Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
28 Ocak 2010 Perşembe
26 Ocak 2010 Salı
NEW YORK TIMES: F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases
F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases
Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.
Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.
The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.
Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.
But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.
“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.”
Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.
DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said.
Minors are required to provide DNA samples in 35 states upon conviction, and in some states upon arrest. Three juvenile suspects in November filed the only current constitutional challenge against taking DNA at the time of arrest. The judge temporarily stopped DNA collection from the three youths, and the case is continuing.
Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government’s power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.
One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who was awaiting trial for methamphetamine possession. Inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s deputy swab the inside of his cheek.
Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated into a numerical sequence at the F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in the world.
The system will search for matches between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other profiles every Monday, from now into the indeterminate future — until one day, perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might leave a drop of blood or semen at some crime scene.
Law enforcement officials say that DNA extraction upon arrest is no different than fingerprinting at routine bookings and that states purge profiles after people are cleared of suspicion. In practice, defense lawyers say this is a laborious process that often involves a court order. (The F.B.I. says it has never received a request to purge a profile from its database.)
When DNA is taken in error, expunging a profile can be just as difficult. In Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a Philadelphia public defender, has spent weeks trying to expunge the profile taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy guilty of assault and bicycle theft. “I’m going to have to get a judge’s order to make sure that all references to his DNA are gone,” she said.
The police say that the potential hazards of genetic surveillance are worth it because it solves crimes and because DNA is more accurate than other physical evidence. “I’ve watched women go from mug-book to mug-book looking for the man who raped her,” said Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”
Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States and has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. It has a population of 61 million — and 4.5 million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent of the people commit about 70 percent of your crimes, so if you can get the majority of that community, you don’t have to do more than that,” he said.
In the United States, 8 percent of the population would be roughly 24 million people.
Britain may provide a window into America’s genetic surveillance future: As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. In December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10.
Critics are also disturbed by the demographics of DNA databases. Again Britain is instructive. According to a House of Commons report, 27 percent of black people and 42 percent of black males are genetically registered, compared with 6 percent of white people.
As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Mr. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year’s federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases.
Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept by investigators.
Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.
Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.
Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants — the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.
The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 — a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs — which now stand at more than 500,000 cases — to increase.
Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people.
But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and worry that the nation is becoming a genetic surveillance society.
“DNA databases were built initially to deal with violent sexual crimes and homicides — a very limited number of crimes,” said Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at City University of New York who studies policing trends. “Over time more and more crimes of decreasing severity have been added to the database. Cops and prosecutors like it because it gives everybody more information and creates a new suspect pool.”
Courts have generally upheld laws authorizing compulsory collection of DNA from convicts and ex-convicts under supervised release, on the grounds that criminal acts diminish privacy rights.
DNA extraction upon arrest potentially erodes that argument, a recent Congressional study found. “Courts have not fully considered legal implications of recent extensions of DNA-collection to people whom the government has arrested but not tried or convicted,” the report said.
Minors are required to provide DNA samples in 35 states upon conviction, and in some states upon arrest. Three juvenile suspects in November filed the only current constitutional challenge against taking DNA at the time of arrest. The judge temporarily stopped DNA collection from the three youths, and the case is continuing.
Sixteen states now take DNA from some who have been found guilty of misdemeanors. As more police agencies take DNA for a greater variety of lesser and suspected crimes, civil rights advocates say the government’s power is becoming too broadly applied. “What we object to — and what the Constitution prohibits — is the indiscriminate taking of DNA for things like writing an insufficient funds check, shoplifting, drug convictions,” said Michael Risher, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
This year, California began taking DNA upon arrest and expects to nearly double the growth rate of its database, to 390,000 profiles a year from 200,000.
One of those was Brian Roberts, 29, who was awaiting trial for methamphetamine possession. Inside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles last month, Mr. Roberts let a sheriff’s deputy swab the inside of his cheek.
Mr. Roberts’s DNA will be translated into a numerical sequence at the F.B.I.’s DNA database, the largest in the world.
The system will search for matches between Mr. Roberts’s DNA and other profiles every Monday, from now into the indeterminate future — until one day, perhaps decades hence, Mr. Roberts might leave a drop of blood or semen at some crime scene.
