Lone Gunman

By donat­ing funds to disaster-specific char­i­ta­ble organ­i­sa­tions and cam­paigns we restrict the use of our funds to the relief of that prob­lem only. This can cause long-lasting issues for char­i­ties and world­wide dis­as­ter recov­ery efforts in the future.

To ensure the char­i­ta­ble help best, the char­i­ta­ble should ensure they give unre­stricted funds that are not ear­marked for spe­cific dis­as­ters.

[Médecins Sans Fron­tières] has already received enough money over the past three days to keep its Haiti mis­sion run­ning for the best part of the next decade. MSF is behav­ing as eth­i­cally as it can, and has deter­mined that the vast major­ity of the spike in dona­tions that it’s received in the past few days was intended to be spent in Haiti. It will there­fore ear­mark that money for Haiti, and try to spend it there over the com­ing years, even as other mis­sions, else­where in the world, are still in des­per­ate need of resources. […]

The last time there was a dis­as­ter on this scale was the Asian tsunami, five years ago. And for all its best efforts, the Red Cross has still only spent 83% of its $3.21 bil­lion tsunami bud­get — which means that it has over half a bil­lion dol­lars left to spend. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s money which could be spent in Haiti, if it weren’t for the fact that it was earmarked. […]

If a char­ity is worth sup­port­ing, then it’s worth sup­port­ing with unre­stricted funds. Because the last thing any­body wants to see in a cou­ple of years’ time is an unseemly tus­sle over what hap­pened to today’s Haiti dona­tions, even as other inter­na­tional tragedies receive much less pub­lic attention.

Shortly after the North­west Air­lines Flight 253 inci­dent, Bruce Schneier pro­vided links to a num­ber of arti­cles that pub­lished inter­views, quotes or essays from him. As expected, Schneier calmly reit­er­ates his old advice that is as valid now as it was pre-9/11.

The one not to miss: Is avi­a­tion secu­rity mostly for show?

The best defenses against ter­ror­ism are largely invis­i­ble: inves­ti­ga­tion, intel­li­gence, and emer­gency response. But even these are less effec­tive at keep­ing us safe than our social and polit­i­cal poli­cies, both at home and abroad. […]

Despite fear­ful rhetoric to the con­trary, ter­ror­ism is not a tran­scen­dent threat. A ter­ror­ist attack can­not pos­si­bly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reac­tion to that attack that can do that kind of dam­age. The more we under­mine our own laws, […] the more we reduce the free­doms and lib­er­ties at the foun­da­tion of our soci­eties, the more we’re doing the ter­ror­ists’ job for them. […]

We’d do much bet­ter by lever­ag­ing the inher­ent strengths of our mod­ern democ­ra­cies and the nat­ural advan­tages we have over the ter­ror­ists: our adapt­abil­ity and sur­viv­abil­ity, our inter­na­tional net­work of laws and law enforce­ment, and the free­doms and lib­er­ties that make our soci­ety so enviable.

In an inter­view with The Atlantic’s Jef­frey Gold­berg Schneier was asked if we are “mov­ing toward the Israeli­fi­ca­tion” of air­port secu­rity. Unsure what Israeli­fi­ca­tion referred to, a quick search led to an excel­lent arti­cle dis­cussing how air­port secu­rity works in Israel:

Israelis, unlike Cana­di­ans and Amer­i­cans, don’t take s— from any­body. When the secu­rity agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten secu­rity and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 min­utes, all hell broke loose here. We said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of secu­rity with­out touch­ing the effi­ciency of the airport.

That, in a nut­shell is “Israeli­fi­ca­tion” — a sys­tem that pro­tects life and limb with­out annoy­ing you to death.

Inter­est­ingly, a large pro­por­tion of Israel’s air­port secu­rity is rooted in behav­ioural pro­fil­ing: the meta-data.

As we age we become less able to inhibit prej­u­diced infer­ences, rely­ing more on eth­nic and sex­ist stereo­types to inter­pret sit­u­a­tions, research into the sci­ence of prej­u­dice suggests.

There are a lot of clichés thrown around about the elderly, but one that seems to be true—or at least is backed up by research—is the belief they tend to be more prej­u­diced than younger peo­ple. This phenomenon—noted in The New York Times as early as 1941—is widely assumed to be the result of social­iza­tion. After all, today’s senior cit­i­zens grew up in an era when racism was wide­spread and gays stayed in the closet. Of course they aren’t as open-minded as their chil­dren and grandchildren.

