It’s raining cats, dogs & data
The only surprise about the latest Facebook breach is that people are surprised.
The sum total of my presence on social media is an account on Instagram through which I follow 120 people and a Siamese cat. Most of my communications are with the cat.
Possibly I follow a pug, too, but it is uncommunicative, so I’m unsure whether the account is the pug’s or its owner’s. The people I follow are a few personal friends and a group that largely consists of friendly middleaged women who post pictures of their china collections that the rest of us admire. The dark web it is not.
Of course, given that I have never met most of the people I follow, it is possible that they include undercover cops, paedophiles and scam artists. But if so, they share a surprisingly keen interest in casserole dishes.
My account is not private because, anodyne as my posts are (dead boring is also apt), I never want to fool myself that anything I touch on Instagram cannot be seen by people whom I never expected to look at it. In my view, the best way to approach the internet is to assume that there is no such thing as private, which is partly why I have never been on Facebook.
It is also why I was bemused by the adverse reaction to news that data from 50 million Facebook users was harvested to target US election ads. Social media is paid for by ads, and all advertisers want to put their ads where they will get the best response.
It had never occurred to me that the usage of all of us on social media was not, at least in some metadata form, available to advertisers. The only surprise for me in the latest “data breach” is that apparently this was not supposed to happen. I am sure it happens often and I wish good luck to the analytics experts figuring out the political leanings of all the cats and pugs.
The Kremlin has demanded that the UK provide evidence that the Russian state was behind the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, or apologise for making the accusation. The Kremlin is wrong. The case is not in a criminal court and it is fanciful to think it ever will be.
Rather, the case is in the court of public opinion, where proof beyond reasonable doubt is not required.
The balance of probability is sufficient, and for many people that test was easily met. For a start, other than the Russian Government, who had a motive for the attack? By the Skripals’ poisoning, Russia showed all its intelligence community that if you betray the motherland, decamping to the West will not save you.
British authorities are probably taking a second look at the medical records of Skripal’s late wife, who died of cancer, though the car accident that killed their son in Russia is unfortunately beyond their jurisdiction. The family has effectively been wiped out.
Personally, I have a distaste for traitors, but there is nothing in this case to cause equivocation among Western countries. Perhaps the chaotic leadership in the US and President Donald Trump’s strange reluctance to criticise his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have emboldened Russia, but if so, that is more reason for the rest of the West to fill the American vacuum.
The US reached into Pakistan to knock off 9/11 plotter Osama bin Laden, but afterwards owned up to its action. Russia has not. It was a threat to public safety in Salisbury, and in the right circumstances, it is a threat to public safety everywhere.
I have a distaste for traitors, but there is nothing in this case to cause equivocation in the West.