Law enforcement officials say that DNA extraction upon arrest is no different than fingerprinting at routine bookings and that states purge profiles after people are cleared of suspicion. In practice, defense lawyers say this is a laborious process that often involves a court order. (The F.B.I. says it has never received a request to purge a profile from its database.)
When DNA is taken in error, expunging a profile can be just as difficult. In Pennsylvania, Ellyn Sapper, a Philadelphia public defender, has spent weeks trying to expunge the profile taken erroneously of a 14-year-old boy guilty of assault and bicycle theft. “I’m going to have to get a judge’s order to make sure that all references to his DNA are gone,” she said.
The police say that the potential hazards of genetic surveillance are worth it because it solves crimes and because DNA is more accurate than other physical evidence. “I’ve watched women go from mug-book to mug-book looking for the man who raped her,” said Mitch Morrissey, the Denver district attorney and an advocate for more expansive DNA sampling. “It saves women’s lives.”
Mr. Morrissey pointed to Britain, which has fewer privacy protections than the United States and has been taking DNA upon arrest for years. It has a population of 61 million — and 4.5 million DNA profiles. “About 8 percent of the people commit about 70 percent of your crimes, so if you can get the majority of that community, you don’t have to do more than that,” he said.
In the United States, 8 percent of the population would be roughly 24 million people.
Britain may provide a window into America’s genetic surveillance future: As of March 2008, 857,000 people in the British database, or about one-fifth, have no current criminal record. In December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain violated international law by collecting DNA profiles from innocent people, including children as young as 10.
Critics are also disturbed by the demographics of DNA databases. Again Britain is instructive. According to a House of Commons report, 27 percent of black people and 42 percent of black males are genetically registered, compared with 6 percent of white people.
As in Britain, expanding genetic sampling in the United States could exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to Hank Greely, a Stanford University Law School professor who studies the intersection of genetics, policing and race. Mr. Greely estimated that African-Americans, who are about 12 percent of the national population, make up 40 percent of the DNA profiles in the federal database, reflective of their prison population. He also expects Latinos, who are about 13 percent of the population and committed 40 percent of last year’s federal offenses — nearly half of them immigration crimes — to dominate DNA databases.
Enforcement officials contend that DNA is blind to race. Federal profiles include little more information than the DNA sequence and the referring police agency. Subjects’ names are usually kept by investigators.
Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor for Alameda County, Calif., and an adviser to crime laboratories, said DNA demographics reflected the criminal population. Even if an innocent man’s DNA was included in a genetic database, he said, it would come to nothing without a crime scene sample to match it. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear,” he said.
INDEPENDENT_Johann Hari: The hidden truth behind drug company profits
Johann Hari: The hidden truth behind drug company profits
Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.
To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.
In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.
Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.
Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.
This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.
And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.
Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."
What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."
The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.
But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.
As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.
We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.
Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."
There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."
Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.
The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.
It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.
Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.
The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."
j.hari@independent.co.uk
Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.
To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.
In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.
Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.
Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.
This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.
And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.
Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."
What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."
The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.
But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.
As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.
We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.
Why would we keep this system, if it is so bad? The drug companies have spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone. They have paid politicians to make the system work in their interests. If you doubt how deeply this influence goes, listen to a Republican congressman, Walter Burton, who admitted of the last big health care legislation passed in the US in 2003: "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill."
There is a far better way to develop medicines, if only we will take it. It was first proposed by Joseph Stiglitz, the recent Nobel Prize winner for economics. He says: "Research needs money, but the current system results in limited funds being spent in the wrong way."
Stiglitz's plan is simple. The governments of the Western world should establish a multi-billion dollar prize fund that will give payments to scientists who develop cures or vaccines for diseases. The highest prizes would go to cures for diseases that kill millions of people, like malaria. Once the pay-out is made, the rights to use the treatment will be in the public domain. Anybody, anywhere in the world, could manufacture the drug and use it to save lives.
The financial incentive in this system for scientists remains exactly the same – but all humanity reaps the benefits, not a tiny private monopoly and those lucky few who can afford to pay their bloated prices. The irrationalities of the current system – spending a fortune on me-too drugs, and preventing sick people from making the medicines that would save them – would end.
