| September 2005 Archives | « August 2005 | Main | October 2005 » |
September 28, 2005 | More on O'Connor Kelly's Departure
SSN pal (I hope she knows this) Sarah Lai Stirland over at National Journal's Technology Daily, gets the first in-print story on the resignation of Homeland Security's top privacy official.
O'Connor Kelly became the chief privacy officer in mid-April 2003. During her tenure, she created a functional office that was supposed to ensure that all new department technologies and processes used for security purposes complied with the nation's many federal privacy laws. She was a high-profile figure who often spoke publicly about the role of her office.Her tenure also was marked by several controversial incidents, some of which sparked criticism from privacy advocates and certain members of Congress. Though she and members of her office often have said they tried to consider privacy laws before designing new technologies and processes, parts of the department often came under fire for violating their own policies.
This year, for example, the pre-screening system for airline passengers run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) violated its own policy of not using information about passengers collected by commercial data brokers. Four Alaskans are suing TSA because they want to know how the agency used the information collected about them.
Her announcement sparked mixed responses from privacy advocates.
Bill Scannell, a long-time privacy advocate and activist who is a spokesman for the Alaskans, said he had "great hopes" that her office would prevent anti-privacy initiatives planned by the department, "but I haven't seen that. I'm sure there were battles that were fought inside that we never heard about ... [but] her role has been pretty much reduced to flak absorption for [department] screw-ups, and TSA in particular."
Jim Harper, the Cato Institute's director of information policy studies, who serves on Homeland Security's privacy advisory committee, characterized O'Connor Kelly's tenure as "better than expected." He noted that she was not popular within the department after she issued a report criticizing it for secretly accepting passenger information from the airline JetBlue.
Read it here.
Meanwhile, the ACLU and the Democrats are taking this opportunity to make the case that the privacy office needs more power, such as the ability to subpoena documents from agencies rather than just asking nicely for them, and needs to report directly to Congress, not to the head of Homeland Security.
The House's Homeland Security Committee's Ranking Member Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) had this to say in a press release:
I commend Nuala O’Connor Kelly for her dedication as an advocate and friend of privacy, despite the limitations placed on her by the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security and the Administration. She deserved a great deal more independence and access to information as Chief Privacy Officer than she was given. I hope the Department reevaluates its lack of commitment to privacy so that we don’t have the privacy violations of Secure Flight and CAPPS II, which cost the federal government millions of dollars. I wish Ms. O’Connor Kelly the best of luck and thank her for her service to the nation.
The ACLU sent this:
"O'Connor Kelly has done a commendable job as Homeland Security's first Chief Privacy Officer considering the limited independence of the job as it was created by Congress," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "But even as strong a privacy officer as O'Connor Kelly could only do so much with the powers that she was given..."The ACLU praised O'Connor Kelly for keeping open the door at Homeland Security for privacy groups, as well as for investigating several glaring privacy breaches that have taken place in the department in the past several years. But the civil liberties group also noted that she lacked the true independence a real privacy officer must have.[...]
"Congress must give the DHS privacy office more teeth so it can serve as a true check and balance in an agency with enormous powers over many areas of Americans' lives," said ACLU Legislative Counsel Tim Sparapani. "In particular, Congress should pass the POWER Act," added Sparapani, referring to legislation proposed in Congress by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) that would significantly enhance the powers of the DHS privacy officer.
Sparapani also cautioned that Homeland Security must not use O'Connor Kelly's departure as an occasion to weaken the position, or leave it vacant for an extended period of time.
"We understand that a truly vigorous and independent privacy officer can be inconvenient for government officials over the short term," said Sparapani. "But over the long run, vigorous checks and balances will strengthen the Department of Homeland Security by inspiring greater public confidence in DHS programs..."
Posted by Ryan Singel at 04:57 PM | TrackBack
September 28, 2005 | Privacy Czarina ResignsNuala O'Connor Kelly, the top privacy official in the Department of Homeland Security, is resigning, effective Friday, according to rumors and one solid source.
O'Connor Kelly, who was the first appointee to the nation's only statutorily mandated privacy office, is leaving to join the private sector.
She was an astute poker player -- few in government or in outside groups could read what cards she was holding.
Previous mentions of her on the blog are here and a Wired News interview with her when she landed the job can be found here.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 09:29 AM | TrackBack
September 27, 2005 | Andy Sullivan ReduxAndy Sullivan, SSN pal and intrepid reporter, got on a jet plane today to head back to D.C. and his lovely wife after 10 days of covering post-Katrina New Orleans.
