Emergent Chaos

In “Social networking: Your key to easy credit?,” Eric Sandberg writes:

In their quest to identify creditworthy customers, some are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal in the virtual stratosphere. Before calling the privacy police, though, understand how it’s really being used.

…
To be clear, creditors aren’t accessing the credit reports or scores of those in your social network, nor do those friends affect your personal credit rating. Jewitt asserts that the graphs aren’t being used to penalize borrowers or to find reasons to reject customers, but quite the opposite: “There is an immediate concern that it’s going to affect the ability to get a financial product. But it makes it more likely” that it will work in their favor,” says Jewitt. [vice president of business development of Rapleaf, a San Francisco, Calif., company specializing in social media monitoring.]

I’ll give Jewitt the benefit of the doubt here, and assume he’s sincere. But the issue isn’t will it make it more or less likely to get a loan. The issue is the rate that people will pay. If you think about it from the perspective of a smart banker, they want to segment their loans into slices of more and less likely to pay. The most profitable loans are the ones where people who are really likely to pay them back, but can be convinced that they must pay a higher rate.

The way the banking industry works this is through the emergent phenomenon of credit scores. If banks colluded to ensure you paid a higher rate, it would raise regulatory eyebrows. But since Fair Issac does that, all the bankers know that as your credit score falls, they can charge you more without violating rules against collusion.

Secretive and obscure criteria for differentiating people are a godsend, because most people don’t believe that it matters even when there’s evidence that it does.

Another way to ask this is, “if it’s really likely it will work in my favor, why is it so hard to find details about how it works? Wouldn’t RapLeaf’s customers be telling people about all the extra loans they’re handing out at great rates?”

I look forward to that story emerging.

In the eight months that I was the head of security under the Andolino administration, the commissioner of the busiest airport of the world, depending on who’s taking the survey, the busiest airport in the world, never once had a meeting with the head of security for the busiest airport in the world. Never once.

Mayor Richard Daley, who appointed the former security boss, says the man is just “disgruntled.”

Daley’s comment is a fascinating confirmation. Maurer, the head of security, ought to be disgruntled if he was completely blocked from getting anything done.

And good for him for speaking out.

Audio at WBEZ and comments (quoted) from Consumerist.

In related news, “TSA told airport to issue badge to convicted robber.”

David Bratzer is a police officer in Victoria, British Columbia. He’s a member of “Law Enforcement Against Prohibition,” and was going to address a conference this week. There’s a news video at “VicPD Officer Ordered to Stay Quiet.”

In an article in the Huffington Post, “The Muzzling of a Cop” former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper writes:

Officer Bratzer was scheduled to address, on his own time, an important “harm reduction” conference in the city this week. His chief stepped in, said no. Why? He didn’t like the message Bratzer was set to deliver. Of course, this decision by the brass has had the effect of shining an even brighter light on the horrific effects of the U.S.-led drug war. That’s good.

A free society requires that all points of view be voiced. Debate requires facts. If the department wants to ban all speech about the laws it enforces, that would be one thing. But I don’t think that’s their position, nor would such a ban be compatible with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But as you can see in the video, Sgt Grant Hamilton is portraying the official position of the Victoria police: that the people it protects are incapable of making distinctions between those in uniform and those in civilian dress. That position isn’t compatible with democratic decision making. What other distinctions do the police worry people can’t make? Isn’t making those choices the job of the legislature?

Please sign the petition to let David Bratzer speak at http://www.leap.cc/freespeech, and consider making a donation in support of their work.

Via a tweet from @WeldPond, I was led to a Daily Mail article which discusses allegations that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “hacked into the accounts of [Harvard] Crimson staff”. Now, I have no idea what happened or didn’t, and I will never have a FB account thanks to my concerns about their approach to privacy, but I was curious about the form of this alleged hacking.

My curiosity was rewarded:

“he allegedly examined a report of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com.

In the instances where they had, Business Insider claimed that Zuckerberg said he tried using those incorrect passwords to access the Crimson members’ Harvard email accounts.”

dailymail.co.uk, 2010-03-06

So, it looks like the allegation is that actual passwords entered for failed logins were routinely logged.

Yuck.

In my work blog: “Announcing Elevation of Privilege: The Threat Modeling Game.”

After RSA, I’ll have more to say about how it came about, how it helps you and how it helps more chaos emerge. But if you’re here, you should come get a deck at the Microsoft booth (1500 row).

In “U-Prove Minimal Disclosure availability,” Kim Cameron says:

This blog is about technology issues, problems, plans for the future, speculative possibilities, long term ideas – all things that should make any self-respecting product marketer with concrete goals and metrics run for the hills! But today, just for once, I’m going to pick up an actual Microsoft press release and lay it on you. The reason? Microsoft has just done something very special, and the fact that the announcement was a key part of the RSA Conference Keynote is itself important.

