da brother's gonna work it out

Our former prime minister supported Hosni Mubarak this morning in the name of stability.

Blair said that meant there should not be a rush to elections in Egypt.

"I don't think there's a majority for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. On the other hand, what you've got to watch is that they are extremely well-organised and well-funded whereas those people who are out on the street at the moment, many of them will be extremely well-intentioned people but they're not organised in political parties yet. So one of the issues in the transition is to give time for those political parties to get themselves properly organised," he said.

How's that working out for you, Tony? Here's a taste of the "no elections, leave Mubarak and Suleiman in power" plan in action:

7:41pm Al Jazeera web producer at Tahrir Square says that a crowd of about 500 pro-Mubarak people started throwing rocks over tanks near Qasr al-Nil bridge.

Yes, today has been so chaotic and unstable that not only are Mubarak's loyalist paramilitaries fighting the revolutionaries, they're also sometimes fighting the Egyptian Army as well, or at least doing something that could be mistaken for that. Meanwhile, the revolutionaries now no longer trust the army, as they did when it seemed to be passively enabling their protests over the weekend and yesterday. Thank God we didn't do anything rash and picked the stable option. Meanwhile, people who really are organised - like the spooks - are attacking the people he wants to give more time to get organised, before they can get organised.

And of course, people do get organised. There's a new trade union movement. Tahrir Square has grown a press bureau, a documentation team recording details of Central Security's crimes, support networks of all kinds. The police withdrawal on Friday may have been an enormous blunder precisely because it shifted the revolution from just mass demonstrations to block-level organising. If people survive tonight, I wouldn't bet against a major political organisation (call it the Civic Forum) emerging from the local committees. Look out for this this bloke.

Actually, it's possible that today's news explains the military's anomalous position over the last few days - it may be that they feared that fighting for the government, against the people, would simply destroy the social contract and bring about something indistinguishable from civil war. In the light of their special political role since the Free Officers' Movement. As Fake Hosni Mubarak says:

Whoever said "A captain must go down with his ship" is wrong. The ship must go down with its captain

The genuinely depressing thing about Blair's remarks is the degree to which he's internalised the regime's public arguments, and the degree to which he may still have real influence.

First, the real influence. It seems certain that the Americans only see this whole issue as part of that horrible grab-bag of cynicism known as the Middle East. Blair's role as envoy means he's still plugged into this. He has certainly had extensive contact with Suleiman and friends. Given the importance of all this, he can probably contact the State Department as easily as David Cameron can.

Moving beyond him, Mubarak has traditionally defended his role by claiming that he is a defensive bulwark against extremist Islam, incarnated for these purposes by the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been in his interests to talk up both this movement's popularity and its extremism, and also to talk down the role of all his other enemies. The Brothers and the state have what could be called a special relationship - the Brothers guarantee the special, pseudo-cold war status of the regime, and the regime guarantees their role as a monopoly of opposition. Being the one true opposition has obvious attractions to their leaders; it's also necessary that they be portrayed as extreme enough to warrant the deliveries of M1A1 tanks and prisoners in unmarked business jets. The Guardian's Jack Shenker, who has been doing a heroic job reporting the revolution, has an excellent article on this issue here. You would think that if they could shut down one opposition, they could also shut down one they supposedly consider much more of a threat...

Blair, of course, pretends to be utterly unaware of the clammy snog between the regime and its opposition franchise. But he can't be blamed for not realising that, if anyone's going to bring religious or anti-semitic violence to the streets, it might be the other side. After all, when he spoke, he probably didn't know that Mubarak's goon squad are in the habit of screaming "Jews!" as they assault journalists.

This does, by the way, make you - or me, at least - wonder exactly which organisation was able to put a significant mob on the streets at the drop of a hat, when the NDP had spectacularly failed to mobilise any sign of mass support for days on end. Military dictatorships with religious stylings are far from unknown - that was, after all, the fix Jaruzelski tried to impose on Poland after 1981, mixing more Catholicism and nationalism in with his communism but keeping the security state more in place than ever. And I can well imagine someone - someone, quintessentially, like Tony Blair - hailing cooperation between an Islamist movement and Central Security as being just the kind of faith-based initiative that contributes, helpfully, to shared norms for the new reality. As usual with Blair, it's the secular left that is his real enemy.

someone has to stay in control

Something else.

Around the table sat his son James– the head of News Corp's European and Asian operations – Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of its British newspaper division News International, plus the editors of the Sun and the Times, Dominic Mohan and James Harding respectively. Meatballs were on the menu, although staff preferred not to get too close to see what the boss actually ate.

I'm not sure whether I hate the psuedo-celebrity reporting style (who cares about the damn meatballs?) enough not to enjoy either the portrayal of News International as a workplace so nightmarish that people are too frightened to see whether the boss had the meatballs or not, or the subtextual suggestion that Murdoch eats something...different. Lovecraft vs. Royston Vasey.

Also, my permanent search request on data.gov.uk for more meetings releases keeps appearing to be updated, but as far as I can tell they haven't released more meetings. However, the scraper should get them all.

the tapes

So what about that Murdoch? Gordon Brown is suing, and the government has been claiming that meetings between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks were covered by MP-constituent privilege; Tessa Jowell (for it is she!) alleges that the monitoring was going on as recently as last week. The police investigation is back on with a new chief. Lord (Norman) Fowler, of all people, accused the News of the Screws of being a conspiracy against the public interest. At the same time, Jeremy Hunt gives himself an out, Murdoch turns up in person. There's the whole comic relief with ex-footballers, and the US division falls out with 400 rabbis.

There's a genuinely weird feeling to this. Obviously there's some sort of political re-alignment going on, but it's impossible to say what it is or how far it will go. It all seems to be dependent on things like the story about the journalist who started taping all his phone calls because his drinking problem meant he couldn't remember what they told him and he feared they would use this to exploit him. Charming people. Someone apparently has copies. But who?

The Grauniad, of course, is congratulating itself on the Nick Davies investigation. However, their leader yesterday pissed me off - they referred, for the first time since the story re-erupted, to the fact that Andy Coulson was condemned by an employment tribunal as being a bully in a case in which the paper had to pay out £800,000 in compensation. And they claimed that only three newspapers covered this story - themselves, the Independent on Sunday, and the Huddersfield Daily Examiner. This is a good point, but a better one for the Huddersfield Daily Examiner than for the Guardian - this blog post refers. Although the Guardian did run the story, they ran a full version on the Media Guardian Web site and cut the story down to a one-paragraph NIB deep inside the paper. They could do with being less self-congratulatory about this.

Coulson and his managers' behaviour in the case is telling - they tried to force one of their employees to see a tame doctor in order to get rid of him - and it is probably no surprise that according to the very limited list of the hacked that is available, both Coulson and Rebekah Brooks were themselves being spied on by their own side.

Out of the whole sordid story, the thing about Brooks/Wade having meetings with the prime minister as a constituent sticks out. Some people marry for money, others for title, but doing so to become the PM's constituent is genuinely cheeky.

surveillance

The Viktorfeed shows an Eastern Skyjets (icao ESJ) flight from Cairo into Dubai. Flight number ESJ020, arrived 2300Z, very likely one of their two executive-config DC-9s.

Dumb Blond

The Philip Blond test: if you have a new policy idea, ask if Philip Blond would support it, and if so, bin it.

interesting project

This looks interesting. The low-cost base station element is already increasingly well served commercially, and also by the OpenBTS team. But I'd be really fascinated to learn more about the mesh-WLAN side, and I rather think they ought to concentrate on one or the other.

in the future, trolls will be a natural resource like oil

Looking back at Tunisia, and forward at Egypt, I think there's an important point that this post almost hits but not quite.

Specifically, I'm fairly sceptical about "Twitter Revolutions" and such - if your revolution has someone else's brand name on it, how revolutionary is it? - but I don't think it's irrelevant.

I'm feeling a little sorry for Evgeny Morozov at the moment. He'd just hacked out a niche as Mr. Grumpy by royal appointment to the blogosphere, when first Wikileaks and then Tunisia and Egypt came sweeping through, and the Tunisian secret police hacked all the Facebook pages in the country, and the Egyptians turned off the Internet, just pulled all the BGP announcements... Sometimes it's not your day.

