I recently attended my first FCC Technological Advisory Council meeting (video archives). A week before the meeting we received a memo from the chairman of the committee (Tom Wheeler) notifying the committee of a “clear and challenging mandate from Chairman Genachowski: to generate ideas and spur actions that lead to job creation and economic growth in the ICT [information and communication technologies] ecosystem.” Specifically, “The TAC will focus on the short term implementation of innovative ideas to create investment and jobs, as opposed to long term regulatory changes.”

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Recently a group of Internet technology researchers, attorneys and policy professionals participated in a DHS-sponsored workshop, “Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects in Information and Communications Technology Network and Security Research.” Possible nickname: Belmont Flux Workshop. If you’re still glassy-eyed: (1) you have yet to engage the depths of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in the context of network and security research; (2) you gave up after seeing “Ethical principles”; and/or (3) you think human subjects issues and network research are orthogonal.

Here’s a summary of the event, and hopefully some inspiration.

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I spent a few hours at the FCC two weeks back, presented a slide version of a top ten list I wrote last year. Requested discussion topics: obstacles to data collection, how data is collected and used, policy-making based on inference, how to develop an objective knowledge base for science and policy, privacy expectations/rights versus the need for understanding the system as critical infrastructure. Audience mostly lawyers, worried about how they are going to accomplish a reasonable broadband plan. As I tried to describe in my five-minute presentation slot (and 1 slide, and more expansive blog entry) on the broadband panel at the DOC ten weeks ago, solutions begin with recognition of some underlying empirical facts, starting with one that is strangely not being emphasized by lobbyists: you can’t make Wall-Street-approved margins moving bits around over long distances. Lot of implications to that reality; the sooner we admit it, the more realistic our broadband plan will be.

Stefan pointed me at a paper titled “Designing and Conducting Phishing Experiment” (in IEEE Technology and Society Special Issue on Usability and Security, 2007) that makes an amazing claim: it might be more ethical to not debrief the subjects of your phishing experiments after the experiments are over, in particular you might ‘do less harm’ if you do not reveal that some of the sites you had them browse were phishing sites.

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[this thread on transfers is too painful to watch. here’s my take.]

Even if turning IP addresses into private property is the best policy decision of those available (which is far from demonstrated, since so little rigorous research of this question has actually occurred), executing such a policy by Board fiat while ARIN itself has no leadership is guaranteed to generate severe dissonance with ARIN’s organizational mission which includes forging public legitimacy entirely from its transparent, open processes.

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In November 2008 I had the honor of being invited to speak at the Chilean Computer Science Society Annual Meeting, this year at the Universidad de Magallanes in Punta Arenas, Chile. I followed a colleague who has been visiting CAIDA for the last two years, Sebastian Castro, back to his sponsoring institution, NIC Chile. We started out with an interesting meeting with a core of technical folk where I learned about the activities of NIC Chile’s recently established research arm (NIC Labs). We exchanged valuable information on the common (and less common) challenges of doing successful research in our respective environments.

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Busy month. On 15 October I presented CAIDA’s analysis of the CAIDA/ARIN IPv6 survey at the ARIN meeting. More on that later.

The next day I presented to the DHS/SRI Infosec Technology Transition Council (ITTC), where “experts and leaders from the government, private, financial, IT, venture capitalist, and academia and science sectors come together to address the problem of identity theft and related criminal activity on the Internet.”

It is only a three-hour meeting, a few times a year (my first time), but intense. They had a timely panel first, “Integrity in Elections”, where they reviewed so many methodological flaws in voting procedures, they shed substantial doubt on the proposition of fair national elections anytime soon. John Sebes motivated the computational science challenge well: if we are not capable of building a trustworthy computational system to accomplish the conceptually simple task of tallying a vote, what can we expect to be capable of building trusted computational systems to do? And while there is inspirational work on documenting and proposing how to solve the technology issues that threaten election integrity, the bottom line is disheartening.

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I (and others) have spent a bit of time over the last year encouraging Internet2 to take a more proactive role in supporting network research. So I was delighted to see the proposal of a new network research review council, which I reckon will amount to a network-research-dedicated IRB for Internet2.For most researchers, Internet2 has the closest they will get to real large-scale network operators. Internet2 operators are more willing to expose pain points and obstacles they encounter, and Internet2 provides more data about itself to the public, than any other network I know, public or private. Even better, Internet2 management is also more capable of fostering effective, cross-disciplinary, scientific Internet research than the private sector, simply by virtue of their incentive structure.

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Last week I attended the biannual principal investigators (PI) meeting of DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s Cybersecurity program. I found myself assigned the speaking slot at 9:30am on September 11, on the 26th floor of an Arlington building with a more majestic view of the Pentagon than I’ve ever had. I spent the coffee breaks looking out the windows at commercial aircraft continually flying right by the Pentagon en route to DCA, an airport the feds bravely did not close down after 9/11/2001. (who says the terrorists won?)

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As part of our DHS-funded cybersecurity project on Internet topology mapping with CAIDA’s new Archipelago measurement infrastructure, DHS program manager Doug Maughan required a representative of each R&D project to attend a marketing workshop at SRI for some intense training on how to communicate the value of our specific projects to potential customers or sponsors. It was a 2-day format condensed from a typically week-long workshop based on (president of SRI) Curtis Carlson’s book on the discipline of innovation. I went in to the workshop somewhat skeptical it would be useful. However, I recognize I have weak marketing skills since the scientist in me always wants to point out the dozen caveats of anything I’m presenting before I focus on the contributions. So I acknowledged I was an ideal candidate for the workshop.

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