Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Niraj Chokshi

State Department Spent $630K to Buy Facebook 'Likes'

Niraj Chokshi, National Journal — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 17:16:35 -0400

A State Department bureau wanted so badly to boost its social-media presence that it dropped $630,000 over two years on advertising campaigns on Facebook, according to a May inspector general's report.

The campaigns "succeeded in increasing the fans of the English Facebook pages from about 100,000 to more than 2 million for each page," the report found. But State Department employees said the money was wasted on "buying fans." Here's the relevant section of the report:

The coordinator initiated two campaigns in 2011 and 2012, with the goal of building global outreach platforms for engagement with foreign audiences by increasing the number of fans on [the Bureau of International Information Programs's] four thematic Facebook properties, primarily through advertising as well as through some page improvements. The bureau spent about $630,000 on the two campaigns and succeeded in increasing the fans of the English Facebook pages from about 100,000 to more than 2 million for each page. Advertising also helped increase interest in the foreign language pages; by March 2013, they ranged from 68,000 to more than 450,000 fans.

Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as "buying fans" who may have once clicked on an ad or "liked" a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further. Defenders of advertising point to the difficulty of finding a page on Facebook with a general search and the need to use ads to increase visibility.

IIP's four global thematic English-language Facebook pages had garnered more than 2.5 million fans each by mid-March 2013; the number actually engaging with each page was considerably smaller, with just over 2 percent "liking," sharing, or commenting on any item within the previous week. Engagement on each posting varied, and most of that interaction was in the form of "likes." Many postings had fewer than 100 comments or shares; the most popular ones had several hundred.

(h/t The Washington Examiner's Michael Conger.)

(Image via Flickr user Marcin Wichary)

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The Biggest Threat to the Economy Could Come From Outer Space

Niraj Chokshi, National Journal — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:24:39 -0400

Imagine waking up just after midnight to a sky so bright you swear it must be early morning. Imagine seeing the Northern Lights as far south as Cuba or Hawaii. Imagine that the same phenomena behind both has also generated electric fields in the ground strong enough to power small electronics. That's what happened in 1859, when the earth was struck by the most severe geomagnetic storm ever recorded.

Forget asset bubbles, recessions, or hurricanes—space weather could prove far more economically harmful. A severe geomagnetic storm—a sudden, violent eruption of gas and magnetic fields from the sun's surface—could prove particularly devastating. If the 1859 storm, known as the "Carrington event," were to recur today it could cause trillions of dollars in economic damage and take years to recover from, according to estimates.

The sun would sneeze and the economy could shatter.

That's a worst-case scenario, of course. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was less dramatic at a space-weather conference hosted by the agency last week, though he did say that such events can be "just as punishing as a tornado" and are "a problem that crosses all borders." Magnetic storms can force Earth's magnetic fields to go temporarily haywire, overwhelming power grids.

The 1859 event didn't cause as much damage as it would today—electrical engineering was in its infancy—but it was globally felt. Here's how a 2008 space-weather report from the National Academy of Sciences described that year's storm:

From Aug. 28 through Sept. 4, auroral displays of extraordinary brilliance were observed throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and were seen as far south as Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Central America in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere as far north as Santiago, Chile. Even after daybreak, when the aurora was no longer visible, its presence continued to be felt through the effect of the auroral currents. Magnetic observatories recorded disturbances in Earth's field so extreme that magnetometer traces were driven off scale, and telegraph networks around the world—the "Victorian Internet"—experienced major disruptions and outages.... In several locations, operators disconnected their systems from the batteries and sent messages using only the current induced by the aurora.

In other words, they literally ran the telegraphs from the electrical fields generated by the storm.

The 1859 event may be an extreme case, but there are more-recent examples of such space weather: in March 1989 a geomagnetic storm took down northeastern Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid in just 90 seconds, leaving millions without power in the cold for up to nine hours. And a set of "Halloween" solar storms between October and November of 2003 sparked a National Academy of Sciences-led meeting on the societal and economic impact of space weather, which served as the basis of the report.

But it's not just scientists who are concerned about space weather. Lloyd's of London, the giant insurer, issued a report on the issue in 2010. In the foreword to the report, Lloyd's Tom Bolt warned of a scientist-predicted spike between 2012 and 2015. "In terms of cycles, we are in late autumn and heading into winter," he wrote then. A severe space-weather event could prove devastating, according to the Lloyd's report.

In the worst case it can permanently damage transformers. In most cases, systems protecting power grids will detect problems and switch off before serious damage occurs. However, this may lead to a cascade effect in which more and more systems are switched off, leading to complete grid shutdown. In these situations it will take many hours to restore grid operation, causing disruption to operations and services, and potential loss of income.

The 1989 storm permanently damaged a $12 million New Jersey transformer. In 1921, a storm 10 times as bad struck. Today, that storm would permanently damage roughly 350 transformers, causing blackouts that would affect as many as 130 million people, according to a Metatech estimate.

An outside analysis conducted by Metatech for the Electromagnetic Pulse Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency found that the effects of a severe geomagnetic storm would not only be widespread, but long-lived. Such an event has "not only the potential for large-scale blackouts but, more troubling ... the potential for permanent damage that could lead to extraordinarily long restoration times," Metatech's John Kappenman told the NAS report's authors.

In a globalized world, all kinds of sectors would be impacted by a power failure. Fuel, food, water, sanitation, communications, medical/health, finance, and transportation would all feel cascading effects. Many businesses rely solely on satellite navigation for transportation on land and sea, and cell phones would be vulnerable to interference.