It isn't cheap – it would cost 0.6 per cent of GDP – but in the medium-term it would save us all a fortune because our health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. Meanwhile, the cost of medicine would come crashing down for the poor – and tens of millions would be able to afford it for the first time.
Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.
The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."
j.hari@independent.co.uk
THE ECONOMIST: Employers spying on staff
Employers spying on staff
Big Brother bosses
More than ever, companies want to know what their employees are up to
Your every keystroke, silently logged
IF THE workers at Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company seem unnaturally cheerful for drizzly autumn mornings, it is because they are being watched. The firm has installed cameras with special scanners at 15 of its stations to measure employees’ smiles, ensuring that harried commuters are always greeted with a grin, however forced.
It may seem extreme to Western eyes but it is just one example of a business that is booming: employee monitoring. Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.
A recent report from Gartner, a consultancy, found that spending on security software rose by 18.6% to $13.5 billion in 2008. The market for security information and event management software (SIEM), which can be used to mine e-mails for keywords and security breaches, grew by 50% according to Gartner. The fastest-growing area is network forensic software, which lets firms record and playback exactly what happens on employees’ computer screens, and can even record keystrokes.
Gartner’s John Pescatore says the software is “like a giant TiVo” or “a security camera pointed at a till in a bank”. This niche doubled in value between 2007 and 2008, from $25m to $50m. Mr Pescatore predicts that the market will jump another 50% by the end of this year.
Companies use this kind of software, for example, to monitor employees who are about to leave, whether through redundancy or choice, to make sure they do not take sensitive information with them. Managers can spot the moment that an embittered salesperson copies a client database onto a flash-memory stick.
Financial-services firms are particularly vulnerable to the enemy within. The case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs banker accused in July of stealing high-frequency trading software worth millions of dollars to the bank, was an illustration of the huge value of intellectual property that is at risk of going astray.
Companies also use monitoring software to protect employees from themselves. Malicious software often infects a corporate network by exploiting security holes in web browsers to infiltrate a PC when its user visits a dodgy website. Compromised machines can then be linked up to form “botnets” under external control, which are used to send spam e-mails or disable websites with a flood of bogus requests. When Procter & Gamble ran a security check of its 80,000 PCs, it found 3,000 were infected with botnet software.
Another use of employee-monitoring software is measuring productivity. Managers trying to decide who to make redundant can use forensic software to catch that slacking YouTube addict red-handed.
Even workers on the road are not safe from prying corporate eyes. Several start-up companies, such as Purewire and Zscaler, have launched software to monitor employees outside the company network. Workers accessing the internet from hotel rooms using a company laptop may be surprised to find their web browsing is being monitored by the IT department back in the office. Their page requests flow through a web monitoring service, which can block or report access to certain sites.
Monitoring software can also be used to spot “presenteeism”—employees who turn up in the office every day but then do nothing. Peter Cheese, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organisation practice, says that presenteeism has become more common as communications break down between managers and staff in firms that are under financial stress.
But although workforce-monitoring software may provide what seems like useful information, it is no help when it comes to addressing the problems it uncovers. It may also undermine morale and mutual trust. Mr Cheese warns: “If you have to check up on employees all the time, then you probably have bigger issues than just productivity.”
THE ECONOMIST
Big Brother bosses
More than ever, companies want to know what their employees are up to
Your every keystroke, silently logged
IF THE workers at Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company seem unnaturally cheerful for drizzly autumn mornings, it is because they are being watched. The firm has installed cameras with special scanners at 15 of its stations to measure employees’ smiles, ensuring that harried commuters are always greeted with a grin, however forced.
It may seem extreme to Western eyes but it is just one example of a business that is booming: employee monitoring. Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.
A recent report from Gartner, a consultancy, found that spending on security software rose by 18.6% to $13.5 billion in 2008. The market for security information and event management software (SIEM), which can be used to mine e-mails for keywords and security breaches, grew by 50% according to Gartner. The fastest-growing area is network forensic software, which lets firms record and playback exactly what happens on employees’ computer screens, and can even record keystrokes.
