Google: the world's favourite command line

Google is, essentially, a honking great unix system whose command line interface is addressed through URLs. This came to mind preparing the embedded map for the G3 Systems post; Google Maps autogenned a slightly different location than the view I wanted every time, although I could link directly to the right view.

So, of course, I started fiddling with it; the embedded map function seems to work as follows. Here's some code:

iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=Byron+Industrial+Estate,+Brookfield+Rd,+Arnold,+Nottingham,+NG5+7ER&
ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=53.001614,-1.119962&spn=0.001834,0.008476&
z=17&iwloc=addr&output=embed&s=AARTsJqS0vJdXgvvmSH9pm0agdKb_l1g-Q">/iframe>
small>ah ref="http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=Byron+Industrial+Estate,
+Brookfield+Rd,+Arnold,+Nottingham,+NG5+7ER&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=53.001614,-1.119962&spn=0.001834,0.008476&
z=17&iwloc=addr&source=embed" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map/a>/small>

Some tags have been disabled. OK, so we kick off by declaring an iFRAME whose dimensions match what appears to be an emerging standard; anything you embed in a website is usually 425 by 350 pixels for some reason. Its content is to be drawn from the URL that follows, and a link to a near-identical page is provided beneath.

To kick off, after the ? sign that signals the end of the real URL and the beginning of the command-line argument, we've got the command q, which permits you to pass search terms, each string separated by commas and multi-word strings concatenated with + signs (just like in Python). In this case the search is an address. An & marks the end of the statement. Then there's ie which specifies encoding for the target page, in this case UTF8. Again, the statement is ended with the delimiter &, and the next one begins with a semicolon.

Next we have t, which I reckon specifies the type of map to display as its value here is k, as in KeyHole. Then there's om, set to 1; I don't know what it does. ll is crucial, as it passes the latitude and longitude of the map centre, separated by a comma, like this: 53.001614,-1.119962. spn appears to contain geographic data as well, but I'm not sure what. z controls the zoom level, a number with a maximum of 30. iwloc is one I don't know; output tells the machine to treat this one as an embed, and finally comes s, which looks to be a hashed unique identifier, and causes the whole thing to stop working if you omit or change it.

So, I increased z from 14 to 17, read off the lat, long and spn values from the view I wanted, and altered the code accordingly. And now it works.

The Failings of Social Network Analysis

If you watched Britz this week you'll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs's seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds of people hoping to win the war with an interesting powerpoint presentation. Anyone remember Steven Emerson's Investigative Project?

In fact, a lot of this wasn't particularly new; the "new software" usually turned out to be Analyst's Notebook, which I recall seeing in 1996 or thereabouts, and most of the folk involved outside academia eventually merged into the general wingnutosphere. Anyway, let's cut to the data.



This diagram is from the Namebase research project, and can be seen in its natural habitat with much more functionality here. It's a diagram of Viktor Bout's social network, or at least as much of it as could be deduced from their pile of newspaper articles. And frankly, it's useless. If you zoom in on it, you'll notice that Sergei Bout, his brother and the founder of the biggest of his holding companies, CET Aviation of Malabo, is far more distant from Viktor than either Alex Vines, a Global Witness staffer, or Paul Vixie.

Who is this man? Is he a terrorist? If you're reading this on a Linux, Unix or MacOS machine, he wrote great chunks of the operating system; as well as this, his accomplishments include a huge range of things in the field of Internet engineering and operations, networking theory, and the like. It's just good news that the Namebase doesn't scrape blogs, or I'd be right in the fucking middle!

So when we look at the NSA wiretapping project - rather, I should say, its data-mining project, as it involved the statistical analysis of CDRs rather than the interception of calls - we need to ask ourselves how it could ever possibly work. The plan appears to have been to pull all the CDRs for a list of suspects, then pull all the CDRs for the phone numbers that appeared in them, and then for the numbers in them, then plot the whole huge pile o'files on a network diagram. It sounds convincing until you think of the sheer number of phone calls involved, and the rate at which the noise factor grows.

This is a key cognitive bias in anti-terrorism; it feels logical to assume that it doesn't matter very much if your search results in false positives. It's worth it to make sure we get as much of a chance as possible of sweeping up the bad guys...right? But consider this example; imagine there are a thousand people, and there is a 1 per cent chance (Dick Cheney's standard) of any one person being a terrorist. We have a big technical breakthrough, the Terroriser, an algorithm that searches all available databases to look for terrorists and has only a 1 per cent chance of misidentifying a terrorist as a law-abiding citizen. On the downside, it has a 2 per cent false positive rate; or as Capita RAS pitched it to the Home Office, accuracy of 98 per cent.

So if we run everyone through the Terroriser, what are the chances that anyone who is flagged is a terrorist?

Well, there are by definition 10 terrorists, and the Terroriser performs as expected; 9 of them are flagged. But so are 20 law-abiding citizens; we now have 29 people in the cells, and the chance of any given suspect being a terrorist is less than one in three. Oh, and there's still a terrorist out there. Now, that's a reasonably good result; a false positive rate of 2 per cent is probably unrealistically low. I count 8 false positives out of 52 names on that diagram for a false positive rate of 15 per cent; it's worth remembering that there is probably a good reason why the Government's pathetically inadequate biometrics trial never reported accuracy rates with false positives and negatives broken out.

