Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Read more

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

Read more

Last week, the so-called "Five Eyes" nations of Australia, Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and New Zealand took part in their annual meeting on counterterrorism, intelligence-sharing and cybersecurity. While cryptography, particularly ways law enforcement could get around it in the interest of fighting crime, was expected to be a major part of the agenda, an official communication issued following the meeting hardly mentions cryptography, and does so in fairly bland, noncommital terms:

[E]ncryption can severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism. To address these issues, we committed to develop our engagement with communications and technology companies to explore shared solutions while upholding cybersecurity and individual rights and freedoms.

This vaguely worded commitment does little to advance an important issue, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "A genuine crypto policy debate needs to be had, and needs to be seen to be had," Wilson says.

The 1990s saw widespread debate over cryptography, one that didn't really have a winner, Wilson notes. "Most cryptographers said that encryption should be commercially available, that export controls were counterproductive, that government control was futile and that our enemies would roll their own," he says. While these points were not necessarily accepted by governments, there did come a detente whereby access to cryptographic technologies was freed up.

Today the argument has moved to new fronts. In the U.S., the FBI's demand that Apple create a backdoor allowing access to an alleged terrorist's iPhone prompted strong pushback from the company and public. (The Bureau ultimately hired outside help to crack the phone.)

"There are strong technical arguments that forcing exceptional access mechanisms into encryption algorithms will weaken the systems, making them more vulnerable to criminal attack," Wilson says. "But the arguments are difficult and technical. Most lay people, lawmakers include, continue to harbor naive visions of how encryption works, which leads to presumptions that cyber lock-picking is doable. Backdoors make encryption vulnerable by design and that's a bad thing."

However, civil libertarians and technologists shouldn't reject the governments' desires out of hand, Wilson said. Points to consider:

• Has the threat of terrorism and organized crime become quantitatively and qualitatively worse since the 1990s?
• To what extent are unbreakable, encrypted messages being used by terrorists? Are there no side channels, metadata or insiders available to law enforcement to monitor criminal activity?
• Have there been mathematical advances in the past 20 years that might enable new ecryption methods with safe backdoors?

"I'm not a good enough cryptographer or social scientist to know the answers, but I do know the right people to ask," Wilson says. "I know that we need to ventilate these issues, engage the experts and trust their answers, if we are to move on without too many further distractions."

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Read more

Microsoft shakes up its sales org: Reports began emerging just prior to the U.S. holiday weekend that Microsoft was about to undertake a major reorganization of its sales force with an eye on shifting emphasis toward cloud sales. The timing coincides with the end of Redmond's fiscal year on June 30. While Microsoft itself has been fairly mum about the details, it did confirm changes are being made "to better serve our customers and partners."

Geekwire obtained a copy of an internal memo outlining those changes, which are set to be rolled out as soon as this week. The major ones include a business model segmentation into enterprise and SMC (small, medium and corporate) customers. Microsoft is also aligning enterprise sales teams around six verticals, which include manufacturing, financial services, retail, health, education and government, according to the site.

POV: It's hard to run a business these days without some level of interaction with Microsoft, and that means these organizational changes could be widely felt. It's also no surprise that Microsoft is trying to re-orient sales around cloud. But this type of reorg is standard for Redmond as it begins each new fiscal year, so time will tell if the changes are lasting or prove to be merely experimental. Constellation will have more on the Microsoft reorganization later this week.

Baidu makes more big moves in AI: While Chinese Internet giant Baidu is still mostly a consumer-focused company, one of many reasons to keep tabs on it from an enterprise perspective is its ongoing investments in artificial intelligence. Just a few months after unveiling Project Apollo, an open-source platform for autonomous vehicles, Baidu has announced that more than 50 partners have joined the ecosystem. They include car manufacturers such as Ford and Daimler; suppliers such as Bosch, NVIDIA and TomTom; and ridesharing companies, startups and universities.

Baidu's intentions for Apollo are grand. COO and group vice president Qi Lu, a former key executive at Microsoft, termed Apollo "the 'Android' of the autonomous driving industry," yet more open than the mobile OS, as Venturebeat reports.

