Am I right in understanding the legal comments in the NYT piece to mean that the only way to get the police to disgorge whether or not your phone was monitored is to sue the Screws and serve a notice on the Yard for disclosure of relevant documents?
It seems that the primary barrier to getting an actual list together is that you have to sue the paper (or the police), and you can't sue the paper unless you have good cause to think you were spied upon. The police, for their part, have been managing the row down by only telling some of the people on the list that they were spied on. Unless you have some other evidence that you were spied on, you can't force the police to tell you if you're on the list.
All clear so far? Frankly, the 2,978 names weighted by the number of calls to each would be a truly classic document of our society.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
windows
This is interesting; Brazil is currently carrying out a national census. How? With 150,000 LG 750GM smartphones, and a canny bit of software. Photos are here. Things that struck me - the Americans decided to build a dedicated device and it cost like hell. The operating system on the 750GM, however, is MS Windows Mobile 6.5 - these days, Windows is the cheap and nasty option! But why not, if they're going cheap?
And one of the biggest problems for the enumerators is getting access to gated communities.
And one of the biggest problems for the enumerators is getting access to gated communities.
not stable, not principled
Elsewhere: we resume blogging at Stable & Principled.
Via Jamie Kenny, the Conspiracy's roundup. Here's the first comment:
Via Jamie Kenny, the Conspiracy's roundup. Here's the first comment:
so this is the biggest news me the day? Not the fact that the Guardian has endorsed David Miliband?
Review: Francis Spufford's Red Plenty
The Book
Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the "fifties' Soviet dream" but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties - the period from Khrushchev's consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in Czechoslovakia. This is a big book in a Russian way - it's always been a science-fiction prerogative to work with the vastness of space, the depth of history, and the wonder and terror of science and technology, but it's also been fairly common that science-fiction has had a bit of a problem with people. The characters who re-fire the S-IVB main engine for translunar injection, with nothing but a survival pack of big ideas for use on arrival, tend to vanish in the cosmos. At its best, this has given the genre a disturbingly calm new perspective - chuck out your literary chintz, the rocket equation will not be fooled. At worst, well, OH NO JOHN RINGO.
Red Plenty covers a lot of big ideas, some serious hardware and even more serious software, and great swaths of the Soviet Union. But you will also need to be prepared to meet quite a lot of difficult but rewarding people, rather like the geneticist character Zoya Vaynshtayn does at the party Leonid Kantorovich's students throw in Akademgorodok. In that sense, it has a genuinely Russian scale to it. The characters are a mixture of historical figures (as well as Kantorovich, you will spend some time in Nikita Khrushchev's interior monologue), pure fictions, and shadow characters for some historical ones. (Emil Shaidullin roughly represents Gorbachev's adviser Abel Aganbegyan; Vaynshtayn the historical geneticist Raissa Berg.)
So what are they up to?
Rebooting Science
Kantorovich, a central figure of the book, is remembered as the only Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize in economics, and the inventor of the mathematical technique of linear programming. As a character, he's a sort of Soviet Richard Feynman - an egghead and expert dancer and ladies' man, a collaborator on the nuclear bomb, and a lecturer so cantankerous his students make a myth of him. Politically, it's never clear if he's being deliberately provocative or completely naive, or perhaps whether the naivety is protective camouflage.
A major theme of the book is the re-creation of real science in the Soviet Union after the Stalinist era; biology has to start up afresh, economics has to do much the same, and everyone is working in a large degree of ignorance about the history of their fields. Some things simply can't be restarted - as Spufford points out, despite all the compulsory Marxism-Leninism, even genetics hadn't been erased as thoroughly as independent Marxist thought, and nobody in charge was willing to even think of opening that particular can of worms. On the other hand, the re-opening of economics as a field of study led to what the biologists would have called an adaptive radiation. Pioneers from engineering, maths, biology and physics began to lay spores in the new territory.
Comrades, let's optimise!
The new ecosystem was known as cybernetics, which was given a wider meaning than the same word was in the West. Kantorovich's significance in this is that his work provided both a theoretical framework and a critical technology - if the problem was to allocate the Soviet Union's economic resources optimally, could it be possible to solve this by considering the economy as a huge system of linear production functions, and then optimising the lot? The idea had been tried before, in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s, although without the same mathematical tools.
This is one of those events whose significance has changed a great deal over time. The question was whether it was possible for a planned economy to achieve an optimal allocation of resources. The socialists thought so; their critics held that it was impossible, and elaborated a set of criteria for optimal allocation very similar to the ones that are familiar as the standard assumptions in the economic theory of the firm in perfect competition. These days, it's often presented as if this was a knockout argument. From the firm in perfect competition, we hop to Hayek's idea that a market economy is better at making use of dispersed, implicit knowledge. Basta. We won.
The socialists weren't without intellectual originality. In fact, they did actually formulate a mathematical rebuttal to the firm in perfect competition - the Lange model, which demonstrated that optimal allocation was a possibility in theory. The Hayekian critique wasn't considered that great at the time - it was thought a much better point that the barrier to effective planning was a practical one, not a fundamental one. And even then, it was well known that the standard assumptions don't, actually, describe any known economy. It would simply be impossible to process all the data with the technology available. Even with the new tools of linear optimisation, who was going to do all those sums, especially as the process is an iterative rather than a formal one? Stalin and Hitler had their own way of solving these arguments - no man, no problem - and the whole thing ended up moot for some time.
Computers: a technical fix
But if it had been impossible to run the numbers with pen and paper in 1920, or with Hollerith machines and input-output tables in 1940, what about computers in 1960? Computers could blast through millions of iterations for hundreds of thousands of production processes in tens of thousands of supply chains; computers were only likely to get better at it, too. Red Plenty is about the moment when it seemed that the new territory of cybernetics was going to give rise to a synthesis between mathematics, market-socialist thinking, and computing that would replace GOSPLAN and deliver Economics II: True Communism.
After all, by the mid-60s it was known that the enormous system of equations could be broken down into its components, providing that the constraints in each sub-system were consistent with the others. If each production unit had its own computer, and the computers in each region or functional organisation were networked, and then the networks were....were internetworked? In fact, the military was already using big computer networks for its command-and-control systems, borrowing a lot of ideas from the US Air Force's SAGE; by 1964, there were plans for a huge national timesharing computer network, for both military and civilian use, as a horizontal system cutting across all the ministries and organisations. Every town would get a data centre.
The Economics Fairy Strikes Again
But, of course, it didn't happen. There's a good paper on the fate of the Soviet internetworkers here; Spufford has a fascinating document on the end of indigenous general-purpose computer development in the USSR here. Eventually, during the 1970s, it became increasingly obvious that the Soviet economy was not going to catch up with and outstrip anyone, let alone the United States, and the Austrian economists were retroactively crowned as having obviously been right all along, and given their own chance to fail. Spufford frames the story as a Russian fairytale; perhaps we can say that in fact, economics is the fairytale, or rather the fairy. Successive groups of intellectuals have fought their way through the stacks of books, past the ideological monsters, and eventually reached the fairy's grotto, to be granted their greatest wish. And it's always the same one - a chance to fail.
Why did the Soviet economists fail? Red Plenty gives a spectacular sweep through the Soviet economy as it actually was; from the workings of GOSPLAN, to the management of a viscose factory, to the world of semi-criminal side payments that actually handled the problems of day-to-day survival. In the 1990s, the descendants of one half of the socialist calculation debate swept into Russia as advisers paid by the Thatcher Foundation. Arriving on the fairy's magic cloud, they knew little of how the Soviet economy worked in practice, and duly got their opportunity to fail. The GOSPLAN officials of the 60s were reliant on data that was both completely unreliable, being the product of political bargaining more than anything else, and typically slightly less than a year out of date. And the market socialists were just as reliant on the management of Soviet industry for the production cost data they needed to make sure all those budget constraints really were consistent.
That's a technical explanation. But there are others available. Once communism was achieved the state was meant to wither away, and not many of the people in charge of it were at all keen on this as a pension plan. Without the power to intervene in the economy, what was the point of the Party, again? Also, what was that stuff about letting people connect computers to the telephone network and pass messages from factory to factory? Where will it end? The central government, the Politburo, GOSPLAN, STAVKA - they would never accept it.
Another, more radical, is that the eventual promise of Red Plenty was to render not so much the top of the pyramid, but the middle management, redundant. The rapid industrialisation had created a new management class who had every intention of getting rich and staying that way. (This was the Yugoslavs' take on the Soviet Union - the new class had simply taken over from the capitalists.) What would happen to their bonuses, and their prerogative to control the planners by telling them what they wanted to hear?
And yet another is that the whole project was flawed. Even if it was possible to discern the economy's underlying cost-structure, write the software, and optimise the whole thing, how would this system deal with dynamic economics? How would it allocate investment? How would it cope with technological change? It's no help to point out that, in fact, a lot of the questions are nowhere near being solved in any economics.
Soviet History
One view of the USSR's history is a succession of escape attempts. The NEP of the mid-20s, Nikolai Voznesensky's term at GOSPLAN in the 1940s, the Soviet 60s. Each saw a real effort to get away from a political economy which was in many ways a wild caricature of the Industrial Revolution, screwing down the labour share of income in order to boost capital investment and hence industrial output, answering any protest against this with the pistol of the state. As well as trying new economic ideas, they also saw surges of creativity in other fields. They were all crushed.
Arguably, you could say the same thing about perestroika. The people who signed the Alma-Ata protocol to arrange the end of the Soviet Union and the dismissal of Gorbachev were not, in fact, heroic dissidents, but rather career communist bureaucrats, some of whom went on to become their own little Stalins. Spufford says in the endnotes to Red Plenty that part of the book's aim is a prehistory of perestroika - one view of the characters is that many of them are developing into the people who will eventually transform the country in the 1980s. Green politics was an important strand in the great dissident wave, right across the USSR and Central Europe; Zoya Vaynshteyn's genetic research, which turns up some very unpleasant facts, is a case in point. Valentin, the programmer and cadre, is going to retain his self-image as a bohemian hacker into the future. Another Party figure in the book is the man who refuses to get used to violence, which will also turn out to be important in 1989.
Anyway, go read the damn book.
Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the "fifties' Soviet dream" but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties - the period from Khrushchev's consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in Czechoslovakia. This is a big book in a Russian way - it's always been a science-fiction prerogative to work with the vastness of space, the depth of history, and the wonder and terror of science and technology, but it's also been fairly common that science-fiction has had a bit of a problem with people. The characters who re-fire the S-IVB main engine for translunar injection, with nothing but a survival pack of big ideas for use on arrival, tend to vanish in the cosmos. At its best, this has given the genre a disturbingly calm new perspective - chuck out your literary chintz, the rocket equation will not be fooled. At worst, well, OH NO JOHN RINGO.
Red Plenty covers a lot of big ideas, some serious hardware and even more serious software, and great swaths of the Soviet Union. But you will also need to be prepared to meet quite a lot of difficult but rewarding people, rather like the geneticist character Zoya Vaynshtayn does at the party Leonid Kantorovich's students throw in Akademgorodok. In that sense, it has a genuinely Russian scale to it. The characters are a mixture of historical figures (as well as Kantorovich, you will spend some time in Nikita Khrushchev's interior monologue), pure fictions, and shadow characters for some historical ones. (Emil Shaidullin roughly represents Gorbachev's adviser Abel Aganbegyan; Vaynshtayn the historical geneticist Raissa Berg.)
So what are they up to?
Rebooting Science
Kantorovich, a central figure of the book, is remembered as the only Soviet citizen to win a Nobel Prize in economics, and the inventor of the mathematical technique of linear programming. As a character, he's a sort of Soviet Richard Feynman - an egghead and expert dancer and ladies' man, a collaborator on the nuclear bomb, and a lecturer so cantankerous his students make a myth of him. Politically, it's never clear if he's being deliberately provocative or completely naive, or perhaps whether the naivety is protective camouflage.
A major theme of the book is the re-creation of real science in the Soviet Union after the Stalinist era; biology has to start up afresh, economics has to do much the same, and everyone is working in a large degree of ignorance about the history of their fields. Some things simply can't be restarted - as Spufford points out, despite all the compulsory Marxism-Leninism, even genetics hadn't been erased as thoroughly as independent Marxist thought, and nobody in charge was willing to even think of opening that particular can of worms. On the other hand, the re-opening of economics as a field of study led to what the biologists would have called an adaptive radiation. Pioneers from engineering, maths, biology and physics began to lay spores in the new territory.
Comrades, let's optimise!
The new ecosystem was known as cybernetics, which was given a wider meaning than the same word was in the West. Kantorovich's significance in this is that his work provided both a theoretical framework and a critical technology - if the problem was to allocate the Soviet Union's economic resources optimally, could it be possible to solve this by considering the economy as a huge system of linear production functions, and then optimising the lot? The idea had been tried before, in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s, although without the same mathematical tools.
