Well, what about those Iraqi MOBILE PHONES? EH? EH?

You'd think someone who specialises in blogging about "public diplomacy" would notice when someone refloats a rah rah painted school success story from 2003. Iraqna didn't "happen"; Orascom built it back then, and didn't we all hear so much about how Iraqis had mobile phones? You didn't hear so much, outside the trade, about how a certain Republican congressman tried to stop them having phones that would work anywhere else in the Middle East (except for a certain country). But they did it anyway.

Now Zain (aka MTC Atheer, aka now owned by the Kuwaitis - strange they didn't put that in the brand) has bought out the central Iraq licence. Either way, I'd be surprised if anyone rolled out a green field GSM net in 2003 that didn't support GPRS out of the box, so I rate this one "bollocks". Perhaps they've started offering hosted Blackberry service. Frankly, if I were an Iraqi politician, the last thing in the world I'd want would be a device that forces all my e-mail through data centres located in Canada and the UK, using its own encryption.

stuck, stuck, stuck

Pakistan Policy Blog speaks sense:

Zardari’s attempt to present himself as a savior belies the reality and the way most in Pakistan and even the United States see him. Billionaire Zardari is part of Pakistan’s feuding oligarchy, not a revolutionary against it.

The sad fact is that most Pakistanis have been hostage to this sadistic version of Bill Murray’s Groundhog’s Day for 60 years. There will be no messiahs in Pakistan. Pakistanis need the rule of law — neither Baitullah Mehsud’s law, nor Farooq Naik’s law — and a system with real checks, balances, and accountability to free them from their malaise.

Read the whole thing; I mean the whole blog, if you've got time. I suppose it couldn't last; the position since the formation of the PPP-PML(N) government was just too good. The government had genuine public support, civil society had given The Tyrant a beating, both the Punjabis and Sindhis were represented, and no bugger voted for the Taliban tribute bands.

Now it's back to normal service; a weak, unpopular, corrupt civilian president without support from half the country. I confidently predict there'll be a coup in three or so years. What is genuinely depressing is the role of Zalmay Khalilzad - whether officially or pseudo-unofficially - in egging Mr 10 Per Cent on. The Americans seem to think that Pakistan is a 1970s rightwing military dictatorship, by nature. Says Mr. Douglas State:

Sweating with indignation, as of course they have every right to be, the great majority of the public would go communist tomorrow - and then, what? So, you see, we have to support General Caudillo. I agree he's unattractive, but, you can't do everything...

But they won't - even the NWFP recorded about 15% of votes for the various Taliban tribute bands. They don't trust the Americans. So what? I don't. After all, they got new F-16s from the US, to replace the ones they didn't get the parts for the time before that; they got a couple of spanking new GSM networks from dealing with Norwegian and UAE interests, respectively.

They need exactly the opposite of this kind of government, and this kind of ethic. It's especially painful that, despite all the "freedom agenda" bollocks, the people who defied the tyrant precisely to defend the rule of law are being sold out. We're on the wrong side of history, again.

This, meanwhile, is purely irresponsible, unless the game is to bring about a new military government. The upshot is that the Pakistanis turn off the MSR via Karachi; now, their interests and the other side are aligned.

SELECT * FROM policies WHERE irishash="0xSTUPID";

Late to the party, I know. But is this the worst example of biometrics as a religion yet? So the Shia-led, pro-Iranian government of Iraq we're desperately propping up doesn't like the Sunni, Iraqi chauvinist countergangs we organised to prop them up much. So the plan to reintegrate them, as they say, into society as law-abiding citizens ain't going so well. (Ah, Sergeant Hussein? You know how we invaded your country, overthrew the dictator, then dissolved the army you spent the last 15 years in and left you to rot on the dole while we conspired with your despised religious and class enemies? And we finally agreed to enrol you and your old mates as an auxiliary police force because we couldn't catch you? Well, thanks, we're doing it again. Yes, the first bit. Have you considered becoming a plumber? Please don't use any metalworking skills you may acquire to make EFPs, that's all we ask.)

Worse, yer man is now trying to pick a fight with the Kurds, in which case they will no doubt retaliate by grabbing Sgt Hussein's home town and telling the government in Baghdad it can't have any more oil. As a lot of the army Maliki counts on for this is actually the Kurdish army, there's a lot more that can go wrong here. So what's the plan B?

Apparently it's biometrics. All those ex-insurgents from the NOIA who signed up on our side were iris-scanned, and the information something or other with Saddam's old secret police files. Hey, I remember that the secret police files got torched. Except for the bits involving George Galloway and various other people who all by coincidence opposed the war. And the ones the Chalabi Boys nicked and the US Army had to nick back; there's a lot of different data sets wandering about, no? Of course, there's absolutely no point in looking for Sunni Arab nationalist ex-army insurgents in Saddam's old files; it was Sunni Arab nationalist army officers who compiled Saddam's old files in the first place. Perhaps they mean the Republican Guard payroll, but who knows, eh.

Anyway, the biometrics. How is this meant to help? Specifically, the iris scans. Now, if you make a bomb, your irises don't leave any traces on it. Iris-scanning implies you've caught the guy already and you want to check if he's on the list. And the point of guerrilla warfare is that the enemy doesn't know who to lock up, or else they can't catch up with them, or the people they are after hide out somewhere they'll need to stage a huge multidivisional onslaught and probably build a railway to get into. I mean, it's got to be better than having absolutely no information, but it's no solution, especially if the data is mashed up with the wrong kind of intelligence files. (Ah, Sergeant Al-Hakim. You must be proud of your years of heroic resistance to Baathist tyranny...)

It's as if they believe that having an MD5 hash of someone's iris means you can double-click on their photo and they're delivered to your desk like an Amazon.com package; or that the camera will take your soul. But then, every government thinks this, at least some of the time. Which reminds me:

The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, promised yesterday to start issuing ID cards to foreign nationals within 300 days - by November 2008. The first required to apply will be students and those married to British citizens or involved in civil partnerships or long-term relationships.

Seven weeks to go. No contracts. No requirements document. No specs. No code. Someone's in for an epic binge-coding session, aren't they? Or is "Teh Stupid! It's Byrne's!" hoping we've all forgotten? Maybe NO2ID should put in a bid itself...

Digital chocolate

So some of our friends came around; and brought their kids. We got out the Chumby, the roast chickens, the giant spiders...no, seriously...

And Maud didn't want to leave her first Unix system. (First of all they found the touchscreen settings, which were presumably more fun than watching it looping over RSS feeds, but the real hit was when they discovered the Web-radio functions and started blasting us with "smooth" jazz and various West Coast hard rock stations.)


We are indebted.

Meanwhile, the local cop in my home town in Yorkshire used to say that community policing was the art of keeping all the ne'er do wells in the same place, so you could keep an eye on them.

Organise, and a very wet 2600

So I took my stupid damn idea off to the stupid ideas club. When we got there, guess who? Spyblog was waiting at the rendezvous with some Dutchmen and an Argentine documentarist and half the No2ID members not currently in hospital. And after we made our way through Jock McZanu's EU Maddie monsoon (GOOD HERE ISN'T IT???) to the pub, who shows up but Rat; carrying a total of 30GB of mass storage on his person in an array of USB drives, a fob GPS, and God knows what in his piercings.

Anyway, we talked over the thing, and many other things besides; what should happen if secret police become members? wouldn't it be easier to do an open-source clone of a BMC helpdesk ticketing app? (why? why? I thought my brain would concrete) how would you sterilise an airport fingerprint reader in less than 10 seconds? So I promised to revise the proposals, and well, here they are.

Or would be, but nobody likes a 2,000 word blog post. So instead it's here on Google Documents, which probably means something badological. Read. Mark. Learn. Inwardly digest. Comment. Here at first, but if you want to take part just tell me and I'll give you write privileges. If anyone cares very much I'll get it set up on Sourceforge and set about preparing a list of functions and tables. I still think Django is the way to go, in which case the mapping of the org model into Python classes into db tables should be as straightforward as these things ever are.

Organise

I've been reading the oohing and aahing about the Obama web operation (for example, here at the Linux Journal); all those individual pages and RSS feeds and iCals for every event. It strikes me that some of this can be generalised, and that we can probably improve on it. After all, as LJ points out, the difference between this and the Republican view of the Internet (Talk radio! With porn!), which also happens to be the Government view, is that it's amenable to individual activists and groups of activists doing things other than sending shitty chain e-mail to their relatives and shouting a lot.

