Friday, March 14, 2014
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Owning the Net: How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware
The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.
The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.
In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.
The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” (...)
Earlier reports based on the Snowden files indicate that the NSA has already deployed between 85,000 and 100,000 of its implants against computers and networks across the world, with plans to keep on scaling up those numbers.
The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, obtained by Snowden, lists TURBINE as part of a broader NSA surveillance initiative named “Owning the Net.”
The agency sought $67.6 million in taxpayer funding for its Owning the Net program last year. Some of the money was earmarked for TURBINE, expanding the system to encompass “a wider variety” of networks and “enabling greater automation of computer network exploitation.” (...)
The NSA has a diverse arsenal of malware tools, each highly sophisticated and customizable for different purposes.
One implant, codenamed UNITEDRAKE, can be used with a variety of “plug-ins” that enable the agency to gain total control of an infected computer.
An implant plug-in named CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE, for example, is used to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device. Another, GUMFISH, can covertly take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs. FOGGYBOTTOM records logs of Internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts. GROK is used to log keystrokes. And SALVAGERABBIT exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer.
The implants can enable the NSA to circumvent privacy-enhancing encryption tools that are used to browse the Internet anonymously or scramble the contents of emails as they are being sent across networks. That’s because the NSA’s malware gives the agency unfettered access to a target’s computer before the user protects their communications with encryption.
Celebrity Charity
Showbiz 411's Roger Friedman published a breakdown of BTWF's 2012 tax report. The foundation's claimed $2.1 million in net assets (donations came in at $2.6 million). Here's where that money went according to Friedman:
$300,000 in strategic consultingWhile these numbers are damning (and what the fuck is "other?"), they shouldn't be terribly surprising given Born This Way Foundation's vague and broad mission statement that does not include "...and giving needy people money." The non-profit anti-bullying organization, per its mission statement, aims to:
$62,836 on stage productions
$50,000 on social media
$50,000 on event coordination
$406,552 on legal
$150,000 on philanthropic consulting
$60,000 on research
$58,768 on publicity fees
$78,000 on travel
$72,000 on salaries
$808,661 on "other"
$5,000 on grants to organizations or individuals
...foster a more accepting society, where differences are embraced and individuality is celebrated. The Foundation is dedicated to creating a safe community that helps connect young people with the skills and opportunities they need to build a kinder, braver world.
We believe that everyone has the right to feel safe, to be empowered and to make a difference in the world. Together, we will move towards acceptance, bravery and love.Its three pillars are: safety, skills, and opportunity. Can't really argue with those pillars.
In 2012, BTWF ran a poster campaign ("to inspire bravery"), sponsored the Born Brave Bus Tour ("The more kids that I can get to come and eat hamburgers and talk outside my shows ... I feel that it will start small, but over time will be very big," Gaga said to Reuters of the "drop-in center/roving tailgate party"), launched a youth advisory board, and worked with Office Depot on a line that included "empowerment gift cards," "Bravery Bracelets," and "Kindness Sticks" Post-It Notes. Sharpies were also involved, but this press release doesn't make clear how they were engineered to make people feel safe and accepted. I hope it involved making them more pungent, thus huffable.
by Rich Juzwiak, Gawker | Read more:
Image: Getty
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
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A Man Enough
I could ask so many questions now, before the door I have opened closes with this phone call, but I do not. Where did you think we would go when we grew up, if not into the world? Were we not doomed to fail you, to hear the sound of our adult selves and make our own choices? How did you believe you would never grow old or weak or be wrong? I wish I was brave enough to fight harder and insist on answers, or be braver still and be the one to forge a new relationship with my parents that is honest and open and adult. I could keep calling, every week, until my mother lets me in.
But I am not that brave.
by Anne Rieman, TMN | Read more:
Image: F. Luis Mora, 1901
Inside The Barista Class
One of the most obscene things I learned as a barista was how eager people are to be liked. NYU sophomores, the ones with Jansport backpacks in full makeup at 9 a.m., stuttered their orders and shyly complimented me on my nose ring. I semi-patiently listened to innumerable Wikipedia-style monologues about the music I was playing from men in their twenties trying to render their business attire invisible with cultural know-how. I was given zines, mixtape-party fliers, home-recorded chillwave demos.
