The Yorkshire Ranter

Politics of call centres, part three (really part three this time)

2012-01-21T17:35:00.000+01:00

So we've looked at how they're dreadful and why. The stakes are important; a huge chunk of the economy is made up of services, and some of the places where they are located are becoming almost as much one-industry towns as they were before their one industry shut down. What if this sector was as productive and as valued as Rolls-Royce? (Especially as, all things considered, it is quite difficult to use them as a weapon of war, rather as the role of the orchestra in counter-insurgency is limited at best.)

We have the technology. Ticketing systems are as mature as anything gets, and a reader of this blog was moved to say that every software developer has at least once tried to write their own. Web-voice integration is a hugely creative field at the moment. Things like Fonolo and the Networked Helpdesk Protocol (API docs are here) show what can be done.

But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it's a cost-centre, there's no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.

The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure

2012-01-21T15:06:00.001+01:00

So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice documents. Basically, it was a site where the phone company took calls from the public, either for its own account or on behalf of a third party. Its practices were defined by Bell System standardisation, and its industrial relations were defined by the agreement between AT&T and the unions, which specified the pay and conditions for the various trades and workplace types inside the monster telco. If something was a Business Office according to the book, the union agreement covering those offices would apply.

In the Reaganite 80s, after the Bell System was broken up, someone realised that it would be possible to get rid of the union rules if they could re-define the site as something else. Not only could they change the rules, but they could move the site physically to a right-to-work state or even outside the USA. This is, it turns out, the origin of the phrase "call centre".

In the UK, of course, call centres proliferated in parallel with utility privatisation and financial deregulation. A major element in the business case for privatisation was getting rid of all those electricity showrooms and BT local offices and centralising customer service functions into `all centres. At the same time, of course, privatisation created the demand for customer service in that it was suddenly possible to change provider and therefore to generate a shit-load of admin. Banks were keen to get rid of their branches and to serve the hugely expanding credit card market. At another level, IT helpdesks made their appearance.

On the other hand, hard though it is to imagine it now, there was a broader vision of technology that expected it all to be provided centrally - in the cloud, if you will - down phone lines controlled by your favourite telco, or by the French Government, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch. This is one of the futures that didn't happen, of course, because PCs and the web happened instead, but you can bet I spent a lot of time listening to people as late as the mid-2000s still talking about multimedia services (and there are those who argue this is what stiffed Symbian). But we do get a sneak-preview of the digital future that Serious People wanted us to have, every time we have to ring the call centre. In many ways, call centres are the Anti-Web.

In Britain, starting in the 1990s, they were also part of the package of urban regeneration in the North. Along with your iconic eurobox apartments and AutoCAD-shaped arts centre, yup, you could expect to find a couple of gigantic decorated sheds full of striplighting and the precariat. Hey, he's like a stocky, Yorkshire Owen Hatherley. After all, it was fairly widely accepted that even if you pressed the button marked Arts and the money rolled in, there was a limit to the supply of yuppies and there had to be some jobs in there as well.

You would be amazed at the degree of boosterism certain Yorkshire councils developed on this score, although you didn't need top futurist Popcorn Whatsname to work out that booming submarine cable capacity would pretty quickly make offshoring an option. Still, if Bradford didn't make half-arsed attempts to jump on every bandwagon going, leaving it cluttered with vaguely Sicilian failed boondoggles, it wouldn't be Bradford.

Anyway, I think I've made a case that this is an institution whose history has been pathological right from the start. It embodies a fantasy of managing a service industry in the way the US automakers were doing at the same time - and failing, catastrophically.

The politics of call centres, part one

2012-01-21T14:39:00.001+01:00

What is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I've often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that's been unusually salient in my life recently - I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone and Thames Water were the best, npower and Virgin Media the worst.) But this isn't just going to be a consumer whine. In an economy that is over 70% services, the combination of service design, technology, and social relations that makes these things so awful is something we need to understand.

For example, why does E.ON (the electricity company, a branch of the German utility Rhein-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerke) want you to tell their IVR what class you are before they do anything else? This may sound paranoid, but when I called them, the first question I had to answer was whether I owned my home or was a tenant. What on earth did they want to know that for?

Call centres provide a horrible experience to the user. They are famously awful workplaces. And they are also hideously inefficient - some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls. Manufacturing industry has long recognised that rework is the greatest enemy of productivity, taking up disproportionate amounts of time and resources and inevitably never quite fixing the problems.

So why are they so awful? Well, I'll get to that in the next post. Before we can answer that, we need to think about how they are so awful. I've made a list of anti-patterns - common or standard practices that embody error - that make me angry.

Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though - for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn't instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.

Waiting on hold is interesting because it represents an imposition on the user - because telephony is a hot medium in McLuhan's terminology, your attention is demanded while you sit pointlessly in the queue. In essence, you're providing unpaid labour. Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait - playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.

And the existence of the queue is important in the social relations of the workplace. If there are people queueing, it is obviously essential to get to them as soon as possible, which means there is a permanent pressure to speed up the line. Many centres use the queue as an operational KPI. It is also quality-destroying, in that both workers and managers' attention is always focused on the next call and how to get off the current call in order to get after the queue.

A related issue is polling. That is to say, repeatedly checking on something, rather than being informed pro-actively when it changes. This is of course implicit in the queueing model. It represents a waste of time for everyone involved.

Repetition is one of the most annoying of the anti-patterns, and it is caused by statelessness. It is always assumed that this interaction has never happened before, will never happen again, and is purely atomised. They don't know what happened in the last call, or even earlier in the call if it has been transferred. As a result, you have to provide your mother's maiden name and your account number, again, and they have to retype it, again. The decontextualised nature of interaction with a call centre is one of the worst things about it.

Pretty much every phone system these days uses SIP internally, so there is no excuse for not setting a header with a unique identifier that could be used to look up data in all the systems involved, and indeed given out as a ticket number to the user in case they need to call again, or - why not - used to share the record of the call.

That point leads us to another very important one. Assymetric legibility characterises call centres, and it's dreadful. Within, management tries to maintain a panopticon glare at the staff. Without, the user faces an unmapped territory, in which the paths are deliberately obscure, and the details the centre holds on you are kept secret. Call centres know a lot about you, but won't say; their managers endlessly spy on the galley slaves; you're not allowed to know how the system works.

So no wonder we get failure demand, in which people keep coming back because it was so awful last time. A few companies get this, and use first-call resolution (the percentage of cases that are closed first time) as a KPI rather than call rates, but you'd be surprised. Obviously, first-call resolution has a whole string of social implications - it requires re-skilling of the workforce and devolution of authority to them. No wonder it's rare.

Now, while we were in the queue, the robot voice kept telling us to bugger off and try the Web site. But this is futile. Inappropriate automation and human/machine confusion bedevil call centres. If you could solve your problem by filling in a web form, you probably would have done. The fact you're in the queue is evidence that your request is complicated, that something has gone wrong, or generally that human intervention is required.

However, exactly this flexibility and devolution of authority is what call centres try to design out of their processes and impose on their employees. The product is not valued, therefore it is awful. The job is not valued by the employer, and therefore, it is awful. And, I would add, it is not valued by society at large and therefore, nobody cares.

So, there's the how. Now for the why.

lazyweb: old budget forecasts

2012-01-15T17:53:00.000+01:00

Dear Lazyweb, has anyone seen a data series showing the forecast for the UK government budget? Or will I have to download all the Treasury statements and re-chew it?

links...

2012-01-15T17:01:00.000+01:00

Quick-hit update to the Baluchistan/US/Iran post; Daniel Drezner has a crack at rounding up the news and comes pretty close to arguing that the Americans are trying to stop the Israelis getting them into a war with Iran. Akbar Ahmed argues, in a must-read, that things in Baluchistan have been getting much worse lately and that this is very bad news for Pakistan, and it's all the government's fault. And US-Israel anti-missile live fire exercise gets called off.

A quick look back to the riots

2012-01-15T16:52:00.000+01:00

Reading through tehgrauniad's riots deep-dive, the impression that I get is that the whole "riots as an insurgency" idea wasn't that far off. I've been indisciplined in that I took notes but didn't keep links (a problem with paying for and reading the actual newspaper), so you'll have to trust me on this. Obviously, blaming the whole thing on "criminality" is about as useful as blaming rain on "water falling from the sky".

The first common factor that struck me was that pretty much everyone they interviewed had a grudge against the police. Not in any broad theoretical sense, but a grudge - a specific and personal memory of perceived injustice and especially incivility, cherished over time. Now, it's in the nature of policing as a public service that nobody enjoys it. If you're interacting with policemen on duty, it's either because they suspect you of being a criminal, or because something bad has happened to you. Generally, everybody would quite like to minimise their lifetime consumption of policing.

There is something that motivates people to put up with it, though, and that something is legitimacy.

The second common factor was the attitude towards property. Quite a lot of the people the Guardian spoke to reported looting goods from shops, and then giving them away, or witnessing others doing so. Stealing goods is one thing, but immediately giving them away is rather different and very much a political act. So much so that there is a word for it (and I'm not the only one to notice this).

Of course, police legitimacy comes in a very large degree from their role as protectors of property, so this was a way of directly challenging their claim to provide security and to employ legitimate force.

Eyewitnesses often described a tactical, practical implementation of this - small groups of rioters harassing the police, in a sort of screening or covering operation, while many more looted or destroyed property. It's very interesting that this could all happen so quickly.

404

2012-01-15T16:10:00.000+01:00

Following up on the earlier post about IMSI catchers and shopping malls and Hezbollah, I wanted to link to a really excellent piece in Le Monde about mining call-detail records ("fadettes" in French, from "facture détaillée téléphonique"). The URI, here now leads to an annoyingly cutesy 404 page. However, the search function turns it up and even shows it as being free...but the link it returns doesn't work.

Jack Straw, still repellent after all these years

2012-01-15T14:47:00.000+01:00

How much of a bastard was Jack Straw again? This much.

Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into secret MI6 rendition operations that resulted in leading Libyan dissidents being abducted and flown to Tripoli where they were subsequently tortured in Muammar Gaddafi's prisons....The year after the joint UK-Libyan operations were mounted, Straw told MPs they must disbelieve allegations of UK involvement in rendition "unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States".

a short telegram, or a very long tweet

2012-01-15T14:36:00.001+01:00

Everyone's linked to Mark Perry (of Conflicts Forum/Alistair Crooke fame)'s piece on Israeli spooks running around Baluchistan posing as the CIA already, but I will too as it's very interesting indeed. I'm not sure what their bag in this is, other than the notion of "always escalate" and hope to profit from the general confusion.

But what's really interesting is what the story is doing out there now. Here's Laura Rozen's write-up, which introduces the suggestion that they may have represented themselves as being from NATO and notes that a leader of the organisation said as much on Iranian TV before being executed. Meanwhile, the Iranians write to the Americans accusing the CIA of being behind the assassination of another nuclear scientist.

On Twitter, she suggests that the scientist wasn't killed by the Americans (i.e. presumptively by the Israelis, or by people working for them wittingly or otherwise), and that this was staged specifically to queer the possibility of reviving the Iran-Turkey uranium swap deal. (You do wonder what George F. Kennan would have made of diplomatic tweeting.) Further, we know that a back-channel has been set up.

Disclosing information about the Israeli operation in Baluchistan might be a smart way of establishing trust between the US and Iran. Obviously, information about terrorists running about blowing stuff up and killing people is of value to Iran. Information that it's the Israelis is obviously congenial to Iran. Crucially, burning an Israeli spy network is costly to the Americans and not something they would do lightly (the Perry piece is a monument to important people trying all they could to do nothing). In that sense, it is a meaningful signal - much more convincing than mere words. Presumably, Perry's role at Conflicts Forum and with Arafat makes him a convincing postman into the bargain. And third-party spies are just the sort of thing that enemies can bond over. I recall reading about the IRA and the UVF staging a joint investigation to find informers in the early 1970s.

Another dose of speculation - if Baluch rebels were meeting with people who they thought were from NATO, was this plausible because NATO was in fact paying them off to leave the Karachi-Quetta-Kandahar supply route alone?

The intersection of electronic warfare and mall management

2012-01-15T13:47:00.001+01:00

Here's something interesting. You may remember this story from back in November about the CIA spy network in Lebanon that met at a Pizza Hut they codenamed PIZZA, and which was rolled up by a joint Hezbollah-Lebanese military intelligence investigation. The key detail is as follows:

U.S. officials also denied the source's allegation that the former CIA station chief dismissed an email warning that some of his Lebanese agents could be identified because they used cellphones to call only their CIA handlers and no one else.
...
Lebanon's security service was able to isolate the CIA informants by analyzing cellphone company records that showed the numbers called, duration of each call and location of the phone at the time of the call, the source said.

Using billing and cell tower records for hundreds of thousands of phone numbers, software can isolate cellphones used near an embassy, or used only once, or only on quick calls. The process quickly narrows down a small group of phones that a security service can monitor.

If the top paragraph is true, it would have been catastrophically ill-advised. Even somebody special, like a CIA agent under diplomatic cover, has a relatively large number of weak ties to normal people. This is the reverse of the small-world principle, and is a consequence of the fact that the great majority of people are real human beings rather than important persons. As a result, things like STELLAR WIND, the illegal Bush-era effort to analyse the whole pile of call-detail records at AT&T and Verizon in the hope that this would find terrorists, face a sort of Bayesian doom. We've gone over this over and over again.

However, phone numbers that only talk to special people are obviously suspicious. Most numbers with a neighbourhood length of 1 will be things like machine-to-machine SIMs in vending machines and cash points, but once you'd filtered those out, the remaining pool of possibles would be quite small. It is intuitive to think of avoiding surveillance, or keeping a low profile, but what is required is actually camouflage rather than concealment.

There are more direct methods - which is where electronic warfare and shopping mall management intersect.

Path Intelligence, a Portsmouth-based startup, will install a network of IMSI-catchers, devices which act as a mobile base station in order to identify mobile phones nearby, in your shopping centre so as to collect really detailed footfall information.

Similarly, you could plant such a device near that Pizza Hut to capture which phones passed by and when, and which ones usually coincided. Alternatively, you could use it in a targeted mode to confirm the presence or absence of a known device. Which makes me wonder about the famous Hezbollah telecoms network, and whether it was intended at least in part to be an electronic-intelligence network - as after all, nothing would be a better cover for a huge network of fake mobile base stations than a network of real ones.

Meanwhile, this year's CCC (like last year's) was just stuffed with GSM exploits. It really is beginning to look a lot like "time we retired that network".

Konsidered a waste of time

2012-01-11T00:47:00.001+01:00

OK, so I eventually finished listening to the 793 songs in the 2011 SXSW torrent and rating them all. This was a while ago, but it was only yesterday that I reorganised some stuff in the collection and remembered that the couple of gigabytes of mediocrity was sitting there. It was clearly time to implement the TYR Band-Pass filter, my objective methodology for filtering musical slushpiles.

So I frobbed around Amarok until I found the "Automated Playlist Generator" hiding under a rock, and then fiddled with it until I understood the UI-only-a-hacker-could-imagine. Seriously, it would have been easier to just provide a command prompt on the underlying database. (Does a "Match All" Constraint Group match both any rules of its own and also the output of a "Match Any"? Search me, guv, because you can search your hard disk and not find any documentation.)

And it gave me 32 tracks, all with a rating of zero. Now that is a valid output from the filter. Or it would be if there were no tracks rated above the upper limit, 3.5. And I gave out quite a few 5s. So I check in the pile. All the ratings are gone. This isn't quite as bad as the phase KAddressBook and Akonadi went through a couple of years ago when they regularly, randomly, truncated my contacts file from 269KB to 10.8KB - always exactly the same - and inserted helpful invalid characters. (Fortunately they also left a renamed copy of the original file, so you could just restore from backup.) But it's pretty shit. Any software that randomly destroys user data has failed and failed horribly. It's the antithesis of polite software.

But it did produce 32 tracks, so there must be a wrong copy of the data somewhere, which suggests that there might also be a right one.

Meanwhile, I've been reading the traffic on kdepim-l about KMail 2 with horror and an increasing sense that KDE is going spongy. Even without anything related to Akonadi actually working, long after the last lot of performance bugs were closed, it still has a nasty habit of keeping the hard disk active for half an hour at a time, doing what? KM2 users report rampant loss of data and of meta-data. And I don't have a working desktop search utility despite years of promises about Akonadi and Nepomuk and Strigi and "semantic desktop".

Think about it like this - a new era KDE application that needs to read data from your contacts file, a vCard sitting somewhere in your .kde4 directory, is meant to go to an "akonadi_vcal_resource" that's mediated by the common Akonadi API and no less than two RDF triplestore databases (Redland and Virtuoso). What happened to the filesystem?

So, I'm going to initiate a new, innocent laptop into the twisted cult this week. And I think I'm quitting the KDE world. I'm not the only one - from 25 killer Linux apps to When you first launch KMail, it will terminate with a 'Failed to fetch the resource collection' error. KMail doesn't have a default incoming mail directory configured, which causes this error. The workaround involves using Akonadi to specify a maildir location for KMail. To do this, launch the Akonadi Configuration tool and point the Local Folders to /.kde4/share/apps/kmail2/.

Well, I've never had that error but my install crashes every time it launches, and only ever works on the second time of asking. Of course, I could spend all my time maintaining this particular e-mail client. Don't all write at once.

RQ-170 upshot, part 2: the bubble

2012-01-08T15:22:00.000+01:00

Is there a drone bubble? It's not clear whether this is more like the .com bubble, when a lot of useful stuff was built but a couple of years too early, or more like the housing bubble, when a lot of stuff was built in the wrong places to the wrong standards at the wrong prices and will probably never be worth much. It's the nature of a bubble, of course, that it's precisely at the top of the bubble that the commitment to it is greatest.

One of the things the RQ-170 incident tells us about is some of the operational limitations of the drones. Typically, they are piloted in the cruise from locations that may be a long way off, using satellite communication links, but when they land, they do so under local control via line-of-sight radio link from their base. This allows us to set some bounds on how much of a problem link latency really is, which will take us circling back to John Robb's South Korean gamers.

Gamers are famous for being obsessed with ping-times - the measurement of round-trip latency on the Internet - because it's really, really annoying to see the other guy on your screen, go to zap'em, and get zapped yourself because it took longer for your zap to cross the Internet than theirs. Typically you can expect 40 or so milliseconds nationally, 60-80 inter-continentally...or several hundred if a satellite or an old-school cellular operator with a hierarchical network architecture is involved. A sat hop is always clearly identifiable in traceroute output because latency goes to several hundred ms, and there's a great RIPE NCC paper on using the variations in latency over a year to identify the satellite's geosynchronous (rather than geostationary) orbit as the slant-range changes.

On the other hand, roundtrip latency across an airfield circuit a couple of miles wide will be negligible. So we can conclude that tolerable latency for manoeuvring, as opposed to cruising, is very little. Now, check out this post on David Cenciotti's blog from January 2010. Some of the Israeli air force's F-15s have received a new communications radio suite specifically for controlling UAVs.

You might now be able to guess why even drone pilots are going through basic flight training. Also, this post of Cenciotti's describes the causes of six recent hull losses, all of which are classic airmanship accidents - the sort of thing pilot training is designed to teach you to avoid.

That said, why did all those drones get built? The original, 1980s UAV concepts were usually about the fact that there was no pilot and therefore the craft could be treated as expendable, usually in order to gain intelligence on the (presumably) Soviet enemy's air defences by acting as a ferret aircraft, forcing them to switch on the radars so the drone could identify them. But that's not what they've been doing all these years.

The main reason for using them has been that they are lightweight and have long endurance. This is obviously important from an intelligence gathering perspective, whether you're thinking of over-watching road convoys or of assassinating suspected terrorists (and there are strong arguments against that, as Joshua Foust points out). In fact, long endurance and good sensors are so important that there are even so-called manned drones - diesel-engined, piloted light aircraft stuffed with sensors, with the special feature that they fly with intelligence specialists aboard and provide a much faster turn-around of information for the army.

Their limitations - restricted manoeuvre, limited speed and payload, and high dependence on communications infrastructure - haven't really been important because they have been operating in places and against enemies who don't have an air force or ground-based air defences and don't have an electronic warfare capability either. Where the enemy have had man-portable SAMs available, as sometimes in Iraq, they have chosen to save them for transport aircraft and the chance of killing Americans, which makes sense if anti-aircraft weapons are scarce (and surely, the fact of their scarcity has to be one of the major unreported news stories of the decade).

But then, the war in Iraq is meant to be over even if the drones are still landing in Kurdistan, and the US may be on its way to a "pre-1990" military posture in the Gulf. This week's strategic fashion is "Air-Sea Battle" and the Pacific, and nobody expects anything but the most hostile possible environment in the air and in the electromagnetic spectrum. And the RQ-170 incident is surely a straw in the wind. Also, the Bush wars were fought in an environment of huge airfields in the desert, and the ASB planners expect that the capacity of US bases in Japan and Guam and the decks of aircraft carriers will be their key logistical constraint. (The Russians aren't betting everything on them either.)

I think, therefore, it's fair to suggest that a lot of big drones are going to end up in the AMARC stockpile. After the Americans' last major counter-insurgency, of course, that's what happened. The low-tech ones are likely to keep proliferating, though, whether as part of the Royal Engineers' route clearance system or annoying the hell out of Japanese whalers or even playing with lego.

The RQ-170 hack and the drone bubble

2012-01-08T14:28:00.002+01:00

The fact that a majority of this year's graduates from USAF basic pilot training are assigned to drone squadrons has got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere. Here, via Jamie Kenny, John Robb (who may still be burying money for fear of Obama or may not) argues that the reason they still do an initial flight training course is so that the pilot-heavy USAF hierarchy can maintain its hold on the institution. He instead wants to recruit South Korean gamers, in his usual faintly trendy dad way. Jamie adds the snark and suggests setting up a call centre in Salford.

On the other hand, before Christmas, the Iranians caught an RQ-170 intelligence/reconnaissance drone. Although the RQ-170 is reportedly meant to be at least partly stealthy, numerous reports suggest that the CIA was using it among other things to get live video of suspected nuclear sites. This seems to be a very common use case for drones, which usually have a long endurance in the air and can be risked remaining over the target for hours on end, if the surveillance doesn't have to be covert.

Obviously, live video means that a radio transmitter has to be active 100% of the time. It's also been reported that one of the RQ-170's main sensors is a synthetic-aperture radar. Just as obviously, using radar involves transmitting lots of radio energy.

It is possible to make a radio transmitter less obvious, for example by saving up information and sending it in infrequent bursts, and by making the transmissions as directional as possible, which also requires less power and reduces the zone in which it is possible to detect the transmission. However, the nature of the message governs its form. Live video can't be burst-transmitted because it wouldn't be live. Similarly, real-time control signalling for the drone itself has to be instant, although engineering telemetry and the like could be saved and sent later, or only sent on request. And the need to keep a directional antenna pointing precisely at the satellite sets limits on the drone's manoeuvring. None of this really works for a mapping radar, though, which by definition needs to sweep a radio beam across its field of view.

Even if it was difficult to acquire it on radar, then, it would have been very possible to detect and track the RQ-170 passively, by listening to its radio emissions. And it would have been much easier to get a radar detection with the advantage of knowing where to look.

There has been a lot of speculation about how they then attacked it. The most likely scenario suggests that they jammed the command link, forcing the drone to follow a pre-programmed routine for what to do if the link is lost. It might, for example, be required to circle a given location and wait for instructions, or even to set a course for somewhere near home, hold, and wait for the ground station to acquire them in line-of-sight mode.

Either way, it would use GPS to find its way, and it seems likely that the Iranians broadcast a fake GPS signal for it. Clive "Scary Commenter" Robinson explains how to go about spoofing GPS in some detail in Bruce Schneier's comments, and points out that the hardware involved is cheap and available.

Although the military version would require you to break the encryption in order to prepare your own GPS signal, it's possible that the Iranians either jammed it and forced the drone to fall back on the civilian GPS signal, and spoofed that, or else picked up the real signal at the location they wanted to spoof and re-broadcast it somewhere else, an attack known as "meaconing" during the second world war when the RAF Y-Service did it to German radio navigation. We would now call it a replay attack with a fairly small time window. (In fact, it's still called meaconing.) Because GPS is based on timing, there would be a limit to how far off course they could put it this way without either producing impossible data or messages that failed the crypto validation, but this is a question of degree.

It's been suggested that Russian hackers have a valid exploit of the RSA cipher, although the credibility of this suggestion is unknown.

The last link is from Charlie Stross, who basically outlined a conceptual GPS-spoofing attack in my old Enetation comments back in 2006, as a way of subverting Alistair Darling's national road-pricing scheme.

Anyway, whether they cracked the RSA key or forced a roll-back to the cleartext GPS signal or replayed the real GPS signal from somewhere else, I think we can all agree it was a pretty neat trick. But what is the upshot? In the next post, I'm going to have a go at that...

HOWTO appear prime ministerial: first, be the prime minister

2011-12-30T18:00:00.000+01:00

Here's a question for you. Obviously it's too much to ask that national newspapers provide a critical view of polling methodology. And there are obvious problems in criticising a poll your own paper paid for on the front page. So bloggers will probably just have to do it. But here goes. To what extent is the quality of "being prime ministerial" caused by being prime minister?

The polls haven't been great for Labour over the turkey gap, and we know this is probably a thing because it wasn't just one poll or one pollster's polls that showed it. Fair enough. The problem is, of course, that given this information, everyone immediately starts trying to impose stories on it. Some of this is pure wind, but at least some of it tries to be based on data.

