According to a Los Angeles Times article about Monday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the FBI has collected 10 terabytes that it’s sifting through in order to seek out clues about what exactly happened and who did it. Maybe I’m just a techno-optimist, but I find this very reassuring.

According the Times, “The data include call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and surveillance footage collected by city cameras, local businesses, gas stations, media outlets and spectators who volunteered to provide their videos and snap shots.”

Lots of data means lots of potential value

It’s reassuring because I’ve spoken with so many smart people over the years who can do amazing things with data. Ten terabytes isn’t a huge data set by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plenty to work with if it’s of high quality. It’s very possible there are some needles in that haystack of call logs, and I’m optimistic the analysts within the FBI — possibly with some outside help — will be able to find them.

Techniques around video analysis and facial recognition are better than many people think, too. If there’s a way to stitch together hundreds — maybe thousands — of videos into a single truth of what happened, then I’m confident it will happen. By tracking faces and objects over time and place, we can recreate a crime and track down suspects without relying on after-the-fact accounts by witnesses who weren’t paying any attention until the bomb actually went off.

It’s not that witnesses are lying, it’s just that an attack like this might artificially color certain observations as being more nefarious than they really were. A Middle Easterner standing nearby might seem suspicious in hindsight, for example, but a witness might not have seen that guy cheering on a friend beforehand, stop to get a soda, and then meander over to the area where the bomb went off.

I have no clue what really happened, of course, I just know that cameras — especially hundreds of them at different angle and shooting over different timeframes — don’t suffer from selective or incomplete memories.

Can we crowdsource some surveillance?

I also find all this now-surveillance data reassuring because — if it proves useful — it might actually help to preserve our civil liberties going forward. We don’t necessarily needs drones flying overhead and cameras on every corner if we can crowdsource (at least from densely populated areas or big events) relatively high-resolution videos and photos during the investigation phase. We don’t necessarily need all orders of mobile call and location-tracking if we can collect what we need from the relevant area afterward.

This does little to prevent attacks, of course, and intelligence agencies will no doubt continue to trace phone calls and generally do what they do. That’s fine by me. If airports want to use facial recognition to flag known threats as they walk in the door, I’m not sure I can take issue with that either.

But by and large, it seems there’s precious little that surveillance — especially video — can do to predict crime unless an agency already knows what it’s looking for and has the means to act fast enough to make a difference. (IBM Fellow and general identity analytics guru Jeff Jonas wrote a great blog post in November about what’s actually possible to predict given the data on hand.)

So to the extent anyone thinks additional surveillance is going to help solve crimes that we didn’t see coming, I think I’d rather leave the data in the hands of hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses rather than a handful of city, state and federal governments that might be tempted to overstep the bounds of what’s acceptable.

Really, though, the notion of how to prevent terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crimes is a complex issue, and I’m not sure there are many ethically right or wrong answers. But when we get past the tragedy and criminality of what happened in Boston, we have to look at it as part of the bigger picture that’s shaping up around all the data we’re generating, collecting and analyzing. If terabytes of geospatially targeted call records and crowdsourced audio-video surveillance can help solve this type of crime and save all the time, money and privacy concerns of more-intrusive and expansive government efforts, then maybe there’s something worth considering.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Faraways.

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On Thursday, Barnes & Noble VP Marc Parrish wrote a provocative guest post for The Atlantic explaining how big data technologies could help identify mass murderers such as James Holmes and Adam Lanza before they actually commit their heinous acts. As much I like to prescribe big data as the solution to various problems — and as much I wish Parrish’s solution was the right answer — his assessment is probably a bit fantastical.

There are a whole slew of reasons Parrish’s hypothesis might fall short, the most obvious of which was pointed out early and often by commenters to the post: There just aren’t enough incidents of gun-powered mass murder to draw strong assumptions about what types of behavior typically precede such an attack. Here’s an excerpt from the most-popular comment, from JLR84:

“The ‘patterns’ that you think of indicative of a spree-killer in the making are far more common than you think, meaning that the whole thing would be rife with false positives. So many that the authorities would never be able to follow up on them, and the system would quickly be ignored. … What you think is a ‘large amount of ammunition’ isn’t. … Spree shooters use relatively small quantities of ammunition compared to the average enthusiast, all things considered. Regular violent criminals, even less.”

Another strong argument has to do with ownership — who actually owns and purchases the guns used in mass murders, or any other homicide, for that matter? If a shooter steals guns or uses his father’s gun, for example, the shooter’s name might never find its way into a government database. Without other evidence linking the possession of guns with intent to do harm, trying to predict who’ll commit horrific crimes with guns might be a fruitless task.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a less glamorous way to use data as a means for curbing violence by guns. Perhaps — if someone were willing to undertake a massive data collection effort, carefully selecting, gathering and analyzing international data on topics such as poverty rates, mental health, gun laws, drug laws, violence in the media, known information about those who have committed murder, family composition, health care, etc. — we could actually identify commonalities or anomalies that shed some light on why certain countries have higher murder rates than others. It’s possible that Americans’ easy access to guns only facilitates a willingness to kill that has been cultivated by other factors and extends far beyond the small fraction of deaths attributable to mass murder.