I said things like "How’s the app going?" and "Welcome to the neighborhood." I answered questions for new Greenpoint residents—of which there were more each year—about the best place to grab wine and tapas, get a shave and drink a beer at the same time. How myself and my co-workers became to be known as experts in such matters was largely beyond me, particularly since many of us shortly couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood in which we served. More than anything else, though, I was asked what else I did.
"Oh you know," the t-shirt designer or gallery assistant with blunt bangs or unpaid Harper's intern would say on their way into the office. "When you aren’t making coffee." (...)
I was 17 when I got my first job, at the Starbucks in my hometown, a suburb about an hour south of Boston. I was trained in the store’s break room through a series of videos. The position’s first directive—conveyed by softly lit panoramas of women chatting over steaming lattes, men in tailored suits smiling gently in the direction of the espresso machine—was to maintain the brand’s identity as a "third place." The term, as appropriated by Starbucks, was actually originally coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe a particular kind of community space, one that facilitated civically minded social interaction. The "first place" is the home and the "second place" is the office, in Oldenburg’s conception, and the idea fit Starbucks’ self-styled business of "conversation and a sense of community" so well that the idea of the third place became their very foundation.
At that age, becoming a barista—as opposed to a waitress, or the girl serving popcorn at the multiplex—seemed like a good idea. In my budding process of cultural affiliation, I’d recognized the coffee shop as my spiritual home from an early age. This was 2006. Like I said, I was suburban. Something about a coffee shop felt intellectual.
There were only two coffee shops in my town, and they didn’t so much compete as complement each other, poised as they were on opposite sides of the economic spectrum. If you weren’t grabbing a large ice coffee, "extra-extra," (that’s extra cream, extra sugar) from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, you were exercising your right to, in the words of Tom Hanks’ character in the immortal You Got Mail, "get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self. Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino."
Though the appeal of such choice—and the corresponding price of such decision-making power—comes as no surprise to anyone, I will say that at least twice I gave empty Starbucks cups to high school girls so they could disguise their Mr. Coffee drip in 8 a.m. homeroom.
But actually working at Starbucks wasn’t cool by any stretch of the imagination. It was my first and only corporate job, with its corresponding dress code (khakis, collared shirts, no tattoos) and business practices standardized to a point well past common sense (the temperature, I was told, was controlled remotely, from an office at HQ in the Midwest). (...)
I transferred stores twice, and though I wouldn’t recognize it until later, there was already something uniquely banal about my interactions with the customers at Starbucks. The robotic and infinitely scaleable details, our uniforms and employee numbers, the pre-calibrated automatic espresso machine, all contributed to a general sense of interchangeability. I had exhausting customers, but their demanding nature didn’t feel personal. I had no doubt the pudgy businessman would have told any woman where to put that whipped cream, or that the undergraduate with the fancy handbag, detailing last night’s party to a friend on the phone, was the kind of girl who would’ve shouted down any one of her servers for ostensibly placing a half-pump more white mocha in her beverage. If a customer was particularly bad we exercised one of the only powers we possessed and "decafed" them. To covertly rob a caffeine-addicted asshole of their morning jolt was truly one of the sweetest pleasures of baristahood, and one that my subsequent professions haven’t come close to replicating.
I said things like "How’s the app going?" and "Welcome to the neighborhood." I answered questions for new Greenpoint residents—of which there were more each year—about the best place to grab wine and tapas, get a shave and drink a beer at the same time. How myself and my co-workers became to be known as experts in such matters was largely beyond me, particularly since many of us shortly couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood in which we served. More than anything else, though, I was asked what else I did."Oh you know," the t-shirt designer or gallery assistant with blunt bangs or unpaid Harper's intern would say on their way into the office. "When you aren’t making coffee." (...)
I was 17 when I got my first job, at the Starbucks in my hometown, a suburb about an hour south of Boston. I was trained in the store’s break room through a series of videos. The position’s first directive—conveyed by softly lit panoramas of women chatting over steaming lattes, men in tailored suits smiling gently in the direction of the espresso machine—was to maintain the brand’s identity as a "third place." The term, as appropriated by Starbucks, was actually originally coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe a particular kind of community space, one that facilitated civically minded social interaction. The "first place" is the home and the "second place" is the office, in Oldenburg’s conception, and the idea fit Starbucks’ self-styled business of "conversation and a sense of community" so well that the idea of the third place became their very foundation.