I do think, though, that there is an important way in which a whole lot of Internet tools contributed to the revolutions. I recently posted on the way in which people can at least for a while function as if they were part of an organisation just because they shared certain assumptions. It's the idea of the imagined community, which can be defined as a group of people who are behaving as if their weak social ties were strong ones. If you want a mental model of this, the revolution happens when enough people change state and start doing this, and it stops again when they revert to pursuing their interests in the normal way. Of course, what happens in between may have changed what those are and how they do it. From a different direction, look at Chris Dillow's post here - it's theoretically irrational to take part in politics, until it's not. The point when it stops being irrational, though, is the point when people stop thinking it's irrational.

In that sense, a lot of the work of starting a revolution is starting a myth. An ironic salute to this was the Egyptian government's decision to turn off the Internet, and later the GSM networks as well. If the value of the Internet really had been as a way to pass on the time and place to assemble, this would have been a serious blow to the movement. But once you're a really angry Egyptian, where else would you protest but Tahrir Square? It wasn't that they needed it for tactical communication, but rather for strategic propaganda. Also, once they took this step, they had also inadvertently demonstrated to the other world media that This Was It. The mainstream media remains very good at bringing its own connectivity, and the main barrier to them covering the news is usually that they don't think something is news. Giving Al-Jazeera and friends - who had been heavily criticised on the Web for being soft on the Egyptian government - a monopoly may have been a really bad idea as it forced them to cover the news or look indistinguishable from Nile TV.

I suspect that a lesson here is that the last thing authoritarian governments will do in future is turn the Internet off. For a start, they will increasingly need to keep it up for economic reasons - the ISP that serves the Egyptian stock exchange and central bank was left alone, and with time I would bet that it would become increasingly porous to information. But much more importantly, this is not a policy that has a great track record. Burma managed it, but started with advantages (not many users, only one network, and a strong position to start with). Iran did far better with its throttle-down-and-spy plan. Even though the Tunisians funnelled all the Facebook accounts in the country into one, controlled by the secret police, it didn't seem to help.

Jamais Casco (via here) asked if you could start a genocide on Twitter - a sensible point, as we know you can do so with the radio, the cinema, television, the newspapers, and (thanks to Serbian turbo-folk) rock'n'roll*. Terrorists tried to start a nuclear war with a spoofed caller-ID. Whether or not you could do that, you can certainly start a mob of quasi-fascist loyalist paramilitaries on QQ. Out of all authoritarian governments, China does best, with strategic trolling and semi-official moderators, which may be more important than direct censorship. Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics makes the interesting point that Russia in the early Putin years didn't so much censor the Internet, as distribute government talking-points and favours to carefully selected bastards.

Then again, was the greatest success of the wumaodang model the 2004 US presidential election? The best way to fight one myth is perhaps with another. And the best ones are distinguished by the fact they are sometimes called principles. The really depressing consequence of this is that Paul Staines probably has a job for life, although the less depressing corollary is that he gets to herd several hundred idiots yelling about ZaNuLiebour for the term of his natural.


A couple of other interesting links: Charles Bwele makes the point that in much of the world, the so-called new media are more like the first ones. Did you know about the Grozny riots of 1958?

*The world's first genocidal remix is yet to come, but I wouldn't rule it out by any means. All art aspires to the status of music, and just look what people get up to with books.

fan service

I wonder who is heading on a steady course of 280 degrees True along the Mediterranean in their Boeing Business Jet from the Texan/Saudi operator MidEast Jet. If they started from Egypt, given the time they came into range and their air speed, that would fit with the BBC reporting that prominent persons had left the country at 2117 GMT, quoting Al-Jazeera (although I was watching it and I didn't see this).

Whoever they are, they're about 15 minutes from Tunisia.

fremdscham

Faintly disgusting at the Register.

"The corporation vowed to increase the spending on "devolved nations" - which is Beeb-speak not for Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea, you may be surprised to learn, but Wales and Scotland. This will increase from 12 per cent to 17 per cent."

Because people who aren't as pale as Andrew Orlowski have "devolved", perhaps to the point where they haven't even noticed the benefits of shutting off comments on all their articles.

migration: lazyweb

Does anyone know if I can trust this stack exchange answer (referring to wordpress bug 14818) that wordpress won't mangle all the Google Maps, video, ManyEyes visualisations and the like from the old site during a programmatic import? I'm now down to two blockers before moving TYR Classic.

I thought I was following you...

For George Osborne read Bernie Madoff: he’ll take your money and take your job, but don’t worry – if you wait long enough, he promises you’ll get it all back from someone else.

(Ed Balls, here.)

Note he didn't say "Of course, we accept the necessity of cuts, but George Osborne is really like Bernie Madoff". This was rather the point of this post. In the end, the people who thought themselves masters of rhetoric, campaigning, and media management were stuck with a hopelessly confused message that they would have rightly mocked had it come from anyone else. On the other hand, funny old Gordon (is he going mad?) had a clear and immediately comprehensible message.

Of course, neither I, Ed Balls, or probably anyone else in Britain actually thinks we'll never need to do anything about the budget deficit. The question is what, how much, from whom, and when. The official answer from Labour on the campaign trail and since was "about half as much, or as much over twice as long".

Even keeping the plan target from the Pre-Budget report, to reduce the deficit by half over the next parliament, there's still significant room to do a better job. You could look at the distributional impact and call attention to the fact that poor families with children lose out the most. You could look at the breakdown between growth, inflation, taxation, and cuts, and perhaps dust off the file from the late 90s. During the 90s fiscal stabilisation, Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown pursued a policy of splitting the adjustment burden equally between spending restraint and higher taxes. You could even use "the Clarke-Brown plan" as a talking point, seeing as Ken Clarke is back in the government. Beyond that, we could look at aiming for stabilisation first, and reduction only once the risk of a second recession is past.

But none of this is likely to help if it comes with an initial disclaimer that it should not be believed too hard. Rhetorical commitments are not much, as Nick Clegg would point out, but they do have more self-binding power than saying nothing. If you preface everything with a statement that you don't really believe it very hard, you risk convincing everyone that the other half of the statement is the bit they shouldn't take seriously.

How did we get here? I think it's worth looking at the idea of "the centre" carefully. In my opinion, the idea that the centre ground plays a special role in politics is a sort of wrapper round a package of interesting assumptions. One of these is something like the median voter theorem - the idea that if voter preferences are roughly normally distributed along a scale between two camps, then the preferences of the voter halfway along the scale determine the outcome. Another is related, but different - that the political scale translates into practical priorities for government. Even if the spectrum is primarily made up of statements about identity, ethics, and emotion, it can be transcribed perfectly from political DNA into practical proteins. (Perhaps institutions are the RNA in this metaphor.)

This set-up is quite robust. There's the classic version of centre ground politics, where preferences along the classic left-right scale are normally distributed and therefore most people are somewhere in the centre. As a result, democracy equals moderation, and campaigning is basically all about assembling a policy package that pushes the party line over the median. There are a couple of others. One is a version in which preferences have a binomial distribution, one peak for Labour, one for Tories, and there are a few swing voters in the middle. As the two peaks are roughly equal in size, though, this doesn't change much - the decisive factor is still which way the centre goes. This is probably closer to the standard operating procedures of big political parties, although the theoretical legitimacy still comes from the first, moderate majority model. This still works in a world like 1970s Germany, where the swing voters are represented by a third party, and the primary form of political competition is trying to be the bigger of the two big parties and therefore the swing party's preferred coalition partner. Here's a fine example of living in either world, as is this.

Another one is a pathological variant - the 51% model beloved of Karl Rove. This accepts the two camps, but denies that there is a significant zone of potential agreement in the middle. Instead, it argues, the biggest source of potential voters for either side is the reserve army of the nonvoters; in a low-turnout polity, on the assumption that nonvoters break the same way as the general population, there are so many nonvoters with some prior party affiliation that they outweigh the swingers. The policy recommendation from this is that a party must do all it can to achieve asymmetric mobilisation, to rile up its own base while trying to damp down the others. Rather than trying to adapt to whatever the real preferences of the people are, as in the first model, or micro-targeting the relatively small group of swing voters, as in the second, the point is to wind up a bigger gang for whatever makes up a minimal consensus in your party.

Interestingly, this should have as a consequence the incremental radicalisation of the party that starts it. As anyone who wanted higher wages would be replaced by a member of the original reserve army of the unemployed, so anyone who deserts i is likely to be replaced by someone more extreme.

