EyePhones Will Replace iPhones

I presented the following prediction as part of a spirited Churchill Club debate with 5 other VCs. It was first published as text in AllThingsD.

Remember MS-DOS commands, and the WordStar keystroke combinations we had to memorize? Then the first Macintosh featured a mouse driven GUI that was game changing because it removed a layer of friction for both the data going in and coming out. When we tried that first model, we knew we could never go back to a C prompt.

And yet the impact of graphical computing was minor compared to how facial computing will change our lives, and how we all relate to The Collective. Think of it as a man-in-the-middle attack on our senses, intercepting all the signals we see and hear, and enhancing them before they reach our brains.

First Generation Mobile Computer

This is not science fiction, and based on prototypes I’ve seen, it’s a good bet that design teams in Google, Apple, Samsung and various military contractors are building eyewear computers that will render smartphones as obsolete as the first generation of mobile computer. I’m not talking about Google Glass, with its cute little screen in the corner. I mean an immersive experience that processes what we see, and then overlays graphical objects onto our field of view: true Terminator Vision. The US military has this capability today, so that troops can see pointers to their platoon members, and markers of known IED locations. So now it’s just a question of making the hardware small, cheap, and available in four adorable colors.

Not only will our favorite apps on eyewear computers be more immediate and engaging, but we’ll experience new computing capabilities so compelling that we find them indispensible. For example, eyewear computers can record our lives, and enable us to summon any relevant conversation or incident from our past. With eyewear computers, we can truly share experiences in real time, transporting ourselves to the perspective of someone on a ski slope, or in a night club, Wimbledon match, or the International Space Station. 

Just as Terminator did in the movie, we will air-click on actual things we see to interact with, investigate, or purchase. We’ll integrate facial recognition and CRM for background data on everyone we meet. When we travel abroad, signs will appear to us in English, and when someone is speaking to us, we can simply turn on English subtitles.

 A new generation of games will be more immersive and engaging than ever before.

Five years from today, when smartphone sales are in decline, we will ask ourselves: Remember when we used to spend our days looking down at those little screens?

He's the Next Jacques Cousteau

Sensationalizing Cyber Surveillance

As we adapt our laws to technology, we struggle to strike a balance between national security and privacy. As we do, we tend to thrash back and forth between extreme policies such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1996 criminalizing researchers and hackers to the Patriot Act of 2001, criminalizing everyone else!

If we begin with first principles, I'd guess that as a society most of us would find the following to be a reasonable starting point for resolving this issue: in light of threats from criminals, terrorists and geopolitical rivals, our government agencies should conduct whatever surveillance they need to, so long as they do not violate our constitutional rights in any way. Chipping away at the Constitution is far more dangerous to us as a precedent than any external enemy. But once we establish that imperative, we want the FBI and NSA to do their jobs as well as they can, with all the tools at their disposal.

Unfortunately, many journalists, bloggers and other pundits prefer to stoke the fires of fear. Conspiracy theories, after all, are a time-proven way to increase clicks, grow one's twitter following, and sell books. Yesterday's report of Verizon's compliance with a court order to provide meta-data on phone calls, and today's allegations that NSA's PRISM program has had free rein on the data stores of the largest internet services, have presented just such a golden opportunity (e.g. BIG BROTHER IS HERE), and now the floodgates are open!

PRISM raises tough questions about the need for transparency in our government agencies, but it is unproductive to be reactionary and polarizing, since these qualities mask the best solutions. And there probably has never been a more prolific source of security and privacy solutions than my friend Bruce Schneier, whom I've backed as an entrepreneur, whose books I've read more than once, and whose words have guided me as an investor. But even Bruce slipped into sensationalism when he posted an article today on The Atlantic titled What We Don't Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know.

Bruce compels the reader that we need better disclosure, but I believe he goes a bit too far in several respects. "The NSA received...everything except the voice content: who called who [sic], where they were, how long the call lasted," writes Bruce. But that seems inaccurate, since the NSA has not received any personally identifiable information of the callers. For that, they need a court order.

"We know [the FBI] can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant," but so can Google and thousands of other internet companies who track everything we do; should the FBI do any less? Bruce asserts that the FBI can use the microphone in our smartphones to bug a room, if they have a warrant; but why shouldn't the FBI use smartphones to effect a warranted bugging?

"We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime," Bruce writes, "deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what's really going on." But I cannot find any evidence that these codenames -- typical for all government projects -- were invented specifically to stymie oversight.

For a balanced view of the facts and issues, I recommend Joshua Foust's blog post, and I leave you with this conclusion from today's Washington Post editorial:

In the days after the Boston bombings, many asked why the government didn’t connect the dots on the Tsarnaev brothers. Now, many are asking why the government wants so much information about so many Americans. The legitimate values of liberty and safety often compete. But for the public to be able to make a reasonable assessment of whether these programs are worth the security benefits, it needs more explanation.

HACK Won't Always Be a Dirty 4-Letter Word

I presented the following prediction as part of a spirited Churchill Club debate with 5 other VCs. It was first published at AllThingsD.

Ever since Hollywood gave us War Games, the fear of cyber apocalypse has gripped America. We’ve outlawed hacking to such an extent that if you’re shut down by a cyber attack, or your data have been stolen, it’s a federal crime to even probe the attacking computers, let alone disable them. Rather than educate and activate our best and brightest hackers, we prosecute and imprison them. 

Businesses haven’t complained because they’ve never wanted to fight back. You can’t prosecute the attackers even if you find them, and admitting a breach may spook customers and even invite more attacks. So instead of fighting, we’ve just quietly taken the punches, and wished it all away. But wishing it away is like trying to reduce teen pregnancy by preaching abstinence.

Two years ago I watched a TED audience cheer Ralph Langner for exposing the Stuxnet worm that our government developed to retard Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was as if the US and Israel had invented malware. Somehow, it was evil for us to use cyberspace to stop the most vitriolic, warmongering fundamentalist on our planet from making nuclear bombs. Because cyber is “unconventional”, we somehow consider it to be just as taboo to use as nuclear and chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, the NY Times reported this morning that, “Hackers Find China is a Land of Opportunity.” Not only has China allegedly hacked Google and Evernote to spy on its citizens, but it has funded massive efforts to steal information valuable to economies and national security. Attacks on our banks, utilities, and defense contractors can be traced back to units in the Chinese military. We even know what building they’re in.

I do not advocate the theft of IP for economic gain, but as cyber war rages on around us, I predict that Americans will come to appreciate that cyber operations can achieve our military and intelligence objectives far better than bullets and bombs. Cyber weapons are faster, more effective, safer, and orders magnitude cheaper than kinetic weapons. Stuxnet penetrated where missiles cannot.

Indeed, the stigma associated with offensive cyber activity is breaking down, now that cyber attacks have exploded in frequency and scale. The banks are now asking the Feds to join the fight, so DHS, FBI and NSA are trying to figure out how to collaborate, without going to jail themselves for hacking or disclosing classified data.

 

 "America's economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity… Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority. "

- President Obama

This sea change presents great opportunities for startups to build a new ecosystem of cyber capabilities that actively defend our nation, and support our military and intelligence objectives. We’ve got the best security experts in the world. New startups are enabling the exchange of threat data, using honeypots to collect counter intelligence on foreign hackers, and deploying HADOOP clusters to track botnets. They even develop exploits around newly discovered vulnerabilities to deliver offensive payloads.

Over the next five years, our nation will embrace the capabilities of American hackers to fight back in cyberspace, securing our economy and our lives. Our Defense Department will need fewer bombers, missiles and destroyers, leading to a Cyber Dividend that will fund healthcare, education and debt reduction.