Respectable mendacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

neeeews of the world

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

1. The Daniel Morgan/Southern Investigations line of inquiry

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The Met Press Office

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

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

3. Andy Coulson's Background Check

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

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

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

4. The Missing Millions of Messages

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

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

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

5. How Hack Happen?

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

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

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

6. Mechanics of Collapse

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

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

7. Compare and Contrast

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

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

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

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

Acid Helvetica titles do not make you a decent person

(Alt. title: Look, it's like a society but smaller!)

OK, so you may remember the case of Startupbritain.org, a well-publicised eye-catching initiative that turned out to be little better than spam paid for with a government grant to some whose-kid-are-you types. It seems that the whole pointless wankabout was kicked off when one of the WKAYers cornered poisonous old Thatcherite gargoyle Lord Young and pitched his eye out.

Ah well, the Big Society was always going to be a happy hunting ground for grantsmanship, wanktanking, and various other kinds of ligging and general availability enterpreneurship. Small business grant programs - which it essentially is - are notoriously vulnerable to fraud and general dodgy dealing.

And then it came to the MySociety listserv. So this message plunked into the trap last Monday. In it, a thing called "Sidekick Studios" offers to hire some software developers. Note - because this will be important later on - that they didn't make any bones at all that they were making an offer of employment. (A shorter version of this post is in the list archive.)

"*We’re Sidekick – And We’re looking to hire 3 Developers…We're a social innovation organisation - we develop web and mobile tools to tackle social issues and public services in a different way. We have 3 different jobs – please take a read and get in touch if the roles spark interest

Fair enough. The first one is for a Ruby on Rails developer with 3-5 years' experience, for an 8 week consultancy gig at their headquarters in London Bridge, working alongside a mobile developer and a user-interface designer on a project for an unnamed client. Nothing to see here.

But here's the problem.

*2 x Creative technical leads / senior developers *
Project – “SS3”
*Key info: *
· 3 month contract – maybe more
· Social innovation projects
a) Social Care Swap “wife swap for your gran”
b) Youth Justice Game Project “4 square for criminals”
· Experienced and creative developer to build proof of concept for an
innovative social project
· Start up experience preferred
· No language preference – but solid front and back end web-dev skills
required - whatever environment you’re used to
· Work in small dynamic team
· Based at Sidekick studios, London Bridge
· Read more hear http://sidekickstudios.net/ss3/

To be honest, it was the peerlessly idiotic "concepts" that caught my eye. "Wife Swap for your gran". Had Nathan Barley been contracted to write the requirements statement? Or was the whole thing a reality-TV show? Had I stumbled upon a new Chris Morris project? We could read more "hear", and some of us did.

SS3 is an experimental technology and design incubator to create new types of public services. We've assembled a team of 10 people, with diverse skills across research, design, technology, social venturing and commerce. Over 3 months, the team will work together out of a studio in London Bridge to launch 3 social businesses, each with the potential to deliver sustainable, social impact. And rock the world.

OK...well, it would appear from the next paragraph that the team is us. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that part of the team is us - the 10 ground crew have apparently been recruited already. It just remains to find Laika and Strelka the space dogs.

We're offering 3 people the chance to become the resident entrepreneur for each venture. And have their salary paid for 3 months. And have the opportunity to become the full-time Managing Director of the venture at the end of the SS3 experience.

Note that the software jobs are additional to this. So you're being offered the chance to implement..."Wife Swap for your gran"...over three months, and if you succeed you get to keep it. And they'll pay your salary. Or maybe not - let's skip ahead here...

How much will I get paid? Good question. And we're going to duck it. Sort of. We are not saying exactly because we might pay people differently depending on their level of experience. We can say the salary will be more than enough to live off in London, pay exorbitant rent, travel to and from work, and have money left over each month. The value of SS3 is the awesome and talented people who'll help build the venture. If you can't see that, then we're not for you.

Note that they have no interest in any ideas you may have:

I have my own idea / startup / service - will you help me with that? No. The startpoint is the ideas that we've already developed with partners, providers and people in the sector and which we know have some potential.

and reserve the right to terminate you at any moment:

What happens at the end of 3 months? We don't know! The venture could be up and running, with money coming in. In which case, you'll be in the box seat to be the person to get the job on a permanent basis. That might be paid at a higher salary, at a lower salary, or no salary at all. If the venture has limited chance of getting to market, we're going to just kill it and you'll be left with a whole load of training and skills, and some happy memories we hope. If the venture has a chance of going somewhere, but we're not right for each other, we move on and find someone else. Sounds risky, huh? That's the point.

So even if the project is a success, in fact, there's no guarantee of getting the job, contrary to prior statements, and no guarantee of any pay even if you get it. And there is a lot of horrible macho Alan Sugar rhetoric and passive-aggressive expectations-wank.

But if you don't do a good job, or your venture isn't going anywhere fast, we replace you...Or we kill it...No remorse...We'll try not to come to blows and then move on...Sounds risky, huh? That's the point...Entrepreneurial..Committed. Passionate..Not an idiot...If you want exits / earnouts / options, we're not for you...No...you have to be in the office in London Bridge...Or out telling people how great this is / learning / selling...If you can't see that, then we're not for you....It's all about the team....If you're afraid of sales, we're not for you...Definitely not. Full-time. 100 MPH. Absolutely committed. As if your life depended on this. Well at least, your financial security. Because it does.

Indeed it does, but not so much that they're willing to offer anything lame like a job. As previously noted, they're not actually promising any money or any commitment of any kind, but they do keep using the word job:

If you do well, and the venture is doing well, you'll get a job. A good job.

Ahem? What was that again?

In which case, you'll be in the box seat to be the person to get the job on a permanent basis. That might be paid at a higher salary, at a lower salary, or no salary at all.

Now, I mentioned that the projects are non-profit and are to stay that way. Fine. This doesn't, however, mean that Sidekick itself is non-profit. In fact it's a commercial company, registration no. 6707987, and its customer in this project is, well, us. Specifically, they've scored a grant from the UK Technology Strategy Board.

So, to summarise: You get to work your arse off trying to make some daft idea like "Wife Swap for grans" fly. For this you get a suspiciously unspecified sum of money. You may be terminated without cause at any moment. After three months, you may get a job, you may get the same job but without the money, or you may get "no tea and walk home", depending on no conditions that anyone is willing to state at the outset. You may not profit from the business, no matter how well it may do, but Sidekick's directors get theirs whatever happens. And we're all paying for this exploitative, cynical, spammy, hilariously ill-thought out shite.

