Canon PowerShot S100
ƒ/2
5.2 mm
1/1,250
80
3 responses to “Auberge du Soleil”
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I think this thread, with its circling buzzards and mechanical security deer would be a perfect one to open a discussion on the NSA scandal and its repercussions on all industries based on exploiting Big Data.
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And why not… The buck stops here…
On cyberwarfare… I just read the BusinessWeek article on the U.S. offensive:
”Created in 1952 to intercept radio and other electronic transmissions—known as signals intelligence—the NSA now focuses much of its espionage resources on stealing what spies euphemistically call “electronic data at rest.” These are the secrets that lay inside the computer networks and hard drives of terrorists, rogue nations, and even nominally friendly governments. When President Obama receives his daily intelligence briefing, most of the information comes from government cyberspies, says Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush. “It’s at least 75 percent, and going up,” he says.
“You’re not waiting for someone to decide to turn information into electrons and photons and send it,” says Hayden. “You’re commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries’ network. We are the best at doing it. Period.”
The men and women who hack for the NSA belong to a secretive unit known as Tailored Access Operations. For years, the NSA wouldn’t acknowledge TAO’s existence. A Pentagon official who also asked not to be named confirmed that TAO conducts cyber espionage, or what the Department of Defense calls “computer network exploitation,” but emphasized that it doesn’t target technology, trade, or financial secrets.
According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2 petabytes an hour —that’s nearly 2.1 million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text.”
Cyber-defense may be very different than cyber-offense. Some argue that open disclosure of defense modalities can make them stronger, but offensive tactics need to be kept private for them to be effective. This leads to a lack of transparency, even in the chain of command. This leaves open the possibility of rogue actors, or simply bad local judgment, empowered with an ability to hide their activities. We may suspect that this is already happening in China, but why would we expect it not to happen elsewhere as well?
When I think of combative futures in a milieu of accelerating tech change, a key issue is the pace of progress in defensive and offensive modalities. We sometimes imagine super-powerful offensive capabilities of the future versus present day defensive capabilities. Clearly both will advance, but there may be extremely vulnerable windows temporally along the way, and perhaps an argument can me made for certain technologies being inherently offensive where the potential for chaotic damage and entropy vastly outstrips the ability of the same technology to maintain order (e.g., bioweapons). And some technologies are enabling ever-smaller groups, soon individuals, to design and deploy WMDs (certain cyber attacks, genetically modified pathogens) and some simple attacks need no technology or skill (e.g., someone road-tripping through California in the heat of summer + Santa Ana winds with a box of matches and some gasoline -> overload firefighting resources systemically).
Offensive cyber-code and autonomous agents today are not so different from the bio and then nano weapons of tomorrow. The cell is but a vessel for the transmission of code. So I think humanity will cut its teeth on cultural norms and responses (police state, cyber-counter-guerillas (beyond governments to posses and bounty hunters), and a societal immune system for the crazy ones) in response to the imminent cyber threats… and then we will face bio threats… and finally nano threats. So there is little reason to focus on the latter until we have solved the former.
When I discussed some of this with Newt Gingrich, of all people, in 2004, it prompted him to do a bit of research on his own, and he concluded: "Biological warfare, biothreat, is the largest threat to the human race, a substantially bigger threat than nuclear war."
P.S. Here are some details on genetically-modified pathogens, my second blog post ever (here and here)
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