PassWord – 3rd June 2015

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password, our weekly examination of the ramifications of technology for Resonance FM, with me, Peter Warren. On today’s show, can the North Korean cyber squads kill us from their PCs? How our gadgets are making us stoned? And the sonic screwdriver that can move around the very screws of our being, and the music of the tides. But first, according to a North Korean defector, Professor Kim Hong-kwan, the regime of Kim Jong-un is now spending around 10 to 20% of its military budget on cyber operations, and one of their key targets is the critical national infrastructure. To you and me, that is our water supplies, electricity, transport systems, phone networks, and payment services. Take these down, and the theory is that you will create mayhem and inevitably death. Over the last 10 years, there has been an increasing concern about the fact that some unknown countries have been stealing the settings of all of these networks in a series of attacks that have been dubbed APTs—Advanced Persistent Threat Attacks. The attacks have been widely attributed to the Chinese, and it is suspected that the purpose is to gather up all of the information needed to disable the infrastructure that we all depend on. But according to Professor Andrew Jones, author of a forthcoming book on cyberwar capability and an expert on military intelligence while maintaining a wary eye on the area, we should not abandon our technology just yet.

Speaker D: Right, well, Andy, um, obviously this North Korean defector has said that the North Koreans have the capacity to take down our, um, CNI, to actually hurt people. Do you think that’s true? I mean, you’ve made an assessment.

Speaker E: Its capacity to take down infrastructure? Yeah, I don’t doubt it. Kill people? No, I’m still very much of the opinion that we’re not quite that dependent yet on the level of technology that it is a credible threat at the moment.

Speaker D: So what sort of capability How many weapons do the North Koreans have? You’ve looked into this.

Speaker E: It’s looking at— very little information comes out of North Korea, as you well know. But from the various reports, they seem to have a capability of up to 6,000 people with varying skill levels. But certainly they have the potential capability. How much of that they can actually utilized at any one time is an unknown.

Speaker D: So what does a North Korean cyber capacity look like? I mean, this is a country that is often portrayed as a bit of a joke. Do they have the people that they need?

Speaker E: I think undoubtedly they do. You know, they’ve put them through university, they’ve picked the best, and they’ve invested heavily in the cyber side because they see that as, you know, a winner, one that they need to pursue.

Speaker D: Now, many states are doing this. I mean, you know, many states are saying we want to invest in cyber rather than invest in conventional military systems.

Speaker E: Why is that? Because of the cost-benefit. It’s cheaper and it’s something that you can’t avoid. You’ve got to invest in levels of knowledge for protection of the infrastructure. It is the same, the other side of the same coin. The same skills that you gain to protect others and the knowledge you gain is the same knowledge that you use to attack.

Speaker D: Now, do we know how they group these attack units together? Presumably everybody does virtually the same thing.

Speaker E: From the little information we’ve got out of North Korea, Unit 121 is the one that has been most closely associated. It’s part of the reconnaissance group, which makes sense. How they break down, from the little information available, they seem to have something in the region of 100 teams. Reportedly. There is no verification of that. It is all defector reports and the like. So, have we actually seen it? No. Is it provable? No. It is all rumour.

Speaker D: So, I mean, the manifestation that we have seen is the attack to free up the controversial film, or what the Koreans consider to be a controversial film, the comedy that seemed to be taking the mickey out of the Supreme Leader? Yeah.

Speaker E: I don’t think it’s been conclusively proven and therein lies the problem. Attributing cyber attacks is actually very difficult. Conclusively attributing them is almost impossible. So it is strongly thought that the North Koreans were responsible but, you know, the IP addresses that people latched on to. Yes, some seem to come out of North Korea, but so did they come out of Taiwan and hotels in China, which is— hotels in China is not inconceivable, seen as North Koreans are working in China. Taiwan, well, anybody’s guess. In this—

Speaker D: on this question of communications, I mean, communications is a bit of a thorny issue for the North Koreans, isn’t it? They don’t actually have much of an China infrastructure, do they?

Speaker E: No, they have an intranet infrastructure in real terms. They have very limited connectivity to the rest of the world. But they do have a strong relationship with China and they do have people and organizations that are working out of China to the best of our knowledge.

Speaker D: So that association with China, is that helpful to them in any way in terms of being able to generate this cyberattack capacity?