There's a limiting case for this. If the political rhetoric that marks the scale is really meant to be transcribed into action, at some point the initiating party will get so extreme that its position is intolerable to a large majority of the public. But here's a serious problem. In the well-behaved, school politics lesson world of scenario one, politicians are thought to set their positions on the political scale by reference to the practical policies they will command. They are flying by reference to the horizon, or at least to the artificial horizon of the polls. But I think it's fair to say, at least going by the fact that they frequently say this is precisely what they're doing, that politicians also set their positions by reference to other politicians. Rather than watching the horizon, they are watching the other guy's wingtip and flying in formation.

Now in some cases this might actually work. If they are all working from a common view of reality, it's entirely valid to reckon that the central axis of the Labour Party is however many degrees to the left of the leftmost Tory. There will be drift over time, but nothing too drastic. They can adjust their relative positions without colliding. What matters is that the constraints in their calculations are mutually consistent. They are linked because they have the same republic in their heads. This is, I think, what underlies the whole concept. It assumes a common public sphere and no bad behaviour. This is why operationalising postmodernism was important.

Of course, basic cognitive biases suggest that people who work together and share an institutional culture will think this even if they are competitors in practice.

The problem here is that the whole thing relies for stability on nobody adopting the counter-game strategy and either trying to change the rules, or just to drag the opposition so far off their home ground that they lose all credibility and fail first. I'm pretty confident that, to borrow a phrase from Nick Clegg, 1931 plus a pound does not equal "progressive", and neither does it equal a winning strategy for the opposition. I'm much less confident that there is any way to correct the course except for adopting the 51% strategy or something very like it and trying to drag the lot bodily leftwards. I don't particularly like the look of 102% World (two hypermobilised and completely mutually intolerable camps) either, but there you go.

Update: I have just read this post of Steve Randy Waldman's which is more than relevant.

opaque

Any idea as to where the Department of Health's meetings data is? There's a PDF here but nothing else.

links

It strikes me that much of today's blog could be summarised as "gut truth, simple message, shout, get cracking".

Anyway, I found this ironic:

Our financial markets have become a largely automated adaptive dynamical system, with feedback. Furthermore, a dynamical adaptive system with feedback is challenging ordinarily, but this one is also strategic. A flight controller is dynamical, but not strategic. Add an adversarial environment, and there’s no science I’m aware of that’s up to the task of understanding the potential implications of that system.

Hmm, someone could do with a copy of Red Plenty?

Also, this.

“Far more people are investigated, examined and spoken with than actually end up being hospitalized,” says Robert T.M. Phillips, a Maryland-based forensic psychiatrist who worked with the Secret Service for 15 years to assess people who threatened the president.

Sometimes the Person of Concern is referred for mental health services. Other times the Secret Service agents themselves continue to engage the person with frequent visits and calls.

Fein tells of one letter he read, written by a Person of Concern to the Secret Service agent charged with preventing him from harming a government figure. The letter was addressed: “To Agent Smith, my only friend in the whole world.”

Nice caveats, shame about the point

My only complaint about this post from Duncan Weldon is that his caveats are better than the ostensible point. The problem with arguments about the budget is that a very large chunk of the spending side is either made up of long-term capital projects, or worse, PFI-ised capital projects, which often can't and arguably shouldn't be used as in-year balancing items, commitments like NHS spending and pensions that are driven by demographic factors, or else automatic stabilisers like Job Seekers' Allowance that are directly linked to the economic cycle with a minimal lag time.

On the other hand, it's hard to think of a tax that isn't dependent on the level of economic activity. VAT? Corporation tax? Stamp duty? Income tax? Fuel duty? They're all more or less cycle-following. That the government budget is heavily influenced by the macro-economic situation is trivially true, and is determined by the structure of the tax and public sector financial management system. This doesn't change with your views on economic theory - perhaps another case for the idea that one of the groups who got the crisis right were those who saw it in terms of accounting.

I'd also add that worrying about Tory talking points like "deficit deniers" is the counsel of despair. If you're worrying about the other side's nonsense, they've got you where they want you. You need to hang something round the other guys' necks. All this accepted, and I do like Duncan's point that it was indeed the lack of an effective critique of capitalism that led the Blair government to miss the bubble, following this advice would still put Labour in the position of arguing that they would make "nice cuts not nasty cuts".

Which doesn't make any sense at all. I suspect the dividing line between the Continuity Blairites and everyone else on this is as follows: Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Ed Balls actually realised how awful the Tories would be and that there was a real risk of a double dip recession, and that therefore it was necessary to fight the "language of cuts". Balls did get to cut loose on this towards the end of the campaign. I suspect Labour would have done better to define against them on this.

However, conventional wisdom demands that Brown be seen as an egghead with no grasp of campaigning. The media-savvy eye catching initiative peddlers, however, were the ones who ended up campaigning on a line of "cuts! cuts! cuts! but not like those evil Tory cuts!" which wasn't clear or convincing.

recommendation

I am enjoying these people's magazine (although the website leaves something to be desired like a less horrible design), especially as it seems to be based in the pub around the corner from my office. Oddly 90s - people being amused by Japanese TV - but I can put up with that.I am enjoying these people's magazine (although the website leaves something to be desired like a less horrible design), especially as it seems to be based in the pub around the corner from my office. Oddly 90s - people being amused by Japanese TV - but I can put up with that.

tasks

I'm not quite as sceptical as some about this. However, it's not clear to me how this differs from the sort of thing UNOSAT does all the time - here's their analysis of imagery over Abyei, the key border area between North and South Sudan. Actually it looks like the "Enough Project" is going to be using UNOSAT imagery itself, going by UNOSAT's own website.

If you follow the link you'll see that they have more than reasonable capability (50cm resolution) and that they routinely observe the presence of refugees/displaced persons and returnees, construction, and the like. There's obvious relevance to an effort to monitor potential conflict along the border, especially as oil prospecting is an issue. You can't easily hide oil exploration from a satellite that can resolve objects 50cm across.

However, the downside is that the UNOSAT report is comparing images over a two-year period. I would suspect that they will need much more frequent passes to be operationally responsive, which is where the costs get interesting.

Also, I've just been over to the website and it's a bit of an unstructured clickaround. What I've always liked about MySociety sites is that they all have a function - FixMyStreet reports things in your street that need fixing, WDTK issues Freedom of Information Act requests, TWFY looks up information on MPs, TheStraightChoice logged what candidates promised and said about each other during their campaigns. DemocracyClub, for example, worked because as soon as you logged in it gave you something to do and some feedback about doing it, and then it hassled you to do something more. It had structure.

Notoriously, if you don't give volunteers something to do as soon as they show up, they'll wander off. It is nowhere easier to wander off than on the Internet. And so there's a button to twitbookspace it and a donation link. There isn't, however, a to-do list or, say, a list of pairs of images that need comparing.

a lot or a little

A question. So the DfT spent £2.7m developing a games site to promote road safety. How much did the TV ads of the 70s and 80s (which got progressively more high-concept, flashy, and shocking over time) typically cost? I have the impression that TV ad production is a pretty profitable and expensive business, and of course the air time itself doesn't come cheap - they often aired in the middle of prime time ITV series, in the days when literally everybody watched them.

This is a problem with government spending data, by the way; how do you answer "is this a lot or a little?", especially when historical comparisons are involved.

say no to the public data corporation

So what about that Public Data Corporation?

I think it should be opposed with full force. Why? Well, the fact they want to structure it as a "corporation" is suspicious in itself - it's going to be tempting to declare it a trading fund and force it to make profits, even if only in the silly Tory sense of forcing other bits of the government to play at shops and pass bits of their budget to other budgeting entities. This would send us right back to 1996 - no access unless you're rich, thanks. The model here is the Forensic Science Service; this was trading-fundised, so that money from the policing budget was sucked back to the Treasury with every DNA test, and has now been sold to the private sector. (Expect to need a DNA-driven innocence project within years two, I would.)

Further, the point of the exercise isn't defined at all well. Sometimes, you might think this was an opportunity. If something is ill defined, there may be the opportunity to define it. However, it is hardly a controversial statement that the current government has something of a record of introducing ill-defined and poorly thought out wheezes that end up in a horrible mess. It's therefore prudent to assume that this particular wizard wheeze is just as poorly thought out as all the others, and will end up in a horrible mess unless someone intercepts it. Just look at what they've done to some perfectly good projects. Hopefully, that's "intercept" as in the way the air force do it - splash it in the North Sea.

