A year ago, Iran's sans culottes saw their Prague Spring dissolve under the clouds of authoritarian might as sanctioned enforcers bulldozed disaffected voters into political silence. For a brief moment, technology seemed to offer a secret weapon to counter state silencers. Twitter enabled angry commoners to assemble en masse before government crowd busters could deploy storm troopers to stop them. Eventually, though, the protests faded. Protest leaders died, disappeared, or were hunted down for imprisonment, beatings, or worse.
Somewhere, as this story unfolded, the Wall Street Journal and other news organs reported that Siemens had supplied Iran with the means of tracking and monitoring telecommunications, like those annoying text and Twitter messages so important for protesting citizens involved in organizing marches and demonstrations.
Isn't it interesting that this year now finds the Iranian government frustrated by the Stuxnet worm targeting another Siemens product? The product, in this case, is Siemens' supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system for Iran's nuclear power facility. While this cyber malware is sophisticated to the point of speculation of state sponsorship, could there be another facet to this attack? Could it be that some disaffected citizen who lost a loved one in last year's protest crackdowns had the sophistication and motivation to strike back not only at the Iranian government but also at a contractor who provided that government with tools to undermine popular resistance? Is there an element of revenge in play, one wonders?
-- Nick Catrantzos
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Inquisitive Arts Score Win
It is amazing what people will divulge if someone takes the time to get and keep them talking. The art in transforming conversation into investigative technique comes from guiding interviews to the point of facilitating admissions. This, in turn, requires creating opportunities for interviewees to reveal where they are being deceptive. This, in turn, requires the interviewing investigator to shut up. After all, as studies have shown, the average length of time it takes before a detective interrupts an interviewee is 8 seconds (Rebecca Milne & Ray Bull, 1988. Investigative Interviewing. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons).
Someone in Vancouver, Washington, must have taken the foregoing lessons to heart when local detectives announced yesterday that Bethany Storro threw acid on her own face on August 30, instead of being the victim of a random attacker. As details trickle out through the media, talk about splash patterns and a search of Ms. Storro’s residence may imply that forensic evidence broke the case. Perhaps. But the home search produced no acid, and deriving subtle indicators of deception from acid splash patterns in this case would be like driving around the block to arrive next door. It is much more likely that old fashioned, inquisitive interviewing and zeroing in on inconsistent statements gave Ms. Storro away. What might some of those questions and answers have looked like? (This is my speculation only.)
Q: If you had to theorize, who do you think might have done this?
A: Gee. I really don’t know. [Deceptive. The innocent tend to offer some names. The guilty or deceptive are more inclined not to.]
Q: What do you think should happen to the person who did this?
A: I don’t know. Maybe they need help. I don’t want revenge. [Deceptive. Storro did advance an avowed, Christian message along the lines of not seeking revenge. The innocent tend to name a harsh punishment. The guilty don’t because this question in effect makes them answer how they feel they should themselves be punished.]
Q: Do you think the person who did this should have a second chance, or rehabilitation?
A: Yes. [Deceptive. Same rationale as above. The innocent stick to harsh punishment.]
Other revealing signs include how Storro structured her story. In a true statement, emotions appear in illogical places because this is how the truthful person remembers them happening. In a deceptive story, every detail supports the narrative and is rehearsed. Thus, Ms. Storro’s initial story most likely suffered from appearing too logical, too tidy. Additionally, most deceptive accounts of events devote an inordinate amount of time to setting the stage and building up to the incident itself. True stories have the bulk of the narrative concentrating on the incident itself with a modest preamble and a modest conclusion.
All a detective or private sector investigator has to do is look, if he or she wants training on how to detect deception. Avinoam Sapir’s Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN) technique is absolutely first-rate for unearthing deception in statements a subject makes, whether in print or in broadcast interviews. Mr. Sapir no doubt would have discerned multiple red flags in the way Ms. Storro talked about the incident from her hospital bed when she got her first exposure to media attention. Wasn’t it interesting, he might have wondered, that she made such a show of Christian forbearance in not seeking out harsh treatment for her alleged attacker? Another handy addition to the investigator’s tool kit would be the Wicklander-Zulawski method of interviewing to detect deception. Indeed, this W-Z technique inspired my foregoing questions and answers.
None of this works, however, if the process excludes the fundamental necessity: an investigator with an inquisitive nature. It takes an inquiring mind to wonder why a woman who claims she never wears sunglasses was wearing them at 7:15 p.m. in the shadow of a city building just in time to mitigate the so-called random acid attack. Well done, Vancouver detectives.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Someone in Vancouver, Washington, must have taken the foregoing lessons to heart when local detectives announced yesterday that Bethany Storro threw acid on her own face on August 30, instead of being the victim of a random attacker. As details trickle out through the media, talk about splash patterns and a search of Ms. Storro’s residence may imply that forensic evidence broke the case. Perhaps. But the home search produced no acid, and deriving subtle indicators of deception from acid splash patterns in this case would be like driving around the block to arrive next door. It is much more likely that old fashioned, inquisitive interviewing and zeroing in on inconsistent statements gave Ms. Storro away. What might some of those questions and answers have looked like? (This is my speculation only.)
