Freedom to Tinker

Dan Gillmor’s Sunday column points out that hard-disk data storage now costs less than one dollar per gigabyte. Thanks to Moore’s law, the cost of storage is asymptotically approaching zero. It’s interesting to stop and think about what happens as storage becomes essentially free.

Traditionally, storing data has been expensive, so we spent time sorting through our stored data to see what we could discard. We only kept something if we really needed it.

If storage is nearly free, though, the traditional cost equation inverts – it becomes much cheaper to keep information than to worry about whether to delete it. Why go to the trouble and expense to sort through your old stuff, when instead you can just keep it forever?

If storage is free, then the only reason to delete a record is because it might embarrass you, or because it might put you in a bad legal position somehow. In such a world, the very fact that you deleted something would arouse suspicion.

The same logic applies to information that you’re not recording now. If it’s free to store information, then you might as well record it, just in case it turns out to be useful. Even if you’re not sure how it might be useful, the cheap and easy course will be to record everything. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see why it might occasionally be useful to store, say, photographs of everybody you meet, or a continuous video recording of the street outside your house.

All of this has serious implications for privacy. People will avoid excessive recording of their own activities, but the temptation to record others, just in case the recording might be useful, will be strong. If cost is no longer a barrier to surveillance by our neighbors, some new barrier has to arise. What will it be?

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a disappointing article on Microsoft’s Palladium. Like many Palladium articles, this one seems to look for conflict and disagreement rather than an explanation of what is really at stake.

We hear about fair use, which in my view is not the main problem posed by Palladium. And we hear that Palladium will “[deter] 98 to 99 percent of all hackers,” which can’t be right – even Microsoft marketing people don’t make such extravagant claims.

For what it’s worth, I get the lead quote: “If Palladium is adopted, and if other technology vendors exploit it fully to restrict access to copyrighted works, education and research will suffer.” When I said this, I was trying to make the point that the main harms that might arise from Palladium would come not from Microsoft but from what other vendors might do with Palladium’s features. But the article spins it as an anti-Microsoft comment.

This is good motivation to spend more time working on that “Understanding Palladium” article….

Sunday’s Washington Post published an AP article by Joseph B. Verrengia, detailing plans by journal editors to “Excise Material That Could Be Used by Militants to Help Make Biological Weapons.” Many prominent journals will participate, including “Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. ”

The article is surprisingly slanted, starting with the headline, “Science Journals to Join Fight Against Terrorists,” as if the journals had not already been doing their part by publishing articles that help scientists understand and protect against biological attacks. The downsides of censoring researchers are barely mentioned, except for the very last sentence of the article, which says, “Others worry that security measures could hamper breakthroughs in basic science and engineering.”

Careful reading makes the drawbacks of censorship more obvious. Here is an example from the article of why research might need to be censored:

Indeed, it has never been easier to … hijack aerosol technology meant for convenient spray vaccines to make anthrax spores float through the air.

The implication is that some research on vaccines should be suppressed because of possible misuse. This makes the underlying tradeoff clear – the research we would be censoring is often the same research that we would use to defend ourselves.

In the current climate, it’s not surprising that calls for censorship of research are resurfacing. Apparently we need to have a debate on this topic. What we don’t need are slanted arguments that ignore the very real costs of censorship.

Karl-Friedrich Lenz, in reply to my previous e-voting posting, sings the praises of old-fashioned paper ballots, citing a Glenn Reynolds column.

I agree with Lenz and Reynolds about the virtues of simple paper ballots that ask the voter to draw an X in the box next to their candidate’s name. Paper ballots are easy for the voter to understand, hard to forge in quantity, and easy to re-count if there are doubts about the result. Their security relies on procedures that any poll worker can understand. In short, they are more secure than many of the voting systems we use here in the U.S.

I disagree with Lenz and Reynolds, though, when they say that low-tech paper ballots are our best option. My favorite approach is a hybrid one in which voters use computerized displays to make their selections, and the machine then prints out a paper ballot that the voter verifies and drops into a traditional ballot box.

Such a system has several potential advantages over a paper-only system. First, a computerized system can greatly reduce the number of improperly cast ballots; for example, it can prevent the voter from mistakenly marking two candidates for the same office. Second, the computer can write cryptographically generated bar codes onto each ballot when it is printed, thereby making it much harder to stuff the ballot box with forged ballots later. Third, if desired the computers can provide a quick but unofficial estimate of the vote immediately when the polls close.

Lots of good security engineering is needed to make these advantages real. Used wisely and in moderation, technology can help to make voting processes more accurate and more secure.