Meanwhile, Baidu also announced the acquisition of Kitt.ai, a Seattle-based chatbot platform startup. Kitt.ai has more than 12,000 developers already using its Snowboy hotword detection service, with products deployed in smartphone apps, cars, homes and other locations, according to a company blog post.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd takes a grilling: Oracle recently held a media day at its Redwood Shores, Calif. headquarters and as part of the event, CEO Mark Hurd was interviewed at length by Recode's Kara Swisher and then took questions from analysts and journalists in attendance. The result was one of the livelier sets of interactions you'll see between a top vendor executive and the ink-stained classes.

Now Recode has helpfully provided a full transcript of the event, which is well worth a read. Sure, Hurd gets in his talking points and manages to get in some of his trademark filibustering, but for the most part he's kept on his toes.

Legacy watch: The IT industry's 'working dead': Technologies come and go in the IT industry, and with them related careers and job roles. CIO.com has published a must-read feature (note: registratin required) on some of the latest tech gigs on the chopping block. The list has some usual suspects, such as COBOL programmers, that we suspect will be able to survive much longer than they have already. Still, the post is full of smart observations such as this one from James Stanger of industry group CompTIA:

“The IT jobs I see threatened are the repetitive ones and those that focus on only one type of OS or vendor system,” he says. “Today it’s not about the vendor or OS; it’s about where the information resides and how useful you are at storing, manipulating, and securing that information. It's all about connecting multiple systems now.” 

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Read more

Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.

Net neutrality's fate is sealed a bit tighter: U.S. President Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission's general counsel, to an open seat on the FCC's board. As the Register notes, Carr is a longtime associate of FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who is a vociferous foe of Net neutrality. Thus, Carr should be a rubber-stamp vote in favor of rolling back the rules, which mandate that telcos treat all web traffic equally, in a vote later this year.

Carr was Pai's personal attorney for three years and was appointed to the FCC post in January. While Carr's nomination is subject to approval from Congress, there is no indication of any stumbling blocks on that front, and once completely filled the FCC board will have a Republican majority led by Pai.

POV: The net neutrality debate goes back 20 years, to the early days of the Internet. While often framed as a consumer-rights issue, net neutrality should be on the radar of enterprises now more than ever, given factors such as the rapid ascent of IoT, the app economy and an overall march into cloud services. All those things will require more and more bandwidth, with strong reliability, availability and predictable, manageable pricing models across both the wired and wireless network infrastructure landscape.

Java 9 finally ready to pour?: While Oracle gained control of Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, the fact remains that major advancements in the venerable, widely used programming language are governed by an open source community. The current production version, Java 8, was released more than three years ago.

Java 9 has been in gestation ever since, but disagreement among Java Community Process members over the addition of modularity to the language has repeatedly delayed an official release. Oracle has been a strong proponent of the modularity features, saying they will add significant performance and scalability to Java-based applications. Opponents such as Red Hat had argued the specification wasn't ready for inclusion in a formal Java 9 release.

But this week, JCP members voted 24-0 to approve modularity in Java 9, saying enough progress had been made, as InfoWorld reports.

POV: Some readers may wonder why they should care about what from the outside can seem like prototypical academic bickering. But the fact is that Java holds a sizable piece of enterprise IT bedrock, both in terms of commercial applications sold by vendors as well as home-grown ones.

Three-plus years between major releases in the language benefits no one. While modularity is a touted feature of Java 9—which is now set for release in September—it also includes advancements in crucial areas such as security. Oracle has expressed a desire to increase Java's release cadence dramatically once Java 9 is released, with annual updates a goal. That would be a welcome move, but can't happen unless the JCP can shed some red tape.

Adobe wants to hear you talking: Adobe is tapping into the rise of voice-enabled digital assistants for insights into customer behavior and desires, through a new service in its Analytics Cloud. Here are the key details from its announcement:

[B]rands can capture and analyze voice data for all major platforms including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and Samsung Bixby. The new capabilities address the complexity in measuring voice interactions, with the ability to capture both the user intent (“play me a song”) as well as specific parameters (“from The Beatles”). Additional data points including frequency of use and actions taken after a voice request is made are provided as well.

Through deep analysis of voice data complemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in Adobe Sensei, brands can gain robust audience insights and recommendations, while automating the traditionally cumbersome, manual analysis.