Gartner’s John Pescatore says the software is “like a giant TiVo” or “a security camera pointed at a till in a bank”. This niche doubled in value between 2007 and 2008, from $25m to $50m. Mr Pescatore predicts that the market will jump another 50% by the end of this year.
Companies use this kind of software, for example, to monitor employees who are about to leave, whether through redundancy or choice, to make sure they do not take sensitive information with them. Managers can spot the moment that an embittered salesperson copies a client database onto a flash-memory stick.
Financial-services firms are particularly vulnerable to the enemy within. The case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs banker accused in July of stealing high-frequency trading software worth millions of dollars to the bank, was an illustration of the huge value of intellectual property that is at risk of going astray.
Companies also use monitoring software to protect employees from themselves. Malicious software often infects a corporate network by exploiting security holes in web browsers to infiltrate a PC when its user visits a dodgy website. Compromised machines can then be linked up to form “botnets” under external control, which are used to send spam e-mails or disable websites with a flood of bogus requests. When Procter & Gamble ran a security check of its 80,000 PCs, it found 3,000 were infected with botnet software.
Another use of employee-monitoring software is measuring productivity. Managers trying to decide who to make redundant can use forensic software to catch that slacking YouTube addict red-handed.
Even workers on the road are not safe from prying corporate eyes. Several start-up companies, such as Purewire and Zscaler, have launched software to monitor employees outside the company network. Workers accessing the internet from hotel rooms using a company laptop may be surprised to find their web browsing is being monitored by the IT department back in the office. Their page requests flow through a web monitoring service, which can block or report access to certain sites.
Monitoring software can also be used to spot “presenteeism”—employees who turn up in the office every day but then do nothing. Peter Cheese, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organisation practice, says that presenteeism has become more common as communications break down between managers and staff in firms that are under financial stress.
But although workforce-monitoring software may provide what seems like useful information, it is no help when it comes to addressing the problems it uncovers. It may also undermine morale and mutual trust. Mr Cheese warns: “If you have to check up on employees all the time, then you probably have bigger issues than just productivity.”
THE ECONOMIST
20 Ocak 2010 Çarşamba
New York Times: Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace
Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The crown jewels of Google, Cisco Systems or any other technology company are the millions of lines of programming instructions, known as source code, that make its products run.
If hackers could steal those key instructions and copy them, they could easily dull the company’s competitive edge in the marketplace. More insidiously, if attackers were able to make subtle, undetected changes to that code, they could essentially give themselves secret access to everything the company and its customers did with the software.
The fear of someone building such a back door, known as a Trojan horse, and using it to conduct continual spying is why companies and security experts were so alarmed by Google’s disclosure last week that hackers based in China had stolen some of its intellectual property and had conducted similar assaults on more than two dozen other companies.
“Originally we were saying, ‘Well, whoever got it has the secret sauce to Google and some 30 other California companies, and they can replicate it,’ ” said Rick Howard, director of security intelligence at VeriSign iDefense, which helped Google investigate the Chinese attacks. “But some of the more devious folks in our outfit were saying, ‘Well, they could also insert their own code — and they probably have.’ ”
For example, a foreign intelligence agency might find it extremely useful to know who was asking particular questions of Google’s search engine.
Security researchers took particular interest in the fact that the Silicon Valley company Adobe Systems was one of the companies hit by the recent wave of attacks.
Computer users around the globe have Adobe’s Acrobat or Reader software sitting on their machines to create or read documents, and Adobe’s Flash technology is widely used to present multimedia content on the Web and mobile phones.
“Acrobat is installed on about 95 percent of the machines in the world, and there have been a lot of vulnerabilities found in Flash,” said Jeff Moss, a security expert who sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “If you can find a vulnerability in one of these products, you’re golden.”
Products from Microsoft, including Windows, Office and Internet Explorer, have long been favored targets for hackers because so many people use them. But McAfee, a leading software security firm, predicts that Adobe’s software will become the top target this year, as Microsoft has improved its products after years of attacks and Adobe’s software has become ubiquitous.
Adobe said it was still investigating the attacks but so far had no evidence that any sensitive information had been compromised.