This is one of those events whose significance has changed a great deal over time. The question was whether it was possible for a planned economy to achieve an optimal allocation of resources. The socialists thought so; their critics held that it was impossible, and elaborated a set of criteria for optimal allocation very similar to the ones that are familiar as the standard assumptions in the economic theory of the firm in perfect competition. These days, it's often presented as if this was a knockout argument. From the firm in perfect competition, we hop to Hayek's idea that a market economy is better at making use of dispersed, implicit knowledge. Basta. We won.
The socialists weren't without intellectual originality. In fact, they did actually formulate a mathematical rebuttal to the firm in perfect competition - the Lange model, which demonstrated that optimal allocation was a possibility in theory. The Hayekian critique wasn't considered that great at the time - it was thought a much better point that the barrier to effective planning was a practical one, not a fundamental one. And even then, it was well known that the standard assumptions don't, actually, describe any known economy. It would simply be impossible to process all the data with the technology available. Even with the new tools of linear optimisation, who was going to do all those sums, especially as the process is an iterative rather than a formal one? Stalin and Hitler had their own way of solving these arguments - no man, no problem - and the whole thing ended up moot for some time.
Computers: a technical fix
But if it had been impossible to run the numbers with pen and paper in 1920, or with Hollerith machines and input-output tables in 1940, what about computers in 1960? Computers could blast through millions of iterations for hundreds of thousands of production processes in tens of thousands of supply chains; computers were only likely to get better at it, too. Red Plenty is about the moment when it seemed that the new territory of cybernetics was going to give rise to a synthesis between mathematics, market-socialist thinking, and computing that would replace GOSPLAN and deliver Economics II: True Communism.
After all, by the mid-60s it was known that the enormous system of equations could be broken down into its components, providing that the constraints in each sub-system were consistent with the others. If each production unit had its own computer, and the computers in each region or functional organisation were networked, and then the networks were....were internetworked? In fact, the military was already using big computer networks for its command-and-control systems, borrowing a lot of ideas from the US Air Force's SAGE; by 1964, there were plans for a huge national timesharing computer network, for both military and civilian use, as a horizontal system cutting across all the ministries and organisations. Every town would get a data centre.
The Economics Fairy Strikes Again
But, of course, it didn't happen. There's a good paper on the fate of the Soviet internetworkers here; Spufford has a fascinating document on the end of indigenous general-purpose computer development in the USSR here. Eventually, during the 1970s, it became increasingly obvious that the Soviet economy was not going to catch up with and outstrip anyone, let alone the United States, and the Austrian economists were retroactively crowned as having obviously been right all along, and given their own chance to fail. Spufford frames the story as a Russian fairytale; perhaps we can say that in fact, economics is the fairytale, or rather the fairy. Successive groups of intellectuals have fought their way through the stacks of books, past the ideological monsters, and eventually reached the fairy's grotto, to be granted their greatest wish. And it's always the same one - a chance to fail.
Why did the Soviet economists fail? Red Plenty gives a spectacular sweep through the Soviet economy as it actually was; from the workings of GOSPLAN, to the management of a viscose factory, to the world of semi-criminal side payments that actually handled the problems of day-to-day survival. In the 1990s, the descendants of one half of the socialist calculation debate swept into Russia as advisers paid by the Thatcher Foundation. Arriving on the fairy's magic cloud, they knew little of how the Soviet economy worked in practice, and duly got their opportunity to fail. The GOSPLAN officials of the 60s were reliant on data that was both completely unreliable, being the product of political bargaining more than anything else, and typically slightly less than a year out of date. And the market socialists were just as reliant on the management of Soviet industry for the production cost data they needed to make sure all those budget constraints really were consistent.
That's a technical explanation. But there are others available. Once communism was achieved the state was meant to wither away, and not many of the people in charge of it were at all keen on this as a pension plan. Without the power to intervene in the economy, what was the point of the Party, again? Also, what was that stuff about letting people connect computers to the telephone network and pass messages from factory to factory? Where will it end? The central government, the Politburo, GOSPLAN, STAVKA - they would never accept it.
Another, more radical, is that the eventual promise of Red Plenty was to render not so much the top of the pyramid, but the middle management, redundant. The rapid industrialisation had created a new management class who had every intention of getting rich and staying that way. (This was the Yugoslavs' take on the Soviet Union - the new class had simply taken over from the capitalists.) What would happen to their bonuses, and their prerogative to control the planners by telling them what they wanted to hear?
And yet another is that the whole project was flawed. Even if it was possible to discern the economy's underlying cost-structure, write the software, and optimise the whole thing, how would this system deal with dynamic economics? How would it allocate investment? How would it cope with technological change? It's no help to point out that, in fact, a lot of the questions are nowhere near being solved in any economics.
Soviet History
One view of the USSR's history is a succession of escape attempts. The NEP of the mid-20s, Nikolai Voznesensky's term at GOSPLAN in the 1940s, the Soviet 60s. Each saw a real effort to get away from a political economy which was in many ways a wild caricature of the Industrial Revolution, screwing down the labour share of income in order to boost capital investment and hence industrial output, answering any protest against this with the pistol of the state. As well as trying new economic ideas, they also saw surges of creativity in other fields. They were all crushed.
Arguably, you could say the same thing about perestroika. The people who signed the Alma-Ata protocol to arrange the end of the Soviet Union and the dismissal of Gorbachev were not, in fact, heroic dissidents, but rather career communist bureaucrats, some of whom went on to become their own little Stalins. Spufford says in the endnotes to Red Plenty that part of the book's aim is a prehistory of perestroika - one view of the characters is that many of them are developing into the people who will eventually transform the country in the 1980s. Green politics was an important strand in the great dissident wave, right across the USSR and Central Europe; Zoya Vaynshteyn's genetic research, which turns up some very unpleasant facts, is a case in point. Valentin, the programmer and cadre, is going to retain his self-image as a bohemian hacker into the future. Another Party figure in the book is the man who refuses to get used to violence, which will also turn out to be important in 1989.
Anyway, go read the damn book.
Friday, September 03, 2010
dsr
Creepy google searches of the week: "who writes the blog for yorkshire ranter" and "identity of yorkshire ranter". Someone in a BT dynamic-IP pool.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
big society
A4E and Miss £5 Million will get you a job....pretending to get other people jobs. I love it when a plan comes together.
libertarian blogging fratricide
An unusual case. (Horrible right-wing) Blogger convicted of threatening to kill three judges. One judge is himself a (not all that horrible) right-wing blogger, and another is a horrible right-wing blogger and journalist's brother. The prosecutor in the case is the former idol of Firedoglake, Patrick Fitzgerald.
cutting down on your mercenary miles
Here's something interesting.
This isn't just recreational cynicism; they argue that the latest announcement of a clampdown on private security companies in Afghanistan is to be taken more seriously than the last six, and that this actually represents an effort to integrate them into the Afghan government's forces or at least its allies. Importantly, and very differently from Iraq, the main players are local rather than foreign - like the 24,000-strong Watan Group. (Check out their Corporate Social Responsibility page.) Rather than just being part of the ISAF baggage train, they're a significant nonstate actor in Afghan politics.
If you were feeling optimistic, you might consider this as being similar to the various political fixes the Soviets arranged in 1988 to keep the roads open for the Afghan government post-withdrawal. If you've been reading this since at least 2007, you'll know that I think the absolute best that could happen in Afghanistan would be to get back to something like the 1989-1992 period, just without the continuing US/Pakistan/Saudi destabilisation and the cut-off of Russian aid that kicked off the civil war (and the destruction of Kabul, the invention of the Taliban, and so on). I agree this is pessimistic, but then, well, I wouldn't start from here.
In Iraq, understanding the business/organised crime environment may have played a bigger role than is publicly acknowledged in getting the US Army out of town. For example, here's a Joel Wing piece on the history of oil-smuggling (you'll note that the Baiji refinery comes up. party like it's 2005!). Interestingly, the initial Awakening Council leader Sheikh Abu Risha was an important oil smuggler, and you can bet those networks were of use.
Leaving aside the obvious Afghan export, the analogous business is probably selling stuff to ISAF. Bagram now has its own cement plant, inside the perimeter, but that's a Turkish construction firm.
We must also consider the alternative that many of the most prominent and powerful Afghans are in fact motivated by greed and opportunism. [harrowell: ya think?] It is therefore in their interest to maintain the status quo of massive US and international spending that fuels the Afghan "rentier state" economy.
This isn't just recreational cynicism; they argue that the latest announcement of a clampdown on private security companies in Afghanistan is to be taken more seriously than the last six, and that this actually represents an effort to integrate them into the Afghan government's forces or at least its allies. Importantly, and very differently from Iraq, the main players are local rather than foreign - like the 24,000-strong Watan Group. (Check out their Corporate Social Responsibility page.) Rather than just being part of the ISAF baggage train, they're a significant nonstate actor in Afghan politics.
If you were feeling optimistic, you might consider this as being similar to the various political fixes the Soviets arranged in 1988 to keep the roads open for the Afghan government post-withdrawal. If you've been reading this since at least 2007, you'll know that I think the absolute best that could happen in Afghanistan would be to get back to something like the 1989-1992 period, just without the continuing US/Pakistan/Saudi destabilisation and the cut-off of Russian aid that kicked off the civil war (and the destruction of Kabul, the invention of the Taliban, and so on). I agree this is pessimistic, but then, well, I wouldn't start from here.
In Iraq, understanding the business/organised crime environment may have played a bigger role than is publicly acknowledged in getting the US Army out of town. For example, here's a Joel Wing piece on the history of oil-smuggling (you'll note that the Baiji refinery comes up. party like it's 2005!). Interestingly, the initial Awakening Council leader Sheikh Abu Risha was an important oil smuggler, and you can bet those networks were of use.
Leaving aside the obvious Afghan export, the analogous business is probably selling stuff to ISAF. Bagram now has its own cement plant, inside the perimeter, but that's a Turkish construction firm.
GCHQ Review, Part 5 - The Future and some Current Relevance
A major philosophical difference between the UK and USA halves of the SIGINT tribe, and between the tribe and the military, was who the intended customer for intelligence was. The Americans were traditionally very keen on bringing everything back to Fort Meade for processing and analysis, and then feeding intelligence reports to the top level of government. As very often, the British followed suite, but only up to a point. GCHQ as an institution was traditionally very concerned with its status as a direct contributor of intelligence to the core executive, co-equal with MI6, the diplomats, and the armed forces' Defence Intelligence Staff. In fact, as we saw in part one, in some ways it had greater independence and status - as well as its own private diplomacy with the Americans, it also has the unique privilege of sending the prime minister intelligence outside the formal processes of the Joint Intelligence Committee machinery.
In practice, though, it was often more interested than the Americans in pushing information forward to the military in the field or to diplomatic posts. This was influenced by the British specialisation in ELINT, which tended to be more interesting to the military and more dependent on collection from their ships or aircraft, and also by the Bletchley heritage. ULTRA's triumphs weren't just about Alan Turing or about computers; a huge problem that had to be solved to make it useful was the distribution of highly secret information to the army in the field in near real time. (A key motivation was that GCHQ was well aware that the Germans were in the habit of breaking Allied cyphers, and then transmitting the results over their ENIGMA and FISH radio networks - allied traffic turned up in the take all the time.)
It's probable that a major reason why GCHQ wasn't more like that, rather than less, was that the American approach was useful politically. Supplying the Cabinet directly obviously helps to win the budget wars. Similarly, too much emphasis on tactical work might give the impression that the agency was a support service to the armed forces, rather than something like a fourth service in its own right. Horrors.
But this didn't stop some important projects from being designed to fill the gap. GCHQ had been called in to investigate whether the Territorial SAS's stay-behind reconnaissance teams, intended to target the Red Army's rear areas for air (and specifically nuclear) attack, were likely to avoid getting caught for long enough to be useful. They demonstrated that, even using burst transmissions, the Soviet electronic-warfare units would very likely triangulate on them within 24 hours. This obviously wasn't good enough, and one of the results was the Nimrod R1, the RAF's airborne electronic intelligence system. System is the right word; as well as the planes, the project included a special RAF intelligence centre at Wyton, communications links forward to the army, and the capability to have intelligence analysts, Army liaison officers, or linguists actually fly on the plane with the radio operators. (As well as the R-1s, the Nimrod MR2s have done a lot of this in Afghanistan, and paid the price.)
That was then; the RAF is now leasing three RC135 aircraft from the Americans, actually older than the R1 airframes and designed for the model then considered inappropriate.
This may be a serious problem; one of the big questions facing GCHQ is the age of fibre-optics and open-source cryptography. With less and less telecoms traffic going by satellite or microwave, and less of that going in the clear, what to do? Further, the questions aren't the same ones as they were in the cold war.
An example of why this is relevant is this piece by Spencer Ackerman on the US Air Force's MC-12 aircraft and its role detecting improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan. In fact, as he points out elsewhere, the MC-12 (roughly, a Beech King Air stuffed with sensors, extra fuel, and spooks) does a lot of other things too, although they're mostly classified. It's an example of a current trend - rather than UAVs, there's increasing interest in cheap light aircraft carrying the latest sensor packages. This has the advantage that they can take up intelligence agents and work more closely with the troops, as well as being cheap.
