Some time ago, the press spent some energy on a report by a U.S. military contractor on preparing for online threats from China. Wired this week has a solid contribution to the issue. It’s opinionated, but it opens with a provocative statement on the part of a White House staffer with responsibilities for cyber security. Read it.

Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

“There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.”

The influential new media thinker Dan Gillmor today took offense after some readers requested that The New York Times stop putting the names of Olympic winners in headlines and blurbs on the main page of its website. He was put off by the suggestion that NBC’s TV rights and the network’s decision to air the most popular events during the evening should affect the way other media organizations do business.

I am usually on the side of defending the principles of journalism, but I found myself disagreeing with Gillmor’s construction of “real journalists” versus the money-motivated “fantasy world” of tape-delay television. I put some thought into a comment on his site, and thought I would put it here as well.

I think there’s a difference between sports and entertainment news and news on public affairs. I, for one, neither watch NBC’s coverage nor read more timely coverage of the Olympics: I don’t care who wins! But I am a graduate of a journalism school and a young veteran of reporting in several media. I understand the drive to put things out there quickly. Timeliness, I was taught, is an important element of newsworthiness.

The argument that allowing people to structure their information in a different bundle is offensive to journalism, however, depends on the idea that timeliness trumps other values in news. I think the most important value of news is its civic function.

Do entertainment and sports news serve a civic function? If you believe that community identity and cross-cutting ties are a key element of U.S. democracy (which puts you in the company of de Tocqueville and Robert Putnam), then the answer is yes. But does timely reporting online matter in this context? I think there may be a civic, social capital-based argument for letting people wait for the NBC coverage, so that they will watch these things together.

Is timeliness more important than the civic outcome? Elements of newsworthiness do not always serve us well; witness the speed- and conflict-fueled daily political crossfire. My point here is that if “journalism” is a form to be defended, we must ask why. To the extent that fundamentals of journalism were developed in an era of daily newspapers, I think it’s important to ask whether a reliance on the fundamentals serves the same purpose now.

I know I am not alone in reevaluating the pillars of newsworthiness that the late Professor Dick Schwarzlose introduced me to as an undergraduate journalism student. Gillmor is far more forward-looking than most. I think we do, however, need to keep in mind that the defense of journalism as an institution is motivated by civic outcomes. (Paul Starr last year in The New Republic gave eloquent voice to this perspective.) Fundamentals of journalism are intermediary goals and must be adjusted if conditions change.

A study of national efforts to improve broadband coverage requested by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission finds that the United States is a “middle-of-the-pack performer” on first-generation broadband and lags on advanced developments. It finds that “open access” policies are a key driver of successful broadband development, and that public investment over the long term can be a key driver.

The study, produced by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University under principal investigator Yochai Benkler, analyzed market-oriented democracies and their efforts to expand broadband, aiming to inform U.S. efforts. Broadband is conceptualized here as having two key components: high download speeds and ubiquitous, seamless access.

Open access accompanies advanced access

Our most surprising and significant finding is that “open access” policies—unbundling, bitstream access, collocation requirements, wholesaling, and/or functional separation—are almost universally understood as having played a core role in the first generation transition to broadband in most of the high performing countries; that they now play a core role in planning for the next generation transition; and that the positive impact of such policies is strongly supported by the evidence of the first generation broadband transition.

It may not be surprising that Benkler and a Berkman team would come out in favor of open access, but there is no reason to assume anything other than a good-faith inquiry. Based on case studies of half of the OECD countries, the researchers found that the countries with stronger open access provisions are out-performing others. In the advanced broadband markets of Japan and South Korea, open access “has taken the form of opening up not only the fiber infrastructure (Japan) but also requiring mobile broadband access providers to open up their networks to competitors.”

I have not read the full report, but it contains a chapter that covers the existing literature in econometrics and qualitative studies on open access. In the report, open access is touted as driving innovation by allowing new entrants to the market to lease or otherwise use infrastructure built by established firms.

