Wampum

Red tailed hawks nested in a sycamore tree that towered over our house at the end of Calle de los Helechos. I was 11 and at the height of my Field & Stream phase. I lusted for data, and Grey's Anatomy of the Human Body didn't have it.

<hat w3c_p3p="on">

The USG has ordered an indexing and query service to provide the USG with some number of queries received. It is argued that queries do not, in and of themselves, contain information which tends to identify an individual. This is false. My first query of the interlibrary loan service was for the 1943 translation into English, of the Art of Falconry, the 1248 work in Latin De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, a European prince who wrote about the natural world like an Indian four centuries before Europeans enslaved Indians, and about comparative biology like Darwin six centuries before Darwin.

My request was a pleasent surprise to the librarian, who'd given me run of the library since I was in 3rd or 4th grade, and it was unique. Not simply unique for pre-teens in rural California, but unique for the entire set of all persons using the California Inter-Library Loan system that year. Some queries are inherently unique, or non-unique within a very small universe of requestors. And that is where the claim advanced by USG fails. Within any sample, and the USG is asking for all queries made in any 168 hour period, there are queries which are unique, and queries which are unique within some context (scope). Very few people generate queries on Iranian politicians, details of the Iraq-Iran military operations, Russian reactor export financing, improvements in centrifuge technology, let alone sequences of "independent" queries with high correlation. Those queries might be "anonymous" if I used multiple "anonymizer" services to query Google, and burried narrow queries in broader, and distracting queries, and spread them out over time. Otherwise I may as well digitally sign the damn things.

The USG has also ordered the same indexing and query service to provide the USG with some number of query replies. It is argued that URLs do not, in and of themselves, contain information which tends to identify an individual. This profoundly mistates the actual order and the data disclosed. The USG is not demanding some random, and unique, subset of all URLs known to the service provider, rather, the USG is demanding some universe of referants, whos non-uniqueness discloses what's "hot" and whats not within that sample universe.

If you use Google simply to find out when The West Wing is on, or off, then Google isn't significantly protecting your privacy, incidental to any other reason Google might elect to resist an incredibly stupid means to acquire raw search engine data. But if you go through a box or more of bananas per week, feeding your Googling monkies, then Google may be more than just a casual friend, it may be your only long-term bet for digital reference with known (to you) data collection (about you) properties.

</hat>

With that as a preamble, the instance of Apache that serves up Wampum now denies (403 return) these netblocks:

• 66.196.64.0/18
  
• 68.142.192.0/18
  
• 72.30.0.0/16
  

Next week I'll take up the issue with my peers, the other authors of the W3C's P3P standard on data collection and privacy. At the moment we're distracted with whether or not the Web Applications Working Group's "ping" (think technorati) allows for the collection of data that tends to identify individuals (of course it does).

That reminds me, blo.gs is owned by Yahoo!, so trackback pings sent to blo.gs (one of the defaults for Movable Type), are data that is provisioned to the USG, and for that reason Wampum no longer sends trackback pings to blo.gs.

If the USG was interested in the metrics for on-line porn, rather than ubiquity of governmental access to private (corporate) and personal (individual) data, its methodology would reflect that interest, rather than the ubiquity of access interest, and Grey's Anatomy of the Human Body is appropriate reference material for teens. Its how things work. Down there and everywhere else.