I have just returned from a fascinating conference at MIT on Security and Human Behaviour and am now preparing for the EU Green Week conference in Brussels.  This post explores an issue common to both conferences: paranoia.

The “security” of central interest to the MIT conference was that of people using the Internet. The titles of some of the sessions indicate the main security issues with which the conference was preoccupied: deception, privacy, fraud and terror. How might, the conference inquired, deception and invasion of the privacy of Internet users be used by “bad guys” (a term frequently deployed) to commit malicious acts – ranging from the spreading of viruses, misuse of medical records, and phishing to vote rigging, Facebook bullying, money laundering and acts of terrorism?

The final session was entitled “How do we fix the world?” It was I fear inconclusive. How might we good guys (obviously) frustrate or catch and punish the bad guys? Identification of the good guys was not as straightforward as one might have hoped. Law-abiding individuals with home computers do not pose a categorisation problem. But companies and institutions that collect personal data for legitimate purposes, but who are insufficiently aware of its sensitivity and insufficiently careful about protecting it fell into a gray area. And the Orwellian Big Brother state intent on imposing ID cards on its citizens and tracking all their phone calls, emails and Internet activity was, in the eyes of most (all?) at the conference not good at all.

Complaints about Big Brother were of two sorts. He was incompetent; he would lose sensitive data and/or fail to make effective use of it. Alternatively, were he to make it work, his surveillance agency would be indistinguishable from the Stasi. The problem is an ancient one: Juvenal asked “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – who will guard the guards themselves.

The session to which I have been invited to contribute in the Green Week Conference in Brussels is entitled “2050 Vision: Transport and spatial planning in a decarbonised world”. I have been invited to discuss “the social issues involved”. In my 20 minutes I will invite people to imagine a future in which science and technology have solved all problems of climate change and energy supply, freeing the world to indulge its appetite for ever-increasing mobility. Feeding this appetite is the objective of most current EU transport policies, as indicated by plans to increase airport capacity and subsidise the car industry to help it through the credit crunch.

What kind of world would such policies produce? I conclude that one of its most salient features will be paranoia. In the hypermobile world that current policies are creating people will spend most of their time in “communities of interest”. As levels of mobility – physical and electronic – increase, people have less time for social interaction with neighbours in old-fashioned geographical communities. The idea of communities of interest was popularized in 1963 by Melvin Webber in an essay entitled “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity”.
Webber was enthusing about the freedoms provided by the new California freeway system. They were enticing. Freed from burdensome relationships with geographical neighbours of all ages and with divers interests, people could spend their waking hours in the congenial company of people who thought like them. These freedoms have been hugely expanded by the global development of what Al Gore dubbed the “Information Superhighway”.

It is now apparent that the freedoms are being purchased at a cost. In geographical communities in which people know their neighbours and recognize people they pass in the street, people trust each other, or know why they don’t. In a world consisting of aspatial communities of interest people know each other much less well. They may know about others’ interests, but they don’t know other members of their “community” as complete people. They do not know whom to trust. Much of the MIT conference was devoted to the problem of negotiating transactions under conditions of low trust.

Low trust creates a particular problem for governments. Governments rule over geographically demarcated parts of the world. Few communities of interest pledge allegiance to geographically defined areas. There is now a globe-spanning community of interest focused on a man who may, or may not, live in a cave in Waziristan. Fear of this man and the atrocities that might be committed by members of his community of interest now justify the inconveniencing of millions of air travelers and the intrusive surveillance of billions of people world-wide. The default assumption by governments is that everyone is a potential threat and should, therefore, be kept under surveillance. Despite the fact that no air passenger, anywhere, ever has been killed by a shoe bomb we are all required to take off our shoes when passing through airport security.

The hope that electronic mobility would substitute for physical mobility has been disappointed. Despite enormous increases in the time spent online we are travelling more than ever. The amount of time we spend in communities of interest, assuming we are not spending less time sleeping, must be time not spent in geographical communites. A Stanford Study has revealed a strong negative correlation between time spent on line and time spent interacting with family and friends.