His penultimate New Orleans story, focusing on a family returning to the Terrebonne Parish, is here.
Hopefully Andy will forgive me for quoting liberally:
The mud boat skirts down the bayou past trapped dogs, ruined hunting cabins and capsized shrimp boats, carrying Alcide "Joe" Boudwin back to his flooded trailer.The state troopers have set up a roadblock to stop residents from returning to the low-lying areas of Terrebonne Parish that Hurricane Rita flooded on Saturday.
But they can't block off the bayou. So Boudwin, 56, his granddaughter Tiffany, 15, and his son-in-law Junior, 45, keep an eye out for alligators and cottonmouth snakes as the flat-bottomed boat noses around the bridge, past the flooded sugar cane fields, over the road where the Bayou Strangler, a local serial killer, dumped his tenth victim a few months ago.
All the way to 4894 Shrimper's Row, to see what nine feet of salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has done to their home.
Three dogs bound out of a rust-streaked trailer and swim across the yard, tails wagging above the water. The bearded Boudwin's Old Testament features light up with joy as he sloshes out to meet them.
But his spirits sink as he looks around his property.
"Look at my lawn mower, it was brand new," he says, waving his hand toward a sunken riding mower. "How'm I going to cut the grass now?"
Out back of the rust-streaked trailer, Junior shouts: "Look at where the washing machine's at!"
The Boudwins are the type of family whose most valuable items are the ones they keep outside. Now the washing machine, the Soloflex strength trainer, and a toilet and sink sit under several feet of water. The shrimp boat out front has cracked its hull when it drifted off its trailer.
SWIMSUIT TOP
Wooden framing shows where the front deck used to be before it washed away. Only the swimsuit top and the cutoff jeans on the clothesline are dry.
"We had $5,000 sunk into that sucker," Junior says, pointing to a mammoth boat engine.
What's Andy think about coming home?
I'm ready to go back to DC. Back to the lobbyists, public-relations attack robots, and 22-year-old congressional aides who have never washed their own dishes but think they know how to run the world.It's a lot easier to write about people who are more powerful than you than it is to write about people who are way, way, way less powerful than you. People who had nothing before and even less now.
I'm trying to think of the best way to put this. Compassion is much more draining than contempt, that's one way of saying it. Another way, perhaps: afflicting the comfortable is a hell of a lot easier than comforting the afflicted.
Go read the whole post here.
Terre
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:16 PM | TrackBack
September 26, 2005 | The Other WorldSSN pal, Andy Sullivan, a damn fine technology policy reporter for Reuters, has been in New Orleans for the last 10 days.
He's filed a bunch of stories and he's also talking to the blog.
New Orleans has flooded again, but you already know that. I spent the day driving around with Jessica Rinaldi trying to get a handle of the scope of the problem -- while everybody knew about the overtopping of the Industrial Canal on the Lower Ninth Ward Side, the other side of the canal proved vulnerable as well and neighborhoods flooded for miles.So it was a day of Mad Max driving and sending in updates via text message when the voice link crapped out. This picture shows me doing the wire service equivalent of those grainy stand-up shots you see on CNN, where the correspondent reports over a low-bandwidth video link: OMG!! New Orleans floods!!! WTF?!?!?
All my good-driving habits painfully cultivated over the past few years with Meg went straight out the window. Barrrelling through intersections, driving the wrong way down one-way streets, hopping curbs and inching through puddles that turn into lakes while we're halfway through. This SUV, a Chevy Trailblazer, is really earning its keep, except it keeps reminding me to keep my seatbelt on. It's going to be a painful adjustment back to civilization.
[...]
Some highlights from the day:
- We stumbled on a convoy of dump trucks trying to deliver rocks in a spot where water comes in. They're pulled over, arguing and gesticulating wildly. I tell them which roads are flooded and which are passable, and we convoy to the spot together. So journalists sometimes can be good citizens too.
- Jessica: "They need to build everything out of the material they use for those Virgin Mary statues, because those things are indestructible."
- I interview a local official, accompanied by a local journalist. As we wallk away, he says, "That guy's cool. I buy my pot from him." Only in New Orleans do reporters get their illegal drugs from government officials.
As I think I've said before, it's going to be tough to write about Internet stuff after this.
