Watch Out for Biplanes

 They killed the last two American troops who were attacked from the air (towards the end of the Korean war.)

That factoid from David Kilcullen's The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. I'm about 100 pages in, finding it interesting and convincing.  So far he's using an ecological/evolutionary approach to the recent history (say from 1991 on) of war, and the changes in how the opposing parties have changed their tactics and strategies, mostly learning from defeats.

One observation is that NSA can gather much more data than they can analyze. Terrorist/insurgent organizations don't rely on privacy laws, but on hiding in the woods of all the other data. I think that also applies to the average citizen--we get lost in the mass of data, so we don't need to be paranoid. 

Even Bees Are Losing Their Privacy

Modern Farmer notes that beekeepers are being offered the ability to monitor their bees online, meaning a loss of privacy.  In partial compensation, they can also provide bees with a solar-heated hive, which will harm the varroa mites without harming the bees.  Or, if all else fails, drone bees are on the horizon.  (A possible confusion between drones that are bees and bees that are drones will ensue.)

MFP and Privacy of Data

Article in the newspaper, lost track of which one, reporting that FSA had issued something like $23 million in MFP payments so far.

I'm impressed less by the speed with which the agency was able to issue the payments than by the ability to provide statistics.  With the centralized payment process the payment data should have been easy but they're also reported applications made and paid.  I'm not sure what's supporting that--maybe the business processes are in the cloud, making such data easy?

The article also went on to note that EWG was asking for release of the payment data.  That reminds me of this notice.  I've read it a couple times and still don't understand it, perhaps because I'm remembering that the 2008 or 2012 farm bill included a prohibition on providing payment data.  My memory may be wrong, or the law may have changed in more recent farm bills.

Tabarrok's Great Post re: Facebook

Alex Tabarrok is the less prominent blogger at Marginal Revolution, but I think his post yesterday is great. 

He makes the point that much of the data Facebook stores is created by Facebook, or more accurately in my mind by the combination of our activities which are enabled by and only possible through Facebook.  As he says, speaking of a cousin in Dubai who he's never called or written a letter in over 20 years: "The relationship with my cousin, therefore, isn’t simply mine, it’s a joint creation of myself, my cousin and Facebook."

I tweeted about the post yesterday, not something I do everyday.  I got a response from one person, and we've gone back and forth a bit.  Let me summarize my position:

Like Tabarrok, I've a current relationship with a cousin which has been made possible through the Internet, email in the first instance, then shifting to AIM and finally to Facebook Messenger: a sequence of communication tools of better and better capability and more ease of use.  I understand that the data stored in the cloud has changed with each tool: now Facebook keeps the full text of our messages.  But the capability of the tool is an essential part of the relationship.  Given our personalities and ages we didn't and couldn't establish it based on snail mail. 


I (and my cousin) are interested in genealogy; she's writing a book (at 87) covering events in 19th century Ireland partly involving two collateral ancestors. For us, all bits of data are precious if they concern the lives of our ancestors, or the lives my cousin investigates.  Of course the data is almost all on paper with just a little bit on film.  What does the future hold for genealogists; how will they handle all the data which is now being stored and which presumably will be available?

How Times Have Changed: Test Data

The Times had an article on the theft by three Homeland Security employees of a set of personal data of DHS employees.

What were they going to do with the data?

Well, they were going to write software, or rather copy  and modify the IG's software for managing IG cases and sell it to other IG's.  And the stolen data was going to be used to test the software as they developed it.

What a change in 30 years.  Back in the 1980's and early 90's I very casually moved around sets of live data saved from county office systems to serve as the basis for testing new software.  While we had the Privacy Act requirements, we weren't really conscious of privacy restrictions and security.  Consequently I, and others, could do then what would be firing offenses today.

The Half-Life of Information

In the dispute between the FBI and Apple over obtaining access to the terrorist's cellphone data I thought of the concept in my title.  Radioactive elements have a half-life, the amount of time it takes any mass of the element to emit radiation and convert to half the mass.  (Not a good definition but look up wikipedia if you want better.)  The point being each element decays at a set rate, fixed by nuclear physics.

Apply the same concept to the information of interest to law enforcement. Some types of information, say the DNA on a rape kit, would lose interest very gradually, perhaps losing interest entirely when the rapist is almost certainly dead of old age.  Other types, perhaps the appointment calendar, would lost interest much quicker. Assuming law enforcement knew who the person was likely to see, the calendar might be of no interest once the day of the appointment is past.

It's now been more than 3 months since the San Bernadino shootings, so my guess is that much of the information has decayed into relative meaninglessness.  We don't know the information, so we can't tell for certain, but I think it likely  The longer it takes the FBI to access the data, the greater the chance it won't be helpful.

