Quotulatiousness

June 25, 2013

Snowden’s character doesn’t matter – Snowden’s revelations matter a great deal

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:08

Gene Healy says that it doesn’t matter what you think about Edward Snowden, you should care a lot about what he’s revealed:

Here, the most disturbing aspect of the Snowden revelations is the NSA’s comprehensive, multiyear call-records database, with communication and phone-location information on millions of Americans. Especially if combined with metadata on emails, website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that information is a potential treasure trove for political abuse — it can be used to ferret out the sort of information governments have historically used to blackmail and neutralize political opponents: who’s leaking, who’s organizing, who’s having an affair. The potential abuse of that information represents a grave threat to American liberty and privacy regardless of Snowden’s character and motivations.

In an post last week, Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith makes the key point: “You Don’t Have to Like Edward Snowden.” Snowden, Smith argues, is “a source,” and the information sources convey is far more important than their “moral status” or the “fate of [their] eternal soul[s].”

Smith mentions Mark Felt, the FBI honcho who served as Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” during their investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. Felt, it turned out, was simply settling scores in a bureaucratic power struggle. He had no scruples against criminal violations of privacy — in 1980 he was convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans through warrantless break-ins as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

It was important for Americans to know that their president was a crook. That Mark Felt was also a crook is neither here nor there. As Smith puts it, “who cares?”

June 22, 2013

Interesting – and probably inevitable – legal wrinkle for the NSA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

At Outside the Beltway, Doug Mataconis links to an interesting article:

It’s only been a few weeks since we learned to true scope of the National Security Agency’s data mining of the phone records of American citizens, but already lawyers in civil and criminal cases across the country are seeing the database as a potential discovery goldmine:

    The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.

    “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess,” said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. “In a way, it’s kind of ironic.”

    Defendant Terrance Brown is accused of participating in the 2010 murder of a Brinks security truck driver. Brown maintains his innocence, and claims cellphone location records would show he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. Brown’s cellphone provider — MetroPCS — couldn’t produce those records during discovery because it had deleted the data already.

    On seeing the story in the Guardian indicating that Verizon had been ordered to turn over millions of calling records to the NSA last month, Brown’s lawyer had a novel idea: Make the NSA produce the records.

[. . .]

This particular criminal case is, of course, on where the Federal Government is a party to the case as a prosecutor. As such, the Judge must weight not simply the government’s argument that the information requested is classified and thus should not be disclosed, but also the question of whether the prosecution has a duty to turn over the evidence to the Defendant. As a general rule, the prosecution must turn over any evidence that is potentially exclupatory or which tend to call some aspect of the prosecution’s theory of the case into doubt. The rules for what must be turned over vary from state to state, and the Federal Courts have their own rules, but they all generally follow the principles set down by Brady v. Maryland, which established the general rule that Defendants are entitled to be provided with exculpatory evidence that prosecution may have against them.

Of more interest, though, is the likely hood that attorneys may try to gain access to this NSA metadata in cases where the Federal Government is not involved, such as state court criminal proceedings or even civil matters such as divorces

June 21, 2013

“Nobody is listening to your calls” … because the metadata is far more useful

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

John Naughton explains why the calming statement that “nobody is listening to your calls” is far from re-assuring:

‘To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks.

So in this business at least, content isn’t king. It’s the metadata — the call logs showing who called whom, from which location and for how long — that you want. Why? Because that’s the stuff that is machine-readable, and therefore searchable. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an NSA operative in Fort Meade, Maryland. You have a telephone number of someone you regard as potentially “interesting”. Type the number into a search box and up comes a list of every handset that has ever called, or been called by, it. After that, it’s a matter of seconds before you have a network graph of second-, third- or fourth-degree connections to that original number. Map those on to electronic directories to get names and addresses, obtain a secret authorisation from the Fisa court (which has 11 federal judges so that it can sit round the clock, seven days a week), then dispatch a Prism subpoena to Facebook and co and make some coffee while waiting for the results. Repeat the process with the resulting email contact lists and — bingo! — you have a mass surveillance programme as good as anything Vladimir Putin could put together. And you’ve never had to sully your hands — or your conscience — with that precious “content” that civil libertarians get so worked up about.

