Wise words from the mighty Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation at The Edge:

Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We’ll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it’s good for.

Dry as ever. Read this and plenty of other responses to Chris Anderson’s article The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?

Andrew Conway emailed me during the week to alert me to this:

Last week the Office of the Director of Intelligence (ODNI) Special Security Center (SSC), which acts as ODNI’s personnel security directorate, began soliciting white papers for a new research opportunity called Cyber Behavior and Personnel Security. The theme of this opportunity indicates that ODNI believes an individual’s conduct in cyberspace should be a factor in the security clearance adjudication process.

Andrew’s comments on this programme are well worth reading, as is his new blog Zero Intelligence Agents, which deals with dynamic networks, spatial modelling, human terrain and terrorism, for starters at least. Straight on the blogroll.

The University of California at San Diego has announced a ‘groundbreaking’ study to determine How Much Information? there is in the world. Extracts from the press release:

The “How Much Information?” study will be completed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university faculty team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship. The program will be undertaken at the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), with support from the Jacobs School of Engineering and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

“Experts say that we live in an information economy, but how much information is there, and do countries count and value information comparably? The previous generation of studies have reported information as countable bits and bytes, and documented large growth numbers” said IR/PS Dean Peter F. Cowhey. “The next generation of studies will count more precisely the impacts and implications of information growth, and do this internationally,” continued Cowhey.

“We have designed this research as a partnership between industry and academics to take the next steps in understanding how to think about, measure, and understand the implications of dramatic growth in digital information,” said Professor Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, co-leader of the new program. “As the costs per byte of creating, storing, and moving data fall, the amounts rise exponentially. We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.” Bohn’s co-leader, Dr. James Short, noted that recent industry studies have reported larger and larger amounts of information being produced and stored in networks, companies and homes. “We will continue to document the growth in information,” Short said, “but at the end of the day we are studying how information works. How information works is about measuring and counting the uses and applications driving the massive increases in networking and data growth, allowing businesses and consumers to use information more effectively to make better decisions.”

Updates on the research will be announced over the course of the next three years, with the initial report slated for publication at the end of 2008. For more information and to view updates on the research, please visit http://giic.ucsd.edu.

The ‘previous generation of studies’ presumably includes the recent International Data Corporation report, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011 [.pdf], to which I’ve referred before. Their research concluded that in 2007 the ‘digital universe’ consisted of 281 exabytes of data (281 billion gigabytes), 10% higher than forecast. By 2011, the total volume - if that is the right word - of data will be ten times it was in 2006.

Big numbers, but nothing close to the postulated total amount of information in the universe. If current trends continue (and I’m ignoring a few variables here, admittedly) there will be no space in the universe for our ever-increasing data production by about AD 2650 (according to Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman).

Mark Safranski has already nominated Matt Armstrong as ‘Public Diplomacy/IO Czar in the next administration‘ and with good reason, judging by an article he’s written for Serviam Magazine.  In Combat Robots and Perception Management Matt outlines his take on the overlooked implications of the use of unmanned systems in the battlespace of the future:

As unmanned systems mature, ground systems operating among and interacting with foreign populations will substantially affect perceptions of our mission, both at home and abroad. Robots will exert significant influence in three overlapping information domains. The first domain is the change on the calculus of foreign engagement as the public, Congress, and future administrations perceive a reduction in the human cost of war (on our side). The second domain is the psychological struggle of the local populations in conflict and postconflict zones, and the third is the overarching global information environment.

Rather than reiterate the substance of Matt’s article, I’m going to pick up on a few points that leapt out at me.

…few have considered the true cost of lowering the bar for kinetic action in a world of instant communications. There are parallels here between outsourcing to machines and outsourcing to private military contractors that circumvent public and congressional oversight by avoiding the use of uniformed soldiers.

This seems like an obvious point, but I haven’t seen it stated in quite this fashion before. The parallel between the deployment of robots and PMCs as functions of political utility is quite striking.

Mapping the human terrain becomes, by implication at least, not only unnecessary but impossible in the sterility of robot-human interfaces.

As Matt says, this runs the risk of reversing the conceptual and doctrinal advances of the last couple of years. FM3-24, for example, was an implicit rejection of RMA as holistic doctrine, and an increasing reliance on (semi-)autonomous technology, rather than HUMINT, might take us back to the pre-Petraeus days. This

may lead to a modern propaganda contest and an escalation of spectacular attacks to reach humans in order to influence U.S. public opinion and increase extraregional sympathy for the insurgents.

In other words, the human link must be maintained at some level. I’m beginning to get a picture of a balance here - what is taken away from one side of the equation must be replaced on the other.

… work is under way today to formulate rules of engagement for robots designed around Western notions of an ethical practice of war codified in the laws of war. But the collapse of traditional concepts of time and space by new media prevents consideration of information by consumers and reporters. The noble pursuit of “lawfare,” of knowing the truth through careful reflection and analysis to validate Western-justified ends and means, just does not work.