A decade ago, a research team led by William von Hip­pel of the Uni­ver­sity of Queens­land chal­lenged that assump­tion. The psy­chol­o­gists pro­posed that older peo­ple may exhibit greater prej­u­dice because they have dif­fi­culty inhibit­ing the stereo­types that reg­u­larly get acti­vated in all of our brains. They sug­gested an aging brain is not as effec­tive in sup­press­ing unwanted information—including stereotypes.

Matthew Ygle­sias recently noted that cur­rent mar­riage equal­ity accep­tance in the U.S. decreases with age, sug­gest­ing that equal mar­riage rights are inevitable as the older gen­er­a­tions cease to have vot­ing power and/or die. When I con­sider this in light of the above, how­ever, I won­der if this really is the case?

via Intel­li­gent Life

The abstracts of the two papers dis­cussed in this arti­cle: Stereo­type Acti­va­tion, Inhi­bi­tion, and Aging and Aging and Stereo­type Sup­pres­sion.

Anonymity is “not suf­fi­cient for pri­vacy when deal­ing with social net­works” is the con­clu­sion from a study that has suc­cess­fully man­aged to de-anonymise large amounts of sani­tised data from Twit­ter and Flickr.

The main les­son of this paper is that anonymity is not suf­fi­cient for pri­vacy when deal­ing with social net­works. […] Our exper­i­ments under­es­ti­mate the extent of the pri­vacy risks of anonymized social net­works. The over­lap between Twit­ter and Flickr mem­ber­ship at the time of our data col­lec­tion was rel­a­tively small. […] As social net­works grow larger and include a greater frac­tion of the pop­u­la­tion along with their rela­tion­ships, the over­lap increases. There­fore, we expect that our algo­rithm can achieve an even greater re-identification rate on larger networks.

There’s been some mer­i­to­ri­ous cov­er­age of this study. This from BBC News:

The pair found that one third of those who are on both Flickr and Twit­ter can be iden­ti­fied from the com­pletely anony­mous Twit­ter graph. This is despite the fact that the over­lap of mem­bers between the two ser­vices is thought to be about 15%.

This from Ars Tech­nica:

It’s not just about Twit­ter, either. Twit­ter was a proof of con­cept, but the idea extends to any sort of social net­work: phone call records, health­care records, aca­d­e­mic soci­o­log­i­cal datasets, etc.

via Schneier

For many years the British pub­lic has often been told that the United King­dom has 4.2 mil­lion CCTV cameras—that’s one for every four­teen residents—as widely quoted by politi­cians, var­i­ous media, and even the police.

This sta­tis­tic is rarely ques­tioned, but thanks to a recent episode of the excel­lent More or Less (UK-only?) sug­gest­ing that this sta­tis­tic was, at best, dubi­ous, I decided to do some reading.

I didn’t have to read much.

The sta­tis­tic comes from a 2002 report from the URBANEYE project, look­ing at the preva­lence of video sur­veil­lance in Lon­don (pdf). From the Conclusion:

In our Put­ney sam­ple, 41% of premises had CCTV sys­tems in oper­a­tion. These insti­tu­tions had an aver­age of 4.1 sur­veil­lance cam­eras. If we use these fig­ures to extrap­o­late the extent of CCTV cov­er­age in Lon­don and the coun­try as a whole we come up with the fol­low­ing results. If we begin by assum­ing that the extent of CCTV cov­er­age in Put­ney is broadly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of CCTV cov­er­age across the whole of Lon­don, we could esti­mate that 41% (102,910) of the 251,000 busi­ness reg­is­tered for VAT in Lon­don would have a CCTV sys­tem. Between them these busi­nesses will have 421,931 sur­veil­lance cam­eras. If we add to these the num­ber of sur­veil­lance cam­eras oper­at­ing in other pub­lic insti­tu­tions (open-street sys­tems, trans­port, hos­pi­tal, schools etc.) it would not be unrea­son­able to ‘guessti­mate’ that Lon­don­ers are mon­i­tored by at least 500,000 CCTV cam­eras. This means that in Lon­don (with a pop­u­la­tion of 7.2 mil­lion res­i­dents) there is approx­i­mately one cam­era for every four­teen peo­ple. From these fig­ures we would sug­gest that in the UK (with a pop­u­la­tion of almost 60 mil­lion) there are at least 4,285,000 cam­eras in the UK.

The Put­ney sam­ple was a pal­try 211 premises. And Put­ney, as one of the 35 major areas in Greater Lon­don, is hardly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the UK as a whole. Even the CCTV User Group says the results are “extremely questionable”.