G3 Systems and Fraser-Brook

G3 Systems Ltd must have been very proud when Tony Blair visited the logistics base it built in Afghanistan for the British Army a few months ago, and again when Defence Secretary Des Browne came calling. Their website boasts of offering a wide range of services to the armed forces, especially the supply of various vehicles, the construction of field hospitals, and various logistics services. They've been working in Afghanistan since 2002; back then their business was to set up the first British field hospital there.

The board of directors is an impressive catalogue of military-industrial bigwigs from companies such as Thales and BAE, and from the Army; it includes a brigadier and a major-general. It also still includes Roy Ashurst and Mike Ford, founders of the company back in 2001.

You don't need to be an expert to remember the case of Lincoln Fraser and Julian Brook's spectacular Imperial Consolidated Group, a financial company that went bust in 2002 with the loss of an estimated £200 million in its customers' savings. Fraser and Brook were already facing disqualification as company directors before that over their disastrous purchase of the Midland Grand Hotel in Blackpool, which ended with guests being turned out in the street as bailiffs seized the linen.

During the administrators' efforts to recover the cash, they discovered an incredibly complicated network of companies engaged in doing much the same thing in the UK, various Caribbean tax havens, Hong Kong, Canada, and South Africa. Imperial indeed. Some of the victims of the original fraud were bilked twice over, as Fraser and Brook reappeared with something called "Matrix Investigations" based on the same property as several other businesses of theirs, which promised to make inquiries in return for a fee. Specifically, it targeted Imperial's original client list, which Fraser and Brook had taken with them. It also conducted an Internet propaganda campaign against the administrators, the Financial Services Authority, and various other parties.

You might be a little surprised, then, to discover that while Imperial Consolidated was collapsing, the same people were in charge of G3 Systems. In the administrators' report to creditors, G3 Systems and a second firm, G3 Strategic, are described as part of the Fraser-Brook Partnership. As well as Ashurst, Fraser and Brook were directors, as was Hugh Allen, who claims to be an SAS officer and was also part of another Fraser-Brook venture, Alpha Toronto Series Inc, which itself was ordered to stop advertising investments by the Canadian government. You don't need to take my word for it; you can read all this in the liquidators' report to creditors (pdf). Much more documentation is available from the liquidators here. Fraser and Brook left the board in February, 2002, but the company was still owned by them in May when Ashurst and Pond appear as directors. The relevant facts are on pages 58-62 of the report.

Fraser and Brook's financial activities were based on the old RAF fighter base at Binbrook in Lincolnshire, but they also owned the nearby Faldingworth facility, originally built as a high-security nuclear bomb store for the RAF but used since 1972 for a variety of semimilitary functions, for example explosive and weapons tests for HM Forces. More dubiously, it appears in the Scott Report as the site where Jonathan Aitken's company, Alpha Defence Systems, was based. Inside the site, there is a complex of bunkers and a weapons testing range, surrounded by the owners' security precautions. You can see the place, thanks to the guys from Subterranea Britannica; loads of photos are here.

Matrix Investigations and G3 Strategic both had their registered addresses at Faldingworth. G3 Systems is based elsewhere, in a business park in Royston and on the old Portland naval base, and is now under new management, being part of a US company. But its website's "facilities" page still shows a photograph of what is clearly the entrance to Faldingworth. (Compare the left-hand photo with this SubBrit photo.)

When the Sloman Traveller arrived in Immingham with its 7,639 pallets of arms - pallets whose contents were not specified to either the Croatian or British authorities, and which were neither sealed before shipment nor opened on arrival - it was only a few miles from the Faldingworth site. Now, if you look up the ostensible recipients' address, you'll notice that it's a basement unit in a shared building in the middle of a housing estate. Seven thousand pallets?


View Larger Map

What they wanted with the arms is an interesting question. The arms that went to Iraq were flown direct from Tuzla to Baghdad, or as Shazia Mirza might have said, at least that's what it said on the flight plan. So why bring them to Lincolnshire? Perhaps the fact that a director of Matrix Investigations, was seen in Liberia about this time could explain it.

Official Instructions for Iraqi Locally-Engaged Staff

The Foreign Office has finally published some actual instructions about what to do if you are an Iraqi employee of the British Government and you wish to flee. You can read them on the FCO website here; one could have wished for a more memorable URL, perhaps, rather than whatever the JSP servlet randomly generated.

The page includes copies of the latest ministerial statement in British (rather than English) and Arabic(thank God somebody thought of that), as well as an application form. The rules are in the statement, which is here in British and HTML and here as an Arabic PDF. Complete the form and return to IraqLEStaffScheme AT fco.gov.uk, or call one of these telephone numbers:

Official Line: Basra 822 199
Mobiles:+964 (0) 7801 096 865
+964 (0) 7801 096 993
+964 (0) 7801 095 769
+964 (0) 7801 096 687

What all this bollocksing around is when they could just put the text on the sodding website is beyond me, but hell, it's government IT.

The good news, looking at the statement, is that the 12-month limit is now being applied as 12 months of service, continuous or not. Obviously the limit is itself absurd, and everything is being done to get it lifted, but this is an improvement as it addresses the fact that many (possibly a majority) of the people concerned worked for multiple Coalition organisations.

Further good news is that the scheme appears to be getting a little more generous. Meanwhile, I am told by an expert that there is no chance of a former employee who claims asylum in the UK being returned to Iraq.

