We Need Chloe

I am Chloe.

Everyday at work, and sometimes during lunchtime on my Treo and often at home, I am working IT systems to the bone. I'm usually the guy who understands what's going on in the log files and other strange places where users and developers don't go. I swear just the other day, I was looking to see if a particular employee tasked to our project was responsible for erasing data in one of our many databases. I was getting an IM from the guy who asked for this information just as said employee was walking into my office.

Maureen Dowd is right about one thing. There's a whole lot of rebooting going on. But these systems are far more capable, sophisticated and flaky than most people can even think of understanding.

At the moment I am struck about how those interpreting the '24' fantasy of CTU as a club against the awkward reality of the FBI and their inability to connect the dots. For the sake of hypocrisy, I hope these aren't the same people who grumble aloud about domestic surveillance. When it comes to domestic surveillance, critics seem to think the intelligence agencies are capable of panoptic evil, ie spying on you and me and knowing who is on our friends and family calling plan. But when it comes to finding Osama, the intelligence agencies are bumbling Keystone Kops of the first order.

I was thinking about the difference inserting an anonymizing lookup table in the middle of a downselect for terror suspects or other data mining targets. In theory, such a thing is relatively simple. In practice, it's just another moving part. As we in the systems business know, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and the more moving parts you have, the more likely something is to go wrong, the harder it's going to be to figure out what went wrong, and the more difficult it is to fix when it does. Beyond that, when things go wrong, the temptation is always to fix, rather than redesign and rebuild. That's what gets us systems guys in trouble.

But anybody who watched the famous hacker qualification scene in the film 'Swordfish' knows the kinds of situations that we systems people are put in when somebody wants something done NOW. If you haven't, suffice it to say that the pressure can be enormous, and often unrealistic.

So it came as no surprise that one of the earlier versions of the domestic surveillance programs did indeed have the provision for anonymization of records to be searched but the idea was dropped. But the simple insertion or deletion of such anonymization procedures isn't all that has to be done when a functional decision is made to go one way or another. There are consequences of being willfully blind in a system designed to find thing for you.