Q: If you had to theorize, who do you think might have done this?
A: Gee. I really don’t know. [Deceptive. The innocent tend to offer some names. The guilty or deceptive are more inclined not to.]
Q: What do you think should happen to the person who did this?
A: I don’t know. Maybe they need help. I don’t want revenge. [Deceptive. Storro did advance an avowed, Christian message along the lines of not seeking revenge. The innocent tend to name a harsh punishment. The guilty don’t because this question in effect makes them answer how they feel they should themselves be punished.]
Q: Do you think the person who did this should have a second chance, or rehabilitation?
A: Yes. [Deceptive. Same rationale as above. The innocent stick to harsh punishment.]
Other revealing signs include how Storro structured her story. In a true statement, emotions appear in illogical places because this is how the truthful person remembers them happening. In a deceptive story, every detail supports the narrative and is rehearsed. Thus, Ms. Storro’s initial story most likely suffered from appearing too logical, too tidy. Additionally, most deceptive accounts of events devote an inordinate amount of time to setting the stage and building up to the incident itself. True stories have the bulk of the narrative concentrating on the incident itself with a modest preamble and a modest conclusion.
All a detective or private sector investigator has to do is look, if he or she wants training on how to detect deception. Avinoam Sapir’s Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN) technique is absolutely first-rate for unearthing deception in statements a subject makes, whether in print or in broadcast interviews. Mr. Sapir no doubt would have discerned multiple red flags in the way Ms. Storro talked about the incident from her hospital bed when she got her first exposure to media attention. Wasn’t it interesting, he might have wondered, that she made such a show of Christian forbearance in not seeking out harsh treatment for her alleged attacker? Another handy addition to the investigator’s tool kit would be the Wicklander-Zulawski method of interviewing to detect deception. Indeed, this W-Z technique inspired my foregoing questions and answers.
None of this works, however, if the process excludes the fundamental necessity: an investigator with an inquisitive nature. It takes an inquiring mind to wonder why a woman who claims she never wears sunglasses was wearing them at 7:15 p.m. in the shadow of a city building just in time to mitigate the so-called random acid attack. Well done, Vancouver detectives.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Monday, September 13, 2010
Hype Demonizing the Dead and Troubled
It is hard to conceive a more base hijacking of homeland security than what is now happening between egotistic speculators and yellow journalists eager to stoke a panic over this personal tragedy. (See http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg%3Farticleid%3D1281024%26format%3D%26page%3D2%26listingType%3DLoc&wsi=2905647a0c44fc0a&ei=dySOTMDlHJ3SrgPbr5GgAg&wsc=pr&whp=3AarticleFull.)
What happened? A Northwestern University lab tech, apparently distraught over losing her job, took her life using cyanide. To compound the tragedy, though, media reports are now turning an otherwise personal, inward event into hysteria about loose control over cyanide in school labs. Not only is this a callous move that aggravates the circumstances for the suicide's family, it gives rise to ridiculous frenzy. Suicides use what they have at hand. Lock up all the lab chemicals, inventory them daily, and then what? Will you also lock up all the bodies of water to preclude intentional drowning? How about bridges and tall buildings, to bar death by leap from high places?
Some controls may be worth a second look, but turning the troubled, dead woman into a theoretical enabler of terrorist attacks is wildly speculative and insensitive in the extreme. Even the reporter advancing this notion sews the seeds of doubt, however, as the article can't help having one of its expert quotes point out that cyanide of the kind mentioned here is more applicable to attacking small numbers of people. Another quote has a security director opining that the young woman was distraught. It is the reporter, however, who leaps from "distraught" to "disgruntled." This proves how handy the dead can be, since they can neither defend their reputations nor retaliate against hasty accusations. It reflects poorly on reporter and accuser, diminishing credibility of all eager to speculate. One day, they may have a real terrorist threat to announce. That will be precisely the day intended victims will ignore the warning from sources tarnished by crying wolf as they are doing today.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Some
What happened? A Northwestern University lab tech, apparently distraught over losing her job, took her life using cyanide. To compound the tragedy, though, media reports are now turning an otherwise personal, inward event into hysteria about loose control over cyanide in school labs. Not only is this a callous move that aggravates the circumstances for the suicide's family, it gives rise to ridiculous frenzy. Suicides use what they have at hand. Lock up all the lab chemicals, inventory them daily, and then what? Will you also lock up all the bodies of water to preclude intentional drowning? How about bridges and tall buildings, to bar death by leap from high places?