June 20, 2013

The UK debate over online porn

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Willard Foxton says that the real problem is that the two “sides” of the argument are not even talking the same language:

Claire Perry, the Prime Minister’s “special adviser on preventing the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood”, has three demands which she claims will save the world from the horrors of porn. First, that internet service providers and other internet companies block child pornography at its source; second, that any sort of simulated rape pornography is banned; and third, that pornography is banned from public WiFi.

On the face of it, these all seem like reasonable demands. I mean, if you oppose them, you must be some kind of filth peddler or mad porn obsessive, right? Or you might just be a person who understands how the internet works, and therein lies the problem. Let’s tackle Perry’s demands one by one and explain, patiently, why she is wrong.

Firstly, her request that internet service providers block images of child abuse “at their source”. It sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? Indeed, it’s so reasonable that they already do, and indeed have been doing since 2007. It’s done through a system called Cleanfeed, which is a rare example of a British state-funded IT project that works like a charm. They way it works is, any time a website is reported as illegal to the police, it’s added to a list. Any sites on that list are inaccessible from British ISPs. It’s a very secure system, and very hard to work around – it works so well that we’ve exported it to Canada and Australia.

Perry also wants Google to “do more” to block child porn. As I’ve said before on these pages, Google (and other large search providers), already have enormous departments devoted to blocking it, with thousands of employees checking YouTube for offensive images. On top of that, very little of the material that so offends Perry is available though a simple Google search; most of the illegal stuff is hidden in Internet Relay Chat file servers or on the dark web, accessible only via anonymising browsers like Tor.

Update: At Techdirt, Tim Cushing addresses the common claim by grandstanding politicians that child pornography is easy to “stumble upon”:

How hard would it be to access child porn if you weren’t looking for it specifically? The Ministry of Truth puts your odds at 1 in 2.6 million searches. (MoT points out the odds will fluctuate depending on search terms used, but for the most part, it’s not the sort of thing someone unwittingly stumbles upon.)

All those demanding Google do more to block child porn fail to realize there’s not much more it can do. The UK already has an underlying blocking system filtering out illegal images at the ISP level, and Google itself runs its own blocker as well.

The above calculations should put the child porn “epidemic” in perspective. As far as the web that Google actively “controls,” it’s doing about as much as it can to keep child porn and internet users separated. There are millions of pages Google can’t or doesn’t index and those actively looking for this material will still be able to find it. Google (and most other “internet companies”) can’t really do more than they’re already doing already. But every time a child pornography-related, high profile crime hits the courtroom (either in the UK or the US), the politicians instantly begin pointing fingers at ISPs and search engines, claiming they’re not doing “enough” to clean up the internet, something that explicitly isn’t in their job description. And yet, they do more in an attempt to satiate the ignorant hunger of opportunistic legislators.

If Google is “the face of the internet” as so many finger pointers claim, than the “internet” it “patrols” is well over 99% free of illegal images, according to a respected watchdog group. But accepting that fact means appearing unwilling to “do something,” an unacceptable option for most politicians.

June 18, 2013

Console game industry model is broken – must be patched with huge wads of customer money

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

At Techdirt, Tim Cushing explains why the console gaming industry’s problems should not be “fixed” by taking away the customer’s rights:

If the current business model is unsustainable, why is that the consumer’s fault? More specifically, why are customers being pushed into giving up their “first sale” rights, along with being asked to plug the holes in the leaky business model with wads of hard-earned cash?

On top of this imposition is the assumption the current model is the only model [$200m movie, anyone?] and that mankind greatly benefits from “thousands of developers” crafting AAA titles. This is completely backward. The industry exists because of its customers, not despite them. AAA studios are not benevolent deities. They’re companies that exist because there’s a market for their products. If this market dies, so do they. If the prices are too high, customers buy elsewhere. Or not at all.

[. . .]

It’s beginning to look like a few members of the industry have been cribbing pages from the disastrous playbook of the recording industry. Raise prices. Blame customers. Bend the world to your business model. Is it only a matter of time before the gaming industry begins lobbying Congress to shut down secondhand sales?

