What the Heck was I Thinking!?

Josephine Hearn, writing at The Politico.com, discusses the identities of the Democrat superdelegates. The focus of the article, and all the quotes from partisans for one side or the other, is on racial and gender identity, not political views or positions.

The percentage of white male superdelegates is disproportionate to the share of white males who make up the overall Democratic electorate. According to a January 2008 national poll by Zogby International, 28 percent of Democratic voters are white men. Women account for 55 percent of Democratic voters.

This election will be extremely difficult for the Democrats to navigate. There are rocks and shoals on every side, with the Convention looming like a whirlpool.

It will be fascinating to watch for those who aren’t in the middle of the fight.

White men hold superdelegate power balance - Josephine Hearn - Politico.com

This post continues my comments on the proximity and related security issues of communities on the Internet.

The components of communities and neighborhoods include social customs - integral parts in identifying (and self-identifying) a community. These customs are no longer sufficient protection from intruders. They only work within the community, therefore they are dependent on how effectively and rigidly the boundaries that define that community are described and enforced.

Even defining the boundaries of a community on the Internet is only as effective as:

• There is a community identity - who is and who isn’t a member
• Illicit "membership" (invasion or fifth column) is detectable and can be defended against
• Penalties and punishments are effective at reducing and deterring the entry or support to entry of "invaders"

On the Internet, laws and rules are hard to codify and nearly impossible to enforce. Various real-world cultures have different definitions of rules, violations, sanctions, and membership. Governments, built on those cultures have different levels of involvement, incentives, and authority.

It isn’t clear how one would investigate, prosecute, or punish a "network identity" for violating one set of norms. Part of the difficulty involves how to define who the real-world person associated with a "network identity." Even more problematic on the Internet is how the Internet communities would deal with "sacrificial" entities (suicide terrorism).

As a result, there is little to no recourse when a network identity invades a community for malicious reasons.

This puts a significant premium on "defense in depth." In addition, the incentives for defending one’s network identity (or presence) lie almost exclusively with the individual.

If you read any of the recent posts around the web on social networking, you can see the tension between convenience, identity, and protection of information.

The last two, "A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web" and the Principles of the Attention Trust are naive attempts to move analog world rules and rights into the Internet.

They will only work if everyone agrees and a set of enforceable penalties exist to punish and deter. That’s what the social compact in the analog world is about - laws and law enforcement. There isn’t a digital equivalent for these requirements yet.

I listened to a presentation by Bruce Schneier at the Educause Conference on “Information Security - Ten Trends.”

It was very interesting and informative about where data and information security in general are headed on the Internet.

What struck me as I listened to the talk was that the real-world concept of communities and neighborhoods has been misunderstood on the Internet.

There are communities and neighborhoods, just as in the real world. They just don’t have some critical features that provide protection and comfort to people in real world neighborhoods.

One critical difference is the absence of distance and barriers. Communities of all kinds are effectively cheek by jowl with all of the other communities on the Internet. Some communities have gates (logins and/or passwords), but these are nowhere near as effective as people believe the analog versions are.

Everyone of us has to travel near or through these other neighborhoods just to get to our own homepage. We often know next to nothing about what those neighborhoods are like. We may not even be able to know with any certainty.

As a result, it’s very hard to keep unsavory characters out of my computer.

Another feature of online communities is that they lack the level of “membership” control that the real world has. This isn’t a problem specific to communities, it’s a general tendency of the Internet.

To gain greater use or benefit, we have given up a greater degree of control over our lives and what others know about us.

To quote Tim Berners-Lee:

The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.

The analogy for all this is a public park.

• Some of the visitors come in vehicles with doors and locks (strong computer security practices)
• Some come in those kinds of vehicles, but they’ve left the doors or windows unlocked (poor or default implementation of the security protocols - one of Schneiers main complaints)
• Some come in and set up tents (weak protection, suitable only to protect against innocent or non-aggressive snoopers)
• Some appear to just be laying on the ground (wide open or unused security)

I’ll post more on this topic of neighborhoods and security.

Some very interesting discussions on Kim Cameron’s Identity web log about how to implement secure identity on the Internet. She makes a reference to a Scott Lemon article about his Axioms of Identity and some of the attributes of identity. These articles very quickly move out of the technical into the philosophical - “who am I and how do I know that?” “Who do others say I am, why, and is that the same as who I say I am?” (my example questions, not Kim’s or Scott’s).