Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture is Transforming Government (June 2009)
Architecture of Freedom
In the United States, we have been blessed with tremendous freedom, and these freedoms are enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. However, in many countries around the world, people do not share these basic freedoms and human rights.
Now in many countries, the limitation and subjugation of people has extended from the physical to the virtual world of the Internet. People are prevented through filtering software from freely “surfing” the Internet for information, news, research and so forth. And they are prohibited from freely communicating their thoughts and feelings in email, instant messages, blogs, social networks and other communications media, and if are identified and caught, they are punished often through rehabilitation by hard prison labor or maybe just disappear altogether.
In fact, many countries are now insisting that technology companies build in filtering software so that the government can control or block their citizen’s ability to view information or ideas that are unwanted or undesirable.
Now however, new technology is helping defend human rights around the world—this is the architecture for anonymity and circumvention technologies.
MIT Technology Review (May/June 2009) has an article entitled “Dissent Made Safer—how anonymity technology could save free speech on the Internet.”
An open source non-profit project called TOR has developed a peer to peer technology that enables users to encrypt communications and route data through multiple hops on a network of proxies. “This combination of routing and encryption mask a computer’s actual location and circumvent government filters; to prying eyes, the Internet traffic seems to be coming from the proxies.”
This creates a safe environment for user to browse the Internet and communicate anonymously and safely—“without them, people in these [repressive] countries might be unable to speak or read freely online.”
The OpenNet Initiative in 2006 “discovered some form of filtering in 25 of 46 nations tested. A more current study by OpenNet found “more than 36 countries are filtering one or more kinds of speech to varying degrees…it is a practice growing in scope, scale, and sophistication.”
Generally, filtering is done with some combination of “blocking IP addresses, domain names… and even Web pages containing certain keywords.”
Violations of Internet usage can result in prison or death for treason.
Aside from TOR, there are other tools for “beating surveillance and censorship” such as Psiphon, UltraReach, Anonymizer, and Dynaweb Freegate.
While TOR and these other tools can be used to help free people from repression around the world, these tools can also be used, unfortunately, by criminals and terrorists to hide their online activities—and this is a challenge that law enforcement must now understand and contend with.
The architecture of TOR is fascinating and freeing, and as they say, “the genie is out of the bottle” and we cannot hide our heads in the sand. We must be able to help those around the world who need our help in achieving basic human rights and freedoms, and at the same time, we need to work with the providers of these tools to keep those who would do us harm from taking advantage of a good thing.
Future Police Cruiser Architected for Law Enforcement
Carbon Motors E7 Police Car Photoshoot - Douglas Sonders Photography from Douglas Sonders on Vimeo.
Digital Object Architecture and Internet 2.0
There is an interesting interview in Government Executive, 18 May 2009, with Robert Kahn, one of the founders of the Internet.
In this interview Mr. Kahn introduces a vision for an Internet 2.0 (my term) based on Digital Object Architecture (DOA) where the architecture focus is not on the efficiency of moving information around on the network (or information packet transport i.e. TCP/IP), but rather on the broader notion of information management and on the architecture of the information itself.
The article states: Mr Kahn “still harbors a vision for how the Internet could be used to manage information, not just move packets of information” from place to place.
In DOA, “the key element of the architecture is the ‘digital element’ or structured information that incorporates a unique identifier and which can be parsed by any machine that knows how digital objects are structured. So I can take a digital object and store it on this machine, move it somewhere else, or preserve it for a long time.”
I liked the comparison to electronic files:
“A digital object doesn’t become a digital object any more than a file becomes a file if it doesn’t have the equivalent of a name and an ability to access it.”
Here are some of the key elements of DOA:
- Handles—these are like file names; they are the digital object identifiers that are unique to each and enable each to be distinctly stored, found, transported, accessed and so forth. The handle record specifies things like where the object is stored, authentication information, terms and conditions for use, and/or “some sense of what you might do with the object.”
- Resolution system —this is the ‘handle system’ that “gives your computer the handle record for that identifier almost immediately.”
- Repository—“where digital objects may be deposited and from which they may be accessed later on.” Unlike traditional database systems, you don't need to know a lot of the details about it to get in or find what you're looking for.
- Security at object layer—In DOA, the security “protection occurs at the object level rather than protecting the identifier or by providing only a password at the boundary.”
The overall distinguishing factor of DOA from the current Internet is that in the current Internet environment, you “have to know exactly where to look for certain information” and that’s why search engines are so critical to indexing the information out there and being able to find it. In contrast, in DOA, information is tagged when it is stored in the repository and given all the information up front about “how do you want to characterize it” and who can manage it, transport it, access it, and so on.
To me, in DOA (or Internet 2.0) the information itself provides for the intelligent use of it as opposed to in the regular Internet, the infrastructure (transport) and search features must provide for its usability.
As I am thinking about this, an analogy comes to mind. Some people with medical conditions wear special information bracelets that identify their unique medical conditions and this aids in the speed and possibly the accuracy of the medical treatment they receive—i.e. better medical management. This is like the tagging of information in DOA where the information itself wears a metaphorical bracelet identifying it and what to do with it thereby yielding faster and better information management.
Currently, we sort of retrofit data about our information into tags called metadata, but instead here we have the notion of creating the information itself with the metadata almost as part of the genetic makeup of the information itself.
Information with “handles” built into as a part of the information creation and capture process would be superior information for sharing, collaboration, and ultimately more user-centric for people.
In my humble opinion, DOA has some teeth and is certainly not "Dead On Arrival."
The Secret Service in Action
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