Speaker E: Well, clearly, because the links out of North Korea are very limited, and so the bandwidth is limited. By being able to launch any operation out of China, then clearly they have access to the bandwidth and to the security through obscurity, you know, it not being directly attributable.

Speaker D: Would that mean then that they would have to have some collusion from the Chinese to actually be effective?

Speaker E: Difficult to answer, but you can only suppose that it won’t be done without the Chinese knowledge. They would have to have some level of permission, I would guess, because the Chinese in their own way control their cyberspace fairly tightly.

Speaker D: So, should we be worried? Is this just a bit sort of more inflammatory propaganda that’s being generated where everybody is jumping on a North Korean story and wanting to demonize them?

Speaker E: I think that’s partially true, certainly. Have they got greater capability than organizations like Anonymous or LulzSec? Not really. Have they got the access that those sort of Western-based organizations have got? No. They are a threat, certainly, but the level of threat I don’t think is really understood.

Speaker D: And what you seem to be saying is that if they really did want to do something that was quite dangerous, they would almost certainly have to have the permission of the Chinese to do that, and Chinese would be monitoring in some way?

Speaker E: In the way that we understand they’re working at the moment, I think yes. It doesn’t mean to say that they couldn’t use other avenues. It doesn’t mean to say they couldn’t embed people elsewhere. You know, all of those are possible.

Speaker D: So really what you could be saying is that you could have a North Korean SWAT team or something similar to that of programmers who were outside of the country and then they would to be able to do something that they might see that they could gain some advantage from. Absolutely.

Speaker E: I think almost inevitably, because they would want to be able to disguise, you know, prevent attribution.

Speaker B: Well, that was Professor Andrew Jones telling us that we can still go on using the internet to click away on our social media just for the time being. Now, Well, um, how are we going to be connected? Being connected could be bad for us, and it could get even worse, because over the next few years, the technology industry wants to connect us to everything that it can, quite literally. The Internet of Things is not coming, it is here already, as large technology concerns like the mobile phone companies and computer giants like IBM start putting computer chips into everyday objects and assigning them with web addresses. Here’s William Webb, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, to tell us more.

Speaker H: Though the Internet of Things, one of the issues about it, one of the issues that will be confronted about the Internet of Things is privacy. Privacy is going to become a big talking point for people over the next 10 years.

Speaker F: Yeah, that’s right, indeed. It already is in every kind of conference. And I think clearly it’s something we need to get our heads around. It seems to me that by and large people make trade-offs all the time of privacy versus utility. So most people use a supermarket loyalty card where they actually give away a lot of information about what they buy, but they’re fairly happy to do so because they get special offers or whatever in return that they feel is worthwhile. And they haven’t seen the supermarkets obviously abuse that information in a way that worries them.

Speaker H: Well, currently, I mean, there is a tremendous misunderstanding about what people are yielding in return for that utility. It hasn’t actually been spelled out. I mean, one of the issues that does appear to be occurring is that technology companies haven’t really come to terms with the transparency that they are trying to force upon individuals insofar as a lot of technology companies are not really saying what it is that they do. One good example is that one that you’ve mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, which is that they’re not saying that they’re using your Wi-Fi signal to actually move data around and charging you for. You have another example, say for example with Google, which says it’s a search engine company, which is also now an identity company. It’s selling your identity. It’s not really making that clear.

Speaker F: No, I agree it’s not. And up till now, people have kind of accepted that, people without really understanding it, but people have kind of said, “Oh, well, I’ll have Gmail. It’s free. Yeah, okay, I do know that Google is effectively looking at my data and processing it and using it for various things, but I’ll put up with that. I don’t quite know what they’re doing, but it’s okay,” kind of thing. And it strikes me actually, by and large, that’s what we’ll see going forward. Each time something new comes along, like a connected device in your home, there’ll be a worry about, you know, so what’s this all about? And then people will start to say, well, actually, it doesn’t look too bad. You know, I get for free, I get this special thing that allows it to work better or whatever. And yes, they’re using my data to build better washing machines, but I don’t mind too much about that. Every now and again, of course, something will blow up and there’ll be a scandal or something will be revealed about inappropriate use of data, and that will have to be handled, and it will cause great problems for that manufacturer or that space. But I think by and large, the privacy thing has to be handled kind of case by case. It’s hard to do it generically. It’s hard to say let’s sort out who owns what data where once and for all and how it should be dealt with, because I think this is just too broad and difficult a concept. So I think we’ll just have to work our way through, and there’ll be some areas, of course, that are very sensitive, like healthcare data, where there’ll, I suspect, be a lot of discussion beforehand and government intervention and so on before anything gets done. And other cases, like smart dustbins or whatever, where there’ll be a tiny bit of angst around, does it reveal when I’m not at home, and so people can burglarize my home? But by and large, people will decide actually the benefits probably okay. But absolutely, we will need to be very sensitive to that as we go through every single one of the cases that emerge over time, and it will slow things down for sure.

