's a lot of manual paperwork, going to see somebody in a booth, get rejected for a misspelling, go back etc. etc.
Same goes for IRS - every year for the past 5 years I had to file (portions of) my paperwork on paper instead of e-filing. Whether it's because I worked in multiple states or because I bought a house and qualified for one of the stimulus packages, when you reach a certain number of papers, you have to manually send it in. Off course this means somebody has to manually file my paperwork in the computer with all the errors that gives which results in an even greater feedback loop of paperwork and manual labor (on both sides) to correct all of that.
Here in NYS you can't pay almost anything at the DMV online without incurring a $5 or $10 convenience fee. They rather you snail mail them a hand written cheque and print out your forms than process your paperwork and payments online. Talking about being inefficient - they already have all my information. I can do everything online except pay them.
In the mean time, businesses find better ways to be more efficient using computers. They can retain certain information without breaching my privacy (unless you're stupid and allow them to retain your full credit card and SSN) and they rather let you do stuff online than going into their offices. My insurance even gives me discounts for not having to walk into a physical place.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
so you can choose not to do business with them. ok. you chose that. all the while, because of the contract you signed, that corporation will still be able to do whatever you allowed them to do with your private information. share with corp x, corp y, sell it to advertiser z, this and that.
and some xyz corp will be able to gather all the pieces of info coming from different sources and have more info on you than government has. because, you dont tell government what you like, and dislike, do you ?
so basically a private corporation, somewhere, probably has much more info on you than leave aside your government, but even your parents ever may have hoped to know about you.
you choosing 'not to do business with them' doesnt mean shit. once your information is out, its out.
Read radical news here
One reason govt is inefficient is because every new administration and congress adds new laws and new goals without ever removing any.
However, the MAIN reason for inefficiency is the voter's demands for accountability. That seems like a good goal but it runs into the inventory conundrum--how much money do you want to spend tracking pencils?
Consider a billion-dollar (or euro) program. If you wish to track where each million goes, you end up with a thousand-line report. But if you want to track where each thousand goes--more accountability--then you end up with a million-line report, something that requires more time to produce by existing workers and also requires the oversight group to staff an entire new department. If the cost of the new department is less than the cost of the fraud uncovered, then it is cost-effective. Unfortunately, we hardly ever worry about effectiveness in government, we only worry about the appearance of being effective.
A rational business man knows it is cheaper to let employees 'steal' 3% of the pencils than it is to spend even 4% stopping the theft. A religious, moral, political person worried more about appearances believes it is more important to make a stand and spend whatever it takes to ensure no one steals. Consider the drug laws for instance. When I say legalize everything, some yutz says 'You wouldn't say that if your daughter was addicted to meth." And the truth is maybe I wouldn't. But the socio-political truth is that my daughter is addicted to meth under the laws and regime we currently have so that ain't fixing the problem.
Voters prefer costly action to no action and they prefer to vote for folks who will do something instead of the do-nothing pols. Effectiveness is not the goal. After 9/11, all the US govt had to do was tell people that the rule of not interfering with hijackers that we've been using for 40 years (Cuba hijackings) is no longer effective and that passengers ought to fight will all means possible to save their lives. That actually is what has happened in real life. The 4th plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and every single attempted terrorist activity on a plane since then has been prevented by other passengers.
But that isn't an acceptable solution to moralistic or impatient voters.
I don't want a company BUYING / SELLING / TRADING information about my purchases with them to other companies or government agencies.
If a company wants to sort through my buying history with them, that's just fine by me. But they can only use the information they themselves have collected through my interactions with them.
And I'm still more opposed to the government doing it because companies are orientated towards helping me buy their products. If I don't buy anything from Company X's latest sales drive ... so what.
, privacy is going to have to adjust to what is now possible. While some of the things that are now possible are scary to people, many add to the public good.
"While all things are possible, not all things are permitted."Francis Bacon (17th C)
Bacon made his remark in a different context but I think it's germane in that privacy is legislated and enforced, and not naturally occurring.
Britain, at least from my POV, has undertaken a huge, perhaps unprecedented social experiment in immigration and mosaic, cultural restructuring. Significant immigration is necessary to bolster a competitive country's domestic workforce and it's international competitiveness, but, as everyone knows, it almost always brings with it social problems. The hue and cry historical precedent, in a skewed way speaks to a more European openness to a community policing itself whether by a sort of neighbourhood watch or a ring of cameras monitoring the streets. It's possible that North Americans, especially in the U.S.A. and Canada, are more sensitive to privacy concerns because development of the new world permitted far greater degree of privacy.
The above aside, I'm deeply vested in the concerns of the article because I'm interested in statistical modeling of political decisions and ways of abstracting inferences from personal data. I was fairly well schooled in statistics and probability to an undergraduate level but don't pretend to as wide an understanding of the field as I once had. While my interest is keyed to the problems of the individual in relation to the group, the relationship between an individual to the social unit speaks directly to privacy concerns. If my fledgling hypotheses are in any way indicative of what might be on the horizon then it's likely that along with the milieu that has spawned our current privacy concerns there are new tools that will let data be abstracted from the new milieu in a way that not only safeguards the privacy of individuals but might enhance one's privacy. Without blurting out my tentative ideas, possibly lucrative, and getting bitch slapped by some stats prof, I still think it's fair to say there's lots of room and time for the data that is now available to spawn a new tool set that will correct any current incursions into personal privacy.
ideopath @ play
A big part of what they do is essentially a kind of journalism. Perhaps the solution to their problems AND the death of quality investigative journalism in America is to transform CIA into something akin to BBC News.
I think your suggestion for the CIA to get into the "journalism" business is about 50 years too late. Google "Operation Mockingbird".
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
--William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
And yet, if government, because of this dynamic, continues not to be able to adopt modern transactional practices, then it's going to fall further behind the satisfaction curve.
Ha ha ha ha! Let me tell you how well private industry is doing. Last week I got on my online account with B of A. I discovered a deposit of $210.50 had been made to my account from out of state. I looked at the counter deposit and discovered that a Ms or Mr Chu from Virginia had deposited the $210.50 into their own account, but somehow in data entry a 'proof code' had been changed that put it in my account, with the exact same number, in another state. The deposit slip itself was filled out correctly and gave me enough information to figure out what had happened.
I tried to call them up. No dice as no number provided a human. So I carefully set about emailing them (online form) giving them ALL the information they needed to fix it, all the secret numbers, everything they needed to know. The next week I get a reply when I signed onto the account saying they considered this situation URGENT, but not only could they NOT email me at the address I provided, they also were not allowed to make outgoing calls to the contact number I provided. They gave me an 800 number to call, but only during 9-5 business hours.
Meanwhile Mr. Chu is out his $200 bucks.
Un fucking believable!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.