The Guardian is very exercised by one of the down-ticket questions in their own ICM poll, which apparently shows that more people think David Cameron is "good in a crisis" than Ed Miliband. The problem with basing any conclusions on this is that it's quite possible that being Prime Minister gives you lots of crises to be good in, and plenty of resources to help you be good in them, like the advice of expert civil servants and the wiles of some of the world's most accomplished bullshitters. Further, as crises in our political system naturally migrate towards No.10 Downing Street, there is a permanent media stage on which you can perform prime ministership.

Obviously, crisis management is a desirable skill in a prime minister, but the job of Leader of the Opposition is not one that gives you lots of opportunities to display it. In fact, as the opposition isn't in charge, it has no excuse for getting into crises in the first place. A Leader of the Opposition who is having crises can only be having them because their party is being disloyal, because a shadow cabinet member is in trouble, or because they are themselves in trouble personally. The Prime Minister gets crises delivered every morning by the civil service in a red box, like an unappetising catered breakfast. It is hard to think of a situation where an opposition leader can demonstrate the ability to deal with crises that is not, per se, very bad news for the opposition.

In fact, the only one I can think of is the situation where a member of the shadow cabinet is being disloyal and has to be sacked to put a stop to the fitna, as it were. And, well, that already happened. To be honest, how many people actually care, though?

So what I would like to see is the following analysis - let's pull some of those so-called soft questions ("good in a crisis" would be a start) and compare the ratings for various politicians before and after becoming Prime Minister (and for extra credit, before and after joining the Cabinet). (Anthony Wells, dear heart, do you happen to possess such a data series?) My hypothesis is that there will be a statistically significant uplift for all of them, and that therefore much of this comment is content-free.

Wellsy does have a consistent series for the "best Prime Minister" question, here, which shows that Cameron's score rose 10 points from early May to September 2010. Gordon Brown went from 30 to 44 between the end of May 2007 and mid-August. The only other comparison in the series is the 2005 general election, in which Tony Blair went in as prime minister and came out as prime minister. I pulled the data for all three PMs over roughly the same periods of time, covering the changes of PM in 2007 and 2010 and the 2005 election, and excitingly, Blair's rating didn't show any significant change, which is what you'd expect if I was right. The move was 2.8 and 2.5 standard deviations respectively for Cameron and Brown and 0.67 for Blair, and the series is roughly normally distributed, so this result is statistically significant at the 99% confidence level for people becoming PM and insignificant for the no-change case.

You could argue that David Cameron became prime minister because people thought he would be better, but of course this wouldn't be true of Gordon Brown as there was no election in 2007, and we get the same result. I did wonder if there might be a seasonal effect (he's like a pound-shop Chris Dillow!), but Brown's ratings didn't do anything interesting over the summer of 2006 and neither did Blair's in 2005.

Protection....

2011-12-19T00:09:00.001+01:00

Update: I originally didn't want to publish this because I didn't think it was good enough, but I hit the wrong button. Anyway, Alistair Morgan read it and thinks one of the premises of the whole thing is wrong. Namely, the weapons were going in the same direction as the drugs, not the other way around. Well, at least the story moved on a bit, but this renders mostly useless a whole additional post I put together from reading a lot of crazy-but-interesting stuff out of the bottom of the Internet. Also, despite the Jessie J reference there's better music at the bottom if you get that far.

So, Alistair Morgan's twitter feed frequently hints at "cocaine, weapons, and Ireland" as well as police corruption as being factors involved in the case of his brother, Daniel Morgan, the private detective murdered in 1987, probably by people who were since employed by News International. It's often been said that Morgan was on the point of publishing some sort of huge revelation when he was killed, but nobody knows what it was beyond his brother's hints based on what the police told him at the time.

Since the eruption of the phone-hacking scandal, a number of sidelights have come up which linked the News of the World, its cadre of ex-police gumshoes, and its contacts inside the police force. Notably, it seems to have spied on the former Army intelligence agent-handler, Ian Hurst, on an NGO, British-Irish Rights Watch (because documents of theirs were on Hurst's computer when they hacked it), and perhaps on the chief of police, Sir Philip Orde. It would have been hard for people working for the press not to have covered at least one Northern Irish story in the last 20-odd years simply because it was such a news staple, but it's worth noting their interest.

The War Economy of Northern Ireland

So, what might link Morgan, cocaine, weapons, Ireland, and policemen? There are some fairly well-known stylised facts or stereotypes about the economy of the Troubles. The IRA mostly funded itself from money collected in the United States, from bank robberies, and from unofficial taxes it collected in the North. It also got contributions from friendly countries, specifically Libya. The Loyalists didn't have a reliable source of their own money abroad like NorAid, and so specialised in protection and drugs. Both sides also got involved in smuggling across the border as a commercial exercise.

That's a glib summary 'graf; obviously, I collect a revolutionary tax for the struggle, you impose fines on drug dealers and dishonestly stick to some of the money, and they are merely thugs operating a protection racket. Traditionally, both Sinn Fein and the British tended to stereotype the Loyalists as basically criminal and the IRA as proper insurgents - there may be some truth in there, but the distinction is one of emphasis and degree and also of propaganda rather than of kind.

Having obtained money, they both needed to convert some of it into arms. The IRA got a famous delivery in the 80s from Libya in its role as Secret Santa, and also often bought guns in the US over the counter and smuggled them back. I don't know how well characterised the sources of Loyalist arms are, which of course gives me license to speculate.

Permanently Operating Factors

Now for the cocaine, which has often been known to land in bulk quantities on the wilder, less populated bits of the Atlantic coast that also offer good harbours. This is a rare combination, as people live near ports. Two of the best bits on that score are northwest Spain and southwest Ireland. Having landed, you can move it on anywhere in the UK-Ireland common travel area without much more trouble. Since the creation of the Schengen area, Galicia is even better for this because there is such a choice of markets you can reach without a customs inspection. But in 1987 this was an un-fact, so you might as well go to Ireland.

This transit trade had important consequences - notably the rise of Martin "The General" Cahill, the assassination of Veronica Guerin, and probably a substantial chunk of the Irish property bubble via the laundering of profits and also by the boost to those ol' animal spirits the drug provides.

Imagine, then, that an important criminal actor supplying the London market with cocaine also had access to a reliable surplus of weapons. There is the potential for trade here.

However, it's not that simple - the famous Libyan shipment would have fit in a couple of shipping containers, and it kept the IRA going up until peace was signed, with a fair bit left over to be buried in concrete by the international commissioners on decommissioning. It is very unlikely that any plausible flow of arms to Northern Ireland would have paid for the flow of cocaine into the South-East.

We Don't Need Your Money, Money, Money, We Just Wanna Make The World Dance...

There's something else going on - Diego Gambetta would have already pointed out that you need to understand the trade in protection. To sell protection, you need weapons, which are the capital equipment of the business of private protection. In so far as the buyers in the UK were paying in guns as well as cash, they were arguably expressing a protector-protectee relationship. While on our territory, we protect you, and license you to provide protection. This was also reciprocated. In accepting them, were the sellers of the cocaine undertaking to protect it in transit on their own territory?

Another way of looking at this, which Gambetta would also approve of, would be in terms of costly signalling. Being both a supplier and a protector is a powerful position, but it might be worth letting the other side have it as a guarantee or hostage, to signal that you didn't intend to break the agreement and deal with some other supplier. This makes even more sense given that you still have a regular supply of guns you could cut off or use against them, and therefore both parties have something to lose.

Now, Gambetta's work mostly deals with Sicily, where a very important protection supplier has often been irrelevant. London is a very different society from this point of view. Whatever you think of the police, you can't just ignore them as a factor. In some other societies, the police might be protection consumers, but here, police corruption usually takes the form of policemen selling protection. (In a sense, the more effective the police, the more tempting this will be. Nothing sells like the good stuff.)

So, gazing down on this complex, neo-medieval exchange of cash, credit, and protection, there is a sort of Sun King whose permission is required for any protection contract to be signed. It's like a feudal society. My liege lord is only so, because he is the King's subject, and the King at least theoretically owes duties to the Emperor, or later, directly to God. Our buyer is in a position to offer protection for his end of the business because he enjoys protection supplied by the police.

Who were the recipients, the sellers? They might have been drug dealers who needed to buy protection from one or other paramilitary group. They might have been drug dealers who wanted to build up enough arms that they could stop buying protection, or rather, change protector. Or they might have been paramilitaries who sold protection to the drugs trade. The distinction is surprisingly unimportant.

So, to put the pieces together, there was some group of South-East London villains importing cocaine from transit providers in Ireland, who were also exporting weapons in the opposite direction as part of an exchange of protection for their common business. This required buying protection from the police. Where did the weapons come from? And why is News International involved?

Can you hear me now?

2011-12-04T18:56:00.000+01:00

Well, here's a contribution to the debate over the riots. The Thin Blue Trots'...sorry...Police Federation report has been leaked.

Among the failings highlighted by the federation, which represents 136,000 officers, were chronic problems, particularly in London with the hi-tech digital Airwave radio network. Its failings were one reason why officers were "always approximately half an hour behind the rioters". This partly explained, it said, why officers kept arriving at areas from where the disorder had moved on.

The Airwave network was supposed to improve the way emergency services in London responded to a crisis after damning criticism for communication failures following the 7 July bombings in 2005.

It is being relied upon to ensure that police officers will be able to communicate with each other from anywhere in Britain when the Olympics come to London next summer. The federation wants a review into why the multibillion-pound system collapsed, leaving officers to rely on their own phones.

"Officers on the ground and in command resorted, in the majority, to the use of personal mobile phones to co-ordinate a response," says the report.

It sounds like BB Messenger over UMTS beats shouting into a TETRA voice radio, as it should being about 10 years more recent. Not *this* crap again!

There's surely an interesting story about how the UK managed to fail to procure a decent tactical radio for either its army or its civilian emergency services in the 1990s and 2000s. Both the big projects - the civilian (mostly) one that ended up as Airwave and the military one that became BOWMAN - were hideously troubled, enormously overbudget, and very, very late. Neither product has been a great success in service. And it was a bad time for slow procurement as the rapid technological progress (from 9.6Kbps circuit-switched data on GSM in 1998 to 7.2Mbps HSPA in 2008, from Ericsson T61s in 2000 to iPhones in 2008) meant that a few years would leave you far behind the curve.

And it's the UK, for fuck's sake. We do radio. At the same time, Vodafone and a host of M4-corridor spin-offs were radio-planning the world. Logica's telecoms division, now Acision, did its messaging centres. ARM and CSR and Cambridge Wireless were designing the chips. Vodafone itself, of course, was a spinoff from Racal, the company that sold army radios for export because the official ones were ones nobody would import in a fit. BBC Research's experience in making sure odd places in Yorkshire got Match of the Day all right went into it more than you might think.

Presumably that says something about our social priorities in the Major/Blair era? That at least industrially, for once we were concentrating on peaceful purposes (but also having wars all over the place)? Or that we weren't concentrating on anything much industrially, and instead exporting services and software? Or that something went catastrophically wrong with the civil service's procurement capability in the 1990s?

It's the kind of story Erik Lund would spin into something convincing.

I am a Guardian reader. You are a Telegraph reader. They are Sun readers

2011-12-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

Jamie Kenny says:

Come to think of it, the only papers which their readers would miss are the ones which have have managed to establish their names and the word ‘reader’ as a social type: which is to say the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Mail.

John Band argues that this is also true of the Sun:

Surely 'Sun-reader' and the Sun also fit alongside Guardian, Mail and Telegraph?

Certainly, people do use "Sun reader" as a social type. But the really interesting question is whether anyone considers themselves a Sun-reader, and I think this is what's doing the work here. (As a very rough check, I compared the Google hits for "I am a [paper] reader" - Guardian most common, Sun a couple of thousand less, but quite a few of both were people either putting it on for argument's sake or indignantly denying it. Obviously, the huge Guardian web presence will distort that.)

People who read the Guardian often do identify as Guardian-readers and other people also pin it on them. This is true, although I think more weakly, of Telegraph or Mail readers. But there is a gradient here - I think you're slightly more likely to self-identify as a Telegraph or Spectator reader than you are to be labelled as one. For the Mail, that's more like evens. (The reductio ad absurdum would be the Daily Sport, which would almost certainly be an insult.)

For the Sun? I'd put it at 80% labelling to 20% self-identification. Why is this important?

Well, you can define a following - Sun readers, Worcester Women, whatever - and use this to sell advertising or push your own influence. In the first case, what matters is that you can define your own readership well enough that advertisers think of you as a way of reaching them. In the second, it's that politicians are willing to believe that Sun-readers are a thing. Note that this involves a willing suspension of disbelief. If you can count the C2s among your readers, your media sales team can throw this at advertisers. If you are ideologically congenial to politicians, so that they're willing to believe in Sun readers, you can exercise power. In a limited sense, if you can render your audience legible as a group, you can turn this into money or influence.

But this only goes so far. The key distinction is what happens when you need them. People who identify themselves as Sun readers will turn out. People who are identified by marketers as Sun readers will read something else in their tea break. And there's an odd recursive quality to this - if you really did consider yourself a Sun-reader, what on earth would you be doing identifying yourself as a newspaper reader? What could be less in keeping?

To put it another way, imagine someone who is acting, trying to pretend to be a Sun-reader. What could be more obviously fake than brandishing a copy? You would need to work on the rest of the act first, and only then have one casually lying around. If you wanted to pose as a Guardian reader, you'd want to be seen reading the damn paper.

News International spent a lot of time and effort trying to create an identity for NI-consumers (there being not much difference between the target demographics for the Sun, the NOTW, and Sky Sports, and a hell of a lot of cross-promotion). Of course, so do all media products, even Mobile Comms International and Elevator Week. Some would deny it (The Economist), some would boast of it (The Face). Some are more successful than others.

But I would argue that rather than observing what its customers wanted and marketing it back to them, or deciding what they ought to want and persuading them to want it, NI's modus operandi was to observe what its customers did, and then market that to its other, upstream customer base - advertisers and politicians.

If the Sun called for a demonstration against the Leveson inquiry, would anyone go?

12 heads in a bag, I read it yesterday, buried like the others on page 27-A

2011-11-29T14:52:00.000+01:00

After the last post, I think it's worth nothing that it's not just an isolated lapse. The Guardian has recently been sucking up to the Treasury in a revolting fashion. Yesterday's paper, in an astonishingly hagiographic profile by Nicholas Watt explained how clever George Osborne is in defining his "fiscal mandate" as being to get rid of the current (i.e. ex-capital investment), structural (i.e. what he says it is) deficit over a five-year forecast horizon, on a "rolling" basis so there is no specific date by which it must be judged.

Well-informed readers will remember that inter-war British governments did this with defence plans - the decision was taken that there would be no war for 10 years and this assumption was used as a basis for policy. But the 10 years was considered on a rolling basis, so every passing year extended it further until it was abandoned in 1933, with the result that the British armed forces were just about ready...had the war waited until 1943.

Now you might recall that Gordon Brown also had a set of fiscal rules, and those laid down that the current (i.e. ex-capital investment) budget ought to be in balance averaged over the economic cycle. Put it like that, and you might think that there isn't really that much difference. And we used to hear a great deal from Tories - and even from well-known newspapers dedicated to Liberal principles - about how the judgment of when the current economic cycle began gave the chancellor too much latitude to fudge the numbers. We heard a great deal about this from George Osborne personally.

But now he's apparently thinking of tactfully leaving a bunch of stuff (current, structural) out of the figures to make them add up. And he's quietly letting the day when they have to add up slide right. Fudging the issue, if you like. Just like Crazy Gordon McKiltie Borrowpants. (Did we mention he's Scottish?)

So why is this a secret? Why did the Guardian publish all the information you need to know this, but not say it? Why do I have to read the papers as if I were composing an exegesis of the Talmud or decrypting the VENONA cables? Is it possibly something to do with this quote from Nicholas "You Fucking" Watt's profile:

Even his critics acknowledge that Osborne is tough, which will serve him well, as one said. "George has an incredible strength. Perhaps this is down to the way he made it into the Bullingdon and survived. They were a bit sniffy about George. The Bullingdon is basically for Etonians. But they let him in even though he went to St Paul's, though they did insist on him reverting to his original name of Gideon.

Now that's what I call the sort of experience that builds real character. This is the Guardian! The Guardian!

Respectable mendacity

2011-11-29T14:50:00.000+01:00

Why has the Guardian gone so soft on George Osborne? Today's paper is a fine example of the art of journalism as practiced to obscure rather than reveal. On the front page, we have this story headlined: George Osborne exploits fall in borrowing costs to boost growth

Now, that's pretty much precisely what the chancellor would want on the front page, so it's suspect in itself. But you might think there was another major UK economy story about. Something about the OECD estimating that we're back in recession? Or you might even have heard another, something about the Treasury/OBR expecting much lower economic growth? Or that the OBR thinks things are so bad the deficit will rise despite the cuts? Strangely, none of these were considered worthy of front page treatment and were shoved back down the ticket to pages 6 and 2 respectively. Page 2 is of course the classic newspaper graveyard - people flip open the rag and immediately see Page 3, which is why what is on Page 3 is on Page 3 if you see what I mean.

The first number that appears on the front page is the figure of £21.5bn, which is apparently "lower borrowing costs" because gilt rates have fallen since last June. It's not said anywhere how much this is relative to the total bill for debt service (£44bn), or to the government budget (£696bn), so it's impossible for the reader to know if it's a lot of money. It's also completely mysterious whether this is annual, over a parliament, over a Comprehensive Spending Review planning cycle, or what. It is not said, but it is strongly implied, that this money is available now and will be used as an economic stimulus.

But the Chancellor isn't doing that, and if it is a 5-year figure, the money isn't available now. We only find out what's going on over the page, buried on page 2, where we find out without much surprise that it is indeed a figure for the next 5 years, so 80% of it is promises, and anyway the annual figure of £5.3bn is 0.76% of government spending.

The piece moves on to recite a list of eye-catching initiatives - £380 million (woo, isn't it a lot? Or a little?) by 2014-5 (does that mean rising to £380 million annually by 2015, or £380 million divided by five? They're not saying, I'd take the short) for childcare (aww, babies), a "£300 million package of tax breaks for small businesses", "a seed investment enterprise scheme" with no price tag, and - I am not making this up - £50 million for the Caledonian Sleeper.

I mean, it's very cool and all - I took it in July 2005 to get out of town after terrorweek - but it's hardly something that belongs in a front page economics story, is it? It's an utterly trivial and vacuous eye-catching sunday-fer-monday initiative with a canny bit of marginal seat fan service in there too.

So, about that £300 million. Sounds like a lot of money! (After all, we have nothing to compare it with. Again.) You have to read on to page 7 and a story by an actual business desk reporter to find out that £210 million of it is a rates holiday for some small businesses that was sort-of going to end next October, that's now going to end six months - six whole months! - later. To put it another way, it's not new money and it's a trivial amount and it doesn't happen for a year yet.

Let's adjust the £300 million - that's more like £90 million, and we're getting into Caledonian Sleeper levels of insignificance here. Experienced observers will guess that the unpriced "seed investment scheme" is probably included in the £90 million, thus getting twice the propaganda for the money, and they'd be right. Again, you've got to turn to page 7 for this, but not being the New York Times or the Craven Herald & Pioneer, there's no way of telling that you need to. Government sources apparently think it's worth £50 million. That leaves us with £40m to account for, and page 7 tells us that £50m is coming for "co-investment" from the "regional growth fund". Well, the £10m difference can be accounted for by journos trying to add up. But it's worth pointing out that the £1.5bn regional growth fund has been re-announced so many times you wouldn't count on there being anything left in it.

And obviously, this doesn't add up to anything like £21.5bn or even £5.3bn of stimulus.

So what's going on here? It's not as if the OECD or OBR stories weren't running before the Guardian went to press. They're right there in the paper! But by the time you read them, you'll already have had your expectations anchors set by the front page, so you're going to think things aren't so bad. This is of course why the Treasury briefers gave the story to Nicholas Watt, Larry Elliott and Severin Carrell - to inject their own spin ahead of the news. In fact, Elliott is probably innocent, as he wrote both the real news stories, and the other two just quoted some of his work (chunks are identical).

Why Watt or Carrell, or the Guardian editor they answer to, still don't either understand this or don't mind is the real question.

Also, you'd have to read down to the bottom of Elliott's piece on page 7 to learn that the Bank of England is apparently refusing to carry out the government's policy even when it only involves the government's money, rather than the central bank's, and Osborne has cracked and given in.

The measures will augment the £20bn that the chancellor is announcing for so-called "credit easing" — money that will be channelled from existing promises that had been made by the Treasury to the Bank of England to enable Threadneedle Street to buy corporate bonds. The Bank has not purchased many corporate bonds and some of the £50bn of guarantees will now be used, instead, to help banks raise money more cheaply on the markets – and in turn reduce the price of loans to small businesses.
.....
Will Hutton, co-author of a report on how to revive small business lending, said: "As it is structured, this won't add £1 extra of new credit." His report, written with academic Ken Peasnell, argues that the government would have been more effective if it had created a vehicle to buy up small business loans from banks, freeing up their balance sheets. Under the government's scheme, the cost of loans to small businesses should fall by one percentage point, according to Treasury projections, although this may be less if the government does decide to levy a fee for the guarantee.

So, the £20bn - or is it £50bn? - "credit easing" just isn't going to happen, because the Bank doesn't want to do it and Osborne is too weak to sack Mervyn King and appoint someone who will, and too proud to resign and leave the job to someone with balls. Instead, the Treasury's money (i.e. ours) will be used to buy bonds (probably government bonds) off the banks. We're already doing this with money the Bank prints, which costs nothing, but this exercise is funded by government borrowing, which we have to pay back. Why isn't this on the front page?

Operation Logroll is go for launch

2011-11-18T23:50:00.000+01:00

So, if you wanted really informed commentary on the Theresa May/Brodie Clark upfuck (now there's some slash), where would you go? Wouldn't you want to ask a distinguished civil servant? I bet you would. Specifically, a career immigration officer with 39 years in the service. Who's just retired, and is therefore allowed to be snarky.

Now you can! Because my dad has a blog.

I'll always remember the day he brought home the video briefcase. I think it's safe to tell the story now.

belated blogging

2011-11-13T17:38:00.000+01:00

So Viktor Bout is guilty. Some discussion is here, including the suggestion that the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) is losing out politically. Dunno about that, but it's striking that the best politician they could find to speak out for him was someone from Vladimir Zhirinovsky's outfit, and not even Anna Chapman or Andrei Lugovoi at that.

It took me a while to get around to this, but there you go. Apparently his defence was that he was really trying to sell the fake FARC a pair of Ilyushin-76 aircraft and just stringing them along with all the talk about surface-to-air missiles and millions of rounds of ammunition, but then I think if I went out to buy missiles and came back with two Ilyushins and a magic bean I'd think I'd been had.

Other recent things I cared about less than I expected - the Stone Roses reunion. Yes, I had the Facebook tickets app open and my finger on the button, but then it was the end of the month and I could do without spending the money. Was that being responsible or just excessively risk averse?

The world's most expensive mobile network

2011-11-13T15:40:00.000+01:00

By the mid-2000s the minimal cost-to-serve a mobile phone user had got down to the point where it was worth Roshan's while to put base stations in places where British soldiers broke down 105mm light guns to carry them piece by piece up a cliff, in order to fire from the hilltop next to the base station and get additional range.

It's fairly well known that the Taliban weren't entirely pleased about this, especially when ISAF started publicising their tip-off hotline and people did just that with their new second-hand Nokias. And they started destroying base stations until the operators agreed to shut down for part of the day. An uneasy settlement was arrived at - after all, Talibs use the phone too, and so do their families and friends. Like the old pattern of the insurgent owning the roads during the night and the government during the day, the insurgent owned the 900MHz band during the night and left it to the government during the day.

(However, their control of radio spectrum is purely negative, as if they were to use it themselves, the government could spy on them doing so, direction-find the transmitters, traffic-analyse the network to find out who is important, and sic drones, attack helicopters, or commandos on them. They can intimidate other people out of using it, but they can't use it themselves without very careful security precautions.)

So I'd like to recommend this really excellent article.

It seems that this shaky modus vivendi has broken down. Not only are the Taliban destroying more sites, they are doing so more thoroughly.

A typical problem for an emerging-market GSM operations engineer is the security of diesel fuel. Some operators in Africa are their countries' biggest electricity generators. This is fiendishly expensive - not only do you have to buy the diesel, you have to pay people to fill up the tanks on thousands of remote cell sites. And other people will steal it, or even steal the whole generator, which is why some of them are half-way up the tower although that means the structure must be much heavier and stronger and more expensive. Highway robbery is a better payoff than burglary as you get the whole truckload and the truck to move it, so you also have to pay for protection. That might mean protection as in guards, or protection as in racket, and quite often the distinction is far from clear.

This also becomes a typical first world GSM operations engineer's problem as soon as a big storm knocks over a few hundred towers and outs the electricity, as some bright spark inevitably notices the backup generator running.

Although you can buy solar and wind-powered base stations, there are still a lot of diesel ones out there. Now, if your objection is not merely financial, this means it's easy to destroy the infrastructure - you force open the valves and set it on fire. Interestingly, though, the Taliban have moved on from just starting a fire to breaking into the equipment cabinet and soaking it with the fuel, then setting that on fire. Thus multiplying the cost of repair and the downtime by an order of magnitude at least.

Alternatively, they sometimes dig a hole and blow the whole thing up with high explosive, wrecking the civil works (budget for quite a bit more including the labour) and demonstrating their aggression to everyone in earshot.

It also looks like they've realised that the backhaul links from the base stations to the switching centre are point-to-point microwave ones, and that the network has a hierarchical structure, with multiple base stations linked by microwave radio to a base station controller (or radio network controller in 3G) site which has a microwave link to the switch, and where there may be a variety of other equipment depending on exactly how the network is designed. As all that suggests, this is a crucial node and therefore a target. It is suspected that they have expert advice.

