As you the reader have no doubt deduced, I’m in New Zealand, or birdland, as I like to think of it, due to all the birds that filled niches here that mammals occupy most other places.

My purpose for being here was to fill a niche as someone who could talk about Internet security worldwide at a conference on Science and Security: Informing New Zealand, organized by the Royal Society of New Zealand. I did that, and as the last speaker of the day, I was struck by how many other talks, from geography to social science to amelioration of landslide and flooding risks at popular tourist sites mentioned the same themes, which included:

• Ongoing, comprehensive data gathering
• Information production by crossing data with purposes of its users
• Multiple sources of data
• Sources of data about different layers of infrastructure
• Centralized yet redundant respository
• Data mining for hazards and events
• Holistic interpretation
• Continuing dialog with users and producers of data and of the underlying infrastructures
• Neither government nor private industry can go it alone
• Avoiding risk is not managing risk
• Technology alone won’t solve anything: results must be conveyed and affected parties must be pursuaded to act
• Summary: networks is politics

The first talk, which was about geography, mentioned many of these points. There are, of course, some differences with Internet security and risk management.

Nobody really imagines they can prevent an earthquake by sufficient technical means, yet every corporate IT department and ISP seems confident that their technology can deal with every problem. They actually can’t, of course; problems outside the corporate firewall or outside the local ISP are beyond the local organization’s direct control. Also, geology changes on geologic time scales, which even in a very geologically active place like New Zealand means at least tens or hundreds of years between major earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, and thus similar times between major changes in topography or topology and associated changes in economy and society. The Internet’s time frame for such changes can be days. Yet we can’t depend on ISPs to tell us what each of them is doing, much less what’s going on in the aggregate of ISPs, servers, and users that is the Internet.

The social science researcher pointed out that security these days goes beyond freedom from military attack, and beyond economic security, even beyond health, to ecological security. That last is especially easy to see in New Zealand, a place where every resident knows the dangers of introduced wildlife, having seen Maori rats and Pakahe cats drive takahe onto the fringes and possums imported from Australia for their fur burgeon to than 90 million, gnawing away at the native vegetation.

One of the main purposes of the conference seemed to be to illustrate commonalities across fields, thus indicating that researchers need to collaborate across fields, and that industry and government need to support such interdisciplinary research. In that I think it succeeded.

-jsq