IJIS Institute Mission The IJIS Institute unites the private and public sectors to improve critical information sharing for those who provide public safety and administer justice in our communities.
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January 24, 2012. The Supreme Court has overturned the conviction of a drug dealer based on the use of GPS technology to track the offender that led to his arrest. The court ruled that the police should have obtained a valid warrant in order to use this technology. In fact, a warrant was obtained but the duration was for 10 days and the police attached the GPS device on the eleventh day. In its opinion, the court held that “the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’ under the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits “unreasonable search and seizure.”
In an article at the Washington Post, Robert Barnes noted that “The court rejected the government’s view that long-term surveillance of a suspect by GPS tracking is no different than traditional, low-tech forms of monitoring. But its decision was nuanced and incremental, leaving open the larger questions of how government may use the information generated by modern technology for surveillance purposes.”
Even though the justices agreed with the righteousness of the conviction in this case, they have taken issue with the means of collecting the evidence and have thereby invoked the Fourth Amendment as a reason for denying police the use of this technology without a warrant.
This narrow ruling sends us in the wrong direction.
There are unquestionably serious privacy and civil rights issues raised by the deployment of advanced technology for surveillance and other purposes—and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights do indeed protect citizens from unreasonable intrusion by government, which is what every American cherishes about our country. There is equally no doubt that we should directly and broadly address the issues in a way that is independent of but takes into account the technological advances that have been developed to make the police more effective, which we also expect as citizens of this nation.
I have argued that the use of GPS tracking devices is not a search under the Fourth Amendment. While I don’t pretend to be as learned as any justice serving on the supreme court, or any other scholar on this topic, I am pretty sure the framers of the Fourth Amendment meant that unreasonable search was primarily prohibited inside my house. I can live with the extension to the inside of my car, but I have a hard time extending this notion to a magnetic device on the outside undercarriage of my car, particularly as I drive in plain sight on public streets.
But even if I am proven wrong by constitutional scholars, I would still submit that a properly trained police officer is perfectly capable of determining whether or not there is probable cause to track a suspect’s movement in order to collect the evidence necessary for an arrest warrant. Why is it so much better to ask a judge to determine that such a “search” is reasonable? We can always hold the police officer accountable for the explanation after the fact, and the courts ultimately will have the ability to correct any wrongs by virtue of their proceedings—so why not rely on police who we have spent lots of money on training to make the right decision in the first place? Police work is highly discretionary, and we set rules in many instances to define the conditions under which police can take action based on their training and determination that there is probable cause for such actions.
In a way, we can’t blame the court for its narrow ruling, given the conflicting and confusing state of privacy law. The Privacy Act of 1974 is still the official guide to privacy procedures and ruling, and suffers from its complete lack of appreciation for technology, let alone the modern advances now in use. We need a revision to this act, as well as the many conflicting state statutes on privacy, to promote better information sharing, while protecting privacy and civil rights in accordance with our roots in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This is not the job of the court, but the legislative effort required to address these important issues will continue to result in narrowly applicable Supreme Court rulings that do not provide the direction we seek to find meaningful and balanced answers that we all know must be found.
The purpose to which technology is applied drives its features and functions, and sets the limits and boundaries for what is included or excluded in product or service packaging. It follows then that it is helpful to define a purpose to which a set of technologies is applied in a single and very clear statement of such purpose.
I propose to the larger community of information sharing that there is a value to defining a class of existing or emerging technology that is or will be applied to facilitate collaboration within and across communities of interest or domains. By having articulated such a class, we can define in more detail its attributes and objectives in ways that will encourage innovation, and will allow us to re-purpose existing technology to apply it to this more specific goal (purpose).
The travails of the economy and the emergence of the networked world have made collaboration of the day, so much so that executives in either government or industry spend a considerable amount of their creative time trying to figure out how to be more effective through collaborating with their peers and even their competitors. If you want to see how far-reaching and significant this relatively new awareness is, just go to Mother Google and do a search on the phrase “Collaborate or Die.” Lest you think that this title is overly dramatic, you’ll be amazed at how many different fields now have this slogan on their front page.