It Is the Deliberate Policy of the Metropolitan Police to Shoot People and Lie About It

Update: Right, I am somewhat calmer.

The first thing that strikes me about this is that we still don't know quite a few interesting things about the decisions that led up to the shooting; for example, why the firearms squad took so long to rock up, who was responsible for the briefing they received, which appears to have been little else than an aggression-building pep talk, or who actually decided to call off the stop outside the tube station.

Let's roll the tape; Cressida Dick told the court that she ordered the surveillance team to "stop" de Menezes outside the tube station, as the firearms squad had still not turned up, but that then "a senior colleague" informed her that they had, with the result that the order to stop him was countermanded and the firearms team sent in.

OK, so who's the senior colleague? Anyone?

And however senior he or she was, what did they think they were doing second-guessing the Gold Commander? Who was, in fact, in command - Dick, McDowell, or Mystery Cop? Further, Dick denied that an order to shoot was ever given; and it is far from clear whether she countermanded her own order on the information given by Mystery Cop, or whether Mystery Cop overruled her.

Moving swiftly on, the firearms squad ran into the tube train and shot the guy, and then one of their number stuck his carbine in the face of another cop, one of the detectives who had been following de Menezes. Yet a third man chased the train driver into the tunnel with a gun; running about in the dark on an active, unsecured railway line with the traction current switched on, with a loaded automatic weapon. It's a bloody miracle they didn't manage to kill anyone else, or for that matter each other. ("Shit! Gunmen! Gunmen dressed as fake policemen!")

But they had been tipped off by the detective who was later himself menaced; why did they think there were more suspects? Wouldn't the fact there was one suspect only have been quite important information? The limited and partial account of the briefing, given in court by McDowell, mentions that they were told that there was a suspect "who was up for it"; suspect, singular. And what information was this statement based on?

The Met doesn't seem to be at all interested in any of these questions; their legal defence strategy should be enough to make that clear. Ronald Thwaites QC was apparently instructed to contest absolutely everything, every damn one of the 19 failings the prosecution identified, and at the end even the impartiality of the judge. (Can we really have seen the spectacle of a lawyer for the police accusing a judge of being biased to the prosecution?) It's hard to understand the logic of this strategy; it seems to be pure bloodymindedness, given what was already known about the incident before the trial. And having failed to dispose of even one failing or the judge, Thwaites then resorted to a frankly repellent attempt to smear the dead.

Yes, it's the coke again; the coke that wasn't actually on him at all, but this didn't stop Thwaites from repeating the allegation. Is that legal? I suppose we should be thankful he didn't accuse him of being a paedophile. One thing that we have learned from this is that the leak campaign against de Menezes, and presumably the Forest Gate victims too, was a deliberate policy; otherwise why would exactly the same smears reappear in the mouth of the Met's lawyer?

The only reason I can see for this legal balls-to-the-wall strategy is that it would tend to detract from any examination of questions like, well, who the senior colleague is.

They've all got to go.

Pathetic Python Blogging: SQL Bug?

I have a curious problem with Python 2.5's SQL support. OK, so we import sqlite3 and create a connection object to an existing sql file. It happens. Then we call the connection's cursor method. OK.

Now, if you look up the sqlite documentation, the most important command is cursor.execute(), where your SQL command goes in the brackets as a triple-quoted multiline statement. Having done your SELECT FROM or whatever, you get back a result set object which you can either fetch bits from with the cursor's fetch() method or iterate through in a loop of some kind.

But I can't find any documentation for the case when you get back an AttributeError saying that the method cursor doesn't have an attribute called 'execute'. WTF? Can anyone explain this?

Bonus Pathetic: Offtopic, I was recently looking something up on the mod_python documentation site when I noticed a GoogleAd eyeing me - "Hacking All Day Won't Get You A Girlfriend! Don't Let Time Pass -" and then the URL of a dating agency. Made me laugh, at least.

Update: Woo. Incredibly pathetic error...

Now for some real rugby

Great Britain 20 New Zealand 14!

Well, at least they didn't schedule it to clash with whatever it was the union people were doing. What a match, though - like inhaling espresso compared to the 'tothersiders. It had it all - tension! speed! spectacle! Sam Burgess, the 18-year old bolter, had a damn good game and eventually scored a crash-over try charging onto a pop up from Leon Pryce....but also very nearly did an Adrian Morley, being put on report for a sickening neck tackle immediately before scoring.

Speaking of Adrian Morley, he had a storming game. As did Sean O'Loughlin, standing in for Kevin Sinfield. And Gareth Raynor, who scored a positively illegal try, racing 50 yards to touch down a kick from Rob Burrow under the Kiwi fullback's fingers. In fact, GB rather reminded me of the sort of New Zealand team I remember; bloody good, if in a sort of chaotic way.

58,000 AKs in a Nottingham basement?

What was a small British company doing importing vast quantities of arms from Bosnia? More importantly, what was it doing telling lies about their destination in order to clear Bosnian customs? What was it doing contracting with Tomislav Damjanovic, possibly Viktor Bout, and disgraced Iraqi minister Ziad Cattan to ship them to Iraq when the Bosnian government export licence stated specifically that they would be shipped to the UK?