Oh, and if the above twitrant weren’t galling enough, Cliff B. throws in a little something for those who find the online requirements of the Crossbone to be dealbreaker.

    “If you can afford high speed internet and you can’t get it where you live direct your rage at who is responsible for pipe blocking you,” he said.

Really? Maybe I’ll direct my rage at the entitled jackass who’s supporting a company’s decision to effectively limit its own market simply because it can’t live without some sort of DRM infection. And what if you can’t afford high speed internet? Well, you must be one of those people who live in the area marked “Whogivesashitland” in Cliffy’s mental map. And trust me, plenty of rage has been directed at the “pipe blockers,” but they care even less about their customer base than the area of the gaming industry Bleszinski represents.

Those interested in gutting the resale market to protect their margins are turning potential customers into enemies. If you can’t adapt, you can’t succeed. These moves being made by Microsoft (and supported by industry mouthpieces) are nothing more than attempts to subsidize an unsustainable business model by forcibly extracting the maximum toll from as many transactions as possible. The industry is not a necessity or a public good. If it’s going to make the changes it needs to survive, it needs to give up this delusion.

June 17, 2013

QotD: Demands for less US control over the internet will get much more insistent

Filed under: Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue.

We can’t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don’t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

Bruce Schneier, “Blowback from the NSA Surveillance”, Schneier on Security, 2013-06-17

June 15, 2013

Cory Doctorow explains why you should care about PRISM

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow spells out a few good reasons why you should be bothered by PRISM and other governmental data-trawling efforts:

The revelations about Prism and other forms of NSA dragnet surveillance has got some people wondering what all the fuss is. When William Hague tells us that the innocent have nothing to fear from involuntary disclosure, it raises questions about exactly what harms might come about from being spied upon. Here are some reasons you should care about privacy, disclosure and surveillance.

We’re bad at privacy because the consequences of privacy disclosures are separated by a lot of time and space from the disclosures themselves. It’s like trying to get good at cricket by swinging the bat, closing your eyes before you see where the ball is headed, and then being told, months later, somewhere else, where the ball went. So of course we’re bad at privacy: almost all our privacy disclosures do no harm, and some of them cause grotesque harm, but when this happens, it happens so far away from the disclosure that we can’t learn from it.

You should care about privacy because privacy isn’t secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to close the door when you go in the stall.

You should care about privacy because if the data says you’ve done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light. Naked Citizens, a short, free documentary, documents several horrifying cases of police being told by computers that someone might be up to something suspicious, and thereafter interpreting everything they learn about that suspect as evidence of wrongdoing. For example, when a computer programmer named David Mery entered a tube station wearing a jacket in warm weather, an algorithm monitoring the CCTV brought him to the attention of a human operator as someone suspicious. When Mery let a train go by without boarding, the operator decided it was alarming behaviour. The police arrested him, searched him, asked him to explain every scrap of paper in his flat. A doodle consisting of random scribbles was characterised as a map of the tube station. Though he was never convicted of a crime, Mery is still on file as a potential terrorist eight years later, and can’t get a visa to travel abroad. Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone, everything else in that person’s life becomes sinister and inexplicable.

Hiding your data in plain sight

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Ronald Bailey gathers up some resources you might want to investigate if you’d prefer not to have the NSA or other government agencies watching your online activities:

First, consider not putting so much stuff out there in the first place. Wuergler devised a program he calls Stalker that can siphon off nearly all of your digital information to put together an amazingly complete portrait of your life and pretty much find out where you are at all times. Use Facebook if you must, but realize you’re making it easy for the government to track and find you when they choose to do so.

A second step toward increased privacy is to use a browser like DuckDuckGo, which does not collect the sort of information — say, your IP address — that can identify you with your Internet searches. Thus, if the government bangs on their doors to find out what you’ve been up to, DuckDuckGo has nothing to hand over. I have decided to make DuckDuckGo my default for general browsing, turning to Google only for items such as breaking news and scholarly articles. (Presumably, the NSA would be able to tap into my searches on DuckDuckGo in real time.)

