CyberWire Daily - Best of: Abby Smith Rumsey

Episode Date: December 27, 2016

Our podcast team is taking a break this week for the holidays. We’re revisiting some of our favorite interviews from 2016.   Back in May, we spoke with author and historian Abby Smith Rumsey about her latest book, “When We Are No More: How digital memory shapes our future.” The book explores human memory from pre-history to the present, from pictures painted on cave walls to the present, with all the world’s knowledge available in an instant on our mobile devices.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Dave Bittner in Baltimore. Our podcast team is taking a break this week for the holidays, but don't fret, we'll be back next week with all new episodes of our show. In the meantime, this week we're revisiting some of our favorite interviews from 2016. Stay with us. Do you know the status of your compliance controls right now? Like, right now? Like, right now. We know that real-time visibility is critical for security,

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can keep your company safe and compliant. can keep your company safe and compliant. Back in May, we spoke with author and historian Abby Smith-Rumsey about her latest book, When We Are No More, How Digital Memory Shapes Our Future. The book explores human memory from prehistory to the present, from pictures painted on cave walls to now, with all the world's knowledge available in an instant on our mobile devices. Abby Smith-Rumsey spoke to me from her

home in San Francisco. Well, I'm a historian, and I'm writing about why it is that at times like this, when we're sort of creating more and more information, it's harder for us to keep that information, to create a really robust historical record, both for present and future generations. I talk about some of the technical issues about why digital information is harder to maintain, to capture robust samples of and to maintain for long periods of time. But I also talk about the risk that that poses if we don't solve the problem. And it's not just a risk to present generations, but also to future generations to lose the past.

And I talk about the value of the past. I think for many people in the technology sector, it's a given that today's information is important. is important. But I think that there's also sometimes an unexamined assumption that because we have a lot of information now, that most of the information that we create supersedes information from the past, that in fact the past becomes less relevant the faster we move into this future that we talk about. What are some of the historical examples of things that were, you know, it turned out to, I know you mentioned a few in the book, things that turned out to have great value long after, you know, they'd been sitting on a shelf for a long time?

You know, one of my favorite examples is of the maritime logbooks that mariners used to keep. I imagine they still do. But the British Naval Museum, in fact, has a vast collection of mariners' logbooks from its years on the high seas as the empire that ruled the waves. And the museum, each one is a logbook written by hand on board ship that has in detail and in very particular hand, and not everybody can read this hand without training,

handwriting, I mean, without training. It records everything that happens in the course of a day on a ship, and it reads actually like a very boring almanac about the birds that are seen and the temperatures and the size of the waves and so on and so forth. And this information, if you read page by page, really doesn't accumulate into something significant. if you read page by page, really doesn't accumulate into something significant.

But the museum or the archive has scanned these logbooks with a very interesting technology that allows a machine to read individual handwriting. So they've been able to scan this material, and they've created a database. And now scientists are studying oceans and atmospheres and changes in weather and flora and fauna and things like that that are so important to climate science. They're now looking at these centuries of data about ocean conditions. And, you know, it's amazing the kind of information they can get out of it, historical information. So these old logbooks are kind of like this goldmine of information for the study of climate change. And incidentally, nobody in the 18th or 19th century

thought that logbooks would be valuable to study climate change because nobody at that time imagined that human beings were changing the climate of the globe. So that's an example of the kinds of information that lurks there that could solve problems that people are not even aware will be developing over time. What about encryption? I mean, I think about, you know, people in the past, someone had something that they wanted to protect or keep out of prying eyes. You know, they could lock it in a safe or, you know, lock a filing cabinet or something like that.

And so, you know, that would keep people out but if someone if that person passed away or that company you know was no longer in existence you know over time someone could figure out a way to unlock that safe or pry open that filing cabinet but i'm not sure that's the case with encryption. Where are we as a result of putting such technologically advanced locks on so much of our data? What's the ramifications of that? Well, I can tell you that you don't even need to encrypt data to make it inaccessible over time. make it inaccessible over time. I mean, I wrote several what are now, to me, very important documents on obsolete hardware and software in the 1980s. It's totally irretrievable. I mean, even a digital archaeologist wouldn't be able to resurrect my Zyright files, probably. But that aside, I don't know any more than anybody else what the effect of all this encryption will be over the long term. I do know that in the short term, it has the immediate effect of privileging,

