So, it is not about the campaigns, media coverage or polling. It must just be about the governance in the Whitehouse during its four year tenure...

...ok people, we all have extra homework for the next four years.

I think Fredo & Pidjin say it best... IQ Test

...from evil design

How many times do I have to deal with linkedin asking for my list of contacts? Linkedin has a chronic practice vacuuming up our social network through nefarious design to expand their domain... it cost them $13m.

They are still at it. I appreciate the professional service linkedin provides, but I wish they didn't take such a deceptive design approach to it.

I think I'll just unlink myself.

... and the future!

Law professor, Eben Moglen gives some compelling reflections about the Snowden disclosure and how now is the time to act to decentralize our big data, harden our open source crypto, and enforce our existings laws. He also talks about how the NSA may have set us up for a global financial disaster (Bullrun).

He reminds us, that the US govt has been in state of permanent war on the network, with all of us, since 2001, vacuuming all that can be had, legal or not, from its own citizens and beyond.

Democracy should provide for the end of wars, not sustain them. Democracy works only when there is privacy and this constant state of war is crumbling our democracy. We need to make cyberpeace and not cyberwar that is sustaining a surveillance state.

He models democracy as a triangle of privacy made up of secrecy, anonymity and autonomy. He declares that democracy is impossible without this. He also uses an ecological model of privacy, equating surveillance and industrial overreach as polluting the environment.

The data mining industry is contributing to the new surveillance state. Big Data (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) are jeopardizing our right to privacy and are polluting the privacy ecology with commercial surveillance.

Our govt has not always been on the moral side of history, nor is it always going to be. On the internet, we need to maintain our anonymity of reading. He asks us to play a "what-if" scenario and pretend Amazon was around during federal support of slavery during the 19th century. What if ebooks had reported themselves to corp HQ during the fight against slavery in this country? What if "Big Data" were beholden to the Union enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. Would the Union have solicted reading habits to indentify abolitionists to help enforce the law?

Big data is leveraging web servers to show what is viewed, for how long, what did you do next. The most egregious of this activity is Google, Twitter and Facebook. Of this group, Eban asserts that Facebook is "strip-mining humanity". They do more to spy on our kids (and us) than we should allow.

He reminds us that National Intelligence Director Clapper's assertion that the NSA is just collecting meta-data (vs real data) is just as invasive because it tells us who did what and when (which can be just as revealing as what was said).

So what does Eben suggest? Three things...

Use the power of the vote (e.g. the President can vote to stop the NSA and... the time is coming that we'll need 9 votes from the Supreme Court to say "no more").

Enforce existing laws and leverage well established legal principles (see Bailment).

Leverage technology by strengthening open source crypto (NSA just lifts keys/certs instead of successfully breaking encryption) and decentralize our data. How about disposable $5 email servers in every home or maybe our own servers to control social sharing democratically and not corporately?

He asks us to do this so we can tell our grand-kids, that back then, "we made SSL better".

...and a case of "chart junk" too!

I know I am criticizing the executioner for wielding an ugly axe but... I think the NSA can use a little help. If the leaked slides are any indication of the quality of information design Big Brother is dealing with, then the folks at Zeit Online can really give them some help. These folks have paid attention to Tufte and Few on better information design.

"Tell-all telephone" layout of the telephone usage data over time, correlated to location data is excellent, and really demonstrates utility design that tells a story.

note: bonus points to Zeit for not using flash for their article!!

We need to keep the right perspective on "the cyberwar" and remember, it really is just cybercrime and espionage. If we don't, then...

"The more we believe we are 'at war' and believe the jingoistic rhetoric, the more willing we are to give up our privacy, freedoms, and control over how the Internet is run."
-- Bruce Schneier

Reading in Ars Technica about "Operation High Roller". Frausters are going after easier tagets. This morning a story in the local paper about a local bank (United Security) passing the buck to one of their customers for bank fraud. The customer, TRC is suing. Seems like USB might have been entangled in the same mess. The larger pattern I see here is that the fraudsters are actually targeting the service bureau used by smaller banking institutions. Once they can orchestrate an attack package for one platform, it becomes fairly easy to pivot and attack another bank/credit union using the same service bureau. I foresee USB trying to blame their service bureau when/if the case with TRC goes badly.

...great again, and again...

...if the country is divided, this NYT article attempts to show it spatially...

... actually this is a good one

ok, too much NSA stuff to keep track of. The folks at EFF are always looking out for us, so they created a handy timeline of who lied, when. It nice to see how this mess evolved.

London depends on video for law enforcement. I see "US" depending on drones for the same thing, but scaling up much higher (bad pun).

Bruce Schneier speaks at RSA2012, where he describes the coming security threats on the internets… and fitting with how real western economies function, I'd say he is spot on… watch out for: BigData (like BigOil and BigPharma), ill-conceived governmental police agencies initiatives and military contractors monetizing cyber-warfare.

Adobe Flash... yeah, it's bad for you (from the a security stand-point), but it's in about 80% of the content. Good luck on a "salt" free diet.