Anthony LeFauce posted earlier today on AllFacebook about a British Intelligence and Security report that found social networks and internet communications in general are too disparate to allow them to effectively track communications.
I think that this is actually a different security issue than the one that’s been hopping around the blogosphere recently. It’s not just “scapegoating,” as Anthony suspects.
The issues facing the security sector reflect a more fundamental shift in our communication technologies, which has been years in the making. Most of what security agencies are concerned with is live tracking. They want to know what a terrorist cell is doing next week so they can take preventative action.
Security in terms of the user, which is what we’ve been talking about in the blogosphere so far, is about databases. It’s not time-sensitive information, it’s identity-sensitive information.
Facebook and other IP-based communications systems, with 500 nodes that can really only give you so much information about who’s sending what, is a nightmare for anyone who is trying to keep tabs on a person’s communications and activities as they’re occurring.
But it’s a gold mine for anyone who simply wants to collect a person’s communications after-the-fact. There are dupicate, triplicate, bazillionate copies of the data on servers all over the place. It’s not like a phone call - you make it once, and if nobody records it, that chance is gone forever.
So to sum it up, we’re looking at a communication system that is scattered, hard to track, but easy to archive. Sucks for governmental security, and sucks for transience.
I don’t think anyone is scapegoating, it’s just a system that naturally tends to be secure in the wrong ways.
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