PassWord – 9th March 2016

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance 104.4 FM with me, Peter Warren. The program that looks into the ramifications of technological developments for you. Now, for the next two weeks, we’re going to be taking a long hard look at the piece of legislation that David Cameron considers to be the most important to this Parliament. Surprisingly, nothing to do with leaving Europe, but the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act. Last week, after massive opposition from the industry body, the Internet Service Providers Association, legislators and the Science and Technology Select Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee, the government presented its revised version— of the controversial legislation to howls of outrage from civil rights groups. But why? According to a survey at the end of last month by OnePoll, 60% of the population believe that the government should be able to monitor mass communications, with many people believing that national security is more important than an individual’s right to privacy, and 42% saying that they don’t care. So we asked Jim Kellogg, executive director of the Open Rights Group, why they are opposing a piece of legislation It doesn’t seem to bother most of the public.

Speaker C: You know, if you put things in binary terms to people and they aren’t given too much time to think about it, they will say, of course I want to have surveillance and security. In fact, so do I. You know, if you ask me, do you want the, you know, do you want GCHQ to have surveillance powers, and I’m going to say yes. But if you say to me, that, you know, do I want the whole population put under surveillance and for GCHQ to know and score everybody according to how much of a threat they look, I would say no. And usually people think that they’re being told about targeted powers. They think that GCHQ and the police and so on are only going to go after criminals. Well, that’s not what this bill does. What this bill does is say that we have to know everything about everybody, and then we’ll analyze everybody’s data to see who looks like a problem.

Speaker D: I mean, that’s the— that’s the interesting point, isn’t it? On other parts of the program today, we’re talking about supercomputing, we’re talking about quantum computing, we’re talking about the use of big data. One of the things that the government said with the previous Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was that they couldn’t predict predict what the technology was going to do. I mean, one of the issues here is what the technology could do is put us under incredible surveillance.

Speaker C: Yeah. This is not, you know, the police today have been talking about, you know, lacking the equivalent of telephone records and things like this. The truth is that there is more and more data about us out there than anyone could possibly handle. The police don’t need more data, and certainly GCHQ don’t need more data. What they need is ways to whittle it down, and they need access to information when they have suspicion. But that isn’t, I don’t think, really as much of a problem as all that. Most of the time, the big companies that hold all our data, like Facebook and Google, you know, actually they can get hold of that data they want to be able to use data about us, so they’re able to hand that data over to governments. It’s only occasionally that this data starts becoming a little bit harder to get at.

Speaker D: Quick final point, isn’t one of the big issues with all of this is the debate has actually been quite fractured and the actual case of what could be done hasn’t really been laid in front of the public. One of the things that people are talking about is They want a referendum on Europe. This is a technological change that is so massive. Shouldn’t we really have a series of debates that are quite open and frank on national media about this, saying what the issues are? Because those issues have not been accurately laid out in front of the public in terms of the power of big data, for example.

Speaker C: That’s absolutely right. I mean, you know, we’re talking about something which could alter the relationship of individuals to the state. You know, something very, very profound, I think, that’s going on here. And it’s going to be very hard to stop, of course, once it’s all built. So yes, we should be having those debates, and they have to range through these hacking powers, through mass collection powers, through the mass analytics, and the use of government and private sector datasets. All of this is covered in this bill. And as you say, the thing tying all these things together is the question of big data analytics, the ability of computers to search through data, find patterns, do matching, things which are incredibly revealing. And in the case of surveillance, you know, when it’s targeted at people who the government feel are in some way untrustworthy, that is a huge political power as well.

Speaker B: So according to Jim Kellick of the Open Rights Group, if the public knew more about technology, they would worry more. But what do they need to worry about? Well, as the research by OnePoll demonstrates, that really depends on your point of view. And also, if you consider that knowing where you are and what you were doing is your business. A right that no one noticed that they were giving up. The 1960s, personified in the papers of the times as a permissive society, was the final age of anonymous innocence when children were ticked in and out and told to be at home by certain times and to listen out for the church clock. Though the first mobile phone was tested in 1973, it was not really until the mid-1990s privacy groups woke up to the fact that the relatively commonplace mobile phones now could find you wherever you were. Quite how far that has gone, most people don’t realize. But now, with more mobile phones in the world than toilets, most of us have actually taken a decision to voluntarily put themselves under surveillance. Because for a phone call to be put through to your mobile, it It needs to know where you are. As Erez Weinerov, the founder of the technology company TrendIt, explains, that has some truly astounding consequences for us.