Further, and just in case anyone thinks I'm biased in any way, does anyone else think The Guardian could perhaps make its pay-for-play Guardian Professional advertorial and events operation look and feel distinct from the actual newspaper's website?

Why am I talking about this?

Well, Sidekick also recommended "a Guardian article" to us - this one. Now, unless you follow Fleet Street politics closely you'd probably think that's just another Guardian URI. But the key bit is that it's in their "Social Enterprise Network", one of their "Professional Networks". Guardian Professional's front page is here. It's possible that there is some difference between Guardian Professional Networks and Guardian Professional, in which case it might be more professional to make this obvious. But I suspect that this piece is advertorial.

It is, however, informative.

Over the past year, in the face of chaotic reorganisations and relentless manager bashing from politicians, we've seen many of them decide to take up generous redundancy packages, in some cases over a year of full pay...

Those civil servants who have been made redundant - they collected their redundancy money! The bastards.

Aside from the huge drop in productivity during the prolonged reorganisation, this mass firing and re-hiring carries huge risks for costs going forward. The same manager is thinking of moving on to work for an international research agency. If the GP consortia wants her unique skills and community relationships in twelve months time, they'll find her charged out to clients at £1000 a day....

Indeed, just like last time. Perhaps it would be better not to do the privatisation and mass sackings in the first place?

If all this sounds a bit gloomy, social enterprises could offer a way to stem the flow of this talent and make use of the experience and knowledge that the taxpayer has invested in...the fear is the shadow of large private sector companies coming in and cleaning up....At Sidekick Studios, we're going t try to grab some of this talent first. Our reasons are pretty selfish – if public services don't want these people, and their knowledge, and their skills, and their networks, then we sure do....From May 1st, we're starting SS3...

I think this might have been improved by an admission that Sidekick Studios is in fact a private sector, for profit, company. What offends me about this is that they are quite openly trying to help push public servants out of real jobs with pensions and union recognition and that stuff and into the hyper-precarious code-for-pizza status we just outlined. Come to think of it, if you can't get hipster interns living off the Bank of Mum & Dad you might as well try sacked civil servants living off the redundancy money.

But then, what else would you expect from people who want to replace the poor sods working in local authority social care with "Wife Swap for your gran" and the police with "Foursquare for criminals", all held together with sales-training day bullshit and shameless volunteer-mining?

aspirational torturer

It says something about the modern thinkers that one of the Egyptian spooks the Piggipedia team identified turns out to be working in the "Security and Loss Prevention" department of a major hypermarket chain. Having lifted photos with names on them from their HQ, they started searching PofacedBook - sorry, LinkedIn - for them, and discovered many more stories like this. That particular spy had been in charge of infiltrating NGOs before shifting over to the retail sector. Sadly, they started deleting profiles pretty quickly.

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.

some memories of west Bradford

Well, this is grim. Intelligent comment is to be found here, in Jamie Kenny's interview with David Wilson.

Would you say that serial killers are a kind of negative indicator of the health of society in the sense that the fewer victims there are, the better society functions?

Serial killers function best within fractured communities, where people don’t look out for each other, and when the gap between those who have and those who have not is wide. In cultures such as these no one really bothers to notice the elderly neighbour living by themselves, or the kids who are homeless because they don’t view these people as having value, or being connected to their lives. Serial killers also exploit homophobia and our laws related to those young people who sell sexual services. When I was in Ipswich in 2006 I used to point out that less than an hour’s flight away was Amsterdam and that no Dutch serial killer had ever targeted prostitutes.

There's also a nasty surprise; according to Chris Williams, who actually met him, he was working on precisely that question, whether the 19th century's apparently low murder rate was explained by the fact that the victims of Victorian murderers were more likely to just vanish rather than be reported to the police.

Well, Yorkshire scores another historic first. I used to work off Thornton Road, and also in Dockfield Mill in Shipley; they're both places where the death of the textile industry left behind a lot of rotting mill buildings that then got re-purposed by all kinds of odd little businesses. Dockfield Road is less so, more traditionally industrial, and there are terraces of classic working-class homes part of the way along it, just about where the pie van parked up when I was working in an envelope factory.

Thornton Road, though, is nothing but old mills and warehouses, now become small engineering workshops, garages, curry wholesalers and the like, a sort of Yorkshire favela development. The district, in the valley between the university and Great Horton Road on one side and Manningham on the other, is not identified with any community - hardly anyone lives there, they only work there or cut through the backstreets to avoid the inner ring road. (Oddly enough, the anarchist 1 in 12 Club is round there too, up the hill towards Westgate. And so are the Quakers.)

The vice trade moved down there after the girls were driven out of Lumb Lane, further uphill (uphill and downhill are always important directions in Bradford) and northwards in the centre of Manningham; this event has been variously considered to have been an example of community vigilantism, Islamism, and also to be associated with control of the drugs market and black/Asian tension, which later led to serious violence. In the 1990s, you could drive past any time of the night or day and see drug dealing going on - I also remember that one of the corner shops still had a sign outside advertising paraffin.

When I worked in an industrial bakery further up the road towards Lidget Green (and its Pathan community), and would walk back down towards the city centre, stinking of roasted high fructose syrup and cream-style product, I remember passing a huge billboard for Coca-Cola with some pouting model reclining across it. Some Four Lions character had decided to deface this example of imperialist decadence and fitna, but rather than aiming for the cleavage or the thighs, or for that matter the Coke, they'd chosen to tear down the face.

we're the muslimeen, creating a scene

So, I went to see Chris Morris's takfiri flick, Four Lions. Short review - it's desperately, barkingly hilarious. Stupidly funny. It started with the snickering. The snickering led to giggling and the giggling led to batshit honking horselaughs all night long.

Perhaps too funny - one of the markers of Chris Morris's work is that everyone is an idiot, is responsible, and deserves the most extreme mockery and sarcasm. The jihadis are either simpletons, paranoiacs, or deluded. The police are bunglers. The defence establishment is desperately trying to be as ruthless as the CIA but can't manage it. Democracy is represented by Malcolm Sprode MP, a contemptible Blairite stooge, brilliantly observed, babbling nonsense. The mainstream of British Islam is represented by a Sufi imam who is an obscurantist windbag full of half-digested quotations, who keeps his wife locked in a cupboard ("It's not a cupboard! It's a small room!", he protests). The general public are either tiresome eccentrics or half-wits. The NHS employs the jihadi leader's wife as a nurse - she is charming, tough, probably the most sane and competent person in the entire movie, and she offers him crucial psychological support when he doubts the wisdom of exploding. Even his little son is cool with Dad blowing himself up and encouraging all his friends to do so as well, and weighs in to help him through his dark night of the soul and on the way to self-induced fragmentation. The real jihadis on the North-West Frontier treat the international volunteers as especially low-grade cannon fodder, hardly surprising given the volunteers' self-regarding pomposity and utter inability to do anything right.