But it still doesn't really allow for them to participate in the direction of the campaign; and it's a one-off tailormade job. If you want to change something with design and engineering, you've got to think mass production - or better, lean production, being able to quickly change the product and still rip them out as if they were standard stampings, and mass customisation, designing to let the users alter the product before and after they get it. Perhaps the crucial factor in this is modularity; you break it down into lumps subject to old-fashioned mass production and configure them as desired.

Further, it's quite common to have an Internet-enabled campaign that sends messages down from headquarters to the mob; not just the organisational model of the 20th century mass party, as originally invented by the Tories in the late 19th century, but even more so, as the party members always had a significant influence on policy and personnel, whether formally (like the Labour and Liberal parties) or informally (like the Tories pre-1965 and pre-1998). However, the "Labour Supporters' Network" (copyright - Zack Ecksley) and the world of nicely on-message duckspeakers around Iain Dale's blog have about as much influence on their party headquarters as a passing slug. Donal Blaney, for all he's the most contemptible arsewit (copy-pasting early 90s Clinton-murder smears? changing the world, Don!) on the Internet, has got the right end of the stick there. But he's still just a one-way blowhard.

What do you need to campaign? You need to know what is happening at the top level, in your rough region, and in your locality. You need to have a locality - to join a group or form one. You need to tell others when and where things will happen. And, I think, you need to be able to escalate things up the organisation. We already have functions like this for various rather crappy geek newssites, but what is important is that the members of the N19 group or the Fisheries special-interest group can break the point out into the London or the Economic or the Environment group, and they can break it out into the main broadcast to everyone - completing the loop.

If this reminds you of Stafford Beer, it's entirely deliberate. Information should percolate up as the members want it to, and "perk" ought to be a better word than "digg".

----------MEMBERS-----------------------------
|LOCALITY 1|LOCALITY 2|LOCALITY 3|
REGION 1 |REGION 2 |REGION 3
:THEME 2 :THEME 1 :THEME 3
|CAMPAIGN|
| = UNIQUE
: = NON-UNIQUE

We have pretty good standards for all the information exchange involved; RSS for the various local, regional, thematic, and main broadcast messages, iCal for calendar events, GeoRSS for messages with location content. SMS or MMS for mobile alerts. And the relationships involved are all ones that can go in a database schema. Members are subsets of the campaign (the campaign, better, is a superset of the membership); they are also part of groups. Messages and events are held in their originating table, until escalated into the next one up or across. By default, each member page has the local, regional and main broadcast feeds, and all the links you need to join or create other groups, start events, subscribe to them, set up alerts, and recommend anything for escalation. All groups, locations, etc create public and password-protected feeds. GeoRSS, with iCal enclosures, should be as MVC as it gets.

Whilst working on the Viktorfeed, I never quite grokked what the various Python Web frameworks (y'know - django, zope, cherrypy, webpy) were for. Now, however, I've actually bothered to read the Django documentation and it looks like the perfect solution. Essentially, it lets you build all your database tables in Python classes, set up all the views of the data you might want, and fit them in whatever HTML chrome you like, as well as creating RSS feeds of any view you can create of the shared data. (*I know I'm years behind the kool kidz here, but, well.)

I think it would be a cracking idea to have a deployable, pythonic, hackable platform for weird political action; with options for resource control, you might be able to use it to run almost anything.

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.

Outside the three mile limit in '65...

You rock. It's interesting that blockade-running is a lasting technique of protest; Joseph Conrad did a spot on behalf of the Spanish Carlists, Erskine Childers for the IRA (although he thought he was doing it for the other side), and then, there was the saga off Bilbao in the Spanish Civil War. It's always worth doing to go and probe what the actual limits to freedom are; naturally, they are set by the other side's available will.

This tends to vary between the sea and the land. Winston Churchill wrote, about the German decision for unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916, that no-one would have objected had a lot of neutrals been driving trainloads of war supplies up to the front and the Germans had turned their artillery on them. Sinking neutral ships, however, was somehow a lot more offensive. Similarly, it seems that the Israeli military finds it easier to use force at some sweating checkpoint than on the high seas; foreign nationality hasn't always been protective.

A couple of possible reasons come up; one is that (as Churchill suggested) it simply feels and looks awful, to the people who would have to carry it out. Especially as one of the great Israeli historical grievances regards the Royal Navy intercepting immigrant ships at sea. (Why else did the Foreign Ministry mouthpiece say they didn't want a "well-publicised provocation in the middle of the sea"?) A second, related, is that the sea is for everyone, like the radio spectrum. Crucially, with 20 miles or so of shore to aim for, and territorial waters used by quite a lot of other small craft, it would have been hard to spot two more wooden boats at night, so an arrest would have to happen further out at sea, in which case it would have been on the high seas, in international waters. Major sea powers tend not to like this, especially when they already have a grudge on the matter. Further, it would have been a precedent for other navies in the area.

There's another point, of course; the idea of a naval blockade has traditionally been financial and legal. If there was an "effective" - we'd now say credible - blockade, a ship that breached it invalidated its insurance, and that of its cargo. Similarly, the blockade invoked the force majeure clause in any contract that required goods to be shipped through it. A little force went a long way. This was the situation off northern Spain at the end of 1936; the Fascists had a few ships in the area, and wanted to prevent shipping reaching the Republican-held ports there. They had the further problem that no-one recognised them as having belligerent rights - i.e. unless they could stop ships, the blockade would not be legitimate.

The Royal Navy was in the area, but wasn't keen on picking a fight with the fascists, largely because the British ambassador to Spain was getting his information from them. Dozens of ships with cargos for Bilbao were held in Bordeaux by the blockade; one of them was about to call the bluff. The Seven Seas Spray sailed in defiance of the blockade, and all advice, and arrived in Bilbao. The next shp to go was intercepted by the fascist-controlled cruiser Almirante Cervera. She instantly radioed for the Navy's assistance; she was a British-flagged ship, and so the Navy had an obligation to defend her. The British government had tried to balance believing in the fascist claims by sending more ships; the Hood, Resolution, and a gaggle of destroyers arrived. What was more, the Hood's 8 15-inch guns were trained on the Almirante Cervera.

They didn't discuss it further. More importantly, the blockade was over; there were no mines, and the threats were empty, and the Royal Navy was now unwillingly committed to protect any shipping in that sea. The roadstead in the Gironde emptied. All it had taken was the willingness to defy; probably, with more effort, the fascists could have sunk a ship, but they were not in a position to stop them all.

Outside Dubrovnik in 1991, there was a more postmodern take on the tradition; a bizarre gaggle of journalists, intellectuals, pacifists, and crisis tourists decided to run the Serbian encirclement of the city in a chartered Ro-Ro ferry. Despite being stopped by an (ex-)Yugoslav Navy vessel, they were eventually allowed to pass after a highly surreal parley; the downside was that there wasn't actually very much in the way of aid aboard the ship or aboard any other ship. There is a telling account of the journey here; note that one prediction from it was very much true, as Stipe Mesic did indeed get to be president of Croatia.

I have to say that the makeup of the Gaza convoy isn't that promising - Yvonne Ridley? Was George Galloway unable to open his sunbed? But the spirit is right, and they strike an important point - Israel does all its trade through its ports, over the sea. They can afford to start a row about the freedom of the seas as much as Singapore or Britain can.

Google Maps API Issue

So I'm trying to make a little Google Map overlay, that will reload data from a remote server every time the page it contains loads. Obviously, I read the documentation, look at examples, sign up for a Google API key. But it's not working, and I'm getting error messages that the API key is "for a different website" and that I can go get another one. I now have three, which the docs say I shouldn't. Any ideas?

Can't we be more helpful and appropriate?

This story; from China is predictably horrible:

Chinese authorities have sentenced two women in their 70s to a year's "re-education through labour" following their application to hold a protest demonstration during the Beijing games, a relative said yesterday.

Officials said this week they had not approved a single permit for a demonstration, despite designating three parks as protest zones.

The International Olympic Committee's communications director said she would look at the women's case, but stressed the games were "not a panacea for all ills".

Wu Dianyuan, 79, and her neighbour Wang Xiuying, 77, sought to protest about their forced eviction from their homes in 2001. They went to the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB) four times this month to request permission to demonstrate in the zones - created for the Olympics to counter criticism about restrictions on political expression in China...