The most articulate and powerful set of lessons learned as they apply to the public safety and justice field is found in a new book to be published tomorrow. Bill Bratton, former Chief of Police in Los Angeles and Commissioner of Police in New York, and now Chairman of Kroll Industries, and Zachary Tumin, a senior researcher and analyst at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he served as Executive Director, Leadership for a Networked World Program, have collaborated (yes, I intentionally used this word) on a book entitled Collaborate or Perish, which reveals the best practices that these two coherent and capable government leaders have developed to carry out this mandate.
This kind of a culture change is only sustainable if investments in the supporting infrastructure are designed to keep it alive. Training, a reward or incentive system, and supporting services are needed to make any culture change permanent. Collaboration is no different; therefore, we should look at what kinds of technology can and will support this important movement.
Social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Yahoo groups, and wikis in general can be viewed as collaborative technology, but there is still a need to move these technologies forward to better facilitate collaboration through organizing the presentation of collective intelligence. The development of Next Generation 911 (NG9-1-1) is, in a sense, collaborative technology in that it facilitates the multi-media exchange of information between citizens and public safety agencies. There is still a great need for innovation in our striving to apply “the wisdom of the crowd” to decision-making—and this is what collaboration technology should be all about. If we can better define the requirements for collaborative technology, assess the gaps in what already exists, and define the functions that future innovative offerings could provide, we will move faster toward making collaboration the rule rather than the exception.
As the year 2012 emerges from the shadows of 2011, almost every magazine, blog and article is about predicting the future. The typical article is entitled something like “What’s Hot this Year.” Rather than make a lot of predictions that may or may not be useful, and even if they are right may be inconsequential, I think a better way to use the time at the beginning of the year is to reflect on the many things we must get done—and then to figure out, in these times of resource shortages, what are the real top priorities. We already know we can’t do it all, so where do we start?
In the general field of information sharing using modern technology, we have made extensive and measurable progress in the past decade, but as Robert Frost said, we have “miles to go before we sleep.” Of all the many remaining tasks and action items, what is the most important and how can we get it done in 2012? I hope you think this is a good question and that you have a good answer.
Here’s my nomination. With all the positive energy applied to developing emerging standards from XML to SAML to NIEM to standards in other domains and communities, there is still an obstacle in this county that in many ways is a show-stopping impediment to interstate information sharing, at least in the justice and public safety community. Because of varying state laws dealing with privacy, and contradictory Federal law on the topic (e.g. The Privacy Act of 1974 5 U.S.C. § 552a), none of which adequately deal with the modern world of technological information sharing or safeguarding, interstate information sharing is still in its infancy.
State statutes embody differing views on the extent to which justice agencies can share data across state lines. Some Federal attorneys have postulated that the Federal government may not share data with state and local agencies, regardless of purpose. I don’t share that interpretation of the Privacy Act, but I am not a supreme court justice either.
It is time that Federal and state legislators, with the clear and complete advice of practitioners and technologists, came up with rational information safeguarding policies that could be enacted throughout the county in order to give us a coherent national policy on this issue. We would have to deal with some tough issues, including federated identity and privilege management practices that would have to be put in place to enforce the policy, but without first defining a rational policy, we are unlikely to solve any problem solely through technology.
Some of the key technology offerings that would help implement privacy policy were discussed in depth in Privacy Technology Summit meeting led by the IJIS Institute in 1996, and many of the recommendations developed by this group have been at least partially implemented; however, the recommendations for action at this summit relied upon the development of a coherent national privacy policy that has not yet been developed—and so the further progress to make interstate and Federal-to-state information sharing a reality has been impaired.
In my opinion, this is the highest priority if we are to build the environment of information sharing to which we all aspire. If we can make significant progress on this priority in 2012, then it will have the greatest impact on improving our ability to provide the right information to decision-makers in the right place and at the right time.
If you think there is another priority of higher importance and impact, feel free to nominate it in your response to this post.
Have a joyful New Year.
Kshemendra Paul, who runs the Program Management office for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE), is fond of talking about his vision of the future being built on ”standards based innovation”—which sounds like a good slogan, until someone asks if this is an oxymoron. If information technology is based on standards, is there any room for innovation? Or to put it another way, if the government issues standards for information technology, is the message to forget about new ways of doing things? These are not frivolous questions. There is a sense in which the procurement of an application product based on a standard turns the product into a commodity, defeating the potential for much, if any, innovation; for example, the procurement of an electrical plug in accordance with UL standards doesn’t seem to leave much room for innovation.
