Privacy Rights, Operational Data, and the US Government

Thinking about smart energy and the 4^th of July generated an essay too large and too personal for publication. A shorter version re-oriented toward the buildings world appeared in the July issue of Automated Buildings magazine (www.AutomatedBuildings.com). This piece pulls together the more personal views from the same article. If you came here from Automated Buildings to find out more about my views, I recommend looking to my previous post on the Internet of Energy.

Several readers have written me that privacy has no place in US Law, and was only discovered as an emanation from a penumbra (in Justice Douglas’s words). I think that this is a profound misreading of the constitution, arising from an awful ruling in a good cause in the 1870’s. The Slaughterhouse Case created a framework that profoundly limited the privileges of citizenship, gutting a key component of the 14^th amendment, and by implication, eliminating the 9^th amendment from any real meaning.

The 9^th amendment, the shortest and simplest of the bill of rights, states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Federalists argued that the whole Bill of Rights was dangerous as it would be impossible to list all rights it would be dangerous to list some, lest there would be those who would assert that government was unrestrained as to the omitted rights. The 9^th amendment was so clear and so revolutionary that all parties have tried to ignore it ever since.

The first direction in the 14^th amendment is that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” These statements hang together on natural law, and on those rights of a held by all citizens, or by all men. As the old saw goes, some statements are so clear that it takes years of legal training to misinterpret them.

Privacy and its twin, the right to be left alone, which Justice Douglas referred to as “the most fundamental right,” are essential to one’s personal pursuit of happiness. Privacy is at the heart of the 4^th amendment, which prohibits searches of papers and possessions. Privacy and self-determination were at the heart of the concerns of the first amendment, restricting the reach over conscience held by the state churches of New England. They were fundamental to the founder’s concept of natural rights. Natural rights are not granted by the government, and nor can they be legitimately taken away (alienated) by government.

A simple reading of the simple words of the Constitution would include natural rights among the privileges of citizenship, as opposed to the obligations of subjects. Recent scholarship shows that Jefferson expunged the work subject from the Declaration, substitution citizen. The Ninth amendment and the privileges and immunities clause of the 14^th, have been ignored for years. Recent opinions from the Supreme Court have invoked each of them.

The rejuvenation of the 9^th and the 14^th can’t come quickly enough. Courts have ruled that inspection of cell phones, including contacts and email, is no concern of the 4^th amendment. The Justice Department argued last spring that there is no expectation of privacy over cell tower operational data, pinpointing your location at all times. New laws enable direct federal control and tracking of the internet. Direct load management of energy use, one competing model of the smart grid, would expand the trove of operation data about our lives and homes beyond anything previously seen.

All because of men of good think society need this information. As Milton wrote, “Necessity, the tyrant's plea".

The strains between a good new idea, so necessary and so important, and basic liberty and natural rights are not new. We can see them in quotes from presidents early in the last century, in their 4^th of July addresses.

From Woodrow Wilson, our most progressive president:

“The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written.”

From Calvin Coolidge, so conservative he as thoughtless:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

Today, there is a new urgency to privacy issues. We live our lives on-line and connected. Tweets and cell calls expose our every move. Digital storage costs have plummeted; there is now no reason to ever throw out information. With tracking and record-keeping essentially free, there is really no impediment to the government tracking everyone, all the time and keeping it forever. Cheap and powerful search matched to that cheap and boundless storage means nothing ever goes away. As the CEO of Google stated :Privacy is dead, get used to it.”

Without privacy, and mandatory rules concerning privacy, no part of our lives will be free from government meddling, from Wilsonian good intentions. We need to reassert privacy, all privacy, and rediscover the subversive rights of the 9^th and 14^th amendments.

The US has always been the land of the frontier. “Go west, young man!” Horace Greely famously spoke. West was where you could make something of yourself, perhaps a new something that was not what you once were. The West was where you went to start over. The west was the creator of a classless world, one where your parents did not matter because no one had a past. Failure to protect privacy is the final closing of the frontier.

What is an internet of energy?

In the political world, we often speak as if the smart grid will create and internet of energy. This sounds sexy, but it can be hard to noodle out what it means. I’m pretty sure that it does not mean that we will use smart meters to deliver porn. To find the internet of energy, we must acknowledge straight up the problems with our energy plans.

The internet was built around assumptions, scarcity of bandwidth and fragility of infrastructure, that clearly apply to today’s grid. Long distance transmission was expensive; email used to hop across the country on late-night phone connections to the next state. Every engineering decision was based on occasional connections, local management, and the knowledge that it was risky to rely on anything that was not controlled in-house.

