A few brief pitches related to my research interests.

The Future of Maritime

Maritime Cybersecurity - State of the industry

As the global maritime transport industry’s reliance on information systems grows, new threats to operations are emerging.

• Types of threats and how they work
• Players in the industry, especially consultants and contractors
• Risks and scale of risk - what are potential costs?

Case Studies:

• Petya attack on AP Moller Maersk
• Port of Antwerp
• Targeted robbery on ships in transit

Disruptive Tech in Navigation, Location and Supply Chain Logistics

Review critical digital and communication systems on commercial vessels and the role they play. Outline why they are critical and what shortcomings exist. Explore emerging technologies and the potential they represent to address these shortcomings. Analyze potential implications of adoption of new technologies - costs, risks, benefits and barriers to adoption.

• Location services
• Asset tracking
• IoT

Maritime domain awareness and sanctions violation

How do sanctions violators operate and how might they be disrupted? Can remote data mining methods provide information necessary to identify likely violators? What are leverage points in the system that could prevent their illicit activity?

Supply Chains

resources UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

The global drugs problem

The problem is policy.

Weapons Provenance & Ownership

Reporting on licit weapons of war making their way into the hands of terrorist and TOC groups. What are the policies and enforcement mechanisms of the End-User Certificates often required to accompany these weapons?

Is there some way to incorporate an objectively-verifiable ‘signature’ into these weapons that would enable observers to identify manufacturer and other details related to weapon provenance at the point of use? I suppose I’m imagining some kind of unique chemical or electromagnetic indicator with affiliated metadata - enabling investigators to rapidly identify the weapon detonated and determine whether the integrity of its supply chain had been compromised (i.e. its EUC had been violated).

Of course many questions around how to enforce or incentivize participation in this system - an offshoot of the Global Weapons Registry concept, but applied to weapons of war rather than small arms.

Conscious Consumerism

Many of the ills of capitalism are perpetuated by undiscerning or unscrupulous consumption habits - there is little incentive or pressure to consider anything beyond price in purchasing a product. This incentivizes producers to bring products to market as cheaply as possible. Unethical actors are willing to violate ethics or, worse, to break laws related to human dignity and environmental sustainability.

Yet a market requires three things: a vendor, a product and a consumer. As consumers’ awareness of the global social and environmental impact of the products they purchase grows, how might the adoption of conscious consumer habits be accelerated? How might the burden of decision-making regarding product purchases be eased? Could this behavioral change drive meaningful change in private sector social and environmental harm?

Benevolent oversight: an open source public surveillance system

What would it entail to develop a system of ‘benevolent oversight’, leveraging sensors (multiband 360 cameras, floorpad id recognition (economist article), audio recorders etc) and smart (secret) contract technologies for information processing, to surveil public spaces and - perhaps - provide some intervention mechanism if harmful behavior is imminent? What ethical considerations deserve thought, and how might they be addressed? What unintended consequences might arise? How could such a system be used by members of the public to ensure safety and security? How would privacy be respected? Could this be enabled by self-sovereign identifiers / DID ?

requirements: observation system - physical networked sensors data processing system feedback / visualization system intervention system

1. data is encrypted at capture, provenance verifiable (?)
2. transmitted (public key encryption) to secret contract node (??)
   • distributed or decentralized processing?
3. secret contract is able to decrypt, analyze and reencrypt without revealing the data to the node
4. anonymized generalized insights made available to human-readable dashboard in real time; specific points of intervention appropriately revealed to trusted actors.

implications

How could this be applied to drug policy? If there was this system - always monitoring human life, notifying or intervening if life threat is imminent - we could monitor people using drugs … most people could and would behave within a reasonable boundary of control so as to not allow their altered experience result in physical harm to person or object. But inevitably some will consume irresponsibly, and either become aggressive or attempt to operate heavy machinery. At this point the system of benevolent oversight could deploy medical personnel or authorities (?? building on what we already have ?? …) or somehow prevent harm by deactivating any potential for harm nearby … ?

references Anne-Marie Slaughter: “In theory - and subject to a new generation of privacy and security regulation - we can track all human activity, local to global, the same way, mapping who is connected to whom, when, and how. We simply need the strategy and the tools to act on that knowledge when we have it.” (The Chessboard and the Web, p14)

Struck by this - strategy, tools, the new generation of privacy and security innovation, regulation and ethics, the data-knowledge continuum. At this point (26 July) I intend for this to be a core focus of my masters work at UCL. Beginning with maritime and obviously regulated spaces (pilot projects - ports and stadiums, say, or airports) - how would we technically and ethically go about creating such a system? Can we create an MVP, a functional prototype? What hardware and software, assets, objects etc would we need ? What people - who - would need to be involved? With what skills? And what would those strategies be?