Go start on this page and follow the links to the stories from there.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 10:20 AM | TrackBack
September 26, 2005 | No Flying NunSister Glenn Anne McPhee, the Church's leading official for education in America, spent 9 months being caught by the No Fly list, until her boss wrote Karl Rove.
Sister Glenn Anne McPhee (C) and Reverend Robert J. McManus at the Congressional Advocacy Days conference of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
And she's none too happy about it.
Sister McPhee's chronicle of frustration began in mid-October 2003, after she was stopped at Baltimore Washington International airport on her way to Providence, Rhode Island.Unable to check in using the airline's kiosks, McPhee handed her driver's license and reservation to an airline employee, who keyed her name into the computer system and then disappeared with her license into an internal door.
When he returned an hour later, he was accompanied by two police officers.
The officers flanked the 62-year-old Dominican nun, one standing with his hand on his gun, the other using a cell phone to run a security check.
Three hours later, having missed two planes, Sister McPhee was cleared to enter the security line, where she was wanded from head to toe with a magnometer.
"This was the beginning of nine months of hell," McPhee said.
Before flying back to Washington, D.C., McPhee called a family connection who works at an airline and who had access to the watch lists provided by the government to the airlines.
Sister McPhee was being stopped because the list said that an Afghani man was using the last name McPhee as an alias. The list had no first name for him, and the intensive checks would continue until she cleared her name with the ombudsman at the Transportation Security Administration, according to this family connection.
Full story here.
There's lots of other TSA/Secure Flight news and commentary floating around, mostly about the report I mentioned here on Friday.
Noah's great wrap-up is a fine place to start.
The esteemed security guru Bruce Schneier, a member of that panel, has some words here.
Dan Solove, a smart professor with a good blawg, chimes in here.
And for those who prefer their media paid, rather than volunteer, check out Sara Kehaulani Goo's article in the Washington Post or Leslie Miller's take for the Associated Press.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 09:59 AM | TrackBack
September 23, 2005 | Advisory Panel Report Made PublicThe Secure Flight Working Group, a set of security and privacy experts that was tasked in January with evaluating Secure Flight for the Transportation Security Administration's Aviation Security Advisory Committee, has released its report, which questions whether recommends that Congress stop any live testing until the TSA has adequately developed a plan for a new system to screen the nation's air travelers.
The TSA published the report -- perhaps inadvertently -- to their website this morning.
Despite having security clearances and signing NDAs, the group was left with more questions than answers and recommended that major changes happen before any operational testing, such as that proposed by the TSA to start in October.
The group consisted of
- Jim Dempsey, Center for Democracy & Technology/Markle Foundation
- Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security
- Steve Lilienthal, Free Congress Foundation
- Martin Abrams, Hunton & Williams
- Daniel Gallington, Potomac Institute
- Edward Felten, Princeton University
- Linda Ackerman, Privacy Activism
- Anna Slomovic, SRA International
- Lauren Gelman, Stanford University
They wrote:
II. QuestionsThe SFWG found that TSA has failed to answer certain key questions about Secure Flight: First and foremost, TSA has not articulated what the specific goals of Secure Flight are. Based on the limited test results presented to us, we cannot assess whether even the general goal of evaluating passengers for the risk they represent to aviation security is a realistic or feasible one or how TSA proposes to achieve it. We do not know how much or what kind of personal information the system will collect or how data from various sources will flow through the system.
Until TSA answers these questions, it is impossible to evaluate the potential privacy or security impact of the program, including:
Minimizing false positives and dealing with them when they occur.
Misuse of information in the system.
Inappropriate or illegal access by persons with and without permissions.
Preventing use of the system and information processed through it for purposes other than airline passenger screening.The following broadly defined questions represent the critical issues we believe TSA must address before we or any other advisory body can effectively evaluate the privacy and security impact of Secure Flight on the public.
1. What is the goal or goals of Secure Flight? The TSA is under a Congressional mandate to match domestic airline passenger lists against the consolidated terrorist watch list. TSA has failed to specify with consistency whether watch list matching is the only goal of Secure Flight at this stage. The Secure Flight Capabilities and Testing Overview, dated February 9, 2005 (a non-public document given to the SFWG), states in the Appendix that the program is not looking for unknown terrorists and has no intention of doing so. On June 29, 2005, Justin Oberman (Assistant Administrator, Secure Flight/Registered Traveler) testified to a Congressional committee that “Another goal proposed for Secure Flight is its use to establish “Mechanisms for … violent criminal data vetting.”2 Finally, TSA has never been forthcoming about whether it has an additional, implicit goal - the tracking of terrorism suspects (whose presence on the terrorist watch list does not necessarily signify intention to commit violence on a flight).