But that isn't my point. My point is that it's all oddly familiar. For a start, they have been placed under an "order" which restricts their movements, subjects them to the scrutiny of a neighbourhood committee, and isn't subject to a court hearing or to an appellant jurisdiction of any kind. Why not? Because, of course, it's not actually punishment. Only breaking; the order would be a crime, and would result in your being sent to a labour camp.

Yes; they've reinvented the ASBO. Meanwhile, 77 applications to demonstrate have been made and absolutely none granted. 74, apparently, were "resolved through consultations", another two turned down because the form wasn't properly filled in, and another rejected on the grounds it involved a child. (Won't somebody think of the children?) And I was fascinated by this quote from Sir Mucho Pomposo Wang Wei of the Organising Committee:

Wang Wei, vice-president of the Beijing organising committee, told reporters they should be "satisfied" with the protest zones. "The idea of demonstration is that you are hoping to resolve issues, not to demonstrate for the sake of demonstrating. We are pleased that issues have been resolved through dialogue and communication - this is how we do it in Chinese culture," he told a press conference.

He added: "We want everyone to express their opinion. Everyone has the right to speak; this is not the same as demonstrating.

It's so familiar; the insistence that anyone who disagrees is doing so out of spite, that only acquiescence is "serious" or "helpful". I'm surprised he didn't offer them a Big Conversation, but in fact, with the right mistranslation he might have done. Similarly, the re-education through labour order for disturbing the public is just a translator's caprice away from an anti-social behaviour order.

Perhaps there's a wider truth here; this sort of events/urban regeneration politics seems to follow the same grammar all over the world. It's conceived of as a project; which implies there are only participants, or else obstructions. Despite the money and the bulldozers, it respects class boundaries; veering around the villas of the rich. It needs special security arrangements which always turn out to involve some sort of summary justice based on vague and unchallengeable notions of appropriateness, propriety, or order; similarly, these are always temporary but are never revoked. The state authorities and private interests involved are indistinguishable. (Interestingly, the legislative foundation tends to be very hard to get rid of; the Act on the Great Exhibition of 1851 is still in force and still a major headache for anyone planning to build on or near the original site.)

More deeply, it seems to include a sort of quasi-medical view of society, or more specifically of the city. It, and we, need to be made better. Not only the method of this treatment, but the definition of better, is reversed for the doctors; but we are responsible if it doesn't work, because we didn't comply sufficiently. The nudgers' cognitive biases are not examined; it's our fault if we don't press the right coloured shape in response. Equally, no-one suggests subjecting the Home Office to compulsory psychotherapy in order to get rid of its hysterical anxiety, but it seems to want to make everyone happy.

The Harrowell Plan (Or, No Christmas Card from Dsquared)

I'm about to propose something to make Daniel Davies cry. Specifically, it's a solution to a problem we currently deal with by a cash transfer through the tax and benefit system. But I think I've made a good case that trying to deal with high energy prices by paying the poor to burn more energy is not sensible, except perhaps as temporary relief of the symptoms. Instead, I suggested, why don't we pay them to insulate, or to install £1,895 air-source heat pumps, and get rid of the problem; after all, we subsidise the rich to do these things to their property. And I suggested that, if we're too stingy or the government is short of cash, we could use the money now paid out as winter fuel payments.

Terrifyingly, there's a chance someone might pick up on the idea - because it turns out they've got one like it in exciting America. Surely it's got to be good. The Californian municipality in question is offering loans to carry out energy-saving improvements, to be paid back through property tax. I'm not quite sure how it works, although here are more details; but it seems to be restricted to homeowners, and I'm far from sure if the repayments are additional to the property tax you'd already pay or not.

My brilliant scheme has the distinction that, rather than the user repaying it, it's repaid from the benefits they would otherwise claim. In a sense, it capitalises the stream of WFP cheques over ten years. Government gets to save on the benefit payments over and above the amortisation period of the heat pumps or insulation; the recipient gets to save hugely on heating; and society saves three to four units of energy from gas for every unit of electricity the heat pump uses. (The technology is wonderful.) And it hits the cheapest way of saving bulk CO2.

Here are some numbers. The two main groups of WFP recipients get £200 and £300 respectively; this is currently planned to go up quite sharply. (Another reason for my brilliant scheme is that tying bits of the government budget to prices that might rise without apparent bounds is stupid.) To be conservative, and also because I could have tried harder, here are some data from 2006. £1.98bn was spent. Elsewhere, it looks like 11,407,000 individuals received money, but the relevant number is a number of buildings not people. It seems 8 million households received WFP, which is a fair enough proxy. That gives us an annual payout per premises of £247.50; with a full-heating ASHP at £1,895, that's a bit over seven and a half years to pay it off.

We've already got a list of recipients, and we write to them every autumn. Obviously there are people who don't want to be bothered, and probably they are right, so we'll give them the choice of fuel payments or [whatever silly name our friendly local special advisor comes up with]. Given the usual take-up rate for optional benefits, I'd reckon the pressure every year should be manageable enough; but if we felt militant enough we could make it voluntary-but-automatic.

One question I'd raise against myself is why this pensioner obsession. Don't a lot of them own their homes? What about children? Well, for some reason they are the only group in our society we find it necessary to give special help with their energy requirements. Minister, I am a mere technocrat. I don't bother my head with these things...but you might want to look at the numbers for some of the in-work benefit schemes.

Riyan

I've been seeing some Click Airways CGK/Click Airways CKW flights going to Riyan again, where Air Bas's UN-11007 was lost with its load of astonishingly inflammable "fish" back in 2005.

The grass is several shades of blue; every MP trips over you...

So, the Tories are currently making hay on the economy, while the black clouds are overhead. Unfortunately it's all drivel, and specifically, it's drivel because the current economic crisis is entirely the result of the Tory economic settlement. The promise of infinite free money from property was the core Thatcherite proposition, and its costs (specifically, high interest rates and a high pound) were traditionally covered by North Sea oil. Of course, rising house prices aren't actually money, just a way of borrowing from your kids, with the special feature that they don't get any schools or railways for the borrowing. But the Tory achievement was to get an economy specialised in property speculation accepted by both major parties. And, as we have seen, they have very good personal reasons to pretend that the government could just stick the bubble back together if it wanted.

All oppositions pretend something like this, of course; but it's incumbent on them to have some idea of the difference between bullshit and government. Just look at the Tories' performance over Northern Rock. To recap, they thought the Bank of England's money was taxpayers' money in August but not in January; they thought the Bank of England was an independent agency in August but under ministerial line management in January; they imagined the Bank of England had vastly more money that it does throughout. Thank God for the civil service.

And even if you grant them a huge pass on administrative reality, their stated positions are wildly incoherent. In the pastel corner, there's Huggy Dave's quality of life reports. In the phlegm-spatter corner, there's Mad Jack Redwood's report on how the economy can be revived by letting private "care homes" pack in more codgers per square foot. What an invention - the battery granny farm. Will the staff get Dave from PR's improved work-life balance? Bollocks they will. However, Greasy Phil Hammond's specialist NHS property development firm, Castlemead Developments Ltd, would presumably find investments in this field rather tastier. More seriously, what the hell does Mad Jack think our problems are? Aren't they more about the tradable sector, and what happens to the balance of payments with an energy import bill and tanking City volumes?

None of this should be any surprise. Look at the chief economist of chouchou snackthinkers Policy Exchange. What has he discovered? Well, his tube train was late, and so he's written "England: An Obituary on a Great Country". Seriously. And he apparently thinks "Britain" supplies IKEA goods and services, rather than a huge Swedish multinational. This used to be the quality of a middling to poor Tory newspaper columnist. Now it's their intellectual foundation.

Hammond's Sauce Works Band

Recently, our dear duckspeaker Philip Hammond MP had his local talking points cache refreshed. He's now constantly saying that the Government is causing "uncertainty" in the housing market because they haven't decided whether or not to cut stamp duty, and that this is a problem. Both statements are of course completely vacuous at best, and actively misleading at worst. For a start, the housing market is tanking. We're in the worst property crash since 1983, says the Halifax; that's another way of saying that the Halifax started computing an index of real estate prices in 1983. It's not impossible that it's the worst since the Great Depression. The price of property is dropping with the almost supernatural swiftness of an economic imbalance that finally clears; at the moment, anyone who wants to buy a house would be literally insane to do so, as it is as certain as anything in economics ever is that it will be much cheaper in a year's time.