So the operators shut down service, and then the Afghan government and NATO yell at them to turn it back on.

And this is where it gets interesting. NATO has been installing macro-cells - big high power base stations - on its outposts as well as the private, ruggedised femtocells I wrote about with regard to Mr. Werritty. The idea was that if the commercial network was down, the phones would roam onto the backup network. Take that, forces of Islamofascism! But there's a problem. The commercial operators won't let the new network be in the list of permitted roaming networks on their SIMs, because they fear that if they shut down and service is still available, the Taliban will blow up even more of their stuff and perhaps start murdering engineers.

The government network could run like an IMSI catcher, masquerading as all four networks to capture their subscribers but forwarding everything - but I get the impression the operators don't want to interconnect with it, so calls would have to be routed out of the country and back in via the international gateway and it probably won't work very well.

And as a result, NATO has created the exact opposite of a successful emerging market GSM operator. Rather than cut-down low-power small cells cunningly distributed in the landscape, it's got big expensive pigeon fryers placed whereever seems safe or rather less unsafe. You'd think the same sort of place would do for a radio station as would do for a fort, but radioplanning is far more complicated than just picking hilltops and often deeply counter-intuitive. Rather than rock-bottom cost-to-serve, it's thought to be the most expensive phone network in the world per-user.

It's possible, thinking back to Rory Stewart, that a network designed along the lines of the kind of wireless-mesh broadband system his mates are building for the Penrith area might be more robust against such an attack. The Mexican Zetas seem to think so. Even staying in GSM, the BSC functions can be forward-deployed to the cell sites, and more of the backhaul could be point-to-multipoint rather than point-to-point, and more of the sites could be interlinked, thus getting more redundancy at the expense of worse efficiency. But that would only reduce the number of critical nodes. GSM remains a fundamentally hierarchical network architecture, and some would inevitably be much more important at the system level than others.

And finally, they could still just destroy towers, only with rather less efficiency. Putting more equipment at the cell site might just make it more vulnerable. Also, a problem with mesh networks is that they are more effective the more nodes there are - but the places where we usually want them because other networks are impossible tend to be sparsely populated. It would also make the whole issue personal. Owning the device would make you a target.

In the final analysis, fire remains an effective technology of rebellion.

The Penrith problem - structural incentives and mobile service networks

2011-11-13T15:39:00.001+01:00

Eh, Charlie Stross's blog is a machine for destroying time. Anyway. This post is going to be so wonkish it's to not come back from.

An occasional theme on this blog has been the intersection between the Bush wars and the mobile phone industry. In fact, looking back, that's not been so much an occasional theme as more of an obsession, and I'd have written more if I hadn't been subject to non-compete clauses.

Everyone who reads this blog probably knows that Afghanistan got GSM coverage very quickly after 2001, with Roshan and the Afghan Wireless Communications Company or AWCC in the lead. Things went so fast that for a while there were four operators with licenses and a good half-dozen pirate networks. The explanation of this is pretty simple - in the early 2000s the mobile industry had developed a whole package of technology, business models, methods, and personnel that made it possible to unfurl a GSM network pretty much anywhere and make an absolute killing.

Thaksin Shinawatra's career is a case in point - who knows how a Royal Thai Police colonel raised the money to come up as the holder of a GSM licence, but he did, and there were consulting engineers and contractors who would build the network and equipment vendors who would supply the parts with 100% vendor finance. Once it was up, it rained money and he was off to the races.

Of course Thailand is nothing like Afghanistan - a solid middle-income, industrialising economy with the kind of institutions that function by corruption rather than failing because of it. By 2001 there weren't so many plums like that one to pluck and the buccaneers who were first in were beginning to think about cashing out.

On the other hand, the gear kept getting cheaper and the success-stories made it easier and easier to borrow from the World Bank or other friendly local multilateral financial institution, as at this point it looked like about the only development success in 40 years or so. Thanks to people like Mo Ibrahim and the rest at Mobile Systems International, the level of average revenue per user that made it viable to build a GSM network was driven down until now we're operating below $5/month and there is no country that doesn't have at least a little bubble of coverage around the capital city.

So that's why it happened. There was a reliably deployable package of technology and economics and legalities, with a global workforce of Sven-units with frequent flyer points on every-damn-thing, and a set of reliable sources of capital. As well as the Aircom or Ericsson Professional Services guys who would design the network, and the contractors who would recruit the people who dug the foundations on the knolls and warps in the landscape that the radio planners made obscurely significant, there were others who would write the formal licence proposal to fit through the newly established bureaucracy of "regulators" and public procurement systems redesigned to please the IMF and other princes of the Washington consensus. No doubt there were people who specialised in operating the other, informal procurement systems. If you know what I mean. There was a product that sold and that, once sold, became one of the markers of modernity and status. The wheel of capital intensification kept turning, recapitulating the development of the Grand Banks fishery in the 1500s. Or something like what Erik Lund would say.

Of course, there were some problems with the package. Most of all, it structurally favours creating a new operator over extending an existing one's network, which is why Uganda has six mobile phone networks (and two WiMAX DSL-substitute not-officially-mobile networks) when a lot of people who ought to know think the UK only needs three. The turn-key vendor contract is meant to give you all the bits you need to call yourself an operator; the MFI funding is released when the licence application is accepted; the money starts flowing when the 15% or so of the cells that carry 50% of the traffic are on line. Increasing population coverage is mostly cost, which is why a coverage requirement is typically laid down in the licence.

And that's why supposedly (and that should be a big "supposedly") Kabul has better mobile service than Rory Stewart's constituency. Rory may need to consider what kind of mobile service places that stand in the same relation to Kabul as Penrith does to London get, and we're going to discuss this (and some other stuff) in the next post.

I know, but I don't know

2011-10-30T23:15:00.000+01:00

I am reliably informed that an individual who was a member of Tony Blair's 10 Downing Street staff, and then one of the Tony Blair foundations (I'm not sure which one - the Faith, or the Sports, or just the Tony Blair Associates commercial version?), is now a scriptwriter for Simon Cowell on the American version of the X Factor. John someone, apparently.

non-Thursday music link

2011-10-30T22:58:00.000+01:00

By special recommendation from the other author of this blog.

What these people need is a national biometric identity register

2011-10-30T17:10:00.000+01:00

The creation of a database containing all 9 million Israelis' demographic, family, and medical information plus identifying biometrics has not necessarily developed to their advantage. Bonus points for use of the phrase "Hasidic criminal underworld". They'll make you an offer it takes years of painstaking theological scholarship to understand.

G3 Good Governance: what is it?

2011-10-30T15:14:00.000+01:00

Following up on last week's pull the records post on Foxitty and tasers and stuff, what if "G3" really refers to G3 Good Governance Group? Here's the data, on LevelBusiness, which is even better than CompaniesintheUK. There are four names involved, two of which - Hugh Petre and Andries Pienaar - quit the board at the end of April 2010. Petre is on LinkedIn. There's also one Katharine MacGowan, who doesn't seem to be anywhere on the web. Hmmm.

And one Mungo Soggot. That's the kind of name that should be easier to track down, and it turns out that he's a South African journalist who did some pretty impressive work on corruption and also rocks and early 2000s emerging market GSM weirdness before moving to the UK. Depressingly, it sounds like he's essentially an exile. His dad was Sir David Soggot, a lawyer, judge, and apartheid resister. Here's Soggot opining on South African politics.

The same people, plus a couple of others, are also directors of RB4R UK Ltd., created 2 years ago, which has never traded, and Risk Analysis UK Ltd, which has been around for 13 years and is very much a thing. It provides "strategic risk advice, investigations, and litigation support", and intended to move the litigation and investigation business into a separate company in 2011 (presumably RB4R). Its accounts showed a profit of £2.39 million on a turnover of £12.1 million for 2010-2011. It employs 46 staff and spent about £3 million on salaries. It has about £3 million cash on hand, and paid just under a million pounds in tax.

Despite that, its ultimate owner is in the Isle of Man. However, as you can see from the above, it paid about a third of its profits in corporation tax, which is charged at 28%, and therefore isn't obviously using this to avoid tax. For what it's worth, the Manx company record is here.

It may be true that some of the people involved are former spooks - certainly the guy who's a CB and a former Defence civilian with absolutely no other qualities sounds like one. There's also an old friend of the blog, Alex Yearsley, who worked there after leaving Global Witness! Cryptome quotes a newspaper article that suggests that the people involved are ex-MI5.

The FT Westminster blog asserts that one Chester Crocker is the chairman of "investigations company G3", but as we have seen, no Crocker is a director of G3, G3 UK, G3i, or G3 Good Governance. Perhaps they mean the IoM holding company.

I don't know quite what the upshot of all this is, but it does seem that G3 Good Governance is a thing, unlike the other G3, it doesn't have any obvious conflicts of interest like the tasers, but it does have spooky directors. Oh, and the press have no idea which company they mean.

it flies! well, that's what it was bloody well designed to do

2011-10-30T14:19:00.000+01:00

The question isn't so much "did Eric Pickles eat all the pies?", it's "who paid for the pies, and how many did he declare in the register of members' interests?". TBIJ is on an absolute tear on Tory lobbying stories at the moment, and the combination of photo and caption for the Eric Pickles one is masterly.

But this story reveals more than it says. So, four cabinet ministers accepted donations to their private offices since May, 2010. Those would be William Hague, George Osborne, Liam Fox, and Michael Gove, or to put it another way, most of Atlantic Bridge and the core of the neo-conservative group within the Conservative Party. I do not think this is a coincidence.

Curiously, it seems that if you get donations to your private office you don't also get them to your constituency party branch and vice versa, with the exceptions of George Osborne and Michael Gove, who would have more jam on it, wouldn't they?

Pickles, for his part, received zero, which makes perfect sense. You can't eat money, and as for spending it on unofficial advisers, that only makes sense if you ever take advice from other people and the Bradford food-mountain has always known he's right.

Meanwhile, Lord Astor of Hever turns up as a trustee of the Bridge and an pal of the Werritty-funding SAS walt, Iraq contract hunter, and intimate of mercenaries Tim Spicer and Anthony Buckingham.

I think I've said before that Astor of Hever came out of the Lobster Project proof of concept script as being a surprisingly important gatekeeper - although in himself, he isn't a major node, people who meet him also tend to get one-to-one meetings with the most important ministers. His weighted network degree, a measurement of how many links in the lobbying network involve him adjusted for how many people took part in the meetings, is 0.125, pretty low (78th in the league), but his gatekeepership metric is 2.533, the third highest overall and the very highest score for a minister with UK-wide responsibility. (I discount the gatekeepership numbers for Scottish and Welsh ministers, as their role is partly to represent Scottish and Welsh interests and they are structurally heavily lobbied.)

The gatekeepership metric in Lobster is the ratio of the average weighted network degree of those who lobbied a given minister to the average of all lobbies, to the ratio of that minister's network degree to that of an average minister, thus capturing the degree to which meeting that minister was associated with meeting more or less important ones while taking into account the fact that some ministerial jobs are more important than others. If it is greater than 1, you're likely to get a boost, if less, you're being heard out.

A limitation is that obviously, the Prime Minister can't help you meet a more important minister, so it doesn't yet deal with the situation where you meet the PM to get your word across and are then referred to a junior minister for action. I accept that this is a problem, although you would expect that it is easier to lobby the small fry, so the metric is nevertheless useful. However, at a network degree of 0.125, Lord Astor is not affected by this phenomenon.

OK, so we have a prediction - other ministers involved with the Werritty/Fox/Atlantic Bridge case will demonstrate unusually high gatekeepership. Step forward Gerald Howarth MP, Minister for International Security Strategy, who achieves a gatekeepership of 2.36, the fourth highest overall and the second highest UK-wide, on a network degree of 1.2. That's some pull, when you note that he's a significant node in terms of quantity.

Lobster detected a sinister network of influence! How awesome is that?

Why not foundation courts?

2011-10-30T12:35:00.000+01:00

Thinking about the political castration of Ken Clarke and the fact that not even the Treasury in its most R.G. Hawtrey-esque mood seems to be able to stop the expansion of the prison industry, it struck me that the political class's attitude towards the public service known as justice is fundamentally different to its attitude to all the others, including defence and policing.

Since the mid-1980s and the rise of the New Public Management - possibly an even more pernicious intellectual phenomenon than New Classical economics - it's been a universal establishment consensus, shared by all parties, that any public service can be improved by giving bits of it a pseudo-budget to spend in a pseudo-market. Playing at shops is the defining pattern language of post-80s public administration. (This chap wrote at the time that the whole thing was remarkably like the 1960s Kosygin reforms in the Soviet Union, and perhaps we can induce him to post it up on his blog!)

For example, the 1990s Tory government wanted "fundholder" GPs to buy hospital services in an NHS internal market. Now they want to do something similar again, but more, faster, and worse. All sorts of local government services were put through a similar process. Central government agencies were ordered to bill each other for services vital to their operations. The Ministry of Defence was ordered to pay the Treasury 6% a year of the value of all its capital assets, such as the Army's tank park, reserve stocks of ammunition, uniforms, etc. As a result, the MOD sold as many vehicles as possible and had to buy them back expensively through Urgent Operational Requirements when they had to fight a war. Supposedly, some vehicles were sold off after Kosovo, re-bought for Afghanistan in 2001, sold again, re-bought for Iraq in 2003, sold again, and UORd in a panic in 2006.

(Off topic, if you're either a reporter hunting a story or a dealer in secondhand military vehicles, watch closely what happens to the fleet acquired under UORs for Afghanistan in the next few months.)

But there is one public service where the internal market is unknown. I refer, of course, to criminal justice. For some reason, it is considered to be normal to let magistrates and judges dispense incarceration, one of the most expensive products of the state, as if it were as free as air. The Ministry of Justice is simply asked to predict-and-provide sufficient prisons, like the Department for Transport used to do with motorways. Like motorways, somehow, however hard the bulldozers and cranes are driven, it never seems to be enough, and the prison system operates in a state of permanent overcrowding. Interestingly, the overcrowding seems to prevent the rehabilitative services from working, thus contributing to the re-offending rate, and ensuring both the expansion of the prison industry and the maintenance of permanent overcrowding.

The new public managers bitch endlessly about "producer interests" - they mean minimum-wage hospital cleaners, but somehow never GPs - but you never hear a peep about our bloated and wasteful criminal justice system. In fact, now that we have private jails, this producer interest is vastly more powerful as it has access to the corporate lobbying system and a profit motive.

Clearly, the problem here is that the gatekeepers to the system - the courts - have no incentive to use taxpayers' money wisely, as they face neither a budget constraint nor competition. There is a rhyme with the fact that a British Army company commander in Afghanistan has a budget for reconstruction of $4,000 a month, which he must account for meticulously to the Civil Secretariat to the Helmand Task Force, but in each section of ten riflemen under his command, at least one of them can spend $100,000 on destruction at any moment, by firing off a Javelin anti-tank missile, every time he goes outside the wire. As once the thing is fired, he no longer needs to tote the fucker any further, you can see that a lot more is spent on Javelin rounds than reconstruction, and indeed the task force was getting through 254 of them a month at one point.

But it's not a precise match. The military do, indeed, have to worry about their resources, as do the police. Only the courts can dispense public money without limit.

What if we were to give every magistrates' court a Single Offender Management Budget, out of which it could buy imprisonment, probation, community service, electronic tagging, etc in an internal market? This would make it obvious to the magistrate how much cheaper non-custodial interventions are than jail. It would force them to resist the temptation to jail everybody out of risk-aversion or political pressure. If a court was to start off the year handing down 16-month sentences for stealing a packet of fags, and end up in queer street by Christmas, well, that will teach them to waste taxpayers' money.

In fact, we could go further. Foundation courts would be able to borrow, if necessary, to tide themselves over to the end of the year, although of course they would have to make efficiency gains next year to repay it. It would be possible for a foundation court to go bankrupt and close. This, of course, will drive up standards. Perhaps we could even introduce an element of choice, letting defendants choose which jurisdiction they are prosecuted in.

I am, of course, joking. But not entirely.

Don't faze me, sorry, tase me, bro!

2011-10-20T20:16:00.000+01:00

OK, so the report by Gus O'Donnell into Liam Fox and Adam "I can't believe he's not Mike Ledeen" Werritty specified some companies as donors to the various odd parallel structures that supported Fox and Werritty. One of these is given in the report as G3 Ltd. This has been described in the papers as being an "international investigations and security company founded by former MI6 officers". Sounds kewl, no? In fact, I suspected it might be an international logistics and security company of similar name from this post - didn't the blog used to be good back then? - but it's not.

Of course, there's no mystery about the directors of a British company. You just look'em up on Companies House's Webcheck service. OpenCorporates and Companies in the UK are also very handy. But if you want the directors of a company, you've got to put up with Companies House's dreadful website and pay them £3 a time. Hey - it's less than a pint.

So I looked up G3 Ltd. It's based on a featurelessly dull business park in Daventry. It has one director, Glenn Mark Cameron, born on the 25th of March 1977. He is, as far as I know, no relation. He also had another company, G3i Ltd., based in the same business park. But that isn't the name we're looking for. However, G3i Ltd. did describe its business as involving "investigations and security". Mr. Cameron lives in Daventry - the address is available to anyone who can find £3 and use the website. It seems to be completely unremarkable.

G3 Ltd, though, has a couple of interesting features. One of them is that it was incorporated as recently as the 30th of August. G3i is much older, but was shut down in March. So it was set up in August and immediately started sending money to political causes? Further, it doesn't seem to have any visible business. (It doesn't need to file accounts for a long while yet.)

Glenn Cameron has a LinkedIn profile, which mentions G3i but not G3. (He's also on Twitter.) G3i is no James Bond venture, but apparently a perfectly sensible small-town IT shop, which later diversified. This is where things get interesting. One of the advantages of CompaniesintheUK is that although you can't query companies for their directors, you can query by director. Glenn Mark Cameron is also a director of a small plastics firm, a pet shop, and two near-identical firms called Pro-Tect Systems and Pro-Tec Security Systems. All of them are located close together in Daventry.

Forget the pet shop. Pro-Tect was around for a while, but Pro-Tect Security Systems was incorporated as recently as April 2011. Which leads us to this December 2010 blog post. Now, let's hop back to the LinkedIn profile. Cameron claims to be in charge of Tactical Safety Responses Ltd, which owns taser.co.uk and sells tasers to the British military and police forces. Blogger Richard Taylor pointed out that Glenn Cameron is one of its directors, as well as being company secretary of the first Pro-Tect.

Well, why care? The old Pro-Tect was stripped of its authorisation to own tasers, which are legally considered to be weapons for the purposes of the Firearms Act 1968 and need a licence from the Home Office. Instead, TSR Ltd. sprang up and was given the authorisation, despite the same people being behind it. Why did the Home Office take the T-bird away from Pro-Tect? Because they let the Northumbria Police have a new and untried version of the Taser, without the Home Office giving its approval, and they pointed it at one Raoul Moat while he was pointing a gun at his head, and the police pulled the trigger, and the gun went off!

So, Pro-Tect/Pro-Tect Security/Tactical Security Responses seem to be one and the same, and to have hastily swapped company in order to evade the consequences of this regrettable, sticky, and pinkish mess. Right. And their business model is that they have the exclusive right to sell Tasers to the police and the MoD. I wonder what possible interest they might have had in exerting influence on the MoD, and who knows, the Home Office too?

Put like that, it's a story of fairly petty influence-peddling. However, Gus O'Donnell didn't get to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, the Pope of Bureaucracy, by making mistakes over detail. It wasn't G3i or G3(UK) Ltd or Pro-Tect or TSR that appears in the report. It's G3 Ltd. (Even if the last revision time on the PDF is 1719, or about 26 minutes before the thing was finally handed out.)

Which leaves us with the strong impression that donations were being collected through this channel very recently, since the 30th of August, via a firm that has not apparently traded in any way. You might suspect that it exists just for this purpose. Further, people involved had financial interests in lobbying the government. And somebody in government felt it necessary to push out the message to the press that this story involved mystery spies and people with funny South African names. Why?

For the record, even if it was G3(UK) Ltd. and GOD had made a cock of the job, Andries Pienaar is not a director of that company. And if G3 Ltd is a company in some foreign jurisdiction, well, it's got no legal business donating money to politicians.

non-Thursday music link

2011-10-16T16:50:00.000+01:00

I think you'd have to be a perfesser to miss this point (h/t Jamie Kenny's twitter feed).

But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner lightly on her elbow, and they would move silently on to the floor. It was quite normal for partners to dance for hours without speaking to each other, before going their separate ways.

Well, a big dance hall implies big sound. That implies either electronic amplification, or before that was invented, a fuck-off big horn section. And either of those will help the dancing while cramping your conversation. (I SAID, HOW ABOUT ANOTHER DRINK!) In fact, the electric guitar was invented in the 1930s as a substitute for quite so many wind players providing the wash.

It's true, as William Baumol said, that you need as many people to play a concerto as you did in 1900 and the same isn't true of producing steel, farming, or running a phone exchange or a bank. Interestingly, the electric guitar was originally an attempt to substitute capital for labour in the music industry, with enormous unforeseen consequences.

Don't believe me? Compare the horns-as-power-chord here and the the rhythm guitar-as-horns here, although those are ahistorical. Anyway, it's not Thursday, so how about a music link?

Moving swiftly on

2011-10-16T15:45:00.000+01:00

So yer Djanogly and his legal aid bill and his insurance companies. Something I'd love to know more about is his rather odd statement that his kids had "non-interest bearing non-voting shares" in these companies and that they were "of no value". This is of course another case of the principle that lawyering a statement is much like doctoring it.

So, I presume that Djanogly (whose name is remarkably hard to type if you're a pythonista and therefore have the word "django" wired into touchtyping muscle memory) didn't really intend to leave his kids something of "no value". Had he wanted to do that, he could just leave them nothing, and save the lawyers' fees.

Now, the financially interesting thing here is that the securities involved are shares. Most shares are ordinary shares - they convey a share of ownership of the company, which is expressed by the fact they carry votes in the annual general meeting, and they carry the potential right to a share of profits if the directors (who the shareholders elected) so decide. However, they come dead last in terms of the company's credit and they pay no interest. All your capital is at risk if the company can't pay its bills, as everyone else gets paid out first. This is the nature of ownership - you have control over whatever it is you own, you can draw on its profits if you want to, but if it goes bust, it's your funeral.

Non-voting shares are usually preference shares. The difference is that you give up the vote, in exchange for a regular, guaranteed payout of income rather than just a chance of a dividend. Further, the preferred shareholders have to be paid their money before any dividends or anything else are paid to the ordinary shareholders, so there is an additional measure of security. This is why they are "preferred".

But Djanogly's statement excludes both preferred and ordinary shares. Note that there is neither a vote, nor any interest. Who would want such a security?

There are reasons. If a company is wound up, its creditors get paid first, with the government at the front of the queue. At the back of the queue are the shareholders, of all kinds. But this is only of interest if the company has creditors - i.e. if it is in debt. If there were no creditors, then its assets would be divvied up by the shareholders in return of their capital. Even if the company, like most companies, has some debt, such a residual claim would be worth having if the company's assets are worth much more than the debts.

Or the company might buy out the funny shares, or swap them for ordinary or preference shares. Also, you'll note that the shares are not "interest bearing", but then shares usually aren't and this is very important. If the shares aren't preference shares - i.e. they are not "interest bearing" - it's entirely up to the directors to decide what to pay out to them and when. They could hold a board meeting tomorrow and pay a huge special dividend in cash, on the special class of shares alone. Or they could wind up the company and divvy-up the pool. In a public company with thousands of shareholders, they might struggle to get away with this, but the Djanogly family controls 100% of the company.

So. The shares are worthless now, but the directors of Djanogly's firm are in a position to make them very valuable at a time of their choosing. Why would you want this set-up? The short answer is "inheritance tax".

As is fairly well known, inheritance tax has a time component. If you give away your money, and then die, it counts as an inheritance for tax purposes if you died seven years or less after giving away the money. If you give it all to the kids, you then have to live seven years without your money, and with the risk that you might survive much longer. And even if you commit suicide, you've to stick the seven years first. Of course, it is extremely annoying to tax-evaders that you can only control the moment of your death in a negative and unpleasantly dramatic fashion.

So the value of a device that permits you to bequeath something that is worthless until activated by a third party ought to be obvious. Ideally, you'd want something that permitted activation from beyond the grave, like the Soviet nuclear missile command system in Charlie Stross's The Jennifer Morgue. But that is impossible, and I think that a contract that required your executor to convene the board and pay out the money the day afterwards would break the rules on related-party transactions, although who knows?

Thanks are extended to Jones the tax.

Adventures in radial graph visualisation - Sindy edition

2011-10-16T15:40:00.000+01:00

The Independent on Sunday has another really excellent piece on Liam Fox including a very good network visualisation. See the power of the radial graph paradigm, and understand why I want Lobster to look like that! kc claffy wasn't wrong.

to be filed for reference

2011-10-16T14:04:00.001+01:00

It's a truth universally recognised that if you find one security exploit you'll find another. Something called CivilServiceLive has published a really excellent rundown of Tory and Lib Dem special advisers and - what is the word? - non-adviser advisers, here. I note that super-neocon journo William Shawcross's kid has been placed with George Osborne, as one of two non-adviser advisers. Hilariously, one of his official special advisers glories in the name Poppy, a monicker she shares with my neighbour's charming cat. Of course, you can't be held responsible for choosing your parents, even if Tories often seem to believe you should.

The Council for Emerging National Security Affairs, though, sounds like a wanktank of the first water but turns out actually to be a thing.