Third, TOR offers free software and a network of relays that can shield your location from prying eyes. TOR operates by bouncing your emails and files around the Internet through encrypted relays. Anyone intercepting your message once it exits a TOR relay cannot trace it back to your computer and your physical location. TOR is used by dissidents and journalists around the world. On the downside, in my experience it operates more slowly than, say, Google.

Fourth, there is encryption. An intriguing one-stop encryption solution is Silent Circle. Developed by Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption system, Silent Circle enables users to encrypt their text messages, video, and phone calls, as well as their emails. Zimmerman and his colleagues claim that they, or anyone else, cannot decrypt our messages across their network, period. As Wuergler warned, this security doesn’t come free. Silent Circle charges $10 per month for its encryption services.

However, your mobile phone is a beacon that can’t be easily masked or hidden:

Now for some bad news. Telephone metadata of the sort the NSA acquired from Verizon is hard — read: impossible — to hide. As the ACLU’s Soghoian notes, you can’t violate the laws of physics: In order to connect your mobile phone, the phone company necessarily needs to know where you are located. Of course, you can avoid being tracked through your cell phone by removing its batteries (unless you have an iPhone), but once you slot it back in, there you are.

For lots more information on how to you might be able to baffle government monitoring agencies, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense Web pages.

June 14, 2013

Reason.tv – Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:07

June 13, 2013

MySpace revamp pulls the plug on blogs

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I heard about this the other day, as an author mentioned on her mailing list that her MySpace blog had apparently been replaced by someone else’s music files. It was part of a deliberate change to make MySpace more “modern”:

MySpace, the Justin Timberlake-owned social network that refuses to die, is back yet again with a new desktop interface — and minus several years of users’ blogs and comments.

Blogs don’t form part of the new MySpace — sorry, Myspace, they’ve dropped the capital S — and neither do home pages full of pinned videos and user comments.

It’s all about music streaming and discovery, much to the chagrin of loyal users who’ve seen years of blogging disappear at a stroke as the platform narrows its focus.

[. . .]

Myspace might not lament the loss of users who only came back to read their own postings, but it highlights an interesting point about all social media platforms. What you post can vanish at any time, and emotion-laden rants content remains available solely at the whim of the site owner — which could surprise a generation brought up to expect everything on-demand.

Myspace could relent; there’s no indication that the content has been binned, and backups could be dispatched to customers wanting to leaf though their digital past. But that’s not part of the future — if, indeed, Myspace still has a future.

June 11, 2013

The elephant in the IT room – who can you trust?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

At The Register, Trevor Pott explains why trust is the key part of your personal online security:

Virtually everything we work with on a day-to-day basis is built by someone else. Avoiding insanity requires trusting those who designed, developed and manufactured the instruments of our daily existence.

All these other industries we rely on have evolved codes of conduct, regulations, and ultimately laws to ensure minimum quality, reliability and trust. In this light, I find the modern technosphere’s complete disdain for obtaining and retaining trust baffling, arrogant and at times enraging.

Let’s use authentication systems as a fairly simple example. Passwords suck, we all know they suck, and yet the majority of us still try to use easy to remember (and thus easy to crack) passwords for virtually everything.

The use of password managers and two-factor authentication is on the rise, but we have once more run into a classic security versus usability issue with both technologies.

[. . .]

Trust as a design principle

The technosphere doesn’t think like this. Very few design their products around trust, or the lack thereof. We’ve become obsessed with how the technology works and what that technology can enable; technology is easy, people are hard. How the technology we create integrates into the larger reality of politics, law, emotion and the other people-centric elements, is often overlooked.

In some cases it is simply a matter of having a limited target audience; American firms designing for American users, for example. It is impossible for most to really understand the intricacies of trust issues in all their variegated permutations. It is human to be limited in our vision, and scope of understanding.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

Federal government denies collecting electronic data on Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Oh, well, if the government denies doing something I guess they pretty much have to be telling the truth, right? Unfortunately, the photo accompanying this Toronto Star article doesn’t show if Peter MacKay is crossing the fingers on his left hand:

The Conservative government flatly denies Canadian spy agencies are conducting any unauthorized electronic snooping operations.

After facing questions from the NDP Opposition about how far he has authorized Ottawa’s top secret eavesdropping spy agency to go, a terse Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay left the Commons, telling the Star: “We don’t target Canadians, okay.”