This plays out in a nicely observed version of Sheffield; it's as much a Yorkshire film as Rita, Sue, and Bob Too or This Sporting Life. There are a hell of a lot of jokes that turn on this; they only need to drive up a hill and climb over a dry stone wall in order to go from the deep city to somewhere you can safely test-fire a bomb without attracting attention. While meticulously reducing their stash of hydrogen peroxide and assembling the devices, they pose as a band - it's Sheffield, after all. What else? Inevitably, they attract a rehearsal studio hanger-on somewhere between cool and fairly serious mental illness. Again, who else? Their in-house psychopath is responsible for proclaiming the Islamic State of Tinsley (I really began to lose it with this bit). The volunteers hugely overestimate their knowledge of Islam, and suffer from a sort of quasi-colonial superiority complex to actual Pakistanis in Pakistan - one of them makes the serious mistake of calling a Waziri sentry a "Paki banchut!". (George MacDonald Fraser would have had him knifed for that, but Chris Morris has crueller plans for him.)

They learn that their cover has been blown from a news screen on the Sheffield Supertram; Omar, the leader, works as a security guard at Meadowhall.

There is a great moment of direction early on where the camera catches the shopping centre roof lit up just as the sun is coming up, catching it briefly showing off its oddly Islamic dome. Around the same time, we watch the CCTV feeds from within the centre through Omar's eyes - the place is entirely empty and a large sign announces "SHOPPING", with an arrow pointing upwards. Clearly, when he looks at Britain, this is what he sees.

Omar is a classic type, an autodidactic revolutionary, the only member of the cell with any self-reflection or intellectual depth or capacity for anything much. He's a man surrounded by novelty-marathon running managers, daft younger brothers, and SHOPPING with an arrow; arguably, what he's really rebelling against is the sheer horror of Chris Morris's worldview. A main force in the plot is his progressive self-corruption - he is throughout the least convinced of them about the rightness of their cause, chiefly because he's the only one with any capacity for doubt. As the mission progresses, he resorts to increasingly sordid deception to keep the show on the road through this or that crisis, and his eventual explosion is more motivated by horror at his failure to stop the others from blowing themselves up and a sense of having run out of options than anything else. It's also telling that, despite his fury and loathing at British consumerism, self-satisfaction, etc, he's by a distance the best dressed, shod, housed, and generally equipped member of the gang, redrafting his manifesto on a shiny new laptop in boxfresh trainers, although he does have to communicate with the others and The Emir through a children's social network website called Puffin Party.

Barry, on the other hand, would have been the Islamic State of Tinsley's chief of secret police. Barry is the only offcomed'un and the only white man in the group, not so much a convert to Islam as a lifelong convert to non-specific extremism and raging paranoia. As the plot progresses, despite his spectacular ineptness, he begins to take over as the driving force, and eventually it is his action that forces them to go ahead with the attack. One thing he has successfully learned in a long implied career of political madness is that paranoia, ideological enforcement, and ruthlessness pay. This doesn't mean his thoughts make any sense, though; his idea of strategy is to blow up the mosque in the hope of triggering a wave of race riots and the revolution, but he rather undermines his planned false-flag operation by insisting on recording a martyrdom video taking responsibility for it. A hopeless case in anything that involves practical work, he helps to doom the plot by recruiting any fool he falls in with and blames everything that happens on Jews.

Cameras play a special role. The wannabe terrorists are compulsive film-makers - a running gag has Omar with a laptop at the kitchen table, despairingly trying to edit the latest rushes of his comrades' martyrdom videos into something presentable. They keep filming and filming, but they always get it wrong - accidentally advertising fast food, posing with a tiny plastic gun, falling out about strategy as the camera rolls. Barry insists on doing a second video just in case they attack the mosque anyway. Omar is secretly keeping an out-takes reel for his own amusement. Reliably, people freak out and fuck up as soon as the red light comes on; Faisal falls over a sheep and accidentally triggers a suicide vest while clowning for a bit of impromptu iPhone video. Hassan makes a fool of himself at training camp by firing off a Kalashnikov for his holiday snaps. As well as Omar's official making-of project, and their own unofficial video diaries, the state is also making a movie - several scenes show that they are under surveillance as they carry out a test explosion. But it's a blooper in itself, a sight gag; the cops raid the wrong house and only succeed in giving themselves away and encouraging Omar to bring forward the attack.

The police response, like the mad conspiracy theories and the bomb making and the ratty, third rate band scene gaffs, has obviously had the benefit of careful observation and a close reading of the Stockwell II report - it follows the detail for Operations KRATOS and C closely, and as actually happened, the command and control system breaks down at once and the wrong man is shot, but there is far worse left to happen.

I urge you to see this film at once, although given that you read this, you probably already have done.

Authoritarianism Does Its Thing

This has done the rounds and been roundly done for all the right reasons.

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America's critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up?

From a purely literary/journalistic point of view, it's the "When, oh when" that gets me. Sometimes, style and content - aesthetics and morality - fuse into one.

More to the point, the astonishing thing here is Bush's lasting achievement - he created a political lobby for torture. It's not just that he let torture happen, or connived at it, or even specifically ordered it. It's that a significant chunk of the body-politic now demands torture - not just 'baggers, but editors of the Washington Post. There isn't a lobbying group with tax-deductible status under 501(3)c yet - unless you count the American Enterprise Institute - but perhaps it would be a more honest world if there was one.

Do I have to quote Vaclav Havel's crack about the man who puts a sign reading "Workers of the world, unite!" in the window all over again? OK. Havel said that obviously, he probably wasn't doing this out of conviction; but if the sign said "I am afraid and therefore obedient", its actual meaning, he might not be so happy to do it.

Perhaps. But I can't help thinking the example may be wrong. Richard Cohen is, after all, not just being willing to turn a blind eye. He's actually yelling for torture, and for specific methods of torture. And the marker of the Bush achievement is that the torture lobby has survived Bush. Here we are, more than a year on, after the US armed forces have been given specific orders against torture. And they're out there wanting it. It's weirdly reminiscent of the last Stasi man and the last suspect.