Now that's what I call lobbying

2011-10-16T13:22:00.001+01:00

In the recent case of Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, there was an issue that the news media spent an enormous amount of time and effort dancing around with innuendo, newspaper code, and carefully lawyered prose. It is a fact that the word "lawyered" is to the word "lawyer" as the word "doctored" is to the word "doctor". Without understanding this hidden and sordid side of the issue, you would have been seriously misinformed. The matter was very sensitive, and there was an excellent chance of getting sued and probably also demonised as being deranged by shameful prejudices.

I refer, of course, to whether or not the Defence Secretary's private office was having unprotected sex with other defence secretaries' private offices.

It took a while to surface this at all - the Guardian let a wee squeak out on Thursday, and eventually it was the Sindy that took the plunge and surfaced it in the same way you surface a submarine, with an enormous roar of compressed air thundering into the ballast tanks under pressure while the nuclear reactor cranks up to full power. It's a must read.

The fact that Werritty's freebies included trips to the Herzliya Security Conference paid for by pro-Israeli lobbying groups should have been a screaming giveaway, but then, that's what a good cover story is for. I presume that was what the Sindy eventually followed up.

I mentioned this element of the story to Daniel Davies earlier in the week. I can offer no special insight except for the enduring value of pattern recognition. This has, after all, happened before in recent memory, with really bad consequences.

Consider Mr. Michael Ledeen and the affair of the weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ledeen, a professional neoconservative, claimed to have intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium and various other things, which came from his contacts in Iran, some of whom were recommended to him by his contacts in Israel, one of whom, Larry Franklin, was convicted of spying for Israel in the US State Department. Ledeen believed these contacts to be renegade members of the Iranian secret service. (He had never visited Iran, and I think to this day never has, and he doesn't to the best of my knowledge speak Persian, so how he would have known is beyond me.) The CIA, for its part, believed that this was partly true. They just disagreed with the "renegade" bit. But Donald Rumsfeld had deliberately decided to ignore the CIA, so Ledeen's intelligence was accepted. However, that wasn't the end of the story. At some point, the Department of Defense became suspicious and called in its own Counter-Intelligence Field Activity to investigate.

At this point, a thick curtain of secrecy was drawn down on the story, even if we did eventually get the Phase IIA report. Whatever CIFA found out, Ledeen was able to introduce the famous forged documents on uranium from Niger, which seem to have come from the Italian secret service, as being Iranian information with Israeli approval, and this was used in the even more famous dossier.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if old blogging chum from way back in the day, 2004, Laura Rozen hasn't also had this thought, as she was instrumental in digging into the whole Ledeen affair and she's too smart to miss it. Also, hilariously, she and Spencer Ackerman had the honour of being targeted by Ledeen's mates in Silvio Berlusconi's intelligence service with a scurrilous smear-campaign. I should probably hat-tip the lady's Twitter feed.

Note the elements of the story. Ledeen is a semi-official adviser with special, privileged access to policymakers. He is outside the formal requirements of government service, but has access inside it. He is seen to have special access to an important ally, and therefore to be trustworthy. A third party observed this, and took advantage of it to introduce information (or rather, disinformation) into the policymaking system. Does anybody see a pattern here? Similarly, Werritty was offered privileged access from outside the government firewall because he was ideologically congenial. It seems that this was considered acceptable because the influence exerted came from a country considered friendly. But then, there were the rogue Iranian intelligence agents, or were they just ordinary Iranian intelligence agents?

In May 2009, Mr Werritty arranged a meeting in Portcullis House between Mr Fox and an Iranian lobbyist with close links to President Ahmadinejad's regime. In February this year, Mr Werritty arranged a dinner with Mr Fox, Britain's ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, and senior political figures – understood to include Israeli intelligence agents – during an Israeli security conference in Herzliya, during which sanctions against Iran were discussed. Despite Mr Werritty having no official MoD capacity, an Israeli source said there was "no question" that Mr Werritty was regarded as anyone other than Mr Fox's chief of staff who was able to fix meetings at the highest levels, and was seen as an "expert on Iran".

Well, at least Werritty actually went to Iran. Unfortunately this is the worst of the story, as it seems he was going round encouraging Iranian dissidents, or people he thought were Iranian dissidents, and promising them British support. This is really incredibly, shamefully irresponsible - he could have got people killed, and it cannot be ruled out that he did, although it's also quite possible that the whole affair was just a massive exercise in bullshitting and wanktankery.

Probably he really believes that he was in contact with the opposition. I'm fairly sure Ledeen doesn't think he's an Iranian agent either. This is where this classic Onion article comes into play. As I said at the time, why *do* all these Iranian agents keep sucking Michael Ledeen's cock?

It is all reminiscent of Bruce Schneier's thoughts on what happens if you create a backdoor into some computer system, so people like us can get in and out without anyone noticing. The problem is that once you do that, it immediately becomes the biggest security threat to the system as anyone else can use it too. Once this new interface to the MoD was created, with Werritty accepting connections from the wider Internet and forwarding them to Fox, of course it attracted dubious actors. Hence the parade of various people trying to sell aircraft spares and dodgy encryption software to the military or to get someone's knighthood expedited.

For my next trick, what parallels do you see between Werritty's role with Liam Fox and those of Andy Coulson and Neil Wallis with No.10 Downing Street and the Metropolitan Police (and of course the Conservative Central Office) respectively? Remember that both of them were at various times funded by third parties. Further, is it not interesting that the same key Conservatives who defended Coulson to the bitter end - George Osborne and Michael Gove - also tried to save Liam Fox? (Jonathan Freedland seems to have sensed something here - check out the reference to "Cheneyite Tories".) And is it not even more interesting that George Osborne actually recommended Andy Coulson for the job? And is it not completely fucking outrageous that William Hague, Atlantic Bridge board member and Foreign Secretary (I think this is the right order of precedence), dares to claim that proper Cabinet government is back in the midst of this berserk threat-chaos?

Leeds. LEEDS. Leeds. (Look, you're the richest club in the northern union. Get a better song)

2011-10-10T18:34:00.001+01:00

So, I managed to get to watch the Grand Final on Saturday night! The first pub we tried had a private function where the TV is, although it also had Timothy Taylor's Landlord Ale, and the other bar contained a group of Irish union fans who'd been drinking steadily since 6am. We moved on, and actually found rugby league on the Holloway Road.

John Kear apparently thought it was the best of the Grand Finals he'd seen, and he ought to know. He also thought Danny McGuire was Leeds's defence leader, a clearly inspired judgement.

Saints were all about width, the classic pattern of trying to extend the line faster than the sliding defence and creating the overlap. Leeds were all about depth and tempo, trying to force defenders to turn and beat them for short sprint pace. It was a classic clash of styles.

A few years ago, people used to talk about the "midfield triangle" in league, being the half-backs and the loose forward. This doesn't quite make sense, as the hooker in league is a specialist acting halfback and one of the most important distributors in the team, and organising a league team around the scrum is beside the point. Instead you've got a square, or a quartet, or something with four in it. A box with four pies in it, if you will. A four-pack of beers.

Leeds re-organised theirs quite radically - in the playoffs, they'd been using Kevin Sinfield as the scrum half and saving Rob Burrow to run at tired legs. In the final, they played Burrow from the first 20 minutes with his regular partner McGuire and put the Sinner back in 13. But that doesn't tell you much. Burrow didn't do much distribution or tactical kicking and McGuire's role in the game was almost totally defensive. Instead, Sinfield and Danny Buderus did the distribution, Burrow had a free role to dash and buzz and harass Saints, and McGuire had a parallel defensive mission to hunt the Saints first receiver, coordinate the defence, and generally get stuck in whereever the attack came from. And he did a hell of a job on this.

Saints didn't really come up with an answer to this, once it got going. Kicking penalties flattered the score a bit. McGuire broke up their moves regularly, Burrow kept catching defenders on the turn and eventually won the Harry Sunderland trophy, and Buderus and Sinfield kept control of the pace of the game.

This may bring back the old "is a stand-off really a loose forward" thing from the 1990s. Back then, there were quite a few good players who operated in either slot - Daryl Powell, Tony Kemp, Phil Clarke, Ellery Hanley, and earlier, Wally Lewis come to mind. The 1994 Lions, coached by Hanley, used first Clarke and then Powell in this role to mark the great Laurie Daley (who was the absolute opposite). It worked at Wembley, but the plan rather broke down after both of them got injured, and it also made the team pretty negative. On the other hand, once Powell was off the pitch and Garry Schofield back on, Daley ran rings round Great Britain for the rest of the series.

But Leeds's game plan didn't really reduce to that. Anyway, it was a hell of a game and Rob Burrow's first try was a bit of brilliance beyond tactics, exploiting a gap in depth rather than width - one side of the defence hadn't come up quite as smartly as the other - and ducking under the big men to make the initial break.

Oh yes, and that makes it a Yorkshire clean sweep of the three divisions with Leeds, Featherstone Rovers, and Keighley. Keighley! They told me it was Warrington's year, and Wigan were back...

Liam Fox: Not Fit For Purpose

2011-10-09T18:21:00.000+01:00

OK, so "Not All That" Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble.

"He is an odd bloke," said one fellow minister. "He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line."

Another Tory MP said Fox's tendency to name-drop and brag about his close friendships with Republicans in the US, media magnates such as David and Frederick Barclay (owners of the Daily Telegraph), and his endless globe-trotting, even before he entered the cabinet, has made many bristle and help explain why he has plenty of enemies in the Tory party and in Whitehall. "I think you either roll with the bluster or find it repellent," said a Tory MP.

Ah, one of them. Anyway. Part of the problem is this famous meeting where his bestie Adam Werritty just happened to turn up. What was on offer? Well, a product called Cellcrypt, whose makers were trying to sell it to the MoD to stop evilly-disposed persons from eavesdropping on British soldiers' phone calls back to the UK. (Note: this is going to be long. Technical summary: voice encryption apps for GSM-style mobile networks can guarantee that your call will not be overheard, but not that your presence cannot be monitored, and not necessarily that the parties to your calls cannot be identified.)

Back in the early days of Iraq, the CPA permitted one mobile phone operator in each of its three zones to set up. The British zone, CPA-South/Multinational Division South-East, let the Kuwaiti national telco, MTC (now Zain and busy running Mo Ibrahim's old Celtel business into the ground) set up there with a partner some of us may have heard of. It's from Newbury and it's not a pub or an estate agency and its logo is a big red comma...funny how Vodafone never talked that particular investment up, innit? Anyway. Later the Iraqi government did a major tender for permanent licences and Orascom got most of it, but that's another story.

One thing that did happen was that soldiers took their mobiles with them to Iraq, and some of them pretty soon realised that buying a local SIM card in the bazaar was much cheaper than making roaming calls back to the UK. Either way, lots of +44 numbers started showing up in their VLR, the big database that keeps track of where phones are in a GSM network so it can route incoming calls.

Pretty soon someone who - presumably - worked for the MTC-Voda affiliate and whose purposes were not entirely aligned with Iraq The Model realised that you could use the VLR to follow the Brits (and the Yanks and the Danes and the Dutchmen and Kiwis and all sorts of contractors) around. Not only that, you could ring up their families in the UK and make threats with the benefit of apparently supernatural knowledge.

This obviously wasn't ideal. Efforts were made to mitigate the problem; soldiers were discouraged from using local GSM networks, more computers and public phones were made available. The eventual solution, though, was to get some nice new ruggedised small-cell systems from companies like Private Mobile Networks Ltd., which basically pack a small base station and a base station controller and a satellite backhaul terminal into a tough plastic box of a suitably military colour. You open it up, unfold the antenna, turn on the power, and complete some configuration options. It logs into the mobile operator who's providing service to you via the satellite link.

Now, because radio signals like all radiation lose intensity with the inverse square of the distance, you'll be vastly louder than everyone else. So any mobile phone nearby will roam onto your private mobile network and will be in the UK for mobile phone purposes, a bit like the shipping container that's technically in Egypt at the end of Four Lions. And none of this will touch any other mobile network that might be operating in your area. Obviously you can also use these powers for evil, by snarfing up everyone else's traffic, and don't for a moment think this isn't also done by so-called IMSI catchers.

You're not meant to do this, normally, because you probably don't have a licence to use the GSM, GSM/PCS, or UMTS frequencies. But, as the founder of PMN Ltd. told a colleague of mine, the answer to that is "we've got bigger tanks".

So, where were we? Well, the problem with trying to do...something...with Cellcrypt is that it doesn't actually solve this problem, because the problem wasn't originally that the other side could listen to the content of voice calls. Like all telecoms interception stories, it was about the traffic analysis, not the content. Actually, they probably could listen in as well because some of the Iraqi and Afghan operators may not have been using up-to-date or even *any* air interface encryption.

But if you're going to fix this with an encryption app like Cellcrypt, you've got to make sure that every soldier (and sailor and diplomat and journo and MoD civilian) installs it, it works on all the phones, and you absolutely can't make calls without it. Also, you've got to make sure all the people they talk to install it.

And the enemy can still follow you because the phones are still registering in the VLRs!

So, there's not much point relying on OTA voice encryption to solve a problem that's got nothing to do with the voice bearer channel. However, bringing your own small cell network certainly does solve the problem, elegantly, and without needing to worry about what kind of phones people bring along or buy locally.

And the military surely understand this, as by the time of the famous meeting, they'd already started deploying them. Also, back when this was a big problem, 19 year-old riflemen usually didn't have the sort of phones that would run a big hefty application like Cellcrypt, which also uses the mobile data link and therefore would give them four figure phone bills.

To sum up, Werritty was helping someone market gear that the MoD didn't need, that was hopelessly unfit for purpose, wouldn't actually do what the MoD wanted, and would cost individual soldiers a fortune, by providing privileged access to the Secretary of State for Defence.

keighley keighley boing boing

2011-10-02T16:28:00.000+01:00

Championes...

Keighley 32, Workington 12. Yeah.

Not the kittens!

2011-10-02T14:00:00.001+01:00

I have just finished reading The Stones of London: A History in 12 Buildings. Not a gem by any means - far too much broadbrush Tory-ish and not much of an edge - but I did think he had a couple of good points. One was in the chapter on Keeling House and Denys Lasdun, in which Leo Hollis makes the very good point that the Brutalists specifically didn't want to impose international style modernism on everyone but the reverse - they wanted to adapt modernism to the peculiarities of sites, communities, materials, and projects. It's quite possible that trying to be enormously localist and consult everyone is a great way to get things drastically wrong, eh, Pickles? There's no such thing as a Wharfedale shipping container.

In fact, some of Lasdun's remarks he quotes would probably please Prince Charles if only he didn't know who said them, and you might even think that part of the problem was the silly name. Although, I guess they said that about Operation KITTENS.

As a result, I guess I'll have to denounce comrade Hatherley as a right-deviationist.

Another one was about the fate of Victorian houses in London, and specifically the way that people buy them and immediately set about ripping out the interior walls, dragging the kitchen forwards from its kennel in the back garden, and building - essentially - an open plan, white-walled modernist interior inside the brick skin.

Throwing out the bums

2011-10-02T13:46:00.001+01:00

What if the entire political response to the Great Financial Crisis could be summed up as "Punch the incumbent"?

Americans threw out George Bush. Obviously this was overdetermined, but still, they did it in the winter of 2008. If you look around the democratic world, what seems to make the most difference is timing - how much distance was left to run in the political cycle. Nicolas Sarkozy got hugely lucky by running for election a couple of months before the crash, thus getting a full term. But then he married Carla and got away with paying all that cash into the Balladur campaign's account at the Boulevard Haussmann Credit du Nord, so falling in the shit and coming up smelling of roses is hardly unusual in his life. Had the election somehow held off until the winter, though, after the whistle blew for the crisis, who would have bet against the electorate lashing out at the incumbent?

In Spain, Zapatero was in charge when the storm broke and took the punishment, although one does begin to wonder if he might eventually pull it round, having survived this far. I'll come back to that. In Germany, the incumbent-bashing reflex hit both the coalition partners, but the biggest winner was the FDP. Wasn't that simply because they hadn't been in charge for many years, unlike the Greens? As a result, Angela Merkel was able to stay on and form a coalition with them. In Austria, the crisis hit with a rightwing government in power and the Social Democrats got back in. In Greece, we had the same pattern, unfortunately for the Socialists who got stuck with the bill. Poles threw out the Kaczynski brothers and brought back the Social Democrats. Swedes threw out the Social Democrats, who were in charge, and brought in the conservatives. Ireland sacked the Right and brought in Labour and Fine Gael. Australia finally binned the rightwing coalition that had been in charge since 1996 and pulled in Labour. Danes threw out the Right, who were in charge, and brought back the Socialists. The pattern was the same everywhere - whoever was in charge, was replaced at the first opportunity. Rather than anything like a coordinated move right or left, there was a rush to throw out the bums.

In the UK, therefore, what would you expect a priori? Labour were in charge when the crisis blew up and therefore they got a beating. However, it's worth unpacking this a little. As things got progressively worse, so the Tories did better and Labour did worse, until the winter of 2009. From then on, the Tory lead began to fade through the spring, and eventually they collapsed just short of the line and were carried over by the Lib Dems. This fits perfectly with a burst of rage at incumbents that just looked like a move to the Right because of the electoral calendar.

It's also worth considering Germany carefully. In many ways, German politics since the crisis has been a preview of British politics a few months ahead. They had an anti-incumbent backlash and a bout of Cleggmania. The conservatives held onto their core vote, with the broad Left fracturing, and the Liberals getting an unusually good score by virtue of not having been in government recently and smiling a lot. (This is quite like the British election of 2010.) As a result, a Tory-Liberal coalition was formed, started yelling for austerity, and began to decay almost as soon as it was launched. It made a lot of rather silly pronouncements, adopted a cuts budget and a succession of gimmes to clientele groups...and now the Liberal element of it is down to 2% in national polls as the economy turns for the worse.

Interestingly enough, they're now seeing (as well as the crushing of the FDP) a broad revival across all the Left parties - the SPD, the Left Party, and the Greens, whose halfleader Jürgen Trittin was making a lot of sense about the Euro last week.

But it would be foolish to think May 2010 was a judgment on the Left or the Labour Party as such. Given the hugely favourable circumstances, it was also such a judgment on the Tories.

my love affair with GSM hardware

2011-09-26T00:19:00.000+01:00

Even more trivial than the last one! Some mobiles I loved.

Samsung ???

This was the first of them all in 2000-2001. A weird reverse-clamshell design that very rapidly developed dodgy contacts in the joint. But eh, I had a real, lasting relationship and I could send her texts from the union!

Siemens c55i

Neat and sort of German. With a big square INTERNET key to remind you that you could look at a small subset of the Web on it, if you wanted to spend an absurd amount of money. I took this one away to Vienna and ran up horrible roaming bills (see above) and went without for six months.

Nokia 3210

First Nokia. Smaller, thinner, more future-y. Lit up like a squid from within.

Nokia 6210

Ah, an enduring design classic. Really great, clicky but soft, good sized keys with lighted markers. Less Star Trek than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Real European design. Series 40 OS. Sound hardware. And when we moved into the new flat, I remembered that Royal Holloway computer centre still had a dialup pool, so we aligned the IR port and dialled in over the circuit voice channel, and we could load the blog. 2003 was a bit late for dialup though.

Nokia 6210i

Same as the 6210 but with a 1.3 megapixel cam. Operators had finally repented of trying to make everyone use MMS and therefore squeeze photos into the size mandated by the 3GPP standards group. Sadly, they also made the keys silvery and destroyed its austerity of design. This was the only one I ever lost, from a boozy working lunch at MCI.

Qtek 8100/HTC Amadeus

Working at MCI made that a nonproblem. Very soon we got one of these as a gimme. Technically this was the first smartphone I had, with MS Windows CE and an SD card slot. The back was designed fairly obviously to look a bit like some Apple products, and the whole thing was meant to be a "music phone". That didn't mean it came with any real storage capacity, and I added a 2GB SD card - at the time those cost real money. Having worked out how to configure the data access point, it meant I could read NANOG on the train of a morning until I got banned for three months for swearing. I also managed to permanently reduce the default camera resolution, so a whole holiday's worth of snaps were thumbnails. It was this phone that I took to Singapore and Cape Town in one month and set my personal record mobile bill of £132.

BlackBerry ?

Vodafone sent us one of the BlackBerrys before they were designed to not be hideous, as a review of their hosted BlackBerry service. This was quite impressive, even if it was hard to stop it getting my colleague Sean Jackson's e-mail. My partner was horrified by the blinking, commanding red light, I was delighted by the clickwheel. I took it to 3GSM in Barcelona. VF asked us for it back soon afterwards. I wonder why?

HTC ?

I had this one in early 2006. I can find similar ones, but only from at least a year later - or perhaps we got an early prototype? Anyway, it was similar to this one but with even fewer hardware controls, so only the horribly crap touchscreen. The first one I had with a touchscreen, or WiFi. Didn't really work. It also destroyed the SD card full of songs. Bastards.

HP iPaq 6915w

This one was actually quite impressive in a slightly grim enterprisey way. It provided a touchscreen, a QWERTY keypad, WiFi, and GPS, and it worked when it wasn't crashing. It also had a hard plastic cover that flipped over the screen. I remember deliberately taking a photo on board a plane from London to Dubai to get a GPS fix, and finding that the camera app would look up photos on Multimap (Multimap!) if it could. Also, looking up questions on the Buddha Bar's WiFi from IMDB to settle an argument.

HP wanted it back.

BlackBerry Pearl

Around then, RIM discovered product design and suddenly BlackBerry devices didn't need a tea cosy over them. The first of the new breed was this one, and RIM sent me one, which I took to Cape Town. It worked well and looked good, although it was made of glue and phone calls sounded really odd.

Nokia N73

3 UK announced a new product - the X-Series tariff, which offered Skype! on a mobile. They sent us one. I was impressed and paid for one myself. It was a damn good photo phone and a good all rounder, even if it wasn't pretty. The Skype implementation was disappointing. But the camera was great.

HTC TyTN

I went to an Orange UK product launch. They said there were Nokia E61s going, but I got there late and they were all gone. I got one of these instead - a preview of the future, really. Windows again, with a large but not good touchscreen, and a slide-out QWERTY, and basically top specifications in everything, and a handy click-wheel. The first 3G device I had. My sister then needed a phone and the N73 turned up, so I offered her the gadget. She renamed it the Beast of Telecom but used it for ages.

Nokia E65

I changed operator to 3UK for the X series and stayed for the cheap Internet service. The E65 was part of Nokia's attempt to outcompete RIM on looks - a shiny slide-out device. But the bit that got me was the fact it could read RSS feeds. I could check key blogs on the train!

Nokia E71

Ah, a genuine design classic this one. So much so I've still got it. Mine came in a mix of chrome, white plastic and white leather keys on the QWERTY. The late version of Symbian S60 it ran worked very well unless you wanted to write code for it, in which case you were basically in for a world of tiresome. It felt and looked great and everything built in worked great. And you could just USB it to any computer and wvdial it to get online.

Bizarrely, Nokia shipped it with a 200MB(!) SD card with some apps on it, rather like they sent out crappy tinny headphones with "music phones". Also, the phones socket was at 90 degrees to the phone, so it wouldn't drop into a pocket and never worked well.
Eventually I dropped it and the screen crazed, and I thought it was time for Android.

Samsung GT-i7500

A hacky mess. No QWERTY, which annoys me. Seriously buggy in every way. Made of tickytacky, ugly. Atrocious battery life and radio performance. Crashy, although that's the Google's fault. At least the headphone cockup was avoided. Perhaps some of the 'droid issues are fixed in updates, but the updates never come. (On the other hand, Nokia announced in about 2008 that you could update your phone's software to the latest version...but it would overwrite all the data on it. Thanks!)

And if it runs out of internal storage, it silently drops SMS messages. Fail.

it wasn't Thursday, and still isn't, so...

2011-09-25T23:09:00.001+01:00

So there was this thread with music. It went like this, and then like this, and this, then this, this, this, and finally this. Also a fair amount of stuff about shwi-vet Erik Lund and the most popular man in Britain. But mostly music.

Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for "oh yeah this is funky".

...like it's 2008!

2011-09-25T22:53:00.001+01:00

Having fixed the Viktorfeed, I notice with some pleasure that the activity levels continue to decline. It looks like the last gang in town is "Reliable Unique Services", ICAO:RLB, an alias for Rus Aviation, operating five Il-76, a couple of which served with various version of Click Airways.

Sometimes history is written by the losers

2011-09-25T18:02:00.000+01:00

A good post on the notion of "hard Keynesianism" raises some important questions about the recent past of the Labour Party. Hard Keynesianism is the doctrine that, if the government should run a deficit when there's a negative output-gap and therefore unemployment, it should run a surplus when there's a positive output-gap and therefore inflation.

It's trivially true that the government can't increase its indebtedness as a share of the economy forever, so obviously if you do any fiscal stimulus at all you need to think about a budget consolidation some time in the future. But the hardness in the hard Keynesianism comes from the idea that the average balance of the government budget ought to be zero. That is to say, between recessions the government should always be running a surplus, and it should just unwind that to deliver stimulus.

There are several problems with this idea. First of all, getting to the point of running a semi-permanent budget surplus is an enormous job and we ought to be very sure it's a good thing before undertaking it, especially as it involves offering everyone whacking tax rises.

Secondly, big private companies or nationalised industries don't usually target zero net debt just for the sake of it. After all, if you can get a return on investment higher than the cost of capital, i.e. the interest rate you pay, you ought to raise the capital and invest it. In so far as this doesn't happen, running the public sector as a structural saver might cost us all in terms of economic growth. It's not obvious that major infrastructure projects should wait until a recession comes along and gives us an excuse to build.

Thirdly, a permanently reducing supply of government bonds might have unforeseeable consequences in the financial sector. Pension funds are big buyers of government debt because it's considered relatively safe and it's available in different maturities, so they can match the flow of income from it to the expected flow of pensions. If it was in short supply, they'd have to pay much more for it, and as a result, pension rates would be worse. Banks park their spare cash in government securities. The Bank of England trades them in order to manage the interest rate. We don't really know what would happen here.

