Volkswagen’s cars didn’t have a fault in their diesel motors – they were designed to lie to regulators, and that matters, because regulation is based on the idea that people lie, but things tell the truth.
The Internet of Things is a world of devices (buildings, legs, TVs, phones) that can be programmed to sense and respond to their environments. These are things that don’t submit to scrutiny: they fight back. You know the old joke about a broken photocopier that works perfectly when the repair tech shows up? Xerox could build one of those and maximize service-call revenue.
As Marcelo Rinese from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies writes, technological tests have to be fair, transparent, and well-defined – which makes them easy to detect and defeat.
It’s a demonological approach to science, where the universe is perverse and wants to hide its secrets from you.
Regulators are slow to notice these things, and the punishment is usually only a tax on the earnings, since charging out the real cost would kill the company, and the prospect of that triggers hand-wringing over the innocents – employees, customers, shareholders – who would be collateral damage in any kind of effective enforcement (that is, enforcement that deters other companies).
Rinese’s piece is excellent, but misses out one critical factor: the prohibition on reverse-engineering of devices. Any device with even a little DRM is covered by the US DMCA and its foreign equivalents, like Europe’s EUCD. These laws punish anyone who jailbreaks a DRM-locked device (cars, insulin pumps, phones, TVs, HVAC systems and thermostats), making it a felony to expose their wrongdoing.
This geometrically complexifies the intrinsic regulatory difficulties of rooting out deliberate wrongdoing in firmware design because it means that interested parties – independent researchers, consumer advocacy groups, competitors – can’t serve as part of the regulatory mechanism, blowing the whistle on bad guys. It means regulators are out there all on their own, trying to police a world that is designed to trick them.
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