TYR has obtained some interesting documents through a NATO source that shed light on these fascinating questions. Everyone's now heard of the famous 99 tonnes of AKs that were exported from Bosnia aboard Aerocom and Jet Line International Ilyushin 76 aircraft towards Iraq, but which apparently never arrived in the Iraqi army's arsenal. But there was much more activity in the arms export business from the former Yugoslavia back then; for instance, Damjanovic was also in on a KBR-managed contract to ship weapons from Bosnia to the US Army training team in Georgia, and so was Viktor Bout, as the weapons travelled in GST Aero's Il-76 UN-76009.

Here's the first document; a company based in Nottingham, Procurement Management Services Ltd, whose registration at Companies House describes it as offering business consultancy and warehousing (note that point), is the consignee, and the consignor is a local company called Unis Promex. Note that the licence is issued specifically for export to the UK. Despite the consultancy, the same address is also home to a registered gun dealer, and next door is a company dealing in "militaria".

Here's the end-user certificate; it specifically states that the weapons - 300 SGM-84 machine guns - are for sale to dealers in the UK and will not be re-exported in defiance of international sanctions or without the UK government's express permission. But what dealers? Selling any such weapon in Britain would be highly illegal, to say the least. Realistically, the only reason to import Bosnian machine guns to the UK would be to re-export them.

But why, pray, does the document issued by PMS come from the fax number of York Guns Ltd? And why does this very respectable company also show up importing no less than 22,500 rifles on this further end-user cert? Between PMS and York Guns, no less than 58,000 rifles and several thousand heavier weapons were shipped out of Bosnia with an ostensible destination in the East Midlands.

Meanwhile, what happened to that shipment? Well, they never went anywhere near Nottinghamshire. Here is the air waybill, issued by Vega Aviation of Bulgaria - it clearly states that the aircraft carrying the shipment is to route direct from Tuzla to Baghdad, and the goods are for the account of Dr Ziad Cattan, Ministry of Defence, Republic of Iraq. He is the former pizzeria owner who spent a year acting as the professional head of the Ministry and then went back into exile, having been accused of embezzling the entire defence budget by his successor Ali Allawi.

TYR can reveal that some of the guns did indeed make it to Britain; perhaps a large percentage of the total. The 300 M84 machine guns detailed in the PMS documents were shipped, as detailed on the waybill, direct from Bosnia to Iraq in defiance of the end-user certificate; but much more may have passed through British hands. After all, some 7,639 pallets of "surplus weapons" also left Bosnia for PMS, travelling via the port of Ploce and the ship Sloman Traveller to Immingham docks in Lincolnshire.

Fascinating Report out on Viktor Bout & Co

The International Herald-Tribune has an interesting article about a Serbian gun-runner and colleague of Viktor Bout's, one Tomislav Damjanovic. For some reason it's in the Style section; most photos of Viktor would seem to rule that out, but the one of Damjanovic they supply does have a certain Balkan sharpness.

Anyway, the report is based on one prepared by the Belgrade-based South-Eastern European Small Arms Centre, which according to the IHT has been distributed among customs, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. You'll be pleased to know someone left a link to it in the comments; you can read it here (pdf).

Between them, they fill in a lot of gaps.

Fascinatingly, the SEESAC report tells us something about the development of the UAE's arms-aviation black market; Damjanovic was present at the creation, so to speak, having been based there working for JAT when the Balkan wars broke out and then falling in with a group of Russian ex-spooks around one Igor Avdeev. This lot, it turns out, were the creators of Jet Line International; and haven't we heard so much about them?

Damjanovic, having lost his job with JAT after the outbreak of war, specialised in running Jet Line's Ilyushin 76 flights into ex-Yugoslavia, and soon drew the attention of the Milosevic government, for whom he smuggled cigarettes to Italy in order to pay for the arms he was importing, and then smuggled surplus arms out of Yugoslavia to pay for almost anything else. His partner was killed in a plane crash with a load of jet fighter parts for Libya after offering the crew a cash bonus to fly despite electrical problems on the plane.

Since 2003, however, he became something like the missing link in the Bout-in-Iraq story; it was Damjanovic who took on US military contracts to acquire arms in the Balkans and send them to Iraq, and some other places too. The now-infamous 99 tonnes of weapons that went missing between Tuzla and Baghdad? One of his jobs. Using various companies, including JLI, Aerocom, and Kosmas Air, he became a big player in War on Terror freight, including a contract to deliver cash (!) around Iraq. Kosmas Air, a Russian operator, was essentially taken over; he and his moved into the offices and muscled in, rather as the Viktor Bout team did with Deirdre Ward's Norse Air in South Africa back in 1998.

Interestingly, the opportunities went beyond Iraq; an aircraft he chartered from GST Aero (them!) travelled from Baghdad via Sharjah to Oman, where it ostensibly "refuelled", and then proceeded to be the famous first plane into Mogadishu. There was more, though; he was also flying guns from Bulgaria to Georgia under a US Army/KBR contract, using GST Aero's UN-76009.

He is apparently now under pressure from the Serbian government to stop, and claims he's going legit; we shall see.

The report also offers some interesting incidental data; a photo of an illegal arms delivery in progress in the Sudan in 2006, clearly showing Goliaf Air of Sao Tome's Antonov 32 registered S9-PSV. Goliaf Air, you may recall, owned an Ilyushin 76, S9-DAE that was used in Iraq.

This Should Not Happen

So what's in the server log? Shall we look?

82.205.254.45 [entrypoint #437] 2007/10/october-08-and-out.html Oct 22, 12:07:51 [0:00:00] views: 1
Yahoo ! (where to apply for the assistance to iraqi locally engaged staff)

Yes; you read it all right. That's someone searching Yahoo! for instructions on what to do if you worked for the British Army in Iraq.

