Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RICHARD HUNTER is Vice President, Security Research, GartnerG2, the strategic business growth division of Gartner, Inc., the world's largest technology research firm. Hunter is internationally renowned for his expertise in technology and security, cybercrime, information management, and privacy. He was formerly Vice President and Director of Research for Applications Development at Gartner. Hunter earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University with a concentration in music and is also a world-class harmonica virtuoso. He works in Gartner's headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, and lives nearby.

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World Without Secrets

“Richard Hunter has seen the future, and it’s really scary. If you ever plan to do anything wrong, you need to read this book. If you suspect that someone will ever try to do anything wrong to you, you also need to read it. I believe that covers pretty much all of us.”
―Thomas H. Davenport, Director, Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, Distinguished Scholar, Babson College

“Like a laser, Hunter gets directly to the heart of the issues for business and society in computer security. He understands and delineates issues and nonissues of cybercrime and cyberwar and provides provocative thought on new social structures affecting current and future security issues. A strongly recommended read for anyone concerned about cybersecurity and the coming cyberwars.”
―Dr. Bill Hancock, CISSP, Vice President, Security and Chief Security Officer, Exodus, a cable and wireless company

To some it’s a dream come true; to others it’s the stuff of nightmares―
a world of ubiquitous computing in which human beings are surrounded by smart, aware, always-on machines that monitor, record, and analyze most or all of what goes on around them. World Without Secrets takes you on a chilling tour of the near future and the hard realities of what’s to come, from the home without secrets to the Network Army, from mentats to the exception economy.

Don’t enter the future unprepared. Read World Without Secrets and learn how to protect your business from information crime, seize emerging opportunities, and survive and succeed in a new environment that is as dangerous as it is promising.

Aus dem Klappentext

WORLD Without SECRETS

Unique, international personal identifiers . . . near- instantaneous data mining . . . biometric face printing . . . intelligent embedded devices everywhere that record, interpret, and transmit virtually everything you say and do. It's not science fiction. Much of this technology is already in place and the rest is on the way. By the end of the current decade we will inhabit a man-made environment of ubiquitous computing in which everything is recorded and nothing is forgotten.

World Without Secrets explores the realities and implications of a world in which anyone who wants badly enough to know anything about you, your business, or anything else will be able to get that information. It examines the information-gathering technologies that are and will be deployed-on our streets, in our offices and public buildings, even in our homes and cars-and explains their benefits as well as potential serious abuses.

This bone-chilling exposé investigates the likely impact of ubiquitous computing on every aspect of our business, personal, political, and cultural lives. Will we be safer and our property more secure? When everything is known, how will we decide what's most important to know? Will there be any way to keep confidential information confidential? How will business protect intellectual capital?

World Without Secrets also takes you into the shadow world of state and private-sector criminals whose livelihood is based on illicit use of growing mountains of information. It offers strategies for surviving and succeeding in a world that is rife with opportunity but dangerous for the wary and unwary alike. And it suggests policy options that can protect individuals and organizations from exploitation and safeguard the implicit contract between employees, businesses, and society itself.

Peppered with uncommonly sharp insights into the way we understand information, conduct business, and try to control our surroundings, World Without Secrets breaks new ground in describing the impact of new technologies on the way we live and work. This comprehensive guide to the immediate future is compelling and necessary reading for anyone who wants to prepare personally and professionally for the enormous changes soon to come.

For more information, please visit www.worldwithoutsecrets.com

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World Without Secrets

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

When you read a description of a book online at Amazon.com, Amazon helpfully informs you that many people who bought that book bought certain others, too. This little trick is a simple example of how a rapid, large-scale quantitative analysis of facts like names and numbers can tell us a lot about what people do and how they behave.

Given the state of the art in data mining, there are a few different ways that Amazon might handle the task. However the process unfolds, it must begin with a concise fact: a unique identifier, which Amazon can supply, for the book you're reading about at Amazon's site. The hard way-in terms of computer resource consumption, meaning time and money-is to use that identifier to search Amazon's entire purchase database, right then and there, and find all the customers who bought that book. Amazon sold $2.5 billion worth of books in 2000. Even with powerful computers and the identifier in hand, it will take a while to find them all (probably more than most customers care to wait online). Assuming the look-up is done, Amazon can then look up all the other books those customers bought, sort and rank them by various factors (such as total purchases across all customers for each book), and present a short list of candidates for your review (and ideally-from their point of view-your purchase). To make it all really slick, Amazon might eliminate titles it knows you have already bought from Amazon. That's something they apparently don't do now, at least if my experience is any proof.

