Interesting write-up on Vox about the political science of Facebook, and how it has been designed to avoid governance and accountability:
…Zuckerberg claims that precisely because he’s not responsible to shareholders, he is able instead to answer his higher responsibility to “the community.”
And he’s very clear, as he says in interview after interview and hearing after hearing, that he takes this responsibility very seriously and is very sorry for having violated it. Just as he’s been sorry ever since he was a first-year college student. But he’s never actually been held responsible.
I touched on this in my RSA presentation about driverless cars several years ago. My take was the Facebook management is a regression of many centuries (pre-Magna Carta). Their primitive risk control concepts, and executive team opposition to modern governance, puts us all on a path of global catastrophe from automation systems, akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It is not one of my most watched videos, that’s for certain.
It seems like talks over the years where I frame code as poetry, with AI security failures like an ugly performance, I garner far more attention. If the language all programmers know best is profanity, who will teach their machines manners?
Meanwhile, my references to human behavior science to describe machine learning security, such as this one about anthropology, fly below radar (pun intended).
Back in 2015 there was some serious consideration of why Toyota were so often used by terrorist groups that the US considered their enemy. Here’s some manufacturers-gonna’-manufacture rationalization:
All of this is to show that any sort of dark alliance between Toyota and the Islamic State is completely specious. The Toyota happens to be the vehicle with the greatest utility; the color of the pickup truck is driven by Asian tastes and the fact that desert heat dictates that white cars are simply more comfortable than black ones; and that Toyota trucks are driven by ISIS is dictated more by the sheer numbers produced and a reputation for quality than some nefarious plot by a well-respected Japanese automaker to supply a terroristic organization.
Simply put: It’s practically guaranteed that any paramilitary force in the Middle East will standardize on white Toyota pickup trucks.
It’s not an unreasonable argument to make (although dark colors and other brands do happen, like the Ford Mark-1).
My main quibble with that article about Toyota is it says nothing about Chad. If you’re going to talk about war trucks, you have to at least make mention of the US role with Toyota pickups sent into battle January 2, 1987:
…no one would have ever guessed that the Toyota pickup truck would come to play an important role in warfare history. This is the little-known story of how an army comprising 400 Toyota pickups outgunned, outsmarted, and outmaneuvered a superior force equipped with tanks and aircraft.
[…]
In the brutal engagement with 1,200 Libyan soldiers and 400 members of the Democratic Revolutionary Council militia, the Chadian army and its Toyota pickups made mincemeat of the Libyan stronghold in Fada. At the end of the day, the Libyan armored brigade in Fada had lost 784 soldiers, 92 T-55 battle tanks, and 33 BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles.
Chadian losses, on the other hand, were minimal: 18 soldiers and 3 Toyota pickup trucks. January 3 and 4 saw the Libyan Air Force try to annihilate the Chadian soldiers and their trucks, but all bombing attempts failed thanks to the outstanding mobility of the Toyota Hilux.
Ok so let’s be frank. It is preposterous to say no one would have ever guessed superior technology would come to play an important role in warfare history. That is literally what happens in every major conflict. Warriors don’t ignore advantages. So there’s a very good argument against that perspective up top, which is that Toyota have for many decades been supplying exactly the technology desired in warfare, and watching the global purchases turn into military purposes.
“Don’t worry about morality or transport my tyrannical friend Habre, we’re flying Toyotas in tonight on a C-130 so you can commit crimes against humanity”.
Whether Toyota can or should stop product flow somewhere along the route is another story. Consider for example that their pickup trucks get assembled in San Antonio, Texas and Baja California, Mexico. Hyundai converted into VBIED were said to have been the result of a local manufacturing plant simply overrun by military forces. The difficulty controlling Toyota’s supply chain is further demonstrated by American companies who lately have been boasting of re-directing Toyota machines straight into warfare:
Battelle, an applied sciences and technology company based in Columbus, Ohio has put out a video explaining how it turns ordinary vehicles into extraordinary ones. According to the company, it’s been creating what it calls “non-standard commercial vehicles” since 2004. Battelle sources Toyota HiLux pickup trucks and Land Cruiser sport utility vehicles, as well as Ford Ranger pickups as a baseline to create their “non-standard” vehicles.
Non-standard sounds far better than dark alliance or nefarious plot, I have to admit.
Ultimately, though, it comes backs to Toyota being on top of its total supply chain and helping investigate use cases of their supply that violates law or its values.
On the one hand releasing product into the wild (e.g. right to repair) creates freedom from corporate control, on the other hand corporations have duty to reduce harms that result from their creations.
Balance between those two ends is best, as history tells us it’s never going to be perfect on either end of the spectrum.
“As a country committed to the respect for human rights and the pursuit of justice, this is also an opportunity for the United States to reflect on, and learn from, our own connection with past events in Chad,” [Secretary of State Kerry] said, apparently referring to U.S. support for Habre in the 1980s to help assuage the influence of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi.
The exhibition looks at the work of [five elite] units as well as the skills and dedication needed to make the cut.
From real-life events, like the Iranian Embassy Siege, to portrayals in popular culture, come and explore the hidden world of the Special Forces.
With just 85 views so far of their promotional video, I’m going to sneak out on a limb here to say coming out of the shadows might be harder than the museum thinks.
Russell Wasendorf allegedly stole over $215 million from his customers and falsified bank statements to cover it up. Bernie Madoff was arrested for losing $50 billion while running ponzi schemes. Jeffrey Skilling was initially sentenced to 24 years in prison and fined $45 million for recording projected future profits as actual profits.
Is the Facebook CSO becoming the new Enron CFO story?
After all, the CSO in question is known for declaring projected future plans as actual security features. When he joined Yahoo to take his first ever job as CSO (also breached catastrophically during his short time there) he pre-announced end-to-end encryption was coming. He never delivered and instead quietly quit to take another shot at being CSO…at Facebook.
It’s serious food for thought when reading about the historic breaches of Facebook that began around the time he joined and continued for years under his watch. It’s been said he’s only giving lip service to users’ best interests (given his failed Yahoo delivery) and more recently it’s been said adversaries to the US targeted him as a “coin operated” asset (given his public hostility to US government).
At this point it will be interesting to see if standing idly for so long and allowing mounting harms to customers, personally profiting from damages done, will lead to any kind of penalty akin to Skilling’s.
Today, given what we know… I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility,” [CEO] said.
“That we’re not just building tools, but that we need to take full responsibility for the outcomes of how people use those tools as well.”
[…]
Facebook has now blocked the facility.
“It is reasonable to expect that if you had that [default] setting turned on, that in the last several years someone has probably accessed your public information in this way,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
The last several years represent the tenure of the CSO in question. “Today, given what we know?” That responsibility was no secret before he joined, and it should not have taken so many years to come to the realization that a CSO is meant to stop harm instead of profiting from it. So the question becomes what is next for the man whose first and only two attempts at being a CSO have ended in the largest breaches in history.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