Speaker E: You know, you’re building up patterns and behavior of the population and trying to figure out what the trends and to see anomalies and to do the analysis and have your insights. Yeah, of course. This is— I would say that these things already are, some of them, up and running inside the web, like online, like Google Analytics. You need to decide what you’re going to do with that. Of course, if you’re going to the smart city or safe city, then it’s not going and attracting an online entity, but it’s going and attracting an offline entity. So the convergence between the online and offline is something that is always very interesting. How to try and figure out what’s the point of connection between those two worlds. And the one thing that we know that connects between those two worlds is the smartphone. Because usually you’re going to do that everywhere and you’re using it everywhere where you are. So it comes to be more of a signature of who you are. Then comes, of course, the part of the privacy that at least from— we’re trying to keep that at the most precious high level privacy won’t be breached and it will be kept up to be only statistical data and not to get into the persona behind the phone.

Speaker F: But the thing is that it’s inevitable that that will happen because as you’ve said, you know, you can yield the person behind the phone if you want to. It’s down to your level of persistence because basically what you need to, you would do is say, say for example that it is, yeah, but the Homeland Security, you find a cluster of people or a cluster of telephones that are behaving in a particular way and you say, I want to know more about the people who are behind those. You can actually home in on that data cluster and make it yield information.

Speaker E: The thing is that today, because you and I understand that, also the people that don’t want the security people to find them, usually don’t use the phone and they don’t go with a phone. So then it becomes to be much harder to understand. And one of the abilities that we are providing with Safe City or the HLS is to understand the pattern around those people that is different and therefore to figure out that there is something that is, it’s an anomaly again Not going on a specific person, but understanding something about the, I would say, the essence or the smell that is different. That you know that something is cooking up and happening, and you’ll have that in advance and not after it happens. So this is again something that is important to understand what the abilities of doing, you know, understanding the behavior and the trends, but also seeing the anomalies and knowing how to interpret them and to take out those insights that are important. At the same time, trying to keep up with the privacy. As you said, if you are persistent and you know to keep up with a specific person all the time, then this is not what trend is trying to do. And there are, are other companies who does that and it’s only for the government to decide if they’re willing to use those companies to attract those specific people. But again, as I explained, there are many times that you’re looking for something without the phone, so that becomes then a bigger riddle even for those companies.

Speaker B: Erez Weinroth on how computers are now counting us in and out wherever we are. And Dr. Weinroth has also revealed another interesting point: that increasingly terrorists who are the targets of the DRIIPA legislation are leaving their mobiles behind. This is Password with Peter Warren on Resonance 104.4 FM. As Dr. Weinroth says, in the rapidly evolving world of big data, and the Internet of Things, we are all revealed in a new information age, no matter how hard we try to hide. And the power of those trying to force transparency will only grow because we are now about to enter a new era of computers that are faster than anything we can imagine and that can carry out calculations that would take today’s most powerful systems millions of years. In just 5 minutes. Here’s Professor Jeremy O’Brien, the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Quantum Engineering, on the unbelievably fast computers that can make sense of big data in seconds and know exactly where we are.

Speaker G: So I’m, uh, I’m very confident that on a 5-year time scale we will have a very powerful quantum computer that is answering some of the questions, um, that we really care about and otherwise can can’t find answers to. So that’s, that’s really quite soon, I think, and it’s certainly soon enough for us to really start thinking about how that’s going to impact our lives and our society and the economy. And it’s certainly why, you know, people at Davos are thinking very seriously about how it’s going to impact their business.

Speaker B: Okay, so then this other question about artificial intelligence: is this going to be the new computer system that will house a AI?

Speaker G: Yeah, I think it’s very likely that the majority of what we would like to do with AI and machine learning will be— you know, we have an increasingly clear understanding that it is best done on a quantum computer. So most of the tasks that we’d like to do in machine learning get a substantial enhancement. Yeah, so quantum computing is an entirely new paradigm for computing in which we harness uniquely quantum mechanical properties. So quantum mechanics is the physics theory that explains how the world works at its most fundamental level. It explains how atoms and molecules and single particles of light called photons behave. And it’s a weird and wonderful theory. It’s weird because it tells us very strange things, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment. And it’s wonderful because it’s the most successful theory that humankind has ever had in the sense that its predictive powers, which is very much a measure of the success of a theory, are second to none. It has been tested over a century and it always comes up correct, and it comes up correct to many, many, many, many levels of precision. And so in that sense it’s very successful. It’s weird because it tells us things that we, that we find very surprising, that we don’t see in our everyday experience. So it tells us, for example, that a single particle can be simultaneously in two places at the same time, or indeed many places at the same time, and it tells us that two particles can be inextricably linked with one another, such that doing something to one particle instantaneously affects the other particle, even if it is, you know, on the other side of the universe, for example. And in fact, it’s those two phenomena, the so-called superposition, the possibility for a particle to be in two states simultaneously, and that inextricable linking of particles called entanglement, it’s those two properties that we harness in a quantum computer to be able to compute particular problems exponentially faster than we would otherwise be able to compute. And so exponentially faster is probably better understood as redefining what’s possible in the sense that, you know, we might have a problem, for example, factoring a large number which takes billions of years on a conventional supercomputer today. If we can do that in minutes, then you can obviously think of that as as just being faster, but probably a more useful way to think of it is that it redefines what’s actually possible to compute, because if something takes billions of years, it’s effectively impossible from operating on a quantum computer. So I think that’s a, that’s a huge application area.