Open access may drive prices down

The highest prices for the lowest speeds are mostly offered by firms in the United States and Canada, all of which inhabit markets structured around “inter-modal” competition—that is, competition between one incumbent owning a telephone system, and one incumbent owning a cable system, where the price of entry into the market is the ability to build your own infrastructure. The lowest prices and highest speeds are almost all offered by firms in markets where, in addition to an incumbent telephone company and a cable company, there are also competitors who entered the market, and built their presence, through use of open access facilities.

Though the study does not appear to be designed to show causation or even rigorous correlation between lower prices and open access, the researchers suggest that this is a key factor.

State investment has been present in better-developed broadband

Noting that the U.S. recovery funding for broadband is strong per capita at more than 7 billion, the researchers suggest that experiences in other OECD countries show that public investment has been a part of successful development.

I have lost track of the state of broadband projects, but I know the FCC is actively working on it and the recovery funds, which were reportedly to be focused on rural and under-served areas, need to be spent. It will be interesting to see whether these principles make it into U.S. broadband policy.

Brian Mefford, CEO of the nonprofit telecommunications mapping group Connected Nation explains on another great Hillicon Valley post how they go about mapping broadband and wireless access as part of the broadband stimulus funding passed last year. They also have a tool for browsing the maps.

We literally have companies fax in a map with lines drawn in that say, “Here’s where we provide service.” Someone might send addresses covered by their network. We have to normalize all that so we can present it as a covered area on a map.

The validation process is something we invest as heavily in as the data collection. Once we receive the data from providers, we translate it into a GIS format and then validate it by sending it back to provider and ask if it accurately represents where they provide service. There will be additions, deletions and other changes.

Our engineers will then spot-check that their (broadband network) equipment is actually where they say it is. They use spectrum analyzers to provide wireless analysis. Then we do telephone surveys with homes and businesses to check their availability.

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed a meeting in April with leaders of technology companies to discuss how to improve the government’s information technology infrastructure. From The Hill‘s Hillicon Valley blog:

“Twenty years ago, people who came to work in the federal government had better technology at work than at home,” said [Peter] Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Now that’s no longer the case.

“The American people deserve better service from their government, and better return for their tax dollars.”

The White House release that included Orszag’s comments said one “specific source” of ineffective and inefficient government is the huge technology gap between the public and private sectors that results in billions of dollars in waste, slow and inadequate customer service and a lack of transparency about how dollars are spent.

This doesn’t mean the public will necessarily see the physical results of any upgrade. The inefficiency is seen as within the government, rather than in the government’s interactions with citizens.

“Improving the technology our government uses isn’t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our websites — it’s about how we use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to make government work better for them,” Obama said in a statement.

Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress [disclosure: I used to work there, but do not know Millhiser] writes that a tagging system in an intelligence database that should have identified the Dec. 25 airline attacker failed—because it hasn’t been built yet.

The backbone of this web of obligations to discover, request, and share information is an automated database that ICD 501 requires the Intelligence Community to create. Part Google, part Facebook, part Microsoft Excel, such a database allows intelligence officials to comprehensively catalog their knowledge, tagging each data-field according to how it is connected to other information, and what level of security clearance is required to read it. The entry on Abdulmutallab should have been tagged to indicate that he is possibly connected to violent religious extremists, that he is a Nigerian citizen, and that he is located in Yemen. Had an NSA official, aware that Al-Qaeda in Yemen was planning to use a Nigerian citizen to commit an attack, searched the database for a Nigerian who fit the profile of a potential attacker, it is almost certain that Abdulmutallab would have been discovered sooner and flagged for additional screening before he could board a plane to the United States.

But there is a very simple reason why such a search was never conducted. According to multiple software designers involved in creating ICD 501-compliant platforms, the Intelligence Community has not yet built the IT infrastructure required to support this database. ICD 501 was issued almost a year ago, but crucial infrastructure that is essential to the directive’s functioning simply doesn’t exist.