Because we knew so little about what would happen next, we solved little problems. We did not make assumptions about how the next segment would handle our messages, or how reliable they would be. This allowed constant technological churn. Once we had TCP, IP began to drive out local protocols such as IPX and NetBIOS, and quickly supplanted top-down engineered protocols such as GOSIP and SNA.

On the infrastructure side, the churn was just as fast. I remember when X.25 was the future, and supported the first North American installation to supplement the banks of modems at CityNet. I remember when we signed up the Boston Choral Society, and gained users with perfect pitch, who bedeviled tech support by describing modem squawks by note. For ears, I telecommuted via dual ISDN lines back-fed out of Siler City, but tariffed as local connections. Each change of infrastructure was a minor blip for home and office communications.

Even the applications changed, always moving toward the simpler and less architected. Single purpose bulletin boards were replaced by Gopher servers and WAIS. Walled gardens such as AOL and Compuserve began to open up to the wider choices of today’s internet. Waves of push technologies failed and peer-to-peer regularly raised its transgressive disruptive hand against the top-down passive order.

Somehow, by planning for infinite scarcity, in every cell of networking, and in every switch and gateway, we found ourselves with unimaginable surplus, in which computers in our pockets are now network connected with greater bandwidth than used to connect supercomputing centers.

The key decisions of the smart energy are to reduce operating margins, to not build enough transmission and distribution, and to use intermittent power sources such as wind, sun, and tides. We are planning for the grid to provide lower quality service than it has in a hundred years. We have now forced ourselves into the corner in which network communications found themselves in the 70’s. We can only gain the same success by committing to the same principles.

The future of the grid will be based upon intermittently available energy distributed over inadequate and expensive wires. It will be too expensive, both in energy losses and in capacity management, to get our power from far away. We will have to make our energy decisions assuming occasional connections, local management of use, and the certain knowledge that it is risky to rely on anything that we do not manage in-house.

For a while, we will try to solve these problems with central decision-making and a hierarchical organization. Utility-based management of home and business use will make sense to traditional power engineers, just as SNA was briefly the networking strategy natural for mainframe users. This will fail under its own internal contradictions. The DOE envisions homes and businesses able regularly to operate off-grid for a week; it is unlikely that such remote energy management will work when the grid is down.

Each time we plan for unreliability, we can gain another level of reliability, accept another level of innovation. Homes that are indifferent to grid reliability can accept the local installation of self-contained, self maintain pocket power plants. Pocket power plants may be subject to longer outages through poor management, but their customers won’t care. Novel strategies of congestion pricing and load management may provide inconstant power to the neighborhood distribution, but the neighborhood will be relatively insensitive.

At each level, planning for scarcity and unpredictability will add resilience. Resilient systems will be better able to accept diversity; acceptance of diversity is a requirement for allowing innovation. As system that accepts innovation, in ways today’s static grid never will, will accept the creative destruction, the quick success or failure that draws venture capital and engineering ideas together.

The future quality of the grid is lousy; that’s the plan. Embrace its failures and unreliability, because that’s where markets will follow. That is how we will find an internet of energy.

Doing things at the right time

I have been writing too much elsewhere to write as much as I’d like here recently. WS-Calendar, EMIX, and EnergyInterop all have drafts out for comments this week. Standards specifications require a lot of coordination to get into publication.

Last Sunday, the WS-Calendar Technical Committee released a draft for comments. This is a small component among standards, but one that can help integrate building systems into the businesses that inhabit them. Already there are early attempts to integrate this specification into energy, into the enterprise, as well as into building operations.

I couldn’t make it through a week without using the IETF standards iCalendar and its supporting communications tools iMIP, iTIP, and calDAV. I am thankful for the many hours they save me every week. I think you may feel the same way, too.

What, you say? You don’t think about these standards? Well, that’s because they are ubiquitous, they work, and are therefore invisible. You use them to schedule meetings, and webinars, to remember plane travel and hotels reservations. They are everywhere, they work, and so we don’t talk about them.

WS-Calendar builds upon these specifications to bring schedules and synchronization to web services and inter-process communications. We created WS-Calendar to create, share, invoke, adjust, and track coordinated response between domains and organizations. By domains, I mean different groups that speak different languages. WS-Calendar will see use in financial instruments and building systems, in energy markets and in enterprise systems, in PDAs and electric cars.

Of most interest to automated buildings readers is how it affects building systems, and what new opportunities it opens up there. Years ago, when became chair of the oBIX TC (Technical Committee), I observed that the BAS needed to know the schedule of the conference room. My corporate calendar already knows when meetings begin each day, when they end each day, and how many people are in each meeting.

There is already a rough draft to incorporate WS-Calendar into oBIX, the OASIS web services standard for communicating with building systems. I have discussed use of WS-Calendar with many members of the BACnet community. It is likely that both communities will soon be able to use this specification to communicate with their respective building systems.