By way of comparison, Canada has a rate of 1.6; the United Kingdom is 1.2. (Source: Wikipedia/UNODC)

Guns certainly make it easier to kill, but they probably don’t, by their mere presence, inspire violent tendencies. At 4.2 murders per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, we’re well above peers such as Canada, Australia and Western European countries — and even above many African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Eastern European countries. And although the percentage of homicides committed with guns is high in the United States (the UNODC says 68 percent, or 9,960 murders, in 2010, while the Guardian‘s Datablog uses data showing 60 percent), there’s no guarantee many of those murders wouldn’t have happened or have been attempted by other means.

Gun homicide rate per 100,000 people by country. Updated: the X axis now correctly reads “Guns/100 people.” (Source: KDnuggets)

Looking at statistics about guns alone does little to answer the question. Over at KDnuggets, an online community dedicated to data mining, there has been some discussion about the correlation between the number of guns in a country and the number of gun deaths. Excluding the United States — which easily tops the charts in terms of guns per capita 100 people and gun homicide rate (among countries with a per capita GDP of more than $20,000) — it’s hard to say with any statistical certainty that having more guns actually does lead to more murder by guns.

So maybe big data really can help solve America’s penchant for killing by helping us understand why, exactly, so many of our citizens feel so compelled to do so. Instead of trying to figure out when people are going to pull the trigger, let’s focus on answering why people are so willing to kill in a country that appears to have so much.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Sascha Burkard.

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The Duma passed bill  89417-6, in which the government proposed creating a blacklist of websites containing child porn, drug-related and extremist material and other content deemed illegal.

A protest had seen Wikipedia go black on Tuesday. And, on Thursday, Google’s Russia PR director Alla Zabrovskaya took to a company blog to say:

“We certainly support the intention of lawmakers to protect children online. However, we believe that the possible negative consequences of applying the law to exceed the expected positive effect, jeopardizing the user’s access to legal resources.”

Zabrovskaya said Google’s Blogger service is already entirely blocked in Russia thanks to an earlier court ruling that some posts on the site were extremist. And she said the whole of YouTube was blocked in 2010 when a court deemed a single video, which YouTube removed, extremist.

“Until now, these were isolated cases. But, with the new law, this practice may become the norm. Those who will suffer most are the Russian internet users who can not get access to legal content. We are convinced that there are better ways to combat illegal content than those offered in the law.”

The bill would create a registry of sites containing prohibited information, managed by a non-profit agency. The agency would ask hosts to advise publishers to remove the offending material. In the event they do not, the registry would compel hosts to restrict access themselves.

Free-speech advocates’ concern is understandable, given Russia’s sketchy record on the matter. Yet WSJ reports:

“Even prominent opposition lawmakers supported the bill, saying that the legislation actually represented a welcome step.

“Ilya Ponomarev, a usually outspoken anti-Kremlin critic, argued that Russia had become a ‘hotbed for cyber crime,’ after years without any laws regulating the Internet and that the bill was needed.

“He argued that the bill had been improved by removing the vague reference to “harmful content” when describing the type of sites that could be targeted.”

The bill is read by the Duma for a second time on Friday before heading to the upper house. It would then be signed by President Putin.

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The news may have hit on April 1, but it’s no joke. Under the proposals — which have yet to be formally published — the British intelligence agency GCHQ, the local equivalent of the NSA, would be able to access data about these communications as they wished.

It’s unsurprisingly caused a great deal of concern and outrage — particularly since the parties who currently make up the U.K’s coalition government fiercely opposed a similar bill that was put forward a few years ago when they were in opposition.

Here’s what the web is saying about the proposals.

The Sunday Times led the pack with its report suggesting that the legislative proposals could be get put forward next month, and pointing out that ISPs had been given some details last month:

A senior industry official said: “It’s mass surveillance. The idea is that the network operator should effectively intercept the communications between, say, Google and some third party. The network operators are going to be asked to put probes in the network and they are upset about the idea . . .

It’s expensive, it’s intrusive to your own customers, it’s very difficult to see it’s going to work properly and it’s going to be a nightmare to run legally.”

Meanwhile the Daily Mail, which now boasts the world’s biggest newspaper website, pointed out that the content of these activities will be captured, too — and will be available with a court order.

Internet service providers will be asked to keep records of all emails, messages on social networking sites and conversations over Skype.