Also, the current position makes sense; data.gov.uk lives in the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office's core responsibilities are for the machinery of government and the Civil Service. Data disclosure and privacy issues are fundamentally administrative. The dossier is where it should be, and conveniently close to seriously influential people. Bumping it to some sort of thingy-wotsname quango based hundreds of miles from Whitehall would be a defeat.

Finally, the best reason to oppose it is that if we spend the next three months refining our response and debating the philosophical nature of privacy, whatever it is they want to do with it, they'll just do it and the damage will be done. If it turns out to be a reasonable idea, it's always possible to welcome it later. But the flip side of "working with" them to improve it is opposition. It's the early no that buys later influence.

Say no to privatisation and the back to '96 agenda. Say no to the Public Data Corporation. And if you're working with government datasets, scrape and stash as much stuff as you can right now.

disgraced presidents piling up?

If the former Tunisian president's plane overflew Malta going north, that doesn't mean he's going to France by any means. North of Malta is...Italy. Surely not...

a dance to the music of confirmation bias

OKTrends has an amusing post, but what I like about it is that it's consilient with the process I defined here. My idea was that songs that were rated 5 might be good, but might also just be violently weird to the reviewer. By the same logic, the same must be true of the 1s. Assuming that my tastes aren't the same as the reviewer, the information in the reviews was whether the music was either mediocre, or potentially interesting. The output is here.

The OKTrends people seem to have rediscovered the idea independently looking at dating profiles - it's better to be ugly to some and beautiful to others than it is to be boringly acceptable to everybody.

not Thursday, so it must be a music link

Also a neat remix here, although my Internet link still tends to jam every time a comment comes up on soundcloud.

Tangentially, I saw a poster for Jon Pleased Wimmin (of all possible DJs) the other day, which made me think "Bloody hell, I thought he was dead? Or at least rendered generally harmless?" So much so that I was about to pass some remark to that effect, when I realised I was enormously tempted to follow up with "I know he's dead...because I killed him." Also, I didn't ask someone if the haddock, as a blackboard appeared to say, really was "21 days aged". This sort of thing is funny, and then it gets less funny. It rather worries me that it wasn't so long ago I'd have been unable not to say it. I mean, I told a cold-caller who asked if I was the homeowner that I was a burglar, and another that I was monitoring the line for MI5 in the interests of national security.

Progressively realising that "brilliantly funny" is quite often "fucking tiresome". It took a while. Fortunately there's you, reader, to take it out on.

Brits In Spaaace! Brown Era Edition

Did you know the UK briefly had an independent imagery satellite between 2005-2009? You do now, and so do I thanks to Think Defence. Sample pix are here.

The satellite was designed to return its data directly to a mobile ground station immediately after collecting an image, allowing far more timely delivery of the information which it collects than standard satellites. The system was specifically designed to meet operational timescales, whether for disaster relief, news-gathering, or other applications where speed of response is vital....TopSat weighs just 120 kg, but carries an optical camera capable of delivering panchromatic images with a spatial resolution at nadir of 2.8 metres covering a 17x17 km area, and simultaneous three-band multi-spectral images, (red, green, blue), with a resolution of 5.6 metres. This is thought to represent the best resolution per mass of any satellite launched to date. This camera is integrated with an agile micro-satellite platform to permit pitch compensation manoeuvres, allowing imaging of low illumination scenes.

It would fit on one of these among other things.

I want nothing to do with your company ever again

Things to do this week: withdraw all my savings from ING Direct and take them elsewhere. Seriously, read the whole thing.

operationalising postmodernism

Now here's a worthwhile Canadian initiative for you, from here. And he names the guilty men.

a quick HOWTO

Because someone wanted this: a list of aircraft investigation resources.

First thing: you always need to be able to map registrations to aircraft serial numbers (MSNs) and vice versa, as well as linking registrations to operators and vice versa. So you need to subscribe to one of several commercial databases that provide this information. Otherwise you'd have to follow up each registration individually with the state of registry, which isn't so bad if it's the US (you can query the registry at faa.gov) or the UK CAA's G-INFO. If it's Equatorial Guinea or Kyrgyzstan, though, it won't be available online or really at all, and that's just how the registrants want it.

I use ATDB, but there are others - the biggest one is Airclaims, which is marketed at insurers and debt chasers, but it's seriously pricey.

You'll also often want to find out where an aircraft was at a particular date, and if the registration and operator on file matched with the reality. Fortunately the world is full of volunteer spies, plane spotters, who take enormous numbers of photos of anything that might fly and post them on web sites. This is how German Amnesty managed to characterise the CIA rendition planes. Airliners.net is the biggest and has a full-featured search engine, but JetPhotos and a few others are worth trying if you turn up a blank. ATDB will try to pull photos from various servers matching your current query. Try querying by registration as well as MSN, and note that if you know the exact type (all six digits of a Boeing designation rather than just 737) you can often do a type-at-location search.

A lot of airports publish their movements on the web - this is why I did the Viktorfeed, to automate watching Dubai and Sharjah airports. This is useful if you want to know who is going where, or who's recently been where, and you may be able to find out more by cross-referencing. For example, if Airline X's flight from Dubai to Baghdad is listed as a passenger flight with a 727 and they only have one 727 with a pax, combi, or quick change configuration, you've got the registration and possibly the MSN.

Also, for some parts of the world, you can monitor Air Traffic Control data through sites like FlightTracker or FlightAware and LiveATC. A lot of these are aggregators for people who operate "virtual radar" devices, which receive the SSR transponder data practically all aircraft squawk when they hear a surveillance radar. Here's an example. The problem is, of course, this depends on owning fancy radio equipment being tolerated in the places you're interested in. If your BlackBerry is considered subversive, or there's just no electricity, you're unlikely to find a virtual radar server - and they won't work if there's no radar coverage. (However, if your staff go somewhere weird, why not...)

The Aviation Safety Network website provides a database of accident reports, which can be useful. AirNav has a huge database of airports, although most of them are on Wikipedia. There's a lookup site for ICAO and IATA codes here. The Great Circle Mapper is a useful calculator for ranges and routes and makes pretty maps. Obviously Google Maps and Earth are useful if you're planning more complex visualisation.


Things to look out for: networks of companies that repeatedly trade the same aircraft, especially if they're based in the same location and their corporate registration is somewhere else and bizarre. Inconsistency. Unlikely details (the office that is in Kiev and is a cinema, the manager who is a Soviet ice hockey player and is dead). Things you can't easily find: details of the cargo or whoever eventually controls the company.


Also, do be sceptical and don't turn yourself into Evan Kohlmann (via Patrick Lang - check out Adam Silverman's thoughts in the comments).

I can remember when the Emerson & Kohlmann show sounded fresh and new in late 2001. I can also remember when the Counterterrorism Blog launched and turned out to be really just a lot of drum-banging rightwing propaganda and some really quite horrible guilt-by-association games. Worry about the false positives.

earth-shattering kaboom

Really excellent piece on the Al-Qa'Qaa munitions complex, its looting during the US invasion of Iraq, and the role of the estimated 40,000 tonnes of assorted explosives that went missing in the Iraqi insurgency and the civil war. Also, strategic geography - that area was on the demographic frontier between Sunni and Shia, on the suburban fringe of Baghdad, and near the end of the road from the western borders. Combine that with the explosives, and you can see why it was the crucible of the war and also part of the reason why things quietened down so quickly after mid-2007 - get a grip there and the Americans and the Iraqi government had gone quite a long way already.

Also, October, 2004:

Sanger, still waiting for the editors of the Times to publish his exclusive, discovered that the story was leaking on Sunday. The article went out the next morning: "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished from Site in Iraq." Shortly after the newspaper hit the streets, Bush's chief political strategist Karl Rove swept into the media area of Air Force One and started shouting at Sanger. "Rove came and screamed at me in front of all the other reporters," he says. "Declared that this had been invented by the Kerry campaign." Apparently, the report had hit a nerve.

Ah.

big war postponed, small war still on the menu

So what about those North Koreans? As the SWJ put it, a small war in Korea was postponed. I'd query "small", especially in the special sense they use it - it wouldn't have been particularly small and it would have been defined by high-intensity battle - but perhaps they are really thinking of whatever would happen after North Korea, as in David Maxwell's paper I linked to. (Maxwell turns up in the comments thread.) The postwar is reasonably certain to show up; the big question is whether Korea has to go through the big war to get there.