Brad Arkin, the director of product security at Adobe, said the company generally expected to face increasing attention from hackers given the growing popularity of its products. But he added that the company employed industry-leading practices to respond to threats. “The security of our customers will always be a critical priority for Adobe,” he said.
Given the complexity of today’s software programs, which are typically written by teams of hundreds or thousands of engineers, it is virtually impossible to be perfectly confident in the security of any program, and tampering could very well go undetected.
Companies are understandably reluctant to discuss their security failures. But one notable episode shows just how damaging the secret tampering with source code can be.
Before the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, an unidentified hacker inserted secret programs into four telephone switching computers operated by the Vodafone Group, the world’s largest cellphone carrier. The programs created a clandestine tapping system that allowed unknown snoops to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track the location of about 100 prominent Greek citizens, including then-Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, military officials, the mayor of Athens, activists and journalists.
The infiltration was uncovered in a government investigation after a Vodafone engineer was found dead in 2005 under suspicious circumstances.
Although the recent round of attacks against Google and other companies appears to have come from China, the threat is not limited to that country, according to computer security researchers. A host of nations, private corporations and even bands of rogue programmers are capable of covertly tunneling into information systems.
“Our conventional military dominance drives our adversaries to cheat, lie and steal,” said James Gosler, a fellow at Sandia National Laboratories and a visiting scientist at the National Security Agency, in a speech last year to Pentagon employees. “The offensive technical capability to play this game is well within the reach of the principal adversaries of the United States. In fact, one could argue that some of our adversaries are better at this game than we are.” Over the years, Chinese attackers have shown the most interest in military and technology-related assets, leaving assaults on financial systems to hackers in Russia and Eastern European countries.
A look at the source code of software at a company like Adobe or Cisco can help attackers find new ways to burrow into products before the companies can fix errors in their software. In addition, the hackers can gain insights into how to insert their own code into the software so that they can have ready access to machines down the road. “One of the U.S. government’s biggest worries is that the attackers will place that source code back into products,” said George Kurtz, the chief technology officer at McAfee.
For example, the widespread appearance of counterfeit Cisco routers, which direct traffic on computer networks, has become a major concern in recent years.
Cisco is required by law to include technology in its networking products that allows investigators to tap the hardware for information. The fear is that a country like China could sell counterfeit routers containing slightly modified software that would allow hackers to dial into the systems. “That could provide the perfect over-the-shoulder view of everything coming out of a network,” Mr. Moss said.
A Cisco spokesman, Terry Alberstein, said that the company had extensively tested counterfeit Cisco routers. “We have not found a single instance of software or hardware that was modified to make them more vulnerable to security threats,” he said.
Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security education organization, said American technology companies had gotten better about protecting their most prized intellectual property by creating more complex systems for viewing and changing source code. Such systems can keep a detailed account of what tweaks have been made to a software product.
But such security can be undermined by employees who open malicious files sent to them in e-mail, said Mr. Kurtz. “One of the greatest vulnerabilities remains the people element,” he added.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The crown jewels of Google, Cisco Systems or any other technology company are the millions of lines of programming instructions, known as source code, that make its products run.
If hackers could steal those key instructions and copy them, they could easily dull the company’s competitive edge in the marketplace. More insidiously, if attackers were able to make subtle, undetected changes to that code, they could essentially give themselves secret access to everything the company and its customers did with the software.
The fear of someone building such a back door, known as a Trojan horse, and using it to conduct continual spying is why companies and security experts were so alarmed by Google’s disclosure last week that hackers based in China had stolen some of its intellectual property and had conducted similar assaults on more than two dozen other companies.
“Originally we were saying, ‘Well, whoever got it has the secret sauce to Google and some 30 other California companies, and they can replicate it,’ ” said Rick Howard, director of security intelligence at VeriSign iDefense, which helped Google investigate the Chinese attacks. “But some of the more devious folks in our outfit were saying, ‘Well, they could also insert their own code — and they probably have.’ ”
For example, a foreign intelligence agency might find it extremely useful to know who was asking particular questions of Google’s search engine.
Security researchers took particular interest in the fact that the Silicon Valley company Adobe Systems was one of the companies hit by the recent wave of attacks.