"Impacts would be felt on interdependent infrastructures, with, for example, potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in about 12-24 hours; and immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply, and so on," the NAS report found.

Hurricane Katrina caused roughly $80 billion to $125 billion in damage, according to the report. A future geomagnetic storm like the 1859 event could cost 10 to 20 times as much and take up to a decade to fully recover from, according to Metatech's estimates.

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NSA Forced Verizon To Turn Over Data on Millions of Customers

Niraj Chokshi and Matt Berman, National Journal — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:42:35 -0400

The National Security Agency is collecting the telephone data of millions of Verizon customers in the United States, according to a Wednesday Guardian report, and the information collected could be incredibly revealing even if it doesn't seem so at first. That's because big data sets -- even supposedly anonymized ones -- can often be used to uniquely identify individuals.

The secret court order forcing Verizon to give up the data over a three-month period doesn't cover the contents of messages or personal information of individual subscribers, The Guardian reported. Instead:

It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number," the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information."

The information is classed as "metadata," or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data -- the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to -- was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

The legal underpinnings of the data collection are not dissimilar to those behind the recent Justice Department subpoena for the phone records of Associated Press staff.

And, as a concurrent Guardian report points out, the government has long argued that this kind of data is perfectly legal to collect because it's similar to collecting the information on the outside of an envelope. But even that so-called "transactional" data --phone numbers, phone serial numbers, time and length of calls -- can represent a goldmine of information. Collect a ton of data and you can use it later to identify individuals.

That's a fact researchers at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, recently highlighted in their own study of a giant set of phone data. After analyzing 1.5 million cellphone users over the course of 15 months, the researchers found they could uniquely identify 95 percent of cellphone users based on just four data points -- that is, just four instances of where they were and what hour of the day it was just four times in one year. With just two data points, they could identify more than half of the users. And the researchers suggested that the study may underestimate how easy it is:

For the purpose of re-identification, more sophisticated approaches could collect points that are more likely to reduce the uncertainty, exploit irregularities in an individual's behaviour, or implicitly take into account information such as home and work- place or travels abroad. Such approaches are likely to reduce the number of locations required to identify an individual, vis-a`-vis the average uniqueness of traces.

And it's not just phone records that can reveal who you really are. A 2006 New York Times story made it clear just how simple it is to figure out a person's identity based on their web searches. A then-62-year-old woman in Lilburn, Georgia, thought she was perfectly anonymous in her searches for "numb fingers," "60 single men," and "dog that urinates on everything."

But when her AOL search data was released online, it didn't take much to lead reporters from Internet user No. 4417749 to Thelma Arnold. AOL later removed the search data and apologized for its apparently unauthorized release, but it serves as illustration that it doesn't take too much to figure who a person is based on what they're Googling for in the supposed privacy of their own home.

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Super Bowl blackout could energize a debate on power grid

Catherine Hollander and Niraj Chokshi, National Journal — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:57:20 -0500

Questions remain over what caused the half-hour power outage during Sunday’s Super Bowl in New Orleans. What is clear is that advocates of improving the nation’s energy infrastructure see it as a metaphor.

“I think any of you who watched the Super Bowl last night know that energy is not only good, it's necessary. And whether it's keeping the lights on so that we can enjoy the game or whether it's keeping the lights on so that we can work, this is — this is essential to who we are as a prosperous nation,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said at a press conference to unveil an energy proposal on Monday.

If there's a silver lining to be found to the partial blackout, it's this: the way the stadium's electrical system worked, at least according to an early official statement, shows how improvements to energy infrastructure can contain damage.

“Power outages cost our country over $70 billion a year,” said Richard Caperton, an energy expert at the Center for American Progress. “Anything that draws attention to that problem and helps motivate people to deal with it is helpful.”

Minutes into the second half of the game, an electrical-load monitor sensed an “abnormality in the system," according to a joint statement from the management company of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and the stadium’s energy supplier. The monitor then opened a breaker, cutting power to part of the Superdome "in order to isolate the issue.” That kind of fast response is a sign of things to come if and when the nation upgrades its energy infrastructure.

“I mean, in the past, there haven't been that many sensors out there, there haven't been that many ways to redirect things and control things and there also haven't been that many different resources, so if one power plant were to run into a problem, that was a major problem,” said Dan Delurey, the president of the Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition, a trade association for providers of smart grid technologies.

The game, which drew an average of 108.4 million viewers, was another in a series of high-profile power outages during the last year. During Hurricane Sandy in late October, thousands up and down the Eastern Seaboard (and beyond) lost power for periods stretching from days to weeks. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., found themselves hamstrung during this summer’s fast-moving “derecho” storm, which knocked out power throughout the Washington region.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s energy infrastructure a D+ in an infrastructure report card released in 2009. The U.S. “quality of electricity supply” is ranked 33rd globally by the World Economic Forum’s 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Report. Proponents say improvements to the nation’s infrastructure will create jobs.

Last year, President Obama called for repairing the nation’s infrastructure in his State of the Union address. “Building this new energy future should be just one part of a broader agenda to repair America’s infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt,” he said. The president’s next State of the Union address, set for Feb. 12, will set the agenda for the next four years. Obama's a big football fan; perhaps the Super Bowl outage will spur him to take renewed action on infrastructure.

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