But finance could react to a shortage of AAA-rated bonds in a couple of ways. One would be to push money into riskier investments. That might in fact help the economy, by getting more money into industry, but you try telling that to people whose savings vanished. Another would be to do what they're doing now, which is just to sit on their cash and do nothing, so we have a demand-deficient recession. A third would be to do what they did a couple of years ago, and invent new AAA assets. And look how that turned out!

And fourthly, we'd have to think hard about what to do with the surplus money. We couldn't risk it, and it would have to be liquid so as to be available in a crisis. Obviously, foreign government bonds...you see where I'm going here.

Now, as far as I can see, the main attraction of hard Keynesianism in Britain is either that it sounds easy to sell because it uses the rhetoric of tough-osity, or else that it's something to throw at Gordon Brown. After all, there is little point complaining about surging public spending in the mid-2000s - because public spending didn't actually surge in the mid-2000s - or that we can't plan on expanding the public sector as a percentage of GDP - because it wasn't historically big or fast-growing in the mid-2000s.

So if your aim is to support the Blairite king-over-the-water, and you're not willing to simply pretend that there was a public spending blowout in 2005-2006, you need an alternative and hard Keynesianism is it. Oddly, if you take into account some of my objections, you end up with something rather like Gordon Brown's fiscal rules.

is there a Corby trouser press, miniature kettle, and teabags in Room 101?

2011-09-25T17:31:00.000+01:00

A couple of News of the World things. Just before the Met dropped their effort to bully the Grauniad with the Official Secrets Act, they ran this story about the disastrous attempt to use a supergrass in the Daniel Morgan case. Is this a coincidence? And this quote reads like a Ballardised version of Le Carré:

One of the most "concerning" events for the judge came on 5 September 2006, a month after Eaton was recruited as a supergrass and while officers were still taking his witness statements. Eaton was taken by DCI Cook to a "covert location" near Reading, and left alone in the bedroom of a hotel. He became very distressed and broke down.

Half an hour later Cook – who had been trying to get Eaton to implicate two brothers, Glenn and Garry Vian, in the Morgan murder – sent him a text message that the officer then deleted from his mobile phone, according to the judge's ruling.

An hour after Eaton had been put into the hotel room he changed his story and prepared a statement implicating the Vian brothers in the murder for the first time.

That's none other than Dave Cook, the policeman who was being followed around London by the Murdochs' private investigators in an effort to protect Alex Marunchak, on the instructions of Greg Miskiw. I wonder who else read the text message?

Also, if the police story that a junior officer on the Operation Weeting case launched the OSA effort all on his lonesome while the handover to the new chief was going on is at all true, I think we probably know who one of the moles is.

he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy

2011-09-25T17:17:00.000+01:00

Did anyone else read this and this and get the horrible feeling that Maurice Glasman is over-promoted, and likely to crash in some really embarrassing way, even more than he has done already? It reminds me a bit of Tony Blair at his elevenarife worst or one of those people who are caught pretending to be commanding the SAS from a Kwik Save in Eccleshill.

Not only was he advising Ed Miliband, but David as well! And it seems he was giving them diametrically opposite advice, as if to find out what would happen! Not only was he an obscure lecturer, but he was literally starving! But when he became a member of the House of Lords, he was able to build a new storey on his house in Hackney!

(Hint: probably best not boast about using your parliamentary attendance-money to build an extension. Just because it's not a duckhouse...)

Also, this: Rather than giving a single mother housing benefit, Blue Labour is more likely to give her a stake in a community land trust.

Where is all this land in, say, Islington, the borough with two grass football pitches and one of them is Arsenal, coming from? Further, where will she live and how will she avoid eviction during the years the CLT will need to round up financing and fight its way through the planning process before the project even breaks ground? Wouldn't it be easier if she could just, eh, stay in her home rather than move to some vague new construction project God-knows-where?

Also, I'm sure some of us can relate to this:

Then I suddenly thought of David, and the grief, and James [Purnell], and the party, and the bitterness, and I thought, I'm glad I'm in Shoreditch today.

Just dance, you'll be OK, right? No, actually, nothing that fun, he was at somebody or other's wedding and staring at his phone for news.

is this normal?

2011-09-25T16:39:00.001+01:00

It seems that the Islington Gazette's usually very funny problem page isn't coming back from their recent re-design. Perhaps I should write and tell them I have a problem.

a restraining influence on the rate of retrogression

2011-09-25T16:34:00.000+01:00

So, I had a drink with the most popular man in England on Thursday. Something which came up in the conversation was that apparently, some UK and European central institutions' press offices are handing out "tokens" to lobbyists. Tokens? This meant nothing to me, but apparently what was meant is that they are counting meetings with lobbyists and monitoring the counts to see if they appear to be giving one company or other preferential access. And the reason is that lobbying information is being analysed by journalists and other malcontents with their stinkin' computer diaries.

Of course, they can always go and meet secretly at White's or the meeting room of some dreadful wanktank, but they could do that before and they seem to find official lobbying worth their while or else they wouldn't do it. I suspect that corporate lobbyists are the sort of people whose behaviour is accurately modelled by the toolkit of neoliberal economics, like psychopaths and economists themselves.

In tangentially related news, did you know that there was a serious proposal to rebuild the Houses of Parliament as a Benthamite panopticon in the 1840s? MP Joseph Hume thought Millbank Prison had been such a success that a parliamentary panopticon might be a good idea, or at least he did a piece for Bentham's Westminster Review arguing for it. Whether he was in earnest or taking the piss I have no idea.

I suppose you could have a single citizen, chosen by lot, at the top of the tower...

the worst thing that can happen is actually pretty bad

2011-09-18T17:03:00.000+01:00

This is wrong, not just for the methodological reasons given. The problem is more serious. What's so great about optimal decisions after all? Absolute optimality has costs.

Specifically, even if consultation doesn't help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of people. That's worth something. Economists, especially, ought to remember this as the whole idea of Pareto efficiency comes with Pareto's further point that a step towards optimal efficiency in any given market is not necessarily a step towards perfection overall.

Further, in practice, people who refuse to consult in the hope of making an optimal decision are quite likely to be rationalising the avoidance of information they don't like or just their own arrogance. In that case, they're very likely to make a really bad decision. It's better to miss the cost-index speed by a couple of knots than stall the plane into the sea. Programmers are taught to remember that premature optimisation is the root of all evil.

A couple of points in the upshot. Do we lose more from not attaining perfection than we do from horrible bungling? For a practical example, are all those superbly conceptualised deadweight losses and x-inefficiencies that are meant to be in the economy in the event of any state intervention whatsoever anywhere near enough to match the lasting losses of financial crisis? Enormous efforts are made to squeeze the long-term unemployed back into the job market. But the numbers are clear - people lose work in recessions and then don't find it again.

Wouldn't it be better to hold the line, putting up with one parmesan shaving less on my martini in the good times, rather than waste time and money and bother a lot of poor bastards trying to fix it later? Kurzarbeit beats the piss out of A4E.

More generally, loss-aversion is often considered to be a cognitive bias. One of the things the recurring drama of the rogue trader tells us is that someone who tells you it's only a little loss and it's worth it for the potential upside is very often lying or deluded. Isn't loss aversion actually quite a sensible heuristic for most purposes? After all, many of the things it would warn you against are actually sure losers, like gambling, smoking, and voting Conservative.

That gets me to the final point. How dare anyone have the intellectual dishonesty to argue against social democracy on the grounds that stuff happens and we need safety first and to respect individual variety and old institutions and no plan survives contact with the enemy? Avoiding disasters and silly experiments is our thing, and if that's conservatism, well, vote Labour.

Of course, my own experiment with voting Lib Dem is exhibit A.

oh fuck hell, it's that extensive future-of-the-Labour-party post at last.

2011-09-18T16:34:00.000+01:00

OK, I've been thinking about this for a while. My problem with the whole "Blue Labour" concept, and further, the love-affair between people like James Purnell and American "community organisers" is this: If you're so smart, why haven't you got health insurance?"

Seriously. Isn't trying to learn from the American Left a bit like trying to design a football team by studying Plymouth Argyle and the career of Peter Ridsdale? Obviously, there is much to be said for the analysis of failure as a road to knowledge. The aviation industry made a whole trade and a near religion out of crash investigation, anonymous reporting through CHIRP, etc, with excellent results. But it's far from obvious that Glassman and friends have spent much time on the failures of US progressive politics.

Part of this is the unvarying, universal force of time. We all idealise the causes and methods that marked our lives. For Maurice Glassman, it's the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. He looks at himself and remembers the marchers of Birmingham, Alabama. Other people recall the rainbow coalitions of the 80s, the 1992 Clinton campaign, the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment running up to the Seattle G8. History defines us before we define it, in opposition to Winston Churchill's remark about shaping the things we build that thereafter shape us. That's why he's so keen on churches.

But what made civil rights work? It wasn't just grassroots organising. Neither was it the intervention of the Feds or the Democratic control of Congress and the White House. Both things had happened before.

Many of the institutions of black self-organisation had existed for years without achieving anything like it. Similarly, even Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration hadn't even tried particularly hard. Part of the problem was that not all of them even agreed that society could be changed - the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X's career before his break with the Nation are cases in point - or that it could be changed short of the final world revolution, like the communists thought.

British workers had plenty of miners' welfare clubs and brass bands in the Great Depression, too, and indeed the First Depression of the 1870s. But nobody seems to have found that satisfactory.

What I'm driving at is that neither Labour, nor the civil rights movement, achieved anything much until they lined up the movement at the grass roots, their own institutions, their influence in other institutions, and a central government that was basically sympathetic. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were willing to send the army and the FBI to enforce the law on the unofficial powers - the flip side of the big society - of the South. Democratic appointees to the courts, the National Labor Relations Board, and a million other committees were available to hear their arguments. The grassroots institutions of Labour were there to hold Attlee and Wilson's feet to the fire, just as the Tory thinktank/lobby/academic world was there to hold Thatcher's feet to the fire.

There is no contradiction between the broader movement and the electoral party. This is a false dichotomy.

But what are those institutions today? Of course, the biggest are the unions. At the other end of the scale, perhaps the blogosphere might even count, eh.

One thing they are probably not is religious. Glassman seems to imagine that we can all win by making friends with the churches. Unfortunately, the biggest religious group in the UK is unbelief and the next biggest is Anglicanism, and there are at least as many church Tories and worse (pseudo-American rightist evangelicals) as there are fans of Faith in the City, which is a bit of a while ago now.

Another thing they are not is anything other than "urban and metropolitan". This is something both "Blue" and "Purple" like to moan about. The great majority of the British live in cities or their suburbs and quite a few of those in London. Further, they have stopped moving out of them and reversed course. If the MLK porn element of Blue Labour is an American import, this is a much less desirable one - it's the usual crap from David Brooks about Real Americans, who by definition have pickup trucks, etc, etc. We don't need this crap.

By definition, an electoral strategy that is founded on winning the hearts and minds of a shrinking minority of a minority - religious people, susceptible of conversion to Labour, who live in the countryside! - can only fail. It is a question of arithmetic. There aren't enough of 'em! Even in London, this all risks shedding Labour people like the unionised bus drivers who live around here at at least the rate god-botherers are signed up.

Come to think of it, the only solution to the equation is if the electoral turn-out keeps falling, faster. If you assume that the religious will keep voting (an assumption borrowed from the Americans), perhaps there's something to be said for clinging to the last voter. But that would work as well for the activist Left and the unions. Anyway, I somehow doubt the final extinction of the swing voter is actually what anyone wants. Even if the whole political class does sometimes seem to be trying to foster extreme cynicism as a strategy.

Anyway, to take this to the bridge. Not so long ago it looked like the Obama campaign would be the model we would take with us, what with its RESTful interfaces and ward teams and whatnot. Now that looks like a busted flush, a depressing miss, a lucky shot in an off year for the other side. The saddest bit being the vanishing of the movement.

A question: the last time the British Labour movement launched a new, independent, task specific organising effort was the Anti-Nazi League. What is the equivalent for economic aims, and would anyone dare?

tagged!

2011-09-18T15:34:00.000+01:00

Term-extraction algorithms have the disturbing property of making things sound more interesting than they really are. These are WordPress's suggested tags for the last blog post:

community organisers, multilateral agreement on investment, plymouth argyle, james purnell, crash investigation

Way more fun than just another future of the Labour Party post. This is of course inherent in the methodology. You're trying to identify statistically significant variance in the corpus used, so the weirdness pops out from the background. Like teal and orange.

again with the central bank thing

2011-09-11T18:09:00.001+01:00

London Banker:

Because they now have the role of market maker of last resort, central banks should become much more active in ensuring that any asset permitted to be classed as capital by a bank can be liquidated on demand in a public market.

If this is so, then they must needs take a view on the value of all sorts of assets and therefore of all sorts of capital investment. This brings us back to a point I was making earlier on - whether the independent central bank is a valid institutional model any more.

the good news is that the No.1 lobby is no longer a bank...

2011-09-11T17:58:00.000+01:00

OK, I've added hundreds more government meetings to the Lobster Project webscraper and run the analytics script. We're up to 3,825 lobbying events between 2,725 entities, which lobster.py reports processing in 4.63 seconds.

Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped somewhat. We retain our Strong Buy rating on him and also on Oliver Letwin. Second, there's been a shakeup of the lobbies - Facebook has dropped out of the top 20 but the lobbying star is BAE Systems, which has surged into the top 5, scrabbling above Barclays Bank to become the UK's biggest single private lobby. That's right, banking has fallen behind armaments.

Is the government considering ordering the Type 26 frigates? Or backing out of the F-35? Or switching to the Sea Gripen fighter, which the Bungling Baron of British Waste O'Space has a 30-odd% finger in? Who knows...

Actually, this is probably just an artefact of the MOD being unusually conscientious about disclosing lobbying information and that theirs comes in a sensible format rather than in a locked filing cabinet, behind a door marked Beware of the Leopard...sorry, in a mangled PDF file.

Lobster Project tip of the day is probably Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, Tim Loughton, Education PUSS. With a gatekeepership of 1.228 (i.e. a 23% uplift in influence from lobbying him) he's significantly underlobbied at a network degree of 0.075. Somebody, buy him an intern.

Although Nick Clegg is in third place overall, I note that his gatekeepership is down to 0.34 and that therefore, there's little hope of getting access to the prime minister through him.

...wi nowt taken out

2011-09-11T16:11:00.000+01:00

What is it with Tories and loan-sharking? We all know about Francis Maude, the toxic pusher and secret ruler of the world, or at least we all should - he was a director of a company offering dodgy "debt consolidation" deals, and also Spanish sub-prime mortgages that were marketed as an inheritance tax avoidance scheme.

And then there's this purely commercial transaction:

Records lodged with the Electoral Commission reveal that the Funding Corporation Group Ltd (FCGL), based in Warwickshire, donated £105,000 to the Tories on 24 June. The company also gave £25,000 last December.

FCGL owns 99.9% of the Funding Corporation Ltd which sells cars on hire purchase plans to drivers with poor credit ratings through a subsidiary, ACF Car Finance. The Funding Corporation Ltd also owns a debt recovery business, Red2Black Collections.

The companies are ultimately owned by Lord Edmiston, a staunch Tory party supporter and Christian philanthropist, who gave the Conservatives almost £300,000 between 2004 and 2009 under his own name....

One man described in an online forum how he nearly bought a £7,000 car from ACF that would have ended up costing him £325 a month over 60 months, a total cost of £19,500, equivalent to an interest rate of almost 200%. Another bought a car valued at £5,995. But the true cost when interest and PPI was factored in came to £16,445...

Measures that would have forced the lenders to curb some of their practices, were voted down by Lib Dem and Tory MPs on 28 June.

Nice mates you've got there, as they say. Eeeuww. For me it's the Christian stuff that really makes me want to throw up. Yer man had some things to say about the ethical aspects of credit, I think. And there's the surprisingly picayune, penny-ante nature of the whole deal. Did you know you could get control of the Coalition whipping operation for a mere £105k? The Yorkshire Building Society has actually offered to lend me - me! - twice as much. I'm sure I could find an issue worth enough to make the deal wash its face.

But of course some people's money is worth more than others'. The Tories bitch endlessly about the trade unions giving to the Labour Party. But the real point is that UNITE's members can fork over millions collectively and Labour will do bugger all in return. At least the Tories are honestly venal - perhaps they could adopt the motto "Good Honest Corruption". As for the other lot, well... I suspect, though, if I were to put together a syndicate of bloggers to outbid Edmiston they would find some excuse.

Circling back to the beginning, though, they say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. When it was fashionable to whine about local authorities advertising jobs in the Guardian, I pointed out that the Sun and the News of the World were permanently full of adverts for loans and specifically for debt-consolidation. A question: how much, do you reckon, the Edmiston companies, Prestbury Holdings, and its subsidiaries spent on advertising with News International? Also, what's the betting one of these guys turns out to own Eric Pickles?

it's not Thursday, so...

2011-09-11T14:23:00.001+01:00

Time for a non-Thursday music post.

And again:

In other "things that are good" news, I want one of these.

In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities.

Chaos as a deliberate strategy

2011-09-11T14:13:00.000+01:00

Yadda yadda China cyberwar. I make the point that the Chinese infosec environment is characterised by chaos, there isn't a well-defined centre of activity probably enjoying offical tolerance or more like the old Russian Business Network*, and that the great firewall is about censorship and also a sort of trade-barrier protecting the locals from competition. It's an interesting point why the Chinese Internet got so awful. Structure is a big part of it; rapid economic growth, lots of software piracy, and therefore a hell of a lot of old Windows machines that don't get patches. But I do wonder, as with all sorts of other Chinese issues, to what extent internal chaos with selectively porous borders is a strategy.

Meanwhile, Four Lions is still a documentary.

*You might say we've just not found it yet. But the distinction is that the Russians wanted you to know it was out there.

Irrational policy design

2011-09-11T13:56:00.000+01:00

David "I was right" Blanchflower's Right Blog is right. On this occasion he's right about polling results. The public apparently thinks that Osborne's fiscal policy is bad for the economy, unfair, too fast, excessive, and is affecting their lives directly. They're also worried about unemployment and public service cuts. Which they also think are "necessary" by a surprisingly strong majority (57-33) although they disapprove of them by almost as strong a majority(55-30, the don't knows making up the difference).

Well, funny old public. Consistent much? Obviously part of this is Waring's pony. The public would quite like deficit reduction as long as they didn't have to have any of the consequences. Similarly, a majority would quite like a pony. Also, hardly anyone would argue for keeping the public sector net cash requirement at recession levels forever so the question is not entirely logical.

But I think this does have some interesting political consequences. If you want a policy to get implemented, I think you need some element that opinion will stick to even if all the other indicators are flashing red. It may, actually, be the irrational element. In this case it's "necessity" and it draws on the complex of ideas around economics-as-morality. You might even come over romantic and say it would be the poetic element of policy.

don't forget the power

2011-09-11T13:34:00.000+01:00

Because Chris Dillow has spam-bucketed me again, like quite a few TypePad sites periodically do, this comment will go here instead. Chris discusses a paper claiming that fiscal stimulus will not work because the central bank will put up interest rates and the exchange rate will rise, and quite sensibly points out that it doesn't make sense to expect the exchange rate to rise in a punishing recession with a large budget deficit. (Unsurprisingly both Tim Worstall* and George Osborne believe this or at least make out like they do.)

Anyway, my comment is that if you look at this from a political economy perspective rather than a macroeconomics perspective it does make sense. Central bank independence, as an institution, is meant to reduce politicians' discretionary power over the economy. Therefore, it's not actually surprising that the central bank might be trying to counteract the decisions of the minister of finance. I mean, Jürgen Stark and friends designed the ECB specifically to implement deflationary policies in the event that the elected power wanted the opposite.

And why would politicians accept this? In a perspective of political economy, this might be because they felt the unelected power would serve their interests, because they felt it was stronger than they were and it would get its way, or because they were simply unaware of any contradiction. Of course, what we choose to be unaware of is a deeply political decision.

Further, a Kaleckian would say it does indeed make sense to look at central bank independence as an institution whose purpose is to prevent full employment.

*Bizarrely, Tim is or claims to be unaware that the European Central Bank is an independent central bank. Let's roll the tape:

“what on earth was the ECB doing raising interest rates this year?”

That’s the problem with government as a whole really isn’t it? Sometimes the idiots get in. Far better to have a system where the idiots can’t do any harm even if they do get in: you know, that minarchist state thing?

Tim Worstall: the only man on earth who thinks the European Central Bank is elected.

Boundaries. Now there's dull for you

2011-09-11T13:13:00.000+01:00

Just as so much Blair era culture-page handwringing about why my kids came back from university, in hindsight, was a way of not talking about wages, student debt, and housing, people tend to lose sight of the central role of politics when they make arguments about "filter bubbles". The original post over at Flipchart Fairytales is actually pretty good, but I had to take issue with the argument about Americans increasingly living in counties that swing to one party or the other by large majorities.

The problem is that it's very easy to change the boundaries of an American city or county or congressional district and they do it all the time. There are even people who make a good living acting as consultants to local politicians on how best to re-district their political opponents out of their constituency or their political supporters back in.

Movements of population are slow, but boundaries can be changed at the stroke of a pen. Thereafter, of course, they are real facts about power and they have an impact on the real world. That is of course why American politicians do it, and why a system that sounds like Shirley Porter stamping on a human face forever is allowed to persist. Both parties benefit, although the Republicans enjoy the usual hostage-taker's bonus.

It doesn't do to miss out power if you're thinking politics.

So, we're about to have our own redistricting festival. Here's Lib Dem Voice whistling past the graveyard and moaning about this Democratic Audit piece. The proposals will be published on Tuesday and there will then be some 12 weeks of "public consultation", but not public inquiries. (LDV points out that public inquiries are scary and have politicians and lawyers, but then, democracy is scary and detailed and has lawyers and politicians, and they have to listen to the results of a public inquiry.)

There is a timetable for the hearings here.

I've said before that really, everything in this exercise should be opposed as being basically dishonest. We shouldn't be having a boundary review to make Tories feel nice about the AV referendum. Any ideas?

the Conservatives really do hate you as much as you feared

2011-09-11T12:46:00.000+01:00

In the light of this it's fairly clear that open data as a project is now over. (Hey, it was the week it turned out the government wants to just throw away the Forensic Science Service's archive, you know, just hire a skip because who wants a load of old stuff, right?)

Tory plans seem to require that eventually, with full implementation of free schools and any-qualified-provider, the entire health and education sectors be excluded from either the Freedom of Information Act or any requirement to gather standard statistics. At the same time, presumably, we are all expected to exercise "choice" among 'em.

It ought to be obvious that the purpose of this is that your local community school, or "school school" as I think of them, will still have to be listed in league tables and whatnot while your local twat-madrassa will be able to bullshit without limit about its results. It is worth remembering that, years later, Kenneth Baker admitted to the Grauniad's Nick Davies that he deliberately tried to make the state schools awful so people would go private.

Another thought: what happens to that funny "Dr Foster" thing that sort-of privately mined NHS data to provide doctors with best-practice recommendations if they're not going to bother with boring data an stuff and just hack away?

discovering the axis of barking

2011-09-11T11:48:00.002+01:00

The Grauniad Dabatlog has produced a rather fancy network visualisation of the sources cited in Anders Behring Breivik's personal manifesto/horse-shit compendium. This is great as I now don't need to worry that I perhaps should have made one. It's very pretty and you can click on stuff, and see that some of the sources are thinktanks and some of them are newspapers, and well, it's very pretty and you can click on stuff. It also comes with a piece by Andrew Brown reprising his "Don't be beastly to the creationists!" shtick but with Melanie Phillips, for some reason.

Unfortunately it's almost completely intransparent, and gives little indication of what data is being visualised or on what basis, and there is really no obvious conclusion to draw from it. But did I mention pretty and click? If forced to take a view, I would reckon that the underlying data is probably a matrix of which sources appear together with others and the layout algo is a force-directed graph (aka the default in pretty much any visualisation toolkit), probably weighted by appearance count. There's some sort of proprietary metric called "linkfluence" which appears to be given by(indegree/outdegree)*len(neighbourhood) or words to that effect.

As a result, the only information I got from it was that he linked to Wikipedia, the BBC, and big news sites a lot. Well yes; Wikipedia, bbc.co.uk, etc, generate a hell of a lot of web pages and people read them a lot. Obviously, to say the least, you need to normalise the data with regard to sheer bulk, or you'd end up concluding that Google (or Bing or Yahoo) was his inspiration because he did a lot of web searches, or that he was a normal man twisted by SMTP because he used e-mail.

In fact, I thought they actually did that until I realised that RSS.org is about the other RSS, the Indian extreme-right movement, not the popular Internet syndication standard. Harrowell fail. Anyway, it does show up rather nicely that the groups "European nationalists", "Counter-Jihad", and "American Right-Wing" overlap. However, I feel there's something missing in the characterisation of MEMRI and various other sites as just "Think Tanks" as if they were just like, say, IPPR.

Also, an emergent property of the data is that there is an Axis of Barking running vertically through it: the nearer you are to the top of the diagram, the more extreme and crazy. MEMRI, FrontPage, Gates of Vienna, Melanie Phillips are near the top; the Wikipedia article on the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 is at the bottom. And the MSM is somewhere in the middle. (Although I do wonder if they allocated the sources to groups before or after running the force-directed graph.)

It seems to be one of those command the exciting world of social media with just one click! things.

Anyway, upshot. I want to avoid Project Lobster producing a diagram like this one. It's too impressionistic and fluffy and reliant on basically aesthetic reasoning. (I think we've had this point before.) Of course, that's partly the difference between the underlying data sets; it was at least thinkable if unlikely that there would be no grouping in Breivik's sources, while presumably political lobbying is nonrandom and subject to intelligent design.