Sensei's involvement will give teams more time to work on improving their voice services' core capabilities, Adobe says.

POV: This is a smart move by Adobe, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "As more consumers utilize voice-enabled assistants to manage their day, shop, and find answers to questions, they are contributing valuable data on their habits and intent," she says. "Brands in turn can perform even more targeted searches for lookalike customers or provide improved personalization of offers."

Legacy Watch: Mainframe outage drives Hawaii DMV to a halt: Problems with a mainframe that services DMV branches all over the state of Hawaii have essentially shut operations down all week, with no resolution in sight.

Motor vehicle registration, drivers licensing, state ID’s, moped registration, out of state license and vehicle transfers and "any and all transactions which require logging into the state database" have been affected, according to a press release from the county of Maui.

The DMV is asking that only customers with "urgent needs," such as an about-to-expire driver's license, come down in person for service, the release adds.

Interestingly—but perhaps not surprisingly—the problem isn't related to the mainframe hardware, Hawaii News Now reports:

The issues began on Monday after the system was shut down for maintenance over the weekend, according to Keith Ho, the city's Deputy Director of Information Technology. The problem, Ho says, is a result of the city trying to run old software on a brand new mainframe.

"We turned the system down on Sunday, so that we can do backups, and then when we brought it up on Monday, we started to see (the slowdown), says Ho. "Because not a lot of people are using it on Sunday, maybe just police doing inquiries, we didn't know until Monday (that there was a problem)."

POV: Nobody likes to go to the DMV, but it's a necessary evil. The Hawaii DMV's situation is a good example of how much inconvenience it can cause the public when critical systems like this go down. It's also another reminder of how much legacy assembler and COBOL code, much of it decades old, is still out there and in some cases can be a ticking time bomb.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Read more

Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.

Amazon-Whole Foods deal spurring grocers to transform: The Albertsons grocery chain is planning to overhaul its e-commerce systems in the coming year to better serve customers and shore up its play in food delivery, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move comes in the wake of Amazon's $13.7 billion deal to buy Whole Foods, a organic foods chain Alberstons was reportedly interested in buying earlier this year.

There's still time for counter-offers to come in for Whole Foods, possibly from Albertsons or Walmart. The latter is the U.S. grocery market share leader, with various estimates ranging from 15 to 20 percent, but Albertsons is no small player, with more than 2,000 stores and $60 billion in revenue. (Another suitor could be Kroger, which already has a robust organic foods business and is the second-largest U.S. grocer after Walmart.)

Beyond technology, Albertsons has invested in e-commerce related talent, bringing in executives from Macy's, Levi's and Disney with an eye on applying fresh ideas to the grocery space.

POV: While Amazon certainly has the infrastructure and potential to scale up a major grocery delivery business, it's interesting to note that Whole Foods, on a revenue basis, barely moves the needle toward that goal, given it has just about 1 percent of U.S. market share.

However, in terms of accelerating transformation in the grocery industry, the deal is clearly feeding the fire, evidenced by Albertsons' plans and no doubt many other chains. It could also help drive more business toward grocery delivery startups such as Instacart—a current Whole Foods partner—as chains choose to outsource. Overall, there are changes coming to the grocery business that will be felt by consumers going forward.

As for those potential counter-offers for Whole Foods? Here's how to look at that scenario, says Constellation Research founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang. For one, Amazon wants high-end customer data and Whole Foods delivers that. "It has distribution and customers, but needs data for pricing and selection," Wang says. "Other acquirers are seeing scale in their own industry but really need a technology or marketplace partner. Buying another grocery is really stupid. But if they bought Pepsico for distribution, that'd be interesting."

"Amazon is cross-industry and working across industries," he adds. "Other grocers who put in a bid are just there to raise the price. If they do buy Whole Foods, they’ll just kill it over time because their business models are not a good fit."

Encryption ends up low priority at Five Eyes meeting: This week, the "Five Eyes" nations of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and New Zealand held their annual meeting on intelligence, counterterrorism and cybersecurity measures in Ottawa. Many observers expected the two-day meeting to result in some concrete proposals around cryptography, specifically how law enforcement could circumvent it in the name of fighting and solving crimes.