This puts details on top of a hunch I had that a fairly simple information system could have collated intelligence about a threat by a Nigerian and about this particular Nigerian.

I spent the night thinking that I would write something about Google’s decision on China, and it seems my blogging spirit has eroded since the days of Sinobyte. If in the end I have something to offer, you’ll hear about it, but for now, I think the most useful thing is to look at what others have said. In no particular order, here’s a tab dump.

• Google’s Threat Echoed Everywhere, Except China from The New York Times‘ Andy Jacobs, Miguel Helft, and John Markoff: The news of Google’s announcement was predictably closely regulated on Chinese news sites.
• U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a statement indicating that on the issue of incursions into business or activist information, “We look to the Chinese government for an explanation.”
• Rebecca MacKinnon writes in the Wall Street Journal that Google has gotten on the right side of history and will be rewarded when an event like the fall of the Berlin Wall opens the past to analysis companies’ roles in censorship.
• MacKinnon also notes that she believes Google “has done the right thing.”
• Ethan Zuckerman sees four ways to read Google’s decision: (1) Google decided to stop being evil and responded to criticism that its adherence to Chinese government standards was damaging. (2) Google retreated from a rough market, where it was struggling to gain market share against Baidu. (3) Google abandoned Chinese users, who had come to depend on the service. (4) Google is about to join the front lines of the anti-censorship wars, which would likely be necessary if it is to maintain any Chinese user base despite a likely block by Internet authorities.
• Google believes the network breaches were state sponsored, reports Robert McMillan at MacWorld. The story focuses on elements of state-sponsored corporate espionage and includes some anonymous quotes that suggest Google has been dealing with this since late December.
• Michael Anti tells BBC he supports Google’s decision. (I can’t listen to this just now, because I am in a library.)
• Evgeny Morozov is skeptical of Google’s motivations: “Are we really supposed to believe that, until they experienced cyberattacks on the email accounts of the Chinese human rights activists, they thought that their counterparts in the Chinese government were all good and well-meaning chaps who would never think of such a thing?” He argues that it seems more plausible that Google wanted to get out of a bad market and wrapped the decision in human rights-related PR copy.
• Based on a classified FBI report, the Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner puts the news in the context of a Chinese cyber threat.
• Junyu Wang has nice photographs of the pseudo-vigil outside Google’s office at Wudaokou in Beijing.
• Dharmishta has a round-up of early reactions that covers several angles noted here and several others.
• Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch: “Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.”
• James Fallows sees this development as a transition in China’s leadership to a “Bush-Cheney era,” by which he means the country’s government is turning into one “much of the world [sees] as deliberately antagonizing them.” He also argues that “In terms of information flow into China, this decision probably makes no real difference at all,” because most users aren’t going for restricted information, and those who want it know how to get around blocks.
• Imagethief, coming at the announcement from a corporate PR angle, sees the Google announcement as the total abandonment of a strategy shared by many foreign businesses in China whereby they attempt to align themselves with the government in order to avoid problems and access the Chinese market.
• Danwei’s regular feature looking at the top story in a Chinese newspaper reminds us that in other big China search engine news, Baidu was hacked yesterday.
• Nart Villeneuve, an Internet security expert and lead author of the 2008 report on the GhostNet cyber-espionage attacks, says this news should reminds us: “The nexus of censorship, surveillance and malware attacks allows China is the key to China’s information control policies. It is not just about the GFW.” He also says he hopes Microsoft and Yahoo will follow Google on this.
• Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy puts the move in the context of increased U.S.–China tensions in 2010.
• Jonathan Zittrain anticipates that if Google pulls down its China-based operations, it may be well positioned to develop circumvention methods to provide access to Google despite government restrictions.

Most likely, I’ll have more to say on this soon. I think over all the interpretations out there make sense. Ethan’s point that there are many ways to look at the decision I think shows that this was no simple decision. The Macworld story mentions that top Google officials met on Christmas Eve to figure out what to do. For at least three weeks now, this decision has been on the minds of some of the leaders of the industry.