Hopefully it's a blogger researching a post, right? Or an MP preparing to speak on our Early Day Motion? Surely?

No. Here's the WHOIS output.

inetnum: 82.205.128.0 - 82.205.255.255
org: ORG-HSSF1-RIPE
netname: SA-HSS-20031117
descr: Horizon Satellite Services FZ LLC
descr: PROVIDER Local Registry
country: AE
admin-c: MS3339-RIPE
tech-c: MA2056-RIPE
status: ALLOCATED PA
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-lower: HSS-MNT
mnt-routes: HSS-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

organisation: ORG-HSSF1-RIPE
org-name: Horizon Satellite Services FZ LLC
org-type: LIR
address: P.O.Box 502343,Building No.14
address: n.a.
address: Dubai Internet City
address: United Arab Emirates
phone: +971 4 391 5122
fax-no: +971 4 391 2906
e-mail: subair@horizon-satellite.com
admin-c: NOC23-RIPE
admin-c: MA2056-RIPE
admin-c: MS3339-RIPE
mnt-ref: HSS-MNT
mnt-ref: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

So, whoever searched for that string was on a satellite link into a Dubai-based satellite operator. A traceroute confirms it; the tell-tale is the very high latency on the last hop via the distant satellite. Horizon's business is centred in the Middle East and Africa.

And what did Yahoo! - it seems rather inappropriate - find? I'm the top result; there is absolutely nothing of any use. There are some delightful press releases from the White House about how well things are going in Iraq, though.

It would be nice if the government showed any sense of urgency about the whole affair, would it not?

Let's lay this one to rest

Says Iranian foreign minister Manoucher Mottaki:

"America, today, in the international system is facing a serious challenge ... Americans are in a very, very difficult situation.

"The people of Afghanistan would not allow America to use Afghanistan against any country. This is our ... belief," he said.

Mottaki said Tehran's findings from three rounds of talks with U.S. officials on the situation in Iraq was that Washington was facing "very serious" difficulties there.

Washington has no exit strategy from Iraq and is bogged down in the conflict there. He said the U.S. had not managed to deliver on its promises to the Afghan people either.

"Therefore, we do not see such a probability that the Americans would want to attack ... another country in the region. They are not in such a position."

You can't fault the guy for clarity. Or realism. Let's cut to the carrierwatch, shall we? Here we are; Enterprise is on station, the only US carrier currently deployed. Hardly the Guns of August. The others? Kitty Hawk is back in Yokosuka; Ronald Reagan in San Diego catching up on her interrupted maintenance schedule. Washington is gradually working-up, having done her sea trials at the end of August. Lincoln's most recent task was Fleet Week in San Diego. Washington is doing a similarly steady return from dockyard hands. Vinson and Theodore Roosevelt are in deep refit. John C. Stennis has joined them, having returned from her short-notice deployment and gone straight into drydock. Nimitz is in Pearl Harbour after a long and slow return trip.

Harry Truman is probably the highest-readiness ship, having already done a COMPTUEX and a JTFEX over the summer; however, she's currently employed doing carrier qualifications off the mid-Atlantic coast. Washington returned as late as the end of May.

So, yes - Mottaki is quite right. Enough for the description of things as they are, though; what about things as they should be? Daniel Levy, writing in Ha'aretz, is sensible. He points out that the US and Israeli strategy towards Iran is hopelessly confused; the aim is left open between regime change and nonproliferation. The chief motivation for investing in nuclear technology is to prevent regime change, but no-one is willing to offer the regime security in return for nonproliferation; so why would they stop proliferatin'? And if they don't stop, where is your regime change then?

This is pretty basic international relations theory; it's all about people, states, and fear. States invest in fearsome weapons because they believe that the fear of them increases their security (i.e. reduces their own fear); if you want them to abstain from these weapons, you need to offer a substitute form of insurance. In the Cold War this was thought of in terms of a combination of deterrence and reassurance; one version of reassurance being "self-deterrence", making it clear that you yourself recognised the principle of non-provocation that you expected the other side to observe.

The Americans have frequently tried versions of this with Israel; trying to buy territorial concessions with substitute deliveries of weapons. So far as it goes, there is quite a lot to be said for this; it's better that Israel should look to its wooden walls, or rather its aluminium walls, for security than that it should try to grab more and more territory as a static defence, which increases the chance it will need all those jets. The problem is that they never get to the flipside of this, which is that US military aid should come with conditions. The result is an unhealthy dependence of the Israelis on the Americans, and an American inability to insist on Israeli moderation for fear of weakening them. It's a ratchet; the more people the Israelis alienate, the more arms they need to deal with the worst case scenario consequences. And the more arms they get, the more able the forward school in Israeli politics is to alienate more people.

Anyway, Levy proposes a twin-track diplomacy based precisely on these principles; one track would concern non-proliferation, the other a broad security agreement dealing with the entire perimeter around Iran. Essentially, each track addresses one party's fears. This is roughly what the Baker -Hamilton commission recommended. Levy's original contribution, however, is that the Israelis should press the Americans to open such talks. I think it's an excellent idea, and Olmert is probably scared enough about his political future to be receptive.

The moment is also good; the British army's move back in southern Iraq, as well as the relaxation in US naval operations, are all helpful in reducing the degree of fear.