Also, it's nothing to do with expediency; when the FBI wanted to question Captain Underpants, they got his relatives to talk to him, and it worked. It is usually the case that the purpose of torture is torture; what service, I wonder, does the knowledge of torture provide to these people? After all, Cohen explicitly says that he wants torture because it impresses the public, not because it produces names.

I can't imagine what would have convinced me in 2000 that in 2010, responsible Americans would be lobbying for torture - even after they had succeeded in voting out the torture president. Back then, it used to be a commonplace notion that the power of the state was fundamentally uninteresting; I recall an especially silly newspaper article in which both Bill Clinton and Deng Xiaoping (Deng Xiaoping!) were bracketed together as meaningless figureheads.

Having a considerable lobby that needs a constant drip of draconian rhetoric to maintain their psychological stability is probably very bad for democracy, especially faced with a terrorist group that explicitly aims to destabilise the state through auto-immune warfare. These people have been trained to freak out at the faintest threat and howl for torture - in a sense, it's yet another backdoor into the political system, as well as an example of the unconscious conspiracy between the terrorist and the state.

blobby blobby blobby

Here's a case study in unpopular populism: 'The ravers should have more respect for Mr Blobby. He was a hero to a lot of kids and the thought of them taking drugs and having all-night raves in his house is completely disrespectful.'.

The photographs are truly eerie. Like this one:


Of course, it was never popular in the first place, as evidenced by the fact the whole enterprise crashed within two years, with one of the projects only lasting three months. Strangely, the Mail doesn't mention that Noel Edmunds and the local council together managed to burn a sizeable amount of Morecambe taxpayers' money, in what should in hindsight have been a kind of cautionary preview of the whole strength-through-casinos project. (They later moved onto leaping into bed with Urban Splash, just in time for the property crash.)

I'm also, however, surprised that it was so late into the 90s; I'd associated it with the rainy era of early John Major. Now, of course, the medium density fibreboard, gypsum, glue, and pink paint has gone the way of the hype, after 13 years of exposure to successive North-West European winters without maintenance; once the roof leaks, any light structure has had it, "ravers" or no "ravers".



That one could be titled "Spiritual Britain", I think. There's also one of two pink spheres described as "mushroom-type objects". Unfortunately they've removed one that showed the old health & safety at work violation on opening day, grinning over the heads of three visibly unenthusiastic kids.

A special point; behold the benefits of openness. Since the Daily Hell got a proper Web site, I've actually linked to two articles on it; one on ACPO, and this one. In the absence of their Web presence, I wouldn't have even imagined that anything of any interest might come from that quarter; but the ACPO one demonstrated that they do, sometimes, carry out solid reporting, and this is at least funny. And the photo caption "Ghostly: a destroyed miniature Blobby lies abandoned, while filth lines the inside of the house" is a minor classic all to itself.

(Hat tip to History is made at night; you don't think I spend my time actually reading that fucking rag, do you?)

Bull

This is wrong;

Gitmo will be closed. Binyam Mohammed will be returned to Britain, or put on trial in the USA. Either way the details of his treatment, and that of all the other inmates, will become public. What are Foggy Bottom and the CIA playing at? Get it over with

Consider this BBC story. The interesting thing here is that Miliband's position requires him to argue two mutually impossible things at once; first, he can't possibly let evidence of Mohammed's torture appear in court, for fear of terrible retaliation from the United States, second, that the United States has not threatened such a thing.

The two are mutually dependent, because if the first one was allowed to stand on its own, who would imagine that good relations with the United States were anything worth having? Therefore, it's necessary for the protection of the self-regard of the political classes that the US threat be both unambiguous and invisible. It is like the chapter in The Art of Coarse Rugby about fields with bulls in them; eventually they conclude that the ideal scenario is a field next to the rugby ground with a large sign in it, reading BEWARE OF THE BULL, but no bull.

That way, if you need to play for time, you can hoof the ball into the field and count on your opponents' fear of the bull to waste time - but should you find yourself a couple of points down as time runs out, you can always declare that the bull was taken away years ago and just get on with it. Similarly, no evidence was ever provided of Saudi threats back when this legal dodge - the BAE gambit as I call it - was invented.

Providing evidence of the threats would spoil it. If the government had to admit it was being bullied into covering up for appalling torture or spectacular financial corruption, this would alter certain political facts. But that is not all. The beauty of the BAE gambit is that it's so flexible; because the evidence of the risk is itself secret, it can be invoked whenever required. I said this at the time, and now they're doing it. If they had to demonstrate the threat, this would spoil its effectiveness.

I see no reason to think that the Government is lying now about the Americans' position. In fact, it's very likely that the Obama administration has not contacted them; for example, here's the new CIA director explicitly stating that he considers torture and refoulement to states that practice it illegal. Here are his own words:

On January 22, 2009, the President issued an executive order directing all U.S. agencies to use Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as the baseline for the treatment and interrogation of persons detained in any armed conflict. The executive order also states that agencies must notify the International Committee of the Red Cross of such detainees and provide the Red Cross with access to them. The intelligence community must follow the executive order.

With respect to renditions, the intelligence community must comply with U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, including Article 3 prohibiting the rendition of a person to a country where it is more likely than not he will be subjected to torture.

Here's the relevant paragraph in the executive order:

Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the obligations of officers, employees, and other agents of the United States Government to comply with all pertinent laws and treaties of the United States governing detention and interrogation, including but not limited to: the Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution; the Federal torture statute, 18 U.S.C. 2340 2340A; the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. 2441; the Federal assault statute, 18 U.S.C. 113; the Federal maiming statute, 18 U.S.C. 114; the Federal “stalking” statute, 18 U.S.C. 2261A; articles 93, 124, 128, and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 U.S.C. 893, 924, 928, and 934; section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, 42 U.S.C. 2000dd; section 6(c) of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Public Law 109 366; the Geneva Conventions; and the Convention Against Torture. Nothing in this order shall be construed to diminish any rights that any individual may have under these or other laws and treaties.”

No torture; no handover to states that torture. So it would be surprising if they were to do so. And, indeed, Miliband explicitly says that no approach to the new administration has been made.

However, the Government has chosen to regard not being explicitly told to stop as equivalent to a reiteration of the threats (whose existence it denies, lest we forget) issued by the Bush administration in 2007. It has done this because it suits the Government's interests. For once, William Hague is right - they should simply ask the Americans to state whether or not the non-threat is still not-in force.