Some controls may be worth a second look, but turning the troubled, dead woman into a theoretical enabler of terrorist attacks is wildly speculative and insensitive in the extreme. Even the reporter advancing this notion sews the seeds of doubt, however, as the article can't help having one of its expert quotes point out that cyanide of the kind mentioned here is more applicable to attacking small numbers of people. Another quote has a security director opining that the young woman was distraught. It is the reporter, however, who leaps from "distraught" to "disgruntled." This proves how handy the dead can be, since they can neither defend their reputations nor retaliate against hasty accusations. It reflects poorly on reporter and accuser, diminishing credibility of all eager to speculate. One day, they may have a real terrorist threat to announce. That will be precisely the day intended victims will ignore the warning from sources tarnished by crying wolf as they are doing today.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Some
Sunday, September 5, 2010
When Solution Is Not the Problem
It’s you. Sometimes, you must stop blaming the chosen tool for not solving your problem. Sometimes, the fault is your own. It is not how good the tool may be at its theoretical best. It is how good you are with it, how well you use it to solve the problem in your path. You must also start out with the right tool for the job.
Matters of security reflect their ambient surroundings, which infect security challenges with the same tendencies and folly that rage through modern life. Not only does the sound-bite age predispose us to seeking instant answers, it conditions us to seek out the sexy at the expense of the reliable – a peddler’s paradise. Witness, for example, the popular rush to set aside proven business tools in a blind lust for promised elegance and slick functionality. Few illustrations of this tug-of-war surpass the efforts of RIM to market its business tool, the BlackBerry, as a competitor of the iPhone, a device optimized for entertainment. To the business user, it is surreal to see how BlackBerry maker’s RIM is positioning its current advertising campaigns for the Torch. Whom do they showcase? Young, hip, artistic, individual consumers eager to go turbo-networking with their peers. No room for any traditional business people relying on the device to consummate a deal, manage a crisis, or communicate a plan of action to colleague or subordinate from field to office.
What Is Wrong with BlackBerry Today
It isn't the specter of being banned in Dubai or Saudi Arabia for RIM's insufficient groveling to authoritarian pressures to make it easier for these governments to decrypt electronic messages. It isn't only iPhone envy and an inability to compete head-to-head against Apple for web surfing, music playing, trendy applications, or even more trendy stylishness. No. What threaten to plunge BlackBerry into extinction are the self-inflicted wounds of lost identity and a headlong rush to transform a stand-apart business tool into a me-too, never-quite-hip-enough toy. This represents a textbook case of how to dilute and extinguish one’s own, once-formidable brand.
Instead of remembering its core market, the business customer, RIM is courting young, personal smartphone users in its TV ad campaigns. This approach forgets that business users differ from kids. So do their needs. As a business user who managed his employer's first all-BlackBerry-equipped professional staff (none of them techies) I offer these distinctions which continue to make the BlackBerry a tool that trumps the iPhone in the business world — at least for now:
My security staff and I need e-mail, phone, a robust address book that can look up phone numbers from the enterprise server, the ability to take decent but manageably small-size photos that we can e-mail easily, and Note/Memopad capacity that most other smartphones ignore or handle poorly. Strong battery life is also a plus. Because we use the device to transact serious business, we need an adult, QWERTY keyboard that facilitates sending out timely and accurate instructions suitable for board room discussion and even legal or reputational challenge in court. We do not need to mix our business applications with social networking, recorded music, games, TV or video viewing. Nor do we need to send or receive video messages of ourselves that are data-intensive but as vapid as the average teen's texting commentary on world affairs We especially lose our taste for such functions when they begin to crowd out our business applications. Example? The newer BB Curve boasts more iTunes-like functionality and video-taking while removing the flash from its camera. Hip young individuals may applaud this. Business users just shake our heads. I have three iPods, including a Touch. They cannot rival the BlackBerry for business any more than BlackBerry can compete against them for music or video access.
A Tool, Not a Toy
Memo to RIM, stop competing for the casual, high texting, low substance dilettante if you want to retain the professional as your core customer. Apple and its acolytes can't quite reformat for the serious business user. By default they alphabetize address books by first name and, when they grudgingly adding a Notes/Memopad feature, they still bypassed a rational, businesslike ordering of entries alphabetically. Instead, Apple insists on indulging callow, adolescent developer defaults, like ordering notes only by reverse chronological sequence. Great for kids with the attention span of a flashbulb and a planning horizon that stops with Saturday night. Lousy for serious business people who use Notes to carry over 50 procedures and references that they may need to consult when responding to a threat or crisis while fielding a panic call comes in at midnight.