At that age, becoming a barista—as opposed to a waitress, or the girl serving popcorn at the multiplex—seemed like a good idea. In my budding process of cultural affiliation, I’d recognized the coffee shop as my spiritual home from an early age. This was 2006. Like I said, I was suburban. Something about a coffee shop felt intellectual.
There were only two coffee shops in my town, and they didn’t so much compete as complement each other, poised as they were on opposite sides of the economic spectrum. If you weren’t grabbing a large ice coffee, "extra-extra," (that’s extra cream, extra sugar) from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, you were exercising your right to, in the words of Tom Hanks’ character in the immortal You Got Mail, "get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self. Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino."
Though the appeal of such choice—and the corresponding price of such decision-making power—comes as no surprise to anyone, I will say that at least twice I gave empty Starbucks cups to high school girls so they could disguise their Mr. Coffee drip in 8 a.m. homeroom.
But actually working at Starbucks wasn’t cool by any stretch of the imagination. It was my first and only corporate job, with its corresponding dress code (khakis, collared shirts, no tattoos) and business practices standardized to a point well past common sense (the temperature, I was told, was controlled remotely, from an office at HQ in the Midwest). (...)
I transferred stores twice, and though I wouldn’t recognize it until later, there was already something uniquely banal about my interactions with the customers at Starbucks. The robotic and infinitely scaleable details, our uniforms and employee numbers, the pre-calibrated automatic espresso machine, all contributed to a general sense of interchangeability. I had exhausting customers, but their demanding nature didn’t feel personal. I had no doubt the pudgy businessman would have told any woman where to put that whipped cream, or that the undergraduate with the fancy handbag, detailing last night’s party to a friend on the phone, was the kind of girl who would’ve shouted down any one of her servers for ostensibly placing a half-pump more white mocha in her beverage. If a customer was particularly bad we exercised one of the only powers we possessed and "decafed" them. To covertly rob a caffeine-addicted asshole of their morning jolt was truly one of the sweetest pleasures of baristahood, and one that my subsequent professions haven’t come close to replicating.
A few hours before close, a younger shift leader might travel the few blocks down Thayer Street to the liquor store. We’d drink Vodka and Red Bull out of our green-and-white venti cups and snigger behind the hulking safety of that massive, push-button espresso machine. As long as we didn’t get so drunk that we slurred the lines we’d been given—"Next guest please; Welcome to Starbucks, how may I help you?"—we were still doing our jobs.
by Molly Osberg, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Matt Biddulph
The Itch Nobody Can Scratch
It began the way it so often begins, so those that tell of it say: with an explosion of crawling, itching and biting, his skin suddenly alive, roaring, teeming, inhabited. A metropolis of activity on his body.
This is not what fifty-five-year-old IT executives from Birmingham expect to happen to them on fly-drive breaks to New England. But there it was and there he was, in an out-of-town multiscreen cinema in a mall somewhere near Boston, writhing, scratching, rubbing, cursing. His legs, arms, torso — God, it was everywhere. He tried not to disturb his wife and two sons as they gazed up, obliviously, at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It must be fleas, he decided. Fleas in the seat. (...)
One evening, nearly a year after his first attack, Paul’s wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when she noticed that the cotton swab had gathered a bizarre blue-black haze from his skin. Paul dressed quickly, drove as fast as he could to Maplin’s, bought a microscope and placed the cotton beneath the lens. He focused. He frowned. He focused again. His mouth dropped open.
Dear God, what were they? Those weird, curling, colored fibers? He opened his laptop and Googled: ‘Fibers. Itch. Sting. Skin.’ And there it was — it must be! All the symptoms fit. He had a disease called Morgellons. A new disease.
According to the website, the fibers were the product of creatures, unknown to science, that breed in the body. Paul felt the strong arms of relief lift the worry away. Everything was answered, the crucial mystery solved. But as he pored gratefully through the information on that laptop screen, he had no idea that Morgellons would actually turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.
