When a company announces its intent to buy another company, certain activities at both firms may be stalled.
This can be a good thing, as certain Motorola employees and IDEMIA lawyers know.
Motorola layoffs on hold
In late 2008 and early 2009 Motorola was in trouble—so much trouble that it would eventually bifurcate. (Heh.) So Motorola was laying off employees throughout the company…
…except in the Biometric Business Unit where I resided. Safran had announced its intent purchase that unit, and Motorola was obligated to deliver that unit to Safran intact.
So I kept my job…for another 12 years anyway.
IDEMIA lawsuit on hold
Anyway, Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit became part of Safran and then IDEMIA. And according to ID Tech, IDEMIA is the beneficiary of new acquisition activity.
“A legal dispute between South African Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) firm INFOVERGE and French multinational IDEMIA has stalled, with INFOVERGE citing ongoing acquisition activity involving IDEMIA’s South African subsidiary as the reason for the delay. The firm is seeking R39 million in damages over what it describes as a breach of contractual obligations by IDEMIA.
“INFOVERGE told reporters that it had been informed IDEMIA’s South African division is undergoing a corporate transaction, which has effectively paused the litigation process. ‘We’ve been told that the South African arm of IDEMIA is under acquisition … which leaves our legal matter in some kind of limbo as we wait,’ an INFOVERGE spokesperson said, adding that the prolonged delay is impacting their ability to fulfill their empowerment mandate.”
To hear some people discuss remote work, they lay it on thick on the “work from anywhere” part of it. (Provided that your legal residence is in a jurisdiction where your company or your employer is authorized to conduct business.)
Imagen 4.
You know, “Here I am in a villa on the beach for the week! #livingthenomadlife”
Well, I’ve performed a lot of remote work for IDEMIA, Bredemarket, Incode, and other companies in my day, but usually not in a visitors’ bureau featured location.
Imagen 4.
Here’s where I’ve worked remotely over the last few years:
Spring 2019: a hotel in San Diego, California for IDEMIA’s Public Safety User Conference. The usual routine, spending half my time in our private command center coordinating sessions and speakers, and the other half of my time everywhere else.
Spring 2020-present: my home in Ontario, California. IDEMIA sent us home during COVID, where I worked for IDEMIA, then Bredemarket, then Incode, then Bredemarket again. The big highlight of my career was when my 25 square foot working space (as declared for tax purposes) moved from the front bedroom to the middle bedroom.
Fall 2020: a relative’s house in northern Alabama. I made vacation airline reservations before my COVID-related layoff, and it made no sense to cancel them so I went. It ended up being a working vacation, participating in an interview in which I was quoted in a German language publication, and making connections with two companies that would become Bredemarket clients.
Spring 2023: an office in Mexico City. This was an Incode offsite originally planned for the summer of 2022 but delayed. Many high points, but the low point was an earthquake drill that required us to walk down several flights of stairs…then walk back up those same flights of stairs. This was worse than the real earthquake that happened that week.
Imagen 4.
Which brings me to today and my new nomad location, a relative’s house in California. The relative is having outpatient surgery as I type this, and I’m staying overnight until he recovers.
Not exactly the romantic nomad life of exotic locations, but it definitely provides flexibility so that I can continue to work and take care of personal business.
This is a real picture. Fancy, huh?
Only problem: I forgot to bring my swimsuit.
But I will be performing some client work over the next two days.
And I could have been performing client work for you, but I guess that will have to wait until I return to my regular 25 square foot remote location. Book a meeting if Bredemarket can help you create content…from any location.
While Bredemarket as an entity has only officially worked one trade show, my personal trade show, conference, and exhibition experience extends back years.
My years of session and speaker coordination
For example:
In a past life I was tasked with session and speaker coordination for an annual conference. Dozens of sessions, dozens of speakers, probably about a dozen rooms, a myriad of microphone and table and cable setups, a little under a week…plus a dozen planners and dozens of employees and third-party conference staff.
There were many ways in which things could go wrong:
What if a demonstrator wanted to show an application on their iPhone, but you only had one-stage cables for a Windows laptop?
What if a keynote speaker wanted to show an application video as part of their remarks, but the audio-visual staff hadn’t tested the video yet? (Back in the day I worked with Sardis Media. They are magicians.)