The content of the calls or messages will be recorded, but the authorities will have to obtain a court order if they want to listen to or read the content.
However, the police and security services will be able to demand details of who the communication is between and what time it is taking place without a court order.

But it was ordinary users, too, who stood up to have their say. Twitter users started to flood the official channel for Prime Minister David Cameron with messages about their anger — or protesting simply by copying him in to mundane notes on everything they were doing that day.

Meanwhile another Twitter user, Ross Lawson, made the point that transparency is not two-way — particularly apposite, given recent scandals surrounding the government’s cash-for-access scheme and its relationship with those questioned over phone hacking:

I have no problem with the government reading all my emails, just so long as we get to read all of theirs.#telldaveeverything @Number10gov

— Ross Lawson (@Ross_Lawson) April 2, 2012

And some pointed out that we’ve been here before. Security blogger Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro said news of this legislative agenda had appeared several months ago — something at the time seemed like a significant invasion of privacy:

If your national or local postal service were to open and check every letter you sent in order to keep a record of whom you correspond with, would you not be outraged? What if the postal service then made all this information available to over 600 public bodies such  as local councils and police forces on request?
 
The Home Office insist that this information is vital for fighting crime and terrorism; but is this legislation really going to be effective against the people at whom it is supposedly aimed?

The Guardian, meanwhile, makes the point about the previous attempt to legislate for this capability — saying that “Labour tried to introduce a similar system using a central database tracking all phone, text, email and internet use but that was dropped in 2009″ amid concerns from civil liberties campaigners, ISPs and mobile phone operators.

The last word, however, should go to @davidcameroon, a Twitter spoof of Prime Minister David Cameron — who came up with a proposal that could prove a lot cheaper and easier than trying to pass a new law:

Government Announcement: To save time, please CC every one of your emails and texts to GCHQ. Thank you. /via @carlmaxim

— David Cameroon (@davecameroon) April 1, 2012

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Tim O'Reilly

As the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on from Silicon Valley to Washington DC, a number of the technology industry’s most influential leaders have come out against the proposed legislation, which would give the government and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet for any alleged copyright infringement.

On Thursday, I interviewed Tim O’Reilly about why he believes SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. His concerns fell into five main categories:

Piracy is not a real problem

The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair. If you have a relationship with your customers, and they know you’re doing the right thing, they will support you.

The people who are pirating are most likely the people who would never give you a nickel to begin with. Piracy serves people on the fringes who are not being served adequately by legitimate markets. Frankly, if people in Romania can download my books and enjoy them, more power to them. They weren’t going to pay me anyway.

SOPA protects the wrong people

I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the experience with piracy is different for people in the movie industry. Maybe — I’m not a movie producer. But I do know that right now the entire content industry is facing massive systemic changes, and to claim that declining sales are because of piracy is so over the top. Any company that is providing great content online in a way that’s easy to use with a fair price has a booming business right now. The people who don’t are trying to fight that future.

So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future. Why should the government be intervening on behalf of the people who aren’t getting with the program?

SOPA ignores history

If you look at it from a historical perspective, the American book publishing industry as a whole began with piracy; there are lots of documents of Charles Dickens and the like taking a stand against these American pirates who were stealing their work. But America went on to become the largest publishing and copyright market in the world. Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets.

More recently you can see this in what happened with the music industry. For a while, music companies were fighting peer-to-peer file sharing. But once Apple came out with iTunes, which was an alternative that was easy to use and fairly priced, it became a huge business. Our policy makers need to encourage the people who get it right, not protect people who clearly didn’t get it right. They need to protect our future.

Tech and lobbying don’t mix

Certainly, the tech industry needs to do a lot more lobbying in Washington, DC. But the whole notion of lobbying is anathema to so many tech people, and for good reason. We’re used to a world in which people design products that have a purpose, where your work speaks for itself. So yes, the tech industry should try to communicate more with the people in DC, but at the same time, congresspeople need to use more of their own independent judgement.

[Update: O'Reilly has expanded upon the topic of tech industry lobbying in a Google+ post, which can be found here. A portion of his additional comments has been added below.]

For example, when I talked with Nancy Pelosi at [San Francisco] Mayor Ed Lee’s inauguration on Sunday, she assured me that she was opposed to SOPA, but that the bill couldn’t just be voted down because of the concerns of the movie industry. I had this bizarre image of the Google Search Quality team meeting with content farms before rolling out the Panda search update to “take into account their concerns.” In the end, Google was making changes that they knew were in the best interest of their users, and the fact that this would hurt the business of various companies producing low-quality content shouldn’t (and presumably didn’t) enter into the equation.

… This isn’t a matter of simply weighing the concerns of one set of lobbyists against those of another, but using a standard of care and independent judgment about what is best for our society. If Congress isn’t knowledgeable enough to make that determination, they need to be consulting independent experts, not lobbyists for one side or the other.