A former Liberal solicitor general says that doesn’t mean other allied spy agencies don’t collect information on Canadians and share it with the Canadian spying establishment.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who was minister responsible for the spy agency CSIS in 2002-03, told the Star that in the post-9/11 era a decade ago it was common for Canada’s allies to pass on information about Canadians that they were authorized to gather but Ottawa wasn’t.

The practice was, in effect, a back-door way for sensitive national security information to be shared, not with the government, but Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and, if necessary, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSEC is a new bit of alphabet soup in the public sphere … I’d never heard of the organization until yesterday. Tonda MacCharles explains what the agency is empowered to do:

The CSEC, an agency that is rarely in the public eye, has far-reaching national security powers to monitor and map electronic communication signals around the globe.

It is forbidden by law to target or direct its spying on Canadians regardless of their location anywhere in the world, or at any person in Canada regardless of their nationality.

The National Defence Act says CSE may, however, unintentionally intercept Canadians’ communications, but must protect their privacy in the use and retention of such “intercepted information.” The agency’s “use” of the information is also restricted to cases where it is “essential to international affairs, defence or security.”

CSEC’s job is to aid federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the military, in highly sensitive operations. It was a key component of Canadian operations in Afghanistan, for example.

June 8, 2013

Don’t put too much faith in denials from Verizon and other companies…

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

As Mic Wright points out, the companies named in the Prism leaks may not be acting as free agents:

Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came…” poem is over-quoted but with good reason. It is far too easy to be complacent. Addicted and reliant as many of us are on free web services, it’s more convenient to just accept the companies outright denials that they have been complicit with the NSA’s programme. But look closely at those statements and things become rather less clear, as Michael Arrington pointed out.

The tech industry’s denials have been carefully drafted and similarly worded. It is not unfeasible to imagine that those companies have turned over users’ personal information to the NSA in another fashion. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement was one of the strongest: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information…”

Zuckerberg’s words are reassuring until you consider that any company that receives an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act — the legislation the Obama administration is using to justify the broad surveillance — is forbidden from disclosing they have received it or disclosing any information about it. It’s not surprising that no mea culpas have emerged from major tech firms or that Palantir — the big data surveillance company with the $5 billion valuation and CIA funding — denies any connection with the project. The NSA has been a Palantir client and one of the company’s co-founders, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, also sits on Facebook’s board.

Anonymous claims to have successfully hacked Turkish government network

Filed under: Europe, Government, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:48

A report at RT.com says the Turkish government’s internal network has been breached by members of Anonymous:

Turkish government networks were hacked on Wednesday, compromising the private information of staffers in PM Tayyip Erdogan’s office, a source in PM’s office confirmed to Reuters. The attack was in support of the ongoing anti-government protests.

Staff email accounts were reportedly accessed after a phishing attack, and those affected were cut off from the network, a source said.

Anonymous hacked the Prime Minister’s official website (basbakanlik.gov.tr) and gained access to staff email addresses, passwords and phone numbers, the group said in a press release.

[. . .]

The group also stressed it will not share most of the hacked data because it “respects people’s privacy” and “does not believe in the full use of power against the weak.”

June 6, 2013

Rail technology changes on a slower timescale than other transportation systems

Filed under: Business, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

The Economist looks at innovation in the railway business:

Compared with other modes of transport, train technology might seem to be progressing as slowly as a suburban commuter service rattling its way from one station to another. Automotive technology, by contrast, changes constantly: in the past decade satellite-navigation systems, hybrid power trains, proximity sensors and other innovations have proliferated. Each time you buy a new car, you will notice a host of new features. Progress is apparent in aircraft, too, with advances in in-flight entertainment and communication, fancy seats that turn into beds, and quieter and more efficient engines. Trains, meanwhile, appear to have changed a lot less.

Actually, the perception of change is much greater for cars and airplanes, but there are few changes in those areas that are not merely evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Incremental changes are the rule of the day, as neither cars nor planes travel significantly faster than they did thirty years ago … but they do it safer and more comfortably now.

