national security

DHS Artificial Intelligence Safety And Security Board Has Some Odd Appointments.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Now that we’ve seen that generative artificial intelligence can be trained ethically, without breaking copyright laws, the list of people to the DHS Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board seems less than ideal.

The Board is supposed to ‘advance AI’s responsible development and deployment’ (emphasis mine), yet some on that Board took shortcuts.

Shortcuts in relation to any national security issue seems like a bad thing.

Here’s the list.

There’s some dubious companies involved. The argument can be made – and it probably will – that the companies are a part of national infrastructure, but is it national infrastructure that controls the United States, or is it the other way around?

I don’t know that these picks are good or bad. I will say that there are some that, at least in the eyes of others, been irresponsible. That would fall under Demonstrated Unreliability.

Breach Ho!

~ Taran ~ 8 Comments
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

As everyone in Trinidad and Tobago knows, Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) had a horrible data breach that leaked quite a bit of personal information of customers, from scanned identification to credit card numbers.

I sat back for most of it. It was pretty clear to me from the onset that there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. As mentioned in the mainstream media, the story from TSTT changed quite a bit.

If there was a checklist of every bad way to handle a data breach of customer personal information, I think they at least hit the high notes. They were as unprepared for their information security being compromised as they were unprepared to have their information security put to the test.

TechNewsTT.com seemed to have the best coverage. I sat back and watched as details of scanned copies of identification, credit card numbers, a suspected password file and more began surfacing even as TSTT denied that they lost that information. When I searched for my information in the data dump, I found 2 occurrences. A few days later, I checked again and I was up to 37. This disturbed me not just because of the amount of times I showed up but because of one very interesting detail.

I’m not a TSTT customer. I am a customer of their subsidiary, Amplia. While I have heard but not met a namesake in Trinidad and Tobago, I strongly suspect that there are not 37 of us with the same name. Of course, that search doesn’t tell you what sort of documents and information was leaked. Why is my name in a data dump when I’m not a direct customer? Peculiar, suspicious, and enough to make one wonder a little bit about whether TSTT is co-mingling it’s information across subsidiaries.

Even more disturbing has been how many people misunderstand the data breach in their own personal context. The fact that a telecommunications provider, with a majority share owned by the government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, mishandled this from information security to being honest with their customers should boggle any sane person.

Unfortunately, this is not the first data breach in Trinidad and Tobago. There have been some announced, such as when the Judiciary got locked out of their system and no cases could continue their slow moonwalk toward progress. These are the obvious breaches, the advertised breaches.

It’s the silent breaches we should be worried about.

There’s so many questions that people need to be asking that it’s hard to write just one article about it.

Trinidad and Tobago: Copying of IDs Continues.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

When I wrote about the amount of photocopies made of IDs in Trinidad and Tobago, back in 2018, I failed to look forward because as most things in Trinidad and Tobago, we are so focused on the present which looks a lot like the past in other nations.

I’d considered writing a really long article about it, but instead, I’ll just do this off the cuff.

Here’s the thing. A lawyer called me this morning and wanted me to email him copies of 2 forms of ID so that he could help his client out with something, because in dealing with a government office, they would make copies of the ID to have on file because… because Trinidad and Tobago is displaced by about 20 years of bureaucracy. This bureaucracy only persists because of those who benefit from it.

In an age where Mark Lyndersay complains that Lensa thinks he should have hair, in the very same country, maybe sending digital copies of identification around could be considered a National Security issue. Or a banking fraud issue, since banks are one of the sore points for… well, everyone.

That it’s not criminal is only because it hasn’t been outlawed yet. It is, as we would say here, doltish.

It’s amazingly simple to do, particularly with the passing inspection identification cards get in the places that make copies of them. It wouldn’t be too hard to create an ID based on a template, a few images that could be done photorealistically by AI, and making sure it’s the right dimensions.

The bureaucracy can’t get out of it’s own way.