As geographical communities are displaced by communities of interest we are increasingly likely to find ourselves living in propinquity (to use Webber’s word) to members of communities whose cultures we find incomprehensible and sometimes threatening. One of the presentations at the MIT conference was by John Mueller who briefly summarized the message of his excellent book Overblown. Overblown is his one-word label for the paranoid response of the US Department of Homeland Security to the threat posed by the man in the cave. His description of the paranoia that has transformed “the home of the brave” into a nation sufficiently spooked to acquiesce in the sacrifice of cherished freedoms was vivid and convincing. But he held out little hope of his evidence and arguments prevailing.  The world’s most mobile nation – physically and electronically – seems to have lost its nerve.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  In our paranoid world of communities of interest it appears that the millions off air travellers obediently removing their shoes are less interested in guarding the guards than in the protection they purport to provide.

Letter NOT published in the Guardian. Submitted 30 April.

My two favorite commentators on the subject of risk have fallen out. Simon Jenkins (29 April) predicts that swine flu will end up with bird flu and Sars in the category of over-hyped scare that never happened. Ben Goldacre (30 April) says that if Simon turns out to be right he wont have been right, just lucky - a swine flu pandemic is a real risk.

 They are discussing what risk geeks call a low-frequency high-impact event. Chances are that Simon will be proved right/lucky. If you bet against every hypothetical low-frequency high impact event that might happen you will be right/lucky most of the time. Many are hypothesized, few materialize.

 The hypotheses that bird flu or Sars could have been, or swine flu might be, as catastrophic as the 1918 flu epidemic were not, and are not, implausible.  But they can be assigned low statistical probabilities. What should governments do when confronted with such threats? How much should they spend in the form of money, time and economic disruption to defend against them? Building defenses against low probability threats incurs opportunity costs; chances are the money could be spent elsewhere more effectively.

 Consider a much lower frequency much higher impact event – a catastrophic collision between earth and an asteroid. It has happened and will do again. In the world’s present state we can but afford to shrug fatalistically. Straining every economic, scientific and technological sinew to defend against it would steal resources from, and thereby inhibit, a wide range of activities that might ultimately build an economy in which asteroid defense would be affordable.

On swine flu I’m betting with Simon, but will continue to cheer Ben on every Saturday.

Risk Now available as Risco in Portuguese. See Deus é Brasileiro? for new preface - in English.

The above title advertises a Cambridge Science Festival event, (9 March 2009) in which I have been invited to participate.  My answer to the question in the title, will be spelt out in my first PowerPoint slide:

“No: because paranoia cannot be cured by CCTV, or DNA databases, or ID cards, or CRB checks, or number plate recognition, or GPS tracking, or email archiving, or data mining.”

Further, I intend to argue that the combined force of all of these measures feeds the threats that they purport to defend against. For rest of essay click here.

Below is a letter to the Guardian, published today (11 February 2009) in reduced form.

Jacqui Smith is keen that the Government’s classification of drugs should send clear messages to would-be users. One message conveyed by her attack on David Nutt (Drugs adviser says sorry over ecstasy article, 10 February) is that she does not care about the scientific evidence of harm, or does not understand it.

She brushes aside his comparison that shows that riding a horse is many times more dangerous than using ecstasy on the ground that the first is legal and the second illegal. A second message is, therefore, that ecstasy should be made legal, or horse riding illegal. Or is the intended message that the Government cares nothing for consistency.

More on drugs here and here

In December 2007 I delivered a Working Paper entitled “Managing risk in a hypermobile world” to the OMEGA Project  - a project dedicated to thinking about Mega Projects in Transport and Development.

I began thus:

“Transport projects facilitate new connections between trip origins and destinations. In so doing they disturb previous patterns of connection, often with difficult to predict consequences. Mega-transport projects do this on a grand scale and create risks and problems of complexity and uncertainty of unprecedented magnitude. It becomes impossible to define the boundaries of the fields of influence of urban mega-transport projects such as international airports and high-speed rail lines that connect cities to the rest of the world. Their specific consequences are beyond prediction. But it is possible to speculate about the nature of the problems that such projects will force us to confront in the future.

The world’s biggest mega transport project

The world’s biggest mega transport project subsumes all the others. It is the promotion of mobility. It is proceeding at a record-breaking pace. It is creating problems of complexity, risk and uncertainty on a global scale, and transforming the way in which these problems are perceived and managed, or, more accurately, struggled with.

