Last week the Obama Administration announced that it would be shortly submitting legislation intended to force providers of all kinds of digital communication services (mail, voice, chat, Twitter, etc.) to install back doors in their services to allow government monitoring of all encrypted digital communication. No explicit details were given of how this is going to work, nor has the actual legislation yet been introduced. Hopefully it never will, because it simply won’t work.
It’s not that such technical back doors can’t be written (they can), nor is it even so onerous to force communication providers to change all their software since these services are rewritten often anyway. The problem is that such back doors will […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 
Today is the Labor Day holiday in the USA, so to honor the more vulnerable parts of our society and economy I’m engaging in this fantasy rethinking of our current economic crisis. If only……
This is the first of probably three columns on health care. The Obama Administration right now has in Congress legislation for reforming the U.S. health system so that sets my agenda. But the point of these columns isn’t to comment, per se, on the current proposals, but instead to look at what I believe to be my two areas of some strength — Information Technology and understanding complex systems — and see how they can be applied to this problem.