Broaden the notion of enduser

The key element for design guidelines of IoT is to leave all the technology dashboards that are being currently build intact but override their protocol by widening the notion of endusers to encompass all citizens. This will allow small artisans and SME (as we see now happening to the iphone model) to make new kinds of slow business with all that data enabling, for example real-time individual threat analysis (which will show 0,00001 threat from terrorists and .5 slipping in your bathroom).

The intelligence on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was there, but various agencies could not tie the pieces together. Why don't give intelligence 3.0 a chance and open up all the data from satellites, readers and intercepting for Facebook and Twitter style datamining? Surely we can give it a try if the old style dashboards keep failing?

excerpts from Bruce Schneier

Beyond Security Theater

"[I was asked to write this essay for the "New Internationalist" (n. 427, November 2009, pp. 10--13). It's nothing I haven't said before, but I'm pleased with how this essay came together.]

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear. The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don't think this way: they are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

It's not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability.

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise."

see also Foresight -- the Open Source Sensing Initiative:
 
"As you know, nanotechnology is enabling ever-smaller, ever-cheaper sensors -- ultimately able to detect and report on basically everything that happens, down to the molecular level. This can be a huge benefit to medicine, the environment, and security.  Imagine being able to locate and tax pollution, instead of having to tax income, for instance.  Consider being able to easily tell if bioweapons are present.
 
But there's a potential downside -- such sensors would be very useful in the control of civilian populations.  Think of your least favorite governments: wouldn't they appreciate such a tool for detailed monitoring of the actions of a population? Some of us have become resigned to a new age of total surveillance, seeing it as inevitable.  Others feel that privacy is an important tool in the protection of civil liberties, and are willing to sacrifice other benefits to maintain that privacy.
 
We can have the benefits without the downsides, IF we're smart about it

But as the graphic on the Open Source Sensing home page suggests, we may not need to give up either security or privacy/civil liberties.
 
Consider the lesson of electronic voting: we have learned that the software and data handling need to be open, but the raw data -- who voted for whom -- need not be public, as long as we understand and trust the voting process itself.  It need not be public, and it should not be public.  It's the process, not the raw data, which should be open.
 
This same principle can apply to sensing when privacy is impacted: let's make the process open, not the raw data.  All we need is the desired answer ("Is bioweapon X here?"), not total knowledge of all events ("John just attended an unapproved political meeting" or "Susie's been smoking something naughty").
 
We need clever systems design: how to get it?
 
How can we make this happen?  Foresight membership overlaps heavily with the software profession, especially the open source community.  These groups grapple daily with the tradeoffs between security and privacy, and have come up with useful tools and processes for teams to use in working through the technical implementation of these values.
 
The Open Source Sensing Initiative proposes to apply the tools of open source software to this new domain, to advance the immense practical benefits for the environment, health, and safety, without crossing the line into unnecessary total disclosure of every aspect of individuals' lives."

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See also, Schneier on Security
A blog covering security and security technology.
January 16, 2010

"Against these adversaries, sharing is far more important than secrecy. Our intelligence organizations need to trade techniques and expertise with industry, and they need to share information among the different parts of themselves. Today's terrorist plots are loosely organized ad hoc affairs, and those dots that are so important for us to connect beforehand might be on different desks, in different buildings, owned by different organizations.

Critics have pointed to laws that prohibited inter-agency sharing but, as the 9/11 Commission found, the law allows for far more sharing than goes on. It doesn't happen because of inter-agency rivalries, a reliance on outdated information systems, and a culture of secrecy. What we need is an intelligence community that shares ideas and hunches and facts on their versions of Facebook, Twitter and wikis. We need the bottom-up organization that has made the Internet the greatest collection of human knowledge and ideas ever assembled."

See also (thanks Jens)

Blowup, 1996, New Yorker, at Gladwell.

"What accidents like the Challenger should teach us is that we have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life."