Activities of a Clandestine Nature (4 of…

Recently I heard a really great argument against clandestine activities: It perpetuates the practice, the habits, the policies, and the systems that facilitate clandestine activities. Being something that we don't want, systematic clandestine activities should be pointed out, certainly be strictly live-audited by unbiased third parties.

Why is clandestine activities bad? The truth of the matter is that knowledge begotten of clandestine activities are inherently out of context and incomplete information. Why spy on my computer, when you can walk up to me and ask? When you take a small slice of what happens, you will surely miss the whole as the whole is not represented by some of the things that you are able to see as a clandestine agent.

Previously suggested problem that those taking part in clandestine activities will as all things in nature fall into the path of least resistance. Some day, we will just water board every person we suspect, I mean why not? I'm sure there's an email I sent once that says "I hate you" or "I'm gonna kill you" or "I hope you die". And my constant opposition of clandestine activities is surely sign that I plan something and desire that no one sees it.

What is the difference between these series acts: passing a secret law that permits some person unknown to me at a time unknown to me read my emails, gather all my past school and employment records, find copies of all emails I've ever sent by USPS, and analyze all information about all my past employment and my family and friends, and these second series of acts: passing a secret law that permits some person unknown to me at a time unknown to me knock me out (perhaps it's already happening in my sleep ? or even on flights, god knows how often I fall asleep quite inexplicably moments before push-off, with two air jets blowing cold air at me and two reading lights shining down! and only to come to quite suddenly for no reason), and torture me and get that information?

Well, you say, there is collateral damage, you feel pain when you are tortured but you do not feel pain when your email is being scanned. This ought to be the most humane way of getting the information from you. Why are you not on your knees thanking all the people whose hard work went into making it so that you are not water boarded? (rightfully or not)

Aha, thank you President Obama! The constitution should save us… Let's see, according to wiki it implicitly presumes innocent for US citizens until proven guilty, but it provides wide leeway for authorities to investigate when suspicion is arouse.

We cannot pursue it through cruel and unusual punishments(8th amendment) as reading my email can hardly be construed as cruel and unusual… even in my interpretation. Although I can imagine some feel it is cruel.

It appears in the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It also fall under Fifth Amendment of due process:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

There should be a Grand Jury of my peers selected uniformly at random who when presented with evidence agree to the search and seizure of my information. I should not be deprived of my liberty and (privacy) property without due process of law. And of course the Ninth Amendment says that we may have rights beyond those listed

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

I should cover my behind and say, you guys in law enforcement are doing a heck of a job, which is much appreciated by present author. And I really hate all those other people who invade my privacy. It's just that I might have a small chance by conventional means (law suite, legal protests, policies, etc.) of changing those things you do that I don't like, and I do not have methods to affect those others.

Everyone who do take part in clandestine activities all feel absolute righteousness as they proceed in invasion of privacy that I do not want them to. Their feeling and their intention absolutely annoys me in addition to their act of invasion. Perhaps we should define invasion of privacy more formally so that these feelings about their feelings are processed rationally. If they can define information theoretic brain death, why can we not define more precisely what invasion of privacy is? What is personal privacy beyond those facts(bits, characters, words, sentences…) whose association with me is information that may cause me harm? regardless of harm, can we take the entropy of those bits and say that is the quantity of privacy lost? Actually, we should take information gain from a representative population and that is the information I lose--those that you gain. The privacy loss as defined (the negative of your information gain by reading my email from knowledge of all emails) actually only qualifies the privacy. It actually does not quantify it sufficiently.

Sadly, this very truthful and fundamental definition takes us a short ways. If you were an English major trying to find new phrasing of something, or if you are a VC looking for new cute company names, this will definitely find information detrimental to those trying to keep it private. But if I am someone plotting next Taliban attack, or someone discussing 21st century is a Marxist century, then the naïve information loss does not help as much as you would like it to (Certainly my email would give away less information under this definition than XYXYXZZZ.com inc) If everyone writes emails using words representing their true meaning equally and every one has same amount of total information(private+public) associated with them then reading your email and reading my email decreases our privacy equally. So we have parameters I_pr for private information, I_pu for public information.

We should compute using Bayes' rule to compute

P(I_pr|my emails, others' emails, I_pu) =

P(my emails | I_pr,I_pu, others' emails)*P(I_pr,I_pu, others' emails)/P(my emails, others' emails, I_pu)

and

P(my emails|Others' emails, I_pu)

and we can then calculate the information

IG(I_pr; my emails|others' emails, I_pu)

based on these distributions, pending specification of relevant linking functions or mechanisms. But the problem with this much more convincing information gain is that you will never convince anyone that the link functions is representative of you. Too complicated for constitutional purposes for sure, and the courts will surely not be empathetic enough to follow the math... Maybe next century when everyone's played with IG and done some modeling in grammar school.

For another example the number $54,102,299.14 and the number $14,541,022.99 relieves me of the same character-wise entropy privacy, however are quantitatively different. We need to rely on some oracle magic. Suppose there is a most concise way to describe the entirety of my privacy, say H containing a series of bits an oracle produced. Your knowledge of H would be your complete knowledge about me. ergmum, we should have a vocabulary of engrams, minimal cognitive elements… H is a series of engrams that is the complete knowledge about me--it's finiteness is not specified. Let's also suppose that my emails (the thing that you use to access my privacy) is encoded by the same oracle using the same engram language producing E the complete knowledge about my emails. |H| is the theoretic maximum privacy I can lose, H*E is the information that I actually lost (inner product like operation for vector space, TBD for strings, perhaps LCS for a special oracle). It remains only to calculate distance(such as edit_distance(H,E) for strings and euclidian_distance(H,E) for euclidian spaces) which is disinformation you gained by reading my email. H*E/|H| is the ratio of my privacy lost, H*E/|E| is the truthfulness of my emails.