Morgellons was named in 2002, by American mom Mary Leitao, after she learned of a similar-sounding (but actually unrelated) condition that was reported in the seventeenth century, in which children sprouted hairs on their backs.
Leitao’s son had been complaining of sores around his mouth and the sensation of ‘bugs’. Using a microscope, she found him to be covered in red, blue, black and white fibers. Since then, experts at Leitao’s Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by over twelve thousand affected families. Educational and support group The Charles E. Holman Foundation claim there are patients in “every continent except Antarctica.”
Even folk singer Joni Mitchell has been affected, complaining to the LA Times about “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space . . . Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin . . . they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”
Since Leitao began drawing attention to the problem, thousands of sufferers in the US have written to members of Congress, demanding action. In response, more than forty senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the government agency the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), to investigate. In 2008, the CDC established a special task force in collaboration with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with an initial budget of one million dollars. At a 2008 press conference, held to update the media on the agreed protocol for a scientific study, principal investigator Dr Michele Pearson admitted, “We don’t know what it is.”
So, it is new and it is frightening and it is profoundly peculiar. But if you were to seek the view of the medical establishment, you would find the strangest fact of all about the disease.
Morgellons doesn’t exist.
This is not what fifty-five-year-old IT executives from Birmingham expect to happen to them on fly-drive breaks to New England. But there it was and there he was, in an out-of-town multiscreen cinema in a mall somewhere near Boston, writhing, scratching, rubbing, cursing. His legs, arms, torso — God, it was everywhere. He tried not to disturb his wife and two sons as they gazed up, obliviously, at Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It must be fleas, he decided. Fleas in the seat. (...)
One evening, nearly a year after his first attack, Paul’s wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when she noticed that the cotton swab had gathered a bizarre blue-black haze from his skin. Paul dressed quickly, drove as fast as he could to Maplin’s, bought a microscope and placed the cotton beneath the lens. He focused. He frowned. He focused again. His mouth dropped open.Dear God, what were they? Those weird, curling, colored fibers? He opened his laptop and Googled: ‘Fibers. Itch. Sting. Skin.’ And there it was — it must be! All the symptoms fit. He had a disease called Morgellons. A new disease.
According to the website, the fibers were the product of creatures, unknown to science, that breed in the body. Paul felt the strong arms of relief lift the worry away. Everything was answered, the crucial mystery solved. But as he pored gratefully through the information on that laptop screen, he had no idea that Morgellons would actually turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.
Morgellons was named in 2002, by American mom Mary Leitao, after she learned of a similar-sounding (but actually unrelated) condition that was reported in the seventeenth century, in which children sprouted hairs on their backs.
Leitao’s son had been complaining of sores around his mouth and the sensation of ‘bugs’. Using a microscope, she found him to be covered in red, blue, black and white fibers. Since then, experts at Leitao’s Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by over twelve thousand affected families. Educational and support group The Charles E. Holman Foundation claim there are patients in “every continent except Antarctica.”
Even folk singer Joni Mitchell has been affected, complaining to the LA Times about “this weird incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space . . . Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin . . . they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer — a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.”
Since Leitao began drawing attention to the problem, thousands of sufferers in the US have written to members of Congress, demanding action. In response, more than forty senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the government agency the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), to investigate. In 2008, the CDC established a special task force in collaboration with the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, with an initial budget of one million dollars. At a 2008 press conference, held to update the media on the agreed protocol for a scientific study, principal investigator Dr Michele Pearson admitted, “We don’t know what it is.”
So, it is new and it is frightening and it is profoundly peculiar. But if you were to seek the view of the medical establishment, you would find the strangest fact of all about the disease.
Morgellons doesn’t exist.
by Will Storr, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
As Long As They Both Shall Live
Two days from now and 10,000 feet above the Southern California desert, Rex Pemberton will don a wingsuit, leap from a plane, and race toward the earth trailing orange smoke from canisters strapped to his ankles while Melissa Pemberton, one of the world’s best aerobatics pilots, paints a white smoky corkscrew around her husband—two minutes of barnstorming showmanship for thousands of gaping spectators spread out below them.
