epiphanatic » 2007» January

Posted on 01.28.07 by jstoner @ 5:43 pm

One of my favorite thinkers on the subject of security, Bruce Schneier, wrote this great blog post recently. Schneier has a very solid, rational approach to the subject; I think of him as the economist of security, because he tends to present security in economic terms: trade-offs, costs and benefits. He coined the term “security theater,” meaning security measures that don’t provide actual security, and that may exist to further some other agenda than security, or secure a different resource than claimed.

But here he is, rationally (and compassionately) defending the practice of security theater in certain circumstances:

We make smart security trade-offs — and by this I mean trade-offs for genuine security — when our feeling of security closely matches the reality. When the two are out of alignment, we get security wrong. Security theater is no substitute for security reality, but, used correctly, security theater can be a way of raising our feeling of security so that it more closely matches the reality of security. It makes us feel more secure handing our babies off to doctors and nurses, buying over-the-counter medicines and flying on airplanes — closer to how secure we should feel if we had all the facts and did the math correctly.

Of course, too much security theater and our feeling of security becomes greater than the reality, which is also bad. And others — politicians, corporations and so on — can use security theater to make us feel more secure without doing the hard work of actually making us secure. That’s the usual way security theater is used, and why I so often malign it.

But to write off security theater completely is to ignore the feeling of security. And as long as people are involved with security trade-offs, that’s never going to work.

This so reminds me of another security expert I admire, Gavin de Becker. De Becker wrote The Gift of Fear, my second-favorite security book (after Schneier’s Beyond Fear). De Becker’s approach is nicely complimentary to Schneier’s: he addresses those moments when that primal part of your brain (the amygdala, I suppose) is saying “Something is wrong here…” His work is about tuning into, educating, and using that part of your mind to protect yourself in bad situations.

Schneier’s work is more about the situations when that part of your mind is a bad fit for the problem: it can save your life in a dark alley, or save you money in a bad business negotiation, but it won’t help you assess the security measures for your company’s network, or think sensibly about national security. When you aren’t confronted with visceral, accurate signs of human malice, Schneier clarifies things immensely. When you are, de Becker is your man. Problems occur when the wrong part of the mind is used to make security decisions.

I think there is important work to do around that boundary, between times when our primal minds will save us, and times when our rational minds will do a better job. In his post, Schneier is talking about a subtle point of detail in that boundary. I think it would be useful, socially and politically, for these two to get together. If Schneier and de Becker worked together, they could create some really useful mind-training, to help people use their entire mind-stack effectively to address the real threats we face.

In my own work, I have the responsibility to create complex systems, and then help my customers navigate those systems. I often must help people who are overwhelmed by complexity, and aren’t dealing with it well. I see this reflected in the world at large, and nowhere do I see bigger problems matched with worse thinking than in the field of security, on a political scale.
How ’bout it, guys?

Filed under: politics--global
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a way out of Iraq

Posted on 01.15.07 by jstoner @ 1:28 am

I think I’ve got an idea of how to extricate ourselves from Iraq. It might not be a good idea, but I think it’s better than Bush’s current plan:

First, draft orders for immediate and complete withdrawal, as fast as possible. If you gotta leave some equipment behind, so be it. Get them complete and initialed, to the point where a single presidential signature will start the process. Make it as few pages as possible, for the President to carry around. I’m calling this the sword of Solomon document;

Get all the regional powers together, everyone with an interest other than chaos. Exclude those who would profit by chaos. Their interests may conflict, but none of them will be happy with the hell-in-a-handbasket scenario. There are those who would be happy with that: don’t invite them. Include Syria, Iran, the Saudis, Turkey, Jordan, the Kuwaitis, and all the appropriate internal players: al-Maliki, al-Sistani, and so forth;

Threaten them with the document. “We are leaving. We can leave now, or we can leave later. The choice is yours. You have x number of weeks to make a deal. If at any point, I lose faith that you are going to come up with something that will be stable, lasting, and as just as we can manage for all concerned, including the Sunnis, I will sign this, and we will let you people deal with the mess.”

“We’ll work with you. We’ll provide support for peaceful directions. But we have to move in accordance with the patience of the American people, and we also have to do our best by all of the Iraqi people.

“And we have to deal with the realities of spheres of influence that will interact over time here. Better to be up-front and diplomatic now than shedding blood in the shadows for years to come.

“If partition is the direction of history, then so be it. Those who want a unified Iraq have to stand up for it, now. This is probably your last stand.”

It would require balls, and statesmanship–if the next president does have to sign the Sword document he/she will have to answer to the American people for $100/barrel oil. But you know, the president serving from 2008-2012 will probably be a one-termer anyway, so they might as well step up.

Filed under: politics--global and politics--us
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patent jealousy

Posted on 01.04.07 by jstoner @ 10:15 pm

I hate you, Eric Holzle. Well, maybe not hate. But I am extremely jealous…
Some of you may have heard of the original ‘stinky t-shirt study‘:

In 1996, Claus Wedekind, a zoologist at Bern University in Switzerland, conducted what’s become known as the stinky T-shirt study. Wedekind had 44 men each wear a t-shirt for two nights straight, then tested how women reacted to the smelly shirts.

Like mice, women preferred the scent of men whose immune systems were unlike their own. If a man’s immune system was similar, a woman tended to describe his T-shirt as smelling like her father or brother.

More recent fiindings link this effect directly to genes in the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC:

…Then they looked at three MHC genes, each with two different varieties, and compared each partner’s genetic makeup.

The more similar, the less sexually responsive they were to their partners. They also were more unfaithful. The genetically similar women reported more attraction, interest and fantasy toward other men prior to ovulation. When they were not in this phase of the cycle, they showed no sexual interest outside of their partner.

So, I’m poking around at this stuff, thinking “This is the basis of a dating site! I can see it now: Get people to get their genes tested, have them post the data about their alleles to the site… it’s a simple match. If you make some money, you could even fund some research to collect more data about the impact of particular differences. You could market through gene testing clinics… damn, this has legs!”

Then, as I googled, I saw Eric’s patent application:

3. A method of matching human beings with others, comprising the steps of: (a) assembling and/or defining a population of human participants, physically and/or virtually, to be matched amongst themselves and/or any future or past participants in the context of a dating service, dating services, or other social groups or organizations; (b) producing, assembling, and/or observing the class I and class II MHC profiles of all or any fraction of the participants, where said profiles include the HLA-A and HLA-B loci in the class I region, and the DRB1 locus in the class II region; (c) comparing said profiles of some or all of the participants with said profiles of others and rating the degree of compatibility between any two or more people according to the number of alleles they have in common, where fewer commonalities represent a greater degree of compatibility; (d) matching said participants based on said comparisons.

Well, it is just a patent application, but if Amazon can get the 1-click patent, this is a shoo-in. I’m not familiar with the relevant bodies of prior art, but as such claims go, this isn’t bad.

Damn you, Eric Holzle. Damn you.

Filed under: ha and science|technology
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