Speaker H: Well, the more interesting debate is going to go on the actual processing of the data is going to be the wrangle. That’s going to be the bit where people will start saying, hang on, that’s my data and I have an interest in the processing of it, and so therefore I should be given some return on the processing of— that data.

Speaker F: I think that’s right for some people. I mean, it’s a difficult area. My suspicion is the majority, by and large, will shrug their shoulders and say, hey ho, as long as I get something that looks good and doesn’t cost too much, I’m not too bothered. And there’ll be a subset of people who are much more concerned about ethical and privacy issues, and they’ll rightly have a wider discussion around this. But so my general view is It would be a bit like health concerns with mobile phones. You know, scares will be kicked up from time to time. They’ll get a lot of media coverage. They will worry people. But by and large, people will mostly think, well, there’s no proof, and actually the mobile phone is such a useful device for me, I’m not going to stop using it because of that. A few will stop using it, but not many. And then gradually people will say, well, it doesn’t look like the world’s falling in, and we’ll keep going. And I suspect the same will happen with Internet of Things, that we will have some scares, we will have some issues, but— and it will slow things down from time to time to keep things going. But that’s just a gut feel. I can’t predict the future very well on that particular one.

Speaker B: Well, that was William Webb telling us how soon all life will be caught in the web and that the music of the machines is going to be the backdrop of our lives forever. A rather startling fact that has recently emerged is that by 2020, there will be more messages exchanged between machines people. In the terrifying jargon of technology, this is being called M2M communication— the flow of data between everything in the critical national infrastructure, the Internet of Things, and the jam in the middle is us. And it’s one of the reasons why the telephone companies are rubbing their hands together in gleeful anticipation of the traffic. People have become not the raison d’être for the networks, but something of a sideshow. Indeed, because of our dependence on computer systems, there is now serious talk about giving human rights to some servers, the logic being that they hold data that is so essential to our continued existence that if it were damaged, that many of us would also suffer. So talk of North Koreans killing us by computer may not be so far-fetched after all. Indeed, given some of the scientific developments that are now occurring, it would appear that computers can reach right down inside our bodies. Researchers at Bristol University have built the world’s first sonic screwdriver, a system that can actually move microscopic objects with sound waves. Here’s Bruce Drinkwater from Bristol to explain explain how it works and what the possibilities are.

Speaker G: This device, whatever you like to call it— we tend to call it an acoustic tweezer, that’s the terminology we use— but to get people to understand it, we quite often say, well, it’s a bit like a sonic screwdriver. But what, what we’re trying to do is make that device, whatever you want to call it, as versatile and dexterous as possible. I mean, ideally biologists would like a pair of microscopic hands down the microscope that they could use to grab things move things and cluster things, you know, how versatile our hands are. But that isn’t yet possible. So our recent contribution is to show that we can get this spinning and rotating effect and control it. And actually, it turns out to be a bit more subtle than we first thought, because things don’t just spin. They spin in a way that depends very strongly on their size and what they’re made out of.

Speaker H: Now, obviously, you’re talking about acoustic tweezers, but it’s not— I mean, if we’re going to actually say what what this looks like. Presumably you have created a device that is capable of creating a sound wave that you can then manipulate.

Speaker G: Is that right? Yeah, I mean, what the device looks like is it’s like a small circle about the size of a ring that you might wear on your finger, but along the ring are lots of tiny little loudspeakers, each outputting ultrasonic waves, so waves at a high frequency. Frequency than we can hear, quite a lot higher than we can hear. And each of those is carefully controlled. In effect, what we do is we— you can sort of imagine it— we fire them one after another so that the wavefront that’s emitted is helical in form, like a helter skelter sort of wavefront. So they’re all fired in roughly the order that you’d see if you were to slide down a helter skelter., and so that stimulates these acoustic waves, which then travel off keeping this helical pattern with them. Right. And why it’s a bit like a tornado is that there’s this quiet zone in the middle, which is quite interesting, and things tend to be drawn into this quiet zone. That’s why we think of it as a tweezer, because things are drawn into this quiet middle where they stay fixed in space, but then we can spin them as well.