There's much more detail here, which makes the interesting point that the role of Task Force ODIN, set up to kill insurgent bombmakers in Iraq, is now a broader one in support of the counter-insurgency strategy. This changes their relevance from being purely tactical and military to being political and strategic. They haven't been inactive on this - from Aldrich's site, here's a fascinating data sheet on their backpack SIGINT kit, the ideal gift for the geek who has everything and a death wish and very similar to some Rohde & Schwarz mobile network testing gear.
Speaking of mobile networks, Aldrich also confirms that a capability to listen to cellular networks exists, mounted on the British Army's three Islander aircraft - it's not clear from his discussion whether this means the access side or microwave-backhaul, or whether this relies on the old A5/0 and A5/1 cyphers still being in use.
In practice, though, it was often more interested than the Americans in pushing information forward to the military in the field or to diplomatic posts. This was influenced by the British specialisation in ELINT, which tended to be more interesting to the military and more dependent on collection from their ships or aircraft, and also by the Bletchley heritage. ULTRA's triumphs weren't just about Alan Turing or about computers; a huge problem that had to be solved to make it useful was the distribution of highly secret information to the army in the field in near real time. (A key motivation was that GCHQ was well aware that the Germans were in the habit of breaking Allied cyphers, and then transmitting the results over their ENIGMA and FISH radio networks - allied traffic turned up in the take all the time.)
It's probable that a major reason why GCHQ wasn't more like that, rather than less, was that the American approach was useful politically. Supplying the Cabinet directly obviously helps to win the budget wars. Similarly, too much emphasis on tactical work might give the impression that the agency was a support service to the armed forces, rather than something like a fourth service in its own right. Horrors.
But this didn't stop some important projects from being designed to fill the gap. GCHQ had been called in to investigate whether the Territorial SAS's stay-behind reconnaissance teams, intended to target the Red Army's rear areas for air (and specifically nuclear) attack, were likely to avoid getting caught for long enough to be useful. They demonstrated that, even using burst transmissions, the Soviet electronic-warfare units would very likely triangulate on them within 24 hours. This obviously wasn't good enough, and one of the results was the Nimrod R1, the RAF's airborne electronic intelligence system. System is the right word; as well as the planes, the project included a special RAF intelligence centre at Wyton, communications links forward to the army, and the capability to have intelligence analysts, Army liaison officers, or linguists actually fly on the plane with the radio operators. (As well as the R-1s, the Nimrod MR2s have done a lot of this in Afghanistan, and paid the price.)
That was then; the RAF is now leasing three RC135 aircraft from the Americans, actually older than the R1 airframes and designed for the model then considered inappropriate.
This may be a serious problem; one of the big questions facing GCHQ is the age of fibre-optics and open-source cryptography. With less and less telecoms traffic going by satellite or microwave, and less of that going in the clear, what to do? Further, the questions aren't the same ones as they were in the cold war.
An example of why this is relevant is this piece by Spencer Ackerman on the US Air Force's MC-12 aircraft and its role detecting improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan. In fact, as he points out elsewhere, the MC-12 (roughly, a Beech King Air stuffed with sensors, extra fuel, and spooks) does a lot of other things too, although they're mostly classified. It's an example of a current trend - rather than UAVs, there's increasing interest in cheap light aircraft carrying the latest sensor packages. This has the advantage that they can take up intelligence agents and work more closely with the troops, as well as being cheap.
There's much more detail here, which makes the interesting point that the role of Task Force ODIN, set up to kill insurgent bombmakers in Iraq, is now a broader one in support of the counter-insurgency strategy. This changes their relevance from being purely tactical and military to being political and strategic. They haven't been inactive on this - from Aldrich's site, here's a fascinating data sheet on their backpack SIGINT kit, the ideal gift for the geek who has everything and a death wish and very similar to some Rohde & Schwarz mobile network testing gear.
Speaking of mobile networks, Aldrich also confirms that a capability to listen to cellular networks exists, mounted on the British Army's three Islander aircraft - it's not clear from his discussion whether this means the access side or microwave-backhaul, or whether this relies on the old A5/0 and A5/1 cyphers still being in use.
GCHQ Review, Part 4 - History and the overseas outposts
A major claim of the recent group of "intelligence historians" is that the study of the secret world is the "missing element" in contemporary history - that, just as the history of the second world war needed revising after the British government finally let on about ULTRA, history (especially of the Cold War) is missing the perspective provided by intelligence. Richard Aldrich's GCHQ is certainly part of this project, just as his The Hidden Hand was one of the better works in it for covert action, propaganda, and human intelligence.
But do we know that much more about the main line of history from it? There are, of course, a couple of serious documentary and methodological problems with this. Even where we do have good sources on the history of secret intelligence, it's typical for the actual intelligence product to remain secret. We have a reasonable idea of what all those antenna farms were after - we don't have much, post-ULTRA, of what the prime minister actually got delivered to his desk in the blue-jacketed files. Writing my own Master's thesis, I remember that the literature was rather better on the contribution of Soviet intelligence to the 1973 crisis than the US kind, but even that was because various individuals had been forthcoming. The Soviets tried to persuade Sadat to end the war by producing MiG-25R imagery showing the Israeli counter-offensive building up; he wasn't apparently convinced. We don't know, however, if the Americans did anything similar with the Israelis, although we do know that the Israelis weren't sharing their own information with the Americans. (And we know now that Ted Heath turned off their SR-71 operation out of Lakenheath, so how much did they know?)
There's another problem, though, which is understanding what contribution intelligence actually makes to decisions. Cynically, you might say that giving politicians more data is pointless; they'll either ignore it or pick the bits that suit their preconceptions. John Keegan argued that across history, intelligence was more often misused, ignored, or just irrelevant to the balance of forces on the ground than not. Obviously, having regular deliveries of ULTRA decrypts didn't prevent Dunkirk, although it may have helped bring off the evacuation. Even more obviously, whatever intelligence sources Tony Blair was using in 2002 didn't bring him very much enlightenment. That raises another question - was the intelligence valid even before the upsexers got at it? Why did all the European countries with their own overhead imagery choose to stay out?
These problems are less serious when the events in question were motivated by intelligence interests, rather than by the content of intelligence. Aldrich is good on this - the times when "the SIGINT tail started to wag the policy dog". Notably, this seems to have been a major motivation in the whole sorry story of Diego Garcia, intended as a replacement for the abandoned sites on Mauritius and Ceylon and for the NSA's intelligence-gathering ships after the attack on USS Liberty. Around this time, GCHQ also considered building an enormous, nuclear-powered ship intended to contain a complete overseas station of the size of HMS Anderson on Ceylon or Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong, plus a BBC World Service transmitter site - Harland & Wolff's was commissioned to carry out a design study.
The plan was to have it flagged as a merchantman, but it would have been an enormous and expensive sitting duck.As plans go, at least it didn't involve ethnic cleansing.
Later, when the third Wilson government decided to pull out of the remaining overseas bases in 1976, it was the GCHQ interest, backed up by the NSA, that led them to keep the presence on Cyprus - as well as huge British intelligence facilities, the Americans had transferred numerous organisations there from Turkey when the Turks asked them to leave, which had then moved into the British bases for security after the 1974 invasion.
But do we know that much more about the main line of history from it? There are, of course, a couple of serious documentary and methodological problems with this. Even where we do have good sources on the history of secret intelligence, it's typical for the actual intelligence product to remain secret. We have a reasonable idea of what all those antenna farms were after - we don't have much, post-ULTRA, of what the prime minister actually got delivered to his desk in the blue-jacketed files. Writing my own Master's thesis, I remember that the literature was rather better on the contribution of Soviet intelligence to the 1973 crisis than the US kind, but even that was because various individuals had been forthcoming. The Soviets tried to persuade Sadat to end the war by producing MiG-25R imagery showing the Israeli counter-offensive building up; he wasn't apparently convinced. We don't know, however, if the Americans did anything similar with the Israelis, although we do know that the Israelis weren't sharing their own information with the Americans. (And we know now that Ted Heath turned off their SR-71 operation out of Lakenheath, so how much did they know?)
There's another problem, though, which is understanding what contribution intelligence actually makes to decisions. Cynically, you might say that giving politicians more data is pointless; they'll either ignore it or pick the bits that suit their preconceptions. John Keegan argued that across history, intelligence was more often misused, ignored, or just irrelevant to the balance of forces on the ground than not. Obviously, having regular deliveries of ULTRA decrypts didn't prevent Dunkirk, although it may have helped bring off the evacuation. Even more obviously, whatever intelligence sources Tony Blair was using in 2002 didn't bring him very much enlightenment. That raises another question - was the intelligence valid even before the upsexers got at it? Why did all the European countries with their own overhead imagery choose to stay out?
These problems are less serious when the events in question were motivated by intelligence interests, rather than by the content of intelligence. Aldrich is good on this - the times when "the SIGINT tail started to wag the policy dog". Notably, this seems to have been a major motivation in the whole sorry story of Diego Garcia, intended as a replacement for the abandoned sites on Mauritius and Ceylon and for the NSA's intelligence-gathering ships after the attack on USS Liberty. Around this time, GCHQ also considered building an enormous, nuclear-powered ship intended to contain a complete overseas station of the size of HMS Anderson on Ceylon or Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong, plus a BBC World Service transmitter site - Harland & Wolff's was commissioned to carry out a design study.
The plan was to have it flagged as a merchantman, but it would have been an enormous and expensive sitting duck.As plans go, at least it didn't involve ethnic cleansing.
Later, when the third Wilson government decided to pull out of the remaining overseas bases in 1976, it was the GCHQ interest, backed up by the NSA, that led them to keep the presence on Cyprus - as well as huge British intelligence facilities, the Americans had transferred numerous organisations there from Turkey when the Turks asked them to leave, which had then moved into the British bases for security after the 1974 invasion.
GCHQ Review, Part 3 - FISH, a case study
So we've discussed GCHQ and broad politics and GCHQ and technology. Now, what about a case study? Following a link from Richard Aldrich's Warwick University homepage, here's a nice article on FISH, the project to break the German high-grade cypher network codenamed TUNNY. You may not be surprised to know that key links in the net were named OCTOPUS (Berlin to Army Group D in the Crimea and Caucasus) and SQUID (Berlin to Army Group South). Everyone always remembers the Enigma break, but FISH is historically important because it was the one for which Bletchley Park invented the COLOSSUS computers, and also because of the extremely sensitive nature of the traffic. The Lorenz cyphersystem was intended to provide secure automated teleprinter links between strategic-level headquarters - essentially, the German army group HQs, OKW and OKH, the U-boat command deployed to France, and key civilian proconsuls in occupied Europe. The article includes a sample decrypt - nothing less than AG South commander von Weichs' strategic appreciation for the battle of Kursk, as sent to OKH, in its entirety.
Some key points, though. It was actually surprisingly late in the day that the full power of FISH became available - it wasn't enough to build COLOSSUS, it was also necessary to get enough of them working to fully industrialise the exploit and break everything that was coming in. This was available in time for Normandy, but a major driver of the project must have been as a form of leverage on the Americans (and the Russians). The fate of the two Colossi that the reorganised postwar GCHQ saved from the parts dump is telling - one of them was used to demonstrate that a NSA project wouldn't work.
Also, COLOSSUS represented a turning point in the nature of British cryptanalysis. It wasn't just a question of automating an existing exploit; the computers were there to implement a qualitatively new attack on FISH, replacing an analytical method invented by Alan Turing and John Tiltman with a statistical method invented by William Tutte. Arguably, this lost something in terms of scientific elegance - "Turingismus" could work on an intercept of any length, Tutte's Statistical Method required masses of data to crunch and machines to crunch it on any practical timescale. But that wasn't the point. The original exploit relied on an common security breach to work - you began by looking for two messages of similar length that began with the same key-indicator group.
Typically, this happened if the message got corrupted by radio interference or the job was interrupted and the German operators were under pressure - the temptation was just to wind back the tape and restart, rather than set up the machine all over again. In mid-1943, though, the Germans patched the system so that the key indicator group was no longer required, being replaced by a codebook distributed by couriers. The statistical attack was now the only viable one, as it depended on the fundamental architecture of FISH. Only a new cypher machine would fix it.
The symbolic figure here is Tommy Flowers, the project chief engineer, a telecoms engineer borrowed from the Post Office research centre who later designed the first all-electronic telephone exchange. Max Newman, Alan Turing's old tutor and the head of the FISH project, had shown Flowers a copy of On Computable Numbers, which Flowers read but didn't understand - he was a hacker rather than a logician, after all. He was responsible for the shift from electromechanical technology to electronics at Bletchley, which set both Newman and Turing off towards their rival postwar stored-program computing projects.
Another key point from the book is the unity of cryptography and cryptanalysis, and the related tension between spreading good technology to allies and hoping to retain an advantage over them. Again, the fate of the machines is telling - not only did the FISH project run on, trying to break Soviet cypher networks set up using captured machines, but it seems that GCHQ encouraged some other countries to use the ex-German technology, in the knowledge that this would make their traffic very secure against everyone but the elect. Also, a major use of the surviving computers was to check British crypto material, specifically by evaluating the randomness of the keystreams involved, a task quite similar to the statistical attack on FISH.