This comparison is not entirely fair. For one thing, people buy their own cars, so they pay more attention to automotive innovation. Carmakers are engaged in a constant arms race, trumpeting new features as a way to differentiate their products. Nobody buys their own trains. Similarly, air passengers have a choice of competing airlines and are far more likely to be aware of the merits of rival fleets than they are of different types of train. In addition, notes Paul Priestman of Priestmangoode, a design consultancy that specialises in transport, trains have longer lives, so technology takes longer to become widespread. The planning horizon for one rail project he is working on extends to 2050. “You have to think about longevity, whereas the car industry wants you to buy a new car in two years,” he says.

Another big difference is that the way railways operate — with a small number of powered units (locomotives) and a very large number of unpowered units (freight cars and passenger cars) that have to be reliably connected to one another and operate successfully. A car can go on any kind of road (or even none, in many places) and a plane can fly in any part of the sky, but a train needs an engineered right-of-way that falls within established standards of curvature, elevation change, and overhead and side clearance. Because of this, any piece of railway equipment that does not run on its own isolated track (like monorails or the various flavours of high speed railways) must always meet the existing standards … which have been slowly evolving since the mid-nineteenth century. With so much capital invested in existing right-of-way and rolling stock, the costs for introducing significant changes can be astronomical.

There’s also the fact that unlike other forms of transportation, passenger and freight trains operate in different and sometimes conflicting ways. Passenger trains need to operate on a known schedule between high population centres at relatively high speed. With higher speed goes a need for better braking systems and more capable signalling methods. Unlike a train full of new cars or iron ore, you can’t just park a train full of living human beings on a siding for a few hours to allow slower trains to clear the way (unless you’re Amtrak or VIA). Passenger trains have to have top priority, which often means the railways have to delay freight traffic to ensure that the passengers are not unduly delayed.

One solution to the problem is to provide separate tracks for the passenger trains, but this can be very expensive, as the places where the extra tracks would be most effective is also where the land is at peak cost: in and around major cities. Most passenger trains are now run by government agencies or corporations acting as agents for local, regional, or state governments, so they sometimes use the power of eminent domain to gain access to the land. This is a politically fraught area, as the more land they need to take, the tougher the process will get.

Brakes are also getting an upgrade. Stopping a train can take so long that locomotive-operators, also known as engineers, often have time to contemplate their fate before an impact. “Your life races before you,” says a former operator who, years ago in Alabama, helplessly watched as his freight train, its emergency brakes screeching, headed towards a stalled truck that ultimately managed to pull off the tracks in time. Stopping a train pulling a hundred cars at 80kph can require 2km of track. Road accidents take far more lives, but 1,239 people were killed in more than 2,300 railway accidents in 2011 in the European Union alone.

Much of the problem is that the faster a train’s wheels are spinning, the hotter its brake shoes get when engaged. This reduces friction and hence braking power, a predicament known as “heat fade”. Moreover, nearly all trains power their brakes with compressed air. When switched on, air brakes activate car by car, from the locomotive to the back of the train. It can take more than two minutes for the signal to travel via air tubes to the last car.

Again, it’s not physically or financially possible to switch over all existing cars to newer technology in one fell swoop, so any updated brake technology must be 100% compatible with what is already in use, or you risk creating more dangerous situations because some brakes may operate out of sequence which will increase the chances of accidents.

Norfolk Southern, an American rail operator, now pulls roughly one-sixth of its freight using locomotives equipped with “route optimisation” software. By crunching numbers on a train’s weight distribution and a route’s curves, grades and speed limits, the software, called Leader, can instruct operators on optimum accelerating and braking to minimise fuel costs. Installing the software and linking it wirelessly to back-office computers is expensive, says Coleman Lawrence, head of the company’s 4,000-strong locomotive fleet. But the software cuts costs dramatically, reducing fuel consumption by about 5%. That is a big deal for a firm that spent $1.6 billion on diesel in 2012. Mr Lawrence reckons that by 2016 Norfolk Southern may be pulling half its freight with Leader-upgraded locomotives. A competing system sold by GE, Trip Optimizer, goes further and operates the throttle and brakes automatically.

This is a good use of computer technology: you add the software on top of the existing infrastructure and use it to detect operational gains without needing to make system-wide changes to all freight cars.

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