Further, Charney explained that identity solutions that provide more secure and private access to both on-site and cloud applications are key to enabling a safer, more trusted enterprise and Internet. As part of that effort, Microsoft today released a community technology preview of the U-Prove technology, which enables online providers to better protect privacy and enhance security through the minimal disclosure of information in online transactions. To encourage broad community evaluation and input, Microsoft announced it is providing core portions of the U-Prove intellectual property under the Open Specification Promise, as well as releasing open source software development kits in C# and Java editions. Charney encouraged the industry, developers and IT professionals to develop identity solutions that help protect individual privacy.

Kim then goes on to analyze the announcement, which is a heck of an important one.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, and am friends with many of the people involved. I still think this is tremendously important.

Apparently, the government of Puerto Rico has stolen the identities of something between 1.7 and 4.1 million people

Native Puerto Ricans living outside the island territory are reacting with surprise and confusion after learning their birth certificates will become no good this summer.

A law enacted by Puerto Rico in December mainly to combat identity theft invalidates as of July 1 all previously issued Puerto Rican birth certificates. That means more than a third of the 4.1 million people of Puerto Rican descent living in the 50 states must arrange to get new certificates. (“Shock over voided Puerto Rican birth certificates,” Suzanne Gamboa, AP)

If I’m parsing that right, all 4.1 million identities were stolen from their legitimate holders, and 1/3 of those are outside Puerto Rico, leading to an unclear level of actual effort to get the documents replaced.

Now, some people may take umbrage at my claim that this is identity theft. You might reasonably think that fraud by impersonation requires impersonation. But the reason that it’s called identity theft is that the victim loses control of their identity. False claims are tired to their name, ssn, birth certificate, etc. Those claims show up at random. Their sense that they have “a good name” is diminished and assaulted.

You might also claim that I’m exaggerating, but I’m not the one who titled the article “shock.” People are feeling shocked, confused and assaulted by this action.

So despite the not for profit nature of the crime, this is identity theft on the largest scale I’ve heard about in years.

Image from the Oritz family showcase.

That’s the key message of Ethan Zuckerman’s post “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention.” I’ll repeat it: “We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.”

It’s a long, complex post, and very much worth reading. It starts from the economics of running an ISP that can provide circumvention to all of China, goes to the side effects of such a thing (like spammers using it), and then continues to ask why we want circumvention anyway.

Take some time and go read “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention.”

Nasty psychiatrissstss! Hates them, my precious! They locks uss up in padded cell! They makes uss look at inkblotsss! Tricksy, sly inkblotsss! Nasty Elvish pills burnsss our throat!

…

Yesss We Hatesss themsss Evil oness yess my preciousss we hatess themsss

But They Helpsss us!

No they hurtsss usss, hurtsss usss sore!

NCBI ROFL: Did Gollum have schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder? via Diagnosing Gollum.

Or, Security and Privacy are Complimentary, Part MCVII:

Later, I met one executive who told me that at the same time of my incident at another restaurant owned by the corporation, a server was using stolen credit card numbers by wearing a small camera on him. He would always check ID’s and would quickly flash the ID and credit card in front of the camera. That way, he could sell the credit card number and address of someone who had no reason to report their card as stolen. Presumably they could then use it on the internet as many sites require the billing address when using a credit card. The corporation decided that there was too much liability in a restaurant employee having access to someone’s drivers license and began specifically requesting servers to not do so except to verify that the person was of legal drinking age. (“How I Learned To Start Worrying And Hate Showing My ID“, Consumerist)

I hadn’t thought about this particular aspect of stealing credit cards. It seems pretty helpful to have address and date of birth. When I think about this, the chaotic nature of how those around us accumulate and use information is hard to predict or track. There’s a value of minimal disclosure here. It’s yet another example of how protecting privacy protects security as well. Asking people to be aware of what emerges from the chaotic swirl of information is expensive.

Historically, the card brands have demanded that their cards be honored based only on the card system. They used to back you if a store asked for ID. As the system has come under attack, they’ve backed away from that, but the current state is hard to discern.

Consistency is an important part of how people form mental models. The whole world is making different demands about what’s secret (is your address a security string? Your frequent flyer number? The first street you lived on?) The demands banks and merchants are changing rapidly from a consumer perspective. (Quick, do you know what the CARD act changes?) When the rules for consumers are chaotic, what emerges is misconceptions, superstition and best practices.

In the world of security, we’re going to have to work hard to provide a comprehensible set of workable and effective advice for people to follow.