Of course, this only matters if you can raise the money. At the moment, the banks have practically stopped lending, so whatever happens to stamp duty is risibly irrelevant. Further, all these statements go double the smaller the deal; nobody who owns a house is ever likely to struggle to raise mortgage money if they want to buy another, but without new entrants, who can they sell to? What mortgage lending is going on is actually very good business for the banks, because it's practically all to people with lots of existing equity, and at higher interest rates too.

Supposedly, according to Hammond and the real-estate lobby, reducing stamp duty would help people raise a deposit in order to pass the new and more astringent lending criteria. But this is obviously drivel. The large majority of new entrants are either zero-rated or in the first, 1% band, so their stamp duty bill will be at the very most a couple of grand. If they have to raise a 20% deposit, well. It's not going to work. If you've got £18,000 to plunk down as a deposit, and the stamp duty at 1% is a dealbreaker, shouldn't you either be waiting a few months, looking for somewhere cheaper, or getting a better mortgage broker?

Further, there's the marginal issue. The Tories seem to be collectively blind to the existence of marginal effects, as if their love of classical economics had carried them back past Hayek and von Mises and Bohm Bawerk all the way to the 19th century. For example, they want to "encourage marriage" by offering a tax break to the married; but the only extra marriages this will result in are the ones where the spouses wouldn't stay together but for the tax break. And those aren't likely to be gems, are they? Similarly, the only additional house sales a cut in stamp duty will cause are ones where that sum of money is enough to make the difference; not very many, as we've just seen. But we're having an epic financial crisis precisely because the banks lent so much money to people who couldn't pay it back. Do we really want more crappy loans?

So; it's completely ridiculous to suggest that cutting stamp duty will do any good, it's frankly irresponsible, and it's even sillier to imagine that buyers are holding off wondering if they'll have to pay 1 per cent more or less, when they can be certain they will pay 10 per cent less in a few months' time and perhaps 30 per cent less in a year or two. So why is Hammond so obsessed? (And he is. Check out the 14,400 Google results, including a veritable barrage of official Tory press statements.)

The first point is pure clientelism. What stupid Tory giveaways have in common is that although their marginal effects usually defeat the stated point of the exercise, they usually succeed in showering one or other campaign demographic with cash. A tax break for married couples won't actually do any good, but it will provide a payoff for several key voter groups who don't even have to do anything; the money just comes. Similarly, the people who are dealing in houses at the moment by definition have lots of equity and cash; who else can get a mortgage? They would get the tax break as much as anyone else. Kerching! Another group who would benefit either way would be the real estate lobby itself; and the sheer number of property millionaires who have quartered themselves on London since Boris Johnson's election should explain this reasonably well.

The second is Philip Hammond's own personal financial interest. Here's something he added to the register of interests in June, his shareholding in Castlemead Ltd, a company whose main interest is....property development, of houses through its stake in Castlemead Homes Ltd and of NHS primary care centres through Castlemead Developments Ltd. (I reckon the Tory position on PCTs wants watching, no?)

This must be no small holding, either; he managed to forget to declare a £3m dividend from the firm. That's enough to make him the the second richest man in the Shadow Cabinet with net wealth (I refuse to describe it as "worth") of £9m. No wonder he spends so much time howling for the propertied interest. He is talking his own book. But surely even he can't be worrying about the stamp duty on his £1.5m pad in Belgravia? Even at the 4% higher rate?

I heard a rumour that someone got Philled in...

OK, so I've been off line quite a bit due to a weird perversion called "moving house". This means that my constituency MP is no longer Philip Hammond, which almost makes it all worthwhile by itself. Hammond was one of the most annoying features of living in wonderful Runnymede & Weybridge; an immensely self-satisfied and superbly mediocre greaseball who was invariably unhelpful on every occasion I had any dealings with him.

For some strange reason, Hammond has risen to a mysterious prominence in politics as Shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury. Now this is no small thing; the Chief Sec is probably the most-underestimated job in government, being the gatekeeper for the Treasury's dealings with all other government departments. So it is a sad comment on the shallow Conservative talent pool that it is filled by a waxwork like Hammond; in more normal times, he would no doubt botch the job and be dropped, but for various reasons entirely beyond his or anyone else's control, the economic and more importantly financial climate has left him with an open goal. If you've seen Kes, it's his Brian Glover/Bobby Charlton moment.

As far as I can make out, the only reason for Hammond's success apart from the desperate shortage of alternatives is that he can be relied upon to repeat predetermined talking points without stumbling over often. He is, as the essay at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four would say, literally a doubleplusgood duckspeaker - one who quacks out the party line without the least deviation. This may not be much of an achievement; you could, after all, replace him with a simple Python script without much trouble. But he's done well with it.

The problem is the content of the duckspeak; after all, duckspeakers will always be with us. Hammond insists on reciting that "Gordon Brown failed to repair the roof while the sun was shining"; this appears to mean that the budget deficit ought to be lower, or something. Leaving aside that everyone, always, believes that if only they were in charge the budget deficit would be lower; it just isn't true. Public debt as a percentage of GDP is significantly (about six percentage points) lower than it was in 1997. If the roofing is not complete, then Brown at least put on quite a few new slates.



But the problem is worse; what on earth is the Conservative proposed macroeconomic framework? What would they consider as sufficient roofing? Indeed, what on earth was it all these years? I can't remember that the Tories ever promised to run a primary surplus during the period 2002-2008, and the only policy of theirs I can think of that was explicitly intended to reduce public debt was William Hague's half-bright brainwave of using radio spectrum sales to fund the universiti....hold on, that wouldn't have reduced the public debt, would it? Hague came up with it because he didn't agree with the Government using the UMTS 2.1GHZ band auction to reduce the public debt.

Not that telcos in 2001-2 would, or even could, have bid that kind of money for spectrum; they didn't have it. They never will bid that kind of money again, either, as anyone in the trade could tell you. Which is a pity, given that I think Hague's brainwave is still part of the Tory platform. The Tories do not appear to have any idea what fiscal rules they will use, if any.

Complaining about the Tory legacy (if the roof needed fixing, perhaps it had something to do with the PSBR running between £28-46bn for each of the last three years up to 1997? Just a thought) is widely held to be a pathetic tactic; but you'd be wrong. It was only this spring that a government warehouse - the so-called Work in Progress Store - that had held the backlog of unresolved immigration files since 1994 shut down without fanfare, as Michael Howard's legacy was finally processed and transferred to the archives.

But they are very good at repeating utter bollocks over and over again.

Dude, Where's My Lawyer?

So what's going on with Viktor Bout?

Thai judges and lawyers spoke among themselves and it was quickly clear there would be no hearing - Bout's new lawyer was unavailable. His previous lawyer had been sick on the date of an earlier hearing. So we filed out, ready to pounce on the shackled Russian once more as he was led back to his cell, pencilling September 26th for our next date with international justice.

Hat tip.

When the world was our lobster

So, those Oystercard outages. I wrote a sizable post on this immediately before going on holiday, but something odd happened with Wordpress's clever ajaxy bits and it vanished. Computers...anyway, we can work out various things about the problem from the few details supplied.

In the first incident, around 1% of the cards somehow became nonfunctional. We don't know how; we do know, however, that it was indeed the cards, because the fix was to bring them in and issue new ones. This raises an interesting question; why did new physical cards have to be issued? The process of issuing a card involves writing the data TfL holds on you to the blank card; there isn't much difference between this and overwriting whatever is on the card with the details held in the database. This suggests either that the affected cards suffered actual physical damage - unlikely, unless someone's running about with a really powerful RF source and a bad sense of humour - or else that TfL can't trust the information on file, and therefore needs to erase the affected records and set up new user accounts.

So, how could it happen? Card systems can work in various ways; you can do a pure online authorisation system, like debit or credit cards, where information on the card is read off and presented to a remote computer, which matches it against a look-up table and sends back a response, or you can do a pure card system, where your credit balance is recorded on the card and debited when you use it, then credited when you pay up. Or you can have a hybrid of the two. Oyster is such a hybrid. TfL obviously maintains a database of Oyster user accounts, because it's possible to restore lost cards from backup, to top-up through their Web site without needing a card reader, and to top-up automatically. But it's also clear that the card is more than just a token; you can top up at shops off-line, and the transaction between the card and the ticket barrier is quick enough that you don't need to break stride (consider how long it takes to interact with a Web site or use a bank card terminal).