Maybe not, but what happens then is that innovation occurs at a higher level. Once we had a standard for a plug, all kinds of appliances could be invented and would work anywhere. When Congress established a standard for the width of railroad tracks, it led to the creation of a transcontinental railroad and thousands of innovations in the use of trains. Even beyond the railroad, the very existence of this capability led to thousands of innovative applications and businesses that were able to address distant markets—think watermelon in winter. Even in the information technology industry, the existence of basic standards such as TCP/IP turned out to be the key ingredient in the innovative structure of the internet.
In fact, standards are the building blocks that enable a new level of innovation. The kind of standards that the PM-ISE will focus on have to do with enabling innovation in information sharing that will improve decision making across communities of interest beyond what could happen without the standards. In this sense, then, standards are essential to innovation. We have already seen the value of standards such as XML, graphical standards and others as key ingredients in innovative solutions for government and the private sector. Several decades ago, in the ‘80s, there was an article that boldly stated there were 25,000 applications yet to be developed for computers. This has to be one of the biggest underestimates in history yet, at the time, people marveled that anyone could be so bold as to make this wild of a prediction.
Standards will generate opportunities for innovation that we cannot begin to imagine because they will address component automation that does not have to be done thousands of times over—and with these standards will come innovative thinking and development of new products and solutions simply because our national development assets do not have to waste time on the standardized components and can instead imagine what might be done with new combinations and extensions of the technology.
If we take the glass half full attitude, if we start to be clear that standards should enable innovation, then we can do a better job of deciding what standards should be created, and let this business reason drive the standards development efforts. Some say we already have too many standards, and it is certainly true that we should not create standards for their own sake, but if we use this test and also ensure that full stakeholder representation in developing standards is the only useful road to follow, then we will pave the way for meaningful innovation and better government.
Over 225 people attended WIS3 (Workshop on Information Sharing and Safeguarding Standards) on December 5. Organized by the Program Manager of the Information Sharing and Safeguarding Environment, “WIS3 is an interactive workshop bringing together government and industry leaders to chart the future for standards in the Information Sharing Environment.” There was strong participation from industry and from the key standards development organizations—notably OMG (Object Management Group), OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Lots of good ideas were presented around the underlying theme of coalescence in developing joint standards that will encourage information sharing across domains and jurisdictions.
One area where there seemed to be some serendipity in coming to terms with future visions was in the remarks by senior officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as from the intelligence community, who agreed that the next big thing was going to be “smart data.” This powerful phrase is meant to imply that data in future exchanges will never stand alone, but will instead be provided along with attributes that carry various important things a system or user should take into account if transmitting or using the data. Lots of thinking people have come to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the variability in state statutes governing data privacy is to “tag” the data with the privacy restrictions generated by the originator of the data, and to associate such tags with the data wherever it is sent. There are other attributes that various domains will want to define as mandatory tags that are linked with the data components in an exchange. The intelligence community, for example, is keenly interested in the source and validity checks made on the data and wants to know these things whenever the data is used to compile actionable intelligence.
A good example of attributes that accompany data can be found in the way the FBI implemented the National Data Exchange (N-DEx), which uses a simple-to-execute color code to allow the originating agency to mark whether the data can be shared or not. Similarly, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) has provisions for incorporating metadata that, in some part, meets the need for associating attributes with data. Some developers have proposed using the NIEM metadata as the way to codify privacy principles. The NIEM development team anticipated the need to associate attributes with specific data and made the provision in metadata to do so.
However, in future applications and exchanges, it may be important to have the attributes or tags more tightly coupled with the data than the rather loose and optional use of metadata provides. As we rely more and more on tags that cannot be isolated from the data they describe, we will need to build tighter coupling so that it is not possible to exchange the data without the attributes that reveal the ways in which it might be used in a different context. This kind of attribution becomes even more critical and sensitive as we implement true role-based privileges controlling access to information.
This issue is the kind of thing that only the PM-ISE is likely to grapple with in a way that crosses disciplines and domains. We need to clearly define smart data and precisely describe how it will be represented in exchanges. When we do so, we will be taking an important step toward implementing the kind of open linked data that Tim Berners-Lee has proposed for government.