While the problem of failing to establish clear goals for Secure Flight at a given point in time may arise from not recognizing the difference between program definition and program evolution, it is clearly an issue the TSA must address if Secure Flight is to proceed.2. What is the architecture of the Secure Flight system? The Working Group received limited information about the technical architecture of Secure Flight and none about how software and hardware choices were made. We know very little about how data will be collected, transferred, analyzed, stored or deleted. Although we are charged with evaluating the privacy and security of the system, we saw no statements of privacy policies and procedures other than Privacy Act notices published in the Federal Register for Secure Flight testing. No data management plan either for the test phase or the program as implemented was provided or discussed.
3. Will Secure Flight be linked to other TSA applications? Linkage with other screening programs (such as Registered Traveler, Transportation Worker Identification and Credentialing (TWIC), and Customs and Border Patrol systems like U.S.-VISIT) that may operate on the same platform as Secure Flight is another aspect of the architecture and security question. Unanswered questions remain about how Secure Flight will interact with other vetting programs operating on the same platform; how it will ensure that its policies on data collection, use and retention will be implemented and enforced on a platform that also operates programs with significantly different policies in these areas; and how it will interact with the vetting of passengers on international flights?
4. How will commercial data sources be used? One of the most controversial elements of Secure Flight has been the possible uses of commercial data. TSA has never clearly defined two threshold issues: what it means by “commercial data;” and how it might use commercial data sources in the implementation of Secure Flight. TSA has never clearly distinguished among various possible uses of commercial data, which all have different implications.
Possible uses of commercial data sometimes described by TSA include: (1) identity verification or authentication; (2) reducing false positives by augmenting passenger records indicating a possible match with data that could help distinguish an innocent passenger from someone on a watch list; (3) reducing false negatives by augmenting all passenger records with data that could suggest a match that would otherwise have been missed; (4) identifying sleepers, which itself includes: (a) identifying false identities; and (b) identifying behaviors indicative of terrorist activity. A fifth possibility has not been discussed by TSA: using commercial data to augment watch list entries to improve their fidelity. Assuming that identity verification is part of Secure Flight, what are the consequences if an identity cannot be verified with a certain level of assurance?
It is important to note that TSA never presented the SFWG with the results of its commercial data tests. Until these test results are available and have been independently analyzed, commercial data should not be utilized in the Secure Flight program.
5W5. Which matching algorithms work best? TSA never presented the SFWG with test results showing the effectiveness of algorithms used to match passenger names to a watch list. One goal of bringing watch list matching inside the government was to ensure that the best available matching technology was used uniformly. The SFWG saw no evidence that TSA compared different products and competing solutions. As a threshold matter, TSA did not describe to the SFWG its criteria for determining how the optimal matching solution would be determined. There are obvious and probably not-so-obvious tradeoffs between false positives and false negatives, but TSA did not explain how it reconciled these concerns.
6. What is the oversight structure and policy for Secure Flight? TSA has not produced a comprehensive policy document for Secure Flight that defines oversight or governance responsibilities.
Their conclusion?
We, the SFWG were not provided adequate information about the proposed program for Secure Flight. Therefore, we are unable to make any substantive recommendations at this time. We do, however, suggest the following actions:Congress should prohibit live testing of Secure Flight until it receives the following from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
First, a written statement of the goals of Secure Flight signed by the Secretary of DHS that only can be changed on the Secretary’s order. Accompanying documentation should include: (1) a description of the technology, policy and processes in place to ensure that the system is only used to achieve the stated goals; (2) a schematic that describes exactly what data is collected, from what entities, and how it flows through the system; (3) rules that describe who has access to the data and under what circumstances; and (4) specific procedures for destruction of the data. There should also be an assurance that someone has been appointed with sufficient independence and power to ensure that the system development and subsequent use follow the documented procedures.
Full report can be found here on the TSA web site (pdf), or here on this site.
(Thanks to Edward Hasbrouck of the Practical Nomad for the tip. See also his comprehensive rundown of recent Secure Flight news here.)
Posted by Ryan Singel at 09:58 AM | TrackBack
September 23, 2005 | Advisory Panel: Delay Secure FlightA panel of security and privacy experts tasked by TSA to review the newest proposed upgrade to the nation's airline passenger screening system has recommended that the system not be tested in the nation's airports until more details are revealed, according to National Journal Technology Daily's Sarah Lai Stirland.
