Teaching for Information Rights Defense and Offense
October 12, 2009 at 3:51 pm 2 comments
Imagine that the United States’ Constitution and Bill of Rights were being re-written today. I’ll bet that something would be said about personal rights of Information. I’m no constitutional law expert, but it looks to my novice eyes as if several rights about information are already there. We Americans already have a right to own property, and information can represent intellectual property. We already have a right to privacy, which is used to protect our information from perusal. We also have a right to bear arms. While there is some debate as to whether that means individually or in the sense of state militia, I believe that most people believe that they have a right to protect themselves and their property.
Should we teach students how to utilize information technology as an offensive force? I’m not suggesting teach them to be rogue hackers or information terrorists. Some interpret the right to bear arms to mean that people should be invested with the power to overthrow their government, should the people see that as necessary. Whether you subscribe to that belief or not, it’s clear that uprisings around the world have been enabled by information technology, from fax machines in China to Twitter and Facebook in Iran. I watched “Valkyrie” this weekend, and visited the Holocaust Museum in DC this last summer, and both experiences impressed and shocked me with how well Nazi Germany used information technology to support and further their agenda. Information is a property, and information technology is a form of arms. Students should be aware of how information technology can be used as an offensive force in order to learn how to defend against it.
Most of the new courses being devised to teach “Computational Thinking” aim toward defining the big ideas of computation, the powerful “automation of abstractions” that enables our society. I’ve been thinking lately about what we should be teaching students in terms of being able to protect themselves and how information technology can be used as arms. What should we teach?
Here are a few items on my list:
- All information that we put in a computer is represented as bits. A “bit” can be represented as a voltage in a wire, or a value in the red channel of a pixel, or as a statistical abnormality in a pattern. Meaningful data (including code, as for a virus or worm) can be hidden in lots of ways.
- Information can be automated. Programs can generate spam messages that look tailored to the individual and sent to millions.
- Information takes time to process. Thus, too many hits on a server can result in Denial of Service.
- Information can be correlated. All students should see how a database “join” works, so that they understand how information about them can be connected to other data elsewhere to develop shockingly complete pictures of themselves (possibly enough to enable identity theft).
- All digitized representations are representations, most likely lacking in some detail or some data. For example, CD’s can’t capture all sound (like high-pitched sounds that only a dog can hear), and digital pictures have limits to their resolution and color fidelity. Similarly, there are holes in any digital information source, which might be exploited.
- The Internet is open. You should presume that all of your sent email, including attachments, is readable by anyone anywhere, as if the reader was sitting at your computer. To protect the information you send on the network, it should be encrypted, so that a potential reader couldn’t read it (without the right codes) even if seated at your computer.
- Internet protocols are just agreements. They are not fixed in stone, nor defined by physical or mathematical laws. They are mostly simple, so it’s possible to write clients and servers for them. If necessary, new ones can be recreated.
Most of these are probably items on most “big ideas” lists. I’m just suggesting a different perspective to come up with them. Now, I don’t believe the Constitution and Bill of Rights are being re-written today. That’s just a thought experiment. I do wonder if we should be teaching about information technology (both as property and arms) to support our students in protecting their existing rights. It’s a different purpose for “Computational Thinking” — in a defensive and offensive perspective.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: computational thinking, computing education, public policy.
1.
Mark Miller | October 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm
You address something here that I’ve been thinking and talking about for quite a while, though you’ve addressed it from a broader perspective. I’ve been looking at it as a rationale for teaching programming/CS in the schools, not for turning out programmers who can work in IT (as is typically assumed), but literate citizens who can navigate the digital world competently. I don’t mean this in the sense of being able to use Windows, or a particular set of applications, but in a deep sense of understanding what’s really happening when they’re using a web browser, for example, or an e-mail program, or running a piece of software, or communicating over the internet, etc. This perspective is important in understanding how to keep our information secure, because as has been shown in the past, even the “signals” we get from applications can be manipulated from outsiders so as to mislead us.