This is particularly true in the case of technical failure or ‘accident’. The mention of ‘accident’ was not the first time in this article that I was reminded of Paul Virilio. Virilio’s formulation of the ‘accident’ addresses the hidden negativity of phenomena contained within seemingly positivist frameworks. In this case, and Matt will correct me if I’m wrong, the deployment of unmanned systems is generally perceived as positive (for political and economic reasons) but this hides negative aspects - revealed through ‘accidents’ - that will have deeply significant implications unless thought through carefully first. In Virilio’s words:

There is no technical invention without accidents. Each time a technology is invented, a technology of transport, of transmission, or of information, a specific accident is born.

And this seems to be the crux of Matt’s plea. The use of unmanned systems is not a simple case of swapping in and out components of a military system. It is more complicated even than outsourcing armed personnel - it involves a sea-change in the potential effects to be wrought by the technology itself. In this case, it is the ‘hearts and minds’ of host populations that will be altered, very likely with adverse consequences:

The uniformed warfighters the robots will replace reflect the country’s commitment to the mission, shaping local and global opinions that garner or destroy support for the mission. Robots, regardless of their real or perceived autonomy, will also represent, reflect, and shape these opinions. The informational effect of robots is substantial, but little research has been done on the subject. Failing to recognize the effect that unmanned systems may have on the struggle for the minds and wills of men and women will have tragic unintended consequences.

I’ve done a poor job of unpacking some of the dense concepts in the article, so I’d recommend reading it firsthand. In an accompanying post Matt says this is a short version of a longer paper to be published by Proteus later this year - I look forward to it.

Nicholas Carr quotes from an article by BBC journalist Bill Thompson in Miasma Computing:

The metaphor of “the cloud” is a seductive one, but it’s also dangerous. It not only suggests that our new utility-computing system is detached from the physical (and political) realities of our planet, but it also lends to that system an empyrean glow. The metaphor sustains and extends the old idealistic belief in “cyberspace” as a separate, more perfect realm in which the boundaries and constraints of the real world are erased.

Bill Thompson raises a warning flag:

Behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the “cloud” is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and every network interaction connects two locations in the real world … In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

Now there’s a metaphor. I’m guessing, though, that the marketers aren’t going to allow “miasma computing” into our vocabulary. It’s kind of a downer.

Nicholas goes on to say:

The metaphor of “the cloud” seems to have been derived from those schematic drawings of corporate computing systems that use stylized images of clouds to represent the Internet - that vast, ill-defined digital mass that lies beyond the firewall. Those drawings always reminded me of the ancient maps of the known world, the edges of which were marked with the legend “Beyond Here There Be Dragons.”

The dragons are stirring.

These are wise words - I strongly believe the ‘virtual’ is the ‘real’, not the ‘Other’. In a previous blog incarnation I wrote something I titled Metaphor: Nature in Cyberspace, and thought I’d post it here again to see if I broadly agree with what I wrote back in March 2007. And (with some reservations) I think I do. Anyway, here it is:

Yes, we all read Danger Room, so I don’t normally post material from the team at Wired, but this story is right in the Ubiwar vein. 26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines ‘Cyberspace’, writes Noah Schachtman, and this is the definition, as penned by UD US Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England:

[A] global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

Schachtman notes the divergence from William Gibson’s 1984 definition of cyberspace in Neuromancer, which I’ve expanded slightly from Schachtman’s piece:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding …

The term ‘cyberspace’ has come a long way since then, a term of which Gibson later said:

All I knew about the word “cyberspace” when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

I nicked that quote from Wikipedia, the same entry from which Cyber Warrior got their definition, as I reported yesterday. The USACEWP appear not to have read USAF’s own definition, as stated by Air Force Cyberspace Command:

Cyberspace is a domain like land, sea, air and space and it must be defended. Although we’ve been operating in cyberspace for a very long time - since the invention of telegraph, radio and radar - we now conduct the full range of military operations in this domain. Just as the sea domain is characterized by use of water to conduct operations, and the air domain characterized by operations in and through the atmosphere, the cyber domain is characterized by use of electronic systems and the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes all energy that flows through the electromagnetic spectrum - radio waves, micro-waves, x-rays, gamma rays, and directed energy. If an electronic system emits, transmits or reflects, it’s operating in cyberspace and we are there to take military action.

Schachtman continues:

“Cyberspace is composed of hundreds of thousands of interconnected computers, servers, routers, switches, and fiber optic cables that allow our critical infrastructures to work,” states the Bush administration’s 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. “Thus, the healthy functioning of cyberspace is essential to our economy and our national security.”

In the 2006 National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, a classified document, the Joint Chiefs of Staff defined cyberspace as “a domain characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures.”

Exactly how that will square with the Pentagon’s new definition of cyberspace remains to be seen.

Well, yes, that’s true. I guess the various agencies agree that cyberspace is a warfighting domain, but what that actually means is unclear. I would hate to come up with an off-the-cuff definition, but then again I’m not paid to. Anyone who feels like having a go, or can point me to some useful resources, please do. As for the military, boys, I suggest returning to Gibson’s prescient definition and extracting what he actually meant.