But first, a moment of marital tension. A screw has worked itself loose, a tiny screw, stainless steel, five millimeters long, one of four securing a sheet of aircraft aluminum across the front left side of the engine. Rex notices the hole, a flaw in his wife’s exquisite plane, as they push it out of the hangar at Pine Mountain Lake Airport, a few hundred yards from their home in the hills outside Yosemite National Park. He taps his finger against the loose corner, and he worries. Engine vibrations have started a hairline crack in the metal. Melissa says she’ll have her mechanics replace the screw at an airport that’s a 15-minute flight away. But he retrieves a screwdriver and tiny screw from the hangar while she watches him, slightly exasperated.
In their garage, Rex often works on his powered paraglider, with its 30-horsepower engine that propels him over these valleys, forests, and mountain lakes at 40 miles per hour. But the $350,000 plane, a sparkling metallic blue Zivko Edge 540, with black flames edged in pink, has much smaller tolerances. “Rex, this isn’t your paraglider,” she says, her soft voice calm but her words coming faster now, betraying her annoyance. “I need you to listen to me when we’re talking about my plane.”
But he’s not really listening. He knows that if the piece breaks on her brief flight, there’s a chance she won’t be able to adjust the prop and may not be able to land. And he knows the odds. In his five years with Melissa, she has lost four close friends and six acquaintances. This season has been a particularly bad one on the air-show circuit. Five performers have died from crashes already, some of them in front of huge crowds, the worst when a modified P-51 Mustang slammed into the audience at the Reno Air Races in September, killing the pilot and eight spectators and injuring 69. Aerobatics are unforgiving. The forces exerted on Melissa’s plane can bend even the thick bolts that hold the engine in place, and a moment of disorientation, a major gust of wind, or a slight overcorrection at the controls can be fatal.
Rex can’t change any of that, but here at least he has the illusion of control. “Just let me see,” he insists, and spins the screw into the engine. “See? It’s the same screw. The exact same screw.”
Melissa relents and climbs into her plane. The prop turns, stutters, and catches, and the engine settles into a deep, throaty rumble. She revs the throttle and roars down the runway, and Rex watches his wife climb into the morning sky.
Every marriage has its unspoken rules, an understanding of needs and desires, and the Pembertons’ is no different, though the stakes are slightly higher.
“I would never tell her to stop because of any fear that she’ll have an accident,” says Rex, 28. “We need to keep each other in check and make sure we’re doing these risky things in the safest way possible but not tell the other to stop, because those are our core values.”
Melissa, 27, agrees. Her husband has made more than 1,300 skydives and 300 BASE jumps. At age 21, he became the youngest Australian to climb Everest, and he recently set his sights on Pakistan’s K2, an objective that had Melissa concerned, though for reasons that had little to do with the technical route to the summit. “It’s one thing to worry about a mountain, but I don’t want him to get kidnapped or blown up,” she says. Still, these are concerns, not ultimatums. “I would never tell him outright, ‘No,’ ” she says. “If he wants to do something, that’s up to him.” Because that’s where they found each other—riding the edge of excess—and why they fell in love in the first place.
by Brian Mockenhaupt, Outside | Read more:
Image: Cody Pickens
[ed. Repost: Thursday, March 01, 2012 ]
Holding Algorithms Accountable
Chase kicks off the panel with an observation he’s made over years of working in data science. “When you’re talking about algorithms used for decision making and predictive modeling, models you build, by definition, have to be imperfect.” He says these models aren’t trying to catch all these edge cases, but to capture the “general gist of the data you’re working with.” If you focus too much on edge cases, it leads to overfitting, which can reduce the value of the model as the whole.
“When you consider the models that people are using are imperfect and they’re becoming increasingly important,” Chase says. “Journalists have an important role in exposing those models and holding them accountable.”
Now, we meet the panelists: first up is Jeremy, who worked on a project for the Wall Street Journal on online pricing algorithms used by Staples and other online vendors. Next is Nicholas, who has been researching how algorithms might be discriminatory, what kind of mistakes they can make, etc — essentially, “algorithms as sources of power.” Frank, who teaches at the Maryland Law School, is interested in helping journalists understand the legal aspects of data and “how the law can be changed to allow more of this work [data journalism] to be done.”