Computer users around the globe have Adobe’s Acrobat or Reader software sitting on their machines to create or read documents, and Adobe’s Flash technology is widely used to present multimedia content on the Web and mobile phones.
“Acrobat is installed on about 95 percent of the machines in the world, and there have been a lot of vulnerabilities found in Flash,” said Jeff Moss, a security expert who sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “If you can find a vulnerability in one of these products, you’re golden.”
Products from Microsoft, including Windows, Office and Internet Explorer, have long been favored targets for hackers because so many people use them. But McAfee, a leading software security firm, predicts that Adobe’s software will become the top target this year, as Microsoft has improved its products after years of attacks and Adobe’s software has become ubiquitous.
Adobe said it was still investigating the attacks but so far had no evidence that any sensitive information had been compromised.
Brad Arkin, the director of product security at Adobe, said the company generally expected to face increasing attention from hackers given the growing popularity of its products. But he added that the company employed industry-leading practices to respond to threats. “The security of our customers will always be a critical priority for Adobe,” he said.
Given the complexity of today’s software programs, which are typically written by teams of hundreds or thousands of engineers, it is virtually impossible to be perfectly confident in the security of any program, and tampering could very well go undetected.
Companies are understandably reluctant to discuss their security failures. But one notable episode shows just how damaging the secret tampering with source code can be.
Before the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, an unidentified hacker inserted secret programs into four telephone switching computers operated by the Vodafone Group, the world’s largest cellphone carrier. The programs created a clandestine tapping system that allowed unknown snoops to eavesdrop on cellphone calls and track the location of about 100 prominent Greek citizens, including then-Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, military officials, the mayor of Athens, activists and journalists.
The infiltration was uncovered in a government investigation after a Vodafone engineer was found dead in 2005 under suspicious circumstances.
Although the recent round of attacks against Google and other companies appears to have come from China, the threat is not limited to that country, according to computer security researchers. A host of nations, private corporations and even bands of rogue programmers are capable of covertly tunneling into information systems.
“Our conventional military dominance drives our adversaries to cheat, lie and steal,” said James Gosler, a fellow at Sandia National Laboratories and a visiting scientist at the National Security Agency, in a speech last year to Pentagon employees. “The offensive technical capability to play this game is well within the reach of the principal adversaries of the United States. In fact, one could argue that some of our adversaries are better at this game than we are.” Over the years, Chinese attackers have shown the most interest in military and technology-related assets, leaving assaults on financial systems to hackers in Russia and Eastern European countries.
A look at the source code of software at a company like Adobe or Cisco can help attackers find new ways to burrow into products before the companies can fix errors in their software. In addition, the hackers can gain insights into how to insert their own code into the software so that they can have ready access to machines down the road. “One of the U.S. government’s biggest worries is that the attackers will place that source code back into products,” said George Kurtz, the chief technology officer at McAfee.
For example, the widespread appearance of counterfeit Cisco routers, which direct traffic on computer networks, has become a major concern in recent years.
Cisco is required by law to include technology in its networking products that allows investigators to tap the hardware for information. The fear is that a country like China could sell counterfeit routers containing slightly modified software that would allow hackers to dial into the systems. “That could provide the perfect over-the-shoulder view of everything coming out of a network,” Mr. Moss said.
A Cisco spokesman, Terry Alberstein, said that the company had extensively tested counterfeit Cisco routers. “We have not found a single instance of software or hardware that was modified to make them more vulnerable to security threats,” he said.
Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security education organization, said American technology companies had gotten better about protecting their most prized intellectual property by creating more complex systems for viewing and changing source code. Such systems can keep a detailed account of what tweaks have been made to a software product.
But such security can be undermined by employees who open malicious files sent to them in e-mail, said Mr. Kurtz. “One of the greatest vulnerabilities remains the people element,” he added.
18 Ocak 2010 Pazartesi
Joseph E. Stiglitz: Rethink GDP fetish
Striving to revive the world economy while simultaneously responding to the global climate crisis has raised a knotty question: Are statistics giving us the right "signals" about what to do? In our performance-oriented world, measurement issues have taken on increased importance: What we measure affects what we do.