All significant participants in the project are now globe spanning enterprises. The motor industry measures success by numbers of vehicles sold. Judged by this criterion, despite global over-capacity, it is prospering. Road traffic, in almost all countries, is at record levels and still growing. It is exploding in countries such as China and India (which recently launched the world’s cheapest car), and is growing even in the most highly motorized countries; and projects to provide the infrastructure to carry it are still providing lots of work for multi-national civil engineering firms. Growing still faster is the aviation industry, generating mega projects for plane and airport builders. And railways, after decades in the doldrums, are being revitalized by mega high-speed projects. The result is an emergent hypermobile society.”

OOPS!  The project that I described in December 2007 as proceeding at a record-breaking pace has come to a juddering halt. It is unclear when, or if, it will get re-started.

The world is now crowded with people who claim that they saw it coming – I amongst them. The concluding sentence to my Working Paper says: “Hypermobility breeds fatalists. Without egalitarian restraint of present trends, dystopian science fiction appears likely to provide our best guide to the future. “ The sudden restraint of (juddering halt to) recent trends has been anything but egalitarian. Dystopian science fiction may yet prove to be our best guide to what comes next. A PDF of the full paper can be read here.

Abstract

The introduction to the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2006 seminar on The Economics and Morality of Safety concluded with a list of issues that were “worthy of further exploration”. I have  reduced them to the following questions:

• Why do moral arguments about ‘rights’ persist unresolved?

• Why can risk managers not agree on a common value for preventing a fatality?

• Why do governments and the media react differently to different causes of death?

• Why do some institutions profess to be pursuing zero risk, knowing that achieving it is impossible?

• Why do some institutions pretend that their risk management problems can be reduced to a calculation in which all significant variables can be represented by a common metric?

• Why are societal attitudes and risk communication still seen as problematic after many years investigation?

• Why are certain accident investigations, criminal or civil, seen as ‘over zealous’ by some and justifiable by others?

These questions are addressed with the help of a set of risk framing devices. For some my conclusion will be discouraging: all of these issues are likely to remain unresolved. Risk is a word that refers to the future. It has no objective existence. The future exists only in the imagination, and a societal consensus about what the future holds does not exist. … PDF of full paper

I began my inaugural blog on this website – On becoming Vashti – as follows: “My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.”

A recent comment on this posting by a former student, June Gibbons, has prompted a further re-reading of The Machine Stops. With each re-reading Forster becomes more prescient. When I wrote my inaugural blog I had not anticipated the sub-prime-credit-crunch. But Forster had:

“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.”

A better description of our current mess I have yet to find. The efficiency of the mechanism for creating and disseminating toxic derivatives was impressive. Understanding of the devastation they would spread was absent. Those “master brains” in whom we all wanted to believe because they were making us richer, did not perish. They never existed. They were, with beguiling gravitas, blowing a bubble; “no one confessed the Machine was out of hand.”

As a guide to the past, and present, and possibly the future, I cannot recommend Then Machine Stops too highly.

Has anyone, anywhere, ever, been killed by a pipe bomb disguised as a bicycle? I have been pursuing this question since last June with the help of the Internet and the BBC’s Today Programme and World Service. So far the answer appears to be “not yet”; but it remains in the mind of the Westminster Police a theoretical possibility that must be zealously guarded against. (New readers can catch up here: http://john-adams.co.uk/2008/11/05/proving-a-negative-and-the-onus-of-proof/ )

The manner of the guarding is causing great inconvenience to significant numbers of cyclists. Around Parliament Square and Whitehall, and other areas that the police deem particularly sensitive to threats of terrorism, the police are confiscating bicycles on the grounds that they might be pipe bombs. A problem for cyclists is that the boundaries of these areas are not published. Cyclists are left to guess where it is safe to park their bicycles. Read on …

Preface for Risco – the Brazilian translation of Risk - to be published in Brazil in March 2009.

I first encountered the idea that God might be a Brazilian forty years ago. I was a visiting student at the University of São Paulo. On a trip from São Paulo to Santos I was the passenger of an extremely skilful Brazilian driver. I was terrified. I begged him to slow down. “Don’t worry,” he said, taking a hand off the wheel to pat my knee reassuringly, “Deus é Brasileiro.”

I am grateful for the invitation to write a preface to this book for Brazilian readers. It provides an opportunity to reflect both on my experience of risk in Brazil and on developments in the field of risk since the book was first published in 1995.

For the rest of the preface click here