Speaker H: So obviously you can use this, as you say, as an acoustic tweezer, but are there other applications, other applications that are perhaps a little more powerful that we would see as particularly beneficial?

Speaker G: There are also kind of diagnostic applications where, for example, cancer cells— as a cell becomes cancerous, it changes its properties. And so again, we could potentially, probably coupled with some biological testing, we could distinguish those two different cell types, so the healthy cells and the cancerous cells. So there’s really quite exciting things that we can do, and all of it could be done at the moment all on a microscopic scale. So it lends itself more to the, you know, taking a small amount of blood, say, and doing a test on that, rather than the blood transfusion application which I mentioned where that would require us to do this at a bigger scale. So there’s still work to be done to scale these things up. But at the moment, we’ve got a better route in to these sort of small-scale applications.

Speaker H: About, what was it, about 14 years ago, the Americans, I noticed, they came up with a system for crowd control where they were using sonics. And what they were doing was they were using sonic waves that would hit sort of resonant frequencies of the human body. And the point of it would be that if you fired these at crowds, that you could make people instantly void their bowels or vomit. I mean, that’s obviously very incredibly clumsy in comparison to what you’re doing. There was talk that the Americans had also developed something that could actually turn people’s body to rubble using a sonic wave.

Speaker G: Is that a possible thing? Something that’s used that’s not quite as aggressive as those things are directional loudspeakers. So there are the security services use them for sending basically just high levels of sound to particular individuals in a crowd. Not, not, I don’t think any harm, there’s no harm happening to those people. They just hear a very loud sound, but that the beam that’s carrying the sound is an ultrasound beam that travels more or less in a straight line. So if we’re standing in a In a crowd, I can point it into the distance and the sound will go in a straight line. The sound that you hear is a modulation of the ultrasound beam. So the ultrasound beam effectively carries the sound with it. That is a little bit— there’s an analogy to what I’ve been researching on, albeit the scale is very different. There’s an ultrasonic beam., and we’re imparting this twisting motion on that ultrasonic beam.

Speaker B: Well, this is this terrifying world of technology that we seem to be inhabiting without really thinking too much about it. Now, we’ve got Susan Balfour in the studio. Susan is a psychotherapist and the author of Stress Control, and in the book she makes a claim that flicking between our TV, tablets, phones, and laptops is getting us high and that we should start coming down.

Speaker C: Susan, hello and welcome to Password.

Speaker B: Hello, thank you for having me. Right, now in your book you say that flicking through all our gadgets is like being stoned on cannabis.

Speaker C: Why is that? Well, this is what the latest research is throwing up. In fact, flicking through from one device to another is doing bad things to our brain. It’s actually confusing our brain, and it’s been found that this— our brain scans look as if we have been taking drugs or even a lot of alcohol. Apparently, well, it’s been proved now that we keep— when we want to understand something, we look— it should go into a particular part of our brain. So if we’re focused purely on one thing, it goes into the correct part of the brain, which is called the hippocampus, which is where we store information. But when we keep flicking We think we’re multitasking, but in fact we’re not. We’re switching tasks too quickly for our brain, and the information goes into a different part of the brain which isn’t able to store the information. Therefore, our recall is being affected. But equally, you know, as I say, it’s the brain scans of people who spend a lot of time online are looking now like drug addicts and Alcoholics.

Speaker B: So, I mean, oddly, it’s almost got a technological analogy, hasn’t it? Because instead of going into the read-only memory, it’s going into the RAM. It’s going into the part of the computer that’s dealing with the temporary.

Speaker C: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Yes, exactly.

Speaker B: So who do you think is to blame for this?

Speaker C: I think what is to blame is that people are not questioning technology enough. I mean, fortunately now scientific studies are being done more and more because people, scientists, are getting a bit worried, and, and the medical profession too, because again doctors are saying that they see all sorts of symptoms in young people who spend too much time online, a lot of depression. The one doctor in America says that The internet is like cocaine. It gives you a high, and then you come off it and you come down into a depressive mood. And this is happening to a lot of people, particularly young people who spend a lot of time online. I think the thing is, it’s not that technology is bad. I think it’s our addiction that’s bad.