Finally, FISH is exhibit A for the debate as to whether the whole thing has been worthwhile. What could have been achieved had the rest of the Colossi been released from the secret world, fanning out to the universities, like the scientists from Bletchley did themselves? Max Newman took racks of top-quality valves away from Bletchley when he moved to Manchester University, and used them in the very first stored-program, digital, Turing-complete computer; Alan Turing tried to do the same thing, but with a human asset, recruiting Tommy Flowers to work on the Pilot-ACE at NPL. (Flowers couldn't make it - he had to fix the creaking UK telephone network first.) Instead, the machines were broken up and the very existence of the whole project concealed.
On the other hand, though, would either Newman or Turing have considered trying to implement their theories in hardware without the experience, to say nothing of the budget? The fact that Turing's paper was incomprehensible to one of the most brilliant engineers of a brilliant generation doesn't inspire confidence, and of course one of the divides that had to be crossed between Cambridge and GPO Research in Dollis Hill was one of class.
Some key points, though. It was actually surprisingly late in the day that the full power of FISH became available - it wasn't enough to build COLOSSUS, it was also necessary to get enough of them working to fully industrialise the exploit and break everything that was coming in. This was available in time for Normandy, but a major driver of the project must have been as a form of leverage on the Americans (and the Russians). The fate of the two Colossi that the reorganised postwar GCHQ saved from the parts dump is telling - one of them was used to demonstrate that a NSA project wouldn't work.
Also, COLOSSUS represented a turning point in the nature of British cryptanalysis. It wasn't just a question of automating an existing exploit; the computers were there to implement a qualitatively new attack on FISH, replacing an analytical method invented by Alan Turing and John Tiltman with a statistical method invented by William Tutte. Arguably, this lost something in terms of scientific elegance - "Turingismus" could work on an intercept of any length, Tutte's Statistical Method required masses of data to crunch and machines to crunch it on any practical timescale. But that wasn't the point. The original exploit relied on an common security breach to work - you began by looking for two messages of similar length that began with the same key-indicator group.
Typically, this happened if the message got corrupted by radio interference or the job was interrupted and the German operators were under pressure - the temptation was just to wind back the tape and restart, rather than set up the machine all over again. In mid-1943, though, the Germans patched the system so that the key indicator group was no longer required, being replaced by a codebook distributed by couriers. The statistical attack was now the only viable one, as it depended on the fundamental architecture of FISH. Only a new cypher machine would fix it.
The symbolic figure here is Tommy Flowers, the project chief engineer, a telecoms engineer borrowed from the Post Office research centre who later designed the first all-electronic telephone exchange. Max Newman, Alan Turing's old tutor and the head of the FISH project, had shown Flowers a copy of On Computable Numbers, which Flowers read but didn't understand - he was a hacker rather than a logician, after all. He was responsible for the shift from electromechanical technology to electronics at Bletchley, which set both Newman and Turing off towards their rival postwar stored-program computing projects.
Another key point from the book is the unity of cryptography and cryptanalysis, and the related tension between spreading good technology to allies and hoping to retain an advantage over them. Again, the fate of the machines is telling - not only did the FISH project run on, trying to break Soviet cypher networks set up using captured machines, but it seems that GCHQ encouraged some other countries to use the ex-German technology, in the knowledge that this would make their traffic very secure against everyone but the elect. Also, a major use of the surviving computers was to check British crypto material, specifically by evaluating the randomness of the keystreams involved, a task quite similar to the statistical attack on FISH.
Finally, FISH is exhibit A for the debate as to whether the whole thing has been worthwhile. What could have been achieved had the rest of the Colossi been released from the secret world, fanning out to the universities, like the scientists from Bletchley did themselves? Max Newman took racks of top-quality valves away from Bletchley when he moved to Manchester University, and used them in the very first stored-program, digital, Turing-complete computer; Alan Turing tried to do the same thing, but with a human asset, recruiting Tommy Flowers to work on the Pilot-ACE at NPL. (Flowers couldn't make it - he had to fix the creaking UK telephone network first.) Instead, the machines were broken up and the very existence of the whole project concealed.
On the other hand, though, would either Newman or Turing have considered trying to implement their theories in hardware without the experience, to say nothing of the budget? The fact that Turing's paper was incomprehensible to one of the most brilliant engineers of a brilliant generation doesn't inspire confidence, and of course one of the divides that had to be crossed between Cambridge and GPO Research in Dollis Hill was one of class.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
GCHQ Review, Part 2 - GCHQ and the Tech Industry
OK, so some more on Aldrich's GCHQ. Obviously, technology is at the centre of this story. I've said that the signals intelligence world is special among spooks because it guarantees results - they may not be the right results, they may not be helpful, but you can usually depend on it producing something to whack on the PM's desk, that he or she can spring on cabinet ministers later. One of the things that makes it special is its industrial nature; unlike most forms of intelligence, it needs machines, great buildings, thousands of technical staff working shifts, and its performance is heavily dependent on engineering.
From a budget-politics point of view, there's a symbiosis here. Back in 1941, the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office got into the habit of bringing top officials from London to be dazzled by the brilliance on display at Bletchley and terrorised by its security officers. It worked. On the other hand, getting the resources necessary to build the crypto industry required the direct intervention of a group of top scientists around Turing and Gordon Welchman with Churchill. Of course, as someone regularly dosed with their product, he didn't find it hard to give them what they needed, which was money and lots of it. By mid-1942 and the introduction of the third rotor on the Enigma machine, it became very obvious indeed that signals intelligence was now an industrial enterprise. This led directly to the decision to let the US Navy build its own Ultra capability, and hence to the founding treaties of the special relationship.
As soon as the Holden agreement let the Americans get hold of the Ultra secret, however, Bletchley was frantically building up new technology that would maintain a bargaining edge. The huge effort to crack the German on-line cipher known as FISH, for example, which led to the COLOSSUS computers, has to be seen partly in this light. This combination of a sort of fatalism - the Americans would eventually triumph - and a hunt for an edge would colour GCHQ's role in the history of technology from then onwards. Despite its founding achievements in computing, and those of the post-war diaspora of scientists, they were always suspicious of British technology. Post-COLOSSUS, GCHQ joined the long, long queue for IBM 360s and then, oddly enough, veered off to get all its computers from Honeywell into the 1980s.
On the other hand, a number of key research projects were pressed ahead, notably a range of exotic over-the-horizon radars, agent equipment, the Nimrod R-1, and the never-completed Zircon satellite. This combination of cringe and competition was mirrored by the SIGINT tribe's attitude to technology in general; starting in the 1960s, they were both keen to spread good cryptography among NATO and other friends, but also to prevent the development of independent crypto. On the one hand, "free licensing" was meant to let second- and third-tier agencies and Western non-governmental systems get access to effective security; on the other hand, rather like the bundling of MS Internet Explorer, it was meant to secure a monopoly. This put the UK in a difficult position - it strongly intended to develop its own crypto, thanks, and export it, but the companies involved very much wanted to claim royalties on their patents.
This eventually ended up with the incredible effort to subvert Crypto AG of Switzerland's high-end cipher machines (CAG, by the way, owned the intellectual property of Hagelin, the makers of what became the Enigma...), under which the NSA and GCHQ persuaded them to fix certain cryptographic problems, but to leave other security bugs unfixed in order that they could continue to spy on their users. The exploit in question referred to TEMPEST, the now-well known problem where some electronic devices leak information in the clear as radio interference, which strongly suggests that the point was to protect some of the many embassy spying operations.
This couldn't, and didn't, last - by the 1980s, as with general policy, the monopoly of security technology was crumbling as the Europeans (mostly) got better at it. There were efforts to change this - GCHQ was given a special responsibility to keep an eye on Nokia, while other allied agencies got tasked with Ericsson, Siemens, Olivetti, etc (but notably not Alcatel). Another important factor, eventually decisive, was that it was moving from hardware to software. In the light of this, the 1990s crypto wars seem a lot more radical than a bunch of geeks playing at spies; something very important did change back there. On a critical note, I did think Aldrich's book could have done with a good technical reader on software, Internetworking, and related issues - the focus is a bit off here, and he seems to depend more heavily on the civil servants.
Did GCHQ hold back or promote technical progress in the UK? There are various views on this. One is that it's part of a huge cluster of PhDs in the Severn valley that must be having some sort of spin-off benefit to the country - even if it's only that when Thatcher offended them to the extent everyone in the computer division of HEO rank or above quit, a lot of other tech companies filled their boots. Another is that it's a sort of shadow of the British Google that didn't happen, because the potential founders were wasting their time sucking up to the intelligence-administrative complex.
Of course, it's true that they invented public-key cryptography in 1971 and didn't tell anyone for 35 years. But this was largely because nobody could think of a use for it back then. (Apparently, they thought of using it to authenticate nuclear launch orders, until it was pointed out that they didn't have to be sent in real time any more because the nukes were submarine-launched.) On the other hand, much of its purpose in life is to provide a source of clue for the wider government (a sort of infosec Shi'ism, a marja e-taqlid for system administrators and government ministers), and who can say British governments have suffered from too much competence?
From a budget-politics point of view, there's a symbiosis here. Back in 1941, the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office got into the habit of bringing top officials from London to be dazzled by the brilliance on display at Bletchley and terrorised by its security officers. It worked. On the other hand, getting the resources necessary to build the crypto industry required the direct intervention of a group of top scientists around Turing and Gordon Welchman with Churchill. Of course, as someone regularly dosed with their product, he didn't find it hard to give them what they needed, which was money and lots of it. By mid-1942 and the introduction of the third rotor on the Enigma machine, it became very obvious indeed that signals intelligence was now an industrial enterprise. This led directly to the decision to let the US Navy build its own Ultra capability, and hence to the founding treaties of the special relationship.
As soon as the Holden agreement let the Americans get hold of the Ultra secret, however, Bletchley was frantically building up new technology that would maintain a bargaining edge. The huge effort to crack the German on-line cipher known as FISH, for example, which led to the COLOSSUS computers, has to be seen partly in this light. This combination of a sort of fatalism - the Americans would eventually triumph - and a hunt for an edge would colour GCHQ's role in the history of technology from then onwards. Despite its founding achievements in computing, and those of the post-war diaspora of scientists, they were always suspicious of British technology. Post-COLOSSUS, GCHQ joined the long, long queue for IBM 360s and then, oddly enough, veered off to get all its computers from Honeywell into the 1980s.
On the other hand, a number of key research projects were pressed ahead, notably a range of exotic over-the-horizon radars, agent equipment, the Nimrod R-1, and the never-completed Zircon satellite. This combination of cringe and competition was mirrored by the SIGINT tribe's attitude to technology in general; starting in the 1960s, they were both keen to spread good cryptography among NATO and other friends, but also to prevent the development of independent crypto. On the one hand, "free licensing" was meant to let second- and third-tier agencies and Western non-governmental systems get access to effective security; on the other hand, rather like the bundling of MS Internet Explorer, it was meant to secure a monopoly. This put the UK in a difficult position - it strongly intended to develop its own crypto, thanks, and export it, but the companies involved very much wanted to claim royalties on their patents.
This eventually ended up with the incredible effort to subvert Crypto AG of Switzerland's high-end cipher machines (CAG, by the way, owned the intellectual property of Hagelin, the makers of what became the Enigma...), under which the NSA and GCHQ persuaded them to fix certain cryptographic problems, but to leave other security bugs unfixed in order that they could continue to spy on their users. The exploit in question referred to TEMPEST, the now-well known problem where some electronic devices leak information in the clear as radio interference, which strongly suggests that the point was to protect some of the many embassy spying operations.
This couldn't, and didn't, last - by the 1980s, as with general policy, the monopoly of security technology was crumbling as the Europeans (mostly) got better at it. There were efforts to change this - GCHQ was given a special responsibility to keep an eye on Nokia, while other allied agencies got tasked with Ericsson, Siemens, Olivetti, etc (but notably not Alcatel). Another important factor, eventually decisive, was that it was moving from hardware to software. In the light of this, the 1990s crypto wars seem a lot more radical than a bunch of geeks playing at spies; something very important did change back there. On a critical note, I did think Aldrich's book could have done with a good technical reader on software, Internetworking, and related issues - the focus is a bit off here, and he seems to depend more heavily on the civil servants.
Did GCHQ hold back or promote technical progress in the UK? There are various views on this. One is that it's part of a huge cluster of PhDs in the Severn valley that must be having some sort of spin-off benefit to the country - even if it's only that when Thatcher offended them to the extent everyone in the computer division of HEO rank or above quit, a lot of other tech companies filled their boots. Another is that it's a sort of shadow of the British Google that didn't happen, because the potential founders were wasting their time sucking up to the intelligence-administrative complex.
Of course, it's true that they invented public-key cryptography in 1971 and didn't tell anyone for 35 years. But this was largely because nobody could think of a use for it back then. (Apparently, they thought of using it to authenticate nuclear launch orders, until it was pointed out that they didn't have to be sent in real time any more because the nukes were submarine-launched.) On the other hand, much of its purpose in life is to provide a source of clue for the wider government (a sort of infosec Shi'ism, a marja e-taqlid for system administrators and government ministers), and who can say British governments have suffered from too much competence?