The last sentence is a bit cavalier for my liking. Act - what a bold statement - the most active verb. Consider iatrogenics? I suspect that intervention is the worst intervention one can take most of the time. When we have it we must decide whether or not to act, and how - what those tools and strategies are, how they could be regulated and governed.

I do think we have the tools though - I believe that it is important not to intervene on anything besides physical, objective violence, at least at first. Subjective violence is by nature much more difficult to interpret or observe (in fact it cannot be observed, only related through means of intersubjective communication aka interpreted). These are innate tools of discipline, accountability and self incentivization along with networked digital devices that can transmit information to humans in an interpretable way, and to one another in a reasonable amount of time.

As for strategies, I feel principle precedes strategy. I am in theory a non-interventionist, or a highly hesitant one at least, and believe that the point above about objective vs subjective damage is relevant to determining the moment and degree of intervention. Whenever intervention is deemed warranted (either by algorithms, selected judges or the crowd - any others?) the minimal action should be selected, the one with the fewest and least consequential potential side effects, then the effects observed for some time before reassessing whether it is appropriate to cease interventive action, continue with the original approach or intervene in another manner.

From this we may begin to discern some strategies. Perhaps integrating with existing systems of intervention is a simple way to begin - infrared-band cameras mounted on drones observing fire-prone land, flagging any unusually strong signals from that wavelength (like a fire watch … a fire overwatch). Traffic cameras that detect if someone is speeding or runs a red light or stop sign, or are driving erratically - deploy an officer (not to mention possible police ineptitude or corruption) or - more integrated - manipulate traffic signals so as to clear the road or even intervene by applying the brake in the car … as the system becomes more and more coordinated deeper degrees of symbiosis (co-efficiency of existence?) will likely emerge

Of course, why would someone sign up for this? The only answer can be - because they are incentivized to. Because they literally get paid to participate. Not only do insurance costs go down - you make money, by allowing drones to monitor an at risk space or running this software on your phone or devices, by declaring to the public that you do not harbor a violent intent, or when you are in public with weapons or harmful objects in your possession, to allow the system to take over (maybe just slow down / stop?) your car or to read your texts, to analyze whether or not you are coordinating intended violence … now we’re getting into the draftish part but actually, socially beneficial behavior - as interpreted by objective measures or subjective input - could serve to mine a currency - the more good you do the more money you make. This feels like a distant extension of ixo, along with a visible-spectrum version of the FOAM protocol …. yes, quite drafty … probably daft

A reimagination of ‘global governance’

Transcending the traditional conception of geographic governance units (i.e. Type I and Type II, Hooghe and Marks), is an enforceable governance system based on group membership (rather than physical location) feasible?

How might entities voluntarily adopt mechanisms to enforce good behavior? How could agents be incentivized to participate, and what would be the potential implications of developing such a system? Ethics? Unintended consequences? What implications might the emerging ‘decentralized identifier’ technologies like Sovrin have ?

A potential collective rule-making system

Policymaking and politics must evolve if they are to retain relevance into the 21st century. Humans could benefit from a flexible, adaptable, location-based and collective system to propose and agree upon rules and norms.

Who would be entitled to contribute to rule-making in a particular space? People who spend time in the space? Owners of the land / space? Anyone anywhere? all of the above? What would the rule making mechanism be? How could rule compliance be enforced or incentivized? How could non-compliance be penalized? Could consensus-driven solution generation be effective? When and when not? How would disputes be resolved?

Taxation and resource distribution

Extending thinking on the potential of decentralized identifiers as a highly localized human governance mechanism, how might the technology be used to collect and distribute funds from individual citizens and entities (i.e. corporations)?

• People indicate the proportion of their income they want to contribute to certain public services or intitutions. Think 10% goes to general government functioning, then they can contribute further to different public service providers, perhaps even earning them access to the services provided. (If they choose to pay into a national health insurance scheme, they get access to that good.)
• A portion of an earner’s income is diverted to be held in escrow
• If the government does not generate enough revenue based on the opt-in system described above, further funds are drawn from each citizen’s escrow accounts, proportionate to their earned income.
• This ensures that the government is fully funded but also allows people to participate to the extent they see fit.

This system is conceptualized to accommodate citizens with different views on the role of government in their lives. Socialists can participate to that extent while conservatives can do likewise.

Antifragile Principles

… applied to software design … applied to supply chain design

Question

To what extent should authority reside at the lowest level?

What do we think we know? What has been missed? How does this move that forward?

VERY drafty : guiding principles, insights and assumptions:

1. People should be able to do what they want provided they are not harming others.
2. Most violence is perpetrated by people who are incentivized to rather than people who harm for the sake of harming.
3. Leverage points exist in the global system that could allow for efficient impact in the disruption of drivers of intentional human violence.
4. Focus on the root of the problem rather than the branches - focus energies as far upstream as possible. I suspect that power is concentrated into the hands of a relative few who are highly incentivized to continue operations and maintain the status quo.