If we have poor measures, what we strive to do (say, increase GDP) may actually contribute to a worsening of living standards. We may also be confronted with false choices, seeing trade-offs between output and environmental protection that don't exist. By contrast, a better measure of economic performance might show that steps taken to improve the environment are good for the economy.
Eighteen months ago, French President Nicolas Sarkozy established an international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, owing to his dissatisfaction - and that of many others - with the current state of statistical information about the economy and society. On Sept. 14, the commission will issue its long-awaited report.
The big question concerns whether GDP provides a good measure of living standards. In many cases, GDP statistics seem to suggest that the economy is doing far better than most citizens' own perceptions. Moreover, the focus on GDP creates conflicts: political leaders are told to maximize it, but citizens also demand that attention be paid to enhancing security, reducing pollution, and so forth - all of which might lower GDP growth.
The fact that GDP may be a poor measure of well-being, or even of market activity, has, of course, long been recognized. But changes in society and the economy may have heightened the problems, at the same time that advances in economics and statistical techniques may have provided opportunities to improve our metrics.
For example, while GDP is supposed to measure the value of output of goods and services, in one key sector - government - we typically have no way of doing it, so we often measure the output simply by the inputs. If government spends more - even if inefficiently - output goes up. In the last 60 years, the share of government output in GDP has increased from 21.4 percent to 38.6 percent in the U.S., from 27.6 percent to 52.7 percent in France, from 34.2 percent to 47.6 percent in the United Kingdom, and from 30.4 percent to 44 percent in Germany. So what was a relatively minor problem has now become a major one.
Likewise, quality improvements - better cars rather than just more cars - account for much of the increase in GDP nowadays. But assessing quality improvements is difficult. Health care exemplifies this problem: Much of medicine is publicly provided, and much of the advances are in quality.
The same problems in making comparisons over time apply to comparisons across countries. The United States spends more on health care than any other country (both per person and as a percentage of income), but gets poorer outcomes. Part of the difference between GDP per person in the U.S. and some European countries may thus be a result of the way we measure things.
Another marked change in most societies is an increase in inequality. This means that there is increasing disparity between average (mean) income and the median income (that of the "typical" person, whose income lies in the middle of the distribution of all incomes). If a few bankers get much richer, average income can go up, even as most individuals' incomes are declining. So GDP per person statistics may not reflect what is happening to most citizens.
We use market prices to value goods and services. But now, even those with the most faith in markets question reliance on market prices, as they argue against mark-to-market valuations. The pre-crisis profits of banks - one-third of all corporate profits - appear to have been a mirage.
This realization casts a new light not only on our measures of performance, but also on the inferences we make. Before the crisis, when U.S. growth (using standard GDP measures) seemed so much stronger than that of Europe, many Europeans argued that Europe should adopt U.S.-style capitalism. Of course, anyone who wanted to could have seen American households' growing indebtedness, which would have gone a long way toward correcting the false impression of success given by the GDP statistic.
Recent methodological advances have enabled us to assess better what contributes to citizens' sense of well-being, and to gather the data needed to make such assessments on a regular basis. These studies, for instance, verify and quantify what should be obvious: the loss of a job has a greater impact than can be accounted for just by the loss of income. They also demonstrate the importance of social connectedness.
Any good measure of how well we are doing must also take account of sustainability. Just as a firm needs to measure the depreciation of its capital, so, too, our national accounts need to reflect the depletion of natural resources and the degradation of our environment.
Statistical frameworks are intended to summarize what is going on in our complex society in a few easily interpretable numbers. It should have been obvious that one couldn't reduce everything to a single number, GDP. The report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress will, one hopes, lead to a better understanding of the uses, and abuses, of that statistic.
The report should also provide guidance for creating a broader set of indicators that more accurately capture both well-being and sustainability; and it should provide impetus for improving the ability of GDP and related statistics to assess the performance of the economy and society. Such reforms will help us direct our efforts (and resources) in ways that lead to improvement in both.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, economics professor at Columbia University and a Nobel Prize winner, served as chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. This column was provided by Project Syndicate, a Prague-based not-for-profit association of 390 newspapers in 145 countries.