Thursday, August 12, 2010
GCHQ Review: Part 1, The World's Most Classified Blog and Other Stories
So, Richard Aldrich's book on GCHQ. This looks like it's going to be another in our occasional series of multi-part book reviews that nobody reads, as the book is nothing if not comprehensive. (It's a mere Laundry-esque 666 pages in paperback.) Apart from being packed with good things, like paper and words, as Spike Milligan said about his autobiography, I think it's undeniable that this is the best factual account of British signals intelligence you're likely to get. It practically bursts with detail and is clearly the fruit of an enormous effort of primary research, and a fair bit of the secondary kind too. If you want to know about the continuation of the First World War crypto effort into the inter-war era, the construction of the Hong Kong over-the-horizon radar site on top of a sheer cliff thousands of feet high and the number of Land Rovers the RAF Regiment lost over the edge, or exactly how many index cards Special Branch found in Geoffrey Prime's private database of young girls, it's here. This is in itself quite an achievement, given how much of this stuff remains classified.
Of course, what everyone wants to know about is the intelligence special relationship with the US and the other Commonwealth nations. You will not be disappointed. Aldrich argues that we're unlikely ever to find a smoking document, even after the release of what was described as the UKUSA agreement earlier this year - the terms of the alliance were repeatedly renegotiated, and its content is spread over many different documents. In fact, it might be more interesting to think in terms of the technical documents. He makes the excellent point that the alliance consists, in practice, of a set of shared operating procedures and technical standards, rather like the Internet, with the distinction that here everything is secret. Rather than gaining access to the IETF by making your work public, you gain access to the tribe of SIGINT by submitting to ever greater secrecy, in a sort of masonic career of increasingly complex rites. Crucially, wherever the documentation goes, the internationally agreed security requirements go with it. This, of course, has an impact on parallel technological decisions, but I'll come to those later.
This tribal nature - and in many ways it is tribal, with different agencies' membership in the relationship stemming from their alliance with the founding couple of Bletchley Park and US Naval intelligence - has important and counterintuitive effects on the politics of SIGINT. For example, the tribal leaders have frequently been keen to help their kin succeed in developing new technologies, extracting more funds from national budgets, and securing their secrets from their common enemies. On the other hand, they have also been very keen to prevent them from developing relationships that bypass the central alliance, and to restrict the degree to which they can secure their own traffic against the "level one agencies", GCHQ and NSA. All tribes, however, are in part mythical, and the status of the leader derives in part from the consent of the led.
In the early 1970s, for example, Henry Kissinger ordered the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office to cut off intelligence sharing with Edward Heath's government (Heath's GCHQ director was, among other things, in the process of negotiating a special link between the Joint Intelligence Committee and the French equivalent). The British were horrified, but it's telling that the NSA itself was very suspicious of the move and took steps to undermine it - it seems that information kept reaching Britain via sharing with Canada and Australia. When the Yom Kippur war broke out, Heath retaliated by refusing to let SR71 reconnaissance flights land in the UK or at Akrotiri, and imposing conditions on U-2 operations from the UK, specifically that the imagery from them could not be shared with Israel.
In the 1980s, the Reagan government imposed a similar "cut-off" on New Zealand to protest their refusal to let US warships call without saying if they were carrying nuclear weapons. The New Zealanders were unexpectedly unimpressed, which was at least in part explained by the fact that the other alliance partners continued to pass information to them, and also by the fact that the New Zealand GCSB was a major analysis centre for traffic from Asia. Notably, GCHQ was collecting French traffic on their behalf as part of the Rainbow Warrior inquiry.
Over the years, the power-relationships within the alliance shifted with the varying scarcity of different resources. To begin with, in the heroic days of Bletchley Park, the UK had a strategic advantage based in its extremely scarce knowledge of cryptanalysis and computing. As the importance of computing and bulk data processing in general grew, this shifted towards the US; they had more money, and their own technology was improving fast. The result was that the Commonwealth partners essentially traded collection for analysis - we had territory, relationships, and collection platforms that the Americans didn't. That included some hideously dangerous overflights, submarine missions, and covert actions around the edge of the Soviet sphere of influence. Again, if you want to know what it was like sailing an old submarine into Polyarnyy harbour in 1959 without asking, it's here.
This oversimplifies; in fact, however much money the Americans threw at the problem, they didn't break the Soviet high-level ciphers between Black Friday in 1948, when the USSR carried out a forklift upgrade of their whole crypto network to end the VENONA codebreak, and the late 1970s. Information had to come, instead, from new forms of collection, targeting networks that weren't encrypted because they were thought to be secure, and by studying the electronic signatures of new weapons. As a result, the inter-allied playing field had a structural skew towards the British, who specialised in forward collection and in ELINT, building up an enormous library of Soviet radars and emplacing microwave listening stations in unlikely places. However, it's unlikely that this was realised at the time - it was all too obvious that Fort Meade was filling up with more and more computers, and it's not clear how honest they were about their successes or failures. There was a sort of technical cultural cringe on the British side.
The other new field was of course space. Starting in the late 1960s, the US began to collect much more of its signals intelligence from satellites, invulnerable to the political turmoil down below. However, this brought about another twist in the political relationship. The Americans had ELINT and COMINT satellites, the allies didn't. But when the RHYOLITE satellites, originally intended to spy on missile telemetry, started to pull in more and more data from the new microwave telecomms backbones, the NSA was forced to rely on its allies to deal with the mountains of data. That meant, among other things, a momentous step - intelligence sharing now included readout, letting the allied agencies point their dishes at the satellites and receive the stuff directly. (Incidentally, this is the purpose of Menwith Hill - it slurps intercept material from satellites and passes it to Cheltenham.)
At the beginning of the 1980s, then, the alliance was undergoing the sort of integration process that the founders of the European Union hoped to see. Rather than painful negotiations in high politics, technical interworking would result in a natural binding together. The system was evolving from the original hierarchical structure into a flatter network, with much greater interdependence. The Americans seem to have been aware that control was slipping away, and made efforts to assert traditional rights, for example by trying to impose the lie detector as part of the common security rules, which even Margaret Thatcher considered illiberal and unscientific. Some tribal practices didn't translate. The New Zealand cut-off was part of this, as was its failure - among other things, what was to happen about the New Zealanders seconded to Canada and the UK, and the Canadians and Brits in New Zealand? What would the US customers for Korean traffic processed at GCSB say when it ceased to arrive?
Interestingly, the US seems to have found continental Europe more interesting as a result. They made efforts to cooperate more closely with West Germany, while the Germans for their part were organising a new European alliance, and the UK was developing close links with the Mitterrand government's intelligence chief (while also helping the New Zealanders get information on his agents).
Yet another shift, possibly even more important than the end of the Cold War for the tribe, was now approaching - the end of the microwave network era and the dawn of widely available strong cryptography. Arguably, what is now scarce is code-breaking of any kind, again, and intelligence analysis; computer power has never been cheaper, while mass collection is much less practical outside one's own borders. In fact, pharaonic proposals like the Intercept Modernisation Programme may be better understood as a sort of atavistic harking back to the microwave era or even to the high Cold War's tunnels under Berlin and Vienna.
However, it's certain that they ain't going away. One thing that SIGINT has which other forms of intelligence don't is that it works, it produces physical output, yer actual primary-source documents - every day, as well as the formal, all-source intelligence reports on particular topics, the prime minister is also sent a wedge of selected quotes from the raw traffic. It's the world's most classified blog! Thatcher's civil servants referred to it as Comic Cuts (in the 1950s and 1960s, similar files were known as Blue Jackets or BJs - another way to make the president feel special, I suppose...), but she lapped it up, like they all do.
Daniel Davies once remarked that secret information is a drug - it alters your perception of reality and makes you feel superior to other people - and that it isn't usually considered wise to make important decisions on drugs. Here's the problem; whether or not the raw matter is actually useful, whether it's typical or misleading, whether GCHQ is breaking a lot of the target's traffic or none of the circuits that matter at all, it's incontrovertibly present. They will produce something rather than nothing.
In our next thrilling instalments: GCHQ and technology, overseas outposts, internal surveillance, and the future...
Of course, what everyone wants to know about is the intelligence special relationship with the US and the other Commonwealth nations. You will not be disappointed. Aldrich argues that we're unlikely ever to find a smoking document, even after the release of what was described as the UKUSA agreement earlier this year - the terms of the alliance were repeatedly renegotiated, and its content is spread over many different documents. In fact, it might be more interesting to think in terms of the technical documents. He makes the excellent point that the alliance consists, in practice, of a set of shared operating procedures and technical standards, rather like the Internet, with the distinction that here everything is secret. Rather than gaining access to the IETF by making your work public, you gain access to the tribe of SIGINT by submitting to ever greater secrecy, in a sort of masonic career of increasingly complex rites. Crucially, wherever the documentation goes, the internationally agreed security requirements go with it. This, of course, has an impact on parallel technological decisions, but I'll come to those later.
This tribal nature - and in many ways it is tribal, with different agencies' membership in the relationship stemming from their alliance with the founding couple of Bletchley Park and US Naval intelligence - has important and counterintuitive effects on the politics of SIGINT. For example, the tribal leaders have frequently been keen to help their kin succeed in developing new technologies, extracting more funds from national budgets, and securing their secrets from their common enemies. On the other hand, they have also been very keen to prevent them from developing relationships that bypass the central alliance, and to restrict the degree to which they can secure their own traffic against the "level one agencies", GCHQ and NSA. All tribes, however, are in part mythical, and the status of the leader derives in part from the consent of the led.
In the early 1970s, for example, Henry Kissinger ordered the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office to cut off intelligence sharing with Edward Heath's government (Heath's GCHQ director was, among other things, in the process of negotiating a special link between the Joint Intelligence Committee and the French equivalent). The British were horrified, but it's telling that the NSA itself was very suspicious of the move and took steps to undermine it - it seems that information kept reaching Britain via sharing with Canada and Australia. When the Yom Kippur war broke out, Heath retaliated by refusing to let SR71 reconnaissance flights land in the UK or at Akrotiri, and imposing conditions on U-2 operations from the UK, specifically that the imagery from them could not be shared with Israel.
In the 1980s, the Reagan government imposed a similar "cut-off" on New Zealand to protest their refusal to let US warships call without saying if they were carrying nuclear weapons. The New Zealanders were unexpectedly unimpressed, which was at least in part explained by the fact that the other alliance partners continued to pass information to them, and also by the fact that the New Zealand GCSB was a major analysis centre for traffic from Asia. Notably, GCHQ was collecting French traffic on their behalf as part of the Rainbow Warrior inquiry.
Over the years, the power-relationships within the alliance shifted with the varying scarcity of different resources. To begin with, in the heroic days of Bletchley Park, the UK had a strategic advantage based in its extremely scarce knowledge of cryptanalysis and computing. As the importance of computing and bulk data processing in general grew, this shifted towards the US; they had more money, and their own technology was improving fast. The result was that the Commonwealth partners essentially traded collection for analysis - we had territory, relationships, and collection platforms that the Americans didn't. That included some hideously dangerous overflights, submarine missions, and covert actions around the edge of the Soviet sphere of influence. Again, if you want to know what it was like sailing an old submarine into Polyarnyy harbour in 1959 without asking, it's here.
This oversimplifies; in fact, however much money the Americans threw at the problem, they didn't break the Soviet high-level ciphers between Black Friday in 1948, when the USSR carried out a forklift upgrade of their whole crypto network to end the VENONA codebreak, and the late 1970s. Information had to come, instead, from new forms of collection, targeting networks that weren't encrypted because they were thought to be secure, and by studying the electronic signatures of new weapons. As a result, the inter-allied playing field had a structural skew towards the British, who specialised in forward collection and in ELINT, building up an enormous library of Soviet radars and emplacing microwave listening stations in unlikely places. However, it's unlikely that this was realised at the time - it was all too obvious that Fort Meade was filling up with more and more computers, and it's not clear how honest they were about their successes or failures. There was a sort of technical cultural cringe on the British side.
The other new field was of course space. Starting in the late 1960s, the US began to collect much more of its signals intelligence from satellites, invulnerable to the political turmoil down below. However, this brought about another twist in the political relationship. The Americans had ELINT and COMINT satellites, the allies didn't. But when the RHYOLITE satellites, originally intended to spy on missile telemetry, started to pull in more and more data from the new microwave telecomms backbones, the NSA was forced to rely on its allies to deal with the mountains of data. That meant, among other things, a momentous step - intelligence sharing now included readout, letting the allied agencies point their dishes at the satellites and receive the stuff directly. (Incidentally, this is the purpose of Menwith Hill - it slurps intercept material from satellites and passes it to Cheltenham.)
