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?

Reduced Blog

Less blogging than usual due to OpenTech 2008 preparations. Must keep hacking, the clowns are gaining. Anyone know much about GeoRSS?

I'm on in track 2 (the Upper Hall), sometime after 1.30pm.

Laura Norder Goes to Afghanistan

While I'm on the topic of Giustozzi, here's something else which is important. One of the biggest motivators for a village to support a Taliban presence is a dispute that the official authorities, in so far as they exist, or the tribal authorities have failed to solve, or have solved in a manner that seems unjust. Another is a desire for security. But this is qualitatively less important; there is a huge difference between "security" and justice.

After all, any half-arsed authoritarian regime can at least claim to be providing security - patrolling, locking people up, shooting other people, maintaining a network of informers, battering suspects - all these can be described as "security". But it's almost characteristic of authoritarian and failed states that the state itself is a major insecurity producer.

Which brings me to my point. The reason why so many Islamist movements that succeed lay a lot of emphasis on the judiciary - the Islamic Courts in Somalia didn't bother to give themselves any other name until after they'd set up shop in the presidential palace - is also the reason for their success. Giustozzi argues that a lot of Afghans don't actually support the content of the Taliban's lawbook very much. What he doesn't go on to say, but perhaps should, is that this implies they choose law in general over lawlessness.

Given the choice of what is marketed as order without law, but which as always turns out to be chaos, and some sort of legal order, the people pick the latter. And they are far from being too stupid to recognise the difference between a government which practices legality, and one that merely has a lot of statutes containing agreeable features requested by foreigners, like Ishmaelia in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Let's be clear - practice beats constitution-writing. Legality is not something decreed in the capital.

Franz Neumann's Behemoth is one of the guidebooks to the last eight years. Neumann wrote in 1942 that the defining feature of the Nazi state was that it claimed to be Hobbes' Leviathan - the all-powerful creator of minimal order - but was in fact more like the Behemoth, the Leviathan's mythological partner, an equally mighty creator of chaos. He argued that this is true of authoritarianism everywhere; it's worth remembering that when he wrote this, he was thinking of the pre-war Nazi state founded on the idea of the Ausnahmezustand, the state of emergency in which (the legal) order is itself suspended.

Eventually, the difference between law and order is how the police behave, on a mountain road at night.

John Reid Retroblogging

I am currently reading Antonio Giustozzi's Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop - The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. I'll review it more fully when I've finished reading it - now there's an idea - but here's something that stands out for reasons of pure partisan rage. John Reid has been mocked plenty for saying that he thought the 16th Air Assault Brigade would complete its mission in Afghanistan without firing a shot (of course, he didn't - he said he hoped it would), but I hadn't fully appreciated the utter blundering stupidity with which he approached starting a war on two fronts.

Like practically everyone, I'd always assumed the eruption of violence starting in June, 2006 was associated with the deployment itself - that the Americans had believed that this ungoverned space was essentially neutral, until the Paras actually located in the middle of it and found it was teeming with the enemy. Giustozzi provides a mass of evidence that in fact, the tempo of Taliban operations had gone off the charts in January, 2006, with a huge surge in attacks on international and Afghan government forces, a wave of school-burning, and an increase in platoon and larger raids on defended targets rather than IEDs, rockets, and bomb outrages. He argues, with considerable strength, that this should be understood as an attempt to launch the third stage of a Maoist revolutionary war, the general offensive that starts a widespread uprising and eventually overwhelms the state.

Put it another way, Reid sent the army straight into the teeth of the Taliban's Big Push, with an official concept of operations that didn't mention counter-insurgency or even combat. I think his current obscurity is well earned. In Giustozzi's terms, interestingly enough, the strategy General Richards adopted was actually not as crazy as it sounded. He argues that the bulk (40-50%) of Taliban forces come from local communities who are in an alliance of convenience with the movement, having been angered by unfavourable turns in tribal politics, the diminishing strength and authority of tribes in general, the behaviour of government forces, an unfulfilled desire for minimal state functions like local policing and arbitration, or some combination of these.

In this view, the spread of government influence into the villages was precisely the worst thing that could happen to the movement; the local elders who treated with the Taliban one day might treat with the government the next. Hence the aggression and tenacity of the assaults on British camps in Sangin and elsewhere - it was necessary to demonstrate that the movement was determined not to be edged out. As Tony Blair might have put it, they decided to pay the blood price in the hope of wearing out the British, provoking intense fighting among the civil population, and preventing the British from installing a rival authority. Giustozzi also suggests the ultimate leadership was being pressed by its Gulf-based moneymen and Pakistani allies to do something dramatic - a feeling yer man well knew.

A contrarian argument might have been that had the Taliban not been fighting so hard besieging Para platoons in their stronghold of northern Helmand, who knows what their general offensive might have achieved with more men and material concentrated on its target of Kandahar? But this is probably silly. It doesn't take account of the benefit to the movement of having many, many villages chewed up by the fighting, or the unavailability of troops tied down in defending their perimeters, or the fact that while the soldiers were engaged in a succession of vicious mini-sieges out in the north, they were neither conducting anything that could be described as counter-insurgency or reconstruction there, nor were they doing any closer to home where it might have been possible to make a start.