Meanwhile, we have an amusing study in outdated thinking. Via Yglesias, a thinktank suggestion that "an Islamic Republic accountable to its citizens would not divert billions into uranium enrichment and ballistic missiles"; so, of course, we've got to fight them because of the corruption/malinvestment/whatever. This is silly, but it was very common in 2003-2005; such and such a country's government was corrupt, and the oil (or whatever) money was being wasted, so call forward the Marines! It goes without saying that this sort of thing is fear-generating, in so far as anyone takes it at all seriously.

It's especially stupid, because we know what Iranians do when they believe their government to be corrupt; they change it. That was how Khatami got elected; it was also how Ahmadinejad got elected. And that was also how the revolution got started.

Posting to say I'm posting under Linux

I is a linux lappeh...at least for the time being!

Am running Mandriva Linux on the Q45; off the live cd at the moment.

I can report that the boot is reasonably painless, although I had to put it in acpi=off mode. It detected the Intel wireless LAN card without difficulty and played nicely with my Linksys box. And, fuck me, this is QUICK! I chose the KDE version and the Metisse 3D desktop, which is pretty graphics intensive...but it's still rapid.

And I could get used to working in three windows at once...perhaps.

Update: Installed, and it works! Not only that, but I can see my Windows drive from in here and get stuff out of it. Have already installed the NTFS plugin. The install went OK, too; reasonably quick and unsporky. Better yet, I've added the shebang lines to various python thingies and they all run blisteringly fast.

Here's the proof, running in the fortified TYR data centre:

Trimming to the Taliban

What to blog about? In the face of work like this or this?

Why not Pakistan? The fix is in, as they say - Musharraf safely re-elected by crook more than by hook, pesky corruption charges disposed of, Nawaz Sharif shouldered out of the way, time for the great heroine's return. The enemy, of course, always has a vote; not only did they threaten to send suicide bombers to kill Benazir Bhutto, but they did. ("The thing about al-Qa'ida is that they tell you what they're going to do...and then they do it.")

In a gruesome way, I reckon they - whoever "they" are - have suffered a major defeat. Blowing her to pieces along with divers citizens wouldn't have been subtle, but it would have kiboshed Musharraf's exit strategy, and it would make sense in a kind of Iraqi, revolutionary terror way. Blowing up 126 random civilians and not getting her puts the perpetrators out there as both brutal and bungling, to say nothing of the martyr image propaganda she'll doubtless make out of it.

The blame game is in full swing; she claims "followers of General Zia" dunnit, which is smart because it doesn't blame any current faction in Pakistan and incorporates it in her own family myth, and is also partly true - whether it was the jihadis or the ISI, they're in a sense followers of Zia. He was responsible for encouraging them and letting the ISI do what it liked.

Meanwhile, her husband, Asif "Mr 10%" Zardari is pouring petrol on any fires he can find; in his view it's the fault of the ISI. Again, it's possible; but you don't say things like that, and I suspect that had they wanted rid of her they'd have arranged something less dramatic and more certain. However, a team of unwitting jihadi fall-guys sounds plausible. Not clear what his game is; although the whole point of Bhutto's return is to replace the military government with a military-approved anti-military government.

Political Pathetic Python; and some mystery jets

I've recently been experimenting with various ways of automatically gathering information about Viktor Bout's airlines; you've probably noticed the resumption of Pathetic Python Blogging. Anyway, though the project is far from ready, enough of it
now works to produce some useful results. For example, who the hell are "Asia Airways", who regularly fly between Sharjah and destinations in Iraq and Afghanistan - using the ICAO code ASW, which is actually the well-known US lowcost carrier Southwest Airlines? (Southwest might want to know, as if someone else is using their call sign they could find themselves paying the air traffic control charges.)

Another is the surprisingly large number of aircraft that frequent SHJ without stating where they come from or where they are going; filtering this morning's output for "route=='Unknown'" gives you a list of some 10 arrivals. Some five of which
were due to malformed data messing with my script, but the rest are correct. And the rest includes companies like Flying Dolphin (ICAO: FDN), a very longstanding Viktor Bout operation indeed and one that ought not to exist, South Airlines of the Ukraine,
a regular on the Baghdad run, and something called "Maximus Air Cargo", apparently a division of the UAE Ministry of Defence.

There's also a lot of fairly foul operators like Avient, Click (both versions), and our old friends British Gulf International. You may recall that this company had supposedly been set up in Sao Tome, before transferring to the Kyrgyz registry; a new firm was formed with the old facilities, staff and aircraft. But, we learned from a contact there, the Sao Tome firm had never existed as a company. Fascinatingly, despite this, it's back; the old BGK code has vanished and been replaced by the new one, BGI, for "British Gulf International Company" rather than "British Gulf International Airlines"

And the EX-registered Antonov 12s have all followed it back into the Sao Tome registry. Curious.