At the beginning of the 1980s, then, the alliance was undergoing the sort of integration process that the founders of the European Union hoped to see. Rather than painful negotiations in high politics, technical interworking would result in a natural binding together. The system was evolving from the original hierarchical structure into a flatter network, with much greater interdependence. The Americans seem to have been aware that control was slipping away, and made efforts to assert traditional rights, for example by trying to impose the lie detector as part of the common security rules, which even Margaret Thatcher considered illiberal and unscientific. Some tribal practices didn't translate. The New Zealand cut-off was part of this, as was its failure - among other things, what was to happen about the New Zealanders seconded to Canada and the UK, and the Canadians and Brits in New Zealand? What would the US customers for Korean traffic processed at GCSB say when it ceased to arrive?
Interestingly, the US seems to have found continental Europe more interesting as a result. They made efforts to cooperate more closely with West Germany, while the Germans for their part were organising a new European alliance, and the UK was developing close links with the Mitterrand government's intelligence chief (while also helping the New Zealanders get information on his agents).
Yet another shift, possibly even more important than the end of the Cold War for the tribe, was now approaching - the end of the microwave network era and the dawn of widely available strong cryptography. Arguably, what is now scarce is code-breaking of any kind, again, and intelligence analysis; computer power has never been cheaper, while mass collection is much less practical outside one's own borders. In fact, pharaonic proposals like the Intercept Modernisation Programme may be better understood as a sort of atavistic harking back to the microwave era or even to the high Cold War's tunnels under Berlin and Vienna.
However, it's certain that they ain't going away. One thing that SIGINT has which other forms of intelligence don't is that it works, it produces physical output, yer actual primary-source documents - every day, as well as the formal, all-source intelligence reports on particular topics, the prime minister is also sent a wedge of selected quotes from the raw traffic. It's the world's most classified blog! Thatcher's civil servants referred to it as Comic Cuts (in the 1950s and 1960s, similar files were known as Blue Jackets or BJs - another way to make the president feel special, I suppose...), but she lapped it up, like they all do.
Daniel Davies once remarked that secret information is a drug - it alters your perception of reality and makes you feel superior to other people - and that it isn't usually considered wise to make important decisions on drugs. Here's the problem; whether or not the raw matter is actually useful, whether it's typical or misleading, whether GCHQ is breaking a lot of the target's traffic or none of the circuits that matter at all, it's incontrovertibly present. They will produce something rather than nothing.
In our next thrilling instalments: GCHQ and technology, overseas outposts, internal surveillance, and the future...
Sunday, August 08, 2010
scraping the barrel
I've finally got around to answering my own question here. The scraper is work in progress at the moment; the original pdf is rendered by pdftohtml into a tiresomely semi-structured (i.e. worse than no structure) tagpile. I was trying to tackle this through recursion, but I might either try using Python's
This all depends on the thing actually having any underlying structure, of course - it may be assembled by copy-and-paste, so anything I do will blow up every month. The things I do for England...
continue keyword or perhaps trying to pre-tokenise the document based on the number of blank lines between blocks, and then deal with the blocks.This all depends on the thing actually having any underlying structure, of course - it may be assembled by copy-and-paste, so anything I do will blow up every month. The things I do for England...
Saturday, August 07, 2010
learning a world of missiles
Expanding on my comment here, I think the most illuminating way of looking at the debate about how big a society (ha!) needs to be to support certain levels of technology may be to look at some natural experiments. Specifically, we know about a number of cases where societies have decided to acquire complex new technologies with limited outside help. Basically, these are clandestine weapons projects.
Now, most if not all of them had some degree of outside help. But the question is really how much you can do with the equivalent of taking along a library on the space ship. To some extent, getting outside help is analogous to this.
Pakistan, for example, succeeded in developing a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Much of the information it needed was essentially canned - they could study it up. The gating factor was, as always, the fissile material. Having tried the relatively easy plutonium route and been caught, they proceeded with highly-enriched uranium. This meant that the technology barrier was designing a working centrifuge and then building enough of them to scale up. A lot of people over on the Crooked Timber thread think, essentially, that this is the difficult bit - there's a lot of implicit knowledge embodied in the process that you can't get from textbooks.
An example of this is the performance of the Iranian enrichment cascades. There have been repeated instances of them seeming to progress much more slowly than the known capabilities of the R-2 machines, and over at Armscontrolwonk, you can argue endlessly whether this represents a policy decision to go slow or else operational problems due to their inexperience.
However, arguably, Pakistan did use a textbook - A. Q. Khan brought over information from URENCO that helped enormously. The rest was a question of learning by doing, or kaizen - continuous improvement. Interestingly, Khan's private nuclear trading operation essentially sold the same sort of thing, a sort of starter-kit of centrifuge parts and documentation that let his customers start to learn about enrichment operations.
The biggest counter-example is North Korea, which did get a lot of outside help in the 90s for its missile program. Rather than just getting documents and example devices, North Korea imported whole sections of a rocket engine production line and many of the people who ran it. They may not have stuck around long, but it remains true that the North Korean nuclear and missile development projects started off with what could be described as on-line outside help. They didn't just have the documentation - they could ask the experts. But their achievements are significantly less impressive than Pakistan's.
Another case is the development of long-range drug smuggling craft. Recently, the Colombians found the first known drug sub capable of submerging fully and also of making a trans-Atlantic voyage. It is, of course, a mystery whether any others are operating. The interesting bit is that it seems unlikely that their builders have access to North Korean-style on-line help. It's just possible they managed to find and recruit a submarine designer, I suppose. But there's no evidence of that. What there is evidence of is kaizen; for years, they have been building progressively more impressive and capable craft, from boats with a low freeboard, to semi-submersibles, to bigger and longer-ranged semi-subs, and now to a full ocean-going submarine. That would suggest that they have general shipwright's skills and heavy metalworking, and they've progressively learned more as they went.
What conclusions? First of all, don't underestimate the power of general purpose technology. (This is essentially the promise of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib: The computer is the most general machine we have ever made. You can and must understand computers NOW...) Second, don't be obsessed by outside help/state sponsors/whatever. They're a way of denying other people agency.
Now, most if not all of them had some degree of outside help. But the question is really how much you can do with the equivalent of taking along a library on the space ship. To some extent, getting outside help is analogous to this.
Pakistan, for example, succeeded in developing a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Much of the information it needed was essentially canned - they could study it up. The gating factor was, as always, the fissile material. Having tried the relatively easy plutonium route and been caught, they proceeded with highly-enriched uranium. This meant that the technology barrier was designing a working centrifuge and then building enough of them to scale up. A lot of people over on the Crooked Timber thread think, essentially, that this is the difficult bit - there's a lot of implicit knowledge embodied in the process that you can't get from textbooks.
An example of this is the performance of the Iranian enrichment cascades. There have been repeated instances of them seeming to progress much more slowly than the known capabilities of the R-2 machines, and over at Armscontrolwonk, you can argue endlessly whether this represents a policy decision to go slow or else operational problems due to their inexperience.
However, arguably, Pakistan did use a textbook - A. Q. Khan brought over information from URENCO that helped enormously. The rest was a question of learning by doing, or kaizen - continuous improvement. Interestingly, Khan's private nuclear trading operation essentially sold the same sort of thing, a sort of starter-kit of centrifuge parts and documentation that let his customers start to learn about enrichment operations.
The biggest counter-example is North Korea, which did get a lot of outside help in the 90s for its missile program. Rather than just getting documents and example devices, North Korea imported whole sections of a rocket engine production line and many of the people who ran it. They may not have stuck around long, but it remains true that the North Korean nuclear and missile development projects started off with what could be described as on-line outside help. They didn't just have the documentation - they could ask the experts. But their achievements are significantly less impressive than Pakistan's.
Another case is the development of long-range drug smuggling craft. Recently, the Colombians found the first known drug sub capable of submerging fully and also of making a trans-Atlantic voyage. It is, of course, a mystery whether any others are operating. The interesting bit is that it seems unlikely that their builders have access to North Korean-style on-line help. It's just possible they managed to find and recruit a submarine designer, I suppose. But there's no evidence of that. What there is evidence of is kaizen; for years, they have been building progressively more impressive and capable craft, from boats with a low freeboard, to semi-submersibles, to bigger and longer-ranged semi-subs, and now to a full ocean-going submarine. That would suggest that they have general shipwright's skills and heavy metalworking, and they've progressively learned more as they went.
What conclusions? First of all, don't underestimate the power of general purpose technology. (This is essentially the promise of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib: The computer is the most general machine we have ever made. You can and must understand computers NOW...) Second, don't be obsessed by outside help/state sponsors/whatever. They're a way of denying other people agency.
architecturally designed
Owen Hatherley has an immense post about Sheffield, modernism, socialism, privatisation, etc. Which reminded me of an estate agent ad I saw recently, for a gaff in the Highgate New Town estate. The sales-slug referred to a "3 double bedroom apartment in an architecturally-designed ex-local authority development, with 19' kitchen/diner, 12' reception, and exclusive access to a full-width south-facing balcony". Well, indeed. A snip at £340,000. I liked the "architecturally-designed" - as opposed to what, exactly? All buildings are architecturally designed - some are designed by architects, some are designed well, a lot are designed badly. But don't let that put you off. It's not really my point either.
I do think it's a sign of the times; suddenly, buildings like this aren't concrete monstrosities imposed on the poor by a remote leftist elite, but rather, "architect-designed" jewels. This is relevant. That this should come up just at the point when Grant Shapps wants to end security of tenure in council housing (which Highgate New Town mostly is, still) should not really be surprising. In the Cameron future, we'll swap over - the poor can move back into draughty, mouseful Victorian buildings they can't afford to heat, and the elite can enjoy Parker-Morris space standards. (75% of the houses Peter Tabori's project replaced didn't have a bathroom.)
I do think it's a sign of the times; suddenly, buildings like this aren't concrete monstrosities imposed on the poor by a remote leftist elite, but rather, "architect-designed" jewels. This is relevant. That this should come up just at the point when Grant Shapps wants to end security of tenure in council housing (which Highgate New Town mostly is, still) should not really be surprising. In the Cameron future, we'll swap over - the poor can move back into draughty, mouseful Victorian buildings they can't afford to heat, and the elite can enjoy Parker-Morris space standards. (75% of the houses Peter Tabori's project replaced didn't have a bathroom.)
leakcheese
The Stiftung reckons that the Wikileaks dump of ISAF's sigacts log is more significant than we give it credit for. Well, perhaps. I've not yet dug into the data pile, but I've not been very impressed by the news version of it. Especially, I'm not very impressed by the news coverage; I was reading the Süddeutsche Zeitung the other day, and what struck me was the number of forms-of-words that were direct translations of things that appeared in the Guardian, Le Monde, etc, etc. Clearly, a lot of this stuff is rewritten press releases from Julian Assange.
Of course, if your rewritten press release contains Secret! Intelligence! Leaks! it feels a lot less like just rechewing press releases. And it's no doubt preferable to have the papers fill space with cheese if the cheese comes from Assange as opposed to, say, the American Enterprise Institute. But it's still cheese; the thing about press release chewing is that it's like Nietzsche's crack about lectures in Hört! Hört! (if you read German, incredibly funny). He talks about students (Hörer - literally listeners - in traditional German universities) sitting in rows, listening to the lecturer reading and usually writing down what he says, hanging "on the umbilical cord of the university".
Everyone who's ever been a journalist has done it. Absorb the input; summarise; add filler, and turn in the news-style product. With practice you can avoid thinking about it at all.
Of course, if your rewritten press release contains Secret! Intelligence! Leaks! it feels a lot less like just rechewing press releases. And it's no doubt preferable to have the papers fill space with cheese if the cheese comes from Assange as opposed to, say, the American Enterprise Institute. But it's still cheese; the thing about press release chewing is that it's like Nietzsche's crack about lectures in Hört! Hört! (if you read German, incredibly funny). He talks about students (Hörer - literally listeners - in traditional German universities) sitting in rows, listening to the lecturer reading and usually writing down what he says, hanging "on the umbilical cord of the university".
Everyone who's ever been a journalist has done it. Absorb the input; summarise; add filler, and turn in the news-style product. With practice you can avoid thinking about it at all.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
evolving
Did you know that each successive generation of German high-speed trains has had air-conditioning plant built for higher temperatures? The trains from the early 90s handle a temperature range from -20 to +32 degrees Celsius. Those from the mid-90s, -20 to +32, but if necessary they can exceed that. The ICE Type 3 handles temperatures up to 35 degrees, and the ones still to be delivered up to 40. And the next class? They're planning for 45 degrees. Apparently the International Railway Union standard is going to be revised upwards.
three links about false positives
Via Bruce Schneier's, an interesting paper in PNAS on false positives and looking for terrorists. Even if the assumptions of profiling are valid, and the target-group really is more likely to be terrorists, it still isn't a good policy. Because the inter-group difference in the proportion of terrorists is small relative to the absolute scarcity of terrorists in the population, profiling means that you hugely over-sample the people who match the profile. Although it magnifies the hit-rate, it also magnifies the false positive rate, and because a search carried out on someone matching the profile is one not carried out elsewhere, it increases the chance of missing someone.
In fact, if you profile, you need to balance this by searching non-profiled people more often.
The operators of Deepwater Horizon disabled a lot of alarms in order to stop false alarms waking everyone up at all hours. Shock! In some ways, though, that was better than this story about a US hospital, from comp.risks. There, a patient died when an alarm was missed. Why? Too many alarms, beeps, and general noise, and people had turned off some devices' alarms in order to get rid of them.