Clearly, the actual authorisation is local (the barrier talks to the card), as is offline top-up, but the state of the card is backed up to the database asynchronously, and changes to your record in the database are reflected on the card, presumably as soon as it passes through a card reader. To achieve this without stopping the flow of passengers, I assume that when a card is read, the barrier also keeps the information from it in a cache and periodically updates the database. Similarly, in order to get online top-ups credited to the cards, the stations probably receive and cache recent updates from the database; if the card number is in the list, it gets an "increment £x" command.

We can probably rule out, then, that 1% of the Oyster card fleet were somehow dodgy when they started to flow through the gatelines that morning, and that the uploaded data from them caused the matching records to become untrustworthy. It's possible - just - that some shops somehow sporked them. It's also vaguely possible that bad data from some subgroup of cards propagated to the others. But I think these are unlikely. It's more likely that the batch process that primes the station system with the last lot of online and automatic top-ups went wrong, and the barriers dutifully wrote the dodgy data to the cards.

This is also what TfL says:

We believe that this problem, like the last one resulted from incorrect data tables being sent out by our contractor, Transys.

People of course think this was somehow connected with the NXP MiFare class break, but it's not necessary.

In this scenario, some sort of check incorporated in the database was intended to detect people using the MiFare exploit (probably looking for multiple instances of the same card, cards that didn't appear in the database, or an excess of credit over the cash coming in), but a catastrophic false positive occurred. This is a serious lesson about the MiFare hack, and about this sort of public-space system in general; the effects of the security response may well be worse than those of the attack. Someone using a cloned, or fraudulently refilled, card could at best steal a few pounds in free rides. But the security response, if that was what it was, first threatened a massive denial-of-service attack on the whole public transport system, and then caused TfL to lose a whole day's revenue.

Less

Spencer Ackerman wants a case for not sending more troops to Afghanistan. Specifically, he wants to know why the US military is keeping a brigade of Marines in Kuwait as a reserve. Well. The first point is that there is a very good reason to have a reserve force at the far end of the main supply route into Iraq. With the British force outside Basra, this adds up to a considerable strike force for use in the event that someone decides it's time to cut Highway 8. For the someone, try here.

But there are good reasons to think that we should not be sending more troops into Afghanistan. For a start, have a read of this. The Taliban, it is argued, use "kinetic operations" - i.e. force - in support of "information operations" - i.e. propaganda, rather than the other way round. (Anyone else remember the Armalite and the Ballot Box at this point?) They are therefore keen for the Afghan government to be seen as a cruel authority with foreign tanks and planes, bent on bombing weddings and destroying poppy fields.

Secondly, the more large army units that go, the more bases will be built, the more money spent on directly military purposes, the more trucks will be involved in road accidents. More teachers will quit their jobs to be paid more money driving white Land Cruisers. The whole force will be even more dependent on the road from Karachi; this is not a good thing.

Thirdly, pouring more resources in might be a way to avoid changing policy. Consider this article by Antonio Giustozzi. Giustozzi's point is that whatever the available resources, the Afghan army is never going to be the answer because of its internal contradictions. It is being built as an instrument of Tajik power, and as a barracks army for use anywhere in the country. Worse still, it has an explicit policy of sending northerners to Pashtun country; which is something like the opposite of counterinsurgency. But because it's "the army", it's likely to be the preferred partner of an enlarged ISAF.

Arguably, more Western (or Eastern, for that matter) combat units are the last thing Afghanistan needs. Nor anybody else. Send more advisors; send money; revive the auxiliary police force; insist on a political solution. But no more wedding raids, hesco barriers, or monster trucks.

Are you sure?

Via Kings of War, an Anglo-Australian spat of sorts.

The British Army has the reputation of being good at counterinsurgency, and in 2003 and 2004 there was lots of fairly snide criticism of the United States by British commanders saying that Americans didn’t understand counterinsurgency [and] were taking too kinetic an approach,” said Kilcullen, who described the British attitude as, “‘Look at us, we’re on the street in our soft caps and everyone loves us.’”

Marston, who was until recently a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst — the British Army’s rough equivalent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. — said that “as an American working in the British system for the last five years” in 2003, he watched the British “act as if they were the best in [counterinsurgency] in the world.” But the British performance on Iraqi and Afghan battlefields since then has not backed up such strident talk, according to Kilcullen and Marston. “It would be fair to say that in 2006 the British Army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq,” Kilcullen said, adding that there were numerous “incidents” in Afghanistan that further undercut the British claims of superiority in counterinsurgency.

“They’ve been embarrassed by their performance in southern Iraq,” Marston said. Meanwhile, the Taliban “almost destroyed” the British Army’s 16th Air Assault Brigade in Afghanistan. In some places, he said, “they just held on.”

The first thing I'd say would be to check out "Ajay" (you really need to get your own blog, mate) in the comments. As he points out, they didn't "almost destroy" 16AAB or anything close to it. He also points out that the whole discourse of "failure" in southern Iraq is based on the belief that something different occurred in north-central Iraq.

After all, even accepting the American claims of success (well, the ones that aren't completely deranged), Baghdad is still a war zone, disagreeable, infrastructure-challenged, dangerous, criminalised, ruled in name by a wildly corrupt sectarian government swinging between US and Iranian influence and in fact by whoever has the upper hand in any given street. Kirkuk and Baqubah are much the same but worse. And the improvement, such as it is, has been achieved by paying off both sets of enemies. Basra after the British move out to the airport is - corrupt, criminal, afflicted by tribal/sectarian violence, and governed by a chaotic sectarian authority. (Also, it never got as bad as Baghdad in the first place.)

But the meta-discourse of the Iraq war works like this: "fighting on" is a sufficient substitute for winning. Anyone who leaves must have been defeated, if they are not actually traitors. Therefore, the same endstate is defeat in Basra but victory in Baghdad. Who, after all, could swear to distinguish these guys - ex-NOIA now on our payroll - from ex-Sadrist or Fadhila men operating as Basra police so long as we (through the agency of the Iraqi government) pay them?

Another point here is precisely what tactics Kilcullen thinks the British Army should have adopted in Afghanistan in 2006. After all, his Iraq policy was to deploy lots of small units into permanent positions all over Iraqi cities, matched with units of Iraqi police and ex-insurgent countergangs, thus in order to gain intelligence, deliver economic relief, and exclude the insurgents from contact with the people, spreading out from reasonably secure areas in a classical counterinsurgency. When 16AAB went to Helmand, they sent individual infantry platoons out to as many villages as possible, there to set up an Afghan government presence, deliver economic relief, and exclude the Taliban. Can anyone see the similarities? No-one was willing to use the C-word at the time, but it's pretty clear what was intended.

The point is well made over at Abu Muqawama; doing this implies being fairly confident that your outposts will be able to look after themselves against any force the enemy is likely to bring up. Among other things, the US Army in and around Baghdad was operating in a large city, so the gaps between units weren't too big; this just isn't the case in Afghanistan. The result was that the Taliban counter-attacked powerfully, trying hard to destroy the outposts and forcing the British Army to fight hard to hold on to them. The counterinsurgency policy broke down because the counterinsurgents were busy resisting insurgent assaults on their camps, and the fighting tended to kill, displace, and enrage the people who lived around the "platoon houses".

Similarly, "Joint Security Stations" implanted in Musa Qala and Sangin would have been constantly under attack, and constantly firing back, producing the same scene of an empty bazaar shredded by gunfire. Which is precisely the result the Taliban were after. Further, it seems that the local force element is excluded by high-level political considerations.

Civilisation is common defence and waste disposal

Jamie Zawinski links to a campaign to have a Californian sewage works renamed after George W. Bush. I disagree, strongly. Who on earth would associate something as civic, egalitarian, and useful as sewage treatment with the Commander Guy? Not just that, but it's a publicly-owned sewage plant, part of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Hunter S. Thompson thought Richard Nixon should have been flushed into the Pacific through the sewers; he didn't confuse the sewer with the shit. As he so wisely said, politics is the art of controlling your environment.

Yer man knows better: like this.

