Like many around the web, I was struck last month by the obituary of Bell Labs engineer John E. Karlin, whose greatest legacy may be the keypad design on traditional touch-tone phones. (That is, the arrangement in a 3×3 grid with the 1-2-3 across the top instead of the bottom.) I had long heard the urban legend explanation that the arrangement was deliberately designed to slow down a population trained to quickly enter strings of numbers on calculators and cash registers and prevent them from overwhelming the phone system. It’s nice to hear that not only was there deliberate thought behind it, but real behavioral research.
(There are similar legends, too, about the QWERTY keyboard being developed to intentionally slow down typists to avoid jamming the keys. This is at least controversial and probably wrong.)
His story also reminded me of the creation of another well-known keypad arrangement: the arrow keys on computer keyboards. To me the familiar inverted-T seems like the only plausible arrangement, but there were actually a handful of different options in production for a while. Jim “Brons” Burrows was an engineer at DEC which developed the inverted-T keypad that later became the industry standard, and his first-person account of that development process is a really interesting read.
Of course, the CBP drones weren’t the only option. The day after Lorenzo’s story, Ryan Gallagher at Slate got in touch with the FAA, who said that “no agency has asked us to issue a certificate of authorization for operating UAS as part of this search.” That pretty much rules out the option that the LAPD was flying drones, even if they were officially refusing to confirm or deny the story.
Given that Dorner was discovered in close proximity to a police outpost, it seems unlikely that a drone covering more territory would have been much help. But now we know, more or less, that it wasn’t used in this case.
If you’ve been on Twitter today, you’ve probably seen it promoted as fact that surveillance drones have been sent into operation over Los Angeles as part of the multi-state manhunt for former cop Christopher Dorner alleged to be on a killing spree. The worst articles imply that the drones are armed and the government has authorized Dorner’s death, using language that’s ambiguous to the point of being deceptive, which is almost certainly untrue. But a closer look at the articles raises another concern: all of the reports are citing a single article which is flawed at best, and at worst may even be fabricated. Are the police using a drone at all?
Sunday Morning, the UK publication “Express” published an article about the manhunt, and provided its drone claims, with its main claim coming from an anonymous source within the Los Angeles police department. The relevant facts presented in the article are:
“Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil.”
“A senior police source said: ‘The thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him. On the ground, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.’”
Riverside PD Chief Sergio Diaz was asked directly about drones, and responded “We are using all the tools at our disposal.”
Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio confirmed the drone use, and provided the quote: “This agency has been at the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement. That’s all I can say at the moment.”
These claims have been cited in dozens or hundreds of subsequent articles, beginning with Gizmodo. But each of these claims is suspect, and taken collectively I believe they are false. Taking a look at each:
“The first human target”
That Dorner would be the first human target for drone surveillance on US soil is true only if you take a very particular, and unusual, read on some of the words. If there are drones tracking him, he is at least the second case on US soil, after a 2011 arrest based on drone evidence in North Dakota. In that case, as is alleged in this case, the drones were Customs and Border Protection MQ-9 “Reaper” drones (a model previously known as “Predator B”). In that case, the suspects’ general location was known, and the drone was used to determine their specific location on a single property, and whether they were armed or not. If that makes them ineligible to be the “first human target[s] for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil”, it’s not clear how.
Senior police source on thermal imaging
It’s not clear why this source would be attributed anonymously, or where this quote comes from. Without a name or the circumstances of its delivery, it’s difficult or impossible to verify the quote. And how did a tiny paper in the United Kingdom get such a juicy source more than 10,000 miles away in the Los Angeles police department?
Chief Sergio Diaz “using all the tools” at his disposal
If Chief Sergio Diaz said that the task force is using all the tools at its disposal to hunt down Dorning, it’s likely he said it at a press conference on Thursday morning, February 7, 2013. If so, it’s not clear why the line didn’t get more attention. An online student-run newspaper from the University of Southern California — “Neon Tommy” — attributes the quote to him in an article published on the 7th. However, that article is explicitly about LAPD’s declining to state whether drones are being used — not presented as evidence that they’re in use.
What’s more, this video from the press conference does not appear to include that question or response, and despite the obvious newsworthiness of such a quote, it doesn’t show up in other publications.
CBP confirmation and spokesman quote
If CBP spokesman Ralph DeSio did confirm drone usage, it’s not clear how or where he did so. The same Neon Tommy article mentioned above cites Ralph DeSio as the source for information about where CPB drones are deployed. Curiously, the very next quote in that article is identical to what Express alleged DeSio to have said: “The agency has been on the forefront of domestic use of drones by law enforcement.” However, that quote is attributed — and linked — to an article by the investigative reporting group California Watch. Did a hasty read of the Neon Tommy article lead to a bad attribution in the Express? Unfortunately, the addition of the next sentence, “That’s all I can say at the moment” gives the impression of unclean hands.
