January 2014

Cyberwarfare is the most serious threat facing the United States, according to almost half of US national security leaders who responded to the inaugural Defense News Leadership Poll, underwritten by United Technologies. But while the leaders in national security policy, the military, congressional staffs and the defense industry are united in the seriousness of the cyber threat, agreement on the next greatest threat breaks down clearly along party lines. Terrorism is viewed as the next greatest threat by leaders who identified themselves as Republicans, while climate change was cited by those identifying as Democrats.

The threat environment beyond cyber is where party differences show up:

• Republicans saw terrorism as an equal threat to cyberwarfare, with an identical 36.3 percent citing terrorism as the greatest threat facing the country.
• Democrats were less than half as likely pick terrorism (18.2 percent) as the leading threat. Instead, climate change took the No. 2 slot among Democrats, 21.2 percent. By contrast, not a single Republican respondent cited climate change as a threat.
• Independents were in line with Republicans, listing terrorism as second (20 percent) behind cyberwarfare. China (13 percent) and climate change (7 percent) followed.

Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile US said they all continue to make progress in deploying services that will allow wireless customers to send text messages to 911 operators in place of voice calls. Of those three carriers, Verizon appears to be the furthest along in its efforts to launch the service by a May 15, 2014, deadline.

Specifically, Verizon in a report to the Federal Communications Commission said it plans to offer 911 call centers the choice of three text-to-911 options, two of which are already available and the third targeted for launch in the first quarter of 2014. Verizon said it is working with its Text Control Center vendor, Telecommunication Systems, to offer the three text-to-911 options: SMS using a Web browser client and SMS to TTY, both of which are currently available, and SMS over Direct IP. Verizon said the launch of the SMS over Direct IP capability was delayed from late 2013 to the first quarter of 2014. Verizon said that so far 46 different jurisdictions are using one of its text-to-911 options, up from 37 in October 2013, and several additional deployments are currently scheduled through early 2014. That Verizon appears further along in the process than other carriers doesn't come as a surprise. Verizon had pushed for a nationwide text-to-911 capability long before the FCC announced the May 15, 2014, deadline for the service. Indeed, Verizon first launched a commercial text-to-911 service in September 2012.

Evgeny Morozov wants to convince us that digital technology can’t save the world, and he’s willing to burn every bridge from Cambridge to Silicon Valley to do it.

To say that Morozov has gone out of his way to irritate powerful and influential people in the tech world doesn’t quite capture it. Doing so is his primary occupation. In the Morozovian worldview, New York University professor and social-media theorist Clay Shirky is a “consultant-cum-intellectual”; Google’s mission is to “monetize all of the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and profitable”; and Tim O’Reilly, the Silicon Valley publisher and venture capitalist who coined “Web 2.0,” is an Orwellian “meme hustler” and the main culprit behind “the enduring emptiness of our technology debates.” To millions of viewers, TED talks are inspirational speeches about “ideas worth spreading” in science and technology. To Morozov they are a “sinister” hyping of “ideas no footnotes can support.”

In their privacy policies and terms of use, the companies that handle our data make plenty of promises about all of the third-party evils they will protect our data from. But those policies contain few limits on what the companies themselves can do with our info or how they will secure it.

Case in point: the messaging app Snapchat gives itself access to users' phone numbers and usernames, standard for any messaging service. After ignoring months of warnings from Gibson Security that it was possible to tie together usernames and real phone numbers with incessant queries of the service's Find My Friends feature, the security collective dumped the code to its site. Snapchat took a few days to even acknowledge the problem, and even after hackers created a database with 4.6 million names and phone numbers, the company is still hesitating to apologize or offer its user base reassurance. Security researcher Chris Soghoian said that a lawsuit against the company for this oversight is extremely likely. Snapchat had the information, and hackers had the opportunity. The damage has been done.