Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Informational Privacy Case

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to review a lower court ruling on how much information the federal government can collect as part of pre-employment background checks.

This is actually pretty good news, although the outcome is far from certain.

From Wired Threat Level:

The justices, without comment, decided Monday to review a lower-court decision surrounding the concept of so-called “informational privacy.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down intrusive background checks last year on nearly three dozen National Aeronautics and Space Administration contractors as being too invasive — calling them an unconstitutional, “broad inquisition.”

Before you start drawing conclusions about what's appropriate for the feds to review before offering you a contracting gig, consider that these consultants would not have access to classified information, and the scope of data included their sex lives and possible drug use.

It's pretty common for the government to review the possibility of risky behaviors, given the constant threat of blackmail by foreign agents seeking to exploit personal foibles  to flip someone into providing information.

What's interesting here is the lack of balance exhibited - a trampling of privacy rights without cause, given the types of data the would-be contractors might be accessing.

Even corporations are looking into prospective employees personal lives and finances as part of their hiring decisions. It's become common for firms to pull credit scores and reports and to search social networking sites for nuggets of information that might shed some insight into someone's proclivities or nonconforming activities, to say the least.

I remember friends and family telling me that the feds came knocking on their doors back in the day when I needed a top secret clearance in the military. While that still occurs, it's much easier to pull scads of electronic data for analysis than it is to pound the pavement checking someone out the old-fashioned way.

Let's hope that the Supreme Court places some clear boundaries around what's appropriate. Given the current makeup of the court, it's not likely that it will be a civil liberties bonanza, but something would be better than nothing.

Image via Wikimedia Commons
 

Data Backup - You Never Need It Until You Really Need It

My daughter's boyfriend recently had a hard drive failure on his laptop. From a hardware perspective, the vendor met their obligation and swapped out the drive with a new, higher-capacity replacement. I helped him get his OS restored and updated, and get the typical apps reloaded, but it was time-consuming, and he was without his machine for a couple of days.

While thrilled that he now had a 500G hard drive, I pointed out that this only meant he would have even more data lost the next time he experienced catastrophic failure, since he's one of the millions of users who does not regularly back up his data, even after enduring a significant data loss.

This posting isn't meant to call him out for poor data management practices. In fact, he's probably the rule rather than the exception. But it does lead to a larger, more salient point - how critical is your data, where is it located, and how do you get it back if something goes wrong?

In the old days, it was pretty easy - you saved everything on your C drive, and if you didn't maintain a copy elsewhere, when your machine died, your data died with it. Today, we live in a much more distributed environment. If you're using any sort of "cloud" computing platform, you might be surprised to learn that even if you don't store your email and data files on a local drive, they could disappear forever, and you're be back in the information stone-age.

Talk to T-Mobile Sidekick users who have gone days without access to their calendars, address books, and other information that many of us would consider critical to our day-to-day functioning. For some users, that data might be lost for all eternity, although recovery efforts are underway. Regardless, if you can't get to your data for days or weeks, what's your plan?

As more data-driven infrastructure moves "to the cloud", it's time to ask ourselves what exactly is keeping that cloud aloft? Whether it's thin clients on the desktop, or handheld devices like an iPhone or Blackberry, the heavy-lifting of processing is performed off-device - usually in "the cloud" with the results displayed locally. Significant portions of your data reside not on the device itself, but rather on back-end infrastructure that you never see. You also never have direct access to it.

How is that back-end maintained from a business continuity - disaster recovery perspective? In T-Mobile's case, it appears that their was no hot-swap available when the primary server, in this case the ONLY server, failed, and no redundancy built in for exactly this scenario. Can you say single point of failure?

Back in my consulting days, any BC-DR planning involved a minimalist recommendation: Data needs to reside in production, in a back-up, AND in a back-up stored off-site. Without all three components, it's virtually impossible to fully and quickly recover from data or communication failures.

Use Gmail or Google Docs? What's your plan if the Internet goes down where you are, or if Google stops responding? Do you maintain local replicas of your mail, calendar, and data? Do you even know how to do that?

If you use iTunes to sync your iPhone, what happens if your backup becomes corrupted, or your machine dies, taking iTunes with it? Not only have you lost your music, but also other pieces critical to maintain business and personal communication. I don't know many people who make a backup of their iTunes install and store it away from their primary iTunes location.