Speaker B: Should we be scared? Is this going to be the advent of the super being?

Speaker G: I don’t think we should be scared, but I think we should be sensible, like, like every technology. We should understand what the opportunities and threats are. And I think the opportunities are tremendous. So if we think about artificial intelligence, you know, that’s a mechanism to make just about every human endeavor better. And an example of that is that we can start to identify treatments for disease based on no actual scientific research. So for example, we might find that, you know, there’s a doctor in Southampton who has an anomalously high success rate in treating women aged 37.5 to 38.5 with breast cancer, and that’s based on, you know, aggregating a vast quantity of data from across the UK, potentially across the world, and analysing that data. And suddenly then we can go in and have a look. Alright, what is he doing? What’s the treatment there? And next thing you know, you have a new treatment that’s highly successful based on simply looking at the data. So I think the opportunities are really tremendous there and I think, you know, I don’t really buy into the sort of Skynet, Terminator sort of doomsday scenarios but I think like everything, like all technology, we should be conscious of what the potential what the potential disruptions are likely to be and start trying to gauge whether they’re, you know, how we can enhance the positive and mitigate the negative.

Speaker B: That was Professor O’Brien, who recently told the world’s leaders at Davos about the quantum computer systems that will make perfect hosts for artificial intelligence systems. The unbelievably fast and the incredibly intelligent. It may sound futuristic, but scientists like Professor O’Brien are simply building on the world that has already been developed by Dr. Weinroth that confined 85% of the US’s population in 5 minutes. An ability to force meaning out of huge amounts of data that is with us already. Here’s Jim Brophy, the client director of the computer manufacturer Fujitsu, on the project the company is developing to make traditional supercomputing power available to virtually anyone.—

Speaker H: the whole premise of cloud computing. Indeed, that you actually don’t buy the infrastructure. You buy the power, the processing power from the cloud in some shape or form. So it’s not even the future, it’s today. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it will be.

Speaker F: Now obviously one of the things, as you’ve mentioned yourself, that this is useful for is big data analytics. What sort of decisions can you quickly come to as a result of being able to level this power at them?

Speaker H: So if you think of some of the research that goes on today, you know, take again an easy example, the renewable energy market, whether it’s tidal or whether it’s wind, to develop the next generation of those tidal systems, for example. What they do is they place them on a seabed pilot. They generate masses of data, and actually even today, mostly they can only analyze a very small portion of the data that’s generated from those units. Actually, if you have the ability to to analyze a much wider spread of data, then the development cycle of products actually becomes much, much faster. And you can take that into medical research, into car research, you can take it into any area that’s— it’s the data that’s important.

Speaker F: I mean, that’s the really important point, isn’t it? What we need is loads and loads of data. With the Internet of Things that’s being projected, that’s going to generate lots and lots of data. With people walking around in smart cities, data will be coming from their mobile phones.

Speaker H: Yeah, absolutely right. And in fact, if you think about it today, that data is generated from appliances that just 10 years ago you would never have thought that, you know, you can get data feeds from central heating systems. You can get them from kettles even today. So you’re absolutely right. If you take the smart city concept, actually the amount of data that’s going to be generated will be massive. Somehow to get the best out of it, you have to understand how you analyze that data.

Speaker F: And, I mean, again, that’s the point, isn’t it? Because obviously patterns are yielded within the data that allow you to home in on particular anomalies or on other data clusters and say, that’s the thing that was interesting me, I want to know more about that.

Speaker H: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in data analytics, but you’re absolutely right that that what you’re trying to see is patterns that allow you to make decisions.

Speaker F: So in this new unfolding world then, what we’ll be doing is we will be generating pictures from the data and we’ll be doing that very, very, very quickly to actually understand what’s going on in the world, but understand what’s going on in the world from a whole range of data.

Speaker H: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. As I say, all sorts of appliances are generating that data now. And actually, if you think about, again, smart cities as a concept, then actually to make a smart city work, the key will be how you integrate many systems and develop those integrations. That’s what will make a smart city work. Smart, in effect. So, yeah, that is the future.

Speaker B: Jim Brophy of Fujitsu on the high-performance computing that now takes 5 minutes to create 3D virtual reality images from big data that used to take 34 hours using conventional technology. It is this ability to crunch huge amounts of data that is now underpinning our world. And, as Jim Brophy said, will allow us to run the smart cities of the future. But to do it, it has to know exactly who we are and where we are, and it does this using our smartphones and what they are doing, a capability that Dan Wagner of Power Technologies points out.