Unlike Transocean, they had a solution - remove the off switches, because that way, they'll damn well have to listen. At least the oil people didn't think that would work. Of course, they didn't think that if your warning system goes off so often that nobody can sleep when nothing unusual is going on, there's something wrong with the system.
In fact, if you profile, you need to balance this by searching non-profiled people more often.
The operators of Deepwater Horizon disabled a lot of alarms in order to stop false alarms waking everyone up at all hours. Shock! In some ways, though, that was better than this story about a US hospital, from comp.risks. There, a patient died when an alarm was missed. Why? Too many alarms, beeps, and general noise, and people had turned off some devices' alarms in order to get rid of them.
Unlike Transocean, they had a solution - remove the off switches, because that way, they'll damn well have to listen. At least the oil people didn't think that would work. Of course, they didn't think that if your warning system goes off so often that nobody can sleep when nothing unusual is going on, there's something wrong with the system.
cuts near me
I think everyone's linked to this excellent piece on building a campaign against the cuts already, but I'd like to seize on this bit:
I keep thinking of "Cuts Near Me". As far as I can see, it would need:
Cuts ingestion. Obviously it would be cool to get the cuts automatically, but no-one seriously expects the government to issue press releases for each cut, headed "Cut" and provided in a standard XML format for structured parsing. So we need a simple form to gather some details - notably the ministry to blame and some categories - and a location, probably found on a map. Source links would be good, too, as would the nominal value. And a link to any group protesting it would be gold dust.
Validation. Kick open a form on the www and people (and other things) will type any old twaddle into it, so we might want to peer-review incoming cuts.
As far as I can make out, that's it for the write elements.
Search by category
Does what it says on the tin.
Search by date
Also self-explanatory, and the basis for an RSS feed of recent cuts.
Search geographically
Probably the most difficult bit, but it's not much more than getting cuts that fall within a given postcode, constituency, or bounding-box.
Output would need to provide a list/feed, plus a map view. I'd want the individual cuts to come with the TWFY links to the MP whose patch it is and the minister responsible, so need to get the postcode -> polygon -> contains constituency centroid mapped at the point the cut gets written.
Alerts would be nice, as would a couple of eye-catching visualisations. I think this is doable.
The more we can build up a modern ‘doomsday book’ of the effect of the cuts, the more we can help people to make the second stage of that journey when they realise that they are not alone in being hit with unfair cuts, and that they therefore need to call for a thorough-going alternative. Combined with resources to help people organise locally, and popular material that can put the economic arguments, such a web-site could be an important tool.
I keep thinking of "Cuts Near Me". As far as I can see, it would need:
Cuts ingestion. Obviously it would be cool to get the cuts automatically, but no-one seriously expects the government to issue press releases for each cut, headed "Cut" and provided in a standard XML format for structured parsing. So we need a simple form to gather some details - notably the ministry to blame and some categories - and a location, probably found on a map. Source links would be good, too, as would the nominal value. And a link to any group protesting it would be gold dust.
Validation. Kick open a form on the www and people (and other things) will type any old twaddle into it, so we might want to peer-review incoming cuts.
As far as I can make out, that's it for the write elements.
Search by category
Does what it says on the tin.
Search by date
Also self-explanatory, and the basis for an RSS feed of recent cuts.
Search geographically
Probably the most difficult bit, but it's not much more than getting cuts that fall within a given postcode, constituency, or bounding-box.
Output would need to provide a list/feed, plus a map view. I'd want the individual cuts to come with the TWFY links to the MP whose patch it is and the minister responsible, so need to get the postcode -> polygon -> contains constituency centroid mapped at the point the cut gets written.
Alerts would be nice, as would a couple of eye-catching visualisations. I think this is doable.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
repeating the 2002-style bleg...
So, if you needed a band for a 30th birthday party...come on, or I'll put it on craigslist....
stuff I disagree with
Adam Greenfield is reading about the notion of "military urbanism". I think this is oversold, and also that like a lot of concepts relating to the social aspects of architecture, it's overbroad - people chuck in bits and pieces of anything that seems to fit. CCTV? Surveillance, whack it in. Temporary buildings? Logistics and containerisation, got to be in there. The Olympics (and much of modern thinking)? Well, that seems to land up in there as well. And, of course, a lot of border security stuff, Israeli settler town planning.
I'm not convinced that the concept holds together once you squeeze quite so much stuff into it; it starts to look like a list of Stuff I Disagree With, and a lot of it isn't particularly military. There is a big difference between blowing things and people up and putting a big blue plywood hoarding round the Olympics site. One of them pisses off Iain Sinclair and the other...insert joke here.
I'm not convinced that the concept holds together once you squeeze quite so much stuff into it; it starts to look like a list of Stuff I Disagree With, and a lot of it isn't particularly military. There is a big difference between blowing things and people up and putting a big blue plywood hoarding round the Olympics site. One of them pisses off Iain Sinclair and the other...insert joke here.
read the whole thing
How did the British Army decide to fight the Helmand campaign as it did? Chatham House has a fascinating paper by Anthony King on the development of the campaign, the abandonment of the original plan, and the processes of decision-making that led the British to fight as they did. The original plan, it turns out, was very different to the implementation - quite a few observers in the summer of 2006 tended to think that the infamous "platoon houses", outposts in northern Helmand held by small groups of Paras, were an ill-thought out effort to implement a counterinsurgency strategy and live among the people. If they had been, this quickly became impossible due to constant and intense fighting with the Taliban just to hang on.
But it seems that, whatever the aim of this deployment, it was a major departure from the original plan.
But as it turned out, there was immediate pressure from Afghan politicians to drop this plan and to send soldiers much further north, on the basis that the Taliban were about to overrun various places where there was meant to be some sort of Afghan government presence.
According to Antonio Giustozzi, what was happening was that the Quetta Taliban leadership was trying to move to the third phase of the classic revolutionary war strategy and build up a force there to attack Lashkar Gah and Kandahar in the hope this would lead to a general collapse of the state, and northern Helmand was on the main infiltration route from Pakistan via the Ghilzai tribe's territory - but nobody on the Allied side knew this.
The upshot was a string of vicious localised battles around the outposts; over time, they became surrounded by a depopulated war zone of ruins, wrecked by Allied firepower, itself surrounded by the enemy. There were nowhere near enough soldiers to go out and pursue them, or to expand the defences to include the whole local area. The British were isolated from the population by their own close air support and fixed in place by their isolation from their own forces.
This quote refers to the situation in April, 2008 - even though the summer fighting of 2006 was recognised as a disaster for the campaign, surprisingly little had changed.
King's key point is that in the light, or perhaps the darkness, of the lack of information about the Taliban in Helmand, it's very hard to say what the British leaders were trying to do. It wasn't counterinsurgency - even they admit that. It wasn't an effort to stop the Taliban offensive in its tracks with a spoiling attack, because nobody outside the Taliban knew about it at the time. It wasn't that nobody considered any alternatives.
In fact, he argues that there wasn't really a rationale - instead, the decisions were guided by culture, habits of mind, the tendency to apply skills learned in other contexts, and bureaucratic factors.
There's something incredibly grim about this list of flags in the map. And that turbine still hasn't been installed, because the cement hasn't got there yet.
Much of this is an example of one of the key themes in the history of the British empire - the tension between Whitehall and the Man on the Spot. Better communications were never the answer. Lord Milner in South Africa complained bitterly of the "tyranny of the telegraph", but it cut both ways - the telegraph helped him indulge in alarmism and self publicity as much as it helped the Government control him. Here's an example.
Whatever had been said or thought in London, Kabul, Brunssum, Brussels, and Washington, this was the defining decision. We might well wonder what else it defined.
King also discusses what might have defined that decision. He argues that a major, unspoken factor in the whole decision to go to Helmand was the Army's fear that a post-Iraq reckoning would result in its budget being slashed. For the MOD more broadly, a similar factor may have been the experience of failure in Iraq and a desire to demonstrate continued willingness to support the US.
The availability of the newly acquired Apache helicopters played its own special role. Having bought them and made the investments necessary to put them in service, the bureaucratic momentum meant they would be used the next time the Army was called on, which meant that the Airborne side of the Army would be called on. That had consequences for the way they would fight, too - King quotes some truly startling remarks from Lieutenant-Colonel Tootal.
Further, the Apache's capabilities made it possible to survive the plan as amended. At one point in 2008, there were only 50 British soldiers in Lashkar Gah, supposedly the strategic centre of the entire war - unsurprisingly, the Taliban chose that night to attack, and only the helicopters prevented them from overrunning the place.
King concludes by suggesting that there is still scope to change course, and that the Army is now turning back to the original plan. He argues that, as preparing for a handover to the Afghan government becomes more important, some of the culture issues will start to work the other way; using more Special Forces as advisors, for example, will tend to bring their prestige to a task that has been seen as secondary to the goal of finding a decisive battle with the Taliban.
If you're after some crumbs of optimism, this could be one - Hezb i-Islami cooperating with ISAF, which if true argues that the Pakistanis mean it about supporting a political solution. Efforts at forming an anti-Taliban firqat are on. Ackerman calls it a
Anyway, read the whole thing.
But it seems that, whatever the aim of this deployment, it was a major departure from the original plan.
The plan identified the area around Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital, and Gereshk as vital. This area was defined as an Afghan Development Zone on which British inter-agency efforts would be focused. DFID and FCO would work within this area,
improving living conditions and governance. As part of this plan, the Helmand Task Force was ordered to establish a British centre of operations at Camp Bastion and to secure a triangle of territory between that base, Lashkar Gar and Gereshk.
The military plan for Helmand developed by 16 Air Assault Brigade involved two fundamental elements. In order to secure the Lashkar Gar–Bastion–Gereshk triangle, one company from 3 PARA would be deployed to Forward Operating
Base Price near Gereshk. The other companies would be used either to secure areas for the provincial reconstruction team or to conduct raids against areas in which ‘insurgents/criminals’ were known to operate.11 With 3,500 troops, of
which only 600 were infantry, the plan for Herrick 4 was ambitious, as Stuart Tootal, the commanding officer of 3 PARA, recognized: ‘Even if our operations could be limited to the region around Lashkar Gar and Gereshk as we planned,
it was still a huge area for the limited number of troops that I would have at my disposal."
But as it turned out, there was immediate pressure from Afghan politicians to drop this plan and to send soldiers much further north, on the basis that the Taliban were about to overrun various places where there was meant to be some sort of Afghan government presence.
British troops were quickly deflected from their officially designated task of securing the Lashkar Gar triangle. Almost immediately upon deploying to Helmand in April 2006, the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, Brigadier Ed Butler, came under political pressure from the incumbent governor of Helmand, Mohammed Daoud. Daoud claimed that various settlements were about to fall to the Taleban, and would do so if the British did not deploy immediately. As a result, Brigadier
Butler deployed his already meagre forces across Helmand province from Garmsir in the south to Musa Qala in the north. In all, the battlegroup spread itself across seven major positions, about 600 square miles of difficult terrain.
According to Antonio Giustozzi, what was happening was that the Quetta Taliban leadership was trying to move to the third phase of the classic revolutionary war strategy and build up a force there to attack Lashkar Gah and Kandahar in the hope this would lead to a general collapse of the state, and northern Helmand was on the main infiltration route from Pakistan via the Ghilzai tribe's territory - but nobody on the Allied side knew this.
The upshot was a string of vicious localised battles around the outposts; over time, they became surrounded by a depopulated war zone of ruins, wrecked by Allied firepower, itself surrounded by the enemy. There were nowhere near enough soldiers to go out and pursue them, or to expand the defences to include the whole local area. The British were isolated from the population by their own close air support and fixed in place by their isolation from their own forces.
The FOBs formed an archipelago of partially secure islands whose small forces were unable to suppress Taleban activity beyond a narrow strip of territory: ‘The soldiers might push the Taliban back a kilometre or two. In the process they might uncover a small-arms cache or a bunker which they would then blow. But they did not stay to hold the ground.
They trekked back to base and the Taliban crept in again’.
This quote refers to the situation in April, 2008 - even though the summer fighting of 2006 was recognised as a disaster for the campaign, surprisingly little had changed.
King's key point is that in the light, or perhaps the darkness, of the lack of information about the Taliban in Helmand, it's very hard to say what the British leaders were trying to do. It wasn't counterinsurgency - even they admit that. It wasn't an effort to stop the Taliban offensive in its tracks with a spoiling attack, because nobody outside the Taliban knew about it at the time. It wasn't that nobody considered any alternatives.
There was little pressure from NATO or ISAF itself for the British to disperse. General
Richards, commander of ISAF at the time, was actively opposed to the platoon house strategy although he did not have direct command of Helmand until 31 July 2006. Major-General Ben Freakley, who was commanding coalition forces in the south, was vehemently opposed to the platoon house strategy. Decisively, instead of dispersing across the province, it would have been possible for 16 Air Assault Brigade and, to a lesser extent, its successors to concentrate as planned on the Bastion–Lashkar Gar–Gereshk triangle, notwithstanding the evident pressure which Governor Daoud applied on Ed Butler.