My point: fast access to the data is worth a lot, which should be a consideration in determining whether and under what rules law enforcement gets access.

Privacy and Genealogy

Made a run to the store, first for Starbucks, then for food. (My priorities). 

The brain cells are clicking just enough to comment on genealogy and privacy.  I subscribe to ancestry.com, and have several family trees there (mostly trees for people who might be related, partially to help my cousin in her researches).

Today Ancestry published their first ever Transparency Report, describing the times they have been asked for data by law enforcement and the times they released it. They also revised their policies. My brain's not up to reading it, but they refer to the EU's rules on moving personal data.  Just one more straw in the wind of future concerns on data.

Boxers or Briefs?

That was the question President Clinton was asked on some show which some people thought he shouldn't have been on and definitely shouldn't have answered.  We value our privacy, maybe.

I was reminded today of the good old days, before clothes dryers, when washed clothes were hung on the line, even in winter, because somehow they'd dry even though they froze.  But I digress.  What I really was reminded of was how the neighbors could and would eye your lines, knowing whether the woman of the house was adhering to the proper schedule for washing clothes, etc.  And seeing what you wore.  At least in principle, although apparently some housewives would hang the underwear of the family on the interior lines, more hidden from prying eyes, except on the days the wind blew.   (I say apparently because we lived far enough off the main road that we were safe from such eyes, except for the people who came in to buy eggs and milk.

What Illegal Spying Is Not So Bad?

Seems that some of the cases where NSA employees definitely broke the law involved spying on significant others.  See this piece.  Somehow that makes NSA seem less fearsome to me, just a bunch of insecure men jealous of their lovers.   Should the motive really make a difference when we're talking violations of privacy?  No, but somehow.

"Personal Data"

Some senators get upset by EPA releasing personal data tied to CAFO's. 

I continue to be perplexed--I think it was the DC Circuit Court said in 1994 ASCS had to give payment data to EWG, including names and addresses. I think the logic was the data wasn't personal.  But now we're saying it is personal, which is the position ASCS had taken since the Privacy Act was passed.

Drones and Farming

Via Marginal Revolution, here's a Daily Beast piece on drones in farming.  Unlimited possibilities, particularly with precision farming.  Meanwhile Conor Friedersdorf has an article on how drones should be limited in the interests of privacy.

The Paradox of "Food Insecurity"

ERS has its annual report on food insecurity.

There's a paradox here: the number of people receiving food stamps is at an all-time high. The number of "food insecure" people is high.  The number of obese people is high, with the poor having the highest proportion of obesity. This seems to me to amount to a paradox.

What's going on?  To analyze it, there's four characteristics of people:

1. poverty
2. "food insecure"
3. obese
4. receive food stamp

Receiving food stamps is a binary attribute: you either do or you don't during the time frame, the other three are more scalar, but government surveys convert them into binary attributes.  With 4 attributes, there's 16 possible combinations, ranging from: poor and food insecure and obese and receiving food stamps to not poor and not food insecure and not obese and not receiving food stamps.

It seems we don't have good data to map the distribution of people into those 16 combinations.  We can assume we know how the world works:

 In one conception, the people getting food stamps are the poorest of us; everyone who is really poor gets food stamps and only the poor get food stamps. In that world, everyone who is poor and obese gets food stamps. Implications:

•  food stamps are well distributed
• the food insecure get food stamps but don't manage them well.
• the food insecure are also obese, perhaps because they binge eat.

In another conception of the world, the world of the poor divides into two portions: one set is poor, no food stamps, and food insecure; the other set is poor, gets food stamps, and not food insecure.  Implications:

• food stamps are poorly distributed
• food stamps fill their role of preventing hunger and the only social problem is getting all the poor to participate in the food stamp program.
• NOTE: the missing issue is where are the obese in this conception.  

Now the ERS report says 57 percent of the food insecure participated in a food program (food stamps, WIC, and a third program), but they compare apples and oranges: food insecurity is for a calendar year, participation in food stamps, etc. is for the month before the survey, meaning a family which suffered food insecurity in January, goes on food stamps in July and is surveyed in August would count as food insecure.

What's my point: the ERS work lacks essential information.  Of course, in their defense I can imagine their surveyors would be reluctant to carry a scale and tape measure with them on their interviews so they could check the BMI of the respondents.   One of the prices we pay for privacy is the lack of information to make good policy.

Restaurants and Their Customers

The NYTimes had an article on how restaurants are tracking their customers, recording their preferences:

Even a single visit can prompt the creation of a computer file that includes diners’ allergies, favorite foods and whether they are “wine whales,” likely to spend hundreds of dollars on a bottle. That’s valuable information, considering that upward of 30 percent of a restaurant’s revenue comes from alcohol. Some places even log data on potential customers so that the restaurant is prepared if the newcomer shows up.