If large companies like T-Mobile fall short, and users get outraged by not being able to access their stuff, it's perfectly acceptable to hold these companies accountable for delivering good BC-DR as part of their normal service offering. But if you are responsible for your own data management, how would you do in a crisis?

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Can I Wrap A Fish In The Internet?

The nation's 15th largest newspaper, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, filed for bankruptcy protection this week, another ink-stained victim of a dying business model and a more sane approach to credit terms.

Exactly how a city paper can rack up a $661.1 million debt before being wrestled like a suckling pig from the financing teat would itself be an interesting story, one that I would pay to read, although I'd prefer to get it for free online.

I'm especially fond of stories that include plot twists such as how the Star Tribune ended 2008 with $26.9 million but now has to sell its plasma to keep limping along. Hopefully, the daily will find a benefactor, as no one wants to see it become a crack whore, even if it became poor and needed the money.

"The Strib" joins a host of other old-school gazettes drowning in a deep pool of red ink after a storied history built on oceans of indigo. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and The Sun of Baltimore have all sought the shelter of bankruptcy protection. Several others could go tits up if they can't find buyers, like Denver's Rocky Mountain News, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

How did these giants of media end up holding out tin cups, begging for change? A good number of them borrowed huge sums of money when times were good and profits were high, and they are now experiencing difficulties repaying these loans as the economy has soured and revenue sources such as auto dealer advertising and classifieds have faltered.

With the sudden tightening of the credit markets resulting from the financial meltdown, there are few deep pockets available for the daily rags to dip into, and it's unlikely that anyone outside of Rupert Murdoch has the inclination to pump cash into a ship that's clearly listing to port, preparing for a final belly roll. It really is the perfect storm.

Subscribers are abandoning ship at a record pace as other information delivery options become available. Being able to read about breaking events on Google News moments after it happens instead of waiting for the morning paper to skid across my front porch reminds me of what it must have been like when folks in 1837 could first send a telegraph message across the country, thanks to Samuel Morse, instead of waiting for the stage coach to bring the mail sack.

Advertisers, witnessing the reader-rats deserting the boat, have significantly pared back both the amount of advertising space they want and the rates they are willing to pay, hitting newspapers where it hurts the most. Some estimates show a decrease of 23.4% in revenues since the industry had a record $49.4 billion in sales in 2005. Experts were anticipating a drop of $7.5 billion in 2008 alone.

Rather than some slow-motion, Sam Peckinpah gunfight ending, print journalism finds itself dying off quickly, like a dinosaur whose food supply and luxury condo were obliterated while he was out chasing a caveman down the street, past the Creationism Museum.

Will I miss newspapers? Probably, a little, mainly at breakfast in the morning, when I sit with the Columbus Dispatch and spend ten minutes on the headlines as I munch my faux sausage sandwich and Activia yogurt. Who knew that being able to easily poop soy products would be the highlight of my late 40s?

It's been interesting to watch the business react to the general lack of concern over their demise outside of the industry itself. There's been a lot of "you'll miss us when we're gone" talk, which doesn't seem like a value-add to me, and a good portion of what I do find valuable in my information addiction is already fed in binary fashion whenever I want. I don't want to see anyone lose their job or livelyhood, but I'm on my second career already and no one cried for me, Argentina.

So what will go away? Lots of paper, and machines, and supporting infrastructure, primarily. Will the research and analysis remain? I would hope so, because that's the real meat and potatoes of good journalism in the first place. If the news business doesn't have this immense aircraft carrier floating around that needs to be funded and supported, just so it can shoot little news jets off the catapaults once a day, good business sense dictates that they can marshal their thinned resources and dedicate them to developing robust content that can be delivered better, faster, and cheaper.

Will there be money for that? The future is unknown, but in other endeavors it's been shown that people are willing to pay for a quality product and lose interest when the offering is shoddy. Ask GM. The revenue stream may not be entirely funded by consumers any longer, but that doesn't mean there will be no funds. Seth Godin has some ideas in his blog:

Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

Slap a nice HP touchscreen PC on the kitchen island and let me have the same morning routine, except instead of wire reports I'm perusing my RSS aggregator, and I won't miss a step. Not having to drag the stack of newsprint out with the recycling every week has a certain appeal, and being a computer engineer, I'm not worried that I'll be starved for news if my touchscreen breaks down. I have redundancy!

I won't be able to wrap a fish in the Internet, or line a bird cage, but my yellowfin tuna comes from the monger pre-wrapped, and I hate birds. Impermanence is everywhere. It's print journalism's turn.