Elsewhere, a reader passed this along which I need to actually watch (isn't video time consuming?). There's a shindig in Warsaw in late October. And I want this on a T-shirt.

all is right with the world

2011-09-04T13:18:00.000+01:00

Did anyone notice that Liam Fox had an audience of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, or I suppose they of him although you know how these things work around here, some time this spring? It's in the latest MOD meetings disclosure, which runs up to March 2011. MOD is probably the most assiduous department for meetings disclosure - not only do they provide lists up to March, they have yet to randomly change the file format even once, insert random foreign characters, use multiple spellings of the minister's surname, suddenly start publishing PDF files, or indulge in any other quirks. (On the other hand, the Cabinet Office has suddenly developed an addiction to PDFs.)

However, I notice that this meeting doesn't have a date, nor a purpose. It's just there - Liam Fox, Rupert, and Becks. It's possible that this is a quirk, as immediately before it there is a meeting listed with John Witherow of the Sunday Times for a "Defence Briefing" in March 2011 and perhaps they interpolated the duplicate items. (The doctrine of just war, however, does require as well as just cause and reasonable chances of success that the decision be taken by legitimate authority.)

Meanwhile, WhosLobbying.com has a problem with the Home Office, in that if you try to look up the Home Office on their website, the site chokes and returns a 500 internal server error.

I suppose it's understandable. If you want any other shocking document release stories, the Daily Hell has plenty. I especially like the image of Blair in the den, plugging through the borrowed prose of Saif Gaddafi's PhD thesis. Haven't I seen this before somewhere?

as for the Mahler, I think it could do with a helipad

2011-09-04T12:09:00.000+01:00

China's neo-con blogging fever-swamp, via (of course) Jamie K.

For instance, Gao Yi, a well-known music critic, tweeted: "Compared with a war, US$7 billion is much more worthwhile. Right now, we lack the off-shore staging capacity for a mid-intensity war.

A well-known music critic? Now that's special. You don't get detailed comment on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's seabasing capability from Martin Kettle when he's in one of his SUCK ON MY CULTURE, PROLE moods, or indeed when he's editorialising, do you? Does Brian Sewell take a view on whether the much delayed Maritime Afloat Replenishment Ship project should go down the Dutch/Canadian JSS route, perhaps building on licence from Schelde in the UK, or stick with specialised tanker and dry-replenishment hulls?

It's a pity that this doesn't mean their politics is any more pacific.

it could be you, but not while she's around

2011-08-28T19:03:00.004+01:00

This is fascinating, especially when you remember GTech's role in our own dear sordid raffle. Great reporting, too.

various official agencies knew about the usual lobotomised pc crowd

2011-08-28T18:58:00.001+01:00

This Melanie Phillips piece is remarkably insightful.

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest

2011-08-28T16:23:00.000+01:00

Tanya Gold brings the fisk to A4E:

Why does this feel so dodgy? I called Harrison's PR and asked her what will happen if there are no jobs. What then? "Emma believes there are jobs," she replied. "There are hidden jobs." Oh yes, those hidden jobs, buried under trees and lying at the end of rainbows. All the unemployed need is the imagination to see the invisible, and maybe a magic shovel and a friendly elf to hug them on the way to Mordor. So a slab of government policy is being handed to a woman who is in denial about the scale and cause of joblessness. The statistics are nowhere in the Working Families Everywhere material. There are 2.49 million people unemployed today in the UK.

So your assignment for today is to start reading the A4E Blog. I especially like the distinction between a "social enterprise" - a Blairite upsexing of what used to be called a charity and then became an NGO - and a "social purpose" company, which appears to mean a company whose social purpose is to buy its directors a very big house in the country.

The Coalition seems to have veered away from its brief enthusiasm for Big Issue founder John Bird, who briefly looked like he might make a comeback in public life. Birdy, infamously, moved to Los Angeles with his then girlfriend and alleged substance issues in order to pursue more ventures with the Big Issue's funds (sample: The Bag Issue, a bag with messages about the homeless printed on it) until the funds ran out and the paper's northern edition, which was a separate legal entity, had to bail out the national movement.

However, this didn't stop Boris Johnson running through a string of similar types as mayor of London or the national Tories falling in love with A4E, which is arguably a far more pernicious and unpleasant phenomenon, having converted itself into a purely profit-oriented entity. Back in the day it was called Action for Employment, and was a grassroots charity based in Sheffield. A certain amount of scepticism might be in order, seeing as Sheffield is still one of the most unemployment-hit areas of the country after 25 years of the treatment.

A little story about Google Mail

2011-08-27T19:50:00.001+01:00

Jamie Zawinski and Charlie Stross pitch in to the poisonous row about Google + and its "real names policy". Now G+ seemed like a good idea to me because of this instant-classic paper, which demonstrated that a) people hate creepy targeted-advertising schemes even if you pay them to put up with it, b) we manage privacy by letting other people know things to different degrees depending on context, and c) we get really angry when other people talk behind our backs and violate the boundaries between contexts. When this paper appeared I literally chased everyone at Telco 2.0 around with it until they read it. Now, you can see with things like the "circles" feature that someone at Google did too.

But then, there's this whole fiasco about trying to impose single identities that always consist of two space-separated UTF-8 strings containing only alphabetical characters, that seem normal to someone from Palo Alto.

Yeah, just like that. Which reminds me of a story. Not so long ago, I was talking to the Google product manager for GMail, during - yes - an open-space workshop on privacy and identity issues. He (and he certainly is compliant with the policy sketched out above) asked if anyone knew why GMail lets you pick a graphical skin, basically a user stylesheet, for your account. After all, they spent millions on the pretty UI, so why would you want to do that?

Apparently the idea came from one of the UI/UX designers. Who said that it should be possible to tell at a glance which one of several GMail accounts you were using. The programmers and network engineers of course didn't get it - why the hell would you want two GMail accounts? Hadn't they just spent quite a lot of time and money and hard work building an e-mail service that you'd actually want to use? Wasn't it a major design goal of the whole project that people would want to pipe their other e-mail accounts into GMail, far from creating more e-mail accounts? And surely, if you wanted to keep e-mail associated with different people or things or themes together, you could use labels, and set up filters to automate the distinction?

To which she said that if you have one privacy context that includes your thuggish ex-husband and his lawyer and your fundamentalist Christian teabagger mum, another that includes your high-functioning asperger's coder boss and various similarly brilliant-but-awkward nice-guy types from work, and yet a third that includes your actual and very irreligious friends, the consequences of wrong-slotting an e-mail were far more serious than just posting to the dev list when you meant the user list or vice versa. Therefore, sometimes you needed a non-permeable membrane between contexts and a suitably glaring visual distinction.

A slow dawn spread across the meeting, someone pointed out that after all it was just an alternative CSS sheet technically speaking, and skins were added to the feature list for the next deploy. (Like the green-screen theme for GMail? Thank feminism.)

Now, it doesn't look like she's been consulted on this particular project, and I think her input would probably be worth having. But then the feminists would have something to say about why nobody seems to have asked. Actually, although our Googler didn't name names and I therefore won't name him, a bit of lateral thinking suggests her career appears to have developed in a manner to her advantage, so perhaps it's one for the theory of bureaucracy instead.

exclusion zone

2011-08-27T18:43:00.002+01:00

I bet you thought I was kidding. But try this lede:

Taped to the inside of a Sainsbury's window in King's Lynn, a printout of a map reminds teenagers of the town's restrictions. Next to it, a notice on Norfolk Constabulary headed paper spells out the terms of a dispersal order: within the marked area, groups of two or more youngsters can be broken up by police not only if they have caused intimidation, harassment, alarm or distress to members of the public but also if their behaviour is deemed likely to do so. Initially, the order focused mainly on the area around the supermarket and adjacent bus station, but when groups of young people who were deemed to be behaving antisocially relocated, it was extended to cover most of the town centre. Drinking in groups, verbal abuse and reckless or dangerous cycling are among the antisocial activities listed.

It must be deeply weird to grow up with this stuff. Years ago I blogged that in the future, the government would introduce universal ASBO conscription - everyone would be given an ASBO at birth, and the restrictions would be removed progressively as they demonstrated that they could behave responsibly, in a manner that balanced the rights they were granted.

But in this case, they've implemented pretty much that. Of course some idiot will show up to say that they shouldn't misbehave, but note that the terms of the order give the police essentially total discretion. After all, if you can't think of a reason off the top of your head why three young people might not potentially, at some point in the indefinite future, annoy any hypothetical citizen, you simply lack imagination and you've got no business being on the force.

PS, what would we say if, say, a government in central Europe declared a "Roma dispersal zone" across one of its cities? Probably not much, although the EU was in fact pretty aggressive about it during the accession process and British representatives in it were no different. But you see what I mean.

so...

2011-08-21T17:28:00.002+01:00

Tom Watson's twitter feed linked the transcript of the BBC Radio story on re-opening the Daniel Morgan case. There's not much in there that's new if you've been reading this, but I've excerpted the best bits.

1: The story that vanished

But the Report can tonight reveal that we’ve seen a copy of a witness statement
to the police suggesting that a week before Daniel Morgan died, he said he was taking a story to a newspaper exposing police corruption.

The witness believed the paper was the News of the World, and that Daniel’s contact there was Alex Marunchak. If Daniel ever had a story, it never appeared.

2: Finances

GOLDBERG: So, just how important was the News of the World to Southern Investigations.

BOOKKEEPER: Erm, the News of the World really was the biggest customer, we used to invoice out maybe five to six hundred invoices a month but all of the invoices were for only for 50 pounds or less. Generally when you generate invoices you actually send them to an accounts department and then somebody in the system
will give the OK that they are OK and they are not fraudulent and they are to be paid, whereas with the case with the News of the World all of the invoices were hand- delivered to a man at the News of the World, not to the accounts department, and he would release an invoice to be paid now and again, so that they didn’t all go through in one lump.

GOLDBERG: So who was the man that they were hand-delivered to at the News of the World?

BOOKKEEPER: Alex Marunchak

GOLDBERG: And what did you hear about the relationship between Southern Investigations and Alex Marunchak, what was said about that?

BOOKKEEPER: I think they were pretty good friends, I think it was just a case of he could help us and we could help him, that sort of thing. He did have his credit card paid off at one time and there was a little comment thrown in about the fact that they had paid his school fees, and they obviously didn’t go through the books and I can remember Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery talking about that before they went out
to lunch and joking and laughing and saying that this would be the first time in his life that Alex Marunchak had been out of debt.

3: A bit of Watson

WATSON: I know that Jonathan Rees and Alex Marunchak had a very close relationship over many years to the extent that they were even in contact whilst Rees was serving a prison sentence. That kind of relationship between a very senior Newspaper Exec and a private investigator with a criminal record deserves greater investigation.

It's mostly style-and-tone, but that's not unimportant. The inverse path is interesting - the fact that substantial amounts of money were flowing from the police back to Marunchak.

But I think the next topic for speculation should probably be what the hell that story was. A significant fraction of why we're all arguing about this now, 25 years on, is driven by the Morgan case.

Strange, really - yet another news/Stross crossover post. We surely need the Laundry's take on the News of the World affair...

things fall apart

2011-08-21T17:05:00.001+01:00

The fact that there was a run on the bank in the autumn of 2007, when bank deposits had been guaranteed by the Government since effectively forever, was a political fact that should have told us much, much more than it did.

Discuss.

I seem to spend all my time watching enormous institutions that seemed to have been around forever falling apart.

your call could not be connected - please check the number and try again

2011-08-21T17:00:00.001+01:00

The Obscurer has possibly the first intelligent article on the whole "turn off their Facebook! that'll learn em!" furore. Notably, they interviewed one-man UK mobile industry institution Mike Short. Go, read, and up your clue. I especially liked that the piece provided some facts about the 7th July 2005 terrorist incident and the mobile networks.

There is only one reported case of a UK network being closed by police. During the 7/7 London suicide bombings, O2 phone masts in a 1km square area around Aldgate tube station were disconnected for a number of hours.

Police have an emergency power to order masts to be put out of action known as MTPAS – Mobile Telecommunication Privileged Access Scheme. The move has to be approved by Gold Command, by the officers in highest authority during a major incident, and is designed to restrict all but emergency service phones with registered sim cards from making calls. But a shutdown can have dangerous knock-on effects. Short says that phones within the Aldgate zone automatically sought a signal from live masts outside it, overloading them and causing a network failure that rippled out "like a whirlpool".

On the day, other networks were simply overloaded as Londoners sought reassurance and information. Vodafone alone experienced a 250% increase in call volumes

MTPAS is the GSM-land equivalent of the old fixed phone Telephone Preference Scheme (not to be confused with the new one that blocks cold-callers), which permitted The Authorities to turn off between 1% and 90% of phone lines in order to let official traffic through. As far as I know, the Met never asked for it and it was City of London Police who initiated it without asking the Met or anyone else, and in fact O2 UK's network had been keeping up with demand up to that point, before the closure caused the cascade failure Short describes.

The significance of O2 is that it used to be "Surf the Net, Surf the BT Cellnet" and some residual gaullist/spook reflex in the government tried to keep official phones on what was then one of two British-owned networks.

Anyway, this weekend seems to have the theme "The Intersection of Charlie Stross and the August 2011 Riots". Charlie's talk at USENIX is sensibly sceptical about some tech dreams as they apply to networking.

This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian, a GNU vision of telecommunications that can’t actually work on a large scale because the routing topology of such a network is going to be nightmarish unless there are some fat fibre optic cables somewhere in the picture. It’s kind of a shame – I’d love to see a future where no corporate behemoths have a choke hold on the internet – but humans aren’t evenly distributed geographically.

Especially as the theoretical maximum bandwidth of one fibre is about the same as the entire radio spectrum. And the point about routing table size and complexity is a very good one, especially as it's assumed that the routers aren't CRS-1s but rather Linksys fifty quidders or mobile phones.

However, one thing the liberation technologists should take away from the riots is that you shouldn't get hung up on bandwidth. It's great to be able to post the photos on Flickr, but it's more useful to have your own secure voice and messaging. When the Egyptian government relented on its GSM cut-off, the Egyptian Twitter feeds lit up with calls for more people to this or that exit of Tahrir Square or medical supplies to the clinic or (and I remember this) that a lost child was waiting at the press tent.

It was what NANOG users would call operational content. There was of course no need whatsoever for it to go via a Bay Area website - all Twitter provided was the one-to-many element, very important, and the publicity on the Web. The latter is a nice-to-have feature, the former, critical. Text, or even voice, is not a high bandwidth application and doesn't necessarily need access to the global Internet.

So yes - perhaps there is in fact quite a bit of angular momentum to be had in a mobile mesh-WLAN client as an instrument of democracy, as long as you're willing to accept that it's not the sort of thing that can be exclusive to people who agree with you. But then, that's the test of whether or not you actually believe in democracy.

Something else, between Charlie's USENIX talk and the riots. Isn't one of the biggest disappointments, from a police point of view, the performance of CCTV? No doubt it will help put some of the rioters in jail. But it didn't prevent the riots and neither did it seem to help quell them much. It's possible that the whole idea that potential surveillance (like the original panopticon) is a policing influence isn't as strong as it's made out to be.

Another point; not all crimes are punished or even taken notice of. This is obvious. Less obvious is that the degree to which the police ignore crime is an important political fact. Is it possible that CCTV, by forcing them to make at least a token response to everything that passes in camera range, actually contributed to using up the police strength? In a riot, the police aim is to demonstrate public, mass control. They are usually willing to ignore quite a lot of individual criminality in the process. It's possible that surveillance culture and technology are opposed to strategy.

Yes, they are all black

2011-08-21T15:04:00.000+01:00

Back in 2006, I said to Charlie Stross that the zeitgeist of the near future would be exasperation. I also said something similar as a comment on the Halting State book-in-progress, so if you think everyone in it seems grumpy, you've got me to thank.

But, of course, we've now landed in the near future of 2006. Scottish independence didn't show up on schedule, but a shitkicker of a recession did, and the exasperation seems to be doing pretty well. After all, I think we could all agree that los indignados are as exasperated as they are indignant. Which makes me ask: what if David Starkey was right? Scholars of blogging will recognise the move I just pulled - I think of it as a Dillow, after Chris Dillow, who begins most of his posts with a bit of provocation for the dads that usually consists of him claiming to agree with some horrible rightwing ogre or other.

Having Dillowed, let's get to the point. Obviously, it's not his bizarre belief that everyone around him speaks Jamaican patois (Language Log fisks), or his bog standard moral panicking, or getting himself up in Enoch drag, that I wish to examine. It's his contention that "the whites have become black".

Random serendipity takes us to Jezebel of all places (party like it's 2008!), where they're covering American youth being advised to fix their problems by lowering their expectations, because the economy sucks and has done so since 2007, they're in enormous tuition-fee debt, and nobody has any intention of doing anything at all about this. The comments at Jared Bernstein's are pretty good too.

Here's John Harris in West Bromwich for the Guardian, as part of a really excellent trio of field reports from the riots:

The rate of youth unemployment here is 33%; the town centre has a pinched, sad ambience, and there are precious few of the usual high street names...."If they're stopping EMA [Education Maintenance Allowance]," added another, "what do they want us to do?" Hearing this, I wondered whether this was a line cynically pinched from some talking head on the TV, and parroted back at me, but all six said they wanted to go to college – a music course was mentioned, with retakes of GCSEs – but in the absence of the EMA, they were now wondering whether it was worth it.

Shiv Malik, in Salford and also back in the office, playing a blinder:

In one of the first barometers of attitudes from the generation who have found themselves entering the job market during the economic downturn, the survey overseen by academics at Teesside University, found that 57% said that employers were discriminating against them because of their youth. It also found that almost one in four were depressed about their future.

Teesside youth and communities expert Professor Tony Chapman said the results were "very worrying" especially if it meant that young people would now give up on their future. And at the heart of this depression lay a lack of security. Only 49% believed they would have a secure job in five years' time...

In interviews with the young people it was clear that they were shocked and angered that their futures had suddenly been made so uncertain by the hiking of student fees and the abolition of the education maintenance allowance...

Housing benefits are being slashed for the young more than for the old through the mechanism of the share room rate. The house building budget has been slashed by 60% at a time when a housing shortage has hiked up prices, making it impossible to get on the housing ladder. And on top of the scrapping of the Future Jobs fund and the tripling of student fees, local councils have also aimed their cuts on youth services as they are not deemed essential services. Another exacerbating factor is that of fast inflating rents in the private rented sector, where most young people now live because it takes years for them to get their own social housing...

Also, this piece of Pual Lewis's isn't much for analysis but is plenty of field reporting.

This from Adbusters (aww! party like it's 1999) is predictably quite the rant, and it kicks off with that UN "survey of childhood" that made the papers a while back. As a former boy, I doubt strongly that I would have been happier through spending more nights in with my parents, but if you read past the first stick or so it picks up force and effect. It also makes the case that the problem is not moral and not even one of "consumerism" or any such - rather it is political and economic and architectural, an issue of power and money and buildings.

Here's a fascinating chart that I was sure I'd blogged somewhere, from the Resolution Foundation. It shows the type of housing tenure in various income groups. Under 35s are on the left, general population on the right.

So where am I going with all this? First of all, back to the exasperation. You think I was pissed off in 2006? At least there was a long slow upwards drag ahead. I eventually got rid of my student overdraft by quitting T&F Informa and taking ship aboard Telco 2.0, in the credit-crunching summer of 2007. A few classes further back, though, everyone was being delivered from the education system direct into the great crisis, just with even more student debts, after a school career characterised by even more hectoring and testing than mine. This all started long before anyone cared about it - a detail that stands out in my mind is that we had mock mock exams to prepare for the mock exams intended to prepare us for the exams, and I recall being really terrified of the future as far back as year 7 because I cocked up an end-of-year paper.

Outside the school gates, property went through the first wave of hyperinflation in 2001-2002 and wages stopped rising a year afterwards. And, well, what I said:

Meanwhile, we were told we ought to consume and keep the economy going, take part in the creative industries and volunteer, but do this while joining the job market, to borrow heavily to pay for further and higher education, to accumulate savings on deposit, to save for retirement (or in other words, to pay others’ pensions), that we were a bunch of unserious greenies, that we were politically apathetic, that we would face the consequences of climate change (after it became respectable to worry), that we were all drug fiends and music characterised by repetitive beats was against the law, that we weren’t getting on the housing ladder, that we were borrowing too much money (this from the people who brought you Citigroup) and that people who were slightly younger ought to be punished for playing hooky in order to demonstrate against the Iraq war. To cap the lot, we were told we were drinking too much. If we were, who could guess why?

So, is David Starkey right? Is it, in fact, true to say that the young have all become black, in a moral, political, and especially, economic sense? I rather think it is.

Whether you like Robert Altemeyer's thesis that about 20% of the population are predisposed to authoritarian thinking, whether as leaders or followers, and gravitate to it quite independently of what the authoritarianism is about, or whether you prefer an analysis of racism that emphasises a Marxist view in which it's a substitute for class, or whether you take the view that it's one of the ways society defines an enemy on which it can project its own moral failings, I think you can make a case that youth-hatred has become a substitute for racism.

If you're not meant to harass the black kids any more, it's far easier just to harass the kids, incidentally getting the black ones, than to harass nobody. That would imply real change, and the authoritarians, they don't like change.

This is a caricature, of course. But I do think it is interesting and relatively new that young people think they are the targets of systematic discrimination as such, while their interests are in fact affected by problems we would find no difficulty at all in denouncing as injustice if they were, for example, all black. They are, actually, disproportionately unemployed, indebted, under-housed, bothered by the police and by the forces of authority more generally, subject to constant insults by the official media, and the losers from major changes in government policy.

Of course, everyone will say that they had no intent to discriminate against the young. But it was impossible to do anything serious about racism until the barrier of intent was crossed, and it was no longer sufficient to say that the black people just happened to get searched by the police at absurdly high rates, because after all nobody had ordered the police to do that.

slightly less lazyweb

2011-08-14T19:51:00.001+01:00

So I couldn't just drop the OAuth library into the plugins directory because I didn't have sudo rights there, so I wgot and zipped it and uploaded it as a plugin via the web interface and changed the include to point there. And now the end of the bifurcation era may be in sight. Not there yet, but the first 25 posts got transferred out of a mere 2,725 and 1,943 comments (before we get to thinking about the Enetation ones, I've got the dump file somewhere, and that'll make a python project for one of these days).

Meanwhile, has anyone got experience of running XBMC or one of the many other Linux media centres on a cheapo Android tablet or netbook device, preferably with the content somewhere on a network? I'm thinking of building a not-a-hifi system that lets me have different music rooms - just because I can.

technique of generalised mayhem without any particular direction

2011-08-14T18:51:00.001+01:00

Over at Stable & Principled, I've been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn't seem to have any thoughts at all that weren't adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces' reserves of manpower just like that? This isn't a "What does it all mean?" post, although inevitably we'll have one of them for you as well. It's more like a "How does it all work?" post.

In all, 2,347 people have been arrested nationally. This is only a rough lower bound on the numbers of people involved, as obviously not everyone got caught and some of the people arrested are innocent. At an arrest rate of one in 10, that would give a total of 23,000. 51% of the arrests were in London, or to be precise the Met's area of operations, which gives us the answer to one question at least - the police eventually quelled the riot by outnumbering the rioters, 16,000 cops versus an estimated 11,500 rioters. Obviously if you pick a different arrest rate fudge factor you'll get a different answer, but then at least we're using a model of sorts.

It's certainly interesting, though, that a fairly small crowd was able to exhaust the policing resources of most of the UK. If the 23,000 rioters had shown up in central London to march on Whitehall, even assuming they were willing to be as troublesome and violent as they were elsewhere, I think the Met would have handled it without breaking sweat and certainly without needing to summon the South Wales force as mutual aid. Even the most hayseed British police forces deal with crowds of 23,000 young men reputed to be ready for violence, every weekend, quite commonly several at the same time, without very much happening. They are lower division football matches. And to be frank, a 23,000 strong national demo is disappointing.

So what's up? One point is dispersion vs. concentration. Demonstrators want to occupy symbolic space and show their organisation by the very fact they could concentrate all these people. Casuals want to duff up the other mob. Therefore, the police problem is to either prevent them from getting to Parliament Square or the match, or else keep them segregated from other people while they are there. The police are on the tactical defensive, but the strategic offensive - if they stick it out they win.

Obviously, the demonstrators (or thugs) can't counter this by dispersing because that would defeat the point. They have to come to the Bill, and the Bill can then canalise them. Kettling is the ultimate expression of this thinking.

If the police have to look for the crowd, though, this is obviously going to be a much more labour-intensive exercise. You can't kettle several dozen groups of ten or so people spread over a dozen streets - the idea is absurd. You have to go looking for them. That in turn conditions what the crowd can do - it can't stage a classic mass demonstration - and favours people who are willing to just randomly destroy stuff that happens to be undefended, while the traditional mass demo favours a show of what you might call subversive respectability. The slow march of the Zulus, if you like.

Another important point was that there was no key identity-group here - it wasn't aligned with any one ethnic or religious group or geography and wasn't even totally young, and it didn't explicitly identify with a class either. Therefore, anyone who felt like it could join in, and did. This obviously helped it go national and also made a traditional (since the 80s) police tactic more difficult. How do you call community leaders to ask everyone to go home if you can't identify the community? From the other direction, how do you negotiate with authority if you can't identify a community?

(This is of course the final problem with the Big Society - its only organising principle is that it's a society and apparently it's big.)

I wonder if a lot of the violence was driven by the fact anyone could turn up, and therefore the only way to demonstrate that you really were one of the gang rather than a do-gooder or a fink or just some random spectator was to do something obviously illegal.