What if an executive had an inspired idea to move one of our main room speakers to Wednesday morning…right when the speaker was conducting a workshop? (Human cloning was not an option.)
Worst yet, what if a speaker fell ill before boarding their flight to the conference venue…and we now had a big gaping hole the next morning?
Some of these things didn’t happen, but they could have…and if they did, it meant disruption of my “three chairs and 2 mics on the main stage on Tuesday at 8:45” meticulously made plans.
I excelled at session and speaker coordination
Yes, plans. I had them.
This was one of the times in which I fell back to Excel as my go-to project management tool, capturing all the necessary data, making it filterable and sortable.
The years have faded my memories of the details I tracked, but I needed to know session titles, dates and times, rooms, speakers, panelists, presentations, videos, live demos, on-stage chairs and tables, handouts, and other things besides.
This speaker could use the podium mic. And he had the conference app.
And that was just for DURING the conference. BEFORE the conference I needed to ensure that session abstracts and speaker biographies were written and found their way to the printed conference program, the registration website, and the conference app.
This was also one of the times that I heavily relied on the color printer that was hidden away in the conference organizers’ area. And it had to be color, because some schedule items were green, some yellow…and some red.
The schedule was constantly revised. And as the week wore on and the days dwindled down to a precious few, I would hide the older rows on my schedule and literally lighten my workload.
I would grip the latest iteration of my private master schedule and race around the conference hotel—sometimes the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa, sometimes another—checking things off my checklist. (All names are fictional.)
Hey, John, could you get your presentation to the Sardis folks by noon today? And you decided not to show that video, right?
Paul, the handouts for your workshop should be in the Guasti Room…I’m sorry, your session is in the Etiwanda Room. The handouts will be in the Etiwanda Room a half hour before your workshop.
George, you will be mic’ed up before the session…right?
Ringo! Side room. Five minutes. We need a raffle winner before 10:30.
By mid afternoon Thursday the last large sessions were done, the last workshops were wrapping up, the last raffle prizes were given away, and all that was left was the final banquet. Plenty could go wrong there, also, but that’s not part of this story.
I was wandering around my local (Upland, California) Staples on a Saturday afternoon. If I had arrived on a weekday, I could have applied for TSA PreCheck.
Only weekday hours, at least at the Staples on Mountain in Upland.
(No, I didn’t apply for TSA PreCheck in 2017 when MorphoTrak became part of MorphoTrust (when IDEMIA was formed) and I became eligible for a corporate discount. I didn’t predict a pandemic. Oops.)
“This openness to facial recognition could signal a turning point that could affect the biometric industry.
“The so-called “big” biometric players such as IDEMIA, NEC, and Thales are teeny tiny compared to companies like Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. If the big tech players ever consented to enter the law enforcement and surveillance market in a big way, they could put IDEMIA, NEC, and Thales out of business.
“However, wholesale entry into law enforcement/surveillance could damage their consumer business, so the big tech companies have intentionally refused to get involved – or if they have gotten involved, they have kept their involvement a deep dark secret.”
Then I thought about the “Really Big Bunch” product that offered the greatest threat to the “Big 3” (IDEMIA, NEC, and Thales)—Amazon Rekognition, which directly competed in Washington County, Oregon until Amazon imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of facial recognition in June 2020. The moratorium was subsequently extended until further notice.
“Have appropriately trained humans review all decisions to take action that might impact a person’s civil liberties or equivalent human rights.”
“Train personnel on responsible use of facial recognition systems.”
“Provide public disclosures of your use of facial recognition systems.”
“In all cases, facial comparison matches should be viewed in the context of other compelling evidence, and shouldn’t be used as the sole determinant for taking action.” (In other words, INVESTIGATIVELEAD only.)
Nothing controversial at all, and I am…um…99% certain (geddit?) that IDEMIA, NEC, and Thales would endorse all these points.
But why does Amazon even need such a page, if Rekognition is only used to find missing children?
Maybe this is a pre-June 2020 page that Amazon forgot to take down.
Or maybe not.
Couple this with the news about Meta, and there’s the possibility that the Really Big Bunch may enter the markets currently dominated by the Big Three.
