Balancing individual privacy against other needs, such as national security, critical infrastructure protection, or even science, has long been a challenge for law enforcement, policymakers and scientists. It’s good news when regulations prevent unauthorized people from examining the contents of your communications, but current privacy laws often make it hard — sometimes impossible — to provide academic researchers with data needed to scientifically study the Internet. Our critical dependence on the Internet has rapidly grown much stronger than our comprehension of its underlying structure, performance limits, dynamics, and evolution, and unfortunately current privacy law is part of the problem — legal constraints intended to protect individual communications privacy also leave researchers and policymakers trying to analyze the global Internet ecosystem essentially in the dark. To make matters worse, the few data points suggest a dire picture, shedding doubt on the Internet’s ability to sustain its role as the world’s preferred communications substrate. In the meantime, Internet science struggles to make progress given much less available empirical data than most fields of scientific inquiry.

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i gave a (faster, less understandable) version of this talk (pdf or slides+audio quicktime) at the October 2008 ARIN meeting in Los Angeles (original October version) and again to ISOC’s advisory council meeting in November. motivation: the end of the current addressing architecture, with scant understanding of how to retain all its positive features in the face of inevitable change. a topic i worry about more each year.

(peter cincotti sings as if we knows what we’re going through.)

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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Since talking to NYT reporters is like playing the children’s game of telephone, let me clarify: any developed region with enlightened government will make sure they and neighboring regions have decent network infrastructure so they have good trading partners, for a simple economic reason: in the 21st century the most economically valuable products will be composed of bits, so nations who move bits efficiently will be at an inherent advantage. this hardly seems like news to me. that this natural evolution is destroying the NYT and most of the rest of today’s mainstream media who no longer control the majority of distribution channels is a little more newsworthy, but i’ve never seen an NYT article about that. that the addressing and routing infrastructure is not capable of handling this growth is also newsworthy, as is the U.S. government’s recent accomplishment in improving DNS security in the face of tremendous obstacles. but i guess the NYT has bigger problems than figuring out how to report news on the Internet.

john,

geez, when you asked whether non-u.s. countries are building infrastructure to ‘go around’ the united states, i did not respond with “But economics also plays a role.” the words you put right before my name in your article. What I said to you is that all the folks I know building network infrastructure outside the United States are doing it for economic reasons, per steve gibbard’s article on “smart growth”, and because one thing we know about network economics is that anyone who can afford to build their own infrastructure, does (which i also pointed you to). And specifically not because they are trying to avoid U.S. surveillance. The idea of U.S. hegemony over data flow is silly — if the CIA is depending on it, we are doomed. Do you always insert sinister undertones even when simple economics explains the data?

k

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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In April 2007 I was invited to David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference to participate on a panel about Yochai Benkler‘s new book, Wealth of Networks (amazon, pdf chapters). In Wealth of Networks, Yochai first observes that two phenomena — communication and computation — are becoming affordable and ubiquitous at the same time that they are each becoming fundamental as input as well as output to our economic systems. He then provides empirical evidence [wikipedia] that this ubiquitous availability of information technology (communication and computational resources, or in math speak, links and nodes) among actors enables forms of collaboration so enormously effective as to offer an alternative to traditional models of production, i.e., market-based or government-backed systems.

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(gathered earlier this year upon a student’s request)

1. Abatte, Janet. Inventing the Internet. 2000.
2. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. 2006.
3. Benkler, Yochai. Freedom in the COMMONS: Towards a Political Economy of Information., Duke Law Journal. 2003.
4. Brin, David. Transparent Society. 1999.

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