Also, did this kind of riot drop in between the classic modes of British policing? If someone commits a crime, there's investigative policing, if it's the right kind of crime and the right kind of victim. If the Chartists are marching on Westminster, line up on Westminster Bridge with shields and big sticks. And of course there's community policing if there's time between the other two for some cups of tea and old ladies, etc.

Investigation was rather irrelevant while it was going on, although of course it's not any more. And the heavy mob couldn't draw a shield wall around every shop in London. Neither could they find enough bodies to kettle every group of rioters, or find enough rioters in one place to kettle. It does look like the December 2010 student riots were a tactical learning-experience for a lot of people.

Finally, those BlackBerries. Not much to say here, except that the most important feature involved seems to have been the fact that BBM is multicast. You can message groups rather than only individuals. There are apps that let you emulate this with SMS, although the reply will only go to you.

As a general rule, BlackBerry Enterprise Server traffic should be hard to do anything to as the server, typically hosted by an organisation for its own purposes, generates its encryption keys when it's set up. It's not anything RIM or your operator has to know about. But this is of limited relevance - plenty of people run their own mail servers, but I've never heard of anyone who self hosts BlackBerry. The BlackBerry Internet Service, which is hosted by operators, certainly can be monitored by the operator as they own the server. UK operators would be covered by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and might have to hand over logs from the BIS servers.

I don't know, however, if the BIS machine archives the content of what passes through it (which isn't required by RIPA anyway). Obviously, the traffic-analysis data of who messages who and when is potentially revealing.

From a network point of view, though, I doubt if snooping on the traffic in transit would be very useful. You'd know that someone was using a BlackBerry, as it would be opening Packet Data Profile connections through the network and querying the BlackBerry network DNS. But as they monitor messaging all the time, that isn't very useful information. Certainly nothing as useful as the BIS server log.

Who's got the logs?

2011-08-01T15:05:00.001+01:00

Ah! Found it: although Yates told the House he had the mobile operators inform the hacked, and named Vodafone and Orange, he didn't. Specifically, Orange identified about 45 victims but didn't tell anyone. Vodafone identified 40 and only told a few who were considered VIPs. T-Mobile UK claims not to have found any. 3UK isn't mentioned. Only O2 is known to have informed all of theirs without waiting to be asked. I therefore presume that the operator that has logged all the lawful intercept requests back to 2009 is O2, although I don't have any further evidence for this deduction.

taliban mobile!

2011-07-31T17:29:00.001+01:00

Did you know ISAF has been carrying out air missions to destroy Taliban radio towers? You do now, thanks to Thomas Wiegold's blog. Specifically, Task Force Palehorse includes UAE Apache Longbow attack helicopters and American Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopters, plus (according to comments) German ELINT specialists. And they go out and identify Taliban radio networks, and kill them.

There's much interesting stuff for German-speakers in comments, notably that the technologies include old fashioned VHF, pirate GSM, and possibly other systems as well, that the relays are often solar-powered, and that the Taliban are significant users of IMSI-catchers - fake GSM/UMTS base stations used to monitor mobile phone activity.

So are the Germans, in order to prevent leakage from their own camps. The British have been using ruggedised, highly portable small cells for some time to stop soldiers using the Afghan GSM networks, for fear both of security leaks and also that (as in Iraq) their relatives in the UK might get nasty phone calls.

things that didn't happen: Ken Grange edition

2011-07-31T17:05:00.001+01:00

I have just been reading the catalogue for the Design Museum's exhibition on Kenneth Grange. An interesting thought - he makes the very good point that the problem with both the matt-black Apple laptops and the iDevices is that they soak up oil and fingerprints and human grease in general. This is of course the case of all touchscreens - they're reflective surfaces, so the filth shows, and people touch them. When I lived in Coop Himmelb(l)au's Gasometer B development the management had placed some tablet PCs (it was just being a thing then) around the public spaces for people to fiddle with. Of course, the screens were practically black with gunk all the time.

As far as the matt black element goes, apparently he copied an idea from Braun and had the mouldings spun in a drum with walnut shells, slightly roughing up the texture and letting the walnut oil soak in, excluding anything else from going the same way. Not something to try with the touch screen, obviously.

So, I wonder, what would a post-iPhone user interface pattern be like? Also, oddly enough, in all his myriad projects over the years, Grange has never done a mobile phone. He did some really amazing designs for Reuters trader terminals, so much so that a casemod almost seems justified. But Psion in the 1980s, Ericsson or Motorola in the 1990s, or Nokia in the 2000s never apparently asked. It would probably have had at least one oversized orange GO button - a constant in his work.

Although perhaps not an extra large number 5.

don't listen to the doctor, dear. ignore him, then listen to the real doctor

2011-07-31T16:38:00.000+01:00

I have to say the only surprise I found in this story was that the list of conditions GPs failed to diagnose didn't include death. "I prescribed Mr. Smith antibiotics and told him to come back in a week's time, but for some reason he wouldn't leave the surgery. Thwack...Fore! I wonder if he's still there? Anyway, hurry up, got to get back to the clubhouse in time for my afternoon pethidine bolus. Bottoms up!"

Of course, that would actually be caught by the typical diagnostic protocol the article describes - give'em a broad spectrum antibiotic, and tell'em to come back in a week. If they come back, refer'em if they insist, if they don't, repeat the prescription. If they don't come back, job done...one way or another.

This is why I stopped reading Dr. Crippen's blog - it was OK as far as it went, but after that point it turned into the Internet wing of the British Medical Association's golf committee.

wer A sagt muss auch B sagen

2011-07-31T16:17:00.000+01:00

In the light of the last post, don't forget Will Lewis's role at the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian wasn't willing to say that the whole affair of the leaked Vince Cable tapes sounded much more like the actions of someone trying to sabotage opposition to the BSkyB takeover than someone trying to spoil the Torygraph's fun, but oddly enough the FT did. Of course it's a BOGOF - there'd be some fun in nicking the scoop off the competition, but it probably did the story no end of good that it broke on the BBC and avoided being just another street of shame quarrel.

And I would really like to know how many other ex-NI press officers have been installed in government. The type case here is Wallis, who managed to be with NI, the Met, and the Tories, and who was specifically hired to push the Met's line with No.10. I can't emphasise that enough - it combines the role of the Met and ACPO as an independent political force with than of NI and meant that the police and the prime minister communicated via Murdoch's man.

I think the priority is still the vetting issue, then Wallis and the wider network, and the telecoms surveillance issue. A question: I seem to have mislaid a link to a news story concerning the different networks' respective behaviour in terms of user notification. At least one operator didn't bother to do any on the grounds the police hadn't given them a full list, which of course they didn't ask for.

I also still think a long-range target has to be the football rights.

the giant squid meets the criminal octopus as the last Tory sings his swan song

2011-07-31T14:41:00.001+01:00

Peter Oborne's piece on post-Murdoch Britain is interesting, although mostly for the sheer otherness of his thinking. He's at least got the good sense or moral minima required to end up on the right side of the debate, but he gets there through some truly odd reasoning. Can anyone remember even one instance when any of the News International outlets ever ran an editorial arguing that a republican form of government was desirable? But he ascribes "a powerful republican agenda" to Rupert Murdoch.

I'd argue that Murdoch has a powerful Republican agenda, as in the American political party, but not a republican one. The only newspaper that professes republicanism is the Guardian, or perhaps the Andersonstown News, which isn't the same kind of republicanism and is interested in a different republic. The only way I can get sense out of it is to assume that he's talking about Australia, which seems a bit of a distant concern. Further, David Miliband knows Polly Toynbee socially, and we're asked to believe that this is worth mentioning in the same breath as the whole Murdoch system of government, as he describes it. Also, he seems to think Michael Gove, Eurabia-pushing ex-News International executive, is still a credible cabinet minister.

It's like reading a leader written by a giant squid. It's intelligence. But not as we know it.

Of course, he's right that what has been revealed is a system, a sort of parallel government. One thing Oborne is extremely unlikely to ever say is that there was a qualitative shift in the late 2000s in how it worked, although I think he's vaguely aware of it.

Labour leaders in the 1990s reacted to the power of the Murdoch system by trying to accommodate themselves to it. This is as good a way as any to define "The Project" - an effort to accommodate the party to the realities of the Murdoch system and to manage a transactional, bargaining relationship with it. The key figures in this effort - Peter Mandelson, Jonathan Powell, and Alistair Campbell - prided themselves precisely on their ability to manage the relationship, to negotiate a degree of freedom of action. The terms of business between NI and Labour can easily be criticised - would a Martian journalist dropped on a street corner between 1997 and 2007 have noticed that the Sun supposedly "supported Labour"? I think not. The paper didn't actually call for a vote against, but it did pour abuse on Labour ministers, opposed basically all its policies except invading Iraq, and offered the Tories a sympathetic hearing.

By the end of the Blair era, this relationship was strained - the original breakdown might be traced to Iraq, in fact, and the exit of Alistair Campbell from No.10. In fact, what was under way was more fundamental than that. We might call it The Project 2.0.

This would involve the Conservatives rather than Labour, and critically would go much further than the original Project. Rather than a transactional, bargaining relationship with the Tories, mediated by powerful media managers belonging to the party, the Project 2.0 foresaw something very different. Whereas Alistair Campbell's role was as "Emily" Blair's bulldog, guarding the gate at the interface between the prime minister's office and the press, alternately wagging and barking as seemed expedient, this new project would integrate News International's men into the machinery of government.

Part of the legacy the original Project was the enlarged status of the government's press officers at every level. In fact, it is unfair to blame this on New Labour. It is a great strategic trend that has been going for many years. Sir Bernard Ingham is not, I think, remembered for presenting an even-handed account of the Thatcher government's record or acting with total equanimity towards critics and sycophants alike. Sir Gerald Kaufman, Joe Haines, Philip De Zueleuta - they all served their prime ministers in the dark art of propaganda and earned a reputation of sinister efficiency and great influence. Arguably, this goes all the way back to Lloyd George's secretariat. Labour's innovation was to bring in outsider professionals, and much else was up to the force of personality of those involved.

Another important trend was their integration with the core executive, the hard centre of the state centred around the prime minister, the Cabinet Office, the Treasury, the intelligence services, and the Ministry of Defence. At the top level, these strands all wind together in the prime minister's office (which, I notice, has grown a domain name, pmo.gov.uk, recently). As a result, the prime minister's official spokesman now has a sort of parallel management-information system that runs into the departments via their press officers, in much the same way the Treasury's MIS extends into the departments through the system of public-service agreements. The two phenomena are quite closely linked, in fact - departments' priorities are fixed through the comprehensive spending round and the PSAs, with reference to the political/press strategy defined on the PMOS's network. Then, their success or failure is monitored via the Treasury reporting system and the No.10 policy unit, and the political response to it coordinated through the PMOS net.

One Blairite contribution to this which is unique was its militarisation. The Blair years turned out to be ones of war, and the emerging press-management network was heavily used in support of the wars, with the result that intelligence was increasingly redistributed from the intelligence-administrative complex into the press-political management system. At the same time, the military's public affairs function was integrated into the system, with a common line for the civilian and uniformed spokesmen. Alistair Campbell's invention of the Coalition Information Centre (a still under-reported creation) gave this an international dimension.

The Project 2.0 consists, then, of reversing the process. Rather than the politicians selecting press managers to control the interfaces between the political management network and the media, News International selected them and made recommendations to politicians, who incorporated them into key locations in the system - the very top at No.10, the Metropolitan Police, ACPO, and to be frank, who knows where else? We know that George Osborne recommended Andy Coulson to David Cameron, and that Rebekah Brooks thinks she recommended him to Osborne. Dick Fedorcio claims he can't remember who recommended Neil Wallis to him, but he did admit that the motivation was to influence No.10 Downing Street, rather than to influence the press. (And who reckons Tom Watson wouldn't have asked him if Brooks made the recommendation if he didn't know the answer?)

Where Campbell bargained with NI and Mandelson cooperated with them, the situation in May, 2010 was more like Field-Marshal Montgomery's remark that "I banned all talk of Army Co-Operation. There were not two plans, Army and Air, but one, Army-Air. When you are one entity you cannot cooperate."

Now, Oborne is as I said, sort of aware of all this. A few weeks ago he surfaced the fact that there is an identifiable Murdoch caucus in the Tory Party, around George Osborne and Michael Gove, opposed to a Telegraph one. It is common knowledge that David Cameron's first priority as Tory leader was to short-circuit the party's internal procedures in order to flush in a lot more new candidates, the so-called A-list. One wonders if the list was pre-approved. And there seems to be an identifiable historical break point - when Michael Howard ran for prime minister in 2005, he brought in a pretty ugly character to run a pretty ugly campaign, Lynton Crosby, but at least he appears to have picked him himself.

My final question, then - with the dilution of the Tory Party with new candidates, and the integration of Murdoch's political officers into key nodes, does David Cameron actually exist politically? Is he, y'know, a thing? What fuckery is this?

as for that bastard Hopi Wegg-Prosser, though...

2011-07-30T19:29:00.000+01:00

A comment pulls me up for inventing the Labour statesman "Nye Bevin". Whoops. But this gave me an idea. Labour mashups! Take the front half of one significant socialist and match it with the back half of another, and see what you get. For example, Harold Cripps is obviously a 1960s trade union leader. Tony Brown, for his part, was clearly a slightly louche early 80s radical London borough councillor, always as ready with a firebrand speech against the evils of patriarchy as he was with a crafty hand on the thigh at the Labour club afterwards.

To mark the death of Nye Bevin, we have a special guest contribution from Alistair Rusbridger, who I'm sure is familiar to you all and who knew him well.

Nye Bevin, of course, was one of the towering figures of the century, as TGWU general secretary, as Minister of Labour and National Service in the Churchill coalition and personnel chief of the wartime command economy, as architect of the NHS, and as Foreign Secretary. He combined the roles of a tribune of the people and a master bureaucrat with a facility few will ever equal.

A product of his times, he lived the age of the managerial revolution and the mass organisation. We remember his role as an unlikely ally of Lord Beaverbrook's Ministry of Aircraft Production in getting the TUC's agreement to dilution and the entry of women on the shop floor. His name is remembered in the phrase "Bevin Boys". Who else would have created the third largest employer in the world in the rationed, financially exhausted Britain of 1948? His remark that he wanted the clang of a dropped bedpan to echo through Whitehall is now deeply unfashionable in an age of New Public Management and the Big Society. But, as Winston Fisher said of Jacky Churchill, he made the vast organisations he headed hum like a great ship at its highest speed. As his goggling and awestruck permanent secretary at the Foreign Office said, there were only two jobs in the department he could have had - doorman, or foreign secretary.

Within the Labour Movement's internal politics, he played an ambiguous but always vital role. On the one hand, he spoke from Tredegar mountain and said "This is my truth: tell me yours". On the other hand, he said, socialism was what a Labour government did, taking a sort of brutalist approach. The point was to control the government, from which civil service line management could deliver a better society. He could always be criticised from the Left as a man of government, and from the Right as always having one foot at the rostrum. But, in fairness, that control of Whitehall was always founded in the bedrock of working-class organising, where he'd started as a dockers' shop steward in South Wales all those years before.

Few people will contest his achievements during the Second World War or as Health Secretary. His tenure of the Foreign Office, however, is much more controversial to this day. As a passionate Atlanticist, he offended plenty of people in the Labour Movement with his commitment to NATO, the transatlantic alliance directed at the Soviet Union he helped to create. Less well-known beyond specialists is his concurrent contribution to the beginnings of European integration, through projects such as the OEEC, set up to manage the distribution of Marshall Aid, something he also had a major role in bringing about.

He can be accused with justice of not practising exactly what he preached here - on the platform, he was loudly suspicious of the Same Old Gang behind European economic integration while working hard to bring it about in the corridors of King Charles Street. Similarly, he played to the pacifist strand in Labour while quietly chairing the Cabinet committee that managed the British Bomb project. (Yet another vast bureaucratic project.) His anti-communism was ferocious, born of years fighting for power in the union hierarchy with them. Unlike many of his intellectual critics, though, he was never deluded about the totalitarian nature of Stalinism.

His foreign policy was even more controversial, if that is possible, outside Europe. It fell to him to manage the UK's exit from India and Palestine and the agonising economic negotiations with the United States, as well as the beginnings of the Cold War. Given the circumstances, it is fair to say he avoided most of the possible disasters. Like many of his peers, he saw the key issue as the fight to maintain any distinctive British independence from the Americans.

trumpet

2011-07-24T00:33:00.000+01:00

This blog raised the question of Coulson's vetting. It demanded that Dick Fedorcio be called in. It demanded an audit of telecoms intercept logs.

So here's another question. A timetable for defence vetting processes can be found here. A request for developed vetting, i.e. a top secret clearance, or what Andy Coulson was meant to be getting when he quit, takes 70 days under normal conditions.

Now, we might want to know who told the papers everything was great to start with. Eh.

Anyway, if he was "undergoing vetting" in January as a result of a decision in November as the official line says, we can rule out the 30 day expedited process. There are too many days. But a date in the middle of November would hit off Coulson's resignation perfectly.

he's making a list, he's checking it twice...

2011-07-24T00:09:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd put together a list of things that upshot from the Murdoch hearings and immediately afterwards.

NI was still paying Mulcaire
Yates was told not to tell Cameron by Ed Llewellyn
James Murdoch says it was all others' fault, i.e. Hinton and Brooks
Rebekah Brooks says George Osborne recommended Coulson
10 out of 45 Met press officers (Fedorcinos?) were ex-NI
Dick Fedorcio knew nothing..he says
He can't say who recommended Wallis
He blames Yates for things clearly in his responsibility
He denies agreeing to Yates or Hayman meetingNI
Neil Wallis worked for the Tories
He may have been paid by NI
He reported back to NI from the Met
Alex Marunchak worked for the Met
Alex Marunchak is a difficult subject for Rupert Murdoch personally
David Cameron sort-of admitted being lobbied about BSkyB
Andy Coulson wasn't really vetted
David Cameron won't say if Control Risks vetted him for the purely Tory job
Neville Thurbeck was a police informer
Who had access to the Police National Computer
Nick Raynsford MP claimed that a "senior officer in government service" was spied on
Yates got Wallis's daughter a job
Wallis was hired because he could influence No.10 and Andy Coulson
There will be an audit of lawful-intercept logs.

Some of those have moved on. Just to move things on further, it looks like Wallis was a walking Venn diagram - overlapping the Met, News International, the Conservative Party, and No.10 Downing Street. Dick "Scorchio" Fedorcio seems to have thought he was needed to exert influence over No.10.

You could mistake this for a parallel structure of power.

against the PCC, for the Competition Commission

2011-07-16T11:37:00.000+01:00

I expect there's going to be a hell of a lot of ink spilled in the next few months about different schemes for "regulating the press", how the very idea is an abomination and this has nothing to do with my column in some Murdoch rag, how this outrageous behaviour makes it utterly necessary for journalists to have to justify themselves to some sort of horrible post-Hutton BBC quangocracy, yadda yadda.

My position is this. Press regulatory bodies will probably be very much like "regulators" of all the kinds that have sprung up since the privatisation era. That is to say, they'll either be impossibly bureaucratic or pathetically complicit or both. The problem with regulators, especially the post-80s, all mates together in an orderly market sort, is that they are a weak-sauce compromise.

Once you create a regulator, you're doing two things: accepting that the forces of the market aren't going to fix your problem, and withdrawing the forces of democracy in favour of the forces of bureaucracy. Compare the Home Affairs Committee's vicious and pointed quizzing of Andy Hayman to, well, anything the IPCC ever gets up to. Nye Bevin's crack about dropped bedpans echoing through the halls of Westminster was very much to the point. Everyone moans about ministerial line management, but when did you last vote for the OFCOM Director-General?

There's a coda to this - over time, if you leave it to the departmental government, the temptation to fiddle and to indulge in recreational reorganisation will get progressively stronger. My point, however, is that very often regulatory bodies function either as a veiled form of ministerial control or else as a flak-catcher protecting the powerful from public scrutiny.

In this case, I would argue that any regulatory committee will be either complicit or floppy if it has to face up to something like News International. The problem is not one of processing complaints more efficiency, although that would of course be nice. It is one of power and only changing the realities of power will fix it.

The trust must go. We don't need more quangology. We need a genuinely competitive and diverse media market. We need to break the bastards up and set the rules to prevent them reforming. And the agency to do this is the Competition Commission, one of the oldest regulators and one of the few that has the taste of saying "No". But it is absolutely necessary to set its terms of reference so that it will have no choice but to break up the trusts. That means changing the law.

Vaz discovers the network

2011-07-15T23:48:00.002+01:00

Dick Fedorcio is taking a little trip to Westminster to be quizzed. By Keith Vaz's committee. How times change - Keith Vaz as the standard bearer of public integrity. It's got to be more convincing to get your second chance after 10 years in the wilderness though.

Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed that the "#AskEdM" hashtag is a shamelessly obvious exercise in trolling? Think about it - how many people who aren't either political obsessives following up a story or just looking for a fight, or else full-time rightwing howler monkeys, ever hang out in Paul Staines's comments threads with all the coup fantasies and racebaiting and ZaNuLiebour and EUSSR? Nobody. Really.

So why not lure the torysphere out in the open, somewhere the majority can actually see them behaving in this horrible way? Like Twitter.

And if they notice it, they'll get angry and look an even more repellent herd of shit-smeared zombies. It's brilliant. As a side benefit, if Edelmans have managed to rig some network of semiautomated talking-points distribution bots, they're bound to show up there so they can be identified. And if you were looking for a list of horrible spamming arsewits, Mike Gigglers trying to be hipsters but stuck at the brown-dwarf stage, ZaNuLiebour dittoheads, and other membrane fauna...well, here's your chance to populate your blacklist. I added dozens. It was a lot of fun.

The only annoying thing is that as far as I know, although Twitter has "lists" that let you group other users and subscribe to their collected output (yeah, like XMPP Collection Nodes) it doesn't have the inverse operation. So you can't easily replicate the Team Cymru Bogons BGP feed and automate the process, even if we've already got a serviceable darknet.

Elsewhere, I put together a quick network diagram of the top Met-NI interactions. Nothing very surprising except that the commissioner is always sought after, and that John Yates appears to have an independent following with them (surprise!). Of course, your man Dick was probably at all the meetings in this chart.

Finally, some music.

You (Feat. Nina Sky) - Creep (Hannah Holland Remix) by Hannah Holland

how to clean out a sheep dip

2011-07-15T23:01:00.000+01:00

Let's talk sheep dip. No, not drinking the stuff.

Spooks have another couple of uses for the word. One means to fix the admin when you borrow people or equipment from the real world. Another, and the one we're interested in, is to arrange things so it's not obvious to other people how you got hold of information. Typically, if you have a secret source of information you want it to stay secret. But there's no point having the secret source if you don't act on it. All the fun of secrets is telling other people about them, after all.

So you've got a problem - how do I make use of the secret without letting slip the bigger secret of how I got it? The answer is sheepdipping.

Here's a second world war example. As basically everyone knows, the British had broken the Germans' primary radio cipher, taking advantage of work Poland and France had begun earlier and eventually creating an industrial system to pull in radio traffic, break it, translate it into English, analyse it, and distribute reports based on it. In the process, Bletchley Park as good as invented the computer. It was a priceless source of information. So much so that serious precautions were needed to avoid giving the game away.

The answer was to make sure that you found out the information you already had from the code break before you did anything about it. So, once the ships and soldiers were already on the move, a reconnaissance plane would go out or a patrol would be pushed forward to look in exactly the right place. As well as disguising the real intelligence source, this was also an opportunity to check that the source was right.

So why are we indulging in ENIGMA kitsch? Well. The Sun denied vehemently that it got access to the medical records of Gordon Brown's son. Actually it didn't, quite. It denied that they were the source of the story they printed, and hid behind the PCC about the tax files and the bank account and his lawyer's notes and God knows what else. But they found somebody who says he told them all about Brown's son out of the goodness of his heart. As God will be his judge. Yeah, he really said that. Everyone say "Awww."

He really said it; it's in the Sun. Anyway, he swore an affidavit.

Here's the sheep dip, though. Imagine if you're a sweaty 'bloid hack who's just been listening to the chancellor's voicemail. But, unlike the rest of them, you read books. What are you going to do? Take the risk of using the illegal secret surveillance as your source? What if some bastard with a Web site and a grudge goes through years and years of stories and pulls all the ones that are single sourced to conversations on the phone? You're smarter than that.

So, you look up somebody who might be able to give you the story you've already got. This shouldn't be that hard. You've already got more than enough information. That way, you're covered. And you get to check the possibility that the whole thing is a nightmarish trap. And there's a chance that they might provide some more juicy details if correctly handled.

The sheep goes into the dip, and comes out cleansed of its ticks and blowflies and worrisome legal problems, ready to be fattened up, shorn of its valuable fleece, and finally roasted and served with red-top jelly.

Alternatively, a slightly less underhand version. So this bloke walks into a bar. No.

So this bloke walks into a newspaper office. And he says to the barman...I've got this incredible story about Gordon Brown's sick kid because mine's as sick and I go to the same support group or clinic or whatnot. And you punch the conniving, insensitive Nosey Parker in the mouth and throw him out in the street. Right? I mean, who behaves like that?

No. This is a newspaper, dammit. You're not going to turn a chance like this away. But there's a problem. If his motives really are as nice as he makes out, what's he doing hanging around the News International building? Perhaps it's all bullshit. He's taking you for a ride. Newspapers attract enough crazies as it is; look at the comments threads. Throw around money for stories into the bargain and you're going to be beating them off with a side-handled baton, like the printers' union pickets. It's Brown's kid because he knows that will get your attention. Hey, you'd prefer Ulrika Jonsson's. But he's probably crazy and crazy people like politicians.