That a waiter you have never met knows your tendency to dawdle or your love of crushed ice may strike some diners as creepy or intrusive. But restaurant managers say their main goal is to pamper the customer, to recreate the comfort of a local corner spot where everybody knows your name.

Is this an invasion of privacy or the way technology enables the free market best to satisfy customer desires?

No One Ever Washed a Rental Car

That's my best memory of something some economist once said.  Turns out the Zipcar is just another rental, according to this from Treehugger.  The advantage Zipcar presumably has is their continuing relationship with their customers and computers to track when their customers fudge on the agreement.  It's just another way in which modern Americans trade privacy for advantage in the age of the Internet.

The Natural Limits on Prying

Kevin Drum has good fun mocking the rapidly expanding military use of drone aircraft as a jobs program (described in an article in today's Times).  But he's picking up on a ratio which I see differently: From his quote of the Times article:

The pressures on humans will only increase as the military moves from the limited “soda straw” views of today’s sensors to new “Gorgon Stare” technology that can capture live video of an entire city — but that requires 2,000 analysts to process the data feeds from a single drone, compared with 19 analysts per drone today.

In other words, for all the security cameras in public places, and all the surveiling which is being done, current technology requires human eyeballs and human social recognition skills to make sense of what is captured.  So if someone want to follow my life, it means a couple people working 8 hours a day to monitor it. 

My bottom line: just because data is accessible, as through a security camera, doesn't mean anyone has the incentive to watch and (mis)use the data, considering everything else they could do with their time.

Tracking People, Cover Stories, Registries, and Ankle Bracelets

I've noticed and sometimes blogged about a modern trend towards tracking people.  Lots of states, maybe all states, have registries for sex offenders.  There was an article the other day on a proposal to extend such registries to other types of offenders.  Facebook and other Internet sites are making it impossible to create good cover stories for our undercover agents; Valerie Plame is one of the last native-born agents we'll have, or so it seems.  Dominique Straus-Kahn was released only after posting bail and agreeing to wear an ankle bracelet. Now Conan Friedersdorf proposes that, if any convicts are released early in California as a result of the Supreme Court's decision yesterday they would have to wear an ankle bracelet that doesn't expire until the end of their original sentence.

Perhaps more benignly, in the past there's been legislation to track parents who are in arrears on child-support.  I've seen discussion on cross-state tracking of doctors and nurses whose licenses were revoked in one state. Given today's headline that contractors who received stimulus funds from the government, or from state and local governments, are in arrears on $750 million worth of taxes, I'd expect a tracking proposal to arise there. 

The list goes on and on.  As a general proposition I tend to agree with the proposals; I view transparency as good and it's certainly less onerous to wear a bracelet than to be in an overcrowded jail.  I wonder, though, where's the discussion of this and what are the limits and guidelines we should use.

The Nosy Book

First heard the term "nosy book" in a chat last week.  Seems to be a name for a local directory, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and occupations, athough there's not many Google hits for it.  In the old days privacy wasn't primary.

Bureacucratic Catch-22

I'm no fan of HIPAA, the law which tries to protect the privacy of patients.  Here's an example.--applying the law literally can prevent a person from accessing her own data, when someone else has stolen an identity.

Student Aid Applications and the IRS

The NYTimes has an article on:

The Obama administration is moving to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, a notoriously complicated form that asks students seeking financial aid for college as many as 153 questions.

If I understand, the biggest part of the idea is to piggyback on IRS 1040 data. Apparently there's lots of overlap, so the Education Department is willing to forgo some questions of value only in special circumstances, and the applicant is willing to permit Ed to access IRS data, the entry process can be simplified, speeded up, and made much more accurate.

Seems to me there's a trend at work--people are more comfortable with having their data online. Whether they trust the government (or Google or whoever) or it's just an evolution as we get more used to the Internet, I don't know.

Personal Information

Back in the day, when the Privacy Act was first enacted, we notified all program participants their information was personal and protected from disclosure. Then, in the early 1990's, the Environmental Working Group took ASCS/USDA to court, saying that farm and program information was not personal. They won, at least at the circuit court level, and DOJ decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court. So our IT folks had to figure out how to provide the data to EWG, while masking the social security number (which was the primary key to a number of the files).

They did, and EWG put it online. I've used this data as an example of the problems of providing governmental transparency.

Meanwhile, FSA has been dealing with the current rules and issued an interesting notice AS-2179. Looking at the list of data which is protected, I'm not sure I see a clear line between what FSA is providing to EWG and what FSA has to protect. The notice doesn't provide a rationale for the division. But it's another example of the complexity the administration will run into as they push for open government.