In fact, he argues that there wasn't really a rationale - instead, the decisions were guided by culture, habits of mind, the tendency to apply skills learned in other contexts, and bureaucratic factors.
Thus, British commanders like Stuart Tootal knew full well that they did not have the forces to secure Helmand and that therefore dispersal was likely to be counterproductive in the long term. However, ingrained with a professional
imperative to act, it was as impossible for 16 Air Assault to refuse Daoud in 2006 as it was for subsequent commanders not to engage in recurrent offensive operations, even though they knew they could not hope to secure the areas they were seeking
to clear. The professional self-definition of the British officer corps made tactical inactivity impossible for them....
It is noticeable that each brigade tour of Helmand has sought to define itself by a major operation: 16 Brigade ‘broke in’, 3 Commando Brigade retook Sangin, 12 Brigade ‘mowed the grass’, 52 Brigade retook Musa Qala, 16 Brigade transported the turbine to Kajaki, 3 Commando Brigade seized Nad-e-Ali and now 19 Brigade have taken Babaji. Until the final two rotations
there was very little continuity between the tours
There's something incredibly grim about this list of flags in the map. And that turbine still hasn't been installed, because the cement hasn't got there yet.
Much of this is an example of one of the key themes in the history of the British empire - the tension between Whitehall and the Man on the Spot. Better communications were never the answer. Lord Milner in South Africa complained bitterly of the "tyranny of the telegraph", but it cut both ways - the telegraph helped him indulge in alarmism and self publicity as much as it helped the Government control him. Here's an example.
On 19 June 2006, Brigadier Butler warned Stuart Tootal that Sangin was about to fall and gave Tootal 90 minutes to decide whether to deploy or not. Tootal and his tactical headquarters ‘quickly rehashed the pros and cons’. Tootal recognized that his troops ‘were here to support the government of Afghanistan’. However, the decisive impetus for insertion was regimental, as Tootal himself confessed: ‘Finally we were Paras and being asked to do difficult and risky things was what we were meant to be about.’ Tootal confirmed that he was ready to deploy 20 minutes after Ed Butler’s initial communication. Deployed for a 24-hour operation, A Company were finally extracted in early July, but the battlegroup remained besieged in Sangin until the end of the tour.
Whatever had been said or thought in London, Kabul, Brunssum, Brussels, and Washington, this was the defining decision. We might well wonder what else it defined.
King also discusses what might have defined that decision. He argues that a major, unspoken factor in the whole decision to go to Helmand was the Army's fear that a post-Iraq reckoning would result in its budget being slashed. For the MOD more broadly, a similar factor may have been the experience of failure in Iraq and a desire to demonstrate continued willingness to support the US.
The availability of the newly acquired Apache helicopters played its own special role. Having bought them and made the investments necessary to put them in service, the bureaucratic momentum meant they would be used the next time the Army was called on, which meant that the Airborne side of the Army would be called on. That had consequences for the way they would fight, too - King quotes some truly startling remarks from Lieutenant-Colonel Tootal.
‘I also made the point that running out of supplies when surrounded was part of our history. When I talked of what conditions must have been like for paratroopers who held the bridge at Arnhem for nine days against ferocious German assaults, having only planned to hold it for two, in 1944, people got the point that I was making.’
Further, the Apache's capabilities made it possible to survive the plan as amended. At one point in 2008, there were only 50 British soldiers in Lashkar Gah, supposedly the strategic centre of the entire war - unsurprisingly, the Taliban chose that night to attack, and only the helicopters prevented them from overrunning the place.
King concludes by suggesting that there is still scope to change course, and that the Army is now turning back to the original plan. He argues that, as preparing for a handover to the Afghan government becomes more important, some of the culture issues will start to work the other way; using more Special Forces as advisors, for example, will tend to bring their prestige to a task that has been seen as secondary to the goal of finding a decisive battle with the Taliban.
If you're after some crumbs of optimism, this could be one - Hezb i-Islami cooperating with ISAF, which if true argues that the Pakistanis mean it about supporting a political solution. Efforts at forming an anti-Taliban firqat are on. Ackerman calls it a
a hodgepodge of improvisation that manages to keep the structure from totally falling apart in the near-term. I'd take that.
Anyway, read the whole thing.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
the right to be ignored
Chris Dillow has a good go at the Government's "Thatcherism - Choose Your Own Adventure" Web site and the Have Your Say-style idiots who frequent it. But the fate of another, related Government Web project is interesting.
The number10.gov.uk e-petitions site will be remembered mostly for its role in kiboshing the horrible "road-pricing" (aka total surveillance of all vehicle movements) proposal. It's now officially "under review", and isn't accepting any more petitions or signatures on existing ones. (Also, the ones that were outstanding at the election have been binned.) At the same time, a variety of suggestions-box websites have proliferated across the public sector.
The distinction is clear; the e-petitions project was intended, among other things, as a way the public could protest about policies it didn't like. The example of road pricing shows that it was more effective in this role than cynics like me might have expected. "Spending Challenge" and friends, however, don't lead to anything - nobody has to respond to them, there's no mechanism to build a campaign on. It's just a pipe leading to the government's File Zero.
Also, the e-petitions site was engineered by competent people, notably Chris Lightfoot. The Coalition's multifarious efforts went online and duly crapped out as soon as production traffic hit them. You can read how MySociety scaled up the e-petitions system here. It's the Big Society for you - a meaningless suggestions box for half-literate blowhards, as opposed to a fairly useful tool, incompetently built by SomeCompany, as opposed to MySociety.
The number10.gov.uk e-petitions site will be remembered mostly for its role in kiboshing the horrible "road-pricing" (aka total surveillance of all vehicle movements) proposal. It's now officially "under review", and isn't accepting any more petitions or signatures on existing ones. (Also, the ones that were outstanding at the election have been binned.) At the same time, a variety of suggestions-box websites have proliferated across the public sector.
The distinction is clear; the e-petitions project was intended, among other things, as a way the public could protest about policies it didn't like. The example of road pricing shows that it was more effective in this role than cynics like me might have expected. "Spending Challenge" and friends, however, don't lead to anything - nobody has to respond to them, there's no mechanism to build a campaign on. It's just a pipe leading to the government's File Zero.
Also, the e-petitions site was engineered by competent people, notably Chris Lightfoot. The Coalition's multifarious efforts went online and duly crapped out as soon as production traffic hit them. You can read how MySociety scaled up the e-petitions system here. It's the Big Society for you - a meaningless suggestions box for half-literate blowhards, as opposed to a fairly useful tool, incompetently built by SomeCompany, as opposed to MySociety.
Martin Kettle is still a worthless old hack
So there was Martin Kettle, talking about "bright Tory shadow cabinet minister Greg Clark" (he's the one who is now the central government's Minister for Decentralisation). Now here's Kettle claiming that David Cameron "wins this season's golden boot" because, well, he's really nice. In fact, Kettle actually seems to have been handed this nanosecond's version of the talking point about Bill Clinton's aides stealing all the "W"s from the keyboards/Ken Livingstone's secret wine cellar/whatever. So I'm declaring victory on the statement that Martin Kettle is a worthless old hack.
(By the way, some examples of the delight of Brown's staff at his departure - or otherwise - and his total lack of emotion towards 'em - or otherwise - can be sampled here. That would have required Kettle to read his own newspaper.)
Here's Henry Porter, who thinks that:
Apart from ordering its own budget office to secretly change its forecasts in order to justify cutting the income of the poorest people in the country by 20%, I guess. Apart from deciding to pretend that across-the-board cuts in departmental spending of 25-40% will happen, but the public sector won't have any effect on unemployment. Frankly, anyone who calls themselves a Liberal should be especially outraged by this, just for the insult to us as intelligent citizens, layered on top of the blatant cruelty. The OBR story has been the most sustained, most fully realised exercise in official lying since Iraq.
(By the way, some examples of the delight of Brown's staff at his departure - or otherwise - and his total lack of emotion towards 'em - or otherwise - can be sampled here. That would have required Kettle to read his own newspaper.)
Here's Henry Porter, who thinks that:
From health to foreign relations, from defence to civil liberties, the coalition has moved with degrees of fair mindedness and deliberation that are refreshing.
Apart from ordering its own budget office to secretly change its forecasts in order to justify cutting the income of the poorest people in the country by 20%, I guess. Apart from deciding to pretend that across-the-board cuts in departmental spending of 25-40% will happen, but the public sector won't have any effect on unemployment. Frankly, anyone who calls themselves a Liberal should be especially outraged by this, just for the insult to us as intelligent citizens, layered on top of the blatant cruelty. The OBR story has been the most sustained, most fully realised exercise in official lying since Iraq.
probably a robbery
Here's an interesting follow-up on the recent raid on the Iraqi central bank, from Joel Wing. You may recall that the attack, a classic NOIA multi-layered assault using suicide bombers, snipers, and infantry, successfully took over the building and held off the Iraqi army for some time before disengaging, and that although a large quantity of documents and computers were destroyed, no money was taken.
I read that as being an insurgent effort to project incorruptibility, in the style both Tomas Masaryk and Mao advised their followers to adopt, in the context of an operation designed to wreck the bank as an institution. Wing's follow-up suggests that there may have been other motives at work - the fire began in the office of the Inspector-General, and the files destroyed include the records of an inquiry into a huge fake-cheque fraud ($711 million - a reminder that frauds in Iraq grow to enormous size). Further, there was a previous unexplained fire in the bank's archives in 2008 which destroyed evidence in a corruption case.
Wing's sources speculate that employees at the bank might have taken the opportunity of the raid to start the fire, that the attackers were involved in the original fraud, or that those behind the fraud hired the attackers to destroy the evidence.
Fascinatingly, almost a year ago, The Guardian reported that similar motives might have played a role in the kidnapping of British IT consultant Peter Moore and the murder of his bodyguards. Moore was working on a new accounting system for the Finance Ministry, that would track all the Iraqi government's income and expenditure in detail, when he was kidnapped from the Ministry's data centre by a platoon-sized force of gunmen posing as Ministry of the Interior forces. It is rarely obvious in Iraq whether the fake policemen are fake policemen, or real policemen posing as fakes, but several different kinds of insurgents had the capability to manoeuvre forces that size in central Baghdad at the time.
Among other things, this is a reminder that the recent history of Iraq cannot be written without paying serious attention to its aspect as the biggest robbery in human history, a fat city for every crook in the Middle East and far beyond.
I read that as being an insurgent effort to project incorruptibility, in the style both Tomas Masaryk and Mao advised their followers to adopt, in the context of an operation designed to wreck the bank as an institution. Wing's follow-up suggests that there may have been other motives at work - the fire began in the office of the Inspector-General, and the files destroyed include the records of an inquiry into a huge fake-cheque fraud ($711 million - a reminder that frauds in Iraq grow to enormous size). Further, there was a previous unexplained fire in the bank's archives in 2008 which destroyed evidence in a corruption case.
Wing's sources speculate that employees at the bank might have taken the opportunity of the raid to start the fire, that the attackers were involved in the original fraud, or that those behind the fraud hired the attackers to destroy the evidence.
Fascinatingly, almost a year ago, The Guardian reported that similar motives might have played a role in the kidnapping of British IT consultant Peter Moore and the murder of his bodyguards. Moore was working on a new accounting system for the Finance Ministry, that would track all the Iraqi government's income and expenditure in detail, when he was kidnapped from the Ministry's data centre by a platoon-sized force of gunmen posing as Ministry of the Interior forces. It is rarely obvious in Iraq whether the fake policemen are fake policemen, or real policemen posing as fakes, but several different kinds of insurgents had the capability to manoeuvre forces that size in central Baghdad at the time.
Among other things, this is a reminder that the recent history of Iraq cannot be written without paying serious attention to its aspect as the biggest robbery in human history, a fat city for every crook in the Middle East and far beyond.
remember this?
Here's something interesting. I'm getting people googling for details of resettlement for Iraqis who were employed by the British during the occupation, again. This is the first such incident since February. The request came in from a netblock registered to an Iraqi ISP and VSAT provider based in Baghdad. I will not provide any more details, as their WHOIS record is quite personally-identifying.
Last night, the links in this post were 404ing; today, two of them (the Arabic PDF and the Miliband statement) are now resolving again, but the one to the application form is still returning a page which (disingenuously?) claims that
Last night, the links in this post were 404ing; today, two of them (the Arabic PDF and the Miliband statement) are now resolving again, but the one to the application form is still returning a page which (disingenuously?) claims that
We are currently experiencing exceptionally high traffic volumes on the website. Please try again later.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
again with the nameless dread!
So there's this web application that does a corpus analysis of your writing and compares it to others....I chucked this post at it.
I suppose Charlie Stross is right in linking the Lovecraft mythos and international politics. Further evidence - I tried the post before that one, about satellites and private finance initiatives, and got the same result.
Update: But when I write for Stable & Principled...
I suppose Charlie Stross is right in linking the Lovecraft mythos and international politics. Further evidence - I tried the post before that one, about satellites and private finance initiatives, and got the same result.
Update: But when I write for Stable & Principled...