Imagine if the DHS HART system, delayed for years, were resurrected…with Alphabet or Amazon or Meta technology.
It gets real tomorrow, with the enforcement date (sort of) for REAL ID at federal installations and airports. But what about the privacy of the data behind REAL IDs?
As can be expected, some people are very concerned about what this means.
“[C]oncerns persist among privacy professionals that the next step will be a federal database of driver’s license information, which is bad from a privacy and cybersecurity standpoint, said Jay Stanley, asenior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union.
“‘The more information the government has, the more the government might use that information,’ said Jodi Daniels, founder and chief executive of Red Clover Advisors, a privacy consulting company. ‘But that’s not what’s happening now,’ she added.”
Kumar addressed what IS happening now, and whether our personally identifiable information (PII) is protected.
“States have been issuing driver’s licenses for many years, and personal information is already being stored. The expectation is that the same controls apply to Real ID, said Bala Kumar, chief product and technology officer at Jumio, an online mobile payment and identity verification company. ‘States have already been managing this for many years,’ Kumar said.”
If you continue to read the article, you’ll also see a statement from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators that echoes what Jumio said.
But as a former IDEMIA employee, my curiosity was piqued.
Has anyone ever gained unauthorized access to a state driver’s license database?
So I checked, and could not find an example of unauthorized access to a state driver’s license database.
“On May 31, 2023, Progress Software Corporation, which developed and supports the MOVEIt managed file transfer platform, notified all customers across the globe, including [Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles], of a zero-day vulnerability that an unauthorized party leveraged to access and acquire data without authorization. Upon learning of the incident, immediate measures were taken to secure the MOVEIt environment utilized to transfer files. A thorough investigation was conducted, and it was determined that there was unauthorized acquisition of and access to OMV files in the MOVEIt environment….
“The information varied by individual but included name and one or more of the following: address, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license, learner’s permit, or identification card number, height, eye color, vehicle registration information, and handicap placard information.”
Well, at least the hacked data didn’t include weight. Or claimed weight.
Cybersecurity professionals know that you cannot completely prevent these hacks. Which explains the “risk” in third party risk management. Progress Software has been around for a long time; I worked with Progress Software BEFORE I began my biometric career. But these hacks (in this case, CVE-2023-34362 as documented by CISA) can happen to anyone.
Be cautious, and remember that others with good intentions might not be cautious enough.
The post touched on many items, one of which was the relative ease in using popular voice cloning programs to create fraudulent voices. Consumer Reports determined that four popular voice cloning programs “did not have the technical mechanisms necessary to prevent cloning someone’s voice without their knowledge or to limit the AI cloning to only the user’s voice.”
Reducing voice clone fraud?
Joel R. McConvey of Biometric Update wrote a piece (“Hi mom, it’s me,” an example of a popular fraudulent voice clone) that included an update on one of the four vendors cited by Consumer Reports.
In its responses, ElevenLabs – which was implicated in the deepfake Joe Biden robocall scam of November 2023 – says it is “implementing Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standards by embedding cryptographically-signed metadata into the audio generated on our platform,” and lists customer screening, voice CAPTCHA and its No-Go Voice technology, which blocks the voices of hundreds of public figures, as among safeguards it already deploys.
Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity
So what are these C2PA standards? As a curious sort (I am ex-IDEMIA, after all), I investigated.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content. C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project, formed through an alliance between Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic.
There are many other organizations whose logos appear on the website, including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Open AI.
Provenance
I won’t plunge into the entire specifications, but this excerpt from the “Explainer” highlights an important word, “provenance” (the P in C2PA).
Provenance generally refers to the facts about the history of a piece of digital content assets (image, video, audio recording, document). C2PA enables the authors of provenance data to securely bind statements of provenance data to instances of content using their unique credentials. These provenance statements are called assertions by the C2PA. They may include assertions about who created the content and how, when, and where it was created. They may also include assertions about when and how it was edited throughout its life. The content author, and publisher (if authoring provenance data) always has control over whether to include provenance data as well as what assertions are included, such as whether to include identifying information (in order to allow for anonymous or pseudonymous assets). Included assertions can be removed in later edits without invalidating or removing all of the included provenance data in a process called redaction.