Of course they will not, because it suits them to be able to kick the ball over the BEWARE OF THE BULL sign whenever they think fit. As Scott Horton points out, there are a lot of people about who desperately want a new US administration to be guilty, because it detracts from their own guilt.

fruit of the poisoned tree

This week we've had the Piccadilly bunglebombers' convictions, but more importantly the first conviction for "directing terrorism". This was the case in which the suspect's fingernails were torn out by the Pakistani intelligence service; he claims, and I see no reason whatsoever to doubt this, that he was questioned between bouts of torture by British officials. But this isn't what worries me.

It's that the poison is seeping into the courts. This particular one was willing not only to accept that, as the case didn't strictly rest on information from Pakistan, the torture was inadmissible, it was willing to determine this in secret and issue a ruling which is itself secret, before proceeding to a trial by jury. The secret ruling was of course secret from the jury. I really cannot imagine how this is meant to amount to a fair trial. And then there is the de Menezes inquest, where the coroner simply decided that no verdict that implied the police did anything wrong was acceptable.

In the bunglebombers' case, meanwhile, we had the astonishing conviction of a man for "withholding information" where the information in question was an e-mail message in an account which the Crown accepted had not been accessed since some time before the message arrived. You can now become a terrorist by not checking your e-mail frequently enough.

And I really have no idea how we would go about reversing this. After the long and successful fight over detentions under ATCSA2001, and the partially successful one over control orders, it seems that this is as nothing to the broader deterioration. As someone said in a quite different context,

Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town's water system wasn't quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that's basically it.

One thing that specifically worries me is that the judiciary's record of opposing the security state in some super-high profile cases conflicts with its opposing, Huttonite tendency of doing quite outrageous things rather than face the prospect of State agents lying. Everyone remembers some of these cases; the risk is that they serve as an institutional alibi.

This is no theoretical question, either. All the data shows that we're heading for an inconclusive election (or rather, one which actually represents the distribution of opinion in the electorate). You can be certain that there will be no help from the Tories on this score. But what terms can the Liberals insist on that would actually achieve something? What legislation could be repealed that would have a clear signalling effect? I'm not optimistic; I fear that if they were to make anything worth arguing for part of the price for coalition or toleration, there would simply be a Labservative government, a "grand coalition of the I'm all right, Jacks" as the Germans say. A club for the self-protection of the parties who corrupted our institutions to this extent in the first place.

The Independent: Is Over

No wonder the Indy's moving in with the Daily Mail; it's taken to publishing leaders like this one, a crude bit of hard right culture war stuff which blames the Sharon Matthews case on "welfare". Yes, really. They also rehearse the old Peter Lilley thing about "single mothers who get pregnant just to jump the housing list", and sniff that the Matthews' life was "disorderly in the extreme".

Refined shudder! Let's not even imagine what might happen if various north London councils' social service departments had to look into the "orderliness" or otherwise of various well-known journalists' home lives. We could be faced with a nonsense shortage. Perhaps we should maintain a national stockpile of terrible journalism against such a possibility.

The proposed solution is of course to make the poor rather poorer, so that they will become better people. They will be scared into being more orderly; it's worth noting that this disgusting piece of writing doesn't even bother to claim that its proposals would have done anybody any good. No;

Ms Matthews might then have been tracked by government agencies earlier and her life on benefits might have become less comfortable.

In the next paragraph, they go on to say that she would still have had far too many children and not gone out to work. So what does this actually mean? Surely they cannot expect that some jobcentre clerk would have detected an ambition in her to fake the kidnap of her own daughter, had she only been forced to fill in some more forms and be lectured some more about Standards?

And, as we have seen recently, there is absolutely no reason to think that the State would have done anything effective had it had this information. I mean, can you imagine ringing up the social services department or the cops with this story? Yes, one of my clients at Dewsbury Job Centre. I think...I think she's going to kidnap her own daughter. Well, I know. Yes, the daughter lives with her. Don't ask me - ask her! Why? For the reward money! But at least, as the Independent puts it:

Ms Matthews might then have been tracked by government agencies earlier and her life on benefits might have become less comfortable.

Surveillance of the poor is an end in itself, it seems, as is rendering their lives "less comfortable". And, of course, I mean the poor, and so does The Independent. There is no protocol for only applying more surveillance to the guilty - that's not how it works.

Of course, on the substance, the whole Government proposal the Indy is supporting is silly, a bit of midmarket newspaper fan service left over from the boom years, when unemployment was primarily the Thatcher legacy and not something that affected the large majority. Now, on the boom has come the slump, and we're facing the possibility of a big cyclical surge in unemployment.

The nature of cyclical unemployment is that it is caused by the business cycle and spread broadly across the economy; there is simply not enough work. There is no point making the cyclically unemployed report more often and jump through more hoops; unless your purpose is to impress Associated Newspapers with your sternness towards the undeserving poor. And, it would seem, The Independent.

Of course, this probably has something to do not only with Independent News and Media's increasing closeness to the Daily Mail, but also the arrival of Roger Alton as editor of the Independent. In fact, this piece - a first leader which was given an unusually generous word count - might be Alton's own work, just as the conversion of The Observer into a cocktail of Decent Left drivel and lifestyle wank was Alton's work.

What is the Decent line on the economic crisis? It doesn't seem at all clear yet; they don't tend to interest themselves in economics. Certainly Nick Cohen can be expected to take up the sort of Tory moralising that has infected the Indy, and Cohen's career was promoted by Roger Alton more than anyone else.

Meanwhile, the Independent is doing its bit to make life less comfortable; they just fired 20% of their journalists. Presumably, Alton (and IN&M) is preparing the Indy for a new role in a Tory period as the Mail for people who can't bring themselves to read the Mail but actually want its politics, just as David Cameron is the Conservative for people who can't bring themselves to vote for other Conservatives but actually want Conservative Party politics.

Update: Jamie Kenny has more. It seems clear there is a push on this going on - the Sunday Telegraph editoralised in the same terms today, and Tory shadow minister Chris Grayling trailed something similar in the Observer.

a cheap holiday in other people's misery

I'm not so sure about this; arsewit wingnut blogger runs out of money, goes bankrupt, various people who should know better jeer.

The whole point of everything from some way to the right of centre - Bismarck or thereabouts - leftwards is that IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. It doesn't matter if you're a good christian, a loyal subject, a committed rebel, if you work harder, if you're especially competent. Even if you're rich; European history is littered with the monuments of elites who thought they could buy their way out at the last. We survive if everyone else does.

Poverty and misfortune are not, generally, held up by individuals' decisions; they roll over the landscape, driven by shifts in huge statistical aggregates and channeled by tiny ripples of random chance, just as a flood begins with a rise in average rainfall and ruins one street that's six inches closer to the water. When you think that so-and-so went bust because of their own immorality, and therefore they join the undeserving poor, you're signing on with the other side. They will tell you that the system is entirely OK; it's the ones who failed it who are the problem. They didn't believe in it enough.