It remains to be seen how to find an oracle, the definition of the engram language, operations over it, campaign to enact law to account and compensate us for the privacy lost, etc. However, I am really really wishing that all these clandestine activities are like zits in the face of growing humanity reaching adulthood and will blow away as our vitalities settle into their respective places.

The Ethics Hierarchy and More Diagramming

I recently learned of the Chomsky hierarchy(aka the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy). It would appear to me that what I have discovered also forms a hierarchy of various ethical maxims. Also, I should mention we have added Laozi's 无为 advocating minimized interference both in governance as well as personal improvements. At first glance, it seems very nice that the transitive action space for these maxims fall into proper subset relationships. But as we shall see, this naïve hierarchy only begin to illustrate the relative situation of these maxims in the world.

 

We have not considered the possibility that I am not able to do some things to others and others may not be able to do some things to me. Let us redraw the Ethics Hierarchy but introduce additional capability regions in the transitive action space. Oh, and we have also introduced color to enhance readability of the picture.

Why is this interesting? Well for one thing we are at a stage where Venn diagram can actually separate all the regions that we are interested in. A second reason is that it makes us realized that the containment relationship visualization using grammar school Venn diagrams that my dad pointed me to was only just the beginning of our exploration. We can draw more circles and see that our world have distinctive sections with different shades of meaning, benefit and possibilities.

For instance, one thing this graph points out is that there are things that Confucius or Jesus recommends us to do that we cannot actually do to others.It also shows us that there are things that we desire that in reality we cannot receive, however we can perform the act onto others. The graph also points out that there are the region of actions space within our desires that others can never give to us.

Lastly from looking at this picture, it seems that actions within realm of possibility that are not recommended by the Jesus action set is small. On the other hand, the actions that Confucius recommend that are not possible is also small. From freehand drawing it would appear that the completely impossible actions inside the Confucius action set is small relative to all Confucius's recommendations, and similarly the completely possible actions outside of the Jesus set is small compared to the whole Jesus set.

Fascinating!!!

The Ninja Innovation, Golden Globe, CES, etc.

Just returned from CES and I've been reading Ninja Innovation written and autographed by Gary Shapiro who heads CEA which runs CES which is where I found out about the book. The book goes down like a good scotch. Which is to say it is well aged, taste great, and a little intoxicating.

Also, reading the book I found out about German strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Hehe, I couldn't help but giggle a little regarding the "dialectic thesis and antithesis of war"… Recalling times long ago, in a land far away, where I first heard of the words "dialectics", "thesis", "antithesis" and the "resolution".

UGH, on second thought, should I post about this? It will surely arouse suspicion of multiple agencies from who knows how many countries monitoring the online postings that mentions these terms. I probably just signed the United States "Wire-tap" Warrant to endlessly monitor and analyze my blog and email and all other personal things, and to retroactively obtain all records of all my private things since birth, by writing about this. Want to give a quick shout out to Jodi Foster(Congrats on being recognized for lifetime achievement at 2013 Golden Globe), I am your fan! I know I'm not a big star since age of three, but still Go Privacy!!! :-)

hehe, okay, but do let me say, I find that today I am not so attracted to this idea of Hegel's.

But Clausewitz's work seem much more interesting. The expression "fog of war" started there. These things that are so obvious today, but probably rarely fully understood, very difficult to clarify in author's own head, and much more difficult to write in language at that time: Obviously the leadership of military has personalities, and obviously those personalities greatly affect what battles are fought and who wins wars. Obviously war includes clearly distinguishable elements (in fact physically separate aspects) of "force" and "uncertainty" and that their "resolution" would rely on the "creative spirit" of those involved, (aka fascinating trinity, die wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit). It sounds so obvious and so right and needless to write--Obviously, now, that I read it's summary in Wikipedia after more than two centuries of people reading and summarizing it) But at that time, perhaps nobody has yet fully grasped all these insights and put them together--except for Clausewitz, of course.

The same goes for Ninja Innovation, what's said seem completely obvious: Of course you need a team of highly specialized people who wants to, are able to, and are willing to work together to, and are willing to wait until the timing is right to accomplish a common goal. But the salience with which this is pointed out through personal experience of highly complex success stories is absolutely critical for the book to be of value to readers, and Shapiro accomplishes that.

Oh, I also want to plug my own blog having similar title called "The Good Business -- Ninja's approach." I must admit, in I originally used the word Ninja slightly derogatorily--This blog documents many of the business practices the "business ninjas" used successfully, or attempted without negative consequences, on me that are perhaps violate professional ethics. The good thing is that the blog did morph to include various devious ways for me to become a business Ninja. Great minds think alike, and we have both landed on Ninja.

I want to quote a line describing the Ninjas from Shapiro's book, that they excel at "the art of espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination" OMG, my heart stopped when I read this. This is the kind of people that the above fine print speak of. Those that spies and sabotages in complete secrecy! they infiltrate my work, hack my accounts, befriend my friends, family, and they kill. Powerful! very powerful, very insightful! exhilarating passage!

Link to the book on Amazon: Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses.

Additional links on Clauswitz's work:

• Gutenberg copy of English version of On War is here by incorporated by reference. ;-)
• Side-by-side translation English from original German.
• Also, apparently there are famous French Military Strategist despite popular jokes about their lack of military success by the name of Antoine Henri Jomini.

p.s. note for self: center-of-gravity in these context is center of target of attack.

p.p.s. Next time I visit Vegas for fun, I'd like it to be riding California's new high speed rails...