Providence
I would really have to get into the nitty gritty of the specifications to see exactly how ElevenLabs, or anyone else, can accurately assert that a voice recording alleged to have been made by Richard Nixon actually was made by Richard Nixon. Hint: this one wasn’t.
Incidentally, while this was obviously never spoken, and I don’t believe that Nixon ever saw it, the speech was drafted as a contingency by William Safire. And I think everyone can admit that Safire could soar as a speechwriter for Nixon, whose sense of history caused him to cast himself as an American Churchill (with 1961 to 1969 as Nixon’s “wilderness years”). Safire also wrote for Agnew, who was not known as a great strategic thinker.
And the Apollo 11 speech above is not the only contingency speech ever written. Someone should create a deepfake of this speech that was NEVER delivered by then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower after D-Day:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
“So depending upon your needs, you can argue that”
This frame was followed by three differing answers to the “Where is ByteDance From?” question.
But isn’t there only one answer to the question? How can there be three?
It all depends upon your needs.
Who is the best age estimation vendor?
I shared an illustrative example of this last year. When the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tested its first six age estimation algorithms, it published the results for everyone to see.
“Because NIST conducts so many different tests, a vendor can turn to any single test in which it placed first and declare it is the best vendor.
“So depending upon the test, the best age estimation vendor (based upon accuracy and or resource usage) may be Dermalog, or Incode, or ROC (formerly Rank One Computing), or Unissey, or Yoti. Just look for that “(1)” superscript….
“Out of the 6 vendors, 5 are the best. And if you massage the data enough you can probably argue that Neurotechnology is the best also.
“So if I were writing for one of these vendors, I’d argue that the vendor placed first in Subtest X, Subtest X is obviously the most important one in the entire test, and all the other ones are meaningless.”
Are you the best? Only if I’m writing for you
I will let you in on a little secret.
When I wrote things for IDEMIA, I always said that IDEMIA was the best.
When I wrote things for Incode, I always said that Incode was the best.
And when I write things for each of my Bredemarket clients, I always say that my client is the best.
I recently had to remind a prospect of this fact. This particular prospect has a very strong differentiator from its competitors. When the prospect asked for past writing samples, I included this caveat:
“I have never written about (TOPIC 1) or (TOPIC 2) from (PROSPECT’S) perspective, but here are some examples of my writing on both topics.”
I then shared four writing samples, including something I wrote for my former employer Incode about two years ago. I did this knowing that my prospect would disagree with my assertions that Incode’s product is so great…and greater than the prospect’s product.
If this loses me the business, I can accept that. Anyone with any product marketing experience in the identity industry is guaranteed to have said SOMETHING offensive to most of the 80+ companies in the industry.
How do I write for YOU?
But let’s say that you’re an identity firm and you decide to contract with Bredemarket anyway, even though I’ve said nice things about your competitors in the past.
How do we work together to ensure that I say nice things about you?
By the time we’re done, we have hopefully painted a hero picture of your company, describing why you are the preferred solution for your customers—better than IDEMIA, Incode, or anyone else.
(Unless of course IDEMIA or Incode contracts with Bredemarket, in which case I will edit the sentence above just a bit.)
So let’s talk
If you would like to work with Bredemarket for differentiated content, proposal, or analysis work, book a free meeting on my “CPA” page.
I am VERY familiar with questions regarding the nationality of a company. There are three questions:
Where is it incorporated?
Where is it headquartered?
Who owns it?
IDEMIA
For my former employer IDEMIA, the answers are France, France, and primarily a U.S. investor (Advent International).
(So depending upon your needs, you can argue that IDEMIA is a French company or a U.S. company.)
ByteDance
For ByteDance, the answers are the Cayman Islands, China (Beijing), and primarily global investors (Blackrock, General Atlantic, Susquehanna International Group, etc.).
(So depending upon your needs, you can argue that ByteDance is a Chinese company, a mostly American company, or a British company off the coast of Cuba.)
Your company
Not that I create TikTok videos (at least not for paying clients), but I provide other services.
More information on Bredemarket’s Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing and writing services:
Bredemarket 