February 6, 2011
Apple: #1 Super Bowl Commercial Of All Time
March 31, 2010
Balancing Freedom and Security
There is a new vision for security technology that blends high-tech with behavioral psychology, so that we can seemingly read people’s minds as to their intentions to do harm or not.
There was a fascinating article (8 January 2010) by AP via Fox News called “Mind-Reading Systems Could Change Air Security.”
One Israeli-based company, WeCU (Read as we see you) Technologies “projects images onto airport screen, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would be terrorist would recognize.”
Then hidden cameras and sensors monitoring the airport pickup on human reactions such as “darting eyes, increased heartbeats, nervous twitches, faster breathing,” or rising body temperature.
According to the article, a more subtle version of this technology called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) is being tested by The Department of Homeland Security—either travelers can be passively scanned as they walk through security or when they are pulled aside for additional screening are subjected to “a battery of tests, including scans of facial movements and pupil dilation, for signs of deception. Small platforms similar to balancing boards…would help detect fidgeting.”
The new security technology combined with behavioral psychology aims to detect those who harbor ill will through the “display of involuntary physiological reactions that others—such as those stressed out for ordinary reasons, such as being late for a plane—don’t.”
While the technology married to psychology is potentially a potent mix for detecting terrorists or criminals, there are various concerns about the trend with this, such as:
1) Becoming Big Brother—As we tighten up the monitoring of people, are we becoming an Orwellian society, where surveillance is ubiquitious?
2) Targeting “Precrimes”—Are we moving toward a future like the movie Minority Report, where people are under fire just thinking about breaking the law?
3) Profiling—How do we protect against discriminatory profiling, but ensure reasonable scanning?
4) Hardships—Will additional security scanning, searches, and interrogations cause delays and inconvenience to travelers?
5) Privacy—At what point are we infringing on people’s privacy and being overly intrusive?
As a society, we are learning to balance the need for security with safeguarding our freedoms and fundamental rights. Certainly, we don’t want to trade our democratic ideals and the value we place on our core humanity for a totalitarianism state with rigid social controls. Yet, at the same time, we want to live in peace and security, and must commit to stopping those with bad intentions from doing us harm.
The duality of security and freedom that we value and desire for ourselves and our children will no doubt arouse continued angst as we must balance the two. However, with high-technology solutions supported by sound behavioral psychology and maybe most importantly, good common sense, we can continue to advance our ability to live in a free and secure world—where “we have our cake and eat it too.”
Balancing Freedom and Security
August 2, 2008
Big Brother and Enterprise Architecture
When people work from home, should their employers simply set performance goals for them and then evaluate them based on whether or not they met these or should employers monitor employees work at home to ensure that employers are where they say they are and doing what they say there are doing?
The Wall Street Journal, 30 July 2008, reports that “companies are stepping up electronic monitoring and oversight of tens of thousands of home-based independent contractors.”
Home-based workers have been increasing steadily over the years, with over 16 million home-based workers now in the U.S. That is huge!
But work is not care-free for these home workers. They can’t be sitting around working in their underwear, watching YouTube, or playing Sudoku. Employers are more often monitoring their employees by “taking photos of workers’ computer screens at random, counting keystrokes and mouse clicks, and snapping photos of them at their computers.”
That’s the visual inspection going on; then there is the audio piece. Companies are “plying sophisticated technology to instantaneously detect anger, raised voices, or children crying in the background on workers’ home-office calls. Others are using Darwinian routing systems to keep calls coming so fast workers have no time to go the bathroom.”
Is this big brother watching mentality too invasive or is it appropriate when we’re on the clock?
Well even well intentioned monitoring of home employees can certainly be taken to an extreme. One company, Arise-com “keeps its 8,000 at home agents so tightly tethered to their phones that they have to go schedule unpaid time off to go to the bathroom.”
From an enterprise architecture perspective, I believe it’s important to consider not only the performance aspect to the organization in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness of these workers, but also to look at from a human-capital perspective with respect to treating the employees with trust, respect, and integrity.
I believe that people should be given the benefit of the doubt and treated kindly and humanly and not subjected to undue and invasive monitoring like photographing them on a webcam. Instead, let’s set ambitious, but realistic performance goals for our employees. Most the time, work at home employees end up exceeding performance expectations. For those that don’t meet their goals, then additional monitoring is appropriate to further assess their performance and to decide whether the privilege of working at home should be continued or not.
Trust but verify. Let’s start off with a core dose of trust, but have the verify ready to go for those that abuse it.
Big Brother and Enterprise Architecture
January 25, 2008
Big Brother is Watching and Enterprise Architecture
The intent is to use these screening technologies at airports, border crossings, as well as possibly in the private sector for building access control and candidate screening.
- Recognition of gestures and microfacial expressions
- Analysis of variations in speech (i.e. pitch, loudness)
- Measurement of physiological characteristics
- Currently, too many false positives
- Existing technologies, like the polygraph have “long been questioned by scientists…and remain inadmissible in court.”
- Ability of algorithms to “correctly interrupt” suspicious behavior or cues
- Profiling is continuously objected too based on discriminatory grounds
- Privacy concerns about the personal data collected
- Testing is limited by security concerns in the field
- Deployment will be limited due to cost, leaving soft targets potentially at risk
Big Brother is Watching and Enterprise Architecture