As of November 21, 2011, Apple reported the following statistics regarding apps written for its IOS operating system, which runs on the iPhone, iTouch and iPad devices:
- Total Active Apps: 514,569
- Total Inactive Apps: 142,415
- Total Apps Seen: 656,984
- Unique App Publishers: 119,790
It’s hard to say exactly when all of these were launched, but a whole lot of them came to us this year. It is also a sign of the times that there are over 142 thousand apps no longer active. I think this says something about the turnover in the technology, as well as the programmers building the apps.
What is very noticeable is the coming of age this year of applications for public safety. There are now dozens of applications for police, fire and EMT field workers who presumably have one of the pertinent devices. Just for a quick summary, point your mouse (or finger) at:
- Lauren Kelms, “Police Test App That Instantly Reveals Criminal Records,” Government Technology, February 9, 2011
- Police iPhone Apps – Designed by Law Enforcement
- PoliceOne.com – Police iPhone Apps
- Elizabeth Christian, “Firefighter apps,” iPhone Life, November 10, 2009
- FireRescue1.com – Firefighter iPhone Apps
- EMS1.com – EMS iPhone Apps
I could go on and on, but you can ask mother Google yourself and confirm my point that there is now a significant number of these applications out and available for public safety personnel. Public safety agencies, such as the San Ramon Valley Fire Department in California, are creating their own apps, and companies that make CAD and RMS software for this market are starting to join the fray.
This really is the year of the app.
A very interesting question about this momentum is related to the ownership of the platform for the apps. While I can only assume that some agencies are buying iPhones for their officers, I have not heard of many agencies doing this, so that one must conclude that the proliferation of these devices in public safety is a result of the men and women in the field buying their own personal iPhone. If this is the case, then we have the curious situation of potentially having the software from an agency or company running on a phone owned by the officer. Are there liability issues at play? Are there intellectual property issues for the apps being sold instead of downloaded for free?
Regardless of the potential entanglements, I don’t think anything will stop this drive forward, now that the apps are out there. We saw public safety personnel buying their own laptops and smartphones before their agencies became smart enough to equip the whole force with these innovative and productivity enhancing devices—and it is likely that this pattern will be repeated. If for no other reason, an iPhone—or, for that matter, a Droid, Crush, Palm, Inspire, or Galaxy—does the work of 10 different devices, including a still and video camera, and does not take up that much space on a utility belt.
The time is now for smart, touchscreen phones and apps of a thousand colors.
President Obama recently signed an Executive Order that bestowed upon the Office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) a new responsibility—going beyond sharing information to safeguarding information. The order provides clear directions on how to set machinery in place to reduce the possibility of data being inappropriately released from governmental systems, particularly those that contain classified information. This provision was a response to the Wikileaks publication of state department cables and other classified information that turned out to be an embarrassment, to say the least.
We could speculate on why the White House assigned this mission to the PM-ISE, but thinking about it, even just a little, results in the conclusion that this assignment makes perfect sense. The organization responsible for developing an environment for sharing information across government should surely care for the information, and build safeguards to protect it. Splitting the duties of sharing and protecting information would most likely result in neither one being done well. The PMISE also has the virtue of being a neutral force in the IT world, in that it operates nothing, argues nothing for its own use, and otherwise is committed to serving the “whole of government” (as beltway insiders like to say).
But this safeguarding function gets even more complicated and difficult when we begin to address it in the light of an information sharing environment that will cross jurisdictions and disciplines in government. One of the key requirements, seldom implemented in government computing systems, is to incorporate the notion of privilege in getting access to information. Privilege is the way information is compartmentalized in order to protect privacy and provide security, and becomes far more critical in information sharing across agency lines. Citing a narrow but particularly difficult small problem, think of juvenile data in a police records management system (RMS), where in most states, the access to this data is restricted to juvenile officers or participants in the juvenile justice system. The average patrol officer generally does not have broad access to these records. Now, when an investigator in another state seeks access to such records, how might the data be released without assuring the release is to a person defined under the originating state’s privacy laws as having a specific role that comes with a privilege of seeing such data?
Most people think of privilege management as being role based, so that if a user who has system access is defined to be in a specified role, then he or she may have the privilege of access. Crossing state lines or crossing the lines from state to federal agencies clearly complicates the decision about roles, even if we had a national directory of roles that everyone accepted and we have no such directory. The more sensitive the data becomes, the more specific the access is restricted. Many programs require training and testing in order to have the privilege of access (NCIC computerized criminal history data, for example).