As the case of Kim du Toit makes clear, this won't help you one bit when it happens to you. Yes, he's an arse of the first water and a troll of epic proportions. No, mocking people because of their poverty is always and everywhere wrong.

Blinded By The Sun

Tim Ireland's new project is more necessary than ever. It's not quite achieved the same degree of punch and professionalism that the daddy of tab-bashing blogs, BildBlog offers readers of Germany's biggest newspaper, but give them time. (This also bothers me. When I started this blog there were one million blogs, of which 50,000 updated on average daily. Now their numbers are beyond counting, and the top 50,000 churn out far more than before because so many are professional. I can remember when the only pro was Josh Marshall.)

Anyway, this didn't seem to interest TSL despite my desperately flagging it, but it's possibly the most Orwellian piece of writing in the history of British journalogasm. Link, if you can stomach it.

AN Iraqi terror boss is demanding legal aid to sue the MoD — over PORN left in his jail toilet. Ahmed Al-Fartoosi — blamed for the deaths of dozens of Brits — is to sue the Government for tens of thousands of pounds. On top of the loo claim, Fartoosi — accused of leading the fanatic Mehdi Army and masterminding a bombing campaign against Our Boys in Basra — wants “substantial damages” for:

HEARING porn videos being played on a soldier’s laptop;

BUMPING his arm and thigh when being put in an armoured vehicle; and

LOSING sleep in his cell due to noise and lights from a corridor.

Fartoosi — represented by anti-war lawyer Phil Shiner — also moaned his solitary confinement room was too hot.

Fortunately there are also newspapers that don't aim for a reading age of seven (I've actually collapsed some of the paragraphs in that quote, if you can believe that). So...

Fartoosi was detained for more than two years, including nearly six months in solitary confinement. He was arrested in his Basra home in September 2005 and released late last year after British forces agreed to an Iraqi-sponsored deal with the militia.

He says he was beaten with rifle butts and blindfolded before he was put in a tank. For 12 hours he and his fellow detainees given no food and were prevented from going to the toilet.

He says he was taken to the British base at Shaibah, on the outskirts of Basra, where he spent 72 days in solitary confinement in a small cell with no ventilation, though he says he was provided with three cooked meals a day. On the third or fourth night, he says, soldiers brought a laptop and placed it on a window sill just outside his cell.

"After a short period of conversation in English it became clear to me that the DVD was showing porn. It was playing at the loudest possible volume. Thereafter for the next month the porn movies were played all night."

So, when the Sun says he "bumped" his arm and thigh, they mean that he was beaten up with the butt of a rifle. When they say he lost sleep, and heard porn playing back on a laptop, they mean he was deliberately deprived of sleep as an interrogation tactic - one which is banned by Army doctrine on the handling of prisoners, by the way.

Note also that the "porn found in a jail toilet", a comparatively puny charge, somehow got promoted into the lede, thus pushing the sleep deprivation down into the bottom end of the story. (After all, do you think you were meant to read any more than the first par?) Of course, associating it with a toilet tends to lend a sort of fnarr fnarr quality to the whole thing as well.

Nobody has any business writing like this. You might wonder as well what the Sun thought it was doing being "STAGGERED" by Colin Stagg's compensation; let's not forget that the Met is currently prosecuting another suspect in the Rachel Nickell case...the guy whose DNA was all over the crime scene. We can be as certain as anything in the law that Stagg is innocent; we've got the DNA after all. So what is their major malfunction? Can it be that they just like arbitrary state power?

Bonus catch: this week, they also managed to report the horrible fate of a boy who fell off a block of flats he was trying to climb down to get away from his enemies with the strapline "BROKEN BRITAIN HORROR"; they are always so keen to churn out victim porn (see the Stagg story), but you have to wonder whether his relatives really wanted to be conscripted into a party political broadcast for the Conservative Party.

Curiosity is not a crime. Killing cats is.

OK, this is outrageous stupid shit of the sort we expect from our gallant allies. Simply, a graduate student at Nottingham University is writing a thesis on terrorists, and as part of this he gets a copy of an Al-Qa'ida training manual from a US government website. Being a postgrad and therefore by definition permanently broke, he got a friend who worked in the university administration to print off the 1,500 pages rather than paying the shared printer fees.

Now this seems silly - 1,500 pages? Seriously? Wouldn't it have been better to search that lot rather than read it through? Don't they have grep at Nottingham? But that's not the point. The point is that "someone" noticed the document on the administrator's computer and grassed them to the police, who predictably freaked, arrested everyone under the Terrorism Act, kept them locked up for eight days, arrested his family, seized all computers they could lay hands on, etc.

The key detail is that both people have names that might give rise to suspicion of being insufficiently willing to condemn, etc, etc. Now, yer man has been released, however, the administrator is Algerian, and is going to be deported on "unrelated" immigration matters. Yeah, right.

Further, the university:

A spokesman for Nottingham University said it had a duty to inform police of "material of this nature". The spokesman said it was "not legitimate research material", but later amended that view, saying: "If you're an academic or a registered student then you have very good cause to access whatever material your scholarship requires. But there is an expectation that you will act sensibly within current UK law and wouldn't send it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry."

Right, sunshine. There is no such thing as "legitimate" research material, just as there is no such thing as "legitimate" thought. We all have the right to read what we damn well like, and as a fucking university you have a duty to stand up for this. As soon as you accept that reading X, Y, or Z, even though not illegal, is the sort of thing They don't like, you've already lost. Ecrasez l'infame.

The University of Nottingham's vice chancellor is Sir Colin Campbell, who can be reached on +44 (0) 115 951 3001, and by fax on +44 (0) 115 951 3005. More people to shout at are here.

Hat tips: Kings of War, IRG.

The Joy of Linux

So I actually bought a printer; in fact, a printer/scanner. And I considered buying two pairs of jeans after showing up at the count with interesting new holes. Am I descending into bovine consumerism? And the obvious next step was to qualify it with the Linux Lappeh.

It wasn't quite the "And then my troubles began..." experience like the BIOS reflash in January, but I was very amused by the fact that XSANE both throws a dialog box containing the following words:

You are trying to run Xsane as root! This is DANGEROUS! Please do not file bug reports for anything that happens when running Xsane as root: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!

and also suggests running as root as a generic troubleshooting option in its documentation. Well, I did, and all went OK. As I said to Soizick: the great thing about using Linux is that you get to feel like a mad scientist.