Whilst we're on the subject of public works, by the way, may I point out that hitting up Centrica with a windfall excess-profits tax would be completely stupid if the intention is to fund a pre-election sweetie special winter fuel payment. The causes of high natural gas prices are well known - we used the North Sea gas to screw the miners and get Lord Wakeham a seat on the Enron board, and now we're stuck with a lot of gas-fired power stations and noninsulated Victorian buildings, while the import infrastructure consists of three pipes, two of which pass through about six middlemen before getting to the big tap next to Vladimir Putin.

Even if Chris Dillow's perfect power ponies plan had a chance of being put in effect, it still wouldn't actually solve the problem. Just giving people more money to spend on expensive fuel doesn't actually get us any more fuel or any more heating; in fact, in so far as the recipients spent the money on fuel, it would go right back to the gas merchants.

What would help would be to use the money to, ah, fix the problem. I therefore refer everyone to my proposal to upgrade every home in the kingdom as close to passivhaus standard as possible, starting with the poorest (say, current fuel payment recipients as a kickoff). Of course, there are a lot of buildings around that you can't do much to (see above), so instead we could fit air-source heat pumps. Strangely enough, there is actually a small government project that already does this in the Yorkshire ex-coalfield, which has a lot of houses built on the assumption coal would always be very cheap, with poor people in them. And here's a bloke in Sheffield who makes them.

Well, actually he doesn't; in fact he imports cheap ones from China. But this does mean that he can supply one big enough to provide your space heating as well as hot water for £1,895 + VAT; which is less than the government's existing Low Carbon Buildings Programme grant. So yes, we are already giving away enough money per LCBP grant to buy one outright. The only problem is that LCBP grants are directed at people who own their homes and care about selling them in the future. This excludes, of course, precisely those people who can't afford their gas bill and usually live in houses with the insulating qualities of a mankini. Further, the price is now in the rough area where the existing value of winter fuel payments could be capitalised over a reasonable period of time - so it could be close to budget-neutral.

You want a workable, egalitarian, green policy for this autumn, Gord? One that actually combines wonkosity with bashing? Or you, Nick? It's become almost routine to read about the search for ways to combine bottom-up development and environmental protection in Africa, say - but perhaps we should apply some of the same thinking here. It is, after all, very much the case that society offers solutions to the problems of the rich but only relief from the problems of the poor.

Birthday Present

So, walking back from dinner, what did I catch lurking in a side street? Yes, but yes, one of these...





There it waited, with a 4-way CCTV installation lunging out the roof like a Blairite erection...I took photographs, and the driver suddenly reversed. But he or she didn't go. So I called the phone number on the side - 08705 899799 - and demanded to know what they were looking for. They said - Surveillance. They wanted to know where I was. I wouldn't tell them. Why should they know? Shouldn't they be answering the questions?

So I asked what it was surveilling. "Well, things," said the Geordie on the line. I asked him who the scheme controller was under the Data Protection Act. "I don't know." "IT'S YOUR LEGAL DUTY TO KNOW." So, I said, I'll just have to report the company to the polis then won't I? And I will, as soon as I've consulted the guys from Spyblog.

Radio silence

I'm off on holiday, so talk amongst yourselves until the 25th...

Avient, Again

So, what if there was an airline that uses the Zimbabwean registry in order to get around most people's idea of aviation safety, is almost certainly in cahoots with the Zimbabwean government, and was involved not just with running guns into the DRC in the late 90s but also with actual combat air missions, dropping napalm out of the back of Antonovs and operating Mi-24 gunships in support of the Zimbabwean army there?

You'd think it would be numero uno on the EU blacklist. But, incredibly, Avient Aviation (ICAO code SMJ) isn't; even though it is widely suspected that some of the Chinese weapons shipment blacked by South African dockers was flown to Zimbabwe in their Il-76, Z-WTV, from a port in Angola. (The Il-76 is the last surviving T-model, and is therefore on its last legs; it came from a firm based in Sao Tome, using the 3C- Equatorial Guinea registry at the same time as Viktor Bout's CET Aviation was.) You might be even more surprised to learn that Avient is actually allowed to base aircraft in the European Union - its pair of ancient DC-10s are regularly seen at Chalons-Vatry airfield in France.

What's going on? Well, part of the answer may be the Gabonese angle to the whole thing. Avient had, for some time, a contract to handle cargo on behalf of Gabon Airlines. They took over, with the contract, an aged DC-8 imported from the Sudanese firm United Arabian Airlines, which is now registered Z-ALB with Avient. Now, it seems that Gabon doesn't want Zimbabwe-registry aircraft, and neither does it want Avient bossAndrew Smith ("one of the most thoroughly despicable & unlikeable characters it's ever been my displeasure to meet"). Fair enough, but you have to say that it probably had something to do with the French government threatening to put Gabon Airlines on a blacklist (President Bongo threatened to ban Air France from Libreville, but he was never likely to go through with it).

I can see the point in the French action, but what I don't understand is why Avient are tolerated in their back yard, when they are apparently enough to warrant a diplomatic row with the darling of French African policy for the last forty years. And wipe that smirk off; Avient have done the Baghdad trail quite frequently, too.

I don't know about you, but it strikes me that if you were looking for an economic sanction against Zimbabwe that was only likely to affect the elite, seizing the Avient DC10s on the ground at Vatry would be a cracker. Given their age and suspected condition, it could probably be put in effect just by having them ramp-checked by the safety inspectors.

Security By Audacity

Does anyone else think the reason the Oystercard system had a multi-hour outage might be somehow connected with the fact that TFL's response to the class break of the NXP MiFare Classic cards it uses has so far been even worse than the manufacturers'? NXP's contribution to dealing with this has been to sue the Dutch students who demonstrated the exploit, but TFL's has been to write to the papers and say that there is nothing anyone could do with the ability to change any and all information on the cards. Nothing, I tell you!

Which, if it were true, would suggest that the cards are completely irrelevant to the system's functioning, which obviously isn't true...

Two odd things

First: the Ethiopian army claims to have killed a Canadian colonel fighting with Somali insurgents. I assume they mean a Canadian who claims to be a colonel in the insurgency, rather than a Canadian colonel who joined, but who can tell these days?

Secondly, here's a special one - Jewish settler caught firing improvised rockets into his Palestinian neighbours' land. If you've got a grievance these days, improvised rocket artillery is the way to go, clearly. Maybe I should dust off that article I wrote back in the autumn of 2006, widely rejected by a cross-section of the national and international press?

I'm especially amused by the Danish design collective that published details of a rocket "intended to help the citizen express his or her protest at events such as the G8"; sometimes, 2001 seems as far away as the 1960s. I suspect anyone doing so now would be shot, which among other things is why I am mostly encrypting my stuff today.

(BTW, Jim Henley is wrong about this. Improvised multiple-launch rigs with RPGs on the back of a Toyota are a tactic that served the Afghan mujahedin very well, as a quick way to bring down a volley of explosions an shrapnel an stuff on targets some distance off. Further, don't forget the rocketing of the Palestine Hotel in 2003, which nicely capsized the CPA's decision loops and scared the living shits out of Paul Wolfowitz. Further, the Viet Cong were past masters at arranging for a barrage of mortars or rockets to happen, and then vanishing. Steve Gilliard did a very good post on this stuff years ago.)

Aaaand....we're operational

View Larger Map

The ViktorFeed is now operational! The map's permanent link is here (aren't Google URLs snappy?); the raw data is available as an RSS 2.0 feed with Simple GeoRSS tags here, at least until I decide on a permanent URL. It is updated every 5 minutes. Huge thanks to all at MySociety.

dive! dive! dive!

Der Spiegel has an interesting story regarding the Colombian drug smugglers' homemade submarines. These have so far been considered a curiosity, but apparently they are becoming more and more common, and the technology is developing fast. The biggest vessel captured so far displaced 46 tonnes, presumably surfaced, with a payload of 10 tonnes. Apparently the current ones, described as the third generation, have a radius of action of 2,500 kilometres; an American admiral is quoted as expecting them to eventually start crossing the Atlantic from northeastern Brazil to West Africa, linking up with the emerging drugs route from there to Europe.

The Guardian Is Not Serious About CVF

There hasn't been much progress on my long-term beef with Martin Kettle for a while. But it's worth remembering that if the Guardian has a major leading article that isn't a business/economics story, it's probably him. And Saturday's second lead (behind a rather competent finance story) bears the Kettle hallmarks.