There are hundreds of roles that would have to be defined and related, and definitions adopted in order to provide some discipline to privilege management by virtue of role based access. Standards would need to be developed by stakeholder organizations, such as the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), to bring us to the point where a directory of roles, as they vary from state to state and federal agency to federal agency, can be relied upon to grant access by a service provider to users authenticated by a federated identity management system. This task can be done, but we are far from having finished it.
One of the first major city commitments to cloud computing was made by Los Angeles when the city hired Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to implement city-wide e-mail, and document storage in the Google cloud. The contract, for $7.25 million, has been touted as the proof of scalability for cloud computing and the rationale that cities and counties will use to migrate their applications to the cloud. The model of looking at cloud computing, particularly for such things as e-mail and document filing and storage, has been replicated in other jurisdictions and in various federal agencies as they seek to exploit the cost savings potential of cloud computing.
As is the case with many new roads, oftentimes there are rocks that need to be removed before smoother travel is possible. In an article in NextGov, Aliya Sternstein reports CSC and Google have indicated to the LAPD they are unable to handle the FBI security requirements imposed on the LAPD that are required for access to computerized criminal history information. The article quotes the LAPD as saying, “CSC and Google have indicated that they are unable to comply with all of the requirements in the current FBI CJIS policy.”
While there are a number of official documents and document leaks about this transaction posted on the web, there is no clear published reason given as to why Google is unable to meet the security requirements. There is reason to believe the dispute arose after the contract was signed, when CSC and Google found out about the administrative regulations the FBI issued long ago regarding access to criminal history information. To ensure the integrity of the national system of computerized criminal history records (CCH), the FBI has held (since the 1970’s), that systems in a police department that provide access to CCH must be under the management control of the law enforcement agency. Management control is clearly defined by the FBI, and includes such things as a law enforcement agency having hiring and firing authority over personnel who have access to the CCH information that passes through the system. This has always been viewed as a reasonable requirement for ensuring that the wrong people have no access to these sensitive records.
It is highly unlikely that Google would ever comply with this requirement. It appears some of the personnel who might have been engaged in operating the LAPD systems under this agreement are actually based in Europe, and it’s hard to imagine Google giving the LAPD hiring and firing authority over these personnel.
Had CSC and Google been more familiar with FBI CJIS regulations, this would have come as no surprise, as this is one of the many challenges that need to be faced in the shift to cloud computing. This challenge needs to be dealt with, if the cloud infrastructure is to be used as the delivery vehicle for CCH (and other information that is sensitive and limited to law enforcement access).
On the other hand, there is already a national series of networks serving to provide law enforcement agencies access to CCH. The FBI CJIS WAN (Wide Area Network), and the state networks supporting it are not part of the public internet and are completely self-sufficient, well managed, compliant networks built as a way to provide CCH to local personnel. In many ways, these networks do a lot of what a cloud would be called upon to do. The actual data contained in these systems is stored on servers at the state and FBI level, not on local servers. In general, agencies have access to these databases through secure networks.
It is hard to fathom why the LAPD or the City of Los Angeles believes that access to CCH, and other like functions already in place through national networks, would have to be merged with the cloud-based e-mail and document handling functions. If these two services are separated and non-conflicting, it makes much more sense to consider the kinds of money-saving moves the public cloud may offer to cities and counties.
Irrespective of how this particular conflict is resolved, it is a good example of the kinds of issues that must be addressed through considered policy, before law enforcement and justice agencies can, at the very least, take full advantage of public cloud computing.
If you are seeking data to test a hypothesis regarding a particular program that has the potential of improving the justice system in America, either you can build into your research the independent collection of such data, as is necessary to test the hypothesis, or you can find data already collected and available through central research and statistics repositories maintained by the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), one of the bureaus in the Office of Justice Programs in the U.S. Department of Justice. BJS maintains and makes available over 30 sets of statistical data, including data submitted by the FBI, intended for use by the research and government communities. In the 1970’s, BJS added a victimization series in an attempt to define the gap in reporting offenses to the police.
Most of the national data is about crime, behaviors, and the administration of justice in response to crime, as well as some attempts to measure the outcomes of programs. These measures and outcomes are more relevant today, as police agencies place more attention on the prevention of crime, rather than response, and as the whole criminal justice system attempts to reduce rising rates of recidivism and cost of incarceration.