It's worth noting that the North Koreans took care to be seen to be alert and causing trouble during the exercises off Yeonpyeong, but without doing anything that would be unambiguously hostile. It's also interesting that they seem to have used electronic warfare as a way of signalling their continued determination to fight in a field that wasn't a direct challenge to the South Koreans and their allies.

Actually, all parties to the conflict attempted to find alternative forms of confrontation in order to exert power while trying to keep control of the escalation dynamic. I recently saw somewhere on the Web a reference to the idea that having multiple independent forms of power or status was an egalitarian force in society as they could balance each other. It's certainly an important concept in international politics. North Korea's original bombardment of Yeonpyeong was a direct and physical, kinetic, attack on the disputed border - at one level, they hoped that if there was no response from the South, they would have set a precedent that South Korea could not treat the island and part of the surrounding sea as entirely its own territory. More strategically, it was a demonstration that they were willing to cause trouble in order to extract concessions, and that they were willing to escalate significantly.

From the Southern side, there were serious restrictions to the possible response. Anything they could do in the same context would either have involved risking bringing about the big war, or else risking a disastrous fiasco - a major raid over the border would have been too much, a commando operation to destroy the guns facing Yeonpyeong would have risked ending up with prisoners in North Korea. There is not much at the moment they could do to put pressure on North Korea economically, and the North Koreans often respond to economic problems by provocations designed to get economic concessions. The North Koreans held escalation dominance - they could choose whether to go further, without necessarily having to go for the ultimate deterrent.

This is why the navies were so important. Although they were constrained in what they could do in one context, the Peninsula, the US Navy and its allies were not so constrained in bringing ships into international waters in the area. The response was to move the focus of the conflict into a different context. Also, cooperating at sea allowed Japan and South Korea to demonstrate alliance unity in a way that they could not otherwise - nobody would bring Japanese troops to Korea, for example, but there is no such objection to Japanese, US, and South Korean ships (or aircraft) cooperating. This is still true even though the US-made or US-inspired equipment aboard those ships permits them to cooperate very closely indeed, with radars aboard one ship, aircraft from another, a command centre in yet another, and missiles aboard a fourth being internetworked.

Also, there was very little the North Koreans could do about it without taking unacceptable risks (even for them). The biggest concern for the allied ships was that the North might lay mines in the narrow seas west of Korea. Paradoxically, the North Koreans were probably self-deterred from doing this - had they got lucky and sunk the Jimmy Carter while she was spying around Yeonpyeong, the consequences would probably not have been ideal from their point of view.

Another parallel form of conflict was the nuclear issue. North Korea had just revealed its new uranium enrichment cascade when it started shelling Yeonpyeong, after all. Bill Richardson's officially-unofficial mission to North Korea brought back the offer to sell North Korea's stock of plutonium to the South. This sounds better than it is, precisely because they now have the capability to use uranium rather than plutonium. On the other hand, accepting it is sensible - it's a matching concession to de-escalate the situation, less plutonium in North Korea is probably desirable, and it moves the nuclear debate onto the slower "enrichment track".

The nuclear debate also provided an opportunity for the Chinese government to play the role of turning up late but bringing a solution. If the 12,000 rods do leave North Korea, a big question is where they would go. The Chinese might buy them and might even offer fuel of some description in return, a replay of the 1994 framework agreement.

a Christmas gift for you: UK Wired edition

I think I'm going to cut the UK Wired out of my diet. They recently got an award, and the mag is usually a handsome book, but it's not good enough. Typically there's a bit less than one genuinely interesting piece per issue, which is nowhere near enough to make the cover price worthwhile. The best stuff is reserved for the US edition - you know the names. And there's far too much filler. A big part of the mag trade is making the inevitable filler part of the whole aesthetic; the best magazines are always good at this. The Face's nibs and odds-and-sods were almost a decent fanzine in themselves, as well as providing spacers between the real stuff and a support-scaffold for the ads. But UK Wired is riddled with advertorial - constant gadget porn, but nothing you could call a product review.

There's a strong argument that there are plenty of publications that do gadget reviews. We used to say on MCI that "we are not a gadget mag". Indeed. So chop it out, unless it really is advertorial rather than editorial that happens to be shit. And if it's paid for, it's polite to say so. Also, given the bulk and kind of ads they carry, they really have no right to be playing daft games with filler. In the latest issue, there are a total of two ads for anything I expect ever to be able to afford and both of them are for web hosting services.

It's a pity, though, that having used one of those advertisers' e-mail hosting and picked endless spam out of Fistful from the other's compromised hosts, I wouldn't use either of them in a fit. This is the tone of the whole thing - the design is fancy, but it's not structural. It's there to look at, not through, or better, with. The writing tends to be tech-y, not techy. The piece on synthetic biology in this month's paper, for example, could have got into a national newspaper, it's that lightweight. (On the other hand, the piece on re-designing Mecca's infrastructure to keep pilgrims from getting killed was genuinely interesting, but crammed into a corner.) The photography is good, and the production is luscious, but here's the problem: high gloss is ads, not content. The columnists are reliably disappointing: Warren Ellis doesn't say anything you couldn't get from his blog, and anyway, if you're going to hire him, why not hire him to do what he does for real? Some people would buy it for Ellis cartoons alone. And there's the guy whose career is based on having marketed MS Internet Explorer, a product you get forced on you when you buy a new PC, and that you have to get rid of by surgery before it explodes messily. That's like marketing the appendix.

But it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for David Rowan's risible leader column. This month, he decided to cover, or at least mention, Dave from PR's trip to Shoreditch to say how great Internet start-ups were. Unfortunately, all he could find to say was that the industry needed:

"tax incentives, networking events, and an ability to hire and fire more easily to attract people like Le Meur back".

Well, the first adds up to "gimme subsidy", the second is vacuous (and self-interested), and the third is pernicious. Most new businesses die within three years of launch and their employees go down with the ship, so by definition this can't be all that important. But if you work for the contract cleaners, I suspect this is significantly more important to you. There's another hiring constraint, though, that really is relevant here: immigration restrictions. We know much bigger companies have been complaining through the CBI about the new numerical cap on immigration. Strange, no mention of that, especially as it's the current government's own, direct, and specific fault. (And we could also be snarky about the fact Loic Le Meur's business puts on a conference every year in Paris, that well-known paradise of hardcore libertarianism.)

If Rowan had wanted to cover the Cameron trip, though, there was a good story in there for a real journalist. Rumours included that staffers from No.10 had called up BT and suggested that they might want to put in free WLAN "from Old Street to the Olympic Park", with no suggestion that there would be any funding for this. Another suggests that they asked if BT would consider moving their enormous R&D centre from Martlesham Heath to the East End, a hilariously enormous project and one that takes no account of the major operational infrastructure BT has at MHRC.

Less sarcastically, if you're a community broadband project, you're not allowed to offer service to any kind of business if you're using BT passive infrastructure. And you've got to pay business rates on your network as soon as it's built, while the incumbents can wait until it's in service and earning money. There's an OFCOM consultation on the small business telecoms market that's been hanging fire for ages. Journalism!

a Christmas gift for you

I approve of this message. What was the BBC development hierarchy thinking? As Vowl says, it wasn't even so much the content, awful though it was, but the quality.

I approve of this message. What was the BBC development hierarchy thinking? As Vowl says, it wasn't even so much the content, awful though it was, but the quality. Airport documentaries: might have been funny, in 1998. Stelios hasn't actually been in charge of EasyJet in years, and IIRC he doesn't own it any more either. An Asian character who's obsessed with hip-hop and constantly talks about "bitches": well, Ali G was funny, in 1996, and he's somebody else's material anyway. Sacha Baron Cohen should sue but he probably doesn't want to associate himself with this shite. Stealing jokes is one thing, but stealing ones that will soon be old enough to join the Army is pathetic.

Also, if you're going to poke fun at crappy low-cost airlines' grasping, self-publicising executives, surely Michael O'Leary's endless grandstanding and bullshitting must be a seam of comedy gold...unless you're Matt Lucas and David Williams, in which case you're clearly too scared he might sue, so the other bucket shop is still Irish but has to look like Aer Lingus.