S9-SAJ An-12TB 401901 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-160 @ British Gulf Int'l AL
S9-SAM An-12BP 3341408 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-162 @ British Gulf Int'l AL
S9-SAO An-12BP 346908 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-165 @ British Gulf Int'l
S9-SAP An-12BP 5343305 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-161 @ British Gulf Int'l AL
S9-SAV An-12BP 2340602 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-045 @ British Gulf Int'l AL
S9- An-12V 1347704 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-163 @ British Gulf S9-SAH ?
S9- An-12V 5343703 British Gulf Int'l AL ex EX-164 @ British Gulf Int'l AL

The jamming signal increases its hum

The story that Israeli satellite TV viewers have been experiencing constant interference for several weeks is an interesting one. As has been pointed out, it can't be the jamming presumably employed during the Deir ez-Zor raid, which would have been over weeks ago. According to the Israeli government it's all the fault of the Germans! More specifically they claim it's the air warning radar on one of the German (or perhaps Dutch) ships in the UN task force off Lebanon. Well, perhaps. Warships have been known to do weird things with radio in the past; but it's not as if they never exercise the radars in the North Sea.

There's more detail at Flight International; specifically, it's the Amos 1 and 2 birds, located at 4 degrees West.

I wonder if it had anything to do with this story from April this year? (I'd link to my own report on it for MCI Telecoms.com, but their website is still very ungooglable.) The summary is that the pan-Arab satellite operator Thuraya, whose satellite mobile telephony and data service is found across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, had been experiencing serious radio interference for most of 2006.

Intensive efforts to explain it failed; management blamed Israel, but eventually, the engineers decided to have the satellite revolve slowly around its axes in orbit while they logged the strength of the interfering signal. Essentially, it was the same way they used to do radio direction-finding by hand back in the day; that is to say, the second world war. Knowing its azimuth and elevation relative to the satellite, and that it would be coming from a point on the side of the earth facing it (and thank God it wasn't coming from the reciprocal..), they were therefore able to plot the source of the signal on a globe. It was somewhere in the Libyan desert.

Two engineers flew to Libya at once and headed for the lat and long position; not very surprisingly, they were arrested by machine gun totin' secret police agents before reaching their goal. Which seemed to lurk somewhere in an antenna farm surrounded by wire and goons and cameras and the like. Case closed. Eventually, the UAE ambassador to Libya secured their release.

It turned out the Libyans were having trouble with Touareg rebels and smugglers and bandits way down south, who tend to pack a Thuraya unit next to their Kalashnikovs; after all, at least one of the groups has got a blog to look after. But this is where it gets, well, Libyan; Libya is one of the countries that jointly own the Thuraya system. They are a shareholder. But for some reason they decided just to point a big dish antenna at the satellite and start frying pigeons.

There have been reports over the summer of disruption to Thuraya and also INMARSAT BGAN satellite-IP service in the Middle East, which could well explain it. Thuraya's satellite is stationed at 44 degrees East.

Target for Tonight

Your instructions, gentlemen, based on the conclusions in this post.

* David Miliband’s Statement on ‘Iraq: Locally Recruited Civilians’ of 9th October stated that Britain will help to resettle- in the wider Middle East, or in the United Kingdom- Iraqis who can prove that they have worked for this country’s soldiers or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.
* Hundreds of Iraqis have been targeted for assassination for having worked for this country. Some have worked for a period of twelve months exclusively for the British and can prove this. Some have not but have been pinpointed for murder anyway. We have a responsibility to save these people from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for the British.
* There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too.
* Iraqi staff members must be given shelter not because of their provable length of service but according to whether they have been identified for murder by local death squads. This can be investigated on the spot by Army officers and referred rapidly to London: the process needs to start now.
* Mr Miliband’s statement did not mention the families of Iraqi employees. As Iraqi militias also murder the families of their ‘enemies’, we must resettle our employees’ families as well. Mark Brockway, an ex-soldier who hired many Iraqis, estimates that we are talking about a maximum of 700 Iraqis to resettle: this country admits 190,000 immigrants net every year.
* Iraqis have already been targeted for murder for having worked for this country. We will be shamed if we allow more to be killed for the same reason. Our soldiers, who are angry at this betrayal, and our diplomats, will be placed at risk if they gain a reputation for abandoning their local helpers.

One of the upshots of the Parliamentary lobby was at least a vague idea of the numbers. Mark Brockway's figure is around 700 Iraqis, and a further 1,000 or so third-country nationals who work on the Basra Air Station. The big difference is that the Government apparently has a database of this latter group, and by definition they come onto the airbase to work, so they could be ghosted fairly easily in 4 or so large aircraft movements.

Oh well, write to them, or call 0207 219 3000 and ask for your MP. You can also help freep the MiliBlog, but please behave with dignity consonant with the traditions of the service.

Update: The director of Basra International Airport has been kidnapped by unidentified gunmen.

Intellectual Rigour

Says Royal Holloway prof, and I suppose colleague, David Cesarani in a wankerish letter to the Guardian:

Would Mearsheimer and Walt care to explain the power of the Armenian lobby?

Apart from "why not ask them?", I can offer a more useful answer.

Aqoul:

The bill, pushed by Armenian-Americans, who crucially are an important constituency for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was more-or-less identical to a bill which has been put before the committee every year for decades, and which has been killed by the committee every year when the State Department urges congress not to upset relations with Turkey.

But this year, thanks to a combination of factors including (1) rampant hostility between the US executive and the legislative majority, (2) the blatant hypocrisy of this particular administration urging congress to keep quiet lest it upset foreigners, and (3) the convenient fact that this particular atrocity was committed by Muslims against Christians, the bill actually went through.

Job's a good 'un, then. What the hell a historian is doing pretending to be ignorant of the existence of Armenian emigration beats me.