However, the way we went about constructing many of these long term data sets did not take into account the advent of modern technology. The big daddy of all crime data collections is the “Uniform Crime Reporting Program” (UCR),which was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and run by the FBI in order to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. From its inception, the UCR program has been criticized by scholars for its methodology and formula, including the Wickersham commission, which advocated the implementation of a national crime statistics program that probably led to the creation of the UCR program.
While the need for research related to crime prevention and response remains high, the cost of developing standalone, independent data collection systems in these economic times can seldom be justified. It is also true that designing national systems such as UCR, and its more sophisticated cousin, the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), should take into account the processes and systems that are already in place and collecting data. This has been an important changing trend in the field. Years ago, as computers were first introduced into the larger law enforcement agencies, standalone programs were created to only collect and report UCR data. Eventually, as more well integrated police records management systems (RMS) were built as commercial products or home grown systems, agencies realized it was much smarter to generate the national reports as a derivative by-product from the RMS, rather than have a separate system requiring duplicate data entry.
National data collection and statistical systems should be built on this same premise. If data is routinely collected to serve the purposes of the operational components of an agency, national data collection systems should first examine what is being collected for operational purposes and determine the potential of using such data for national reporting purposes. It is more cost effective to make what are likely to be minor modifications to RMS data collection and storage requirements, than it would be to create new and duplicative data collection and reporting systems.
The leadership of BJS has recognized the righteousness’ of this premise, and has begun to seek opportunities to enrich national data collections with data derived from systems implemented for operational purposes., particularly, as technology becomes more widespread, there is increased value in finding ways to exploit such already useful data collection for the purposes of supporting research and statistical objectives. As an example, the pervasive use of integrated automatic fingerprint identification systems (IAFIS) and the national standards that have been adopted for their use, make this data a suitable source of information on arrests, and a valuable source of data in support of recidivism studies.
In these economic times, there is no other sensible path to take.
Last year, Dr. Ray Kurzweil, one of the most notable inventors of our time, speculated last year at the World Futurist conference, that by 2020 we would be able to build a technology object that had the processing power equivalent to the human brain. His thesis was that this technology wouldn’t replace the brain in any way, rather, we would be seeking ways to augment our brain power with technology and build a greater capacity for intellectual development into the marriage of technology and biology.
He knew, however, that in order to achieve such a notion, we would have to develop some awesome new way to link the technology to our brains. We would need a new “man-machine” interface that would allow a robust two-way linkage for passing data at very high speeds, in order for the information and processing power of this technology were to be of any assistance to our feeble minds (at least mine). He went on to speculate we would need to spend the next decade searching for a new foundation for what has become known as the “human interface”.
From the annals of the research work on artificial intelligence, and the investments we have made in voice recognition to the prototyping of avatars, the search for a better “man-machine” interface has been with us for some time. Innovative programs such as “Second Life” made the avatar fly, and let us invent a new persona to place before the world. Nuance, creators of speech recognition software “Dragon Dictate”, made substantial advances in the translation to and from voice, but was still hampered by the limitation of the technology and our ability to create a higher plane of reasoning.
During his final days, Steve Jobs tantalized us with a personal assistant that engaged in natural language conversation with us to direct the activities of our supporting technology. The new Siri feature, embedded in the new iPhone 4s, but not available for earlier versions, has the capability to do your bidding. According to a summary in PC magazine, “…you can ask Siri to set a reminder for you, send a text message, get weather reports, set calendar appointments, send e-mails, search through your contacts, set alarms and timers, or get directions. Reminders and tasks are location-aware through the new Reminders app in iOS 5, so you can ask Siri to remind you to pick up your dry cleaning when you leave work.”
Some critics have already slammed Siri for being rudimentary, but it is only fair to note that Apple has only made this a beta release and has committed to further the polishing and positioning of this promising tool. We may even see it develop into the next level of sophistication as an important way to link people and machines, and create the synergy promised by such collaboration.
Rather than criticize this emerging technology, I would rather take it as a parting gift from Steve Jobs and mark it as a symbol of his uncanny way of predicting what people want and can use before they know this themselves. There are very few of us that can match the genius that was his, and I believe we will have to search hard and far for a replacement. Thank you, Steve, for your innovative gifts.
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