Something else: production values. Obviously something posing as a cheap docusoap has to look cheap, but once you spend a certain amount of effort pretending to be shit, the face grows to fit the mask. I didn't actually see any sets falling over, but perhaps I wasn't paying attention. Perhaps I don't watch enough TV, but was this the worst slab of dreck broadcast in the last 10 years? Further, you, me, and everyone else is going to be rolling out to defend the BBC enough times in the next twelve months that we'll all get even sicker of it than we did during the Hutton inquiry, and this isn't going to help.

an infallible scheme for redesigning Britain

This paper in PLoS One is fascinating (if heavily blogged already). Basically, BT let some researchers from MIT, Cornell, UCL, and their own R&D division have an anonymised slice through their call-detail record (CDR) pile, the database from which phone bills are calculated. The scientists filtered out all the numbers that only made or accepted calls, in order to get rid of the call centres and spammers, and drew the rest as a massive directed multi-graph network. The conclusions are fascinating; in human terms, Wales isn't a meaningful unit, and neither is England. Scotland, however, forms a well defined sub-graph.

Instead, Wales splits into three geographic tiers with very little interconnection. These regions don't respect the border at all - not surprisingly, the northern tier is completely integrated with Liverpool and Manchester and the central tier with the West Midlands. South Wales is clearly identified, with a sharply defined border along the water between it and the West Country. There's also a well-defined western border to Yorkshire, and interestingly also between the West and South Ridings but not between them and the North Riding. Essex is an extension of London, but Kent is distinct. So is Norfolk.

In fact, England isn't really identifiable on the maps: surprisingly, the administrative units that fit best to the BT data are the EU regions much hated by 'kippers. More broadly, if it's got a recognisable accent, it's a recognisable presence on the graph - although the big exception is Yorkshire. There's even a territory for people with no recognisable accent, a sort of motorway crescent to the west of London which is described as a "tech corridor" - in fact, if you were to draw all the Formula One teams' workshops on the map, they would essentially all fall within it, as would Vodafone, O2, Cable & Wireless, and 3UK's headquarters, Aldermaston, Eidos, Surrey Satellite Tech, chunks of BAE and Thales, and Electronic Arts UK, so perhaps they have a point. In the end, though, this potentially interesting zone - Ballardia? - gets lumped in with the Cameroonian central-southwest.

a glimpse of imagery diplomacy

This is one of the most interesting stories in the Wikileaks cable dump. The Saudis use the existence of the French national imagery satellite capability, and David Ignatius's column in the Washington Post, to resist efforts by the Americans to stop them using US arms and satellite data provided for use on Al-Qa'ida for other goals of foreign policy, notably trying to encroach on Yemeni territory. Of course, the UK isn't allowed to do that.

Back to 2006

Bérube sez:

So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine.

Ah..I said back in February 2007:

the modern global Right has operationalised postmodernism as a system of power

The Googles tells me I actually said it as far back as April, 2006 in a thread at Chris Lightfoot's.

Quoted without comment

"Richard sent me photos of his private parts before I'd even met him," says the redhead. "I thought this was very odd for a politician."

dis.gustin.ng

Yahoo! might be going to shut down del.icio.us, the link-sharing and bookmarking website it bought back in 2005 or thereabouts. (They might sell it, too.) This is awful - it's one of the most useful things on the Web and it's a key link in the production chain for everything I've written in the last six years for this blog, Fistful of Euros, Stable & Principled, Telco 2.0, and God knows what else. As well as providing a bookmarks file you can use anywhere, it also provided a huge quick-reference handbook of stuff other people found useful. During 2004, not only did I start using it, but this blog started to provide a list of RSS items from my account and several other blogs in the sidebar.

Yahoo! never did much with del.icio.us - they managed to retire the original domain name and redirect it to delicious.com, just as link-shorteners became fashionable, they made the web site more ugly, and they tried to impose some sort of horrible terms of service amendment by asking users to sign in with Yahoo! user IDs. I had nothing against this, but when I saw the lengthy new ToS document, I didn't bother reading it - it could only be evil, and therefore I refused. Bizarrely, they never even tried putting adverts on the home page, despite being the world leader in display-style Internet advertising, and neither did they ever try to get me or anyone else to subscribe, although they got me and hordes of others to pay for Flickr accounts.

You'll note that this doesn't include any new features or anything interesting at all. Also, they never did anything about spam accounts, so a lot of the social functionality became useless as "links for you" were always spam. However, they couldn't kill a basically useful product. If they sell it, though, it might survive or it might die - look what happened with Technorati.

A common theme about Yahoo! is that although the company drifts strategically, and every now and then gives the Chinese secret police confidential data about dissidents, the engineers are pretty good. True - they released lots of cool and useful stuff. Pipes, YQL, Term Extractor, YUI hackdays. Similarly, the Firefox extension for del.icio.us is very good indeed. It provides a full-text search over your tags, something the web site itself doesn't, and it can provide offline access to your bookmarks if you need that.

So here's a tip. The FF extension lets you work with your bookmarks offline and without signing in - so it must store them on your local machine. In fact, it uses quite a lot of Firefox's bookmarking functionality. And when you sign out, it asks if you want to keep your bookmarks in Firefox. You can add more bookmarks before you sign in again. Therefore, there's a way to slurp your data out of Yahoo! before it all gets deleted. Obviously they'll stop maintaining the plugin at some point. But once your data is stored as browser bookmarks, it can't be too far from being exported to an OPML file, at which point it could be imported anywhere else. Is dis.gustin.ng available?

repetition, repetition, repetition

This would do as a HOWTO start a war.

The document, drawn up by John Williams, press adviser to the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, spells out ways to soften up the media, including "critics like the Guardian". Under the heading Not taking the UN route, Williams wrote: "Our argument should be narrow, and put with vigour – Iraq is uniquely dangerous."

In his memo, he said drafts of the dossier at the time had no "killer fact" which "proves" that "Saddam must be taken on now, or this or that weapon will be used against us." When Blair was launching the dossier three weeks later, he told parliament that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMDs.

Williams wrote: "Our target is not the argumentative interviewer or opinionated columnist, but the kind of people to whom ministerial interviews are a background hum on the car or kitchen radio. We must think Radio 5. Although the big Radio 4 programmes have to be done, we must not let them set themselves up as judge and jury."

Repeat, repeat, repeat. Here's Grant Shapps applying the same technique:

"We are still saying someone could have rent of £21,000-a-year paid by the taxpayer. How many could afford to pay that?"

Give him some credit - he even let on what he was doing.

psa

Anyone going?

lobby

Oh yes, so the IBM ManyEyes people fixed their computer.



I've got much more data now - I still need to do the four (key) departments that release in PDF format, and flush the existing stuff to replace the records with ones with standardised dates, but that should give you an idea. Hit the button in the visualisation with a network on it to redraw the force-directed graph.

in case of Russian invasion, break glass

Shock! NATO is secretly reviewing its plans to defend the Baltic states and Poland in the event of a war with Russia, a Wikileaked cable reveals. Interestingly enough, the details of this are already public - Gazeta Wyborcza published them on the 5th of November, appropriately enough, detailing that the NATO Response Force would be first in followed by up to 9 divisions from NATO states with the biggest contributions from the US, the UK, and Germany, using Gdynia and Swinoujscie as the main reinforcement ports and, of course, the NATO navies to clear the troops' way across the seas. On the 11th of November (again, pretty damn appropriate) Jean-Dominique Merchet's Secret Défense covered the story at its new home. All the leak really adds is that the planning exercise was in large part motivated by the need to get the new NATO members on side with the "reset" of US-Russia relations.

Korea: logistics, and propaganda

In my continuing fit of doom about Korea, this isn't helping - a US Military Sealift Command reserve freighter full of Maritime Prepositioning System kit is practising offloading it all in a Korean port. Supposedly, when they're finished they'll put it all back aboard and sail away. If you believe that, though...

The MPS is the US military's way of saving time shipping stuff around; they basically keep all the gear for an Army or Marine brigade packed in a ship somewhere strategic. Instant force, just add soldiers, who can come by air. This has a nasty logistics sound to it. Meanwhile, there is a real danger of war, says a Korean strategist from CSIS. Serious politicians are saying things like "reunification is drawing near" and that the Japanese military might be sent to look for people abducted by North Korea. That last one, from the Japanese prime minister, has an even nastier propaganda sound to it.