Uninspired surveillance post

A short compendium of US illegal surveillance links: Qwest "threatened with loss of contracts" after pre-11/9 surveillance request, says exec on insider trading rap. Greenwald blasts immunity proposal. David Isenberg. Much detail. Laura Rozen.

I have nothing very original to say, except to point out that there seems to be quite a big iceberg here. There is a big difference between the idea of sticking a fibre splitter in an AT&T Internet exchange point and glurking up the physical layer traffic, and demanding piles of CDRs. Them, eh? Call Detail Records - the database row generated by each phone call that specifies the parties to the call, the time started and ended, and details of routing and charging.

It's the heart of what it means to be a telco, really; without them you'd be like (shiver) an ISP. They permit you to bill for everything, and they were almost certainly the "metadata" referred to. Quite simply, you'd never be able to process the total take pulled off the IX, even if enough of it was unencrypted; hence the CDRs.

There is a lot of technological difference between the two activities; one is real-time and the analysis is cryptographic, another is batch-processed and statistical. But what does seem clear is that there was an extensive new effort at surveillance of the US telecoms infrastructure.

Priceless

What do the two halves of the Control Party - its Scottish and Northern wing, and its Southern and Posh wing, both - think should have no price in our society? Recap: a price is a measure of something's value in terms of the alternatives you forgo by choosing it. Prices are a constraint; they force us to allocate resources between competing priorities. Straightforward enough, so far.

In public policy, if you wish to constrain the growth of something or the use of a resource, there are essentially two ways to do it - you can ration it, or you can tax it. The first corresponds to an artificial restriction of supply; the second to an artificial constraint on demand. Either way, what is being achieved is either equivalent to raising the price, or analogous to raising the price.

Successive governments have been quite keen on creating quasi-markets or budgeting systems for various things; GPs are meant to "buy in services" from NHS trusts, the government departments are meant to pay a capital levy to the Treasury to force them to economise capital. But what is interesting are the limits of this principle.

It seems that it is acceptable for some things to be treated as if they were cost-free; specifically incarceration, roads, and unearned income. The government frequently tries to influence the judiciary to send more people to jail, and has changed the law to make it harder to leave jail. Therefore the jails are so full it is actually impossible for some people to be released. Perhaps the Home Office should be forced to buy the extra prison places it wants from the Ministry of Justice every time it wishes to rattle the keys? Or alternatively, perhaps each court should have an annual budget for punishment, thus being forced to prioritise its use of scarce cells?

Similarly, it seems the idea of building more roads is being floated again. Simultaneously, we are told that traffic on the railways is to be demand-managed; that is to say its price is to rise in order to keep the demand from exceeding supply. But roads are treated as if they were more like air.

And finally, both clunking fist and Dave from PR are in agreement that gains captured from the housing bubble or inherited are to be taxed at a substantially lower rate than income from either wages or even company profits. It is now the policy of both wings of the Control Party that both labour and capital should subsidise the land bubble, inherited wealth, and dubious hedge-fund manoeuvrings.

Priceless indeed. You thought the elimination of the 10% lower rate of income tax was bad enough; hell, it was even framed as an encouragement to the poor to work harder. It's not just a policy skewed to the rich, though; it's a policy skewed to the idle rich.

As a brief example of one of the many reasons this is awful, consider the Vertu range of mobile phones; beware the Flash-ridden website. These are heavily designed, or rather designered; their design is in fact far from beautiful or functional, but is intended to convey the impression of good or at least expensive design. And they are tricked out in various inappropriately posh materials (diamonds, for example).

However, the actual electronics within the case are unimpressive. The company is a Nokia division, but very little of their engineering effort has gone into them. For example, only two of them have an e-mail client, only one has a UMTS radio, and none have WLAN support, GPS, a serious programming environment, or any of the other features Nokia packs into its most advanced devices. Nokia's N-series devices are marketed at those whose taste in displays of wealth lies towards the Modernist end of the spectrum, and delight in technology for its own sake. Its E-series devices are marketed at people, and more importantly organisations, who actually find mobile e-mail, GPS, integration with enterprise telephone systems, VPN service, and the like useful.

Vertu's role is to get rid of old models for silly prices to people who are impressed by ornamentation, and who are unlikely to require IPSec; rich people who don't work and have no taste, in other words. Can you see what I'm driving at?

Oh, and I agree with every damn word of this and this.

0x05B7Y: Out of Bolts Error

Remember when the Airbus A380 was delayed and it was an example of the total bankruptcy of socialist Europe's way of life? Look what's happening with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner (and BA's fleet)...

Boeing blamed the delivery delay on continuing problems with flight control software, being produced by Honeywell International, and integrating other systems on the plane, which it did not detail.

It said it now expects the first test flight of the 787 to take place "around the end of the first quarter" next year, suggesting it could be as late as March or even April 2008.

That is a drastic extension to its original plan to start airborne tests in August 2007. In early September, Boeing scheduled the first test flight for mid-November to mid-December as it wrestled with software problems and a shortage of bolts.

Bolts? Boeing has run out of bolts? That's positively Soviet. Call GOSPLAN and get a brigade of shock workers on the bolts right now! There's probably one huge bolt on a low loader in the yard at Boeing Field... Snark aside...actually, fuck putting the snark aside. Let's get the snark out of the shed and give it a damn good snarking. There's something about the Reuters report that makes me think the software actually uses bolts; it's made in Seattle, after all.

I suppose they called it the Dreamliner because unlike the A380 it's, well, still a dream.