Cyberattacks shut down Estonia
I've been following this fascinating story for a few weeks now. It started when Estonian authorities began removing a bronze statue of a World War II-era Soviet soldier from a park in Tallinn, Estonia. The removal sparked violent protests from Estonians of Russian descent as was to be expected. What was unexpected was what the NY Times -- in the article entitled, "Digital Fears Emerge After Data Siege in Estonia" -- and others have called the "first war in cyberspace." The country was beseiged by a flood of distributed denial-of-service attacks on the country's digital infrastructure, "clogging the Web sites of the president, the prime minister, Parliament and other government agencies, staggering Estonia’s biggest bank and overwhelming the sites of several daily newspapers." The cyber-attacks went on for several weeks. The story was also slashdotted.
The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each. That is a data load equivalent to downloading the entire Windows XP operating system every six seconds for 10 hours.Continue reading
Welcome UC Berkeley bloggers for June BOTMs
We have a special treat this month, as the Government Documents Librarians from UC Berkeley have agreed to be FGI's collaborative guest bloggers for June. They normally hang out at their own govinfo blog. The group includes Jim Church, Harrison Dekker, Tim Dennis, Glenn Gillespie, Susana Hinojosa, and Jesse Silva (full bios are here). I'm really excited about this collaborative experiment! And thanks also for May's BOTM, Angie Cope! Angie introduced us to a bunch of mapping information including:
- National Atlas of the United States and the U.S. National Map
- International Polar Year March 2007-March 2009
- USGS Launches Land Cover Data Web Tool
- National Wetlands Research Center Library
- TIGER Mapping Service using public geographic census data
- NASA Global Map Projections online
- NGA GEOnet Names Server (GNS)
- GPO dives into digital future
- Real-Time Water Data for the Nation
- Map Collections - Treasures of the Library of Congress
- USGS Pilot Project Makes High-Quality Landsat Data Available Through Web
- Baghdad Reference Map from National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
- Geodesy for the layman (or woman) from NGA
- Map Scanning Registry and online map collections
- Federal Geographic Data Committee
- Global Change Master Directory of data sets
UC berkeley bloggers, BOTM for June, 2007
Jim Church is the International and Foreign Documents Librarian and Librarian for Development Economics at the University of California Berkeley. He began his career with international documents as the UN and European Union Collection Assistant at Princeton University, later serving for one year as Economics Librarian at Yale University, and four years as State, Local and International Documents Librarian at the University of California, San Diego. Jim served for one year as the international documents column editor for the Journal of Government Information. He is currently the International Documents Columnist for Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) Journal DttP, and an international documents panel judge for the GODORT notable documents panel. Harrison Dekker is currently the Coordinator of Data Services for the Doe/Moffitt Libraries at UC Berkeley. In addition to providing data services, he is actively involved in broader library technology initiatives. Prior to his arrival at Berkeley, Harrison worked as a programmer analyst for a Chapel Hill-based management consulting firm and for the North Carolina State Data Center. His library experience includes stints with the State Library of North Carolina, IBM, and the University of North Carolina. Tim Dennis, a recent graduate of Berkeley's School of Information with over 10 years of experience in research libraries, specializes in user services technology support for the UC Berkeley Government Information unit. He has extensive experience in government information reference services, statistical/data services consultation, and documents processing. Recent activities include: creation of the library's first informational weblog, GovBlog, the IM reference service, GovChat, the unit's Government Information wiki, and is currently leading the unit in a user-centered redesign of the website. Glenn Gillespie is a Reference and Government Information Specialist in Doe/Moffitt Reference Services Department. His primary responsibilities are three-fold. He has oversight of documents operations, provides technical support and is responsible for post-cataloging processing of all material coming into or going out of the Government Reference collection. Glenn devotes a significant portion of his time to reference service through regular duty at Doe and Moffitt Reference desks. Glenn possesses substantial reference experience, with significant knowledge of congressional and federal resources and publications. Susana Hinojosa is currently the UC Berkeley selector for California/US State, and Latin American government publications. In addition to the government documents collection development, Susana's responsibilities and areas of expertise include reference/research and instructional services. She is an active participant in the Government Document unit's development of innovative services which include chat reference, email reference and a GovBlog. From October 2004 through May 2006, Susana was also the primary selector for the library's Spanish and Portuguese collection. Jesse Silva is currently the Federal Documents and Political Science Librarian at Berkeley. Originally from the Los Angeles area, Jesse traded the smog for the redwood trees of UC Santa Cruz where he earned a BA in Community Studies. While working in the University Library, he discovered government documents and a twisted love affair was born. Soon he entered the MLIS program at San Jose State, moved to San Francisco, and took a job cataloging government documents at the SJSU/San Jose Public joint-library. He did this at the same time he co-authored a book on legal executions in California. After a very brief job with Innovative Interfaces (which had nothing to do with gov docs and everything to do with teaching libraries how to use the Innovative software), Jesse is very excited to be working with and learning from the library staff at Berkeley. When he is not in the library, you can find Jesse enjoying everything about living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Continue reading
Turkle on Privacy
I'm always struck when I hear people say that privacy doesn't matter anymore and that "we're all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?" and "As long as I'm not doing anything wrong, who cares who's watching me?" I believe privacy does matter and that it is very important and that libraries have an essential role in ensuring privacy.
Sherry Turkle, sociologist, psychologist, professor at MIT, and author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and How Computers Change the Way We Think (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004), addresses this very issue of privacy in her fascinating new article in Forbes:
- Can You Hear Me Now?, Special Report by Sherry Turkle, Forbes, May 7, 2007.
Here is a sample:
When the question of illegal eavesdropping came up, a common reaction among the gathered Weberati was to turn the issue into a nonissue. We heard, "All information is good information" and "Information wants to be free" and "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." At a pre-awards cocktail party one Web luminary spoke animatedly about Michel Foucault's idea of the panopticon, an architectural structure of spokes of a wheel built out from a hub, used as a metaphor for how the modern state disciplines its citizens.... By analogy, said my conversation partner ... on the Internet someone might always be watching; it doesn't matter if from time to time someone is. Foucault's discussion of the panopticon had been a critical take on disciplinary society. Here it had become a justification for the U.S. government to spy on its citizens. All around me there were nods of assent. High school and college students give up their privacy on MySpace about everything from musical preferences to sexual hang-ups. They are not likely to be troubled by an anonymous government agency knowing whom they call or what Web sites they frequent. People become gratified by a certain public exposure; it is more validation than violation.
Thanks to Library Juice!
See also:
- Issues: Privacy
- Privacy and the "Terrorist Surveillance Act" (It doesn't authorize the government to spy on terrorists, it authorizes the government to spy on everyone hoping that it can find terrorists.)
- Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?