Speaker I: So, for example, I’m reading a magazine at the hairdresser, I see a bottle of scotch or I see, you know, some aftershave, I want to buy. I pick up my phone, I wave it over the ad, and I touch with my thumb and I bought it from Boots or from whoever the advertiser was.

Speaker H: Simple as that.

Speaker I: So is this going to be— That’s a major benefit.

Speaker F: Is this going to be a little like that world that was demonstrated in Minority Report where people were walking past adverts that were actually made for them personally?

Speaker I: Yes, it’s exactly the same as that. The same platform the same infrastructure that we built that allows you to buy from that mobile, with your mobile from an ad in a magazine, allows you also to walk past an ad and for it to present a custom ad to you. Because the mobile then is engaging with the world around you.

Speaker F: Isn’t an essential component of this going to be security? People will worry that if somebody picks up their phone, they could go and buy lots and lots of things on their phone.

Speaker I: They might worry about it, but it is a ridiculous concept. Because the reality is today that people who steal phones take the SIM out and wipe the phone down before selling it on eBay or whatever. Because phones can be tracked if they still keep the SIM in, and they can be tracked if they’ve still got your data on it, like Find My Phone and so on. So most thieves know that now.

Speaker F: Where are you going to go in the future with this? How soon can we expect to see this mobile payment system were actually being predicted a year or so ago and everybody said they would be ubiquitous by now, that they haven’t quite broken through.

Speaker I: I think that ’16 is the year that you’re finally going to see mobile payments come to life and become ubiquitous.

Speaker F: I mean, it was said that when you leave your house that there are 3 things that you go to pick up: your keys, your wallet, and your mobile phone. And people have been predicting that all of those things will be united.

Speaker I: Could you see that happening? Absolutely. I think, you know, in the not too distant future, there will only be one thing that you’ll need to leave the house with, and that will be your mobile phone. It will be the key to your home. It will be the key to your car. It will be the wallet, and it will be everything else that it already is today, which is an incredibly important part of everyone’s lives.

Speaker F: But that will make it a very, very, very powerful device, won’t it? Not only will we be reliant on it. It will also be able to say quite a lot about us.

Speaker I: Absolutely. And I think it’s quite obvious that it already is. I think that’s already clear to people who have smartphones.

Speaker B: And it’s not just the payments that have been reconciled to us that are squeezing out our identity. As Chris Moore, the Vice President of Nexmo, a company specialising in social media, points out, the reason why WhatsApp wants you to have its service for free is so it can know you.

Speaker J: As you know, what’s happened with the messaging apps globally, so this would be WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Viber, Facebook Messenger, they have connected to about 3 billion users worldwide. And so it started out in an environment of where we had pure person-to-person communications. And so, you know, any individual, you and I, could connect to each other over those messaging apps. And that, of course, it drove explosive growth globally because it wasn’t only just text, but it was more rich communications. Now, what’s happened in the last— actually, about 2.5 years ago, WeChat in China, and they have, you know, they own the China market, and Malaysia for that matter. They dominate those two markets. They began to enable the ability for consumers to communicate with brands.

Speaker B: Next, most, Chris Moore, on why WhatsApp is free. Now, as Dr. Weinroth said at the start of this program, by overlaying a number of different data sources, Who and what you are can quickly be revealed. But the technology giant Google is going even further than that. As Powers Dan Wagner points out, paying for services on your phone is a technology that will be here next year. But Google has just announced another technology. Why pay with your phone when you can pay with your face and leave your phone at home? Very handy, but unfortunately the last piece of data that you really want to give out, because Google is a company that doesn’t actually make a lot of fuss out of the fact that it sells identification services to governments. And why stop at using your face to pay for things you want? Why not use it to open your phone? We check our phones on average 120 times a day, and simply using your face to unlock it would be very handy for you. But it would also be handy to the technology companies— the one to sell your location— and to the governments who are keen to know us. As those opposing the DRIPA legislation point out, technology is a double-edged sword: useful and invasive. But quite how invasive, we might find to our cost. According to Professor Fred Cate of Indiana University, a noted expert on data privacy, even before Google’s face recognition announcement, sophisticated algorithms could be used to search through CCTV databases and track an individual’s historical movements. Meaning we could be about to give up not only our present but our past as well as our future. You’re listening to Password with me, Peter Warren. You’ve heard how the new DRIPA law will allow the government and the technology companies to intrude into every intimate detail of our data. But it must be needed, or else why would ministers defy the advice of its own intelligence and technology committees and the whole of the civil rights movement? Listen next week to hear the defence of DRIPA when my contacts reveal just what it is that the law they call the Snooper’s Charter is trying to stop.

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