Speaker B: That’s what we need to address. I mean, that’s interesting, isn’t it? That’s a very interesting point, because some researchers here in the UK have said that 1 in 3 3 people are addicted to technology now. I mean, that’s a very frightening statistic, isn’t it?

Speaker C: It is, yes. I would think probably even a higher number. But yes, I mean, you just have to look around you when you’re traveling on a bus or a tube. You see people sitting looking at their screens. They don’t look at life at all. They look at their screens and look at what other people are doing. You can see it all around you.

Speaker B: So what do you think that we can do about this?

Speaker C: Well, I think we have to— my book is called Stress Control, and I don’t mean control in the sort of tense, kind of uptight way, but I think you have to get a little bit more control over ourselves and our use of technology and say no to it. I’ve also got a chapter in my book which is the positive no, and I think we have to say no in a way to protect ourselves.

Speaker B: So you’re not advocating throwing everything away. You’re saying these things are tools and let’s start using them like that rather than letting them take over.

Speaker C: Precisely that. We can’t throw them away. They’re never going to disappear now that they’re here. But I think what we should ask sometimes is, just because something can be created, do we really need it? And why do we need it? You know, why do we need robots to do things instead of us? We’ve got problems of unemployment. I mean, you know, I think a lot of questions are not asked and we should start start really thinking a little bit more about this instead of just accepting it and using it kind of mindlessly, if you like.

Speaker B: Okay, well, thank you, Susan Balfour. This is Password with Peter Warren on Resonance FM, and after us you can hear Kitchen Magic Time. And if you’re listening to the repeat, then it’s the Organ Presents: The Other Rock Show. Now, one of the things— it all seems a bit depressing So hopefully this is something that can lift you up a bit. One person who is also not happy with this state of affairs is the composer John Ecotte. He used to use computers to automatically make music, but he was not happy with the results. Computer music, according to John, is sterile, and he decided to find something more natural to generate his compositions, and he settled on the tide. John has just arrived back in the UK from a voyage in pursuit of his muse. He and a group of musicians have sailed up and down the Spanish coast collecting the sounds of the sea, and he is now sailing up to Ireland and Cumbria making a series of performances using sensors and computers to sonify the sea. Here, John tells us about his work.

Speaker H: Now, one of the things about this is that people will be sitting there thinking, is this one of those sort of experimental pieces of music? Is this a piece of music? I mean, what is it that brought you to this and what is it that you’re aiming to achieve with it? And also, what do you get out of it?

Speaker I: Well, my kind of route to it was I was interested in computer-generated music for a while, and I did a PhD in generative music. So that’s making computer software that arguably has a kind of intelligence or creativity built into it that can compose music. And that’s quite a large emerging field., and I enjoyed it very much, but during the course of it, I found it was a little bit soulless letting a computer do all the composition, and I wondered about using some other kind of earthly connection that would make the decisions, if you like. And because of my love for sailing and navigation, I realized the tide is a kind of interesting shape. It’s interesting because it has this very predictable shape every day, but as I just mentioned, every tide is unique and has its own detail to it. And so I wondered what it would be like mapping tide to music, and that’s how, yeah, that’s how the project emerged. I was actually thinking about it for about 5 years before I did the first Flood Tides. Performance in 2008. So it’s been kind of generating in my mind for a long time, and I’m very much enjoying continuing to develop it. So I know I find it a great creative and technical and musical challenge still. I mean, in some ways I love the idea of just continuing to develop this piece for the foreseeable future.

Speaker B: I mean, in a sense, it’s endless, isn’t it?

Speaker H: The tide just goes on and on and on, as Canute found out.

Speaker I: It is, yeah. And that’s kind of a nice aspect in some ways. When we’ve done some performances, it does, you know, encourages you, or the audience, to reflect on tide as a kind of rhythm that’s been, you know, endless since the beginning of time. We have a sculpture now as part of the Flood Tide project, and about this time last year, we launched a sculpture at Trinity Buoy Wharf, which is where we first performed Fluttide.

Speaker B: It’s a metal— Well, that was Jon Ecott putting our world firmly into the heart of the machine. If you’ve just tuned in, you’re listening to Password, and unfortunately you’ve just missed it because that’s all for this week. Password is brought to you by Future Intelligence, and you can find out more about the world of technology on our website, futureintelligence.com.

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.