Tapping Undersea Cables
Good article on the longstanding practice of secretly tapping undersea cables.
This is news right now because of a new Snowden document.
Page 458
The Value of Breaking the Law
Interesting essay on the impossibility of being entirely lawful all the time, the balance that results from the difficulty of law enforcement, and the societal value of being able to break the law.
What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in WA and CO, it was obviously not legal for personal use.
Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?
This is very much like my notion of “outliers” in my book Liars and Outliers.
A Problem with the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
I haven’t heard much about the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. They recently held hearings regarding the Snowden documents.
This particular comment stood out:
Rachel Brand, another seemingly unsympathetic board member, concluded: “There is nothing that is more harmful to civil liberties than terrorism. This discussion here has been quite sterile because we have not been talking about terrorism.”
If terrorism harms civil liberties, it’s because elected officials react in panic and revoke them.
I’m not optimistic about this board.
Walls Around Nations
A political history of walls: Roman walls such as Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, and the wall between Mexico and the U.S. Moral: they solve the wrong problem.
My Fellowship at the Berkman Center
I have been awarded a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, for the 2013–2014 academic year. I’m excited about this; Berkman and Harvard is where a lot of the cool kids hang out, and I’m looking forward to working with them this coming year.
In particular, I have three goals for the year:
- I want to have my own project. I’ll be continuing to work on my research—and possible book—on security and power and technology. There are a bunch of people I would like to work with at Harvard: Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Joseph Nye, Jr., Steven Pinker, Michael Sandel. And others at MIT: Ethan Zuckerman, David Clark. I know I’ve forgotten names.
- I want to make a difference on a few other Berkman projects. I don’t know what yet, but I know there will be options.
- I want to work with some students on their projects. There are always interesting student projects, and I would like to be an informal adviser on a few of them. So if any of you are Harvard or MIT students and have a project you think I would be interested in, please e-mail me.
I’m not moving to Boston for the year, but I’ll be there a lot.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid–Bacteria Symbiotic Relationships
This is really interesting research.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
F2P Monetization Tricks
This is a really interesting article about something I never even thought about before: how games (“F2P” means “free to play”) trick players into paying for stuff.
For example:
This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so powerful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, that makes them really happy, and then threatening to take it away if they do not spend. Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value the same item as a reward. To be effective with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect.
This technique is used masterfully in Puzzle and Dragons. In that game the play primarily centers around completing “dungeons.” To the consumer, a dungeon appears to be a skill challenge, and initially it is. Of course once the customer has had enough time to get comfortable with the idea that this is a skill game the difficulty goes way up and it becomes a money game. What is particularly effective here is that the player has to go through several waves of battles in a dungeon, with rewards given after each wave. The last wave is a “boss battle” where the difficulty becomes massive and if the player is in the recommended dungeon for them then they typically fail here. They are then told that all of the rewards from the previous waves are going to be lost, in addition to the stamina used to enter the dungeon (this can be 4 or more real hours of time worth of stamina).
At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress. To the brain this is not just a loss of time. If I spend an hour writing a paper and then something happens and my writing gets erased, this is much more painful to me than the loss of an hour. The same type of achievement loss is in effect here. Note that in this model the player could be defeated multiple times in the boss battle and in getting to the boss battle, thus spending several dollars per dungeon.
This technique alone is effective enough to make consumers of any developmental level spend. Just to be safe, PaD uses the same technique at the end of each dungeon again in the form of an inventory cap. The player is given a number of “eggs” as rewards, the contents of which have to be held in inventory. If your small inventory space is exceeded, again those eggs are taken from you unless you spend to increase your inventory space. Brilliant!
It really is a piece about security. These games use all sorts of mental tricks to coerce money from people who would not have spent it otherwise. Tricks include misdirection, sunk costs, withholding information, cognitive dissonance, and prospect theory.
I am reminded of the cognitive tricks scammers use. And, of course, much of the psychology of security.
More NSA Code Names
We don’t know what they mean, but there are a bunch of NSA code names on LinkedIn profiles.
ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA
The NSA's Project SHAMROCK
Nice history of Project SHAMROCK, the NSA’s illegal domestic surveillance program from the 1970s. It targeted telegrams.
Musing on Secret Languages
This is really interesting. It starts by talking about a “cant” dictionary of 16th-century thieves’ argot, and ends up talking about secret languages in general.
Incomprehension breeds fear. A secret language can be a threat: signifier has no need of signified in order to pack a punch. Hearing a conversation in a language we don’t speak, we wonder whether we’re being mocked. The klezmer-loshn spoken by Jewish musicians allowed them to talk about the families and wedding guests without being overheard. Germanía and Grypsera are prison languages designed to keep information from guards—the first in sixteenth-century Spain, the second in today’s Polish jails. The same logic shows how a secret language need not be the tongue of a minority or an oppressed group: given the right circumstances, even a national language can turn cryptolect. In 1680, as Moroccan troops besieged the short-lived British city of Tangier, Irish soldiers manning the walls resorted to speaking as Gaeilge, in Irish, for fear of being understood by English-born renegades in the Sultan’s armies. To this day, the Irish abroad use the same tactic in discussing what should go unheard, whether bargaining tactics or conversations about taxi-drivers’ haircuts. The same logic lay behind North African slave-masters’ insistence that their charges use the Lingua Franca (a pidgin based on Italian and Spanish and used by traders and slaves in the early modern Mediterranean) so that plots of escape or revolt would not go unheard. A Flemish captive, Emanuel d’Aranda, said that on one slave-galley alone, he heard “the Turkish, the Arabian, Lingua Franca, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English.” On his arrival at Algiers, his closest companion was an Icelander. In such a multilingual environment, the Lingua Franca didn’t just serve for giving orders, but as a means of restricting chatter and intrigue between slaves. If the key element of the secret language is that it obscures the understandings of outsiders, a national tongue can serve just as well as an argot.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.