The US needs tech innovation

Laws like SOPA make us sclerotic as a country, where we have all these extra burdens that provide little benefit. In general it makes America less competitive. If SOPA goes through, it could very well force certain innovative companies to go offshore. There are incumbent industries that will always protest every new technology; but any forward-looking country needs to protect its emerging industries.

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The trouble is, Walsh wasn’t everything he made out. Contrary to his image, he was, in fact, a convicted fraudster who had been jailed just a few years earlier for stealing the equivalent of a million dollars.

The details of Walsh’s troubled history with the law began to unravel after Belfast-based investigative journalist Lyra McKee published an incendiary investigation, which revealed his background.

Four years ago, he was convicted of a $1 million fraud committed against an English company where he was financial director. Prosecutors found he had used the money to “fund a lavish existence,” operating his scam through a string of lies, bluffs, the involvement of a fictitious Iranian businessman and even claims of kidnapping. The incident led a judge to call out his “extravagance and greed” and hand down a jail sentence for the crime.

At no point during his time on Belfast’s venture scene did Walsh’s prior history as a financial criminal emerge, despite the fact that he was invited to a number of prominent events held by local startup groups — including Invest NI, a government-funded regional business development agency. And though Walsh Doherty Capital talked big, its only significant investment seemed to be two unknown and apparently unlaunched Texan businesses called Shout For It and Tex Mex Games.

However, McKee, also who also works as the editor of MediaGazer, the sister site of Techmeme, says Walsh’s activities didn’t stop at simply concealing his past. She reports he did, in fact, speak to some companies about investing money — before later demanding cash from entrepreneurs under threat of legal action.

She relates the story of one startup founder she refers to as “James,” a repeat entrepreneur who was approached by Walsh with an offer to invest, before he pulled out of the deal and tried to exact a £10,000 ($15,654 USD) “break-up fee” amid claims he had hidden pertinent information about his company.

After receiving this, an inexperienced entrepreneur may have finally been intimidated into paying the full amount. James wasn’t inexperienced. At the advice of his lawyer, he ignored it.

So what’s the reality?

Well, there’s no illegality in Walsh’s failure to reveal his past — though most would consider it rather unethical. But in trying to find out what Walsh did and didn’t do, I came across some important pieces of information about his activities.

First, on its website, WDC claimed to be a “part of the Sebastian Doherty Sebdo Global Banking Group.” In this case, Sebastian Doherty seems to be the “Doherty” in Walsh Doherty Capital, and Sebdo is a shell company whose headquarters appear to be a post office box in the British Virgin Islands.

Earlier today, however, the Walsh Doherty website was taken down and replaced with text saying the business closed down in October, that “statements made on the Internet with regards to the conduct of the firm are strongly denied” and that it has “no legal connection to Sebdo Global Investment Group”.

However, a quick Whois search reveals that Sebastian Doherty was the name used to register a number of domains related to WDC and Sebdo — as well as the website of Shout For It, the American company that Walsh claimed his fund had taken equity in.

The mystery continues

More importantly, though, I couldn’t find any record that Walsh Doherty Capital itself exists as a legal entity.

As far as I can see, there’s no company in U.K. or Ireland registered or trading under the name of Walsh Doherty, nor does there appear to be any independent record of either man running or raising money for a private equity fund in recent years. On top of this, neither this David Walsh nor Sebastian Doherty appear to be accredited investors in Britain, nor do they or any of the companies they claim to represent exist on the register of the Financial Services Authority, Britain’s financial watchdog. This is highly unusual.

When I put the claims and my own questions to WDC in an email, I received a short response saying that the company had a “personal” (rather than a legal) connection with Sebdo, but that it could not respond to specific allegations.

Here’s what they said in full:

We are currently preparing a press release on the allegations made by a web based reporter and will respond to you in due course.

We deny any wrongdoing by the firm, which closed in October 2011.

We can confirm we had no legal connection to Sebdo Global Investment Group other than the personal interest of one individual.

We cannot comment on individual cases as they are likely to be subject to litigation but will respond generally on the conduct of the firm and its operations.

However, the offer to “respond generally” did not seem to include to answering my questions on whether WDC was a legally registered, regulated company, which funds it held, and why Sebastian Doherty’s name appeared on registration documents for web properties linked to WDC if it is only a personal connection.

So we are left at a dead end.

The next step will be to see how Walsh himself, and WDC — which, remember, says it closed down three months ago — takes on the allegations.

Now the startup investment community in Belfast is left to clean up the mess and confusion caused by this controversy. InvestNI, the agency that had previously invited Walsh to a number of events, told me it had no knowledge of his criminal background and said specificall it has “no relationship with David Walsh.” Let’s see if the region’s startups can say the same.

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