The Chinese envoy has been to Pyongyang, while the Foreign Ministry has had a pop at the US commander in chief in the Pacific, Admiral Mullen. This could be good news in the sense that Chinese engagement might warn off anyone from doing anything dangerous. The US Deputy Secretary of State is going to Beijing soon with a delegation, followed by Robert Gates next month.

keeping your leaks leaky

Image number four here has a certain additional spice, doesn't it? What a week. As well as WikiLeaks being the website they couldn't hang, 4chan became a geopolitical actor, thus fulfilling my prediction that in the future, trolls would be considered a strategic resource like oil. The BBC interviewed a builder from Leeds thinking he was a Liberal MP, but as it turned out, it didn't matter - the real MP did exactly what the fake one said. And of course there was the case of James Naughtie, demonstrating that the BBC really is the voice of the nation. Speak for England! Prince Charles got a nasty surprise from the students, which startled the mainstream media into actually covering the demonstrators' main grievance for once.

A lot has been written about how Wikileaks is staying online and I don't propose to add to it - this piece on CNET and this one from Renesys should tell you all you need. If you're looking for mirrors the list is currently here and there's a mirror of the mirror list here.

However, there are a couple of good technical points to be made here that I've not seen elsewhere.

First of all, Wikileaks is a website designed to be easily cloned. If you look at it, each page is a self-contained file with a flat URI - there are no signs of a query string, and each cable released has a unique ID within the same directory. This is important because it means that the process of creating a mirror is just to copy all the files into the /public_html/ directory of another web server. On a Unix-like system, it could be a one-liner command (the site doesn't actually let you do this the quickest way) - the utility wget is capable not only of traversing the directory and downloading all files, but also of changing links within them to point to the same filename in the target directory. The -m or --mirror option activates the options -N -r -l inf --no-remove-listing, which will in order ensure you only download material you haven't already loaded, that wget will get everything in the target directory or directories, and that any directory listings will be preserved. -p requires that everything needed to make up a page, such as a photo of Julian Assange, will be retrieved. -k turns on link conversion.

It might be enough to do: wget -N -p -k wikileaks.wherever /home/you/public_html/

So it's easy to create a mirror, and it's trivial to keep it up to date - you could just run your script as a cron job to grab whatever gets released every day. Anyone thinking of a really controversial Internet project should, IMHO, consider design-for-cloning to be a useful pattern. The clone count is now in the thousands.

Second technical point: what a horrible idea Mastercard SecureCode (and its pal Verified by Visa) is. I already hated it before this - it's a password, that should be a strong password because it's financial, but that I don't use that often and therefore can't remember, and it trains you to accept the idea of typing confidential information into a random web site you didn't ask for. Essentially all phishing requires you to type your bank details into something that you didn't ask for. Forcing the public to type their bank details into some random website they didn't ask for is howling insane. Right?

Also, the failure case is horrible - you get to reset the password by disclosing a whole lot of confidential information into the same random website you didn't ask for, so an attacker who managed to inject a frame into the original merchant's website could fake a failed payment and harvest all the information they would need to empty your bank account. And the service support when they imposed it on me was dire, especially as the SecureCode web site went down part way through the process.

But it's worse than that. An important part of the way card payments are accepted on the Web is that, as is also true in shops, you interact with the merchant, whose bank interacts with the wider infrastructure. So you should know who you're dealing with. Further, the bank should at least have some idea who its merchants are - they are customers after all - and restrict access to the system to them. And there's more than one bank that provides merchant service, so there are no single points of failure.

The SecureCode (and its Visa twin) websites, though, are customer-facing, so they have to accept traffic from the whole of the Internet. And all the Mastercard payments from the Web have to go via the SecureCode website. So you have a critical operational function, that is a single point of failure, and that is exposed to every last dog on the Internet. It's only surprising that somebody didn't bring it down earlier, especially when things like Bees with machine guns! are available.

not the Thursday music link

It's not Thursday, so it must be time for a not-Thursday music link. Special "one hand washes the other" edition.

Admin notice: Wikileaks

Need to know how to reach Wikileaks data? All the mirrors, alternative URIs, IP addresses, instructions, etc you could want are here. You might want to grab a local copy of the page itself, from this URI.

not about the Americans

The key fact to remember about the Wikileaks cable dump is this: it's not about the Americans. There's not been much in there that says something huge about US policy, which is why con-wissy types are so happy to deny it any significance. What there has been is something for everybody - a major purpose of diplomacy is to get political information, and leaking a ton of US diplomatic cables provides something for every host country to enjoy.

Here's Italy's delivery, for example. Not that anything about Berlusconi is shocking any more, but it's certainly interesting that he has a very personal special relationship with Russia. That throws an interesting light on the era of the "3Bs", Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi. Modern thinkers all, they also all thought they had special access to Russia.

Here's important confirmation that the Saudis are a major force pushing for military dictatorship in Pakistan, and probably in so far as they support Nawaz Sharif they are only using him as a pretext for military rule. This also tends to confirm that the Saudi influence sphere is a real factor in Afghanistan still.

Here's something for Belgium.

Here's something for us; Mervyn King was a key actor in insisting on cuts and a Con-Dem coalition, and specifically in terrorising Nick Clegg with "it's worse than we thought" stories.

Here's something else for us: there was a major ruck in the intelligence special relationship about the disclosure of imagery gathered by U2s operating from Akrotiri to the Lebanese, Israeli, and Turkish governments. It seems that the Brown government was trying to impose serious conditions on operations from Akrotiri.

Something for the Americans: Robert Gates is a major barrier to starting more wars.

This is interesting, although you've probably already read it.

And of course there's going to be a bank sometime in the near future.

Statistics efforts are coalescing here.

Leave your favourite leak in the comments.

Update: The Grauniad metadata file claims to contain the date, source, tags, and destination of each cable but the destinations are missing.

Moulded from birth. Forged by hatred. Honed in ignorance.

I'm beginning to worry seriously about Korea. There's the wikileaked cable suggesting that Chinese tolerance is running out. There's more recent confirmation. This after the initial non-reaction. Even if Peter Foster is right that the Chinese position hasn't changed that much, it still looks like something has changed in the deterrent balance.

On the other side, Joint STARS has been deployed. You know to start worrying when the ugly grey kit comes out. The US Navy has put 2 carriers and their reinforced task groups off Korea, including a ballistic-missile defence destroyer (USS Paul Hamilton) and four Ticonderoga class cruisers. In all there are something over 900 vertical launch missile tubes on surface ships alone, as well as 70 or so F/A-18s. The Jimmy Carter is in the area, but we don't know which other submarines are, or what percentage of the cruisers' VLS tubes are full of Tomahawks as opposed to SM-3 air defence missiles, Harpoon ship-to-ship missiles, or ASROC antisubmarine ones. And the US Navy has chosen this moment to send 30,000 tonnes of jet fuel to Korea. They do move this stuff around, but it's surely an odd moment to move the jet fuel if you weren't preparing for war. There are also two Marine groups in the area, so chuck in 16 Harriers and a bit shy of a brigade of Marines.

Unlike, say, Iran in 2007, US carrier availability is currently high. They have more ships to send if required.

The South Koreans have been as good as promising to retaliate hugely if there is another attack. They've sacked the defence minister and replaced him with a serving general. People are throwing D'Annunzio-style demonstrations for war. General upcranking is going on. So you can probably see why I'm worried. The whole Japanese navy is at sea, probably in part to get their Aegis missile destroyers deployed on their anti-missile radar picket patrol line early. And there's that unexpected uranium enrichment.

So it's probably high time to worry. Here's more worry: an excellent piece in the Small Wars Journal by US Army Colonel David S. Maxwell, on the problems of either occupying North Korea or just coping with the upshot of a collapse. I hadn't been aware of the degree to which the state ideology is based on the anti-Japanese guerrilla years. In comments, Maxwell says that what worries him more than the prospect of guerrilla war in post-North Korea is a warlord scenario, more Afghanistan than Iraq. Rather, it would be more like the worse-case scenarios for the end of the Soviet Union, given some of the kit that would available.

Maxwell's policy recommendation is to start at once with a propaganda drive to persuade the middle levels of the North Korean state not to go guerrilla and not to sell any highly enriched uranium they may have hanging around, and to come up with a plan for reunification led by Koreans and secured by all-party talks. That's all very sane, but it's not going to be of much help if someone fires artillery into Seoul tomorrow night. So from a British point of view, the best advice I could give would be "get on a plane and go and do an Attlee".

There are also PowerPoint slides to go with that. Hence the title - it could almost be a motto for the blog.

constant levels of outrage

In this thread at Charlie Stross's, it occurred to me that social outrage is a constant, but that its content is infinitely variable. You could almost call it the principle of the conservation of outrage - outrage can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transferred from one object to another. Addiction to drugs or drink has transitioned from being a sin to being a medical condition. Mental illness is doing something similar. Sexuality, for several whole generations, is a ship that has sailed.