So you need to check on him. Quick. And because you've got a human source, you don't need to mention whatever you do to check up in the final story. Into the dip goes the sheep. Baa.

In my life I've had the pleasure of cleaning out not just a sheepdip but a cattle dip. It's a long job. My advice is to drain off as much liquid as possible - keep checking the filter on the firepump - and then pressure-blast it with boiling steam. Accept no substitutes, and watch your feet.

a city wired for sound

2011-07-13T13:03:00.001+01:00

Am I right in thinking that Andy Hayman's testimony yesterday fingered Met press chief Dick Fedorcio? Hayman admitted he'd regularly had dinner with News International executives while he was meant to be investigating them. He mentioned that he had done this in the company of the head of communications of the Met, presumably with his approval, although Hayman was also acting in his capacity as ACPO media lead.

Fedorcio has had the same job since 1997. He was named by Nick Davies as having been present in the meeting where the Met demanded to know why Dave Cook was being followed by News International private detectives, and apparently intervened with senior police officers to get them to go easy on NI. Surely the guy in charge of police-press-political relations is a key figure in a scandal that's all about relations between the press, the police, and politics?

Like the key News International men, Alex Marunchak and Greg Miskiw, there's no sign of him. The Home Affairs committee, and indeed anyone else who wants the truth about this, must call Fedorcio without delay. Oh, and is Greg Miskiw in the UK?

Second point. Yesterday's New York Times claims that Miskiw and others on the NOTW were able to locate mobile phones by paying £500 a shot to a corrupt police officer. That is to say, this policeman had access to the lawful intercept systems that are part of all GSM and UMTS cellular networks, or at least he could task people who did. ETSI Specification 01.33 defines this as a standard element of all GSM networks and the corresponding 3GPP TS 33.106 does so for UMTS ones.

If this is so, they could certainly also get pen-register information - lists of calls to and from given phone numbers - and even tap the calls themselves.

This is a massive violation of the UK's critical national infrastructure security, of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and of the Data Protection Act. News International, their police contact, and the police force responsible (not necessarily the Met) should all be prosecuted.

There is an urgent need to audit the lawful interception systems' logs, among other things to find out if there are other unauthorised users out there. International standards foresee a detailed audit trail as part of these systems in order to preserve the legal chain-of-evidence. If the Interception Request message was submitted in proper form from the police to the telcos, the operators are legally in the clear, but if I was in charge of their network security I'd suspend processing the requests until such an audit was carried out as we now know that an unknown but significant percentage of them are illegal.

Thank fuck we didn't build that giant national ID card database.

Third point. Not that anyone will answer this, but were any of the Prime Minister's designated deputies for nuclear retaliation subject to illegal telecoms surveillance?

Fourth point. Circling back to the Defence Vetting Agency and Andy Coulson, the vetting procedure as described on the DVA Web site states that in some cases, the decision may be taken to issue a security clearance subject to risk management measures taken by the department involved. In these cases, the DVA will disclose information to the sponsoring department that it would usually keep confidential. Did they make such a recommendation to the Prime Minister's office, and if so, what was the information?

watch the skies, or rather, the airports

2011-07-10T23:41:00.000+01:00

FMCNL. We loves you. Rupert Murdoch arrived this morning at London Luton with Gulfstream G550 tail nr N89NC at 09:25 UTC.

It would be improper, I think, if N89NC was to depart again if there was any doubt at all as to who was on board. We don't know how many other people involved, other than Greg Miskiw, are Americans and therefore difficult to extradite.

slight return: coup plot

2011-07-10T17:55:00.000+01:00

As a relief from all the Murdoch/Met filth, what about a slight return to last week's coup plot? One of the oddest things about Technique of the Coup d'état is Malaparte's judgment of individuals. The most famous example is the chapter on Hitler, who he thinks was too soft. Seriously - he argued that he lacked a genuine revolutionary aim and was obsessed by remaining at least roughly within the law. He also predicted that there would be more and more tension between the SA and the broader Nazi Party as the first wanted a revolution and the second increasingly cozied up to the establishment.

This was good as far as it went, although most of his predictions can be put down to a case of where-you-sit-is-where-you-stand. Most of the people he interviewed were SA members. No surprises there - he was a fascist who swung to the Left, was fascinated by paramilitarism, and did we mention the slightly gay touch? Not surprisingly, therefore, he got the story on the SA being increasingly alienated from the Party. And his point about Hitler getting closer to the Establishment was a good one, although he expected the Establishment to swallow Hitler up rather than vice versa. Neither did he spot that in fact, Hitler would be quite capable of carrying out a violent coup once he was in charge, in order to get rid of the SA leaders and terrorise the Establishment.

Few people did, though.

Another odd personal assessment is his take on Lloyd George, who he glosses as a boring bourgeois moustache rather than the radically modern and excitingly crooked politician surrounded by spin doctors and intelligence-administrative technicians who was occasionally thought to be a potential putschist himself.

Owt else? Nothing much, except it strikes me that his ideal putschist is a sort of heavily armed flaneur.

plastic gangsters

2011-07-10T17:24:00.000+01:00

Something else, (via BorisWatch's Twitter feed): I didn't know Coulson lived so close to the infamous pub at the centre of the Southern Investigations case.

Come to think of it, News International people always liked to project a gangsterish image, ever since they moved to the East End, even though the choice of Wapping was because there was a big empty warehouse there. As a fashion-statement it's hardly unknown, of course. It's no surprise that both Dave Courtney and "Mad" Frankie Fraser managed to weave the whole affair into their mutual beef. The Sun did both of their post-criminal careers as celebrities a power of good. Am I right in thinking this coincided with Brooks and Coulson's rise through the NI hierarchy?

There's much more good stuff over here, including a photo...of the pub!.

But if we were making a film, it would be round about now that the plastic gangsters found themselves involved in something far more serious.

this is a security announcement

2011-07-10T17:03:00.000+01:00

There's been a little progress on some of the lines of inquiry in this post. First up, the question of whether or not Coulson was subjected to security vetting before joining No.10 Downing Street, and if so, what the Defence Vetting Agency said about him. This one took a relatively long time to spin up, but now it's landed in this piece.

Coulson, arrested by police on Friday over his role in the scandal, went on to be cleared by the security vetting team at Downing Street after three in-depth interviews about his professional and personal life. He was given "strap one" status, which allowed him the highest access to top-secret material.

So not only did they hire him, they gave him a Top Secret security clearance. Wow. Shoulda googled, DVA, shoulda googled. To say nothing of DontDateHimGirl, or perhaps that gangland website Jamie Kenny linked a while back. Here are the criteria for the different levels of vetting:

You will need a security check if, in the course of your work, you will regularly need access to SECRET and sometimes TOP SECRET (under supervision) information or assets. You will need developed vetting if your work will involve substantial unsupervised access to TOP SECRET information or assets, access to category 1 nuclear material or access to material from other countries and international organisations. If you don't think your job will involve accessing any of this information, you should check with your sponsor whether you need to be vetted.

A question. One of the reasons why this is important is that the prime minister's office receives, as well as Joint Intelligence Committee and Defence Intelligence assessments, a special ration of choice raw intelligence material from GCHQ. This exquisitely practised method of making the prime minister feel special comes in a file known as a BJ, and I'm damned if I'm not going to get a rise with this joke having invented it for my review of Richard Aldrich's history of British SIGINT as far back as last August.

I prefer to think of it as the world's most classified blog. But anyway, this is as secret as secret gets, and moreover it is signals intelligence and therefore covered by special security procedures. These procedures are standardised between the UK, US, and other allies who cooperate on signals intelligence in a document called IRSIG for International Regulations on Signals Intelligence. I'm pretty sure it doesn't contain the words "By all means show it to your dodgy spin doctor who hires people who plant drugs in cars during divorce cases, bribe coppers, and murder each other with axes in pub car parks". What do the Americans, to say nothing of the intelligence-bureaucratic complex right here, make of the whole sorry mess?

Moving swiftly on, what did Cameron know and when did he know it? What might have gone into the report? For the details, the DVA's "So you and your family are being grilled by faintly Pinter-esque security agents! Why didn't you decide to be, say, a quantity surveyor?" page is pretty illuminating although not quite as good as the official Subject's Information Leaflet (PDF).

The interview will cover most areas of your life. The vetting officer will build up
as complete a picture of you as is possible. We have to consider your loyalty, honesty and reliability, and whether you could be more at risk of bribery or blackmail than others. We will ask you about your wider family background (relationships and influences), past experiences, health, sexual relationships
and behaviour, drinking habits, experience of drug taking, financial affairs, general political views, hobbies, foreign travel and so on.

Apparently they didn't think to ask if Coulson was particularly likely to commit bribery. It looks like they'd have noticed if he was behind on his mortgage, if he was gay, if he'd ever so much as looked at a spliff, or if he'd been in a trade union - all the usual "well, somebody might blackmail you with the threat of having your security clearance withdrawn, so we have to make sure we withdraw the clearance, thus completing the circle and making the blackmail possible to begin with" stuff.

Another question. Who were Coulson's character references? Wouldn't it be hilarious if one was Rebekah Brooks, or one of the various politicians who claim to consider him a friend?

Snark. I once had to complete a security clearance form and the bit that stuck in my mind was that I had to swear that I would not try to overthrow parliamentary democracy by violent, subversive, or industrial means. I've managed to stay legit so far, although the temptation can be a bastard. But there was nothing about running a really shitty newspaper that had to hide from its readers behind high walls, steel fences, and CCTV cameras, nor about planting cocaine on unsuspecting women.

simple

2011-07-10T16:59:00.000+01:00

More progress from here. In comments, we have an explanation of the PoCA 1906 vs. BA 2010 issue. It's actually much simpler than I imagined. Basically, the old Act was in force at the time of the crime, and it's not clear whether the new one is operational yet in the absence of the Ministry of Justice's guidance.

fun with charts!

2011-07-08T17:41:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd reorganise the information in this Peter Oborne post.

I plotted the number of times each newspaper group reported on the phone-screwing case against the number of times they were caught paying for information. Even I was surprised when the R^2 correlation came out as 0.94 - a near perfect inverse relationship. The shittier your newspaper's general conduct, the less news it carried. If some twit at the Observer hadn't tripped over his cock, it would probably have been a linear relationship.

transmission belt

2011-07-08T16:36:00.001+01:00

I still can't get over this morning's Cameron press conference. The incredible thing, as I said, was the transition in what was respectable to discuss. The Guardian went the whole hog and brought up the whole ball of police corruption, and Michael Crick of the BBC pressed very hard on the question of the money. Well, you might have expected that from them.

But ITV News's reporter demanded to know whether News International might shred all the evidence, Adam Boulton from Sky News was the first to raise the BSkyB issue, the Times wanted to know about the content of Coulson's "assurances", and the Sun asked if Coulson had betrayed the prime minister. Even if the Sun guy couldn't actually bring himself to say "Andy Coulson", it was quite the showing - about one step from a Nile TV-style on-air apology.

Cameron's response was odd. At one point he said this:

Democracy is government by explanation and we need the media to explain what we're trying to do".

Apparently he believes the mass communications organisations are a transmission belt between the Party and the People. How bizarrely communist.

At one point, he started talking about transparency, government credit cards, and releases of government meetings data. This was frankly surreal; I wasn't expecting him to go all ScraperWiki.

He also went on endlessly about having given Coulson a second chance. So much so that this was evidently a talking-point he'd been intensely coached with. I do wonder what work this was meant to do. Was it just meant to sound patronisingly nice? Surely someone ought to ask if he's soft on crime. After all, while criminals are in prison, you know they aren't spying on the families of the war dead.

The Tory crisis plan seems to be in two parts:

1) Hide behind OFCOM and the police.

2) Counter-attack Miliband's press secretary Tom Baldwin, because he used to work for the Times.

If you take this at face value, it implies that all current or former News International journos are marked men. So, I asked Tim Montgomerie if he would join me in calling for the resignation of Michael Gove, former assistant editor of The Times and current Education Secretary. We need to get a grip, etc. He's not replied yet.

neeeews of the world

2011-07-08T15:57:00.000+01:00

In an effort to clear some of the NOTWFail stuff out of my mind, I thought I'd try to come up with some useful pointers for further investigation.

1. The Daniel Morgan/Southern Investigations line of inquiry

This is by far the most serious accusation, in every sense. It has police corruption, a murder, and the unusual sight of a police surveillance team following the NOTW's private detectives following Detective Chief Inspector David Cook around London as he tried to investigate them. (Isn't the movie going to be great?) And wasn't it an amazing moment this morning when Patrick "for once, bracingly chilly" Wintour brought it up in the No.10 press conference? It wasn't that long ago that only Fleet Street or London underworld obsessives knew the story and were unrespectable enough to talk about it.

Here's the Nick Davies version, which is nicely condensed. The whole affair has a strong taste of noir and this boils it down to a bitter, sticky, toxic, but powerfully caffeinated residue.

As editor of the News of the World Rebekah Brooks was confronted with evidence that her paper's resources had been used on behalf of two murder suspects to spy on the senior detective who was investigating their alleged crime.

Brooks was summoned to a meeting at Scotland Yard where she was told that one of her most senior journalists, Alex Marunchak, had apparently agreed to use photographers and vans leased to the paper to run surveillance on behalf of Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, two private investigators who were suspected of murdering their former partner, Daniel Morgan.

Note the involvement of Fillery, who was the investigating officer in the original case and took over Morgan's business afterwards, and who was later done for child porn offences. It's also worth noting that Marunchak was accused of being crooked in both directions - not only was he accused of bribing the police for information, he was accused of trousering a share of the money paid out, as a kickback in exchange for putting business their way.

If anyone needs investigating, surely he should be interviewed as soon as possible - and also Greg Miskiw, who comes up in the story. Compared to these two, the royal correspondent is a bit pathetic. Miskiw is an American citizen. Wouldn't it be embarrassing if he was to turn up in the States, protected against extradition?

2. The Met Press Office

So, who's the guy who briefs the News of the World? This blog asked the question repeatedly after the de Menezes and Forest Gate cases. Might that be Dick Fedorcio, the then Met press chief who insisted on going easy on the papers after they were caught spying on DCI David Cook?

On a related theme, Andy Hayman and Lord Macdonald's roles at NI are surely now completely unacceptable.

3. Andy Coulson's Background Check

This was also one of the things that made it a morning to remember. The prime minister explained that he had commissioned "a private company" - yet more private detectives! - to look into Coulson's career before hiring him. What company? Also, I'm not sure whether these enquiries were made when he joined the Tory press office or when he joined the Government.

Further, we know Alistair Campbell and other Government press officers had access to highly secret intelligence in the past. (Not a press officer, but the only politician outside the inner-cabinet who knew about Suez in advance was the then chief whip Ted Heath - it's a precedent for someone with a wholly political/propaganda role being clued in.) Obviously, the dossier was a bit of an outlier, but you'd be a fool to think that the practice of deep integration between government media staff and policymakers had vanished.

So, did Coulson have an official security clearance? Was he ever positively-vetted? If so, what did the DVA's notoriously nosy investigators say about him?

4. The Missing Millions of Messages

Probably not much point covering this as Davies the scoop is after it already and if the "sources" bits are accurate, the dibble are very close to making arrests.

But. 500 GB of Murdochmail. Please. Please. Even just the headers.

Similarly, shouldn't we at last get the big list of the hacked?

5. How Hack Happen?

There's really very little hard information about this around. This piece in the Indy may be by Jemima Khan but that doesn't make it less interesting. It looks like they had found a way of forcing a password reset - so even if you changed the PIN, they could force it back to the default.

Stupid telcos' stupid voicemail implemented a password reset by setting the password to a well-known default value rather than issuing a new, randomly generated PIN like your bank or really, any random website's "forgotten password" link.

But I think we'd all like to know how they did it. Smart money is on the call centres - especially as there have been cases of mobile phone salesmen paying competitors' call centre staff for lists of people whose contracts are up for renewal and also of credit card numbers being sold. Khan names a company: "CTI".

6. Mechanics of Collapse

So what just happened? Was it the advertisers? Who went first? How much advertising did they pull?

Also, what happened with the distribution chain? Did, as rumoured, the newsagents stop ordering papers?

7. Compare and Contrast

Andy Coulson has been arrested under Section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906, as well as the Criminal Law Act 1977 for the phone-screwing (the NOTW term - after all it was hardly a hack). But this legislation was meant to have been superseded by the Bribery Act 2010. What's up?

One explanation would be that the Ministry of Justice has been working on official guidelines on how to interpret the new law, which encompasses many more forms of corruption than the old and provides for rather heavier penalties. Obviously, it wouldn't be ideal to choose the scandal of the century for the new text's very first run-out, so perhaps that's what's up.

However, there are some other issues here. The new Act provides for the seizure of ill-gotten gains and for the disqualification of company directors - the old one doesn't. And the old Act requires the approval of the Attorney-General for a prosecution; the new one gets rid of this and leaves it to the CPS as per usual.

Either way, it's enough that Coulson offered money. Whether they accepted it or whether they delivered is irrelevant - the crime is either offering or soliciting bribes.

corruption production, fag packets, protection rackets...

2011-07-07T17:26:00.001+01:00

It looks like rusty old thatcherbot Sir George Young announced a COI review of government advertising in the News of the World today. Fortunately, the Grauniad published a list of the top 50 NOTW advertisers by spending, and they're not on there, so you can be reassured the whole exercise was as pointless as everything else I've done since 2003.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

DEVIL WORSHIPPER.COM YOU SATANISED NOTW JOURNOS WILL ROT IN THE PIT OF HELL GOD HELP YOUR DEVIL RIDDEN SATANISED SOUL.

Elsewhere, in "credit where credit's due" news, it was Channel 4 news that first connected the dots of the Daniel Morgan/Southern Investigations case and the phone-hacking affair, although it was Tom Watson, presumably having been clued-in by the Grauniad, who broke the detail that they were actually working for the Morgan accused at the time.

Who controls Government ad spending?

2011-07-06T13:15:00.000+01:00

The Government's Central Office of Information, essentially its in-house advertising agency, spent £193 million on advertising in the financial year 2009-2010. The year before, it spent £211 million, making it the UK's single biggest media buying desk.

Is it appropriate for the Government to be spending taxpayers' money propping up the deeply discredited News of the World and its mates in Rebekah Brooks' Augean stables? In the light of 10 Downing St's creepily close relationship with News International - hiring workplace bully Andy Coulson as press spokesman, meeting Rebekah Brooks under MP-constituent privilege to avoid public scrutiny - doesn't this spending constitute a worryingly inappropriate use of public resources?

I don't think so. Perhaps you don't either. Or perhaps you're cool with it. Either way, perhaps the top management team at the COI should be aware of your opinion. Fortunately, the COI's top management team is on their website! So I've loaded it into a Google spreadsheet for convenient reference.

Obviously, there's the CEO, Mark Lund. But think like a civil servant. Who's in control? Mark Cross is in charge of "communications planning for all campaigns" so it looks like he's a key node. The org chart bears that out - might be nice to get Graham Hooper, director of client service and strategy, too.

Don't be abusive. They are public servants after all. But do be firm.

ISP

2011-07-03T19:03:00.001+01:00

OK, I'm completely sick of paying far too much to my shitty boutique ISP and BT for crackly steam voice and ADSL2+ that regularly provides between 400 and 600 Kbps downlink and 30-100 up. Right here in London. The SNR margin, attenuation, etc look normal and the modem trains to over 10Mbps, but there is reliably 1-3% packet loss so TCP never actually breaks out of slow-start mode.

I have some options.

Go to another ADSL op - well, the danger is that they'll just port the hank of copper flapping in the breeze, leaving me no better off, rather than replacing it completely.

Get BT FTTC service whether from BT or someone else - the problem is that our exchange was originally planned for the 31st December 2010 (at the time this was a horses' birthday, used for all areas where there was a planning permission fuck-up), and has since been sliding right. The last update pushed it from June 2011 to September 2011, although BT is claiming that "Lower Holloway" can have it now. But there is no such exchange.

Also, data bundle sizes for FTTC service are all incredibly stingy.

Bury the hatchet and get Virgin cable service - this eliminates the fritzing, bent-safety-pin mess that is BT's aerial plant around here, although some of the cable installs are worth seeing, and would probably get us much, much more bandwidth. Also, cable has been installed here before so they might let me off the install fee.

However, reading their tariff, I can't make any sense of what it actually costs. Everything's "FREE! for the first six months thereafter suchandsuch", or "NOW! MORE TELLY for just £5", or "FREE! with a Virgin Phone line for £12.99 a month". A Virgin Phone line? Is that a thing? On the principle that people who won't actually name a price are ipso facto lying, I'm not keen.

Also, no IPv6, daft adverts about "fibre optic broadband" when it's not, etc.

an update

2011-07-03T18:40:00.000+01:00

I may have to update the scoring in this post. I went to see this over the weekend - too late as it happened, but I floaked it - and I have to say that it's not the project of someone torying-out. Far too 1945-68 British reasonablepunk.

Reflections on a HOWTO

2011-07-03T18:31:00.001+01:00

I have been reading Curzio Malaparte's Technique of the Coup d'état this weekend. It's a fascinating document - the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. It was already fairly well-known at the time that Russia in 1917 really wasn't the environment Marxists imagined would lead to a revolution and that Lenin had essentially retconned the whole thing to provide for giving history a little push. Malaparte's unique contribution was to argue that it was more fundamental than that - the Bolshevik seizure of power could in reality have been carried out almost anywhere, for whatever reason. It wasn't a strategic or ideological question, but one of operational art and tactics.

So, what's this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important - you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything's shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don't, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings - get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.

Ideally, you do this by just floaking in through the front door as if you were in the railway station to catch a train rather than to seize the signalling centre. You'll probably need, once you've got control of the real instruments of power, to stage some sort of symbolic overthrow of the government, but this is really only in order to get the message across to everybody else. Then, induce whatever authority is meant to be in charge after the head of government has been incapacitated to legitimise your action after the fact. It doesn't matter much what state it's in - a pro tip is to keep the parliament but get rid of enough opposition members to rig the vote.

Bada bing, bada boom, you are now the dictator.

From the other side, Malaparte argues that the worst thing that can go wrong is a general strike. There's no point occupying key points if you can't make the machine work yourself, as you'll just be master of a lot of dark, cold buildings. The second worst thing that can go wrong is that you start to fall behind schedule. The whole trick relies on missing out as many people as possible, and the longer it takes, the more people have time to recover their orientation and get angry.

Interestingly, he comes up with something very like the 70s "historic compromise" concept in relation to this.

So you need either to get the support or at least the neutrality of the unions, or else render them unable to act in advance, which will mean fighting a civil war before you get to bring off the coup. And once you start, you've got to move quickly and keep moving.

Interestingly, he doesn't say much about how you're going to keep power once you've got it, if you can't rely on calling everyone out on strike. After all, two can play at this game. This is a weakness in the whole concept, and quite an illuminating one.

Malaparte was a deeply odd character, a border-nationalist of German origins, an Italian first world war hero, later a diplomat and journalist and a fascist of the first hour who went on to fall out with fascism and get locked up. This is probably why he is read at all now. Having been released, he reported the Eastern Front of 1941 for the Italian papers until he fell out with the Germans, covered the Finnish sector until something similar happened, ended up back in Italy in time to take part in his second Italian coup (he had already managed to invade Russia twice, once as an attaché with the Poles in 1920 and again with the Germans as a journo in 1941, and live to tell the tale), served in the pro-Allied Italian army, and claimed to have become a communist.

He was also an almost joyously unreliable source, a self-mythologising war junkie who made Hemingway look sensible, and to be frank, if he fell out with the fascists it wasn't because he was going soft or anything. I've read his dispatches from the Eastern Front (The Volga Rises in Europe) and found it hard to make out what the Germans objected to - obviously my standards aren't those of a Wehrmacht press officer, but there's a lot of hardboiled combat reporting, quite a bit of gratuitous fine writing, and nothing much critical of the war or Germany.

He also had an Ernst Röhm gay-fascist streak you could have landed a fleet of Savoia-Marchetti flying boats on, across it. Or at least his style did. The Volga... is just full of dashing blond Finnish officers and casually hunky, rough-trade Nazi recovery mechanics track-bashing in the Ukrainian sun, although there are a fair few fair country girls whose hearts and minds don't seem to need much winning in there as well. (By the time it all got stuck in a ditch outside Rostov-on-Don he'd long since been ghosted by the German spin doctors.)

Anyway, a fascinating, utterly mad, and often deeply creepy writer. Back to the steps of the telephone exchange.

I think his coup technique is quite telling. Fascism always had an odd central contradiction in that it insisted it believed in hardcore political realism but also in romantic activism. Power, and specifically either firepower or horsepower, was all that mattered, but with enough will it would always be possible to change the power realities. Marxists offered inevitability; fascists opportunity. Rapid shock action directed at the key installations will give us the state, and that will give us everything else. Speed, style, ruthlessness, and cheek are everything. It's the hope of audacity - get the right people together and a list of oil refineries, and everything is possible.

This may not sound very convincing, but it's certainly true that many, many coups have been carried out following this rough plan.

Malaparte makes a complex distinction between the seizure of power in a parliamentary state and just using the parliamentary institutions to go legit later. He's agin the first. I'm not so sure - two of the most successful coups of the 20th century were carried out in France, Petain's parliamentary coup and de Gaulle's rather less parliamentary one in 1958.

I think what's happening here is that his residual fascist is showing.

Another thing that runs through the book is the idea, very common in extreme politics since 1918, that the military tactics of the late first world war - infiltration, independent action, surprise attack - can just be ported straight into politics. Malaparte actually goes so far as to make this explicit. It's a great historical irony that the world experts of decentralised command were the Prussians, of course.

As always, though, it all makes for great tactics but lousy strategy.