Forty years ago the Royal Navy came up with a wheeze to persuade the government to buy a new fleet of aircraft carriers - it claimed that they were actually "through deck cruisers". There was no need for pretence this week when the £3.9bn order for two superships was signed in Govan. The vessels, to be named after the Queen and her son (another naval wheeze - would any government dare axe Her Majesty?), should come into service from 2014 as the oceanic embodiment of British power.

Well, he could have mentioned that the "new fleet of aircraft carriers" weren't designed as aircraft carriers, either; the Invincible class originally only carried 5 fighters, intended to chase off Soviet Bear reconnaissance planes rather than to provide serious air defence, and their main mission was as a base for anti-submarine helicopters. The Invincibles' role as light fleet carriers was originally a desperate hack for the Falklands, which the Navy realised could be built upon.

(And if you want a good story about the CVA-01 decision, why not mention the fact the RAF promised they could provide air cover to British forces anywhere on earth, producing a map to support this on which Australia was about 300 miles north-west of where conventional wisdom would suggest?)

The government is proud, the navy thrilled and the army jealous. The problem is that no one seems to know exactly what the ships are intended to do or how they will be paid for.

Wrong; they will provide fleet air defence, the same for British or allied landing forces, close air support for troops ashore, and a significant air strike capability, with secondary ASW, command and control and logistic roles. They are budgeted for in the defence equipment programme. That is a cheap criticism, though. If Kettle means that we won't ever need the use of an aircraft carrier, or that they are morally appalling in all cases, why doesn't he say so?

Nor is it clear what sort of plane, if any, will fly from their decks: the Joint Strike Aircraft, which they are designed to carry, will not be ready in time (and will cost a further £12bn), even if the United States goes ahead with the necessary vertical takeoff version, which is not certain. In the meantime the navy will have to make do with its ageing Harriers.

It's perfectly clear. Harrier until the F-35 ISD in 2014, thereafter F-35. You've just said so yourself. Further, note that Kettle is complaining that the Fleet Air Arm's Harriers are "ageing" and also complaining about replacing them, within the space of two sentences. Is he even aware, I wonder, that there are Harriers in the RAF as well? And that they are no newer? The argument that the cost of replacing Harrier is all the fault of the Navy is dishonest; the Harriers will wear out, whether they are flying from Illustrious and Ark Royal, the future Queen Elizabeths, or land bases.

And if you're worried about the Army (they are "jealous", remember), you should be aware that the Harrier force's central mission is to support the infantry. The aircraft itself was designed back in 1969 as a specialised close support aircraft, a sturmovik as the Russians would say, one that would be small, manoeuvrable, with a lot of space for weapons, and no requirement for airfields at all. This was why the US Marines, probably the most CAS-minded air force in the world, bought them. Letting the Harrier force go isn't an option - because we already cut half the RAF's CAS aircraft two years ago when the Jaguars were decommissioned, and the press didn't really notice.

For a government facing a tricky byelection in Glasgow, led by a prime minister from Fife, it is easy to understand the attractions of ships built partly in Govan and Rosyth. Last year's Commons statement giving the go-ahead was greeted by MPs cheering news of work going to their constituencies. What was lacking - and has been since the 1998 strategic defence review set out plans for the vessels - was a discussion of why the ships are needed, or how they can be afforded

And you're not going to get one here. Viz:

No one doubts the importance of carrier fleets in certain circumstances - Britain could not have fought the Falklands war without Hermes and Invincible. Floating off some future conflict zone or humanitarian disaster, the new ships will prove valuable. But so might many other forms of military resource, some of which will be sacrificed to pay for these aircraft carriers. The army lacks secure patrol vehicles and helicopters, but the Future Lynx helicopter programme looks likely to be scrapped in order to bail out a defence budget that is already overspent and must now fund naval gigantism.

Many other forms, eh. Fortunately the Matra-BAE Dynamics Ideological Handwave appears to be cheap and available off the shelf. The FLYNX project ought to be scrapped anyway, because it's a procurement zombie - it's been going on for ten years, not a single helicopter has been procured, but no less than three different sets of capability requirements have been written, at astonishing cost, and the current solution is to buy another lot of the same helicopters, which don't actually cover the LIFT element of the requirement (which is the bit about racing to the succour of the wounded in Afghanistan, Minister), and are rather large and expensive for the FIND element, which is about sneaking about spying, and could better be done by robots, more smaller and cheaper helicopters, or by ones big enough to cover the LIFT requirement with the spooky gear bolted on.

Regarding the "secure patrol vehicle" thing, here's Armchair Generalist. Sure, everyone would like to see more of them. But they are relatively cheap, and in fact the government keeps buying more of them. Which is a pity, because they are completely useless for anything other than Iraq and some missions in Afghanistan (the ones where you don't need either heavy metal, or mobility). But politicians love them because they show We Care. As far as Army procurement goes, the generals are more concerned about the FRES project, which is costed at £14bn and has already spent hundreds of millions of pounds without building a single vehicle. Many people think it is actually physically impossible.

Further, the Invincible class lasted 30 years; HMS Fearless was laid down in 1964 and managed to launch Chinooks full of SBS men into Afghanistan in 2001. Will we be in Iraq or Afghanistan in 4 years, let alone 14 or 40?

So we didn't get a serious discussion of why the ships are needed, did we? Oh well, space constraints. What about the solution?

This does not mean Britain should not have access to carriers; only that it cannot afford to build and support two new ships, three times the size of its current ones, without doing harm to other capabilities. The answer would have been to share the cost of construction and operation with France, which has just pulled back from expanding its own carrier fleet. Talk of this last month led to silly tabloid headlines about an EU navy. But a shared fleet and a capable military to back it up would do much more for global security than two big British ships and a cash-strapped army - even if it meant that the red ensign had to fly alongside the tricolour.

What does "access" to carriers mean? I hate this "access to" meme - it's a long standing government way of saying "something other than what you need". Rather than poverty, unemployment, or a terrible diet, your problem is that you "struggle to access finance, employment, and fresh foods". I fully expect to hear a government minister explain how they "are taking forward an initiative to improve our counter-terrorist capability's access to ammunition".

More seriously, how can we possibly "share the cost of construction and operation" with France when France has just "pulled back from expanding its own carrier fleet"? The French government wants to make some quite impressive cuts in its defence budget, and has decided to put off building a ship, so why would they give us money to work on ours? This "answer" is actually self-refuting.

In fact, the French are likely to get assurances of some sort of the use of the British ships for training when the Charles de Gaulle is in dock, and perhaps also of support if something comes up. Presumably they will offer something in return. This is roughly what Kettle is suggesting, but reversed; but it's impossible for both Britain and France to do this, just as two people with no money cannot help each other out by lending to each other.

And on top of this, we finish with what sounds like a call to revive the European Defence Community of 1954, which is...different. After all, the Guardian's policy is not actually to support the creation of a single European state, the last I heard. Nobody actually wants this, and there is no evidence the French do. How it would work, who would command it, who would task it...all this is handwaved away.

Worse, this is a common fault of much discussion of British defence policy. On the Right, the assumption is usually that we don't need a policy because the Americans will provide. On the Left, it's usually that we don't because the Europeans will pay, as if there was a great pool of available funding or forces over there. It makes as much sense as assuming that "the Boche will pay" did in 1919.

Here, it's driven by Kettle's addiction to Neither-Nor Criticism. He wants to appear decently anti-militaristic and concerned - this is the Manchester Guardian, after all - but he also doesn't want to accept the policy consequences of this. After all, he's a sodding Decent! How can you be a fan of humanitarian intervention and the war in Iraq, but also be opposed to having a blue-water navy? If you don't think we need a navy, or you think that we don't need armed forces at all, go ahead and make a case. If you think we do, then please suggest a shape of the forces and a foreign policy that would reliably not need the carriers. But he refuses to go anywhere near either. So, what we get is a sort of tepid soup of unexamined assumptions, with the extra feature that he seems to be desperately underbriefed on the issue.

Alternatively, the reason why he dislikes the carrier project is that it might confer too much independence of the United States. Now, this would indeed be consistently Decent. Some sort of half-baked "access to carriers" would be far more likely to prevent independent British - or European - action, and far more likely to compel a future prime minister to march because some ally wanted it. George Orwell attacked the "shabby kind of pacifism common to countries with strong navies", in a passage much quoted by the Decents. But how much worse is a shabby kind of militarism that doesn't want to pay for the Navy?

