Here’s a useful piece of feedback just in:

As far as I understand, your remit is to look for emerging trends in IA threats. To me this is not just a technology forecasting issue but a socio-technical one as threats involve the interactions of people and technologies. While forecasting the emergence of quantum computing is straightforward identifying how technology might lead to products and how it will be used and abused is far more difficult. It needs some assumptions about society and people and the world as a whole. I suppose one approach is to collect potential technology trends and then engage another community in identifying threats. This all might be part of your plan so apologies if I’m stating the obvious but the wiki did seem rather technology focused.

Fully agree this is as much social as technical. We hope this way of doing it is a better way of identifying the possible social issues as well as the technical ones. We just started with some technical points because they’re easier.

I also wasn’t sure who the threats were aimed at: was it threats of citizens on government; business on citizens or the other way round?

That’s a really good question. I think the answer is all of them, and I wonder if it’s meaningful to categorise them (C2G AND B2B in this case meaning bad things B does to G, G does to C, C to G etc).

Two other hobby horses: threats are often seen as to do with networks and availaibiity. There are also a whole class of threats surrounding information and meta-data and its concentration, pollution etc.

Sounds exactly right - please elaborate.

And finally, I think it is useful to distinguish trust and trustworthiness. One could have an attack on the trustedness of an e-voting system that destroyed its usefulness without touching the system at all (e.g. make people *believe* the underlying crypto might be broken)

Indeed. I think “trust” may now be overused and unhelpful. The DTI Trustguide work suggested that no-one trusts online systems: the reason they use them is convenience and confidence about restitution. Of course in the example given attacks on the trustedness of inherently unworthy e-voting systems are responsible, desirable and overdue.

We had the first Blindside event on Tuesday 27th Feb. It wasn’t a launch; more a barnraising that brings together a community with a common purpose to an empty space where we can do something useful.

The community is all of us who care what might go wrong in the information age. This includes NGOs, government and business. We had guests from Holland and Croatia, ORG and No2ID, Sun, Microsoft and Vega, the Home Office, 10 Downing Street and SOCA.

Wendy Grossman did a write up for The Register which kept Chris’s server busy. Thanks to Chris x3, Ian, Ruth, Glyn, Abbie, Nigel, Beata, Erik and all who came.

By the end of March we’ll report back to the government’s central sponsor on information assurance a first “critical friends” overview of emerging technologies and the sorts of concerns they give rise to.

Is it going to feel like the local quiz team reporting back the wisdom from the pub to the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica? I don’t expect to startle them. They’re entrenched experts, and we’re just getting this process started.

But if we can offer one or two useful insights this time or next, then we’ve proved we’ve got a valuable process started which still has a great deal further to go - a conversation worth pursuing.