It’s interesting to note, too, that this comes amidst a general turn to negativity in U.S. media on China. Following the COP15 meeting, a dominant narrative had China as the spoiler (this after the media got done lambasting the White House for failing). Beginning with Paul Krugman’s op-ed on the currency problem, there has been a set of accusations that China is the problem in the U.S. economy. This news, and the news on China’s newest missile tests, have taken the environment and economy confrontations and added corporate and national security elements, as well as reviving human rights narratives.

For someone who watches events closely, I must say the Google news is big. The general tone of antagonism toward China, however, does not seem to be based in any new developments other than a change in the conventional wisdom in newsrooms and chattering classes. It’s an open question whether antagonistic rhetoric in this situation reflects an existing antagonism or fuels a new one.

As an addendum to my post about information systems and the politics of the failed attack on Dec. 25, here’s a nice paragraph from Dan Ryan at Sociology of Information.

The president was furious about the failure of the system to see “the red flags” and intelligence agencies are reported to have said that the information they had was “vague but available.”  The problem is that flags are not, in general, a priori red.  Presumably, some smart people are thinking about how systems see and things like that; hopefully, they don’t just think of it as “connect the dots.”

Ryan points out that many of the new measures we know about are designed to create more information.

In the framework from my previous post, the problem here is that the machinery built to process information failed. I would not want to fall into the trap Ryan decries of complaining that “dots” went unconnected. I do think however that a process that better collated the available information might have brought this threat to wider attention. So it’s not “connect the dots,” but rather “collate and evaluate” information.

Then again, a radio report last night (BBC interviewed someone clearly from a conservative organization in D.C.) pointed out that gate personnel were working from the wrong no-fly lists. This person seemed motivated by some anti-Obama talking points, but if part of the statement was factual, both the information and response systems were broken.

Alex Lundry gives us lessons in graphical literacy for political speech. Some pointers:

• Common tactic: Play games with the origin and axis. (Change where the chart’s “zero” is.)
• Correlation / Causation: Don’t conflate them.
• “Pie charts suck, so be wary of them.”

And he gives us a great video.

[h/t Infosthetics]

It’s not every day that you read a lead political story in The New York Times and find 10 mentions of “information.”* But in today’s report on the intelligence failures that allowed a man to board a flight to the United States with explosives in his pants, information aggregation, processing, and distribution is the core of the story.

The political noise since Sunday has been over whether “the system worked,” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano gracelessly stated (though she clarified later). President Barack Obama yesterday noted that there was a “systemic failure” in connecting information about this particular attacker and signals that a “Nigerian” may be part of an upcoming attack. Obama said, however, that “once the suspect attempted to take down Flight 253, after his attempt, it’s clear that passengers and crew, our homeland security systems, and our aviation security took all appropriate actions.”

The confusion here comes from the fact that there are two systems under discussion. An information system built to gather, analyze, and redistribute intelligence failed, but a response system designed to deal with a crisis apparently worked.

This is a rare case in which the collection, processing, and use of information by a government makes headlines. Below the political blame-seeking and analyses of implications for an “embattled” White House before midterm elections that are still a year away lies a serious discussion of the ability of the United States government to manage security-related information.

The information system that failed on Sept. 11, 2001, was changed drastically with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which were each intended to be central nodes for better cooperation among bureaucracies for national security. The new system, in this case, suffered from familiar failures.

Ideally, the system would have put the attacker on a no-fly list (though as security researcher Chris Soghoian has shown, this may not have stopped him from flying). He wasn’t on the list, because no one connected his father’s statements that he might be involved with terrorists in Yemen with other intelligence about a coming attack by a Nigerian. Aside from bureaucratic procedure, it seems a variety of information architectures and processing rules might have made this connection more apparent, either by human or automated analysis.

* There were 10 mentions in the print edition. Online may be different.