The panel of nine security and privacy experts, which included Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten and Bruce Schneier, founder of the Internet security firm Counterpane, said in the report that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff should provide Congress with a signed, written statement on the goals of the project - goals that could only be changed on Chertoff's orders.The department also should provide information on the technologies used in the Secure Flight program, how it works to achieve the stated goals, and what policies are in place to make sure that the stated goals are achieved. The panelists said they also want DHS to provide specifics on what information it collects about people, where the information comes from, how "it flows through the system," who has access to the information, and what the procedures are for its destruction.
"We believe live testing of Secure Flight should not commence until there has been adequate time to review, comment, and conduct a public debate on the additional documentation outlined above," said the report, a portion of which was obtained in advance by Technology Daily.
Full story here.
Stirland, a fine reporter who I recently met, also notes that the group's report is supposed to be published on Monday.
That surprises me as the folks I've talked with who are on the panel believed that the report would not be made public.
They also expressed frustration with the TSA, which, they say, did not provide them with briefings that would allow them to adequately judge the program's efficacy or privacy implications. Instead, they said, they got much the same information that was provided to the public, despite signing strict non-disclosure agreements.
My guess is that Monday will be a very interesting day for TSA and Secure Flight news.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 07:48 AM | TrackBack
September 22, 2005 | TSA Chief Nixes Commercial DatabasesThe new head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, is shelving long held plans to use commercial databases as part of a new airline passenger screening system, according to the Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler.
The TSA has been considering using commercial data for Secure Flight, but came under intense criticism from privacy advocates, the Government Accountability Office and others. In response, the agency has decided to launch the program without using commercial data, said TSA chief Kip Hawley. "There's no question it would be helpful, but it brings with it a lot of privacy concerns," Mr. Hawley said.Secure Flight is now expected to launch by early next year, according to one person interested in the program who was briefed by a top TSA official. According to this account, regulations governing it will be issued in the next few weeks, with the program set to begin with at least a handful of airlines as early as November -- or if it can't get off the ground before Thanksgiving, then in early 2006.
The idea is that Secure Flight will do a better job of identifying would-be terrorists than the existing system does. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the stepped-up security that followed, many innocent travelers have been wrongly flagged as flight risks. Getting one's name off the watch list has proved difficult.
Under Secure Flight, the airlines would collect passengers' names and birth dates and turn them over to the TSA, which would run the names against the terrorist watch list. If someone shows up on the "no fly" list, that person would be barred from boarding the plane; other suspicious names would be flagged for extra screening.Collecting full names and birth dates will reduce false matches by 60%, Justin Oberman, who runs the program, told Congress this summer. But to further increase accuracy, the TSA considered the commercial data, which could include information culled from marriage and birth certificates, credit-card records, court filings, newspaper clippings and other sources.
The TSA secretly tested this procedure without informing the public -- hiring a contractor that collected 100 million records -- which brought sharp rebukes from the GAO and privacy advocates. The agency apologized and reissued its privacy statement.
But it remains unclear what commercial data would be used for. Mr. Oberman suggested to a congressional committee that the data could be used to find people who aren't on the watch list -- members of "sleeper cells" that the FBI doesn't know about -- as well as to better match travelers to known names. "If we just rise and fall on the watch list, it's not adequate," he said in July.
Full story here.
This isn't too much of a surprise, given that the GAO found that TSA violated the Privacy Act when it collected data on 100,000 Americans without giving them notice and that Congress is still debating (in conference) whether or not to prohibit TSA from using commercial data.
Without the data, the question that has to be answered is whether the system can accurately match passengers against the watch list without having some outside source to verify a passenger's age.
That information is supposed to be self-reported by passengers in the future when they make a reservation, according to the TSA. However, TSA needs to figure out how to get that data from the first round of passengers or do without and possibly risk have a huge number of false hits on a 120,000 name-long watch list.
Posted by Ryan Singel at 03:05 PM | TrackBack
September 22, 2005 | Toys for All the Boys and GirlsI've never been one to beg for presents, but if any of my readers are feeling in the giving mood, I want one of these:
Yes, there is no time like the present to train your child in the art and science of screening and being screened.
Yes, this is real. It's part of the PlayMobil USA airport series.
Here's the photo of all the included parts:
Note the loose gun.
Now is that for the passenger to put in his luggage or for the screener?