Some seem to have accepted this message. Others think that I’m an advocate for CS for its own sake, as if I’m no different from those who are passionate about horticulture, for example, and might see what they do as all-encompassing. They cast me in the light of someone who is contriving rationales for universally teaching my field of choice. There are still quite a few people who can’t see the relevance of CS outside of its own discipline.
I think a good part of that is it’s seen as a discipline that promotes a difficult, tedious, and dehumanizing way of life and work. That POV has legitimacy, but only because of the way the field thinks of itself. People have gotten so used to this idea that they think that computing can never be anything more than a “necessary evil”.
I am reminded of Chris Crawford’s series of essays, “History of Thinking”. Here are a couple excerpts:
The latest development in this process is the creation of programming as a form of writing. I think that we have all missed the significance of programming as an extension of writing. We seem to think of it as merely a way to make the computer do wonderful things, something for programmers, but nothing more. But transport yourself back in time to Sumeria and argue with the scribe who tells you that writing is merely a system for keeping track of goats. “A means of communicating great ideas?” he laughs dismissively. “A form of art? Get your head out of the clouds!”
Programming is a highly specialized form of writing, a language whose forte is the description of processes. Conventional human language is a general-purpose expressive vehicle, meant to handle the full range of human predicaments. The weakness of conventional language is its emphasis on “nounification”, a phenomenon I discussed in an earlier essay. The dramatic shift in programming languages is their shift of emphasis to what happens rather than what is. This process-intensive approach is, I think, a profound shift in the way we think about the world around us. Just as writing opened up vast new territories of understanding to the Greeks, so too will programming open up new territories to us.
But before that can happen, we too must undergo the transformation that the Greeks put themselves through. We cannot afford the luxury of delegating programming to an elite of scribes; we must democratize programming, spread it through our culture, make it clear that a person is not truly educated without an understanding of programming. Perhaps we will need to change the nature of programming before this can happen. Egyptian writing remained an elitist activity because there were too many hieroglyphs for an individual to learn easily. It was the creation of the alphabet and phonetic spelling that made writing readily accessible to large numbers of people. Perhaps programming now is too similar to hieroglyphics; perhaps it takes too long for anybody but a specialist to learn. If this be so, then what we need is a new kind of programming that doesn’t demand so much learning time. Surely we have the hardware resources to support such a language.
…
My analogy runs deep. I have always been disturbed by the realization that the Egyptian scribes practiced their art for several thousand years without ever writing down anything really interesting. Amid all the mountains of hieroglypics we have retrieved from that era, with literally gigabytes of information about gods, goddesses, pharoahs, conquests, taxes, and so forth, there is almost nothing of personal interest from the scribes themselves. No gripes about the lousy pay, no office jokes, no mentions of family or loved ones — and certainly no discussions of philosophy, mathematics, art, drama, or any of the other things that the Greeks blathered away about endlessly. Compare the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians with the writings of the Greeks and the difference that leaps out at you is humanity.
You can see the same thing in the output of the current generation of programmers, especially in the field of computer games. It’s lifeless. Sure, their stuff is technically very good, but it’s like the Egyptian statuary: technically very impressive, but the faces stare blankly, whereas Greek statuary ripples with the power of life.
My emphasis in bold.
If we truly want an empowered citizenry which is able to defend itself and act in this new technological world that’s being created I think we as computer scientists have a lot more work to do in terms of generating new ideas that make the power of computing understandable. Otherwise we will continue to have a hierarchy of “scribes” who are “masters of the realm” and the “common people” who are at the affect of these “masters”.
We as a society have succeeded in optimizing our old sense of democracy through our use of text and multimedia on the internet, but what we’re ignoring is the subtext that supports this optimization, which is profoundly undemocratic.
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Owen Astrachan | October 13, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I’ve been teaching a course about this stuff for eight years, now rolled out to a very large and diverse Duke audience none of whom will major in computer science (ok, epsilon might), gave a talk about it at SIGCSE last year, and just gave a presentation about how it’s a new form of computational thinking at CCSC-midwest. See http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps082/fall09 for the course, see http://www.cs.duke.edu/~ola/talks.html for a link to the ppt about a new way of thinking about computational thinking