creating, you know, some different categories of information and access to information without truly understanding the import of that information. And I'm not talking about national security information. Sometimes it's just commercial information. Sometimes it's simple things as weather data. Do you know it was very hard for the U.S. government to get information about Hurricane Katrina in real time because they were using commercial satellites,

and the commercial companies were not making that stuff available to the government because actually they were commercial assets. The government had to go in and go to court to get information to this, get this kind of information. So I think we need to think very carefully about both the categories of encryption that we allow and then how do we back out of that. And I know that sounds much simpler than it really is. back out of that. And I know that sounds much simpler than it really is. And I think the case of trying to get into the iPhone of the people in San Bernardino who perpetrated that terrorist

act is a good example of just how complicated these policies can be. What about, you know, I think about Thomas Jefferson famously, you know, burning the letters between him and his wife. What about the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten? Well, I do think that everyone has a right to control information about themselves, which they consider private, and control it from circulating freely. I think that was true before the internet, and I think it's true now. What is difficult is that what constitutes a private person has really changed. And I think that that's still something that is a work in progress.

At least in the U.S., we have fairly good definitions of what constitutes a public person and a private person, and which parts of a person's life are public and private, and that's how lawsuits about libel and that kind of thing are adjudicated. But now that everything that circulates on the web is, in some strange technical sense, published, and people actually put things on Instagram or YouTube in order to expose things about themselves publicly, even if they don't know what that means. It creates a lot of difficult issues. I think we need to revisit the issues of what constitutes privacy and a private versus

public act. There are ways that savvy digital natives, or I should say people who are digitally literate, understand how to control the scope of people who can view the things that they send on the Internet or through e-mail. And I think one of the most important things in education now is to educate digital natives about what can and cannot circulate freely, what should and should not circulate freely, and to teach each individual with any smartphone that they need to start becoming aware of their digital self versus their private self. But that's easy to say and hard to do in a generation which is, in a way,

kind of inventing things as they go along. The right to privacy is, I think at this point at least, best understood in the old-fashioned sense. A public person, a public personality shouldn't have the right to actually get rid of websites that they have posted if they've changed their opinion about how things are now. And this certainly happened when I was working on Capitol Hill at the Library of Congress. People would tell me about members of Congress who would ask the Library of Congress or Thomas, their website, to take down their old websites if they had changed their views about a certain thing. And you can't do that with a public record. And representatives are

public figures. But I think the question of the right to be forgotten, in some cases, in most cases, I think we should err on the side of caution and let people take things down until we have a better sense of the ramifications of all that information online. So speaking of the people in our audience, it's their jobs to protect data, you know, from being lost, from bad guys. You know, what do you think their role is in all of this? Well, I think their role is incredibly valuable. Just having taken on this very complicated technical task of trying to secure data into the future when we know that the world in which they are operating technically, hardware, software, et cetera, is always changing. And furthermore, that as I at least imagine it, that the policies that they

need to adhere to over time, and they need to be very strict about these policies because the stakes are so high that, in fact, those policies themselves are changing, and that policies that may have been operative 10 years ago turn out not to be the best. And so they change that. And I think it takes a certain amount of what you might call intestinal fortitude to be able to withstand having to meet really exacting standards at the same time that you know that things are shifting. But I also, I've often thought about how even though I think about this issue a lot as a historian and just as a human being, that the actual technical work of what they do, what they do when they go to work every day and how they spend their time,

technical work of what they do. What they do when they go to work every day and how they spend their time is quite opaque to me. I don't understand what they do and I don't, in other words, I don't truly value what they do. And yet I know that somehow there has to be a certain lack of transparency if they're dealing with security. All I can say is that I hope that they, in their capacity as private citizens, not in their work capacity, actually join the chorus of citizens who are demanding that our politicians pay a lot more attention to settling some of these issues around digital security, about protecting national security and privacy at the same time. This is a dynamic kind of balance that needs to be in place.

But it needs to be negotiated and renegotiated constantly. And somehow in this political cycle, we seem to be talking about everything but these important issues. seem to be talking about everything but these important issues. I do know, I've heard from many people in the scientific and social science world, that many of the things that they would most like to work on, that would have the biggest benefit for mankind in the short term as well as the long term, are hampered because there are no effective policy, data policy and access policies, to some of these things,

medical data, for example. So it's really difficult that we operate, and cybersecurity people in particular, operate in a world in which these policies are not dealt with forthrightly. That's author and historian Abby Smith-Rumsey. Her book is When We Are No More, How Digital Memory Shapes Our Future. and their families at home. Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home,

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