Update: Right on cue, Joel Davis at Singularity Sunrise writes:

Well, there you go, cyberspace is the global network of interconnected hardware and software which the modern military stands ready to defend and/or attack. What have they omitted from their definition? The wetware - the human mind.

Faster Wireless Networks: sending descriptions of data could be more efficient than sending the data itself, by Duncan Graham-Rowe at MIT Technology Review:

The role of computer networks would appear to be fairly straightforward: to ferry data from one point to another. But a novel wireless-network protocol developed for the U.S. military breaks with this tradition by sending not the data itself but rather a description of the data. In simulations, a network using the protocol was five times more efficient than a traditional network. Within the next year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will test the protocol in field trials at Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia.

The protocol is part of a project to create a new generation of mobile ad-hoc networks - self-configuring networks of mobile wireless nodes - that will enable faster and more reliable tactical communications between military personnel and vehicles, says Greg Lauer, section head for advanced network systems at BAE Systems in Burlington, MA, which helped develop the protocol for DARPA.

But the project also demonstrates the potential of a new and exciting field called network coding, says Muriel Médard, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who collaborated on the project with BAE Systems.

Read the rest of this fascinating article here.

ICT4Peace references an article in the Guardian on the recovery of data from doomed space shuttle Columbia, and rightly criticises this statement:

But doesn’t it prove that you can get your data back from pretty much anything?

No, of course it doesn’t, despite the remarkable feat achieved on this occasion. Sanjana Hattotuwa of ICT4Peace concludes his post with this intriguing thought:

The point here is simple. Data loss creates and exacerbates conflict. In a context of violent ethno-political conflict and with many fragile peacebuilding processes at play, data loss can often not just be catastrophic, it can be positively life threatening.

Backup.

This sounds entirely reasonable to me, and I’m posting this as a reminder to self to think about this some more. In particular, whether and how conflicts might be prosecuted over data itself.

I haven’t had a good look around Sanjana’s blog but there seems to be a lot of good stuff worthy of further reading.

I gave up reading Robert Scoble’s blog Scobleizer some time ago. Far be it from me to criticise the 31st most popular blog in the world, I just don’t go for Scoble’s frenetic techno-evangelism or the febrile adulation he elicits in some quarters. His name might not mean much to many regular readers of this blog but what he says matters to an awful lot of people. He has a knack of spotting technological trends, mainly due to his absolute immersion in new media and technology and, let’s face it, he’s ultra-bright and totally dedicated to his cause.

Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.

Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ’swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.

This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.

Noise, in Scoble’s sense, is noise with information value, very different from the engineering sense in which noise is data without meaning, without semantic content. Scoble’s noise, like noise in the information theoretical sense has redundancy. This redundancy is what provides Scoble with the ability to detect patterns in the streams of Twitters and FriendFeeds coming his way. As a good journalist, he knows that just because fifty people propagate a meme (a troublesome term, but I’ll let it slide for now) doesn’t make it true, but he can see the drift of global conversation and concerns.

I’ve been toying with ideas of data, information and redundancy recently. About whether the physical nature of the internet, and the ways in which it transmits and reproduces digital data as a matter of course, could in some way constitute force-multipliers in the global insurgency (another troublesome term, as David Betz wrote yesterday). Does the fact that, once created, data continues to flow through the internet, somehow act to the benefit of the insurgent or terrorist sophisticated in the use of new media? I don’t mean the relative ease with which anyone can set up a website, or post a video of an IED explosion in Iraq. I mean the unpredictable course data takes once ‘released’ into the digital wild and its subsequent recontextualisation as actionable and significant information.

I suspect that it could do, although I’m not convinced it is yet happening, except perhaps in the sense of the deliberate viral spread of propaganda of the deed acts through visual media. One critical point is how (and whether) data is being recovered from parts of the internet and used somehow as a weapon or tool in whichever campaign or operation the individual or group is involved. Reconstituted ‘information bombs’.

See also:
Mining the digital
Global Information Flows

Update:

Oops, shoulda checked Zen’s feed first: Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter. He reckons it’s a great little tool, and even mentions Robert Scoble to boot. Should I take the plunge? Is the fact that both he and I have written about this today a function of memetic correspondence, or sheer coincidence? I dunno, but read why Zen likes it here.

Jihadica wrote the following

On May 10, 2008 Ekhlaas member mohanad57 posted a link to Encyclopedia of Modern U.S. Military Weapons in pdf format. Like most illicit material shared by Jihadis, the link takes you to an independent file sharing site (in this case, rapidshare.com). This keeps the forum managers from getting in trouble, reduces bandwidth consumption, ensures that files can be shared rapidly, and makes the links temporary. For all you jihadologists out there: If there is a download you want on a Jihadi forum, get it immediately – the link will stop working in a few days.

And keeps intelligence services on their toes, to boot. The digital mobility of jihadis, and other terrorist and insurgents, contrasts wildly with the atrophied institutional outlook and methods of those attempting to monitor their activities. This might be a slightly unfair criticism - the advantage is most definitely with he who acts first when it comes to utilising the web - but the point still stands.