I recommend and endorse hplip.

The Bombardment of Walthamstow Rages On

This NYT story is nonsense. Various rightwing barkies have taken the opportunity of the French armed forces' deliciously 007-esque mission to rescue the sailing yacht Le Ponant to tout the following story around the media: the Royal Navy has been ordered not to detain pirates under any circumstances, for fear that they might something or other, because of the Human Rights Act. The details are opportunely left open; the usual formation of the story makes only two testable claims, one of which is that landing a captured pirate in Somalia would likely be illegal because the local authorities might cut their head off, and the other being that the pirate might claim political asylum aboard ship.

What the story does not actually say is why this would stop anyone from detaining pirates, or for that matter why the same doesn't go for the French. After all, as a State party to the European Convention on Human Rights, France has the same legal obligations. Now, the first claim is obviously true in the sense that yes, Virginia, Somalia is a nasty failed state run by a mix of more-or-less Islamist warlords and Ethiopian army officers. Handing someone over to this lot for trial might well be illegal. But has nobody else noticed that it would also be intensely, profoundly stupid?

Who on earth would want to return captured pirates to the state, or rather un-state, that permitted them to operate openly from their territory? Even if the Somali authority they were returned to actually wanted to try them, you've got to assume there's a significant chance of them getting away. In fact, the French mission gives us all the information we need; the pirates collected the ransom, went ashore, and seem to have planned just to drive off with it, which doesn't inspire confidence in local law enforcement.

Further, there is no legal reason whatsoever to give pirates captured off Somalia to the Somali police. Pirates have a special status in international law they share with slavers, torturers and those responsible for genocide; they are hostes humanae generis, enemies of all humanity, which in practice means that any state that can catch them has effective jurisdiction in the case. Once the pirates are caught, there is absolutely no reason not to take them to a proper court back in London, or wherever. That given, why should we need to even think about handing them over to a jurisdiction where they might escape, be tortured, or be put to death?

The second testable claim is that a captured pirate might claim political asylum. This is true. A longstanding principle of the law of the sea is that of exclusive flag state jurisdiction, which means that a warship of state A is for all intents and purposes part of A's national territory. The principle holds in a weaker form for merchant vessels. Americans really ought to be conscious of this, because they fought a war against Britain in part over the principle.

Now, a story. When I took my MSc in 2003-2004, my International Law course was taught by Commander Steven Haines, who had just resigned from his post as a senior legal adviser to the Royal Navy, round about the same time Elizabeth Wilmshurst walked out of her similar post at the Foreign Office. In fact, I heard Wilmshurst's name for the first time from him. He didn't give his reasons, but do I need to draw you a fucking diagram? (He's also the only person I know who ever had control of a nuclear weapon. Cool, eh? Pity he took so bloody long to mark essays.)

Haines took part in the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone, where he was involved in the decision as to what to do with limb-choppin' war criminal Foday Sankoh after his capture. The military were keen to fly him straight out to Illustrious, as he's not known for being a great swimmer and would be very unlikely to escape; Haines opposed the idea on the grounds that he might claim political asylum, which would have been politically more than problematic. Instead he was confined at the airport and then in the Freetown police station with a guard reinforced with British troops, but later cheated the courts by dying before he could be brought to trial.

So the problem is not new, but it's not like it helped Sankoh any. And there is no reason why some one can't spend their political asylum in prison; it doesn't confer immunity for one's crimes, and piracy is a crime. (That is both bathetically and pathetically obvious, but there is an important point here which we'll come back to.)

To recap: yes, it would be illegal to hand over a pirate to Somali warlords for trial. No, this does not constrain anyone in catching pirates, because anyone who can catch them can try them. And frankly, not handing prisoners to the Somali "government" is a feature, not a bug. Yes, you can claim asylum aboard a foreign warship; no, this is no deal-breaker.

So what did those thrillingly tough and macho Frenchmen do with their six captured buccaneers? They, after all, aren't letting themselves have their national essence sapped by do-gooding lawyers and bickering parliamentarians' quibbles, right? Up to the yard-arm? Walk the plank? Hand them to the fun-loving fellas from Ethiopian Military Intelligence? Er, no.

Six pirates sont transférés à bord de la frégate Jean Bart et ils seront remis à la justice pour être jugés en France.

So yes, the six pirates were brought aboard the Jean Bart and will be tried in France.

Far too many people who should know better have swallowed this transparent bollocks at face value, or indeed, at a considerable premium. For example: here's Information Dissemination getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muqawama getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muq getting it wrong again after initial treatment. I don't have the stomach to look into the fever swamp.

So why, do you think, is this story being pushed so hard? The ur-text is this Times article, which consists of pure assertion - there is no information in there implying the central claim, that the RN has been ordered not to detain pirates - and a quote from swivel-eyed Tory Julian Brazer MP apparently reacting to the Times reporter. Repeat it a few times, and voila; new facts.

But who, pray, is keen on demonising the very idea of law as a constraint on state action? Try this comment at AM:

Ultimately the very notion of law itself may be bought into disrepute. As it is already in the ranks of the American forces.

See? It's those bastard lawyers who MADE us torture them. Indeed it was; just not the same ones. This kind of embrace of raison d'etat has something of the power of all the ideas of a liberation from freedom about it.

By the way: as well as the Reuters report, Liberation has photos and commentary from the guy who runs Secret Defense.

Update: I'd forgotten that the original Captain Kidd was commissioned by the Navy to hunt down other pirates. He was a countergang that went wrong. Now there's a far better lesson for you.

Torture Lawyers

If you can read you should read this if you read nothing else this decade. It's all about how the Americans started torturing people, whose idea it was, how men like John Yoo came to provide the legal justifications, who was keen (the ideological core of the administration), who didn't want to know (the FBI and, curiously, the US Navy's Criminal Investigative Service). It is intensely depressing, and the only hope in it is the precedent from Nuremberg that a lawyer who is involved in a war crime in their legal capacity can be just as guilty as the torturer.

Here's the most significant bit, if that means anything at this level of degradation:

On September 25, as the process of elaborating new interrogation techniques reached a critical point, a delegation of the administration’s most senior lawyers arrived at Guantánamo. The group included the president’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who had by then received the Yoo-Bybee Memo; Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, who had contributed to the writing of that memo; the C.I.A.’s John Rizzo, who had asked for a Justice Department sign-off on individual techniques, including waterboarding, and received the second (and still secret) Yoo-Bybee Memo; and Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld’s counsel. They were all well aware of al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” Dunlavey told me, “and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.” I asked what they had to say. “They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C.,” Dunlavey said. “They came down to observe and talk.” Throughout this whole period, Dunlavey went on, Rumsfeld was “directly and regularly involved.”