We can expect that enterprise systems will soon support this information sharing. Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle all participated in the WS-Calendar process. I have heard of a trial use of WS-Calendar directly from a Microsoft Exchange server. The makers of registrar’s office software, used to schedule college classes, are looking to communicate class schedules, and the number of students in each class, directly with the building systems.

Smart grids and demand response are everywhere in the news today. Smart grids communicate energy shortages and surpluses to the end nodes of the grid: buildings, homes, and industries. New standards for energy market communications include WS-Calendar. Through WS-Calendar, Energy, Enterprise, and Buildings communicate in a common language to discuss when and how to perform.

WS-Calendar is based on a suite of documents, all currently seeking comments. xCal defines a standard way to render iCalendar information in XML. CalWS is a web service standardizing the API for Calendaring & Scheduling functions on any platform supporting calendaring. WS-Calendar is the component for inter-domain communications.

Comments on WS-Calendar can be posted using the comments link at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ws-calendar/

Its almost here – and time to start planning how to use it.

Lessening the Integration Barrier to Smart Energy

We do not have a problem of knowing what to do to make buildings participants in smart energy. We do not have a problem that the technology is too expensive. We do have a problem that it takes too long to integrate systems. High integration costs lead to vendor lock-in. High integration costs lead to long sales cycles for replacements and upgrades. High integration costs will continue to slow the adoption of distributed energy resources. High integration costs lead to islands of automation, unable to participate in smart energy and demand response.

In design and in construction, today’s best practice is to use a BIM (Building Information Model) to deliver better buildings on-time and under budget. BIM trades higher design costs for much lower construction costs and reduced risk. We use BIM to generate energy models, essential to green certifications for buildings. Until recently, BIM hasn’t had much to do with the operations of a building, or with systems inside a building. This month, I am writing about how this is starting to change.

In traditional CAD, we have used libraries of templates supplied by product vendors for years. Suppliers of plumbing and lighting equipment have wanted it to be easy to design with their products, and they have wanted their products to look good in design renderings. Specifiers Property information exchange (SPie) is a project that encourages this approach applied to the more detailed requirements of BIM. SPie objects are cross-referenced with Omniclass and can include hookup and connection information. The National Electrical Manufacturing Association (NEMA) and is one of the associations participating. SPie brings the things we install in buildings into BIM.

Two technologies dominate the generation of building energy models. GBXML has wide support not only in energy modeling, but also in the design of HVAC and control systems. Information built on GBXML has had no path pack into BIM. EnergyPlus is purported to generate more accurate energy models, and has a well-defined model view for re-entry into BIM. ENERGie, (the ie is again for information exchange) is an effort to merge the two to provide a single model coordinating system design with building design and supporting full system detail. It is likely that ENERGie will soon be required for General Service Administration (GSA) and Department of Defense (DOD ) work. GSA and DOD are the two biggest landlords in North America, so their wants can drive the industry.

In information technology, we again and again see the technology we develop for the most advanced systems flowing down through normal business and all the way to the consumer. ISO 15926 is an information framework developed to express the relations between systems and components in the largest chemical processing plants. Today, ISO 15926 being adapted for a variety of tasks, from the esoteric mapping between ontologies to the automated mapping between form and function to operate smaller systems. ELie is a project to hand over the Equipment Layout in buildings to the owner by mapping from BIM to ISO 15926. ELie connects a static design to a runnable model.

Management of live electrical load in buildings is the largest challenge in smart energy. Plug load is almost unknowable in any automatic way. It will be some time before smart energy-communicating systems will outnumber legacy dumb-load equipment. Smart electrical panels that expose energy use per circuit have not found wide use; they follow no standards, and it is unclear what space they support. PLie standardizes the description of Panel Layout and brings it into the BIM of electrical wiring. PLie can provide automate the mapping of building wiring into the spaces and equipment it supports.

The EIS Alliance is developing models to support autonomous load management and shaping in buildings. One of their concepts is that the buildings electrical meter should be an information appliance for the building EMS. New building equipment and appliances could support the same interface to report their own energy use. Web services (WS) aware electrical panels could use the same interface to standardize their load reporting. Combining this interface and PLie brings the buildings dumb load under management with minimal integration.

Everything above is talking about plans and designs. New systems present ongoing integration costs. WS-DD and WS-DP are new standards to enable the automatic discovery of systems. These standards enhance the value of the energy information appliances by describing what each meter is tracking.

This laundry list of energy-related specifications are the answer to high integration costs and provide a path to sustained re-integration of systems. The flow of information through Model Views into smart energy is the key to continued understanding of building performance. These specifications will move the markets in energy management systems into improved interfaces, for users, for enterprises, and for energy marketeers.