But you'd be a fool to imagine that the outrage has gone anywhere. It worries me that, for example, the revival of what Paul Krugman calls New Austerian economics is really explained by the need to be outraged at somebody - the surplus of outrage has been directed at the victims of financial misfortune, who are always in ready supply. Of course, the fact that it went that way is interesting in itself and tells us something about the functions the pool of available outrage performs.

what could possibly go wrong?

So someone's trying to raise $150,000 to buy a satellite from the bankruptcy of TerreStar, in order to "Connect Everyone". I admire the aim, but I'm concerned that this is going to be a round of forgetting that a lot of perfectly good GSM operators are doing just that. Also, I can't find any reference to what they intend to use for the customer-premises equipment except that "we're building an open source low cost modem", which would be better if it came with a link to the source repo, right, or at least some requirements documentation? I'm also a little concerned that the team includes this guy:

Fabian is a NYC based Swiss wanna-be-entrepreneur who spends all his time trying to make meaningful connections between ourselves and business.

(and I chose charitably) but not anyone whose potted bio mentions being an RF engineer.

Actually, I think that it would be more worthwhile to start off with the low-cost open source satellite radio, as this may be the difficult bit and would be highly reuseable in other projects. A lot of Indian or African GSM people would find a cheap satellite radio very useful for their backhaul requirements. Depending on the spec it could be used with things like the amateur radio AMSATs, the transponders on the ISS, and the spare US Navy FLTSATCOMs. USRP is way too expensive at the moment (they cost more than a cheap netbook) so that one's out.

review of a movie that doesn't exist yet

I think most of my readers also read Patrick Lang's blog, but I think this guest post is the best thing yet written on the Taliban/SIS/McChrystal/Petraeus fake sheikh affair. Really, there's a great movie to be made here - the multiplicity of motives, the ironic contrast between the absurd story and the deadly serious interests and emotions that drive it forward, the eternal ambiguity of the relationship between the manipulator and the manipulated.

The ISI comes out of it as being dastardly clever, but in a deeply futile way. They succeed in preventing a dangerous outbreak of peace and sanity, but what have they gained? The wars grind on, the butcher's bill ticks up, the fantasy of a Pakistani empire of trucks and pipes across the Hindu Kush is as far away as ever, the Indians continue with their industrialisation across the other border.

The Americans come out of it as being well-meaning but naive. After all, they only get into this story because they want peace. So does the real Taliban leader. They both share a sort of big, stupid nobility.

The British do almost as badly as the ISI; not only do they end up being the dupes of the piece, they do so without the saving grace of having good intentions. They're as naive as the Americans but more underhanded. SIS gets involved purely as a way of sucking up to the Americans and putting one over its real enemies, GCHQ, Her Majesty's Forces, MI5, and the main-line Foreign Office diplomats. The Government is desperately keen on the project for similarly base reasons - to suck up to the Americans, to grab at an opportunity to solve its problem in Afghanistan, and of course to embarrass the Labour Party. Of course, it would have been a brilliant political fix had it come off - but the master manipulator is not Bismarck but William Hague.

The fake sheikh, meanwhile, is a classic example of the Pinocchio/Hauptmann von Kopenick theme - the puppet of bigger forces who becomes a power in his own right. Without his successful performance, of course, none of the many expectations curling around the tale have a hope of happening. His agency is real, and his character expands to fill the role. The fact that the whole project is an exercise in theatre is interesting in itself - a film within the film. The actors in the film are, of course, puppets of the script and the direction, and it is a work of fiction. The enduring purpose of the theatre and the cinema, however, is that works of fiction have real influence on their audiences. Like the fake sheikh.

After all, the grocer of Quetta (not a bad title) is the only character in the drama who successfully pursues his interests. He gets some interesting time off away from his bazaar stall, and even gets rich. You could play this as the ordinary man who succeeds in making fools of the powerful who insist on involving him in their schemes, or perhaps as a microcosm of all the people who are getting rich off the continued war, Mother Courage rather than Kopenick. Alternatively he could be killed off, casting the whole thing as an utterly bleak tragedy. However, arguably the classic in this vein is The Third Man and that sticks with the tragicomic.

the intersection of Wikileaks and Viktorfeed

If Bout agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department in a plea agreement sparing him life in prison, “we’ll certainly want to know more from him about the circumstances of those Iraq contracts,” said a law-enforcement official with detailed knowledge of the criminal case against Bout. The official was referring to large U.S. military contracts in 2003 and 2004 in which Bout’s cargo companies were used as subcontractors to deliver military supplies to U.S. forces in Iraq. “We’d want to understand if our officials knew exactly who they were dealing with. If U.S. officials knew they were dealing with Bout, that’s uncomfortable news.” Could U.S. officials face prosecution? “The conspiracy laws are broad,” the official said without elaboration.

Well, that would be fun. I'm also interested by the suggestion of a plea bargain. From here. This is something I don't think Irina from RFE/RL quite grasped.

There are some interesting Viktor Bout-related cables in the Wikileaks dump - this one suggests that part of his defence against extradition was to suggest he was in Thailand as part of a "government to government submarine deal". This one details a visit by US diplomats to Ras al-Khaimah airport, where they viewed some rotting Il-76s and made enquiries about what may have been Viktor's maintenance base. This was in any case around about the same time that the UAE gave the Antonov 12 operators the boot.

I'm surprised there aren't more, although there may be more releases yet. The relevant tags would be AE for the UAE and perhaps some others - NEA for the Near East desk is one.

Update: Moar!

False dichotomy watch

We've seen plenty of this sort of stuff before:

These networks such as the UnCut movement or the student movement with outstanding micro-organisations such as the UCL Occupation (which has received over 60,000 hits on its blog in a little under a week) who have so dynamically organised yesterday, today and going forward will inevitably be more flexible and effective than organisations with generic ‘leaderships’ such as major businesses, the police or even the National Union of Students.

Well, if your benchmark of effectiveness is the NUS... Mere snark, though. This particular Internet prairie fire does seem to be spreading nicely and doing more than tweeting. However, whenever someone starts going on like this, I do tend to suspect what they mean is "...more flexible and effective than organisations with people with funny accents who are train drivers an stuff".

I've said before, though, that I suspect that a lot of this network organising is structurally suited to negativity. Look at the 'baggers, for example. The classic examples political science types use, like open-source software projects, tend to be very different to the implementations in politics - rather than trying to recruit masses of people, they're usually driven by a hard core of the obsessed, or of people whose job it is. Order is difficult, mayhem is easy. Specifically, you can contribute significantly to mayhem by putting in an hour here or there.

On the other hand, though, it's not as if we're likely to run out of rage. This is 'bagger lesson one. Negative tactics and the expression of inchoate rage are not without value. Nigel Stanley gets it right - it's a false dichotomy. Getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen, and we'll all get there in the end.

the lack of liberals

So I went to protest the London Lib Dems' conference, held in the late Blairite magnificence of Haverstock School NW3. Arriving punctually, what did I find?



No Liberals. In fact, not only had they vanished from the Haverstock, it turned out they'd given up on the whole idea of having a conference and punted it to February. Now you know why the party's colour is yellow. Not only were they afraid of the general public, but their reputation is now so toxic that nobody wants to give them house room.

Meanwhile, here's a prominent London Lib Dem in action.

"Right at this moment of financial peril to the nation is perhaps not the moment to introduce mandatory pay audits."

Just two years ago, the Liberal Democrat MP backed mandatory measures, saying: "A voluntary audit system for private industry is hardly worth the paper it's printed on. We need to know when the government actually plans to step in if progress isn't made."

The Liberal Democrat manifesto pledged to introduce fair-pay audits for all but the smallest companies.

Today Featherstone said: "It was a different world two years ago – financially and in terms of pressures on business. We are in a completely new landscape now … Much more of partnership working, no longer government dictates, this is absolutely the time to make voluntary pay-reporting work."

Two years ago? Two years ago was December, 2008 - hardly a moment of expansive prosperity. Banks were falling like seagull shit. People were trying to estimate what the absolute minimum level of cash balances was that could prevent the bankruptcy of the entire GM and Ford supply chains. Flocks of great empty ships were gathering in Falmouth harbour and off Singapore, forever delayed by the drying up of trade credit.

Also, check out that last sentence, a real classic of pseudo-Blair verbiage without enough verbs.