Actually, I want to order not just this setting, but most of the figurines and sets PlayMobil sells.
I mean, who doesn't want the prison set with the removable bars so the criminal can break out?
More importantly, I want to be able to find out what happens when Warrior with Wolf steps up to the x-ray machine. Will the TSA screener be brave enough to tell this man he can't bring his wolf or his sword on the plane?
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 09, 2005 | Battelle Review 2.0My review of John Battelle's The Search ran in an abbreviated version in today's Wired News. It can be found in all its shortness here.
It started off as a much longer piece -- some 1,300 then 1,100 words about Battelle's fine book.
I managed to get it just on the short side of 800 words, which was trimmed down further for publication..
For those of you that care, here's the full review (the 800, not 1,100 word version):
After the internet boom turned to bust, the curiously blank front of Google stood out as a shining anomaly in the ruins, an interactive Victorian gazing glass that seemed to foretell the Web’s second future.John Battelle, a longtime tech journalist, became fascinated with what he glimpsed and spent three years wandering Silicon Valley, talking to the wizards, the investors and the nay sayers
His new book, The Search (Portfolio, $26), is a surprisingly gripping story of hackers turning insights about informational conundrums into billion dollar businesses and corporate behemoths battling to shape the web to meld with their profit models.
At the same time, Battelle shows how search is pushing technology towards the dream of artificial intelligence, while thousands of small businesses thrive and die by the whims of search engine algorithms, and an unorganized consortium of non-profits, bloggers, and corporations are rebuilding the Library of Alexandria in a digital, distributed and democratic form.
Battelle, who launched one of the internet's seminal business magazines, The Industry Standard and co-founded Wired, is certainly qualified to tell the story of how pure search triumphed over bloated portals and in the process, revitalized the dream of a revolutionary wired world.
With the exception of a dry, early chapter on the mechanics of search, Battelle's The Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with a evangelical drive to make his audience feel the import of the search revolution.
"Search is no longer a stand alone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on… the World Wide Web. Increasingly search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world and our place in it. It's how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge."
Battelle is at his journalistic best in his chapters on Google’s early days, the travails of an oversize shoe merchant devastated by a change to Google's ranking methods and the story of Overture's Bill Gross, who started a search engine and sold it for $1.6 billion, yet to this day, rues a single decision that might have kept him from the laurels bestowed upon Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.The latter is one of the many tales in The Search that center on business models – in Gross's case, arbitrage.
Business models fascinate Battelle, who at one point asks rhetorically, "after all, what are publishers but content-based intermediaries between a customer and an advertiser."
The saving grace for lay readers is that Battelle conveys the excitement of a counter-intuitive idea and explains business models clearly.
Despite that talent, The Search at times feels like a internet business theory primer, and passages such as the one detailing how future search technology will help shoppers from paying too much for Merlot can feel like retreads of pre-bubble hype.
Those occasions come when both Battelle and the reader lose sight of the reason why Google is so loved, hated and dissected.
In short, Google is closest thing to a deity on the Internet.
It is powerful, whimsical, arrogant, omniscient and secretive. It asks us to trust that it is not evil, even as it knows more about many of us than our friends do.
It told Wall Street and the world it was not interested in short-term profits.
The company handed the world a free gift and then later, figured out how to make money.
Its homepage, along with GMail and Google Maps, brought graceful design back to the internet.
Ironically, Google's technological insight into search, the famed PageRank algorithm, saved search from spammers by finding that the web has a human order.
What's revolutionary about this approach is that Google figured out that every time people add links to the web, they are adding intelligence to the web, which makes Google a god created collaboratively by everyone with a homepage.
Despite his business model obsession, Battelle is also fascinated by the cultural ramifications and promises of Google and ubiquitous information.
He bookends The Search with chapters teasing out the cultural meaning of our online lives, our searches and the paths they take us across the internet.
That participation underlies the concept of Web 2.0, which re-imagines the web as a cacophonous metropolis, not a strip mall.
Battelle finishes by riffing on the possibility of a database of the world's knowledge, built with meta-data, ubiquitous blogging, trackable devices and fuzzy folk tags.
Together, Battelle posits, these might transform the search box into a "reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge."
"Perfect search—every single possible bit of information at our fingertips, perfectly contextualized, perfectly personalized—may never be realized. But the journey to find out if it just might be is certainly going to be fun."
The same could be said of Battelle's Search—not perfect, but a great journey.