But the official joint communication released after the meeting spends just a couple sentences on cryptography, and appears to essentially punt the problem toward technology companies:

[E]ncryption can severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism. To address these issues, we committed to develop our engagement with communications and technology companies to explore shared solutions while upholding cybersecurity and individual rights and freedoms.

POV: Go here to read Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson's take on why the encryption debate is far from simple.

Meet Kinetica, the GPU-powered database with NSA roots: Kinetica, an in-memory relational database startup that leverages NVIDIA GPUs in conjunction with commodity hardware, has scored $50 million in Series A funding, with investors including former Oracle president Ray Lane.

Kinetica's founders, Amit Vij and Nima Negahban, were hired in 2009 by the National Security Agency and U.S. Army Intelligence Security command to create a real-time terrorist tracking system. The database is now on its sixth product release but even the initial version was reportedly quite impressive, as Vij said in a statement:

At the time, our database ingested data from more than 200 different streaming big data feeds. This included drones that tracked every asset that moved at 30 frames per second; mobile devices that emitted their metadata every few seconds; social media like Twitter and Facebook; and cyber security data. We were evaluating billions of signals to find that needle in the haystack.

Current customers include GlaxoSmithKline and the U.S. Postal Service. Its being used in multiple ways, such as fraud detection, smart grid management, supply chain management, genomics research, and deep learning and machine learning.

POV: Kinetica is not the only company working on GPU-accelerated database technology, but would seem to have the early mover advantage given how long it's been in existence, and the success it's had gaining marquee customers.

The size of the Series A round, at $50 million, is much higher than typical, suggesting that Kinetica's investors are quite bullish on its prospects. Kinetica will use the money to increase engineering, sales and marketing headcount from the current 75, as well as open more offices around the world.

"The sweet spot for Kinetica has been interactive, geospatial analyses at scale, which has appealed to customers including government agencies, big retailers and big utilities," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "Advanced visualization capabilities have also appealed to pharmaceutical and healthcare companies."

While data-intensive geospatial and visual analyses are often performance constrained, Kinetica says its GPU-accelerated database and visual analytics platform can deliver up to 100 times faster performance than conventional systems using one-tenth the hardware, he adds. With the 6.0 release it's also diving into advanced in-database analytics applications combining machine learning and deep learning workloads, for which it's using libraries including TensorFlow, Caffe and Torch, Henschen notes.

GPU-accelerated databases have a bright future, so they're attracting healthy financial backing. In March, Kinetica competitor MapD raised $25 million in a Series B round. "GPU hardware remains exotic and unfamiliar to mainstream enterprises, however, so we're not yet in the hockey stick growth phase," Henschen says. "I expect continued experimentation, particularly in cloud environments where marketing partnerships could make a difference for these vendors. GPU-based systems won't thrive in isolation, so vendors and practitioners will have to ease the technical bottlenecks—such as getting high-scale data in and results out—of using these systems in concert with conventional systems and data platforms."

Microsoft gets multi-cloud friendly with Cloudyn buy: Microsoft has agreed to buy Israeli startup Cloudyn, which offers tools for managing consumption, spending and performance across multiple cloud services. The price tag was between $50 million and $70 million, Techcrunch reported.

While that sum is a rounding error on Microsoft's balance sheet, the deal has symbolic significance. Cloudyn was already a Microsoft partner, but supports other clouds as well as Azure. Judging from the tone of a blog post by Microsoft's Jeremy Winter, this approach may continue. Winter also notes that Cloudyn's tools helped a U.S. based Fortune 500 company realize a 286 percent return on investment.

POV: Cloudyn's capabilities could make Azure more attractive to customers, and certainly Microsoft wants to bring as many workloads to Azure as possible. However, Constellation believes that multi-cloud is the approach most enterprises need, whether they realize it now or not. Therefore, keeping Cloudyn open to other competitors would be the right move for Microsoft.

"Cloud economics are the key questions customers try to get on top of before making platform deployment decisions," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "The question is, as part of Microsoft can Cloudyn still be the independent, impartial third party that tracks cloud infrastructure costs and makes recommendations in regards of where loads should run?"