If we have poor measures, what we strive to do (say, increase GDP) may actually contribute to a worsening of living standards. We may also be confronted with false choices, seeing trade-offs between output and environmental protection that don't exist. By contrast, a better measure of economic performance might show that steps taken to improve the environment are good for the economy.
Eighteen months ago, French President Nicolas Sarkozy established an international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, owing to his dissatisfaction - and that of many others - with the current state of statistical information about the economy and society. On Sept. 14, the commission will issue its long-awaited report.
The big question concerns whether GDP provides a good measure of living standards. In many cases, GDP statistics seem to suggest that the economy is doing far better than most citizens' own perceptions. Moreover, the focus on GDP creates conflicts: political leaders are told to maximize it, but citizens also demand that attention be paid to enhancing security, reducing pollution, and so forth - all of which might lower GDP growth.
The fact that GDP may be a poor measure of well-being, or even of market activity, has, of course, long been recognized. But changes in society and the economy may have heightened the problems, at the same time that advances in economics and statistical techniques may have provided opportunities to improve our metrics.
For example, while GDP is supposed to measure the value of output of goods and services, in one key sector - government - we typically have no way of doing it, so we often measure the output simply by the inputs. If government spends more - even if inefficiently - output goes up. In the last 60 years, the share of government output in GDP has increased from 21.4 percent to 38.6 percent in the U.S., from 27.6 percent to 52.7 percent in France, from 34.2 percent to 47.6 percent in the United Kingdom, and from 30.4 percent to 44 percent in Germany. So what was a relatively minor problem has now become a major one.
Likewise, quality improvements - better cars rather than just more cars - account for much of the increase in GDP nowadays. But assessing quality improvements is difficult. Health care exemplifies this problem: Much of medicine is publicly provided, and much of the advances are in quality.
The same problems in making comparisons over time apply to comparisons across countries. The United States spends more on health care than any other country (both per person and as a percentage of income), but gets poorer outcomes. Part of the difference between GDP per person in the U.S. and some European countries may thus be a result of the way we measure things.
Another marked change in most societies is an increase in inequality. This means that there is increasing disparity between average (mean) income and the median income (that of the "typical" person, whose income lies in the middle of the distribution of all incomes). If a few bankers get much richer, average income can go up, even as most individuals' incomes are declining. So GDP per person statistics may not reflect what is happening to most citizens.
We use market prices to value goods and services. But now, even those with the most faith in markets question reliance on market prices, as they argue against mark-to-market valuations. The pre-crisis profits of banks - one-third of all corporate profits - appear to have been a mirage.
This realization casts a new light not only on our measures of performance, but also on the inferences we make. Before the crisis, when U.S. growth (using standard GDP measures) seemed so much stronger than that of Europe, many Europeans argued that Europe should adopt U.S.-style capitalism. Of course, anyone who wanted to could have seen American households' growing indebtedness, which would have gone a long way toward correcting the false impression of success given by the GDP statistic.
Recent methodological advances have enabled us to assess better what contributes to citizens' sense of well-being, and to gather the data needed to make such assessments on a regular basis. These studies, for instance, verify and quantify what should be obvious: the loss of a job has a greater impact than can be accounted for just by the loss of income. They also demonstrate the importance of social connectedness.
Any good measure of how well we are doing must also take account of sustainability. Just as a firm needs to measure the depreciation of its capital, so, too, our national accounts need to reflect the depletion of natural resources and the degradation of our environment.
Statistical frameworks are intended to summarize what is going on in our complex society in a few easily interpretable numbers. It should have been obvious that one couldn't reduce everything to a single number, GDP. The report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress will, one hopes, lead to a better understanding of the uses, and abuses, of that statistic.
The report should also provide guidance for creating a broader set of indicators that more accurately capture both well-being and sustainability; and it should provide impetus for improving the ability of GDP and related statistics to assess the performance of the economy and society. Such reforms will help us direct our efforts (and resources) in ways that lead to improvement in both.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, economics professor at Columbia University and a Nobel Prize winner, served as chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. This column was provided by Project Syndicate, a Prague-based not-for-profit association of 390 newspapers in 145 countries.
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