Yes, it’s possible that Express contacted Ralph DeSio over the weekend, got the confirmation, and then a quote from him that is out-of-character for the organization and plagiarized from a California Watch piece. But that seems unlikely.
Whether or not these drones are being used in this manhunt, and whether or not they’re armed (they’re not), there is real cause for concern. A secret aerial surveillance program wherein federal agencies loan military technology to local police forces raises serious questions and we should demand to know more. The expansion of warrantless surveillance to unarmed vehicles with capabilities that exceed any helicopter or light plane currently in operation is also a problem. The general militarization of police is well-documented and alarming, as is the shift in rhetoric and actions in the Dorner case from capture-and-try to capture-and-kill.
But we do a disservice to our efforts at resolving these important issues when we resort to untruths or conspiracy theories.
There’s recently been a lot of great writing on women and the problem of gender inequality in the tech field. I recommend these three pieces in particular:
“Not a Beard” by Mari Huertas, who was a member of Obama’s re-election tech team. In an effort to indicate that the team was more San Francisco than Washington, many articles joke about the beards on the team. Needless to say, Mari does not have a beard. From the piece:
I want other females, young and old, to feel encouraged by the women who worked on this re-election campaign and in technology, civics, and government as a whole. I want girls and young professionals to find their way by the determined wakes we leave. We’re doing important, satisfying, fun work – we should broaden and extend our purview so more can wade into the fray.
“How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year” by Brett Berson, a member of an investment group that hosted Etsy’s CTO for a talk on the subject. It’s important to note that it wasn’t a cheap or easy fix: it involved spending money intelligently on “Hacker Grants” and consistently and proactively reaching out. But it’s also been worth it, increasing diversity on the team and increasing the quality of applicants, male and female.
Even science recognizes that diversity is important: research from both the Kellogg and Sloan Schools suggest that cognitively diverse teams perform better on hard problems.
Beyond that, though, hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities.
I’m consistently frustrated by the homogeny of the tech scene in San Francisco and generally, and it’s encouraging to see that people are addressing the problem. It’s a long road ahead, and it extends even beyond gender issues. Another great piece called “And Read All Over” by Jamelle Bouie has done an excellent job, for example, of demonstrating the (mostly) unbearable whiteness of the tech journalism community.
Anyway, I think the importance of these issues is even greater than their obvious effect on the discussion around equality in the tech community. As technical developments increasingly have profound effects on our privacy, speech, and civil liberties, I feel much more comfortable with diverse teams making those decisions.
Cory Doctorow is coming through town again, this time on his tour for Homeland, the sequel to his excellent young adult novel Little Brother. Cory likes to talk about how his fiction “predicts the present”: taking the bits of future that are already here, just not yet evenly distributed, and applying them more widely. It’s a neat trick that makes his sci-fi seem eerily prescient, and I know Little Brother has been boosted by supporters of Occupy who saw much of their story foretold in his writing.
In another of Cory’s young adult books, the recent Pirate Cinema, much of the plot focuses on draconian copyright enforcement systems and backlash. Of course, there’s a rich history to pull from: the battles over SOPA and ACTA were just the latest in a long narrative that Cory has been engaged with for years. His “Theft of Intellectual Property Bill (TIP)” might have been fiction, but it’s a logical extension of what we’ve already seen.
Combine predicting the present with some old-fashioned coincidence, and things start to get spooky. Take Cory’s “Jimmy Preston,” who in Pirate Cinema gets a then-unprecedented five-year prison term for sharing music files. Cory writes:
But he’d collected 450,000 songs on his hard drive through endless, tedious, tireless hours of downloading. From what anyone could tell, he didn’t even listen to them: he just liked cataloging them, correcting their metadata, organizing them.
I hope that Jeremiah Perkins doesn’t face the same ultimate fate as Cory’s Jimmy Preston, who didn’t do well in prison. Even more importantly, I hope we don’t see more jailtime for filesharers.
When the book came out, I saw at least one review that said the action was too over-the-top, the law too excessive, the studio groups too vindictive to possibly reflect reality. Detractors should take note: when the book came out, the mainstream probably wouldn’t believe a five-year sentence for file-sharing. Then it happened. Cory’s good at predicting the present.
His story also reminded me of the creation of another well-known keypad arrangement: the arrow keys on computer keyboards. To me the familiar inverted-T seems like the only plausible arrangement, but there were actually a handful of different options in production for a while. Jim “Brons” Burrows was an engineer at DEC which developed the inverted-T keypad that later became the industry standard, and his first-person account of that development process is a really interesting read.