Legacy Watch: Medtronic's ERP integration woes: Medical-device giant Medtronic has brought a key system for customer orders and manufacturing back online after a nearly week-long outage, as the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reports.

Medtronic bought competitor Covidien in 2015 for $50 billion and has been working to bring the company onto its ERP system. A Medtronic spokesman "wasn't sure" whether the system outage was related to that project, according to the paper, but it's not too difficult to connect the dots.

POV: The thought of a week-long outage for a system that critical should make any CIO break out in cold sweat. Medtronic says it doesn't believe the outage will impact its earnings, but that remains to be seen. It is conducting a root-cause analysis of the problems; should it make those results public, they could have some valuable insights into the pitfalls of major systems migration.

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Read more

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

Read more

Google is getting a lot of attention lately over the $2.7 billion fine it received from the European Union over antitrust practices related to its search engine. The controversy stands to overshadow the company's recent effort to launch a policy debate around an important topic: The governance of cross-border law enforcement requests for information.

SVP and general counsel Kent Walker made the case in a speech last week to the Heritage Foundation, an influential Washington, D.C. think tank:

For as long as we’ve had legal systems, prosecutors and police have needed to gather evidence. ... With the advent of the post office, police got warrants to search letters and packages. With the arrival of telephones, police served subpoenas for the call logs of suspects. ... But the laws that govern evidence-gathering on the internet were written before the Information Revolution, and are now both hindering the flow of information to law enforcement and jeopardizing user privacy as a result.

These rules are due for a fundamental realignment in light of the rapid growth of technology that relies on the cloud, the very real security threats that face people and communities, and the expectations of privacy that internet users have in their communications.

Today, we’re proposing a new framework that allows countries that commit to baseline privacy, human rights, and due process principles to gather evidence more quickly and efficiently. We believe these reforms would not only help law enforcement conduct more effective investigations but also encourage countries to improve and align on privacy and due process standards. Further, reducing the amount of time countries have to wait to gather evidence means would reduce the pressure to pursue more problematic ways of trying to gather data.

Under the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, for the most part foreign law enforcement organizations are reliant on "diplomatic mechanisms" such as Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties when they want information held by a U.S. company. That process is far too bureaucratic and slow for most criminal proceedings, with an average wait of 10 months, Walker said.

Meanwhile, those same delays are prompting some countries to simply assert "that their own laws apply to companies and individuals outside of their borders." This places globalized U.S. companies in an "untenable situation," since they're at risk of violating U.S. law or that of the nation making the request, Walker added.

Google is proposing that the ECPA be updated to reflect that "law enforcement requests for digital evidence should be based on the location and nationality of users, not the location of data," as one measure.

A second would be for the U.S. and foreign nations that meet those "baseline" privacy, human rights and due process standards—which Google does not specifically define—to ink new pacts that would provide an alterative to MLATs.

Analysis: Unpacking Google's proposal

In principle, Google's proposal is most welcome, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "Clearly, something needs to be done to lubricate the necessary flow of information between cooperating law enforcement agencies," he says. "Equally, this sort of international challenge has been overcome many times in the past with extradition treaties, international shipping and aviation laws, as well as telecommunications and satellite regulations."

But the devil is in the details, and it's difficult to say how Google's view of the world and its problems align with most nations, he adds: "We live in awkward times where a great many developing nations are on edge, keen to assert their sovereignty in the global economy. A fresh complexity that didn't affect past treaty negotiations is that we have digital corporations now, with skin in the game, that are bigger than many countries."

Encryption: The elephant in the room

Wilson recalls the "crypto-wars" policy battle of the 1990s, which ended in a consensus that while criminals can use and benefit from encryption, it was also necessary for community security and would in reality always be available in roll-your-own form.

"The arguments today revolve around whether encryption is so powerful that it gives terrorists and organized crime a crucial edge over law enforcement," he says.

• Intercepts and decryption are just one tool of many used by law enforcement.
• Messages don't stay encrypted forever and police can find many points in the communications line at which to intercept criminal activity.
• Tampering with commercial cryptography will drive the most dedicated—and thereby most dangerous—criminals to build their own.
• Criminal can also resort to steganography, the practice of hiding secret messages in normal files such as graphics. Stenganography is much harder to detect and decode.