Beaver confirmed the account of the visit. Addington talked a great deal, and it was obvious to her that he was a “very powerful man” and “definitely the guy in charge,” with a booming voice and confident style. Gonzales was quiet. Haynes, a friend and protégé of Addington’s, seemed especially interested in the military commissions, which were to decide the fate of individual detainees. They met with the intelligence people and talked about new interrogation methods. They also witnessed some interrogations.

Addington. Addington. At every ugly hinge of the Bush years, he's there. I'd never heard of him until at least 2006, when the Stiftung turned me on to the story. I wonder if he was a member of the White House Iraq Group? Another one we never cleared up.

This depresses me for other reasons; at the end of 2001, I was just about still prepared to defend them. I never imagined they would want to keep the prisoners indefinitely; better in their hands than those of the Northern Alliance, right? The penny finally dropped for me with the decision to refuse them POW status in early 2002. But looking back, should I have been angrier earlier? Not that it would have helped; but I do think I consistently underestimated them. I was always opposed to Iraq - but right up to the end I didn't really believe they meant it.

It seemed so crazed, the only explanation I could think of was that it was an exercise in madman theory (and you all know what I think of that); once the inspectors went back in, and they started cutting up rockets and flying Mirage F1-CR recce planes, wouldn't this be the end? Or at least, wouldn't it be enough for us? What I didn't realise, of course, was that they wanted war for reasons that had very little to do with the war; for Blair it was presumably to cling to the US. And for Addington?

His significance, I think, is that it's all been about law; they wanted and dreamed of escaping the constraints of the legal state, and no wonder they started at the top.

Update: Pathos to bathos in a flash. Yes, that should have been John Yoo, not Woo. Perhaps they should have hired John Woo; he'd have danced round his own arse on the tip of a Tomahawk missile while chop-socking Addington into diced wanker and collapsing Osama's occiput with a diamond-edged writ. They'd have told all they knew, willingly.

Phorm, how do I hack thee?

Let me count the ways.

If you think Phorm - the evil advert-spooking system practically all the UK's eyeball ISPs want to force on you - isn't so bad, I've got news for you. First of all, let's have a look at this Grauniad Tech article.

BT's 2006 trials certainly involved some sort of interception, because the data streams had extra Javascript inserted into them - which puzzled a number of people at the time. Two examples can be seen at the forums of raisingkids.co.uk and progarchives.com. In both, the Javascript and other tags inserted by the 121Media system are clearly visible, with one showing the referring page and possibly "interests" of the member. Both contain links to sysip.net - the 121Media-owned site through which BT sent browser requests during the 2006 trials and later ones in summer 2007.

OK. So not only were they snooping, but Phorm actually injects not just data - like a cookie - but code into your URL requests, so their customer websites react differently as a result. It's especially worrying that what they are adding is JavaScript; it's not just data, it's program logic. It does things. And, as any user of modern Web 2.0 services should realise, you can do all kinds of things with it - for example, you can call other web servers from within a web page without reloading. There is no way for you - the person whose BT, Virgin or Carphone Warehouse billing record stands behind the IP address that stands behind the identifier Phorm assigned - to know what such code does until after the fact.

Now, consider this; the good people of F-Secure unpicking the latest trend in security threats, the iFrame injection. It works like this - a lot of websites catch the search requests they receive and cache them, either to speed up the search process or to provide suggestions with the search results. This means that the search string...appears in a web page on their servers. So, if you fire enough popular search terms (which you can get from their website...) in, and append your attack code, there's a chance it'll get cached. And then, a visitor who uses the same search terms will get a page that contains the attack code; JavaScript is executed in the client side - i.e on the visitor's computer - so you're in.

So, let's put them together; if you're a Phorm customer, you can get the interests and web habits (and billing data?) of everyone in the UK delivered to your dodgy website in real time, and then you can reload anything you damn well like in their browser based on that information. Suddenly - let's back off here. It'll be someone unpopular. At first. So bnp.co.uk or alghuraabah.co.uk sends you to www.sweeticklekiddiesandtentacles.203vggngh65t7.biz.cn; and there's fuck all you can do about it, except try to explain the concepts of "deep packet inspection", "iFRAME SEO injection", and the like to a court of law.

Paranoia, right? Not so much.

You think that's scary? Here's some more F-Secure for you. There is at least one exploit out there, which could be delivered through the lines we just discussed, that writes dubious code to the BIOS - the low-level insect brain of a computer, the bit that lights up the screen, spins up the hard drive, and explains how to read the boot sector and start the operating system. The only fix there, I think, would be to format the fucking lot and install something completely different - or throw the damn thing in the sea.

But here's where it gets bad; the thing nicks your online banking passwords. And then what does it do? It puts money into your bank account. Feel free to speculate.

Update: Now that's what I call an April Fool from F-Secure. A cracker. This is of course without prejudice to the rest of the post, but I should have realised there would be no way they'd have included a live link to the exploit if it was real. If you were brave enough to follow it, well...you'd get the joke.

The Payback

This is interesting. Jim Bates, an expert witness for the defence in some of the Operation Ore cases we discussed, has been convicted of misrepresenting his qualifications. Specifically, the charges relate to whether or not he claimed to be an electronics engineer, despite not being one, and to his career in the Royal Air Force. I frankly have no idea what he may or may not have done in either of these, but I would like to be the first to point out that neither of them change the facts of the case. Bates is not the only person to have reviewed the data; and anyway, he wasn't asked to carry out any electronic engineering.

You do not need a degree in electronic engineering to use the Unix grep command, which is all you need to check if the IP addresses in list A (the alleged buyers) appear in list B (the Visa merchant terminal log). Further, I fail to see how this changes anything about the 54,348 stolen credit cards; we even know which company they were stolen from (Levenger, Inc.) and that they were stolen from their MS Access database.

Further, it is something of an IT industry tradition that not everybody who knows anything about computers has a "Computer Engineer By Royal Appointment" coat-of-arms; we think this is something akin to freedom. Hell, I've got an MSc in International Relations, and so has the CEO of British Telecom.

I'm not at all surprised to see this bit of the story:

'It is critical that those who serve as expert witnesses are credible on an ethical basis and do not have any alternative agendas which may affect their independent status,' said Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which brought the case against Bates.

Indeed, indeed. How's the Forest Gate case coming on, fella?