Chase says maybe algorithms aren’t completely to blame. From a reporting perspective, there’s a split responsibility between the algorithm and the institution that chooses to trust the algorithm. He asks the panel: should we focus more on exposing the algorithmic layer or the institutional layer?
Frank brings up an example of S&P failing to update their data set promptly — most of the reporting was focused on the failure of the algorithm. Nicholas throws out a bunch of questions reporters should ask about algorithms. “How are they making mistakes? Who do those mistakes affect? Who are the stakeholders? How might algorithms be censoring or discriminatory?” This covers a wide swath of reporting, from the most abstract features of algorithms down to the nitty gritty.
“If you’re going to talk about responsibility — and it’s tricky — it’s all about the human level,” says Jeremy.
Nicholas adds a corollary to the correlation doesn’t equal causation argument. “Correlation doesn’t equal intent. Just because there’s a correlation, doesn’t mean a designer sat down and intended for that to happen.” He noted that the predictive models used by the Chicago Police could show a correlation with race, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the intent of the analysts. He says journalists have to be careful in claiming there’s a specific intent to an observed algorithm. “Really understanding the design process behind algorithms can shed some light into their intents.” (...)
Chase draws an analogy between penetrating the black box of an algorithm and the black box of an institution. How do we navigate these things? Nicholas brings up the trade secret exemptions to FOIA law that ensures to opaqueness of the algorithms the government might use through third-parties. If these technologies are patented, there’s a chance that we can start to understand them, but “at its core, it’s very opaque.” Reporters can start to connect the dots, but “correlation is a weak form of connection.”
Jeremy says that the inability to explain an algorithm may be a story in itself. Frank agrees, bringing up a the example of company personality tests. There’s very little direct relationship between your answers and your productivity as an employee; they’re essentially matching large data sets of what the best employees in the past have said.
“When you consider the models that people are using are imperfect and they’re becoming increasingly important,” Chase says. “Journalists have an important role in exposing those models and holding them accountable.”
Now, we meet the panelists: first up is Jeremy, who worked on a project for the Wall Street Journal on online pricing algorithms used by Staples and other online vendors. Next is Nicholas, who has been researching how algorithms might be discriminatory, what kind of mistakes they can make, etc — essentially, “algorithms as sources of power.” Frank, who teaches at the Maryland Law School, is interested in helping journalists understand the legal aspects of data and “how the law can be changed to allow more of this work [data journalism] to be done.”
Chase says maybe algorithms aren’t completely to blame. From a reporting perspective, there’s a split responsibility between the algorithm and the institution that chooses to trust the algorithm. He asks the panel: should we focus more on exposing the algorithmic layer or the institutional layer?
Frank brings up an example of S&P failing to update their data set promptly — most of the reporting was focused on the failure of the algorithm. Nicholas throws out a bunch of questions reporters should ask about algorithms. “How are they making mistakes? Who do those mistakes affect? Who are the stakeholders? How might algorithms be censoring or discriminatory?” This covers a wide swath of reporting, from the most abstract features of algorithms down to the nitty gritty.
“If you’re going to talk about responsibility — and it’s tricky — it’s all about the human level,” says Jeremy.
Nicholas adds a corollary to the correlation doesn’t equal causation argument. “Correlation doesn’t equal intent. Just because there’s a correlation, doesn’t mean a designer sat down and intended for that to happen.” He noted that the predictive models used by the Chicago Police could show a correlation with race, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the intent of the analysts. He says journalists have to be careful in claiming there’s a specific intent to an observed algorithm. “Really understanding the design process behind algorithms can shed some light into their intents.” (...)
Chase draws an analogy between penetrating the black box of an algorithm and the black box of an institution. How do we navigate these things? Nicholas brings up the trade secret exemptions to FOIA law that ensures to opaqueness of the algorithms the government might use through third-parties. If these technologies are patented, there’s a chance that we can start to understand them, but “at its core, it’s very opaque.” Reporters can start to connect the dots, but “correlation is a weak form of connection.”
Jeremy says that the inability to explain an algorithm may be a story in itself. Frank agrees, bringing up a the example of company personality tests. There’s very little direct relationship between your answers and your productivity as an employee; they’re essentially matching large data sets of what the best employees in the past have said.
by Stephen Suen, MIT Center for Civic Media | Read more:
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