It's beyond Nilekani now
by Krishna Kumar Subramaniam,
IIT Kharaghpur Alumnus
On September 19, 2007, while driving alone near Seattle on her way to work, Tanya Rider went off the road and crashed into a ravine. For eight days, she was trapped upside down in the wreckage of her car. Severely dehydrated and suffering from injuries to her leg and shoulder, she nearly died of kidney failure. Fortunately, rescuers ultimately found her. She spent months recuperating in a medical facility. Happily, she was able to go home for Christmas.
Tanya's story is not just about a woman, an accident, and a rescue. It is a story about bits ˜ the zeroes and ones that make up all our cell phone conversations, bank records, and everything else that gets communicated or stored using modern electronics.
It's also a story of the meaninglessness of trying to resolve the conflict between individual privacy and public policy.
Tanya was found because cell phone companies keep records of cell phone locations. When you carry your cell phone, it regularly sends out a digital "ping," a few bits conveying a "Here I am!" message. Your phone keeps "pinging" as long as it remains turned on. Nearby cell phone towers pick up the pings and send them on to your cellular service provider. Your cell phone company uses the pings to direct your incoming calls to the right cell phone towers. Tanya's cell phone company, Verizon, still had a record of the last location of her cell phone, even after the phone had gone dead. That is how the police found her.
So why did it take more than a week?
If a woman disappears, her husband can't just make the police find her by tracing her cell phone records. She has a privacy right, and maybe she has good reason to leave town without telling her husband where she is going. In Tanya's case, her bank account showed some activity (more bits!) after her disappearance, and the police could not classify her as a "missing person." In fact, that activity was by her husband. Through some misunderstanding, the police thought he did not have access to the account. Only when the police suspected Tanya's husband of involvement in her disappearance did they have legal access to the cell phone records. Had they continued to act on the true presumption that he was blameless, Tanya might never have been found.
New technologies interacted in an odd way with evolving standards of privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law. The explosive combination almost cost Tanya Rider her life. Her story is dramatic, but every day we encounter unexpected consequences of data flows that could not have happened a few years ago.
The world changed very suddenly. Almost everything is stored in a computer somewhere. Court records, grocery purchases, precious family photos, pointless radio programs∑. Computers contain a lot of stuff that isn't useful today but somebody thinks might someday come in handy. It is all being reduced to zeroes and ones ˜ "bits." The bits are stashed on disks of home computers and in the data centers of big corporations and government agencies. The disks can hold so many bits that there is no need to pick and choose what gets remembered.
So much digital information, misinformation, data, and garbage is being squirreled away that most of it will be seen only by computers, never by human eyes. And computers are getting better and better at extracting meaning from all those bits ˜ finding patterns that sometimes solve crimes and make useful suggestions, and sometimes reveal things about us we did not expect others to know.
Nandan Nilekani alone is not to be blamed. In spite of his reputation, he is clearly in over his head. He is just a guy who is being swept along by a storm which he does not comprehend: none of us does. He entered as a hero and may well exit a zero. But the matter has been swept up out of his hands.
Ref: Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson,
An online version of this book is available at bitsbook and can be dowloaded from:bitsbook web site
Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis, Addison-Wesley
Hal Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and an IEEE Fellow. He has helped drive innovative educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare, cofounded Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and was founding director of the Free Software Foundation.
Ken Ledeen, Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies, has served on the boards of numerous technology companies.
Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
Together, the authors teach Quantitative Reasoning 48, an innovative Harvard course on information for non-technical, non-mathematically oriented students.
kumar
by Krishna Kumar Subramaniam,
IIT Kharaghpur Alumnus
On September 19, 2007, while driving alone near Seattle on her way to work, Tanya Rider went off the road and crashed into a ravine. For eight days, she was trapped upside down in the wreckage of her car. Severely dehydrated and suffering from injuries to her leg and shoulder, she nearly died of kidney failure. Fortunately, rescuers ultimately found her. She spent months recuperating in a medical facility. Happily, she was able to go home for Christmas.
Tanya's story is not just about a woman, an accident, and a rescue. It is a story about bits ˜ the zeroes and ones that make up all our cell phone conversations, bank records, and everything else that gets communicated or stored using modern electronics.
It's also a story of the meaninglessness of trying to resolve the conflict between individual privacy and public policy.
Tanya was found because cell phone companies keep records of cell phone locations. When you carry your cell phone, it regularly sends out a digital "ping," a few bits conveying a "Here I am!" message. Your phone keeps "pinging" as long as it remains turned on. Nearby cell phone towers pick up the pings and send them on to your cellular service provider. Your cell phone company uses the pings to direct your incoming calls to the right cell phone towers. Tanya's cell phone company, Verizon, still had a record of the last location of her cell phone, even after the phone had gone dead. That is how the police found her.
So why did it take more than a week?
If a woman disappears, her husband can't just make the police find her by tracing her cell phone records. She has a privacy right, and maybe she has good reason to leave town without telling her husband where she is going. In Tanya's case, her bank account showed some activity (more bits!) after her disappearance, and the police could not classify her as a "missing person." In fact, that activity was by her husband. Through some misunderstanding, the police thought he did not have access to the account. Only when the police suspected Tanya's husband of involvement in her disappearance did they have legal access to the cell phone records. Had they continued to act on the true presumption that he was blameless, Tanya might never have been found.
New technologies interacted in an odd way with evolving standards of privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law. The explosive combination almost cost Tanya Rider her life. Her story is dramatic, but every day we encounter unexpected consequences of data flows that could not have happened a few years ago.
The world changed very suddenly. Almost everything is stored in a computer somewhere. Court records, grocery purchases, precious family photos, pointless radio programs∑. Computers contain a lot of stuff that isn't useful today but somebody thinks might someday come in handy. It is all being reduced to zeroes and ones ˜ "bits." The bits are stashed on disks of home computers and in the data centers of big corporations and government agencies. The disks can hold so many bits that there is no need to pick and choose what gets remembered.
So much digital information, misinformation, data, and garbage is being squirreled away that most of it will be seen only by computers, never by human eyes. And computers are getting better and better at extracting meaning from all those bits ˜ finding patterns that sometimes solve crimes and make useful suggestions, and sometimes reveal things about us we did not expect others to know.
Nandan Nilekani alone is not to be blamed. In spite of his reputation, he is clearly in over his head. He is just a guy who is being swept along by a storm which he does not comprehend: none of us does. He entered as a hero and may well exit a zero. But the matter has been swept up out of his hands.
Ref: Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson,
An online version of this book is available at bitsbook and can be dowloaded from:bitsbook web site
Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis, Addison-Wesley
Hal Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and an IEEE Fellow. He has helped drive innovative educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare, cofounded Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and was founding director of the Free Software Foundation.
Ken Ledeen, Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies, has served on the boards of numerous technology companies.
Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
Together, the authors teach Quantitative Reasoning 48, an innovative Harvard course on information for non-technical, non-mathematically oriented students.
kumar