There's a less time- and computer resource-consuming, more likely approach. Amazon could do a full-scale read-through of their transaction database nightly, weekly, monthly, or however often they like. They would see what was purchased and do the same look-up described of all the other products those people bought as well. They would use that information to build a database of books-affiliated-by-purchase that they could reference quickly whenever a new purchase is made. That approach would save them the trouble of building such a database on the fly whenever a customer looks at a book description. It would explain why they don't pick up on the fact that you have already bought one or more of the books on their list. And it could be made to work, for every online customer, in less time than it took to read this paragraph.

Anyone who has shopped at Amazon probably remembers being surprised the first time Amazon presented such a list. The thing that surprises many people is that the list Amazon shows them is often immediately credible, because it includes books that they've already read and enjoyed.

How does Amazon know so much about you? You never told them what you liked.

You didn't have to. They knew it almost as soon as you selected your purchases, even before you gave them your money.

The Power of Names and Numbers

Facts like names and numbers are precise, quantitative, and unequivocal. They're about what people and machines do, not what people think. Customer (John Smith) bought product (X) in quantity (Q) at price (P) from vendor (V) using channel (C) at time (T) in location (latitude, longitude) with credit card number (NNNN). The purchase is compact and meaningful. We don't have to know why it happened to predict with some accuracy when and under what circumstances it will happen again.

What people do often says more about who they are and what they think than what they think they think, and what people say they think doesn't necessarily tell you what they'll do next. Lots of people who say they care about privacy hand out detailed personal information to anyone who offers them a piece of free software, for example. Even before they've seen the software, even before they know (or think to ask) the uses to which the information will be put, they've shared their personal data.

Amazon isn't telling you what other buyers think about the books Amazon is recommending. Reviews are available, if you want them, but that's not how Amazon came up with the recommendations. It's not about what people liked. Amazon is telling you what other people bought. That information is easy to collect because it's an intrinsic part of every purchase transaction, and it's easy to analyze compared to any ratings that a diverse set of customers might apply to a book that they've all read. (Every customer has his or her own rating system, and Amazon doesn't know what it is. But a purchase is a purchase is a purchase.)

If given a wider universe of data to work with, Amazon might also find that people who bought certain books tended to rent certain videos, or drink certain coffees, or travel more frequently than others to particular locations. Knowing those preferences could open up entirely new avenues for Amazon's recommendations. Can I add a double latte with cinnamon to your order? Would you like to drink it in Rio de Janeiro? Wearing a scarf in a certain shade of red? It's neither possible nor necessary to predict all the associations that might turn up. The power of large-scale analysis of simple facts is precisely that it reveals such patterns. The technology that makes the analysis possible, data mining, is available now in a very robust form, and it's getting stronger.

Amazon doesn't have an infinite universe of data. It has the stuff it can generate from its own sales, plus whatever else it can buy or rent from third parties. (If Amazon were less ethical, we could add: plus whatever it could steal from third parties to that list.) Amazon doesn't have everything.

But the universe gets bigger all the time.

What Does It Take to Create a Universe?

Databases essentially consist of attributes-pieces of data-and relationships-the rules that describe how the attributes relate to each other. A key is an attribute that uniquely identifies an instance of a certain set of related attributes. A good key is unique, and the data that depend on a good key depend on all of it, not just a part of it. (I'm trying to make this simple, and it'll end soon, I promise.)

Your name is a good attribute for referring to you in a message, but it's a poor key for correlating information about you-your address, weight, height, and spending habits-because any number of other people might also have your name. Your address is a good key for referring to a location, so long as the whole key-street address, city, state, and country-is present. Drop the state and country and there's room for confusion. (If you live in greater Boston, Massachusetts, where there are five streets named "Arlington," you need a zip code too.)

Here's the most important thing. Databases can be linked, or related, when a key value is common to both structures. It doesn't really matter whether information is stored in separate physical databases. All that matters is the keys. If the same keys are present in two different databases, any information in one can be correlated to any information in the other, as if they were a single database, at least in a logical sense.

It's pretty easy from here on out. If you want to pull a universe of data together, the first thing you need is a really good key that ties the data to something in particular. That something is usually a...