Final Caution: Don't rely exclusively on the techies to chart your course. All specialists sooner or later fall in love with the tools of their trade. The same technologists who push for more and more functionality are the ones who resist design freezes and struggle to come up with final documentation – or final anything. It's always more fun to keep trying something new (the Edsel, New Coke, and Microsoft Vista) than to finish and perfect what they have grown bored with. But the business user needs and desires core functionality that works reliably – not razzle dazzle and the future promise of cool things that take too long to work and offer little practical value in relation to the effort necessary to master and troubleshoot.
For RIM and the serious business user, decide. What business are you in, tool or toy? Who is your customer, the business professional or the budding or overripe adolescent? Their wants and needs are very different, and one may be less forgiving or fault tolerant than the other.
- Nick Catrantzos
Matters of security reflect their ambient surroundings, which infect security challenges with the same tendencies and folly that rage through modern life. Not only does the sound-bite age predispose us to seeking instant answers, it conditions us to seek out the sexy at the expense of the reliable – a peddler’s paradise. Witness, for example, the popular rush to set aside proven business tools in a blind lust for promised elegance and slick functionality. Few illustrations of this tug-of-war surpass the efforts of RIM to market its business tool, the BlackBerry, as a competitor of the iPhone, a device optimized for entertainment. To the business user, it is surreal to see how BlackBerry maker’s RIM is positioning its current advertising campaigns for the Torch. Whom do they showcase? Young, hip, artistic, individual consumers eager to go turbo-networking with their peers. No room for any traditional business people relying on the device to consummate a deal, manage a crisis, or communicate a plan of action to colleague or subordinate from field to office.
What Is Wrong with BlackBerry Today
It isn't the specter of being banned in Dubai or Saudi Arabia for RIM's insufficient groveling to authoritarian pressures to make it easier for these governments to decrypt electronic messages. It isn't only iPhone envy and an inability to compete head-to-head against Apple for web surfing, music playing, trendy applications, or even more trendy stylishness. No. What threaten to plunge BlackBerry into extinction are the self-inflicted wounds of lost identity and a headlong rush to transform a stand-apart business tool into a me-too, never-quite-hip-enough toy. This represents a textbook case of how to dilute and extinguish one’s own, once-formidable brand.
Instead of remembering its core market, the business customer, RIM is courting young, personal smartphone users in its TV ad campaigns. This approach forgets that business users differ from kids. So do their needs. As a business user who managed his employer's first all-BlackBerry-equipped professional staff (none of them techies) I offer these distinctions which continue to make the BlackBerry a tool that trumps the iPhone in the business world — at least for now:
My security staff and I need e-mail, phone, a robust address book that can look up phone numbers from the enterprise server, the ability to take decent but manageably small-size photos that we can e-mail easily, and Note/Memopad capacity that most other smartphones ignore or handle poorly. Strong battery life is also a plus. Because we use the device to transact serious business, we need an adult, QWERTY keyboard that facilitates sending out timely and accurate instructions suitable for board room discussion and even legal or reputational challenge in court. We do not need to mix our business applications with social networking, recorded music, games, TV or video viewing. Nor do we need to send or receive video messages of ourselves that are data-intensive but as vapid as the average teen's texting commentary on world affairs We especially lose our taste for such functions when they begin to crowd out our business applications. Example? The newer BB Curve boasts more iTunes-like functionality and video-taking while removing the flash from its camera. Hip young individuals may applaud this. Business users just shake our heads. I have three iPods, including a Touch. They cannot rival the BlackBerry for business any more than BlackBerry can compete against them for music or video access.
A Tool, Not a Toy
Memo to RIM, stop competing for the casual, high texting, low substance dilettante if you want to retain the professional as your core customer. Apple and its acolytes can't quite reformat for the serious business user. By default they alphabetize address books by first name and, when they grudgingly adding a Notes/Memopad feature, they still bypassed a rational, businesslike ordering of entries alphabetically. Instead, Apple insists on indulging callow, adolescent developer defaults, like ordering notes only by reverse chronological sequence. Great for kids with the attention span of a flashbulb and a planning horizon that stops with Saturday night. Lousy for serious business people who use Notes to carry over 50 procedures and references that they may need to consult when responding to a threat or crisis while fielding a panic call comes in at midnight.
Final Caution: Don't rely exclusively on the techies to chart your course. All specialists sooner or later fall in love with the tools of their trade. The same technologists who push for more and more functionality are the ones who resist design freezes and struggle to come up with final documentation – or final anything. It's always more fun to keep trying something new (the Edsel, New Coke, and Microsoft Vista) than to finish and perfect what they have grown bored with. But the business user needs and desires core functionality that works reliably – not razzle dazzle and the future promise of cool things that take too long to work and offer little practical value in relation to the effort necessary to master and troubleshoot.
For RIM and the serious business user, decide. What business are you in, tool or toy? Who is your customer, the business professional or the budding or overripe adolescent? Their wants and needs are very different, and one may be less forgiving or fault tolerant than the other.
- Nick Catrantzos
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