Using up al-Hashemi

We said the Iraqi political situation was getting worse, and the main political group that represents the ex-insurgents was splitting from them. Abu Aardvark has much confirmation.

Check out the troll freakout in the comments.

Perhaps he's dead, I'll just make sure...

Boris Johnston really is turning out to be as bad as it was blindingly obvious he was going to be. There are no shortage of examples, but this one in particular makes me shudder with fear. Yes, it's the desalination plant.

Desalination? Yes. But it's not just that. A desalination plant that will produce about as much water as Thames Water loses in leaks. Seriously. Thames Water, and presumably the Borisphere (and surely none could be more spherical) claim it will be cheaper. Well, this may be true...for values of "true" including "assuming that our massive complicated prestige project won't go over budget" and "assuming the price of natural gas doesn't go up - after all, there's an infinite quantity of it in the North Sea, right?"

But it's worse. The justification for spending a ton of money converting natgas into drinking water and pouring the water into pipes WITH HOLES IN, rather than spending some more money (perhaps) fixing the bloody water pipes already, is that it's "pro-motorist".

Yes, the reason is that repairing the sodding water mains might be inconvenient to the bizarre sect who insist on bringing huge metal objects into central London and spending their day looking for somewhere to put the things so they can get out of them and start walking, when there was a perfectly good parking space back home in the suburbs they could have left it in. Yes, he is proposing to burn vast quantities of scarce fossil fuel imported from Russia so other people can more easily burn vast quantities of scarce fossil fuel imported from Saudi Arabia, when they have no reason to do so at all.

But it's not the specifics that are the worse bit. It's the general principle; policymaking based completely on pandering. I mean, why not go the whole hog and just GIVE people who claim to vote Tory actual cash? At least plain bribery wouldn't do as much damage to London's infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is precisely the spirit of Boris. On one hand, you've got the appalling pork barrel fan service. On the other, you've got the politics of spite and revenge; the deliberate effort to be unpleasant to anything described as feminist or anti-racist, the made-up stories about fabulous wine cellars, the fake audit team. And that, by the way, is a move copied precisely from the made-up "Clinton staffers trashed the White House" bollocks of 2001. You ask Dean Godson and Sooper Don Blaney.

This is, of course, completely inimical to anything that could be described as competent administration. Which is a pity, because there is famously no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. The point of a mayor is precisely that; waste disposal, policing, space planning, infrastructure, social services.

Part of the good news is just how good the blogs on Boris are. Tory Troll and Boris Watch have forced their way into my RSS aggregator in the last few days. And it's all an effective preview of a future Tory government: pandering, content-free government, and ideological revenge campaigns in the civil service.

A Truth Moment at the CRB

According to the BBC, the Home Office really, really doesn't get the basic truth that 0.01% of a really big number is quite a big number. The Torygraph reported that the Criminal Records Bureau had mistakenly told its customers between February 2007 and February 2008 that some 680 people had criminal records when in fact they had none. The Home Office's response:

The Home Office said CRB has a 99.98% accuracy rate in vetting people working with children and vulnerable adults.

Indeed. I keep saying this; 99.98% accuracy, which is the politician's way of saying a 0.02% failure rate, is only good enough if 0.02% of the total isn't a large number. It must seem silly to people outside the telecoms business that we go on about 99.999% reliability. But that is a percentage of up to hundreds of millions of calls and signalling events.

Fortunately, there are some numbers in the story. The Home Office claims that 80,000 (a round number, but we've got nothing else to go on) people were prevented from taking up posts involving "vulnerable people"; there's no way of telling whether this means only ones involving "vulnerable people", only ones where a job offer was withdrawn, or just the total CRB checks that came up positive, and there's no telling what period of time it refers to. If it was the total for 2007-2008, that means the chance of a positive CRB check being a false positive is 0.85 per cent (99.15 per cent in contractorspeak). And we *haven't* even considered the false negatives....

So where's your 0.02 per cent now? Naturally, it's possible that the 80,000 covers more than one year...but hold on. If there were many more, some such figure recurring every year, then this suggests the actual numbers are even worse. The CRB has been going since, what, 2002? 13,333 refusals a year on average. We know the 680 false positives are for just one year; which would make it a 5.1% false positive rate for 2007-08. (That's 94.9% in contractorspeak.) So, the Home Office's figures cannot possibly be right; it's impossible to have a negative number of false negatives, so we *know* that the CRB does not provide 99.98% accuracy. Surely this means the Government should be suing Capita or whoever?

The ViktorFeed: Documentation

Here is the presentation I delivered at OpenTech 2008:

| View | Upload your own

I'd publish the text, but I didn't prepare a text:-)

Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I've been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of these place all movements on the Web, but neither of them provide anything like an RSS feed, which is why I began scripting, in order to save checking them myself. (You can read about this phase in the Political Pathetic Python posts on this blog.)

The current version works as follows: the web pages involved are loaded and BeautifulSoup instances created for each one. If a page fails to load and an IOError occurs, this stage is skipped for that one and a default message added. Data is extracted using BeautifulSoup's find method in list comprehensions. Each flight is represented by a tuple of values in a list. For each flight, the tuple is unpacked and each item in it assigned to a standard variable. If the airline name is found in a whitelist, the tuple is discarded. Otherwise, various standard items - for example, the name of the airport the flight arrived at or departed from - are added, the time variable is processed to provide both a readable time and a time in seconds since the epoch, and a database is queried to provide the geographical locations of the source and destination.

In the event that a location is not given or not found, a default value is specified and a message added. The default location is in the Bermuda Triangle, thanks to Soizick. The values are reassembled as a dictionary and appended to a list. When all pages have been processed, the content of this list is decorated with the time values in seconds since the origin, and sorted into reverse chronological order. This version is then undecorated, and the individual flights are used to create a Simple GeoRSS file through Python string formatting, which is encoded as Unicode and written out to disk.

Items in the file consist of the time and data group, in the title field, the source, destination, airline, and flight number in the description field, a GeoRSS Line tag with the source and destination geocodes, and the current time and date in the pubDate field. This data can be visualised in Google Maps more than simply. The test version was served from my laptop, using the SimpleHTTPRequestHandler and ForkingTCPServer methods and port forwarding.

Things to do: get it going on a permanent Web presence, refactor the code into a slightly less ugly mess, keep all the flights in a database, make it possible to query past movements.

OpenTech 2008: It's like the ESF, with code...

Back in 2004, this blog went to the European Social Forum - we weren't that impressed, but we did call it "the Caesar's Palace of Ranting". I'm not sure what the equivalent for the UKUUG's OpenTech 2008 would be; there was plenty of ranting, but a sight less committee wank, more practicality, even if no-one can answer the question of what any of this stuff stands for. I ran into, among others, Liz Henry, most of MySociety, the author of Spyblog (who has some damn good war stories), various readers including Duane Griffin, and a small galaxy of assorted hackers, militants, gawpers, freaks and mutants. Good People, as the Doctor would say.

And they are, too; even if the live demonstration of the ViktorFeed didn't happen due to the lack of a routable IP address (or even working connectivity for that matter), there was the loan of another laptop when OpenSUSE didn't want to speak to the projector. When I'd finished the show and dealt with all the questions, I was faced with at least two offers of colocated server capacity, and the services of at least three professional software developers, as well as an interview for the BBC World Service, a spare USB key, and a pint of lager. All of which would have come in handy the night before, when I foolishly attempted to change something in the code after midnight and borked the whole thing, forcing me to get up at six the next morning to fix it.

As it turns out, having met Francis Irving, I'm probably going to be assimilated by MySociety, or at least my project is. I was also very interested in some of the green/geek crossover projects - I missed the session on solar power and IT, but I did get to the AMEE presentation on their automated carbon dioxide profiler and Hotmapping's show of their IR surveying work, intended to classify buildings by the rate at which they lose heat. Apparently they'd already found one urban cannabis farm.

And BT Osmosoft's TiddlyWiki - a wiki in a single file - may not sound all that much; but I really liked the idea of a zoomable, pseudo 3D interface for wikis. I'm quite keen on the idea of using this to organise contacts - who puts their friends in alphabetical order after all?